Author here.
Sad to hear that you perceive the docs and comments here as LLM generated.
I'm genuinely curious what in particular gives you that impression.
I'm sorry, this comment [0] was clearly written (or rewritten) by an LLM. Sections are titled, constant m dash usages, and "Thanks again for the thoughtful look! We can zoom into any other area of your choice."
I feel like I'm on another planet here. Basically every new piece of software in my space (DB/query engines/streaming engines) is being written in Rust these days. There are like three production projects, total, written in Zig.
Same! I feel like I'm on crazy pills. Multiple folks in this thread are saying stuff like, "yeah, Rust, cool, but it has zero use". How are Linux, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, Firefox, Python's `cryptography`, etc., not real use?
Rust is targeted at strategically important systems (proxies, databases, OSs, VMs, hypervisors, high-throughput servers, cryptography, browsers) and by any measure is making significant inroads into those kinds of systems in real industrial applications, and I'm to believe that Rust adoption is languishing? Am I going insane?
Fair point re: Zig vs Rust, but my larger point was about exceptions by any other name, in the linked article:
"Instead, when returning an error, rather than jumping to the return address, we look it up in the side table to find a corresponding error recovery address, and jump to that. Stack unwinding!
The bold claim is that unwinding is the optimal thing to do! .."
If by "exceptions" you're talking about stack unwinding (as opposed to the language-level control flow constructs like throw/catch) then Rust has always had that with panics and panic=unwind.
It was the same for me growing up in the shadow of Silicon Valley in the early aughts, post dot com crash. Even when I went to college in 2008 the conventional wisdom was that there weren’t going to be any jobs in software, it was all being outsourced. I studied CS anyways, because I loved it. It was still very hard to get my first job out of college in 2012.
But then from like 2015-2022 things got crazy. Anyone with a CS degree, or even a boot camp certificate, could immediately get a 200k/year job with little effort. And people started to think this was normal, would last forever. But in fact this was a crazy situation, it absolutely could not last.
I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
> I feel for the young people who thought (or were told) that CS degrees were an automatic ticket into the upper middle class. But in reality, there’s no such thing.
It's not just about money. Besides, the gold rush that you describe was only this big in the US, for a certain subset of workers, and only during a limited time (I feel like splitting up the 2015-2022 period into pre- and post-pandemic is more than warranted on its own). I went into CS not with an expectation of endless riches, but because I really like computers. My goal isn't $200k/year, it's employment. I would more than gladly take a lower-end job doing digital pencil-pushing, or IT, or tech support, or really anything that lists a CS degree as an acceptable education for the job. But it's not just that the money had dried up - the jobs aren't lower-paid, they're not less attractive, they just don't exist anymore. I can't imagine what the job search was like for you in 2012, but whatever financial pessimism might've existed at that time seems like a wholly different beast to what we have today.
2012 was also on the tail end of the Great Recession. I actually somewhat reluctantly hung on where I was for an extra year or two because I didn’t want to play my connections cards in a tough market. As it turned out it basically took one email but I didn’t know that would be the case.
Hey HN, I'm hiring engineers for the new Cloudflare Data Platform (https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-data-platform). We do streaming ingest and processing, managed Iceberg catalogs, and a distributed query engine—all built on R2 and the Cloudflare Edge. We're making it ridiculously easy for Cloudflare customers to build data lakes.
I'm looking for Rust engineers with experience or interest in databases, stream processing engines, and query engines. You'll get to work on incredibly cool tech on a huge scale.
Note: we are hiring for hybrid in one of our engineering hubs (SF/AUS/SEA/NYC/LON/LIS).
If you're interested, shoot me an email (in profile) with subject HN and a brief description of your background.
Rust still supports Intel Macs just fine. The x86_64-apple-darwin target was recently downgraded to tier 2, which just means that some automated tests will no longer run as part of the standard dev cycle.
AsOf join in those systems solves a rather narrow problem of performance and SQL expressiveness for data with overlapping user-defined timestamps. The bitemporal model solves much broader issues of versioning and consistent reporting whilst also reducing the need for many user-defined timestamp columns.
In a bitemporal database, every regular looking join over the current state of the world is secretly an AsOf join (across two dimensions of time), without constantly having to think about it when writing queries or extending the schema.
And, fundamentally it can't be opensource. Bot detection (like anti-fraud more generally) is an adversarial game that relies on hidden techniques. Open-sourcing it means you lose that advantage and make life much easier for anyone trying to get around it.
The schemes large players use to increase the cost of e.g. creating new accounts on their services do in fact rely on obscurity. They target developer cost, not compute cost.
You're computing hash in order to block automated web requests. The hash isn't the point --- the hash cost is the part of this system that isn't going to work long term.
I think there's probably a platform for it that you can open source --- the virtual machine, or the core of the virtual machine or something, but yeah, you're right, this is something Anubis will have to contend with long term; the effective solutions for this all benefit from obscurity.
Buybacks are just a more tax-efficient way to issue dividends to shareholders (dividend issuance is a taxable event and at short-term rates, buybacks raise the stock price and those gains aren't taxable until you sell, at which point it may be long-term cap gains).
It's reasonable to be upset about the fact that this is arguably a tax dodge! But all of the other criticism of buybacks apply equally to dividends which no one seems to get upset about. Fundamentally this is the corporation saying it doesn't have a market-beating way to reinvest this capital, and it's giving the money back to its owners to more productively invest.
But the buyback involves buying from sellers. Why don't the sellers of the shares owe tax? Don't see how that's a tax-dodge.
The fundamental purpose of a buyback is not to raise the stock price. The purpose of a buyback is to reduce the amount of outstanding shares, which makes every existing owner own an increased percentage. If a company buys back 10% of its stock, each long term shareholder now owns 10% more of the company. Over the long term, steady buybacks increase shareholder value this way, but the purpose of it isn't to slam the order book and juice the price. That's counterproductive, because you'll buy fewer shares at higher prices, and within a trading day, the market will push the price back to normal anyway.
They do, but it is only paid by the people who took the money (instead of being forced to do so), and, more importantly, only on the difference from what they paid.
If you pay out $1mln of dividends, then everyone collectively owes (let's say at a qualified rate of 20%) a total of $200k. If you buy 20,000 shares from one guy at $50/share, you returned the same $1mln of cash to shareholders, but if he bought last year for $45, he only owes (let's say at a long-term capital gains rate of 20%) a total of $20k in taxes.
Unless you're day trading, dividends are generally taxed at capital gains rates for most publicly traded companies in America (REITs and K-1 partnerships get worse tax treatment at the point of distribution). You don't even need to hold it for a year. Could be different in other nations.
You're comparing apples to oranges. At least in the US, both capital gains an dividends have lower tax rate carve outs if you own the stock for > 1 year.
They reduce sharecount. Not all buybacks increase share price. I can give you a thousand examples of massive buybacks that happened before the stock dropped considerably. But all reduce sharecount.
Searching on the subject of "buybacks where share price decresed", Google returns Merck as an example (reffing Harvard Business Review), which actually works quite well to illustrate. The HBR article even notes the main strategy "historically, companies that bought back their own shares have posted immediate returns between two and 12 percentage points above the market average"
"Merck's stock price dropped after a major buyback announcement when investors focused on expiring patents and a drying drug pipeline"
Except: Feb. 23, 2000, NYT, "Merck & Company, the No. 1 United States drugmaker, will buy back as much as $10 billion of its shares, which have fallen 18 percent this month." (Closest share price I can grab is 2/25/2000 at $57.39)
Share price then climbs steadily (tiny drop in July) up to a max at 12/29/2000 of $89.27 before finally crashing.
The first example Google returns is full of info on the stock behavior that makes it look like the stock buyback did not initially jack the price. Owners had 10 months to pull in a 55% share price increase before it crashed. And they floated through the 2000 March 10 bubble popping until the stock market really started deflating in 2001.
Until the mid-80s they were illegal except in a handful of unique cases. This is not just about div vs buyback taxes. Though there is no immediate mathematical economical benefit to the shareholders who remain, the markets have proven that the stock price will rise (and likely executive compensation) as a result of reduced sharecount vs the same demand (though possibly more demand as other companies engage in the same behavior).
Much of the gains in the stock market the past decade or so are simply the result of a greatly reduced number of shares available to purchase - as a result of buybacks, takeovers and going private (there are roughly 1/2 the number of listed companies today as in the 1990s).
Fundamentally this is the corporation saying it doesn't have a market-beating way to reinvest this capital
Isn’t that the crux of it, though? Running a company into the ground by not investing in growth or R&D? We give tax credits to corporations to incentivize R&D spending
There aren't always infinity positive return ideas to invest in. Sometimes there really aren't any. Garrett Motion is a company that manufactures turbochargers and sells them to the big three automakers. It's a decently steady and profitable business but it's slowly on the way out. EVs don't need turbochargers. They have a small R&D division looking into EV inverters, and they'll continue to make turbochargers for non-auto applications, but for the most point, they are a melting ice cube and their CEO tells you this in plain terms on earnings calls.
But their stock is priced like it too, so they are plowing most of their free cash flow into buying back shares, and it more than offsets the melt. The result? Their shares are steady and up about 95% over the past 5 years despite overall revenue decline across this period.
Sure, you could have this sleepy turbocharger factory start investing in real estate, or get into uranium mining, or begin trying to write and sell cloud computing software. But their strategy is to keep making a good product and regularly eat up stock to overcome declining earnings per share, and it's working rather nicely.
That was considered a tax loophole by the last administration so the R&D exception was allowed to expire in 2022 and only recently restored by the new admin.
R&D tax credits did not “expire". Immediate expensing expired in 2022, requiring companies to split credits across multiple years. Multiple attempts since then have tried to restore expensing (often in bipartisan tax packages), but Congress hasn’t passed a permanent fix.
> Fundamentally this is the corporation saying it doesn't have a market-beating way to reinvest this capital, and it's giving the money back to its owners to more productively invest.
Before tech companies demonstrated the principle of infinite growth, the purpose of a company was to generate revenue (paid as dividends) for its shareholders.
So much growth hasn't really been possible before.
If a company can keep growing and investing infinitely, one might argue that it's time for the DOJ / FTC to step in and stop them from eating the entire business sector. That's the sign of a monopoly pushing into every market like an invasive species and making the existing businesses in those markets go extinct. Kind of like how tech companies are now movie companies, music companies, game companies, pharmaceuticals, grocery stores...
> buybacks raise the stock price and those gains aren't taxable until you sell
They temporarily raise the stock price for the people who are the counterparties to the stock purchase, but isn't that also creating a taxable event for them?
Once the buyback is done, what's keeping that share price from sliding right back down to earth? The shareholders who support the company and hold watch a group who bet against the company by selling shares reap a profit, in a tax advantaged way, while their own dividends are effectively stolen. The buybacks are actually a crap deal for anyone who is a responsible buy and hold investor.
The dividends aren't stolen. A company with 1m shares outstanding buys back 100k of them. Now there are 900k shares outstanding. All long term shareholders who support the company own an extra 10% of the firm with nothing out of pocket. Imagine steady buybacks at reasonable prices over a long period of time... this has an incredible effect.
Warren Buffett bought a couple percent of American Express, and now owns 22% of the company despite not buying a share in decades. It really becomes apparent over time. American Express just carefully repurchased shares over the years and Buffett's stake became greater and greater.
I’m not sure if this is basically the same or just related to the first item, but I’m also going to make them also fix the bug where taking away 1/4 then adding 1/3 returns you to the same amount.
Dividends create a taxable event for everyone that owns the stock.
Buybacks only create a taxable event for the shareholders that wish to sell.
And the share price doesn't slide down because there are now less shares on the open market. Theoretically the market capitalization decreases by the amount of money spent on the buyback.
Also, if you issue a dividend the market expects that dividend to be ongoing, hell or high water. Share buybacks do not have that social expectation, so the "temporary" nature of them is an asset for companies that don't want to go from a growth stock to an income stock.
> Once the buyback is done, what's keeping that share price from sliding right back down to earth?
The plan really seems for the buyback never to be done. Or only in case of economy-wide disruption when there is something to blame— a kind of reverse-Buffet.
In fact , adding more punch to the bowl is a key advantage over the legacy tender offer process— tenders directly compete for shares for just a little while. Buybacks, while they have limits, are much more persistent and flexible.
Perhaps it was some historical accident that when the SEC made reacquiring shares easier, everyone started doing more of it … but at some point the explanations of efficient capital allocation just become too much.
The commit history is legitimately insane though: https://github.com/linked-db/linked-ql/commits/master/
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