putlake

Here's the inside story of how the ban was years in the making and all the effort it took. From someone in the government at the time the process started: https://twitter.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/159637064508835020...

From what I've heard, AWS prices for large customers like Netflix are a lot lower than for Alexa or Amazon Retail. Netflix has the option to switch to GCP or Azure; Alexa doesn't so they don't get those discounts.

Because there are different types of bacteria that are vying for domination. The "good" bacteria are fine with antibiotics because they usually only get used when there are too many "harmful" bacteria that threaten the life support system.

I'm South Asian, have lived in the US for over 15 years, and don't know wtf you're talking about. Neighborhood doesn't ever mean caste. The reason you never hear people talking about caste is because they don't.

I use both Cloudflare and Fastly. Haven't done a deep comparison of their pricing, but Fastly at my teeny scale (<$100 per month) is affordable for the benefit they provide.

Is CDN bandwidth your only need or do you also need features like log streaming to BigQuery, WAF, direct integration with Google via signed exchanges (SXGs)?

This illustrates the reverse lookup problem with these services. You can take pains to use a Google account with zero contacts. That safeguards the information of your contacts. But Trucaller already has your information because they get it from other people who have added you in their contacts list, and who aren't as privacy conscious as you are.

exdsq is right in the sibling comment. Alameda also made a lot of money (probably still does) with arbitrage. BTC in Korea costs more than BTC in the US. It's not easy to convert KRW to USD freely but they seemed to have found a way around it.

[Edit: Typo]

One month ago today, this poll was very bearish on Facebook and Netflix. These two companies saw their stock crash after earnings in the last 2 weeks. Apple and Amazon reported strong earnings, and Google blew it out of the water. I'd say the HN crowd did pretty well. There's maybe an opportunity here to do polls every quarter to predict winners and losers.

>> SEO: if your content exists at two (or more!) distinct URL endpoints, it is a SEO no-no. […] You need redirects.

> Or you could just only serve it from one of the two URLs and let the other 404.

That's not a good idea. The URL you are choosing to remove may have built up some link equity, which you will lose if you 404 it. Instead of 404ing it, 301 redirect to the surviving URL. This allows search engines to consolidate equity from both URLs into one.

The plugin author seems like a standup guy who responded cordially and even returned money, which is something no scammer would ever do. Your platform, your rules. But I feel you're being unfair to him with this knee-jerk reaction.

NPR's Marketplace had a fascinating story about something similar in the apparel business. They design pockets in various types of clothing to reduce tariffs.

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/05/29/theres-a-reason-your-...

Example from the article:

Certain women’s garments with “pockets below the waist” get lower duty rates than those without. Because of that, a number of the women’s shirts Columbia Sportswear makes are intentionally designed with tiny pockets near the waistline, which lowers the cost of importing them. One of the company’s shorthands for “pockets below the waist” is “nurse’s pocket.”

Cozy did the exact same thing, at least before their merger with Apartments.com. Tenant pays last month's rent via someone else's (ex-spouse's) credit card, then moves out, collects their security deposit, then disputes the card. Cozy supposedly tries to fight the dispute with the credit card company but landlord is not allowed to be a party of that discussion. Cozy fails to convince credit card company. Cozy asks landlord to return the money.

I've not understood why one wouldn't use Chrome or Edge's built-in password manager. Is there a compelling reason to use a separate password manager app?

I ran this on my Mac and it found 2 instances of log4j jar files, both related to Xcode:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/ContentDeliveryServices.framework/Versions/A/itms/share/OSGi-Bundles/org.apache.logging.log4j.core-2.11.2.jar

/System/Volumes/Data/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/ContentDeliveryServices.framework/Versions/A/itms/share/OSGi-Bundles/org.apache.logging.log4j.core-2.11.2.jar

Should I just delete them or is there a different mitigation? Apple needs to ship a patched Xcode version ASAP.

PSA: Please don't download random binaries. Ungoogled Chrome already exists. It's called Microsoft Edge. And it has a cousin called Brave.

This is a great question, and I don't know if the answer is as clear cut as the "No" responses here suggest. With 1TB free, Cloudfront has now removed the incentive for AWS customers (those who use EC2 or S3) to adopt Cloudflare's free or even $20 tier. While Cloudflare doesn't make much money off these customers, it's how their network learned and grew. 1TB is more than enough for a lot of applications.

afaik Cloudflare prioritizes its paying customers over those on the free tier e.g. when there are limited resources at a POP. It's not clear whether Cloudfront will do the same -- does anyone know?

Thank you for sharing the original Reuters article. In that article it says Amazon helped draft Virginia's privacy bill. So I guess they are making exactly the effort you talked about? But of course Reuters is calling them out on it:

"In Virginia, the company boosted political donations tenfold over four years before persuading lawmakers this year to pass an industry-friendly privacy bill that Amazon itself drafted."

After a lot of insinuations and handwaving about lobbying, the article has this short paragraph about what's actually in the law: "The Virginia law allows technology companies to track consumer searches on their platforms to create marketing profiles. It gave tech companies exemptions to collect and analyze smart-speaker recordings without customer consent. And it prevented consumers from suing companies over privacy violations."

Seems totally reasonable to me. Amazon already lets you get a copy of your data and you can request for it to be deleted. And from having worked there (note: I no longer work there and don't have a dog in this fight), I know how the org ties its own hands and makes things difficult for itself, just to protect customer data and their right for that data to be deleted forever.

You can ask to see the data Amazon has on you, and for it to be deleted. If you ask for it to be deleted, they will delete it all. And you can keep asking every month if you like. Not to mention no one is forcing you to use Alexa in the first place.

The cartoon playing out in the media once again reminds me of Gell-Mann Amnesia because I used to work at Alexa. The lengths that they go to for preserving consumer privacy actually seemed absurd to me. Alexa engineers and applied scientists' lives would have been much easier if they didn't take customer privacy -- and their right to request and delete their data -- so seriously.

Yes, they are lobbying against regulation. But that's because no business wants to have to deal with 50 different laws in 50 states. They're saying let's have one federal regulation so it's easier to comply. It's not that they don't care about privacy -- they very much do. In fact, all these large companies want regulation because it strengthens their moat. A startup won't have the resources to comply with such regulations on Day 1. They just want it to be reasonable because dealing with different state-level regulations is too much.

> AMP ads on AMP pages get to render instantly because they are prerendered and only trigger impressions when they are viewed. Non-AMP pages aren't prerendered because they would count as an impression even if they aren't viewed.

This is not even wrong. I'm sorry; I never post just to criticize someone's comment. But yours was the top comment on the page and was, in addition to being wrong, condescending to an author who is clearly very knowledgeable (I say that as a web publisher who has monetized with ads for more than a decade).

From the article:

> [The recent DOJ lawsuit against Google] claims that Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, even though the company’s employees knew that it only improved the “median of performance” and actually loaded slower than some speed optimization techniques publishers had been using. It alleges that AMP pages brought 40% less revenue to publishers. The complaint states that AMP’s speed benefits “were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a ‘nice comparative boost.‘”

This is a very big deal and a huge trust buster, and a giant dick move by Google against publishers. It's literally an evil act by a company that said Don't be Evil. The article is spot on that AMP has irreparably damaged publishers' trust.

From the article: "So when the coastal ports started getting clogged up last spring due to the impacts of COVID on business everywhere, drivers started refusing to show up. Congestion got so bad that instead of being able to do three loads a day, they could only do one."

I could not make the connection from the first sentence to the second. If drivers are not showing up, congestion (in the lines for drivers) should go down, shouldn't it?

It should be noted that the WSJ is owned by News Corp, which runs an ad network of their own for their properties. This launch announcement even talks about how they combine their first party data about their subscribers with data from Mastercard Ad Intelligence to "create bespoke marketing and advertising solutions" : https://newscorp.com/2017/12/05/news-corp-launches-news-iq/

China's WuDao model had 1.75T parameters and Google's Switch transformer had 1.6T. How is this the world's largest then?

I had this same question when I first learned about social security and saw a non-trivial amount of my paycheck funding the program. So I wrote this comparison (it is about 10 years old but still accurate): https://www.diffen.com/difference/Ponzi_Scheme_vs_Social_Sec...

OP is very misguided. Cloudflare does not proactively refresh their caches. That's just not how CDNs work.

Here is how I would troubleshoot:

1. Look for the X-Forwarded-For header: All requests or the AWS server will come from Cloudflare. That's the point of a CDN. The X-Forwarded-For header tells you the actual client IP making the request. I think Cloudflare has some tools to block certain IP addresses. You can use that once you have identified the IP to block.

2. Make sure nginx returns appropriate headers so that Cloudflare will cache the responses from the origin server. If caching is set up correctly, Cloudflare will not make requests to your server. They will serve from their cache instead.

I regularly use site-specific controls, mostly for Javascript. Let's hope Edge retains it.

This isn't insider trading. It's tax fraud.

Here's how they structured their affairs to claim long-term capital gains (via Sen. Carl Levin's testimony [0]):

The key financial product involved in these fictions is called a ``basket option.'' ...basket option basics worked like this: The bank sold its hedge fund client a structured financial product, called an ``option,'' whose payoff equaled the profits generated by a ``basket'' of securities held in a designated account at the bank. The basket here is key. It was an open account with ever-changing contents. Technically, the account and the securities it contained were held in the name of the banks in its own trading account. The hedge fund put up 10 percent of the cash needed to buy the securities, and the bank lent the other 90 percent.

This arrangement included a number of fictions which defied reality, but resulted in big profits for the hedge funds and the banks.

First, though the structure was designed to create the appearance that the bank owned the assets in the basket option account, the hedge fund made all the trading decisions for those accounts--and in fact, used the bank's computerized trading system to execute trades in the account. RenTec estimates that its trading through basket options accounts averaged more than 100,000 trades each day, or about 30 million trades a year. Also, the hedge fund reaped all of the trading profits, even though the financial structure created the illusion that the bank owned the assets. The beneficial owner, the real owner, was the hedge fund.

Now, second, the hedge fund's control of all the trading for the basket option account demolishes the fiction of a legitimate option. So the hedge funds set up new entities, which they controlled, to serve one function, and that was to act as the option holder. The hedge funds would then claim that their control of the option holder was totally independent of their role in making the trading decisions for the basket option account. Documents that we will explore today show the extraordinary lengths to which RenTec and the banks went to perpetuate the illusion that the option holder and trader were somehow independent, when in fact the hedge fund, RenTec, played both roles.

The fictional option was structured so that it could be exercised more than 1 year after it was created. Under that structure, the hedge funds claimed that trading profits from the account were long-term capital gains and thereby qualified for the reduced long-term capital gains tax rate.

The Tax Code gives long-term capital gains a reduced rate on the theory that it provides an incentive for investors to risk their capital on the kind of long-term investments that grow the economy and create jobs. The high-volume trading that, for example, RenTec conducted through its basket options does not meet that test. When securities are held for weeks or days or even seconds, it is surreal to characterize those trading profits as long-term capital gains.

But that is what the hedge funds did. The banks and hedge funds used the fictional option structure to collapse millions of individual trades into one transaction, the execution of an option. As if by magic, the option structure transforms what would be short-term capital gains from an ordinary trading account into long-term capital gains subject to lower taxes.

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-113shrg89882/html/C...

Examples for what happens when media ownership is concentrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI

And this one I'm not sure if it's just good PR by Amazon or laziness by media outlets or both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6U2Un5kEdI