skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that in AliExpress land, the long tail of stuff being sold (i.e. the stuff outside of the brand-names) was almost always created as a single batch by a process that can’t be replicated (e.g. because the people who made it only came together at that place and time to make that thing), and when that stock is depleted, the individual item is never sold again. If there turns out to be high demand, then another product will be produced that will be similar (sort of a knock-off, but sometimes it’s better rather than worse) but not identical.

One place you’ll run into this approach with higher-ticket items (i.e. not a $0.03 comb) is in the handheld emulation-console market. Some cool little device was created that everyone wants (e.g. the aluminum-alloy RetroGame 350)? Too bad, they can’t make more even if they wanted to.
I find this super interesting to watch being on the inside. There is some phenomenon where several people around the world come up with the same idea at the same time. There's even a term for this in scientific literature: Multiple Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

The theory of evolution, calculus, etc were "discovered" by multiple people with zero contact at the same time.

An event or change in the world (like airbnb here for example) trigger people to come to the same conclusion.

Now imagine you have a team of people working on it who are "just ok" - maybe they lack the product or engineering skills but still bring something to market. When the next team comes along that is truly stellar, they will out-execute.

With VC, it is really interesting. They may decide to invest in the team that is farthest along because they look like the leader in what is a new market. Or the stellar team may raise money and then the B team that started earlier and has more scale may go to investors and say "Look, this company raised money and we're way bigger - give us money too!" and they have a pretty good case for it at the surface level.

That is my take on how these things may happen and evolve.
That's a fair critique. It's not him posting.
Isn’t the parking situation almost like overbooking a venue and hoping the musical chairs works out?
Luhmann's Zettelkasten
Again: They are not only signal processing tasks. Not even primarily signal processing.

You seem to have a very reductive view of humans. I reject the view that humans are only signal processors.
WeLeakInfo gets pwned by FBI; Dutch, Irish police arrest alleged breach brokers
What precisely is "personal data"?
Can a nosey neighbor look out their window and note passersby that they recognize?

Can one recognize people whose face they saw somewhere (on TV, on a dating app etc) without "permission". (e.g. "I'm pretty sure I just saw my tinder match going into a bar with someone")?

What if someone has a very good memory for faces and a curiosity to match? What if someone employ scouts to report when they spot certain people?
What if someone automate these processes?

Where is the line between private informatio and publicly available raw data such as photons bouncing off people's faces?
The "service charges" came to $42M over 3 years in one state:

https://www.wyff4.com/article/the-dmv-sells-your-information...
There's a very simple reason for this: Payment is complicated and adds overhead. Particularly payment that works for everyone internationally.

Every form of payment, no matter in which direction, needs to provide enough benefit to justify the costs of the complexity added by it.
Don't they skim like 30% or something crazy like that off the top of every purchase? If so, I wouldn't call it "solved".
Netizenship – A Tool to find the membership of a given username in popular sites
Hi all,

This is my first submit. Apologies for any mistakes.

I have written a small tool for finding out the membership of a given username with popular websites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Around 30+ websites are covered as of now.

The tool is open-sourced at https://github.com/rahulrajpl/netizenship

It can be tested/used via 'pip install netizenship'

Regards, Rahul
$30k is in a place like NYC. The typical cost is much lower:

> As of March 2019, our statistical data indicates that the median construction cost for a new parking structure is $21,500 per space
If you have Apple care plus, you may just exchange the AirPods at some point during second year of wearing.
These are great answers. In general I think leveraging uncertainty and imperfect information is going to be pretty universal.
Yeah I've been avoiding Amazon lately.

They just don't care. Literally every-time I need to rely on them for something, they screw it up somehow. Always a late or missing package, or something inconsistent with the order. Especially when I take them up on one or two day delivery, expecting them to follow through on the promise.

I just think the cost of the losses is factored into their wild system. Getting orders by claiming to offer same day delivery is worth it even if 50% of those orders never show up. So customer service suffers because of their ruthless desire for market share.

Honestly, what product has amazon produced that is a good product? They just decimate industries by using their scale and financial backing to take a hit while their competitors die and then do as they wish.
Right. I mean, cameras are everywhere. Probably, computers will look at and parse their feeds, not just slow humans with eyeballs. Better this than Sensetime.
This seems absolutely correct. Google, Facebook...not the first but now ARE the market.
The US is the largest single market for light commercial vehicles. That’s more than just vans, but I couldn’t easily find a statistic for just vans.

I get the impression the EV vans are a good niche to play in for smaller players that don’t want to go head-to-head with Tesla.
If you can do that with 3rd party dependencies, can't you do that with all the code?

This is what confuses me about monorepos. Their design requires an array of confusing processes and complex software to make the process of merging, testing, and releasing code manageable at scale (and "scale" can even be 6 developers working on 2 separate features each across 10 services, in one repo).

But it turns out that you can also develop individual components, version their releases, link their dependencies, and still have a usable system. That's literally how all Linux distros have worked for decades, and how most other language-specific packaging systems work. None of which requires a monorepo.

So what I'd like to know is, of the 3 actual reasons I've heard companies claim are why they need a monorepo, is it impossible to do these things with multirepo? If it is indeed "hard" to do, is it "so hard" that it justifies all the complexity inherent to the monorepo? Or is it really just a meme? And are these things even necessary at all, if other systems seem to get away without it?
VROOM killer
Search and Earn with Microsoft Rewards
Microsoft says it will fix an Internet Explorer security bug under active attack
Random article[1] says:

> our guideline real-world figure of 1.4 kg of Li2CO3 per kWh

> 73 grams of Lithium metal .. equates to 385 grams of Li2CO3.

Adjusting for atomic mass difference, by data from an article[1], a 100kWh battery would be about 100 * 1.4kg * 73g/385g = 27 kg of Lithium, or 27 kg * 19/7 = 73 kg of potassium for a 46kg difference, if all else were equal. If that were the only difference, it would not even register for the usual 1000-2000 kg car.

Electronegativity difference 0.98-0.82 = 0.16 should (I'm just guessing) change a 3.7V nominal battery to a 3.55V nominal. This a notable decrease, as you would need about 5% more batteries for the same capacity. 5% of a 500kg battery pack is additional 25 kg.

All else being equal, it would be an irrelevant change for stationary, marine and road use. For planes it would be a notable factor, though not immediately disqualifying.

Since a 1:1 substitution wont work, all the other changes can make a material difference, in either direction. Comments about research batteries still apply.

[1] http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Projects/How_Much_Lithium_Pe...

EDIT: Fix calculation.
> Just like one can't disprove solipsism, one can only brush it aside as pragmatically useless.

Agree.

> Just because a theory is internally consistent or even accurate, does not mean it is a good all-around theory: simplicity and elegance counts too. And having to agree on who is the solipsist among all figments is inelegant and an impossibly complex task.

Indeed not... but the true measure of a theory/hypothesis is how hard is it to vary to explain new facts. (I think this idea is due to Peter Deutsch, originally.) If you can change your explanation by saying things like "Ah... well, Aphrodite wouldn't do that because she's pregnant in Spring"... then I'm sure we can agree that it's a badly or unfounded theory of the world.

This is actually an extremely high standard that very few pass.
To be fair, many college buildings are provided in large part by donations, but I don't think the same is true for parking lots.

Ideally, each student would receive value from the university roughly relative to the tuition they pay, and things that are completely optional should be charged for separately. I think it's reasonable to charge separately for:

- cafeterias
- housing
- tickets to performances

Why should parking be treated separately? Providing parking for free just encourages more parking, which means more pressure to create more parking, etc. Charging for it separately encourages more efficient commutes, whether by bus, bike, walking, or carpooling.

The same goes for cities and other areas with limited resources. Charging for those limited resources encourages more efficient use of those resources, as well as alternatives. Parking is merely one solution to transportation, why should we subsidize it over others?
High density isn’t the answer either. I don’t know one high density city in the entire world where housing became affordable and available for all as density increased.

Medium density and spreading out is the right solution. The example that comes to mind is the snail shell structure/concentric circle design of Paris, France.
But do pieces accelerate AS they fall?
Out of curiosity, how do you know that’s why he’s not being hired?
> + UI complexity, sign up + Transaction costs (VISA, fraud protection) + Financial accounting + Hosting the relevant financial data + Legal issues

In particular, under legal issues: taxes.

Sell something online to a person in city/state/country X, and you might be required by X to collect sales tax or VAT on the sale.
I may be jumping the gun a little because I was thinking about this in the context of another thread, but a practical problem with machine learning in general is that, for a learned model to generalise well to unseen data, the training dataset (all the data that you have available, regardless of how you partition it to training, testing and validation) must be drawn from the same distribution as the "real world" data.

The actual problem is that this is very difficult, if not impossible, to know before training begins. Most of the time, the best that can be achieved is to train a model on whatever data you have and then painstakingly test it at length and at some cost, on the real-world inputs the trained model has to operate on.

Basically, it's very hard to know your sampling error.

Regarding interpolation and dense sampling etc, the larger the dimensionality of the problem the harder it gets to ensure your data is "dense", let alone that it covers an adequate region of the instance space. For example, the pixels in one image are a tiny, tiny subset of all pixels in all possible images- which is what you really want to represent. Come to that, the pixels in many hundred thousands of images are still a tiny, tiny subset of all pixels in all possible images. I find Chollet's criticism not cynical, but pragmatic and very useful. It's important to understand the limitations of whatever tool you're using.

>> although now that I think of it I'm not sure of how nets handle extrapolation

They don't. It's the gradient optimisation. Gets stuck to local minima, always has, always will. Maybe a new training method will come along at some point. Until then don't expect exrapolation.
Some of us still have problems reading off of LCDs all day and tablets still don't cut it. Maybe e-ink will eventually be ok.
How about just building a parking structure? That seems the only way to actually solve the problem.
Yes, a 3 billion image database is tiny. Some orgs run that many new images per day, they just aren't exploiting it in this way.
I think there is also an inability to define "talented" in an objective and consistent way.
The secret part isn't the biggest issue - it's the fact that there were certain groups allowed to shape policy (like large IP holders) while others (like citizens) were not well represented. It thus led to a very one-sided set of rules.
No problem. As a side note, the Zig language does a much better job here, especially with defer. It works at the scope level (how it's supposed to be), and they have an `errdefer` construct used to call functions that return errors.
Tokyo is a massive inspiration for Bounce. We hope to have that ubiquity someday and with an even better experience including your suggestion to know which areas have empty lockers.

And support for multiple languages!

When I went to japan, the occupancy of these lockers were often 100% -- people would be standing in line waiting for a locker to open up!
Sadly, it reminds me of all the stories of authorities using databases for stalking women they're interested in, or people they have a personal grudge against, or whatever.

https://nypost.com/2019/03/11/sergeant-used-police-databases...

https://theweek.com/speedreads/651668/hundreds-police-office...

https://apnews.com/699236946e3140659fff8a2362e16f43/ap-acros...
The semi-future is that some of the Sonos gear supports Airplay 2 (and possibly some Google format, but I wouldn’t know.)

I only ever use them with Airplay 2, and they are firewalled off from the Internet. I also don’t have the Sonos app installed on any of my devices, so it can’t brick my speakers and insist on my signing a new TOS to get an update I didn’t ask for to provide features I didn’t ask for.

I fell right out of love with Sonos the first time they pulled the “your devices will have limited functionality until you agree to our update TOS” stunt, especially because that TOS seemed to be all about agreeing to even more data collection.

Then they stated shipping speakers with microphones, and it was clear which direction they had chosen as a company. They aren’t a hardware company. They’re now a surveillance capitalism company that uses hardware to collect data.
Co-creator here! Feel free to ask us anything.

Check it out if you can — it downloads really quickly, and it's free!
I have a system from Sonos. Their app to set-up the wireless speakers adaptive sound feature didn’t (at the time - not sure now) work with the latest iPhone. I dug an iPhone SE out of a drawer to set it up.
Sounds like a great idea for Bounce to support someday! Thank you for describing this! We want to create a world where your things never hold you down - you always have access to what you need!
So what you're saying is a van with just 200 mile range would cover the large majority of use cases better than an equivalent ICE van that's more prone to needing maintenance and has less storage space in the same body volume.
What is the guarantee that FOSS electronic equipment will survive any longer? Just because someone could support it doesn’t mean someone will, right?
Yeah, I'm super uninformed here, but single men's expectations of potential partners are totally the prime suspect here.

Anecdote: My uncle explicitly stated on his dating profile that he was looking for women with masters degrees who were willing to stay at home. I have no idea why he wanted that or why my dad's sister agreed, but this kind of demand is oddly common.
Sadly, a flat per-transaction fee of 30 cents or so associated with credit card payment processing means that fees alone eat up over 10% of a $3 plan.

Until payment processing is an inherent feature of the monetary system, rather than through multiple third parties, small transactions like these are just bad for everyone.
Room & board is practically mandatory and costs $17.5k. That cost cannot simply be ignored and was a fraction of that 20 years ago.
Most probably unusable in the UK, as the AI won't be able to explain why it rejected a candidate ("why did you score them low for team working?") and the candidate will take the employer to the cleaners. God only knows what hidden variables it'll start discovering and exploiting. My guess is it'll reinforce well-known prejudices.
> There's an overwhelming number of applicants. That says nothing about their qualifications.

People explain away Google's high false negative rate, and desire to not do anything about it, by claiming they receive such large numbers of qualified applicants that it isn't worth caring about false negatives. How does that narrative jibe with the "talent shortage" or what you stated here?
But how about as a population rather than individuals? Is there a general or random relationship between owning and renting?
i wonder the same thing, it's an arms race, perhaps someone will release a counter-measure like the chinese meitu (http://global.meitu.com/) that is trained against these types of ai's..
Another system of mass stupidity. Our "leaders" should be absolutely ashamed of this disgusting "advancement" they have allowed to perpetuate uncontrolled. It's pathetic, and everyone knows it. Yet once again nothing will happen to improve things, they will "tweak" the algorithm and call it a day.
DigitalOcean hater here.

I won't counter any of the praise I'm reading; if anything this will probably validate it.

I'm on the other end of the DO equation.

My small mail server is relentlessly targeted for spam from DigitalOcean IPs - and has been for years.

In fact there are 4 networks I block (by ASN) - DO, OVH, AWS (new!) and Psychz Networks.
(note: No mail from outside N.Am/EU allowed)

Forget to stop my mail server when dropping the firewall for 20 seconds? Get a ½ dozen spams from DigitalOcean IPs.

I actually like that there are hosts for dodgy services. I also get that conscientious hosts get bad customers and it takes time to overcome their bad behavior.

However from the time I 1st heard of DO until now, it's an unbroken timeline of DO being a toxic source.
(note: The difficulty of reporting spammy IPs in bulk - using firewall not mail server logs - is another post)

So like a lot of orgs, DigitalOcean treats people on the inside really well. But for those of us on the receiving end of unwanted attention from DO networks, it's a rough ride.
I think most of the microtransaction argument here is forgetting about Swagbucks [1]. I would argue micro transactions are doable, either through networks or payout systems that wait until you have enough for a payout.

I believe the real reason is that Google isn't exactly a commodity. People are used to the brand, the user interface, the web url, and maybe the occasional quality or exact flavor of the search results.

Because it's not a commodity, people don't just instantly change to whichever site pays the most, and because of that there would have to be a large pay difference for customers to make a switch. Users are basically willing to "forfeight" the money they would get using Swagbucks to use Google.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swagbucks
I plugged a $15 Bluetooth receiver into my 11 year old stereo receiver and it works pretty well. The 30-pin iPod connector built into it is not seeing much use these days however.
Can you explain that for me? I'm not sure how better detectors let you delete the noise from the sun.
> It’s obvious why the likes of Facebook and Google don't charge for their products: It costs nearly nothing to transmit...

That's not why. They don't charge because it's not lucrative to do so. Charging - however small - would change expectations on SLA, privacy, security, etc.

Most importantly, as everyone on HN knows, they can't charge for access to their platform because the platform isn't the product. You and I are the product.

Finally, Bloomberg should be more careful with their word choice. They are prestigious enough to know that __nothing__ is free. There is always a cost(s) involved. The transaction might not call for an exchange of financial wampum but that does not make it free.
When you consider the infrastructure provided for hosting, payment processing, distribution, and the storefront itself, 30% is not unreasonable.
Practical Common Lisp (first few chapters)

do a toy project

read a lot of old Common Lisp code floating around on tarballs

then read Paul Graham's books
I own one of these and it’s well explained too. They ask for signup information, a credit card, etc. explaining exactly why they need it.

I can understand if you forgot all of this I guess, but it seems hard to forget to me, when it’s such a unique setup flow to a printer and they warn multiple times.

Edit: oh no, it seems that OP actually got shafted by a change to this experience... bummer.
While you studied the law, he studied the blade [video]
Can You Write Code on an iPad? (2017)
Yes, this is how we describe it! Low enough price, and max reliability. The cost of getting turned away at a hotel because you're not a guest is probably worth $6, especially if you have places to go, people to see.
> The students are paying for a service from the University.

Yes but not a parking service. If you want to park, arrange that yourself somewhere else, like a private garage.
Appeals to authority are unlikely to move this crowd.
For business services and products there exists similar price gap.

Low level managers and staff are allowed to purchase stuff directly below some sum, typically below $2000, sometimes higher. If somebody needs something below that sum they just buy it online or with few emails if they have money in the budget.

If you go above that limit, suddenly it's more complicated. There may be purchasing department. They compare prices, may select bidders etc. Purchase may even become a procurement. You often have to send a person to sell and negotiate. If you send someone, you may as well add $20,000 to the price to cover the cost of travel and time. Product you sell for $5000 online costs now tens of thousands.
I think it's a great idea, with the right execution. We will explore this in the future.
> It’s obvious why the likes of Facebook and Google don't charge for their products: It costs nearly nothing to transmit, say, one Gmail or host, say, one photo on Instagram.

This already doesn't make sense. This wrong logic could be extended to every paid service which doesn't rely on an external service, especially SaaS, on the internet. If this reasoning was correct, everything from Zendesk to Superhuman to GitHub (pre-Microsoft pricing) should be free. Development costs money, and hosting overall costs a fair bit of money (because every user doesn't just post one picture, or have one email, and it compounds).

The real reason it is free is because they want users, and make more money from ads than they would charging a reasonable price (which would massively cut adoption anyway).