ykler

It sounds like a lot of the criticism is that employees don't get enough compensation or don't get it quickly enough. With options, the variance is too high, since even companies that raise a lot may fail, and liquidity takes a long time. Plus, if the shares are voting, founders have to give up some control. I guess the variance will always be higher than many employees would prefer (at least not considering schemes that share risk among multiple startups), but how about something like the following for mitigating the concerns people are raising?

The company commits that some percentage of each month's revenue will be immediately set aside for existing employees (to a first approximation, split equally between them). Crucially, any investment should be counted as revenue for this purpose, since early-stage startups often get major investment before major revenue. Ideally the percentage should be something big, like ten.

To encourage employees to stay, the revenue will be paid out to them over a period of years, similarly to how options take time to vest. A detail to be worked out is what to do with any money that isn't paid out because the employee leaves. (Maybe just return it to the company, though that could give companies an incentive to get rid of employees after a major funding.)

The company should be able to revise this commitment but not without a warning period of, say, half the period over which compensation is paid out to employees.

OK, sorry that I misunderstood you. But for what it's worth, lots of people with no connections have bootstrapped or gotten into incubators and then gotten funded or just hustled and got funded. For instance, just yesterday I talked to a woman with no connections or track record who got seed funding for her startup, but it took her over a year of "making friends with investors". Obviously it is a lot easier if you are well connected though.

What are the principal sources of excess overhead?

Do you have evidence of this? This web page suggests that the extra costs in the UK are not that high: https://www.crunch.co.uk/knowledge/employment/how-much-does-... In some European countries it is hard to fire workers, which could be a serious issue, but in general it is hard to believe that hiring in Western Europe is not cheaper than in the US, usually.

It sounds like you're complaining, but if it is really so easy, just become a founder. In a way, it is impossible for there to be an unfair distribution of wealth between people who do A and people who do B if everyone has the choice whether to do A or B.

I don't know if you can really put a p-value on this result without a more specific null hypothesis, but anyway it looks like this tournament result provides extremely weak evidence that Stockfish is better than Houdini. In the round robin component, Stockfish and Houdini played two games against each other, each winning one and losing one. In the "superfinal", they had 15 draws, Stockfish won 3 games, and Houdini won 2 games.

Obviously it is a problem that social security numbers are often accepted as proof of identity, but the article seems to be saying that permanent id numbers are bad even apart from this. I don't understand what the argument is though

Hard drives need a gas because the heads use it to float over the platter. And helium is hardly that rare that it is an issue; it is used in balloons for children.

Yes, or a full-featured programming language. Even though I don't really know or like Ruby, I still like that Vagrant uses it for config since it is at least possible to do complex things if you need to.

Wow, that is a shockingly steep dropoff! If you believe this chart, clojure will be extinct in another year. Could there be some other explanation than that clojure is really in a death spiral, like maybe Indeed has been growing faster in less developed markets or something?

I just glanced at this, and maybe I don't understand, but it sounds like psycopg2 namedtuples only work on one table at a time; is this right?

I don't want a full-fledged ORM, and I sort of like SQL, but just normalizing nested objects to put them in the database and then unnormalizing them on the way out is really annoying to do in raw SQL in my experience. Every time you want to store a new object in the database, it feels like so much effort to write a bunch of boilerplate functions. Or do you have a solution to this?

Yeah, if that is right about China, it is pretty damning. And sure, given how few data points there are, it is the kind of thesis that would be impossible to really definitively confirm.

"People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it." He is probably right. And yet, how tragic. Forty hours is not that long. Imagine that the telephone hadn't been invented. Would we still today be living in a society where people went to the telegraph office to send telegraphs but basically no one could telegraph themselves?

Dude is 29 years old and already this timeless bullshit that in my day kids were idealistic and now they just care about money. (Although, maybe there are fluctuations about the mean and 1985 was an extreme.)

Obviously most writing systems are derived from older systems, so I tried to only list systems that might have independent origins (although both the Semitic and Western systems come from an area that had writing for a long time, so it is questionable). Old Persian cuneiform was left-to-right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform), while the Pahlavi and modern Persian writing systems have a common origin with Hebrew and Arabic (i.e., Semitic).

Thai (at least today) is left-to-right, but anyway Thai is highly irrelevant since it is derived from Indian writing systems and probably ultimately from Semitic ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script).

Old Persian: left-to-right. Calendar: solar. Sumerian: left-to-right. Calendar: lunisolar. Egyptian: left-to-right. Calendar: solar. Chinese: right-to-left. Calendar: lunisolar.

So, anyway, so far the evidence is not strong at all (and I wasn't saying it is), but I'm not yet convinced there was definitely no influence.

No, this is why we have the first amendment. The second amendment is crap. I have no very strong opinion on whether people should be allowed to have guns, but the issue is not very relevant. Governments will always have way more force than private individuals. The important thing is to contain that force. And it is a very bad thing if just looking at what extremists have to say can get you arrested.

This is very interesting. Why was it thought that at-large districts would dilute the black vote? Blacks were a minority in every southern state, I believe, so naively one would think that they would stand to benefit from at-large districts and suffer from gerrymandering. The only way I can think this might not happen is if the plan were to only have a very small number of the representatives (like one) be at-large, but presumably the relevant proposal should be to have all representatives be elected on an at-large basis (?)

The article is specifically about exceptionally good restaurants that are moderately priced. And San Francisco has historically been famous for this (at least I heard about it a lot growing up in Seattle).

The French Wikipedia article has much more info than the English one.

In what sense is Kafka (or your use of it) hacky? I have never used Kafka, but I have always thought of it as being more solidly engineered than Redis but also more complicated and perhaps tricky to deploy (based on blog posts I read).

This is ridiculous. Obviously if you want to test whether a raccoon understands the concept of displacing water with rocks you can't just have one experimental setup. You have to present the raccoon with very different cases where it could apply this concept and see if it has generalized or whether it has to learn each case on its own. (And you may find that there is no bright line; in some relatively similar experimental setups the raccoon may immediately start piling rocks into something and in more different ones requiring more ingenuity it might not. And the same thing goes for human understanding: there is no sharp line between grasping a concept at all and being able to cleverly use it.)

The Draggable JS homepage doesn't have this problem. Is this because it doesn't use HTML5 drag/drop at all?

Couldn't you frame this as, "Kudos, King County, this is a great thing that will help improve the lives of people in King County. Let's try to get it in Chicago, where there are even bigger gains to be made."?

I'm unclear about what he means by "Don't blindly sign NDAs". What are the risks, and what items to watch out for would be on the checklist my lawyer would ideally provide?

Speaking as someone perpetually puzzled by the American healthcare system, from an economic standpoint, it seems like it is primarily the responsibility of government or perhaps the insurance industry to fix this. (Government, of course, is paralyzed. As for insurance companies, I don't understand that well their incentives and the impact of regulation on them. For instance, could they refuse to pay for expensive treatments or for relatively ineffective treatments, and would it be worth it for them?) It is good that Google is finally cracking down and bad that they didn't earlier, but it is a bad idea to present corporations (or people) with opportunities to legally make huge profits by doing harmful things (or allowing harm to harmful things to happen).

First of all, the whole thing is limited to patents, which are a small part of the IP of most IT companies. If Microsoft uses GraphQL, Facebook can't freely pirate Windows. Second of all, you can still sue FB over patents, you just have to stop using things they are providing free of charge first. Also, there is an exception if FB sues you first. It seems fairly clear that the intent is to avoid litigation over patents, especially software patents, which many people think are a bad thing.

No. How did you manage to get that interpretation?