skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
April service disruptions analysis in GitHub
Considering how far behind they are from competitors like Google, I wouldn't exactly call it a winning strategy. And they are going to spend billions on the acquisition anyways, regardless of how good or bad the technology is. To me this move seems more like desperation than brilliance on Amazon's part.
Should I list the people who joined the team?
Does anybody know if we have something similar for Azure?
It's not blasphemy, just elementary economics.

Customer service at scale, for many products, turns the product from profitable into a severe loss. It will go out of business no ifs ands or buts.

YouTube clearly cannot survive if its customer service costs exceed its advertising revenue.

It has absolutely nothing to do with speed of growth, and I don't know why you think it does.

Are you saying free user-generated video hosting sites shouldn't exist period? That YouTube simply shouldn't exist? Because that seems to be what you're saying.
All the new alternative social networks and video sites that have cropped up and the old ones that have ben gaining in popularity is evidence that people are beginning to turn away. Ex. lbry.tv, bitchute.com, gab.com, voat.co, phuks.co, zerohedge.com
What complete and utter BS.

Other than #MAGAts, there is no bigger threat to the US and our democracy than Facebook.

You KNOWINGLY allow for the posting, distribution, and re-distribution of false information from sites you know to be dubious.
Seems strange to me to assign any emotion to the political entity of a huge country. I don’t even mean what it means. What does China / America/ Soviet Union feeling remorse even look like?

History has shown us that any super power will go to war. The Romans, the British, the Americans. Maybe we’ve learned our lesson from history or maybe today things are different due to greater education, multiculturalism and just rapid communication. Either way we shouldn’t be pinning our hopes on “Jesus Christ”, as again I don’t know what that means. Would he come down and disarm everyone or something?

We avoid conflict by having rational open dialog, educating people and increasing transparency and accountability. The way to increase the probability of conflict is by having this tribalistic us vs them mentality. Everything they do is bad, they are evil and we are just.
Useful Resources on Negotiation
I wrote my own flags package called flaggy and think its the easiest to use and makes the most sense! Up to 600 stars om github now.
https://github.com/integrii/flaggy
Introducing Amazon ElastiChute! Are you tired of employing delivery drivers who take a few seconds of their day to go to the bathroom?

With Amazon ElastiChute, you can seamlessly transfer hundreds of physical packages from delivery van to a client's front door. ElastiChute elastically expands to envelop a package and jettison it at just the right speed at a customer's door.

Only pay for the hydraulic fluid you use.
Wow, at no point did I get the impression that she was responsible for the whole thing. Yeah, the title made me think she was going to be more responsible, but nothing wrong with pulling people in and I was very satisfied with her explanation and story.

And the story is awesome! It points to how sometimes getting the product into as many hands as possible and then interviewing customers on how they use it a great technique for eventual product success.

She probably could have talked about the engineering side a bit more, but she probably just wasn't in the loop there. And anyways, this is obviously a marketing blog post so engineering would have been a pointless diversion.

Btw, I got the sense she was enthusiastic and energetic and likely very diligent in her efforts to call up her customers and get to the root of how they used it.

Don't underestimate that level of ground floor contribution.
If we assume that each CSR can handle an average number of cases then the absolute number of cases handled by a human increase with even 1 CSR taken on. The Mythical Man Month doesn't apply as there's no time limit on it.

So no, I don't need to answer that beyond any number greater than there are now, which I already did.
I'd advise just running Wordpress or Ghost. Even a small VPS is more than enough scale and you get a working blog out of the box with easy extensibility for the future. And you can still use a CDN in front.

People think a static site is enough without realizing SEO, RSS feeds, comments, etc, are all things you might need and would have to rebuild yourself.
I agree with you that bitch should not be a negative term. After all it just a female dog. But colloquially it is used as a negative term. That’s the society/world we live in. It dosnt matter what you and I believe how it should be used. What matters is how’s it is actually used. You wouldn’t get the clicks you were after if the word was used as you think it should be would you? And my question comes from that perspective of grounding in our world’s reality. Given that, by used the term, it promotes objectification - May be not yours since your self esteem allows you to own it - but of women in general. And that might be too selfish of an action perhaps?
I'd consider 0.001% that can be done within a year by a single individual or two to be absolutely massive.
Agreed.

Take any gosh-darn company on earth that's brought in $1bn in revenue.

Now take all of their employees.

Each of those employees has a story that could be titled:

How I helped xyz with abc that ended up with that company bringing in $1b in revenue.

The number of such employees in the whole world is somewhere between 10 million and 7 billion.
No, I do agree with that - to an extent:

> You don't have to be a gearhead, and there's very little to photography that should consider the gear important

But "I can't even tell you what camera it is" and then some questions arise about who is making all those decisions about things like depth of field, composition - her, camera operator, combination, etc.
The solution is to nationalize FaceBook (and any site that proves to be similar) and allow everyone free access to it w/o censorship. Give Zuckerberg a $1 for his time and effort.

Meahwhile, Google must be split up: e.g., Alphabet can go do AI work as a private corporation but Google Search needs to be nationalized (or split into at least 3 entities - i prefer nationalization).

Amazon must be broken up and parts nationalized, but this is a more complex case for later discussion.
You look like an early prototype of the Zuckerberg robot body.
I find myself suspicious of anyone that starts off comparing themselves with Patrick Bateman.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110823180459.h...
Shields exist because flesh is weak against sharp steel, like censorship exists because authorities are weak against sharp facts.
> MSVC

I thought it ran on multiple operating systems
Stripe: Expanding Support for JCB Payments
Citation needed.

I'd assume based on personal experience that higher retention rates occur in subjects the reader is already familiar with. If you're reading into a subject you're not familiar with and rely on "your brain" to optimize what's most relevant for that subject I'd bet you'd come out looking like the stereotypical "know it all" in any related conversation.
I'm not going to go into why I disagree with your uncle, but let's just say there is more than one kind of cost of capital.
Need more stem cell research. Growing a tooth is very hard to do so far.
TLDR; you can't.
Come on :) . How we're supposed to learn how to fly to space.

It could be done way more effective, yes. Yes, it's a political question.
Do you have any links that aren't from these wackjob, far-right fever dream websites? It's honestly hard to even read some of these without laughing.

>https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_co...

All I see is extreme editorializing of the regular push and pull of government ("horrific neglect", "bull[ing]", "stonewalling", etc). How many of them were fired because Obama didn't like what they were investigating? Trump's count is 5 in the last few weeks. I'm sure Obama fired at least that many if you're making a comparison, right?

>http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/obama-fires-inspect...
>https://cei.org/blog/obama-fires-inspector-general-who-uncov...

You don't take these blog posts seriously, do you? His connection to Obama was... what exactly? This is prototypical far right nuttery: oBaMaS FrIeNd dEeP StAtE BeZoS NyT AmAzOn hEr eMaIlS.

>http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/obama-fires-inspect...
>https://cei.org/blog/obama-fires-inspector-general-who-uncov...

I wonder if you actually read these, since they have basically nothing to do with what you quoted. Did you just google "Obama friends bad" and copy/paste the first few links or something?

>"Obamagate II: Secret of the Schmooze"

Not going to spend time watching some fringe conspiracy YouTube channel, sorry. More complete nuttiness.

>That, or have a short memory, since Trump and Obama both pale in comparison to VP Dick Cheney and the Iraq War (KBR? Halliburton? have people forgotten about them already?).

I'm disappointed that I got this far before seeing this. You should seriously consider that you may be in a short, narrow, and extremely loud echo chamber. These aren't the kinds of ideas that normal, well-read, well-informed people from all sides of the political spectrum hold.
Hi there. Have you ever considered making the decision making open? I mean it seems you are obsessed with criticism and scrutiny. Then here is an idea for you: invite journalists from major media outlets to your decisions making. Then you can avoid these "unfortunate" cherry-pickings as you put it.

Why I am saying this: it seems you sit backwards on your high horse, criticising those people who for all intents and purposes have very limited insight into the decision making.

Me and my close friends are fed up with Facebook and how obviously it is trying to polarize everyone in this world.

No sympathy for you on my side, and I cann assure you I speak on behalf of my friends too.
I think most bees are solitary and live in burrows they make in the ground. And only two species of bee make honey.
According to Ars Technica [1], this page is "created and managed by our global curation team".

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/twitters-first-f...
One of the key awesome things about traditional masterclasses:

You get to ask the master questions.
This seems pretty remarkable for a US governor to reach out directly to another nation’s leader. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, it is a sad situation when state governors feel the need to go it alone in absence of coherent national leadership.

All told, Inslee and Dow Constantine have done this adoptive Washingtonian proud in this pandemic. I have found the competence of our leadership a huge relief. I only wish the national government were as clear headed and professional.
I don’t know... I have a Github actions workflow that on a commit, it builds a site (mkdocs) and upload it to a gh-pages branch for hosting on Github. You could also push the generated html to S3.

That coupled with Working Copy could be a pretty good mobile workflow.

For me, this was much easier than deploying Lambda code and managing How all of that worked together. Using Github Actions wasn’t much more than setting up a deploy script.
Hi! I am really here, not a bot :)

If we're talking metrics, the 64% stat cited in the article turns out not to be a good way to measure impact of recommendations on an extremist group. We internally think about things like prevalence of bad recommendations. More on prevalence here - https://about.fb.com/news/2019/05/measuring-prevalence/. I don't have a metric I can share on recommendations specifically but you can see the areas we've shared it for so far here: https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforc...
The title pulled me in and I enjoyed the read without feeling misled. Mission accomplished.
Just because we’ve been through a shift in what is considered acceptable doesn’t mean I feel comfortable reading this article now.
The Inquirer article is talking about old-fashioned ballot stuffing at a polling place, not mail-in voting.

The Dailybreeze is documenting a case where it looks like someone was trying to do a scam with 80 ballots. That could have an impact on a municipal election but would be lost in the noise in a national election and is hard to replicate in a coordinated and unnoticeable fashion.

It looks like the Heritage group is has been collecting cases of voting fraud for 4 years and have 1200 records. Not a huge number over so much time. It’s not clear that that is related to mail-in voting or other kinds of fraud. Again, this kind of stuff is hard to do in a way that has an impact on a national election.

Elections are never perfect but, based on the experiences in Oregon and Washington, I don’t see mail in voting adding a significant added risk. The virus on the other hand does.
I guess what is "fast" though, I suppose it is not impossible for this particular design(that looks like it would wiggle/swivel?) due to the horizontal moving main joints. But I have not done calculations to prove that(which would be faster horizontal or vertical swing)

edit: which is interesting arguable horizontal join/swing design is less work
I think stashes are tagged with the branch name somehow? When I do a `git stash push && git stash list`, I get something like `stash@{0}: WIP on {branch}: {hash} {commit message...}`.
>Not 1 incident = 1 vote, but 1 incident = 1 criminal case affecting 1 election.

This doesn't reason out.

The question is "What impact does voter/election fraud have on elections?"

You determine this by calculating the impact that these fraudulent votes had on the election. It doesn't make sense to say "because there was 1 fraudulent vote in one county in one state, we have to count all 500-100,000 (?) votes in that county as fraudulent too."

This Heritage Foundation report is literally an analysis detailing how voter fraud is a non-issue in American elections.
Me too, though I'm still stinging a bit from Bayh-Dole. Sometimes reaching across the aisle is a great way to produce something awful.
The Quest to Purge New Zealand of Invasive Predators
Plasma Mobile update: April-May 2020
It's this dynamic that some people want to treat each other as peers in some ways. This is because they are stronger as a group i.e. united we stand, individually we fall. However they to exclude others since if you include everyone, then there is no advantage (us vs them, the other).
100% agreed. But that has nothing to do with the claim that mail in ballots will have significant fraud.
First generation of stations. Can't bring supplies other than with the crew's ship - no transport spacecrafts docking.

ISS is a couple of generations ahead. Robotic arm, massive solar panels, modular construction, adaptation for unforeseen tasks, reliability in the face of a loss of some transportation options, international cooperation...
It has the wrong kind of motors to be interesting. Servos are a dead end, imo.

The interesting robot projects now are the ones embracing brushless motors with encoders and dynamic walking gaits. It’s the same components that are used in drones.
I enjoy reading his blog as well. One of my favorite posts is:

https://www.iquilezles.org/blog/?p=4765

"Though – at some level, all facts that you know are untrue.
1. To a toddler, Mickey Mouse dancing in a film is a character that undoubtedly exist in front them.
2. But that is false, everybody knows a film is just lots of “images”, right?
3. Well, that’s false too, to a nerd images are “a matrix of tiny colored squared pixels”
4. But that is false too, a professional programmer knows pixels are not squares but point-samples trying their best at filtering an analog signal”
So, while all are partial truths in a given context, they are also false at the next level of understanding.

These conflicts of false truths usually gets resolved easily: most of us rarely enjoy knowing more than one or two levels of truth to any particular topic anyways, and ignorance makes happiness. On the other hand, an experienced communicator can adjust her speech and pick the right truth based on the audience she’s talking to, assuming there’s little variance in the audience’s profiles.

But, what happens when something needs to be communicated to a huge audience of varying levels of education or interest in a topic that is important to everybody? Say a nation wide message. When you address a disparate audience of millions that need an explanations, how do you choose the level of reality you going to operate in; which of all the false truths are you going to employ to convey your message?"
Have you considered attempting to develop a "differentiable programming language" so that it's possible to do gradient descent directly on the space of programs? There was some work on building a "differentiable lambda calculus", https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82396223.pdf, but I haven't heard of anyone trying to use something like that in modern program synthesis.
Machine Learning Company Insitro Raises $143M to Bridge Biology and AI
If I was a higher up at FB, I'd consider the risks to me as a business of these issues of polarization, and I'd spend according on advice and evaluation (a lot).

For example, if FB comes to be seen as a kind of mind control platform, that could be devastating as national govts decide to step in and put a stop to things. Imagine even a mid-sized country regulating that FB was responsible for tagging any posts that contained not just Covid-19 misinformation but all sorts of misinformation. That sort of thing could be extremely dangerous to FB's business model.

These sorts of risk in my mind would be very high indeed and I would devote a lot of resources to at the very least understand them. $2M is a drop in the bucket for a company with revenues of $70B for addressing such risk.

(Actually I checked and a bucket contains approx 10K drops, so this is actually surprisingly close to being a drop in the bucket).
Everything social that exists today already existed when humans were still living in trees. That doesn't mean that social media like Facebook can't serve as an amplifier that turns problems from annoyances to existential threats to our society.
Ok, but which country would Google Search have to be nationalized into?

The brits won't be happy if Google is nationalized into a french public service
Published as in? Is the data available on some site?
Potentially useful context: the parent here was the Co-Founder and CEO of Onavo which he sold to Facebook for $120 million. If the name "Onavo" doesn't trigger any bells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo . It was ostensibly a VPN but tracked its users' behavior and Facebook used the data from Onavo to judge how much traffic various startups had when deciding whether to acquire them.

I think that the fact that the founder/CEO of Onavo is now Facebook's VP of Integrity is entirely consistent with everything else we've read about Facebook over the years.
Unless you're talking about a protocol other than SMTP, all message headers and the body are sent during the DATA phase.
To be honest, I'd be a lot more skeptical if this research weren't done by a third party.
The error here was Google burning their remaining goodwill by trying to play nice with their next biggest market, for after USA is tapped.
When that political party is set on dictating not only how every citizen but how every ethnic should behave... well...
> I'd assume based on personal experience that higher retention rates occur in subjects the reader is already familiar with.

In that case only a fraction of the information in the book can really be learned. Yes, you can read a book you already know very well and retain 95% of the information, but then what's the point of even citing any numbers?

> If you're reading into a subject you're not familiar with and rely on "your brain" to optimize what's most relevant for that subject I'd bet you'd come out looking like the stereotypical "know it all" in any related conversation.

Only if you think you retain 90% of what you read.
Yes. It's just the first step. Considering the downvotes to my comment, looks like some people want the app to be completely closed-source.
>"A cycle of misinformation and disinformation arose in which the KGB cited U.S. conspiracy theories, and U.S. conspiracy theorists, in turn, began to cite texts associated with KGB disinformation."

Forgive me -- but... that's hilarious! <g>

Bridge of spies? More like bridge of lies...<g>

Reminds me of a quote I have long since forgotten:

"The borrower runs in his own debt"

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

This whole thing is akin to two students, students A and student B, where student A is copying student B's answers on a Math (or other) Test, while student B is simultaneously copying student A's answers, but neither one knows that they're copying each others answers -- which were originally from themselves! <g> (it makes no sense (how was the original answer originated, fractal recursion, 0 becoming 1 after an infinity of recursive iterations?) -- but apparently that's what happened! <g>)
I’m writing a Leanbook in Typora. After trying out nearly every MD editor I could find on Mac, it was my favorite.
> Venom - all terrain quadruped - snakes are all terrain?

More like a [venomous] spider than a snake I think.
I'm going to eat you.
I know there's data to show this could work, and I'm not against it personally, but this has to be the worst possible moment to be trying to get people on board with a decrease in economic activity.
Yeah, your original point was very fair; GP probably didn't mean for his statement to be interpreted as its inverse, which I jumped the gun on. My reasoning was that if the inverse wasn't implied, then the overall conclusion should simply be "all companies should provide exceptional customer service".

I also probably should have more charitably interpreted GP as "companies in a strong position have a better ability to provide good customer service."
It's definitely something Facebook can (and does) exacerbate though
yea, it really didn’t though
Fair enough, but I also get to see first-hand how decisions are made and how rigorous debates take place, so I have more faith in the process. We've got lots to do to improve transparency of how this stuff happens, because I know people care about it. One way we started a while ago is publishing minutes to one of our meetings where decisions on content policies get made. https://about.fb.com/news/2018/11/content-standards-forum-mi... -- lots more to do!
Having worked on several ISP networks that practice isn’t nearly as common as many people seam to think. It would be technically difficult to do that at the rate of a large ISP.

There could be capacity issues between an ISP and some content providers but that is different than throttling or optimizing traffic.
If you don't count "influencers" as ads.
https://giphy.com/embed/2NytyaOZjUypq
Modeling How Parrot Fever Spread
YouTube IS overrun, with low-signal, copied comments for upvotes, senseless off-topic fighting, spam to go listen to someone's mixtape, etc.

It's disgusting - and beautiful. Let the votes and Report buttons decide, or just get rid of them.

The work should be in policing the Report button - not automatically deleting shit.
I'd like to see how much they're paying the actors and how they make the courses
> You can test this theory by reading three similar books in a row on an unfamiliar subject. You’ll remember more of the third book than the first.

That's not a very useful scenario when talking about reading X books a month and retaining Y percent. If you don't control for how much of the information is new, then the % retention is pretty arbitrary. You can read the same book 3 times and I'm sure you'll get better retention on the third repetition.
Perhaps GP is not inclined to work for Amazon, regardless of the compensation package.