If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees - <AUTHOR> https://software.rajivprab.com/2020/08/18/if-founders-treated-their-investors-the-same-way-they-treated-their-employees/ <comment><USER4> Valid reasons to work for a startup:

\- You are a cofounder.

\- You have little experience and you are using this to break into the industry, and get experience on many different technologies ("wear many hats").

\- They are working on a very specific problem or using a specific technology that you strongly desire to work on and it's difficult to do it anywhere else.

\- You want to work a certain way (remote, on the beach, whatever) and they are willing to go this route.

Invalid reasons for working at a startup:

\- Getting rich off stock options.

\- Making a lot of money in salary.

\- Work / life balance.

\- Stability.

<comment><USER5> Main reason: it's more fun.

I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work.

I can stay in my lane and do my specific job tasks, or I can run around putting out fires and helping wherever help is needed.

I mindlessly build the specific design product handed me, or I can guide my own work in accordance to the needs of our customers and the business.

I can follow policy and fill out forms when making any decision, or I can just do what's right because who has time to write policies and look over approval forms?

tbf, tech is relatively good at a lot of these. As I understand it, Facebook gives a fair bit of latitude to engineers, and Google used to be famous for their 20% time. But the longer a company exists, and the bigger it gets, the more bureaucracy and controlling it'll get. Every big disaster means a new policy on how to prevent future disasters.

I think pg wrote an essay stating that the most valuable skill in an early startup employee is "helpfulness" (maybe not though -- cursory search didn't find it). You do what needs to be done.

This is roughly your "wear many hats" point, but more than just different technologies, and not just being new. If you just want to have a well-defined, steady, sane-every-day job, a startup is terrible. If you every want to say "that's my job", a start-up is terrible. If you're the sort of person people will come to for help with whatever comes up (and enjoy being that), start-ups can be great.

<comment><USER6> _> I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work._

I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for.

I've worked for startups in the past and have had a huge impact _on the startup_ but almost no impact on the outside world because the startups just weren't tackling very visible problems.

Now I work for Google and I have basically _zero_ impact on Google i.e. basically nothing that I can do will ever move the dial in terms of Google's revenue, etc. But I've worked on several projects that have had a big impact outside of Google. For example, I was on a small team (3 people) that developed the Python 2.7 runtime for App Engine (this was a while ago) and I was on another small team that implemented the server-side infrastructure for the Google Home. I also developed the screensaver for Chromecast - which is a tiny tiny project - but still millions of people love it.

<comment><USER7> > I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small > company depending on what type of impact you are looking for.

For a lot of people, "I want to have an impact where I work" is more about their own ego and sense of importance than about impact on other people's lives. This is not a value judgment, by the way - wanting to feel like more than just another faceless disposable drone is a valid desire.

<comment><USER8> I'd argue that people conflate "having an impact" with "creating a product" rather than "having an impact" with having visible prestige. I used to think the former, but not after having experience interacting with people who want to be middle managers of middle managers. Those people want power and mostly don't care about impacting anything outside revenue increases that can be easily tied back to their name.

<comment><USER9> I would suggest that you've had experiences with bad middle managers. I say this all the time, but I only began to appreciate middle management when I became a front-line manager. An effective middle manager makes a whole boat full of people feel secure and strategically focused. They figure out how to leverage the strengths of their front-line managers and senior-level ICs, and how to fill in gaps. They know how to manage upward towards the executive layer, to acquire resources and summarize a great deal of complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So founders _do_ treat some of their investors like this - look at every ICO, and a lot of dumb overseas money, and a good number of friends/family/fools rounds. And conversely, there are _some_ employees that they treat with kid gloves, who basically get the investor treatment. Look at executive hires.

The difference is basically two letters: "No". Most institutional investors have the ability and inclination to say no to a deal. Many executives - <USER2> even high-level FAANG engineers - have the ability and inclination to say no to a deal. Your average engineer a couple years out of college does not, or if they do, they don't understand the power of declining a job offer. Start your negotiations with "no". Be curious and open to opportunities, and show a lot of enthusiasm during the interview process, but whenever you feel you're treated unfairly, _walk away_. People will stop treating you unfairly.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that some people need money and can't say no. That's why anybody works for minimum wage...

The executives and investors and FAANG engineers have all made good money and seen decent RSU terms, you can't pull the wool over their eyes. Someone who is just getting into tech may be allured by a 50k salary and "1 MILLION OPTIONS!!!!" (There are ten trillion in the option pool).

I think engineers would do well to know that you are a COST CENTER to the business and the people who run it. They need you to make their product so they can make money but they hire you begrudgingly. You are in their power and they want to take advantage of you by paying you the least they can (shady options awards) and working you as much as possible (why did you slip on this feature you story pointed!!!).

Put yourselves in their shoes and you would do the same. Starting a successful business is all about customer growth and making money. If you aren't directly responsible for a part of that then you are a cost. Make sure you are getting paid what you are worth because nothing in this world gets built without great engineers, but the system is run by people who want to have power over you. Be careful.

<comment><USER12> > The problem is that some people need money and can't say no.

If they need money, and this is the best offer they got, then what's the problem with accepting it? They are still better off than not accepting it.

<comment><USER11> No problem with that. The problem I have is with selling people bullshit golden promises of wealth when that is mathematically impossible given the cap table. Just don't even offer equity at all at that point so employees aren't deluded.

At this point I know what I'm doing enough to not get burnt by these types of scams, and when I was an engineer I was lucky to basically work for FAANGs the whole time where they are very charitable to employees. But when I was 23 I didn't have the knowledge to evaluate pre-ipo equity and some startups prey on this information imbalance to delude people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Always absent in these kinds of essays/posts is the reason _why_ startups are able to get away with this. If it didn't work, obviously the options games would have stopped a long time ago. A lot of people don't want to admit that there's a small army of young, naive employees who are enamored with startups and are perfectly willing to sign up for below-market salary and extremely unfavorable options terms in exchange for "the startup experience". And importantly, this small army is constantly renewing itself. Repeatedly bringing up how much the game is rigged doesn't really do much to change anything.

<comment><USER14> Options aren't a game. They're preferable to employees, for tax reasons. If startups gave employees shares, then employees would have to pay taxes on those shares, even though they're illiquid - so you're paying taxes on something you can't even sell!

Options solve this problem well, by delaying the tax burden until the equity is actually worth something. If it ends up worth nothing, you don't exercise your options and you don't pay any taxes.

<comment><USER15> I doubt that's the reason. Like some FAANGs do with stocks, can't you always deduct a part of RSUs as tax liability and add the remaining into the employee's account?

<comment><USER16> You're probably getting downvoted because you're making confident-sounding but wrong claims. I posted a top level comment that should resolve all your confusion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24202814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24202814)

<comment><USER15> I think my phrasing was wrong, it was more of a question. Edited it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Bravo bravo bravo! This piece neatly encapsulates all the problems with ISOs. The biggest one is mentioned at the beginning - information asymmetry. I don't really understand why most companies, especially small ones less than 100 people, can't be transparent about their cap table with employees.

I do think the culture around 90 day exercise Windows is changing. Here is a list of companies with extended windows [1]. At this point I would never join a company with 90 day windows.

[1] [https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise- windows](https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows)

<comment><USER18> AFAIK the 90 day thing was more of a legal thing than something the companies themselves wanted to enforce?

<comment><USER17> It's true that a company can't issue ISOs if the termination window is more than 90 days, they have to be NSOs instead. IMO the downside of the NSOs (pay tax immediately upon exercise instead of at next year's tax deadline - <USER3> don't actually change the amount of tax that is due, just the timing of when you pay it) is small compared to the very real risk that your options will go poof if you don't have the cash to exercise and pay tax if there is a termination event.

<comment><USER19> Startups can easily opt to convert ISOs to NSOs after the 90 days -- but of course, they typically do not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is perfect.

I looked at working for startups as though I were an investor, because while an investor is putting maybe 1/30th of their fund into a company, I'm putting %100 of my time into it and it will be my sole source of income and wealth, which means I have way more to lose as an employee than someone who YOLO'd a few million of hedged, other people's money into it. As an employee, my risk/reward has fixed upside (+lottery tickets) and an asymmetric downside that includes opportunity cost.

Most people are just doing jobs, and that's how they manage, but money is made in direct inverse proportion to how much physical work you do. If you are doing work, you are rarely providing as much value as someone delivering just the value of yours and others' work. Arguably, the most value is provided by people who do the breadth-first search for opportunities than the depth-first search for technical "solution" leverage. A company needs both, but as the post implies, figure out if you would invest in a company before deciding to work for them.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think startups would have a lot easier time recruiting great people if they offered Stock Appreciation Rights [1] instead of typical options. I didn't even know SARs existed, they're so non-standard in the startup industry, until as a founder considering an open-ended hiring offer for the first time I desperately looked for some legal upside compensation system that wouldn't screw me in all likely scenarios. Stock would mean tax bill upfront with high chance of failure. Options would likely expire before I could securely exercise and liquidate to cover costs.

I ultimately decided to stay the founder course, but glad to have found what I think is an acceptable compensation structure. Even if requiring it adds friction to deals until docs are standardized, at least people should know it's an option. I'd be curious to understand if anyone has found a downside, except to the investors that build these anti-employee systems to arbitrage on knowledge asymmetry.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_appreciation_right](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_appreciation_right)

<comment><USER14> One downside here is that SARs are taxed as ordinary income. This means you might end up paying 30-50% taxes instead of the 15-20% long term capital gains rate you'd pay on ISOs, RSUs, or selling shares from exercised NSOs.

<comment><USER22> Also, I don't think there's a secondary market option for SARs or similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was employee ~150 at a company that essentially had it's exit event with a massive GE investment a couple years ago. DUring that investment, employees were required to sell their stock/options. To the credit of the VP who hired me, the result was exactly as he had told me: "when this company has it's event, you'll likely get enough off your options to put the kids through college or for a big down payment on a really nice house. But the only people who will sniff 7 figure paydays are the VP/C-suite and the only person getting rich(er) is the CTO/founder."

</comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting that this post is falling off the front page so quickly. At the time of writing it has 537 points and is 8 hours old. There are many above it with much fewer points, that are much older (eg. 127 points, 12 hours).

It makes me wonder if YC intentionally penalizes posts like these, because ideas like these make it harder for their portfolio companies to hire employees.

<comment><USER24> I believe it penalizes articles that have a large number of comments relative to votes.

<comment><USER21> That doesn't hold explanatory power in this case, look at the points, comments, and age. For "Modeling a Wealth Tax", "Canon's Cloud..." and "If founders treated...": [https://www.dropbox.com/s/vk1i2q8mlbs5x2s/Screen%20Shot%2020...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/vk1i2q8mlbs5x2s/Screen%20Shot%202020-08-18%20at%205.12.58%20PM.png?dl=0)

I'm also suspicious, although most suspect as sibling comment to yours suggests, that it's likely something automated rather than malicious. Perhaps there's too few comments?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cs-szazz This hits home. I'm a fairly early employee at a unicorn, with no exit in sight. I've talked to the cofounders about extending my exercise window, and got the response of "We can probably do that when the time comes". Of course if that turns out to not be the case, well then I'm now stuck leaving behind a huge portion of my equity to cover the taxes, assuming I can sell to cover.

Love that this seems to be getting more popular, hope it becomes the norm for companies in the future.

<comment><USER25> Hi cs-szazz. I remember being in your situation; it's frustrating because you can't Google for answers. Here is advice I was given when in a similar situation.

\- Find the other people at the company in your situation (size of grant, type of options). Share your learnings with each other. Consider getting professional advice, the Bay is full of attorneys and CPAs for whom this is a familiar situation.

\- If you're at a unicorn, you probably have co-workers who are veterans of other unicorns and have been through this before. Ask them for advice (or an introduction to their source of professional advice)

\- As a group, consider asking your board to arrange a limited second market sale to cover exercise costs and taxes. Many institutional investors are happy to buy a little extra stock, especially if it helps with keeping senior staff happy and focused on the right things.

\- If you're going to be doing anything involving stock without board approval (like trying to build some kind off house-of-cards, pseudo-legal collateral package for a loan shark) you really need to hire an attorney.

\- if you only have options, you might not be a shareholder. Your rights and access to information might be different once you've exercised a share.

\- You can't extend the 90 day exercise window on ISOs, that's a federal law thing. The company can convert to NSOs to extend the window, but the setup for that conversion is complicated and expensive.

<comment> cs-szazz I think you hit the nail on the head, it's frustrating because there's no clear answers, very little resources on the topic.

I'm actually in Canada, so I'm not sure on the ISO -> NSO distinction.

I do think your advice about coworkers is good though, I know of a couple other early employees in my position (similar grant sizes, also unable to afford to fully exercise). I've often considered what would happen if all of us decided to push for an extended window (and convert to NSO's)

As for the secondary, I don't actually want to sell. I want the ability to wait until there's liquidity to sell, and do it on my terms. Selling now significantly reduces future upside. What I'm really trying to avoid is getting stuck at one company because I can't afford to leave in the future.

I do appreciate your advice though, always good to chat with someone who's been in a similar situation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I missed over $1 million in options when one of my former companies was acquired. I still made good money but nowhere near the same. I was pretty sure it was going to sell, but I didn't know how long it would take (over 1 year for sure) and nothing in life is guaranteed.

If I had exercised all the options I would have had over $300k in paper gains for a tax bill. Instead I exercised 10% of what I had the ability to exercise. This is one major reason I will never work at a startup again unless I am the cofounder.

<comment><USER26> Depending on the size of the startup at the time you join, I found it fairly easy to negotiate an extension to the exercise window. Likely because so few people even bring it up.

<comment><USER4> There was 0% chance of that occurring as the CEO was a total shark. You would be shocked at how much of the cap table he retained vs. all the crazy funding shenanigans that happened. Very astute player of the game, he did very well. I will invest in his future companies but never work for him again.

<comment><USER27> Why is it ok to fund that behavior if it's victimizing people?

<comment><USER4> I was an employee not a cofounder. I agreed to the terms. He will do anything to succeed. I invest money in people who succeed. That is my opinion about where I will place investments in hyper-risky early stage startups. The biggest jerk in this whole thing is the USA tax code / IRS that made me pay taxes on paper gains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That 90-day expiry window is the most archaic bullshit. Can't come up with 200K cash? Too bad, and thanks for all that hard work and long hours you put in.

<comment><USER29> FWIW it's rooted in US tax law. Unexercised Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) are required to expire 90 days after an employee leaves.

The way some companies get around it is that, after 90 days, they replace the expired ISOs with nonstatutory stock options which, as their name implies, are not recognized by the tax code. Tax code is complicated but NSOs are ultimately worth maybe 10%-20% less than "equivalent" ISOs.

But, at least until recently, there wasn't standard paperwork for doing this, so the only companies that did it were those willing to innovate on their stock plan. I think a lot of founders weren't trying to screw their employees, but their lawyers weren't comfortable going off the beaten path.

But I think that excuse is fading now. Enough companies have done it to provide precedent.

My circa-2015 startup looked at this and fretted a bit but ultimately sidestepped the problem by giving everyone restricted stock instead of options. That's only really possible at the very early stages when the 409(a) valuation is nearly zero. But for anyone joining a seed-stage startup today, that's what I strongly recommend: Ask for restricted stock, and if the purchase cost is non-zero, ask them to comp you for it as a signing bonus (which is "free" for them since they're buying the stock from themselves). You'll have to pay income tax on the value but that should be pretty small (maybe you can even get the company to "gross it up", but that's real dollars for them). Then you'll never have to worry about exercising stock options or paying AMT. Don't forget to file your 83(b) election within 30 days.

<comment><USER30> > NSOs are ultimately worth maybe 10%-20% less than "equivalent" ISOs

I'm at a company that gives NSOs. Can you explain what you mean when you say that NSOs are worth less than ISOs?

<comment><USER29> _Obvious disclaimer: I 'm not a tax specialist. You should not rely on tax advice found in an internet comment. I probably got some stuff wrong below._

When you exercise an ISO, it is not considered regular taxable income. It is as if you legitimately purchased the stock on the market for that price. No tax is due until you sell. If you sell immediately then you pay regular income tax on the gain. But if you hold it for at least a year, then you pay long- term capital gains rate, which maxes out at 20% (vs. 37% for regular income tax).

When you exercise an NSO, the gain is considered income and is immediately taxable at regular income tax rates, whether you sell it or not. If the company is not public, then you can't sell share to pay the taxes, so if you're going to exercise NSOs, you'd better do it either before the valuation has gone up much (in which case you end up paying mostly long-term capital gains tax), or wait until after IPO (and pay regular income tax). Since investing in startups is very very risky, exercising early probably isn't the right choice for most regular people.

Extra complication: The US has two tax codes that exist in a sort of quantum superposition. Each taxpayer must pay whichever tax bill is larger of the two. The above describes the regular tax code, but there is also Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). Under AMT, ISOs are not special; they are treated like NSOs. But, the maximum tax rate under AMT is 28% rather than 37%, and doesn't kick in until higher income levels. So if you exercise ISOs before the company has gone public, but after the valuation has raised significantly over the exercise price, you might again have trouble paying the taxes. But if you manage to pay them, and you manage to hold for a year, your overall gain will probably be 10%-20% more than what you would have gotten with NSOs.

Extra extra complication: Let's say you exercise your ISOs before IPO and you manage to pay the AMT. Years later, you sell the stock. Is your capital gains computed based on the ISO exercise price, or the valuation at exercise? BOTH! Under regular income tax, you owe capital gains on everything since the exercise price, but under AMT you already paid for the gains between the exercise price and the valuation at exercise. If you don't want to get double- taxed you have to learn what it means to take a credit for a timing-based AMT adjustment. This is well beyond the point where Turbo Tax gets pretty unhelpful and you probably need to get a CPA, but in the Bay Area there are so many rich clients that a decent CPA will charge thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of dollars to do your taxes. Have fun!

All that said, if your plan is to exercise-and-sell in one action sometime after IPO, then I think ISO vs. NSO doesn't make much difference.

<comment><USER31> You got everything right, but in my experience TurboTax handles the AMT credit just fine. I personally recouped 6 figures of credit carried over across multiple years, and TurboTax always automatically calculated the usable credit every year, and when I ultimately sold the exercised shares it also properly computed the different AMT cost basis, allowing me to recoup even more that year due to the higher spread.

I would still recommend folks to properly understand what it is and how it is calculated so they can double check the numbers, but that really applies to pretty much every tax form.

<comment><USER29> I guess it's gotten better. I remember a time when they asked you to please just enter a number for your timing-based AMT adjustments without even giving you a hint what that is. Admittedly that was a long long time ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A few things I have noticed missing from discussion of why/why not to join a start up is prestige and lineage. Early engineers from start ups that get traction carry an aura of prestige (warranted or not is a separate question) that they were witness to 'something special' that happened.

Second is lineage. Like it or not, cohorts of engineers often stick together and create informal networks that help populate their careers with better opportunities in the future. Going through the crucible with a team is a great way to form bonds that can last decades.

<comment><USER33> The first part I'd say is even less likely than a big payout. That is only going to be true if it's at a very well known consumer brand or just within a very specific niche

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The last time I got hired into a startup with options, they didn't tell me what percentage of equity the options represented, they just said, "You get 50K." I didn't even ask for any more details because their choice to give numbers instead of a meaningful metric made me think to myself, "OK, so I'm deciding whether to take this based solely on salary, and anything else is just a future bonus, not a deciding factor." I did take the job, but never banked on the options.

To me, failing to give you all the information isn't a deal-killer on a potential job. But it should flavor your approach to the job, and help you decide exactly how committed you are to the work.

<comment><USER35> I never even think about options. They're a non-factor when deciding to work at a startup or any company. I don't even know why they bother to give them out. As an alternative to tiny options they could opt to give people a bonus on acquisition or IPO or find some other incentive to keep talent. I'm honestly more interested in 401k contributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Don't forget: Even if they are a unicorn, they won't IPO for 15 years and you'll be trapped because you can't afford the taxes to leave the company. Imagine working for Palantir.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Investor: So, 0.1% of your ($10M) company works out to $100,000

Isn't that actually $10,000, or is there some startup valuation math that I'm not aware of?

EDIT the article has since been updated with new numbers, and the math now works out as expected

<comment><USER38> Read the rest of the article.

<comment><USER37> I did before I posted, and the rest of the article didn't explain that disparity at all.

That being said, it looks like the article has been updated to use new numbers now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Some of these problems are coming from the reason that many of the startups are unicorns, with other words pyramid schemes.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/201...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2017/05/22/startup- unicorn-or-corporate-ponzi-the-telltale-signs/)

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-tech-startups-behaving- ne...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-tech-startups-behaving-new-age- ponzi-schemes-kirti-dixit/)

</comment><comment><USER40> This is the first "employee perspective" criticism of equity incentives I've read that makes perfect sense. Hat off for that! :)

Sadly in the country where I've founded startups (Sweden) the government mandates that the terms must be really shitty, or there are immediate tax consequences that somebody has to swallow.

<comment><USER41> Strange Sweden has a strong private investor culture possibly employees should be lobbying for a change in the law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those in the comments who are confused about how various equity compensation schemes work, the best guide I'm aware of is [https://www.holloway.com/g/equity- compensation/about](https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation/about). It covers all the common types - RSUs, NSOs, ISOs, 83b elections, and more.

<comment><USER42> This is a great resource.

Only annoying thing is the constant prompt to login with your social accounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This hits me right in the tendies. How many times have I had this conversation to no avail

<comment><USER44> I think I had this conversation word-for-word with one company. I told the CEO my salary demand and he could pay me in cash or in stock at the previous valuation (which had happened a week earlier, so I knew the price and that they had cash). He just kept blowing smoke at me. I decided I couldn't work for someone who lied to me (or, perhaps, believed his own BS?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The oft-cited quote is that it's very, very, very rare to make money working as an employee at a Startup. The farther you are away from the founding team, the harder it is. And 99 times out of a 100 even the founding team doesn't make anything, if there's an upside exit at all.

If you want to work at a startup as a non-founder employee, go into it knowing that you're taking the risk and getting little of the potential upside reward. If the pay is good and you like the company and the work, then do it. But any stock options will be mostly meaningless.

I wish Founders would just let Employees participate in seed stage financing and be in with the same terms as early investors if the employees want to truly risk it.

<comment><USER46> Your last sentence is key. I think it was a way of financing enterprises some centuries ago. Why is it no longer accepted?

<comment><USER45> Yes it's a curiosity.

I mean it makes sense. Let's say your salary would be $120k plus $30k in stock. Rather than giving you stock as options, you could just be given that stock as equivalent value (subject to a vesting schedule) and on the same terms of the Seed Round. No money out of pocket... am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is so true, and incredibly frustrating. I joined a start up as the first employee, and the amount of equity they gave me was ridiculous. I got blinded by the notion of them raising a large amount of money and hiring at a rapid pace; the reality was they failed to raise an A round, then diluted employees despite giving a better valuation for their seed "friends and family" round.

When confronted just talked about how that was the business. Was super frustrating. Once I realized how the CEO operated, I left. I waited for my 1 year cliff though.

</comment><comment><USER48> This thread has reminded me of a concept (whose term I am struggling and failing to remember) that is as important, if not more, than what is traditionally thought of as the cap table.

In the case of a sale, investors with <this term> would get their money back (possibly at an inflated ratio) before the rest of the money from the sale is distributed via equity.

This is important because it means that even if you get favorable stock terms, you might still be screwed (or at least disadvantaged) if there is no money left after this money is paid out.

Can anyone remind me of the term?

<comment><USER49> Liquidation preference

<comment><USER48> Ah, yes, I think it was this. The startup I left had unfavorable liquidation preference seniority for employees (standard) but most of the investors had a liquidation multiplier.

[https://angel.co/blog/liquidation-preference-your-equity- cou...](https://angel.co/blog/liquidation-preference-your-equity-could-be- worth-millions-or-nothing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Good read. I like the new story format to rehash the lively startup vs big tech employment debate on HN.

It could almost use a part 2 to explain aspects of the conversation (how is the employee making a $300k investment, preferred stock, etc), but I don't think anyone is missing the joke.

The story format makes it clear _how_ employees are getting a worse deal than investors. Still, employees receive cash dividends every few weeks (a salary), isn't that a positive?

<comment><USER51> The employees receive "cash dividends" that are typically lower than market rates for a salary plus the second they leave for a new job they will likely end up creatively shafted out of the difference in salary they effectively invested in good faith.

Because they're not working there anymore it's "demoralizing to others" if they retain the ownership that, again, they invested a part of their salary for in good faith. You've probably heard that one before.

It is absolutely outrageous to tell an employee that they're getting paid less in exchange for equity and then turn around and declare that the equity doesn't count the same as if they got paid market rates and just invested a portion of their salary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I have a question on this. I am employed in a startup since the last 3 years. I already have 100k shares vested (5 year window, 3 years passed). I can buy them at a low strike price (<$100 for all shares). However, I think that when I buy the options, I'll have to pay the tax on the amount?

What happens if I don't pay the tax but just buy the options? Will I lose my options because I haven't paid the tax?

<comment><USER53> In the US, any stock held past December 31 of the year in which it was obtained by exerciing an ISO (the most common kind of startup option) generates "income" according to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

AMT is essentially a completely different taxation system that runs in parallel to regular income tax in America. If the shares you exercise are worth a good amount, you will probably wind up paying AMT, especially if you live in a place with high state and local taxes.

After calculating your tax liability for both systems, you have to pay whichever is larger of regular income tax or AMT. Usually this payment, or part of it, comes due April 15th of the next year. Your company is not involved in your reporting and paying these taxes, but it's a federal crime to either misrepresent your income (which omitting the exercise from your filing would be) or not to pay the appropriate taxes.

If you haven't realized yet, a lot of this is complicated, so do your own due dilligence and/or work with a tax professional.

The AMT tax rate is 26% or 28%. The "income" considered by AMT for exercising and holding is equal to the difference between your strike price and the fair market value (FMV) of the stock on the day you exercised. FMV is based on a 409a valuation for companies that are still private. For public companies it's the market price for the stock on that day.

I'm not sure what you mean by your having "a low strike price (<$100 for all shares). For 100k shares, a strike price of $0.001 would cost $100 to exercise 100k shares.

To make the math easy, I'll give a hyptothetical...

You have 100k vested shares with a strike price of $0.10. The company has done well for the past 3 years and now has a FMV of $3.10 per share. To exercise 100k shares, you would need to pay $10k. However, if you're still holding these shares on 1/1/2021, you will have an AMT tax liability due 4/15/2021 of ~28% * ($3.10 - $0.10) * 100k = $84k.

Now it's weird how AMT works, so the above number isn't exactly what you wind up paying, but it's close. In general, the case stated above implies you would owe a sizeable amount in taxes if you exercised and held the stock.

People do this if they're leaving a company and their options will otherwise expire, or if they strongly believe the company will IPO or be acquired soon. Exercising starts a clock on the stock you're holding. If you hold the stock for a year after you exercise, your earnings will then only be taxed at the long term capital gains rate (probably 20%) rather than the ordinary income tax rate (usually higher than 20%). Earnings are the sale price minus the strike price (what you paid to acquire the stock or your "cost basis").

The downside of exercising now is 1) you have to pay cash to exercise, 2) you will generate a tax liability without necessarily having a way to sell your stock, and 3) if the price of the stock falls, the AMT you paid winds up being an even greater percent of the value. There is a way to receive credit on future tax bills for previously paid AMT tax that wound up like this, but it's complicated and best to be avoided.

The upside is mostly to obtain the a lower tax rate on the eventual sale. Most employees still with the company who didn't exercise their stock early don't exercise it until they plan to sell it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I ran into this example recently by some startup in Las Vegas, job said junior flutter dev at $80k plus corp apt paid oh BUT no relocation expenses paid you have to move out their with just your clothes on your back and yet they are still looking past their Aug 1 deadline because they thing they will find a senior flutter dev on those terms..

</comment><comment><USER55> Well, employees are not investors, even if the author is implying that they should be the same, or should be treated the same. Employment contracts are at-will, nobody is forced to agree to compensation.

Of course, if the compensation is horrendously unfair, the top talent will not accept it.

<comment><USER56> > Employment contracts are at-will, nobody is forced

What is the point you are making here, other than stating the obvious? It's the same for investment, what am I missing?

<comment><USER55> The point was that it's a free market, like it or not. Companies won't treat investors the same as employees. They never have. If they do, let me know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> yuuuup.

This is the reason I won't work for startups. If you want me to take a below market rate job then I'm an investor, and you can treat me as such.

I would argue early employees are investing much more, $ for $ than any VC.

</comment><comment><USER58> Are these terms for stock any different for even the first 20-30 employees? Or are they also get the same terms? Why do people say being the first 20-30 employees in a start up is good?

<comment><USER59> The terms are often the same, but the percentage is more like 1% than 0.1%. Also the easy way up the management chain is to be a warm body in a rapidly growing company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Early exercise and ISOs fix a lot of these problems.

</comment><comment><USER61> Isn't this capitalism? Labor and capital are two different factors of production. If you're willing to take the pay cut and risk associated w/ joining a startup, but are unhappy with the returns, why wouldn't you just keep your job, invest the $100,000, and get access to the preferential terms given to capital?

<comment><USER62> Good luck investing in private companies with $100k. The only way us serfs can get access to those opportunities is to chain our futures to the company and go work for them. Also means we can't diversify our portfolio like the VCs can.

<comment><USER63> You can diversify by investing in public markets, where you have actual liquidity. I've made more off of the Facebook stock I bought after the IPO than I have from any of the startups I worked for. One did have a "successful" exit, meaning the returns were positive, though nothing to write home about. I would've been better investing that money into Apple or AMD. All the people complaining about their worthless stock options need to realize that generally, the investors all got screwed, too.

<comment><USER62> The whole thesis of VC funds is to invest in many companies and have a few home runs drive returns. VC-backed companies failing is just the cost of doing business in a random extremistan world. For programmers it's as you say - either nothing, or at best "nothing to write home about". Unless you win the lottery.

<comment><USER63> Yep, I understand. I've worked for 5 startups in roughly 20 years. Only one had any real success, resulting in that "okay" outcome. I have more than enough capital to meet accredited investor status, and wouldn't invest in a private company again. (I have in the past and know I'll never see that money again.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> As an investor I don't ever recall getting a paycheck from a company.

<comment><USER65> How many hours of work do you do for each company you invest in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> > Founder: Sure. We're looking for a $100,000 commitment, and in return, you > would be getting 0.1% of the company.

Founder: Sure. We're looking for a $100,000 commitment, and in return, you would be getting 0.1% of the company on top of $100,000 in pay.

FTFY

<comment><USER67> No, the $100,000 commitment represents the opportunity cost compared to a higher paying job.

That is, if the distinction is between:

1) $150,000 + 0.1%, or

2) $250,000

Picking (1) would equal trading $100,000 for 0.1%.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Incorporating a business and initial legal work: go solo or use a lawyer? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently at the brink of starting a business, and thus am looking to form an LLC (open to the idea of a C-Corp as well though) in DE, as well as drafting our first Master Service Agreements and employee contracts.
The way I see it, I have two options: use a law firm that will charge me <$3000 to set up all these initial legal documents, or try and save some of that money and use rocketlawyer/legalzoom and do so myself.
Does anyone have experience/input around this?
Many thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Don't waste time getting a master services agreement reviewed by a lawyer, because big clients are never going to let you use your own master anyways.

Do talk to a lawyer before incorporating with multiple cofounders, because you need vesting. Do not mess that up. It is a big deal.

Don't waste too much money on company formation, though. Try to keep the transaction with the lawyer focused solely on vesting. There are lots of other things you can do suboptimally during company formation, but they aren't going to matter so much that you should spend extra money today to deal with them.

Do talk to a lawyer before signing your first employment agreement, but don't do it until you actually need to do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, thanks for the insights.

"Don't waste too much money on company formation, though. Try to keep the transaction with the lawyer focused solely on vesting. There are lots of other things you can do suboptimally during company formation, but they aren't going to matter so much that you should spend extra money today to deal with them."

Could you expand a bit on this? When you say "Try to keep the transaction with the lawyer focused solely on vesting" do you mean basically making sure that all stipulations around vesting are ironclad and super straightforward?

<comment><USER2> Yes; don't, on the other hand, waste lots of time on multiple classes of stock, or on discussing the benefit of S versus LLC or C versus S; you can end up paying thousands of dollars for what should cost you a couple hundred tops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> LegalZoom is perfectly adequate for incorporating, particularly if you're doing it solo and don't need to worry about e.g. equity or vesting between multiple partners.

With regards to getting an MSA drafted: many consultants just use one from NoLo or similar. Your larger clients who most care about the details will simply refuse to use yours and counterpropose using their standard paper. You will say that you'll accept their standard paper pending legal review and pay a lawyer a few hundred bucks per incident. Your lawyer will, ideally, prevent you from agreeing to any term that "gives away the store", like e.g. an IP assignment or non-compete which would prevent you from ever doing anything in a related field again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input. FWIW, we are looking to form a multimember LLC. I've read over several operating agreements and we're both on the same page as far as that goes, not sure if that might alter your feedback.

<comment><USER2> Do talk to a lawyer before forming a multi-member LLC. If there's any chance that any subset of the members of that LLC will go on to develop something bigger, you need to work out vesting and control.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for the input. Right now the only members of the LLC are my cofounder and myself. We intend to keep it that way (and dole out shares to investors and employees down the road). As for vesting, he and I are on identical schedules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I posted some notes and links to suggested reading in this area, adapted from a talk I've given several times for Houston start-up forums _[fora? fori?],_ at [http://www.OnContracts.com/legally- lean](http://www.OnContracts.com/legally-lean). As it happens, in different places the notes cite both @patio11's and @tptacek's comments here at HN.</comment>


Clayton Christensen taught me patience, showed me love, confidence and hope - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/africa/1792488/harvards-clayton-christensen-leaves-a-legacy-of-love-and-hope/ <comment><USER2> James Allsworth was a friend and co-author with Christensen. I found his eulogy heart warming.

[https://exponent.fm/episode-180-its-been-a- week/](https://exponent.fm/episode-180-its-been-a-week/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've only been in tech for 6 years so I had never heard of him before his passing recently. I ordered his Innovators Dilemma and Innovators Solution after reading about his influence. Im pumped to read them!</comment>


Jason Scott: Preserving Our Digital Pre-History - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001309.html <comment><USER2> If you pledge money to Archiveteam please pledge some to archive.org as well, they have a substantial workload there and could really use the money. They're less 'glamorous' but they are certainly in for the long haul. And they've done as much or more than anybody else to make this happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> I pledged $25. I love these types of things... this reminds me of Corey Haines' "journeyman programmer" donation drive (<http://pledgie.com/campaigns/5917>), as well as the Ruby Mendicant initiative (<http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/proposal>). The community has such power!</comment>


Yiwu: The Chinese city where Christmas is made and sold - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141218-the-hidden-home-of-christmas <comment><USER2> I visited Yiwu last year. It was fun looking around and seeing all of these item. But I imagined it to be lively, yet there were very few people shopping around in the area. I've asked the sellers why. They said it's because most of their clients buy their items online already but before there were a lot of people shopping at Yiwu.

Things to note: For Christmas shoppers, they only sell wholesale (1000 pcs or more depending on the product, 100 pcs if the item is pricey). Most stalls wouldn't sell you anything if you will only buy a few items even if you try to explain you need it as a product sample.

Since it is wholesale, make sure you order it in advance as most of their products are located in different province in China. Some of them have to ship it to Yiwu first and they would advice that your orders will arrive 3-5 days.

If you are just travelling using the train and need to carry all your items, don't buy too much because you have to walk a very long path with very high stairs carrying all of those stuff (No elevator). And you only have 15 mins time to walk from train station to train platform.

Advice: Rent a car from Yiwu to Shanghai for example. It's not that expensive. They also have shipping companies to your country, so you can ship your items to your country. It looks risky because it's not UPS or DHL, but it did arrived at my place so their shipping is ok.

Almost all of the sellers don't know how to speak English. It's a must to have a translator.

Yiwu Hotel prices are very cheap and provides nice accommodation. I love the food in the area and it's cheap too! :)

For me, best and fastest way to travel to Yiwu: Shanghai then take train to Yiwu. :)

It was fun! :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The sheer size is almost unimaginable from the perspective of an individual walking around, if the 4 million sq m listed in the article is accurate. For comparison, that means Yiwu is roughly 400x larger than an average Walmart -- and certainly must be much more densely stocked.

I recently visited Seoul's Dongdaemun shopping area and the scale was shocking. It includes dozens of massive, multi-story buildings that span roughly 10 city blocks. When it was built in 1970, it was the largest such market space in Asia. (They claim it is still the largest, but perhaps the distinction is because Yiwu is considered a city.)

If the average city block is ~10k sq m, then 10 blocks with an average of 4 stories per building yields 400k square meters of space.. which is a mere 10% of Yiwu's claimed size -- wow! You could spend weeks walking around Dongdaemun without seeing everything, but the experience was similar to what the article describes Yiwu as -- booth after booth of the same types of mostly wholesale merchandise.

<comment><USER4> I visited Dongdaemun a few times as well, as well as a similar electronics markets in Beijing and Shenzen. Same for clothes.

It does wonders to really make you feel globalization and industrialization at scale in a way that can't be explained or grasped in a classroom, and how much markup gets added before you see the items landing in your local luxury shopping mall, together with nice looking sales people telling you what a bargain you're getting or how special the items are. Don't be fooled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually visited Yiwu to tour a painting factory as part of a China trip to visit artists.

The infamous painting of the rows upon rows of identical paintings and one painter walking down the isles is from a factory in Yiwu. [https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how- to...](https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to- paint-10000-paintings/)

</comment><comment><USER6> In Michigan, just North of Flint, we've got the small Bavarian village of Frankenmuth which is a huge tourist draw with lots of handmade German crafts.

[http://www.frankenmuth.org/](http://www.frankenmuth.org/)

Just outside town is Bronner's [https://www.bronners.com/](https://www.bronners.com/) which is a superstore dedicated just to Christmas and open every day of the year except Christmas. It's a unique only Michigan attraction, never seen anything like it in my travels across America. I would imagine nowadays most of their merchandise comes from Yiwu.

</comment><comment><USER7> Many times in my life I've looked around at all the factory manufactured things and have been amazed first at the amount -- that so much of my material life is made in a factory -- and then have wondered, how much of earth is covered in factories? in that, how much does it really require to produce soooooo much, as it is not just around me, but around most of the world's people. It is probably only a small bit of the earth's total land area, but I do wonder.

</comment><comment><USER8> I live in Yiwu, AMA.

<comment><USER9> Just out of curiosity, is there any child labor involved in this? Also, what proportion of local population is doing this (considering both workers and business owners)? Why this city, but not other cities around? Anything special of your hometown? Thank you!

<comment><USER8> Most of the workers are coming from places outside Yiwu, and their population has exceed the local ones. And most of local population are business owners and factory owners.

I haven't heard of any child labor involved, For Yiwu is rich and has very high level of education and not lacking of workers here.

I think what made Yiwu as a global wholesale place is most of its history. The first group of Father-Candy-Man came in 1600s.[1]

It has many many foreigners and a good culture around them, you'll love it when you come and visit it.

[1] [http://www.yiwu-market-guide.com/yiwu-market- history.html](http://www.yiwu-market-guide.com/yiwu-market-history.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 2014\. But worth a second look, because nothing much has changed, and because the composition of some of those photos is stunning.

<comment><USER11> Well, much more trading business is done online now, coupled with a general slow down in the Chinese economy/world trade:

[http://www.voanews.com/a/wholesale-capital-of-the-world- grap...](http://www.voanews.com/a/wholesale-capital-of-the-world-grapples- with-slowdown/3323010.html)

<comment><USER10> From the friendly article: _The sheer scale of what's in front of me belies the fact that Yiwu market's heyday was in the past – much of this trade is now migrating online, to websites such as Alibaba and Made In China._

<comment><USER11> That was 2014, it has accelerated greatly in 2016.

<comment><USER12> Nice try. Yiwu is still HUGE, and a great place to find products to sell, or a place for a product you need.

<comment><USER11> No one is denyng that, but like every other trading mall in china, times are changing. Yiwu gets the brunt of it because it got so much business, but the traders from the Middle East and Africa have cut back.

Next thing you'll tell me that the Canton Fair is still going strong, which it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> haha. Nice to see my hometown appears in hacker news ;)

<comment><USER14> Do you know any of the people that work or have worked in these factories? What do they think of this work? What do they think of the people that endlessly consume these things?

<comment><USER15> These days probably half of the goods are sold in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like something from the Twilight Zone.</comment>


United becomes latest carrier to put economy passengers in rows of 10 seats - - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-travel-briefcase-united-boeing-20171021-story.html <comment><USER2> It's not too often that you see widening income inequality in such an unambiguous, tangible, visible form.</comment>


On Proof And Progress In Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1994-30-02/S0273-0979-1994-00502-6/S0273-0979-1994-00502-6.pdf

<comment><USER2> Minor note: Thurston's 'geometrization conjecture', which Thurston talks about near the end of the essay, has since been proven by Grigori Perelman. This article was apparently written before then. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrization_conjecture>

edit: article was published April 1994, Perelman's first paper appeared on the arxiv in November 2002

</comment><comment><USER3> Please use [pdf] in the title when submitting pdf files</comment>


Ask HN: Why not use CloudFlare authoritative DNS? - <AUTHOR> Many advocate using Google DNS or OpenDNS instead of your ISP's DNS servers (recursive DNS) because of security and performance.
If we apply the same advice to authoritative DNS are there any reasons why using CloudFlare's DNS servers should not be used?
Note: For the purpose of this discussion I'm assuming that we are only interested in CloudFlare authoritative DNS and not their SSL services. <comment><USER2> There's a recent discussion here [https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1871816-good-dns- host...](https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1871816-good-dns-hosting- options?from_forum=215) about DNS providers and why using for instance CloudFlare DNS rather than your registrar's DNS servers is a good idea.

TLDR: Hover is a domain reseller and DNS provider who a few days ago suffered a DDoS attack which disrupted everyone who was using their DNS servers. Hopefully if you had your domain registered with Hover, but used CloudFlare DNS you'd not have experienced any disruption.</comment>


Buyer Beware: My Apptopia Refund Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.moxone.me/post?pid=4

<comment><USER2> I think this has been posted at least twice before in the last few weeks.</comment>


Did anyone ever figure out what happened to HN's nickb? - <AUTHOR> There is this thread here that never got resolved:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991147
I ask because I know him and also never figured out what happened. <comment><USER2> _I ask because I know him_

Do you know him as in you have met him in person, and know the real-world name he has besides his screenname? I hardly know anyone on Hacker News on that basis.

Not fully on this subject, but found in a thread linked from another tread I just looked up about nickb, it's interesting to look at Paul Graham's comments from 2251 days ago[1] about why he didn't want Hacker News to grow too big.

"It's a combination of motives: I want there to be a site that's like Reddit used to be; I want a real application to drive the design of Arc; and it's good advertising for YC.

"All three are best satisfied by a medium-size site with good quality links and comments, so I am definitely not hoping News.YC becomes the next Digg."

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100182)

<comment><AUTHOR> I know a Nick Bobic personally, a really smart and ambitious compsci guy from Ottawa. He is the guy mentioned in all those articles (Cryptobox, Excino, WiPlay, the Gamasutra article, etc.) listed in the other thread. I got involved in some of his endeavors, but not the main companies he did. He was two or three years ahead of me at Ottawa University. Last I chatted with him online was around 2005 (and he told me to buy AAPL, heh.)

That said, I can not personally confirm Nick Bobic is nickb, but it fits pretty well and others in that old thread seem to be sure of it.</comment></comment>


Coffee extinct by 2080 due to climate change - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coffee-could-be-extinct-by-2080-due-to-climate-change-destroying-areas-suitable-for-growing-beans-a7222241.html <comment><USER2> Can't we engineer a strain of coffee that grows under different climate conditions?

</comment><comment><USER3> Title should read wild coffee. Not all coffee as title suggests.</comment>


Donald Trump, Marco Rubio Won GOP Debate, Poll Finds - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/11/11/donald-trump-marco-rubio-won-gop-debate-poll-finds/ <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this and wanted to put the word "flawed" before "poll". Mainly because this got front page mention on the WSJ website but if you read how the poll was done it's clearly suspect in it's methodology.

<comment><USER2> What independent indicators would there be if the majority of national polls had margins of error so far underestimated as to be meaningless? Particularly this far into the future from an election which would provide some assessment of accuracy. Or, put a different way, what published assurances exist that a particular poll has resulted from a properly random sampling of the voting populace? (often: the cell-phone screening problem) At the very least there's a bias to judging a poll as having some accuracy because of the "weather prediction paradox", which is: I say I can predict the weather 23 days from now with perfect accuracy because I can change and refine my prediction as that day approaches and say I was 100% correct in my prediction 22 days ago given my data then as now conditions (or voters' minds) have changed.</comment></comment>


Editorial: Desktop-Class Plain Text Productivity on iOS - <AUTHOR> http://omz-software.com/editorial/ <comment><USER2> I was expecting to find a video demonstrating ease of use.</comment>


The Fate of Most Silicon Valley Drones: 'Live Work Work Work Die' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/books/review/silicon-valley-live-work-work-work-die-corey-pein.html <comment><USER2> Yup. Let's discuss the shiny framework du jour and make absolutely sure that we ignore the building Butlerian Jihad.

This will end well.</comment>


Willoughby Wallace Hooper: Photographer of Death - <AUTHOR> https://madrascourier.com/biography/willoughby-wallace-hooper-photographer-of-death/ <comment><USER2> > in one narrated incident, a sepoy was mutinied in his camp and started > firing on his officers. Rather than rush out of his tent with a gun, Hooper > charged out with his camera and attempted to photograph the assailant.

Willoughby seems like a true artist, gambling his life for a photograph. Calling him an "Indifferent bystander" seems like a rash reaction by those who don't understand the power photographs like these have in the public eye.

Sure, he could have fed these groups of families and children going through extreme famine instead of taking photos, but those families were a drop in the bucket of starving people in India. Sometimes spreading images to the masses is more affective than helping a few people.

</comment><comment><USER3> _I do not think, Sir, that the most tenacious money-lover could look upon these indisputable evidences of human suffering without experiencing the impulse to do something in the way of alleviation._

Would that this were true.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really dislike seeing real world pictures of death.

<comment><USER5> And yet you clicked.</comment></comment>


BitHound Announces Support for Bitbucket - <AUTHOR> https://www.bithound.io/blog/post/bithound-announces-support-for-bitbucket

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the kind words @thealphanerd, really happy to hear you're liking bitHound and the integration with Bitbucket!

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey, it's Dan from bitHound, happy to see this on Hacker News. Here to answer any questions that anyone might have :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Happy to see Dan's company doing well. I was CTO at a HyperDrive startup and Dan helped me on a number of occasions with our process. Very talented and intelligent guy.

</comment><comment><USER4> An amazing product! Super excited to see support for more vendors.

</comment><comment><USER2> Thanks @markeroon, you're too kind. Always happy to help :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> awesome!</comment>


Nvidia Ampere GA102 GPU Architecture [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/ampere/pdf/NVIDIA-ampere-GA102-GPU-Architecture-Whitepaper-V1.pdf <comment><USER2> I posted this a day or two ago:

The A100 whitepaper "spoiled" a lot of these factoids already. ([https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data- Cent](https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent)...) The new bit seems to be the doubling of FP32 "CUDA cores" (I really hate that word: when Intel or AMD double their CPU pipelines it doesn't mean that they're selling more cores, it means their cores got wider... anyway). A100 didn't have this feature (I assume A100 was 16 Floating point + 16 Integer "Cuda cores" per CU like Turing. Correct me if I'm wrong)

You don't need to read the whitepaper to understand that NVidia has really improved performance/cost here. The 3rd party benchmarks are out and the improved performance is well documented at this point.

The FP32 doubling, is one of the most important bits here. But fortunately for programmers, this doesn't really change how you do your code. The compiler / PTX assembler will schedule your code at compile time to best take advantage of that.

The other bit: larger L1 / Shared memory of 128kB per CU, does affect programmers. GPU programmers have tight control over shared memory, and is very useful for optimization purposes.

\</comment><comment>----

GDDR6's improved memory bandwidth is also big. "Feeding the beast" with faster RAM is always a laudable goal, and sending 2-bits per pin per clock cycle through PAM4 is a nifty trick.

Sparse Tensor Cores were already implemented in A100, and don't seem to be new. If you haven't heard of the tech before, its cool: basically hardware accelerated sparse-matrix computations. A 4x4xFP16 matrix uses 32 bytes under normal conditions, but can be "compressed" into 16 bytes if half-or-more of its values are 0. NVidia Ampere supports hardware-accelerated matrix multiplications of these 16-byte "virtual" 4x4xFP16 matrixes.

I swear that RTX I/O existed before in some other form. This isn't the first time I heard about offloading PCIe to the GPU. Its niche and I don't expect video games to use it (are M.2 SSDs popular enough to be assumed on the PC / Laptop market yet?). But CUDA-coders probably can control their hardware more carefully and benefit from such a feature

<comment><USER3> > The FP32 doubling, is one of the most important bits here. But fortunately > for programmers, this doesn't really change how you do your code.

Early benchmarks are showing games under-performing quite a bit in the worst cases. The crux of the issue is that it's not /exactly/ a no-compromise doubling of FP32. Each data path per SM can either do 2xFP32 or 1xINT32/1xFP32 per clock cycle. So if your game or application has any significant INT32 operations scheduled, all of a sudden you're back to the number of FP32 cores you had last generation, though you get the benefit of parallel INT32 execution.

It's a pretty cool architecture overall though.

<comment><USER4> Its not uncommon for GPU workloads in games to max out about 20% INT32 calculations, but alas its enough to drop the FP32 performance quite a bit. I suspect Nvidia next time will probably separate out the INT32 and 2x FP32 units and gradually move towards going towards a better ratio of hardware that better suits the usual workload split.

<comment><USER5> Due to the lower amount of INT32 in game loads as you stated, I don't think that separating INT32 and FP32 hardware makes a lot of sense, because you can share a substantial amount of the hardware between the two overall leading to space savings.

<comment><USER6> On the contrary, "dark silicon" instead suggests that separating fp32 and int32 (now in GA102/104, fp32 and int32/fp32) data paths at the cost of more die space usage currently makes excellent sense. (See also: tensor cores, ray tracing cores.) Jensen Huang very briefly alluded to this when during the GA102/104 announcement he mentioned the end of Dennard scaling.

<comment><USER5> But the GA102/GA104 doesn't have seperate execution units for INT and FP32 because the INT also does FP32. So I don't see how that shows that separating FP32 and INT hardware makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These GPU architectures are too complicated for my taste. It reminds me of the days of segmented memory, and makes me feel like having to jump through hoops all the time. I'm curious if people have tried to invent something more elegant, and where these approaches have failed.

Also, the fact that NVidia has probably patented this particular architecture makes it less interesting for me to really dig into.

<comment><USER8> It's a good question actually. Intel tried to make a GPU called Larrabee that was mostly a bunch of small x86 cores with giant vector units. Turns out that it couldn't compete in rendering performance on existing games (in 2010) without the fixed function units that GPUs have, so they canceled it as a GPU. It did result in the AVX-512 instruction set though.

I think the idea still has promise but there's a chicken and egg issue where you'd really need to rearchitect game engines and content pipelines to take full advantage of the flexibility before you'd see a benefit. It's possible that it would work better today, and it's also possible that Intel just gave up too early. In some cases we're already seeing people bypassing the fixed function rasterizer in GPUs and doing rasterization manually in compute shaders [1] [2].

[1] Doom Eternal: [http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2020/RenderingDoomEte...](http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2020/RenderingDoomEternal.pdf)

[2] Epic Nanite: [https://twitter.com/briankaris/status/1261098487279579136](https://twitter.com/briankaris/status/1261098487279579136)

<comment><USER2> Fujitsu's A64FX ARM is proof that 512 bit SIMD can work on a CPU based platform.

<comment><USER9> For graphics use GPUs perform a very significant amount of work in hardware (rasterization and texture interpolation being the two computationally most intensive [probably followed by ROP, which blends pixel shader output into the framebufer]; you can easily calculate that the ALU bandwidth of the TMUs is about the same order of magnitude as all the shader cores), which gives them a huge efficiency lead over anything purely done with programmable hardware only.

<comment><USER10> Michael Abrash had a great series of articles in Dr. Dobbs detailing how he came to work for Intel (which spun Larabee) after talking at a game conference with some of their people to ask them for a lerp (linear interpolation) instruction in x86 extensions[0] :)

Oh and Larabee gave us more than AVX512, it also gave us the Xeon Phis, which were accelerators (much akin to the GPGPU of nvidia GPUs?) aimed at scientific code undeer the promise that "since it's x86, you don't need to change your code that much!". However:

> An empirical performance and programmability study has been performed by > researchers, in which the authors claim that achieving high performance with > Xeon Phi still needs help from programmers and that merely relying on > compilers with traditional programming models is still far from reality. > However, research in various domains, such as life sciences, and deep > learning demonstrated that exploiting both the thread- and SIMD-parallelism > of Xeon Phi achieves significant speed-ups.

(from Wikipedia[1])

So pretty much the same as a GPU. It is a bit unfortunate that, in theory, good OpenCL support could have made running this code in 2/4/8 core CPUs (with or without SMT) or in the thread-beast that are/were the Phis. But that woud've probably required OpenCL to be a bit more mature, and Intel skipped that train too.

[0] [https://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/a-first-look-at-the- larrabe...](https://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/a-first-look-at-the-larrabee-new- instruc/216402188)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi)

<comment><USER2> OpenCL would have been a bad fit for Xeon Phi.

OpenCL is very specifically tailored for GPUs (though FPGAs may benefit). The concept of "constant memory", "shared memory", and "global memory" is very GPU-centric, and doesn't benefit Xeon Phi at all.

I'd assume that any OpenCL program would simply function better on a GPU, even compared to a 60-core in-order 512-bit SIMD-based processor like Xeon Phi.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Xeon Phi's main advantage really was running "like any other x86 processor", with 60 cores / 240 threads. But you still needed to AVX512 up your code to really benefit.

Honestly, I think Xeon Phi just needed a few more revisions to figure out itself more. It was on the market for less than 5 years. But I guess it wasn't growing as fast as NVidia or CUDA.

<comment><USER10> Maybe I was mixing up names in my head, but I remember from 5~10 years back an Open[Something] (thought it was OpenCL) that in theory could transparently handle multithreaded code across single/dual/quad[0] core or GPGPU (either nvidia or AMD).

This is what I had in mind when I wrote "if Intel had given it good OpenCL support". Again, maybe I'm mixing things up in my head since my career never took me down that lane to write massively paralell code (though I am a user of it, indirectly, through deep learning frameworks).

[0] back then this was as big a CPU would get

<comment><USER2> There's a version of OpenCL that compiled to Intel, but I'm not very familiar with it.

I remember reading things like: [https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documen...](https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/documentation/iocl- tec-opg/top/coding-for-the-intel-architecture-processors/using-vector-data- types.html)

Where you'd have to use float8 types to be assured of SIMD-benefits on CPU code. As such, its probably more useful to rely upon auto-vectorizers in C++ code (such as #pragma omp simd) and maybe intrinsics for the complicated cases.

Intel does seem to have some level of OpenCL -> AVX tech: [http://llvm.org/devmtg/2011-11/Rotem_IntelOpenCLSDKVectorize...](http://llvm.org/devmtg/2011-11/Rotem_IntelOpenCLSDKVectorizer.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can the FP32 and Tensor core modules compute at the same time, or are they an abstraction over the underlying silicon, and we can only utilize one at a time?

<comment><USER5> Pages 16 and 17 in the PDF have graphs that show them being scheduled concurrently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ampere seems like a great upgrade for gaming. How much of the FP32 improvements will transfer to hobbyist ML researchers training models on a 3080?</comment>


Let Us Prove PG Wrong - <AUTHOR>

"We'll bet a seed round you can't make something popular that we can't figure out how to make money from." - do you know of any examples that would invalidate this, even if the "we" were not YC? <comment><USER2> A free application service where people complain about how much they hate any form of advertisements, which doesn't store cookies, session or any form of data and in fact the only database fields are: (thread{id, title, text}) and (comment{id, text})

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends how you define "make money from". If you mean revenue then there probably isn't an example. If you mean profits then there I am sure there are plenty.

You only have to look at the movie industry. Plenty of popular movies that weren't profitable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sure he meant profits</comment></comment>


8tracks Password Security Alert - <AUTHOR> https://blog.8tracks.com/2017/06/27/password-security-alert/ <comment><USER2> Ok, so the breach was via an employee's Github account that wasn't secured with 2FA. I understand that would have given them access to the source code for 8tracks, but HOW did they get access to database credentials?? I would have assumed best practice would dictate that database server IP addresses and access credentials would have been in a configuration file that is NOT checked into version control??

Most companies go to great lengths to extract credentials, keys and other sensitive information into some sort of environment file, don't they?

Unless they had a copy of their database in text/JSON/XML format uploaded to version control as well??

<comment><USER3> The backups could have been stored in a system protected by github SSO perhaps.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I hadn't thought of that. Makes sense that this could have been the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _If you signed up via Google or Facebook authentication, then your password > is not affected by this leak_

This is why it drives me _crazy_ when I click "login using google" and then it immediately prompts me to create an account with only my email filled in.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for letting us have access to all your personal data!

<comment><USER6> This is not how "login with google" works. Instead it's using Google/Facebook/whatever as a trusted third party to authenticate you.

<comment><USER7> But Google/Facebook/whatever can trivially link all of your accounts through the SSO (and when you access your accounts). Of course, Google can get some of that information from GMail and both can get it from tracking (and GP was talking about the other way around), but it is something to consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I'd like to know and is lacking from this disclosure is what data they stored and was leaked from users, and the hash algorithm they used.

<comment><AUTHOR> Motherboard[0] talks about 18 million accounts compromised, stolen data includes usernames, emails and SHA-1 hashed passwords.

[0]: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbjm83/hacker- ste...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbjm83/hacker-steals- millions-of-accounts-from-internet-radio-service-8tracks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Although the decryption of one particular user's password through brute- > force techniques is unlikely,

This doesn't seem true to me given that many people use weak passwords (even when they think they don't).

</comment><comment><USER10> Here we go again. We see these happening to often.

</comment><comment><USER11> That the Github account did not use 2FA does not explain the breach. How did the attacker get the password?

</comment><comment><USER12> At least the passwords were hashed. I wonder what hash they used though. I'm tempted to bet good money it's going to be an inadequate one like SHA1 or a completely broken one like MD5.

<comment><USER13> When the purpose of hashing is protection of passwords, MD5, SHA1, SHA256, etc. are all effectively equally broken. MD5 vs. SHA1 makes no real difference here.

You can usually tell a company's security posture when they say "all passwords were hashed and salted" without listing the hashing algorithm. If they're using an algorithm actually suited for password hashing, like bcrypt, they'll usually state the name of the algorithm.

<comment><USER12> To be honest I know that MD5 vs SHA1 or SHA512 is irrelevant in terms of password hashing, but personally seeing SHA512 would make me laugh a little less than MD5. Both are inadequate for this particular use-case, but at least seeing the modern hash would mean they tried to do the right thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wish all sites let you login with one of the big identity providers like google or Facebook.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely not, it ties all of your information together trivially. People should just use password managers with a unique password for each website. Then you don't really about one site's bad security meaning that your security on another site is ruined (with SSO that's also an issue, you just trust the SSO provider more explicitly). You only care about whether data was accessed or modified with a particular service.

<comment><USER15> No, I prefer Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER7> And if your Google or Facebook account is hacked...?

<comment><USER16> Same as if your password manager account is hacked.

<comment><USER17> There are non-cloud based password managers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


10 JavaScript concepts you need to know for interviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.codementor.io/arnavaggrwl/10-javascript-concepts-you-need-to-know-for-interviews-b6j6kp1y1 <comment><USER2> It is strange that the author has not included the use of Promises and the async keyword. Should be essential knowledge today.

> Value vs. Reference — Understand how objects, arrays, and functions are > copied and passed into functions. Know that the reference is what's being > copied. Understand that primitives are copied and passed by copying the > value.

> Scope — Understand the difference between global scope, function scope, and > block scope. Understand which variables are available where. Know how the > JavaScript engine performs variable lookup.

I'd say the above two are essential to know in 99% of programming languages out there.</comment>


The woman who saved Stephen Hawking's voice and gave the tech to those in need - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-20-2018-1.4583785/meet-the-woman-who-saved-stephen-hawking-s-voice-and-then-gave-the-technology-away-to-those-in-need-1.4583922 <comment><USER2> I recall reading somewhere that Stephen Hawking's original voice was a DECtalk, specifically a voice included with it called "Paul". I'm guessing that, in order to keep this voice, someone had to dump the samples from a DECtalk or even call up HP to see if they could buy the masters. The article says he copyrighted the voice, so I'm willing to bet it was more the latter.

It's interesting to note that until 2001, the "Paul" voice was used by NOAA to broadcast weather alerts to automatic weather radios. It's also interesting to note that the voice itself was a series of samples recorded by Dennis Klatt, a researcher who dedicated his career to helping the disabled speak again and passed away shortly after the DECtalk was released. That Hawking was able to adopt it as his own, is a rather sweet tale with a cyberpunk twist.

You can compare the DECtalk "Paul" voice with Klatt's own voice here: [http://www.festvox.org/history/klatt.html](http://www.festvox.org/history/klatt.html)

<comment><USER3> the master from his voice never belonged to HP, it is owned by Nuance after multiple acquisition. The original owner was Speech Plus, who made the CallText 5010 synth he used until this year.

They indeed were looking for the masters [1].

When they found it they made a replacement for the voice synth on software running in a raspberry pi. They had just replaced the the old voice synth back in Jan. [2]

Additionally, Dennis Klatt was the inventor of DECTalk, the three original voices were his own for the male voice, his wife voice for the female voice and his daughter voice for a child voice, they were named Perfect Paul, that was the default voice, Beautiful Betty and Kit the Kid.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking- voi...](https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voice/)

[2] [http://www.hawking.org.uk/the- computer.html](http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-computer.html)

<comment><USER4> > the three original voices were his own for the male voice, his wife voice > for the female voice and his daughter voice for a child voice, they were > named Perfect Paul, that was the default voice, Beautiful Betty and Kit the > Kid.

Don't forget the whispering Wendy. Who was that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little OT, but I think squarely in HN territory:

Years ago, a friend of mine's mother-in-law lost her voice due to cancer. As an engineer, he built her a tool from a toy Casio keyboard and some samples, allowing her to talk using this portable toy.

After that experience, he talked about wanting to create a service by with which people could archive their voices, so that in case of future need they could be loaded as samples for such a device. He'd give them scripts to read and record, from which he'd parse the phoneme samples, and then storing them in a repository that they could later retrieve if necessary.

Today there's probably a need for a lot more security than he'd talked about at the time, but it seems like something that's eminently do-able today. It could be a very cheap and low-cost endeavor, but useful as a sort of insurance because it carries a really high value in the unusual cases where it's needed.

<comment><USER6> This exact thing does exist: [https://www.vocalid.co/legacy](https://www.vocalid.co/legacy)

I believe there's also another service I'm forgetting the name of right now.

<comment><USER7> Lyrebird

<comment><USER8> I experimented with Lyrebird the other night, recording the maximum 300 sentences for their learning algorithm, and I wasn't impressed with the output. With that said, big fan of the idea and I hope they can improve the output over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Initially, Nachman and her team were asked to improve the speed at which he could communicate"

Hawking could only communicate at about 10 words a minute. There has been some work to improve this technology with predictive type, for example.

[https://iq.intel.com/behind-scenes-intel-keeps-stephen- hawki...](https://iq.intel.com/behind-scenes-intel-keeps-stephen-hawking- talking/)

Was curious if the technology has improved much? Eye tracking, gesturing, etc

<comment><USER10> I didn't actually have a great sense for how fast a normal person might talk. In case anyone else is curious, it turns out that normal conversation averages about 110-150 words per minute. That definitely puts into perspective how sluggish 10 wpm is.

[https://www.quora.com/Speeches-For-the-average-person- speaki...](https://www.quora.com/Speeches-For-the-average-person-speaking-at- a-normal-pace-what-is-the-typical-number-of-words-they-can-say-in-one-minute)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone clarify because I'm confused. I thought there were newer alternatives with better hardware but Hawkings wanted to keep his old system. How does giving way his system help when there are better implementations out there?

<comment><USER12> Hawkins wanted to keep the familiar voice he has been using. He did not want it replaced with 'better' voices because he came to identify strongly with the voice.

They (Intel?) replaced the hardware and software with a better system, called Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT). It allowed him to use computer easily (compared to the old system) [0]:

 _The new Intel user interface operates like an engine. A sensor mounted on Hawking 's cheek is detected by an infrared switch attached to his glasses, helping Hawking select a character on his computer. A customized version of the popular SwiftKey app has greatly improved the system's ability to predict his next characters, words and actions so he only has to type the first few characters of a word. That information is relayed to his speech synthesizer.

To search the Web, for example, Hawking previously had to take lengthy routes: Exit from a communication window, navigate a mouse to run the browser, navigate the mouse again to the search bar, and finally type the search text. The new system automates all of these steps seamlessly and quickly._

[0] : [https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/12/02/intel- hawking...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/12/02/intel-hawking- tool/18822665/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do about mentally ill and potentially dangerous employee - <AUTHOR>

I currently work with someone that we suspect is mentally ill.  We hired him a few months ago, and at the time, he was a bit shy, introverted, but seemed to be good.
In the last few months, however, his behavior has turned very erratic and scary.  He mentioned taking medication, but he never explained what kind of medication, and he has stopped things like personal hygiene.  He comes in looking extremely disheveled.  He has had very big mood swings, and has gotten very angry over insignificant things.  He is very much into guns, and has said more than once "Don't piss off someone who has a gun."  He doesn't do any work and is literally dead weight, but we are paralyzed as to what we can do.  We believe he must have been on medication but has stopped taking it, which is why he is behaving like he is.  But we don't want to draw his ire in case something goes wrong.
We asked HR, and they said that we can only do things like put him on a performance plan, etc.  But it's a hot issue because he is potentially mentally ill and they don't want to subject themselves to a lawsuit.  But given the fact that most of the mass shootings have been from mentally ill people, I'm worried given his previous statements that something really bad could happen.
What options do we have in terms of dealing with a potentially violent, erratic co-worker who is seemingly mentally ill? <comment><USER2> 1: please stop linking mental illness to violence. The vast majority of people with a mental illness pose no risk of harm to other people (and are much more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence). Your other colleages are just as likely to be the perpetrators of violence. (You're also wrong about spree killers, many of them did not have a diagnosis or symptoms of mental illness.) if we assume that one in one hundred people has a psychotic style illness that means there are about 3 million people in the US with that diagnosis. There are about 16,500 murders in the US each year. So even if every single US murder was carried out by a person with a mental illness (and a different person was responsible for each murder) we see 16,500 mentally ill murderers and 3 million mentally ill non-murderers.

But, if you really think this person poses a risk of harm to the public (or to themselves) you probably want to contact the police. You might want to look up police powers to detain people with mental health problems and use that language when you report. It's probably useful to keep a diary of erratic behaviour. If the employer knows the relevant doctor it's a good idea to let her/him know.

2: when an employee has a disability (and mental illness counts as a disability) the employer should make reasonable adjustments. So, for personal hygiene it is unreasonable for an employee to turn up at work smelling. A reasonable adjustment would be for the employer to have a meeting with the employee, let the employee know their personal hygiene was not appropriate for work; and find a trusted person who would have that conversation in future. Depending where the business is the employee will get different protection if they have declared their illness. (In some places undeclared illness means no protection (but IANAL)). If they have declared it's possibly okay for the employer to have a friendly meeting to ask if there are any reasonable adjustments that need to be made; and to ask if medical treatment is going well.

3: someone should be documenting all the inappropriate behaviour. At some point the employer should have a meeting to discuss this. Make sure good notes are kept during that meeting. (If it's legal where you are take a recording of the meeting).

But really most of this is standard stuff about dealing with under performing employees. Document the poor behaviour; have the conversation; warn; dismiss.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) It does not seem credible that all this would go on before multiple witnesses with no action whatsoever.

2) is there no dress code of ANY kind?

3) you keep speaking as "we", yet there is no indication that his supervision is in that "we".

4) I find "we asked HR" to be both out of line, and suspect -- it's wholly inappropriate for peers to contact HR in such a context.

</comment><comment><USER4> This post was killed by a spam filter. Sorry; those are more strict for new accounts. We've marked your account legit so it won't happen again if you repost this.</comment>


5 Sales-Spiking Website Tweaks Gurus Don't Know - <AUTHOR> http://attentionthievery.informationhighwayman.com/ <comment><USER2> Ok, what the heck is this?

I decided to go ahead and throw an email at this to see if anything came up. The wording sets my "scam" sensors off like mad. Maybe I just have a learned response to "one step away", "just one click away', "don't let anything stop you know" types of wording.

Anyhow, after seeing that the "click here to enroll for free" thing ... actually seemed to do that, it sent me a confirmation email -- with more "red- flag" wording, a confirmation link, _and a VCard_ on it of all things.

The link did the normal confirmation jump, and included a download to a "cheat sheet" for creating a business website that sells.

The cheat sheet has actual content. A lot of it. A lot of it's "common sense", and there's an interesting consistent misspelling, but it's not bullshit.

This is either a very prolonged scam, which I'm starting to doubt, or what could be a hugely successful marketing campaign for this person and their company. If they're being legitimate in their claim of sending out "one email a day" with a tip to people, for free, where that tip isn't bullshit but is just something that the type of people who respond to "red-flag" wording don't know (or might not, or whatever), that's .... that's a huge market. That will pay you. And you'd be "doing good", reducing ignorance.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, maybe I'm not. Guess I'll have to wait a few days to make a call though.

Edit: Found the product, at $197. That said, if the emails he sends out are legit, it's a novel (to me) method of using this type of thing for sales / marketing of a product that has any sort of substance, and it may very well be worth $200 for the type of people that would buy it. I'm keeping an eye on this.</comment>