skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, there will always be people out to make a (not so quick?) buck. Having sufficient supply, and thus not being able to scalp for profit, would help. But something as simple as backorders and a queue would help too, as that would tamper demand and need to go to resellers. I think it is utterly absurd that in looking for a new AMD card in the US, there's nowhere I can order and just wait. (One exception I found was Provantage, back from the ol' mail catalog days. I have an order with them but the product has since been removed from the website. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe one day.)
I got $10 verizon prepaid and set up my whatsapp and signal that way.
I think it was (1) fighting spam and (2) the social graph already exists due to contact books.

I think officially it’s just (2) and (1) is just a side effect, but I think it’s secretly more about (1)
I've understood it like this : Taiwan is a successful, politically stable liberal democracy. It's existence contradicts the CCP stance that democracy is inherently Western and inconsistent with Chinese culture. [* I have no citation for this, I feel I've read it multiple times ] The CCP stance delegitimises Taiwan and the example of Chinese democracy it represents. Military pressure adds to this, because it creates uncertainty that Taiwan will be able to maintain control over its territory in the future, and pushes Taiwan to need support from the US, which feeds the argument that it is not a true free standing Asian country, but an artefact of foreign incursion.

China is a big powerful country. But that shouldn't be surprising. I think you can argue that China has been the most important centre of human civilisation and scientific progress for most of human history.

I wonder whether the CCP are concerned that mainland Chinese would otherwise look across the Taiwan Strait, and rather than thank the CCP for the success of recent decades, would instead wonder how much better life might be if China was more like Taiwan.
Do you have a link to the full interview? That first article is just a bunch of short quotes, some incomplete, some seemingly out of context. Some of the quotes address the clearing house deposit requirements. The article doesn't actually give his response AFAICT as to why they paused trading.

I just can't understand how that article supports the accusation of lying.
Especially for cost--my group recently picked up a pair of 900 MHz Ethernet radio modems which acts basically like a 40km long line-of-sight Ethernet cable. Super useful for field research, but at US$900 per pair, they're above the "let's see what happens" budget for true experimentation. A $90 pair, on the other hand, even with a slightly lower range, would put them comfortably at about the price of a Raspberry Pi or other SBC, opening up a lot more possibilities.
Okay, you need to get yourself over to the reddit FIRE group.

Here’s some resources:

Reddit FIRE:
https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

Practical FIRE blog:
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/blog/

Poor Richard’s Retirement:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0725GG5LK/ref=tmm_kin_title_...

What you need to save:
https://fourpillarfreedom.com/the-financial-independence-gri...
Thanks for that. It's nice to see a calm perspective on GME.

Of course, he doesn't try to get to the bottom of a lot of the questions that really do need to be answered, but a good perspective on what it means for "the rest of us."
>If you're a fund manager who lies to the public about closing a highly volatile position that could bankrupt you, you are facing securities fraud and violation of fiduciary duty, respectively.

The claim that Melvin closed their position is something of a game of "telephone" in that it was a CNBC anchor that claimed that "from what I understand" Melvin Capital is out of the stock, after he talked to the CEO (off camera).

Importantly, there was no recording of the conversation, just a journalist claiming a source said something. The fact he used "from what I understand" instead of a direct quote is telling.

Melvin themselves have not (as far as I can see) issued any kind of statement, written or otherwise, that clearly states they have zero position on GME any more.

All of the other stories about the claim simply state "according to CNBC".

My point is that as far as I can see, there is no evidence that Melvin are actually out of their position, other than easily-deniable comments that a single journalist claims "from what I understand" on.

Link here to the video from CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/01/27/melvin-capital-sells-o...
Then compare the Queensland-NSW border or the Victoria-NSW border, probably comparable with most European borders or at least within 1 order of magnitude. Both borders were closed (with exceptions) at various times to contain outbreaks to one state. If we loosen up the definition of country then these are Western countries that aren't island nations with zero covid.

It shouldn't also be noted that the borders don't have to be hermetically sealed. As long as cross border contamination is minimized other tools (contact tracing) can deal with it.
> Second, any consensus protocol can only remain live as long as there are no more than f faults out of 3f+1 replicas. This is again irrespective of the network model

We actually know of consensus protocols that require synchrony including between participants and clients that go up to 99% fault tolerance for both liveness and safety; in fact Lamport himself described one in his original paper (remember that it's "written messages" and not "oral messages" in his vocab that's the relevant category; these days public key cryptography is cheap and uncontroversial so there's no need to care about the "oral" case). There's also a table on page 291 in the 1988 DLS paper (see https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm88.pdf, the "authenticated byzantine" row and the "synchronous" column) that gives an overview of the fault tolerance levels in various different cases.

The original definition of consensus did not have a notion of passive clients needing to learn the result, so the "active participants synchronous, passive clients asynchronous" model common in blockchain land was not really analyzed well back then. It turns out that with a synchronous network, the passive client requirement is what brings safety and liveness down from 99% to 50%. And it also happens that the 50% fault tolerance protocols are less fragile in the case that the synchrony assumption breaks temporarily.
I suspect the problem for Myanmar is not their past but their future.

This link gives some insight into how they are going as a country and it is not flattering reading:

http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p102401/mobile...

What conclusion can be drawn, then, regarding Myanmar’s growth experience from independence in 1948 up to the end of the 1990s? If we wish to be unkind, we can say that Myanmar is a subsistence agricultural economy, relying on a few commodities, with a pre-industrial economic structure, which has no shock absorbers to cushion the impact of events originating within and outside the country. Natural and human-made disasters, therefore, windfalls from the bounty of nature and commodity booms that resulted from such events as the Korean War largely determined the state of the economy, rather than factors such as the GDI/GDP ratio.

Such unkind views can, however, no longer hold with the official data for Myanmar’s economic performance coming into the new millennium. In biblical times, it was possible for a country’s economy to enjoy seven fat years in a row and then to suffer seven lean years in a row. Not anymore! Global warming, a growing menace, has brought with it climate change that has made weather volatile and erratic. There is no way a country can expect to have seven consecutive years of good harvests in the twenty-first century.

That was written back in 2005 and it looks like their GDP predictions have turned out to be correct with a big drop in their GDP since 2005.

https://tradingeconomics.com/myanmar/gdp-growth-annual
What is the advantage of mentioning patents? I would rather not speak on that so 0BSD and Unlicense are nice.
Most of the independence armies except Rhakine armies (AA and ARSA) officially want a true federal union, which would require a new constitution. This is the same aim as NLD.

Only KNU (Karen army) so far has made statement opposing military coup.

Edit: That said, independence armies are all to some degree corrupt and many funded through drug manufacturing and smuggling.
True, though this isn't the goal of a restaurant. A restaurant's goal is to make money by providing food, service, and an atmosphere that people enjoy. Minivans are terrible airplanes and even worse golf clubs. But they're great at being minivans.
> We have democracy, social policies (even universal healthcare, which is comically bad anyway but we do have that), freedom of speech, free press, yadda yadda

Most middle-eastern countries do not have this either...

> but Myanmar is still richer than us.

but I am willing to bet they are richer than both Nepal and Myanmar. It seems what Myanmar has over Nepal is natural resources, (just like the middle eastern countries). This is nothing to be proud of.
Your summary of the Newsweek article is pretty misleading. They're not accusing r/WSB or GME investors as a whole of being far-right extremists (which would be false), they're referring to actual alt-righters talking about GME.
It gets cold enough that people spend much more time congregating inside, that's all that matters to the virus.
I wonder what caused force log out in the first place? I have a Signal account logged in and then SIM card was removed from the phone, and Signal still works (of course I'm not in MMR).
Did people had faith in financial institutions after 2008 crash anyway, if so who are those people?

I feel like huge majority of the people already know that system is rigged but what can they do? Most of them got very limited options against the system.
This trend towards Emotional and Sentiment based Analytics - the acquisition and monetizing every snapshot of our personality. This reduction of our humanity into a cluster of data points to be used against us by marketing and political campaigns - this is just gasoline on the flames of Silicon Valley techno backlash.

People like Affevtiva running facial micro expression algorithms etc. What happens when all this data is complied by your friendly neighborhood Data Broker in the name of a "Better Customer Experience" with realtime FitBit heartrates/sleep quality from Google with Amazon applying tone of voice stress analytics with Apple Pay's recent purchase history on top of .........

I am writing this inside a Facebook VR headset with eyetracking hardware and can't be sure my 'gaze' is not something I have agreed to have monitored in some EULA.

If they get these neuro brain machine interfaces to the point they work - I can only imagine the outcome without any established boundaries.

And just how can this industry establish boundaries ? Who decides and who decides who decides ?
What stops them invading any country generally? Depends how hard the response is and what is gained
In Transmetropolitan, the protagonist's matter converter (his oven so to speak) has a drug addiction problem. Like Spider Jerusalem, I may have to move to the sticks.
Institutional traders (hedge fund, i-banks, prop traders, hft) have the advantage of deep pockets and the financial literacy to be able to execute strategies which create easy returns. Many of these strategies are easily scalable to turn a small edge into a big one, using leverage. Oftentimes these strategies have an asymmetric risk profile, with low probability of losing a lot of money (sometimes with unlimited downside potential), for example:

- writing out of the money options for the premiums

- shorting stocks with leverage

- '08s frenzy of selling credit default swaps

- forex trading with spreads so low that they take 100x+ leverage

Usually, when these strategies work, it's easy money and they get addicted to the easy returns. They scale the strategies up to a level of risk they can't handle. Like having 140% short interest relative to GME's float. When these strategies blow up in their faces, it wipes them out completely, to the level of requiring bailouts.

Main street (retail investors, taxpayers) have had enough of this, and a lot of anger is directed at institutional investors for always getting the easy money and the bailouts at their expense. They want to see the game applied fairly, such that when the bets go sour, they go bankrupt and don't get bailed out like in 2008. In the 2015 CHF forex crisis, many brokers went bankrupt overnight. That's what should happen to Melvin, and to anyone who takes the stupid risky bets that don't work out.
Avoid 3 at all costs. These early stage startups have all the risks but none of the upside a cofounder typically gets. Ask them to show you the cap table. Typically, investors and founders will hold 80% and you will be lucky to get 1-2% of the company.

Start by doing 1. If you don’t enjoy hustling and marketing and selling yourself and your work, chances are you’ll have challenges starting a startup or joining one early. Learn and experiment this while you are at your current job.
When I last looked at Ouroboros it still had the property that there's only "one confirmation per slot", so you need to wait ~log(n) slots before an attacker has a <1/n probability of reversing the chain. I personally think that a good PoS system should strive to have hundreds of confirmations per slot the way eth2's LMD GHOST does. That said, it's very possible that there's an improved version of Ouroboros that already does this and I just haven't caught up to it yet.
Why "sticking to the man" resonates with me, and why I took pleasure in this incident is because students from the mid-2000s realize that hedge fund managers for the most part are not as smart as they think they are. Their bungling significantly set back the dreams of several students of my generation. I am not far right by any means, just was far gone and sad for 2010-2015.

I suspect that the truth is closer to "Wall Street" than we care to admit. Insider information is still the key, not stochastic differential equations, Ito's formula and portfolio balance theories. Melvin putting all their leveraged eggs in one basket is considered above board, and is not being questioned.
Unfortunately in many countries even prepaid SIM cards are directly tied to government ID verification. I know this has been discussed many times, but I agree that it would be nice to be able to use Signal for secure communications without a phone number.
People really don't seem to understand the concept of the op-ed. Maybe publications need to do a better job of making the distinction clear.

For reference, this is from an article from the newsroom:

But of course, what the Reddit cabal did to inflate the stock of bygone-era companies like GameStop, AMC Entertainment and Bed Bath & Beyond simply mirrored what the hedge fund sharpies had done in conspiring to “short” those same stocks and drive down the prices

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/30/financial...
Yes it can only check types. That's why you model your types to only contain valid data.
This supports macOS only.

> Requirements: at the moment, msync supports only macOS. This is because it uses macOS's built-in afinfo tool to determine music files' bitrates.

You can simply use file[1] to get the bitrate on Linux if you have the metadata (if you lack the metadata, read below). I bet even macOS supports it, it is available on Unix, Unix-like, Plan 9, and IBM i. That, or you can use the MediaInfo[2] program or library, although I am not sure if it works with metadata or not.

Using file:

file foo.mp3 | sed 's/.*, \(.*\)kbps.*/\1/'| tr -d " "

The result is in kbps.

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

[2] https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo, https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo/Download

You can download the CLI, GUI, or the library of MediaInfo. You want the CLI or the library.

---

The above solutions may work only if you have the metadata (ID3, for example) set, although I am not sure about MediaInfo.

Another solution would be using ffprobe[3] (requires ffmpeg), which for example returns this for a FLAC file:

Metadata:
Comment : Processed by SoX
Duration: 00:00:26.20, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 527 kb/s
Stream #0:0: Audio: flac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16

It should not be based on any metadata.

[3] https://ffmpeg.org/ffprobe.html
Can you provide a source that states Melvin publicly said this? All I can find are references to CNBC where a journalist claims "from what I understand" Melvin is out of the stock.

The problem with this is that it's easy for the CEO to later say "the journalist misunderstood" or "I said we covered some of our position (1% is 'some' right?)" or many other things.

Is there a definitive statement from Melvin themselves anywhere?
> And the fact that Janet Yellen, the new Treasury Secretary, got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Citadel doesn’t help either.

I think there is an opportunity for a service that allows the logistics of ordering/distributing large quantities of books written by such people that can be used by banks/funds for distribution to their employees and such to avoid the bad-light of direct speaking fees. Order the books, target gets paid (the cut the publisher takes can be considered an acceptable collateral cost of avoiding the exposure) and everyone looks nice - "we were just sharing knowledge - books are good!". Best part is, some people might actually read the books.
Even better, it is limited to pools that primarily operate in China. I really wish someone would turn off that link. It is really awkwardly bad and mis-quoted a lot.
The quote from that caller is pretty amazing. There are just so many things wrong his statement that it's hard to even know where to start.

1. A 7% weekly loss isn't really anything that a buy and hold investor should be worried out. Yes losing money sucks, but are you really so afraid of volatility you would rather earn practically nothing from 3 month T-bills?

2. It's super easy to call shorting GME risky after the fact.It's incredible what people call "obvious" and "risky" once a particular situation has blown up. Captain Hindsight strikes again.

3. He claims he is worried about "market manipulation", but I doubt he would be complaining or have his faith shaken in the markets if he just realized a 7% gain this week.

This guy is looking to blame someone and hedge funds are a convenient populist target.

On an aside, it seems the market can't ever get a break. If it crashes and unemployment skyrockets, it was due to some fat cats gambling. If the market skyrockets and unemployment is high, now the fat cats are making money off the backs of everyone else. If the market skyrockets and unemployment is low, well, everyone isn't sharing in the gains equally.

Give me a break.
That is quite literally a different argument.

The argument being made is that the original funds never exited their original ~$10 shorts. So every $100 increase in stock price is a 10x increase in losses.

If someone re-entered at ~$300, a $100 increase would be a 30% increase in loses.

The scale of these is massively different.

I have absolutely no doubt that other firms have entered short positions.

Claiming that "Melvin may have re-entered afterwards" is obviously a possibility, but is not the same as having lied about exiting in the first place.
The media’s behavior is why I became cynical about the system: moralize everything for no particular facts. You don’t like someone, label that person far-right. This is how transparency is lost. With transparency gone, so is trust.

And we stopped the trade for your own good. Yeah, right.
Jimmy Kimmel said "and maybe even some Russian Disruptors," for no apparent reason in his opening monologue talking about the people buying $GME last week.
All these traders are playing in a casino. Yes, the casino favors the house. Yes, people have figured out how to make big bucks by counting cards. The rules will probably change so the house keeps on winning.

To me, all this indicates that the only way to win is to not play. Passively investing in the market as a whole is the only way to win long term.

Disclosure: I work at a robo-advisor specializing in long term passive investing. My views are my own, and in no way associated with the views of my employer. This is not investment advice.
I feel like the overwhelming majority of people believe that the system is fair and their shot at being a billionaire is just over the next hill.
This is one of those cases where the game was definitely rigged, even though no one intentionally rigged it. Every actor in the chain was following their own self interest, but at the end of the day, the guys who got cutoff at the knees during the 11th hour were the retail investors and r/wsb.

I don't think this was a coincidence, but rather a special case of more general rich-get-richer dynamics that we see everywhere in society.
Afaik, long range attack is eliminated by bootstrapping from genesis, where the densest chain is selected.
Know what bugged me the entire time through all of this?

The big money guys on the big money shows kept referring to themselves as "the investor class."

As if by the very nature of their jobs, they were set aside above and apart from those of us who have to earn our livings by doing useful things. I'd love to know how much of the brainpower in the US is set aside for the purpose of doing nothing more than extracting wealth from the markets.

Additionally, I've long held the opinion that if your primary method of earning a living is by extracting wealth from the market, then your "capital gains" are just a fancy way of earning a living and you should be taxed at the exact same rate that everyone else is. You don't deserve to pay half the taxes just because your earnings are derived from stocks.
If insider information really is key you should able to easily provide evidence for that claim. The market moving before news is announced is something that the SEC monitors and has consequences when it happens.
If you are scared out of the market by a little ripple like this, investing in equities may not be a good fit, behaviorially. If you are thinking about taking it out now, are you really sure you'll be able to stay in when the market drops 40%? If not, better to cut your losses now, reduce your equity holdings, and probably find someone to manage your money for you.

I self manage for the most part, but I also have at least some discipline and an awareness that the market could drop at any given time. It's only over the 5 year plus time horizon that I actually expect to make money.