skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Programming paradigm fanboys get into heated arguments about which model is the "best" one

My original comment certainly reads that way, but my intent was really to point out that it doesn't make sense to privilege the Turing machine model in the study of computation. I wrote more about why in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334163
Please take with a huge amount of salt as it a only describes my personal experience and is more of an anecdote than an advice :)

Last year I was a cofounder of an AI/software company and after a year I was starting to be burned out. I didn’t liked the people I was working with, I was believing less and less in the idea, we where running out of cash and some investors where starting to exert pressure into making the company something I didn’t really liked.

Anyway, I decided to do the math, which went something like this… in 5 years this business could “succeed” as in having x amount of users with a yearly revenue of y which could then be sold for z and with me having x percent of equity would mean that I’d make $$$. And all of that is with 12 hour days, constant pressure from customers/investors/marketing…

On the other hand, I could get a good boring job that allows me to work about 2-3 hours a day, make $, which in 5 years is similar to $$$, but I have time to live…

Well, I got the boring job (which is actually not boring! But I still work around 2-3 hours a day) and I couldn’t be happier!

I’m still working on some side projects that might have some financial potential, but those are fun again, more of an adventure than a dread.

Being in the startup game for a while made me realize that often it’s mentally is very similar to the whole idea of retirement. Work your head off, forget about happiness and fulfillment in life, break relationships, outsource kids to grandparents… and when you reach 59.5 years old and have no energy to enjoy life, maybe you’ll have money to enjoy life.

Well, screw that!! I’m living today!
Overkill objects for everyday life
> they think it's their only shot at a comfortable lifestyle.

That is patently ridiculous if you've ever known any Goldman Sachs interns or medical residents. These folks all have plenty of much easier options for having a comfortable lifestyle, and they know it, but it would be a comfortable lifestyle with certainly less luxury and prestige than GS banker or doctor.

That is basically my whole argument, that there are a subset of people who will work super hard just because they want to be at the top of the totem pole. Arguing that these type A folks think that working 80-100 hour weeks is "their only shot at a comfortable lifestyle" is laughable.
I mean, duh. You can see it on Amazon itself. All the "Amazon Fresh" items don't have the "free" shipping tax and are way cheaper.

Like this deodorant. $1.88/oz with Prime and you have to buy at least a 4 pack. $1.15/oz on Fresh, and you can buy just one.

Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Dove-Advanced-Antiperspirant-Deodoran...

Fresh: https://www.amazon.com/Dove-Antiperspirant-Deodorant-Fresh-2...
I obviously can't speak to the accuracy of the translation, but damn, is Latin a beautiful language. :)
You have proposed a strawman. What does this have to with Amazon forcing sellers to use Amazon's warehousing and logistics service and ensuring that sellers can’t sell through a different store or even through their own site with a lower price.
three things i find to be true of every web app i work on:

1. good logging is the most important part of the app. whatever the app is meant to do is secondary. the app should be a logging app first, and then a backend service to sell widgets second.

2. assume performance requirements for request latency and transactions per second will be at least 3x whatever the product owner tells you at the start of the project and plan accordingly. never trust any suggestion that you can 'ignore performance for now'.

3. the UI may be more important than logging
> Bad ones (pathological ones) - we just try to get rid of them ASAP and no refunds.

A customer "not buying much" is not "bad". If you accept his money for cheap stuff, he is your customer. There's a difference between an honest customer who usually doesn't buy much and then buys something expensive and is getting sadly scammed and a customer trying to rob you.

If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to help him when he gets scammed on an expensive item, you are the bad, pathological, person/business.
> "China's growing popularity"

People who think the Like count determines the future need to just ask Obama and Trump how many Likes they collected and whether all that work translated into any actual outcomes.
Hong Kong was returned 1997, not so long ago.
Until you where you're shipping, the cost is not knowable.

You can build a feature for that but it adds complexity both in development, and (more importantly) the user experience.
Can you name other careers that are deeply satisfying and pay just as well?
I'm in a similar boat. At my job, the junior engineers do most of the coding and I get to enjoy designing systems and project management.

I'm considering just hiring people to do the side projects I wish I had the energy to write the tedious code for.
Another way to remove finger-pointing is to identify features that should be reasonably easy to implement, but for whatever reason don’t get done in time, or worse, don’t get done well (end results being bad).

If a team was tasked to make a simple landing page for example, and it was oddly hard or time consuming for an average team member, it would be good to dig into why. If the answer is ‘you should see the boilerplate involved, or the deploy process ...’, then you can make a neutral analysis as to the cause.
> Could you expand on 'lower quality'?

The review/rating system has become untrustworthy.

It's extremely common (>50%) for me to see a 4+ star rating that turns out to be dominated by 1 star reviews and tons of complaints.

It's not unusual to find that what positive reviews there are, are for a wholly different product.

Even more frequent is that reviews for several different products are all bundled together.
> Garmin … Fitness tracking features are generally superior to Apple

Superior how exactly?
Would there be enough people willing to go into Medical School debt without a high salary on the other end?

The entire point of game theory is to align incentives. It is not to simply paint pictures of ideals and deny that humans are human.

I understand that the AMA has incentives that are not nearly as noble as simply ensuring the world has a steady stream of doctors. Nonetheless, the answer is not to simply say "the AMA has some impure incentives" as an actual dismissal of a different argument.
How's the emerald mining curriculum?
The problem is that Amazon is strong arming sellers to prevent them from offering that item for a lower price elsewhere.
I agree with you there. But is your point that any secure email system must critically have forward secrecy, or its insecure? Even though forward secrecy really only gives you any benefit for the messages that you delete, which most people don't in the context of email?

Just thinking, if people had the option between 1) deleting their mail and 2) email search, secure (unlike WhatsApp) and easy (unlike Signal) backups, ability to offload your email archive to the server (it's common to have gigabytes of mail, do you want to store all of it on a mobile phone forever? what happens if you drop it in a river?), and so on, don't you think people would go for option 2?

This is all disregarding the specifics of PGP-encrypted mail, for which I agree is not great.
Sounds like you agree, not disagree then? This single simplified price is the point.
I am thinking of synesthesia, yes.

Thought the piano software was named after that word. Didn’t check the spelling.
> Free shipping is the God of online retail, so powerful that France actually banned the practice to protect its retail outlets.

That's not entirely accurate.

France has disallowed free shipping for books. Every other category of product at Amazon qualifies for free shipping.

While the article the author links to makes this clear near the end of that article, to write that France has banned free shipping is barely accurate.
They definitely don't make any money on it, but I'm not sure I'd call it a loss leader, but more of a 'loss at the expense of keeping customers on Amazon.'

That is, if Amazon didn't offer it, I may check out Walmart or Overstock or somewhere else, and find other things at good prices.
> B&H is my go-to place

I will also throw in a vote for B&H.

A customer service rep from NYC once called to personally answer some questions I had about a sub-$100 product. This happens often.

This week I ordered a display with free shipping that was scheduled to arrive 5 days later. I received it in 24 hours - 4 days earlier than expected.

Their return policy is also hassle-free.

For music or audio products, I buy from Sweetwater.

Same good points as B&H, but you have an assigned "sales engineer" which some people find annoying, but I really like - whenever I have a problem or question, I get the same person on the phone every time.

I don't order from Amazon if I'm not comfortable outright losing my money, getting it late, or receiving a counterfeit.
And they can absorb the higher cost of this customer service via monopoly behaviour, where their competitors can’t.
No we can‘t and if we could EVERYTHING would change because the AIs in „Her“ were vastly superior to humans. They were on a „technological singularity“ level.
I buy expensive electronics from B&H Photo Video, when possible.

In the 1980's, B&H was the queen of the "grey market". Now, I trust them to deliver authentic goods with legitimate warranties, and I'm profoundly suspicious of unnecessary transactions with Amazon.
I don't see regulation being the issue here.

The law will oblige either of the two sides to carry the burden of proof. Either Amazon has to proof the package was delivered, or the customer has to proof it wasn't. If the other sides does not accept the proof received, it has to sue.
Books printed on demand are essentially garbage.
Amazon basics items are the worst of the crop.
Here, the members of the state leave the pensions fund dry, the roads break down, the chemicals leech while they enjoy a private jet and get arrested when they travel to the USA on drug charges. Meanwhile, the prosecutor and the journalists trying to expose the corruption risk life and limb because these very same people want them dead.

I personally don’t want the state to see any extra money—in particular because this is a Republic, not a democracy and so, I don’t even get a chance to say anything.
> Corporations value the ability to remove all human agency & decision-making from software development where possible.

Corporations value the ability to continue as an operating entity and make changes to the code after the proponent of Kleisli arrows and lenses has departed for greener pastures.
The rule is really simple: it makes people uncomfortable when you make generalizations about natural traits shared by the group they're in. Period. All groups (even groups people feel proud to be a part of), and all generalizations, even ones that sound positive or don't apply to the listener. I'm not going to list examples but if you're having a hard time thinking of them just imagine overhearing a conversation at a coffee shop about "those <something you are>, they're always <something you do or don't do>."
I apply the same policy myself after a similar incident. I ordered a bunch of hard drives, when delivering them to my porter, the (dedicated) amazon delivery guy got an error on his tracking machine and took the parcel back. But then it was marked as delivered, and amazon refused to bulge, despite me receiving multiple emails the days after that delivery attempt, notifying me that the parcel would be delivered the next day (which I interpret as someone scanning the parcel they claimed has been delivered at their warehouse). A few weeks later they finally agreed to reimburse me.

Between this experience and my lack of trust in their supply chain, I now never buy anything expensive on amazon.
This is from one of the links on the page.

> [...] hydrogen gas has a specific heat capacity of about 14.31 kJ/kgK at room temperature [...] But even hydrogen gas is not particularly useful [...] We will probably need a liquid.

> The specific heat capacity of aqueous Ammonia, for example, is slightly higher than water's specific heat capacity, at 1.014 cal/deg*K compared to water.

> But this tiny difference is much more expensive than, say, adding 1.4% more water to your temperature regulation system.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-specific-heat-of-water-grea...
Beaming Down Space Solar – Air Force Research
Isn’t the point of Prime next-day? Normal shipping was already around two days.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. - Goodhart's Law

> The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. - Campbell's Law

This is just another proof that you can't trust metrics. Build up a network of people that you can hold personally responsible for, and if any of them ever recommends low quality work then let them go. Let that network know whenever you discover a network of individuals who put out low effort work so that you and your network can disregard the entire network.

Bottom up, not top down. Do not rely on citation count. Do not rely on views. Do not rely on upvotes or reviews from people you do not know. Do not rely on if they went to a prestigious university. Do not rely on the ability to pass a standardized test.
What principles are these?
Well if you give it away during your life it would be taxed as income, so not really a problem for the state either.
MPLS and DIA connections provide that but cost hundreds of dollars per month. Consumer broadband is affordable because it’s oversubscribed/shared and not dedicated. Average people won’t pay $800/mo and should use their phone as their Zoom audio if they need guaranteed quality.
Your second point hits close to home.

It's inevitable, now everyone has access to computers and that means the average audience inches ever closer to the average person.

But boy, it feels like crap to make something I'd never use in a million years.
This is becoming more difficult as Alexa services are being built into more and more consumer goods. I've seen microwaves, thermostats, headphones, clock radios and more with Alexa inside.
I wonder if part of the current problem is not that the fields are too big.
In a small field where people know each other, reputation becomes more important, and you can't just misrepresent your results, since everyone will read it and know you did it.
Meanwhile, in a big field, it is easier to hide in the crowd. Write some papers that get accepted, but not read, and have some friends cite them.
That’s an accusation the author just kinda throws in at the end without explanation. It’s a big problem if true, but what’s the evidence for it?
> With hotels you can at least call and get a discount or book with the right cancellation policy to get a cheaper price than booking.

Someone should write an app to automate that.
Now that he's written the phrase "turtle neck" online, the whole experiment is compromised. Best to start thinking of another item altogether.
Oil was peoples lives, at first. Oil barrens manipulated whole towns out of their land, stole, lied, and destroyed livelihoods. Oil still destroys peoples lives, but the damage is abstracted.
You can be both. You can be thankful that opportunities exist for them to practice their craft and bring things into the world to make it better. You can also be mad that they couldn't do it at home because of the regime which really does do ridiculous things like set monetary interest rates ignoring that it's still connected to the international financial system.
My friend broke his phone on the way to office, ordered a new one from Amazon when he arrived at office (8am), and left with a new phone at 5pm. Can't beat Amazon shipping.
What’s wrong with books printed on demand?
A friend received hair loss ads after using wifi at my place -I, the one with hair loss, use an ad blocker.

Reddit app shows me ads for US restaurants. I live in Europe.

AdTech is depressingly bad. You tell me the smartest and best paid software engineers in the world work on this mess?
Moreover, a deliberate campaign to eradicate another group's identity, is now something that can be carried out by PR professionals. It puts into perspective that the most powerful companies in the world are in the business of advertising. Or, to use provocative language that is literally true: mind control.
What about my comment makes it so arrogant?

In case it helps, I've provided some substantiation for my position here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334163

I should also clarify that I didn't intend to argue that lambda calculus should be the only way of understanding computation, but rather that it doesn't make sense to privilege the Turing machine model, as the comment I was replying to suggested.

The Turing machine model is arbitrary, and it is unmathematical in the sense I've described in my comment linked above. A different culture (or species!) would be likely to come up with a different computational machine-like model, but any culture that develops formal logics would be likely to discover the lambda calculus as a consequence of that.
You should talk to FedEx and UPS and ask for discounts. I can ship things often cheaper than USPS flat box when shipping FedEx express.
Privatized profits, socialized losses. Heads they win, tails we lose.
While I agree with the sentiment in general, enthusiasm about one's work is not a bad thing. If people didn't get really personal about some of their tools, or unhappy about their current toolset, we'd all still be stuck doing Civil or Fortran - actually, I wonder if even those would exist.
I don’t think that’s the case. I spent tens of thousands of dollars on amazon over the years and had a similar bad experience than the author. I doubt they treat customers differently depending on how much they spend on the site.
That's a good find, but I was unsure of whether "program" is semantically equivalent to "code" here. Plus I'm tempted to leave codex since it sounds so good.
Is any store’s generic brand actually good? Maybe Kirkland at Costco is alright.
I disagree. Buc-ees wants people to stop, buy gas, buy food and drink, restroom stop, maybe buy a souvenir and then be on their way. If Buc-ees wanted people to hang out and make themselves comfortable they would have tables and chairs for people to sit and eat the food that they bought. They have no chairs meant for customer sitting -- only some to buy and take with you.
> You tell me the smartest and best paid software engineers in the world work on this mess?

I’m pretty sure adtech doesn’t pay the best.
Yes I imagined his idea of "criticizing" amounted to abusively yelling at people. From what I've seen, the way people win Nobel prizes is by working their lab 24/7 like a slavedriver. I actually have seen psychopathic professors yell at female lab members until they cry. I knew one guy who complained about it. He apparently got much more productivity out of yelling at the guys. Pretty dark humor if it's a joke.
Hyper is great if you need animated cat emojis [0] instead of a blinking cursor in your zsh prompt. It's based on Electron. So, if you like your terminal to perform poorly and take a while to start up, then have at it.

[0] https://github.com/balazssagi/hyper-cat-cursor
Isn't Matt Stoller just repeating the Attorney General's argument? Or are you saying he's embellishing it?
Cloudflare Is Ordered to Disclose Identity of over Two Dozen Piracy Sites
And Amazon just make you pay 0.01€ for shipping when you buy only books, so the law is moderately effective.
Great news! There are journals that do this!
E.g. https://academic.oup.com/gigascience

They require the full means for replication to be open access, and reviewers take this very seriously! They will run your code, open github issues if they detect bugs etc.
Thank you. This is why I like Emacs so much, been using it for about a decade now and I still get to discover amazing stuff like this.
Microsoft Wingdings -- seems to have more than one meaning ....
Every time I've called up the hotel directly and ask for a discount they say no, and tell me to use booking.com if it has a better price. After a few tries I've stopped doing it and just go with whatever booking shows online.
Where do I even start with this. Do you just call all your favourite bad guys "Al-Qaeda" and group them all together as if they were all one organization?
Because government grants demand it. Private patrons can trust their own judgment when deciding who to fund, but when it's taxpayer money being handed out people are understandably going to demand objective metrics to guard against corruption. In academia the objective metrics of choice are publication and citation count, so here we are.