HN user

nscalf

1,776 karma

I'm a software engineer with a background in politics (lobbying), economics, and sports betting.

I'm always happy to chat about anything you might be working on, so feel free to reach out at https://twitter.com/scalfino

Posts13
Comments438
View on HN

I lived in Florida for a long time, I can tell you that people don’t evacuate when it’s a cat 4 threatening to maybe become a cat 5. Having a category meaning “this is much worse than a 4” would be meaningful here. I see no reason to have an upper limit, it just artificially makes everything at and above the cat 5 threshold mean the same thing.

Also, Florida homes are built from cement, meant to survive storms like that. The building codes come from hurricane andrew, a particularly damaging cat 5.

I think the caveat here for people doing something legal is the questionable future status of crypto. Countries have completely outlawed holding them before, I’d rather just not have it tied to my name if there’s any risk of it becoming illegal, if there were a feasible option.

It is nothing shy of disgusting that someone clearly incapable of serving the role of senator dragged her constituents and the country through this till death. Shame on her, her family, and her staff.

This robot didn’t pull money that would otherwise be used for giving people healthcare. You’re complaining about unrelated things, the problem is around bought and sold politicians allowing for regulatory capture in healthcare, not around great science and engineering building an impressive product. This what-aboutism is just pathetic.

There may be alternatives to specific subreddits, but there is no Reddit alternative. There is only one macro network like Reddit, and that is Reddit. Maybe that network effect breaks, but I doubt that happens because of this.

It might be worth listening to the Acquired podcast episode on Nintendo. They are very far from perfect, and have had a good number of serious failures, along with some very strange decisions that clearly hurt them. Nintendo has a die hard stance on modding that is definitely net negative. Just a few weeks ago they went after some giant Twitch streamers for playing modded content. They also consistently ship technology that is generations behind.

One big thing they pointed out is the type of gaming they target. While the Playstation and Xbox general aim for very serious, high "skill" players, Nintendo often launches just above the seriousness and skill level of mobile gamers. It's easy for me to sit down with my extended family and play Mario Party or Mario Kart, but they'd hate me if I had them play Elden Ring. They also are strongly against much of the free to play content.

I left that episode questioning how much of Nintendo's recent success is due to them outcompeting versus the competition making a series of unforced errors.

Social media has created more mental illness in people. It's become normalized to jump to extreme slander like racist or sexist, etc. In my experience over the past 8 years on HN, when I am flippantly called things like that for disagreeing with something, there is usually a wave of nuanced, intellectually honest people who support you in the comments.

My advice is to "post and ghost". HN doesn't show you when someone else commented, so just move on. I personally don't care what non-nuanced thinkers think about me, and I know people who are willing to engage honestly with me will either prove me wrong or disagree without feeling the need to rip me apart. I think the consequences of dissenting are overblown.

In my experience, conversation rates were ~6% from a pop up timed to land when you were nearly done with the article (though on short articles, it was similar to what is described—I don’t have data on those two broken out). Subscribers stuck pretty well, something like 40% kept opening emails. For my relatively small newsletter, churn was extremely low. They’re basically warm leads if they make it to the end of an article, and email is extremely sticky.

Email pop ups are a very effective short term newsletter growth tool.

Let’s not pretend like anyone thinks we can reasonably reach out to someone and have any impact on what the SEC does. This country runs off money, not voter sentiment, and we all know it.

Out of curiosity, what makes you think interest rates need to go higher to stop inflation? I know that’s the standard response to inflation, but economics is wildly complex. My read on this situation was always that we needed to decrease the feds balance sheet, get some marginal increase in interest rates, and the rest is supply side.

I don’t think any of this really matters. You can just not have a Facebook account, almost none of us are in positions to defend our social status or prevent social engineering on Facebook. If you’re famous, that’s one thing, but there’s no point if you’re an average person.

We spend trillions in military programs. If many pilots are saying they see something crazy in the sky, and are backed by other eye witnesses, on board radar, and supporting ships radars, the only reasonable response is investigations. There shouldn’t even be a discussion about that, it should be an immediate default.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. It seems like the best path for them would have been something like what slack did. There was a time when Dropbox was a widely used product, that would have been a great time to get acquired and bundled.

Once you go public you have no option other than to just grow at all costs. The cost of Netflix pushing growth is turning consumer sentiment against them by cracking down on account sharing and pushing ads into the service. Netflix had a gross profit of $12.44B in 2022. Why not preserve the large, successful business that consumers have a high opinion of instead of push for further profits?

The truth is that Netflix could continue profiting billions per year more or less indefinitely without risking the company by shifting focus from growth, and the only people who would be upset about it would be shareholders. And the only reason they'd be upset is because of greed. They could stop trying to grow and be a strong dividend company overnight.