skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I know a little about this, unfortunately. My "shameful past job" at one point in the 90s was working for a company that basically made small-business CRM+accounting software you could customize to drive any MLM scheme you could think up.

Amway's not the best example, since they actually sell real goods and because Amway's sellers' best customers have almost always been the sellers themselves. In other words, many sellers used it as a way to buy goods at "wholesale" and never really had any intention of reselling them. At one point, I think that was even part of the Amway pitch, particularly at the time they were inexplicably popular for their (expensive and therefore in theory a better deal discounted) water treatment products.

I don't think there's a price advantage there compared to Costco or online, though--much of what made Amway fade into the background starting in the mid 90s.

So too Stella Dot, Mary Kay, Cutco/Vector, probably Herbalife and even Transamerica, etc. They sell real stuff, whether or not the pricing makes sense, and you can technically turn a profit on it, whether or not the market is really there, so they're not technically considered a pyramid scheme in the scam/illegal sense.

Now, I'm not saying they're good ideas--at all--and they absolutely operate on hype and pipe dream every bit as much as those awful timeshare presentations. They have the same exponential market saturation issue as any pyramid scheme and the same diminishing returns--but they are generally not considered fraudulent, just obnoxious.

The really awful pyramid schemes mostly just sell "new seller kits" to prospective targets that teach them how to sell "new seller kits" to their targets, have no real product or way to make a profit, and the entire rollup is those kits and other overhead fees. They're the financial equivalent of a chain letter.

I'm pretty sure those do get action taken against them if they're identified. The biggest problem there is most are pretty small, take a bunch of people's money, then burn out once it's all rolled to the top ranks who founded the scheme and new marks aren't easy to find.
I think there are many many good reasons for electric cars. Climate change is quite far down the list though.

That said, today I went into the office in central London for the first time in a while and was kind of shocked. While crossing the road to get a burrito I was consciously keeping track of the electric cars which went past. It felt like every other car. Then I got on the electric bus back to the train station and passed the drop off point for what must of been close to a hundred Lime electric bikes. There is a palpable change and I for one think it's exciting.

It's just a shame Elon is such a, ahem, character.
NYC has ~6% more women than men at all ages > 20

https://www.statista.com/statistics/799446/resident-populati...
before they can organize as workers, they need to have class consciousness, and actually working with other workers helps.
Remind me not to friend you :-)

Joking aside, I didn't read OP as "big mad" about this. Just a little wistful. And possibly glad to have good subject matter for a public blog post...
Seeing someone who served in the Navy being told that their peacetime service is very different from the war that Twitter is currently experiencing is... I'm not even sure how to react to that. Lots of execs like to stretch those military metaphors -- they're all in the trenches, all hands on deck, take no prisoners and all that -- but I think you may have stretched this one way past its breaking point.
Elon's companies aren't known to pay particularly well. I got an offer at one of his companies that was such an insane lowball it was hard to take seriously.
> In some places I've had to use remote KVM extenders, which are HIGHLY susceptible to ESD pulses from office chairs. A few times every hour the screen blacks out for a second, usually returning to normal, just because someone stood up.

Apparently so are HDMI cables. A HN thread few months ago clued me in on this, and this solved a weird issue I had with my work laptop: it would randomly bluescreen; at first, once a month, but after a year it was closer to once or twice a week. There was no obvious pattern to it, except it almost always happened within a minute of me getting up from the chair. I suspected it was overheating, but ensuring it's cooling properly didn't help. The problem went away when I stopped using and actually unplugged the external display, and now it seems very likely it was the cable picking up ESD from the gas piston of my office chair.
Article mentions one (bitcoin arbitrage)
> On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion.

Existing Twitter and Facebook connections (names, followers, friends, etc) to create many secret indexer servers made of easily verifiable Google searches of real people with real friends and GPT-like toot generation to fake just enough activity seems like a pretty straightforward route to avoid suspicion.

Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
Where does did all that money go? Is it part of a zero sum game and in someone else's hands now, did it evaporate, or a combination of the two?
If you change "j" to "y" in the nested marquee, you can make the Betamax logo bounce instead.
>This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.

https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47
"Other times, two Tesla employees told CNBC, Tesla workers are pressured to help with projects at his other companies for no additional pay because it’s good for their careers, or because the work is seen as helping with a related party transaction or project."

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...
The birth of the stock market also created new avenues for fraud that did not exist prior.

Right, but I've never heard anyone say in response to stock market fraud, "You know what would fix this? A stock market!"

The logic path on fixing what is ultimately a blockchain-related problem with more blockchain just seemed a bit circular to me. The blockchain/crypto portion does not really seem to be solving any real-life problems, or if it has, anything it has solved is being outstripped by the problems/losses.
would it be possible to do something like this with marquee instead of SVG/animation?

https://codepen.io/Anna_Batura/pen/MWXjMmE
>It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient.

Is it though?

Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.

I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
Do you mean because there's some connection between FTX and YC? I certainly don't know of any.

Moreover, even if there were, (a) the OP has been on HN's front page for hours and is currently at #4, (b) this story has been heavily discussed on HN, with several major threads in the last few days alone, and (c) asking people not to fulminate doesn't mean they can't make substantive critical points—if anything it helps them do so.
I award no points for fairness because that is completely beside the point.
Serves a few purposes, but as you said the main objective is already done by de-noising.
The other reason I do this is because it's easy to detect that kind of scanning in HTTP logs, but not as easy for other services (ssh, ftp, smtpd, etc) without something like fail2ban, and the blanket ban applies to all of them. So, if a bot scans your HTTP server enough times, they can't go after "softer" targets later.

For scan-spam that does hit your "real" site, it's a bit more tricky as there absolutely will be false positives. You can grep for all 401/403's and add them to the list, but that will sooner or later hit a real user. So it's much more specific to the application you're hosting, where this works for just about any site. The other nice thing is that even when they scan your "real" site, they'll often hit the default host via IP scans at the same time, so you can still manage to ban them.

It's not perfect, but it's good enough :)
Remove Twitter from a) and add a third option: c) work at any company that isn’t clearly being run into the ground.
If you're serving 40mb a second you don't _need_ a distributed system.

Twitter isn't Netflix.
Specifically, the US was outside the range of WW2 weapons. At the end of the war our factories were the only ones left. Secret sauce of the American economic boom.
When we began looking at farms, the advice we got over and over again was to live with it through a few seasons before making any changes. See how the water flows in the winter months, see what dries out in the summer. Learn what the wildlife get up to, where the best views are.

It's something I think about to this day. As we've made progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly informed by those observations — and it's really easy to see how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or lacking context.
Worked to stoke voter fraud mania? Probably. I doubt they relented due to a cooperation agreement because that would require an indictment or a plea deal or grant of immunity. It's not clear at all what proceedings, if any, reversed their decision. Nor do we have any idea what basis they used for the charges in the first place. I don't typically go for conspiracies but given the vagueness of the charge and the timing of the charges being dropped, I'm leaning towards this being simple prosecutorial overreach possibly due to political pressure.
Your second paragraph raises an interesting and seemingly valid point, but your first paragraph gets me wrong: I did mean the acronym, i.e. gf or bf (and some other such ones; not all, by a long chalk).

Anyway, thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. :)
patient is dying, better chop off an arm and a leg and remove some of the monitors and move the patient to a different building.
Another way to achieve Musk's target would be to drop ad revenue numbers precipitously until it is equal to subscriptions - a process that may well be under way.
Well they bent right over on USB-C, so ...
Nah, I kept it all, moved it to a personal Dropbox folder.
Elon should focus on accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy, rather than accelerating Twitter's transition to being a free for all hell scape.
Anything more than 0% office implies a huge sea change from 0%.

To go from zero to one on this, your company now needs to lease space, even if part-time. Your employees are now bound geographically.

At zero, things are dramatically simpler and easier. The only hard thing is - middle management has nowhere to hide with work from home. Performance has to be monitored accurately now, versus the straightforward bums-in-seats-looking-busy-for-eight-hours method.
Derp, yeah. Thanks.
How would one come up with such a rule in 1494 before logarithms were a thing?
GitHub is releasing two open-source fonts: Mona and Hubot Sans
what time it is here changes from one moment to the next. and there are also horizons. you dont have all the data about things yet you operate. just trying to help
https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1588907407002185729#...
Grey check mark lasted less than a day? To me it seems like he's trying to do it all by himself in an area he has no expertise.
Sorry, you are misinformed.

All private corporations in the U.S. have shareholders. (LLC's have members, which are similar.)

The executive team and board of those private corporations have a fiduciary duty to the corporation that they will take actions to increase their investment.

Twitter has at least one major shareholder, Elon Musk, which is why I jokingly wrote "the shareholder" singularly. He also seems to have other institutional shareholders, but it's unclear if he just personally owes the money or if they have taken a collateral interest in Twitter itself. (The latter seems more likely)

Thus, Elon Musk has a fiduciary obligation to his shareholder(s), even if it was just him (it's not).

Like it or not, he is taking steps to reduce the drag on Twitter's finances because he doesn't have a lot of choice.

After burning hundreds of millions of dollars for years, he's got to cut the fat quickly or the company will become insolvent.
If I try very hard to tease out the answer to my question, it seems that you're suggesting that bankruptcy would be preferred to layoffs, with the government providing temporary relief after everyone loses their jobs. This seems like a net negative, compared to some people losing their jobs, and the company possibly moving on to great success, with those remaining, and future, employees.

I apologize if I interpreted your response incorrectly, but it was, again, very indirect.

The purpose of my question was to help me understand your perspective, and to help you present some meaning to your statement "As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker."
Oh wow I really enjoyed this read. Thank you so much for sharing. Bless the Apple librarians for saving history.

> “Who uses all of this?” asked Steve.

> Monica answered, “The engineers use this to do research.”

> Steve’s response: “They should know all that already.”

Sounds like Jobs alright.
That reminds me of my days doing shudder ColdFusion and seeing Microsoft Liquid Motion, their short-lived Macromedia Flash competitor.

Well and DHTML immediately reminds me of Dreamweaver and trying to make everything compatible with IE and Netscape with a lot of browser detection.

I miss the people I worked with back then. But not UI work. As bad as it was, it was less complicated and more stable than it seems to be today.

And I don't miss people asking me to make something "more green" that is #0000FF. To paraphrase Spinal Tap: "None. None more green"
> Some (many?) countries have demonstrated that no-tipping can work just fine.

Yes, but the reason it's difficult to implement when there was previously a tipping system is the fact that increasing prices to cover labour means a no-tipping place has a higher menu price than a place that encourages tipping.

Customers also have less perceived "power" over their dining experience.

France for example, (mostly) abolished their tipping culture through several pieces of legislation and to this day there's a 15% service charge on your bill in France. Even then they still tip, a little.
NSA guidance on how to protect against software memory safety issues [pdf]
The ledger ensures that the handing over of the "thing" can happen without trust in any intermediary. You still ultimately have to trust the counterparty to deliver what they promise.

Think of it like HTTPS. Nobody can sneak anything into the request, but the counterparty you're contacting could still be a fraud.
I mean, those $12B annual debt service payments didn't exist before. Seems clear that Twitter was struggling in many ways, but things seemed to be accelerating post acquisition.
Why do you say liquidity is the issue? It sounds like you are imagining some specific scenario here.
I think this is the crux of the argument. API is great in concept but validating and verifying the underlying technology that is claiming CO2e reductions is by far the bigger and harder problem.

Sorry if I'm being harsh here but its similar CO2e platform accounting companies -- theres a million of those and its low cost low effort low return for actual benefits (just putting money in the pockets of the middle men).

I don't see how something like this is beneficial unless its essentially sending hot leads to technologies.
Indeed… Or perhaps to be able to retire someday without ending up homeless or living as if you were…
Sorry, I mean investors in the company itself, not crypto traders.
don't forget selling weapons, fuel and vehicles to both sides. at the end of WW2, the US had 2/3 of the world's gold. that didn't come from nowhere
> adding that “bankruptcy is not out of the question” if the company can’t “bring in more cash than we spend."

> “We can’t scale to a billion users and take massive losses along the way, that’s not feasible,” Musk said, speaking at an all-hands meeting for Twitter’s product team. But “if you have a compelling product, people will buy it. That has been my experience at SpaceX and Tesla"
So, normally, ad businesses are pretty immune to high level drama. When you pay for eyeballs, even if the owner is a schmuck, the eyeballs themselves don't drop that drastically. If a bunch of advertisers drop you, other ones will swoop in for those eyeballs at the lower price.

A key thing he leaked today was that only 30% of Twitter's ad revenue was performance based. For the other 70% of brands on Twitter, they are only there because they wanted to be there. No one is losing money by pulling Twitter ads. No one is swooping in to replace them.

Soooo... on one hand Musk is probably just being Musk here. But I'm not sure that one of the things that didn't happen here is that the Twitter board and executives, understanding that there was no real path to near-term profitability and an impending downturn, forced a now-broke guy to cash them out.
"git undo" tool: https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless/wiki/Command:-git-...
The number one result when you search for Twitter on HN:

Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever (buzzfeednews.com)

2953 points by minimaxir on May 12, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 1353 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23155647
It seems to me this English article does not reflect the actual decision of the court in French.

See judgment here and attached PDF (in French) https://www.courdecassation.fr/toutes-les-actualites/2022/11...

The case was a person who was arrested for drug possession and trafficking, they were requested to give their passcode to unlock 2 phones allegedly used for trafficking, they refused then were further charged for not giving their password.

1) 15th May 2018 - First court ruled on drug trafficking but rejected the charges for not giving the passcode to unlock the phone, considering that a screen passcode is not a cryptographic mean to make the data on the phone unreadable or inaccessible.

2) 11th July 2019 - Escalated to the court of Appeal, same result.

3) 13th October 2020 - Escalated to the cour de cassation, who ruled that the law was incorrectly applied and sent back the case to the court. The cour de cassation doesn't rule cases, it only rules on whether a specific law was correctly applied by the court. (A decision of the court de cassation, like this one, explains how a law is meant to be interpreted and applied by the courts).

4) 20th April 2021 - The court of Appeal, repeated the initial result (home screen passcode is not a cryptographic mean to protect data) and dismissed the charges AGAIN.

5) Yesterday - Escalated to the cour de cassation AGAIN, who ruled that the law was incorrectly applied AGAIN, and sent back the case to the court AGAIN.

6) Future - This is pending another trial, from the court of appeal.

My understanding of the cour de cassation explanations, the home screen may or may not constitute a cryptographic mean to make the data unreadable or inaccessible, that depends on the phone. The court needs to rule on whether it is for that specific phone in that specific case.

For the HN audience who is technical and some of you actually make the phones. Most modern phones including all Apple and most Android have cryptographic means to protect all the data on the phone, it's effectively not possible to access contacts, messages, photos, storage, etc without having the home screen password. (Please consider that historically, it was often possible to take out the sim card or the storage SD card or use other tools to read the content of the phone, but not anymore)

My understanding is that the next ruling will have to consider whether these technical protections render the data inaccessible to the police. If yes and the data is deemed required for a criminal investigation, the suspect is required by law to disclose their passcode, or risk up to 3 year of prison and 270 000 euros.
The hidden volume set up by Truecrypt has different offsets between the headers and the actual encrypted data.

It's possible to move the encrypted volume 50GB from the header and fill the disk with random bytes, but it's not doable through the standard GUI.

In an encrypted state, it's impossible to tell the difference between the hidden volume and random data. When you use your real passphrase, the primary header is decrypted and the hidden volume may just be random-data empty space. If the key you entered decrypts the random bytes between the first Truecrypt header and the first partition, it's clear that the key belongs to the secret header and not the normal partition.

You can try to cover your tracks; you can use your hidden volume as the main volume and enter the main volume key when forced to come up with a password.

However, you'll have to make sure the activity logs on the PC line up with the other logs available (i.e. increments in power on hours, external drive logs and timestamps, external access logs, etc.) that can prove that the partition you've unlocked doesn't contain the OS that caused all kinds of side effects. Hell, you can probably find something related to relocated sectors/wear levelling statistics to find the clusters that are in use.

When the passphrase for the hidden volume has been entered, you can find the physical offsets of the encrypted data and find out that the first half the drive (or less, or more, depending on your setup) isn't mapped to your booted partition.

A completely read-only OS with no logging outside RAM or connections to the outside might be used securely if you use the hidden volume as your main OS, but such a system would be too difficult to use properly.

As always, opsec is crucial for security even if your software algorithms are absolutely perfect. If you follow the guidelines set forth by Veracrypt, it should be very difficult to prove the presence of a hidden partition. That does mean you should be using your secondary OS as often as your hidden OS and analysis from external devices (such as network traffic) should not be able to tell the difference between the two.
Per institution.
And there is a lot of consolidation.
So I would be careful.
It is really easy to be placing money into different banks, but essentially the same one.
You seem to be basing this on the idea of a ship full of decent and willing sailors who had a common cause. I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers or enemy sympathizers.

Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him down personally and entire useless product divisions so the best thing to do is cut out the expensive rot - nothing ruins morale like having hostile and counterproductive teammates dragging you down.

The part of the company takes takes tweets, stores tweets, and displays tweets seems to be working fairly well. The rest is on the rocks or was headed for them full steam.
Youtuber "Doctor Mix" recently used it for a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, it was interesting watching how he put it to use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAkgxhK91kk
For pedants it's octopodes because its a Greek root, but the sort of people who think that way are the worst and are responsible for screwing up English a lot, so fuck those nerds.

If you're speaking English then you just add an s or es. So Octopuses is right.