erostrate

My bad, he's just so visible that I had incorrectly deduced he was CEO.

My understanding is that chessable was founded by streamer IM John Bartholomew as an educational platform, and like chess24 got acquired by Magnus Carlsen's group. I believe they are trying to create some synergies between chess24 and chessable but they still operate fairly separately.

Current landscape of chess platform as I understand it:

lichess: non-profit, free and open source, community oriented, high quality tech, growing userbase, amazing founder ornicar, much loved by its users and supporters including me. Regular online competitions well attended but doesn't organise major events. Doesn't really do things like video lessons or partnership with streamers as far as I know, probably due to non-profit status and community focus.

chess.com: for-profit, the largest user base, led by IM Danny Rensch. Tech is not as good as lichess but still okay-ish. Organises major events with GM commentators. Has partnerships with major streamers, such as the most successful (but controversial) US number 2 GM Hikaru Nakamura. I used to support them before lichess got big.

chess24: for-profit, led by GM Jan Gustaffson, much smaller than chess.com and lichess, supported by current world champion GM Magnus Carlsen. Tech is worse than both lichess and chess.com. Also organises important events, and also produces high quality content such as video lessons. I'm considering supporting them too as I watch a lot of their content but I just enjoy playing on lichess too much.

One fascinating thing is how both for-profit chess.com and chess24 have much worse tech than non-profit lichess despite presumably large budgets. For example chess24 platform has been under development for years and has become a running joke even for its employees. You'd think a chess website would be fairly simple tech in the grand scheme of things but clearly it's still hard to do it right. A testament to how impressive lichess founder and community is.

The WHO initially said there was no evidence supporting the need for masks in the general public. They only changed their stance in early June. In Europe many politicians were making the same claim, which was convenient because they didn't have enough masks.

From this (very good) FT article https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...

"But the specific engineering of container ships mean that they can’t get longer; they have to get wider. An oil tanker is a shoe box with a lid: hull on the bottom, oil in the middle, deck on top. But a container ship is a shoebox without a lid: hull on the bottom, then containers all the way up. It’s not as strong without the lid.

There are definitely hydrodynamic forces in the open ocean, it’s just that the ocean is usually in charge of them. And the biggest stress on a ship’s hull in heavy weather happens along the longitudinal bending moment — lengthwise, between the bow and the stern. The longer a ship gets, the worse the stress gets when a wave pushes up in the wrong place. As far as length goes for container ships, “we are at the limitations of welding and steel quality,” says Lataire. “I will not say that it is impossible to weld thicker plates, but in a way this is the economic limit.”

I downvoted you, not because I'm Chinese (I'm not) but because I think your post violates HN's guidelines.

Is there a good analysis somewhere of pragmatism in Chinese culture?

It seems that there is a particular brand of ultra-pragmatism and rule-gaming that is overrepresented in China.

Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else.

I don't mean to stereotype all of China negatively. I've worked with enough amazing Chinese colleagues to understand this is not all of China. I'm just curious if this pattern has some truth to it or if it's just a random racist stereotype, and how it can be explained.

If you take the opposite line, that Facebook is responsible for checking that the product is sold legally, then the conclusion is that Facebook would have to confirm legal ownership of every product before allowing a sale.

This also seems wrong.

The right solution is in the middle: Facebook should spend some effort validating the legality of the sale. The required standard of effort should depend on how much money Facebook is making from the ads, and on an estimate of the proportion of products sold illegally, amongst other things. The former to ensure that a very small similar website is not held to the same standard, the latter to ensure that if 99% of the products are sold illegally then Facebook is responsible.

Without knowing the total volume of these land ads and the proportion of illegal ones, it is hard to tell if there is anything to fix here.

Thank you so much! I've been using Vim for 5 years and I always thought :s was one of the major pain points.

> This is simply because companies pay money to individuals who then pay taxes. This is a feature not a bug as taxing companies is less efficient from just having employee pay as a deduction that gets taxed downstream.

So if a company has a large revenue that it mostly reinvests and pays low salaries, very little tax would be paid on this revenue, and that seems okay to you?

> People who complain about “companies not paying taxes” are like the “47% don’t pay taxes” people in that they don’t understand the principles behind taxation very well

Are you sure about that? Amazon paid a federal income tax of 1.2% in 2019 on 13B of U.S. income. I think this is what people complain about when they talk about companies not paying taxes.

Another version of the pdf: https://pdfhost.io/v/im99v6oam_howthingsfloat1991pdf.pdf

You're presenting group selection, natural selection at the level of the group, as an established theory. But that's not the case.

From Wikipedia, quoting evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne: "Group selection isn't widely accepted by evolutionists for several reasons."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection

You don't need to hold and transfer the cash immediately with T+2 settlement because effectively your broker is lending the cash to you for 2 days with the shares as collateral, hence the margin requirements and the RobinHood debacle.

But there's no fundamental reason that loan must be made by your broker, aside from the historical T+2 convention. You could just repo the shares for two days while you wait for the cash to arrive.

Taboola relies on the open web for its existence, but by littering it with their garbage for a quick buck they are contributing to drive people towards walled gardens. It's a self-destructive company. It reminds me of this fishing technique where they scrape the whole ocean floor with huge nets, slowly destroying the whole ecosystem in order to get a few more low quality fish.

I googled some orders of magnitudes. Bank of America total scope 1 and scope 2 emissions (all buildings + travel + other stuff) were about 1 million tons co2 per year [1].

A lower bound on Bitcoin mining emissions was 20 million tons in 2018. [2]

Of course there are more than one bank, banks perform a lot of functions that crypto doesn't, etc.

[1] https://about.bankofamerica.com/assets/pdf/Bank-of-America-2... [2] http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-018.pdf

Thanks for highlighting that, it's important to bear in mind Chesterton's fence. But it's also important to consider whether this particular feature is working as intended.

For what it's worth I don't care much about Lewandowski's pardon and I suspect a large part of the outrage here is because his compensation was public and he is a tech worker. There are other more salient recent examples suggesting the pardon system is being abused.

I can't tell if this is a joke or not.

As an experienced long distance hiker/runner would you have pushed through the pain as the author did?

It seems crazy to me, to push through pain so bad it "makes you chest constrict", likely coming from bone as opposed to soft tissue, and in an area (foot) where long term damage would be very bad. I've pushed through minor cases of shin splints and tendonitis but what the author describes sounds irresponsible to me?

So I'm wondering if I'm too wimpy or if the author is irresponsible?

That's a very interesting idea. However cycling is also hugely popular in protestant countries, eg Netherlands or the UK. And other sports share this fascination with suffering. For example in mountaineering one of the most famous stories is that of Joe Simpson going down a remote mountain in the Andes with a broken leg and no food or water over several days.

I don't follow? I wasn't implying that this is a good thing, or that it makes tech people special, and certainly not that it makes them superior.

Edit: here's an xkcd more relevant to what I meant: https://xkcd.com/309/

And tech people tend to be much more willing to spend time&effort "optimizing" their choices to fit their values than the average population. At least for "small to medium" choices - not sure about raising children.

This article is not great, it reads too much like scaremongering. But the underlying problem of PFOA/PFOS is real. The article fails to mention that most chemical companies have been phasing out these chemicals for several years.

There is a pretty good movie about this topic, Dark Waters. The movie is well informed, largely accurate, and more factual than this article. The main protagonist of the movie is actually Robert Billott, the author of this article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Waters_(2019_film)

I disagree, there are world wide debates going on about the cost and benefits of globalization, about the merits and failures of western liberal democracies, about the interaction of capitalism and the environment, about economic inequality, etc.

> Articles about this post would have been more appropriately titled “Cellebrite accidentally reveals that their technical abilities are as bankrupt as their function in the world.”

was also pretty good.

I find it strange how many prefer to preserve a system where the 400 richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest 150 million citizens (3200 billions), rather than see 1% of this wealth wasted by government inefficiencies.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

This brand of cynicism where you claim that everything is expected can also be a way to protect yourself from negative information. If you care about say privacy and you constantly receive news about surveillance, it can be disheartening, so it's easier to dismiss the news with "well, what did you expect?". I know I used to do that, in my head at least. I'm not advocating for cynicism of course, just saying that people might be doing it for deeper reasons than sounding smart and world-weary.

That's an amazing article, thanks for sharing!

Ironically many people here seem to be jumping to conclusions after reading only his side of the story, something which he (rightly) reproaches to NumFOCUS in the very article.

Disclaimer: I watched some of the talk and I do think Jeremy Howard appears largely accurate and right, and I empathise with his feelings. But I wouldn't get to a definitive conclusion until NumFOCUS has had a chance to present their side.

> a) 80% of the content on publications like TechCrunch [2] is all about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin. I challenge, you go there RIGHT NOW. COUNT the % of stories about FAANG companies.

For the lazy, I did just that, 19 stories under the "latest" Tag, 7 of which are about Google/Apple/Tesla/Virgin/Microsoft. So about 36%.

Good point thanks I missed that.