skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look startups aren't perfect. You will most certainly work harder than at a large established firm. Your life balance will be no where near as good as at a large firm.

But why are you electing to work at a startup?

1) You are getting some options and have the possibility of a big upside which does not exist at a large firm.

2) You want more responsibility and you will certainly get it in the form of wearing many hats, but you will work harder.

3) If things are working out you will be promoted faster and move your career forward much quicker than most established firms.

4) There are many other points I could make here but arguably the most IMPORTANT reason to work at a startup is to LEARN, and learn you will.

There are tradeoffs with working at a startup, startups aren't perfect. To say that they are much worse than large corps who are scared of key man risk and keep you at an arms length so they can fire and lay off thousands at a time is disingenuous.

Corporations are generally only after profits big or small. You as an employee have a responsibility to make the right decisions for you.

Edit: some spelling mistakes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LSWau3pTyIg
> Tech workers have no job security.

To generalise in the same manner as the article, they also have no loyalty - job-hopping is more common in tech than any other industry I've seen, excluding perhaps hospitality. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Reusable Rocket Ships (1994)
Exactly. That urge is in most of us. Finding a way to tap it to improve our odds of success I think is one of main takeaways of article.
>Some ideas are obviously good

Are they? Of course everyone thinks their ideas are "obviously good", but testing often proves otherwise. That's the whole point of it.
I love React, but it seems like it would be easier and more productive to use a toolchain that had a much smaller payload (like Mithril, or React-lite), than engineering a solution like this.

If performance and time-to-click was your concern.
Hard to install? It's one command ("pacman -S sagemath") in Arch and three commands in Ubuntu.

Hard to get started with, I can agree with. Despite there being several tutorials, it's not as easy to start using out of the box as Mathematica.
Okay. So we create dedicated bus lanes. And buses have right of way on the traffic light (we have proximity sensor - when bus approaches the light turns green). And we triple the buses on the roads.

This could work and will indeed be cheap.

So the only roadblock is how to disenfranchise the drivers so they would not vote out the administration in a nanosecond. And we may also put to good use the riot and other military gear the police is stockpiling

It is politically impossible.
You'll have to convince China
I think he doesn't need to imply it, firing someone without explanation is bad management, no matter how young or old you are.
> my users probably don't have the CMake 2.8.9.2 that I wrote my build script for

cmake is "pretty good" about exposing policy flags to control compatibility.
I didn't get that from the article. The author's friend was 31 when she joined the company, not much older than her 28 year old manager. To me it illustrates the churn at the company. The 28-year old manager will probably be fired - excuse me I mean "graduated" - by a 20-something manager after a few years.
I found this in my collection of papers, the article on the DC-X is on page 49 and it talks about how re-usable rockets are going to change the world, 22 years before they actually start to change the world. Always useful to keep in mind the promise vs the reality of new technologies.
Amazon is new Walmart.

They don't care that you don't like their work environment.They have money; you need money and have little options.

I think instead of being interested in recycling talent; Amazon is interested in those who will take the most abuse.
I did read all of that. To me, the system seems inferior to tup, which they discuss (tup doesn't require me to specify dependencies, which I consider a killer feature). Also, tup works on windows, while that paper suggests Shake doesn't.
It's a huge social/economic issue though. The people who can afford self-driving cars in our lifetime are not (usually) the same people taking the subway to work every day.
> Given the choice, I think I’d rather make furniture.

So go start making furniture.
Having worked at a few startups I can relate to what the writer is saying (although I do agree the article is a bit slanted). It happens a lot in the tech world under the guise of "thinking differently" about management. I agree that age shouldn't matter, until you're 10-15 years older than your Manager who is completely out of their element, has no clue what they're doing, and you spend every day wondering how the fk they got the promotion in the first place.
This is the main reason for sprawl. It's not racism, politics, or any other bs agenda. People like having a yard, a garage, quiet neighbors, small schools, etc...

As someone who grew up on 5 acres of land, knew every neighbor I had personally, and never heard a single siren wizz by, I can attest to there being some benefit to that lifestyle.
Not only that, but the rail project will be finished right around the time autonomous vehicles are coming online. Nothing about any aspect of either mass transit or personal transportation will be the same after that.

It's insane to start a new rail project at this point in time, IMO. Total waste of money.
it's not in the least bit funny and the author is not implying that a 28 year old can't be a good manager. The author is comparing 1980's, 1990's tech work and now, and is making a point that amongst other observations, its also a new phenomenon for a younger person now in the tech world to be a manager to older staffers.
Even with perfect software how could cars, self-driven or otherwise, ever compete with rail? A four-track rail system has a per-track throughput of 100000 people per hour. Freeways can get 2000 cars per hour per lane, and an average of 1.6 people per car works out to only 3200 people per hour. That's the theoretical best. Actual roadways never approach this figure.
> So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life.

That's about 1.4 times the median household income in Chile. You can have a pretty good middle class life in the US at 1.4 times the median household income too.
> A very important part of pledge's design is that a parent can be more restricted than its child. This isn't a sandboxing mechanism. It's intended to mitigate the dangers of some other vulnerability leading to remote code execution. With pledge, even if you get into the system you may not be able to make all the syscalls you need.

ISTM this will just slightly raise the bar so that attackers who get code execution have to force a call to execve.

On the other hand, it avoids needing to worry about all the setuid issues that Linux's seccomp avoids using PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS.
Would you say companies the size of Amazon, Netflix and HubSpot still fall into that bucket?

To me they are large tech companies that have kept some sort of startup canon in place, and not in a good way.
Unless you redefine remote, not really.
I think they were trying to imply that the 28 year old was an "undertrained" manager:

>UNFORTUNATELY, working at a start-up all too often involves getting bossed around by undertrained (or untrained) managers and fired on a whim. Bias based on age, race and gender is rampant, as is sexual harassment.
Markdown stored in git with script auto-pushing changes/new files to github. Just:

$ git clone https://github.com/rofrol/m1ndmap

$ cd m1ndmap

$ npm i

$ npm run watch
Is that anything very surprising though. Surely similar things have been expressed a lot elsewhere. Even the very basic normal distribution tells us something similar as well. So I don't think it really helps a lot in any way. I'd only say that 90% might be too extreme a number for "crap". You may say they just fell short of being magnificent but "rubbish" is really an overstatement.
Interesting article and very contrasting opinion. It's hard for me to agree with most of it though, but I might simply be too closed minded.

A few notes:

>I should admit that we still A/B test some ideas. Rather than adhering to a strict A/B testing process, we let our team to A/B test ideas they're curious about.

The idea is that you don't test everything in the first place, only test things where your thinking is "My hypothesis is that changing or adding feature X will improve certain metrics" -- and in those cases, you a/b test. Else you aren't really proving that you're right or wrong. If it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, why implement feature X at all? If it's a qualitative improvement, it doesn't make sense to a/b test it.

>3) Performance
>Related to lost conversions, A/B testing tools make your site slower and this also reduces your conversion rate--even for the control. The additional conversions you lose because of this performance hit are another, often ignored, cost of A/B testing.

You should probably be using a different tool if it makes your site slower.

>5) Speed
>A/B testing slows down your organization's decision making. Some ideas are obviously good and adhering to a strict A/B testing process reduces your time to go live. Time is finite and the number of improvements you implement per year has a major impact on your growth trajectory.

It's impressive that growth is simply a factor of time within this company. This makes sense only if their average production decision making has a positive impact on growth/conversion rates as a factor of time.

>You can monitor your long term conversion trend rather easily via Google Analytics to gauge if you're making good decisions.

Yes, but that would be very unactionable. If the growth is going up, you pat yourself on the back and say "I'm clever" and if it isn't you say "I suck". But since you don't know which decisions or what the real reason is for conversion going up or down, you don't know what the fundamental metrics are that drive your growth up or down. You basically say "I don't care why things are going well" or even lie to yourself and say "Things are going well because I make good decisions."

Growth is not just about growing, but about knowing why you are growing and using that knowledge to find new ways to grow. If you know the fundamentals about what drives your growth, you also know which things you can or cannot change without affecting growth.
> Does anyone have more context on Dan Lyons?

Look up "Fake Steve Jobs", it was a great read back in its day. He stopped the blog when it became apparent that Jobs was mortally ill.

Pretty good insights into the "Silicon Valley" pathological culture.

(It has long since mutated astonishingly from the simple Fairchild seed that named it.)
Oh, I totally agree. There are lots of fun/nice tri clubs and I met a lot of great lifelong friends and great people while enjoying the sport. I certainly don't think that everyone who does tris is a rich douchebag. Just that there are SOME people like that, and their "loud personalities" can suck up all the oxygen in the room sometimes.

I'll probably get back into it because there is lots I miss about training, I just needed a break and have been enjoying the ultra scene for now.
I agree with this quite a bit.

I'd like to see a US city facing traffic/growth problems right now really embrace BRT[0].

To me it seems like the pragmatic solution, given the already extensive freeway networks in most US cities, and the incredible capital outlay required to get any sort of rail system up and running, not to mention the 20+ year timelines.

But I think most Americans have a much stronger stigma of buses than subways, so maybe it's just too uncool for the US to ever embrace.

[0]: Bus Rapid Transit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit
If you lived in Seattle and ever had to ride the #8 bus, you wouldn't say this:

* Yelp reviews for the #8 (1.5 stars): https://www.yelp.com/biz/seattle-metro-route-8-seattle

* CHS: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/05/the-bus-stop-the-8...

* Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2ex4q6/the_no8_bus...

The recent split of some parts of the 8 help, but the greatest remaining issue with it is that Denny is constantly gridlocked, and the 8 is stuck in traffic.

Regarding dedicated lanes: there's literally nowhere to put a dedicated bus lane on Denny. It's just never going to happen. A gondola from Capitol Hill to SLU will happen before this does.
this might come as a .. surprise to you, but the entire news and media business basically exists for this purpose.
I've interviewed at a couple like that, but never worked at one. They are present, but there isn't enough of any 'one kind of place' for any description to be representative.
Sometimes I wish the euphemism "grooming the backlog" was required to be called "making a wish list". I guess that wouldn't sound managerial enough.
That would require a change to the current economic model, the comment I replied to seems to indicate that Automation was not a threat to demand at all, but if everyone is out of work, demand for non-essential goods will be 0, no one will want a iphone if they do not have food.

So Automation is a threat to both supply and demand...
No, Lyons is drastically exaggerating and overstating. Perhaps that's what it was like at HubSpot, but I've worked for four different tech startups and only one of them has exhibited even an inkling of Lyons' description. Even there, I would never compare it to a frat house, kindergarten, or Scientology. More like management makes kool-aid and a handful of people think it's wine.
Your site's tirade against "broken encryption" is weird. You do know that no major desktop browser uses OpenSSL, right?
The article reverses the cause and effect of Massachusetts' divide between the wealthy and the worker in order to lay the cause at the feed of the Democratic Party. Take the examples: Universities, Banks, and Large Companies (Mills in the past, Pharma today) were dominant well before the Democratic Party become dominant [1], and were not somehow made powerful as the result of Democratic policies alone. We've really always has a "________ of the rich", where the blank is either "liberalism" or "conservatism" depending on the current party in power.
Show HN: Zeno, cursor binary search with Vim-like bindings
"I see the whole thing as a declaration from Putin to Russia"

After thinking about it, I think you're right on this. I'm evaluating it as bad international PR when it's probably more internal propaganda.
There are a lot of companies trying to fill female quotas these days though
Recent Developments in Artificial Intelligence
I feel like the problem is that people hate contrived examples. "You have to choose whether to kill one person to save five." Well, I don't want that choice, so the first thing I'm going to do is look for alternatives that don't kill anybody. In the hypothetical that isn't allowed but in real life it is. A sufficiently clever person can in many cases figure out a way to save everybody, and either way the person who tries is justifiably more valued than the person who doesn't.

So what's wrong isn't choosing to save five people at the expense of one, it's the easy acceptance of killing anyone as a reasonable option.
Snowden: Surveillance is about “social control,” not terrorism
Knuth has a point. Although I use email and couldn't work without it, I think we haven't yet realized email's insidious invasion of our world, and its pernicious change of our work habits. Suddenly the Inbox has become a tyrant dictating our daily schedule. Since when do others have priority over our time and attention, expecting immediate replies to their intrusions?

Companies and organizations have not yet grasped the negative impact on productivity that email has wrought. Like drinking from lead goblets in another era, it's going to be a while before we get it. We need email, but it needs to be put in its place.
> The US doesn't have the tense history with Nationalism that Germany does.

Not yet anyway.
Slack opens up its Trello board so you can see what it's going to build next
Multiple.js – exp. of sharing background over multiple elements by pure CSS/HTML
Soundcloud: Introducing SoundCloud JavaScript SDK 3.0.0
Introducing Rate Limits
Open-sourcing LightCycle for Android
You're searching for a good adhominem attack, coming up empty, and asking for the startup community's help in taking him down.
Engineering for Nostalgia: Building a Personalized “On This Day” Experience
Breaking ground at Clonee
Mobile Scale London recap
Not all startups are like this, the author is bitter about his experience.
> ...how can you treat the other party seriously if they put such ridiculous, childish demands like 'no brown M&M" in contract?

If you don't know what you're doing, you won't treat the other party seriously. This is a strong signal to the other party that you don't know what you're doing and SHOULD be avoided.

If -however- you do know what you're doing, then you take the other party seriously even when you come across such demands because (as shawn-furyan said):

> Those sort of riders are a sentinel to signal that the venue read the contract carefully... If they caught the brown M&M's thing, they probably got all the stuff about rigging safety, so you don't have to grill them on those things. Otherwise, you'd better double check.
Dan Lyons was Fake Steve Jobs, then was a gadget writer where he was a frequent doomsayer of Apple and complained endlessly about the lack of access and review units Apple gave him. When he left that job and went to an advertising startup it was assumed that he'd just burned all of his tech writing bridges and had to resort to writing ad copy, but looking back I'd say it's a fair shot that he wanted an angle to write about startups so he took a job at one.
Facebook: Open Compute Project U.S. Summit 2016 – Facebook News Recap
Facebook: OpenBMC: One board management software for all hardware at Facebook
Facebook: Facebook Boston Tech Talk: GraphQL
I just don't get excited about such far off future stuff. It's neat, but until it's actually here, or at least imminent, it's nothing more than neat. I feel the same way about SpaceX's BFR and MCT.

I'm not judging BO, I'm sure they know what they're doing and their future plans look pretty good from what I know. But given the large difference in current achievements, I'd hope it wouldn't be too big of a surprise why someone would get excited about what SpaceX is doing but not BO.
Airbnb: Caravel: Airbnb’s data exploration platform
That sounds like it's more about the manager having no clue than their age.
I made this because my crappy little laptop's trackpad is awful to use. Maybe some other people can make good use of this/can help fix some issues/think it's interesting?

After finals are over I'll probably fix up some of the minor issues.
Great interview, thanks for the link. Edited my comment above with a bit of your thinking. Thanks!
Introducing Lightning: A Flexible NVMe JBOF
Performance Scale 2016 recap
Opening designs for 6-pack and Wedge 100
Building for Trust
Architecting a Machine Learning System for Risk
AirMapView: A View Abstraction for Maps on Android
Airbnb: Using R packages and education to scale Data Science at Airbnb
Maintaining Quality at Scale
Airpal: A Web UI for PrestoDB
I don't have 3G at work. I work in an office building <100 miles from silicon valley.
Uber: Uber Engineering Bug Bounty: The Treasure Map
Different resolutions in different "screens". Each screen is pretty much a separate workspace that takes up the full width and will hold one or more windows, but can be dragged up and down so you can have multiple visible.

Here's an example [1]. DigiPaint used one screen for the toolbars, so it was independent of the image you were working on (unlike e.g. DeluxePaint). Here's a video showing screen dragging in AROS (which reimplements the Amiga API like MorphOS, but also runs on everything from original Amigas - with some limitatons - to Raspberry Pi or x86 PCs, both native and hosted under Linux) [2]. On non-Amiga platforms the different screens can't have different resolutions, though.

[1] http://don64738.deviantart.com/art/DigiPaint-Fashion-3371985...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKCHZFYj9Kk
Google: Genomic Data Processing on Google Cloud Platform
It would cost $200m to add tracks to the 520 bridge, and there's an existing 100 foot wide right-of-way from Renton to Bothell. I.e. for less than a billion and a couple years, the trackage could be more than doubled, and more than double the communities served.

The fact that this is not part of the 25 year $50b plan means something is terribly broken about Seattle's mass transit plan.
There are many different kinds of startups.
This is correct. However, it's still strane to mention ages in this context.

Just replace age descriptions with race descriptions to see how weird and out of place that is.

> She was white, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her latino manager that she had two weeks to get out.
You can but it's extremely, extremely rare for the very simple fact that your primary skills as a manager is people skills and the ability to relate to other peoples situation. Something you normally won't be as developed at that point.

At 28 you have more experience than a 18 year old, but not much and def not enough to be able to relate to a 35 year old person in most cases.

So not sure I find it ironic. Rather I can relate as I have seen my share of managers and been myself for the last 22 years.

And yes older managers have problems too :)
I have a certain level of discomfort with embellished storytelling presented as journalism (think Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson though I don't put Dan at that level). And, in his book, Dan makes some cracks that are arguably reverse-ageist. That said, I find it's a cogent perspective even if it probably shouldn't be taken as literally accurate reportage.
Dedicated bus lanes (Bus Rapid Transit) has its own weaknesses, particularly in pre-built up urban areas. To make the best of your system, you need 4 lanes wide of dedicated bus space at the stops, or else you get really inefficient performance, that WILL NOT SCALE.

At that point, once you've discovered that tunneling is the only option to get effective mass transit through your downtown core area, then you may as well just go light rail, since tunneling costs so much already anyways - may as well give the system a higher capacity ceiling, and higher speed.
No I'm not. I'm looking for more information, because I don't want to buy into outlandish-sounding PR articles on their basis alone. While you were writing this comment, I was editing my comment with insights from the interview that @CPLX linked to ;) and I agree with him.
> Freeways can get 2000 cars per hour per lane

I'm missing something, in a single lane at 60mph you would be able to get ((60 * 1608)/5) (assuming car is 5m long) = 19296.

If we assume that there is 5m of seperation between every car (possible when all cars are automatically driven and communicate with each other) that's still 10k cars an hour.

4 lane highway, 40k an hour, assuming occupancy at 1.6 that's 64000 an hour.

Human driven no way, we are too unpredictable and react far too slowly to safely drive in that way but computers probably could.
Seattle already has a pretty expansive bus network, including express busses and a combined light-rail/bus tunnel.

And yet... the roads are still gridlocked.