skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You are taking the same risks as the founder

Not even close.

You can quit and go get another job any second of any day with zero consequences.

You have zero financial responsibility or obligations to the investors.

You have zero responsibilities and obligations to clients/customers.

You have zero obligations to financial institutions (banks, loans).

You have zero or little reputation on the line in the industry being addressed. In fact, in most cases competitors will gladly hire you because you have valuable industry-specific experience and training.

I could go on. I see a bunch of comments on this thread painting founders as greedy bastards. All I can say is: I hope you can one day wear those shoes and actually understand reality.

That said, yes, there’s a startup culture that works people to death and often offers dubious outcomes. I really don’t like that at all. In technology some things are very hard. If you don’t work hard it is often impossible to achieve anything of note. I don’t have a problem with that. I am no stranger to 18 hour days, 7 days a week. I get it. A company can’t operate like that forever. If it does, there’s something wrong with it.

As a founder my standard mode of operation is simple: If I am awake, I am working. There’s no way I will demand or request such a thing from anyone else. I am the one whose all-in, not those who work for me.

NOTE: Don’t work for less than you are worth. Option are neat, they could be worth zero or a few million. More often than not they are worth zero. Get fair pay for your work. Assume options are worthless.
Or put another way: a legal conviction is still legally correct even if it ends up being factually wrong.

Compensation would generally require the accused (the State, or it's agents in this case) to do something illegal, or at least legally incorrect, to be held legally responsible, and therefore financially responsible.
Why it’s smart to order the second-cheapest wine on the menu
> is just going to classify based on incidental features such as style (e.g. sensationalism), "hot words", etc.

"Just?" Can you really not read a newspaper article about a topic you don't have a lot of depth in, and tell just based on the writing style (vocabulary, techniques, embedded logic, etc) that it is "likely" to be at least inaccurate?

How well this can be implemented with current machine learning technology is another discussion.
There are a lot of great things about being in a startup, and many people have done well financially and personally with that career path.

It's also true that a great deal of the promotion of this career path is propaganda that benefits owners - both founders and financiers.
Stories like this make me glad my company has yet to accept VC money.

We're a five-person legal tech startup and the work environment is far and away the best I've ever experienced. Granted, I've only been a developer in total for four or five years now (including almost three here), but of all the jobs I've had it's the best.

My CTO/supervisor is amazing: smart, funny, likable and with a management style that works for me amazingly well. Mostly hands off, but fully available for deep dives on technical subjects when necessary. At this point I've earned enough trust to be able to just get shit done with minimal oversight, though we do check in daily at least, and keep each other apprised of what we're up to, or interesting things we've come across.

The lack of external forcing agents is probably a win for us at this point. Obviously there's benefits to having a pile of money to burn: we'd probably hire several more developers and really work to hone our product. But for a team with two full-time developers and a really great designer, not to mention extremely smart and talented leadership and sales teams, we're doing great, and ship features at a pace that seems to put to shame similar companies with much larger teams and far more money. Honestly, I have no idea what they're doing with their time.

Still working on that product-market fit though...

Anyway, tl;dr I feel like I hit the jackpot here.
It always sucks to see whenever the comparison is made between pricing offered by a small developer team vs. an enterprise with hundreds of thousands. Microsoft could likely sell Windows for free and still profit from the ecosystem network effects and upsells of its cloud offerings.
Owning a lot of something worth nothing is less valuable than owning a little of something very valuable. 1,000,000 times 0 is still 0.
Every court system in the world accepts eye witnesses testimony. Reliability is evaluated on a case by case basis.
they appear to be using some process already to find the ornaments. As noted here, they may be more interested in improving their own software and their own publicity than providing anything useful for others
There's certainly some selection bias on these sorts of threads, but I agree with you that it's important for individuals to take as much responsibility as they can for the outcome they expect.

That means vetting a company before joining it, pushing back during negotiations and being willing to walk away, giving necessary feedback to your coworkers regardless of their title, and personally practicing the style of leadership you expect from others.

It takes a team of people though, and if the team isn't solid then you need to either try to fix it or walk away. A good team will build individuals up and support them rather than wear down and exploit them.

I just passed the 5 year mark at my current company. When I joined there were about 30 people, and now it's probably around 400. I took 4 days off this week, but on Friday afternoon I popped into the old "office", which are some portable buildings on a cattle ranch. It turned out to be the once-every-few-years junk cleanup day, and the CEO, possibly a billionaire on paper at this point, was limping around with leather gloves and a sore back, and all he had to talk about was the recent ultrasound of his first baby, and how proud he is of how the company has grown since the last cleanup day.
I don’t know much about cryptocurrencies; how is monero different from bitcoin in this context?
that’s up to you to decide isn’t it? what i mean is, there’s no correct answer. 1% is a baseline (minimum) offer. many think it’s fair. at this early stage there is high variance. i think 3-5% is fair. this early you are an absolutely critical hire. I personally don’t want to work for a founder that’s stingy and going for bare minimum.

otoh first second third employee jobs don’t come along every day. turn in down and you may never see an offer this early, ever again.
I watched this happen recently in real time. This article interpreted a Flurry study wrong and was featured on Tech Meme (its headline has since been softened): https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/most-iphone-users-app-t... – "Analytics Suggest 96% of Users Leave App Tracking Disabled in iOS 14.5"

Then the game of telephone began as bloggers simply rewrote the article and added their own spin: https://www.techmeme.com/210507/p14#a210507p14

- Ars: 96% of US users opt out of app tracking in iOS 14.5, analytics find

- iMore: 96% of iPhone users have opted out of app tracking since iOS 14.5 launched

- Wccftech: Analytics Reveal 96 Percent of Users Have Disabled iOS 14.5's App Tracking on Their iPhone

- Ubergizmo: 96% Of iOS Users Have Opted Out Of App Tracking

- …

Flurry since updated their study to make it clear what it was measuring and found opt out in rate to be about 24% for prompted users (not the 4% cited): https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restric...

But none of those articles are interested in correction and the initial visceral reaction and herumphing tweets have all since occurred. Hundreds of thousands of people got the wrong idea.

What it shows it that there is very little original reporting, people don't ask study authors for clarification, and misinterpreting of data happens all too often.
Alan Watts on Thinking https://youtu.be/gbngLDPSaDw
Depends on the price of the house in a major European city (which could be pretty high, I imagine).
If the whole c level does not work the same hours and the reward is not reasonably near the horizon and the extra time is not compensated, then you are being exploited, will never see a reward materialize and your salary is diluted.

Jump ship as far and as soon you can.
It always boggles my mind when I try to use a new API and I have to jump through a hundred hurdles to start using it.

Let me use your service and start paying you!

In the ocean of bad APIs out there I'll pick yours if you can offer:

1. An easy process to onboard

2. Good documentation

3. Usage based pricing
Was anyone else surprised that they used simple k-means for clustering the phonemes? I skimmed the paper and it looks like they use a really high k (128), presumably to avoid having to do an elbow-plot like approach.

Maybe the computational benefits of such a simple algorithm outweighed the potentially bad clusters. Thoughts? I'll try to read the paper in more depth later in case they explain the choice and I missed it.
I'd need a minimum 700,000 to buy a lot or a condemned teardown home on a lot here in Vancouver, BC. Actually that's not Vancouver, that would be an hour away in Maple Ridge or Langley. I'm ok with building (or subcontracting the building of) my own home - but I still can't afford the lot to even start the process.
You can join FAANG and similar. I've had almost nothing but failures on my resume and I was able to interview all the time. It's just about grinding LC and system design - which is really tough and time consuming.
This wasn't an eye witnesses glance, or false memory.

It was a witness who literally chased/followed the suspect from the crime scene to a place where people knew who he was.
Haven’t established any bases in the Middle East? Are you kidding? Building bases in the Middle East was first order of business after world war 2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Sultan_Air_Base
But it's not the last line of a function, though, is it? Put an if statement in there, and it can be literally any line of the function. Sure, you can still work out which one, but it gets more difficult.

And, even if it were the last line of the function, you are still not communicating clearly whether the function is meant to return a value at all or not. This both hurst readability, and makes it easier to accidentally introduce bugs.
Great article. One point it kind of touches on but misses is the higher risk of “growing pains” / incompetence in startup land. Leadership, processes (lack there of) etc can all be lacking / poor. Anything from poor strategic judgement to shitting the bed on equity valuation (eg I once joined a “rocket ship” that valued its shares at $50 a piece. I realize of course share price is a function of outstanding shares but given startups want to minimize their share price, it didn’t seem well managed at all)
In this country you are either rich or some flavor of poor. Simplistic as it sounds, I won’t be able to “exhale” until I am grossing at least $400k annually. I am far from it, and I feel it. I can hardly save at the moment. Health care is a big bite as well. Even w an employer plan. Still have to come up w a $3500 deductible before costs are shared. Not whining. Just saying that even though I have a decent monthly check, I am poor.
Iran has a shit regime (corollary: all countries' regimes are shit, just some more than others).

To your question, it's a matter of emphasis. You have a fundamentally greater moral imperative to criticize your own government (I assume you're not Iranian living in Iran) and its dealings/shortcomings simply because you can, in principle, actually have some relatively significant impact on its actions. So no, there is no need to ignore the conduct of the Iranian government, but if you place emphasis on it disproportional to what you actually have influence over, your moral priorities are fundamentally misplaced.
Sure but lets not add the state to the list of things that can end people's lives.
Fair enough. So that's just the old concept of 'tainted coins'.
Debunking the Arguments for Vaccine Apartheid
I'm wondering why the employees (especially the one in red) are putting themselves into physical danger over a $100B corporation's cosmetic supplies. Why even get involved? Just get physically away from them and start writing the paperwork. Isn't this what insurance is for?
Willfully? Absolutely. I think willfully trying to get someone convicted of a crime should carry 3x the punishment of that crime. It’s the deliberate misuse of state power to pervert the course of justice.
I dont really think thats a valid distinction. Is there a false/different final "thing" that is being described?
>Right. And what does any of that have to do with work?

For you? Nothing. For your LGBTQIA+ coworkers? It means having to figure out how many times a day to bite your tongue when somebody "apolitically" makes an "innocent" attack helicopter joke that "isn't targeting" them. Ignoring those people and their feelings is political. I have personally called out coworkers who were making shitty "jokes" in front of clearly-uncomfortable non-straight coworkers. This is a real thing that happens every day even if you successfully ignore it.

>No, I mean the people who identify as a letter and scald you if you don't know what their letter means

I was assisting you should you desire not to be "scalded" by not understanding what eight letters mean. Your combative stance about those marginalized people belies your claim to be "firmly left of center."
I read a book by a consultant who said he could immediately gauge how well a factory was operating by looking at how relaxed the average workers were. The most efficient factories almost looked like nothing was happening, because they had a smooth and efficient process and knew how to calmly handle emergencies.
Not wishing to and having to step in are two different things. I wish I didn’t have to sit on irc. There are a million things I’d rather be doing and I could be doing.

But this is what must be done.
The valley is a machine, caked with blood, running on flesh.
It’s all intertwined. When you can print billions and use it to fund research while other countries can’t — well this will also reenforce your lead.
Zillow says Seattle is over $800,000.

Can't find salary info for UW (the big university).

Tech-folk making $150,000+
Spot on.

I've been working in startups for 10 years (my whole career so far) because I was optimising for learning, not financial return. I made the bet that startups would be the fastest way to learn (breadth of tasks, workload, exposure to more senior people etc) and I am allergic to larger company bureaucracy.
.. after sending each recruiter to a week-long GPG training class.
So the question is, who was writing the code and why were they so evidently incompetent? Easy for anyone to pick up a bit of R and start working with it. Thus it's hardly surprising to find the situation you describe. Why weren't these folk put through a rigorous course before being let loose in a pharmaceutical company of all places? Hardly their fault unless they exaggerated their skills.
2h11 Win10
Updates xxx
Rust heads into the kernel?
$200k is your expected equity payoff if you have a 2% chance that your equity is going to be worth $10M and a 98% chance that it's going to be worthless, which is the simplified model used in that back-of-the-envelope calculation
Forgoing the latter is worth not doing the former imo. Again, unless we’re talking millions per year, which 99% of FAANG employees aren’t making. The best one could hope for is high six figures, probably toping out around $800-$900k after 15 years.

As I said though, this only makes sense if your goal is money. I personally don’t value money over other things like mental health and enjoying my work. I know I would have much worse mental health, and hate what I do at a FAANG.
Writing a game from first principles in 65c02 assembly language
> Maybe we'll actually reach some future where all production and maintenance labor is fully automated and most participants in an economy won't be human and we can just ethically enslave them for the benefit of human owners, but we're nowhere near that point.

It’s equally likely that in such a future most people will be on some version of UBI that allows them to get by, but wealth, in whatever form it takes, will still be limited to a relatively small subset of people. There’s no reason to believe that the robots/AGI/whatever means of production will naturally be owned collectively rather than privately. I hope the future turns out better, but there seems to be something in human nature that makes inequity tend to stick around.
Sorry — everyone unfortunately does not have the human right to have a family of 5 in Manhattan.

Everyone does (IMO) have the human right to live off of the land without destroying it permanently for the next family.
> She adds, “The Greeks were obsessed with being Greeks,” considering all those who didn’t speak the language “barbarians.”

But "barbarian" meant something like "speaking another language".
Sure, but driving in mud will take the same amount of energy for both the gas and electric car. It’s not like the ev has an inherent disadvantage in low speed off roading.

Since rock crawling is all about low end torque with guys installing two transfer cases so they can go 4 lo-lo and redline at 3 km/h I would have thought the low end torque of electric motor would be better than gas.
I think every country has baffling and shocking miscarriages of justice were someone was thrown in jail for something they didn't do.

But you can release someone, even after 20 years. "Oops it wasn't you who raped and strangled that child sorry". The death penalty is final however.
The neighbor witness followed the suspect to a place where he was known/recognized.
Tech stocks are a similar story.
The socialism is all about nationalized means of production and lack of private enterprise. Everything is revolving around eliminating owners of capital as a social class.

The often repeated American "socialism" whenever "free education" or "free healthcare" are mentioned has nothing to do with actual socialism and is a misnomer. It has nothing to do with social policies.

Source: I come from a former soviet block country
I agree; founders should have substantially more equity than any one early employee. But its not just about which is harder to start as (founder or early employee), but also the time/energy/emotion invested over years to bring the company to a successful scenario. Being a third employee is still pretty hard if you are working 60-80hrs/week for years and making major life sacrifices.

And you're right; $100M exit isn't always a win. That was a somewhat arbitrary milestone I used to do quick math.
Run, don't walk, to a farm community, and away from expensive fancy cities.
It's interesting to observe that whenever R is discussed, someone talked that python is better than R in this or that area.
All things bwing equal, if you're wealthy, your income is guaranteed by the state and the law - it will take the collapse of civilization to wipe you out. Whereas if you have a salary, your income is a matter of your luck holding - not being in a major accident, or your employer/industry/ economy imploding for 18+ months
> I don't have the temperament or skills to be a founder

If only everyone were as mature and introspective.

> are wising up about wealth distribution... will see they have better options elsewhere

Truthfully, all those people will discover is that the distribution of educational pedigrees - the real predictor of "better options elsewhere" - is far stickier, nepotistic and unfair than a 9 percentage point difference in equity.
Is the model actually trained (=updating the weights instead of just the state) during en/decoding?
To be honest, outlook for mac isn’t particularly great either. It is not much of a step up from outlook web access, which is what I ended up using on linux after trying all the mail clients. Evolution with the ews plugin came close, but required a ton of configuration and the tasks integration was never quite right.
As far as I can tell you can just not use hooks, if you (and the rest of your contributors) agree.
Yes, humans being too sparse is headline news weekly.
I think those same people are spending their mental energy on deciphering law, writing code, and trying to predict the stock market now.
Tight downzoning took all the unfairness of the existing market for real estate and amplified it hugely. Today, housing market is driven by rentierism, which is pretty much the opposite of "free". I agree 100% that regulations create and drive markets, but the regulations have been put in place to ensure a steady transfer of wealth from those with less to those with land.

The downzoning trend that started in the 1970s, driven by the twin forces of 1) racism (not wanting to allow non-whites into white neighborhoods after the civil rights movement tried to allow integration), and 2) Malthusian thinking (keep the population down by letting fewer people live near me), led to a transformation of real estate, making it even worse.

They aren't making any more land, as they say. Which is what drives the value of it up so much in certain locations, the locations where people want to be. But by downzoning so that no more people can use the same bits of land, the structures themselves acquire the really insidious property of land that makes it a really bad for for markets.
I'm in a PE role, and I have to tell myself every day not to go do the POC because that's not how I can maximize my impact. If someone else can do that work, I'm going to try and lean on them.

Strategy is hard. Much harder than I thought it would be. I am unable to make progress on strategy when I'm deep in tactical work.

I do jump in when needed, but every time I get my hands dirty I fall behind on strategy.

Your PE may indeed be useless, but it's also possible they are pretty good at their job. Good strategy is boring and seems obvious when presented because it creates clarity across a diverse company.
Worth noting that this is an exceptional track record - 4 of 5 startups with a paying acquisition. Great story, but it’s not likely the normal result of doing 5 startups :)
People chose to adopt or to leave nazism all the time as well (that said it’s not a particularly common belief).

Sure people changes their beliefs - something I thought was true turns out to be no longer true, I no longer believe in it. I think you’re trying to say that because our beliefs are based upon our judgment they’re somehow not fluid. But we chose to judge and consider ourselves.

As mentioned earlier, sex, race and sexuality are innate and deserve protection. Nobody is arguing otherwise (unless you are).
My children went to the same school as Sergei Brain’s kids and prepandemic, on an international flight he flew in economy with his kids vs using a private jet or flying them in first class. Very admirable since he is one of the richest people in the world, but something I would find very hard to do myself, to be honest.
Ironic that the website doesn't have a robots.txt file :p
What if an independent, international, grassroots organization outside the control of governments took up the challenge?