Hacker News: BlackJack

Tech investor plan to buy landmark SF bar (Toronado) turned into tortured battle

BlackJack — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:59:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/toronado-bar-orion-parrott-20340961.php

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203904

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Notes on Trinidad and Tobago

BlackJack — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 14:53:09 +0000

Article URL: https://mattlakeman.org/2024/12/26/notes-on-trinidad-and-tobago/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42595010

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by BlackJack in "Passengers Say Turkish Airlines Flights Have Unwelcome Guests: Bedbugs"

BlackJack — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 02:58:44 +0000

ANA is good but isn't even the best airline in its' own country. LH isn't the best airline in its' own group (Swiss and Austrian have better seats/service, and Swiss has equivalently good coverage).

United is probably the best US airline for international but domestically Delta is arguably better.

New comment by BlackJack in "The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia"

BlackJack — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 17:17:59 +0000

The British were engaged in the slave trade, then worked to outlaw slavery but replaced it with indentured servitude that was basically like slavery with a trivial income. That and exploitative colonial government meant you don't need slavery to loot everything.

Reparations are a different topic and wouldn't necessarily solve the problems of slavery/colonization.

New comment by BlackJack in "It took my savings and 14 years but I’m about to beat arthritis"

BlackJack — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 12:15:19 +0000

Processed foods usually refers to packaged snacks, food with lots of added ingredients, corn oils, artificial ingredients, etc or fast food/junk food ordered at restaurants/fast-casual places.

New comment by BlackJack in "GameStop stock influencer Roaring Kitty may lose access to E-Trade, report says"

BlackJack — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 13:08:42 +0000

In the past, he had call options that he could've sold for profit but instead he exercised them to get even more GME stock. It's literally the opposite of dumping.

The whales manipulate markets much more than anything Keith Gill has done.

New comment by BlackJack in "Veo"

BlackJack — Tue, 14 May 2024 19:36:11 +0000

Disclaimer: I work at Google on related stuff

Veo is the name of a video model. VideoFX is the name of a new experimental tool at labs.google.com, which uses Veo and lets you make videos.

Thanks for the feedback though, I see how it's confusing for users.

New comment by BlackJack in "Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships"

BlackJack — Thu, 09 May 2024 18:00:09 +0000

Guaranteed value is a licensing payment that compensates the publisher for allowing OpenAI to access its backlog of data, while variable value is contingent on display success, a metric based on the number of users engaging with linked or displayed content.

...

“The PPP program is more about scraping than training,” said one executive. “OpenAI has presumably already ingested and trained on these publishers’ archival data, but it needs access to contemporary content to answer contemporary queries.”

This also makes sense if they're trying to get into the search space.

Lawmaker Presses Loro Piana After Reports of Exploiting Indigenous Workers

BlackJack — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 20:12:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/us/politics/garcia-loro-piana-vuitton-indigenous-peru.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40045040

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by BlackJack in "Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science (2011)"

BlackJack — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 13:46:31 +0000

That's not even close to true. Look at the massive growth of slavery and religious violence under Arab and Muslim conquest across Asia and Africa.

Arab and Western conolialism have different flavors but enormous exploitation and abuse.

New comment by BlackJack in "The Vicuñas and the $9k Sweater"

BlackJack — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:42:55 +0000

Archibald sells a vicuna sweater for $3.1k, and they say the at cost price is $1.9k [1]

Given maybe $500-800 in production cost, shipping, duties etc, the cost is probably $1k. It is significantly more expensive than other fibers.

1. https://www.archibaldlondon.com/us/collection?category=vicun...

The next chapter of our Gemini era

BlackJack — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 13:11:36 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-update-sundar-pichai-2024/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39301528

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by BlackJack in "Tell HN: Bash.org is no more"

BlackJack — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 12:48:59 +0000

So sad to hear that. QDB brought me so much joy to read.

New comment by BlackJack in "Poor Charlie's Almanack"

BlackJack — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 22:39:52 +0000

Love this book, and looks like stripe.press has some other really good books like Hamming's The Art and Science of Doing Engineering.

That being said, the UX of this page is horrible. Scrolling hard, navigating hard, bad font. I cannot believe they put this out.

New comment by BlackJack in "Notes on the Ivory Coast"

BlackJack — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:59:18 +0000

I've read most of Matt's "Notes on [X]" In general they are well written and interesting. In some cases though it's too simplified and at times insensitive. In particular, I've talked to people who are from Nigeria/Ghana or have visited there and they pointed out issues with his narrative. But most people who read Matt's blog have never been to these places, so they take everything as 100% accurate.

That being said, if you treat it as literally just his experiences, then they're fantastic reads.

P.S. His notes on Mauritania [https://mattlakeman.org/2023/08/16/notes-on-mauritania/] is really interesting for the train story. I had never heard of such a thing before.

New comment by BlackJack in "US office owners face $117B wall of debt repayments"

BlackJack — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 18:08:03 +0000

Have you done the math, even at a ballpark level? Commercial Real Estate (CRE) is estimated to have ~$500B loss in 2023 and nearly the same in 2024 (different from debt repayment) [1]. Stock indices were fine. In general, there's way more private investment/ownership in CRE. The market can suffer a lot more in losses before it starts to meaningfully affect mom&pop. Even stocks like SLG and BX have done fine last year.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/commercial-real-estate-values...

New comment by BlackJack in "Things are about to get worse for generative AI"

BlackJack — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 13:25:33 +0000

That's a good point. I agree it's not clear cut one way or another and we gotta let it play out.

New comment by BlackJack in "Things are about to get worse for generative AI"

BlackJack — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 12:02:38 +0000

disclaimer: I work on GenAI at google, but views are my own

The question is, how did the model create Mario&Luigi or Scrooge McDuck without training on copyrighted data? It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model.

One possible outcome is more transparency on what datasets were used to train the models.

New comment by BlackJack in "How we turned the tide in the roach wars"

BlackJack — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 17:04:44 +0000

After reading your comment, I checked their history. The account has 7k+ karma, and if they're professional marketer they are promoting:

* DALLE * Stable Diffusion * Tabletop RPGs * Sega CD * Nice suburban housing * Neuralink * Cliffnotes

etc etc. It just sounds like a normal person talking about things they like or interests.

Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company

BlackJack — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 18:55:31 +0000

Article URL: https://longform.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38535327

Points: 28

# Comments: 2