skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How often do you receive damaged book from Amazon?
I use amazon for buying books for about two years. 99% of those orders go through amazon.de (Germany). Besides one or two of those orders I almost always get a book which is damaged in some way.

- Bent corners
- Dirty pages
- Bent cover
- Folded pages
- Some weird sticky substance on covers (???)

I think that amazon does tremendously good job at fining this thin border when it becomes 'a problem' and I issue a return, otherwise I just don't bother because I don't want to waste time packing it again and waiting for delivery service to pick it up.

However, I am starting to be furious. I pay for new book and effectively receive used one, something which never happens with direct buy from any other store. I googled around and found posts from 2012 detailing same issue.

I buy only books from amazon and sad truth is that if I only could - I'll buy elsewhere, but a lot of positions I can find only there + I need delivery to other country and it's impossible to find better rates for shipping than amazon's.

Does anybody experience same level of frustration? We are talking about 100-200 EUR order which is not a pack of m&m's at corner shop. It annoys hell out of me, looking at destroyed pages during reading because I care about my physical books.
Thank you for this explanation. AMP has put a really bad taste in my mouth but what you describe here does have some interesting implications. Something to consider for sure.
I'm not sure how long you've been following American politics, but for a few decades now the Democrats have been compromising and capitulating at almost every turn while the Republicans have staunchly refused to do this.
I keep thinking of Maniac Magee and reading it as a child and thinking then that Jerry Spinelli was describing ancient history that we’d never see again.
> On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals.

I like to think about books as of an example where content is way more important than presentation. Most of the web sites these days spend a lot more effort on how you present it than what, in the end a 1000 thousand words article now has a very complex architecture behind it, hundreds or thousands of time more than the content.
email is its own protocol and not related to http and web browsers.
Years ago I used openlayers and osm to develop an online map to display data for a research project I was working on. I originally considered using Google's api, but their licensing at the time was incompatible with the terms of our grant regarding our collected data.

I enjoyed working with OSM, it was actually my first experience building an application around an external API. It was a fun experience and i was fairly pleased with the way it turned out.

It ended up going live for a small time, though, we ended up running into a snag with the government after finding an endangered species in an active mine site and were forced to remove our public data and submit it all to a private government database locked behind fees.
I'm quite certain human trafficking and drug smuggling occur in Europe too.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2017/10/some-6000-people-a-yea...
I'm projecting?

But I haven't even thrown out 'true', 'devoted', or 'zealot' yet!
Creator here! Thanks for submitting - I hope people find this interesting. I’m excited to explore more use cases beyond listing and reformatting git log output! There’s a similar project called gitbase, but I had difficulty just spinning that up for ad-hoc CLI querying so created this project in hope of a better UX for that type of use case. It uses SQLite virtual tables, which was something I had been meaning to play around with. This seemed like a cool use of them!
I think it's a mistake to assume that two people are communicating with each other just because they're saying the same words. Some of the worst things that have ever happened to me have been the result of people thinking they are in agreement despite having totally different ideas behind those words in their heads, and in retrospect I would have rather had arguments.
fvwm95 is still a thing.
I was replying to “I wonder if the main usage of the internet isn't the web as we think about it”.
If someone could produce a book of his writings, I would buy it. Not sure for how much.
We still don't know:

1. If those planets have water.
2. If their surface gravity is tolerable.
3. What kind of atmosphere they have, if any.
4. What's the mineral composition of those planets.
5. How violent the surface weather is, provided an atmosphere does exist.

So, there's only cause for cautious optimism.
that’s great to know, will take a look and add a note to the README
Supply Chain Finance: Greensill and the Stillbirth of a New Asset Class
The notation in that article is basic discrete math stuff...
Care to elaborate? This is the first time I hear about the "boogaloo" thing
Tethered probes aren't viable for cave exploration. The tether would get blown around by the water and snag on everything. Human cave divers have to keep their guidelines taut and tie them off periodically to rocks. Probes don't have enough manipulator dexterity to do that in a cave environment.
How much of a hassle is refunding for you?
Taking a screenshot of your actual browser means you either reveal details about your personal preferences (bookmarks, plugins, etc) or you have to use a factory standard browser.

Also this way, you cannot just easily choose the used browser, but also the device, think smartphone, tablet, android vs apple...
Why would aliens work in base10?
Perhaps it comes down to how we define truth. Truth, for me, is not some sort of ontological object as the word "exists" may imply, and it requires nothing absolute.

Truth is an artifact of communication as experienced by those who are communicating. It's the semantic non-randomness in language. We share expectations regarding the consistency between statements and the degree to which language predicts empirical observations.

If none of those expectations are met, i.e when all truth is gone, then language loses its function.
In the near future, human lifespan might improve, but mostly in the form of surviving in poor health at old age.
I'm a complete novice when it comes to maps, GIS, and all that. (Though I like to consider myself technically literate in general.) I had no problem getting started with QGIS for that stuff. It is fiddly, of course, but the software was clear and well documented enough.
At first thought I totally agree, and feel quite similar about many insurance offerings -- especially on relatively low-value items. That said, and heavily based on my wife's track record & the fact that two years is roughly the average life expectancy for her iPhones (commonly broken glass and poor battery performance at/before 'EoL'), I actually think it's not such a bad sell -- but she's a much "heavier" phone user than I am.

I'll probably pick it up for her next iPhone, which likely will be a higher-priced one, but even at the lower end the variance reduction isn't the worst thing for a luxury item that is relatively prone to breakage.
I read this the other week before the site got taken down and I found it to be incredibly prophetic.

I especially enjoyed this part:

"The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.

Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed."
I mean sure it’s an effect in the sense that when it happens we call it consolidation. My point is that none of the groups owning the insurance companies are buying up the pharmaceutical companies. And why should they? They are pulling home 2/3 of the profits of the price hiking campaigns they are driving and go about blaming it all on the companies who’s day-to-day is focused all about how we can make these drug cheaper, yet that never reaches the consumer.
No, but she generally isn't willing to call the doctor who did the study an idiot or fraud.
I'm honestly curious what is the big challenge with keeping large arrays of ground mounted panels clean in Pakistan. The prevailing wage for unskilled labor for a 6 day a week, 45-hour work week for one laborer to clean panels is probably about $250-300 a month (USD equivalent, in rupees) in that area. That would be a good wage compared to construction work or farm work in that region.

With some basic equipment like rolling carts with sprayers and squeegees on extension sticks, how many individual 72-cell sized panels (1.99 x 0.99 meter size) can one person clean in one day? Multiply by probably 4 to 6 full time staff positions.
Good news. There are free ebooks, one per year: https://github.com/georgjaehnig/webpages-to-ebook/blob/maste...

Also looks like someone combined them into one ebook: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hkbfj4/all_...
Always glad to see this get some play on HN. As our civilization gets more interconnected and systems-centric, it becomes more and more useful to have a name for the demon in the machine.
Robert Evans and Jason Wilson have a pretty good overview here: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...
Couldn't you just pull it back to go in reverse?
What does this have to do with my question lol
You are right, it's dynamic, however it's a different type of dynamic than in JS. The reason being that systems query components they operate on as opposed to coupling code with data.

Like you can't have a type mismatch with systems, since you get the data you queried.
ALL COUNTRIES MATTER!

You, sir, are racist.
I think they were referring to the War of 1812. A war the US lost, and where the song "The Star Bangled Banner" comes from.
This one put some serious effort into it with a drum machine, game, meme creator, pdf viewer', etc. Mostly just as a resume for the creator:

http://eeerik.com/
United States Declaration of Independence
The problem with generating power in the Sahara for use in Europe has little to do with transmission losses and much more to do with the capital cost of building high capacity power lines over thousands of kilometers. There's also the cost of protecting those lines, since they would have to pass through several different countries that are not always politically stable.
A Vernacular Web
You're right that you couldn't replace every use of fossil fuel, but for a large portion of non-industrial use I think it's a very valid and viable strategy.

The key is that you're producing the alcohol as part of an integrated system of production that mimics Nature. You have a farm that requires no inputs (of fertilizer, and in some cases no irrigation) that produces multiple crops per year. ("Syntropic" agriculture, "Permaculture", food forests) You can grow sugar beets, yams, sugar cane, or starchy plants such as potatoes, certain kinds of reeds, tubers, etc. directly for fermentation, or use scrap fruit from the orchards, etc. Literally anything that has starch or sugar can be used as a feedstock. Scrap dough from a (doughnut) bakery.

The leftovers from the fermentation and distillation aren't wasted: you feed them to livestock. Because it's a yeast culture there's more protein in it now than it had before.

So your farm produces fruits and veggies, meat, and alcohol fuel.

(I'm getting all this from http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/sitemap )
Self-intersection is not the same as cutting. The disconnect you’re experiencing is between the mathematical description of the problem—-does there exist a smooth homotopy of immersions between two embedding a of the 2-sphere in 3-dimensional space—and the colloquial description. The mathematical phenomenon corresponding to cutting would be discontinuity of that homotopy, which is different from the description of self-intersection, which amounts to the difference between an embedding and an immersion.
I skimmed this

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/

Appearances is that losses in transmission lines are a few percent per 1000km. Across the US is about 4000km so you'd lose a little under 20%.
Ask HN: Book Like SICP but for Drawing?
Folks need to understand the context in which all this is happening. This isn’t just about what policies we should have for high-skill immigration. It’s the product of decades of administrations ignoring the immigration laws that we have.

In other countries, the legislature votes on immigration policies and those policies are implemented. Canada decides to have high-skill immigration through a point-based process and the executive implemented those policies. That’s not what we do in the US. We formulate immigration policy through executive fiat and bureaucratic practice. In the US, the H1 program is not a high-skill immigration program. We don’t have one. The Wikipedia article covers this well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa

> An H-1B visa allows an individual to enter the United States to temporarily work at an employer in a specialty occupation.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

> The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability

The Immigration and Naturalization Act that created the H1-B program was billed to voters as creating a temporary immigration status, not a vector for permanent immigration. It has turned into a de-facto permanent immigration visa not by law, but by executive practice.

My family (my parents and I, then later my uncle and aunt and their two adult kids) came here on an H1B visa. I’m a proponent of skilled immigration. But viewing this as just a debate over immigration policy (or worse, just an artifact of Trump racism) is deeply misleading. We’re a country founded on the rule of law. But for decades, we’ve ignored our ordinary legislative processes when it comes to immigration policies. That’s not right, that’s not how Democracy is supposed to work, and it’s hard for me to blame people who are simply demanding that our existing laws be enforced. At the same time, yes, it’s unfair to people who came here on H1-B thinking it was a route to permanent residency. Maybe if proponents of skilled immigration had actually done the work and actually gotten legislation passed creating a permanent immigration program for skilled workers, we wouldn’t in this mess today.
I always found tinc rather difficult to set up. Have had a more convenient experience with zerotier one.
No More Shampoo
Are those sites long-term alternatives? What is to say Bitchute won't be bought by a giant corporation one day?

A site I was a longtime member of and helped grow wrote "Yes, we promised to always keep the site free. We now break that promise. To access content, from now on will require a subscription." Everyone who uploads videos to these video sites runs the risk of the owner commercializing their work.
Priority inversion in the automotive CAN protocol
I don't disagree on the point that they were undercut in price. But they were also undercut in price because commodity normal PV panels composed of 156mm polycrystalline or monocrystalline cells (60 or 72 cells) are much cheaper to manufacture than the weird proprietary system they developed. They are also much cheaper to mount on large roofs (home depot/walmart warehouse sized) or on large scale 300kW+ ground arrays.

Ordinary 60 or 72-cell panels are DEAD SIMPLE in their construction. It's a sandwich of a backing material, encapsulation for the cells and soldering, glass in front, with an aluminum frame and a junction box on the rear.

Solyndra "panels" are fragile, hard to transport, hard to mount, everything about them was a pain in the ass.
CodeGuru supports Java and other JVM languages, according to https://aws.amazon.com/codeguru/

Is that the only language you write in?
Well nothing, i see it to preserve a bit of history, turn it on once in a while, maybe help netbsd to support it (patch etc) and port stuff over.
The relevant bit:

> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission.
Smallstep also offers an open source ssh-aware kms-backed certificate authority.

https://github.com/smallstep/certificates

One nice advantage is its support for different provisioning flows. The oauth flavor allows you to hook into an existing identity provider to authenticate certificate requests.

Simply:

$ step ssh login

and boom you've got a short-lived ssh certificate in your ssh-agent using a private key that never touched the disk.
That is a solid point, at the end of the day, programming languages and frameworks are just tools we use to build a product that has some use to someone (Be that monetary value or art or whatever). At work, it is almost always better to just iterate on the existing tool stack rather than try to spool up new one. I love writing Rust, but I'd need a good reason (or at least a big project to amortize the cost over) to reach for it over the existing very function c++ libraries I already use for our embedded work.
Ask HN: Is it ever sane to do a tcs PhD without much remaining interests?
Hi,

I'm about to graduate from a (non-US) master with a strong emphasis on theoretical stuffs (automata, logic, type theory and so on) and a pinch of ml. The topics were fascinating for me until recently when I had to make a decision on a tcs phd offer and realized that it potentially causes a career suicide given that

1. I will probably never get a Turing or become Gödel and, somehow consequently, have no motivation to transform my interests in researches to interests in building a career as a researcher.

2. I got zero experience in the industry and will remain more or less so until finishing this phd in my 30, which potentially confines me within the highly competitive academia. I was stupid enough to believe that the only hiring bar for FAANG and alike is the elementary icpc stuff and whoever played with serious algorithms and a handful of languages and tools can pass it.

3. People are practically re-defining cs := machine learning and cs_why_doing_it := cs, which used to make me cringe. Now I start to agree on them since I find the latter one more like stuffed with random adult toys crafted by theories with few intrinsic values in it apart from letting academics pleasing each other, instead of a tiny brick on the holy road towards the discovery of logic and nature like I used to religiously believe.

But still,

1. It's a phd and phd is a thing.

2. I don't hate the topic and there are still reasonable amount of connections with the industry (focused however still only on the most formal aspects).

3. It's corona time and I could end up with nothing if not accepting this offer on time.

4. I could always quit, though not sure if it's a good idea.

I'll wholeheartedly appreciate it if someone could forgive my ignorance and save me from a tangible mental breakdown with any advice.
Signed HTTP Exchanges (SXG)
There are different ways to think about it, but I find this the most illustrative.

Mining is about authorship of the blockchain. The system is simple enough; people broadcast transactions, and they get collected and entered into a shared ledger. But the details are tricky. Order is one major issue; does A or B come first? A and B may be mutually exclusive, so whichever is first is critical. Because the network is imperfect, and network users may be malicious, it is very important that we come up with an extremely robust way of deciding how transactions are entered into the blockchain. Authorship - that is, mining a block - is everything.

The simple solution is to make it random. If it's random, then no individual miner can reliably control authorship, and thus cannot engage in attacks like double spends (unless they control a majority of the mining power, i.e. a 51% attack).

POW is a way to achieve randomness in a robust way. The only way to mine a block is to solve a problem that can only be solved via brute-force hashing. This is costly to do, so incentives are offered to get people to do it via coinbase rewards and transaction fees. This adds to the security model because miners now have strong economic ties to the POW algorithm and blockchain with capital and marginal costs.

Of course, there are other ways to achieve randomness, but can you think of one that will force a decentralized network to achieve robust consensus (i.e. to not fork)? Much of the 'magic' of Bitcoin comes when you realize the incentives under which miners operate. Once a valid block is broadcast on the network, miners have extremely powerful economic incentives to accept this block and begin mining on top of it.

Consider what happens if, instead, the miner continues to mine at the 'old' block height. They may come up with a valid block fairly soon (it's random, so they have no way of knowing), but each moment that passes, the other miner's valid block is being transmitted over the network. Any subsequently transmitted valid solution is at a disadvantage in becoming the consensus, and that grows as time passes. Basically, any time spent mining on the old block once a valid one has been seen is pure waste. Since the entire network operates from these same incentives, consensus grows very strongly as no one wants to mine on a minority chain.

_____

Difficulty is a different issue; this is just a way to keep block times fairly consistent, even as the network grows and more mining power comes online. Because it is calculated directly from the block chain, difficulty rules follow the same strong incentives that build consensus on the majority chain.
Looks like they had 3 fingers per hand, so base 6 seems a likely choice. 6 works great as its divisible by 2 and 3.

I wonder what base we would use if we (somehow) had a prime number of fingers. 2, 6, 30, 60?
How can you pass up naming it “git-sql”?!

git sql “SELECT * ...”
Going back to normal: how Iceland has dealt with the coronavirus
This article, written from the perspective of someone who clearly "gets up close" with that particular scene, is far more interesting:

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...

TL;DR: It's about as coherent as you would imagine for something that self-organized on 4chan.
The explosion limits of hydrogen are very wide. I do not want to live in a world with a widely deployed hydrogen infrastructure. Stuff is going to blow up. People are going to die. Disclaimer: chemical engineer, German University.
OhI missed that somehow. Thanks for pointing it out.
happened to me a few times recently, too
Show HN: Learn you some Lambda best practices
Of course, a map will never be the authoritative source of a territory -- hence the saying. But what sets OSM apart from many other mapping projects is its focus on local knowledge and actual people. If people in an area call something by a name, then in OSM, that's its name, even if there's no official name for it, or if nobody really uses the official name.
> I'm a bit confused about the example. It seems you care about tagging an integer with a qualifier.

No, I'm pointing out that a proper sum type can (and often does) need that. It doesn't mean those are the only members.

> The type switch is useful when you have to consume the actual type, without runtime errors for type conversions

My point is that the type switch is garbage when multiple variants can have the same associated type.
similarly, all language itself flattens and simplifies reality
It's something techie on America's birthday