skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do short sellers really do that much damage? Surely they're just part of the price-discovery mechanism for a stock?

Imagine a small or midcap company that is a solid, profitable business, just hanging out on the market, doing it's thing, not seeing that much trading activity, with only a tiny fraction of shares actually trading hands any given day.

Then, one day, there is a concerted attack by multiple parties who borrow and sell short far more stocks than is ever traded in a single day. The added selling pressure overwhelms the market and the price tanks. This catches the eye of media, who start publishing articles asking what's going on. Some articles are even paid for by the short sellers themselves. Prominent people start pulling opinions out of their ass about how the business has no future, the board and executives are incompetent etc etc. It's a vicious cycle and down the stock goes.

Now, why, if this is all just an artifact of shorting, and it is in fact a solid, profitable business with a bright future, can't this be easily countered by simply pointing that out and buying the shares at a discount until the market catches on and the price skyrockets back up?

Because, unfortunately, it's much easier to just go with the momentum and jump on the shorting bandwagon, betting the stock will go down even more. Even if you tried to stem the drop, the short sellers can just borrow even more stocks and continue to overwhelm you with selling pressure.

This dynamic plays out all the time in US stock markets, and this isn't even taking into account abusive naked shorting, which is actually kinda sorta illegal except even the rules against that aren't meaningfully enforced.
When egos get involved it’s not the right answer that counts but the answer that makes one look good. People might say they care about data and facts but what they really care for is data that reinforces their ideas
An interesting thing about Amazon outages like this is that most people wait and come back and make the purchase.
amazon.co.jp seems to be working fine for me. I just accessed it through the iPad app and was able to view product pages and my purchase history with no problem. I’m located in Japan, in case that makes a difference.
Combine this with "the coming war on general purpose computing"[0] , IME, DRM, difficulty to repair devices and computers that user has no control even on their car and soon we'll be living like on the dystopian essay "The right to read".

[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
Thanks very much for posting this, it's a well thought out exploration of what the design and management of large scale systems will entail.
It's interesting because of how awful the UX is there for a multi-trillion dollar company.

This would be acceptable if it showed an error notification after redirecting you, but it doesn't.

It just very cheerfully dumps you to their homepage.

It's bad enough the mobile app is just the website bundled up in a less functional form, the least they could do is add small things like this to it.
Yeah, good luck voting out your nation’s central bank. Even the politicians can’t.
If you want to lose money, sure.
That's total gross revenue for all of Amazon. From: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266288/annual-et-income-....

"In 2020, online retail platform Amazon reported a net income of 21.33 billion U.S. dollars, up from a 11.6 billion U.S. dollar net income in the previous year. During the same fiscal period, the company's revenue amounted to more than 386 billion U.S. dollars."
Can someone explain how does WW outage happen? My assumption is anysite at Amazon scale is atleast designed to be regional partitioned.
Search for "Denuvo removed" on Google. Lots of recent examples.

Doom Eternal & Metro Exodus – https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-05-29-denuvo-sec...

Monster Hunter World – https://www.vg247.com/2021/06/03/monster-hunter-world-denuvo...

Mass Effect Legendary Edition – https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/mass-effect-legendary-e...

Nier Automata – https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/nier-automata-update-re...
> There's obvious hypocrisy for a company that's done all sorts of user-antagonistic things to internet user

Does this mean any article about Google that does not criticize Google deserves this snark? Fwiw the snark is annoying not because folks disagree with it, but that saying it again and again and doing nothing is a trite form of internet me-too-ing or signalling. That Google depends on an ethically dubious set of assumptions is obvious; now how do we fix it and why are we talking about this here?
What is (was) the free and open internet?

I'd argue its people running their own servers - traditionally an x86 (plus RAM, disk, modem pipe and power) running a POSIX kernel running httpd, smptd, ftpd and maybe ircd. A static IPv4 address from ARIN (via an ISP) and a DNS name from ICANN (via a registrar).

These are the necessary ingredients you must have, as an individual or a group, to participate in the "free and open internet".

I'd argue that Facebook is just a natural extension of AWS, Digital Ocean or Github pages. Facebook takes away the DNS name, and they take away your content and put it behind an algorithm, which you can bribe to let your stuff through. I'd consider a difference of degree, not kind.

Even those who go to the trouble of running their own physical server still use services like Google Analytics, which violate the privacy of every data consumer. Maybe not as bad as putting your data behind someone else's paywall and then paying them to expose it, but it's pretty bad. Since we use the web for literally every application now, it's a particularly worrying trend.

My point is that if you want a 'free and open internet' then you need to make it easy for people own, understand and run ALL of these ingredients. Like, provide them by all by default for everyone's smartphone, and run servers on your smartphone! And give them reasonable defaults, with a first-year-free DNS name. A free static IPv6 address block. Default, svelte, little mobile friendly server daemons. Then let people make crazy HTML documents with their voice and self-publish them like in the old days!

All the components are there, we just need to DO it.
Pontzer's book Burn seems to indicate exercise is good for health but not weight loss. Energy usage in the body is complicated but diet seems to be more important than exercise if I understand it correctly.
Everyone else will still make me wait several days or make me go to a store.
I was just able to load some random pages on amazon.co.uk
I'm not sure I detect the grouchiness in the bug report, although I probably would have closed with a line like "Thank you for your work!" which might be omitted when reporting bugs in paid software. For free software, bug reports are part of how we contribute back to the community. For paid software, bug reports are part of why we aren't paying more for the software, and the fix improves the capital asset of the owner, rather than being a contribution to the community.
No shit. Nobody cares about net income. They care about how much consumer spend Amazon is losing during the outage.

The total number above does indeed include AWS, which should be subtracted since it's not offline, leaving us with ~$340B in 2020.
About a 3 quarters of a million a minute in revenue though. They roughly do a billion in sales every day in e-commerce m
I d be interested to know the numbers - with the amount of impulse buys or marketing driven links, there s probably a lot of ads being paid for that redirect to nothing a user might just give up on
You can thank the Fed. Pensions and their consultants publish an assumed rate of return, which is increasingly difficult to obtain in a sustained low interest rate environment. They have been increasing exposure to private markets to compensate for low returns in fixed income("yield seeking"). There is additional pressure since public and private pensions are typically underfunded, and overly aggressive return assumptions give cover to the states and companies that don't fund them to the extent they should.
We’re talking about the government here, it’s entirely reasonable to assume they’re going to start regulating this kind of thing by imposing rules on citizens.
Frankly, just learn the language properly…
Compiler writers can’t throw their hands up in the air and do some non-deterministic/non-specified thingy. That would be terrible.
Graph on downdetector.com shows AWS (likely) experiencing the same issue, which I guess is no surprise. So, a lot more than just amazon.com affected by this.
Pretty sure they use CloudFront
It is very hard to beat the extensibility of Lisp though. Like what is the equivalent of defadvice in Lua?
It is one thing to have a choice. The society demands that we conform. That just makes me want to not conform even more.
Stature Lengthening Surgery
Not much insight in this article.

But this is a major issue. It's spooky being around the group-think in the Bay Area these days.

A high % of bay area techies would rather look like they're doing the right thing than actually do the right thing. And we're see the consequences of such play out.
Older devs should just work on their own ecommerce stuff and squeeze expenses to maximize their runway until they takeoff. Interviewing is a waste of time past a certain age - I was 53 the last time I got hired.
Obligatory: Don't Talk to Police

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
from a friend at AMZN: still no root cause identified as of 8:55 PM PST
It's hard to take seriously an article that is so heavily laden with hyperbolic prose. Like this from the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs:

"monocled, mustache-twirling oligarch", "secret control panel", "faceless", "takeover of Oz"

"fleeced", "skimmed", "self-enriching", "waging a class war", "bankrolling", "profiteering", "wage a war"

And on for every subsequent paragraph.
Weird how only the product pages are down. Items on saved lists can still be bought.

Its global. Someone out there is updating their resume...
its back up for amazon.in
Definitely worth reading in its entirety, especially the section on the internet comments about the project.
Looks like that ruling was made in 1927. This absolutely needs to be overturned. At the risk of godwinning[1] myself, this is literally a Nazi policy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Indeed, amazon.co.uk product pages seem to be working.
It's not like YouTube that would never get those eyeball-hours back. Most customers will return later instead of buying elsewhere.
The one Amazon property that seems unaffected is their China site (https://amazon.cn). No doubt its running entirely separate infrastructure, unlike every other country's local Amazon site.

Example: https://www.amazon.cn/any-random-string-works-here/dp/032199...
If the short sellers are right, the price is going down long term if you lend shares to them or not. (The short sellers may not be able to profit from it as much, but a worthless company will be found out eventually.)

If the short sellers are wrong, the price will not being going down long term, whether you lend shares to them or not; might as well profit from it if you can.

Your mistake is in thinking your choice to lend shares to short sellers has any impact. If you're buying shares of Apple for your retirement account, the price when you go to retire will be whatever it is, regardless of whether your shares were lent to short sellers.

Some brokers let you opt out of lending shares out, but if you're ever long some shares and you're afraid that the company is actually doing some major fraud and the price might drop to zero if the short sellers are given an incentive to publicize it then why are you long this stock?! Conversely if you're confident the company is healthy, then clearly the short sellers will just lose a bunch of money; why not take a slice of that?
To be fair, Pichai's quote is taken out of context. In his capacity as Alphabet CEO, he worries about neutrality of the interconnects. TFA goes:

> And, when I asked about whether the Chinese model of the internet - much more authoritarian, big on surveillance - is in the ascendant, Pichai said the free and open internet "is being attacked". Importantly, he didn't refer to China directly but he went on to say: "None of our major products and services are available in China."

Google does run at least one semi-independent group to tackle such censorship, disinformation, propaganda, and abuse https://jigsaw.google.com/
It works for me if I reload the page of any product after I land on it. Seems to only happen on the first click.
Author of diffsitter here

I think some of the issues are alleviated because tree sitter was made with text editors in mind, so you're not really getting a compiler parser as editors still care about comments and whatnot. It's also fast, which was a big motivation to use it.
Having someone else in charge of one's investments always has these results. They invest for their benefit, not yours.
There must be a silly single source of failure, like a lambda giving the time of day or a marketing tracker pixel.

Yourkit, a java profiler, stopped working after a certain date in 2018 and had to be patched on thousands of users in my company alone. Could be some such time based constraint on a dependency loaded by all components for instance.

You can regionally partition but if the poison pill was inserted years ago and rolled out everywhere with a time trigger...
The way I see it is that the market participants job is to allocate capital effectively, not function as a savings account. Shorting provides incentive to sniff our frauds and enhances yields for those with fixed liabilities in a low interest rate environment.

Furthermore, not all short sellers are evil. While some short sellers may have ill intentions, short sell have researched and exposed many fraudulent companies effectively embezzling funds.

I don't agree short selling should be banned, but I agree the already illegal practice of naked shorting should be enforced in a more meaningful manner.

If people can lend out dollars for interest, than I think lending out shares should be allowed as well. If banks can lend out deposits and collect fees that seems to be the same thing as lending out equities as well. Do you see some delineation between these practices?

I agree shares shouldn't be lent out the holder permission, but if you want a consistent amount of money every month, no matter what, then those small fees really add up. This is what most retirement funds are obligated to provide, and they can no longer get it in government debt.

This might also be a perspective thing. I have a very different view on the function of markets than you seem to have. A market primary job is to allocate resources effectively, not provide entitlements to passive participants. The market doesn't exist to pump what ever positions you might be long, its meant to reward effective use of capital while preventing ineffective use.
There are always bottlenecks and single points of failure no matter how resilient the design in. And even if there are multiple regions, the same bit of offending code could have been deployed to all of them.
If only they had Uncle Bob Martin on their payroll.
The author means that technology is deterministic. Those castles aren't fantasy once the idea of them is implemented: they are behaviors of mechanisms which could be measured, poked, and prodded.
The problem is chemistry isn’t that different from software. Once you publish the idea it isn’t too difficult to derive the chemical composition. Replication is the easy part. Design and testing cost money.

So in essence we’d have to design drugs and not publish the chemistry which would be uncovered soon enough anyways. This leads to a situation where investment dollars go into other things and human health suffers, especially with so-called rare diseases.

Not to mention the USA loses hegemony. The USA provides Europe with a great deal of military technology and protection as well as medicine but it isn’t for free. The EU exchanges agency in many ways important strategically to American interests. It’s mainly a fair deal.
How far back to you want to go?

There is no definitive start point for C, as it grew fairly organically out of B and began as a living language. However, a reasonable approximation for C 1.0 is The C Programming Language (Kernighan and Ritchie, 1978) [0], commonly known as K&R C.

The language they describe is much simpler than modern C. Notably for this discussion, it contains no synchronization mechanisms.

There is nothing in that book that suggests C was a macro assembler. On the contrary, its description of C precludes it from being a macro assembler for the reasons I talked about in a parent comment:

> Although C matches the capabilities of many computers, it is independent of any particular machine architecture, and so with a little care it is easy to write "portable" programs, that is, programs which can be run without change on a variety of hardware. . It is now routine in our environment that software developed on UNIX is transported to the local Honeywell, IBM and Interdata systems. In fact, the C compilers and runtime support on these four machines are much more compatible than than the supposedly ANSI standard versions of Fortran.

> Because the data types and control structures provided by C are supported directly by most existing computers, the runtime library required to implement self-contained programs is tiny. On the PDP-I1, for example, it contains only the routines to do 32-bit multiplication and division and to perform the subroutine entry and exit sequences.

Notice the way this paragraph frames the issue. Since the features of C are supported by most machines, it can be implemented with a small runtime library. It does not say that C must use those features directly. In fact, it explicitly anticipates that C could provide some of its primitives in ways other then directly leveraging a corresponding capability of the hardware. The feature here is efficiency and a small runtime.

[0] https://1lib.us/book/2660358/b1a4cf
Jeff stepped down, and now this happens...I bet he will be back in the office on Monday!
Seems to back up now
amazon.co.jp is now working again for me also.
I’m not disagreeing with you, but I’m wondering if there have been cases in the past where central banks have broken fungibility based on region or bank assets. The thing that immediately comes to mind are those “HAWAII” federal reserve notes in WWII which were meant to become worthless should Japan have invaded successfully. That never came to pass, but I’m wondering if that historical event is similar to the kind of thing you are talking about?
> If the short sellers are right, the price is going down long term if you lend shares to them or not.

Your mistake is assuming predatory short sellers don't exist.

> If the short sellers are wrong, the price will not being going down long term, whether you lend shares to them or not; might as well profit from it if you can.

If people want to pay a premium to not loan out their shares, let them and adjust the price accordingly. That's how markets are supposed to work. Why do people buy Berkshire A instead of Berkshire B? I realize there is a subtle difference (apart from price), but I know people that pay the premium without knowing what it is. Shouldn't you be happy to profit from an investor's ignorance?

Make it an option and let people vote with their money. That's what markets are for.
I like the refactor bot idea.

I'd be a little nervous to lean on Copilot to refactor, but I'd love a bot that just implements the changes that IntelliJ can already recommend to me.

A bot that did other logically straightforward refactors (like extracting mapper methods from big functions) would also be nice.
That stocks in retirement accounts are lent out to short sellers against a small fee is not a wild claim? It's ubiquitous and routine.

And no, it's not at a price agreed upon by both parties. The owners of the stocks have zero say in any of it. Even if they did, most people aren't able to make an informed decision that allowing their stocks to be lent out to short sellers for a small fee is in their interest. (and, despite creative rhetoric to the contrary, there's no world in which doing so is in their best interest)
Other possible funny (but probably happened somewhere else) scenarios:

It doesn't rely on him running it, it just runs under his UID.

A widely distributed authentication/security process does an internal healthcheck by looking up 'jbezos' on the datastore. A few hours ago someone disabled the jbezos user.
Actually there is a standard location for user settings: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

Dconf complements it: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf and dconf-editor is even similar to regedit.

For system settings... that is a bit more complicated.
That describes me. I pirated lots of games when I was still into gaming. I bought Tribes 2, for example, because of course you can't pirate it if you want to play online (and it's a multiplayer-only shooter). Same for e.g. PUBG and one or two others.

Steam is a great thing for anti-piracy; 99% of the time it works without any friction and is faster/safer than piracy.

On the other hand I've only played the original Call of Duty and BF1942, and have neither paid for nor pirated any of the sequels of either. Frankly most AAA games actually really suck.
I think it's recovering now.
Normally the fact that amazon pages have _so many things_ on them means that there are a lot of backend services that could fall over and you'd be mostly ok (e.g. not showing "frequently bought together" items or whatever).
But of course, some things are really essential.
my recommendation is to take that non-conformance out to a second or third order

first order non-conformance may be tolerable depending on your personality, but second order or third order non-conformance can be immensely enjoyable and the people who get it will get it
Honestly, given the headlines of the past few weeks this is a fair joke, but in my experience they do not fire people for outages like this. Anything that can take down retail or AWS at large is considered a design problem, not a human error problem that deserves termination.
I'm not sure where you got that idea. C was never ever a macro assembler, and its antecedent language (B[1]) is actually even more abstracted away. C was a slight lowering, not a raising, of hardware abstraction.

If C were a macro assembler the following things would be true of it, most likely:

- types would have fixed bit sizes (ie. uint32_t would be the norm)
- you'd be able to do various 'normal' things for assembly like rotate left and right.
- inline assembly would probably be.. you know.. standard instead of something that compiler vendors only started putting in in like the 80s.

You might be thinking of the fact that C++ was originally sort of a Macro C (aka Cfront)?

[1] Ever wondered why `int` is so fuzzily defined in C? It's because in B there was only one type and it was always word sized. That's also why various things are typed `int` by default if you don't specify.
Wow. It started 2 mins before and again stopped working.
Link that worked.

https://www.amazon.com/Perdido-Street-Station-Crobuzon-Book-...
Ex EV battery engineer here.
You’re right that the cycle life of a lithium battery typically doubles per 0.05V (‘tik’) undercharged from 4.15V (and on the other end of the scale as well, less so).

This typically corresponds to around 7-10% capacity per ‘tik’, so to effectively triple your battery cycle count would reduce the runtime by approximately 30%.

Interesting effect here.. the amount of power in each cycle is less because you’re undercharging the battery. And for each consecutive ‘tik’, 0.05V is approximately more power because the discharge curve becomes flatter (voltage != state of charge). It doesn’t scale like you’d think. Seriously diminishing returns!