Hacker News: thetrb

New comment by thetrb in "SpaceX S-1"

thetrb — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:46:44 +0000

how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.

New comment by thetrb in "YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers"

thetrb — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 22:52:53 +0000

Do you think a random Youtube employee makes that decision and can just drop it lower?

New comment by thetrb in "A secret deal let Spotify bypass Android's app store fees"

thetrb — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 18:36:45 +0000

Wouldn't they be able to say that the actual revenue is just the 85% they get after Apple's take?

New comment by thetrb in "The first two custom silicon chips designed by Microsoft for its cloud"

thetrb — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 22:30:31 +0000

Why would Microsoft not produce them at scale? With Azure and internal use cases I'm sure they're at a good scale.

New comment by thetrb in "The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet"

thetrb — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 04:10:36 +0000

And then why would we want to give a country that's not a democracy free access to our markets?

New comment by thetrb in "FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank"

thetrb — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 19:46:41 +0000

People expect interest when they park a large amount of money in a bank. Where should that interest come from when the money just sits there? The bank will have to invest is somewhere (ideally somewhere very safe like in Government bonds) where they can then collect interest.

So it looks like in this case SVB chose MBS with a pretty low interest rate and long maturity, which they now have to sell due to the bank run you mentioned.

New comment by thetrb in "Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week"

thetrb — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 23:20:48 +0000

Agree, but that's how it always was before Covid.

New comment by thetrb in "Texas sues Google for collecting biometric data without consent"

thetrb — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 19:16:40 +0000

What are you talking about? There is a Texas lawsuit about this against Meta: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/texas-facebook...

New comment by thetrb in "Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?"

thetrb — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:55:50 +0000

That 3rd-party keyboard would also be able to log your Signal messages, so I don't get your point.

New comment by thetrb in "Ask HN: Ads triggered by WhatsApp “end to end encrypted” messages?"

thetrb — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 17:11:02 +0000

The thing is if it's a 3rd-party Android keyboard or similar that logs your messages then there's nothing Meta can do about this.

New comment by thetrb in "Facebook’s Retirement Plan"

thetrb — Thu, 05 May 2022 16:48:50 +0000

That's not true. User count is still going up.

New comment by thetrb in "Elon has decided not to join our board"

thetrb — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 05:39:56 +0000

what's also scary is that he could do this with pretty much every public company he wants (very few exceptions of companies with >200B market cap or so).

New comment by thetrb in "Decreasing service fees on subscriptions to 15%"

thetrb — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 18:22:17 +0000

My view is that it's an effort to avoid regulation. It's easier to justify a fee of 10-15% to regulators than a flat 30% fee.

New comment by thetrb in "California exodus is a myth, UC research project finds"

thetrb — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 01:36:28 +0000

Moving from NYC to Long Island is slightly different than moving from California to Tennessee, so I don't really understand your point.

New comment by thetrb in "Germans are turning down Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine"

thetrb — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 19:21:38 +0000

I don't think that's the main issue. I think it's that the general assumption is that Moderna vaccine is about 90% effective and AstraZeneca about 60% effective.

I don't know how well you can actually compare these 2 numbers and if those are even the most important numbers, but that's part of the problem: Most people only look at these numbers and that's why they would prefer the Moderna vaccine.

New comment by thetrb in "EU privacy agency urges more safeguards to curb U.S. tech giants"

thetrb — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:43:57 +0000

Cool, maybe the US should also add some protections against German exports.

New comment by thetrb in "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves"

thetrb — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 00:55:28 +0000

Wow, calling a pregnant woman "leech-like" is one of the most misogynistic things I've ever read on HN.

New comment by thetrb in "Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?"

thetrb — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 20:19:54 +0000

What also comes into the picture here is the extremely high cost of living in the Bay Area. Even startups have to offer $200k in non-"maybe" compensation to make sure people can afford living here. Even a relatively small size startup with 50 people now already has $10 million in salary costs per year (not even counting taxes, benefits, etc.).

So overall the balance is tilted very much in favor of the big companies that can afford paying people that much. I'm wondering how that changes where startups get started. Is the Bay Area still the dominant place for this?

New comment by thetrb in "Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident"

thetrb — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 00:15:36 +0000

The driver looked up a few seconds before the accident, though and didn't seem to notice anything on the road.

New comment by thetrb in "Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring"

thetrb — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 17:29:31 +0000

Most people don't move because they "hate the bay". They might hate living in the Bay Area because of housing, traffic, etc.