skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As a public company, we are subject to wild swings in our stock price that can be a major distraction for everyone working at Tesla, all of whom are shareholders. Being public also subjects us to the quarterly earnings cycle that puts enormous pressure on Tesla to make decisions that may be right for a given quarter, but not necessarily right for the long-term.

> SpaceX is a perfect example: it is far more operationally efficient, and that is largely due to the fact that it is privately held.

Something that I can very well understand.
Yes. Also I don't care much about tools, I like my visual studio but I'm ok using anything else that does the job.
While there's some good reasons here, I can't help but think this is more an emotional reaction on Elon's part, to the shorting and general negativity around the company.
Perhaps for some people, but I don't think that sort of sentiment about Ali Wong is universally true.

I genuinely enjoyed the material and found it very fresh, especially as someone that didn't really think standup comedy was for me before that.
Scale API raises $18M to build the AWS for AI
> if tomorrow the government said from now on every doctor can see no more than 2 patients per day

I don't see much purpose in the exaggeration; change it to, Doctors must see each patient for no less than 15 minutes; and can only work 8 hour days.

Granted, internists with their own practices or in small towns do this already.
True story: I was standing on my back porch, finishing my morning coffee. It was one of those January Silicon Valley mornings where it can't quite decide whether its raining or not. Between the clouds, a rainbow appeared. From my vantage in the hills in South Fremont, the end of that rainbow sat squarely on the Tesla factory.

Being the sophisticated investor that I am, I know a 'buy' signal when I see one.

Here's to Elon and any Tesla employee who ever broke a sweat to deliver the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.
Can you expand on that, please?
Show HN: An online tool to track and compare cryptocurrency predictions
He is bluffing trying to squeeze the shorts, no one rational can value it 82B unless it was waymo level tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Power_Ventur....

"Judge Fogel’s reasoned that MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. and Ticketmaster LLC v. RMG Techs. Inc. indicated that the scraping of a webpage inherently involves the copying of that webpage into a computer’s memory in order to extract the underlying information contained therein. Even though this "copying" is ephemeral and momentary, that it is enough to constitute a "copy" under § 106 of the Copyright Act and therefore infringement.[9] Since Facebook’s Terms of Service prohibit scraping (and thus, Facebook has not given any license to third parties or users to do so), the copying happens without permission."
Instead of taking it private, what's stopping Tesla as a company from buying back shares from public market when the price is low? It not only stabilize the price it is also have long term benefit if the company is confident for the future.
> the font color on this blog is absolutely horrible.

Yeah, I've noticed more sites do this. Super annoying. I made this bookmark for those cases:

javascript:(()=>{document.querySelectorAll("p,div,article,section,ul,ol,li").forEach(x=>{x.style["color"]="black";});})();
SHOW HN?

I've added the answer to the FAQ :)
Are you arguing that the probes would be too difficult, or that the civilization/AI would simply choose not to use them? If we assume that the system is still working at the behest of or at least in cooperation with its human creators, I think "because we can" is enough to make it happen. We seem to have an innate drive to expand and explore and see what's out there.
If you're a heavy TSLA short-seller, you're already in deep trouble, unless this falls through very quickly. There will be margin calls. Welcome to the losing side of short-selling.
Putting up for one thing doesn't mean you're automatically capable of putting up for all things. I'm not diminishing his existing achievements. He's put up very well in specific cases.

Case in point: Musk calling a professional diver a pedophile for having a informed opinion based on his personal experience and expertise.

The kids were rescued, Musk had nothing additional to put up, and would have been better following the path of shut up. He was already getting a ton of praise for quick action, and got upset that not everyone universally appreciated it.
This would have a side-effect of making all the short-sellers lose, which would be quite satisfactory to Musk.

Until Tesla's economics become obvious to all in the market, this is probably the best decision; this allows them to be more focused on the long run.
Why Did the Titanic Sink? Explaining with OneNote and Digital Ink
A recentish one places an estimate at 10B initial costs, and 10B maintenance. 20B is doable by the US alone, yes.

Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, it's why you must research. In this case the truth may well be that humans have an easier time making the sun shine less rather than lowering our carbon footprint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
3D Printed AI Device Tracks Objects at the Speed of Light
The original (academic) source, with more images and analyses, is available at http://web.econ.ku.dk/pabloselaya/papers/RomanRoads.pdf
"App Stores have basically zero friction already..."

I disagree with this point. The Apple App Store has a large entry barrier, in both cost and requirements, in that one needs to already have bought in to the Apple ecosystem in order to develop for it.
Can someone please ELI5 this for me? Why is a private Tesla better? As long as Elon and employees own more than 51% of the stock (do they?), can't they not just ignore the stock price swings?
It only falls if Elon is bluffing. He’s guaranteed $420 / share.
Ha. I was thinking the same. I've heard lots of good things about Golang :)
Honestly as someone who used to use a Hackintosh as my daily driver, I can't recommend building one to anyone.

Everything from getting drivers to work, to handling updates, is a major pain. The whole point of the mac is that just works, and a Hackintosh is the furthest possible thing from that.
Ballsy. And nukes short sellers from the orbit as well even if it doesn't go through. It's the only way to be sure.
In the end there's really no good way to electronically block against a drone. Someone could preposition some infrared lasers pointed along the expected flight path and the drone could use those to perfectly navigate to the target. Or a single laser that tracked the drone by scanning the sky and the drone acknowledging when the laser was pointed at it. Or I'm sure a dozen other schemes. Someone willing to spend a year tinkering could come up with a drone that is only stoppable by directly disabling it.
What an amazing privacy policy do these guys have! Don't take my word for it, check it out: https://wolfpack-digital.com/privacy
/sarcasm mode off
In the Tesla case I feel that the shareholder concerns are pretty valid and provide an interesting counter pressure to Musk's "This is fine" attitude. Not saying either is right, but the friction is likely valuable.

I'd not want to be an investor in a private Tesla. It would seem way to volatile.
> it finally starts listening to potential users and making things better, but because everyone else just stops making desktops.

Of course those of us on this site are members of the Hacker Class. Putting our own house in order might involve writing code, but meaninful contributions can come in the form of bug reports or even just using software and occasionally writing something about how you use it.
> 8.65 in liabilities comming due before the end of March 2019

Forbes says [1] it’s $920 million due in March 2019 convertible at $360/share, and a total of $1.8 billion coming due through November 2019.

You can also check Note 10 on Page 24 of their latest 10Q filing (Quarterly Financials through June 30, 2018) [2]

[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimcollins/2018/04/02/forget-th...

[2] - http://ir.tesla.com/node/18946/html#Notes_to_Condensed_Conso...
This is no bluff:

> Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it’s contingent on a shareholder vote.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026914941004001280
It seems just the announcement, if nothing else happens, is twisting the knife on those shorts. The price is +25 today already.
I'm open to suggestions and collaborations.
Elon Musk Email on ‘Taking Tesla Private’
> I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use <script type="text/dart"> instead of JavaScript.

Funny, that's what I saw as the core attraction. The fact that they never pushed for adoption in other browsers and fell back on transpilation removed the benefit you'd get from an alternative scripting environment.

Thankfully, we now have web assembly.
To the article's credit, none of these solutions address the "high up drone dropping a grenade on you in an area you can't secure beforehand" - simply because you won't know it's there until it's too late.
And Swift
He tweeted that he had funding and in the email mentions no funding. This is a really weird announcement that feels like an empty pump of the stock. He could have chosen any number...
Windows, partially. Vulkan can be used in classic win32 apps but not in "modern" UWP apps.

The Xbox One uses a variant of D3D12 and doesn't support Vulkan at all.
1. You can buy TSLA stock as soon as trading them resumes. Lots of people already have.

2. If this acquisition goes through, each one of your stocks will be worth $420. Congrats.

3. You can't really dissent to shareholder majority agreeing to this deal.

4. $70bn is a lot of mulla, so I would guess this will not be all Musk's personal funds.

5. Theoretically, through some sort of a private equity venue. Just like any other private company.
As a thumb rule I do not like to work for private companies especially when around 40% of my renumeration comes from RSUs.
First anounced a couple of hours by Elon on twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/10268726522903797...
Which lead to comments if it being a scam..
It is impressive to see the power of twitter news!
The main question I have is about financing. If Elon owns 20% of the company now, and he doesn't intend for that to change, and he is giving the option of public shareholders to sell at $420, then who is financing this? Usually a private takeover requires a partnership with a huge private equity firm. Wouldn't releasing this without having (or identifying) that partner be premature? And wouldn't the resulting stability be dependent on that partner's exit strategy?
Lots of things can go wrong with a deal this size, but yes, unless he's bluffing, this most likely will happen.
> If that quote attributed to Fred Jelineck ("Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up") is right, they should have negative linguists.

That's a really, really, really stupid quote that pushes the increasingly popular world view that experts only drag the world down on every subject.

Linguists' contribution is unrelated to performance, positive or negative. Performance is the job of computer scientists designing architecture and of skilled programmers doing smart implementations of architecture.

The performance would probably go up if the company fired all presidents/vice presidents/CFOs etc., too (giving implementors free reign, unconstrained by costs and schedules), but the company would probably go under.

Every specialist has their own role to play. Thinking that subject domain expertise is a negative is indefensible.
By paying a large premium to the all time high? If he's worried about the stock going down, paying more for it doesn't make a ton of sense. You should wait until the stock is down and then take it private.
I don't currently have plans to port it to any other platform but I would consider it if there is strong interest
Pretty enormous amount of money required. Say half of TSLA shareholders take the $420, that's approx ~$40bn required. Then there's another $10bnish of debt refinancing required, and probably many more billion for future product development and new assembly lines.

I don't think Softbank could finance this, it would be well over half their entire fund.

Saudi maybe - but still quite a chunk of change for them.
I think you're right; simply increasing turnout would probably split the vote along the same lines, and not change the outcome.

What I was replying to is the idea that the winner speaks for the people, which you always hear after every election, which you hear a lot from Trump and his supporters, and which is reflected in the comment "we got what we voted for." If everyone voted, then that would be at least arguably true. But since half of the eligible voters didn't bother to vote, we don't know what they wanted, and no elected official can claim to speak for them.

My final comment was about some theoretical person who could get the dis-interested voters to vote for them. Whoever has that magic could get twice as many votes as the Democrat or Republican. I suspect that the non-voters are mostly centrists, who feel that the major parties have gotten too radical. So maybe a solid centrist candidate could have a third-party chance.
It means he’d rather not be under the scrutiny of wall st investors. He thinks the volatility is off-putting to his employees. He thinks wall st isnt forecasting correctly or is short-term focused. These are his reasons.
If a majority votes to take the company private, you would have the option of selling or accepting private stock (some non-voting class I'd assume) that you can trade. Voting class stock would be only offered to investors with >X% current holdings, probably the 5% the Saudi's just purchased. Employees may have a third class stock. As an investor, you'd be given paperwork to sell or accept the new stock in exchange for your old stock. Rules for buying and selling private stock are pretty common and there are several organized indexes for private stock trades.

All of the short-sellers would lose every penny they gambled.
I think that would fall under "major distraction for everyone working at Tesla."
Moot point. If public, Tesla can't stop the Sauds from buying stock. However, they can refuse a bailout from the Sauds to go private
Actually, you should do better than 30% loss due to the non-linearity:

1 - 0.97**10
=> 0.2625758731050719
Any experienced non-retail short seller would've bought some long term out-of-the-money call options as insurance for a scenario like this. Most retail shorts know it's best practice... but they're retail after all, so many are going to get burnt if this hype goes through.
It's fictional.

http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/MQ-27_Dragonfire
Amazing magic seeds or sufficiently advanced technology? Call it what you will, but that's like mentioning AC and Westinghouse, but ignoring Tesla or only mentioning one parent on your birthday.
The New Housing Crisis: Shut Out of the Market
FTA :

>>> Armed groups such as the terrorist militia "Islamic State" (IS) pioneered the use of small drones

rotfl...

Armed groups such as colonialist US Army pioneered the use of big predator drones.

ah ah ah
Hi Guys,

Im a psychologist with a specialty in entrepreneurship mental health and co-founder conflict. I help people (sometimes individually sometimes as a co-founder pair) address difficulties such as impostor syndrome, communication skills, burnout, making decisions under stress, and effective leadership.

The co-founder relationship is extremely intimate and specific, and it is near impossible for two people to work so hard on a rigorous and trying endeavor and not run into issues. Part of what makes it hard is also the fact that outwardly, everything always has to look awesome. So there aren't any realistic comparison points.

A co-founder relationship is not unlike dating in that you have to figure out where your deal breakers are, what issues you can work through, and what issues you can let go. You also have to be open to accepting your own role in problems that arise, and commit to trying to work on those too. All of which is hard to do while also managing the stress of starting and running a company.

If anyone has questions I'm happy to answer them. You can look me up at azimuthpsych.com.

Also, if you're looking for a therapist for either yourself or you and your co-founder, heres an outline to help you out.

https://azimuthpsych.com/articles-and-ebooks/how-to-find-a-t...

Janna Koretz, Psy.D
Seems like a good decision for Tesla. They have been pushing way to hard to satisfy the public opinion. The product and the company will continue to do well without being a public company.
Google wants to make JOMO happen
Private companies are still allowed to give share to employees.
Employees are then allowed to sell their stock periodically (every 6 months in this case).
What are the odds someone could pull off a drone assassination that leaves no physical evidence recoverable by the FBI? Surely some piece of debris will contain DNA, a serial number, some identifying information that would lead law enforcement to the perpetrators.
Wow, look at it go on re-open
This feels like a rushed announcement.

First you throw out a tweet, later in the day you halt trading, then you make an announcement that you're "considering" something major, but that you haven't decided yet.

Not only that, but Musk seems a tad bit paranoid. He's regularly talking about all those evil greedy short-term traders that attack the company -- which is a little silly since traders have given Tesla a larger market cap than GM and Ford.
I don't know about the MoltenVK branding specifically, but Khronos does plan a "Universally portable subset" of Vulkan with tools to target both Metal and D3D12 from one rendering codebase and common SPIR-V shaders.

The project is call Vulkan Portability Initiative:

https://www.khronos.org/blog/khronos-announces-the-vulkan-po...
I'm pretty shocked at the low adoption of hybrid cars. Why don't people want them?
An accelerometer and gyroscope may not make for a precise dead reckoning system, but if all you need is to get into a 1m blast radius, they might be good enough. Pair that with a smartphone with face/feature detection like those used for AR, and you might be able to navigate pretty much anywhere, no need for GPS.
I've always felt that same way too. Lots of really smart people doing what they can to get more people to click on ads ... the source of 99% of their revenue. Seems a little sad. Same but less so with Google as at least they make $ from their cloud product ... whose development is funded by ad clicks.
Good catch, thanks.
Hopefully fixed now.
I can see the cannabis industry investors and other stoner dudes purchasing for that specific amount.
Right, but with who?
I don't think it was an intentional pump, I think he needs someone to change his Twitter password, not tell him the new one and post on his behalf, just like Trump also needs.
If Elon is guaranteeing a $420/share buyout - are there any downsides to buying as much stock as possible right now? Would the only risk be that this whole plan falls through or that Elon ultimately decides against that price?
Nothing on financing and an FT reporter said bankers close to Tesla knew nothing about it.
Thanks. Your last sentence seems to sum up the motive here in my opinion, not so much to screw the short sellers, but to limit/stop the ability of them to influence the value of the company through whatever means.
> 1) As has been shown time and time again, the rewards of productivity gains accrue to the owners of capital far more than to the workers who are more productive.

This looks much more like the real problem to me. The solution: Make it much easier and less bureaucratic for such people to invest their money.
Startup School Help! I submitted the application with no content by mistake a few weeks ago. I sent an e-mail to	startupschool@ycombinator.com requesting that it be reset but have not received any reply. When I try to apply again I receive the following message: "Thank you for applying to Startup School!
We will let you know whether you’re accepted by August 20th, 2018." with no chance to edit the application form.
AMD Is on Fire
I like the idea of a more-ethical not-for-profit, that is required to spend or lose all money at end of year, and has a CEO cap of say 150x employee average. Could have some sort of investment scheme setup too, that inmates can buy into, and some of the 'left-over' could go into that giving them a little nest egg when they get out to cushion themselves and prevent recidivism.

The 'bonus' could be tied to performance/behavior/etc... and it could be 'will-able'.. in case you're a lifer, or die in prison, your family will have some benefit. A lot of poverty is because the breadwinner is in prison...if the breadwinner could still win bread while in prison it might positively effect poverty quite a bit.
You are saying it isn't a bluff with evidence from the potential bluffer.
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who is gonna finance that 420USD buy-back ?
Newton Mail app shutting down September 25
Tesla doesn't have money to buy shares back. It's not clear what does he mean by "taking Tesla private" and who would be providing the money.
> Also, don't you know that the Saudis put $50 billion into Softbank's fund?

Anyone with a conscience would refuse Saudi funding, funneled via SoftBank or directly. Remember how HN and googlers were up in arms against accepting Pentagon money, this is a million times worse.

It is true that Musk is accepting a bailout from the Sauds, are you disputing that?

Hence, it's disappointing that he's ignoring, or somehow rationalizing all the blood shed by the Sauds
Is the Trump Admin allowing asbestos back into the manufacturing industry?
I seriously doubt $70bn are changing hands because someone got "emotional". In my understanding, this is a great deal for Tesla, the key question is how Musk got the enormous amount of money to pull this through...
I don't like the guy (and it's obvious from my comments), but this move is brilliant on so many levels.

The short sellers just got taken to the cleaners, badly.

By taking the company private, he's under less public and regulatory scrutiny.

It's probably easier for him to raise money privately, and there seems to be sufficient interest.

Tesla's employees, who are probably pretty much worn out, got a nice pay day.

And, of course... he's the hero again.

Edit

Pure speculation, but could it be that this announcement might actually backfire on the $420 price?

Tesla's is one of the most shorted stocks, ever. The short sellers stand to lose immensely, so they'll try to close their short position as quickly as possible, thereby driving the price up higher -- possibly higher than the $420.
It was! :)
> Employees are then allowed to share their stock periodically (every 6 months in this case)

Some companies do periodic buybacks. Private shares can generally be sold at any time to accredited investors.
I think he is more concerned about actual espionage, sabotage, manufactured bad press etc, than the stock price manipulation. That maybe indeed be paranoia or maybe he has seen it happening enough.
The main difference though is sell to whom? In the case of a public company, you sell your shares via the market to whomever will buy them. In the case of a private company, you're selling the shares back to the company, and the valuation is formulaic instead of market-based (unless there is some kind of private "market" that continues, but I've never seen that and would doubt its legality).
He wouldn't make such an announcement without having backers lined up.