And sometimes the good guys win!
I expect that the fallout from this will also be that the current board of ISOC gets replaced. But maybe that's too much to hope for.
1,043 karma · joined January 31, 2013
I expect that the fallout from this will also be that the current board of ISOC gets replaced. But maybe that's too much to hope for.
So far, there have been two real pain points: 1. Netplan is a mysterious friend who occasionally rearranges my furniture when I'm not looking. 2. Snap is a young kid who wants to make help me get groceries but borrow my car to drive to the store.
I'll leave netplan aside for a moment and focus on Snap.
I got 20.04 to fail badly under KVM using either the just released version or the nightly build because Snap fails. I can see exactly where it fails thanks to Python (cool). It's in an error handler for a UI view that's reading a property that doesn't exist and it hoses the install (ouch). It appears to be triggered because I was testing an odd network configuration.
Once something goes wrong, after that, every change just results in a one-line "apt-get fails" error message.
But consider the implications...
Canonical apparently doesn't have an automated testing system which checks how Snap behaves under failure conditions but they put it into the install process without protections around it. This feels pretty half baked....
Just tried to install 20.04 on LVM. It gets in to a completely broken state if you misconfigure the network due to an error in an exception handler in an Python error handling view in the UI. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
My only tip is that you really have to get the DNS name right. There is no easy way to change it post install. I had a typo on the first pass.
Next step is securing the launch screen. Since it sits behind NGINX, do the configuration there.
There is a reason that the courts have something called 'burden of proof'.
When an individual worker does something a large company doesn't like and they fire him, the burden of proof in my mind is on the company. Because HR has professionals and if they can't tell a better story than what we are seeing, then retaliation is the reason 90% of the time.
It isn't unclear. It is perfectly normal for companies to get rid of the whistle blowers. That's why there are (weakly enforced) laws against it.
LLCs are usually pretty simple. Usually, he has to get your agreement to do anything that dilutes you. Profits flow through as income to you. It is a bit annoying on the majority owner because (a) it is hard to raise capital and (b) you've got to file K-1s promptly every January so I can see why he'd want to get it all back.
ECONOMICS
So he basically values the business at $300K ($4.5K / 1.5%). My rough rule of thumb is that small stakes in small stable business should be worth around x3 ARR. If it is very profitable, it is worth a bit more. If not, it is worth a lot less.
If you can, you should ask him to send over the financial (P/L, balance sheet) and ask tax filing for last year. If he says no, check the operating agreement and see what it says you are entitled to (if anything) but basically ask him how you can judge what the shares are worth without seeing the books.
Personally, if he is willing to give you the books, I'd say that's a good sign that he is offering a buy out to make his life easier not grab the profits.
PRACTICAL
The main problem with arguing a majority owner about getting bought out is that he can always eat up the profits by paying himself more, especially if it is pretty small. The important question is why he wants the equity back.
This is just a negotiation so you want to understand why he wants to equity back and make a positive case for him to either pay you a fair value for it or let you keep it.
Consider framing your equity share as lost wages. Something like, "I took a $10K pay cut to earn that equity. I believe in you and what your doing and would like to stay in and share in the profits. What can I do to help make that happen?"
Consider exchanging the equity to a royalty so that he writes you a check every quarter based on revenue up to some limit (say x3-5 what he would pay today). Companies really can only sustain a 5% royalty on gross revenue and it would be divided between everyone he is buying out.
If he wants to convert to a C corp to raise money, then you could offer to convert to Common in the new corp but I'd tend to get my money out.
FINALLY
There is a tendency for small business owners (me included) to feel entitled to a large share of the profits to value their contributions above those of the people that have worked for them. We tend to take lot more risk -- as an owner, you are usually the last person to get paid. You have to (politely) make your case for yourself to counteract that.
If you are an engineer, I think the easiest/cheapest thing you could offer him as an incentive to think of you as someone he wants as a partner is help with hiring. It could be very useful to him when recruiting if he could point candidates to you as a closer. You'd have good standing to act as a reference for him.
But spare capacity is a good idea, especially if you have real-time traffic.
I kinda worked backwards from the cost. I ran the business for a year on Azure but each 'sample' of the resample took about 2 mins so it precluded any near real-time analysis. I ported the kernel to a GPU locally using python/numba and it ran in about 10 seconds and that was enough to seal-the-deal.
From there, I spec-ed out a GPU server and then machines that matched each role in my environment. I decided I was willing to spend $50K and just started loading up the machines.
I wound up at a facility run by a fiber vendor because they'd sell me a fixed 250mbps pipe for the same price that a data center would sell me 20mbps pipe that bursts to 1gbps. It only works for me because of the nature of my business -- most people would be better off somewhere else.
Choosing a co-loc facility is complicated. My recommendation is to tour and get quotes from 3-5 vendors in your area before choosing anyone. Ideally, take someone who has done it before.
But the real kicker is that I get x5 the cores, x20 RAM, x10 storage, and a couple of GPUs. I'm running last-generation Infiniband (56gb/sec) and modern U.2 SSDs (say 500MB/sec per device).
I figure it is going to take me about $10K in labor to move and then $1K/mo to maintain and pay for services that are bundled in the cloud. And because I have all this dedicated hardware, I don't have to mess around with docker/k8s/etc.
It's not really a big data problem but it shows the ROI on owning your own hardware. If you need 100 servers for one day per month, the cloud is amazing. But I do a bunch of resampling, simple models, and interactive BI type stuff, so co-loc wins easily.
The article ends with "And so economists dusted off Keynes. Countries that enthusiastically followed his advice and used public funds to stimulate demand came out of the recession much better off than those that hesitated. China’s decision in 2008 to inject stimulus spending worth more than 12% of GDP looks smart in retrospect."
The title should really say -- "Keynes was right. Gen Z is screwed because we didn't follow his advice".
But the poor fortunes of Gen Z (in the US) are mostly due to a shift in power to big corporations caused by a systematic dismantling of labor unions and the outsourcing of manufacturing to China. Technology is an enabler but not the central culprit.
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But I don't feel like this is primarily a legal issue. It is a negotiation about property. The contracts come into play but the company and you both benefit more from a negotiated agreement than from a fight. It hurts them if you get mad and just quit, fork, give them a PR black-eye, and take the community with you.
So you should: 1. Take your employment contract and ask an attorney to look at it. 2. Ask if this document gives them the right to transfer control of an open-source project to them. 3. Decide if you are willing to quit over this or not.
Once your head is clear on what you are willing to do, it is time to start negotiating...
Hire the attorney to negotiate for you. Don't do it yourself -- you need a 3rd party and lawyers are professional negotiators. Expect to spend some money -- feels roughly like 5-10 hours if it goes quickly. You should be very clear to your company that you are asking a lawyer to negotiate for you because you want to work something out and you feel like it will destroy your relationship with them if you try to do it yourself.
Then get the attorney to discover why they want legal control of a project that is open-source when they already have you as an employee. If they care about the project and just want to influence the roadmap, they could just pay you to work on it full-time and get most of the benefit. If they feel like they need it for other reasons, see if there is an overlap between what you want and what they want. If they just feel like they own everything you do, you need to decide if that's what you signed up for.
Overall, I find it hard to give any better advice because you only presented what you want and not what the company wants. It could be anything from appearances (their investors want them have control) to money (they see a way to make a lot of money from your work). Until you know what the other party wants, you can't really come up with an agreement.
It will be interesting to see how that shakes out in the next five years.
I don't agree with your take on Amazon. We can't trust the US government to police the large companies. The large companies are too good at (a) walking right up to the line or (b) buying off the people who make/enforce the laws.
Don't understand the downvotes either.
2. Learn how to decompose big problems into a set of little problems. I'm not sure where (if) they teach this in CS but that's the skill that really lets you get somewhere interesting.
3. Find a group of friends and build something together. Most professional programming is a group activity and learning how to communicate and work with other people is super valuable.
This particular problem has always existed in insurance. The best way to make a profit is to not insure sick people. I was hoping the cautionary tale was that it didn't work for the insurer, rather than it being a ripoff for the customer.
Digging a little deeper, it looks like their plan is to implement a telemedicine+drug kiosk system at Chinese scale which is interesting. That should work.
Their PR person claims they hit 80% 'positive' rate on detecting lies using micro-expressions. Seems... unlikely. When the dust settles, it will probably just turn out that that preventing people from lying about identity so you can't escape your past has all the value and the rest of it is worthless to the insurer.
https://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/ping-good-doctor-show...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/shuchingjeanchen/2018/06/06/chi...
I've been planning to see if I can (mis)use it as an OLAP replacement but I haven't had time to get to it.
It was originally envisioned as a sequel to the Hobbit with a slightly more grown up audience. When JRR wrote it, he hadn't even settled on Sauron as the bad guy. He vaguely thought the bad guy would be Treebeard! He got Frodo and co. all the way to Rivendell before he connected his other story (the Silmarillion) to the LOR story.
Bombadil was left in, in my mind, because he had to explain how four hapless hobbits could throw the black riders off the trail and still escape from the forest. And he didn't really have any editorial constraints until the movies came along.
Sure, you can invent some just-so-story to explain him but the truth is that the tale evolved in the decades it took to write and so it has vestigial parts.
1. Uber/Lyft went to the state to get the regulations overturned in a bit of venue shopping. They don't have to do fingerprinting. Happens a lot around here.
2. He failed to mention Austin Taxi Co-op. Some old hippies got together and helped form a normal Taxi company but made it owned by the drivers. It has an adequate but clunky app that is slowly getting better. They grabbed about 2/3s of the regular taxi drivers.
We won't really know how the ride-share market plays out until the subsidy goes away. It reminds me of when Standard Oil would go into town, undercut the local gas station until it fold, and then recoup the cost by raising prices. It is one of the things that the Antitrust laws were specifically designed to stop.
Oddly enough, the way he got around it was to start his own consulting company and hide behind it. Nobody would hire him as an "employee" but they would hire his company without asking about his personal history. Seems like a big loophole but it worked.
Owned by the drivers. Has about 1/2 the traditional taxi drivers in Austin after launching which Uber/Lyft left.
They were trying to get an app built but without the deep pockets of the VCs they appear to have abandoned it. You call them and they dispatch. I miss the payment side more than the ordering side but I only use them to go to the airport of it isn't really the core case where Uber/Lyft excels.
There is a sense of pride and ownership among the drivers. Feels better than both Uber/Lyft and other taxi companies. Doesn't have that desperate feel about it.
Co-Ops do work. They have a different set of owners and thus a different set of incentives.
Sometimes there are differences because different founders contributed different amounts. For example, this schedule wouldn't be fair if one of you had a side job.
Ultimately, it won't really matter. If they think you have too much ownership, they can issue themselves additional stock grants to get you down to what they want you at.