skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually this not reflected in the empirical data. Studies of the data comparing longrun performance of companies with high payout to low payout ratios show significantly that average companies* perform better when they retain less cash.

This is counter-intuitive because a strategist would tell you that companies with more cash have more options, companies with less cash have to go through all the expense of going back to the market every time they need to make capital investments.

One thing that turns out to be the factor is agency costs. Companies with large cash hoards might waste money on bad or frivolous projects or more often bad, overpriced acquisitions.

In apple's case they have more cash than they can reinvest in their own business. The market could get better returns on that cash than apple can. Therefore the market will value the cash on Apple's books at discount to it's true value. The cash is discounted by apple's low sub-market rate of return on that capital and by the implicit risk that management might any day choose to do something dumb with it.

Instead companies that have to go to the market more often to raise cash, that have to file more prospectuses, turn out to be more transparently run and more accountable to shareholders. In the long run managers who "have to open the kimono" more often, turn out to perform better for shareholders.

When Microsoft announced the first huge one time dividend in 2003 or whenever it was, something funny happened. When they transferred X billion dollars to shareholders, their stock should also have dropped by exactly X billion dollars reflecting the value transferred out of the company. Instead their market cap only declined by 0.8X. Meaning than hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder value was created out of nowhere. This was because the cash was worth that much more to shareholders who had a use for it than in the of microsoft who couldn't do anything with useful with it.

The 0.2X was the implicit discount of the value of that cash on MSFT's books that was unlocked by setting it free.

In fact because dividends are hard to take back, a dividend usual signals to the market that management have confidence in future earnings growth. Stocks usually jump on dividend announcements even though theoretically it shouldn't make a difference. That's the signalling effect.

*the big caveat being that APPL famously never performs or does anything exactly like an average company.
must..resist...ranting....'where the heck is half life 3'...
Anyone else think that making it official makes it less fun? I guess if you were a student there now it would be cool that it got made official, but in future it will be just another official piece of paper, rather than something people do or say because they decided to.

Maybe I'm just a killjoy...

EDIT: I see the article has a page two, where it details how they involved the students in the whole thing. Note to self: resist the urge to skim read articles, even if they are about students dressing up as pirates.
So, the US collectively pays for the TSA. The TSA takes your money, buys into the accountability of body scanners - somehow miss (then deny) the vulnerability – one a terrorist could successfully overcome - and they're asking, what? That no one know about it? Are you serious? Like the TSA is a newb database admin that accidentally dropped the users table or something? The TSA is literally fucking with your lives and you pay for it and seriously being told to shut up about it in no uncertain terms. Yikes.

What gets me is that the person who pointed out this flaw actually demonstrated it. I shutter to think what would have happened to this information had he only provided anecdotal hypothesis.
> stashing uncommitted changes when switching branches, for instance

Really? This scares me to death. I absolutely want to be informed when I have uncommitted changes. What an anti-feature.
Drawn to Scale raises money to make SQL big-data-ready
I think it might be stretching to say that Apple has no use for that cash. That they have no immediate plans is hardly the same thing.
Because without dividends that gain is entirely speculative. Over the next two years it could triple in value, or it could take a nosedive. There's no fundamentals backing up the value of AAPL shares. Yes, Apple is crazy profitable. But ask yourself: what's in it for the investors if they're not sharing that cash?

Regular dividends provide a fundamental baseline in the value of a stock, and market pressures typically force movement of stock price to normalize the dividend yield. It provides stability for stocks no longer driven by growth and speculation.

AAPL has been a massive growth story for the last decade. But as with any growth story, at some point fundamental limits are reached. I'm not saying that has happened now, but when it does (as it did for Microsoft), Apple will be forced to choose between issuing dividends or watching their share price fall (and, worst case scenario, spiral) as growth speculators sell off their portfolios.
Twice the dose of radiation.
A 'lazier programmer' who actually checked the optimization of various factorial methods?

There's a joke in there somewhere...
I was with them until the P.S. -- that's just creepy.
SPDY has been enabled by default in Chrome for a while.

SPDY is enabled by default in Firefox 13, currently on the nightly channel. In Firefox 11 (beta channel) or 12 (aurora channel) [2] it can be enabled with a hidden preference [3].

After Firefox 13 is released in a few months, over 40% of web users worldwide will be browsing with SPDY. (Today the number is already over 25% worldwide thanks to Chrome alone, based on numbers from StatCounter.)

[1] http://nightly.mozilla.org/

[2] http://www.firefox.com/channel

[3] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/02/spdy-brings-responsive-and...
> You shouldn't have to be a linux command-line cowboy to have to use and understand git.

No, you really should. Any programmer should be able to use the command-line as a prerequisite for calling themselves a programmer.
Microsoft: OnLive's Windows-on-iPad service violates license
Thanks for the link. I have mastered all the hidden features. :)
Obama admin: War is peace, IP negotiations are transparent
Assholes and a vendor which doesn't care about the privacy of customers.
Who’s the winner of WeHackIt first Online Hackathon?
"Evolution" is a touchy word, because there are so many idiots who will deny it exists or who will distort it horribly.

It's a shame that a useful word is less useful now - purists want to make sure that biological evolution is never misrepresented. That's fair enough. It's a simple concept and lots of people (even the ones who accept evolution) sometimes make mistakes.

Personally, I think the term "computational evolution" is clear enough.
Upon closer review, you're right in that it's not very clear that SPDY requires TLS. I did find this in section 5, Security Considerations:

5.3. Cross-Protocol Attacks

By utilizing TLS, we believe that SPDY introduces no new cross-
protocol attacks. TLS encrypts the contents of all transmission
(except the handshake itself), making it difficult for attackers to
control the data which could be used in a cross-protocol attack.

Also interesting is that the language in the Overview makes it seem as though TCP itself is not a requirement and that SPDY can be used over any reliable transport layer such as TCP.
Not yet a great hacker? Exec is hiring an Operations team [SF]
One of the most interesting things about the TF2 story is that they opened up custom item creation to the community, and allowed players to actually profit from designing and uploading objects to the store. I remember reading a quote from Gabe Newell mentioning that some of the top player sellers were making over $30,000 / month from their creations.

edit: If in game, player driven markets are the sort of thing that interests you: keep an eye out for Diablo 3's real money auction house.

Also: hats.
200K WordPress sites hit with code injection
> Interesting - I definitely believed there were four cpu cores in that chip yesterday.

I have trouble understanding how that could be done, they clearly stated "quad-core graphics" as opposed to the A5's "dual-core graphics" (the A5 using a SGX543MP2 with the A5X probably being a SGX543MP4), there was no fudging around or tentative to make it anything but.
2012 Acura NSX Price and Release Date
We already knew that may be a prototype of the new brand 2012 Acura NSX, just have no idea it might be so spectacular! It’s nonetheless an Acura, the corridor was not in U.S., but when a Honda will cross the ocean.
On the plus side, they're making good time.
That's interesting about the 601 -- can you say more? I checked a half-dozen pages about it and one said it used "special relays" and the others said nothing about the implementation.
Four years of signing up for pistols, never once got in (I signed up fairly early too. Guess I shoulda automated it). This new degree will now make it even harder to get in! Maybe as a result they will look into expanding the class.
My grandparents are diabetic, and I've long imagined an implant that could measure blood sugar levels and report it back when they sit down at the computer or pick up a device. NFC is used in subdermal implants today, it could be done. My grandfather has a pacemaker, perhaps it could be a combined function. The problem would be getting blood samples without actually causing damage to vessels, but I am no medical researcher so I don't know all the hurdles.

I agree with you that measuring is the most intensive task of tracking personal statistics. I can enter how many servings I had of what in any fitness tracker website, but what if I had 1.3 servings? What if I had .2 servings (just a taste)? How do you estimate that without measuring it first? And if you're measuring everything on a scale, where has the fun gone in life? What's the difference between medium intensity running vs high or low? If I biked at 15mph it might be medium, but what if I kept that 15mph steady up steep hills? Or what if I kept 15mph down a hill without pedaling? We're built for rough estimates and are amazingly adept at convincing ourselves we're right.

I have enough difficulty with time tracking at work either breaking my productivity or cutting into my limited "me" time, and that's just a petty little thing. I usually end up estimating at the end of the week then fixing discrepancies that always come up.
The CEO of Dropbox explains why simplicity is so hard to achieve.
Who is Joseph Kony, and Why Does It Matter?
Sequoia invests in Songkick. First investment in UK-based startup.
Change "Administration" to "Department" and I think you've got a winner.
Is C++ usage on the decline?

No it is not. C++11 is a modern programming language that lets you harness every bit of power from your computer.

From a productivity point of view I think Java and C# are as verbose as modern C++. In the end it really depends on what kind of application you develop, for web development you can be a few orders of magnitude more productive than in C++ if you use Python or Ruby. For number crunching nothing beats Fortran.

You should chose your tools (programming language, compiler, OS etc.) based on what you know and on the application domain.
Could you explain your first point a little more, I'm not following what you're saying?
Sony is an interesting comparison. But they haven't had an iconic product associated with their brand since the BetaMax, and I don't think anyone could differentiate their content from Fox in the way that Disney's content is readily identifiable.

I.e. name three specific Apple products and three Disney movies - now try that with Sony electronics and movies.
>It is just such a common complaint, and I have yet to hear of any down side that actually makes sense to me as someone who has a fair understanding of git

Probably because gaining a fair understanding of git is damned hard. Why you want to do things, and what these actions are actually for is not clear from the topology of the terms that git uses to describe these actions.
On Gnome Zombies and Desktops
> If they have $50B of cash they have no use for

Not the case and not what was stated.

They don't need those for immediate ops right now, but having tens of billions readily available is a great chip when discussing deal with manufacturers. It means you're able to put billions on the table upfront at a financial moment's notice. Apple's billions in the bank are a major asset in their negotiations.
Security Firm: Injection Hit 200,000 Sites
Go has "panic", which does as you suggest and propagates up the stack to something that can "recover". If nothing can, it will crash the program. Its use is generally reserved for truly exceptional circumstances.

Most errors are handled quite like the way you propose, e.g. handle, err := Open(). You can ignore the error if you wish, but that's up to you, and it's explicit that you're ignoring it: handle, _ := Open().

Panics are not meant to be a way to control the flow of the program, but rather to regain control of it if something disastrous occurs.
Because the board members have a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders.

Of course, if the board believes that holding the cash maximizes long-term shareholder value (e.g., by enabling acquisitions or capital expenditures down the road, or serving as a buffer in a recession), holding cash satisfies their fiduciary duty.
From the description I didn't get what Yobongo does (or did); anyone care to explain?
I fixed it for myself by using a password manager. I only have to worry about securing the (encrypted) database, which is comparatively trivial.

I'm still vulnerable to the "supercomputer cracks your encryption" attack but that's orders of magnitude better than having my bank account compromised because some blog leaked my universal password.

Edit: If there were no fix, changing all of your passwords would be the only option besides letting the Internet at large have your accounts. Unless I'm misreading you.
Heads or tails: Does it make sense to bet on down rounds?
> Because the board members have a fiduciary duty towards their shareholders.

Which isn't an issue if the board believes this cash pile is a good tool to maximize long-term shareholder value in the long run, they're in the clear.

> If the company literally has more cash than it knows what to do with

You're deeply misreading Cook's statement. He said Apple does not need its cash reserves for its operations, meaning for day-to-day expenses and management.

That does not even remotely come close to meaning they have more cash than they know what to do with.
The Perfect Belt
I agree with you to a point (especially in this instance). On the other hand, I think there are certain circumstances where the laundry should be aired.

While it could be said that nothing is fair in love, war and business, I, personally, find unethical business practices to be quite loathsome. Sometimes a company that tries to win through intimidation and questionable legal threats deserves to have the world know what they're up to.

My grandmother once gave me a piece of advice that's stuck with me- "Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching." Years later, I think about that and I wonder, how many people are running their businesses with a smile on their face and a knife behind their back.

So yeah, there are plenty of times where airing dirty laundry is a shallow thing to do, but there are also times where you can finally see the true colors of a company and what they really stand for.
Angry Birds Space gets geeky with awesome real-life demo from NASA
Show HN: Image Sniffer at commentto, coded in 2 days
I don't know if that's entirely true. NPR was really suspicious of the government before 2008. Then something changed.
And the associated reporting that the public reads [1]:

A5X processor is confirmed, quad-core graphics!

and

Now we're talking about the quad-core graphics A5X. [...]

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/07/apple-ipad-3-liveblog/

Edit: another slide... http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/23/4cg.png/ @ 28''30
To me the bad thing about the TSA, and counterterrorism in general, is that every day that goes by without an attack reinforces whatever methods and expenses they might incur.

But the worse is that only a terrible event could prove them wrong and stop the nonsense.
I work in HPC. Every application I've seen has been written in C++, with the exception of proof-of-concept Matlab code hacked together by the researchers. This is then contracted to be rewritten in C++.
I've done a significant amount of development with Twilio, and I can say that I do see a need for a service like this. Developing conversations with Twilio is a pain, and requires a bank of phone numbers. A service like this can pool phone numbers among apps, and result in savings for everyone.

The question is, how many apps need to implement conversations for Twilio?
Justice Department may sue Apple, publishers on e-books
I guess I'm not clear what your ideal product would be. All of the scenarios you describe have very constrained bandwidth, which means that sync outside the LAN will always be crappy. It sounds like you either need NAS or peer-to-peer sync (something like Mesh or AeroFS).
I wasn't stretching anything. Tim Cook said Apple has "more than we need to run the company." Running the company requires having cash for immediate, future, foreseeable and non-foreseeable events. "More than we need" means there is some that there is no need, or "no use".
From what I can see it says "substantially similar" not "substantially identical."[1] I am not a lawyer but it is my understanding that the relevant issue is "substantially similar."[2]

What do you mean "they never show that the text was copyrighted"? Do you know what is required to copyright content? There is no office where you file a copyright application. Using a (c) and/or other types of copyright notices is optional in a post-Berne American court.

[1] Is there a way to download the pdf of an embedded scribd asset? Reading the document is painful...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity
> "i" before "e"... which ironically is a mostly incorrect rule

Really?

$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -c ie
3953
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -c ei
2650
Path brings music matching, improved camera, Nike+, and an API for developers
TF2 was a masterstroke for Valve in PR. I paid $40 for TF2 and I felt like the value that it gave over the past 5 years has more than exceeded what I paid for it. It has generated a huge amount of goodwill towards Valve and Steam that will help anchor them in the PC gaming industry for years to come. It will be interesting to see where they're taking Steam and the PC platform in the near future, especially given all the talk about a possible console.
No, it's really not. Neither NVIDIA nor AMD use it in their own marketing, nor does Intel for its Graphics parts. The tech press does, but (and this is important) only as a means to explanation via reference to the term from the CPU world. And even when they do, they have to throw in a ton of caveats about how "cores" don't match up between the very different architectures, etc...

Apple's use of the term "Quad-Core" in that slide is confusing. I don't see that there's any meaningful doubt about that. The more interesting thing is whether it was deliberately confusing.
If you read the article again, you'll notice the publishers are the ones setting the prices.
Sonalight (YC W12) Lets You Text While Driving Without Touching A Phone
Oh it can surely run bcrypt for a few users. The question is if it can run it for a couple thousands a minute.

I am not so sure of that.
Groupon Engineering Blog
Police Drones Are Already Here
Akamai Now Running 105,000 Servers
The kind that feels they could put in their own board members and have them immediately distribute Apple's cash hoard to the investors, at which point the investors cut and run. I don't think Apple has so much money that this is a profitable gambit at the moment, but at some bank balance you'd be stupid not to at least contemplate the option (especially since you can't expect the stock value to grow at its current rate indefinitely...).
The blog post characterizes this communication as intimidation. I don't see anything remotely intimidating about it; to me it looks like the TSA telling the other reporter that the guy has no credibility, and I think this is an entirely valid criticism of anyone who delighted to be featured on Alex Jones' show.

I have no especial objection to the original story, but it's little more than a marketing exercise: a hyperbolic headline attached to a banal observation, which shoots at a large target and unsurprisingly, hits it. When you think about it, government procuremet on this scale is almost always slow and suffers from stable-door syndrome. As I've said before, nothing is going to happen with the TSA until after the election, because the minute Obama proposes loosening security at airports he'll be accused of inviting terrorists onto planes. Have you not noticed how none the congresspeople who say they are outraged - outraged! - over the TSA's intrusive security methods have made any attempt to cut the agency's funding?
API Driven Mobile Components with Verious
My Travels with OS X Lion & iCloud: Purrs and Bliss
Thanks Gary, I am always happy to listen to and to pass along suggestions. My email is in my profile.
I read it, and it seems purposely vague enough so that you don't really know who was in the wrong. Is that the whole point of this, just to muddle an issue and then hope it disappears?
NASA looking for Star Trek-like Tricorder to track astronaut health
Dude Adrian this website's the shit. Yo, and if you're looking for really cool ways of presenting data, look up this guy http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Evidence-Edward-R-Tufte/dp/0...
We can bicker about the amount, but the meaning of "more than we need to run the company", means there is some that is of no use to the company.

I perfectly agree that Apple should keep a massive cash horde to fund future investment.
In general, he's right. Kernels and some other applications that require low-level access are an exception to the general rule that C is not a good language for massive projects.
Macobserver treat HN like a link dump.

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jmartellaro
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=digiwizard
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Semteksam
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davethenerd
I couldn't find your example, but here is some players getting paid royalties on their creations submitted through a contest.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/10/21/user-created-tf2-items-bri...
Disney, Fox, Universal call for judgement against Megaupload competitor Hotfile
Just because they are legally in the right does not mean that we cannot express our displeasure with their actions.
No, I have never written exception-handling code like that mocked in this article. There's a strong correlation between uses of 'catch' and the probability that you're using exceptions incorrectly. Go's lack of exceptions is probably what pushes me away from it most strongly.
dynamic_cast<MyData>(funky_iterator<MyData &const>(foo::iterator_type<MyData>(obj))
Yeah. Right.
Don't get me wrong, I love templates, but contemporary C++ using STL looks like a classic case of the "If all you have is a hammer"-syndrome. GCC had to implement special diagnostic simplifications just so you can actually find out that that 5-line error message was a simple const'ness mistake when using a std::string method. Even worse, they can be slow as hell. Ever waited for Boost to compile? Good idea, bad realization.

I have been programming (in C) for 12 years, and when I see something like this I still get a shivering feeling. How can one design such a shitty programming language like this?
My understanding was that vendors just pay the entry fee to game Angie List reviews.
I wondered if it was the abbreviation of criminal hacker
صور مناظر طبيعيه جميله 2012
Seems low-risk to me; they probably got a nice pile of money from initial sales when it wasn't F2P.