skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, Amazon used to be a bit like going to a mid-tier department store. Items were curated and higher-quality than, say, dollar store or clearance items and there was a certain level of trust with them as a retailer. I would buy something from a known brand and enjoy it, and rarely do a return. Customer service reps were a phone call away and I could google the model number and see other people's experiences with it as well.

Now I'm seeing so many sponsored results to brands I've never heard of and seemingly only exist for drop-shipping or rebranding some OEM product. Worse, the non-sponsored results would also be no name brands, where I'd gravitate towards the ones with high reviews. Then I buy the product and see a little gift card I could monetize if I was to review the product with 5 stars, so seemingly most of those reviews are fraudulent. Worse again, the quality on this product is below, sometimes even way below, a normal brand I could get retail locally but priced about the same. I must return 1/4 of the products I buy because of poor QC or later breakage from normal, if not, light use. Support or customer service for these brands is almost non-existent too and this brand will disappear in a year anyway, so why bother trying to build any sort of reputation. Amazon is always happy to do a return so it solves that problem, but its a still a big hassle and I'm sure the carbon footprint of all these returns is scary. Then I'm playing random OEM roulette again with a similar product that will also have fraud reviews and 5 star review coupons inside of it.

I also dislike the dark pattern format of the site, which shows sponosered results in very small text and puts it in between related items. I'm not sure what Amazon's Choice really is, but its almost never a product or brand that I would consider trustworthy and I imagine is just a product that is giving Amazon good margins. In a curated department store model, recommended items would be actually recommended by staff and taste-makers at the cost or benefit of the reputation of the store. If Macy's is recommending a Braun coffeemaker, then its probably going to be a good coffeemaker as Macy's wants to please me as a Macy's customer. If Amazon recommends one, its just going to be some in-house rebrand or random OEM brand with lots of suspicious reviews (tons of 5 stars but also tons of 1 stars, with not much in the middle) and with positive reviews being either "amazing i love it!!!" or referring to an entirely different product (bots?) and negative reviews being in competent English and verbose and detailed about all the things wrong with this product.

I think like with any capitalist endeavor, without proper oversight and regulation, it naturally falls into a race to the bottom and "low road" capitalist outcomes. Amazon has been left more or less alone by legislators and its, of course, gone as bad as it can and I imagine will only get worse over time. Amazon moving from the department store model to the random street bazaar model is good for the bottom line but every year it gets harder to shop there as no-name brands with no support and fake reviews dominate its marketplace.
It works, and it's awful. I was looking for a present for my girlfriend, and she started seeing ads for the things I was looking at. About a week later, she was excited to show me her new purchase... and I'm scrambling to find a new gift idea. And now I'm paranoid -- it seems that the only way to stop this is to make a cash purchase in meatspace.
The bit afterwards about high-priced hearing aids that doesn’t mention Costco kind of undermined my trust in this author to explain the state of retail business.
> The drone, which can be directed to detonate on impact, was operating in a "highly effective" autonomous mode that required no human controller, the New York Post said.

> "The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true 'fire, forget and find' capability," the report from the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya said.

I’m not sure why this is called “rogue” — apparently it was operating as intended
Welcome to America where everyone is equal. You can buy all the free speech you can afford, and the rich guy can buy all the free speech he can afford, and we let the invisible hand sort it out.
Seems like commenters are misreading the lawsuit here. My first instinct after reading the top paragraphs of Stoller's post was also "so what, this seems fine," but if you read to the end and see what the suit is really alleging, it's not just a policy that punished sellers for offering discounts on their products when sold off Amazon. It's the fact that Amazon is charging anywhere between 30-45% in fees to the sellers, which is much higher than other online marketplaces and obviously less than the 0% they'd charge themselves to sell through their own site (though they'd still need to pay money to operate the site), and then punishing them if they sell somewhere else that has lower fees for a lower price.

That seems like legitimately monopolistic behavior and something that is illegal and should be stopped. The post is still misleading in that it doesn't mean Amazon is raising prices across the board by 30-45%. But they are raising prices across the board by whatever the delta is between their fees and WalMart's fees, or some other marketplace that charges even less, minus the difference in shipping.

Normally, market forces would solve this problem without any need for legal intervention, because some other marketplace like WalMart can just offer lower seller fees and attract all the sellers. But that doesn't happen precisely because Amazon's massive subscribed user base represents so much of the market that no can afford not to sell there, which is seemingly the definition of a monopoly and why legal intervention is called for. Lower-cost marketplaces can only compete if Amazon is not allowed to blackball sellers from access to the only customer base that matters.
There is good or bad code - there is only code
Class action?

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/700288695/google-pay-study-fi...
This man knows how to write good documentation
You might be interested by pernosco, written by the same people. It's rather spectacular.

https://pernos.co

The recording overhead is the same (it leverages rr) but you can explore your bug to your heart's content.
>Ok, why would that not be the case?

Because of professionalism. The root of term used for “professions” like law, medicine, engineering etc. is that one professes to a code of ethics. That code should overrule base desires.

We generally wouldn’t accept a doctor who views and treats patients primarily as an income stream despite greed being a near-universal human drive and we shouldn’t expect a professor to view subordinates as potential romantic partners. Acknowledging the drive exists isn’t a reason to condone it.
Ford, and\or their parts suppliers still makes parts available for cars they have not sold in over a decade.
> They’re using LoRA, a low bandwidth (kilobits/second at the most) long range radio protocol. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t connect to the network with standard consumer hardware to compromise your network.

Can we as a society for once stop making the airwaves proprietary?
> My big boss once said that the great thing about working remote is that we don't need to book-end our jobs as being 9 to 5.

Hehe sure we can make it 10 to 4 then. Thanks bossman.
> Until you where you're shipping, the cost is not knowable.

Helpful sites handle this by offering to compute shipping at any point in the order, using my supplied postal code. Rockauto is one.

Less helpful sites make me finalize the order as far as possible. I've seen sites withhold shipping amounts until I submit my payment info.

Crap like this is what drives me back to Amazon and Ebay.
I certainly didn't intend to do that. It's hard to write a comment addressing an entire article, but perhaps I should have quoted the tagline specifically. I was only rambling on about the 'trick of free shipping', not so much the bad practices mentioned.

As far as using AMZ logistics, that makes complete sense. I've come to expect a high standard from items I buy from them regarding when I'll get the item. If that starts varying wildly...well what's the point of Prime? Fast delivery is AMZ's entire schtick.

The price fixing I can't defend or make an argument about.
The number of times I’ve gone through the dance of adding to cart, inputting all my information, and then bailing when I see $57 2-day shipping ($97 for next day) and $40 for 5-7 days— it’s ridiculous.

Amazon simplifies my life. To be blunt, I don’t care about the “cost” (fiscal or otherwise).
I'm writing novels outside in my spare time. Unfortunately, for people like me there are no reasonable options, especially since I need Windows (special software). The SunBook were too expensive to me (+tax and international delivery). I've given up by now and just buy the cheapest smallest laptop I can find, plus a power pack. It makes continuous backups so if it explodes in the sun I wouldn't lose too much work.

My EePC was better than what I have now, at least it had a matte screen and 12 hours battery life with a replacement battery, but unfortunately was stolen.
> They can be formally and precisely described and I don't know of any mathematician who wouldn't accept TMs as a sound definition.

Just because something can be formally and precisely described doesn't necessarily mean it's (aesthetically) "mathematical". Another example that comes to mind now is the notion of an applicative functor (Applicative in Haskell) — sure, you can give the categorical definition for it but it's quite an oddly specific structure (if anyone reading this knows where they arise in non-FP contexts, I'd really like to know!).

So for Turing machines, maybe a question we might ask is, "how can we ensure Turing machines always terminate?" This is a much harder question than say, imposing a type system on untyped lambda calculus which unconditionally makes all terms terminate, while still retaining the ability to do recursion and useful work.

A good yardstick to judge the "mathematicality" of a construction often amounts to looking at its compositional properties. That is, could you re-use the concepts over and over again, and could variants of the structure be uniformly described? While Turing machines and lambda calculus are both equivalent and can be both formally described, one does win over the other in terms of having a simpler, more compositional structure.

This is quite subjective, and in any case it feels remarkable that both Turing and Church came up with their constructions to describe computation formally!
I agree with everything you said. At the risk of being pedantic:

> A feedback loop of profits from industry to universities. Right now when technological advancements happen at universities, those flow out to the general public, then to companies, who figure out how to monetize them. The profits generated by that monetization are captured entirely by private corporations, even though the foundational innovations on which they are based are funded by Universities and by extension the public. If some of this profit were diverted back into Universities (maybe through increased corporate taxes), then this would help.

This isn't ENTIRELY true. Universities "own" research IP and they do have tech transfer offices which at least theoretically help them monetize their largest breakthroughs via researcher startups. Many large, well established labs will also perform collaborative industry research, effectively acting as a CRO, which they can charge a lot of money for (and the Universities can subsequently take overhead from). The huge, field leading labs with well known PIs will have multiple R01s and various grants but the vast majority of their funding will come from industry.
I knew parents who didn’t let their children consume media with commercials. The internet has certainly made that more difficult and I don’t know how it turned out for them.
or, OR!, more likely he was connected to his friend's wifi and it uses IP to group people.
Perhaps also make the font size a bit more readable? 10pt is pretty unfriendly to even 20/20 vision.
All programming languages should have a PyArrow-backed DataFrame data structure. After working with DataFrames in Python or Spark, you'll never want to go back to manipulating nested arrays.

Ruby, Go, Scala, Java should all build these libs (Scala has Spark for cluster computing, but it needs a good Pandas-like single node lib) to attract the data engineers. I'd imagine it's relatively easy to add DataFrame support now cause PyArrow does the heavy lifting.
Node.js vs. Express: Determining the Best Back End Technology
Is it "the shrinking of the hacker culture"? I've become an expert in 3 different js frameworks in the last 7 years. Its' fucking exhausting.
If you keep track of these categories and have amassed a large enough dataset, it sounds like a fun experiment to see if a NN can learn some feature of the papers text to predict if a paper is BS. Some combinations of citations may even be a telling feature.
And even when you get a “enlightened despot” you still run into problems with their spoiled kids...

Or have we not decided who comes next in Russia and China?
> often delivers the product next day.

I haven't had the ability get next day shipping for a while. Anymore my order won't even ship for a few days. A little over a year ago next day or 2 day was the norm.
Ok this is helpful. If people are doing their own thing and not following the established, agreed on (or even dictated) way or vision, then you need to figure out why if you are the lead.

Maybe it is communication related. Does everyone know that this is the way they should do something? But they still don't? Have you created docs and edicts around these areas? Have you been assertive in code reviews? Have you been proactive and requested design sessions before a lot of work was done?

Has a decision been formally communicated? I see this step not happening enough, people are hesitant to be authoritative after a discussion on architectural concerns. If you are the lead, that needs to happen.

Most of the time it's simply a case of them not knowing how to do it. People are afraid to show their lack of skill and knowledge and ask for help. They get deadline pressure and deliver their default way.

Have you provided a feature or cut through the system that shows this vision for people to follow? Maybe example code, resources on the web that go very deep into the ideas and tactics? Have you paired with them to help them get started or get over obstacles. Perhaps pair your most senior person with juniors for a while to get them on the same page and capable with this vision.
You don’t see the final price in US stores it’s all + sales tax. Except concession stands can magically tell you the actual price.

His point is all online stores can do the same thing as soon as they have your address. That’s not what the market wants.
First, we're talking here about mental boundaries, not physical ones.

Second, I used to believe that there is no real boundary, but upon reflection realized that this is completely wrong. Not only is there a physical boundary, this boundary is essential because living systems must distinguish between themselves and the things in the universe that are potentially available to be used as resources to stay alive.

In fact, there are multiple physical boundaries in living systems at various levels of hierarchy, starting with the defining characteristic of most life on earth (by number of species, not total number of individuals or percentage of biomass) which is that it is eukaryotic and so has a boundary around the cell nucleus. Then there are cell walls, the segregation of cells into organs, and finally, your skin, which delineates a physical boundary around you. Yes, some of these boundaries are a little bit fuzzy. But that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Only complete, utter idiots believe in free anything that is not coming from the dollars they spend on the item, or their premium membership fees.

The complete, utter idiot is a strawman model of the common person. (Quite literally, since a shirt stuffed with straw is a complete idiot.)

E.g. the last time I entered into a mortgage, I was supposed to get free lawyer fees as a gift from the bank. Oops, that little offer was pulled right off the table when I informed the bank I'm going for a cheaper variable-rate mortgage.

That's a really nasty example of "free": you pay tens of thousands of dollars more in interest over the lifetime of the mortgage because you didn't have to pay a $600-something out-of-pocket expense at the outset.

That said, though the shipping may not actually be free, it seems fair to say that Amazon is competitive in that area.

> To most consumers, Prime looks like a lovely convenience offering free shipping, and it’s hard to find better prices elsewhere. But the reason you can’t find better prices isn’t because Amazon sells stuff cheap, but because it forces everyone else to sell stuff at higher prices.

How does Amazon force "everyone else" to sell stuff at higher prices? If Amazon offers some $50 item with no-additional-charge shipping, how does that raise the price elsewhere? If someone wants to match Amazon, they have to also sell that item for $50, which may appear to raise the price. But they also have to provide no-additional-charge shipping, the same as Amazon. If it's $50 with $15 shipping, the business goes to Amazon.

If we accept the premise that Amazon is a leader in cheap and fast shipping, it follows that Amazon exerts pressure on everyone else to cheapen and speed up their shipping.

The author's premise seems to be that shipping is actually cost-free with other online venues, and so they just jack up their prices to the Amazon level, and then put the shipping portion of that straight into their pockets that Amazon would have applied toward the costs of shipping. How ever does Amazon complete with all these other venues that just teleport items to your door using pennies' worth of energy?
I've had good success both ways. If you have less leverage, I'd say avoid naming a price first. If you clearly have the upper hand, then it doesn't really matter.

To get the best deal possible, you have to be willing to walk away. Higher risk, higher reward. It's also really important to be polite, friendly and honest (a little bit of bluffing is ok though) the whole process. You really do need to do the research beforehand to know what's reasonable to ask for. The other side did.
Let’s see. If Amazon is forced to do as proposed - separate Amazon Prime from free shipping by third party sellers, what’s to stop Amazon from just bringing more products in house as “shipped and sold by Amazon” and making third party seller products even less attractive? How does that help third party retailers?

I already filter product lists based on whether they are eligible for Prime.

The second question is when did poor little Walmart need help competing against Amazon? Walmart failed because of execution not because of a “monopoly” and definitely not because they don’t have the money to go against Amazon.
Fair enough. I'm quite happy to take the used product if it's flawless, in my mind that's a bit less waste produced by my lifestyle.
I see where you're coming from, I do all that too. But it's the "jack of all trades" thing. You "know" all that, but do you actually __know__ all that.

I can develop a nice relational database design, write the SQL stored procedures to manipulate it, write a backend API and write the front end SPA for it. I don't think I'm an expert in any of those things though, and if I am then it's more focused on the backend API stuff.

Like, I understand CSS better than most people, but I'm not a guru like some. I can write SQL for anything I need but I couldn't tell you anything about performance tuning my SQL outside of seeks vs scans and the size of a lock.

Understanding the basics of these things isn't really a daunting task and that's why full stack devs aren't paid half a mil a year. But you have to accept at some point that if you're full stack then you're rarely going to be considered an expert in any field. That's not bad though having rounded knowledge is super good.
This is why Trump's threat to withdraw from NATO was so short-sighted. In the 20th century NATO was basically America supporting Europe against Russia. But in the 21st century it will be Europe supporting the US against China.
While they may not do so exactly in the manner described by the GP, it's naive to think Amazon doesn't give differential treatment to select customers for reasons directly related to income from those customers.

Behaving otherwise would just be shooting yourself in the foot for weird ideas of fairness.
They put shipping quotes four screens in -- after requiring an email address -- in hopes of getting you committed and having chances to harass you to buy stuff after.
I only bought one (by mistake, not knowing), which had pretty bad print quality compared to a proper four-color offset or high-end digital print. Also bad paper quality. This seems to be common.
I think there is Clojure and cloJure. The language is very different if you can mostly get by writing pure Clojure code, and another language altogether if you need to interop with Java constantly.

If you can get by mostly writing Clojure code (either by wrapping the Java libraries that you will use on helpers, or by using third-party libraries), it is a great language, even if in the end it is a very different from any other Lisp (but I'd argue that the changes are for the better, for example first instead of car, thread macros, protocols, immutable data structures). But yeah, for sure Clojure is much more optionated than any other Lisp.

Now, if you need to interop with Java code constantly, yeah, Clojure can be a pain. A good chunk of the code you will write goes to appease the alien structure that is the concept of Class on a FP language.
Humpbacks Caught Singing in NY Waters Raise New Mysteries About Their Lifestyles
No, it was free two-day shipping with cheap one-day, but that has morphed a bit over time, as sometimes stuff is eligible for free one-day shipping or is eligible for same-day delivery, if you buy at least $35. Also sometimes it takes longer than two days.

Their normal ship time was up to 7 days in the past, and even using their non-prime shipping today that is still true.
It sometimes surprises me how people don't seem to see that while all of this is part of a healthy (and seemingly normal) societal change, that it's unfortunate that not just are oldfashioned behaviors shunned, but that merely talking about struggles with them is so taboo. Is society really going to adapt better because people lash out so uncompromisingly?
Now all the local shops cant say “we cant compete with amazon prices!”

Little did they know I would have always paid a premium to never see them again

Amazon can change the wording about price/shipping and keep everything else

The market chooses it and I never have to find out how employees at a retail shop are going to lie to me today
My grandmother grew up in a hut, every weekend it would be swept out with fresh sand, because it had a stomped mud floor. This was in Germany. Pretty sure the local gentry had these stucco ceilings, but not everyone.

Pretty sure a lot of what was done wasn't done with as tight calculations as it is done today. On the other hand, the markets weren't as unforgiven as today so it might have been easier to turn an investment into a profit.

It would be interesting to see the bookwork (if it even existed in the first place) of the Scottish Café, with supplemental informations by economists / historians putting it into perspective
I think it’s that they’re often of lower quality and less durable.