skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's face it, Amazon's review system is broken at the core. I have the perspective of a seller on Amazon and, as such, you simply don't exist without _positive_ reviews. For the story, it all begins when you start with Amazon as a channel. Ads would be an option to kick start a presence but you actually need some traffic (you actually need the "buy box" which is just Amazon's way to legitimate you as a seller) to be able to advertise (this is true at the very start on a given Amazon market). So you, or people you know, place _fake_ orders to get started and if possible add a first review which, naturally, is fake.
Once you have that going, congrats, you are selling on Amazon. From there on it's a uphill battle to gain traction and it all comes down to better position for your products. This is not different from any market really but there are specific hurdles along the way. Amazon tracks the number of "defects" on your product which counts things like A-to-Z claims or... negative reviews (and more stuff I won't bother you with here). If you hit a threshold (1% of claims _or_ negative reviews) you start seeing a nice warning telling you that your account is at risk of deactivation. Additionally, a similar threshold or trend, unsure tbh, will result in a temporary loss of the buy box mentioned earlier (60 day look back window for the above-mentioned threshold). This means that you disappear! (no ads, remember?).

So, you can probably imagine how strong your incentives are to get any positive review juice out there. What is shown in the tweet is actually against Amazon's terms[1] but there are more (and less) subtle ways to get what you need including things mentioned in comments around here and you really don't have that much of a choice if you want to stand out in the noise.

With all that being said, whatever you think of delivery related reviews for instance (especially in covid times which has added a lot of uncertainty to the whole thing), they hurt businesses exactly where it hurts. And that can be extended to negative reviews in general even when these are legitimate warnings for other potential buyers. Imagine now for a second that you rely on low volumes of orders, the number of potential genuine reviews is also low and with the Amazon thresholds you are therefore literally at the mercy of a few bad reviews without a cushion of positive reviews to fall on. So yeah there is a market for fake reviews, duh...

[1] not the best link but there is a screenshot showing the terms in the thread where it says that you can't ask for positive reviews or give something in exchange for it.. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/t/new-asking-for-rev...
Oops my bad
Local News Website
How viable a business is starting a local news site today? Think original reporting in a city/county of about 100K people. What are the must-have features?

Right now where I live there are several local sites, all designed a little differently. Some do original reporting (low quality, in my opinion), others just repost press releases. Some allow comments on articles, some don't, and some run toxic forums.

The website for the local newspaper is behind a paywall, a source of frustration for people who want to share articles. Especially if they are about family members.
The election hasn't been decided FYI and you are woefully uninformed. Lookup Dominion, Scorecard and Hammer or just search the internet for "2020 election fraud". Biden is illegal, illegitimate and will not be the President of the United States.

If you want to understand why one indicator available to you is to look at network viewership.

From Friday (Fox is usually top):

MSNBC - 2.9m

CNN - 4m

Fox - 2.2m

Fox has also lost 50k likes from its facebook feed - it seems NewsmaxTV will be the big winner after this. Part of me likes to think Murdoch just wanted to move Fox to the center to sell it but given who he is him and Lochlann probably just thought they could play kingmaker again and get away with it. Comcast is also hurting - just look at the ratio under this: https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1325918816644304896?s=20.

There are 131 affadivits in Detroit and RealClearPolitics just pulled their PA call. If you put money on Biden I would cash out NOW!

Personally what I want to know is whether Podesta will end up spilling the beans on Madeleine McCann after this?
I have transcripts, but I still have to read them. You're right though, it's better than listening to the audio.
Seems to work really well! Playing Gasoline by Audioslave, it really misses the high intensity peaks.

It interprets the trumpet in Miles Davis - It Never Entered my Mind as dark ripples and is beautiful in it's own way.

It's a long way from the last time I used a visualizer on Winamp, nice!
I write a lot of Python and didn't know about this despite it being a 2015 blog post! The real kicker for me is:

* [ExitStack] easily scales up to many resources (including a dynamic number that's acquired in a loop)
> The Venn diagram of banks where you’d feel safe storing millions of dollars and that would also be willing to help you defraud the US Treasury are exceedingly small. It’s just not practical.

You only need 1. However, the solution isn’t to move money from your account to a bank which then hides what’s going in from the US government. The solution is to make a terrible investment say buying land from Bob for 10 million only to sell it to Sally for 5 million. Meanwhile an associate of Bob, Sally, or both moves 4 million to a holding company owned by you.

That gets 4 million in a secret account, let’s you offset capital 5 million in capital gains, and pays 1 million for money laundering.

Repeat as needed. Sure, 4 million in a hidden account is less useful day to day, but it’s insurance if you need to flee the country or happened to go bankrupt etc.
Images reminded me of cymatic patterns. I wonder if there is any relation there
Funny title. Meanwhile, title in an alternative universe, where the project didn't go as planned: "How Go has caused Obamacare to fail".
I just ignore the down votes. You probably hitting the target.

This is of concern. The medical industry has a history of covering up the direct know effects of their medicine, AKA poisons. That system has been know for a very long time to lead with arrogance and it sometimes takes them a very long time to pull things they know are killing people. Its just too much $$$.

See vioxx and merck, for just one example.
look at this from a slightly different angle: Amazon is entrenched infrastructure for a great part of internet sales, and the only way to get ahead is via soliciting reviews for money.

If this were true this would support claims of a monopoly position in the market, unfortunately antitrust laws as written today are unsuitable to address the problem adequately.
I tried the generic contacts and got no response. Filed an FTC complaint for whatever good that did, then blocked and moved on.
And how often do you need that sort of decoupling at all?

Beside that, I disagree in principle because, like the OP said, it's just hiding the maintenance burden elsewhere. It doesn't go away.
Moving up in lethality while maintaining the same "infectiousness" still results in a real-world decrease in infection rate, as more infected hosts will die (and/or infected hosts will die more quickly), preventing them from spreading it further.
> I don't see how it could have played out any other way.

I suppose we are getting technical here, but at some point someone working for these governments (an actual person with a calculator) has had to sit down and do the math to figure out how much money needs to be set aside in order to achieve the advertised pension payout.

Who is that "person" in most cases, and why was their math so off? The math must have been very optimistic on the ability of the pension funds to compound wealth.

And so the facetious answer to your remark would be "things would have played out much better for these governments if the person doing the math was more realistic about expected returns." Not sure how realistic that goal is in itself.
What's weird is McDonalds is a huge food corporation and the process Impossible and Beyond (and 50 other plant-based meats use) are pretty much open secrets. Why don't they just make their own? They're very good at making tasty stuff. I think some of the earlier players like Morningstar that use seitan etc. are actually much closer to what McDonalds wants - especially for breakfast sandwiches.
Do you understand the benefits of drawing by hand on paper? I think you are smart and educated. Please, do your research properly, if not for you for the benefit of your kid. There are tons of research on this subject.
> You can't say "if everybody would just educate themselves on this topic", because the vast, vast majority of people do not.

> Singular papers can do real harm, as we can see from a whole movement of "vaccines cause autism" stemming from one fallacious paper.

The vast, vast majority of people don't read the papers you like either. That includes the "vaccines cause autism" movement; 0% of members have read any related paper.

You mention some real problems, but they aren't addressed by the peer review system.
The interpid Dr. Herbert Schlangemann.
If people are relying on your work, it is perfectly reasonable to ask them for a contribution. There are other options like kickstarter, too.

I know more than one open source project developer who made a nice program, but it never caught on and the developer wound up discouraged and embittered. A common thread, though, is they simply put it up on a bare bones web site. They actively refused to do any sort of marketing, promotion, outreach, evangelism, read any books on sales and advertising, etc., which pretty much guaranteed failure.

BTW, in Apple's early days, Steve Jobs was a master at getting attention focused on Apple's computers. No successful outfit neglects that.
Just to agree on our respective positions, my understanding is that you are claiming that the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine should apply to journalism and news.

I would argue that this has very easily exploited consequences: if you want something to be ignore just hire some hacker to surgically hack parts of that information. Not enough to be criminal, and you are safe from the court of public opinion.
But they do want to kill plants, which can feel pain and hear themselves being eaten [1]

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/24473/20191218/a-group...
I think most people know this.
it seems like it might be worth trying to build something similar now?
What a bullshit article. This author is struggling to make political points.
There is nothing inconsistent about saying "I don't want to live forever" and compassionately caring for others.
Here to see how fast this gets flagged and/or downvoted >:)
Is there a link to the actual resulting sql database dump to save the many hours of running this script?

I had the idea to look and see what people were saying about Chernobyl at the time, but want to add my own search constraints and play with other data in a way that is difficult to do on the usenetarchives site.
I think in the US some class sizes are in the hundreds, so this does not seem scalable for their case.
No, Canada isn't involved at all in SpaceX.

The issue with Canada is that Big Telco owns the Government. So when it comes to competition there is none and they make sure nothing threatens their Oligarchy. Trudeau like others, promises to go after them every time there is an election and then does shit like everyone before him. I'm sure there is a payoff somewhere in there for him and the others.

Any money he throws at this will be tax payer money and it's just a different way of separating the masses from their wealth and funneling more of it to Big Telco. He will never offer any kind of support to companies like SpaceX since they are not part of the club.

Just good old corruption in plain sight of the masses. He knows they won't do anything about it and there are millions in favors he has coming when he decides to leave Government.
There are some "gastropubs" that use it and it is very decadent tasting.
I think this is a valid point, especially if the review count is gameified so you are rewarded when leaving more reviews. I see plenty of Google maps reviews from people tagged as "Local Guides" that respond to questions about a location with something like "I don't know, call them".

As an aside, favorite negative review I have heard of is one for the Taj Mahal complaining that it is too far from the airport.
A key difference is that ensuring everyone has affordable broadband can be seen as an investment in infrastructure, that likely will end up netting the city far more in taxes than it costs.
I just went through this kind of experience on Friday, taking my Oregon real estate license exam (I passed, now will be dual licensed in WA and OR!).

The having to scan the room, scan my ears, scan my "desk" (or in this case my crotch because I was using a laptop) was all very silly, but didn't really bother me. The worst parts were all very human - they sent me the wrong link for the test, shared incorrect information about the allowed materials (IE: scratch paper, a 4 function calculator, etc), and then I waited for more than 20 minutes for the proctor to finally show up. Then of course there's the problem that the test provider has wonky weird software, including forcing you to install their "secure" test software. Which then yells at you for having a browser open that it necessitated to start the install process.

I guess what I'm really saying is - I find it funny that this is deemed "secure" when really I suspect most people taking a test have the same emotions as myself - we just wanna get to it and get it done.
In the video[0], the title is "Crown prince on Khashoggi killing: 'A heinous crime that cannot be justified'".

He does not say that in the video. The translation is wrong, and the title is wrong. He literally says "It is a horrible incident" ("هو حادث بشع"). There is no 'heinous crime' in there.

That is the problem. In article after article, and video after video I have seen about this, people stretched things, did not call things by their name, talked about evidence, translated wrongly.

I am not saying that they did not do it. I am saying that this was a mess, and my initial point was that if something like this, with news organizations involvement world wide, a scandal that involved multiple governments, people still make a mess and a version that is absolutely fact based is still not there, then there is little hope for the things we don't hear about.

You may be mistaken thinking I'm defending a government and you seem to think you're producing evidence. I'm just telling you that what you think evidence is may not be. If you or I were ever accused of something, I bet we'd want the concept of evidence to be much more than the Times mentioning phone calls and video footage and people saying "but bonesaws.. footage.. dismembered.. operative". The same way we'd like wars not to be waged because someone dangles "evidence" in a vial addressing the United Nations.

What I stated earlier is correct. "Everybody knows" because "everybody knows"[1].

- [0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/saudi-arabia-now-admits-k...

- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
Try svelte, see if you like it
I find plenty of spelling errors with VIM users.

It mostly comes down to who has spellcheck on and pays attention to it.
In my experience, GraphQL enables smaller, less experienced teams to build complex web apps faster. (As long as you use decent frameworks and tooling.)

There are definite downsides versus eg REST (notably performance, which becomes harder to reason about), but it’s an acceptable trade-off for us.

I’m also optimistic about the great tooling that is improving all the time - eg Hasura, Postgraphile, Graphene-SQLAlchemy all solve N+1 today.
There are a number of generous corporations and individuals helping us out in various ways, including cash contributions to the D Foundation.
After some thinking I realized that there is indeed a continuum between "the exception that prove the existence of a rule" and "the exception that proves the correctness/validity of a rule" and in this post it is unclear which meaning was intended.

Anyway I believe my point still applies to most common usages.
>Make the lion vegan to complete the circle.

1. Lions are obligate carnivores, we're not. We do not need meat to survive (evidenced by several cultures around the world living off a nearly entirely plant-based diet for centuries), lions do.

2. What animals do isn't a good moral compass. Animals rape each other, steal, kill their children, and do all sorts of morally reprehensible stuff.

>Some animals are abused and we can work on regulation to prevent that

The best solution to stopping animal abuse is to not breed the animal in the first place. Can't abuse something that doesn't exist now, can we?

>I don't think making sure cows die by old age should be the end goal.

I never proposed that. I said we shouldn't have bred them into this miserable existence in the first place.

Why do we get to decide how long a cow should live? Why do we get to artificially inseminate a cow that cannot possibly give consent? Why do we get to take away the newborn child of a defenceless creature? Come on.
Sure but I don't think they'll be exactly in McDonalds target audience here. Their dietary habits are on the polar opposite end.
The costs are high, but the quality of service is really good. I have a fibre connection and receive 1 Gbps (speed test occasionally returns 1.1 Gbps) with 1 ms latency and Unlimited bandwidth. Previously I had cable and received 600 Mbps with 6 ms latency also with unlimited bandwidth.
How Not To Run an A/B Test (2010)
Don't bother; if this person was serious about making a point (instead of just ranting) they would've used their real account.
I don't think Telesat is Canadian but I do know that Bell and Shaw are in bed with them. So hence the connection to funnel more money into their pockets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesat
If you have an HDHomeRun (or another supported tuner), you can attach an antenna and connect it to a Plex server. Jellyfin also has a live TV feature and is completely open source, but I'm not sure of the state of their apps.

Plex and Jellyfin support streaming from anywhere as part of their core offering, and live on your own hardware, and seem like an all around better option.
I found this fascinating. In the world of "optimize everything" I quickly realized I've been doing A/B testing completely wrong.

tl;dr is to set a sample size before starting an experiment - otherwise risk statically insignificant results.
^ This is the tech version of lawyering up. You don’t want to get swindled out there.
I still have my nexus 5x.

AMA.
Has anyone asked those people if they want to be cared for?

Why is the government forcing these people to be "safe and protected"?
Yeah, a decent mid range Android phone would be great but it must have stock Android otherwise decent is gone.

That means only Google phones, and Google has been known to change their mind randomly. Can you rely on them having a decent mid range phone the next time you need a new phone? They could just go back to $1300 flagships by then.
I would be in favor of a VM that is indistinguishable from a non-VM host. Is there any project that helps bring such functionality to, say, VirtualBox?

Not because I encourage cheating, but because I should never have to install proprietary software on my personal machine to take an exam. I will however on occasion grudingly be okay with installing closed-source software inside of a VM.
given that a behavior in a race condition can be undefined, he or she may have been right

If the other party really had an interest in understanding, and not just condemning, he would've looked for more facts. He wouldn't have been talking over me and cutting me off.
Neo-Fascism, or the Political Logic of Neoliberalism
I use vim, with only the dumb auto-complete, because it forces me to take it easy, to get a more complete mental model of the area of the code I'm working on, and, if it becomes too tangled to keep in my head, the tool won't save me and I'm forced to rethink that part of the program.

It forces me to concentrate a bit more, to focus and achieve a state of mind that I enjoy a lot, where I feel close to the code, at peace, focused.

Back when I started programming, I was using windows notepad, then UltraEdit32, Ms Visual Studio, then on Linux Code::Blocks and Eclipse, and it's so awesome how they can look into the structures and tell me the properties on the objects, but on the other side, it removes the friction of writing ugly structures with too many badly named properties.

So I moved to VIM relatively late.

I dunno, it just gives me a different level of peace and understanding.. It's also practical because I can work over ssh and with tmux, and vim does have nice text-editing capabilities, though I'm often not using it to it's full potential.

The article mentions how our fingers are the bottleneck in turning though into code, maybe those guys are brilliant, or maybe they write too much code, I like to spend time on each and every line, not just pound away like a crazed monkey like I did in my teenage years, I like to consider each line I write, and examine it together with the lines around it and the functions around it and the objects around it, does it fit in, does it feel right, does it perform well.. This takes a long time for me. Maybe I've turned into a bad programmer..

I used to easily monkey 5-600 lines of code out per day, but now I write maybe between 10 and 200, but I find them beautiful and satisfying, almost every one of them, and I feel I've weighted my options for everything I make, and that is very satisfying to me, it gives meaning to my day and makes me want to continue doing what I do.
As someone who both blogs and does freelance writing through a service, I have written articles describing Amazon products. I don't think I have ever written a "fake review." I think what I've done has fallen on the ethical side of that line, but I know there are writers who will write fake reviews because it pays and writing is a hard way to make a living.

If you object to this kind of thing going on, let me again remind people that there are creatives -- like me -- trying to fund their work with tips, Patreon and similar and not making enough money. Over the years when I have complained that I don't make enough money even though my articles have a track record of hitting the front page of HN, I have repeatedly been told "Get a real job, you whiner. Quit expecting writing to pay. It doesn't pay."

Sure it does. But most of what pays is stuff that routinely hits the front page of HN as "undesirable" in some fashion: Fake reviews, sketchy content marketing where the piece is intended to sell you something rather than actually inform you, etc.

If that's not the internet you want, let me suggest you make an effort to support independent creatives.

I'm too poor to give money via Patreon to other creatives, but I run r/ClothingStartups so indie clothing brands have a venue for advertising their stuff for free and trying to connect with others and figure out how to develop their business. So I do what I can to help small-time operators succeed online because the years I spent homeless while being told to STFU about my whiny crap of not having enough income while tens of thousands of people read my writing drilled it into me that "This is one of the things wrong with the world and this is something we desperately need to work on in earnest."
Who's surprised?

How can anyone assume Windows to be secure or have reasonable defaults? Have you looked at it?