If you want really want dividends instead of a buyback, just sell your shares in proportion to the percent of the company bought back.

It's logically the same thing. In both cases you have the same amount of cash and the same ownership of the company (although, you do have to pay a transaction fee to sell shares).

The two things seem the same but are different (as far as taxes are concerned)

Not since dividends are treated the same as long term capital gains. Unless you've been holding your shares less than a year, you're fine.

Tendering shares for which you have a capital loss triggers a capital loss event, and the amount that you can take a tax loss is limited by other factors (whereas you have to pay full penalty for gains, for losses there is a limit at the individual level). It's not symmetric

They don't "seem the same", they are exactly the same thing. From the shareholder point of view, they are completely equivalent. The only thing that changes is that if you are completely passive about your holdings, buybacks reward you with a larger stake of the company, while dividends reward you with straight up cash. Either way, you can trade one for the other at market price.

If you think there is something wrong with stock buybacks that is not also wrong about dividends, you are simply confused.

When you tender, you trigger a taxable event. If you are sitting on a position with a capital loss, to participate in the buyback you have to take a loss.

With a dividend, while you take a tax hit for the dividend, your cost basis is adjusted accordingly (so you don't take a capital gains event) which is important if you have a losing position (you are only allowed to take a certain amount of loss in your tax return under certain circumstances, making the buyback unpalatable in the context of a larger return with other sources of capital loss)

Try to do your own taxes this year. It's a learning experience.

Does anyone know what a $8M Seed means?

Does that mean it was raised in such a way that no investor has a board seat?

define "we"

Humanity, and everything that follows from it.

Once we are a "swarm" we will no long be human. I think that is a nightmare vision you have put for there.

Humanity is already a swarm. A swarm consists of individual animals that more or less coordinate to go in a certain direction (so this is different from a hive mind).

Also, it is 1000ths (or even millions) of years in the future I was talking about. Why would our current moral standards still hold?

If physical function is what makes us human, Stephen Hawking isn't much more human than a mind in a robot.

"In effect, a job doing research in Computer Science is more prestigious than an industry job building real system"

That's actually no longer true. Hence why a Prof leaves to take a job at Google

It is still true. Google is an exception, it's certainly not the rule.

And I think it's partly because they do do a lot of research, so they get some of the research prestige. With the number of full-time researchers and publication output they have, the research side of Google would rank as one of the larger institutes if it were standalone. See e.g.: http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

I think the same is true prestige-wise of other research-heavy companies. Bell Labs was prestigious; being at Microsoft Research is prestigious; etc.

I don't see why doing privately funded research would be any less prestigious. Microsoft Research is arguably the most important operating system research group in existence, like Bell Labs before them. Honestly I would expect these kinds of misconceptions from the general public, but do most people in our field not understand the state of computer science research today?

I respectfully disagree. A start-up is hard. If you're doing anything other than putting maximal effort into your current endeavor odds of success go down.

I think you can certainly be successful in that mode. I was--working in almost complete isolation, and afterwards I still wasn't really a part of the startup community (since I didn't really know many people in it).

What I missed though and what I've realized since is that if you actively engage in that community you end up meeting people that end up helping you that you would otherwise never meet because you can't justify meeting them with your head down all the time.

So it ends up being sort of non-intuitive, and hence the post. I think if you do relax that mode a bit your chances actually go up. Of course there needs to be a balance though.

I'm three years into an ambitious and promising startup now, and feel the same way. I gotta get out and get in touch more with the community.

This is absolutely not true. The wikipedia page for the max flow problem lists several (slower) poly-time algorithms for solving exact max flow. Most theory-101 classes cover at least Ford-Fulkerson.

I don't think that's true. See, for example, Finding Maximum Flows in Undirected Graphs Seems Easier than Bipartite Matching (Karger-Levine, 1997): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.52.3...