Daryl Yeo Doppp

What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn

Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.

This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would

FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.

Effective Engineer - Notes

By Edmond Lau
Highly Recommended 👍
http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/

What's an Effective Engineer?

Recently CSS has got a lot of negativity. But I would like to defend it and show, that with good naming convention CSS works pretty well.

My 3 developers team has just developed React.js application with 7668 lines of CSS (and just 2 !important). During one year of development we had 0 issues with CSS. No refactoring typos, no style leaks, no performance problems, possibly, it is the most stable part of our application.

Here are main principles we use to write CSS for modern (IE11+) browsers:

SUIT CSS naming conventions + SUIT CSS design principles;
PostCSS + CSSNext. Future CSS syntax like variables, nesting, and autoprefixer are good enough;
Flexbox is awesome. No need for grid framework;
Normalize.css, base styles and variables are solid foundation for all components;

This document has moved!

It's now here, in The Programmer's Compendium. The content is the same as before, but being part of the compendium means that it's actively maintained.

Who pays when startup employees keep their equity?

JD Maturen, 2016/07/05, San Francisco, CA

As has been much discussed, stock options as used today are not a practical or reliable way of compensating employees of fast growing startups. With an often high strike price, a large tax burden on execution due to AMT, and a 90 day execution window after leaving the company many share options are left unexecuted.

There have been a variety of proposed modifications to how equity is distributed to address these issues for individual employees. However, there hasn't been much discussion of how these modifications will change overall ownership dynamics of startups. In this post we'll dive into the situation as it stands today where there is very near 100% equity loss when employees leave companies pre-exit and then we'll look at what would happen if there were instead a 0% loss rate.

What we'll see is that employees gain nearly 3-fold, while both founders and investors – particularly early investors – get dilute

Instructions

CloudFlare is an awesome reverse cache proxy and CDN that provides DNS, free HTTPS (TLS) support, best-in-class performance settings (gzip, SDCH, HTTP/2, sane Cache-Control and E-Tag headers, etc.), minification, etc.

Make sure you have registered a domain name.
Sign up for CloudFlare and create an account for your domain.
In your domain registrar's admin panel, point the nameservers to CloudFlare's (refer to this awesome list of links for instructions for various registrars).
From the CloudFlare settings for that domain, enable HTTPS/SSL and set up a Page Rule to force HTTPS redirects. (If you want to get fancy, you can also enable automatic minification for text-based assets [HTML/CSS/JS/SVG/etc.], which is a pretty cool feature if you don't want already have a build step for minification.)
If you

require-from-twitter

Since Twitter doesn't have an edit button, it's a suitable host for JavaScript modules.

How to use

Source tweet: https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/712799807073419264

const leftPad = await requireFromTwitter('712799807073419264');

Using Python 3 + Google Cloud Vision API's OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents

Just a quickie test in Python 3 (using Requests) to see if Google Cloud Vision can be used to effectively OCR a scanned data table and preserve its structure, in the way that products such as ABBYY FineReader can OCR an image and provide Excel-ready output.

The short answer: No. While Cloud Vision provides bounding polygon coordinates in its output, it doesn't provide it at the word or region level, which would be needed to then calculate the data delimiters.

On the other hand, the OCR quality is pretty good, if you just need to identify text anywhere in an image, without regards to its physical coordinates. I've included two examples:

####### 1. A low-resolution photo of road signs

	/*<?php
	///public class PhpJava { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.printf("/%s",
	//\u000A\u002F\u002A
	class PhpJava {
	static function main() {
	echo(//\u000A\u002A\u002F
	"Hello World!");
	}}
	//\u000A\u002F\u002A
	PhpJava::main();

	{
	"AWSEBDockerrunVersion": "1",
	"Image": {
	"Name": "<AWS_ACCOUNT_ID>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/<NAME>:<TAG>",
	"Update": "true"
	},
	"Ports": [
	{
	"ContainerPort": "443"
	}