numair

Absolutely. I think the FB CoI within American venture capital, where they have fully infested the LP and GP ranks of most funds, is a much bigger and more important story. It really helped me understand that we need to work really hard to keep the rest of the world’s capital markets free and open — a major focus for me these days.

You never know which stories The Information won’t run, or which “negative” articles are actually deflections. Similarly, you never know which amazing startups remain shut out of funding, and a lot of entrepreneurs have no idea about the amount of back channel collusion goes on in creating the funding rounds and “overnight successes” they’re told to idolize.

A random dude on HN such as me shouldn’t be the source of this knowledge. Hope someone takes up the cause, but we live in a time of astounding cowardice.

> The Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with knowledge of the situation.

I miss the old days of journalism, when they might feel inclined to let the reader know that their source for the indirect source is almost entirely funded by the fortune generated by a man who worked slavishly to become a close friend of the boss of one of DeepSeek’s main competitors (Meta).

Feel bad for anyone who gets their news from The Information and doesn’t have this key bit of context.

> Source?

https://www.facebook.com/security/advisories/cve-2019-3568

Oh man, the irony of this response. Do Kwon very specifically did NOT have USD in this situation, and I’m pretty sure his defense will be that there was no representation that the peg would be maintained indefinitely. Whether the evidence points to the contrary is another matter altogether.

It’s less than one minute of nuclear arsenal maintenance. We can afford both.

https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/2024/06/17/us-sp...

As someone who works in an office alongside Japanese illustrators and graphic designers, I would like to know where the manga-style training data came from, and what is being done to ensure that the artists are fairly compensated?

This is ridiculous. The EU has a complete axe to grind against Apple, for reasons that I believe border on corruption (if not, veer completely into it). Meanwhile, Meta has a near-monopoly on social networking in the Western world and is subject to a slap on the wrist at best.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, one of the best friends of the current EU Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, is currently on Meta's payroll. For this reason alone, the current EU Competition Commissioner should recuse herself from being involved in this role. There are other reasons, including direct conversations I have had with co-founders of Meta regarding EU commissioners, that cause me to have very little faith in these people to act fairly, or to do little other than carry out Meta's very long agenda to be able to ride on top of Apple's platform and deliver their own App Store with their own currency (remember Facebook Credits, anyone?) and completely replace iMessage etc for people who live within the mass-scale dystopia that is the Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp Industrial Complex.

Meta is a total monopoly that causes daily harm to society, and yet this is what the EU finds itself obsessed with. These people should be ashamed of themselves. And, they should release the records of every meeting and every communication they have with Meta and its various lobbyists, and the children/spouses of these people (because they love using the family connection to avoid scrutiny, as evidenced by their hiring of various congresspeople's children in roles that make no sense).

> I'm a SysOps engineer at a fairly large online casino. We have around 4 million monthly active users. We had been happy Cloudflare customers since 2018 on the "Business" plan which has some neat features and costs $250/month for "unlimited" traffic.

Sorry to be “that guy,” but, you’re serving 4 million people at a casino and paying $250 a month for shared multi tenant infra, and you’re SURPRISED you have problems? Really?

To be honest, I’m glad these sorts of businesses get kicked off Cloudflare because it causes problems for others sharing the same IP space and infra. I’ll let someone else with experience discuss how many times a day the network would see a hacking or DDoS attempt against the online casino, which is by far the favorite target of hackers. But in general, I just don’t want any of my infra touching the same stuff as these guys.

Like another person here, I am assuming that Cloudflare ops told someone “tell these guys to get their own IPs and upgrade,” and then the message went to Cloudflare’s (utterly lousy!!!) sales people to try to fix before shutdown, and then it all turned into the mess we see here.

The true moral of the story, I think, is, if you’re running an online casino on a shoestring budget, expect bad things to happen to you. Of all kinds.

While we are on this topic — can someone, anyone, tell me how to disable the AI autocompletion suggestions in Outlook for iOS? Getting ready to dump Microsoft and Exchange to get away from that utter mess.

Perhaps some of the people who are commenting here don’t realize that there isn’t much of a way to opt out of these data “analysis” activities.

The problem isn’t technical, it’s social. I don’t want my bank, and some “global payment network” that can easily lobby its way out of real data oversight, to know my transit patterns and habits.

Don’t worry! Visa and MasterCard have lobbied the hapless fools who inherited this wonderfully efficient and effective system, and the trains of Japan will soon switch over to join the global payment oligarchy.

Japan is about half a generation away from mass-scale mediocrity.

This reminds me of the time at Facebook when one of OpenAI’s current board members was upset that the Director of Facebook Platform was getting more praise and attention than he was, in his role as Co-Founder and CTO (or whatever). That caused a lot of problems, from which the Facebook Platform never recovered.

People who start out petty usually remain that way. There’s a lot of people in this world whose happiness depends on others doing just a little bit worse-off than them.

If I was a developer building on OpenAI’s platform today, I would begin putting my contingency plans into place.

Protip: If someone says they are trying to be like Berkshire Hathaway, and their business plan doesn’t include a strategy for cornering some segment of the insurance market, they do not understand and will not become like Berkshire Hathaway.

Oh! We are finally going to talk about how PayPal was utterly owned by Russian cyber gangs that made a mockery of the idea that these guys were fraud detection geniuses?

checks article

Oh, wait, nevermind. More “folklore.”

What’s the easiest way for a startup to poach H1B workers from competitors and large, established companies? Is it even possible, or are they trapped at their sponsoring company? If there is a process or workflow for accomplishing this in a repeatable/scalable manner, I’d be keen to know!

Actually, Kelly matched one meme with another:

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/09/mariah-carey-i-dont...

It’s pretty sad that the parent got upvoted and commented so much, without anyone catching on to this.

The HN crowd really needs to take a course on modern culture or something. People in this community are not as smart as they think they are, and this problem seems to have gotten a lot worse after the recent Reddit migration.

This exchange is pretty funny to anyone who knows the background on the extremely cozy relationship between Katherine Graham and the CIA. It seems that, in our post-truth world, facts have become conspiracies and conspiracies have become facts. Alas.

To all of the armchair experts on HN who want to criticize this project and its maintenance costs: you better make sure you understand the (very French) politics that made this an utter pain for everyone involved, along with the constraints of the time at which this was designed and built.

The engineering work done by Arup to make this project work was utterly amazing. I suggest this as a small bit of weekend reading that might kick off further exploration:

https://www.arup.com/perspectives/would-the-pompidou-get-bui...

It’s important to remember that the music business is one of the first places where corporations used technology to replace human workers.

Back in my day (not really) you could get a job as a live musician, performing at restaurants, cafes, and and lots of other places. Then, suddenly, people started to install record machines and buy music from record companies! So, you know, AI-generated music is just a progression of a centuries-old trend.

Quite ironically, this might be the disaster that causes the labels to license their libraries on more flexible terms to a larger variety of players, thus liberating the world from the current streaming service oligopoly.

It’s a bit of a dirty secret that Japan actually has abysmal data privacy and enforcement. The budget of the regulator in charge of these matters all but ensures that they will do too little, too late. Japanese companies need to proactively work to prevent OpenAI from grabbing data sets that put it in a position in Japan similar to Palantir and the NHS.

Those of you who are in the VC / startup space in Japan should lobby to keep this stuff within the border, or you’re going to lose the opportunity before you realize what you’ve lost. You’ll spend the rest of your careers begging OpenAI for API access to learning models built on top of your own data.

Edit: By the way, it’s worth noting that OpenAI has a ton of data on Japanese people, through its semi-secret — well, until exposed by Elon Musk — data sharing deal with Twitter. Because Twitter was so actively pushed onto the Japanese public, it became the default “open forum” for the country. That data set is, by itself, all you’d need to have your LLM generate strings of text that appear to come from a real Japanese person. It’s interesting that the government is more focused on how to ride the buzz wave, than asking questions about the permissions involved in training LLMs on this deeply personal data.

> Social media was the first contact between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost. First contact has given us the bitter taste of things to come. In social media, primitive A.I. was used not to create content but to curate user-generated content.

I always forget just how utterly wrong the “experts” celebrated by the mass-media tend to be. This statement is patently, utterly wrong — what happened with social media was a demonstration that young, privileged millennial Americans with too much power decided to play for their personal incentives (money, power, etc) rather than what was best for society. It was a silent war between humans.

I want to write a counter point to the idiotic “AI is on the verge of becoming self aware” dystopia nonsense being paraded by so many charlatans in our industry right now, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day for it, and the humans who control the algorithms that determine distribution don’t like me very much. Someone else needs to do it!

Except for the multi-million dollar home he has (had?) in California, and probably a few others you’re not supposed to know about…

Sorry, I don’t buy it. I think the redacted product is Siri, and the author’s dismissal of this possibility shows how people underestimate the number of voice searches conducted using that service. As far as I know, it is the world’s most-used “AI service.”

Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, as anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and then ended up lost in memes and randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API.

Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits. Or are they still in denial?

Oh, the irony! The real “TikTok for text” is Twitter, which anyone who’s clicked a link to a tweet and ended up lost in randomness for 10 minutes can attest. Twitter is also the product on which these guys staged a vampire attack to seed Instagram, which is part of why Twitter crippled their API.

Why don’t they do the world a service and try to hijack users out of Instagram to something more balanced and healthy? If you’re partly responsible for causing cancer, you might want to work on fixing that before moving on to loftier pursuits.

This seems like one of those “unlock greater efficiencies” type deals where both parties earn an effective 0% margin on each others’ business. Both payment processing and cloud computing are very low margin when you’re handling business for a savvy customer who knows how to reduce costs.

From a data perspective, it would seem that there would be some major implications for this particular deal. If Stripe can gain a window into the purchasing habits and volumes of Amazon’s massive customer base (not the actual items, but the size and frequency), it seems like it’d be a major boost to the depth and breadth of its machine learning models. For Amazon to give that sort of capability to another company — which seems to have begun a few years back — seems quite remarkable to me.

On this same line of thought, I would assume that Apple has been working to bring more and more of its payment infrastructure in-house, as it’s a major area of data leakage (regardless of whether the data is merely used to train fraud prevention models, or to do something more “interesting”). Maybe someone with actual knowledge on these matters will comment here…

HyperCard and Macromedia Director remain the gold standard for this sort of visual-interactive design. It was all so early and new and ubiquitous that we never realized how special it was.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TqISbaJ7qug

Iterating on this in a modern way remains TODO. As John Henry and his counterpart note in that video, the beauty of those tools was that people who didn’t care about code were able to create interactive experiences.

The whole “everyone learn to code or you’ll be poor” thing of the past 10 years has been a huge and unnecessary distraction.

You’re the first and only person to point out this fact, which shows how depressingly little history is studied by people who work in this field. It’s a shame it’s become about getting to The Money as quickly as possible…