Hacker News: steindavidb

New comment by steindavidb in "Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer"

steindavidb — Sun, 30 May 2021 18:25:14 +0000

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Highly recommend a journalism class at local community college.

New comment by steindavidb in "Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work"

steindavidb — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 16:00:15 +0000

tl:dr; "I want to be a postdoc"

New comment by steindavidb in "Ask HN: What are real-life useful use-cases for blockchain (not currencies)?"

steindavidb — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 16:37:25 +0000

Do you mean blockchain or technology inspired by blockchain? Lots of cool merkle tree stuff (trillion, certificate transparency); also several international shipping supply chains use blockchain for chain-of-custody (txns are irrevocable cosigned transfer of custody with no trusted overseer). I would love to see criminal evidence and deeds of ownership move onto a similar framework.

I expect digital ID will also benifit from an auditable, immutable log (e.g. sovrin)

MIT now issues digital degree proofs on Bitcoin using “blockcerts”

steindavidb — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 14:39:40 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/steindavidb/status/1318924223570731008

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24848307

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

New comment by steindavidb in "If founders treated their investors the same way they treated their employees"

steindavidb — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 17:28:12 +0000

Hi cs-szazz. I remember being in your situation; it's frustrating because you can't Google for answers. Here is advice I was given when in a similar situation.

- Find the other people at the company in your situation (size of grant, type of options). Share your learnings with each other. Consider getting professional advice, the Bay is full of attorneys and CPAs for whom this is a familiar situation.

- If you're at a unicorn, you probably have co-workers who are veterans of other unicorns and have been through this before. Ask them for advice (or an introduction to their source of professional advice)

- As a group, consider asking your board to arrange a limited second market sale to cover exercise costs and taxes. Many institutional investors are happy to buy a little extra stock, especially if it helps with keeping senior staff happy and focused on the right things.

- If you're going to be doing anything involving stock without board approval (like trying to build some kind off house-of-cards, pseudo-legal collateral package for a loan shark) you really need to hire an attorney.

- if you only have options, you might not be a shareholder. Your rights and access to information might be different once you've exercised a share.

- You can't extend the 90 day exercise window on ISOs, that's a federal law thing. The company can convert to NSOs to extend the window, but the setup for that conversion is complicated and expensive.

New comment by steindavidb in "Signal threatens to dump US market if EARN IT act passes"

steindavidb — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 20:41:06 +0000

Senator Feinstein (D-CA) is a do’s-onshore of the bill. Here’s the form to contact her office and encourage her to not support the bill: https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me

New comment by steindavidb in "Sites with dumb password rules"

steindavidb — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 22:25:42 +0000

obligatory thread naming good open-source password entropy checkers. I'll start.

zxcvbn: https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn

Computer Color Is Broken

steindavidb — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 01:20:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20650538

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by steindavidb in "Vermont's Remote Worker Grant Program"

steindavidb — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 16:53:08 +0000

(for a single filer) at $100k income, this lowers the effective state income tax to 0.8%

at $200k income, this lowers the effective state income tax rate to 4.4%

New Hampshire is literally next door and has no income tax.

New comment by steindavidb in "CS 189: Introduction to Machine Learning"

steindavidb — Fri, 11 May 2018 20:02:35 +0000

this works fine over http instead of https. is there a way to fix the link?

Script to delete a too-big Dropbox Folder

steindavidb — Fri, 04 May 2018 15:32:17 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/davidbstein/delete-big-dropbox

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995335

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by steindavidb in "What's in those mysterious cabinets?"

steindavidb — Wed, 02 May 2018 14:38:17 +0000

It has to do a lot with reliability and cost. A smart car has a lot of expensive sensors and an expected life of a few years with regular maintenance. There's also a huge market opportunity around smart cars. Those cabinets can last decades, in all conditions, with minimal upkeep. Adding sensors decreases reliability and increases maintenance cost. There isn't usually an appetite to put traffic signal upgrades or extra maintenance headcount in city budgets for non-critical infrastructure upgrades, so the financial incentives to innovate are more limited as well.

New comment by steindavidb in "Don’t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion"

steindavidb — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 23:43:58 +0000

My SO and I have three MBPs between us. Two have had keyboard failures (one the "8" key, the other the space bar). Both took about a week for Apple to repair.

New comment by steindavidb in "Software Testing Anti-patterns"

steindavidb — Sun, 22 Apr 2018 14:22:30 +0000

This website is unreadable on iPad, the font size changes every time I scroll.

New comment by steindavidb in "Medium suspended our account and blocked access to all our published stories"

steindavidb — Sun, 25 Mar 2018 15:35:37 +0000

Commonmark is a wonderful and well defined markdown standard (ie the one GitHub uses)

New comment by steindavidb in "Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?"

steindavidb — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 21:02:45 +0000

I taught myself 18.100a from the book and website when I took it because class was too early in the morning and found them sufficient to make up for the missed lectures. Wonderful resources. Highly recommmend.

New comment by steindavidb in "#deletefacebook"

steindavidb — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 18:06:31 +0000

I did this by running a sikuliX script. Took about 5 minutes a day for a week to iron out all corner cases it got stuck on.

New comment by steindavidb in "Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?"

steindavidb — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 23:54:27 +0000

Travels with Charley in search of America

New comment by steindavidb in "Dropbox Professional"

steindavidb — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 21:12:00 +0000

this is actually fixed with selective sync in dropbox pro

New comment by steindavidb in "Ask HN: Learning modern web design and CSS"

steindavidb — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 13:22:45 +0000

Going straight to the spec is really great for HTML/CSS. Also worth looking at the CSS snapshot from w3 https://www.w3.org/TR/css-2017/