skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Venture capital wouldn't exist if this weren't the case. Hell, hacker news wouldn't exist if this weren't the case.
A large number of people who work at, say Apple, the company which bought the most of their stock back, will see very non-trivial increases in effective compensation because of stock price rises.
Nope, just a small batch test-chip run. And even out of a few dozen chips, I think we only did packaging for ~5 chips.

It boots Linux, but at 6 mm^2, it's not really big enough to contain an on-chip memory controller, so going out to DRAM is through an FPGA controller and thus is painful.
This is a redirect, and would be trivial to detect and override at the browser level.

Actually, the back button should auto negate redirect pages
Perhaps this URL https://www.amazon.com/LG-32MA70HY-P-32-inch-Monitor-Display...
It's an interesting observation then that the people doing the "highly critical peer review" might promote papers with no source code showing how the calculations were done over papers with messy-but-available source code. I know some fields intentionally/explicitly hide their working ("Law and sausage are two things you do not want to see being made."), but I wouldn't have thought academia would subscribe to that...

There's a lot to be said for the IETF's policy of "rough consensus and running code".
Sigh. Buybacks and dividends are mathematically identical. Well...that's not true. Dividends get taxed harder than buybacks, which is why more and more [institutional] investors want companies to switch to buybacks over dividends.

I feel like people have been conditioned to get an irrational hatred when they hear the word "buyback" as if it were some evil trick pulled by those evil banksters over in wallstreet. "buybacks are killing capitalism" blah blah. Its pure FUD that comes from finance being complex and the average person not being nearly informed enough about it to parse it correctly.

Buybacks and dividends both are ways of returning capital to shareholders. Dividends do it directly, buybacks do it by raising the share price.

Example: Company makes 100$ profit and is worth 1000$ @ 1$/unit. You own 100 units of stock. Lets say it pays out everything to shareholders every year, once a year, at the end. It can pay this as a dividend, so you would get 10$ at the end of the year, for a total of 110$.

Or it can do buybacks, and buys 100$ worth of units, effectively removing them for existence, and lowering the total number of units to 900. The company still makes 100$ though, and to keep the same ratio of price to earnings, 10 (=1$*1000units/100$), the price of each unit needs to rise to 1.111$, making your shares worth 111$.

As you can see, they are pretty much identical, both giving 10% returns, except dividends are taxed much harder so buybacks win. The buyback shares are worth 1$ more, because this is a simplified example and I don't account for compounding, and you would have to continuously collect dividends and reinvest them continuously to get the same result(111$), which more closely approximates what happens in reality.

Dividends are just traditional, buybacks are just another way to do the same thing. Your "dividend" is the share price increasing over the course of the year.
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. This kind of investment is problematic even when the money’s source is legitimate.

Having housing owned by absentee landlords who live halfway around the world is mostly negative for a city’s residents (though might benefit some local property owners whose property values are thereby inflated). Remote owners for the most part don’t care about maintaining their property, improving the local neighborhood or city, forming relationships with tenants, etc., and sometimes even leave units unoccupied for extended periods of time, taking housing stock off the market.

I hope governments figure out some way to impose substantial additional taxes on non-owner-occupied housing, especially when it gets to large scale, or when units are kept unoccupied. The purpose of housing is to provide a place for people to live, not to build a fortune for a few capitalists, especially ones who are not local and are therefore largely unaccountable for bad behavior.
If you're working for a large public company, stock grants are dollar-denominated. Say you're given a sizeable stock bonus, $100k. How much of a benefit do you get from stock dividends & buybacks with that quantity of stock? A few thousand dollars per year, at most. Negligible compared to the per-employee dividend & stock buyback number.
sweet, what are you working on? We're capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
Exactly. Microsoft and other companies get a tax break by providing some employee compensation in the form of benefits (like health insurance or retirement plans) instead of wages. In exchange for that tax break, they are required to make the benefits available to all of their employees, from the janitor to the software engineer, on the same terms, with certain exceptions (like restricting to full-time workers only). By subcontracting, they can get out of making it available to the janitors or QA testers. The quality of health insurance, for example, offered by any of these outsourcers (not only Lionbridge) is much worse, in premiums, deductibles, and copays, than that of Microsoft or the other tech company actually in charge. And that's if they are offered insurance at all -- if the outsourcer isn't giving them one hour less than the number of hours necessary to qualify for health insurance.

It's a scam. Nothing stops companies from providing different quality levels of insurance to different types of employees; they just have to pay payroll taxes on that compensation. But they've managed to have it both ways -- they're getting the tax break while failing to hold up their end of the deal. The law needs to be retroactively changed to close this loophole and retroactively assess companies FICA tax, interest, and non-payment penalties on the full value of their health insurance, retirement, and other FICA-free benefits if they didn't really make it available to all employees. The result would be a huge tax bill for Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and everyone else.

Also, Microsoft and other companies need to be on the hook as joint employers, like the union was trying to do. The union was almost certain to win on that at the NLRB under a Democratic administration. There was no hope under a Republican NLRB. In addition to joint employment in the collective bargaining context, we need legislation to implement a very broad, unified joint employment standard (ABC test + Browning-Ferris indirect/potential control) across all federal employment laws, including tax, wage and hour, anti-discrimination, and workplace safety laws. Subcontracting should not be a "get out of jail free" card; every employer in a joint employer scenario should be jointly and severally liable for everything, regardless of their knowledge of the wrongdoing. (Otherwise, you get the "what, we're only paying the contractor $5/hour but we had no idea the contractor was paying its employees less than minimum wage!" issue.)
would have played if not for the login with facebook bit :/
Show HN: Chessbot – Play chess with teammates directly in Slack
We should eliminate corporate income tax completely, and raise taxes on individual investors to make the change revenue neutral. That would encourage economic growth by simplifying corporate accounting and reducing the incentive to engage in pointless financial engineering.
Usenix 2017 Paper: Reverse Engineering x86 Processor Microcode [pdf]
I think this is unlikely to happen in the current climate; it would be seen as a tax break for the rich. It's frustrating to me how many otherwise good ideas are off the table as they would be seen as helping the rich get richer.

Look, for instance, at the proposal to reduce the deductible limits for retirement contributions.
The media is against it because Trump. I don't see a difference between the corporation using the money or individuals. If the corporation thinks it doesn't need the money, it is probably better off in the hands of individual investors.
I was looking for a job after I shut down the data centers I had been operating (old company got acquired, load shifted to data centers at new company). I had experience running big distributed databases. There was a job posting that was almost a perfect match. Running a huge database of the people and circumstances around illegal migration into the US. Whatever I may or may not believe about immigration and lawful or unlawful migration I couldn’t stomach building an efficient system for hunting down down people who come here looking for work. I figured I should never build something if I don’t want to be on the receiving end of it. But I guess the “are we the baddies?” moment cake when I realized that someone else went and build it and in a democracy I have to take some responsibility for that anyway.
But worker pay won’t go up unless there’s a shortage of workers. This is orthogonal to worker pay.
In the frontier days of app stores, a lot of the policies made way more sense. 30% cut but you don't need to engage a payment processor and it makes it way easier for the consumer to pay? Sure! App approval required so people don't download malware? That's good for consumers, which is also good for the ecosystem. Apple is much better at this than Google is too as we've seen more misbehaving Android apps than iOS (eg crypto mining in the background).

But Apple (and Google, IMHO to a lesser extent) are starting to use their gatekeeper positions for their own advantage. And these markets are getting so huge and the potential damage to other companies so large that they're just inviting government action, probably by the EU first but I can also see the US getting to the point of taking antitrust action.

It's clear Apple has streaming and original content ambitions. They also have iTunes of course. If they're not careful they're going to trigger intervention when they arbitrarily start applying rules to Hulu and Amazon Prime Video that don't apply to others.

There are already some pretty silly contortions for these policies. Take Amazon. You can purchase items through the iOS app... except for anything digital like, say, Kindle books. But you can buy Kindle books elsewhere and then load them on the iOS Kindle app using your email and password. As others have noted, other companies haven't gotten these exceptions.

This is also why I think it's a huge mistake for Apple to get into the original content game. Their other businesses are so huge that original content will never be able to compete on a revenue basis. Yet they risk their own platform by favouring their own content. Government action could be ruinous for them. When Apple competes on their own platform against third parties it undermines faith in that platform and (IMHO) its long term health (even viability).

I don't know what the alternative is though. It's not letting anyone install anything as much as tech-savvy purists may think so. That's actually not what consumers want or need. Is it allowing competition in App stores? Maybe. There isn't just one domain registrar and just one root-level CA.
ICBM time to target is around 15 minutes. I assume that satellite shoot down time is similar with a rocket. Does going from 15 minutes of warning to instant give much of a tactical advantage?
> Are they allowing downloads for offline viewing?

They do for quite a few items in their catalog - probably not even a majority, but quite a few nonetheless.
By using the key, I assume you mean how painful it is to implement it server-side?
Laura Lee Hacked During Apology
Break them then, with no warning. Letting Javascript trump browser controls (or spam confirmation popups) is a problem that never should have been allowed to live beyond the 90s.
I think it's worth noting, too, that science is very skeptical of itself. To my knowledge, there's only 3 accepted laws: those of thermodynamics.

Science is not about necessarily finding the perfect explanation, but finding a more perfect explanation. Always speculating, testing, refining, building on the shoulders of the giants that have come before us. I doubt within my lifetime, or even in anyone's lifetime, that we will truly have a Grand Universal Theory that fits 100% of the time. But, I have no doubt that we'll keeping making steps to a more perfect explanation. Sometimes it will be small steps, others huge leaps, but there will be progress, but no completion; at least that's my current thought.
> Those people could easily be full time employees with benefits---only employed by Lionsbridge, rather than Microsoft.

Not good enough. The quality of benefits from Lionbridge or similar companies is much worse than the benefits offered by Microsoft. Microsoft is getting a tax break (they don't pay FICA on health insurance or certain other benefit-based employee compensation) dependent on making those benefits available to all employees; they need to hold up their end of that deal instead of scamming taxpayers by using subcontracting loopholes.
Around 50% of Americans hold no stock at all, including indirect holdings like pensions, 401k etc.
Research Software Engineer: A New Career Track?
Yes, but would you agree that dividends are typically frequent and predictable? I think that's a fair statement in comparison to stock buybacks.
> Interestingly, I think the vast majority of people probably think open source means the source is visible, regardless of whether it's an OSI approved license, and regardless of whether they are happy with the license.

It leaves us with an education problem.

Ten years ago I don't recall ever seeing people confuse the term Open Source with source-code-available - but the Open Source community was much, much smaller then so I guess the people involved were all on the same page.

Now that Open Source has genuinely won (when's the last time you hard a company say they have a policy of NOT using open source?) it seems we have a new terminology problem that I was previously unaware of.
If you compare it thinking of it as a sales tax model, Apple’s tax rate is almost 43%.

Dev sells app for $0.69, Apple adds a 43% tax on top ($0.30), for a cost to consumer of $0.99 before paying the state/local tax.
The thesis that Apple got to its one trillion market cap helped by buybacks is so absurd that it hurts to see how many people repeated it. Matt Levine also commented on the issue (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-07/buying-yo...):

“The theory here is essentially that if Apple had 220 billion more dollars—roughly the amount of buybacks it has done in the last six years—then it would be worth less money. It doesn’t sound especially plausible. Presumably Apple plus $220 billion would be worth at least, like, a dollar more than Apple alone? And if the buybacks work so well, why not do more? Why not sell off all of Apple’s businesses, use the money to buy back stock, and leave Apple as an empty shell with a reduced share count and a $2 trillion valuation?”
Xiao8 and Ferrari, who are playing in today's game were the Chinese casters for yesterday's game. So expect them to have an idea of what the bots will be up to.
The quarterly stock review cycle hasn't restricted Jeff Bezos' ability to innovate and think long term. Investors will tolerate losses for a long time if you have a plan and execute on it consistently. But if you constantly over promise and under deliver that impacts management credibility, which will naturally be reflected in the stock price.
I'd tentatively agree with that. I don't think corporate taxation is particularly valuable, and corporations are much harder to effectively tax. Wealth inequality matters at the individual level anyway, not the corporate level.
My personal opinion is "not yet".

Give intel some time to cope with this newest set of vulns, see if they can find a way to re-enable hyper threading safely, and if they can't and are still advertising hyper threading, then start going after them.
Those increases are only non-trivial and meaningful to employees who have a non-trivial or meaningful amount of equity. In other words a very small percentage of employees.
Which is why damages for this negligence should have statutory minimums. $10,000 mentioned elsewhere in this thread is a nice round number. If given a sufficient period to fix their shit (a year?), no one can complain that they've been harmed by such a requirement. I've seen this in contracts, which said basically, "since it will take years for a court to assess damages if you do this awful thing you agree not to do, we stipulate here that the damages will be $X instead."
It's not about subjectivity. It's about exposure. A lot of people weren't exposed to a language long enough to know what is actually better.

I bet if everyone were exposed equal parts to smalltalk, javascript, haskell, lisp and python you will see an entirely different paradigm.
Each story cited the high housing expense to income ratio.

Focus on problem not symptoms.
Many corporations have used debt-financed stock buybacks.
A buyback is just a dividend except instead of cash the stockholder receives more ownership. I never see this type of article written about dividends which makes me wonder why we see them about buybacks.
A website from 1996 will look much the same in a modern version of Chrome. Good luck with your SDKs.
The reason the press is so obsessed with stock buybacks is because the press loves talking about how much the middle class is getting "screwed" by big corporations, no matter how benign the issue at hand is. If you make a lot of money, you probably did/are doing something shady.

It's part of the reason why the press has gotten so focused Silicon Valley and "tech bros".

The media has a narrative and will promote anything that confirms that narrative, and will ignore anything that doesn't.
Why can't buybacks be scheduled on a frequent, predictable schedule? IANAL, but I don't see anything preventing a company from disclosing that they will buy back $foo amount of stock every quarter.
>Case in point - where's the competitor for the Mac App Store on macOS? There's not. Users have to do all the legwork themselves.

Yeah, double-clicking that DMG and dragging the .app 30 pixels to the Applications shortcut is a lot of work.

>That's literally no different than side-loading your own apps.

Yup, clicking and dragging is the same as configuring a different machine to properly build and provision.
My understanding was that BLM limited the number of tickets they could sell, and they decided to make the tickets go by lottery rather than raise the price. If I were planning to go to Burning Man, I would just plan to buy the $1,200 ticket and skip the angst.
I modified to code to print in a loop. The complexity() function from your second code is unaltered:

$ python3 /tmp/t.py
complexity of 762, 89775939935689957703680.000000
relative complexity of 762 to 762 , 1.00

complexity of 1024, 131584429444916036885282816.000000
relative complexity of 1024 to 762 , 1465.70

complexity of 2048, 153297054278133875964680175492268032.000000
relative complexity of 2048 to 762 , 1707551649004.70

complexity of 4096, 128907209987952013910454741738429736597460090880.000000
relative complexity of 4096 to 762 , 1435877029862269597515776.00

$

Feels like the rise by bitlength is non-linear. So, moving to RSA2048 has significant benefit against 1024, to the extent 1024 is tractably weak against 762, but I am still feeling this does not point to an immediate, apparent threat to 1024.

Forseeable, but not immediate.
To me, a stock buyback or dividend is a bad sign. It means the company literally can think of nothing better to do with the money than shrug and return it to shareholders. “We’re out of ideas and innovation, guys! Go find somewhere to invest this where it will be put to good use!”

I guess if you’re an electric utility that’s fine. If you’re supposed to be an innovative tech company, and you don’t know what to do with your cash???
>lol...maximizing shareholder value is a cause of sagging productivity?

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.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/lazonic...

>Once the problems of strategic control have been addressed, the process of taking back the corporation can turn to
the critical role of organizational integration. Productivity in an advanced economy depends on the extent to which
members of the labor force have the opportunity to engage in collective and cumulative learning over the course of
careers that may span 40 years or more. Under the Old Economy business model, major corporations supported
this social condition through the norm of a career with one company, albeit almost exclusively for white males. It is
unrealistic to assume that in a world of open-systems technologies and intense global competition the norm of a
career with one company could, or should, be restored. That does not, however, lessen the need for collective and
cumulative careers as the employment foundation of a highly productive economy. It is reasonable to believe that
in the provision of lifelong learning through on-the-job experience, government agencies and civil society organizations,
including universities, will have to continue to play important, and perhaps even growing, roles. The business
corporation, however, will have to anchor a national system of career employment through a retain-and-reinvest
resource-allocation regime. Jettison the downsize-and-distribute ideology of MSV, and U.S. business corporations
can focus on becoming learning organizations once again.

>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.
"sheer size of the value extraction from employees"

It is incorrect to assert that the employees are creating all the value created by a company. Companies are not just people but also a lot of other things:

Easy to see and measure things like equipment, facilities and bank account balances.

Somewhat harder to quantify but still important things like business relationships, contracts, brands and reputation.

Even more effervescent but still important things like corporate culture & values; the so called "DNA" of a company.

All of this stuff matters a lot and exists mostly independent of the employees. It is owned (quite literally) by the stockholders so the value accrues to them.
Microsoft has stated that you can leave HT enabled when using Hyper-V on Windows 2016. The same mitigations have allowed them to keep HT enabled in Azure.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2018/08/1...