skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“The free market will solve everything” is a seductive idea because of its simplicity. “Just let the free market solve it. Oh, there’s a problem? It’s because the market is not ‘free’ enough.” The reality is more complicated. We need a balance of a healthy market forces and regulations to prevent the exploitation of people and the environment. But that’s a lot of work, and not as elegant sounding of a solution as, “let the market figure it out.”
Meta: what’s with all the employee stock option submissions recently? I see like four in the past two days. Is it because of the clump of major tech IPOs?
This is an extremely bad take.

Due to exercise windows, people are often forced to either give up all of their options, or exercise them when it is unclear that they will be worthless.

> So I sold part of my options when they were in the money.

If you were able to sell your options, then you were in a totally different situation than what is being discussed here.
For my wife's emergency surgery, they paid the surgeon. But the surgery room, recovery room, and anesthesiologist - that was all determined to not be medically necessary. And they fought those bills for about 8 months before paying.
> much of the codebase bloat I've seen in recent years has come from super-hackers

I'd say they aren't really super-hackers; no true Scotsman and all that.
> I don’t want thousands of dollars in my investments riding on the success of one single company

Myself as well. For the private companies where I had options, most never worked out as being worth anything so not acting on them was the actual money-saving move. For the public companies, act on them if they're worth something when they vest and take the profit over to a mutual fund; I have had some options vest at 2x the current stock price making them useless, so you just play it vesting date by vesting date and hope for some profit on each chunk.
Wouldn't that make Doom much harder? In-game adversaries would take advantage and execute vectorized attack patterns supported by cached-ammunition flow. Would Doomguy be able to survive at all?
Netflix's Metaflow: Reproducible machine learning pipelines
> Also it is possible that the value of tracking is non-linearly related to the number of people you are tracking (if three people are somehow similar I might be able to apply some insight gleaned from one to the other two). So, they might fundamentally want quite a bit more than any reasonable person would be willing to pay for their service, to stop tracking.

Not my problem. Price it in and be transparent about how they are using data.
Justice minister announces online freedom of speech bill
These organizations charge exorbitant amounts of money for the care they provide. This is care which very few people are able to refuse. And if you do refuse care you are likely to die. What hospitals do would be considered extortion if a private citizen did it.

I have no sympathy for them whatsoever.
I can really feel the tide turning in the health industry right now. Up until this point, we often looked to add things to our diet to increase our health (whole grains, fiber, antioxidants, minerals, supplements, etc, etc).

The evidence from things such as intermittent fasting is suggesting the path to better health is to remove from our diet and abstain from food, not the other way around. Removing all grains from your diet is probably vastly more healthy than adding whole grains.
Nice idea and implementation!

In case you plan to move this from hackathon experiment to real product, to me the second letter in the logo splash (first image in the readme) looks like an "l" instead of the "r" that it's supposed to be. So I first read it as "BlightPath" which is probably not desired.
You don't need a high level mole when access to these databases is just floating around for sale.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48348307
I ported parts of a TCP stack to the Cray X-MP in the 1980s. It was so fast that at first I thought it was broken. Hit <return> on the compile command line and the prompt would come right back almost immediately.
Is the issue JS as an extension language, or is it using JS for core events? Or maybe something else? People write successful games with Pygame, and Python's VM is much less optimized than what's available in the JS world, even in 2010.

To get 1-frame response time, you need to poll and redraw in the same 16.67ms window. That's an eternity inside a computer. I can write a JS curses app using blessed and it feels pretty snappy, so I'm guessing JS isn't the fundamental problem. The GNOME folk have always been a fan of IPC though (remember ORBit?), so I wouldn't be at all surprised if the latency is due to context switching.
>I bet supermarkets aren't big transmission vectors.

I think that is probably true, after all we continued to buy groceries right through the lockdown period and cases remained low.
A top-up would increase your number of options (and thus your percentage), that is different from the value/percentage not changing as part of a new raise.

Unless you're talking about the cap table being completely wiped but that's a different scenario and I wouldn't consider that to be part of dilution.
> Not just in this particular discussion, but overall a shift away from talking about individual, inspired and sometimes entrepreneurial creativity toward how to pass a FAANG-style interview or have better standups and corporate culture.

Comparing hackers in an individual context is apples and oranges to talking about them in a company context.

It's great when hackers use their knowledge and creative energy to create new things or startup new companies.

It's not great when super-hackers use their assumed intellectual superiority to make life miserable for their team members and managers. There are plenty of real "hackers" who have the right interpersonal skills and self-awareness to be lead teams in a business context and get work done. Unfortunately, there are plenty of self-described "hackers" who use think their intellectual superiority excuses a lot of bad behavior in the workplace, from stonewalling projects unless/until they get their way to railing against the corporation.

If these hackers want to go off and start their own companies then I'm all for it. As a coder-turned-manager, I don't want any self-absorbed hacker types on my team, though.
> If you code as an outsider

More likely a jumpy or purse clutching individual who is oblivious to their surroundings will stand out to perps.
Data Science Challenges
> and prices are hidden

I believe the Trump administration is addressing this:

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2019/11/15/trump-administrati...

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/10/29/trump-administrati...

> The rule requires that most health plans and health insurers not only provide easy-to-understand personalized information on enrollee cost-sharing for healthcare services, but must also publicly disclose the rates they actually pay healthcare providers for specific services.

> Through a shopping tool available through their plan or insurance company, consumers will be able to see the negotiated rate between their doctor and their plan or insurer, as well as the most accurate out-of-pocket cost estimate possible based on their health plan for procedures, drugs, durable medical equipment, and any other item or service they may need.

> Consumers will also have access to accurate price and plan information that allows them to shop and compare costs between individual doctors before receiving care, so they can choose a healthcare provider that offers the most value and best suits their medical needs.

But it'll be another couple years before it's all implemented it seems
I don't believe the workers at these huge factories are doing anything approaching "estimate the profitability and determine what they want out of that pie."

I think they're desperate for jobs in a way that precludes estimating profitability and negotiating for pie.
When Bert Plays the Lottery, All Tickets Are Winning
New Zealand is the other country that allows it and they seem generally satisfied with their healthcare system.
Smaller percentage of a much larger company. It’s a speculative market right now which helps. Most of these startups you’re seeing in the news are going public at $5B-$10B plus valuations. The big ones for $50B+
Not at a start up but I worked at a company that had yearly options or RSU grants (your choice) and a share purchase plan. Got acquired after 2.5 years and hand't exercised/sold anything up to that point. Acquiring company accelerated grants and employer match so I ended up with about 60k CAD post tax. Would have only been about 20k if they didn't accelerate.
In the .COM bubble, many, many employees got crushed by exercising and holding options that were in the money when they exercised. 'Accountants and politicians were inundated with horror stories' [0]. The crushing happened when the stock price subsequently crashed below what their option price was. That circumstance meant they were liable to pay tax on the capital gain from exercising, but, did not have enough equity in the shares to cover the tax liability.

Generally, only exercise if the shares are in the money and 1) you are immediately going to sell or 2) the options are expiring. If you're going to exercise and hold, sell enough to cover your tax liability. See an accountant if the amounts are 'large' relative to your financial situation. If they are expiring and in the money and the company is private, talk to your HR department about selling enough shares back to the company to cover the tax liability. Seek professional advice if the amount is material for you.

Schwab has some good common-sense advice[1]

[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-tech-taxes-story.html

[1] https://www.schwab.com/resource-center/insights/content/unde...
Why not just keep the device off and stop using it? That would stop all attacks!
Sympathy has nothing to do with it.
> I think this has turned into a cultural issue unfortunately, and once it's culture all reason, sensibility, and middleground is lost.

I strongly disagree. While we all have our own personal political views and deltas to varying degrees, many people that I know on both the left and the right (U.S.) are increasingly distrustful of data being "harmless". They know it is not harmless.

Prime example: Hunter Biden's laptop fiasco. Even if you love or hate the guy, NO ONE wants to be subjected to that level of public embarrassment and privacy invasion.

I believe that personal privacy in the 21st century is an issue that either hurts us all or helps us all - perhaps one of the few issues right now that easily crosses boundaries. Another example I will use: Everyone hates Facebook. And for good reason.
These points hardly justify how one could casually that drop React land is "crazy-sauce" while recommending NativeScript... There's quite a bit to address here:

> Needing shouldComponentUpdate to do anything nontrivial

I'd need to see what "non-trivial" means, because I have barely used it in three years pushing React to production, even when I used classes... The article you post is from 2017, it shows an optimization for a very particular scenario (rendering a list of 600 items), which BTW, could be optimized in many different ways... If you're telling me Vue never needs this kind of optimization for heavy fronts, I'd have a very hard time believing you.

> The sheer amount of times React has been basically rewritten

I honestly wouldn't know or care if the library has been "rewritten", "extended" or "patched" or what they've done to the underlying code - because the core API has not really changed in years... Like I said, hooks extended the library and developers could transition at their own pace or not transition at all.

> Every react codebase cargo-culting into Flux (normally through redux) when all you really need most of the time is a simple AJAX call.

There are many React codebases that don't use Redux. But it's still a great state management library (or pattern) for moderately complex UIs. If you have your own state-management solution (including "simple AJAX calls", whatever that means in the context of Flux or state management), you can use it...

> you can get reasonably productive and performant in <1 day after reading all the docs

Ditto for React... Any semi-competent dev can be writing at least presentational components with basic network calls in a day... Moderately complex state management and asynchronous actions that affect state take longer to wrap your head around, but I doubt that Vue really simplifies this. UI programming can become naturally complex under certain requirements, and I doubt there is a framework that can completely abstract away this complexity.

> Also I want to point out that "react" is almost always react + redux + react-router + webpack at the end of the day

That's Create-React-App, which completely abstracts the need for pretty much everything except React-Router (10min to setup) and Redux (which nowadays you can substitute with plenty of alternatives). You can be writing business logic and views in 15 minutes, tops. And in a fair amount of cases, CRA stands the test of time, too: I've got code in production for very large customers using it and I know of startups that are building complex products in their second or third year of operations and haven't even ejected their app...

> the amount of hype and OSS friendly companies

Sure, there are network effects - popularity begets popularity. But surely a library or framework can't live on hype alone? Look at Angular... React also - mainly, rather - remains popular because it has seen significant improvements to its core and ecosystem.
Even at home/hobbyist scale, it's worth taking aluminium swarf to a metal recycler.
Certainly true in Adobe's case.
> And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.

This is the point where I realized that person was not commenting in good faith. It simply isn't plausible that a GNOME developer was earnestly unaware of XFCE's existence.
> When did workers create the wealth, exactly?

When they showed up to the factory that day and turned a pile of parts into an iphone.

Where do you think the wealth comes from?
> Other countries seem to have solid solutions for "socializing" medicine

What baffles me the most is that most "socialized" systems functions much like a tax-paid insurance policy that covers everything and has no profit motive.

Even in a normal insurance situation you're "paying for someone else's treatment". That's the whole point of insurance.
It's not evidence for MOND, it's evidence contradicting the LambdaCDM model

One interesting new model for Dark Matter is called "Superfluid dark matter" which seems to be getting more attention and maybe will supplant LambdaCDM

Edit: from the FA "(3) we detect a systematic downward trend in the weak gravity part of the radial acceleration relation at the right acceleration predicted by the EFE of the MOND modified gravity. Tidal effects from neighboring galaxies in the Λ cold dark matter (CDM) context are not strong enough to explain these phenomena. They are not predicted by existing ΛCDM models of galaxy formation and evolution, adding a new small-scale challenge to the ΛCDM paradigm"

Yes, that specific part can be explained by MOND but ΛCDM is one of several models of dark matter (as MOND is one of several possible modified gravity models)
Not OP, but I recall Zenga did something similar and completely screwed over their employees just before their IPO.

I've heard of many other instances as well so this must be a somewhat common tactic.
You can also be held liable for your contractor not paying the sub contractors. The sub contractors can take out a lien against your property to be paid. This is more akin to what Apple is getting away with by sub contracting to suppliers in the developing world.

https://www.araglegal.com/individuals/learning-center/topics...
Fiberglass is incredibly useful for prototyping and repairs. I watched a shipwright rebuild a bow by creating a mold from sheets of melamine. Then epoxy it to the cut open hull. And this was an age old technique using little more than hand tools and common sense.
> In that case, don't I as an employee get liquidity either way, since it's being bought at the agreed upon price?

Correct. The problem is a lot of companies go further. They restrict sales completely. In practice, insiders are allowed to purchase at depressed prices in tenders from time to time and then resell at a mark-up in the open markets.
When I did the same almost 30 years ago, we used graphical debuggers, namely Turbo Assembler debugger.

GDB isn't the only game in town, and even so, it has graphical debuggers as well.

So I see that more as a failure of teaching than anything else.

As for WebAssembly, I actually agree, if anything else it is now fashionable and that motivates students.
I actually checked companies house but sadly the company (the original Arm Holdings) concerned no longer exists!
jitboy: A Game Boy emulator with dynamic recompilation (JIT) for x86-64
I've been saying this for a long time.

Supply and demand don't apply to healthcare.

You can only adjust supply.

Peoples demand for their health is infinite.
Yes, CCL still exists and it still has the Cocoa interface for Mac.
Here's the issue, Whatsapp had a system like that but then Facebook bought it up and it's hard to think of a reason beyond 'we want to crush our competition'
I rewrote a Clojure tool in Rust
So I'm fairly ignorant about these things, but I'll give it a go.

My company is an LLC. In a sense, I have this equity. This is how the value is defined:

Value = Percent_Of_Shares *(Current_Price_Of_Company - Price_of_Company_At_Time_Of_Issuance)

Note that, on the day these issued to me, the value here is equal to zero, because the current price of company is equal to the price of company at time they are issued. Thus, I have received something which has no value, and thus have no tax burden. Technically I'm now a partner in the LLC.

This has tax implications: when the company is making money, I owe tax money on that. However, they're in growth mode, and losing money, which means I get to carry a tax writeoff. Further, it's written into the company's bylaws that if they make money, they're obligated to give employees a distribution equal to the tax burden that the employee will incur, i.e. when there is a tax burden outside of a liquidation event, they are obligated to give me enough money to cover it. Also, if they sell the company, my shares are vested immediately. I don't know what happens to them covering the taxes if I leave; maybe I become liable for it, and there's a downside there.

The shares are non transferrable, which is lame but apparently quite standard.
Interesting, I have not but will investigate.
On-disk persistence (“untethered”) is actually fairly rare. Why do that when it leaves behind evidence and you can just remotely run the exploit again to hack the device?
I've had options at 3 companies that all went through some event.

1 - Company acquired after I left. I paid 3k for my shares when I left, made 3k net. Not bad.

2 - Company was self-funded when I left, paid about 2k for shares. When they took external investment years later, I needed to sell my shares, net 6k.

3 - Company I was still working for was acquired. I'm acquihired at a better salary & benefits, plus retention bonus after a year. Exercised my options at 4k to net 55k.

I've had a run of good luck, and, in each case, the cost to exercise my options was one I could afford to lose if things turned. If it comes up again, I'll have to evaluate where I am at that time. Each event is unique, you have to judge your specific circumstances.
A good manager should be good at hiring, good at choosing who works under them, choosing the team that cultivates that environment. This is why most companies look for a culture fit more than a skill fit, because it's easier to beef up a good hire's skills than it is to get someone to have healthy communication, empathy, and team working skills towards their employees.

(Technically, team working skills are optional. Not all projects need it as unusual as that sounds. If they have good communication skills, then they can work well with other teams, which is what specialists need to know as they're often a team of one or two. Eg, I'm a data scientist and most of my career I've been a team of one.)
I asked my new dentist why her recommendations were so different from her predecessor.

She said that there's not always one "correct" treatment. Some dentists will try to nip potential problems in the bud, lest they get worse. Others have more of a wait-and-see attitude which can avoid some procedures but make others worse.

Doctors, plumbers, builders, and mechanics all do the same thing. Do you replace the brake pads now, while the wheels are off anyway, or do you squeeze another season out of them since there's still a bit left? Rebuild the whole deck, or maybe just replace the more banged up boards and wobbly railing?
No. Destroying another's property is not right regardless of the wrong they did to you. Both parties here are in the wrong.
Interesting comments so far, mostly showing how the options have not paid off. Not surprising really, when you consider the likelihood of so many startups reaching a high valuation, and of those that do not having dilution to make the early options much less valuable.

I've worked in a few startups.
One got VC funding but then died in the 'recession' that followed.
Another remained small, couldn't make useful sales, so got bought by a larger company in that market. The main founder came out of it with a well-paid job at new-co. The rest got some small amount of payback for the IP some time later. That did not make up for the salary sacrifice from working there. Still nice to think the product was done well enough and made sales, but that feeling doesn't pay the bills, or the mortgage.
Next startup showed me how dilution works, and how trust is beaten up by greed. Still have some options in the company that bought the original, but those will only be enough for a few good holidays, not even a car purchase.

Despite the fact that these haven't resulted in big payouts for me, the experience was still good in many parts - creating new products and services, growing teams, and so on.
What I would say is, don't take too much of a drop in salary for those benefits, assume the share options won't amount to much, and make the most of the startup environment.

Oh, and do make sure you continue to give yourself some personal time. What I do regret is the time given to those companies that should really have been for myself and my family. The balance I applied did not work out, for me. A shame, but you cannot be too sure at the time. Optimism is a good thing. Pragmatism and realism too.
Ah yes, I’d completely forgotten that appendChild returns the child element and append doesn’t, because it’s so long since I actually had cause to use the appendChild return value!