I think the reference to retirement funds is in relation to the fact many of them are under collateralized. They need to take new investor's money to pay out old investors.
You might enjoy "There Is No Antimemetics Division", a story (told in a series of short stories) about the idea of "Antimemes" (if memes are ideas that spread like viruses and can't be forgotten, antimemes are the opposite, they're not invisible but you can't remember them).
This calculator is outdated -- the current price of storage oscillates around $0.01/MB. The maximum single chunk size is also 10MB now, and you can send as many chunks as you like.
I think the HN crowd has always been interested in this sort of stuff? It certainly has since I started reading it (~7 years ago). One of the things that I like about HN is that we are not completely inward looking.
From the guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
You could certainly say that a BBC group being forced to sign a confession for attempting to conduct an interview 'gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' about the world, but it could certainly fall under 'Most stories about politics, or crime', too.
Either way, as you point out, once a post has over 100 points you probably have your answer!
> once a post has over 100 points you probably have your answer!
It seems that we both agree that it's an Off-Topic article at face value and yet it is On-Topic based on the votes. The votes in effect override the second criteria of relevance, not unlike the final clause in Azimov's law of robotics.
Hence I'm genuinely curious about any shifts in the audience demographics that are occurring.
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