drelihan

Comparing Python to Perl ( assuming equal experience with both ):

If you are a good programmer, you will write good Perl and Python code. If you are a bad programmer, you will likely write terribly horrendous Perl code and slightly less horrible Python code.

Probably referring to recent articles / interviews that claim how large tech companies over-hired in efforts to take supply out of the market for competitors. https://fortune.com/2023/03/10/google-over-hired-talent-do-n...

For those looking to make a good investment to “create a desirable urban space”, there are many ways to donate to non-profit (museums, theaters, local schools, libraries, co-ops, etc) to achieve that. A coffee shop, or even funeral home, could set itself up as a non-profit, with the employees and managers making market salaries but relying on community donations, in addition to community business, to keep the place going if needed.

For businesses who set themselves up as for-profit, or those who wish to invest in for-profit businesses, a return on capital is required for those systems to work. Investors may accept a lower return on their money in a local business compared to one they will never see, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with making sure there is a investment return. Otherwise, how do you suppose the next business gets funded?

Was expecting more info on how repayment works thru the revenue sharing notes - not clear what percentage of revenue a business is agreeing to pay or how much teeth these notes actually have. I would expect most of these “investments” to end in a almost complete write downs. Could be a great funding alternative if the details / investor protections were fleshed out. I personally would not touch any of these until then.

Pay attention. This is how you rant.

Agreed! Once we automate one task, we move onto the next. Some of the automation requires tending over time, but order of magnitude less than the manual intervention than before.

There is always more to do, even if it might not be in your immediate job description. If you work at a company that rewards productivity, then you will do well. If you don't work at a company, or for a boss, who rewards productivity, regardless of automation, why would you stay?

The only thing I can think that is worse than doing an automate-able task over and over is lying fallow while a program does it for me.

I’d rather invest in just that company, one that can continue reinvesting profits in itself at attractive returns year in and out. I can sit back and let compounding work it’s magic ( although at some point in my life I will switch from a net producer to a net consumer and opt for cash ). In cases where a company does not need all the cash it generates to continue its growth or does not have growth prospects ( not necessarily a bad thing), then I’d rather have cash to invest more productively elsewhere.

No, the corporation retires the shares after the buyback. Total outstanding shares decrease. All remaining shareholders get a larger percent ownership of the corporation

Buybacks are effectively taxed at the same rate as dividends, at least qualified dividends, just timing differs:

Simple case with a corporation worth $200 with two equal shareholders, who each paid $100 for their half of the company and are in 20% capital gains tax bracket, ignoring net investment tax of 3.8%:

Dividends:

Corporation pays $100 in qualified dividends, $50 to each shareholder. Each shareholder pays their capital gains tax rate on the $50. If that rate is 20% for each, then a total of $20 is collected by the US Treasury. Each shareholder then reinvests or spends the remaining $80 in the economy, while the government puts the $20 to work.

Buy Back Case:

Corporation buys back $100 of shares from 1 shareholder. No taxes were due there as there were no capital gains for shareholder 1. Shareholder 2 now owns 100% of the corporation, so their investment is now, all other thing equal, worth $200. When shareholder 2 sells, a bill for $20 is due ( $100 in capital gains x capital gains rate ). Shareholder 1 reinvests/spends $100 in economy, government gets no additional cash now, but will eventually when Shareholder 2 sells.

In the end, government gets the same $20 in tax. Benefits of the buy back are that investors are able to choose whether or not they want to cash out, whereas a dividend forces it on all investors. Downside is that government has to wait for the $20 in capital gains taxes. However, if shareholder 1 owed capital gains on the buy back ( perhaps they bought their share for $50, so would owe $10 in the $50 it made on the sale ), the government would get $10 from that sale + $20 down the road when shareholder 2 sold.

My two top ( by dollars and attention ) are:

- Walker School ( walkercares.org ) - special education and behavioral care for children and their families. Why Support? This is a local organization that serves a population of young children that often, but not always, have endured tremendous trauma and/or abuse, and typically have no where else to go. The Walker School helps them recover and rehabilitate and find them a permanent, safe home to re-enter mainstream society and become productive happy kids and eventually adults. A $1 to help get a kid back on track early saves a $100+ supporting someone through adulthood.

- Museum of Science ( mos.org/ ) - if you are ever in Boston, please make a trip halfway across the river and check it out. It is one of the best science/engineering museums in the country. Why Support? Not everyone is going to be a scientist, engineer, mathematician, etc, but the Museum offers vital community outreach to show what these disciplines can offer society. We can't all play for the Patriots/Celtics/Bruins/etc, but a lot of people can enjoy watching them and enthusiastically support them. I see the museum as the "Local Sports Team" for STEM.

Big difference is that a surgeon cannot fiddle around with a liver, jam it back in the body, wake the patient up, test how the change works, and address (or revert if really messed up) any unexpected and unwanted behavior.

I agree "Web dev" has a very long learning curve, but there is opportunity to be productive and helpful at many, many different points along that curve.

Others.

Have it do one thing very well and document it clearly so users can build it into their own processes.

If it is more complicated than that ( i.e. must do several things very well with ever-changing needs ), document it clearly and include a link to the source code and build instructions.

You own 40% of the company right now and Jim owns 60% ( assuming all common stock ). If you sold the company right now, that should be the ratio to use to divvy up the proceeds due to the common shareholders.

Assuming no vesting / clawback agreement was in place:

Simple option: have Jim buy your shares at fair value, which may be very close to 0.00. If Jim is unwilling / unable to pay with cash, have the company write you a note for the shares. In both cases, Jim ends up with 100% equity, which is what you say he wants, while you are compensated for value created to date.

Imagine there was a cookie market made up of two types of cookies, tasty and meh. An active investor in cookies would spend time determining which cookies are likely tasty and which are meh. They would pay more for the tastier cookies so they can savor the flavor and less for the meh ones they can binge eat in the shower when no one is home.... A passive investor comes along and says, I don't want to do all this research, I'll just assume the market was able to price these accordingly and buy any cookie at the market price. At the beginning, it is great. They just sit back and buy baskets of cookies, some tasty, some meh... but they always pay the higher price for tasty and lower price for meh, so it is fair. Over time, more people start buying baskets of cookies rather than spending time/money figuring out what to pay for them. At some point, no one is left to figure out which cookies are tasty vs meh, so the price of all cookies converge to a single price. Cookie manufactures notice this and figure might as well just make meh cookies as no one can tell the difference until after they buy them... and then we are stuck in a world with meh cookies. With some critical mass of active cookie investors, prices could be set fairly for all cookies. Too many active investors, and there is a drain on the system as there is likely a lot of duplicated work among the investors ( each one has to have a research team, back office cookie trading systems, etc, etc ). Too little and prices become less accurate.

No really easy way to do it. Just step through in a debugger a bunch of times and pay attention to the call stack and you'll start to get a feeling of the flow and structure of the code.

That and try to tackle a number of smaller projects / fixes / improvements. That helped me the most and I was marginally productive while I was doing it.

... actually the U.S. Nuclear System uses 8 inch floppy disks. FISK seems to be too advanced.

How else do you think the U.S. Nuclear System shares data https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478...?

Finishing my first build now. It was a tear down of an old house and replaced with a slightly larger ( ~ 4200sqft ), custom house on the same footprint. A different design ( curved roof and lots of glass ), but less site work ( e.g. driveway, well, retaining walls, etc already in place ).

Rough timeline ( just under two years from start to finish ): - starting looking seriously in Nov 2016 - Found property in Jan 2017 and closed on April 2017 - interviewed half a dozen GCs / architects, had one lined up by May 2018 - basic design / layout of house done by July 2018 - started permit process in July 2018 - Demo'd existing house Nov 2018 - All permits finally approved Dec 2018 - Construction Dec 2018 - present ( projected finish Oct 2018 )

What I learned:

+ If this is your first house and you don't have experience, hire the best general contractor you can find for your project. Hire a general contractor prior to selecting a site if possible, as they would be very helpful in helping you with the pros and cons of each build site. Your choice of contractor is one of the biggest choicest you can make in terms of how enjoyable the process will be. The best way you can automate the process is your selection of GC.

+ We worked with a design/build firm that did both the architectural work + the contracting.

+ The general contractor is CEO. You are the Chairperson of the Board. Your role isn't making day to day decisions, but rather finding a CEO that can perform the job, providing what he or she needs to do the job you asked ( mainly timely money and decisions ), and confirming the job has been done.

+ Minimize change orders, but don't be afraid to make changes during the construction. Decisions get exponentially more expensive to change as you go along. We only had one change order --- ripped out a sliding door and replaced it with a window. That change, which would have only cost $75 at drafting time, cost us ~$5k. However, if we had waited until the project was finished the cost would have been $8-10k+. Also know, that if you ask for an estimated cost on a change order or add-on during construction, expect it to actually cost 25-50%.

+ Even seasoned pros make mistakes. Accept upfront that mistakes / delays will happen. If you stress about every mistake and try to optimize everything, you'll drive yourself crazy. Focus on avoiding the mistakes that would be prohibitively expensive to fix properly.

+ Permitting time is a lot longer than you think. We hired the site engineer in July and didn't get approved permits until Dec ( there was never any push back on the permits, but they all had long processing times and could not be run in parallel.

Shouldn't the criticism for IPO terms like this be directed at the money managers buying these shares on behalf of their clients?

It is ultimately those making the capital allocation decision to push back on unreasonable terms. Seems like they "sort of are":

"Domo acknowledges in its disclosure statement that Standard & Poor’s will be excluding companies with these structures from some of its indexes, and other index owners may follow suit. That’s a problem for Domo, because the rise of passive investments keyed to stock indexes means that many investors won’t be buying its stock."

Awesomeness?

I still use Eudora... heavily .... maybe this is a sign

Variable interest rates are only disastrous if you ignore affordability in the future as rates increase. You should know at what rates the adjustments will hurt you and at which rates the adjustments will break you. Downside if that most people only base affordability on the current rates ( if they even consider affordability at all ).

A basic personal finance class in high school would go a long way. Anyone take one of those in high school ( or even college )?

Building the career fair website for my college while in school. There was a lot to be desired, but thousands of students had accounts and uploaded resumes, hundreds of companies registered and paid over $500k per year through the site for registration fees/sponsorships/etc. I was given a single physical server that was locked in a closet somewhere on campus. It was ~2001, so I had to build pretty much everything from scratch on the LAMP stack ( and keep it running ).

I have since built systems orders of magnitude more complex, but you always keep a special place in your first.

Ok - first thought I had was a big model castle made out of pennies

Most of the comments seem to read a lot more into this that what the author of the article was proposing. The algorithm is sound. Talk to one person, get some knowledge/opinions and a list of other people to talk to. Repeat until no one is suggesting anyone new. The goal of the algorithm is to get a base sample of the project or organization so you can figure out where to start contributing and/or learning more. I have seen ( similar approach ) work in both individual contributor, manager, and investor role.

What the interviewer does with that information is another story ( likely multiple other stories ).

If support volume grows, there are three options: 1.) hire more staff 2.) keep staffing levels the same and force workers to take on more for the same pay or 3.) look at why support volume is growing and a) fix some avoidable reasons that require support ( small fixes in UX can go a long way ) , b) automatically solve some of the support issues ( improved documentation ), and c) have the support staff build themselves better tools so they can more efficiently handle the support volume rise.

If you are an owner, #3 will not only improve your products, but also likely to make your entire company much more valuable over time. If the staff are also owners or there is a system in place such that the staff benefits when the owners benefit, they will likely be on board for #3 as well. If #3 is not sufficient enough to provide support, then hiring should be done.

Let's assume that overall, this does not make the road any more or less efficient ( i.e. the same # of product, i.e. people and goods, still pass through the highway stretch per hour ).

For those whose $time_saved_in_traffic > $40, they now have a more economical option.

Imagine a business that bills out labor at $100/hr and offers to pay the $40 toll + $10 extra per day if the employee can and is willing to bill another 30 minutes. Employee is better off ( they effectively spend the same amount of time "at work" plus and extra $10 and likely slightly less gas money ). Employer bills out an extra $50, assuming 20% of that is markup over labor cost, this is an extra $10 in their pocket. The government gets an extra $40 (minus whatever the base toll is) to reinvest elsewhere.

The downside is that the remaining lanes ( those who cannot justify the cost of the fastlane ), will end up paying more in slightly longer commute times if the remaining lanes are now more congested.

What society should be paying attention to is how the efficiency of the road overall improves.

If there is open ( i.e. wasted ) capacity in the HOV lane, opening HOV lane to more traffic will improve efficiency in the road overall.

If the additional revenue can be reinvested to improve efficiency, this should improve things for everyone overall.

If there are no ( or negative ) efficiency gains, then those forced to ride in the mainstream lanes will bear the net cost.

tl;dr; Focus on improving the overall efficiency of the road.

no, if you can just write scripts to clean up the data used in the ML/AI models, you'll likely spin gold for the next decade or so.