cornellwright

Personally, I'd like to get rid of all coins, and introduce a $0.25 note and call it a day. Round all cash payments up to the next quarter and no more metal money.

Egypt has a 0.25 Egyptian Pound note. The last time I was there it was only worth about US$0.06.

These are fair criticisms, but I don't think anybody has this nailed. I use a mix of Windows, Mac, and Linux, and have found myself walking around with the lid open in all three. Mac seems to handle what you describe better than everyone else, but it's far from perfect.

I have one monitor that used to work fine on Windows and Mac. After a software update the Mac only recognizes it about 1 in 20 tries of plugging and unplugging.

He still went back to work at the first company though. I guess this depends a lot on his personal situation as well.

Yeah the company is lucky he wasn't well on his way to finding a job somewhere else at this point.

Along with the boredom I'd image you have the anxiety of getting fired or laid off if someone realizes you don't actually do anything. Then when you go to get your next job you won't have anything to show for the last n years.

A lot of people recommended practicing coding problems. Along with this, I would add practice talking to people you don't know.

Go to networking events and meet-ups. Offer to give mock interviews to people more junior than you. Have coffee with founders to give them feedback on their ideas. Anything that puts you in unstructured conversation with strangers will make you more comfortable and confident in an interview. You get better at reading people and start to see things from both sides.

Being a software engineer often mainly only requires communicating with a mostly unchanging group of people. Interviewing well requires being able to communicate efficiently with someone you just met. During an interview if you can direct less time and mental energy at just communicating you'll have more for demonstrating that you'll be able to do the job.

This is completely right. I don't think people realize how much tying healthcare to full time employment hurts people and slow innovation.

It makes people stick in bad situations and disadvantages small businesses both financially and in wasted time.

That might be reasonable if their were real competition for high speed internet so that customers could actually vote with their feet if they didn't like their ISP doing that.

I live in the Bay Area and there is only one ISP (Comcast) that offers me more than 5Mbit.

Do you market your house / front yard as a good place to do illegal things (even implicitly) and then take payment from the people doing them while turning a blind eye to whatever conduct is happening?

Not the OP, but I have also interviewed and hired ex-Theranos engineers. I don't think it damaged their career prospects. So long as they can talk about the normal things you talk about at an interview they'll be fine.

I feel like most people recognize that given the huge number of employees, most working there are genuinely good, competent people who got caught up in a bad situation. No reason to hold that against them.

Talk to an employment lawyer. Seriously, they can help shed a lot of clarity on a situation like this.

There are a lot of different ways to game out a situation like this and they depend a lot on your relationship with your boss, what outcome you want, and the specifics of your agreements.

Once you hire someone you have to give them a chance to be successful. As the threshold for firing someone is (rightly) much higher than simply not hiring them, fixing a false positive is much more expensive than missing out on a good candidate.

Also you can fix some false negatives - allow people to interview again for other positions at the company. I've seen multiple people get hired on the 2nd or 3rd time around and ultimately be successful.

Oh please. This is like the (apocryphal) saying everything that can be invented has been invented [1]. It's easy to look backwards and in hindsight say app MVPs were easy and obvious. For most ideas you should be able to distill some quantum of utility into an MVP even now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell#Everythi...

This was one thing I really liked about driving an electric car in the winter - you can start the heater remotely through the app. Since it's an electric heater it warms up way faster than ICE. If it's plugged in, it will not even drain the battery.

The press loves controversy.

I think the previous commenter must have meant "had" as that says as of sometime before the 2012 date on that article the master password allegedly no longer worked.

Still egregious if that sort of early stage stuff hung around that long, but not the same as it being there today.

Source?

When Jonathan Hurst (one of the cofounders) was getting his PhD, his lab was next to mine. We got to (had to) listen to his enormous jumping leg bounce for hours on end. At that point it was mounted on boom attached to a center pivot and the robot wore a circle through the carpet.

It's so cool to see how far this project has come.

You can't "emulate lenses on a screen" unless it's a lightfield display (which it's not).

With higher resolution you could correct for more lens distortion, but you still need lenses, and you won't be able to fix lens flare on fresnel lenses.

When I last renewed my insurance it offered me coverage for driving for rideshare for an extra $50 per 6 months (I think - I've never driven Uber/Lyft, so I didn't look too closely).

If I'm remembering it right that sounds like a very reasonable price

Yeah I've heard stories of some people doing crazy, dangerous, illegal things in small planes and just turning their transponders off.

I was a passenger in a C182 once where the transponder antenna fell off midflight. It was very educational how much trouble ATC had seeing us. Even after telling them exactly where we were, flying the heading they gave us to present the broadside of the a/c to the radar antenna, they basically said "there's something that might be you there, but I can't really tell."

A big jet at FL370 should show up on primary, but I can see it depending on a bunch of factors.

ATC primary radar is pretty weak. Not showing up (particularly after changing flight direction) doesn't mean much. It's very odd (and illegal) for something to be up in flight levels without a transponder though.

If this is not a robot, then what is a robot?

Any lawyer worth talking to will give you a free, confidential, initial consultation and discussion of potential costs that will be help you decide if it is worth going after. Most likely the lawyer sending a letter will cost like $500 and get their attention.

As for what kind of lawyer, one that does work for startups should know the ins and outs of this.

$100/hr is only that much if you bill 40 hrs per week, every week. It does not account for non-billable time, vacation, sick time, etc. You are also taxed higher and have to provide your own benefits. You are taking on higher risk due to the temporary nature of most engagements.

If you're billing $100/hr you're not making bad money, but it's nowhere near equivalent to a $200K W-2 job.

One of the worst things about the current tax code (and soon-to-be new tax law) is the cost of compliance. You can argue about high tax or low tax and who should pay more than whom, but cost and time to comply does not create any value and is an artificial way that we make our country less competitive.

This article is a clear example of that, laying out 10 different things you need to know with complicated formulas for deduction and professions that do and do not get benefits. What a mess.

I've been through YC. I'm on the board of a YC company that has raised an A round. The negative signaling affects you're talking about just aren't there.

YC does have a positive signal - meaning that any stamp of approval from YC will make you do better than not. This is why demo day rounds are frequently oversubscribed. They do not have a negative signal - by that I mean getting rejected will be treated the same as not applying.

Not getting accepted isn't seen this way. YC itself says they can't fund all the companies they want to. I know a number of founders who were rejected from YC and while they don't plaster it on their website, they don't hide it if it comes up.

YC is not some magic oracle at picking startups. They just have way better dealflow because of their reputation and how simple their process is.

A big part of how YC got where they are is by being more founder friendly than anyone else, creating an impressive positive feedback loop. Adding exclusivity would destroy that. The partners have a much more long term focus than this.

The counter argument to this is the YC Continuity fund [1]. It already does invest in some YC co A rounds, and them not investing does not have a negative signal. It is in YC's best interest to try to avoid negative signaling about any companies they've funded as that potentially limits YC's upside.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity/