skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why do founders get over 10x early employees?

Because founders take at least 100x the risk of an early employee, and 100x the personal risk and commitment.

Founders generally aren't getting paid (at least until revenue or significant funding comes through) and they have 100x the impact that an early employee does on the success of the company. If an early employee doesn't work out, the founders just replace that person. If the founders aren't working out, the company fails. If an early employee isn't working out and the founders don't replace that person, and the company fails, that is again the founder's fault.

Early startup employees have higher risk and generally more stress than at established companies, and if the market was rational, they would be compensated more, in cash, to offset this risk and stress.

Equity is not the solution, for many reasons. The biggest reason is that the founders will always value the equity higher than early employees. If not, they should not have founded the company.

It sometimes makes sense for founders to sell some of that early equity to VCs (anyone who has buckets of cash and wants more risk/reward exposure) who can afford to hedge by investing in lots of early stage companies, only one of which needs to be a winner. Once the VCs put the money in, it makes sense for founders to hire people at market rates.

VCs should be people who are swimming in cash, and therefore looking for a high rate of return, and with a high tolerance for risk in the amounts that they are going to invest. Early employees in general do not meet any of these criteria.

For early employees to accept equity in place of a market-clearing salary is then just a mistake. We see engineers settling for half the salary they could have at an established company, plus lottery tickets. This is absolutely crazy. Early engineers in the vast majority of cases should not be going anywhere near the kinds of crazy risk that pouring half your salary into a long-shot investment represents. Especially when the salary that you are left with is tied up in that same risky venture.

The reasonable position for early employees is to insist on not also being early investors. Raising money is the founders' responsibility, they should go out and do that, and early employees should demand the same salary they could get at an established company.

The argument that equity compensation aligns incentives makes sense for co-founders and for executives. It almost never makes sense for early technical hires who can easily be replaced.
Self-Driving Cars Are Leading Our Future in Autopilot
We've looked into that. It's hard to make the math work - when you slice up YC's equity into that many pieces, each piece becomes very small.
This is true but the logical implication then is why are there not more startups in Europe/Canada where healthcare is "free"..
Big nasty for loops get replaced by big nasty filter/map/reduce calls. Filter/map/reduce may be less error prone than for loops, but if it would be a big and nasty for loop, it will still be big and nasty.

Worse, "nasty" to me means more than just "what was inside the loop is large". It means that the loop itself was nasty, that is, it wasn't just a straightforward iteration over a collection, or a loop with fixed bounds. That means that it's harder to just replace it with a filter/map/reduce.

I think that for loops can be hard for beginning to intermediate programmers, but with experience, they get easier. I don't remember exactly how many times I've messed up a for loop in the last decade, but the number is either 0 or 1. It's not 2. "Once in a decade" isn't exactly the source of large-scale bugs that people often claim for loops are.

Note well, though: This is not my first decade as a programmer. The number was much higher my first decade. Filter/map/reduce may be easier to learn. You may in fact get to "one bug per decade" faster with them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17279687. Or I guess rather I should say the article posted yesterday had excellent commentary in 2016 and 2013 ;-). The money quote was " And in this particular case, I'd say they shouldn't be using the database to do locking around sending a receipt. It should be put into a queue and that queue should be processed separately, which avoids the transaction problem altogether." For all the people who mock the GoF book or the idea of design patterns, that right there ^ is a pattern of software engineering that you can recognize and apply. It requires a layer of architectural thinking beyond just the code, but it is the kind of thinking that when I see it in people separates them as senior from not senior.
Moonrise / Senior Full Stack Engineer / Chicago, IL / ONSITE FULL-TIME/ www.moonrise.works

Moonrise is connecting workers with local shifts for income. They're helping these people finally get ahead or escape financial emergencies.

Moonrise is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer. In this role, you will be developing new features and maintaining functionality of our core product. You are a self-driven engineer that understands the technologies that power the web - from databases to web servers, client-side JavaScript to server-side APIs - you enjoy building it all! Additionally, you empathize with your users and can apply basic product design principles to your work. You enjoy mentoring junior members of the team and working collaboratively across business units.

Keywords: API, PHP, HTML5, JavaScript, server-side

For more info contact HR@moonrise.com or amanda@avyet.com.
While the motivation is somehow similar, scaling up versus scaling out, these systems are really solving different problems.
Keep in mind that GraphChi uses a vertex-centric computational model that requires pre-processing of the data and is not really applicable in streaming scenarios where low latency is required!
I've worked at multiple startups and feel it isn't worth the effort. The execs always make out and everyone else doesn't make it worth their effort. The compensation will be better when working at established companies.
Who wants to spend $100 on cables?
One thought experiment is to take your hypothetical market rate, and calculate the opportunity cost of working at the startup. Then think if you had that cost over say 5 years, in hard cash, would you take it and invest in the equity of that startup over other options?
I wish there was a good GUI for nvim/vim. I've tried them all and they all lag, either just a cursor lag when there is syntax-highlight (gvim) or when using snippets/auto-complete (nvim-qt for example).

I haven't found a single good GUI for nvim/vim. If you have, please let me know.
I am interested in this. Where does one find these opportunities for early stage investment?
Software architecture: all you need to know [Free eBook, PDF]
So register something else that's short and memorable. It doesn't have to be your name.
4 essential beginner web analytics terms you need to know
> But the Big5 have tons of locations

Name one Big5 job in the entire U.S. south. Or at least one that pays as well as them.

There aren’t any.
I don't have the time to explain the logic behind my wisdom. I can only show you the door as my conclusions are avenues you obviously haven't explored. It's up to you whether you want to take the blue pill or the red pill.
At the moment, yes - and we know this is a huge issue. I don't recommend using it if you are working at a YC company at the moment. We're fixing this in the next week.
Sorry, but you are wrong.

It's a 15 minutes task for good admin to start dropping VPN connections (not to block, but to interrupt every 5 minutes, but blocking is even easier).

One important info:
- ISP can't see your VPN traffic. But they can see that you are connecting to specific IP (VPN service's IP) at specific port. Once you're connected to VPN you probably pass ALL the connection through it. So ISP can see only single connection to single point. That is more than enough.

So how can they block VPNs:
1) Most VPNs uses standard VPN ports. Just dropping connections to that port is a good start.
2) Dropping connections to a servers when this is your (almost) only, long standing connection. This is a good moment to store that IP as VPN service IP.
3) Reverse DNS on IPs you're connecting to. A lot of services will reveal that they belongs to VPN services.
4) Public list of VPN IPs. Some provides them. Some are already noted somewhere on the internet.

ISPs can even share their databases with each other to be better at VPN dropping.

This is very easy thing to do.

It would be REALLY hard to hide your connection to a VPN service. One thing that came to my mind, to hide your VPN servers you would have to:
- use VPN services at random ports
- change VPN IP every few minutes at random factor, so dropped connections will occur anyway
- in the background you should keep direct (un-VPNed) connections to random servers at random ports, passing random data around (it will look encrypted just like VPN connection)

This would require huge infrastructure though. Really huge.

But still - if ISP notice behavior like that - it means you're probably trying to do something shady, like walk around their VPN dropping rules - so they could just throttle your connections even more, just in case :)

So in general - you're fu^Hat very bad situation. I'm from Europe. I'm "safe" now, but we are also going to have bad law for net neutrality soon.
> but there are plenty of startups run by ego-centric micromanaging wanna-be engineers.

This times 1000. Too many stories to tell, especially in SV.
It looks like you both agree, they said you should not work at an early stage startup.
There are many issues with both formats:

- JSON has no comments
- YAML nesting tends to get deep which makes creating bugs very easy
- Both are become hard to read / edit in larger files

The primary issue is translating the intent into a machine syntax. The format we landed focused on minimalism to communicate intent.

The the file format is the least interesting thing about .arc but one of the most distinctive. An .arc file VERY QUICKLY communicates the project intent.

An example:

```
@app
hi

@html
get /
```

The equiv CloudFormation YAML is 700 lines. You'd have no idea what that project does without digging into the code. The .arc by contrast is extremely easy to both read and author. As the app grows it becomes very clear the project intent and were to find things.

We certainly could have created a new YAML thing but many projects already do that … and I'll let their work speak for itself.
As Google for Education tools enter classrooms, parents are asking to opt-out
One trick I use is passing data files through the command line "sort", "uniq", and "wc" utilities. Those are great benchmarks to see how off you are from tuned code on your machine.
Yes, but you might still have enough time to morph into a person who finds doing all that stuff unfulfilling. Humans are amazing at adaptation.
Oh, how I feel this.

About two years ago, I lost my voice, too. Warts growing on my vocal cords, an extremely rare condition (about 1.6 adults per 100,000, and about twice as many children). From February, when symptoms first started being really noticeable, to September, when I got my first surgery, I went from a little hoarse to barely able to speak at all.

At this point, my voice is maintained by regular laser surgery on my vocal cords - about four times a year at this point. The laser burns off the warts without damaging my vocal cords (much), but they come right back. This is for the rest of my life, or until we find a magic cure for the papilloma virus.
just take the 50k out, go home. I'm aware you had to invest expenses in a business address etc. accounting for the first year, taxes etc. even then for the first year that should set you back maybe 5k-10k if you have nothing to take out of expenses. talk to your scrivener again for your options. the fact you haven't even done that but are posting here on the internet wasting time looking for sympathy is pathetic. no one here knows your situation and you've kept your actual skills/background intentionally vague (you actually looked for contracting gigs? what type of programming did you do? etc.). you had to have gotten advice on even getting a scrivener to setup a company. fuck the "right thing", no one fucking cares, you're a gaijin and there's way worse off looking gaijin who have setup companies than you. who are you afraid of looking bad in front of? your scrivener got their fee, your business garden/office place got their rent, immigration got their quotas, blah blah. for all intents and purposes, they don't care, you're a client to them.

edit read some more, go home
Ok, we've added the qualifier ": Study" to the title above. But I don't think this complaint is so fair. As far as clickbait goes this title is tame.
USB-C /w DisplayPort seems to work really well for monitors. If you have a monitor that can output a good amount of voltage, it is quite literally the only connector you need.

At work the only cable connected to my MacBook Pro (running Linux) is a USB-C thunderbolt cable to a monitor which connects all my standard USB-A devices (keyboard, mouse, hub, flash, drives, etc.)

At home I can do the same thing with my HP Spectre or Dell XPS 15 and an LG monitor (XPS complains about voltage, but it still charges).

Viewsonic even has USB-C monitors that are KVMs too. You plug in your keyboard and mouse to the monitor and it will switch them on input select.

Ultimately I'd really like to see a pure USB-C KVM that support DisplayPort 1.4 (no KVM does this currently) so you could have laptop power and full 4k+10Bit all from one cable.
Smart domain squater!
There were a whole bunch of ‘studies’ done after World War Two that purported to show how it was possible that ‘good people’ could be induced to do bad things.

I think the ones that gained wide currency were the ones that most excused truly horrific and servile behavior by individuals.

I don’t believe for a second that someone who would torture or abuse or kill someone on the orders of someone else was ever a ‘good person’.

Don’t tell me that someone who is talking someone’s child from them right now is a good person. I quit a job just recently working for dhs just because I didn’t want to participate in that kind of behavior even tangentially.
"it depends" is a fine answer for whether a device supports something. that's how USB-A/B worked. you didn't know if the device supported quick charging, worked at better than USB 1.1 speed, or even if it supported data transfer. there's lots of power-only USB devices.

But you at least could make a fair assumption that the cable you were trying to use supported all of that (beyond the rare power-only cables). For me the real killer with USB-C is the wide variety of cables that all look physically identical. it's fairly easy to keep track of what features a computer, phone, or peripheral has. but having to keep track of which features each cable supports is a huge pain in the ass. It means i can't just have a box of random USB cables on my shelf, and grab one when i need one.
Absolutely. Also, startups are intense, which goes both ways.

Intense can be great if you're looking for that, and the startup is doing well.

Intense can be terrible if the startup isn't doing well and/or the atmosphere has gone acrid. It is now intensely bad.

It's like a polite disagreement with a casual acquaintance versus bitter fight with a close friend.

When startups derail, they really do go far off the rails.
> In my opinion unnecessary abstractions -- especially splitting code up into different files

It gets especially bad when someone else wrote that code and you're just getting into it. Layers upon layers of abstractions scattered across classes, functions, files. Each add very little on their own, but you kinda have to keep it all in your head (or write it down as I do) if you're planning to grok it and fix that bug.

It's kinda like reading some piece of code not in its final form, but as a pile of diffs are applied to it. Fun. :-)

I find older style procedural code with longer functions generally much easier to get into than any OOP.
How a Powerful Spy Camera Invented at Duke Ended Up in China's Hands
I wish they were frankly. Unfortunately there's endless dishonesty and fraud in the blockchain world in projects denying that their solutions involve huge amounts of trust; that's just a mild example out of many.
"Native advertising"
I'm sure nobody leaves them open with Chromium as it's impossible.

My common browser usage is to have low hundreds of tabs open - right now it's a bit higher than usual, 1086, although it's not the record. It's just regular browsing, topic research, some social media and stuff left for later. Works well - under Firefox with Tab Center Redux, that is. I've tried switching to Chromium in the past, when Firefox used to be visibly slower, but I've never could use it for longer, always went back to Firefox as Chromium's UX was horrible. With recent versions, I don't even feel the need to check out Chromium ever again.
I love that you can rotate the globe around and there is a position where you can only see water.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a0s75tyqtoh0hrd/Screenshot%202018-...
with a tinfoil hat on, you could say that this is a very convenient rebranding ;)
I work at a startup (Reforge) and I own a startup (Casting Call Club).

I turned down a Google offer to do these startups.

Here's why:

1. I have full control over building things from start to finish without politics.

2. I work remotely, setting my own hours. All of us have been doing what we do for 10+ years. We care little about the hours put in and care a lot about the impact made. I can do this from SF (used to live), or Boston (where I live now), or Bulgaria (to visit family).

3. I learn so much about the whole picture, rather than a niche.

I love Google (and my previous employer Eventbrite), and might return to them one day. For now, startups match me.
I think you guys are agreeing with each other, right? L5-L6 isn't "average", is it? Most FAANGMUA employees are not managers/senior engineers.
I liked the possible paleolithic stratum of adze, axe, Erz(ore) ... in Basque
(Sample size of one)

I worked at a unicorn startup five years ago in the bay which no longer exists. Anyone who bought the options -- and the company was very cagey on providing cap table info -- was left with nothing.
Thought this was relevant after the Google Maven fiasco. Scientists really need to have ethics drilled into their heads when they are getting their degree.
Facebook's median compensation across all employees is $240k. Median of engineer compensation would be significantly higher. Also note that Facebook's median age is 29.
This would be easy to test by replacing John with another kitten, right?
Sounds like a good way to steal power from work -- charge up your phone at the office and supply power to your wall outlet when you come home.

:-)
FYI your startups website gets flagged by chrome as your certificate date being invalid.
It's not the same because the conclusions are about humans becoming sadistic just because they put on a uniform. The whole pitch of the experiment was their behavior was spontaneous, unsolicited, and caused by the setting. I.e., not caused by the experimenters asking the participants to behave a certain way.

The Milgram effect (superiors asking you to cause pain because science + authority) has been replicated many times.

This is all explained quite well in the article.
It was the 70's. So the pants were probably polyester! Ha!
It means "I agree with this, but have nothing else to contribute to the discussion, and don't understand that an upvote would suffice, or I just want to pad the number of comments I'm making on this site."
One nice thing about startups / small companies is they can be flexible with work hours.
As the oxidize projects continue to land this email will become more and more obsolete. There's simply no way for C++ to compete with Rust, and while there will be continued utility pledge() is pretty quaint versus memory safety.
I'm in a somewhat similar boat and have seen DS positions at FAANG not pay as well as SWE. Why is that?
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. Would you please stop creating accounts to do this with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I have a bias for cash, not equity.

I'm like you. I'd rather take cash and dump it into my 401k or an index fund for retirement.
Comparing anti-HTTPS people to anti-vaxxers is a terrible comparison and obvious clickbait. If someone believes that HTTP is good enough, fine with me - it doesn't hurt anyone. If it's a company, their customers can take their business elsewhere if they care. On the other hand, anti-vaxxers cause harm to others due to herd immunity, plus their children usually have no choice in the matter.
A great place to start reading about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)
It’s a dispersion of guilt and it allows people who do bad things to go along because the think others would do the same in their position.

Lots of people in the world have died rather than to go along with things they felt were wrong.

Don’t think that we all have monsters inside because we don’t.
Founders are being paid passed seed. So their risk economy spans "garage to seed". Following that, they certainly do have x10 commitment, and non-existing "work-life balance".
Is there?

All I read every where is how terrible these things are.

I like them.

Does that make me a shill?
Die See = Meer (Sea), der See = See (Lake).

Die See instead of Meer just sounds more classy and poetic.
Your worldview will change when you've dependents. :-)
If you're young: yes try

If you can be a cofounder: yes go on

Everything else: no they are bad employers
Do you have any evidences that this applies to short term working memory? That's what the article is about. The limit seems to be 3-7, and it's not clear that's malleable.
The article points to many historical connections between the women's rights movement and marriage laws, through I wish it would have connected the dots to the current day. Looking at here in Sweden a lot of laws in regard to marriage was abolished in the time around 1960-1980, through the feminist movement was split on the issue and has since not really continued to abolish them. The US for example still have alimony as a concept which backs from the 1700s world view that alimony to wives was paid because it was assumed that the marriage, and the wife's right to support, would have continued but for the misbehavior of the husband.

A lingering view of marriage is the idea that the two individuals are now a single entity and should be treated as such by the government and companies. From a 21th century perspective this doesn't make much sense. Historical a loan might have been given to a family, and if it defaulted the debt transferred to the other family members. Today that is no longer a practice. Welfare is usually on a per-person basis with some minor exceptions. The biggest exception here in Sweden is insurance which still has some "family" aspect attached in both cost and coverage.
Can you elaborate? My impression was that they still pay very well, while the startup scene is much less hot than in Silicon Valley.
> where younger people are attracted to companies that pander to them

because older people don't wnat companies that offer better benefits, easier leave for family issues, less hours, etc...?

> they are willing to accept less pay for more work

in an effort to get ahead and make more for the last 30 working years of their lives, so that when they do have a family at home they can afford it.
400k is an outlier for sr engineer or 1st level manager. Most all of them fall into 200-300/yr in the valley or Seattle at those companies.