skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> My mother's partner of more than ten years is still legally married to someone else, because to divorce would set off financial destruction for both parties.

This is something I really don't understand. If both parties want the divorce and can agree on any asset splits, a divorce costs whatever the filing fee is. A few hundred dollars and you're done.
"Unlimited PTO" is a policy ripe for employer exploitation. In practice at my workplace, this means
a) Cannot take more than 2 weeks of PTO at a time (even if you want to go unpaid). Automatic manager rejection.
b) Cannot be combined with other forms of time off. I had a kid recently and was told that PTO cannot be combined with FMLA.
c) When I told them that I wanted to take FMLA, I was told by the Dir. of Engg that I could not take any further PTO for the rest of the year even with the "Unlimited PTO" option and said policy was unrelated to FMLA. He went so far as to state that when he worked at Twitter, there were folks who would alternate working 2 weeks with 2-week PTOs cause of the Twitter's "Unlimited PTO" policy. I found that extremely insulting and de-motivating.

Of course, I am sure a lot of this has to do with management culture /values. Another colleague in a different department is being discouraged from taking FMLA (which is borderline illegal). However, he feels stuck as the company is doing his Green card application and has him by the balls.

All that to say, I took my FMLA and handed in my notice as soon as I returned.
In order to solve the USB Type-C dumpster fire we need a new USB Type-D standard which is unambiguously and apologetically NOT backward compatible... which is usually an Apple move. Except if Apple invents it they aren't going to share it so there's no solution anytime soon.
In the late 90s-early 00s, at a corporate job, several of us used a script to have the browser load a random page every few minutes. (I didn't write the script... I think the pages were just random links from search results based on random words.) Anyway, the thousands of pages loaded masked the NSFW pages. We figured we'd have plausible deniability. "You say I visited Xxx.com? I don't know... I think my computer has a virus or something. It's always loading up random stuff. Let me see the log... Yep... Just as I thought... It says I visited 24,239 pages on Tuesday. Heck, that's not even possible!"
If you're telling yourself that you might be falling for a bit of a sneaky misconception about your problems. Take it from me, there's a big difference between realistically accepting a mental health problem and making it into your whole identity and wallowing in it.

There's also a big difference between mental health denial / "get over it already" and making steps to finally stop it from totally dominating your life in the future.

Depression is like a separate animal inside you with its own drives for survival and reproduction. You don't turn your back on it, but you don't let it devour you and steal your name and face either.

If it can manage to, it would love to take control of you and make you believe that there is literally nothing that can help and you're utterly powerless to change anything, and that anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just one of those people who doesn't understand and thinks you can just cheer yourself up out of depression by smiling and going outside or whatever. That's a false dichotomy.
Never mind — it's working now. I don't know why it didn't work earlier.
Ugh, no. Don't mess with classic, lightly-formatted HTML.
Comparing your past self to your present self can be extremely destructive if you think you were in a better place then than you are now.

Maybe sometimes it’s abjectly true - you became homeless and in the past you weren’t so it was better back then. In a lot of cases you’re probably looking back on a high moment while in the middle of a low moment. Either way, the comparison does far more harm than good and it might well hold you back.
If it makes you feel any better I'm male, have been here roughly as long as you, and have yet to find a reliable way to make money online either. But I think I might be getting closer.
I didn't say median. I said it is L5-L6 comp, which doesn't make it a median as I assume most engineers will be in L1-L4 band. That said, it is not an outlier either. And won't be surprised is 20-30% of engineering and PM orgs are making that money.

Also, Uber and Airbnb gives RSUs which are not paper money. I am confident that an IPO for both these companies are inevitable.
Speaking about a few cons from an H1B perspective from countries like India.

1. The nature of H1B Visa makes it inherent for people to not take the risk of working at a startup. Part of the problem is the short time between layoffs and finding another job. H1b's may have very little time[1] to search for a job after a layoff. A startup could make it easier for them. Short of a layoffs due to financial reasons, startups could have a decent protocol for making the transition smoother. If the engineer is not a good fit, unless he is terrible, he can work a few months more until he finds another position. A few weeks notice as a standard is very little and keeps good engineers away from startups.

2. Some startups process Green Cards(GC) only 1 year into employment as a part of their "policy". This is partly understandable as GC processing is a bit costly. But the cost is not that much(<10,000 based on my experience)[2, 3]. So this 1 year hard stop is non-sensical from a monetary standpoint(especially with developer salaries running in 80-150K over many years)[4]. It also creates a sense that GC is being used as a carrot and stick approach to make people stay, this is morally questionable because for the H1B's have a lot at stake (pack bag and go to india if you don't find a job fast enough, disrupting family and personal lives).
A better idea would be to process it immediately as Google/FB etc do. This gives a lot of people confidence to work and even if it does not work out its not that big a deal.

PS I can vouch that a GC is more important than 10K$ here or there in the long run.

[1]At the moment a one time 90 days grace is provided thanks to a 2017 USCIS rule(which is plenty), but it can be only used once per H1b VISA. i.e. if you use that up once you can't use it again.

[2] http://www.immi-usa.com/eb2-green-card-cost/
[3] http://www.immi-usa.com/immigration-attorney-fees/
[4] https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary/results?l=San+Francisc...
Also, when you use your credit card to get a cash advance, it is charged at a higher interest rate. Letting you buy cash-like things would let you circumvent that higher interest rate, but since they usually ban those things, the loophole is closed.
I live in Puerto Rico, and the hurricane María, throw the electrical grid to the floor, literally. Yes suddenly 3 million US citizens can’t use electronic payment because the hurracaine take down the whole telecommunication network.

The majors of the cities were given some satellite phones by FEMA. No traffic lights around the island ( still today some not working), the roads where blocked by electric pole on the floor. The store looting happen the first ~2 weeks. The complete island goes in ONLY CASH MODE, for around ~3 months.

But yeah, What possibly could go wrong?

I hate to use cash, I like my credit card rewards, but after María, that idea 100% cashless, u got to think about it twice.
Mailed you a chapter from my upcoming book.
Judging by the sidebar on the left with their last post in 2015, seems not.
By "Maximize income" I mean Expected Value. The Expected Value of a lifetime of investment banking is certainly higher than that of a software engineer. While not every investment banker ends up making $5M, very few make less than $200k.
I see. But for most people, when they look at their W-2 they will see the total cash they earned.
Chaos monkey doing his magic! ;)
I replied to give my opinion as to why you were down voted. Your response is to be essentially personally dismissive of me. Meanwhile, I am currently downvoted to zero and pretty much expecting to be ROFLstomped for daring to say anything.

I will reiterate that this is exactly why I think you were down voted: someone disagrees with you, doesn't care to engage you in discussion about it and doesn't care to deal with the fallout from voicing disagreement in an overwhelmingly male forum that will generally be sympathetic to your concerns.

If sexism is not an issue here, where are the other 16+ openly female members of the leaderboard?

Piss on me as an individual all you like, but the data does not support an assertion that gender is irrelevant on HN.
> perspicaciously

That's not a word you see every day.
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/netflix.com
AWS Amplify now supports Angular 6 apps and Angular AOT compilation
First thing first: I would hope that "Git" would be removed from the GitPub name. I'm in favor of replacing Git in the process and having both a new client source control implementation and server API set (SourcePub?) that are designed with each other in mind, eases federation, and is both powerful and easier for new devs than Git (Hg managed this... not sure why a Git replacement can't do the same).
HOW DOES CEO BEHAVIOR AFFECT BUSINESS CULTURE?
And what about Abu Ghraib?
Well, I appreciated the presumably intentional humour in this comment even if no-one else did so don't consign yourself to abject misery over the reactions.
Is your comment satire? It perfectly fits in at least one of the points of the article.
As someone who has started and worked as an early employee at several startups in the bay area and has spent a large amount of time interviewing and evaluating offers:

Con 1: Compensation

Equity is not worth it. Early employees bare the same risk as founders, work just as hard, and have an order of magnitude (or two) less upside. The chances are that even a series A funded startup will go bankrupt and the equity is useless. Seed funded startups are even worse in the sense that the risk is way higher for just slightly more equity.

Base compensation is too low. Salaries at usually barely livable in the bay area and leave no room for savings. This has two major problems:

- First, its hard to support mortgages or families. This creates a biased hiring process that favors those already well-off or very young (and likely inexperienced).

- Secondly if the startup fails (the likely scenario), the chances are the employee's savings are non-existent. They'd more likely opt for a cushier job instead of building on their experience at another startup.

SOLUTIONS:

1) Early employees need a higher salary. No living wages. No forcing people on a ramen diet. I'm talking $130-$180k for engineers at the seed stage (in Silicon Valley), PLUS healthcare. Other roles should be proportionately similar based on market rates. This means either seed rounds need to be larger, or bridge rounds become much more common. I think the latter makes more sense; if the startup has some traction, but not enough to go for a series A, then the founders can raise a little more. If the startup doesn't have traction and burned through its seed, it should fizzle out sooner and liberate the team to do other things.

2) WAY more equity for early employees.

* 25% - founding team (first 5-10 employees)

* 25% - all future employees

* 50% - founders

* Investors eat from everyone's shares proportionately.

A win for the founders should be a win for the early team. There should be no scenario where the early team doesn't benefit from an exit but the founders do. The founders succeeded because of the team.

3) No bullshit vesting schedules. At worst, stick with the standard 4 years, 25% a year, 1 year cliff. No 10-10-20-30-30 5-year split nonsense that only favors employers and force people to stick around longer than is healthy.
And add refreshers that vest. 10-20% of their annual comp. Salary bumps can also work as a substitute. Incremental rewards are important.

4) Not 100% on this, but common stock for everyone. No class A shares -- win votes by convincing the team you're right and not being a douchebag.
How did they hide the smell?
What the hell did you expect from AlterNet?
An example off the top of my head would be some sort of IoT device which has a drop-down to communicate via 4G, WiFi, ethernet etc. I'd be they'd put the value of the select to be the interface name and wouldn't check input value, so you could craft a special request with a bad value. But I do agree; not super easy to exploit.

The more worrying fact is something like this which could easily be drawn in to 100m installs.
I'd love a 'Delphi for the web' created by this guy. Maybe something that uses TypeScript?
You should be able to download the full PDF, and then use whatever PDF viewer you prefer.

Direct Google Drive link: https://goo.gl/TGCyTD

Click on the "Download" option in the upper-right.
In Canada, rates vary per card and even vary right along with the variable reward schemes. https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/sites/default/files/pdf/5513.pdf

Merchants aren't allowed to charge different prices for different payment methods, so there's an incentive for credit card issuers to maximise the rewards and quietly pass them along as fees to merchants!

It's a huge injustice, IMO. A case was brought to the competition tribunal that would have made issuers notify cardholders that rewards are passed on as fees, but it was rejected. https://www.thebalancesmb.com/small-business-credit-card-294...

Some are as high as 3% - so merchants get charged $12 on a $400 transaction, vs. just 12 cents for Interac debit. So you can see why banks are pushing Visa/MC network debit cards now.

EDIT: The EU stopped this nonsense by straight up capping interchange fees at 0.3%. Pretty sure Visa/MC are still doing just fine there :) http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4585_en.htm
That's optional, for folks who WANT to commute (eg, either want a big house in BFE, or want to live the city life, or whatever). If you want a short commute, it's yours -- if you live in the city, work for one of the many tech companies up there. If you want to work at FB, come be my neighbor and walk to work, I live in a great walkable neighborhood <2mi from FBHQ.
I'm pretty sure they all pay less outside of their HQ location. At least in London, salaries are significantly less for the equivalent role.
Hmm, if you look at http://downdetector.com/ a number of services have had an outage spike today, Reddit, Netflix, Instragram
My experiences from startups have been underwhelming for reasons similar to yours. I haven't been part of an autocratic ego-centric management, but I still felt like I didn't deliver any real impact. I was just told to fix bugs, close tickets, etc. Same cog in a machine feel but without the benefit of working closely with people to mentor you.

In the last startup I was in, even though we're in a team of only 3 engineers, implementing design changes was an uphill battle. The senior engineer lives in Eastern Europe so communication time was difficult, and he had a very impractical way of doing things (preferred his own hand-made JavaScript framework over third parties, no modules, no integrated testing). These things lead to making myself a harder sell for companies that follow less unorthodox software development practices.

Yeah, they can often be more freeform, but also by giving you the illusion that you can flip things around, or be a big fish in a small pond. Being that big fish is not good if the pond itself stinks.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to imply it is just about stage of your life in terms of age and family status, but more just your stage of your life in terms of financial needs and tolerance for risk. For some people that need for lower risk and financial stability comes when they are older, and for some people they start out needing that financial stability at a young age.
Goes to identity. Telling people not to do this is pointless unless you can suggest another way to construct identity. A person without a past is... an interesting thought experiment, but not something that exists in the real world. Identity builds up in layers -- what is your nation, your religion, your favorite team, your hometown, your college, your spouse, your child. If you give all of that up, then who are you? What are your goals? What do you believe in? What are you willing to fight for? What gives life meaning?

A better bit of advice is "avoid ruminating" and this applies to every thought, not just the ones that involve the past. But even that is not easy, especially for those who create things, since to create something you have to ruminate on it heavily, for months or years -- this is probably why there is an overlap between depression and creativity.
I know of at least one successful entrepreneur/investor who does exactly this with his incubator: incubator/umbrella company hires FT employees who get contracted to the startups and receive stock in the startups proportional to the time spent on each.
> TLAB

Thread Local Allocation Buffer. Cool. Doesn't the stack in golang serve somewhat the same purpose? I've sometimes wondered about golang going the direction of Erlang, with multiple independent GCs. (Not per goroutine. It would have to be per "Actor" which I find myself implementing again and again in golang.)

Modern generational GCs use TLABs to solve this exact problem.

So that solves the problem on allocation, while the generational hypothesis reduces the frequency of stop the world. Generalizing in this fashion, I don't see why generational GC is inevitably necessary. With golang, the stack provides cheap allocation to local threads, even with concurrency, and throughput isn't as big a deal, with a bit more work needed by the programmer for optimization. (But perhaps my view would change with access to more data or with more experience.)
I really hope they stick with Git and produce something concrete rather than trying to shoehorn a diverse collection of version control models into the same API. The last thing you want is the sort of lowest common denominator solution that everyone agrees on but is otherwise useless.

Later, after the GitPub federation approach is proven, let another team take up the torch for AnyPub.
Except we don't have to, we have experimental evidence that shows what happens and what happens is not what 'happened' in the SPE.
For micro and mini there are some adaptor thingies. I bought a few to deal with the couple of older devices I have with mini.

One probably exists for USB-C so you only need one cable.
Private offices are great, sort of. I haven’t had one in the last 15yrs in both big and small companies. I find it surprising that you have had access to this “benefit.”
Apple's 1981 Plan for the Mac
This a cool exploration of technology, and I don't want to take away from that.

> The program was efficient enough to run in real-time on a IBM System/360 computer, and robust enough to properly identify 90 percent of the symbols drawn by first-time users.

I just want to point out that 90% accuracy is, from a user's point of view, awful handwriting recognition performance. It means you will be correcting on average about 10 words per paragraph! Even 99% percent accuracy is not nearly good enough to give people a sense that the computer is good at handwriting recognition.

I also want to point out the difficulty and danger in interpreting strokes when doing handwriting recognition.

In the last demo box, try writing a capital Y without lifting the pen. You'll have to go "up and down" one or both upper branches. Because of this, the recognizer will call it a K, A, or N even though it is obviously a Y when you're done.

This demo is constrained to only using one stroke per letter, but systems that permit multiple strokes still get into trouble when the strokes don't match what they are expecting--for example if you draw an X using 4 individual strokes outward from a central point.

This also happens with words. In Microsoft's handwriting recognition in Office in the early 2000s, writing the letters of a word out of order completely borked the recognition. For example writing "xample" and then going back and adding an "e" at the beginning would not produce a recognized word of "example."

My point with all of this is that there is a reason you probably don't do all your computing with natural handwriting. It's a surprisingly difficult problem. Users do not expect it to matter how they form letters and words on the page. And they have very low tolerance for correcting computer mistakes.
I spent 2 weeks in the UK and used cash exactly twice.

Being able to use your contactless VISA card directly with turnstiles in London public transport is a game-changer.
I made a thing. QuickBox – Access a contained Linux environment in one click
Hi HN I want to share a project I've been working on called QuickBox. It's a web app that lets you access a Linux environment in one-click. Check it out here:

http://bit.do/quickbox

I built this because I wanted a fast and easy way to spin up an Ubuntu box to test some scripts without affecting my machine. I also wanted to show my friends (who don't use Linux) what Linux is like without them having to install it (or Docker or a VM). I wrote it mostly with Go and Javascript using the Docker Engine to do all heavy-lifting. I'd appreciate any constructive feedback. Also, I am currently looking for job opportunities in the Bay Area. Feel free to check out my GitHub to see some more of my work (https://github.com/eightlimbed), and I'm happy to send you my resume. Thanks!
> Some way to try out/transfer between startups who allow it would be awesome.

This is a fantastic idea that I really think we should explore within the YC ecosystem!
The project might need to change name; it seems like it may be violating the Git trademark rules[1]:

> Portmanteaus ("GitFoo" or "FooGit") are out. Most of the cases run into this rule. For instance, we asked GitHub to not to use "DGit" to refer to their replicated Git solution, and they[1] rebranded. We also asked "GitTorrent" not to use that name based on this rule.

[1]: https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
The value of an unvested RSU is a very tricky thing. I had to try to value my potential RSU benefits when I got divorced. It's not the same as a stock option where even if you leave, you have an asset that you can still purchase at the contract price. RSUs are little more than a promise that at point in time X, company promises to release Y stocks to you. I'm pretty sure you could argue that RSUs have zero value until released to you.
Copenhagenize your city: the case for urban cycling in 12 graphs
How’s your math?
How is that an exaggeration? I talked about the ability for them to go to another company. Founders cannot just leave and have a much greater lead time if they lose it all.

What social connections do you think founders get that employees somehow dont? And what is this worth? So founding a company and losing everything is fine because you make some friends? If you talk to any entrepreneurs, you'll quickly realize you'll lose more friends and connections than you gain, precisely because of lack of time and ability to relate. It's a very lonely road, not some glamorous jet-setting adventure.

What's absurd is thinking that starting a company is just some hobby that is no different than any normal job. Until you actually do it, it's easy to overlook the incredible personal investment and stress it takes to put something together from nothing. Most companies fail, and many do not raise capital or have some quick meteoric rise but rather suffer through years of trying to make it work. The upside for founders is incredibly rare while the downsides are very common. Employees get paid either way.