sockgrant

Interesting. I suppose that's possible. It was a single light and it was changing colors. Its movement tended to stay within a specific range.

Do you have any thoughts on the white flashes? They were the scary part. Everything was perfectly daytime for a split second, and there was no fading of the light like with lightning. It was immediately all white then immediately dark again. It creeps me out thinking about it.

The light on the horizon seemed 50 miles away, but the flash was right on us, extremely bright, and blanketed everything evenly.

Got a good video of one? I watched one and it wasn't similar to what I saw.

Had that same feeling years ago. Went out to a dark place to see the stars. Ended up seeing a light jumping around on the horizon. Then there was a bright white flash that lit up the whole field and forest, but not like lightning. No shadows, no source of light. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, no thunder. It wasn't lightning.

Pretty scared, I kept watching the jumping light on the horizon. A few minutes later the white flash again. I ran back to my car.

I had the same ridiculous thoughts as you. "what if they know I saw?"

It freaked me out for a long time. The way the light was moving.... Too fast to see the movement even, it was here, then there. I watched it bounce around for at least a full half hour, it wasn't a satellite or a meteor.

Agree on first, disagree on second. There’s a lot of reasons to work a well paying corporate job.

But here-here on the first point: never take stock at startups, kids. It’s never gonna work out well. Wanna work at a startup? Make one.

I agree. Seems like he didn’t research things well and basically got scammed. There’s no way 1200/month to live in a 13 person 2 bedroom is anything but the most expensive roommate:cost ratio that he could’ve found.

Can you explain why you don’t think a SWE can be passionate about coding? I don’t think I understand your point.

Yep. I’ve seen this in a number of startups. Didn’t see it as much at big firms.

Reading code is harder than writing code. So, IMO, lazy or slow engineers would rather complain that code should be rewritten than refactored. Or that different frameworks / languages should be used.

Ive entertained them a few times before realizing that it was a waste of time and often things came out worse.

What about Warcraft 2 or Red Alert? Those seemed like the precursors to modern rts

That’s what you got out of the article?

I think the point of the article is that we shouldn’t have predatory loan companies that are going after kids who are trying to get higher education.

Yup. Decisions have to be made, people will always try to influence them. You’re either making the decisions, trying to influence the person that is, or you’re sitting out.

I have been wfh for 5 years and I have similar recommendations to you (jarvis bamboo, natural lighting, good noise cancelling headphones... dual monitors all that stuff). The only thing I'd add is for ergonomics. Back support when sitting -- for me the Better Back has done more than a chair can do.

https://getbetterback.com/

I've tried a few things for sitting and they all were crap compared to this.

Do you support importing from gdax?

Sure, but it doesn’t need to be in the title

I’d rather have ads.

Totally agree. But in some parts of society this is now a detriment that we’ve outgrown. But it’s really hard to fight our nature.

Revenue would work, probably not profit.

> they're like lottery tickets that are only mostly, but not completely, up to chance

> if you know some quantitative finance [...]

> a simpler approach is to do a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation [...]

You're looking at this as if you're calculating the odds of winning the lottery and doing backwards math to figure out the viability. That's only half of the picture.

There are a lot of circumstances that do happen and can't be put into a math equation.

1) If a company is striking gold and you have significant options they can fire you before the rest of your options vest to get more stock back into the pool. See: Zynga

2) If the company needs to grow fast but doesn't have enough stock to offer new employees they can ask you to relinquish stock back into the pool to help hire more employees. If you refuse, go back to #1. There was a good post on HN where someone was being strong armed like this.

3) Dilution will happen. You can't account for how founders and investors will dilute things because there's a lot of tricks that can happen here.

4) At the end of the day, you're counting on the company to go public or be sold. The problem is that founders turn down huge acquisitions all the time, only to have the company -- and your stock -- become worthless. See: Digg and the would-be-millionaire employees that ended up with fat debt from exercising.

There's plenty of ways that your stock can go bottom-up that have nothing to do with the success of a company.

Yeah they always assign a dollar amount to options instead of a % amount which is what really matters.

$100,000 in options sounds great but if it’s .01% of options then you’ll have to be part of a monster IPO or sale to get a windfall.

Always insist on the % amount. Most founders will try not to share it.

How's the eng culture?

Yet another reason why taking startup stock sucks.

Oh? You managed to actually get stock in a startup that seems to be worth something? And you didn't get diluted to a pittance? And the board / founders didn't try to fire you or ask you to give stock back to the pool? Lucky you, you're one of the 1% of the 1%.

Now stay there until the company sells or goes public.

Wait -- they got bought? Congratulations, you just won 2+ years of golden handcuffs at Parent Corporation! Enjoy your new corporate job!

Alternative storyline: You leave startup early, exercise options and go into debt, startup dies, you lost money.

Do you know anyone that works there? Is the engineering culture messed up or something?

Same. I’ve done 10 or so apps in objc/swift and now 4 in RN and even though I know native like the back of my hand I much prefer RN.

Jsx and the rendering model of react is 10x better than constraints in code or storyboards.

Getting android nearly for free is just a cherry on top.

Honest question: if I get paid in USD but then change all my money to British pounds, do I need to pay tax when British pounds increase in value and I trade back to USD?

Is this different than BTC?

Also, creating simplicity is usually much harder than creating complexity.

I'm one of the absent-minded crowd.

I think it's hard for the orderly types to relate to the absent-minded. For them, remembering things comes naturally. They project this onto absent minded types which leaves only one explanation for them being inconsiderate or forgetful -- that they're lazy or uncaring of others. As if they thought "Yes, I remember I'm supposed to do X, but whatever... it's not important."

As someone who's very absent minded I can say that there's never any dominance tactics or purposeful lack of consideration for others. I just forget things or don't think about them.

If, in the shower, I think "hey I need to remember to buy shampoo as soon as I get out of the shower", I will literally forget about it within the 2 minutes it takes me to get out of the shower and dry off. I'll be standing out of the shower trying to remember the thing I was supposed to remember. Oh well, I just move on with my day.

It's not an occasional thing. This happens to me 9 times out of 10.

So it's no surprise that when I tell someone "yeah I'll bring X the next time we meet" I never remember to bring it.

Luckily in my life I've got friends and family that understand that it's just the way I am and that it's ok. I get the fuddy-duddy professor treatment. I've had more than a few friends tell me I'm the dumbest smart person they know.

Yeah. I’ve heard amazon is really unpopular up there I’m surprised he couldn’t find more to say on the issues.

You make it sound like they're choosing to ignore the setting.

It's software... I'm pretty sure what's happening is a new feature gets built, with animation, and the team responsible forgets that there's a "reduce animation" setting that they should take into account.

I have an iOS app that has a disable animations setting and I frequently forget it exists. My app is a few million less lines of code and a couple thousand less engineers than iOS.

150,000 views a month is 150000/30/24/60/60 = 0.0578 qps. If there's no heavy processing you shouldn't need to be doing any optimization for the machine's sake at that rate. Slow queries / frontend code is a different story :)

Yeah. But if he's not the culprit he's the best person to help.

Also, unless there's a personal vendetta, the biggest motive for someone doing this is someone that doesn't want to pay the expense of an employee on leave for awhile.

The grass is always greener. You're (theoretically) making more money than them and most likely have a more flexible schedule. They're also tied to location. You can get bored of Costa Rica and move tomorrow if you want.

There's nothing to be jealous of. You can start a surf shop if you think they have it better than you.