skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the banking system of the eurozone (continental europe) is very conservative and not keen on risk. there's nothing that resemble venture capitalism in the old continent (with the notable exception of the UK which is a member of the Commonwealth). I think that the european system is more secure for private wealth (I assumed that having seen what happened to some banks in the US in 2008) but it's showing its weakness these days because it's putting entire countries on their knees.
>I trust that they have interviewed enough people to know who "fits" their organization

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Selection processes which deal with a large number of applicants are often geared to find reasons for eliminating candidates.

In other words, if fit was the issue, the person who decided that you didn't, may not have any particularly good basis in experience for making that determination - could be they just don't like people in suits.
This is par for the course for Zynga who have made a successful company by stealing the lunches of creative companies and developers.

Don't be surprised when an evil company acts evil. Just don't work for evil companies.
Seth Meyers nailed it:

"In an effort to compete with the iPad, Amazon Wednesday unveiled their new tablet computer called the Kindle Fire which will retail for $199. It’s expected to sell well among parents who always buy the wrong thing."
Interesting. In this case, the creation time and i-node change time are the same - the file was written as new.

I see where you are going. I guess I'll have to move to FreeBSD to get file "birth time" support (or look into POSIX extended attributes). It's more or less a painless change. FreeBSD also has ZFS support, which is the filesystem to rule'em all. Either way, I don't expect Silverlight or WPF to run on FreeBSD.
Social Media Strategy: Do you have one for your business?
Nokia produced the best mobile phones back in the day, solid quality and fair price.
They just missed the smartphone trend and when they still could get back they refused to be mere "hardware-producers" and out of pride they didn't cooperate with Android.

So in no way Amazon and Nokia are comparable.

The only thing I don't like about the Kindle Fire is that (although Android is used) the Android-Market will not be useable
Fails for U.S.A. and U.K. Also Laos.

And I agree that matching "us" to "Australia" at all is pointless.
Yegge, is that you?
What are Chinese Herbs?
I would agree with the analogy if the stock compensation was payed out along the way.

I think it is more akin to "we are not satisfied with your work on the contract we are taking what you have produce so far and are only going to pay you a portion of the original agreed upon amount."
I suspect that none of those employees were planning to stick around after the IPO anyway.It's sounds like a terrible place to work.
Apple releases iOS 5.0.1 | Where Am I?
Bicycles and living close to a trail loop are also good too. Fortunately my work is right beside a 25 minute loop. :)
IANAL. Considering the employees are going to be challenging California's "at will" employment laws and the fact that the charges against the employees is performance based, how likely is #2 to have a fighting chance?
which unfortunately meant bending the very foundations of capitalism and free market 360 degrees and making sure those institutes do not fail and implode our economy.

That would be 180 degrees. 360 is a complete circle ;)
I've been working from home for about 6 months now, and relate to a lot of what's in this article. The scheduling can be super tough - it's way to easy to get distracted on the internet and blow an entire morning doing absolutely nothing.

Overall, the thing that I think has kept me both productive and sane is working hard to have external passions. For me, it's outdoor sports like rock climbing and mountain biking, and if you just decide that you're going to get out for a few hours every day and do some non-work thing that you love, then you have a justification for being productive during the portion of the day that you are actually working. I also find that doing these sports brings me into contact with other people beyond my girlfriend and house mate, which is definitely a very appreciated bonus after being cooped up in the house by yourself for so many hours a week.
IOS covering the shoulders of Twitter | Where Am I?
developers should blacklist companies like this. sort of an informal union.

with the right personalities behind it we could do serious damage to the sleazy conniving wheeler-dealers who pull this shit.
Finally a Public IaaS Cloud Provider to Add SSD Storage
What Is The Epilepticus Status Grand Mal (Seizures)
Is there any reason to watch the videos if one has AIMA? Could one do the assignments without without ever watching a video?
The paper itself is quite readable: http://www.q-group.org/archives_folder/pdf/spring2008/ChenBe...
I know that employment is at-will in California, but you can still sue for wrongful termination in some cases.

Could this be happening in this case?

I read the beginning of this page (http://www.ca-employment-lawyers.com/Wrongful-Termination.ht...) and it seems to depend highly on the contracts and employee handbook that Zynga have.

In any case, you would think that this should make hiring talents more difficult…
Nuclear War Plan by I.R.S.
I love that "Great" gives me United Kingdom.
Honestly? I think this is the execs trying to grab as much stock as possible for themselves pre-IPO, so they can dump it and run.

There's no way that this actually turns out to be a net positive for the Company. It's going to make it significantly harder to hire actual talent, it's going to cause morale decay and revolt from within the company, and it erodes Zynga's brand. Literally the only benefit here is that the execs end up with more stock when the IPO happens.
The experimental description also leaves out key information in understanding what they did. I linked to the real paper in this thread which seems much more readable.
Edward Naughton continues his "Android violates the GPL" crusade
This happens everywhere. Employers let the flotsam sit around for months, even years, configuring servers or generating a slide deck and when time comes to shell out cash as either a reward or through compensated attrition, they'll pull out that long-dormant knife and stick it into an unsuspecting recipient's back.

That way the don't have to over-compensate the performers beyond what they've already promised them.
I think this is spot on. I have friends who left the finance industry because they absolutely hated the toxic personalities that it attracts. The ones who went into tech say it isn't much different. Anywhere there is fast money to be made will attract scumbags.
Please post a link to your service it sounds very interesting: I would like to use it.
Hamburg considers suing Facebook over facial recognition feature
Wales and UK work for me - I suspect it's been updated.
Uh, isn't citing papers that have nothing to do with your paper unethical or plagiarism and could be seen as padding your paper? I don't think citing sources that have nothing to do with your paper is a good idea...
I also feel like an upvote is not sufficient to express my appreciation that you took the time to write this empathetic and informative post.
You're right, the exact protocol and many other important details are undocumented. As I understand it, the "receiver down" scenario has the rather nice property of neither guaranteeing that messages will be sent or won't be sent.
Do they have a legal footing to stand on? The way I read it is: 'We consider you overpaid for the job you are doing and we no longer wish to keep you around at that compensation level'. That is a valid reason to fire someone in CA isn't it?
Burma is missing (of course Myanmar is there ...)
MyOpenID XSS : One of the Largest OpenID provider is Vulnerable
I lived one of the below mentioned expensive cities.
Being keyboard only is huge usability issue. Simple drop down enables to use pointer devices as well.
Expected Salary by Major
Measuring Your Social Media Impact
If Growl is going to remain Open Source, as the note says, then someone should really compile a free version from the google code repository and give folks the option to buy it in the App Store or download the community version.

Although I've taken this opportunity to remove Growl and my productivity is better for it
We're not based out of silicon valley, so I'm not sure if we qualify. That said:

"Cofounder: set up shop in grandma's living room and lived on the couch. Me: quit my prior startup, endured business partner's rage, dumped girlfriend, moved to a different state. Business: bootstrapped, profitable, growing."

Probably not dramatic enough, but there it is.
Even if the chef didn’t contribute as much as others who took home M$20, is Pincus is really claiming that: “We don’t want to make the mistakes Google made: Look how badly things turned out for them!”

?

Somehow, that doesn’t seem like his best work as a CEO...
Water has much better thermal conductivity than air so significantly warmer water can provide equivalent levels of cooling. Also, most computer components are designed to be air cooled in an office setting so they can get fairly warm with little damage. In other words to keep an 80w CPU at 45 to 50c might take water at 35c but air at 20c. If the outside air is 40c then then you only need to actively drop the water 5deg where air needs to drop 20deg and cooling systems are much more efficient for small changes in temperature than large ones. You can probably find many cases where air temperature water is perfectly acceptable where you would want chilled air to do the same thing.

PS: 40c = 104f and most cpu's are fine at 50c most are still ok at 60+c. If the outside temperature is more reasonable you can often get away with passively cooling water systems where air needs to be actively cooled. You can also combine this with other methods aka if a local lake can give you water below 30c most of the year you might be able to use a passive cooling system with water even if you would need to actively cool air.
Without changing to this paid Growl model, Growl would
have died off and would no longer be around to use at all.
Growl is however still Open Source

Wonderful non-sequitur.
as they claim the liquid coolant works efficiently at 40°C (104°F), using outside air to cool hardly requires a particularly cool climate. they also attribute fan removal to a significant part of the savings.
the executives believed they could attract more top talent with the promise of stock

Not now, I would not take it, it would be an all cash deal for me after those shenanigans. Even if they don't go throw with it, they have shown their hand.
And yet Techstars NYC forced all its startups to be part of a similar show on Bloomberg.
So I'm curious why they didn't follow the standard Valley way of dealing with this - issue enough new shares and grant them to everyone but the people on the "hit list."
I can appreciate a carefully-placed curse word.

But swears are like bolded words. Restrained use emphasizes a point, while overuse drowns the message.

Dropping "fuck" every few sentences isn't offensive, it's boring. It indicates your underlying message isn't powerful enough on it's own.
Amazing iPhone app lets you acoustically measure distances of up to 25 meters
The Apple Online Store does this - you put in your street address and zip code, and it calculates the city and state.
It took me a second too. What the gp says is that the fake relationships are cargo too. The players are mistaking the thing for its description. Beautiful people are not beautiful relationships, and friendships built on lies and partial truths are trustless and empty.
Does chosen have an equivalent to what this selector does with data-alternative-spellings?
In effect it is paid out along the way, that's the effect of the vesting schedule (whether it's options vesting or buyback rights terminating each month).
Stepping Off the Gas
6.4 trillion liters of urine may become viable biofuel
Ta-da-m! This is the first question any usability/UI/whatever designer should ask: "Can software do this for users automatically?". Only then the designer should think of the visual appearence and interaction.
I am allergic to generalizations, so I felt a bit sick when I read that "the real limit is the mentality that MOST young Italians have: risk aversion, fear of failure, sense of self-entitlement, fatalism, cynicism and envy". I'm not a hater here, I hate haters :P Just trying to show the other side of the coin. Moreover in the post you (implicitly) focus on tech/web startups. What about traditional startups in Italy? Btw thank you for your response.
He is not opposed to using it http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=fuck+by%3Ae... I think he means exactly what he has written -- just a suggestion to Zack on how he can present better.
I recommend Sococo. I work for Sococo, but I use it too. Work from home, interact with people in WA, CA, AZ, MN - they're just over the virtual cubicle wall.
The traditional argument for why the Internet can't/shouldn't be controlled always had a heavy dose of "it's not practical" in it. But ask yourself, when has the impracticality of regulation ever stopped a big government from lumbering in?

Knowing that stuff like what the OP mentions would eventually osmose into the internet, I have often been a critic of things like Net Neutrality and other structures which would effectively subsidize the current model of The Internet as we know it, locking it in place and creating a barrier to entry for any NEW, more free models which are as yet unheard of but may come along in the future!

Typically it has been very hard for me to get people to wrap their head around the idea that the Internet may not be the end-all be-all pinnacle of human achievement most people consider it to be, and that soon alternatives may arise which if given a fair chance could do even better.
I agree with this statement, and I think Zynga's actions are at best unethical.

It would be interesting to know the facts from someone in this situation but I also expect that such folks should not be blabbing to folks other than their lawyer.

My interpretation of the story was that they were asking for folks who had stock that was not vested which is to say part of some future vesting pool, to give that up their right to that stock. So if you gave someone 100K shares over 4 years, and they had been there 2 years, 50K was vested and 50k yet to vest, they are asking that you give back the 50k that have yet to vest.

This would be different than Skype's 'clawback' clause, and it would be slightly less onerous than canceling vested but not yet exercised options.

The article also suggests that choices were made based on some measure of value (and implied performance). I have seen folks who are doing ok work, but its not at the level that they are being compensated, that puts you in a tight spot. Few, if any, folks are open to a restructuring of their compensation package in a downward way (which is what Zynga is proposing it would seem). In California at least you simply ask them to leave (and the article suggested that the choice was 'accept this new lower compensation package, or leave, your choice.')

Frankly I think it would be less painful on the company oversall if they just laid off the folks they felt they had made the compensation error on. I don't see anything good coming out of this approach for the company, and I recognize they may think they are being compassionate by not firing people who, except for the size of their option grant, are doing ok.

Google's innovation here is something they call a 'Google Stock Unit' (GSU) (which is not an 'option' it is more like restricted stock) where the ratio of GSU to actual stock is fixed at the time it vests by a perfomance multiplier. That way they can offer a hot shot person 2500 shares of 'restricted' stock (market value of 1.25M$) which vests in four chunks of 625 'units' a year, and if you didn't meet your goal that year your multiplier could be less than 1.0 even 0. So they wouldn't actually have to give it to you if you weren't a hot shot inside of Google. To be fair the multiplier could, in theory, be greater than 1.0 too. The cleverness of that scheme is that the company could 'tune' the compensation of someone dynamically.

I'm guessing Zynga might be wishing they could do something similar for ISO type options.
I thought it was disingenuous that I got prompted to update Growl, which led me to the uninstall script, then asked me to buy through the App Store.

I just kind of shrugged and didn't complete the last step. And as dotBen mentioned, my productivity is better for it.

If I knew it wasn't a free update, I never would have uninstalled.
What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From The Grateful Dead
This is totally true.

Your employer is not there to do you any favors.

Most likely, they will knife you in the back the minute they get the chance.
IT is not a valid reason to reclaim unvested stock, those are looked at like current compensation when termination is unjust. You cant terminate someone just to unvest them. That being said, I always draw a line through and contract that says that I loose vesting on termination, and change it to all options become instantly vested on termination. IF they want to negotiate as to when the options will be awarded to ensure that I am going to do a good job before I get options that is one thing, but I never allow for a termination to unvest me after the fact.
The most disturbing thing that I noticed was this: a person's status in the business world (or at least certain sectors of it) seems to be perfectly correlated with how they'd probably score on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist

I'm not making some superficial political statement either. I noticed it in myself. There were people I worked with that I completely hated yet... when they were present... it was almost like a drug. There's this "high" you get off them. You feel more confident just because they're in the room. They've got this kind of charisma that goes beyond mere confidence or enthusiasm. They were, by their actions, the most psychopathic ones.

It's like we have a genetic, predisposed tendency to follow psychopaths. I found it unbelievably disturbing. I'm a bit skeptical of evolutionary psychology, but this is one area where that kind of thinking feels like it could be right. It's like we know, on some subconscious animal level, that while these individuals are dangerous to us they're also more likely to win in a war. They will kill for us. And our genes want to be on the winning team.

Among other things, it converted me to a born-again advocate for human genetic and neurological engineering. We simply have to purge ourselves of this evolutionary legacy code or it will kill us all.
Works for most tasks, but recently I had to get my head inside 100 modules of crap (some open source stuff). Takes me several hours straight to 'get it'. Was very hard to find several hours in a row, working from home.
We're on Hacker News - a site focused on startup and entrepreneurship. Risky, dangerous, and unsafe are all buzzwords that we flock to.
Congratulations, we're many that are jealous. :-)

(If the girlfriend gets a sudden attack of sanity and dumps me, I'll try to organise living in Japan for a few years.)
Regret has never been a good enough reason in the eyes of a judge to annul a contract.

If Zynga agreed to the terms as described they haven't got a leg to stand on. The time to negotiate a contract is before it is signed, not retroactively. If they use the threat of termination then they will lose even more, not only will they not get their stock back, they will also have to pay excessive severance pay due to wrongful termination and they lose their best employees (those that have options).

Prior to an IPO you make sure you don't 'rock the boat' and you make sure that your management team is seen as competent and playing by the rules.

This is neither and I really wonder who is advising them to take these steps. They are hurting themselves in just about every way that I can think of, they look incompetent and sleazy, neither of which is the kind of company that you'd want to invest in.

The IPO cake should be large enough for everybody to share, there is absolutely no need for stupid tactics like these.
I watched that sketch with my wife and in-laws when I first started working from home... I think my silence was deafening
Bad experiences with stock options happen a lot in the tech world. I believe it's one reason that working for a startup doesn't have the allure it once had. Many are busting there butts and just collecting a paycheck because their shares have been diluted or rescinded. Starting early with a company now doesn't mean nearly as much.
Perry's 53 Seconds of Fame
Wait a minute.

What just a damn minute, here.

Are you telling me that a company that cheerfully built itself on shady shit like un-removable browser toolbars might continue screwing anyone it wants in the furtherance of its leaders' avarice?

I am shocked.

Look, it's endearing when people have scrappy stories about their origins. We all act out of desperate vigor when we're up against the wall and far from our goals. But there's a difference between being scrappy and being a swindler. Scrappiness transmutes into strength and informs your company's values. Swindling, on the other hand, is almost always forever, and informs values in a much more negative way.

A swindler will knife you at the first lucrative opportunity. Avoid them. Do not work with them or for them. They are Aesop's scorpion. Deal with honest men and women instead. Perhaps their purses are marginally smaller – but that's because they won't go rummaging through yours when your back is turned.
And that's why it's very dangerous for iPhone developers to assume that the keyboard height is always 216 points; suddenly your East Asian users could start having problems with your app.
> We do some investigation and find out that this guy's name is on over a dozen defunct LLCs.

> we come to find out that he'd been sued multiple times by previous partners

Is there a way to find out about this in advance? Some kind of database to check who you deal with prior to starting business with them?
5 Cute Rush Job Hairstyles for Straight Hair
The question most certainly did not seem clear to me. And the assertion does not require more than half of female bank tellers to be involved in the feminist movement.

Rather, bank teller becomes an irrelevant side-fact, and the focus of discussion becomes whether Linda is more likely to be part of the feminist movement given her being deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice.

Human language is imprecise, and comes with assumptions based on context and culture. The people who came up with this question succumbed to the false assumption that the majority of people would interpret the wording of the question the same way they did.

Because of the flawed nature of the question an the incorrect assumptions of the test givers, this question cannot be relied upon to give any measure of the "conjunction fallacy".
They're also a big PHP shop, and keep in mind that this is a game company where long-hours, OT, crazy demands are "normal". Mix them together and ask yourself again if Zynga is a place you'd like to work...
Working with numbers
Great idea - excellent execution!
They have a strong argument that the options deprived them of real salary that they would have earned elsewhere. It will be interesting though. The reality though is they just lost every bit of talent they ever gained. The good talent is already in talks with other organizations I can guarantee you, I personally would be looking for an exit and no one I mean no one worth their salt is going to sign up with them now.
You can use a bladder to quickly equalize air pressure without exchanging air. (Air will slowly penetrate most bladders, but it's not fast enough for rapid pressure changes.)

Some heaters use a similar approach to limit corrosion. http://www.westank.com/bladder-tanks.php