HN user
That's fair, though I will say Kotlin's type system having nullability built-in is something I doubt Java will ever fully add (instead of the annotations it currently uses). So in that respect, it's making it more type safe, but the delta between Kt and Java isn't near as big as TS and JS.
(not a frontend dev, so excuse any ignorance)
I agree CoffeeScript usage has gone down dramatically, but has Typescript not usurped it? It doesn't seem like everyone just went back to using JS, so maybe Scala was CoffeeScript, and Kotlin is closer to Typescript?
As soon as I opened the page, I searched for "null" and saw it didn't show up in the original post. Leaving that out is almost a bad faith argument, because it is the number 1 Kotlin feature I doubt Java will ever get.
Now, I will say that build times are way better on Java. A large part of this is the ability to generate ABI jars with Gradle, which you can't do with Kotlin. If anyone from Gradle or Jetbrains are reading this, please please please try and make this work, I know there's ongoing tickets but in larger projects Kotlin and Java are not even close, for this specific reason.
I'm not sure what it's taking about for the "with" feature: https://nipafx.dev/java-record-semantics/#with-blocks
In Kotlin data classes, it's already implemented (just called copy) https://kotlinlang.org/docs/data-classes.html#copying
We're already using the new IR compiler on 1.4, but I'll check out 1.5!
11,503 files, 1,431,195 lines of code. (spread out over <50 Gradle modules).
I think the main problem is that Gradle doesn't have the same support as Java for ABI compatible changes, so invalidation of modules are more common.
I used Kotlin in a large codebase, and one of my only complaints is the compile times. We use Gradle for our build system, and relative to Java it is slooowwww. But we like the other benefits of Kotlin, so it's worth it in the end. But if they could get compile times down, it'd be the perfect language imo.
Are there other companies where a CX Specialist makes the same as an engineer? Usually I see Engineering offset from CX, so an entry level CX employee might come in at Level 1, while an engineer might come in at Level 3. I don't think I've ever seen an Engineer and CX Specialist have the same corporate level, but perhaps that's just the companies I've worked at?
I generally subscribe to PG's definition of a startup, which is a company designed to grow fast: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Unfortunately we heavily shard our tests, running on a single laptop would take a while.
Unfortunately right when we were trying to deploy a hot-fix to production, our CI can't clone the PR to run tests.
What do other folks use to avoid this situation? Have a Gitlab instance or similar that you can pull from instead for CI?
If I understand correctly, the .so TLD is effectively a national resource of Somalia, and as such they have total control over it and could in fact shut it down if they wanted.
It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.
Serious question, if this is an extended legal dispute or the domain is actually subject to deletion, that would be hugely damaging to the Notion brand right?
I ask because I can't think of another company that's had a similar issue lately, so I find the domain dispute an interesting issue that we rarely see get to this stage.
+1, though sadly Ontario has cut their tax credit so it's just Federal for us now.
This question gets more complicated in places like Ontario, Canada, where the term "engineer" is actually protected. To call yourself an engineer in a professional setting, you have to be a member of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers. Of course in practice, they choose not to go after people who call themselves engineer vs developer, but perhaps that will change in the future.
I think the "overcompensating" can also happen when you hire, doesn't have to be an existing employee. Invariably other employees will find out what new hires make, and if you don't stick to loose compensation bands, you're going to have a tough time trying to justify this.
That doesn't mean much unless the employees have liquidity right? Presumably after the acquisition the employees would've been able to convert their options to cold hard cash.
Yeah definitely, but Amazon can always say "Go host on GCP". Then Google Cloud can say "Go host on Azure". Then Microsoft says "Go host on Digital Ocean", and repeat until you run out of hosts.
Is it like a game of hot potato where the last hosting company has to host them? Because it seems there are alternatives to each individually, and it's only when they all say no that there are issues for Parler. And to me that feels like a Parler problem, not an AWS problem.
Yeah it's certainly a slippery slope, 100% agree.
In your example it's probably slightly different because religion is a protected class, while political leanings aren't.
I think what's particularly interesting is you substitute "right wing" with "Jews" like you did, and you start to wonder if Amazon crossed the line. But then change "Jew" to "terrorist", and you think Amazon might be in the right. Clearly we can't protect ALL groups, that'd be silly.
Serious question, it seems AWS is by no means a monopoly on web hosting (Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, Linode, the list goes on). It seems to be they're well within their rights as a company to not host Parler, and Parler can try to go somewhere else. If no other companies want to host Parler, isn't that more a reflection of Parler than the hosting companies? It doesn't seem like they should be obligated to host, since that's as slippery a slope as not hosting is. Perhaps this is a decision where not everyone will ever be happy, and that's just how it's going to be?
"Worse, you'll quite possibly end up firing them when you eventually start reigning them in and they don't like being told how to build things."
Had this exact thing happen at my company. It's tough when you have to start doing this, but even tougher if you don't. There are times I certainly think we'd have the same output with half the people if we'd kept the bar higher.
Very similar experience, especially around people abusing extension functions and opting for clever one-liners. We had to really push back on that during code reviews, but even then we still have some weird code in certain spots.
Interesting, are you able to share more? Or if you know where I might be able to read more about this?
How does something like this mesh with selling common stock but the company having right of first refusal?
Say I want to sell common stock that I own, to someone who meets the SEC accredited investor definition. It seems that right of first refusal means that the company could buy the stock instead, but it would have to be at the price that I set with the external investor. In that case, don't I as an employee get liquidity either way, since it's being bought at the agreed upon price?
It depends on how far along the company is, as IPO approaches it'll be a 0% discount. For a Series C-D, 60-70% discount isn't uncommon.
It's talked about a little, but there's two classes of shares (common and preferred). Usually startups will value your options in an offer using preferred, so they might say you have 100k options at a $1 value each, with a 5 cent strike. But the reality is even if you manage to get liquidity, perhaps through a secondary, you probably won't be able to sell at the preferred price! If you wait until IPO then common equals preferred and it doesn't matter, but it always felt wrong that the value of your options was only true if the company IPOs, versus taking in to account an appropriate discount.
Yeah love Zach's Github repo, I hope that a longer exercise window becomes the norm as more companies offer it to stay competitive.
A few thoughts:
I've seen Tender Offers mentioned a few times in various articles, but I've always been curious about how such an event would affect the 409a valuation. Are Tender Offers usually closer to preferred or common pricing? Does it just depend on the company and that's why there's so few resources?
Also, I see liquidation preferences mentioned very very briefly, but in my opinion it's insanely important for prospective employees to get a sense of the cap table.
Also, if you're joining very early and a sought after talent, negotiating a longer post termination exercise window is doable, rather than the typical 90 days.
For me it really depends on the project. When I joined my current company we were much much smaller (6 engineers total), and there was a lot of new stuff to be built. I could easily work 8+ hours in a day, of actual coding.
Now, I probably get closer to 5-6. Though that may be impacted as well by the pandemic, where work from home is finally catching up with my productivity (been work from home since March).
Thanks! I wish Hashicorp the best of luck getting hosted clusters out the door, totally agree with you about table stakes.