sheepleherd (u/sheepleherd)

sheepleherd commented on Who pays when startup employees keep their equity? gist.github.com/jdmaturen... · Posted by u/tanoku

landryraccoon · 10 years ago

I think you mean lower expected value, no? The way you put it cash is strictly better in every way than options - both higher expectation and lower risk. According to you there's no upside to options relative to cash.

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

you are correct to point out the "flaw" in what s/he said.

I don't know the actual answer (and it would be difficult to convince me that anybody has all the data either) but many people "experienced" with startups believe that so many more options come out worthless that cash is strictly better, better expected return at lower risk.

however, in the same way that the freakonomics guys explain people playing state lotteries even thought they are "not worth it": state lotteries (and startups) offer some of the few chances that most people have to actually get rich, so even though they don't pay off on average, they are "the only way" and "worth it" to some people. Not claiming that these people have clear ideas about either expected values or risks involved, but they have clear ideas that "it's the only way". For workers at many skill levels, they may have a sense that in their industry they won't be too much worse off in the long run so why not take a shot.

sheepleherd commented on DAOs, Hacks and the Law medium.com/@Swarm/daos-ha... · Posted by u/ikeboy

vmarsy · 10 years ago

By a Honest Ponzi scheme I mean someone comes to you with a contract, and is not trying to be deceptive, is not trying to lie, doesn't have misleading marketing materials. He writes in Font size 36 : "This is a Ponzi scheme, it works the following way : [...]. You agree with all the risks involved when giving the money". This would work if this was Ponzi Scheme, or a Roulette game actually[.].

When you sign, there is a notarial act, and a video of you shaking hand and saying out loud that you understand this is a Ponzi scheme and you might end up loosing all your money, there is also some drug tests performed to make sure you are not under the influence of any drug, and some psychiatric evaluation to make sure you are not disabled in any way.

[.] Another thought slightly off topic: can I sue a Las Vegas casino because I put $100k on Red but the ball ended on Black and I lost everything? They even facilitate drugging me with C2H6O!

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

ponzi's are illegal, and not for being misleading, for having the financial structure of a "pyramid scheme". "disclosing" the structure makes it easier to prove that they fit what has been made illegal.

sheepleherd commented on The Money Letter That Every Parent Should Write nytimes.com/2016/06/18/yo... · Posted by u/pavornyoh

ktzar · 10 years ago

In most EU countries the letter you'd need to write is very different since, as long as you have a decent job, you'll get a decent pension which will allow you to live comfortably as long as you own property by the time you retire.

Reading some of those letters made me realise how different risks families have and take in the US and the EU.

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

These things have changed dramatically in the last couple generations, in Europe and in the US, and Asia. I would caution you against thinking that things will stay as they are. Hell, I'd caution you against thinking things actually are the way they seem to be.

sheepleherd commented on Apple iPhones Found to Have Violated Chinese Rival’s Patent bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/bcg1

progressive_dad · 10 years ago

The US needs to set some ground rules with our Chinese rivals...

Start with requiring occupancy of all homes held by foreign nationals, trusts or investment groups, or you pay enormous property tax increases.

Then you require all US businesses selling consumer products to staff at least 1 US resident inspector for each stage of the supply chain from raw goods to finished product. If the host country doesn't like it, then you can't do business with that host country. This inspector may be called before Congress to answer personally (with jail time) for any human rights abuses not reported in the supply chain.

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

Yeah but the world is not a pretty place, at home we have monopolistic unicorns, and abroad we have unfair business practices... I'm not shedding any tears for Apple, screw'em.

Even if the US is a relatively "clean" place to do business today, when we were the up and coming upstart, we stole plenty of ideas from abroad, and even within: the whole reason synecdotal Hollywood is in literal Hollywood is, movie producers snuck out there from the East Coast so they could infringe on Edison's film patents and get away with it.

Relatively poorer economies are never going to sit by and let large foreign industries dominate their economies if they can do anything about it. And we shouldn't expect relatively poorer economies to have deeply embedded free market economists explaining the theory of comparative advantage to every populist politician.

sheepleherd commented on How I Ended Up in Tech by Chance thewell.jopwell.com/posts... · Posted by u/runesoerensen

occam65 · 10 years ago

That's a great negative viewpoint. Thanks for sharing it.

I think you missed the larger point - that we can be doing a better job as evangelists of the industry, and broadening it's reach.

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

actually, i would say yours is the narrow point, and it's also a POV whose reach you are looking to broaden. The negative aspect of your POV is that some of us get tired of hearing it over and over (and I'm not picking on you, just explaining the different attitude) Labelling our worldview negative is also a negativity.

My goal in reading hacker news is not helping contribute blasts of cold air in order to preserve every little snowflake; but every little snowflake is welcome, nay, invited even, to read sober analysis of what processes are really going on. That's real math, science, and engineering.

I had to laugh the other day when I saw an effort to promote STEAM. STEAM? It's STEM, but including the Arts! OMG. Did we leave anybody out?

sheepleherd commented on Show HN: My own C compiler (just for fun) github.com/rcorcs/rcc... · Posted by u/rcorcs

tmm · 10 years ago

Does the LLVM introduction tutorial[0] kind of fit what you're suggesting? You learn how to implement a toy language called Kaleidoscope on top of the LLVM infrastructure with one data type (64-bit float), if/else, for loop, and a few other things.

It covers the lexer, parser, AST generation, and a few other things.

There's also one for writing a backend targeting a fake hardware architecture.

[0] http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/index.html

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

thanks, that's very good.

quick critique (wanted to contribute to this conversation while it's active rather than delve deeply into LLVM for the rest of the day :) it's (naturally and understandably) written from the perspective of "this is how it is, if you want to connect with what we do here's what you need to do".

As a pedagogical tool (that is still a compiling tool) it could use an intro of more "here is what a lexer needs to do, here's how/why we chose to do it, here is why what is downstream belongs downstream, here is an example using a language syntax that is extremely simple" (C is not), "here is an alternative way you could try to do it", etc.

But definitely you point up a good way to start toward [mystic music] "my dream goal" in this example.

Again tho, I'm wishing that there were tools and "a way" that ALL projects could be managed this way, not just one great complier, but the several great compilers and editors, and all-the-types-of-things-people-keep-having-the-urge-to-reinvent

sheepleherd commented on Show HN: My own C compiler (just for fun) github.com/rcorcs/rcc... · Posted by u/rcorcs

adrianN · 10 years ago

Any nontrivial project requires lots of time just to understand its design. Even minimal contributions will likely require comparable amounts of work to completing a toy project. And as any professional programmer knows, reading other people's code is a lot less fun than writing your own.

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

like you are saying "it's a problem", and like I'm saying "that's the problem I'd like to see solved"

as an example, what they teach us in school, and what large projects like NASA have do do, is to first agree on a specification for interfaces, then to write code to the interface, then iron out the kinks. Working on a project like that, and the bigger the project, soon we discover that there are many local wins if we can only change the interface that we agreed on because "we didn't know enough when we agreed" etc. etc.

As an example of what I'm saying (as a thought experiment solution) is that if a real live compiler project was written to clean specs (even if the specs came after the code), then there'd be a lexer, parser, etc. and for a little homebrew project like this one, you could write your own lexer from scratch, testing it all the while against the rest of a functioning compiler. Probably, you would not finish it because you would learn in a series of "aha" moments what "the hard parts" are, and how they are solved.

So you could abandon your own piece, but at the same time you would be now equipped to contribute to the real project.

Or you could move on to working on the parser... lather, rinse, repeat.

No need to tell me what all "the reasons that doesn't work is"... I know the reasons, and it's useful to identify the laundry list of them, but the part I'm interested in is the attitude that "hey, this is worth solving" and "hey, this could be solved..."

sheepleherd commented on Show HN: My own C compiler (just for fun) github.com/rcorcs/rcc... · Posted by u/rcorcs

marvy · 10 years ago

more details?

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

more detailed question please? I'm happy to discuss but I'm not sure whether you are looking for bottom up nitty gritty details or more top down grounded philosophizing.

sheepleherd commented on Show HN: My own C compiler (just for fun) github.com/rcorcs/rcc... · Posted by u/rcorcs

sheepleherd · 10 years ago

the computer science / computer programming problem I'd like to see solved is, keeping projects "fresh" and open/accessible enough that people like this could feel like they were learning in an unencumbered way, and at the same time contributing something useful to an existing project, while at the same time pushing the capabilities of what available open source projects can provide.

"Reinventing the wheel" projects absolutely litter public source nodes; believe me, I know why people do it; but my dream is the dream of software that most of us have given up on, code reuse, "reentrancy", shared libraries, etc.

Maybe something like a "wikipedia of source code".

I'm not discounting the benefit of doing a project to learn about it; what I'm saying is, too bad it's not code that will be useful for anything else without a lot more work; and too bad work is going into something that is not reuseful-able.