skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand where the negativity comes from, as can anybody else who was without work for some months or maybe even years. You are absolutely correct that there are a lot of opportunities in that kind of department, though. People who use them are probably the kind of people who find another project within weeks.
> ".. more attention will fall on a strange inefficiency at the heart of the business: the advances that publishing houses pay their writers. This upfront money is the economic pillar on which quality books rest, the great bulwark against dilettantism."

It can't be that inefficient, since publishers are still in business and Amazon wants more of their money.
Consoles make no sense with Intel chips, just for cost reasons.
> How are they not churning out indie-style games by the dozen???

Work contract?
TLDR is actually in the middle of the whole text:

The Shakespeare expert wrote a book (more than a decade ago!) on how Shakespeare is a genius apparently for controlling and using the nonsense in his verses.

Much ado (the linkbait quality title) about connoisseur (as in xkcd).
This was an appropriate exercise in link replacement. The original post adds little to the original content, basically summarizing it.
Are those the same people whose jobs were lost due to Walmart and Amazon? Or who prefer to have a vibrant local downtown?
An exchange, picked mostly because it made me smile.

PG: "Since all of the money is in a few big hits, we own about 3% of [the $30 billion portfolio]. I haven't done the math on how much that is."

Interviewer: "One billion dollars."

PG: "Well, $900 million."
Also: https://identityassurance.blog.gov.uk/2014/10/09/how-we-use-...

Left a comment there but it's awaiting moderation. The GDS do a good job for the most part, but I very strongly disagree with how they're handling this one.
and? can you explain me what is the issue with being a "socialist" ?
Then I am part of the problem, I guess?

Because yes, I would argue that we shouldn't be paying attention to the trolls. They aren't poisoning the discussion because they aren't part of the discussion. They are trying to disrupt it from the outside, but any sort of moderated community they will be kicked out whenever they show up.

I would also argue that it might be worth differentiating between using misogynist behavior/rhetoric to attack a woman who you disagree with ideologically vs the sort of misogynist ideology that is the focus of the article. Misogyny as a means vs misogyny as an end, if you will.
Even Atlas shrugged
They also use lame processes here in Germany, by hiring people from the job centers in a situation that they cannot reject offers, with a salary that barely gets to the end of the month and bad working conditions.
what is a private snap?
Are markets where one player enjoys a monopoly "free"?

> Oh wait... it was tried 90 years ago and it didn't work out.

Whether the current system is working is up for debate.
It is great that Ubisoft is retaining its employees this way. What is unfortunate is the wasted potential. Hundreds of talented employees sitting around with no management deadlines? This the perfect opportunity to create an internal innovation lab, with employees creating small experiments ("projects"). At a minimum, it hones skills and encourages collaboration between former members of different teams. In the best case scenario, new profitable games are invented. Eric Ries would have a lot to say about this.
As a Brit that lives in a village with minimal public transport, the ONLY reason I want (fully automatic) hands-off driving is for when I'm drunk.
Because many seem to be willing to go back to the 70's (vi/sh) instead of embracing the progress you mention.

Since I discovered UNIX, with Xenix in 1994 followed by many other variants, I always looked for ways to replicate such workflows in UNIX.

At the end of the day, Mac OS X and Windows communities are more welcoming to such ways of working.
More information can be found here: http://kennywithers.com/featured-online-marketing-articles/t...

Edit: NSFW, sorry for not noting that earlier.
that's why anti-trust laws exist. If we break them up as they grow, we still reap the benefits of economic growth without the dangers of the monopoly.
I think that's a great reason to force them to indemnify their workers and ex-workers, and to provide safe working conditions. I don't see how it justifies breaking Amazon up. It's not like smaller firms don't often do the same - for example, the Chinese restaurant workers we read about just a few days ago weren't exactly hired by multinationals.
Not picking on you in particular you are just an example of an attitude which assumes that we either have complete freedom for businesses to do as they wish or (gasp!) "communism" with state control. The "law of the excluded middle" springs to mind.

There are plenty of examples of state regulation in the greater interest, pharmaceuticals being an obvious example, road safety another. It is not in the greater interest of society to allow businesses to trample over each other or to do as they wish.

Amazon is acting to the detriment of a large number of industries and ultimately to people in general by stifling competition and by being monopolistic and abusive.
I don't think the parent comment was saying there was a problem per se with her being an outspoken socialist. But it's easy to imagine media leaning towards the conservative will choose to completely ignore that fact.
Or the UK.

This localised internet is really starting to get to me.
that's stupid, because too rise that high you work whole life... and when you rise that high, you have so much potential to build your own character with precious experience and knowledge.. if you want weddings, drinking beer, wasting time for nonsense, being lazy, you could've done that in small home city of nebraska.. but point of life is not to live and die.. it is to learn as much as possible before death.. that blog has no sense..
If a single player can move the market, then it's not a free market. You can throw out all the theories about economic efficiency when we reach that point.
If you want a job, why not just dig a hole in the street and try to get paid for it?

That would not be different from keeping a job that is not needed anymore alive just for the sake of the job.

If you feel bad about Amazon, donate 10% of what you buy at Amazon to a "hole digger foundation" which pays people who lost their jobs because of Amazon to dig holes.
I've been following it, too.

Changing goal posts, changing terminology, an inventor with a shady past, loudly seeking funding, disallowing most peer-review, invite only 'demonstrations', no technical side to the patent.

The only thing that has changed, for me at least, is that the discussion about Rossi being full of shit has moved from phys.org to news.ycombinator.com .
> Convenience, low prices, extensive catalogue, pleasent customer support, innovative products... Yes, we need to kill the beast. Maybe pander and bait some clicks in the meantime.

Don't you think the article raises a number of valid points? While Hachette is little better than Amazon, having an effective monopoly on such a large market is definitely not healthy. The fact that they are exploiting their workers doesn't help.
I shop at both Wal-Mart and Amazon, oddly both also benefit some smaller companies I purchase from. Wal-Mart shopping centers, at least near me, have all sorts of restaurants and specialty stores I like/use/need. Amazon's market place has let me source some products that were previously difficult to find elsewhere (Skyflakes crackers for one, many other items from that side of the world could be found but not consistently or for good pricing)

The book industry needs to change, I haven't come up against the dark side of Amazon's influence. I did watch for years when Apple and the publishers clearly broke the law and cheered when they got caught as I had seen prices for books I bought just sky rocket.

As for how their employees are treated or their "perceived" treatment, local employment laws cover those. Avoiding unionization is not a crime and should not be held against anyone. Much of retail outside of grocery is not unionized. When the same unions hire no benefit, no union, temps to protest tell me again how they are the good guys?
Humans fail, it's called "crashing".
As do all the internet nodes, mobile network hubs and their accompanying spy/malware, that your pics use to travel from your phone to those servers...
In some areas maybe. Seems newegg and Tiger Direct have similar prices still though for electronics. I wonder what the difference in sales volume is. What are newegg's logistics like, anyone know?
At least for ebooks it recently occurred to me that it will probably be difficult for any ebook vendor to establish a monopoly. After all, everybody can just offer ebooks on their web site.
Are we really facing "less variety of products and lower quality of the remaining ones"? I see more variety in Amazon's kindle store than I ever saw in a traditional publisher's range, and while the average quality may be lower the peaks are as high as ever.

If Amazon really did undercut Diapers.com by selling at a loss, that sounds like a perfectly good case for existing antitrust laws, not something that requires executive action. For the rest, I'm happy to reap the benefits of what Amazon gives us.
this witchcraft was already burned at the stake by Popular Science.[0]

[0] : http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-10/andrea-rossis-...
Truecaller Gets $60M in New Funding
We have to remember that when we talking about giant companies we are talking about giant institutions, of a form and culture that has not existed in human history. The closest parallels common throughout human history are armies.

I think that our 20th century paradigms have failed to understand and shape these institutions, each with their own trappings. Labour unionism, which was deeply rooted in man labour cultures and many countries' political systems was amazingly corrupt. They became their own institutions layering their own dynamics and interests into the already impossible mesh. The results were far from unanimously positive.

Liberal-capitalism nurtured the concept of non natural person, corporate entities. The cultural relationship between individual, employers, consumers and investors and the institutions is grafted onto the idea that the institution is a legal person. At this point, companies are far more than risk sharing and limiting devices. They are institutions of the same gravity as churches, bureaucracies, aristocracies and such. They are entrenched. I don't mean that in a strictly accusatory sense. They are just part of the web of culture, laws, economies and everything else.

First of all, we all need to have the humility to understand how little we know about how these things work. We are designed to operate within social institutions, not to build and destroy them each generation. No one built feudalism or poleis. No one really designed the international system of nation states. No one created Danish national identity. These things just evolved. Those are the kinds of things we're dealing with.

I don't know what is the right way of dealing with Amazon, Google or Walmart as a (global) society. I think I would be more comfortable if the times brought around a period of miniaturization, where these mega institutions gave way to hundreds or thousands of smaller ones.

For Amazon, what's keeping them huge is (a) dispatch & postal delivery is surprisingly hard. (b) The chain between design, manufacture, marketing and delivery is surprisingly cumbersome. Amazon is a company that does what a market would do in a world fewer impediments.

Maybe the next few decades will make global delivery trivial. This would enable products to come directly from suppliers and simplify the chain. Software developers once had to sell software through software stores. The modern incarnations of software store is a relatively thinner layer. Producers are closer to consumers and the intermediaries are really just market makers.

PS: Price controls have a bad track record dating back to Roman times.
Mitigating Financial Risks by Emphasizing on Testing Phase in the DevOps Process
I think it's a very important distinction to make, especially early on, to make sure that founders focus on power users and completely ignore casuals. It's tempting to try to get interest from marginal users, because there is many more of them than potential power users, but it's going to do you no good if power users don't see value in what you build.
I think he meant developing/prototyping ideas not actually releasing them
Looks promising! I have been looking into the MyPressi (http://mypressi.com/), as it has a reputation of punching far above its weight as far as a good cup of espresso goes, but in the end I decided against it because it needs compressed gas cartridges to operate.

The Minipresso appears to rely solely on hand pumping, so I wonder if it still gives as good a result.
The medical needs are pretty great with Ebola (it is nasty), but if the aim is to control the outbreak the most important thing is isolation. The hospitals can’t be seen as a death camp or else we won’t get people to come to the hospital in the first place defeating the purpose of the setting them up. Any hospital will have to offer real treatment where your chance of survival is greater in the hospital than it would be being cared for by your family at home.

Even if we go down the path of training locals they will still need to be supported so we will need a lot of trained medical staff - even assuming one trained nurse per every 10 beds we would need 10,000 nurses (the norm in most hospitals is 1 nurse per bed). We might be able to reach this number with volunteers, but my feeling is people are going to be reluctant to go.
I'm not American, and had not heard of New Republic. But reading this article, I think New Proletariat sounds like a more honest name for their magazine.
If I remember correctly, part of the original hope was that it would go to younger people (as opposed to being the climax of a lifetime of achievement), so that the award could be used to continue their work. That's part of the reason why it can't be awarded posthumously - the deceased are known for being unproductive.
Seems like Ubisoft is managing their employees just like every French consulting company is managing its consultants between projects. Why is it considered unorthodox? Is it because Ubisoft is a game editor and other editors never do that, or because they host their own projects with their own schedules, and therefore should be somewhat able to better reallocate their workforce?
The Kindle is attempt to do exactly that, breadth of offering and convenience is a pretty big hurdle to overcome.
Modern society always progresses at the cost of old, inefficient jobs, while redistributing the wealth from those destroyed markets. The only concern is whether the redistribution of wealth is towards equality or inequality. As long as wealth is transferred to more people, the overall gain of buying power will eventually create a better economy.

The problem is really not about monopoly, but whether the beneficiaries of these business contain a larger population.
It's not really 'autonomous driving' so you might be overestimating the safety factor implied by the term 'autopilot'.

I'm not a car person or expert in the field but I've done a little bit of work on automotive systems. As the other responders pointed out these systems are designed to, ECC or not, do things like (at the slightest sign of inconsistency or error)

- reset and recover very quickly

- enter reduced functionality or failsafe modes

- fully disable themselves and anything that might cause you to rely on them

They're fundamentally built around the eventuality of them failing and with consideration of the things that need to happen when they fail. They don't usually rely on 'well, we'll just put in a somewhat more reliable component'.
Here is the news, not the propaganda
That guy is a bit of a black sheep at KTH.
She meant developing indie games for Ubisoft. Surely they should be able to come up with a few that would be good enough to become actual products...
Sure but that still doesn't address the actual problem and from a certain viewpoint two companies doing the same thing is less efficient than a large company doing it because of economies of scale. So which is it? Do we want efficiency or fairness?
So let me get this straight. You work on a project that may require up to 80hours/week for weeks and months at a time. And then at the end instead of massive layoffs, as game companies are known to do, they send you to an office to wind down, spaz out, and recharge. This I don't mind. Sounds better than the emotional rollercoaster of working hard and layoffs.

Also, the Japanese were doing this for a long time. Salarymen, between projects, regularly came into work and did nothing all day. Eventually when a new division started you had a viable pool of candidates.
But in truth doesn't Amazon act more as a economic lubricant? Connecting consumers with all sorts of industries and businesses all across the world? For every industry or business that's "trampled" aren't an equal or greater number of businesses benefiting? It's like a shit hot postal service with a great website that's hugely profitable and ploughs most of its profits into making the service even better. It renews my faith in the human race to get big stuff done, and done well. I'd say we need to keep an eye on it, especially its tax affairs, but for now its probably best just to wait and see what happens ...
May I learn what it has to do with HN?
> But it's easy to imagine media leaning towards the conservative will choose to completely ignore that fact.

It makes little sense.Conservative media didnt stop labelling Obama as "socialist"(which he clearly is not * ) even after he got his prize.

*: I cant think of one thing he did that was "socialist", even the mandate thing was designed by conservative think tanks,hmm... yes perhaps the bailout,that definetly was "socialist",but it's not like the Bush administration didnt bail out banks either.
Seems to me if Ubisoft had half a brain they would turn this in to a 20% time of sorts.

A bunch of talented game developers we already pay wages have a few months off? What if.. gasp.. We let them make games? Any games. There's literally nothing whatsoever to lose. Worst case scenario your employees do something they enjoy for a while.
In my experience, Amazon almost always isn't the cheapest place to get something online.
It's interesting for geeks, as were the rest of the Nobel Prize announcements these past few days. Also, I assume many of us were (over-optimistically) hoping it would be Snowden.
I was not familiar with Satyarthi but it seems totally deserved. On the other hand, I was always having an issue with Malala being nominated. She's the mainstream winner, that's clear, there's plenty of media attention but could anyone explain to me what are her tangible achievements for human rights?
"...the second-leading killer for those ages 15-34."
I would have never guessed that.

Now I can understand why some are trying to use social media to detect who might be expressing feeling that are common with depression and suicidal thoughts.
There are a number of JS-in-JS stepping interpreters posted in this thread, one of which I've worked on :) For people who like this sort of thing, I think tailspin [1] is a particularly interesting example, since it supports reversible execution as well.
[1] https://github.com/wthimbleby/tailspin
Scientists close to a non-insulin cure for diabetes
There are only four options:

1) this works
2) this is a scam, and the reviewing authors are collaborators
3) this is a scam and the reviewing authors are being duped by Rossi
4) it isn't a scam but it doesnt work as advertized either, it's honest scientific mistakes both by Rossi and reviewers.

Earlier, My scam-meter was at quite a high reading. Now I'm not so sure. I'm still sceptical, but what's interesting is the fact that the other options now also look a lot less appealing.

The authors come from very respected institutions and would be jeopardizing their careers by participating in a scam. Could this be the case? Certainly, but it would be one of the largest academic scandals ever, at least in Sweden (UU and KTH are two of the most regarded universities)

Thr experiment appears to do what it can to rule out them being scammed by Rossi. The probability that a group of honest researchers could be fooled in an experiment like this feels quite slim. There would have to be a LOT of smoke and mirrors in order to tamper enough with instruments, swap samples of fuel to show isotope changes and so on.

I don't want to use circumstantial reasoning like "If this worked it would be in journals" or "if this worked he wouldn't need funding". What I will say is: if this works then it can and will be repeated. I'll remain sceptical until it's repeated by several groups of researchers. It's s fantastically simple device and an experiment that is relatively small and easy to perform.

If the past is any indication this won't be followed by repeated experiments by independent groups, but by a long period of silence. That won't raise credibility.
Incidentally smile.amazon.com does this for charities. Whatever you buy from that link a certain percentage of the sale goes to your chosen charity.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in a case involving Amazon working conditions, although the workers involved are actually employees of Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc., which provides staffers for Amazon warehouses.

The workers are required to go through security screening at the end of their shifts, to make sure they aren't stealing from Amazon. There are only two check stations for the entire warehouse they work in, and it often takes workers 25 minutes to get through the line and leave.

They are required to clock out BEFORE they get in line, so that's 25 unpaid minutes.

The workers won in the 9th Circuit, and that spawned several class action suits seeking compensation for about 100000 workers who are subject to post-shift security screenings. CVS Pharmacy and Apple are also facing such suits.

The company is arguing that time waiting in line for a security check is similar to commuting time, which companies do not have to pay for. That law is that employers have to pay for things that are "integral and indispensable part of the principal activities" of the job. Several Justices seemed skeptical that this covered security screenings on exit--it's not a principal activity of the job.

The lawyer for the employees argued that an employee is hired to do what he's told to do, and so should be paid for things that the employer requires him to do.

Some Justices did seem receptive to the worker's case. Justice Kagan noted that what makes Amazon special is that they have a better inventory control system than their competitors, and it is very important for them to know where everything is. Merchandise security is a principle activity of Amazon's operations, and so the security checks would be a principle activity of the job.

The Obama administration is siding with Amazon.
Nothing. It's off-topic in that it's mainstream news, and somewhat political.

Perhaps most of us are interested in it (I am), and happy with the winners, but that doesn't mean it belongs here.
Maybe we should no longer have elections as there's a lot of duplication between > 1 political parties too
Right, book publishers are largely middlemen. Let the old ways die and a hundred new business models flourish.
Just because Marx failed to provide a solution doesn't mean he was wrong about the problem. The underpaid workers at Amazon are just a symptom of the extreme consolidation of wealth that is slowly but steadily undermining the entire basis of the type of prosperous rising-tide-lifts-all-boats capitalism that was the foundation of America's 20th century growth. We're facing real problems in the near future that neither Capitalism nor Communism has the answer to.