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thefj

173 karma · joined August 28, 2019

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thefj··on Don't encode POST bodies like GitHub Copilot, use URLSearchParams
Another, less serious issue in the memoization example for JS:

  (cache[key] = cache[key] || fn(...args));
Will not memoize results that equal 0 or an empty string.

I guess it goes to show that copying answers from stack overflow might not be the best idea, whether it's done manually or using ML.

thefj··on Price of silver surges as Reddit traders find new target
Futures have to be settled physically, if carried to expiration, as far as I know
thefj··on Price of silver surges as Reddit traders find new target
There's much more silver owned by investors than there is physical silver in the world.

It's the same idea: you have a synthetic version of an asset trading for the same price of the real asset. If people start demanding the real asset, there isn't enough of it to go around and prices start to rise.

Not saying that's what's going to happen, but it's not absurd.

thefj··on Ireland to Order Facebook to Stop Sending User Data to U.S.
When Russia did it it was reported as "Move Seen as Part of Drive to Curtail Freedom of Information"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-steps-up-new-law-to-cont...

thefj··on Portland police declare riot as anti-cop protesters torch union headquarters
It goes both ways. The police unions should be outlawed, and police members should use democracy like everyone else.

If they don't like something about the job conditions, they can vote democratically to change it.

I can't form a tax union and negotiate with the government, why should they be able to?

thefj··on Blizzard bans player from Hearthstone following on-stream Hong Kong protest
Didn't the NFL had an issue with kneeling a while ago? Did they fire the players?
thefj··on Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him
Keep in mind that Stallman maintained that Bushnell stopped answering emails for two years, and that was the reason for firing him.

Seems like he still holds a grudge.

thefj··on Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed
Cryptocurrencies are not a scam. Doubly double End. This is very simple.

But seriously, sure some people just push blockchain stuff to get money from investors. But I can buy drugs using Bitcoin. I can't buy drugs using git. So there's probably a difference between them.

thefj··on America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
What happens in that scenario when it's just two people living in the same building? Why are colleges different?
thefj··on Prashanth Chandrasekar Replacing Joel Spolsky as Stack Overflow CEO
I always think of the story on HN about the guy who bought back his startup from the VCs for $1 after it "failed" and he went and ran it without the same expectations, and it is doing just fine.

Agree with the general point, but the guy burned 8 million dollars in investor money to get to the point where the business is "just fine". It's not really a good example IMO.

thefj··on SolarCity was insolvent when Tesla paid $2.6B to buy it, lawsuit says
He bought a falling company from himself and his cousins for almost 3 billion, plus the company had 3 billion in debt. The deal resulted in him getting half a billion more in tsla stock.

Tesla's market cap in June 2016 was 35 billion. It's 43 billion now. That's not that much value created. The S&P went up almost 50 percent in that time.

It's all besides the point anyway, since many shareholders sold their shares because of this fraud. They don't care what he's doing now, they just want their money back.

It's in everyone's best interest to have checks on self dealing CEOs. If people can't trust public companies to behave, the whole system breaks down.

thefj··on Cleaning up bad bots
I wasn't implying it's your fault, just saying that it's weird to, say, get mad at Walmart when they put up extra security measures in places where they constantly get robbed.
thefj··on Cleaning up bad bots
Colonialism?

I understand your frustration, but the problem isn't that it's far away geographically, it's that your country is allowing criminals to use your IPs to do bad stuff.

thefj··on The Awkward but Essential Art of Office Chitchat
The people who at the top of the organization generally manage other people.

No offence, but if you're not interested in people, or at least in learning to fake it, how do you expect to manage them?

thefj··on Small but significant improvements in Swift 5.1
I must have missed the official announcement[0], module stability is a very welcome change.

Swift 5.1 enables the creation of binary frameworks that can be shared with others leveraging the language’s added support for module stability.

https://swift.org/blog/swift-5-1-released/

thefj··on Campaign to take down Amazon is being funded by Amazon’s biggest rivals
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21027657

thefj··on An outdated idea about solar panels has been slowing advancement: study
In recent years, the price of solar panel technology has been driven down, but the cost of labor and installation hasn’t. As the framework technologies go out of date within a 25-year period, individuals and companies are facing larger costs when they are required replace both the framework system and the panels themselves every 25-30 years in order to install entirely new systems.

In contrast, the authors write that replacing panels more often with newer and more advanced models would allow cross-compatibility between the panels and the system, allowing the framework itself to remain the same while new panels are popped on and off.

So even though the installation and replacement labor is what's expensive, they assume that some kind of cross compatibility will appear, and it will be cheaper? Seems like quite a leap.

thefj··on Upgraded reminders aren't compatible with earlier versions of iOS and macOS
If you upgrade your reminders on your iPhone with iOS 13, your iPad and Mac using the same iCloud account can’t access your reminders until iPadOS and macOS 10.15 Catalina are available.

You gotta love Applespeak. "Earlier versions" means all available versions.

thefj··on WeWork’s Back Is Against a Wall
Absolutely. Traditionally the move for a company in this situation might be to replace the CEO if they plan to raise public money and he has a history of bad behaviour.

In WeWork's case it's probably impossible to remove him both legally and because the whole company is built around his personality cult.

thefj··on WeWork’s Back Is Against a Wall
There are millions of poorly run shady businesses, it's a problem that takes care of itself if you don't have infinite money coming in.

Not sure that it's a problem now though. Like Matt Levine suggested[0], WeWork did a lot of weird shit when they were private, but now they want public money, they need to behave more like a responsible company. It's kind of what's supposed to happen because of the disclosure, it's just that most of the time companies take care of governance issues before the S-1.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-13/we-is-...

thefj··on WeWork considers IPO valuation of as low as $10B
It's more complicated than that... They also have a different arm that buys the buildings.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-the-workspace-giant-want...

thefj··on AI Scientist Andrew Ng urges all countries to develop strategies like Beijing's
Does someone understand what's the strategy he's urging to develop? I've read the article but it's still unclear to me.

The U.S. still has the edge in fundamental research, he said, but Chinese companies have easier access to the consumer market thanks to Beijing's national AI strategy, which promotes the spread of the technology.

thefj··on Pension funds may be wrecked in a future recession
Not OP, but it makes sense. A lot of investors hear about an asset going up and they want to join the party. A lot of the other investors try to predict where the emotional investors will go and buy the asset in anticipation.
thefj··on How a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran
Could have been a very sophisticated false flag self sabotage for no visible reason. (Not that I believe that, or think that it shouldn't be called an attack)
thefj··on [dead]
> “Most people can agree a beheading video or some kind of ISIS content should be proactively removed, but when we try to talk about the alt-right or white nationalism, we get into dangerous territory, where we’re talking about [Iowa Rep.] Steve King or maybe even some of Trump’s tweets, so it becomes hard for social media companies to say all of this ‘this content should be removed,’” Amarasingam said.

Yes, if you're starting out labeling right wing politicians as nazis, you'll end up with an AI that classifies them as nazis.

thefj··on Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher
I guess we disagree, since to me, serving ads with my page is making my position about wanting to show ads with the page pretty clear.

But even if it wasn't, Brave has special filters for sites that have anti-adblock measures, and it's spoofing the user agent to make it seem like regular Chrome.

thefj··on The Survival of Iggy Pop
https://outline.com/mHkM2m
thefj··on Google begins penalising domain leasing
Seems like the misleading description is from the article, not Google. After following the links I got to this tweet that agrees with your theory. They're trying to detect if the subdomaon content is independent of the main site.

https://mobile.twitter.com/googlewmc/status/1161725709926182...

thefj··on Science Journal claims Genetics can't predict same-sex sexual behavior
Study:

https://geneticsexbehavior.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/g...

Seems like the researchers also created a website:

https://geneticsexbehavior.info/

thefj··on Wikipedia Is Now a Brave Verified Publisher
Let's say I put out a cookie jar out with a sign that says "Take a cookie, leave a dollar". You come by and take a cookie and leave a piece of string. You're not improving my business model.

The Brave thing is just a weird way to feel better about breaking an implicit social contract.

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