scottmmjackson

Disclaimer: I'm an RStudio employee. But this post is my personal opinion and not representative of that of RStudio.

Separately, I'm also a licensed (non-practicing) attorney; despite that, this isn't legal advice.

Some of the things you've said are correct, but are kind of skipping a few important steps.

Buyout: Any corporate buyout, particularly of a Delaware corporation, opens the board up to scrutiny and requires the consent of the corporate constituency. In JJ's presentation he cited Revlon which is an example of a dispute over a buyout by a major shareholder. So, yes, technically benefit corporations can be bought out, but they must approve of the buyout using the corporate governance rules of a benefit corporation.

Converting to a benefit corporation isn't easy- you pretty much require unanimous shareholder consent and it's fairly close to the amount of consensus you need to convert to a pure nonprofit. Same with converting back to an "any lawful business purpose" corporation. So again, yes it's possible, but it's very unlikely unless something convinces basically everyone with a stake that it's worthwhile.

I'm not sure where you're getting that PBC status is not legally binding- I didn't see anything like that in the Harvard link. Corporate purpose statements have a very real legal effect. Would you mind explaining more about this statement? I want to make sure I'm not mistaken.

Note that the article you cite was written a year before the Delaware Benefit Corporation Law was signed by the governor- so some of the things it says might be a little speculative based on the legal realities at the time.

If you want to learn more in depth, I can recommend "Benefit Corporation Law & Governance" by Frederick Alexander.

But if you know R, you can change the behavior of operators.

    > oldPlus <- `+`
    > `+` <- function(e1, e2) {
    +     if (is.character(e1) && is.character(e2))
    +       paste(e1,e2,sep="")
    +     else
    +       oldPlus(e1,e2)
    + }
    > "hello" + "world"
    [1] "helloworld"

Disclaimer: I work for RStudio. I previously worked heavily with SciPy.

The difference kind of goes to the fundamental difference between R and Python. R's nature as a statistical programming language is something you have to install packages in python to achieve: numpy, matplotlib, etc.

What you gain with RStudio are environment inspection tools[1] built for the kind of vectors, data frames, etc. that you'd only get with `numpy` in Python land, and therefore PyCharm and VS don't know about (or would need a plugin to know about). Same goes for the plot viewer and `matplotlib`.

Beyond that, a sizeable portion of RStudio's runtime is written in R itself; you can actually write addins for the IDE using R, as opposed to PyCharm where you'd have to know Java or Kotlin, and I assume VS where you'd be required to use .NET.

It's always going to come down to "what is the best tool _for the job_?" Knowing people who use python for data science, they don't seem to indicate to me that they're particularly fond of PyCharm (which is what I'd use for Python if it's too big a project to effectively grok in VIM). They tend to use Jupyter notebooks (not even iPython!) because more important than static inspection and quality tools (which devs care about) is a richly-featured REPL that saves detailed history forever (which a researcher cares about).

[1]https://i.stack.imgur.com/ASgJs.jpg

Dude.

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-fortran

And no, neural networks aren't suitable for discrete problems.

I actually did put in the work, however, and I agree with parent. You also don't become an authority by pretending you're some mystic wise man without saying anything of substance.

It's unconstitutional for many reasons, one of which is that the executive has no authority to block the entry of legal visa and green card holders without due process.

And yes, it deals a massive blow to the rule of law and faith in the stability of the nation when legal visitors and immigrants are blocked from entry due to an arbitrary dictate from POTUS.

It's a constitutional issue in every sense. The US Congress ALONE has the power to make policy. The POTUS can relax policy enforcement, but cannot enforce policy that was never made. What part of this is hard for you to understand??

TBH microservices do a good job of making you much more dependent on your tools, and selecting the wrong tool for the job won't become clear until you've used that tool for years.

"One algorithm crashes on load but the other is a little slow. They're exactly the same, right?"

I wasn't surprised when I found out it was a law firm either. I've had the good fortune to work with some of the good ones, but legal marketing in general requires a very sensitive a-hole detector.

SPA frameworks are not all-encompassing tools for buildong all web pages. Notably, trying to SEO a SPA is frustrating at best and impossible at worst.

However, in b2b use cases where SEO isn't an issue, SPA frameworks are ideal for coordinating a static-site<->dynamic-api system.

They still charge for court records and opinions. Remember how Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for trying to take them for free?

They're trying to "Do One Thing And Do It Well". It's always interesting how core UNIX philosophy often gets lost in Startup Culture's rush to "Disrupt The World".

3 is one of my biggest pet peeves with SVG. Accessing the SVG document from its container is extremely annoying and not necessarily straightforward to debug, as I learned in one of my recent side projects: http://scottmmjackson.com/weekend-project-offline-fullscreen...

> They need to ensure that none of their client use financial services to commit crimes

There are also laws that give financial institutions due diligence obligations to ensure they're not facilitating "unsanctioned boycotts".

This is one of those situations where having worked a retail job in your life can really impart some wisdom into you. Retailers often give their minimum-wage grunts this song and dance about "family" and "performance tiers" and all that- and the grunts will tell you that it takes a couple years for some people to internalize that it's all a scam to make you work harder for minimum wage.

Your employer will not take care of you. It is your job as an employee to make sure they meet you halfway.

I'll go even further: it's a big industry. Companies of all size and sophistication buy advertising in huge amounts.

You have some players who have honed their advertising strategy for years to try to get the biggest bang for their buck- and they're willing to pay to have professionals work out how to hone it further.

You also have unheard-of locals who have pinstriped sales reps telling them about how much money they're going to make if they buy this billboard or phone book page, and agencies paying big bucks to get the pinstripiest, salesiest representatives to the right suckers as efficiently as possible.

Then there's everything in-between for all the people who are in way over their heads but want to at least imitate the ones who are doing it right.

No, it's commercial speech. The FDA already regulates what they can say in drug advertisements. There's not really a legal issue there.

Legally, it's not really an issue. Commercial speech can be broadly regulated by Congress.

Free Speech doesn't really factor into a huge portion of what you see from the FDA, FTC, SEC, CFPB, and hundreds of state-level organs focused on regulating deceptive business practices.