skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like it was flagged/removed with no explanation. It's currently ranked 107, even though it's vote:time ratio should easily put it on the front page.

Kind of ironic given the subject of their post. If I didn't know any better, I might think there are some FB people attempting to bury this story...

Edit: And this submission already appears to be suffering the same fate, ranked far below other stores with nearly equal vote:time ratios.
"The researchers estimate that covering an apartment building with the treated wood could save about 35 percent of the energy used for cooling." Is that compared to the average building or a building covered with another kind of white plating? Because the latter would be super impressive while the former would mostly just state the obvious: white things don't heat up from sunlight as much as non-white things.
GP was making that point sarcastically.
Having two will offer some redundancy. You could probably signal process the RF given off by them to get to exactly the right mechanical screaming sound. The ISS already has the right kind of segmented cupola window.
Chinese reports – Microsoft has apparently temporarily cut ties with Huawei
I think we’re talking about Miller-Modigliani [1] which says that enterprise value should not change as capital structure changes. However it presumes many untrue aspects of the world in order to make this claim.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani–Miller_theorem
The company becomes equally less valuable after a buyback.

Consider a company with value of $1000, with 100 shares outstanding. Each share is $10. Buying back 10 shares, the company spent $100, so the company is now worth $900 and has 90 shares outstanding. Each share is still $10.

This is the basic model that shows share price should be unaffected by buybacks, but there are other effects. The buyback could signal to investors that the company is unlikely to be inefficient with capital, so investors would value the company at $910 instead of $900.

Alternatively, in a demand/supply model of shares, the buybacks could have exhausted some of the supply of shares, so the valuation for the company settled on by the rest of the market is higher.

There's no clear answer here, but reality is probably somewhere between these models.
On that note, how does this differ from FileCoin? Is it basically a self-hosted NAS on top of IPFS?
Delivery App Orders Restaurants to Cook Almost Whatever You Want
That just means that at current interest rates, the stock's forward P/E exceeds the rate of interest. It's rational to borrow money to buy stock if the earnings spun off by the stock exceed the rate of interest. You're basically arbitraging against the bank: the bank gives you money to buy out people who think the stock is overvalued, you give them a set amount of interest for the money, and if it turns out you're right and the stock's future earnings exceed the price of that money, you pocket the difference at the expense of people who left the market. If you're wrong and earnings are less than the interest rate, it's reflected in net income, the stock drops, and you (and the rest of the shareholders) eat the difference, often in a dramatic fashion.

With low interest rates, high corporate profits, and low growth, I'd expect to see a lot of debt added to balance sheets; it's a way to lever up the capital structure to the benefit of existing shareholders, as long as profits remain high and interest rates remain low. (And corporate bonds/loans are usually fixed interest, so the interest rates are locked in until they need to go back to the debt markets.)
Police are only one group who might use facial-recognition software. Body-worn-cameras can be used and not collect face data or use facial recognition technology, or their legal uses can be severely restricted and clearly defined (or outright banned, lots of options). Why conflate all these things. They overlap sometimes, not all the time.
The difference here is realized vs. realizable pay: http://www.execcomp.org/Issues/Issue/pay-for-performance/rea.... The realizable number is more often used when comparing to peer companies. The reason is not generally to get larger numbers for headlines. But indeed, as you say: "One drawback of realizable pay is that because it combines actual pay with a current snapshot of future incentive pay, it may differ significantly from the comparison of pay actually received at the end of the performance period to the performance over that period."
The thing that scares me is the silence.
> They spend $200 a month on cable and Pay-Per-View while I watch Youtube and Netflix. They pay $65 for videogames and spend thousands of dollars a year on vacations.

What do these things have to do with being an introvert?

My strategy is, instead of budgeting or being as austere as I can, I set a mental threshold for how much fun or peace of mind or happiness a dollar is worth to me. If something is above that threshold, I spend money on it. If it's below that threshold, I don't. If I'm spending too much money, then instead of making a budget, I raise my mental threshold.

I'll spend money to have my lunch delivered because the saved time and mental energy is worth it to me personally. I will not spend money on a car that does anything more than get me around and run AC, because I'm not someone who gets great enjoyment from the car I drive. I am into gadgets and will spend money on the latest tech - even if I don't strictly need it - because I get proportional enjoyment out of it. I won't shop recreationally on Amazon for things I only kind-of want, even if they're very cheap or on sale. Etc.
Understand 1,700 Mechanical Linkages with These Helpful Animations (2015)
Curiously - have you personally tried it?
This is a cheap throwaway joke that has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the article. It would have been possible to make this joke by only reading the title.
Our tax policy encourages this. You can write off the interest you pay to bondholders, but you can’t write off the dividends you pay to shareholders. Everyone involved (except for the government) is better off if you sell bonds and buy back stock.
In fact, there are several cards that give extra points or cash back when used at grocery stores and gas stations.
> Why should it be tied to other employees’ compensation?

If a company is doing exceeding well, why should only the CEO see the benefit, and not the people doing the grunt work of actually building the products that lead to the company's success?

> Fairness and capitalism-based business generally don’t go together.

They don't, but they can.

> That kind of thinking leads to all kinds of problems. For example, is it fair for an employee to jump ship for a higher salary offer elsewhere and leave their coworkers to pick up the pieces? I would say no.

I would say yes. People jump to new jobs for a higher salary all the time.
"Bitcoin has UTXO+transactions+proof-of-work, Ethereum has accounts+smart contracts+proof-of-work (soon to be CBC Casper), and Oasis has accounts+confidential smart contracts+BFT"

Love how the author plugs his blockchain in that sentence as if it is in the same league as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Because the company cash to buy the stocks should decrease the amount of capital cash on hand by the same amount resulting in no change in the capitalized value of the stock.

The stock doesn't just vanish. It is held and owned by the company. So no, each share doesn't represent a larger percentage of the company. Unless the company retires the shares.
I'd like to see a breakout of your budget.

I know I couldn't do this.
I live in the midwest and have trouble keeping spending around 20k post-tax. I have a wife and child through.
Do you have roommates? Do you own a car? Do you have a child?
if 32% of people say that discretionary spending is the number one cause of their debt, doesn't that cast at least some doubt as to whether economic inequality is the primary cause of this particular issue?
>But no robot could do what those people who landed on the moon did, let alone bring back hundreds of pounds of selected moon rocks

Can you elaborate? Robots in 1969 perhaps couldn't, but bringing back rocks seems well within the abilities of present robotics.
> Why should it be tied to other employees’ compensation?

Because the employer cannot exist without his employees, and if the employer is getting billions while the employees are only getting thousands, then those employees are certainly getting undercharged.

It's a way to force wages to scale to productivity and value, something that (if you have not remained ignorant of the current political dialogue), has been shown again and again to not be happening anymore.

Not just that but, why should the employer make more? What added value does the CEO bring that other people cannot already do? Most CEOs can be replaced without employees, consumers, and shareholders noticing. The 'personnel value' that a CEO brings is clearly very marginal in most businesses, as opposed to bringing in more engineers or HR workers or temps. And the CEO's salary can pay for a lot more of those.
It's certainly the business of investors, who vote to approve executive compensation (so-called "Say-on-Pay" votes) each year. While the vote is non-binding, it helps provide a signal to companies when investors are displeased with executive performance.
Why would an increase in economic inequality increase discretionary debt? The wealthy would pay it off, and the poor would be tightening their belts (or at least not loosening them).

The broader problem definitely has to do with inequality, but this slice of it is surprising and really probably doesn't relate to that.
You're not accounting for the transfer of cash out of the company. If you have a company with a business worth a billion dollars and a billion dollars in cash, it should have a market cap of two billion dollars. If it uses half a billion dollars to buy back shares then it should have a market cap of $1.5B because it has $500M less cash. Then it also has 75% as many outstanding shares, so the value of each share is the same.

But the buyback often increases the value of the shares because it allows investors to express their preferences better. If the company has a $1B business and $1B in cash, there is no option to invest in only the business, only the combined business+cash entity. If you think the business will give 9% returns and the cash 2% returns and you have an alternative investment that gives 6% returns, you won't invest in that company. But if they separate the cash from the business then you're willing to invest in the business, which makes the business worth more to investors and increases its share price.
There is nothing extraordinary though, especially for HN crowd.
It's why I probe newspapers on articles on subjects I know more about (in my case, well, physics and machine learning). I see what are the errors, what is the level (and quality) of simplifications, etc.

If it is poor, I don't expect other articles to be of higher quality.
United States rolls out new 18-count indictment on Assange
People also use cards to accumulate points, and credit cards are easier to fight against fraudulent purchases vs debit cards. So it's not even a fair measure.
Belgian Monks Just Brewed Medieval Beer from a Long-Lost Recipe
This is a "sounds good but is actually terrible" idea.

Outsourcing would skyrocket and millions of low paying jobs would be lost and sent abroad and to sub-contractors because you've just created a strong incentive for the CEO to fire the lowest-paid workers in their company.
Google suggests it's this: http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/download/ (GitHub: https://github.com/shihuade/JM )
Thanks for that. It's crazy how much left propaganda there has been and how initially it was all about Russia. Choose whatever political opinion you want but what Facebook is doing is dystopian.
HCL employee, customer files found open to public
> Is it fair that software engineers make several times as much as teachers just because the thing they're good at happens to be in high demand right now? I would say no.

I disagree. Nobody forced anyone to be a teacher: people have chosen that job knowing full well they’d make less money than an engineer. People aren’t assigned careers like they were in a the Soviet Union: they pick what they want to do. I used to be a photojournalist. The pay sucked so I ended up doing software. Nothing is stopping a teacher from making similar choices. People complain about the pay, but they keep joining lower paid professions. It’s supply and demand.
100% of a company's earnings legally belongs to the shareholders

That's simply not true. Next you'll be telling us it's illegal for a company to do anything that isn't about maximising shareholder value.
The public market isn't really expanding and has essentially become zero-sum. This doesn't preclude the existence of other capital markets that might actually be taking share away from publicly-traded companies - for example, late-stage VC/PE financing (a la Uber, Lyft, and most other Silicon Valley unicorns), crowdfunding, or cryptocurrency ICOs & STOs.

Nature usually abhors a steady-state: when you think you've reached one, it often means that there's a competitor that's too small for you to see but growing exponentially.
A bigger percentage of a less valuable company, because buying the shares back costs money. Ignoring taxes and other “minor” details (like a discount applied go cash that could be “wasted”), if a company market cap is $10bn and it has $1bn in cash after a buyback investors in aggregate would still have $10bn after the cash is used to repurchase 10% of shares: $1bn in cash and $9bn in stock trading at the same price as before (there are 10% fewer shares, but the company is worth 10% less).
Well that doesn't tell me much of anything, but I love that sentence.
The computer will do what people tell it to do, so it’s just as plagued by human emotion and the self-interest of those who program it.

It’s just a different form of the same corrupt politics.

The biggest problem with technology is this delusion that it somehow isn’t a reflection of human failings.

If we at least admitted that then we’d be able to reason about it responsibly.
No, the market can still expand, it's just that shareholders (as proxied for by boards and management) would today rather have the marginal dollar in pocket rather than invested in some growth opportunity. Companies have invested billions in growth opportunities in past decades and we're currently seeing how the returns from those investments play out, and that's where today's growth is coming from. There just aren't as many good places to put money to work in the market right now.
Facebook is so corrupt and evil that you have to assume the worst by default. Otherwise they're probably still manipulating you somehow.
Yes, I did read that. But what is Linus' branch then, and why do folks aim to "upstream" changes to it?

I'd argue that the other important Linux sources are _themselves_ cathedrals, each with their own form of centralized leadership — be it an individual or a group (like a distro or company). And these cathedrals happily work together.

You can totally have this model with GitHub.
Feels like things like this are super common in the consulting / non-tech company world. A lot of small factions all wanting their little requirement slotted in, and the whole product end up either being completely incoherent or there are large parts that are wasteful.

For me it was a project a while ago with a telecom company. They wanted a place to manage their customers' communications. One group was adamant that we needed to surface customer's emails in this portal, instead of providing say just a link to whatever their email provider is. Essentially they wanted us to build a clone of gmail / hotmail / yahoo mail but only with SMTP / POP / IMAP access to the data. We tried to tell them how expensive and not useful this would be, but no had to build it.

Obviously we couldn't build a gmail clone in the time we had that was better than gmail, and there was pretty much no incentive for users to use our version instead of gmail proper. So after spending more than half of the total project time (and budget) on this email functionality, six months after launch we had a very small handful of users linking their email and most of them didn't do anything with it. Even after being presented with the usage data, we couldn't just get rid of this feature, because that would be admitting failure.
They were doing that but I believe this is not something that makes sense any longer.

The TCJA passed by the republicans got rid of the tax system that was causing the problem and switched the USA to a territorial income tax system like other countries have.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/explaining-tcjas-inte...

> The TCJA’s international reforms are significant. Combined with the reduced corporate rate, they largely eliminate the incentive for US firms to accrue assets overseas, while seeking to protect the tax base from avoidance by both US and foreign-based multinationals.
Roommates. No car. No kids.
tie those too
Mozilla fires up another Firefox update, patching 24 vulnerabilities
The analytics script should be installed in the React theme. We plan to release a Google Analytics extension so you will only have to configure it with your GA ID. But the plugin you are using right now will not work anymore, with Frontity your WordPress becomes the source of data for your site (like a headless CMS) and the frontend is totally decoupled from the backend.

Feel free to take a look at the 1.0 roadmap where we announce the extensions that will be ready: https://community.frontity.org/t/1-0-roadmap-progress/207.
Current space-rated FPGAs are like 10-15 years out of date compared to what the newest stuff can do. People are starting to take more risk with launching commercial parts in LEO but no one is seriously going to rely on anything but Level 1 parts for expensive, long-term missions.
Highways are absolutely a profit center. The Fed spends ~$50 billion/year on highways and gets ~20% of the entire productivity of the nation in return. ($4 trillion on $20 trillion GDP)

If the entire highway system increases GDP at least $250 billion (1.25% of GDP) then highways are profitable.
These folks seem to thing there is a market for something like it:

https://tuple.app/
The title is vacuous click bait. The subtitle is I still needed an abortion.

I don't know what would be a good title, but this is super bad for a long list of reasons. At a minimum, adding the subtitle in addition to the actual title would at least indicate what the article is actually addressing, which this title does not do.

Really good quote from the piece:

What I did say to my daughter, as she sat perched on our kitchen stool, is that I am filled with gratitude for the women who came before us — women who fought for the right to choose, who dared to imagine that we had the right to control our bodies and who said loudly and proudly that we should not be forced to bear children against our will. Roe v. Wade is rooted in a basic understanding that women’s lives matter and that we have rights, needs and interests that don’t vanish when we become pregnant. Pregnancy and childbirth can be extremely difficult — emotionally and physically painful — and bringing a child into the world is an enormous responsibility. Deciding whether or not to give birth may be the most important decision a woman will ever make, potentially changing the course of her life forever — or ending it. Black women, in particular, have high mortality rates during pregnancy. In some areas of Mississippi, black and Latina women are more likely than women in some of the poorest countries in the world to experience a pregnancy-related death. Forcing any woman to see a pregnancy to term may be risking her life as well as her physical and emotional health.

It's unfortunate that the title is so very bad. It's actually quite a good piece written by a woman who was in law school when she ended up pregnant due to being raped and chose to end the pregnancy.
Equality of outcome is a dark place to go. Every single time it has been attempted it has resulted in mass death. Is capitalism fair? Maybe not, but you'll see less body bags than the alternatives.
When an American says they have roommates, do they literally mean they share a bedroom with another adult they're not romantically involved with? Or does 'room' mean the whole apartment?
Why a Windows flaw patched nine days ago is still spooking the Internet
The Digital Identity Problem
Agreed.

On a similar note, I bring thing this kind of thing up whenever people talk about how much money Jeff Bezos has.

While Bezos has a lot of cash for sure, he doesn't have $160B like news headlines make it out to be. Most of his "money" is tied up in stocks, and if he were to try to cash out all of it, it would tank the stock prices pretty hard, and he'd only get a fraction of it.
UK says it warned 16 NATO allies of Russian hacking activities
Two Days with the Curvy Wife Guy
Does being able to lobby for good things as well as bad things make it better? It's still essentially bribing the government to do something other than what's in the best interests of the public?
After reading the post a few days ago about the Playdate console and reading this post, it makes me wish there was a popular retro-style handheld console that I could develop for.
You could also say man on the $10 was killed by the VP of the man on the $2.
Assure TLS is enforced on your mail servers
Tried Grafana briefly a year or two ago, and I wanted to like it, but similar to Kibana, it's laser-focused on the task of realtime monitoring current data. I wanted to use it for a high-level view of historical stuff (robot data recordings from ROS), and there was a lot of really basic functionality for that use case that just wasn't there at all.

Even stuff as basic as being able to pan a plot back and forth after you've zoomed in— here's the four year old ticket for that in their issue tracker: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387

I ended up generating Bokeh plots and had a much better time. So Grafana is great for what it's great at, but I don't recommend it for uses other than current-moment data.
Who do they belong to if not to the owner of the company?
In the same line of thinking --

If the board thought they could hire an equally competent CEO to lead the company for half the price, they would do so.
> Ugh. Reading stuff like this gets me deeply sad; what could have been done with that money and time instead?

You're assuming that an organization can whip out the best proposal possible at a moment's notice, which is highly unlikely. What you perceive as waste is simply development costs, without which the organization could not come up with the most competitive option possible.

Complaining that having different teams working internally on a product is wasteful is just like complaining that a sports team that hiring backup players and running development league teams is wasteful.
Yep, and I here when people do not align line comments properly
Asking that question seems to imply that you didn't really see the commenter's reasons for asserting that...

"instead of actually investing in things like capital expenditures, R&D, or higher salaries"

Specifically the last one. The pay gap is larger than ever. The efficiency gains over the last 20 years or more are systematically being funneled up the food chain to executives and shareholders. Even in tech there's a ton of wage stagnation compared to the real cost of living over this period.

I think this is the crux of the assertion if I'm not mistaken. It's broken that the share of increased prosperity isn't anywhere near equally distributed. I wouldn't call that throwing money at random shit.
Which doesn't have to be the case if they take the self-publication route.
I wish something like this exists for UI or work bench setup. How people work with different screens and how editor or other tools setup