skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
illegal doesn't mean very much when customs is about shaking you down, stealing your stuff, and making you pay bribes. Every time I've traveled to Africa for example, I've had to give customs officers some stuff and money. It got so bad that I was buying Bluetooth speakers and duty free gin just for them.
There's often a legal exemption for personal belongings.

Of course, if you claim the 50 iphones in your bag are "for personal use" it might not work as well.
The point is dreamworks animation was not a tech startup the way Quibi was.

Dreamworks had large Babe Ruth level swings and to some extent got very lucky with chance.

Mike Meyers was not the original voice of Shrek. It was Chris Farley, who played an entirely different character. Farley died and much of the film had to be redone. While Farley was a star, he wasn’t well and there’s no telling the movie would have been a hit like it was under Meyers. Without the early success of Shrek a moat would have been over-engineering.

Quibi looked like they thought it would operate under similar forces, runaway successful content made cheaply.

When in fact the medium of delivery and matching algorithms are more powerful than smash content. Worrying about and being good at the former is just not like what Dreamworks did.
I've observed it from the other side (failing to connect to a Zen customer for more than an hour), and additionally the zen.co.uk website refused to serve me either directly or via Tor when I tried to check its status and/or a looking glass service (though not recalling finding those anyway, when I've finally connected via a private server).
Price elasticity of demand isn't linear. Something that is a Giffen good at a lower price may well have negative marginal demand if the price rises too much.
I didn't think that the absolute series voltage would matter much - the right number of cells will be close enough for the voltage regulation in the laptop. My big concern with that approach is matching the cells. It's not practical for me to do that myself since I would need to test a lot of cells. Or maybe I am overestimating the negative consequences of using unmatched cells. But I don't think so.
I'm in the US, and have had one colonoscopy at age 33 (to rule out cancer, I had rectal bleeding). It was hemorrhoids, but will have another any month now because of family history of polyps and colon cancer. And I'll have one every 5 years even if I have zero symptoms.
There's a lot of analysis online about these topics, and more importantly, the total cost/impact/negative externalities associated with battery storage is going down approximately exponentially. The same can not be said for fossil fuel energy systems.
Cigarette taxes are overwhelmingly paid by the poor, and impact them disproportionately. They do not have a significant impact on the smoking rates (people who would have quit due to the price already have) and there’s no data on how that tax money is spent to offset the externalities.

Some info: https://priceonomics.com/how-cigarettes-tax-the-poor/

TL;DR cigarette taxes feel fair to non smokers because it appears to discourage a habit with bad outcomes, but economically they aren’t effective.
Aren't tariffs and taxes the same thing? In this context, import taxes are tariffs.
"as of May 2019, the US has the highest tariff rate among all developed nations with a trade-weighted tariff rate of 4.2%"
> I wonder if this is simply because there is a mismatch between what people are being told and what people are observing with their own eyes.

when in doubt, "humans don't intuitively understand exponential growth" is often a good guess. to the average person, "barely under control" and "everything is fine" look very similar and the precautions taken in the former seem pretty silly. by the time an outbreak is directly observable in your day-to-day life, things have already gone sideways.
Product Hunt's New CEO: Josh Buckley
Video on the Internet is still broken.

Videos aren't that big, especially for 5 minute clips at a lower quality.

It shouldn't be this hard to share, copy, or post small video clips.
Yes, and the move into references is a very welcome one. It will solve one of the large bottlenecks for OAuth use.

Still, I'm not sure using references in the crypto data itself is a good thing. You will get more requests, more infrastructure dependency, more metadata tracking, for fixing the bloat of a minor (in size) part of the protocol, and getting cryptographic agility, that is a disagreeable feature at best.

Also, once they have references, why are they adding polymorphism too? Polymorphism is a hack that tries (but fails) to solve the same problem.
Okay, how much do you think a cigarette should cost?
In the current-day context there are a lot of ways you can improve Java code just by not using OO mechanisms. A lot of the pervasive use of inheritance in the past was driven by the assumption of working in big monolithic codebases in huge teams with long development cycles and really poor use of SCM. Working in small teams, on microservice codebases, in short dev cycles, without long-lived feature branches and late merges, you don't need as much protection against other people's code. You can use concrete classes instead of interfaces, and you can separate data from algorithms instead of finding ways to conceptualize every function as a "behavior" of some anthropomorphized collection of data.

A couple of edits:

The old style makes sense for the API surface of libraries; I won't dispute that.

As much as they annoy me, I do see a bright side to people who insist on defining "correct" Java style as the circa-2000 style motivated by a bunch of long-dead assumptions: they will help Java die. Nobody under forty wants to write code that way. All it will take to kill Java will be for Oracle to declare a future release (say Java 25) as an "eternal support" release and then release an entirely different language as "Java 26" the way Microsoft did with Visual Basic.
> Does a nonpartisan, alternative organization exist?

If it does, it soon won't. The only permanent home of Liberty is in the individual and families. Organizations become attractive to power-hungry psychopaths when they become effective, and those who gravitate to leadership are skewed toward self-serving. Therefore, compromise and decay are right on the heels of success. Faith in a man-made establishment is a slow escalator to a shallow grave.
It would be in the US since FERPA requires written permission to release student records, but who knows in Canada.
Well there was a lot of talk about this on the mailing list with a lot of core devs opposed to the idea.
Assuming the state also refuses to confer any legal validity to any religious ceremony, and to legally define marriage as a heterosexual union, then fine. Otherwise it still winds up being "separate but equal" but for sexual orientation instead of race.

Benefits and legal status are important, but social and cultural equality is important as well.
$1k with the receipt, $50 without? Damn what kind of paper is that receipt printed on....
At least with Brazil, in practice you're allowed a single personal computer and phone. If you come back to the country with both your old phone and new phone you'll have problems. But if you leave without a phone or laptop, and come back with both, without packaging, with apps and files loaded and everything, and claim you'd brought them in Brazil originally, you're fine. So that's what people do.

If you have a legitimate need to bring multiple devices to and fro, at one point there was a form you'd fill out at the airport when leaving where you'd put down serial numbers and they'd verify on return.

With something like a PS4 it might be a little riskier, but you could probably spin some kind of story they'd accept, as long as it appears similarly used and not in packaging. ("I was visiting family and my nephew wanted to play PS4 so I brought mine for the week!")
How do you mean matching them? Just get 8 NCRs or whatever and that's that.

The absolute series voltage matters in that you don't want to over- or undervolt it by 3.7V usually.
The battery he's ended up with looks like it does have charge protection after all (6-pin chip under the kapton tape), which is probably a good thing.
Certainly there is an inflection point where demand meets a taxed price that would cause Apple to build a factory in India. If Apple is not currently building a factory in India, then that point has not been reached and the result is just higher prices for Indians.
>That isn't to say these remote proctoring solutions will necessarily prevent cheating either (and having now used one of these services, I think cheating would have been relatively easy), but it at least should make test takers think twice.

Sounds like security theater.

>I think we can all agree that an in-person exam would have been better, but the state of the world made that untenable.

Why not? Just rent out a large open space (stadium, convention center, school gym), and space the students 20ft apart. The risk should be negligible. Let's be honest here, the real reason is that [cost of exam surveillance software] < [cost of conducting a physically distanced exam]
personal effects are non taxable across borders in most tax regimes

so legally this is fine
Not grounds for stopping work[1], but perhaps grounds to explore other avenues[2] to see if something else might yield faster results.

I’m no expert, but my personal opinion is that AGI will probably be some hybrid approach that uses some reinforcement learning mixed with other techniques. At the very least, I think an AGI will need to exist in an interactive environment rather than just trained on preset datasets. Prior context or not, a child doesn’t learn by being shown a lot of images, it learns by being able to poke at the world to see what happens. I think an AGI will likely require some aspect of that (and apply reinforcement learning that way).

But like I said, I’m no expert and that’s just my layperson opinion.

[1] if the goal is AGI, if it’s not then of course there’s no reason to stop

[2] some people are doing just that, of course
I disagree with Schmidt. Misinformation is spreading because trust in institutions is eroding. This eroding trust is because of transparency and improved information dissemination. Most people don't trust the news anymore because it can easily be seen how biased they are. They don't trust institutions because they see how partisan most are.

You can't just ban or regulate social media and expect the toothpaste to just magically go back into the tube. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are doing their best to suppress information that goes against the popular narrative, but that's not helping me trust those narratives more, but instead making me trust those internet companies less.

Address the issue of trust, and you can fix the real issues here. Not "idiot" amplification.
I'm not on the mailing list / saw the survey first on HN. At first glance thought it was marketing spam or something.
He might not have a citation but I do: https://www.heffter.org/microdosing-lsd-research-potential/

> A more serious issue concerns other receptors that LSD activates. In particular, LSD is a potent activator of the serotonin 5-HT2B receptor. Activation of that receptor stimulates growth of cardiac ventricular and valve tissue.

You might want to be less aggressive when asking for citations in the future. Especially considering this is something you could have found in ~5 mins of googling.
I think this is a good point that needs remembering. All it takes is to read a "political" thread on HN and the comments from people on both sides to know its true.
Left hand path seems to be the fastest way to solve this.
You can add for example assembler on C64 or Amiga to the list.

Highly vital demoscene and even new games released on both platforms.
You think Apple wants them to be this expensive? It's 100% the government's fault
Simplest and fastest HTML Hosting ever
That's funny. I loved gadget savings tourism: a tablet from the US, a laptop from HK, a camera from Japan...
Spotify updated its Terms of Service to allow users to transfer their playlists
Maybe another outlook is that firefox has been captured, put in a box and fed just enough to keep it alive.

on mobile the complaint says:

"The six “core” apps are Google Play, Chrome, Google’s search app, Gmail, Maps, and YouTube. Manufacturers must preinstall the core apps in a manner that prevents the consumer from deleting them, regardless of whether the consumer wants them. These preinstallation agreements cover almost all Android devices sold in the United States."

So chrome must be installed, prominently, and is not able to be deleted by the device manufacturers.

In absence of this, would device manufacturers install firefox and send them some support?
You know it's an electric car when it look ugly
Building for Collaboration
That would require a ton of core upgrades and would be hard to implement without enormous abuse potential, so not very likely.
Got YC interview – tips to prepare?
Because we should try to protect people from being exploited. You can use this exact same logic to argue against minimum wage, consumer protection laws, building codes, etc.
> I mean, that’s a good thing, right?

Not being specific to NY or the US. This is not good when illegal/fake cigarettes are readily available. With these cigarettes, none of the entities(tobacco farmers, the government, smokers) will benefit from smoking.

https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/alert-you-are-buyi...
Some of that is just inertia. Things are done a certain way and everyone is comfortable with it. Throw in a new method and everyone gets nervous. You might even have trouble finding an anesthesiologist who has done enough nerve blocks to be comfortable with it. And even if you do, your doctor has maybe never worked with them before.
As a younger person who missed out, I recently enjoyed this mini-documentary— especially the surprisingly lengthy history of the many devices for a supposedly "failed" format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3BceoMuaA
The US Eliminated Nearly 21,000 Election Day Polling Locations for 2020
workplace provided me with an Autonomous ErgoChair2 and i love it. haven't touched the settings after a few days of initial config.

https://www.autonomous.ai/office-chairs/ergonomic-chair
No idea what I did wrong, I really thought it was the right subreddit to post it in. :)
I have since updated the link to another subreddit.
Even $300 is a big premium for what you get. Basically just an extra camera and a LIDAR sensor that nobody knows what to do with yet. Oh, and a shiny stainless-steel band around the edge.

I think what Apple has realized is that a certain subset of their customers will always want the best model, no matter how little sense the price makes compared to the regular model. For some people, it will always be a status symbol (or an enthusiast's obsession). Or they're of the economic class where $300 just doesn't even register on their budget. As one reviewer put it, the 12 Pro is "the shiny one", and for some people that's all it takes.

What this amounts to is that these whales can subsidize things like the $400 SE model, which is an incredible value. And I'm completely fine with that arrangement personally.
The Worst Virus Outbreaks in the U.S. Are Now in Rural Areas
The Stratachery article posted yesterday was way more interesting and less filled with perjorative attacks.
Google doesn't just use the search term. It also uses your search and browsing history. This is why if you're a programmer, you're more likely to get results from StackOverflow because your search is more likely to be about programming. It's one reason why people can get better search results from Google than, say, DuckDuckGo.

If you've been watching lots of conspiracy YouTube videos and reading lots of conspiracy blogs, Google is more likely to give you conspiracy search results because it thinks that's what you want to see. This is called a filter bubble [1], and it's how social media as well as search amplify questionable content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
The model is an idea. The spreadsheet is an implementation. Don't confuse the two.

You should be able to describe your model on paper or a slide or two. The spreadsheet as a working version of the model is necessarily more complicated. Having both allows anyone to verify that the model is working as intended.

"I can't explain it" is not the same as "You wouldn't understand it."
Wow, I wasn’t aware of the Skype IP battle [1]. In that case EBay licensed the underlying IP from the founders.

It is especially interesting in the context of quibi because it appears that most of their content deals allowed the content creators to own the underlying content but require a 2 year exclusive license to the service.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/31/skype_joltid/
The spec could say something like "a client may ask for extended information but can't demand it unconditionally and must gracefully handle situations when access to particular fields is denied".
Adding a +1 for building your first models by hand, before using something "on rails". Perhaps until say $5M ARR for B2B SaaS.

My experience was that I have a much better command of the important levers in my business -- and can more easily scenario plan -- with a robust model that I built myself. Much easier to derive key metrics out of it too. And once you have a starting point, it's easy to iterate and expand it as the business grows.

My limited experience with the "financial model as a service" apps are that they make a bunch of assumptions for you and make it a lot harder to ad hoc plan. i.e. What if we delayed our hiring round of 5 headcount 2 months? What's the impact on ending cash balance? What's the impact if I move part of my ARR pricing into an up-front setup cost? What if we offer quarterly payments instead of annual pre-paid, and 30% of our clients opt for that (where does that leave cash)? etc. These are things that you could do in Excel in about 10 minutes with even a basic model, but would be challenging to do in another person's app.

IMO an early-stage SaaS startup's initial model should be focused on ARR/cash burn, looked at Monthly, with true planning cycles quarterly or maybe every 6-months if progress is more or less on plan.

I don't think I was asked in a single board meeting until $4M ARR or so about Revenue. ARR and cash are king.
I don't know what the actual rates are in India, but I remember some 10-15 years ago I bought a bunch of camera gear from the US because it was much cheaper than buying it locally in France.

The delivery was via UPS or Fedex so they handled the customs. In the end, paying VAT and taxes (which were levied on the whole price, including shipping!) it was still cheaper than buying locally.

One of the products was a heavy tripod and head. Another fun fact about this: the tripod was actually made in Italy by an Italian brand...
Asking for relief in a vague generalized form is the general practice in larger complex cases where the relief the claimant would be entitled to depends on the outcome of and findings associated with various claims made. As these become known, parties will be given an opportunity to be more specific about the relief they think is appropriate.
Hello F.B.I.,

Nice try.

Sincerely,

Guy who owns alot of DVDs
The "without receipt" payment is likely just pocketed by the agent.
If I'm buying the phone for myself there is no customs. Unless I try to claim that I bought 10 brand new Iphone 12 pros for my personal use...
@uxarchive is one of the most useful mobile resources! Well done @usewaldo!
TxAuth? Toxic Authorization?

My positive attitude about OAuth* may be showing.
Microsoft Java Developer Conference
What's even sadder about this is that there are oven ready JSON serialization formats that support unions natively. Avro, for example, would serialize to something like

{ "key": { "KeyHandle": "myhandle" } }

and

{ "key": { "FullKey": "myfullkey" } }

They could just provide a schema and nobody would have to implement anything of the wire end.
The new Firefox mobile is really bad for extensions too... they block them all except about 20 of them... I switched back to Firefox v68/Fennec
I think the conclusion is a bit unbalanced. Plenty of trips are short range and people don't have unlimited cash to replace their bikes with even cheap cars. If it's there, they may well use it a lot of journeys which they'd otherwise have used a car for - popping to the shops, going in to town or going to a nearby friend's house.
I find that it's hard to successfully misrepresent what someone said when the original is right there for everyone to see.
Does anyone know a good way to observe & measure the impact of this? I have a small fleet of Linux servers behind NLBs with cross-AZ load balancing turned on, and they have some significant collection of OS-level metrics via the Prometheus node_exporter.

Would incidents of this be captured by the "node_netstat_TcpExt_TCPAbortOnData" metric ("connections reset due to unexpected data")?
Comparison of Kubernetes Ingress Controllers
So it clearly is a survey for people on the mailing list and others would just spoil the numbers :)
I was on a cross-country United flight ca. 2015 or so and happened to sitting right in the front of first class and got to see the pilots take a bathroom break (bear with me). The process was incredibly interesting.

1. With the flight deck door closed, the three flight attendants place a drink cart between first class and the attendant area/crew bathroom. There's now a ~4.5' barrier locked against the frame of the plane.

2. The flight deck door is opened; one flight attendant goes into the flight deck while one pilot uses the restroom. The flight deck door is left open but the attendant is standing right next to it (but facing the lone pilot). The other two attendants stand against the drink cart, one facing the passengers and one facing the flight deck.

3. Pilots switch while the third attendant remains on the flight deck.

4. After both pilots are done, the flight deck door is closed and locked and the drink cart is returned to where ever they store it.

Any action by a passenger would cause the flight deck door to be closed and locked. Any action by the lone pilot would cause alarm by the flight deck attendant. Any action by the flight deck attendant would cause alarm by the other two.
ECS is a joke. Implementing scaling policies is way too complicated, don't even get me to talk about scaling out with EC2-based capacity providers [1]. Combine that with the mediocre job cloudwatch does at collecting and allowing to act on realtime metrics, you end up with a solution where you still have to do everything yourself. And the tooling and integration is not on par with what the k8s ecosystem is sporting nowadays.

What people want is a cluster engine they shove a bit of text into and it does the rest. Integrated k8s does a job well enough with that, as does ECS. The difference is, k8s knowledge is transferrable to a growing number of businesses, ECS knowledge is not. Something to keep in mind if you're looking for employment in that area.

k8s also has the beauty of being able to exist completely disjointed from AWS infrastructure. Nothing better than being able to lock in clueless product teams -- not every dev is interested in that whole "service ownership" idea -- into their clusters and let them bear the responsibility. ECS is way too tightly integrated with AWS, and requires changing a lot more infrastructure. This is not easy to allow in an org where the NOC assigns VPC and general network layout.

---
[1] Fargate still does not support CMK encrypted ephemeral volumes https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/issues/915. From which you can tell, nobody who is spending serious money with AWS is using ECS too much based on this, as they would have hopped on implementing it by now. And using AWS integrated containers without fargate is pointless IMO, as that's exactly the kind of service you'd be looking to get from paying extra for big cloud.