Jaimy Emmanuel jemmanuel

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?

Getting Started in Scala

This is my attempt to give Scala newcomers a quick-and-easy rundown to the prerequisite steps they need to a) try Scala, and b) get a standard project up and running on their machine. I'm not going to talk about the language at all; there are plenty of better resources a google search away. This is just focused on the prerequisite tooling and machine setup. I will not be assuming you have any background in JVM languages. So if you're coming from Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Haskell, or anywhere… I hope to present the information you need without assuming anything.

Disclaimer It has been over a decade since I was new to Scala, and when I was new to Scala, I was coming from a Java and Ruby background. This has probably caused me to unknowingly make some assumptions. Please feel free to call me out in comments/tweets!

One assumption I'm knowingly making is that you're on a Unix-like platform. Sorry, Windows users.

Getting the JVM

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

Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documents

Introduction

Knowledge Bases (KBs) are effective tools for Question Answering (QA) but are often too restrictive (due to fixed schema) and too sparse (due to limitations of Information Extraction (IE) systems).
The paper proposes Key-Value Memory Networks, a neural network architecture based on Memory Networks that can leverage both KBs and raw data for QA.
The paper also introduces MOVIEQA, a new QA dataset that can be answered by a perfect KB, by Wikipedia pages and by an imperfect KB obtained using IE techniques thereby allowing a comparison between systems using any of the three sources.
Link to the paper.

Related Work

Cryptographic Best Practices

Putting cryptographic primitives together is a lot like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, where all the pieces are cut exactly the same way, but there is only one correct solution. Thankfully, there are some projects out there that are working hard to make sure developers are getting it right.

The following advice comes from years of research from leading security researchers, developers, and cryptographers. This Gist was [forked from Thomas Ptacek's Gist][1] to be more readable. Additions have been added from

	/*<?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();

	#!/bin/sh

	command="${*}"
	printf "Initialized REPL for `%s`\n" "$command"
	printf "%s> " "$command"
	read -r input
	while [ "$input" != "" ];
	do
	eval "$command $input"
	printf "%s> " "$command"

	man() {
	env \
	LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$(printf "\e[1;31m") \
	LESS_TERMCAP_md=$(printf "\e[1;31m") \
	LESS_TERMCAP_me=$(printf "\e[0m") \
	LESS_TERMCAP_se=$(printf "\e[0m") \
	LESS_TERMCAP_so=$(printf "\e[1;44;33m") \
	LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$(printf "\e[0m") \
	LESS_TERMCAP_us=$(printf "\e[1;32m") \
	man "$@"

	enum { BMAX = 32, BMIN = BMAX / 2, BHEIGHT = 6 };

	struct BNode {
	uint32_t length;
	Key keys[BMAX];
	union {
	BNode *children[BMAX];
	Value values[BMAX];
	};
	};