skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
80% of companies in the S&P500 over time produce zero return. 20% of companies account for ALL of the returns. In the past these would've been driven by massive growth stocks like Amazon going 1000x over a couple of decades. Now, the main reason to IPO a tech stock seems to be because the company has reached its growth potential and you want to flick it off to derisk early investors, and often it plummets as reality sets in. Meanwhile, high growth stocks are captured in pre-IPO markets and the gains are all accrued to private investors.

I think the S&P500 is an entirely different beast to what it was 20 or even 10 years ago as a result of this.

If you were a family office your goal would be to get exposure to pre-IPO growth stage stuff as well as the public market.
I'm curious how this compares to SoFi's Money program. SoFi manages student loans and now they are moving into cash management.

It seems that this is an area new companies feel is ripe for disruption.
Apple hires designer Andrew Kim away from Tesla
More than anything, I’m astonished that an article about k8s in Forbes of all places is both cogent and well-informed. There’s nothing in it that anyone who payed attention to Kubecon or k8s in the last couple years wouldn’t have known, but I’m so used to seeing Forbes push out least-common-denominator clickbaity crap that I’m actually impressed they published this article.

The title is still kind of dumb and clickbaity, but there’s no accounting for one’s editor’s taste, I suppose.
Yes, it's fairly "wink, wink". The GP selectively quoted a part of their FAQ answering this. Here is the full answer:

> Strictly speaking it is “source-available.” Many people use the phrase “open source” in a loose sense to mean that you can freely download, modify, and redistribute the code, and those things are all true of the code under the Confluent Community License. However, in the strictest sense “open source” means a license approved by the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) which meets a particular set of criteria. The Confluent Community License is not approved by the OSI and likely would not be as it excludes the use case of creating a SaaS offering of the code. Because of this, we will not refer to the Confluent Community License or any code released under it as open source.
It's not exactly a crazy change to one's way of life. As recently as when I was a kid, people drank water out of cups. When we were out in public, we'd use a water fountain.

Carrying a water bottle with you everywhere you go is another option, but probably not strictly necessary unless you're currently trying to pass a kidney stone.
It seems to me like one of the basic things Amazon should do is... Only allow reviews from people who have actually bought the product, and had time to receive it in the mail. I know, what a mind boggling concept.

This reminds me of the hateful comments that plague YouTube. Most of them come from accounts that only ever post hate comments. Would it be so fucking hard to write a heuristic that tags users constantly getting their comments downvoted so that someone can review them? Then, if they fail the review, you mute them for 6 months, delete all their comments, but let them think their comments are still visible. Maybe let all the haters see each other's comments and reply to one another so they can live in their own parallel universe of hate. These problems are not hard to solve. There is a lack of will to solve them.
I keep seeing anecdotes about the unreasonable effectiveness of improv. Many people say it’s in the top 2 or 3 subjects they’ve studied and learned, regardless of their background/profession. Maybe it’s time to look into studying it myself, I’d be happy if people shared any recs on how to get started.
When a company buys their own stock, there are simply fewer shares free-floating, in the hands of owners. The company's profits therefore are divided among a smaller group, and each share receives a larger percentage of those profits.

Technically true, but the company had a choice about how to return profits to investors and chose the buyback over the dividend, so the remaining owners don't get a larger percentage of profits unless the company also issues a dividend. It's generally an either-or these days.

Imagine an extreme case where McDonald's buys every single share but one. That remaining stock-owner will therefore own 100% of McDonald's, and get every last profit made from the world's obese.

Not all McD's stock is publicly traded. Moreover, a fair amount of McD's stock cannot be legally sold due to it being owned by ESOPs. That being said, the remaining stock owner would not own 100% of McDs, they would own 1 share of McDs (and 100% of then-outstanding stock). There would still be several million shares authorized and in reserve that could be sold or re-issued at a moment's notice. The decision to sell/re-issue those shares is made by the company, not the owner, and the fact that he theoretically owns 100% of the company at that time is meaningless because he owns only a fractional percent of the company's authorized shares and thus has no actual power.
I don't think it's fair to cherry pick 1 github thread and use it as a moral condemnation of an entire software project.
When I was saying a "trust-based system" in the original post, I was thinking about Silk Road - from what I've read from news, its eBay-like rating system reportedly, significantly increased the safety and efficiency of transactions overall. I was also thinking about #bitcoin-otc - the earliest Bitcoin trading community on Freenode IRC, it identifies potential buyers and sellers via OpenPGP public keys, buyers and sellers rate each other, and the bot builds a Web-of-Trust among all the participants. Alice can simply review all possible personal trust paths to Bob to assess the risk and trustworthiness.

My consideration was, it has been shown some trust-based rating systems can work under the most untrustworthy environment, I just went to the assumption that a similar, elaborate design to solve problems like vendor frauds, RMA frauds, etc. So I just vaguely said "I believe having a system based on trust can be a viable solution".
Your Tales of Subway Hell
I am aware of the difference between primordial soup and mushrooms :) dont think im assuming something, just trying to think through whether the emergent complexity process started way back or if its something that evolved more recently.
Experience a product, improve yourself, feel better about it
No one is denying there is a legal risk. However, they got an estimated 600k signups (probably more?). Even converting 10% of those (which a company of their "growth hacking sophistication" should be trivial to do) could provide a substantial amount of growth for the company. Since they don't charge for order execution (and are likely paying a 3rd party to do so), they're clearly going for volume to make up for it.

As I've mentioned previously in another thread, this is clearly a gamble. When you're on the VC track to justify $4b+ valuations, taking gambles is par for the course.
Ask HN: Web dev learner here. How can I improve look and feel of this website?
Hi folks,

I ask this question here only because I hold HNer's in high regard.

I am a novice to Web Development and am creating a website for a school pro bono. The hosting provider GoDaddy & am building this on WordPress. I am really interested in improving the look and feel of this website, however, I find that my development abilities would be very limited if I rely solely on WordPress. During the learning & building, I realized that we need to have CSS & HTML skills as well, but unfortunately, my CSS & HTML skills are next to nought.

Would someone please advise me on the way ahead?
I did independent research of my own and came across terms like Parallax Scrolling, wherein one light / transparent background image static and the readable/ useful contents of the website can be scrolled/ navigated through. Also, I would like to add image sliders and sleek, seamless animations. The browsing should appear fluid to the user. How can I reach that level?

Any website or tutorial that will enable me to design a captivating, mesmerizing look and feel of the website?

Any feedback would be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance :)

Memento Mori.

PS: This is the website I am working on - http://www.jaihindjuniorcollege.com/
>> Retail brokers charge huge fees

What? $5-$10 for a stock purchase? If you are purchasing such a small amount that the fee is > 0.1 % you should not be trading stocks. (In general you shouldn't.)
> Extracting this information is not always trivial, mostly because of a gadzillion options to a gadzillion git commands – I don’t think there is a single person alive who knows them all. Probably not even Linus Torvalds himself :).

Or Junio Hamano, for that matter (although there is a greater chance :)
I thought a strength of the lawyer is also in knowing the quirks of the judicial system, such as knowing the quirks of a judge, or even the quirks of human irrationality, as opposed to being a merely excellent interpreter of legal text.
I agree, they are all very much the same. I just find it a sorry state of affairs.
He did the funding in kind of a weird way- posting on reddit "I am a rich anonymous Trump supporter, I will match your donations". He also used multiple shell companies to donate to Trump's inaugural committee, which is being investigated for sketchy finances and potential self-dealing
Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation
The pwnocalypse will cause the apocalypse.
I'll echo this. Keto did wonders for my skin.

But it's a hard diet to maintain, both in terms of managing cravings and consumption, and also because we put carbs (corn syrup, et al) into bloody everything. I found cheese/yougart, ketchup, and salad dressings to be the worst offenders.
You must not have visited NYC or SF, both of which have excellent water. NYC's comes from upstate aquifers while SF gets from Hetch Hetchy in the Sierra.
6. Moderate alcohol intake, especially wine.

The position that moderate alcohol consumption promotes health has been overturned [1]. Data now shows that the only safe level of alcohol consumption is zero. Every single drink increases your risks of alcohol-related disease. The previous data showing a benefit to moderate alcohol use may have been a result of some confounder such as social economic status or reverse causation (diseased people quit drinking).

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Ask HN: CS and programming books of 2017
Which CS/Programming related book(s) that were released in 2017 would you suggest?

Last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15878575
Works for adults, too.
Robinhood's whole business model is making money from people who think they're getting a free lunch. You're still paying money for the trade. But instead of paying a direct fee, you're paying more money via the bid-ask spread.

Everytime you make a trade, Robinhood sells that trade to a market maker. Robin hood charges more money for forwarding this trade than most other brokers. To make up for this increased cost to market makers, they then pass the cost to you by charging more money for the trade.

This is akin to restaurants that claim you get free delivery. You don't really get free delivery. They just increased the price of the food.

Looks like they were trying to play a similar game with that 3% savings account by claiming your money was risk-free when it really wasn't.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-free-trading-on-robinhood-i...
Wave Computing to open source its MIPS instruction set architecture
TFA anticipated your comment:

> One possible explanation for the regulatory efficiency here is that so many of fintech’s financial innovations have been tried before. Robinhood was certainly not the first non-bank to get the bright idea of pretending to be a bank and taking deposits!

[...]

> In many areas of “tech,” companies are racing to do things—in virtual reality, in artificial intelligence, in surveillance and data collection—that have genuinely never been done before and that pose novel social and regulatory challenges. In many areas of fintech, though, companies are racing to do things that were done in the 1920s, before modern financial regulation came into effect, only this time with an app. The regulators know how to handle that.
Fidelity also bans people from their platform, does not tell them why, and makes it a pain in the ass to liquidate assets and get your money.

Source: It happened to me, I have fine credit, I don't daytrade (I'm an index investor for 95% of my investments), don't rapidly move money in/out, don't exploit interest-bearing accounts like weirdos do on various sites, and I have no idea what the hell the problem was. They still won't tell me anything beyond "We don't want your business."
Ask HN: What are the best new programming books that came out in 2018?
Imagine the entire web (90%) can only run in Google Chrome and Google Chrome stops linux support. What then? Will linux not be able to render 90% of www? What if MS pays Google millions of $ to stop linux and Mac support?
>simply having wealth begets more wealth

It's not a 100% rule. Lots of wealth has been lost due to wrong investment. Many rich people lose their fortunes.
Public Holidays and Working Day API
No, because design is part of the value proposition. A brain hack that brings me happiness is... what any product is.
Simplifying things quite a lot, say that you have a share in a stable company priced at $1000. During the year the company makes $50 per share in profits and the price gradually goes up to $1050. The company can pay a dividend: you get $50 and pay taxes on them (and your share is now worth $1000). The company could also use the money to buy its own shares: you still have a share worth $1050 and no tax is due (yet).
I did something like this back in 2010 with javascript when browsers were much slower at executing code. I was experimenting with manual image scaling and rotation without use of built in canvas functions, mostly to get perfect nearest-neighbour rendering and do extra tricks like perspective transforms which were not really available at the time (just affine transformations were built into the canvas API).

I was struggling to hit 60fps so I devised this hacky system where I'd leave various markers in a "template" function, then parse that using Function.toString() and replace certain areas with unrolled loops, removed if conditions etc. Put the generated function code in a new Function() and used that for the remainder of the animation loop until settings changed.

Actually worked pretty well, along with some other optimizations, was able to hit 60fps in chrome and almost that in FF, depending on the scaling mode of course. At the time my manual implementation of bilinear filtering destroyed the frame rate no matter what, but these days browsers can run it without breaking a sweat. They've come a long way performance wise.

I still have it stashed away on my webserver, so here if anyone is curious. Code is a mess though: http://bigmooworld.com/pwings/pilotwings/pilotwings.html

You might recognize it..
Why embrace the bad parts of startup culture (open plans)? Seems cargo cultish: open plans exist as a cost control measure, and make it easier to grow/shrink. Academia has endowments and tends to have a more stable labor force.
And most people should realize that all discount brokers are this way and Robinhood is not special in this regard.
Thanks for the feedback, LaserToy!
Simple Explanation of Cardano ADA – This Is Going to Be EPOCH
folks, be super careful with your money - even if they survived and got X number of customers, if they were to fail - I don't know how and when the customers would get their money back.

In the past, I have seen small mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar 'finance groups' pop up which promise to give you much better returns than the markets based on investing in some 'magical fund'. Such groups then take your money and for a while the going is good until Government halts them and then overnight these 'money mills' are gone and your money is stuck as is money of other folks with tax authorities taking action against the customers who had no idea. And the way these operations are setup and run, folks running these money mills get off scotch free only to shy away for few years until they come back again with yet another 'idea'.
Regarding most of the dismissive comments on using JS for styling...

1. you can't inherit...
2. I don't want it in the same file...

// component.style.js
import base from '../base.style.js';\

export style = theme => ({
...theme.typography.body1,
...base.component.foo
fontFamily: theme.fonts.serif,
});

// component.js
import { style } from './component.style';

...

I'll see your objections, and raise you one...

// theme-builder.js
import deepMerge ...
import { get } from './api-client';

export default async _ => {
const [base, client, application, user] = await Promise.all([
get('/styles/default'), // default options
get('/styles/site'), // client/deployment options
get('/styles/application'), // in-application configured options
get('/styles/user'), // in-application user options
]);
return deepMerge(base, client, application, user);
};

I'm currently working on an application that has those needs... doing that per-user means building styles at the server every time... using JSS, I just deepMerge some JSON/Objects and it all just works. I've built applications both ways, BEM, generated selector replacement, other techniques, and JSS... I'll take JSS.
Matt Levine is a treasure. His Money Stuff column/email has taught me, a programmer not versed in fintech, a lot about the intricacies of the financial world. In particular, his clearheaded view of blockchain tech is useful counterpoint to the hype.
I pay for zenefits. I have my own company and I pay myself a salary and zenefits takes care of all taxes and government forms. It’s not that cheap (I think $400 for the year) but I never have to think or worry about forms or taxes until I file my full taxes at the end of the year with my accountant.
>>to let you set a custom portfolio on autopilot

Can't you invest in a set of 5 passive ETFs and forget about it for 40 years? Or even build your own ETFs for that purpose: https://www.motif.com? Or are you talking about "if risk of market crash is too high, sell everything for a bit -- buy back in when this calms down" type stuff?
Well, if you have that attitude, you won't be CEO for long. Shareholders want return, and get to replace the CEO. So for public companies this doesn't work.
They combine inventory for the same item from different sellers. Even if the item you bought says it is being sold by Amazon that doesn't mean that the product you receive will be one that they sourced. It could easily be from a third party seller instead. Unless you're buying something like they're own Amazon Basics brand you have no way to reliably tell where something actually came from on Amazon.
Huge fall in visibility on http://Google.co.uk for ASOS during 2018
It would be nice if Software Engineering jobs would involve more human interaction. With all this Scrum I have the impression the Engineer is supposed to only work on tickets, have no meetings ideally because it's more efficient when Product people etc. do that.

Kind of a bad trend IMHO...
honest question: Do you think open offices are or should be an "embraceable" aspect of start-up culture?

Are the common activities of faculty compatible with rows of desks, no privacy and constant interruptions? I'm thinking about administrivia and deep, contemplative thought.

The only (perhaps) valid use-case I've seen for open office is highly collaborative tactical execution. The minute you need individual thought-space or strategic focus it's a massive hinderance.
A) correct

B) No, because there are still plenty of authorized shares being held in reserve by the company that it can reissue.

C) Theoretically yes, because dividends are allocated pro rata on a % basis of outstanding stock (assuming 1 class of common stock). If there are multiple classes, or preferred stock, or the company reissues shares, or a million other things, then this may or may not still be true.
Sorry, I didn't notice that.

This article is readable for me in an incognito window though. Seems WSJ has changed something?
What fintech can learn from Robinhood's 'epic fail'
I've had RSI issues for a few years now, and I've tried a whole lot of split mechanical keyboards. I've found others I like, but there are a couple of "killer" Model 01 features that will keep me from going back to any other board:

* The 'fn' buttons under the palm are super ergonomic. They make the lack of physical function keys a non-issue. Which leads to:

* vi-style arrow keys everywhere! Just hit 'fn'!

* Modifier keys under the thumbs took a little while to get used to, but are so much more comfortable in the long run.

* Frequently used keys like 'Return', 'Tab', and 'Esc' are under your strong index fingers. Can't tell you how much better my pinkies feel between this and the previously mentioned modifiers being under the thumb.

* Curly and square brackets are very close to the home row. You just press 'fn' and they are right above the fingers of your right hand.

* Individually sculpted keycaps aren't a gimmick; they really make it much easier to find where your hands go.

In addition to those features:

* Matias keyswitches have long been my favorites.

* It has high quality wooden enclosures and cool programmable LEDs that really look great and stand out in the office. (Could be a con if you don't like the attention)

* Open source! Need I say more?

On top of that, it's been fascinating to read Jesse and Kaia's blog throughout the entire process. They are extremely responsive to questions and comments. You can tell they really have a passion for this product.
The difference is other people.

Yes, if you're writing your -own- code, learning to envision what the system must do in your head first is very, very valuable.

When you're on a team, however, you -have- to compartmentalize. You have to create abstractions, black boxes, functionalities that you -could- dive into, but which you will accept only understanding at a contract (interface) level. The skill of envisioning the system is still useful, of course, but there will be black boxes.

The problem that causes, of course, is that every abstraction is leaky. You didn't know that calling this method also fired off this event, and so you -also- triggered that event. Or whatever. Hence, bugs and iteration. You also have to deal with -bad- interfaces, a bajillion parameters, or a parameter object that isn't intuitively obvious how to initialize, and you start having to iterate.
Unfortunately not everyone can migrate to AWS, and not everyone would want to either.

There are plenty of reasons companies still host everything on their own servers, and can't/don't want to move their infrastructure to a cloud service.
It's hardly a cherry-pick. They have attempted to pull this of on AUR as well on two occasions.
>> This is what is in your hot water tank right now

Does anyone think the inside of a ~20 year-old cold water feed pipe is going to look shiny and "clean"?

Go take an electron micrograph of the bacteria on your skin, or use a microscope to look closely at the living things inside your bed, in your sofa, or on your pet.

Then take a deep breath, check the causes of death tables if you really have to, and remember that - given we're all intelligent humans - none of these "eww, gross!" things really matter in the overall scheme of things.