Hacker News Reader

dasudasuon Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

Ebay isn't that bad either for cheap Chinese products. Lots of direct Chinese sellers.

dasudasuon A Statistical Estimate of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy

In many sub-fields of physics, authorship is alphabetical.

dasudasuon FATCA Pushes “Accidental” Americans to Give Up US Citizenship

It's not true to say they necessarily don't use any of the services. The US still defend its citizens abroad, and might evacuate you in case some disaster happens, do hostage rescue using the full power of its military and intelligence agencies, and will generally provide consular help and speak on your behalf should you get into trouble.

dasudasuon GoDaddy employees told they were getting a holiday bonus in a phishing test

"And now here is the secret code phrase to show this is legitimate: [...]"

Not sure how you inform people about benefits without giving a link, if the intranet isn’t easy to navigate, short of including everything in the email all the time. So how should it be done anyway?

dasudasuon Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform

It’s not a tech issue. You can target anyone that’s part of a disaggregated network and broadcasts it. That’s true for torrents, TOR nodes, or blockchains.

dasudasuon Airbnb’s Stunning IPO

You do still hear about hidden cameras however.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/what-...

dasudasuon Maybe we shouldn't want a fully decentralized web

>never believed in the concept at all

New generations come and go. Nobody is born with pre-existing notions of what is right or not, including free speech. It's not a surprise that some values are replaced with others on a per generation basis.

dasudasuon S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch cryptocurrency indexes in 2021

No. A company that doesn't grow but has positive cash flow is still worth something. You can view a stock as a bond with a coupon rate that is not fixed and doesn't have to be paid back to you immediately if the company thinks it can reinvest it to make even more money. A company's stock might drop at the ex-dividend date, but it would have gone up incrementally each day before that.

dasudasuon US internet speeds 91% faster in 2020 according to user speed tests

Yep. Service providers didn't ramp up their investments at all into telecom equipment providers during covid, which is impressive. They just had good capacity that was never fully used. They're going slowly on the whole 5G thing now as they don't expect customers to be ready for massive price hikes to their plans. Ultimately the capacity of customers (individuals and businesses) to pay is what drive those investments, regardless of how much everyone claim to need ever increasing bandwidths.

dasudasuon Convolution Is Fancy Multiplication

The etymology is the same in English.

To convolve : to roll together : writhe.

Convolution : a form or shape that is folded in curved or tortuous windings.

dasudasuon Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism

Not sure why you would even mention publicly traded companies for your point. Now the actual stock market, comprised of millions of individual investors, is propping up those market capitalizations. The VC delivered them to their IPO, and the market accepted them, so clearly they did something right as far as they are concerned.

dasudasuon Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism

How are we supposed to fund new capital-intensive ventures otherwise? The government just subsidizes everything at the taxpayers' expense? (Welcome to Canada and Europe.) The government just picks winners in advance? (Welcome to the PRC.)

Capitalism is supposed to reward people that were able to succeed from previous ventures, or alternatively allow people to voluntarily pool more modest amounts of capital together. Everything gets distorted in the real-world, of course.

dasudasuon Guitar Center files for bankruptcy

They approach a bank, or issue some bonds, and it goes something like: "Lend us 1 billion to acquire this company. We'll pay the interest from the operating income. It will also be secured against the assets of the company."

So from the point of view of a bank or bond-holder, it's not such a bad deal if the company survives. It's not a bad deal either for the past owner who does cash out. Then, after the acquisition, they put the debt on that company's books because they were technically costs incurred from that company, and there is nobody to stop them anyway.

dasudasuon Nvidia Announces A100 80GB GPU for AI

I was reading the latest earnings call transcript of this HFT firm Virtu Financial the other day, and it does appear to be that way.

>So there is a back and forth here and all of the other players that we compete with, they are also economic animals. They don't have any magic elixir or magic algorithm that we don't have, right. We all kind of are doing the same thing and we're all providing great service and value for the marketplace. So I know this a little handy way to give an answer but there is an ebbs and flows around competition. The business continues to be very profitable for us on a net basis. On a gross basis it's incredibly profitable but as I said in my remarks, we have paid, put that in quotes, not in our financials we've provided back to our retail customers about $950 million of price improvement this year.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4386120-virtu-financial-inc...

Top quantitative firms like RenTec don't rely critically on speed or compute power, but rather on high quality data, which they've also said publicly.

dasudasuon Save like a pessimist, invest like an optimist

"In the long term we are all dead" so why would it even matter if over 2100 years your perfect 5% compounding hasn't happened as expected? No place on earth experienced nothing short of complete societal overhaul in that span -- most often multiple times at that.

dasudasuon The Prestige Trap: finance, big tech, and consulting

>In reality, they have it backward—prestige follows excellence. Exposure to prestige can't make you successful any more than spending time around rich people can make you wealthy.

Exposure to "prestige" and by proxy exposure to ambition-driven individuals that are also "excellent" enough to be accepted into the "in-group" is a big factor into how you unlock your own potential. The author seems to hold the view that being excellent is just an innate quality that follows you around no matter what. If you join some organization where nobody cares, nobody pushes you to be excellent, or can't even recognize excellency when it exists, then no, you won't become a superstar out of nowhere and have the world at your feet. Even founding a startup nowadays would be considered a "high prestige" move, because few people can really afford to stop a menial job to pursue that.

dasudasuon How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

As a reviewer, it’s when you see one of those papers where the impact is not so clear, and at best is extremely incremental or just a slightly different take on something that has already been done. You can tell a grad student spent a lot of effort to come up with this. If you reject it, you’re just going to make his/her graduation that much harder. It’s like looking at a very involved homework. The alternative is to gatekeep the field a lot more and make people drop from their PhD midway through.

dasudasuon How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

Humanities tend to have much lower stipends such that it needs to be supplemented with tons of teaching assistantships.

dasudasuon Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit Speech

Fits right in with their social credit idea. I don't think it's even a veiled reference.

dasudasuon I sold Baremetrics

Savvy investors include non-dilutive clauses when they know money needs to be raised, but good luck trying to negotiate this as an employee. It’s also not too bad if the dilution occurs at increasingly higher share valuations and help compound growth (see TSLA).

dasudasuon I sold Baremetrics

I doubt they knew he would make a blog post with this many details. But still, good will can get around through word of mouth.

dasudasuon McDonald's is adding plant-based burgers to the menu

Humans might have been eating a lot more meat in the past when they were hunter-gatherers: it's just that their entire existence was centered around getting that food. Look at Inuits and how little plant based food they consumed.

dasudasuon Toronto-area lawyer had to flee Canada after taking on the tow truck industry

These insurance companies are not stupid. The incentives don't align perfectly. They can also just hike the price of the insurance policy and pass along the cost to the consumer. Much less trouble than taking on the mob. If the problem truly is systemic, then your competitors are just as affected as you are, and it's a wash. If you solve the problem, then you also solve it for your competitor.

dasudasuon Drivers react to Tesla’s full self-driving beta release

This is exactly why regulations such as professional engineering licenses were put into place. You don’t want someone with that mentality building a bridge.

dasudasuon A Little Money Laundering Can Have a Big Impact on Real Estate Prices (2019)

The argument being made is that this wild speculation is enabled by the money laundering. If you know laundering will keep happening with impunity and that the whole thing is tacitly approved and backstopped by the Canadian government, then it becomes rational to participate too.

dasudasuon The pandemic turned my parents into day traders

Asset inflation, probably, which is what many people agreed happened in the last decade.

dasudasuon The pandemic turned my parents into day traders

Consider that trillions in new money were created out of thin air and that bond yields crashed. The discount rate for equities just got massively re-evaluated. Also, only select sectors that were already overweighted by indices are up significantly from pre-pandemic levels.

dasudasuon Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account

With two parties divided along ideological left-right lines, it’s expected that a majority won’t be switching side too often in their lifetime. The opposite would be ideologically weak parties doing a form of clientelism that would change according to the trends of the day.

dasudasuon Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?

So the customer set up an IT service with multiple servers to sync with yours so that both can sync to the ledger? How does that work in practice? Is someone also monitoring that nobody is doing a 50% attack? Are both parties present when something is inserted into the blockchain?