skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bezos cannot guarantee that employees may have access 3rdparty sales data.
Can any big retail like Walmart, Costco, Safeway, etc. can guarantee that no employee ever looked at 3rdparty sales data ?

If Walmart sees a cheap item flying off the shelves, and thinks that it can make a cheap copy of it, then Walmart would do it. Isn't how store brand work ? and they often use a white label producer anyway (i.e. same factory, different packaging/label).

Walmart, Costco, etc. they know precisely what products you buy and how often. They can push you next time to buy their own version of it, by sending you a discount for for it, or simply rearrange the shelves in store.

I understand that sellers with little to no competitive advantage, are very vulnerable to such practices. But this is hardly new with Amazon. They could avoid selling through those channels (that is why you find some products only through producer website, or direct sales).

Amazon has 35% of the e-commerce market in US, or 6% of retail market in US (Walmart has 9% of retail market in US). Amazon does not do as well in the rest of the world. The 35% of the e-commerce market is in US. And even that 35% includes being an agent for 3rdparty sellers.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
I read that with a nostalgic tone and think, “If that happened, we’d all be up in arms about the power and corruption that Yahoo/Mozilla duopoly wielded”
I had been looking for this for years when I had an Android phone!
Bezos cannot guarantee that employees may have access 3rdparty sales data. Can any big retail like Walmart, Costco, Safeway, etc. can guarantee that no employee ever looked at 3rdparty sales data ?
If Walmart sees a cheap item flying off the shelves, and thinks that it can make a cheap copy of it, then Walmart would do it. Isn't how store brand work ? and they often use a white label producer anyway (i.e. same factory, different packaging/label).
Walmart, Costco, etc. they know precisely what products you buy and how often. They can push you next time to buy their own version of it, by sending you a discount for for it, or simply rearrange the shelves in store.
I understand that sellers with little to no competitive advantage, are very vulnerable to such practices. But this is hardly new with Amazon. They could avoid selling through those channels (that is why you find some products only through producer website, or direct sales).
Amazon has 35% of the e-commerce market in US, or 6% of retail market in US (Walmart has 9% of retail market in US). Amazon does not do as well in the rest of the world. The 35% of the e-commerce market is in US. And even that 35% includes being an agent for 3rdparty sellers.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/12/amazons-mark...
What is the difference in approach between these? I've programmed extensively in dynamic and static languages, and don't understand what you're talking about. Less verbose, I might concede. More robust though, I need some more evidence.
Yes, big businesses as well: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/06/03/hsbc-backs-c...

>> Last Friday Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing former leader, demanded that HSBC state its position after enjoying privileges in the territory that “should not be taken for granted”.

He also warned that it could “be replaced by banks from China or other countries overnight”.

In a Facebook post he wrote: “We need to let … British companies such as HSBC know which side of the bread is buttered.”
Yeah, there are so many alternate syntaxes, shortcuts, and ambiguous statements in Ruby; just reading through Matz’s reference book on Ruby was a trip for me.
In the office or out of the office on social media?
Valuable to whom? I can't remember ever getting an email impersonating someone I know via a legitimate From header with the same name as someone I know.
> Anything is better than a separate file.

I dunno. Massive breakages of backward compatibility in an established language may not be better than that.
You make a good point. Let me revise my original statement: There is a huge market for security engineers.

I'm interviewing in SF with ~8 years of product engineering experience and ~2 years of AppSec/SecEng experience. I'm looking at 8 companies that are all willing to pay well for folks to do that work. Typically in range of ~180 - 220k base salary from what I've seen so far.

On the topic of meaningful change: You're absolutely correct in that it's easy for folks in security to find themselves in places where they identify work that needs to happen without receiving support or authority to make it happen. For aspiring technical security folks, there's a few things you can screen for to avoid companies that will do this to you:

1. Does the company have a formal CSIO (Chief Information Security Officer)? If not, move on. CSIOs represent security risks and needs to your executives and board members. Without that, you won't see security work get on anybody's road maps.

2. Does the company have an established security program? If not, do they have a roadmap for making one?

3. What is the size of the technical security team compared to the larger engineering organization? There's no bad ratio here, but the smaller the ratio is, the more critical it is to automate as much as possible.

4. What training programs exist within the larger engineering organization? Do they cover security awareness? Technical security? How well is this program executed? A good training program is critical to reducing new work created for security teams that are typically overloaded to begin with.

There's probably more you can look for here, but I find these questions to be reasonable filters.
Wire wrapped connections can actually be more reliable than soldered but a 16/32-bit 68K design is going to be at least twice the work (and twice the wires) of an 8-bit Z-80 design...
Everyone has a name, but not every name is recognizable to the average person.
That would require two additional NOT gates, which, in turn, would require an additional chip, which given the layout of the board, would require additional board space.

But what would the benefit be, other than a somewhat cleaner address space? You don't get to actually use the space that isn't mapped in this scenario--RAM, or whatever, doesn't magically appear there. You also end up having to worry about additional gate delay.

So, from the software's perspective, you go from, "Don't use these addresses, unpredictable things will happen." to "Don't use these addresses, nothing will happen."

Either way, code that uses these addresses is buggy. So you are paying extra hardware for very minimal benefit.
That finally explains why it has hardware to remember the voiceover setting but not the ANC setting
That is trivially easy to do with a little social engineering. Contact lists are stolen all the time
People lose their jobs over all sorts of things all the time. Before "cancel culture," people could lose their jobs over a complaint from a single angry customer, or a joke or comment that got elevated to HR, or any reason at all.

That doesn't ruin lives, it's a relatively common occurrence, particularly in the modern day. People are only equating it to Orwellian dystopia and Stasi oppression because politics has become involved. But it's not cancel culture's fault that at-will employment exists entirely at the whim and mercy of the employer, or that political activism (which cancel culture is) is clearly free speech. It's always been the case that if someone can convince your boss to fire you, you can be fired.
Querying an RDF triplestore using SPARQL and Relational pipes
All that sounds good, but it still doesn't all you to prove no access has occurred. Sure, the data is "encrypted" (although even that's problematic) and access is logged, but the application servers must have access to the keys, and someone must have production credentials. What's preventing that person from attaching a debugger and grabbing the keys? Better yet, what's preventing someone from stealing the sellers' session, and making it look as if the seller's accessing the data? All the access might be logged, but how do you know whether the logging server has been tampered with? Maybe you do your evil deeds when the server is down for "unplanned maintenance".
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding, though, on what constitutes abuse (and thus an anecdote for your assertion). Amazon openly mines third party sales data to bolster its in house brands, just as Costco does with Kirkland, Walmart with Parent's Choice, Trader Joe's does with their house brand, etc..

Amazon has a policy, as described in this article, of not allowing individual seller's data to be used in non-aggregated form by internal parties. This is purportedly to make third parties feel less directly competed with, and is a guarantee not provided by my above examples (Trader Joe's, etc.).

There is not a mountain of evidence that they look at unaggregated data, and it is absolutely difficult to prove a negative on. For example, let's say there's a single brand breaking through in a new electronics category. Let's say some enterprising internal brand manager is looking for up and comers to pull into Amazon Basics. Why not just search the site for that type of electronic? Or look at short term best seller lists?

I'm on the fence about what should or shouldn't be legal in this situation. But if Amazon can't do it, it seems clear that Trader Joe's, Costo, etc. shouldn't be able to do it, and that's quite a can of potentially anti-consumer worms.

Amazon has the policy, and the journalists have found sources saying they break them, so at the very least an internal investigation is warranted, or some non-criminal external investigation for transparency's sake. But as far as I understand (I am so ready to be corrected), Amazon does not even need to have such a data aggregation policy, much less have an iron-tight way of policing it. What this really looks like to me is Amazon shifting from being a third party seller platform to a more highly curated internal/external hybrid platform, just as maker supermarkets did in the 90's. Believe me there was a lot of handwringing then about the practice at supermarkets, but now it is commonplace and one can argue that it is ultimately a benefit to the ecosystem.
Lock-free is not the same as wait-free.

> Web application servers will often hit the wall on something like a shared cache or the session-state store. Unless 100% of the shared data uses efficient lock-free algorithms, then given enough threads eventually some mutex somewhere will be the limit.

Without strong LL/SC (which exists nowhere for useful block sizes), it's difficult if not impossible to implement complex data structures, particularly compound data structures (lockless doesn't compose well), that can't block somewhere. Many sophisticated lock-free and even nominally wait-free data structures implicitly rely on dynamic memory and complex garbage collection strategies, which just hides the ball.

If you have shared resource contention, usually something is going to block somewhere. And the more you scale up, the more your optimization hacks to minimize real-world blocking breakdown, thus the long history of multithreaded software hitting limits at 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc CPUs.

The way around these is to architect your application at a higher-level to avoid or mitigate resource contention. And how you do that is extremely context dependent, though "share memory by communicating" is a rule of thumb intended to steer you in a less failure-prone direction, keeping your options open. If you go in planning to just add lockless implementations of basic data structures everywhere, you're going to fail hard. Often because the hit to pipelining, etc, for using atomic operations in your critical path impose huge costs upfront.
Time to cite sources, because neither of those sound like they're true? Tiger King would have been made by HBO, or Amazon Video, or etc. (Tiger King was not commissioned by Netflix, it was pitched to Netflix).

Similarly, I'm pretty sure Audible commissions plenty of works rather than only reaching exclusivity agreements about already published works.
As much as folks like to hate on Google here, Android's privacy protections / permissions are on par with iOS and improve with every release. Each has their advantages, but its not far off.
TypeScript or PropTypes
Agreed, once data passes via human-human communication its not possible to observe 100%.
You can have two separate machines (whether VMs or bare-metal) plus a load-balancer in front and go blue/green deployments by deploying changes on one machine then redirecting the traffic to it by reconfiguring the LB, and if all good you then update the second machine as well.

You do not need a VPN if all your machines are on premises in the same network or within a VPC in case of a cloud provider. In case where you do need a VPN (let's say a hybrid on-prem + cloud architecture) you can have a single VPN gateway (either software like Strongswan on a dedicated machine, or hardware router + whatever AWS's equivalent of that is) bridging the two networks.

In a lot of projects though, neither of those things are required at all. Not every project has a threat model requiring VPN'd communications between hosts or multiple environments & seamless deployments (a lot of projects would be fine with taking 10 minutes of downtime out of hours to deploy updates).

I'm not saying Kubernetes is bad or should never be used, but just like any tool it should be used for the right task and in some cases the cost, complexity or downsides associated with the tool end up being a net negative. I dislike the current trend that everything should be in containers, Kubernetized, etc where you spend more time on infrastructure than writing the code you're trying to deploy in the first place.
Unfortunately, it seems like the 68010 is the only one completely out of production. You can find all the others easily on Digikey, even the '060.

It seems like the 68030 would be ideal for both power and simplicity; 32-bit, better than the '020, yet easier to build than an '040 or '060 because it still has dynamic range bus addressing[1].

[1]http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/68030%20Board/6... (ctrl-f for dynamic range bus addressing)
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I don’t think he needs to “prove a negative”. Just show us that you care about upholding the trust your sellers place in you to act ethically.

What if he said “we care about our sellers. To prevent abuse by our Amazon basics team we have isolated independent customer data from our amazon basics team and firewalled the teams with access to the data from the rest of the companies. Independent audits and training are used to minimize the risk of inappropriate access to this sensitive data. “

If Bezos said that wouldn’t you feel better?
HotSpot does not need to infer object shapes, so it doesn't need inline caches for field accesses. HotSpot doesn't need to infer whether (and where) methods lie in the prototype chain of an object. HotSpot does not need to speculate that arithmetic fits in integer range. HotSpot does not need to speculate that fields are (not) deleted from objects. HotSpot does not need to speculate that a function has a .toString() called on it. HotSpot does not need to speculate that a local variable can be modified by a sloppy direct eval. HotSpot does not need to do scope analysis and closure conversion. HotSpot does not need to speculate that the arguments object does not escape.

All of these things are extremely typical for a JS VM to profile and speculate on.

I do not work on JSC, but I did work on V8 and it does all of these things.
To be clear, I'm genuinely curious - this isn't intended as an insult to any of the folks who have worked on these projects.
Paul Graham, we need your advice
We have developed a technology that significantly reduces energy consumption and has a transformative impact on the world. It can be used in all areas where engines or rotation are used: electric vehicles, e-planes, e-ships, power and wind generators. We have two working prototypes that validate our technology.

Our technology is particularly effective when applied to EVs. It reduces energy consumption from the battery and extends the range of an electric car to more than 700 miles on a single charge.

Our product for EVs is a magneto-mechanical battery. It provides the electric vehicle with 70% additional mechanical energy. As a result, the consumption of electrical energy from the car battery is reduced by 70%. On average, an EV consumes about 16 kWh of energy per 60 miles. Thanks to the additional mechanical energy from our magnetic battery, the electric vehicle will consume only 4.8 kWh per 60 miles, thus increasing the range to more than 700 miles on a single charge.

All VCs we met decided not to invest in our startup (after talking to physicists).

How progress is supposed to go ahead if physicists are afraid of extending their knowledge about the universe? We have a working prototype. They say that it violates the laws of thermodynamics. We say that if it had violated the laws of thermodynamics, it would have not worked. But it works!

How we can find investors who actually want to change the world for better?
Why did GitHub ship all our software off to the arctic?
Partial decoding, causing aliases, is indeed common and mostly not a problem. What this system appears to have is overlapping decoding. I can't say I've seen any system until now that was deliberately designed that way.
There's been some vulnerabilities exposed but I think overall "sketchy" can be subjective. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-ban-us-national-security-...

A recent example is the app was caught reading the user clipboard in iOS 14 beta but a lot of other apps were also caught red handed. The oft-cited national security risk about ByteDance providing user info to Chinese government is a bit overblown, when the NSA has been spying on its own citizens for years...
Hey, you didn't work there by any chance did you? I really loved the old "Public" folder and agree those direct-to-raw-file links were super convenient (when used appropriately of course!)
I've bizarrely been refunded in cash multiple times at Wal Mart for card/app purchases.
Just use a neutral vaulting company!
1. You're assuming there is a decision made by US couples / women about whether to have a child based on income. I don't think that conscious decision happens very often, I think there's a whole bunch of people who convince themselves they'll "get by" because reproduction is a basic drive. Fertility rate therefore would not be much affected by the level of family support, but the quality of life for the individuals concerned very much would be. It's that quality of life that I was trying to highlight.

2. I am in the valley. I work for Apple, and 9 years ago when the kid was born, Apple's policy on paternal leave was in fact 2 weeks paid leave, you could opt to use your vacation (which I did) after those 2 weeks, and you could cash in a week's accrued sick leave as well as a bonus if you had it, but that was it. It's better now, but that doesn't make my experience any different.

2(a) My wife worked for Chevron at the time, and their policy (who knows what it is now) was similarly 2 weeks of paid leave, then you can take accrued vacation, then you're back at work. She quit.

Reading back my original post, I can see it's confusing where I'm saying "I" and talking about being in hospital - I was trying to continue the "My sister":"Me" but it was of course my wife giving birth, not me.
Parents eye private schools that say they will have open campuses this fall
It depends on how far away they are. Magnetic (dipole) fields fall as the cube of distance. Since the earth's pole has a dipole moment (8.0 * 1022 Am^2) and is detectable ~30uT at the earth's radius, thousands of km from the core. Even a 1T field at a radius of 1m would be billion times smaller ~1nT a km away or 1/30k of the earth's field.

A giant 6T MRI would be comparable to earth's field at 27m.
Mobilizing for a Zero Carbon America
Bezos gave an incredibly forthright set of testimony. I like how he continued to answer in the affirmative when the interrogator continued to drop the aggregate quantity scope. Can they do it for 3 sellers, yes, for 2 yes. That's basic mathematics, the aggregation will take place over however many are in the pool be it 100, 50 or even 3. Seems like Bezos stuck to the facts and reality on that one.

His comment about trying to give helpful answers too when questioned about organized stolen goods. Bezos did a fine job, his replies were coherent, concise, and didn't bumble trying to coordinate and mobilize a bunch of caveats and statements with extensive justifying or clarifying context that could not be delivered in the compressed timescale he was afforded.
It's not really a loophole: you can't sell a digital copy because without a physical medium you can't sell _your_ copy. You could take money, and then transmit the bytes that make up the thing you bought to someone in exchange, but those bytes are copies of your version, they are not themselves the original.

Could you put your file on a harddisk and sell that? Again, no, because writing it to disk _creates a new copy_, so now you're violating copyright.

There's actually pretty solid legal argument for first doctrine not applying to digital media.

However, things get more interesting when you're selling your _license_ or your _access_ to some content. For example, can you sell your entire account to someone else, so that they now have access to what you no longer have access to? Depending on where you live: yes, you can.
He’s probably saying these are free apps which Apple doesn’t take any money for, and the money the developers keep are from ads or fees from clients and so on.
I really struggle to not be an Electron hater, but... why, oh why??? Basilisk II is already a thoroughly cross-platform piece of software that runs beautifully as a native Windows/Mac/Linux app. What can possibly be the appeal to re-compile Basilisk into Javascript, so that it runs at less than half the speed, packaged in a full Chromium/Node installation?

The total download size of the native Basilisk II is about 8 MB (not counting your disk image). The size of this Electron monstrosity is about 180 MB! I feel like I should be wearing a straitjacket. Does no one else see things going terribly wrong?
50 gallon barrel of lube was a real SKU, I remember a friend sending me the link because he found it amusing.

Was a couple thousand dollars IIRC
If they have that much of an advantage it’s not at all obvious why they need a $765M taxpayer investment.

They should have been able to raise funds from capital markets. I’m not a crazy free market ideologist but I tend to think if private investment failed, there’s a reason.

I also having spent the last 20 years in HW I disagree that anything having to do with the production of material goods requires a large number of engineers.

Finally it’s not at all clear that their chemicals experience translates into pharmaceutical experience. Again if there was a strong business and technical case, private investors would want in.
The microeconomics of cryptocurrencies
So there may be a use for diamonds beyond industrial cutting.
I agree that he could be labeled as a perfectionist, but the frequent hyperfixations on various different topics, as well as the inability to follow through on grandiose ideas point towards ADHD. It's impossible to tell with 100% certainty, his life shows too many common symptoms of ADHD for me to be convinced otherwise.