skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What if Pincus he had just fired them, with the reason being that they were not earning their compensation? It seems reasonable to fire someone if they are not pulling their weight? Giving them a choice seems unfair, but how is it worse than just being fired?

I think this is just Pincus being a nerd and over rationalizing the situation, instead of just decisively 'pulling the trigger'.

On the other hand, these people were given an offer of X% of the company in exchange for taking lots of risk early on. They took the risk, and now that the value of the company is greater, Pincus is taking the incentive back. So Pincus offloaded personal risk (paying lower salaries + stock instead of just paying market salaries) and then when the risk was gone he is canceling his agreement. I would never trust this man.
This has alternate spellings (data-alternative-spellings). So you can type America and it will show United States.
An Unprecedented Limited Time Promotion
10 Leadership Games of all time
IANAL...

...but I'm sure Zynga has some good ones. I don't think they're trying to annul the contract. Essentially, they're saying that these employees are underperforming, and thus they have the right to fire them "with cause". If they straight up fired the employees, those employees would lose out on their unvested shares. They would have nothing. Instead, Zynga is saying, "Give some back and you can stay."

Low and shady. Should we expect anything less from this company? The bright side is, they avoided a mass-firing (likely because engineering talent is still tough to find).
Unvested shares may not be equity in the company, but they very well may be equity in the equity. They represent a promise to grant actual shares when certain conditions are met, and that promise is worth something in the present. Contriving to reneg on that promise is little different from defaulting on your debts. In a way, it actually is defaulting on a debt.
Someone else also read APERTURE?
A willingness to do so is why he gets paid the big bucks. Why people would consider the words to be anything but the lies of a scoundrel remains a mystery.
I almost invariably isolate any API calls behind some kind of wrapper facade. In fact, a lot of the presentation is about exactly that: adapting Ruby's IO primitives--which can raise various exceptions, and may return a process exit status in the form of a global variable--in code that isolates their idiosyncrasies.
Other European countries have similar urbanization levels/curves. And the most 'concentrated' country, the one with most of its people in cities, is, surprisingly, Australia. And they don't seem to have a ton of startups either...
Careful with that recommendation. I've got a friend from the eastern part of Europe (if you still consider it part of Europe in the first place). He came to DE on one of those things and is currently fighting an expensive lawsuit to be able to stay.

He is a great artist (musician) and earns more money than I did in DE as a developer, but for some reason he's still supposed to 'go home' now.

Yes, this is a single data point and you should not believe random strangers on the internet.
Larry Johnson and Cave Brin
They removed Apture from the Chrome Store just now
Ashton Kutcher: Twitter Management
As stated, I believe all the information needed to generate the report is there. My point was that what is sufficient for an application is generally insufficient for basic reporting. So, when budgets get short, the database work to make queries by reporting easier is often ignored and complicated queries and processes become the norm. Those laying the problem solely at the feet of the DBA's are missing the other group that tends to make these queries necessary: App Developers. I once had an app developer tell me one type of invoice was impossible to make because some of the relationships and data were intrinsic to the application and would need to be modeled the same as the application. He wasn't far off.

There is a point between transactional and data warehousing that needs to be hit. Simple summaries or considering the question of "how do I retrieve everything in this state" will sometimes suffice. Building a system to get single transactions in an out tends to make routine report take all night or be impossible to get in a reasonable amount of time.

If your schema and app requires non-trivial SQL, then expect maintenance nightmares and lack of ability to scale.
GDP Desnity Map (per square kilometer)
Jo Pa Fired.
programmers need a job to get a visa, and it's not the easiest thing in the world...but it's easier than most places! Check out monster.com even, or try to find startups via HN.
"Friends don't let friends work at Zynga" was something I heard floating around a while back...
The fact that the writer hasn't actually researched an important part of their largest competitor's business model doesn't speak well for Womply.
Great UI, and I love the signup interface. Just emailed it out to a bunch of my teacher friends.
I live near Berlin.
There is much wisdom in this essay on startups written by Paul Graham in 2006:

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

Quote:
"I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. "

Regarding Nerds:
There are certainly a lot of nerds in Berlin. Are they elite technology geeks? Maybe. But lots of such nerds are willing to move to Berlin. Check passed.

Regarding Rich people/investors:
There are actually relatively few rich people in Berlin. (Berlin is so cheap for a reason: it is a very poor city). So this key success factor is still underrepresented. Check NOT passed.

Just sayin'.

Don't expect too much.
Seriously, this should be point #1. Otherwise (as I suspect) this article can be summed up as: "This is a great place to work! Too bad you can't move here, suckas."
That service seems to compete more with http://polleverywhere.com than this.

I see a definite familiarity with http://remind101.com/ though, with which I have some moderate experience.

EDIT: On a closer look, both even use the same @CLASS subscription method. That's honestly a little sketchy.
Google Acquisition Binge Continues With ‘In-Page Search’ Start-up Apture
Google Acquires Katango, The Automatic Friend Sorter
POLES MARMER MURAH  - POLES MARMER JAKARTA - POLES GRANIT - POLES TERASO
"Who is searching for my name" timeline is Google's potential social weapon
Munster’s Map of the New World (1550)
Not according to their S-1: "Our current merchant arrangements are structured such that we collect cash up front when our customers purchase Groupons and make payments to most of our merchants at a subsequent date. Under our traditional merchant payment model, we pay our merchants in installments over a period of generally sixty days for all Groupons purchased."

According to their current merchant terms it's a payment after 30, plus every two weeks after that on any balance.
Power as a Resource: Windows 8 and the Quest for Energy Efficiency
You can just hire commercial ones. Multicolour may be banned in your country:(

Look for a stage rental company like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLMYYWxir_s&feature=youtu...
New Service Design Patterns Book by Robert Daigneau
> What scenario can you think of where coercion would be a real issue?

Forget about intimidation and consider bribery. Instead of a domineering boss threatening termination imagine a man with a laptop and a roll of $20 bills.
Thanks! And I love that line about the "personal connection" without breaching privacy -- I'll have to use that.

One of the things we've been exploring is ways to integrate over existing LMS software, and it's been pretty disappointing to hear how no one has any sort of plugin system or API for apps.
E-Cig Tutorial Video Library
1. Politics

2. Editorialising

3. Inaccurate in its implications (what, no judge has ever "stood up to Wall Street", whatever that means, before?)

4. From Rolling Stone, and not on the subject of music.
I'm using Dreamhost to host this site, and it started giving me 500 errors within 5 minutes on HN front page. Is that normal? Anyone know a better host (maybe 1&1) with better bandwith terms??
Following Michael Arrington from TechCrunch to UnCrunched
the question for people like us developing for mobile is what is best for our users today - and the answer is native (in most cases). and as you mention, it's probably the right answer for a few years to come.

note: there are a bunch of apps that I've come across that are just 4 views of static content and no interactive functionality. those should definitely stay html5/javascript.
Yes, there are many different angles.

To be clear, the technique of messaging in a special code to a number to "subscribe" to a service has been around for many, many years before edtech companies started using it recently. But it's a good approach.

And there's one big difference: services like Remind101 offer broadcasting, but they don't allow the students to reply.

We're out to open up and optimize the communication between teachers and students. Over time, each side will get the tools that serve them best. That's why the UX is web-based for teachers and SMS-based for students.
There are two aspects to this, that people are missing:

1) On a personal level, you absolutely must be optimistic and try and do everything you can to create a company if that's what you want, but also to push the system to change and improve.

2) Statistically speaking, it's pretty obvious that messy taxes, bureaucracy and so on, do have negative effects at the margin, so taken as a whole, they're absolutely a valid thing to complain about.

The key distinction is to stay as far as possible from the poisonous ponderings about how it's not possible to do anything and it's all stacked against me and blah blah blah, which is all just a big excuse not to try.
Boyle has done nothing illegal - recording anyone in a location where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy (a dining room at a Burger King definitely qualifies) is perfectly legal.

I see a world of difference between a fight in a Burger King and a fight broadcast live over the Internet to thousands of people. The 'expectation of privacy' here doesn't seem as clear-cut as you make it out to be. I don't think you have to be in your own living room to have an expectation of privacy.
WP7.
I think that makes you not really a regular user. Don't get me wrong, I think it's fine that Google is providing tools for self-promotion and features for brands. But it seems to me that the best feature for brands is a lot of engaged users.

The reason Google search ads have a stranglehold on the market is because they have so much search marketshare. Similarly, it seems to me that the best thing to do would be to aggressively provide users with the best experience possible. The brands will follow, regardless of how good their tools are.
What is Attraction Marketing?
Had no problem with English in Berlin. Anyone 35 and under will speak impecable English and when it comes to ordering doner kebabs, all you have to do is point. (Obviously, one should learn German eventually)
That will only happen if we allow it to happen.
How does creating a contact group in Gmail connects it to a SMS number? I am curious.
IOS 5.0.1 Software Update
Exactly, for many use cases a mobile web application fits perfectly.
No matter how vehemently you keep asserting it, the promise Zynga made has value - or else Zynga wouldn't want to renege on it, duh - and making threats in order to get anyone to give you anything of value is extortion in the common law.
I am entirely in favor of this. Mainly because I'm four blocks away and am trying to hire engineers.

Seriously, it's bullshit. It makes me mad not just for the people getting screwed, but for the whole industry. The whole point of giving somebody early equity is that it's a gamble. Sometimes it's worth nothing; sometimes tons. If companies start doing it in a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose fashion, then that really reduces the value of the equity as an incentive.

Zynga isn't just hurting their employees; they're hurting every early-stage startup that comes after them.
Don't inject your own visceral response into an TL;DR.
Go do it then---I was accepted to intern by 2 or 3 companies in a matter of weeks. Just make sure you have something to show them. You might have to settle for an unpaid internship thought, but good luck on finding a job.
Why would you not consider it apart of Europe?
pg has also gotten into bed with Yuri Milner and his DST firm. You will notice that both Zynga and Groupon are recipients of DST funds, so it's no surprise that pg is promoting Pincus and Mason.
In fact, I have no doubt that if any of the new batch of YC startups were to become successful and IPO, this sort of behaviour that Pincus is trying to pull may be emulated.
When you lie with dogs you get fleas, etc.
Yup, shared host has its limitations. Use a cache plugin like W3 Total Cache for now.
Style Guide for Python Code
I think this is really awesome and definitely headed in the right direction as far as getting teachers more involved with technology, however from my experience in several different schools, most have been really strict on cell phone use during school and teacher/student communication outside of school.

It was quite a hassle really because teachers wanted to do more but were restricted by school policy. I hope schools start to utilize technology in the classroom.
Folding Pocket Square
Compiling Apache 1.3.x on Modern Linux Distributions
It really depends on the probabilities of settlement versus winning a suit versus the costs of litigation, etc. It's probably best for them to just lawyer up and take their advice. This sort of tactical strategy is what they're paid to do.
I remember those times, too, but MySpace never had the sheer ubiquity that Facebook has. It feel qualitatively different to me, in that I never felt like I was out of the loop or unable to communicate with certain people or excluded from certain conversations because I wasn't on MySpace. That was partly because I could see people's MySpace pages (not that I frequently wanted to) without having an account, unlike Facebook.

Yes, the technical elite from MySpace eventually moved to FB, but more importantly, FB got a ton of users that were never on MS. I don't think Google can do the same to FB, because there just aren't that many people that aren't on FB. They have to actively court current FB users. Stealing the technical crowd is relatively easy. But FB's network effect is unprecedented and represents a much bigger challenge, IMO.
With out a large and powerful government it's dealing with a small number of huge Telcos. Harder, but certainly possible.
And it's really a boon for privacy, because we will finally be forced to a) actively care about it and b) define exactly what, where, and when it is.

It's not privacy that we are ultimately losing, it's obscurity.
I think this is a result of applying 19th century concepts of privacy to a 21st century world. The rapid leap of technology has outpaced our notions of privacy and ethics. Think about this situation from the point of view of someone born in 2011 and their response might be completely different.

Society needs to start thinking about what we need to move forward and stop shackling ourselves with ideas that are hopelessly outdated.
Keep in mind he was living with a host family. If you want to rent an apt, it will cost more. Here's some crowd-sourced numbers on cost of living in Berlin: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country...
I had a brief conversation with the "inventor":
http://www.metafilter.com/56994/Death-ray-fiddlesticksit-doe...
Downvoters aside, it isn't at all out of the question. From http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/privacy/Privacy_R2d_Torts_Secti... :

"One who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person. " (emphasis added)
Google Chrome Will Add Search Inside of Every Web Page With Apture Acquisition
So then I don't follow: why is arguing that G+ is dead based on usage metrics now OK, but doing it 5 years ago for facebook was wrong?
Neo (Affordable Car Loans) wins Founder Showcase Pitch Competition
This is exactly what I was thinking.

If Pincus succeeds with this, startups as a whole and this kind of compensation in particular will look much worse.
The live-tweeting thing was strange. It's funny that two fairly naive young people in a Burger King are deciding the fate of their marriage, in that it's so absurd. I do think there is humor there.

But something was off-putting about how faithfully the guy was trying to document this event. It seemed like he was really trying to put these two people's identity on blast, and foiled only by the circumstances (the quality of his phone's camera, the distance between himself and the couple) rather than, you know, any sense of propriety or mercy.

I guess what I'm saying is, the element of identity changes the stakes. Like I said, the notion of two people ending their marriage in a Burger King is so ridiculous that it's funny. But when it becomes John Smith of 123 Main Street, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, having a fight with his wife Jane, it starts to feel weirdly mercenary. Like it's not being done for a laugh anymore, but expressly to humiliate two people.

But, I agree that this is the way things are going whether we all like it or not. Whatever is in public is fair game for social media. But Mr. Boyle should consider exercising his powers of restraint a little better.
Except when the regulatory laws or agencies in charge of cleaning house get gutted. Hooray, modern American politics!
While GRPN IPOed at $20, it opened for trading to the public at $30 and its dropped daily ever since.
It's not the classiest person who highlights/broadcasts the flaws in others.
That is the way the law is currently structured and interpreted (in the U.S.A.), but it doesn't have to be that way. I have long been of the opinion that people should automatically own (representations of) their own expression, even in public. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the current situation in the U.S., as you describe. Most jurisdictions in Europe are somewhere in-between.

That couple should have the right to sue. I understand that under the current framework they do not, but they should.
Looks like the NPDB people have added an EULA you must agree to before accessing the database.

> In order to access the [Public Use Data File], users will now be asked to review and agree to a Data Use Agreement (DUA) that spells out specifics of how the data provided in the PUF may be used in accordance with the law.

http://www.npdb-hipdb.hrsa.gov/resources/publicDataStatement...

Users may copy the data, but they can't distribute it.

> Not repost the dataset and only report, disclose or post data from the dataset in connection with statistical reporting or analysis that does not identify any individual or entity.

http://www.npdb-hipdb.hrsa.gov/resources/publicData.jsp
WebGL GPU Landscaping and Erosion
The expectation of privacy is not "internet" or "not internet", it's "public place" or "not public place".
Honestly at this point I think the damage is long done. I'm just glad that they got to eat their dog food after being so nasty to their employees
We can fix that, permanently, and we should.
I am saying it shouldn't be a legal issue.

It is the equivalent of saying 'you need to take a cut in pay or you will be laid off'.
Crafty! How do you get the image to overwrite? I would think that you could only append to the image data that's already been transmitted.
Facebook, FTC Near Privacy Settlement
I think they called out the situation pretty well. It's users hitting one website, and it's views not downloads or active users.

That said, there's certainly a lot of increase in mindshare with Linux Mint lately. The biggest reason I have seen is due to Ubuntu's Unity "situation."

My guess is that people are moving in large enough numbers that it's starting to show up in places like Distrowatch.

This isn't a bad thing. From my experience "top distro" is a cycle that just so happens to have derivatives being thrown in for good measure. In the time that I've been using Linux on a desktop there have been a lot of advancements.

I personally went from Red Hat (3 i think), to Mandrake Linux, to Debian, to Gentoo, and after several years of using OS X, I have Arch Linux in a VM that I use for development.

Things are going to change. The old top distro is going to be over thrown by another until something better or more useful comes along. Honestly, with the commercial aspect to Ubuntu I never thought so many of the die hard Linux users would use it to begin with. I figured we'd see those people kicking and screaming to their graves before they used it. But a few of those people did switch and now they're switching to something else because Ubuntu has taken a turn for the worse (in their opinion).

We'll see how it plays out in the long run, but I think the simple fact that we're seeing so many stories on it here is only fueling the fire. People are looking at it because it's being linked all over the place.
There's a thing in the Midwest known as minding your own business. There's also a whole cultural phenomena in large cities where people crammed together respect space by avoiding eye contact with one another. (Which, oddly, many Midwesterners tend to see as cold and aloof, but it's a built-in mechanism of cities).

Boyle traversed to needless gossip when he probably would have been better served to mind his own business, which is particularly annoying from him because he works with journalists as a "newsroom web developer" and presumably could be considered a journalist himself. He works at the Globe, and removed this fact from his twitter profile as people started questioning the ethics of the ordeal. I assume he was distancing his personal twitter from his professional life, but journalists don't normally get that kind of work/life balance from their employers.

I think the point of the Bourdain reference is that Bourdain's in the public eye as a celebrity, while this couple was not. One type of gossip is almost acceptable while the other type is decidedly not acceptable.
Why does this web site prevent my browser from zooming in the text?
I agree this shouldn't be posted on HN but just to clarify. My issue with this article is it doesn't spell out the law behind the case. If the SEC doesn't think they can win a case against Citigroup and they were settling to impose whatever punishment they could then this judge isn't a hero at all. In fact he'll be facilitating Citigroup by letting them get away with this completely.

By not telling us what law Citigroup violated and giving us the language in the law so we can make our own judgment this article prevents us from discussing the issue intellectually. Which makes it just an emotional argument and hence inappropriate for HN
This is bound to happen. Microsoft is an aging giant though it still has some of the best minds in the industry.

One concern I always have hiring from such old guard companies is that the people who have worked there for long, have skills too specific to the company they come from. They need some time adjusting to different technologies and development practices.
Java isn't the best example, no :-) For example, its checked exceptions basically force dealing with them all over the code (if you want a nice API without seventy throws clauses, that is). The equals example you're giving is horrible indeed.

My personal favourite, which is C# at the moment, also has the "null" misdesign so you're right about that. Still, none of the duck typing issues exist (other than the null checking, which admittedly does undermine my point). Also, the IDE helps you do it right, which gives you more confidence as you write the code.
There are some crazy smart Ruby people there. Makes me a bit envious.