skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I don't really understand the negative sentiment here. If a company's buying back stock, then someone's selling those shares. That investor now has extra cash on hand to invest somewhere else. It's not like that capital just gets thrown into an empty pit.

Mature companies returning money is a pretty natural state of affairs. Unless you believe that all growth and investment over the next 25 years is going to be done by exactly the same set of companies from the last 25 years.

That's a recipe for stodgy sprawling monopolistic conglomerates. Competition and innovation is only possible when new entrants challenge entrenched players. And turnover in firms is only possible when capital is transferred from the large, pre-estabilished firms to small, growing ones.

That transfer of capital to innovative challengers necessarily involves large, mature companies returning money to shareholders either in the form of dividends or buybacks.
you are exactly right and this is the reason that DNS will eventually move to the blockchain. As with money and bitcoin, the internet isn't truly free until this happens
No. The reason for that was that Google is Google and in Google the only thing that matters is launching new things[0] and keeping gmail/gsuite[1] and the ads[2] running.

You might think I'm exaggerating, but frankly, even the search product has seen a massive decline since 2009.

[0]: based on testimonials from googlers and xooglers here on HN.

[1][2]: based on observations.
With no C macros there is no C at all.

This kind of arbitrary simplification is particularly unfortunate because C is a professional, Dangerous tool; removing the main way to organize code is like simplifying a chainsaw by omitting power switch interlocks.
It also depends on the last name. Short last names will be used more than long ones, male or female. Funny last names more than non-funny ones.
> That is why I said “not literally”.

Not until after I had responded.

> That by definition increases the government’s ability to pay for things.

For that one thing, but at the expense of reducing that same ability for everything going forward.

Funny that you use "since we got off the gold standard" as a dismissal, then cite a document from that time as supposed proof of your point. This is just sophistry. The funny thing is that I actually agree with a lot of what you say about e.g. Pigovian taxes and UBI, but I don't think it's productive to misrepresent the relationship between inflation and taxes, or make self-contradicting claims, or gaslight people about what you had said earlier. Opposing points of view are fine, but you seem to be undermining something close to my own.
EuroSTAR Testing Conference Prague 2019
OP’s point is the wealth is there. It’s just not being allocated to basic services or debt repayment.

The reason seems to be corruption. The debate is around the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic corruption, with good arguments on both sides.

Puerto Rico isn’t poor. But it is in a crisis. That discrepancy contains the problem and solutions.
When I did SUS it was $30K, limited to a year though.
True. But lets take the alternative. If an asset like a loan or bond was non-transferable meaning once made you had to hold it to term no matter what then the price of that loan would be higher to compensate for the illiquidity. And from the perspective of the borrower whether you pay to the originator of the loan or to a subsequent buyer makes no functional difference.
This is not an unreasonable piece of legislation if shelters are provided as an alternative.
I wasnt aware we're only here for that? That's in any case not my agenda.

That was the discussion my post opened up. So if we're going to discuss anything here together, it's going to be that.

How can you believe in UBI and still believe that it's up to private initiatives to care for those who can't provide for themselves?

UBI does not currently exist, and the only reason it will ever come to exist is if we all take personal agency and revolt against the current status quo maintained by CorpGov.

Until people like Ms. Brown are provided the education and motivation they need in order to fight for a secured future for posterity, these problems will continue to get worse.

It's not easy. It's not fun. It's not ideal. But life and liberty come at a cost, sweat and blood, and if you are not willing to pay those costs or assist others in paying them, you do not necessarily deserve life and liberty.
It’s another anecdote - my current employer reached out to me on LinkedIn. Not a commissioned third party recruiter, an internal recruiter.

Someone reaching out to you from a company is a huge leg up over applying directly somewhere: you already know they’re interested.

I’m not sure how they would have found me otherwise. My personal website? Through word of mouth and connections?

It’s only spam when you’re not considering a job change.
You're the one saying what you think should be shown.
To me this appears to be a straw man. Nobody is suggesting outlawing cars wholesale.

The primary observation is this: densely-populated areas of human habitation require denser sorts of infrastructure. The most obvious example is housing: by definition you can't have dense habitation if all you have are large-lot single family homes. Transportation is similar: one person per four-door sedan simply doesn't support the density of a city.

For areas that aren't densely populated, like the backwoods and suburbs where I spent the first 28 years of my life, cars are a great solution. But cities require different solutions (which happen to become economically feasible because of their density, benefiting from economies of scale).
> Buying back stock only creates value for shareholders if the stock is trading for less than its intrinsic value. Above that price buybacks destroy shareholder value.

That's assuming the value of the cash is the same in the hands of the corporation as the shareholders. But if the corporation has nothing it needs the money for internally then the cash is nothing but a liability that it has to waste resources trying to figure out how to externally invest, or have it get infected with principal-agent problems and empire building. The shareholders as more directly self-interested parties may be better equipped to find investments with a better risk-adjusted return.

Moreover, if the company is successful then needlessly holding the cash causes the stock to trade for less than its intrinsic value, because holding cash lowers the company's overall ROI from the above-market returns its actual business is generating to the average of that and the presumably market-average rate of return it collects on the cash. Returning the cash causes the company's share price to adjust (i.e. rise) to reflect the higher returns from its actual business once they're no longer being diluted.
Yes by ultra focus on tech, we can provide a decent living, but lack the bigger picture and become the peons of those who know better, and can articulate their view clearly and logically.

E.g. look at any PG essay that tried to talk about broader philosophical or political issues and you'll see this limitation. His frame of reference is stuck in a recent enlightenment framing of the world. Granted, PG is indeed a great communicator in technical fields.
You’ve just given the reason I often use to explain why printf debugging is something I’m not a fan of. For native development, printf debugging takes a backseat to proper instrumentation and debuggers just for sheer productivity reasons IMO. The main thing it gives is a serializable log for debugging multithreaded bugs. However, for just viewing state during a run, I think people should just learn to use their debugger (which can inject prints and watches on the fly, no need to recompile).
True, but because competition drives relentless increases in productivity business will cherry pick people that managed to learn off their dime rather than train people. It's simple. Only force applied by people or governments changes the rules enough to open space for these kinds of things.
It's expensive to live in a city that's 40% asphalt to move cars around and park cars in. You basically need to pay 40% more for the same living space, since you don't really pay for the moving space. Great way for car companies to force externalities onto everyone else. Don't like cars? "Oh well, you're paying for the road and parking anyway. You can't beat the problem, so you may as well join it."
> One argument is that money in motion has a reasonably high level of liquidity

Fair enough. I believe that's outweighed by other concerns, but it's a reasonable argument made in good faith. Thank you.
Decreasing someone's range increases their costs, a lot, because it effectively makes real estate more scarce and removes distant retail competition (in addition to increasing the real estate cost of retail).

My intuition says the effect size is going to be a multiple of what it costs to maintain a cheap car.
There are separate rules, but they operate in the opposite direction. The SEC rules give a safe harbor, a type of immunity for enforcement actions for share price manipulation, to firms whose insiders sell when a buyback is announced.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/secs-jackson-says-research...
In all fairness, Google+ failed for a lot of reasons--starting with the "Google" part. But Circles was actually a pretty nice concept that I wish Facebook had to separate my friend friends from people who are more like professional acquaintances.
I typo’d that. I meant to write “there is no solution other than various parties NOT getting all of what they were promised”.
I don't exactly understand who you think is being "robbed" here. Shareholders?

Because if that's the case there's little evidence of it. US equity returns have had one of the best decades in all of history. That certainly does not support the narrative that American shareholders are being ripped off on a systematic scale.
True for Apple, but much less true for companies putting 100%+ of free cash flow into buybacks.
Many managers believe that learning is something that you should do on your own time. Even when "learning" boils down to memorizing idiosyncrasies of some framework/protocol/micro-controller they force you to use.
- There are very few sustainable opensource projects.

- Of those which are, such as Linux, they are sustainable not because community cares about them (they might or might not) or because community pays for them (they might or might not), but because corporations find enough vested in them to support them (through money and/or people). I highly doubt Linux Foundation is sustainable without corporate sponsors.

- If you ask a typical dev to pay for a Linux distribution, they will balk at it. A one-off donation? Maybe. And that's Linux, a major and a clearly expensive project. How many projects are there that we take for granted? How many of them are sustained by the oh-so-great-and-generous open source community? Dozens? Less?

There's a very clear division:

- Strategic projects with vested interests get picked up my huge corporations (or started by them).

- A few lucky projects get enough traction to be able to live off donations whole working on them full time.

- The absolute vast majority of all the rest can and do survive only because devs can afford to work on them. As soon as they can't, good bye development and support.

Edit: fixing some autocorrect mistakes.
To be fair if you have 5-7+ kids you already gave up on a lot of things. In developed countries very very few families have more than 3-4 kids
A social entrepreneur’s guide to Lisbon, Portugal
Looks cool. Maybe I'm missing something though, but it's not really clear how you'd set this up? Is there a quick start or some examples of configs for different situations?
Retirement accounts are limited by the amount one might deposit annually. The most perhaps one can make is 19k in 401k and perhaps somehow max out SEP IRA - $56k (which I find quite tough to max out). Regular IRAs are out of questions, since at the income level dealing with 401k and SEP IRA, one does not get any benefits of funding regular IRA afaik.

So... The best-case scenario is $75k per year someone might be able to stash away in a retirement account. Let's say someone is able to do it for 50 years - it leads to $3.75m. It is a decent amount for retirement in my opinion, but 1) it is unlikely to optimize it fully to get there, and 2) doesn't really look stratospheric to make a difference in retirement funds ownership categorizations (i.e. 0.1% owns large part of retirement investments).
For which cancers does this procedure work (assuming your wife didn't have prostate cancer)?

I understand 25 k USD feels reasonable if it saves your life without surgery and it's complications, but it steep for "just ultrasound". Do you know why it was that expensive?
Agreed. I think this actually argues in favor of using a [fix] tag over [bug].
Is there any demo online with the beta version? I'm very skeptical about Flutter for web but I'd like to be proven wrong.

IMO it'd make more sense if they gave priority to desktop. The world desperately needs a good Electron alternative.
Honest question: why?

It seems patently absurd to me, especially when you're visiting. I'm visiting Berlin right now. It's a car friendly city in a car friendly country and I wouldn't want to drive anywhere here if you paid me. Too much of a hassle. Besides driving is so incredibly boring. If you're visiting, you're not going to really experience the city from behind the windows of a metal box. Maybe Northern American cities are different, but I haven't yet visited a European city where driving would be clearly preferable.
You must be from Calgary! Unfortunately, scooters and bikes won't work when there is so much snow during the winter.
I can’t seem to access the article anymore but I recall it saying their concern was the potential for the privacy policy to be changed at any time. This concern would be true for any company.

Just having servers in China is not really much different from having servers in the US. The NSA probably logs more than it lets on.
Totally fair, thank you. But you left out some important bits from your response, including that several academic groups have used the site for building fake news classifiers:

> The site has been used by researchers at the University of Michigan to create a tool called the "Iffy Quotient", which draws data from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsWhip to track the prevalence of 'fake news' and questionable sources on social media. The site was also used by a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in initial training of an AI to fact check and detect the bias on a website. [3]

Despite publications in academia using the site, you may also note the following:

> In 2016, Kyle Pope, who had served as the editor in chief of The New York Observer, was announced as the new editor and publisher of [Columbia Journalism Review]. [1]

> In 2016, the New York Observer became notable for being one of only a handful of newspapers to officially endorse United States presidential candidate Donald Trump in the Republican Party presidential primaries.[18] The newspaper's owner and then publisher, Jared Kushner, is Donald Trump's son-in-law. [2]

...I'm not sure what to think of the above pedigree for CJR's editor, but IMO I suspect he either fell to one end of the political spectrum or the other.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Journalism_Review#Edi...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Observer

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check
Satellites don't come crashing down like that. If not maintained, the atmosphere causes their orbit to decay until they burn up. The bigger risk is a collision which can create an orbiting field of debris that makes future space travel impossible.
I agree, but I also don't want to live like a sardine in a can, packed in with millions of others, living in a small box, having no green space, etc. I'm generally a social person, but don't like living that close to that many people. Many others seem to agree.
If it were just 2x worse wouldn't that still be pretty horrifying?

Let's not split the wrong hairs.
ActivityPub isn't decentralized. It's federated. There's a big difference.

That being said, solutions like Scuttlebutt, DAT, & IPFS are decentralized, do work, and do have social networks.
It’s part of the tax proposal, mortgage debt will not be fully deductible against your net worth.
> Twitter making a standard would at least result in something not stupidly broken.

Agree with most of your comment, but I can't see where this is coming from. I would be shocked if any "standard" coming from Twitter would be anything but broken.

Again, you're saying W3C doesn't work in the interests of the user, but ignoring that Twitter works actively against the interest of the user.

W3C isn't ideal, but the alternative being discussed is devoid of any merit whatsoever.
What amazes me about this, and I'm prepared to be wrong but my confidence level is sort of high, is that you could implement most DNS servers, and, I believe, virtually any authority server in any language at all and it'd be fine. Forget Rust and Go; you could do it in Perl.
LISP?
I sympathise but I think this post has a few contradictions in it. For example, I'm not surprised the bus in your area is inconvenient schedule-wise because I assume you aren't the only person in your city who drives ten minutes to work. Ten minutes? Wouldn't it take you about thirty minutes maximum to walk in that case?

If the walk would be unpleasant or otherwise not viable, can't that probably be blamed on car systems as well?

I don't think anyone thinks we can get rid of cars entirely. I'm from a country with the same land area as Japan but with ~115 million fewer people. You can't get rid of private vehicles in a place like that. But you can make urban areas less wasteful and more enjoyable.
I'm sure that's true of a lot of people. But I'm not sure it contradicts the parent. If the residents and businesses in a city want to exclude cars--even if that means fewer people want to visit the city from the outside--that's their decision.
That's awesome you took the plunge; jumping off the cliff is probably the hardest part. It's not easy but people who are smart and motivated are really good at figuring things out when they need to, it's just that so many take safe but unfulfilling path.

I went the opposite direction, leaving a comfortable but soul-sucking job in a totally different industry to transition into programming. It was rough for a few years as I was struggling to build up my experience and make enough money to get by on, but now I have a great job that I actually enjoy going to.
Most likely because the batteries would be cold 24/7, which doesn't happen with personal bikes since you can detach them.
The fact that we have to look at education from the perspective of whether or not we can find a job contributing to the coffers of rich executives is remarkably warped.

Education should be done for educations sake. Actual bullshit degrees come from universities seeking profit over education and even if you removed government loans from the equation they would still exist.

The idea that everything would somehow be fixed if loans were removed is a delusional one as long as there is a profit motivation for universities. Because it's easy to create McDegrees and sell them.
My mother had thyroid cancer the better part of a decade ago, just the one dose of the radioactive iodine sabotaged her teeth to. Like you she didn't have the best of dental health as it was but she's been losing a few teeth a year since.

My father died of cancer just before I turned 13 and he wasn't sick very long, over the course of a year or so he had a port installed, had a roughly horseshoe shaped and size scar on his scalp, had headgear bolted into his skull in multiple locations and the day we had to take him to the ER he had worked all day and by that night was effectively drowning in is own bodily fluids with his lungs mostly full of fluid at which point he went on a respirator, went unconscious and was taken off life support less than a week later.

Cancer sucks man, I'm sorry you got dealt that hand.
"Programmers don't like this (shit) tool addition you wrote because it doesn't work with the existing (shit) programming tools" is a better paraphrase TBH.
> Forcing people to pay thousands of dollars per year to participate in society is highly repressive.

You're right. We should charge them thousands of dollars per month so they can live downtown and walk everywhere instead. Problem solved!
Your take on the future of QR codes? (Other than payments in Asia)
Textbooks Are Too Expensive
Prohibiting buybacks might increase dividends. It’s more likely to boost M&A. What it unlikely is for internal R&D, capital investment or hiring to benefit.
Apologies for offtopic, but do all search engines do the affiliate thing? I.e. if I click on a Google link and buy a thing on Amazon, Google gets paid?
Unless you can provide specific examples of the necessity for bug-compatibility with BIND in DNS servers, I'm totally unconvinced by this. DNS is a gross, creaky old protocol, but it's just not that complicated.
We used to call them "DJ" movies Kenya, and they were particularly popular in rural areas. They were typically shown in "cinemas" which were basically dingy shacks that mothers disapproved of. They also used to edit the movies and redistribute them.
They are obsolete now, replaced by guys who torrent movies and sell them on DVDs.
This is a silly criticism, the same thing happened with HTTP, that's why HTTP 1.1 happened
Loved the Z80 on my Amstrad CPC 464!
I used an assembler typed in by hand from a magazine.

Geekiest accomplishment: A disk loader for Spindizzy.
The game was too large for the main memory with the disk driver loaded.

Had to use the video buffer to load the game in two parts and splice them together (overwriting the disk driver). Fun times!
I really love Azure, but not so much for hobby projects. If you want ssl on an app service, you’ll need at least the basic tier which starts at about $50/month. How does that make sense?
The niche commercial compilers I tend to love, happen to have a positive income of several decades, allowing their employees happy lives.

Hardly something that most LLVM FOSS contributors not on university research budgets can enjoy.
You learn the language to communicate with everyone else on the planet. Computers are tools for manipulating and transferring information so spend time learning their language.
Instead of wasting colossal effort catering to needs of everyone let everyone spend some time learning the language of everyone else.
The thing is that the importance of grounding has been well known in the field of AGI for many years.

Where I think the big impact of these guys in the field of AGI besides mainstreaming ideas that have been around for awhile, is in finding ways to improve the models created by deep learning to be more abstract and accurate. Assuming that is possible. They are putting out papers about things like disentangled representations. That is how deep learning get grounded language understanding.