Amazon Warehouse scam: 16TB HDD swapped for 8TB, returned for full refund - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BlissWallpaper/status/1286419567783432193 <comment><USER2> "Amazon Warehouse", for those not familiar with it, is an option you can select specifically to buy an item that was previously returned.

Amazon has done a cosmetic inspection of the item and gives it a ranking on how it appears which you see when you are buying it.

There are certain types of items where you can save a huge amount of money and get great deals using Amazon Warehouse. Hard drives are obviously not one of them due to the assumption that everything is returned _for a reason_. An example of a type of item that I've always had good luck with is pots and pans.

The interesting thing about this is assume that the tracking is in place to identify who returned the original item. What would you do?

Maybe the actual scam (I don't mean in this specific case) is buying perfectly good Amazon Warehouse items but, knowing that they had been previously returned, _claiming_ the item was swapped out after swapping it out yourself.

So Amazon can't really know who to blame from a single incident. But certainly I would expect accounts would accumulate warning flags and at some point be banned.

<comment><USER3> I feel like this needs to be the top comment. Buying warehouse items is risky, that's why it's cheaper.

Also, you can just return it if you don't like.

I don't think this deserves the scrutiny it's getting here.

<comment><USER4> I'd think that it's cheaper not because it's risky (specially since Amazon says it inspects the item), but because it's second hand. Trying to pass the risk to the user is probably not what most people would expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I semi-recently bought a Samsung 970 EVO from Amazon, except new (and not from a third-party seller). Instead I received a security blanket: [https://i.imgur.com/DTPdhAn.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/DTPdhAn.jpg)

The SSD box was seemingly factory sealed.

I also bought a Dyson fan recently and what came was an obviously used, yellow stained, disgustingly old model of a Dyson fan. I hopped on Live Chat, they apologized, initiated a return - few weeks later I get a semi-threatening email from Amazon telling me that the Dyson fan I sent back "wasn't sent back in its original condition" \- I hopped on Live Chat and made sure everything was ok with my account (it was) - but still, ..wtf. this is a problem.

<comment><USER6> I keep telling everyone I come across, STOP BUYING THINGS from Amazon. They know they have a huge problem and refuse to face it.

I was injured in 2010 by counterfeit toiletries and since have embargoed them completely. I'm happy to buy things from the manufacture and pay shipping, at least I know with a reasonable confidence that what I am getting is going to be the real thing.

<comment><USER7> There need to be better indexed shopify and big cartel sites. So many great online stores I've bought from use that as a web front.

<comment><USER8> I don't think that's a solution. While I really, really like Shopify as an ecommerce platform its usage alone tells you nothing about the legitimacy of the seller. Indexing all products on a certain platform just seems like another marketplace to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recall seeing youtube videos about people who purchased pallets of returned items from Amazon. Kind of an "unboxing" video for a huge stack of returned items. Yes I was bored.

They had a few similar scenarios where people had clearly purchased expensive computer components like motherboards etc and then returned the box with some worthless motherboard in there instead of the expensive one. You can imagine some poor Amazon warehouse worker receiving the package, opening it up and seeing the motherboard "yup - looks like some computer gubbins. approved." and off it goes.

The video people seemed to react like this was quite a common occurrence.

So this makes me wonder, if amazon are bundling-up returned items into pallets and selling them in bulk, how did clearly returned items get sold back to an end user? Frankly I am amazed the scammer went to the effort of putting in a 8TB device and connecting it, rather than either returning it empty or with some random old IDE drive in it as a decoy.

<comment><USER10> > So this makes me wonder, if amazon are bundling-up returned items into > pallets and selling them in bulk, how did clearly returned items get sold > back to an end user?

If the item is (looks) unopened and pristine, Amazon will usually sell it again as new.

Some switcharoos are caught, some are not.

<comment><USER11> They could catch it multiples ways. Simple precise weight measurement would catch basic scammers. They could X-ray the package and use cv to determine if the contents have been modified or not.

<comment><USER12> Why automate? Pay someone to open the box and check.

<comment><USER13> Cost of multiple shifts at multiple locations + cost of implementing verification process + cost of security and oversight + cost of extra inventory loss due to employee theft

vs

Cost of negative image (deferred via simple returns) + cost of inventory loss duo to fraud + cost of inventory loss due to employees

It's simpler to simply eat the cost of abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of how a friend (as a teenager in the 90s) would buy expensive video cards from Best Buy and CompUSA only to swap them out with cheap cards off eBay, re-shrink wrap the box and return for a hefty profit. I thought it was a clever, profitable hack at 16 years old but now I'm ashamed I didn't just call this what it was: theft.

<comment><USER15> Fry's electronics when I was there was a victim of that. Fry's management in their heydays (before newegg, amazon) gave the directive to open boxes, even when these boxes appear new, during the return-process. This is the result of lessons.

Hopefully, Amazon will learn it or make it a problem for the vendors.

<comment><USER16> Fry's is the only retailer I have been to where an LP associate insisted on opening up a product I just bought new to inspect it. Yep, its a rice cooker, I should have went over to returns to return it as its condition changed from new to open box before I left the store.

<comment><USER17> > Yep, its a rice cooker

A rice cooker is a cylindrical item that usually comes in a rectangular box that leaves empty room in the corners. The LP associate was checking for additional unpurchased items in the box, not that you were getting a rice cooker.

<comment><USER16> It was a sealed box.

<comment><USER18> There may have been some inside theft / collusion going on with employees.

Example: Employee takes a rice cooker off the shelf, puts high value electronics (memory, processors, etc) inside, reseals it with shrink wrap. He tells his friend on the outside to buy the rice cooker to smuggle it out. They then split the proceeds.

This probably goes on for weeks until the store wonders why they're suddenly selling so many rice cookers, but are already running low on Pentium Pros and 32 meg SIMMs.

<comment><USER16> So, what your saying is I should expect being treated like this, after I have purchased the product, thus making it my property.

I will go ahead and just go over to returns next time and go somewhere else.

<comment><USER18> I'm just guessing. I don't work in retail but I'm sure all sorts of scams happen, ones we can't even imagine. Was this recent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's why Fry's Electronics--a bay area retailer--scans the serial numbers of hard drives, DIMM memory and other electronic stuff. During the return process, Fry's employees check the serial number of the returned item against what's there in the receipt. This strategy was born precisely because of the scam that Amazon is seeing now.

<comment><USER19> But here an _internal component_ was swapped. The serial number on the product was unchanged.

I've never seen a receipt list any serial number, let alone serial numbers of multiple internal components.

<comment><USER15> At least Fry's electronics used to TEST memory sticks, motherboards, CPUs in front of customers during the return process. I knew cases where customers tried to return CPUs with bent pins, and their returns were denied.

IIRC, Fry's did not test hard disks, except to match the serial numbers. So, now this scam requires testing of hard drives of their capacity during the return process. And this is a cat-and-mouse game.

<comment><USER20> I feel like the testing was more of a way to 1. try to avoid the return by proving it worked and 2. put it right back out on the shelf for sell. Actually picked up some good deals in the good days of Frys from returns. It's a shame they're nothing more than an as seen on tv store these days.

<comment><USER15> First, they used to put these reshrink-wrapped items back on the shelves without any labels. Few years later, they started to put the label "Returned item".

Fry's is dead, as their HQ on Brokaw Road is being converted to an office complex. They missed the dot com gravy train; had they gone to IPO around 1999, they would have made a killing. However, Fry's brothers and their management are weird.

<comment><USER21> oh is it? last i knew there were 3 bids over the last year or os, all unable to get through re-zoning. The last news I heard was april 2020 and it is still stuck.

do you know something very recent, or are you going on vaporware press releases.

<comment><USER15> Nothing new, just that April 2020 news. Fry's done for now thanks to Covid. It was slowly dying before that.

Here are some facts: (a) most of the shelves are empty; (b) shelves between two shelves are removed, to make it appear business as usual; (c) vendors were not getting paid by Frys; (d) therefore, any decent vendor doesn't want to send them items on credit; (e) so, Fry's is left with the junk we see on TVs.

In some aspects, I miss Fry's. Fry's used to hire all kinds of people, gave jobs to new immigrants without English skills. Now we such people driving Uber, Lyft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Way back when I was in high school, it became a fad among the tech-geeks to have our TI-85 graphing calculators modded with a "turbo" switch that would let you run some games like Wolfenstein and Tetris at better speeds. It involved cutting a hole in the back plastic casing inside the battery compartment to make room for the switch, and then soldering a few connections on the board underneath.

There was one kid who was doing it for everyone at $20 a pop, but he made no guarantees about not accidentally bricking the calculator in the process. I was a little apprehensive about having him do it since TI calculators were (and still are) ridiculously expensive, and asked him what his success rate was. He told me it didn't really matter because even if he accidentally screwed up, all you had to do was go buy a new TI-85 from Future Shop (which was like a Canadian version of Best Buy before they were actually bought by Best Buy), put the broken calculator in the box, and then return it the next day for a full refund. He would then mod the new one for no additional charge.

My turbo switch was installed fine so I didn't have to pull the scam, but I knew a few kids who did.

</comment><comment><USER23> The reply from Amazon's support Twitter is the indication of a far larger problem in most business. Namely, it's easier to deal with the consequences of "mistakes" than it is to not make them.

e.g.

\- the "fines" Google and Facebook keep getting for breaking privacy and other laws which are laughably small.

\- customer support teams not dealing with serious customer issues until they get attention (viral tweet, front page HN etc)

\- monopolies in most forms: e.g. the big-tech anti-poaching agreements

Generally I'm all for "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" but that assumes that you are acting in good faith but still sometimes screw up. It seems like "screwing up" has become a good way to ensure short-term profits and as everyone is obsessed with KPIs and OKRs at a 1-week to 3-month time frame, the incentives are all wrong.

And "mission statements" and "cultural values" are too synthetic to come close to fixing this.

<comment><USER24> > Namely, it's easier to deal with the consequences of "mistakes" than it is > to not make them

What we're seeing is a widespread use of "fractional fraud".

Transactions and business lines that are 1%-5% fraudulent are unlikely to be challenged, but have a huge effect on profitability.

The best example I've seen is Bunnie Huang's deep dive on counterfeit SD cards [1]. Margins on SD cards are like 1%, so blending in defective cards at a 1% rate can double your profit. Another example is retail trade payment for order flow. A major broker-dealer was just sanctioned for front-running its clients.

As long as your defect ("mistake") rate stays below your customer's response threshold, you can keep doing it. It is impossible to overstate how important social norms are for policing this kind of misconduct.

[1] [https://nostarch.com/hardwarehackerpaperback](https://nostarch.com/hardwarehackerpaperback)

<comment><USER25> I'm reminded of an internet fable

> A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old > farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

> The next day the farmer drove up and said: "Sorry son, but I have some bad > news. The donkey died."

> Kenny replied, "Well then, just give me my money back."

> The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."

> Kenny said, "OK, then just unload the donkey."

> The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"

> Kenny: "I'm going to raffle him off."

> Farmer: "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"

> Kenny: "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he is dead."

> A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What happened with > that dead donkey?"

> Kenny: "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at $2 a piece and made a > profit of $998.00."

> Farmer: "Didn't anyone complain?"

> Kenny: "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his $2 back."

> Kenny grew up and eventually became the chairman of [company you want to > mock]

<comment><USER26> Sorry, not a native speaker. What does it mean to "raffle somebody off"? (Edit: googling it says: "dispose of in a lottery", which makes me wonder: why is there such a specific verb in the English language? I have never even thought of "disposing of anything in a lottery")

<comment><USER27> A "raffle" as distinct from a "lottery" in American English differs in how the prize is decided, and what kinds of things are typically the prize.

Typically a lottery runs in one of two ways: with pre-decided winning tickets, or a number that's drawn after the tickets are distributed to decide which ticket (if any) is the winner. In this way, the odds of winning are mostly independent of the number of tickets sold. The prize is usually money.

A raffle works by selling tickets, and then picking exactly one of those tickets to be the winner, making the odds directly dependent on the number of tickets sold. The prize is usually a physical object, and not money (though there are exceptions, e.g., a 50/50 raffle).

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the explanation. I'm familiar with the both forms of gambling, but for some reason, I've encountered "lottery" as a term a lot more; "raffle" I hardly knew, until now. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Welcome to Amazon shopping for the past 5 or so years. Everything is fakes, used goods marked as new, and low quality goods with 4.7+ stars from fake reviews.

The convenience is so nice, yet about 50% of the time I'm disappointed with any purchase made on Amazon.com. But, those stock profits :heart_eyes_emoji:.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why the surprise here. This "scam" (or theft) is as old as stores taking "no questions asked" returns. I knew someone who did this a time or two back in the mid-90's to Circuit City and/or CompUSA. I warned them that this could be traced back to them if the stores became interested enough to do so, that did not deter them much.

<comment><USER30> I wonder what the consequences can be for doing this. Just pay full price or also face legal actions.

<comment><USER31> It depends on how much the local DA wants to nail you.

It's definitely criminal behavior, some kind of theft or fraud

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I recently bought a Nintendo Switch from Amazon (not a third party seller) only to open the box and find the switch itself missing. Baffled at how this slipped through.

<comment><USER10> I guess the box looked unopened so the returns worker didn't look inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've ordered three Xbox Play and Charge kits from Amazon, two were blatantly counterfeit (came in a plastic bag, scratched and with no markings, I don't believe it's "OEM"), the other was genuine but with batteries manufactured four years before and pretty much DOA (probably used and sent back by someone?)

I had to order from Microsoft directly to get an acceptable product.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have a new Lenovo laptop, purchased on Amazon directly from Lenovo, arriving on Tuesday.

I intend to unbox the laptop and record it on my GoPro.

Seems silly, but...

<comment><USER35> After this ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23941572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23941572)) I always record. I had no problem to return and didn't need to prove that it arrived cracked but... better safe than sorry

<comment><USER36> I learned my lesson with TVs on Amazon a few years ago too. There were a couple reviews noting cracked screens, thought it was probably just rare bad luck. Bought the TV, it arrived cracked.

Had Amazon schedule a UPS pickup for return and bought the TV locally. Poor packaging for TVs on Amazon just seems to be normal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I just plain don't buy electronics on Amazon. I've rarely had it go well. It's usually something - anywhere from something like this, to paying full price for something that was obviously previously opened.

<comment><USER38> I don't understand who all these people are who are having bad experiences with Amazon. I only ever buy products that have the Prime label and have plenty of verified positive reviews. Stuff always arrives very quickly (often the next day), and I have literally never had a fake product mailed to me when I do this.

One time I bought a used product from Amazon and it was a little beat up but it still worked.

Another time I bought something that was clearly manufactured and sold from China, and sure enough it sucked, but I just returned it and it was no big deal.

<comment><USER39> > _I have literally never had a fake product mailed to me when I do this._

It's possible you're not buying commonly-faked items, or possibly it happened and you just didn't notice. Lots of fakes are of similar reliability for the first 20-50% of normal lifespan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I had assumed this was common knowledge that this occurred. We used to experience returns like this all of the time that Amazon would accept up-front before acceptance by our warehouse. >$200 chargers returned in original boxes containing $10 chargers. There have been other stories of iphone boxes full of playdough or just anything that would weight roughly the same.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are other 3rd party fulfillment providers that rather than dealing with having had this pushed on them by Amazon, they just put that return back on the shelf and they get shipped out to other customers.

<comment><USER41> What did you do when you get such a return, and what would Amazon do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Probably more expensive to train some warehouse workers to analyze returns to the extent of plugging it into a computer and seeing the size than to just deal with this happening some time.

<comment><USER43> I bought an alternator for my wife's car. While replacing it, I discovered this:

[https://imgur.com/a/E53NxjE](https://imgur.com/a/E53NxjE)

Prior customer bought, discovered the holes were machined incorrectly (part would not bolt up), clearly marked the part, returned it, and Amazon put it back on the shelf to send to the next buyer. With the car half torn apart, Amazon offered they could get me a replacement item in 8 calendar days. Yeah, that's not going to work, so I took it over to a milling machine and had it milled out to fit (first photo shows immediately after milling, second and third photo are before, third photo has the new part doweled to the old part to align one of the holes and show how far off the second hole is). Just like this case, Amazon A2Z was willing to accept the return and ship another one, but the real customer failure was during the previous return, not when I had the complaint.

There's a customer satisfaction angle that "Earth's most customer centric company" should probably be considering here.

<comment><USER44> If a customer has to physically punch a new hole in a product, I consider that a full refund without return :)

<comment><USER43> That's what I'd have expected from 2010 Amazon. It's not what I was offered by 2020 Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This happened to me buying a Yamaha MG06 Compact Stereo Mixer from Amazon Warehouse.

The one I received had clear indications that it had been in use for a long time, dust grime and wear—-it was gross.

In this case it appeared the person returned the same model for a new one. It was a good trick that Amazon resolved without feedback on my pointing this out when I returned it.

I bought it brand new after that.

Previous to this, I had ordered something else from amazon warehouse, again a "like new" item for a steep discount and it was as described. A great deal.

</comment><comment><USER46> Sounds about right. I have had overall VERY GOOD Amazon Warehouse experiences, but I have also had TWO VERY TERRIBLE Amazon Warehouse experiences with two separate products that could have been avoided if items were actually "Inspected"...

Hue Outdoor Motion Sensors (May 2019) -- Several sensors in my first order had obvious water damage outside packaging and MOLD inside packaging. Just looking at packages during "Inspection" would have prevented this. Requested replacements. Received MORE water damage and MOLD. Repeat several times until finally received NON-MOLD items or for refund.

GE Smart Light Switch, Smart Fan Switch (Feb 2020) -- Ordered several of each, kept receiving wrong model (e.g. ZigBee instead of ZWave Plus, or ZWave instead of ZWave plus) as if prior customer gave up on large project and randomly threw products back into whatever boxes. Comparing product number on item to product number on box during "Inspection" would have prevented this! Kept requesting replacements, kept receiving wrong items. Finally returned items for a refund. Amazon CS did finally issue full refund, but had trouble unraveling the mess on their end because so many items were in play.

</comment><comment><USER47> Pro tip: don't bother with Amazon France, order from the UK.

For some reason, all the non-consumables that I ordered in France were re- furbished items sold as new. In contrast, the UK has always been stellar. Once Brexit hits, I will stop using Amazon altogether.

<comment><USER48> Does it matter at all? Won't the item be shipped from closest amazon warehouse regardless of site used?

<comment><USER49> Due to Brexit this is changing:

[https://tamebay.com/2020/07/amazon-fba-brexit-bombshell- efn-...](https://tamebay.com/2020/07/amazon-fba-brexit-bombshell-efn-and-pan- european-fba-ends-for-uk.html)

Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23888510)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Got a Motorola phone, same-day shipping from the US, and actually got it just few hours later.

Phone screen broke. Contacted Motorola for support, they said the phone IMEI is from India and can't be serviced in the US under warranty, I have to ship it to India if I want it fixed by them :/

<comment><USER51> I am surprised at this , for a long time the reverse use to happen .

Also it is usually not coz the IMEI, it is because each model has sub geo variants depending on the spectrum they are allowed to use in those regions etc. Cross region variants other region decline to service . It is not just Moto, Apple does the same .

<comment><USER50> I think the Indian one was cheaper, so they probably bought a big batch then sold it in the US for more expensive US prices. Indian model also had dual- SIM, which US phones generally don't have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is a consequence of amazon being too big to care. They aren't doing the most basic check to verify that what's in the box is what the outside of the box claims it is. Some years ago, I bought two identical routers from Best Buy and then decided I didn't need the second so I went to return it. I put it in the wrong box. Best Buy refused the return because the serial number on the router didn't match the serial number on the box.

The whole concept of Amazon is fundamentally flawed. I've gotten too much counterfeit stuff and junk to ever trust them again.

<comment><USER53> Oh and it's even easier when they make the seller pay for their fuck ups and for fraud - it's peanuts for Amazon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> What are your favorite alternatives to Amazon? E.g., I go to monoprice for cables. Are there other niche options that you like for different products where you can expect quality?

</comment><comment><USER55> Even in the best case where you get something that is superficially what you ordered, you have a sneaking feeling that you're getting something counterfeit: [https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1286821682968051712](https://twitter.com/timsneath/status/1286821682968051712)

It's frustrating when you have to treat every transaction as if you're buying from a flea market.

</comment><comment><USER56> I shopped on Amazon for many years. I never had problems until around the time of COVID19. It seems to be a cesspool of scammers and conartists now. Amazon doesn't do much of anything about it either. I'm out a couple hundred bucks.

I'm kind of annoyed. I need a reliable place to order stuff. Aliexpress and eBay seem ahead of Amazon now. That's bad.

My favorite scam: Futures. Sellers will sell low-availability things at (slightly) inflated prices and long ship times. If prices go down, you get the product. If prices go up, they refund you. It's too complex for Amazon minimum wage drones to understand why this is a scam, so you can't do anything about it.

Amazon wouldn't refund my Prime, which renewed around the time of COVID19, and which hasn't really worked. That's turning into a scam too.

<comment><USER57> > It's too complex for Amazon minimum wage drones to understand why this is a > scam, so you can't do anything about it.

Too be fair, it's not exactly a scam. No one is really being cheated out of anything. It's annoying for sure, but there is no deception.

<comment><USER56> It is a scam. It's a sophisticated scam. I thought I was buying an item. I was giving the seller a free options contract, valued at a few hundred dollars.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_of_options](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuation_of_options)

Price jumped up by a $150, and I never got my item. I needed the item and not receiving it resulted in a couple hundred bucks of damages. If price had gone down a hundred bucks, I would have overpaid by that much.

The seller, by the way, did charge my card. It was marked as shipped. The seller issued a refund on the day it was supposed to arrive, claiming it was "lost in trucking." Many other buyers had their orders "lost in trucking" too from reviews of that and other sellers.

My opinion is that Amazon should have made the seller fulfill the orders. At the time I ordered, several items were available at the same price. At the time I was to receive the order, price had gone up $150. It's not like the seller couldn't have fulfilled it; they would have just taken a loss to do so.

I'll mention this isn't the only time I got scammed on Amazon this year; just the most clever scam.

<comment><USER58> Out of curiosity, what was the item that has such price swings?

<comment><USER56> Chest freezer.

A lot of items had these swings though: face masks were the most obvious, but virtually all emergency supplies went through major up-and-down spikes. Dry shelf-stable food, some medicines, toilet paper, etc. All of a sudden, the whole world wanted to stock up.

That made it really hard to buy those items if you have a non-emergency use for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> In Mexico most of the times you'll get a previously opened and returned package. Which in turn would usually return myself and ask for a new package (happened with an AIO cooler unit which even had the thermal paste applied on it...

Or the items won't work as expected which has happened to me with laptops and tablets. The only good thing is there is no problem returning the used / bad stuff. But you lose time and the discount price.

</comment><comment><USER60> It's cheaper to just accept returns instead of checking every product for complete function.

And I think it's acceptable considering how easy returns are with Amazon.

<comment><USER36> I don't think its acceptable at all. An easy return doesn't fix having to wait an additional at least a few days before you actually get what you paid for.

That is just basically accepting that Amazon is completely unreliable for anything even remotely time sensitive, despite what made them huge in the first place - extremely fast delivery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Isn't that what was called pulling a "scamazon" on Shameless? I haven't had this happen with Amazon (but I know they'd make it right)

I did just have it happen with an order from a sketchy web front obviously shipping out of China. I knew it was risky but I used PayPal, which I've used in the past and used their buyer guarantee. This time the dispute is lagging (maybe COVID-related staffing issues) but I see many reports on their forums of it happening and claims being closed without resolution, requiring a ton of extra work to escalate and find someone who can help, etc.

I was supposed to receive $65 of cleaning products, but wound up with a cheap small pair of socks (lightweight and easy to ship. Even the customs declaration says "socks" on it)

However according to USPS the package was delivered. So a quick review looks like they fulfilled their obligation. I'm hoping I get a chance to send in pictures showing what I got obviously not matching the order (which conveniently wasn't line itemed in PayPal, so hopefully they will accept my email showing the actual items...)

</comment><comment><USER62> A close friend has a very similar thing recently, except it was/should have been a new Ryzen 3700x, not a warehouse deal.

If you've bought one you'll know it comes in a box with a big cooler on top, and the proc is at the bottom in a bit of plastic packing.

He got the big cooler but no Ryzen. Contacted Amazon, got another Ryzen and cooler sent out.

I think this is incredibly common...

</comment><comment><USER63> This is not a scam unique to Amazon. It happens everywhere, and has for decades at least. A more insidious version attacks eBay sellers. The buyer will send an item back broken and ask for a refund, meanwhile keeping the good verse;n you sent them. Take serial numbers, secretly hide marks and photograph them before sending anything.

<comment><USER64> But do you do with that serial number mismatch and 'missing secret marks' evidence? A seller could easily fudge that "proof" and eBay/Amazon aren't big on taking sellers at their word. There's no fool-proof way to collect evidence of return fraud and there isn't much you can do once you have that evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> It happened to me when I bought a new motherboard from Amazon (shipped and sold by Amazon, not Amazon Warehouse nor fulfilled by Amazon). I opened the motherboard box and inside was a 10-year old motherboard.

I knew this was a possibility when buying from Amazon Warehouse but didn't expect it when buying new directly from Amazon.

<comment><USER66> The way Amazon runs things is completely inexcusable. If you can't order _directly_ from Amazon and get a non-fraudulent product, then the whole platform is basically going to a flea market, having all the vendors turn their backs, shuffling product amongst the vendors, and sending normal citizens through to buy what they want.

Any traceability and trust the end consumer would have is gone. Amazon may be able to trace a particular product to a vendor, but that's of no help to a consumer wanting a consistent supply of goods. Amazon also doesn't show if a vendor chooses to opt out of comingled inventory, which would go a long way towards helping end consumer trust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> A similar thing has happened to me in the past. Brought a phone dock from amazon, and when it arrived, it didn't fit my phone, looking at the serial number on the dock itself, it was for the previous model of phone but the packaging was for the latest.

So someone had decided to upgrade for free.

</comment><comment><USER68> I think what a lot of people are missing in the comments when they say "I bought <product> from <brand> not a third party..." is that for new products the 'seller name' you're buying from does not correspond to which box you get off the shelf. It's called co-mingled inventory--Amazon doesn't track which box you (as seller) sent them, they just throw it on the shelf with all the other "new" same product boxes.

Obvious fraud is at least somewhat Amazon's problem since it gets returned, but the huge problem for the name-brand vendors is all the support requests / bad reviews they get when people get counterfeit crap, thinking they bought from <brand> directly.

<comment><USER69> IIRC, if you're a seller, you have to pay extra to not have your goods co- mingled with the "same" product from other companies. It would appear that seagate didn't do that.

<comment><USER17> > if you're a seller, you have to pay extra to not have your goods co-mingled

It would be great if Amazon passed that information on to the purchaser. It might even justify paying a higher price to buy from a non-comingled vendor because it would indicate increased accountability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I recently purchased a open box Apple Pencil from BestBuy. When I got it, it didn't work. I realized the pencil s/n didn't match the box and looked up the manufacture date. It was several years old and the battery must've been shot. Someone had bought a new pencil and used the box to return their old pencil and BestBuy must not have checked.

BestBuy gave me a new one, no hassle. But then crazily enough, the brand new Apple Pencil didn't work either. Bad luck! They were out of stock at that point so they just gave me a refund.

Anyway, I know this is a risk with open box. A friend just purchased a brand new Garmin Fenix via Amazon. When she opened the Garmin box, nothing was inside! Amazon refunded her. She purchased it from REI instead.

</comment><comment> TD-Linux Someone did this scam even at a local Best Buy. When I returned it, they unpack it and scan the barcode on the case, but of course not on the actual HDD. (the person doing the scam didn't even do a good job, and broke some of the plastic clips in the process)

</comment><comment><USER71> Reminds me of scrolls with the "king's seal"...we might need to start demanding more than fancy shrink-wrap to ensure that something is actually in factory packaging.

I think an interesting way to do it would be to have slightly stronger plastic wrap that can be "dented" in several places similar to a UPC pattern, that in turn can be scanned by a phone for authenticity. (This could be done both by warehouses prior to agreeing to stock something, and by consumers to verify what they get.) Scammers might eventually figure it out but at least they'd need to recreate a complex dent pattern after shrink-wrapping, and they would need to be able to do it for each unique company they're claiming to be.

</comment><comment><USER72> I need to buy 15 16GB SD cards for a high school robotics team for Raspberry Pis that are guaranteed to be shutdown improperly and bumped around a lot.

I balked at Amazon. I just don't know how to trust their stuff anymore. Left having no idea where to get a sensible price.

<comment><USER73> Newegg! Usually it's pretty close to competitive with Amazon for electronics.

<comment><USER72> I have no idea why newegg didn't cross my mind. I guess because I'm not buying desktop computer parts.

Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> This was a big reason that I stopped buying stuff from best Buy.

I would buy some peripheral or appliance, get home, open the box, and see a dirty, stained, clearly broken device.

They were always very good about refunding, but they treated my wasted time as if it were nothing.

This has not [yet] happened to me with Amazon, for new devices, but it did happen once with a used "New condition" peripheral (what arrived was broken, dirty, and packed with toilet paper and rolled up newspapers). The third-party vendor jerked me around so much, I had to use Amazon's A-Z guarantee.

I tend to use Costco for home appliances, these days, and my expensive kit from manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER75> Amazon has become very difficult. I end up using ebay more and more: sellers there are small businesses and they bear more responsibility. It feels more decentralized. Longer shipping, but cheaper and more reliable.

<comment><USER39> WAY cheaper! I used to default to Amazon for everything. So many things that Amazon charges $10-15 for (with free shipping, of course) can be had for $5 with $0-$3 shipping on eBay. I've saved tons over the last couple years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I don't know how best buy our other brick and mortar stores deal with this kind of scams. Unless they actually hook it up and check for that kind of scam its tough. In that sense its not a uniquely Amazon issue. At Amazon's scale though it gets exaggerated and also because of that scale they can ignore it and keep replacing items for their customers. The process to check each and every item for scams might be too costly. Its a fascinating study nonetheless and it will be great to get some real insight from people working on these issues.

<comment><USER50> You can just drive back and hand it to them and get a new one or a refund in just an hour or so. Not so easy with Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Gavin Free of the Slow-Mo Guys talked on a podcast how he got 2 cans of Dr. Pepper instead of a dremel: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-LRgWpyMEI&t=29s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-LRgWpyMEI&t=29s)

I wonder what else could "black hats" do with this "exploit". Buy laptops, install malware, return them? The higher-end the laptop, the higher the chances are the next buyer will be rich, and that seems like an interesting way to access someone's bank account.

</comment><comment><USER78> I had this exact thing happen with the purchase of a Nest Protect from Amazon. Nest packaging complete with "Inspected" sticker on the box and a First Alert detector inside.

I no longer shop at Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER79> have a former friend that would do a brick and mortar version of this... even went so far as to buy a shrink wrap machine.

buy an external drive, take it home and remove the drive.. fill case with rocks or wood or something to add mass.. put it back in the box, shrink wrap it and have his wife return it.. doing a slight upgrade to the next size up. repeat a couple of times.. then get full refund.

he'd even end up with his own crap filled drives once in a while..

<comment><USER80> Reminds me of how someone went to Target to buy an iPod for her daughter, found it full of rocks and exchanged it after getting her refund rejected, only for a replacement iPod from another Target to also be filled with rocks.

[https://www.engadget.com/2007-10-09-birthday-girl-gets- two-r...](https://www.engadget.com/2007-10-09-birthday-girl-gets-two-rock- filled-ipod-boxes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> A long time ago, I bought Half-Life 1 in a regular store. I tried to play with a friend online but it said my CD-key was already being used. Turned out my friend had bought the game, came without a CD-key printed on the box, so the store opened a random box and gave him that CD-key. I bought that exact same box.

In the end, my friend sent a picture of the box to Valve and got a fresh CD- key, and we could finally play together.

</comment><comment><USER82> This is why retailers are starting to get drivers licenses to complete a return; its much harder to scam if you cant do it anonymously.

<comment><USER83> I doubt this will do much. They would still need to actually investigate the issues which they already don't do.

Online banks nowadays do ID verification with passports, etc and yet very basic fraud committed intentionally by the account holder is still happening because the truth is even though the information to identify the perpetrator is there nobody can be bothered enough to act on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Just had something similar happen to myself a couple months ago -- bought some good condition used Galaxy Buds Plus (released 2020) sold by Amazon, received Galaxy Buds (Non-Plus, released 2019) inside Galaxy Buds Plus packaging. I had zero problem returning the item and getting a full refund, but I do wonder if the person who did this got away with it.

</comment><comment><USER85> Bought an Intel CPU, got an "Intel" box that was full of Chinese playing cards. Amazon rep insisted it was "just a mistake", my ass. It's fraud.

[https://imgur.com/a/P05mh4j](https://imgur.com/a/P05mh4j)

edit: Intel product, Sold by Amazon. None of that third-party stuff warehouse stuff here.

</comment><comment><USER86> I learned many years ago that auto theft is almost 100% committed by a very tiny fraction of the overall population.

Probably same phenomenon here. Small # of people doing this. I'm hopeful Amazon does not go easy on these people. The numbers are likely in their favor even if they decided to take every single one of those cases to court.

</comment><comment><USER87> Curious what countries this is happening in?

I'm in the Uk and never had these problems despite being a fairly prolific Amazon user.

<comment><USER88> I buy a lot of stuff from amazon and only on 1 occasion did something like this happen. Bought a 16Gb DDR4 SODIMM, mind you from the warehouse deals (half price!) and a 4Gb module arrived. Opened a case with Amazon and they sent me a second one, but this time the correct size...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I once bought a lawnmower where someone had swapped it out with a lower-end model. That was from Lowe's.

I'd like to know what action companies take against this type of theft, it seems trivial to identify the culprit but maybe difficult to prove anything and probably expensive.

<comment><USER89> Unless there's some sort of large scale, organised fraud occurring, or it is so hugely prevalent as to be affecting the bottom line then I'd be very surprised if any action was taken. If you think about the amount of time and effort involved (legal counsel is expensive) then it's not worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Had a similar issue with Best Buy: ordered a 10TB HDD (quite a few) and inside was a 250GB HDD.

To be fair, they were champs and replaced it with another unit, but unfortunately there are people who do this and then they don't validate it. The HDD was also an absurdly old one too.

</comment><comment><USER91> Yeah the return fraud is also a problem for third-party Amazon sellers.

Buyers can essentially destroy the item and return it claiming warehouse damage, and then Amazon won't always take responsibility even if it was sent to FBA near perfect or new.

</comment><comment><USER92> I've had this happen with a graphics card.

Bought a 2070. Got a 2060 in scruffy packaging.

To add insult to injury I sent it back and doesn't seem to have arrived yet and/or covid ate it. 5 fuckin months later it's still:

>Your refund will be processed when we receive your item.

<comment><USER93> Curiously enough I encountered the inverse problem the other day.

I received a refund for an item sitting on my desk. I purchased it, received it, and did not request any refund at all.

I called Amazon about it and they said to let the refund go through and they sent me an email I could reply to when I was ready to be re-charged.

Extremely odd, and I was worried there was some scam I was missing. Amazon rep said the returns department made a mistake somehow.

I imagine there's probably someone that returned the same item I bought and they're still waiting for their refund. :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> This is standard practice at Amazon and it's very annoying. Even defective items just get sent out until someone doesn't return them and items that were clearly used get sold again as new without even being cleaned.

</comment><comment><USER95> I am glad to have read this thread. A few of the issues mentioned in comments have happened to me in the last year, but I just wrote it off as one-off scamming, did not realize it's systemic and sophisticated.

</comment><comment><USER96> I've had this happen to me multiple times with Apple keyboards and mice for the office. They are listed as brand new and sold by Amazon. But they are clearly used when you open the box.

</comment><comment><USER97> There is a post about it every week on /r/datahoarder

</comment><comment><USER98> This reminds me of the time I bought a high-end GTX video card at Best Buy... only to find a bottle of shampoo inside. These types of return scams happen all the time.

</comment><comment><USER99> I bought a 240hz monitor from AWH and there was a 144hz one in the box. Sad times to set that all up and see that someone got a free upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER100> "But certainly I would expect accounts would accumulate warning flags and at some point be banned."

</comment><comment><USER101> If you're going to swap the drive, why not swap in a 4tb, or a 2tb, or a 500mb?

</comment><comment><USER102> I bought a new kid's book from Amazon.

A child had written their name inside the cover.

</comment><comment><USER103> The real scam is from Amazon, selling store return items as brand new.

</comment><comment><USER104> why would they swap in a 8 tb one thah still has value and not a idk 500g one and profit more ?

<comment><USER105> I have a NAS that holds four drives. If I upgrade 8TB drives for 16TB drives, I would have no further use for the 8TB drives. I also don't have half-TB drives lying around.

<comment><USER104> sure, but if you are a scammer then selling the 8T for at least 100$ and picking one for basically free would net you more profit. maybe it was somebody that did not think he does something wrong because "amazon is big and will eat the cost"

<comment><USER77> Huh, honestly it'd be "cleverer" to find a broken drive (that the OS wouln't even detect) and swap it into the enclosure. Then the thief can say it was defective, or the next buyer would, and there would be less of a chance of an investigation/change of policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> What does this have to do with Amazon? Return scams have been around for as long as returns.

</comment><comment><USER107> Another outrage dump where prime members and AWS customers vent their spleen on the teat that nourishes their lives. It's a frail rebellion. A piece of performance art. Experimental theatre</comment>


PHP loses contributor, scalar types in limbo - <AUTHOR> http://news.php.net/php.internals/82750

<comment><USER2> Well that's unfortunate.

Could someone who's a little closer to this illuminate the ramifications?

<comment><USER3> I personally don't know much but from reading replies I think this reply [0] by Philip Sturgeon might give the most insight:

> _I do not accept this.

> You are one of the most active, motivated and appreciated contributors of > PHP over the last few years. Not to shit on anyone specifically, but there > are only 4 or 5 people doing 80% of the work of PHP recently, and you are > one of them.

> Scalar Type Hints are a massive burden, and you're stuck in the middle of > everyone who has a strong opinion about either strict or weak and getting > screamed at by both camps at the same time as getting crap from the people > who dont want either.

> I constantly see people giving you shit in here, on Reddit, StackOverflow > Chat and wherever else and it sickens me. They're condescending, patronising > or at the very least missing some P's and Q's which are fairly important > when giving feedback as harsh as they often give.

> The lack of respect between contributors here in general sickens me, and I'm > not known as somebody who is wildly polite at all times.

> Scalar Type Hinting was the closest it's ever been. If the workload is too > much then stick to one RFC at a time, but to remove yourself from the > equation is a massive loss for PHP as a whole. I'm not trying to place a > burden on you, but your input will be sorely missed by a massive number of > people.

> Please, don't let the assholes win. PHP needs you._

[0] [http://news.php.net/php.internals/82754](http://news.php.net/php.internals/82754)

<comment><USER2> Well crap. Away from PHP I go, it would seem. I think I'll finally jump ship to Ruby, or maybe to Clojure...</comment></comment></comment>


AI beating humans? Not in my lifetime, says Google's cloud chief - <AUTHOR> https://www.airsassociation.org/services-new/airs-knowledge-network-n/blog/entry/ai-beating-humans-not-in-my-lifetime-says-google-s-cloud-chief <comment><USER2> Clickbait headline. She was asked if we would reach "the singularity" in her lifetime and she said no, not in her lifetime (which arguably is on average 18 more years).

</comment><comment><USER3> You know, artificial general intelligence or superintelligence, might not happen for the time being being, but narrow intelligence that is good enough and cost efficient enough at specific tasks like driving vehicles, doing different tasks at factories, even waging war... will transform our society. That I think would be more in the scope of this century.</comment>


Ask HN: Any open source alternatives to Postman or Assertible? - <AUTHOR> I assumed something like this would be there, but apparently there are none. Are there any Postman or Assertible open source web alternative ? Prefer something which can deployed to Heroku. Not looking for an native or chrome app. <comment><USER2> [https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like they only have Mac/Linux/Windows App. I was hoping something i can just deploy on Heroku or host it on any server.</comment></comment>


23 Essential Tools For Web Development on a Mac - <AUTHOR> http://webjackalope.com/web-development-tools-mac/ <comment><USER2> I wasn't impressed by this list. There were no hidden gems. Most of this stuff is extremely basic for any Mac developer, there were also glaring holes in the list.

Examples about how to get things like Bazaar VCS installed from Macports would have been a lot more interesting for people I think.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this list a little contrived. These tools are not ALL essential, are they?

No mention of source control, either. Yikes.

<comment><USER4> I agree. I'm not convinced that many editors are essential. I only use emacs...

It seems to be written by someone just getting into the world of development and they're excited about it. Not particularly neat for us older hackers.

AND, phpMyAdmin is not a mac app...

<comment><USER3> 15 years ago, my CS202 professor was asked:

Q: "Dr. Anasastio, can you recommend a different editor from emacs? It's so hard to work with. Can we use pico or jot?"

A: "No. Emacs is THE editor. If you plan to work in computer science, you have to know it."

Though I personally use TextMate for most coding these days, I can certainly see his point. 15 years later, emacs is still relevant and powerful (and free).

Find me another editor you can say that about, and I'll pay you $5. (vi doesn't count: it's only relevant because sysadmins could fit it on a floppy, and now it's vim anyway.)

<comment><USER5> :%s/emacs/vim/gci

<comment><USER6> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > For those Mac users who think BBEdit is better than Textmate, it's usually > because BBEdit is a Cocoa application, and TextMate is a Unix application.

False. TextMate is a Cocoa app and BBEdit is Carbon.

</comment><comment><USER8> lol, I just see a page full of crap.

Not anymore. The page works now.

So let me put something useful here.

My list of tools:

vim

<comment><USER9> It's back to being a page full of crap... just symbols for me... [http://img.skitch.com/20080820-e9u8x5grdwdqbt6dk2wdq4e74e.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20080820-e9u8x5grdwdqbt6dk2wdq4e74e.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Forget MAMP. Install Vmware Fusion and run your server environment of choice in a local virtual machine.

<comment><USER11> I've thought about this. How do you transfer files between the host and the guest? Do you develop in OS X, transfer the files and then run them? If yes, isn't this a little time-consuming?

<comment><USER12> You can mount your VM locally by running something like Samba on the VM side, then open stuff normally with TextMate or whatever.

It's a bit slow and has some quirks with huge projects, so I stopped doing it, personally. Mounting with ExpanDrive or MacFuse(SSH) were slower when I tried.

<comment><USER13> Personally, I just setup an rsync share on the VM, and then run a script on my local machine that rysnc's the project directory just checking timestamps for changes and ignoring all scm folders. It's super quick after the initial sync, since all your usually changing anyway per testing iteration is just a few small text files at a time. Works great for big projects too.

Although nowadays, I'm finding the 'separate VM & host os" for development a bit tedious. Even executing that script to see code changes vs. just saving the file and seeing it right away is a drain on productivity. And doing remote editing put's a noticeable lag to my editing.

<comment><USER14> Very true. Why not just setup a staging server on the VM and use MAMP and benefit from the quick save and preview. Then sync up to your VM for staging to test your deployment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My list:

* an editor, source control, firebug, parallels.

23 is sort of a lot. And as for ftp???!!!?

<comment><USER16> "And as for ftp???!!!?"

Actually, Transmit's a pretty awesome little utility. It supports ssh (scp) and more importantly, it supports AWS S3 so you can explore and modify your buckets with it. There's a Firefox plug that does similar thing but it's horribly buggy.

<comment><USER6> But why? I don't know of anybody that deploys by copying files to their server manually. There's always something else that needs to be done and it ends up getting scripted away. Even the most basic deployment usually involves a copy and telling the server to restart or refresh itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you need 23 essential tools then you're doing something wrong. When the article says "5 essential tools" then I'll be interested.

<comment><USER18> How's 4 tools sound instead? I could add one more, but I wouldn't consider it "essential".

      1. Some sort of text editor that you know how to use.
      2. Some sort of versioning that you know how to use.
      3. Some sort of way to transfer files offsite that you know how to use.
      4. Some sort of way to run the code. A local copy of the server environment that you use should do.

I can't think of anything else that's _essential_. Some things might help make you more productive, but you could easily continue working without the likes of Quicksilver or Spaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> ::sarcasm:: This blog is a goldmine of lists--just what we love on HN!

        23 Essential Tools For Web Development on a Mac
        15 Quick Ways to Shrink Page Load Times
        12 Ways to Design For the Fickle Web User

</comment><comment><USER20> A list for those just who haven't found Eclipse and it's plugins: SQL Explorer, Subclipse, PHPEclipse,CFEclipse, EPIC. and Firefox and it's plugins: Web developer, Firebug, FireFTP I'm sure there are many more that I have forgotten.

<comment><USER13> PyDev Extensions for django developers!

He also forgot the scm utils, like Versions or Cornerstone. GitNub seems to be more a GUI for GitHub than git unfortunately :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> cocoamysql and phpmyadmin can easily be replaced by navicat or navicat lite (free), which is available for linux, osx, and windows. ive found it pretty handy.

</comment><comment><USER22> _If you're looking for a way to ease the pain of using the command line and Terminal, try iTerm._

Probably not aimed at this crowd.

</comment><comment><USER23> 6 of the 23 apps are not free. Whats up with that?

<comment><USER24> God forbid we actually pay money for apps that help us make money...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> WebKit

</comment><comment><USER26> Can't see it with ff3</comment>


Almost human - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/10/almost_human.php

<comment><USER2> Eliza was more convincing. (And it comes free with my editor.)

</comment><comment><USER3> sorry, elbot isn't any better a chatbot than any others that have come out over the years. Started talking with it and it just started giving the same nonsensical responses that are typical with these things.

Also, people need to get off the Turing test as this line in the sand that has to be crossed to meet some 1950's concept of AI. Actual human-equivalent AI will need to be judged by modern concepts of neurology and psychology.

<comment><USER4> From the first comment on the blog post:

>While I'm at it though, I'd like to point out that I don't think the "Turing test" is meant to be an actual test at all. To me, the point of the Turing test is as a philosophical proposition: if, when the communication interface is limited to a bidirection terminal, the other end is indistinguishable from a human, then we could conclude that the other end is intelligent. Since each response is simply an iterated (i.e. stateful) function of the previous response, it follows that intelligent machines are possible. It doesn't tell us anything about how to create the function, though.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin's creator is Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/86255/the-mysterious-creator-of-bitcoin-could-be-japanese-mathematician-shinichi-mochizuki-says-the-inventor-of-hypertext/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733290>

Other sources:

* <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733497>

* <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733488>

</comment><comment><USER3> While his reasoning is sound, the link title here is really misleading. It has not been confirmed that Mochizuki created Bitcoin, it has been hypothesized.</comment>


Woman claims hospital pressured her into abortion after medical error - sahin-boydas https://hoiabc.com/news/top-stories/2019/04/11/woman-suing-methodist-claims-hospital-pressured-her-into-abortion-after-medical-error <comment><AUTHOR> This is horrifying.

My wife and I have 3 kids, we had a few miscarriages in between. To know that a child, living in the womb, has been lost is a terrible loss.

Deepest sympathies to the mother and to the medical personnel involved in the error.

</comment><comment><USER2> The currently submitted title doesn't match the article title, and is rather editorialized. The term "cover up" does not ever appear in the article.

<comment><USER3> In fact it is worse. The hospital was not trying to save face or prevent knowledge of the incident, the implication is that they are trying to avoid paying for the now injured child's life-long care</comment></comment>


IT Operations has a Cultural Problem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.opdemand.com/

<comment><USER2> Let's see. Linkbait title, latest buzzword, consistent use of "bureaucracy" (I do not think that word means what you think it means - you cannot wave a magic DevOps wand and make bureaucracy go away) and insinuations that operations departments are "outdated"... Yeah, seems like a worthwhile article with a good point.

I sure want Joe Random Engineer committing code that goes live on our real, grown-up site, where we make real money, and a failure leads to us losing real money. Ops departments exist so that that can't happen. If that means you have to wait a day before testing your latest code in production, I don't see this as a bad thing.

The "cultural problem" is in people who think that operations departments don't need to exist because "like, how hard is it to run servers? We'll just put it 'on the cloud' and magically all of our security, reliability, and availability problems will be solved"

The biggest piece of nonsense is this concept of a "private cloud". What the fuck is a private cloud? Oh, you mean a remote datacenter, like we've had since the 70s. OK.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Jamming ephemeral cloud infrastructure into an ITIL-style bureaucracy is like jamming a square peg into a round hole. You can push as hard as you want -- it ain't gonna fit.

</comment><comment><USER3> looks like somebody didn't like it when boss said "no, you can't put the new accounting system on heroku"

</comment><comment><USER4> A few of the responses here are snarky and understandably so considering the author's reasons for this post, yet the problem remains. How does cloud computing fall within the traditional IT ops model? Anecdotally I've worked for a large city and they're still a little hesitant of cloud computing because they see it as a threat to their employees. I'm not sure how it'll shake out but they'll move towards cloud computing eventually and developers instead of operations could/should manage it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would argue that that operations engineers need to become more like developers, not that developers should be operating critical systems.

The cultural problem can also be framed as a transition from a server-centric operations model to an application-centric one -- something James Urquart wrote a great post about for GigaOM: [http://gigaom.com/cloud/what-cloud- boils-down-to-for-the-ent...](http://gigaom.com/cloud/what-cloud-boils-down- to-for-the-enterprise-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "agile management" is pretty much always going to mean "less management," so it's understandable that management is kind of schizophrenic about the DevOps movement

<comment><USER6> It's not about less management, it's about trusting your employees and their judgement. Accepting that failures happen and learn from the mistakes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my experience this is completely true of large organizations, "Most operations departments are inflexible and inefficient because they rely on specialized engineers glued together with manual processes and a large IT bureaucracy – all fundamentally at odds with the fast-moving, application- centric world of cloud computing."

This is a cycle. If the management of the Operations organization is measured based on reducing downtime they control what they can, Release & Change Management. This kills frequent small releases, so development teams have to build big releases. If management in development organizations are measured mostly by delivering on schedule they cut scope. You end up w/ development organizations delivering the minimum to ensure they meet the project mostly artificial timelines for huge releases. Suggesting small frequent releases sounds good to development (assuming they can reduce the operational paperwork associated w/ releasing), but jeopardizes Operation's control of stability so Operation's resists it. Suggesting that more get delivered in each huge release jeopardizes Development's ability to meet project deadlines because there is so much unknown and the commitment is expected up front, a quarter or more (I've seen 18 months) in advance.

There are reasons for all of this; it's not bad people, just a consequence of large organizations. Reducing downtime reduces costs because you can cut support staff. Delivering on time increases productivity because code that isn't being used is useless code.

</comment><comment><USER8> If my local server providing a vital service goes down, I catch hell. If my cloud server providing a vital service goes down, I catch hell and can't do anything about it except bitch at customer service who has their own set of priorities and a TOS protecting them from any meaningful action on my part.

So, what's the right option there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Clearly the right option depends on the specifics of the service and the team managing it. However, unless you have a spare server sitting around, you're in the same boat either way, right?

Outages at serious cloud providers like AWS are usually restricted to availability zones, though there have been a few high profile exceptions where entire regions were affected. In general though, with AWS you can redeploy your server rapidly if you have your infrastructure blueprints kept as code, and your data backed up to EBS snapshots or S3.

Just this week I had a high-traffic Wordpress blog shit the bed on EC2/RDS. Using the tools we built at OpDemand, I was able to clone the platform and get it back up and running in < 60 minutes without any HA. I think < 60 min recovery time is probably a stretch for most on-premise environments..

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> troll much?</comment>


Enabling the F4 key in macOS - <AUTHOR> https://boinkor.net/2017/11/enabling-the-f4-key-in-macos/ <comment><USER2> This is not about enabling the F4 key, it is about enabling the Dashboard key which has been disabled for the last few versions of macOS.

Dashboard and F4 share a physical key but they are not the same and you can hold down Fn to switch between the two, regardless of the keyboard preferences. To be clear, this advice would generally apply only when you have "Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" switched _OFF_ in the keyboard preferences.

If you're using these keys as regular function keys, they work as regular function keys and have always done so.

<comment><USER3> _To be clear, this advice would generally apply only when you have "Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys" switched OFF in the keyboard preferences._

And for further clarification, OFF is the default.

What I don't understand is what the author expected. If they set this setting to ON, then they won't see the issue. If it's OFF, then they expect a feature that isn't an included feature anymore?

<comment><USER4> I'm not using macOS, but it sounds like the Dashboard key, which now does nothing, is not sending F4 instead.

Unfortunately that's simultaneously perfectly consistent while it also violates the principle of least surprise:

\- It remains technically correct - the Fn keys are in "do special thing mode", and this key has no special thing associated with it any more

\- It is now a dead key, which is extremely confusing because, now that it does absolutely nothing __under the default configuration__, it's arguable as to why it's even there anymore. From the "my computer is a physical thing that humans interact with" standpoint (as distinct from the "behold my mathematically perfect 4GHz calculator" standpoint), it kinda makes a lot of sense for that key to go "oh I just send F4 because I don't do anything special" to me. In fact NOT doing that would irritate me no end!

Anecdotally, this reminds me of the recent 1+2+3 calculator incident in iOS: it's pretty obvious all the frontline developers at Apple have touch-bar MacBooks (something something "politically-correct forced dogfooding", oooooo) so this inconsistency fell through the cracks.

Apple is starting to fragment from the bottom up in a big way...

<comment><USER5> Surely you can see an argument for it potentially being more confusing that F4 sends a keystroke to your active application but none of the F keys do?

<comment><USER6> Non-macOS user here on a random laptop: when I type Fn+<some key> and that key doesn't have a special function that can be invoked using the Fn key, the result is the same as not holding the Fn key.

If the behaviour of the Fn key were inversed (i.e. keys with special functions perform that function unless the Fn key is held down), I would still expect regular keys to work normally no matter where on the keyboard they are. The F# keys aren't special.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is kind of short on details but a few things I'm curious about...

First, function keys are not necessarily "normal" when pressed; by default they also require "fn" to be pressed, otherwise they perform a system function (Dashboard, sound volume, etc.). And since you can _turn off_ a lot of these features in System Preferences, I can imagine that these keys might be set to do nothing.

It is also possible for Mac applications to install _system-wide_ hot keys, theoretically overriding even single key presses. At the very _least_ you need to know what apps are currently running to debug this.

It is also possible to install your own keyboard overrides, through System Preferences. Need to check those.

I'm probably missing some other things. The Mac is extremely flexible when it comes to the keyboard.

<comment><USER8> > The Mac is extremely flexible when it comes to the keyboard.

True, but the fact that macbooks ship with a keyboard lacking page up, page down, home and end just frustrates me to no end. Much smaller sized laptops manage to include those keys while maintaining comfort. And you cannot make up for missing keys with key combos.

<comment><USER9> > And you cannot make up for missing keys with key combos.

If you're saying you can't replicate those keys with key combos: Fn-Up Arrow, Fn-Down Arrow, Fn-Left Arrow and Fn-Right Arrow perform PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End, respectively.

If you're saying key combos are not a suitable replacement for those keys being not present: Well, I make do, personally.

<comment><USER10> Home/End can also be accomplished with Cmd up/down.

<comment><USER3> Or (EDIT: whoops, Ctrl not Cmd) Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E, Emacs style. In fact, a lot of Emacs navigation combos work just about everywhere on macOS. I have a keyboard with all of the keys the laptop keyboard leaves off, but I find that I don't use them on macOS.

<comment><USER10> Cmd-a is select all in OSX by default and Cmd-e does nothing for me. The capital versions don't do anything noteworthy for me either. In emacs, home/end would be M-< and M-> no? To your point, Ctrl-a/e/f/b/n/p all work as they do in emacs in OSX.

<comment><USER11> CMD-e used to be "eject selected disk" in Finder/desktop. Will thus also cause the error-"bloing"/"don't know what you want"\- sound on most macOS versions, if nothing suitable is selected.

<comment><USER12> CMD-e is apply the selected text to the search input. Extremely useful, search for the next instance of a word you see on the screen is thus:

Double click word CMD-e CMD-g

<comment><USER11> Don't know what (which program) you are referring to, I was referring to official MacOS shortcuts and the Finder [1] (Search for "Command-E")

[1] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201236)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As long as we're discussing system-wide keycode tricks, I wrote a prefpane that allows you to hide the Mac's cursor at any time with a hotkey.

[http://doomlaser.com/cursorcerer-hide-your-cursor-at- will/](http://doomlaser.com/cursorcerer-hide-your-cursor-at-will/)

Useful for when full-screen web videos flake out on this, recording the iOS simulator, and a number of other situations.

</comment><comment><USER14> The keycodes listed in the article are wrong. F4 is 118; F5 is 96. Not sure why it worked for the author. For any interested, a full list of macOS keycodes can be found here: [http://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/key- codes-for-func...](http://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/key-codes-for- function-and-special-keys.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> If you want to do a lot more to change keys, consider Karabiner: [https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/](https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/)

I use it to turn |\ into forwards delete (with fn \ emitting a \\) and to turn caps lock into cmd-alt-shift. You can do some really crazy things with it if you're sufficiently dedicated.

<comment><USER16> Be aware, though, that the newest version (Karabiner-Elements) has a bug where a key might get stuck. Which means you won't be able to login if SHIFT or a letter is stuck. I eventually removed it, because I lost work a few times because of this.

<comment><USER15> Works fine for me. Though I don't remap shift or any letters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Neat. Seems like a powerful way to do most common key remapping without a kext like Karabiner Elements.

<comment><USER18> Does it work for other arbitrary keys?

<comment><USER19> I don't think so. It should only work with this specific key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have similar troubles with the f11 key. I only use it in windows(step into) but it has never worked on Mac. I guess the next thing to do is try this milder fix for key 96+7?

</comment><comment><USER21> While we're here does anyone know what the volume keys are for a non-apple keyboard attached to a Mac?

<comment><USER22> Depends on the keyboard I suppose; if you want to remap keys I recommend Karabiner: [https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/](https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/)

I use it with my WASD custom and it works great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's stuff like this that routinely puts off power users from macOS.

<comment><USER24> Agreed -- I would dump macOS for Debian in a second if it weren't for my workplace trying to standardize everyone on one OS. The fact that I have to buy a third-party app just to disable mouse/scroll acceleration and enable my mouse's extra buttons is absolutely ludicrous.

(if anyone is wondering, the third-party app I speak of is Smooze, and it's a godsend [https://smooze.co/](https://smooze.co/))

<comment><USER9> > Moustache: This app also includes a moustache.

 _finger-down-throat gesture accompanied by retching noises_

At any rate, you can configure the "extra buttons" on most mice to do tasks on the Mac without special software. For example, I have a gaming mouse at home, and have one of the buttons configured to trigger Mission Control (showing miniature images of all windows open across all apps) merely through the Mouse pane of System Preferences. Also, games detect the extra buttons and can be configured to use them with no problem.

But yes, disabling mouse acceleration should be a built-in feature as well, and it is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Get better touch tool

</comment><comment><USER18> Apple feels like a hot mess right now. I spilled water into my wired keyboard, so they gave me a wireless one. The volume controls on it don't work. No magic combination of the Function key and F11 and F12 (I think? It's not in front of me) would work. The keyboard viewer showed a big blank. Plugging it in and turning off the wireless feature did nothing.

I stuffed it into a desk drawer, and stole one from the desk of a departed coworker. If I spill water in that, I might ask them to order me another wired one, if Apple still bothers making them.

I know it's a small thing. But reaching over to my laptop to adjust the volume, or hunting for it with my mouse is annoying. It's one small papercut out of many.

<comment><USER26> > Apple feels like a hot mess right now

Because you spilled water on your keyboard?

<comment><USER18> The new wireless keyboard had the problem, not the damaged keyboard.</comment></comment></comment>


Implementing shuffle in Mesos - phatak-dev http://blog.madhukaraphatak.com/implementing-shuffle-in-mesos/

<comment><AUTHOR> Such a cool post on Madhukar's Blog.</comment>


The Most Аwesome Depression Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-01/pl_brown

<comment><USER2> Florid satire filled with clichéd tech references. Not really funny or clever at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> depression != "Great Depression"

I'm tired of explaining this. Yes, we're entering a depression. It's not this nation's first, nor its second or third.

<comment><USER4> Is there a consensus on how many we've had?

It seems more like we are about to enter another great inflation, as described by RJ Samuelson, except shorter/sharper than the last one.

<comment><USER3> I think 70s-80s was a small depression, but they can call it a recession if they want. A recession is more like the dot-com bust + 9/11.

Off the top of my head:

* 1807 (Embargo! Political cartoon: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Ograbme.j...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Ograbme.jpg))

* 1837 (Specie speculation: Weird political cartoon: [http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3a10000/3a18000/3a1800...](http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3a10000/3a18000/3a18000/3a18005r.jpg))

* 1873 (Railroad collapse; government too tight with money. Weird political cartoon: <http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mpimages/mp105.jpg>)

* 1890 (Panic of 1890: Specie and railroad speculation)

* 1929 (Great Depression)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know whether to agree with him (it's not a depression until there are a whole lot of bread lines) or slap the smugness right off his face (he'll feel a whole lot different when he can't afford food).</comment>


Apple's New Privacy Policy Updates: What You Need to Know - <AUTHOR> http://headway.io/blog/apple-app-store-new-privacy-policy-what-you-need-to-know/ <comment><USER2> Article has section about "why they are enforcing this now" but doesn't mention gdpr. eye-roll.gif

<comment><USER3> It's not Apple's job to enforce the GDPR on apps in it's app store

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing I don't understand with Apple's approach to privacy and their claims of customers not being the product, is why they then sell their customers in bulk to Google to monetize all that private data.

[https://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-Apple-default- search-...](https://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-Apple-default-search- engine-iOS-deal_id109385)

<comment><USER5> > _why they then sell their customers in bulk to Google to monetize all that > private data..._

That's easy. Because if Apple were to disallow the use of the google search engine on their phones and web browser they'd find themselves slapped with an anti-trust monopolistic practices suit faster than you can say "Google Lobbyist".

I mean, if they wanted to, they could _try_ using the whole, "customer privacy" excuse in open court. But like the famous meme says:

"Oohhh that's a bold strategy Cotton. Let's see how it works out for 'em?"

I wouldn't be too sanguine about their chances of surviving such an openly hostile action to a clear competitor.

Apple does the next best thing, it gives _you_ the option not to use Google. But it doesn't make that choice _for_ you.

<comment><USER6> Not making Google the default search engine would not lead to an antitrust suit. Even if Apple were a monopoly, setting some other search engine to the default wouldn't be a problem.

GP seems to be overstating what Apple is selling, which is just the default internet search function, not the private data that is stored on the phone. Sure, I'd love it if Apple went with a different search engine as the default, and Google is most definitely getting access to information through that partnership when Apple's customers search on Google, but it is not from Apple giving Google access to anything on the phone that you'd assume was being kept from them.

<comment> yoz-y Had Apple had a monopoly I can imagine that iOS would have to be a bit different though. At least in Europe it's quite possible that the default search engine would have to become a "first run option" in a similar fashion to the browser selection in Windows.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Russia's Corruption Generates Equivalent Of 50% GDP - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201008020916dowjonesdjonline000169&title=russias-corruption-generates-equivalent-of-50gdp-watchdog

<comment><AUTHOR> More interesting details: [http://www.itar- tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=15369167&...](http://www.itar- tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=15369167&PageNum=0)

"The corruption situation is so dramatic that the report authors singled out corruption-related losses of Russian economy. They estimated these losses at about 50% expenses of Russian businesspeople. Some 80% of current assets in the education system are shadowy, that is to say mainly related to the corruption, and this figure reaches 90% in state and municipal services."

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting story - but did anyone else find this headline non-sensical? How can corruption _generate_ a percent of GDP?

I'm guessing they meant 50% of GDP is in black markets, or that 50% of business expenses go to bribing people.

<comment><USER3> One component of GDP is "personal consumption". In Russia, if a large number of people are consuming black market goods, then the "actual" GDP is going to be much higher than the government-reported GDP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Russia isn't the only country that has a large underground economy:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_economy#Comparison_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_economy#Comparison_with_regular_economy)

(The figures are a bit dated, but still interesting.)</comment>


Open Source Hardware: A Quick, Visual Intro - <AUTHOR> http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2008/11/open-source-hardware/

<comment><USER2> This is the most complete list of open source hardware I've seen in one place.

<comment><USER3> Krschultz, Thanks for the kind words, I hope you find them useful. Please let me know if there are any other topics you would like to see covered or if there are other aspects of open source hardware you would like more info on.

<comment><USER2> There are a few others out there that I know of.

<http://www.littlebits.cc/>

OpenMoko is conspicuously absent

Open Motor Controller - perhaps the most valuable FOSS hardware to date: <http://www.dmillard.com/osmc/>

Monome <http://monome.org/>

It strikes me as odd there are so few FOSS robotics HARDWARE platforms out there, or am I just missing something?</comment></comment></comment>


Capture the Flag Competition Aims to Trace Missing Persons - <AUTHOR> https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/competition-aims-to-trace-missing/ <comment><USER2> I always wonder - how do organisations that help to find missing people handle the fact that some of the people may not want to be found? How do they avoid, for example, inadvertently helping an abusive partner find their victim who has run away to safety? Imagine having escaped and then seeing your photo on Twitter! By the time you ask them to stop it could be too late and people around you could have realised your past.

<comment><USER3> If it's like most OSINT exercises, participants find clues to find a person but the actual contacting is done by law enforcement for this very reason. A child or spouse might have fled because of abuse: contacting them to say they have been found and can go home — or worse, giving location info to the abusing party — could end in tragedy. By handing off to law enforcement and letting them take it from there it allows for such situations to be handled confidentially as well as allowing the authority of the state possibly begin the process of justice.

<comment><USER2> I don't see how that works when police forces literally Tweet photos of missing people though. Could easily blow their cover in their new location?

<comment><USER4> I imagine that there is human judgement applied to the decision to make missing-person photos and information public.

Police departments see the impacts of abuse more than almost anyone except those being abused -- they're going to, in general, be very sensitive to enabling an abuser.

<comment><USER5> Why do you imagine that? My impression is that police officers are more likely than the average person to be abusive themselves, and that police departments are still fairly unsympathetic to domestic abuse victims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/TraceAnObject/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TraceAnObject/)

[https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse](https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse)

SFW but fair warning to not think too hard about the origins of these photos or the horrors they may have contained.</comment>


LASP: A Language for Distributed, Eventually Consistent Computations - <AUTHOR> http://lasp-lang.org <comment><USER2> I'm kind of disappointed that with a name like LASP, it doesn't have lisp syntax.

<comment><USER3> Apparently it's not even really a "language" in the same way most articles mean, but simply an Erlang library.

<comment><USER4> Which is good, because there already are way too many languages...

<comment><USER5> Could you elaborate on the drawbacks of having "too many languages"?

I thought that it was commonly accepted that having a diverse ecosystem of programming languages was good thing for everyone (Companies and engineers) because it fostered and fueled innovation in more mainstream languages by showing that feature X is relevant, or possible or desired by the community.

I sincerely don't see how it could be a problem? You can just ignore the bad ones or those that don't suit your needs while enjoying the others. Also, I might be mistaken but I am under the impression that new PLs have faster iteration cycles and are more receptive to feedback to suit one's particular needs.

I personally enjoy to see a new programming language makes the front page of HN because they often try to address existing problems in current big PLs, in a new way or incorporate state of the art PL theory concepts that I did not know!

Edit: why the downvotes? This is a genuine question!

<comment><USER6> I don't know why people are downvoting either, but I feel like you deserve an answer. I'll admit others are probably in a better position to answer you though.

A language's popularity is not really proportional to how clever it is unfortunately. For example, Javascript is extremely popular but that's because it's the only language supported by all browsers. Ruby is popular because.. well probably because Rails is in Ruby, although I haven't used Rails enough to know whether it needed to be written in Ruby. From my limited time using Ruby though, I don't see how it solves a different problem than Python does, but hopefully someone more familiar with it than I am can pass on his or her wisdom.

Having a diverse language ecosystem is not necessarily good because there are a finite number of people working on them, and having more languages means each of them will not be worked on as much. On the other hand, making a new language CAN be good when an existing language doesn't fit a particular problem well.

Having to learn a new language, while fun, is still time consuming and I think most people would agree that there is time better spent except in the case that a language truly presents something novel. Of course, most would also agree that the more novel something is, the more time it would take to learn as well.

In any case, because of the effort required to both make and learn a new language, I think the person you are referring to was implying that people are currently too liberal in deciding to make a new language and instead we should only be making a new one if it's actually warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A sample code fragment on the front page will be highly appreciated.

<comment><USER8> Added a small code fragment.

(Disclaimer, I'm one of the primary authors of Lasp, @cmeik on Twitter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Commutative, Conflict-free, Convergent -- the 'C' in CRDT sure is flexible. :)

<comment><USER8> (edited for formatting)

Commutative (operation-based) and convergent (state-based) have been grouped under the more general term conflict-free.

In 2011, Shapiro et al. [2] showed equivalence between the two types, and later the name was generalized [3]. I've compiled a list of CRDT related resources for more information. [1]

[1] [http://christophermeiklejohn.com/crdt/2014/07/22/readings- in...](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/crdt/2014/07/22/readings-in- crdts.html)

[2] [http://hal.upmc.fr/inria-00555588/document](http://hal.upmc.fr/inria-00555588/document)

[3] [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2050642](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2050642)

(Disclaimer, I'm one of the primary authors of Lasp, @cmeik on Twitter)

<comment><USER9> Thanks, this was useful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can usually guess quality of programming language from the first page of its description. For LASP it clearly sucks. No simple example, are you kidding me? I finally dug out example at below link and all I can say is this is pretty ugly language. So many _ and curly brackets that it feels dizzy. None of the sample code is even remotely intuitively readable to make a guess what's going on.

[http://christophermeiklejohn.com/lasp/erlang/2015/01/10/ad-c...](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/lasp/erlang/2015/01/10/ad- counter-orset.html)

<comment><USER8> The syntax you're complaining about is Erlang's. (_ is to ignore a token in a pattern match, braces denote tuples.)

I've added a simple example, because I received that criticism from others, so, thanks for your feedback.

Lasp's prototypical implementation is provided as an Erlang library: this is a research language and we're researching the semantics of distributed computation and not the syntax. The syntax seen in the examples is extremely close to the syntax of the built in 'lists' module of Erlang, with the addition of having to declare types, because of Erlang's type system. This was done to make it seem natural to Erlang programmers.

(Disclaimer, I'm one of the primary authors of Lasp, @cmeik on Twitter)</comment></comment>


How to Land the Space Shuttle from Space [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4prVsXkZU <comment><USER2> That guy is a very good presenter IMHO. Amusing but not overly so, engaging and made great use of visuals.

<comment><USER3> yeah but the camera guy could have done a better job, I got motion sickness.

<comment><USER4> I feel like the rotation clamp was too firm, and perhaps the camera could have had a mass on a torque arm to give it more angular inertia. This was SUPER distracting early in the presentation before the presenter was scaled down.

<comment><USER5> The video description says it was the autofocus...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was great! I love coming across great, short talks like this that elaborate on a very interesting problem that laypeople like myself would never otherwise have even known existed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Accordingly Shuttle pilots and commanders are honorary members of the WWII Glider Pilots' Association. Mach 14 or 80 knots, it's the same principle!

<comment><USER8> In the soaring community, we sometimes refer to the Shuttle as the world's highest performance motorglider. The power-off glide ratio is absolutely atrocious, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What surprised me the most, the difference between being in orbit and starting to reenter is only 362 km/h but it takes a three minute burn to decelerate which I guess is a 0.5mv² thing with big m and huge v.

EDIT: My intuition was wrong, this has nothing to do with a large kinetic energy due to a large velocity.

<comment><USER8> The reentry burn is done with the teeny little OMS engines rather than the big main engines. If you look at the back of the Shuttle (such as [https://i0.wp.com/amazingstoriesmag.com/wp- content/uploads/2...](https://i0.wp.com/amazingstoriesmag.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/05/Space-shuttle-main-and-OMS-engines_a.jpg)), the OMS engines are the two little ones in the upper corners. Once you're in orbit, there's usually no hurry to make changes, so you don't need much acceleration. For getting _to_ orbit, you want to stop fighting gravity as fast as possible, so powerful engines are a must.

<comment><USER9> Tiny is pretty relative [1]. I expected them to be more powerful and - mistakenly - thought the small acceleration is due to the large kinetic energy due to the large velocity.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJ10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJ10)

<comment><USER8> Right, rockets provide the same acceleration regardless of speed, since there's no way for the engine to "know" how fast the vehicle is moving. Acceleration is basically exhaust velocity times mass flow divided by vehicle mass.

With an 84cm diameter and weighing about 200 pounds, I'm OK calling them "tiny."

<comment><USER9> I missed that, I only looked at the image and there it looks way more massive and larger than what the dimensions table says. Even taking into account that the image depicts an entire stage and not just the engine, 0.84 m and 100 kg is a lot less than I would have expected or guessed based on the image.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I first saw the image and thought wow, that really is big. Then I saw the specs.

I guess it's misleading because the engine is much closer to the camera than the background, but nothing makes that obvious. There's a tiny little person behind it, and if you don't realize the perspective difference, that would look like the engine is pretty huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR seriously impressive stats given in an engaging, amusing, rapid fire talk by Bret Copeland, pilot

</comment><comment><USER11> If I wanted to make a presentation like that what tools would I need to use? That was way more engaging than a powerpoint presentation. It almost seems like an animated video that pauses itself rather than a slideshow.

<comment><USER12> It really is just a series of animations. It's basically a time lapse of drawing. You can look at how Henry from MinutePhysics does his videos[1] (and if you like how this presentation is done, I _highly_ recommend looking into MinutePhysics). These were probably done in something similar to flash. For open source programs, I'd probably look at Synfig[2] or Pencil2D[3].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhZ3naSgJg4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhZ3naSgJg4) [2] [http://synfig.org/](http://synfig.org/) [3] [https://www.pencil2d.org/](https://www.pencil2d.org/)</comment></comment>


YouTube's "Feedback" feature is a business waiting to happen - <AUTHOR>

To measure how well users like its new site design, YouTube has added a rectangular blue tab on the bottom right corner of the site.Upon clicking the link on the tab called 'send feedback', a dialog box appears, giving the viewer an option to highlight sections of the site and leave feedback.<p>There are a number of companies that sell a 'feedback' feature, however none that give the user the ability to highlight sections of the sight or virtually mark the screen. This is the future of feedback in regards to websites.  Somebody should monetize. <comment><USER2> This startup does something similar <http://www.bugherd.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've already done this after seeing the feedback tool in Google+ a few months back :)

Check out BugMuncher - <http://bugmuncher.com> \- it's had a good response so far and has got a good number of happy users.

</comment><comment><USER4> Jotform's Wishbox is doing exactly same thing. Few days back, they posted about it on HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3265421>

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading an article on techcrunch about a startup doing this as well. It allowed you to mark the screen and would take a snapshot and send it with your feedback.

Update: didnt see the comments below, but the website posted below(jotform) was the one i mentioned above.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was first offered in Google+</comment>


Announcing core Node.js support for ECMAScript modules - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nodejs/announcing-core-node-js-support-for-ecmascript-modules-c5d6dc29b663 <comment><AUTHOR> It was a difficult process, but I am very happy that Node finally has support for unflagged native ESM. It landed today in Node 13.2. Thank you for everyone who worked on this.

The `modules` team still continues to work to improve ESM support, especially for packages wanting to provide both formats ("CommonJS" and "ESM") during the transition.

I recommend following the discussions on the nodejs/module repo [0] for anyone interested.

[0]: [https://github.com/nodejs/modules](https://github.com/nodejs/modules)</comment>