standapart

Perhaps Plume will be the next company to be sued by Texas...

tl;dr

The author discovers the wild world of financial engineering and "float".

Instead of settling usage changes for it's image service with a single charge, Cloudflare settles it with two charges in such a way that the customer "floats" Cloudflare money for some portion of their billing cycle.

This is the bullshit that you start to do when you become publicly traded. It adds zero value for the customer.

Your investors need liquidity and private markets won't give you the valuation that you need.

So get Google to buy Wiz for their nascent services play and plow the cash into this.

Smells like July of 2000.

A master class in enterprise software sales fit into a single comment. Bravo!

However, scaling will get you your next round led by Nvidia... I mean Microsoft... I mean AWS...

If Figma continues along this path I worry that they are doomed.

Generally, there are three paths to profitability: 1) increase pricing, 2) decrease expenses, or 3) offer new products and services with superior margin.

It seems like Figma has chosen to implement 1) but sell it to customers as 3). However, in contractionary periods like we are in now, 1) does not work -- no matter how much lock-in you have and how you sell it.

Weirdly, they don't preference contracts for shell corps owned by, say, poor white trash from Middletown, Ohio -- despite these people meeting your definition of "someone who historically hasn't been paid well".

But I digress. In the biz, if the contract has to be trafficked through a shell corp where the owner takes a 20% cut, everyone simply bids a 20% higher rate.

It's the taxpayer's prerogative if they would rather their government pay an inflated contracting rate -- as opposed to using that money for education, infrastructure, social services, etc.

From subpoenaed communications we even know that certain figures who publicly denounced the lab-leak theory, privately believed the theory was plausible or even likely.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-lab-leak-deception-an...

This article is part of what I like to call the narrative media. You decide what the facts are and don't give a damn about reality -- because that's what keeps your readers coming back for more.

I forgot that we're playing the demo games now.

Well I'll see your demo, and raise you another demo

https://x.com/sean_moriarity/status/1760435005119934862

Except that demo was done by a single person, with a day job and no cap table.

Weird... Things are starting to smell a lot like 2020, again...

Exactly -- and CZ was always the fall guy. Yi is the mastermind.

Some stories don't have a hero.

What a wonderful way to cut headcount/expense and lock-in profitable margins on healthy annual revenue.

Can only work when you have the advantage of being the dominant product in the marketplace -- but I gotta hand it to the board, I couldn't have done it better myself.

Not really. There were things like Purdue, but that wasn't fentanyl.

The fentanyl epidemic is the result of market developments in the illegal drug trade.

So here's a little brain teaser about what you have to do when dealing with potential nation-state actors. This scenario is for the folks who are calling "hyperbole" when the actor is clearly, potentially a nation-state. This scenario is based upon an event that actually occurred.

1. You have a $200 million piece of defense-critical equipment. 2. You know that there was a 5-minute period where a potential member of a foreign intelligence service was alone and unattended in the same room as this piece of equipment.

What do you do with the equipment? You can:

a) Put the equipment into service b) Disassemble the equipment on both a hardware and software level and try to detect if anything was altered c) Destroy the equipment

If you choose anything other than c) you have probably never been, nor should you ever be, in charge of securing critical assets that can be targeted by a nation-state. This incident seems to indicate that the leadership at Microsoft would choose a).

Also, bear in mind that these are the people that you just sent all your ChatGPT data to.

Nice post! Couple things that might be useful:

1. While JCH will usually be the most performant hashing method, naively, removing a node will affect all nodes of higher order. This makes the logic of node deletions somewhat more complex than (say) Discord's hash ring. This is why JCH is more common for long-term, distributed, redundant storage -- where the topology changes far less frequently.

2. For sharding, what makes distribution hard is not so much the hashing but consensus on the cluster state -- this is the hidden problem. Bryan Hunter's talk on Waterpark (https://youtu.be/9qUfX3XFi_4) is a excellent example of what you can do when you can set things up so that the topology is fixed. In fact, this approach makes things so straight forward that it is shared by Riak, where the number of vnodes is fixed.

However, if you have a rapidly changing topology (like several Kubernetes clusters that are frequently scaling up and down), you can often need some sort of consensus mechanism to make sure every node has a consistent view of the cluster. In my experience, this usually ends up being the most complex part of distribution problem to solve.

Losses have to be paid by someone.

Whether they're paid by "you, the taxpayer" or "you, the bank customer", they will be paid.

Just remember that some losses matter more than others. Losses by community banks in Oklahoma matter (on a dollar for dollar basis) less than losses in Silicon Valley.

https://twitter.com/SeidlerCorp/status/1636518949872451584?s...

For some additional context, here is an excerpt from the hearing:

https://twitter.com/SeidlerCorp/status/1636518949872451584?s...

Here is my question:

Certain individuals have argued on HN that depositors of SVB should be made whole. For the most part, their arguments have not been based on systemic banking risk. Rather, their arguments have been based on the negative impact of employers suffering losses on uninsured deposits.

Would these same people argue that deposits of, say, community banks in Oklahoma be fully insured? Do they disagree with Yellen?

This is a significant simplification of the matter. I doubt it works in reality.

Replace the words "VC firm" with "Sequoia" in the previous statement and see if it rings true that Sequoia's reputation would be destroyed forever.

When the smoke has cleared, it would be interesting to quantify whether this event affected a (statically significant) higher percentage of YC offspring than other incubator offspring.

Could be a selling point for alternative incubators in the future.

Perhaps being a part of YC puts you at greater risk from these events. Draw your own conclusion about the reason why.

Requirements aren't the only way to steer someone to a product. Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS.

Nor does the lack of a requirement indemnify someone from responsibility.

With all respect, Garry: YC is to blame for the consolidation of this risk in a single counterparty.

Those who led all these entities from the same industry to bank at the same place must be held accountable too.

Probably safe to say: Stripe isn't going to be able to raise a couple bil to pay tax liabilities in this environment.

What if this was never about getting the money out of the crypto markets. Could it simply be about minimizing how many of the assets the bankruptcy could liquidate all at once?

It may take a long time to recover these funds. Remember seeing that slippage was as much as 50% on some of the transactions, a permanent loss.

No one still in crypto wanted to see the liquidation happen.

There hasn't been a free market in health care in the US for decades-- thankfully though, the pig has kept it's lipstick and we give you the illusion of choice. Hopefully, in the next few years, we can just do away with this facade.

It may not be worth trumpeting this as an achievement, though. Just go ask any doc what they think of CMS.

I don't have an RCT which establishes this. But I'm not the one who asserted that the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines prevented transmission. You have the burden of proof in this situation. Hence my reference to the astounding amount of certainty in your comment.

I think it is completely clear from the statement that you made that: the vaccines are effective at treating symptoms of covid and that they will reduce the symptomatic infection rates.

However, symptomatic infection rate and infection rate are decidedly not the same and we've know from the beginning that asymptomatic spread occurs substantially with covid.

The only way you establish the effect on transmission is with a large-scale RCT using a well-designed testing protocol. This may be hard but this is the standard.

This is not an RCT. The work itself makes this very clear, it's observational, based on what we'll call "pseudo-voluntary" testing. Just provide the RCT for your claims-- this is necessary since the vaccine is known to be effective on a symptomatic level.

The amount of abstract certainty present in this comment is truly astonishing. Please just cite the RCT on this.

True. However, because viral fatigue and related complications are generally present among symptomatic people (and 20-somethings are less symptomatic than other age-cohorts) it might well be that your risk of these things is also lower-- even if, conditioned on being symptomatic, the risk of "long-COVID" in 20-somethings is higher. I think the jury is still out regarding risk ratios for long-COVID, however-- partly because the pathology is rather ill-defined and still developing.

The more important point is just that viral fatigue and respiratory complications are not new things. They are present for a range of viruses. The mere existence of these factors is not pertinent to the "public good" point that the original comment centered on.

Thanks, yeah. It is completely plausible, I think, that vaccination for any cohort of subjects could reduce their infectivity.

The decision rule, however, is never the existence of a non-zero number. It is always a question of magnitude and whether that magnitude has meaningful impact.

Just to clarify this point: if you experiment with some simple SIR or SIRS models (which are not useful in modern epidemiology, but I digress) you will observe threshold phenomenon. This means that there will be broad ranges where perturbations of parameters (for instance, R0) have little meaningful effect on the progression of the outputs (for instance, the number of infected). Then there will be very small intervals where slight perturbations of parameters have a very meaningful effect on the outputs. For instance, there's not that much difference between R0=5 and R0=6, but there's quite a lot of difference between R0=0.999 and R0=1.001.

This is just to say that: it's plausible that vaccination has little to no impact on actual spread of Covid variants in the global population. I'm not saying this statement is true, I'm just saying that this statement is far from being disproven. There's just not enough evidence to call covid vaccination a "public good" and care about whether the low-risk get it.