skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see at least 4 reasons why Apple isn't paying dividends.

1. Tax: the cost of repatriating foreign profits to the US is high. The USA has a higher corporate tax rate than most countries, and with switcheroos like the "Dutch Sandwich" and the "Double Irish", bringing that money home makes no sense.

2. Tax again: capital gains vs income tax, to be precise. Many shareholders would prefer the stock price to go up over receiving dividends. A growing cash balance puts upward pressure on the stock price.

3. Buy-up fuel. Like large most tech firms, Apple has a split personality. Part creator, part hedge fund.

4. For dick-waving rights. Never underestimate this motivation. Here in Australia the dick-waving contest between the executives of the two largest mining companies has led to outbreaks of profoundly expensive bugger-ups.
Too bad web apps or Phonegap apps won't easily be able to participate in any of the syncing fun through the mobile safari localStorage API.
I discovered when I got home that the graph was blocked by my office's web filter. Definitely makes more sense with it there. Thanks for your understanding!
10 Rules for Scalable Performance in 'Simple Operation' Datastores
Free is not a sale. You have to charge something to claim them as a customer.
The Bug by Ellen Ullman was popular when it came out. I couldn't stand it.
All this recent litigation nonsense is turning me into an extremist. Consider me anti all patents. And I'm this close to being anti all copyright as well.
Sorry, you're absolutely wrong.

The value of X, for any X at all, is what someone else is willing to pay for it. That is how markets work. Any kind of market. And it works for everything from pricing apples to pieces of art to companies.

If people are willing to pay $1 billion for your company, it is a billion dollar company. If nobody is willing to pay you a dime for it, it is worth nothing. Your revenue is an input factor into what people are willing to pay, but doesn't determine the price.

If you study financial theory, the theoretically correct price for a company is the "expected present value of future revenue". Meaning that if you look at all future revenue that it should ever make, divide that revenue by a discount factor for the fact that a dollar tomorrow is not worth a dollar today (and further discounts for risk), that number should be the present value of the company.

So a company with little revenue and good growth prospects may be worth much more than a company with great revenue which is going off of a cliff. It is worth this both in practice and in theory. And anyone who says otherwise simply doesn't understand how to value companies.

Note that in practice, in illiquid markets (which stock in privately held companies always is) the variance of market value from the theoretical relationship becomes wider. We still price companies based on what someone, somewhere, was willing to invest in it. We do that because someone educated people, who is paid to get this right, with possession of more facts than we probably are, decided that this was a reasonable price after doing research. They may be wrong, but the last price paid is the best market indicator of the value of the company.
Paul Krugman's take on the .com boom pre-bust (1998)
>...a lot of these changes are for no reason. One month you go to 10,000 G visitors from 4,000 the next you drop to 2,000.

Systems comprised of vast numbers of highly interconnected, constantly self-modifying feedback loops exhibit chaotic behaviour. Who'd have thought it?
Oh, don't get me wrong - betting against the Apple _analysts_ makes absolute sense - In particular, for anybody on HN, I'd trust your insight as much, if not significantly more than the Apple "Analysts" - Very few people have Gruber's track record in terms of understanding where Apple is going to go, and even he has been off a few times (misjudged how successful the iPad was going to be).

I'm not talking about Apple Analysts, I'm talking about _financial_ analysts, who all see Apple's balance sheet, cash flow - and can make the same Analysis that the OP did, which is "Apple will have $300 Billion in Cash by 2015."

That's a decision to invest for financial reasons, nothing inherent in Apple itself. If those investors have declined to invest in Apple, it's because they have greater knowledge, understanding, and ability to comprehend what is likely to happen to the cash flows that Apple is experiencing right now than we do.

So, if you want to invest in Apple the "Company" because you think you understand it's future as a "Company" - great, I think you have a chance to out-perform the market.

But, if you want to invest in Apple the "Financial Statistic" because you think you understand how to value it's future based on NPV of future cash flows - realize the people you are going up against have been doing that type of analysis on companies for 8-10 hours a day for the last 20 years, and have declined to bid up Apple.
Man oh man, there are a lot of (very bad) armchair lawyers on HN.

You might consider AirBnB's actions unethical, but they certainly aren't illegal - which would be obvious to anyone who bothered reading the CAN-SPAM wikipedia page. It's not illegal to violate Craigslist's TOS, and AFAICT the "spam" messages were sent from a legitimate Gmail account.

For those of you claiming "I'd rather be poor than violate craigslist's terms of service": Bullshit.
Forgive me if my surfing time is limited. I would appreciate links to these conversations, if you have them.
Hire me to grow my site and I'll give you 49% of it
This is good advice.

However don't assume that you have the right price either. Entrepreneurs often set their prices too low. For more on this see http://jacquesmattheij.com/Double+your+price+(and+no,+I%27m+....
The best programmers that I’ve known put people first. They’ve realized that the software that they’re writing is for people, even if it’s just the back end of a complicated system or a protocol that no one but other developers will ever use. They write documentation because it’s important. They help people use their code. They’re willing to work extra and deal with a bit more complexity to give the people using their software the right solution.

I always get a bit irritated when people make the "people first" argument. It's not that I disagree with putting people first. It's just that "putting people first" always seems to mean "being a good cog in the machine".

There's more to putting people first than writing documentation and explaining your code to other people. Those are important, but they mean putting the task first, not the people. To put people first, you have to do things like: listen to others, empathize with them, use tact, compromise, and occasionally do something impractical for no other reason than to help work suck a bit less.
>CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM

A state law cannot pre-empt a federal law; when a federal law and a state law are in conflict, the federal law takes precedence over the state law. (U.S. Constitution, Article VI, Clause 2.) Notably, the CAN-SPAM Act expressly pre-empts any state law that "expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages, except to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto" (15 USC 7707). (So, a CA law against fraudulent email would survive pre-emption by CAN-SPAM, but a CA law against simple bulk spamming would be pre-empted by the federal law.)
Really, it's about risk management. Unfortunately, I don't know the probability that chasing after thieves will result in death, however, I am going to guess that the chance of harm to yourself is significantly higher than driving 100km. Just like there are some slopes a novice should not ski down, and there are some battles one should not pick, there may be some thieves one should not chase.
...that supports the claim that only "smart" parents have smart children, or that smart parents don't have dumb children, or that dumb parents don't have smart children, and so on.

That would be a silly claim to make. A more plausible claim, and one which is well supported by the evidence, is that smart parents are considerably more likely to have smart children than dumb parents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
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10.8V 6 cells Li-ion replacement battery for Toshiba PABAS117, shipping to the whole world!
Ask HN: How should I open-source my iOS app?
My friend and I just released out first iPhone app, "Silent Shout" (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/silent-shout/id439580131?mt=8&ls=1), and we want to open-source it. I've never open-sourced anything, and have never done much more than fork open-source projects and modify them for my own purposes, so I'm quite ignorant about the process of open-sourcing projects.

Our goal is to allow people to use the code and learn from it for any non-commercial purposes. We want to retain the right to earn money from the project (through future in-app purchases, or adding a price to the app for v2). I'd love for this to be a collaborative project, rather than something like Canabalt (https://github.com/ericjohnson/canabalt-ios) which seems like its simply a one-time code giveaway. Is there a license which fits our case, and aside from setting up a public git repo (which I'm in the process of doing, https://github.com/workwithnano/silent_shout), does HN have any other advice for us?
Abnormal Returns From Investments of U.S. House of Representatives
Aaron,

I have read your Quora post and I agree that the credit card system is antiquated, outdated and leaves a lot to be desired. I certainly feel this as credit card user and as a member of the startup community who knows the possibilities that are out there. I wrote the article considering the perspective that when Square started I was rather skeptical, it felt like a bit of a gimmick, yet their latest update suggests they are moving away from merely providing a piece of hardware that allows a merchant to accept credit cards and considering a more holistic system.

The new direction is at least interesting as the introduction of Card Case means they could the a customer's identity and credit card to their mobile phone and I can't see why down the road they couldn't use a variety of fund sources, i.e. not just credit cards.

I do think Square has a long, long way to go.

Where they started has given them some traction to date and I think that's because at this point in time, albeit antiquated, credit cards are well understood. In my opinion it's good to see Square adding extra features to their initial offering as I think it will need to in order to survive.
Visualization of randomness
Sometimes, when you think somebody is your director competitor, they are actually not competitors in eyes of your customers or users.
It is important to determine whether your users or customers think this company is your direct competitor.
I spoke with a professor at a regional nationally-known university a few months ago. He was setting up a program for students to get real-world experience working with startups.

"Awesome!" I told him, "If I can have 2-3 kids for 3 days a week of around 4 hours, it will provide me with enough value to be worth my time, and in return they're going to get a lot of great experience. Just don't tell me you're sending a group of them here to do some kind of bullshit interviews, research, and reports. Really don't need much of that."

To his credit, he agreed with me that yes, that was exactly how he was planning it: the post-grads would roll in, take a look at some problem, go away and study it, then provide me a nice bound report at the end of their time. He wanted me to present them with little nicely-wrapped problems to consume.

I pointed out that this was not working in a startup. This was not entrepreneurial. This was -- for lack of a better term -- pre-consultant training.

We parted on friendly terms, but it really made me sad. I feel like both the students and I could have gotten a lot of value from a short time together, I was willing to invest in infrastructure and my time in return for their participation, and it was a shame that the university couldn't work out something that would be beneficial to us all.

This sounds like a great idea. Sign me up.
fearlessness - come to think of it, Git makes developer fearless while deleting current version code and put some new twist to it. cause you can go back to it whenever you want it.

and git is a tool like vim.
With that title I was hoping to read a good conspiracy story about Square running some form of malware stealing users' data: I'm disappointed.

Change the title. Or make up a malware story to go with the tone of the title.
4. For dick-waving rights. Never underestimate this motivation

Related: Steve Jobs has already publicly committed himself to not paying any dividends. It's difficult to go back on something like that even if it does make sense.

It's hard to know what Apple could do with a cash pile of $100B, $200B, $300B, because nobody has ever had a cash pile of $100B, $200B, $300B. As a shareholder I'd rather sit around and find out what they can do with the money rather than collect my $2.50 a share or whatever.
Ask HN: Incorporate first, develop later?
With the rise of patent trolls and Lodsys actually filing against developers today, should all developers publish apps through limited-liability businesses or corporations rather than as individuals?

So, even if you get sued, you can take existing earnings as dividends and shut the company down without any personal ramifications, change the apps and republish through another company? Will this work?
Hi,

I compete with Square, so I'm admittedly biased, but I know something about this space.

We've built a full-featured POS system and API from scratch that runs in a web browser. "Full-featured" is an important descriptor because it means a lot of things:

- working with spring-loaded electronic cash drawers

- working with RS-232 serial line printers of various types

- handling nested products and product versions

- tracking hours for payroll

- working with all kinds of industries, not just coffee shops

- handling inventory

- integrating with accounting software (our own)

- handling business transactions

- working with existing legacy POS systems

Square doesn't do any of this right now. With enough money and resources it could eventually do some of it. However, there are competitors out there who can do more and who can do it for less money because they're not as tied to the existing infrastructure.

It's also somewhat amusing that we came out with FaceCash Register in March (Square Register?) and adopted "Pay with your face" as a motto ("Pay with your name?"). We made this image in 2010 (https://s.facecash.com/images/home1.jpg) and they posted this one last week (http://media.bestofmicro.com/square-card-case,S-T-293933-13....). Such is life in the Valley.

Anyway, maybe I'm wrong about all of this, but I don't think I am. I've bet a lot on it. Square is a really nice product, but as I've also said before, I think they just made the most beautiful eight-track player the world has ever known.

Aaron
Is buying stolen property, which you seller does not tell you is stolen, over Craig's List equivalent to stealing the item? Should the buyer be jailed?
Tor Challenge
The behaviour of the status bubble that he shows in the video is a known bug in the Mac version (http://crbug.com/76590) which should hopefully be fixed soon.
However, PHP allows me to do this:

$keyName = "bar";
$array = array($keyName => "baz");

So in that instance it makes sense to force people to quote their keys. Also, bar or baz could be constants.
Unpaid internships aren't illegal just because some students get taken advantage of by doing grunt work and not getting experience, it's because they have been used for discrimination.

Top law firms are a great example. It used to be that if you wanted to get a job at a top law firm you had to do an unpaid internship for that company. Who has the money to not work for 3-4 months and still be fine? Kids with wealthy parents. This system ensured that minorities and underprivileged couldn't get into the field because they couldn't afford to take an unpaid internship. They were made illegal partly to try to prevent this "old boys" network from continuing and to instead help people succeed on the merits of their work, not who their parents were.
Microsoftie Builds Nuke Reactor in Garage
WHO says cell phone use "possibly carcinogenic"
In the "Copyright Act".

Please don't ask me for specific quote, because I don't know US law, but from what I've read on the topic (http://www.ucop.edu/ott/faculty/crothers.html, http://www.wisconsin.edu/gc-off/deskbook/copyrgt.htm), it's pretty much the same as in the rest of the world, that is:

Copyright is automatically granted to the creator of the work (or his employer, in case of "work for hire") and anyone who wants to legally use it needs permission (license) from the copyright holder.
I'd prefer to donate to a central organization aimed at abolishing software patents in general, rather than donating to fight one specific - albeit aggravating - instance of software patent abuse.
Wouldn't it be nice if PHP arrays acted as objects and all of those functions were methods?

$newArray = $array->map("function_name");

Not gonna happen, but would be nice. Any extensions doing this?
I would add that as soon as anything in programming is well understood or becomes measureable, it is almost immediately automated as either a supporting tool or software library. The humans are necessarily just doing the stuff that hasn't been turned into code yet.
Perfectly in line with what I was thinking, thanks!
Ask HN: What's the coolest thing you can buy with Bitcoins?
I gots me 6.52 in bitcoins that's burning a hole in my pocket. I'm looking for something digital to spend it on (I live in Canada, so I'm not counting on having any physical product shipped to me).

Any ideas? Offers of exchange are welcome.
The problem is not being unaware of C#, the problem is being aware of Microsoft.
EFF Files Petition Opposing Proposed AT&T/T-Mobile Merger
> judicial system is not known for being very technologicaly adept

Exactly my point. To invoke the extreme example, simply being connected to child porn in the media can destroy your life. The media hasn't been known to be tech savy either.
How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
He means abortion and leaded gas.
I thought I said that!
The EFF Tor Challenge
I'll throw in my favorite under-rated characteristic of good programmers: the ability to throw away code you've worked hard on. Sometimes code that is well written, tested, and documented just isn't needed anymore or doesn't fit with new changes to an architecture. The pros throw it out without a second thought. Many programmers find it hard to let go and it causes serious bloat to a code base.
And here's the police report. Not a stunt.

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/bentley.pd...
Delete only after you have a copy under source control.
Further, it's great to see they're doing it right: it's invisible to the user.

No pop-ups, no opt-ins, no alerts. It does its thing, and if you really want to opt-out, you have the option to do so.
Is it legal and/or feasible to start a Kickstarter project to help fund these developers' legal costs? Not sure how it could be distributed but if they could somehow pool together it would make for a pretty awesome stand. I know I'd gladly contribute to stop these stupid a-holes from pulling these stunts on the average joe.
Another approach could be something that sort of resembles B.

When the find UI opens, it has the same effect as displacing the page, the way full-width find bars do. The difference would be that the UI stays as it is and isn't changed into a full-width find bar. The null space to the left and right of the find bar would still allow whatever it's overlaying to shine through.

The only move to make now is figuring out what happens when the user isn't sufficiently scrolled down far enough, i.e., the null space around the find UI when the user is scrolled to the very top of the page is actually void space. What do you put there? I suggest silently[1] extend the scrollable area of the page by adding a quasi-content area. It's quasi-content because it's not actually part of the page--it's just part of the scrollable area. It pulls its color/background pattern from the page's background style.

Another approach would just be to have the find UI extend into the browser chrome, temporarily shrinking the location bar.

[1] being careful here not to set off any events or changing the way, e.g., event coordinates look to script on the page
I feared that it might be misinterpreted as such. I'll consider that. Thanks.
Sounds like a lot of people on here are jealous. Obviously they weren't being ethical, but I think just about every popular web startup does what they need to do to solve the chicken and the egg problem. I think every single dating site puts up fake profiles, sends fake msgs, winks and flirts to get started.
Under the Hood at Google and Facebook
Blogging eBook - Basics, Best Practices... and Blunders
Microsoft OneNote for iPhone
DOOM Ported to JavaScript and HTML5
Last fall I had two roughly equal job offers, one for a telecommute, the other for a job 12 miles away.

I took the one 12 miles away, partly to avoid losing my bike commute. I figured losing 90 minutes per day of forced exercise would be bad for my health. (Of course if I'd taken the telecommute gig I still could have gone for a bike ride every day -- but would I have done it, when the weather was bad?)

I won't take a job that requires a car commute. (Unless it's the only thing I can find, which seems incredibly unlikely.)
how about chinese passwords?

他们不了知道
3000 ** 6 = 729,000,000,000,000,000,000

I guess unicode between the client and backend isn't consistant enough yet. Maybe in 10 years or so.
All this is true, but has no bearing on the common use of language. When a trader refers to Acme corporation as an $N company, he is indicating that $N is its annual revenue, not its market capitalization.
Wikipedia Maze Puzzles
Google Video links from Metafilter with Titles - verily
Full native Node.js support. Alright!
Not long until I'll be able to video chat on my Android via Google Talk, woo!
apparently, people have very fragile sense of humor here, on yc.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem simply explained
The Future of Square
> I suspect Apple will charge a flat rate for iCloud and allocate the royalties proportionally (like Spotify). From the customer's point of view it will be "free" to sync their music into iCloud, but the labels will get paid (again).

This is how I see it too. Customers with smaller collections (i.e. the majority) will have higher margins, and effectively subsidise those with larger (and therefore with larger royalty payouts) collections.

Works similarly to the way ISP's do: users who use say, 20GB of a 60GB cap are more profitable than a user who uses 145GB of a 150GB. Bandwidth costs are small, but on a large scale, it works.
"Why did we have to read this article"
Apple, where is the Facetime open spec that you promised?
Google may just beat them to the punch.
>>...just doesn't seem like a winning strategy
Its not a winning strategy, its a testing strategy. Theyre not going to talk people in Paducka Alabama into using it. They want it where they are, sf and ny, and are testing it with a partner. Get it right before you get a million people on board.

>> ...network effect to work in Google's favor
What are you talking about here? What network has to exist? A person signs up, and uses it when it is available.

I dont understand what it is you think they need to be doing. Why would a small concentrated area be any better for mass adoption?
Thanks for the IE9 info!
How is what you're looking for any different from an unpaid internship?