skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I understand your point, I think society should treat all of this as a distinction without a difference. Herbalife et al. should not be allowed to prey on the vulnerable, regardless of if they happen to sell a “real” product or not. It’s not a real business selling a real product.

Other countries rightfully have seen it this way for some for the companies under discussion.
The question is mostly what should the rules be, and how much leeway do you give an administrative agency to decide what they are and if they are being broken.

At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped.

As an example, from the FTC:

"Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market".

Who decides what "the merits" are, and who decides what the "market" is? They play a lot of games with these definitions. What are the merits in the smartphone business? Did apple abuse their position to unfairly take over the camera business? Is "cameras" even a market anymore? Is a camera so clearly part of a smartphone that it does indeed meet the definition of "merits"? Is Amazon abusing their position in e-commerce to take out the delivery business (fedex etc) by offering "free shipping" ? Is AWS abusing their position in IaaS to unfairly compete in the "server cpu" market? Is that even a market? Or is it not because x86 chips and ARM chips are thought of as different? Read the current case brought against Meta. The definition of "market" is... really pretty awful. Someone is just trying to make their career.
This is such an excellent album.
Why use Ticketmaster, then?

I will sell tickets for your band/venue at whatever price you want, declare x% of the price a "fee," and give most of the fee back to you. I'll happily be the punching bag, but it won't work. Your fans will be upset with you, not me, for choosing a podunk, unheard of ticket seller that charges egregious fees.

The only reason why your band is going to choose Ticketmaster over my is because Ticketmaster already controls the market.
Did SBF have any cats in the office? That should have been a warning sign.
He put up about 30B, financed 14B.

Still a lot of skin.
So a handful of people. I think that pretty much aligns with what I was saying.
Yes, but does that mean the smartest man in the world is stupid?
Technically Alphabet.
It writes a 10 page essay for what can be described in one or two paragraphs - and is obvious to basically anyone who advocates for good standard libraries.
> I think you'll find for most plastics, landfills are much less carbon intensive than recycling.

recycling means we don't need to worry about the carbon intensive process of extracting and processing the raw materials to make new plastics instead of just reusing the plastics we've already created. The continuous creation of more and more plastic also means more and more microplastics.

You might love landfills, but I hope I never live too close to one. Proximity to landfills has been linked to all kinds of cancers and health problems.
Not even close to as bad as facebook.

Also it makes me nostalgic for YTMND
Even the biggest Musk fanboy at Twitter isn't immune to the morale hit from a doubling or trebling of their workload because their team was cut in half from layoffs. What consolation is the company "getting back on course" if you've got to work 70+ hour weeks for the next several months. No time off, sleeping at your desk, never seeing family, and certainly no holiday time off. At the end you now work for a Musk company so your compensation will lag the SV mean.

I feel bad for anyone in that position that feels happy. That's just a really sad Stockholm syndrome at that point.
Hard to say! Because, look. Suppose you begin not with layoffs but with the announcement "everyone back in the office for 40h/wk", knowing that people will leave. At that point, you don't get to choose who will leave, and it won't necessarily be the less productive fraction of the employees.
Did the blockchain fail here? Blockchain and DeFi was created to solve these very problems of centralized trust and human financial fraud. Uniswap and Aave withdrawals are working just fine.

Leaving your coins on a centralized exchange kills the reason for a blockchain and DeFi. It’s crypto by name only.
The workers don’t vanish with the business. If the government provides enough relief these workers can organize around a new business that provides a similar service (maybe even buying the intellectual property and/or branding from the bankrupt estate) under a completely new leadership. Or if the business isn’t actually providing anything useful (like many on this thread are suggesting is the case with facebook) then these workers are probably better off finding new jobs (after being compensated from the failing business).

Facebook is extremely rich, facebook can afford to break apart their business and give part of it to those 11,000 workers. Heck facebook can even afford to keep those 11,000 workers earning 6 digits while being tasked with doing nothing. In either case, it would be in the interest of the worker. What is not in the interest of a worker is having a leadership that makes bad decisions, wastes the time of the workers, and then lays them off. This kind of behavior should not be rewarded.
Yeah fair enough. I have no problem with Vocaloid -- but I do have a problem with the over the top marketing copy (sorry if that was unclear).
Every epoch in the insignia design had a distinct style, right? Roman military insignia looked like Roman military insignia, there wasn't a vast range of styles within that use case / time period.

Outside of military use and maybe some rare other state uses, there wasn't much insignia, and especially not much insignia that you would call a logo by today's application.
The FDIC, as of March 2021, has 119.4 billion[0], along with "... a US$100 billion line of credit with the United States Department of the Treasury.[9]"[1].

I think they've got enough to cover any consumer issues.

[0]: https://www.fdic.gov/about/strategic-plans/strategic/insuran...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corp...
This was one of the worst written, saddest pieces I have ever read. It's full of idiotic commentary, unjustified praise and just plain ignorance. Out of the dozen+ remarkably stupid quotes I found I'll share this excerpt:

> That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”

> Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.

> “I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.

> “I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.

> “YES!!!” exclaimed a third.

> What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.

> “I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”

Lo and behold. The intricate, behind-the-scenes scheming of the highly educated financial elite, revelead at last. All predicated upon the grand vision of... buying a banana with your "super-app". No wonder we're going through a much needed correction, some people need to be weeded out of decision making roles ASAP.
Been saying this forever. It's never wise to call your enemies stupid, it makes it considerably more embarrassing when you lose to a idiot.

All of my enemies are 8 foot tall, einsteinian, gigachad supermen.
That history represents 400 years of colonialism. Latin represents classism and racism and denies the history of billions of marginalized peoples.

Thus, it must change because the purpose of a university is not to retain cultures and histories when no one else cares, it's not to improve the mental capabilities of the students.

It purpose instead is to pursue equity in 2 senses: no especially talented people of the wrong* parents are allowed to gain inordinate skills and the foundation makes gobs of money.

(*) Determination of wrongness changes over time, and the adage "2 wrongs don't make a right" is considered tomfoolery.
Quoting myself from a similar thread today:

Good advice. As a Lisp developer, I have used Swift and it seems like a nicely designed language, very good tooling on macOS/iPadOS and OK on Linux. Go, Rust, and others are also good.

Off topic, but I thought it sad how once 9/11 happened with the side-tracked war on terrorism, the NSA and FBI apparently (from my private citizen perspective) stopped doing much of the previous great work on public support for computer security, going after international computer crime cartels, etc. As a US taxpayer, I would like to see them prioritize that type of work.
Having read that book, yes, "Octopuses are cool" is a pretty good summary. It's worth reading it for that.

On the biology part, if you never have heard of terms like "efference copy" it will be interesting food for thought about what consciousness might be, but no "solution" really. And you'll learn that an octopus is a ten megapixel screen, but that's just the first point again. If you only want that first point, there is also a "My Octopus Teacher" on Netflix, which is great in its own way.

If you wanted to read about human intelligence, I suggest "The Secret of Our Success" by Henrich instead.
It's from his email: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1590750376118341632

"Performance advertising" is a marketing term, as distinct from "brand advertising".

Brand advertising: feel good stuff, like the Coca-Cola polar bears. You can't measure an immediate impact, you just saturate the market with it to ensure you're top of mind. Brands often have a big pool of money to spend here, and are somewhat indifferent to whether they spend it on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc, etc, so long as they hit certain metrics about demographics and reach.

Performance advertising: you're trying to get a specific action from the user. You often build these campaigns to be ROI positive. For example, you spend $100 to get clicks on "house insurance" ads, you expect to get $200 of sales.

All else being equal, advertisers prefer to run ads on sites where they're not adjaced to controversial things. For performance ads, you might swallow your distaste and tolerate the ad being next to controversial things -- after all, you can directly measure if they're producing the ROI you want. For brand ads, it's much squishier, so you're more likely to take your spend somewhere "brand safe".
This one is actually significant: Yoel Roth was the one person everyone outside of Twitter looked upto as the sane voice in the room. (EDIT: Robin Wheeler also out; both her and Roth were on the Twitter Space to address advertiser concerns yesterday)

At this point, Elon will be unfettered.
It will work out. There's been an initial bad reaction to a few things, like content warnings, but I think most of the new people will adjust. There will be some conflicts, but some features of Mastodon will prevent some of the worst problems with Twitter: the equivalent of "likes" doesn't cause things to spread, there's no quote tweets, and no algorithm trying to pump up the most outrageous content.

If the desired of different people are too incompatible, then some servers may wind up blocking other servers. So be it.
Reporting now adds the "Head of Advertising" and the "Head of Trust and Safety" to the exodus of executives

https://twitter.com/anthony/status/1590822724946956289

> TWITTER EXECUTIVES ROBIN WHEELER, YOEL ROTH ARE DEPARTING

> Yoel is a notable one as he was publicly supportive of Elon and was frequently retweeted by Elon as a way to show efforts to improve the service were working
Control groups exist because they get us closer to global optimality.

We can't eliminate suffering and dying of untreated people but it's generally considered ethical to eliminate suffering and dying of many while withholding that treatment from a subgroup of the study ("allowing them to die" by not taking action, rather than the "causing them to die" by taking action).

as long as that selection is done randomly and "fairly" I think it's an entirely acceptable risk. There have been trials that were truly badly run, and people died and suffered more than necessary, due to mistakes (often amateur ones) in the protocol. I'm more concerned about those types of deaths.
Hi Stuart, thanks for sharing your app, I'm looking forward to checking it out further.

I appreciated your write-up here and wondered if you've considered adding a bit more of a name & background narrative approach like this somewhere on the app website?

I usually try to get a feel for who's building an app and why, and somehow ended up reading the entire ToS and Privacy Policy looking for a name, a brief story, anything along those lines.

While I'm glad I didn't exactly find "we here at CIA care about your data" anywhere :-) ...I hope you see what I'm getting at. Your story and goal are very relatable. Thanks again & congrats on this launch.
Mechanical Engineer - loved startups - was introduced to HN by CS nerd friend - loved the community - read an article on Energy Storage problem - founded company building solution to that - have raised millions - still hang out here and love it. The communities dialogue on a lot of things outside of CS (Energy and Dynamics I have noticed) is pretty sub par though especially when mixed with a bit of excessive cocksureness. Thanks for everything.
Musk attracts engineers by selling a vision. Reusable rockets to make humanity an interstellar species. Electric vehicles to free humanity from fossil fuels. Humanoid robots. Neuralink. And on it goes.

For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]

That might not be your cup of tea, or you might believe Musk is too petulant a leader to bring that vision to fruition. But it is an aspiration that will make some people excited and willing to put in the hard work Musk is demanding.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728
and the big piece of land full of resources the colonizers stole right in the middle of those two oceans might have been a factor too.

the remarkable thing is what a terrible, unlivable, ugly nation we built out of all that wealth. The Romans built imperial Rome, the French empire built Paris, the US government built... a beige car dependent urban sprawl.

Americans should be ashamed of themselves.
Maybe you don’t remember the 80s but this is how pretty much every hostile takeover went down. Leveraged buyout > massive layoffs and restructuring > change in business model and the next thing we’ll likely see is some form of selling off assets or divisions, not sure what those would be in Twitter’s case but it won’t be a surprise if they come up with something.
The only problem with left-pad was that NPM let people delete packages that other packages depend on. That's literally it.
Do you use a vpn?
What advantages does it have over the open source jitsi or open source bigbluebutton?
As a customer you are implicitly if not explicitly buying an iOS device with the understanding it can only run iOS Apps.

Apple's APIs are proprietary, and they charge 15-30% of all digital sales to to build an iOS App. This is not different than Epic charging X% for use of the Unreal Engine's APIs to build a game.

That said, I would like to see Apple forced to document their hardware, and allow dual booting to other operating systems on their devices. While iOS can be AppStore wall garden, it should be possible for me to install Linux or Android on my iDevice / MacBook.
I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.

Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.

So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.

In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.
needs <map> tags
The lack of military invasions has certainly been a boon, but not sufficient to overcome the issues left over by Spanish/Portuguese style colonialism which created land owning aristocracies and rampant corruption. Argentina, Brazil, and Chile really all ought to be superpowers and Venezuela could have been richer than Saudi Arabia.
If that were true, why would the person be on the plane in the first place? Couldn't they just watch a movie of their destination or zoom call the person they were visiting from home?
I mean that's all The Big Five MO, and NG is probably tied with Boeing for the worst. Their cost inflations in the last two decades especially are beyond the pale
I've seen quite a few of the still-existing Twitter employees openly mocking him on twitter at this point with joking references to being "hardcore" and other memes that seem to be coming out of this disastrous all-hands.

Its almost difficult to believe at this point that he isn't intentionally running the company into the ground.
> If you repeatedly re-measure for 95% confidence, you strongly select for random noise.

You can't use standard methods for early stopping - as you rightly point out, you get gibberish if you naively keep peeking at a growing data set. Instead, you have to use statistical methods that explicitly adjust for the repeated sampling in early stopping trials. This does make early stopping more complicated to analyse than a trial with a pre-determined duration.
In Saunders v United Kingdom the ECHR said that the right to not self-incriminate "does not extend to the use in criminal proceedings of material which may be obtained from the accused through the use of compulsory powers but which has an existence independent of the will of the suspect".

Even if the evidence is not properly encrypted, in which case you could argue the data is indistinguishable from randomness and does not exist unless it's decrypted, a password would likely fall under a similar category.
Tell them to work for Boom Aerospace.
Isn't much FOD ingestion due to the wheels kicking up something? If so, mounting the engines in the back seems like a bad idea, as even if they are higher up than an under wing mounting there's a risk that the wheels might kick up some debris?

See also SAS flight 751, where ice broke off from the wings and were ingested into the engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_System_F...

From a FOD perspective, in my admittedly very non-expert opinion the best location would be to have either a high mounted wing with engines in the traditional under wing position, or then engines above the wings like the Honda business jet?
I think the notion of a CEO doing all the things their workers do purely out of solidarity to be shallow and condescending. Obviously his job is different from theirs and he is going to have a different set of rules. And I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in. He's clearly a workaholic.
Extreme, but sometimes patients need exactly that
I think the stupidity was in the non-contingent offer to purchase it. Now he's trying to pay for that stupidity. Maybe he's doing that stupidly too, but only time will tell.
In jest: I'd give an allowance to any product that steps right on the boundary of what we currently know as the fundamental limits of physics. Like Shannon entropy for a compression implementation. Or Planck length for processors.
I'm guessing this is supposed to be satire hitting back at people nostalgic for the "good old days".

It falls short in its mission. It's still more usable than Twitter.
This. My attention is worth more than that.
Aviation is a though nut to crack without large money bags, especially civil aviation..

That being said, there is some cool stuff being done (lilium, boom, etc).

Time will tell if one should ditch the software dev hat and put on the engineer hat I guess? :-)
It's a great example. Sued many times in many regions. Unable to operate in some countries where they aren't able to pay off politicians and government bodies. Founders have faced criminal charges in several countries and had assets seized. Fraud, price-fixing, false claims, tax evasion, racketeering, and the list goes on.

It's a great example because there is just so much about it. It's not some obscure company that has never been sued or never been found guilty. It's a company run by people who commit fraud and get away with it because they are just so wealthy.

It is a criminal organization. They have even pled guilty to criminal charges in the past. But somehow they just get to pay a fine and keep on going.

The whole point of my comment wasn't to focus on Amway but just to point out how ineffective the FTC is. Even when the activity is criminal and/or flagrant they are powerless to actually do anything to stop it. At best you get some modified legal jargon.
Bank of America has an estimated 67 million customers. Assuming $250k per person, and I've got the number of zeros right, that's $16 trillion ($16,750,000,000,000) in liability if they were to go down, enough to sink FDIC.
Unless they're required to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week?
I don't particularly dislike musk, but I'm happy to be on the sidelines of twitter. I like the site and hope he doesn't muck it up.
I bet a lot of people actually experience Schadenfreude at seeing these social media empires being toppled.

The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.
FTX is a centralised exchange, it is not routing all customer trades on chain. It’s not a blockchain failure, it’s just a lack of client asset segregation by a traditional centralised trading house.
The name of that is TRADEMARK ™

Copyright is evil.