skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Goodreads was the future of book reviews. Then Amazon bought it." Washington Post, 01 July 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/01/amazon-...

The site is built on outdated technological infrastructure, which made the cost of overhauling and updating it a challenge that was ultimately not worth it for the e-commerce giant, according to former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Meanwhile, limited manual content moderation and a lack of protective features allow users to engage in targeted harassment known as “review bombing” — behavior that has resulted in the cancellation of books and their authors.

... Former employees said Amazon seemed happy to mine Goodreads for its user-generated data and otherwise let it limp along with limited resources. In Amazon’s more than 20-year history, the company has made dozens of acquisitions, and it is not unusual for it to try to cheaply acquire properties in markets that it wants to dominate, only to let them languish. ...

Goodreads “hasn’t been all that well maintained, or updated, or kept up with what you would expect from social communities or apps in 2023,” said Jane Friedman, a publishing industry consultant. “It does feel like Amazon bought it and then abandoned it.”
It's performative, like all social media. It's about signaling to your social network that you are an intellectual
> The only downside to capital punishment is that it's possible to wrongly convict someone. Other than that...

For many, myself included, there is no "other than that." My core and unbending opposition to capital punishments exists solely on the fact that the punishment is irreversible and there's too many documented cases where executed prisoners were likely wrongfully convicted.

I could perhaps support capital punishment if we had a higher level of guilt we could establish in our legal system reserved only where the evidence is entirely(!) unequivocal for particularly heinous crimes. I don't know exactly what that means, and is probably just another bad idea.
This paper, while important, seems off-topic.
I am an avid reader. Never found goodreads interesting. I don’t want to transform reading books in a gamified, cheap experience that all too easily can devolve into status seeking.
How to use ChatGPT to practice Spanish
Show HN: Go Forward or Backward in Time
WikiBeforeAfter provides a seamless interface that enables users to input their desired time, duration, and direction (before or after) to go forward or backward in time.
> I often wonder what they really should have done?

They could have pivoted to Android earlier. I had a BlackBerry Q10 and their BB10(QNX) was actually pretty good (the unified messaging was amazing at the time), but it was clear even then that without proper Android app/ecosystem support, it was always doomed to struggle. (their clever emulator was great, but wasn't enough). - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXewkl5K7-M

When they finally did pivot to Android, their phones were pretty good (I carried the "BB Priv" for a long time, and the KeyOne was great from my short time with it). But they were way too late by then, and had to face the onslaught of Samsung / LG competition, who all had newer tech at cheaper pricing.

A BlackBerry Priv in 2011 might have saved the company, it would be competing against a "Droid Razr" and an iPhone 4S. The Priv actually arrived in 2015, and was competing against a Galaxy S6 Edge and iPhone 6S Plus. It was way too late -- people who loved their keyboards had already learned to survive with "phablet"-sized smartphones for a few years by then.
The library fines end up being too high.
This is the same argument as there may be valid reasons to curbing free speech. Once you start going down that route, there is no end. You say death penalty is reserved for the worst of the worst and only if we are 100% sure they committed the crime, the next one in line would say it may be suitable for more and when we are 90% sure of the crime. How come it is different from Sharia law, which demands a hand for theft and eye for infidelity - some can say those are also justified. All punishment that's irreversible and violates one's body should be banned.

On your second argument - if death penalty had the very least effect of turning people away from crime, USA would have much better crime stats than "rest of the western world". Most criminals operating at that level (murder, rape etc.) operate on the assumption that they will never be caught.
Is the US one of those countries?
For the same reason we can't quit Instagram (or TikTok), despite it being abundantly clear that it's extremely detrimental to our mental health.
I'm mostly on Windows, if someone sends me a Figma link I open it in a different browser because half the time it locks up for a few minutes then crashes the whole thing.

Would prefer to be sent a PDF, and you won't often catch me saying that.
Major auction houses have been involved in a whole lot of fraudulent and/or shady dealing. It's essentially part of their business model.
It actually did. There are lots of remote-first/only startups!

It's far more common for larger companies to declare RTO policies than smaller, more flexible startups.
For one thing, delivery drivers and similar can get confused if they don't know which part of the name they should expect on the doorbell... (especially if both parts of your name are uncommon)

I don't think there's an easy fix to this. Not everyone has a first and a last name, but in many places, cultural conventions (or legal practice) assume that you do.
Like with functional programming, which at extremes is only declarative, there is a tendency to call “declarative” only those approaches that are perfectly declarative and incapable of imperativeness. However, not unlike purely functional programming, declarativeness is useless unless it is contaminated with real world at some boundary.

If you pretend that COPY means with these files like those files on host machine as of execution time, RUN means with this command executed at build time, etc., then even Dockerfile becomes fairly declarative. Every declaration defines a new immutable layer with its own unique hash, it’s just that some declarations can easily be used in ways that make the outcome vary based on the state of the entire world as of build time.

Just as in Ansible you can use “declarative” YAML in a very imperative lasagna of a setup, you can do the same with a Dockerfile, Nix, Haskell, or Python. You can also get pretty close to purely declarative bliss with any of them, but it will grow impractical before that point.
The name order isn't your only issue to worry about. A Japanese system might be expected to have two fields, one for the name as it's written and another for pronounciation. Just in case someone decides that 小鳥遊 as a name is pronounced as たかなし.

I remember Amazon.co.jp having two name fields when you registered a new user, and in English they were called "Your name" and "Your name again", because a name pronounciation field probably makes little sense as a concept to most non-Japanese speakers.
I feel like I still don't understand what a container actually is.. is it a filesystem? is it an operating system? is it in a class of its own?
I miss Rails deeply but when I tried using it earlier this year, I was struck by how limiting the templating system is compared to React. Components, unidirectional data flow, and years of thinking in Hooks made moving back to ERB feel like a step backwards. And that’s saying nothing of the TypeScript piece.

My dream is that we’ll see Rails with React Server Components support.
How much of a performance hit would you estimate you take from doing that? Seems like a nice solution if not too much
DINOv2 now licensed under Apache 2.0
I've used it but I forget it exists. I wish smoking was like that! I'm not sure what the addictive element is meant to be.

The reviews are poor enough to just be a waste of time I regret looking at. I mostly read non-fiction history, science, health, politics and something I have only noticed recently is that so many Amazon and GR reviews are just political takes - using the review section to advance or attack some position instead of actually discussing the book. Pretty tiresome.
Is this book actually a good book or is it recommended because it was written by someone of a group that people want to promote?
We historically used Parallels to create virtual machines used as build environments for MacOS based software. Then, when we switched to apple silicon, it stopped working (you could install a MacOS virtual machine, but it was based on an apple dev image and you could not connect to your own apple id for signing, etc.)

We gave up and bought a few mac minis. Does anyone know if those issues have been solved by cheetah, or some of the other virtual machine managers mentioned by @dinkblam?
How can I feel "so cool!" and "so unnecessary!" in the same time? :)
It just performs better.

Also Yuzu has asynchronous gpu shader building which means you don't need to find and download a pre-built shader cache for a game for it to run smooth. Yuzu can build itself a shader cache while playing and it doesn't cause the game to stutter and hitch like crazy.

Yuzu just seems to me to be the technically superior option at this time.
The DSN is just part of the conspiracy. Those antennas don't actually exist. The images are CGI, and the people who claim to work there have been brainwashed.
Although, I have a wild fantasy that someone will build fleets of drones that’ll take to a battlefield with the sole purpose of stopping a conflict.

Buzzing around, disabling vehicles, grabbing weapons and ammo, plugging up artillery barrels, flashing lights in combatants eyes, softly playing contemporary adult jazz… basically making it impossible for the two sides to fight.

Peacenik Bots, premiering on Netflix next year.
I think 60% of the population is enough to pass laws such that it doesn't actually matter if the other 40% is willfully ignorant.

I also think as the climate becomes more and more inhospitable, that 40% number will continue to decrease.
Capital structure may be more important than size.

A bootstraped company can resist enshitification indefinitely, but if it gets any investment, resisting it becomes harder and harder up to the point where a publicly traded one can't resist it at all.
"When I worked on Android security there was one project I wanted to sabotage."
It sounds like part of the issue is that people think random == evenly (but unpredictably) distributed on a specific (and relatively short) timescale.

For a truly random source, the odds of getting the same number in the next roll are identical to getting it on any prior roll. For example, flipping a coin twice is as likely to get you heads twice as it is to get you heads/tails.

eventually things even out. But if it’s truly random, when that is going to be the case should also be completely unpredictable. It might end up being after the service is deprecated, for instance. You might end up never getting a specific ‘desired’ answer ever. For instance, if the test is flipping a coin and we do it 10 times, there is a small chance we never get tails and get 10 heads in a row from a truly random source.

That is working as expected.

Usually (at least with load balancing) they instead want a smoother distribution, where it’s less likely to get the same answers they just got, when they just got them.

So for example, they’d prefer that if they just got a heads they’re more likely to get a tails next (but it won’t always happen).

Notably, this isn’t really random. It’s also a really hard thing to do in practice without also getting all nodes in lockstep, being predictable to an outside attacker, or having internode communication. Maybe impossible, I don’t remember.
I'd say that extinguishing the sense of hope in a reformed human being is also a downside, but that's because I have a shred of empathy.
> Why IS every porn site trying to normalize incest, for example?

One of the explanations I've heard (that seems reasonably plausible) is that it allows the creators to add a "kink" to the porn without needing to actually change much of anything.
Two things I love about UTM:

- The serial window.

- The ability to truly lock the mouse to the window.

I wanted to use it on my work provided machine, but when hooked up to my monitor, the performance was lacking (21:9, 1440p). Performance also felt the same across an M1 MacBook Air, an M2 MacBook Air, and an M2 MacBook Pro, so it felt like something was up, not that the machine just couldn't handle it.

Sadly, Parallels was the only thing I tried that performed well when connected to that monitor.
Add to that the production of newer ones just negated the effeciency gain.
One of my favorite comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
TL;DR: this article is mainly about Shell rowing back on its offset development targets, not for the oil it produces, but for its operational emissions.

Having worked in the sector, albeit not with Shell, my guess is that the board were advised that offsets increasingly carry massive legal jeopardy, including director’s liability.

This is an interesting summary of the problem:

https://www.clientearth.org/media/nq4jnyww/ce-offsets-legal-...
I've met a lot of people (typically open source enthusiasts) who say that distributed transactions are a dumpster fire and other people (Microsoft/enterprise partisans) who think they are great.
If anyone at the Times is reading this... a case study for your consideration...

I dropped my subscription to the NYT a bit more than a year ago due to just this kind of blocking silliness. I like to be able to share articles I read with others, and if I have to get an archive.is/ph link anyway to do so, why should I be paying to read it first myself? If the value of eyeballs on articles is mainly to serve ads, and adblocking is an issue, then I'd say charging a subscription to try to make up for it (which it doesn't according to their own numbers) is kind of going in the wrong direction.

I gather that the NYT itself thinks that "News" as a product is a dying market and is why they are putting most of their time/effort/money into building up the Games and Recipes subscriptions. I wonder if that isn't a fatal case of mission creep.
I think GP meant that in a hundred years WE will all be dead, not that our descendants won't be there.
> but I've explained why in the "Why a subscription?" box here

No you haven't, you've just regurgitated the usual argument made by people peddling subscriptions.

Its always the same old story, and charities do the same thing when seeking donation subscriptions...

The person selling the subscription says "oh, but its only $8 a month that's only half a Starbucks coffee"

Meanwhile, the REALITY for the person on the receiving end of the salesdroid is always the same ...."your sub is not the only thing going on with my life bud".

And its very true in IT, sub to this for $x, sub to that for $y, sub to that for $z, and soon enough you are "talking real money" as the old saying goes. And then if you are expecting the company to pay for an employee then that adds up exponentially in-line with the number of employees.

So, yeah, subscriptions suck ... for a real and valid reason.
Looks like Njalla's VPN[1] is missing, I'm not sure if they have their own servers but it seems more than likely

[1] https://njal.la/vpn/
I think I remember every single book I have read that's worth reading, and that list is in the hundreds. Not because my memory is so good, but how do you forget if you actually thoroughly enjoyed it / got something out of it?

edit: I don't have a goodreads acct and don't fully remember what it is, but I think the value there is finding people who like books you like, especially less famous ones, and then finding what else is on their list.
The study keeps talking about extremists but how is that defined? Also why would they select a specific sample from the random population? Seems like a dubious or potentially flawed study design.
I would definitely keep an eye out for Fedora Asahi Linux
Minecraft PE Maps » Page 4
Ask HN: Good Resources on Software Architecture and Software Design?
I certainly don't mind being called "Mr.", but I don't see why it can't just be another field, or part of a free-text field.
I see, thanks for providing some evidence :-)

I followed RePlant before, when they talked about "future of food" topics, and knew that most involved persons were really early-stage scientists, so I thought that this was truly grassroots.
Last night, I was trying to figure out what the art was on a paperback book cover from the 70s (Destroyer #2, Death Check). Only have bad, low-res scans of it. Good Reads was the only site that had anything like substantive summaries of it (more than one, mixed in with reviews). Eventually figured out that it was supposed to be a chess piece (the villain plays chess, from the summaries).

Where else was I supposed to go?

Same thing with Google. I really want to quit it, but when you plug the keywords into DDG and it doesn't seem to have a fucking clue what you're searching for, what's your next move?
this is really helpful - thanks!
I get what you're saying. This was not an issue. If one or more of the records in the 'transaction' failed to be inserted, then none of the other records inserted as part of this transaction would be able to be converted into the settled state. As part of my settlement script, there was logic which looked at creation timestamps and would change the state to 'failed' if they had been pending for too long (which was only a few minutes). My script settled records created by different accounts in parallel (though for each account, sequentially based on timestamp) so as not to allow a user to intentionally make incomplete transactions in order to hold up settlement and prevent the script from settling other users' records. A user could only delay settlement of their own records.

Because I used UUID as IDs and they were created on the front end, the user in my app could potentially re-submit the form (click submit again after seeing the 'Unexpected connection error please try again...' message); this represented a second chance to complete the transaction. Those records which were already successfully inserted into the db the last time would be ignored the second time (due to ID conflict) and those which had failed the first time and not been inserted into the db would then be inserted as pending; then the settlement script could complete its job and settle on the next interval.
Yeah, I get this one will do, but sleep-deprivation can drive me crazy. After a few days with irregular sleep times, I often get heart palpitations, skip beats with an uneasy feeling in the chest and sometimes panic attack.
If the Amazon guy really said that ("inferior human beings") I would not trust his views on anything to do with people.
Casey discusses a couple of the laws (i.e. Amdahl's law, Conway's law) in his "The Only Unbreakable Law" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY
Why is landing on the moon ~75M?
Because you cannot fully ask the question without context.

1. Why is it so cheap to make rockets?

- Because the program was born into and from scarcity.

- Because everything else from schooling to housing to healthcare to decent food is cheap.

2. Why is everything so cheap?

- Because it can be when the thrust of force is not share holder value(or profits) but solving the problem with the means you have.

Overheard near the water cooler:
"On average americans pay 18K in taxes and for that many get good roads, functioning public services like water, firefighting and roads, good public education. Of course exceptions exist but they are concentrated and don't rise to consume the majority of people in the US. Try replacing that with private enterprises and tell me if you can get it for 18K".

3. Why are other cheap things not as good like public schools in India?

- Because the thrust of force there is that the problem is not important, at least not from an electoral standpoint in many places in india.
Exclude New Delhi public schools, which are of course cheap and good because there the thrust of force is, of course, solving the actual problem. Many other cheap things are still broken.
Yeah, that’s the whole selling point of Atmos. No more discrete channels to mix to, instead spatial locations that the receiver decodes for your system.
This argument is puzzling in that I really struggled to understand what it is that the author thinks is so terrible about Goodreads. If the conclusion of the argument is supposed to be that we (Goodreads users) should all feel the desire to quit it, then presumably the problems with the platform will be applicable to all users, not just a handful.

On the one hand, she complains that Goodreads is not just a space for readers, it's also a space for authors. On the other hand, she takes the perspective of authors (and is one herself), and complains that Goodreads hasn't done enough to stop review bombing. It's somehow both a problem that authors and readers can interact on the site (as pointed up by the fact that she received a thank you from an author for her early positive review), and that the site doesn't focus enough on the author experience. Even if the problem is supposed to be that the site is unfocused, not really prioritizing any one's needs in particular, that's not likely to cause a typical user to want to leave unless the problems become much more concrete than that. And it's really not clear that a typical user would be upset about interacting with an author on the platform, or attending a Q/A session, etc.

While I readily admit that Goodreads has a bunch of issues (amateur reviewers taking themselves much too seriously, interface problems), I'm not sure my complaints are even salient for this author. To me, in fact, statements like the following suggests that her problems with the site might be more personal:

> My to-read list ballooned alarmingly, not from titles I felt drawn to out of genuine desire but ones the algorithm pushed on me. The thrill of discovery, too, felt compromised: every time my feed told me a friend had added a book that I’d found first, I felt a frisson of annoyance. Have some imagination.

> I use it to get a rough and ready sense of how a book might be selling based on the number of ratings and the speed at which they accrue. I use it to drop five stars on upcoming books by friends, giving their work a tiny boost in a landscape where a book can live or die based on hype.

As a Goodreads user, I find it perfectly passable at what it does - allow users to catalogue books they have read and books they want to read, find potential new books to read, and view a feed of books read by their friends. Unlike the author, I'm glad Amazon has more or less abandoned it. It's not a perfect site, or even a great one (their recent UI update made it so that adding a "read date" to a book you've just finished now takes 10 steps instead of 2), but the flaws are minor enough that I'm not strongly compelled to look for an alternative. I suspect this experience is generalizable enough that this is why "we" can't quit it.
> The overlap of sets of people who care about quality audio and the people who would buy Atmos in a TCL TV is probably pretty sparse.

I used to think that too, but the proliferation of soundbars has shown that there is a market for better home theater experiences in the "middle" between bad TV speakers and higher end home theater setups. TCL's upper end range of TVs are really popular in a similar market segment (people who care about good picture/features but still want value) and generally perform very well, so it might be a feature that is popular especially if they start bundling in a kit for a good price. I've used the Sony equivalent with the TV acting as a center speaker in a larger setup and it sounded really good, so it can definitely work.