skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article: "Amazon has 237 million active customers but as a general rule makes almost no profit."

Does Amazon really make no profit? Or do they just have some creative accounting techniques that means they never declare their profits to avoid possible taxes?

Consider the case of the bookdepository.co.uk, purchased by Amazon in 2011. Not only does the bookdepository match most of Amazon's book prices, they offer free worldwide delivery too. Yet, unlike Amazon, they are profitable.
Upstart can indeed keep your process running. We use it for all of our process monitoring and it works like a charm.
Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick but this seems unnecessarily forced. Surely, given time, the system should equilibrate. If YC partners investing in startups is treated as a signal of winners, investors will be able to derive their own conclusions in time about whether this is a trustworthy metric.

If it is trustworthy, then surely this would mean that great startups prosper faster and those that aren't that great know it even earlier, meaning that they can pivot after spending much less time on building their business.

If it is not trustworthy, the numbers will show that to be the case, with investors being able to directly assess which companies backed by YC-partners actually make it big. In this case, surely investors will wise up and not go by YC-partner investments as a signal of success.

If I'm missing something, I'd appreciate it if someone could point out where my logic falls short. Otherwise, I stand by my conclusion that this seems unnecessary.
Money laundering is an act of assisting someone in getting away with a crime. If you inadvertently do so, you're not guilty of money laundering. The intent has to be there.
I agree. That there isn't evidence of a struggle is a factor that influences the probability of conviction (which obviously is the primary consideration for prosecutors in determining whether to proceed with a case), but it isn't a necessary requirement for the offence to have occurred.
I don't believe that, since there are items that we had shipped that changed to prime add on when that was created.
I suppose people all over the world need these?

Pffft. These so-called international business machines have no future.
You're not their target market. I'm a Prime user with over $20,000 in yearly purchases, certainly, I enjoy the benefits of Prime a lot more than you.
Redesigning The Smartphone Interface
Now that Amazon is branching into original content production (loved Betas!) it makes me think that Netflix is doomed. Amazon Prime has a large % of the Netflix library, plus Amazon will sell you digital copies of most of what Netflix is missing. They capture far more revenue per customer because of this. I will still subscribe to both but if Netflix doesn't keep up with the original programming Amazon will eat them alive IMO.
Systems such as Go's goroutines, or clojure's core.async, or objective-c's GCD all solve the same concurrency problem while still allowing you to saturate all of your cores from a single process.

This allows you to get around some nasty architectural problems you can hit with node, where you must either find a way to manually schedule all of your computation into tiny chunks to avoid latency issues, or face potentially severe costs serializing your data to communicate it between processes. No trolling here, it's really a thing that happens!

People do solve these problems in node, it's just that the "ease" suddenly turns against you, as you must now solve tricky systems problems - such as manually scheduling all of your computation properly - or face potentially unacceptable performance degradation. In these cases the limitations of the platform become your overriding architectural driver - better drivers like logical separation start to take a back seat. It's not pretty - and not necessary in other environments.

Given that you won't encounter these types of problems until later - once you've already built up a large codebase and switching platforms is difficult - I think it's better to start in an environment where you know you have these tools available to you when you need them. Even though I really enjoy programming in node (and I've done a lot of it!), I'm wary of starting anything new there unless I have a good reason. There are a lot of great modules written in node, I just try to keep those components isolated and not let them grow too large.
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Need a new website? (Not a parody)
But that explanation is actually misleading. I've had items that I ordered previously from Amazon suddenly turn into add-ons at the same or even slightly higher prices.

Amazon may well have decided to create the add-on program in lieu of removing them, but "wouldn't even exist" isn't the entire truth, as it doesn't acknowledge the fact that the items did exist before.
Introducing Facebook Photos
Lately, my Prime deliveries have been sent via UPS Mail Innovations, which relies on the USPS for last mile delivery. This inevitably turns 2-day delivery into 1 week plus delivery, due to the USPS's incompetence where I live. Complaints to Amazon result in a free one month extension of Prime benefits, but they can't stop the service from being chosen on future orders.

Unless this changes soon, I am likely to let my Prime membership expire, as it has become useless to me because it is no longer reliable. Any attempt to raise the fee while still using USPS for last mile delivery will be met absolutely with cancellation.

That said, if they raised the fee and promised to use only reliable (e.g., UPS, FedEx, hell, even Lasership/OnTrac), I'd take the deal.
I can't give you any input on the legal side of things, however I commented on a thread about 6 months ago regarding gift card fraud[1] and the assumption that it's a new phenomenon.

With gift cards, especially Starbucks gift cards, it's almost (if not literally) impossible to verify legitimacy. Generally, almost anyone attempting this type of fraud, even at the lower levels will:

- Mask the fact that funds are loaded with credit cards in the transaction log by purchasing gift cards with gift cards.

- Use services[2] which sell residential IP's by location (infected systems) as proxies

Unfortunately for the service your offering, Starbucks has an internal chain-disable feature which deactivates any gift cards "downline" of a fraudulently loaded card, hence it's entirely possible that after conducting a card transfer, even one fraudulent transfer could put the entire balance of your legitimate holding account at jeopardy, and the average Starbucks call center representative will be unable to help you.

Services like Cardpool (also offered in-store at Safeway locations) verify individuals identities prior to cash-in, however even with that the amount of fraud they experience is staggering. To give you an idea, the rate of successful, fraudulent transactions experienced by Cardpool in Safeway stores for 2012 was over 20%, compare to the average chargeback rate on an adult site, which is between 0.5 and 2%

I think you've made a smart move to put your project on hold until you have a better grasp of the entire situation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6175294

[2] http://5socks.net/
Err, View > Show Toolbar

http://idzr.org/r6y7
Related: Being smart doesn't automatically make you wealthy.
> And I'm too cheap to buy prime.

You are not too cheap to buy Prime, you just don't purchase enough from Amazon to make Prime worth it. A "cheap" person who uses Amazon a lot always has Prime, otherwise they are just throwing away money on shipping.

Once you start buying many items from Amazon, Prime easily pays for itself at the current level. And will pay for itself at the next level too after a certain use
Notice how on amazon you cannot search for 3rd party vendors with free shipping.

I have to assume this is so people only use the "prime" checkbox to try to find free shipping.
Come on, mocking straw men just makes things worse for everyone.
A lot of great, civil, thoughtful responses here.

Penetration occurs in consensual sex as well. All I'm saying is that I agree that we do not want to live in a world where a claim of rape (regardless of penetration occurring or not) is all that is required for a conviction.
I'm sorry, but that's all that there should be. If a woman says no, that's how she establishes her lack of consent. Lying to a court is illegal. That's covered. End of story.
Thanks for your descriptive rebuttal.
Such positive and negative... SpaceX and fucking Palantir...
> No, because selling guns out of your trunk is a crime more often than not.

So is operating an unlicensed money transmission business -- in the US, this is likely to be both a state and federal crime -- or a licensed money transmission business without adhering to appropriate anti-money-laundering controls.

> This is a poor analogy.

Seems to be a spot-on analogy.
prime? or subscriptions

subscription use that damn innovations to save them 25 cents or whatever from ups coming to your door (which actually I am okay with but it adds a day)

I've never seen a regular prime delivery use innovations.
Best HN comment ever.

I once went for an interview for a PhD where The interview was just a load of puzzles. You either knew the answers or you didn't, and I'm not the sort of person that remembers trivia.
>>wealth allows you a greater degree of freedom to be isolated from the rest of humanity.

Not just giving you the freedom to be isolated; it pretty much forces it. You almost cannot live among the middle class if you're rich. Imagine living in some middle-class area then suddenly you win the lotto; 674 Million dollars.

It would take the strongest of will-powers to stay where you are and not move to some millionaire neighborhood; if only for safety-reasons. And you probably don't need your fulltime job anymore. And to learn how to maintain that money, you'll probably have to spend more time with people of the same financial level. Suddenly, most of your time is with the elite rich in your neighborhood & meetings & parties. Any friendships you had previously will probably fade away slowly, except the _closest_ friends you've known since you were a kid or something. You just won't have that much in common to talk about anymore. Dan will be joking about how he really wanted the white yacht, but his wife wanted the light-grey one while you sip coffee at a cafe in paris or something.

Or... the most humble way you could maybe do it is... http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/

I like to think I'd be like Jerry if I'm rich, still mellow and can enjoy sitting down at a humble coffee-shop chattin' about life.
On the 1st anniversary of BlackBerry 10, its US market share hits 0%
> At high levels of concurrency (thousands of connections) your server needs to go to asynchronous non-blocking.

It does. But it doesn't have to expose that as callback chains or promises to the whole over-arching infrastructure that sits on top. Concurrency units should be isolated from each other and internally execute whatever their logic is without having to worry about being polluted with callbacks. Then there could be multiple of such concurrency units executing in parallel but that is a the job of a decent VM/runtime/library to handle.

> And at these levels of concurrency, you can’t go creating threads for every connection.

Even something as simple as python gevent can create tens of thousands of green threads without a problem without exposing callback chains for everyone to see.

Erlang VM and something like https://github.com/puniverse/quasar can run with millions of concurrency units so do goroutines and Rust's concurrency units (sorry forgot the name).

> So the whole codepath needs to be non-blocking and async, not just the IO layer.

Quite the opposite. If your whole codepath riddled with callback chains and your project is large now you have a huge headache to deal with.

> This is where Node excels.

If it forces one to use promises/deferreds/futures or nested callbacks, I say it fails.
Then you aren't their target market. They don't make their money off of people that are high-usage customers. They make it off of people who buy it and use lower then the predicted average.
Twitter Buying 900 IBM Patents to End Infringement Dispute
Those are separate matters: one is a matter of law, the other a matter of fact.

Suppose for example, that the police interviewed this man and he confirmed every part of her story. Then I think there would be sufficient evidence of rape.

On the other hand, if he gave a completely different story, maybe there would be insufficient evidence.

The problem with the ADA is their apparently wrong understanding of the law
This is slightly off topic, but if we're talking about language capabilities for async:

Something I only figured out fairly recently but that shocked me is that Haskell, with its lazy evaluation, you can essentially get asynchronous programs for free, and still write in a synchronous style.

While by default the IO monad is strict (basically makes IO stuff synchronous), there are some non-strict actions that are really easy to use.

Imagine the following program:

Open two ports, and print the first couple of bytes recieved from each port.

In node (at least from the callback-based stuff), at one point you're going to have an inevitable :

while(!done){} //waiting

in Haskell, this program looks roughly like:

main = do
socket <- someSocketInitCommand
socket' <- someSocketInitCommand
response <- hGetNonBlocking 1024 socket
response' <- hGetNonBlocking 1024 socket'
print ("1st socket : "++ response ++ "\n second socket:"++response')

Lazy IO in Haskell is what I call blocking on data-dependencies: because of how lazy evaluation works, Haskell is able to keep on going until the very moment you need the result from some async call.

It's even crazier that Haskell has the holy grail of async programming : the function that transforms a synchronous function to an asynchronous one.

Instead of having

main = do
x <- a

you simply do

main = do
x <- unsafeInterleaveIO a

a becomes asynchronous , and nothing else in your code has to change.

(from what I understand unsafeInterleaveIO is called like that because it makes the order of your IO actions a bit uncertain, which is a problem for print statements, but when you're doing async programming this is already the case!)

Laziness makes Haskell crazy neat, and I would really love for lazy features to enter other languages. There are some issues (error handling mainly) but it gives you the best of both worlds, I find.

( I am by no means a Haskell expert, so all this might be wrong, but in my experience things work this way-ish)
Lout is quite a bit saner but doesn't have much traction. It seems to be in "deep maintenance" mode now.
As originally stated, Godwin's law was an observation.

Any thread about fascism that gets shut down by someone chirping 'Godwin' can't have been that interesting to begin with.

Edit: It's even a sardonic observation, lamenting the quality of effort that has someone screaming "NAZI" over some piffling matter.
I basically agree with where you're coming from, but I think that we can do better than that here. I think it would be prudent to delete that comment.
That used to be the case, but more and more I am noticing everything coming in one box. Sometimes even multiple different orders will come in one box.
I have a strange problem that my garbagemen in Berkeley won't collect boxes. They're supposed to collect them if they are neatly stacked next to the bin, but they don't. If Amazon would consolidate into as little cardboard as possible it would have huge value to me.
How do you handle compliance for your business (the bitcoin->giftcard one). From this discussion it seems like a total minefield. Do you ask your customers for their ID Proof/Address Proof ? (KYC/AML style) I know fraud isn't an issue for you at all because the bitcoin payments would be irreversible.

I took a look through your site and there are some really great deals (7% cheaper! wow!), great work btw!
Perhaps you're right about India's education system.
I'm curious about the mechanics of this. What stops someone from giving their number for BitCoin, then using the card anyways?

After you sell/trade your card, how do others use it to buy coffee?
"But there’s one thing we can all agree on: At high levels of concurrency (thousands of connections) your server needs to go to asynchronous non-blocking."

No, we can't all agree on that. Asynchronous non-blocking might be better in limited scenarios where threads are expensive (memory or cpu or other constraints).

"While Java or Node or something else may win a benchmark, no server has the non-blocking ecosystem of Node.js today. Over 50k modules all written in the async style, ready to use."

Sad to see so much work go into a faulty design. Take a look at this presentation http://www.slideshare.net/e456/tyma-paulmultithreaded1.
The flipside of this is that Walmart does not charge extra for small, individual items, and I suspect they're losing a lot of money by doing so. I'm a heavy Amazon user, but as an experiment (and because I needed some individual toiletries) I ordered ~15 items from Walmart.com. Walmart's answer to this shipment request was to send 5 separate packages from different places and taking anywhere from 1 day to 10 days. Shipping transit estimations were all off. One shipment was just a single loofah. Just a very annoying process altogether.

Even with these add-on products Amazon is basically forcing you to adopt a Costco / buy-in-bulk model, and I think it's the only profitable and sensible direction.
The difference is that government regulators (in the US at least, but presumably in many other countries soon) have stated that they consider bitcoin exchanges to be money transmitters and therefore regulate them in ways that prevent money laundering (http://blogs.reuters.com/financial-regulatory-forum/2014/01/...).

I suspect most lawyers/regulators would consider changing bitcoin into gift cards is legally like transmitting to cash.

Cars are regulated also, for instance to post a license plate that can be used to identify the owner's name and address, in part because they can be used in crimes.

This isn't _just_ an issue of if the seller is being ethical; it's an issue of whether they're following the law.
Putting A Stop To Amplification Attacks
yep... we're all ears to alternatives. i often have to publish technical works academically and i really think the current crop of non-LaTeX solutions produce painful results. but i'm up against "we all use MSWord™ because we all use MSWord™" and there will be no getting overworked academics to invest the energy in anything that doesn't look like the tools with which they are already familiar. so... for gawdsake, find me something which isn't LaTeX which produces good equations and good page positioning without crashing and -looks- like MSWord to the non-technical computer user. i've had no luck. (and my cobbled together web nightmare rtf2text, git merge, meta LaTeX rube-goldberg device is leaking oil rapidly)

oh, and it has to play well with EndNote™ too. -sigh-
Investigating API dev tools
That's not a straw man, it's satire.
Hmm, maybe. But midtown Manhattan, and more generally corporate America, are their own sort of ideological bubble. I would probably substitute "out of touch with reality" for "out of touch with what people in coastal cities think" in what you wrote.
> What does the future hold for academic writing? We like to think that a few years from now we will format our research papers with the web version in mind, rather than the printed PDF.

I've been thinking about this for almost a year. I believe as well that webview-first is the future of technical publications. The problem is how to either 1) get traditional publishers to adopt newer and better technology (a lot of publishers are still using systems seemingly from 90s that doesn't even support features that have been stablized in TexLive for years); or 2) build new publishers that gain enough reputation fast enough, so that the academia would consider them as good communication channels.

Personally I like the second way better. It's more convenient (and easier to think out of box) to start from scratch than to change an existing system (by system I mean organizations, publishers, rather than a computer system).

Academia is somehow like a trust chain. People tend to follow reputable researchers/professors. If a platform can get most reputable researchers, it can be adopted soon.
The only problem with that is Saga is a common word in video game titles -ville not so much. If you swing by a game related site like http://www.gamefaqs.com/ and search for saga it will turn up more than a couple hundred games with saga in the title(including more than one game titled "Saga")
Yahoo Email Service Hacked
Exactly, you described it more to the point and I was simplifying it down quite a bit. Success doesn't happen in a vacuum.
> Language X

Actually, comparing runtime/platform (Node) to language is completely pointless. Language is, well, only a language, it can't be "faster" or "slower" unless we're talking about coding speed. We have to compare implementations.

And even if we treat Java as a platform, contrary to Node it has ton of highly-varying implementations, so it's still pointless without careful clarifying what one compares. Or they may accidentally find out there's a Java variation with green threads somewhere that may break the whole "look, their ugly threads are slow and our event loops are fast" charm.

The article is just a pure load of non-sense. Highly flammable, though.
Hi all! If anyone has any questions or comments, I'm happy to answer 'em!
How To Edit An Existing Vim Macro
Not a "vulnerability". Nothing is being exploited here. Show there be rate limiting on following? Probably. Does it really matter? No
They've been doing that. In Southern California, I get deliveries 7 days a week now, with USPS handling the Saturday and Sunday deliveries.
After all, it's not like anyone has ever perjured themselves in court before.
Google’s Motorola deal shows tech giant is happy to just be the platform
"Problem is the lack of third party libraries that does IO the way gevent works, if your lib does blocking IO, there is no point using gevent."

Here we probably see some of the problem. Gevent works in a way that most people don't expect, which is to hack the IO layer itself. You don't need a library to "support" gevent for it to still work within gevent. If the library's "synchronousness" is that it opens sockets and uses them, that Just Works in gevent; every time the library does a "blocking" operation in gevent, gevent replaces it with an entry in some sort of polling loop, and moves to the next eventlet that can do work. I used it to write a highly concurrent program that made a ton of simultaneous XML-RPC calls, and I used gevent + the default "blocking" XML-RPC library from Python's core library. It makes the ecosystem support async, at least for network, timers (sleep), and a few other things.

Gevent has other issues; I don't think it can do the same for disk IO. But especially if you've got a network heavy program, you can just drop gevent in and get perfectly cromulent async.

I think a lot of people don't quite understand this. The Node community's persistent and vocal false belief that "async == visibly event-based structure code" probably isn't helping. But it is also true that gevent is a legitimately weird hack on a language. Cool, but very unusual.
I now realise I was providing reading comprehension training†

† NOT, I REPEAT NOT, a literal course of training. I want to make it doubly clear that I did not certify anyone and can not be held responsible for any of their future actions vis-a-vis reading or comprehending.
You've managed to very clearly articulate, better than I've ever been able to, how I've always felt about being a developer. This made my day.
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Truly gratuitous thread-crapping.