Hacker News Reader

throwadobeon Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

> Then I think you're legally required to tell the truth here.

Or you can just not respond, at least in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-incrimination

throwadobeon BMW Overtakes Tesla in European EV Sales for First Time

Those are opinion pieces and meant to be contrarian. Shareholders by definition own the equity of the company. You're confounding the equity with the enterprise, while also ignoring the meaning of "control".

Having IOUs from the company in the form of future goods or services owed to customers, interest payments owed to debtholders or future taxes owed to the government do not equate to having an actual ownership in the business.

throwadobeon BMW Overtakes Tesla in European EV Sales for First Time

Presumably because they believe keeping Musk will increase value long term, so they are still maximizing the value of the future cashflows discounted to the present.

The size of Musk's ownership stake adds another layer to this metric, but at the limit, that really that just means the words "they" in my previous statement can be replaced with "Elon Musk"

throwadobeon BMW Overtakes Tesla in European EV Sales for First Time

The shareholders literally own the company, so they are the ones who get to decide what gets maximized. Most shareholders decide they want returns to themselves to be maximized. Not all will in every single company at every point in time, but it's likely the case 99.9% of the time.

throwadobeon Show HN: Hacker News for film buffs

Full time moderator(s) who are paid a proper living to do their job and happen to be literally _excellent_ at it

throwadobeon BMW Overtakes Tesla in European EV Sales for First Time

are you in Europe, which TFA discusses?

throwadobeon BMW Overtakes Tesla in European EV Sales for First Time

The mission of Tesla is to maximize value to its shareholders

throwadobeon Ex-bank CEO gets 24 years after falling for crypto scam, causing bank collapse

> After he asked for a $12 million loan from a neighbor, Brian Mitchell, his neighbor detected the scam and refused to lend the money.

Who asks their neighbors for $12 million? The dude was out of his mind. 24 years seems long but at the same time somewhat deserved given his role and the amount of damage his sheer stupidity inflicted.

throwadobeon Ordinals aren't much worse than Quaternions

"Ordinals notations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_notation are lik systemaic ways of labelling ordinals. They don’t described every posible ordinal."

throwadobeon Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)

It's an interesting problem, but I would say that a single feed of the "latest" news isn't really what I want as a reader. I already have twitter for that. None of your writers are known to me so I'm not going to implicitly trust them more than John Doe on Twitter.

I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding. Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with... but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if they want what everyone else is reading

Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!

throwadobeon Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

> enforces a draconian global taxation scheme on any citizen or person who has ever held a US green card, even after they permanently leave.

That's not quite true. If you _return_ your green card ("abandon it"), you no longer have to pay taxes. This makes sense as a parallel to being a US citizen, who would pay taxes even if they lived abroad.

I'm not saying it's right, but we need to be accurate.

throwadobeon Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

You're arguing legality trumps morality. We're in the opposite camp.

Fuck MPAA/RIAA. They're not good faith actors and they play dirty all the time. We need to fight dirty too. It's so rich of those guys to complain of racketeering of all things!

throwadobeon Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

Fuck the MPAA/RIAA

throwadobeon Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

> And then used it for racketeering, allegedly, which is where the government interest starts.

MPAA/RIAA needing to be saved from racketeering is epic levels of irony

throwadobeon Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand

That's the mother of cop outs. It's an absolutely honest question.

throwadobeon Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

Google owns ~90% of the search market and if you don't play by their rules, you're out of the game. The argument is that there's nothing really superior about their technology today, just market dominance to force everyone to operate in a way that serves their _ad_ interests as opposed to search interests.

throwadobeon Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

Answer the question yourself by first deciding the market(s) for which you're making that assessment.

Google commands a higher market share % of search than Microsoft does of personal computing OS.

throwadobeon Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

#2 will get you laughed out of any room. The goal here is not to destroy Google.

throwadobeon Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

That's a pipe dream and really achieves nothing other than hurting Google.

throwadobeon Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious

Immediately worse vs. worse long term.

throwadobeon Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin

If you haven't made the switch to Firefox, now is the time. There's no reason to keep supporting Google through Chrome. There hasn't been one in years.

throwadobeon Cardie – An open source business card designer and sharing platform

within any industry, really, even technical ones... "Tech" seems to be the exception.

throwadobeon Adobe exec compared Creative Cloud cancellation fees to 'heroin'

I think Canva's dream is to become the next Adobe, so there's that.

throwadobeon Adobe exec compared Creative Cloud cancellation fees to 'heroin'

> The early termination fees in the FTC case represent “less than half a percent of our annual revenue,” Rao told me. “It doesn’t drive our business, it doesn’t drive our business decisions.

Great, so you should have no issue removing them altogether because it's not really a material source of revenue and it would result in meaningfully more satisfied users.

> “I look at a lot of cancellation flows that are out there. There’s people you can’t even cancel online, you have to call. That doesn’t seem simple at all. When you start talking about the the range of what a cancellation flow can and should be, we’ve always been in the category of good, and we want to be great.”

Who are you looking at that requires calling? Certainly not big names like Adobe. This is such a disingenuous argument that it almost counts as evidence that Adobe's culture is one of trying to mislead.

throwadobeon A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soon follow

Citation needed. Maybe it's difficult to state it, entirely.

throwadobeon Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

I think the fundamental issue with Alexa is that Amazon is trying to answer the question "how can we use it to sell more shit?" instead of trying to answer "how can we make people's lives better by adding more value than any other assistant in the marketplace?"

throwadobeon Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

TBF to Amazon they take all my shit back on the reg

throwadobeon Large Enough

I wish I could frame this comment

throwadobeon Large Enough

This is also my perception using it daily for the last year or so. Sometimes it also responds with exactly what I provided it with and does not make any changes. It's also bad at following instructions.

GPT-4 was great until it became "lazy" and filled the code with lots of `// Draw the rest of the fucking owl` type comments. Then GPT-4o was released and it's addicted to "Here's what I'm going to do: 1. ... 2. ... 3. ..." and lots of frivolous, boilerplate output.

I wish I could go back to some version of GPT-4 that worked well but with a bigger context window. That was like the golden era...

throwadobeon Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

It's a rise about as far as a quantum leap