nerdsniper

Source? Wow.

Delve. Not Deel. Very different startups.

I think both of you meant “Delve”, not “Deel”. Deel is a pretty successful HR startup that’s still growing at a good rate and AFAIK free of major scandals.

Again, Deel is HR, not SOC2. Delve was the SOC2 company described in the article linked above.

Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding

Uhh, China does over half of the world’s shipbuilding.

China is also responsible for 25% [1] of the world’s heavy equipment manufacturing and is considered to have double[2] the CAGR of the global average for heavy equipment manufacturing.

0: https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...

1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/constructi...

2: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/heavy-co...

EDIT: OH MY GOD THAT IS A HUGE CHANGE!! On MacOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Motion. I had no idea that was on. I like motion, I wouldn't have set this myself!

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Original:

How does that make anything about this "physics-based"? I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely trying to figure out what part of this is completely going over my head. I don't see any "soft-body physics" interactions, but maybe I don't understand what to look for.

I don't see any deformation or elastic collision physics, and those are usually the most obvious things that I associate with "soft bodies" in engineering/physics.

I'm having trouble identifying any physics at all in this UI design system.

Yah thats definitely Minnesota, eh?

The trick for better quality low-skill soldering is:

1) Use a leaded solder with flux mixed in like the Multicore 502 [0]

2) Use more flux.

3) Use little alligator clips on adjustable arms to hold the stuff together for you so you can keep adding… yep… more flux.

4) Get some braided copper solder wick with flux in it for when you’ve finally added too much solder but it still looks terrible and you just wanna start over. After wicking away all the solder, clean up the wires with some more flux.

Oh also the flux is more toxic than the lead. Get some good ventilation so you can use more flux.

0: https://www.newark.com/multicore-loctite/c-502-99c-5c-0-7mm-...

They have little solar panels.

Sure - it's just hard for rando's to get tons and tons of real human interaction data to run a GAN against. "How to do the training" isn't the barrier for this, and not worth keeping a secret.

CF doesn’t block archive. Archive poisons CF. Explanation direct from the CEO of CloudFlare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

Beating this would require a large amount of sophistication, not a small amount.

Basic machine learning clustering will expose bots mouse+keyboard+touch behavior and discriminate them from humans.

It will also likely discriminate against anyone with a disability and therefore using affordances like eye tracking. Just imagine how different a person with only one hand would look compared to a “typical” user!! This shouldn’t be too much of a problem in the USA because no one is enforcing the ADA at the moment outside of California / Illinois / NY.

But I’m curious to hear from ‘eastdakota how they plan to guarantee that users with disabilities won’t be affected by these kinds of behavioral analysis. Cloudflare has such a massive footprint that it’s absolutely critical for them to err on the safe side of filtering, assuming they desire to be ethical.

The immoral thing for cloudflare to do would be to say “we just provide a ‘bot likeliness score’ and it’s up to each website to decide what threshold they need”. And then wave their hands and say “we’re not the ones blocking users with disabilities…the websites are the ones setting their thresholds too strictly”.

When you reach Cloudflare’s size … you own all the 2nd and 3rd order effects of your decisions.

This kind of data not only separates bots from humans - it’s pretty trivial to distinguish male vs female, right-handed vs left-handed, approximate age, native language (based on keyboard input patterns), state of injury (including tracking progression of healing), and a variety of different mental/physical disabilities. How one navigates a website tells you whether they are ADHD or schizophrenic or has Parkinson’s, and it can tell you about drug use/abuse: how well is this person’s Parkinson’s treatment working? What days of the week does that person tend to abuse amphetamines?

It is super difficult to mimic all of these signals in a way that would cluster the same as typical humans.

Also decent embeddings models could run locally and just trickle through the user folder if that was so necessary.

That would be “gray hat”. It would be illegal, though it has happened in the past and to my knowledge no one has yet been prosecuted for illegally fixing vulnerabilities.

But it’s definitely not white hat.

Nearly every stock consumer router keeps getting these RCE’s. Perhaps that’s the point, they can get any arbitrary household in trouble if it’s expedient to do so.

I'd be curious to look for any investigation into whether extended paxlovid treatment fixes a significant subset of long COVID.

Profitable or not, this sounds a lot like excusing someone who stole $150 million from others by not following the law - that, even if he did steal it by breaking the law, this $150M is not the source of his wealth. It appears to the judge of the court as well as to the press and to many observers from the public that he utilized that vast wealth to avoid any significant consequences for this great theft.

You do make excuses for those with capital who break the law, and even here you judge people's actions differently based on how much capital they have - if that $150M were the source of his wealth, your arguments would be different! Even though the actions would have been the same.

Would it be honest to simply state that those with vast wealth are the smartest, fittest, best humans among us and deserve deference from the rest of society? Vast wealth could then be a very convenient proxy for who should be granted the most power in our society, because they are the smartest, fittest, and best of us. They are smarter and better, so they would be the most adept at wielding that power - thus we should grant them as much power as possible so that it is all concentrated in the best hands.

My core thesis remains the same: An individual's captured/extracted value likely exceeds net value creation when examining the individual outliers who capture the most value. Therefore it is reasonable to tax them at a higher rate, to recapture some of that excess extracted wealth which went above and beyond their net wealth creation.

I would also say that even in the purest hypothetical case, it is reasonable for a society to decide not to grant 100% of all net created value to the individuals who created it, and for the society to capture some of it for broader societal purposes. I think reasonable people can agree that there would be real problems inherent in living in a world where the most extreme limit of income inequality is manifested - most of those problems would be related to concentrating power in the hands of those who break the rules to maximally enrich themselves.

This is all in line with my original assertion that the optimal choice between "maximizing greed is best!!" and "everyone should earn exactly the same as everyone else no matter what!" is....probably somewhere in between those two extremes.

Noted, but you do glorify Elon Musk:

Keep in mind that Mush created 4000 millionaires the day SPCX was IPO'd.

while also asserting that:

I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals.

Elon Musk is a great example of that "Lance Armstrong" concept. It would beggar belief for him to have beat everyone else that cheats at business, without breaking laws/regulations himself.

Some news [0] from today:

The lawsuit alleged that by not disclosing the stock purchases before the legal deadline, Musk was able to keep buying shares at artificially low prices and underpay Twitter investors by at least $150 million for those shares.

US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said she “has significant misgivings about the settlement” between Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and described “red flags” in the SEC’s decision-making. This isn’t surprising given that she previously questioned whether the deal is tainted by corruption.

It starts to sound a lot like "the Lance Armstrongs molding the law and its enforcement to their personal desires" as posited in my previous post.

0: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/judge-doesnt-lik...

Indeed, it appears I was miseducated to believe there was more of a consensus that "free market" assumes approximately "perfect competition", when in reality there is a less of a consensus than I was taught -- e.g. modern followers/revivalists of "Austrian economics" are quite opposed to the idea of perfect competition being a condition of a free market.

From Wikipedia:

For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. They say this implies that economic rents, which they describe as profits generated from a lack of perfect competition, must be reduced or eliminated as much as possible through free competition. [0]

The definition of perfect competition is when the following conditions all hold: A large number of sellers and buyers – A large number of consumers with the willingness and ability to buy the product at a certain price, and a large number of producers with the willingness and ability to supply the product at a certain price. As a result, individuals are unable to significantly influence prices. [1]

You are free to say that you personally don't care for "free markets" and use another term to describe the type of market that you prefer. But the textbook definition of "free market" was already defined 250 years ago as a market in which "a large player be prohibited from shifting the s-d curve".

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition

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I’m just not convinced that value creation and value extraction are well-linked when examining outlier cases.

> I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals.

Why would anyone assume that the most extreme outliers wouldn't (generally) be breaking some rules that the mode follow; breaking those particular rules would help them become an extreme outlier. Wouldn't it follow that if some % people are breaking rules to their advantage and getting away with it, that to exceed even those other "cheaters" that the most extreme outliers nearly must also be breaking those rules? It's like watching Lance Armstrong beat all the other cheaters and saying "There's no way he could be cheating!"

It feels like a fantasy to put so much blind faith in all the most extreme outliers and assert that none of them are doing anything illegal. Should we not tax illegal behavior much more severely than legal behavior? Would that not be rational?

Also --- of COURSE you "celebrate / make excuses for thieves and criminals". Uber would be a fantastic example of a group of criminals that you celebrate and make excuses for. Before Uber, if someone (even a municipal taxi driver) tried to pick someone up at an airport who flagged them down like a taxi, they would go to jail if they hadn't paid for an exclusive "airport taxi" license. Uber arranged taxis for airport travelers all the time - and they frustrated law enforcement using actual Obstruction of Justice via their "Greyball"[2] program. You can make excuses for them that none of this was found to be illegal/criminal, but Ycombinator partners are on record saying that the Lyft founders did, in fact, believe that what they were doing could very well land them in jail [3]. YCombinator partners encouraged them to move forward.

But you'd celebrate the Uber/Lyft founders and the YCombinator partners (as would I, for breaking the taxi cartel system that was even worse for the median American). And you have not ever celebrated the taxi drivers who went to jail for picking up passengers flagging them down at the airport before Uber/Lyft.

Perhaps this is because, to some degree, "capitalist" society is somewhat like a "racist" or "sexist" society, except instead of determining an individual's worth based on their race, capitalist societies discriminate based on how much capital one has. If you control enough capital, the laws are very malleable - what's illegal or not is what those with enough capital decide should be illegal or not.

Should the Lance Armstrongs of the business world be taxed the same as those who actually are not doping, but whose names we don't recall? Given that capital accumulation yields political/legislative/executive power, that might ensure that the Lance Armstrongs get to mold the law and its enforcement to their desires.

2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s

I respect WalterBright. I think his accomplishments are admirable. We’ve agreed on some fascinating issues in the past. We disagree sometimes. I’ve seen him thoughtfully consider new viewpoints occasionally.

I’m just not convinced that value creation and value extraction are well-linked when examining outlier cases. The nature of outliers makes it far more likely that value extraction would be much more likely to exceed net value creation. Even if for the more median percentiles, value creation and extraction are well-correlated.

I wouldn’t suggest a cap, but I would suggest very high tax rates and a more stern eye towards anti-competitive practices and negative externalities.

As a thought experiment:

Celebrating unbounded greed (the most “extreme” option) would be celebrating when politicians steal as much money as they can by manipulating stock markets and Kalshi and taking crypto bribes, taking kickbacks from contractors and blackmailing or strong-arming the other branches of government.

Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating selling poisoned food and telling ourselves that its the stupid people’s fault for buying melamine-contaminated milk without getting it tested by their own independent third party before drinking it. And then blaming the stupid people again when their third party testing lab that was trustworthy gets purchased by the same private equity group that owns the milk company and starts watering down or falsifying their tests.

Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating people whose wealth increased by neglecting expensive safety protocols, blowing up neighborhoods with gas explosions, and silencing them by intimidation, as well as blackmailing and bribing the judges overseeing any torts.

The more of this you allow and celebrate, the more your outliers grow and become a true bimodal distribution. Where the peak earners are, by necessity, extracting more value than they create.

The thing is, we have had a lot of things like this happen in most developed countries. There is a lot of corruption, and it’s not divided along party lines. Celebrating and glorifying unbounded greed is likely to lead towards a state where there’s less “rule of law” and more “rule by force”.

Relatively unbounded greed can probably work quite well in a society with a strong rule of law to protect against corruption, dangerous/damaging corner cutting and fraud… as well as an economy that actually meets the assumptions of a “free market”: i.e. no individual buyer or seller has enough concentrated power to significantly impact the supply-demand curve all by themselves.

When analyzing an optimization problem, the optimal values for the input variables are often found to lie somewhere between min and max.

It’s not clear that the person you replied to was advocating for one extreme, but even given that your strawman-esque assertion is probably true … I’d suggest analyzing a few other points in the domain beyond merely the two extremes that you contrasted.

Which range of the domain do you think we’d be most likely to find the optimal values for society? Do you believe that range might actually be inclusive of either limit? Are you sure you’d like to live in a world where the extreme limit of income inequality is manifest?

Non-competes are awful. But enforceable protections for trade secrets makes perfectly good sense.

Two very different things!

Oh wow, that would pretty limiting. Thank you for that heads up!

I see that from the 400 miles altitude they filed with the FCC, you'd expect them to be able to provide maybe an extra 2 hours before + after sunrise/sunset near the equator. However, that appears to improve to almost 4 hours at 50 degrees latitude - assuming 30 degrees of elevation is sufficient for the light to not get too scattered through the atmosphere. If you assume a much more conservative 60 degree elevation requirement then it would be 3 hours before+after sunrise/sunset at 50 degrees latitude.

It also depends on the season, but this has a much smaller effect than latitude.

Shortening the night by a combined 6-8 hours might be quite useful for operations in Ukraine which occur near 50 degrees latitude.

I’m pretty sure the plan is to have tens of thousands of them so that they can hand off from one satellite to the next. I know this tech would have been fantastic when I used to work on oil rigs in super remote locations.

It works fantastically well for construction and military applications.

More like, “the unmeasurable” or “unmodelable”. Examples could be the “A” in the Arrhenius equation or the “k” in Fourier’s law of conduction.

“A” is described as being derived from the collision frequency of molecules in that specific reaction but really it’s just an arbitrary magic number you look up in a book for the specific reaction that you’re working with. It’s often relatively temperature invariant across some range of temperatures but go outside that range and it becomes a function of temperature too.

Pulling up the wikipedia for “Collision theory” will show you that there has been some work to derive values of A rather than just find them all experimentally for every reaction. But it’s still very unsatisfying to the curious mind.

“k” is the thermal conductivity of a particular material. Curious minds might wonder what’s hidden behind this constant. How would someone predict “k” for a novel theoretical material? Like, say, tetrahedrane?

It’s been awhile, otherwise I’d walk you through a graph containing a couple hierarchical nodes where one constant leads to another equation. But it’s a bit too late to pour through Perry’s Handbook right now to jog my memory.

As a chemical engineer, one of the signs of maturity was myself and each of my classmates individually coming to accept and embrace the inevitable “magic coefficient”.

The curious always wanted to know why some magic coefficient was there. Where did it come from? How is it measured / calculated? How to derive the magic coefficient?

Eventually you learn that it’s turtles all the down. You can pick apart the magic coefficient and dive into the nuanced physics that its derived from…but then you still end up with a new magic coefficient.

So eventually, the curious students learn that the mysteries are out there for when you want to go out and explore them. But otherwise, we pick our level of abstraction for the problem we’re currently working on and accept the magic coefficients that apply to that level of abstraction.

The real trick is knowing the conditional boundaries when those magic coefficients no longed apply and you either need different ones or “here be dragons”.

Not really. ShowHN’s are for interactive things and are supposed to be free and generally shouldn’t require account creation.

“Reading material” is specifically called out as being off topic!

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html