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ThrustVectoringon Ask HN: Why do search functions everywhere not return what I search for?

Elasticsearch or a functionally equivalent competitor is a straightforward commercial-off-the-shelf solution for text search. Default settings for it include fuzzy matching and returning "relevant" results instead of only exact ones.

Pretty sure there's nothing more nefarious going on than a bunch of different engineers and different companies plugging in COTS text search solutions with minimal customization.

ThrustVectoringon Google combines Maps and Waze teams in restructuring move

They're careerist, not bored. The promotion process at Google is how you advance your career, and shipping new applications and features is how you get promoted.

ThrustVectoringon $7M lost on Amazon inventory, then bankrupt

It's principle-agent problems all the way down; the compliance and enforcement teams do not care about the best interest of Amazon as a whole. They care about ensuring that the specific KPIs they're evaluated on look good, from top-of-division management down to line members. In all likelihood, Amazon gets exactly what they measure - something like number of tickets closed, number of legal or regulatory incidents, etc.

You always want to identify the job title of who you're talking to and have a good guess as to what their priorities are. It sounds like they repeatedly talked to people whose job description is "close as many support tickets as possible with the hours and staffing resources you have". I'm not at all surprised that the result was getting their tickets closed with zero long-term improvement or concern about their situation.

ThrustVectoringon Stripe account suffered a card test

Referrals from business associates, angel investors, etc. There's a decent amount of various bits and bobs of domain knowledge that comes along with funding, and referring you to a lawyer is one of them. Past that, any good lawyer working outside their specialty will often know and be able to refer you to someone who can work inside the specialty you need.

ThrustVectoringon Stripe account suffered a card test

This sounds like a significant business dispute covered by specific contracts and regulations. You should get a lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer and have a board of directors, funders, or the like, this is a good resource to use to get a lawyer.

Anyone advising specific actions to take in this thread that aren't "get a lawyer, preferably an expert in this field, and follow their advice" is doing you a disservice. This is almost certainly something you can't DIY. If the monetary amounts are too small to be worth a lawyer, you have very limited options.

Get. A. Lawyer.

ThrustVectoringon We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

Mortgage-backed securities weren't exactly the problem, it was merely the vehicle in which a trans-Atlantic banking regulation arbitrage trade was carried out, and the trade accidentally became fully self-financing. US mortgage originators and banks were allowed to take risk if they sold it off onto the capital markets, and EU banks were allowed to take risk as long as it was deemed "safe" by ratings agencies.

The truly pernicious part is the self-financing spiral. Banks issued mortgages, which deposit cash in the home seller's account. Seller puts the cash into a money market fund. MMF gets short-term interest by financing AAA-rated securities. EU banks use this financing to buy senior tranches of MBSes. These MBS purchases allow banks to issue more mortgages by freeing up their capitalization.

Like, zero-sum alchemy will only generate small frauds and relatively limited losses. You need large amounts of leverage and some kind of self-financing spiral to generate catastrophic de-leveraging events.

ThrustVectoringon California man fined for selling maps of property boundaries without a license

Commercial speech is speech, and ought to have first amendment protection. The regulation should be structured in terms of requiring licensed surveys for specific uses (eg, mortgage underwriting), not making unlicensed line-drawing illegal.

ThrustVectoringon Made in America is back, leaving US factories scrambling to find workers

> Why should residential property values increase anyway?

Total non-worker consumption is equal to the unconsumed portion of total worker production, the worker-to-retiree ratio is getting worse each year, and total productivity gains are stalling. Working-age adults have to get squeezed somehow on pain of retirees voting different policies, and housing/rent/mortgage is the least flexible in terms of household budget and least politically obvious pathway for it.

ThrustVectoringon Made in America is back, leaving US factories scrambling to find workers

Every real dollar you add back to worker consumption via housing affordability measures is a real dollar you remove from non-worker consumption via a reduction in investment income via rents, mortgages, and housing sales. Housing is a market where there's extremely little productivity gains available for improving the size of the pie as a whole - at best you can improve energy efficiency, commuting waste, or other non-valuable housing related consumption. But if all you're doing is making housing more financially affordable, you're going to have to deal with the fact that Peter's financial savings is Paul's lost rent-seeking, and Paul is generally a pensioner that votes.

ThrustVectoringon More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude

If you're at all the target audience for this website, you and your entire social circle are soft targets for debt collectors. You have a high credit score and care about it, you have bank accounts and non-retirement investment accounts, you may have home equity in a state that doesn't protect the hell out of it like Texas, etc. If you get sued for $20k and a judgement gets entered, odds are your creditor ends up getting the full $20k. If this isn't you then I apologize for stereotyping, but this does describe a majority of the commentariat here.

A lot of the subjects of these articles are from very different socioeconomic backgrounds and will have a very different experience. Their bank account either doesn't exist or has like a week's pay in it. If they have investments, they're in an untouchable 401(k). They may live in a state that forbids wage garnishment, and even if you get that their wages may already be garnished and immune to further action. You might be able to grab their tax refunds, but those might already be spoken for by other creditors. And to top it all off, bankruptcy court can at any time issue a stay of proceedings and follow it up with a discharge of debts.

In short, there's a reason why most consumer debts are sold on for pennies on the dollar. That's what you actually get from it - maybe you talk some poor sod into paying $20/mo on a $20k debt that you bought for $200. Especially against an intransigent target that rightfully believes the debt to be morally invalid, you can find it extremely difficult to actually collect on a debt.

Anyhow, my point is that attempting to enforce these contract provisions invites PR/legal/political blowback that far outweighs maybe getting a thousand dollars out of the small cohort that actually calls the bluff and makes them make them pay.

ThrustVectoringon More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude

You can't get blood from a stone, and there's no law that says you can't deliberately set up your finances to be maximally stone-like. IMO you should be doing this anyways so that the medical billing system can't decide to steal your life savings.

ThrustVectoringon Empty offices are becoming apartments in Texas’s big cities

Far more likely than a mortgage modification is a straightforward sale of the property to new ownership (who then goes on to refurbish as residential and sell or lease the units). The banks have a specific dollar amount that pays off their obligation in full, at which point it's the buyer's problem (and their financing).

ThrustVectoringon Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors

The $350 is the cost to the department in terms of things that scale per student (specifically faculty for teaching, grading homework, etc). The university as a whole has many other expenses.

ThrustVectoringon Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare

This is an organized campaign to shut down a website by targeting their third-party infrastructure website. Kiwi Farms is a terrible place by pretty much any objective measure, sure, but do you think the people responsible for this campaign won't move on to the next-worst content that they can find? Are you sure that their view of objectionable material is going to align with yours? How worried are you that their political opponents are going to draw inspiration from these successes and undergo copycat campaigns against the websites they hate?

ThrustVectoringon Kiwi Farms response to CloudFlare

To be fair to CloudFlare, their entire business model is dependent on the US regulatory environment and section 230 protections. If there's a credible threat from Congress along the lines of "if the internet won't self-regulate, we'll have to do it for them", it's existential to their business.

ThrustVectoringon Attorney General Bonta Announces Settlement with Sephora on CCPA/GPC Enforcement

> short of contacting a legal department that has no public contact info

All corporations are required to have an "agent for service of process" in the state they are registered in, and the secretary of state should maintain a lookup tool for this (haven't checked all 50 but it's common). Opt-out should take you approximately ten minutes - look up their agent for service of process, and send a certified letter explaining the action you want them to take to avoid the lawsuit you are considering.

ThrustVectoringon Military drone swarms and how to combat them

Everything other than "sit on rooftops with a camera" in the post is just technically wrong.

1. Needles do not have the aerodynamic properties necessary to be effectively fired.

2. Chemical explosives and kinetic payloads are far better in terms of energy and weight than railguns. You'd see electromagnetic launchers being used for nailguns if they were at all reasonable for the relatively low amounts of power involved, and they aren't, and it's for good engineering reasons.

3. Chemical agents often have shelf-life issues, particularly when they're stored like you're proposing.

4. Solar recharging is going to have significant weight costs and result in either low duty cycles (most of the time spent sitting waiting for more energy) or other significant performance tradeoffs.

5. Perching on a power line does not give you access to electrical energy, you need a voltage difference to recharge, plus line voltages are really unsuitable for batteries and electronics, so you'd need a large (and heavy) transformer to step things down anyways.

6. Everyone with the technical capability to develop nuclear-powered aircraft has already looked at the problems and risks involved and said "oh hell no". Furthermore, if you miniaturize these things so they can be deployed en masse, the battery size and long-term contamination risk go way down anyways.

ThrustVectoringon Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

Apology accepted, and I'll take that as permission to try to re-explain myself while I'm three beers deep.

There's an economic analysis trick that can cut through a hell of a lot of cruft and confusing abstraction - whatever happens with the dollars and financial instruments you ignore, and you take a pure look at the real goods and services involved. In these terms, the landlord/tenant relationship looks like "some guy makes a bunch of widgets and only uses some of them, selling the rest for rent money. The rent money can be used to buy those widgets, letting the landlord consume that many widgets without physically making them. Generalize this about generic 'stuff' instead of just widgets."

This is what bothers me about your suggestion to redirect money from non-rent economic activity. How do you want to redirect the widget consumption to make the actual physical changes necessary to have additional productive economic activity? Do you want to apply the squeeze to landlord, tenants, or both? And again, I'm not asking where the money comes from because it's completely irrelevant to this analysis: a more productive set of businesses will require more machinery, warehouses, etc. The labor and material used for these come at the expense of making other stuff, and this physical investment of real goods and services is someone's stuff that they made without consuming.

Like, the lack of an answer to this question is really what makes me think this solution is wishful thinking. There's many answers to the question of who gets squeezed in terms of real consumption, but with very different consequences:

1) Nobody gets squeezed. Workers produce and consume the same, there's the same amount of real businesses, and the same amount of non-worker consumption. The difference is something like "instead of your job paying $4000/mo (after tax) while rent is $2000/mo, now your job pays $3000/mo and rent is $1000/mo". You still have the same excess production over consumption, but more of it gets siphoned off by your employer instead of your landlord.

2) Landlords get squeezed. Rents might get reduced, but this isn't necessary - what matters is landlord consumption goes down. If rents are lower, then workers have excess consumption available, but they forgo it in favor of productive investments in new businesses. If rents don't go down, then landlords forgo this consumption in favor of productive investments in new businesses. Either way, it's landlord consumption that is reduced, the only thing that changes is the nominal owner of these businesses.

3) Workers get squeezed. Rents might or might not change, again, and it's only relevant for who the on-paper owner of these new businesses are. If rent is the same, then workers have to save more and forgo more consumption to make the businesses exists. If rents change to finance this, then they go up so that landlords can build businesses without reducing their consumption.

4) Mix-and-match between the effects of various changes. You can literally get all three of the previous situations simultaneously - businesses get better at underpaying employees for their owners' benefit, landlords consume somewhat less, and workers also consume less, all while rents do anything.

In summary, allocating more investment into non-rent economic activity requires someone to not consume the real goods and services that go into making these businesses. It's some combination of the renter and the landlord depriving themselves of consumption, and if neither consumer budgets on the question then you've merely changed the financial description for why identical real transfers are happening.

ThrustVectoringon The world map that reboots your brain

https://ibb.co/BVfgYj2

This is the best I could do, and it's pretty much just putting the vast empty expanses of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in the higher-distortion areas near the top and bottom.

ThrustVectoringon Integrating variants in 42k autism cases identifies mutations in new genes

An autism diagnosis means that you're too autistic to function in society without causing mental health professionals to be involved in your life. There's at least two easily identifiable non-genetic factors: society can lower the threshold of autistic behavior that it tolerates, and mental health professionals can be involved more often and at lower general thresholds.

ThrustVectoringon Integrating variants in 42k autism cases identifies mutations in new genes

So, a big thing about mental health diagnoses in general is that they have two components: an identifiable behavioral difference from neurotypical baseline, and enough difficulties and social conflict in their life that mental health professionals end up getting involved. The second part is important to keep in mind - people who are like Bill Gross and wind up happily married and running a highly successful bond fund simply do not get diagnosed at nearly the rate as an eleven year old who cannot go through a school day without a screaming meltdown.

This is especially important when it comes to identifying genetic correlations with autism, since anything that negatively impacts overall functioning is going to wind up positively correlated with autism diagnoses. Nobody sane is going to argue that having an itchy skin condition means that you're more autistic, but an autist with itchy skin is more likely to have enough behavioral issues in school to meet the threshold for a mental health referral.

To summarize my point, there's all sorts of genetic stuff that will end up completely unrelated with being autistic, but will end up correlated with getting diagnosed as autistic. This is because merely being neuro-atypical is not enough to get a mental health diagnosis, you need to combine it with enough life difficulties and social conflict to drive the bureaucratic machinery involved with producing a diagnosis.

ThrustVectoringon Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

Yes, businesses produce actual value. The problem is in what you're diverting from, the ground rents extracted by artificial housing supply constraints. Whether you pay your landlord $X or $Y has zero direct effect on the total amount of real goods and services produced and consumed by the economy as a whole, it's purely redistributive. So if you reduce the total amount of rents paid to landlords, you are enriching renters at the expense of landlords without changing the total size of the real economy, and there's no real goods and services freed up to then be productively used by businesses to generate actual value.

ThrustVectoringon Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

> What we need is a way for all that unproductive capital used to directly fund the businesses of the young, growing the real economy (rather than the financial).

You're conflating financial "capital" with real productive capital here. In real terms, non-productive financial assets simply do not matter; whether landlords extract a billion or a trillion dollars makes not a whit of difference in the real goods and services the economy produces.

If you redirect financial assets from bidding up the value of housing to bidding up the value of small businesses, you've simply moved the siphon from cost of rent to the cost of owning your own business and/or suppressing wages.

ThrustVectoringon Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

Housing crises are a symptom, not a cause. The root issue is demographics, specifically the worker-to-retiree ratio growing at a rate that outpaces productivity growth. Since saving is essentially impossible at societal scales and generational timeframes (how exactly is a car built in 1980 supposed to cause more nurses to provide healthcare in 2020?), tomorrow's workers have to be coerced into transferring real goods and services to tomorrow's retirees. There's essentially two broad categories for this: "saving" by exchanging unconsumed current production for financial assets from retirees, and paying taxes.

If you managed to fix a housing crisis, the only way of doing so is torpedoing retiree financial assets (mix of personal home equity and pension fund), which would shortly cause an increase in entitlement transfers to sustain retiree standards of living. The only way to ease the combined tax and rent-seeking load on younger workers is to reduce the total transfer to non-workers, and the political balance of power forbids this, so things will remain fucked.

ThrustVectoringon $23M YouTube music royalties heist is a reminder that online copyright is flawed

The system YouTube has built for copyright holders is highly privileged, and you should not be surprised that anyone who can manage to take advantage of it does. For example, the cost to generate some kind of copyrighted music and submit it to ContentID is cheap enough that content creators can monetize their own videos by deliberately including music designed to trip ContentID and pay the copyright owner (that is, themselves) advertising revenue.

The advantage to this is that when there are multiple competing copyright claims on a video, one common solution is that advertising revenue is split between claimants. So if you monetize via a copyright claim, you get 1/Nth of the advertising money, rather than the flat zero that the uploader gets when subjected to copyright claims.

ThrustVectoringon “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

"You can't acknowledge when you're wrong" isn't about whether or not you're actually wrong, whether or not you acknowledge it, or even about you, really. It's often a social ploy to make your agreement unnecessary for the rest of the group to commit to collective understanding and action. "Oh, Jim just can't admit when he's wrong" lets the rest of the group use a "consensus of people we think are behaving reasonably" instead of actual consensus.

(The biggest other thing this can be is a complaint that the victim doesn't let the complainant win enough arguments, and that the audience should consider more of the arguments won without the victim conceding and with an extra penalty of being seen as a sore loser.)

ThrustVectoringon “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

Mental health diagnoses pretty much only happen when the patient's life is impacted enough to convince the people involved in their life that there's a problem and figuring it out is necessary. If you get good enough grades, have a non-zero amount of friends, have a family and career that accommodates your random foibles, and generally manage your life well, then you can be as textbook mentally ill as you want without ever getting mental health professionals involved in your life.

As a relatively famous example, take Bill Gross, aka the "Bond King". He only realized he had Asperger's in his seventies when it was randomly the topic of a psychiatrist he was having dinner with. And why would he seek out some kind of diagnosis? He's happily married and running fantastically successful bond funds.

ThrustVectoringon Enough with the notifications

The pattern is usually worse than you think, because you click "not now".

Typically, the browser or phone OS does enforce a yes-or-no answer, and if you pick "no" the site or app is not allowed to ask again. So the "Would you like notifications" screen doesn't actually use the host program's API to enable notifications, it just brings up the dialog and asks you again.

This often means that there is a "no and stop asking" option. You just have to realize which dialogs are brought up by the application or the host environment, "accept" the application's request, and then deny the actual permissions request.

ThrustVectoringon Ask HN: What tone to use in code review suggestions?

If there's a significant number of nitpicks, I'll generate an issue to implement/fix/improve linting tools.

ThrustVectoringon It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal

You have to identify and avoid the p2w rails in order to pull this off. Specifically:

1. Put the game down when you get hard time-gated

2. Don't do PvP

3. Especially with a leaderboard feature

4. Especially in grouped content

I'm sure it's a good game up until the PMs and behavioral psychologists decide you're invested enough to put up with time-walls.