skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the top listing returned in Amazon's search results for the main textbook used in upper division and first year graduate level statistical inference courses in North America

http://imgur.com/a/nYmkFie

Notice the black mark on the bottom right corner? That's to conceal text saying that it's an international edition not to be sold outside of India -- editions that tend to be dirt cheap compared to North American editions but have poor print and binding jobs, usually no preface or solutions to problems in the appendix, and missing chapters. Notice that it's original price was listed as $999.99 and it's listed as 98% off? The listing price of the NA edition is actually about $100.

This listing shows up before the legitimate listing in the search results. It has been this way for many months. I'm fine with international editions being sold on Amazon -- so long as they are clearly labeled as such.

When this problem has become so pervasive and even impacts Amazon's original core business to this extent, I find myself looking to other retailers... Only to find it impacting many of them as well. I bought an international edition from a third party seller on hpb.com, and my partner is finding shady probably factory produced stuff littered with obviously fake reviews on Etsy now.

I'm really curious what the evolution of this problem will look like for e-commerce marketplaces.
I understand that, I'm just saying that if your risk calculation concludes that LTS is less risky by default, then it's based on false assumptions, based on misunderstanding. The new feature releases are not major releases. If companies were fine upgrading to feature ("limited update") releases while there were still major releases around, I don't see why they would be more risky now that major releases are gone. I think that people can perceive them to be more risky because they confuse the change to the way those releases are named with the old major releases. For some companies, getting an LTS service is less risky, but not because of some intrinsic quality of LTS but because of their particular internal processes. For a great many companies, sticking to the default, gradual update process is the cheapest, least risky option.

Moreover, there are also special risks to LTS programs, particularly the free ones. A much smaller number of people work on them (about 1/50 of the total number of people working on OpenJDK), and they completely rely on backports from the mainline. So, for example, once the CMS collector is removed from the mainline, it becomes unsupported in some LTS programs (certainly the free ones) because there are no longer fixes to backport, and they don't have the resources to fix bugs without backports.

Finally, you can't talk about risk and treat LTS as a single thing, as the different LTS programs vary greatly in their risk vs. conservativeness. The Oracle LTS service contains almost only true patches: bug and security fixes, like the first two patches for each feature release. Red Hat's LTS/OpenJDK Updates and Azul's Zulu backport huge new features in their "patches." Amazon considers (or considered) taking the current VM and backporting it as a whole to an old JDK version in a "patch."
Yes, it's very hard. They would have to completely re-architecture their systems.

For e-commerce, the client can sign his or her address with the shipper's public key, so that only the shipper and the recipient are guaranteed to know the address. To the user, this could happen transparently without any change in UX, where the e-commerce website acts like a keyserver.

For email addresses, phone numbers, names, etc. it is more difficult. You can't just store a hash of the email address if you want to ever be able to email your customers.

Internal documents can be more trivially end-to-end encrypted. Imagine the whole company shares a WhatsApp group chat. Nobody has to ever hold a plaintext copy of an internal document. Only permit access on company devices which hold the keys in hardware.
There's definitely been a huge influx of people jumping on the CS train for the money recently. But the thing is, from what I've heard, there's still a huge gap between how may programmers are needed and how many there are.

Now, this state of affairs won't last forever. Eventually the market will level out. But I would guess we have at least another 5-10 years until that happens, and when it does happen, it won't mean the field crashes. It'll just settle into a more realistic state. Jobs that are "easy if you can understand code at all" will be the hardest hit. You might not get paid 6 figures to throw together simple web pages any more. Jobs that are intrinsically hard will be fine.

So my plan is to stay ahead of the tide. To push myself, get good at my craft, and get into a sub-field that's hard instead of resting on the current boom. Then, when things shift, hopefully my value will speak for itself.

In summary: yes, things right now are too good to be true. But that doesn't mean the whole field is a bubble. CS is very necessary in our world (and increasingly so) and there are lots of very hard problems out there to solve, it's just that there are even more easy problems.

Edit: Here's a source I found on Google (I don't know the source firsthand, but it seems credible enough at first glance)
https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/software-engine...
This has been on my mind a lot in 2019. She summed it up very nicely. In my opinion - the problem is that the internet used to be a fun hobby but now it's a job or a requirement for a job or just a requirement. You can't really quit the internet - not if you intend to function in society.
Well, Finland has in past been (1) invaded by Russia and (2) been targeted in disinformation campaigns.

They know they will be the next ukraine if they don't watch out.
Im also wondering what “best” or “winning” means in this context. Theres no way they’ll surpass AWS in revenue in 3 years so whats the dimension of quality here?
Basically an intern. Zero engineering credentials despite the title. OMG.
Sad, but likely true. It would appear as an observer that facist ideals are on the rise even in the youngest genrrations, but that may be simply me noticing it more.
I'm curious what "bad actors" you imagine with a DNA dataset. Targeted viral agents to hunt and kill only shadowgovt's? If someone wanted to do that, raiding my trash for a half-eaten sandwich is a lot easier way to get the data they want then hoping I upload it to 23andme.
The Information is always light years ahead of other tech sources. Probably the #1 tech reporting outlet. So yes, no one is skeptical.

Edit: noticed you work on Google. So that about explains it.
Even prior to this supposed leak, it would be really difficult as a developer to build anything reliant on Google's technology stack. There is a huge number of killed projects; abandoned platforms; and projects like maps where low/ no fees have become prohibitively expensive.

Building atop Google is betting the farm on a fickle master.
Thinking in Data (2012)
I can't find the article now, but that was actually a suggestion I really liked; don't learn CS in college, learn History, learn Math, learn anything else, because someone who can program are about a dime a dozen; but a historian that can also program is unique. The domain knowledge is so much more important than the tool used to explore it - and having both is a golden ticket.
There is NO WAY to retire Google Cloud...

This is the ultimate suicide you need to take to destroy public trust, once and for all.
There's a difference between leaving a "simple note" and abusing a security tool to spam employees. Google is tired of employees using their job as a political soapbox.
Furthermore, it sets a precedent. Next week someone uses the same tool to argue against unionization. And now Google had to let them do it or they'll be seen as being impartial.
A management fad called dev-ops is what went wrong, before you could count on your sysadmin to take care of that :) Apart from that, not everything always makes sense to use in production without a good level of understanding --- and might otherwise lead to, for example, a false sense of security.
So the supply chain collapses before 2030...that means that everything post-Z80 vanishes in a puff of smoke? Why stop there, there are still (small-ish) warehouses full of vacuum tubes - we need schematics and software for computers built out of them.
Everywhere I've worked, "signing off" on the changes just meant we were OK with the technical implementation. Unless you were junior, you were trusted to have approval for the purpose of the change.

A change like this, which was linking to an official policy document, wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.
That’s really the best way to describe it. YouTube has been trending the same way now for a while which is where it’s easiest to see. We’ve created these content ecosystems where the content is terrible and it’s just barely sellable. Like no one would actually pay for it, but with ad model you can create content that is just barely more valuable than nothing at all. Just barely. The value of the vast majority of content now approaches zero but never quite gets there, and that’s where we are now. Improvements in targeting ensure the content actually becomes worse over time while still being sellable.
Why should you have to move to get superior service? It should be regulated that access to equal internet service regardless of geographic location, where physically possible, is required by law.
> Drag people from one place to another its not governments role here.

The US government is one of the largest employers in the USA. And they are responsible for the expansion of major metropolitan areas around the US. Washington DC is an obvious example, but for one from that list, Dayton Ohio owes most of its technology sector to the US Air Force due to its proximity to Wright-Patterson Air Force base, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the glut of technology contractors in the area.

I'm sure Dayton is not a terribly desirable place for technology workers to emigrate to, but it does demonstrate the feasibility of special economic zones. The US is full of beautiful places that would be highly attractive to workers, if only jobs were available in sufficient numbers. The US government could even work with public-private partnerships to ensure that enough private investment occurs to bring culture to the area so that it doesn't sit around as some stagnant boomtown.
The message in the popup was:

“Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.”

which seems pretty reasonable since her job is literally to place notifications of what employees legally can and can’t do when visiting websites.
I still lay claim that google is not hiring the talent that they think they are or claim to be. With such huge budgets and failed product after failed product one has to wonder what is the genesis of their failings. Having met countless arrogant but mediocre engineers that leave Google after four years, I will bring up the old algorithms only hiring nets bad employees with good memories.
Scroll just west of here (not my zip) ... what's that clump in the ocean?
https://www.xfinity.com/mobile/network/map?zip=92008
I did some numbers a while ago you may be interested in:

If all power generated right now was from D+T fusion, it would generate about 8.2% of the current helium consumption.
We consume 153,596 TWh of thermal energy per year [1].
Each D+T reaction releases 17.59 MeV [2].
Multiply by the atomic mass of He4 and divide by Avogadro's number to get the mass of He4 produced per energy produced.
Divide by the density of He4 at STP to get volume of He4 produced per second [3].
Divide by the consumption of He4 to get the ratio of He4 produced to He4 consumed [4].

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(153596+TWh+%2F+year)+...

1. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-and-changing-en...

2. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/fusion.htm...

3. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gas-density-d_158.html

4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-017-9359-y
Keep piling big budget infrastructure like subways into existing cities seems like a dead end, you push the living cost ever higher, concentrating workers ever more into city centers, congestion, then more big budget infrastructure, this is just a vicious cycle.

If electric vehicles are the future, young people shouldn't be afraid to creat their own new cities with scattered companies and minimum infrastructure investment, you only need roads and charging stations. Cheap land make for cheap houses and low living cost, in fact, isn't this what their fathers did to achieve the American dream life young people nowadays so pine for?

This seem to be the only way the American dream can still be realized.
Google is far from the world’s “third largest provider”

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/public-cloud-market-sha...

As far as the manager “being on the chopping block” the article talks about “losing funding”.

$8 billion in revenue means nothing. Is it profitable?

This is the same company that left an entire city’s streets in disarray after abandoning Google Fiber.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.
I no longer use any of Google's services and neither does my employer for this reason.

We did have one application running on their cloud, but decided to move it to aws because we just can't trust them to keep anything around. Every year we had to rebuild some part of our app, because they replaced or completely removed some feature we were using. It got old and we were done with it...
Human innovation is just one kind of response, to the general trend. The real argument here is about the price, a finite resources that everybody understand to be running out would already raise in price long before any actual real limit is hit. The price system response to both on the supply and the demand side and importantly it doesn't respond in real time rather its actually predictive.

So if somebody says that something that is now available for essentially free, ie used to fill up balloons and children birthday parties you immediately know that it is nonsense.

With all of these arguments going back 200-300 years the people who make them never take a general higher level trend into account to make their argument.

> It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?

What I'm saying is that we should be intellectually honest and look at the actual trends and data we have historically for such claims and consult our models that we as humanity have developed to understand how these dynamic works.

This is what we do in basically every single situation but somehow when arguing about 'resources running out' we throw this out and are just willing to believe the same old nonsense arguments over and over again.

> The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.

That is a totally different problem. The Ozone was a externalize problem. Focusing on those kind of problems makes actual sense. That's my exact point, instead of inventing nonsense scaremongering problems about Peak-Whatever.
Agreed, if it's sealed in the original packaging and in new condition, I don't really care. Of course if it's food it shouldn't past the sell by date.
We're on Google because we're not betting the farm on them or anyone else. Google has the best Kubernetes hosting, but using Kubernetes allows us to move if anything drastic changes.
You're trying to conflate physical items with intellectual property here - that isn't how the legal system works in the US or in any country that I am aware of.

Genius has no ownership over the lyrics - they are not their intellectual property. When you get a license to mineral rights, whatever you extract is your property and you have ownership of it. That isn't the case here, and as such, it's a nonsensical analogy.
I imagine google will keep the technology around to support their own products. I read this to mean they will stop selling access to it.
We’re at the point now that eBay is more reliable than Amazon.

There are thousands of retailers out there, Amazon seems to be unique in having this problem at scale.
Ethically it’s wrong and it’s a violation of the trust put into IT workers. It wasn’t a judgement call it was a personal choice.
You don't provide any context in your attempt at a wry comment, and then you compound it by not only reinforcing the ageism, but adding in classism as well.

You're defining the cashier by their job/role, as well as how they spend their money on saving for retirement. Textbook classism.

My anecdotal reply would be that I've made it to this golden age, I've earned far less than the average, saved more than the average, and still have a wonderful, interesting life ahead of me. I've married, raised a family, and had memorable trips with them.

Your last sentence is really indicative of how you view wealth and money; for many, becoming a millionaire is about stability and being able to provide for your loved ones, not to become someone that people "give a fuck about."
How much is the subscription? wonder if they have a student discount?
'The race is on to figure out a fix after authorities linked Russian groups to misinformation campaigns targeting Catalonia’s independence referendum and Brexit'

Thus far there's not a single shred of evidence that Aaron Banks etc. worked with Russia on the Leave campaign, indeed, this exact allegation is currently the subject of litigation between Banks and a Guardian journalist, Carole Cadwalladr. Perhaps the weasel words 'authorities linked' are how they got it past CNN's lawyers.

Somewhat ironic that a piece on fake news should itself recycle what currently amounts to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
GrabOp Wants You to Test New App
#NEW GrabOp arrived making jobs for the people & on #applestore now!!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grabop/id1478285475

We want you to test the #app

For #iphone, #apple #users

#betatester #betatest #betatesters #betatesting #testmyapp #indiedev #developers #apps #NewRelease #Oprah #Tuesdaymotivation https://t.co/KUhkqvdCUO
Another issue is ethics. There is a critical mass needed of people saying no to prevent unethical software from being common.

Right now there are multiple gold mines as software used to be more or less ethical/trustworthy, now people are busily trading that trust for $.
If you're a startup you should seriously consider colocation for as many of your workloads as possible

The vast majority of startups do not succeed or fail based upon their ability to control their datacenter spend. They succeed or fail based upon their ability to attract customers and grow revenue. Colocating and managing your own servers instead of taking advantage of the ease of using the cloud will only be a distraction for almost all early stage companies.
Why Do We Crave Sugary Food?
Venkay Mama
I guess the question is did she add a company policy or guideline by adding what she added? I wouldn't classify a union drive as a company policy.

Some may think a union drive is a company function. From what I remember about my experience with unions is you are allowed to put up notices in the employee breakroom that is done by the union rep who is voted in within each shop.

I would say what she did was more along the lines of blasting the union notice over speakers to everyone who entered the cafe.
Another side effect is that the signal to noise of product reviews on the internet have gone way down. It feels like you can only find glowing reviews of any product when you do a search. Youtubers, blog operators, etc are all incentivized to say a product is great and link to amazon with their affiliate code.
Even if you don't need it, you really probably do. A lot of people talking about entrepreneurship and whatnot have some kind of blindness to the idea that one can fail at these things, and once you've eaten up your savings you're back at square 0 and back to the soul-crushing reality of job. Objectively it is wiser to simply keep the job in the first place.
I’m guessing this is a cloud compute only decision and does not include Google Apps... I cant imagine them pulling out of Google Apps.
As an individual, not as humanity.
>Humans don't run out of non-renewable resources, the price just goes up.

How much for a live passenger pigeon?
It would be the ultimate Google move to sunset GCP. Literally no product they provide is safe.
You own a portion of a company, but that portion can be watered down at any time, no? Can't a company produce more shares and disseminate them at any time? I know that conceptually you own a portion, but it's so watered down and abstracted it seems like a far cry from actually owning anything that actually correlates to an actual means of production.
Apple is actively ripping out software licensed under earlier versions of GPL as well, as they're now horribly out of date.
The language drift is absolutely confusing here but "establishment" as "organization" seems to be quite correct. Establishment is also used (even to this day) as a vague word for location in a utilitarian sense, "Business's establishments" is one surviving usage of the term that comes close to that archaic usage - it is a tool or asset in support of the operation of a thing, a thing established in support of the thing.

Lastly I wanted to mention the parallel term you draw here because it's also a drifted phrase

> to make official

Is actually a highly accurate synonym for establishment, but only in archaic word usage, official (the adjective) is actually just a corruption of official a noun, it's sort of like "the influencer lifestyle" or "that's an influencer hat". Technically all "off-*" words originally related to religion, but that's gone by the wayside quite a bit by now.
Gartner isn't a source that I'd use as a basis for it (or honestly, anything). I would take a look at annual revenue for all of these businesses.
If the US had a thing like the UK's CBE/knighting Krebs would be worthy of one for his constant public service exposing this stuff.
Protecting programmatic access to user data with Binary Authorization for Borg
GrabOp Wants You to Test New App
#NEW GrabOp arrived making jobs for the people&on #applestore now!!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grabop/id1478285475

We want you to test the #app
For #iphone, #apple #users

#betatester #betatest #betatesters #betatesting #testmyapp #indiedev #developers #apps #NewRelease #Oprah #TuesdayMotivation https://t.co/KUhkqvdCUO
If it's past the sell by date, then return it. I've gotten old items from the grocery store, it happens.

I'm happy to give Amazon more leniency since their customer service is excellent and they make it very easy to return items.
allow me to introduce you to something you’ve obviously never heard of - the cloud.
I dont know if anyone has told you because you live under a rock with gigabit internet, but you don’t have to host your web server on your home PC. Most people would actually recommend against hosting a business web server in your home.
> Because more eyes catch more bugs.

But for product inspection we have pretty good evidence, from millions of human hours of factory work, that it's a bit more complicated.

X makes a widget, and sends it for inspection by Y and Z. Y has a look, but assumes Z will catch anything that Y misses. But Z also assumes that Y will catch anything that Z misses.

You end up with two people doing a superficial inspection and missing problems.

Of course, that's only if they're doing the same inspection twice. If they have different and clearly defined inspection roles the two inspector problem doesn't apply.
Pretty ideal, actually. Muni works fine.