> “We’re not interested in the millions of devices of everyday citizens,” he [Comey] said in New York at Fordham University’s International Conference on Cyber Security. “We’re interested in those devices that have been used to plan or execute terrorist or criminal activities.”
Oh so they only want to know about the bad people? That's a relief.
The stupidity of the statement is beyond question. "Give us access to all and trust us to leave the 'innocents' alone. Umm, see J. Edgar Hoover's history for the damage an unrestrained senior official can do behind the scenes."
I know you're trying to be snarky, but he's responding to a very real accusation from our community.
Every time this question comes up, half of us freak out and scream that the FBI is trying to grab all of our deepest darkest secrets.
I'm not inclined to trust them very far on this issue either, but I still think we should take it as a good sign that Wray is aware of our concerns and that he publicly acknowledges their validity.
>but he's responding to a very real accusation from our community.
No he isn't. His whole point is that the FBI can't know for sure which of us is a terrorist or "bad guy" unless they can sift through all of our data and all of our devices to find out. Given the history of the US government classifying every sort of activist, from quaker to environmentalist as "terrorists", his argument should be tremendously unpersuasive to everyone who thinks it through.
> we should take it as a good sign that Wray is aware of our concerns and that he publicly acknowledges their validity.
This statement is not acknowledging our concerns' validity, but brushing them aside with the tired old "nothing to hide" fallacy.
They are indeed interested in "the millions of devices of everyday citizens", because in their warped power-craving worldview, every one of those citizens could actually be a "sleeper threat" committing precrime. If they really are not interested, then why are they continuing to saber-rattle for criminalizing those millions' activities?
I experienced the exact same feelings as you. Until I started interviewing candidates in quantity, I had no clue how many candidates cannot complete FizzBuzz. The reported failure rates of this simple test are completely legitimate. In my own interviewing, it comes out at about 50/50. The 50% who do pass often make some significant conceptual mistake, for which I'm generally pretty forgiving since interviews can be a stressful experience. This question comes at the end of a hiring pipeline that does 2 phone screens before the on-site happens.
> Title's probably aren't going to be given without some other political reasoning. They have to be claimed. Same goes for "Director", "Head of", and "VP" titles. Titles are rarely assigned based on merit, so stop trying to earn them.
My god, that's a spot-on piece of wisdom if I've ever heard it. Some titles like Principal and Architect can be earned through hard work and exemplary performance. C-level titles and Director/VP almost never operate on merit.
Tax Loss Harvesting. This is the sole reason why Betterment(/Wealthfront) is superior to Vanguard. The benefits of this technique more than offset any fees they charge.
That's really debatable. After 10~15 years of investment in Betterment or Wealthfront, in all likelihood all of your investments will be in the black, and there will be no opportunities for loss harvesting. But you're still stuck paying the 25 basis points per year unless you sell (and thus incur the capital gains, anyways).
I've got a fair bit of money in Wealthfront and tax loss harvesting has directly saved me quite a bit of money over the last couple years. For instance, the beginning of last year was tumultuous and their tax loss harvesting let me realize around ~55k in losses. The market then shot back up and my investments were right back where they were barely a month later. Because I had a source of capital gains in 2016, I basically earned free money.
So even if my investments were in the black in the macro scale, with tax loss harvesting I can realize additional gains from the inevitable dips that happen on the more micro scale.
I'm really talking about what happens after you've been invested with them for over a decade. Wealthfront has not yet existed for 10 years, so I know you haven't had your money invested with them for that long. The fact that tax loss harvesting can be beneficial is not in question.
Once you tax loss harvest once, you lower your cost basis on the investment to less than you originally paid. You can only subsequently tax loss harvest on the same security to the extent that the value of the investment is lower than your new lower cost basis. This will become harder as time goes on and you have previously tax loss harvested many securities.
Their white papers all use a timeframe of 10 years to show that Wealthfront is cost effective. I'm pretty sure they don't want customers thinking through all the implications of longer investment time horizons.
Oh gotcha with the cost basis raising over time. I wonder what strategies you could use to mitigate that. Perhaps buying a similar asset, holding that instead of the other, wait for the original to go down, and then re-purchase. Seems fragile and risky of course...
> Perhaps buying a similar asset, holding that instead of the other, wait for the original to go down
If you're presupposing the assets are similar, this is unlikely to happen to any significant degree.
The standard way to increase your odds of being able to tax loss harvest is to own as many different uncorrelated securities as possible. You can take this to mean a fund per industry (as Betterment and Wealthfront do) or even to the extreme of only owning individual companies. That way, some are up and some are down, and you can TLH. The more slices you divide your portfolio up into, the longer you'll be able to do it. But I think realistically (especially factoring in inflation), this strategy will stop giving results before 15 years.
What about the effect of a (let's be honest, inevitable) market crash? You'd be able to realize quite a bit of loss as that is happening by selling assets. Then as the market recovers and assuming those assets are actually worth more than the crash-adjusted value, you would be able to harvest losses again on that asset.
I think you'll see that in the last 90 years, even the worst market crashes don't take the index down to a level lower than what it was 15 years prior. To put it another way, pick any time in the past 90 years, the S&P 500 is always higher 15 years later than that date and every day afterwards. Maybe slicing up your investments into finer-grained categories than the entire S&P 500 will help ... but I'm very skeptical that anyone can TLH for long periods successfully.
If you want to pay a perpetual 25 basis points per year for Wealthfront or Betterment, go ahead, but it seems unlikely to me you'll come out ahead of a simple index fund if you are investing long term.
I suppose there is no harm then in milking the tax loss harvesting for as long as it is profitable and then reevaluating performance in ten or fifteen years to see if it makes sense to switch to a lower cost provider like Vanguard.
Like I said though, I have seen very significant returns from my loss harvesting. Even without a yearly source of capital gains, it definitely does not hurt to collect the losses and use them later in life (for instance if you sell an investment property).
There is a harm. In 15 years, if you decide you don't like Wealthfront, in order to move, you will have to sell all your assets and incur the capital gains.
This is true any time you move brokerages, is it not? If, at some time in the future, you chose to move from Vanguard to Wealthfront to take advantage of tax loss harvesting, you'd pay capital gains tax as well.
> This is true any time you move brokerages, is it not?
No. If you own the assets directly, and they are traded on the exchange (like the ETFs WF/Betterment use) they can be transferred around without triggering a sale event. Target date funds and the like would probably have to be sold.
I have my tax advantage at VG and my taxable has been all over the place finally settling with CS for now.
Okay, you have me a little confused now :) I read my parent as saying that in order to move investments out of Wealthfront, you'll need to sell and pay capital gains. I read your comment saying this isn't necessarily the case. There seems to be some disagreement here. What am I misunderstanding? The ins and outs of investments and tax ramifications can sometimes seem very opaque to me, so I appreciate any education on this front.
I stand corrected. I thought they had their own mutual funds that they charge an expense ratio on, but I took a closer look at their site and it looks like they put you in third-party mutual funds from e.g. Vanguard and iShares. Since this is the case, you can just do a transfer-in-kind to another brokerage if you want to leave, and this is not a taxable event. (Sorry for my mistake!)
Looking further, they don't support outgoing ACATS (what most brokerages do), but do support DTC which I'm not at all familiar with[1]. So hopefully you could do Betterment until the TLH stopped being worthwhile and do a direct security transfer to another brokerage.
Although Betterment offers fractional shares, which is confusing, not sure if they're actually ETNs representing fractional ownership of ETFs. I don't know how that works legally.
Which is why I said own the funds 'directly'. I'm not sure if WF/Betterment pool your money and then carve up % of funds or if you end up the actual owner. They may force you to liquidate to leave, which IMO is another strike against using them.
With regular brokerages you can move stocks/funds around with a transfer.
I think it's telling that in their promotional materials designed to show their merits, Betterment shows a maximum time horizon of 10 years. I think they know that their strategy is much weaker on longer time horizons, yet the fees remain constant. 10 years may seem like a very long time to some people, but when I invest I'm thinking about time-frames of 30 to 60 years. Meanwhile you can tax loss harvest yourself with a little education.
Couldn't they employ tax gain harvesting for users that are interested in the short/long term capital gains differential in TLH? They don't do this, but I'm curious.
i.e. cycle long term gains after one year of ownership so that they are more likely to produce harvestable losses in the next year. Obviously this prevents the basis gains of TLH, but wouldn't it be dwarfed for users whose long-term capital gains tax rate is much lower than their short-term capital gains rate?
Yea, tax gain harvesting is definitely something you can do. Though it's harder than tax loss harvesting. You have to take into account the entirety of a person's tax situation to do it, as opposed to tax loss harvesting, which only require knowledge of the account transaction history, which Betterment and Wealthfront of course have. To do tax gain harvesting you have to wait until late December when you have most of the information, and you essentially have to complete an entire tax return.
Yes, but this only works for those who are exploiting a difference between their marginal tax rate and the LTCG rate. That is, those in the 15% marginal bracket whose LTCG rate is 0%. For other investors it is preferable to pay no taxes (continue to hold the security long-term even after it qualifies for long-term tax treatment)
No, you are not understanding how it works. Your portfolio can be in the black every single year, but you can still use TLH to improve your returns every single year by harvesting losses in individual securities.
TLH only comes into play with taxable accounts. I would bet a lot of VGs AUM is from tax advantaged accounts.
Even in taxable accounts TLH is really oversold. It's another way to shift taxes around, which can be good, but the obvious methods of maxing out tax advantaged accounts should be done first.
I'm dismayed to see most of the advice given to you by HN is bad. I am in a very similar situation, and it has been ongoing for years. I have also been bullied for some substantial parts of my life, so I understand the power dynamic very well.
In my recent experience, there is a playbook that you should use. This playbook is designed to be used in a one-on-one setting, between the bully and the person defending herself. I consider it fairly literal; you should memorize this sequence, rehearse it, and play it out as close as possible to how you rehearse. It is also intended to be used without any emotion; the goal is to be as matter-of-fact as humanly possible. It goes like this:
1. Point out a very specific problem behavior (screaming at you, some other event). Be as specific as possible, and use times/dates if you know them. There should be zero ambiguity about this, and the bully should never have leeway to disclaim the event.
2. Explain how it made you feel (angry, demotivated, alienated, etc.)
3. Say "when you did #1, the message I received was (.....) Was that the intended message?". A common example from my own experience is "I feel like I'm perceived as incompetent, and not any value to the team."
4. Regardless of the answer to #3, specifically say the words "In the future, don't do that again." Don't use the words "request" or "would like" in this response.
5. Explain the consequences of breaking directive #4. Something like "If this happens again, I will report the incident to HR (or your manager)."
This recipe has corrected nearly every incident of harassment and bullying I have encountered (well, at least as an adult). It won't fix the underlying issues; someone might still hate your guts, be jealous of you, or use you as a scapegoat. Those are deeper issues that this kind of recipe can't address. Nonetheless, this script directly addresses the problematic behavior, and it opens the door to confronting some deeper problems once the bully realizes that their bullying is visible and unaccepted. Strange as it sounds, most bullies think that their behavior is invisible to all but the victim. Exposing the bully to others can shift the power balance substantially.
The other thing I recommend is to keep a work diary. You don't need to write in it every day (although, in a problem workplace, you may end up with >1 entries a day). In this diary, I encourage you to record events that took place, how you feel about them, and any technical consequences of that event. I have noticed that bullying tends to produce technical changes in team function which hurts the product and hurts the operational efficiency of the group. If these kinds of disputes ever escalate to HR, which sounds very likely in your case, you will need this diary to establish a pattern of behavior and demand resolution. It will become your most valuable tool to improve your situation. It also serves as a somewhat impartial record of what happened. You may decide that, after reviewing X months of work diary, these issues are not that serious, and your emotional reaction is dominating how you feel. In my own case, I expected this to be true (I didn't trust myself enough), but it became obvious after a 1.5-year diary review that the problem wasn't me. :)
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Clause #2 would require the inclusion of the BSD license with any release of compiled code. This is a very serious issue with the library. Any additional licensing terms which must be propagated to the compiled software is bad juju.
What are you talking about? Every open source license I can think of requires you to distribute the license with your binary: GPL, LGPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, etc.
The vast majority of compiler runtime libraries have explicit exceptions to licenses to avoid this, to avoid creating copyright infringers out of everyone.
So? You just don't use Cilk if you don't want to include the license, just like a normal library. It is a language extension, not something that magically infects your regular C or Fortran code...
The MIT license says "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." I would think that a binary distribution would count as a "copy or substantial portion of the Software", but I'm not a lawyer.
Full text:
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
I agree in principle that Jeremy does not deserve any proceeds of the sale, because he did not contribute to any of the valuable IP that GM wants to acquire.
But there is one serious issue here I don't understand (devil's advocate mode) ....
If Kyle and Jeremy actually founded a Delaware C-corp in Sept 2013 (claim #11), then both their names would be on the officer's list. If that charter specifies a 50/50 split of corporate control, then legally Kyle has no ability to simply tell Jeremey that he's "fired" (claim #14). In fact, I don't think it's legal to fire a significant shareholder outright, unless you have an official company meeting and hold a vote. In this case, it's just 2 guys, so theoretically some impromptu meetup counts as a shareholder meeting. Also note here that the courts don't like having shareholder meetings without records, and in such cases leads the courts to treat such activities as non-corporate events (aka unofficial). In any case, it boils down to what ownership was declared when the C-corp was incorporated.
If someone controls the majority voting rights (or a collection of voters), then they can vote to remove someone from the shareholder's group. However, as far as I know you cannot simply seize ownership from the person you remove from the shareholder's group. The company must then be valued, and the person being ousted must be compensated for the value of his share. Furthermore, you can't simply revise arbitrarily future ownership. Jeremy's holdings would be appropriately diluted whenever fundraising events occur. Weirdly, Jeremy expected to receive his "50%", which as any person should know would have been diluted by investment rounds. Major investors are always involved during these events, and everyone knows exactly what they are getting. The fact that he thought at the end he would "get his 50%" leads me to believe he never cared about asserting ownership until the final big payday arrived.
I think Cruise as a company has a serious problem. If the documentation exists to prove this 50/50 ownership in Sept 2013, there is no way this lawsuit will be smooth sailing.
Exactly. If the 50/50 split is on paper, and signed by both parties, then Kyle is basically fucked. It literally doesn't matter of Jeremy "wrote any code" or whatever during his short time working with Kyle.
This was supposedly in place before the vesting schedule. Vesting is designed to limit, not give, shares to owners. So if he never signed anything and was part of the company when it formed and it was agreed that it was a 50/50 split I don't believe that vesting would matter for his position at all.
Or maybe there can be multiple things which have names with the same initialisms, and we don't need to humblebrag about ones that aren't relevant to the thread at hand?
Or, we all stop assuming that people are here to "humblebrag", and contribute different points of view. In addition, maybe we all use terminology that is widely understood by others, since the purpose of HN is technical communication.
If we're going to drop assumptions, then let's remember that context matters and not everyone on HN is a computer scientist or familiar with communicating sequential processes.
If the context is not "computer science" but instead "web technologies" or "computer security," then CSP most certainly stands for "Content Security Policy." It's perfectly possible to know one meaning but not the other; as someone with a CS degree working in internet security, I'd heard of communicating sequential processes once or twice before, but they were at the back of my mind in comparison to content security policies.
But of course, since not everyone on HN works in security or on web technologies, it would've been more "widely understood by others" if the title expanded to say "Content Security Policy" instead.
It really does explain a lot though. This is why, when down the road Facebook needs to make revenue or suffer the wrath of investors, your personal life will become their cash machine. This is already true; just wait, it can get much worse than it is now.
Not only that, but the Skype UI is totally different on every platform. I run the Windows client at home, the Linux client at work, and my boss runs the iOS client for team meetings. Each one of them has a very different look and feel, and even different context menu options. Such bizarre inconsistencies. There are too many to list them all here, but it's the most chaotic mishmash of user controls I've ever seen on a desktop app.
Oh so they only want to know about the bad people? That's a relief.