skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I combined two draft blog posts and wrote an intro to give some context to why people may see Twitter as not having lived up enough. It’s going to be very long. Heh. No worries if it isn’t read:
———

Many growth/tech stocks are off by 10-40% from higher peaks or averages since the market went bananas in April & May 2020. Almost all growth/tech stocks are off by over 10% from late Oct or mid Nov.

Twitter as you stated with its run rate, will top $5B rev in 2021. The stock price opened at $45.5, $36.5B market cap. Twitter is off ~30% from most of 2021. Which is $65/share and a $52B market cap.

*Comparisons*:
- Pinterest market cap is ~25% less. Not well monetized so far. ~$2.5B rev in 2021.

- Snap's market cap is more than double. Rev could hit $4B for 2021. So ~22% less.

- LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Announced in June, completed December 2016. It was trading at a $17.5B market cap before acquisition. Rev for 2016 was $3.7B. This year the run rate has topped $10B. 2021 rev will top $11.5B.
- For context, Twitter was worth $13B in June 2016 with $2.5B rev for 2016.

- Github was bought for $7.5B in stock. Announced and completed in June and Oct 2018. Microsoft shares were $99 in June 2018. They opened at $335 today. Those $7.5B acquisition shares are worth $25.5B today.
- Gitlab, a partial competitor to Github, closed its 1st public day on Oct 14, 2021 above $15B. It's valued above $14B today. Annual run rate above $200M.
- Gitlab has no overlap with Twitter. GitHub does with its social network and other trends. GitHub's valuation, whether under Microsoft now, or as a hypothetical public company, is likely 3x+ Gitlab. Or ~$45B. Github 2018 rev was likely above $300M. These numbers won't line up with Twitter because of both getting a lot of SaaS, subscription, and enterprise revenue.

- Telegram allegedly has been bank rolled by its founder since inception. I personally doubt this, but regardless, its bank roll has been limited. It didn't get the vast capital or marketing/namespace an SV company gets. Telegram's burn rate is lower than Twitter or any other company listed. Rumors say Telegram has turned down funding at a $30B valuation. Other rumors speak to a $30-50B IPO in 2023.

- LINE, a messaging app with some social network features, is based in and most popular in Japan. It was a subsidiary of Korean company, Naver. LINE went public a few years ago. It did a 50/50 merger with Softbank's Yahoo Japan. The combined company, Z Holdings, has a market cap of $45B. LINE is most popular in a couple of South East Asian countries and with expats.

- KakaoTalk, a messaging app with some social network features, is based in and most popular in Korea. It is much smaller than the others. 50M active users in 2021 with 90% in South Korea. KakaoTalk's parent company, Kakao, merged with Naver's competitor Daum with the current company called Kakao and valued at $45B. KakaoTalk only represents a fraction of this value.
I believe that's coming from homebrew itself, which is pretty aggressive about updating everything. The homebrew formula contains no reference to xcode version, for example: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formul...
Yes Google is following Facebook and YouTube business model of building echo chambers. You only get stuff that confirm your opinion so it's useless if you want the truth about any particular topic. DDG is better but it has problems too
It’s more like using hamburger helper instead of a spice rack, a GUI can be excellent and better than CLI, beef isn’t always better when it’s overcooked.
Basically it's the same reason to outlaw robocalling specifically. The point is to raise costs to bad actors enough that some (and hopefully many) get out of the game.
If the science is limited in that area, why do you believe tipping points (positive feedback) will be horrific? There's just as much reason to believe that negative feedback (the good kind) will keep things from going off the charts.

Either way, it's not scientific thinking, and it isn't trusting the experts either.
Yes, I was hoping to see some progress out of the uncanny valley. But this got even deeper in the valley. My 7 year old, was next to me, and she got scared of all these
The article mentions a Republican activist investor. Why would someone active in right wing circles push for banning someone doing what Ngo is doing?
and array numbering from zero
> The Hacker News force is strong in this one.

Since I don't have enough karma to downvote I'll say why I hate this kind of comment.

1) It violates HN's comment guidelines, "Be kind." "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. "

2) It tries to put you above all the "nerds". As if you're so much smarter than the borderline asperger nerds that are somehow incapable of putting any thought into usability of products.

3) You're one of us, you're here on Hacker News. This is a giant non-monolithic forum.

4) It lacks imagination and it's stuck in the status quo. Innovation doesn't just appear fully formed out of a slick FAANG press conference. Innovation happens one curious motivated hacker at a time pushing barely usable tech forward while people like you sneer at them.
>just to keep the numbers round

That's not "just keeping the numbers round", that's putting a huge assumption on a complex system (births = deaths, no change in overall population over time).
As is so often the case, your "is just" papers over a lot of detail. When a firm sells a good for less than the bid price of the buyer, the marginal value captured by that bidder is called consumer surplus. Firms do this for many reasons: they don't want the reputational hit of running an auction, they don't consider it worth the effort, they don't anticipate a need until after the revealed demand of the market is shown, and by that time it's too late to build an apparatus. Probably others I'm not thinking of.

Scalpers capture this marginal value and in exchange provide the "service" of reallocating some of the goods to the buyers with the highest bid prices. (I put scare quotes around service here because I'm sure many consider it a pessimization.)

If you're a wealthy person, scalpers may actually be good for you, because you don't have to compete with poorer people who have more time to refresh a webpage. You can just buy the good on eBay. On the other hand, it seems totally valid for the government to decide that it is in the best interests of the people that the consumer surplus in the system devolve to actual consumers.
getting to just use the same consistent API without rewriting clients was AMAZING.
Mask Mandates Save Lives
Notion does not offer analytics, so my team built it in
> There are no laws forcing employees to join a union.

There absolutely are states where certain trades must be performed by union employees. My company almost got into an expensive legal battle because the locale we were working in required union contractors for electrical work. The union claimed our payroll staff (IT) violated local union laws because the union saw them running ethernet cables which constituted "low voltage" work, something the union was supposed to do. This shutdown the jobsite for our staff while the union and our company sorted things out.
It’s not exactly what are you asking for, but the Congressional Dish podcast attempts to cover bills and hearings.

https://congressionaldish.com/
So the site is about a server you can run that will be your very own tube site. Who other than nerds is going to install that? It requires administration, you're going to be very interested in running an instance to the point of commitment before you go there.
I read somewhere that Tox's security was compromised.
no. The 5th amendment has been read weirdly by the supreme court.
It literally is a restriction on the ways in which you can associate with other groups or individuals.

You can sign an agreement to use only a particular supplier for a product, unless that product is labor and the supplier is a union.
The IC’s Guide to Driving Career Conversations
I won't argue these projects aren't quality because they certainly do the job, but they obviously lack polish of commercial software. Eg. despite looking into kepass I still chose to pay for 1password, just for the convenience.
Sometimes based on artificial scarcity created by a scalper. People are sometimes paying for a status symbol and wouldn't have purchased the item otherwise. Meaning their interest was only piqued after the item was hoarded.
I just did a super take with a sibling comment to yours comparing Twitter to other social media and comm products.

> Twitter is an also-ran. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly insane to think.

Yes, this is absolutely crazy!

The other problem is how much Twitter is brought up by people and the media. Data shows a minority of the already minority of people who use Twitter, talk politics. Yet you can’t go any time without people pointing to Twitter as a representation of a huge population to prove their points.

For example, reactions to “cancelling” someone will have droves of people and media point to a tiny portion of Twitter saying things that can’t represent the massive demographic people are critiquing.

All of this makes Twitter seem so much more important even to people not constantly around tech, startup, or SV circles.
Side-note: Polly's intonation makes for a fairly confusing listening session.
It's not even just dumbing down. It's heavily weighting to selling one or another thing. It's been getting worse for years but it's really degenerated in the last several months.

You can sort of fight it by including a term showing your topic in your search, I think.
Great idea, although from an engineering POV I think this is really hard. Most websites are super JS-heavy and hence, from a browser's POV, change constantly.
Quite a ton of difference between pixels on the screen changing and the underlying DOM changing.
In general, no.

The contents of your mind are protected because you must take an active part of disclose them. Of course, they can still order you to give them the password and stick you in jail for Contempt of Court charges if you don't.

Check out Habeas Data. It's a fascinating/horrifying book detailing much of this.
Amazon UK is mildly less crap than this.

I just tried using Amazon.com to order something to Hong Kong for Christmas - sweet Jesus I don't know why anyone would ever visit that site more than once. I ended up giving up and just ordering the things with the co.uk version and sending them myself.

They extra postage cost is nothing compared to the insanity of the .com site.
I use Twitter is to get the latest pulse in real time for any event (news story, episode). I hope they retain that. Problem with highly curated feeds like FB, LinkedIn is that it doesn't give you the the current snapshot and hence I don't even trust it.
Well signal does not have the data, they comply with such orders with the tiny amount of metadata they have (like a timestamp of when your account was created and that’s about it)
this happens to leftists, journalists, and other critics, not just repubs:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
Am I missing something with Ubuntu? Is it really deprecated? What’s the best way to install and keep up to date on Ubuntu?
Will it now be named "The Old Chronicles of Rebecca"?
If, at that time, NPR was aggregating information, that would be one thing. I really got the impression that they were mindlessly lifting headlines and story ideas.
Starting already this month:

Digital painting and drawing. I'm already not bad at that, but I want my skills to be semi-professional at least. I have a very vivid imagination, and I want to be able to recreate the concept I see in my mind.

Computer science foundation. Right now, I'm at the stage that I know enough to explain them in layman terms, but not enough to actually participate in an active discussion or projects that rely heavily on academic knowledge. Stuff like compilers and interpreters, computer architecture, database systems, distributed systems, and OS architecture.

Another item on my list is reflecting more about philosophical and psychological matters (I read more fiction books than non-fiction ones at a ratio of 25:1, the only bibliography I've read was about George Lucas).
I agree with you that scalping is a symptom of market inefficiency. But I think it occurs mostly when there are further considerations taken into account, e.g. public image and reputation.

For instance everyone knows, including organisers, that some people would be willing to pay large sums for tickets to premium events (concerts, sport, etc) but selling tickets at such price would lead to a public outcry.

We saw the reactions to Uber's surge pricing as well.

It may also be a brand strategy to let products sell out and be reported as being resold at huge prices. It creates a buzz and scarcity that may increase demand further.
Privatise the health system so that it can be more flexible and provide treatments in a more elastic manner (not necessarily in big expensive hospitals).

Deregulate until things are sane if you live in the USA were the government and insurance companies propped up the prices ridiculously.

I'm sure that if you prevent non-vaccinated people not to go to public hospital, they will gladly comply.

But I don't think covid is a battle we will win with vaccines, the virus mutates fast and the effectiveness drops pretty fast.
As of the latest figures I'm reading in the newspapers, 40% of people in ICU because of Covid are vaccinated, 60% are not.

Hopefully some medication will come up to cure the symptoms, like remdesivir.
How to get better at technical interviewing, this is a skill that has cost me the most in terms of opportunity cost.
Such a predictable hackernewsbro libertarian response. Scalping hurts markets and only benefits rent-taking middlemen who provide no value. There is no liquidity issue to resolve, and scalper is a negative feedback loop that hurt avaialability. You're right that suppliers could simply jack up prices to fill the supply/demand gap, but there's a reason they don't do this: supply crunches are temporary. What do you think it would do to MS or Sony branding and reputation if they temporarily jacked up prices to meet this gap in the short term?
Yes, I knew several guys that used DesqView for running multi-node BBS's. Before DesqView, it wasn't uncommon for multi-node BBS guys to have a Novel server and one PC per modem per phone line.

I played with but didn't run it - I was running Maximus on OS/2 at the time :)
No, I used common sense, but I actually have the quantitative data that poster was asking about. Right now, I am doing exact keyword matches and trying to find myself. Will get back to you when my analysis is done.

> You seem to be confusing the concepts of 'Google have made their tech more profitable' and 'Google have made their search capability better'.

No, you are confused. Try to Google the article I was talking about. It talks of perceived value to the user. What value would you lose without access to Google maps, search, youtube, gmail, etc.?

Google made their tech more valuable. That sounds like an improvement to me.

> Google have made their search capability better

If you want an explanation for this obvious statement (and not be demanded to ask in return how capitalism works), I suggest you first try to code a simple search engine. I think a 100-line Python script with some imports would do. Only this would make talking about capabilities possible.
Thank you for your structured and helpful feedback!

Let me try to cover some of the points:

- We have a small team of passionate foodies producing their own recipes and reviewing/curating weekly recommendations for our users. The team has an international background (incl. US/EU/Asia), which helps to tap into various experiences when it comes to generating the weekly menus. They have worked at some of the most popular European recipe apps. Feel free to check out our Instagram account to explore some of the recipes they have produced so far (https://www.instagram.com/kitchenful/)

- We provide our users with a personal menu each week. In addition there is the option to choose from standard categories and your own favorite recipes. Currently it’s not possible to import your own recipes, but we have it in the backlog. So far this hasn’t been a blocker for our users to use our service on a weekly basis.

- As of now we don’t have a feature to export the recipes. Mostly because so far we didn’t get that request from our users. But I see the peace of mind value in it as a user and will look into this.

- We are building our frontend clients with Flutter. So we look forward to supporting many platforms (iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Linux, ...) soon, stay tuned.

- Currently we are working with custom ranking and rotation algos for the recipe collation. But ML definitely on the horizon as we increase the number of data points :)

Happy to ping you once we have implemented a bit more features on the multi-platform and recipe import/export side. Excited to get your early feedback then.
Oh gosh, I wonder what the literal and naive fine would have been.

I too would have returned in anonymously.
I think a fingerprint is easier to get if you’re not willing to cooperate. However, I think if they really, I mean really want your password, they will probably find a way to get it out of you. I think it also depends if it’s the local sheriff asking for your password or someone from the FBI while you’re tied up in a bunker somewhere in Nevada.
> why is that said to be so?

Uh...because that's what the archeological findings are? For example, from https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... :

"Cities and other large settlements appeared for the first time during the Neolithic. Pathogens require a large host to thrive and these large, crowded populations provided a human host population that had not previously existed among hunter-gather societies (Armelagos et al. 1991:15). Now able to spread easily from person to person in the crowded conditions of cities, pathogens were able to exploit entire groups and reach endemic levels (Armelagos et al. 1991; Papathanasiou 2005).

"Crowded conditions paired with human settlements in close proximity to animals also contributed to high rates of infectious disease. In many early agricultural communities, animals were kept both near to and inside of houses. This proximity allowed some zoonotic diseases to transfer from animals to humans (Armelagos et al. 1991; Eshed et al. 2010). Contaminated water sources and close contact with human waste also facilitated parasitic infection in both animals and humans (Armelagos et al. 1991; Larsen 2006; Papathanasiou 2005)."

"The increase of infectious disease associated with the adoption of an agricultural lifestyle did not necessarily increase mortality (Eshed et al. 2010). Those most likely to suffer fatal infections would have been infants, young children, and the elderly. Individuals who reached reproductive age had likely developed a resistance to such diseases (Armelagos et al. 1991). However, it must be noted that nutritional deficiencies can reduce resistance to infections which can further contribute to nutritional deficiencies (Armelagos et al. 1991; Larsen 2006). This interplay between nutrition and disease can increase mortality in populations and inhibit an individual's ability to work and/or reproduce (Goodman 1993)."

Basically until we learned about the implications of sedentary urban lifestyle with agriculture, and until we learned how to do something about it, we'd been unknowingly suffering from major quality of life issues.
iCloud backup can backup your whole phone, specifically the files section. iOS and OSX users can save anything to that.
There’s a risk that scalpers establish a short-term monopoly over a market.

For example, say scalpers buy all of a particular model of remote control car - they can now dictate the selling price, without adding any value to the market. But of course, the opposite argument is that people will then buy competing remote control cars and the scalpers will have to reduce their prices. Thus they are merely being entrepreneurial and finding an opportunity for arbitrage.

This is one of those timeless debates with no answers. I’m sure Ancient Egypt had scalpers, and people wanted to ban them.
I would guess the shipping costs would keep a lot of that (though not all of it) in line. It did used to be a big issue when the UPU subsidized shipping from China, but that's gone now.
The issue is a bit more complex. I was thinking more on the lines of "will I get bothered for making crypto available for the masses that nobody can crack?"
Yep! This is me! Both DesqView and DesqView/X --- because I had a Renegade BBS with Frontdoor.
The thing I never really understand about scalping is why the original retailer/supplier wouldn't simply raise their prices. If graphics cards are consistently out of stock, why not simply raise prices? We're seeing that with cars as many dealerships raise prices on their inventory rather than letting people buy them at MSRP and then re-sell them for a profit.

If you're selling the items, why would you want to give that profit to scalpers? Is the issue that the seller doesn't know that demand so far exceeds supply?

With something like Tickle Me Elmo, one could assume that they didn't know in advance, but could have quickly changed the price from $20 to $80 and dampened demand as the season went on.

Could sites potentially predict demand by having some pre-registration for product sales and then predict the price better based on that? For products that are going to "drop", it could be beneficial to consumers (at least ones that have money) and sellers to have that. As one collects data, one could start predicting what price would leave you without too many scalpers based on pre-registration numbers.

Maybe the issue is that many things might be more winner-take-most or winner-take-momentum/word-of-mouth/hype markets. If everyone saw Tickle Me Elmo at $80, some other toy would get all the hype as the hot-item of the year and they wouldn't sell any. Still, for something like graphics cards, that seems less likely to be the case. People don't buy graphics cards because it's a hot item. They buy them for practical purposes. I guess one could argue that if certain crypto markets saw graphics cards as having higher prices long-term, they might try and migrate off graphics cards which could lower the demand long-term, but it seems like graphics card companies are more interested in serving gamers.

It's just always seemed odd that sellers would allow people to arbitrage their pricing like that - especially on known hot items.
I guess the point is that gender is the most salient social structure/feature of the napoleonic world, and this is a panoptic, 'monumental' history, so it's a notable omission.