methodover

There's not, because there wasn't any.

It's like an angry drunk complaining that all the bars he's banned from are coordinating to ban him. It's like, no, you were an angry drunk separately at all of them.

“Those are not gay rights they are human rights”

You are misusing the English language. When a minority is targeted with animus and their rights are systematically violated, we tend to label the campaign to fight back against those things: Gay rights/Pride, Women’s rights/Feminism, African American’s rights, etc. This is done as a matter of pragmatism.

There’s no priortization of one group’s rights over another. Are you trying to say that when a minority is called out as being supported, that it makes you, who is not a member of that minority, feel left out? If not, then what is it? Be specific.

1. No one's saying that companies ought to only advocate for gay rights and leave behind every other issue.

2. I am tolerant towards everyone. It's actually not that difficult.

3. You seem to be a little confused on what gay rights are. Here's a summary: Gay people want to be treated fairly. We want our partner/spouse to be treated equally. We want our children to be treated equally. We want to not be fired for being gay. We don't want to be called names for being gay. We don't want people to hate us for being gay. These things are not special considerations. These things are basic rights.

4. The right thing to do is to be in favor of gay rights.

You might not realize this, but you come off a little bit anti-gay in your post.

> Why are companies promoting "pride"?

First of all, you don't need to put pride in safety quotes.

Second of all, gay rights are human rights. Companies promote them because it's the right thing to do, and because they want all the good things that come along with doing the right thing. I don't think it's all that complicated.

Edit: If you're gonna downvote, at least say why you're downvoting.

The moral isn’t that you should try something new. It’s that if you’re trying something new and not doing great with it — and feeling embarrassed about it, keep soldiering on. Embarrassment is a natural part of the process.

> 6. We have other flaws before our eyes, but our own flaws behind our back.

There has to be a typo here, right?

I marked this as “bullshit” because it doesn’t make sense. But the link says it’s not bullshit...

> From your perspective, you are already fully vested

So, um, about that. I should not have said I have 1.8% in the bank. I actually just have about half of that vested so far. I won't be fully vested until three years from now.

I don't really want to quit. I'm excited about what we're working on and I think it could be really useful for people. I just wish that the upside was a little bigger. I also really loathe the idea of walking away from something that isn't finished, you know?

Plus, all the intangibles are nice: I like my co-workers, I like our full-remote office.

Yeah, I mean you're absolutely right. I'm in an incredible position, and yet, it still feels unfair. I'm 90% sure that it's just that I'm petty and greedy.

And yet, like, at the end of the day the engine that drives the economy forward -- and humanity forward -- isn't cash. It's individual human beings sitting down and putting in the hard work in creating something new and nurturing it for years.

It feels like our economy gives most of the rewards to the people who put in money, and not enough to the people who put in the actual hard work. Even here, where things are amazing for employees.

That 1.8% figure I gave includes shares that have not vested yet. My original stock compensation was significantly smaller. I've received small stock option bumps over the years, including a significant one last year. I have about half of my total shares vested today, and I won't be fully vested until 2021.

I'm pretty sure the equity I have is already incredibly generous for an employee. But yes, I did bring up the issue a couple weeks ago. He doesn't believe we're in a position to go to the board and make any changes to stock compensation at this time. He thinks we should first figure out how to accelerate (with this new project) and then we'd be in a better position to ask for more stock for employees from the board.

The allocation of profits in startups, at least, feels... problematic.

I was the #2 engineer hire when I was hired five years ago. Since then, we haven't become super successful -- yet -- but we're at least at breakeven. We have three engineers and we're working on a huge new project that hopefully will really grow the company.

I have 1.8% equity.

Sometimes when I'm working late or working on the weekend, which is often, I wonder: Is this really worth it?

I'm totally fine with taking a pay cut to build something new, in order to have the chance at making life changing money. But at the equity I have, we'd need to be quite successful in order to get that.

The VCs who funded our seed and series A (the only funds we've raised) will see the lion's share of the profits. Emotionally, that feels odd. We've thrown a significant percentage of our lives, and they've only thrown in money -- and a pretty small amount of it, really. I know it's supposed to make sense from a financial perspective or whatever, but emotionally it doesn't feel fair.

But hey I guess it worked, I have what feels like a small percentage and yet I'm throwing everything I have at this company. I'm likely an outlier, though. I suspect that if VCs and founders gave employees a bigger piece of the pie, they'd have a much more motivated workforce.

I’ve wondered for a long time about crowdsourced “therapy” — a kind of it, anyway.

I don’t want to just hear myself talk for an hour, which is usually what therapy amounts to for me anyway. I want other perspectives. I want to hear other people whove been through what I’ve been through talking deeply and honestly about their lives. And I want enough perspectives that I can figure out for myself what modes of thinking, strategies, etc, I might make the most use of.

The problem is most people are incredibly closed. Myself included. We don’t talk about our internal mental life as it relates to the outside world. Well, we do - but not with much transparency. And we don’t talk about our personal histories, our childhoods, our teenage years, etc. We don’t talk about the intimate details of our lives.

(And we really shouldn’t; to be clear. Not in a way that can be traced back to us. Much of personal histories are deeply embarrassing.)

And yet, we’re supposed to figure out on our own what’s normal and what isn’t.

I feel like I’ve spent literally years learning things that other people figured out a long time ago.

I’ve been thinking for a while about making a website that’s 100% anonymous (but moderated), but encourages people to write honestly about their own lives.

No advice. It wouldn’t be about advice. It’d be only a repository of individual experiences.

I feel like such a site, if done well, could be a real boon to people who are struggling to figure out life, as I was.

I don’t understand how affordable housing isn’t a huge political issue. It’s missing on the left and the right. Housing is way more important, most people would think, than say, free college tuition (left) or reducing immigration (right) — two issues that get tons of coverage by politicians.

Where is the outrage? Where are the action plans and policy proposals? It bothers me.

Seriously.

The first thing I found myself thinking while reading the article was, what was the appropriate response to a society like that? If you’re part of a 16th century expedition, and you’ve come across a nightmare society like this, what’s the right thing to do?

I’m not so quick to dismiss “conquer the country, ban human sacrifice, pave over the temples.” It might not be the worst option. :/

About Pickle—

If we pickle a string which comes from an untrusted source, that’s fine right? There’s no way to format the string or anything such that it exploits any kind of vulnerability with pickle. Right?

There’s nothing in Trumps exec. order about a space force[1]. It’s not clear if Trump was speaking extemporaneously about something they aren’t ready to pull the trigger on or what.

1. https://twitter.com/AaronMehta/status/1008786783436451840

This is a great comment.

As an adult, the way I’ve come to learn is exactly the same as you. It’s way more efficient, too: if you begin with the end and work backwards, you can ignore the things that aren’t very useful. Like if you’re learning how to make a graphics engine and you don’t know linear algebra, you can learn only those parts of linear algebra that are relevant to the work of creating an engine and leave all the other useless stuff behind. (And in linear algebra there seems to be a ton of pretty useless stuff.)

This is probably a bad idea for a mathematician or scientist, but for a programmer who’s in the trenches just trying to build stuff, it’s great.

Things are honestly still pretty secretive. Even here in SF. Anti-gay bias is everywhere and pushes many gay people to just quietly hide their sexuality. Fun fact, one of the two times I was ever called a faggot by a stranger was on an SF Muni bus (I was holding hands with a dude). Stuff like that, plus the long glances and stares, plus you remembering other forms of discrimination, just kinda makes most gay people in my experience very reserved in public compared to straight couples.

Do we know any details about what specific trade secrets were “stolen”?

This is legitimately scary to me. If I change jobs how do I know what the line is between applying past experience and copying trade secrets?

Um. This isn’t nefarious.

We’ve used inspectlet from time to time to help figure out where there are problems in our UI. It tracks mouse movements as part of a complete session. It’s been really helpful.

Ahh, okay. So, it's basically a tax avoidance idea. If my stock buyback costs 20% in taxes on overseas profits, or 10% interest in bonds, then I'll take the bonds.

But wait. Taxes are a one-time thing, right? You pay the 20% (or whatever it is) and you're done.

You're going to have to pay those bonds back sometime, right? Wouldn't you need to pay them off and have to pay that 20% tax rate?

Oh I bet not. I bet there's some tax avoidance trickery that means you pay less in taxes if it's paying off bonds, right?

> least a third of the shares are being repurchased with borrowed money

What?!

That is insane. Right? Like I know I’m just a lowly programmer who doesn’t know jack all about finance, but I thought the whole point of a buy back was that your public company was flush with cash and instead of spending it on capital expenses (am I using that word right? I mean things that grow the business, like say, Facebook buying Instagram) you spent it on buying stock from shareholders.

What the heck is the point of a buy back purchase with debt?! I really don’t understand.

If the article explains it and I missed it, it would be awesome to have it pointed out.

That same quote jumped out at me too. In another sentence they say they don’t have a list of words that trigger demonetization.

Well, YT, you do.

It’s just in your ML model. You let a pattern recognition algorithm create the list for you.

(Yes it’s not quite just a list, but still.)

No, the user's interest. Users were logging into these devices, presumably. They wanted to access their Facebook account on them, Facebook and the device manufacturer figured out how to do it. It sounds like everything is working as intended, there.

> - How on earth does Facebook justify giving direct API access to information that users have, in every setting possible, marked as private?

The user logs into Facebook on the device. This log-in action the part of the user is effectively permission to share data with the device.

> - How on earth does Facebook justify offering deep API access on users who have literally disabled API access to their data?

When the user logs into Facebook on the device, they are giving permission for their data to be transferred via an API to that device.

I do not understand your outrage.

This sort of stuff actually does matter. There are teens and young adults watching Twitch from all over the country, and in many places being gay is not accepted. When I was a teen, companies for the most part delicately avoided homosexuality. Those rare moments where I did get a glimpse of acceptance were huge. I remember watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that highlighted discrimination towards gay people and encouraged empathy[1], and it left me bawling. I was 15 at the time, having grown up with a family that strongly disliked gay people. It very much affected me seeing a show that we all liked reach out a friendly hand towards people like me.

Anyway, point is: this stuff is important. Good for Twitch.

1. The Outcast is the name of the ep, if you’re curious.

> Facebook the website doesn't have much to offer

:thinking_face:

Facebook offers an event planner, a blog platform, photo hosting, video hosting, news aggregation, venmo-like payment system, de-facto single sign on service for most websites

That's in addition to Messenger, which as you said is huge.

Reddit frightens me way more than Facebook ever did. Reddit gives the impression of what ideas are popular with its rating and comment system. But those systems are remarkably easy to manipulate.

Imagine a Russian troll farm operation making a certain favored candidate look far more popular than he is, for example. Or a corporation rallying fake support around a piece of legislation.

Sock puppetry on an industrial scale could pose a serious threat to our democracy. Reddit needs to figure out how they could mitigate that threat.

Maybe I want to remember your name because, let's say, I want to pray for all my customers every Sunday. Or perhaps I want to try and memorize all my customer's names so I can use your name when I see you come in my shop. Or perhaps to track patterns of purchases by my customers. Or perhaps because I think it's important to have a track record of everyone I've sold to, and when, for purposes to be discovered later down the line that I can't think of right now.

In America, I don't need a reason for writing your name down. In the EU on the other hand, all personal data needs to be deleted, unless a specific government-approved exemption applies, as you said.

Quoting the US Supreme Court, in Chicago v. Mosley, 1972:

> Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content. To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship [1]

I'm pretty sure that if the GDPR was copied and pasted into a US law, the Right to be Forgotten would be struck down as unconstitutional very quickly.

1. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/408/92/case.html

The American interpretation of “free speech” is much more broad than in the EU. Here, laws banning hate speech or flag burning or corporate campaign donations are unconstitutional for example. Libel lawsuits are much harder to pull off here as well.

A law requiring businesses and individuals to delete any personal data at the request of the data subject, as the GDPR requires, would have to be extremely narrowly written to survive constitutional muster here, I think.

If I do business with you and write down your name, the GDPR requires that I delete your name if you ask me to (and even if you don’t if our relationship ends). That wouldn’t survive a First Amendment challenge here.