skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Warren Buffett bought IBM shares in 2011 at $170, and sold them in 2018 at $145. Oops.

When he bought, he marvelled at how the CEO was targetting 20% returns on capital. When I heard this, I realised that Buffett had forgotten one of his lessons that he himself espoused: that companies that "target" returns on capital are should be avoided. IIRC, it was one of his reasons for bailing out of Fannie Mae (?). His timing was impeccible on that one, as the whole thing exploded not long thereafter in the 2008 financial crisis.

Also at the time of his purchase, it was known that the company was beginning to offshore. It struck me at the time that this could cheapen the whole thing and turn into a disaster.

So there were at least two facts at play here that should have forewarned Buffett that it might not be a good purchase. I was actually pretty astonished at the time that a guy as savvy as Buffett didn't seem to anticipate the problems ahead.

And now we come to the $64,000 question: how does a company add value to shareholders? It's a simple question, but I bet most won't know the answer to it. The answer is provided by Prof. Damodaran Aswath: a company adds value by targetting returns on capital in excess of the cost of capital, risk-adjusted.

So actually, doing stuff like maximising returns on capital is a sub-optimal goal. Not that you should invest in something marginal, either.

Another problem with these corporate-type guys is that they do a lot of "management by numbers". It's all about "KPIs" (Keypoint Indicators) and other "metrics".

Back when Motley Fool wasn't a shitpile that it is today, there was a guy in the UK that put together a portfolio of "family companies", i.e. quoted companies with a substantial management and/or family stake.

How did the companies fair? Very well, actually. The portfolio did great relative to the indices. Why? Well, my conclusion is that family-concentrated businesses were run conservatively as proper operating businesses, rather than a bunch mathematical formulae to be tweaked and fiddled with.
There was another ROM called Ez-o-Ray which was similar. It took me many years later, how embarrassing, to realize that Ez-o-Ray was Yaroze backwards!

"Ez-O-Ray had some cool features like support for the psyq dos debugger (using a TSR to emulate the psx plugin ISA boards)."

http://spin.quequero.org/psx/tute/faq.html
FWIW, similar popular libraries:

1. https://github.com/jeronimofagundes/EmailValidator#available... (PHP)

2. https://github.com/ivolo/disposable-email-domains (Node)
all AI is plagiarizing something, though. Computers cannot reason, they can just jam stuff together that satisfies whatever the program says.

ML is matrix math (generally) - stuff that you can do by hand, computers are faster at it. As fancy as GPT and co-pilot are, it's all copied from somewhere.
There's definitely a lot of more modern developments as well, but there's also stories like Jack and the Beanstalk, that can be traced back thousands of years and which has themes similar to those described in the article.
I was in shock, when realised that everything that I love about Mac Desktop since beginning of OSX era will be showed away in the name of vertical integration.

Now I am ok. Catalina is the last Apple OS that I will run on my computers. Figma is in the browser. Blender is working under Linux perfectly. Windows is horrible, but if used properly for specific tasks it will perform. The big problem was to move away from Logic, but where there's a will, there's a way.

I am deeply thankful for all those years of Desktop Bliss, but Apple nowadays is marketing and shareholders driven company and this is the opposite of Jobs philosophy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
> They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder.

And there’s no reason for them to do that IMO. They should dump it into the quarantine as high confidence spam. I wonder if the drop shows up in the mail flow logs.

I deal with a lot of small businesses and more than once I’ve seen bad spam filtering or silent drops cost people money (upset customers). The spam filters I can understand. The silently dropped messages should get them a class action lawsuit.
I use migadu for all my side-project-esque domains because of their pricing, and their service has been wonderful.

Unfortunately I’m still using another provider for my primary domain because I can’t get real time push notifications on Apple Mail with Migadu—they’re limited to 15 minute fetches for best case scenario
Brine is toxic unless it can be diluted. Which ends up being a huge problem in large plants.
Even Gmail has unlimited aliases, via catch-all (everything after +). With Gmail, specifically, you can use dots (.) in an e-mail address for aliases as well. I'm not using Gmail, but I would not use an e-mail service without catch-all. The dot behavior, however, is weird. Nobody does it that way, 'cept Google.
The comments are similar, but the energy is different.

One of them read to me like "go and strive to be great in one of the million directions possible" and the other was "you won't win on any direction more than average, so settle down and live simple".
Apple can be quite strict. We had a contact tracking feature in our app early during the pandemic, before the gov implemented an official one. Apple was not happy with this and asked us to show some backing that it's officially supported by the government. From my dealings with Apple, they have always been very bullshit-proof, where even a Fortune 500 company can't coax them into loosening their policy.

Google have greatly ramped up their efforts. It used to be that they audited apps to make sure the in-app purchases were going through them, but now they've updated Android policies a lot to cater for security violations. File access has been limited, similar to iOS. You now need permission to access things like locations from maps. Camera, mic, every thing that shady companies like FB did in the background and now much more highly restricted.

I don't think you can really audit code. It would be a complete pain to audit something built in Cordova; even a Hello World hybrid app is a nightmare. They have some nifty performance tracking, though.

Let me paste a few that they track: Excessive wake-ups, Stuck partial wake locks, Excessive background Wi-Fi scans, Excessive background network usage, ANR/Crash rate, Excessive slow/frozen frames, Permission denials.

They also give notifications on what can be done to improve both security and performance. They notify things that increase or decrease ratings - majorly punishments to rating for things like overheating or privacy concerns, but minor bonuses for people who say things like "nice update".

Also there were rumors that apps that didn't meet these guidelines would have their ratings punished. I noticed a sharp drop in search rank once when I had a viral spike in uploads, likely because the ASO algorithm watched it as buying downloads/reviews, but it recovered the position after a few weeks.
https://monsterfx7usa.wixsite.com/monster-fx7
The most simple ones ("survival" type, but it won't produce enough water unless you scale up) is spanning clear plastic over a pool of (shallow) salt water, weigh it down with a rock in the middle, and put a collector in the center underneath so the evaporated water runs down it.

But I'm sure there's commercial solutions out there.
Now that the facility of the digital tooling is more granular and refined, and theres no shortage of weak-minded grunts that are powertrippin to do what theyre told by the telepath aliens in human disguise or the government, as zealous intern lords over the online conversation or jannies of pre-crime trends, this is all now easier to implement when it will matter the most to our future: silencing anti-alien dissent after "arrival."

The Roswell trojan horse and social infiltration to pressure the farce of 2020, is paying off. Abductees/contactees with negative experiences of the 40+ species will be flagged and limited as agents of “disinformation.”
Back of the envelope - say that you could get 7-8 hours of sunlight a day that could destill water. That would mean ~50 liters/day. ~20 Days to get 1m^3. Reverse Osmosis costs approx $0.50/m^3 water, so your payback on a $100 system would be ~200 * 20 Days or 4,000 Days to equal what you could get for spending $100 on buying water from a reverse osmosis system. The objective here isn't large scale economics, but self sufficiency.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_(book)
It is my understanding that it is incredibly difficult to keep water pure. Transporting it any amount of distance from the source is likely to leech quite a few minerals from the available pipes.
Thats how it works in Maserati Quattroporte, both electronic and mechanical actuators are integrated.
as big as a fiasco as BER was/is - it turns out it's (attempted) infrastructure expansion. That and stuff like U5 extension, etc (is it a tourist line? sure, but it's work being done). Trialing/using Electric buses is another one (though they have suffered in both heat and cold).

I'll grant you digitization being crap - don't understand why copper is still king here.

Politics I don't pretend to understand or care about, i just like that nobody's shooting/assassinating/oppressing each other (turns out that's a surprisingly high bar in the world).

vaccinations definitely sucked/were late, but it's finally now ahead of many (even first world) countries [0]

[0]: some selection: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
For both the disease and the cure.
>Because answer doesn’t change a single thing.

If this is a simulation perhaps there's a way to break out of the VM or either there is a debug console.
Western European center-right is often described as left in the USA.
You seem to use a different definition of "left" and "right" than me. What points in the party programme make them a "left" party?
Which by definition will increase the salinity in the local environment.
As someone who knows nothing about that issue, what you said is neither here nor there. That makes it look like you're just repeating a political talking point without understanding why it matters or what it means.

There's nothing inherently wrong with making building wind turbines harder. Maybe it's for safety reasons, or to protect the environment or workers rights or property rights or whatever. It's absolutely the government's job to make some activities more difficult when necessary.
BGP Blackhole Community
Pinterest and 'major social network' in the same title..

How about no.
> Is there a major environmental/health problem with particulate from regular steel-on-steel railways?

Yes, as only extremely modern passenger trains have regenerative or resistive electrical brakes and even they need to do the last few bits of the braking process with the old friction brakes since electrical braking doesn't need at low speed.

Old trains, especially freight, still runs entirely on friction brakes - either metal or the new "silent brakes" that are a plastics composite.

Additionally, you have environmental concerns from oil and lube, which is why you should never fucking ever re-use torn out wooden railway sleepers. They are drenched in immensely toxic anti-rotting agents to begin with, and seep up all the oil and other contaminants (e.g. feces from bypassing old trains without closed-loop toilets).
I thought it would be something impressive like somehow using the obtained salt for further powering of the device but nope, another clickbait trip into bullshitland
Their $19 (Micro) Plan lists "200 in/day and 20 out/day". My email usage, personally, seems to be in bursts. It stays below 1 or 2 outbound mails on most days, however on some days (rarely) there'll be threaded conversations with >50 outbound mails. So, I feel like it would be fantastic if the plan had monthly limits instead of daily limit. Or some other sort of limit, say EC2 like, which would allow the user to consume the resources in bursts.
But you would never scale this system up - it's entirely inefficient compared to reverse osmosis, on a cost basis. This is the type of system that you would use for just a few people, and as such - brine would never be an issue.
You are absolutely right about coming back and have no recollection of why I marked this as important. I have always been working on a different tech stack every 1 or 2 years and many times same problems come up again. I remember I solved them (found the right answer on SO or may be did something myself) but have to do it all over again. That's when I feel I should have noted it down somewhere.

At work I have started writing down a public troubleshooting document where I write down anything which I spent a lot of time and then turned to be something simple (wrong or missing configuration most of the times).

These notes help me and sometimes other team members too. But this is in confluence only, which doesn't enforce hierarchy. I don't have a single system of my own. My notes are spread in gists, Google Keep, Dynalist and Markdown files. I don't live in console and Linux isn't my primary OS and Org mode heavily relies on Emacs.
It doesn't. Any salt extraction creates brine which must be disposed of somehow.
> when we finally get rid of ICE cars

When we send them to poorer countries, as Germany has been doing with cars that fail the TÜV emissions test. Central Asia is full of German cars.

I suspect that the same is going on with recycling and emissions. Rich countries reduce their impact by moving it elsewhere.
Ok Im going to guess. The advent and popularity the keto diet.

Assumptions
1) Alzheimers has been postulated to be a metabolic disease of the brain and the keto diet via ketones provide a cleaner-fuel with less by-products.

2) The richer countries has more people able to afford the keto-food. Generally more expensive. Fatty beef cuts, cheese, salmon etc.

Just a stab in the dark or another guess. I'm not a scientist !
Tesla’s Yoke and Touchscreen Shifter Look Like a Parking Lot Disaster
Yeah, it's esoteric because if you think it is just about words and flesh, you aren't getting the meaning.

Did you know that "Dao" or "Tao" is translated as "Logos?" What's interesting in Lao Tzu is that he claims the Dao comes before the One, whereas in Christianity they occur at the same time, whereas in the Arian Heresy, the One came before the Logos.
It makes less sense than imaginations running wild at the sight of crocodiles and dinosaur bones.
I worked as an outside consultant with a team at Everis. It was indeed a meat-grinder of a firm. The final week I was there we did a minimum of 15 hours a day, and I think the longest was 19 or something insane.
I'll repeat my comment from nearly seven months ago [1] since it left a really bad taste about how users are dealt with. Nearly a year ago when the initial waves of the pandemic were raging on, Migadu removed its free tier. That's not a problem by itself because businesses have to make money to sustain and grow. But Migadu gave one month’s notice (contrary to the claims in the replies, that's what I saw) for users to switch. The replies to the comment also said that the new lowest paid tier was "affordable in every corner of the planet", which sounded quite ignorant even for a non-pandemic time.

Another point, which may matter to some people, is that while Migadu may be a Swiss company, the data centers where the mails are hosted were in France (this was the case at least a year ago). So the situation is somewhat comparable (not entirely though) to Fastmail being an Australian company with data centers in the U.S. being used.

For those who want multi-domain email services for a lower (flat) price, look at mxroute. It's based out of the U.S. though, which may not be an option for people who want certain services outside Five Eyes jurisdictions.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25382626
Can I ask you to please review the HN guidelines on posting.

There is a link called guidelines at the bottom of the page.

If you want to participate in flamebait, it's best to keep it in the comments over at reddit.
No it's not, payment for order flow allows market makers to fill non-market-moving customers at better prices, capturing the spread. You're spreading harmful misinformation.
Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet – here’s why (2017)
This is Tesla normalcy, those door handles have potential of totaling the car due to "excellent" Tesla service and parts availability.
Hey there, cool service. I signed up immediately.

>You cannot have more than $50 in credit at any time.

Just curious, why a $50 limit? I'm the weird kind of guy who likes to pay years in advance. If possible, please consider raising this limit to $100 or even $200.
> Is the performance or user experience over web really that bad, even in this day and age to warrant shipping a 100MB package to the user?

On slow networks (mobile) it is really frequently bad due to the large number of URL's (mostly trackers) that must be loaded. Some web pages require many MB's just to display a simple page. In theory this approach could be faster because you could multiplex data over a limited number of TCP connections, so you can avoid the latency that is caused by setting up a lot of new connections. But they don't seem to use this approach.
Shirky is great.

So many of his posts and speeches have become classics.
> Europeans defeated indigenous peoples throughout history, by superior technology and numbers.

Oh boi, not this horrible and flawed argument again. People have learned nothing from recent research into the impact of diseases in that history? Popular books like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and "1491" give you a view into these matters and provide one with references for their sources for research.

This idea of "Europe won because it is good at tech" really needs to die. The best weapon Europe had when fighting indigenous people in the Americas was actually various kinds of pox.
Nope. The blip coincides with and was caused by a corruption scandal involving quite a few CDU/CSU politicians. As well as an increase in Greens' press coverage when they announced their candidates.

Both influences have subsided by now
The MIT system appears to output clean water from each 'stage' of the system at variable temperatures. Thats energy lost - if a counterflow heat exchanger could be devised such that the output water was all cool, the final efficiency would be much higher.

They also don't seem to keep good control of salinity within the stages - I suspect after a few hours operation the efficiency will drop as the salinity gets higher and higher within the paper towels.
Definitely. It's an interesting idea, but going from "this could have happened" to saying "it did happen", is quite a leap. :)
Some examples I noticed (haven't look at Monterey yet though), most of those changes make sense on a small portrait display with touch interaction (e.g. iPhone), but not on a notebook display in landscape orientation (most of those fall under "questionable changes to the user interface", but I still think it's important to point them out, because IMHO they don't make sense on a notebook-style computer):

- scroll bars have been removed (but they can be enabled again), not sure when this happened, Catalina maybe?

- Ok/Cancel style dialog boxes are vertically stacked (since Big Sur)

- the completely intuitive "Save As..." action has been replaced with "Duplicate" (at least in Apple tools), no idea what's the reasoning behind this is TBH, this wouldn't make sense on iPhones either

- more vertical space wasted for window chrome since Big Sur, especially in the Finder

- "Natural Scrolling" (can also still be reversed thankfully)

- ...and probably a few more subtle changes which I don't care much about
They are conservative in the sense that they don't want too much change and only slowly adapt to new things.

Being sceptical of flag waving nationalism, in favour of global trade agreements and the EU and taking an (at least verbal) stand against the far right (and the far left) is the definition of a conservative mindset in Germany.
Yeah, I've read that Hillary Clinton would be considered right-wing in e.g. Germany.
You think Microsoft blocking you is bad? They ACCEPT mail and drop it afterwards.
Hi. This is a full program by a famous bharatanatyam dancer -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl-BZzr-TKI#t=58m

At 58:25, there's english explanation along with mudras. I hope that gives you some idea.

This is how it looks in Mohiniyattam, a different form -- https://www.facebook.com/shaaledotcom/videos/502594377555050 . The dancer depicts a scene where Indra (a god) comes to visit the wife of a sage. He comes in the disguise of the sage (when the actual sage is away) and the wife sees through that and laughs at him.

This is Odissi -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYHAUGX1L5U .
How would they make the 3rd party poll results they show fit with the false prediction?
How many IaC tools are you using?
Just add some artificial minerals, it can come in some powder form I guess.
I agree... I'm looking forward to see on the desktop this capability model pioneered in mobile devices.

Unix file access permissions designed 50 years ago for multi-user shells are not adequate when dealing with potentially hostile applications accessing your data.

Today I'm more worried of a random App encrypting $HOME or hoovering up all my PII.
But that's hardly noteworthy; any internal or international conflict from the 1600s is chock full of what would be, in modern terms, war crimes and crimes against humanity, usually on all sides unless one of them simply lacked capacity.
I already have email with unlimited addresses/aliases/domain with my hosting provider (a local-run no frills cPanel), I think most of HN will have similar setups.
How is any of that “dumbing down”?
> these principles are things for people to apply to themselves and everyone should be very wary when they're imposed on others.

I feel like this generalizes to a lot more than just amazon principles.
I know what you mean about pop Christianity, which has been a major issue in America. No desire for any kind of philosophical engagement, past or present.

When I say esoteric, I mean having hidden layers of meaning. See www.shwep.net for the best podcast on esotericism in Christianity
Well, a US right-wing party would be called fascist around here and might get forbidden at some point.
People in HN are weirdly afraid running own mail server. Thats not that hard. If you are web developer, who is capable setting up linux+varnish+nginx+php-fpm+redis+mariadb stack, then I would say that functional mail server has less moving pieces.
I think most horror stories are related to trying run own server in bad neighborhood, in some cheap VPS service. Now entire IP block has bad reputation and indeed there is hassle with delivery.
I think you can answer your own question.

> I have immigrated into this country 12 years ago and became citizen 3 years ago

It somehow still is better than the alternatives on the grand scheme of things. Short answer: Record low unemployment rates (before the pandemic).
oh beauty! Perhaps you could share those scripts on a github?
Regarding point 1, we Germans absolutely do NOT like someone getting in the way if we could do it ourselves faster and better, so please let us put our grocery into bags ourselves. The second worst thing is imo waiters hovering your table instead of doing their job and letting you enjoy your meal in peace. (Thinking of it, you might have the problem that you are not beckoning the waiter over if you need them? If you don't, you might actually wait quite a while and perceive that as bad service;)
His father sounds like his manager. Something tells me that somewhere in the future there's going to be a rude awakening.
There's mxroute in the U.S. that provides a similar service, but has pricing primarily based on space usage.