nicholas73

I'll leaving the price for others, but it seems to me the more important number at this stage is the percentage of ownership you'd get if exercised.

I mean a startup's purpose is to go from 1 to 10 or even 100, or go bust. So it's not as material whether the options are 1 or 1.25 strike if it does work out. In fact arguably you'd want more 1.25 options rather than less 1 options.

Of course that's all things equal, and the board may have screwed you on the total number of shares too.

This is evil.

"The chances of hiring folks to build an MVP and getting enough paying users off that to bring them on full time or getting enough traction to raise money are absurdly small."

What about the chances if you build yourself? Any better?

IIRC, Schellenberg requested re-trial to try to take advantage of the politics despite that a re-trial had the possibility of increasing the penalty to death penalty even without political motivation. That is, he gambled and lost.

Assuming you can raise debt, the other reason would be that if you fail to make debt payments then you potentially lose your company. Shit does happen, and it doesn't take a once in a lifetime virus to wreck your plans.

I've done this job. Sure you do learn some sales, but you don't really practice it. Nor does it necessarily expose you to market needs that aren't going to be covered by your bigco.

In the end you have to play to your strengths and do what you enjoy. If you think you would like a sales role and a sales driven company, then go for it. If not, you are spinning your wheels for a chance to glean something. If it's an avenue you would take anyway, then you have more possible positive outcomes.

Yes we should remember that stock markets pale in size compared to bond and currency markets. Money leaving another market can buoy stock markets in a way that is almost mechanical, separate from attempting to value individual stocks.

Ok but how did they know it was her phone?

I don't have perspective, maybe, but what is exactly holding back someone who does well in school to score higher on a test? It's not like you don't get to retake it if it was a fluke.

If it's the test fee, just allow a retake for free like a gas station smog check offer.

Or, a college can bucket grades and test scores separately and just take whichever is higher.

I had middling grades and not much extracurricular padding in high school but 99th percentile SAT (no prep other than a practice test). If it weren't for the SAT I would have had worse college options. School felt like it provided nothing more than read and regurg and my background did not promote anything extra. So personally I do not see how this decision evens the playing field.

Sometimes when I am wearing headphones, I get dissociated with the outside world and forget that my farts make sounds. So I fart without muffling it, and my neighbor thinks I'm just a jerk that toots openly. Then whenever he farts he toots openly too, in a game of one-buttsmanship. As a result, nobody is particularly comfortable working and I have to take walks when otherwise I would have been blissfully ignorant.

Anyone know why Stripe doesn't handle this?

Many employers attempt to verify your salary (maybe even if you didn't give one). Lying would give them a reason to withdraw an offer.

One thing that doesn't seem to have been said is that there can be a big gap in expectations coming out of college and into the workforce. You may have imagined/been promised the world studying hard problems, and are now a cog in a cube doing scrap work. That's a hard psychological transition.

This is a hard reality to adjust to and navigate. A lot of it has to do with figuring out what you really want and need. Many on HN then dream of having a side project take off. Others maybe want a high status job. Later, some decide family is more important and want work/life balance.

It's not just the job but designing the lifestyle you want and how to get there. The lack of that idea is what's really causing the anxiety at work.

Perhaps consider that achieving financial freedom may cost you more time than you want to give up at this point. It's front loading the work. Have an easy job with a good life insurance plan, and everything will be fine...

I quit my job a couple years out of school, and it didn't really change anything for me. The next jobs were no more satisfying and I didn't make great use of the downtime. One source of anxiety was traded for another. My career was derailed further, and major life milestones didn't happen for lack of money.

Yet perhaps it was unavoidable that one must go through self -discovery. Maybe you can do it more efficiently that I did.

One perspective I gained was that you aren't short in time to change your life even in your job. You lose even more time later, as work and family become more demanding. If I knew what I know now I could have just kept my job and worked on something on the side. I just didn't know what to work on back then.

I also didn't spend on myself. It would have been cheaper in the end to do so, in retrospect.

Anyway, you don't want to be jobless during a potential downturn. At least see it through the virus period.

Yes, but the magnitude can vary widely. The world used to use 100m barrels per day (bpd), and the last oil crash in 2016 had 2m bpd of oversupply. Just 2% unbalanced in supply/demand caused wildly fluctuating prices, due to the same reason as today - nowhere to store oil.

Now we've knocked off some 35m bpd of demand, and have millions of bpd of voluntary and involuntary shutdown, some of which will not return. This is a gigantic variation compared to any other crash in history.

So why won't prices necessarily skyrocket if demand returns? First you have a huge amount of stored oil to work through. Second you have potentially fast response shale to quickly increase production again.

But, shale only increased 1m bpd per year even during good times, so it can only make up for so much supply destruction. Secondly, this time shale companies may be mortally wounded. Even if they get taken over in bankruptcy you can have a lot of displaced workers and service companies.

So it really depends on how long the downturn lasts. If there is a quick rebound, like if a cure to covid-19 is found, then it shouldn't be too bad. But if this drags out through 2020, I think even $100 oil will start to look cheap in a few years.

I'm in... does Pokerstars accept US players for money? Or we pool the prize outside Pokerstars?

The point is that contango is like a slow trickle that decays your value. That doesn't mean it can't go up due to larger fluctuating factors. But over time is does go down while in that state, so it's not a buy and hold play.

Basically you need the virus situation to abate, along with OPEC price wars to end. And it needs to happen very soon (check the spread between front month and next month oil futures).

You know that USO does not hold physical oil, but futures contracts, right? Futures contracts are now in heavy contango (front month is cheaper than following month). That means every month USO has to roll over these contracts by selling front and buying next month, so USO will lose value over time as long as these conditions persist.

You might already know this but that is why USO can lose value over time (the opposite was true when oil was higher). So careful with the timing.

While I agree on the money aspect, other achievements provide more points of differentiation for top candidates. MIT likely is deciding amongst students with about perfect scores anyway.

I had a bout of diarrhea during my SAT 2 Math (the harder one, whatever it's called) and still scored 780/800. I was a bit annoyed that one question put me down huge percentiles though, because you could miss like 10 questions and still get 800.

The bare minimum we can do is quarantine for a month until warmer weather arrives. Then we can see if that has an effect.

News report says that the first community spread case came from a woman near Travis Airforce Base, where evacuees where brought for quarantine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnCvvVS2tPQ

Canada is fairly captive...

A lot of state med schools these days will waive tuition provided you serve in a rural community of that state after your residency for a few years. You definitely will get job security and high pay. I know a lot of later in life doctors for instance.

Any schools on the west coast? That sounds like a fair deal.

To be fair San Jose weather is heavily biased towards sameness.

Not sure this is a result of crash planning, or that good deals are hard to find at the top and he won't pony up unless it's a good deal.

Futures can put incredible leverage on your account. Most broker margin requirements are actually quite lenient - you could blow your account in a day if there is some event. Why should the broker take the liability if your account runs out of equity? That's why they auto-liquidate.

For our last hire, I was the only one on the hiring committee to ask about past projects. The others defaulted to "fundamentals" questions.

I think the reason people do this is a mix of 1) not knowing what traits to look for 2) not comfortable with unstructured conversation 3) frankly that it takes work to evaluate each resume and research projects enough to have a useful conversation.

For me though, how they achieve success at past work is the best indicator of future success.