20yrs_no_equity

By the way, have you noticed how dramatically down usage is of this site? How participation has fallen off a cliff in the past couple years?

Ever think that might be because you harassed and banned everyone who thought differently?

That you've created a monoculture, as a result of your crusade against diversity, and thus there's not much to talk about when everyone is exactly like you and agrees on everything?

Maybe that's why. At any rate, your ideological based moderation and anti-intellectualism is not working.

No, you only ban accounts for people who don't toe the line to your ideology. IF you followed your own rules, there would be no problem. Why don't you follow your own guidelines?

Why isn't dang banned for his abuse and harassment of people?

You force me to edit my comment because you slow banned me. which means I can't respond to the people who are being abuseive.

Your moderation policy favors and encourages abuse...which is shown by the abuse that dang heaped on someone earlier (Which I identified to you.)

Again, why isn't dang banned?

You don't get to pretend like I did something wrong when you're being completely dishonest and hypocritical.

You set up the rules that prevent me from responding, you have carefully cultivated a culture where those who agree with you ideologically know they can be abusive without risk, and you hellban people for, for instance, the crime of linking to scientific articles that disagree with your ideology.

Literally, I once created an account that had one and only one submission before it was hellbanned-- a comment link in to an article that undermined the global warming hypothesis, the "article" as published in a peer reviewed scientific paper. The link was the totality of the comment and it was relevant to the discussion. You cannot justify that, it is proof positive that the moderation policy of this site is ideological, and has nothing to do with civility or being substantive.

Of course you're going to ban me- this site cannot tolerate anyone who disagrees with your hardcore leftist ideology, and technology views, no matter how civil. You harass them, as you have harassed me, you abuse them as I caught dang abusing someone before, and then you ban them.

You insist on an echo chamber. Enjoy it. But don't for a second pretend like you have any moral high ground, you lying piece of shit.

Do you even realize you're an anti-intellectual?

--------------------

The censored comment was: [Sigh, despite giving a description of how this works, meaning that aperture and sensor size are actually irrelevant, I'm being downvoted to hell, for the "crime" of pointing out how Apple has done something new. Most of the comments are ignorant, and obviously fanboy nonsense. This site does not appreciate substantive and civil comments when said comments go against its biases (in this case, hatred of Apple and love of all things google.) Further, because I am slow banned I cannot even reply to people. Therefore, I have given a substantive and civil comment, it is being misrepresented and I can't respond. Fuck this bullshit. You don't get to see what I said originally.]

Proof hacker news does not give a fuck about substantive and civil discussion, but only about agreeing with the moderators ideology.

Enjoy your echo chamber!

(and yes, I expect to be banned. I knew creating an account I would be banned because this site is run by assholes who will not follow their own rules and when caught breaking them, they delete the comments exposing their hypocrisy.)

No need to deal with TheRealBob. Blockchains make CAs obsolete.

I've been developing software professionally since the 1980s, when I had to build a computer from scratch. I've seen these three waves first hand- personal computers, now in your palm, the internet, now ubiquitous with cell networks, and finally crypto. The third has not yet become mainstream.

I will say this- we are on the verge of the crypto revolution. I have never before seen so much energy and effort, and finally, money in the crypto sphere. In large part because now there is cryptographic money (eg: bitcoin et al.)

For those of you who think that the startup scene has become lame where you're just building apps to sell advertising, you're missing out.

The thing about the crypto revolution is that it is not nearly as obvious. Internet and PCs were obviously great in the early days- great for everyone. Crypto is harder, has a learning curve for consumers and until that's eliminated it's easy to think that it will go nowhere in the same way that pgp has effectively gone nowhere for 20 years.

Much in the way that we've given up on "artificial intelligence" and made great strides in machine learning.. crypto is on the edge.

It's the place you want to be.

Wow. It's ridiculous to oppose the government stopping people from getting economic broadband? And you compare it to shooting people with a fire arm?

I knew that the loony left had taken over HN, but this is really around the bend.

This site use to be a place where people believed in the Internet, and believed that people hat a right to communicate.

What Jeff believes is right is what accrues to Jeff more power. The founders of Google, Bill Gates and Steve Balmer, Jobs and Wozniak, the early Sun people, they all made mistakes and might have done bad things. Generally I think people running businesses are doing so because they want to make a dent in the universe. I don't buy the idea that CEOs are sociopaths (which seems to be a common perception). But if you told me you believed Bezos was a sociopath I would suspect you were right.

I only worked there a couple years but I had more interaction with him than I would like (though he never chewed me out) and usually, I'm eager to get close to the CEO and learn what I can.

Even a 1X liquidation preference is screwing the founders. Here's my opinion: Dollars are fungible. If a redneck gives you a dollar for your beanie baby, that dollar is as valuable to your bank or to walmart as a dollar coming from a lawyer in an expensive suit. It should be no different whether that dollar is a dollar in cash from an investor or a dollar in salary that an engineer gives up.

So, If an engineer gives up $70k a year in salary to work for a startup, the "options" should have an intrinsic value of $70k a year (the numbers that vest in that given year.) So should the RSUs. Anything less is cheating that engineer.

Those options or that stock should have the same participation as the venture capitalists. I will accept preferred having some narrow advantageous rights, but it should be only a few that are essential and make sense. Right now these deals are loaded down with double dipping that screws entrepreneurs because it is "standard practice "and "VCs need to cover their risk" -- but this is BS -- VCs have less risk. The VC is in many deals, the entrepreneur isn only one.

If anyone should get LPs it is engineers. So the company I'm founding next will have one class of stock, or if it has two it will be the founders and employees with preferred stock. (and sure VCs will balk, until they are desperate to get in on the deal-- but you should be raising money not when you have an idea or because you want to be able to pay yourself, but when your investors are desperate to get in on the deal. If that sounds unrealistic, then you're following the standard startup model, which is designed to screw founders, and now I'm getting circular so I'll get off this train.)

RSUs can be granted, with no cost, as a form of compensation. I think that's the better way to do it.

Options require an exercise price which is the source of a lot of hassle. For instance an early employee gets pushed out because someone wants his equity, so he has 90 days to come up with $35k/year (so $70k if he's been there 2 years) to exercise his options he's already effectively paid $70k a year (in lost salary) to get.

Options are very tenuous- they can be cancelled or adjusted in acquisitions (according to many terms) etc. RSUs have none of these problems. (Though the tax situation might be worse for them, but that's showing the IRS or the people who lobbied the IRS for the rules, setting it up to screw employees.)

I could go on.

Founder Shares are just shares with special rights for founders. Google and Facebook had them.

For Apple Beats Audio was a talent acquisition (eg: they got the founders, Trent Reznor and the like) for Apple Music, and a technology Acquisition (Beats streaming service and content is powering Apple Music) as well as buying a profitable accessories business.

Apple has great gross margins on computers because they have such operational excellence in building them, but still a Mac makes much less margin than headphones- at any price point along the quality curve.

Accessories are just generally really profitable.

I worked at Amazon, I interacted with Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post doing this does not surprise me. It is effectively his political blog, where he gets to push his agenda while being abstracted away from responsibility. (EG: Amazon PR can continue its campaign of BS propaganda without WashPo articles hurting them or Bezos.)

I worked for Compaq for awhile in Houston. They built this fantastic houston campus, full of high rise buildings surrounded by woods. It was my first experience of a corporate tech campus, and while it was nothing compared to the Ski Lodge mentality of later (still 1990s) Microsoft Campus it was impressive to me.

At around the 2nd or 3rd story there was a tunnel between the buildings, making a big ring. You could run/walk the tunnel all the way around the campus, including thru the manufacturing area (yes, they actually made their computers on site in Houston, this was back when you didn't get everything made in asia.)

This company was the most paranoid I worked for. There were multiple levels of code names. EG: the code name for our product that my manager used with me was different than the code name that she used with her boss.[1] So she once started talking about a product but was using the wrong code name and I was completely confused! The product we were making was a printer driver. Nothing you would think needed to be that secret (and at this point the printers were increasingly commoditized- the job ended when Compaq got out of the business entirely.) And in fact there were different code names for the different versions, so I had to use multiple code names. We all knew the real product name too, so it was kinda silly.

I remember the really rough searches we had to go thru - the Compaq security guards seemed to be all assholes. Prototypes of todays TSA. You had to be searched when coming in and when leaving. (we were going to smuggle software out in a pocket??! didn't matter, there was manufacturing going on on the premises, we could be stealing Intel CPUs.)

At one point I discovered a woman from my high school graduating class was also working there (this was a big company at this point!) and we just met up one day in the tunnels and went to lunch. (also a woman in tech, I tell you it was no big deal until people started giving them a stigma.)

But it was great- in the stifling heat of Houston, to have that tunnel between the buildings, that was air conditioned, you could go anywhere in the company via those tunnels and you had a great view-- it was a sea of tree tops, with a few high rises sticking up. (Compaq was up north of houston, away from the Houston Sprawl.)

I wonder what happened to that campus.[2]

[1] Yes, back in the 1990s, females were about %50 of the tech population, their proportions dropped when people started telling young girls that tech was hostile to females. My mother is a programmer, for instance, and her team was %60 female, %40 male- in part due to sexism, women were perceived as being more appropriate for "sitting around typing all day" so she was able to hire females more than "ruining a guys career" by hiring guys. But that was because her company was old school. Tech companies like compaq were much better.)

[2] Here's a picture showing the tunnels I was talking about. Looks like 2nd floor but I think it varied by building elevation: http://www.lagunabeachbikini.com/shoebox/1991/Compaq-1991/bi...

I suspect the regulators who wrote the laws that are preventing this are wise to your idea and its the actual right of way that they are going after. The only advantage that a municipality has over a private company or not-for-profit, is a monopoly on the control of rights of ways in their geographic area. That's why municipality is can do this- private entities would have to get their permission to install a network. And it would come at high cost.

So long as there are levers of control, people will attempt to exploit them. The government at every level, should have no power to prohibit entities, whether government or not, from providing internet service.

Freedom of transaction is a basic human right (whether the Bill of Rights talks about it or not, read the Preamble to the Bill of Rights and you'll see the Bill of Rights doesn't create rights, according to the Bill of Rights, it creates limitations on government from violating those rights.)

Even if you disagree with the above, the First Amendment is unquestionably part of the constitution and thus this is a violation of freedom of speech (internet is speech.)

Thanks. I am doing that, a bit at a time. I'm not actually bitter, though I think I seem bitter. I am maybe cynical. (maybe they mean the same thing in practice.) But I'm doing well, and I'm not slowing down, I've just seen startup employees get a raw deal way too many times and think the entire "startup culture" is oriented in a way that screws over employees, particularly engineers (without whom software cannot be made. While other functions are absolutely critical too, that doesn't mean the people in those other functions should work 30 hour weeks, and take home most of the payday.)

One of the reasons I'm not bitter is that the VC industry is dying. IT's not obvious yet, but like the headphone jack, its days are numbered.

You can't have 30 years of experience when you're 20 years old. You're unlikely to have 15 years experience when you're 20 years old, and you're certainly going to have a different perspective when you're more years into programming, which has good and bad aspects.

Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me.

Hire the best people first, then make your team diverse, both across thinking and across ages and across everything else.

But there's a synergy I've noticed more than once when pairing a 40ish with a 20ish. OR even a 20ish, 30ish and 40ish three person team.

I'm obviously not (and it should be clear in the above message) calling for quotas, but it's a good goal.

Homogenity reduces ingenuity.

Yes, it's the most interesting new language since Go. It does a lot of things right, and much more importantly it's much better supported and moving much faster. For instance, there's no good go IDE/debugger setup right now (just the other day my boss was complaining that he's %10 as effective as he would be with a debugger, he's exaggerating, but not that much.) Also the way Swift has evolved so quickly makes me believe it's going to be a significant language. I don't think Apple intends for Swift to suffer the same fate as Objective-C (Which was never proprietary and which was superior to things like Java, and came out before Java, but was never widely adopted outside of Apple's ecosystem.)

Right now Swift has Playgrounds, no other language has that, excellent support in Xcode, works across platforms, and the language makes a lot of really good design choices and is improving rapidly.

What more could make a language worth learning?

As for whether it's the best language for you to learn next, that depends on what you have learned in the past. If you've never done a functional language, the next language you should learn is Elixir. Erlang is the only language I know that gets concurrency right, and Elixir is a ruby syntax and nice extensions on top of Erlang. Elixir is the best way to write erlang and erlang is a correct functional language with genuine concurrency (Haskell might also get concurrency right, I don't know, but Go does not and no other language or actor model framework does it right. It has to be in the language.)

If you've only done scripting like Python or Ruby and you want a compiled, heavier or more hard core language to learn, I think Swift is the ideal candidate for the next language to learn.

Unlike most engineers I want to be a manager. But it seems there is no opportunity for that. It seems that the non-engineers who are in the executive positions want non-engineers to manager engineers perpetuating the problems startups have.

There are few engineering management positions listed. The few I saw in the bay area resulted in excluding me because of my age (Stripe, I'm looking at you.)

It's frustrating to keep being pushed into individual contributor roles and then have low quality engineering managers hired in above you. (And I know I can do it because I end up leading teams all the time, they naturally form a round me. The members of the team are very happy with me- I have no authority but I end up leading them anyway.)

So I think the route for "old" folks is blocked also by the desire of non-engineers to make engineering management be done by non-engineers.

The best team composition is an age of ranges, spanning 20 years- eg: early twenties to late 40s. (I wouldn't turn down an engineer older than that though, of course). And ranges of experiences. You need diversity to refine the ideas before committing them to code. Often the younger guys are faster at producing features, but produce lower quality code while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it. Both is a good combo.

I think a lot of the startup failures of really early stage startups might be due to the entire team being exactly the same age and right out of college. So they make mistakes that have been made many times before. Put another way there are many mistakes that can kill you and the more experience you have on your team the better you are at identifying them-- but you have to have innovation and new ideas too.

Which is not to say that any of these sets of characteristics are exclusive to a specific age -- this is just generalizations.

For me, personally, anywhere that I want to plug in my ATH-M50x is somewhere that I'm not moving, so I don't mind a dongle. USB-c provides enough wattage to power an external DAC and if Apple does get rid of the headphone port on the next MacBook Pro, then that's what I'll buy. (Currently I plug the headphones into the headphone port at work, but at home I have a DAC/Amplifier plugged into my monitor's digital audio out, thus the mac's audio goes over HDMI.)

I care enough about sound quality that these headphones are the only ones I'm interested in using for awhile.

Apple has enough of a track record of getting rid of things, and people thinking it's absurd for them to do so, only within a few years for it to be obviously the right move. So I trust them a fair bit.

One of the biggest examples of this is releasing a phone without physical keyboard. How absurd!

There were several years of people insisting the iPhone was going to fail, or was inferior because it didn't have a physical keyboard like the Blackberry.

Unless tech crunch got things very wrong, they didn't.

The investors will get a base hit, the employees, nothing.

My sincere condolences to all the option holding employees of Hipmunk who will not likely get back what they gave up in salary (due to liquidation preferences and the like, they will be lucky if they get anything, other than golden handcuffs.)

20 years and no equity has taught me that next time I do a start up, I want restricted stock, not options, with an exercise price of $0.01. Or founder stock. In fact, I think the only way to do a startup is a founder (unless you're just starting out.)

Having the long term goal forces them to make the decisions and the technology work for that long term goal while achieving the short term goals.

Compare this to Virgin Galactic. They are working on a system that is great for tourist rides, and other suborbital missions. But unless we're talking something really small, they aren't inserting anything into LEO.

Getting into LEO is a critical step for getting past GEO orbit out into the solar system.

But if you just focus on LEO you end up with Virgin Galactic- they will beat Blue Origin on costs all day long. Thus in the tourist ride business their superior economics will let them win that business.

But if you want to go to mars you need heavy lift like SpaceX and Blue Origin are building.

> "The Supreme Court has held that even if the police have a flawed understanding of the laws and rules they are enforcing, their flawed interpretation governs the interaction on the street."

Gee, how convenient. And not consistent with the constitution, particularly according to this case, the fourth amendment doesn't have an exception for "cases where the agent of the state is confused".

Another example of "Don't talk to the police."

I don't know what police agencies expect to happen. A certain number of grenades in babies cribs are going to happen, but if these things go unpunished and merely asking for directions (or calling 911 because your kid is suicidal resulting in cops showing up and executing him) results in a negative outcome, how can they expect continuing public support?

I go out of my way to avoid the police and for most cases where I might be the victim of a crime, I'm just not going to involve the police, unless it's something on the order of murder. And even in that case I expect there's a good chance if they feel they can pin it on me they will, without regard for the evidence or truth. The cost of defending myself would bankrupt me.

The system is broken.

I'm not a fan of Facebook so this is great news. The more they manipulate the platform and undermine its objectivity and freedom, the less people will trust it. And while the reasons they shouldn't trust it - namely privacy- are not directly related to these actions, Facebooks attempts to control people like this will make them aware of its untrustworthiness.

TBH this is an area very prime for disruption, the "next Facebook" is right around the corner, but it will bear less relationship to The Facebook than The Facebook did to Myspace.

Your characterization of the Magic Bullet Theory is inaccurate. The error is in not realizing the car was of an unusual geometry (I believe JFK was elevated, and the seats were different widths apart between the front and the back- unusual for cars of the time.) So assuming the car was normal, and all the seats were the same distance apart and the same height, you would need a magic bullet. Applying deeper understanding of the setup of the car accounts for that, reducing it to the improbable bullet theory. That doesn't mean they were wrong, that means they didn't have access to the car to do direct measurements. When the government locks down the evidence (or in the case of 9/11 immediately ships it off to china, before the investigation begins, literally shipping buildings across the ocean to be recycled) it's not the fault of the conspiracy theorists if they come up with wrong hypothesizes when denied access to the evidence every legitimate researcher should have access to.

Regarding "fake film" you seem too be referring to Oliver Stones "JFK" which is not the source of the Magic Bullet Theory, or any of the theories there, it is merely a collection of the theories prominent at the time, and then fictionalized.

Yes. "Truther" is code word, like "birther" and "denier" and "conspiracy theorist". It basically means "anyone who doesn't agree with the Official Positions Of The Ministry of Truth, and is thus ipso facto without credibility".

It's from a very anti-intellectual ideology.

Literally these people reject the scientific method. They are rejecting argument evidence and claims based on the source, not based on the quality of the arguments (which is talking to the person not the point, and a form of fallacy of appeal to authority)

I know paper burns at fahrenheit 451 (thanks Ray Bradburry)... what temperature does jet fuel burn at? Or that gasoline truck? I presume it's a much higher temperature.

The jet fuel that hit the twin towers was mostly expelled in massive fireballs, with some of it draining into the towers.

I don't see a reason to believe WTC 7 was saturated in jet fuel. So WTC 7 was a paper & wood and fabric fire, right?

Isn't calling them "conspiracy theorists" itself an attach on their character?

Personally, I like to play devils advocate, and I'm curious about what happened on 9/11. It doesn't add up for me. So I have taken the "conspiracy theorist" side several times... I don't see people making arguments against the theorists data.

I see the same common fallacies, most often variations of appeal to authority. "Popular science debunked that" for example in response to an argument that Popular Science didn't address.

"If it were a cover up it would have gotten out" in response to people pointing "it getting out" is my favorite, of course. Sort of a "I don't believe it, therefore it can't be right". Not sure what fallacy that is.

Ok, so you asked a series of questions and I presume you don't know the answers so I want to tell you the positions I've heard people take in response to them, but I am afraid I am going to be downvoted heavily. So, before you downvote me, realize I'm answering questions that are asked right here. Or is this just a troll setup to get someone to stick his head up to be beat up? Is this a form of smear the queer? I would hope HN hasn't sunk that low.

Rigging the building- there was a large amount of short term, sudden work done on the interiors of the buildings in the weeks before 9/11. This was done at night, some claims about "asbestos checking" or other reasons were given. Multiple reports form workers in the buildings about this happening, with large work crews in there. (I am relating the reports I have heard, and thus what I believe people believe- the answers to the question- I'm not stating this happened as an objective fact, I cannot prove it. I am not taking a position on its veracity or most of the explanations I give below. I'm merely relating the beliefs of other people.)

It of course seems mighty coincidental that there was this asbestos remediation work and inspections going on in these buildings right before the attack. There are a lot of such coincidences, such as the unusual insurance situation with the twin towers right before, the head of security of the twin towers being related to the administration, the fact that there was a "scenario" being "war-gamed" on that very day (allegedly) that involved jetliners hitting towers-- and then it actually happens?! To be honest that just seems like sloppy work.

Also, in a controlled demolition situation there is a characteristic sound of the many charges going off. This sound has been reported by many witnesses on 9/11. Of course they are all just people- office workers and the like, but even some firemen- so they aren't "authorities". But multiple explosions before the collapse are a common eye witness claim.

Slow acting thermite vs shaped charges- I don't know what the common theory is, but I've seen arguments that shaped charges were used, particularly based on the cuttings in some of the beams in wreckage that was exposed. I'm under the impression that most who believe the controlled demolition theory believe that it was shaped charges. I'm not sure how or why thermite would be involved.

How to keep the conspiracy theory under wraps? That's the easiest part.

Ever watch the show "Penn & Teller: Fool Us"? Particularly if you binge watch the show it's kinda amazing how every trick fools you and you have to take a few minutes figuring it out. Sometimes you can figure it out easily, sometimes you're stumped. But the ones that stump you, if you go online and find out how they are done are obvious in retrospect.

The unfortunate reality is that we are not as objective as we would like to believe. What we believe is in large part based on what we want to believe. We want to believe our eyes so when the girl magically appears behind the sheet on stage we want to believe it is magic, and most people just go never knowing how it is done. On some level they know, but they don't look deeper.

Misdirection is very powerful. People are not in the habit of looking for it, and its easy to knock down online as "paranoia" when it is pointed out.

Further we are raised from kindergarten to believe in the government, that the government is benevolent and that we can trust our rulers. It's hard to overcome that and be objective. You know in North Korea they feel the same way. In Japan during WWII many people sacrificed themselves because they loved their Emperor. People worship dictators, its' easy to believe they will give more than the benefit of the doubt to a democratically (in theory, 2000 is another bit event) elected president.

The very week of 9/11 people were talking about how those buildings wouldn't fall naturally like that, and what we've had since then is 15 years of an Official Conspiracy Theory (the al queda box cutter theory) propagandized far and wide and any alternate theories, or even people asking questions shot down as "conspiracy theory's" or elsewhere here in this thread "truth bullshit".

Personally I don't know what happened. I don't believe things went down as they are claimed exactly- I'm incredulous that the entire air force stood down for a day when just a year earlier they were on a rogue lear jet in 15 minutes after loosing contact with it.

But the most telling thing is the term "Al Queda". Al Queda was, we were told in the late 1990s "the CIAs code name for the mujahideen fighters they supported in the afghani war in the late 1980s". But somewhere after 911 "Al Queda" became not a code name to describe a group of unorganized people, but a sinister organization with "cells" everywhere.

This means that Bin Laden somehow-- and here I'm imagining Tom Cruise getting the NOC list in the first Mission Impossible, only with a robe and a long assed beard hitting the floor-- snuck into the CIA and found this top secret code name "al queda" and then decided to name his massive organization by that name?

You're right, you can't keep this massive conspiracy under wraps. You can't make a woman appear out of thin air.

It doesn't matter.

Most people won't believe it.

Germans for years couldn't accept that the Holocaust had happened, and right under their noses. After all they arent[ monsters.

Many still don't want to believe it.

I don't know what happened, but it's not like the Official Conspiracy Theory is an open and shut case.

I like that idea a lot. I know there are some government requirements that a CEO or CFO sign off on various paperwork. In a holocracy, you could have those be roles that one of the Principles energizes.