skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are right - there are definitely things that can be done (what you are describing used to be done on Xbox games for example).

The main thing is making sure that these things are ubiquitous, that there isn’t a workaround and that systems are in place to do the specific checks which are different for each item at every return point.

In the example with the Xbox games, not all games had the seal, or the same game SKU might sometimes have the seal and sometimes have a standard case. Then there was the workaround where people could lever the case open at the top and still take the game out.

The danger of seals is sometimes they can provide a false sense of security, but they probably do help when implemented well.
Who is buying Amazon hardware at this point?
I get that there are less first and business class passengers but canceling a whole cabin makes me so so frustrated. I don't need to get into detail that people in this upper classes act a fool. There could have been a better way to address this. If "flight experience" is an issue why not let people on all classses order if they have been with their airline for a sufficient time?
I do think that, and (to paraphrase The Mythical Man-Month) I also think that it would be great to work on a small and focused team with a clear mandate and no legacy stakeholders to worry about. So do we all, but those circumstances are not usually available.

The interesting parts start to pop up when you need to make difficult choices. Good managers with a technical background are scarce and therefore not usually available. Sometimes you need to make a choice between a bad manager with a technical background, a good manager without a technical background and no manager at all. Whichever choice is made, it will never satisfy everyone.
Really nice, thank you
> People playing video games are at least deriving some enjoyment from it

not that i believe in bitcoin, but why can't they equivalently claim that mining bitcoins would derive enjoyment? after all, enjoyment is subjective.

The problem with people claiming mining btc is a waste, is that they are attributing a set of moral and ethical rules that they themselves see as absolutely correct, and anyone who do not ascribe to those rules are scums.
In Germany the equivalent field and degree is called “Informatics” (Informatik).
I always felt weird about telling Americans I studied “computer science” because it sounds so dumbed down. It’s like how a 6 year old would describe it to someone else: “my older brother studies the science with the computers!”
The place I heard the quote is the opening statement by Hal Abelson in the course he co-taught with Gerald Sussman and is now part of MIT Open courseware. Not quite sure when it was taught, but the text SICP was written in 1985.... He goes on to say also the word Geometry derived from metron to measure and Gaia, the earth, and that Geometry was developed in Egypt to restore boundaries to land after the annual flooding of the Nile. But it's really the beginning of our efforts to formulate our concepts of space and time.
Absolutely.

The issue here is people returning it in a state where it is still sealed - as if an item is sealed it will go back into stock straight away and the retailer can’t open it up to check that it is in there.

If it’s opened you can still return it, but once that happens usually electronics have to be sent back to the manufacturer to refurbish/reset.

It’s not about stopping people returning items, it’s about making sure the correct returns channel is used and detecting fraud (which happens when people return the item pretending it’s unopened so it goes back into stock unchecked, but the item has been replaced with a brick).
A couple of my favourites include:

"There's no such thing as a stupid question."
"Design things for the person who's going to maintain it. It may be you."
Yes, but there is this annoying rule that you have to order drinks every once in an unspecified while.
In the end, it probably took 3-4 weeks to get my money back for a $5k 1-day delivery package that wasn't ever delivered. I would have gone the bank route next, but since Amazon did eventually give me my money back, it wasn't needed.

I'm sure the shipper was who lost/stole the package. But my point is that you can't take your great support experience with Amazon buying $50 sheets and expect that you get the same experience when they lose something expensive. For expensive or specialist items, you can often get the item faster and cheaper going to a different retailer despite how all your experience buying cheap stuff on Amazon tells you otherwise.
Dick certainly refined his skill throughout his career. But at the same time, we can't deny that he wrote a lot of garbage in between his masterpieces.

For example, in the same 4-year time period as masterpieces like Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we got forgettable (and in some cases quite terrible) books like The Ganymede Takeover, The Game-Players of Titan, The Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, and of course the universally maligned The Crack in Space.

The sad truth is that Dick was fueling his writing habit with drugs (particularly amphetamines) during this time period. He wrote six novels in one 12-month period during 1963-1964. It's a marvel that even the clunkers are fairly readable things, though they're often throwbacks to his earlier pre-1960s work. Another sad truth is that Dick's output was also drive by the need for money (by 1964 he had three ex-wives).

The odd one out from this period is Galactic Pot-Healer, which Dick claimed to have no memory of having written (too many amphetamines), and which he practically disowned. But it's one of his best, a colourful Vonnegutian mix of tragedy and comedy.
In the future I suspect cancelling will be illegal: the same way vigilante justice is illegal now. Causing a person to be fired/doxxed by a mob for an action that isn't even illegal (free speach) is no more morally noble then going and beating them up over a suspected crime.

If a person commits a crime, then let courts decide, otherwise it's just mob rule and vigilante "justice".

That said, I think it's going to take at least a few more decades before such a ruling is made. I suspect it will come along the lines that internet history is protected speech, and so it's a protected work category and is illegal to fire a person over. Once companies can just point to the law and shrug, then they can ignore the online mob.

Additionally, one would think cancelling should fall under libel and slander laws, and the accused would be able to go after the instigators.

It's uncomfortable when it's "your side" that finds it's goals at odds with human rights, but in the end we're all better off with defending basic human rights. Policing morality is infinitely more difficult and oppressive, no matter how much it really feels good at the moment.
Not sure if this is helpful, but advice I got in therapy was to allow myself to feel something with feeling like I need to act on it. It’s okay to just sit around and be sad. So I’d say just because you feel loss doesn’t mean you need to do anything other than just feel it. Sit around and be sad until asking yourself “would my loved one want me sitting around feeling sad?” leads you to say “of course not!”

Sorry for your loss. And take comfort in knowing you won’t always feel this way.
I've met Jacob in person and we had a super interesting discussion about RL that sadly petered out during the covid lockdown. This blog post very much fits my impression of him and I give mad probs to shitting on your own work (particularly the thermometer encoding was a pet peeve of mine).
> It is cheap and easy to set up a blog on your own custom domain

True. But you can defeat all of Medium's annoying features by just disabling JavaScript.
What does fire and forget even mean? That the missile follows its target automatically and you dont have to think about it anymore?

Interesting, then the only difference between an „autonomous killer drone“ supposedly uncovered by the UN and a plain and simple fight jet missile is...the duration of the flight of the drone vs the missile?

But then perhaps a missile like an ICBM would take longer than the drone here took? So perhaps even that differentiator does not work.
I don’t live in a country where Amazon operates but I do live in the EU. I’ve had good experiences with them regarding refunds and getting items the courier firm messed up with. I once ordered some stuff to the UK to a friend who shipped it to me with alongside some stuff from other places. My wait time for the whole package was a month due to this and when it arrived I noticed that one of the items I ordered was missing. I contacted them and they offered me a refund. I wasn’t expecting that!

Another time DPD messed up my package and never delivered it, they just shipped it again and it I finally got it. The only nuisance was the wait time.

That being said my trust for Amazon is at an all time low due to their marketplace listings. The discoverability has gone awfully bad, I generally end up searching for stuff elsewhere, researching stuff on Google and if I find something I need that’s only available through Amazon, then I have to and dig deep to see if it’s okay.

They simply allow through all sorts of dubious items, knockoffs and scams that clearly just ship from China. Whenever I can, I just order straight from smaller, specialty shops that deliver abroad, instead. It’s not an Amazon-unique situation, however. A local giant online e-tailer started a marketplace and they pretty much instantly started having very similar issues.

I still dislike having to spend lots of extra time just to not to accidentally buy something else instead of what I wanted. Frustrating, to say the least!
You may be right, but this is the strongest indictment of business and capitalism that I've read in a long time.
See Proof of Stake or Open Representative Voting for alternatives which don't encourage waste
Fix the underlying usurious financial system and things will automatically become much better.
I think it’s a choice to monetize your writings. Medium doesn’t force you to put your stuff behind a paywall. We need to stop blaming Medium and realize the authors wanted to monetize.
I am more sure if I’m the only one here but why should anything be enabled automatically? The crux of the issue here is “Informed Consent”.
It's worth noting: In most of these cases, even when caught, the guilty parties and the bad papers remain unnamed. There are known-to-the-editors fraudulent papers in major journals still being cited.

The consequences of committing academic fraud are minor, and the consequences of not doing so generally mean no academic jobs or tenure.

There isn't a 99.99% innocent claim here (as at the end of the article). This stuff is widespread. This is much more accurate:

"because everybody is complicit in this subtle fraud, nobody is willing to acknowledge its existence"

Littman is at Brown, where the majority of the CS department engages in this !@#$%. I'm not trying to single out Brown. Parts of MIT, Stanford, etc. are even worse.
Make sure you also read "Not by Its Cover", a sort of sequel to "Beyond Lies the Wub".
Although the standard proof of the incomputability of the halting problem assumes it is computable and then reaches a contradiction. And that's more or less the central proof of everything to do with computability.
In the same vein, I remember a rash of train accidents where the engineers were simply derelict in their duty, but the entire world seemed to rush to defend them because, oh my God!, accidents happened where positive train control systems were not installed.

I don't think even so much as a reprimand was given to people who failed to the one thing they are supposed to do: Control the speed of the train.
Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27295906
TypeScript's type system, with tagged unions, `never` type and type inference being used in an app with good Language Server support (e.g. VSCode) is probably the closest I've seen to this.

The biggest limitation still in place is that it can't reason very well about value ranges (e.g. numbers between 20 and 30) without you enumerating every single possibility (i.e. 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | ... | 30) which isn't really feasible or desirable for larger ranges.

We're probably very close to this level of generality, though, with the recent string template types being a major step forward in expressiveness.
voluntary extracurriculars outside school are the privilege of affluent families. extracurriculars at school help kids from less educated background to do choir, theatre, arts and team sports, ...
You can register at ups (even in Germany) and also get email similar to dhl's where you can have the package rerouted
It depends on the context. A university degree in Informatik will obviously not be about using MS Office. But 7th grade Informatik is. 10th grade Informatik introduced programming at my school.
A trained job “Fachinformatiker für Systemadministration” will be about sysadmin work.
In Happiest Place on Earth, a Startup Is Targeting Car Addiction
Hmmm.

Here we see the following claim:

> By partaking in a form of fraud that has left the Overton window of acceptability, the researchers in the collusion ring have finally succeeded in forcing the community to acknowledge its blind spot. For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud?

But I don't see how this follows. If I follow the link to the description of the actual fraud ( https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/6/252840-collusion-rings... ), it says essentially the opposite: the "fraudulent" papers are no different from papers published by ordinary means.

> the review process is notoriously random. In a well-publicized case in 2014, organizers of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference formed two independent program committees and had 10% of submissions reviewed by both. The result was that almost 60% of papers accepted by one program committee were rejected by the other, suggesting that the fate of many papers is determined by the specifics of the reviewers selected

> In response, some authors have adopted paper-quality-independent interventions to increase their odds of getting papers accepted. That is, they are cheating.

> Here is an account of one type of cheating that I am aware of: a collusion ring.

> A group of colluding authors writes and submits papers to the conference.

> The colluders share, amongst themselves, the titles of each other's papers, violating the tenet of blind reviewing

> The colluders hide conflicts of interest, then bid to review these papers, sometimes from duplicate accounts, in an attempt to be assigned to these papers as reviewers.

> The colluders write very positive reviews of these papers

So the system is: conferences already can't tell the difference between a good paper and a bad paper. Researchers respond by adopting strategies for passing review that are irrelevant to paper quality (since paper quality doesn't count). But those strategies aren't bad for paper quality. If I'm reading conference papers, why would I worry about whether one of them is the product of review collusion?
I didnt know I had bruxism, but got a custom fitted plastic bite tray thing (sorry not sure how to translate) to wear at night, because i have a bad bite. And damn that thing changed my life. it was like €300. And yea discovered i had bruxism because my jaw and face felt so unusually relaxed in the morning.

Make sure you look into having something at night so your teeth doesnt wear further :)
This also applies to interviewing. Google for instance generally doesn't include anything PL theory related in their interviews, even though it would often be more relevant to the work than random dynamic programming problems. As a result of this they produced languages and frameworks like Go, Dart, Angular and Tensorflow, which display ignorance if not outright contempt for modern programming language theory. This led to the latter two being mostly replaced by React and Pytorch, which are more influenced by language design best practices, to Dart being mostly ignored, and to Go being violently rejected by a significant subset of the programming community.
Right, I didn't get that. But how often is an item returned without the box being opened by the customer?

Also, how does Amazon prove that the brick they received came from the customer and not some employee?
> PG13-compatible

So not (IBM-System-)R-compatible, then?
I don't know if I'm lucky and some other people are just unlucky. But I also sometimes suspect that some people buy things at prices that are "too good to be true" or that always go for the lowest price. (I admittedly also tend to go elsewhere for certain types of items. For example, I always buy my Apple stuff directly from Apple.)
Ask HN: Why is there no public response from Babel after all the accusations?
After the lengthy discussions at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114718 I would expect the Babel team to explain more about what they're doing with the budget they already have and to reassure contributors that they're not wasting their money.

However with all accusations we're met with nothing but radio silence?

I'd bet Babel is already top 1% of OSS projects regarding funding?

Do they seriously expect to keep that or increase it if they can't be transparent with the existing funds?
Thank goodness I am retired and don't have to publish stuff in the current environment. Thirty years ago when machine learning was a sleepy backwater, life was a lot easier for us.
The website is not stating one of the most important fact: what is the size of the display? Also on indiegogo you need to scroll and read a lot until you find what size. It is 4.2".
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" - I always encounter this theme with healthcare
That's still constructive. This can be a confusion because there's actually two kinds of contradiction proofs:

to show ¬ P, assume P then derive a contradiction (false, ⊥)

i.e., ¬ P := P -> ⊥. This is actually just fine and constructive, it's just how you prove a negation.

OTOH, there's another kind of contradiction proof:

to show P, assume ¬ P, then derive a contradiction (false, ⊥)

Written with function notation, this becomes P <-> (¬ P -> ⊥)

But if we unfold the definition of negation, we have that

P <-> ((P -> ⊥) -> ⊥)

The left to right direction holds classically and constructive, but the right to left direction uses double negation, which can is equivalent to the law of the excluded middle, AKA classical reasoning.
Oh, thanks. Will update.
You can observe your own consciousness.
Alexa is another sales channel for Amazon. The fact it can be used for setting timers, toggling lights, and looking up stuff from Wikipedia is all tangential to making Amazon your default choice for ordering something while cooking and paying for Prime so you can listen to music.
Does anyone know where I can get a large but affordable e-paper display. Can be raw without anything around? From 10" and up. Thanks
Interesting solution! I had massive issues with my posture, neck, hips and even feet, which i know, sounds crazy, but all came from my bruxism and bite. If you have bad posture and maloclussion, look into forward head posture, lots of studies on it now.

I have not done botox. What i did was jaw relaxation exersices and physiotherapy. Its helped a lot.

I have a compulsive need to bring this up as well, I didnt understand it all was happening to me and starting to treat it has changed my life.
I’m utterly inexpert in this area, but that doesn’t sound right at all; I think it should be more like 2–3 months, and probably even more.

3–4 days on a 2000mAH battery means over 20mAH per hour. You say deep sleep uses <20μA, which would be under 0.1% of the total here, so we can call that rounding error and just focus on the time when it’s actively doing something. Assume it wakes up every hour, takes 12 seconds to connect, fetch and render, before returning to deep sleep. 20mAH in 12 seconds is 6 amps. I’m not familiar with the actual power consumption figures, but https://lastminuteengineers.com/esp32-sleep-modes-power-cons... suggests an ESP32 chip with everything on is using up to about 260mA, and I seem to recall hearing that e-ink displays used a few milliwatts, but it’s hard to find details. All up, my extremely rough estimates are coming to active consumption more like 300mA, not 6A—so more like three months than three days.

(I haven’t been careful with the voltages in these calculations, but my impression is that you’re looking at about 3.3–3.6V on the battery and ESP32 chip. I think the 300mA is probably fairly significantly on the high side, since most of the system won’t be in use for all of that nominal 12 seconds. But I caution you again that I’m not competent in this field; I’m just a layman that thinks the numbers didn’t add up.

While I’m talking: why do most of these things, especially the batteries, cite current figures rather than power figures? Is there a genuine reason, or is it some kind of historical mistake, or something else?)
I was under impression that their return policy has some intelligence added. I mean how many items customer have returned/refunded, what are sellers saying about returned item kind of ML. After reading all the stories in comments, feel this is what Amazon should be prioritising. Already some local online stores are competing them across the globe.
It depends on their leadership style. Micromanagers needs tech backgrounds. Hands-off delegators need communication of goals, and to trust their team.
I’ve never been asked to print a barcode and put it in the box. I just returned a $300 item last week, and all they wanted me to do was ship it back.

This is also true for Amazon business purchases. I have returned items around $600 and have never been asked to put a code in the box.

But I’ve never returned anything over $1,000.
There is also https://www.reviewboard.org/
I think the only way to do this might be founding your own company and building your own product in Forth and Lisp.
> If I'm reading conference papers, why would I worry about whether one of them is the product of review collusion?

Because the one you are reading may have crowded out a better one. Even if the current review system is essentially random, replacing it with something that is essentially a contest of well-connectedness is worse. Young researchers with good ideas but fewer connections, or people from less well-known institutions would have their ideas suppressed.

So you should be worrying about stagnation, and about not reading what might actually be new and exciting.
Still don’t see it. Just kidding. Good job doing that! I’d buy if it would be larger.
You can't pay rent with the hope of success.
Effectively extract recommended links in HN comments
Mailmainhq
> where "you" stop and the rest of the universe (including other people) begins

If you bother to delve into this idea you will see that there is no real boundary. Is the oxygen I breathe in part of "me"? If it gets used in a metabolic process, I would say yes. If it gets breathed straight out again less so. Are my gut bacteria part of me or not? There is more and more research that implies that they have an important effect of my well-being.
Yeah, blame Chinese lab like blame e-cigarette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_vaping_lung_...

US lung illness outbreak 2019-9
Military World Games(Wuhan) 2019-10-18

Dig into these patient's therapeutic documents!
Have you explicitly selected delivery to a Packstation through their locker picker, not just put the Packstation address in as a normal shipping address?