mrmcd

Previous reporting on this (when the JPM civil suit was filed) mentioned that JPM didn't care about the fafsa forms business at all. They bought them entirely to get a big pile of marketing leads to sign up young people for banking services early in their adult life before they're signed up with other banks, through a brand they're already familiar with. Considering how many "$200 to open a new checking account!!" junk mail fliers Chase sends me, $41/lead must've seemed like a bargain.

She probably thought they would just be subsumed into a massive corporation, that JPM had shitty metrics and monitoring on their marketing campaign, and nobody would notice most of their emails were going nowhere.

Right. GE is $100/5 years. So, might as well pay the extra $3/yr for faster passport lines too.

Just pay the government a $100 bribe^W 'application processing fee' for Precheck or Global Entry, and no more taking off your shoes. Or taking out your laptops or liquids, or having a government employee look you over in the nudie scanner. Also, shorter, faster lines.

But all this is actually necessary and not security theater. We promise.

This guy also has a bunch of posts on the same site denying climate change and rehashing conspiracy theories about fraudulent votes for Biden. I wouldn't take anything he says very seriously.

Yes, but more likely the major naval powers would just ignore you unless you were doing something that specifically angered them (fugitives, human trafficking, piracy, etc).

Otherwise I think they'd be happy to let you sit there on your leaky little scurvy raft in international waters as long as you want. Piracy is a much bigger problem if you have anything valuable and aren't just sea hobos, but it's more likely the weather is gonna mess you up first.

It cost me $10k to mod the battery on my phone, but now I won't have to charge it again for over 5,000 years.

The degree to which HN is obsessed with AMP is hilarious at times. You'd think every single one of the 100k engineers that work there do nothing but dream up ways to trick people into using AMP for some secret illuminati end goal.

If you don't like AMP, that's fine. If you don't like this UX change that's fine too (and I suspect will be easily fixed with an extension). But maybe consider for a moment that not every single UX change to a product with a billion users is part of the vast AMPiracy.

> I don't know why people in this thread seem to think that Turkey is a poor developing country.

In the EU, there is a lot of prejudice against Turkish people because of the decades of immigration. Think of how most Americans stereotype Mexico and Mexican people, and that's roughly how many people in the EU regard Turkey.

In the US people don't really know anything about Turkey, aside from a vague idea that it's "middle eastern". Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of Americans think Turkey is all deserts and they speak Arabic.

My girlfriend is from Turkey, and I shared this story with her a while back (I discovered it while also researching some Unicode collision issues.) She said that while it's an entertaining story, there's almost certainly a bit of sensationalism and exaggeration from the Turkish press combined with credulity by English language journalists when re-reporting it. Basically, the supposed texts wouldn't have made sense in terms of grammar and syntax with a straightforward dotless/dotted I swap, and would've been obvious to someone fluent in Turkish what happened. This is would've been especially true if you had had this cell phone for any amount of time and communicating in Turkish and it had been routinely swapping Is.

More likely is a bunch of young and/or not too bright people were looking for a reason to get into a violent confrontation. Then the muckraking Turkish press had a sensationalist murder-suicide lovers quarrel story, and as a bonus a nationalistic "see how cell phone companies don't respect our culture" angle as the cherry on top.

However, you should still ALWAYS be careful when converting between character sets and be locality aware when manipulating strings. Practice string safety. ;)

In other words every actual payment company didn't want to get a colonoscopy from every regulator on Earth for Zuck's Spruce Goose hobby.

Google Home stores everything after the hotword trigger until the light goes off (you stop speaking).

Each action has a card that explains what triggered it, what device, and what result was given, and you can listen to it. You can also turn recording storage off entirely, or delete by device or date ranges.

Honestly the only bad part is it's buried several layers down in the options and account activity, where most people don't go looking. If you do care though the privacy options and controls are pretty good.

There's 8.6 million people in the NYC legal limits, over 20 million in it's greater metro, and a way more diverse economy. You'd need waaaaay more tech to get anywhere close to SV, which just isn't that big population wise.

> But they’re way behind, need to spend tens of billions to have a competitive global cloud infrastructure, and have a much more severe customer problem than IBM: their customers hate them

Had a good, long laugh at that one. Jesus, is there anyone on this planet that doesn't regard Oracle as the corporate equivalent of a slimy, violent mob boss?

Or more accurately, a JP Morgan customer bought a Bitcoin ETN.

Unrealized capital gains aren't income because I can't pay my rent and buy groceries with Amazon stock. Even if I could once I did it would be realized same as if I sold it for cash, and I'd owe tax.

You could argue that capital gains rates are too low, but that's a different argument than saying stock owners are getting "invisible income".

"The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only laws that apply in Australia is the law of Australia."

Numbers aren't real in the KANGA Kingdom! Lalalalala I CAN'T HEAR YOU!

Oh boy, a "travel voucher" that likely has so many restrictions it's worth 1/10th the actual number printed on it.

I'm not gonna hold my breath these people will actually offer cash.

I wish there was a way to give imaginary internet upvote points to all the people who didn't act like harassing shitheads, but I guess we're stuck with giving them to this asshole, who whines about "this isn't who I am!" and "I invested in so many of my LGBTQ friends!" months or years afterwords when finally called out on it.

The terms of the loan we're really, really unfavorable. They essentially pledged every piece of IP they have to get the loan. It's not the kind of loan you take if your company is healthy and has easy access to financing.

Instead of crazy conspiracy theories, how about this: USA Today isn't actually that popular, but some botnet programmer with an imperfect understanding of American culture thought it was a brand ordinary Americans all love and read regularly. So they were all instructed to follow their page in an attempt to make the bots look legit.

So you are literally selling them futures on your next preferred series, except if the valuation comes in below the cap, then they get extra stock, so there's no downside for them except total equity wipe-out.

Why do I feel like this is a leading indicator of imminent bubble collapse?

Yes, but, what if I wanted to get the blockchain involved somehow?

oh... it's a "PR" stunt is it?

Did you read the article. It talks about how that trick no longer works on a lot of sites because they are now checking User-Agent strings too.

I assume the NYT headline was a reference to a few years back when Page was talking about how great Glass was and by way of comparison described looking down at a phone screen as "emasculating".

I assume he (Page) was just meant that using a phone a lot felt awkward and took your attention away from the rest of the world around you, but made a poor word choice while improvising in front of an audience. The tech press had a little tisk tisk field day about though, especially since this was well past the point where Glass was looking like a silly boondogle.

In most newspapers though, someone besides the author writes the headline for an article, so I'm assuming whoever wrote this one for the NYT thought they were being clever here in referencing that faux pas.

edit: Just checked it was actually Brin who said the emasculating thing, so who the fuck knows what the headline writer was thinking. Maybe they remembered wrong too.

I can't speak for MDMA, but I have experimented (ok, recreated) with psilocin (shrooms), 4-ACO-DMT, and DMT, which are all serotonin agonists.

The best I can describe it is that a high enough dose feels like putting your brain into debugging mode and then cycling through hundreds of circuits simultaneously. It's not so much "I am experiencing happy now" as "I am experiencing happy, sad, confused, interested, pulsating colors, fractals, childlike wonder, fear, and every other cognitive state simultaneously or in rapid succession."

Some people get very spiritual about it, but I think you kind of have to be a spiritually inclined person anyway to have that specific experience. I always saw it more of giving the hardware a good jolt and seeing what falls out. It's pretty common to go from laughing uncontrollably, to inconsolable sadness, and back again, fairly quickly. This is where a lot of the fear about "bad trips" comes from, but I've found you can manage that with practice and having experienced people tripping with you or babysitting.

I do think there are therapeutic benefits though. Even if there are difficult periods, I find I always felt happier, more ok with the world and open to new experiences and attitudes for up to weeks after words. The article briefly mentions how there's a hypothesis that depression is possibly an effect of individuals who "over learn" negative experiences and become fixated on negative outcomes, and this makes a lot of sense to me. Aside from a sort of "purging" feeling just from such intense bursts of emotions, I could see how it helped to kind of kick me out of the traps of negative and habitual thinking and emotions. Maybe it helped my neurons "relearn" there are other experiences, emotions, and modes of thinking that I can access too?

This is all anecdotal evidence though, gathered while under severe impairment, so take it with that caveat. I would bet that aside from the legal issues, the hardest part of investigating things like psychedelics in a scientific way is that every experience is inherently subjective and personal. Trying to describe and talk about them gets very squishy very quickly.

In the most literal sense, "being a unicorn" means nothing more than in the last funding round, they sold X% of the company for $Y, and (100/X)*Y >= 1,000,000,000

For example, if DizruptrCo Inc, sold a 15% equity stake for 200 million, they are a unicorn "valued" at $1.333 billion.

How they come up values for X and Y are part of the VC fundraising black magic. What's being reported here and a lot of other places recently, however, is that VC investors are actually willing to put an abnormally high value on Y in late rounds, because liquidation preferences mean they are very unlikely to lose money. Founders also love this, because it means they get to join the Unicorn Club, hopefully on their way to the Three Comma Club.

This is whats meant by unicorn valuations being "inflated". As always, the people who get screwed the hardest if things go south is the employees. People are starting to figure out, however, that a down round, or really anything short of a spectacular exit, for an inflated unicorn means their options and equity are probably going to end up worthless. This could lead to all the best talent running for the door as fast as they can, death spiral, etc.

Assuming 80 possible characters (A-Z,a-z,0-9 + 18 punctuation symbols), log2(80^8) ~= 50. So a correct horse password would be about the same as a random 8 character alpha-numeric entropy wise.

The XKCD argument is that correct hose style is way easier to remember. It's possible Schneier thought Munroe was arguing that a correct horse was as much entropy as a 20 character random password, even though he isn't. This is the first I've heard of this argument though so I'm not even sure how much of a controversy it is.

I just looked at some of the hashcat benchmarks and they are clocking MD5 on one of their test machines at 115840 Mh/s.

(2^50)/(115840*10^6) = 9719.43 seconds, or about 2-3 hours to break one correct horse style password. I think the point is that 50 bits of entropy is not enough when you consider the speed of GPU hashing.

Obviously you shouldn't use MD5 for hashing passwords, but since you often have no control over what algo a site uses (or even information about which one they did pick), assuming they will do something common and bad like unsalted MD5 isn't a bad starting point for this kind of analysis.

Reminds me of when I came across an article about this charity last year: https://cleantheworld.org/

I'm sure they are good people with good intentions, but everything about it just annoyed me to no end. Aside from the unintentionally condescending aspect of literally giving the world's poor our half used personal cleaning products, how could this possibly be efficient from either a monetary cost or energy use point of view? Instead of just buying a huge shipping container of new soap from a factory engineering by a huge soap company to be efficient as possible, they are spending thousands of man-hours collecting half used soap bars and re-manufacturing them in their own facility.

Then once they have the soap, there doesn't even appear to be an on the ground logistical operation for distributing it to people efficiently. Instead volunteers go on trips where they apparently just show up and hand out soap to random villages and towns, resulting in tons of unfortunate website and fundraising photo ops of smiling white volunteers handing bars of soap to poor black and brown kids. Also, sometimes they wear super hero capes: https://cleantheworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/medium-...

So like the article said, this all seems simple, straightforward, and helpful on paper. But issues like clean water, sewage treatment, personal hygiene and public health are complex engineer and policy problems even in rich countries, and doubly so in ones with very limited resources. Just air dropping a bunch of recycled soap probably doesn't achieve much beyond making you feel good.