kinkora

Thanks for clarifying on that error.

I am not involved in the wordpress community in any shape or form but am fairly privy to what it is along with the open source world yet.. even I am finding it hard with confusing and/or conflating statements on what falls under the non-profit, foundation, commercial entity, etc.

But even if you ignore random stranger me from the internet, wouldn't it flag something in you that your own legal representative got it wrong on an official company post clarifying the structure? Even if I apply the most charitable interpretation, it seems Neil is also equally confused or at least not on the same page as you since he is unable to respond consistently in the other threads?

I am sure you will at least see why that everyone is just perplexed by how obtused the whole structure between the WordPress.org, WordPress The Foundation and Automattic.

I have an M1 now and it is glorious but back when I had the MBA with the butterfly keys, someone pointed me to https://github.com/aahung/Unshaky and it helped eliminate 99% of the double-typing or ghost keys. You will have to tweak the ms until you find the right number that fits your typing speed but once you get it all setup, the butterfly keyboard will become much more tolerable.

Or.. you could just swap it for an M1. :)

The 4HWW book changed my life when i picked it up randomly while waiting for my flight at the airport nearly 13 years ago and it's not just because of the remote working bits (i've been working fully remote for the past 7 years) or the parts on creating an income autopilot muse (i have a handful of content sites) but because of the journey it took me on to eventually discover the financial independence crowd, which strangely, intersects very prominently with the people that are into 4HWW. I've met loads of people in the FIRE community where the 4HWW concepts being always the common ground that brings us all together.

Not sure if Tim reads comments on HN but he really should acknowledge the FIRE bit more and the impact his book has brought to that community. Most critics of the book focus too much on the outsourcing endeavours, the remote work shift, the digital nomadism culture, the income muse pursuits, etc but it is the FIRE component where most readers ultimately end up at and i, will vehemently argue, has the most impact to his readers.

IMHO of course. :)

yea, not sure what the OP is referring to or what their personal circumstances are but that is definitely not as simple as that from personal experience (i left Australia for 10 months) along with first hand accounts of people I know.

Besides the obvious wife/kids being in Australia = personal ties, ATO also considers the following to be reasonable points to be constituted as a tax resident:

- Australian Bank accounts, even with $0.01 in it.

- Superannuation

- Properties owned, regardless if it is as an investments or owner-occupied (not rented out)

- Any Australian Account e.g. commsec, vanguard australia, telstra/optus mobile, etc

- Postal address/P.O. box

And so forth. ATO is purposefully applying broad strokes to "ties" to Australia so that they can claim their share of taxes accordingly.

I have a mate whom is a miner, working offshore for BHP, and was audited by the ATO since he lives in Indonesia (wife/family) thus claimed he is a non-tax resident. He is originally from WA so got dinged for a house he owns in WA (which he intended to come back to) + his (Telstra) mobile plan that he never used but paid the smallest plan to keep so that he didn't lose his aussie number + his NAB bank account that had $1000 in it so that he has some cash to spend when he visits family. ATO told him that if he wanted to be considered a non-tax resident, he had to liquidate _and_ close everything he has in Australia to be considered a non-tax resident. Since he didn't do so, they considered he has every intention to return to Australia thus place undue burden on medicare & pension system, if applicable, thus had to pay the difference in tax he paid in Indonesia vs. working in Australia.

"Every journey of a 1000 miles begins with 1 step"

Maybe we should laude and celebrate that at least loads of effort was put into getting all the G7 finance ministers in one place and actually have a discussion + agree to a next step?

Feels unnecessary negative and very arm chair criticism to just hand wave the whole endeavour and say "oh nothing was done and all they did was talk".

I sometimes think people in the last decade are to quick to find faults for every little thing that falls short of a 100% effort (and even that gets criticism) without even considering that they are not the men-in-the-arena [1] doing the hard work.

----

[1] Whenever I think of criticizing something/someone, I always consider Theodore Roosevelt comment on this sort of behaviour where he once said:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Funny, I had the same thought when I was in my teens and couldn't ever imagined it until Simpsons did an episode [1] on this where Homer got his dream job at Globex and the CEO/Company is the dream boss - provided a fully paid for house, flexible hours, great pay, beautiful company town, easy going colleagues, CEO that trusts you, etc.

It was only halfway through the episode you realise that Hank Scorpio is the stereotypical james bond villian and everyone working for him (including homer) was helping him in his diabolical schemes! But you wouldn't know it if Homer didn't re-sign from his job while Hank was battling Bond. :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ew78KThLOY

my "insider" knowledge from the FB upper management is that Zuck is considering a future presidential candidacy so all of this congress stuff, dealing with political correctness, etc is great training wheels when he eventually gets into it. If you look at it from that lens, it makes sense right?

Disclaimer: note bunny ear quotes and like any 2nd hand information, there might be some stretched out truths attached to it.

Pieter Levels (levelsio) of Nomadlist famously gets mocked for using a single index.php and sqlite but does 5 figure MRR. https://nomadlist.com/open

He used to get a lot of flack for it and i never understood why since you use whatever gets the job done. Too many people doing the "gatekeeper" thing.

You probably hear all the usual productivity hacks like promodoro, start with small things, constantly do it, switch off distractions, etc (which i do too in some form) but let me tell you an unorthodox technique I came up with that was inspired by this tweet - https://twitter.com/tkiramadden/status/1255516715502522370

For me, I don't always have an issue being productive when I am in the zone but I have a problem of sometimes being unable to "jump-start" into that mode. Its like the engineers/developers version of a writers block and I get the occasional mental block when I need to create something.

So what do I do to overcome this?

I gave $1,000 to a really trusted friend and told him, if I dont show him the thing I want to create by the end of the week, he can give that money to an organisation that I absolutely against with on principle (think brainwashing) and hate with my guts.

Boy, it was sure a motivator to my brain on day 5 or 6. :)

preface - I am directing my displeasure at Apple, not the fantastic team at wine for creating this as an open source project.

I love wine and it runs fantastically well on both my personal mac and on my fedora workstation. I run a lot of old school engineering apps (think like MIPS simulators) that doesn't run on any other platform so wine makes it easy for me to both be productive at work since I am much more efficient on a command line and allows me to WFH occasionally so that I can spend time with my family.

Now my rant - since upgrading to Catalina last week, I've been completely unable to run wine at any way shape and form due to Apple's mandate that all 32bit programs be barred from running on Catalina. Guess what runs exclusively on 32 bit?

I tried everything including compiling my own wine64 wrapper but it doesn't work at all since the underlying app is still win32. I know there is a crossover product that works but unfortunately that's not on the cards due to budget issues.

Honest question: why is it so hard to get wine32 working on Catalina and why doesn't Catalina have an option to run 32bit apps? Its been out since October 2019 so one will have thought a solution will have surfaced.

Interesting story!

Side note - i am Australian, have traveled the world and I find it funny in many countries (particularly Asia), everyone thinks Milo is from their own country. They are suprised when I tell them it's Australian and hilarity ensues when they looked it up online.

Oh and don't feel bad cause Aussies have loads of brands too that we thought were local but are actually from overseas. For the longest time, i thought Maggi noodles was from Asia but its actually Swiss!

I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engine and prior to that, it was the discovery of electricity.

So he proves this out by taking an example of what happens if you hit someone on the head and assuming that person sleeps for a long time, how will he feel out of place in the world. Here are the examples I remembered he used (paraphrasing):

1. If you take someone living in the 1700s, knock them on the head, and have them wake up any time till the mid 1800s, to that person, life feels almost the same even though 100s of years have passed. Sure, maybe there are more buildings, more people, more horses, weapons are more or less the same, etc but essentially life is still familiar.

2. Now take someone living in, lets say 1850, knock them out and have them wake up in 1880. Holy shit, suddenly the world is so much brighter and there are "lights" everywhere. What witchcraft is this?? The world will look so different from what he/she remembers them.

3. Now take that same person living in 1880, hit them on the head again and have him/her wake up 35 years later and it is 1915. HOLY DOUBLE CRAP, what is this new fangle machine on wheels on the streets people are on and where have all the horses gone?? Ok I need to go into the toilet and wash my face...OMG WHAT IS THIS FLUSHING THING AND THIS METAL SPROUT CREATES MY OWN CLEAN RIVER??? Walks to the city and wow, look at all these buildings looking like mountains! And not only that, he/she looks up in the sky and sees gigantic "metal birds"...WTF YOU CAN RIDE THEM AND NOW GET FROM LA TO NY in a couple of hours?? The world will look completely magical to them.

Now here is the interesting thing - if you take someone from 1920s, hit them on our head, and put them in 2020.. that economist surmises that life will look pretty much the same to that person, not unlike scenario (1) where you take someone from 1700s and put them in the 1800s. Vehicles might look a bit more modern, buildings might look a bit more taller or "sleek-er", there are way much more people but essentially, the world hasn't really change much. Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it.

So yep, it is nothing to do with you. We just happen to live in a time where we have yet to experience a "leap" in invention where life has become completely magical to us. My guess will be, the day space tech becomes a common place and attainable, that will be when the world looks magically different to those of us living today and that generation will feel the same leap as the inhabitants living from 1850~1920.

Not sure if a bit of confirmation bias on my side but seems like there is a recent big uptick of layoffs at Silicon Valley companies? Popular ones like Quora, TripAvisor, Ebay, Mozilla, Uber, 23andMe, etc we hear about but among my own network, i am even hearing it from smaller startups & businesses.

Just wondering if it is just me but I am surmising that it seems to indicate a wider systematic.. issue? Maybe issue is not the word for it. Symptom is probably a better description and it feels we are at the precipitous of an incoming storm/crunch/etc.

Please tell me I am imagining things.

Edit: I guess my question is more are all these layoffs an indicator of an incoming recession or is it something more nefarious like the big tech (FAANG) are taking steps to widen their positions while they are still in a "strong" position to do so (e.g. google).

Seems to be almost noise cancelling. The Verge did a hands-on[1] on the feature and was able to cancel out the noise in the room filled with people.

[1] Starts at 20 seconds in @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDN2RRaY1po&t=20

Perhaps I could have better communicated my feedback and I do apologise for that but I wanted to point out that I did not say there is nothing out there and in fact, specifically mentioned that I could find those repos:

Yes, I know there are probably some Github repos out there that may do what I want and I am nitpicking

Plus I could also say that if you spent 2 minutes searching my comment history, you will find that I am a Perl enthusiast and also started my sys admin career with cgi-bin yet you jumped straight into dismissing me as an anti-Perl person.

I could also add that if you took another 2 minutes to look at the link of list of modules that you listed, none of them are friendly to new adopters. E.g. Here are the documentation for the top 4 links:

• Bailador: https://github.com/Bailador/Ressources (misspelled link + 404 error to documentation)

• Cro: https://cro.services/docs/intro/getstarted (taking out the code samples, the whole documentation is 9 lines)

• Uzu: https://modules.perl6.org/dist/Uzu:cpan:SACOMO (this one is actually good. just needs some polishing for new comers)

• Pheix: https://perl6.pheix.org/doc (404 error to documentation)

And compare that to the following:

• Rails: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

• Django: https://www.djangoproject.com/start/

• Laravel: https://laravel.com/docs/5.8

That's just the documentation. I haven't even gone on about the fact that all of those Perl 6 modules are by independent contributors (Cro being a private web consulting company) and the worry about it disappearing or losing support for future releases, bug fixes, etc if I want to adopt Perl 6 for production systems.

So my point stands.. until Perl 6 has an official & comprehensive framework to do something to help beginners, it will not be popular. Key word "official", "comprehensive" and "beginners".

The whole point about this article is that people don't adopt Perl 6 because of the many myths purported but my feedback is that the reason because any new language gets popular is due to the official frameworks and community around it that helps the adoption which also set some standards and will help dispel some of these myths. All of these makes it much more inviting to someone new to the language and drives adoption. Without that, even me as a Perl veteran will find it tough to get myself up and running.

Lastly, I have tried to give constructive feedback to the Perl 6 community and have always met with these sort of defensive behaviour. We could do with some more conversations around feedback than simply dismissing comments right away with a "your language is so filled with anti-perl hate".

Myth: Perl 6 has no official "framework"

Reality: Yep.

The biggest issue with Perl 6 IMO is that there are no "official" scaff holding framework(s) for anything. If I need to spin up a web app? Start from scratch. Need something like a CMS? Start from scratch. Need a static site generator? Start from scratch.

Yes, I know there are probably some Github repos out there that may do what I want and I am nitpicking but it is IMHO that until a programming language adopts an official framework[1] to help with new entrants or even crusty old dev guys like me that don't wanna keep reinventing the wheel, that language will rarely ever get popular.

[1] e.g. rails to ruby, laravel/wordpress to PHP, Django to python, nodejs to javascript, etc

Arguments & discussions about google tracking you and how some products are crippled if you disable it (looking at you Maps!!) aside, they at least recently introduced a way for you to delete all the information here:

https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity

Not many people know about this so spread the word!

brings to mind the saying, "a broken clock is correct twice in a day"

PIA (Private Internet Access) and am a happy customer for 3rd year running.

Why do I choose them? Besides the ease of use over multiple platforms, they are the only VPN (I am aware of) that has held up in court that they do not store any logs when asked to handover personal information.

Sources:

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-...

[2] https://www.scribd.com/doc/303226103/Fake-bomb-threat-arrest

interesting background you have there and yep, i agree on that it is an entirely different challenge trying to restructure the business to handle the bigger spending customers.

Anyway, thanks for offer but I'm not in SF!

probably a loaded question (so I apologise?) but why are you reasonably confident for growing a 6 -> 7 figure businesses? what about 7 -> 8 figure busineses?

context: i ask because i have this problem right now and find this is a harder hurdle (trying to double a 7 figure business without VC money)

I preface my statement below with a disclaimer that I live in a "developed" or "1st-world" country but have previously lived and experienced other less developed economies.

Anyway, it feels to me Gates is fixing a real problem but with very 1st world solutions?

For example, software will be able to notice when you’re feeling down, connect you with your friends, give you personalized tips for sleeping and eating better, and help you use your time more efficiently.

Maybe it is just the skeptic in me but it is a lil captain obvious that more of those activities will give you a better quality of life. In fact, I will say that most people are very aware that they should sleep or eat better or even use their time efficiently and probably wouldn't need any form of software to tell them that. I will even wager that the overwhelming number of people that are feeling down, need more sleep or need to eat better can't do so easily and is possibly due to their personal circumstances such as having to work insanely hours due to (almost uncontrollable) working conditions and/or have a low to middle wage job that won't allow them to have any spare income to eat healthy/organic food.

This feels like a stereotypical 1st world solution to me that will only apply to certain type of people and I say this as someone in the privilege position to do so.

I know I sound dystopian but could someone refute my view? Am I missing something?

I completely agree that some people pursuing FIRE can be too fanatical about chasing the pot of goal and only waiting until old age to "enjoy". I kind of skirt in the middle (i'm more of a FatFIRE) and think of FIRE more as a North Star. :)

I should mention that I do live in an expensive part of the world (think SF but not SF) and the bank account was just the liquid assets bit of the portfolio. Been on the FIRE journey for 10 years now so I have some illiquid assets (properties, stocks, etc) but I tend to not think of touching it ever.

Ctrl-f + "fire" in comments... Nothing??

The author mentioned FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early) which, IMHO, a big factor in your happiness at work based on my own experience being on both ends of having money and nothing.

Some background context - worked for a decade+, quit job to go travel for 6 months with sizable savings in bank account, came back almost broke, now back in the workforce.

So I am one of the lucky ones in the world to absolutely love the industry I am in hence never hated "work". Colleagues, office politics, etc is another matter but "work" itself was always interesting thus I was happy in the sense that I never hated doing my actual "work". What I noticed that contributed to my happiness at "work" was how correlated it was to the savings in my bank account. The more my bank account grew, the less I worried about the "other things" (crazy bosses, stifling politics, strange colleagues, etc) and the more I could relish enjoying the challenges of doing my actual "work".[1]

Fast forward a decade, I then quit my job to travel and it was absolute bliss of happiness! Kind of a taste of retirement life. HOWEVER, while I had a huge chunk of savings, it wasn't exactly FU forever money so as the bank account started dwindling while traveling, I noticed my happiness was correlated again and I started enjoying traveling less.

Once my bank account was down to an unacceptable level (for my own standards), I made the decision to go back to work to replenish it and work again towards my FIRE goal. I managed to get another job in an industry that I enjoyed doing the "work" but I wasn't exactly feeling happy this time round due to the constant worry about being laid off, having to pander to colleagues and/or bosses, dealing with politics, etc. Doing the work was fine but a lot of my unhappiness came from worrying about "everything else" at work due to me depending on the paycheck.

Fast forward to today, my savings are back to healthy levels and once again, I'm happy at "work" even though nothing has changed in terms of "everything else". Makes me realise that anecdotally for me at least, having FU money in my bank account contributes A LOT to my happiness at work - assuming of course with a caveat that you love doing what you are doing at work.

[1] I put apostrophes (") around the word work because I defined work in this context as not the job/position as a whole but the actual thing that I do. I.e. If work is Software Engineer at Google, I defined "work" as doing code related stuff.

IMHO i think we need a another acronym for "RE" in "FIRE" because it is a lil bit of a misnomer. Most people who come across the concept of FIRE will inadvertently ask the following questions:

• What will I do after i am "retired early"?

• Wouldn't I be bored when I'm "retired early"?

• What happens when I need more money than I expected later for <insert reason here> after I'm "retired early"?

• If an emergency crops up, how do I deal with the unexpected expenses after I'm "retired early"?

People seem to equate the "RE" part as you show the finger to your boss, stop working completely, and you are at home now doing nothing. While that might be true to a very very very small percentage of people that FIRE, in my personal experience, most people (including myself) continue to work or at the very least, do something part time (sell things on the side, cut their working hours down to 3 or 4 days, part-time "menial" jobs, etc). I will hazard a guess that most people that FIRE-ed are actually still "working" ergo still have some form of income to supplement their living expenses (on top of their FIRE stash) thus I will describe the RE part more of a mental freedom thing than an actual thing one does.

My personal anecdote - I am technically FIRE in a lot of measures but I am pursuing a fat FIRE (mentioned in the article) so I'm not exactly there yet from my perspective. However I do have the choice to FIRE if I want to but yet, I continue on working. Why? CAUSE I LOVE MY JOB! but let's say tomorrow if I stopped liking my job for whatever reason, I will still continue finding another job that I like even though I have the freedom to sit at home and be "retired early". I will even boldly say that 9/10 people I know that are on the way to FIRE or have FIRE-ed all are either still working or continuing on doing something they love that most people will define as a "job".

Sorry for my verbose explanation but the "RE" is a lil bit of a pet peeve of mine of all concepts of FIRE. Definitely need a better acronym - maybe something closer to FU money.

That might be true but you also have this bit in the article:

“Mr King is expected to receive a payment of up to $11.3m as a result of the Paddy Power Betfair deal. The firm’s current chief technology officer Robin Spira is due to make up to $3.5m, its legal officer Christian Genetski stands to make up to $6.2m, and it chief financial officer Andy Giancamilli is due to receive up to $5m” (Those add up to $26 m)"

All these guys can be classified as "late stage" employees and I can't believe that these guys were given a way much more bigger payout than to the founders or to the original team of founding employees. I am not saying they don't deserve the payout however some comments below stated that these guys are possibly the reason why the company could even have an exit thus rewarded accordingly but wouldn't one argue that if the founders did not start the company, there wouldn't be anything to sell with? I am just completely confounded how unfair compensation is regardless of what the terms of the VC were.

My honest question to YC members - What is the general advice shared between the YC community to prevent this happening to founders and/or founding employee(s)?

Not OP and a hiring manager myself once but I will love to compare notes and hear your thoughts on what are the common problems/mistakes you see when interviewing developers or engineers and if you have any general advice.

Considering most of the HN population are technical folks, many will possibly find your experience & knowledge useful or at the very least, contribute to a worthwhile discussion on hiring technical people.

Edit - Added a list of problems/mistakes that I commonly see when I interview people for technical positions:

• Being borderline arrogant, argumentative and/or abrasive in conversation even though they are brilliant - Yes, I've interviewed people that are smart and have a wealth of knowledge but the straight forward truth is this role (and most developer/engineering roles for that matter) requires a person to work with not only other people within the team but also with other technical teams & departments so if you can't show that you are a team player, it doesn't matter how good you are as a developer/engineer.

• Lying straight up on certain details and not owning up to it - one common interview tactic I use is to ask what version of [technology] that the person has worked on and what are their "battle scars" experiences with that particular version or [technology]. I have had people tell me they work on versions that don't exist (i.e. latest v5 and they claim v8) or claim they have 5 years experience when said version of [technology] has only existed for 3 years. Also, I find that the true experienced people in [technology] can passionately tell you about their problems using [technology] and what they did to get around it rather than simply just evangelizing said [technology].

• Talking bad about anything or anyone - This might just be a personal preference but a big turn off for me is when a candidate starts bad mouthing their ex-bosses, colleagues or company. I might make exceptions for special circumstances (i.e. sexual harassment, bullying, etc) but even then, I will find it as a negative against their personality if that person keeps harping on it and don't show at least signs that they are taking steps to move on. Call me old school but I believe in never burning your bridges regardless of what the circumstances are and even if you don't, the last thing you should do is bring it up in an interview.

Note - these are my personal opinions, preferences and experiences on interviewing and I do not claim my methods to be the best way on doing so.

what do you not get specificaly?

I was in the same boat until I talked to someone working directly with youtube and that conversation cleared a lot of my questions. Allow me to do the same for you. :)

Within my finance circle, there is big discussion on why Microsoft did an all-stock deal and the substantiated rumour through the grapevine is that the $7.5billion acquisition was Microsoft's way of releasing a chunk of stock without having to go through the public market. Read what you will of it but interesting viewpoint nevertheless.

While OnePlus (i've owned all OnePlus phones since OP1) is a great example however there is a common misconception that it was "new" at that time. The OnePlus 1 was almost identical to the Oppo Find 7A in specs, price, etc [1]. Also not commonly known, OnePlus was started by an ex-Oppo executive and is actually (majority) owned by Oppo Electronics which is the parent company of Oppo Mobile [2].

Also while price was definitely a huge factor for it's popularity, the main reason IMHO was because it was the first phone that officially supported a popular AOSP at that time - CyanogenMod (now LineageOS [3]) and it even had the logo branded on the back. Almost everyone I knew with a OP1 phone bought it simply for cyanogenmod and how fast/smooth it ran it with no issues. Remember that when OnePlus 1 was first announced in 2014, android phones were well known to be filled with vendor bloatware (Samsung Galaxy S3,S4 anyone?), expensive, became really slow over time and for those of us that wanted custom ROMs, it was relatively painful to flash/root a stable AOSP on any device. OnePlus 1 was the first phone that I had absolutely no issues with having CyanogenMod on it such that I even turned on nightly updates knowing full well that it was tested at least on a OnePlus device.

So yea, I think OnePlus became popular simply because of price and their official support for CyanogenMod which meant a phone with a fast & responsive running android and most importantly, no bloatware.

[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=6214&idPhone2...

[2] https://www.gizchina.com/2014/04/28/oneplus-responds-oppo-co...

[3] https://www.androidauthority.com/cyanogenmod-lineageos-65481...