"Rest and vest": engineers who get paid and barely work - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-who-barely-work-silicon-valley-2017-7 <comment><USER2> There seems to be conflation in this article between two very different groups.

Group A is folks who are acquired and have outsized grants that say vest over N years (N between 2 and 4). It turns out the acquisition was probably a mistake, but the acquiring company made it (and won't own up to it). That's what's described in the Facebook and Microsoft examples. This is the classic "rest and vest" scenario (Note: an acquisition is not required, just any outsized grant).

Group B is "just" engineers at Google, Facebook, etc. getting paid really well for not doing much, while hanging out with the lavish perks. I've never heard of anyone refer to this as "rest and vest". In particular, I found this quote disturbing:

> There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to > work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won't work to get promoted, don't > want to get promoted.

At Google (and elsewhere), it's considered fine to reach a senior / terminal level and stay there. Is a VP or Director of Engineering lazy if they never move up? Of course not. The same is true of individual contributors.

Finally, the numbers mentioned for compensation are _normal_ for very senior engineers at Google (and again, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.). This isn't "rest and vest", it's just business as usual. I don't particularly agree with the folks who spend their days in classes, taking long lunches, etc. but if they get their work done, what do I care?

<comment><USER3> At Microsoft, we called a lot of these people in Group B, "volunteers". They were with the company through the glory years and had great wealth. They just wanted to come to work every day because they liked saying that they worked at MS. The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"

<comment><USER4> > The best response given when I asked one why they still worked, "Why would I > spend time at home? Have you met my wife and kids?"

I am not sure whether I should fear sorry for the kids or for the father. Having father that jokes about not liking you must sux.

<comment><USER5> I once interviewed with a team leader and two of his engineers. When I asked "What qualities characterize a valuable member of your team?", one of the engineers described how hard they work: they work so hard that the team leader cancelled dinner with his wife on their 10th anniversary so he could work late that night. The team leader was beaming with pride. I felt sorry for all of them and especially for that guy's family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not just SV that has this phenomenon. I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab from 1988 to 2000. I had risen to the rank of Senior Member of the Technical Staff, the second-highest rung on the technical career ladder. Beyond that there is the rank of Principal, which is very hard to attain. It's essentially the equivalent of getting tenure. It requires peer review. Most engineers never attain it, and I was not optimistic that I ever would. So in 2000 I decided my JPL career had peaked, and so I quit to go work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup in Mountain View. ;-)

To my surprise, when I announced my departure, a bunch of people suddenly came out of the woodwork to tell me that they really didn't want me to go, including a number of very senior managers. So I used that as leverage to negotiate a deal for myself: I would come back after a year on the condition that I be promoted to Principal. Which is what happened.

The problem was that my promotion did not in any way coincide with JPL's strategic needs for my skills. One of the reasons I had left was because I had been on the losing side of huge political fight ([http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html](http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl- lisp.html)) and when I returned I couldn't find a project that was willing to take me on. But they couldn't fire me because I was a Principal. So I basically spent the next three years getting paid for doing nothing, and getting pretty depressed about it. It's actually not fun to feel like a parasite, at least it wasn't for me.

<comment><USER7> From your linked blog post:

> The situation is particularly ironic because the argument that has been > advanced for discarding Lisp in favor of C++ (and now for Java) is that JPL > should use "industry best practice." The problem with this argument is > twofold: first, we're confusing best practice with standard practice. The > two are not the same. And second, we're assuming that best (or even > standard) practice is an invariant with respect to the task, that the best > way to write a word processor is also the best way to write a spacecacraft > control system. It isn't.

Well said. I think I'm going to have to hold onto this argument for a rainy day.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the kind words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can confirm.

But it's not a nefarious thing and the people aren't slackers: 90% of the people who end up in this position are ass-kickers who strive to have impact and get bored: most feel bad about slacking but their bodies and minds simply need a rest. They created BILLIONS in value and even providing tech support, they "pay for themselves" many times over -- that's why companies like Google keep them around.

Subtly: the kind of people who end up resting-and-vesting are precisely the kind of hyper-ambitious people who develop unique knowledge and skills.

<comment><USER9> And for a rich company, I suppose keeping them around stops their competitors from hiring them a while.

<comment><USER10> The article explicitly mentions this.

<comment><USER9> Yeah sorry. I've just realised how I'm subconsciously getting very picky about the domains the articles are on and whether or not I read them vs just reading the HN commentary instead (which is usually better). I don't know whether that reflects badly on me or modern journalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is very misleading. It's not uncommon for engineers who've been instrumental to a key product or development to be given a light duty afterwards. This is primarily because these folks bust their ass and quite literally are exhausted once their project ships. The time with light duty is meant to retain this key talent and give them back some work-life balance. Also if your thing lands and it's big enough you usually get promoted and they want you to focus on soft skill development, literally making friends, so you can go on to do something bigger. My last half, my manager told me that all he wanted me to do this half was make friends. This is because he was giving me space to find the next big thing. When you shift from task oriented work to bigger picture stuff, you can't just start building stuff thinking people will use it. You have to spend time talking to people about what problems they have and see if you can come up with a way to solve them. It's really not unlike a startup in that regard.

There's also the old joke of the mechanic that comes to fix the machine by knowing where to tap with a hammer. So having people around who know where to tap is key. They are well worth what they are getting because sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc... can't go down and if they do millions of dollars are burning for each minute those sites are down.

</comment><comment><USER12> I attended Caltech in the era that Feynman was a professor there. I heard he was paid XXX a year. I opined that was ridiculous, who could possibly be worth that much?

An upperclassman laughed and told me that Feynman was worth that much to the university even if he did nothing. Attaching his name to the university brought in donations, grants, and top talent.

Of course, Feynman being Feynman, worked like hell anyway.

<comment><USER13> What was the XXX figure? It'd be interesting to know.

<comment><USER14> Wikipedia claims that Feynman's first job after Los Alamos was at Cornell for $4,000 per year (~$54k/year inflation-adjusted). This claim is repeated in many sources, including the book "Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman".

That book also makes the claim that in the 1960s (perhaps as early as 1960 itself), Feynman's salary crossed $20,000/year and that he was the highest- paid member of the faculty. Inflation-adjusted, that is at most $165k/year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ok, thanks for sharing this. I made this observation for the last 3 years myself, not as an employee even, but as a contractor. I had three positions at two companies, all paying quite high (150k$/year). I changed the positions because the workload was so low that I had an hour of work a day, then pretending I was doing work for the rest of the day which I can't stand for more than a few months. Now I changed again in the hopes of having real work to do, comes out that they contracted me only for "if there will be work in a few months". Interviewing several people on what I can do for them: essentially nothing. "Maybe you could google if using docker would make sense". On the one hand this kind of "work" feeds my family and hives me lots of freedom, but on the other hand it leads to nothing. And I am usually not the only one who has no idea why they are going to work.

<comment><USER16> It's kind of an open secret, I think, that (at least in the US) there's not anywhere near an average of 8 hours of work a day per "full-time" employee. Probably closer to 3 by the time you average out the overloaded and the ones who are doing almost nothing.

<comment><USER17> For knowledge workers, there may be 3 hours of actual "doing stuff" time, but for me at least, I'm constantly thinking about work, even when I try not to. It just bleeds into my thoughts in the shower, at dinner, lying in bed, etc.

The way I see it to anyone who might question why I'm lying on a couch at work with headphones is that the hard part of my job happens in my head. The easy part is what I mash into the keyboard after I've spent hours finalizing my plan of attack in my head.

<comment><USER18> That. And if someone objects about paying me for browsing HN, I'll reply that they are not paying me for me solving their problems during evening shower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And they wonder why house prices in the bay area are so high. :-(

I started work at Sun Microsystems on the Monday after they had IPO'ed (the previous Friday). It was about a year later when all of the various restrictions on personal stock sales had been lifted that I clued in that some people just didn't care any more about work and it was quietly explained to my shocked ears that these people were now multi-millionaires and working was no longer 'for a living' it was 'for the fun of it.' Or not. And I asked why they didn't just leave and the answer was simple, because it gave them something to do and their friends all worked here. Further many of them had been given additional "refresher" options and the more the stock went up the more they were worth thousands a month in additional value down the road.

I was fascinated to see how the different people responded to that new found wealth and the options it brought with it. For the good ones, it empowers a sort of fearlessness to do the _right_ thing even if you boss doesn't think its the right thing. Or to advocate for an important point that might be politically inconvenient for the company. For some it affected their opinion of everyone else as if they were somehow so much "more" than folks who hadn't been there pre-IPO.

Fortunately most of the latter types left fairly quickly.

I could see how it could easily be the 'best' management choice to have someone like that not putting in too much face time at work. Bad managers control their reports by threatening to fire them, if you can't control them they are a threat to the bad manager, better to keep them far away from anything that could set them off.

That said, if you find yourself in this place the absolute worse thing you can do is to do nothing. Get healthy, learn something, use that 'free' time productively. It isn't like you can get it back later.

<comment><USER20> I had $30k in Sun stock at one time; lost it all.

<comment><USER19> A friend of mine worked too hard, his wife got fed up and divorced him. It was horrible, he had to sell of his Sun stock so that he his wife could have half. That was in the late 1990s. He has really mixed feelings about it.

I sold some of the stock I had gotten as part of the employee stock purchase plan to buy a brand new car for cash. It was the first time in my life I didn't have a car payment every month. That was in January of 1995. When I sold that car in 1999 to a used car dealer he asked what I paid for it, I told him $1.6M. That was what the stock would have been worth had I held it until 1999. Then I used the stock in a company that had acquired my startup to buy a replacement car, again for cash. When I sold that car in 2009 the equivalent value for the stock was just $280. A bargain!

The dot com days taught me the hard way _why_ you diversify. Sure you don't get the big returns like the ones you hear about where a person invested it all in one stock that went through the roof. But you also don't lose it all when the stock goes down either.

All things in moderation, and now when I have more money in a stock than I'd like to lose I sell half and put the proceeds into something unrelated to the stock I sold.

<comment><USER20> I think I bought it at $60/share and it went down to $3 after dot com bust, wiping out Roth IRA. Oh well, that was years ago in my 20's and I'm diversified so really just a lesson (not to buy tech stocks).

<comment><USER21> except tech has been the driver of growth since the last economic crisis.

<comment><USER20> Sure, but on average, everything is doing well since the last economic crises. There are dot-com tech stocks that never recovered. I'll only buy funds or dividend paying stocks, though mostly everything is in a 401k (which rode out the crashes quite well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Medina said he experienced the high-pay, no-work situation early in his career when he was a software engineer in grad school. He finished his project months early, and warned his company he would be leaving after graduation.

>They kept him on for the remaining months to train others on his software but didn't want him to start a new coding project. His job during those months involved hanging out at the office writing a little documentation and being available to answer questions, he recalls.

This isn't a good example. The company budgeted X dollars over Y months for a total comp package of Z for an engineer they knew had a discrete timeline, and the engineer finished in Y-3 months. What should the company do, fire the engineer and save delta-Z? The company got what it wanted and more by having him stick around and answer questions and do documentation work for 8-10 hours a week of "free" labor.

</comment><comment><USER23> So working 9-5 is "coasting"...? Fuck you. I've got kids.

<comment><USER24> I'm kind of amazed this response is this far down. How dare these people take advantage of the poor companies /s.

If you have a market position that allows this, especially one you created for yourself, I have no grudge against you. That narrative is entirely a construction of companies...just as 'welfare queens' is to try and argue against worker protections and rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's something corrosive to the soul about having no purpose in life.

I retired once. It lasted about 6 weeks, then I decided to create the D programming language. I plan to work until my mind no longer functions. I'm not interested in retiring.

<comment><USER25> It's true. I recently was terminated. Two days later, I was spending all my time on my side business, my programming language, and about four home- improvement projects that had been planned but never executed.

"I can't slow down, I can't hold back, though you know I wish I could; you know there ain't no rest for the wicked until we close our eyes for good."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I did the work-from-home (wfh) thing for about 5 years across two different jobs. The first job was the worst kind of wfh situation because there simply weren't any boundaries between work and home and day work bled into night into weekends.

The second was the other worst kind, paid very well to do almost nothing, and again day nothing bled into night nothing into weekend nothing. I tried to use it to study things or learn other topics, but every once in a while I'd be needed for a few days, go and put a fire out and be back home doing not much at all. The reason for the situation was a disastrous corporate management. However, the situation was so great in theory (get paid top-10 metro senior pay to do nothing at all) that I actually had a hard time changing jobs because I kept telling myself I actually enjoyed screwing around.

Given a binary choice of one or the other I'd actually choose the second job again, but I'd structure my days very differently and try to be much more productive. The good news is that life isn't binary, and I'm in a place now where I work most days in an office, but can wfh when I need to, and rigorously control my schedule so work and home-life don't intersect. I took a pay cut, but I love this current work much more than either of those two jobs (and my wife is much happier as well) -- lessons learned I guess.

<comment><USER27> >I'd structure my days very differently

What would your restructured day look like?

<comment><USER26> I think I would definitely put more effort into establishing clearer space/time boundaries between work and home. I live near a local library and might turn it into an office of sorts so that I have a place to go, people to interact with and so on.

I'd definitely put more effort into making sure I'd wake up, shower, and dress for work during work hours and then stop at the end of the work day.

Basically, better discipline, more delineation.

<comment><USER28> I used to go out in the morning to a local Starbucks and do email and planning tasks plus also get some social interaction. That worked really well for staring the day with a clear boundary.

At the end of the day I'd walk up to the train station (through a park) to meet my wife, so I'd have a clear boundary on both ends of my day. It worked really well while I lived there. Now I'm in a small town and it's a bit harder to do something similar.

<comment><USER29> That's great advice, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The article lumps few different scenarios under the sensationalist "look, ppl are making shit ton of $$$ and are barely working!!!" umbrella.

None of the scenarios are unique to SV or even IT world in general, the only "shock factor" is the compensation figures.

But again, most of the scenarios are pretty typical to corporate environments. Unless you're on some "kick ass all-star" team, once you start growing you can cruise if you choose to.

What struck me as odd is the "Just don't talk about it and everyone will assume you're on someone else's team" bit. Can't really picture an environment where a person doesn't show up the next day and everyone just "assumes" they are on a different team now...

</comment><comment><USER31> One of the interesting trends of the past 10 years is the degree to which "big tech" has replaced "big finance" as the place for the elite to go to collect huge paychecks for relatively "nice" white collar work.

It makes total sense for top SV engineers to get paid well, IMO. But I am afraid working for these big tech firms is starting to have that feeling of "elite pedigree" that pervades complacent industries, like finance.

In 2002-2006, one could have written a similar article, but about top staff at Goldman, Morgan, UBS, etc. There were plenty of $300k-$500k salaries being paid for maintenance work for profitable business lines.

Options and RSUs are an interesting twist in Silicon Valley. To compete with the stock option packages given out by startups to early employees, Google and Facebook grant RSUs (and similar) instead. In Wall Street, the "golden handcuffs" used to be a near-guarantee of a year-on-year raise, an end-of-year cash bonus, and a track toward promotions that had built-in pay increases. No one wanted to throw away their time invested in a single firm. SV firms are different in that turnover is high, so vesting acts to counteract that. They have such fast-growing stock values, the stock grants can also be used in lieu of bonuses. Plus, to management, it really is "funny money" that does not actually increase operating expense.

Anyway, though the mechanics are different, it seems the net result is the same. "Golden handcuffs" are as real in tech as they are in finance.

The saddest reflection I have on reading this article is on how capitalism seems to value different professions wrongly.

These salaries are bigger than top specialist physician salaries. And physicians need 12-17 years of post-undergrad training, as well as often requiring $200k of medical school student loan debt.

It just seems like if Google and Facebook can afford to pay this price for engineers (who add leveraged value via their software contributions), capitalism should figure out how to pay doctors more, as well.

And go down the list of other "non-BS, but comparatively underpaid" professions like teachers, firefighters, etc. They could all use a compensation upgrade.

But what is the exact mechanism that is making it so finance and tech are among the only fields where labor compensation is commensurate with leveraged value-add?

<comment><USER32> I had a similar thought. I'd say that tech has been firmly in the "masters of the universe" phase for a while now and while I don't think the end of it will be the same as in finance (the nature of the businesses are completely different, there's no systemic risk), I think tech's comeuppance will be anti- trust. It's already happening in the EU, and in the US Democrats are making that a big part of their platform [1]. The election of Trump has revealed the shift towards populism in American politics, and I think Democrats see anti- trust as good politics to capitalize on it. Personally I think it's smart both from a political and policy perspective. Tech seems to tend toward monopoly, and anti-trust is critical to combating that. It's also a perfectly good and necessary counterbalance in capitalism.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/7/31/16021844/a...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/7/31/16021844/antitrust-better-deal)

<comment><USER33> The competition is a click away and has very low barriers to entry. Facebook might have network effects, but Google doesn't. If someone made a better search engine, people would switch. What evidence that Google's search monopoly is anti-consumer is there?

<comment><USER34> Google has such a vast amount of data on users that its search really can't be beat right now. If you're fully in the ecosystem with mail, maps, contacts, calendar, smartphone, apps, etc. you're going to get better results -- not to mention switching could mean giving up these integrated products.

<comment><USER33> So if we break up Google, this harms consumers by stopping the integration.

<comment><USER35> No, it's more likely that either breaking up Google, or heavily regulating Google into playing fair would lead to integrations that worked between services. Why be locked in, if those integrated data features could work between the best services from different companies?

We need to stop letting Google protect it's poor quality products by bundling them with their good ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I know the rest and vest type. It can be demoralizing for others to know that some in the company aren't pulling their weight, because they got lucky in the past with stock offers.

It's one of the many reasons I like Netflix. We allow engineers to be paid almost entirely in cash. No one is resting and vesting that I know of -- not only because we wouldn't tolerate unmotivated people -- but because there's no vesting schedule that I know of. AFAIK, you can leave any time with everything. If you want to leave, then leave. We'd rather hold onto people that actually want to stay and get stuff done, and be self motivated.

</comment><comment><USER37> These engineers are worth more to them just sitting around relaxing, being content with their lives instead of taking a high octane job at a competitor or startup that will eventually compete with one of their smaller services (mail, ad analytics, etc).

<comment><USER38> True. The issue then becomes: what could they be doing for society? This takes more ingenuity and leadership.

<comment><USER37> Yeah...then again a lot of brilliant software engineers get to a point in their career where they realize how hard they've been working. Then they start to focus on other parts of their life with ample time and money they never had before. It's not a terrible thing by any means.

Some people willfully choose to turn their focus towards their personal lives, raising their kids, etc while still being paid a lot of money in a cushy job where they are respected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > There are a lot 'coasters' who reached a certain level and don't want to > work any harder. They just do a 9-5 job, won't work to get promoted, don't > want to get promoted.

Finally someone who understands how being an employee works. You are paid to be present ~ 40 hours a week, as stated in your contract.

Working twice as hard and killing your week end has no point and you won't get promoted. Don't bother.

<comment><USER40> The gist of my last performance review was my manager saying "I don't really know what you do most of the time, but things rarely are broken and everything seems to be going okay." (That was a positive review.) That made me realize killing myself is pointless, it wouldn't even get noticed anyway. No one would care. A lot of these companies imagine themselves to be so much better-run than the reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would argue that the vast majority of software engineers in the US are actually overworked and make close to middle-class wages. It's really unfortunate seeing articles like this, because it reinforces everyone outside of tech's stereotypes that us engineers are lazy, overpaid slobs.

<comment><USER42> I agree. I've worked with people who actually put in 8 hours of work a day on a regular basis, and it had a huge impact on my desire to get things done. Also, working with Germans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > "Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior > engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to > kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles > of their own jobs," one engineer described.

Is this really prevalent at Google?

edit:quotes

<comment><USER44> My experience is that it isn't, because of the performance review process. If someone could "optimize" their evaluation-- including peer evaluation, evaluation from other teams, stack ranking, etc-- then I guess they could work less. But I really don't see how they could do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of the common saying,

"The hardest thing about working at Google was the job interview to get the job in the first place."

</comment><comment><USER46> Yes, but the Wall Street CEO's are sooooo hard working. Give me a break. I once worked for a company whose CEO completely ran the thing into the ground and eventually got fired but got paid millions anyhow. I jokingly said I could have ruined the company for half what they paid that meathead.

I think the real scandal is the ridiculous amounts of money CEO's get paid for doing nothing in a lot of cases. The money these "high paid engineers" are getting is peanuts compared to the sums these CEO's are getting.

Sorry for the rant, but it just stuck in my craw a little.

<comment><USER47> Someone once said that your boss isn't paid more because he's better/works harder, but because only 1 of the row below can be promoted to boss, so they have to make the pay amazing, so everyone below works really hard for the company to try and get promoted.

<comment><USER48> There was a study I read some time ago that essentially said the inflation of CEO salaries is because the boards who control the compensation of CEOs is just one big Old Boy Network. They all know each other, are wannabe or ex CEOs, so they end up "taking care" of each other.

I don't remember the exact details or whether the study was scientifically solid or just someone spitballing stuff, so who knows.

Personally I find the golden handshake deals completely reprehensible, and more or less a criminal misuse of shareholders' money, especially if the CEO leaves/gets fired because the company is going down the drain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, at my current position I am certainly resting, but not vesting, so I'm torn about what to do. On one hand, I have lots of time to do my own projects, but instead I've been very lazy and mostly read HN :/ and on the other hand, I am at the low end of the pay spectrum for my experience. I'd rather be paid more, but I don't want to have to work harder for it than I am now.

Wow, I am silly.

Edit: I mean that the company has not IPO'd and I don't own any stock/equity as a remote contractor.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've posted before that I suspect this is the trouble with a lot of Google services that don't always seem to get the love they deserve. People who are well on their way to vesting just aren't hungry anymore, and can't be bothered to care. Not limited to Google of course.

</comment><comment><USER50> I wonder how much of this is due to non-voting shares being sold to the public that prevent an activist investor from being able to push the board to trim the fat?

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder what kind of work they do that makes them so unique and indispensable. I also heard stories about engineers who did not share how their code worked, so that the company would not risk firing them.

<comment> m-j-fox I've wondered this about CEOs. For the price of one Jamie Diamond you could hire the entire graduating class of Harvard Business School. Surely, between them, they could perform his duties, no?

<comment><USER52> Think you mean Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan) and my opinion is that they can't. They would likely lack the real-world experience to take highly important decisions under pressure. At that level it's not all science, knowing the right people and people skills in general are very important. His public appearances are quite good also, a very good speaker.

<comment> m-j-fox Blame autocorrect. But you get my point: doesn't have to be the HBS class; could be the HBS professors; or 100 bankers with 20-years experience each. Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on their services.

<comment><USER52> Sorry, didn't mean to be a grammar-nazi. I think their job means much more than meets the eye. The guy is directly lobby-ing the US president, and highly ranked officials around the world. Mistakes at that level cost quite a lot. It might be the case that some professors can be up for the job, but would anyone take a chance?

> Point being, there's got to be a better explanation for CEO pay than ROI on > their services. I'm not sure there is a better explanation for it for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> All's good when the stock price is inflated. The reckoning (cost cutting) will come.

<comment><USER54> Which is inevitable. They better saved enough money before the company wiped them out for its own existential crisis, because by then, it is hard to imagine how could they return to this ridiculous lifestyle once again.

<comment><USER55> They've got cash reserves of like 100 billion...

<comment><USER54> Tell that to Microsoft, and how many people they are still planned to layoff on the way. Company is going to survive, even continue to prosper, but they will trim the fat and relaunch itself someday in the future as all the companies do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> > she had been killing herself to make it more successful and protect her > people from losing their jobs over it.

> As tired as she was, she couldn't just quit this job. She owed a big chunk > of money in taxes thanks to that stock and needed her salary to pay those > taxes.

> after getting violently ill at the thought of going to work

Burned out and trapped by debt. Not a great place to be even with the $1mm/year compensation. Most of which is illiquid I assume.

<comment><USER50> Google/FB stock is in no way illiquid.

<comment><USER6> It can be if it's part of the compensation in an acquisition deal.

<comment><USER57> How?

<comment><USER6> Because it can be subject to a vesting schedule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Google is sounding more like IBM every year.

<comment><USER59> Did IBM pay well back in the day?

<comment><USER60> There are more important things than money to attract talented researchers. The cafeteria at IBM Research - Almaden [1] offered an "IBM Burger" [2]. (I had one, and they were delicious! A big hulking mainframe of a hamburger.) When Sun found out about that, they had their own cafeteria offer a "Sun Burger", in the hopes of attracting better qualified researchers. Cargo cult corporate research menu design at its best!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_- _Almaden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Research_-_Almaden)

[2] [http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/](http://kiranh.blogspot.nl/2006/02/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I was at a startup (which pay high salary) and for 6 month I don't have work. I thought its a red flag and I decided to leave. 4 month after that the startup closed down the office because it did not get further funding.

So yes salary was good, benefits where good, there was no work, but "there is no free lunch".

</comment><comment><USER62> Legendary slacker story: [http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource- job-chin...](http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/17/business/us-outsource-job- china/index.html)

Don't work hard, work smart :)

</comment><comment><USER63> Is it unethical to keep a chair warm when my boss didn't give me new tasks to do?

For other areas of life (immigration), I need to get more years of continuous relevant work experience.

I come to an office every day, but my boss just doesn't have enough to keep me busy. My job title is "Project Engineer", which is vague enough to cover everything from DLL debugging to Node.JS programming to network monitoring to evaluating Advanced Planning systems. The latest task is to do some online course in machine learning, even though he didn't specify how the company will need it.

On bad days, I feel useless. But I reconcile the situation to myself by saying it's basically a "basic income" (the salary is not high; the minimum that people on my visa can have). I could think about changing after I have the years of work experience, but years just come with patience, not with productivity. I feel like my situation isn't "fair" because my friends are so much more stressed, but I need the years, not the results.

I also do a lot of side projects and post them online (e.g. learning Chinese - [http://pingtype.github.io](http://pingtype.github.io) ), but my contract and visa specifically state that I can't have any other paid work. So all my projects must be free and open source.

If another rest-and-vest person wants to comfort their conscience, I suggest reading more about Basic Income theories.

</comment><comment><USER64> I've seen a different kind of behavior. It consists of taking a project that could be done in six months and stretching it over two to five years. And, yes, it looks pathetic and absolutely ridiculous when viewed with the eyes of a "get shit done every day" entrepreneur, yet it seems that in some of these environments this can become acceptable behavior in some strange-as-fuck way. I think it's soul-sucking depressing.

</comment><comment><USER65> This happened to me once. I ended up coding my own personal projects at the "host" company to pass the time. Otherwise, I would have gone nuts.

<comment><USER63> That's what I'm doing now. It's ok, but it's against my contract to get paid for those projects. So I have to give everything away for free, open-source!

Sounds great, but that also means my marketing budget is zero. I can't find users. I've put in all this effort, but nobody knows about it, and it feels all like a waste of time. But you know, I still get paid ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> > _" They are really good engineers, really indispensable. And then they start > to pull 9-5 days"_

Worthless slackers.

<comment><USER67> That quote is super cringe worthy.

The article is very unclear, they also quote:

>"Most of my friends at Google work four hours a day. They are senior engineers and don't work hard. They know the Google system, know when to kick into gear. They are engineers, so they optimized the performance cycles of their own jobs," one engineer described.

Probably a lot of cherry picking going on.

<comment><USER68> They're not really contradictory. A 9 to 5 day can easily turn into 4 hours of real work. Show up, eat breakfast, spend some time reading HN, an hour of work, lunch, an hour or two working, grab coffee, play some foosball, another hour of work, go to the gym, time to go home!

<comment><USER69> Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard, sustainable technical work in them per day, and that's assuming a regular schedule, adequate sleep, good nutrition, no major emotional upsets going on... Now, that is _work_. No checking Facebook. No checking email. Process optimized so there are no long periods of waiting around.

I have had periods when my day was six hours: five hours of hard work and an hour of eating lunch at my desk while I chatted with someone, dealt with email, got tomorrow planned, and other overhead. It remains my most effective schedule when I'm doing straight technical work as opposed to people work. That hasn't stopped bosses from wanting me to sit around the office for a couple more hours so other people, who did take regular Facebook breaks and the like, didn't feel like I was a part timer.

<comment><USER70> >Conversely, most engineers only have three to five hours of really hard, sustainable technical work in them per day,

What makes you say that?

<comment><USER69> Measuring myself for a decade and a half, and some data from colleagues measuring themselves on my suggestion, and watching youngsters that I was mentoring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> So...the age old concept of "Fuck You" Money?

This is more an indictment of the work hours/pressure on average engineer.

</comment><comment><USER72> I think this happens to EVERY companies out there. The higher up you go, there are just less to do since all you are doing is delegating your jobs.

It becomes a problem though when problems do arise and you coasted for so long that you have no idea what is going on and where.

</comment><comment><USER73> I notice ther was no mention of amazon, but that is a large tech company with 10s of thousands of engineers. Anyone have an amzn rest and vest story?

<comment><USER74> I think that's culturally impossible. Amazon's a bit of a snake-pit and there's no way such behavior could exist in that environment: it'd be painting a giant target on your back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> So what exactly does indispensable engineer mean? How many people making more than 1M a year are at each of these companies?

<comment><USER76> And can they use one more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I think it's not only engineers. I know several people who are either corporate lawyers or other long-time managers who pretty much go to meetings the whole day because they have nothing real to do. They all are pulling good money but feeling like they are not doing much seems to take a psychological toll.

</comment><comment><USER78> What strikes me about this as someone working outside all this, is how ridiculously profitable advertising is!. Its kind of weird that it is so much more profitable to show people pictures of things they could spend their money on, than actually taking their money.

</comment><comment><USER79> Well, this highly connotates with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14945045)

</comment><comment><USER80> Sad to see tech giants not recapturing carbon with their unlimited money.

</comment><comment><USER81> Aren't companies like McKinsey more efficient?

They have the rule that you either get better and a promotion or you will be fired.

So they only keep people that improve every year or they get new people.

<comment><USER82> No. The partner model is different. Tech companies are keeping talent on the bench. McKinsey and co turn over hardworking younglins.

<comment><USER81> Different from what I said?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Why are programmers called engineers these days? An engineer has an engineering degree and does something completely different than computer programming.

<comment><USER84> Having interacted with various P.E.'s and been mostly disappointed with their work (seriously these guys are worse than architects as far as having creativity pointed only toward fuck-ups that the client would never want), I wonder why programmers/coders/whatevers even _want_ to engage in this pretense. Why not call ourselves "code lawyers"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Where do I sign up for that job?

</comment><comment><USER32> This is probably why Apple, a hardware company, has operating margins that are higher than Google and Microsoft (even though their gross margins are almost half of Google's and Microsoft's).

The only person I can think of that might have this arrangement at Apple is Scott Forstall. I think that's why he's been radio silent until very recently (or he could just be very loyal to Apple). Maybe Katie Cotton when they changed their approach to PR from wartime to peacetime, but that could just be a regular retirement.

I mostly don't understand how Google and Microsoft employ so many people, or what they even do.

>"I've actually had a number of people, including today at Google X, ... send me pictures of themselves on a roof, kicking back doing nothing, with the hashtag 'unassigned' or 'rest and vest.' It's something that really happens, and apparently, somewhat often," the actor Brener told Business Insider's Melia Robinson last year.

Called it a year ago [1]:

>I've speculated for a long time that basically anything interesting Google says they're doing is essentially meant to be a jobs program to keep employees from leaving, PR for external stakeholders like investors, media, being attractive to potential employees, etc. They seem to have lots of formal ways to keep employees from leaving/close as well including investments off of Google's balance sheet (not GV or Google Capital) into ex-employee startups and just flat out paying people not to leave (which is the arrangement I'm guessing that Matt Cutts is under). It all seems very Microsoft of old. Can anyone at Google (or ex-employees) tell me if this is true?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410662)

<comment><USER86> A friend of a friend at Apple seemed to have a very long leash. He was involved in the original iPhone, but afterward he kind of bounced around, spent time in Japan, "worked" at home, did a lot of other projects. He and Apple eventually parted ways, but I'm not sure he was fired, and at any rate it was after years of this kind of behavior.

<comment><USER32> I find this hard to believe given what I know about Apple's corporate culture. If your characterization of his employment is true, I don't believe it's common.

I think the closest that might come to this is Bob Mansfield. He returned after his retirement shortly after Scott Forstall left and eventually gave up his executive role, but even then he continued to work on "special projects", which turned out to be the Apple Watch [1] and now the Apple Car [2].

[1] [https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions- apple-...](https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/disruptions-apple-is- said-to-be-developing-a-curved-glass-smart-watch/)

[2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to- ove...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-taps-bob-mansfield-to-oversee-car- project-1469458580)

<comment><USER86> Apple's a big company with a lot of business units that are pretty hermetically sealed from each other. Various different people I've met who work at Apple have had very different experiences there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Or, as a recently bought out/retired colleague remarked, "My job now consists of being home all day and trying not to piss off my wife" \- a much harder endeavor than any engineering project I can think of.

<comment><USER88> Sounds like love and respect are long gone from that "relationship".

<comment><USER89> Hard to say. It could be a million things. Some people are just hard to get along with. Some people are great fun for 1 hour a day, but miserable if you're around them all day. If you've devoted your life to your career, it's no surprise that you won't have anything in common with your wife & children, which makes things harder.

They may love & respect each other, but not find each other's company enjoyable.

<comment><USER88> I've known and talked with enough people to know that you are very likely right -- that still doesn't stop me from thinking "how the hell can love and respect exist in such conditions?"

People are extremely diverse indeed. I've known such couples and couldn't for the life of me ever imagine me being in such a relationship. But they are out there.

<comment><USER39> Are you really surprised that people can't get along when they re stuck together 24/7 all days?

That's what happens when they retire.

<comment><USER90> My wife and I recently took a trip together involving hours of driving throughout western Europe. We were glad to find we enjoyed just being together, even at the end of the trip.

I think it's important to keep building that relationship (courting) throughout the working years, not just to avoid hitting retirement and thinking, "What am I going to do with this person for the rest of my life?" but also just to enjoy all the years along the way!

You wanted to be together enough to get married - isn't it worth investing time and effort to keep enhancing that, rather than just letting it wither?

<comment><USER91> "We were glad to find we enjoyed just being together"

Currently. Feelings towards people change constantly. They can hit extreme levels on either side at any moment.

<comment><USER90> Yes, but we are 20+ years in, and excited to continue...

Seems like a house - if you don't do maintenance, it gradually deteriorates until it becomes unlivable, but with continual maintenance and improvements, it can last forever...

<comment><USER91> Sometimes. And sometimes it's better to walk away from the mortgage and file for bankruptcy. Unfortunately, there's no way to predict which choice is right. I think "The Money Pit" has some solid guidance here but I haven't watched it in many years.

<comment><USER88> You are right. We can never truly know from the start, especially having in mind that we grow and change all the time as well.

I've had a failed relationship which lasted 8 years and I know the struggle and the bitterness.

I have however confirmed the old cliche that love can bloom any time at any place as long as one is with an open mind and open heart and doesn't hold grudges to the world at large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> This actually dates back decades. DEC invented "no output division": a team comprised of senior but bored people who would be unfashionable and dangerous to kick out. You give them some bullshit bling project and segregate them well from people who are actually doing meaningful work so that they don't get in the way. It's better if they do something meaningless for you than something meaningful for a competitor.

<comment><USER93> These also exist at Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> "It's a defensive measure."

"That's Microsoft Research's whole model."

?

</comment><comment><USER95> It pains me that the article speaks obviously of a female manager. But then often the writer unwillingly mixes it up, and makes her a male. It smells a bit like gender bias.</comment>


Show HN: A free video call app for the web - <AUTHOR> https://talk.vasanthv.com <comment><USER2> The website immediately asks for access to my camera and microphone. When I decline it shows an error and black screen. I think it should display some help, anything, what the website/app is about without asking for camera access.</comment>


Announcing .NET Core 3.0 Preview 8 - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-core-3-0-preview-8/ <comment><USER2> Checking the .NET Core Libraries Source Code by the PVS-Studio Static Analyzer - [https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0656/](https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0656/)</comment>


Ask PG: Why is your website with a constrained width but not HN? - <AUTHOR>

Your website http://paulgraham.com/articles.html , being constrained in width, is a firm acceptance of the typography rules that advocate containing the width of text lines strongly. So why is HN almost full-width, where the uppermost comments have the most width and get almost hard to read? <comment><USER2> Would be nice if the comments were posted in inline-blocks with a set width. So they could cascade while still retaining their width...</comment>


Software Multiplexing: Share Your Libraries and Statically Link Them Too [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3276524 <comment><USER2> TL;DR: This statically links multiple programs and their common shared libraries into one program, replacing main() with a function that calls the right entry point based on the name of the executable. With this, you can essentially create a busybox-like from the sources of coreutils.

The speed advantage compared to static linking is not due to magic, but to the fact their tooling does LTO.

It's all based on LLVM IR, so this not something that takes programs and shared libraries, and links them all with some tricks. It builds from source (AIUI from skimming).

<comment><USER3> This is not exactly a new idea.

In 1994 we added crunchgen(1) to FreeBSD which does the exact same thing for use on install and "Fixit" floppies.

I wrote the first prototype as a mess of shell-commands, and James da Silva from Maryland Uni turned that into a really neat tool, which to this day creates the "magic rescue binary" on FreeBSD systems:

        critter phk> ls -li /rescue/* | head
        2086658 -r-xr-xr-x  146 root  wheel  12245968 Dec  6 12:34 /rescue/[
        2086658 -r-xr-xr-x  146 root  wheel  12245968 Dec  6 12:34 /rescue/bectl
        2086658 -r-xr-xr-x  146 root  wheel  12245968 Dec  6 12:34 /rescue/bsdlabel
        2086658 -r-xr-xr-x  146 root  wheel  12245968 Dec  6 12:34 /rescue/bunzip2
        2086658 -r-xr-xr-x  146 root  wheel  12245968 Dec  6 12:34 /rescue/bzcat
        2086658 -r-xr-xr-x  146 root  wheel  12245968 Dec  6 12:34 /rescue/bzip2
        [...]

<comment><USER4> Sorry for the delayed reply. We did find crunchgen well after the final version of the paper was turned in, so we weren't able to compare with it.

One key part of allmux does replicate what you did in crunchgen: combine multiple binaries into one, and dispatching on argv[0]. There are also some important differences (and I wish we had known about the tool in time to discusss these in the paper):

\-- crunchgen works on binary code, whereas allmux works on compiler IR (LLVM). Compiler IR enables much more sophisticated compiler optimizations to be applied to the mux'ed (or crunched) program. For example, we are able to apply link-time optimizations (LTO) across the application-library boundary for both static and dynamic libraries. In fact, we're able to get more than 45% code size reductions even for a _single_ application and its libraries using LTO (e.g., see the top chart in Fig. 9 – Single Programs).

\-- Judging from the man page online, crunchgen works by parsing Makefiles to understand dependences and by using the DSL to specify libs, libs.so, etc. allmux works by adding passes to the compiler (Clang) and relying on the build process to invoke clang for all compile/link steps for all relevant components. This does limit allmux to needing source.

\-- crunchgen does not change the behavior of shared libraries, judging by the man page at least. In contrast, allmux also includes shared libraries (linking them in statically in the mix'ed binary) and deduplicates them across applications. This has two benefits: (1) It speeds up program startup, which can be a valuable win in some scenarios, e.g., using a Mux'ed compiler to build a large system with 1000s of source files (see Fig. 1). (2) It achieves large disk and memory reductions compared with static linking, and even some reductions compared with dynamically shared libraries because of the added benefits of LTO (note that LTO is essentially not applicable to dynamically loaded libraries). The combination of _BOTH_ memory reductions and speed improvements compared with either static or dynamic linking is a key benefit of allmux that the crunchgen approach doesn't aim to get. Of course, this is limited to predetermined sets of applications and libraries.

Thanks very much for the note, and responses / comments welcome.

\--Vikram (on behalf of the authors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The better approach is to do only dynamic linking with dependency isolation (side-by-side multiple versions/configurations of a library that don't conflict with itself. no more RPM upgrade dependency hell.), package managed as idempotent transactions (preferably pre and post snapshotted with something like zfs or btrfs), garbage collected (dependency tracked) library packages like how habitat or nix does it: every unique, no duplicates library installed in its own unique directory. This means no duplicates, no missing dependencies, no breaking dependencies, no duplication of static and dynamic code hacky toolchain kludges. It works with existing systems instead of redoing things, adding more complexity instead of making it more organized.

tl;dr: Habitat (hab) is really neat. From the opscode folks.</comment>


EFI Boot Application in C# - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp/blob/master/efi-no-runtime/README.md <comment><USER2> This is pretty wild. I hadn't realized that there were easy ways to work with EFI in higher-level languages than C.

Other languages:

Rust: [https://medium.com/@gil0mendes/an-efi-app-a-bit- rusty-82c36b...](https://medium.com/@gil0mendes/an-efi-app-a-bit- rusty-82c36b745f49)

Wasn't able to find an example for Go, but seems likely it's out there.

<comment><USER3> C# is higher-level in aggregate, but if you look at individual features, it lets you go as low as C in most respects - raw pointers with arithmetic, unions, stack allocations, you name it. It seems that this EFI project uses it at that level, and higher-level features that would require e.g. GC aren't supported.

<comment><USER4> This is one of the benefits of C# that makes it approachable to beginners.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't say pointers and unsafe code are features that makes it approachable to beginners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I genuinely had no idea that you could produce bare object files with ilc. This is so exciting to me, as compiler work has ended up being the majority of the work that goes into pure-managed OSes. Guess I know what I'm going to do when I actually have some free time, down the road!

<comment><USER7> EFI is actually itself already much of an OS (it's certainly bigger than DOS, for example), and the executables are PE format just like Windows application binaries, so this isn't quite as low-level as it may sound at first.

<comment><USER8> EFI just means you don't have to deal with the arcane x86 boot process. If you want to do anything kernel-like then you are still pretty much on your own, you're still gonna need a memory manager, process scheduler, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have started pure pointers algorithms and data structures library half year ago. Got hit by lack of generics of pointers and unmanaged generics. These seems fixed in preview of f# and c#. There are many other improvements to have non GC runtime going and considerrd in C# and F# code and other movements into Rust like features. So it may be reasonable to write low level code in c# within 2 versions I guess. F# even better as it has templates(c++ like generics) and other non oop compositional stuff. Given this tendency I stopped to try to learn Rust.

<comment><USER10> Pretty sure F# allocates like nobody's business

<comment><USER11> By default yes, but that's the price of using immutable objects and datastructures.

However, you can cut pretty much all of those allocations with a bit of care and still retain some F# niceties.

I recently wrote a very low allocation text file parser that could ingest log files at over 200MB/s single threaded. All in F# using structs and Span the same way I would in C#.

Except I get the safety, terse syntax and rigor of options, records and matches

<comment><USER10> That's pretty cool. I wish some of the foundational f# libs and webserver were written that way. They probably use more idiomatic code which means application code pays those costs too.

<comment><USER11> For years, a lot of pain was caused by F# using classes for critical types such as Option, Tuple and Choice. Additionally most records should have been structs by default.

They have started fixing this by introducing value tuple, value option and supporting C# performance primitives like Span. But they have a way to go still.

<comment><USER10> Ah, that summary is helpful, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I understand correctly, that uses this:

[https://github.com/dotnet/corert](https://github.com/dotnet/corert)

Written about here:

[https://mattwarren.org/2018/06/07/CoreRT-.NET-Runtime-for- AO...](https://mattwarren.org/2018/06/07/CoreRT-.NET-Runtime-for-AOT/)

"One of the first things people asked about CoreRT is "what is the size of a 'Hello World' app" and the answer is ~3.93 MB (if you compile in Release mode), but there is work being done to reduce this."

..

"So Test.CoreLib really is a minimal runtime!! But the difference in size is dramatic, it shrinks down to 0.49 MB compared to 3.93 MB for the fully- featured runtime!"

<comment><USER13> What is new compared to this post is even Runtime.Base is optional. You can get Hello World down to 5k by implementing a even more stripped down core library:

[https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp/blob/master/no...](https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp/blob/master/no- runtime/zerosharp.cs)

<comment><USER12> Thanks. One level above your link is I think the best explanation:

[https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp](https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp)

" _no-runtime_ is a rather pointless sample that demonstrates how to write code in C# that is directly runnable without a runtime. C# has value types and you can p/invoke into an unmanaged memory allocator, so you can do things with this, but you're so severily limited it's rather pointless. But Hello world ends up being about 4-5 kB native EXE, so that's rather cool.

 _with-runtime_ is something that can be actually useful. This includes the full managed and unmanaged runtime - GC, exception handling, and interface dispatch all work. Test.CoreLib used as the class library here is the same Test.CoreLib that you can find in the CoreRT repo. Don't look for things like Object.ToString() because being compatible with .NET is not the point. This sample comes down to about 400 kB, most of which is the C runtime library.

 _efi-no-runtime_ is an EFI boot application that lets you run C# on bare metal, without an OS. Similar restrictions to the no-runtime sample apply. Making a version of this sample with a runtime would require some porting work on the runtime side."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Importantly there's a limitation, which is that the CoreRT runtime doesn't support EFI directly so you won't be able to use most of what you're familiar with when it comes to .NET. But AOT compilation for .NET is maturing and can be used today for other exciting targets like WebAssembly. Perhaps EFI one day in the future.

</comment><comment><USER7> I hope this is just a "for fun"/"to see if it can be done" type of thing, because otherwise it is more than a little disturbing when the source code in a high-level language takes _more_ lines of code than doing the same thing in pure Asm:

[https://gist.github.com/yackx/a52010a05a430496ae11](https://gist.github.com/yackx/a52010a05a430496ae11)

[https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp/blob/master/ef...](https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/zerosharp/blob/master/efi- no-runtime/zerosharp.cs)

(The Asm above was for good old BIOS, here's the EFI version: [http://x86asm.net/articles/uefi-programming-first- steps/hell...](http://x86asm.net/articles/uefi-programming-first- steps/hello.asm) )

<comment><USER15> > otherwise it is more than a little disturbing when the source code in a > high-level language takes more lines of code than doing the same thing in > pure Asm

The vast majority of the code is just defining the minimal set of standard C# data types needed to compile any C# program.

<comment><USER16> There is an analog in the efi asm example in the include file [1] with its structures and defines which have a few types but is mostly concerned with defining the same structures as in the C# program.

Something that is very unique and interesting is the usage of the System.Runtime & System.Runtime.InteropService , I'm guessing that some of the contorting needed to get things working in the code lays with those functions. The other half would be the ilc and the linker having the EFI subsystem as an option.

[1] [http://x86asm.net/articles/uefi-programming-first- steps/efi....](http://x86asm.net/articles/uefi-programming-first- steps/efi.inc)

<comment><USER15> Runtime and InteropServices are needed for .NET's P/Invoke FFI. It's used to declare the layout of structs, foreign pointers and marshalling code. You can see this being used starting at line 127, where it appears to define EFI handles, tables and headers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google releases closed source VS Code plugin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-code-vscode/blob/master/LICENSE <comment> basil-rash This is of course in contrast to Microsoft, who releases their Azure plugins under the MIT License [1][2][3] etc

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode- azureappservice/blob/mas...](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode- azureappservice/blob/master/LICENSE.md) [2] [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms- azuretools.vsc...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms- azuretools.vscode-cosmosdb/license) [3] [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms- azuretools.vsc...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms- azuretools.vscode-azurefunctions/license)

<comment><USER2> Most Microsoft VSCode plugins are open source. If you click on details in the extension marketplace, you'll see a lot of GitHub URLs:

[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/Microsoft](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/Microsoft)

And perhaps most ironically in this context:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-go](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode- go)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's "VS Code" not "vs. Code". That makes it sound like it's closed source versus code.

<comment><USER4> That was certainly correct when submitted. Hacker News silently rewrites submission titles, in order to fight clickbait (and to correct common mistakes, I guess).

Unless you re-check and verify your submission title when redirected to /newest, you will never know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I updated/fixed it. Something other than myself changed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So Google releases a closed source library for an open source Microsoft product? You can't make up jokes this good.

<comment><USER6> There is nothing strange here. Google has both open source and proprietary software. Source is not available for nearly all of Google's websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not liking this. With all the shenanigans of companies like Kite, doing funny things with people's code, I'm not keen on closed source tools from cloud companies. I realize my code gets uploaded to Google anyway, but this is just uncomfortable.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is this on GitHub if there's no source?

<comment><USER9> For the issue tracker.

<comment><USER8> Is there really nothing better?

<comment><USER10> There are better issue trackers, but the target market almost certainly has a Github account, and is searching for things on Github (rather than Google). Hence not hosting it on Gitlab or Bitbucket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> CONTRIBUTING.md [0] is odd given the LICENSE and, even moreso, absence of available code in the repo. They ask for PRs and CLAs, but... how?

Huh, digging more, it _used to have_ an Apache 2.0.LICENSE file. Wonder what the story is.

[0] [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-code- vscode/blo...](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-code- vscode/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, in 2019 I guess Microsoft is the new Google and Google is the new Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER13> One more reason not to support Google I guess. I don't understand the appeal of VS code anyway - its nothing but a slow Electron thing. Notepad++ and Sublime blow it out of the water.

<comment><USER14> VS Code has great debug integrations. I used to be fully on sublime, then I dabbled in Atom and VS code because I liked the aesthetic and value that in something I have to stare at all day.

The debug integrations in VS Code were what hooked me. Very clean, extensible, and they work. It's certainly what won me over compared to Atom.

<comment><USER15> Just curious, I've briefly tried JetBrains and VS Code, and to me, VSC just seems like a worse IDE. Why not just use a good IDE instead?

<comment><USER16> You _briefly_ used both of these and found JetBrains to be _personally_ better, then follow up by asking why not just use a "good IDE?"

The simplest response with a similar level of effort is - I disagree with you and find VS Code to be an effective IDE.

<comment><USER15> Valid point. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heparin Market to Record an Impressive Growth Rate by 2026 - <AUTHOR> https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/market-insight/heparin-market-2602 <comment><USER2> Every day when I was hospitalized I received a shot in the stomach muscles of this stuff. I told my GP about it and she said when she was pregnant she'd shoot up with on her own (I don't think she was mainlining it but still it's like everyone's doing it)</comment>


Data Viz: Streams of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' Follows the Eclipse - <AUTHOR> https://insights.spotify.com/int/2017/08/24/data-viz-total-eclipse-of-the-heart-follows-the-eclipse/ <comment><USER2> Vermont was in it for the long haul.</comment>


The Beauty of Roots - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/roots/

<comment><USER2> Previous submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033455>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980043> <\- This has some discussion

<comment><USER3> Thanks RiderOfGiraffes, I always find your links quite handy. You somehow bring back to my mind Saunt Lora's proposition in Anathem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The feathery sections look a lot like images generated by iterated function systems (IFS). I wonder if the roots of some polynomial using parameters of the IFS generator as coefficients are exactly those points that will be drawn by the IFS generator, hence the similar patterns. Seeing the random-looking patterns gradually converge reminds me of playing with IFS parameters until patterns start to form and gradually coalesce into a solid shape.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is why I am continually entranced by numbers.</comment>


Boston Startup Housing - <AUTHOR>

I think the co-working office space loft in Central Sq is a great idea (http://coworking.pbwiki.com/CoworkingBoston), but many of us cannot afford to pay for both housing and office space.
I wanted to see if any startup founders would be interested in renting a house or large apartment together, for both living and working out of that space.  I'm posting this here because I'd like to have other entrepreneurial techies as roommates.
The ideal place would be located in the vicinity of Cambridge/Somerville or Allston/Brighton and cost not much over $500 per room monthly, with lease starting Sept 1 (or even better if no lease).
We are two guys, ages 25 & 28, working on a web startup.  Anyone have space to offer or want to join us in this search? <comment><USER2> I'd be interested. I'm living in Cambridge now, and am working for a startup. Shoot me an email: patfitz06 aaat gmail</comment>


Remembering DEC: Memoir from Co-Founder Harlan Anderson Due Out in November - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2009/10/remembering_dec_memoir_from_co.html

<comment><USER2> It looks like an interesting book, but it's not available on Amazon, even for pre-order. Interestingly, Amazon seems to recognize the title, as it auto- corrects searches, but it doesn't list it.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully it's simply to obscure to get any kind of pre-order status.</comment></comment>


Cafeaulife.coffee - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.github.com/cafeaulife/docs/cafeaulife.html <comment><USER2> As noted, this is just the inner core of the Hashlife algorithm. HashLife is optimized for computing very large numbers of generations of very large and complex life patterns with a high degree of regularity such as implementing Turing machines.

As such, it is particularly poorly suited for animating displays a generation at a time. But it is still a beautiful algorithm that touches on the soul of life's "physics."

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice. Since you asked for feedback, I'll say that the mix of narrative prose and line-by-line commenting of declarations is a bit strange. It's like it can't decide whether it's reference-style documentation, a literate program, or a standalone essay.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is this page unreadable on the iPad 2? The default text size and content width are too small, and zooming in causes the text to blur. I've seen a similar issue on techcrunch.

<comment><USER2> Good question, I have filed an issue against the tool used to generate the doc: <https://github.com/jashkenas/docco/issues/80>

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> yet another explanation of the algorithm: [http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2011/05/game-of-life- part-...](http://www.thelowlyprogrammer.com/2011/05/game-of-life- part-2-hashlife.html)</comment>


Universe may be curved, not flat - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/universe-may-be-curved-not-flat-1.13776 <comment><USER2> Someday in the future children will be taught in history class how in the 21st century people though the universe was flat. And they will laugh.

<comment><USER3> That's not really a fair way to present the situation. It isn't 'In the 21st century people couldn't imagine the universe could be curved, how terribly quaint!'.

Rather, it's more like 'In the 21st century the best data available from CMB anisotropies was that Ω was approximately 1 (or a tiny bit more), with Ω=1 being inside the confidence interval, so most cosmologists used a model where Ω=1. Later, better data showed that the true value of Ω was actually very slightly less than 1, so cosmologists started using the new, slightly more precise value.'

The fact that there's a change in the words you can use to describe the universe at Ω=1 ('open' at Ω<1, 'flat' at Ω=1, 'closed' at Ω>1), and the latest update happens to have crossed that line (so makes for good headlines), doesn't change that this is just another case of science slowly homing in on a true value.

<comment><USER4> This reminds me of a letter from Einstein (EDIT: It was Isaac Asimov) where he points out that saying the earth is flat is a pretty good approximation of the curvature of the earth.

It's also worth pointing out that educated people have known the earth is round since the classical period.

<comment><USER5> It was Isaac Asimov I believe.

[http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm](http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm)

<comment><USER6> TIL that Asimov supported the notion of "nearly right", which is good enough as long as you tried really hard and could explain how you got to your incorrect answer.

<comment><USER7> "Nearly right" is good enough, providing it's within the accuracy you need for any particular job.

<comment><USER6> I suppose that depends on how the question is asked. Taking a question that has a yes or no answer with one of them being correct and changing the parameters so that nearly right is good enough doesn't seem proper to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, the next question is, what animal is saddled with our universe, and who is riding it. Perhaps it's The Foe from Pohl's Gateway series? :)

<comment><USER9> It's turtles all the way down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This result is consistent with what one would expect because of the geometric effect of the recently discovered Dark Energy. A saddle-shaped overall curvature is consistent with a universe accelerated by Dark Energy.

<comment><USER11> _A saddle-shaped overall curvature is consistent with a universe accelerated by Dark Energy._

I wonder about this. As I understand it, the de Sitter spacetime (which would describe a universe containing dark energy and nothing else) has positive spacetime curvature, but admits all three types of spatial slicings: closed (positive spatial curvature, like a sphere), flat, and open (negative spatial curvature, like a saddle). Wouldn't that mean that _any_ spatial curvature we observe could be consistent with the presence of dark energy?

<comment><USER10> We need to distinguish between the curvature of a specific location versus the curvature of the universe as a whole.

As I understand it, for a universe that's being uniformly accelerated, by for example dark energy, its overall curvature should be negative. In the absence of dark energy, and for a universe whose masses possess escape velocity (no more and no less), the classic zero-energy assumption of modern Big Bang models, the overall curvature is zero (i.e. flat). For a universe that has less than escape velocity and will recollapse, an idea that has now been pretty much abandoned, the curvature is positive.

The escape-velocity zero-curvature universe has an interesting property -- it has zero net energy, i.e. gravitational potential energy is exactly balanced by kinetic energy. This means the universe can appear spontaneously, like quantum virtual particle do, but on a larger scale.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing ... Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist." — Stephen Hawking in "The Grand Design".

I'm not qualified to say what a negative curvature might do to that pretty spontaneous-creation picture. It's a nice model, and it offers an answer to the question "where did all this come from?"

<comment><USER11> _As I understand it, for a universe that 's being uniformly accelerated, by for example dark energy, its overall curvature should be negative._

By "overall curvature", do you mean spacetime curvature, or the curvature of a spatial slice?

As I said in my previous post, the de Sitter spacetime, which is the model for a universe that is being uniformly accelerated, has uniform positive spacetime curvature. These Wikipedia links give a good overview (of course Wikipedia is not always reliable, but these pages appear to be consistent with what I read in other more knowledgeable sources such as GR textbooks):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter_universe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter_universe)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter_space](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter_space)

The spacetime curvature scalar R is 4 Lambda, where Lambda is the (positive) cosmological constant.

The second Wikipedia link also describes the different possible spatial slicings of de Sitter spacetime; as I noted previously, slicings exist with all three types of spatial curvature (positive, zero, and negative).

However, it is true that the slicing with negative curvature is the one that's used in the standard cosmological models of a universe that is dark energy dominated; that's the FLRW model with exponential expansion that's discussed in the first Wikipedia link. So if that specifically is what you were referring to by negative "overall curvature", then I agree; but I would specify that it's overall negative _spatial_ curvature, and that that model assumes a particular spatial slicing which is not the only possible one.

<comment><USER10> > By "overall curvature", do you mean spacetime curvature, or the curvature of > a spatial slice?

I'm referring to the overall spacetime curvature shared by the universe as a whole.

> ... and that that model assumes a particular spatial slicing which is not > the only possible one.

Sorry, out of my depth.

<comment><USER11> _I 'm referring to the overall spacetime curvature shared by the universe as a whole._

Then that's positive, not negative, for a spacetime dominated by dark energy. The curvature that is negative is the curvature of the spatial slices in the model used in cosmology for a dark energy dominated universe--more precisely, in the model referred to in the article as being suggested by the new data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_theory_of_the_univers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_theory_of_the_universe)

<comment><USER13> How do torus and saddle fit together?

<comment><USER14> Putin on a Ritz[1] comes to mind

[1][http://putintheritzon.ytmnd.com/](http://putintheritzon.ytmnd.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > This means that if large triangles could be 'drawn' in space, their internal > angles would add up to less than 180 degrees.

I wonder if this could somehow be done with the voyager 1 and 2, although I imagine this would involve setting the two voyagers up to look for each other - something that may well be many orders of magnitude outside what is possible, though they still seem to be able to contact us.

Also it may not be a large enough distance, but I'd guess its the largest available to us that we could actually test.

<comment><USER16> It's not the drawing of them in space that's the issue. Remember, you're in space right now in addition to being on the earth.

The issue is in making the measurement. The 180 degree problem is really complex.

<comment><USER17> I'm not saying it's easy to send three probes to the edge of the solar system, but how come measuring the angles is hard? (Granted you cannot do it with the Voyager probes).

Also does anyone know what total interior angles you'd have to measure, ie. would be it ~179° or ~179.99999999°?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > But this version of inflation cannot account for the Universe's lopsidedness > except as a statistical fluke — similar to, for example, a fair coin that > happens to come up heads many more times than tails over 1,000 flips.

So, does this mean p = .001 for this result? Does the result hold if we choose a different way to partition the sky into two connected regions?

<comment><USER19> my reading of that section is that they're just trying to illustrate what statistical error is. i don't think there's any real meaning to the 1000 value.

[edit] but googling for "statistical significance planck anisotropy" turned up [http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5083](http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5083) which says "3 sigma" which is about 0.3% (p=0.003). so it's close.

[edit2] whoa. but you've got the right answer with the wrong maths. if you toss the same side of the coin 10 times in a row, that's p=0.001 (1/2^10 = 1/1024). getting the same side 1000 times in a row is much, much less likely.

ps since the result is basically (if i understand right) "one side of the universe is slightly different from the other" then it depends on how you choose the halves. if you divided things "at right angles" to what gives the signal, you wouldn't see anything at all. not sure if that is what you meant by partitioning (mathematically they use something like a 3d fourier transform - spherical harmonics - and this is a significant deviation from zero for the lowest frequency component).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lawrence Krauss talks about the physics of the curvature of space and why the current consensus is that it's flat. I found this Youtube to be really helpful in understanding something of the subject:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0HqZxXZK7c](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0HqZxXZK7c)</comment>


Apple sales soar to capture 14% of US PC retail sales - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1520

<comment><USER2> I wonder where the tipping point comes in?

That is, the point where there's a substantial enough non-Windows marketshare that ISVs can't go with Microsoft's proprietary development solutions and practises due to the need to go cross-platform or neglect a large chunk of the market.

Once you hit that point, the value of Windows (that is, it's ecosystem) starts to plummet.

Any other ideas for what could happen?

edit: I guess we've already seen the effect of the second paragraph in the proliferation of web-based applications.

<comment><USER3> Hm... they say Apple now captures 25% of all revenue from PC sales, I wonder if that includes corporate sales. Because if it does, it means that Apple currently holds _over half_ of new home/personal PC sales.

<comment><USER4> No, it doesn't. For most corporations, apple is what the kids use to listen to music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's just that no one's buying PCs right now while the Mac cult continues to buy Apple products, recession or not.

It's been well-known for a long time that Mac users are much more willing to pay for value than PC users are. They enjoy buying things that make them happy. This is why you can be a Mac ISV and get by with a much smaller userbase to sell to.

<comment><USER6> +1 despite your use of the word "cult", because you're right -- Apple customers are the ones with the money. Not a bad set of customers to have.

Another factor you don't mention here: Even if you think that Vista doesn't suck, it seems to have utterly failed to inspire anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'm still waiting to hear why macs are better than PC's. I've asked many mac fans and never received a good answer.

<comment><USER8> Thats because there's not _a_ good answer, there are _good answers_ depending on what you want to do with it.

For me it comes down to; I hate putty and don't like cygwin very much. Also mac hardware is well defined. I know I'm going to be able to dual boot the centos distro we use for development, and once I've got all of the drivers figured out, I can easily get the same mac again and get that config to everyone in our company. I've bought one too many dells with _the same model number_ and _different_ sound, graphics, wireless hardware. My mac also sleeps when I close the lid and wakes up faster than any other computer I've ever had. This makes me happy.

Note: This is just _my_ reason. For every other mac user you'll find a reason of their own. Some little itch that a mac just happens to scratch a little better. And yes, I find mac fanbois with bs reasons for mac superiority just as tedious as most hackers do.

<comment><USER7> you are the first person to give me an honest non-knee jerk response answer. thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Half of my friends use laptops that are actually company laptops, but they use them around the house and for anything and everything. None of these computers are Apples.

Anyone know what Apple's market share is for all PC sales including corporate?

</comment><comment><USER10> Ever notice that, unlike with PCs, the older your PowerBook is the cooler you are?

</comment><comment><USER11> WHAT? Is this title implying that Macintosh computers are PCs as well? Say it isn't so doc! What's that about Intel chips? Native windows booting? What? _Sobs in the corner_</comment>


Serverless and Ansible GUI Runner's Released: Commandeer 0.4.0 - <AUTHOR> https://getcommandeer.com/docs/releases/version-0_4_0 <comment><USER2> Cool way to manage local stack w IAC</comment>


Moonlighting? Please Tell Me About It - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I've been working 2 weeks now full time, and been trying to work on my own startup on nights and weekends. I didn't know how hard it was when people talked about it until now. And I thought school and startup was hard. To illustrate, I come home at 6pm, fall asleep until 8pm, code until 1am, sleep from 2am to 8am, and start all over again. I guess this is called moonlighting.

I am going to stop this moonlighting stuff and work full time on my startup with a new appreciation in about a week. I'm saving about 1k per week, which is about my monthly expense. I'm almost done with the beta (after 6 months), and I think the reason I'm not at full time is because I'm afraid of failing. But it doesn't matter now because I just paid $500 to get inc'ed and I got enough to last until the end of summer.

A side note, from my full time job, I've learned that lunch breaks are a boost to productivity.

If you moonlight too, or did before, please share your insight.

<comment><USER2> Two weeks? Wow. And those eight hours of sleep you get seem brutal...

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure which is worse.. How mean you are or that people are upvoting you. At least he's trying, and he just wanted a little support. From the sound of it, he's a single founder, so it can get pretty harsh.

<comment><USER4> I agree. This sounds like a tough schedule. I once tried to write a book at the same time as having a 9-5 job, and I was dismayed at how little time was left over from the job. When you add in travel to and from work, the day's practically shot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm moonlighting, and I have to say - it's brutal. I get a couple of nights a week to work on my startup project, and it sucks: a) it's not nearly enough time, b) I totally lose flow, c) I'm tired before I start, and so have really motivation trouble.

Many a-list bloggers say it's really not an ideal approach - and they're right.

That said, I have no choice. I have a wife & 2 kids, and not that much money in the bank right now. So my choices are either moonlighting or give up the startup dream, which I absolutely refuse to do. (Which reminds me: all that stuff about the tech industry being a complete meritocracy, you can start a startup on no money, etc. - that's all just crap. There's no meritocracy. You can only launch a startup if you - or someone else (your daddy, etc.) has enough money to pay all your bills while you do it. That rules out: working class people, middle class people with kids, etc.)

Anyway, my goal is to work enough to just get something launched, and then hope it takes off from there enough to transition to it full time. It's a long tough road, but I'm tough enough to stay with it.

Still, I would not recommend this route.

<comment><USER6> I partially agree with your comment about it not being a meritocracy: yes, it is still very difficult for those with prior commitments. However, it is still much more realistic than starting a B&M; store or something along those lines, where you need significantly more startup capital and working on it in your spare time just doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm moonlighting, but I'm going after customers who move slowly. That is, if full-time founders decided to compete head-to-head, they might pump out features faster, but would still be stuck in the same long feedback cycle I'm in as far as knowing what features are and aren't worthwhile. For that kind of customer base you can afford to moonlight; in fact you should moonlight because you would burn through funding before getting traction.

If you're going after faster-moving customers, e.g. Techcrunch readers, you really need to go full-time. Otherwise once you get traction full-timers might imitate you, and then woo those fast customers with fast development.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd echo the "find a cofounder" sentiment. Sharing the load is good and a co- founder is a good energizer/motivator.

I'm not entirely clear why you incorporated.... Definitely something you want to do, but why not wait a bit and see if what you build sticks/takes off?

My last startup was an "off-hours" thing, and my current one was an off-hours thing for the last few months (and is a full-time effort as of monday). While I didn't work NEARLY as hard (generally one evening and one full weekend day), I sympathize.

G'luck!

My only advice is to brutally slash your idea down to the core-- find out the BASIC value proposition you can offer and get it out...

</comment><comment><USER9> i've done this kind of thing for spans of a year or two. besides the advice you're probably already getting, i'd say going running regularly helps a lot. when i was running, i'd be have a lot more energy throughout the day and night; when i wasn't i'd want to nap when i got home.

finding a cofounder is also a big productivity boost. find one early -- the more progress you make by yourself the harder it is to get someone else excited about "your" idea. if you're moonlighting, it's easy to put this off, but you're only hurting yourself long term. (i used to believe the single founder thing was doable for a while, but all of pg's counterarguments are right.)

</comment><comment><USER10> i've been doing this for a little over 3 years now. during grad school i wrote the beta version of my software when i wasn't working on my thesis. now i work during the bulk of my non-day-job time, but i make sure to have leisure time, too.

i think the danger of this lifestyle is the risk of not getting things accomplished in a timely manner. if we spread ourselves too thin we end up with our hands in a bunch of half-full pots.

nonetheless, kudos for the stamina. we have 24 hours every day to use how we see fit. 8 hours for sleep is a given, 8 hours for work is another (almost) given, and what we do with the other 8 hours is the difference between mediocrity and success.

~dean~

</comment><comment><USER11> it sucks, it burns you out, but if you can do it, then startups is for you :)</comment>


Caviar Delivery Scam - <AUTHOR> A friend of mine works for a restaurant group in NYC and they like many they have had to respond by offering delivery to folks in order to keep some revenue flowing. He and I were chatting and he mentioned that lately, a large majority of high value ($500+) orders were fraudulent with the fraudster ordering things that can be resold such as high-value wine, liquor, etc that isn't necessarily perishable. He says that the scams work like this:
1. The order comes in via Caviar usually with a ridiculous amount of booze. It is usually a courier delivery but looking back some have been picked up by 'customers'.
2. There are some instances where the order gets canceled either by the scammer within the 2 min grace period post ordering of from the actual customer who had their account phished/received some sort of alert/and stopped the transaction.
Has anyone here in the HN community been impacted by such a scam on Caviar/DoorDash? I am intrigued by it because there is obviously someone on the receiving end that's ending up with a boatload of high-end booze and then offloading it somehow. Why wouldn't Caviar just require folks to enter their CVV again before checking out as a security precaution? <comment><USER2> because apps are generally about getting people to pay for stuff without thinking about it, requiring the CVV will likely have a noticable impact on sales</comment>


Show HN: A translation file format that's pleasant to read and write - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MarkTiedemann/mtff <comment><AUTHOR> This is supposed to be a light-weight, yet strict translation file format that is easy to work with.

I've developed it out of frustration with the translation file formats that we used at work.

Any feedback would be much appreciated!</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best resource for learning JavaScript from scratch in 2016? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Eloquent javascript. Search online for the annotated copy by Gordon Zhu; it is exceptional but incomplete.

Watchandcode screencast by Gordon Zhu

Javascript the Good Parts by Crockford

These three will get you far along the way to mastery

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS](https://github.com/getify/You- Dont-Know-JS)</comment>


Show HN: A crowdfunding platform to combat patent trolls - <AUTHOR> https://unpatent.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News!

Patents were created to promote innovation, but as the whole industry agrees now, they're actually hurting innovators. Patent trolls are using them to sue the hell out of startups and innovators — more than $29bn/year are wasted on patent trolls, not to mention the $21bn on VC investment also wasted on them.

We want to change this trend by empowering companies to invalidate patents that threaten them and the whole ecosystem.

Everyone can create a campaign against a patent, and then interested companies can back it. With the raised amount, we reward people for contributing prior art — which is any evidence that a patent was not novel. Then we file a reexamination before the patent office.

Patent office/lawyer fees + prior art rewards should be minimum $20k, which is extremely small for anything regarding IP litigation. The process takes ~6 months.

We chose patent '435 because it affects the whole ecosystem - <USER2> customizes online content with some user's preferences.

Let's kill stupid patents together! Feedback and personal experiences are super welcome. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Awesome! Do you foresee corporations contributing to fundraising? Unpatent seems like a great way to raise awareness of overreaching patents, but individuals have little incentive to contribute financially. Corporations have both the incentive and financial resources to contribute.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, we're 100% corporate focused right now. We also got some interest from companies who want to fight against other companies' patents just so they have a better portfolio than their competitors. That's not our utopian use of the platform, but in the end, if patents that shouldn't be granted are revoked, we're happy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty neat that you have Lee Cheng as an advisor, who is hero in the battle against trolls.

But from the Bio's, it doesn't look like anyone on the team is a lawyer. What sort of track record do you have invalidating patents?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lee is awesome! We love having him onboard. We've been talking with lots of lawyers since the very beginning, but to be honest we are automating the role of the lawyer here. That's why we are focusing on the ex partes reexamination, which allows this kind of automation to happen.</comment></comment>