Wow. No idea this existed. I was about to set up a TV tuner with my Plex and pay $4.99 for the ability to broadcast live TV over Plex but see that JellyFin has this feature for free.
I’ve had much better luck with 100% honesty. Just say you set up a 20m transmitter to improve the life of a 93 year old woman.
I bought a house in my very early 20s. Roommates of mine finished the third floor with no permits. Went to sell the house ten years later and the location it was in required a U&O inspection. My realtor told me to lie, apply for a permit and pretend I just did the work.
Instead I called the local building inspector and said, “Hello my name is xxx and I’m calling to confess.” He cracked up laughing, came to the house immediately to look at everything and told me I was fine.
This is the root of the problem. Wikimedia rises too much money
100% agree and it’s endemic to the people running any organization not held accountable. There’s a port authority near me that was formed to maintain key bridges. The tolls on these bridges is exorbitant.
The people who run the authority use it as their own personal slush fund, donating money to things like ballet schools and other pet projects.
Maybe these projects are the most worthy thing in the world but forcing people to donate to them under threat of arrest (for not paying bridge tolls) is immoral.
But the post also said misappropriating the funds “is a minor issue”.
It’s not a minor issue to say you’re raising funds for X and to then give those funds to Y just because it only amount to Z% of your budget. And in this case Z% is actually pretty high.
A new search engine now has to compete with global network effects, orders of magnitudes more data, Android, and a complex web of interconnected functionality.
Are you a pessimist in life? You’re focusing on only the negative aspects of starting a search engine today.
24 years after Google was formed we have orders of magnitude cheaper processing, orders of magnitude better AI, the ability to start small with cloud computing and work your way up from there. We have 24 years of search engine research to a large extent publicly available.
I really think all this “things would’ve been so much easier back then” are simply excuses as to why someone can’t do something today.
Try building a search engine today. The barriers to entry are much harder.
I’ve often heard the saying how “everything easy has already been invented” and that it’s so much harder today to invent new things.
I think it’s a fallacy. Things were just as hard in the past.
I owned an ISP in 1998 and there were plenty of search engines at the time. Google invented something unique and innovative and they were rewarded tremendously for it. There were literally hundreds of other companies trying to do the same thing but Google was better. If it was low hanging fruit then Hotbot or any of the other major players could’ve done it.
I rewatch things all the time. If I’m doing side work at night and just want something on the background I’ll put on a movie or show that I’ve seen before.
Beyond that, hard drives are cheap! I have a single 18 TB disk in my main computer that runs Plex. It lets me and my kids watch content from anywhere with an Internet connection.
Another thing that happens that I didn’t see mentioned is that people at higher levels will only allow incompetent people to be promoted to their level.
If they allowed the best people to get promoted to their level, it would adversely impact their own bonuses and career. So instead they fight to get incompetent people promoted to their level so they have no competition.
25 years of a loose confederation of unpaid developers working on a code base with frequent updates and improvements. If this is the worst that can be said about it, they're doing pretty darn good.
There can be exceptions to this but I have never heard of a chargeback over this period and certainly charges a year or two old would be crazy.
Maybe what happened is that the cardholder initiated a chargeback on the most recent charges and Upwork decided on their own to refund them all?
In any case, it is primarily Upwork’s job to validate credit cards. If their position is that they failed to do that for two years and they have no responsibility, that is wrong.
I'm honestly sick of seeing these posts. Every single post I've seen on HN, I have had no down time in EC2, S3, Workspaces, FSx for Windows, Directory Service, Console, etc.
Over 200 services, 86 availability zones and 26 regions. We might as well post every 5 minutes if we post every time something on AWS goes down. And yes AWS is more dependent on us-east-1 but one of the outrages posts was for a minor outage in us-west-1.
I'm actually pretty fiscally conservative but I think it's ridiculous that someone abused the intent of a Roth IRA by accumulating $5 billion into it.
The whole purpose of IRAs is to encourage regular people to save for retirement. It was not meant to provide billionaires tax loopholes to avoid paying millions or even billions of dollars in taxes.
It's kind of like playing a game with someone. 99% of the people are following the rules and then some weisenheimer comes up with an idea that while technically not breaking a rule goes against the spirit of everything that the game stands for. What happens in that instance is the other players of the game will say, "Nice try, but no." This is what Congress is doing.
At the top of the linked article is a link to a previous blog entry entitled "A Genius????" that lists a bunch of "smart" things he's done that presumably qualify him for being a genius but that he cringes at calling himself that.