skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the risk of dogpiling on other comments, I also feel Amazon's quality has hit rock bottom. I used to use Amazon because it had a reputation for quality items. Now they all come from China and I pay Western prices for the privilege of having it shipped to me faster.

USB keys and SD cards are almost all universally garbage rip-offs, and I recently purchased a stroller from Amazon, but had a bit of a panic moment when I wondered whether the baby carrier itself was certified by Canadian authorities (it was, but I shouldn't have to ever wonder).

For all of my child's items, I'm now steering clear of Amazon.
Airport facial recognition technology runs into privacy fears
So I was there about 5 months ago. I'll be honest, I'm in pretty good shape and even still, Pompeii is way too much to do in a day. Herculaneum is wonderful and very well preserved, but if you only had an afternoon you could see it with some ease.
Were I to do it again I'd likely spend one day in Pompeii, one day in Herculaneum and on the slopes of Vesuvius, and at least a day in Napoli proper. That would get everything in any respect, but would let have a real sense of those couple sites.
Love the explanation!
Sphero buys LittleBits in a bid to dominate connected educational toys
I agree multiple services is crazy & inconvenient. that isn't an excuse to do something illegal.
I’d be astounded if the didn’t. They just need to tag the fish and check caught fish for older tags.
Very nice website and you offer Apple Pay. I’d totally buy direct from you over going to Amazon. I think you’re on the right track.
Pretty sure it’s a spin on a Fight Club quote.
That is not the point. This would be like telling people who want better working conditions to found a company and implement them. When our hypothetical professor starts building Stanford in the Ukraine he stops being what he wants to be, a Stanford professor, and becomes something entirely different, a Stanford builder.
It feels like the only rational explanation is "Bezos wants it like this."

I know the folks at Amazon are talented, but the abject failure to optimize for quality over quantity is pretty much only explainable as intentional.

I guess a second runner up would be that they're so organizationally KPI-focused, and their KPIs are so myopic, that no one actually realizes how much they're screwing up customer experience. But that seems a stretch.
I always wondered how we got all these reports of lead in products and children's toys. There was a post a few weeks back where someone explained it and it made perfect sense: recycling.

China takes a ton of US recycling. They often melt down metals, e-waste and solder and it's difficult to separated out lead and unleaded source material. A lot of it just gets put together and used in bulk.
It seems like a pretty decent card for most people with a number of privacy, security, and usability upgrades. I'd get it if I wasn't able to extract most of the benefits and rewards from my Amex Platinum. As it stands, it's hard to beat the flight, lounge, Uber, and hotel benefits if you go on trips even semi-regularly.
> Either way, it is becoming increasingly difficult for American politicians and climate activists to say they can see the effects of warming temperatures in the United States. For at least the past 14 years, there have been no such warming temperatures.

Nicholas Taleb says a weatherman can't hold his job when all his predictions are false for a month, while a climate scientist is not troubled by this risk. Could it be climate change is just a hoax?
Also the sturgeon is an invasive species in many environments, like in SF we're poisoning our lakes to remove them.
I read the story and honestly don't see that the writer is at fault. Sure, criticize the woman for not knowing better, but that's where her blame stops and Amazon takes the rest.
Singapore is in a unique position. It makes sense that they have public transport as the number one priority.
Agreed. Obviously I shouldn't have been surprised, but it still amazes me how pertinent it is, 30+ years after it was written.
Purely Functional Cloud Components with AWS CDK
I'm still baffled why Beijing is still goes THAT easy on USA.

It is fully in its capacity to make Washington to capitulate.

If they were to go with embargoes and not tariffs, things would be dramatically different, especially if they can nuke holiday season sales.

Just a plain clothing embargo would send all and every American retailer scrambling. There will be not enough merchandise in all India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam combined. And it will be even worse if Chinese factories in those countries would also join the embargo.

For things like regular household goods will also be no real alternatives as even export oriented economies like Vietnam import god knows how much plasticware from China just because it is often cheaper than manufacturing locally.

Just thing of how many "dollar goods" you buy every month, and what would you do if there would simply be none.

I instantly remember my childhood in early nineties Russia. We were one of richest families in the city or likely the entire Russian Far East, with father's business and mom's salary making few hundred thousand bucks a years, but from time to time we had to subsist on millet for months in a row for a simple reason that there were physically no other food in the entire region.
I'm the APSW author. The binary builds for Windows are distributed with those extensions all compiled in, although my doc needs some updating. It is also only a single flag for other platforms to include all extensions during compilation. What can I do?
Only if you have data as part of your phone plan! Many people don’t. Especially people who are just using a burner phone/SIM.
What content do you feel like we will miss out on? Genuine question. Clearly, Wikipedia would keep operating. Universities would continue to operate web presence, but their highest quality content (academic papers) is already paywalled. As for news, there's a spectrum. There is news about global events, and then there is news about entertainment. Entertainment, itself, (Netflix, Hulu) is already paywalled.
> At one point in 2013, some Amazon employees began scanning randomly selected third-party products in Amazon warehouses for lead content, say people familiar with the tests. Around 10% of the products tested failed, one says. The failed products were purged, but higher-level employees decided not to expand the testing, fearing it would be unmanageable if applied to the entire marketplace, the people familiar with the tests say. Amazon declined to comment on the episode.

This crosses a higher threshold than many of the other anecdotes, it sounds like there’s an actual record of willful negligence.

What’s the likely big picture economic situation with Amazon? Is there any way to estimate where the bulk of fake goods are coming from and the money through Amazon is going to? China was mentioned several times in the article, is this a China problem, or actually bigger than that? Has Amazon formed a tunnel that primarily moves illegal low-quality product into the US and money out? Is Amazon the largest vector for foreign goods that are breaking US laws to be sold in the US, or is this an internet problem in general? I can’t think of other US retailers, even online, that I’m scared to shop at for fear of fake product.
The debate should be public transportation vs cars for those mega cities, not against Tesla.
I've been using SourceTree in Windows. But it's slow and I really hate that they put the staging area and the file tree into the same control.

Heard of Fork [1] and switched in a heart beat. Works like a charm and looks great. Unfortunately only for Windows and Mac. I fall back to the command line on Linux.

[1] https://git-fork.com/
> Electric cars are poor, even counterproductive stand-ins for long term solutions such as public transportation and the elimination of the suburban commuter lifestyle. They hide a multitude of externalities forced on the public and not paid for directly by owners or manufacturers.

Sure, but that's the solution you get from people who've never really experienced a well designed public transportation system. It's essentially a "faster horse" solution to traffic pollution issue which doesn't address the reasons behind the insane amount of tarmac space in modern US cities.
List of Public Domain Music
Another favorite: receiving your item freely bouncing around in a much larger box alongside a single bubble pack that neither tries to nor succeeds at filling any appreciable amount of the empty space available for said bouncing around.
To the UI, too far from modern applications.

I also heard that the API have some misfit with Rust ownership model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20368618
>If mobile numbers in your country are in the 2________ range, how feasible is it to add millions of phone numbers to your contact list to find out the number of someone? I think this is nonsensical.

If you're a state actor probably pretty easy. Get a couple thousand rooted remote controllable android devices (which you probably already have for other projects) and have them automatically add 10k phones numbers each. Then have them join public telegraph lists and check for matches. Now you have gone through 10 million phone numbers. Run it in a loop 10 times and you have 100 million. Might take a few days to setup and run.

I don't see why this is infeasible in any way to do if you have a moderate budget (ie: state actor).

edit: And if your target is in your jurisdiction then you probably have a good mapping of names to phone numbers already.
As I understand it, if you fulfill with Amazon they keep your inventory mixed with the Chinese knockoffs, so you actually don’t know for sure if customers got the inventory you sent to Amazon or a counterfeit instead.
Not a trade war. The Trump administration goal is nothing short of regime change in China; and it's a goal the next President (Trump, Warren, etc.) will likely continue. By 'regime' I mean an end to Chinese 'destiny' based policy, even if it requires a change in CCP leadership. That's not to say the CCP will be displaced, rather the balance of power internally may change.

HN readers are hip to the reasons why this needs to happen. Internally, China is destroying its people's savings, purchasing power, environment and health to achieve China's 'great destiny'. Externally, China has created all manner of artificial economic inefficiencies. This includes debt enslavement of African and central Asian nations, dumping of goods, and theft of IP at a monolithic scale.

It's true that the full case has yet to be made to the American people. It's also true the US cannot do this alone and the EU (China's largest trading partner) may have to join the fight. And, it is the case that a 'trade deal' may be reached between Trump and China that falls short. None of this is going to alter the larger national (global) security objective of 'helping' China compete for resources in a less zero sum manner.
Spring-based software launches in hundreds or even tens of milliseconds if you've precompiled on Graal. The Spring team have been working closely with Graal folks to remove roadblocks.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, though not on Spring.
Perhaps you joined wave before I did, but IIRC by the time I got an invitation each invited user had 5 inivitations to share among their friends/peers.

So forming a group wouldn't have been a problem because you could invite your friends who could invite their friends.
It's a quote from Fight Club
Ah ok, make sense this way. "Customization" would be less confusing for me.
Doesn't it seems like a bit of an abuse of language to refer to former bitbucket users as "refugees"?
Mind boggling to me is that what we see of Herculaneum is less than a third of what is buried. The rest is under the city and they're afraid excavating it may cause problems (drainage related I believe).
If you believe numbers coming out of China I don't know what to tell you. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-power-emissions/fal...
Does a person who lacks respect for human life deserve for their life to be respected? I'd argue no. I'm not celebrating his death or anything, but I have no sympathies for him either. I'd argue he did more harm to the world than good which is plenty of reason to be glad about his departure from our world.
Cremation results in ashes, only the light volatiles go up in smoke. Conventional burial also isolates the heavy metals in one place; which wouldn't happen with composting because they would all enter the ecosystem.
the issue is it would also wreak serious havoc on china's economy

and while xi is president for life, he doesn't want to risk mass unrest in his own country.
Swift Continuous Fuzzing
Amazon's transformation in Canada has been remarkable. Back in 2011 or so, the selection for anything was extremely sparse, like the shelves in a Soviet-era store. Today, the shelves are full, but with third party sellers selling used products as new, and the search results jammed with no-name Chinese brands with thousands of 5-star reviews.

I bought a Blackberry Key 2 LE on Amazon.ca, advertised as a Canadian model and brand new. When it arrived, the box clearly labeled it as a refurbished product to be sold in India only. Thankfully they still offer a no-questions asked return policy , but maybe that's limited to Prime members. Once my student subscription expires, I'll be off Amazon forever. Just not worth the hassle.
Update a GitHub repository submodule to the most recent SHA, as a webhook
It's a bit scary to see that a person who has all the best doctors and researchers available still dies at 79. Probably he didn't do everything to extend his life though.
Parts of the world belonging to a system and other world parts are so different in a system's ability to control them, that I suspect that any system capable of planning, learning and building world-models will naturally divide the world into self and not-self.

In state 0 such discovery just hasn't happened yet.
Where am I saying it’s worse? He did a bunch of bad stuff related to questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election and I’m not attempting to rank them.
Hi, author here,

I understand the critics against the subjective criteria like "Look".

Look means: the ability to create a native app which is at least beautiful as modern WebApps.

e.g. Slack or VSCode (Electron) are beautiful, while fractal or NoteCase (Gtk) are not.
"China is worse" is a particularly horrible excuse for America doing nothing given those per-capita numbers.

"America is worse per capita" is a bad excuse for China to do nothing.
I've heard two stories about the origins of Spring Boot, one of which included Ruby on Rails. I don't remember the other being Dropwizard, so I guess now I've heard three stories, only two of them from Spring contributors.

"Magic classpath scanning", also known as "classpath scanning", comes with leveled POMs, which is a massive sanity-preserver.
Well, it certainly doesn't calculate it by political territory or tribal affilliation.
I'm not even talking about the first column as there is no such thing as a standard electric car, is it a Zoe or a Tesla model X?

Moreover, production needs energy and the carbon intensity should be mentioned (so we suppose that they used the same value). A battery produced at the Gigafactory is going to have a smaller carbon intensity as most of its power supply is solar...
By the way this study is very pessimistic. For example if I take the efficiency of the Tesla Model 3 (16.4kWh/100km) for the whole 150'000km we get 12.3 metric tons of CO2 (500gCO2/kWh), far from the 19 tons of the figure.
The times and post are nothing compared to the number of trackers on the McClatchy papers.
> Side note: I'm filled with dread just thinking about buying a motorcycle helmet from amazon.

Don't, I wouldn't. Revzilla, sells all sorts of motorcycle gear and has a great reputation. https://www.revzilla.com/
You can (and we need) to do both.

Suburban living on average doubles the climate impact of the same number of people in a city. The OP notes correctly that this externality is not correctly priced in the current market.
I agree. It seems that it is by design in some way. The shift is really dramatic.

Perhaps it is just "we're not eating enough of the wall-mart (call it what you want) market". And now they're going after that at the expense of the larger brand.

They're big enough now that they'll grow / maybe miss what they're doking up until it is too late.

I'm already shopping elsewhere more often / actively searching out alternatives to Amazon.
I am using Google's dialer on android, and it's been very effective with identifying spam callers...

disclaimer: google employee.
If your developers are not the people doing end-to-end lifecycle management of the application they own, you don't have "devops", you have ops.
I had never heard of an Overage Provision before...

Nice to know we explicitly provide for land owners to extract rent even when they don't own the land any more.
What we need is a way to jam these trackers with generated data to the point that they are useless. Something like https://trackthis.link, but running 24x7 on countless computers, phones, raspberry pi, hacked routers, and virtual machines.
Here's your tree-like spreadsheet (with no collaborative features): http://strlen.com/treesheets/
Just Devil's Advocate, but if they're scared, why didn't they back down?

I sincerely hope someone is in the room on our side who has seriously considered the possibility here that we may have miscalculated. There needs to be some contingency in place so that we don't get stuck in round and round of barrier escalation.
OK, proof https://d.pr/i/4yEClL
> Another thing Signal likes to do is to broadcast the fact every time you shift it to a new device. I have seen enough changing round from a couple of correspondents to deduce a pattern in their hardware habits.

This is a security feature to ensure you're talking to the same person. Phone numbers are terrifyingly easy to port to another account.
Indian Academics Confront the Threat of Nationalistic Pseudoscience (2018)
A DevOps Dishwasher
In North Central Florida where temps get up to 100 or 110 (we're not on the coast) AC feels like it is necessary but I've known of people who have lived here without it. A series of fans and knowing which windows to leave open and when is the key. It's all in the construction of the house too. When people immigrated from Europe to the southern United States the typical construction of these houses was a very tall house with giant windows which open up. Since heat rises these early houses were built around this premise and people around here have been here a long time. Otherwise ice arrived by train and was placed next to a fan which was mechanically operated or by hand in the old days. My native ancestors from this area lived in log cabins (not teepees or huts as commonly described in history books) and the wall-less thatched structures were communal gathering spots not their actual homes. Modern construction with all the prefab elements and insulation is suffocating in my opinion and this is why, by choice, I live in a wooden house although yes I do have AC and enjoy it very much.
"Teleportation" is such a misleading term. Information (in the form of a quantum state) is transmitted, not matter. And it requires a lot of setup and preparation including classical transmission as well.
By far, the best way to eat Portuguese marmelada is with goat cheese, tapas style.

Slice both the ultra-sweet marmelada and the salty cheese into squares of the same size, stack them and stick a toothpick through them.

In Brazil, when made with guava paste (goiabada) this same dish is called Romeo & Juliet, one of the best food names ever created.
Negative Rates Are Coming for Your Savings
Policing at scale is difficult, as YouTube and Facebook have learned.

Small communities are far easier to police. But to do it pre-emptively with AI is an open problem. My interest is how can we make a system that will reliably converge in most cases to what’s true, like Wikipedia? It would be GREAT to have it for making sense collaboratively of news, politics, religion. People submit claims/evidence and each one has its own page.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiality_and_Othe...

What is the incentive model? One I thought of is that you gain reputation points linearly but lose them exponentially in high-stakes challenges. The question is who can resolve a challenge one way or the other. And whether the result is immutable or can swing back if it turns out eg that the challenge was swayed by a coordinated effort.

If it’s a static system there are always going to be increasingly sophisticated attacks built on coordination (sybil attacks, sleepers). The most basic attacks require a net gain in credits to be sustainable. Namely, coordinated attacks (marauders) have to win challenges (and net positive points). But later on, attacks can be paid for by trading outside currency (eg BTC or USD) in exchange for using internal credits (“aged accounts”) in “vandalism” actions (attacks which do not gain credits but may even lose them, but are sustained by outside gain).

This is an issue for the source of truth for cryptocurrency as well, but at least the data is very well defined, and there doesn’t seem to be a huge gain from vandalism (except shorting). National elections in the US also have similar things for ballot counting. On Amazon and the sites I’m talking about, we are referencing outside events instead of internal processes. Wikipedia seems to have the most successful model w human editors of various kinds watching over the result.

Is there published research on the game-theoretic aspects of maintaining integrity of collaboratively edited information about the external world?
Environmental protections would have been a much more justifiable motivation for attempting to modify the behavior of Chinese exporters and even the playing field for US competitors who must comply with environmental regs that Chinese firms can ignore.

But Trump's goal with the tariffs was simply to destroy economic cooperation between the US and China, so that peaceful business entanglements would be less able to prevent escalation toward war.
My point is that as long as donations of any kind are legal, politicians will continue to optimize for fundraising, rather than optimizing for policies that benefit the largest number of people. Who is most equipped to donate large sums to politicians? The wealthy.
And yet nothing changes, so to feign self awareness is the height of theater.

They do it in the open. They say they do it. They tell you they know it's bad, this thing they do. And they do it anyway.

It doesn't make them better than others to pay lip service and not change. If anything, they lead by example and it makes them worse for having done so.

Shop lifting is a crime, but hey, everyone does it, so watch me pocket this candy bar. And some beer. And a TV. And maybe I'll just grab some money from the cash register. And yeah, I think I'll steal the assistant manager's car to get away. See? This is just how the world works!
Show HN: Itempass – Aggregate your social and contact details into one page
Request for Authors
I’ve always been annoyed by BitPay’s proprietary invoices. But missing out on $100k because of them... next level.
Did I say that? What does make sense is to do cost effective, beneficial, and non-sacrificial things.

One of the best things overall is to promote next generation nuclear power as a major alternative to coal. If coal could be phased out entirely within 20-30 years that would be a huge win. Perhaps grid storage could largely replace gas generation.

That would leave fossil fuels mainly in transportation, which would be a giant improvement over today.

Lower CO2 trajectories give more time to rigorously evaluate the science, get more data, and develop revolutionary technology.