skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Open source is subsidized somehow.

I get that done tech infrastructure startups are frustrated that users demand open source, open source let's established firms sell services, and the commotion from established firms makes it more difficult for the infra firm to establish a most and extract revenues...but, I don't see why users should compromise on their preferences just to make it easier for those startups to make the kind of returns investors demand.

“My business model doesn't provide enough money” -> “the market should change its demands” is... interesting reasoning.
We would end up with massive conglomerates who owned 500+ companies of 4999 people, and if that didn't work you'd just get simple collusion where everyone knows company A and B are owned by the same person so they try to cooperate even without being explicitly ordered to.
For a pretty general rebuttal to essays like this (which are pretty ignorant) I recommend Buyback Derangement Syndrome recently published in the WSJ:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/buyback-derangement-syndrome-15...
Do they actually make switching gear? I wasn't aware that they were in that space? Do you know what carriers use their gear?
The investor pays tax when the stock is sold. That tax implication is exactly the reason that many investors prefer buybacks over dividends.
> And there's no other way to get iPhone users, who are by far the biggest spenders.

Well, it's not like iPhone users can't simply buy Androids. I have mostly iOS household with a few Androids sitting around - mostly unpowered and gathering dust (kids use them mainly to watch Netflix on road trips).

I think Netflix has a strong position to negotiate with Apple over this.
I own a roomba and I do think it's great. Why dont you like it?
> * If you are wealthy and don’t draw an ordinary income then this also means your tax rate is 0% on your qualified dividends.*

Really? I thought qualified dividends were taxed at the same rate as long term capital gains. This is zero for very low-income taxpayers, but certainly not "wealthy" ones, like you describe. Or perhaps I'm missing something?
The rule of thumb I said allows you to have non political discourse with strangers over the internet, and have political discourse with strangers face to face.
TSLA has been heavily shorted for a long time. People are shorting a stock on a relatively short term timescale (typically) while speculating in Tesla is frequently believed to be longer term (again, typically).

Given that many long term investors believe in dollar-cost averaging and explicitly refuse to try to forecast if the price will rise or fall over the short run, both groups can be right at the same time and aren't directly opposed viewpoints.
As Warren Miller, the late, great ski movie filmmaker always said about attempting that challenging run or trick or whatever: "If you don't do it this year, you'll just be another year older when you do."

The older I get, the harder it is to accept being bad and new at things, and it's a constant fight to remind myself that it's okay to suck.
It could, given that it constitutes just under 20% of US power. What do you mean by changed? Do you mean have other countries utilize more nuclear energy or do you mean to have US and France reduce their use? Nuclear power has some nice advantages especially when we are talking about Gen IV reactors such as drastically reduced, and even re-using existing, nuclear waste as wall as a greenhouse gas emissions output that is about the same as wind energy. Renewable energy would be great but these forms of energy also have their own trade-offs.
It's not capital gains, because nothing is sold, but dividend income is taxed, whether or not it's re-invested. Form 1040, line 9.
Do companies have to announce buy backs in advance like large shareholders ?

I am annoyed that some of my secondary market purchase attempts are thwarted by right of first refusal exercised by the company.

On the other hand, I think dividends reduce volatility, make option pricing a little more complicated and trading less fun.
You have completely twisted that point to mean something else.

The point is that certain parts of our society are not technical and will never be technical. Despite the expectations and wishes of a tiny minority of technical people.
There's a lot of reference to research that the authors claim show that stock buybacks are bad and terrible, but no description or quantification of how exactly their research showed this. The closest I can see is "According to our research, when trillions of dollars of corporate cash are extracted from companies through buybacks, on top of dividends, the result is a dramatic concentration of income among the richest American households and the destruction of middle-class employment opportunities." To me, this is phrased the way politicians phrase descriptions of studies, stats, or findings that they are wildly misusing.
I'm having trouble making sense of your comment. Do you want to break it down for me?
This is different from the employee context because the corporation gets to deduct the compensation expense. So it's a deduction to one party (corp) and an income inclusion to the other party (employee).
DataOps Stack Exchange Site Posted on Area51
Facebook picks HP's Lucio as its new CMO
An effective argument involves not only logos but ethos and pathos as well.
not a good student, can't give you a good overview but this kind of blew me away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon... - you also can explain the y-combinator from first principles. Not sure how practical that is :)
Yes, I'm willing to be frank and state explicitly that I'm calling this person a liar.
Yep and every concept you introduce is a revolution for the general population. That's the idea.
Only on the first ~$77K worth, which is probably less than the annual dividend plus capital gains income for a wealthy person.
FWIW there is essentially no historical evidence that stocks that pay more dividends are more "rational."

Stocks likes TLSA and TWTR have high multiples because they stand a decent chance of having a lot of growth in the future, they have a lot of volatility because that growth is uncertain. These are fundamental facts about their business that wouldn't go away if they squeezed out some sort of token dividend.
Don’t Shoot Messenger
My private health insurance in NZ costs $1650 USD a year, including dental and optical, and nearly unlimited hospital care.

On earnings of $~100K USD, you'd pay $26.5K USD in income tax, $1.2K in compulsory accident insurance, for a total tax rate of 28.12% (https://www.paye.net.nz/calculator.html).
I think Spotify needs Apple far more than Netflix does. You don't listen to Spotify (for the most part) on TVs, but Netflix is there.

Many fewer folks use Spotify on desktop OSs, it's common for Netflix.

Netflix is well positioned to fight Apple over this, and if they call Apple's bluff, Apple will likely be forced to consider.
My marriage is just as valid as anyone else’s. And it’s incredily offensive to suggest that my marriage is somehow an attack on marriage itself. Your view is bigotry in an old, familiar form, and can only be defended based on religion, which has no role in limiting civil rights within our secular society.
I once found a bug for a company and reported it on Hackerone. Then they said it was a duplicate bug report and paid nothing but also immediately fixed it. My problem is most bug bounty programs put the power completely in the hands of the company.

I think there is probably a market for a site where users post the bounties with a detailed and accurate description and their desired price or the community and affected company bid to determine the value of a bug. The affected company could then "purchase" the bug and then the person who filed the report would pay an authoritative trusted third party like a professional security firm to verify the vulnerability. Then the person who found and reported it gets paid if the third party verifies it exists. The company would only get the vulnerability description if the third party verifies it to exist.
I'd never looked at it this way before but it makes sense.
You'd have thought that accounting for the extent of a cancer at diagnosis would be a requirement for determining the success of any subsequent treatment.

Is it cynical to assume that a lot of medical research is next to worthless, done almost as a box ticking exercise. Do research to get a paper published to put on your resume. And a lot more is done by/for pharmaceutical companies who have an interest in their drug been shown in a good light.
Great comment.

But I also can't help but think that it ascribes an unnecessary purity of purpose/intent to the "working people" of the city.

Do they think they have common cause with the "working people" of a rust belt town or exurb? Do they (or for that matter, the trustafarians) think the rust belt iron worker's lifestyle or neighborhood is hip and cool?
Dividends are not always frequent and predictable. There is certainly no requirement that they be. A board can decide to pay a dividend (or not pay one) or to reduce the dividend at any time, unless the corporations bylaws somehow protect it (although they can typically change these as well).
> Grandma might not invent the next internet on an iPad but your kid is also never going to get that opportunity.

Actually Playgrounds is pretty amazing. And you can definitely spin up a development platform in AWS and then Remote Desktop from your iPad or access via Coda or similar Terminal tools.
>You have to step back a few links in the chain to see the error here.

What error? He isn't indicating that the mechanics of capital equity valuation are wrong, but that the sheer size of the value extraction from employees which occurs in de-risked large entities far exceeds what most people would expect.

You can have all of the conditions leading to wealth creation as in your post in a system where labour has far better leverage to capture a larger portion of their own value creation.

The interesting knock-on effect is that reviews of inequality indicate that firm formation is actually amplified in situations where labour has that leverage, as workers are able to get more self-generated capital through labour to finance their own bootstrapped projects/businesses.
> It gives me a real, irrevocable return on my investment

Why don't you just sell a bit of your holdings each year, and get this irrevocable return yourself?

And if others don't want to sell and be taxed each year, they can just hold onto their shares (and continue to be subject to market risk).
I was thinking the internet was started around 1970. Your point is correct, but any Grandma working on it then is very likely dead, so unlikely to be working on the next internet.
> However, I personally wouldn't assume that AMDs HT implementation doesn't have similar issues.

It does not. The fundamental difference between AMD and Intel CPUs in all these faults is that AMD does all permissions checks eagerly before returning results from memory, while when speculating, Intel defers them until speculation is resolved.

This does not mean that AMD escaped all of it, because some of the attacks (eg, spectre variant 1) do not cross a protection boundary that permissions checks would catch.
> The best fix for this is to eliminate the "benefits" corporations see by hiring temps/part time over just hiring for a full time job.

Having worked at a big tech co, our budget for contractors and vendors was different than our budget for full time employees.

It wasn't that vendors were even cheaper, the average was close to $100 / hour, and vendors got paid for every hour they worked! But vendors were easier to let go if they turned out to not be good, or if (when) the department budget was cut.

Getting approval for head count could take forever, but if I wanted to hire 3 vendors next week, it was only an issue of "is the money there right now?", not "will the money be there for years and years to come".

(As an aside, at one point in time the 3rd or 4th highest earning person in the building was one of my vendors, he was earning over 250K per year for awhile, all cash!)
I had this issue and it turned out to be fluctuations in the power source. Purchased an official RPi brick, and put the root filesystem into read-only mode and the Pi became much more resilient. (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=161416)
a naive pursuit of maximizing shareholder value outside of greater context could easily result in failing to maximize shareholder value, let alone worse productivity metrics.

I’m not saying the article is faultless, but I don’t agree with the reaction to the quote you selected. It seems very reasonable to me.
OpenAI at The International – Game 2
I have one of these (https://www.amazon.com/LG-32MA70HY-P-32-inch-Monitor-Display... an external monitor for just that. It includes some pretty nice features if you choose to use them, and in my opinion is a fairly good price for what you get.
Your income from your employer is not taxed on the corporation. It's a cost of doing business and is tax deductible.
It is, in this case "double taxation" is a term of art and denotes the shareholders' perspective because the shareholder is taxed first on corporate income (as "owners" of the corporation) and second on receipt of their dividends (as part of their individual income).

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/03/102203.asp
Yeah, that's where I 'met' him. But I've quit twitter...
https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview?use...
This is neat, but my biggest problem isn't the key.

My biggest problem is how many things I have to configure to even be able to start to use the key.

There is a reason why Duo got bought for >2Gigabucks. 2FA is a PITA to administer.
Thank you! You're too kind.
most taxable investors strongly prefer buybacks. capital gains from the equity appreciation are taxed at no more than 20% vs whatever your income tax rate is which can be 25%-50%.
I've never been in a union but know people who have. From this small and biased sample of unions:

- Pay is based on seniority, not skill

- You have to please your boss from the company and also the union

I don't want either of these things. If there is a union where this doesn't happen then I could consider it.
If Phoronix never agreed to the license, then I can't see how that wouldn't be legal. And otherwise it's going to be a good year for Europe-based benchmarkers.
I would not use medium.com to write a blog (in fact I write a blog with no audience and it's not on Medium).

First, the average quality of a Medium blog post continues to go down. A year ago I wouldn't have hesitated to follow a medium link, but now a combination of 1) low quality posts 2) low quality writers and 3) annoying popup means I stare at the link to try and see if I've read from this author before and if what they wrote is worth the hassle

Just my 2 cents, I'm sure others derive value from it, it's just that I don't
Should have added a smiley or something to my comment. I meant it more as a history remimder then social commentary.
You don't exchange any stock when you're paid dividend. If you sold a bit of your holdings each year you would eventually have no equity left.
Right, that's why the market is functioning well when it's rewarding you for bring that information to it earlier. That's what short selling does.
Because they're taking the tax savings from the irresponsible congressional actions and using that to enrich the wealthy rather than raising the pay of their workers by a non-trivial amount.
I think it's poor form to just refer to the opposing position in an argument as a "meme", then feel as though simply referring to it as a "meme" makes it so you don't need to actually make a counterargument. I see this a lot on the internet lately and I'm not sure why people think that different opinions can just be shrugged off and called "memes". That's not even what a meme is!

The author makes the point that, when companies spend so much on stock buybacks they don't have reserves to keep things running in economic downturns, thus leaving them in grave danger should recession come around, and leaves their employees more exposed than they need to be. I think this is a point worth talking about, especially if you feel it's not true, because by calling it a meme and not countering it, you've given no chance to bat for your own opinion and offering counterpoints.

On the subject of the first quote, I'm no economist, but it seems perfectly feasible that optimizing for shareholder value does not perfectly correlate to optimized productivity. For example, Musk wants to take Tesla private because he feels the quarterly stock review cycle restricts his ability to innovate and think long term. Musk is quite the capitalist, so I think the idea that optimizing for share price being bad for productivity is certainly worth presenting at the table.
Sorry I don't really understand your point. Some people short sell on a "short" time line, but some people try and make large, long term plays via shorting. Ackman and Herbalife, being a canonical example.
You could make a nuanced argument like that, sure. But if you did that, you'd have to actually flush it out, and making an argument like that actually work is quite hard. Which is why this article doesn't bother to attempt it. They just state it, and hope nobody is paying attention.
You are technically correct assuming your dividends aren't of the qualified variety. In that instance you don't pay capital gains, you instead pay full-fat income taxes!

Capital gains are, however, absolutely owed on qualified dividends.

In either case (with the added assumption that we're talking about securities held in a non-tax-advantaged account), your brokerage will send you an IRS form 1099-div.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/011215/if-i-reinves...
Emilie hat die Bilder für die Hochzeit meines besten Freundes gemacht
​
"Am Tag nach der Hochzeit haben wir uns gefragt, was unser Lieblingsmoment des Tages war und wir beide stimmten zu, dass es die Zeremonie war. Ich denke, manchmal kann man sich mit dem Essen auf den Partyaspekt konzentrieren , Musik und Dekorationen und nicht darüber nachdenken, wie die Zeremonie stattfinden wird. Eine meiner denkwürdigsten Erinnerungen an diesen Tag ist, dass ich Marks Gesicht sah, als ich den Gang entlang ging und wie glücklich ich mich fühlte. Es ist ein wunderbares Gefühl, vor all deinen Freunden und deiner Familie zu stehen und deine Liebe füreinander zu erklären. "

Emilie May Fotografie von Emilie Maye hat diese entzückenden Bilder des wunderschönen Paares und all ihrer süßen und herzlichen Momente festgehalten .

"Emilie hat die Fotos für die Hochzeit meines besten Freundes gemacht und als ich das Fotoalbum und die Schönheit der Fotos des Tages gesehen habe neckholder abendkleid, hatte ich Tränen in den Augen, wie schön sie waren und wie Sie hatte ihren Tag festgehalten, ich wusste, dass Emily für unsere Hochzeit wunderbar geeignet sein würde und würde das Gefühl unserer Tage perfekt einfangen. "

" Wir wollten jemanden aus der Gegend und die Leute von Floral Affair in Chorlton waren großartig Ich wollte die Arrangements, die ich mir vorgestellt hatte, und wollte saisonale Blumen mit einem natürlichen Grünlandgefühl mit schönen leuchtenden Farben. "
http://www.mekleid.de/
Don’t keep backups on your web server, even if you think they’re secret
No it's not "often" that high. Here's the list of the top 20 highest earnings per employee per year: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-facebook-alphabet-most...

Industrial Bank is #20 at $144k. That means that unless you work at one of the 20 companies on that list, your company is making less than $144k in earnings per employee. That profit is then taxed, and only a fraction of that is returned to shareholders, with the rest re-invested in the business.

So there's no way it's often hundreds of thousands.
Dividend income on "qualified dividends" is taxed at the capital gains rate.
That's capitalism, baby. He who controls the capital reaps the rewards.
With two $5k cars, you can guarantee safety by having a leader car clear the road while you follow at very low speed.

Is there a hyperthreading joke here somewhere?
assuming you mean tesla- they couldn't pay dividends because they have massively negative EPS.

twitter, surprisingly, is actually showing a positive EPS (is that new?) although the P/E is > 100 so, again, a dividend would be pretty small.

at least apple is paying out these days.
It all depends. Instagram was ~13 employees when bought at $1B. WhatsApp was like ~30-40 employees and bought at $19B.
He's slowly re-inventing communism. Give him time.
Or Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2018/03/are-buybacks-really-shortchanging-in...

Companies choose how much equity capital to put to work based on

- the investment opportunities they have;

- the availability and cost of equity capital;

- the availability and cost of alternative capital (i.e. debt which is generally cheaper for well-established firms that generate cash flow);

- the leverage or financial risk profile that makes sense, (companies with more stable cash flow may use more debt v. equity)

When companies have large growth opportunities, have negative cash flow, and the stock price is high/equity cost of capital is low, they increase equity capital. (e.g. Tesla selling stock)

When cash flow turns positive, reinvestment opportunities diminish, the stock price is low, they return equity capital. (e.g. Apple paying a dividend and buying back stock)

How you return the capital is an accounting/tax decision. There's nothing very special or evil about doing it by buying back stock. Aside from tax issues, no difference vs. paying a dividend.

If the tax on capital gains is the same as on dividends, dividend forces the shareholders to have a taxable event, whereas the buyback lets shareholders choose whether to sell back to the company at a given time/price.
Can I ask, Is Intel going to sue us if compare benchmarks with SMT to no SMT? Like they mentioned about the microcode benchmarks. Intel is in trouble.
Doesnot mean the people targeted by software fair any better with such data leaked on the internet.
> I think it's poor form to just refer to the opposing position in an argument as a "meme", then feel as though simply referring to it as a "meme" makes it so you don't need to actually make a counterargument.

If you read my comment, i'm applying Hitchen's razor: That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. They didn't make an argument.

> I see this a lot on the internet lately and I'm not sure why people think that different opinions can just be shrugged off and called "memes". That's not even what a meme is!

First of all, yes, it is exactly what a meme is. A meme is a socially transmitted idea with virality. That is precisely what I am asserting this "buybacks are evil" idea is.

> The author makes the point that, when companies spend so much on stock buybacks they don't have reserves to keep things running in economic downturns, thus leaving them in grave danger should recession come around, and leaves their employees more exposed than they need to be.

The author does try to make that throwaway point, though of course, provides no evidence that it was in any way related to buybacks. Just think through the idea you're asserting here: In the interest of maximizing shareholder value the company is going to make itself more likely to go bankrupt in the future? How does that maximize shareholder value?

Secondly, even if they were doing that, which there is no evidence that they are: if you ban buybacks, they'll just switch to dividends. If you ban dividends, you've now banned all mechanisms by which investors may be remunerated for their capital investment, and thereby effectively banned the stock market.
I have, on more than one occasion, resigned saying "I don't do this kind of work". Nothing more and nothing less, mostly because I'm usually deep enough to see what's happening at the implementation level I rarely get in that (unethical or distasteful) situation without knowing.