skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not disagreeing with you on whether this will (not) happen. I'm telling you that you that hypothetical or not, it does not work the way you think.

> The stock buyback is an important part because it increases the insiders' percentage ownership of the company while not raising the value of the company. If Apple were to purchase a 100 million shares of the company, they would also be spending Apple's money. That transaction is completely balanced, company value doesn't change. If Tim Cook purchased 100 million public shares of the company, the stock would go up because it is injecting new money into the equation.

Tim Cook buying 100 million on the stock market doesn't meaningfully change Apple's price. If he buys 100MM in stick, it just means that he takes ownership of the stock from someone else who walks away with 100MM. There's no new money "injected". If he wants to buy a significant amount of stock, there will be some upward pressure on the price, because you have to find someone willing to sell, but that same condition applies to Apple. They have to buy on the open market just like Tim Cook. If a 100MM purchase is going to push up the market cap by 0.1%, it'll do the same for both.

As for the buyback being important because it increases insider's ownership, no, it doesn't. At least not in any meaningful sense. There's maybe 1% held by "insiders". If Apple buys back 175 billion in stock at their current price/value (a terrible assumption, but whatever), they'll take 33% of the stock back. So the insiders will hold 1.5% instead if none of them sell.

It's not possible for even an extended buyback to drive up the insiders' shares to a significant amount. And I don't mean "not plausible". It mathematically doesn't work. Apple has far more in real estate alone than the insiders' shares are worth. To hand them significant ownership of the company would mean to destroy the company by liquidating everything and leaving them a husk (even the name is worth more than the insiders' shares).

And yes, they could theoretically get loans to buy most of the company, but again, that's no different before or after the buyback. As you noted, the stock buyback is (theoretically) balanced.
How would a technical person get paid to summarize a technical article?
I don't think this is the reason. You can do pretty much anything in Torch/Theano. But, researchers are lazy and writing code is only a means to an end. They will shamelessly copy/hack as much open source code as possible, so if a framework has some quick module for a desired algorithm, or if a researcher wrote their paper in some framework, and you want to build off that paper, then you'll just copy that.
I don't accept the premise. It still has a PE of 530.
"Anxious behavior" still implies insight into the mind.

Rather than downmod, why not show how it doesn't?
> Nobody needs to use multiple frameworks unless you're a researcher or something who wants to be able to take use the code from other people's papers or something.

I never said I wasn't. I'm interested in more than one thing, and so it makes me sad to see that the cutting-edge stuff I'm interested in is implemented in a variety of languages and frameworks (typically for no better reason than that particular researcher uses that particular framework), which means I either need to invest a huge amount of time and effort into becoming a polyglot or abandon any more in depth understanding than the paper.
Capitalists are generally smart enough to forego immediate gain in favor of substandard greater gains under different conditions.

Rather than drive as fast as I can in Atlanta's 8AM rush hour (and get nowhere fast in the ensuing jam), I leave for work before 6AM (with half the drive time).
What do you do when you find yourself in quicksand?
RescueTime is a very powerful tool if you want to understand better how you spend the time on your computer and smartphone.

Unfortunately, they do not offer in-depth analysis of the data.

I build my own tool to print customized charts and I would appreciate hearing your opinion on this..

Here is the repo: https://github.com/ilbonte/rescuetime-again and this is an output example: http://i.imgur.com/PptwdMU.png
Maybe they didn't stop re-investing all their profits. Whether Amazon keeps and re-invests all of its profit (as retained earnings) or returns it all to shareholders, the reported net income number doesn't change.

It seems like you would have to look at their balance sheet to answer this, not just their income statement.
I Require.....macaroni sculptures.....
There are people who are both #1 and #2, but they're pretty rare. Or, at least, that's the perception I get, because I don't generally have to interrogate people to learn if they're #1s: they're all too happy to broadcast that fact.
You don't seem to understand how Xamarin works at all. The entire point is that you have the ability to share code, but also to drop to platform specific code at any time. The absolute worst case should be that you build totally different UI code for each platform while most of your business logic can sit in shared code. If you do target their cross platform UI framework (Xamarin.Forms) then all or large chunks of of your UI are in shared code, but even then you can write things like platform specific renderers to tweak your controls to the platform.
Google probably needs algorithmically savvy people, but that is surely not the case with most of the companies asking similar questions. If a company developing CRUD apps asks me to reverse a linked list, it is a sign to me that they are clueless.

If I have provided a GitHub account with some interesting code, then sure as hell I have demonstrated that I am able to compose "airtight" boolean expressions.

Just like I have to be informed about your company before interviewing, take your time to inform yourself about me.
#AirbnbWhileBlack: How Hidden Bias Shapes the Sharing Economy
Undoubtedly. Ashburn has a population of less than 50,000 people. There's no way it could have almost 50% more use than New York City with millions of people.
"Amazon seems to represent less than 10% of packages in the US [1]"

No.
They represent <10% of revenue for UPS, as the cite says.

That gives you no info about the percent of packages for UPS, despite the quora claim. It's not safe to assume they pay what others pay, and in fact, given the range of volume discounts, it's entirely possible they pay 1/3rd-1/5th what others pay, if not less. (I base this on the fact that the companies i've worked for, which have nowhere near amazon's volume, seem to pay around that). If that was correct, they could represent 5-6% of revenues but 15-25% of volume.

(it also tells you nothing about overall. It could be that combined across 6+ carriers, they represent a large percent of all package volume in the US).
Why That Salesperson Just Won’t Stop Emailing You
I agree with you; your original comment was talking about beginners specifically, though.

That being said, it's the natural state of any field moving fast. Web development has even worse fragmentation. Mobile development has about the same amount of fragmentation. There are a dozen distributed computing frameworks (Hadoop? A dozen things on top of Hadoop? Spark? Mesos? Kubernetes?).
Exactly - percent bodyfat is a much better target metric than weight.
https://mailinator.com/ is an interesting option. Lots of domain names to use and you can easily point your own domain names' MX records at it. Meets (1) and (4), with the precaution that it's a "public blog" approach to email and that anyone with the address and the knowledge it is hosted at Mailinator can check recent posts to that inbox. (Which is often perfectly fine for throw-away spam inboxes.) The mailbox itself doesn't expire, but items in it will.

For (2)/(3), if you register for an account you get a semi-private inbox that you can forward to your real email, but it is a step. I think if you upgrade plans you can set-up something more automated, but the current pricing page is surprisingly light on details from what I remember.
Slightly off topic but for anyone who is taking this course ...are the materials only related to NLP or are the techniques much more broadly applicable to other areas of deep learning (cursory look of the syllabus suggests this but would be great if someone who is actually taking this course can comment)
The real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs
just reading all that caused me to want to shoot myself honestly
You should toss all your preconceived notions. For example, Amazon would not have to cover all areas. It could easily just cover its densest areas and leave the rest to UPS, et al.

I would not underestimate what Amazon could pull off with complete control of shipping & logistics.
I would guess pretty soon since it's part of the W10 Mobile keyboard
when I read this headline I thought "Weasel" was a hacker crew I hadn't heard of before.
> BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices. As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision.

That's how it is supposed to work, they do the best with the data they have and then update as more data comes in. They are trying to gauge hard to measure things using samples, it's a tricky business.

As for revising to the upside, it happens all the time. December and January were both revised upwards:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_03042016.htm

> The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for December was revised
from +262,000 to +271,000, and the change for January was revised from
+151,000 to +172,000. With these revisions, employment gains in December
and January combined were 30,000 more than previously reported.
So interviewees are supposed to read "how to interview" books to know that they should generate a STAR format answer? What does this have to do with being able to do a job?
Hidden Speakeasies of New York
One should eat less fat and carbs, but in doing so one will be less satisfied and be more likely to snack or eat larger portions later, negating the effect.

The problem is that while I am a good and level-headed person, my future self is a hungry bastard.
> BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices.

See.. this is where you're completely wrong.

> As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision.

All BLS reports are revised -- they're surveys that are aggregated as firms respond. Their methodology is completely transparent.[1]

In fact, the BLS is so transparent that they actually keep a data series that tracks revisions to their own data with monthly history back to 1979! [2]

Their initial monthly jobs numbers in 2015 were overstated by an average of 4,000 jobs. However, in 2014, their initial jobs numbers were understated by 37,000 jobs. Does understating the initial numbers by nearly 40,000 jobs/month sound like the behavior of an agency trying to fool the public?

Conspiracy theories about public entities that report every single facet of their methodology, data, and metadata are silly.

[1] - http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/revisions-to-jobs-numbe...

[2] - http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#Summary
Early packet drop – and more – with BPF
I very much believe overflow checking should be on for release builds, and not just debug. Overflow is defined by the language as an illegal operation, but if it's only enabled by debug builds, then it's effectively defined as "somewhat" illegal. I think this gives the community the wrong impression, and a firmer stance should be taken. This is a killer feature, in my opinion.

In practice, for anything which isn't a micro-benchmark, it's a negligible performance hit. For things resembling a micro-benchmark, you can specifically use wrapped-arithmetic operations, or disable it for that module.

I see a strong correlation between people complaining about overflow checking overhead, and people who don't actually care about the safety features.
Whether the latter scenario motivated this change or not, it will be the dominant result of this change. FBI are nationwide; few of their targets are. The fact that any particular suspect has the means to challenge a warrant on the other side of the country will be used as proof that suspect is sitting on a pile of ill-gotten gains that ought to be frozen. The fact that any other particular suspect doesn't have such means will be used as proof that the warrant is valid.
this looks awesome!
There are already methods for all intents, and while (as noted in TFA) it's possible wrapping gets an operator, it's really unlikely that saturating or checked would get one.
Donald Trump Goes Through Face Surgery
Vehicles talking to each other will not break a practical traffic jam. The one caused because one car had to stop for some reason or other, now everyone has to stop or slow down in the same vicinity until there are less cars flowing through the area.
First of all, this site is like a study in the Fundamental Attribution Fallacy. When I read comments like this, I'm certain the person writing them has no idea what I believe, but has someone managed to develop an entitlement to that knowledge because we share a message board. Unable to discern what it is I actually believe, you instead try to interpolate it from random comments on HN. Spoiler: it's not working. I'm especially amused by how many different political villains I've managed to be cast as. Am I libertarian? Am I a statist? Am I a right-winger? Am I an SJW? Depends on the thread!

Stop doing that.

Second, the #1/#2 distinction has nothing to do with the US government. Overwhelmingly, the #1's I've interacted with have cast "criminals" in the "bad guy" role, not NSA. The point isn't who the adversary is, it's that they're animated solely by the idea that they're in a real struggle with some kind of adversary in the first place.
The Joke of U.S. Justice and “Accountability” When They Bomb a Hospital
Sounds super illegal--wouldn't post it online if I were you. The NSA really is watching.
My running app estimates I burned a bit over 4000 calories in the marathon I ran last weekend!

Though clearly this is an exceptional event, not something I could do even semi-regularly.
SFMOMA: Contemporary art in America
Can Duolingo crush the TOEFL?
It is being a bit picky in my opinion but the issue is that if this pattern continues deployments could take x longer depending on how long each gem needs to be installed. If the gem isn't required for your app to run why should you wait for it to install? Also in some more secure orgs certain gems need to go through an approval process. If this has become a dependency it could create an impasse as you need to go through all the hoops to update artifact repositories etc.
Microsoft Flow
As someone who was pretty "good" at math and CS algorithms, I'll let you in on a little secret: None of this is comes naturally to me. I struggle when encountering new ideas that I've never seen before. I've bombed easy technical interview questions because I couldn't make the right logical leap.

I still got good grades back in the day because I worked hard. I ground problems until things made sense. Every problem you do adds to your problem solving toolbelt. As your toolbelt grows, you start noticing patterns and you can apply those tools to these new problems. I rarely have to derive things from first principles because I've seen so many different problems at this point.

Some people think that I'm unusually smart or have a natural aptitude for these things. That can't be further from the truth - I don't think this comes naturally to most people. You just work at it until you get good at it.

The best textbook I've found for Algorithms is the one used at Princeton: Sedgewick's "Algorithms." It's extremely practical and doesn't go into too much of the math/proofs behind the algorithms themselves. From there, just grind problems until it makes sense.
Bezos understands that the value of a stock is its discounted future cash flows.
The DSM exists for billing purposes. It's not exactly a scientific taxonomy of psychiatric disorders.
I learned a very valuable lesson from reading Housing Bubble blogs and what not during the 2008 Financial Crisis.

I prided myself on being one of those people who saw it before it was happening, and had purchased double shorted bank ETF's. I thought I was a genius by "getting news first" and acting on it, and seeing the money I was "making". But then the Government stepped in and said they would not let the banks fail. My position evaporated into thin air.
yeah but you could be a passenger, on a plane, on a train - it's not for idiots driving
They have good systems, less-awesome people, at least some of the time.

They suffered the same issues a lot of companies that grew quickly had: their sales outstripped their ability to hire and retain the same level of talent that made them great to begin with.
Serious bodybuilders have to eat like it's their job. At a certain point, regular food fails to provide enough calories so they have to reach for liquid diets.
In certain Vedic traditions, physical exertion is seen as a form of meditation. The concept there is if you can discipline your body, you can discipline your mind.

That being said, I think the author of this article tries way too hard to be counterfactual. If you put an obese male or female on the treadmill with modest caloric restriction, over time they will lose weight on a log scale.
Amazing that this thread holds Google and Microsoft to different standards. Google Now uses Google's search engine, no opt-out. Cortana now uses Bing's search engine, no opt-out. You can easily have your browser search hijacked by an extension in the browser (on desktops this is easy, on phone OS's not so easy.) So you use Cortana, then you get the search result and suddenly you are on a shady search provider, you get a virus and you blame it on Microsoft.

Sure, I think Microsoft should offer a solution to this that isn't so hamfisted; or is hamfisted but has an opt-out for power users (maybe that requires elevated permissions), but let's not pretend that search hijacking isn't commonplace. Most Windows users are not HackerNews readers or power users.
The point is that the hypothesis that animals are philosophical zombies is just as untestable, but we're married to the opposite conclusion for no good reason.
I don't think everyone realizes the benefits of competition for the companies but many of us do, a and it wasn't clear that this was really the point you were making.

I sometimes like to think of it as not so much a benefit of competition as a risk for monopoly holders.
> Cornell professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that women were paid 79 cents for each dollar a man was paid. Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

This is not supported by the evidence. See, for example, this article by Christina Hoff Sommers (http://time.com/3222543/5-feminist-myths-that-will-not-die/):

"No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing."
It's sadly nothing at all like debates between people pushing different unit testing methodologies.
While that's possible, I think we all know that most companies would not do it that way.
Nothing ryanlol has said even remotely indicates that Scwartz going to jail would've been a good thing.
Yeah, I concur. There are a million other ways to test someone's knowledge. Rather than having them write a merge sort (for example), giving them one that either doesn't work or is suboptimal is a much better way to assess their abilities. (Or maybe pick something more real-world than a merge sort since nobody writes their own sorts anymore.) But you get to see how they deal with existing code, how good they are at debugging, and things like that. Those skills are probably going to be used more than writing new stuff from scratch anyway.
Mental health benefits, however, are mostly achieved with endurance training, as well as cardiovascular health, mobility in old age and resilience to age-related injuries (hip fractures, mostly). Swimming probably offers the best tradeoff b/w weight loss, cardio, muscle gain & safety (if only it weren't so boring)
I use Instapaper. I haven't heard of Pocket. I like Instapaper's really minimal design, their "Instapaper Text" extension, and the ability to save and sort articles for later.
> Even if ULA dramatically cut their costs to drive SpaceX out of business, that will stimulate a huge surge in demand for launches.

If only that were true. It does happen in many markets, but not currently in the space market. Space is still in the early-stage / chicken-and-egg mode. A bit of simple value chain analysis shows why.

TL;DR: we may be closer than I think to the space business moving into traditional economics, but even then it's probably decades out.

There are three disjoint space markets:
- military: largely price insensitive; volume unknown to me but not enormous; has specialized needs so a lot of it couldn't be satisfied by COTS launch systems
- science: some of which (earth sensing) can use COTS, the rest is low volume, has non-commercial requirements (e.g. non-LEO) and often has weird timing constraints depending on what the orrery says.
- commercial, which is what we all want to explode in volume! Today this is 100% LEO.

Science is largely the space side of NASA and I personally am convinced congress only funds in order to provide enough economic volume that the contractors are available to support the military. I.e. a fig leaf for the military just like the DoE (whose hands are all over space science as well).

So commercial: the chicken and egg problem the compound of two (used to be three, see below) issues: launches are rare and expensive, so satellites are few and far between, which makes them expensive, which doesn't encourage volume, which doesn't encourage launch capacity development, which keeps them expensive... This is one of the reasons why previous private efforts (e.g. Rotary Rocket) have foundered. Despite what my libertarian friends say, it's almost impossible to break out of this trap without government incentive; the activation energy is too high.

Now almost is not the same as 100% and this is where I'd like to believe and agree with you. And I do agree, except the time base I believe in is too slow to support the phrase "huge surge in demand"

One thing that has been great is the folie à deux on the part of billionaires Bezos and Musk (I believe that SpaceX and Zip2 are the only companies Musk actually founded, right?) has allowed ego to try to break that cycle for LEO applications. Unless Google or Apple or Amazon can start pumping out satellites for internal use in high volume the overall market will grow slowly (who else is likely to buy a lot of satellites? I'm not sure). And even so that effort will take time to ramp up. If not...hard to see who will take up the slack.

I also look forward to non-LEO applications, like mining. It has its own bootstrap problem.
Those are certainly valid points, and they don't fall on deaf ears. Through a mistake when failing to push to the upstream remote this gem caused exactly that problem for someone yesterday[1]. Fortunately I was able to fix it in a few minutes and get the OP back on track.

[1]: https://github.com/harrowio/capistrano-harrow/issues/1
Doesn't matter. They've won this point by repetition. I suspect most of them even know it is wrong. There's no defense against the rhetorical punch of "77 cents on the dollar".