Sounds like the setup at WeWork offices. Granted, it's a co-working space instead of a single company's office, but I found it to be a good mix when my company worked out of WeWork Golden Gate last year.
>If he's willing to do that, then he'll have to exercise what he already has vested.
Not necessarily. It depends on the terms of his or her options grant. Many companies give employees a 10 year exercise period after they leave (advocated by Sam Altman: http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity).
A 10-year exercise window has to be extremely rare to the order of non-existing in SV startups. Maybe it's picking up stream since the article was written and I am not aware of it. Can an employee vouch for his/her employer (company) that does this? Do more recent YC companies do this?
In fact, even Quora hadn't actually implemented a 10-year exercisable window by the time (or right before the time) Sam's article was written: see comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7610668. Note that the article simply mentions it as an idea; not as an ongoing implementation. I wonder if it is now actually implemented at Quora.
From reading the post it seems like her dad made this decision for her, which feels a bit off to me. While the school may not have been serving her needs intellectually, I can see a strong argument for sticking it out socially. Then again, if she was already isolated or had strong friendships outside of school, maybe it's not such a big deal. Would enjoy hearing Katya's side of the story.
I will be making a blog shortly, so then you will be able to hear my side of the story c: My dad wasn't the one who forced me to do it, if anything I pushed him to let me pursue this career in a way I would never be able to do should I stay in high school. As for feeling isolated in school it wasn't so much that as I knew that only a few of my friends were really friends with me, while most were my ;friends' because I saw them five times a week. My friends fully support me in this and we plan on spending many weekends catching up. Plus, social networking is a thing so we can talk to each other from miles away. It's not as if as soon as I left high school I cut off all ties with my friends. "Nope, never mind, we aren't friends anymore cause I'm too good for school. I will now spend all my time being a social recluse and not conversing with anyone. Farewell" That'd be dumb
From what I remember, I socialized both with people I liked, and people I disliked, a lot more outside the high school building than inside during history class. During lectures and tests I usually zoned out and sometimes worked. She should be better off socially, as long as she doesn't sit on the couch and watch TV all day or whatever. (edited to clearly explain my opinion comes from kids "socializing" with kids results in little more than Lord of the Flies behavior, and hanging out in the real world instead of high school should be incredibly valuable to her)
Another observation is its highly culturally incorrect to say it, but she's missing out on the important work skill of just phoning it in and being patient while appearing to care. Sure, soon as the school bell rings, life can begin and she can boot up her computer. In the real world you're going to spend hours, maybe days, at diversity training and OSHA certs and PCI compliance and ISO9000 and the programming world for decades has been full of silver bullet dev fads that, much like the diet industry, mostly revolve around making the motivational speaker money rather than really "doing" anything. If they actually fixed anything they'd be out of a job, so you do the math there. And sometimes you'll simply have a boring pointless job, that's life. So this is the major malfunction of the plan.
For a couple centuries teens have been famous for doing crazy things, she'll probably turn out just fine even if everything does crash and burn. Its not like she's got 3 little kids and a spouse and mortgage and medical issues and elderly parents relying on her. A good way to learn how to survive and bounce back from failure, and how to avoid failure, is to fail, so weird as it sounds I hope for her future's sake she totally crashes and burns like only a teen can (metaphorically) ... she's young enough to stand back up, get dusted off and patched up (with a little parental help, probably), and learn how NOT to crash and burn when it really counts, later in life, when there's absolutely no one to rely on. Or the short version of the above is she's a teen, doing teen stuff, just like she's supposed to, at least in my opinion as old man parent.
I believe one of the benefits to this is that she won't learn to "phone it in." Why is it considered a skill to accept the status quo? If she is raised in and develops a life that is magnitudes more productive, perhaps she will impart that attribute on the world. Perhaps she'll start a company which doesn't accept the bureaucracy of the world as a necessity.
As an outsider to scaling issues, what strikes me about SoundCloud's struggles with shedding their Rails past is how similar their problems sound to Twitter's problems. Granted, a microblogging service has a different set of concerns than an audio delivery service, but the pain is the same.
Going out on a limb, perhaps this similarity contributes to the reasoning for the Twitter/SoundCloud acquisition rumors: more exciting problems for Twitter engineers to solve now that they've tamed their own beast? Or to put the theory in a business light, Twitter engineering leadership may have confidence they can architect SoundCloud better than the SoundCloud team has done.
You're making a big assumption, which is that all those good engineers love to live in Silicon Valley and want nothing more than to stay in the area their entire lives. For each one of the engineers who feel that way, there's someone who worked here for awhile but now dislikes the area for one reason or another. Enticing good people to spend a few years in Berlin working for a company like Soundcloud might be easier than you think.
A well-articulated point, but I disagree with ruling out the concept on this basis. Affordances could be made to make this sort of concept more usable. For example, the pinch could work when the user is approximately within the icon dimensions (e.g. only one finger is actually on the icon, the other is close to it) rather than the "strict" implementation requiring both fingers to be within the icon's dimensions.
Good point, but I'd worry about overlap, since you'd likely be touching two icons at once with an approximate touch. I suppose you could take the center point between the two touches and expand on whichever icon that lands on (with boundaries of course; it would be strange if you pinched the edges of the screen and it expanded an icon in the center).
Another thing that's bothering me about it being a two finger gesture is that the entire point of this feature idea is to be able to see things quickly at a glance. I would imagine, then, that in these scenarios most people would be holding their iPhones with one hand and only touching the screen with one thumb. This wouldn't be such a big deal on iPad, but I think it would be on iPhone. That makes me feel more strongly that some kind of one finger gesture may be a better way to do this.
Other people in this thread have pointed out some good points too about discoverability: which apps support the feature? How would the API be designed in a way that's performance and power efficient?
I'm familiar with a couple of vendor solutions but this is the first platform-agnostic one I've come across. Looks promising, excited to check it out.
We used UserVoice's iOS SDK for awhile, then decided to drop it when we started receiving crash reports for the SDK. It worked well when it didn't crash, though. :)
Right now we use a plain old email form, with some meta information prefilled in the body of the message. It's admittedly a bit old school, but it works.
We also looked at the ZenDesk iOS SDK since we're in the process of switching to ZenDesk. However we were turned off by the lack of activity in that repository.
FTA, "To make matters worse, the government won't disclose its reasoning for requesting the gag, effectively shutting the public out of the courthouse without any explanation."
It's idealistic to think that no information should be able to be quashed by the government, but it's not idealistic to think that their motives for doing so should be made public.
I had the "motives made public" line in there but moved it to the top of my comment.
Suppressing leaks of top-secret military technology is acceptable, suppressing secrets that could harm the image of the US government or individuals because they did something bad is something that shouldn't be allowed.
People must be accountable for their actions, otherwise they are cowards.
Not sure it should be obvious you don't. Pull requests are especially well-suited for a team environment, but using PRs in a solo project can still give a higher level of structure to the progression of your code. Gives you an opportunity to explain why you're doing what you're doing.
Agreed. This approach is especially nice for situations where you open up the code at a later point, so that people can see the historic progression in more ways than just the Git history. https://github.com/thoughtbot/hound/pull/1
