634636346

Fitting that this was posted on Columbus Day.

> Cathie Wood’s Ark ETF seems to find the payments margin opportunity, and the gang to get it there. In its Big Ideas 2023 paper, Ark points out that there are 9 steps between Buyer and Seller in a consumer payment transaction, sucking intermediary fees of roughly 2.8% of the value of the purchase. Ark believes enormous money is to be made if the steps between Buyer and Seller would be reduced from 9 to 3 (removing card networks, issuers, and acquirers, for the most part), thereby reducing the expense from 1.64% to 0.21% of the value of the transaction (leaving a massive 2.60% ‘take rate’ for its horse). If you’re looking for crazy, Cathie Wood’s group is a hot mess full of them.

Most of that "take rate" goes to the issuing bank, which returns it to the customer in the form of rewards, which can often be redeemed for cash, and a number of issuers now offer generic 2% cashback cards. There's also the added benefit of fraud protection (and the ability to charge-back, as a last resort). Anyone using Cash App or similar in lieu of a credit card, I just assume is financially illiterate.

> However, OpenAI pinky promises they don't use API data for anything, like training. Maybe that makes you feel a bit safer, although probably it shouldn't.

It doesn't. I don't trust OpenAI or Sama. Frankly, I'm even hesitant to use VSCode now, even with its customizable privacy/telemetry settings (though I can at least limit its network access).

Doesn't this give OpenAI access to your source code?

The pearl-clutching over "book banning" is ridiculous. It's parents not wanting schools exposing their children (i.e., minors) to certain materials the parents think is inappropriate. And these supposedly "banned" books are still readily available to adults from Amazon, B&N, and (usually) regular libraries. Why is this such a big deal?

Meanwhile, you now have censorship at the internet backbone level, with ISPs arbitrarily, unilaterally deciding to stop routing traffic to legal websites, and there's been little outcry: https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888

It's not just hypocrisy. Many of the HNers railing against this are actually responsible, even if just indirectly, for it. Take Chrome (including Chromium) use, for example. Chrome has never been that much better (e.g. 2-3x) than FF. Maybe at its best, when it first debuted and V8 wowed everyone, it was 20-30% better--not enough to justify the investment a poweruser (who heavily customizes their browser) would have to make to jump ship, and not enough for anyone concerned about the open web. Yet I would guess most people here jumped ship at some point (probably when it was new and shinny and Google still paid lip service to "don't be evil"), and they've never looked back, despite FF having caught up and remaining competitive.

Asking people to not use Chrome isn't asking much, and yet people here can't even manage that.

> engage in illegal

Well then why haven't they been prosecuted?

I wouldn't be surprised if the author, and a large segment of HNers agreeing with her, did a swift about-face when they realized that Tor also provides an end-run around the internet backbone black-holing of IPs that some Tier 1 ISPs did to KiwiFarms last year, during the height of the campaign to deplatform it. More people using Tor in general means more people having the means and know-how to evade censorship, and we can't have that, can we?

I wonder how many HNers angry about this are also some combination of 1) working for bigtech 2) using iOS/OSX/Android instead of Linux (yeah, I know Android is technically a Linux) 3) using Chrome/Safari instead of Firefox and 4) have endorsed, at least in the past, bigtech firms like Google and Cloudflare acting as arbiters of what is/is not acceptable content for the internet, and even whether it should be viewable by anyone at all.

One of the devs is using the CoC to silence criticism, even CoC-based criticism: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/...

Like one of the commenters in that thread said, this sounds like they were using the noidex feature to use the IA as a personal private backup, and thus abusing it, and ruined it for everyone else. The IA is great as a personal public backup. (For example, I've deliberately submitted copies of certain OSS projects I've worked on to the Wayback Machine.)

Sorry, I wouldn't have been so harsh had I not suspected the entire blog was AI spam. Good luck with your back. (And please do at least some basic resistance training, even just once a week.)

> The text content of the blog is all hand-written by me, not AI, although I do use AI (Stability) to create the header images.

Well, you can't really fault people for suspecting you're using AI for other things too, can you? It's almost a form of gaslighting. You also apparently did an AI-generated podcast? (According to your profile.)

Theo isn't a "Code of Conduct" type of guy. Not a good fit. Though the license of the Rust compiler (MIT/Apache) does at least make it a possibility.

I stand corrected. However, I still think he's using GPT to generate much of his content, and at most doing some post-hoc editing of it.

Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb, so we can just take its characterization by its harshest critics at face value, rather than having to actually read it ourselves and make up our own minds.

However, I do find it strange that the site now only being available through Tor--and thus not showing up in Google search results or being easily browsable by "normies"--seems to have been enough to assuage the people spearheading its deplatforming, since Tor should pose little of an impediment to those capable and willing enough to IRL harass and SWAT people (the purported real reason KF exists). It's almost as if their real concern is people being able to google them and find a site that comprehensively documents their bad, and perhaps illegal, behavior.

There are still almost 5k banks in the US. Unlike Zelle, if this opens to all of them, all you need is one bank.

>The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.

I'm pretty sure every holder of US Treasuries (including me) is owed money by the US government.

It will be interesting to see how this affects "toxic," deplatformed, and to some degree debanked (at least from PayPal and CC processors) entities, like the KiwiFarms. While this page is somewhat vague about the private/public status of the Fed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm

it seems pretty well established that federally chartered corporations, like the USPS and Amtrak (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebron_v._National_Railroad_Pa...), are bound by the first amendment, so theoretically the Fed should be as well.

That means the usual "it's a private corporation!" defense of corporate censorship is probably off the table.

I upvoted you, for what it's worth. People here really are relentless with the downvoting and flagging.

> The [rapidly diminishing] inverse correlation between veganism and obesity would seem to reject this, but I think that can be easily and entirely explained

It's easily and entirely explained by fiber. Fiber, through gastric distension, is, along with protein, the primary driver of satiation. There are other factors too, like the fact that they eat more whole, unprocessed foods, which are harder for the body to digest (i.e., require more energy.)

This (distinguishing -1 from a character value when char is unsigned) is one of the reasons character literals in C have type int instead of char (C++ changed them to char.) Note the return type of getchar().

> remineralizes the enamel

So does fluoride. (It replaces the hydroxyl group. Your saliva already contains calcium and phosphate.) Enamel remineralized with fluoride yields fluorapatite, which has a critical PH of 4.5 vs 5.5. of hydroxyapatite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorapatite

What a ridiculous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9090135

> So, setting aside the need to maintain 30+ year old code, what would be modern reasons to start a new project in C?

C code written today will still be runnable 30+ years from now, and likely on whatever platform you're using, unlike code written in some flavor of the month language. C is standardized, has been ported to every architecture, and is easy to port in general, and there's so much code that's already been written in it that the inertia behind it is virtually insurmountable. I've invested significant time in other language ecosystems (like Perl, coincidentally also on the front page) only to see them eventually declared "uncool" (however productive) and killed-off by faddish HN types. But I'm confident they won't have similar success against C.

C is the real Hundred Year Language: http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html

I can't believe people made >= $1 billion from a note-taking app that loses data.

> This is only made worse when they scan the gym and compare the weight they can lift with that of a power lifter who’s often times no where near as big yet capable of lifting more

No one in a gym is made insecure by someone who is clinically obese, irrespective of how much they can lift. It's even more ridiculous when you realize how many of these people are obese, and on steroids.

> HRT

Whoa, it's not HRT, it's TRT. Completely different. HRT is for people with gender dysphoria, whereas TRT is for normal, well-adjusted, no-dysphoric men to maintain healthy testosterone levels (or as high as they can convince their PCP, or more likely, a telemedicine mill, to prescribe), regardless of how healthy they eat, how much alcohol they drink, and how consistent they are with exercise and sleep.

Totally not the same thing.

I'm surprised it isn't even higher. TikTok is full of zoomers who haven't even turned 18 yet, and they're already abusing steroids and SARMs.

EDIT: I just remembered this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/24/why-ther...

> But more surprising was the amount of hordenine and ostarine – described by the programme-makers as often being found in gym supplements, which made up more than half of the pharmaceuticals found.

Ostarine is a SARM, and supposedly there was more of that than cocaine or MDMA residue in a London sewer "fatberg."

Can someone explain why all of these federated services are so left-wing? Don't these people have enough of the normie internet catering to them already?

The Titans were overthrown by the Olympians.