exogeny

JMJ is amazing. Some of my favorite background music. I know that sounds pejorative but it's really great for that sort of quiet, thoughtful escape.

Here's a totally random piece of trivia: "social media" as a term was coined by the then wife of Seth Goldstein -- who founded a few different companies, Turntable.fm being the most notable -- and was originally the basis of a company he founded that was basically an ad network inside of games and apps built inside of the Facebook platform.

Seth is an interesting dude and I haven't caught up with him in awhile.

This is absolute comedy gold and I wanted you to know that I saw it and appreciated it.

That's great except for the 90s, hip-hop, male, and deep prompts!

I've lived in NYC for almost 15 years. I've never seen a more corrupt and shiftless organization than the NYPD. It's almost comical. I grew up in a small, Midwestern town and was never anti-cop until moving here, and it got immeasurably and irreparably worse during the George Floyd protests. Every single time anything ever got accelerated or instigated, it was by the police and not by a single protestor. Between the kettling, the instigation, and disrespect it became clear that they're a glorified gang that has operates with almost complete impunity and it shocks me that anyone in the city respects them or considers them a friend to the common good.

The most common run-in I have with them is standing at a crosswalk or sitting in an Uber and watching them put on the sirens and move everyone out of the way just so they don't have to sit in traffic. I'd estimate seeing this happen, oh, I don't know, about a thousand times while simultaneously I have never once seen them pull anyone over for any kind of traffic or moving violation.

You're the only person in this thread so far who seems to have a clear understanding of who is the one to blame in this story.

FanDuel is going to do like $6B in revenue this year. This entire story above happened for three reasons:

1. The CEO made terrible decisions in regards to how much and who they raised from. They got in over their hands as the company grew and the entire founding team got fired.

2. The CEO immediately after, who took over an unprofitable business that wasn't growing and was in bad shape after the merger with DraftKings got called off, took a deal that was the best he could do at the time. That CEO was a non-founding CFO before taking over, and was basically put in the C-Suite by KKR as a term of their investment in the business.

3. That deal to PaddyPowerBetfair, now Flutter, was completed about a year before PASPA was repealed and sports betting was legalized in the US. Had #2 happened a year later, or if #2 had happened with that information in mind, the deal terms would have been insanely different and way more valuable.

It's very easy in retrospect to say that the original CEO should have taken different terms, or that the following CEO should have taken a better deal. That's all hindsight.

All that said, I have zero sympathy for the original CEO and founders. I feel loads of sympathy for the employees, but again, if they stayed on after the deal, they're now sitting on an absolute gusher of cash.

Should have played more blackjack, nerdos!

This is a very thoughtful and sensible reply, but it's going to get lost in the storm and that is a shame.

Personally I've always thought that a lot of these issues boil down to intentional misreading or lack of understanding of things unsaid. As an example, a whole bunch of people, for some reason, took "Black Lives Matter" to mean "Only Black Lives Matter", as if that was said or as if that was the point.

In your example with Einstein, to me it would be perfectly valid for Gould to have said "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. We should seek to find and develop those people." But of course I would worry that those same people who took umbrage with the example of BLM would assume that it would be done at the expense of others, or that it would be done to exclusively benefit in a zero-sum way the unheralded, unfound geniuses in Gould's example.

I run a small startup, fifteen people, and yes, I believe in diversity in hiring and team composition. If all things are equal, then I will hire the person that brings a diverse perspective to my team, not on basis of identity but on basis of opinion, basis of experience, and basis of perspective. I will not pursue that diversity at the expense of hiring the best candidate, and I suspect my perspective is shared a lot more than people think, solely because the "If all things are equal" part is unsaid and it is simply too easy for the cynic or bad-faith arguer to assume otherwise.

Yeah, there's a word for that: pedophile. That's straight grooming.

This is as good of an endorsement as you'll ever see.

Also I am happy to be your next choice after Kyle. I'll join Stripe, Patrick!

Whaaaaaat! I attended CMU and didn't know this was a thing. I tried my best to turn all of my dorm-mates in Schlag on to the demoscene for months! I don't know how much or if any of it stuck, but I can feel assured that "Elysium" and "Odyssey" and "Second Reality" were exposed to a new generation, if only for a few minutes.

Well, anyway, rock on fellow Tartan(s). Thanks for keeping the demoscene hacker spirit alive!

My compliments on one of the few times I've actually seen that phrase used and spelled correctly.

People want it both ways. They want private business to use the free market to develop more efficient and better solutions than a socialized system, but also a limit to just how much that free market should compensate them.

Either you're a capitalist or you're not. If the company in question was Disney or Apple, this wouldn't be appearing on HN in any capacity.

It's so unnecessarily callous and such an unforced error. Why do this? Why accrue all of this bad PR for no reason?

Fuck Elmo. What a dick.

Jim Spanfeller is a herb.

This code really whips the llama's ass.

It's annoying that so many comments, depending on your tribe, try to pin the problem on one thing. Oh, it's because they're soft on crime. Oh, it's because Reagan shut down the mental health support system. And on and on.

The answer is: yes. It's all of these things. And all of the partisan, it-wasn't-us bickering gets us absolutely nowhere.

More housing needs to be built. Rezone everything. Hire more police, bring back beat work. Prosecute quality of life crimes. Commit those who are too mentally ill, or too addicted to proactively seek help on their own.

Simple: never listen to influencers about anything. They are not your friends. They are paid to sell you things, and in almost all cases, with zero disclosure of that.

This reads like a press release to me.

The exact same thing happened/is happening at Carnegie Mellon. To the school, the undergraduates are nothing but PR and legal liabilities, therefore any fun or social life must be eradicated.

It's news that Thiel is a villainous, hypocritical sociopath? Since when?

What does anyone care what that war criminal Kissinger thinks? Could you possibly find someone older, less reputable or less relevant than him?

For only $10 more, they'll send you three pounds of fries served in a greasy paper bag, a Terrible Towel, and a Donnie Iris cassette single of "Ah! Leah!". It's the best deal in academia.

All jokes aside, if you'll allow me a tangential but relevant aside, a lot of people have heard of Carnegie Mellon, but very few have heard of Richard Caliguiri or David Lawrence. They were both mayors of Pittsburgh, and both led the city through urban renewal and revitalization plans that accurately foresaw the decline of the steel industry and consequently redirected resources to future-forward endeavors -- in this case, academia. Fast forward almost fifty years, both CMU and UPitt are world-class institutions, a plethora of industries (finance, robotics, healthcare) are thriving, and the city is widely seen as one of the most living cities in America.

Sports, News, and Finance. Those verticals are all MASSIVE. Remember, just because you don't use them, that doesn't mean no one does.

My opinion, news is pretty clickbaity but Sports (particularly the season-long fantasy games) and Finance are both still best-in-class. It's borderline amazing how resilient they've been.

I was too young for DL but I absolutely remember its cousin, the hologram-driven Time Traveler [0]. It blew me away when I saw it in my local arcade, but I don't remember it being a good game at all. Most of my quarters at that time (1991-1992) were going to ST:TNG pinball, Outrunners/Virtua Racing, and STUN Runner.

Also worth a mention here is this kickass Italo remix of DL themes and samples [1] by Koto.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Traveler_(video_game) 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRffez98uYY

It's instructive in the sense of knowing where to avoid anti-knowledge lunatics hellbent on destroying objective truth.

Back in the day, I used to oversee a lot of usability research for a well-known travel engine. Every single time, people would choose the lowest possible base price. It did not matter if you explained to them how uncomfortable it might be, any add-on fees they'd occur, quality of product, or literally anything else. All that mattered was the first number they saw.

I don't know if it's a uniquely American thing, but the ability to wrap one's head around future cost additions or commensurate value is just completely not there, at all.

Well, it's a pretty simple calculus for the owners.

You're going to get people to pay for my stadium, Mr. Politician, or else losing this thing that millions of people in this city love is going to be, fairly or unfairly, blamed on you.

It's of course gross and hilariously stupid given that every professional sports team owner is a billionaire, but most of those marrow suckers didn't become billionaires by not leveraging incentives when the benefit for doing so is obvious.

I think the bigger problem is most of the companies that go public this way are dogshit money-losers that shouldn't be public in the first place.