skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This old TechCrunch article from 2018 (https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/23/what-is-this-weird-twitter...) posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636153 has a former "Amazon Ambassador" actually explain that job:

> An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch:

>> When I was there they just got an extra paid day off and a gift card after Peak [pre-holiday season]. This is what I got. A paid day off (that expired in 3 weeks lol) and a $50 Amazon gift card. Plus, they gave us lunch. Coldcuts and sandwich bread. I absolutely did not get paid more to train people.

>> Ambassador isn’t a ‘job’ you do every day, its just something you are trained to do. You go to a 4 hour class and they teach you how to teach others to tie a knot using a set of instructions. This is how new hires a supposed to be taught. You are supposed to teach them right from a script using a set protocol. Becoming an ambassador was a way to get out of loading trucks, or packing boxes for 10 to 12 hrs. You may ambassador 1 day then unload trucks for the next 3.

>> I stopped doing it after the first year I was there because it didn’t pay more. It’s voluntary. Your manager picks them. Generally speaking ambassadors are the “kiss asses” of the department.

> In case it isn’t obvious, Chris is no longer at Amazon and is happy to speak his mind. Thanks for helping us clear this up, Chris.
To be fair, when the brand was created the germans wanted to change the target markets.
In this case Amazon would be seeing who was voting.
I mean, won't robots need repairs/maintenance, "training" in the form of programming or tweaking parameters, and other things?

These may have lesser costs than their human equivalents, but I don't think they're magically zero-maintenance.
Dont forget, it the battery still needs replacing eventually. Oh, its in the structure of the device?

Well that sucks. Talk about planned obsolesence.
Doesn't anyone have an idea of the likelihood of this passing?
My feeling is that everyone falls for it. Maybe not to the same extent, but most of us probably only notice when we disagree with what’s being said.
I feel like 99% of the issues here stem from the fact we are in the midst of a global natural disaster and folks are irritated they can’t share respiratory aerosols. That’s fair. However I think the future is undeniably hybrid conferences.

1) audience participation- this is the fault of the conference organizer and tooling. I have an amazing device attached to my computer that captures local photon statistics using an interesting effect Einstein discovered that can magically beam a simulation of my face to the presenter. If you aren’t seeing the audience, that’s not the fault of the format it’s the fault of the organizer for now allowing you to see and interact with your audience.

2) in person events and hallways incidentals - yes, this is fair. A lot of people really derive pleasure from travel and sharing air with tons of other people. Personally, I’m tired of air travel and the hassle of sleeping in a widely shared bed at a hotel and getting sick in the first 15 minutes of a conference. I’ve had as valuable or more valuable networking interactions through irc, Usenet, slack, even pull requests. I’ve never landed a job via a conference or even someone I met at a conference, but my career is built on my early use of irc. But it’s ok - if there weren’t a global natural disaster, I expect we would have dual format conferences. The successful ones will solve point 1 effectively, and point 2 can be solved through online networking events in the platform. The fact organizers aren’t successful yet is probably more to do with we slapped this stuff together in a hurry due to a global natural disaster. With time and experience I don’t see why the esports version of the live conference won’t be just as viable.

3) blocking time for the conference forces present me to attend sessions during the day and my employer is happy to save travel and entertainment expenses and let me attend. I will insist on that in the future as well - and I’m senior enough I can do that unilaterally and allow my people to do it too. I hope you do if you’re also a tech leader, and if you’re an IC advocate with your management. Otherwise I can create a playlist for future me, but present me will always be too busy to prioritize watching these things “in my spare time” (hahaha what’s that?)
Ok this is kinda brilliant. Almost everyone already refers to them as “VW”, which will still be accurate after the name change.

So they get the media boost of the brand name change without actually having to suffer any hit from lack of recognition.
This is the most ridiculously untrue comment, and it's not only untrue its the worst possible attitude for the individual to have.

You prevent yourself from attempting anything to change your circumstances, while rolling around in self pity and building resentment towards successful people.

Too much of this destroys societies, and having it personally yourself destroys your life.
WWDC is different from a typical conference. The vast majority of viewers for them will be online regardless, so it would make total sense for Apple to optimise for the online audience (and after all, the keynote is basically a piece of marketing), but I don't think that indicates anything for a standard conference.

Personally, as someone who now happily works remote 100% of the time, I would be more inclined to attend a local in-person conference than ever before.
There’s two kinds of millionaires. The technically millionaires on paper, and those who have access to a million dollars without altering their lifestyle (or sacrificing their lifestyle, i.e. selling their house and moving somewhere cheaper). The latter is a more interesting statistic, in my opinion.
The only problem being, nobody provides AIS data for free. Though I wonder how much a subscription would cost for personal use.
It is actually an interesting question, the effort is so transparent that is it likely Amazon is actually behind this, or someone else is trying to make Amazon look bad to galvanize people.

The other possibility is they handed a bunch of money to a PR firm that does a bad job.
They would crush any small company in the prelude, even if they didn't intend to. I dont really think that copyright can be fixed, but at the very least we would need new laws to the effect of if you get sued for wrongful dmca, you pay the oppositions legal fees in addition to lost income and you risk losing the ability to make takedowns if the claim was in bad faith or negligent.
The worst is that the problem is twofold:

a) You can mobilize/pay people to astroturf and create very vocal minorities

b) You can dismiss and discredit actual movements/majorities as a)

At the same time though authenticity (as in no anonimity) is also undesirable given how the companies in charge can't be trusted with it.
Well the law was basically written by the big media companies, so we're lucky that there's any recourse at all.
That's a good point. Unions have never done anything shady, they're too busy feeding the poor and rescuing kittens in trees.

Snark aside, OP never said it was the union doing it. It could just be someone outside the potential union members who just supports unions in general, or doesn't support Amazon, who is doing it.

What other explanation is there? Do you think there is some die-hard Amazon supporter who goes out of their way to generate fake profiles and then post messages that wouldn't sway anyone?
I actually was sued over this exact thing and lost (and paid quite a bit of money). All for a little UI experiment that nobody saw but me, google and (via google image search) these vultures.
A currency created "by fiat" means it's created without backing.

"A novelty of the 20th century was the issue of fiat currencies by governments. ("Fiat" means not backed by any reserve commodity, as the gold- and silver-based currencies of previous centuries were)." [1]

[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
Follow their official Twitter accounts, Amazon really is this evil and inept.
Good that he's come to partially recognize where the problem is. If pedophilia apologism were the only reason people wanted RMS out, then you might have a point.

Now maybe he can work on not being an asshole in 65535 other ways.
I didn't say anything like that, where did you get "2-3 days" from or "signage"?

VW themselves said they didn't plan to put out the press release for a month. They didn't say anything about the timing of "stationery or signage".

Did you mean to reply to a different comment...?
> allows users to deposit

And exchange crypto for fiat or at least USDT/USDC/some other stablecoin. Without that nobody will use the platform.
It's not secret apparently:

> During this portion, the NLRB will read off each voter’s name and both sides will be allowed to contest ballots, likely based on factors such as whether an employee’s job title entitles them to vote or an illegible signature. Any contested ballots will be set aside.
I do enjoy the irony of Amazon being paranoid about a little box and what might be happening inside it.
Here's the actual: https://f4d9b9d3-3d32-4f3a-afa6-49f8bf05279a.usrfiles.com/ug...
Is it possible? Yes.

It's about as plausible as you being a galaxy brain suggesting that the unions are behind the posts in order to undermine amazon's credibility, in order to undermine the union's credibility.
What credibility has Amazon got? (The Amazon experience is typically good for a customer, but bad for an employee. My question is in that context.)
I think the many point of the article isn't necessarily that it is easy to construct models in terms of lines of code but that any tweaking of the model is dominated by increases in data-size. Why pay for a PHD when you can invest in more data instead.
I think it's better for 2B billion to enjoy life, than for 20B to live under some miserable constraints.
Be careful with that conspiratorial thinking, friend. You might start questioning all sorts of narratives you had never before been allowed to consider alternatives for.
Both good options but neither does IPv6 AFAIK.

There used to be one at ifconfig.dev but I don’t know what happened to it
Most correct you say? Based on what? Mind you we're talking about code that will never even ship in the vast majority of cases. Ergo, do whatever works best for you.
Greece would fall under NATO protection in this scenario (plus EU) as it's a member of NATO.

NATO is a defensive pact, so I think attacking a NATO member (even if you're a NATO member) likely results in NATO action against the aggressor.
> Founded in 1955, Voltswagen of America, formerly Volkswagen of America, Inc., is an operating unit of Volkswagen Group of America and a subsidiary of Volkswagen AG

So Voltswagen is a unit of Volkswagen Group of America? That's not confusing to say at all... I feel like having your subsidiaries name differ by one letter (which both looks and is pronounced similarly) is a bold choice. Too bad, I liked the Volkswagen name.
The way it reads like source code, truly makes me circle back to the idea we're all living in a simulation.
If you knew that your algorithm produced false positives and you deployed it anyway, then you had fraudulent intent for the subset of automatically generated takedown notices which were false positives.
I guess poverty relative to cost of living and median wage may also be relevant
Or a PR contract somewhere with a kicker that only pays out if the union vote fails
Strongly agree, but my experience is that linking to papers directly usually means your thread will die with only a few comments; most people don't want to put in the effort to read the paper and many either don't read or quibble with the abstract. Also, a lot of business websites and Github pages are fluffy and PR and boring academic papers don't stand out well by comparison.

Sadly commercial logic means that most third party science news reporting reverts to a sensational mean because there isn't that much money in accessible-but-serious journalism. Scientific American used to occupy a sweet spot of being informative yet accessible, but as the market at that spot shrank they watered down the quality of their coverage, and that was over 20 years ago. Quanta seems like the best online science writing in recent years but at the cost of fairly limited scope.
Interesting idea. Nothing to stop people being paid to voice another person's or company opinion though.
They don't believe it. They want to cash out (fair enough) and just trying to keep community happy while they do so.
The Link Building Strategy
They are not "scare quotes", it is part of the BBC's style guide. It is to make clear that they are not the ones declaring that the accounts are fake, but that it is attributed to someone else.
I think anonuser123456 was being sarcastic. The "forced at gunpoint" was, I think, a hint.

There are those who hold the viewpoint that if you don't have money from a job, you're eventually going to run afoul of those with guns (police), so you are forced at gunpoint to work somewhere. I've seen people say that here on HN. This is why I'm not sure that it was sarcasm. But still, I suspect it was.
> China is obsessed with territorial unity, not expansionist policies

Obviously false. From Tibet to the recent massive South China Sea annexation and Taiwan, all of it is hyper expansionist. It doesn't matter if they lie and claim otherwise, it's plainly a lie. They're seeking territorial expansion.

Nobody in their right mind believes the waters off the coast of south Vietnam belongs to China, except China. That's not about territorial unity, it's about hegemony in Asia and expanding their territory through military force. They're in conquering mode.

The territy they took when they conquered Tibet is twice the size of France. The South China Sea territory they're attempting to take now - which does not belong to them - is at least the size of Tibet or larger.

That's conquering on a scale not seen since immediately after WW2 with the Soviet Union's land grab in Eastern Europe.
Stack makes it easy to scan and organize your documents
It is clear. Some of those were created with gmail addresses and done with the web client instead of sprinklr like the amazon fake accounts. Those all use amazon email accounts and sprinklr.

Which obviously a real box packer isn't going to have a sprinklr acct so you know at the very best someone is getting a 15 minute break while a pr rep looks over their shoulder and more likely they all work at the same desk in a corporate office.
France, UK, and the rest of NATO, I guess.
TIL that NFT would have been different if Trump had won.
I co-own a company that is a supplier to both SpaceX and many of their customers. I haven't worked on a launch license myself, but between what my company does and various friends in the industry, I'm familiar enough with the process.

You're right that the relationship between the launch provider and and customer is complex but not particularly collaborative. The GP point is simply that SpaceX doesn't build that complexity into their commercial pricing -- which is awesome. (Their pricing for government customers is much less transparent, precisely because the relationships are MUCH more complex and collaborative).

For Waymo or other LIDAR providers, the relationship with the customer is certainly NOT more inherently complex than the relationship between a launch provider and their customers. They're being opaque about pricing for strategic purposes, which I'll avoid speculating about, since they're also one of my company's customers...
Subaru already has a Crosstrek plug-in hybrid, but it's not available very widely. I would have been interested if I'd known they existed before buying my current car, but they're only available in certain states with seemingly low stock.
Sounds like Amazon learned from what third party sellers do on their platform.
The US is separated from Iraq by half a world, but invaded it twice.

France still has a top-10 military and maybe the most effective overseas force projection capabilities outside the US and Great Britain (maybe China, we'll see how effective their navy is, sooner or later). Not to mention a long-standing nuclear arsenal. If Europe—any of it, at least in the EU or NATO—is attacked from the East, the French will be on the front lines, and landing on beaches. Turkey, on its own or as a puppet of (probably—god, they've wanted it for like 200+ years at this point) Russia, is increasingly a realistic threat. Plus Russia itself.

Like other major European former-colonizer states, France maintains strong ties to many parts of the world and is relied on, or considers itself responsible for, security in those regions. Algeria is attacked? France will surely show up to the party. Algeria decides to take some kind of Cuba-like action against French property? France will likely be there, in a very different capacity. They have strong interest in Lebanon (threatened, potentially, by Syria and Turkey, among others) and much of West Africa, as well, where, if you follow international news, their foreign legion and special forces are often deployed and quite active.

Sidebar: They're also possibly the most experienced torturers in the West. You see them called in for it sometimes, if you read between the lines a bit. Yikes.

See also: Libya, and Italy's leadership there (for better or worse). France has similar ties to a dozen or more countries in Africa and the Levant. Warranted or not from some broader perspective, they'll tend to see intervention in conflicts there as obligatory and desirable.
Absolutely amazon. I take your point, but when fighting against a much larger organization this is exactly the kind of guerilla warfare tactic you'd need to come out ahead. This kind of information campaign is exactly the sort of thing that the internet makes accessible for groups of all sizes.
A shocking change in their current direction. One hopes they have the capacity to close the circuit on this. But beyond this press release, they really have to charge forward to transform themselves.
Henry Ford!
Go would be an infinitely friendlier language if it had had built in an Optional type from the beginning. People using nil pointers to indicate nil values is a scourge on the language, and pretty much unavoidable given the current design.

My harebrained idea (obviously we can't change it) is that if nil pointers didn't exist the language would be much better. Require that a pointer always has to point to an address and then people couldn't have built all this infrastructure using nil pointers (something that rightly has to do with reference semantics) to indicate nil values (something that has to do with the meaning of the code)
TinyMS: A New High Level API Toolkit for Deep Learning
I'm not criticizing attempts at understanding things. It's just that it's not science in any sense as the physical sciences are. You really can't run experiments since you can't control all the variables and the behaviors of people. You can't even accurately measure outcomes or contributing factors.
When you don't have the tools that can produce predictions of reasonable accuracy, then perhaps we shouldn't be calling it science and pretending that what these social scientists are telling us is in any way accurate.
We've had social scientists try to address all sorts of maladies, such as suicide, lack of interest in education, high divorce rates, etc., and most of these parameters have not improved. If they simply would study, describe, and debate these matters, it would be one thing. But they, the "experts" pretend they know the answers when they're as often right as wrong.
No, I disagree. Misuse and opposition are fundamentally different things.
You're making kind of a big show of using "the yanks" - what's that about? Is that a British military thing (like how they don't refer to being "in Afghanistan" but "in Afghan")
It's easy to knock people for 'lacking critical thinking' but the truth is we're all predisposed to believe what aligns with our personalities and worldviews. And people like to harp on the idea that we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades.
If you had a million you could also get a loan with interest less than "risk free" assets. E.g. The stock market makes 7-10% but you can get a loan for 1-3%. So 1.5x your returns then become 12-16%.

Perhaps you can invest in lower risk dividend stocks which will pay out your interest + a little and 3x. If we assume those stocks only make 4% but also pay out 3% then you are looking at 16% returns. Moreover when those dividends get raised you are doing even better.

Leverage can go a long way if used well.
Google's Area 120 made a slick document scanner app
That's a funny way of noting that Acquaintance, Stranger and Unknown make up nearly 80% of the homicides.
They're already being educated...
I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.
>> getting yelled at for 90 days that makes them less likely to solve problems with violence.

Which movie is that from? I dont remember ever being yelled at during basic. Our "staff" never felt the need to raise thier voices. If you are infantry you know to be most afraid when the training staff say nothing.
You get cheated every day by big corps and don't complain do you?
If needs be. They ran a ferocious pace of sorties for an extended period from off the coast of Libya a bit under a decade ago, and since then it's not exactly been sitting on the sidelines; the aircraft, the carrier, the weapons and the logistics. That experience is still present in the personnel, the carrier is still operational, they've still got the air power to go with it.

Basically, yes. They can and will. That's real, proven, global power projection. The number of other countries in the world capable of that can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

What, with one ageing aircraft carrier?

The way you ask that question suggests that the answer should be "no"; but it's not. The answer is "yes".
I remember before common folk had internet, and there was still disinformation, misinformation, and plain bullshit.
At this point this clickbaitism is marginally more moral than dark pattern UIs. What a shame beautiful internet converged to this.
People's Car

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1932%E2%80%931938:_...
I wish Subaru didn't go all-in on touch for critical controls like climate and radio. It may be the #1 reason I don't look to them for my next vehicle.
the wikipedia hole that begins with "Yaweh" will probably be interesting to you. I found it enlightening - the progression of a monotheism from a polytheist pantheon reads much like a sort of narrative branch-then-retcon.

I'm also tempted to draw a parallel with the hard sciences, though. As the thinking matures and evolves on the shape of a theology, you reduce the fluff and get rid of ideas that no longer fit your concept of reality. Part of the trend we might be seeing with church numbers is that christianity as we know it may have written themselves into a corner.

I'm a particular fan of buddhist concepts of the divine for their ability to be abstracted into many different contexts. they tend not to touch things that can be disproven (yet), and by dealing with only the absolutely intangible, stay relevant. the problem space is limited to the utility of the thought. Stick to the metaphysical and you don't risk dissolution when you do things like make unqualified statements about what makes "God" angry.
a similar article was up yesterday. I only think it's a problem (edit: the ethics are another story..) if these accounts aren't upfront about being employed by Amazon to do such work. The impression i got from reading yesterdays article is that this is not the case.