Ozarkian

SSN is available for everyone on databases available over torrents or on the darknet. You should assume your SSN is public knowledge.

It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel stock outstanding.

The State of California is moving in the exact opposite direction: banning these things completely.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/california-lawmakers-propos...

The Broken Window Fallacy strikes again!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

You didn't understand the article. A home heat pump isn't a power source.

The Million Dollar Web Page is still up!

Back during the dotcom craze, you could buy a pixel for $1. It was a 1000x1000 image, so the value was a million dollars. Some teenager did it.

Amazingly, it's still up. Although all or nearly all the links are broker or point to somthing different than what was originally there...

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

Don't forget about nuclear fusion! It's the future!

You can't constrain an idea whose time has come. China will continue developing AI regardless of whether we will. We have to do it just to stay in the race.

It's the same thing with the atomic bomb. There wasn't really a choice not to do it. All the theoretical physicists at the time knew that it was possible to develop the thing. If the United States hadn't done it, someone else would have. Perhaps a few years or a decade later, but it would have happened somewhere.

I owned one of those! I sold my 1040ST to my friend to get some of the money for a Mega 2.

I liked how the keyboard was detachable and the hard drive was the same size at the motherboard case, so you could stack them.

I would like to disagree with you; however, your sentiment is based on sound grammar.

You're not wrong. But Liberty Reserve was able to be shut down because it was centralized. Banking regulators in various western countries leaned on the Costa Rican authorities to shut it down.

Try doing that with crypto. Who are you going to arrest?

Everyone's social security number is available. If you go download the leak referring to in this HN post [1], your SSN is certainly in it. Mine was, everyone in my family's was, almost all of my friends' were.

The world needs to stop pretending that SSNs are secret. They aren't.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41248104

I have been living outside the United States for twelve years.

I always had problems with SMS until I got Google Fi. And that's a problem because, as the article here says, many banks insist on SMS these days. There are various services that give you a virtual number. But they always suffer from one of two problems: (1) VOIP numbers are 'blacklisted' by some banks for security reasons: they want a real cell phone number (2) I simply don't get SMSs in some cases some technical reason

Google Fi works everywhere. Even when there is no cell phone service: it will tunnel over WiFi.

Google shuts off the data on Fi after you've been outside the USA for a month. No problem, I'm happy to pay $25 a month for a 'dataless' connection that gives me SMS and voice.

The world's librarians at least gave it a good effort. Do you still remember all those card catalogs at the library?

I'm sure you're right that the broker is obliged to 1099 me for it.

Are you saying that I should have imported the 1099 and overridden the basis of those shares to be exactly what the sale price was? That seems like an odd thing to expect the end user of tax software to know to do. It's not clear to me that doing that would not also set off a flag when the IRS evaluates the return. There ought to be some solution between employers, brokers and the IRS that doesn't put such a burden on the taxpayer.

I hear all kinds of complaints about the IRS. But my experience with them is that they are reasonable.

I had a tax situation when I did a same-day sale of some nonqualified stock options. What happened is that my employer put the net gain as income on my W2. In addition, the stockbroker sent me a 1099 for the total value of the options sold. This wasn't quite correct, because the income was already reported on my W2 and the broker should have known that and not 1099'd me for it.

I filed my tax return correctly, only including the W2 income and disregarding the 1099.

The IRS added the 1099 back into my income on their end after I filed, and sent me a bill for around $190,000 for the tax on the 1099 income.

I sent them letter with a clear and correct accounting for the difference. They agreed and sent me back a letter admitting that I was correct and that my tax due was now $0.

It was a bit nerve-racking, but I'm glad they did the right thing in the end.

The California Franchise Tax Board, on the other hand, is a whole different beast. Those people are a bunch of idiotic uncouth goons.

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

High real estate prices sound good for people that hold real estate. But in the aggregate, high real estate prices are a net transfer of wealth from the young to the old. We need healthy young families in our society, but we've priced them out of living.

Was this woman [1] protesting? What about this man [2]. I don't think either was exhibiting behavior that could be correctly called a protest.

[1] https://ewtn.co.uk/article-charges-dropped-for-now-against-w...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g9kp7r00vo

You missed the parent's point, which is that a significant fraction of people flying to London because they have business to do in London, and the value of their time is not zero. If their time is wasted, that has a real cost in terms of lost productivity.

I often use "please" and "thank you". I'm not sure why, since I don't treat other inanimate objects this way. I just feel odd writing something curtly or rudely.

For those of us in the world who don't know, which one is it?

I guess the recipient of this plasma gets the gift of the micro-plastics.

He reached some kind of settlement with Google. I have no idea how much Google paid, but my suspicion is that James had the last laugh.

This piece obviously puts sales in a bad light. If you had asked me what a salesman is like in my early 20s, I would have described them much as this article expresses.

But in my career in Silicon Valley I really came to respect good salespeople. I often had roles where I was debugging customer-reported issues, and good salespeople make everything smoother.

I came to a conclusion that there are two types of sales transactions: one that is a one-time transaction and one that is an ongoing transaction.

The one-time salespeople were just like this article: they are just trying to close a sale knowing that they don't ever have to deal with you again. If they lie, they don't have to deal with the consequences. So their incentive is to spew any kind of nonsense or lies or manipulation to close the deal.

The other type of sales guys depending on building relationships. with engineers on both sides, with management, with purchasing and billing people, with everyone. When I was working on customer bugs, having a great sales guy representing the account made everything much easier. They could get the customers to loan hardware, assign more resources, get documentation, negotiate for time, etc. I respected these great sales guys because they had real skills and talent in these spheres that I didn't.

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

-- Douglas Adams

I would have assumed he was a UNIX system administrator. Everybody knows that only guys with enormous beards can properly tame a UNIX system.