takinola

Serious question, who is still buying memecoins? Why do they do it? The graph for each memecoin is essentially the same - a quick runup followed by a sharp drop to a flatline. Who still thinks putting money into these things is a good idea?

I have the exact opposite reaction. Asking people for permission puts pressure on them to think about what you are doing (your responsibility) and make the decision about whether it is the right or wrong course of action. When I am asked to make a decision, I switch into a different thinking mode than when I am simply told the implications of a decision someone else is making as an FYI.

The majority of decisions being made in a company are two-way doors - they can be reversed if needed without great consequence. Those decisions should be made quickly by whomever is close to the topic and everyone else should just be an inform (as a sanity check).

I don't quite follow the logic of either of these proposals. If (a big if) AGI displaces human labor, then most people will not have any income from employment. If that happens, who has the income to purchase the output of the AGI? If the addressable market served by the AGI declines drastically, then where do the profits come from? If the AGI has low/no profits, where does the tax or dividend come from?

The only solution I can come up with to this conundrum is if the output of the AGI is provided for free to people so the value is captured directly without the intermediating commercial steps. However, there will still be friction in this process (in the form of physical inputs) so I don't see how this is a long term sustainable approach.

Good thing I don't believe in AGI so this is, at best, a philosophical debate.

There is a steelman argument for not pushing back on plans that don't make sense. You have to remember that folks like this are not just random mad men spouting crazy ideas. This is someone that has had crazy ideas in the past AND made them happen. In some cases, more than once. If you had a front row seat to watching someone deliver stuff that you thought couldn't be done, what you do when they came up with the next crazy idea? It is not unreasonable to subjugate your own judgement and just see where it goes.

My understanding is a lot of difference in healthcare spending in Europe v USA can be explained by the cost of pharmaceuticals and the fact that we have fancier (read more expensive) stuff.

The pharmaceuticals pricing is due to the factor that pharma companies believe they can charge higher prices in the US than anywhere else so the US consumer effectively subsidizes the rest of the world. I'm not sure how to solve this problem in a way that lowers prices AND maintains availability of the drugs. The obvious solution is to demand that pharma companies lower prices in the US, but (assuming they are unable to increase prices in Europe) this will just lead to some (many?) drugs not being profitable and reducing availability of drugs for all.

As for the fancier stuff, we do want to have fancier stuff. That means you get better healthcare outcomes for some pretty sick people. We should not want to cut that out. We're in trolley experiment territory when you start discussing whether it is better to have a life-saving, but expensive, procedure available but not everyone can get it because of cost or to not have the procedure available at all for anyone.

All public companies, especially of this size, have their financial statements audited. Of course, shenanigans still happen but I haven't heard any credible claims regarding UNH just yet. More importantly, corporate hanky-panky is almost always designed to boost revenue and margins and not lower them so I am willing to bet the numbers here are trustworthy.

> profits be damned.

But, profits cannot be damned, at least not if you plan on being a going concern. At some point, the companies need to make a profit otherwise they go out of business and cannot provide any healthcare at all.

My point is not that UNH is a sterling example of healthcare service but to point out that the narrative justifying the public outrage is not really logically coherent or supported by evidence. If there is no public healthcare service, you will need to have private insurers. If you have private insurers, they will need to make profit. The best you can do in this situation is make sure there is competition so the profits are not out of line (which seems to be the case) and there is minimal waste in the system (jury is out on that one).

Also, public healthcare is not the panacea that it seems to be promoted as. Healthcare is expensive and at some point, limits will be placed to avoid bankrupting the system. Take a look at any number of the systems of any number of European countries and see the wait times, approvals, etc.

BTW, I support the idea of a government provided healthcare system, but I just don't think it will solve all the problems the way people seem to think it will.

A quick look at United Health's P/L shows a 6% profit margin. This does not quite support the popular rhetoric of a corporation in search of relentless margin (unless the argument is they are bad at it despite all efforts).

I don't think financial institutions are legally allowed to even offer this as an option. Plus, it would be very expensive to opt you out of the risk systems. Plus, some subset of opted-out users would still sue when they are, inevitably, pwned and some hacker runs off with their life savings.

But that's my argument exactly. Even if kids with Ivy League degrees disproportionately have successful careers, lots of non-Ivy League kids also go on to have very successful careers. One possible explanation is that the Ivy Leagues are just really good at spotting talent early and not that they are actually responsible for building the talent. Going to an Ivy League school might be an indication that you are smart, hardworking and driven. However, if you were not already that way, the school is not going to transform you into someone who is.

> The parents are a bunch of professionals, virtually nobody doing anything else, and most kids went to private primaries + got tutored. We must have left some poor but capable kids in the wrong school.

The idea that the school you go to matters for your career seems unsupported by evidence (outside of consulting, law, medicine and investment banking). Most people don't go to ivy league schools (by definition). Looking around at senior leaders at most of the tech companies I have worked at, very few of them are Ivy leaguers. The Ivy League has a really great brand but the impact is overblown imho.

Prince Nico Mbarga was not someone I expected to see on HN. What a throwback to the past. Sweet Mother was practically required on the playlist at any event where your mother was going to be recognized in some form or the other (which is pretty much every important event)

There is some logic to retention bonuses at failing companies. The point is not to get "you" to work as CEO of the most failing company on Earth. It is to get someone that the board thinks is competent at rescuing the company to work there. If this person has such skills, they likely can go work somewhere less screwed up and make more money and/or have a less stressful job. Hence, you need to pay them to make up for the difference. You might argue with whether the CEO is the right person or is up to the task but if you do hire someone for the job, the compensation makes sense.

As for the non-executive workers, the more likely outcome is they get fired or lose benefits. This is because the company likely needs to shed costs really quickly and the biggest cost for most companies is payroll. This asymmetry of outcomes is stark and, quite frankly, sucks but the math checks out. Companies exist to create value and they will do what is needed to continue doing that. Compensation is not about fairness or putting food on the table. It is about what is required to help the company continue creating value.

The takeaway is to always have a sober assessment of your position. Take a look at the chessboard and figure out if you are a Queen or a pawn. Once you know where you stand, act accordingly.

That's kinda the point of the bonus, isn't it? If you otherwise would not want to, they give you more money to make it worth your while to stick around.

If this happens, someone will build an aggregator that interfaces with all the 190 different services.

> It is also important to note that introducing such measures would require everyone to identify themselves online, which could mean that people over the age limit are excluded

This seems like a solvable problem. Imagine there is an age verification authority that people can use to prove their age (upload a drivers' license or something). Websites can issue a cryptographic challenge for age verification that does not include the details of the website. The user then completes the challenge at the verification authority and is issued a token (that does not include the true identity of the user) proving they meet the required criteria. This way, the users' online activity is shielded from the verification authority and the users' true identity is shielded from the website.

Of course, none of this solves the problem of having someone else log in for you but that's a different issue.

My understanding is the liver does not regrow but the remaining tissue just gets bigger. Hence, the liver is not quite a perpetual motion machine.

Interestingly, I agreed with the idea that they are better when discussing tech and VC (after all that's their day job). Do you have any examples of where they have been significantly off on tech finance?

> The real problem is the electorate

This is similar to a company blaming customers for not buying from them and preferring their competitors' products. The game doesn't work that way.

No chance he gets a prison sentence for the NY case. He will get a suspended sentence or some other slap on the wrist. The Federal cases are dead. There is no chance they can continue while he is in office and they will be killed by the time he leaves.

What needs to happen for GPUs to be commoditized so that an infrastructure builder is relatively indifferent to using GPUs from Nvidia, AMD or any other provider?

> Needless to say that’s not the case with GPUs and a lot of people that make the AMD vs Intel comparison don’t seem to understand that.

What needs to happen for GPUs to become as interchangeable as CPUs? What are the leading signs that this is becoming possible?

Seems like you are discovering the truism that the last 10% of a project takes as much time as the first 90% of the project. In my experience, it is always a slog to ship a product. What you are feeling is normal and the experience of many developers. You should plan for this part of the project and figure out ways to motivate yourself to ship something.

You should consider turning this into a Shopify app.

What front-end tooling did you use? Did you use any CSS framework?

The challenge is this is a commonsense interpretation of the checkbox. The legal interpretation could be much broader. If you have something to lose (ie you are a money making entity), you are much less willing to take the risk that someone someday will decide to interpret the checkbox in a manner that you did not expect.

I first saw the scene on a tiny airplane seat headrest screen and remember being jolted awake by how mind-blowing it was. I watched the movie twice on that trans-Atlantic flight.

Correct. The experience of time and space is dependent on the observer.

I’m surprised no one has posted this gem from Yes, Minister

https://youtu.be/Zl0aEz34A4o?si=D9RcUnMq0oI370Lg

The explanation that unlocked the intuition for me was the postulate that all objects in the universe are moving at the same velocity. Some are moving faster through time and some faster through space. If you move faster in time, you move slower in space and vice versa but the vector sum of your speed through space-time is the same. Therefore a photon is moving really fast through space but does not experience any movement in time.

The obvious use case for Meta is content generation. They provide the tools to content creators who create new content to post on Facebook/Instagram which increases Meta’s ad inventory