throwaway66666

Unprofitable companies are the only ones that really benefit from IPOs.

An IPO is basically a way for the company to raise money, but tis time straight from the public. Usually when it gets harder and harder for them to attract private investors. The IPO listing basically guarantees that they won't take the public's billions and run.

Successful companies with perfect cash flows (think of Github, Valve, IKEA) always try to remain private. Because they have nothing to gain by raising more money. They can give their employees good bonuses and maintain control of the company.

This is by design. In Silicon Valley we are obsessed with them because they are the only meaningful exit for common employees (take the money and run mentality). The rest of the world doesn't care much because they see them for what they are.

Of course. Startup employees do not know they can sell their 'private' stock already, today. However, they need permissions to do so from the company's board (their answer will be NO. Here, saved you from asking. Or maybe they will offer to buy back the stock with shitty terms), and can only sell them to an accredited investor and not random people/public.

Many companies would be ran better if they remained private (think of Facebook, which now has investor pressure to increase the price, which results in careless decisions about data handling, privacy etc).

> For instance, we say “users want control over their privacy,” but what people really want is some subset of:

> To avoid embarrassment

> To avoid persecution

> … sometimes for doing illegal and wrong things

> To keep from having the creeping sensation they left something sitting out that they didn’t want to

> They want to make some political statement against surveillance

> They want to keep things from the prying eyes of those close to them

> They want to avoid being manipulated by bad-faith messaging

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You forgot the two most important ones. Users want their privacy because.

A) they do not trust you.

B) They expect that everything they do, will be used against them. (eg providing an email address will result to receiving spam. Providing personal details to advertisers using them etc).

C) Info they leak, is leaked out forever. Today that might be ok, but circumstances might change tomorrow.

It is a bit dishonest to say that users want privacy because they want to do illegal things. Or that they want to make a statement against surveillance.

Wanting privacy is not a statement, it is an end-goal on its own.

Yes I am missing the point of the article but I had to point the above out.

Thought experiment. If we assume that "alien intelligence is here" in some form like UFO sightings, why not also assume they are on the internet? I believe someone would learn so much more about us from reading wikipedia, than flying a UFO above north carolina at 90k feet. No?

And if they mastered long-distance space flight and life discovery, what stops them from reverse-engineering how to connect to an unprotected starbucks guest wifi. Or even posting here like you and me sometimes do.

Do you think they would be more perplexed by the stuff we do to each other in real life (micro; prisons, crime, violence. and macro; governments, military, borders). Or with the way we treat each other on line? (scams, trolls, harassment, narcissism, mistreating privacy data)

They were planning on using an exploit to crash the browser... Did I misunderstand?

EDIT: yes I did. Thanks for making me go back and read carefully rather than jumping to conclusions.

EDIT: I misunderstood the article. Nothing to see here.

Now imagine being an angsty teenager looking for harry potter erotic fanfic and stumbling onto the NSA's director tumblr.

They 're onto us, you 'll think in a flash of paranoia. As if a swat team is in your house.

Horrible... I thought they were doing fantastic. Everyone loved Cozmo. Superb reviews, insanely good marketing. Claimed they sold 1 million robots. 100m in revenue. What went wrong?

Ha, sadly no! Whereas it's unacceptable for let's say an airplane to use euler, or a modern video game camera engine...

Most animation software used by artists/animators uses euler angles, and in order to deal with gimbal lock they just... Use a 2 or even 3-child hierarchy (they call it "controllers") where each controller animates one axis (or two). That's a huge overhead compared to just using quaternions, but if it makes animators more productive it's probably worth it. Computer vs Human time. Especially in situations where render farms are used and a frame takes an hour to be rendered, does it really matter?

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So, it's not the animation applications fault. it's the animators who always prefer euler + messy scene hierarchy :) I 've even see robotic arms be animated like that... robotic arms!

I am quite surprised at how the wheels have turned. I remember a year ago I was interviewing people and each single candidate listed SASS as a skill, and almost everyone during the interview claimed its their preferred method of working. (my team so far has been using plain css and are happy with it, so that surprised me a lot back then).

Is it considered bad practice now? How did it rise so quickly, how did it fall so quickly, what's going on in the web dev world?

Despite this being a cool feat. It sounds so close to the source material (down to parts of the songs being a lofi 1-1 copy paste), that I don't see a real point of it for even existing. (except "omg death metal neural nets lol" factor)

> What I find most sad is that most of the people on HN will rail against how evil Google is (or any other company) yet happily use their Open Source code and not complain that they're benefiting from what they claim to despise.

"We had horrible gravel roads and the dictator came and built good roads we use even today". Is my late-grandparents argument as to why dictatorship is by far the best way to rule a country. And I 'd happily drive on those roads to tell them they are dead wrong.

Interesting question. I would assume yes. There should be enough data for things like sustain pedal and velocity dynamics. Music people can be "crazy" and add a lot of detail in their work. It is pretty common to find midi renditions of pieces that contain all kinds of extra information, from pitch shift cues for guitar solos to legato for string instruments (when the finger slides across the string, instead of "jumping" from position to position), to even volume automation for fade in/out effects. Classical musical notation also contains it, though way more limited than the 0-127 range of MIDI, in the piano/forte dynamics notation.

It might have been stripped off to ease complexity, or maybe it was unadequate and created odd sounding results. Maybe the midi library they used doesn't do a good job of portraying it and it is actually there! Who knows!

It's midi. It's meant to be notation, not a realistic composition. I suppose the background "machine gun" piano notes would be a bassy synth combined with 90s electronic music drums. So please do not focus that much on the audio or performance part of it, but on the composition part of it.

I do agree they could have trained it about the importance of velocity though. (That neural net, and most young music students out there too, heh)

Got it, thanks for your comment. Makes sense.

I 've stopped using google because of AMP. Only google can sabotage google at this point, and I think this is how it will happen if they keep going this way.

Barrack Obama pardoned Manning on his last day in office. If Assange's only crime is assisting Manning, and Manning's sentence has been commuted by the very President of the United States and is now free, why are we on a hunt for Assange?

It may sound a bit silly but is an honest question.

It's like... if I commit a robbery and you drive the getaway vehicle, I am (the actual robber) deemed innocent and let go, but you still go to prison for being an accomplice. It makes little sense?

Many places in the world are like that, I 've travelled to most european countries by car, and I can't name a single city that doesn't have 2-way 1-lane roads.

Actually I am curious what europeans honestly think of the self driving car craze, since getting the bus, the metro, and.. ehrm walking and biking is much more common and pleasant there.

I am sorry, I am not buying this. You entered a 2 year contract with a person that you 've never met. That lives already there but only your name is on the lease. And who is around 20 years old but does plastic surgery to look like a teenager. (is that even a thing?)

And you know what? Screw it. Showing kids videos of pandas eating cucumbers and asking them to be like the pandas, is an ingenious use of narcissism to achieve what parents collectively wasted more energy than north korea's nuclear program ever did. Convincing their kids to eat vegetables.

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EDIT: I 'll contribute a story of my own.

A friend of mine is a photographer in Bay area and LA. Since the past few years he only works with instagram models, predominantly asian girls. I spent some time hanging out with him and two models that are also good friends. The first you notice is that... they are completely unremarkable. Shocking right? They didn't treat the waitress bad, and I was never ignored mid sentence in favor of checking instagram notifications. At least no more than a person with a 2-digit follower count would. And didn't experience a crazy fast do coke and club 6 nights per week culture. Quite the opposite actually, I witnessed the "I 'll take a picture with this drink, and drink only half of it because it has too many calories". I think the most "vapid" thing I witnessed was them being VERY jealous of another influencer who managed to get the "blue verified" icon. That's it. Don't get me wrong, they were kinda shallow, but not magnitudes more than people with no following, that's the thing! I think we love to hate them because they are treated as if they achieved some high-status with no effort. Sure. But we are forgetting that what is projected on social media is total fabrication. Both of them are off instagram now, since they got married (to well-off dudes). Was that an end goal? Was it gold digging? True love? None of my business actually.

That's cute. But did you consider hiring a stranger from craigslist to slap you everytime you access facebook?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4661940

Or perhaps testing websites... drunk? I love and loath these articles. They are the equivalent of "and you won't believe what this madlad did!!!!" of hackernews.

"Mike from Triplebyte here" is the new "Here in my garage with my new lamborghini".

(referring to the way-too-common reddit ads with the goofy looking guy, and to Tai Lopez's cringey "here in my garage" self-help-success videos)

So it's a bit like tinder with arbitrary notions and not just I like you. Pretty cool idea actually. (I didn't mean the tinder comment negatively, I also think Tinder is a fantastic idea)

I grew up in Greece, where we go to a second school (private classes), after the main (public) school. And they both assign you homework. We are talking, 7 hours of public school + 3 hours of 'private' school (we call it 'the after school'). So 10 hours of being physically present at some kind of school and then homework from both of them. So expect 2-4 hours of homework added on top of that. 10-14 hours school days. Yay!

You might be wondering why the "after school" exists. See, you need to attend the public school (or an accredited really expensive private one) in order to advance through the education system. But because public school suck you go to the second school in order to really learn. As to how much the public schools were I grew up suck, we are talking kids having sex and filming it during school time - and the teachers dealt with this by banning cellphones to the school. No cameras, no recordings!! When I think back, I honestly feel rage with how much wrong the system was.

Anyway, of course this meant you had to be physically present at some kind of school location for 10 hours per day, and then spend 2-4 hours doing homework in order to keep up. I remember people defending that system to death, making fun of america's homeschooled children and finland's relaxed attitude and how we are the "real heroes" of the education system. Ugh.

PS. I just remembered. We even had homework to "religion class". Oh yeah, we learned about the life of jesus mostly, in theory we had to learn about other religions too, but it was mostly all about the J. So, of course we were given homework even to that too. Ugh ugh ugh. Not a religious school btw, a regular public one. Complete with "why didn't you learn the creed of faith, are you not a chistian?" attitude from the teacher towards 8 year olds that didn't study. What a shithole.

And here I am still writing asmjs by hand. Do we know if that's fully deprecated or are there any plans to keep it fast and loved like wasm?

It is probably the nicest phone ever in regards to size/screen/weight. I wish they would give it a hardware bump too to keep it competitive.

I love how they are giving cows grazing grass as an analogy leading to the possible explanation of the quantum effects. Of course, as cows are lazy to climb hills, atoms are also lazy to climb the invisible hills so they roll back to the valley). It's proof that a farmer heard the "whoever solves this gets a nobel prize", and wanted to give it a go.

I 'll give it a go too. IT'S A RACING CONDITION!!!! See. In the latest patch, we switched universe rendering from QT to Electron, because we read a very compelling argument on twitter. As you know, certain CSS properties cause reflows, repaint, relayouts. Here, outside of time, WASM still didn't get the needed adoption, so in order to optimize universe rendering, we split it into different threads. However, these threads do not have shared memory, so what happens is you change state in thread A. In order to have you see a loading gif, we make the change locally to your system but it is not propagated everywhere yet, then the render loop runs again, and it overwrites the local change you made. You need to hit the particles with an attribute that will trigger a recalculate style call, not just a repaint, because repaint is overwriten and does not actually modify the element's width and height.

I will stop being throwaway when you need an address for the mr Nobel please! :)

Think of cats and belly rubs. Now that's a mind war! Kitty lays on the floor showing you it's belly, you pet it two-three times, suddenly claws are out and you 're screaming for help! Learn to read when claws are close, and you 're golden :)

I have spent quite sometime with Vive, Rift and PSVR. (rift, psvr at home, vive at my office)

PSVR is unironically the hope for VR right now, even though it has by far the lowest quality.

It has some very good games (Astrobot, Wipeout, RE7, Ace Combat 7, Moss, Beat Saber). It's cheap, easy to set up (aimed towards couch VR instead of room scale), cool helmet design, and the fact that the headset works as a regular monitor for non-vr games and one person can be watching TV while the other person gaming, is genius.

Compared to let's say Oculus where you need, 4 usb ports (3x usb 3.0), cables everywhere, space, a ~$1200 pc/headset combo...

I do believe in VR though and am excited for what the future holds.

People are not freaking out because Page gave away 150M to huge benefactor and innovator, but because "Page gave away $150000000 to a sexual harassment perpetrator!!!". In this light, doesn't it look bad?

My opinion is that Rubin deserves to be awarded (with a proper company policy to prevent misuse of funds, nepotism etc). But also deserves to be fired and punished for misconduct (if it is proven to have occurred). These two are not mutually exclusive. The rest is all fluff about how the public perceives a company's culture.

Before reading the article and before seeing your comment, I was chatting with my partner about the 737 Max, advising her to be wary. And lo and behold... You are definitely not alone in this.

However, and to play a bit devil's advocate, China has a reputation as being a place that does not care about the value of human life, and the current climate is charged with USA advising people to ban Huawei's hardware, so this could have ulterior motives. If it was France banning them, nobody would bat an eye.

Political or not, in my eyes it is definitely the right move.

Hah, of course, spoke too soon! And it's by Jeff Atwood! I got the idea back then from some game devs who used a variation of this technique (though theirs was a queue mechanism for prioritizing disk reads to speed up loading of important assets and defer the rest in the old magnetic days). Anyway, congrats to the react team, really cool.

I am wondering if they plan to abstract it completely so that everyone uses it without even realizing it.