hrunt

Normally, when a company gets 80% of their revenue from one line of business, the market does not see them as "diversified". Are you saying that you think everyone on HN thinks they get a larger precentage of their revenue from ads, or that the 80/20 split in their revenue does not accurately represent their diversification?

I pay them for the family plan. Being able to share items with my wife and kids (particularly joint accounts) is extremely useful, and they do it without creating two classes of passwords (like LastPass, my previous vault).

BTW, the paid accounts provide TOTP code storage, more comprehensive password health reports, emergency vault access for others, hardware key support, someone to call with problems[0], and encrypted file sending.[0]

[0] https://bitwarden.com/pricing/

Imagine for a minute that you have a hammer. This hammer is a very useful tool and you have never had a problem with it. You don't know what is in the hammer -- could be steel, could be titanium, could be uranium (you're not a scientist!) -- but you know that it has always worked for you. Your experience with the hammer is so positive, you would buy another hammer from the company again, without question.

One day, the company that makes this hammer says that they will be updating it to automatically tell the company a bunch of information about the hammer's use -- when it's used, where it's used, what the environment is like around the hammer, how many times it's used, what it's used for. They assure you that they don't care about who is using the hammer, but obviously it will be YOUR hammer reporting the information, so at some level it will be associated with you.

Why are they doing this? Well, they know that sometimes their hammers break. They only know this, though, because sometimes their hammers break for their own employees and sometimes customers tell them hammers break. They would really like to know ALL the times their hammers break, though, so that can try to fix all the problems with their hammers, and not just the ones they see or get reported to them. They say this will be best for their customers and that's why customers should be on board with the change.

No one would ever buy that hammer again, right?

Regardless of the privacy implications of the company knowing everything about your usage of the hammer, the company is basically saying that their hammers break so much that many of their customers don't bother telling them and just go use someone's hammer. In other words, their product is bad and their customers don't value it enough to deal with it.

Don't even get me started on paying monthly for that hammer ...

I always thought this was a genius move. Remember, at the time, Apple had no product in the space. The market was highly fragmented, and cell phones were becoming commodity devices. Here's Apple wading into a sea of competitors, with a product that was priced outside of the normal range and needing to differentiate itself. With the AT&T deal, Apple accomplished several things:

1. It put the marketing might of one of the largest corporations behind its brand-new, niche product. The deal created an incentive for this corporation to market the product on Apple's behalf.

2. It created a forced scarcity. Only /some/ people (those on AT&T) could get the iPhone, which immediately created a brand distinction necessary for a luxury product. On day 1, there were haves and have-nots.

3. It provided an out for Apple not ramping up production too fast (whether they could or not). If the iPhone failed, they wouldn't have product everywhere. If Apple couldn't make iPhones fast enough, they would only be affecting a subset of the market.

4. It limited Apple's engineering requirements. They only had to support AT&T's network on day 1, and not the network technologies of the other carriers. Limiting exclusivity to AT&T meant that they could focus on the product while delaying the technical challenges of supporting multiple cellular networks.

If you are like me and wonder, "What's the point of a centralized digital currency in economies where almost all financial transactions are effectively digital anyway?" I found this HBR article[0] provides a good overview of how an economy with a CBDC looks different than our current economy, why countries may want that, and why countries may not want that.

[0] https://hbr.org/2021/10/what-if-central-banks-issued-digital...

The companies spent all the money this year on R&D expenditures. That was cash out of their pocket (they spent it this year, so it reduced this year's cash on hand). The effect of the rollback is that they can now only count 20% of those expenditures to reduce their profits (and, by extension, their taxes) this year, so they are paying taxes this year on the remaining 80%. While yes, the profits are higher, the cash is not any higher, and cash pays the tax bill.

Note, this was not an "unexpected" change (it's been in the code), but it WAS unexpected that the provision was not extended.

Note that this affects not just startups. My wife's firm is a small, employee-owned, non-tech S-corp. This hit them as well. It resulted in tax bills for the shareholders approximately 25-30% greater than the firm's accountants expected them to be. The shareholders are on the hook for those higher taxes, although the company did the right thing and distributed extra cash to them to offset the higher taxes.

> Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.

If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.

Thanks for noting that. I've updated the title since so many people (not unreasonably) seemed to jump to the inclusion that "investigators" meant "police".

I am not a physicist, so I am hoping someone with more understanding can explain this to me. Why do we say that we "discovered" a new uranium isotope that scientists effectively created in a lab under very specific, man-made conditions? How come we don't say that we "manufactured" this new isotope? For all intents and purposes, this kind of atomic configuration would not exist except for man's specific efforts.

There are plenty of sports with different rules between amateurs and the pros. Amateur and pro boxing use different scoring systems. American football uses a different ball, different clock rules, different catch-possession rules, etc. Different baseball leagues use aluminum vs. wooden bats. Track uses different hurdle heights. None of these remove the central conceit of amateur sports.

That said, I agree with many professional golfers that the way to address the distance issue is through the clubs and course design. It's a simpler solution for the game.

Trump and Nixon are also two very different situations. When Ford pardoned Nixon, Nixon was done with politics. He had no chance of coming back as a politician. If he had not resigned, he was going to be impeached and he was going to be removed from office. There was bipartisan support for his removal. Ford spent his political capital to pardon Nixon and heal the nation, but he also knew that Nixon would not be a factor going forward.

The same is not true for Trump today. Even if Biden pardoned Trump, establishment politics would continue to have to deal with him moving forward. He has shown no indication that he would stop attacking everything around him.

The article points out that while system colors are supported in Firefox (as of the time of the writing of the article), the "color-scheme: light dark" method he was using was not supported, and it looks like that was not supported until Firefox 96 (January 2022).[0]

[0] https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_color-scheme

Is it a summary when it turns 3 sentences into 3+ paragraphs?

Ex-employee of Golden Frog GmbH here (makers of VyprVPN). Golden Frog nor VyprVPN ever sold any of its customer information in my time there. Based on my conversations with current employees, they still do not.

Not all VPN providers sell data (DNS or otherwise). Some operate for privacy-driven reasons and actively seek to be good stewards for their customers.

Why Porkbun? What makes a good domain registrar these days (almost everyone is or has been acquired by someone doing something questionable)?

My wife is an architect who is working with a school district to build affordable housing for its teachers. The district has received a grant, and the district has plans to build the housing with developers building neighborhoods that feed into its new schools. The affordable housing would only be for teachers, and not for other groups that may qualify for affordable housing.

And the broader community (i.e. the city in which the housing would be built) is fighting it because they don't want affordable housing to hurt the values of homes that already exist in the area. Everyone supports the teachers -- until it affects their home values.

The Daily Mail[0] has plenty of pictures showing the impact of the fungus on the community. I assume, because I'm always suspect of Daily Mail reporting.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11812901/New-images...

Yeah, but there were definitely incompatibilities with every speed increase. When 28.8k modems were coming out, the spec was not set yet, so several vendors released early versions (anyone remember v.fast?) and then updated the modem firmware later when the standard was set. And then when 56.6k modems came along, USR had X2 and Motorola and others had K56flex. About a year later, v.90 and v.92 came along to standardize everything.

If you were an ISP, you had to support everything. For the 56.6k stuff, I remember us having two separate dial-in pools for X2 and K56flex.

One of my first jobs was working for a mom-and-pop dial-up ISP. I persuaded my mom to get an account with them when I saw them in a computer magazine. I did not even have a web browser! A little after that, they hired me.

One of the things we used to do when I first started was shuck modems. We would buy the consumer models, break open the plastic cases, pull the circuit boards out, and slide them into slots of custom enclosures. Then we would hand-assemble DB-to-ethernet adapters and plug them into serial controller banks.

We bought any and all modems, but the cheap models from US Robotics and Supra were really a game changer. The only tough part was that dealing with the slight differences in command differences on the client side needed to connect to the different modem types.

I see plenty of ideas of what it could be. The company has only stated that it is not due to a hack or vulnerability, which may or may not be true.

I will throw one more into the mix. A few years ago, a core system at our company went down. The system was very old and several times IT leadership had investigated replacement solutions, priced them out, and sought approval to execute on them. For one reason or another, it always got punted. Then one day, the system had a major hardware failure and took some parts of the business down. The core services that customers paid for continued to operate as-is, but it was still a giant black eye. It took a few days to stand-up an emergency solution, and several more weeks to stand-up a more permanent solution.

So, maybe Dish just didn't invest properly in a core-but-not-critical area of their technology and it finally gave up the ghost.

No, probably not. Your $5 VPS is going to be dedicated to you. The VPS provider is going to provide no privacy guarantees to you and will easily be able to associate requests for your information with your VPS. They will have no issue providing it to whomever asks for it.

In addition, your traffic will be the only thing coming from that VPS, so tying network information to you will be easier.

The key thing to remember about VPNs is that you are re-positioning your trust. Instead of trusting your ISP with your traffic, you are trusting the VPN provider. A hosting provider is about as trustworthy with your traffic as an ISP, and offers the same amount of pseudo-anonymity. It's a lateral move at best.

My favorite part of this photo is that the pilot captured the shadow of his own U-2 on the surface of the balloon. Here is the full image[0], and it was verified by the Pentagon.

[0] https://d3lcr32v2pp4l1.cloudfront.net/Pictures/780xany/5/2/3...

I miscalculated the time frame. The time frame is 36 months, February 2020, which is before the pandemic started. I have since edited.

To put this in context, the $2.3T drop is for the prior six months. In the prior 36 months (including the six months with this drop), the housing market posted a gain of $13T, a gain of approximately 40% (based on the peak valuation of $47.7T from the article).

While it may signal some cooling, housing is still substantially less affordable than it was pre-pandemic.

* edited to correct the time frame, 36 months not 24 months.

> So if YouTube used the same deep learning models to push people to more extremist content but without using any user signals so that everyone has the same recommendations that's no longer promotion?

I don't want to respond to part of your comment and not the other, so I'll just say: I don't know, because exactly defining the specifics is not my goal.

> Fundamentally any decisions a site makes to filter and sort content to show, including HN ordering by vote count and mixing in new content to allow it to make the top page, is an explicit choice they are making that cannot be differentiated from "promotion"

This is the part of your comment that actually matters to me. This statement is so definitive, and yet there are people arguing just as definitively that some ways of prioritizing content for users create liability while others do not. I think there is a difference between "elevating when it otherwise wouldn't be elevated" and "providing a moderated list", but those two states are probably separated by a grey area, not a bright line. I think how YouTube identifies content for users is distinguishable from what HN does, but I also don't know if that difference matters with regard to liability, especially with regards to Section 230, which makes no attempt to legislate HOW content is made discoverable.

I think your comment shows the difficulty SCOTUS is having with this case. What's the difference between "promotion" (in my definition, that means putting an influence behind it to improve its standing with the viewer) and other actions commonly necessary to display information, and is that difference enough to eliminate the Section 230 protections for the defendants?

In my language, I say HN does not "promote" content because the view for me is substantially the same as the view for everyone else. Contrast that with YouTube, where Google's algorithms elevate content specific to individual users, thus leading me to conclude that Google thinks I "should" watch the content. I would argue that far more than automated filtering, signals from other users, and human moderation goes into YouTube's recommendations -- particularly a calculation of the revneue to Google of you watching the video.

But again, this concept that Google "promoted" the content that harmed the plaintiffs and should thus be liable for that action is the heart of the case, not that Google should be liable for the content itself.

IANAL, but I would start developing my argument with the idea that emails Google placed in my Priority Inbox were sent to me specifically, and the intention of the sender is that I specifically would see it. Google is still not putting anything in front of my eyes that was not intended to be there anyway.

When YouTube recommends content to me, the original author did not target that content specifically to me, and YouTube alone is making the decision to put it in front of my eyes.

No, I would not want HN legally responsible for comments posted by users.

Hacker News does not directly promote content (aside from prioritizing content based on non-content factors [age, voting, etc.]). It does moderate, but that is not the same as promotion.

The crux of the argument in this case is that the plaintiffs want Google held liable for promoting content, not hosting it. The difficulty the Supreme Court seems to have is understanding what the boundaries are between promoting content and simply delivering a usable view of content choices to consumers, and whether Congress intended for that difference to matter with regards to Section 230.

Is Hacker News default feed that promotes highly-upvoted, newer stories to the front of the list and example of HN promoting those stories? If so, should HN be held liable if that algorithm pushes content that harms others?

The Planet Money episode the article references makes a point about the waitlists and why it is not necessarily a scam or a market failure. The margins on these places are low. The financials really only make sense if the school is at full capacity all the time. For a school to survive in these conditions, a waitlist is necessary so that if children or families leave -- which happens all the time -- they can immediately backfill that money.

A point not made in the PM episode is that in markets with a lot of waitlists, charging for a position on the waitlist increases the likelihood that the families on the waitlist will be available when their turn comes. If waitlist membership is frictionless, then the daycare cannot count on that future backfill as strongly.

I worked with a daycare on a building project, and I saw how amazingly expensive childcare is. The teachers are paid what many would consider to be barely a living wage, but property costs and especially insurance were substantial. The owners did it our of their love of doing it, not because because of typical financial goals.

Yes, they could raise their rates, but if they did, many parents would have had to go elsewhere. It was a balancing act to charge enough for the quality they wanted to provide while also being able to be affordable for the community they served. Most teachers were younger, and did not last very long (two years at most).