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sflicht

40 karma · joined December 14, 2013

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sflicht··on Kill The Cookie Banner
Any US corporation who displays a cookie banner to US based IP addresses should be taxed $1 million per instance of this occurring.
sflicht··on Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
Not good at engineering their own job security
sflicht··on AIOC: Ham Radio All-in-One-Cable
> AIOC

Was expecting a fine tuned version of ChatGPT that specializes in sounding like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

sflicht··on Ask HN: Why is Google Premium not a thing?
What was the ratio of clicks to impressions for those super expensive terms?
sflicht··on Twitter has a new CEO – what about a new business model?
Seems self-defeating if any significant number of people, like me, block every individual from whom I see a promoted tweet. (I assume that such tweets are the only way an individual rather than a corporation would have a non negligible ad spend?)

I guess not many people do as I do. But promoting one’s stupid tweets is a pretty good indication of someone I do not and will never have any interest in hearing from… I suppose I might make an exception for a sufficiently funny/edgy promoted tweet, but I also suspect that twitter enforces stricter content rules on promoted tweets?

sflicht··on A Review of “The Man Who Solved the Market”
> he doesn’t need to do anything anymore to keep the AÍ [money?] printing machine going

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how systematic trading strategies differ from some other ML problems. It's an adversarial, nonstationary environment. The same strategies don't just keep working indefinitely. (Not to mention the fact that maintaining any complex production software system requires an enormous amount of work, even completely ignoring the need to keep developing new alpha. For instance, consider the case when certain oil prices went briefly negative in 2020 -- even if your software was so perfect that it was unaffected by that event [hah!] remember that many of the counterparties you actually trade with may not have been as clever. This is just one small example. as markets evolve, they will find ways to turn up new bugs in your code.)

sflicht··on I resigned from Twitter
> love the product

Seems to me that everything good about the product was present pre-IPO and it has only gotten worse over the years. I still use it but I find the interface/functionality strictly less pleasant with each design change.

sflicht··on Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence
But they are also better. (Just more expensive and/or bulkier, i.e. their pros come with some associated cons.) Whereas delayed send / batch read only has "advantages" in the mind of the user, who could achieve them for himself or herself quite easily.
sflicht··on Show HN: Pony – a messenger for mindful correspondence
I can't be the only one who thinks this idea is terrible. "What if we make the product worse, perhaps people will like it better?"
sflicht··on Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine
foodwishes.com cookingissues.com ladyandpups.com
sflicht··on Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine
wow, pretty surprised by this. I often explicitly search for the seriouseats recipe -- they're usually much better than allrecipes, food.com, etc. Also Kenji's book (the Food Lab) is awesome.
sflicht··on Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone (2016)
I don't see why it would be a controversial bill in Congress to simply exempt scientific publications (broadly construed) from all copyright law. Springer and Elsevier (the latter not even an American company) would be losers, but I doubt they spend more than a couple $mil on lobbying per year between the two of them. The benefit to humanity seems pretty clear.

This seems entirely within the scope of Congress's power under the Copyright Clause, and need not be tied up with other more controversial aspects of intellectual property law. There was a time when one could have made a case that permitting copyrights on scientific publications would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (e.g. because only journal publishers were in a position to efficiently provide copy editing, nice formatting, and distribution). None of that has been relevant for decades, so it seems to me that one could even make a case that the status quo violates the Copyright Clause, since enforcing journal copyrights pretty clearly diminishes rather than promotes the progress of science.

sflicht··on Apps Getting Worse
What is wrong with having a lot of settings? I absolutely hate that Twitter does not let me turn off their "features", but rather only lets me say "see less often" (which of course does nothing because I told Twitter not to track my preferences etc, but probably doesn't do anything for anyone anyway, except maybe provide a datapoint for some poorly thought out ML algorithm they put in place).
sflicht··on Silicon Valley’s Safe Space
The crossword puzzle also remains pretty good, with only a smattering of social justice themed clues once every few days.
sflicht··on Building all of our new mobile apps using React Native
Even if you think your app depends on push notifications, your customers don't necessarily want them. I would bet that in 98% of the cases you have in mind, I would be perfectly happy to use the functionality without push notifications. (For example, "all chat". Even if your app is capable of chatting with me, I doubt I actually want it to.)
sflicht··on Strava heatmap can be used to locate military bases
surprisingly nonzero adoption of fitness trackers in Pyongyang
sflicht··on A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k
envy?
sflicht··on F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules
Isn't it because this is required by the Administrative Procedures Act?
sflicht··on Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'
Crowdstrike et al are more likely to support Clinton. They benefit from having neoconservatives (who unanimously oppose Trump) in charge at State/DoD, because their business depends directly on tense relations with Russia and China. They're just another part of the MIC at this point.
sflicht··on “Julian Assange’s internet link has been intentionally severed”
Of course the existing moderation policy constitutes a background of censorship, so your claims should be evaluated within that contest.
sflicht··on Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'
A little more unsubstantiated info from Reddit [0].

[0] https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/57vu5l/red_alert...

sflicht··on Wikileaks: Julian Assange's internet access 'cut'
Whatever action was taken (and I'd bet that it was the UK acting on behalf of the US government) was almost certainly done with the Ecuadorean government's "permission" -- although that permission might have been obtained somewhat coercively.
sflicht··on Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?
Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke [1] by mathematician V. I. Arnol'd.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Huygens-Barrow-Newton-Hooke-quasicrys...

sflicht··on Moving Forward on Basic Income
So why not explicitly pass a subsidy (e.g. through the tax code) for the chronically ill? Disguising such transfers through regulatory costs is both inefficient and dishonest. It's also very unclear whether society would choose to subsidize all sick people. For example, those who are sick and rich enough to afford their insurance premiums (or who were lucky enough to obtain long-term coverage before they got an expensive medical condition, so their premiums are low), might not merit such transfers. If women have higher expected lifetime health costs due to pregnancy-related care, society might or might not want to have healthcare-related subsidies that amount to a transfer payment from men to women.

The proper way to make these sorts of decisions is by passing laws that make the transfer payments explicit, not disguising them in byzantine insurance regulations.

sflicht··on FBI Harassment
Bet you dollars to donuts that the author's name does, in fact, at least partially explain their interest. Remember that law enforcement was particularly interested in Aleynikov because he used subversion for VCS.
sflicht··on Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?
Yes, this seems like something that could very easily end up making a bad system even worse.
sflicht··on Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes
Oh, I guess the issue is the boom. What about flying subsonic over populated Canada, and then (slightly shifting the conventional NYC-HKG route) head over Hudson Bay to accelerate to supersonic velocity?

The return route is often done over the Pacific (because of prevailing wind patterns), so there would not necessarily be a need to sonic boom over southeast China.

sflicht··on Boom (YC W16) – Supersonic Passenger Airplanes
Can you carry enough fuel to do a non-stop flight from NYC to HKG or SIN or SYD? (You give SFO-SYD as an example, so NYC-HKG should be possible I suspect.)
sflicht··on U.S. Says It May Not Need Apple’s Help to Unlock iPhone
So does qualified immunity mean that Apple can't sue the Justice Department for the (substantial) legal expenses it incurred?
sflicht··on Anti-money laundering laws and copyright laws are similar and should be revised
Why is avoiding "money laundering" (whose modern legal incarnation can apparently be trace to the misguided days of Prohibition) a laudable goal? As far as I can see, the concept amounts to inventing a new crime to force third parties such as banks to help law enforcement do its job of preventing and/or punishing actual crimes. In doing so, it undermines the fungibility of money, makes the financial system more costly / less efficient, and leads to systematic persecution of and inconvenience for people innocent of any crime (e.g. those who get into legal hot water for "structuring transactions").

The whole idea should be scrapped.

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