skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you heard of the American TV Show Jackass? Debauchery and indecency is well celebrated in American culture.

Regardless of "strategy", algorithmic content delivery is going to be used for propaganda, period. What's really fascinating is it kind of happened over night, when Instagram and Twitter were updated to not display content in chronological order. Personally, I took for granted how much bigger than a "UX change" this was.
Yes, and it's a serious problem.
Preemptive blocking or omnipresent monitoring.

Both of which are contingent on end users not being allowed to possess strong encryption.
OT - Apple should have removed Telegram months ago.

Telegram has been used to share some very bad COVID disinformation.

My father who is older and lives in Iran shared with me this video about how to treat COVID. It was produced really nicely in the Farsi (Persian) language.

Anyone who has ever read the book "Made to Stick" (highly recommended) would immediately that this video was designed to be a viral disinformation campaign.

The video started so credibility talking about the virus, the family of virus it belongs to, it talked about genetics similarities, etc. All seem very credible. Then it comes the disinformation gotcha:

To defeat COVID (with some beautiful inside the lungs animation ) talking about alveoli and how they function, when you are indoor you need to laugh deeply and very hard. This laughing hard gets rid of the virus, etc. etc.

Great idea, right? Seems like a way to exacerbate the spread of a deadly virus.

To me the quality of video made me think it was probably produce by a state or entity working for a state with budget.

If that is so I considered this incident as one of the first examples of using disinformation to commit genocide.

The problem with Telegram team working from the United Arab Emirates, it's unclear to me if it's being used to weaponize disinformation for evil means or not.
From what I have seen, I believe, Telegram is being misused and it needs to be removed from the App Store.
Wrist Routine – 8 Exercises to Fix Hand and Wrist Pain
This is awesome work - great job!
Been there, was surprised by the door. But in the end all is well, it was a toxic company.
I think it depends a lot on category. What you said about kids clothing is spot on, but I'd expect similar dynamics for women's clothing (tighter fits = lower tolerance, also lower tolerance for color mismatch etc) and there are a couple of categories that I've outright stopped buying on Amazon because of the enormous problem rate, namely whitelabeled consumer electronics.

In 2020 I've returned ~5%:

markers that were dry
test clips with mislabeled quantity
de-laminated screen protector sheet
mislabeled thermal printer (photo, listing said it had an internal spool compartment but it didn't)
cell-phone arm stand that lacked the spring tension, even adjusted to maximum, to hold up my small, un-cased Google Pixel

1% sounds quite low, but if I had foregone buying anything heat/storage sensitive and followed my own rule about whitelabeled goods that's exactly where I'd be. On the other hand, my returns were painless and most gambles paid off so I think I'll carry on.
Dvorak is that good. QWERTY is not the worst.

People always rationalize their inability to change. Those who made a step knows both rewards and cost. It was worth it hundred times.
Earlier comments by ‘sunnysofa are marked dead, so their submission and other comments may have been vouched for, or they’re caught in a filter, or something else. Hard to say. For a definitive answer contact the mods using the Contact link in the footer.
Yes, and that's a bad thing for the Chinese investors.

As an analogy, consider a bank giving someone a loan to build a house. In case of default, they'll repossess the house to recoup some of the amount.

Does this mean it's a good idea for a bank to give huge loans to people who they know won't be able to pay it back, so that they'll get the house? Obviously not! Repossession only avoids losing the full amount of the loan; the bank is still making a loss overall.

Laos ceding majority ownership of the power grid to the Chinese company that built it only means that the infrastructure investment isn't as profitable as expected (otherwise they could just use the profits to service the loan) and they're cutting their losses.
Good idea. The card is through Chase. I've had the card for years and overall I haven't had any big problems.
Not at a week yet, but all of my time is spent on derivations and then translating them to code too.
I guess this means you can buy stuff, return a box with trash inside, get the money back and keep the stuff. Sweet!
You know...

All these conversations of transcending, torch passing and such always make me think of all the gods that killed and usurped their gods. Cronus and the Olympians or whatnot.

Anyway, to me, a decent working definition of god is immortality (long life or evitable mortality are good nuff), great wisdom and the powerful creative abilities. Those seem at least possible these days.

Maybe we only become true gods once you pass the torch. It sort of proves the point, especially the "creator" point... to make a worthy torch bearer.

Sure, I guess I'm in with silicon. I'd prefer it was me in the silicon, but I guess one descendant is as good as another. Hopefully they won't be this bigoted against meat though. At least have respect for your ancestors.
Definitely worth keeping in mind, although it is important to remember but these are not a linear series of checkboxes. You’re going to have fluctuating quality of work, happiness, success every single week, month and year. It is also very possible that the causality runs in both directions.

The universe is complex, and ice really don’t have it all figured out, but acknowledging that complexity will prevent a lot of theory induced blindness!
Oh, I misread that as an arrow pointing from 'before' to 'after'. Makes sense now!
Update Azure CLI from the command-line (az upgrade)
And unlike many clothing stores, Amazon doesn't allow directly exchanging an item to change size. Instead, they treat an exchange as a refund followed by a new purchase (at the then-current price). When something is on sale, the discount may no longer apply by the time you go to exchange it—so if you're at all uncertain about the size you're better off ordering one of each up front, and then returning the ones that don't fit.
StarCraft: Avoiding game crashes related to linked lists
I admit I have not.

SRS isn't my main method for learning -- I use a variety of other methods. I only use SRS for (independent and disconnected) atomic-type knowledge that I need to drill. My rep loads are generally not onerous, so it's not a problem that necessarily affects me too much.

(Example: I learn through cognitive dissonance so I use it primarily to deprogram certain associations in my head. For instance, the word "oficina" looks like "office" to my English brain, but the word actually means "mechanic's workshop" in Portuguese. Or "pretender", which looks like pretend in English, actually means "intend". SRS helps me drill the Portuguese meaning into my skull. I use SRS to memorize bits of knowledge that don't fit anywhere and that are hard to create a context for.)

I have looked into SuperMemo in the past because I was attracted to the prospect of a general pro-level memorization tool. I use complex pro tools all the time and was not fazed by the learning curve, but I felt the UI was, let's say, overfitted to the creator's personal preferences.

It was a purely emotional decision but I knew I wouldn't use it regularly, and the best SRS tool is one that one would use over one that one would not.
Easy: the КПСС was the bottleneck between the oil and natural gas fields of the Union and the fuel importers of the West. They were the funders of the Космическая программа СССР from the 1930s on.

Two things happened in 1985: KSA opened the taps to full production, tanking oil prices, and the Plaza Accord weakened the dollar. Since oil is denominated in USD, this further kneecapped soviet hard currency income. While they were simultaneously attempting to fight a war in afghanistan, the real price of oil had dropped by a factor of 3. Elsewhere, as a result of the Plaza Accord, west germany used its stronger marks to buy out east germany as a fire sale from the Warsaw Pact, but I still have no idea what japan (or perhaps just the LDP selectorate?) got from its stronger yen, other than (averaged across the whole country) stagnation.

TIL Polan can into space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirosław_Hermaszewski
(double checking received opinions never hurts, compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737221 )

====

Conspiracy theory:

Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736853 and consider that anyone outside who for whatever reason had been modelling the soviet economy might have been able to show to the actors within it (especially after Gorbi's transparency reforms) that it was worth more in pieces than as a going conglomerate, in which case the implosion of the soviet union would have been the ultimate stakeholder activism geopolitical LBO.

If Mark Felt had been a Belter, he would have said du chesh peyeting instead of "follow the money."
Any system that accepts public uploads will eventually receive all kinds of horrifying depravity and disgusting content. Viewing some images can cause permanent psychological injury. What is OK for one person might cause severe distress for another. For example, certain kinds of porn can trigger panic attacks for victims of abuse. Automatic nudity/gore detectors save a lot of people from looking at such things. This includes users and employees.

Automatic content filters also enable new business models. They allow new products to exist that wouldn't be economically viable without automatic filters. And they lower costs, which makes our society more efficient and wealthy.

They are not perfect, but neither are human moderators. Here is some analysis on the performance of these nudity/gore detection systems:

"Comparison of the best NSFW Image Moderation APIs 2018" https://towardsdatascience.com/comparison-of-the-best-nsfw-i...
You can access disinformation through Safari. Should Safari be removed?
Your intuition is correct, at least in the product categories that I have experience with.

Anything over 2% returns to me generally indicates to me that something is wrong with the product or the product description is not clear enough.

In fact having a 30-40% return rate with a high enough volume will get a buyer banned from Amazon.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers...
Minimum salaries for H1Bs are already location-specific [0]:

Compare the salaries between Broadwater County, Montana [1] and NYC [2] for further evidence.

[0]: Per https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary... :

> The employer/agent will pay the H-1B worker a wage which is no less than the wage paid to similarly qualified workers or, if greater, the prevailing wage for the position in the geographic area in which the H-1B worker will be working.

[1]: https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...

[2]: https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=15-1...
> went on to show that from their point of view they weren't all that bad.

Exactly, just like the Nazi soldiers weren't all that bad either but they were just following the orders of their superiors and believed in a united Germany. But really they were ok.
Adding to this, it's nice to have the compiler enforce these things rather than rely on the dev to see the variable name and treat it accordingly. In the latter case, you're one sleepy afternoon away from having things blow up in production because you "thought there was no way that that variable could be a null pointer"
See the Elm to JS compiler, it does deep unused code elimination at the function level so you only ship the code you actually use (or the functions u actually use, even inside libraries).

The closure js compiler is also pretty good if you prefer writing js.

If we only start using better languages in our applications we could improve performance quite a bit.
One of the real bad ones is _more sales wouldn't have helped anyway_.
Arch is amazing as a daily driver. I use it both on an ec2 vm for development and on the client (my thinkpad) that connects to it. Both are zero maintenance after being set up and I get the latest kernels and dev tools without the need for a PPA or dpkg dark arts.

I’ve been running the same arch install on my thinkpad and moving it to newer models for over a decade! Compare that to Ubuntu or fedora where I’d have to upgrade every six months to get support for this or that and it would be a nightmare.

One thing that is frustrating about the project is that I’ve donated to it several times and still don’t know if that money ever made it to the people running the project or was put to good use.
I find many of the "cheap" phones better for my needs. I want a small phone, one that can live in a pocket without worry in the field (military). I need a phone with a removable battery (security thing where I work). I need a phone with a headphone jack (ie headphones without Bluetooth). So very few of the flagship phones are even an option.
Does this mean I can flip a bit in my laboratory and instantaneously someone else in another laboratory can know which bit I flipped?

I think that would be a requirement for "information transfer".
“Marginal” here means “the next increment from what is currently exchanged”; it's a standard term in economics.

You seem to be using it in a very different sense.
I'm sure there are people who abuse the system, but for you example of clothes, I'm not surprised there is a high number of returns.

Last year I bought two Levis jeans at the same time. One the exact same model, color and size as the one I was wearing which was worn out, the other a different color (figured I could use having two pairs of jeans). None fit me correctly. The model I had already was too big, the other too small. Sent both of them back and made the effort to go to a brick and mortar store where I could try them. Turns out the sizes had changed or something. I ended up with a different cut, as the model I had was either too tight on the legs or too wide at the waist...
Comparing Safari with Telegram makes no sense. As they are so different in so many ways.
Demystifying Computers: GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
Wow, prison sentences are inherently unfair to the rich because they're used to living in mansions?
Reducing Perceived Latency (2012)
I use a split kinesis in qwerty and have no problem moving between keyboards.

I had a friend who went full dvorak and had a hell of a time just changing an airline ticket on my machine, though. A big chunk of this article is about relearning typing for new key layouts...
Now that it is a captive technology, the question becomes why should anyone want to explore it other than Microsoft.
That is increasingly suggested to be incorrect by anthropologists and evolutionary biologists focused on human development. It’s now understood that prestige and hierarchy played a fundamental role in shaping the mechanics of human culture, starting at the beginning of the distinguishing of Homo sapiens.

A mind-blowing book on the subject I recommend: “The Secret of our Success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter” by Joseph Henrich.
This is the pattern I've seen as well.

That and the anti-pattern of using Amazon as a quasi-tool-rental outlet where they buy something for a project, use it, and then return it after the project is done. The 'borrowing' aspect was also an issue at Fry's in the Bay Area where test equipment that they sold would have been used already.

Of the two I think the 'borrowing' pattern to be pretty unscrupulous. I see the buy a bunch and return the ones you won't use/wear/eat what ever is more along the lines of the store fitting room approach.
Marshalite
in short, HN readers were already living in de facto quarantine pre quarantine
Asking unqualified strangers on the internet for "how to make a case stronger" should really be met with "start by hiring a lawyer" as first, second, and third reply.

(because from the post, they only got in touch with one to write an initial response)
Normally, those high comps would motivate people into earning the credentials for taking that career path. But you can't address local scarcity in this way when the law incentives you to instead import cheap labor from abroad.
I have a PhD but I work in industry. We have people from national labs usually because of compensation. It's not high six figures but it is pretty competitive especially for the area I live in. I worked in finance for a few years in New York and although the pay was better, living in Manhattan has a way to humble you :)

To be honest, I feel like I really lucked into this job and don't really know many places that employ people like me for solving PDEs in industry but you could definitely try something like quant researcher/developer which will alleviate some of the compensation woes from university and still have aspects of mathematical code to some extent.
I'm curious about the policy. "You can't return a TV if there has been a sports game on TV".
Is it too late for Silicon Valley to avert election chaos?
This is a well know problem with online clothes shopping by now. In the Netherlands 13% of all online purposes is returned, and between 30% and 60% (shoes) of clothing.

I have the same problem with my 200cm and slim posture. I have a handful of brands I can order blindly, but jeans in particular are a chore to get the right fit. I strongly prefer brick and mortar shops, but size availability varies.

People used to think that returned goods would just be freshened up and sold again — just like clothing you try on in a brick and mortar store — but the reality of the system is slowly getting understood thanks to investigative journalism worldwide.

A Dutch television program in this category concluded that returned clothes that are in good condition are often bound for for markets in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where there is a demand for brand goods below or at the price of lower quality Chinese imports. Some brands don't want this because of brand dilution and fear of their products hitting the black market, so those items are simply destroyed instead.

Suggested solutions include charging a fee for returns, but that will have to be mandatory because people will just shop where the returns are free if left optional.

Personally I would like to see high street shops offer the option of trying on clothing ordered online at their shop for free (or others even if a good business model can be found), and have them handle the returns instead of this grossly unsustainable system we have now. By eliminating the risk of people abusing the system, the need to remove those items from the chain is diminished significantly; just like regular clothes shopping, but with the benefit of a much larger catalogue.
Is having a board of directors full of VC big shots to answer to that different from having a boss?

I listened to a Changelog podcast the other day featuring Sytse Sijbrandij (GitLab CEO) and he mentioned having to run stuff by his board and I was like woa, even someone as obviously self-made as @sytse has a boss.

I'm starting to think that only by bootstrapping (or taking very little investment, at least) you really do work without a boss. Not sure if the YC path that pg promotes in this article fits that.

(I'm thinking about this a lot lately because my company is currently at this crossroads. We raised a little, turned that into profitable growth, but we could raise more to grow faster.)

EDIT: meta-level comment: it's kind of weird how we managed to create a world where nearly everybody has a boss. CEOs answer to the board, who answer to shareholders, who work at investment funds that have bosses and shareholders and LPs of their own, and down the rabbit hole it goes. I wonder if there's any general way out of this, different from "bootstrap a SaaS" which is a little specific to be good general advice.
Covid-19 Host Genetic Study Identifies Three Novel Loci
I checked out the Wikipedia page and it seems the short story is free to read http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fir...
I do this and Amazon even encourages this pattern via its Prime Wardrobe and other past offerings.
Nice explainer (I love his videos): https://youtu.be/pMjXAAxgR-M
The problem is somehow we have engineered a global society where Apple is the ultimate law enforcement authority in scenarios like this.

Is Tim Cook really qualified to be the ultimate authority of what speech is allowed or not allowed on a global basis, at least for all the billions of people who use their devices?

Similarly for Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. We cannot allow a very small number of corporate CEOs to make unilateral decisions about how to police speech across the globe.
Also interesting to note that the hype came a while after the release of GPT-3 (the tweet was about a month after), and that many of the examples could have possibly been generated from GPT-2 (which didn't get as much hype). Put another way, you could show ppl GPT-2 examples from a year ago and claim they were from GPT-3, and I don't think many would know the difference.

I do think GPT-3 has shown improvement, and it's a step forward, but it probably tells more about how humans interpret rather than how AI might work. Wrote about it more in the link below:

https://avoidboringpeople.substack.com/p/doctor-gpt-3
That's like the most common scam on Amazon. Many of the packages are put back on the shelves/on sale without being checked, so some other buyer gets it and either has to (once again) return it or lose their money. It's pretty ridiculous.
While I'm against doxing, what right does Apple have to tell Telegram what to do?
I've been trying to coax better performance out of a Jetson nano camera, currently using Python's Open CV lib, with some threading, and can only manage at best about 29fps.

I would love an alternative that is reasonably simple to implement. I dislike having to handle raw bits.
While this may seem shocking, logistically it makes sense. It’s potentially easier to destroy or dump a returned product than re-preparing it for sale.

I went out on a date with a program manager for one of Amazon’s return programs and she told me her job was basically finding out ways to repurpose returns as cheaply as possible. Apparently destroying and dumping it’s the easiest and least resource consuming way to deal with returns.

In a similar note, search for Amazon Warehouse. That’s one of their programs for returned merchandise and sometimes I have found insane deals there. But you gotta check often.
Astounded that Apple is choosing to flush their privacy / human rights cred globally down the shitter over the slight possibility of losing market share in the tiny economy of Belarus...
Is it true that Pakistan bans vpn as well? My friend on pakistan can connect to my openvpn server, but after the vpn connection established no packet ever made it to the server. This happened suddenly since last month. The same person also said my wireguard vpn server doesn't work, though I'm not sure if it's due to configuration issues on their end or blocking as I don't have log on that server. If it's true it seems to be utilizing some deep packet inspection stuff, which means the Pakistan government is really serious about policing their citizen's internet access.
Do you mean “incorrect” in the sense that comparing a customer_id to an order_id is semantic nonsense?

I agree, and I do wish SQL had stronger typing so the parser could warn you before your query silently runs off the rails. For example, in Oracle, I believe the following is legal, but I wish it wasn’t:

select *
from my tab
where 1 = ‘1’