skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they already have a pretty generous return policy.

Yet there is no option to indicate that "This product is a counterfeit" when filing a return, despite it being a documented problem. The purchaser must choose a different, and inaccurate, reason for their return when filing for one.

One way to read into this is that Amazon doesn't want to keep records of counterfeit items sold on their marketplace because of the liability such records might incur.
I don't think this is really a counterexample. skype was already a widely used product when microsoft bought it. joel isn't arguing that you can't have enough money to just buy a product that already has a large network of users. also (iirc), skype only took market share from aol in the first place because it had a killer feature aol lacked: video chat. network effects mean you can't be replaced by a similar service, not that you can't be disrupted by a new product with a unique feature that people actually want.
RC Car Storage and Display Box -Part 3
Google has been about the same for me. I went from total Google fanboy to migrating a lot of my life away from them and advising others to do the same.
I'm pleased to see he implemented the vital U+1F4A9 code point.
Commercial copyright infringement.

I recall RIAA back in start of 2000’s said it should be around $100k-$300k per instance.
If only the answer to "how" was as simple as "writing a web service for searching GitHub repos with regexes," even though the problem is probably in itself non-trivial if there's this much interest in search at all. At least the specification is clear enough.

I guess what I mean to ask is, how would people know this is a "correct" answer to the "how" question beforehand? Is the answer literally just "search" because that's simply what's trending right now?
Apparently linters are bad and that’s why go literally refuses to compile if you have unused imports. But crap like this? No problem, flies right through.
Fake reviews also contribute to more fake and low quality products being sold. It looks like Amazon simply doesn't care.

https://thehustle.co/amazon-fake-reviews

FTA:

"One stay-at-home mom from Kentucky told me she makes $200-300 per month leaving positive reviews for things like sleep masks, light bulbs, and AV cables."

“Do you actually like the products?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she wrote. “I never use them.”
Counterfeiters counterfeit the medium, not the information. It's mostly harmless to consumers in cases where it's the information that matters (books, digital content). It's harmful when the physical medium is the product.

Elsewhere in the discussion, 'erentz says:

> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.

I think they're right in more than one way. It's not only the platform vs. publisher issue. Fake news are the information goods equivalent of counterfeiting - faking the bits, not the medium.
Why are you so confident that these services are unprofitable?

You're already assuming the main profit source would be second order effects (analytics value add). Why not go further and assume that there already are second order effects that make fonts profitable.

For example, more internet users means more profit for Google, and accessible cross language fonts lead to more web users.
You already have to rely on a third party to get a domain (and to get an IP address)
Play realMyst - it's a fun experience.
If the data is in Cloud Storage, BigQuery can query it in-place without loading it. BigQuery calls this an External Data Source.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/external-data-sources

My biggest papercut with using this was having to make sure that all of the locations matched exactly.
Agree, and I work in the latest 'social media platform' type end. We have many customers. I can assure the author of the post, when those customers pay for enterprise licensing and their system is broken with an obvious bug. The 'we didn't do any testing before hand because staging is a lie' doesn't actually fair well as a valid excuse for anything. In fact, you just look like an unprepared and immature muppet.
I think there's an underlying assumption that your server, your DNS registrar, and all the CAs present in your root store are trustworthy. It may not be a particularly safe assumption, but it's presumably better than unverified TLS or trust on first use (for the majority of present day usecases).

If anything, I would expect universal adoption of automated verification methods to improve security. Instead of only needing to trick a single CA out of an entire root store into issuing a certificate, you would instead need to hijack the DNS listing without being noticed by _anyone_ (and hopefully all CAs, as well as everyone else, would be on the lookout for this).
The switcheroo problem described in the article simply does not exist say over on Ebay. On Ebay, you directly know if you are buying from a legitimate distributor, small time grey market / surplus dealer, or a knockoff shop. There are plenty of products for which knockoffs/generics are good enough, so simplistically "banning fakes" is not the solution either. The problem is this obscuring of the actual supplier, which Amazon could fix tomorrow if their entire business didn't revolve around using that confusing UI to mislead customers with dark patterns.

I'm continually amazed at the popularity of Amazon. It goes to show how powerful advertising, social distortion, and the sunk cost fallacy ("prime") are. For example, Amazon has never had good prices on anything, and yet that myth persists. Presumably the same people that repeat this can't even be bothered to just check eg walmart.com. (Walmart does find some new way to disappoint me every time I step in there. It's just so utterly huge that it's foolish to ignore.)
Ten rules for dating my teenage daughter placing your Wi-Fi access points
I haven't used a camera on a device 24/7, but I have used multiple tablets as a camera monitor for months on end.

What I've found is, as long as it's reasonably modern supporting fast charging, the device has no problem staying on with full screen brightness.

Some older devices can drain their batteries quicker than their chargers work however
> I see the Amazon fake products problem as related to the social network fake news problem.

Brought it up elsewhere[0], but I think you're right in more than one way. Beyond publisher vs. platform issue, fake news are the digital equivalent to counterfeiting; they're to news - and in general, to information media[1] - what Amazon counterfeits are to physical products.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399726

[1] - Which include all digital media and most physical books.
Chartly [1] is a project I worked on for about a year and launched but is no longer under active development.

It failed because we spend so much time building lots of random features and never got much feedback.

In retrospect I think the data vis market is just too saturated to get noticed at this point. I am sure it is possible for someone, but it wasn't for us.

Current "side" project is Webase [1] where we incorporate many ideas that were in Chartly, but addresses a broader and much earlier market.

[1] https://chart.ly
[2] https://www.webase.com
By having a President that holds rallies on getting these issues passed and sets a agenda for the people to vote for congresspeople who support consumer protection laws like these. This is where the office of the Presidency really has impact, it can direct the attention of millions of people to exert great pressure on its target.
Walmart's online store is now my go-to for most household products. Free 2-day shipping without a subscription and the ability to actually vet their supply chain means it's basically always better.
I develop for Apple platforms, and it's absolutely mind-boggling how frequently and regularly they break your code for no tangible benefit.

Hopefully their influence doesn't spread to the web too.
I was successful in using this guide: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/open-distro-for-elas... to setup Amazon's Open Distro version of Elasticsearch/Kibana. I had to modify it to work with Elasticsearch 7.x (which corresponds to Open Distro 1.x). This guide was written for Elasticsearch 6.x (which corresponds to Open Distro 0.x).
I think talking about cognitive biases in the context of building and understanding complicated/complex systems is the point of 'systems thinking'. Just having a name for that kind of exercise is useful. Just like everything else, it gets taken too far, or stretched into a flimsy product to be sold to the managerial class.
The more crucial difference is that the products were sold by third party sellers. I'm assuming counterfeit goods are almost never a problem if the seller is Amazon.
California’s mandate has already been postponed over the objections of several municipal utility districts and probably will never take force in the way people who drafted it expected.

I really think mandates like this are totally wrong approach. Consider that in virtually every jurisdiction in California a new home requires both solar power and a 2-car garage. If that isn’t perverse I don’t know what would be.

Unlike you I consider a carbon tax almost trivially easy to implement. Way easier and more effective than construction mandates.
At the risk of sounding "out of touch with reality" and "retro nostalgic", I strongly believe that a lot of clean, sterile work took place in the 1965-1985 era. From UNIX to SR-71, everything mankind did in the technical space was minimal, purposeful, clean, legible, durable, maintainable, modular and many other adjectives that would compound on the idea of creating a truly better product or service. Marketing took a backseat, science and data mattered and advertisement was truthful.

Today's world seems broken, fragile, noisy and unmaintained. May be that humanity needs to unwind, rewind back a couple of decades and try again. If you play the scenario of human evolution multiple times, I am sure a large scale system such as global society would end up in a different state... every time.

Reminds me of the story that Kyoto, Japan didn't get ruined because one of the military commanders in charge of the nuclear bomb drop locations, had a soft spot for Kyoto... and instead chose Nagasaki and Hiroshima. [1]

If we were to replay human progress, I want us to go back to that era and relive the engineering life. Must have been amazing to work in a technical field in the 70's and 80's. Now we have AI and Quantum and all these fucking buzzwords, largely perpetuated by people who have no clue - marketing and PR folks.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/hi...
For some of those companies it would be "drink a La Croix with"
> Nothing is recorded. In some cases, processing even happens at the edge.

If the data is not processed at the edge, how is nothing recorded? This smells like extremely minced words.

IANAL (definitely not a German one) but I'm almost certain that even post-2017 it's still illegal to take video in a public space and send it elsewhere, without a sign, even if that video is not in some sense "preserved" elsewhere.
Like many others on this thread, I have a hard time seeing how it can succeed. I’ve been following anytype.io for a while and it seems like a much better solution that comes with a built in product. No need for pods since they live individually on each device. And it’s based on IPFS, which seems to be a much more established protocol for dealing with this sort of data.

It’ll be released later this year and hopefully it lives up to the hype.
The good news is, it's not even necessarily true that you pay more when buying elsewhere anymore. Amazon is coasting on that reputation but they're no longer subsidizing customers like they used to.
Do you index the default branch of every repo? Or do you just index the master branch?
So glad to hear you’re finding Simply Said helpful!

That’s our company’s book, written by our managing partner, Jay Sullivan. I was pleasantly surprised to see it pop up while browsing HN.

What’s one thing you learned from the book that’s been helpful for you?

(Nonviolent Communication is also a good one that’s on my reading list)
Agree to disagree. If a carbon tax was trivial to implement, why is it not implemented yet? If not now, when will it be?

Utilities can kick and scream (and attempt to subvert the mandate to maintain their relevance), but the mandate will go into force.

> Commission officials acknowledged homeowners will see smaller bill savings under SMUD’s Neighborhood SolarShares program than they would with solar panels on their roofs.

> The average single-family home in the utility’s service territory, which covers most of Sacramento County and parts of Placer and Yolo counties, can currently save around $75 a year with rooftop solar, the Energy Commission estimated. Under SMUD’s program, the average single-family home will be guaranteed electricity bill reductions of just $28 a year.

> The changes from SMUD’s initial proposal didn’t convince critics from several prominent environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity. They argued the solar projects SMUD plans to use for its program are too large and generally too far from residential neighborhoods to be considered true “community” solar facilities.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-02-20/califor...
We don't actually know mortality. By the numbers, 2,470 deaths, 23,419 recoveries, and 53,105 undecided cases.

10% of all settled cases resulted in death. That is far higher than the 3% of Spanish Flu and reasonably close to SARS. Median time to death is around 12 days which is similar to time to recovery meaning the 10% seems likely to be an accurate metric.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/clinical-features.html

The most interesting part is the ages of cases. Last I checked, there were ZERO deaths of children 9 and under. Mortality rates hover at around 0.2 to 0.3% until over 50.

The really big unknown for me is the weird SARS antibody Antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) effect. Basically, if the antibody levels get too low and reinfection occurs, the disease becomes much more lethal than if no antibodies are present at all. This effect is now known to be the reason mortality rates for a second case of Dengue fever are so high. In SARS, the disease disappeared before reinfection was an issue. In the case of a pandemic, a second, more lethal wave could be disastrous (if this is also possible with COVID-19). This could also complicate naive vaccines that don't account for possible secondary, enhanced infections.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006291X1...

All that said, I'm not super-worried.
Amazon became the first statistical store. You get what you want with a certain confidence interval.
Completely agree with you. Data lakes were marketed well because, well... data warehousing is hard, and a lot of work. Data lakes don't make that hard work disappear, it just changes how and where it happens.

I've found data lakes complement DW's (in databases) well. Keep the raw data in the lake and query as needed for discovery, and load it into structured tables as the business needs arise.

Data lakes alone are doomed to be failures.
Very interesteing. I have long wondered: if I have the sheet music, is tempo detection good enough that it can follow along on the sheet?
Biosafety Level (BSL)
This is a good way of putting it. All these "run your own agency" self-help courses have been pushing "value based" pricing with the promise that you can slap together a Wordpress template and charge $40k for it because of the "value" a website brings to the company is mostly nonsense IME. Stuff is built by the lowest competent bidder, period.
If you are going for compliance, don't forget ES is not a database - there are notable edge cases where it drops data.
A compilation error, the first `err` is never used.
You could tell by looking at the two gloves in the story that they were different, but the "fake" actually looked better to my eyes - the blue rubber appeared thicker and more pronounced. Which brings up a really interesting question about fakes - if they are as good or better than the products they are mocking, are they actually "fakes"? I fully recognize that there is a need to protect copyright / product dress / brand and that there is a distinct consumer interest in ensuring that products are safe / made from safe materials, BUT - so many of the products that are cloned on Amazon are only distinguishable by price anyway, and have no unique value proposition from one "brand" to the next.
While I'm still working on it, I currently have 0 DAU and have been in a perpetual MVP / beta for a while now. I'm still collecting signups however it doesn't have great growth numbers at this stage.

https://bustl-app.com

A Trello + Zapier productivity app that acts like a PA, scheduling your events, reminders, etc. There's going to be a point sometime this year where I decide if its dead in the water or whether to keep going.
This is correct. But perhaps even more correct would be to say it _consolidates_ the risk at your DNS registrar, since of course bad guys who seize control of your DNS records could anyway deny all service and capture anything unencrypted.

You should definitely not use an untrustworthy DNS registrar or registry for important things, but that was true regardless and it hasn't stopped the .com TLD (which is run very badly indeed) making a tremendous amount of money.
Your estimates show that you know enough other shit to make good estimates.
Elixir, Erlang, and Clojure, to name a few.
Regarding your last point. You weigh buying software over building it when you know how much it costs to buy and maintain, and have a strong grasp on how much time money and energy it costs to build it yourself. That is how you make an informed judgement. Sure there is risk, but if your burning 15K a year on a build server and you can build it yourself for 5k and run it for 1k a year then math doesn't lie about what choice you should make.
Dyslexics
There's a level 4 virology research center in Wuhan, which means it studies the most dangerous pathogens in the world. This facility has been collecting SARS-like virus samples from bat populations and other animal populations for years. Some are speculating that it may have escaped the lab.
He's trying to sound sophisticated.
I can't link to/find the article[1] because of Bloomberg's paywall, but Matt Levine of Money Stuff has said a few times that free trades in exchange for order flow is a good deal for retail investors.

[1]- Maybe this one: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-21/the-tr... ?
Think of programming code as communication to your future self and colleagues. Then we need less rules mindset, and more empathic one.
I remember Nugget. It was a nice idea, but they pushed the paid version and it just didn't feel like it added enough value for the price.

I've recently launched Webase [1] as a platform to test building apps without writing any code.

One BIG key to any startup idea is getting feedback as quickly as possible and ideally with writing a lot of code.

[1] https://www.webase.com
Two Wyze cams for $50 - solved. No monthly fee, has some AI stuff that boxes around heads / people.. has android app notifications, remote viewing..

Have a location that uses one of these on the inside plugged into a battery backup and a blinkxt wireless cam on the outside (can put these anywhere / wireless ) that needs fresh l-ion batteries every couple months.

no monthly fees, text alerts, apps with real time and recordings of what happened earlier / yesterday..

no idea where the data is sent for these for their cloud, but the Wyze also has on board sd card for secondary backup data..

or how long they will last or the cloud will do the video for free basically.. my samsung indoor cam lasted about 3 years before it bricked and these a replacing that.. at that price if they last that long it works for me.
> There are also other things the Go compiler doesn't enforce.

Importantly, there are a number of almost certain bugs the Go compiler is happy to let through without even a warning.

Like not rebinding the result of append(), or not checking the error returned by a function.
Ripgrep is based on RE2 and supports backrefs. Wonder why they didn't use that.
Open source does not have a reward mechanism for tedious
“ California Energy Commissioners gave the Sacramento Municipal Utility District unanimous clearance to offer builders the option of buying solar energy from SMUD, via local solar farms SMUD would build, rather than install solar panels on new-home roofs.”
Every additional third party is an extra problem. It's an extra relationship to track.
I posted about this on HN recently[1]. Within the last month, I've been getting an increasing amount of native ads on different platforms for "Free [Product]!". If you engage the ad, you find out that the ad-purchaser wants you to buy the advertised product and leave a positive review for it on Amazon, after which they'll refund you for the cost of the product.

Some of these items have thousands of positive reviews[1], which is misleading to consumers who rely on honest reviews to guide their purchasing behavior. Also, it is almost comical how difficult it is to reach out to Amazon about this issue as a user.

In the end, I just contacted my state Attorney General's Consumer Protection division and the FTC.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22388067
You've just removed all of the machine parsable context of the error, guaranteeing that downstream code can't make an intelligent decision.
Map, News and Chart at VirusOUTBREAK
> Additionally, many more traditional CAs will let an inexperienced user have the CA generate the private key

This should not be true for any CA in the Web PKI. If you have evidence that a CA trusted by Mozilla offers this service you should give that evidence to m.d.s.policy (or me and I'll see it gets passed on with attribution)

There have been resellers who offer this. These are independent businesses from the CAs, and it's even crazier to let them (basically middlemen with no oversight) pick your private keys or know what they are. But as separate businesses it's hard for us to effectively stop them.
https://www.roast.io/

I launched it shortly after https://www.prerender.cloud, which server-side renders JavaScript SPAs, to make integration easier.

Prerender.cloud kind of sells itself, but roast.io does not. I've wondered if it appears too complex.
In my experience, reality is unpredictable enough that no one actually know what the requirements will be two versions down the road. In practice you end up with code that is more complex than what the current problem needs, trying to solve a future need that you presume will happen but you don’t really know what it is and when it will happen.
The article cites Dijkstra's "considered harmful" essay, which asserts that "goto" should be removed from "higher level" languages, not "machine language".

Without reading the remainder of the article, this would seem to undermine any further assertions.

UPDATE: after reading the article, it seems the opposite is being shown. my bad.
It doesn't have to be a bioweapon but there's no evidence to confirm or deny that this escaped from the Wuhan Virology Institute. It could have very easily infected a worker from the lab if safety precautions were not followed. And the CCP would never disclose it.