naniwaduni

You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.

It matters because while the choice of excuse doesn't really matter to the surveilling end, they still need to make the excuse with the fig leaf of plausibility. The worse their excuses look, the easier it is for you to convince other people who don't already agree with you that you're right and they're wrong.

Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."

I mean, that it... quite literally did?

Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.

"We now have a complete, futureproof free software stack with decades of backwards compatibility! It just has win32 in the middle."

(2019, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21776370)

x86 bytecode isn't the native instruction set on any real hardware you're running games on either, just one of the lowest-level publicly exposed interfaces.

Indeed, the Romance cognates of "library" even usually mean bookstore (or maybe bookshelf...etymologically it's just a thing that does something vaguely related to books). Most languages where a cognate of "library" rather than "bibliotheque" means primarily a lending library (which still might be paid) picked it up as a loan from English.

I had a very visceral negative reaction to this story, and found it disappointing that someone would hold that opinion. But I suppose it's a lot easier to take that stance when it's not you or someone you care about being falsely accused and sent to prison.

I have to imagine that from her point of view, it's a lot easier to take the stance that you'd rather see guilty people go free than put an innocent person behind bars when it's not your neighborhood with the dangerous criminal gangs....

I think by the time you're building a system that needs to generate (and persist!) billions of identifiers per millisecond, you're solidly past the point where all your design decisions need to be vetted for whether they make sense on your extremely exotic setup.

The turn-off with Coke is usually the carbonation. The appeal of sugar is quite primal.

The trouble is that a bank is not lending against the nominal value of the stock as collateral. That number is almost entirely fictional. Taxation of capital gains at time of sale is less a loophole than a reflection of the difficulty of assigning a fair price to assets that are not perfectly liquid.

Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.

People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.

Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.

Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.

Which of your security layers isn't a trade-off?

Stocks are a financing mechanism. They're useful for the economy independent of the price discovery aspect in the much the same ways that lending is, except that instead of receiving an obligation of future payment you're compensated on vibes.

If you make it expensive enough to pay ransoms outright, throwing money at security starts looking more appealing.

A ban on paying ransoms isn't the right tool for this. Fine them, punitively, with a portion set aside to incentivize whistleblowing.

This is not an approach any other app on any platform has historically used, and it doesn't seem sustainable if every app you install has to modify your hosts file to use a hack like this to detect whether it should handle files or not.

How many apps are you installing that it becomes "unsustainable"? Host file entries are extremely cheap, and it's not like the app needs more than one. Of all the arguments against this, sustainability is a comically weak one. If anything, it's using less contested resources than the "hitting random ports on localhost" approach...

The latter sounds absurd, nearly as ridiculous as the English it was translated from.

Nobody cares about every part of GitHub working correctly. I mean, ok, their SREs are supposed to, but tabling the question of whether that's true: if tomorrow they announced a distributed no-op service with 100% downtime, you should not have the intuition that the overall availability of the platform is now worse.

The legal system does nothing to fix the harm done by murder to the person who's now dead, either.

The Latin alphabet variant modern English uses has uses only ~11 kinds of strokes, where is this 26 coming from?

Arbitrariness of the sign is a principle that requires so many epicycles to present as "true" that it's more of a warning against overgeneralization than an insight with any significant predictive power in its own right.

Nearly all the security value of 1fa is that it keeps your users from picking the own passwords.

From ChangeLog:

    * telnetd/utility.c (getterminaltype): Change the
      name `user_name' to `uname', as the former shadows a precious
     and global variable name.

and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.

It's this one. If you're in a position to refund a "cost accident", then clearly you don't have to enforce cost controls in real time, and the problem becomes much easier to achieve at billing cycle granularity; the user setting a cost limit is generally doesn't care if you're a bit late to best-effort throttle them.

To be clear, you just answered "Do you care to show prices?" with No.

Oh, they're very clear, just not explicit.

It's not a novel problem. But yes, I don't think people quite appreciate how quick and easy it is for people who are in the habit of brewing up one-liners to solve simple problems to do that. I've done it here on HN for jq toy problems before, and I don't really doubt there are people similarly familiar with imagemagick.

There is value in maintaining the fiction that words mean things.

It may amuse you to learn that tar headers are designed as straight up text tables with fixed-width columns, marred only by the fact that modern implementations pad with 0s instead of spaces. The numbers are encoded as octal digits!

The human cost becomes negligible once the tooling is already integrated. You don't get to call it negligible until after the integration has been done.

Adjective order in English is basically that most essential qualities of the object go closest to the head. There are lists out there that try to break this down into categories of adjective ("opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose"), and to some extent the anglo intuitions on which sorts of properties are more or less essential are not trivial, but it's not as arbitrary as people want to make it out to be.