skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason most people invest money in public companies is because they expect to get money back at some point. Otherwise, why invest at all?

There are two primary ways that companies can return money to shareholders: dividends and stock buybacks. Financially, the two are exactly equivalent. Tax-wise, they're mostly equivalent (there are a few exceptions around the edges). When a company issues a dividend, all the stockholders end up with a bit less equity and a bit more cash. Many stockholders would rather decide whether they value the cash or the equity more, which is why buybacks are attractive. In a buyback, you get to decide whether you value equity, in which case you keep your stock, or cash, in which case you can sell it back.
https://www.folj.com/

Lateral thinking and logic puzzles.

Segmented by difficulty.

If the answer is numerical, you can check to see if you are right before reading the solution.
According to Phoronix it's in:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...
Show HN: Infomap Online – Community Detection with the Map Equation Framework
Money/debt is still very cheap but hopefully the starry eyed VC groups are finally recognizing that not everything can grow exponentially with linear costs, not even true tech companies. Everything is reliant upon everything else at varying levels of complexity and complication. If you go all in on 10 things, all 10 can still fail hard or break even long enough to bury your investment.

Though at the moment there must be some neat online only systems being stood up by devs sheltering at home.
SAP Graph: API Sandbox on preview
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation has had poor results in the past, failing to live up to its previous hype. So I want to know what they did that's fundamentally different from past results. If what they did differently was do a poor job in their experimental setup, then that is enough to explain it.
When did David Icke try to pass a gun range in Kentucky off as Syria?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/business/media/turkey-syr...
At a meta level i am shocked this is getting downvotes. It is a legitimate question that pokes around what could be considered generally accepted wisdom. It concerns me that HN is starting to frown upon this sort of thing.
There's also rocket chat! I love matrix, don't get me wrong...
For self hosting .. is there some sort of a guide available that helps understand the resourcing needs relative to concurrent active users?

I'd like to hop on this, and think it will work great, but would like to make sure there's a way to right size a particular installation.
I was very sure (correct me if I'm wrong) that salmonella are only on the egg shell and could probably be decontaminated by dropping them in boiling water for a few seconds without denaturating the egg white. I really like the surge in dyi/food realated articles on hacker news, keep them coming!
Many companies still pay dividends as well. But, yes, functionally both dividends and stock buybacks return money to shareholders, i.e. the owners of the company. However, as you say, in the US the tax code tends to favor capital gains over dividends.
I'm at https://www.kelvinjiang.com/

Mostly a small collection of posts about programming and personal finance. Also been running for around fifteen years.

Most popular post is about currency arbitrage, which seems to have had a small resurgence in interest as of late from various crypto folks: https://www.kelvinjiang.com/2010/10/currency-arbitrage-in-99...

Side note: not sure if it's just a funny coincidence, but it seems like a good number of folks here have been running their sites for around fifteen years. Perhaps the timing just happens to match the typical career arc of software professionals, or maybe it was due to the popularity of blogging fifteen years ago.
But it never was about making a return on profit. The solvency and economic growth enabled by these overnight loans (assuming it doesn’t cause bigger problems down the line) is absolutely worth it.
Stop using code blocks if you're not posting code
How about being prepared so that you don't need to be bailed out by the federal government?

How about spending that money to provide better service?

It's not a revisionist history that virtually everyone complains about the declining level of service and increased fees.
Tbf, the bitrate depends entirely on the res constraints you've specified. We see 1Mbps when requesting 854x480, which seems to be quite a reasonable resolution when on a multiway conference.
Ignoring the “When Is the Bottom?” Question
The right way to structure this is to issue $50B worth of stock to the government. The airlines can buy it back with future profits to prop up the price once things are back to normal, while keeping the company afloat and retain jobs now.

The shareholders would protest, and should be allowed a right of first refusal. Put in money at the same price per share to avoid dilution if you want to. Their alternative is bankruptcy, so they don't have much other options.
In nominal dollars, not real dollars.
In good times, people complain about companies like Apple "hoarding cash". Now, people complain about companies redistributing profits to their shareholders--many of which are ordinary people holding shares in their 401(k)'s or otherwise. They really cannot win.
Interesting idea! i'm curious how many folks would be comfortable opting into that not knowing exactly where their name is going (I see the disclaimer and love the idea) I just bet folks would be cautious. Is there a way to identify what type of salesperson/experience/level/industry etc.
Sure they could've held it. Apple did it for a while. You could invest it and make even more, or invest a bit in not treating your passengers like f*cking cattle and constantly charging millions of fees, maybe?
It's how companies give profits back to their shareholders. It's just tax advantaged compared to dividends.
And Option 5 - Invest in research and development: better engines? Lighter materials? Better interior arrangements so that flyers can feel comfortable while you still turn a profit? I get that airlines don't directly create these things, but they could throw their excess cash into R&D contracts for manufacturers...
Have you noticed that the same statisticians who claim that 80% of people don’t know they have it fail to multiply the denominator when reporting statistics like mortality rate?

For example here in NJ we have about 40000 confirmed and tested cases and 1000 deaths. The mortality rate for our state is about 2%.

But if 80% of cases have no symptoms and are not tested, then the denominator should be 5x higher.

The real mortality rate is .4%

The same as a bad flu, but less than many flu seasons.
I doubt many enterprises upgraded to those, though. Even regular consumers hated the interface upheaval, and enterprises are extra sensitive to those kinds of changes.
Sure. When you combine hyper-competitive capitalism with a market that lacks regulation - taking steps that ensure you are privatizing profits and socializing losses is just good for business. Arguably, some of these corporations believe it is also necessary to stay in business.

Airlines exist in a space with ample competition, limited differentiation, and high price-sensitivity for customers. When that happens, they live or die on number of passengers and valuation compared to competitors. It's hard to increase demand for flights past what is already available. So they pump their numbers for the short term because that's what everyone else is doing, and because the cost of saving money for a rainy day means spooking investors or ceding more passengers to a competitor.
I'd agree in so far as it makes pulling scams (or innocently giving useless advice) far too easy:

"I had depression, and I tried X, and it worked. You've got depression, so you should try X." Extremely unlikely to be helpful, and often can be harmful.
And as has been said on other threads about this topic - were the individual airlines to have saved that money (taking the hit on interest rates before deploying it now), the amounts we're talking about would barely cover a few months of total operations per airline.

Am not an apologist by any stretch, but the narrative is "they should have created a black swan fund instead of share buybacks". But they'd have been skewered for years by the trade press for keeping billions of dollars in sub-optimal immediate cash form in order to buy a little extra time.
Requests to delay mortgage payments jump nearly 2k% as borrowers seek relief
You might not expect that some particular disaster is going to happen, but you can expect that some setback is going to occur, eventually. The good times do not last forever. It's not like the principle of having a reserve for bad times is a new idea (see also: ant, grasshopper).

If our corporate overlords bet everything on short term gain, and left nothing for the tomorrow that they thought would never come, why should we have to fix their mistake?
For the line of thought in articles like these, there's no difference if airlines had spend $45B on dividend payouts in the past four years rather than on buybacks.
Yes. Would love to be in the beta
The money was loaned to provide liquidity, and paid back with (low) interest.

I would need to look it up, but IIRC overall the feds made money on the bailout, especially to the banks, but took a slight haircut on the money they lent to automakers. Of course, that haircut doesn't factor in the benefit in keeping those industries alive and keeping those people employed (IMO very worth the price), but that's a bigger question.
4. Invest it in your core biz.

5. Invest it in research

6. Buy other companies to extend your core biz.
As a complete novice in this area, I don't understand the advantage of using a proxy-like service such as TURN.

What is the advantage over simply routing the media streams through application servers (i.e. user A connects to server which links to user B) which can then perform application-specific authentication, enforce restrictions on payloads, etc... Performance?
I beleive it is a scam. Every single person I've met who suffered from "depression" had a troubled past, and often a troubled present.

Not saying the symptoms are mild. It's a nasty state to be in. Inability to sleep and concentrate, leading to all sort of physical issues and impossibility to learn and keep a job.

All that being said, the causes are rather clear. Hard to fix. All these pshyco active treatments are judge bandades, anything to keep the brain quiet which in my opinion often aggregates the issue. Dependence, side effects... A person is not depressed but doesn't have its full brain capacity.

It would be valuable if clinical consultants converted to social workers to help patients address the root causes instead of prescribing medications and whatnot. Thing is, it doesn't sell that well and isn't covered by your insurance. Medics and therapy sessions are.
"Actually, that was good."
Google: “it’s better to be illiterate than have the possibility to read something wrong.”

I swear to god I thought the internet would be so different in 2020.

Before (and even after) the ban there was a lot of good information on YouTube, a lot of it was from trained medical professionals and now it’s all going away and people will be left with gossip and guesses.
Japanese language require IME to type, which converts sound written in hiragana to kanji: i.e. you type soba → get “そば” → IME suggests you “蕎麦”. Basically a stretch of modern phone keyboard correction but existed since the 80s.

Nice side effect to it is while there are predetermined sets of conversions coming with IME, it also handles some arbitrary mapping for convenience, i.e. かお(face) → ( ´∀｀) or きょう(today) → 2020/04/08.

iOS Japanese keyboard gives me following for literally number 1: 1 １ ① 一 ⅰ Ⅰ 1K ⒈ ⑴
I'm not a med sci person, but I bet if we look at the algorithms for getting to large N, all of them are expensive and all of them visit small N first. Anyway the results for any N seem very likely to be misleading to laypeople. (Laypeople means "almost everyone." For example I'm in photonics. In psychiatry I'm a layperson.)

I agree with nabla's comment that the real problem is our inability as laypeople to properly understand (or even properly upvote) scientific work.
This is a pretty standard way of creating solvers for puzzles that have discrete states. When you are searching for a shortest solution you can also hash states to track losing paths and abandon them early.
Burning Up; Warning: Internet companies are running out of cash – fast (2000)
Buybacks serve the same role as dividends. A company takes money they have no need for and instead of giving it to investors in the form of dividends (which is taxed) they buyback stock. As a shareholder you don't end up with cash but the value of the stock increases by the same amount but there is no tax.

I own Google stock. They don't have a dividend at all and buyback massive amounts of stock. It is just efficient. If the government taxed buybacks then they would likely start giving a dividend, as people would prefer deciding what to do with the money.

One additional issue is that company's have chosen often times to do stock buybacks even when taking on debt. This is because they can borrow money cheaply and believe the buybacks are good for the value of the shareholders overall. This isn't necessarily a bad thing for anyone - but in times like this it puts a real stress on them that may even bankrupt them.

I think it is a bit of question of risk. In theory I'd like the company's I own to be prepared for an emergency, but I' also be annoyed if I invested in a company and they just let the money sit in a bank account for years instead of finding a way to return profits to the shareholders immediately.
Both the declining level of service and increased fees are a byproduct of consumer preference: namely they choose flights based on sticker price.
>Just remember that the Federal government ended up making money on the automaker ...

The estimates I've read are that the federal government lost between 9 and 10 billion on the automaker bailouts.

For example:

>...In the end, taxpayers lost $10.2 billion.

https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chr...

>...the U.S. recovered all but about $9 billion of the auto bailout money.

https://www.marketplace.org/2018/11/13/what-did-america-buy-...

>...(quite apart from all the jobs that were saved).

Yea without the bailout, there would likely have been more job losses as consolidation occurred in the industry.
They have nothing better to do with that money.
> People make it sound like they were buying back their stock as they were cutting flights and laying off employees.

No. People make it sound like they were buying back their stock as they were not using that money to increase worker salaries and benefits. Nobody would complain about necessary bailouts if the organization shared profits with its laborers instead of lining executive pockets.
No. The right way is to issue 50B of stock back to the public. The shareholders who received 50B and are holding it in their personal emergency funds can buy it back, or new investors can. There's more than enough private capital available without requiring the government to step in.
If they fail what happens to the planes, the staff, the pilots, and anything else that makes the airline? Nothing.

The best thing we can do is let them and their bad debts die. We have private bailouts they're called acquisitions.
Nvidia Joins the Covid-19 High Performance Computing Consortium
Thank you, it is endlessly frustrating that this debate is always framed as "extraordinarily generous no-strings-attached bailout" vs "allow them to perish in flames," when there is always the alternative of a "bail-in" which requires executives and shareholders to take some of the pain, secures a much more concrete and measurable benefit to taxpayers, and thus helps avoid worsening the moral hazard problem we are drowning in.
I don't think this is helpful, it's quite possibly counter-productive. If you're prone to conspiracy thinking, you're going to link any current event to any alternative explanation, no matter how far fetched.

If 5G wasn't in the news, it would be something else. Suppressing the signal only makes it stronger, because now you've "proven" that "the elite can't allow the secret information out".

David Icke is preaching to the choir, he isn't converting anyone. Nobody who is otherwise capable of sound reasoning is going to watch him and go: "I might disagree with this person on whether Zionist Reptile Shapeshifters are controlling the world, but his analysis of the effects of 5G on human health and COVID-19 seem credible!"

Conspiracy thinking is extremely common even among clinically sane people. The "cure" is not suppression, not derision, but letting people figure it out how their mind sometimes works against them. The biggest obstacle is the human ego.
If stimulating some part of the brain can increase neural activity in a lasting way, could you use this to, say, make yourself better at math? Or, could you use it to suppress unrest by making everyone happy? If this works there are a lot of larger implications.
KMonad: An Advanced (QMK-Like) Keyboard Layout Manager in Haskell
Yes, it's like cancer, we don't know the cure but everyone rushes to tell you that you just need to take a pill and you'll feel better. Which pill?
Sure, but that still wasn't the best option.

1. We had the sharpest market drop in history. Models could predict this, but while this drop is say a 1 in 30 year event across all industries, this drop for certain sectors (like airlines) is more of a 1 in 100 year event. If companies all planned all the time for once in a century events, global growth would be much slower.

2. Most companies in most industries are still better for having done share buybacks. We're only back at 2017 stock levels. They've been buying back since 2010. The best return most companies got for their cash was doing this, and I'm not sure that's changed with this downturn. Most companies will be back to normal pricing in a year's time from now anyway, and their share buybacks will still have been as brilliant of a decision as ever.
What is the the expected release date for Bootstrap 5.

Being that it is still an early Alpha, this change may not have a significant impact for a while.
There’s really no such thing when you’re talking about a modern economy. Sure, compare in 2020 dollars (or 2019 dollars, to bypass all this recent volatility) if you must but the real value of a nominal dollar amount is directly affected by the strength of the economy and that is contingent on the bailouts and short-term loans. It’s very circular.
What is the problem with believing 5G causes coronavirus? The people who believe it are misinformed, and so what?

I understand why it's harmful to spread anti-vax memes, but 99% of "misinformation" is harmless. It's often difficult to separate theory and conspiracy from harmful information, a dubious concept.
> No business is going to hoard 50 billion dollars in an emergency fund for a pandemic that cuts 90% of revenue, that's just absurd.

Maybe a smart airline should. Because people have been issuing warnings about a possible pandemic for many years.

A business that operates as if it's always going to be sunshine and rainbows is not a properly run business.
The point is to have originals available at a good compression rate.
Having a thumbnail in the original sucks, as I don’t want lossy compression on my originals.
> I'd say most of the lower class has this issue.

Why would you say that? Do you think that rich people are happy and poor people are depressed? Anecdotally, the poorest people I know are often the happiest and the richest people are often the most miserable. I was a whole lot happier when I was younger and poorer. One thing has nothing to do with the other.
> No business is going to hoard 50 billion dollars in an emergency fund for a pandemic that cuts 90% of revenue, that's just absurd.

Aren't there a number of companies that have been hoarding cash for some time? [1]

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/07/microsoft-apple-and-alphabet...
Yeah, but most setbacks lead to a 10% drop in flights, not 99. This is quite material. A company that anticipated up to a 20% drop in flights and saved to last a year with that, will only be able to last a few months with a basically 100% drop in flights. That is exactly what we're seeing now.
Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-DNaDlSqBQ
I run a whole bunch of blogs, but the ones that people seem most interested in are the ones about homelessness. Those include:

San Diego Homeless Survival Guide https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

Street Life Solutions
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/

The Genevieve Files
https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/

Pocket Puter
https://www.pocketputer.com/

What Helps The Homeless
http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

(I will add this is also pertinent, though less obviously so:
https://writepay.blogspot.com/)
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it also a bet on the future in the sense of "I think our stock is undervalued right now and that it will go up in the future, so I should buy it cheap right now and then I can reissue the stock and raise a significantly more amount of money"? At least that's how I've thought about it
Apples cash hoard was all sitting overseas because it couldn’t be repatriated, no? That’s kind of a different scenario... they didn’t really choose to hold cash. They just didn’t want to pay the tax to bring it to the states.
They won't "go under". Force them into bankruptcy, someone buys them and assets out of bankruptcy. Management learns that there are huge ramifications for poor management decisions prioritizing investors short term wants vs business long term needs.
I gave Pharo a chance. It stinks. Its classes are cluttered and complicated. The documentation is horrible. The syntax is simple, but simple does not mean easy. In a lot of ways, I found myself re-inventing perfectly good wheels to get anything done because I couldn't figure out how to use the stuff that was there. In the end it was a waste of effort.

And being forced to use a GUI to do simple text-related things made it smell from the get-go, but that's a personal preference thing.
Timeline—

November 2017: added TURN abuse to our stunner toolset

December 2017: discovered and reported TURN vulnerability in private customer of Enable Security

February 2018: briefly tested Slack and discovered the vulnerability

April 2018: submitted our report to Slack, helped them reproduce and address the issue through various rounds of testing

May 2018: Slack pushed patch to live servers which was retested by Enable Security

January 2020: asked to publish report

February 2020: disclosure delayed by HackerOne/Slack

March 2020: report published
Australian here - I too want to go back to old Yugoslavia and see what it was like. I recently had some time in Serbia and Kosovo, and it was eye-opening to say the least - the differences and the similarities between the cultures don't make a lot of sense to the milquetoast mentality inculcated into me by my Aussie upbringing. It is a very fascinating region of the world and I can only say that having spent time in both Belgrade and Pristina, there is a little bit of hope that the new generation will rise from the turmoil of their parents past. Slowly, bit by bit, the prejudice and distrust is eroding.

Hate those border crossings, though. The drive from Vienna to Pristina was something I'll never forget.
https://utkuufuk.com

Some of my latest posts:

I had to build a web scraper to buy groceries
http://utkuufuk.com/2020/03/28/grocery-scraping/

How I Manage My Side-Projects Using Trello
http://utkuufuk.com/2020/03/20/trello-project-manage/
> The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half the participants are receiving fake treatment.

This second sentence from the article is enough: let us not comment on an experiment that had no control group. I will be interested in the results from the second trial though.