bluehat

Neurodivergent folks often need a little extra time to learn or for somebody to sit down and explain things to clearly. We do not need a carte blanche for decades of sexual harassment. That's just somebody being an asshole and using us as a shield.

Yeah I agree that catching things in the moment is also great. It's all just tricky.

Author here, wasn't advocating for this. Proving intent in court is an extremely high bar, and means that a lot of stuff, such as fraud, goes unpunished. So, I'm not sure that this is appropriate for many issues, especially ones like violent crime.

What I was advocating for here is that people who are not directly wronged step up and help out. If a man behaves inappropriately towards me and I say something, it is (quite reasonably) often mistaken as a threat. I've never been a man so I don't know for sure, but I suspect that if a male colleague stepped up, took the person aside and said something privately, that this might go a lot better.

I want to shift the focus away from the person who did something wrong and towards minimizing and fixing harm. Too often we focus on the person who did a bad thing. Unless there is reason to believe that the person hurting people is dangerous or unable to stop hurting people, I'd much rather focus on "what are we going to do to fix this situation" than "what do we do with the person who caused this?"

you do not have to be a data vendor to have sensitive data on your servers

Customers will probably be less upset if something leaks internal to a party during a primary than they would be if something leaked to a different party.

Support doesn't have to be voluntary, and often isn't. If you are coerced into supporting the status quo, that doesn't mean you aren't supporting it, it just means you lack the freedom to make this decision.

It is possible to run into more than enough trouble with data without being a data broker.

Going to especially second that last bit. Not everybody is expressly data science, but most companies start running into some sort of data at one point or another.

Campaigns aren't wrong to be concerned about who has their data. There is good historical reason for them to be skeptical that security on your system will be strong enough to prevent customers from accessing other customer's data. https://time.com/4155185/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-data...

Now imagine getting buy-in for using customer data to improve your models.

I can't blame campaigns for being paranoid about vendors potentially going across the aisle. NationBuilder is one of the only big names I know that does it. They are in a unique and unenviable position given the death grip NGP VAN has, and they pay a big price for it on nearly every front.

That remains terrible branding. Branding is part of marketing. Her dog is not part of that.

A really core question(/assumption in many comments) is "is a computer science education only for SV job prep?" As usual, we could stand to remember that the world doesn't revolve around us. People learn to program for a lot of other reasons too.

If you want the quickest path to a SV job, you learn the most modern frameworks and drill them until you scrawl the boiler plate in your sleep. Project-based learning is extremely appropriate for this. You absolutely don't need four years of education to crank out a comfortable 6 figure salary off this knowledge. (In fact, it might be a liability if your pet framework ages out). You only have to be able to fill a need (even one will do) which a lot of companies have.

If you're looking for anything else, a diet of only back-to-back projects might not be the best way. If you're jumping head first from javascript into kernel modules you might consider a book. If you're looking to automate some bio or physics lab equipment, you can't expect getting good at a few popular frameworks to carry you. If you're learning math there are advantages to having people grade your work and offer office hours.

And if we're being really honest, this non-project-based stuff is pretty useful as SV job prep too. Not knowing things like linear algebra, statistics, and discrete math can be career limiting. I mean, how many of us are really ready to jump the gap to doing serious ML work?

Yeah, but there is no denying that the external structure is helpful and the dedicated office hours can be a real lifesaver.

How do you know?

Another way to view it would be that speakeasies thrived where the police didn't bother (or accepted discouragement) to go. Police resources are financial and political, and often stretched thin over poor or minority neighborhoods. So it is strange to divorce something and call it just "norms" when such strong economic forces are in play.

...you think MC Hammer predates SV? We started out as the site where transistors were made. That is also why the ground is so horrendously toxic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor

So much for Sincerity and Integrity in Dealings between Man and Man I guess :p

In a world where you have a massive backlog of good content, yes. Unfortunately, I struggle to find content which is both high quality and easy to learn from. Do you have suggestions?

Heretic. Kernighan and Ritchie is the one true gospel.

Gutenberg link, for the lazy http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/148

This guy is nuts. Basically every article I look at I wind up reading multiple times and get new information each time. If I had the attention span to keep reading them I would probably keep learning too...

I don't think I'd ever do an embargo in a cold pitch. My experience is that cooperation is best assured with an incentive structure, and you don't really have the power in a cold email to assure any kind of incentive structure. Unless there's a compelling follow-up story or they fear the wrath of somebody you are associated with, the reporter has zero reason to care what you think or ask for. Being too aggressive in demanding an embargo can come across as an idle threat, which is somewhere between a turn-off and dangerous.

My solution to this is to pitch stories that don't require embargos. "We exist, and we are great" is generally not a tactic I have had much success with anyway. Your affiliations and successes serve as credibility the week of your funding/launch just as well as they do on the day of your funding/launch. The only thing you're gambling on is the time-sensitivity.

I solve this by focusing on the angle. If you tie yourself into an existing popular media narrative/topic/event with a short lifespan, they have to cover you promptly. You also increase your chances of being covered because now you're offering an educated hot take on something everybody is already scrambling to cover. This also boosts social engagement, if you're going for that.

contact@radioeden.us

I am not a lawyer.

We operate very very differently than Chez JJ did.

Because of our community focus, the vast majority of the residents in the house at any given time are long-term, and here much longer than 30 days.

Even if this was not the case, this location is composed of more than one building and no building has more than 5 bedrooms.

Mostly, we have an excellent real estate lawyer.

Cool! TIL!

Question merged to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808712

Short version: we're open to it. This said, normally house head training to work under our systems is longer and we like to have somebody experienced shadow the new person for a few months before going solo. We were worried about the timeline, so we were considering just selling the company that runs the location we live in.

Didn't know how to handle this, so question merged to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14809337

Short version, we spend one long day a week on the house. There are also checkins.

We were honestly looking for advice here. I appreciate your interest, and would like to speak with my mentors before responding on the price.

The first year we only operated half of the space for the first two months. The second half was delayed by construction and opened in March. The uncertainty of construction meant we could not line up bookings ahead of time, and this impacted our Q1 and Q2 earnings for 2016. We also had the costs of opening the location, loan payments and opening a 2nd location.

In 2017 we finished paying off all of our loans, and have not opened any locations. While the year is not complete yet, we are ahead of where we were this time last year.

Daily operation of the place has a few major components. There are a number of contractors to coordinate, most notably our completely awesome cleaners and the repair contractor. The repair contractor requires coordination with the landlord and often subcontracts, so you occasionally need to be a little hands on with the subcontractors to make sure everything is done to the completeness which you intended.

The items with inflexible hours are checkins and reset. New residents require a welcome, an orientation, and supplies like sheets and towels. These hours are restricted to 5PM-7PM. Checkins happen 7 days a week but there aren’t checkins every day. Some residents have flight delays or weird circumstances which require other checkin hours.

House reset is currently on Mondays at 7:30PM. House reset is when all clutter is brought to the main area of the house, returned to its owner, or sent to goodwill. Residents also help roll out upgrades, like assembling IKEA furniture.

Mostly, cleanup functions as a way to get the residents oriented with the house and set behavior expectations. Residents frequently come off 6 to 20+ hour flights into their checkin. It is not reasonable to expect them to remember everything you tell them at that time. Residents learn a lot more during reset, particularly where all the bathrooms are and where they can find more toilet paper. They do not clean things aside from getting the kitchen sink and counters under control but reset is extremely important for house cleanliness. The data is extremely clear that residents who participate in cleanup make way way less of a mess in the house in general.

Reset is timeboxed strictly to one hour, and after that we serve snacks and drinks. That is the time when most residents get to know each other and we get to know them.

Chores are minimal, though you will wash a lot of laundry on season changes and you do buy a lot of toilet paper. Costco delivers.

We have never had a house head not live on their campus, though every house head runs their house differently. I’m not sure you need to live in the apartment, but you probably want some sort of community leader nearby and accessible. Some residents stay for multiple years, so promoting one of them might be an option. Having somebody accessible is important when residents lock themselves out, but also for setting house culture.

Honestly though, the opportunity to be positive part of people’s lives and a first community in a strange new place was a big upside for me. The residents eat at Thanksgiving with us, I’ve taught some of the younger kids how to cook, and on a few occasions I’ve held a resident’s hand in the hospital when their family was thousands of miles away. I like singing happy birthday to them, and they often come back to visit us. Also, we run the coolest trick-or-treat house on Halloween.

The residents honestly can be pretty awesome too. I feel guilty in that I probably get a lot more from them than I give them. Grad students are fascinating, and they come for every reason from research at NASA to the reading Stanford historical archives to working in Google Brain. I’ve gotten to try food from a lot of countries, and learned to cook a few of the recipes. I’ve learned a lot about a lot of cultures and picked up lots of fun slang and idioms (a favourite, from German, is “shooting sparrows with a cannon.”) Also my professional network has grown substantially including access to a lot of new fields. The cash is good, but I think you’d miss out on a lot of intangible upside if you weren't there.

As for the three of us running the place: I’m pretty sure one person can do it. Our schedule works like this right now: one long day a week of running the house, three days a week of building whatever startup we’re trying, and one day a week of studying. Because coordination is hard we think it is less work for just one person.

If the company was still owned by us I do not believe a $90K salary is a given, especially prior to that person going full time to run the company at a higher efficiency.

We have reason to believe our lease is good indefinitely.

We think there are other things of value in the company than the lease. Starting one of these places yourself isn't cheap, easy or quick. Making sure your dorm is listed in new hire/intern/founder material takes time and connections, generally from former residents.

It also takes experience and skill to properly lay out houses and incentive structures which motivate residents to cooperate and be good to each other. Some of our systems are pretty elaborate. For example: we manufacture large batches of dish sets and silverware each with a different animal. Residents are assigned an animal, and only allowed to use the dish set with that animal. This has lots of utility: it means residents have to clean their dishes before making more dishes, it creates personal responsibility around abandoned dirty dishes so the kitchens do not become hellish, and it mitigates the variation in the definition of "clean" one might find between an undergraduate intern and a doctor doing their residency. We also believe it is a key piece of what has helped prevent the dorms from ever having a flu outbreak.

I started running these places to get an internship program I was in un-cancelled. When I ditched being an engineer to do nonprofit work I started another to make up the income gap but it was pretty casual. I met the OP and the 3rd person there. Together we decided to start running these places at scale to give us an infinite runway to bootstrap companies.

The three of us talked and we're open to somebody managing the place. We have done house head training when it is needed to open a location, but we like to have somebody experienced shadow them for a few months before going solo. The timelines are pretty tough for this house though. This is why we were going to sell the company for the location the three of us live in.

All of that said, if you're interested in having this conversation, we are willing to have it.

Another fan of Toastmasters here. If you're local to the Bay Area, my friend runs a kind and impressive chapter in Mountain View. They are called the Sierra 49ers.

The customer will always be right. The difference is with contractors is they lead the framing. With a startup, you lead the framing.

But customers are always going to have dumb ideas, and you generally don't get to tell them to completely fuck themselves.