skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lambda School hiring for its online, free-until-hired computer science academy
> I wonder how it came to be illegal. Did legislative bodies pass laws to protect workers solely out of the pure and spontaneous goodness of the legislators' hearts? Or did they pass these laws because people organized and agitated and worked to get these laws passed?

Wait, are you really going to try and give unions credit for antitrust laws (ie, the laws that OP is referring to)?

The first antitrust laws outlawed collusion, which also had the effect of outlawing a lot of common union activities as well. Labor unions fought to exempt themselves from antitrust laws.
I really enjoyed this article, but calling "being sales driven, not product driven" a mistake doesn't make any sense to me -- had they not made the call to be unit-economics-focused, they might have gotten into some product-perfecting rabbit hole and failed to generate the traction needed to actually keep their company afloat. This is something I notice in a lot of articles like this; they say "we should have done X instead" without acknowledging that doing X would have exposed you to a bunch of unknown unknowns, any one of which would have sunk you. I agree though that in general "make something that people love" is sage advice, but using the fact that your company succeeded, though not quite as quickly as you would have wished, as evidence for it just seems invalid.
Does this really work? Do you have a backtests? I trade primarily options and I came across another service that tracks google trends compared to the stock price as well. There was an employee of TSLA who tweeted they hit the numbers goal before, and if you had gotten in on short term optionos, you would have gotten destroyed, even though he was correct. A lot of the times, the news is FUD when it comes to the markets.

I've seen many people post they scrape employee lists from LinkedIn, then follow them on social networks and compile a list of posts based on companies and then bet on that. I haven't seen trade results though.

Edit: Just went through a video and you mentioned prediction of earnings at 80%. Will have to investigate this.
It's either you or the raccoons.
Pigouvian taxes ftw.
If you sell a fixed % of your holdings every year (that is equivalent to the % you would get paid in cash due to a dividend) you will never run out of equity.
The modern browser is quite good at rendering text, just as it was in 1996. The web is largely still about words. What improvement is so important as to strike the words of those from 1996 off the record?
I think he was saying evolution rather than revolution is a better business strategy, when bootstrapping at least
I’m happy my stuff didn’t require multiple pages :)
If you fully trust the software you're running, I see no reason to disable HT. At this point, I don't think I'd have it running on anything publicly facing, though. That said, I still have it enabled on my work PC & home PC.
You can now download and install Windows 95 as an app
I think it’s important too to seperate out the views of actual normal (ie not insane) people from those who make the most noise and produce the kind of propaganda pieces you’re talking about.

I guess from my point of view, whether or not some people are over the top crazies about one topic or another doesn’t really affect the underlying issues.

Personally, I do my best to take a measured and reasonable approach: im vegetarian (not vegan) and I just focus on doing what makes me feel that I am doing at least something to combat the well-documented and scientifically supported ill-effects of large scale agribusiness.

I think too often individuals fall into the trap of “all or nothing”. Am I concerned about climate change? Yes. Do I still drive a car? Yes. Does that make me a hypocrite? No.

It’s possible to do what you can with what you have to make a small impact in your own life. And for many, that’s about all we can ask for.
In US, workers making minimum wage with full-time schedule make around $15,000 a year. Many people have fewer hours or lower hourly rate. They survive. It's not a great standard of living, though.

On the plus side, the bug hunter would have the advantages of being their own boss. On negative side, their finance and tax situation might be worse or at least more complicated. Probably also better to save money in case they have a stretch where bug finds or payouts drop. Someone doing that would need even lower cost of living.
> And this would be totally fine if we valued corporate rights over individual rights. But as a society, we value individual rights over corporate rights, which is why we allow for unions but not corporate collusion.

Unions are corporations. They are corporations which claim to represent their members' interests, but under US law, they are not obligated to. (And fittingly, there is actually plenty of evidence to suggest that many do not, which is one of the reasons for decline in both overall union membership and the decline in support for unions among union members).
I can have my tin foil and wear it too: both the stagnation of wages and the mis-placement of anger over the stagnation of wages are bad for the middle class and good for the corporate overlords.
There's no such thing as an unbounded exponential growth curve. Any business will inevitably reach a point of diminishing returns, and their hockey-stick growth curves will turn into s-curves. The only alternative would be for a single business to eventually grow to such a size that it essentially becomes the entire world economy.
> Maybe housing costs are what's causing the slump (if there is one)?

Yes, that's how the business cycle has worked in western countries since the classical antiquity. The largest component of urban housing costs is the price for access to land, and payments for access to land are surplus payments beyond what is necessary for land to be supplied, because land is a fixed a natural resource with no labor cost of production.

An increase in land banking and the holding of real estate for investment purposes decreases the supply of land available, increases payments for access to it. This increases the market valuations for real estate value based on the increase in the capitalized value of future rent payments. This increases the opportunity cost of investing money in productive businesses which employ labor to produce goods and services relative to putting money into land. This decreases investment in production of non-land goods and services which have a labor cost of production, which decreases the demand for labor, which decreases wages.

Decreased wages then lead to decreased consumption which leads to decreased ability to pay rent, which then results in a drop in property valuations based upon capitalized rent payments. After a sustained period of rents increasing faster than wages, the property bubble usually pops and results in an economic depression.

One solution to avoid this problem is through taxing and redistributing surplus land rents through a land value tax, which countries such as Taiwan have implemented. China has people smart enough to clear this hurdle and find creative solutions to continue rapid growth, but since Xi has consolidated power and gone back to heavily promoting Marxism as the economic model for China's future, the current political situation makes it seem unlikely that they will actually do so.
I jaw-dropped at something not yet mentioned here.

Taking a look at Step 9 (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...) where the LCOS display is revealed, I took a look at the linked PDF.

That PDF says the pixel size is 4.5um. 1000/4.5 is 222, which I think means a single row or column has approximately 222 pixels in it.

I ran the display through https://www.sven.de/dpi/ (specifying a display size of 0.4 inches), and it decided the display has 5507.27 PPI.

The PDF says that the active area is 8.64mm x 4.86mm, so that PPI rating isn't perfectly accurate - but _wow_, 1080p in less than 1cm x 0.5cm. Ha.

The LCOS module is shown 2nd from right in Step 15. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Leap+One+Teardown/1122...

I'm not sure how to properly interpret "4.5um pixel size" within the context of a non-square module. The pixel dimensions (square? slightly rectangular?) aren't in the PDF. I'm also not sure how to compute how many 4.5um pixels there are within 1 sq mm, which I would very much like to do.
Of course they are! The full debt will be repaid in time, with interest. Where does that money come from?
Worker pay goes up with unionization and collective bargaining without needing a tight (usually temporary) labor market. Otherwise, we end up in a highly cyclical economic condition where employment conditions are tolerable during tight labor markets, but are downright terrible when there is a surplus of labor (note only recently, with unemployment near 3.9%, the lowest unemployment rate since 2000, that employers are considering usually undesirable candidates [criminal records, no college degree, etc]).

Why is this undesirable? Simple. Lower and middle class workers drive the economy with their consumption. If they don't have stability, they don't spend. If they don't spend, the velocity of money through the economy decreases. You want workers to feel comfortable spending, and the only way to do that is by giving them stability along with a fair wage.
Delayed wages, lower profits: Chinese gaming firms fret as approval freeze bites
Increasing your market cap by buying back stock is the economic version of a perpetual motion machine.
>>At the end of the day, if a business succeeds, then it is benefitting someone somewhere, regardless of my personal opinions. I will always say no if I say something I cannot stomach, but I speak out knowing that my role in the company is expendable, and I am owed nothing beyond the paycheck I receive for my contributions.

I don’t know how to say this un-offensively, so I’ll just say I think this is a morally bankrupt position that can be used to justify all kinds of fraud and crime because there was at least one benefactor. I think to make a utilitarian justification you need to take into account the negative impact on others too.

I don’t think you are morally bankrupt though, it sounds like you have another framework for determining what you personally will work on.
Dale Brown [1] wrote about this in his series of military techno-thriller novels, I think somewhere around Wings of Fire, written in 2002. Basically the idea is to have easy to launch constellations of micro-sats that could be launched to LEO to cover a specific area for a few days or weeks.

If this does come to fruit in real life, it wouldn't be the first time that ideas from his books have become reality 10-20 years later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Brown
Yes I guess it depends on your definition of non-trivial. $1000 is nice but it’s what, one or two weeks of rent? There are undoubtedly Apple (and other tech company) employees who watch their company’s stock price daily and receive a huge amount when it goes up 2% but not many of them.
I'm going to give the progressive movements of the turn of the 19th/20th century a lot of credit for antitrust and worker-protection laws. I'm also going to ignore anyone whose response is to try to nitpick and split out individual acts and try to attribute them to completely contextless utterly independent forces that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything else happening at the time in any way.
To amplify that, I know many people who were very successful working at BigCorp. They resigned and started/joined a small company doing the same thing.

They failed miserably.

Never underestimate the value of the backing, resources and organization of BigCorp to one's success.
Nice observation. Now that you said it, I agree with you
One of you had stepped into Jobs's reality distortion field. The other had not.
> Vegetable farming is not a great thing for the environment either, and sometimes "organic" production does more harm.

Could you explain these points more?
Good cryptocurrency/hacker news discord communities to join?
Are there any good ones you recommend that are og/legit tech focussed?
I heard about it from a friend in '96, read that article in '97, attended first time in '98. There were already people saying "Man, this thing has sold out. You shoulda been here back when it was good, before there were, like, 7,000 people here most of who don't know 'the principles' the event is based on..."

Pretty much every year between then and when I last went (in '14) there were new rules which people claimed "ruined the evnt forever!!!" - in '99 Steve couldn't run The Drive-By Shooting Gallery again because they banned guns. Erin's camp stopped being allowed to use theirliquid fuelled flamethrowers in around '03 or '04. The Lawrence Livermore Labs guys got told they couldn't bring their big lasers out and paint animations on the mountain range in '10 or so... But at the same time, there was always some amazing new thing to see. I don't regret any of my trips out there. I still plan to get back there again one day.
(Author here)

The post quotes both Brooks and Dijkstra; the first managed development of a system and got famous, the second saw the system's actual failures and reported his criticism on it.

So, care to explain what exactly is it that you find lacking? My experience with people who cite "failure to grasp the thinking" has been rather with "architecty" types that can't get past handwaving to make a point, so anything concrete would be appreciated.

For example: you say Dijkstra complains "on overblown marketing material mostly". Citation, please? Sounds like you mean that the marketing overpromised and underdelivered, but to me it looks like Dijkstra was pretty clear about the whole set of ideas being poppycock even if fully delivered; he says that it's fundamentally the wrong way to do things, and does so in a rather smug "told you so" mode.

... unless we want to argue that maybe Dijkstra didn't "grasp the depth of Brooks' thinking" either, nor the functionality of that thinking's actual, first hand implementation?
> I'm not sure that's how Medicare is 'predicated' - the fundamental assumption is that you get to a) reduce administrative overhead due to a centralized system, and b) using the power of a single-payer system to negotiate lower fees

This fundamental assumption is wrong, because Medicare doesn't negotiate. Medicare sets rates by fiat, and providers don't have the ability to negotiate rates with Medicare the way they negotiate with private payers. Medicare reimburses rates that are below COGS, which means that providers actually lose money on Medicare patients and have to cover their losses with the margins they make on privately-insured patients. (Medicare acknowledges this, and in fact will pay separate stipends to providers who don't see enough privately-insured patients to cover the losses on Medicare patients).

OP is correct - Medicare's funding model is not sustainable without private insurers to provide the difference.

> it's reducing the profit margin of private insurers, not relying on them to subsidize Medicare

Uh, where do you think that extra money goes?
In terms of benefits, SV companies, modern tech companies, are typically the cream of the crop, so I think it mitigates the need.

I don't think we need collective bargaining on salaries. But I do think workers should have a unified voice at the table, and at the very least have a political lobby for their rights.
Because it is creating a huge short-term bubble of raised stock value when the companies have done nothing to actually increase their value. It's another cog in a huge crash for no reason whatsoever except to enrich a few people.
You're so understated!! It's troubling to you. Wow.

I tend to celebrate such fair, intellectual posts! But in this case… consumption as economic indicator isn't just troubling, it's horrific.

Our economic measures are not just mediocre, but actually destructively backwards. They are measures that actively push us to catastrophes, unhappiness, destruction…

GDP etc. would triple instantly if we just paid our neighbors to do one another's housework.
Quite a lot, if there's no easy way to step outside of the walled garden. You could argue that Apple does provide one with their developer efforts, but I'm not sure if that quite cuts it.
I don’t think the parent argued that his feelings of frustration are somehow untrue, but was just pointing out that they have to be weighed against the billions of users that Apple decides to prioritize for. Preventing a constant “go to our sketchy website and put in your credit card” experience for IAPs is likely a smart trade off vs a couple weeks of developer frustration surrounding honoring external purchases.

Also, I’m still not clear on how OC’s app was treated differently than others in the space. From his description it doesn’t sound out of the ordinary to me, but I suppose it’s possible I’m misunderstanding something.
The art of trying...

I appreciate your take on the event.
A corporation is a separate entity from a shareholder. If a company's corporate income and a shareholder's personal income are the same, surely we should also be OK with lawsuits against corporations also digging into the pocketbooks of shareholders.

That distinction exists for a reason.
It's pretty easy if you use a traffic cone as a "killing cone" to stabilize the head you're cutting. Since they're so old you might as well remove only the digestive tract and boil the whole bodies into broth, cause the meat will be inedible.

If you have kids, they're typically not as grossed out as adults and it's a really good biology lesson
Yeah, it's definitely possible. It's a biz model in the crypto currency world.
Everything can be. Biggest thing to carry out of that is all press coverage in the West of Chinese economy goes through a lot of "broken phones."

You have to do your own first hand research to get an idea of anything.

Example: the headline says "Shenzhen's property prices beat that of Manhattans" , but that only a half truth - average still climbs up, but median were going down for close to 3 years. Yes, the 400sqm mansion apartments did probably beat NYC long time ago, but who cares about them?

In overall, SZ market got push not due to demographics as popular narrative says, bur thanks to their (failed) universiade. A giant amount of property speculators, top tier ones at that, bought into the idea that universiade, just like the Olympics, will magically push property prices and Shenzhen will see its own share of Pangu plazas (the once most expensive apartment building in China). Well it just became the self fulfilling prophecy, but only for the top of the market.

Another thing few people know - Shenzhen spend more money on the universiade than most countries spent on the Olympics. To their disappointment, the event did not even sell half of all tickets, and went completely invisible to the outside world.
Buybacks create artificial demand for the stock, pushing prices higher (and giving the company a tool to support the stock when the price declines).

Lower share count also means higher price in the long term, relative to the alternative scenario of paying dividends. This is relevant for employees with stock-linked compensation. The dividend alternative may require higher cash compensation for employees and create retention issues (not that stock compensation is free, mind you).

And of course lower share count means higher earnings per share, making it easier for management to attain targets and beat forecasts.

One aspect that can hurt long-term investors is that the company will overpay for its shares when the stock is overvalued.
Yes I think it is a more significant problem for Multitenant cloud providers..
Nonsense. Capital is ownership of raw materials and means of production, even if we use money to track that effectively. Capital comes from natural resources more than anything else. Consuming those resources destroys capital rather than generating it — except when the consumption is an investment that increases our access to more resources (i.e. using oil to run equipment to get more oil as well as examples that aren't the same resource).

If we live more consuming lifestyles, we drive up the demand for resources which could increase the motivation of people to get them and thus drive economic growth short-term, until/unless we use up the resources entirely. And that all still ignores externalized costs (pollution and other harms) that can come from the extra consumption.
I updated my comment with some actual numbers; it's probably around $6000/year that your previous option grant was active, with favorable tax treatment because it can be taxed as long term capital gains if you're smart (and if you work at Apple, you probably are).
For me it still has the same frustrations as Smartthings or some other cloud based solution, but having more integrations and deeper insight as to what's happening, when, where and how is the big selling point for me. That and the speed... Push a button, lights come on instantly!
Hazlitt is one of the most under-appreciated writers in Economics. His “Economics in One Lesson” is brilliantly simple.
While China may be a Communist Dictatorship, the economy is extremely capitalistic with no aspects of Marxism. Do the workers own the means of production? No, not Marxist. Privatization also is not Marxism.
I'm pretty ok with OSX and that's an OS that is both noob-friendly and comes with powerful modification features.

I do think both types of users can co-exist on the same platform. People of all knowledge levels use Windows & Android.
That's a very optimistic view, and does not take into account the vast discrepancy in leverage between an employee and an employer.
> Medicare for all would get rid of high private insurance premiums, but it would also raise payments by people who are currently uninsured, and would have higher payment levels than Medicaid. So the decrease in provider payments would, in total, be something like 10%, which could be compensated by lower administrative costs, since hospitals would have fewer insurance companies to deal with.

Your numbers are completely out of whack. First of all, Medicare pays rates that are below COGS. That means that, at the current reimbursement rates, providers wouldn't want to see more Medicare patients; the more Medicare patients they see, the faster they lose money.

I have no idea where you're pulling this 10% number from. But administrative costs due to private insurance companies are nowhere near 10% of total reimbursements - that's an absurd figure. Most administrative costs have nothing to do with the number of insurance companies you're dealing with; it's to do with the overhead of providing care and billing[0]. Reducing the number of payers doesn't reduce that fixed cost.

[0] Yes, billing is still an issue with Medicare. How do you think Medicare knows how much to pay providers in the first place?
Nope, so that makes two.
AlgoRythmics
All the idealism of burning man pretty much dies as soon as you realize that everybody’s on drugs. It’s a dark path. Some people do alright. On a long enough timeline, most don’t.
"The answers are "lots" and "mostly"

Where would that be? Name examples. In Germany you certainly don't get it paid by the employer.
(Author here)

I agree. There's much too much "art", religion and cargo cultism in software development, and much too little science/engineering.

And it's hard to even say whether we're improving.
Activist investors are a bit of a misnomer, unlike traditional activists these investors are squarely interested in their own investment.
But that's with the content ofthe argument that a functioning eco system needs to be locked down.

It doesn't really.
Call me crazy, but I liked the movie, and I’m a fan of the books. Just finished God Emporer of Dune.
Deno v0.1.0, rewritten in rust