Hacker News Reader

pearjuiceon Everything is Ghibli

Theft of what? There was no market for "memes in ghibli style commissioned by the original studio" which would probably cost hundreds if not thousands if hand-drawn. Nobody was going to pay for that. When it became freely available and instantly reproducible, that's the new market.

pearjuiceon Warren Buffett amasses more cash and sells more stock

Don't want it to sound harsh but he's 94 years old. Could it be he just doesn't want to go out with a loss and is fine with his final score not fluctuating too much? Even if the markets don't correct/crash like his reserves seems to indicate, nobody can blame him for eventually being too early or not losing money opposed to gaining even more.

Because this strategy seems to be in line with what we've been reading ("buffet amassing cash") for the last 5 years at least?

pearjuiceon Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL

Doing it in pure SQL is really impressive but I think the real tell-tale sign of peak "cracked engineer energy" is the maintained, decade-old blogspot site. Can't exactly put my finger on it, but really gives off "niche mastery". I don't even know the authors but I'm sure in the right circles a few dudes maintaining a blogspot site called "database architects" for a decade probably don't need an introduction.

pearjuiceon Sora is here

Though I like the novelty of AI generated content, it kind of sucks dead internet theory is becoming more and more prevalent. YouTube (and all of the web) is already being spammed with AI generated slop and "better" video/text/audio models only make this worse. At some point we will cross the threshold of "real" and "generated" content being posted on the web and there's no stopping that.

pearjuiceon IMG_0001

Was a pump & dump by Casey Neistat. Lacked true popularity and network effects as it turned out people don't want to share unedited, raw footage. Social media is about looking good. So Casey just used his YouTube/influencer popularity at the time to pump metrics and then managed to sell it to CNN. No idea what CNN did with the tech or people but not much later they shut it down entirely.

pearjuiceon Crypto Had Its Chance

>the lack of regulation in crypto has led to any tangible, groundbreaking innovation?

Is creating a ~$1T (and that's just BTC) asset class which went from obscure mailing lists to ETFs not innovation? Of this asset class, only 21M (divisible) units will ever exist[0] and to this date the original asset (again, BTC) has had no compromising (security) incidents deviating from its original mission (P2P ledger).

This doomsaying "doesn't deserve to survive" just seems mean-spirited without any actual arguments as to why it's not deserved for an asset class to exist which is truly deflationary (as in money supply) and shoving everything under "crypto" hoping for some outright ban because it's not regulated. It being unregulatable is a feature, not a bug.

[0] even with forks, the original whitepaper-protocol as we know it today will probably always be "BTC"

pearjuiceon Adam Neumann Submits Bid to Buy Back WeWork for More Than $500M

Huh? This is a peak performance in capitalism. Free market mechanics at its finest. This guy got roughly 2B$ to step down whilst still billing 50M$ annually as a "consultant".

pearjuiceon Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

To me, this seems like engagement clickbait targeting PG to promote an infotainment product (CTO coaching/course):

>there is no cookie banner law

There definitely is. The article explicitly states this:

>you need my consent when you want to track me

"tracking" here means storing data:

>store information in a visitor's browser is only allowed if the user is provided with "clear and comprehensive information", in accordance with the Data Protection Directive, about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and has given their consent (wikipedia)

The actual directive also explicitly states this

>consent may be given by any appropriate method enabling a freely given specific and informed indication of the user's wishes, including by ticking a box when visiting an Internet website (32002L0058.17)

pearjuiceon Automated Unit Test Improvement Using Large Language Models at Meta

So write unit tests automatically, change code later and then regenerate the unit tests? Now the code has a bug but the unit tests pass. I'm already seeing this today with devs using ChatGPT to quickly get the "test boilerplate" over and over.

pearjuiceon Alexei Navalny has died

They were cherry picked examples such as your "$10 fine" example to demonstrate that how in multiple places in the world people (and even children) are imprisoned under horrible circumstances, spend their entire lives behind bars and some simply die or get murdered within their prison cell before completing their sentences.

I or you don't have to prove any alliance here. I could be burning a Russian flag in front of your eyes and you would probably still find a reason why I cannot have criticism on one side doing exactly the same injustices and (criminal) acts as the regime of the flag I just burned. Let me be clear that Navalny should not have been treated and died the way he did and in a fair justice system people would be held accountable.

That doesn't mean I cannot state an opinion that it is repulsive things like this happen everywhere yet somehow one side doing it is worse than the other and claims the moral high ground. They are both bad.

pearjuiceon Alexei Navalny has died

I'm not sure why or what you are cherry picking here. I could easily quote pieces on how prisoners are treated in Guantanamo Bay, what happened in Abu Ghraib under American supervision or how we happily send billions of dollars to a country of which Save the Children said of the detained children "86% were beaten, 69% were strip searched, 60% spent time in solitary confinement, 68% were denied any healthcare, and 58% were denied visits or communication with family".

I'm not pro-Russia, pro-Putin or pro-anyone-who-detains-opposition-for-life. I'm also not pro people saying "Russia bad" when these things happen everywhere and somehow think they are morally superior.

pearjuiceon Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

Yes, when this whole saga is over they will probably absorb the carcass.

pearjuiceon Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others to join Microsoft

Because OpenAI has first mover advantage, an actual product, the household "ChatGPT" name and starting anything from 0 would mean you start with a 3-0 disadvantage. Even if you threw a few billion dollars at it and attracted all of the top minds for at least a year - probably longer - you will be seen as the "ChatGPT alternative". How long before you can capture the momentum they have now with OpenAI? It's also a legal minefield, even when the majority of employees of OpenAI migrate, there will be all kinds of no-competes and conflicts of interest.

Strategically, this is probably a better move. Microsoft doesn't see their investment implode and they probably have some sort of plan to inject or absorb Sam and/or Microsoft back into OpenAI to prevent this in the future. Perhaps replacing the board of directors to prevent further infighting.

pearjuiceon U.S. Deficit, Pegged at $1.7T, Effectively Doubled in 2023

As long as the US is a military super power there is no problem whatsoever.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

Not trying to be a low-effort reply but any Economy 101 textbook will theorize this kind of debt/interest/inflation mix is impossible. Practically, the world is too dependent on the USD in one way or another. If they try to break loose, they might get confronted with those military expenditures which is a good enough incentive to keep using USD as a global reserve currency.

pearjuiceon GPTBot – OpenAI’s Web Crawler

I wonder how much the regression of ChatGPT is due to it adding new content which has its origin from ChatGPT. The blog and SEO spam with ChatGPT fluff is going through the roof, eventually all of that will get crawled too and the model will just get positively reinforced on its own output. Or is that not a concern?

pearjuiceon What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

Why would he be annoyed? The lifetime business value and goodwill from this public analysis probably earned a lot more for Patrick than any consulting gig Colin would have paid for.

pearjuiceon Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Crypto Project Officially Launches

https://archive.is/hejHt

Non-paywall link

pearjuiceon Postman acquires Akita for automated API observability

They don't have to. They just need enough time and believe for the investors to dump it on retail (IPO) or get bought-out by another company.

pearjuiceon Ask HN: How to navigate the world as a brain-damaged 17 year old?

>fight back hard

Bad advice, especially in UK and in OP's age bracket. The UK has a sharp rise in knife incidents, moreso at younger ages.

https://news.sky.com/story/fatal-stabbings-in-england-and-wa...

pearjuiceon Russian paramilitary chief says his forces will turn around

Information & propaganda wars are so asymmetrical I sometimes wish there was less reporting until it was actually clear what is going on. It's all just one fog of uncertainty and whoever thinks what is being reported now is correct is probably mistaken. Somehow this buildup of troops was completely unreported, even though any intelligence agency worth its salt should have seen concentration and movement of troops for days if not weeks. Completely unreported in the media AFAIK, and all of a sudden all media is reporting Wagner is going full steam ahead towards Moscow.

pearjuiceon Dragonfly – Performant in-memory data store

I don't know how well the results hold up after a year, but according to Redis the Dragonfly performance test is biased and with Redis configured properly it reached higher throughput than Dragonfly. YMMV but just putting this up here. Personally I never used Dragonfly so I wonder if the "marketing metrics" actually hold up in production.

https://redis.com/blog/redis-architecture-13-years-later/

pearjuiceon JPMorgan Chase Bank Assumes All the Deposits of First Republic Bank

Meaning JPM was also granted a new exemption to the 10% deposit cap in this acquisition? There are regulations[0] preventing banks with >=10% of US deposits to grow larger in size by acquiring other banks. Another win for TBTF theorists.

[0] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/05/29/regulatory-reform...

pearjuiceon U.S. regulator set to take over First Republic

Another bank, another leeway for the FDIC insurance limit?

pearjuiceon Twitter lacks many features to be a true Mastodon replacement (2022)

Mastodon is a wasteland. It can't compete with the engagement and exposure you can get on Twitter. For a social network, any feature parity is irrelevant if it can't reach critical mass.

pearjuiceon This website is solar powered and running on a Raspberry Pi-like computer

I wonder if putting extensive load on the server could drain the battery in enough time before the sun comes up?

pearjuiceon Banking in uncertain times

>which the borrower and bank has to be repay in future

And when do you expect this debt to be repaid back? If you cycle all the way back, at some point the money is created out of thin air backed by nothing but believe that the US will not default. It's not ignorance but reality that as long as you are the strongest arm in the room nobody is going to challenge you into paying back your debts. Yes, on paper it's all economically sound and "basic accounting" but the reality of the situation is that if America would not be able to defend its position as "stable country", nobody would accept their debt denoted in the currency they create themselves.

pearjuiceon Banking in uncertain times

As I said, the scenario outlined is hyperbole... Practically, they won't actually bet on red but use all kinds of financial instruments to achieve the largest amount of yield possible with the depositors capital at their disposal. I'm aware the bank is wiped out and the deposits are no longer managed by SVB. None of this refutes the point that until the bank goes bust, the bank will try to maximize yield and shareholder returns with the cost being their own capital. The depositors capital, is an extra with no cost. As far as I am aware, shareholder profits won't get clawed back. Now that the $250K FDIC barrier has been lifted, the moral hazard is that the bank (not SVB which no longer exists, but any other bank) is no longer responsible for whatever happens with the capital of their customers - even if they would go completely bust; the FDIC will fix it.

pearjuiceon Banking in uncertain times

>Why is the US seemingly immune to this kind of thing?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

Not trying to be a low-effort reply but any Economy 101 textbook will theorize that it's impossible. Practically, the world is too dependent on the USD in one way or another. If they try to break loose, they might get confronted with those military expenditures which is a good enough incentive to keep using USD as a global reserve currency.

pearjuiceon Banking in uncertain times

Given the bank's yield is some sort of formula with regards to how much and succesful they are in investing/loaning-out the capital of their depositors. Then how is it not a moral hazard, when the bank gets a signal that the FDIC will cover all this capital, regardless what the bank does with it? Even if the bank asset can go to 0, in the end the vehicle used to prop up this asset will come from the depositors. If I (depositor) give you (bank) 100$ and someone else (FDIC) tells you "do whatever you want with that money, if you lose it I'll give it back to the depositor" - you could basically go to the casino and put it all on red. Even if you would also lose your own 100$ in the process (you risked 200$), you would probably take on more risk simply because my capital isn't at risk but the returns will be yours.

Hyperbole yes, but the moral hazard seems to be with the bank (and the investors therein), not the depositors or their actions. Or I misunderstood you.

pearjuiceon Banking in uncertain times

They don't want the stock to go to 0, but they don't want to miss potential returns either. When the FDIC will cover all depositors, investors (from a purely capitalistic perspective) would demand to use as much of their capital as possible to maximize returns. As we've seen numerous times before in the past, a large quantity of investors is myopic and regulatory oversight often comes too late or after the fact.