skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a previous thread[1] where this came up:

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Is maximizing shareholder value really law now ? Just trying to understand if CEOs are legally responsible to return maximum share of profits to shareholders.

Well... that's a slightly complicated question. It's definitely not quite as simple as "companies must maximize profit to the exclusion of all other concerns". But while directors and executives are given wide latitude to run the company according to their judgment, they don't have carte blanche to do "whatever they want" either.

More to the point, while a company as a whole can do more than simply "maximize profit to the exclusion of all else", the caveat seems to be that they can do so if the owners (eg the shareholders) agree.

From the SCOTUS decision in the Hobby Lobby case:

While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.

The question I see then, is how much influence a single shareholder can truly yield based on this principle. That is, of course, assuming they don't single-handedly hold a controlling share of the company to the point that they can simply replace the board with whoever they want and enforce any arbitrary edict. Given a publicly traded company, it seems clear that some shareholders are going to want the "maximize my stock value at any expense" while others are going to go for more of a "do the humanitarian thing and treat (employees|the environment|whatever) well" or such-like.

See:

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3943559

https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what...

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20130603013056/https://www.brook...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

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

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34513015
There is absolutely zero chance this company has planted 168M trees. They're probably couldn't dropping seeds into the ground or some other greenwashing tactic.
And for some reason this time it's a PDF.
I can predict the trash TV of the future "my 600lb, 12in life"
It's true you often need a car but it shouldn't be the case. Cars are terribly inefficienct way to get around. They are more expensive and slower (once there are enough of them) than alternatives. The anti-car sentiment is about changing the infrastructure so the cheaper/greener and faster alternatives get a chance.

Public transport is one alternative but I think small personal transport devices are more promising.
This is the only way. Make it costly via legislation to produce harmful products. Hell make it illegal. We've see how quickly industry can adapt when forced to during covid. It's just that no one is forcing them to do anything.
Also, the Tesla driving score reminds me of the Windows “Experience Index” score. Which was complete and utter toss. But made people feel good about their systems.
I feel like cars are only good for older people of a certain age, and as healthcare (for now) has gotten better for well-to-do people, they can continue on older than the greatest generation could. But, when they hit 80 or 90 or so, or they get disabled, the car centric cities will turn out to be very inhibiting for older folks, and many end up feeling isolated. It is also a major problem with car centric city planning that isn't as well discussed IMO.
30/50cm per pixel are the maximum allowable by law in the US for "civilians". I'm sure we could do even better if allowed.
Why browser makers might not want to cater to web developers wanting to use a keyboard on a platform that is used at 99.9% through touch controls, platform on which we both know they neither develop on (when is the last time you made a website on your tablet?) or even test on, is indeed left as an exercise for the reader.
Ha, love his last entry on cat-v jar:

(#cat-v) khm → occasionally someone on hacker news will link to an article so they
can all misunderstand it together
It's wild to me that we all recognized autoplay was a problem, Google broke a bunch of websites, there was a big stink around it, and so 5 years later... we still haven't solved autoplay. Nothing has changed, we just stopped talking about it.

I made a demo showing how easy this was to circumvent in 2018 and it works just as well today in both Chrome and Firefox as it did in 2018, nothing has improved since then: https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/demo/ (link has autoplaying audio).
I prefer having extra work done writing code (adding "?") than having to do extra work reading code. Exceptions are functionally invisible control flow; it isn't clear to the reader that a function may blow up if the exceptions are unhandled.
You still have that freedom to walk anywhere after parking you know. I have done this 100’s of times. Just park then from there go anywhere you want then just take a taxi or lyft back to your car.
Public transport sucks, not sure why so many people people like it. Driving is much better unless you live in a large city like NY or LA. My own climate control, radio for music and podcasts, plus driving is therapeutic. I hate being around so many people packed in a train, airplane, bus.
And as I said, it does not matter if you can drive YOURSELF. These cars get special permits for the relatives to drive the disabled person to the destination.

But other than that, you are wrong again. The most common neurological disabilities actually affect motor and sensitivity. Are people are allowed to drive.
funds are safu .... in his pocket lol
And yet people look at me like I have two heads when I explain that I’m still actively making every effort to avoid getting Covid.

The long term brain damage is going to be a massive impact on companies who are forcing RTO and causing their employees to deal with repeat exposures to Covid from co-workers.
Run through all the numbers I ran through. The only number you're adjust is financing - which is a big number, but my financing number was based on $28K. Financing $20K drops you to $600, which is still expensive. Get much cheaper than $20K and you're starting to drive up your maintenance costs while you drive down your financing costs. Those maintenance costs come with several other ancillary costs (aggravation, paying for transportation while car is being serviced, missing work, etc.)

As I responded in other comments, my calculation didn't even take into account for parking, registration, and vehicle emissions testing costs. Young people are looking at the delta to their monthly expense outlay for getting a car and it's quite considerable.
Hacker News in the Terminal
Why Stock Buybacks Are Dangerous for the Economy (2020)
> The main benefit of Zipcar to me versus owning is that the car had a parking space that it went back into.

I used to wholeheartedly agree with this. I lived in a very parking-constrained area. Zipcar had cars with dedicated spots on random corners throughout town, which was extremely convenient! At least prior to 2020...

Then the pandemic hit, and the number of package delivery trucks skyrocketed, along with doordash, uber eats, etc. And also just a general decrease in people's willingness to follow parking rules and signs. In the final year of my Zipcar membership before cancellation, literally 100% of my rentals involved dealing with a blocked parking spot when trying to return the car. I just don't think Zipcar's concept is viable anymore.
> Edit: You can read about the telemetry options currently present in Audacity here: https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/

Seems pretty reasonable actually. I remember that the situation was more arguable when there were the push backs against the privacy issue, The Muse seems to have responded appropriately to the criticisms.

The community split is unfortunate and sad but I sympathize with people wanting to avoid having to sign a CLA. One of the benefits of contributing to a GPL project without a CLA is that for the project to get rid of the GPL, it has to go out of its way asking for permission to every contributor or to remove the concerned code, which ensure your code does not risk ending up in a future, proprietary version of the project.

The reasons given for the existence of the CLA are reasonable too and I empathize (ability to release under GPLv3 and to release an version in Apple's App store, citing the example of VLC), but the CLA gives way too much right to The Muse which has all the rights to say "thank you, now we will actually make Audacity proprietary". Ideally its scope should be reduced.
Business profits yes, because executives exert direct control over revenues and expenses.

Share prices no, because it depends on the future expectations of others who buy and sell shares every day.

Imagine you are part-owner of, say, a local landscaping business, and you're a passive investor, i.e., not part of its management. The managers of this business would be working for the owners, including you, and the managers' mandate would be to maximize business profits over time, a portion of which you would get as income in the form of annual dividends or distributions.

When you buy a share in an exchange-listed company like, say, Apple, you're a part-owner of Apple. Our legal framework (encompassing everything from federal and state laws to company bylaws) stipulates that the board of directors works for and represents the interests of shareholders like you, and that the company's executives work to maximize profits for the shareholders over time. Shareholders, including you, vote to elect the members of the board, who have a fiduciary obligation to act in the best interests of shareholders, including you.

However, when most people think about "maximizing profits" they think about it as maximizing share prices. In practice, executives of exchange-listed companies are "held accountable" (by the board) for share prices, generally under the assumption that present share prices are correlated with future profits.
One of the most insidious ideas of our time. Interestingly, it seems directly at odds with the new dogma/mandate of BlackRock-style DEI, which is insidious in it's own way.

I wish the history of corporatocracy was taught more in schools, it seems like there was this massive, sudden leap between "the king gives you the right to build a bridge and collect tolls on it" and "the purpose of all human life is to build financial structures to increase the wealth of the shareholder class." I want to know more about how that shift occurred.
We reduced IT costs by 1.5 times with a kitchen management software
I think it is a little more nuanced, in practice. For a lot of amazing progress and such, the short term doubling down on something seems to make a ton of sense. As such, for the individual farmer and all, risky idea. For the town and the society, they can often ride the reward with minimal exposure to the risk.

My personal pipe dream is that we found a way to not load so much downside of risks on individuals. Which seems to be what we do.
> I mean does someone somehow forget to turn on their wipers when it's raining

I personally really like my auto-wipers. Not because I forget to turn them on, but because when it rains here in Phoenix (an admittedly infrequent event), we go from regular rain to no rain to misting to hurricane style rain in the course of a 10 minute period. It's extremely convenient being able to set it to auto and not have to constantly fiddle with the speeds as the desert rains rapidly change. It lets me focus on the roads more, which is a must during rain here because people seem to forget how to drive on wet roads here.
I find it very concerning that Mozilla has such an artificial limit on what addons can be used on Android. Do you know why they have set up such a limit?
While a lot of forums still exist, I think the amount of active communities has definitely declined.

I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them died because people eventually moved to other platforms. The way I see it, what made a forum great was the community, a constant stream of active posts and engagement. To me they were a hangout spot, a venue of entertainment more than anything else. These hangout spots seemed to have shifted to social media platforms for a lot of people.

Another issue seems to have been a decision by Google to devalue forum posts. Those used to be very common search results 5-10 years ago. It's pretty rare these days.
Sorry, but the sentence

> it took a few years ... to be come publicized knowledge that the media lied about every war, about every economic policy, ...

is exactly what you call a "wooden" statement. But even when the author meant "by and large, the media lied", the statement is a dishonest exaggeration it is. Of course there are media that can be caught lying over and over again, but there are sufficient large, conscientious news outlets to suppose it is a dirty spin.

> If we continue with this way of interpreting one another we'll likely fall into the same polarization that we're complaining about (again, a grand irony).

Discrediting all media equally is part of polarization, and letting it go isn't helpful. Discussing it as if it were true, as many seem to do, is a symptom that it has gone too far.
Think about it this way: Why put money in a stock that's not going anywhere when there are so many other options
Exactly. Money isn't enough to keep things running in perpetuity or even for a long time -- ultimately everything has to be administered by an organization that has a self-interest in sustaining itself with a board etc.

If money is simply set aside to fund something, somebody still has to hire somebody to manage the thing, and oversee their performance, and fire the manager if they underperform, and find a new manager, and sign off on big decisions like a change of space, and so forth. But if that trustee just... doesn't care to do that... then what exactly are you going to do? Somebody would have to sue to enforce that overseeing, but frequently nobody cares to sue or has standing.
This is actually how I tell my kids to drive lol.

“Drive like everyone else is an impatient brain dead dipshit intent on killing you”

“Also, check your mirrors constantly. “
So last time this story made the rounds, the legislature had passed the bill. Then the mayor signed it into law - but not before adding some legalese that roughly amounted to "just kidding lol". Afaik nobody could explain why it was legal for the mayor to add arbitrary language without legislative oversight. Has anyone dove in to figure out how that happened?
Can you please not (a) post in the flamewar style to HN, or (b) use HN for political flamewar? You're breaking the site guidelines badly here.

We don't need you to change your views but we do need you to present them thoughtfully and respectfully, if you want to participate here.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
Oh boy, you found one outlier! That negates my entire argument!
> As a "Generation X" near the Boomer boundary, I just can't stop being shocked by "average car is $47k".

I don't doubt the average new car price could be 47K, but averages are pushed up by the very expensive ones. And today there are a lots of cars at the very high end over 100K which skews the average.

Regular cars (entry-level Honda/Toyota/Mazda/etc) haven't gone up much, probably about tracking inflation (would be nice to see a graph for e.g. an entry level Mazda 3 (323) MSRP vs. inflation over the years).
I suppose this could also become highly personal, say if a super-charismatic shareholder can convince the rest to do something despite being in the minority.
Because the Tesla fans will cling to anything to further their arguments.
They are not the same. Errors force you to explicitly handle unexpected conditions. Exceptions don't. And "?" is for making error handling not take up half of loc.

Read up on how exceptions work in C++ implementation-wise. It's not pretty.
> and programs where half the loc are unhappy paths that do what exceptions do... with a huge amount of work.

This made me laugh harder than makes sense. I'm sure I've been guilty of doing said code, as well.
Rust is a systems language, not a business language.

If you're building an operating system or a software platform, to for it; the robustness will pay for itself in time to fix hard-to-find errors.

But if you're iterating fast to find out what the program should be about to begin with, use a prototype-friendly language instead. With garbage collection.
Early in my career, I worked for a company that had one of its five core values as "Maximize shareholder value" and these would get displayed all around the company (as if they were supposed to inspire us). I thought (1) 'I can't believe anyone is actually inspired by that' and (2) 'Well, at least they're honest about it'.
Previously

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28535516

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23234101

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606733

This is the sort of article that takes on a different tenor in changing economic times.
911 calls can’t be used in this metric since they encompass non-police emergencies and non-emergencies as well.

So going off reported crimes, we have 1/10 of a crime per officer per day, or maybe better put, 1 crime per 10 days per officer. So tell me more about how they’re not twiddling their thumbs. Even accounting for administrative work (court appearances, paperwork, etc), that is a ridiculously low crime response rate.
Tablets often come with keyboards.
This is something I hear a lot from other founders.

Spinup time of new engineers is like 6mo+, some devs who can churn out normal CRUD product work just fine in Rails or React ~never become productive with Rust, and hiring skilled Rust devs is just crazy hard (though maybe now that Blockchain/Solidity things have cooled there may be more supply).
i don't know that it would be fair of me to bemoan the slow progress of long covid research given how new it is by medical standards, but at the very least i am glad that mainstream awareness and reporting seem to be increasing

it's quite scary that everyone who catches covid is rolling the dice on potentially debilitating, poorly understood complications, and i have to imagine people in general would behave very differently if they were mindful of this. and there's the systemic difficulty forced on current long covid sufferers, who have an uphill battle in persuading those around them (including, often, medical professionals!) that they have a real and sometimes severe condition
Why aren't we updating the mRNA vaccines to better combat the new variants? Wasn't the initial thinking that we'd all get an updated shot once or twice a year?
Exceptions come with their own weirdness. Usually, if you want to handle an exception, you need to wrap the code that could generate it in a block, which means any variables declared there won't be available in the parent scope. I'd much rather have the ability to just write normal code and deal with the error on the spot, along with some syntactic sugar (such as "?") to return that error to the caller.
Plenty of fish in the sea, really...
In Swift, at least, the possibility that a function can throw must be marked as part of its signature, and the exception cannot be ignored if it is thrown so the call requires explicit syntax as well, so there is no way to miss that something could "blow up" when reading the code.
> because there is zero standardization
For the Netherlands, you could not be more wrong.
By law, all public transport companies for Trains, Metro, Tram, Bus, Watertaxies are hooked into the exact same NFC payment platform, the OV-chipkaart. Recently, they rolled out debit/credit card payments on these readers nation-wide.

Additionally, all public transportation companies provide standardized service information including live updates (often required by the law). Any journey can be fully planned on 9292.nl.
Tough to rule it out I suppose, and would be interesting to know purely as a matter of history, but I really don't see the attraction of it as an idea in of itself.

The emergence of primitive proto-cells, then unicellular life, whereever it originated, seems quite easy to understand, and I'd agree with Stuart Kaufmann's "At home in the universe" suggestion that it appears more inevitable given a few environmental prerequisites than something requiring an extraordinary explanation. If interstellar RNA(?) did find it's way to earth, then it was likely competing with home-grown primitive cells, given what we know about early earth conditions and the inevitable rise of complexity.

The basic idea is that all it took for life/evolution to get started was a circular chain of chemical reactions (a primitive/proto-metabolism - consuming environment chemicals, and producing others) and some type of semi-permeable container (eventually to become a cell wall) such as a fatty bubble made out of hydrocarbons that can be produced in early-earth conditions. That's all evolution would have needed to get started - some froth on the seashore (or by the deep sea vent/whereever) "competing" with other flavors of froth for numerical supremacy.

The more interesting phases of evolution, which it seems are less inevitable (or perhaps I should say lower probability - but nonetheless inevitable given enough time) are things like the emergence of multi-cellular life, or what triggered the "Cambrian explosion" of variety to emerge.
So it's okay because the vast majority of people aren't affected?

By that rationale, Black, Asian, and LGBT Americans should keep to themselves and stop fighting for rights or having a voice.

In both cases we are talking about people with immutable traits or characteristics society as a whole isn't fond of. (If society was fond, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, nor people fighting for equal treatment in society.) All of these people have been the victims of the genocidal lunatics in the 20th century.

The only difference is society has not progressed to a point where it is socially acceptable to condemn people for hating the neurodivergent.
I don't think the question is well formed. What is meant by "maximize profits for shareholders?" That doesn't even make sense. Shareholders don't take profits. There's no definition for "maximizing" any sort of gain as the ceiling isn't known.

A better question would be "are corporate executives accountable to shareholders for stock value?" 1000% they are accountable to the shareholders and if the executives do not act in their best interests, there could be repercussions. This may even include legal liability, depending on the situation.
We already pay taxes and not a small amount of them. More money isn’t the solution here.
I dunno man, according to another poster, I think FSD would probably give itself a safe driver rating of at least 85 for that.
Maybe because it’s better? (:
It never did, I was being sarcastic. Most users on phones use chrome or safarIE, as those come preinstalled.