skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to keep repeating this comment until the world hears it--I think most people joining startups are being taken advantage of without realizing it. Sorry to be repeating myself:

If you're primarily interested in making money, or if you love the startup but not the compensation, you should NOT work at that startup.

If you're a good developer, you can get a better deal by working at an established company and simply investing. This has been true for every startup offer I've ever seen. Ever.

I've considered lots of startup jobs because I believed strongly in the companies. Every single time, however, I was able to get a larger chunk of the company by keeping my current job and simply investing.

To give an example, my current job pays about $250k, and one year, I invested $100k of that into a startup, leaving me with ~$150k of salary. This $150k + startup equity was a better deal than the startup was offering in both salary and equity (BY FAR). Plus, equity bought as an investor is much less tax toxic than equity options received as an employee of a startup.

On the other hand, most people who work at startups aren't interested in money. If that's you, that's totally cool!
>Technology in general has moved a lot of power away from government to the big players in the tech industry.

Really? I think companies and governments seem to work together pretty well just looking at all of legislation that has passed recently and all the secret agreements made in secret courts in order to have access to data from companies like Facebook and Google, that the public has been made aware of that happen.

>This shift in power is what scares people who's only goal is to be re-elected.

Or people are trying to muster of some sense of fear in people order to gain support, they themselves aren't scared because as you say they are using it as a political tool to get elected…
I pretty much agree that's a higher probability way to make money. I think "the real unicorn" is working for and with good people though.
Bringing the Etsy Experience Offline: Introducing Etsy City Guides
I don't think people are any more pessimistic about back doors as they are about perpetual motion machines.

Let's pause to consider this. Math works, that's why even the NSA can't break encryption. I wouldn't want to tell you wrong and say that it's impossible, it's not, but it would take something like ten billion years to crack. Needless to say, there's a reason why they need a backdoor, and that's because math works.

However, if a backdoor were put into all electronic products, the strength of the encryption is now meaningless as any would-be attacker (government or otherwise) would just target the backdoor instead of trying to break the encryption. Why wait ten billion years for a computer to brute force the message when you could just find a flaw in something designed by the government?
> The Firefox team has spoken publicly about the drop in downloads they experienced when they moved mozilla.org to only support SHA-2 certificates

I was wondering why I could not download firefox from my work computer with the latest Chrome, it seems that not only older browsers have the problem with SHA-2 (hint: cooperate proxies).
Working at Dunkin' Donuts (2004)
Can you explain how you were able to invest 100k into a startup without being an angel investor?
s/URLs/domains/

come on people
If you strip away all the logically questionable parts of this story, there are 2 really important takeaways:

- Companies: don't make employees exercise options when they leave the company. I love the new "10 years to exercise" trend that has started to emerge.
- Employees: don't pay taxes or exercise options early to maximize your gains at an eventual exit. It makes no sense - keep the optionality.
Pingdom year in review 2015
How did you invest in a startup with only $100k? Was this a seed-stage thing or were you a small contributor to a later round?
That scenario becomes a lot more dire when the CEO says

CEO, to me: Yes, because we are compelled by law
backed by jail time or hefty fines.
This article highlights the need for two changes in the startup world:

1) We need a different term for the "post-money valuation" that VCs place on a company after fundraising. It is not a valuation in the same way that a public company is valued, due in large part to the preferred stock liquidation preference. Employees hear about a $1B valuation and assume that the IPO or acquisition price will be some multiple of that "valuation".

2) We need some tax reform that prevents employees from needing to pay a tax bill with cash for illiquid shares in a privately held company. It makes perfect sense for an employee of a publicly traded company to need to allocate some of their stock grants to tax obligations, seeing as though they can sell those shares at any time. But employees of privately held companies can't sell their stock (usually), and needing to take real dollars to pay a tax bill on those shares is just not the spirit of the law.
You still haven't described what exactly Blue Origin did first, that is so important.
Uhhh... we get RCN over here in Somerville...
I've only been a professional programmer for 2 years now. For my own edification, what events or laws or shifts are you referring to?
haha I was thinking the same thing when I saw the ticker headline on the treadmill at the gym.

On the other hand, how exciting would this be: "Falling branch nearly misses skier!!!"

As someone else pointed out, daily occurrences are not worth talking about...
Yes, compared to e.g. Google and Microsoft.
Either via VPN or through my regular ISP. I get the captchas regardless. I know my ISP (a small local one) has had some misuse problems, so I understand that there are captchas. What I don't understand is why they don't rely on captchas that are actually readable.

I know computers are great at captchas, but now they are a serious usability problem.
The best part about that tweet is how Jeff double spaces after a period.
I would also imagine that you get a MUCH better deal and probably higher preference by investing versus being an employee. Which is also not a great message to send employees.
I already discussed that scenario. We'd shut our doors, release all of our code as CC0+WTFPL, and start a new company fresh.

At the end of the day, we care about our integrity more than we do dollars.
#2 is wrong.

I know it's fun to say it that way, but it's wrong. If you work at a startup try going to your boss and saying "I'll give up all my equity for a $100/year raise." They will say yes (modulo a conversation with you about how that's a really bad idea for you).

It would be fair to say that a lot of people overestimate the value of equity a lot of the time. But that's not the same thing as what the author says.
He is the best austrian skier, and a professional. He behaves professional.
No, I know a couple. Look for companies with around $10-100m annual revenues and no external investors. If you speak to their owners, their biggest frustration is, ironically, competing with unicorns for talent recruitment.
Elliott Alderson is that you
The issue I have with Cook's proclaiming support for strong encryption is that Apple still has control over what can and can't install on the user's device. So imagine if some strong agency came and said to a company you can't allow certain apps to install and you can't tell your customers we told you this. "You can allow these apps that claim to encrypt user's messages [list here], but not these [list here]". So some state could still strong arm Apple into compromising privacy and Apple would have their hands clean.

It seems that if you really want to guarantee privacy, you have to give the individual control over what they can install. Telling people to just "trust us" is not really good enough. And Cook is saying they are giving the user ultimate control by not having keys to their encryption but in reality that's nonsense... they are still requiring people to trust them.
What remote control model aircraft license are you talking about? I'm not aware of such a thing in the USA.
I doubt Teh Government sees anything with a single point of view.
Of course they should...on top of all the new tech stacks and modern dev paradigms because, of course, engineers have an infinite ability to learn.

I'm not disagreeing with you, per se, but I do marvel at the sheer volume of information young engineers are expected to grok these days...
Eric Schmidt needs to be explaining this & why it's important to his politician friends and sphere of influence. Perhaps he already is, but it would be meaningful politically if he (and others) said something publicly. Cook is kind of the lone ranger on the matter as far as public discourse is concerned, post Paris & San Bernardino.
Most difficult problem in startups currently imo
I'm left scratching my head at this as well. I'm assuming (without reading into it) they are arguing that it was U.S. copy righted material that was taken, and distributed on U.S. soil (i.e. the internet).

Julian Assange faces similar offense[1], though in this case they are claiming national security as opposed to copy right infringement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange
If you compare Airtel (Private) vs BSNL[1] (government) one, the pricing is almost same.

In poorer regions Indian government tries to subsidise it as well, and ends up with loses every year (barring 2015), so I guess we can approximate it to a non-profit org?

1. http://bsnl.in/opencms/bsnl/BSNL/services/mobile/3g_prepaid_...
In the context of parent and grandparent, what do you look for when doing your due diligence to evaluate the risk of the employees getting screwed on common shares when every other stakeholder makes money?
The question isn't free markets, but effective ones which serve society. Effective regulation is what makes markets.

Economists far more generally speak of competitive markets, which carry numerous requirements, of which neither healthcare nor Internet / communications generally satisfy.

Which is how they came to be regulated in the first place.
Most startups are more than happy to take your money. Just email or meet with the founders, explain your enthusiasm for the company, and you're usually good to go!

For higher-profile deals, though--e.g., Uber--you wouldn't be able to invest such a small amount.
>Do you think your life would just go on without any troubles at all if government suddenly disappeared?

The classic "I'm going to pretend your criticism of one part of government means you want to completely abolish all government" strawman.
That's a very interesting approach!
DbHero – A GUI database explorer for PostgreSQL
1 thing i must say it`s very compact and user friendly .. and easy to use.. all your things in a basket..
n more over it`s handy..
Why are we supposed to play dumb about the subtext behind Cook's comment?

I'm sure Cook believes what he's saying, but the real marketing strategy here isn't "crypto versus plaintext"; it's "consumer product company" versus "online service provider".

Seen through this lens, there's an argument that what Cook is doing is counterproductive. He's making an argument that Google can't sign on to, and using crypto as a wedge to drive the argument home. "Be a consumer product company, because then you can protect users with crypto".

Also: the kind of encryption that Apple is really making a stand for? They do a better job of it than Android, but Android provides the same encryption: what scares the USG about Apple is that iPhones are locked by default, and when they're locked, they can't be imaged easily. That's true of Google's phones as well.

Meanwhile, Google is doing a much better job of securing browser crypto than Apple is; Apple is almost an obstacle to better browser crypto.
Not an academic paper, but I found the Roslyn (new C# compiler) whitepaper to be an interesting window into the future of programming languages: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2774...

"Tackling the Awkward Squad:
monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and
foreign-language calls in Haskell" (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...) finally made me understand monads. Or rather, why they have such an unreasonable draw on Haskell people. tl;dr: Monads are useful to thread data (state, side effects, ...) through a computation, without modifying all your function signatures (the functions can be lifted to work with the monad). But mostly, it turns out you NEED monads (or something like it) to sequence side-effects (since Haskell is lazy).
Why is that the best part?
I'm not sure we need #2 - we need companies to be better about not forcing their employees to exercise options when they leave the company and we need employees not to exercise options early to minimize the taxes they may have to pay in a windfall. This can simply be executed by every company without any government tax code reform needed.
Let's do a thought experiment, you have a pie that you need to allocate, and you need to allocate it to the following groups.

Founders
Investors
Non-Founding Executives
Non-Founding Employees

How do you allocate the pie fairly?
How how do you ensure that risk is properly rewarded?
Hydraulic Storage in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator
I think that is how the "reputation traps" develop.
Equity can still be an incentive to work at a start-up - it's just not an incentive to take a pay-cut.

Start-ups should lose its label as a cash cow - but it can still be:

- a well-paying job
- high impact
- more freedom
- good career capital
- a lottery ticket
Binding arbitration is an affront on the seventh amendment of the US constitution. If binding arbitration didn't exist, then this party would have had recourse in a real court with a jury, not some privately funded arbitration judge.

The reason that corporations like binding arbitration is that it eliminates the jury, and gets rid the option of
the jury nullifying the law. Sometimes onerous laws get bought and paid for by corporations, and jury nullification is one of the few tools left to combat this.
I suggest reading this piece on the recent Jupiter vulnerability: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/12/on-juniper-b...

"The problem with cryptographic backdoors isn't that they're the only way that an attacker can break into our cryptographic systems. It's merely that they're one of the best. They take care of the hard work, the laying of plumbing and electrical wiring, so attackers can simply walk in and change the drapes."
This has nothing to do with being vocal about security. Yea, they're helping the technical cause, but if you don't want backdoors in everything, the CEO's need to talk to the public so they're aware, and sending letters and phone calls.
10 Rules to Being a VP of Sales in a Startup – SaaStr
All of which is true but until the larger community of founders and investors buy into the rational basis for their existence those common shares do not provide any incentive for a competent programmer to take the risk of working for a startup rather than for an established company.
How? I honestly don't understand how a person in the same ethical framework could disagree with this, if he fully understands the situation.
> Learn the basics of how to architect a small distributed system that is fault tolerant, resilient and reliable. You can't learn it all in 11 days, but man you can make a big dent and it is to me one of the most fun and challenging problems to solve. And there is still so much to learn. You can build and test little systems in AWS for nearly nothing using t2 instances.

Learning about distributed systems of late and been wanting to do this for a while now. Do you have any project ideas? I can think of implementing a key-value store.
Google's also had a positive impact on TLS usage in email: https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/

TLS for email is still in pretty bad shape but it's getting better. (Funny, I just noticed that Google's page says "Safe Browsing" while only "Safer Email".) I know you're not a fan of DNSSEC, but something like Secure SMTP via DANE is probably needed for meaningful improvement: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dane-smtp-01 (though it won't help with the chicken-and-egg problem of domain ownership validation by email)
Sure. That still sounds much worse in many ways than all the info being up on Tom's Drones or wherever.
Agree.

> suggest to trade the equity portion of the offer for the cash value of the options (in addition to the advertised salary). Good luck.

I was explicitly given that choice (in three packages, high/med/low options count in exchange for offsetting increase in starting salary). Being "smart", I took the salary and low options and that was a poor choice in retrospect, given that we IPO'd 2.5 years later and my salary now would surely be the same regardless of the initial choice.

I don't know how common it is, but it's absolutely doable and done. (I suppose you could argue whether the company I joined was early-stage or not.)
This is often repeated wisdom, and it is quite wrong.

If the liquidity event involves the public stock market in any way e.g. IPO, merger, acquisition with a nontrivial part of the proceeds paid in shares of a public company - then you are forced to execise on one hand, and have a lock-up period, usually 6 months, forced by the underwriters or SEC rule 144.

That is, there is a mandatory 6 months wait between the forced exercise and the effective liquidity event.

This applies to investors as well as employees, BTW: I was bitten by this as an investor -- a modest 5X return on investment after 2 years turned out to be less than 2.5X return (still nice), but the taxes were paid on the 5X numbers, and the end result net of taxes was therefore 1.1X -- and it would have been a loss if everything happened in the other half of the year (luckily, I was able to net the gains with the losses because the 6 month lockup was april-october; but had it been october-april, even that wouldn't have been possible).

In two other tax regimes I've operated in, you are only ever assessed taxes in the event you can take money into your pocket. The US system is ridiculously unfair in this sense.
Your printer is spying on you
3rd parties should not get the chance to weigh in on journalist's reporting quality. Reporters should be able to succeed or fail on their own. What are you, working for or on behalf of B. of A.?

I happen to have a bank of america/ML account because I am a software engineer who got stock options that vested. Like probably a lot of readers of ycombinator. So I am going to write them a letter complaining about this action. I'm about to close my account there. This is one way to attempt to make an impact. Also I recommend complaining about the third party company that apparently sent the dmca. Those dmca takedowns seems to experience little or no negative effects when they make mistakes. This is hard to change through legal means, but it can be changed through public pressure on those companies.
Yes, in addition to the amazing tax benefits of investing rather than being an employee, you get preferred shares.

I also want to add that I know of a startup which allowed employees to trade off salary for equity in a way that completely screwed their employees. E.g., they gave their engineers something like either 0.2% and $150k, or 0.3% and $100k.

This implied a valuation of $200 million (since an employee would trade off 0.1% of the company for four years of $150k instead of $100k--for an added $200k bonus, and $200k / 0.1% is $200 million).

At the time, though, the company was selling shares to investors at a valuation of $50 million.

In other words, they were charging employees quadruple the price for equity. I'm thinking about writing a blog post on it.
Most of the things I described assume you have full control over your host's OS.

For stuff like you mention - you should maybe reconsider not using containers if you're on a pay-per-container platform? They are just a tool, and certainly don't fit every single use-case. Also - paying per container seems like a silly thing to do - since containers can be very short-lived. Resource-based billing would be a better fit - although that could be tricky to measure I guess.
You can get a $100/year raise just for the asking. In tech, salaries are just not negotiated at the $100/year granularity. Imagine saying "I'm also considering an offer from this company, can you offer more" and the HR department coming back with "Sure, we can give you $100/year more."

If you can get a $100/year raise just for the asking, and you can also get a $100/year raise in exchange for equity, then simple arithmetic indicates that the equity has zero value.
Comparison of Erlang Runtime System and Java Virtual Machine
http://ds.cs.ut.ee/courses/course-files/To303nis%20Pool%20.p...
I've been wanting to setup a small distributed system like this as a project for a long time, but struggle to find something that would be useful to build (even to a small degree).

Personally, I don't play Minecraft (and, thusly, couldn't really appreciate what I just did by setting up a super duper Minecraft server system).

Could anyone think of some more general purpose distributed systems projects that would be a little more generally useful?
2 approaches:

1) you pay the strike, and pray the valuation continues to rise through any IPO, buyout, etc..

2) arbitrage - you pay the low strike, then sell in the secondary market for more, and hopefully realize a one-time profit after cost frictions.

From the article, sounds like most of the afflicted here were playing strategy (1), while there was some window to execute on (2) though many may have not noticed it.
We knew all this in 2000 in the dotcom crash. But along comes a new generation of starry-eyed kids (who are "just smarter" and don't care about experience) and they are just more meat for the grinder.
J is one of my favorites. The syntax is cryptic at first, but the lack of ambiguity makes programs easier to understand and easier to design in the long run.
I was a small contributor in a later round (series A or B).
Living in China and living the wechat platform. I pay my groceries by presenting a QR code, pay my taxi by scanning the driver's QR code, pay my utilities and to up my mobile. Really handy!
Manufacturing Christmas Ornaments Now Cheaper in Mexico Than China
> Why were employees paying tax on the nominal value of the shares?

Alternative minimum tax, created in 1969 to target 155 high-income households who were using too many tax loopholes. It was not adjusted for inflation, and it did not anticipate rank-and-file employees receiving stock options.

> Is it not possible to structure the compensation so that tax is payable when the shares are sold (capital gains) or on any dividends paid on the shares?

Yes, but this requires the employee to pre-pay for the shares when they are issued.

Normal tax rules do not consider exercising options to be a taxable event, but AMT rules do. You can exercise options resulting in modest paper gains without them being taxed.
Various accounts of the Enron saga include anecdotes of employees happily (and being encouraged to) invest most or all of their 401k in Enron stock.
The Beatles Are Coming to Apple, Spotify, Google on Christmas Eve
I'm a member of Prospect[1], a non-party-affiliated union for professionals. It's mainly good for getting legal advice if the company you work for tries to screw you over, so it's pretty relevant to the company/article being discussed (except Prospect is a UK union, but there are US equivalents).

The cost is relatively trivial compared to a programmer's salary - about £200/yr. Unfortunately you can't claim it against tax in the UK.

[1] https://www.prospect.org.uk/
While a lot of things may be influenced by bribes, the TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) is one of the better entities that also works for the common person and is respected a lot more by the public compared to local arms of the governments. It may not be perfect, but it's not the sleazy corrupt good-for-nothing entity you may assume it to be.