skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My guess is he's hit that obscene level of wealth and realizes he is now beyond the controls of the system, and can therefore game it to his advantage.

When you can afford the best legal team money can buy and payoff the rest of the gatekeepers, then the game is simply to transfer wealth into your own pocket in bigger chunks.
People were saying exactly those same kinds of words about residential real estate in 2006.
Josh Wolfe (an investor with Lux Capital) has claimed it was a ruse to liquidate Tesla stock en masse without Tesla hodlers getting suspicious.
https://twitter.com/wolfejosh/status/1545387947578597376
Twitter is going to be the downfall of Elon. I don’t understand is fascination with it. It’s a big distraction and he alienates a certain percentage of his customers for Tesla.
> For such a visionary, he seems that he can't see the reputational damage it does, consistently failing to follow the law or agreements made with people.

He's been doing this since 2014 at the minimum. Buffalo, NY is still waiting for their solar shingle factory with thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Elon Musk hasn't changed at all. He's always been like this. The visionary part was him recognizing that most people don't care about silly things like corporate ethics. I guess Elon Musk is richer now, so his moves are necessarily bigger. Instead of lying about a $1 Billion factory, he's lying about a $40 Billion Twitter buyout deal, and that necessarily affects more people.

But he hasn't fundamentally changed his approach, and I don't think anyone has really punished him for his large-scale billionaire style trolling.

------

EDIT: I'm kinda hoping that Twitter sues him and forces him to buy at $54.20, just like he wrote in this contract. It seems like Twitter has the legal right to do so, though it may be dragged out in court for a while.
And Mod; hope he gets three cheques
If you have proof that twitter is > 50% bots, you should give that evidence to Musk. Or, give it to an attorney that's eager to see Twitter's board go to jail for putting false data in SEC filings.
If this doesn't show Canadians that telecommunications are a public utility, I don't know what will. The CRTC's (Canadian FCC) own phones are down[1] today because they're a Rogers customer. If that doesn't scream regulatory capture...

1: https://twitter.com/CRTCeng/status/1545421218534359041
“There is only so much government money and resources to fight diseases, this one seems like low hanging fruit that the affected community could solve with some leadership, personal responsibility and group effort.”

Listen, as a gay man, I’m just going to go ahead and say we are not the greatest at self-control sometimes.

But, living in Chicago? The minute they made the vaccine available for monkeypox, there were lines out the door. Through the roof demand. (Through the roof of Steamworks, because in a move that makes total sense but is also totally hilarious, the first pop-up event was at a bathhouse.) We will get this vaccine in a heartbeat.

But we can’t. Because, in part…the FDA slow walked the inspection of the single plant that produces this vaccine. So it won’t be at full capacity for quite a while.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/monkeypox-vaccine-de...
Elon Musk Says He Is Terminating Twitter Deal
I'm genuinely shocked at the lack of quality discussion here. Did anyone actually try reading the article? The concept here is not to obfuscate things but rather to de-couple Google's search engine and Google's Adwords products.

Most opinion in this thread is "lol alphabet is google" which is apparent to everyone. Of course they are functionally the same entity, but someone whose job depends on it has proposed this as a solution. Are we really to assume that they just woke up and decided to turn their brain off? There's clearly going to be some actual change that attempts to satisfy regulators here.

We can look at history and possibly speculate how this looks, and we can also identify a few things.

1. Google is a search engine

2. Google the company sells AdWords as a product to advertisers.

3. Google benefits tremendously from owning both of these things.

Here's my take: Google wants to decouple their search and ads teams, move ads to a separate entity that works as an advertising marketplace, generate revenue there. Search will now sell its advertising space, likely in a way that can also be taxed, to the highest bidder rather than itself.

I also predict that google will want to pressure other platforms, which will enable them to break into other markets. META is the second largest advertiser online, but they do all of their advertising on two platforms, Instagram and Facebook. If google can push for the forced decoupling, then it will likely also apply to META. They can then swing their AdsWords product on top of FB/IG and start to eat back some of the traffic that they have been losing in recent years[1]. It's a bit of a gamble, but Google is betting on their AdWords software to be stronger, and a lot of the history would agree.

Also, now that I think about it, this has pretty big implications for user data sharing cross platform. Now you have to formalize the way that personal information is exchanged for the purpose of advertising.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/242549/digital-ad-market...
Biden nowhere close to hitting refugee goals
I didn't wget it
For anyone thinking he can pay the 1B$ termination fee and walk away, it's not that simple.

The 1B$ is a "reverse breakup" fee, and applies when an outside force (like SEC or financing) prevents the deal. That 1B$ has nothing to do with any choices on either side, and is unlikely to factor into this process.

At this point they're clearly going to trial, and it's not unlikely that the cost to Elon will be somewhere in the neighborhood of the difference between the fair current market value (~20B$?) and the purchase price (~44B$).

My guess is it'll end up being ~10-15B$.
Monkeypox is highly visible too, sometimes scarring for life your face and hands. It's going to be pretty clear in 6-12 months who the people were that took this seriously, and who the people were that went YOLO.
Right, but Twitter's method of counting the number of daily active users, meaning the number who are seeing ads, which is what the SEC report refers to, was allegedly designed to exclude most bots. Perhaps it's wrong, but they never said 5% of accounts are bots (far more are).
Pulled two solar panels off one of my arrays, because a few of them have hot junction boxes from bad connections. Replaced those with spares and got the array back fully online (one of them has been bypassed for arc fault warnings that, digging into the junction box, look legit).

Then I replaced all the fancy, spring loaded, "replace the back of the junction box for new functionality!" interface stuff with some vintage, 1980s style soldering and bypass diodes. Because I don't care about the optimizers on my well-sited array with no shading, and I don't need rapid shutdown for a ground mount array, etc.

And then proceeded to short the leads, put them in the sun, and ensure that the junction box guts didn't get hot, while observing just how brutal on panels doing this is - you really highlight the difference between cells thermally, when in "normal running," you don't see any differences in the array.

And now I'm writing all this up as a blog post. :)
When Musk made the offer

1. TSLA was trading at ~$1,000 share

2. He offered $54/share

Now?

1. TSLA is trading at $750/share (so if Elon musk was 100% in TSLA, he lost 25% of his wealth).

2. Twitter's comprable, Facebook, fell roughly 33% on revised revenue projections and slowing growth. TWTR roughly tracks Facebook, except for last quarter where the stock hasn't moved due to Musk's offer.

So Musk became poorer, and TWTR, which probably should be trading in the high 20s, has an offer for $54/share; meaning Musk may be paying double what it is currently worth.

I find it pretty amusing Musk has meme'd his way into a disastrous deal.
Note how puritanical feelings about sex and sexual minorities come into play here.

> A grandma dies because her family ignores rules around not gathering during Covid-19 -- tragic.

> A young man dies because he has sex with too many partners -- well, he should have known about the risks.
I absolutely love that fact that this tweet happy individual might actually get slapped for just tossing out tweets. Not sure if $1B would make him squirm or not, but even for billionaires, $1B is an expensive twitter rant.
At least we can now be sure the data is now safely accessible to the US goons.
Musk has released nothing that would indicate that the numbers are fraudulent.
Closer to 8 billion now. 7.753 according to google.
I stand by my theory that the whole thing was a displacement activity that caught his attention instead of something else more arduous that he was supposed to do that month.

Like when I suddenly develop an interest in Columbo trivia when actually I'm supposed to be doing my accounts.
> PyPI offered to provide a security key to make the maintainer's life easier

It's even easier to just leave 2FA disabled and stop maintaining the project. Which is what they did.

Are maintainers obligated to support their projects indefinitely?
> Can't get around this city (no waze, gmaps).

offline gmaps!

Thankfully Canada’s horrendous roaming and overage charges has taught me how to use my cell phone effectively without service.

(Also have the entirety of Wikipedia on my phone, thanks kiwix!)
Whew!

Thanks Dang and company.

I appreciate you all.

@my HN peers:

Have a great weekend and thank you all for being you. I learn a ton here and enjoy the perspectives often found on these pages. It is all high value.
Interesting. A clever play, if it's true.
Exactly, I think we are going to see some funny headlines in the coming days.
The bandwidth issue could be helped by having multiple radios like LoRaWAN does right? I think they use up to 8 radios on 8 different channels to have simultaneous data transfer with multiple clients.
> Same for banks in Canada. It’s unbelievable what they do and get away with.

Canadian banks are so bad that they actually make the service and fees with a USD checking account with all the normal features at Wells Fargo look good.
Seems like a manic episode enabled by yes-men.
Just a smattering of shareware games that I played growing up that never got big enough to get modern ports. A more capable GPU could also be nice for having the emulator drive modern screen resolutions smoothly.
I'm sorry... I tripped.
If a human driver is lost or in distress, the default behavior would be to find the nearest safe spot to pull over and put on your hazards. Shouldn't this be the default fallback behavior if a remote driver isn't responding?
US definitely has exceptional successes, but there are so many systemic flaws which other countries may or may not have, and where US could vastly improve.

* High medical costs

* Highest maternal mortality among developed countries

* Highest income gaps

* High education cost & the vicious circle of college debt.

* Increasing trends of bankruptcy & paycheck-to-paycheck sustenance.

* Lack of public transportation issues in most places

* Very oil dependent economy.

* Gun violence. So many lives needlessly lost every year.

* Growing mental health & opiod crisis

* Lack of public awareness about current affairs (& to some extent apathy even)

* Waning trust in judiciary & in parallel the rise of the rich oligarchy

* Interference in politics of other countries

* Equality of diversity (in true sense) is still to be achieved given racial profiling persists

* The extent of personal freedom without state agencies keeping track of activities.

It definitely has successes but there is a long road to being a model nation. But US as a nation has demonstrated the capacity to overcome odds in fortitude. There is hope - but a sense of cautious hope
This is good for Twitter, and good for the world. Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed, would have made Twitter an open forum for spreading lies and hate.

My guess is Musk never intended to buy Twitter. He needed an excuse for dumping billions of dollars' worth of TSLA at its peak (while at the same time faulting Bill Gates for shorting TSLA), and his proposal to buy Twitter provided a convenient cover.
Have been getting all circuits busy alerts periodically throughout the day.

Fun stuff!
The biggest issue we Europeans have with the american exceptionalism are the implications on foreign politics.

Victoria Nuland giving cookies at the Maidan square and appointing the post Yanukovich government? US can.

Paying italian Mafia to kill socialist workers in Italy? US can.

Having US drunk air force peoppe kill 30 civillians in Italy because they wanted to see how low they coukd fly and sending them back home without charges? US can.

Toppling governments, supporting and funding coups in half the world? US can.

Military actions around the world against UN, which include bs wars like Iraq? US can.

Spying on all the world,including the german chancellor, inserting back doors in routers, processors and civilian infrastructure? US can.

US exceptionalism is a dangerous thinking, and what is more worrying is how openly US leaders talk about it. I vividly remember a 4th july speech by Obama with a 10 minutes rant on how US is exceptional and can do things other can't.
Ah, that's easy.

HN is running on an old laptop from Viaweb.

Arc is running under the pg user and it's used as the process supervisor.

The actual web server is a VB app running on Linux through Wine.

The flat files have been migrated to an MS Access DB, also running through Wine.
The SEC isn't being asked to address anything, it's being informed that Musk is moving to drop the merger which was something SEC had to be informed about the same way that it had to be informed of the merger plans, as I understand it.
I've been on a sailing kick recently, and think you'd like this vlog featuring Sven and one of his boats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bca5_uyH9E4

The sheer utility of every component of the craft is awesome.
Can someone explain what this is? Hard to dive into a recording if I have no context and no idea if it’s relevant to me.
Lol yup that's why I only use cloud for my L2 switching.
~10-15B$ is not inbetween the 2 numbers you posited it would be between though.
Twitter isn’t the one breaking the agreement for no reason. I read the letter, it’s full of nonsense.
I suspect the initial decision was something like "hey I could actually just buy Twitter, that would be funny". It's less clear to me why he almost immediately started trying to back out. It's probably a waste of a significant chunk of money, but is that all?
No, Matt Levine is taking today off (as mentioned in yesterday’s article).
I have not been to a con since a few years before the pandemic, I really gotta figure out what’s around me now that I’ve moved.
Yes, I understand that. But it's very different from its origins. When America was founded, it consisted of mostly farmers. Basic agriculture. It produced nothing extraodinary and in relation to other countries. Britain was the financial powerhouse of the world, and there were no monoliths present. I just wanted to point out how language has been distorted to make the notion of exceptionalism something that it is not and never was.
TD Bank (and Scotiabank in Latin America) operate as independent entities outside of Canada -- those American TD Bank branches are branches for a different bank (TD Bank USA). In fact, I believe that TD Bank (Canada) simply acquired a US bank rebranded it. I believe they have basically nothing in common operationally.
This suggests a new attack vector on software projects; if I wanted to cripple a competitor, all I would have to do is to first find a real important bug it their software, but then report the bug rudely enough that the developers then want to punish me personally by not fixing the bug. I would then have guaranteed that the bug in my competitor’s software is not fixed, and people will use my software instead.

In other words: Trying to punish rude users by not fixing the bugs they report is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The logic of "The US is the greatest if you likes X things and bad if you prefer Y" is poor because it can be applied to anything.
Colombia during Pablo Escobar's time was probably considered pretty great if you were a Narco Trafficker.

The article entirely misses the problem non-US people have with the US faffing on about greatness or its exceptionality.

Which is that individuals from the US seem to see this as an indication of their own superiority and develop a parochial point of view regardless of their almost total insignificance to the accomplishments of the US.

Most US citizens have done precisely nothing to increase the 'greatness' of the US other than pay their taxes (which they oppose doing).
Many non-US citizens have done much more, the success of the USA is the result of a combined effort from many countries but the parochialism of many Americans refuses to acknowledge this.

Even if your country is exceptional, which is immeasurable nonsense (I'm sure every country is exceptional in some ways), you should not take pride from this because you have done incredibly little to achieve it.

I expect precisely 0 Americans to agree with me, but my PoV is not uncommon in Australia at least.
that, at least, was a very canadian outage caused by a beaver chew

it's hard to build resilient rings of fiber between towns/cities where there is only one linear path (road) for right-of-way that you could economically build the fiber along...
I've been noticing internet problems here and there all week, and was getting a little sketched out (is the heat waves, Russia, or alien attack:) so this really got me worried.
>Section 6.4 Access to Information; Confidentiality. Upon reasonable notice, the Company shall (and shall cause each of its Subsidiaries to) afford to the representatives, officers, directors, employees, agents, attorneys, accountants and financial advisors (“Representatives”) of Parent reasonable access (at Parent’s sole cost and expense), in a manner not disruptive in any material respect to the operations of the business of the Company and its Subsidiaries, during normal business hours and upon reasonable written notice throughout the period commencing on the date of this Agreement until the earlier of the Effective Time and the termination of this Agreement pursuant to Article VIII, to the properties, books and records of the Company and its Subsidiaries and, during such period, shall (and shall cause each of its Subsidiaries to) furnish promptly to such Representatives all information concerning the business, properties and personnel of the Company and its Subsidiaries as may reasonably be requested in writing, in each case, for any reasonable business purpose related to the consummation of the transactions contemplated by this Agreement; provided, however, that nothing herein shall require the Company or any of its Subsidiaries to disclose any information to Parent or Acquisition Sub if such disclosure would, in the reasonable judgment of the Company, (i) cause significant competitive harm to the Company or its Subsidiaries if the transactions contemplated by this Agreement are not consummated, (ii) violate applicable Law or the provisions of any agreement to which the Company or any of its Subsidiaries is a party, or (iii) jeopardize any attorney-client or other legal privilege. No investigation or access permitted pursuant to this Section 6.4 shall affect or be deemed to modify any representation or warranty made by the Company hereunder. Each of Parent and Acquisition Sub agrees that it will not, and will cause its Representatives not to, use any information obtained pursuant to this Section 6.4 (or otherwise pursuant to this Agreement) for any competitive or other purpose unrelated to the consummation of the transactions contemplated by this Agreement. Parent will use its reasonable best efforts to minimize any disruption to the respective business of the Company and its Subsidiaries that may result from requests for access under this Section 6.4 and, notwithstanding anything to the contrary herein, the Company may satisfy its obligations set forth above by electronic means if physical access is not reasonably feasible or would not be permitted under applicable Law as a result of COVID-19 or any COVID-19 Measures. Prior to any disclosure, the Company and Parent shall enter into a customary confidentiality agreement with respect to any information obtained pursuant to this Section 6.4 (or otherwise pursuant to this Agreement).
A better search engine (esp for used books) is BookFinder: https://bookfinder.com. Between it and Goodreads, which has better ratings anyway, you can avoid Amazon entirely.
I believe that you believe that, but I cannot believe that's true. Microsoft is far too big to care about any trends, including open source. They are simply doing what makes the most money within the time scales they operate. If that means supporting certain open source projects right now, that's what they'll do. If it means hindering open source adoption overall, they'll do that. Sources: ODF vs OOXML, terrible support for Linux across their application suite, this article, and a tediously huge list of things happening several times per year at least since the 90s.
Can you really divorce greatness from goodness?

I mean you can, but the author seems to go back and forth in how he places value on bigness. The sentiment that we have the most research institutions does not seem to be presented as valueless, and yet we also talk about the replicability crisis in science.

McDonald’s is the largest restaurant chain in the world, does that mean American cuisine is the greatest?

I think I agree with the overarching sentiment of the piece: that America is unquestionably exceptional given a neutral definition of the word exceptional, but may conclude we are less driven by greatness and more driven by dominance at all cost.

And this is overly critical, America is obviously not do bad things 100% of the time, in fact I would probably say America is equal parts "Do great things" "Do, even if there's no evidence it's good" and "Gosh, no one has ever been inhumane enough to charge money for THAT before"
A nation founded on the principles of all men being created equal, along with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is indeed exceptional.

The results have been exceptional, too.

The US does indeed have plenty of problems, but those problems are usually traceable to neglecting those founding principles.
Indeed, I can't seem to find the crucial part from Ars in the WSJ article, namely the : "As part of one offer, Google has proposed splitting parts of its business that auctions and places ads on websites and apps into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella, some of the people said. That entity could potentially be valued at tens of billions of dollars, depending on what assets it contained."
There's another belief floated by Josh Wolfe (an investor with Lux Capital) who claimed it was a ruse to liquidate Tesla stock en masse without Tesla hodlers getting suspicious and tanking the inflated stock price.

https://twitter.com/wolfejosh/status/1545387947578597376