skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, debt is a cheap way to drive up stock prices under ZIRP. If you are a qualified borrower (e.g. a large corporation) then you can borrow cheap and use the money to buy your own shares. If you are lucky, your reduction in dividend expense is greater than the cost of the debt.

But, share buybacks are basically “return capital to shareholders”. Put another way, it is an admission by management that they expect shareholders (at a given stock price) to be able to achieve higher return on equity/capital elsewhere. When a company buys its stock back, they are also saying something about how their long term prospects look.
this is historically illiterate, and frankly insulting. if there is any starry eyed idealist here it's.. you.
Various youtube metalworking channels including AvE and This Old Tony:

https://www.youtube.com/user/arduinoversusevil
https://www.youtube.com/user/featony

Smart, unusual, and entertaining.
Yep, there are plenty of applications where crashing is a big deal! But, we think, also plenty where that's not an issue. Note also that the "unused" strategy creates bugs that don't cause crashes (but they could be detected with something like ASAN).
I don't see much, just two cage like structures that are probably elevator motor houses.

Are you mixing them up with the building next door?
Having spent most of my spare time for the past 8 months on a FinTech idea (which I now question the cost of launching) I spent the day yesterday looking into PayDay loans as one of the URL's I got for said biz is pretty damn catchy for a PDL endeavor. Case in point--GoDaddy has all kinds of loan ads on the parked page.

I agree with you though, that's a sleazy way to make money, IMO.
Take Apple, a now $1T company. Does anyone really not know what Apple is doing? Really?

I agree, and Apple is a perfect example of the direction of the larger market.

Apple use to report sells of laptops and desktops separately, Apple Store revenue and profit, iPod sells (until they became meaningless), iPhone and iPad sells.

But they saw that Amazon didn’t suffer any harm by only posting “Bezos charts” - showing that sells are moving up and to the right without posting unit volume - that they started doing the same thing with new product categories.
Nobody owes me, and I'm not asking for anything. I'm just lamenting the fact that things are the way they are.

I use both Windows and Linux, which is precisely why I want to use an editor that's properly cross-platform instead of using separate editors or use one that's configured differently based on platform.

Maybe you should try Windows? It sounds like you could benefit from broadening your horizons a little bit.
Payday loans are bad but they are not that unethical. The alternative option for people reliant on payday loans are actual loan sharks, which will turn out a lot worse for the debtor. So don’t be so hard on yourself.

I think it would be difficult, but possible to run an ethical payday loan company that focuses on building people up and out of long term debt.
Technology’s “Time Well Spent” movement has lost its meaning
Literally Hitler.
How did that work?
Behavioral economics exists only because psychology has completely lost objectivity and focused on agenda. This article is a good example, uses cognitive ‘proof’ for a behavioral hypothesis. Trash.
As a gentle satire of a much-hated London-based design company we were working with during a project for a major brand, I added something called 'disco mode' to the customer's site if you crafted the correct query string. It progressively added more and more random jQuery effects to the page on a timer, while the customer's logo jumped to a beat.
I find it unclear whether the author is aiming for Uniform, or just “looks pretty uniform”.
> Held to the same standard as civil engineers

Impractical comparison. Software engineers rarely create works where loss of life, or even physical harm, is a side effect of poor workmanship.
Less unwanted female attention.
How would I be able to see the whole tree of replies, though? Would I need to rely on an exponentially large number of services being available at request time?
As discussed previously, TLS is old and successful, which gives you a lot more to talk about than protocols too young to say their own names and barely heard of outside the nerdiest circles.

The most recent example where attackers get to do a TLS downgrade is Logjam, where they tie things up for long enough to solve the Discrete Log problem and then use their solution to cover up an earlier lie so that the downgrade protection doesn't trigger.

This sort of trick also wouldn't work against TLS 1.3's downgrade protection, because rather than use a removable sentinel they baked the sentinel into the shared entropy. This sets up a catch 22. If you remove the sentinel to hide your tracks, the connection fails due to a mismatch, but if you leave the sentinel there then a client knows what's up.
The RF downmixer used by the receiver does radiate.
Circumvented browser features to force autoplay on videos with high volume on our websites. While not a morally bankrupt thing to do especially compared to some of the other examples, we all felt dirty doing it.
Is this real? Can't find any sources on it.
Facebook is only partially to blame. The real responsibility is of the society as a whole: the atomization and loneliness of the society which FB exploited; the public and government that permitted digital corporations to do more or less what they want, and the dismantling of all the protections that existed from concentration of power in monopolies and oligopolies.

It's really disturbing how people complain about what these companies are doing -- what did they expect would happen given the above?
I am not expert on the matter, but AFAIK building peer-to-peer protocols with good mobile support seems to be pretty demanding.
Buying into an ETF is buying into a company that owns shares. The ETF owns the shares in other companies, you own shares in the ETF. You do not own the shares that the ETF owns.

Similarly, if you buy shares in Apple, you do not directly own its cash, facilities, intangible assets etc. Apple owns these. But you own voting rights and the ability to participate in dividends or buybacks.

In both cases the company -- the company's management, really -- has a wide degree of freedom in what it does. Apple can buy companies or sell iPhones without consulting shareholders. ETFs can buy and sell shares similarly.

Similar-looking but quite distinct is the trustee/beneficiary relationship from trusts law. In that case the trustee legally holds property "for the benefit of" the beneficial owner. Again, as a beneficiary, you would not own the shares held by a trust on your behalf, but the trust would need to buy and sell them according to its view of your best interests.

Since both corporations and trusts have wide-ranging legal, financial and taxation implications, the details vary widely depending on where you are. Each jurisdiction has comparable but distinct caselaw and of course legislatures have tinkered quite feverishly with it too.

I am, of course, not a lawyer. I didn't even finish law school.
We use SCIP in our system and it’s brilliant. They have proper python bindings so the call overhead is low. We reduced what was previously a complex hand optimised algorithm to a handful of equations a weight function. Highly recommended.

https://github.com/SCIP-Interfaces/PySCIPOpt
Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything
How to Install Apache Tomcat on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ok. How about we forgive every outstanding mortgage they hold? They're so big, they can take a hit, right?

What's that? They don't hold many mortgages? They sell them all upstream? Then why are they foreclosing? But it's a good point that they have such easy access to the secondary market. How about we cut that off, too?

Maybe they are too big to fail overnight. But we can do it in bites. Diminish one piece of their business at a time. Eventually (sooner than you think) they can be trimmed back to a manageable size. But we should start right away. With their track record, each new infraction should result in the death penalty for some piece of their empire.

Then again, we don't need the government to punish them. We just need account holders to close their accounts. If people are not willing to do this, why should the government that represents those people get involved? One reasonable thing that the government could do is require WF to pay the refinance fees for anybody who wants to move their mortgage (or even the servicing of their mortgage) away from WF. Then people can impose a personal penalty on WF without any cost to themselves except the time and effort to go through the process. If we are fed up enough, we could even require WF to buy down the refi to the same interest rate. But that would only benefit recent mortgages who should have known better to begin with.
How did you get that past code review?
There's a scene in The Big Short involving discussion over the rise in subprime mortgage bond prices despite an increase in mortgage defaults:

Mark Baum: "That's not stupidity. That's fraud."

Jared Vennett: "Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal, and I'll have my wife's brother arrested."
The specific Terry Thomas office build that's the topic of discussion is atypical, that's the point of the article. It sounds like they'd accommodate attire appropriate for the temperature... it's Seattle, wearing outdoor clothing to work is totally normal.

And we have a very mild climate, so it would only be this hot in late afternoon for a dozen days or so each year. On such days I'd just say "I'm uncomfortable so I'm going to WFH the rest of the day." I'm pretty sure that would be acceptable for this architecture firm. It's never been a problem that I leave work early due to traffic from baseball games near my downtown Seattle office, for example.

I totally understand that you have a different heat tolerance and physiological reaction to heat than I do. I'd go crazy exercising in a gym when it feels so much more stimulating overall to be outside, whereas mid-80's temperature with low humidity is just mildly unpleasant to me. But I respect that other's feel differently about it.

However, the difference between 78 and your ideal temperature is probably not so great, especially compared to many other parts of the country with much higher temps and humidity. I wouldn't entirely discount the possibility that this Terry Building might not be as uncomfortable for you as it sounds. And if it did turn out to be unbearably uncomfortable for you, I wouldn't discount the possibility of working together with your team and management to find an agreeable solution.
Right, so, instead of helping people back from the edge of the cliff, they shoved them off.

The answer to your question seems to be that they should examine the account and offer a loan modification if certain conditions are met. They failed at this for these people. That other people aren’t eligible for modification and would be foreclosed on regardless is not relevant here.
Is losing your home insignificant?

I would be shocked if out of hundreds of foreclosures, there were no suicides.
Yes.

When they turn up in my search results for an issue it always makes me sad because the threads never have useful resolution.
They are action movies. Star trek was never about action.
I see nothing in the article to support your point. Care to elaborate?

I see listed credit card scamming, ddos'ing, phishing, trojan discussion and identity theft. It's not clear to me any relation to Russian forum culture, or how that would apply here.
This paper contains the phrase "Air–Beverage Interface," definitely going on my reading list. Thanks for sharing!

And agreed on the consistency part. For espresso, once you figure out what you like, you begin the endless quest to make it that way consistently.
They are still better at reporting than most other tech companies. They publish separate numbers for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. They don’t separate out Beats, Watches, etc. but no other electronics company is even as transparent as they are.
I like how you dropped the name of the "big consulting company" in the end, there.
> A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly)

Could you expand on the correctness aspect? I'm currently working in this space for what I believe to be good reasons (to improve the accessibility of a particular service for visually impaired users). But I'm eager not to abuse my position and knowledge.
Yep, as I mention in this thread (https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1025393125567737857) indistinguishability is the hardest missing piece! You're right that you could try to do some kind of profiling and come up with heuristics, but I would note that real security bugs are most often not on a "hot" path anyway (more frequently executed code is actually less likely to contain security bugs, as we found in a paper from last year: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-l...).
Things progressed and changed every single century. Just not like some it happens in a tech tree in a computer game. Unfortunately history gets taught as something that is teleological, with things only having value if they bring them closer to what we consider important. So people look at multiple centuries of scholastic thought and proclaim ''well, that was a waste of time!" because it wasnt the scientific method.
I don't necessarily agree that the first project was unethical, the banks were saying no because they wanted to develop a product of their own to compete with the company that hired you, not because they had any moral standing to prevent the customer from running analytics on their own data. The company you did the work for is immensely helpful to the consumer, and banks refusing to let consumers interact with their own data is, IMO, more of the moral violation than forcibly scraping that data out.
Well, military's purpose is killing people. Now if that is evil or not of course depends on your beliefs.
It’s not about improvement over other solutions necessarily. It’s about experimentation and building cool things to learn.
They aren't supposed to be anymore. Dodd-Frank requires banks to have a living will for unwinding in case of crisis. Wells Fargo's was approved last year.

I assume it'd never be triggered from above due to "a series of scandals" as long as operations remained viable.
Amazing there’s nothing here about crypto.
Some remarkable recommendations of "similar" games appeared in this thread. I'd like add The Company of Myself [0] and its perhaps even better prequel Fixation [1]: I think it neatly fits this "philosophical indie platformer" niche. If you haven't yet, try them while you can (yup, Flash based).

[0] http://2darray.net/portfolio/the-company-of-myself/
[1] http://2darray.net/portfolio/fixation/
Yes - just the interest, and they can perpetually roll the principal. So the cost of debt becomes tax deductible versus dividends.
Most unethical?

Probably pre checking one of those cookie policy checkboxes or what not. Wasn't too happy about that, especially when the software used removed the feature before for exactly the reason you may expect.

I also previously used a mod to read personal messages on a forum once, though that's one of those things which is heavily, heavily debated about on community management sites, with about half the audience saying its an unethical breach of privacy and the other half saying either that it's their site and property deal with it or that it's a good way to stop poaching and abusers.

But that one wasn't exactly coded by myself, so eh, it's an edge case for this question.

So probably a tie between those two, depending on what you count by 'as a programmer'. Fortunately, everything else I've been asked to do in my career has been pretty normal/ethical.
While I haven't done anything nefarious other than putting a few tracking/analytics frameworks into our product, I have heard a few stories from my colleagues...

E.g. at a contractor company, a client wanted to lease 5 developers for a project. We didn't have enough free developers, so they assigned a single guy to the project, who was making commits from 5 different accounts. The client was paying for 5 devs of course.

There was also a client who was building slot machines, and we wrote the software for it. We ran experiments to figure out the best way to rip off gambling addicts.

The first company I worked for took EU innovation grants and when the deadline came, they simply copied their existing product, replaced the logo and showcased it as something they used the grant for.
I think all that is the responsibility of the viewer. When you view a single message on Mastodon, then Mastodon is responsible for fetching the rest of the thread for your display.

In practice, it looks like Mastodon also stores / caches local copies of messages and profiles, pretty much as they are received. (Including thumbnails!)
It's probably less about legal forks and more about bad actors forking it, inserting spyware, and buying Google ads against "vpn server" and "tunsafe". It seems like it's more of a problem for open source software targeting nontechnical users, and I imagine uTorrent had a lot of issues with it.
What almost everyone misunderstands about product managers
I find it shocking that anyone can defend the government of Venezuela with a straight face. The country is demonstrably worse today than it was before Chavez was elected. 90% of the country now lives in poverty, inflation is likely to reach 1,000,000% this year (not a typo), infant mortality rates are soaring, Caracas has the highest murder rate in the world, and the average Venezuelan lost 11 kilograms in weight during 2017.

The blame for this situation rests solely on the shoulders of the Venezuelan government. They created a house of cards when they nationalized the PDVSA and coupled their entire country to a single commodity. Like all toxic people they wish to blame someone else for their problems, in this case the United States. For those who believe the United States is to blame for all of their problems how do you reconcile the fact that the US is still their largest trading partner. Have you read any of the sanctions that the US has placed on Venezuela? I'll link you to them, each runs about 2 pages each.[0] How do financial sanctions targeted at 7 government officials in 2015 explain a country collapsing in 2013? Does toilet paper production run on time travel?

[0]: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
Indeed! With a long equity runup the risk premium for Corp debt drops too.
> While not a morally bankrupt thing to do

Could you explain this position? (Honestly asking.)
There's something about physical interaction with these old computers that emulation just cannot satisfy.

There's also something amazing about working on a very low powered system... There's so much of the universe of computing you don't have to worry about. To this extent one of my favourite projects was the build your own Apple I. And learning C on an original Raspberry Pi.

I read often about this concern that we have offloaded so much responsibility to China that we are losing the fundamentals in the West. I wonder if this desire for nostalgia and simplicity will compel many of us to get in touch with our engineering roots.
Well that's kind of the thing right? Once you launch your ICBM, the fate of your cities are already sealed. On top of that, the effects seem to be highly variable. From a practical point of view, you might as well just use them in a traditional manner.
The local community of Ingress players in my city. It also acts amazingly well as a human-powered search/recommendation engine and mutual help community.
I suspect you're not going to get many personal stories here because it would be self-incriminating. But I have a couple from some people I know in tech.

1. I know the guy who, pre-Snowden, actually designed many of the pieces of network gear needed for the dragnet. His perspective was basically: Yes it's wrong, but what do I know? I just design electronic circuits.

2. Same guy also mentioned how at another company he worked at they used DNS tricks to exfiltrate data out of their enterprise clients. Nothing crazy, mostly just analytics to aid in things like product design. They got caught though. First Intel went out, then a couple hours later 4 other big tech companies (including Apple and Microsoft). Then a huge swath of devices stopped reporting. They got acquired shortly afterwards for a large, but sub-billion dollar amount.

3. I know a couple people that crack into devices and sell the 0days to the highest bidder. I consider this practice for anything cyber-physical (self-driving cars, etc) to be so unreasonably unethical that it should be against international law. It's one thing to sell these things to an allied government, it's quite another to have them on the open market.
The WordPress community.
Take people's content and put ads on it. TOS compliant but shady.
Guess I haven't had enough coffee -- I'm struggling to remember the joke in which the punchline is the professional telling the client something like "You're not paying me to do [one simple/small thing], but for the years of experience it takes to know that [it's that one simple thing]".

The problem with trying to charge for programming work is that so much non-trivial work can be summed up as a few keystrokes, or an addition of a single line, or even producing less code (by deletion/refactoring). That said, I don't understand why your boss thought this subterfuge was necessary. If the client is non-technical enough to approve 8 hours of billing for something that takes 5 minutes to fix, how is that client competent enough to look through the git history to know that it was only 5 minutes of work?
I think this is extremely common in payed-by-the-hour scenarios, when the person doing the tasks aren't on-site.

I also think most people are aware that's the case, and are fine with it since they've got an estimate that they've approved. The estimate was good enough to justify the business value so they expect to pay the full hours.

Letting people know you need more time is probably a bigger issue.
I've been in Seattle for almost 3 years now and the temperature the AC gets set at is like 64F. When I lived elsewhere it was always set @ 72F. It's so cold in my office downtown that I have a fall/winter jacket I'm often wearing on the hottest days and dresses/skirts end up causing me to be uncomfortably cold the entire day.
I love the Freakanomics podcast that gives both sides to the Payday Loan industry: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/payday-loans/
Show HN: Astrolab turns your telescope into a remote control telescope
> lawful, democratically-endorsed uses only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
I have no idea what caused it. This happened during my backup process so I lost about a month worth of personal emails. Definitely a nuisance but i don't think I lost anything critical.

It looks like the offline backup process needs to be:

- Download emails with thunderbird (using IMAP so they aren't deleted online)

- Then backup the local emails

- Then finally delete them from the online folder
I worked for a major gambling tech company. There was almost no oversight and I pretended to work when I really didn't.