skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Craiglist single handedly turned the newspaper industry on end by offering free local classified ads online, which were previously a major revenue source for newspapers.

The tech doesn't matter as much as the effect - a tiny upstart company totally changed the business landscape of a large entrenched industry with a tiny staff and budget.
> Solution for society: Recognize that bending the law over backwards to provide perfect security for big content companies has costs in excess of benefits and isn't worth it, especially given the availability of the previous solution.

To the extent society has any opinion on that whatsoever, it already agrees with everything you just said, if not going further. But society doesn't determine the laws in question; if it did we wouldn't have them.
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I just remember there being a famous story of Mark Cuban buying out of the money puts on Yahoo stock after the acquisition of Broadcast.com. Obviously a different scenario, but always reminded of this whenever IPO lockup talk comes up.
It's a miracle!
In other words, they must reserve a very big hammer to protect themselves simply due to the type of business they are trying to start. Said hammer could be abused, but they cannot not have it.
"to know that there is a logical process (is there?)"

There isn't. You're fucked.

-- ex Google employee
Employees can't rely on your decency because the investors might put someone else's finger on the trigger if that time comes. I wish there were a way to ensure everyone gets paid or screwed together, but tactics like share classes and dilution and liquidity preferences seem to be so strongly customary that I wonder if a VC would lose interest in a firm that relinquished the power to selectively starve that VC's rivals at the banquet.
Adobe Flash fallout extends to TVs, RIM perseveres with PlayBook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
This really surprises me. Code Search is an engineering-centric tool. I'd think Google would want to keep it just for their own internal code base. What are the Chromium folks going to use now?
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They can't touch the shares that have vested - I think we both agree here. They could just fire the non-performing executive, and put an end to the vesting schedule.

Here is the thing - Firing Non-Performing executives at startups with huge stock allocations happens ALL the time at _every_ company. It's not at all unusual - I've never been at a company where it hasn't happened. And frequently. It's absolutely business as usual.

I don't understand why Pincus didn't just fire these people and move on. That's the weird part of this entire thread.
> “We don’t want to be left with a complicated array of good-but-not-great services.”

Sounds like Steve got his point across.
> And those penalties are based on the cost to the other guy. So if warner falsely demands your youtube video is taken down - you lost no money so even if they lied the penalty is zero.

DMCA notices include the required text "under penalty of perjury". Perjury qualifies as a criminal felony, quite aside from any financial penalties. Unfortunately, nobody has ever enforced that requirement; someone ought to. Perhaps with the parties responsible for sending such notice imprisoned for up to five years (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1621.html), they'd think twice about sending false takedown notices.
I think a good solution (for Ruby) would to add something like that to a future Ruby version. These things do conflict with Ruby's core semantics a bit, but they do open the door to some intriguing styles -- as does this: https://github.com/intridea/hashie
Not usually, you need someone on the other side of the transaction. And even if the options were available, the volatility would make the spread very costly.
FWIW, you cannot get any Zynga employee's opinion in this because the pre-IPO "quiet period" is in effect. So this is a pretty one-sided conversation.
The probability that something happens, in a vacuum, is pretty meaningless. It's just a number that changes based on evidence you have. For example, if you knew nothing at all about the universe, the probability that the sun would go up tomorrow could be extremely low. The probability of the sun going up tomorrow given our knowledge of the world is much more meaningful.

A perfect example of how this is significant is the very first assumption: while your dad may have met 20,000 women, the probability that he would date and then marry your mother given his qualities and preferences in women is most likely much higher than 1/20,000.

Another example: let's say we have a loaded die. If we don't know anything about it, the probability of getting a 6 is 1/6. If we know it's loaded, the probability is something else. Which value is correct? If it's the latter, then wouldn't the probability of your being born really be something like the probability of your being born given a bunch of environmental factors and the like?

Basically, the number presented here is mostly devoid of value. That said, the visualization is very good and gets its point across both succinctly and clearly.
> Sure web mobile apps kind of suck right now, but theres hardely any frameworks, established processes or documentation on how to build them properly.

Your argument assumes that building good web applications is merely a function of tools. It's not.

We have a performance-per-watt wall, plus a heat wall, plus a weight wall in mobile hardware.

There is a reason that Apple is pushing C-based development without as much as a garbage collector, it's not just the stubbornness of Jobs. It's because a dynamic language with state-of-the-art VMs struggles hard to do basic smooth animations on current-gen mobile hardware, and will continue to struggle, for at least the next five releases of Nitro.

You're going to need something like a battery revolution to build the mobile web app panacea that you want.
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The right-of-repurchase grants that I've seen have always been 83-B grants where the company lets me buy all the stock up front so I can start the tax clock. The right of repurchase lapses on a vesting schedule, just like options.

From that perspective, there isn't much difference between (A) Vesting Stock, and (B) Lapsing over time a Restricted Repurchase agreements.

Nobody is going back on their word - it's just a different way of vesting.
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Good point. I'm positive I'd just fire them. It sounds like he made a list of B/C players but wants to keep them around.

Maybe he's concerned how it would look if he fired a group of execs right before the IPO?
Well - the hacker can be fired. That also takes back all the unvested stock.
Oh, I thought you were talking about Craigslist vs. eBay.
It's hard because you can't say sorry, you have to do it.

The biggest form of respect anyone can give someone else is their time.

Center your message around that. Say that you feel foolish for bailing on them twice after you had set a time and knowing better.

Say that you'd like to make it right if they're open to it.

At the end of the day no one likes being treated like an option instead of a priority.

Do whatever you need to to make sure no emergency or distraction can come up to interfere with respecting this person's time with your time. Learn to say no to other things if this is so important.

Talk is cheap, action is king.
I have found 31 repos on Common Lisp.
Clojure - 3956 repos.

Compare to:
Ruby - 141811 repos.
Python - 67482 repos.

It seems that writing on Ruby is more fun than writing in Lisp.
Can someone post the full text of the article?
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Right, stop using those "complicated" built-in date processing functions and instead roll your own. What could possibly go wrong? Storing a number that's only meaningful when defining it somewhere outside of the database is much more fun! Finally you get to meet all your co-workers in person, at least all the junior developers who will stop by your desk to ask why there are these weird numbers in the date columns.
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What's really disgusting in the conversation is that there's some implicit assumption that it was _wrong_ for the Google Chef to have received $20mm. Indeed, the only thing wrong with that is that $20mm is far too little, given the Chef's contributions to Google (I am assuming they're talking about Charlie?)
Also, you can't make a Ruby object falsy. So if you overload #nil? you get fun problems like:

obj.nil? # => true
!!obj # => true
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"Unvested" means just that: The shares have not vested. The shares are not yours yet. You cannot lose something that is not yours. People who get fired before their shares vest, are not "losing" their unvested shares, nor are they "giving back" their unvested shares.
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More often, startups fire employees under the disguise of performance. I am not sure what constitutes non-performance but it has been used countless times as an excuse for getting back the unvested stock options.
No, it is not the code. It is InnoDB's default buffer pool set to 8MB that cause my website to be so slow ...
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I agree. In addition to the 83-B election, I've seen a right-of-first-refusal for share repurchase. (Third party offers you $X/share for your shares, the company has the right to purchase at that price instead.)

I've never seen a "we can repurchase shares as we see fit" clause.
http://www.myfivesevenfive.com/

A community for people to write Haiku poetry

Rather unloved at the moment. My schedule has been crazy ever since I launched it :(
CPU pipeline optimisation lesson incl. an interactive ASM/C++ walkthrough
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None of these employees who have had their stock (possibly millions of dollars of compensation) "clawed back" will be likely to do any productive work whatsoever for Zynga - so why not fire them and get it over with? After all - that would have the effect of instantly canceling all future vesting - no discussion or agreement with the employee required whatsoever, and zero controversy.

After some deeper thought on this topic - my new assessment is that these people are actually experiencing what is called a "Soft Termination" - they've been fired, but they are allowed to stay on as employees for things like Medical, Job Hunting, etc....

Instead of appreciating it, though - they are squawking about having their stock pulled back in return for not being "officially terminated". I bet this type of thing goes on more often than we know, particularly with Executives who may have a significant percentage of the company and are not working out.
I realize you're referring to Swing Java apps, and I won't argue on their behalf for a second. However the SWT library is a dream of a native toolkit experience if you're writing a client app in Java. It's fast, does a good job of working across a wide variety of platforms (Win32, Cocoa, GTK, and I think Motif), and is extremely well documented.
If you're only interested in the canvas-based ASM/C++ walkthrough, you'll find it here:

http://overbyte.com.au/misc/Lesson2/asmVScppL2.html
From the release notes I see a new 'db' lib has been added which'll work out-of-the-box with PGSQL, MySQL, SQLite and ODBC. No more fetching different PlaneT packages for different databases, plus it has the added benefit of being in the core. Great work by the Racket Team :) lots of batteries included!
This is all horsecrap. Adobe flash never ONCE ran successfully on my HTC Evo. It is absolute garbage and is never useful. IDK why anyone mentions "we support flash on our phones/tablets"... its all crap. It barely works if it even does. Read any tablet review including playbook about how "wonderful" flash is there.

Dropping support is basically saying... "oh yea, since nobody is developing for it AT ALL and no system can successfully give a decent experience with it, we'll just stop supporting it since it won't affect anyone wanyways."
tldr: In this article from 2009, consider storing UTC plus the local timezone instead of the local server time when building applications that have users in multiple timezones. Use a time or a time offset as appropriate to capture a point in time (e.g. a birthday) or a timespan (e.g. the number of seconds this thing ran), resp.
A Mr Kirchof would disagree with you if he wasn't dead.

A perfect emitter facing an infinite cold sink is in perfect equibirium at the temperature of the cold sink.
All real-world probabilities are like that, though. Outside the quantum world, ALL randomness is just an illusion based on human ignorance of current conditions.
Anytime you have both vesting schedules and at-will employment, your employer can fire you at any time and you will not get any unvested stock. Startups need to do this all the time when employees are underperforming or a bad fit. Renegotiating so that you can get a portion of that stock and stay employed is perhaps, if this were an isolated incident, a much better deal for the employee than getting fired.

Where this becomes very distasteful is if these aren't isolated incidents of very underperforming employees but Zynga using its leverage to negotiate compensation down arbitrarily. Even if a developer is performing just as well as expected upon hiring, it is unlikely that they could get a guaranteed offer of $1M from another company, and so Zynga could easily force a renegotiation of an unvested grant worth $5M down to $1M. This would be reprehensible - even if that employee isn't really adding $5M worth of value, if they are performing up to the expectations that were set when they were hired then the agreement should be honored - getting a chance of a huge upside is one of the reasons employees take lower salaries and work longer hours at startups in the first place. A company that abused its bargaining position like this should not expect to be able to hire good employees in the future.

There isn't really enough information in the article to know that this latter case is what's happening. There are scenarios in which this behavior is very malicious, and scenarios in which it's relatively reasonable. It all hinges on how the employees in question were performing and how common this tactic is. I don't think anybody here knows those details, so we should really try and avoid the typical internet rush-to-judgement here. I don't know anything about the internals of Zynga, but I have seen HN get out the pitchforks for other companies when the real story turned out to be much more mundane.
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Better than being the guy who ruined education discounts to serve his meth habit.

Are education discounts ruined now? I haven't been in a college store in a while.
If you are one of these employees, talk to a good lawyer. You can definitely sue Zynga.
Actually that's exactly the opposite of true. In fact you -need- old data to validate that your mathematical model actually works by applying it to whatever historical timespan of data you are trying to derive intelligence from. At least if any sort of unit of time is applicable to any of your models.

Of course just sitting on the data doesn't do anyone any good at all..and randomly picking at stuff isn't likely to do much either unless you go in knowing what you want to find.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

Came pretty close to tanks...
I don't think dick jokes are unprofessional. I think the fundamental divide here is not "likes dick jokes"/"is made uncomfortable by dick jokes" but instead "simply doesn't attend conferences they don't like"/"blogs about how unprofessional conferences they don't like are".

Seriously, if you don't like the way a conference is run, vote with dollars and go somewhere else. The rest of us who don't give a shit about things that don't matter will be there instead.
Wait until they discover `uuidgen`

Minds will be blown.
Awesome so he idealizes a dude who parks in Handicapped parking (without a number plate).

What kind of world do we live in?
And what do you propose is the alternative? Very easy to take a moral high ground when you don't have to worry about the repercussions of over population and strained resources. As the poster said themselves - too many people in China.
Wow yes!

My family is a great use-case for this! I have both old members of the family that would never spring for an iPad and young members who don't need an iPad that would be great candidates to be entertained via an iPad for the duration of the cross-continental flights our family has to make (our family spread out to all corners...)

Do this and make it as cheap as possible. Don't make it a luxury item.

Crap, not having to pack children books for the kids alone would probably get the people I know to rent.
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I wonder what the value of 50,000 dollars five years from now is in terms of today's dollars considering inflation ,another five rounds of QE and a probable economic crisis.

Perhaps my odds are better if I just bought $2000 worth of silver and did absolutely nothing else.
Actually, it is theft. The grant is a commitment to issue the equity on the vesting schedule. Attempting to change that schedule is attempting to deny employees the compensation they are morally due.

If the employee continues to do the work he promised to do at the time of the grant, firing him, or attempting to renegotiate, simply to get the stock back is a form of theft.

You can't just hire someone at $100k a year and then decide you want to pay them less, at least not without risking a losing a lawsuit.
because as we all know, once you have thoroughly checked for exploitable bugs your system is completely free from exploitable bugs!
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They do stuff like this and now RIAA wants to eliminate DMCA, too?
As an investor what this tells me is the CEO has no personal integrity, and I begin to doubt the veracity of his IPO filings.
Yes, but with less relevant results.
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I thought the discussion of tradeoffs was interesting, in particular the problem of saying no to customers, and that the business became rigidly centered around the database structure.

It makes me wonder if CouchDB and others might not be best when used with, rather than as a replacement for, RDBMS's.
The "final version" was published in February 2009.

http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
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Today: We just launched a fresh redesign to our entire site and added in what we think, frankly, is a killer hotel search and booking experience and here's why:

Our video explains it better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3fnvpCG9jY

1) It's crazy fast, give it a try. It's like Google hotel finder fast but we use real-time pricing.

2) We show you pricing from all the major players. No one else shows you prices from Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, etc. all at once.

3) We still kept our original hotel content and when available, you can filter by "room view" or by best value (free wifi, free breakfast, free parking, free shuttle).

4) Room Concierge - We think of it like Zappos meets the entire online hotel industry. Usually, when you book online, you're treated as a second-class citizen. The normal sites take your credit card and then they're done. We're using our knowledge of the best rooms in hotels and providing everyone who books a 3-star or better hotel FREE concierge service to help fight for a better room on your behalf. Want a QUIET room that doesn't sit across from an ice machine on the street level? Just tell us and 48 hours before you get to the hotel, our team lets you know what we've been able to do for you at the hotel. In our testing, 90%+ of the requests we make on behalf of our customers result in a room the customer wants.

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So? The web was not designed for video. It wasn't designed for dynamic interactivity either or applications at all, actually. Yet here we are.
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The first line says that he meets 10,000 women, then the next line says there's a 1 in 2000 chance that he has kids with a woman he meets... that means he had 5 wives?
Don't overload #nil? in Ruby
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Clickable video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3fnvpCG9jY&list=HL132090...

Also, one of our engineers will be checking periodically to answer any questions about how we built our site and the technology behind it.
Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.
What is the possibility that ANY OF US exist AT ALL?

I think it's fair to believe that we are the only intelligent beings in all the universe.

What are the odds that some form of life evolved the same way we did over billions of years to form something as complicated as human beings? Probably Zero.

I guess the odds would have to be the same that there are also beings FAR MORE intelligent than us as well.
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This is neat, but the odds that I exist are 1 in 1 since this is the only possible permutation of the universe.

Go ahead, prove it isn't.
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All you succeeded in doing was raise a question about which discussion followed. Anyone can do that, even a 3-year old.
yes, any good broker can set you up with a collar. you miss the upside but it will keep your price locked in until the lockout period expires. A lot of people do that.

If you work at a startup that is about to IPO, there is a high chance that the brokers will find you and will pitch you all of these services.
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No, I think it shows that there's a chance he'll have kids with a woman he never meets... somehow.

Shouldn't there be a 1 in 1 chance that he'll have his kids with a woman he meets?