skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, if the airlines "go under" in bankruptcy, the assets, airplanes, and people remain-- with new leadership and investors. The dynamic, economic outcome is to let them fail and reorganize them.
Git Visualized: Forked a Repo, Now the Original Has More Commits
That's roughly how the GM bailout worked. 'The government initially had a 61% stake in GM when the company emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, leading critics of the bailout to dub it "Government Motors." It started to sell that stake with GM's November 2010 initial public offering. '
Having worked in the financial industry for close to two decades, and with most of my friends in the same industry, it is remarkable to what lengths regulators went after the 2008 banking crisis.

Banks are vital middlemen between many parties and as such, were already heavily regulated back then, but after the massive tax-payer funded bailouts, regulation went into overdrive.

For example, Banks are expected to survive short- to mid-term dire periods. However, the 2008 crisis showed that most banks were not in that position. So the regulators went into overdrive and regulated most of the weak spots they had identified, and (IMO) most importantly, really stepped up stress tests. Banks have to demonstrate that they can survive interest rate shocks, market crashes, political crises, etc. for a certain amount of time.

And these things get audited extensively. A friend of mine works at a bank under direct ECB oversight, and the sheer amount of data, models, simulations, etc. they need to produce is just staggering.

Perhaps it is time to apply some of these methods to other industries that might only survive with a taxpayer bailout. For example, a global pandemic as we are experiencing right now, is not exactly something that was unimaginable before.

Airlines could be expected to maintain contingency plans for such scenarios, and required to maintain appropriate financial buffers, with stock buybacks, dividends etc. forbidden as long as those buffers are below the levels required by those scenarios.
I agree that a lot of these arguments seem pretty naive and lack understanding about how markets and the economy work. Also there is nothing inherently wrong with stock buybacks at all I think. However, I think everyone would benefit by realizing that these "unpredictable" events are actually not that rare and we should be prepared for them. Companies should keep more cash for unpredictable scenarios. It didn't have to be a pandemic, it could have been war, volcanic eruptions, terrorism etc. Companies should not assume it will always be "good times". Also these types of events seem to trigger chain reactions that make leverage and financial tricks really risky, so keeping cash I think is good.
why isn't stock buy back considered inside trading? Is the purchase somehow firewalled from the company?
I mostly agree. Although dividends arguably are a bit more reliable than stock appreciation because of buy backs. However, the basic point is entirely correct. If you think stock buy backs are evil then you must logically agree that dividends are also evil. Which doesn't really make any sense given that, under classic finance theory, the share price is the discounted present value of dividends.
Matt Levine has a good take from a few weeks ago. Basically he argues the buybacks were the only sensible play, if you were the airlines.
No, because dividends don't benefit from compounding stock prices.

If you buy back your stock from 20 -> 80 a share vs. having paid out the same amount in dividends, the share buybacks yield a much greater income than dividends, which once paid no longer compound unless individual investors re-invest them.
We need Georgian land value tax for domain names.
That's a completely different and opposite point to "the government made money on the bailouts, actually."

> (assuming it doesn't cause bigger problems down the line)

We're dealing with those bigger problems now, today. The moral hazard created by the 2008/2009 bailouts is a big part of why executives could leverage their companies to buy back stock throughout the 2010s with confidence they would pay no personal price if it ended in tears.
United went bankrupt in 2002. Air Canada, 2003. US Airways, 2004. Northwest and Delta in 2005. American in 2011. This pandemic may be a once-in-a-century event, but "we're out of money" is not, especially for airlines.
> Why would you say that? Do you think that rich people are happy and poor people are depressed?

There are numerous studies showing this, for almost all disease categories. All psychological illness is negatively corelated with socioeconomic status.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status

I'd say it's hard to find good sources of nutrition and the time to exercise when you're part of the lower class.

edit: negatively correlated...
Re:placebo, these were people with treatment-resistant depression. They've had depression for many years, have undergone many rounds of medication and talk therapy (I've been through 7 drugs including ketamine, and 3 therapists). This is not a group that is prone to placebo improvements, they're cynical and hopeless, though of course a double-blind study is still needed.
It's the exact same thing as dividends, with slightly better tax implications (you can choose when to receive them, rather than be taxed whenever you do receive them).
Cash in a bank isn't "locked up." The bank uses it to make loans. In a sense, it expands the supply of money because a bank isn't required to have 100% cash reserves. So $50 billion in bank accounts generates more than $50 billion in loans.
Besides being bad on principle, misinformation in times of struggle can lead to irrational behavior, including misguided violence. For example, in this specific case: "5G-coronavirus conspiracy theory spurs rash of telecom tower arson fires" https://fortune.com/2020/04/06/5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-the...
In my experience, the fastest way to serve a web font stack is via base64-encoded web fonts in a single “font” CSS file; it’s more raw bytes but fewer requests. To do it this way requires having all of the web fonts be in the same lowest common denominator format, which is .woff.

I also add about 10k to the combined font stack file by adding hinting which is only seen on 75dpi displays, because too many users are still using low resolution monitors.

The main reason I use woff fonts and their approximately 120k size is because the days of “font-face: Verdana” giving (almost) everyone the same looking website are a thing of the past with Android smart phones everywhere.
It's not very security-conscious of them to continue using IE11. These healthcare companies are being incredibly irresponsible by continuing to use an insecure and outdated browser; even going against Microsoft's own recommendation in doing so, as I understand it. By supporting IE11 your company is helping to enable the healthcare industry to continue using insecure software.

A well-run IT department should be able to provide its users with a modern and secure browser. Why does your definition of a well-run IT department include the requirement that software installations should be restricted, but not a requirement to avoid using insecure and outdated software?

I believe one can make a compelling case that the continued use of IE11 within the healthcare industry is unethical, as it provides a known attack vector by which people's data can potentially be stolen. Stop giving them a pass on this.
Fastly announces $50M in support of nonprofits and open source
That’s “it made money on top of everything else, even though that wasn’t even the point,” meaning any money made is a bonus.
> 1. If there is extra profit one year, these companies will willingly reduce premiums instead of giving bonuses, stock buy backs, or dividends to investors. I don’t know if you have observed the stock market recently

It's the thing competitive markets require of them. If costs go down, one company is going to notice how much more profit they can make by lowering prices and using the lower prices to triple their market share. The others then have to do the same thing or they continue to lose market share.

The buybacks are something else entirely -- they're a result of low long-term interest rates. Companies have at least two ways of raising capital. They can sell stock and they can borrow money. When interest rates are low it makes more sense to raise money through borrowing than selling shares. Buybacks are the reverse of selling shares, so when interest rates are reduced there is a rebalancing which involves companies borrowing more money and buying back shares because it's cheaper to use borrowed capital than invested capital when interest rates are low.

> 2. “Compliance cost” - these things are not done via paper and fax machines. Regulation simply asks one to keep track of, say in the case of medical companies, administration cost vs servicing cost etc - things you would have had to do anyways in your public-good-seeking scenario above

Have you seen the regulations in some of these industries? There is nothing simple about it. It requires you to have lawyers in addition to accountants. And the lawyers are pathologically risk-averse but have plenary control over compliance policy because no one wants to end up in court, so the rules in practice are characteristically much more rigid than what the legislature intended.

Many of the costs are also fixed rather than proportional to customer volume, which disproportionately impacts smaller companies and results in a disproportionately large negative impact on competition.
Right now is an excellent time for fully online services to make their mark like a few products I've seen promoted on this forum (specifically the IPTV centralization site in the last month or two).

I think once we get through the pandemic and begin returning to normal life we may, at least short term, see companies drop the whole develop product, get VC buy in and cash to burn, then explode staff count and product depth without the user base or revenue streams to maintain them. Companies will be more conservative short term and consider their liquidity and ability to reshuffle and adapt vs a titan of their segment buying up all the smart engineers. Some may still go for that (true unicorns, perhaps?). Maybe I'm being optimistic.
This is true of all compression formats. The receiver has to know how to decode it. A good compression algorithm will attempt to send only the data that the receiver can't predict. If we both know you're sending English words, then I shouldn't have to tell you "q then u" - we should assume there's a "u" after "q" unless otherwise specified. This isn't new to this technique, it's a very common and old one (it's one of the first ones I learned watching a series of youtube lectures on compression or maybe it was just information theory in general) and it has been commonly called lossless compression none the less.
<insert python joke here>
It was announced a ~month ago that Mirantis (Aquirer of Swam and Docker Enterprise) will continue to develop Swarm with no implied death date. https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-will-continue-to-supp...

It is also an open source project, so even if the corporate overlords abandon it, the code could live on!
I want to see if they can restore circulation for a low risk non-invasive treatment of hemianopsia.

I saw sometimes when circulation is restored for an unrelated treatment of more critical need, sometimes hemianopsia goes away. No one will risk it when they can just turn their head.

If magnetic stimulation gets to this point, would it be more of a risk than just precise surgery?

Would it still be hit or miss? Is restoring circulation actually doing it or something else?

If you get to the point where you can restore site through electromagnetism, would it less risk and more reliable to use genetics? Take someone's genome, recreate a model of the trauma, and personalize a blood thinner like they personalize chemotherapy?
It's unlikely the market holds $50B in demand for airline stocks right now. Sending their shares to zero isn't going to help.
Speaking for myself, when I say that I wish companies spent more of their warchests, I mean investment, not buybacks.
Show HN: Logicboard – In-browser IDE for remote programming interviews
LogreIO – Log stuff easily with one click
I've been loading up and I imagine many investors are.
That nuts. MS has known about this bug for 20 years!

Example.com exists for a reason.

How could anyone trust MS for security anything?
In addition to all the other issues that people have brought up, the most important thing to remember is that the airline business is extremely cyclical. They know that there are always bad times around the bend. Their total lack of preparation is what's so galling. The management at these companies is simply unfit when they so routinely ignore the history of their own industry.
You can really only increase base compensation when you have the cash and you expect to have that cash down the road as well. Employees are not happy with incomes that are as cyclical as business income is. A bonus could be a good option.
> There's more than enough private capital available without requiring the government to step in.

If that were true, the price wouldn't have tanked so much?
Isn't there some sort of limit to the Fed's endless free money printing machine? Doesn't inflation or some other negative consequence kick in eventually?
You're unfortunately still stuck in thinking you can just take a string and make it another string and boom you have i18n.

Unfortunately that's misunderstanding that fundamentally language relies on way more context than just strings to get the same message across.

You can't just simply translate and have a good UX for other languages.
https://www.ronatory.com/posts/1-daily-blogging

I started daily blogging around 5 months ago. I didn't set any restrictions regarding the topics, it could be about anything.

So why is that awesome and why should you read it?

What's most interesting to me is that I wrote about topics I didn't thought about, that I would write something about it. So lets see how this will evolve. So far I just like the everyday challenge of writing down something I thought about recently and share it.

So everyday will be a surprise post about any topic. I think this is even for myself the most interesting part of this blog.
What does a factcheck of spliced Biden campaign video have to do with the issue at hand? The quotes I pulled were directly from the transcript.
Do you hold lunatics and quacks to the same standards, or are they not considered part of the media... Despite having what are, essentially, television channels?
> You even vote without ID which is extremely weird for the rest of the world.

Some states do require identification, but it's up to each state decide what is required. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws_in_the_United_St...
As I understand it the issue here is cash flow; the assets the companies have on their books are still valuable, but there is a cash flow issue right now. Every normal company would approach various lenders to take out a loan - I'm not quite sure why airlines are being treated any differently, or why the government or public needs to receive stock as a make weight.

If their businesses are solid, sound businesses, major lenders will not have an issue with offering good terms on whatever it is that they need to bridge the gap.

Other than a firm understanding of what that gap is, am I missing something obvious which makes bank loans not the go to solution here?
> Increase pay/benefits to your rank and file employees for helping you get so much cash

The auto industry did this through high wages and very large pension plans, and got absolutely destroyed in '08 and also demonized by taxpayers for creating an undeserving "welfare class" of autoworkers that was too expensive to maintain.

> Invest back in the business at reasonable levels so as to keep enough cash for an emergency fund

What if you feel like any further investment yields negative return? Berkshire Hathaway has been sitting on cash for years because they felt that they couldn't put their money into any constituent businesses and generate the right return. Why purposefully throw money into a black hole?
Holding cash does not lock it up. Banks make deposited funds available as capital for investment. This can lead to a liquidity problem during a crunch, but that's literally why we have a central bank.

There are plenty of companies that have large cash reserves.

Stock buybacks should be made illegal again except as market operations to provide compensation. You can return to shareholders through dividends.
In that sense, I can losslessly compress everything down to zero bits, and recover the original artifact perfectly with the right algorithm.
Not always. Some places use ActiveX or npapi. I know one place which the security system uses a java8 applet. The functionality has been remove from other browsers. I wish if MS provided a way on edge to run some webpages in IE. At least then we could isolate problematic webpages that use plugins while have rest run on edge.
So what? The times were right and the opted for a stock buyback with excess cash.

I don't own airlines stocks, but when a company where I am a shareholders does a stock-buyback with excess cash I am v=so very happy.

I am OK with banning stock buyback during the period between bailout and full repayment of the loan, but what happened before of after the loan should not be part of the argument for the bailout.

There are no bad politicians, only bad voter.
When did David Icke issue a correction?
They need to be careful, such approach would have limited the info about covid-19. When I was watching the news, youtube videos in early Jan, it was coming from the "conspiracy theory" folks. Not mainstream media. Those folks were right.
Scam coronavirus testing drive-thru sites reported
See, I don't like calling it a "scam" because that implies malice. Hanlon's razor may apply here. "Depression" is our modern analogue of "hysteria" in the past; a blanket term for a wide variety of poorly understood diseases.

The medical establishment's strange resistance to exploring gut flora and inflammation as a cause of these kinds of diseases, on the other hand, is something I might call a scam.
The public currently wouldn't buy the stock due to bankruptcy risk. If the government commits to buying what's left at the same terms the public would start buying as well reducing the burden on taxpayers.

Historically this kind of deal has been profitable for governments in the cases that I know of (in banking), while at the same time keeping more jobs and thus reducing economic impact of unemployment.
> They seem to have it all, but just want to die.

Maybe this just isn't a problem like doctors make it out to be. Maybe life isn't worth living. It seems like if you try to take up this position, you get shouted out of the room because no one wants to accept the fact that life is utterly meaningless and futile for a subset of people, and it's not a condition -- it's just an objective analysis of the situation.

Slaving away for 60 years and having to spend the vast majority of your healthy, waking hours making someone else rich isn't rewarding. It's pointless.

The good things in life -- family, friends, hobbies -- are sidelined and you're only allowed to focus on them 2/7 days of the week. Yeah, life really doesn't seem like it's worth living.
https://alicegg.tech/

I have been writing this blog for a bout a year now. About half of the articles I've written are about cryptography, the others are about software engineering and conferences I've attended.

A couple articles I'm proud of:

* The dangers of AES-CBC: https://alicegg.tech/2019/06/23/aes-cbc.html

* Low Tech Crypto - Solitaire: https://alicegg.tech/2020/01/03/solitaire.html

* BDD in Golang: https://alicegg.tech/2019/03/09/gobdd.html
What is profitability and why is it more important than profit?
Have met lots of people who are depressed and don't have a troubled past or present. Your descriptions of etiologies, how medications function and help, etc. are simplistic and ignorant at best. My opinion of your opinion is not high, but luckily that's not a good basis for judgment.
Not to mention the airline industry in particular routinely has adverse events that affect it. Just to run down a list of random things airline execs should be considering as "normal" risks they need to plan some buffer for, all of which have caused significantly impactful events on a regular basis for the industry, even to the point of causing some airlines to go bankrupt and/or be bought out by competitors over time:

* Government regulation impacts

* Union strikes

* Aircraft groundings due to faulty (or less-long-lived than anticipated) parts

* Ticket search companies undercutting their profits

* Oil (and thus fuel, one of their main costs) price surges

* Wars and conflicts that decrease travel demand or cause large unsafe-to-fly zones over the world.

* Volcano eruptions that fill regions of the globe's sky with engine-killing volcanic dust.

* Terrorism (the reduction in passenger demand in the wake, groundings while implementing new safeguards, related lawsuits in the aftermath, etc)

* Now-obviously: Pandemics (but even smaller epidemics have shown effects several times in the past couple of decades!)
> it’s called fiduciary duty to their own stakeholders

SoftBank has a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders. (Note: not all stakeholders. It has a duty to them. But it's not a fiduciary one.)

It also has a fiduciary obligation to WeWork shareholders, by virtue of its Board seat.

This case is, in summary, about how those duties conflict.
> systemd

nobody needs systemd. nobody but RedHat. it is a step backwards, net net.
The automaker bailouts were part of a much larger overall program, that did make a minimal profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

> TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6% and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.
Where it might be very useful is for companies who distribute Cellular IOT devices where they pay for each byte uploaded. That could have a real impact on cost with the tradeoff being more work on-device (which can be optimized).
Buy pandemic insurance to protect your company in case of downturn.
This is true. But the point that not everyone can have the same job is also true. We all know and use some math, but we are all not Mathematicians.
Does that mean it's worth learning..?

I'd also challenge that CTCI is what companies test... It's what FAANG tests.
It's obvious that buy-backs are basically a hack for struggling companies to sacrifice long-time gains for short-term posturing. So what would a fair regulation around stock buy backs look like?

We could make it illegal, but that seems like it would favor people who want to do corporate takeovers. Also, I've seen legitimate uses of stock buybacks, such as buying it back to give it as a grant to new employees.

We could limit the amount bough or spent, or require that some percentage of stock's bought back be re-allocated to employees as grants or options.

I'm not an economic person though, just spit-balling.
youtube and other steaming platforms use a lot of servers to handle the load, so no jitsi can't be youtube itself unless you have a beast of a connection and even then you'd cap your connection after a hundred users. CDNs like cloudflare does the same but for websites.
Indeed, I work at a company with no debt and significant cash reserves. I had not idea it was so rare until the past few weeks.
Won't happen until mainstream media and average Americans are onboard. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening anytime soon.
“Quarantine” (Parody of Billy Joel's “Honesty”)