skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never understood how 1% equity to be the first hire is attractive. It's irrational greed. You see stories like Google or Instagram and you think "that could be me". You're more likely to win the lottery than for that to be you.

It's the same thing with crypto bros not wanting to miss the next Bitcoin.

Not only is 1% substantially less than the 33% the last founder got, those shares aren't equal. Voting power, clawbacks, dilution, acceleration on change of control and so on.

Thje most likely outcome is that equity is worth nothing. The next most likely outcome is an acquihire. Participating and liquidity preferences may mean your 1% stake is actually worth $0. Maybe the buyer offers you a new equity package but how is that different from just getting hired directly? Meanwhile, the founders often get huge bonuses (which are really a way of paying the equity holders less) with generous new equity packages (even with earn outs).

If you're good enough to be hired as a founding engineer, you're good enough to be a founder or simply to work in big tech or fintech for $500k-$1M+ a year in total comp with next to no risk. And that total comp beats the expected value of your employee startup equity value by a mile.
Perhaps the planners are smart and are subverting the election systems quietly while we are all focused on DOGE.
> and are all nepotism Right time right place in a market

Are you absolutely sure its this way and not the fact that there isn't a real market because the market was collapsed to socialism through money printing, collusion, and corruption.

You really can't have economic calculation when the entities involved all cooperate regardless of profit, which naturally happens when debt financing decouples these needs.

Other distortions to increase said profits in said environments such as artificially constraining supply to raise price level also create chaotic whipsaws which first strain, then destroy distribution networks, just like Atari did to video games back in the 80s, where retailers lost so much they refused to even place Nintendo on their shelves without a guarantee.

The historic record is fairly light with regards to fiat money printing and actual collapses that have occurred. We know its happened, but the chaos it produces seems to remove all the important details leading up to crisis.

Also, there has always been a non-fiat currency to pivot to up until now, where the underpinning global currency tied to all other currencies is about to fail. Its unprecedented in scope, and risk because failure of a currency translated to failure of production, and modern production is needed to feed half the people currently alive today. Malthus law of population and its regressive states (reversion), seem to indicate that when it fails completely, most will starve.

Few seem to recognize the debt trap they find themselves placed in foolishly by previous generations who have failed to cede power (hanging on to it to their death bed), or respect the rational principles that guided their fore-bearers.

We live in an age stark with evil and evil naturally begets destruction through complacency and sloth which are two sides of the same coin.

If you ask yourself, is your life better, and do you have more options today than 10 years ago, and 10 years before that? Most will say, no, and no.

Plot the trend and you'll see we move ever closer to ruin, goose-stepping forward, with the majority of people burning the bridges as they go. The dynamics are there to be seen for those wise enough to pay attention.
>That piece is the definitive explanation of the issue.

Is it common to say this about your own work?
> How does shutting down a hospital allow a PE firm to "cash out"?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/private-eq...

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/private-equi...
You know, these days I think the abstracts are generated by LLMs too. And the paper. Or at least it uses something like Grammarly. If things keep going this ways typos are going to be a sign of academic integrity.
Here's a potential starting point: https://tech-coops.xyz/

Fairly often you see service-focused small companies (i.e. agencies) being run as coops, e.g. my friend's NZ .NET shop http://iontech.nz/
This is how singlefile and some other archiving tools work, they just embed all remote assets as data urls within the page. It works really well, the only inconvenience is if you need to parse the html later on, the massive attribute lengths can crash some html parsers like jsdom or cheerio.
I don't think it's necessarily because of lack of generalizability. We (SWEs) built it, so we naturally have the most intimate knowledge of how to dogfood/use it. And so the cycle intensifies (use, provide feedback, improve). There's many positive examples of LLMs being useful in document based workflows in other domains as well!
>> it's telling that you use passive voice here

No, it is not telling anything. I used it as convenient shorthand in a comment to not cite the long chain of representative govt that implemented the HIPPA laws.

>> Doctors and administrators do not have a process for doing what you suggest

Yes, they do. Literally dealing with it right now in caring for an aging parent. Yes, some doctor offices/practices are a real pain in the arse about it and do what they can to not cooperate. Others are very efficient and helpful. I understand your frustration about the awful ones, but the rules have little to do with it, they'd likely be just as obstinate without the rules designed to constrain the abuses of insurance companies.
Second supersonic flight test in progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcMB5kb-PUM
I think that got abandoned ages ago.
I would tend to refuse such an offer but not because of an irrational fear of crypto. Rather, I would have very real concerns about the value of the tokens:

How do I know they will be worth anything when the company exits? I probably won't get a contract with the company that tells me exactly how I'll be paid in cash if the company is acquired. Instead, I will get a token that will be bought back by the company at a price set by the company at a time set by the company.

Another similar issue I see is dilution: How do I make sure the company doesn't just issue a billion new tokens so that my tokens are diluted to nothing? How does the token price change when new real shares of the company are issued (presumably investors want to get real shares instead of tokens)?
I've now checked, and it was originally a form of Henry, but can now also be a diminutive form of any name beginning with Har... So we're both right : - )
Pre-typewriter, writing was extremely time-consuming and inactive. It was also an occupation afforded to very few. It is not a stretch to assume as a rule anyone engaging in writing was going to be heavier.
> Assuming two founders and a 7% stake by YC, the founders retain 48.5% equity.

I think its usually more accurate to state that the company retains some N% of equity, while the founders are granted some further amount M% where M<N. Every company is different, but at least in VC backed companies, you're going to keep dry powder on the cap table to hire employees and prepare for future capital raises. Though, for a very early liquidation event, things are different. The far more common estimate of M that I've seen at liquidation, after enough time and capital injections to get to a $10M+ sale, is like 10-15%. Its pretty rare to see a founder exit at $10M+ valuation with 45%+ of the company still under their control (but, it does happen, for sure).

My biased take is that founding engineers uniquely make ultra-high leverage technical decisions that have the power to save or cost the company millions of dollars, not just in cloud costs but much more importantly in engineer salaries and lost revenue due to an inability to deliver on product priorities. There is no other "founding" role beside the founders themselves which can claim this. Oftentimes, if you come to the "right" side of one of these high-leverage technical decisions a year later, its too late, and the cost-benefit of implementation might fall in disfavor of the expected return.

So, yeah: I am definitely in favor of the idea that 2% is the bare minimum a founding engineer should accept, and something more like 5% is far more fair. I've joined startups as Engineer #6 before, and received something like 0.4%; to suggest that a founding engineer should get as low as 1% is an insult to the positive leverage they can assert on the organization at that stage.
Indeed, usually by the time a contractual agreement is relevant the CEO will purge most founding staff, employees often lack funds necessary to properly execute the shares clause, and or the board simply transfers the Assets for $10 to an adjacent entity fudging everyone.

This is why sweat-equity deals are a huge red-flag for terrible arrangements. Mostly these schemes target fresh grads, and the credulous. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UmyPZt_9kw
I know, it didn't work and (in my opinion) did more harm than good to his reputation.
> Why does no one run a completely employee owned tech company. What is the disincentive for modeling your company as employee-owned and operated. It seems that would be the best path to an efficient company and a focused company that’s not angled to be taken over by outside aggressive for profit interest and dismantling.

I worked for a company like that. It was a start-up size company that was in business for 20 years or so. It stayed small and had not external VC breathing on their neck and such.

So it does exist and it has it benefits and downside. For one, just because it's employee owned doesn't mean that the few founding employees won't screw anyone over and it does't mean everyone gets an equal amount of shares. Initial founders may still keep 99% of the shares, and maybe dole out a crumb here, and a bit there.
> You do it as a partnership where new employees buy into the company when they get hired.

Practically speaking, this does not work in most businesses.

But maybe you have an idea that I haven’t seen.

What would some numbers look like for a company and what would the buy in be for a new employee?
But VC backed companies have way more risk for average employees. How can that be true if you might never get a non-diluted share or any compensation when sold off?
If you do the Math, 1% seems fair. The typical YC company raises a seed round at a valuation of around $20M. 1% of that with standard vesting terms equates to $50k/yr.

If the typical founding engineer equity was 5%, that would equate to $250k/yr which would mean most startups would have greater total comp than Google.
Well another reason is that as soon as VC enter the space they provide capital for companies that you could otherwise beat to do really inefficient things like give equipment away for free or "leases" that you can't compete with without taking VC funding. In my experience it's been yet another variation on "worse is better."
Theres at least two sporting good store is employee run and for some reason my brain can't remember the name (it insists its DEI)

But https://www.nceo.org/research/employee-ownership-100

There's a lot. I didn't know brookshires was a cooperative
Hey guys, CEO of FetchFox here. Happy to answer any questions about the crypto token. I'm also making the draft doc public, please be aware the details are still being worked out, but we will publish the full plans on our site within weeks.

Draft doc with comments enabled: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VvxEQBRexuFJT5qCr9MCeZRV...
Basic economics. If it's still at 1%, then people are taking 1%. That simple, crying about it wont help.
I joined a company a few years ago, and there was a long term dev that had been there forever and was now a manager and did live trainings on webex with Lucid chart, where there was no prepared docs or whatever, but he drew the architecture diagram as the training, providing detailed explanations and answering questions as the diagram went. It was astonishingly effective at getting the points driving the architecture (and the salient business context driving the architecture). Each detail and each big overarching principal stuff would come at at the time when its context was right there on the evolving diagram. i was so inspired I bought a Lucid subscription, tho I never have done such good presentations, having some pictures I find makes it easier to communicate with more people.
I'm sure there is a statement very similar to yours that is true, but as it is written it seems not to be so, since there are plenty of non-banks listed by Companies House here: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/s...
Nvidia RTX 5090 owners report melting power connectors
Apologies, just made it public: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VvxEQBRexuFJT5qCr9MCeZRV...
According to this blog it has been patched. But it really does open up the question of how much do we trust Apple, Google and other large tech companies.
the 180-220k range is common in startups too, and I just ignore the equity

basically when I’m on the market at all the smaller companies move faster so I just take them

older mid size companies are the ones that compromise on base salary and take too long

I just don’t and won’t do the studying adequate for FAANG
I used to be strong proponent of this but after learning about the actual professional ethical constraints "real" engineers operate under I have changed my mind. Engineers are forbidden to mislead their clients, and from taking shortcuts and cost-cutting measures that are known to increase certain risks of unanticipated harm.

But they may still harm! If "real" engineering ethics allow them to make landmines and cruise missiles, it certainly allows us to make spyware and racist sentencing algorithms. It would help with data breaches I'm pretty sure, but therac-25 and 737-MAX type incidents are already pretty rare. Most of the damage caused by software is intentional.

Whatever we need here we can't copy from traditional engineering, because they don't have it either.
fr fr, the only way I will join your startup is if you have a very interesting idea and I will be coming in as a founder with a very different slice of pie than "founding engineer".
Ask HN: What media platform do you find respects your interests?
Many social media platforms go out of their way to show "engaging" content that is often low quality rage bait of some kind and sways away from the users key interests as provided either explicitly via a topic list or implicitly via usage.

For myself I personally find YouTube (long form not shorts) actually does a good job of recommending me content that is relevant to my interests and generally doesn't shows me low quality content way outside my interests. Possibly the worst in this regard is Reddit which seems like it is constantly mixing in "engaging" content.

My wife uses TikTok and I'm generally surprised how focused her recommended content seems to be, however she has been using it for a while now.

I'm interested in people's personal experiences!
I think that's another interesting metric. It's also a rather terrifying graph. [1]

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
Getting a security clearance, particularly a high-level clearance takes a long time. They send investigators to interview people you've worked with, check records, etc. It can take over a year for a normal person. The only way I see these people getting clearances this quickly is if they just skipped the background investigation, on orders from senior people in the Trump administration.

And there's just no way they would have given Big Balls a clearance through the regular process.
Just recently I read about the etymology of the Japanese 奥さん Okusan = “your wife”

Until Japan started modernizing in the 19th century, it was considered rude to call people by their real names. If you asked your lord, “So how’s Sharon doing,” those may have been your last words.

So everyone called each other by their position names or by their nicknames if they were close, and for women in noble families or samurai families, it was usually the place they lived.

In ancient times, nobles had manors that looked like this. This is the entrance, the garden, the main building, and this building in the north of it was always the wife’s residence. So they often called her “Kita-no-kata,” the lady in the north.

Now, nobles built their houses based on a fung-shuei-like belief that Japanese shamans made everyone believe, like how rich people communities are into weird stuff, so the wife’s residence was almost always in the north.

But centuries later, in the age of samurai, priorities shifted. They were invading each other like there was nothing else to do, so they built their houses and castles with defence in mind first and foremost.

So the wife’s room wasn’t necessarily in the north anymore. So they were like, “So, how is the… umm… lady in the depths of your house?” 奥方様はいかがお過ごしですかな？

奥方様 means the lady in the depths, and it was shortened to 奥様, after the samurai age, and while 奥様 is still used now, we needed a slightly less formal version, so now if is often 奥さん. Deep-san!

source: https://www.facebook.com/metroclassicjapanese/posts/the-etym...
Basic economics. If it's still at 1%, then people must be accepting the 1%.
That's why we need to build better ones.
> ... I empathize, but it's a voluntary market, so clearly people think it is worthwhile.

I think a lot of people don't know how it works in theory, and don't know how it tends to work in practice.

Sometimes people are also given misleading verbal pitches on the value of the options.
You can run BQN in termux on Android pretty well. A list of libraries is available at https://github.com/pellertson/awesome-bqn. https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/ has pretty good documentation.
> Yeah, and ads is the main mechanism why.

...Nnno. Mergers and acquisitions are how you consolidate. It doesn't matter if you show 10 million more ads than your nearest competitor; you're not going to somehow end up owning them unless you buy them out somehow.

The laws and regulations surrounding M&A were loosened several decades ago, and that has, very clearly and directly, led to the level of consolidation we have today.

The effects of ads and the effects of this on ads are both byproducts.
This is a brilliant post. One of the best that I have read in months.

Real question: How do you know? Example: Did you partner get a PhD in Physics at Stanford and you at UCB? Or, did you get masters at Stanford, but PhD at UCB?
I author a lot of technical documentation actually.

Even so, yes. I make all my work public, 100%.

I use public repositories as my backup for anything I create, regardless of stage of completion and so others can learn from or help improve my work as they see fit.

I do not believe proprietary technology should exist and I put my code where my mouth is.

Humans progress faster when we collaborate freely. Fork anything I do and make it better if you can.
Nit: published today and the URL contains 2025/02/10, but the article is dated tomorrow. Oops!
I would imagine that for some people $100,000 a year is enough? Or there are people who aren't getting $220k+ offers and $100,000 is what they can get?

There's nothing inherently wrong or illogical about making less than the maximum amount of money you can make.
Discussion (20 points, 17 hours ago, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996057
It's mainly for quants where you couple the array language with a time series database of all your stock quotes. Once you understand the language you can do a ton of analysis with extremely little code. Think of it as a mathematical SQL dialect I guess.

In my opinion, it's very cool, but Python's ecosystem (and R's) is just so much better with scientific libraries and charting and all that. Kdb+ (the database) and K the language are likely much faster than R for general analysis type stuff. R is also free and Kdb+ is not.
There is a base package of employee shares you get upon being hired. The investment portion would be separate from the base package as part of adding the investor-employee to the company.
To follow that line of thinking, it could be way more profitable for you to take your $180/yr "bonus" and put it into angel investments. If you have decent connections and have a good eye - you'll probably have a much higher expected return than your 1% at a startup.
Do you mean a browser extension? Not trying to be rude; Just making sure I understand.
`fzf` is so universally useful I just recommend it by default to everyone I work with now who touches a terminal. The new fuzzy finding shortcuts it creates for shell history and switching directories alone makes it worth it, even if you never call `fzf` itself, as I recorded back in my tutorial eons ago. [1]

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf
Read the blog date. It's over a year old. This is old news.
At this point, I have to assume this take is intentional, with the goal of misleading everyone involved to view the crypto industry as a victim of evil bankers and their bought-and-paid-for regulators.

1. Define "illegitimate debanking". Debanking of whom? Crypto companies, end users, their surrogate banks and holding companies? You'll find the original article defines several forms of what crypto people mean when they say "debanking", and that the explicit goal of the term is to conflate all of them. Which is restated quite clearly in this "rambling", and as you seem to have missed the central thesis of this and the preceding article, I believe you are complicit.

2. If you believe the banking system and the government is corrupted, how does cryptocurrency solve the problem? Does it matter if the US debt is held in dollars or Dogecoin when the US defaults on the debt? Or, as I suspect, when you ask if it makes sense to use crypto in order to hide funds from the government, are you advocating that the act of government taking money through taxation (i.e. "funding the government") is the corruption you speak of?

3. Yes, criminals deal in all sorts of securities to launder money. Cryptocurrency is a wonderful way to facilitate this, as is art, cars, or anything else of value. Are you saying we should address the root cause of criminality, and ignore the tangible financial risk of supporting cryptocurrencies in the regulated financial industry?
Plenty wrong with tokens but I would remember that VC funding also comes with a lot of drawbacks and, in my opinion, is what is holding technical progress back. I am in a startup and VCs are preventing us from focusing on longer term goals like interoperable protocols. The VC game is simple - fund a "disrupting" company aka an extractive monopoly and cash out. In that light, even though we took VC funding some sort of cautious yet fair token raise would have made sense, it'd allow us to work out the product without compromising on longer term goals.

I understand the distrust for blockchain but there is also ideology in blockchain world that has not yet occurred in the greater world, that funding is broken and new alternatives are needed. Has somebody figured a perfect one - no. Is experimentation good? Yes.
> Instead, we offer a crypto token.

Lol, alright.

Either the crypto is not actual equity and is worth nothing. If it’s tight to actual equity, this is an ICO and is now illegal in the US apart if you basically IPO.
Been using duckduckgo for 2 or so years now. For the sake of argument tried Yahoo for few things and even it was better than google. Stockholm syndrome is strong with this one.
The ATM check frontend is much less picky than the teller check negotiation frontend. And the backend generally doesn't care too much either. To my recollection, I've only had one check ever refused by the ATM backend, and that was because the issuer hadn't signed it (on accident... I got the check back, took it to the issuer and they signed it on the spot, no harm done). I have had ATMs refuse a State of California Warrant (like a check, but not because it's drawn on the State's General fund), but a teller took it, no problem.