skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depending on exactly when you bought your car from Carvana, Carvana likely lost between $2,000 and $5,000 on your purchase. Carvana has never made money on selling cars. If you're willing to pay $5,000 more for a used car because you'd like good service, then there are a great deal of options available to you. The simplest option is to go to a reputable dealership that focuses on customer service (which have existed and continue to exist!) or you could find a legacy player that is moving into the space. Elsewhere in this thread, someone mentioned that they recently had a great experience with CarMax.

At its core, my argument is that there is a sweet spot in which you can get great service from these "boring industry + technology + money" companies but that's because they're actively pursuing good customer service at any cost with no consideration for making money. As soon as the company (or its investors) realise this behaviour is unsustainable, they forget all about their narrative and go all in on making money -- which is when the quality of the service slips.

The amount you pay to Carvana (more or less than you'd pay elsewhere) doesn't have a relationship to the quality of service you will receive, because it's not a "normal" business.

There can be positive consumer outcomes from companies that approach business like Carvana: in the short term, customers get investor-subsidised products, and in the long term, other players in the industry get to learn from consumer reception (e.g: CarMax probably learned about demand for higher quality service from what Carvana demonstrated early on) but Carvana specifically is doomed to failure because it isn't a sustainable company that made a bad decision during the pandemic... it's been unsustainable its entire life.
Fair enough, but this implies that this use case is for a business context, in a business environment. All my comments are only applicable to the home/personal use context.

I don't care what spyware/crapware microsoft chooses to add to the enterprise setting.
I'm not going to focus on the problem here. I just want to say that I like the idea behind your website, a good source of market research. Bookmarked it.
*mis-allocation
Brutal honesty, you mean. Where often the person is more interested in the "brutal" part than the honesty.
What if I use developer tools to edit the contract before I click "Accept"? I doubt there is a single website in the world that takes whatever text is displayed and saves that for each individual account. I could print out a copy before I click accpet so that there would be a record of it, if I went to court. Is it a contract if I don't sign it, but merely click accept, and if they don't sign it either and then provide a copy with both signatures?
Do you sell outside of Amazon?
Making a transparent distributed operating system in the mid-late 80s and 90s as a Unix replacement was total over-engineering and over-complexity that never had any real demand or advantage. Therefore it is a great example, you just refuse to acknowledge that. Comparing it with actual real world operating systems of the time is misleading and does not refute the second system syndrome, because a lot of complexity in those came about from making them work in in real systems which Plan9 did not need. The fact is there was significant effort and complexity put into making it distributed, and that would not be required if it did not have this unnecessary capability.

You're grasping at straws a bit here, I would have expected you to defend your argument a bit better. First you try to justify the distributed capabilities of Plan 9 by saying it's now used in kubernetes 30 years on, and when I point out that's not transparent at the OS layer then you just change to not accepting it is a complexity at all.

Anyway the argument is pointless to continue. Plan 9 was a commercial failure and brought little new to systems design. It was a warmed over Unix with over-engineered distributed systems concepts that had been built up since the 50s and 60s and weren't new. At least contemporaries like OS/400 were attempting to bring something new even if they did not ultimately succeed (although OS/400 itself was far more of a commercial success than Plan9 of course).
> These are professors and language experts, so I'm a bit surprised by the presentation.

I am not surprised by this at all. If they really want to create something practical, I would rather employ the creator of Turbo Pascal, than one of the creators of Haskell. To me it seems as SPJ et al. are taking the money to do something fun and interesting, and scratching an itch they had for some time. Nothing wrong with that, but don't expect something that will be useful anytime soon.
Social Infrastructure Saves Lives: Analysis of Japan’s 3/11 Disasters
I wonder what they get out of this. Injecting ads perhaps?
Really cool to see that the libraries have preserved this book. It's out of print for so long that the copies on Amazon are 400$ upwards, but I was able to fetch a pdf from LibGen - someone has digitised a copy from a Turkish university library.
They should really be working on their own solutions as they can afford it rather than buying from pool of hardware small businesses are struggling to secure.
The Thunderscreech had a supersonic propeller.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscree...

Unsurprisingly it was noisy.
The Role of SBF's Parents Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried in FTX's Rise
> No one wants that. We want separated bike lanes. I also don't see why this angers drivers, you should want it too because now there's no cyclists on your car road. Everyone wins.

You may want that, and indeed, I would highly prefer that, but most people who discuss this can only think about political punishments to affect behavior and go back to thinking that driving must absolutely suck in order for people to choose other options, rather than making alternatives even better than driving.

You don't need to begin with the mindset of "too many car lanes, destroy them until people are forced to use the nonexistant bus". It should begin with "people prefer driving. How many we make something even better so they don't prefer driving anyone?"

Sure, that will begin a competition between transportation modes, but when it comes from trying to make something even better, not out of wrath of driving/cars, then perhaps people will listen.
Thirty years ago, I worked for the Navy and had some exposure to propeller design for submarines. Military propellers at that time were already employing complex shapes for efficiency (and noise reduction). While it certainly takes time for military technologies (especially classified ones, which propeller shapes were) to propagate into the civilian world, in this case, I think the issue is primarily cost. Civilian props have remained quite simple because the cost of manufacturing complex shapes is high (often requiring multi-axis milling machines). In addition, repairability and other concerns may be more important than efficiency.

While I don't work in fluid dynamics anymore, it's cool to see people explore some of these ideas in the civilian world. Unfortunately, they may be solving the wrong problem for the vast majority of their users, for whom the cost doesn't justify any performance benefit.
It was the B-movie era. You usually saw a double feature and a cartoon or two for your dime.

The same night could include Giant and a forgettable sci-fi flick.
These numbers only matter if the DE is of significant size compared to your applications.

So basically, if you plan to use a browser that is not links, don't waste your time with a minimal WM (unless you want to for personal reasons).
Binance CEO acknowledges temporarily suspending accounts over “abnormal” trading
Twenty years ago those would signal strongly that you don't depend on or respect social conventions. Now, that you have a lot of disposable income.
Degrowth can work – here’s how science can help
I think you’re making the flawed assumption that no one would ever downvote something that might be well-intentioned, well-argued, but unpopular (for example, literally anything about Covid that goes against popular opinion).
> A single uncompressed 1080p 32-bit (24-bit with 8-bit alpha) wallpaper is 66MB of RAM.

I think you mixed up bits and Bytes there. 1920px * 1080px * 4 Bytes/px = 8294400 Bytes = 8100 MiB. For 4k it's the quadruple.
Twitter’s New Head of Trust and Safety Says Platform Wants to Move Quickly
Instead you want to avoid/deny eventual natural death for ever? Fight it? To be at peace with the process of aging and the thought of eventually dying is not the same as suicidal thinking.

> I cannot see a world in which this could be deemed healthy.

I cannot see a world in which fighting and avoiding natural death can take healthy forms. All matter decays. All things recycle. We have material bodies, hence we are part of the cycle of life. The old giving way to the new is a necessity for growth & evolution. I would even say it's beautiful. And healthy.
it seems hard to define what unexpected means, and that case laws to establish them would take ages, be difficult to predict for a long time, and can be avoided by the company settling discretely, and prevent any actual precedents.

Legislation should be written so that litigation wouldn't be required to uphold consumer rights.

Imagine similar concept to GDPR, but for consumer rights that must be adhered to, or be fined. You cannot sign away your rights under GDPR, and you automatically get those rights by virtue of being based in Europe.
> No, this ticket intended to literally just fix a typo is not also going to fix this unrelated bug qa discovered while testing.

That's basically how it is supposed to work. If you need something to get fixed, create an item/bug for it and let it get prioritized.
Fun part of that is that the political systems are flawed as well and actively resist hiring new politicians who are more principled. In the US, it’s almost impossible to win without endorsement from Dem or Rep parties. Anywhere that does First Past the Post will devolve to two party rule at scale. Many countries have authoritarian regimes, so elections don’t matter. Even just drawing political lines is fraught and liable to bias against the will of the people based on existing precedent. Money in politics provides advantages to the rich and corporate interests.

Politicians are motivated to keep constituents happy, but only so far. The political systems generally provide a significant buffer for politicians to act on behalf of themselves or their donors and not get replaced.
Tell me about it. I was told many times that we should have "locked down harder", like "sensible countries" including Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Of course the vaccine helped but their effectiveness wanes after a few months. Additionally, even being vaccinated, catching covid can still take a small toll on the body. I know people who were up to date with their covid shots, but have caught covid-19 strains three times, (in other words they got tested to confirm) more often they wear clear signs of the impact having it so frequently has had on them.

The covid spike toxicity due to the spike being present from being administered "most" vaccines and covid-19 itself, is my guess for the reason there's similar problems in both groups, albeit, to a very much smaller extent with vaccinated people. I know first hand a couple of people who reported a serious issue with the vaccines, in particular one was a nurse who's got a couple of young kids, but back at work, working at the local hospital, telling me she now needs to be fitted with a pace maker after she reacted to her vaccine shot. My next door neighbour who's slightly older in her late 30s, possibly early 40s, was fit, not fat, was anti vaxx, caught covid a few months back iirc, had a mild case in so much as she was handed medication and asked to ride it out back at her own residence, and afterwards with about the same mind set on vaccines ... I hadn't seen her in a bit, spoke to her last week, she's a couple month after open heart surgery ... very pro vaxx now ...
Don't you find it problematic to put the research in climate sciences on the same level as predictions by Charles Manson and other cult leaders?
The Northeast Corridor high speed retrack is planned to exceed $100 billion. Records are made to be broken.
> Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.

No but there are laws of chemistry.

The point the previous poster was trying to make is, that the industry needs natural gas as a precursor product, mainly for the chemical industry. Obviously, you cannot replace that with electricity easily. Over 12% of Germany's natural gas use is purely for the chemical reactions it provides within the chemical industry. A further 10% is for use in the metal industry where gas also has been notoriously hard to replace as it's not used for its energy value alone but for providing reduction reactions.

What you say basically is, not only Germany should have kept on building nuclear, it should also have developed new hydrogen based industrial flows for all these sectors alone, things that exist nowhere on this world on actual scale.

So LNG terminals would have been necessary in any case. Germany had none due to the over-reliance on Russian gas.

Otherwise I will not comment on the difficulty of replacing domestic heating, which IS a huge block of gas usage, on the scale of a whole country, as others have already done this.
Silly lawmakers, thinking that a boat that sticks nets in the water is a different business with different concerns than an on-land factory that takes fish as an input.

BTW, this is Newfoundland where, left to their own devices free from interference from “nanny state lawmakers”, the local fishing industry used improved technology and salt-of-the-earth rural knowhow to … deplete fishing stocks so quickly and efficiently that the cod catch fell to 1% of historic levels by the time a 30 year moratorium was declared in 1992.

The maintenance and management of the illusion that the Newfoundland coast’s core industry, and the “outport” communities like the Change Islands that depend on it, are viable, and the softening of the landing of their decline, has been a project of that annoying nanny state for like a half century at this point.

There’s no fish processing facility on those islands because there are eventually going to be no little fishing boats and no town. Stand back a bit, and it’s 185 people whose net-negative presence on some remote islands is being subsidized at a massive loss by the rest of society.
I thought Germany's dependency on Russian gas was the reason this time?
Well, people will probably maintain the same level of belief that they have now. Given the timing, are these leaks arranged to make Musk look one way, or Twitter look another?
No, I'm not assuming that. You can't have "must comment to downvote" just for those though, and having it for all is bad for the given reasons.
Well, as stated, the iPad and MacBook Pro aren't accessories, hence their margin aren't marked as such. You dont calculate the same BOM cost on Accessories with higher margin and expect the same result on a different product categories.
Are you saying there is a moral equivalence equivalence between killing terrorists in military operations .. and going to another country to behead a journalist who said mean things about you?
Right, what content voting has? None. That's why it is irrelevant for me.
But the bar really isn't 'no human can tell' the bar is 'the bulk of the humans can't tell'.

> Things would be quite different if an AI could interpret new information and form opinions, but even if GPT could be extended to do so, right now it doesn't seem to have the capability to form opinions or ingest new information (beyond a limited short term memory that it can use to have a coherent conversation).

Forming opinions is just another mode of text transformations, ingesting new information is either a conscious decision to not let the genie out of the bottle just yet or a performance limitation, neither of those should be seen as cast in stone, the one is a matter of making the model incremental (which should already be possible), the other merely a matter of time.
And completely different from 'uninhabitable'.
Disclaimer: This is a paid post and should not be treated as news/advice

GTFO NFT BS
Create children's stories in no time using AI
Storywizard uses the latest advances in generative AI (and some magic) to help parents and kids generate unique and beautiful children's stories with vivid images and enjoyable plots.
It's not that it's difficult, its just that it's not perfectly efficient. So once you include the inefficiencies of the heat engine it not necessarily producing energy on net.

But there are also some engineering challenges to work out in employing heat generated like this to drive a heat engine, at least with somethings decent like 30% efficiency.
Why the laws of physics don't exist
You are correct in stating that current chat bots, such as GPT, do not have the ability to form opinions or interpret new information beyond a limited short term memory. This is a limitation of current technology, and as a result, chat bots are limited in their ability to engage in complex arguments or discussions. However, it is important to note that the development of AI technology is ongoing, and it is possible that future advances will allow for the development of more sophisticated AI systems that are capable of forming opinions and interpreting new information. Until that time, chat bots will continue to be limited in their abilities.
>How does this reassure anyone?

By only saying "Hey, so everything is fine, just look at this fancy report with a fancy name on it" and assuming that they don't actually read it.
CRI80 bulbs just grate on me. Even some of the ones rated 90 I find a little annoying (which I've occasionally had to settle for for e.g. downlights in a particular depth). And some of mine that I've bought that are rated 95+, I'm skeptical of.

I'm too pedantic / OCD-ish to deal with the colors being so off. If you're the sort of person that's bugged by that sort of thing, just bite the bullet and get the better bulbs. If you've still got old indansecents around, try them out in that fixture. If you feel like it restores sanity, then high CRI LEDs will too.

I wish I could say, "They'll last you 10 years", but my experience with LEDs has been that I feel like they literally die as often as my old incandescents, but because I use so many lights in my home, I'm happy for the power savings.
> and we survived it

FSVO "we".
The closest religious school I'm considering for my son is over 20 miles away currently, and obviously I can't move over night to reduce that. I also don't live on a narrow dirt road - I live in a city in a community with probably hundreds of houses

There's also no reliable transit option to either location.

Am I suppose to just suck it up, throw out my vehicle, and bike 90 minutes there just to drop him off?
Twitter is working on Crypto Currency
Sounds ripe for someone to disrupt! :D
I run KDE on an old Intel NUK. It’s got 4GB RAM, 32GB SSD and a decade old i3. KDE still flies on that system.

The only time I’ve found KDE not feel responsive was in Kubuntu. I have no idea what is different about Kubuntu vs other Linux distros but the slowness in KDE on Ubuntu is down to Ubuntu and not KDE.
U.S. Justice Dept is split over charging Binance as crypto world falters
Mandatory video by Sabine Hossenfelder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

So they probably are talking again about Q_plasma, not Q_total .
Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
You’re welcome, Internet stranger!
>Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!

I think the opposite will be true. I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening.

I dont know if you buy this theory of social media causing loneliness. I intuitively feel that way and the more I talk with friends on chat, or comment here the more lonely I feel. Meanwhile meeting my friends or strangers in real life gives me a memory boost and makes me smile.

The less everyone spends on Twitter arguing with bots, or here on HN arguing in the comments the happier we all are
Me too. Around 200, most of them with companion audiobooks.
Which is why a contract is insufficient as a form of consumer protection. Think GDPR - i think despite the disruptions as a result from it, GDPR has done a fairly good job in forcing rules so that companies complying is considered to have provided sufficient privacy and data protection.

Why not produce such a set of rules for consumer protection?
Moving to Israel I knew prescription meds were way cheaper than in the US.

What surprised me was that in the US, non-prescription meds are FAR cheaper. THe joys of having an actual free market as opposed to the captured and unwieldy hybrid that is US insurance.
Ask HN: Standard auto replies for email providers
I run a system that sends bulk email on behalf of customers. If I send an email to a non-existent address (old address book, mistyped email) then I usually get a bounce message in a machine-readable format that makes it very easy for me to mark the address as bad and to potentially flag high bounce rates against my customers.

However, a lot of email that comes back is setup as a basic auto-reply by the user. Things like "I no longer check this mailbox" or "I am/will be changing my email address" etc. These imply an error but because they are hand-written, they contain hundreds of phrases, some more specific than others and are much harder to automatically process.

I kind of think that we are far enough into the age of bulk-email service providers that people like GMail/Yahoo/Office365 etc. should provide a more useful mechanism for canned responses. Currently if you add an "out of office" it is nothing other than a message. If, instead, you could add "No longer using mailbox" or "Away for extended period" than it would allow the recipients system to send back a machine-parseable version of the auto-reply with an appropriate SMTP code e.g. "No longer using mailbox" could return a standard 5.1.6 response.

I'm not sure why with email being such a large part of most people's online footprint, that we aren't doing more to help make things much clearer. Currently it is much harder for me to try and respect privacy and enforcement of spam due to these sorts of things.
I'm sorry, but no.

My desktop is meant for multitasking, I need a lot of stuff opened to keep track of important information, and the systray allows me to glance over it, and know from which program that important notice came from.

No, I don't want to use a dedicated worspace filled with programs. No, I don't want a notification icon that has to be opened so I keep track of things.
You need a start. That's pretty much it. Everyone starts somewhere the important thing is to keep learning and growing. This means different things for different people, but it usually boils down to spending a long time learning and a bit of luck.

Going back to getting a start, unless you know people or get lucky first this will probably be something that doesn't pay well and is hard, but don't get stuck, keep learning and growing.
Larry page had a better way of framing the same idea: "the toothbrush test". He'd ask "Is this something you will use once or twice a day, and does it make your life better?"
Who invented the thumb drive?