skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simply, the 1% ‘shares’ were actually shares in a company that only begins existing if the company you worked for surpasses some value $X. Example, if the company is sold for $X + $50 million then you have 1% of $50mm. The con with these agreements is that you, the little-person-with-no-leverage, you are not told the X while you are working there. Ask your CFO, they will say in a practiced tone, “We don’t give out that information”.

IMO the best way to tell if the company is a winner, is to see big growth in sales/market size, especially after funding rounds. If the company is on its third funding round with no revenue and no clients then it’s one of these weird VC zombie dogs that manage to get funding because of spectacular bullshit artistry by the CEO (likely with a sales background). In which case your shares are worthless but the pay/gig might be interesting.
"The entire point of joining a start-up is to 'play the lotto'."

I don't think that's "the entire point" for all of us. I enjoy the challenges of scaling products that already have product market fit; startups are a great place to do such work. I also enjoy small, but not too small, teams; somewhere between 50 and 150 is a nice sweet spot for me. This setup is also found at many startups. Sometimes, markets lack institutional players as well. If I want to work on certain kinds of healthcare, financial technology or cryptocurrencies, startups are also a great place.
I love the Z80; it was my second (the first was a luggable IBM XT clone; it truly sucked compared to the home computers of that time) CPU experience beginning of the 80s and it was great. I couldn't imagine anything better and I have not found anything better. I do a lot of embedded asm coding now with modern CPUs and it is just not as nice to me as writing asm on a Z80 system is. Probably because I did so much of it at a young age; it is still fun and fluent. No manuals/internet needed on msx or spectrum, which is also fun; if anything tells me it is not only nostalgia, it is that; being able to write programs without needing to look everything up or download libraries. Not practical these days (mostly because everything has to be modular, so almost nothing ships with batteries included anymore), but still preferable in my opinion.
This impression of India seems really strange to me. I've never been, but it's been 'top of my list' for years. I was completely baffled when I mentioned this to someone and the reply was 'oh but it's just poverty tourism' ... What? Why would I want to do that on any level, even short of any sort of self-aware embarrassment, what's the appeal? I can understand the Taj Mahal more, but your comment reminds me of it, tourists actually seek out slums to... what exactly, gawk at and photograph the poor?

It would be as bizarre and uncouth at home as I find the idea of it abroad.

I very much hope not to fit that mold when I eventually visit. I don't think I would - I would mainly just like to eat and cook! - but perhaps it's naïve to think I'd be any less annoying than the next gora.
Team behind MEGA65 retro-computer asks for 66k EUR donations for steel moulds
The people developing the FPGA-based retro computer named MEGA65 (http://mega65.org), an enhanced replica of the ultr-rare Commodore 65 prototype computer, again try to hack the system: Instead of using a crowd-funding platform they are asking the community for donations of 66,000 Euros total by displaying the 8 highest bids in a highscore-list on the page. The campaign runs for one week now and has already collected around 10% (over 6,000 Euros).
Maybe they try to save on i18n.
The author who has probably done these deals probably knows the most common occurrence and went with it?
> the slowest parts of my work were my typing

My rule of thumb says: if fingers are the bottleneck, then your programming language is not powerful enough (too verbose). Working with higher level abstractions is good for health: brain doesn't get RSI.

> which is type-theory-driven (fancy phrase for "slow")

...
We recently had a power outage at the 10 story building we are in. No idea how long it was in the works, but a week later they installed a giant array of Tesla of Tesla Powerpacks.
>Do you think it's immoral when you, say, switch from Verizon to AT&T to get a cheaper rate on your cell phone plan?

This is an astounding comparison that seems to aim to reduce questions of exploitation down to questions of personal morality, rather than the actual historical development of the systems we have and the ones we like to see. Is it immoral to switch phone providers? I don't think so. Is the system in which switching a cell phone provider can actually harm labourers morally questionable, even on the grounds that liberal egalitarians set out? For sure.
Normally the way the preference works is that you "give up" your shares in exchange for being paid back, as if you had initially given the company a loan instead of bought equity.

E.g., you invest $1M, company sells for $15M, and you want to be able to get $2M (2x) of the $15M in exchange for your investment.

With regular preferred shares, you get paid your $2M and then that's it, your initial $1M is paid back.

With participating preferred, you get your $2M, but then act as if you still had the equity that you bought with the $1M (even though you basically already got paid back for it). So you get $2M + whatever your cut of the remaining $13M is.
I think this is like a negative feedback loop:
People realized that working at MegaCorp makes far more money -> Startup recruiting becomes harder
-> Startup doesn't have any choice but to pay more salary
-> Startup needs more cash and grow even more reliant on VC
-> VC gets to negotiate better preferences
-> Employee common stock reduces in value

There's really not much any players in this game can do. Maybe bringing in more remote high-end workers for startups will partially solve the problem?
They would need permission from their regulator to raise rates to get the return on investing in those improvements. But voters/rate payers don't like rate hikes... so no underground cables.
No time working on my I Ching course for my master degree. However I join a programming competition many years ago About an incident of a crazy assignment for a kid. My clone of the github here:

https://github.com/kwccoin/ABCDEFGHPPP

It is fun. I think I even try to use a micro version of cobol to do it. But the fastest is still c.

May be we can start one. Sadly no time to join.

(I think there is a web site that post many versions of the same program. It must have Wc. If not these should be there. )
When I received my most recent startup offer, I was handed a spreadsheet that outlined the size of my option, and what they would be worth under multiple hypothetical scenarios, including highly-optimistic >400M and >3B valuations.

While it was nice for them to do the math for me, I do think that the scenarios presented were misleading and only represent the case where everything goes exceptionally well.

Now they did caveat that these were based off of assumptions, and that I should consult my own professional advisers etc etc. But, they didn't name any of the factors that could significantly impact returns (liquidation preference, participation, caps, etc.).
I have 4 ISPS in my area, including Comcast. It's been the same for the last couple of years and I've moved around to different areas.

How much of the infrastructure did companies like Comcast fund? They should get a check from the government, if they become public utilities and they funded it.
> The vast majority of the world use mobile devices as their only computing device, and the office workers and power users such as us are minority users and thus get minority attention. I think something like iPad OS getting laptop features and everyone targeting one or two mobile OS targets will be the future in 10 years.

If you consider that a tablet is a "computing device" then my washing machine is also one.

> It's like proliferation of electron apps, or how even the prosumer SLR / MILC camera market is dying as smartphone cameras get better and better.

They get "better and better" because they are crap. As U2 said: even better than the real thing.
>The problem is that modern UI's can do so much that some has to be hidden so the common use cases can be easier

Bollocks. The "modern UI" can't do anything that much more that Windows 95 wasn't doing already. Too bad the touchscreen became standard long after anyone cared about good UX, and so the UI paradigms are still struggling with this new kind of hardware.

There is no reason ever to hide the scrollbar, which is not only a control, but also an indicator.

The UI designers don't hide it for the sake of good UX, it's for the sake of being "brave" - leading to articles like this.
> If the motivation is to predatory pricing, where you are deliberately holding the price below the marginal cost per unit in order to drive the competition out of business, you'll find that the FTC frowns on such behavior.

Of course, but it is constantly debated line.

To go back to Email, "we'll be losing money until the price for storage drops" is that predatory?

"We're losing money because we haven't ramped up our partner ad program yet." Predatory?

There are many cases where a large pile of cash can help establish a business, and help create a higher quality user experience and a better product, precisely because there is the chance to not turn a profit money for awhile.

> but because I'd find such an atmosphere positively toxic. It's something I'd expect of the Uber "bro" culture, and no, I'd never want to work there.

I never encountered the Uber bro culture, but I have been lucky enough to work at teams where we wanted to do better than everyone else and where that was our mission day in and day out.

Part of that was looking at the competition and seeing how badly they were shafting users on price, and getting angry about it and funneling that anger into making a better product.

> This is why it's so bad to say anthing like, "I want to drive the competition out of business"

The goal is always to make a product so good that there is no possible competition, and that is of course perfectly legal to do, just so long as the competition is driven out of business solely because of consumer's making a free choice as to which product they want to buy.

> they can take that video to the FTC, and now you're in a heap of trouble.

My understanding is that the trouble only comes if the company has actually done something illegal. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market, and someone in sales goes and starts bribing people, huge problem. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market and the supply chain and engineering teams find a way to shave 30% off the product's price, or the software engineers and designers work together to make the product 10x more usable than anything else on the market, then there isn't a problem.

The issue that comes up of course is that if the CEO does say anything that might be seen as encouraging someone to win at "any cost", and any single employee takes those steps, then yeah, obvious legal problems.

But the overall fact is, in competitive winner-takes-all markets, the goal has to be winning big, and everyone needs to be aligned behind that goal, and everyone on the team has to believe in that goal.
Look, I get it, you have hardwood furniture in your beautiful mansion or whatever, but the rest of us need tables and chairs too.
Have they? The state of labour laws in the countries which produce cheap goods sold to Western countries seem generally poor, especially given the timeframe for which this has been happening. It's also suspect how work is treated merely as a matter of wage and benefits rather than a question of the nature of wage labour itself.
Just imagine the power that such a technology a totalitarian government could wield using this.

Just imagine the power of the people in a crowd pointing them at a politician making a speech.
Important to note also that "tend to equalize" can just as easily mean "the top comes down at the same time the bottom goes up" as "the bottom rises faster than the top". By most big measures, the world is more equal than it was 30 years ago, but that came at the cost of stagnating a significant chunk of the global "top" (ex. the US middle class).
In fact, no compression scheme can reliably compress data to fewer bytes than it started as, thanks to the pigeonhole principle.
> The most recent example is China turning to free markets, and the resulting vast improvement in their economy.

China hasn't turned to anything like textbook Anglosphere free markets. Yeah they loosened up and turned away from classical central planning, but state-owned firms still control 30% of assets and their government does quite a to set economic policy and direction. They didn't privatize everything and let the free market run amok.

[1] http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/state-owned-enter...: With all these evidences in hand, we can now answer the question raised before: How big are Chinese SOEs? Even though their share in the economy continued to decline in the past decade, SOEs still make up a substantial part of the national economy – roughly controlling 30 percent of the total secondary and tertiary assets, or over 50 percent of total industrial assets.
It might help if the CPUC didn't have appearances of corruption. I'd like to see the CPUC weighing in on PG&E heavily.

On KQED Forum one caller mentioned that bankruptcy allows clawbacks of payments (bonus, dividends) that are deemed improper.

Perhaps this is one way we can fund actually making PG&E state-owned.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/stor...
And yet the C64 (and VIC) far outsold the BBC Micro and the Spectrum.

And yes, BBC Basic was a very nice language, but it wasn't very fast for real-world tasks. Way back then I implemented the KERMIT file transfer protocol (and a VT100 terminal emulator) in BBC Basic and it was very slow. I re-wrote it in 6502 assembler to make it really usable. So for anything serious you needed to do on the BBC Micro, you needed to write it in assembler.

And don't get me started on that "reset" key that could be hit by accident at any time. Or the crap DFS disk file system.
That's surprising to me. The need for capacitance is common sense to anyone with an understanding of electricity, which I would have assumed to include people who install solar panels on their homes.

Has deployments gotten broad enough that not just (curious) early adopters install them, now?
Hyundai Kona Electric becomes self-driving BotRide for free ride-hailing service
This is not a good way to start a company.

In May 2020, the timing will be perfect for some ideas, but not for others.

You're also not likely to succeed if you start with an idea or a problem and then try to find customers. Start with the customers -- people who trust you enough to buy something from you, even though you're just starting out.

That's the real barrier to sales for most startups: no one wants to be your first customer or your guinea pig. They know there's a 99.9%+ chance you'll go out of business.

People rarely take that leap unless they know and like you already.
It's billions. Not millions.
> Logically it is a single proof, but technically it consists of quite a few theorems and lemmas, so this is not a valid comparison.

I think it's 100% valid, indeed, the Metamath and/or Metamath Zero verifiers are verifying much more. I'm measuring time to verify ALL proofs of an entire system, including every theorem and lemma. The Coq measure you're quoting is the time to verify just a single proof with its lemmas. Coq is slower at verifying "a single proof of a theorem including all its lemmas" (though a complex one) than Metamath is at verifying "proofs of all theorems including all lemmas". To be fair, Coq is not designed to do this quickly, so that should not be surprising.

> Also proofs in Coq are typically structured and are pretty complex because of all the automation, while metamath proofs look like core dumps :)

You're showing the "compressed" format. That's simply its internal storage format, which is normally optimized to reduce storage space. Humans do not need to work in that format (and usually don't). Normally for final display the proofs are shown in HTML, for example:

> http://us.metamath.org/mpeuni/f1o2ndf1.html

Note that in the HTML display every step is justified by a hyperlink; you can click on the hyperlink to see the justification (recursively). For example, step 3 uses the justification "syl"; if you click on "syl" you'll find that it says that if ⊢ (𝜑 → 𝜓) and ⊢ (𝜓 → 𝜒) then ⊢ (𝜑 → 𝜒). The theorem syl is itself proved, and you can click on its links to see how it derives all the way back to definitions and axioms.

If you want to see just simple text, you can see the proof in text format by installing "metamath" and running this:

> metamath 'read set.mm' 'show proof f1o2ndf1'

As far as "structured" goes, I think structuring proofs is necessary for any system. A complex proof in Metamath is typically built up from axioms, previous proofs, and lemmas as needed. I think that's necessary for any math verification system.
Way easier with the default tools. Companies with money will buy sccm etc. But for those orgs without, MSI or writing a script are the only default options. And scripts are unreliable
> So, they seem to be turning off their income as well as some costs. Their expenses however still exist in the form of infrastructure, employees, etc.

Yes, but they're weighing that loss of revenue against potentially having to pay out billions in damages if they cause another fire. It looks like the last fire is going to cost them over $18 billion, since that's what they're trying to cap it at last I saw. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-09/pge-looks-...
He's probably referring to Intel compilers outputting code designed to slow down CPUs from other makers.
Of course it only works if the legal reasons don't prevent you from providing a response that acknowledges the existence of 'legal reasons' (even if it doesn't explain them) - canarys attempt to solve this, but even a '451 is used in response everywhere appropriate' canary is only an existence proof when removed, it being available doesn't show anything.
The better alternative to skim reading the news
Someone should make a tshirt “Liquidation Pref: the most dangerous word”
Has anyone seen this code used in the wild? What are some examples?
I am almost offended when I get “451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons” when visiting some US news publication from Europe. GDPR making it less legal to sell my data to advertisers is not what Bradbury was writing about.
I don’t see how they (or anyone else that may operate PG&E) has any option here... PG&E operated under a risk model that allowed them to defer maintenance for years with no consequences for the fires they caused.

When that turned out to be wrong, they need to 1) stop causing fires and 2) complete the maintenance they should have been doing.

The problem is that #2 may take years to get caught up before they can begin operating normally again.

So where they are now: they operate a high risk service during certain whether conditions, and they’re responsible if anything goes wrong.

So what should they do given their current position? (As in right now.. no “should have”s that they can’t change.) shutting down occasionally seems pretty reasonable from their point of view.
Just listened to it. He’s a giant!
Employees that are paid common stock didn't put any money. They are also paid decent salary. It is like playing a lottery, but only with opportunity cost.
Not sure what needs to be protected here.
Unless I misread the article, it's about blue-collar workers losing their manufacturing jobs due to globalization. I don't know what the typical career progression in manufacturing looks like, but if you can be replaced by some freshly hired 22 year old in China, you're probably in the bottom rung. So it's not like that hypothetical 40 year old was suddenly thrown back into the bottom rung after a successful career where their superior experience protected them from competing with 22 year olds. Their well-paying job at the bottom rung disappeared, with the only alternatives being retraining for less well-paying jobs in the bottom rung of other industries or staying unemployed. It appears many stayed unemployed.

I think they should be given sufficient support to bridge the gap while they retrain; potentially even before their jobs disappear. That seems strictly preferable to unemployment.
60% of land in CA is under Federal management.

Another 2/3 is private land.

There is more bureaucracy around things like air quality regulations, but in general it's not an "aesthetic" issue causing these problems.

Many of the issues are around "interface" fires where cities butt up against forested areas. Doing a controlled burn of some remote wilderness is fine, but doesn't accomplish much as far as human safety. This is exacerbated by things like the massive drought CA suffered, and other climate change related problems. For example, millions of CA tress which would otherwise be green and healthy have died or are afflicted by disease as a result of climate change, which makes them into tinder that fuels these "conflagrations".

If you do a controlled burn nearby a heavily-populated area, you always run the risk of things going out of control and having unintended consequences. The issue as far as PG&E goes is that their POWER LINES and other equipment have not been properly maintained, which is 100% their responsibility.

They are obligated to clear areas around their lines and make sure everything is operating safely. The Paradise fire wasn't caused by State mismanagement, it was caused by sparking PG&E lines and transformers catching immediately adjacent growth on fire. That's not a State of even a Federal management issue or responsibility.

They are a for-profit corporation though, so other than fines and penalties for their negligence, they have no incentive to do better. They pay out massive salaries, bonuses, and dividends (bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/04/16/new-pge-ceo-salary-double-geisha-williams.html), yet their solution to "safety" here is to just shut everything off and act like it's a problem caused by others.

There are many interrelated aspects at play, but insinuating that the State is somehow just a bunch of misguided hippies not following common sense is just silly.
B12 is largely misunderstood. B12 isn't produced by any animals, it's only produced by certain bacteria. It used to be available in plant based diets, but modern hygenic practices have more or less stopped that. In modern industrial farming it's common for the animals to not get enough B12 either, so they often get B12 from supplements as well.

Fortunately it's incredibly cheap to synthesize supplements and you don't need much of it at all, so this is not really a concern for vegans.

https://www.forksoverknives.com/vitamin-b12-questions-answer...
It goes without saying that metamath is not designed to be read from the source directly. To be perfectly fair, Coq isn't either; you can kind of get the gist but to really understand what's going on you have to start up Coq and look at proof states. Metamath as it's meant to be seen looks like this: http://metamath.tirix.org/f1o2ndf1.html .

I agree that calling it "one proof" is a mischaracterization, but comparing all of Raft to all of set.mm is probably about right. I would guess set.mm is 10-100 times larger than Raft in terms of number and complexity of actual proof content, but it checks in a fraction of the time, in part because of that "core dump". You might think it ugly, but have you ever looked at a .vo file? The difference is metamath checks its 'cache' in to version control.
I very strongly believe this to be the case. The details don't feel right.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21359698
Firefox in particular is themable; mine is pretty compact.