skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number Answer: No one knows, but we assume Pi is normal.
For those not so deep in the world of startup, can you give a layman's explanation of what Participating Preferred is?
Yeah, an overview of how things are laid out is great to have but let me go there after I've already looked around a bit, and don't make it an obstacle.
The author, Mario Carniero, is both one of the top three smartest and nicest people I know (and many other Ohio State students where he did his undergrad would agree). Glad to see his research getting Hacker News recognition.
Check what the owners got, and if they got any payout with the 50% dilution event. If the owners also got nothing, then the investors took it all. But if the owners got say $50 from the deal and you got nothing for your 2% you got screwed.
Why is it that the common shares holders are not properly informed that a certain investment round basically reduced their cash-out to 0? The incentives to invest more time into the company is greatly reduced. The person affected who is asking to Heidi said that they were working very hard, considering that they owned 1% of the shares of the company.
Instagram had what, 12 employees when it got bought for 1 billion?

I worked for a small company that fired half the employees (10->5, mostly marketing/sales execs) and absolutely nothing changed. Our revenue actually increased over the next year, not to mention gross sales not paying those salaries. We were originally going to replace them but decided to wait it out for a full year because we realized we didn't need them.

They were all expert busy-workers, who used to try hard when they first joined but got lazy about 2yrs in and started phoning it in. Startups and small businesses have no time for those types of people.

The other massive expense VC-backed companies waste money on are high-paid consultants (and lawyers) from the big business corporatey world.
Yes, but you changed the original problem from "Monty reveals a goat" to "Monty revealed a goat".

One little letter and the whole thing is a completely different problem.
Electronics have been running gas engines for decades, get over it.
Making managers (what startups can and must do)
It sounds like an easy way to screw holders of common stock out of their money. Don't they have any protection at all? Like at least, does the agreement for "liquidation preference" have to be reasonable (like, they could go to court and challenge it, and the company would have to prove that it was a necessary deal)?
I really like the look of that. It'd be awesome to see a dwarf fortress map rendered like that.
> Has this not been done? If not, why?

I'm no libertarian, but I will concede that this is a perfect example of libertarian griping about government spending: it's not getting done because no one has any incentive for it to get done.

Does the manufacturer have any incentive to honestly test the machine? Hell no, then no one would buy it.

Does the government have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because airport/customs security is security theater and their goal is convincing voters that "something is being done". (Voters might have an incentive to honestly test the machine, but it's more-or-less impossible for this preference to affect policy, unless huge numbers of people become single-issue voters about security device testing. Which isn't likely.)

Do the operators have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because if a terrorist slips through the machine and then blows up a plane, none of the blame comes back to the individual officer who ran the test.

Without any incentive for the machine to work, it's no surprise that it doesn't.
I couldn't agree more. Screw hamburger menus, scriptified scrollbars, and buttons that don't work properly. "Mobile first" is fine, but jeez, don't break my desktop. I mean, srsly, what do you think you're playing at?
This is exactly my thought. The author is just guessing. There are 95 comments here, and they are just guessing too.

The real reason of why the employee got zilch would be found by just reading the documentation - the legal agreements awarding the stock options, the purchase and sale agreements, incorporation docs...
The bbc move seems successful though.not just Manchester either... also to Wales
There are more ways to measure the health of the American worker than the BLS' unemployment rate. What about other statistics? Things like like...

- Wage growth over time
- Health outcomes
- Savings rate
- Credit card debt rate
- Feelings about the future (are we on the right track/wrong track?)
> expected to perform more emotional labor

Can you explain what you mean by this?

> the experience of being in a relationship is generally better for men

Seems wildly speculative.
NSA Exploits Used by Worm-Cryptominer to Infect and Attack Systems
I think we're capable of rising above our instincts as a sentient species, and as a result human relationship desires are far more diverse than they would be for any other species of great ape, but instinct is not the only source of selection pressure involved, since those instincts are often reinforced by culture and society, religion and sometimes by law.
You're describing every modern industrial vehicle, battery powered doesn't change that at all.
She mentions this in the article - most deals are structured with carve-outs so that specifically those employees you want to stay get multi-million payouts (over multiple years) as long as they stay with the employer. If there was no such carve-out for the VP, it means the acquirer doesn't want them.

The answer is still "walk", but the acquirer is not going to care. The reason to walk is that there's no sense staying in a job where your employer doesn't want you and isn't going to reward you. It's for your own self-respect, not to stick it to the man.
I guess supercritical CO2 can be a decent refrigerant as well.

https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/a-heat-pump-usi...
> , there are hundreds of millions fewer people in poverty than there were just a few decades ago.

And how much of that is due to globalization and how much of that is due to the growth of local economies? How much faster would those local economies have grown if wealth was not being siphoned out by multi-nationals? (These are not honest inquiries, not rhetorical questions.)

> None of what you're saying justifies that the alternative would have been better, where most of these people remained poor subsistance farmers.

The people who were poor subsistence farm who had their lands given away are generally not those who have been lifted out of poverty.
Good advice. However, from a negotiation POV, it’s difficult since there are so many alternative people who only ask how many shares they will get, and think that more shares is better than less, rather than what they are worth. It’s comical. This makes it easy to just pick one of those people and skip the few who know what’s going on. For a founder or VC, this is like free money, since you can promise whatever you want ( 100 zillion shares) and pay them whatever is convenient. Eventually, this will erode the trust needed for Silicon Valley to work.
On Linux Desktop funding: companies like Red Hat and Canonical fund much of the development on things like GNOME.

The real budget is likely much higher than the article suggest, especially now that Ubuntu fully switched to Gnome.
Title is factually correct. Article is superfluous.
Why didn't I get any money from my startup? – A guide to Liquidation Preferences
This is my take as well. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics to describe physics suggests it is more fundamental than something our monkey brains came up with. If aliens are operating with the same physics, they are going to create a mathematics that is isomorphic to our own.
Also see, from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920
If my example (turning $200 million into $100 million) the investors don't get their full investment back. They lose half of it.

But I get your point. And yes, it has something to do with leverage.

But I also assert that the current system is better for common shareholders as well. The idea that we could have a slightly different world in which investors acted exactly as they did today, but bought common shares instead of preferred shares is clearly wrong.

If they're buying common instead of preferred then valuations would drop significantly. Probably by over 50%. This means that either companies would be giving away much larger %s of themselves when fundraising or they would be raising much less capital (which is of course used to pay the salaries of all those common shareholders). Both are probably bad for common stockholders in most cases. Which is why we see very few companies ever do this.
Tangentially, I find it amusing that the Library of Congress classifies the Bible as "BS".
These businesses seem highly appealing to financiers, as this is largely what financiers do in their day to day - and it seems to work out well for them.
Dear Comcast, I Noticed Your Email About My Tweet and Wanted You to Have This
This is a false equivalence. Buying factory-farmed meat directly supports its producers. The manufacturer of my laptop does not run the concentration camp for Uighers.
No Swedish meatballs? I guess I'm not visiting IKEA.
Your fun little hippie commune doesn't extrapolate very well to society at large.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/39133
Because they can? If you don't like the terms, it's up to you to walk away.
We should strive not for perfection, but to be excellent enough
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor
Half of India doesn't have a usable toilet. The situation is improving but it's not uncommon to see people literally defecating in the streets simply because they cannot afford a toilet or infrastructure isn't there where they live. It's a big problem space and with a market of almost 1.5billion people there surely must be some sort of airbnb like service possible in the toilet industry. TaaS: Toilet as a Service.
Medical herbalist, Yarrow Willard enthuses about these 'saprophytes' in this video[1] Many will find his outlook completely fanciful ( he says they are nervines of the forest) but I think its positive and he is experienced in ways.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI8s01q0Ojk
I think we got our wires crossed.

"When you take your business to them you are effectively telling your local workers..."

By "them" I meant the overseas workers. My bad.
Sarcasm is hard. Unless I'm mistaken, you're imitating Blizzard and Diablo Immortal. If not then I think your comment comes across as extremely blind to a large segment of users.
Are they under pressure from regulators or courts to never start another fire again or something?
Sounds like they're not really a utility anymore.
I used to own music. Now I have all the music, but also none of it.
I really love this line at the end of the article: "At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use." I wish more tech companies embodied this ethos!
Navajo Nation is getting addresses, thanks to Plus Codes
> Instagram had what, 12 employees when it got bought for 1 billion?

Which was really a pittance.

I acknowledge hindsight is 20/20, but it's interesting to see posts here lamenting that startups hire too many people, when selling for much too little is surely a more grievous financial mistake.

Or to put it another way, if they had 75 engineers when they sold for a billion, the tragedy would still not be that they had too many engineers.
That's the one where they get liquidity prefs up front and then also get to participate with common, right? Worked for a company that had that.

Fortunately we had a violent restructure and an insane cap table got crunched down, cleaned up and all that stuff was made null and void. Definitely a "useful crisis" as we got to an exit later without any liquidity prefs hanging over our head.
Yes, I know. I may get a power shutoff.

It's not for all of California. In Silicon Valley, it's mostly west of I-280, although my own area, about 2 miles east of I-280 in San Mateo County, is on warning status.
Who knew it ever stopped being a thing?
I once stumbled on a rant by a post doc CS student. In addition to an essay why being able to do type erasure is good and why actually doing type erasure is terrible. He had an essay with the observation that while capital has the ability to pull their money and reinvest it elsewhere if they dislike returns and risk, skilled workers are kinda stuck with whatever skill they've invested in. And capital can diversify while a worker usually is stuck with exactly one investment. Given that it seems shitty to give capital better tax preferences than earned income.
This kind of trivia is my favorite thing to find on HN
Implying intensifies
People have the patience of learning the new tricks ONCE when they get a new phone. After that nothing major like this should change. I am sure this change would have created more than a few hundred WTF moments while someone was driving/cooking/whatever and texting (yes, I know it is bad, but everyone does it) and I wouldn't be surprised there are a few accidents.
> As a result lots of big companies have competing “pulls” — eg fiefdoms.

Exactly. Why? Because they suck plain and simple. My wife (a highly paid and educated professional) just wasted 3 hours today trying to get a simple new cable box installed from Verizon. Earlier she tried to have Best Buy do a simple TV pickup and ended up having to cut her losses cancel Best Buy and just get 800junk to pick it up (at a higher cost). There is ZERO reason large companies can't get things like that right that they do over and over and over again every day.

I say this as someone who has actually operated and run a small company and had employees. Yes it was not a large corporation. But it had way less resources available and very generally not even enough people to get done what needed to get done. Don't let anyone tell you different. It's the same thing people have had shoved down their throats ever since (ironically) 1981 when the IBM PC came out along with that crap that Microsoft put on it. 'It's not us it's you'. People just buy that thinking and that is why companies get away with what they do. (There is also consumers and businesses making poor choices and not wanting to pay for quality for sure).
Hopefully this leads to the state getting good deal in the inevitable public takeover.
For anyone thinking about working for startups:

- don't treat verbal agreements seriously

- common stock is 99.9% worthless, you want preferred stock

- liquidation preference is important, if company doesn't want to tell you, insist on market-rate salary

- if a company tries to switch from an LLC to C-Corp and move you from being a minority owner of LLC (0.1-3%) into a common-stock owner of a C-Corp with the same %, block/sue them; you were working for thieves
Apart from when you hit a key at just the wrong angle and it sticks.
Correct. The founder probably retained 90% or more of the stock, its growth was completely organic. I was very lucky to be part of it.
OPs comment asserted that developed world workers were being hurt specifically because of the combination of free trade and a minimum wage caused unemployment. My comment was refuting that specific argument.

The stats you mention are interesting but not relevant to OPs assertion that a wage floor in developed nations was problematic in a free trade world.
Don't forget hair analysis.

And out of all of those, the only one that actually works is DNA analysis and even that fails from time to time due to how easily samples can be contaminated.
“As part of our commitment to supporting our customers to live healthier and more sustainable lives, we have decided to launch our first-ever ‘Meat-Free Christmas’ in our restaurants.”

I think there's a big difference between supporting customers who want to eat less meat (i.e. offering a veggie option) and removing the meat option entirely. There aren't any statistics on this, but if there's no meat at all, I might leave and go somewhere else. Maybe Ikea could have convinced me to eat less, but I'd likely end up somewhere else with no reduction whatsoever.

I guess it's Ikea's store and it can do whatever it wants, but I personally don't like the idea of some company telling me how to eat because a marketing guy decided it fit well as part of a corporate sustainability initiative.
The terminology was specific mentioning 'citizen' which is because you cannot join any of the state security positions, including military, if you are not a citizen but 'only resident'. The letter written by the secretary of defence notes specifically that they are looking for people in the corporate world to join but that these people must be citizens.
The digits "360" are centered at the 360th digit. [Edit: if you include the leading 3 before the decimal, which Wikipedia doesn't.]
BERT is such a great case of clever hans. If you scrub the shallow statistical similarities from question answer sets accuracy drops significantly .
This is not really a big scoop but an article describing how to use it would be great !
Important note: San Francisco seems to be getting a pass for the blackout.
IKEA breakfast are the only reason I visit. That's one place I new to visit. Amazon it is then...
Background on why california has so many fires:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/climate/why-california-fi...

Answer: Santa Ana Winds + above ground power lines + fire suppression. From the article:

It’s counterintuitive, but the United States’ history of suppressing wildfires has actually made present-day wildfires worse.

“For the last century we fought fire, and we did pretty well at it across all of the Western United States,” Dr. Williams said. “And every time we fought a fire successfully, that means that a bunch of stuff that would have burned didn’t burn. And so over the last hundred years we’ve had an accumulation of plants in a lot of areas.

“And so in a lot of California now when fires start, those fires are burning through places that have a lot more plants to burn than they would have if we had been allowing fires to burn for the last hundred years.”

In recent years, the United States Forest Service has been trying to rectify the previous practice through the use of prescribed or “controlled” burns.
blah blah options blah preferred blah series A/B/C blah blah

The real reason they got shafted is that they weren't important enough or they didnt follow what is going on. If you have a $1m asset you shouldn't be hoping its OK when there are so many sharks in the building. Yeah it would be nice if you could trust management and VCs but you can't.
Unless I'm reading it wrong it looks like the "Power shutoff potential" is elevated or higher for all of their CA territory
I am sure in 2-3 decades eating meat in West / developed World would either become prohibitively expensive like caviar or it would be outlawed.

It seems that nowadays humans want to completely redefine what is humanity - all social, cultural, religious values are being discarded altogether or are
being completely redefined.

I don’t know whether this is good or not - all I know is that there seem to be political or social movements behind each and every one of these movements and to have band of people redefine and reinforce, by law and through media, an altered version of humanity for our Children is a scary thought for me.
Well of course - exporting work conditions is non-trivial to impossible. Take a textile factory in a newly industrializing nation.

Okay now add air conditioning to get it up to US standards - oh wait there isn't even a power plant to connect to.
This is a little bit surprising to me, at $DAYJOB i had some requests for an MSI installer. I knew there's some AD/GPO features or whatever but your level of seriousness here is unexpected.

Is it really easier to install compared to an exe installer (say nsis / inno-based)? How so?
Haha, me too. I have dietary restrictions that make most of their foods inedible for me, but the meat is good. But take it away cause there definitely aren't people like me out there.
I just have to laugh and cry when anyone suggests "re-education" as a solution to this. The truth is that more and more people are in complete shock and utterly dislocated from anything resembling a prior society of culture. Parents have NO IDEA what to tell their children because NOBODY knows what will be economically useful or useless in 10 years, or even 5. The "tech" industry has been an ever more rapacious and annihilating blitzkrieg on the ability of anyone but an ever shrinking few to be attractive to other people, not only economically, but socially, emotionally, educationally, etc..., and on the ability of anyone to anticipate the future and plan out a lifetime.

"Industrial policy" in this environment would merely mean determining what mechanical processes to have human bodies implement while they despair under the specter of realizing their fake-need make-work tasks could be destroyed at any moment by the snap of a ruler's finger.
Check out Venture Deals by Feld & Mendelson. It explains in layman's terms most anything you'll encounter during fundraising.
> How do you get your employer to hear you?

At the risk of sounding flip, I'd say a lawsuit generally works.
I feel like meatballs can be more accurately replaced by a meat-substitute than a burger can. So maybe they'll go that route?
Why would it become prohibitively expensive? Are ranchers going to stop selling beef?
How do I choose provider? I checked my IP via talosintelligence.com and it seems that my /24 subnet is mostly neutral with 1 good. Using vultr.
People loved XP coming from '98 which was way more prone to crash, BSOD, data losses etc, from what I recall.
Gets me thinking about then ending of the book version of Contact.
When some of the economists mentioned are the president of the International Economic Association, a a chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and a Nobel Prize winner who also happens to be the economics columnist for one of the largest U.S. newspapers -- I think it's fair to say that these are representative of mainstream economic thought.
Yes it has, that doesn't make it bad though. It has also been fantastic for 90% of the world's population.
I completely agree, but if they are able to properly (as in with predictive power for variations) build a MOSFET or anything of similar complexity they would likely be able to understand our concept of an electron.

I believe that is very unlikely as it is very unlikely to miss atoms and then it is very likely to miss electrons. Of course I also do not think that it is provably impossible.
agreed - there's a branching model in the roadmap :)
> Form without content can be an interesting technical experiment, but it's culturally massless and kind of boring. Not to mention wrong in a destabilising way - like someone speaking random syllables that make occasional sense, but don't form a coherent message.

Couldn't read that without being reminded of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol

As the composer says, "I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything." If you haven't heard it, pull it up on YouTube — it's quite an experience.
I remember that! I loved the story (albeit it was just a story). Kind of cool to see that this is a possibility soon.
There is a style of roundabout called a hamburger roundabout. It's controlled by lights, and has a two-way lane running straight through the middle.

I don't drive much, these days; but even as a passenger, they do my head in. No More Hamburgers! Boo!
From my cursory understanding, they are not under direct pressure but recent legal fines have implicitly made the risks of remaining operational sky-high. What did the litigators think would happen?