Its not two realities. Its one population chunk living in reality and one chunk living in a misinformation fueled delusion. Special interests have managed to weaponize social media and misinformation. It started with allowing blatant lying and partisan propoganda to be framed as impartial news because deliberate mass misinformation is apparently free speech. Now the cat is out of the bag and the only way back is strong regulation of social and news media.
250k per employee all-in (benefits, etc) doesn't seem that outrageous being in SF. Plus I'm guessing they're all high caliber employees given the scale of what they set out to do and what they've accomplished with a relatively small team.
Except the people already were there, and they want to stay there. The imaginary high caliber people who can do this in a low cost of living place are exactly that: imaginary.
Pull open your brower's cert store and have a good look around. I suspect you'll discover that the majority of people who can run a certificate authority don't live in Silicon Valley.
It's hard work. It's challenging work. It's been screwed up a few times, yes. But it's not the sort of thing that's so hard that only five people in the world can do it correctly or something, though.
I fully endorse Let's Encrypt right to hire people solely from SF, but if you think high caliber people don't live in low cost of living places, you're either uneducated or purposely disingenuous.
EDIT: Source: I work on a fully remote team (>50 people) with teammates around the world who are high caliber people.
I think you can be more charitable in reading the GP's point; I certainly didn't interpret it the way you did or see it as a statement that high caliber people only live in SF or other high cost of living spaces.
It was a response to the claim that "there's no reason for them to be in SF" which is an odd assertion.
The point is that comparing an actual team with a purely hypothetical one is really just an exercise in imagination. These people exist, are competent, happen to live in San Francisco, and this organization has built a compelling product paying them what is likely lower than what they would earn at other employers in their region.
As I understand it nothing is preventing another service from emerging that competes with Let's Encrypt and has a better cost structure. It may also be reasonable to refrain from donating to / funding Let's Encrypt if you feel that they are poorly managing their finances, but even that to is more productive than simply stating "this team should not be in SF".
The reality is everyone is playing armchair quarterback/back seat driver/whatever and telling LE about that they COULD do. As if somehow LE was dedicated to overspending. As if they didn't scour the earth to find the people and save 25-50%.
Building a good team is hard. Building a good distributed team is harder. That they exist is just as much luck as anything else.
Is it really 100% in SF? That strikes me as high -- even in a lot of European countries it's not a full 100%.
Anyway: considering what they do and where they do it, I don't find these numbers high at all. I would be shocked if they didn't have at least a couple engineers making over $200K in actual cash compensation if they're working in the Bay Area.
Overhead doesn't scale linearly with pay. Once you're into 6 figures, it's definitely not equal. I'm guessing much more like $150-200k per employee in compensation.
Taxes, health care, other insurance (disability, etc.), and other benefits (401k, etc.) are a significant fraction of the cost to employ someone. These things are not cheap.
The standard overhead is (I believe--correct me if I'm wrong!) anywhere from 25% to 100%, depending on your base salary and how competitive the benefits package is.
Employer taxes, standard benefits (health, vision, dental, etc), extra benefits (like free food, budget for books, and other niceties), and office space.
The 100% overhead only applies to the "average" job. Health benefit costs are typically the biggest piece of the benefits puzzle and don't scale with salary. In SV the overhead is more like 25%.
Would the business perform any better if they were paying $2.05M for 20 employees? That's $100k per employee including overhead. Salaries would be significantly less than $100k. On paper it may sound better, but you end up with extra administrative overhead, and lower quality work. Could twice as many junior staff perform as well as that many senior staff? My guess would be no.
Their staffing cost probably is on the higher end, but I'm guessing thats by design.
Correct. LF has a small office in the Presidio, with perhaps a half dozen people living in SF proper and another dozen in the greater Bay Area. The rest of us are scattered around the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia.
I'd like to see it broken down further by staff, it would be interesting to see the responsibilities of the "Executive Director" and weigh up the salary difference between that and the median salary of the rest of the team.
I know in addition to salary there are other "hidden" costs like health care etc, but even taking that into account their employees must be taking home a pretty significant wage.
I don't know specifically about the Bay Area, but everywhere else in the world having a bunch of short stints on your CV would be a bad thing. It also doesn't take many 5 - 15% pay bumps before you have maxed out what anyone is willing to pay you given your bleak CV.
Unfortunately salaries in the bay area seem to be inversely proportional to age ;) That's only half kidding. Many companies are willing to pay premiums for what I'd call "future potential" of new hires. With 30 and supposedly 5-10 years of work experience you'd be expected to already have "proven" your potential. Your degree will matter a lot less than what you've actually done in the past. If you don't have much to show for your experience it may well be that you'd actually be offered less than a promising candidate right out of college. However, $100k seems about average. There are people who are offered 150k (+ 100-300k stock grants) out of college at some of the "hottest" startups.
Which amount to "whatever piques one's intellectual curiocity" and "whatever good hackers like". Apparently this piqued HN users intellectual curiosity and they like it.
Besides an intelligent person can have an intelligent discussion about any topic, even Kim Kardassian. And the post is in final analysis about policy, freedom of speech, adapting to the digital age, etc.
While I wish your argument were correct, it's not. The flaw is in the inference voted for → was intellectually interested.
A model that appears to fit the data [1] is that multiple kinds of interest drive voting, and intellectual interest is not the most powerful one. This is the weakness of the story-voting mechanism. It is why, on a site that values intellectual interest, the vote signal must pass through other filters, like flagging and moderation.
>> Which amount to "whatever piques one's intellectual curiocity" and "whatever good hackers like"
It only amounts to that if you completely disregard this part: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "
I like to think it's "These small business owners got bad reviews. Here's their stupid way of dealing with it. Don't make the same mistake. What tips do you have for handling negative customer feedback or reviews?" -- which would be on topic. Unfortunately it ends up as being "wow, look at these idiots", so you are probanly right.
Trip Advisor is a tech startup. The situation couldn't have occurred without a service like them. The ways businesses try to deal with the ramifications of online reviewing is probably interesting to anyone thinking about innovating in that space.
So a nearly 15 year old company with a billion dollar revenue still qualifies as a startup?
>> The situation couldn't have occurred without a service like them
Freedom of speech infractions have occurred for way longer than online services have existed.
So if someone tweets something stupid/political it should be posted on hackernews as well, simply because tweeting wasn't possible prior to twitter? Or what if someone reacts badly to something on tumblr, is that relevant for hn'ers as well in case they are trying to innovate in the micro-blogging space?
Unless i'm understanding you wrong... Trip Advisor has democratised hotels and yeh people had freedom of speech but not widely accessible freedom of speech. Without Trip Advisor it would be much harder to find someone's opinion on a specific hotel.
Maybe consumers should be democratised too? Shall we assess the quality of a consumer? Do they piss up the hotel walls or do they tidy up before they leave?
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
What part of "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." didn't you understand?
This part apparently: "Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
But forgive me, I am, unlike you, not the type of person who finds a story about a Hotel manager behaving badly particularly intellectually gratifying.
>But forgive me, I am, unlike you, not the type of person who finds a story about a Hotel manager behaving badly particularly intellectually gratifying.
Yeah, because it's just about a guy behaving badly, might as well been about a bar brawl. It's not a story that doesn't have connections to how some businesses perceive the internet, internet "mob" justice, antiquated laws, free speech and such, right?
You seem to struggle with the fact that your personal interests and the HN submission guidelines diverge. Even though the story of a Hotel manager levying unlawful charges against his guests seems to pique your intellectual curiosity immensely, it still doesn't mean that it adheres to the submission guidelines. More specifically this part of it: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"
Also, your use of a double negative in the sentence "It's not a story that doesn't have connections to how some businesses perceive the internet, internet 'mob' justice, antiquated laws, free speech and such, right?" makes it far less sarcastic than you probably intended it to be.
That was my first thought. For storage, a Synology would wipe the floor with his setup. He's using it as a compute node, though, and even the newest DS415+ wouldn't hold a candle to this server project.
The game server seems to be down. It worked when I tried it yesterday, and it plays pretty much exactly like the official client. It really is very impressive!
Sorry for the problem, it should be fixed for now.
(cause: temporary ipban of the proxy server by the emulator server because of too much floods in the login module).
Good. I wish all the people developing crappy and useless apps, flooding the place, would get banned. You publish 10 different apps where the only thing that changes is the youtube channel, and claim you were beta testing? I hope Apple and Microsoft ban you as well.
The most amusing thing is that the Play Store has an incredibly easy way alpha test as well as beta test versions that are distributed only to users who have signed up for testing. In fact, when you upload the apk to the store it's almost literally impossible to miss it. The one issue I have with their test mechanism is that test users have to have an account with Google(even if it's just membership to a single Google Group).
What the OP did was publish spammy garbage. Not to say Google couldn't afford to put a more human touch on their customer and developer relations, but the OP is just way out of line on this one.
