cfitz

I first thought the article was a joke when I saw its length.

Their sympathy for Melvin Capital despite said “fund” seeking to make money by sinking American companies into the ground via massive “short” positions, as with GameStop, is just disgusting.

You don’t have to put others “down” to be “up”. There’s a way for us all to win. We certainly don’t need hedge funds to help us accomplish that.

EDIT:

“How they did it”:

Melvin Capital purchased substantial volume of short positions (many billions), collaborated with Wall St on how to best design the downfall of a business employing thousands during a pandemic, and even put out fake news articles & tweets to fool the Reddit mob out of fooling themselves. Did not work out in the end.

(No, I do not agree with Reddit’s current valuation. It is merely a remnant of the whole GME fiasco.)

Brilliant, great work by Ferreira.

While working out a scalable solution, this would be a great addition to preexisting sewage infrastructure in the US!

If you're using Ruby on Rails, perhaps consider the "Ahoy Matey" AKA "Ahoy" free and open source gem created by Instacart [1].

I've used it in my personal projects and have never had any issues. It's great to have no vendor lock-in and full ownership of user metric data. If you go this route, please be responsible with the data and follow all relevant regulations & guidelines (ex: GDPR) regarding its storage and usage.

[1]: https://github.com/ankane/ahoy

According to their history of Terms of Service changes, it appears that they made changes to the language surrounding information collected while "private browsing" between September 1, 2015 and June 21, 2016. Just do a Cmd+F or Ctrl+F for "snap" (part of snapshot/snap shots; they do not spell it consistently).

In that case, it's been in their terms since 2016.

I do not agree with this practice nor do I condone it, but who is ultimately "in the wrong here"? Is it Google or is it the users, the latter of whom are supposed to read these Terms prior to agreeing to them?

Are "Terms" too long these days? I can't imagine most people have the time to read through all - if not any - of the Terms of Service (etc.) for all products and services they're utilizing in their life.

I beleive this thread would be even more popular with the last line in the article as its title on HN: "Why don't we want people to be good at things?"

This is what we need to be asking ourselves in our current society, especially given the often very real torturous cycle regarding success and others which the author outlined in their post.

While I understand it is a business like many others, it'd be genuinely nice if GrubHub would stop airing their "restaurants are our family"/"support local restaurants" advertisements.

If we really want to support local restaurants (and give them better chances of post-COVID survival), we should do exactly as stated above: call in to order directly.

Do not give GrubHub, Uber Eats, and similar services a large portion of your order total just for being an easy-to-use middleman. The vast majority of restaurants around today are capable of processing payments and handling pickup/delivery themselves.

While these restaurants fight to stay alive in unprecedented times, the least we can do is put in a bit more effort for an order of food we would have placed and paid for anyway.

Thank you!

I’d love to implement a similar command line program for logging various on-computer activities. Thank you for sharing!

Perspectives like this and others are one of the many reasons I greatly enjoy HN. I didn’t even consider the situation in this way, yet is makes much more sense than what I constructed in my head. Thank you for that.

What a persona this paints of the seller.

Would like to add that I also share your wonder. To me, this needs to evolve to anecessity for them (ICANN, in terms of ability) rather than just an “if”.

Please forgive me my lack of context surrounding this, but would love to learn more about why Corp.com is being sent various data (some sensitive, as mentioned in the article) from various parties in the first place. Did it use to serve a purpose for MS or other?

I have this same impression, but I also use Mint to organize my finances.

I'm a big fan of how I can categorize expenditures and export them as CSV's or charts, which I can then send to my accountant for an easy tax season.

Without this (so far) free tool - as I have not paid for anything Intuit related minus likely my personal data - my annual U.S. taxes would be a massive pain in the rear end, being that I'm self-employed.

Yup, just open Preview for an image (possibly other documents as well e.g., PDF), go into “markup” mode, and begin to draw with the pen or pencil. Preview will try to “perfect” your drawn check mark, X, straight line, curved line, etc.

...insider trading? If there’s not an investigation into these “executives” already underway, there should be.

To your defense, you're sharing a truth that is often difficult for many technical founders to hear/read. Many either over-estimate their non-technical skills or don't care to think about them at all, as "the better product always wins" myth remains present to this day. I am not personally exempt from this thinking, especially at the start of my entrepreneurial journey, where I wasted many months bringing products to market, to no avail. I am also certainly not the first person to make this observation.

If you aren't willing to hop on a demo of your product via video chat with a potential customer, per their request, you're directly lessening the chances of that product's success. With that said, once you realize that without marketing or sales, nobody will see your beautiful creation(s), you quickly realize the need for such. Personally, this lead to a desire to learn, practice, and master these skills. However, you can easily find others with a seemingly natural affinity for these skills and delegate these efforts to these individuals (whether partners or employees), enticing them with stock and/or salary should you have sufficient revenue and/or funding.

EDIT: I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting solo ventures succeed less often than those with more than one founder. There is research (see that from NYU and Wharton) pointing to exactly the opposite.

"Bigger, better, and more broken than ever before."

(Disclosure: My 2017 MBP has been repaired 8x and replaced 1x. My iPhone repaired 1x and replaced 1x.)

I am a fan of Fred's work/blog but I'm not sure how this is a "how to" AKA a guide, rather than a regurgitation of someone else's guide, meant only for well-financed companies.

For those of us bootstrapping, this will unfortunately not work. We are stuck settling with these parasites.

I wonder if lockup agreements will ever be made illegal.

I doubt it, since they’re primarily there to ensure the original investors get an ROI, but they sure seem to be an overall negative incentive for the general public / retail traders to purchase stock with lockup agreements, given the earliest they can buy is right when the IPO pops.

We need to promote the use of messaging apps which default to SSL. It shows a user-focused product and perhaps a healthy company.

If you’re talking about decrypting messages encrypted created and read via SSL (what they imply is the case), it’s not possible unless you have the private key, versus the widely available public key.

I doubt it’s lying around in Facebooks repositories but I’ve never worked there so cannot say that is the case with certainty.

This is all assuming they are even using modern SSL and are careful with user data. Unfortunately, not a great track record there for FB.

Including the Google Analytics library and Facebook Pixel on your site at the very least sends each and every pageview back to both of those entities. If the developer has implemented custom conversions, even further behavior is tracked.

I deleted FB from my phone about 2 years ago and have not once regretted it. I still stay in touch with my closest friends via phone, text, and the good ole' fashioned physical meetups.

No more fake celebratory comments. No more fake photos. No more fake LIVES portrayed by others (early on, I participated in this).

I must say that one of the best things you can do for your mental health is to delete these social networks off your devices. I've actually gone so far as to block all these sites network-wide via my pi-hole so nobody can mindless scroll through content while in my home.

My quality of life has improved as a result; I can now live in the moment and be grateful for not only where I'm at, but also where I am going (i.e., goal(s)) and what I will learn on the way there.

I agree completely. I truly don't care for sports, despite attending several of my alma mater's football games, but I've always felt the same way.

Why are college players limited to "scholarships" (which are essentially 100% tuition coverage, 100% on-campus food/dining coverage, and a $1500 scooter to get around -- of course nothing to scoff at when compared to a student taking out loans for the same education), while the colleges rake in millions?

Colleges - at least the one I attended - make a ridiculous amount of money off these games via tickets and merchandise, the latter even when the team is in the off-season. There's a reason why colleges are able to pay their coaches millions. (My own alma mater left a "bad" coach with a multi-million dollar severance package.)

Am I the only one that finds it wild/crazy - and disappointing- that our elected/selected officials took this long to realize the effect of big tech on the human psyche and thus our individual behavior..?

Glad to see this, being that my 2018 MBP unit has been serviced 6x cumulatively (3x keyboard, 2x logic board, 1x display) and replaced entirely 1x.

I am not a fan of the time it takes to drive to the store 2x, talk with several levels of tech support, and ultimately spend $4.5k on a “loaner” since Apple doesn’t have a loaner laptop program.

How convenient this is, as negative PR grows surrounding their 2016- MBP product line.

I’m late to the party, but I’ve personally had my keyboard replaced at least 3 times, the logic board replaced 2x, the display replaced 1x, and the entire unit replaced entirely (all under warranty, albeit AppleCare+).

To say that I regret selling my “tortoise” of a 2015 MBP is an understatement.

This is wild! I can already see hotels using this tech as large glass walls that later turn into movie screens or “smart” screens...