skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They are absolutely not commiting fraud - that is a total lie.

If some random wants to contact amazon to delete our business AWS account they need to reject that as well.

I would login, open a account and billing support case.

Do Account / Close and cancel my account

They will give you a chat or call back option in most cases. The call back option has worked well for me.
This is true, but it's not worst case by far. Most video is 24 or 30 fps, so about half the typical 60 hz refresh rate. Still a nice optimization path for video. I'm not sure what effect typing in an editor will have on screen refresh, but if the Electron issue is any indication, it's probably complicated.
I work at a FAANG, but I don’t really understand what a “leet code” interview is? I’ve interviewed hundreds of people, and hired a number of them. What makes a great engineer is enthusiasm, curiosity, good communication skills, and a willingness to adapt to the processes of the team.

Initiative & leadership are nice, too, if I think I might need a manager in the wings.

Ambition is ok? It’s hard to temper highly ambitious people.

Coding is a mechanical skill you can assess in 5 minutes at the whiteboard during your interview while you look for the important skills.
Yup, similar experience.
Our devs kept using S3 as a caching backend for some small pictures. Only based on billing, we learned that we had over 17TB in tiny files, unable to groom it in any way that was feasible. Kept hitting all sorts of api limits.
But the article doesn't say that he was taking "kickbacks", but that he was hired as a "consultant". Is that illegal?

"We'd like to do business with Netflix, hmmm whom should we hire as a consultant, maybe someone at Netflix, surely knows a lot about the kinds of companies that do business with Netflix."

Edit: I agree it's immoral just like how FDA leaders approving drugs then getting hired by the drug industry is immoral, but IIRC the problem is that that's just circumstantial evidence... it's hard to prove that what they did was illegal.
Thanks, this is indeed a better source.

A lot of people here are saying this is incredibly common which is frankly pretty surprising to me. Does it really happen through shell LLCs?

I am definitely aware of execs prioritizing startups they've invested in, which is... not a great look.

But this seems to be a different thing. Kail wasn't an investor. He explicitly drafted agreements that paid him a fraction of the money flowing from Netflix. This seems almost like embezzlement to me (not a lawyer! just a guy using words he has heard!):

> Two days before Unix Mercenary was registered, Kail signed a Sales Representative Agreement to receive payments from Netenrich, Inc. amounting to 12% of the billings from Netenrich, Inc. to Netflix for its contract providing staffing and IT services to Netflix. Later in 2012, Kail began to receive 15% of all billing payments that VistaraIT, LLC, a wholly owned company of Netenrich, received from Netflix. From 2012 to 2014, Netenrich, Inc. paid Unix Mercenary approximately $269,986, and VistaraIT, LLC paid Unix Mercenary approximately $177,863. The payments stopped in mid-2014, after Kail left Netflix.
Sounds like Andrew Lee (of Freenode fame).
When I was in law school, I felt patronized by the amount of time we spent talking about conflicts of interest because it seemed so obvious to me. In retrospect, having read so many of the disbarment announcements in the bar association newsletter, it's clear that a great many people do not understand what a conflict of interest is.
That is essentially what mobile phone carriers do, yet "customers" provide fake/stolen IDs all the time to perform sim-swap attacks and obtain financed phones they never plan to make a payment on.
I'll admit my first thought, based on the wording, was that the articles were posted on a google service such as google docs.
Planet Money has a great report in this: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged
One item seems to have caused a lot of confusion in the comments so I will take a stab at clarifying:

It is perfectly legal for Netflix to ask for options or any other consideration in exchange for the contract. Companies do this sort of thing frequently. They know that merely signing a large contract with a large firm will increase the value of the contractor.

It is not legal for someone working for Netflix to ask for shares in their own personal capacity as individuals. That is what runs afoul of the law.
The way I see it:

- I work in purchasing approval position for company A

- Company B would like to do business with Company A

- If I say "B, I can get you deal with my employer A, but you need to give me extra money" - this is against every business conduct guideline / contract / terms of employment in every company I worked for, and against law in many jurisdictions.

In case that somehow slipped / you missed it: person was SIMULTANEOUSLY employed by A, while being given money by B to approve things on behalf of A. That's simple kickback / bribery.

It wasn't a morally-dubious but frequently-legal case of "revolving door" where a person does this sequentially. They were approving deals as exec for netflix, and earning money to approve those deals by small companies, at the same time.
From the headline alone, my initial assumption was that it was about a google-hosted website and the content was actually deleted. Then I read the article…
> actively fights anyone trying to repare them

What makes you say that? What did you expect would happen if you spill juice into your laptop?

What they are perhaps fighting is unauthorized repairs, in the sense that they want to be able to void the warranty if some random third party messes with the insides. That's not quite the same thing.

Apple has been very helpful when I brought in a 5 year old macbook pro with keyboard issues, replaced some keys for free on the spot. Also when the batteries of 8 and 9 year old MBAs started to go bad, they said they could replace them but advised me to order batteries from iFixit and do it myself, which I did.
Well all those regulators will manage to accomplish is to stagnate their own financial centers and lose out on changes in the financial services industry.

The city of new York supplanted the City of London as the worldwide financial powerhouse very early last century. This was partly (though not primarily) due to regulatory environments in the City of London to protect entrenched interests, thus putting them behind the curve and allowing this new, innovative city to take momentum in the financial industry. As the financial industry changes rapidly, particularly as it democratizes, we will see less influence from these behemoth financial centers, but anything one of them does to try to hinder these changes to protect itself will only accelerate it's demise within this industry. New York is making one of the mistakes the City of London did in the 20th century and it will pay for it.
One case doesn't prove anything. There are thousands of cases showing that white collar crimes are in fact punished less than other types of crimes.
They have also been adding games that aren't exclusives to them and initially launched on the main App Store. They are all the games that have a "+" after their name. Essentially the same game will all IAP removed/made free.
JavaScript used to be a tiny, quirky, but powerful language.

Brendan Eich managed to get a lot of things right for such a tight scope, along with some very unfortunate decisions, of course.

Now we have a language that just keeps on growing, the old quirkiness can't be swept away, and new ones keep adding up.

I'm not sure it's a win.
What's your background? I just started A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics because I also got stuck on math when I was previously studying cryptography. Not sure if it will actually solve my problem but so far seems like a great place to start.

https://pimbook.org/
Why does it need to be powers of two? The whole idea of 432 is nicer numbers, but if you’re using equal temperament (12-TET specifically), you’re already using the “ugly” 12th root of 2.
Mapping the AI Investment Activities of Top Global Defense Companies [pdf]
Well, I'll be losing sleep hoping Netflix can make it through this tough time. Seriously, is there one person alive who believes the guy should get seven years in prison? Fire him, do your character assassination thing, but prison time? Why are our tax dollars being used to defend a multi-billion dollar corporation? Let Netflix run its own company. Change compensation structure or something to reduce corruption. Douche or not, this is not behavior worthy of jail time.
I'd login and go look at your most recent bill, this should bring up the bill from September 2021, for you [1].

That should give you a breakdown of where the charges are coming from, specifically which region an EC2 instance might be running in. Once you can figure out which region it's in, you can go to the EC2 dashboard for that region [2] and start terminating instances.

Having said this, AWS should seriously have a way to say "close this account and delete/stop everything associated with it." Having to spelunk through bills and the AWS console to figure out what you're getting charged for is a joke.

[1]: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=202...

[2]: https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...: (update both us-west-2 with whatever region you're looking for)
How hard is it to stop an EC2 instance? It's literally 3 or 4 clicks from when you login. As for forgetting how to login, if I give some company my credit card info, I damn well make sure I know how to login when I need to.
I don’t understand this view. Learning to “game the exam” (by which you mean pass) is the gateway to all careers, whether you’re a truck driver or a brain surgeon. What’s special about software?
Brian from Backblaze posted a graph for 2018 showing how much data customers were backing up. More than 50% of customers were backing up less than 300GB. They're paying $6/mo for backups that would cost only $1.50/mo on B2. The graph did show one customer backing up over 400TB, which I would consider abusive, but as long as it's just one / a few customers doing crazy shit like this, it's not worth changing their unlimited backup offer to an unlimited* offer, and having fine print saying there actually are limits.

If it were me, I'd continue offering the $6/mo unlimited plan, throttle upload bandwidth for personal backups larger than a TB, and offer a high-performance option for $6/mo/TB with no throttle that also supports Linux, network drives, and anything else you want to backup. That's still a 20% premium over B2, and they have control over the client behavior which is also an advantage.
> goes to show how while collar crimes are not punished more leniently

No, it goes to show that the only white collar crimes that are stiffly punished are those against other rich people.
That's not a grey area at all. If you are a director and you are pushing your board to drive business to a company you have a significant stake in, you MUST disclose that.

A grey area would be more like whether you should offer to leave the meeting while they discuss the proposal.
Yes that's better than having your utilities shut off and being evicted a month later with greater debts.

As long as the person doesn't take out loans there's a good chance they can recover with government assistance.

There are a consumer protections around necessities for survival for exactly this reason.
It's painful how much of this is "on schedule" to achieve circa 2000s doomsayer's dystopia. Make gateways to the internet, they become gates.

Whether it's advertising/monetisation policies, getting suddenly buried in their corporate bureaucracy, content moderation or whatnot... it's clear that you're dealing with a monopolith gatekeeper.

What a mess, and all for what? To protect creators? How far we are from any such goal.
Stockholm syndrome can be very real in the python world. There needs to be room for critical discussion of the pain points in order to address them and improve the ecosystem.
> Like, seriously, more than half of the companies funded by YC do this. I think this is the norm more than the outlier.

Then charge them all. That will put a halt to the practice pretty quickly.
It looks at several peoples. None of them are primitive enough, to your thinking? What are the peoples we should be looking at?

Unfortunately, we can't go back in time to see what those people in the Americas, in the study you linked to, were actually doing, 9000 years ago.

One of the points of the study is that men provide a majority of calories in many types of societies -- that it is a relatively common finding. We'll never be able to visit people in the ancestral state -- starting 200000 years ago -- but this idea does dovetail with what we know about other species where there's long term pair bonding. Typically, the male in those species contributes a great deal of calories to the offspring.
I know exactly how much of a hassle it is. I use it several times a week.

Edit: Someone brought this to my attention: https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/why-apples-macbook-pro-will-g...
I was saying Terry Tao specifically for living people.

I also don't know a ton about him, but as someone in the math scene, he's the only modern-day mathematician I hear about with any regularity.
That's more of what I'm looking to substantiate...thank you.
New Linux laptop offers RTX 3080 and 144 Hz 17-inch screen
In the EU it got harder and harder to cheat the digital tachographs. The latest generation of smart tachographs record GPS coordinates of start/stop points so one can no longer cheat with a magnet on the wheel's Hall sensor. Everything is signed cryptograpghcally, even the wheel sensors have a crypto seal, the only way to cheat is to use tampered firmware, which carries huge penalties. I'm surprised at how deregulated the US transportation market is by comparison.
He was working at Netflix. He ensured that the deals between Netflix and the startups would be greenlit, as long as the startups handed him some cash/stock under the table. It’s classic bribery. The article is a bit confusing by only mentioning the implementation of the bribe (“consulting”), but it’s just bribery.
And an indirect victim is all of the competitors to the companies that were complicit in this scheme; presumably their services were displaced by those who paid-to-play.
He worked for Netflix, he was responsible for finding a vendor, and he basically chose a vendor based on who would pay him, personally, to let them be the vendor for Netflix. He didn't choose based on who would be the best vendor for Netflix, even though that's what Netflix was paying him to do. Netflix presumably would not have wanted him to do this if they had known what he was doing.
So all the Sox compliance in the world did nothing to prevent this fraud?
The formula 1 template of going remote (slide deck)
full slide deck on how F1 TV Production went remote
> And we tuned it from there to into its own sort of mini-SAT with an accompanying preparatory industry and culture.

Agreed - interview prep is a cottage industry.

It should be worth reflecting and discussing why that is. If tech interviews are not horribly flawed, why is there a small industry of paid prep resources for passing those interviews?
Do they know this? Are you a service provider?
What are the disclosure laws if an exec has a stake in a public or private company, and there is an actual or potential vendor relationship with that company?

Are there even laws for this, or is it more about company policies set by the BoD?
Eye-opening.
My answer within the last few decades would be Alexander Grothendieck and I’d place him higher than Tao, Scholze and any other living (or dead) mathematician within that time frame.

Few in the HN crowd understand the mathematics Grothendieck worked in and therefore cannot properly assess his contributions and intellect due to their unfamiliarity with his work.

von Neumann had savant like intelligence, but Grothendieck was in an unmatched league of his own in terms of abstractions.
Maybe, instead of hiring a single person, you should hire Netflix itself. Netflix itself surely knows a lot about the kinds of companies that do business with Netflix.

Let Netflix worry about compensating the people who are doing the work.
Wow. According to the listing in the app store, there are actually 4 in-app purchases in DayCount. DayCount Premium ($9.99), DayCount Forever ($27.99), DayCount Pro ($12.99), and StreakCount ($12.99).

The first says it is a 1 year subscription when viewed on in the store on my iPad, but does not say subscription when viewed in the store on the web. The other three do not say subscription on either the web or iPad.

I can't find anything anywhere either on the store or on the developer's site that says what any of those actually do above what the free version does.
First Bitcoin futures ETF rises 2% in trading debut on the NYSE
FP-like syntax is hardly possible to make ergonomic without automatic currying.

Which, I suppose, is out of question. It's hard to introduce in a backwards-compatible manner.

Why, I won't mind if MS developed a variant of Elm instead of TS. But that would be not realistic for a number of reasons. You can only turn a supertanker slowly.
There is less political corruption in the US than people think. Everything is so scrutinized these days, especially compared to the rest of the world. White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu's travel expenses scandal was a big deal at the time, and this was in 1992 (before social media) and the amount of $ was pretty small. I think insider trading is possible concern though, although that too has gotten considerable scrutiny in the media.
Because even the salary/bonus of a VP at Netflix is never really enough for some folks. And, as sibling comment eludes to, there's always one more ladder rung above you. No, of course you don't get it. Yes, of course you'd live just fine on that salary with tons of money left over. So would I...until I become a VP at Netflix.

But it's the bigger question of whether a person of such morals has VP material written all over them, or if the position causes one's formerly-solid morals to slip a bit (or a lot).
I recommend this:

https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowser...
An even better one would be "Einstein's General Relativity model supported by (another) observation". We've had many similar observations already (e.g. Mercury's procession around the Sun) that provide similar confirmation.

That's why there is such consternation about it, versus the Standard Model born of quantum physics: both models have tons of confirming evidence supporting them, and yet they are at some level incompatible/incomplete. There's a gap in our knowledge, understanding, and intuition.
If that's the case though, why not keep DNS for now, especially for the initial handshake?

Then, similar to HSTS, the browser could remember the mapping and use the DNS name as a pet name for the target.

Another alternative would be to use "phonebooks". One could trust a few trusted websites for the initial handshake: "oh, just google battery horse to find my blog". Or: I'm linked on John's blog. That goes well with pet names, but is a bit more involved.

In any case, as long as the underlying identifier is secure and unique, you can just share that trough other means (links, Qr codes, messages, etc).
I once saw a presentation by Chip Elliott about a project to make video sensors ultra low power. They were redesigning the sensors from the ground up to reduce power usage in order to enable cameras to be used as very low power sensing devices. They were thinking that instead of processing a lot of captured video computation could be embedded in the sensor to make sensors that could output sophisticated signals from a dedicated chip. For example a chip that detects people or faces, a circle detecting chip, or a video flow analysis chip. All that is available in software these days, but the idea was to build it into hardware that requires almost no power. The intent was to take the huge potential of cameras as sensors and remove the high costs of power and computation as a restraint on their use, making them as cheap to use as a temperature sensor, possibly revolutionizing sensing and greatly increasing the sophistication of sensors. Combining that work with event-based cameras seems like a natural fit. Never heard any more about the project, I wonder if they've had any success. Tried a Google Scholar search but didn't find anything published.
Yeah but if you just write plain old readable code that doesn't use esoteric syntax sugar, then the problem is that almost anyone can understand it without having to google stuff.
Why this is so poorly understood by people is beyond.

Small businesses always complain about how they can’t afford to pay more. But if you need to pay less than a minimum wage to make your business viable then… it’s not viable.

Well..if there were laws to enforce a higher minimum wage, all of your competitors would have to do it too and the price of products across your industry would rise.

The myth here is that everyone would suddenly stop buying things, but with higher wages people can afford to spend more.

Over the years we’re in the same boat and the cycle begins again with a new minimum wage - that’s ok.
So this guy traded his reputation and possibly his freedom for some small kickbacks? When his other option was stay at Netflix as a VP? When RSUs were around $9 (current stock price: $635)?

I wonder how much money he threw away assuming he had stayed 5-6 years instead. $5m? $10m?
There are in fact plenty of people who believe that people shouldn’t be able to get away with white collar crime to the tune of millions of dollars with a slap on the wrist, when petty criminals get much worse sentences for more minor trespasses.
About a decade back, CrowdStrike earned a reputation of being one of US Gov's (mostly LEO but some IC) CyberFUD mouthpieces - along with Mandiant, FireEye and Cylance. They often served to help US Gov amplify it's "Cyber PearlHarbor" narratives - while generally offering zero evidence.

The legacy of those companies (now much consolidated) is they never, ever report on US Gov intrusions into (often friendly) foreign networks.
Hm, yeah, that definitely sounds like a resolver bug. Did you report it? I'm curious to see if it was fixed.