skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For example, the first goal required her to create a plan to reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organization by 75 percent in just eight workdays.

Oh sure, no big deal.

If true and if this description is accurate, this doesn't sound like a goal that Amazon could explain as anything other than a setup that's guaranteed to see her fail. If this goes to trial I'd be curious to hear how they justify setting this kind of goal.
Maybe it's exactly what they want (I didn't check the links). Maybe they want to make someone they don't like banned.
"the secret" is spending a long serial period of time deep in architecting solutions because the time you spend doing that kind of work compounds like interest.
> You print books? Well we have e-books now.

It's often the same publishers publishing the e-books. They did successfully make that transition.

> Instead they went all in on pulp bestsellers and celebrity memoirs at the expense of actual good authors

If they're best sellers, as you note, that was clearly a good choice. They were selling what people actually wanted.
I hope it will be success. Factory farm has been too cruel to animals.
You'll want to be careful to consider homophones while also taking accents into account. E.g. if your dictionary contains "deary", it probably shouldn't also contain "dairy".
I have about 6000 books, about 1000 of these are on Kindle.

Of the 6000, most have bookmarks. I read at least the first 50 pages of most of them. I've finished a couple hundred so far. I found my old business cards make perfect bookmarks.

I guess "No one buys books" isn't strictly true.

I tried to write 4 books. I was told that I'd likely sell less that 1000. Beyond that would be considered a major win. I finished one, published it, and have made about $500. It took me months to write.

I love books. I have a copy of "I, Robot" signed by Asimov. I really like books signed by authors.
Why isn’t this a problem with cheese or yogurt?
I had this exact situation at work when they shipped millions of devices with serial numbers, and didn't leave out any letter or number. Customers had so much trouble reading them accurately, I had to make a regex script that generated every possible typ0 permutation of what the customer said, and then it would list only matches from the factory database. From there, folks would try to correlate other info like dates to figure out what their real serial number probably was. It was a nightmare. Ironically several of the digits never changed, and some were just 0 1 or 2 to represent which factory made it, so there was no need for the entire character set in the first place. They seem to have been convinced we'd produce 8 quadrillion devices.
I find the limits at ny libraries to be exceptionally high. Why does anyone need 25 digital books checked out at a time? That’d probably help with waitlists too.

I love Libby, I want to see it survive.
> As a consumer, when you buy an e-book or e-audiobook, it costs about the same or sometimes even less than the print book version. But for libraries, the e-book or e-audiobook version of a title actually costs up to three times or more than the print version.

> This is because publishers use a licensing model for selling e-books to libraries. Each copy of a digital book title requires a purchase of a license. While there are many types of licenses, the most common license needs to be purchased and then re-purchased every year.

This is why I have zero sympathy for Publishers' efforts to go after the Internet Archive for their scan and lend digitap library. The publishers have been price gouging libraries in ways that shoild be straight up illegal and most Authors have gone along with it.
While I get that it's specific to Seattle, it did contain some stuff interesting to someone halfway across the country (me).
Your name is your own first and foremost. You can honor your parents in other ways.
Honestly I think that you are trolling me, but I am trying to assume good faith. In your first reply to me, you said "[an explanation is that] systemic racism in education in the past has left black applicants less well prepared than other applicants." Now you are saying this is a shaky hypothesis and has minimal impact on the applications?
Ah right, Grothendieck, the less violent (albeit less effective) unabomber. He could have been a postJvN contender but alas, too laid back on implementations XD

Kolmogorov option OTOH (as summarized by his life) could be the optimal interpolate
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3376
This. I donated half a lifetime's collection of physical books a few years ago, when I moved into my girlfriend's apartment. I kept books which are either a) impossible to get electronically (mostly technical or academic works), or b) worthless on screen (mostly large-format photography and art books, or c) for which I have a sentimental attachment to the physical artifact (a couple of first editions; some gifts; some that bring back particular memories).

It's so freeing! I read a LOT, and being able to curate a massive library in Calibre, and keep >3k books on my Kindle, is (for me) entirely superior to lugging around heavy physical objects.

I rip DRM off of (most) every ebook I buy, and back up the files, so I'm not worried about losing access, either. Even if the apocalypse arrives my Kindle + a solar charger fit in my bug-out bag better than a box of books.
In the original Macintosh System Software, system calls would sometimes return a "DSError". The popular belief (I think confirmed?) was that DS stood for Deep Shit.
In my opinion, you are just focusing on a small aspect of what the Mandate of Heaven was about or how it was viewed. If you read the philosophical text like Mencius, etc., and understand what supposedly the Zhou were arguing to claim that they obtained the Mandate, then the mere territorial aspect is incorrect.

To keep things relatively simple, my thoughts is that obtaining the Mandate is really what the Chinese and their philosophers call obtaining the hearts/minds (心) of the people. Emperors and their advisors all knew that their position was nothing without the people's backing as e.g. stated by Mencius, and therefore when there's tons of rebellions and famine/starvation, etc. going around this was considered a huge sign that the emperor was losing the mandate and if he didn't change his ways that he would outright lose the mandate. The Chinese have a proverb stating that the ruler was basically a boat in a vast ocean (the people), and that the ocean can easily capsize the boat.

The right to rule China/rebellion was justified because it was believed that if a person truly had the heart of the large majority of the people he would actually win, because the ruling class was considered quite small compared to the ruled populace. And despite what people think, China didn't have large standing armies. Their armies were called up from basically the peasant class. The peasant class will not fight for a king who is a tyrant. Even Mao didn't want a professional army and wanted basically a civilian militia army that largely did farming work, etc., and would only be called up if they needed to fight some enemy thinking that standing armies were a waste of money. So this tradition was pretty well entrenched even to modern times.

When the Zhou first came up with the idea of the Mandate of Heaven they cited the fact that the Shang king had become a tyrant, and that he lost the heart of the people, and therefore those people flocked to Zhou ruler instead and that the Shang king had barely anyone to protect him and therefore was easily defeated. Now this is probably mere ancient propaganda from 3000 years ago, but it became basically canon in terms of how the Mandate was said to work.

There's actually more to this, e.g. Heaven is not a deity in Chinese thought. Heaven actually means nature, or a sort of natural law... but I'm trying to keep this simple.
New AI-Powered App Launches for Making Angry Girlfriend Happy Again
exact opposite for me - the more i got into ebooks, the harder i found it to handle the ergonomics of paper books, and today my reading is pretty much 100% on my phone or kindle.
It is Amazon being Amazon, leadership is raised on a culture of reprisals and pettiness.
Rules Aren't Reasons
Oregonian here. Both, I think. However homelessness increased everywhere over the same period the legalization covered so it's kind of hard to gauge how much legalization actually increased it.

The problem was that there was no way to compel people into treatment for addiction when the drugs were essentially legal. There was an attempt to replicate what Portugal had done in the early aughts, but as I understand it they could compel people into treatment. The other problem was lack of treatment resources - even if people wanted treatment it could be difficult to come by. While I tended to favor decriminalization before, after seeing the results close up it seems that there should have been a longer period of preparation prior to the enacting legalization. And for substances like fetanyl and meth - highly addictive substances that cause people to resort to crime to keep up the habit - it's probably not be a good idea to ever legalize them because overdosing, death and permanent mental damage are common. We need a more nuanced approach where less addictive (and non-addictive) drugs like pot, LSD, shrooms, etc. are essentially legal while highly addictive drugs remain illegal with stiff penalties for distribution.
New York offshore wind projects scrapped, along with promise of local jobs
Yeah lol, Uncyclopedia was the original one. The original original Uncyclopedia is at uncyclopedia.com, love both of them.
Not necessary. It can just be coincidence. It happened to me in different occasion, where I helped a 60y old to set up online dating. She was very active without care. So, her contact book has been accessed by some dating app and then me got a few unwanted WhatsApp calls by foreign numbers.

So, may be she told a few people her new work number. They saved it to their devices, which had an malicious app running.

Not necessarily you're compromised. May be her contact is listed in your webpage? That happened to me too, where the employer decided to put clear text href email address publicly on the website. The machinery acted quickly. By finding information like "sales" or "customer service", connections can be made. So Phishing is more effective.

But still. For me, it would be an alarm sign to trigger an investigation. If there is no public listing of contact information, then its likely in the inner rings. Because.. knowing that you're CEO and writing in your name to a new mobile number, it looks like spearphishing.

The only way to protect is to train train train. Why did she mark it as spam in slack? Because she used her suspectsissity and her feelings. Let her tell the others how she came to the conclusion it's spam. There won't be much she will tell (I think) but it will raise sensitivity with others, because they'll remember the story..
>he was overheard in his room saying veganism is wrong and gender fluidity is “stupid”

Misleading headline - I think this is more about the latter statement rather than his opinion on veganism
I used to buy and read a lot of physical books. Around 2013-204, I started moving to eBooks, and Amazon Kindle played a significant role in my journey. But a couple of years later, I had an epiphany while discussing books with my daughter, “I never see you read books. You are just reading on your computer (kindle) or the phone and are not reading.”

Since then, I have returned to reading physical books with an approximate ratio of 1:5 against digital ones. I have kinda rule/understanding with my daughters -- you have unlimited access to books that you can read, and you also get extra pocket money for reading them. Of course, it is OK not to finish a book, but in that case, a few cool-down days before buying another one.

Yes, buy and read physical books. I believe, the return is a magnitude higher for everyone than the loss it does to anything. If you have kids, read more physical books in front of them. Encourage them to read physical books. They are less distracting and help the kids focus.

Five years ago, I wrote a story about it.
https://story.oinam.com/2018/why-physical-books-matter/
What you're describing is a cellular automaton, in the same vein as of Conway's Game of Life. You can do lots of interesting things with those, but it's emphatically not where I'd start for a flexible computing platform.

Why not go the extra mile, and make each tile a small CPU? There's a Zachtronics have called TIS-100 with this premise.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/
> While there are many types of licenses, the most common license needs to be purchased and then re-purchased every year.

Forcing libraries to repurchase their entire collection every year should be illegal. I would also settle for a loophole that would allow the library to OCR a physical copy they own and then own the resulting digital copy.
Alienating Tesla Buyers by the Cybertruck-Load
Unlike a prison you can be sure you will end up in the hands of the medical system sooner or later. You are very motivated to care about it.
I forgive them
I'd have a tough time trusting Google enough to buy another Pixel. They fairly recently removed long term features (and selling points) from previous models to make them exclusive for the Pixel 8+, and generally made the camera difficult to use while also way over-processing photos. On-screen exposure controls are now a Pro feature.

It currently holds well earned 2.9 stars in the Play Store, and its one of the few apps they won't respond to reviews for anymore
Does this mean they library can also "give up" their licenses once a book becomes less popular? (This is still worse than the system for physical books, but at least it lets them dial back the rent over time.)
Morena is slated to win the election in June because of the perception that infrastructure projects are getting done. Sheinbaum will want to get re-elected, and if the railway gets robbed that will be difficult. It's a lot easier to protect a railway than to create a good civil society with jobs for millions of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Transformation#Infrastr...
Can relate to this one though, when you push the code in production, pushing more changes just comes with so much more additional worries: Will it interrupt user's work on a live system, what about refactoring, changing API's that can break things. There's a fear that whatever you push next could break things really hard so you end up giving up the code cleanliness in exchange for mental rest.
Sigh. I'm fully aware the propaganda of which you speak. Thank you very much. Yes, I know it's origins. No, it is not the stem of my dislike of these systems. Please stop trying to reduce it to "crazy American Red Scare mumbo jumbo".

I have spent decades watching the ways human beings interact with and use computers. I've made it my life's work to pick apart technological systems and how they have been applied to societal problems, and what the various outcomes are.

It is a fact that automation which removes dependence on other humans acts as a power multiplier to it's owner. It is a fact that as we remove more individual actors from things, decisions will be skewed more and more to the extremes of the component actors of the system. It is a fact that since the industrial revolution, and the introduction of industrial business machines, the acts of artifice and processes we are capable of creating have become more and more capable of facilitating industry fuelled process pipelines capable of generating great casualties. The last century having some very shining examples of how things can go wrong, and the bloody U.S. from 2016-2020 having gone through it's first brush with a certifiable psychopath in the Chief Executive seat.

I have had the everloving shit scared out of me, and much of my naive techno-optimism knocked out of me. I've now had a shining example of "what could a smart psychotic, amoral person do with this system" added to my "should I make this system?" calculus.

I look at cases of "everything is just fine..." non-U.S. posters entertain, and I just end up affixing "for now. Your psychopath in charge just hasn't come up yet.

India has it's Modi. China jas Xi. Putin's saber rattling again. Britain is chasing itself through fear into becoming what Orwell had nightmares of more and more every year. I listen to elders who think that "oh, just trust everyone else", that I then half to clean up the mess of afterward when their implicit trust in others ends up being violated.

I wish my misgivings were as easy to cure as innoculation to Red Scare propaganda. That was easy. I saw through that before getting out of middle school. This is much harder. My generation hasn't faired well in managing to build trust or emotional stability which scares the crap out of me for the odds of not leveraging technical advancement to unmake something beautiful that ultimately I still believe, or try to believe in. I love the American Experiment. I want to believe we are by and large good, virtuous, and comparatively enlightened people capable of maintaining a government that places as a priority maintaining a state of Liberty without degenerating into a mess social control mechanisms laying around waiting for the sufficiently motivated and intelligent psychopaths to pick up and orchestrate.

So again, sorry to bust your bubble. I could write volumes on this topic, but I don't feel like letting this degenerate into rambling anymore than it already has.
I don’t know how a university can have a philosophy program if students are not free to discuss ideas.
Are they? Mark Dawson was caught buying 400 copies of his own book in 2020, but he's not the first or last author to have done that.
sounds like she didnt fit in with the cool kids and they bullied her out of a job. the real losers are amazon as a company and the plaintiff.
Article title: What If Your AI Girlfriend Hated You?
"What do holds have to do with the cost of digital books?

This may seem surprising, but patron holds are the single biggest factor in rising costs. To maintain reasonable wait times, the Library buys additional licenses of a digital title when patrons place more holds on it. That means that when hundreds of patrons place holds on a single New York Times bestseller, the costs of “buying down the holds” can quickly become astronomical."

How odd - I know it's the licenscing and I can understand the reasoning behind, but at a distance it seems like ritual almost. When they get the e-book, the data is there, and when you hold it, you get a copy, the "original" is untouched, but the library has to act as if it was unavailable.

It feels like how electric cars add artifical engine sounds.
Fucking books are like museums. 100 year disadvantage.
This feels like a lawsuit from US justice department waiting to be filed against the book publishers. Why does an ebook need to cost 3X to a PL compared to what I as a consumer would otherwise purchase from Amazon.
Our 2013 carpet does it, very annoying. Happens under the accelerator pedal.
My father is 84. On average once a week he calls me in a state of confusion and despair that he can’t do something on the computer. 100% of the time it involves logging in to a website or paying for something. This is when I’m so happy he has a Mac - I open Messages, find the last message from him and click on the Share Screen icon. We then complete the activity together, as if I’m sitting next to him. I’m always surprised how few people know this is built into macOS.
This brings up memories.

One day while sick, I distracted myself from being sick by writing up a silly module to do arithmetic in arbitrary bases. And, because it was easy I stuck it on CPAN. https://metacpan.org/pod/Math::Fleximal is the module.

Of all of the silly things I'd done, I would have sworn that this is the one that should never generate a support request. But it did! Why? Well I'd included a demonstration of how to turn hexadecimal into an alphanumeric code. And someone had the bright idea of using the same thing to turn long numbers into readable codes!

My module worked, but I was still a bit flabbergasted that THIS wound up in production somewhere!!
Telephone equipment avoids the letters i and o in the alphabetical designation sequence for this reason, they look like numerals 1 and 0.
team member here - totally see where you're coming from, we'll be relaxing this soon.
I'm happy to see people talking about the problem posed by implicit invariants, but this post strikes me as defeatist. This line especially:

> Implicit invariants are, by definition, impossible to enforce explicitly.

Yes, Hyrum's Law (and, at the limit, Rice's Theorem) and all that means that we won't ever be perfect, but just because an invariant is currently implicit doesn't mean it must remain implicit forever. We can identify classes of implicit invariants and make them explicit using things like type systems.
Tell people that you don't know the answer

I should probably clarify that point; oncologists are often dealing with small numbers and a lot of uncertainty. I'm also not sure how much they're supposed to say—I don't see the NDAs or other docs they sign with drug companies. That said, if they see tumors shrink in at least some patients, that's pretty good.

I also have recurrent and metastatic squamous cell carcinoma originating in the tongue. A lot of these 1b and even 2 trials are being tested in multiple cancer types. Something can work pretty well in lung but not head and neck, or vice-versa.

They will say they don't know the answer, but I prefer having some guidance. "Good" and "bad" are also relative, particularly for what I have, which is nearly always fatal. Is SGNTV good, cause it shrinks some people's tumors, or bad, cause of all those side effects? The answer is both.

It's still useful IMO to run sanity checks on what you're told. For example, one onc said that I should try a trial very similar to this one: https://www.oncnursingnews.com/view/lenvatinib-plus-pembroli..., or one like it, that had already failed. When I checked to see what research had been published, I was baffled by the rec. I checked w/ my oncologist at UCSD, and she was also like: "I would probably not rank that trial highly."
> Forcing libraries to repurchase their entire collection every year should be illegal.

We could have public libraries be entirely outside the copyright system. I doubt it’d have a material effect on production of new books.

If as a society we have a problem that our libraries are too popular, then that’s probably a good thing.

> I would also settle for a loophole that would allow the library to OCR a physical copy they own and then own the resulting digital copy.

Something about this reminds me of that company with the thousands of tiny antennas that got sued to oblivion.
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Exactly, there is SO much cool stuff in biology that was already known 50+ years ago, even 100+ years ago, and when you're first learning biology, it's all new and fascinating. Unless you don't click with it! And then nothing helps, it's not like there's some magic angle that hooks everyone.
My book took a year and a half to write and has made about $400 in direct royalties.

I can't precisely quantify the return on investment, but I believe that having the ISBN on my resume has resulted in me getting more work opportunities and/or salary, so it's a pretty good investment. Also people think you're smart for having the stupidity to start writing a book without having the good sense to abandon the project halfway through.