News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

vladd

Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen on Saturday January 03, 2026 @07:37AM (#46475856)
Where does Russia's attack of Ukraine fits within this?
Re:Tesla sales drop for fifth month in a row in Europe on Sunday June 29, 2025 @06:15PM (#44417015)
The market can remain irrational more than you can remain liquid.
> Not really because there are too many other variables

You can average out countries that equalize property rights to the state vs. average of countries where property variance is respected, and check which ones are doing better vs worse.

> How do you know that creation of value can't exist in the presence of equality?

Equality of output would imply equality of inputs? People will no longer have the right to decide for themselves if they want to be busy creating wealth or busy doing more social/pleasurable things?

> yeah and it's 1000x better than cavemen banging on rocks in the stone age

Why do you take that improvement for granted? (in the context of today's nuclear treats, it's not a given that we'll able to propel this rate moving forward in the next 100 years, there's a non-zero probability that we wipe ourselves back to the stone age).

Or more generically, if you had to chose between two economic policies, one with 1'000x improvement where people can take risks and see variation in rewards according to their choices (and an element of luck/historical background), and another one where everyone is forced to the same output, irrespective of their actions, which leads some to pursue more pleasure activities to a larger fraction of their existence and the improvement is just 50x, which one would you choose for the society?

Is equality worthy as a goal in itself? And if so, enough in order to stop people in self-selecting doing what they want and letting them keep some percentage as a reward for assuming the risk? Even if it leads us as a society to slower growth?

> The current economic system funnels economic value from the poor to the ultra rich.

The economic system creates values (and you can compare it with alternatives such as Soviet Union to realize just by how much). It does this in an unequal way, by chance, historical context and self-selection preferences. But the creation of value still trumps any inequality it might have. With TV, air conditioning and phones, an entry mid-class person in US is having it ten times better than the kings of middle ages.

Re:Ditch Banks – Go with Money Market Funds and Treasuries on Thursday August 15, 2024 @11:50PM (#41263001)
Since bonds are always reaching their promised payout terms upon their maturity, you can manage that risk through proper alignment in maturity dates.

You can purchase multiple bonds that are spread around their term duration. E.g. buy now 1-year bonds, and repeat every 3 months. After 4 such cycles, you will now always have bonds reaching maturity every 3 months.

Or just buy shorter term ones to begin with (if the interest is still appealing), and move to longer term ones once you have enough maturity diversity for the advice in the previous paragraph.

Re:That time Verisign typo-squatted all of .com and .net on Tuesday November 28, 2023 @03:29AM (#38443603)
In Romania, one of the top 5 ISPs, telekom.ro, is still doing it in present days.
If the business is the customer, upgrading a machine increases the customer price hence it requires communication as it changes the benefits/cost value proposition.
Re:Bugzilla Celebrates 25 Years with Special Announcements on Sunday August 27, 2023 @01:31AM (#37279680)
> we are an independent entity not owned by or associated with the Mozilla Foundation

Who owns then Zarro Boogs Corporation?

Re:Jessica Livingston on Friday June 23, 2023 @03:46PM (#36451391)
https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types is a pretty good (and free) resource to get started in this field.
Why think in binary? His anecdote can be inspirational for others and testing his correlation is cheap to try out for others in similar predicaments.
People cannot create fiat currencies out of thin air. When done it's a crime (currency forgery).
I created a "Reddit for News" where various RSS feeds provide an initial stream of stories but people have Reddit-like abilities to upvote or submit their own.

It's at https://www.goobix.com/news/ , I would be happy to get feedback or build capabilities people feel as missing.

Just to remember that there are different sorts of liabilities and punishment.

For example, losing one's net worth might be an example. Shareholders are already subject to it, while for employees, even when fired, they just lose the potential of future earnings, leaving their accumulated net worth untouched.

Wikipedia calls this the principal-agent problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... ). Should employees in a position of power be agents that are putting up some collateral as a guarantee to be forfeit in case things go south? Or otherwise would unwarranted risk-taking behavior in their job be enough to go to jail when the results of their actions impact others in the world at large negatively?

Similarly to how we removed a lot of workforce from agriculture in the last century. The breadth and scope of services offered increased ten-fold and workers learned to add value in different ways in these new areas.
Re:We're Drowning in Subscriptions on Saturday March 18, 2023 @06:24PM (#35213742)
Which registrar are you using that allows payment in advance beyond 10 years?
Re:Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter 2022 [pdf] on Saturday February 25, 2023 @08:28AM (#34936503)
I liked in particular this year's collection of phrasings from Charlie, Warren's long time partner:

• The world is full of foolish gamblers, and they will not do as well as the patient investor.

• If you don’t see the world the way it is, it’s like judging something through a distorted lens.

• All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there. And a related thought: Early on, write your desired obituary – and then behave accordingly.

• If you don’t care whether you are rational or not, you won’t work on it. Then you will stay irrational and get lousy results.

• Patience can be learned. Having a long attention span and the ability to concentrate on one thing for a long time is a huge advantage.

• You can learn a lot from dead people. Read of the deceased you admire and detest.

• Don’t bail away in a sinking boat if you can swim to one that is seaworthy.

• A great company keeps working after you are not; a mediocre company won’t do that.

• Warren and I don’t focus on the froth of the market. We seek out good long-term investments and stubbornly hold them for a long time.

• Ben Graham said, “Day to day, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term it’s a weighing machine.” If you keep making something more valuable, then some wise person is going to notice it and start buying.

• There is no such thing as a 100% sure thing when investing. Thus, the use of leverage is dangerous. A string of wonderful numbers times zero will always equal zero. Don’t count on getting rich twice.

• You don’t, however, need to own a lot of things in order to get rich.

• You have to keep learning if you want to become a great investor. When the world changes, you must change.

• Warren and I hated railroad stocks for decades, but the world changed and finally the country had four huge railroads of vital importance to the American economy. We were slow to recognize the change, but better late than never.

• Finally, I will add two short sentences by Charlie that have been his decision-clinchers for decades: “Warren, think more about it. You’re smart and I’m right.”

> If you're going to make such a claim, the least you can do is cite at least one example.

You can take a look at the process of naturalization (becoming a Japanese citizen): "Those who wish to be naturalized must either have no nationality or, in principle, lose their nationality by naturalization."

Hence you could argue that this provision forbids foreigners that integrate into Japan nationality in remembering and being connected with their past identity (that might be seen as lacking purity).

Re:Let's Encrypt posts letter from executive director on Monday December 05, 2022 @07:49PM (#33874261)
I believe you get downvotes because you think by analogy rather than by reasoning. Not having that big corporation example doesn't negate Let's Encrypt's value proposition (and the improvement they brought compared with the way things were done before).

Also you're mixing security on data transportation with security of data at rest. Both are important but there are different solutions to each.

Re:Puter on Saturday December 03, 2022 @02:13AM (#33841429)
It unifies the Operating System with the cloud. Your local storage becomes irrelevant while at the same time you have full durability and portability of your environment on any device in the world.
Re:Ask HN: Are you a “lifer”? If so why? on Wednesday November 30, 2022 @01:41AM (#33797696)
Statistically, companies surviving that long are related to the food and/or accommodation industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
Price is what you pay, value is what you get.
Re:The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth on Sunday October 31, 2021 @09:50AM (#29056954)
>> the company's book value increases as its stock price rises because they own the shares they purchased.

You might refer to the company's intrinsec value.

On the book value, repurchased shares are accounted for at the original purchase price as treasury stock ( https://www.investopedia.com/articles/fundamental-analysis/0... ).

When phone companies came into existence, that's exactly what they did -- they amplified such conversations by making it easier for people to have phone calls and talk at a distance of each other.

They also got amplified whenever long distance calls got cheaper (as the overall volume of conversations increased).

The following has been used for sure in order to commit crimes and fiddle with democracy: Verizon phone conversations, Gmail discussions, Twitter, Snapchat or Tiktok messages etc.

Nobody wakes up and says "let's be unethical today", but rather, it's the reality of life with user generated content platforms, that either you get both outcomes, or you get none.

The discussion is about making people realize that the "technology" to keep only the good parts (without the downsides) wasn't invented yet.

Hence we're in a position to argue whether it would be more ethical to shutdown / censor everything, or have fruitful discussions on how to emphasize the good outcomes over the bad ones with the current tech (by first understanding it, something that politicians seem to be very bad at, or show little interest in it compared to the negative FB sentiment engagement they're generating in their voters -- ironic :) ).

Walmart is "manipulating" the placement of products on the shelf so that it's more likely for you to engage in bulk buying when you visit their stores.

Both Facebook and Walmart have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value for them.

The difference is that, with user generated content, the idea of black and white "bounds" of the law is no longer applicable and you have to devise a system of checks and balances based on probabilities.

You can consider 10'000 posts for offline analysis: give them to some human raters and decide retrospectively what engagement and thoughts (positive/negative) are they generating in teens, which should enable you to draw some statistics about the expected average outcome. This doesn't mean it's either scalable or economically feasible to do so in real time for every post (so you cannot take decisions based on something that doesn't exist at the individual post level).

You can have multiple algorithms, send all of them to human raters and get for each algorithm some aggregated behaviour, but then we're back to the book question above -- what ratio of positive vs negative outcome in outliers is acceptable, and how do you define a "legal"/"allowed" algorithm?

Let's try to phrase it in an actionable way for the law-makers to act upon it.

Are you suggesting that any profitable company hosting user-submitted content should invest all the profits in moderation teams to the point where they are either a) becoming profit-neutral or b) all the relevant content has been reviewed by a human moderator?

And how do you define relevant content -- having had 50 views? 10 views? 1 view? Who should decide where to set these limits? Do we believe politicians are going to do a better job at it rather than the existing situation? Or should we ban any non-human reviewed post just to move the certainty of illegal posts removals from 99.9% to 99.99%? (humans do make mistakes too)

(Facebook is really big so having just 99.99% of posts in compliance still means an awful amount of them escaping the system undetected)

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