skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Switching from tech startup to finance, dumb move?
Hi HN

I was the first engineer at a tech startup in SV and, after building and leading an engineering team and scaling the company to ~40 people, I was passed on for a promotion, since the founder decided to bring in an experienced VP of engineering to take on the majority of my activities. I don't have anything against this new guy (except that he is not a very talented leader IMHO), but what disappoints me is that I have been completely excluded from every "leadership/management" task without being given any constructive feedback, and I am just expected to quietly switch to an individual contributor role after 3+ years of leading major initiatives.

The whole thing has been very ego-crushing for me, so I made my resume circulate through the help of a well connected recruiter in order to keep my options open. I got in touch with two very famous hedge funds for a backoffice role (cloud computing stuff: modern infrastructure management, rearchitecting of legacy applications, containers, ...) and the interviews have been very mature (no Google style). I got an offer from both places, they are localed in NYC and Chicago so I would have to move.

I have fundamentally two questions:

- What to do with the reasonable number of options I have vested

- Is this really a good career move? Am I just going to be extremely disappointed in a few months? FWIW, I worked in big enterprises before, but software was their core business, never trading/finance

Current employment numbers (startup):

- Salary: 160k

- Bonus: ~10k a year

- Equity: ~1% as ISO (after dilutions), of which I currently vested 80% (the startup is definitely on an upwards trajectory, at the moment exercising those options and paying the AMT tax would cost me around ~100k or more)

New offer by the hedge funds (they are pretty much comparable):

- Salary: 200k

- Bonus:

- 200k a year (minimum guaranteed by the contract, every year)

- 50k sign-on + relocation bonus

Thank you!
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments. We have to ban accounts that continue like this.
"Lobbyists" is just the label attached to the people who give input. Yes, they're professionals and yes, this is where the corruption happens, but that's just the nature of seeking input.

You surely don't expect companies to not advocate for themselves and be wholly altruistic? A lobbyist is paid to advocate for their client's interests. Sometimes that aligns with the public interest, most of the time it's a grey area.

There are plenty of opportunities for corruption in the interaction and those need to be addressed; rebranding 'lobbyists' isn't one of them.
> Wouldn't that beep every time you run a command?

It's up to the terminal emulator to do what it wants with the beep character. Technically, it's up to whoever has to display the character; if you're running bash at a tty — an actual terminal — then the kernel gets to decide what to do, so it beeps, since there is little else it could choose to do.

Terminal emulators, on the other hand, know they aren't actually in a limited environment and can do a lot more than playing a sound. That's why there's such a thing as "visual bell" among terminal emulators. Some highlight the tab title upon visual bell, Konsole merely sends a notification if a bell occurs.

----

> And/or interfere with any programs that use the beep for their own purposes?

I don't quite understand what you mean here. There isn't any way for arbitrary programs to listen for / wait for / register callbacks for the beep.

If you're thinking about the `\a` in `$PS1` ... well, PS1 is shown only when bash runs as an interactive process.

Also, the beep control in ALSA is muted by default.
The issue is not acceleration front/back, which can be dealt with in design and is fairly stable and consistent, but acceleration as much as 0.5G side/side, which is also more intermittent and against which it's difficult to build seats that would protect customers.
Can you not think of a topic where you have a clear point of view but can write in an unbiased way?

For example, I can give novice programmers a reasonably unbiased overview of the strengths and weaknesses of various programming languages, even ones I don't favor myself. I can also talk happily about the flaws in the languages I personally prefer.

I see people do this pretty often with things like cities they've lived in, restaurants, books, and movies. Anybody who works at it a bit can do it. You just have to be able to distance yourself a bit from your preferences, to learn how to make an intellectual case that cuts against your biases.

So yeah, I've read The Economist for something like 30 years, and I think they do a good job of having a strong viewpoint without skewing their coverage much because of it. In particular, I think they keep their opinion-y activities well contained in the leaders and regular columns. The news still has a fair bit of viewpoint (e.g., numerical, humanistic, skeptical, and, well, economics-focused), but rarely do I find them shading the facts or juggling the numbers to force an outcome, which is what I mean by bias.
On my MBP, I can get about 6-7 hours of low-intensity use out of VS Code or Clion, which is pretty unconscionable because I think slowly and most of that time is just waiting for keystrokes. I get about 8-9 with graphical Emacs (with autocomplete, etc). I get about 11 using Emacs on a remote server over ssh. Auto complete, etc, works fine on the terminal.
"The challenges of maintaining a closed vacuum pipe that spanned a mere 17 miles were vast and expensive."

The vacuum level required for a particle accelerator (10^-11 torr or something like that) and the one posited for the Hyperloop (0.75 torr) are so far apart that they have virtually nothing in common.
There are only 3 variables with a "no-" prefix, but 30+ starting with "inhibit-"...
I remember talks of propping up underground rails as internet of things, literally pushing things instead of data toward any place automatically. I'd love to test this.
> I have yet to see a device which will claim that it support Linux.

I may have misunderstood this, but System76[0] specifically make 'designed for nix' desktops and laptops.

[0] https://system76.com/
The SIM, being a physical piece of hardware plugged into my phone, could easily be used as an attack vector for my phone company to root my phone. Hardware plugged into my phone is a much more vulnerable attack surface than control of network traffic.
This is true, but I believe current American journalism has additional problems beyond the generic ones. For those interested, I strongly recommend Jay Rosen's blog:

http://pressthink.org/

For example, his latest piece discusses areas where political coverage should not be neutral:

http://pressthink.org/2016/10/campaign-press-not-neutral-tow...

Saying, e.g., that they should be for deliberation and voter participation, while being against opacity and demagoguery.

And I strongly recommend his critiques of the View from Nowhere. E.g.: http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question...
Harder to make errors, easier to modify.

But what you said is true too.
Hypothetically, the vacuum tube gives you energy efficiency.

Drag power is proportional to the cube of velocity, so drag energy losses over a fixed distance are proportional to the square.

In an ideal world you're paying a fixed cost per unit time to pump the tube down then you shove as much stuff as you can through it at transsonic speed, catch it all with regenerative brakes at the other end, and pay an energy per kg payload cost lower than electric road vehicles.

Of course in practice that fixed cost may turn out astronomically high, but that's the idea.
The Samsung Gear VR is available and has been on the market for several months.
That setting is still there.

System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options > Scrolling > Without Inertia

System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Mouse Options > Scrolling > Without Inertia
I also like SuitSupply. Highly recommend.
I bet he would like the Apollo 11 Experience:

http://immersivevreducation.com/the-apollo-11-experience/
Yet the modern world decided to go back on that.

The principle being that you are not (as) responsible for what you do under duress.
Whatever it is, you can be certain that the solution is massive taxation and central control by bureaucrats.
Are you kidding?

Interpolated strings are awesome. Only problem is that they weren't introduced in python 3.1 so you could drop the f
What I'm really curious about is what changed between the era of yellow journalism and the mid-twentieth century. I absolutely agree that people hearkening back to print journalism as a time when everything was fact-checked and reliable are mistaken, but it really does seem that journalism now is more sensationalist than in the recent past, just not the distant past. That means that print isn't the answer; there's something else to a society that makes its reporting either good or bad. What is it? Corporate power? General partisanship?
Ask HN: Mechanical keyboards for programming
What are the best mechanical keyboards for programming currently available in market?

I've got my eyes on the Das Prime 13.
> A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids.

Oh, I love the last point. I've met people like this - who are atheists for the same reason others are religious - because that's what they were taught and/or because it's cool these days. Religion vs. atheism in general population is not really about independent thinking - in general, people are equally poor at this, whether believers or non-believers.

> evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.

I think you need to have a proper "thinking framework" to explain it well. Like e.g. evolution seems awesome only until you get the feel of just how many checks it does to get to its goal. If you could do half as many checks yourself in a similar timeframe, you'd solve your problem yourself, along with countless others. Or with Bayesian filters, at some point you need to get the feel of how things are connected to one another via causality, and then it stops being a surprise[0].

What I'd wish people would do is to stop trying to score cheap shots off one another. I.e. there's a difference between believing in evolution as a a process and evolution as the only source of all the life around us. For the former, the very phenomenon, you need only:

- ability for a thing to make copies of itself

- ability of an environment to make changes on the blueprint of those copies

That's it. You have those two things, you have evolution by definition. It's a trivial thing to accept once you understand how it works (which sadly, schools tend to not explain well). On the other hand, I sympathize with people who have troubles accepting that this very phenomenon could by itself create all life we know, ourselves included. Ultimately it boils down to whether you trust "science" or "religion" more, and frankly, there's plenty of reasons to distrust both nowadays. Keep in mind that for a typical person, science is not just GPS and cars and cell phones, it's also (and primarily) all the utter bullshit they read in science sections of newspapers and magazines.

--

[0] - Tangentially, it also makes you realize that you can only get away with a lie because the party that's being lied to doesn't bother to check things - things are connected together via causal links on so many levels that you really can't tell a perfect lie. Personally, it also makes me believe that the quest for privacy is a moot thing, because it again only depends on how much people bother to dig out the information they want; technology is only making the process of looking at causal links easier and faster.
Elon Musk had zero experience building cars, yet he made Tesla happen. Perhaps a high intellect and a good general purpose engineering training can accomplish more than you think.

You, on the other hand, are overwhelmed by the challenge of maintaining vacuum in a tube that spans a mere 17 miles. At the very least, you should restrain yourself from using language like "...some idea he farted out...".
The tolerances on each part must be very tight. If there is a single flaw in one part, the whole vacuum fails. The challenges become exponentially greater as you scale up the diameter of the pipe, since the force on the pipe is proportional to the square of the radius. The LHC had a 50mm diameter pipe, the hyperloop proposes an 8+ foot diameter. You do the math.
uBlock Origin, sigh.
The keys are screens. They won't need the caps to distort the e-ink images.
If you have a PS4 the PS VR with VR Worlds game includes a steet luge game. Not quite skate boating but rolling downhill on a street.
OEM software quality is so diverse that they can't be trusted to execute something as sensitive as identity.

It also is a classic telco hedge.

Step 1) We need towers to make this thing work. Let's build towers.

Step 2) These towers are super expensive and make the expense amortization complicated. Let's sell the towers and then lease from the buyer.

Step 3) oh crap. There is no encryption and people are cloning handsets. Let's use SIM cards to separate sensitive operations from the rest of the device.

Step 4) manufacturing sims is complicated. Let's buy sims from other suppliers and make them sign off on unlimited liability clauses if their identity solution is compromised.

It is all about two things:
Preventing a single player from having too much power on the ecosystem and transferring financial risk. There is no evil plan. It's all rather mundane.
> The economics of minimum wage among 'respectable' economists is debated in a similar way that the global warming "controversy" is debated by big oil.

I know climate scientists are pretty much agreed on global warming. I thought economists disagreed about minimum wage still. That Wikipedia page seems to suggest that more and more economists are supporting a minimum wage over time, but there is still not a consensus. Does that sound right to you?

> Right, if you particularly wanted to avoid cutting into the profits of companies like Walmart, there are other ways you could top up incomes.

I was just trying to make a technical point about the existence of alternatives to the minimum wage. Many of the people who advocate these alternatives have good intentions about helping people in need.
I don't think he was alone in this, if he says it was hard, I'd assume it was hard for a whole team of world class physicists and engineers.
Career change from tech startup to finance, dumb move?
Hi HN

I was the first engineer at a tech startup in SV and, after building and leading an engineering team and scaling the company to ~40 people, I was passed on for a promotion, since the founder decided to bring in an experienced VP of engineering to take on the majority of my activities. I don't have anything against this new guy (except that he is not a very talented leader IMHO), but what disappoints me is that I have been completely excluded from every "leadership/management" task without being given any constructive feedback, and I am just expected to quietly switch to an individual contributor role after 3+ years of leading major initiatives.

The whole thing has been very ego-crushing for me, so I made my resume circulate through the help of a well connected recruiter in order to keep my options open. I got in touch with two very famous hedge funds for a backoffice role (cloud computing stuff: modern infrastructure management, rearchitecting of legacy applications, containers, ...) and the interviews have been very mature (no Google style). I got an offer from both places, they are localed in NYC and Chicago so I would have to move.

I have fundamentally two questions:

- What to do with the reasonable number of options I have vested

- Is this really a good career move? Am I just going to be extremely disappointed in a few months? FWIW, I worked in big enterprises before, but software was their core business, never trading/finance

Current employment numbers (startup):

- Salary: 160k

- Bonus: ~10k a year

- Equity: ~1% as ISO (after dilutions), of which I currently vested 80% (the startup is definitely on an upwards trajectory, at the moment exercising those options and paying the AMT tax would cost me around ~100k or more)

New offer by the hedge funds (they are pretty much comparable):

- Salary: 200k

- Bonus:

- 200k a year (minimum guaranteed by the contract, every year)

- 50k sign-on + relocation bonus

Thank you!
> Because the Islamic golden age ended when their cities were razed by the mongols to the ground.

That was certainly part of it, but it was also because they managed to burn through the cultural & intellectual capital they had captured from Persia, Byzantium & North Africa. They Islamic Golden Age was much the same as the golden year one might experience if one stopped saving and burnt through all of one's savings in 12 months.

I don't know what Crusade-fuelled revisionism you might be referring to; I think that in the Middle Ages folks gave credit to the Dar al-Islam for the classical learning it captured from Persia, Byzantium & North Africa.
Question: What do you use to keep your work and freelance calendars in sync?
I have a few clients, and email / calendars for each. It gets old having to manually look to see when I'm free and coordinate meetings, "Yes, Thursday at 3 PM should work for me..." type stuff.

Of course I already shared access so I could see my schedule, but that's not ideal either as it forces me to make all of my accounts known to each of my accounts... if I forget to disable it after a job, then whoever takes over my account would see all that information. I don't love the idea of sharing my client list.

Ideally what I would like is to have a 3rd party service I could tie into... and it would manage all of my accounts and keep them in sync. When I was busy on one calendar, it would create a "BUSY" event (with no other details) on all of the other calendars.

What are other people using, does anyone have anything like this or any suggestions for how to manage multiple calendars? I want every client to just be able to look at my calendar in their system and know if I'm free for a meeting or not, and be able to book it without manual communication.
> Cloudflare is made for a site that serves up web pages with some content like your logo, a few images, etc.

For an interesting counter-example: 4chan (including its image-CDN subdomain!) is served through CloudFlare. It seems that CloudFlare really is willing to host and distribute multiple petabytes of image content per month, as long as it's for the sake of something else (e.g. pages of threaded conversation) that's not an "online storage space."

Though, I think in 4chan's case it might also help that pages and their image resources both get expired off of the site quite quickly. You can create a page that hotlinks image URLs from 4chan's CDN subdomain, but the correspondent resources at those URLs won't be there five hours later, so there's little point to doing so. Unlike most image-hosts one could name.
Try a revenue neutral carbon tax.
Part of the reason is gravitational effects. When a large amount of ice melts, the Earth's gravity is shifted away from that region.

This gives you a sense of the absolutely huge amount of ice we're talking about. For example, if the West Antarctic Ice Shelf collapses we'll see about 10 metres of sea level rise, but mostly in the northern hemisphere. To underline just how much ice this is, this effect will slowly be counteracted as the ground below slowly rebounds (as it no longer has a huge amount of ice crushing it down from above).
The Stakes Are Rising in Google’s Antitrust Fight with Europe
You may remember an incident with Transmission recently. That was a bundled mac ransomware.

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2016/03/first-mac-r...
Eh, I tend to forget the FA Cup and the FL Cup - after all, major clubs will happily sack managers who can "just" win one of those in a season (like Van Gaal last year)...
I'd say that for a typical religious person, "theory of evolution" as a source of life is akin to saying "Einstein's theory predicted gravity bends light, therefore my sun burn was really caused by a black hole over at Proxima Centauri". There's kind of a huge gap to cover between directly testable predictions and what's trying to be explained. So it boils down to whether or not you believe a complex chain of reasoning made by smart people, and there's plenty of things that can influence what you believe and who you trust.
Given that the Hyperloop is failing spectacularly, "a high intellect and a good general purpose engineering training" seem empirically to not accomplish quite as much as you think they do -- although, in fairness to high intellect and good general purpose engineering training, there was never any real reason to think that they'd be able to accomplish magic.
> I Rome had succeeded (or China, or Persia, or the Mayans), I suspect one consequence might be we'd be now well into discovering the intracacies of long-term remediation from industrial CO2-induced greenhouse warming of the planet.

Or the intricacies of surviving in a post-nuclear world!
I'm looking forward to an extremely-typed language, where in addition to the usual types, more specific types can be defined with regex expressions, sub-ranges, even function-based rules, etc.

Such extra-strong typing would lead to much more robust program and reduce complexity of testing
The LHC has lower pressure than Hyperloop is supposed to have (1E-7 pascal, reading http://www.lhc-closer.es/taking_a_closer_look_at_lhc/0.high_... versus 100 pascal, reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Theory_and_operati...)

Still quite challenging, but not in the same league, even considering that hyperloop requires way longer tunnels.
That is actually a valid point, Musk only proposes a partial vacuum which is a lot different from a pure vacuum. However, I think that is still a lot to ask for heavily used transit infrastructure.
The Hyperloop will operate at about 15 psi pressure differential maximum (i.e., one atmosphere).

The Alaska Pipeline is certified to operate at 1,180 psi.

It's not a problem, and minor leaks are not a problem, either. A leak that would stop a particle accelerator dead in its tracks will just make a hyperloop operate at slightly lower efficiency. Plus you can always just run the pump (any practical design will doubtless have the pumps running continously to make up for leakage, just as many ships and buildings have continuously-running bilge and sump pumps).
It's easily 10 years too late for that.