skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dear @garry - Thanks for your article. I'm curious if you could comment on VC-driven "founder salaries" for startups. I've seen some fair setups and some very unfair setups.

I can appreciate this from the VC's perspective, they want the founder to be working to grow equity worth, not just to draw salary.

But I can also see how sub-market "founder salaries" would bias startup ownership towards either those with extreme risk appetites or towards those with family safety nets and wealth. How do you approach founder salaries?

Also, when judging founder salaries (knowing full well that will bias towards a small set of the population) how do you determine the comparable (e.g., Is it FAANG? Is it based on YoE as an Engineer? School? Degree?) Is this something that just is necessarily biased in favour of <25yos?
Why hire? There's no law against kidnapping or slavery on a seastead.
I built a visual statechart editor a while ago, feel free to give it a try, happy to answer any related questions too.

https://www.stateskit.com/
A Full Life
sls just produces some CloudFormation with utilities to bundle the project. Honestly I like AWS SAM more.
I haven’t looked at that specific space in a long time, but what I did then was to do an online search for what Chinese/Taiwanese teens were listening to or watching. It helps if you can do this in Chinese and if you localize your search results properly so that the search does not focus on results from your home country.

Doing a quick test, the Slow Chinese podcast may be a good start.
1 month vs 3 years might be inflated a bit for learning, but then again it might fit.

At a startup you might get core technologies going in a month, while at a big tech company the timescale might be closer to years.

I worked at a startup and the focus was on the work. I got to make decisions on what to work with, what technologies to adopt, and then I had to get them running. I worked on core technologies.

At a large company you rarely get to do this. You usually have large systems in production, have very large teams, and get to work on an established code base adding a feature or fixing something.

An interesting exercise at a large company might be to look at the version control checkins from the beginnging. The features at the beginning of the log probably went in a lot faster from fewer contributors.
First, be smart. Very very smart. And be able to demonstrate your smartness at the drop of a hat under stressful conditions.

Second, attend a top tier "name" university like MIT, Stanford or Carnegie Mellon and major in a related discipline.

Third, do some side work in your chosen field that can be shown off to prospective employers.

Fourth, learn how to present yourself well (for interviews and such).

That's generally speaking, of course. Exceptions exist.
I think you've hit the nail on the head as to what's causing this.

1: FAANG companies have had a great decade in terms of stock prices which means employee options are enormous in terms of dollar value (even if salaries aren't huge on their own necessarily).

2: VCs are pumping much more money into the ecosystem, which destroys the equity play for employees. When companies are raising $100m Series C rounds, it changes the cap table in a brutal way. Cap tables ultimately add up to 100% which means someone has to be diluted.
I know the feeling.

A few months ago I was installing Debian on a desktop, and there's this one part during the installer where it prompts you for some information before your desktop is ready to go.

The input processing was so fast it was stupid. It somehow felt even faster than xterm which is already so much better than just about any app on any OS.
Idk, I was just referring to Wikipedia where it says:

> Air is forced from the lungs during a dive and into the upper respiratory passages, where gases cannot easily be absorbed into the bloodstream. This helps protect the seal from the bends.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earless_seal
Here we're talking about meeting a culture not made of human subjects. We know nothing. When they're able to cross interstellar space we're unlikely to have anything they'd want. They'd be so advanced technically we might not even detect them given our limited understanding of physics.

The thing I do see an alien species could want from us is our capability to understand a blueprint and to reassemble them physically from transmitted information. Because that is how they might travel between galaxies. Their assembly, I hasten to add, would be a rather stupid thing to do on our part. If we want to live. But we might do it anyway because we're curious.

How are the scenarios of brute predators, noble protectors, or imperial fleets any more worthwhile to consider than those of the incessant replicators? My answer: Because our culture likes that kind of tale. Because we project our predatory and social features onto an unknown.

So whenever somebody explains phenomena like blips on a radar with an alien species that happens to be eerily similar to us I think of how people made god in their image and either rail against the blatant human-centrism or just disengage.
HN has 30 cool slots, internets have millions. It is okay if something cool doesn’t get to the front page and that’s it.

Links don’t go /news-first for the exact same reason most HN readers don’t go /newest-first.
Perhaps this explains the switch

Hyperbola was based on Arch but was trying to use Xenocara (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocara) as the X display server
Not hard-coded for a particular resolution but hard-coded for a particular DPI.
This is the problem when you have more billionaires than land in Monaco:

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/monaco-extension-sea/index...
Don’t worry, we have a REST service for that too!
What it means. It's glib remark implying there was any difficulty.
It has always been mindboggling to me that startups are still so all in on the Bay Area. Most problems mentioned in the article go away if/when you are willing to staff developers in an area that is not as ridiculous in terms of cost of living as the Bay area. According to StackExchange data, the 50th percentile pay for a Full Stack Developer with a Bachelors degree and 3 years experience (a profile that would seem reasonable for a startup hire) in the Bay area is $140k, whereas in the St Louis and Minneapolis it is $89k. Not sure why for many startups Bay area seems to be the only option. If they staffed their developers in a place like St Louis they'd be able to avoid the SF salaries and still pay in the 75th percentile for the market and the developers would have more purchasing power making $115k in the midwest or Raleigh than they do in the bay area making $145k.
would this help in running tensorflow on the latest MBP 16 ?
If so any guide out there, the documentation is not super helpful
Strongly agree with this. I just did about seven weeks of interviewing in NYC for senior iOS roles, at both startups and big tech companies.

To be frank, it was a total shitshow. Especially on the startup side.

Here’s some of the bullshit I faced interviewing at early stage companies before accepting an offer literally 2.5x as high as the (multiple) offers that startups made.

1. Shitty equity: one startup wanted me to be engineer #7 and completely own the mobile app and strategy, which is the single point of interaction for their customers. They offered me 0.1% and spun some story about how much it would be worth when they were worth $800mm. Their last valuation was about $35mm. Even if their numbers were real, I’d still make more at a big tech company in equity alone. They also made it clear they wouldn’t budge.

2. Bad work/life balance: the big tech company where I accepted apparently has no issue with people taking off whatever time they need (avg is about 25 days per year), working normal 40 hour weeks, and working from home if needed. By contrast, the startups felt way more restrictive here.

3. Terrible interview process: almost all these startups had pretty disorganized process. Worse: they did the standard whiteboard algorithms interviews, whereas multiple bigger tech companies had more iOS-specific interview loops. Even worse, the startups tended to have a higher bar for hiring than the bigger tech companies. This one is subjective and could be random or misperception on my part too.

4. Most infuriating of all, all of these startups (except coinbase) had a 60-90 day option exercise window for employees who left before a liquidity window. Let me be clear: fuck you if you think this is fair. IPO might be 7-10 years out and if I stay and add value for anything short of that, you’re going to ask me to take a huge risk to exercise my options (and pay the taxes) on your probably worthless stock, otherwise you’ll just keep it? Fuck you.

The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s pretty clear that these founders and investors don’t give much of a fuck about their talent, and watching them get squeezed by big tech companies offering sky high comp fills me with glee.

Be a founder, investor, or big co employee. Fuck being an employee for a startup so they can bleed you dry.
How long a submission stays on the front page is almost entirely human-controlled, not vote-controlled.

It's algorithmic in the sense that there are obviously different thresholds, but a human decides which bucket a submission is in. And the bucket determines how long it stays, and whether it's low or high on the front page.

Then there are corner cases. Ever notice people point out in comments when an article is misleading (not just the title) and then a short time later the article gets downranked or whisked off the front page? It happens more than randomly.

The point is that the simple theory of how submissions work is almost entirely mistaken. HN is a newspaper; the editorial staff decides what to print.

Votes still matter in the case of getting things onto the front page, sometimes. Much of the time it's a result of the second-chance queue described in the article though.

The theory that people will find 30 interesting articles for the front page each day is false. It's a huge amount of hard work. Very few do it for free. And those that do, collectively tend not to have good taste. (Some individuals do, but not random HN members as a whole.) Leaving it up to the community would result in an uninteresting front page.

I think it's techie nature to want to find an algorithmic solution for something as complicated as HN curation. I fell into the same trap. But an automatic solution doesn't exist. The early history of flight proved that it was foolish to try to design a plane that would stabilize itself, as opposed to giving a pilot manual control. HN is much the same.

Reddit shows that there are automated solutions, of course. But at HN scale, the problems with Reddit's approach become significant. And we only have one subreddit here.
Can it be used with email and NNTP and so on?
Thank you for the information and the reminder. My apologies.
Isn’t that the job of actions after an transition happened? (modifying the internal context according to the event).
I think somebody did. Go on Twitter and put turntable.fm in your tweet. They'll come calling. I otherwise don't remember their name.
Kind to 3am You
I've used butter to make flour tortillas before. Works pretty well.

I've also used Crisco, on that note. Works not-quite-as-well, but still better than expected.
It seems to me that most companies start to gain a tedious/conventional/corporate atmosphere once they get to more than, I don't know exactly, somewhere in 100-400 employees. At that point the company has acquired, in addition to those who care purely about building companies and building software and building hardware and physical processes, a middle layer of conventional auxiliary staff, and nice though everybody may be, the company just becomes a standard corporate office environment. Many people (especially those who have enjoyed academic environments) strongly don't like such atmospheres, and for those many people this is a pretty strong incentive to work at small companies.
Well they have decided to put the most important information at the bottom of the readme...

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/tree/roc-3.0.0#roc...

It's a collection of GPU development tools and libraries.
This is why whistleblower protections are so important. Without a radical re-org, there will still be enough management within the company that prefers to cover things up. They might well have been hired for that skill.
Perhaps lies is not the best word in this case. Is there a word in English for someone that gives advice knowing that they themselves are not qualified to do so? Like if I were to confidently give you medical advice despite not being a doctor. Putting on a façade?
As I have been a contractor for a while, I wrote a blog post from my point of view. I hope it answers some of your questions.
https://www.stefanschick.eu/posts/hiringsoftwarecontractors/
It blows my mind that a company the size of and with the resources of Google can't get this right, even after all this time. It reeks of apathy to me. And even though I've been a dedicated iPhone user since the 6 Plus, I'd genuinely hoped Android would get better eventually since it's much more open and I enjoy customization, but as it stands, I have no compelling reasons to leave Apple's walled garden.

It seems lately that the only time Google can be deigned to do anything radical to solve problems is when it has one regulatory agency or another breathing down it's neck. It's genuinely disheartening to see a company that, when it started, looked to be ready to change how business was done succumb to the same forces that grind up so many others.
In a world of online everything, a real PeriodOfReflection could benefit us all
> but there's no doubt that it's a dual-use technology

I do in fact doubt this. We've been building fusion weapons for 50 years very successfully, progress in fusion power plants is negligible in comparison. If fusion power plants are a dual use technology for weapons, they must be a very inefficient way to get there.
I refer to my student loans as my BMW M...
Ah I thought that bill ended in the 50s but it must still be going.
Thanks for sharing that powerful quote.
How about you just start giving your first engineers a bit more equity?
It’s even worse, because when you leave after 3 years, you have to pay to exercise those options and then pay the taxes on them. And then hope they end up worth something someday.

Fuck that.
I think it's fair to say that someone who can get that sort of job right out of college probably should. However, I'm not sure that the vast majority of engineers can do that.
Many times we've needed the pure hypothesizers and even the philosophers before we're able to break out of the previous paradigms.
Dunning and Kruger explained how people drastically overestimate their value. The author won't be earning what he thinks he deserves, isn't working on projects he thinks he deserves, and doesn't get the promotions he thinks he deserves wherever he goes. His reality may never change for him and that's his cross to carry.
China forcibly extracting organs from Uighur population (2013)
I think they're going to become more dependent on defense business, which is unlikely to go anywhere.
I think the equity situation is bad, and only going to get worse. FAANG stocks have been on an absolute tear and VC firms have got more money to deploy than ever before.

If I were to bet on it, I think we'll see the tech industry move to a model that mirrors the financial world, with fixed year end bonuses, and no equity opportunities. That's what this thread is basically advocating for, even though right now it means working at Google and getting options.

$1b+ Venture Funds and employees getting generous equity grants don't match. I don't think VC is going away as an asset class anytime soon, and I don't think fund sizes will be dramatically (3-5x) smaller.

If anything, I'd say it's probably for the best for the average person working in tech. Most startup options aren't worth anything, and are highly illiquid.
> "I've banked at Wells Fargo since 2013, and I intend to close my 2 WF accounts and open up new ones at Chase soon."

you're just moving from one crappy, uncaring bank to another (i've banked at both in the past). a credit union or local/regional bank will treat you like a real human rather than a necessary inconvenience: https://www.bankrate.com/banking/reviews/
If I remember correctly, Whitney prototyped J in C and only after that did Iverson turn it into a real language.
Well, it was pretty much “logic alone” that led us to general relativity, for example.
So what got invented in the last ten years that is going to be huge?

I'd go with Crispr.. and stem cell therapy.
In Australia at least, the special forces training (so I've been told by those who know some who went through it) can definitely cause injury and you are free to leave at any time due to it. But you can never return.

The emotional impact of going through the training will not be the same the second time around, so they won't take you back for another try.

A story I heard was that the trainers were total arseholes saying he was weak, saying he couldn't finish, and so on - then as soon as he realised he had to stop (broken leg or something) their attitudes completely changed to supportive and caring. Going through that and seeing the other side would definitely ruin the experience if they let you back in.
It is indeed. However, I've found the problem of writing assignment actions correctly is very similar to the problem of managing ordinary variables without xstate. I'm wondering if I'm doing this right, since I thought xstate was supposed to make that kind of bug much rarer.
Start a soylent competitor?
What percentage of Boeing's revenue and profits comes from NASA contracts and ULA?
Best libraries (in any modern language) for generating PDFs and Excel sheets?
has anyone tried the Lytro Illum? It would be interesting to see how much it has improved moving from proof-of-concept to fully fledged product.
When is SamuelJackson++ coming out?
I mean if this is true we'd expect to see more startups out of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Maybe the stats bear that out I dunno. I do know that the ACA has been credited by lots of folks as the reason they were able to start a company.
We can do both.
Eh, I really don’t think this is representative. I’m a self-taught iOS dev who has only ever been self-employed and I just got a $420k / job from a public company. And I’m smart, but not some unfathomable genius.

I think every engineer should at least do some mock interviews on data structures, algos, and system design (there are TONS) of free study resources and then do a round of interviews. You only need one yes.
I have a lot of bacon grease, but I have only used it in cornbread. I'll have to see where I can substitute it (per my earlier comment, bacon fat flour tortillas now sound very good).
I didn't mean that a company became a unicorn every month or two, but it seemed that companies were founded quite frequently that later went on to become unicorns.
> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years

That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
in the book "Flight to the Stars: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Interstellar Flight" by James Strong, the author theorizes the max-v of a generational ship would be about 15% the speed of light. It would take 450 years to get to the next closest star.

Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away.

Not so sanguine about it solving near-term problems, either. We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population. The benefits of cheap power will also be hoarded
True. I may have to try out the tortillas with other fats to try it.
I've said this before and I'll say it again.
Never accept a lower salary in exchange for equity.
Salary is your market rate for providing labor.
Equity is what you get for taking on the risk of being out of a job sooner than later.

So with that in mind, if the equity and bonuses in BigTechCo are a sure deal, then it may be worth negotiating for more when you join a startup.

Don't sell yourself short.
> The thing missing is an explanation for why we find ourselves in a particular branch.

That question does not really make sense. In every branch, there is 'you' asking about why is being in that particular branch.
This seems to only guarantee the ‘get hired for an exorbitant amount’ part. How about getting the startup off the ground by yourself?
The McRib Arbitrage (2011)
That makes sense! Sorry, I'm in a nitpicky state today.
I learned Morse code back in 1992 in order to pass the General class amateur radio license. Back then, the test was 13 words per minute. I practiced for a few months with cassette tapes and over the air copy. After I got up to about 18 WPM, I went and took the test. I almost choked, but was able to recover and pass the test. I haven't used Morse code since then.
Re: I hope it will go supernova in my lifetime, it will be spectacular.

It could bleep up satellites and communication lines, nobody really knows. Be careful what you wish for. If Yellowstone and Betelgeuse go off at the same time, we are the New Dinosaurs.
Nuclear-bomb simulation shows how blast would destroy 6 US cities
those who are deeply cut for entrepreneurship and startups are not motivated by money first or even at all

From working with many, many founders, this isn’t my experience at all.
Lack of docs plus lack of user base is also a giant failing of bazel. It’s almost always impossible to figure out something I could make happen 6 ways with most other build systems make work in bazel. And there’s little community so now instead of getting work done I am debugging bazel source.

Also building distributable packages with bazel never seemed to work well due to the constant aliasing of so files. Things that would work in the direct bazel build would fail in packages and vice versa so now we had even more pain.

Trying to suck up just header files and multiple so files was always arcane bullshit as well.

We did work with git and other such functionality, but if you had to build a package from another build system to bring into bazel there were always annoying pain points.

Also bazel managed to bring in implicit dependencies in our system so that clearly isn’t something bazel
magically handles but was rather a product of your expertise.

After reading build systems ala carte I am just more convinced bazel is not the build system that I would really ever need. I’m not sure that build system exists yet to be honest :). But in the work I do other systems solve my problems better.
I'm sure these guys' will have an idea of 'competition' that involves a suspicious amount of interaction with the economies of the "nation-states" that they are supposedly bettering (only without all that inconvenient 'taxing' and 'regulation'). It'd be rather a different vibe if they were talking about genuinely starting from scratch somewhere, somehow, but this almost certainly isn't the draw.
The 2010s Were a Terrible Decade for Housing Construction
I think you should first try to understand people at the individual level and only then understand them in aggregate, and you seem to want to skip that first step. Because otherwise you're just going on your own biases and what other people have told you.

It's like I didn't understand blues music very well until I realized that they put a lot of feeling into how they placed each specific note, more so than other genres I've heard. But if you don't know to listen to that, you don't understand what they're trying to say.

Groups of people talk in different ways like that, too. It's easy to listen to them and assume they're saying nothing of value, but perhaps they're communicating something you haven't learned to listen to yet.