Octokiddie

The Guardian-Harris survey also found that 49% of respondents think the S&P 500 index is down for the year. In reality, stocks have been ripping: The S&P 500 is up 13% this year on top of a 24% gain last year.

This is kind of interesting. It would be more interesting to know how that misperception has changed over time. I suspect that at any given time half of people wouldn't correctly guess whether the S&P was up or down.

1. Flood the higher ed market with low-quality federally-guaranteed loans.

2. Witness the explosion of enrollment in low-quality colleges and universities.

3. Notice the spillover effect of (2) into every corner of higher education, in the form of higher tuitions everywhere.

4. Watch as (2) leads to ludicrous debt burden on college grads.

5. Wring hands about out-of-control cost of college, leading to higher demand for loans.

Rinse and repeat year after year.

What would happen if federal student loans were phased out across the board?

Nuclear weapons are all about posturing. Both sides know the consequences of detonation and do everything in their power to avoid it. Thus posturing.

Microservices are the Wrong Answer

The author never states the question. This makes it impossible to evaluate the answer, which presumably is stated in the title. The article would be much stronger with a clear statement of the perceived problem that microservices solve and why modules are a superior solution.

Oddly enough, I predict the final destination for this train will be for moving images to fade into the background. Everything will have a dazzling sameness to it. It's not unlike the weird place that action movies and pop music have arrived. What would have been considered unbelievable a short time ago has become bland. It's probably more than just novelty that's driving the comeback of vinyl.

A few points of note:

1. This doctor is widely-described as a pathologist. So it seems unlikely he would have developed any cancer treatments as a lead investigator.

2. It's much more likely he was part of a team that developed treatments, and that his was a supporting role.

3. A quick glance at Google Scholar indicates work on multiple approaches to melanoma treatment that Scolyer had some kind of role in. The article doesn't say which one was used.

4. There is no "cancer-free" in glioblastoma. Pieces of the tumor always remain after surgery, waiting to grow back. This is part of the reason there is no cure.

5. MRI cannot detect remnants as in (4).

6. Median survival is roughly 12-15 months, so being alive at this point is not in itself much of an indication of success. Three years would be more interesting. Even three years of "clean" MRIs would be more interesting.

This story keeps getting trotted out, and the journalists doing it fail to acknowledge these points. It's an extraordinarily complex disease that does not lend itself to feel-good stories. If it does get squashed into that box anyway, the result is misleading at best.

Breast augmentation could be one case.

Google is an advertising company. Relying on them to do anything other than service that business seems risky at best given the abundant history of rug-pulling. Even then, at this point I'd be questioning the support for ads. Support can mean anything from customer support to not running the business into the ground with blunders.

The article hints at, but doesn't really nail the strong associations between music and our past that develop as we age. The older we get, the more listening to old music takes on the role of time machine, teleporting us to an earlier time where we can forget all the bad parts, leaving just the good.

Strangely enough, the same thing can be said about cars, and even software.

Any insights into what makes this culturally acceptable?

Context: Bitcoin miners have just adopted a 50% pay cut for themselves. This pay cut was baked into Bitcoin protocol at the launch of the network (mostly, see "BIP 42" [1]). The OP link gives information about the block in which this pay cut was made.

I get that HN comments tend to dismiss Bitcoin. But the fact that for the fourth time this pay cut has happened without a hitch speaks volumes to what makes Bitcoin interesting: It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. Nobody can stop it. And it's extremely resistant to change. It requires no governmental approval. All attempts at subversion or interference have failed. There aren't many systems that come close to that kind of record.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawi...

For those complaining about the presentation, Safari's "Show Reader View" works well. Also supported on Firefox. On Chrome, it's complicated.

The irony is that when you know the result is on Reddit, it's far better to use the Reddit search bar. It's not even close. More than that, I've found myself just going to Reddit search rather than Google. Ditto StackOverflow.

So it served its purpose by trapping the OpenAI spider? If so, why post that message? As a flex?

I'm more interested in what that content farm is for. It looks pointless, but I suspect there's a bizarre economic incentive. There are affiliate links, but how much could that possibly bring in?

Every explanation of double entry accounting seems to do the same thing. If I'm trying to understand the double part of double-entry bookkeeping, what exactly does the "double" refer to? What's being "doubled"?

How would you salvage the article to actually explain the "double" part in detail? Could you do it purely from Bob's (or Alice's) perspective?

It was not taken by surprise. But in spite of that, it was still unable to respond.

This is even a major point of discussion in the book. The incumbents always see it coming a mile away. They can't respond because doing so breaks their business model. Employees can't go to managers and say, "We need to enter this low-margin market for low-end products." Doing so is a good way to get sidelined or fired.

The "dilemma" is that either traditional option, compete with the upstarts or move further up-market, leads to the same outcome - death.

I was looking for something about how the company actually made money, but only found this:

It’s a dramatic exodus that comes less than 18 months after Stability’s 2022 fundraise that valued the company at $1 billion. Now, the company is facing a cash crunch, with spending on wages and compute power far outstripping revenue, according to documents seen by Forbes. Bloomberg earlier reported that the company was spending $8 million a month. In November 2023, CEO Emad Mostaque tweeted that the company had generated $1.2 million in revenue in August, and would make $3 million in November. The tweet was later deleted.

This sounds a lot like the two-year period leading up to the dot com crash. Insane valuations and no revenue model. Meanwhile those insanely-valued companies bought Sun Microsystems servers like there was no tomorrow. When the games ended, a lot of those insanely-valued companies went to zero and left a massive overhang of Sun hardware in their wake. Sun began its long nosedive not long after that.

This kind of gross imbalance is self-correcting. Those who have been through a few of these cycles know the warning signs. Those who don't get an expensive lesson at the school of hard knocks.

The title doesn't match the article:

Last month, Deputy Attorney General John Fowler argued in state court that mere possession of a basic cellphone indicates criminal intent to commit conspiracy under Georgia’s racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations statute, better known as RICO.

Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg is redirecting Meta-wide efforts to build artificial general intelligence and wants to secure a whopping 350,000 or more Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of the year to make that happen.

The last I heard Facebook was all-in on the Metaverse. This move reeks of desperation.

More than 100,000 people turned out across Germany on Saturday in protest against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which sparked an outcry after it emerged that the party’s members discussed mass deportation plans at a meeting of extremists.

This article would benefit from linking to an article detailing what transpired at the meeting. As it stands, the article is about an outcry against something that has not be described in any detail.

In October of 2021 the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) decided to launch what is believed to be the first significant open source lawsuit based in contract rather than in copyright. Critically, the SFC’s case argued that anyone who benefits from the General Public License (GPL), not just the authors of the software, should be able to bring a lawsuit to enforce the terms of the GPL.

This seems to be the key issue. It's the first time I've heard of a case in which the party claiming harm was not the author of the software.

It raises a lot of questions - for example around linking. My understanding of the issue with respect to Linux was that Linus won't enforce GPL against those who link, therefore, Linux is immune to the reciprocity requirement when just linking occurs.

This new case seems to raise the issue of whether those other than authors of GPL software can bring suit under contract rather than copyright for linking to GPL-licensed software.

The strong anti-Bitcoin sentiment on HN is still amusing. It goes way back - 13 years or more.

Having read many of these negative comments, I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin. Just this thread has examples. It must be more than a little annoying to feel very strongly that Bitcoin is pointless, but to also notice that it's still here. Year after year.

If that shoe were on my foot, in addition to being annoyed I'd be curious about what I was missing.

Bitcoin doesn't have to do something useful for everyone to survive. It doesn't have to "replace fiat." It doesn't have to be a payment system. It doesn't have to "go to the moon." It doesn't even need an ETF. Bitcoin just needs to fill needs (or wants) not met by anything else. They don't even have to be your needs or wants.

Unlike every other attempt at electronic cash that came before it, Bitcoin also doesn't need the approval of any person, police force, legislative body, military, or government. I'd challenge people who hold negative views on Bitcoin to name some other systems for which this holds true.

I think that's the point that a lot of hostile commenters might be missing.

Hundreds of feet underground, in a long-dormant portion of Chiquita Canyon landfill, tons of garbage have been smoldering for months due to an enigmatic chemical reaction.

It doesn't sound enigmatic. It sounds like anaerobic respiration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_respiration

... In aerobic organisms undergoing respiration, electrons are shuttled to an electron transport chain, and the final electron acceptor is oxygen. Molecular oxygen is an excellent electron acceptor. Anaerobes instead use less-oxidizing substances such as nitrate (NO3), fumarate (C4H2O24), sulfate (SO24), or elemental sulfur (S). These terminal electron acceptors have smaller reduction potentials than O2. Less energy per oxidized molecule is released. Therefore, anaerobic respiration is less efficient than aerobic.

In short, heavy rainfall in the last year combined with decades of organic waste disposal in the landfills (think yard trimmings, discarded food, and other organic matter) have resulted in an enormous, uncontrolled underground anaerobic respiration problem in Southern California.

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” -- Frederik Pohl

Car, meet traffic jam. But few, if any saw this one coming. Oddly enough, today's readers would find any story based on this premise mundane - kind of like a story about a traffic jam.

From the article:

“We do see a huge, huge difference in the way students are connecting with each other,” Smith said, later adding: “Just a short two years ago, they spent more time just looking down at their phones every moment that they could, and so it has become the culture of our building, and again, the kids seem happy.”

In the 1990s, a cell phone was an expensive toy. Today it's almost impossible to function as a member of society without one. Everyone, even, kids under 8, simply must own one of these damned devices, carry it around at all times, and respond to its every demand.

Public schools were a mess before all of this. But the cell phone has turned all of the problems in school up to 11. It has done so while offering little to nothing in return.

But, does humanity really need an AI friend?

This reminds me of the Fredrick Pohl line "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."

So I wonder what the traffic jam is going to look like given that the car seems to already be parked outside with the engine running.

Faster depopulation across the developed world? Probably, but maybe there's something even more important.

I'd put what the author describes into the category of "pleasure trip," which is what the car was mainly used for initially.

As infrastructure to support the car was built, it became a necessity. And that's what created the traffic jam: network effect. The suburb and the car fed on each other. You don't get a traffic jam worth talking about without a suburb and a network effect.

So I'm curious about the network effects something like an AI friend might have. What kinds of new infrastructure and new lifestyles will they enable/encourage? And how will this infrastructure fuel future demand?

Looks like that part was edited out.

... On that call, Powell and most of his colleagues reluctantly endorsed buying defaulted Treasury securities — an unprecedented move to maintain financial stability — if a legislative debt ceiling solution did not come in time.

This is a red herring. The Fed doesn't "buy" treasuries. It can't, at least not with dollars. The Fed conducts an asset swap in which it accepts a treasury, and credits the Fed account of the seller with bank reserves. These reserves are not spendable outside of the Federal Reserve system. No new money is created.

QE has done nothing to aid economic recovery - not here, not in Europe, and not in Japan, except to influence the psychology of people who don't understand what's going on.

If it ever comes to the Fed doing QE on defaulted treasuries, the same thing will happen. Big psychological boost for gullible investors, but nothing in terms of actual help to the economy.

Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web

I appreciate the author didn't find a good product-market-fit. But the above claim makes no sense and isn't supported in the article.

The author doubles down on the idea later:

All that is to say: discovering relevant literature, compiling evidence, finding mechanisms turns out to be a tiny percentage of actual, real life R&D

The author admits to not having worked in research, and this is one place that lack of experience shows. This is the kind of thing that takes years, or decades to develop an appreciation for.

Discovering relevant literature, efficiently and well, is a thing that can make or break you as a research scientist.

Over time I've sensed the devaluation of literature search skills in science, but I've also noticed those that can't do good literature searches do bad research. They waste time, sometimes years, in re-discovery of old results. They commit resources to experiments that don't need to be done. They have objectively worse ideas because they don't actually understand the field they're working in. They can't see the holes in the literature that lead to opportunities.