dbatten

Presumably, you can trust that when you buy Amazon's private label brands, you're getting the actual Amazon private label, and not a counterfeit?

If not, let's hope that this eventually creates incentive for Amazon to handle the counterfeiting problem to protect their own brands.

If so, one would hope that Amazon is able to extend whatever tech/business practices are protecting these private label brands to other product on Amazon?

The YouTube codec did some wild stuff with that slow-mo flying mulch at the beginning... any video experts around that can explain?

Given that Bezos envisions, for example, creating a network of preschools in low-income areas, I'd say he's at least thinking about helping people get out of cyclical poverty.

Still, I'd also like to see Amazon pay its employees better...

Not that I doubt that they're right about this data point, but interesting choice of source... appears to be some sort of climate-change-denial organization?

Unfortunately, as long as getting health insurance through your employer remains tax-advantaged, people will be unlikely to demand the decoupling of work and health coverage...

We recently sold our house. I discovered a typo on our deed. The previous owner's deed also had the same typo. These deeds had been reviewed by at least 3 lawyers, at least 2 title insurance companies (who had a financial interest in not screwing it up), and at least 3 realtors. Nobody noticed the mistake.

It was hell on earth trying to sort it out, and the sale almost fell through because of it. The real kicker was that our lawyer basically told me he wished I hadn't noticed it because the sale would have just gone through and nobody would have cared... but since I did, we were legally obligated to fix it.

I don't disagree at all, but I feel this basically just makes my broader point. Napoleon eventually lost due to the political/financial/technological might of Britain, not because he hit a better general.

I second the missing data points, especially technology and cultural/social conditions... but I'd also point out that a lot of history is written by the winners.

Napoleon was able to win the way he did because social conditions in France permitted him to conscript as many soldiers as he wanted and basically usurp the entire economic output of the country for the war effort. He famously bragged to one opponent that he couldn't be stopped because he could afford to "spend 30,000 lives a month." Other European societies at the time hadn't yet conceived of making war that way. And, once they all finally got around to it, we ended up with World War 1.

Julius Caesar was the other major outlier but Rome was undoubtedly more technologically and socially "advanced" than the Celts he fought early in his career. Furthermore, basically everything we know about Julius Caesar's exploits comes from books written by... Julius Caesar. Surely, he had an incentive to make his victories sound as dramatic as possible.

I second the Luigi recommendation. Republic Wireless uses it for all of our data warehouse ETL, and it's been fantastic to work with.

I also second the other comment that recommends starting with basic data extraction rather than diving into Hadoop or Spark immediately. Sure, at some point, you might need to process 100 billion lines of data. But in your average business, you're far more likely to be working with thousands or millions of records on customers, sales, orders, invoices, sales leads, etc. That stuff doesn't need Hadoop/Spark, it needs a Postgres database and a DBA with a good head on their shoulders keeping everything organized.

In my experience, government data sets (particularly demographics and other geographically-related data sets) are a fantastic way to get your feet wet with data processing. They're published by a bunch of different agencies, so they're not necessarily conveniently available in one place. However, they usually use standardized identifiers for geographies, which makes it easy to join the data sets together in new and interesting ways.

For instance, here at Republic, we recently used Form 477 data on wireless broadband availability from the FCC, data from Summary File 1 of the US Census, and a couple of Census geographic crosswalk files to be able to calculate the percentage of population in given zip codes and cities covered by various wireless carriers. That required reading the docs for several different data sources, automating some downloads, building database tables to hold all of the information, and then carefully crafting some SQL to pull it all together.

Of course, government data sets generally won't require a whole lot of automation (they're updated yearly or less than yearly, not daily). To build your skills on that front, I'd recommend learning to extract data from various APIs, structure it in a meaningful way, and make it available in a database. For example, if you have a website, set up a free Google Analytics account for it, then build a daily ETL that extracts some meaningful information from the Google Analytics API and stuffs it in a Postgres DB. Then see if you can build some charts or something that sit on top of that database and report on the information.

Interesting. I knew Gaza and the West Bank were geographically separate, but I didn't know conditions on the ground were so different. Thanks!

Random observation: I'm always fascinated by how poverty and development can co-exist in a lot of places on earth. During conflicts between Israel and Palestine, you always see photos of the insides of Palestinian hospitals and the lack of sanitation and equipment is heartbreaking. But then this ice-cream shop has high tech equipment, high sanitation standards, and a seemingly relatively wealthy client base. And the street looks like it could be any street from any other relatively stable, developed nation in that area.

I suppose it's also all a matter of the point that the media are trying to make with the article... A travel article is going to highlight the cool parts, while an article on the horrors of war is going to focus on the disasters.

PSA: Trying to hold your breath for a long time is dangerous, especially if you hyperventilate first. People die this way.

The hyperventilation thing is because your brain needs oxygen to live, but your impulse to breathe is driven by carbon dioxide saturation. When you hyperventilate, you get rid of a ton of carbon dioxide, and you can get into a situation where you don't have enough CO2 buildup to trigger the signal to breathe, but you have so little oxygen that your brain is dying.

Personally, not something I'd like to mess with.

Source for industry making fat shaming bad? I'm willing to listen if there's evidence, but this doesn't pass the sniff test for me...

I've heard people argue that a much more effective way to do environmental regulation would be to basically not regulate and instead increase liability standards for environmental/health damage.

Right now, in many cases, if a factory is dumping toxic sludge into a river and they're within EPA limits, there's nothing anybody can do to stop it.

If you allowed farmers downstream to come after them for damaging crops (or whatever), or allowed class action suits against coal-burning power companies for cancer and such, imagine what that might do to incentive structures.

I'm not sure I buy it, but the asbestos case makes me wonder.

You vote on more than just the president, though... you still have an opportunity to get your voice heard.

Admittedly, as a statement of fact, it's plausible/likely that the electoral college reduces turnout because presidential elections get people excited (especially when they know their state is in play), but that's not usually a rational response. You still get to vote for congress, state government, ballot initiatives, etc.

This alone is a great reason to run AMD...

This is an awesome resource, thank you.

The first time I started actually learning about World War I and started realizing that the Germans were pretty much as innocent as anybody else in that conflict (and probably more innocent than, say, the Russians or the Austro-Hungarians, or the Ottomans), I was like "wait, what?"

Also, that the US didn't really do much from a combat perspective (though financing the whole thing for the Allied Powers certainly helped).

Mind=blown.

Secure Multi-party Computation.

The basic idea is developing methods for two (or more) parties with sensitive data to be able to compute some function of their data without having to reveal the data to one another.

The classic example is developing an algorithm that allows two people to figure out who is paid more without either revealing what their salary is.

Such algorithms get significantly more complicated if the threat model starts changing from "we're all acting in good faith, but we just don't want to share this private info" to "I'm not sure some of the people involved in this are acting in good faith."

Based on my (admittedly limited) look into this field, it seems like there has been some theoretical progress made here, but there's nothing like a generalized framework or library for general development with it. Instead, practical applications seem to be one-offs. For example, a contractor a while back developed a system that lets parties (nation-states or private space firms) figure out if their satellites are going to run into each other without revealing anything about the location or orbit of their satellites. That way they don't share sensitive data, but they can move their satellites if they're on a collision course with somebody else.

Personally, I got interested in this when working for the government. I was working on an extremely cool data integration project (State Longitudinal Data System grant form US Department of Education) that basically went nowhere because we couldn't get over the legal hurdles to data sharing... If we didn't have to share data, but could still compute interesting statistics about the data, that would have been really cool.

Democracy in America is a fantastic book. It's amazing the number of things that might as well have been written about America in 2018. Reading it with the benefit of nearly 200 years of additional history, it basically becomes a tremendous commentary on the staying power of national culture and mythology...

Yes, making the use of tax havens illegal is very hard. It's basically a giant game of whack-a-mole, where the corporations have more people with stronger incentives working to get around the tax laws than the government has trying to write new ones.

Here's a fun explanation of the kinds of hoops corporations will jump through to dodge taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

Windows user here. I use the built-in robocopy utility to sync files to one of 2 external hard drives. One hard drive stays at work, the other at home, and I switch them periodically (usually, right after downloading new family photos onto the computer).

With this method, a virus or something like a fire that only affected one location would not be able to take out all copies of my data and, at most, I'd lose the most recently backed-up information.

It's not 100% bullet-proof, but it's good enough for my personal purposes.

I suspect most readers on HN will see this as a warning against religious tyranny when it's actually a warning against attempting to rehabilitate criminals rather than simply punishing them justly for their crime... Interestingly, the former is likely a rather popular notion here, while I imagine the latter viewpoint is fairly unpopular.

Here's the full essay: https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/073-02_055.pdf

The particular essay in question is "On the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment."

Here's a PDF: https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/churchman/073-02_055.pdf

Generally, if you come from a Twitter link, WSJ doesn't show the paywall. So you just search for the headline on Twitter...

Really? Works for me...

That would explain it though.

Completely serious question given the downvotes: Is this discouraged or banned on HN?

Whenever I hit a paywall from an HN link, I immediately go to the comments to see if somebody has linked to the full article. Thought I'd help folks out since nobody had done that for this article yet, but if I'm out of line I won't do it again.

Paywall work-around: https://t.co/jZyOpZbbtD

1) Cheap junk food is marketed, whereas cheap staples aren't. Basic white/brown rice is a commodity. There's no differentiation, and ultra-slim margins, so nobody's trying to market it to you. Easy Mac on the other hand...

2) Taste. To us adults (and mostly upper-middle class adults to boot) on HN, rice and beans may sound more appealing than cheap mac and cheese with mystery meat. Take a poll of 3-year-olds and you may get a different result.

3) Ease. Staples like rice and beans are only really cheap when you're buying them in dry form, bulk. This means you need to season them and cook them, which can be a long process. (My wife and I recently tried to save on black beans by cooking ourselves rather than buying canned. The result was good, but by the time you chop onions for seasoning, add other ingredients, monitor the beans, drain and cool the beans, and wash the crock pot, cutting board, knife, various spoons and measuring implements, etc., well, it ends up being a lot of work.) If you're a single parent working two jobs to support your kids, 5 minutes of preparation is meaningfully better than even, say, 20 minutes of preparation.

Unfortunately, I think this is a thornier issue than most of these articles give it credit for.

Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen, but he was serving as a uniformed combatant in the Canadian army. Under such circumstances, I can't imagine anyone would have a problem with the United States military killing John Doe in battle without trial.

Obviously, the circumstances around the kill list are murkier... The "war on terror" isn't a war in the traditional sense, terrorists or suspected terrorists are not uniformed combatants, the CIA is not necessarily the military, and it's not really certain that dropping a bomb on somebody's "cafe experience" is equivalent to killing them in a pitched battle in a declared war.

Still, I have a hard time imagining what rights a US citizen is supposed to be entitled to when they are effectively a foreign terrorist working to attack the US. Are we supposed to have a trial for them without them present? (We all know how that would go.) Ask for their home country to extradite them? (Country will almost certainly either be unwilling or incapable.) Send the Navy Seals to kidnap them and force them to stand trial? (Dangerous and wildly impractical, not to mention boots on the ground increasing the risk of creating a larger conflict with a foreign nation.)

Personally, I have two take-aways on the issue:

1) I wouldn't want to be the judge that has to sort this stuff out, and I hope they do it well. It's not easy.

2) I think the bigger problem is drone killings in other nations FULL STOP. Regardless of who the targets are, it's completely unacceptable for any country to think they can just fly into another nation's airspace and start dropping bombs on anybody they please without a declaration of war, some sort of cooperative MOU, or a join military exercise...