skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Am I right to ask for a raise?
I'm 30 years old, primarily a full-stack web developer, but I've done some AI and app development too.

I'm a contractor and I've been working on a project for the last few months with a client. This project is potentially worth millions to my client and could quite easily revolutionise their business.

It's also technically very challenging. For perspective it took another company 6 years of research and £3,000,000 to achieve something similar.

Initially we asked a small tech company to build a prototype for £60,000 but they failed to deliver anything of value.

However, over the last few months of obsessive research and development I have managed to single handedly create the entire solution myself and I am trying to decide whether I should be asking for more money to continue my work. I'm on £400 a day, but that is less than 3 times what they would have been paying the aforementioned tech company for the same work.

Were I to leave now they would struggle to continue development and would probably have to scrap the project. The tech here is extremely niche making it almost impossible to replace me at this point.

How should I play this? And am I being unreasonable to ask for more? I genuinely want them to succeed and don't want to be difficult, but I also feel like I'm being short-changed.
I think the biggest gap that this guide and every one I've seen like it that they undersell the positive value for employees of the Restricted Stock Award (RSA). RSAs can be significantly better than ISOs in many situations.

There is no actual reason why companies can only offer RSAs to founders and super early employees. The taxes get trickier once the strike price gets high enough, but employees should have the choice to maximize their equity value!

From the very beginning of founding my company and still 5 years later, we offer our employees the choice to take their stock as RSAs, options, or a combination of the two. We also teach a mandatory "Stock 101" course every quarter for new employees that is a 1.5hr version of this guide. Too many employees' (engineers in particular in my experience), don't actually understand how their equity compensation works and I think it's the responsibility of the company to educate them -- both for their current role and possible future job offers.
Perhaps not originally. It has that context lately.
Why do you think it's a "fake" crisis? All of the world's climate scientists (spanning multiple disciplines) are lying or exaggerating...for what exactly? More research grants? They could probably get more money by writing papers denying there's a problem.

"Things are better than ever" is a meaningless statement. The Titanic was going great until it hit that iceberg. Our lookouts have been loudly warning us of this iceberg for decades - and their predictions have been largely correct.
Debian/Ubuntu maintainer here; it sucks for us, too.
They will send you to collections w/o warning. Good luck getting the credit hit removed.
True pollution is a problem. But it's been largely solved in developed countries.

Which resources are you worried about running out?
Jeeze. The IRS must work with you on that, right?

Talk about getting screwed!
The Number One Priority: Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks, Part 3
It's possible that we could be replaced but it's hard to envision it would happen without a general AI.

Developments that are sophisticated, but fall short from truly replacing engineers, wouldn't have the predicted effect. Let's say a 20% improvement in the time it takes to produce software. Would anyone feel strongly, at this point, that this that would result in 20% of engineers being out of a job, or is it more likely we'd just produce 20% more software?
> businesses aren't on trial. it's their owners / directors / responsible parties who are on trial, and those are 'private individuals'

While it's very rare that a company is on trial it does happen. Partially in rather prominent cases[1]

There is such a thing as a corporate death penalty.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen
Python's major glaring problem as a systems language is dealing with processes. It is just verbose, ticky and annoying.

I have my other issues with it as a systems language that are more idiosyncratic, but for replacing bash, process management is just way too much hassle.
Fresh water. Arable land. Habitable land.

Developed countries hide their pollution slightly better (no belching smokestacks or filthy rivers) but it's still there.[1]

Most people don't live in developed countries. Don't they deserve to have pollution-free living conditions too?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit#Environmental_eff...
> The debate is far too abstract, with unsupported, sweeping claims about comparative efficacy.

It’s not at all abstract, you’re just obfuscating. If your concern is costs, we should have a fully nationalized model like the UK because that has lower expenditure per capita than single payer or mixed public-private systems. Or, if we can’t have that, have single payer, because it too still has lower costs than the mixed systems in the developed world.

It’s not cargo cultism by way of arguments from analogy. It’s Americans irrationally clinging to their exceptionalism in the face of stark counter examples while their people die in the streets, ration care, and go bankrupt.
Same as with learning anything I guess. Deliberate learning (or specify what part you want to learn) is much more effective than learning broadly without any aim or specific goals in mind.
You are right that this being a bank it is about money, but I think that you miss the liabilities angle: JPM is also out to not lose money, and investors that come back to them with newly worthless triple-A rated coal-industry bonds need to have a retort ready: "you did not read our report!"
I guess I missed that fizzbuzz now means things like fizzbuzz, rather than actual challenge
Should probably be merged with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22384754
sure, sorry I couldn't answer before, I had a think at work.
If your paycheck is $10k you will get $(24k-10k)/2 = $7k. If you "double your salary to $20k" the difference is now $(24k-20k)/2 = $2k. "So you get a $10k raise and take home only $5k more" -- yes that's exactly right. You are suggesting this is a negative externality but I disagree, the subsidy is not a static guarantee, it is a guarantee of help. The whole goal is to close the inequality gap. Therefore, one will get less Guaranteed Income the closer one is to Climb-Out-Bound. That's the whole goal. If this is misguided compared to giving everyone including all the lazy asses and the hardworkers a flat equal rate, let me know.

The equation is pretty straightforward and there is a pretty graph here. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQTCmq0UwAAM7Ku?format=png

Choose a Climb-Out Bound and adjust the amounts accordingly.
Impact of shipwrecks on microbial biogeography andgeochemistry in Gulf of Mexico
> This is missing some fundamental ones: gclid and dclid.

I always preferred CleanURLs as it has an autoupdate feature, which pulls down this json file https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/raw/master/data/da...

https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls/-/wikis/Technical-...

CleanURLs does include both gclid and dclid. From memory the other url cleaning addons required a new version of the addon.
I use POSIX /bin/sh exclusively. It's reasonably lightweight but because of this you loose a lot of the "bash-ism"s. There's ways to work around it though, and the pure-sh-bible[1] is great.

1: https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible
Newegg has problems too. All my friends have RMA horror stories with them, mine is having to pay $50 and shipping because the plastic PCI-E retention clip broke when I was disassembling my new computer with DOA motherboard for an RMA.

Also, Newegg gave up on maintaining their reliable filtering tools for third party sellers.
I agree, I basically wrote the same thing in the FAQ for Oil:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/01/28.html#shouldnt-script...
Water is needed currently for nuclear power.
https://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2014/01/22/importance-of-wat...
> Arduino support means that you are going to do a bunch of things to support 8 and 16 bit systems that look absolutely silly on 32 bit systems.

[citation required]
Fresh water will never run out. Specific regions on the planet will experience drought or floods from time to time but that's the way it's always been. Meanwhile look to Israel and how they've managed to build desalinization plants efficiently and now they have an abundance of fresh water where they used to have very little. Crop yields are up (more than 100% in past few decades), so arable land doesn't appear to be a problem.

I can't reply to below response but no, desalination has gotten much cheaper:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

They use lava rocks and some membranes to filter the salt out.

And no, we don't control the rain.
Cache takes the bulk of the idle power consumption, thanks to not-perfect transistors.

Battery life in benchmarks (and in a lot of real-world use cases) is more about how long the CPU spends in its halted sleep state, and how much power that takes, than its "full throttle" power usage.

Mobile x86 CPUs since Core Duo(?) have the ability to turn off parts of their caches in lower-power modes, for this reason.
Alrighty then, time for me to never do any x86 asm programming again I see :)

Thanks for the detailed correction.
> So choose alternatives to the other things too

It's only appropriate to say this in the context of what one can possibly try doing, not as a justification based on failing to have done this. The amount of websites deploying surveillance is the sheer majority of all websites, especially for many specific sectors.

> and/or install a browser plugin that blocks their tracking bugs

I did say that I have the highest hope in technical solutions, but once again this eventual hope is not a justification for writing off legalistic approaches.

> So what do you expect to happen to loan interest rates if you make it illegal to set the interest rate based on whether the user consents to credit reporting?

For one, secured interest rates wouldn't changed appreciably because there is collateral to foreclose. Even so, any increase would make asset prices drop such that more people would be able to own things rather than renting them from banks. Surveillance and financialization are both centralizing forces, and I am generally opposed to both.

As for the general idea of legitimate interests for consumer surveillance, these records should ultimately be under the control of the surveillance subjects ourselves rather than unaccountable hostile parties. At the very least, a surveillance subject should be able to request a copy of all records, request that they be deleted, and request that they be reinstated from a signed export (and ideally only processed for a very narrow purpose).
That's what Oil is, except it also runs bash scripts and lets you upgrade seamlessly.

That is, bin/oil is the same as bin/osh with a bunch of shell options on, including 'shopt -s simple_word_eval' which eliminates a lot of the quoting hassles.

You can try it now, but some things will be cut out after optimizing the prototype interpreter (in the name of time):

You Can Now Try the Oil Language http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/10/04.html

I'm looking for help too: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/12/09.html#help-wanted

----

Also, I think there is more room than ever, because both Python 3 and Perl 6/Raku are worse for shell-like tasks than their predecessors! Mainly because of startup time and the string abstaction.

We discussed that a couple weeks ago here, and I think it's on the blog somewhere too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156151
Young kids need 10-12 hours of sleep. 10 hours working, plus 1 hour lunch, and a 30 minute each way commute means your kids likely should literally be sleeping the whole time you're at home during a work day.

I don't know any parents that do that - literally never interact with their kids 4 days out of the week. What actually happens is parents sacrifice their kids' sleep schedule.
Sure. NP-completeness is utterly a matter of theory, I make no claims otherwise. SAT solving is such a powerful tool precisely because you can do so well on "small" (and often "average") solutions that it's an attractive target for practical instances of other problems -- despite its theoretical NP-completness.

The poster I originally responded to was curious about the speed with which 9x9 Sudoku can be solved despite "its" NP-completeness, and my point was that it's because of the small restriction of the general, truly NP-complete problem, and not because of anything inherently special about the SQL-based solver.
My father-in-law, who passed away a few years ago, was at Bell Labs then. I really wish I knew about this when I could have talked to him about it.
The problem is that what's beneficial to society is not always clear-cut.
you can always copy the code and install locally if you don't trust the publisher. That's the full benefit of open source. If it breaks in the future, just inspect and copy the new version again?
Study Finds Century-Old Combat Helmet Superior Shield Against Brain Trauma
You don't get to precisely choose which isotopes are produced by the reaction. Even among the light elements, there are radioactive isotopes, such as tritium. And it doesn't take much of it, to render the entire mixture hazardous unless refined in some fashion. One hope is that the refinement process can return the radioactive stuff to the cooking pot, so that the ultimate waste products are safe.
You sound considerate and a little unconfident about money negotiations, which makes me think you're probably the kind of person who is paid less than your work deserves.

Make sure they understand the value of your work.

Think about how you will feel, and what you will do, if your raise is denied
Computer Vision Basics in Microsoft Excel (using just formulas)
The people I've seen add the most value and be the most productive are always the ones with the longest tenure. Because they know the software backwards and they know the domain too.

18 months is barely a blip on the radar.
Can you speak to the architecture at all? e.g. an event hits Freshpaint, and 3 months later is is qualified as a defined "event" to be forwarded to 3 destinations - how does it happen?

I ask because I saw your previous comments and saw that 1) you're an expert at optimizing PostgreSQL, and 2) you said that Heap was harder to build because of the queries that users can define in the frontend.

So basically, are you able to leverage PostgreSQL to build something like Freshpaint? I would imagine it is prohibitively expensive to store your event data in PostgreSQL if it's sole purposed is to be categorized and forwarded to other destinations, vs. being queried like it was in Heap.

Amazing work and best of luck!
I'm not saying you're wrong at all -- most typical startup ISO offerings suck and are not good situations for employees.

That said, as a founder who custom designed our stock plan to be as employee-friendly as we could, there is a better way when actually done right and not just "following the standards".

Stock plan improvements like super long post-termination exercise, offering RSAs instead of just stock options, and most importantly in my opinion, adequately educating your employees on the risks and return possibilities of their equity!

It is irresponsible and manipulative. IMO, for a company to say, "we're giving you X shares worth Y dollars now and it might go up way more than that." While many employees' eyes will glaze over a bit if you start citing tax code, helping them get the basics and fully internalize the risk/reward tradeoff is both doable and necessary!

Equity can be a really valuable part of early employee equity and it's just as much of a peeve of mine to hear people say it's worth $0/lottery as to hear companies oversell the startup dream.
This is fascinating in its own right, of course, but I was indeed referring to a literal finite lookup table, by appeal to the finitude of the 9x9 problem class only. You give a useful strategy for compacting the size of the lookup table though!

(And really, isn't a function just a compressed lookup table? Often trading time for size.)

Another theoretically interesting way to shrink the lookup table is to reduce all grids to the set of essentially different grids -- see Wikipedia for the details [0]. The upshot is a reduction in size to "only" 5,472,730,538 grids. You can then scan the set for a grid matching your input clues -- though, as noted, this trades time for size.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_Sudoku#Enumerat...
Except employees do invest money in the business by exercising their options. And that money, dollar for dollar, buys them an inferior product: lower priority in the liquidation stack; less liquidity because of abusive bylaws restricting secondary transactions; less tax benefits since your “gains” are taxed upfront.

The lower the pay, and the higher the relative cost of exercising, the worse it gets. So higher-paid executives are less penalized than entry-level employees who might spend their savings exercising options that will end up worthless.
Nevada caucus site leader quits after refusing to sign NDA over caucus tech
It looks like they're working on the Berkeley Pit: https://www.mtpr.org/post/montanas-berkeley-pit-water-treatm...

But yeah the developing countries do deserve it. However, it remains a complex political issue. How do you declare or enforce regulations in countries outside of our jurisdiction? You can try to convince those countries it's worth it but you can't force them to.
> Specific regions on the planet will experience drought or floods

And you don't think it's a problem that entirely preventable human activities are causing this? How would you feel if you lived in a drought-stricken region? The Indian subcontinent is one such region. Historically, and cumulatively, the people living there haven't contributed very much to climate change. But they're the ones that will pay a price for it.

> Meanwhile look to Israel and how they've managed to build desalinization plants efficiently

Desalinization requires a lot of energy and is capital-intensive. Even if it's cheaper than it used to be, it's not cheaper than taking fresh water out of a lake or reservoir, treating it, and piping it. Why should poor countries pay a "desal tax" for a problem they didn't cause?

Are you proposing for developed countries to fund desal plants for developing countries as compensation for causing climate change?

What you're saying is "It's not a problem for me. Tough luck if it is for you".
Funny that everyone assumes the buyer is the thief.

I’ve had FedEx steak from me twice. Caught both times, but only because I really pressed the issue.
Silicon is one thing, but the comment you’re replying to specifically mentioned batteries. Non-replaceable batteries offer a modest reduction in size, at the cost of reducing the device’s service life to 3-5 years. I personally don’t find that to be an impressive advancement in technology. The design’s lack of respect for user-serviceability reinforces the other user-hostile features of the iOS ecosystem identified by the grandparent. (Sent from my iPad.)
Tariffs and sanctions. "Tax carbon or you can't trade with us. We'll freeze your assets in our banks. We'll get our allies to do the same thing. Any company that trades with you can't do business here." It works to force compliance on many other issues.
Recently I needed some ROS code for a four wheel steering controller. Someone has this really neat steering controller package that lets you define a wide variety of robots and interface them with ROS, and it does nice things like calculate the odom values for you.

But I ultimately found that setting up and running ROS was sort of more complex than I needed (I’m running on raspberry pi). I pulled the snippet of C++ from the steering controller that I needed and converted it to python. I use python multiprocessing to launch multiple python files as processes that run independently, and use multiprocessing pipes to communicate between the parent process and the sub processes.

I’ve got a whole pure python robot with RTK GPS, four wheel steering, a live server interface, and GPS path-following. It’s all working fine and I haven’t really needed ROS yet.

I feel like I never would have learned how to build this software if I hadn’t learned ROS first though. ROS shows you how all the pieces fit together, and after learning that I started to see how to build it from scratch. For simple applications in resource constrained environments there may be times where building it from scratch is easier. I sure am glad that ROS code and steering controller were there for me to borrow from though!

EDIT: The USB package in TFA looks nice. It’s tricky to run ROS on anything but the exact distro they recommend and this seems to be a useful tool for getting it running quickly without messing with your system.
There's Now a Nationwide Database of Priests Credibly Accused of Abuse
This information asymmetry is also solvable at the company level and IMO, good founders have a obligation to fight to educate engineers who are thinking of joining a startup.

I'm not saying you're wrong at all -- most typical startup ISO offerings suck and are not good situations for employees.
That said, as a founder who custom designed our stock plan to be as employee-friendly as we could, there is a better way when actually done right and not just "following the standards".

Stock plan improvements like super long post-termination exercise, offering RSAs instead of just stock options, and most importantly in my opinion, adequately educating your employees on the risks and return possibilities of their equity!

While many employees' eyes will glaze over a bit if you start citing tax code, helping them get the basics and fully internalize the risk/reward tradeoff is both doable and necessary!
Fun thought experiment: I have 100 apples created in my orchard yearly but this year I decided to create # fake apples from sugar to help "UBI" the village and I wanted to see the effects.

There are 4 people out of 40 below the 3 apples/year mark and I served them in a PGI (progressive guaranteed income way). The inflation was 9 apples this year which means we minted 109 apples and had a 9% spike in commodity prices when we issue the UBI.

At Turnson's orchard, they also have 40 people, 4 below the 3 Apples/year mark, but they decided to give everybody a guaranteed income of 3 apples. They call it "UBI" and claim it will work wonders. Let's see: Turnson creates 120 new apples to cover the UBI on top of the 100 apples his orchard actually produces. The inflation is 2.4x so people who had 200 apples got another 3 apples, and ended up with the equivalent value of 84.5 apples. People who had 0 apples also got 3 and ended up with a grand equivalent buying power during commodity spikes of 1.25 apples.

At Turnson's orchard with UBI, the poorest of the poor ended up with 1.25 apples, and everybody else's currency devalued substantially.

At our orchard, with PGI, we were able to give apples to the poorest and neediest without destroying our currency's value or buying power. Inflation 9% during issuance of currency (See Kuwait in 2011 doing their UBI thing - tis one googles deep.) At Turnson's in this example, inflation is 2.4x during currency issuance and is supposed to even-out to some midpoint between 1.0 and 2.4x. 1.09 to 1.0 has the midline of 1.045 so there is more longterm inflation no matter what. How much depends on how important you think it is to devalue currency by giving some to everyone at the same time.

(Additionally, without an incentive to work, stay employed, or provide value to society, why would people not just accept their cheques and bail? Nobody in blind support of UBI seems to think there are freeloaders or slackers in the world)