rchaud
rchaud on Hacker News
This is the same site owner that allows Alberta pro-separatism pages to operate out of Kenya and India with impunity.
Amazon didn’t borrow anywhere near this much. They also had the sales tax loophole that let them outprice the competition and take their market share for over a decade.
And I suppose you could sketch on notepad with ASCII but some might prefer the cave-painting primitiveness of pen and paper.
There is a moat: government contracts. Everything from NSF grant reviews, drone warfare, DHS visa processing and Medicare/Medicaid claims processing are up for grabs under the right administration.
small price to pay to circumvent being bought off by big business at every possible opportunity.
if they were making profits now, it would set an upper limit on the number they IPO at. Losing money however? Sky's the limit.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Oh yeah, who
wouldn't prefer to look at their phone instead of banging?
People have had the baby conversation. The stumbling block is money, not Reels or Tiktok. A 50% drop in fertility if true, is low compared to the percentage increase in the cost of childcare, nutrition and education. Especially in a country like Argentina where the locals do not see a future for themselves there even as the billionaires like Gates and Thiel buy up farmland and luxury real estate like no tomorrow - pun intended.
She's in prison because she defrauded enterprise customers. If she went B2C, she'd probably be head of the FTC by now.
World's best AI models doesn't offset public resentment caused by putting data centers in residential areas, openly buying off the White House and Congress with PAC "donations" and constantly threatening to eliminate everyone's job.
As if the endless deluge of AI, Meta Glasses and Flock camera articles are full of friendly banter.
The invasion of Iraq was the brainchild of hawks like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Feith.
Bush was a frat boy and hollow suit who was completely unprepared for an event like 9/11 and delegated decision making to his cabinet.
Bush has pretty much said, gaffe or not, that the invasion was illegal.
https://abcnews.com/Politics/bush-condemns-unjustified-bruta...
Well before 9/11, US troops were intervening in Somalia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Libya, Lebanon and Grenada.
2029? By then the pendulum would swing back to it being considered "deep state intervention" and a "waste of taxpayer funds" especially since "the national debt is higher than ever".
If a site has PayPal as a payment method, I'm using PayPal. It's a million times more convenient than punching my CC into yet another site.
I don't use mobile wallets. I've had a PP account since the time it was required to buy anything on Ebay.
The best feature it has is being able to cancel newspaper subscriptions without the hassle of calling and talking to a retention agent.
They've all had multi-billion bond issues in 2026 so I wouldn't exactly call it "their" money.
35 years ago, the enormously popular animated series Captain Planet taught kids about protecting the ozone layer, using biodegradable materials and renewable energy.
Absolutely none of that mattered in the long run because capital markets think environmental destruction is a small price to pay as long as some people get rich.
What kids learn about personal cooling tech and what not won't matter when the supply of the raw materials required to make them is reserved for some VC-funded trillion-dollar 'startup' trying to synthesize an undetectable chemical weapon to get past the bureaucratic red tape of international treaties.
> Where people are arbitrarily jailed if they voice an opinion against the government?
I take it this ambitious Canadian grad hasn't had the temerity to protect his privacy before entering the land of the free[0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386895
Considering that the buyer is Google, it's more likely to be a Gemini customer with a Google Cloud plan.
The US doesn't default on his interest payments. The US consumer on the other hand....
> Sebastian Mandal, a San Francisco-based startup startup founder who describes himself on LinkedIn as a college dropout and a professional Minecraft player.
I see a Sequoia Capital funding round in his future.
The biggest buyers of ads are not promoting products, they're shilling for politicians. The same way junk mail props up the postal service, political ads keep the lights on at local TV channels. They are unwatchable during election season, and there's some election campaign happening all the time. Mayors, governors, senators, congress.
Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.
That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.
Tech itself may not be a big employer, but the whole point of paying for AI is to eventually save billions on salaries, payroll taxes and insurance premiums, is it not? What happens to the labor market and consumer confidence then?
I agree that the companies taking on debt have strong balance sheets. Yet they are taking on debt at high interest, and stacking it in off-balance sheet Special Purpose Vehicles. Why, when they have hundreds of billions in cash reserves that could pay for the buildout? It's not like they're socking that cash away to pay shareholders. The big dogs like Google and Meta are paying 27c a share, which is a rounding error for them.
Just because the hardware and inference costs
may decrease in the future doesn't mean prices will. The AI vendor market is the furthest thing from a competitive industry where there are limited barriers to entry and new market entrants exert downward pressure on prices and profit margins.
Every single company in this market is losing billions on this business, and the only way to make it back is to acquire paying customers at a loss and jack up prices later.
In other words, the private equity sales pitch. You left out the bit about jacking up the price and milking customers for every penny until their contracts expire.
You can't possibly believe Apple had no hand in the Huawei ban.
Consumer demand is much more price-sensitive than enterprise demand, not least because the latter can issue bonds to pay for RAM and GPUs. Prices for consumers are going up everywhere: food, gas, insurance, you name it.
Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch have a competitor that's the elephant in the room: Chinese Android handhelds that run rings around them on price and play everything from NES to Switch games locally as well as PS5/Steam via remote link.
"Involved in their own healthcare" tends to mean getting second opinions, reading medical articles, joining a support group and talking to other patients.
Pretty soon it will mean "I looked it up on ChatGPT and it says I don't need surgery".
From this[0]
> A lawsuit filed by Scott Winters, a 55-year-old pastor from Florida, claimed ChatGPT told him not to seek medical help after repeatedly asking about symptoms in the build-up to a near-fatal pulmonary embolism.
in the same article:
> OpenAI's Drew Pusateri told the BBC's US news partner CBS News that "ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be used as a substitute for medical care, diagnosis or treatment".
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwylp3nxp5yo
> If this makes the PS6 cheaper then great.
Yes, I'm sure that was top of mind for Playstation executives when making this decision. /s