Just an aside, but that is a gigantic undersell of veterinarians. The difficulties of becoming one aside, just seeing that "humans-only" doctors only work on one kind of ape, compared to the many very different kinds of life forms a veterinarian has to deal with (of course they specialize too), I don't understand why one would think a veterinarian would deserve the word "only".

Do you have proof, or do you just happen to feel this way without actually knowing any background story? If you make such an accusation you should state your reasons, preferably observable facts. Both "hacker" and "news" are generic terms after all.

In addition, even if they did mimic the name, I would not see a problem. It's very descriptive, unlike a completely made-up word that someone spent a lot of effort on to establish as a brand.

If I launched a new site called "TheFacebook.com" tomorrow, what proof would you need that I was, at a minimum, knowingly causing confusion?

I'm not sure how to measure the actual level of recognition of a brand name, but I feel that Hacker News falls into the second or third tier of whatever that ranking is, whereas names like Facebook or Google form the top tier. That, combined with the relatively generic name, make me inclined to believe without further evidence that it's a coincidence - especially given the fact that the site is actually about news related to hacking, or hacker news.

A closer comparison I can think of is if I saw a watch company called "The International Watch Company". The real IWC is a luxury watch company, but the brand and its full name aren't known to many people. In that case too, my opinion is that the name is generic enough for it to feel like an honest coincidence.

There can't be two companies with the same name in the same niche, which is what is happening here.

In either of the above cases, a Google search turns up the conflicting name as the #1 organic hit, precluding my judgment of an honest coincidence, but I understand your position.

On Castro Street in Mountain View they would.

Besides, we aren’t talking about random people, we are talking about the audience for The Hacker News.

Or if that spelling is too specific, "The Read It"

You mean, with the name "ycombinator", right? I remember accessing this site a few times in the (distant) past and was a little confused as to what it was and what it was "selling" (based on the actual frontpage).

I'd check out https://ycombinator.com/ and assumed the news subdomain was a forum or some '1337' thing.

I say this as a slashdotter, digger, redditor (and others) - all of whom have and always had brand naming. I'd say that over the last couple of years, HN has crossed a bridge into the mass market. Before then... it was niche.

What happens if "everyone" does it and now you compete not with a few but with hundreds, thousands? Will you still do and feel so good? Does your suggestions scale if it is applied not just to a few? What makes you think you can just multiply your particular personal situation by [insert any number here] and it will still work?

The attitude of 'if everyone does well, then it makes my life harder' I find regrettable. Again, I suspect this is a minority view.

Edit: Imagine the situation where education is freely available, where people have a life long love of learning. Where companies allow their employees to go to classes of all sorts. Wouldn't that be a great world. The one we have now is sort of the opposite. The strange part is this could all be done now, all it takes is a political will. Damn commies I suppose.

I think such huge levels of new "entrepreneurs" just means you get something like "Uber jobs". All the risk of being on your own but none of the benefits of being part of a large organization. Even if every single new entrepreneur were to cure one kind of cancer - how many such people are needed before the ROI on a cure for a cancer form is down to pennies? Just to use an extreme example where every single person actually is a genius. Now imagine what happens when most people are ordinary. Not to mention that actual monetization of cures for forms of cancer can only be handled by - large companies! It seems to me to be quite clear, given the complexity of what needs to be done in today's world economy (vs. shoe makers or smiths or XYZ makers in centuries past who could happily work alone or with just family) that most people in the economy should be employed and part of large(r) organizations. If everybody is an individual (entrepreneur) this would not fit into how modern society works, solving complex tasks in a tight network of people.

To me it's like propagating a mostly bacteria world because multicellular organisms, where individuals give up most of their autonomy and prefer to be part of a big organization, are somehow "bad" (and cancer cells, breaking out of the organization to follow their own path, are somehow rebels fighting for freedom?). To me, people giving up many of their freedoms to work in a higher-level form of organization is something positive, and I think we actually need more of it. The problem is that, following the multicellular organism analogy, today's organisms (firms) are quite hostile towards their own cells (workers). Too narrow-minded. They could (allowed to) be that way - if the parent organization, the state, would jump in and provide the safety instead, on the (even) higher level. For the unbelievable wealth (in tools, knowledge, infrastructure, processes, networks) that at least part of humanity has accumulated and achieved I think we have waaayyyyy too much risk completely unnecessarily put on individuals, for no good reason. We could easily give everyone food and shelter and some basics. To me, much of that pressure on people is completely artificial. "Sure, we could feed you, but we won't because you are unworthy."

2) I find your opinion of a corporate social contract terrifying. If anything, entrepreneurialism is necessary for the ex nihilo creation of labor demand to keep society stable.

By the way, there are links below the text, here's the one to the HN discussion of 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10885727

For database, we use RDS/Dynamodb

Redis for cache.

Dynamodb is better in cases where we want to localize the latency of our regional lambdas.

RDS for everything else like dashboard entity storage etc..

Cloudwatch prints logs, kinesis takes the log to s3 where it's transformed in batches with lambda then data is moved to Redshift. Redshift for stats/reports.

Converted whole ad network to Serverless. Used Rust Lambda runtime for CPU intensive tasks.

Using Go for the rest of the Lambdas.

I love Go and Rust and optimizing just one Lambda at a time brought back the programme joy in my life

Used Apex+Terrform to manage whole infra for the ad network.

We managed to deploy Lambda in all AWS regions ensuring minium latency for the ad viewers.

The thing which took over 50 (tech side only) person team, now takes 10 people to run the whole ad network.

Network is doing 20M profit per year/9 billion clicks per day.

It's my greatest achievement so far because we made it from scratch without any investor money.

But one the other side, we'll have to shrink our team size next year as growth opportunity is limited and we want to optimize efficiency further.

I'm currently planing to write a book about AWS. It should teach people how to build their MVPs without restricting themselves in the future.

Are you available for an interview in January?

I think I'll put up a small splashpage for email gathering in the next days to keep people up to date :)

I'll start gathering informations in January, feel free to share this form.

50 person team to run an adnetwork on tech side only? I am really curious why did it take that many people before going to Lambdas. We are in the adtech space also and there is a 5 persons team (on-call ops+2 devs) to run our own datacollection, third party data providers, RTB doing half a million QPS and own adservers doing hundreds of millions of impressions daily.

Think about drilldown to 3 level, based on device, os, placement, country, ISP etc... along with click stats per variable.

I've never used elastic search for this.

Before that used bigquery but every query takes atleast 2 seconds.

So we had to move to a dedicated redshift cluster.

Quoting myself:

> unless you were huge enough to have your own locations

Those locations are millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars investments with backup power generators large enough to provide power to a comfortably sized village. So, "large enough to a) need and b) able to afford owning such a location just for your own needs", e.g. Google, Amazon. Even companies like large banks have their servers co-hosted in a separate section but in the location owned by a 3rd party co-hosting provider. To own one you either are one of those providers or you are in the "Google tier". For the purposes of the current context, the linked article, one would even need to have multiple such locations all over the world. I think that qualifies as "huge" (the company owning such infrastructure just to run their own servers, co-hosting firms do it for others).

Cloud has talent working in the background on AWS's payroll, they've better ability too hire at scale than what we can do.

So decided to use them, no we don't regret. It's a more reliable cost then hiring and managing a team which might prove to be less reliable.

Loadbalancer is shared across the user accounts, so amazon has to stop the ddos.

They've very effective network level ddos detector/filtering

Once you have setup Lambda in one region

You just need to loop through the list of regions and deploy your lambda in ALL AVAILABLE REGIONS. Yes, it's that simple!

API gateway doesn't charge for 4xx response, so it's very good for defying level 7 ddos too.

Add cognito and use lambda authorizer, it generates API keys and emails it to your users.

Add a Latency Based DNS routing using route 53 on top and you ensure minium latency in all regions!

I learned (soprano and alto) recorder when I was young, in evening classes at a music school (East Germany), and started learning to play violin a few years ago (which turned out to be _the_ instrument for me, I can't stop and after a few years I know it's not short term). I had always practiced a bit on the recorder on and off. Fortunately nobody had forced me to continue music school. When I was young I had sooo many other interests. Being told what to do can hardly be a recipe to create a person that acts on their own? Sounds more like a recipe of trying to educate somebody who follows orders well.

The human world outside "money" is far larger and the bonds also far stronger than inside of it, I would claim. It's just that one is mostly subconscious and the other one very often requires conscious attention, so guess which one you always notice.

Alas, money is always an overriding concern. Your adherence to local cultural regulations may or may not buy you good karma, but that karma is not redeemable beyond your current social group. You won't pay for supplies out of it, and you won't build your house with it. But you can do that with money, regardless of where you are. So money tends to displace everything else out of sheer utility. Of course it can't substitute for every social interaction, but then you also don't want to run scarcity economy on karma.

Corporate boards are elected by their shareholders specifically to optimize for profitability above and beyond any other criteria. (Which is hard work! That’s why “corporate board-member” is a paid gig—it requires hard mental self-trickery to get into that mindset, plus a lot of cognitive dissonance to stay in that mindset, and those both take a lot out of you, emotionally.)

A good example of this: recycling. Social norms have caused people within corporations to favour recycling, and so, for example, office managers will implement recycling and waste-reduction programs, where employees must sort their waste into bins, etc.

But this is entirely uncoupled from whether the corporation itself will implement recycling on an industrial scale. Most of the corporations that have recycling bins in their hallways, don’t have any recycling or waste-reduction programs going for their products or services, or for the manufacturing and logistics pipelines serving them. If norms were enough to influence corporations to do so, they’d have long done so; society has been pushing corporations to care about the environment, in every way we can think of, since the 1970s.

But look at it from the corporation’s perspective: a few bins for the office, and a contract with a recycling company to empty them, just makes the “offices” line-item cost a tiny bit more. It’s an eensy-weensy operational expense. But doing something like Apple does, where they design their phones to not include non-recyclable materials, and accept them back for trade-in specifically to recycle the components? That’s something that requires large capital expenditures to implement, and so that’s something you have to convince your shareholders is worth doing.

And, if you’re a public company, your shareholders probably aren’t humans themselves, but rather other corporations like mutual-fund management houses. And those companies are operating under the principle that their goal is to make their fund participants high returns—not to invest in ways that those fund participants would prefer, or even find ethical.

The social more is never going to take effect, because (public) corporations have boards of people who are paid to only think about money, and shareholders who are also mostly corporations with boards paid to think solely of the profitability of their investments. Never do human preferences or human norms enter into the board’s equation for “what should the corporation do, from a top-down perspective.” Public corporations are about as able to be influenced by human norms as an alien or an AI. (They can be influenced if their workers form a union and then that union strikes to express its disagreement with the corporation over some social norm. But that’s less about the corporation “understanding” or “appreciating” the norm, and more about how an organism under threat will do things it doesn’t want to do to appease a predator.)

---

Tangent: The only reason Apple “gets away with” having an industrial recycling program, is that they’ve made it into a feature of their product, part of its marketing, in a way that appeals to their particular user-base (i.e. upper-middle-class people who usually have some guilt over how their purchasing affects the environment.) They used this “increased appeal to our customer-base -> increased sales” argument to convince those corporate share-holders to okay the program.

That situation, though, is pretty unique. Most companies in the world aren’t selling expensive, “trendy” items, with the kind of customer-base that “we implemented a recycling program for our product” or “we reduced our factories’ emissions” would appeal to. And even the ones that are, aren’t necessarily selling the majority of units into cultures with norms like our own; Chinese manufacturers, for example, might be able to establish a recycling program for goods sold abroad, but they likely won’t get much uptake for a recycling program for goods sold domestically in China. If that’s where their board and their shareholders reside, then that recycling program (and associated CapEx) is just not gonna happen.

The whole point of probabilistic modeling is to replace absolute decisions like "right or wrong" by continuous weights on the possibilities. If you absolutely need a definite decision, you can sample a prediction according to the probability assigned by the model. If the true outcome is x and the model assigned it probability p, then that procedure is going to be wrong (1-p) of the time. You could define that number as the "wrongness" of the probabilistic model, as a continuous analog of the definite case.

The advantage of probabilistic modeling is that you can also ask how wrong the model expects to be and get a meaningful answer. If there are many possible outcomes and none of them very likely, any choice is going to be wrong a lot. But you should expect a good model to have a small difference between its expected and actual wrongness. One might call that value "honesty".

the parent is relaying their personal experience, why would they have to add disclaimers about one-sidedness? A forum like this is literally just people telling "their side" on various topics.

I've been mistreated at work and find the parent comment very believable. If you haven't been, then you are either young or lucky. Good for you but please don't just discount other people's experiences.

"Money creation in the modern economy" (Bank of England, PDF)

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

Quote:

In the modern economy, most money takes the form of bank deposits. But how those bank deposits are created is often misunderstood: the principal way is through commercial banks making loans. Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money. The reality of how money is created today differs from the description found in some economics textbooks:

• Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.

• In normal times, the central bank does not fix the amount of money in circulation, nor is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits.

First, it isn't false at all, commercial banks create money, just as they say in the paper. Second, if you make the bold claim that the people of the Bank of England wrote a paper that is false you should provide more than a single sentence - especially when commenting here on HN.

So, your original response is to someone who said their understanding was "that reserve banks create money out of thin air", so that is the foundation of our discussion at the moment. Your response on the surface feels like a refutation of that assertion, largely resting not on content necessarily but on the weight of authority that is the BoE. Essentially, what I was trying to say is that I don't think it refutes the person you were responding to, mostly because it is some very carefully crafted wording the obscures instead of reveals the truth of the matter.

A quick dissection would go as follows: while technically correct about loans showing up as deposits in accounts and thereby creating money, it ignores the basis for those loans, which is the fractional reserve system itself. It is FRB [1] that was what spawned the system of creating those deposits based on mathematical rules such as the fractional reserve rate [3] (which many people tend to think of as being 10%, though it is often not true these days). A very crude summary of that system is this; if all deposits (created money, as according to the BoE document) are 100% of a banks money, they are only required to actually have in reserve 10% of that. Therefore, the person you are responding to is essentially right. Banks create money out of thin air by entering it on systems, even when they don't actually "have" that money to lend. The reserve rate was thought of as a minimal protection required in order to assist in preventing runs on the bank if too many depositors requested their money at the same time (because, as per the reserve system, the bank doesnt actually have all that money at any one given time). So in America for example, this is the foundation of the Federal Reserve system, wherein member banks (not all banks are) then have promises of assistance from the regional reserve bank (of which there are 12, with NY Fed being the titular head of the system), so that if your local bank gets close to a "bank run" level, that regional reserve bank will inject funds to them temporarily in order to create stability, which was part of the original mandate of the Federal Reserve.

In the response you quote, the wording might lend one to understand otherwise, and that the fractional reserve system no longer works that way, especially with the patronizing ending sentence of the first paragraph about how "some economics textbooks" differ from how money is created today. I can practically hear some posh accent with an upturned nose dripping that sentence out with disdain. Silly plebs, trying to understand banking. The part about "distraction" is that it seems the bankers don't actually want people to understand how banking really works on the underside, as it is actually in their interest to obfuscate it for various reasons.

Given what I've said so far, I'm therefore not sure how the statement: "Rather than banks receiving deposits when households save and then lending them out, bank lending creates deposits.", nor the ending of the following sentence, "or is central bank money ‘multiplied up’ into more loans and deposits" can be actually accurate. I assume there is some word trickery I am failing to understand, (see: NSA on what "collection" means) because otherwise it seems flat out wrong. I am better versed though in the American system, so perhaps there is some nuance of the English system I am unaware of. (but it is worth remembering that the American system was founded upon the British/European system, when post 1907 Knickerbocker crash congress sent a delegation to hobnob with the central bankers of Europe to learn how they did things, which was largely the basis for the Aldrich and later Federal Reserve bills)

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/25783813-peter-palms/4549...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement

[Bonus] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation#Credit_theory_o...

> The fractional reserve theory where the money supply is limited by the money multiplier has come under increased criticism since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. It has been observed that the bank reserves are not a limiting factor because the central banks supply more reserves than necessary[19] and because banks have been able to build up additional reserves when they were needed.[20] Many economists and bankers now realize that the amount of money in circulation is limited only by the demand for loans, not by reserve requirements.

> ...

> Banks first lend and then cover their reserve ratios: The decision whether or not to lend is generally independent of their reserves with the central bank or their deposits from customers; banks are not lending out deposits or reserves, anyway. Banks lend on the basis of lending criteria, such as the status of the customer's business, the loan's prospects, and/or the overall economic situation.