Lure fishing "cast and retrieve" as opposed to waiting is very common and not at all just a bass thing fyi. Maybe it has something to do with the particular species here in mid east coast Australia but fishing stores have tons of space dedicated to lures.
I remember fishing as a kid, my dad would be bait fishing while I lure fished because bait was super boring.
Same in NZ. Cast and wait is what we did as 5 year olds, but once we were older we had lures and better rods and reels and it was a lot more fun. Also caught more interesting fish!
The rule of law is a public good; companies that damage it are imposing a negative externality on others for their own advantage, and should be penalised rather than rewarded.
Well, I called the SEC and they said they can't think of a way how these ICOs are not violating the Howey Test. Basically that in time, they be prosecuted.
So, those of us that decide that the potential for financial or criminal consequences is not with it miss out when it turns out all but the most egregious scams will get a pass.
Through my work we’ve been in contact with the SEC as well, a few times, and they are pretty clear on not stating any real absolutes unfortunately. We do more of the service side of things for the institutional space, however - so perhaps our questions were a bit different.
Well, yeah, exactly, but that's why it's the law. Stealing is a competitive advantage (for the thief), but a net negative for the society, which is why it's illegal and persecuted.
I agree with you, that the law should be as small as possible, but you're missing the second part (just as important IMO) - that the law (small as it should be) be enforced fully and applied fairly.
The book and movie do a pretty solid job about explaining what CDOs, derivatives, etc. are.
What the book and movie don't do (unless I'm forgetting something) is explain how anything involved with the 2008 crisis was illegal - the sole exception being that CDSs are very arguably insurance contracts and should be regulated by insurance laws.
The Big Short made it sound like credit rating agencies engaged in intentional negligence, which doesn't strike me as something "too abstract to prosecute" (or whatever the excuse is supposed to be here).
Negligence in general isn't a crime - it does become a crime if gross negligence directly causes death or major injury, but as far as I know, you can't prosecute someone if their negligence merely costs someone some amount of money, no matter how much. It may cause liability for that amount of money, but that's not a crime that the government can prosecute and threaten with jail time, that's a civil case between them and whoever suffered and may sue them for some money.
Founders don't work many more hours per day than early employees at x100 less than early employees. They work many more months/years before earning an income at all.
By the time the employees start to get hired, a large part of the risk and work that a founder does to earn their hopeful future fat stacks has already been done.
Now, are startup compensation packages a little low and relying on the money making reputation of past decades? Sure. That doesnt mean there isn't a world of difference between working hard on something that has a decent amount of vetting for below market rate, and working hard on working that's almost certainly not going to pan out for zero dollars.
> Founders don't work many more hours per day than early employees at x100 less than early employees. They work many more months/years before earning an income at all.
>
> By the time the employees start to get hired, a large part of the risk and work that a founder does to earn their hopeful future fat stacks has already been done.
What you describe isn't the case for most tech startups I know.
These startups need a lot of highly involved technical work done, and often need to hire a small team early on. They typically get seed money quickly. It's not unusual to see seed money right from the start.
> Now, are startup compensation packages a little low and relying on the money making reputation of past decades? Sure.
The point in this thread is not that it's "a little low".
The numbers quoted is that if you're a good engineer at a top tech company, you can almost guarantee about $2m over 4-5 years. In a startup, you'd make less than half of that in cash, with the only compensation being some stock options, that people are rapidly realizing are worth nothing in most cases.
That's a big difference, especially over many years. And we didn't even mention the large gaps in benefits, healthcare, work-life balance, job stability...
The bottom line is that the startups were so good at squeezing the real value out of their job offers, that now only irrational developers will choose them over bigger already successful companies.
If good means experienced/senior, which is what the people pulling those numbers in are, then yeah I certainly don't think startups are anywhere near competitive with big companies for talent. I don't think they really need to be, or should try to be.
If you're 15 years in at Google then yeah, no shit you shouldnt take a job at some hinky dink no name company. You're severely demoting yourself. You wouldn't go wait tables at a restaurant and expect the compensation to be competitive with your software engineer salary. Your skills aren't that useful to the restaurant, they wouldn't make anywhere near enough money from you for it to make sense.
Senior level big software company employee vs startup employee is like that but on a less extreme scale. You're more useful to them than you are to a restaurant, but you still have a lot of skills and experience that it doesn't make sense for them to pay for that it does for a big company.
Its on me for not specifying and making assumptions, but imo when talking startup competitiveness it should be focused on fresh grads or those with a couple years experience in industry but not necessarily at big tech. That's where startups are going to find their cost effective generalists, and its where I think the compensation is "a little low and relying on past reputation".
Also, with good devs making $400-500k/year at bigco, I think it needs to be kept in mind that those numbers are with a lot of their compensation being in stock and big tech stock having risen a lot in the last decade. Someone whose compensation at Facebook happened to turn out to be $400k/year would have been getting signed each year for far less.
Using those numbers would be like evaluating startup packages as if theyre guaranteed a large ipo.
As for startups getting funding right from the start, that means they're being funded based on founder credentials rather than the qualities of the business. If you have those kind of credentials and use them to start a company then your opportunity cost is likely huge. That's the founders additional risk there.
Paperwork and forms are 0% of what you should be doing. That's just basic accounting stuff that should be generic and cheap for them to handle if you're just one guy doing consulting. It shouldn't take up any of your energy or be a cognitive burden.
It's hard to say what you should be doing because it's hard to get a read of what you have been doing to begin with. Which may actually be because you weren't doing anything? Like have you just been sitting around in an office trying to deal with minor bureaucratic issues like forms all day every day? Where did the $50k go?
A company is just a way to describe a legal entity that you create to do money making activities within. What money making activities did you start out planning to do? How did you plan to get people to pay you for them? Which actions have you taken to get people to pay you for them? Which aspect of that do you think is holding you up.
It's very concerning that you don't speak at all about things like "I keep adding features instead of just releasing" with regard to a software product you had decided to make or "I get meetings but never any interest once they find out about my rates" on pursuing consulting contracts. Instead choosing to talk about forms.
I highly recommend just getting a junior developer position somewhere. You'll be alright. No reason to kill yourself even if financial failure was a reason to kill yourself. Programming is an in demand profession and having that skill puts you ahead of a lot of people who may have more money in the bank, but far less earning potential.
If you struggle with making yourself actually do work when left to your own discretion, so you can teach a class fine but put in front of a code terminal find yourself day dreaming or whatever, look in to an ADHD diagnosis as well as productivity methods based around lists. I have to plan my day out with ver detailed todo/checklists otherwise I sit around doing fuck all.
You do that because its not an either/or decision, and the bidding nature of digital advertising means the lower effectiveness will be reflected in what you're paying. You can be paying a premium for people searching to buy gardening gloves, a little bit for people reading gardening stuff, and then a pittance for people that may be related to gardening in some fashion.
You're extrapolating based on your own actions rather than measuring the result. The results say that if you show gardening gloves to enough people at random, you'll eventually get some sales. Everything else is just narrowing down "random" a little bit.
Non-developer here. Can someone check my understanding of this situation for me please.
Facebook or any other website has information that ideally only I should have access to. I don't visit Facebook hq with my id in hand to get it, I use a computing device to talk to their computing device. they don't really know if it's me using that device, just that it knows information only I should have (password). The device is also my choice, they just provide general instructions for talking to theirs, or rather just comply with standards. Meaning html or whatever the total information sent from browsers and back again is called. Some browsers being difficult, they even have some code in there for them specifically. Mostly css for ie and mobile safari.
Because me visiting the Facebook building every time I want to see something or like something is ridiculous and something no one thinks happens, when these browsers request information as me they're then referred to as me, or my agent. So if data goes from Facebook to a macbook with chrome on it that knows my password, it's for all intents and purposes a two party relatiinship. No one sees that chrome, osx, my ISP, my router, my whatever; and goes "Facebook is giving data access to third parties!"
Enter mobile devices, or more accurately old mobile devices. Complying with those standards I mentioned above /html /building a quality full functionality browser is hard given their tech. They still want you to be able to use facebook, facebook still wants you using it, and you want to use it. So the device manufacturer and Facebook come up with a communication method they can use. Basically the same information sent and received as if you were using a browser and facebooks standard html, facebooks still just assuming you're on the other end because the device knows your password, but the syntax of their messages is different. Basically a more extreme version of having some funky css in there to make old IE work.
Terminology aside, am I on the right track? If so, what exactly is newsworthy about this? Is there a practical difference from a data security viewpoint between Facebook -> my Huawei phone -> me, and Facebook -> my Huawei phone -> chrome -> me?
If my user agent - the hardware /software I choose to use to talk to facebook - is hostile to me, I'm fucked either way aren't I?
You're exactly right, and there is no practical difference from a data security viewpoint. Except web access is probably worse in practice: many of the older mobile devices funnelled all web browsing through manufacturer-provided or third party servers, this is still an option in Chrome on Android, and desktop browsers are plagued by malicious extensions.
The New York Times is arguing that allowing users to access Facebook with third-party apps running on hardware the users own is the same as giving those third parties access to the data, that the setting which blocked third parties like Zynga and Cambridge Analytica from accessing this data should block those apps too, and that not doing so is a betrayal of user privacy. There's a Twitter thread by one of the journalists behind this that's even more clear about this: https://twitter.com/laforgia_/status/1003619629355413504
Like, I'm not exaggerating here, the journalist who's writing this series of articles really does think that if Facebook respected user privacy they should've made the setting which blocks every random quiz and game your friends use from scraping your data also force your friends to install the Facebook app to interact with you. (I don't think he's grasped that web browsers are third-party software though.)
Thanks! Pretty concerning that a lot of hn commenters seem to be with the nytimes on this.
I'm the filthy saas salesman that should be tainting this place with their ignorance. Everyone else is meant to be more informed on these things so I can get a more educated perspective!
As a software developer who is familiar with Facebook's APIs I have not been happy at all with the recent NYT coverage. It's mostly been the kind of coverage I'd expect from the National Enquirer.
I remember fishing as a kid, my dad would be bait fishing while I lure fished because bait was super boring.