skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
these 'free to play' broad-reach companies CAN'T provide the service this app developer feels he/she needs, they wouldn't scale properly if they did.

Bollocks. I realize there's probably a lot of app spam, and of course you want to deal with a lot of that in an automated manner, but we're talking about apps that have built up millions of users here, it is in no way unreasonable to expect at least one lowly paid human to look into these cases before shutting them down. A single person could probably clear a hundred of these cases in a day, especially if the automated system gave them info on why it thinks the app should be banned - if it says there are too many negative reviews, that's real simple to check, if it catches a TOS violation, that's also real simple.

Here, it looks a lot like someone (maybe accidentally?) turned the sensitivity threshold too high on the ban-bot and never bothered to check if it was working right because it's not public facing enough.

As far as the Google comparison, to me that's rather unfair, because in the case of Google's app store, they don't tend to go around auto-banning large numbers of popular applications. So whatever algorithms they're using are doing a pretty good job, as opposed to Facebook's, which are apparently flailing like crazy.
No va? http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.polishedcode.com
How about this then:

http://techliberation.com/2011/06/24/the-ftc-makes-its-googl...

Either way the investigation is lacking in merit.
That's all well and good, but there are nontrivial costs to creating a system where you need to have a lawyer vet every line of every contract you sign.

There's been a general consensus about what a "market" employee agreement contains, which lets people make decisions in a relatively uniform way between offers. If it becomes known that any company associated with a certain firm has wacko contracts and that you'll need to pay 20k in legal time to even evaluate their offer compared to others, it becomes an easy no all around.
Felix Salmon makes a good case that Skype's stock agreement was deliberately obfuscative:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/06/24/upgrading-s...

Basically, Skype's claim is that the point of this clause is to retain employees -- you don't get cash in your vested stock unless you still work for the company. But as Salmon points out, none of the employees actually realized this -- the clauses are bafflingly worded, and refer to external documents, to the extent that you'd need a lawyer to figure them out -- so it doesn't make any kind of sense as a retention tool. Add in the fact that this policy is pretty radically different from standard tech industry practice, where if you're vested you're vested, and it really seems like it's just a way to screw employees.
While I understand that legalese is necessary since English is ambiguous in its best moments, the only reasons I see not to include a "plain English" version of a contract are A) to save on lawyer hours, or B) to screw someone over.

For most contracts I suspect that the overhead on a plain English version would be very small, as the lawyers' understanding of the topics is necessarily deep to formulate the contract (or they're just shitty lawyers, another topic).

Plain English versions of contracts, with their plain English meanings of clauses, should be included in any contract between two parties of vastly different bargaining power, i.e. a corporation with loads of legal resources and a non-millionaire potential employee.

Update w.r.t. comments—I understand the points you're making, but I don't think it invalidates the argument. I'm racking my brain to find the examples I've seen, but there do exist in the wild "plain English" versions of contracts that are not binding (and they specify that) but instead contain comprehensible summaries of the salient parts.
YouTube - Justin Bieber attacked in NY (Warning Explicit Language) RAW VIDEO
I think you are being a little shortsighted. You may mean it doesn't get you jobs in the specific area that employs most of the people you share online/offline time with.

I'de bet most of the guys that programmed the operating system you were running when writing that post got paid for they job. The same goes for people developing compilers or VMs, like, you know, the one Python/PHP runs on... and don't get me started on database servers.
There are too many unimpressive ORM projects. There's a hundred PHP frameworks and half of them decide to roll their own ORM rather than use and contribute to an existing project.

So you're left with a lot of unsophisticated systems.

Doctrine (PHP), DataMapper (Ruby), SqlAlchemy (Python), LiNQ (.Net), Hibernate (Java). I've used all of these a great deal (except Hibernate, I've not done all that much Java).

All of these projects are sophisticated, complex, impressive. Propel? CakePHP ORM? Or just search php orm -doctrine -propel and look at the 3 dozen results.

These are junk. I'll stand by that assertion. Not because they're PHP, but because they were started often as a part of a larger framework without any respect paid to the fact that an ORM is a very very hard problem to solve.
Puppet is pretty great and at TransLoc we don't use any Ruby. We combine it with packaging all of our code as Debian packages and it makes bringing up a new server a matter of installing puppet, then running the puppet manifests.

Note that the easiest way to start is to not use any of puppet's built-in client-server stuff (puppetd command). Instead run everything like this:

$ git clone $REMOTE_REPO_WITH_MANIFESTS puppet
$ ls
manifests modules
$ sudo puppet --modulepath=modules/ --debug manifests/site.pp

You could use something like fabric if you only have 1-2 servers.
Puppet and Chef are pretty agnostic. You can use them to manage only your infrastructure (packages, user accounts, databases) and leave app deployment up to something like capistrano or fabric if you like (although at a certain level of app complexity it makes sense to integrate.)

cfengine has been around longer, but seems to have negative adoption since puppet became well-known. I know a few people who swear by it, though.

FWIW, at my current startup I use Chef to manage a mid-sized collection of servers (app, load balancers, DBs/replicas, task processors) where the app is written mostly in Python, and it took a ton of pain out of scaling up to deal with a very large paying customer two nights ago.

Puppet has better documentation, but learning either is a bit of a trial and error process I think. You might find Blueprint (https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint) useful to bootstrap (the authors are around in the HN community, I think.)
I've tested Patrick's scalable content practices and have had much higher return compared to both AdWords and Facebook advertisements. Best part is you spend the time/money up front and it keeps working forever.

FWIW - In comparing these three methods (Content, AdWords, Facebook) based on their impact on the bottom line ($$$ -> that's what counts, right?) Facebook by far was the worst performer.

The only drawback to this is that it takes patience - results are not immediate.
SecondMarket Sued For Failing to Buy Facebook Shares
"that you will receive no value" is hardly opaque, even if the rest is. Any contract that said that would have me pouring over it with a fine-tooth comb. Or more likely, just rejected it and finding work elsewhere.

I wonder if that contract is subject to legal action, though? Seems to me that was a deliberate attempt to screw him over. He shouldn't have signed it, but they shouldn't have written it, either.

I'm now serious considering canceling my Skype subscriptions and finding alternatives, despite how useful they are to me a the moment.
GoDaddy is the armpit of the tech industry. It preys on uneducated users (generally "business" people), sells with sex, and offers mediocre products at best - and even that is quite liberal. It just goes to show you how important marketing is.
I can confirm this. Matt Trainer used to be an official presence on forums (developer liaison) but moved to a different part of the company. Since then no one has really stepped up to fill in his shoes.

To be honest though, the forums have never been a way to get in contact with Facebook Staff. The best recourse (which is actually pretty quick these days) is to file a bug report and have developers pile on support and votes. For example, I filed a single bug report last night and had it looked at by a Staff member and priority assigned in less than 12 hours.
The site is down right now. This is the app it's about: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.quesucede.notesmap...
Write your first MapReduce program in 20 minutes
True, but where would a court of law fall on the situation? When the unlocked car, it clearly falls on the side of the car owner.

But this? It isn't so clear.
Google retires Google Health and PowerMeter projects
I worked for a Silver Lake owned company, surviving multiple quarterly layoffs, and 3 CEOs. The only metric for these companies is EBITA, and dropping people helps maintain that number. The PE firm is making money all the while the actual company is hemorrhaging.
This research should have been done as due diligence in the lightbulb->launch phase. If nobody is searching for the problem your product solves it's likely not going to be successful at scale.
"Super confidential" Nokia Android Phone
I find it ironic that the gist of her argument is a little sexist itself: Don't call us victims, call us your valuable assistants!
Google Voice Search in Russian (Русский)
Had to happen eventually, right?
I think the HN title of this post is misleading to the actual article content. The HN title here implies that the women in tech are apologizing, when she is actually saying to men "Please stop apologizing for other offensive males in tech, just recognize the situation in general, recognize your female co-workers, and strive for improvements".
I'm fairly certain that Google wasn't the first firm to think about, or employ, automation. They may have taken it to an extreme, but even so, its also ridiculous to call what is a facebook problem Google's fault. Google may have set an example, but the FB execs decided they'd not have any customer support.

Anyway, you're mixing up first agents. Google didn't put a gun to FB's head, as the old adage goes.
People will continue to not fuck with him or his estate. You don't get rich by writing a lot of checks.
I'm sorry that Facebook fucked you over like that - but this is also an excellent reminder to be mindful of backups. Throwing something on facebook or Flickr doesn't count.
Yes, in my experience that's been a much bigger problem than bandwidth. I tried Clearwire, which advertises itself as 4G. The bandwidth was between fine and superb, but the latency was unbearably bad--many webpages would have various resources timeout, and load without CSS or not at all.
problem is that facebook doesn't really have too much of an incentive to care about these developers. they are not like apple, whose products include third party apps as part of the core value proposition. when steve jobs sells you an iphone, one big reason you buy it is because it has thousands of great apps. people don't sign up for facebook because of farmville, farmville uses facebook because people have already signed up for facebook.

thus, when apple's developers get screwed and there's no app ecosystem, there is the potential for decreased sales. when facebook apps disappear, i doubt there are a lot of people leaving facebook.
Anybody can buy market share if they have deep enough pockets. If it's non-recurring, it doesn't help Bing much in the long run. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-losing-billion...

Put another way, you could compare Google and Bing to Apple and Dell. One side has most of the profits, the other side has most of the volume. Except in the Google and Bing comparison, Google has both. Microsoft is catching up on volume, but their profit situation is actually deteriorating.

Anyway, I think it's good for the world if we have multiple competing financially viable search engines. Unfortunately that describes only Google right now, because neither Bing nor Yahoo search could survive independent of Microsoft's deep, deep pockets and total lack of regard for shareholders.
Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going and Put You in Debtor’s Prison?
numbering computer-related lists in binary stopped being cute a long time ago
Oh my god, half of my pictures aren't me at all...they're all just photos of things I make..
SMART power cycle count?
Wattvision: Response to Power Meter shutdown
I can't speak for Patrick but I do keyword based landing pages on the main domain where the product is for sale so you can pass page rank from keyword pages to your product pages or TLD.

This is also less work because you can create these optimized topical landing pages programmatically and just add some unique keyword rich content to them.

Also if you are adding domains regularly just for content you will have to wait a decent amount of time to let the domain age and you are always starting over at PR0.
If they can't provide the service this app developer - whose app was used by over a million people - then why are they fucking providing an opportunity to create apps anyway?
A Consequence of Losing the PC Wars
Would you trust someone at minimum wage to do it?

At the same time, FB makes lots of money per capita. They could hire a few grunt banhammer moderators.
Not really, Teneriffe is in Spain, Curaçao is in the Netherlands, Kourou is in France but they don't lie in CET.
Well, the author intends to give us advice on the the general purpose CS stuff which all the CS students should have a practical knowledge in.

I think its taken for granted that while graduating, we would be doing the more demanding things such as:
-designing our own programming language.
-developing a minimal OS dedicated for some specific task.
-develop an new alogorithm or drastically improve upon an existing one.
-etc...

While doing the things mentioned in the author's list, you may surely implement a few of the crypting concepts which you have learned during your graduation. No one is stopping you to do that.
How important marketing is in a marketplace that's relatively standardized. A domain name is a domain name, no matter where it is bought (relatively so), making marketing your company crucially important.
Latvians Arrested in Scareware Scam
So the people who lost out here have any recourse? I hope they are talking to lawyers. I'm not typically the type of person to sue over everything but this is screaming for a lawsuit.
Social Spoken: Aneta Brodski on the Power of Video - The Network
The roadblock system? Yeah, it's really flawed. I got roadblocked for logging on to my account from a Swedish IP (through a VPN; I live in the UK). It took me something like 10 tries to get through because I don't obsessively study my friends' photos like Facebook expects me to.
It baffles me why there are no large competing social gaming web platforms. Google, Zynga, EA (playfish) could easily start one. It's a guaranteed success: people love games to be social. Facebook developers are so disgruntled with the FB platform that they 'd flock in hordes to convert their games.

On top of that, facebook enforces FB credits from July, and banned adsense advertising in apps. We are not going to pay 30% of our revenue to facebook for such a crappy platform. We moved our apps to an external website.
>Almost a year ago, a flurry of TechCrunch commenters repeatedly called me the “C word”, insisted that my brain somehow was incapable of quantitative tasks, and one even told me if I didn’t like my female body, I could euthanize myself legally in the state of Oregon. Awesome.

There's one big problem right there, taking a bunch of online comments seriously. Anonymity seems to be bring out the worst in people(both men and women), there's no point whatsoever mulling over it.
Why players become invested in games
Oh, Silver Lake, the private equity firm that apparently screwed Skype employees out of their stock options! I think these guys deserve each other.
Has anyone ever told you "Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one?"
I find it ironic that the tone gets so bellicose at times, and also kind of wonder what the purpose of the implied threat at the end was in an article that started out so reasonably.
The problem with that is that the legalese version of the contract is supposed to be definitive. If they also provide a plain english and one of the terms when exercised invalidates a "plain english" provision, how is that supposed to be interpreted? In this case it was one of those details that mattered greatly. A plain english version would have just said "you get X options you can exercise on this vesting schedule, subject to terms(*)"
It's their dreaded friday push which usually breaks things until monday. Dont expect reinstatement until then.
Yeah, I suspect they would have a decent chance at collecting some sort of payout with legal action even though they did sign contracts. It would be common sense to expect notification when such a substantial change was added to an original contract.
1. By no means do I want to defend Skype here, but the prose in the linked documents isn't especially incomprehensible, at least not for documents of this type.

I teach contract drafting to third-year law students. It's hard work to take a complex if-then-else concept and render it in plain English.[a]

And here's the rub: Few clients want to pay lawyers to spend extra time on readability -- "good enough" (whatever that means) is the goal.

2. [EDITED TO ADD THIS:] It's not unusual for a private company's employee stock plan to include a "call" option that gives the employer the right to repurchase employee-owned shares when the employee leaves the company.

That makes sense when you think about it -- if you're a private company, you don't want a lot of random ex-employees owning dribs and drabs of your shares, especially if you're worried about the 500-shareholder limit (under current law).

On the other hand, for a company with an upcoming exit to buy back the shares at the employee's cost, instead of at a good-faith estimate of the stock's then-current value -- well, that does indeed seem unusual.

(EDIT: Some documents like this provide that, IF: The company wants to do its buy-back EITHER: (i) after an exit is announced, OR: (ii) if an exit is announced within 30 days or so after the employee's departure; THEN: The employee is entitled to the exit pricing for the buy-back.)

3. Again, not to defend Skype, but conceivably they might not have had a choice about the buy-back price, at least not without jeopardizing some kind of favorable income-tax treatment.

If I had to guess, I'd venture that, X number of years ago, some overzealous junior lawyer decided to draft the relevant documents so as to put the company in the strongest position s/he could. Now that zealousness may be tying their hands. I stress that I'm speculating here.

* * *

[a] If you have occasion to write a complex if-then-else sentence, try using all-caps and punctuation like this: IF: It rains at least one inch today but not more than two inches; AND: It doesn't rain tomorrow; THEN: You will turn on the sprinkler system tomorrow; AND: You will not do so the day after.
Glad to see them doing the right thing and aiding in the export and migration of their users' data to other services (direct export to a Microsoft product! Would that /ever/ happen at Microsoft?).
Most VCs Are Investing All Wrong
Cool, let's all cheer about the fact that a lot of developers just got screwed, and so did a lot of their users.
Clearly nonsense. When I worked for KL Group, a unique incentive program was put into place to allow employees to participate in any "liquidity event" that might take place.

It was explained to everyone, clearly, that you only benefitted if you were an employee at the time, and that when you leave the company for any reason, the founders would buy you out according to a specific, written formula.

There was absolutely no ambiguity about the mechanism.
I would argue that the marketplace isn't well standardized, but rather that some information information (eg. on practices related to domain transfer and takedown) is unavailable to or ignored by most of the consumers in the market, causing the observed irrationality that results in GoDaddy remaining solvent.
Why do you assume that Marco is one of "the best engineer-entrepreneurs"?
Anonymity seems to be bring out the worst in people

It can be argued that anonymity presents people in their most honest, unfiltered form.

So, the same anonymous commenters calling her the c-word may "intellectually" argue that women are merely incapable of succeeding in tech when in polite company.
The title is confusing, indeed. She's trying to say, 'Men: Don't apologize for the situation'.

And I totally disagree. As a man, I know what happens when we don't: We get lambasted for not caring.

We do care. We care enough to apologize and defend.

While I haven't worked with a female programmer, the ones I met socially were very competent. The female QA Testers I've worked with have been amazing. Even the female phone tech support reps I've worked with have been great. (For the record, most of the males filling those positions were better than average. I'm not disparaging them.)

The negative stereotype of women and science/tech/etc is undeserved and wrong.

But ignoring the situation is not the answer. Not-apologizing is a form of ignoring it. It doesn't help the situation at all.

Apologizing, however, shows support and that the vocal minority are just that: A minority.
Good God, Maisel's house is incredible!
Everything is a remix: How inventions are born (video)
I think it actually makes some people go overboard. Instead of being themselves, they start doing things to achieve certain goals, like being noticed or getting laughs. I don't doubt that there's some truth to their actions, but it goes beyond that.

Sometimes.
Lawyers don't include plain English because, in general, legal code cannot have comments which are not executable code. Imagine the sort of comments you would write if they were all executable (and you could not trivially break this constraint -- it's a metaphor, work with me).

The business danger is that your plain English suggests, or is ambiguous with regards to, the meaning of something which your legal code is not ambiguous about, and the court holds that the meaning extracted from the plain English is controlling because, well, if you hadn't intended it that way you're a billion-dollar corporation with a dream team and you should have been able to phrase what you actually wanted in the contract you had drafted.

What's something which could easily be misconstrued... ooh, vesting schedules. "We grant you 10,000 options with a 4 year vesting schedule of 2,500 options per year." Lawyers will probably not be that loose with language. For one thing, this doesn't address the somewhat significant issue of when those 2,500 options accrue -- if I end my employment on day 1,000, do I end up with 5,000 options? Or 6,843 options? Or, perhaps more significantly, is the maximum number of options accrued under this 10,000? Or 20,000? (Lawyers don't get a DWIM operator any more than we do, and "with" is one treacherous little beastie now isn't it.)