MarkMc

Ultimately a large number of people identify with Trump. So when he says he inherited an awful economy and the tariffs are the cure, they believe him

Thanks that's a good idea! I think I'd need to use AI to categorise each story, then maybe have different tabs on the page for each category...

The presence or absence of an image depends on user votes. If you feel an image is not useful, click the '...' button and select 'Suggest or Choose an Image' > 'This story does not need an image'

Thanks! No fixed plans for future development - it kind of depends on how much traction it gets. If it gets a lot of interest I might add a 'AI editor' that chooses images and write subtitles (or deletes boring ones which have been written by the article's author). But even if it gets little use besides myself, hosting costs are minimal so it will be around for a while :)

OK that's cute, but when is Facebook going to release this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EohIA7QPmmE

Lex: "It just feels like we are in the same room. This is really the most incredible thing I've ever seen".

Not just magazines. I remember being amazed in 2018 how my flatmates were watching YouTube on their living-room TV instead of a broadcast TV channel.

This change of attention is also affecting movie studios like Disney

Waymo really needs to do an A/B test to demonstrate the safety of their cars: When you order a ridesharing car you randomly get assigned one of their driverless cars or an Uber with a human driver.

After a year see which group has the safest record. Simple.

My doctor was target of bitcoin extortionists. Now her system is so locked down and doesn’t interface with any other system. To transfer information to another system she prints it out and scans it into the new system

Mark Cuban made a great point:

If advertisers were getting results from their X ads, or possibly If you posted data that showed that ads on this platform were effective and produced results, you would be in an entirely different position.

If your ads produce results, businesses would tell you they understand how difficult it is to completely eliminate hate on the platform.

If they don't produce results, there is no reason for a big company to fuck around and find out that their ads showed up next to a hateful post.

I can't tell you how many times I get Cheech ,(or is it Chong?) ads for CBD gummies. Shit I would never buy. ..

On other platforms ads sometimes are eerily relevant to my interests.

That never occurs on this platform

When asked if he ever advertised on X:

Multiple of my portfolio companies have. And I always ask them to check. Without exception, all have said it doesn't give the same returns as other platforms

https://x.com/mcuban/status/1727400271364669756

Step 1: Buy put options on gold

Step 2: Announce a credible space mission to mine a gold asteroid

Step 3: After the price of gold tanks, sell the put options

Step 4: Cancel the space mission

Step 5: Profit!

How long until this business plan works and millions of people’s life savings are wiped out?

we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer.

Waymo cars are safer, cleaner and cheaper than Uber, which has never made an operating profit and has abandoned its self-driving development.

Uber is stalled on the railway tracks while the freight train of self-driving tech hurtles towards it. How is it still worth $76 billion?

Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products…

Two weeks? That’s a pretty slow response to an existential threat

Money doesn't make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

The rebrand to Wise was reasonable since they were branching out to general banking and didn’t want to be seen as just a way to send money.

For those who doubt the old Twitter management could be so incompetent: These are the same people who never noticed they were showing me ads in a language I couldn't understand whenever I went on vacation.

I am director of an online bootcamp, and we tackle the cheating problem with a custom browser-based platform that records 3 video feeds during an exam: 1. the screen capture, 2. the webcam and 3. the video feed of the students phone placed so we can see the students desk. It makes it pretty hard to cheat, but does require lots of supervisor time getting all students set up correctly and then monitoring the video feeds

He's still going to die within the usual human lifespan limits, just like the rest of us.

I'm not so sure.

For millennia people tried and failed to fly through the air like birds. In the late nineteenth century so many people had tried and failed, it seemed like a law of nature that humans were destined to remain earth-bound. Then suddenly, miraculously, we figured it out.

I think it will be the same with the 'usual human lifespan limit' of 120 years. At some point we will figure it out, and a group of humans will have a longevity distribution whose right tail extends to 150 years. Bryan Johnson may already be in that group.

The company might claim that the minority gender is in fact 'stronger' because a diverse workforce performs better.

The "living wage" housing costs for Manhattan are $22,852 [0] while there are quite a few 2-bedroom apartments listed for rent below $3,000 per month [1]

So 2 single people sharing a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan are not earning a "living wage"? I don't think that's how most people would define the term

[0] https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/36061

[1] https://www.zillow.com/manhattan-new-york-ny/cheap-apartment...

I must be the only person who thinks Twitter is still worth at least $44 billion. Yes, Elon has made a few dumb mistakes. But they have been reversed pretty quickly without much long-term damage. It's the rate and scale of successful changes that count.

Advertisers will come back and Twitter will be hugely profitable.

When on vacation earlier this year I saw ads in a language I don't understand.

Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.

This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon

Yes Musk's track record is one factor, but mostly it's my personal experience seeing how poorly targeted Twitter's ads are. For example:

1. When I go on vacation I see ads in a language I don't understand

2. When I sign up for a service like Disney Plus I still see ads for that service

3. When I sign into a real estate website and mark some houses as 'favourite', that website doesn't show me ads on Twitter for similar houses

4. When I put an item in an online shopping cart and leave it there for a few days, I don't see any Twitter ads suggesting I complete the purchase

5. I live in an inner-city area, but for some reason Twitter shows me ads for combine harvesters and Starlink

The Apollo space program had almost no effect on human history

How can the minority applicants who have lower scores but high potential be distinguished from those who just have low scores?

A machine-learning model would be fed historical admissions data, including candidates’ family background and academic achievement, and noncognitive skills such as grit and resilience, along with outcomes of past admission decisions. It would use these data to predict new applicants’ performance — as defined by each institution, such as college grade-point average or income 10 years after graduation. The model could figure out which characteristics best predict performance for various subgroups — for example, how salient SAT scores are for public-school Black students raised in the South by single mothers vs. private-school White kids from the Northeast. If we use only unadjusted test scores, all that context is lost.

I love the idea of using an algorithm to rate candidates [1] and having a feedback loop to rate the performance of the algorithm [2] but I think Fryer has too much faith in machine learning. I suspect a machine may simply learn that nothing beats a middle-class kid who did well at high school.

[1] The book Noise by Daniel Kahneman et al has a fascinating description about how algorithms are superior to human judgement: "Meehl reviewed twenty studies in which a clinical judgment was pitted against a mechanical prediction for such outcomes as academic success and psychiatric prognosis. He reached the strong conclusion that simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment...You can surely imagine the response of clinical psychologists to Meehl’s finding that trivial formulas, consistently applied, outdo clinical judgment. The reaction combined shock, disbelief, and contempt for the shallow research that pretended to study the marvels of clinical intuition"

[2] This would fix the problem Paul Graham describes here: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1585890585621168128

Isn't that illegal when it comes to hiring employees?

Plus, for the Twitter top legal brass, I bet he wasn’t feeling too great about that bit of litigation the deal closing helped him escape.

By firing General Counsel Sean Edgett it seems Elon's pride is clouding his judgement.

Edgett demonstrated great skill by drafting a watertight legal agreement at very short notice, then expertly using litigation to prevent Musk from wriggling out of the deal.

Whenever I go on vacation overseas Twitter shows me ads in a language I cannot understand. This is one of many clearly-identifiable problems that are not rocket science to fix. And Elon Musk has a reputation for fixing problems.

When Twitter shares are publicly traded again in a few years, Musk's purchase price of $44 billion will look like a bargain.

My prediction: In 5 years Twitter's market cap will exceed $150 billion.

May I plug my Hacker News app reader? In the app the image associated with this title makes it immediately clear it's about aircraft

https://mclarentimes.com/

Maybe it's simply a bug, and nobody in Google is motivated to fix it.

I love the smart use of incentives this story highlights. But it doesn't go far enough: IRS and SEC agents should be allowed to audit any company with revenue over $5 million per annum - if the audit results in a fine of at least $500,000 then the agent gets a $100,000 bonus. Conversely if the audit doesn't result in a large fine, the agent has his or her bonus pool reduced by $10,000. This would provide a great incentive to weed out people who cheat the system.