Pyxl101

The Federal Reserve is not a private corporation. It is an agency of the United States government, which was established by an act of congress: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm

> The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act to serve as the nation's central bank. The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.

Regional federal reserve banks are also not private corporations, although their organization structure shares some features in common with them. Member banks that participate in the federal reserve system, on the other hand, are typical companies.

It would be hard for the fake profile to get connections with people that he would have had to claimed to have managed or worked with (but was lying about). A fake profile for "Sam" might make it even easier to spot the fraud.

Plus, other people who know him in real life might notice that his profile information is bogus and call him on it. (Why does your LinkedIn profile say you were a director?)

Lack of capital isn't the only reason to rent. You might also choose to rent because you are not interested in investing a significant amount of your money in real estate, or because you don't want to make a long-term commitment to live in one place.

Every game that Zachtronics releases has a gameplay trailer, for comparison. Perhaps it would be useful to look at some of those for inspiration:

http://www.zachtronics.com/tis-100/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/SHENZHEN_IO/?curat...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/?curator_...

I think a gameplay trailer could be made from content from that video, by stringing together a series of short clips. Show the player moving around, manipulating things. Each clip a few seconds in length. Similar to the trailer for Exapunks, you could display text like "Solve puzzles" "Manipulate bits" "Hack your way to safety" (or whatever makes sense). Maybe end with a sequence where something drastic happens (the player does something and the whole screen changes), fade to black.

I think it'd be useful to show the player what the gameplay is actually like. Sure, it's not for everyone, but you can still show what it is.

The previous owner of the property erected a gate along their private road, posted "no tresspassing signs", charged for access, and opened/closed the gate at their discretion (leaving it closed for months during winter). I don't have a horse in this race, but that doesn't sound like public access any more than an amusement park is public access.

Yes, it's my understanding that Khosla owns the entire compound and all of the houses. It's one property and was operated as a business by the former owners, the Deeney family.

The previous court case that (SCOTUS declined to hear) was really about whether Khosla needs to apply for a permit for his development work that changes public access to his property. SCOTUS declining to hear the case essentially means that Khosla needs to apply for the permit for these changes -- the implication is that until this happens, the case is not actually ripe for review. If he's unable to obtain the permit, then Khosla may be able to pursue his argument that the state's mandated public access is an unconstitutional "taking" of private property. (IANAL)

The case is not about the beach itself. It's about land near the beach through which one can travel to visit it. Is Khosla obligated to provide the public with access to the beach by crossing his land? Ordinarily this kind of right is represented as an easement on the property, or as a roadway separate from the property, neither of which exist here.

The previous owner built a gate on the property, which was open and closed at their whim, posted "no trespassing" signs, and charged for access to the road and beach.

There was an article on HN about how Google leaders have considered shutting down GCP if it doesn't become a market leader: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815260

And it constantly annoys you, begging you to use the mobile app.

Reddit: Stop it. I'm aware there's a mobile app. If I wanted to use it then I would. I don't need to see an advertisement for it on every damn page.

Let’s say I have $1m in cash and I want to buy a house worth $1m. I could either buy the house with my cash, or take out a loan to buy the house and invest my cash into another asset.

Almost any investment will produce a greater yield than the interest cost of the mortgage because the mortgage is secured debt. A mortgage might cost 3% while stocks can return 7-10% or more.

In this scenario, taking on the debt even though you don’t need to is financially advantageous most of the time. In this sense debt is a tool.

Debt is also a tool that lets you afford a house that you can’t buy with cash on hand but where your income is easily enough for principal + interest. What’s better: a) saving for 30 years after you start working and buying a house in cash (maybe paying higher rent that whole time?) or b) taking on a mortgage, getting your house now (as soon as it’s responsible), and paying it off over 30 years. Most people will choose the latter.

Thus debt is a tool that also allows you to buy things far sooner (in life or business) than you could afford to with cash.

There are other things that can be done with debt like borrowing against existing assets (to avoid having to liquidate the entire asset just to get a little cash) or borrowing against expected revenue streams and so on. Most of these tools permit greater economic growth than is possible without.

It seems like this idea could also achieve that by providing some kind of union of two taste-graphs. I'll input my wardrobe, then select from a set of pre-uploaded designers, and the algorithms can recommend clothes for me to purchase that are inspired by both my taste and the designer's.

What would be neat is if this system could automatically mine the taste graph from historical photographs pulled from social networks and the like, without effort on the user's part. (For example, everything you've uploaded to common social networks, or everything in your phone - if you choose to provide them)

I agree with you - laws should be written in as plain, simple, and timeless language as possible. Idioms are something that I'd try to avoid if I was writing laws today. However, in this instance, the operative clause of the amendment is clear:

    the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

We can also understand the meaning of the amendment by examining the intentions, motivations, and beliefs of the people who wrote it -- what they were trying to achieve by doing so. There is extensive legislative history on this subject, which makes it clear that the founders believed that individual firearm ownership was an important and necessary preexisting right. The Supreme Court ruling that I've referenced goes into this history:

> By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects. Blackstone, whose works, we have said, “constituted the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation,” cited the arms provision of the Bill of Rights as one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. His description of it cannot possibly be thought to tie it to militia or military service. It was, he said, “the natural right of resistance and self-preservation,” and “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence,”. Other contemporary authorities concurred. Thus, the right secured in 1689 as a result of the Stuarts’ abuses was by the time of the founding understood to be an individual right protecting against both public and private violence.

> And, of course, what the Stuarts had tried to do to their political enemies, George III had tried to do to the colonists. In the tumultuous decades of the 1760’s and 1770’s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms. A New York article of April 1769 said that “[i]t is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defence.” They understood the right to enable individuals to defend themselves. As the most important early American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (by the law professor and former Antifederalist St. George Tucker) made clear in the notes to the description of the arms right, Americans understood the “right of self-preservation” as permitting a citizen to “repe[l] force by force” when “the intervention of society in his behalf, may be too late to prevent an injury.”

> There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course the right was not unlimited, just as the First Amendment’s right of free speech was not, (...) [citations omitted]

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/#tab-opi...

The phrase "well-regulated" is an idiom that means something like "working as expected, calibrated correctly, normal, regular". You can't interpret an idiom literally based solely on the words that it's made from - idioms have their own independent meaning.

The following source gives examples from the Oxford English Dictionary of how the idiom was used from 1709 through 1894, demonstrating how the idiom 'well-regulated' has meaning beyond 'regulations' i.e. laws.

https://www.constitution.org/cons/wellregu.htm

> 1709: "If a liberal Education has formed in us well-regulated Appetites and worthy Inclinations."

> 1714: "The practice of all well-regulated courts of justice in the world."

> 1812: "The equation of time ... is the adjustment of the difference of time as shown by a well-regulated clock and a true sun dial."

> 1848: "A remissness for which I am sure every well-regulated person will blame the Mayor."

> 1862: "It appeared to her well-regulated mind, like a clandestine proceeding."

> 1894: "The newspaper, a never wanting adjunct to every well-regulated American embryo city."

The sense of the term above is something like 'normal', 'well-ordered', 'regular'. Indeed the word 'regular' also shares the same origin as the word 'regulations', yet its common meanings are unrelated to the concept of regulations.

Parsing the 2nd Amendment, the US Supreme Court wrote that "the adjective “well-regulated” implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training", and elaborated (quoting another scholar, Thomas Cooley):

> The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms; and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose. But this enables government to have a well-regulated militia; for to bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them in a way that makes those who keep them ready for their efficient use; in other words, it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order.”

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/#tab-opi...

The phrase "a well-regulated militia" in this context consequently means a militia that's learned, proficient, and effective in firearm use. In any case, what we're discussing is the preface of the amendment, which announces a purpose for the amendment and does not limit it. As the court wrote:

> The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause. The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose. The Amendment could be rephrased, “Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

That clause simply provides one important reason why "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed". It's not a limitation or restriction on that right. For more an extensive deep-dive on the meaning of this amendment, see District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008): https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/#tab-opi...

> ... the Second Amendment’s prefatory clause announces the purpose for which the right was codified: to prevent elimination of the militia. The prefatory clause does not suggest that preserving the militia was the only reason Americans valued the ancient right; most undoubtedly thought it even more important for self-defense and hunting. But the threat that the new Federal Government would destroy the citizens’ militia by taking away their arms was the reason that right—unlike some other English rights—was codified in a written Constitution. ...

> Besides ignoring the historical reality that the Second Amendment was not intended to lay down a “novel principl[e]” but rather codified a right “inherited from our English ancestors,” Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U. S. 275, 281 (1897), petitioners’ interpretation does not even achieve the narrower purpose that prompted codification of the right. If, as they believe, the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia — if, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment’s guarantee — it does not assure the existence of a “citizens’ militia” as a safeguard against tyranny ...

> Every late-19th-century legal scholar that we have read interpreted the Second Amendment to secure an individual right unconnected with militia service. The most famous was the judge and professor Thomas Cooley, who wrote a massively popular 1868 Treatise on Constitutional Limitations. Concerning the Second Amendment it said: (...)

> “It might be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been elsewhere explained, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. (...) The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms; and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose. But this enables government to have a well-regulated militia; for to bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them in a way that makes those who keep them ready for their efficient use; in other words, it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order.”

> In the old days, it was routine for customs officers to search ships coming in to harbor, including the effects of their passengers, to enforce importation laws

Yes, but electronic devices can't digitally contain physical substances that might be subject to customs laws. It's not comparable. It's probably still today reasonable to search ships in the harbor and passengers for physical substances (like banned animals or fruits/vegetables), but it's not obvious to me how searching electronic devices achieves any reasonable objective related to customs law.

> So the market goes down 10.0% one day and then up 11.1% the next, an investor in the normal 1x is back to where they started. A 2x investor is still down and a 3x investor is down even more.

Can you explain why that is? I would have expected that your gain or loss from the leverage funds relates only to the difference in price between when you purchased and when you sold (multiplied by the leverage).

I was curious about the issue and found this article which has some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights_in_Saudi_Arab...

In Saudi Arabia, women need permission from their male guardian to perform a variety of activities:

> The anti male-guardianship campaign is an ongoing campaign by Saudi women against the requirement to obtain permission from their male guardian for activities such as getting a job, travelling internationally or getting married.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_anti_male-guardianship...

While maybe not property (just like how children are not property of their parents in the US), it does seem that women’s rights are limited in Saudi Arabia compared to most other countries.

Can single or married Saudi women purchase Aramco stock in this sale or do they need permission from their husband/guardian? That’s what I was trying to understand originally. Reading between the lines, it seemed to be saying that only divorced women who are responsible for kids can buy shares, and other women cannot (maybe with permission of their guardian?)

Why does Tranche B specifically mention Saudi female divorcees? Is the implication that married and single women aren't allowed to purchase shares, or am I misunderstanding?

Be careful about drawing conclusions about broader nature from the behavior of the domestic cat. The cat’s behavior is, like the dog’s, very significantly the result of human driven natural selection. In the cat’s case, humans have favored them for 1000s of years because they kill pests like rodents. That was their ancestral “job”, their role as a domesticated animal that lives in harmony with humans.

You can probably find some other animals in nature that kill for no apparent reason though. There is apparently a term for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing (though the term confusingly conflates unnecessary killing with caching the excess for later)

The benefit of billionaires existing is that they made extraordinarily valuable businesses. Take Steve Jobs or Bill Gates - if they didn’t exist then Apple and Microsoft wouldn’t either. If Notch didn’t exist then neither would Minecraft.

If you create something (a company, a video game, other IP), and people value that thing at a billion dollars, then you’re a billionaire. Notch became a billionaire after selling Minecraft because almost 100 million people play it.

What do you expect should happen if someone creates a thing of value worth a billion dollars? Do you not want these things to be created? Do you not want them to be sold? (Ownership has to change hands eventually; people don’t live forever). How are you expecting society would work?

Reaping what you sow provides the incentive to work hard in our society. Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html

> Universities are supposed to educate people

The primary goal of most research universities is to conduct research. Educating people is not the goal, or is an auxiliary goal.

Related: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/05/29/...

> But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. ...

> This is not a value judgment, nor is it a particular complaint about Harvard. It’s true of any top-ranked private research university, including Caltech. ...

> Corporations do not have inherent rights.

That's not exactly true. Corporations have many of the same rights. For example, in Citizens United vs FEC, the Supreme Court wrote that:

"The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations (...) The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not 'natural persons'."

(page 25 in https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf )

If the First Amendment is the recognition of a right, then corporations have that right, just like natural persons. This concept in the US is called "corporate personhood" and it has long been recognized by courts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Case_law_...

> In 1818, the United States Supreme Court decided Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (...) Beginning with this opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court has continuously recognized corporations as having the same rights as natural persons to contract and to enforce contracts.

The drone needs to land to deliver the package. Most consumers don't have airstrips in their front yard.

I'm pretty skeptical of Lazar. See this article for an investigative counterpoint of many of his claims:

https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strang...

> A last item for your consideration to assess Lazar’s veracity is his academic background. He claims Masters degrees from BOTH Caltech and MIT in subjects they don’t offer and during time periods he couldn’t have physically been at either campus. In response to questions at the “Ultimate UFO Seminar” in Rachael, NV in May of 1993, Lazar was so kind as to offer up the names of two of his instructors at Caltech and MIT, a “Dr. Duxler” as well as “Hohsfield”. He even spelled them. Stan Friedman told me he went searching for Duxler and no such person ever taught at Caltech or MIT. However he did find a William Duxler who taught Math and Physics at the previously mentioned Pierce College and confirmed to Friedman that Lazar had taken at least one of his courses in the 1970s.

> As for finding Hohsfield, Friedman rolled snake eyes, beyond confirming no one by that name ever taught at Caltech or MIT. However did you know that in this amazing 21st Century you can buy reprints of all sorts of old high school yearbooks? Like, for example, the 1976 yearbook for W. Tresper Clarke High School? And if one were to do so, one would find that there was a Technical and Vocational teacher there by the name of Frederick Hohsfield. Looks like he was teaching electronics. Interesting, no?

Falsely claiming academic degrees is all by itself extremely damaging to his credibility. According to Wikipedia:

> Lazar claims that his academic records were erased in an effort by authorities to discredit him

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar#Education_and_qualif...

Even if his academic records were erased, it should be easy to identify professors who had him in their class, or classmates who attended with him. If Lazar was willing to prove his claims, he could provide the name of a classmate or professor who did verifiably attend either institution, and who is willing to name Lazar as a student. Applying Occam's Razor to the situation is not favorable to Lazar.

Next time you see it, break out your phone or camera and capture a video. Then we can discuss the actual video!

If that's the case, why not read the pilots into the test, even at a summary level?

If the Navy had told the pilots, "You just experienced an advanced technology test. Nothing to worry about" then they would have undoubtedly kept their mouths shut and not talked to the media.

> with no obvious labor differences for why this is

One difference that stands out to me is that the supply of people who can perform the job is constrained.

Other professions may be crucial - indeed, the truck drivers who deliver supplies to all stores from which we purchase daily goods are crucial - but that job in particular can be performed by almost anyone with minimal training.

Words like "crucial" don't have much meaning as far as determining job compensation: it's a supply/demand interaction. If the supply of people who can perform the job is not constrained, because the job is relatively easy to get into, then that will suppress the compensation.

It's difficult to obtain a computer science degree and perform at the level required to solicit job offers from the kind of companies that pay new graduates $200k. Imagine for the sake of argument that these jobs require an IQ of 125 or higher: then only about 5% of the population will be capable of performing at that level. (This is just an example. I'm not saying that I think programming has a particular IQ requirement.)

Done! Thanks for the suggestion. I've edited my post to include a link to the case on RECAP.

The complaint submitted to the court presumably has more details. It would have been nice if the blog post had included a link to it directly, but they did include the case identifier.

Edit: I went ahead and dug the information up. Here are the details about the court case on PACER (requires login): https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/iquery.pl?924893974295...

This appears to be a link to the specific complaint: https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/doc1/035018374190 (20 pages, ~1 MB)

Edit: I've uploaded the complaint to the RECAP archive, which I believe you can access for free as a PDF here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/16154366/elasticsearch-... (see document #1)

One of the claims that's easy to summarize is that Elastic alleges that floragunn made massive changes to its codebase shortly after Elastic released proprietary updates, contrary to floragunn's typical development practices, and that these changes included copies of Elastic's proprietary code:

> On June 7, 2018, just over one month after Elastic made the source code for XPack version 6.2.x publicly available under the Elastic License, floragunn made a sudden and very large change to the Search Guard code. This change comprised 244 additions and 145 deletions of code. Many of these changes involved the wholesale copying of the X-Pack code that Elastic opened little over a month before.

The complaint goes into more detail with specific alleged examples of source code copying, showing the code in Elastic's codebase and the corresponding code in floragunn's.

Is there an actual argument somewhere for why these subsidies are desirable for the nation? Let's say, written by people who agree with them. What is the stated purpose? This should be written from the perspective that most industries should not warrant any subsidies. I don't understand why taxpayers should subsidize farms, and I'd like to read the rationale.

It doesn't really make sense to assume that utilization would be abysmal without constraining supply. The people who operate taxis are rational actors. People who operate taxis will simply exit (or not enter) the business if they're sitting around idle and not making money.