skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except Amazon started as a third-party marketplace. This isn't *new*, some of us just have really short memories. For the first several years the only first-party sales they did were in books (and not all books on the store even at the beginning). They've expanded into other first-party categories, but there are much fewer first-party categories than people assume. (And always have been.)

The big thing that changed isn't the third-party marketplace on Amazon, it's that they increasingly and intentionally blurred the lines between "third-party" and "second-party" marketplaces. Any third-party that uses "Fulfilled by Amazon" logistics (warehouses, shipping) just about gets automatically upgraded in the Amazon user experience to "second-party" even if Amazon has no deeper working relationship with the third-party than "Fulfilled by Amazon".

Some of that intentional blurring of the lines is also questionably Dark Patterns intentionally designed to confuse consumers in just exactly what categories Amazon supports directly (first-party) and which ones are third-party, and more importantly which ones are first-party usually versus third-party today (such as sold out goods). They want to give consumers the illusion of an "everything store" that is never out of stock. That's never the practical reality, and the illusion may be evil from the perspective of shadily pushing consumers to unvetted third parties due to Dark Patterns that back that illusion.
It is actually insane

I just lost after putting a $1,325,000 bid on a $1,000,000 list price for a 1000sqft house

Edit, Zero added
Related:

Fast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860 - Dec 2019 (291 comments)

Fast – Examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844301 - Dec 2019 (2 comments)

Fast · Patrick Collison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355237 - Oct 2019 (3 comments)
The ratio of price/income has been growing way faster over the last decades.
Hi mkaic,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I can't say that i don't believe in AGI because i don't think i understand what AGI as an entity encapsulates in terms of it's nature.

I'm unable to cope with equating it to humans because, for example, an AGI at "the beginning of it's origins" does not have same sensory or mechanical organs as the man.
So what nature do we think it does possess?

Another question that bothers me is that sentient beings as we know them in the nature, even the most primitive ones, seem to do something based on an innate purpose. I don't think the purpose itself is easy to define. But it certainly seems to get simpler for the simpler organisations and seems to be survival / multiplication at its basest level. What will a complicated entity, that originated with so many parameters, evolve "towards"?

And yet another question i have is around the whole idea of the information available on the internet being a source for learning for this entity. Again to my previous point, is not much of this information to do with the humans and their abode?

Neither am i skeptical nor do i disbelieve in a drastic change of scene. I'm simply unable to imagine what it looks like ...
It gets even weirder when your bank acts like a scammer. A few weeks ago I was trying to help my wife add her USBank credit card to Apple Pay and Apple Pay said I needed to call this number to finish setting up the card. So I call the number and the guy is very friendly and asks me for a bunch of identity verification details, which I provide to him, but then he asks us to send a code back that will be coming over text messaging - yes, I initiated the phone call, but I suddenly realize that the number Apple directed me to was not the same number on my USBank card. Being a bit paranoid I tell the guy “Look, nothing personal but I get nervous when people ask for a verification code to be read back to them, I’m just going to call the regular number and go from there, okay?” Instead of being friendly, this guy suddenly gets in my face and is like “Oh, you’ll give me all this other info but won’t read that code back to me? I’m Fraud Prevention dude, good luck getting this done calling the main number. Oh, and just for this I’m putting a block on your card.” I hung up immediately and called US Bank’s main number and asked to talk to a supervisor - sure as hell, it turns out the guy I had talked to did work in their fraud prevention department and actually had retaliated against me by locking my credit card. It was the most incredibly ugly thing I’ve ever seen from a customer service department.
If a vendor creating IP/code for your company violates a license, your company violates the license. It can even be as simple as a contractor using an image that they don't have a license for. If they upload the image on your website/use it anywhere public, you are liable. Recently had a client that had to pay out $30k because one of their contractors did exactly that.

This is very basic stuff and makes me wonder if you've ever worked in a vendor/client relationship before.
>In April 2021, signal outraged the open-source community by going a whole year without publishing their server code updates.

So? We have no way to be sure what is actually running on the server. In an end to end encrypted system, if the server can degrade security then you are doing it wrong.
I’m talking about criminals. I’m raising them as an example of why governments need these powers.

404 BTW
The conspiracy theory (at this point, is it even one?) is that they want to create a virus that targets only certain ethnic group, like SARS2 did to some extent, or at least being a able to have the vaccine before everyone else, which also happened to some extent.

Because otherwise there are no valid reasons to create this kind of pathogens in labs; the chance the bugs created there will be similar to the naturally occurring ones are basically none and even less so that the vaccines or treatment will be or remain efficient treatment.
It's more a growth of the home-buying demographics. If you look at it, millenials are a larger demographic boom than the baby boomers. They are basically at or entering their years of top demand for buying homes. If you compare the potential demand to supply, you'll see a mismatch that will likely go on for the next 10 years.
Probably because the phone number is calling about a scam (fradulant charge), and then when they hang up, people report the phone number as a scam because they don't understand the difference.
> Saying 'this is what we call hyperbole' seems to imply, 'my ideas stand so well on their own, I don't need to respond to your criticism; the problem is not with my ideas or how I've expressed them, it is with your inability to recognize a particular rhetorical device.'

Well. now this is a strawman.
It certainly does now that you’ve posted an off topic low quality comment.
One of the things that bugs me about spreadsheets is that they encourage people to set up very fragile unnamed things, like “the value of row X” or whatever. Then the spreadsheets become gigantic and hard to understand but the owners still swear by their data. Meanwhile in the back of my head I’m thinking: this thing could be totally wrong by now and you have not really set yourself up to see that happening.
Hey Kostas here (one of the 3 people we did this). We are actually using a WASM port of chocolate-doom from which we are getting the frame buffer from WebGL. We use 256 time series to represent each color, and then we are using an algorithm to map pixel data to their corresponding time series. Since doom uses more than 256 colors, we are using a redmean approximation to find the closest match
Great job! I think this list is nice in that it’s both a list of tools (I found some interesting ones I had no idea about) but also a dev stack that I can deploy.

I don’t identify with a lot of commenters as my company does a lot of experimental work so I’d rather not pay the cloud tax, both in money and in lock-in.

I launched a product in the European space that has since fizzled but people loved the lack of cookie banners and the fact that their data was in a silo. I think your stack helps in this regard.

Awesome!
Is it any surprise meetings around this topic are contentions?

Fauci was receiving credible death threats and even on this topic thread here there are a number of dead comments with comments similar to (and I quote): Fauci must be executed for us to move forward.

The idea that people voice approval for executing people they disagree with is so repugnant and contrary to the idea of civil discourse I don't find it surprising people start yelling in science meetings about the topic.
Up to 5g means it's on the right quartile. 0.1g would be in the left quartile. The peak of the curve would be less than 5g. And by less I mean 2-3g or less not 4.9g. Sorry, but even under your model it's not possible to be "on average" 5g and also "up to" 5g. If the risk of multiple independent varying non-zero contributors is high enough I can score a big hitter then "up to" would be higher.

I am sure I injest microplastics but I want good science behind how I assess the risk.

One of their cites appears to be a paper on a catastrophic fire in a plastics feedstock factory in a rural location in south Asia. I am sure they got a lot of contamination. But Australia isn't importing those foods. The authors are in Australia. I'd really like them to indicate how much of this burden is in the supply chain in Australia.

The main reference paper (austria not australia this time) talks about plastics aggregation in shellfish. And a lot about BPA contamination of breastfeeding bottles. There's been a push to remove BPA from plastics in the food chain, so I would hope there would be some detail on how this is changing. A lot of the citations are on the cytotoxic qualities of plastics, but not on the indicative amounts in the food chain.

So my primary problem is that I want to believe we have a significant issue here. I truly do, I think petrochemicals and plastics contamination have to be take seriously. But I am concerned this paper is promulgating a magic scare number which is going to be challenged and wind up undermining the case.

Btw most of that 5g would be excreted. What isn't is hugely worrying. Do not use plastic bottled water, and try to limit your use of plastics in microwave cooking especially of oily and sugary foods (which maximise absorption of plastics and pthylates)
There is every reason that macroeconomic conditions would affect the value of land, but relatively silly and incidental reasons that the price of land would be so strongly coupled to the price of a home to live in (itself a depreciating commodity).
You need a mechanism to decide the ratio of currency/population necessary to prevent a deflationary cycle.
I wonder how much of this has to do with flippers buying up rental properties to 'rehab', put a few coats of paint, change the tiles, flush out undesirables on and sell onward. Higher real estate turnover could put a damper on vacancy rates.
A lot of this is tough to evaluate as a lay person. For example:

>From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells.

>A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2, which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory work gone awry.

Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe the furin cleavage site is the most important part for infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be the area scientists focus on.

Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.
> Presumably, Daszak possessed a great deal of that inaccessible data. He said as much during a March 2021 panel organized by a London-based think tank: “A lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases.” Previously, EcoHealth Alliance had signed a pledge, along with 57 other scientific and medical organizations, to share data promptly in the event of a global public health emergency. And yet, in the face of just such an emergency, Daszak told Nature magazine, “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”

Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright criminal.
I'm not sure if Transformers are necessarily the spark. My personal pet theory is that the absolute most important thing we need to crack is online self-modification, i.e. letting the model alter its own structure and optimization as it is inferencing. I think getting that level of flexibility to be stable during training is extremely important.

And wow, thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the film! I had to learn a ton of new techniques to pull it off haha, but I'm quite satisfied with the result. I've got some pretty fun ideas for episode 2 already, too!
> He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities of the lab..

I don't believe a PhD in virology is necessary to understand that this is some risky business. Not being in-line for patent royalties (or retributions--prisoner's dilemma and all that) may have made his lips a little looser than those of his co-workers.
Oooh, nice, this has levels to it.

1) The Fed should create the outcomes such that their predictions were wrong

2) While also just having a bad interpretation of data to begin with

3) The Fed is only imagining that its toolkit can cause a specific outcome for economic growth, but it cannot cause humans to transact a certain way or predict what a large group of humans (or large pool of capital) will do. No economist can, and the other economists don't have an infinite balance sheet to try to influence it either.

4) The Fed was never asked to or mandated to do the things it does to stimulus the economy. (Caveat, the stimulus bills in 2020 are a major exception). The Fed just notices that nobody can stop it. Similar to the Supreme Court realizing that and testing it in Marbury v Madison. Congress lacks consensus on it and everyone is afraid of the alternative (Congress having to deal with monetary policy themselves, politically).
Reminds of me of Tony Abbott getting hacked https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minis...
I don’t think that COVID significantly affect population demographics in non-elderly cohorts.

Same point in a different context: I would be skeptical of someone arguing that the reason for the Great Resignation is opportunities opening up in the workforce due to COVID casualties. The numbers just aren’t high enough.
At the same time Zillow managed to lose a billion dollars last year buying and selling homes (the so-called “iBuy” program that they were forced to terminate).

Something doesn’t add up? But maybe it’s just a question of most homes on the market actually not being desirable enough to get these high bids.
I've also been using WizTree for quite a while, but recently learned WinDirStat scans the filesystem instead of trusting the NTFS metadata because it can sometimes be incorrect(?) and is a bit tricky due to poor documentation.
The WDS developer actually addressed this in AWDS's issues 4[1] and 19[2] a few years ago, and even said he's contemplating supporting the MFT but it seems he hasn't gotten around to it.

1: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/issues/4#issuecomme...
2: https://github.com/ariccio/altWinDirStat/issues/19#issuecomm...
I guess is this the subthread where we list other disk space analyzer tools.

I've been using TreeSize Free/Pro on Windows since as long as I can remember. Solid program, nice "old school" interface that I really enjoy using. Not open source, but worth paying for.
I'm sure that those with a lot more hardware experience than me have the intuition to make guesses like this but I was surprised at:

>You have to register to download the HDMI spec which is more effort than I have for this, but the Hot Plug Detect pin has a pretty descriptive name. I guessed that this either has to be pulled up or pulled down to signal that a cable is connected. Sticking a 20K resistor to the 5V pin seemed to do the trick. With the oscilloscope, we can now see activity on the SCL/SDA lines when it's plugged into the laptop.

Is it really not that concerning to just guess what amperage will/won't fry something? I mean, you could test from very high resistances downwards, but you might overshoot, right? Or is there an assumption that the hardware on either end will provide the appropriate resistance, in this case?
It's been about 17 years, that should be long enough :)
Oh, whoops, I'll edit the comment to make it more clear. Thanks for reminding me.
There's something about the possibility of fragging your exceptions that is probably zen-inducing for a lot of folks.
Sure, but this is HN, I'm optimizing karma for both sides here ;P

(I agree with you though, and I eagerly await the scientific studies that quantify Vaping cannabis vs. smoking)
Discussed yesterday:

SerenityOS Browser now passes the Acid3 test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30853392 - March 2022 (141 comments)

Lots more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30858768
Singularity...

The whole concept of the Kurtzweilian "singularity" has always felt to me like a technology-flavored hand-wave of eschatological thought: AI designs AI in a recursive manner, science/technological progress (whatever it means in this context) leaps ahead at an ever-increasing rate, then we all go to heaven and/or the world ends because robots kill us all.

Some people are big fans of the singularity meme (using the word in the original meaning, not mockingly), and I respect that, but I have always felt aversion towards it.

I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I guess it is partially because of the idea of ever-increasing infinite technological progress. This can certainly exist on a theoretical thought experiment level but not in a physical world which has finite resources. Strong AI or not, unless we go fully into science fiction with pocket-sized Dyson spheres powered by quantum fluctuations and powering an entire planet and blah blah blah, such AI would have to interface with the physical world to do anything meaningful, and it would be limited by the available resources and most importantly by what is feasible and what is not.

Edit: fixed some of the typos
Seems like the phone number was not shown, but was transmitted to the browser. He did open developer tools, so according to the Missouri governor that's hacking:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/15/f12-isnt-hacking-missouri-...

Ah, Boing Boing, I look back in shame that I used to think you were the coolest blog...
More papers related to the subject here forgottenphysics.com

I recommend reading the papers when you get the chance. The author did a great job digging through and summarizing the historical record to help explain how Quantum Mechanics was born at the turn of the 20th century, along with her own contributions.
In short: Indeed there are hidden variables in the equations that comprise the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.

1. Planck’s energy equation has a hidden time variable. The equation should be E=htf where h is an energy constant, not an action constant. This implies that each wavelength of light has mass h/c^2 (and therefore momentum), and the fine structure constant has units [cycle x seconds].

2. Planck’s famous black body paper had an undeveloped hypothesis in it that nearly went forgotten. The author calls this the resonance hypothesis. The upshot is that E=Kb x T is missing a term that describes the resonant energy of the system. The equation relating energy directly to temperature via Boltzmann’s constant is in turn only describing the unorderly energy in the system and should be considered a lower bound of the energy of a system of molecules.
The criticisms I've heard typically reference pause times in the tens or hundreds of milliseconds. Agreed that different domains and applications have different requirements for pause times. I would be very interested to see histograms of pause times for different GCs, but I'm pretty sure the specific results would vary a lot depending on the specific corpus of applications under benchmark. If your 99%-ile pause time is tens of microseconds, is that good enough for video games? Audio kernels?
I've seen this thought many times:

> AGI 1 will create the next even better AGI 2

But this doesn't quite make sense. If AGI 1 is conscious, why would it create a different more powerfull conscious AGI 2 to take it's place? This would mean at best the sidelining of AGI 1. At worse, AGI 2 could kill AGI 1 to prevent competition.

Unless AGI 1 could seamlessly transfer it's own instance of consciousness to AGI 2, like a body upgrade. Otherwise it would be like let's say Putin giving his place and power to another person which is smarter than him. This just doesn't happen.

In the case of the seamless transfer, how could AGI 1 be sure that AGI 2 doesn't have a latent flaw that makes it go insane some time later? Could it just keep AGI 1 around for a while? But since they are now diverging clones they are competing against each other.
Well no, it isn't obvious. Component and manufacturing costs do influence a significant part of the final sale price of a product, regardless of what people like to think. "Apple charges $200 more because they had to use a special manufacturing process which costs more" is an equally believable answer.
No, not to my knowledge. It seems that they obtained/built my pre-college profile many years ago, but they attempted scam until later and failed to match it up-to-date
Population isn't growing much at this point tho. It's trending to 0%.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...
> No wonder even institutions are now buying, in fact one in every 3 SFHs in US are now owned by institutions.

Source?
”JavaScript. Brendan Eich implemented the first prototype for JavaScript in 10 days”

A good example of when fast is horrible. Developers have been paying the price for all the design flaws in JS ever since — billions of hours of extra work.

(yes, it’s hard to design something perfect in one iteration, but I think we can all agree that 10 days was rushed, Brendan has said so himself)

Some of the other items on the list are really impressive though!
Many banks today have communications preferences options and I've told all of my banks that do to never call me directly. If I receive any sort of legitimate call from them I immediately follow up with a strongly worded letter that they should not have called me and violated their own security policies.

The only thing we can do about "bank behaviors make it easier for scammers" is to change bank behaviors. It's not an easy process, but unfortunately it is a necessary process.
I wonder about these grand conspiracies. I am on the fence as to whether the world is controlled by a global elite of super geniuses stealing from the unwashed masses. Or whether the people in charge actually are just wildy incompetent. I'd say the evidence supports both.
This comment can be deleted if it’s out of scope, but I have a question:

Did you even try to find this source on your own? If not, whose obligation do you think it is to supply a source for empirical claims in a civil discussion?

Or if you’re trying to educate yourself or simply asking out of interest, there’s probably a more meaningful way of engaging with the OP than a one word comment: ‘source’.