ykler

It sounds like a lot of the criticism is that employees don't get enough compensation or don't get it quickly enough. With options, the variance is too high, since even companies that raise a lot may fail, and liquidity takes a long time. Plus, if the shares are voting, founders have to give up some control. I guess the variance will always be higher than many employees would prefer (at least not considering schemes that share risk among multiple startups), but how about something like the following for mitigating the concerns people are raising?

The company commits that some percentage of each month's revenue will be immediately set aside for existing employees (to a first approximation, split equally between them). Crucially, any investment should be counted as revenue for this purpose, since early-stage startups often get major investment before major revenue. Ideally the percentage should be something big, like ten.

To encourage employees to stay, the revenue will be paid out to them over a period of years, similarly to how options take time to vest. A detail to be worked out is what to do with any money that isn't paid out because the employee leaves. (Maybe just return it to the company, though that could give companies an incentive to get rid of employees after a major funding.)

The company should be able to revise this commitment but not without a warning period of, say, half the period over which compensation is paid out to employees.

OK, sorry that I misunderstood you. But for what it's worth, lots of people with no connections have bootstrapped or gotten into incubators and then gotten funded or just hustled and got funded. For instance, just yesterday I talked to a woman with no connections or track record who got seed funding for her startup, but it took her over a year of "making friends with investors". Obviously it is a lot easier if you are well connected though.

What are the principal sources of excess overhead?

It sounds like you're complaining, but if it is really so easy, just become a founder. In a way, it is impossible for there to be an unfair distribution of wealth between people who do A and people who do B if everyone has the choice whether to do A or B.

I don't know if you can really put a p-value on this result without a more specific null hypothesis, but anyway it looks like this tournament result provides extremely weak evidence that Stockfish is better than Houdini. In the round robin component, Stockfish and Houdini played two games against each other, each winning one and losing one. In the "superfinal", they had 15 draws, Stockfish won 3 games, and Houdini won 2 games.

Obviously it is a problem that social security numbers are often accepted as proof of identity, but the article seems to be saying that permanent id numbers are bad even apart from this. I don't understand what the argument is though

Hard drives need a gas because the heads use it to float over the platter. And helium is hardly that rare that it is an issue; it is used in balloons for children.

Yes, or a full-featured programming language. Even though I don't really know or like Ruby, I still like that Vagrant uses it for config since it is at least possible to do complex things if you need to.

Wow, that is a shockingly steep dropoff! If you believe this chart, clojure will be extinct in another year. Could there be some other explanation than that clojure is really in a death spiral, like maybe Indeed has been growing faster in less developed markets or something?

I just glanced at this, and maybe I don't understand, but it sounds like psycopg2 namedtuples only work on one table at a time; is this right?

I don't want a full-fledged ORM, and I sort of like SQL, but just normalizing nested objects to put them in the database and then unnormalizing them on the way out is really annoying to do in raw SQL in my experience. Every time you want to store a new object in the database, it feels like so much effort to write a bunch of boilerplate functions. Or do you have a solution to this?

Yeah, if that is right about China, it is pretty damning. And sure, given how few data points there are, it is the kind of thesis that would be impossible to really definitively confirm.

"People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it." He is probably right. And yet, how tragic. Forty hours is not that long. Imagine that the telephone hadn't been invented. Would we still today be living in a society where people went to the telegraph office to send telegraphs but basically no one could telegraph themselves?