Because a salary is about doing the task you are employed to do, it's not about filling up every available moment or that you are slacking if you have free time one week. If an employee is able to find a quicker way to do the tasks they need to do that week than the norm, good for them as long as it means the work is done to the same standard and on time.

I don’t buy it. This assumes the tasks to be done are fixed, pre-determined, binary pass/fail kinds of things. Many (most? all?) salaried jobs aren’t like that: you can spend more time and do more, or so it more thoughtfully, insightfully, carefully, etc.

I would agree many aren't like that, but you can set your own deadlines and tasks and break down a big project into smaller goals. One day's difference in a big research project or when developing a piece of software is not going to change the cost or lose significant value in society or to the business. So why would that be attributed as loss in these calculations?

You still have certain work that has to be delivered by certain deadlines.

>Today, Verisign is the single most profitable company in the stock market, a great example of an economic termite

This is just blatantly false. VeriSign is in fact the 1215th most profitable company in the stock market [1]. By operating margin, it's 155th [2]. I find it hard to give an article much credit when I can't even get past the introduction without having to comb through citationless false/misleading statements.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/most-profitable-companies/pag...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/top-companies-by-operating-ma...

Verisign has a profit of around $1B with around 1k employees.

Ingersoll Rand has around 18k employees. SBI holdings has around 19k. Beiersdorf has around 21k.

I don't know what the author was thinking or why it was phrased that way, but Verisign seems vastly more profitable per employee than others on the list. Also, I have no idea why they even need ~1k employees.

Tbf, this is page 13 of the list. If you go to the first page, Saudi Aramco made $230B with 73k employees according to their website. This is still ~3x as much profits/employee as VeriSign. FAANGs are pretty comparable as well. It's definitely a very profitable company _per employee_, but I fail to find a metric where Verisign can be described as the most profitable public company

This is a terribly misinformed take. If you throw enough resources at Python then sure, you can probably get adequate throughput. The problem is that in finance a lot of problems require you to think about latency, which is a total non-starter for Python

If it were a total non starter than why would their entire company be using it?

It's not clear which company you're referring to, but

- Instagram was at one point a startup. It's common for startups to write in a scripting language to optimize for speed of adding features. Then if you grow or get acquired, the scripting language often eventually gets replaced by a language more optimized for maintenance cost, safety, and/or speed.

- Data scientists often only really know scripting languages, and at any rate scripting languages are useful for prototyping algorithms that need to change daily. Hence a lot of hedge funds use Python. For code that is stable and really matters for performance purposes, it's common for funds to use C/C++ or even FPGAs.

I have no doubts that we are able to handle our requirements with python, but if there's a better way, does it not make sense to investigate?

A skilled carpenter can undoubtedly use a hammer instead of a screwdriver. This doesn't mean that I should insist they use a hammer when a screwdriver would do a better job.

Sounds like they're already using Rust where performance matters and are looking to switch

Instagram has much lower latency requirements…

I believe they’re referring to the hedge fund. Lower latency requirement is a confusing way of phrasing it as lower latency is a higher bar. But generally most hedge funds do not need to operate at the speed Instagram does.

Well they only publish trades ~30 days later. There's no real chance of front-running a politician and for all you know they could've closed their position before the 30 day period ended. Plus, if people follow them into the trade (i.e. people buy because Pelosi bought) that only moves the price in the politician's favor. It's not like politicians are running crazy strategies that you can figure out from their trades, so I can't really imagine it creating any incentive to hide trades

I find the explanation for the sequencing rule rather unsatisfying. Why shouldn't the following be true?

         b : lb      d : ld
   -------------------------------
    a := b :>> c := d : max lb ld

Otherwise, it seems like you could leak info by just assigning two variables, where one is always public. E.g.

    x = user.firstName;
    y = random()

would be "safe."

(It's very likely that I'm missing something here)

Let's say we have `a, b, d : 0` and `c : 999`. Then `a := b :>> c := d` according to your rule is well-typed and has a security level `999`.

Now let's say I have a conditional expression `private : 999`.

The following program typechecks according to the rest of the restrictions. In particular, `999` from `private` is less than or equal to the `999` from the sequenced command.

  ITE private $
    a := b :>>
    c := d

But we just leaked data because if the value of `a` (which we can observe) is not `b`, then we know that `private` was 0 (aka. false). This should never happen because `a` is public and `private` is private.

The intuition here is that the lower the security level a command has the more public the conditional has to be. Otherwise, private data would *influence* public data which we can then observe to deduce something about the private data.

> it seems like you could leak info by just assigning two variables, where one is always public.

I didn't quite follow this bit. But if you elaborate, I'm happy to discuss.

I think maybe the key idea I was missing here is that the type of a variable is not always the same as the type of the scope it was defined in? If I'm understanding correctly, there's an implicit rule that's missing:

    a : la   b : lb   a := b
   --------------------------
             a : lb

So for example if `b : lb`:

   a := b :>>
   doSomething()

need not have a type `>= lb`.

Does that sound vaguely correct?

Btw thanks for clarifying

I've interviewed with a reputable company (mentioned on HN frequently) that performs background checks before interviewing you on-site

The only way I can see that being possible is if you got a stock option and survived long enough for it to vest.

But that's extremely high risk to take a 30-50k pay cut and move from highly affordable Michigan to Cali. All to bet it on stocks.

Source- 2017 recruiter was offering 80k, I was making 120k(40hr/week). Bonus points for the recruiter harassing me multiple times about "not changing the world" until I finally told him that I need to hang up.

I think you may be comparing salary to total comp here, though I'll admit I haven't looked for the source for your $105k figure.

As an American o had the exact opposite impression -- every European company I've applied to has requested one. Interesting to see that it was just an outlier experience (and I suspect your experience was the same)

I suspect that removing that functionality would take more work than can be accomplished in 1 day, which is why they temporarily suspended it and why they're adding "limited buys" tomorrow