skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to Work for Equity
Hi HNers!

I am a very good software dev mostly working on mobile apps.

About twice a year I will have a friend approach me with a great mobile app idea. The friend has an exciting idea (which I also like) but they have little money. I work a day job at a rate they can't match my normal payments. These app ideas are very simple to me to implement and usually take 2 days for me to build from scratch and have minimal maintenance.

I was wondering if I can do an equity-type deal where I own 40% of the app, in exchange for me building the app and doing some maintenance. I see some potential in some of the app ideas being pitched to me, as some apps could become really good.

I was thinking I would take 40% of profits, and if the app is sold to another company get 40% of the profit

Has anyone built a software app on a deal like this? Is this even legally possible?

Location Australia

Thanks

Pete
Companies adopting ERP (almost) invariably overestimate the costs of bringing their business processes in line with the software and underestimate the costs of bringing the software in line with their business processes.
Steve Jobs.

It hasn't been there since he passed - they've been coasting, and it's starting to show.
New model links political instability to negative representation
China grows way more than enough food to feed its people and its neighbours too.
I left Mozilla (brief undistinguished tenure; briefer overlap with you) in part because I felt it simply refused to acknowledge that the Internet of 2005 (dominated by 500M people using web browsers in democracies) was not the Internet of 2015 (3B people, mostly apps on smartphones, tracked by their SIM cards and social networks). I was thrilled to start working on FirefoxOS, then soon experienced it as a kind of doubling-down of denial. Skimming Brave's About page, I don't see anything that addresses the existence of Verizon or Windows OS-level security, let alone WhatsApp. I have no idea the extent to which other people think this way, but to me the silence of Mozilla and Brave on the extent to which browsers on laptops have simply been overwhelmed by the rise of other tools and other layers makes it hard to take their pronouncements seriously.

PS, thanks for saving the Web when you did. It seems genuinely heroic to me.
Companies that exploit workers by skirting around labor laws need to be regulated, do you really need more substance than that?

It's not like this a one-off occurrence.
>If ML was so good, it should have won anyway.

Experience proves otherwise, to the best of my knoledge. For gaining wide propagation in a niche, whether of habitat or market, being the paragon of what can be conceived is rarely the way to optimize success. There are many other factors, and technical merit is lightly pondered.

That's true for life, where there are numerous examples where a function is filled by an organ that evolved in a counter manner of what an engineer sense of elegance/parsimony would provide.

That's also something that happens for technical products, where early proliferation in the market seems to offer a far more successful advantage than excellence of the product.

That said, I never had the opportunity to touch ML, and only already heard about it through my personal research on the roots of Coq that I studied during my CS courses in University. I didn't touched much of Java since I left University. Last year I worked on an SDK provided for several languages, including Java, so it gave me the opportunity to look at how it evolved, and play with its integration of functional paradigm. That still requires far too much boilerplate code to my gust, but is bit less frustrating in how you can structure your code.
Wouldn't this require access to the companies APIs or scraping them somehow? I don't know that they allow for that.
That was my first thought too, but my knowledge on the topic is tiny and I was hoping the article would explain why that wasn't possible.
The handling of biometric data is designed to be secure between the sensors and the secure enclave. For example, data from the fingerprint sensor is encrypted when it is sent over the wires inside the device. The secure enclave does not store images of the fingerprint, but a representation of it which is not enough to reverse back into a fingerprint.

This is covered in the Apple Platform Security Guide.

https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...
(I believe this link can change when the guide gets updated)
The driver can see this breakdown on every ride and on their weekly statements already. Why would the customer need to know this information?
> Gitlab is still the team that didn't notice that three of their three independent backup mechanisms had not been working for weeks to months.

So, this is a really good point. Someone made the smart decision within Gitlab to outsource some of the harder problems to an outside party with serious experience on the topics rather than trying to script their way out of the challenge themselves.

> Protection against rogue employees is also something that happens in larger teams, if at all.

ref: amazon w/r/t capital one for a good example of this exact failure mode. (Can't tell if we're in agreement; your statement is a bit ambiguous, but given "if at all," I'm assuming we're on the same page)
I used Clerky in 2016. I found them pleasant and easy to work with. Took the time to answer all of my questions. Prices quite reasonable. Unfortunately, this data point is a bit out of date.

I regularly work with companies that use all of the above. All seem to produce decent documents. You can also compare their sample documents against ones from CooleyGo [1] and the like.

There are things you may desire as a founder that won't necessarily come standard in template docs from Clerky/Stripe/Gusto. Single-trigger acceleration [2] is the obvious example I can think of right now but I'm sure there are others.

Also, be sure to do your 83(b) election ASAP -- definitely within 30 days of incorporation. [3]

(Not a Cooley shill - they just produce good content.)

--

[1] https://www.cooleygo.com/documents/

[2] https://www.cooleygo.com/what-is-double-trigger-acceleration...

[3] https://www.cooleygo.com/what-is-a-section-83b-election/
It's more complex - essentially the people in Taiwan who's politics descend from the nationalists who escaped ahead of Mao's and took over the country are different from those who's politics descend from Japanese invasion and occupation from 1895-1945, ~1 week of independence, followed by occupation by those self same nationalists. They literally speak different languages.

The weird thing is that the Nationalists, the arch-anti-communists who believe they still rule one China are the ones who have been cosying up to the mainland over the past decade or so, making big bucks doing so - they're the ones who are against Taiwan as an independent country ....

The kids? they love j-pop/k-pop are much more citizens of a wider Asia rather than China.

So the people who have won this latest election by a landslide aren't the descendants of the Nationalists who believe they rule China, but they do believe in a Taiwan in a wider Asia, what's happening in Hong Kong scares the shit out of them.

IMHO we should happily recognize "Taiwan", but not the defunct "RoC"
It seems like people shouldn’t be equal when in one case it means 50 or 60 year olds dying from a four pack a day habit that they refused to quit after a lifetime of warning and in the other case it’s a teen or young twenty year old that vaped the wrong thing once not really knowing what they were getting into
Assuming you are using an IDE, the new Cat(1,2,4) is far better and concise, plus the IDE tells you already what they are.
when people argue that they didn't go to jail, i take it to mean that those who were "responsible" didn't suffer "enough". Where enough is taken to mean an eye for an eye.

Whether you subscribe to this sort of thinking is up to you - i don't, but the result is that the people who suffered don't feel they've been vindicated nor made whole, and the world has moved on since.
Mass extraction and consumption of oil and coal will happen until these resources are too sparse to warrant building new plants or maintaining existing ones.

I don't really see any future where this doesn't happen. If you remove coal subsidies, or tax them, then some of the energy production currently handled by coal will change to oil, but once the oil becomes expensive enough to extract, coal mines will open back up again.

This just seems inevitable to me. Is there an angle I'm missing?
This is an all-of-the-above-all-hands-on-deck moment in human history, so I applaud you for focusing on the things you feel are most impactful.

Some of us are also looking beyond the challenges (e.g., coal power) that have known solutions for the most impactful thing we can do to buy more time. Large transportation, electricity, and agricultural infrastructure will take time and lots of political will to change.

Planting trees on unproductive land with desalinated ocean water that no one's fighting over is low-hanging fruit.
And then all those trees dry out because waterbed can't carry this many, and they catch fire. See California, nearly every year. It's a 100% natural process for them to dry out and catch fire from time to time. It's just not very conducive to permanent carbon capture. The proposed solution (irrigation) is the most pie-in-the-sky part of the plan. It's "solar energy, ???, profit" basically.

I like the scalability aspects of this. I don't think we have a technical solution that is as scalable as a biological one. I do think that simply "planting trees" is not going to do the trick though.
What does a vap app even do? Mine works just fine without an app.
IMO that's a very wrongheaded way to think about floating-point values. As far as IEEE 754 goes, my only praise for it is that it's significantly better than no floating-point standard (which we had before).

Integers are inherently different because calculations with integers are naturally discrete, while floating-point calculations are a discrete approximation of the reals, which are not discrete.

There are two general purposes for floating-point numbers: scientific computing, where you start with an imprecise value and the precision multiplicatively accumulates (the original use). And as a hardware optimization for calculation of non-integer values (a common use-case today). In neither case does it make sense to treat a floating-point value as a precise number, which matches common advice to not compare floating-point values by equality.
Here’s an explanation in terms of folk probability. Ron Conway is playing poker, not roulette. He’s exposed to many opportunities and he chooses the ones he thinks are good bets. He earns far higher returns than he would if he picked randomly from the set of opportunities he is offered. The difference between him and the average angel investor is due to skill. No doubt he makes many bad bets but he is on the far, far right tail of investor returns for angel investments and has been for decades.
Special instructions won't help latency. There are prefetch instructions that basically just do loads. Each load in x64 (at least on Intel) grabs 128 bytes (two cache lines) from memory to cache minimum.

The Cell from Sony did have explicit cache control (I think) and it was notoriously difficult to program for.

The real reason cache isn't handled explicitly though is because it isn't necessary. Getting good performance and cache usage can be done at the C++ level, you just have to know how the CPU works and access memory linearly so it can be prefetched. I've tried to use prefetch instructions and beating the out of order buffer in the CPU is actually very difficult.
I guess I will publish a book for monetization. I will select a few chapters to post on my blog.
I don't think it's a red herring. It gets right to the heart of the very personal entitlement parents have, to the exclusion and detriment of people around them. I asked (rhetorically, admittedly) your stance on school funding equity because it's an issue where there can be no question that the status quo is something along the lines of, "Fuck you, getting mine, and also let me have some of yours," which is roughly analogous to what you've held is appropriate for the issue at hand.

We could make things better, and it would require maybe not having your kids in particular at the front of the line. That doesn't mean society is absolutely thwarting your endeavor to be a good parent; it's a recognition that while children are important, they are not the only, nor the altogether and at all times, primary concern of civilization. I mean, if you want to define human nature solely by the effort to advance one's progeny... I mean, even then, you have to admit that the well-being and conceens of the adults who support that effort are also important. Evolution is the process of surviving the day, serially.
They did, but it stopped and then went back as far as I know. E.g. nowadays there are two Chinese writing systems, simplified and traditional. Similar Japanese efforts to ban some rare kanji (e.g. some were only ever used in certain last names) fizzled with the advent of computers that make it easy to type any kanji.

People do not always want things simplified. They also want richness and this may conflict with simplicity. Look at fonts, for example. They gained a lot of complexity recently, there's lots of contextual variations and even two different systems to express it (Apple has its own). The monospace fonts that were invented for typewriters are much simpler than other fonts, but nowadays they are only used in certain specific contexts, like programming, and even there they started to get quite a bit of richness + complexity with PragmataPro being the absolute champion of it.

I'd say the general trend is toward perceived simplicity, but internal richness. Automation, not simplification.
1: yes I believe it is possible to better. However I also believe that many of the reasons those other countries do better than the US - as much a 7 times cheaper - are political and thus not something any manager can solve. Going from 4x more expensive than best world prices prices (LA is about 4x, NYX is about 7x) to 3.9x more expensive than world prices are possible - that is a drop in the bucket though compared to the 4x improvement possible by finding the real issues where are political.
That would imply mean reversion. Investors who have been successful in the past should be no more likely than average to be successful in the future. That is not what we observe in VC.
If it’s at all like driving for Uber/Lyft, they likely do both.
Those Oft-Forgotten Pant Parts
Caltrain Vibration and Volatility Analysis
There are investments that return 10+%, but that doesn't mean that's how much you should take out every year. The 3-4% (usually 4% for retirement savings) is to buffer for years where you get negative returns. I've never seen anyone recommend withdrawing 12% a year with plans to have the nestegg last a long time.
How is the Internet (effectively) free?

* desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, etc aren't free
* wireless data plans aren't free
* wired Internet connections aren't free
* streaming services aren't free
There exist multi-cart vapes where you can load up 4 different carts (one THC, one CBD, one Terps, one Flavoring agent, as an example) and control the dispensed amount of each via phone app.
I thought the deal about the F35 and other fighter planes was that when the various countries bought this hardware they got to build a part of it. Really as a way to soften or justify the absurd cost of these things,

For example here in Denmark, the Danish company Terma which is specialised in radar technology produces a number of components for the F35:

https://www.terma.com/media/444108/f-35_and_terma_171012_scr...
Is anyone else getting worried about the amount of the internet that is proxied through cloudflare?
Yeah, I got the spam too.
And you can get similar results inside your favorite programmer's editor using something like Jedi:

https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi
The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, by Carl Sagan [pdf]
Nice, haven't heard of this before. Do you happen to know who is overseeing this implementation, and related affiliations?

I did a cursory investigation but it wasn't immediately obvious.
Most chips don't need the latest silicon technology, mostly that's just for high end CPUs and memory - "fast enough" allows one to start to optimize for cheaper
There's not many nuke stocks anyway. Can easily back-fill the few that are public to diversify into that.
Yeah, it’s basically Snow Crash.
There have been a few issues due to mold and yeast contamination too. Still, better than the black market days because you can check the serial number against the contaminated batches.
We're destroying society, one working norm at a time. This is ludicrous, and the lack of regulatory oversight of this kind of vampire game, which winds up ripping off the food source, and the delivery agent in some wierd game of capitalism is a huge black mark on our generations time.

I cannot think of a reason to want to take work in the developed west, and casually turn it into this kind of serfdom. Every time I see gig economy workers in developing world economies, I think about this, and how immoral it is to uplift their drudgery and replace it into our context like there is no downside.

Has anyone else here read "Down and out in Paris & London" which is Orwell's record of his time in the Paris restaurant business, and then as a tramp (bum) on the road between workhouses in the UK? This is what we're going back to.

This is insane. We have to stop backing the gig economy.
Financial Services Restructuring [video]
It's a common misconception that cache is "low latency". It certainly is compared to main memory (which can take ~200 cycles before it stats feeding the CPU the bytes it wanted), but L3 hit can take 40-60 cycles easily as well, so it's not even an order of magnitude difference. By the time you're hitting L3, you're kind of already screwed.

For perf, I'd much rather have larger L1, or a (much) bigger register file.
You never know. Doug Forcett made an almost perfectly accurate guess as to the inner workings of the afterlife while stoned.

For those unaware, it's from the show The Good Place. Good fun for me, highly recommend it.

Edit: Apparently a joke with the meaning of "you never know who might get lucky and have an interesting insight" was... disliked. My thoughts on being able to have insight from anywhere come at least partially from the (somewhat recent) story of physicists that noted a connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors (iirc) that mathematicians did not (after many years). Sometimes, insight comes from the outside.
ok sure. contaminated often implies some kind of accidental addition of harmful substances which isn't the case here which is what I was clarifying.
Well, that gets into game theory stuff, though. For example, one could say that logically any aggressively expansive intelligent species on that scale should take the position of being friendly and supporting to lesser-advanced intelligent species by default, as a way to encourage other more-advanced species than them to take the same position.

The real danger would be a super but unintelligent race doing the same (think "giant space ants"), since they wouldn't have philosophy department chairs.
Honestly, I don't understand how this isn't the same thing as tax fraud.
If you're a programmer, does your editor perform spellcheck for you? Mine certainly doesn't.

It's utterly bizarre to me that people in this thread are seriously suggesting that spelling is an obsolete skill.
This seems to be a rather simplistic/one-sided answer furthering a specific agenda.

* The responses that don't fit the narrative that 'legal' vaping is safe are'explained away' in this article - that's just unscientific and a matter of ignoring contrary evidence.
* There are other dangers to vaping ignored in the argument (eg addiction, kids starting even earlier if there's 'bubblegum' or 'cherry' flavour rather than tobacco
* No long term studies, so we really have no idea what's safe and what's not.
* Overall there's no control or standards on the stuff in the vaping juice, so we still don't really know what effect which product might have.
* The bans were not motivated just by the sick people but also the various other factors - so even if true that 'legal'vaping products weren't the cause there are many questions still to be answered.
* ...

The world is never so black and white as this article paints it.

A) Is vaping better than cigarettes? Maybe. Is it better people switch to vaping? Maybe. Is it better we encourage/aid them to stop smoking and vaping? Absolutely.

B) Will flavoured vaping with sweet flavours, wild west unlicensed/non-regulatef ingredients and unchecked advertising get more young people and even children interested and hooked? Absolutely.
Or the 1997 documentary on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec
HTTP: //wintersupplement.com/pure-cbd-tincture/
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http://wintersupplement.com/pure-cbd-tincture/
You are missing something: the companies that build tunnel boring machines already have engineers who know how to make the machines looking into the problem of making their designs better. It isn't clear that there is a significant improvement available.

Rockets were a small enough niche that there were improvements possible if someone invested in them. It isn't clear if such improvements are even possible. (meaning they might be)
wow you rarely see "tech" companies migrate in this direction (vs say enterprise or smb).