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It sounds like you already know how to improve your comments, how about just doing those things.

Well, I keep missing the "serve"/"server" thing because spell checkers think "server" is a real word so don't flag it. :-)

I'm happy to forgive that kind of small typo in a hacker news comment, but generally it's easy to catch these things by just reading over the thing one time. If you're putting any amount of thought into your contribution it should be much faster to read it over one time than it was to write in the first place.

Getting that wrong is a small price to pay. Plus, people know what you mean.

Too much effort, bruh.

Capitalization is apparently too much effort for some now. Who would have thought the Ai would make us so lazy so quickly?

Who cares about people with reading disabilities, let's shift burden onto the reader. My time is better spent managing my Ais.


This started years before LLMs, as a way of signaling unconventional thinking. Maybe influenced by the UX of instant messaging.

That's my general understanding too. More recently people have adopted it as a way to not look like Ai, I've had several cite that as their rationale. There has been a notable uptick since the Ai step function change at the end of last year, along with all the other patterns we see, such as the one that underlies this new HN rule.

>onto the reader

Or the reader's AI who is able to format or translate the text to make it easier to read for the reader.


I shouldn't have to burn tokens to read. Most input boxes and editors will handle the capitalization for you during auto-correct. It seems like people go out of their way to drop the caps.

On mobile, maybe? I haven't had anything like that on any PC I've worked on.

IMO, if it's too much effort to improve one's comments, then it's too much effort to write them in the first place.

There's something viscerally distasteful about a one-liner comment berating the author of a long thoughful comment for exerting too little effort.

You can already do this in vim. Pretty easy to shell out to whatever command you want and use the result for various purposes.

That's still built on top of the hardcoded vim design choices though.

For example, I really like the "select then edit" approach of Helix, but Vim doesn't really play nice with that (there may be better plugins since I last looked to be fair). File handling, buffer rendering, and frames have very little to do with that, and yet I have to switch editors, lose all my plugins and configurations, and switch all those subsystems at once.

There's missed opportunities for modularization.

Edit: looks like Neovim is already split from its UI.


You're right that changing the whole editing model will involve rewriting a lot of keybindings. You could do that in vim if you really wanted to -- start by remapping motions to enter visual mode first. I don't really know why you'd want that when visual mode is already a keystroke away, but that's ok.

FWIW though if that's what's important to you, I get the sense that kakoune is much more vim-like in making it easy to compose with other tools, while being set up for your preferred editing model.


The post is not about preventing the rise of fascism, it's about not preemptively building tools for them to use in implementing fascism.

Yeah sorry I'm not a fan of rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

By "ad-tech" it's referring to the surveillance that underlies modern targeting of ads on the internet. YC's job ads don't do that.

Why is this flagged?

I didn't flag it because it might be the first original thought that blog has had in years, but I totally understand the impulse to flag pluralistic without even reading it.

What are you talking about? This blog has many good, not flagged submission here.

That myth long predates the internet version of it I think. Pernicious, yes.

But note that the quote does call it out as a myth.


Fiduciary duty isn't a myth! It just doesn't mean what people claim it means.

Will you enlighten us?

There is no legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. The very idea is an economic theory popularized by Friedman and his students.

It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.

People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.

That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.


I was under the impression the application was more akin to 'fiduciary duty provides an executive shield for morally reprehensible corporate choices' rather than 'it provides an ability to sue someone for not following it.'

Legal defense instead of offense. IANAL, correct me please.


I don’t think “morally reprehensible” is a legal standard (but i’m not a lawyer either).

But to the point of this thread, there is no legal requirement that makes it so a boards fiduciary duty is in conflict with broader moral decisions, nor one that requires them to forget about their humanity when applying their duties as corporate officers.

If they are assholes, its because they are assholes, not because they are required to do so by their obligations to the corporation.


I mean in the sense that if there's a morally distasteful business choice, but corporate officers pursue it, then are sued, a solid defense is claiming fiduciary duty. To wit, they thought it would make the company money.

Assuming fiduciary duty didn’t exist, what would the claim be in the lawsuit about morally distasteful business choices?

Generally I’m not aware of any civil claim that would let shareholders sue over bad morals.


Modern shareholder law is definitely a strange business. People have successfully brought suits for a variety of bad-but-not-illegal causes. There were a lot of lawsuits about sexual harassment and climate change, I believe the theory being that “bad thing will make the stock go down, and the company didn’t disclose that they might do the bad thing”. Then more recently a lawsuit against target proceeded (I don’t see whether it’s completed yet) despite target having disclosed the risk (in this case of their DEI activity).

The claim in the suit is notably that the company failed to disclose the behavior, not that they did the behavior (Target notwithstanding), which mostly agrees with your line of questioning.


Ok, but "Everything is securities fraud" (pace Matt Levine) isn't really what we're talking about here. E.I.S.F. cuts against the Chicago School "shareholder value" thing as often as not.

It depends on your legal jurisdiction but it means COs need to act in the corporation's best interest and not their own. In some places, that requires them to take shareholders' interests into account (especially for mergers or takeovers) but also the employees, consumers or creditors. In the US and notably Delaware, courts generally value shareholder value over anything else.

Considering the vast majority of US corporations are incorporated in Delaware, I think it's accurate to say most US companies only aim to maximize shareholder value.


No, Delaware does not in fact require corporations to "maximize shareholder value". That simply isn't a real thing.

"Fiduciary duty" is a duty to operate in good faith, without self-dealing, in whatever (1) you believe to be (2) the best interests of the company. Both (1) and (2) are totally subjective. You can believe the best interests of your company reside with employee welfare, or with customer satisfaction. You will not find a Delaware case that says otherwise.

So far as I know, the only time the actual value of a company's equity comes into the picture is if there are multiple competing offers to acquire the company.


It definitely is a thing in the eyes of Delaware courts:

In eBay vs Newmark: >Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the craigslist directors are bound by the fiduciary duties and standards that accompany that form. Those standards include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders. The “Inc.” after the company name has to mean at least that. Thus, I cannot accept as valid for the purposes of implementing the Rights Plan a corporate policy that specifically, clearly, and admittedly seeks not to maximize the economic value of a for-profit Delaware corporation for the benefit of its stockholders—no matter whether those stockholders are individuals of modest means or a corporate titan of online commerce.

https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=143440

In the Trados case: >It is, of course, accepted that a corporation may take steps, such as giving charitable contributions or paying higher wages, that do not maximize profits currently. They may do so, however, because such activities are rationalized as producing greater profits over the long-term. Decisions of this nature benefit the corporation as a whole, and by increasing the value of the corporation, the directors increase the share of value available for the residual claimants. Judicial opinions therefore often refer to directors owing fiduciary duties ―to the corporation and its shareholders. This formulation captures the foundational relationship in which directors owe duties to the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the entity‘s residual claimants. Nevertheless, ―stockholders‘ best interest must always, within legal limits, be the end. Other constituencies may be considered only instrumentally to advance that end.

https://courts.delaware.gov/opinions/download.aspx?ID=193520


That example is exactly the case I'm talking about: Trados was seeking to liquidate.

I did this yesterday and it was happy to provide me with an incorrect explanation. Not just that, but incorrect thermodynamic data supporting its claims, despite readily available published values to the contrary.


Yes it is. There’s a reason why university knowledge is gated. And was gated for centuries.

Can’t believe I have to explain simple stuff.


2 seconds to insert 100 rows in an empty database table is not "good enough" if you are doing anything that is worth doing.

Who said anything about this? I never did.

Tfa did

It is absolutely obvious how different it is from interacting with any LLM about the ways that it is wrong.

Nope, appeal to obviousness is not a sound argument. There are many things people thought were obvious that were wrong.

It wasn't an argument. There isn't much point in going to a lot of trouble to make an argument to someone so clearly determined to ignore the truth. It is nevertheless true.

Just saying something is true doesn't make it so. Truth requires justification, and if you can't provide that, then there's no reason to believe it's true. For someone making a claim, the onus is on them to provide evidence.

Otherwise I'll just say I'm right and you're wrong, after all, that's what you're saying.


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