Yup, IMHO what was leaked in this case is not so important. What is important is how it was leaked, how long it was leaked for, and how long it took to notice.
How many people would need to be killed for you to consider the leak important? How many friendly countries involved in an ongoing war with your number one adversarial nation for the last 80s have to have their spring offensive plans impacted in the middle of a war would make this 'important' to your mind?
Yes, you're right. I failed to keep a full perspective when I wrote that. I won't defend that.
I do feel it's significant that it took about a month from the sharing on that minecraft server for these leaks to be recognized. I'm surprised no one on the server flagged it, or it wasn't picked up by some intelligence program. That's where my shock came from. It feels like a deeper problem. Maybe I'm naive in believing the military/intelligence community didn't know before this news broke.
Lots of people in the comments here stuck on the boring semantic definition debate of mocks vs stubs vs nulls vs whatever.
This is not really by what the article is about IMHO. It’s a great overview of how to grow and organize your application with some opinionated patterns that give some favorable properties to your system. The nullable stuff just helps achieve those properties. If you want to use a mocking library to write nullables, and call them mocks, fine. Not important.
I think this might be a problem of expectation management that could stem from the title. A headline along the lines of “Patterns to organize your code for testability” might reflect the general character of the article more clearly. But as it specifically says “testing without mocks”, I was intuitively expecting something different, and even was a bit confused when the author suggested techniques that I would refer to as “mocking”.
Yes, exactly. “Bake your mocks into your third-party library implementations” is an interesting idea and might be a useful thing to do, but it’s certainly not “testing without mocks.”
Agreed and I find this happening a lot in discussion of testing. It seems everyone/every company has "their way" of doing testing, which at times even includes new words for certain concepts that they find useful (e.g. stubs) and then the conversation about testing gets muddled by people doing things/naming things differently.
I only recently got into testing my code and while I love writing tests, getting started was kind of difficult because there was just so much noise. I eventually had to find one person to follow in my space (Kent C. Dodds) and just kind of go all in on his methodology.
That’s a LONG time (in total) for employees to wait for liquidity. Yes, they likely provided some opportunities for early employees to liquidate some of their holdings, but it’s got to suck to sit on that much funny money for so long.
A direct listing would be very unfair to the banks that have patiently waited years to take a multi-billion-dollar chunk of Stripe’s upside in exchange for setting the IPO price (integer between 20 and 50).
but at least in an IPO the company would get a financing round, and the banks get to manipulate the market with a stabilizing bid indefinitely
direct listings completely rely on retail buyers for liquidity, and even in the frothiest markets that's not enough money in the face of all employees and the company dumping shares immediately
> direct listings completely rely on retail buyers for liquidity, and even in the frothiest markets that's not enough money in the face of all employees and the company dumping shares immediately
IPOs typically have a lockup period, which means that employees will always be selling to retail buyers, whether on Day 1 with a direct listing or Day 90/180/etc. when the IPO lockup expires.
It's not clear to me that it makes a difference for employees either way. It's not like the stock price on Day 90-180 are still thinking about what mechanism the company used to go public 3-6 months ago. At that point the stock price is mostly based on the two new 10-Qs that have been filed since then, plus additional current information like market conditions, etc.
Better for the company, better for the employees, better for external speculators.
A stabilizing bid by the underwriter is effective market manipulation that pretends there is more demand than there really is. It can be retracted at any time as well. Outside of an IPO this is illegal.
They can keep the confidence game going for 90-180 days, and the other aspects of an IPO are better for the company since there would be no reason to sell even more shares since they sold a piece of the company at a highest valuation to the banks in the IPO.
They've had several options for employees to liquidate some of their holdings before now. They've generally only been open to current employees, but one a few years ago was also open to past employees.
Noob question that I am sure is answered many times. What are the catalysts for a private company switching from options to RSUs (double trigger). In my previous role I got RSUs (double trigger), but now at a much smaller startup I have an option package. As an employee RSUs are a bit easier to make sense of, but both are equity instruments at the end of the day. When, and why does that transition happen?
> What are the catalysts for a private company switching from options to RSUs (double trigger).
For employees at very early companies that are going the venture route, ISOs are a no-brainer. The company is small enough that the strike price isn't too onerous, the company is too small to hit up against the IRS limits, and they provide pretty good tax treatment under the assumption that the company will grow massively in value - like, 100,000x - which is the the optimistic case that everyone wants to optimize for.
For employees at late stage companies (e.g. last funding round before IPO), ISOs are a rough deal. The strike price is large, so the only people who can afford to exercise them before a liquidity event are people who are already independently wealthy. The tax benefits are also still present, but smaller, because the expectation is that the company might grow 10x in valuation, but not 100x or 100,000x (most $100M companies are not going to grow to $10 trillion in valuation).
RSUs avoid that problem, by requiring zero cash up-front, in exchange for less favorable tax treatment in the "company grows 100x-100,000x" case - which is fine, because that's less relevant.
Of course, the billion dollar question is where the inflection point happens - when do RSUs become a better deal than ISOs? There's no universal answer to that, and some of that depends on specifics of the company, and some of that also depends on who you ask (certain people will benefit more than others from the switch at different points, so it depends on how much the company is weighing each of those [metaphorical] stakeholders).
ISOs also have one other advantage for companies: because they have to be exercised within 90 days of departure, a large portion of ISOs that are granted will never actually be exercised (the employee will choose to leave them unexercised, either because they don't have the money to pay for the exercise price + taxes or because they don't want to). So every option granted is <1 share actually given up (in expectation), allowing the company to grant bigger compensation packages (because some portion of those will not actually be used, and can therefore be reallocated to someone else).
With RSUs, every RSU granted is 1 share actually given up (except in the case where the RSUs expire, which makes the company look bad).
There's also usually a switch from ISO to NSO somewhere down the line, often fairly early. NSOs aren't capped at a 90 day post-termination exercise window. Some companies have extended the window to as much as 7 years - Pinterest comes to mind. There is a cap, but it's closer to the RSU cap than the ISO cap.
The progression is usually:
- Founders get shares with a re-purchase option for vesting. The company exercises the option if you leave before vesting ends to take back your un-vested shares.
- Next ~100 people get ISOs.
- Next ~2000 get NSOs.
- Then, double-trigger RSUs until the company goes public.
- Then, single-trigger RSUs.
I agree with your general assessment. The difference between options and RSUs usually comes down to upside potential. An option is worthless at grant time (by law, it usually has to be issued at the 409(a)) and it's just the right to buy company shares. If you're buying the shares at the current price, there's no value in that. Options only gain intrinsic value of future appreciation in the underlying equity past your grant date.
On the other hand RSUs are shares of the company, so they are worth at grant whatever a share of the company is worth.
An option with a $10 strike price to buy shares of a company whose 409(a) is $11 has an intrinsic value of $1. An RSU of a company whose 409(a) is $11 has an intrinsic value of $11.
Companies generally, in my experience, give you about 3X as many options as they would shares for the same role. Give or take. Companies usually switch from options to RSUs when they think that growth in the stock price is going to slow down - [edit] (and when they're hiring people with a higher aversion to risk!)
> except in the case where the RSUs expire, which makes the company look bad
The benefit of double-trigger RSUs over single-trigger RSUs is that they're not taxed until after a liquidity event (IPO, acquisition, etc). That's nice for the employee as they don't have to come up with extra cash to pay taxes on the RSUs as they vest but before they can sell them.
However, double-trigger RSUs have to expire within 7 years -- otherwise there's not a "substantial risk of forfeiture" and they'll be taxed immediately upon satisfying the time condition, just like single-trigger RSUs [1]. It makes sense -- there's no practical difference between a double-trigger RSU that never expires and an illiquid single-trigger RSU, so it would be a tax loophole to treat them differently.
At Stripe, when your RSU vest, you still don't have the ability to buy the shares. Instead you have to wait for a liquidity event, or for 7 years to pass (making the shares worthless).
Publicly traded stock gets deposited in your brokerage account because your employer is publicly traded. Private companies offering double trigger RSUs that don't turn into shares or cash until a liquidity event (I.e. an IPO). At that point (plus a lockup period, maybe, depending on how the company goes public) the shares, minus withholding, will get deposited into a brokerage account and be available to sell.
I can search the internet way better. Email me what you are looking for and 9 times out of 10 I will send you back something better than what Google will spit out. Furthermore you won't even have to sift through 10 links, or change your search, I will do all this and send you the result back.
This is such an incomprehensible boast. Do I think that you might be able to deliver me handpicked results that are better than a Google search? Sure. Can you do it for me in 100ms or better, and at no cost?
What are you even proposing, human search agents? That's absurd.
Do I think that you might be able to deliver me handpicked results that are better than a Google search? Sure.
Ok, so you agree partially.
Can you do it for me in 100ms or better
Not all searches require an immediate reply, so I'll just focus on those. Looking at the list of the most expensive keywords on Google, it is safe to say the vast majority consist of searches that do not necessitate a decision at the moment of the first try. Think Attorney, Insurance, Travel.
Taking the most expensive keywords as a source: Attorneys, Insurance, Travel, etc... I'll use SuperLawyers + Avvo + Yelp for Attorneys. I'll go directly to insurance websites and compare rates. I'll go to Kayak, CheapOAir, Hipmunk and the likes for travel.
Consulting firms will offer new projects every ~6mo.
There are research engineering jobs that also might be a good fit - you deal with a lot of different problems and get to satisfy your need to learn additionally from the researchers.
Yes but statutory damages will not be available and according to our lawyer. The statutory damages is what gets people to comply because it is the one that can multiply exponentially as it applies to EACH violation (download, sale, ect...). If you use the implicit copyright you can only go after actual damages which will be harder to prove. I'm not suggesting you file a copyright for everything, just stuff you want to absolutely protect. In the context of this discussion it is education videos.
You have one month after discovering the infringement to register if you want to get statutory damages.[1]
Register a copyright online here: http://copyright.gov/eco/
Yes, they take video uploads. Costs $35 per item.
This guy once gave at talk at my university where he said he regretted not doing a lot of things because he was working and now he was too old to do them because of his health.
He sounds like someone who would give a great talk. I can see that happening for sure. I've devoted my life to a lot less before realizing there was more out there. These people put so much time into their work there's little left for a broad life - unless you make some clear boundaries like Mark is doing now. Maybe this will be a one time thing and, as you suggest, he may regret not making more time for other areas of his life. Maybe he'll manage to carve out more time for himself.
I don't buy regret. From what I've read so far, people who worked too much regret not doing things with family, etc. and people who lived bog-standard GenPop family life regret that their life had no meaning. So I guess death is just one big paradox of choice.
Every careful person equipped with a reliable thermometer will make the same reading of temperature. There are alternative scales, Fahrenheit and Celsius, but both record the same thing...
to
Economics is genuinely harder. National income is a more complicated concept than temperature, and there are plausible alternative sets of rules for calculating it. Serious minded statisticians have spent many years discussing these issues, and there is now a UN-sponsored standardised system of national accounts.
But it is easy to write a mathematical symbol without giving thought to what observable fact in the real world corresponds to that symbol, or whether there is such an observable fact at all.
But isn't that exactly how we settled on the truth of temperature? Years of debate about what the right constructs for defining temperature mathematically are?
Yes and no. There's no single god-given way to measure temperature (though the 0-point seems clear), but once you have a scale, comparing the temperatures of two liquids is straightforward. On the other hand, a symbol like GDP is really a mix of thousands of inputs sampled using a variety of techniques and adjusted according to dozens of criteria like inflation and hedonics. Comparing GPD over time in a single country is crude, modeling GDP across countries is nothing at all like calculating how quickly water heats up compared to mercury.
It should be noted that a "temperature scale" is a pretty non-obvious thing. The idea that the temperature we call "ten degrees" is as much colder than "twenty degrees" as that is colder than "thirty degrees" is something you'd never figure out without getting as far as the 18th century.
Even the concept of "temperature" is not obvious. Give someone a hot piece of bread and a hot piece of metal and the metal seems hotter even if they're at the same temperature.
Statistical mechanics is a subject for which it is very hard to pin down the conceptual foundations. To read a thermometer I need to be sure it has reached "thermal equilibrium" with the object being measured. But how do you define thermal equilibrium in terms of underlying mechanical ideas? How do we identify the mechanical systems to which the concept of temperature and thermal equilibrium can be meaningfully applied? See http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2691/1/UffinkFinal.pdf We would be accusing statistical mechanics of 'mathiness' were it not the case that we know how to make it work for very many systems of practical interest. The main problem with economics is that it does not work as often.
Good points. I think the hidden terms here are "ratio variables" vs "interval variables". It's not obvious that 200 degrees (Kelvin) is twice as hot as 100 degrees. But almost everyone is going to agree that water at 300K feels hotter than water at 280K (though this may not work across materials, as you note).
What we can do with our temperature scale is build a model that says every time we convert n liters of oil into heat and direct it at x liters of water we get a change of temperature of y degrees. Reliably, and with small margin of error.
We can't do this with GPD, and if we declare that a 10% increase in education spending will lead to a 5% increase in GDP over 15 years, we don't have a testable scientific model, we have a guess based on our interpretation of extremely messy data.
Except groups exchanging capital are still an GAI-complete system, unlike atoms - even if they behave predictably, they can start doing weird things completely at random. Also, atoms themselves don't have equal voting or influence rights to change the way we compute temperature when it suits them.
True, but irrelevant. The definition of temperature (average kinetic particle energy) means it exists. Conversely, Absolute Hot[1], is an open question.
Irrelevant to what? The poster claimed that there was a real thing in a physical reality. If that is true, shouldn't we have observed it before? As the statement stands it claims as absolute reality something which no one has ever seen.
Ok, so we've never seen something to be exactly 0K. We've probably also never seen anything to be exactly 3.14159K. That doesn't mean objects with temperature of exactly 3.14159K are impossible, neither that we should assume they don't exist until you point out an example.
Temperature scale is a good model that maps the territory quite well. There is nothing to suggest it will suddenly stop working at 0K, if it works very well even as we get closer and closer to absolute zero.
Contrast with most economic models which as maps correspond to territory in a similar way the map of China corresponds to the Middle Earth - there are trees and not trees, you have to turn it around to make the sea be on the proper side, and... that's about how much it matches. Be wary of zooming too much in, lest you get eaten by an Orc.
It may be a good model, but that is not what the poster claimed. The poster claimed that is was an aspect of a real, physical reality. There is no evidence of that.
In fact, there is a good argument that 0k is unachievable [0].
》 If that is true, shouldn't we have observed it before?
No. The concept of temperature is based on the bulk interactions of matter due to the motion/collisions of atoms and molecules relative to an inertial reference frame. A frame that usually has to exist outside of the system for temperature to have practical meaning so it is a concept that by definition has an absolute zero, even if we haven't observed it yet.
In this case, absolute zero really means zero motion relative to the instrument measuring the sample so it is possible for a Type 1+ civilization to build a planet sized (or bigger, don't know how the math works out but it probably has something to do with constricting atoms to a precision within a planck length) laser or other electromagnetic trap to cool some nontrivial number of atoms to absolute zero like those used for Bose-Einsten condensate experiments.
Wrong. Nonsense invocations of nomenclature and pretentious obfuscations aside, your explanation came after the fact. When temperature scales were being constructed, neither thermodynamics nor atomic theory had been at the state you presuppose. What you state are not givens, they are conclusions of theories and explanations of the observations in terms of them. To say that temperature must by definition have an absolute zero isn't saying anything. Where did this definition come from? What is heat that temperature measures (yes, heat, not temperature)? Neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius knew. Current kinetic theory explains heat as exclusively the motion of microscopic things (not just atoms, btw) and it thus follows that the absence of motion must mean the absence of heat. In the 17th century, you might be telling us that absolute zero is complete dephlogistication. But why should temperature have an absolute zero? Without your theory of heat, or at least some intuition of it that frames heat as a quantity and cold merely the absence of heat, you have no reason to claim that temperature has a lower bound.
You really need to understand the order of dependence of explanations.
Let me turn this around. What do you think the hypothesis is, and how would you know if you've succeeded? Do not use the term "absolute zero" because you think that is a hypothesis, and not a definition.
No. The definition of Absolute Zero is zero kinetic energy of the particles of a substance. You've been complaining that this definition is somehow a hypothesis, or otherwise suspect because it has never been observed, which I've said, was irrelevant, we can calculate it. It's not hard. It's junior high physics. What's the kinetic energy of something that has stopped? It's zero.
Your position is absurd. It's equivalent of saying, that distance is an unproven hypothesis, (which literally doesn't make any sense, because that's not what the word means), or perhaps more charitably a suspicious concept because we've never measured anything with zero distance between two items, because the closest two particle can get is planck length.
I'm not trying to be mean, but what you've been saying is pure gibberish.
Whether a scale has a zero is something that is decided after the fact. Whether it is "fundamentally important" is, again, dependent on the state of the theory it is bound up with and the result of.
Temperature is one thing, but without knowing the air pressure you couldn't even cook an egg properly.
Assuming unstated conditions, like normal air pressure, is just as well an entry point for error if you want to reliably describe the assumed state of things.
With temperature we know what feeling each measurement corresponds to. When a politician ernestly does everything he can to raise the GDP per capita of his country often he is not aware of what real world consequences there will be. E.g. In China ten years ago everyone had motorbikes. Ten years later many families have cars but the roads are stuck in gigantic traffic jams and the the sky is covered in smog, and rivers covered in muck. GDP per capita and median incomes are going up, but is life getting better where people are getting more fulfilled and more contented?
When you get into engineering one finds a strong caution to beware of optimizing the metric at the expense of the process. In your instance, GDP is up, median quality of life is down. Far as I can tell ordinary economists are totally blind to this.
Eh, there are Nobel laureates who work down the hall from each other who cannot agree on the definition of basic macroeconomic concepts such as what constitutes a "bubble" or whether "market failure" is even a valid concept to begin with.
edit: OK, I was wrong here with my priorities.