skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Hey developers, you will be out of a job when some other company acquires us. This is best case for us, because we will make a lot of money. Unfortunately for you, you don't have any shares, so you will probably just be fired or prodded to leave".

I think I was the first one to realize what was going on: we were the developers in Belgium, and we had some cheap developers in Eastern Europe. They had developers in US. They were going to continue developing their own product, and would "keep us all as developers".

But from their point of view, it didn't make much sense to me that "We have devs in EU, but those guys from Belgium are 4x more expensive than those from another country". I quit shortly after the acquisition, and my colleagues all left a year later. They kept the developers in Eastern Europe.

It makes total sense to me, and I'm not resentful about it, probably because it's so easy for developers to find a new job.

One other thing I want to mention: they were very transparent on the strategy when they were acquiring various smaller companies. Very insightful.
This is a very incorrect take on forests. They’re incredibly intricate ecosystems in balance. They are anything but black and white, grow or die situations. Cancer in a forest would be the invasive tree that wipes out all of the native species which can’t compete. Or a blight that destroys the dominant trees.
I think it is more complex in most dimensions, except for render pipeline and asset size. Physics engines are off the shelf, even in AAA games, they're not really where the bulk of time is spent coding. Not to mention all the games you described have fixed maps and no multiplayer.

Really, most of the budget of AAA is spent on art and level design. They have sophisticated tech, but often it is not on an unreachable level.
That's what you voted for.
Highlighting Row and Column of Selected Cell Using Google Apps Script
APIs Are Ontological Boundaries
Why only VC money? I don't understand, which person would invest their in your company so that the customer (rather than themselves) should get value from it?
I thought on the PDP-11 bytes in a 16 bit word were stored little endian but the 16 bit words in a 32 bit long were stored the other way around so it's a bit of both?
One of my dreams is to walk the Lycean Way [0] where I’ve read that the remote trails have you camping among ruins. It seems amazing that there’s still so many ancient ruins just laying about and accessible to humans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycian_Way
> Put options let you take a bearish position without short selling

Put options can’t be written at scale without shorting.
The financial system is slow. ACH can take days before you can be sure things won't be reversed, trades take two days to settle, there's various anti-money-laundering policies everywhere that generally take the form of holding on to money for a bit to make shady things easier to track and detect.

So, anyway, for lots of reasons, things that users think should be instant, aren't. And that's really bad UX, especially for a platform that depends so much on emotional stuff: "deposit $200 bucks and buy 3 shares of X, leaving you with a $30 cash deposit which RH can then earn interest on" is probably how a large amount of RH's balances come into being. That breaks if it's going to be a 1-day gap between someone depositing their money and then buying the shares.

So everyone papers over holes like this with margin.
Less clever people show up and attach to the “offensive” part without bringing along the “clever” part.

Going a bit off topic, but HNs constant fight against this is its best asset. Sometimes it's annoying to see a funny joke down-voted, but it's so much better than the entire comment section devolving into nonsense like slashdot did >15 years ago.
This seems like are much more sustainable and honest model. So much of the costs of modern capitalism are hidden and picked up outside of the companies pushing for constant growth. The focus on growth an profit neglects the point of life. Modern work tends towards exploitation for a lot of jobs. Switching focus back to concentrate on the whole picture makes sense to me and I hope they can overcome the greed that drives our current systems.
It is good when someone from the team is in the interview loop. Everyone? We’ve accomplished this in the past with group lunches. It is a pain to organize in larger companies. I agree, it is the hiring manager who should have the final say. We have one caveat: we have a “bar raiser” interviewer who is not on the team who ensures we are not just filling seats.
When a company is founded, the purpose of it is whatever the founders want it to be.

After a while, there might not be a purpose anymore, just a thing that is.
Well those private companies wouldn't be seen as "supporting" anybody, if they behaved with any level of consistency and transparency. It is a problem of their own making, with every virtue signal further compounding expectations. I suspect that the majority of people you hate probably have phone numbers and receive mail, but I don't believe that AT&T and UPS "support" them - because those companies don't pull these stupid stunts. Debanking is starting to get normalized... and the new liberal battle cry is "private companies!"
Companies are there to make money to shareholders. Still I see huge difference in paying dividends and having growth in tune of general economy and massive VC funded growth with end goal of pawning it all of to someone else or being last player on the market and hiking prices up. The later one might not ever actually be net positive.
Yes. Or just negotiate it with the current holder, knowing what it goes for on the market.
> I'm pretty sure a mass buying of the stock would drive the price right into the floor.

Could you explain this? Doesn't increased demand drive the price upwards?
Megaquarium is by the same team as Big Pharma

It's a aquarium business management simulator (think RollerCoaster Tycoon but indoors and with aquatic life.) Really enjoyed it as a relaxing casual game.

Looking forward to trying out Big Pharma.
Unfortunately, a transition to a more planned economy is going to be necessary, because individual actors working independently of the needs of others might be a surprisingly good way to allocate resources, but it's not smart enough to be done sustainably.
The name is very unfortunate. Bloody Health? Drip? Seriously?
>Everyone talking about what GME is 'actually worth' is spouting bullshit. The fact is, no one knows. Because it's up to the market.

youre right in that no one, least of all me, can predict future stock prices, but i think youre missing the point. even if GME stabilizes at $150 - which is an unlikely tripling of value - most of the people involved are going to lose most of their investment.

the fundamental principal is that a short-squeeze HAS to end in a pricing crash. its the whole mechanism by which the squeeze occurs in the first place. the final price isnt really relevant, the point is that most people have to absorb large losses by definition. I think a lot of the players dont understand this; they think its free money, and are gonna scream bloody murder because they think they only lost because RH did something illegal. RH actions are irrelevant, legal or not, because the trade was bad in the first place.

the only way this doesnt happen is if the original market was wrong about GME to the tune of 1000%. maybe the short squeeze happens and GME never crashes, it peaks and stays at $350 and then beats the S&P 500 by 10% YoY for the next decade and everyone that bought long just makes money. if you believe that then well, good luck.
The Facebook Oversight Board’s First Decisions: Ambitious, & Perhaps Impractical
Yeah, Factorio’s complexity isn’t in the graphics, it’s in the simulation.
> This nonsense is not going to bankrupt these folks. Non-shorted hedge funds are going to use this event to extract more dollars from individual investors

And, probably worse, lobby the government for more regulation such that retail traders have even fewer levers to pull.
That's so interesting! I wouldn't have the first idea how to pull off a plan like this; is this what people learn in the field of M&A?

For example, how can you be confident that someone will be interested in acquiring you, and for a good price, instead of one of your competitors, or just building their own? How do you know your customers will be happy to switch to the replacement product that gets put in front of them? (I'd be quite interested to know what they did to make themselves an attractive target for acquisition, as a practical example)

With reference to the main topic - I think there is a place in the market for both stable long-term and high-growth shorter-term businesses like this example. Sometimes the market is hungry for a solution right now, not something perfect in five years. Satisfying this demand is what causes high growth. And it's natural that we see a lot of this in the tech industry, since we're closer to the cutting edge than most.
How are the futures hedged if shorting is not allowed? Does that mean every futures seller is effectively unhedged?
Destroying a hedge fund is also not a 'fundamental value', no matter how satisfying it might sound. Also, as I've said before, often the largest investors in hedge funds are pension funds or similar pooled vehicles, so screwing an investment fund like this doesn't always just stick it to the rich guys...
Congresswoman spread theory that PG&E started Camp Fire with space laser
You make a good point. PDS solutions aim to get rid of "big data", and centralised data lakes that can be queried. It's not inherently a bad idea, but:

> a nicely structured datadump is not particularly valuable if it's just one person

This very much depends on the person.
Patent trolls are exploiting a bug in the patent system. They don't buy patents that are actually novel and useful; those are too expensive. Instead, they buy 100s or 1000s of patents that are vague and/or obvious. These are cheap to buy because they don't have much of any value on their own. They bundle dozens of these together, find lists of companies somewhat related and send demand letters to all of them. Simply defending the lawsuit will cost more than they're asking for in the demand letter, so many companies just settle and write a check.
Now I suddenly wonder what sarcastic assembly looks like! XOR swaps instead temporary variables everywhere? Jump tables for simple if/elses? Moving the stack pointer up and down for no reason, just because you can?
OpenMCT is great if ALL you want is to do is look at Telemetry. But good luck if you want to send a commamd to a vehicle. I think YAMCS is much better solution: https://github.com/yamcs/yamcs

Yamcs has got a builder for displays, client APIs, etc. Almost everything you'll ever need.
I was struck by:

"They reject ... anonymity restrictions, online gender-based violence ..."

Do those two goals partially contradict each other? Online violence, including gender-based violence, is often anonymous. Anonymity can protect people who need it, but it also protects people who use it to harass.

That said, people don't seem to need anonymity, and are perfectly happy to make threats under their own name or easily-pierced pseudonyms. Online threats aren't taken seriously in the US, and I'm sure it's no better in Indonesia.

I'd be curious to see the knock-on effects if law enforcement took action in the easy cases. Perhaps it would make people less likely to make them; perhaps they'd simply make an effort to make their cases less easy.
> Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has since deleted the Facebook post in which she made the suggestion, according to Media Matters for America, a left-leaning research outlet. But the group released a screen grab of the November 2018 post in which Greene detailed a long, meandering conspiracy theory involving Pacific Gas and Electric Co., former Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband, space-based solar generators and unnamed people who claimed to have seen “what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.”
He was interviewed for the Kotke Ride Home podcast. He has a book coming out about Oumuamua. I will probably buy the book because Loeb is apparently brilliant. His evaluation of Oumuamua is very interesting.

BUT the data about Oumuamua is really really tiny. The science of interstellar objects is nascent. Other than to say "If it is a natural object it is super-strange" I am not sure what else there is to say.

In the interview he was articulating theories about it being a cosmic "buoy." So I am anticipating a couple chapters of solid science followed by a lot of speculation, even if it is highly informed speculation.
Very good point. It was a very good lesson for many, that the company you work for is not your company, but theirs.

Most companies always talk about "us" and "our company". But once it gets sold, it will be very clear that it's not "us".
Complicated to exploit bugs often rely on specific code and data being in particular places or even the number of cycles a code block takes so even if the same bug had existed for years you might have to write a separate exploit for each version.

And make a version check if failed attempt will crash the software or you only get one attempt. Sometimes the hardest part is finding out what version of exploit to use and that may even have to be done manually.
Second anecdata point: Interviewed multiple times for 5-6h in one day, for a medium level Software Engineering role.

Either in 4-5 hour-long, mostly technical sessions + lunch, or just in "meeting all your potential colleagues, the CEO, COO, etc." for 45min-1h each.
What's wrong with bash? Specifically, what are you trying to do that you can't?
First Discord bans the group, now Facebook, and in the meantime, Google has helpfully removed more than 100K negative reviews.

Big tech is organized against the little guy and at the end, they are no worse than the Wall Street, whether they wear shorts and t-shirts, turtlenecks or suits.
I just heard about this game earlier today! It's looked super cool from what I've seen, I might have to get it soon...
This short squeeze is a stress test of the entire market. The reason that the brokerages stopped trading yesterday is because the clearinghouse (there's apparently only really one) are at risk of going under from this. If that happens it'll be a cascading failure and the whole market will crash.

Source: The WeBull CEO in the first 7 minutes of this video explains all this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MAqxQe0l4g0&feature=youtu.be
TSLA was included into the S&P because they had a profitable business - GME makes net losses so the S&P won’t be bagholding it.
One of the problems with treating terminals like other text input contexts is that they're inherently different and you're going to constantly run into issues when the context switches to displayed text.

For example, you could get a terminal that allows selecting text with keyboard but what happens when a user inevitably wants to or accidentally selects text from the non-input part of the terminal? Should the input part of the terminal and the display part of the terminal be treated differently? In Firefox as I type this I get a nice big input box where I can do multi-line paragraphs but if I start clicking and dragging to select the text in the input box it'll never let me select text from your comment, likewise in reverse, but on a terminal this would be undesirable behaviour for the common pattern of selecting text to copy output for documenting or troubleshooting.
Some terminals have plugins or scripts to allow such selection of text but not for input purposes, if you decide to only allow text selection on the input field as a means of improving text input do you just get two such methods of being able to select text? The sane approach might be to allow selecting all text but you'll end up with paper cuts where a user doesn't care about what is going on before the $ but might end up in situations where text is selected far before the $ because of a reverse search gone wrong, etc.

As an aside, terminals/bash do have some form of text-editor like functionality, readline is the usual library involved (man bash, /^readline) and has reasonable support for moving cursor around words, move cursor to character search, deleting/yanking/pasting words, etc. It's not the best text editing interface but for dealing with a single command line it's usually sufficient. There's even a vi-like editing mode (set -o vi) built into bash if you feel like you need a modal editor for a single line but it seems even less intuitive and harder to grok.

https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html

https://catonmat.net/bash-emacs-editing-mode-cheat-sheet

https://catonmat.net/bash-vi-editing-mode-cheat-sheet
Strange that VSCode + debugger frontend extensions (mentioned in the first part) caused such trouble, it's working flawlessly so far for me for mixed Zig/C projects, across Windows, macOS and Linux (Ubuntu 20)

The inspection capabilities in the VSCode debugger are very bare bones though, that's true. At least the variable view panel could need some work.
I'd gotten the impression that Loeb isn't trying to convince the public and scientific community that it was an alien probe so much as is he trying to show it could have been.

I think is agenda is to get the community looking for these things more often, perhaps out of some disappointment that if it had been an actual probe (a la "Rendezvous with Rama"), we'd already have missed it.

Whether it's worth bending the science to fit this narrative is of course, questionable.
I am not sure if Stream Chat is something you would need. Check it out
OK. Do you believe that 30% of all American corporations are "phony-baloney" "zombies" that are "functionally dead"? Or do you think Taibbi isn't really saying that?
Just to be clear, there aren’t multiple clearinghouses for US equities. There’s one, the DTCC. They handle effectively all of the US equities trades’s settlement cycle. If there’s any kind of doubt that they don’t have enough collateral and they need to take losses, it could cause a lot of chaos. Initiating the kind of “stop all trading” you refer to, is a lot more complicated than it sounds. You would get a sort of a stock market equivalent of a bank run.

On the flip side, (1) they’re known to ask people to post more money than necessary, because they like to err on the side of caution, and (2) if they ask you for money, you just post it, or you risk being kicked off from trading US equities for a long time.
For some context, the PDP-11/40 debuted in 1973, and was $40k in 1973 dollars which is $233k inflation adjusted for today.

There wasn't much available for a "home computer" at the time, but the Kenbak-1 might be a good example for comparison of what one would have cost. It was $750, or $4400 inflation adjusted. It had 256 bytes of memory.
It's just like the condition monitoring and predictive maintenance market, but for humans.
What I Really Think of Bitcoin
Game Won't Stop
When efficiency is achieved, the economic growth is later converted to "everybody should use this new efficiency".

And more importantly, efficiency in the consumption is not translated in efficiency in the use of resources (which is the important one): transporting goods by horse vs faster transportation with combustion engines.
Nokia did release the code via Symbian Foundation, but it was (now obviously) too late for the open source model to produce any value for them, let alone rescue the ecosystem. So soon after "Elopcalypse" they shuttered the foundation. However, it's quite hard to unrelease open source code, so it is mirrored here in Github: https://github.com/SymbianSource
The general consensus as you see it is that Tesla and Moderna are worthless?
But the result is more consumption, because you spend the money saved on inefficiency on more consumption. If coca cola produces 1m bottles of coke in 1 year and finds a way to produce that many in half a year, they're not going to produce 1m bottles a year anymore, they're going to produce 2m bottles a year.
Wanted a `for` loop between two numbers, couldn't find a good way in 10 minutes, made the script require `zsh`.
So eager if one'd have done a benchmark with rust
The only thing I really miss from scsh is the process notation (which is arguably the hardest to implement). The rest is pretty well covered in most schemes. Srfi-115 has sexpr regular expressions, srfi-166 is, IMO, the best formatting utility there is.
But complexity =/= fun. Factorio shows that "simple gameplay" can lead to massive fun.

IMO, the AAA titles would be better if less time was spent on a bleeding edge physics system, and more time spent on other aspects.
I'm definitely with you on the last bit. As are plenty of others. Jack Welch famously called it the "dumbest idea in the world" and it has been widely panned: https://www.google.com/search?q=dumbest+idea+in+the+world+sh...

If I squint at it from the right angle, it's not terrible, in that in theory many of the other kinds of value should roll up to long-term company value. E.g., healthy employee relationships are a real asset. Being a good community member should pay off in the long term. Etc, etc.

But in reality, when you crossbreed this with the "efficient markets hypothesis" [1] and managerialism [2], it becomes dangerous. Mix in a live stock ticker plus ways for executives to cash out and a declining CEO tenure and you get an excuse for doing anything that boosts the share price long enough to unload the shares on a sucker. Or, at lower levels, anything that boosts a metric that drives stock price gains.

So instead of building long-term value, the "maximize shareholder value" mantra ends up doing the opposite. E.g., cutting long-term R&D spending to fund stock buy-backs. Laying off long-term employees in favor of an outsourcing deal that cuts short-term costs while raising them down the road.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism
Cathedrals, Bazaars, and Fusion Reactors: The Struggle of Open Source
Of course the rich guys will use human shields to protect themselves as you are indicating. They will demonize this action as the work of jokers who just want to see the world burn. If your pension fund was relying on short selling, you had a terrible pension fund! The only place where blame should lie for any outcomes of this is squarely in the lap of luxury. Any average investors who were burned by this should be pointing their fingers at the hands that promised to feed them and have repeatedly failed to do so.
That's actually pretty much what happened. Ryan Cohen was able to do what he did (buy a lot of stock and get a board seat) because the stock price was low. But that arguably saved the company. Change of control isn't inherently bad. And it often leads to incompetent CEOs being fired.

The firm has an opportunity raise a ton of capital very cheaply that it can use to fund productive investments. That's good for the firm, and its good for the people who work there.

I have no sympathy for the short sellers. They're paid a lot of money to understand the game they're playing. And if they lose, that's too f*cking bad. But the same goes for WSB. If they're gonna be pissed off that the company makes what is unequivocally the right decision for the firm, then they're just as hypocritical as the short sellers.