skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have some fairly basic questions:

1. What happens if an employee loses access to the wallet their company-ownership-tokens are on? Is it just a matter of re-emitting new tokens and distributing it to them? How are the old tokens handled (e.g. if the wallet is found at a later point in time)?

2. Could you ELI5 how you correlate the company value with token value?

3. Presumably, if everything works out, this allows your team (as well as anyone else) to sell their ownership tokens at any point, but also buy others' tokens that are available on the market as well right? I can see a few issues with this including insider dealing (some people having earlier access to great/awful news before others and making token transactions based on that).

I think it's an interesting idea but I think there are a lot more details that I'd like to see ironed out based on the little that's in the doc (that also has public-write access on it for some reason)
Why not get mad at all the money appropriated to USAID to fund specific causes and find out most of that money went to pay for houses near Langley, VA and Politico accounts? That's a much larger scandal than this super transparent process happening.

The scandal is now super deep. They just caught FEMA funding another $60 M going to hotels in NYC! Prepare for this to get deeper. I hope they root out all corruption. My hat is off to them, I'm extremely overjoyed they're finally fixing our government. This is the best government the USA has ever had.
There was a period where doctors would run every test on the list.. They stopped this because even if everything were free, each test has a false positive rate with a psychological cost to the patient. If anything the US has a problem with not accepting that everyone is going to die and asking them to go on to a road makes this more likely, (thus costing more than the value of the appointment.)
Now paint it into 3d circuitry with lasers..
1% at seed is not going to stay 1% at the first raise after dilution
That might depend on whether you prefer being rescued incompetently to dying alone in the wilderness, no?
Had exactly this conversation a couple of times. You are effectively asking me to invest $100k in your company. In exchange for what?

My risk is even higher than yours, coz at 1%, I'll have no say in anything important. And I'm breaking even only once we reach 10M valuation.
Has better search for history so you can find the arguments you used last time so you don't have to remember

Also the fact it syncs between machines means even if the last time you used that command was on your old laptop 2 years ago ctrl+r still finds it
Every infrastructure decision I endorse/regret after 4 years running a startup
The skin tone and hair style are guessable, but not derived from the science, so definitely qualify as a creative act.
double negative unwinding...
My non-partisan hand across the political divide was rebuffed.

I can see you only find one side capable of rage-bait. Opposing opinions must be very troubling for you.
I like to say "founding engineer is a synonym for 'sucker'"
> You want me to give up my $220k+ salary plus RSU (let's say worth $60k/yr), to join a startup and take $100k/yr salary.

Not really. They don't want you to give up anything or some do and you can just say no. The reality is that people want to find other people who want to work in startups to be their engineers. You really can't get top performance out of a guy who hates doing some work by paying him. You'd much rather get the guy who loves doing some work and pay him enough that he feels appreciated. Mercenary hires are useful in prop trading firms, but anywhere else the mercenary is better contracted than hired.

Besides, startup salaries are not $100k/year and you can get 2% as a founding engineer.

Taking more money to do a job you hate is a recipe for burnout.
It makes some intuitive sense to me that the boundary between the solid(ish) mantle and the liquid outer core would be fuzzy, while the boundary between the liquid outer core and the solid inner core would be rather crisp. Not sure how to explain why I think of it that way, it just seems like the way it should work for some reason.
Hey! The doc you linked allows anon edits. You should make it read only :)
Tangentially, the way the leading "a" seems to fall off makes me think of Rebracketing [0].

Ex: "I found an ewt in the pocket a napron" --> "I found a newt in the pocket of an apron."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing
That is my case, same name as my father(no Jr however), so the family called me by my middle name, Which you get used to, to the point where I won't recognize it if called by given name. It is a bit confusing as I have to be mindful to use the correct name when doing government tasks.
Not any more, but who knows what's set to Tokyo timezones (or could be just pessimism about the finish date)
LLM Hallucination Benchmark: R1, o1, o3-mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash Think Exp 01-21
I think the biggest problem with these offers is that the payoff for the founders vs a "founding engineer" is so wildly out of whack despite minor differences in their work and effort. That is, after a seed round, founders typically (obviously "typically" is doing a lot of work here) retain ~80% of the company, and after a Series A ~20-30%. So, lets say there are 2 founders, and a founding engineer is hired shortly after the seed round. That means at that point each founder will have about 40x the equity of said "founding engineer". Yes, the founders had to come up with the idea and get the initial seed funding, but that process usually takes on the order of 3-6 months. The founding engineer is going to be working just as hard after starting as the founders (oftentimes harder), usually making similar cash compensation, for 40x less equity.

My main point is if you think you might want to be a "founding engineer", just be a founder instead. As a good example, consider Nathan Blecharczyk, one of the 3 cofounders of AirBnB, and was its original CTO and coded its first website. He's now worth about $10 billion and according to Wikipedia is the 203rd richest person on the planet. If he instead took a job as "founding engineer" at AirBnB, and let Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia instead take on the sole founder titles, he'd be worth orders of magnitude less (granted an order of magnitude less than $10 billion is still hundreds of million, but point being there is no reason he should be compensated less than his other cofounders).
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 crushes RTX 4090 in VR
Why does your employees need to gamble on crypto assets when stock options are better understood and covered by law frameworks in all countries?
The more time they waste with this inane crap then the less time they have to do us real harm.
Well, color me corrected.
Not true at all! Extended grapheme clusters are defined by Unicode for a reason and include relevant combining marks following a letter[1]. The point more generally is that a programming language shouldn't preferentially choose one character definition over another. The decision of whether to iterate by bytes, points, or clusters is a significant one which the language shouldn't force upon users. For many common operations, bytes are a sufficient representation, but then one must be precise about encoding. A list of UTF-8 bytes is very easy to deal with but the bytes of a UTF-16 string are highly problematic. Inserting a single byte character at the start of such a string would destroy it's entire content. There is no situation where "give me the characters of this string" is a sufficiently precise statement, so it should not be made available by programming languages. Likewise, the idea of indexing a string is not well defined at all. The only consistent interface for accessing strings requires users to specify both encoding and separation, and this can only be done performantly in the general case with a linear scan.

[1] http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/
All we ever needed was in Snow Leopard. Everything since then (ok except maybe for SIP and XProtect) is bloatware.
"Half" seems like a significant underestimation.
Well i don't see why we need to mangle the jargon. "Language model" has an old meaning from NLP (which still applies), as a computer model of language itself. Most commonly, a joint probability distribution over words or sequences of words, which is what LLMs are too. Prompted replies are literally conditional probability densities conditioned on the context you give it. "Foundation model" is a more general term I see a lot.

To say a model is "just a LLM" is to presumably complain that it has no added bells or whistles that someone thinks is required beyond the above statistical model. And maybe I missed the point, but the author seems to be saying "yes it's just a LLM, but LLMs are all you need".
Dan, can we BAN all political threads unless we have fairness. There are a fair number of HN users that also want the USAID scandal covered with a post with 1500 comments. The time for HN to be left biased needs to come to an end.
It is much easier to build elevator right at the equator. It is possible to have base off axis adds extra length and loads. It doesn't make sense when there are plenty of places right on equator.

Quito, Ecuador is probably the best location since it is at 9350 ft. Could also attach on top of Pichincha volcano to west or main Andes to the east.

In Afrcia, Mount Kenya is nearly on the equator and goes up to 17,000 ft.

There are multiple options in Indonesia. None of them high. The mountains of Sumatra or Borneo are probably the best options but there is Lingga Island near Singapore.

The advantage of these locations is that they cover the world and are close to Africa, Americas, and Asia. They are also all safe since there is nothing to the east to be hit by broken cable.
It happens with partnerships sometimes. But it's generally a pretty risky move for a would-be partner to make unless there's already a money-making engine.
I like this discussion! I'm interested in more equitable and humane company structures and looking for better ways to collaborate. In my day (2014 lol), Founding Engineer was not a common role, it was called "Engineer #1". When we exited, I think I (one of 3 co-founders) netted about 10x my awesome first engineer. He's one of my best friends and the diff seems kind of fair to both of us.

Here's what I did that they didn't:

- worked 24/7 (ok, 12/6) for the first 4 years including 1 where I was paid $0. He was more like 10/5 and came 1 year in. Still an absolute beast but we'd often talk about how I had to work "founders hours" and him employee hours.

- took 1/2 his salary when we hired him after raising our seed

- immediately had to push way out of my comfort zone in terms of responsibilities (investor stuff, copywriting, support, hiring, managing, partnerships, running ads)

At a base level, we're just kind of different people. He had hobbies outside of our company and I was a locked-in computer monk.

The other bit is that he was not like a highly paid Facebook engineer. He had gone back to the midwest after school and we were able to 2x his salary and move him to SF. Founders hiring the first employees need to really scour their network for diamonds that big tech might miss, because it's pretty well accepted that your odds of getting rich are much higher in big tech than startups.
> You've sub-optimized and you are too young to know it.

Can you elaborate more on this? What would be a more optimal approach?
Right. See this story about the 2015 rare earths glut.[1] That glut triggered one of the shutdowns of Mountain Pass.

Owning the whole supply chain is a win because the price of magnet-ready alloy fluctuates less than the price of dirt with some rare earths mixed in.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timtreadgold/2015/05/15/chinese...
What GPUs aren’t IEEE compliant? I don’t think that’s been true for more than a decade.
> Why does no one run a completely employee owned tech company?

I thought about setting up Fetchfox this way, and in some ways we are an employee run company. Everyone including me gets the same crypto token as our stake in the company's success. I get a higher stake as the founder/ceo, but some offers give the employee 0.5 for every 1 of my allocations, which I think is pretty fair.

Long term, it would be nice if I had <50% stake in the project, and it self-managed somehow, similar to crypto projects like Ethereum.

That said, the phrase "employee owned" has some bad connotations. It has an implication that you are not trying very hard to grow, or that you are somehow less committed to company, or that you are some sort of co-op. For these reasons I don't like use that phrase.
Let's say I can't fully disclose the details because it is an area I am actively working on, but I had an algorithmical problem that was already solved in an ancient paper, but after a few hours of research I could find no open implementation of it anywhere. I thus spent quite some time re-implementing this algorithm from scratch, but it kept failing in quite a few edge cases that should have been covered by the original design.

Just to try it out, I uploaded the paper to DeepSeek-R1 and wrote a paragraph on the desired algorithm, that it should code it in Python and that the code should be as simple as possible while still working in exactly the way as described in the paper. About ten minutes later (quite a long reasoning time, but inspecting the chain of thought, it did almost no overthinking, but only reasoned about ideas I had or should have considered) it generated a perfect implementation that worked for every single test case. I uploaded my own attempt, and it correctly found two errors in my code that were actually attributable to naming inconsistencies in the original paper that the model was able to spot and fix on the fly. (The model did not output this, this I had to figure out myself.) I would have never expected AI to do that in my lifetime just two years ago.

I don't know whether that counts as "novel" to you, but before DeepSeek, I also thought that Copilot-like AI would not be able to really disrupt programming. But this one experience completely changed my view. It might be the case the model was trained on similar examples, but I find it unlikely just because the concrete algorithm cannot be found online except for the paper.
> IIRC there was no difference between Voodoo graphics cards for PC and Mac

I'm not sure about that. The video BIOS is x86 code; that certainly wouldn't have run on a (PowerPC) Mac system.
Cooperatives are great, but collective governance is a big challenge.

There is also a major issue with realizing equity because employees generally don't buy in or sell out when they leave. This means that equity is essentially locked away from the employees.

The model works well for stable businesses with regular profit that can be split up, and not so well for growth companies. Employee labor investment in capital growth never gets paid out because there is no exit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turco-Persian_tradition
How does he know he could have done better? Did he actually calculate a realistic rate of return for high risk short term investing or did he assume he would reliably pick winners?
The house always wins. In Vegas, casinos are the house. In Silicon Valley, VCs are the house.
I still think the jury is out on this given that they seem to fail on obvious things which are trivially reasoned about by humans. Perhaps they reason differently at which point I would need to understand how this reasoning is different from a humans reasoning (perhaps biological reasoning more generally?) and then I would want to consider whether one ought to call it reasoning given its differences (if there are any at the time of sampling). I understand your claim I’m just not buying it based on the current evidence and my interacting with these supposed “super intelligences” every day. I still find these tools valuable, just unable to “reason” about a concept which makes me think, as powerful and meaning filled as language is, our assumption of reasoning might just be a trick of our brain reasoning through a more tightly controlled stochastic space and us projecting the concept of reasoning onto a system. I see the COT models contort and twist language in a simulacrum of “reasoning” but any high school English teacher can tell you there is a lot of text written that appears to logically reason but doesn’t actually do anything of the sort once read with the requisite knowledge in the subject matter.
... or were early New World squash just of the smaller variety and only recently have we selectively bred them once that Mendel fellow started messing around with his peas?
Of course it would be inefficient because it is an extreme oversimplification of what is desirable (which is arguable) and whether or not certain markers would achieve it.

The big mistake that racists and bigots make is in overvaluing whatever they think their own strengths are and undervaluing strengths they don't have.
> it was for them somewhat problematic at times that the siblings had different surnames (Björnsdottir and Björnsson), as people don't assume they're family, and especially not that the parents both had different surnames again.

I've heard similar things with certain eastern European countries (Bulgarian has different forms for males vs females: Ivanov vs Ivanova), and also with various Indian populations where the child's last name is just the father's first name.

Meanwhile I have the more mundane option where my father's first name is just my middle name.
He was talking about fixing the economy, not election fraud.
I don't know if I can even blame the doctors for that. I mean, for a list of very generic and vague symptoms like that, there are probably thousands of viable diagnoses. Running every possible test to catch some rare disease every time someone comes in complaining that they "feel fatigued" would be completely unfeasible.

Even if the cause is found, for many diseases the treatment is just "eat healthy and exercise".

People think medicine is like fixing bugs in a code. Just a lot of tests, eventually a single cause is found, a pill is taken and the person is fixed. Reality seems to be closer to this: as you age, you accumulate damage everywhere. Eventually this damage is going to kill you, but before that it just makes you a bit slower and more tired. Sometimes, if you're lucky, some of this damage can be reversed, but mostly not.
Suppose instead of loaning to a single company, you loan to many different companies to balance out the risk and return. Just a thought. Additionally, it would make sense to randomly give out larger loans for the sake of potential innovation.
You typically need to pay salaries before you have money coming in the door. Some founders cover this out of personal savings, and some businesses make more than the cost of an employee before they need one, but generally you need outside capital. So you'll need to provide something of commensurate value in exchange for it, which is either debt or equity.

A business with a chance of success in the 90s might be able to get a bank loan. As an early stage tech company, the capital available to you is venture capital.
The LLMs might help with sequencing the characters you extract from the page but actually getting the contents is still difficult. A number of times I've come across a page where the letters of the text are glyphs in a custom font with no mapping to ascii or anything similar or even more common, especially with output from CAD, are letters that are made by drawing lines in the shape of letters so there is nothing identifiable to extract and you are left with OCRing the page to double check the results
My understanding is that the PC is actually the odd one out there. Many pre-UEFI devices (PowerPC Macs, Sun SPARC boxen, etc) ran Open Firmware, which used device-independent bytecode in their boot ROMs. You could swap the graphics card out of a Mac and put it in a Sun machine, and things would work. PCs, on the other hand, put x86 machine code directly in the boot ROM.
How big is the AI Agents market?
> If you do the Math, 1% seems fair.

The math is simple:

As a founding engineer, I do almost the same amount of work as the founder (e.g. 90%), and get only 5% or less of the reward.

If the founder is the main source of capital, I can understand. But if all the founder does is build the product and raise money, how different is (s)he from you?
I don't want to be too disparaging, so I will just say that the language is exotic. Otherwise, the licensing model is Oracle-esque based on host and core counts etc. The software is fast, that you cannot deny, though it does critically depend on the speed of the storage attached to the host. Also, it's written in C++ and it shows. Had to do multiple (paid) upgrades due to memory leaks.

I'm sure there was a time it was best in class and even now maybe it's the best for a few niche use cases, but unless you're absolutely certain you need it, I would flee from it and save your sanity.
I meant the combining mark point as a thing you would want to cut off; a 50-char chopped-off "summary" of a thing should not include a character with ten thousand combining marks ever. Of course it'd be preferred to cut to cut before and not in the middle, but certainly not after, which is what you'd get if taking the first 50 extended grapheme clusters, the 20000-byte glyph counting as one. Point being, you still just want to use a library that has properly thought out the question. And that applies to most (all?) sane fully-Unicode-aware operations.

Places where ASCII-only is a known expectation and there are meaningful per-char operations are plenty; that's what using a list of bytes provides. Indeed you'd probably want to use another abstraction if you have non-ASCII. And for such you could use something to do the form of iteration or operation you want just fine, even if the input/output is a list of byte-chars representing plain UTF-8.
Not many people are going to totally ignore their opportunity costs to join as a "founder-ish" engineer at a startup.

I have taken a role like this before, but when I did so, I was making a lateral move from a compensation standpoint. This is without factoring in any expected value of equity (because there was none).
He was talking about the economy.
Thanks! You inspired me to try babylon.js. You may also recognize the background image.

I'd love to compare notes.
I think the point of it was that our enemies had figured out that the way to destroy America wasn't to kill our leaders, but rather to convince us that our enemies were inside the country, and then watch us tear each other apart.
C is small enough as to be very valuable to know. It's not the "high level assembler" that it was originally sold as, but as a conceptual model it's invaluable. It's also very valuable to run through CVEs, bug reports and such to find out how it falls down, and why safer languages have value. You can learn all that without even learning it to such a degree that you can write code in it.

I know you said C seems too hard - I felt the same way some 30 years ago. Then I learned Pascal, and found learning Ada to be a bit of a breeze after that. After that, coming back to C was a different experience - very natural. You don't have to force anything, and you can learn whatever you want whenever you want (or not at all).

Sometimes your capabilities can quickly level up in unpredictable and exciting ways - which I find to be one of the most fun parts of programming. And it tends to unfold like a horizon - you learn low-level stuff, then you get interested in high-reliability software, or real-time systems, or highly parallel / functional systems, etc. This is all great, and no one brain is big enough to hold it all - so have fun!
> I recently received a request for retraction from a bank CEO. (Tweets sometimes become unavailable.)

More than that, threads are no longer visible if you are not logged into Twitter.
I think you are missing a few components. An absentee owner can still take a loan and hire employees with no equity stake.