skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree 100% with this. Employees should be suspicious that they have access to an investment nobody else does - invest now!

I've seen countless friends get burned in various ways believing they would be getting rich soon from their options and then fizzle. Either through the company just never having a liquidity event or being sold for less than previous valuation rounds.

The worst is I've seen people reject job offers that were far superior in cash compensation because they had a recent big option grant. A friend of mine stayed on at a place even though he didn't get a cash raise but instead was given some options that vested over a few years in addition to the options he already had, some of which were vested. Did it not ring a bell that a company that can't give him cash but can instead offer compensation out of thin air in the form of options is in trouble?

And then there are the golden handcuffs were an employee is scared to leave because their options have too high a fair market value and their tax costs would be considerable. Further limiting their career growth.

I've seen the other side too where friends have taken home a really nice pay day after liquidity - but it is the exception and not the rule.

I recommend joining young companies that are willing to pay you a lot of cash for your exceptional ability and experience (execution is critical at this stage across the entire company from engineering to sales) and maybe take it easy on the option grants. Some stock is fun but don't count on getting rich on it.
If you are already pretty proficient in coding, I would take a break from it and instead learn something different.

- Sport (Snowboarding/Skiing/Swimming, Climbing etc lessons)

- Reading books (History, Biographies, etc)

- Visit a new town (doesn't have to be too far) and hangout with complete strangers and learn their stories.

Or purely on the STEM side you could refresh yourself on probability, statistics, linear algebra and get a deeper grasp on machine learning/data science.
It seems plausible that the implied causality is backwards - perhaps it's not that people don't mind the parens because they use LISP, but rather that people use LISP because they don't mind the parens. Personally, I don't think I ever did mind them, but I'd be really surprised if that's not at least a moderately important filter on the set of people who become lispers.
If decent pilots make unavoidable mistakes, then they will make unavoidable mistakes when its regulated too?
Build or Buy? Anatomy of an Acquisition
Prior to the deal, on the secondary market, while all of their managers were telling them that the shares would only massively increase in value.
What makes a container object domain-specific?
If I just have to pass data through the application, the anonymity may be appropriate.
> I would also maintain that the 100km altitude flight is important - it's the internationally recognised boundary of space - and that the 'first' that Blue Shepherd claimed was valid, since the SpaceX Grasshopper did not cross the 100km Karman line.

Having a flight control mechanism that function outside the atmosphere is valuable/important. Landing a rocket without relying on atmosphere is valuable/important. Gluing those two things together is much less so - like being the first person to climb Everest and swim across the Channel.

Honestly the F9 landing isn't much of a "first" - landing a rocket vertically has been done, and landing the main engines of an orbital launch vehicle so that they can be reused has also been done. What makes it exciting is a) the technical difficulty b) the potential for making things there's actual commercial demand for (satellite launches) much cheaper - and in both those regards Blue Origin's landing isn't comparable.

I suspect the main region for the popularity is that SpaceX has done a lot of community engagement, webcasts and all the rest of it, while Blue Origin has done everything in secret. But I'm fine with that - if it encourages companies to be more open then that's all for the good.
http://www.javatuples.org/
if you live in the bay area and have a normal nuclear family, you need equity if you hope to pay for a house, college, etc.

Then holy hell am I glad I don't live in the Bay area. Because, as the article demonstrates, there is zero guarantee that the equity you have will be worth anything. That you'd depend on such a thing to pay your mortgage and send your kids to college? Madness.
Reminds me of how nobody was punished for the complete lack of security that allowed Private Manning to copy files off classified systems (open access to a CD burner). Defense contractors face heavy fines for such breaches and have their systems properly locked down but the military itself just does what it pleases and looks the other way when dumb decisions bite them.
Mp3 artifacts?
This is so funny, but I actually just finished that book 2 days ago. Along with about 10 other books over the past few months about antisocial personality disorders and Autism, Asbergers, Females with Asbergers. My way of grieving through it was to read and learn everything I could about myself and my ex.

Thank you!

I'm also reading/have finished reading in the past few months:
The Empathy Trap
Safe People
Without A Conscience
Trauma and Memory
Women Who Love Psychopaths
Social Engineering
Whos Pulling your strings
In Sheeps Clothing

From your recommendation which is the first one I heard of, I found these highly reviewed books on Amazon in the recommended section after you search that book.
What sort of application might be good to build for learning ML?
http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/ is also a decent introduction about neural network.
Doesn't cover recurrent neural network though.
Definitely agree on this. I jumped straight into trying react, react-router and the fb version of flux at first but ended up jumbling all the concepts together.

You can get so, so far with just react alone it's ridiculous
If you really believe in the company and it's a rocket ship (some rockets explode mid-flight or stall though!) then I'd recommend buying some shares early on to hedge for the reason you state. But I probably would't early exercise 4 years of options on your first day at the company.
It's not like you sign a contract that says you must remain here for 20 years. Read the Wealthfront article linked in a sibling comment.
The real question is, when do you "buy in" to a valuation.

Things are only worth what someone else will pay. So if you don't have evidence that there is a buyer eagerly wanting to pay $5/share for the options you are getting for $4/share, don't assume they are worth anything.

Because of dilution math, it's very rare for employees of all but unicorn startups to cash in at anything close to the expected value of the shares. That means that your 50K shares awarded after a $5M series A (on a big pre money valuation) are not going to be worth much if the company sells for $10M the following year.

Founders should set up a chart that tracks the various possible outcomes and lets employees understand what their options will be worth in those scenarios and see what the founder would get in those scenarios. This would allow additional shares to be given to valued employees if the company turns out to be a beautiful white horse but not quite a unicorn.

The thing to be aware of is when the founder has the option of cashing out for $10M and the employees effectively getting nothing. If this happens the investors will have essentially lost interest and will potentially get their investment back but will not mention the deal to anyone again. This is a sort of perverse incentive because the founder will be inclined to deceive employees into thinking a big exit is on the way, while simultaneously negotiating a low millions acquisition and high salary at the acquiring company.

In that scenario, the founder should have to renegotiate so that the most valuable employees get at least 10% of the founder's payout, but employees rarely have (or use) that much leverage with the founder.
Paragon NTFS v14.0.543 Mac OS X
The joke was something about risks clouding Volkswagen's view. It's probably fair use but he's not really reporting on anything, just making some dumb commentary with little to no journalistic weight.
Why Isn't Flow Based Programming More Popular?
It's a decent list but not enough. The real trick is being general purpose enough to handle low-level up to programming in the large while being comprehensible and easy for compiler to work with. In my field, highly-assured INFOSEC, you also want correctness and traceability for security purposes.

I wrote an essay on a layered, bottom-up approach to constructing such a language here if anyone is interested:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...

I'm also interested in feedback on my approach. It tries to solve probably a dozen problems at once with some basic principles and three, compatible languages.
I'm not as pessimistic as most here, but start-up employee really is the worst of all worlds.

1. Reports vary but the general consensus seems to be lower pay than a Fortune 500 or similar for more demanding hours.

2. If you're offered equity it's an insulting fractional percentage (how can you be offered 0.1% and not let the profanities fly?), and will need to use actual money to exercise the options.

3. There are tons of stories of completely incompetent and/or corrupt founders literally locking the door on employees (Zirtual et al).

4. I'd be remiss if I didn't at least bring up the insane (comparatively) COL of the Bay Area compared to even other large US metropolitan areas.

I'm not going to start railing about VC-istan because I do think the degree to which the system is rigged gets overblown, but if you're going to be involved in start-ups it doesn't make sense to be anything other than a founder, C-level-for-hire employee, or investor IMO.
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I'd love to see real data on what percentage of tech workers who receive equity ACTUALLY end up cashing out for over, say, $100K. Not a HN Survey, because of course everyone here has $10MM in equity, a mansion on the Peninsula, and a supermodel spouse. But a real survey across the huge tech company landscape, in and out of Silicon Valley.
Check out http://avisingh599.github.io/deeplearning/visual-qa/
Why Facebook Is Offering Employees $10,000 to Live Near HQ
In the exceptional cases where they got a nice pay day, was the company unable to pay cash? If not then there's the answer why no bells ring.
Humans are just an exponentially increasing function which will generally grow to consume the resources available to them.

Why do they deserve to be prioritised over the millions of other species on earth?
Fair Market Value drives the value of common shares, not preferred share costs. FMV is derived using a formula the IRS has to project what a share in the company is worth and it is usually far less than what the latest investors paid.
Brazil warns against pregnancy due to spreading virus
My wife and I just bought a banjo, I plan to take some time this week and next to learn it. Then I'm going to hang out with fellow mandolin players this Sunday or next. I suggest you do the same, or something similar. You'll be more rounded as an individual than if you learned the-next-hot-shiny. Plenty of time for work stuff after the holiday break.
> Well, computer "science" is primarily an engineering discipline.

I would say that software engineering was the engineering discipline, and computer science a mathematical discipline.

My point was that the proof itself is not subsidiary to empirical evidence, only its application is, and in my eyes, there is merit in the proof, free from its application to the "real world", for example as a lemma to another proof. Consider it a form of separation of concerns: whilst I prove a theorem, I am not concerned with how it mirrors the observable world, but in order to apply it, of course I must ensure that its assumptions can be reliably observed. In this way, our "beliefs" are limited and do not taint the logic of the proof itself.

> How do you know that while these proofs reference the infinite, they are actually applicable to the infinite?

Which brings us to your next point: I do not know, I simply believe it to be true because it is convenient to do so. My point is that this belief or its refutation does not affect the worthiness of the proof, only that of its application.

I actually do not believe in the absolute power of proof, I don't think it is something you can get away with believing once presented with all the facts. I hope I've explained myself better in this comment though: I don't think our views are as antipodal as it first seemed.
That stuff that sounds like tinny tamborines.
> They could have avoided this by waiting to exercise their options...

The article refers to "stock grants" and refers to the fact that "Top sales employees were awarded with annual bonuses of 20,000 shares of common stock".

IANAL but AFAIK, receipt of stock grants would trigger an income tax liability on the value of the shares at the time they were granted.

Tax treatment of stock grants and options is very complicated and so dependent on details that it seems somewhat unfair to jump to any conclusions based on assumptions which are almost certainly incorrect.
The management pushing the stock and painting a rosy picture while behind the scenes the ship was sinking.

The employees putting everything they had (and then some) into a single stock from their employer.

I don't know if there was criminal behavior involved but an imbalance of information was in play that cost the employees everything and then some.
I read Koine/Classical/Homeric Greek reasonably well. Message me (e-mail in profile) if you have any questions.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that it's still an investment in a company, and carries with it risk, including a full loss.

Anyone implying that owning equity in a company has any guaranteed payout, even on acquisition, is being intentionally misleading, I think.
Sometimes knowledge like this is a little first-past-the-post, all-or-nothing.

Completeness of knowledge is key, especially when a chain of reasoning (debugging) is as strong as its weakest link. At these times, a false assumption based on how something works in some other language could really wrong-foot you. Being familiar with some language means it's faster to learn other languages that have similar implementations, but not assumed.
Reading the article, I thought Coke was doing something similar to Pepsi here.

Back in the late '80s there was a Pepsi commercial where 'scientists received messages from deep space' and it turns out to be painters(?) sitting on the radiotelescope and opening up a Pepsi and going "Ahhhhh": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9jT6uKknoY
Having worked with all of the above besides Lambda I think I can offer some points to help with your decision. It would be nice to know what kind of work was being done with Lambda but oh well.

Using Python will give you better readability, more battle tested libraries, a more robust set of tools for data/number processing and (this is the kicker) a much easier time interoping with Postgres, specifically it's stored functions and procedures.

Using Node will give you a better paradigm for evented I/0 tasks, be quicker with basic I/O tasks, more experience with javascript (don't underestimate this), a larger pool of people who will likely understand this as this is typically the first if not the second language web developers learn, but as a downside node comes with a rapidly changing eco system so what you write could become out of date very fast and the asynchronous nature of it all can make the logic much harder to follow.

Both are quite popular and enjoy some amazing communities behind them, so you'll be fine in whatever you choose.
Governments go with contractors due to a multi-decade effort by the economic right to promote the idea that government is less efficient than the private sector, providing strong political incentives for downsizing actual government departments.

Turns out private companies are at least as incompetent...
Fallen of WW-2
Pirate Bay cofounder invents device that will bankrupt music industry
Indeed. Smart, young companies are refusing preferred share investments and are willing to keep their valuation lower because of that. It's true that you're selling a larger portion of your future for less money in many ways, but you protect the founders and original investors as well as the employees too.

Huge growth is important but it's also important to be smart about it. Selling a part of your company for a bit less if often better than mortgaging the common shares.
By joining a late stage (vs early stage) startup as an employee, you are trading execution risk for valuation risk.

At an early stage startup, your shares are essentially free to purchase - especially if you join a company which hasn't had a formal external valuation event (like a fundraise) yet. All your risk is around the startup evolving into a successful business with a high value.

Join a late-stage startup, and most of the execution risk is gone. But the company may already have an artificially high value attached - so you have a lot of risk that your shares end up being worth significantly less than you paid for them.

The real unicorn, for an employee, is a middle- to late-stage company which has successfully executed, is growing, and ideally hasn't had any formal external valuation events. There your shares are cheap to buy and extremely likely to increase in value.
I'm in Edmonton, AB. Last time I went to those places I seemed to recall they had pictures on the menu, but I could be mistaken.

Red Robins and BP are definitely lower tier, but they still count as a "popular restaurant," at least in Edmonton they are very popular.
I read emberjs's guide last night and play some toy example.

I think ember-cli is great and have good first impression overall, would like to build a more serious project in these days.
> that employee would still have had to personally fork over the amount needed to purchase the underlying shares

Then what is the difference over just buying the shares outright as opposed to exercising options?

My understanding has always been that exercising options means getting a benefit (the shares) which has a value (the strike price) and you subsequently pay tax on that value.
Agree in general, but you can overdo it with splitting services up. E.g. would you really run a extra container just for a cronjob that runs once a night to e-mail some data from a database? Esp. if you run on a platform where you essentially pay per container that seems like a waste.
Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive? Analysis of Clinical Trial Design [pdf]
(Oops, I meant table view, not scroll view. Thanks.)

I agree with you on the specifics, but somehow still reach different conclusions. :)

Edit: I guess if you take the lense of wanting Swift to replace the combination of ObjC + plain C, what you're saying makes sense.

It's a shame though if you end up losing the very-helpful ability to dynamically modify system provided behavior.

And even for relatively performance intensive stuff, like table scrolling, objc is plenty fast.

Every language obviously has its domain of performance-appropriateness -- C too will hit its limits; x264 w/o the asm optimizations is ungodly slow, for example.

I just think for "apps", generally, objc is a speedy language. Empirically this is true. Explanations that call for this being true "despite the language" are suspicious to me; if it's not the language, what's the magic pixie dust?

And personally I suspect the swift folks aren't going the more static route because of actual real-world user-facing performance walls they've run into, but because that's what they're into -- they're C++/static language/compiler guys.

Last example: Look at the most performance constrained stuff apple is currently doing, the watch. Think that's Swift? I'm pretty sure it's not.
Anyone who used Modula-3...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-3

...knows that one can have key features of C++ for systems programming with an easy-to-parse, safer, and [for a time] more efficient language. The SPIN OS team even modified it with type-safe linking so one could hotload code into the OS. What I saw there was "hotload code into running system" w/ associated benefits during updates. Or safer, better JIT. ;)

Anyway, combined with LISP-style macros & irritating parts removed (eg uppercase, verbosity), you get a system language that blows C++ away in productivity (esp w/ DSL's), compiler efficiency, maintenance, and possibly run-time efficiency. The world might have went in a different direction but they better be honest about parsing pain they created. And all the productivity opportunities lost due to that.
At least with the auto industry, the unions were able to offer some protections for the worker. How many programmers belong to a union?
You have not yet actually made a guess you've just kept asserting that "a lot of money" is "a lot of money" and I agree. A lot of money is a lot money. I just think that modulo nobody is actually seeing a lot of money from start-up employee equity.
I see a lot more "skepticism" than outright hatred.

There's been a few not-so-cool security problems, that's what I usually hear from people being turned off. Plus the amount of really bad plugins...

My only personal gripes are that it's not fun to develop themes and plugins, so I stopped using it years ago for my main website. Still using it though.