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>So presumably an S&P 500 index fund is not disadvantaged, since it is tracking a float-adjusted index, i.e. the weight of SpaceX will be tiny if its float is tiny.

Nasdaq already caved. FTSE and S&P are supposedly considering it.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/03/31/index-providers...


>Buyers of index funds should care about fiduciary and waste. This is what this seems like at this price.

Right, but the whole point of index funds is that you're letting the market decide what's worth investing/buying (via market cap/free float weightings) and at what price. If you're making calls on what's "waste" or not, then you're no longer a passive investor and you're just picking stocks.


Fiduciary responsibility in this context is a large umbrella of responsibilities. They should be fighting the new nasdaq rules on behalf of us. As you mentioned, this forces them to participate in fleecing the passive fund holding public and undermines the whole point of index funds. I don’t see how a fund manager could just blindly take this rule change and not make a ruckus about how it’s forcing him to break their fiduciary obligations

Following the rules of the fund and being index is one thing. Sitting silently as this pump and dump is designed to fleece your clients, is something entirely different.

> Starting May 1, 2026, Nasdaq rules allow large IPOs (e.g., top 40 market cap) to join the Nasdaq-100 Index within 15 trading days. This forces index-tracking funds to buy new shares, often at inflated valuations shortly after listing, a "fast entry" rule designed for mega-IPOs like SpaceX or OpenAI


The market will not drive index fund purchases of SpaceX - the 5x multiplier of the floating shares will. And that’s the rub.

Who's "they"? Billionaires? Wall st? SpaceX insiders and investors?

By now, questioning "who are they" is naive or plain weak.

Someone who can't articulate who the villains are out of a pre-selected list and has to fall back to personal attacks is pretty "weak" as well.

If you were to apply the principle of charity[0] to the person you originally asked the question to, who do you think that they would mean by the word 'they' in this context?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity


>who do you think that they would mean by the word 'they' in this context?

It's really not clear, which is why I listed 3 plausible options. I'm also not going to bother attacking an imaginary position and be accused of "strawman" or whatever.


The unknown subject is a valid construction in language. It is not necessary to be able to answer "who's they?". It is semantically equivalent to saying "I knew the rules would be changed."

There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this pattern is used to imply the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.


>There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this construction is used to infer the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.

This excuse only works if who built the bridge isn't central to the discussion. Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking that we're being oppressed by The Elites™.


Aren't we, though? Like it's hard not to argue that there's one or more groups of people that get together at lunches and dinners and galas and have ongoing projects to do things like institute rule changes at NASDAQ that effectively require index funds to take on outsize risk from a known-overvalued IPO just in time for that IPO to happen.

To understand why this isn't a conspiracy of a sort by some "elite" group of people to take money from 401ks and IRAs, you'd have to argue that there's a good reason to shorten the window that outweighs the reason the window exists. The fact remains that many many IPOs crater within a few months. The rule change seems to exist to leave small low-effort investors holding the bag.

Just because we're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get us.


>Like it's hard not to argue that there's one or more groups of people that get together at lunches and dinners and galas and have ongoing projects to do things like institute rule changes at NASDAQ that effectively require index funds to take on outsize risk from a known-overvalued IPO just in time for that IPO to happen.

It's also not hard to think of half a dozen other groups that could possibly benefit and plausibly have enough clout to steer things in their favor, hence why the need to make a specific claim rather than beating around the bush a vague "they" that can't be refuted.


>This excuse only works if who built the bridge isn't central to the discussion.

It isn't central to the discussion. The appearance of corruption is clear; nailing down the culprit is difficult. It isn't reasonable to expect people to have a theory of corruption in order to complain about it.

>Otherwise this is just generic conspiratorial thinking

The perception of corruption is not a conspiracy theory. Corruption is an ordinary financially motivated crime, while conspiracy theories usually involve some kind of grandiose or mystical objective ("new world order").

Anyway, the question is moot because the only possible answer is "the regulatory authorities". We know who makes the rules! I just didn't want to tolerate this kind of fallacious nitpicking.


Open your eyes? Everyone on the top 1000 Forbes and at trumps inauguration?

Yes.

>that isn't float adjusted?

AFAIK the problem is that they're lobbying the nasdaq 100 index provider to add a 5x multiplier for free float for spacex. Otherwise it would be far less controversial.

edit: https://keubiko.substack.com/p/nasdaqs-shame


So like... most b2c apps out there? I checked app privacy report for a few such apps I have installed and also got a very high proportion of third party domains. Maybe not as high as 77% but definitely above 50% (ie. more domains are third party than first party). The most surprising part here is them refusing to put correct info in the "data collected" section of the app store listing.

edit: they seemed to have updated the store listing, so the "data collected" section is correct.


Are you also the type of person who thinks the government should be run like a business?

No. Stop putting words in my mouth.

No one put words in your mouth, they asked you a question. You are the one who made the initial comparison to B2C apps, so it seems like a fair question to me. Your comment implies that its standard and the app isn't doing anything out of the ordinary when I think most people would except an official government app to be held to a higher standard than the average B2C app.

>You are the one who made the initial comparison to B2C apps, so it seems like a fair question to me.

The relevant part of B2C is the 2C part, not the B. Mass market apps are generally ridden with telemetry and SDKs. Moreover I'm not sure how you think it's a "fair question" to go from a remark about how other apps are equally bad, to thinking I want the US government to operate as a business. It's like doing:

A: "I called the IRS and was put on hold for 2 hours, can you believe that?"

B: "To be fair that's the experience calling into most businesses, like banks or the cable company"

A: "Wow so you think we should be running the IRS like a bank?"

>I think most people would except an official government app to be held to a higher standard than the average B2C app.

Is this a "yes, in an ideal world that's how things should be" type of statement, or are you claiming "yes, government agencies have a track record of delivering technical excellence on software projects, and this particular project was especially bad"? The former is basically a meaningless platitude, and I don't think anyone seriously thinks the latter is true.


[flagged]


>Ok, so then it just sounds like whataboutism.

The flip side of "whataboutism" is "isolated demands for rigor"[1]. Going back to the IRS example, is it a fair retort to point out that IRS's hotline only sucks as much as any other large organization's hotline, or is it "whataboutism"?

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...


It's the government, the US government. By far the largest employer and spender in the world. So yes, they are held to a higher standard. Businesses intentionally throttle customer service lines for profit reasons. The government should not. How is this difficult to understand?

>So yes, they are held to a higher standard.

See my earlier comment about how this is a meaningless platitude.

>Businesses intentionally throttle customer service lines for profit reasons. The government should not.

None of this was presupposed in the original comment, only that wait times are long.


what the hell do you mean meaningless platitude? Do you understand the difference between civic duty and corporate duty?

If a company proactively evades taxes for profit, do you give the government the same pass? Companies skate and fight all this through litigation and interpretation. The government's duty is to the people and to uphold the law, not fight it. They are held to a higher standard of law, accountability and practice in all undertakings. What exactly are you refuting here?


It's a classic deflection tactic - when they can't refute you by merit, they answer something with a question that is completely different about what was said - BOOM, the discussion is now about something else, completely different from the original issue. I honestly can't tell if it's bots or humans these days doing this a lot, but they're getting pretty good at it.

[flagged]


> If so, why do you think lobbying exists?

Specifically because it's not a natural market. There are people who secure a 2-year, consequence-free term to impact U.S. law, at the behest of people with money.

Lobbying is special interests dictating decisions that often are not financially, morally, or otherwise ideal/beneficial to the other party (the United States and its people). This wouldn't fly at any corporation or business because there would be direct impacts on the bottom line or reputation of the company.


> If so, why do you think lobbying exists?

Would you like to be able to ask your representative to focus on a particular issue?


The government should outsource way more of their traffic to third parties than a business should, since the government is inefficient, right?

Poe's Law strikes again. I legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm.

It is sarcasm. I always get screwed by Poe's law, since dry sarcastic parodies of extremist views is one of my favorite methodologies for producing humor.

I'm happy to be against both the white houses' 3rd party telemetry as well as other apps. I can multitask.

A government app being built like b2c is exactly the problem

I'm sure that HN's preferred app would be <5MB, and has zero third party SDKs or telemetry, but half a dozen SDKs and third party domains is basically most mass market apps these days. Is it bad? Yes, but the whitehouse isn't being egregiously bad, but "whitehouse app is bad, just like most other apps" isn't going to get clicks.

"everything else sucks too" is not a great defense for the US govt.

If only. It would be a far better state of of affairs if the US government sucks like every other first world country. No other first country are waging war in the middle east, having paramilitary forces terrorize residents, or are undergoing a partial government shutdown.

Just because an app embeds YouTube instead of creating their own video hosting solution that does not mean that does not mean that the app sucks.

I didn't mention anything about YouTube.

This thread is about how there are too many requests to third parties for the app. Half of them are for YouTube.

Even if we eliminate the YouTube half it's still too many.

See gov.uk for a good example

For all our faults I am geniunely impressed by gov.uk. its not pretty, its not particularly fast, and its certainly not flashly, but I've never once not been able to find what I needed or have a flow not work.

Oh, sorry you missed Exlir and WASM, and rust and programming socks of course. Half credit.

Right, the White House is collecting data and sending it to Huawei, and overall collection rate is worse than any other app you’ve seen by a wide margin.

That makes me net more surprised after reading your comment.

You're not surprised the white house is worse than any other app you've seen by 20%?


>to Huawei

???



> Limitations

>Timestamps/Speaker diarization. The model does not feature either of these.

What a shame. Is whisperx still the best choice if you want timestamps/diarization?


Even in the commercial space, there’s a lack of production grade ASR APIs that support diarization and word level timestamps.

My experiences with Google’s Chirp have been horrendous, with it sometimes skipping sections of speech entirely, hallucinating speech where the audio contains noise, and unreliable word level timestamps. And this all is even with using their new audio prefiltering feature.

AWS works slightly better, but also has trouble with keeping word level timestamps in sync.

Whisper is nice but hallucinates regularly.

OpenAI’s new transcription models are delivering accurate output but do not support word level timestamps…

A lot of this could be worked around by sending the resulting transcripts through a few layers of post processing, but… I just want to pay for an API that is reliable and saves me from doing all that work.


I wonder if you could run multiple models and average out the timestamps, kind of like how atomic clocks are used together and not separately

Isn't Elevenlabs the best in this?

They can have issues with the timestamps: https://github.com/elevenlabs/elevenlabs-python/issues/707

I've not tested their speech-to-text yet, but based on the docs it looks promising. Thanks for the suggestion!

It's fantastic, and their diarization is spot on as well.

WhisperX is not a model but a software package built around Whisper and some other models, including diarization and alignment ones. Something similar will be built around the Cohere Transcribe model, maybe even just an integration to WhisperX itself.

I would try Qwen-ASR: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3asr

See the very bottom of the page for a transcription with timestamps.


Mistral Voxtral has timestamps and diarization and does a good job for German (have not tested for other languages yet).

There is also: https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped

It doesn't use an extra model (so it supports every language that works with Whisper out of the box and use less memory), it works by applying Dynamic Time Warping to cross-attention weights.


Just a warning that plain WhisperX is more accurate and Whisper-timestamped has many weird quirks.

Diarization is done separately to ASR anyway (it's usually a separate run, after the ASR).


Link doesn't work for me, can you double check it please? Or tell the name of it so I can look it up? Thanks!

Enable show dead in your HN profile settings. The link works then as it's a dead show HN post.

>There's no way to avoid that AFAICT and even if you're an established business you hit it at intervals because all these certificates expire and so the whole process resets every few years anyway. What a mess.

Maybe have overlapping sets of certificates and dual sign your binaries? That way there's always an "aged" certificate available.


>My understanding is that a specific binary needs to become popular for it to stop being flagged. This creates a chicken and egg problem.

Given the recent npm axios compromise this sounds like a pretty smart move?


How is it a smart move? Here, Microsoft is training users to ignore a security warning. If the same mechanism were added to NPM (that is, a warning that the package is suspicious and for the user to be extra sure they want it), users would have been trained to ignore any security warning issued for the compromised axios version (just like they had ignored it for all previous "clean" versions) and installed it anyway.

The relevant heuristic in NPM supply-chain compromises would be the age of the specific binary. i.e. a freshly released package is riskier than one that's been around for a few days. So perhaps the policy should be that NPM doesn't install new package versions unless they've been public for 24 hours, or there's a signed override from the package repository itself stating that the update fixes a security issue. Of course, that would also require the NPM team have a separate review process for signing urgent security fixes.

Because people download viruses from the internet all the time? "Common sense antivirus" might work fine if you're technically inclined, but that's not the case for everyone.

The growing prevalence of so-called "supply-chain attacks" (a bad name because it implies a commercial relationship that doesn't usually exist) shows that "common sense antivirus" isn't working so well even among the technically inclined.

>Why is it okay for these companies to pirate books

Courts have ruled it's not, and I don't think anyone is arguing it's okay.

>but it is not okay for others to try to do the same to an AI model?

The steelman version is that it's okay to do it once you acquired the data somehow, but that doesn't mean anthropic can't set up roadblocks to frustrate you.


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