Its primary point is that TIOBE is based on *number* of search results on a weighted list of search engines, not actual usage in Github, search volume, job listings, or any of the other number of signals you'd expect a popularity index to use.

It could easily be indicating that Python articles are being generated by LLMs more than any other class of articles.

The truth is, even if you have pedigree (top-tier college, worked at FAANG and startups), the very first time fundraising is going to be pretty hard and annoying unless you've already been going to a lot of founder meetups, want to start something in a hot field, or have VC's in your personal network. This is especially true after the money wave from pre-2022 receded.

I do feel like I probably could've raised on better terms, but I'm not sure it would've improved the trajectory of my life or expected value. YC taught me a lot about fundraising that I didn't know I didn't know. Compared to other VC's we've worked with (who have all been pretty great), YC has provided more specific advice to our stage, better technology, and a slightly better network.

This is very much the indie-hacker route, but honestly, if you have one thing that's working out, it's usually better financially (though maybe less fun if you like purely doing engineering/product work) to try to grow it than to build a portfolio.

As someone who went through YC, but started out more on the indie-hacker side, I want to mention that going through YC in particular does not close the door to just continuing to build a successful, growing business without raising one round after the other.

I think some indie-hacker influencers encourage this kind of us vs. them thinking about VC's, and the truth is somewhere in between.

I know of many businesses who have decided (either by choice or through a lack of fundraising options) that the ideal way to grow and scale their business after YC is to not fundraise. It's something that YC partners explicitly acknowledge. They understand that an alive business can continue to grow, whereas a dead business is just dead.

I did some Googling and it didn't seem like there's an easy option.

Google clearly believes that they can obfuscate identity by enough so that ads can be targeted while privacy can also be preserved.

If you don't think that all ads are bad (and Google argues that ads help make many of the sites we rely on economically feasible), then I think you may agree that sometimes, ad targeting produces more useful ads. Many of my friends have actually found Instagram ads interesting enough to talk about them at dinners. It's better to have those ads rather than random banners for things that you don't care about. Google would definitely also argue that ad targeting improves the worth of the Internet and allows more sites to offer their services for free because they can make more from AdSense.

The following only makes sense if you buy this argument:

The data for ad targeting has been abused so often that for many (most?) consumers, it's not worth it.

Google's perspective is: "we can be a responsible steward of this data for this new age of privacy-conscious ad targeting". The Chrome topics API and mathematical/statistical obfuscation are things that a blunt tool like the law may forbid. As far as arguments go, I think this is actually a plausible one. I do think Google has somewhat OK privacy controls compared to other large tech companies, and way better ones compared to bad acting small sites and ad companies/data brokers.

That being said, I don't love the concentration of power (that's why the DOJ is going after them) - I'd much rather there be some decentralized way to ensure privacy but still allow useful ads, but we get what we get.

The cost of an email is virtually 0. The cost of a unique phone number that can receive text-messages is non-zero. This was a pain in the butt for me, as you often have to get a real phone number (they reject VoIP ones) and that takes more work to get working.

Bots and scraping is a huge issue for Instagram. Instagram really dislikes the fact that you can buy a lot of likes for very cheap, so I kinda understand why they do this.

1. The courts have concluded that just because a price is higher does not mean it is necessarily in the fiduciary interests of shareholders (especially long-term ones). This is reasonable too, as in many ways, shareholders are more shortsighted

2. Even in the short term, shareholders are usually incentivized to accept offers, whereas auctions and negotiation may yield better offers (this reminds me of the latest season of Succession)

3. Somewhat interestingly, a study (Kidder) showed that companies that defended takeovers successfully were worth less, but companies that tried to defend a takeover but ended up being acquired by the original buyer or another buyer ended up being worth more

4. Different structures of offers (a 2-stage offer, where 51% of shares are acquired at one price and the remaining is acquired at another or not acquired) can make the offer pretty bad to a lot of shareholders, even though it coerces shareholders to pass it

The article concludes that because of all these factors, the board having more power is generally a reasonable thing. I think this generally matches up with the overall role of boards, and I generally agree.

This study seems to support the Mars Sample Return Mission, which has been controversial lately due to its high costs: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/the-senate-just-lobbed...

> The concern expressed by some scientists, including former NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen, is that the ballooning cost of Mars Sample Return will cannibalize funding from other science missions. And if the price is already approaching $10 billion now, then it is likely to spiral further out of control.

> Google's plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an "environment attestation" test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a "third-party" attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed "IntegrityToken" that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted.

The problem with Captchas today is that there are a lot of services you can use to bypass them. You send the token to a human, human gives you the solution-token, and you pass that to Google.

I can see why they want to make this more protected. As a user, if this lets me solve captchas less for certain sites, I'm OK with that. Of course, I don't think this API should be used for the entire web, but I definitely understand its use-case.

> By the way, we didn't plan doing that at the end, after thinking about it a lot, but it meant we would need to gain many users by having a killer product and work for free for very long, like a regular startup I'd say.

Real web3 startups are just like normal startups if you take out the token economics. There do exist use-cases and users, but I'm glad the author had a strong enough sense to do what he felt was right. It's definitely easier now that the bandwagon has mostly stopped, but I think his reaction is a good one to maintain throughout our careers.

> Stratospheric SO2 rains out of the atmosphere after a year or so, so unlike CO2 emissions it is relatively easy to control the dosing and the magnitude of the desired effect

Is this not true? I'm curious about where I can read more about research about the lifetime of atmospheric SO2.

Edit: The best source I could find about stratospheric SO2 was based on measurements after Pinatubo at

https://www.osti.gov/pages/servlets/purl/1439705

(https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JD027006)

I see that the concentration declined to roughly 1% after 180 days (Figure 7). Volcanic aerosols seem to last a bit longer but seem to go back to background around 4 years (Figure 10).

> The thing is, "the algorithm" should have very little to do with that sick feeling. The coldness of the interface and robotic voice certainly make for a stark contrast with the thing you are doing, but they aren't the cause. The moment you start thinking about someone's longtime home as something that can "align with strategy," and about pricing someone out of their longtime home as "an adjustment that would be more beneficial," you have morally lost. It doesn't really matter how you go about making that adjustment.

The tool and the training for the tool definitely matters, but the truth is, making business decisions about housing will necessarily hurt people in ways that are disproportionate to the amount of additional income a landlord gets.

This sucks for everyone, but especially for less mobile or financially-secure tenants. I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore.

1. This was likely mitigated through a device update. What version did it roll out with? Which devices are still unpatched?

2. How was it compromised? Was it an OEM? An internal leak at Google?

3. What is the attack vector? It sounds like it was likely side-loading apps used by some attacker, but did any of these make it onto the Play Store?

This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials.

I know of businesses (scraping for ride-sharing, scraping for business intelligence for retailers, scraping from LinkedIn - see HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn) that have continuously succeeded via scraping in ways that large businesses oppose.

The key is: you must make enough profit to justify dedicating engineering and legal techniques to defend your scraping.

- Scraping public data is legal, as affirmed by the Supreme Court in Van Buren v. United States [1] and HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn [2]. Defending yourself or suing the data owner in court are both expensive though

- Defeating anti-scraping via technical means is pretty much always possible, but can be costly depending on the scraped site's technical expertise and value in keeping their data private. The benefit to you must exceed the cost to you, and ideally should also exceed the cost to the data owner

- Mobilizing PR and internal resistance may also be effective, but it's usually hard to have outcry from a large enough group to change an organization's policies. In this case, the union can push for it, but AA may try to withhold improvements until the next set of union negotiations

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

This is a reminder to pay for services you depend on. Per the Pinboard founder's post:

> I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

> Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!

https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30926834

Points: 266

# Comments: 148

> Futility was the order of the day. “Most experts believe that no matter what legislation is enacted, the unhappy outlook as of now is that wiretapping is here to stay and will increase,” Newsweek reported in an article on “The Busy Wiretappers” in the spring of 1955. The tumultuous decade that followed proved all of the predictions right.

Public-key encryption has brought wiretap-resistant communications to the mainstream through the Internet in a way that would've been basically impossible to do at scale in the analog world.