skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was a fine read, and somewhat brave, because posting something like this just invites a bunch of people to play the 'let me judge this person and decide whether their firing was legitimate / their reaction to it was appropriate' game, as if it was remotely any of their business.

The only part I disagreed with was the section on being truthful in internal corporate communications. When it comes to firings, being discreet beats being truthful. The only thing the vast majority of people at the company need to know is that the fired person is no longer a coworker. Those who truly need to know more than that probably already do - and if not, they can quietly be told verbally.

Impenetrable corporate BS like "we had a very honest and productive conversation with Zach this morning and decided it was best to part ways" makes me think "oh good, the company is inclined to keep its mouth shut, and I don't need to worry quite as much about defending my reputation." If I'm not Zach but Zach's coworker, I think "whatever happened there (and if I really want to know I can ask around), it's nice that the company's not shit-talking him in public."

On the other hand, an honest internal email like "Greg was fired because he had a fundamental disagreement with our engineering team about the interaction between engineering and product management, and this lingering conflict led to him phoning it in" (to use, like Zack, a complete hypothetical) makes me think "great, I wonder who this is going to be forwarded to, and if the company will be just as mouthy later on to outsiders."

You might disagree, but I'd take the corporate BS version every time.
I think that watering hole analogy is the the best explanation of the online ad industry that I've heard in quite a while.
Ask HN: How to negotiate equity/compensation as first hire?
We just got into an accelerator and I have been with the company for 3-4 months. The company pivoted from b2c to b2b and I helped with product UX, biz dev and some of the website setup stuff.

There are 2 founders with 50/50 equity split. The company just sold 6% to the accelerator.

I have a pretty broad set of skills. I can develop at a jr level, quite good at marketing, accel at strategy and biz dev., and played a non-trivial part in getting into the accelerator as I am pretty good at translating complicated financial and technical concepts into succinct easily understood points.

This helped convince investors that we were providing something valuable, and they could grok these concepts much easier.

The company doesn't have much money ~25k in the bank.

I am asking for:

650 a week salary for next 4 months during accelerator.

new macbook ~1600, I broke mine in NY during the meetings. About $600 of wages owed to me I have agreed to give up so basically this is about $1000 of company money/bonus for me to use. I am going to use it to buy a new macbook to do my job.

80 dollars of software (adobe CS for 4 months)

1% equity award, retroactive 1 year cliff from start date.

1.5% of next funding roud capped at a normal salary ~50-60k. This is to get an actual salary when it is possible for them/the company to pay me.

===============

Is this too much or too little. I don't knoiw exactly how to value myself and I tend to undervalue some of my skills and maybe over value others. I tried to be objective above.

Help would be appreciated. While I have read a bunch of posts, there really is nothing standard about startup equity/compensation. I have a decent skillset, however the founders have much better pedigree than I do. They are pretty technical and have a lot of knowledge about the space. One is an engineer one is finance but also technical. We are in fintech space. I have a very broad skillset, with decent understanding of all of this, not to the depths the founders do though.
Now, if it wrote the code I need for my project it would be the tool I've always wanted. (grin)
Discrimination at Squarespace
This is actually an amazing idea on so many levels. Everyone wins in this model: improved quality of life for the elderly, better housing for young people than they could afford on their own, improved density for city planners, increased social cohesion.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/good-luck-im-behind-7-proxies
dislaimer: my own blog
https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=Why_I_Block_Scripts_and_Ads

> The load time goes from 1.48s, to >45s
Worth it if you need to use a cross-platform desktop framework and don't like java. C++ is most definitely harder to use than many (newer, thus) more modern languages but you will be rewarded by the niceness of Qt.
Brit here. Our laws are weaker, but broadly similar in spirit.

There are some reasons, called, "automatically unfair" reasons, for which you cannot fire a person: e.g. being pregnant, being a member of a union (or refusing to be), refusing to work on Sundays, and general sorts of sexual/religious/racial discrimination. Outside of that, you can dismiss somebody for any reason or no reason within the first 2 years of employment.

After that, you can dismiss a person generally only due to their incompetence, negligence, legal incapacity[1], or because you don't have any work for him to do. You are required to be fair and reasonable, a standard which is generally interpreted in the employee's interests.

One element of the article that seemed particularly off was that he claims he still doesn't know why he was fired. In the UK, you have a legal right to know the company's reason for firing you, and you can sue them if you think they lied about it.

[1] e.g. if a court order prevents the school janitor being within a mile of a school, you can fire him due to being unable to do his job.
My 15 yr old spends lots of time on imgur. He gets news from it, as well as humor and gamer stuff, much like the previous generation got news from The Daily Show, though the imgur news is very much more watered down than what one would get from The Daily Show. He often has a warped sense of what's going on in the world, but he often knows stuff before I do (because it hasn't percolated up on HN or reddit).
It removes them from local government control, which can have good or bad effects. In terms of oversight, the authority is moved from the local government (ultimately chosen by the local voting public), to the nonprofit's board of trustees (ultimately chosen by... well, usually themselves).

The hoped-for good outcome is that they'll be run by competent technocrats who will do a good job while being insulated from politics. The worried-about bad outcome is that entities with no democratic oversight can end up captured by their administrators, and drift increasingly away from the needs/wants of the local population.

In practice, the national government retains some kind of oversight of UK academies, in part because it controls most of their budget. So they can't completely go off into doing whatever they want. But local government no longer does. So another way of looking at it is that the move represents a centralization of educational oversight, removing oversight power from local government authorities and investing it in the national Department for Education instead. In my personal opinion that's the wrong direction; I'd rather have schools be more locally run.
Yep. I too got burned by one. I wonder what the ratio is.
My bank is moving towards a phone app for ATM transactions, no card required. If that happens, goodbye magstrip!