HN user
Ummm, are you saying that C is the grandparent of C, or do you have a typo in your example? Sure, the initial comment is not necessarily the grandparent, but in your ABCDE example, A is the grandparent of C, and C is the grandparent of E.
Maybe I'm just misreading your comment, but it has me confused enough to reset my password, login, and make this child comment.
Here's a fun fact: There's a typo in his article [0].
I only learned about the typo when I asked him to sign my copy at a Christmas Tree lecture years ago. Instead of signing it, he corrected the typo. He had a mnemonic he used to remember the digits in a Potrzebie. He had the mnemonic stored on a file on his home machine. I watched him ssh to the machine, then fire up Emacs to look up the mnemonic.
You're correct that the rail needs to continually have its stress managed. This could be cutting the rail and adding a new piece, or removing a bit. This is a fairly labor intensive and costly process so the railroads were very interested in coming up with a way to determine when a buckle or break was most likely.
Buckles and breaks were most common just after a train had left a section of track. The normal approach was to issue slow orders when the temperature got too high (buckle) or too low (break). So there was a lot of interest in finding more accurate ways to determine when slow orders were necessary and to optimize when to add/remove rail.
AFAIK this problem is still outstanding. The product I worked on years ago never quite succeeded. Railroads are a harsh environment.
This is a fine article. It covers a lot of the decisions one must consider when considering stock options. I just think it's a little abstract for folks who haven't lived the experience.
I actually tried to enumerate the scenarios. When I hit five variables I realized the advice would be mostly worthless. That's 32 separate outcomes, some of which are pretty subjective, e.g. do I think this is a viable company?
Nevertheless, I've been down this road a few times. I have some wins and losses. I think this article misses an important point: Exercising is not an all or nothing proposition.
For example: If I join a startup and leave after a year, the difference between my strike price and the 409a price might be non-zero. I can still exercise a percentage of my options to avoid AMT. Maybe I can't exercise all of them without triggering AMT, but chances are I can exercise a fair amount.
If I'm offered an early exercise, I don't have to do 100%. I can do a number that fits my budget. I just have to make sure I file my 83b election form.
If I'd bought Bitcoin at $1 and it went to $5, I would have sold. If I'd bought at $10 and it went to $20, I would have sold. If I'd bought at $100 and it went to $150, I would have sold. The amount of discipline it would have taken to hold through all the rises and make an obscene amount of money is well beyond my risk profile.
But I get what you're saying.
Read the first "Alex Cross" book.
It's...not very good, but it's a pretty good example of Patterson's work. I read the first 3-4 books in the Alex Cross series, but gave up after finding no growth or improvement on the character or the author.
I think you'll find his popularity similar to what makes lots of other things popular. His books are rather bland, but not quite boring. He doesn't pack a lot of exposition between the action so the plot moves forward. Unfortunately this often makes the characters seem quite stupid as they rush to action rather than ponder the situation. I find this unrealistic and annoying, especially given Alex Cross's profession.
Obviously, I'm not a fan.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Windows or RDP.
I was just on a developer group call the other day where another developer from another organization was having weird scaling issues RDPing into the vendor's sandbox. The solution was to adjust some buried registry setting on the remote machine, not fiddle with the local machine. Unfortunately I paid little attention to the details as I rarely RDP and when I do I can tolerate display issues.
I realize this is super vague, but it was so fresh in my brain I had to respond. Maybe someone who actually knows something can provide actual details.
Hello there. That's eerily familiar. For me it was sports (although I was quite good at baseball and soccer) and Turbo Pascal. My parents, especially my Mom, put up a huge resistance to me programming. I had to promise to try out for the HS basketball team (easily my worst sport) to get a computer. I'd been cut the previous two years so of course I barely made the team that time.
My Mom was convinced I was sitting in the computer room playing games. When I told her: "No, I was programming", she asked what I was programming. Of course I told her I was writing a game, as all kids learning to program were. She responded: "See! Games!" as though she'd somehow proven her point.
But, like you, I've made my career from programming and it's treated me quite well for the most part.
Parenting is a tricky balancing act!
Indeed it is. Our rule of thumb is that you have to finish what you start, and generally give it two chances. This worked well for me as a child. I wanted to quit everything after the first go, but there were many activities that I loved after the second go, and a few I was happy to be done with (looking at you trombone).
1. Finishing what you start means honoring the promise you made--be it to the teacher/coach, the team, or someone else. Oftentimes other people are depending on you.
2. Giving the activity a second try accounts for the possibility that the problem wasn't with the activity so much as the environment.
To be clear, I only apply these rules for the kids wanting to quit, not the parents. If, as a parent, I observe unacceptable behavior by the coach/teacher, dangerous conditions, etc I will pull the plug. Thankfully that hasn't happened yet.
I had this happen with a fraudulent charge once. To be clear, I don't know that it was a recurring payment with Stripe, but the behavior was similar. It took me about three years and a half dozen new cards to finally kill it.
At one point I asked the customer rep if there was any way to rid myself of this nuisance other than completely closing my account. She responded with the normal "that's your decision, blah, blah, blah...", but I was legitimately asking, not threatening.
I think I said something like: "No, let me be clear: I don't want to close the account. I just don't want to deal with this every six months either. I'm seriously asking if this is the only other recourse because it seems we've tried everything else."
It did get resolved eventually. It was also for a trivial amount so nothing like what you're looking at. It was still very annoying though.
I don't know if there's comparable data, but I can tell you the mining companies in north west Australia would routinely run 300+ car trains without incident. But these were very much a straight line from the mine to the port without much civilization in between.
I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago.
There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:
- Wheel Impact Detectors
- Hotbox detectors
- Acoustic bearing detectors
- Truck performance detectors
To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember:
- Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature)
- Top of rail friction management
- Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters)
I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).
I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).
I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.
As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.
Exactly. I've had a bunch of different mortgages over the years. Plenty of them have been passed around, but I've never had to sweat the details. I just set up autopay and forget.
Yeah, I could not care less about what they do with the loan. I'm not looking for a relationship, just the best deal I can get. Full stop. Do people still think otherwise on loans?
All that said, our local CU does in fact keep their own mortgage portfolio. This may be rare, I don't know. They're a large CU associated with a government contractor.
When I bought my house they had the best deal (rate + closing costs) hands down. When I refinanced they were no longer offering 30yr loans on their portfolio (and I wasn't interested in 10/15), but still were originating them to sell. Unfortunately the 30yr rates were not as quite good as I could get elsewhere and closing costs were close to a wash so I went another direction.
Has anyone actually used Rocket? Every time I (or a friend) have looked at them they have higher closing costs and wanted multiple points to close the mortgage.
I was able to do way, way better by going with a local bank, as did my friends.
The only thing I can figure is they are better for folks with "good" (not "excellent") credit and can maybe close the loan faster.
>Learning syntax as a filter
Syntax is one of the most universal things about our psychology. The idea that some people have it and others don't seems a little absurd to me.
Sheesh. Care to put any more words in my mouth?
I said nothing about whether or not someone _could_ learn the syntax of a programming language. My comment was specifically about the difficulty of learning to program while also navigating arcane syntax rules (in the sense they're unfamiliar and rigid) that come with most programming languages.
If you want to write code you'll probably power through it. If you don't, you might decide it's just not worth the trouble.
This isn't a value judgement on the individual. I'm saying it's a pretty good indication if someone has the temperament for coding. If you're unwilling to understand syntax errors, how likely are you to debug your program?
It's also harder to learn to program when you keep running into syntax errors. I suspect that's a big part of the allure of these visual languages.
I don't know if that's good or bad--maybe a little of both. It seems like overcoming syntax errors is a pretty good first-pass filter for determining if one has the mettle for coding. On the hand, not everyone is a professional builder, but it doesn't hurt to know how to tighten a screw or swing a hammer.
This was one of my favorite books to read to both my children. Others have touched on all the reasons why so I'll throw out another couple books for any aspiring parents:
- The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton
- The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear by Don & Audrey Wood (or The Strawberry book as we called it)
I'm extremely fond of the Strawberry book. I don't think I'll ever not love it. It's such a fun story that slyly places the reader as a character in the story. It's just a little bit sneaky.
And, the illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. I would pay real money for a framed copy of the disguise scene. It makes me laugh to this day.
I've done exactly what you're saying I should not do and it worked out very well.
My point is that these hard and fast rules don't leave any room for nuance. Consider, as I mentioned in another comment, you don't have to exercise 100% of your options. Exercise whatever makes you comfortable. Maybe that's one under the number that would push you into AMT.
If zero is your comfort level, then so be it. But get to that conclusion by doing a little thought and evaluation, not applying an arbitrary rule.
There are lots of things I'm close to that I need to think objectively about. Maybe I don't hit your ideal of 100%, but I do my best. Investments is one area. The health and well being of my children is another. You can never have perfect objectivity. You do the best you can. GP's advice is too rigid and therefor not very good.
FWIW, I'm speaking from experience. Had I taken GP's advice and "never exercise unless it's early exercise" then I would have missed out on a lot of money.
The other thing to keep in mind is you don't have to exercise 100% of your vested options. If you're too nervous or don't trust your own judgement, maybe go for 10%, or whatever makes you comfortable. There's a lot of room between 0 and 100 here. Go ahead and explore it.
That's certainly not true. You should evaluate the investment just like any other investment and decide if you can afford to lose the money and stomach the risk.
Part of your evaluation should be consulting a tax professional to determine if there are any immediate, negative tax consequences. You're not guaranteed to get hit by AMT just because you exercise some stock options.
And Bill James did a lot of his Sabermetric writing while working night shifts as a security guard.[0]
He's not Einstein, but he was way ahead of his time in a particular area and it's fair to say he's been hugely influential in the baseball community for nearly 40 years.
Many of my dreams are weird and don't make sense in the cold light of day. So...
This. Even if you work in a small shop, SOC 2 Type II Security is starting to become table stakes for any kind of formal business arrangement. This means you have a formal Change Management process which includes peer review and peer testing.
If you push your code and ask forgiveness in this environment you're risking your company's SOC2 compliance. The auditors are not going to care about the business impact. Their priority is to make sure you're following the process you wrote.
At best you'll get an exception for that control. At worst you'll get a Qualified Opinion. I would not want to be the developer who violated controls and caused the auditors to render a Qualified Opinion. In that case the management response will likely indicate you've been sacked.
Peer review is a good thing. Mature organizations have been doing it forever. It was already endemic at my first real job in '98. We're finally seeing that discipline forced on the industry from the outside. By and large we haven't done a good enough job ourselves so now the AICPA is involved. Get used to it.
I've seen a couple mass layoffs. I survived one, but did not survive the next one a few years later.
This is very general advice and you need to correlate it with other events, but it's been a pretty strong indicator something was up: Keep an eye on your manager's priorities especially if they shift in a ways you can't explain.
One example from early in my career: Our manager abruptly became much less interested in product status and overall progress. To his credit he scheduled a call (we were a remote office) a couple weeks later in which he said the following: "Commit your code. Ignore all policies and procedures. Work at your own pace."
We suspected as much, but that call was the confirmation. Ironically, the organization was so large, and the layoffs so huge, they had to arrange financing just to complete the layoffs. This led to a one to two month period where we were employed, but had nothing to do. It was really weird. Generally we'd come to the office, play a bit of Half-Life, then adjourn to my friend's basement to work on the BattleBot we were building.
Video calls give me anxiety.
Often enough, the other party's camera is off to the side so they appear as though they're not engaged, even though they are.
I _know_ they're probably paying attention, but it's reminiscent of a face-to-face conversation where the other party is staring at their phone more than they're looking at me.
So even though I know they're engaged, my brain's circuitry keeps telling me they're not.
The Racer at KI originally ran forward on both sides, then switched to one forward, one backward in '82.
I have fond memories from the 80's and 90's riding both sides. There was always some good-natured trash talking between the two tracks as they headed out from the gate and up the first hill (think "Great Tasting" vs. "Less Filling" and corny stuff like that). They eventually turned away from each other, but came back together for the finish line.
Sadly they flipped it back to the original configuration a while ago.
One strategy I've used is to bake a raise into the negotiation. This raise should automatically kick in when the company reaches some measurable goal (MRR, ARR, MAU, whatever...not profit, not VC funding) or a certain amount of time has elapsed. The 'or' is important here as the time component should reflect your worst-case expectation for getting the raise.
There are a couple important things to keep in mind here:
1. You have to trust the other party to some extent. You have to be willing to believe they'll be up-front about the metrics and willing to execute the raise.
2. You have to be willing to work at the lower rate at least until your time component kicks in. Despite any growth projections, do not count on meeting the first criterion before the time component.
Let's use your situation as an example. You'd like to get to $35/hr, but you're willing to work at $30/hr. You've already anchored $40/hr so negotiating a follow-up raise to $35 should be doable.
Let's assume the company has 500k MAU. You might suggest a raise to $38/hr when the company reaches 1MM MAU or after six months of FTE.
If they're not willing to engage in this level of negotiation, that's fine. You've lost very little in terms of leverage and you can still take a more traditional approach.
If they are will to engage, then you have a few more knobs to turn in the negotiation process.
Of course the main risk is they'll renege on the contract, but that's always a risk (I'm assuming this is an at-will contract). You should be prepared for that. But, if they're an ethical employer and you do a good job, I bet they'll be willing to pay a bit more per hour to keep someone who now has a decent amount of domain knowledge and proven themselves to be competent and reliable.
As a sysadmin in the 90's it was considered malpractice to not have a copy of tomsrtbt[1] available at all times. The idea was, in a pinch, if you brick your internet gateway you'd have a chance of recovery by booting from tomsrtbt. It had just enough tools crammed onto the disk to fix configurations, fsck a disk, and rewrite the bootloader.
Hence my question. Per site guidelines I assumed the most generous interpretation of the poster's comment, which to me means they found those sites and do not consider them official. In that light, I was curious what they would consider official.
I prefer to take a hardware vendor's opinion as to whether that hardware is supported by Linux. They have some skin in the game, and have the resources to test the hardware, whereas many Linux distros will rely on user reports.
I imagine Ubuntu and Redhat have more resources to validate hardware and so those sites are likely more reliable, but once you get to niche distros YMMV on their compatibility matrices.