skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anecdotally, Canada & US Amazon used to be like you described when they first started becoming the "everything" store but things have really declined lately.

6 or 7 years ago there was a much higher proportion of items actually sold by Amazon. Now it's a morass of third-party sellers with inaccurate listings to the point that even just finding an item is quite a choice. I recently gave up trying to buy kitchen knives because most listings had no OEM part number, a vague description and photo and people arguing in the Q&A section about basic features like whether it had a serrated edge or not.

Amazon has become a dumping ground for people who buy things on Alibaba, at liquidation or even just at Costco and try to resell for a markup. Even a search for basic consumer products like a box of cereal will have the top results be these kinds of sellers. For instance, I just searched for "ichiban noodles" (a popular international brand of instant noodles that can be found for <$1/each in any grocery store in Canada). The top result is a pack of 8 for $27!

Yes, Amazon still replaces or refunds almost anything that you have an issue with, but I'd rather just get the thing I wanted the first time.

A perfect of example of this is a picture frame I bought from Amazon (or rather, third party seller fulfilled by Amazon). It arrived damaged because it was thrown into a too-large box with no padding. I notified Amazon and they sent another one. It arrived identically packaged and also damaged. Then I asked for a refund. At this point, almost a month had passed and I still didn't have a picture frame, despite a huge amount of resources having been consumed by Amazon.

No store that actually has to bear the cost of returns themselves would do that, but Amazon made out like kings on the transaction: they got a cut of the original purchase, their FBA fees, then got to charge the seller for disposal of a broken item - twice!
Syntactic Concepts in the Oil Language
I am one of those people. I appreciate you saying this. I have spent decades of my life trying to lose weight including following doctors orders word for word for 10 years. It only ended with gained weight despite their beliefs in “physics”.

I am now 3.5 years into carbohydrate recovery and I’ve lost 200 pounds eating way way way more than my “TDEE”.

I’m not saying this for any other reason than to express my gratitude.
> They still insist that double-blind testing

That's at least a step forward from 1985, it would seem:

> We made no effort to do A/B testing, since we feel it does not replicate normal listening conditions, and there is still insubstantial evidence that A/B testing reveals small differences as well as does prolonged listening to each unit under test.

So, in 1985, not even non-blind A/B testing! These people are delusional.
As someone who fought battles with webpack and webpack 2, I’ve since been pleasantly surprised that each upgrade has just gotten simpler and more stable, and I can progressively delete more of my own code as the features get built in. Big thanks to the maintainers!
Show HN: Wellcome – office check-in platform for employees and visitors
Right, and I suggest you to talk with few men before doing sexist remarks about clothing sizes and talking anecdotes as ultimate truth.
Why not have the customer hold onto the return item until another customer buys it as used on amazon, and the return label ships directly to the new customer? Sure people could send unacceptable returns, but couldn't that be mitigated by losing the privilege to return in that way with amazon? It still seems better than the alternatives of throwing it away.
I sat next to a guy in the petrol pump business once on a flight from a time before time (pre-COVID), so I asked him how the pump knew when to stop: he explained that the handle contained a rotating cylinder (halved in the middle) with a known volume V that rotated N times until V*N = Purchased Liters.
But your claim was $1400 per kilowatt hour, per year, when electricity is free. All I'm doing is correcting that - the actual figure is $12, with the exact details you specified, sourced from the report that you linked.

Your quote:

"Current estimates place this at $1,400 per KWh per year for the average case assuming that the electricity provided is free [1]."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739820
I agree that private entities can largely can do whatever they feel like. But there is something deeply obnoxious and unprincipled when these entities piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. They’re actively suppressing non-establishment viewpoints while pretending to be a non-editorial, neutral platform. And, perhaps most insidiously, because of their secret suppression of ideas and voices, they make it seem as if certain mainstream viewpoints are actually unacceptable fringe ideas. Suppose I ran a forum used to discuss crimes in my city, but secretly hid anyone’s post unless the crime they were discussing had an Asian or Arab person as a suspect? And then, suppose I also secretly deleted any comments from people complaining about the secret editing. That’s not the style of forum people should be defending. It’s legally permissible but all types of dystopian.
The last time I tried to bump webpacker from 3 to 4 at <dayjob> was absolute hell. The fancy chunk splitting logic was spewing out non-deterministic bundles across different machines in our infra. Took a lot of deep digging in the internal graph representation to find the root cause.

I gave a local related meetup talk, slides here.

https://vheis.su/slides/curing-webpack-cancer/#11
This practice has resulted in it being impossible for local competitors to spring up in those places, incidentally. When your clothing market is flooded with nearly-free product from overseas, domestic competition becomes impossible. This would seem good for consumers superficially, but it winds up limiting economic growth and creating a dependence which is likely to eventually fail.
The flip side of this is Amazon actually refuses to inquire with delivery companies, and here in Canada, the post requires that the sender be the one to inquire.

I've had several instances where the item was clearly at my local post office but misplaced. Canada Post refused to check without Amazon requesting it, and Amazon refused to do anything but send a new item. In each case the original item mysteriously appeared in my box months later when the postal workers inadvertently found it.
A decent tube amp is not significantly more expensive than a decent modeling amp, particularly considering the used market. They're also just as "bulky" as a solid state amp - the heaviest components are the power transformer and drivers.

When you start talking about professional gear, the cost of modeling amps is more than tubes.

I'd also contest that this is "figured out" - this area is actively researched.
On a whim I dedided to double-check, you're right at least for residents of the USA and Germany (~21500km vs ~13600km average).

https://www.kba.de/DE/Statistik/Kraftverkehr/VerkehrKilomete...

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
Our Consensus Reality Has Shattered
Interestingly and a bit off-topic, Michael Burry (of The Big Short movie/Scion Capital fame) had a few plays on almond farms regarding water scarcity. It seems that he left his positions a few years ago, but the whole California water wars thing is quite unsettling.
I've found that a slightly longer (~100 lines) webpack config allows me to use all the caching and fancy tricks I want and is still just as debuggable. I think the main thing is setting it up yourself so you know what all the plugins/settings do.
The physics interest in this which tends to get quoted is related to possible variation of the fine structure constant. I was trying to remember what I think was the original paper in that vein, placing limits on strong, electromagnetic, and weak coupling constants, which I think should be referenced, by Max Irvine: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.1983.008... (article paywalled)
It really depends. I'd say 90+% of the pumps I encounter have working latches (NW US).
That may be true but I’ve never had a hint of a problem returning something with Amazon. Yes they do have an annoying counterfeit problem, but at the same time, the second you complain, you get an instant complete refund and maybe even an additional credit as apology.
People seem to do it all the time in California at least. I've never actually seen a tank overflow but if it did it seems like the potential consequences could be disasterous.

Maybe they should remove those flip-up latches if they want to prevent people from doing that.
"the clerk almost jumped to my neck"

Thanks for this, I'm always amused at how certain phrases and sayings get twisted-up a bit during translations between languages, but I'm sure you actually meant "jumped down my throat"...
Flawless.... or /almost/ flawless... At 5m 20s, the house of cards is clearly glued together.
When were they actually "pro freedom and anti authoritarianism", outside of their marketing pitch?
This part about wanting to be conquerors really made it clear to me: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ej09htBVkAADsqu.jpg . These are just people who've ended up being "nobodies" in society, probably feeling jealous of successful people, and wanting to be seen as heroes. They are (un-)surprisingly no different to most jihadists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlbirlSA-dc
How covered by automated tests is the kernel? Some tests would require hardware emulators to some degree, but a lot wouldn't.
It stays in place by gravity.
> Debian/ia64 at the time (2015) only partially worked - lots of common utilities would randomly segfault or fail in peculiar ways.

It works reasonably well these days, albeit not perfect.

There are issues with kernels >= 4.15 on larger NUMA systems, but otherwise it runs mostly fine.

Images can be found here:

> https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/
Yeah I was thinking the same thing, this is probably a bad idea. You don't want to go sit in your car either.
I am not saying anything about political protesters, only commenting on the example you used (landlord one) to say it's not applicable in this case.

> Even if there were something, certain things are typically protected in law; in most western countries, for example, a landlord cannot forbid a shop from serving members of a specific religion or of a specific ethnicity

Of course, but the landlord can forbid a shop from having any animals inside the shop for example, except the service animals ofc or to say that only specific type of shop can operate on the ground (prior to signing the contract). This is a more complex issue than "landlord example"
Yarn is much better in this regard. I'd thoroughly recommend it. It's drop-in compatible (except it will generate it's own lock file), so it's pretty easy to try it.
If it’s to cover them in case they lost who does it go to?
"Hello, world" is a rather poor example, because there's little practical value in a mobile application like that. The real value comes from being able to reuse many existing Java libraries.
Imagine the time before the formalization of dyslexia within medicine. It would have been very disrespectful and cruel to tell people who found learning very challenging something like “just try harder! It’s basic physics, the more you study, the more you learn!”
I've been using ASDF (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) for a while now to manage each of the language (and sometimes build tool) versions for a folder/repo in a consistent manner. I'd definitely recommend taking a look at it.
You can always prop it open with the gas cap and let the diaphragm trigger described in the article do its job. Unless the air inlet is obstructed.
The pinnacle of consumerism!
I found the exact opposite for ortholinears. It took zero time to adjust, and within a day I was actually touchtyping using the properly assigned keys for every letter, something I'd tried many times over the years, but always found super awkward on a normal keyboard. I realised that I'd always subconsciously known there was something wrong with the weird fingers-curling-under-each-other you're supposed to do and it felt like a weight had been lifted!

Of course, that was for prose. It took a month or so to arrive at a satisfactory layout for all the symbols, having suddenly dropped to 48 keys. Though thumbs are so useful! Using them only for spaces is criminal.

Still use a laptop on the couch at home for casual stuff. Still can't type properly on it.

Not much point to this comment, I guess, other than that I highly recommend anyone to borrow someone's plank/preonic/ergodox for a day or two if they'll let you, and bang out some prose. You might be very pleasantly surprised!
> They do that because they want to keep a history of each transaction.

It's about more than just history. Logging would (maybe) suffice for that. It's about getting cause and effect right when there's more than one computer separated by a distance.

> I don't want to keep a history of all the positions of a character in my game.

Sure - not in a single-player game.

But can you take the same approach in a multiplayer game? Grab some players, give them different clocks and separate them 20-150ms apart from another, and have each of them tell the server what happened at the time it happened? Things will diverge pretty quickly.

You end up reinventing the same old append-only log on the server. That way, when client messages arrive at the server out-of-order, you still have the info necessary to rollback state and issue corrections to other clients. When that's all set up, you can then choose some horizon (200ms?) and garbage collect all events before that. Or you can keep the events around and show replays and/or calculate stats for achievements at the end of a match.
I made the same comment above about the kernel. How covered by automated tests is glibc?
> Also does seem that 32bit support is on the way out, slowly but surely.

Nah, we're currently even adding LLVM/Rust support for m68k, so don't worry, 32-bit support isn't going anywhere soon.
you'll discharge it on the grounded pump trigger before you withdraw anything with gas on it.

static builds up everywhere, all the time during dry winters, yet gas stations don't regularly start exploding seasonally.
If something works on-prem, it also works on clouds: after all, just get compute, and run. However, that's not how Redhat sells Openshift.
I've seen similar stories before, and I'm wondering whether (some?) US pumps might work slower than ours? Or maybe it is just larger fuel tanks due to larger cars...

Here in Finland typical pumps fuel 40 litres/min, i.e. 10.6 US gallons per minute, which gets my car from near-empty to full in just over a minute.

Does that sound similar to you?
Seconded. RSS is how I stay abreast of project updates. For ones like Webpack that lack RSS, GitHub’s releases feed can be a substitute: https://github.com/webpack/webpack/releases.atom
Almonds have got to be a tiny percentage of our food supply as compared to meat, though.

It would make more sense as a water-to-calorie comparison of almonds vs meat.
Except `set -e` is stupid because it is disabled all the way down when a command occurs in a conditional, meaning this:

function foo { false; true; }
foo || echo foo failed

prints nothing!

From the bash manual page:

| If a compound command other than a subshell returns a non-zero status because a command failed while -e was being ignored, the shell does not exit.

POSIX says the same thing, so this is true of all POSIX-y shells.

This means you really have to check for errors you care about, and `set -e` is useless. Ugh!
I know some people who work at a non profit theatre. The theatre has been in danger of going out of business for years and may disappear this year. The audience halls were always almost empty even though the plays were important and about serious topics. Think 20% capacity. If they had sold more tickets, chasing money a tiny bit more, they could have reached more people and would not be in such dire straights recently (before Covid)
Well that's why I put the beer in the car before pulling out the nozzle: to force myself to discharge that static buildup.
American here and I've had exactly one bad shipment (counterfeit earphones in 2015) in my ~20 years of buying from them.

I don't doubt that the problems described by others are real, but I think there's a lot of variance in the number and kind of problems people actually see.
can you tell me what exactly the purpose is of supporting an industry that is, by your own admission, not struggling?
I wonder if Amazon will pursue these folks - they ordered items intending to return them. Got to violate some terms and conditions somewhere.
1) 192kHz is almost entirely snake oil. It uses 4x the CPU cycles and 4x the storage capacity for no measurable difference when it comes to human hearing.

2) 96kHz vs 48kHz does allow for some small but probably worthwhile improvement in the behavior of the anti-aliasing filters used in the analog->digital converters.

3) I have a theory that has been shot down by some highly respected DSP people but I retain it nevertheless. In Ye Olde Analogue domain, most of the distortion that occurs will be somehow related to harmonics, because of the nature of the analog electrical signal and the components it passes through. In the New Digital Goodness, there's no inherent reason why any of the distortion will be fundamentally harmonic. Consequently, if either type of signal pathway introduces any distortion at all, the analog one will tend to be "musical" because of the harmonic aspects at its core, whereas the digital one will be something else.

I'm not arguing about the amount of distortion etc. Anybody who knows anything about this stuff knows that Ye Olde Analogue pathways were full of distortion, but that either we grew to love it or it was just inherently musical enough that we loved it from the beginning. The sound of that old analog gear you love? Yes, that's right, you love the distortion it adds.
Let's take a moment to look at how disingenuous this article is:

* Out of twelve returned trackers, one of them went to landfill. The article focuses on that item and does not itemise the fate of the others.

* Adding a tracking device to a returned new product is tantamount to damage. If such a device is detected during returns processing, anyone with half a brain should immediately presume a malicious actor and have the item very carefully and securely assessed for disposal.

* Did not verify that the tracking device remained within the bag.

* "30-40 percent of online purchases are returned" what absolute hoopsla. I've worked in online commerce and this is off by an order of magnitude. A very few segments (e.g. shoes) may approach such return rates.

This crap is why journalism is in such disrepute.
Just a bit of math is amazing
I'm amazed this entire scene can be described mathematically over time...
Is this actually the status quo? There are patents on APIs around, and since they were granted, it would seem that USPO, at least, doesn't think that APIs are inherently unpatentable.
Also a happy freestyle user here, I have the version for mac. Anyone tried both the freestyle and advantage that could give some points of comparison? Is the advantage 3x as good, same as the price ratio?
yes, we should also consume less meat in addition to consuming less almonds.
> e500v1 and v2 aren't even user-space compatible because Ruiz-era Motorola was cheap and wanted SMD w/o Altivec, so they replaced the FPU...

Both run the standard Debian powerpc port with a kernel with FPU emulation enabled.

There used to be a powerpcspe in Debian which I maintained where even Rust worked after I added target support to the Rust compiler (and one very talented FreeBSD developer improved the LLVM backend).

However, GCC upstream decided to kill off the powerpcspe port for GCC 9, so we had to drop it in Debian.
This is pretty interesting stuff, thanks for sharing! Does temporal information get any special treatment in the economic graph at the moment? Are temporal queries of any interest?

I ask because I work on Crux [0] which at its core is a point-in-time bitemporal Datalog engine, and I see a lot of similarities (schemaless core, Worst-Case Optimal Join etc.)

[0] https://opencrux.com
This pretty much nails the problem with Webpack in my view. It doesn't seem to be based on any kind of strong, logical, easy to understand core, but instead is comprised of lots of interwoven threads of magic that no-one really understands.

This makes any attempt to debug and solve problems with it a total nightmare, like crawling through a tar pit. You might make it, but you're gonna feel all sticky and dirty coming out the other side.

That said, kudos to the developers, I use it every day, but I wish it were a lot simpler.
32-bit PPC ISA is still used in some embedded devices.
And frankly, if you replace MP3 with a newer decent codec like Vorbis or AAC that doesn't have obvious glaring issues, "very high" isn't all that crazy high either.

That said, disk is cheap, and FLAC is easy piece of mind.
Yeah 2lbs per person per year in the US.
I’ve only driven in maybe a dozen countries, but so far the US is the only one where the pre-payment thing existed. I was glad to have read about it in trip prep, or I would have stood there staring at a non-functioning gas pump for far too long!
Yeah I got the Ergodox and just couldn’t get used to it. I think the ortholinear was a big part of that.

Especially painful as I’m in Australia. I think shipped it was about AU$500. Very not cheap indeed. I sold it on eBay and didn’t take too much of a haircut.

My other concern with the mega-custom layout is the fact that I often use ‘normal’ keyboards. I didn’t want to get used to some special situation and then not be able to use it. (Same reason I’m not putting time in to Colemak.)

Now I just use the Microsoft thing. It does the job.
a like throwing some peanuts in an animal ZOO :D

PS: I am sorry, I am very bad correspondant.
For added delight, visit the author's homepage: http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~funkk/
We are still actively maintaining support for the Motorola 68000 CPU in the kernel which is even older.
"Evolutionary intertia"? Evolution is change, and inertia is the resistance to change... it makes no sense anyway.
>Women’s attire doesn’t have standard sizing so every brand is different

Neither do men's attire. Even sizes that are meant to be standard (like the British/Italian/EU systems for shirt, jacket and pants sizing) aren't.

I don't buy anything from sellers that don't explicitly give the dimensions in centimetres anymore (which has become standard practice).
Show HN: T-rec – super fast terminal recorder generates animated GIFs for macOS
Compiling Rust on a m68k machine would demand some patience.
The official expansion of CPL is Combined Programming Language, but I wonder if an inofficial one was ever Chris' Programming Language. (Compare Thierry Coquand)

Doug McIlroy visited Strachey for a year in 1968, a link in the transatlantic story of computer history.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2724586

> "According to Doug McIlroy, Christopher Strachey's GPM (general-purpose macrogenerator—a macroexpander of the same era) was only 250 machine instructions, yet it was sufficient to enable Martin Richards's BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) implementation, later inspiring Ken Thompson to bootstrap C via B, eventually leading to the self-hosting native-code-generating tool chains we now take for granted."
Well so at least here in the US there are two different notches: one that pumps fast, and one that pumps slow. I always use the one that pumps slow.

But 10 gallons a minute sounds about right. My car (well, SUV) has a 17 (?) gallon tank, and it takes a couple minutes to fill at that slower notch.
I love mechanisms that rely on laws of physics other than electromagnatism. Seems like in 2020 we reach for the almighty transistor before considering alternative physical solutions.
Why the need for a zip code? Loyalty or something else..? Seems the latter considering the phrasing.