LastNevadan

That's not true for me on iOS. I denied it access to my contacts, and I can still start a new conversation by entering a recipient's phone number.

Perhaps the Russian FSB has also infiltrated Hacker News?

The real way to 'get' two's compliment is to implement the combinatorial logic (i.e., gates) to implement both one's complement and two's complement. You'll instantly understand the value of two's complement!

This author really likes to hear the sound of himself grinding his own axe.

For a US citizen, getting a second passport doesn't give you a way to escape tax liability. The United States is the only major country that has citizenship-based taxation: you're liable for taxes in the US even if you are a physical and tax resident of another country.

Virtually all the world's banks have written agreements with the United States to collect and report account information to the US government. Their incentive to cooperate is that they'll be booted from the SWIFT wire transfer system if they don't comply, so obviously all banks want to comply. Because of this, many banks won't open accounts for US citizens under any circumstances, and many others will only open accounts under narrow circumstances.

US citizens are also obliged to report their foreign accounts to the US government if the aggregate value exceeds $10,000, and the punishment for failure to comply is already very harsh.

And why shouldn't sovereign countries not have the ability to define their own immigration criteria? If Saint Kitts wants to welcome the wealthy of the world to be citizens, why shouldn't they be able to? They have their own due diligence program to filter out undesirable people. Plenty of the world's rich have earned their fortunes legally and fairly.

Did you hear about the tractor salesman whose wife left him?

She left him a John Deere letter!

It looks like your thesis is inaccessible at the moment due to the HN kiss of death.

The thieves want plausible deniability if they are caught possessing it.

If a policeman suspects you of being a car thief and catches you with a Raspberry Pi, that looks pretty suspicious.

The same policeman wouldn't think anything suspicious about (what appears to be) a Nokia cell phone.

The question I had as I read this was, "Why can't he discharge this judgement in bankruptcy?" The article doesn't even touch on the topic.

Yes, that's part of their strategy.

But it doesn't apply in my specific case. I'm not employed. I pay for everything out of my own pocket.

I bet a better deal from Marriott directly as a member than by going through a third-party.

I travel a lot.

I used to use various sites, but I realized that if I concentrated on Marriott/Bonvoy I could reach their highest status level (Ambassador). I've almost reached the dollar value and night count to retain my status through 2024, and it's only April!

I'm quite happy with them. I get a lot of free upgrades, lots of points for free nights, free breakfast, late checkout, etc. And if anything is the least bit out of order, they fix it for me.

I hate AirBnb. There are lot of bad actors now, and AirBnb customer support is useless. Even if I need a flat for a long period (like a month or more), I try to find an independent agency and use them. Searching on AirBnb can be a good starting point: if the listing shows an agency name you can usually find them on Google. AirBnb "protection" is useless anyway, so I don't understand why I should pay such a huge premium for it.

Booking.com is fine. I didn't get stressed out about the messages that the author writes about. But now I only use Booking.com when there is no Bonvoy hotel in the place I'm going. I have never had to escalate anything to Booking, but in general the places in booking are as described. There aren't as many bad actors as there are with AirBnb.

EDIT: I'm not employed. All my travel is personal travel paid out my own pocket.

Yeah, I had the same thought.

It couldn't possibly be that teachers' unions are the problem!

When I was at the university and started programming on UNIX, the professor said we should try both emacs and vi and see which we like better, and provided links to some tutorials.

I tried them both and liked vi. Emacs seemed slower. In my undergraduate wisdom, I deemed emacs to be "stupid" and went on with my life using vi.

After I had been programming professionally for about ten years, I decided that my harsh judgement as an undergraduate was often incorrect. (I had also deemed Voltaire, Spanish, sociology, microeconomics and many other things as "stupid", and came to understand as an adult that they weren't.) So, I decided to give emacs another chance.

My conclusion was this: vi is better for touch typists. Your fingers are almost always on the home row. Emacs wants you to hit the meta/alt key a lot, which is difficult for a touch typist. It's much harder than hitting shift. Vi makes you hit escape, but that only happens when you switch modes and it's not that hard to hit.

I noticed that lots of skilled and professional engineers never learned to touch type. That discovery itself was odd to me: why would a professional programmer not want to invest the time to learn to type properly: typing fast boosts your productivity significantly. But they do. And my conclusion was that emacs was for them, because hitting the control/alt key isn't as much of a penalty when you're a hunt-and-peck typist.

I have to second that thought. This is the most fascinating thing I've read in quite a long time. I don't even know what to comment in response, besides something trite, like "wow!"

Breaking news: people with skin in the game talk their book. Full story at eleven!

Thanks, I didn't realize that. I thought Authy worked differently. I'll try Authy.

I recently upgraded my iPhone and I'm trying hard to live without Google. Google is evil.

The only two Google apps I can't seem to get away from are Authenticator and Maps. I travel a lot, and I find the reviews are helpful for deciding where to go. Even if I don't read the reviews, the number of reviews are helpful to find a useful store of any time.

Apple maps' reviews aren't as helpful.

My first thought is that someone had created a HN-specific bot network to upvote it. It was annoying useless site without content and couldn't understand how it got to the first page.

I couldn't find SVB on this list. Thinking that Forbes may have deleted it, I tried looking at the same page on archive.is[1], and couldn't find it there either.

I don't understand the title of this post claiming it is 20th on the list.

[1] https://archive.is/vcrgq

Wow, the world has changed! I remember walking home from school by myself when I was in kindergarten.

Matt Levine's blog at Bloomberg also discusses Wirecard

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-27/wireca...

This story made it to CNN:

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/airtag-lost-bag-valer...

I had an Australian manager once. To live to up the stereotypes of Australia, he had two things: a map that was "upside down", with south up and therefore with Australia at the top of the globe. The second was a book of Australian slang and swear words.

One of the words in the dictionary was "dickhead," who definition was this: "A person of no consequence. One's boss is invariably a dickhead."

Lol.

I confirm this comment: the UI is way too slow for what it is trying to measure. I also type about 80 WPM and found the response speed of this site unbearable.

Also using Firefox on Windows 10.

Thanks, I didn't understand the downvote either. I just try to remember that your HN karma doesn't buy you anything real.

I was an early employee of a company that went public in the early 2000s with a market cap of $300M. You just don't see that anymore: companies these days are much larger when they IPO. It seems to me to be unfortunate, and SOX seems like the most likely culprit.

It's unfortunate that so many companies are staying private so late. The employees are trapped in their equity positions, the values of these companies has no price discovery, and non-insider investors have no opportunity to invest in these possibly high-growth young companies.

I've heard that this is an unintended side-effect of Sarbanes-Oxley, does anyone have any insight?

It's not a hard-and-fast rule.

The problem is this: once you have a high level of debt, you become sensitive to interest rate changes. Your debt rises, so you have to increase interest rates to lure investors to buy the bonds. The high interest rate forces to you run a bigger deficit, do you have to borrow even more money. Then investors demand an even high risk premium. That's the cycle.

Once that process takes hold, the only way out is some combination of lower living standards, higher taxes, higher inflation and currency devaluation.

You're right that it hasn't happened yet in the modern era. But it will. Remember where you heard it first.

Certainly, there are countries in a worse place than the United States. Japan or Italy are the first to be likely to blow up in a big way. Greece is a good candidate for blowing up first, but it is small enough to be backstopped by the ECB. Italy is too big to be backstopped. The USA may fall, but it probably won't be the first major economy to do so.

Historically, governments have been prone to currency crises when their debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 100%. The USA is just slightly above that now, and interest rates have remained low here (and in other countries) because central banks are monetizing the debt. But that can't be sustained forever.

Wait until they find out that the United States has way more debt that it can service over the coming decades, and that the way out is persistent inflation combined with gaming the inflation metric used for Social Security cost-of-living increases.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I found a flexible metal rod on the ground about two meters in length. The 14-year-old geniuses we were, we decided to toss it at the power lines above until we shorted them.

After about 40 minutes my friend made a successful throw, landing it perfectly across the overhead lines. The rod partially vaporized and bits of it landed in the grass, starting small fires. We put out the fires by stomping on them and then ran like hell.

We later learned that we had blown a fuse, shutting off power to the street where it occurred, probably affecting about 50 homes.

We swore one another not to tell anyone. We escaped punishment for our crime.