Hacker News Reader

origin_pathon Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

Yep. It's a spectrum. At one end you have normal companies, in the middle you have pseudo-companies like Uber or Lyft or perhaps even Twitter where they're just indirectly guzzling printed money for decades after it's laundered through several different intermediaries, and then at the end you have FTX which is a fully fraudulent non-business. Where does all the crazy money come from? Ultimately from the central banks.

origin_pathon Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

There's a disclosure that SBF actually gave Vox money as part of a journalism grant. This business of billionaires buying journalists outright by calling payments philanthropic grants is way out of control. It's bad enough when Gates does it.

origin_pathon Two weeks of dealing with Google as a developer

Although it's not app store review, Apple DTS is like that (but way cheaper). And I have to say the quality of developer support you get from it has been amazing for me.

origin_pathon The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

I did read it. You attempted to disclaim the specific claims of the poster whilst also arguing its premise was correct, but the premise of "white culture" (which does not exist, no debate needed) being functions of "white supremacy" that "suppresses cultural variance" is just nonsensical racist gibberish from the US left. Slowmovintarget has it right - we've seen this sort of thing before except with "the rich" or "capitalism" being used instead of "whiteness".

origin_pathon Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

That must be common. I remember many years ago I was walking to the Google MTV campus from a corp apartment in Mountain View itself. It's a fair walk, maybe an hour. I was doing it because it was sunny and why not. A cop car pulled over and asked if I was OK. They were friendly but the only apparent cause of this visit was that I was walking. I found that deeply strange.

origin_pathon Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

A fix: legal penalties for filing false or irrelevant CPS reports.

origin_pathon Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

Our society is way too tolerant of that kind of behavior. It's similar to how there are still occasional people wearing masks, even outdoors. It needs to become socially acceptable to tell people they're being paranoid and weird, in the same way they feel it's acceptable to tell others they're not paranoid enough.

origin_pathon NASA – Artemis I Liftoff

They aren't really taxpayer dollars in this case, it's borrowed or printed money that hits people directly via inflation.

origin_pathon Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

Note though that other large projects with similar scaling-git problems tended to just write wrapper tools to work around it, see how Chromium and Android do it.

origin_pathon The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

Those two things aren't even close to comparable in scale. The Aztecs were truly horrible in ways not seen in Europe for a very long time. That's why Cortez could conquer so much territory despite starting out with basically nothing. The locals were desperate to overthrow the Aztecs and teamed up with the Spanish. The sheer scale of the pointless and arbitrary human sacrifice was horrific.

origin_pathon The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

"guess what happened when the Spanish invaded the Americas?"

They put a stop to the practice of human sacrifice, which was rampant throughout the Aztec Empire?

origin_pathon The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

The Spectator isn't even remotely close to far right, unless you're going to describe the Guardian and BBC as far left. It's a standard mainstream newspaper in the UK that's been around for a very long time.

I recall a time when "far right" was used to describe Nazis. This sort of wolf crying has rendered the term meaningless just like the word Nazi itself, racism, sexism, etc. It doesn't work anymore, people see through it.

origin_pathon The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

The census is a set of forms. It isn't like there's someone in front of you trying to guess your age, gender etc. What "self-identify" means here is that you're allowed to pick whatever you want regardless of biological truth, whereas normally lying on a census can result in a fine.

origin_pathon The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

"the general premise ... is correct"

That can't be, unless one subscribes to a highly racist view of the world. Concepts like "objective, rational linear thinking" are not anything to do with "whiteness" and to even suggest it is, is really quite profoundly insulting to everyone who isn't white.

origin_pathon What Happened at Alameda Research

How do you know there aren't many other bets like this on their sheets?

origin_pathon Why doesn't flutter.dev use flutter as their front end?

An example of a UI toolkit that does do this is https://jpro.one which renders JavaFX apps to HTML. They use it for their whole website and even their documentation. It works fairly well except if you go offline and lose the connection to the server.

origin_pathon Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

We were talking about in 2022 but I see now that the original comment is flagged, sigh.

origin_pathon Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

Be aware that since Omicron virtually all of those are dying "with" COVID, not of it. Examples collected from the Milwaukee coroner's office:

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/six-recent-covid-deaths-...

That's why the age skew is so high.

origin_pathon Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

In fairness UK conservative media have been reporting on it (Spectator, Telegraph). But it's being blamed on lockdowns and NHS collapse. That might be true; not all countries have excess deaths and it's a bit unclear to what extent the effect is real. It depends a lot on how you model the baseline.

origin_pathon Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

Officially the increased sickness effect doesn't exist at all. We only have these sorts of anecdotes and vaccines can only be discussed occasionally on HN, and not at all on most other forums, so notes can only be compared rarely.

Unofficially the effect does exist and goes by various names: OAS, Hoskins Effect, immune imprinting. It can be seen in some of the vaccine effectiveness data back when it was being collected by places like the UK, where vaccinated people were getting COVID at 4x the rate of unvaccinated by the time they stopped reporting (and the rate was worsening with time).

It can also be seen in the boosters trial data where they had to switch the definition of success to antibody production, because the boosters were not actually reducing infection incidence e.g. the bivalent boosters were tested on all of 8 mice and all 8 got COVID when exposed so effectiveness is zero, but that didn't stop them being approved on the basis that they caused production of antibodies (to the variant targeted by the OG vaccine, not Omicron).

OAS unfortunately can be caused by any vaccine tech. It's not mRNA specific. The antibodies you produce are for the older extinct variants that the vaccine trained you for, not the current variants. The body doesn't recognize that there's a difference.

origin_pathon Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

I'm not a doctor, so maybe there's some deep difference between something that has the same symptoms as a heart attack and a heart attack. Regardless of what exactly it was, it freaked him out, it freaked me out too and I'm glad there doesn't seem to have been a recurrence (or if there was he chose not to tell me, knowing that I'd tell him again to see a specialist).

"Both the Vaccine and Covid are known have a low chance of causing heart issues."

It is 'known' by people who are deeply conflicted by their own pushing of the shots and could thus never admit it, if their policies had led to immune or heart damage. Nothing much can be said about vaccine safety given that the public health and research system are clearly terrified of doing or saying anything that might reduce compliance with their policies.

origin_pathon Just how complicated could it be to register a German company?

Both, I think.

origin_pathon Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins

I'm very skeptical about their numbers.

Some time in 2021 there was a story about COVID vaccines and heart issues here on HN. The comments filled up with people saying that ever since they'd got their shots they were experiencing new heart-related symptoms they'd never had previously like permanently racing heartbeats, palpitations/fluttering, inability to do exercise and more. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to re-find that discussion. I also have a good friend who works in IT who had a heart attack in the weeks after his shots, but he refused to believe that's what happened and never went in to get diagnosed (the symptoms were an exact match however).

Some rough calculations indicate the numbers affected by this kind of (hopefully) low level heart damage seem much higher than claimed. They say of the "hundreds of millions" of shots there are only 1000 cases of diagnosed heart damage from the vaccines. Call it 1000/100,000,000 or one in a million. There are approx 5M readers of Hacker News per month, so far less per day. Of those only a tiny handful have accounts and post comments. If their numbers are right then there should be ~no HN commenters with post-vaccine heart problems but this thread filled up with people posting their own experiences of such a thing.

Then there's also the other health problems. My gfs friends who took it have been complaining that they seem to get sick with colds/fluey things way more frequently since the shots, I heard similar complaints from a couple of old coworkers. One of those girls complaining of frequent sickness also reported disrupted menstruation but the doctors have ignored it all because as far as they are concerned, the vaccines are 'perfectly safe'.

origin_pathon Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.

"The FileSystem API looked promising, and then google killed it."

How do you mean? They're doing blog posts about web access to the filesystem just this month.

origin_pathon Just how complicated could it be to register a German company?

Switzerland is maybe a bit better than Germany but the differences are small. The bureaucracy around running a company is still light years worse than the USA or UK.

Forming a GmbH or AG still requires the involvement of notaries, for example, still involves significant amounts of paperwork, and still requires up-front 20k CHF (afaik not delayable). The UG holding company isn't apparently useful here and there's no mandatory IHK equivalent but the rest is similar.

But where things really start to hurt is the mandatory insurances and pension payments that are required the first time you hire someone i.e. yourself. Not only is it very expensive (~25% of salary), it's so complicated you can't actually do it yourself and neither can your accountant, so they all go via insurance brokers. In other words there's two different firms between me and the insurers, all of whom are adding huge delays and costs. The agreement with just one of these insurers is 25 pages of highly technical German.

Oh and don't even try the barrel of laughs that is issuing employees with equity, let alone options.

It's the slowness that gets me. The tax office is backlogged by years. Even a professional, decent sized Treuhand (roughly = accountant) will routinely do things like go on holiday for a month, come back, get sick for a couple of weeks, go on holiday again, etc. The mere process of setting up the company and fully completing that setup took me >1 year this time. And that's assuming you actually get competent help: I'm now on my third Treuhand because the first two made huge & obvious errors in their work (e.g. lots of typos in submitted documents, calling me Frau instead of Herr, unable to answer basic questions etc).

But this is not specific to forming companies. Swiss bureaucracy is hilariously kafkaesque and slow in other ways too. Recently I got a letter that my C (work) permit would expire in a month, so here is an invite to book an appointment with the local government office to come in and get another. I go online to book, which you can at least do, and discover they have no free appointments at all for a month and a half. OK, whatever, I book the first available slot. When I turn up they immediately fine me for being "late". I explain that I've come literally as soon as they allowed me too (you need the mailed invitation to turn up), but the lady shows me the fine print where it says that I have to inform them if I can't come within a month for any reason and that this, apparently, includes reasons they already know about like "we don't have enough staff to see people". They then charged me a few hundred francs for the privilege of getting my documents renewed, booked me another appointment to get a photo taken (another few weeks of delay) and of course during this time I can't travel outside the country because my documents have expired.

Problem is, everything here is like this. Every interaction with the government will take months, require the payment of hundreds of francs and involve Brazil-esque procedures that mostly involve manually schlepping printed papers between the huge and numerous government offices that dot the highly expensive real estate of the city. In many ways the internet never really happened here beyond online calendars so the offices often don't communicate with each other using wires. It literally often boils down to "print it out, stamp it, give it to you to deliver".

origin_pathon Just how complicated could it be to register a German company?

Yes, it can be worse! In Switzerland the process is quite similar to Germany, but the pain really starts not with founding the firm but when you first start to employ people. Or indeed, when you need to shut the company down.

Source: I've done this. The first time I tried to shut a company down, my advisors (who you need to handle the local paperwork) didn't tell me about the "three strikes" requirement in the public register. So it took five years to get the company fully shut down.

origin_pathon The Case for Abolishing Elections

That's clearly nonsense. What do you think the SNP is?

origin_pathon The Case for Abolishing Elections

How? You realize companies will have replaced employees who leave after a year, right? You can't just switch people's careers off and on again like that. What if they were self employed? Their company can easily have been destroyed, there's nothing for them to go back to.

origin_pathon The Case for Abolishing Elections

I think quite a lot of the politicians I've interacted with (in the UK) actually do seem to believe in public service. They certainly aren't all narcissists.

origin_pathon The Case for Abolishing Elections

Yes, so the politician is at least trying to understand and represent other people's views. They've made the decision to take the heat and are psychologically prepared for it.

Choosing people at random is not going to work well. Look at what happens with juries - lots of people find creative ways to get out of jury duty and that's for a way smaller commitment of time than a political term. The randomly chosen person won't want to be in government at all. Their life has just been totally up-ended through no fault of their own. Now no matter what they do, they're going to be wildly famous and wildly unpopular with huge segments of the population. All they wanted was to do their job and take care of their family, now they're getting harassed on the street by political enemies, having to go on TV, having to justify their decisions to journalists. Presumably some of the really unlucky ones will have to become ministers, but how do they even get picked?

No, the randomly chosen person has no reason to give a single damn about anything or anyone except themselves in that position. Heck half of them will be thinking: if I just refuse to turn up to work, maybe there'll be a recall and a new person will be randomly chosen.

Then take into account all the exceptions and justifiable reasons why people will be able to get out of this duty (e.g. because they're sick, because they're caregivers, because they're non-citizens, because they're mothers, because their company testifies that person is critical to their operations, etc). The ones you'll end up with are the ones who have nothing better to do. Expect the terminally unemployed to be over-represented.