skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dropbox has good market share but such a small network effect. You could easily migrate to a lot of cloud based or self hosted options and hardly lose any features.
How is what you're talking about different from what the article describes?
ah, yeah, well, sorry. maybe don't chase that rabbit like that next time?

also i find the "rabbit hole" metaphor and a username beginning with "dbased" to be pretty "on the nose" in the context of this thread (sorry, i couldn't resist any of that, and i only realized i ended with a pun after typing it out).
Yeah I think this is the real problem. Most people think Amazon makes a lot of money. They even say they made $12B, but they gave billions to of RSUs to employees so the IRS wisely says they didn't make much. The truth is they didn't make much/any money which is why their tax is low.
If Obama had been willing to live up to America's treaty obligations to prosecute torture, there is very little doubt that Haspel would have been one of the people who landed in prison.

>Haspel oversaw a secret “black site” in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel later participated in the destruction of the CIA’s videotapes of some of its torture sessions.

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/15/washington-breaks-out-th...

However, more to the point, the press reaction to Obama refusing to prosecute those who ordered or carried out torture mostly came down to expressions of disappointment.

If Trump had refused to prosecute Bush officials for their crimes, he would not have gotten a pass.
People don't leave here very often. But, yeah, that would be a problem. Having someone else code review everything helps spread the knowledge, at least somewhat. But we definitely need to work on our bus factor...
Seems logical, but in the USA there always seem to be convoluted reasons why seemingly simple things can't happen, usually the result of vested interests pushing their agenda and getting their way for a very long time.
There are things that Amazon needs done to continue to run it's business effectively. Roads need repaired, crime needs to be kept down to acceptable rates, trash needs to be removed, they need to be defended from foreign nations, etc. The need of the corporations of our nation means that everyone, including these companies that don't build their own roads and militaries are on "the government teat".

The idea that money is better in private hands than in the collective hands of government is a story that is oft repeated, but is far from proven. Arguably, studies I've seen of late show loss of efficiency and increased cost when privatized. This is a requirement for profit anyways.

Further, money spent by government has had massive effect on economic growth. Hoover dam made the much of the West livable, nasa still had massive scientific output, and welfare programs are incredibly effective.
Alternatively, there's a chance the tragedy will prompt efforts to better preserve more historical buildings.
How about simply filtering amazon reviews that are only left by people with a wide variety of expenditure and who spend over $500/year?
Some sibling comment to oc seems pretty straightforward: the profit taxed is the profit reported to shareholders
I no longer buy from Amazon: batteries, chargers, flash drives/SD cards, any sort of food (or container for food)

essentially only stuff that's completely obvious if it's fake, or if it's too expensive/niche to bother counterfeiting
To me, whenever something is undefined at one level, there are still constraints on it at another level. We go about our daily lives without laws and regulations explicitly detailing our every interaction, and rely on custom and ingrained behavioral rules to fill in the gaps. Every level of abstraction has another layer behind it. When I read someone arguing about undefined behavior allowing a compiler writer to do anything, it makes me imagine someone who, if they could afford the finest lawyers and found the appropriate loophole, would consider it not just their right, but their duty, to kill and eat me. It's not terrifying to imagine there are monsters here and there; there always have been a certain number. What terrifies me is the idea that this mentality is infecting society and altering norms and interactions. It doesn't feel like evil as such, it feels more like a metaphorical prion disease. There's something fundamental to being a human being in being able to deal with undefined situations by breaking out of a given context into a broader one.
Agreed, in the same way all touchscreen smartphones were/are(?) called iPhones, or people calling all tissues Kleenexes in the US, I think for a huge fraction of laypersons, ABP has an understandably strong grasp on the product category.
Taxes are a good thing.

They pay, or should pay, for education, health, military, roads and infrastructure and a wide variety of other stuff that is good for everyone.

It puzzles me that people hate taxes so much.
We are talking past each other: It is a bit contradictory to say "quantum computing is up in the air" and "QM is one of the most tested theories" as an argument against what I am saying. Yes, both are statements are true, but they are in no ways counterpoints to what I am saying, if anything they support it. QM is a well established and empirically tested theory. Quantum Computing is a purely mathematical construct that emerged from that well established theory without any experimental evidence for it, and only now, 30 years later, we are starting to have a chance to employ this purely mathematical construct in practice.

Same with GR: it was a purely mathematical construct for a while until we could test it, but there were too many theory clues that it must be right.

And this is not selection/survival bias: it is extremely rare for humanity to find a robust mathematical construct for which we can have a high degree of certainty that it describes the universe well. In the few cases where we have had that certainty, due to mathematical proofs in seemingly disjoint fields, we ended up being right.

To push it to stuff like super strings and quantum gravity: few respected scientists would claim that their pet mathematical construct is correct, but many of them will say "the vague commonalities between all these diverse and seemingly unrelated mathematical constructs definitely point to an underlying fundamental construct".
I switched to Mastodon about a year or so ago. I fully agree with the grandparent post in that the atmosphere is very different compared to the major social media platforms.

As you allude to, discovery is harder since you don't have an algorithm pointing you in the direction of content you're likely to engage with (yes, engage with, and not necessarily enjoy) but once you have found the right people to follow, it's more rewarding because it's your community, not owned by a single corporate entity.

Although I didn't use G+ much in the later days, its closure showed my how irresponsible it is to rely on proprietary platforms. I'm committed to never be active on a proprietary, closed social media platform again.

My main account is here: https://functional.cafe/@loke
This perfectly demonstrates the state of US media (and western media in general).
After over 2 years of misinformation, unfounded allegations, and downright fabrications, the media are now congratulating themselves on a job well done.

It's clear that they have no intention of abandoning their Russiagate narrative, despite Mueller's report.
If you've been holding back on Ripgrep because of its 0.x version numbering, now's the time to adopt it. Ripgrep is faster than grep, faster than ag (the Silver Searcher), and even faster than git grep.

The author breaks down all of these details in this 17,000 word blog post, full of detailed benchmarks. https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ (It's from 2016, but it's still mostly in good shape; ripgrep has only gotten faster since then!)
Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam Wishes Comedy Hadn’t Changed
You pointed out no such thing, and regardless; no such bona fide definition of "front running" exists. You got it wrong: admitting your error would be the honest thing to do. It's OK to be wrong; that's part of science and rational enquiry. It's not OK to not admit that you're wrong.

FWIIW I'm not on Wall Street; I work in tech. Wrong again.

Your results are both trivial and basically linkbait. Everyone who knows what a time priority order book is knows there are stale orders on DEX exchanges. The fact that people are arbing them is markets doing what they're supposed to do; creating one price across disconnected markets. Anyone who knows what they're doing and uses a DEX knows this; DEXes are for people who for whatever reason can't use central exchanges, or for smart contracts that are less concerned with getting the best price marked to the millisecond. In fact I pointed out the stale order issue to people who created the one of the more popular DEX protocols over lunch. They pointed out what DEXes are for. I guess nobody sent you the memo. It's OK to not know this; I didn't know. Personally I think they're bloody stupid, but you making their use out to be something sinister or poorly understood is ... well, a lot like Michael Lewis paranoid lunacy.

I realize you're not Michael Lewis, but you're taking on the title of his execrable book to sell ... something much less science fictiony and exploitative than his tall tales, but still fairly off the mark.
Stuff like this is never an outright order to break competitors. Most of the "features" requested for google sites would be solely chrome "features" that would break on the rest of the browsers.

Google also did the same thing with Internet Explorer/Edge where they put a transparent div on top of youtube videos that was "designed to give focus to videos" but broke youtube videos for all IE users.
Here's an interesting titbit about Gene Wolfe: he helped develop the machine that makes Pringles potato chips [1]

[1] https://kokorognosis.livejournal.com/43391.html
What are you comparing it to as a foundation for you comment? It includes lots of meat which is also a great source or protein.

My wife and I both dropped a ton of weight and changed our eating habits for life. Like all diets your milage might vary.
This is my go to tool when dealing with Amazon reviews: https://www.fakespot.com/

99% of products feature a least some of fake 5 stars. Only very good brands don't rely on them, I usually buy from them even if they have 4-star rating.
"and was so beyond the pale obvious fraudulent that I felt the need to email jeff@amazon."

Obviously Jeff is well aware, and could do a lot more about it, but doesn't, ergo he is complicit.

Fake Reviews are 100% supported by Amazon and Bezos.

It's basically full on fraud, right out in the open.
You've only correctly identified the scarcity on one side of the comparison.
I wish I kept a link, but there was looking to buy a book on music theory or something similar. One of the books had 13 or so reviews, all glowing. Many were of the form "Exactly what I was looking for!" or "Just perfect!" with nothing more.

Two of them had the same surprising word that made no sense in the context of the sentence: both reviews used the word "goal." Then it hit me: either the directions telling them what to review or in their own attempt to translate to English, the auto-translation picked the wrong synonym, choosing "goal" instead of "score."
It compares your answer against answers from other users, to make sure that they agree. This gives them a training set to use.
It's impossible that giving customers sub-optimal recommendations is good for amazon.
The fact we managed to invent, create, and detonate nuclear weapons without anyone finding out is why I believe secrets can be kept.
Thats not needed. Just bundle the data in the same way that branches and other data is so I can do a git fetch and it pulls in everyones comments.
Sure, we should be encouraging reinvestment but how do you resolve the unfairness of companies that choose to reinvest themselves vs. pay out a dividend and allow investors to re-invest?

Amazon benefits from many government-funded programs: educated workforce, road & rail infrastructure, national defense, judicial contract-enforcement, etc.

Is it fair that a company that reinvests gets all that for free while a company that makes a profit pays substantially?
I think a lot of it is that companies don't see software as something you need to sustain. They see it as a tool that helps them with the rest of their business. It makes sense to them to go out an buy that tool. For example, if you are a brewery and you need kegs, you go out and buy kegs. You don't hire a whole bunch of coopers and devote a fair percentage of your business building barrels. That's seen as an old fashioned, wasteful way to do business. Unless software is your actual product, why do you have a team building it? You might even buy custom built kegs, but once you have them, you don't need a team building kegs -- you just need to hire someone occasionally to replace old ones.

I think from that perspective it makes total sense. Unfortunately, software is an embodiment of your business requirements and that you business requirements will probably be changing from day to day. Once you realise that, you can see that you need a team to be constantly changing the software.

In bonsai (trees in pots) there is a saying that a bonsai is only "finished" when it is dead -- because it keeps growing and changing. You can never say, "I'm done" because tomorrow the tree is different. I think this is also true of software: it's only "done" when nobody is using it any more (or, I suppose, when it's so unimportant that nobody cares that it isn't correct).

I think until we get the singularity, we will always need "programmers" -- people who translate the business requirements into something that the computer can act on. In fact, it's mostly thinking about the requirements that is important. The actual encoding of the computer instructions is (hopefully!) not that difficult.
"We at Amazon think it would be a shame if an algorithm flagged your {insert fake 5-star Chinese product here}.

Have we mentioned we offer a Premium Seller Protection service that will ensure nothing... untoward happens to your listings?"
I'm not exactly sure which version of "If you can prove that all of those have to say the same thing...." you're arguing for. It doesn't scientifically matter what statements you can make about any number of mathematical constructs if none of those constructs make testable predictions. Remember, falsifiability is a necessary condition for a construct to be a valid scientific theory.

OTOH, it does matter if you are able to make a statement of the form "Any mathematical construct that accurately describes X must have property Y." It is not clear that quantum gravity (or the linked article) meets this latter standard.
B&H
Yeah and I feel the bots or human assisted bots are getting more and more sophisticated. Even here on hacker news it feels like there is something less organic than before about posts and comments rankings.

It may be that I am getting old and that the culture has changed but I'm not sure...
The number ought to err too high, not too low. This is supposed to be punishment and deterrent, not a gamble to get ahead illegally.
> How the fuck does Amazon not know how to deal with this? 100% of reviews coming in for a product on the same day? MAYBE THAT'S A SIGN, AMAZON.

Then they would stagger the days. The issue is that human adversaries are formidable and you start approaching generalized AI to defeat them.
Not really. Unverified de-facto = fake.

Because unverified reviews are easy to make, then it follows manufacturers will just flood the system with fake one's. Which they do.

Unverified boils down to fake.
But could we do things inside the wormhole that we couldn't do in regular space? To go faster anyway?
First Big Survey of Births Finds Millions of Missing Women
All the current left/right political dogfighting and cultural warfare is a smokescreen for what's really going on, which is a class war. And the rich are winning. Unfortunately it seems increasingly likely that in their limitless greed they are destroying the fabric of the society that made it possible for them to become so wealthy. Sadly, history seems to keep repeating this theme down the centuries.
Don't elect wealthy politicians who are in bed with industry lobbyists and watch things change overnight.
How much energy does a photon need to form a black hole?
The issue the tech community has is that Amazon doesn't even appear to be doing the bare minimum.
Even if you add the ability to filter, it won't help unless it's the default. You'll still have a huge number of buyers choosing the product due to fake reviews and driving up the sales numbers. Since they aren't the smartest shoppers, they're also likely to leave their own review and be influenced by the other 5 star reviews.
What would prevent a company from telling the shareholders they made no profit? Is there a separate process that prevents them from lying and is more difficult to manipulate than the current tax code?
You have touched on the fundamental divide in American society. Do it yourself because you want it done and since you have the resources or the drive, versus wait for someone else to do it or force everyone else to since you lack the resources or the drive.

Even politicians who spend so much time and effort highlighting inequalities in society are able to do so because they had to drive to make themselves to do it. If their manner of achieving things is for good or ill is up for debate, but there is no arguing that they are where they are because they chose to go for it.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step...
A “Brave” New World: Internet Archive on Brave's Micropayments
This is yet again another, surely well-known 'leak' in how products are presented and displayed, since it can still happen, Amazon is tacitly complicit with the fraud.

Most of these issues could be mostly cleared up with some basic operational policies: purchase only reviews (or sideline the others), no 'changing the product', some degree of manufacturer verification etc..

But they chose not to do it.
It frustrates me that older generations lament the loss of cursive in the curriculum, but refuse to acknowledge that it overall reduces the readability. Not everyone is a born artist, and the evidence is quite clear that it isn't a magic bullet (or else everyone would have readable cursive). I know I don't write that well, but because the letters aren't linked up there's less ability to scrawl, so they tend to be reasonably interpretable.
It looks like some sections of the vault did collapse:

https://images.scribblelive.com/2019/4/15/556d889a-06ba-4094...
The Simple Solow Model of Software Engineering – LessWrong 2.0
Online Harms White Paper
Ah. The reason I ask is that the ending I saw could be interpreted either way, but I saw the 'happy' ending as obvious satire/irony. I'm just worried that I saw the wrong ending and over-interpreted it.
Oh hell no.

Here in West Australia we get these bastards in our lawn
https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/declared-plants/doublegee-pest

Natures Caltrops.
and let me tell you, they're strong enough to pop a tyre on a pushbike.
Some quantom cryptography can work but it's very iffy and expensive, there are ways to detect taps and even when a cable is bent.

Simply cutting the connection because the signal was interupted won't work, not to mention that many taps can be inserted without interruption and it's not like the NSA can't figure out how to work around maintenance windows.

But in this case it's not even a covert unauthorized tap it's a Chinese company ofc they'll cooperate with the Chinese government.

But again encryption doesn't prevent physical attacks of this sort they can still suck all the data out and while it maybe useless unless they can decrypt it this vector has nothing to do with building a secure internet.

The problem is that even if you encrypt everything state actors can simply go one step up the chain at the end of the day someone needs to be able to decrypt your packets besides you.
One product (power bricks for MacBooks) had over 1000 5 stars, then the 1 star reviews came in where people actually had their power adapters catch on fire. Amazon, or maybe the seller, shut the review/product down. Now, it's back:

https://www.amazon.com/KUPPET-MacBook-17inch-Compatible-MacB...

Lots of verified purchases. All the reviews are within the same date range. It doesn't take machine learning or advanced AI to catch this; a simple SQL statement should be enough to flag these. But still, they persist.
Abstract summary: Timing channels enable data leakage that threatens the security of computer systems.... We argue that OSes must provide time protection, the temporal equivalent of the established memory protection, for isolating security domains.
I consider myself a fairly progressive person. But I think at least some of the people, who don't like paying so much taxes, don't like the fact that the government is allocating the tax money collected, and it could, according to their belief, cause inefficiency.

I agree with that notion to a certain degree. For example, I wish there is a way to allocate the tax that I pay yearly to the programs that I want to fund. Specifically speaking, say if I pay $100 in tax, I should have a say to paying at least $50 of that to programs that I think are important for me (e.g., dept. of transportation; dept. of education; EPA...)
Same sort of experience: my transition from zillions of hours of PC flight sim to gliders did not go well at all. It seemed that I would never get so I could follow the tow plane in a non-exciting way.

I have observed that experienced pilots do reasonably well at following the towplane on the simulator even with no simulator experience at all. So it isn't just that it is different. There is something else going on there.
My cynical nature assumes some Amazon MBA has done the math and concluded that the gain in revenue from Amazon-only brands will exceed that lost from people abandoning the rest. This is based on the assumption that Amazon's Fulfilled By Amazon cobranding program does not allow third party participation for Amazon's in-house brands like Amazon Basic.

In light of that admittedly negative view what's Amazon's motivation to limit fake reviews since it doesn't damage their own brands, albeit at the cost of damaging their brand as a whole.
Those allegations didn't have very strong evidence. They were repeated by some lawyers looking for people to opt out of the class action. When I asked for details they didn't have anything.
Yachtkov: Building a Yacht Rock Song Title Generator
This whole article makes me question that statement. I hear it all the time, but passive aggression is a very real tactic in a bloodless war.
My theory is that they have metrics for selection they are trying to optimize. If customers only bought the 10 best of any item, how could some PM get a promotion for increasing phone charger selection 100x?
That’s also mentioned in the linked article.
the rise of ultrasound technology and abortion, starting in the 1970s, empowered women in China and India to choose sons over daughters as part of routine reproductive decision-making