skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think I asked this from you in another thread - but this advice feels difficult to follow. Are you in SF? Do you work at a company like Netflix which is known for paying very high salaries? Or are you not fully a developer, but in management? Because national labor statistics show that even the top quartile of salaries is still much lower than this, so I'm not sure how realistic it is for even the HN crowd to just up and make $250k programming.
I would suggest contacting the CFPB to start.

http://www.consumerfinance.gov/
Learn python by solving problem
If we can make encryption that is nearly foolproof, why can't we make a backdoor that is nearly foolproof? Why is a Manhattan Project of backdoors not a possible solution?

Also can't the role of the good guy be split up among a group? Similar to the two man rule to prevent rogue agents from launching missiles, can't we have some sort of process that requires agreement among a majority of a few parties including the end user, the company who owns the software, law enforcement, and the (public) judicial system. If all it takes to break down the door to my home are a judge and law enforcement to agree, why can't we accept similar when it comes to data?
Given the track record of presidents, candidates, and politicians, ignorance of encryption (often willful ignorance) is a threat to modern technology. There is ample opportunity for Clinton to be informed. This is not the naive wishful thinking of a newbie politician; it's the savvy attempt of a master to appear to be the "reasonable" side of the debate and shift the Overton window.
Dainese are also selling their D-Air system in the US now.
Thanks for the comment, but 'investing' 100k, a sum FAR more than almost anyone reading the comment will ever see in their own bank accounts, is not 'investing' for most of us. Diversity and spreading the risk is bread and butter for almost all of us. Throwing 100k into a company you believe in' is a greater gamble than almost any reader could ever justify to their spouse and expect to stay married. You live in a very different world.
It would be a strange reading of this article to conclude that this one company invented US tax law.

But, if the company heavily compensates people with an asset that has irrational tax laws, then it does seem like they bare responsibility.
Or it means: you value your equity at $0 a year, and your HR guys get a bonus for reducing expenses.
> Yeah, that's called theft.

Only by loose metaphor; its actually properly called "copyright infringement", which is more analogous to trespass to chattels than to theft, or even conversion (though it obviously differs from either in that copyrights are intangible personal property, and the others deal with tangible personal property.)
Indeed - I think the claim that alpha can be expressed as p/q with some 'lowest q' seems to rest on divisibility properties.
I think that was either PayPal (paypalsucks.com) or GoDaddy (with nodaddy.com).
What about a deal where you give me half your salary and I buy you a lottery ticket every payday?
The problem here is the valuation model for the common stock was broken. Properly factoring in liquidation preferences and your 409a valuation of common stock would not have ever hit $4.29 per share with 229 million shares outstanding. The fact that preferred shares sold for that price is completely irrelevant, it's like saying the Tesla sells for $80k so we'll just value this Nissan Leaf the same.

The IRS does not force these companies to improperly value the common stock. It's just the default position they take because it's cheaper for the company this way.

The 409a valuation is based on the price someone would pay for 100% of the outstanding shares of converted-to-common shares. This is much lower than preferred stock investment price (where the dollars are being put into the company to grow it, not being paid to shareholders to retire). It's even much lower than the secondary market price since that's the price for a small percentage of shares -- try selling them all and the bid/ask would fall to zero.

The price of illiquid common stock must reflect the risk-taking stance of management and the Board. Even having an $800m offer doesn't have to boost the common stock valuation so much because if management is declining those offers and swinging for the fences you can reasonably factor in that risk in the price.

Unless and until an actual IPO, companies should take a discounted future cash flow model based on single-digit future growth to demonstrate the common stock value is absolutely worthless, and everyone should be required to file 83(b).

We know its a lottery ticket, the tax code allows us to value it appropriately. The real problem is companies straight out fucking up their 409a. Common stock shareholders at Good would not be crazy to consider a lawsuit.
We improved the security of potentially ~30% of the Internet
New shark glows in the dark, officially named the 'ninja lanternshark'
This is what angers me when it comes to the whole drone industry. I've been flying model airplanes and heli's for over thirty years. I've owned planes costing in excess of $20K. They are FUCKING TOYS BUILT WITH TOY TECHNOLOGY.

All of these companies, like DJI, and irresponsible operators, are ruining the hobby and placing property and people in danger.

I would never, in a million years, think of flying anything over people, crowds, kids, homes, commercial buildings, etc.

All of these systems are 0 F.T. (zero fault tolerant). Which means your decision making while flying them has to reflect the reality that the thing can fall out of the sky at any instant and there will be little or no control when this happens.

What this means in practical terms is that you fly these things EXACTLY as we've been flying model airplanes for decades: Away from people and property. In general, at approved flying fields (clubs) or in the middle of nowhere.

Bullshit like this is what is causing the FAA to now start down the path of treating model airplanes like guns: They are all bad. Never mind that millions of people have owned them for decades, fly them all the time and never hurt anyone. My fleet of probably thirty or so planes and helicopters has never placed even as much as a cat in danger. But, no, thanks to the stupid fucks who do crap like this now I have to register with the government because my planes and helicopters are going to magically charge their batteries, assemble themselves, open the garage door, fly out and hurt people, all while I am watching TV at home.

The irony isn't lost on me here. This is exactly the gun argument. Drones don't hurt people, stupid people with drones hurt people. Let's go after them, not the drones.
It was most likely a licenced and insured pilot - looked like battery failure to me, but usually large unit (this was an X8) would have had dual batteries for redundancy. Being an X8 it would have dual motors and props, so if one failed it could still fly.

The media shouldn't blow this out of proportion - if quads are banned they will regret loosing such awesome aerial footage.
A similar thing happened to me. I joined a late stage startup with a market cap of $1.5B. It IPO'd a few years later with some critics calling it the worst IPO of the year. It now has a market cap of $600M. I felt betrayed by execs who had nothing but glowing things to say about the health of the business. I gave the company 2-3 quarters to show signs of hope then quit.
You could do this on the moon, for example
The show is one of my favorite of all time.
I always find it funny when startup founders believe that they are taking on more "risk".

So when the company isn't doing well, the founder lays themselves off first right? No? Hm, seems like the rank and file employee takes on the risk there...

Not to mention that it's probably a lot easier for a founder to get another job than their employees. Oh and by the way, the founder has been paid more, has gotten more stock and has probably had investors pay for a lot more nice dinners/drinks than their employees.

But yeah, the founders deserve to be compensated much higher because of this "risk", yes indeed.
Container size influences memory usage, which is an important concern:

http://www.stackengine.com/container-memory-usage-or-size-ma...
I'm not an expert on this, but when you exercise stock options you have to pay taxes on the fair market value at that time.

In some cases it might make sense to exercise stock options before you can actually sell them (e.g. if you expect the price to keep going up to save on taxes or if you're leaving the company when you typically only have a limited amount of time to exercise or lose those options).

So in these cases you now own the stock and paid taxes on it, but if the stock price falls drastically after that you might have actually paid more taxes than the stock is worth now.
Yeah, good point--I'd recommend investing only $10k or $20k if possible.

One of my points, though, is that you are effectively investing $100k in the company by taking a crap deal to work there (e.g., via a $25k pay cut over 4 years of work). For that $100k, you're getting much less than you would get by simply straight-up investing $100k.
The beauty is that any engineer who masters this information will come to realise that they hold all the keys to the kingdom.
Very user-friendly and loved the UI/UX.
But the people negotiating the deal with Blackberry knew how the waterfall would shake out. They elected to agree to a price where the share of the purchase price distributed across common stockholders left many employees in a bad place. That was a choice. As was structuring the ownership of the company, and the compensation offers to their employees, in that way in the first place.
That would be a bad deal for me. But it has no relevance to the point I was trying to make.
This really made the difference clear to me, thanks for the write up.
Boston Dynamics Wishes Us a Terrifying, Robot-Filled Christmas
Hack her FB account, make something funny once inside.
The average IQ of a user is inversely proportional to the popularity of a product. Case in point: laser pointers.
I've driven by that place, and... it's kind of hard to not notice, especially at night when it's lit up:

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.631347,12.2397643,3a,20.9y,1...
Function-call-statements are a special case. Not every expression can be turned into a statement.

http://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.3.6

This gets rids of almost all the syntactic ambiguities. The only big one that is left is statements that start with parenthesis.

http://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#3.3.1
From the XKCD:

> This leads us to the central problem of getting into orbit: Reaching orbital speed takes much more fuel than reaching orbital height. Getting a ship up to 8 km/s takes a lot of booster rockets. Reaching orbital speed is hard enough; reaching to orbital speed while carrying enough fuel to slow back down would be completely impractical.[5]

Did SpaceX just solve this problem and rendered this paragraph obsolete? Or is that Falcon 9 reached space and turned around without achieving orbital velocity?
This is trivially wrong. You could get a $100 raise once, and possibly several times. But at some point, the boss would say "alright, no more raises".

At that point, you could say "I'll give up all my equity for another $100", at which point the boss would jump to agree.
Already a thread started

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10784089
This Obituary Was Perfectly Executed for a Great Computer Programmer
I think the cool kids are running startups where all the data is on the table - i.e. no secrets, but rather all staff have access to all data about the company. This seems to be a trend with European startups, anyway ..
Ah, sorry I didn't respond before.

I live and work in SF at a large company (not Netflix, but something pretty similar). I'm 80% a coder, 10% a manager, and 10% a data scientist, and I love my job. $250k salaries are very common at large companies these days--you just need to stick around and work hard for a few years.

Even if you make $150k, my advice stands, but you should probably invest smaller amounts than $100k, obviously.
For anyone wondering what "APK" is, I think it's the Android packager. Interesting choice!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_application_package
"The probability of getting rich from employee equity is almost zero, while the chance of rain on the 1st and 15th is 100%."
Beautiful home office of a french graphic designer
Register for hack.summit() 2016
As someone whose best friend started a business that is being grown organically (no seed money, no investors, no venture capitalist, just an idea), my perspective is probably different than most of HN's.

The risk he endured was literally starving. If it wasn't for us, he very well might have.
Love the idea. I usually hit LinkedIn and Facebook to check out who I know around the area before I go there and try to message them.
It's sort of a nonstandard punctuation thing, especially on Twitter, where characters are limited and space-saving measures like single spaces after periods are standard.
The first two things would be the amount of funding taken, and the preference overhang. If you know that a company has taken $300M in funding and that their last round of $150M had a 3x liquidation preference with a 1x preference on earlier rounds, then you can do the math to figure out that any exit under $600M is going to leave the common stock worthless. If you know your ownership percentage (and every startup employee should), you can then do the math to figure out how big an exit the company would need to have the desired financial outcome, eg. if you own 0.01% of the company, it would need to exit for $10.6B before you become a millionaire. Go judge the size of the market, growth rate, and profitability yourself to see if that's likely.

In Good Technology's case, just look at Crunchbase:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/good-technology#/ent...

There are red flags galore for startup employees there - the funding history started with a Series E in 2005, with the company supposedly founded in 1996. That's the time to ask about the company history, which the article says started as a startup that bought Motorola Mobility's business. Every funding round since then was either private equity or debt (!!), along with a secondary sale.

If I saw just the Crunchbase investment history and heard that it was a startup that purchased a spun-out portion of Motorola, my immediate reaction would be "This isn't a startup, this is a mature private company with a business model that requires large infusions of cash." (I've actually been burned in the public markets by a similar company - mature companies should not need regular cash infusions.) And I'd value the company accordingly - most likely, I wouldn't take the job there at all, but if I did, I'd assume that salary and experience is all I'm going to get.
I thought the whole point of eating at bland restaurants was to not get sick?
If I were in your shoes I'd keep the momentum going with swift. Otherwise React seems like a nice complement to your skills.

I think for myself this holidays I'll be tearing into Elixir and React for a new project.
it's also useful for those at the top of the hierarchy. and those who imagine they might be at the top some day, they tend to imagine it might be useful as well.
Alexander Coffee, good place to start -- once you're in town it will be easier to use the 'Red Camba', ask the locals for available options > http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g297317-d106806...

Otherwise-- just get a room at one of the high-end hotels, (@ $66 USD total deal by gringo standards) > https://www.expedia.com/Santa-Cruz-Hotels-Hotel-With-Wifi.0-...

*Added Bonus, privacy for couples siesta ;-) Echale Ganas!
"Thankfully, this is somewhat rare, though it does happen fairly often."

Wait, what?
Submitted this to HN yesterday but it didn't get attention. This articles summarizes the issues well : https://medium.com/@amod/the-dangers-of-a-rogue-social-netwo...

Another note, Facebook is spending millions to lobby & market "Free Basics" in India.

More examples of their machinations, stressing on the word "accidental" :
http://recode.net/2015/12/21/facebook-accidentally-asks-u-s-... .
Doesn't this just apply to those with either sufficient net worth or earned income to qualify as an accredited investor? Or have you heard of startups taking the money of some new graduate making less than $200k/year with insufficient net worth?
I disagree that what Cook is doing is counterproductive. I think Google could take a stronger line to secure user data if they wanted to. They don't have to become a consumer product company to run a messaging system which they cannot read. If Google can't sign on to that, maybe they should change something so that they can.
It's ironic Tim Cook is defending encryption when Apple gives backdoors with iMessage - http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/fbi-imessage-encryption/
And the VBR company can claim that their codec gets higher that the others when it needs to giving better definition to the complex parts of the sound. It's not a hard sell and most people won't care.
Any thoughts on my reaching out to Elizabeth Warren's office as well?
I don't have a study to back it up, but it seems the high pollution levels in Indian cities are mostly because of extremely high vehicular density - based on my unscientific observation that most polluted areas of Delhi are next to transportation depots/stations.

Anand Vihar - a suburb of Delhi - for example, is the most polluted place in the world, but that's also because it's the gateway to Delhi for people from the state of UP(200m population). There are like 100 buses coming into that place every few minutes!

But then, there can be solutions which don't negatively affect growth - public transportation, more and better planned cities to reduce vehicular density, and most important of all, elimination of subsidy on diesel - because the sources of pollution aren't fundamentally tied to growth.

I don't usually buy the argument that high growth will bring abnormal levels of emissions in the Indian context. I think that's because manufacturing can be never be the engine of growth in India, because of inherent, almost unfixable problems we have in India.

So, that's why I think that the Indian growth story is fundamentally different from Chinese growth story - or even any other growth story in the world, and it's important to keep that difference in mind.
> Thanks for the comment, but 'investing' 100k, a sum FAR more than almost anyone reading the comment will ever see in their own bank accounts, is not 'investing' for most of us.

To the extent that is true, neither is taking a salary hit on that order in exchange for equity from your employer.

The contention GP makes is that even ignoring the opportunity for diversified investing, from a financial standpoint, getting a job with an established company is strictly better than a startup in most cases, since you can exceed the pay and equity (and equity in the startup) of the startup job with the bigco job.

That the bigco job also gives you the option of diversifying your equity investments to manage risk, while the startup job does not, reinforces, rather than counters, that argument.
The point about only founders getting rich is one that is in stark difference to the way Silicon Valley was pre-bust.

The first company I worked for went IPO a year or two before I joined. The very first admin of that company got so rich from stock options that she bought a vineyard and retired in 1999. Lots of people bought houses with the money they made, including the first engineer who bought a house in prime PA.

I joined another startup just a few years ago, and they were extremely stingy with options. "Less-important" people (ie. anyone non-engineers, or non-management) were getting a few hundred or maybe a few thousand options, which I thought was a bummer. I think everyone contributes to the success of the company, and everyone should get a chance to do well if the company does well. But I've seen this case several times where the founders keep everything for themselves.

I'm not sure what changed, but it's probably reflective of how greedy and self-centered SV is getting. It feels like it's more like Wall Street and less about classic Silicon Valley, which is a shame. Go watch "Triumph of the Nerds", the classic tv special during the dotcom boom and see if you can reconcile the difference of those companies and the ones today.
I actually used this when I used to work in DC but lived in NoVA. Really good stuff and helpful. You basically get a free ride to the city and many times almost close to where you work.
How America’s Top Junk-Food City Went on a Diet
I would bet that maybe not, but a disproportionate number of darknet websites is.

P(darknet | child porn) might be low, as you are suggesting, but P(child porn | darknet) >>> P(child porn | clearweb), in orders of magnitude.
As a female with Asbergers, I would say this is true. It's also true not in how I socialize but how I respond to socialization. I don't immediately interpret what someone is saying and it's very difficult for me to understand if their body language/facial language nuances are being sarcastic or not.

Sometime's people are trying to be nice but I'm worried they are being sarcastic and I'm not interpreting correctly. The reason I've LEARNED to worry about that is because sometimes I thought people were being nice but they were being sarcastic to me and making fun of me to me or in front of their friends.

Sometimes, hours later, I'll have to reobserve the interaction in my head, view it from all possible angles, cross check it against how this person typically is/how much I genuinely think they like me or not, and then I can feel pretty confident in about the message I think they were really sending across. But if I don't have alot of previous experiences with this person to cross check, it's like having an incomplete algorithm to make a decision on.

Yes, this is an arduous process and it's why alot of people tend to say I keep them at a distance for a while before I get to know them, I need to stay safe and then gradually as I learn more about them open up to them because I can interpret how they are reacting to me correctly.

When it comes to having mutual crushes. It's turning out to be a nightmare trying to navigate weather a guy is genuinely into me and even if I'm willing to believe he is how to engage with that, when other girls are masterminds of cutsey mindgames and being flirtacious.

The guy I think is into me right now I think has become frustrated because I'm not flirting back with him, but he knows I like being around him, so it's confusing for him and I think hes getting frustrated thinking I'm playing mind games. I need to go talk to him before he goes away entirely but what to say? Gosh I don't know, been debating that for weeks now...

In summary, can not only be exhausting it can be emotionally painful and hurtful when the people on the other side facing you don't really understand what it's like in your head. They tend to jump to alot of conclusions that are not even close to the innocent confusion I experience and genuine effort I'm putting in to get to know them.
iMessage is better than Google's chat offerings in this regard, but not that much better.

If you want secure messaging, you need to be using OTR or Signal. Apple isn't really helping you here.
And.... When the dealin' is done, you start to see that unless you're a founder or a really close friend of the founder, you have no one to advocate for you when the chips are divvied up, and you pretty much get to take or leave the deal.

4 or 5 years, slaving away at a startup, weekends, nights. And at the end of the party, you basically have zero say. Congratulations, hope you're best friends with the CTO.
"Compound interest is your friend; your employer's stock options? not so much. "

This x 10. I wish people realized this more often.
Oh yeah! So ready for this! Hey @prtk doesn't HN get free access to this thing?