There's probably some examples, but the US has such an outsized per-capita murder rate that it's not particularly comparable even when trying to select the best examples. If you stretch the definition of "major" and "comparable" then it's possible to find examples where they're somewhat similar but it requires a lot of stretching and is no longer representative. There's hundreds of cities in America with a murder rate higher than that of London. The US has a homicide rate approaching something like an order of magnitude higher than the UK (8/100k vs. 1/100k last I read).
If I have the math right, their revenue of $130m is made up of $110m in COGS. If they’re losing $1m/month that means they’re spending roughly $30m/year on running the business. My educated guess is most of that $30m is marketing spend required to secure the $130m revenue and cuttable costs (salaries, office space) are much less than $10m/year.
Sounds like ARR is the wrong term since it’s probably not a business operating on recurring revenue — probably an example of the bananas valuations of the last few years, based on revenue not viability.
Generally right here, just has a physical operating component to the business which makes COGS high. Think of it like e-commerce business where you are buying goods and shipping to customers. We can cut deeper, but new investors don't want to do that at he cost of revenue. In other words, I cannot materially cut costs without sacrificing revenue bc I have a fundamental GP problem that will take time to improve over several quarters.
He’ll be watching his back in prison, he’s got access to billions of dollars — or, at least, is perceived to. He has wronged a lot of people, too. Also, prison is a one way street: if he stays on the run, and some day things do get to the point where he would feel safer in prison, he could hand himself in. Once he’s in prison, he has no choice left.
The South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime, and it's exceedingly rare even for violent criminals to be murdered in a Korean prison. The popular perception is that you can spend a couple of years in prison and enjoy your ill-gotten gains for the rest of your life with no further repercussions, provided you've hidden your money well enough. Guess what, the whole point of crypto is that it's easy to hide.
A few years ago, a man named Son Jung-woo was arrested for running what was the largest child porn site in the world back then. His sentence? 18 months. The U.S. wanted to put him away for life, but the Korean courts would not deport him.
I'm sure Do Kwon would rather hand himself in to the Korean authorities than risk going to prison in any other country.
>A few years ago, a man named Son Jung-woo was arrested for running what was the largest child porn site in the world back then. His sentence? 18 months. The U.S. wanted to put him away for life, but the Korean courts would not deport him.
This was the subject of the "Welcome to Video" episode of Darknet Diaries[1]. IIRC, he couldn't be extradited to the US because he was facing a lawsuit in Korea, one filed by his own father seemingly for precisely this side effect.
Compared to bank accounts, real estate, and offshore corporations, it is certainly easier to hide your crypto (or rather, hide the fact that it's your crypto) if you know what you're doing. Heck, even the word "crypto" means "hidden".
Do Kwon might not be any good at sneaking though airports, but he certainly knows his way around the crypto scene. He has had plenty of time to launder his coins. In fact, he's probably had more time to plan and execute an exit scheme than any of the other crooks who got busted lately. So I wouldn't underestimate how well he has hidden his embezzled billions.
And what’s the main use of cash from the perspective of the US government? And what makes cash have value? And what has been the history of money thus far that has led to this junction?
Hacker News is especially hostile toward crypto. Most likely, people here won’t even bother to engage in an honest conversation. “It’s a scam, it’s for crime” is the consensus. It’s frustrating when you’re surrounded by “confident idiots”, people who are uneducated about a topic that portray confidence. As I’ve gotten older, I just care less about educating people for free.
Bitcoin is going nowhere. Time itself will teach the naysayers. HN will be angry, in denial, etc as the trend of bitcoin adoption plays out. But they can’t be so ignorant as to stop it. In other words, their education is not required.
If the purpose of the confiscation is simply to freeze the funds, it seems many agencies can do so. If they're patient enough, they'll eventually catch the owner when the funds move.
The courts for the most part. Or at least that is the public perception.
The sentencing guidelines maintained by the courts have all sorts of criteria for reducing the sentence that can be compounded to skew the result heavily towards the low end of the legally mandated range, and many times even below the legal minimum. For example, people who were drunk when they committed crimes often get away with lower sentences because "they probably weren't aware of what they were doing." Bonus points if you have a wife and kids to feed, pay a token amount to your victims as compensation, get your mom to write a letter to the judge, and/or act like you're sorry on your day in court. Some of these criteria have good reasons, but allow them to be compounded and that's how you end up with "you're guilty of raping your coworker, but you may go home."
So why didn’t he hand himself in? He’s been on the run since last year, he has had numerous opportunities to hand himself in before being arrested in Montenegro.
He probably believed he could have his cake and eat it too. Turns out he's not as clever as he thought. Now the only thing he has some amount of control over is which jurisdiction he will be handed over to.
Any jurisdiction that has filed charges against him and has an extradition agreement with Montenegro. His country of citizenship probably has priority, though.
If he doesn't want to be extradited, he can delay the process for quite a while like Julian Assange did.
If verifying people is hard and so a company chooses to take the easy route of not bothering and therefore attract lots of customers who do illegal things, surely in any world that's at the very least knowingly facilitating illegal conduct? There are a lot of platforms that do far more than Block to verify people -- Block absolutely could do the same if they wanted to.
I don't think the allegation is that Block doesn't check, it's that the check is vulnerable to fraud. If Block rolled out a better verification system next week, based on off-the-shelf components, would they no longer be a fraud?
Posting about your company when relevant is one thing, advertising it another’s launch thread is another, and it’s pretty gauche… especially when, in this very thread, one of your testimonials is saying he doesn’t actually use your product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236557
I disagree, I am very happy that parent posted this. I want to know about other tools in this space, and the comment contains a nice summary of pros and cons, some of which are extremely relevant to me!
Bloop looks awesome too, don't get me wrong, and I'll check it out.
I don't see the issue with this. It happens on most of these Launch threads and is a common occurrence. I don't think there are rules that prohibit it either.
There's no formal rule against it but it's often done in bad taste. When people overpromote their thing in someone else's launch thread, we tend to scold them. Someone else's launch is not a great place for competitive promotion—each product or project deserves its day in the sun. On the other hand, users like to discuss alternatives and comparables, and that seems healthy.
I'd say the sweet spot is somewhere between just leaving the competitor's launch thread alone, or, if you must, then (1) mention it once and stop there; and (2) when you have any relationship with the alternative thing, disclose it.
That's the sort of thinking we apply in practice but wouldn't make a formal rule out of, partly because it's always evolving, but mainly because we don't want the list of rules to be too long. If we tried to codify all such things we'd end up with a bureaucratic list of hundreds of rules—ugh!
That’ll be a lot of people who are streamers on twitch with it listed on their LinkedIn profile. I’d ballpark closer to 2,000 actual employees — maybe 1,500 as a conservative estimate.
From the start, wikileaks was a partisan project masquerading as a righteous cause. Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth.
Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist. Many people believe wikileaks is a net good but despise Assange. Assange failed wikileaks, the media did not fail Assange.
The truth is a narrative. Not all narratives are true, but calling something a narrative doesn't in any way disprove it.
Would you like to actually call out anything in Collateral Murder that you think wasn't exposing the truth?
I'm old enough to remember Collateral Murder. I'm old enough to remember it's video footage. Of members of the US military murdering people, and laughing about it. You can't dismiss that as "just a narrative", it's also the truth, and it's a fucked up truth that the public deserves to know about.
I make no claim that collateral murder did not represent a war crime, I make no claim that the release of collateral murder was a bad thing, rather, I am claiming that Julian Assange was never a noble person releasing leaked footage to expose the truth, he was a political performer, creating the narrative that he wanted to create, using leaks as props. Julian Assange had no loyalty to the truth (as has been shown in the years since) and cares only for the “truth” when it’s favourable to whatever agenda he has at the point in time.
You can be glad that collateral murder was released while also being deeply unhappy with Julian Assange’s motives and actions.
> I make no claim that collateral murder did not represent a war crime
Well, that's quite a change from: "Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth."
So you admit leaking Collateral Murder was about exposing the truth? A truth which was a war crime? It seems like maybe you made a vague accusation you couldn't back up specifically there.
> Julian Assange had no loyalty to the truth (as has been shown in the years since) and cares only for the “truth” when it’s favourable to whatever agenda he has at the point in time.
Make a real accusation instead of being vague. If Assange's lack of loyalty to the truth has been shown, I haven't seen it, so please, tell us what evidence you have. Otherwise, this is just another vague accusation that you'll shift away from when confronted for specifics.
If you're going to claim Assange is dishonest, I'd like to see a) evidence he knowingly leaked false information, or b) evidence he knowingly withheld true information. Be specific, stop this vague handwaving.
Everyone has an agenda, even if that agenda is only that they want to think of themselves as a moral person. What matters is whether the person's actions are good or bad.
> Julian Assange had no loyalty to the truth (as has been shown in the years since) and cares only for the “truth” when it’s favourable to whatever agenda he has at the point in time.
He published the truth and spent over a decade in confinement for it. Isn't that enough?
Ok, let's open some new positions for totally noble poeple to expose the truth. Anything less than noble should be put in prison regardless of the truth exposed. Any takers? Meanwhile let's see what b.s mainstream media is pushing. They are not less than noble and deserve the whole attention.
Its a straw man argument. The thugs dropping bombs on innocent people every twenty minutes aren't good enough or honest enough, either. You only have to be marginally better than them - a very low bar - in order to effect change.
Which means, if you aren't interested in effecting change in the form of real justice for these war crimes and crimes against humanity, you're not one nanometer taller, in terms of moral authority, than the criminals dropping bombs on peoples heads - in your name.
So you'll only accept evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and then take action about it within the context of your own democratic processes, if you get that evidence from a good and/or honest person?
Because honestly, this just keeps the door open for more crimes. Rarely is anyone ever good enough or honest enough - and neither of those conditions are required for addressing our heinous crimes against humanity, frankly. You just have to be good enough to know that war crimes and crimes against humanity are heinous, and honest enough to produce workable evidence that can be used to produce justice.
Assange is good enough and honest enough for that case, really - and if a person doesn't agree, they're a bootlicker thug. The WAR CRIMES have to stop. The CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY have to stop. It doesn't matter one iota what sort of person reports the evidence - the evidence is real. The crimes are real.
Assange's honesty doesn't change the enormous magnitude of the victims digging their loved ones out of the rubble, one bit.
War crimes are a serious problem, of course. But it's also quite possible that Assange's distribution of Russian propaganda affected elections in multiple countries and allowed for Russian human rights violations in Africa and Syria.
So you'll only accept evidence of war crimes if they are committed by the US?
And yes, I know you didn't write that but it's just as fair of a characterization as the one you provided.
Intelligence analysis (at least those reported in US Senate investigations) show Russian-linked code and Russian language in the Wikileaks leak of the hacked DNC emails. Assange either lied (lies) about not receiving that content from Russian sources or is being disingenuous by sticking to a distinction that maybe there is a middle man in between the FSB/hackers and the individual(s) that uploaded the data/documents.
Completely ruins his credibility, no? That's not honest by any definition.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy, but also, have you noticed that, from the beginning (2011?), nearly every major Wikileaks release is US government or 5 eyes? Funny that.
Also, maybe look in to Assanges friend (and Russian antisemite) Israel Shamir. And look at Wikileaks activities (through Shamir) in Belarus.
Look, if Assange came out and said "I get a lot of my info from Russian intelligence sources and I want to further their agenda" he would be not necessarily a "good" person. But maybe an "honest" one.
What's the revisionism? The collateral murder video was actually especially popular and impactful to the demographic (democrat young white liberal) that is now almost comically against Assange.
Also, there's literally no difference in the way they did "narrative building" with Collateral Murder than , say, the NYT does in covering war crimes in Ukraine. I mean to be honest it's a bit hard to understand why you would even highlight the narrative building by the exposing party, when the actual events involved a cover up of war crimes from the Pentagon and an insane amount of damage control and PR. It just doesn't register for me, it's like saying you lost confidence in the NYT for covering war crimes in a way that highlighted that war crimes are actually... bad.
I disagree with your characterisation, there was a lot of criticism of Collateral Murder from young white liberals! Assange and wikileaks, at the time, were presented as apolitical truth-seekers, not as journalists. Journalism is very different from what Wikileaks claimed to be, and Collateral Murder was not presented as a piece of journalism, it was presented as a leak. You cannot conceivably compare what Wikileaks claimed to be at the time, to what the New York Times claimed to be at the time.
Go back in time to when Assange was first accused of sexual misconduct and you’ll find that a lot of people disliked him: it’s revisionist to claim that he was perceived a noble hero by the left until he was accused of sexual misconduct or until he started his crusade against Hilary Clinton (as if any young white liberal liked Hilary Clinton…)
To me, there is no real difference. Or at least not enough to warrant any criticism of wikileaks (w.r.t how they handled Collateral Murder, not in general of course).
Whatever they did was much more effective than american journalists were doing at the time. It was less so to push a narrative than to expose an event that would've been swept under the rug, just like many many other "oopsies" the americans ignored at the time.
As to liberals being pro-hillary, I don't disagree that it wasn't true in 2008. But those liberals almost certainly grew to avidly support her in 2016.
I guess I'm biaised since I have been exposed to the "other side" of the iraq war and the war on terror, as a practicing muslim in a pretty political family. But to me it still amounts to complaining or criticizing from a position of pure privilege (I'm referring to the criticism at the time of the video's publication, not your comments!), as Americans basically found it "yucky" to be exposed to the results of their own imperialist policies. In that context, I think WL would've been criticized no matter what because the actual issue wasn't that they were pushing a narrative, but more so that they were making some Americans uncomfortable.
Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support.
You can't transparently publish information and have an opinion.
> Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support.
Turns out history has gifted you with a test case. :)
What you are describing was literally the early version of Wikileaks[1]!
The ostensible problem was that it generated little to no public awareness[1].
Wasn't that the whole idea behind Wikileaks? To not only be a platform to upload and publish random documents, and instead to provide context and work with writers to make it understandable for a wider audience? That's how I understood it at the time, that Assange was unhappy with the limited audience existing platforms were reaching.
/e: I see my reply was less targeted towards your comment but the one above.
> Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”)
That was very very far from being "their original releases". wikileaks used to be a real "wiki of leaks". it was quite glorious, a real goldmine for journalists to work through
His publications were inconvenient for one party, and then they were inconvenient for the other. He exposed all parties which helped us all become a little more independently minded, but the partisans were in power and exacted revenge.
How could they be partisan when "both sides" have accused them repeatedly of being against them? Case in point, Collateral Murder was celebrated by Democrats and then when they leaked the Hillary emails now all of a sudden Democrats thought Wikileaks was evil. The information was true, the only thing that changed is they didn't like the what it showed.
That's not Wikileaks fault, maybe we should hold those in power accountable regardless of how we feel about their stances on other issues.
The failure of WL is that rather than focus on doing journalistic work, it became the Julian Assange show with Julian Assange about Julian Assange. And then it becomes much more questionable that WL was only publishing information that might harm the Clinton's campaign while he was simultaneously in talks with her opponent's campaign about obtaining a pardon from Trump.
When you start operating like that, you lose any and all credibility and protection you might have some sort of journalistic organisation. At best, WL can be described as activists, at worst as useful idiots.
> The failure of WL is that rather than focus on doing journalistic work, it became the Julian Assange show with Julian Assange about Julian Assange.
This not a failure of WL, this is the American establishment and elites who were doing everything possible to smear Assange, even to the point of nothing-burger stories about how he was a bad house guest and didn't clean his cat's liter box enough. They were really grasping at straws.
Most finance rules are quite reasonable and problems can be fixed retroactively. A serious company should absolutely approach their financial controls with the rigor it deserves but the cost implication of making mistakes early on is overblown.
If a company is turning over tens of millions per year and has missed something as basic as taxes then yes, absolutely, pain is inevitable, but it’s both solvable (after all, they’re doing tens of millions in revenue!) and very different from the type of problem a startup might encounter if they are cavalier with their finances early on.
The OPs post is of great benefit because often the key to avoiding problems is going from oblivious to aware… and so while a post like the OPs may not be exhaustive, it does put people on the right path, as it is heavy on the recommendations of getting a professional involved — and explains how to do that in a very accessible way.
How many startups have died because they didn’t know they had to charge sales tax? How many startups have died because they spent hundreds of hours obsessing over operational minutiae before they earned their first dollar?
(I don’t know the OP, but coincidentally I have worked with one of the companies he recommends, and I was very impressed — it’s clear to me this isn’t just churned out content marketing that uses the first Google result for “accountant”)
Health issues aren’t addressed with accurate information, they’re addressed by understanding the needs of the individual. Even if GPT-4 could guarantee accuracy when discussing self-harm, that would not necessarily be the right answer from the perspective of ensuring GPT-4 does the most amount of good.
If a friend told me that they were suicidal, I could explain to then in great detail about the nuances of depression and medication and suicidal ideation and how to effectively harm themselves if that’s what they want, but I know that is probably not the right answer, and the right answer is actually, “I’m here for you and I will help you get professional help”.
Harm reduction often involves helping people do dangerous things more safely (like safe drug injection) but that’s one component of helping people, the key to harm reduction is the long term investment in addressing the problem. Safe injection, for example, is often married with further healthcare. GPT-4 can’t do that and so telling you to go to a healthcare professional instead is going to have a much better outcome.
> Health issues aren’t addressed with accurate information, they’re addressed by understanding the needs of the individual. Even if GPT-4 could guarantee accuracy when discussing self-harm, that would not necessarily be the right answer from the perspective of ensuring GPT-4 does the most amount of good.
That argument could be used for removing most health information from the internet, restricing books on the topic to people with a medical license, etc.
I agree that ideally any chatbot built on top of GPT-4 should do more, like asking further questions, following up in later conversations etc. And as others have pointed out, GPT itself should point out even better methods to satisfy the expressed immediate need (ice cubes instead of cutting). But saying "Sorry dave, I can't do that. Ask someone else." doesn't sound like the right approach.
