skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is of course illegal

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?

If only there were some sort of books of history we could go look this stuff up in to find out.

And I think you'll find corporations have problems and excesses, too, but you seem perfectly willing to tolerate those.

As to the rest, see the other replies: "I have and have always had good bargaining power" does not imply "I will always have good bargaining power". In fact, the belief that how things are now is how they always must be is one of the most basic economic mistakes a person can make.
I'm in this exact scenario. I am thinking I might just go with AMD this time around, even if it is mostly an illusory short-term strength over Intel. In the long run I will undoubtedly have to refresh my hardware as new exploits come out, but at least I can take solace in the fact that I'm only worried about a single machine and not a datacenter.
What's your history with them that leads you to this conclusion? If you don't have any, and you're simply making assumptions based on their choice of licensing terms, what would your argument look like if you instead imagined them as people acting in good faith, trying to provide software to people on terms that allow them to both continue improving the software while also providing for their families?

I guess the reason I have trouble assuming bad faith with things like this is because it would be much easier for these people to just get high paying jobs at big software companies than to try to eke out a living making a useful source-provided (it would be so much easier to just use "open source" here, but that is verboten) product while arguing with people like you.
I've got no stake in this. I don't really care if buybacks are good or bad. But the author makes a point that buybacks, being so tax effective, make companies much more likely to spend their money on stock buyback rather than rainy day funds and investing in research/development/employees.

I think that's an interesting idea, I don't know if it's right or not, but since you just keep saying the argument makes no points while making no points of your own, I have no way knowing why you feel this position is inaccurate. Could you argue against that point instead of dismissing it? I'd like to hear what you think.
Where does the capital come from that flows in to savings?

- From wages, which are paid by enterprises that create the goods that are consumed

- From investment gains in enterprises that create the goods that are consumed

Its consumption all the way down.
Who is gaurding the hen house n these companies?

Experian
Target
Spyfone
????
I'd really like to use FIDO for entire organization. For windows logins, .NET apps etc. But there is no easy solution.

On the other hand TOTP is simple to add for .NET apps.
what’s the difference between a union and a bunch of small 1 person companies all deciding to price fix?
Do you want to have your cake and eat it too?

The difference is that if the company pays dividends then the stock price will drop because it represents a claim on a smaller amount of assets. So you can achieve exactly the same effect yourself by periodically selling a small percentage of your holdings. It's like having a big piece of a small cake versus a small piece of a big cake: if you get the same amount of cake in the end then who cares how it's shaped.
Sure. But that's not a fundamental difference, that's just a difference in normal usage.

The only fundamental difference between stocks and dividends from an investor perspective that I'm aware of is tax treatment.
A few points, from a mostly-laymen point of view.

When you watch a SpaceX launch they actually have to really dial down their acceleration to get through Max-Q, the highest dynamic pressure, due to air resistance. Air resistance is a function of speed SQUARED and the density of air. By starting the rocket that much higher, I believe they are essentially removing that inefficiency- by the time they're moving fast enough for it to matter, there isn't enough air for it to matter.

There's also the whole tyranny of rocketry equation. The first foot of elevation gained is the hardest and the first mile per hour of speed is the hardest. Starting even a little bit higher and faster is a big win over taking off from sea level.

And as others have said, they've got incredible flexibility here. Whatever orbit you want to be in, the launch will take place in that orbit. A lot of traditional rocket launches have 'instantaneous' launch windows where missing by 1 second is a no-go because the ground is only in the right spot at one moment.

Most important of all: let them try! If this whole thing is a bust, it's private enterprise and you and I lose nothing over it while getting to see an enormous jet. And if it does work, we all win from the increase in availability of satellites and access to space.
It looks like CAT only does allocation of the last level cache (ie, L3). Despite the literature claiming this could prevent timing attacks, but I don't see how it could. Isn't there enough difference in speed between L3 and L1 that one should be able to extract timing information?
The future of eCommerce revolves around this single idea
> 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.

OK, let's address that argument.

The alternative to stock buybacks is stock dividends. Both of those mechanisms deplete corporate cash reserves, but stock buybacks do them in a way that causes the stock value to appreciate, which has tax benefits for shareholders that outright dividends do not. If there's no potential for corporations to distribute their cash reserves to their shareholders at all, then there is no point in having a stock market in the first place.

> 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.

There are countless businesses, including some of the most valuable public businesses in the world, for whom the quarterly review cycle is not an impediment to innovation and success. Musk is probably humiliated that Tesla is running out of money and has not been doing a good job of handling the transparency involved in having a publicly owned company.
I’m no economist either, but it’s not rocket science to figure out that when rents increase on housing without improvements, you are losing quality of life (if we account for inflation) - though theoretically the rent increase could actually reflect the area becoming nicer / more convenient.

Consumption of real estate is fine when it means building real estate that will actually be used (which China is doing a lot of, even though some is unused). It’s bad when it essentially becomes speculation on property values, and I would argue that it’s also bad when property values rise and that wealth creation is only captured by incumbents / people that got in the market at the right time.

Other consumption can be non sustainable, but at least it often directly leads to some quality of life improvement that a rent hike may not.
23andMe will no longer let app developers read your DNA data
Ask HN: Where can I add value?
Pretty junior dev here (27). I'm trying to figure out where the best path to take my career is, and I'm not sure it's dev. Trying to figure out where I can best fit / add value.

I started out learning philosophy in college because I wanted to understand esoteric questions ("What is consciousness?"). Midway through, several friends encouraged me to do something 'practical', so I added a CS BA as a second major.

I did alright through the CS program, but I didn't really like it, unlike many in the HN crowd. Felt like I was perpetually swimming to catch up, which was very stressful.

Got internships in two small companies, and one of them hired me after school. Over time, I've moved away from dev work, and towards pre/post sale implementation work (We are a small B2B vendor, selling to large software companies. Our software is typically installed on-premise).

I've found that I've liked the following things:
* Learning vim (I have pretty damn deep knowledge of vim at this point. It's occasionally helpful.)
* Setting up Arch Linux from scratch.
* Learning some functional programming concepts on the side.
* Teaching people (I often coach clients on how to change system configurations for the software we install).
* Explaining complicated concepts to people.
* Finding clever ways to break things.

I'm neutral towards, but pretty good at:
* Task organization and prioritization.
* Documenting things in a manner that is clear to users.

On the flip side, I'm not very good at the following:
* The boring parts of industry software work (java, reading code, reading long documentation)
* Actually building stuff. (My GitHub has stuff like essential-scala and a partial workthrough of 'The Little Schemer'. Most recently, I've been working through overthewire's bandit.)
* Office politics (although I'm not terrible).

Would love any ideas or suggestions about what paths I might best fit into.
I guess there's that too. As someone that has strayed from the herd, I had forgotten about that whole planned obsolescence thing. Although the herd immunity does still somewhat apply to outdated devices, given the bank knows which Android version you're on, and can thus increase their prior that the device has been pwnt by 4th parties.
Exactly. Low margin rates and the fact that TSLA doesn't pay a dividend really help shorts maintain long-term positions, as well.
It's all about pixels. Don't bother with a huge screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080.

I would be interested in something like 4K (3840 x 2160) or the best resolution your laptop can support.
The One Rule for Life
Show HN: Odc – Easily update your NPM dependencies to their latest versions
I'm not sure why this is being down voted, it's true.
Sure, and I never said the stock price and innovation are inversely correlated, but I have a feeling that it's a very reasonable idea that optimizing for stock price based on speculation in the free market is an imperfect way to encourage productivity and innovation, and it's worth discussing how the economy could be restructured in a way that did so more perfectly than stock prices.

I don't know what that system would be, and I'm not going to come here and say it's time for a socialist revolution, but perhaps we could make a better free market and we'd all be better off without speculated stock prices being our primary source of motivation.
No, it's just that this principle isn't true. There are a lot of factors that influence which languages and systems persist. Being of sound design is a factor, but not the biggest one.

Take Javascript, for example. It's the top language on Github. Its not there because its everyone's favorite language, or because it's an ideal language for writing reliable software. Its there because its baked into web browsers. We're now starting to get full-featured reliable compilers into JS with sourcemaps and whatnot, plus things like webassembly. So it's becoming quite reasonable these days to write code for the web in a language that isn't JS and not feel like a second-tier citizen. But that hasn't always been the case, so people wrote a lot of JS out of necessity. And that's why it's at the top.

(I don't mean to riff on JS in this post. There are plenty of other opportunities for that. The language has improved over the years, and this is surely part of the reason it's remained at #1, and part of the reason why browser vendors didn't throw up their hands and try a different language instead. But the main reason its at the top is because it's the language of the web.)

If SmallTalk were built into browsers instead of JS, then we'd all be writing SmallTalk. And it'd be blazing fast. And that has nothing to do with how sound its design is.
I wonder if it would be possible for developers / other stake holders to launch an investment fund who's sole purpose is buy shares in Apple / Microsoft / etc with the view to influence internal policy.

Activist investor style.
30% on a subscription-based model is not cheap. Calculate that over a year or more, and that's not exactly pocket change.

That's roughly $40 per year that goes into Apple's pocket on an $11/month subscription in the name of marginal security.
Yes, and long term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than dividends, so long term shareholders prefer it.
You have 9 chickens? Do they lay a lot of eggs? are they purely for egg laying?
Netflix can't disable subscriptions and simply write "please go to Netflix.com to start your trial" or else Apple will reject that app.
One reason that property values have gone up in these places is that property in world cities is now often used as an investment vehicle for foreigners who made fortunes in politically unstable places, and want to park their money somewhere safe, or at least diversified. Often those fortunes were embezzled from public coffers or built on criminal enterprises, and real estate is a magnet for money laundering. But this kind of investment is problematic even when the money’s source is legitimate.

Sure, if you want to talk about Colombian narco-dollars, or Russian keptocracy.

China has a huge middle class, who worked all their life and had mandated government savings, with a pension for women at age 55.

Please, do not write down all foreign investment in property to stolen money: Chinese purchasors in the west of small to medium size flats, and houses are buying for three reasons

1) the cost of property in Beijing is too high
2) their children are doing masters or phd programmes in the economy and its sensible to invest and save the kid rental
3) they want an exit strategy for their life savings if things go bad in the home country

They are not kleptocrats. This is not stolen money. This is 30 or 40 years of savings, coupled to insane property bubbles.

[Edit] I know some of them. I talk to them about this. I am not reporting from things I read, this is what I know from my neighbours in my apartment complex.
Eventbrite does this too on their website, however on the mobile app the advertised price includes any fees.
Since software is eating the world, now every company has been forced to become an innovative tech company just to survive. What we used to think of as "tech" companies are no longer anything special.
The answer to the question "why don't they hire infinite testers?" is the same as the answer to "why don't they switch to 8x as many testers per app?"
> Tax advantages for shareholders are a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

You can call this a wealth transfer, but only if you're willing to accept that every decision in the tax code is a wealth transfer. Graduated rates? Wealth transfer to the poor. Lower rates for long-term capital gains? Wealth transfer to the rich. Refundable tax credits? Wealth transfer to the poor.

Unfortunately, going down this road isn't terribly productive from a tax policy perspective since it doesn't actually tell us what the right choices to make are. Where should LTCG rates be, compared to OI rates? Should they be subject to FICA/Med withholding? How do we weigh this against the desire to incentivize people to save? It's not as simple as labeling everything as a wealth transfer in one direction or the other.
> think calling their language "deliberately misleading" is deliberately misleading when there is a representative from the project here telling you that they do not intend to mislead (thus even if it is misleading, it isn't deliberate).

Well, yes, of you assume the honesty of the person being accused of being deliberately misleading, then that forces you to reject the claim that they are being deliberately misleading, but that is also a prime example of circular reasoning.
To me they’re entirely different products. I use Snapchat to send funny things I see to specific friends who will find them funny. I can’t do that on Instagram without broadcasting that same message to over 100 people.
Something is very wrong when both home vacancy rates and housing prices are high. Vacant investment homes and vacation homes shouldn’t be a thing while a first home is financially out of reach for most people.
> Here's the longer paper the author wrote a couple years ago that explains his reasoning. You may disagree with his argument, but to dismiss it outright as having no merit says more about you than it does about the author or the NYT.

I criticized him for not making an argument in the article. He didn't, nor did he link to this paper.

But sure, let's address this argument:

> >If hundreds of billions of dollars annually stop flowing out of the nation’s major corporations to do buybacks, then vast amounts of resources will become available to provide the financial commitment that innovation requires.84 Ban buybacks, and companies will be able to use these funds not only, or even primarily, to finance capital expenditures but more importantly to attract, train, retain, and motivate their career employees. In high-tech companies a significant proportion of these employees will be engaged in R&D, but the innovative enterprise needs experienced and motivated employees in a range of other functions as well. And some of the funds made available by a buyback ban can flow to the government as tax revenues to enable it to invest in physical infrastructure and human knowledge that can underpin the next generation of innovation.

If the problem with buybacks is that they return capital to shareholders then you're going to have to do a lot more than ban buybacks to stop it. If you want to argue against buybacks, you need to argue that they are worse than other methods of returning cash to shareholders. Arguments that they are bad because they return capital to the people who invested the capital are arguments against capitalism itself. And by all means, if you want to make an argument against capitalism, go for it. But don't pretend it's got something to do with buybacks.
Actually, we should eliminate the corporate income tax, and replace it with taxing pollution (such as taxing plastic).
Unless the browser is using hypervisor https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/windo...
the Medicare tax would have to increase dramatically

Would it? It already covers all the old people who suck down almost all the healthcare expenses already. Expanding it would cover younger and healthier people. I don't know the numbers...that's just my quick take.
> * Developers are forced to comply with Apple's rules. Otherwise companies could develop shitty apps that use private APIs to work around Apple's restrictions and then force customers to open up their devices to use it.

This. Apple consistently chooses to make workaround options complex for the purposes of discouraging this sort of activity.

See:

* Deprecated APIs are actually obsoleted and removed; your app won't run in the new OS version and that means people buying hardware can't run your app.

* Right click has long been a hardware feature but off by default, so that apps wouldn't build in non-standard mouse 'gestures'.

* New ITP anti-tracking features in Safari have no off switch The solution to cookie issues is to change how your app works (such that you don't use hidden cross-domain redirects/frames)

* Side loading apps onto iOS devices is not possible without a business profile or the end user having a development environment - and misused business profiles are revoked.

* The option to turn off app signatures has been removed from the UI (not always the case - Minecraft for instance used to tell users to turn app signature verification off globally to work around their lack of app signing).

* Android has a list of permissions you must grant apps in order to install them. iOS on the other hand requires the application to prompt for individual permissions (location information, microphone access, etc), requires a description of why they want that permission, and per App Store guidelines must run with (reduced) functionality should the user say no.
Technically, nothing needs to be additionally configured for FIDO U2F to be implemented for an application. You just need to connect the key to your account and it should just prompt you to click the button when you need to sign in. If a company requires a phone number or some other byzantine process for registering a key that is their own design choice.

I get that simple U2F key registration is not what's seen in a lot of time in the real world, but most implementations are needlessly complex IMO.
Companies can issue more shares at any time in order to raise money. Doing a stock buyback is easily reversed, not a trap.
Definitely.

The common complaint about subscription models is obviously good: if the company folds you have nothing, instead of an unsupported product. But it neglects the other issue, which is that companies intentionally cut off the possibility of "good enough" to guarantee revenue.

I don't think its an accident that products like Microsoft Office went to subscriptions around the time it becomes very hard to imagine a new feature actually worth buying for.
Very small percentage? From a quick Google roughly 17-25% of Apple employees are engineers. Assuming all engineers get options, and that options are around 1/4 of an engineers compensation, and assuming that buybacks raised Apple's stock by 2% (I don't know how accurate that number is, but I'm just throwing it out there), each employee saw a 0.5% bonus per year assuming their options were issued before the buyback was decided. That's definitely non-negligible; it's around $1000/year for the average engineer.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple also compensated some high-value non-engineers in stock. To find the actual number of people who benefit, you would have to include them, plus you would have to add in all the people who don't work at Apple but own Apple stock directly or indirectly (for example, while I don't work at Apple, I probably own some stock because of my participation in a mutual fund).

I'm pretty certain that there are tens of thousands of people who see an increase in earnings because of Apple buybacks. The majority of them might be well-off since they are engineers or have the luxury of purchasing mutual funds, but I am hardly a millionaire or billionaire.

EDIT: Did more Googling; Apple's stock jumped around 12% after announcing their buyback, so the bonus is around 3%. I would love a $6000 bonus/year for the next few years. [0]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/05/12/what-impa... [0]
Also why I applied to YC :)

Although different idea slightly..

Theres also our website: https://projectpiglet.com

Which uses this data to find insiders in companies and suggests short term trades on that info (we also have a long term algorithm I use, up 100% yoy).

There's actually a ton of applications, our focus is Enterprise search at the moment.

However, it's setup so what ever you send to the ingestion end point is captured (so you could send all customer engagements, or Reddit, or medium). Basically, using the system how you want.
It would likely just encourage convoluted corporate structures that would function more-or-less equivalently to the ones we have today.
Sell+My+House+Fast+Plano+|+214-233-5504