HN user

vladd

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I'm Vlad Dascalu, the CEO of Beetux Software - a Romanian-based company located in the city of Bucharest.

Among other web properties, it operates www.Goobix.com - a significant collection of browser-based online games.

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berkshirehathaway.com 2y ago

Warren Buffett's Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders 2023 [pdf]

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www.aljazeera.com 2y ago

Italy shocks banks with 40 percent windfall tax for 2023

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berkshirehathaway.com 3y ago

2022 10K Annual Report – Berkshire Hathaway

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berkshirehathaway.com 3y ago

Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter 2022 [pdf]

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sec.report 5y ago

UiPath Inc S-1 SEC Form

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berkshirehathaway.com 6y ago

Berkshire Hathaway 2019 Annual Report [pdf]

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www.linkedin.com 6y ago

It’s later than you think

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berkshirehathaway.com 7y ago

Berkshire Hathaway 2018 Annual Shareholder Letter [pdf]

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www.berkshirehathaway.com 8y ago

Berkshire Hathaway 2017 Annual Letter [pdf]

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phoronix.com 10y ago

X.org Managed to Get Renewed

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www.cryptocoinsnews.com 11y ago

Bitcoin Exchange Bitstamp Confirms Loss of ~$5M USD from Hot Wallet

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www.bbc.com 12y ago

Microsoft's Cortana mixes AI with human-added humour

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www.foxnews.com 13y ago

Pilot was attempting his first Boeing 777 landing at San Francisco

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www.sbs.com.au 13y ago

Bolivian president's plane forced to land due to Snowden on board rumor

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www.quora.com 13y ago

Career Advice: How did you adjust to working with smarter people?

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www.dailywebapps.com 14y ago

MacBook Pro Retina Display: Webmasters, get ready

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www.berkshirehathaway.com 14y ago

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter

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plus.google.com 14y ago

Update on Google's use of data from Mocality’s site in Kenya

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www.youtube.com 14y ago

Burning Man: Oh, the Places You'll Go

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www.asana.com 14y ago

Facebook Co-Founder's Asana Project Is Officially Launched

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plus.google.com 14y ago

Google caught with altered rankings for its Product Search website

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www.cbsnews.com 14y ago

Google caught with altered rankings for its Product Search website

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www.google.com 14y ago

Google gathers ID card photos to reactivate flagged accounts

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www.goobix.com 14y ago

How the cost to make a copy changes industry's revenue distribution (2006)

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plus.google.com 14y ago

Google: You need identity

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www.youtube.com 14y ago

Microsoft launches video campaign against GMail-Man

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www.erbix.com 15y ago

Browser-based IDE for writing webapps 100% in JavaScript

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www.youtube.com 15y ago

How Tribes, Social and Analytics helped Zynga [9min video]

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www.erbix.com 15y ago

New fully-fledged CRM app written 100% in JavaScript

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www.reuters.com 15y ago

Greece will default in mid July without external aid

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Not really because there are too many other variables

You can average out countries that equalize property rights to the state vs. average of countries where property variance is respected, and check which ones are doing better vs worse.

How do you know that creation of value can't exist in the presence of equality?

Equality of output would imply equality of inputs? People will no longer have the right to decide for themselves if they want to be busy creating wealth or busy doing more social/pleasurable things?

yeah and it's 1000x better than cavemen banging on rocks in the stone age

Why do you take that improvement for granted? (in the context of today's nuclear treats, it's not a given that we'll able to propel this rate moving forward in the next 100 years, there's a non-zero probability that we wipe ourselves back to the stone age).

Or more generically, if you had to chose between two economic policies, one with 1'000x improvement where people can take risks and see variation in rewards according to their choices (and an element of luck/historical background), and another one where everyone is forced to the same output, irrespective of their actions, which leads some to pursue more pleasure activities to a larger fraction of their existence and the improvement is just 50x, which one would you choose for the society?

Is equality worthy as a goal in itself? And if so, enough in order to stop people in self-selecting doing what they want and letting them keep some percentage as a reward for assuming the risk? Even if it leads us as a society to slower growth?

The current economic system funnels economic value from the poor to the ultra rich.

The economic system creates values (and you can compare it with alternatives such as Soviet Union to realize just by how much). It does this in an unequal way, by chance, historical context and self-selection preferences. But the creation of value still trumps any inequality it might have. With TV, air conditioning and phones, an entry mid-class person in US is having it ten times better than the kings of middle ages.

Since bonds are always reaching their promised payout terms upon their maturity, you can manage that risk through proper alignment in maturity dates.

You can purchase multiple bonds that are spread around their term duration. E.g. buy now 1-year bonds, and repeat every 3 months. After 4 such cycles, you will now always have bonds reaching maturity every 3 months.

Or just buy shorter term ones to begin with (if the interest is still appealing), and move to longer term ones once you have enough maturity diversity for the advice in the previous paragraph.

Just to remember that there are different sorts of liabilities and punishment.

For example, losing one's net worth might be an example. Shareholders are already subject to it, while for employees, even when fired, they just lose the potential of future earnings, leaving their accumulated net worth untouched.

Wikipedia calls this the principal-agent problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble... ). Should employees in a position of power be agents that are putting up some collateral as a guarantee to be forfeit in case things go south? Or otherwise would unwarranted risk-taking behavior in their job be enough to go to jail when the results of their actions impact others in the world at large negatively?

I liked in particular this year's collection of phrasings from Charlie, Warren's long time partner:

• The world is full of foolish gamblers, and they will not do as well as the patient investor.

• If you don’t see the world the way it is, it’s like judging something through a distorted lens.

• All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there. And a related thought: Early on, write your desired obituary – and then behave accordingly.

• If you don’t care whether you are rational or not, you won’t work on it. Then you will stay irrational and get lousy results.

• Patience can be learned. Having a long attention span and the ability to concentrate on one thing for a long time is a huge advantage.

• You can learn a lot from dead people. Read of the deceased you admire and detest.

• Don’t bail away in a sinking boat if you can swim to one that is seaworthy.

• A great company keeps working after you are not; a mediocre company won’t do that.

• Warren and I don’t focus on the froth of the market. We seek out good long-term investments and stubbornly hold them for a long time.

• Ben Graham said, “Day to day, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long term it’s a weighing machine.” If you keep making something more valuable, then some wise person is going to notice it and start buying.

• There is no such thing as a 100% sure thing when investing. Thus, the use of leverage is dangerous. A string of wonderful numbers times zero will always equal zero. Don’t count on getting rich twice.

• You don’t, however, need to own a lot of things in order to get rich.

• You have to keep learning if you want to become a great investor. When the world changes, you must change.

• Warren and I hated railroad stocks for decades, but the world changed and finally the country had four huge railroads of vital importance to the American economy. We were slow to recognize the change, but better late than never.

• Finally, I will add two short sentences by Charlie that have been his decision-clinchers for decades: “Warren, think more about it. You’re smart and I’m right.”

If you're going to make such a claim, the least you can do is cite at least one example.

You can take a look at the process of naturalization (becoming a Japanese citizen): "Those who wish to be naturalized must either have no nationality or, in principle, lose their nationality by naturalization."

Hence you could argue that this provision forbids foreigners that integrate into Japan nationality in remembering and being connected with their past identity (that might be seen as lacking purity).

I believe you get downvotes because you think by analogy rather than by reasoning. Not having that big corporation example doesn't negate Let's Encrypt's value proposition (and the improvement they brought compared with the way things were done before).

Also you're mixing security on data transportation with security of data at rest. Both are important but there are different solutions to each.

Puter 4 years ago

It unifies the Operating System with the cloud. Your local storage becomes irrelevant while at the same time you have full durability and portability of your environment on any device in the world.

The following has been used for sure in order to commit crimes and fiddle with democracy: Verizon phone conversations, Gmail discussions, Twitter, Snapchat or Tiktok messages etc.

Nobody wakes up and says "let's be unethical today", but rather, it's the reality of life with user generated content platforms, that either you get both outcomes, or you get none.

The discussion is about making people realize that the "technology" to keep only the good parts (without the downsides) wasn't invented yet.

Hence we're in a position to argue whether it would be more ethical to shutdown / censor everything, or have fruitful discussions on how to emphasize the good outcomes over the bad ones with the current tech (by first understanding it, something that politicians seem to be very bad at, or show little interest in it compared to the negative FB sentiment engagement they're generating in their voters -- ironic :) ).

Walmart is "manipulating" the placement of products on the shelf so that it's more likely for you to engage in bulk buying when you visit their stores.

Both Facebook and Walmart have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value for them.

The difference is that, with user generated content, the idea of black and white "bounds" of the law is no longer applicable and you have to devise a system of checks and balances based on probabilities.

You can consider 10'000 posts for offline analysis: give them to some human raters and decide retrospectively what engagement and thoughts (positive/negative) are they generating in teens, which should enable you to draw some statistics about the expected average outcome. This doesn't mean it's either scalable or economically feasible to do so in real time for every post (so you cannot take decisions based on something that doesn't exist at the individual post level).

You can have multiple algorithms, send all of them to human raters and get for each algorithm some aggregated behaviour, but then we're back to the book question above -- what ratio of positive vs negative outcome in outliers is acceptable, and how do you define a "legal"/"allowed" algorithm?

Let's try to phrase it in an actionable way for the law-makers to act upon it.

Are you suggesting that any profitable company hosting user-submitted content should invest all the profits in moderation teams to the point where they are either a) becoming profit-neutral or b) all the relevant content has been reviewed by a human moderator?

And how do you define relevant content -- having had 50 views? 10 views? 1 view? Who should decide where to set these limits? Do we believe politicians are going to do a better job at it rather than the existing situation? Or should we ban any non-human reviewed post just to move the certainty of illegal posts removals from 99.9% to 99.99%? (humans do make mistakes too)

(Facebook is really big so having just 99.99% of posts in compliance still means an awful amount of them escaping the system undetected)

If a poem (or book) makes 10% of its readers more likely to become geniuses and contribute to solving world problems such as cancer, but 0.1% of its readers are more likely to commit suicide, should that book be banned by law?

Today's online society is based on posts created by content creators around the world, where algorithms can barely scratch the surface at interpreting their content, humans don't scale in reviewing every post, but statistics such as the above could be arguably inferred easily based on a combination of engagement (click/scrolls) data and attrition/session-revisits numbers.

Which is really problematic, because codifying into law rules and punishments based on aggregated outcomes and impact to us as a society (or to society sub-segments such as teens) makes it a very hard process to navigate between censorship vs. positive overall outcome vs. specific negative outcome on some outliers.

It's always relevant to ask: what problem are we trying to solve?

The ban is meant to bring EU closer to the 2050 zero-CO2 emission goal. This will be achieved by shrinking current emissions while increasing CO2 removal ( see https://assets.weforum.org/editor/responsive_large_webp_XR_q... ).

If someone brings in the discussion the ability to have 10'000 extra for the co2-net-zero goal, let's think -- it is helping the goal? Can we remove with this money more CO2 than the super-car would be producing over its lifetime?

Bringing out the stick to keep the discussion on topic must be traded-off carefully against the danger of killing relevant novel ideas and different ways to look at the problem.

> He said in a phone interview with a pro-government TV talk show that the amount takes into account the salvage operation, costs of stalled traffic, and lost transit fees for the week that the Ever Given had blocked the Suez Canal. <<

It makes no sense for the lost transit fees to be paid by the insurance companies as most vessels waited the 6-day period and then got to traverse the canal with some days in delay (so Egypt still got that money).

In the end the claim seems exaggerate and might be indicative of Egypt's lack of focus on long term relations. It's one thing to pay 500'000 USD for a passage, but if I know that I have a 0.05% probability of paying 1 billion dollars (which is another 500'000 USD expected payout on average) then surrounding Africa without any fees is all of a sudden a lot more attractive.

Seems the article is confusing the "trigger" of an event with its "root cause".

I like to give the example of the Concorde airplane crash [0] to exemplify the difference: the incident was triggered by debris on the runway (which caused the tires to explode, igniting the fuel tank above). But the root cause was the placement of fuel in proximity of inflatable tire materials.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590