skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: From tech startup to finance. Bad 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!
If you are willing to pay the ransomware demands who are you going to pay when your HDD fails? I'm not saying ransomware isn't a problem in itself but from a user's perspective it's indistinguishable from HDD failure and should be dealt with by using backups.
Maybe ClojureScript.
My mistake. I only see a few outcomes then. #1 happens then #2

#1 |------|
#2 |--------|

and #2 happens before #1

#1 |-------|
#2 |---------|

or #1 starts then #2 starts:

#1 |-------------|
#2 |------------|

or #1 starts before #2 and finishes before #2

#1 |---------------------|
#2 |----------|

For two channels are are 8 possibilities in all. https://oeis.org/A079144
Of course you can design a type system that has objects and also segregates effects. The question is whether that would be particularly helpful for structuring a program if you're trying to write explicitly in the OOP paradigm.

Functional programming is a paradigm, and it emphasizes the segregation of effects. OOP traditionally does not.
You might find this interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI - David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech

It's well worth the 22 minutes, IMO.
I liked Elixir, other than it wasn't statically typed, but I found the ecosystem quite young which means you will have to spend a bunch of time purely keeping your code up to date with libraries as they change and if your tech integration doesn't exist, you are on your own.

After a bit of consideration, I figured F# makes more sense for me. It has a large ecosystem covering many technologies, its all moving to open source / any platform. It also has lightweight processes, and lots of tooling.
It's alright, and it's well taken. The cardboard setups are a clever hack, and the extension into Gear VR et al. is interesting, but I'm looking for something more immersive if possible.
Just to make sure everyone reading this can follow along: you are probably suggesting using Emacs on the X windowing system on OS X (which would of course require XQuartz to be running).

And by "problematic keybindings" you probably mean how most graphical Emacs packages on OS X use the Command modifier key to set the meta bit.

But Mitsuhara Emacs (or emacs-mac as you refer to it) lets you assign any "Emacs modifier bit" (control, meta, alt, hyper or super) to any of OS X's modifier keys (namely, control, option, command or fn) except for the shift key.

So for example if you're on a Macbook, but you are used to the key on the bottom left's being a control key, you would add (setq mac-function-modifier 'control) to your .emacs.

To use the option key as your meta key, (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta).

>The traditional x port flickers a bit

None of the other ports you mention have ever flickered in my experience. And running Emacs under X has the disadvantage that Emacs ends up looking quite different typographically than native OS X apps do.
> If your ISP provider says "unlimited data" does that mean you can funnel the traffic of Russia through your internet connection?

I mean, yeah. Unmetered+uncapped bandwidth is a dumb idea that creates bad incentives, and anyone offering it deserve to be punished by abusers until they rescind their offer.

If people can't proxy all of Russia through your LTE data plan—or serve a billion image hotlinks per day through your caching reverse-proxy—then you should put that in the contracts you make them sign. That's what contracts are for. Say precisely where you're drawing the line, or you don't get to complain when people act as if you haven't drawn one.
Anecdotally one of my Engineering lecturers at university was an expert on human logistics. (i.e the physical queuing of people) I remember talking to her about a project she was working on with a large retail chain advising them on how to funnel people through store checkouts more efficiently.
"Once again a long time has gone by in which I have not been able to concentrate on the slightest thing -- I will now try to get started again"

"Eternal child"

It strikes me that Kierkegaard had ADD as discussed here goo.gl/otcRc6

A little tongue-in cheek, but could Existentialism ≈ ADD

Existential angst may not entirely derive from "a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility" but could be the call of the real world to a distracted soul.

Can explain a few other things:

Camus' car crash

Sartre sending his Nobel rejection letter too late for the decision

Litres of coffee consumed and cartons of Gauloise smoked
Ah, I see what you mean :/

EDIT:

Wait, if the walls were made to be near frictionless, then the aggregate energy, minus what's lost to hear from turbulence, would be used for motion, right?
That's my point...there is a gap in information.
Generally the less like a server your computer is, the less nice the driver support. I have a Xeon workstation with a nvidia quatro graphics card at work and it has been rock solid for years. The same cannot be said of my laptop.
Maybe I'm daft but one suggested itself to me: if you add more very cold water locally, that influences the temperature and pressure/density differentials with existing currents. It's presumably the effect on those currents that causes more water to build up elsewhere.
Is there a programming language/research area dedicated to the transitioning of one library API to the next?

For example, I depend on Foo v1, and would like to upgrade to Foo v2. Currently mainstream languages either use a type system to indicate the upgrade was unsuccessful (can't catch everything, and still require the user to patch things), or allow the user to muddle along, knowing things might break subtly but not enough to be "bothersome" (e.g. node ecosystem).

So one Foo upgrade is costing O(n) in refactoring cost where n = dependents of Foo. Given enough patience the Foo author could make an adaptor between v1 and v2 to reduce it to O(1) upgrade (inside Foo itself), but this is asking so much that nobody sensibly do it, except for big projects which provide great migration warnings, codemods, bridges, etc.

This, combined with, say, plaintext structural sharing/diffing between library versions (so that code size doesn't blow up if you have 5 transitive dependencies on Foo), might solve two important problems of dependency/versioning hell imo, and keep software as fresh as realistically possible.

I understand the general version of this is uncomputable, but that's my question: is there research on constraining the expressivity of an language just enough to make version upgrade of a library mostly automatable? Here's an idea: first-class support for fetching the code of a transition between v1 and v2, half-automated by the language & tools, half community-maintained & uploaded to a dedicated place. Alternatively, push as much as possible to data instead of functions, to make writing transition code (which would simply be massaging data from one form to another) much easier, like GraphQL deprecation strategies (https://facebook.github.io/graphql/#sec-Object-Field-depreca...)

Real-life example: two React.js components written under two different React versions naturally don't interoperate. You can't include one inside another. Right now you "can", but this is thanks to sheer human effort from React.js to maintain backward compatibility, so components using React 15 work with components using 14, etc. Same for Java, Windows, and others. The language doesn't help you with that at all. Semi/fully automated version transition/code generation would be a killer language feature.
> No, an error implements the error interface. It means that it can be a value of any type that implements the constraint of having an Error method.

It doesn't matter what a value implements if you don't test its content by type. Std lib errors are meant to be tested by value, not by type. It has nothing to do with interfaces again. When you get a std lib error in order to know what error it is you compare it to an exported value, not its type. I don't know why you keep on insisting on interfaces that's not the core of the issue here.
Please point out a "leftist" (or far-right, for that matter) government that has extracted their country from interlocking defense liaison, surveillance, and intelligence agreements.
I'd say it's simple when you actually "step through" a few steps of a simplified simulation. On paper or in your head, picture a few critters reproducing and dying, with random feature changes occuring every reproduction step and with chance of death being directly tied to those features. Step a few generations and you can clearly see that what really drives the evolutionary process is the criterion you chose to determine which critters die and which survive.

But yeah, I know most people have problem grokking processes like these. School definitely doesn't teach it - not in a proper, abstract, "algorithmic" way. Only with stories about butterflies and dinosaurs. I know I finally grokked evolution somewhere in my mid 20-s, after a) reading enough Less Wrong articles, and b) simulating it in my head, pretty much in the way I described above.
> Actually, I think that a great deal of America's success is because member states are NOT free to leave.

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads, 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'

No Article nor Amendment of the Constitution delegates authority over secession to the United States, and thus that power is retained by the several States, or to the people thereof. Thus it's pretty obvious that member states are free to leave any time they choose; it's the only reading of the supreme law of the land which makes any sense.
> really incoherent, and to ramble way too much in super long digressions about subjects that seem to have little to do with the theme he's trying to write about. So his writing winds up being all over the place and chaotic, making it hard to figure out what the bleep he's trying to say.

Textbook ADD
I bet they will fix that somehow with Wayland. Tools like xdotool are pretty popular and if they don't support it officially, someone will come up with a hack around it.
Helium, for the time being, is a non-renewable resource, and there are concerns of a helium shortage for important applications like cryogenics. It is probably not a good idea to use helium as you suggested.
My personal opinion is not that it can't be done, but that it's financially impractical given then huge maintenance costs compared to conventional high speed rail system.
Neither the Java std lib or the .NET std lib do that though, they don't declare an exception as a static constant you need to compare with. Because it's (rightfully so) considered bad coding. Exceptions give you some valuable informations like stack traces. Go errors gives you nothing. They are inferior to Exceptions and a relic of C programming patterns.
Banks adopt blockchain for mortgage valuation system
I think the problem is that Linux and its ecosystem follow a bazaar model. In this setting coordination is harder, which is critical for a nicely designed UI.

That said, my favorite UI design was mid-to-late 2000s GNOME, as implemented by Ubuntu 6.09 Edgy Eft. It was simple, and everything just worked. Sadly, Ubuntu has become a bit more complex and buggy these days.

I think that, if I want to get the best of Linux as a developer, running a text-based keyboard-driven environment (mutt, emacs...) on a tiling manager is the best route to happiness.
BART gets you into Oakland and Berkeley which are cheaper than SF proper, but it is certainly not as extensive or reliable as NYC's. What really bugs me is how early BART closes...
I really enjoyed typing along with this 3-part series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDv6DfQxhtQ
Per writes the beginnings of an emacs-inspired Windows (directwrite) text editor.

I want to continue developing it, but have no idea what to do regarding design... I'm considering using Sublime's themes.

Another interesting tutorial: http://www.catch22.net/tuts/neatpad
Pessimism is an incredibly important tool, especially for engineers.

Positive thinking never solved anything.
Yeah, the tribalism isn't really based on party lines so much. Identity politics has gained primary importance, perhaps in part because of social media.

Also, on that note, I thought this was interesting:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-...

Basically, the "Trump tribe" is identified by their embrace of authoritarianism.
I'm rocking a keyboard called Mathias Quiet Pro. As far as the feel goes, if my blue switch CM storm gaming keyboard gets an A grade, the Quiet Pro is like an A-.

The Quiet Pro is barely a hair louder than the average membrane keyboard. I work in an open office and I wouldn't dream of using any other mechanical keyboard at work.
Bribing a LEO seems to be a risky business - how risky depends on the conditions. If you're the only one bribing an officer, you'd better ensure you have that consistent cashflow. It's easier if everyone is bribing the police. But still, the moment you interact with law enforcement, you appear on their radar. It's always better to avoid that unless absolutely necessary.

> Due to the nature of the internet and social media there is an ever decreasing chance of flying under the radar.

I disagree with this statement though. I think that Internet as it is now only makes it easier to fly under the radar - simply because people generate such a huge amount of noise that it's barely possible to handle. As long as you don't get too greedy, you can get away with a lot, simply because nobody is going to bother looking for you (hence e.g. spam).
Sure enough, this is new with Sierra. El Capitan doesn't support it. Finally! I was tired of Seil/Karabiner/whatever else constantly updating itself and changing its name, just so I could remap caps lock to escape.
Well, when you largely ignore a problem for 27 years, the solution tends to get expensive. The decades go by ...

https://youtu.be/4Jnu09xQ4lk

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=45811
Can you tell us which hedge funds? I can't imagine hedge funds need much in-house technical work. HFT prop shops, on the other hand, are pretty much all about technical work.
CTO Mentor Network – A virtual peer-to-peer network of CTOs
You say you would rather be using i3 generally, yet you also say that you can pretend by using fullscreen on a window.

Do you not use the tiling? Do you simply use it for greater screen real-estate?

I'm curious as my preference of i3 focuses on the tiling
We're trying. The left opposes it because it doesn't make government bigger: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-lefts-opposition...
This look really great!!

Is there an example that shows how to actually implement in a page? I'm looking through the github code and it's not immediately obvious how to embed the recorder/replay functionality.
The open source movement is a programmer thing to begin with. "Source" does stand for "source code" after all, so it's no surprise that designers don't contribute as much as programmers.

Designers do their own part by putting out the design equivalent of free open source code, in other words free icons, fonts, templates, concepts, etc.
an expert in logistics asked “why do we need to move cargo at 500 mph?“. The problem is one of face.

I guess the 18,000 packages per hour that arrive at ANC by jet must also be a matter of "face"?

What does this even mean?

Edit for clarity: The FedEx terminal at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport can handle 13,400 packages per hour. The UPS terminal there handles about 5,000 packages per hour. Virtually all of these packages arrive from Asia on jets traveling hundreds of miles per hour (as opposed to the alternative, container ships, which are cheaper, but much slower).

That's because Anchorage is the major airport that's closest to being on a great circle route between North America and Asia. Most of the packages clear customs in Anchorage, and are then fed into the FedEx and UPS systems for further distribution throughout North America.

Clearly there is a very large market for moving cargo at 500 miles per hour. Frankly, I have a hard time believing that an "expert in logistics" would make such a statement.
That's great until the ransomware gets clever and encrypts your backups too.

I'm extremely skeptical of the people that say ransomware is good for the economy or whatever. Broken window fallacy. Sure it creates an incentive to protect against hackers. But isn't that a bit circular? Hackers are good because they create inventive to protect against hackers? Ransomware is by far the most economically damaging kind (and personally damaging, for all the people that lose their family photos...)

Theres a lot of blame to go around for this situation. Shitty anti virus companies that sell a false sense of security and barely work. The broken security model of windows and most software. How inconvenient and expensive it is to actually do backups, so because of most basic human psychology most people put it off... If they are even technically minded enough to know they should, and most people aren't. Programs that pollute my home folder and documents with garbage that increases the space necessary to backup (OK that's just my personal issue.)
Distributed and parallel time series feature extraction for big data
Interesting choices you have in front of you.

Hedge fund pros and cons:
* higher pay
* more volatile pay
* what is your long-term career path at the hedge fund?

Startup pros and cons:
* probably a nicer work environment than a hedge fund
* you feel disenfranchised

The simpler argument would be to simply take the job that pays the most. I think there are very few exceptions to that rule.
The iPhone-lookalike phones you can buy in China don't run iOS, so I don't consider them 'clones'.
You can be pretty productive.

Have a look at core.matrix (https://github.com/mikera/core.matrix) and vectorz.clj (https://github.com/mikera/vectorz-clj) libs. They give you almost native speeds.

If you need even more performance, checkout neanderthal (https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal) which has a GPU back-end.
I had the same feeling. I often want to keep facebook apart from my hacker reading, for some reason.
1) Elon Musk is not building any Hyperloop, so I don't see how its supposed failure reflects on him.

2) Which Hyperloop is failing? There are at least three groups, and as far as I know, they haven't even got close to testing the system, let alone know if it's a failure or not.

I'm skeptical of the whole concept, but declaring failure at this stage is no less silly than assuming it'll definitively work.
I imagine strawberries (and squishy cargos) might be more sensitive to high acceleration and jerk.
Then you gotta warn us in the title that you link everything :). Just kidding, but on a more serious note I also found it very distracting. Sure, link the first occurrence of the word, but I see no reason macOS needs to be linked every time it's mentioned. Even the big daddy of wikis, Wikipedia, recommends against linking things that have already been linked and very common terms [0]:

> An overlinked article contains an excessive number of links, making it difficult to identify links likely to aid the reader's understanding significantly. A 2015 study of log data found that "in the English Wikipedia, of all the 800,000 links added ... in February 2015, the majority (66%) were not clicked even a single time in March 2015, and among the rest, most links were clicked only very rarely", and that "simply adding more links does not increase the overall number of clicks taken from a page. Instead, links compete with each other for user attention."

When I, an internet user see a link, it's visual distinctiveness cues to me that it might lead me to more information that emphasizes something. It's fine for websites to link to their own tags, but there's also overdoing it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Link...
"44,000 retweets"

What the hell was this ever written about? 44k retweets in China? How many posts get 44k retweets every 60 seconds in China? I'd guess it's in the double digits.
As a side question, can I ask how much experience you have other than your work at said startup? Within a year I'm going to have to make the choice between going the tradition route in tech or joining a high-frequency prop shop. The starting offer seems to be around 130-150k base with 20-80k bonus at the end of the first year (which is implied to scale heavily after the first year, unless things go really poorly).

If you were given the choice, which route would you take?
I felt like I was addressing this but it may not have been very clear. I understand, and agree with, the point about diversity. My argument is that the EU is still far from preventing political diversity since member states have a large amount of leeway. I also argue that this leeway can be reduced further still without seriously harming this diversity, and that it should be, since there are things to be gained from it.
Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately I don't feel comfortable in sharing the names, but if you google "top 30 hedge funds", they'll be there.

From the interviews it seems like these companies are actually looking for people with distributed systems experience (think of SV's devops + architect skills), and willing to pay well for it (I've heard of several people leaving Google/FB/Netflix/... to join these groups).
Presumably with all existing systems it has been much, much more cost effective to be aerodynamic rather than building/maintaining/decompressing the worlds largest vacuum tube
Maybe I'm totally unaware, but don't trucking, air freight and sea freight have the same problems w/ regards to weight requirements and movement of goods in transit? Is this not a solved problem? Build Hyperloop Freight to fit a ULD and we're all set no?