skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They look for accounts that make consistently "lucky" large trades during blackout periods before earnings but at or just after the close of the quarter. Then they run the SSN/address/bank accounts/phone # associated with the trading account and compare to lists of insiders supplied by companies of who has access to their financial info.

I think they also have separate flags on insider's tax returns to look for any unusual capital gains from market transactions. It's not a trivial problem to make trades in an account completely unrelated to you and then get the illegit proceeds back into your control without tripping some flags.

Also, most of the volume in these stocks are huge algorithmic trades from institutional investors and funds. They also tend to move in herds based on when analysts release new reports or change ratings on the stock. Thus, those are pretty easy to filter out of a search. Unusual trades from individual brokerage accounts are going to stand-out. Especially if those accounts aren't making similar trades in other stocks.

When they get suspicious matches they run them down to see if there's anything there. I used to be an insider at a big tech company and there's quite a bit of scrutiny. You'd have to be really stupid to do that shit. Especially repeatedly with large amounts.
Also, the way the smallpox vaccine is administered is mildly gruesome:

> A droplet of ACAM2000 is administered by the percutaneous route (scarification) using 15 jabs of a bifurcated needle. ACAM2000 should not be injected by the intradermal, subcutaneous, intramuscular, or intravenous route.

(emphasis mine)

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcated_needle
Looks pretty out-dated (1991). A lot of the math is very poorly formatted, and a lot of code's in an ancient form of BASIC.

Doesn't look like a good fit for a primary textbook since it's too scattered and slow, though some of the content might work as mini-games, sorta like crossword puzzles.
There's nothing illegal about trading your employer's stock if you don't have access to insider information. Millions of investors do that with no problems.
beetleDB is mongoDB clearly.
Yes, I'm saying that environments with diet and gravel roads are a much easier perception problem than dense urban environments, and perception is one of autonomous driving's weak spots. Conversely, quick physics computation and response is a relative weakness of human drivers, and is exacerbated by these environments.
Not really, Messi is great at soccer, he didn't write the rules of the game, but he was able to do things with the tools available that no one thought possible. To be great you usually have to be creative.
Third member of FDA panel resigns over approval of Biogen Alzheimer's drug
Rust does have nullable pointers, but those are unsafe to use. In safe code, you use non-nullable references and the option monad.
How does this even end up on the SEC or IRS radar? $1.4M seems like a blip in the grand scheme of things.
One thing I’ll say is that not everyone knows how to write good documentation. There’s a difference between writing a reference index, a getting started guide, design pattern motivation, and so on. They are all very different things.
Nice article, very relatable to my experiences.

Having been on both sides of these types of discussions, I have a few thoughts:

Advice isn't always unconditionally uncontingent. An infra person saying that something should probably be done in some overly specific preachy "best practice" way is sometimes thinking of things that a product person may not. For example, maybe the data guy told you to use WebScaleDB because scaaale, and you chose to use a simple YourSQL thing instead. But it turns out that in the next semester, a metal team you had never heard of is working on chaos testing and they're making sure WebScaleDB handles datacenter failovers properly (but they don't know about your snowflake YourSQL instance silently chugging along in a forgotten corner of one DC). This sort of stuff can be very tricky to anticipate, especially in large companies with siloed teams. I've found it useful to fully embrace the idea of leveraging technical debt: yes maybe YourSQL won't scaaale and maybe it'll die horribly and without explanation when failovers start happening, but if it can carry us to the next point in the evolution cycle, then we can reevaluate our options then, instead of being trapped in analysis paralysis and getting nothing done for the entire duration of time.

As a person giving advice, I feel that I fall in the contingent camp (looking at specifics before giving suggestions), but over the years, I've started to try to be mindful of cognitive overload: saying "it depends because X, Y, Z" often goes over people's heads especially when they're already trying to soak up advice from a million different directions. Sometimes, it's better to just take a stance and spit out the TL;DR. If the stance happens to align with "best practices", you can just point at them and people are usually satisfied; if it doesn't align, you can often sway people to understand that there is nuance with a clever enough soundbite: "no, actually you don't want to enforce 100% coverage, full coverage tells you nothing about test quality, uncovered code is what tells you what you're lacking" (or "you don't need WebScaleDB; a billion db rows can be binary-searched in 10 comparisons"). Even if your dumbed down advice now lacks nuance, there's always the opportunity to course-correct as the team builds more experience on top of that advice.

Sometimes, you have to be the thought leader and drive the change you want. At my company, for the longest time, every team was suffering the pains of Jenkins. You can't do X because otherwise Jenkins will not be able to handle it, they'd say. We've invested a lot in Jenkins, they'd say. A scaling solution is coming soon, they'd say. My team couldn't wait anymore and we took the initiative to bring in an off-the-shelf 3rd party solution that had all of the pain points figured out (and then some). This turned out to be a really good call because just a week after we deployed the new solution, our Jenkins cluster - shadowing at this point - completely gave out due to scale limits. This third party solution is now what other teams in the company are adopting - including teams that were investing in jenkins integrations before.
In this case, probably multiple reasons: A weaponized version might be designed to work around current vaccines. Though we do stockpile them, just in case. Also they're live vaccines with not so great risk profiles. Assuming the vaccines were still effective against a weaponized version, with an off-the-shelf (literally) vaccine ready to go we could aggressively vaccinate every sick and symptomatic person and everyone those people even looked at, and pretty effectively stop mini outbreaks as they occur. It's actually the method that was used in some developing countries during the eradication campaign. So we have a (likely) effective alternative to mass vaccination.

Also the vaccination leaves a small scar, so there's that too. Then again, if you don't get vaccinated, get smallpox, and survive? You may be full of lots of little scars.

There's also probably some societal/political/social problems (or some other better word to fit this) to starting up vaccinations: it would seem strange to do it if we didn't have specific knowledge of a threat. Look at COVID: we know it's a threat and people don't get vaccinated. So with smallpox vaccinations you'll get some people who panic thinking there must be a threat, others saying if there's no threat then it's pointless and won't do it.

Also as we see from COVID (and if you look at the history of the polio vaccine along with the massive industrial complex around annual flu vaccines) it's clear that such efforts are truly & enormously massive and expensive and difficult. We can't really go around doing that for every potential threat.

Notably, what was approved by the FDA does not appear to be a vaccine, and is instead an anti viral medication effective against smallpox. Also notably, we don't truly know it's safety profile: it would be tough (and unethical) to infect humans with smallpox to try out the drug, so it was tested on animals and approved on the basis of those results. I guess if you want to develop medications against potential-but-not-yet-realized threats, that's the best you can do.
This is just brilliant!
http://neverssl.com to try it
2021 Sonata (Limited) here and I echo your sentiment. I spent a lot of time and realized that only Hyundai and Kia provided a good mix of the things I wanted in a smart way.

Mazda's anti-touch stance makes it a non-starter for Android Auto/CarPlay

Toyota, Subaru and Honda have abysmal infotainment interfaces and didn't seem to invest in me enjoying the interior of a car.

Nissan CVTs have questionable reliability . Etc.

The lane keep assist on other average vehicles is so laughably had compared to what Hyundai and Kia have pulled off. These systems actually keep you centered instead of bouncing between lanes (hello Mazda).
Blind spot cameras, birdseye cameras, HUD, little touches like the car slowing down automatically for you on some mapped curves when using cruise control etc. (Also I've used that stupid smart park thing waayy more than expected. I love it)

I'm still disappointed that car reviewers don't focus on such usability issues and instead rag on about performance of the engines or "its a toyonda so it is reliable" and ignore such small but practical tweaks.
It's interesting to think about the incentives. Look at the press they're getting. It's at the top of HN and will be fodder on all major news outlets. It was probably an easy slam dunk case for the prosectors.
This is highly dependent on output expectations. I can see this being the case in large corps and FAANGs but not in many startups
Exercise increases Motor Neuron Disease risk
Infants almost have a 0% chance of encountering any issues with COVID. 8 out of 100,000 children need to be hospitalized. You're talking about a 0.08% chance of hospitalization and for infants it's actually even lower.

Most vaccines have an efficacy lower than the COVID vaccines. Basically you are feeding off of your own fear, and you don't trust science. That's your right, but don't blame anyone for your self-imposed quarantine but yourself at this point.
>Firmina will improve access to Google services for users in South America...giving users fast, low-latency access to Google products such as Search, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services

When companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft build cables do they ever let people besides themselves use it for a price? It would be unfortunate if millions of people had no choice but to use Google etc services because they were the only ones that performed well enough.
Heartbleed? I assume you mean Spectre and Meltdown
The cheating scandal that nearly ruined baseball
Plenty of employers have company-wide blackouts for any stock trade in advance of earnings. So even if you don't have access to inside information you may be subject to company policies that prohibit it.
About one person, probably not. I think this one hits close to home for a lot of us that have stock in many of these large companies from being employees. Granted, this situation seems particularly egregious, trading off of insider financial information not even available to most employees, but still.

I believe the intent was to provide a chilling effect on regular people at FAMGAN-type companies who may have some access to insider information and were perhaps toying with the prospect of acting on it.
"Now, someone insufferable will read this and say “NOT ALL MIDDLE MANAGERS,” and let me tell you, if you’re thinking that, you are probably part of the problem. "

The author's somewhat cynical take might be an issue here.

The 'employee' probably feels just fine at home.

But coordinating people across product, p. marketing, ops, dev, hr, finance, sales support, sales ... this is a lot of what makes a company tick.

Companies are not collections of automotons doing individual bits of work, the good ones are 'teams' and this dynamic is going to be hard remote.

The article is effectively a little too cynical.

That said, there are also some side benefits no doubt.
Top Best Free Google Fax Apps
This should be great news, probably is. But given the current context, it is downright Michael Crichton's creepy
Same for me on android, i only got some video overlay I could get rid of.
I think this is generally good advice for software engineering, accept when its not. The problem is that some bad ideas become better ideas by virtue of being popular ideas. Write a shitty framework/language/technology and you have nothing, convince a million people to use it and it becomes compelling because it has a lot of users working with it and solving problems.

Its the classic stone soup story[1]. You see this especially with software and tools that focus on front load new users making it really easy to do trivial things but failing catastrophically when you need more.

You also see the reverse of this, great ideas that don't get bye-in failing by virtue of being too niche.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
Basically this. People book Airbnbs to feel like they're living like a local, but don't always like it when they end up living like a local.

I've used Airbnb across 30-40 countries, and it is absolutely a mixed bag.
When customer support fails, going to the media is probably the next best option.
> I unfriended anybody I didn't know in meatspace

I use Facebook basically the exact opposite way. I don't friend anyone I interact with on a regular basis (family, coworkers, neighbors), and use it exclusively for people I don't have another good way to keep up with - people I've met while traveling, people into the same niche hobbies, that sort of thing...
He needed Clinton's lawyer.
The Unity cable from Japan to the US cost $300 million (~10,000km) in 2010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(cable_system)
> So is 64% drop in the middle of February is not the result of vaccine but then the ending result of an 80% drop by the end of February is? That makes no sense sorry.

It's June.

I don't know why you keep talking about February when the comment you responded to was very explicitly about current case counts.
They aren't stripping query params off urls, so you can just add a recipient ID to any URLs in the email e.g.

https://newsletter.com/linked-page?uid=7b32e2f7
> Evolution is a continuum. There is no "current form", it is constantly changing with every new human that is born.

It's an inspiring philosophical concept, but it's like saying 'the world changes with every breath you take'.

> Your offspring will have different attributes than you. This is evolution.

They have different attributes for many reasons that have nothing to do with evolution (and are not hereditary). And any real evolutionary changes are so small that they practically don't exist.

> This is conjecture. You don't know that modern humans aren't "genetically smarter" than those from 200,000 years ago.

It's not conjecture; it's based on evidence: I can't cite the exact science off the top of my head, but humans have been biologically the same for around 200,000 years.

> Meanwhile, you provided zero evidence.

You are the one making the claims; you need to provide the evidence. I'm not going around the Internet finding citations for everyone.
There absolutely was nonpublic information. Probably not about individual companies but certainly about the degree of the looming impact to the global economy.
Raymond Hettinger talks about this in "Beyond PEP8", which is one of my favorite conference talks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf-BqAjZb8M
I was literally thought fractions like this in school, except the cake was drawn, I'm having trouble imagining a different solution :)
How do Nancy Pelosi's boots taste?
I don’t know about IRS but SEC enforcement actions are largely driven by complaints from regular people. Perhaps the stock broker got suspicious and acted per their ethical duties, or perhaps one of them wasn’t as tight lipped as they would have needed to be.
In 1930s people wouldn't heat the whole house and wouldn't heat it to 70 degrees in the dead of winter. People would heat one room to 50 degrees and stay there most of the time, and put on a jacket. Walking around in a t-shirt in the dead of winter is a very modern thing. You don't realize how much higher your standard for comfort are.
That's true. I wonder what the odds of getting caught are. I wonder how the odds would change if you had someone unconnected to you who placed the trades and shared the profits.

As I write this I can imagine a cryptocurrency marketplace for insider information. The insider asserts some fact about a company and stakes an amount in crypto. Buyers see the potential - e.g. "Amazon insider staking 1 million for X% return" and can choose to take on the deal or not. If the buyer does take on the deal they see the information and if the information is borne out then the buyer must return the insider's investment plus X%. Otherwise the buyer gets the insider's stake.

There's a lot of rough edges and potential for abuse, but I can imagine something like this making it hard or impossible to prove insider trading.
Ah. It is an interesting question, I admit.
Wow, really impressed by all the work, website, and write up being just one contributor!
I love how no one on Wall Street was convicted of anything criminal even though they almost destroyed the entire global financial system. There was even text messages of fraud being committed and nothing happened. Not even clawbacks or fines or anything. The government just let them go. That was so disappointing, and one of the first signs of how Obama was going to betray the progressives and let Bush's status quo remain. It was pretty sickening to watch the entire thing play out and then end with nothing.
The usual problem with this pedagogy is that kids get confused when presented with improper fractions (eg. 11/8), and so on. I guess this is probably still a good intuition to start with, but how did you tackle those extensions later on?
No, I Don't Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13948561
For whom yet to read the article, this story is about stopping the money-throwing and switching to more scalable (cheaper) solution.

It's kind of interesting to see them choosing rather "declarative" (which is, json-centric) approach instead of adopting small languages like Lua for scenario-based scripting.

Maybe the declarative approach is suitable for auto-generation from the user stats data as they described? After all, there are often fewer number of people who like to write stress tests than writing a feature that should be stress-tested.
Before passage of the STOCK act in 2012, there was disagreement whether members of congress could be prosecuted for insider trading.
> ...this seems like a total waste of time and resources when you could be chasing whales like you should be.

That's what the Bohra's thought!

It's what a lot of insider trading criminals think. They think the SEC has "thresholds" and only go after "whales". They don't, they look for patterns and go for it. Low hanging fruit is irresistible for them, it's not a "waste of resources."

What's ironic is the that typical insider trading criminals are well-compensated exec level staff. These people pull in Nx100K total comp. The thing is, at those level their peers have wildly variable net-worth. Some come from dynastic wealth, others clawed their way up from ordinary backgrounds. Tragically the ones who clawed their way up tend to suffer from envy when they look at the toys some of their old-money peers have-- they end up looking for "shortcuts" to keep up with the Joneses. Envy can lead to ugly things.
Can you name the companies and a source? I recall a few weeks ago there was a HN post about congressman but I didn’t recall seeing cyber security in the list.
It's a lazy, incorrect statement.
There is a lot of talk of feature flags but that only works when you can realistically delay your feature 2 weeks so that the 'special' set of clients can see it early. What we've seen that has worked is essentially demoing the feature in staging/test to stakeholders at the major/demanding client. They are happy that they aren't taken by surprise and then we provide training materials for major feature/UI changes to their users. Never have had an issue, client is happy and essentially zero technical involvement.
What's stopping revocation of approval? Or is that fixed in stone now?
In this case, it was a planned crime, with profits ship to Seychelles(no aml) and then on to India. Had a fine been possible, no jail time. This type of corruption is never single sourced - the information transfer for all value types, are done where schema and data(databases in total) -- leaving US national security for sale eg "sunburst" and public data in the hands of ( car warranties stalkers ) In sum, all Amazon data has is in the hands of India criminal networks having for travel, fake ids and blackmail .. leaving American youth unqualified for jobs in their country.. its hard to compete against fake credentials and coordinated action ( the results are obvious )
An Interpreter of the Algebra of Programming in miniKanren
I'm a "middle manager" managing a team of 3 right now, and my team has been all remote since I started in this role 4+ years ago. I have over 20 years of software dev experience and I still contribute to our code base.

It's pretty easy for me to listen to my team's daily updates at our standups and figure out how they're doing without A or B. If something's taker longer than our estimate and they explain why, it's not hard to tell if they're making this up (FWIW, no one who works on this team has ever done that).

And yeah, sometimes their productivity dips because they're tired, distracted by non-work stuff, or they just find this particular piece of work uninspiring. That's ok, no one operates at top productivity all the time.

But all of this just highlights the fact that if you want a manager of a development team to be able to evaluate team members' performance, that person needs to understand the job that those team members are doing.
There's a vast pool of people to hire that don't need this special treatment, and can produce quality code on time as well. How are you going to compete with them?
You're overestimating what these private member briefings are really like.
What nonpublic information do congresspeople have about how pandemics might impact the global economy?
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Stripe yet. Fast and free
Avoid these common mistakes when issuing stock options to employees
SEC targets regular people to keep us in line. They let big institutional traders and connected people go.
They are sheep to be gently herded and monetised.

Google's primary business is advertising. Regardless of what propaganda it spreads, the ultimate motivation of making a browser is to make more money for itself. Almost all the changes that it has done make perfect sense in that context.
if you don't personally profit from the bet... it's not one.
Just like I’m at a loss for words as to why you think religion is a source of control. Unless you mean discipline.

Why do people still have to attack religion?
I hd horrible experiences with airbnb after using it for many years, we dont use it anymore..