skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This came up on Quora yesterday: http://www.quora.com/How-legal-or-illegal-are-Zyngas-actions...

My gut instinct was that was a jerk move, but after thinking about it I'm not so sure. Here's my answer from Quora... I'd love to know what others think.

(On a side note, the article cited on Quora mentions that employees were asked to give up some unvested options, but that their vested options are not affected.)

==============

This is a slight oversimplification, but a typical stock option grant of, say, .4% of a company is akin to the CEO telling you, "for every year that you work for us, I will give you .1% of the company." For early startup employees who typically take below market salaries, this kind of stock grant is one of the things that makes working at a startup more worthwhile (financially speaking).

It's exceedingly rare that a startup grows to a billion dollar valuation within a few years of founding, but when that happens, it makes sense for the company to re-evaluate whether it's worth giving someone an extra .1% for one more year of work. When a company is young and not worth much, giving someone $10k in paper value as a loyalty bonus is a no-brainer; when a company is worth billions, giving the same person a 50 million dollar loyalty bonus requires a lot more thought. It might still make sense if they're the COO or CFO or something like that, but does it make sense if they are a "Lead Software Engineer" or "Senior Product Manager"? How many "Lead Software Engineers" could you hire with 50 million dollars of stock? Put this way, I think it's reasonable that Zynga wants to let some early people go at their current compensation rates (and California has at-will employment, so you can quit or be let go without reason at any time.)

Note #1: I think this sucks for the early employees, and I certainly would not want to work for a company whose founders have a history of these kinds of practices, but that doesn't make the practices unethical.

Note #2: My answer would be very different if Zynga were trying to take back options that had already vested.

I am not a laywer, so my assumptions about how at-will employment works might not be 100% correct.Edit
I understand your inclination towards doing away with a two-party system, but as long as we elect exactly one president, a two-party system does tend towards moderate policy.

My intuition on this goes as follows: Imagine one single spectrum of policy, that goes from "Left" to "Right" for example. Assume voters exist somewhere on this spectrum, and will vote for the candidate whose policy is nearest to theirs on the spectrum. Then so long as there are exactly two viable candidates then they both have no incentive to deviate from the median voter. Each candidate picks up one whole side of the spectrum, and the only thing that can happen as a candidate makes their policy more extreme is that the median voters begin to see the other candidate as closer.

Of course, the actual US election system is far more complex. Very extreme voters do in fact "throw their vote away" if both candidates appear far from their policy. There are a lot more issues than just one, so a single spectrum of policy is oversimplified. Many voters vote on individual issues, which are often black and white (e.g. pro-life/choice, for/against gay marriage). You could probably argue that candidates actual policies have very little to do with their stated policies, or that voters are significantly more swayed by advertising dollars than policy. All of these are real concerns, but I think the basic point stands: a two-party system encourages both candidates to situate themselves at more or less the median of the American electorate, which I consider a desirable outcome.
It must suck to live in Italy and pay a lot of taxes, knowing it's going straight into the pockets of corrupt and populist politicians while social services are cut and the whole economy starts spiraling downwards.
yep. That is the key. The primary beneficiary of the drug prohibition isn't cartels (who by the way risk their own lives), it is the whole government power structure.
The key to getting the most out of Bootstrap is to use the less modules.

I created a fork of bootstrap where I setup the following:

* boostrap files are in a subdir called 'boostrap'

* in the 'css' directory create a less file for each style sheet, for eg. site.less, admin.less

* in that site file, place all your variables and then include all the bootstrap files

* under that, put in all your custom CSS

* here is an example: https://gist.github.com/1356716

* the top of the file is the contents of variables.less, then the includes, then custom CSS

* copy the Makefile into your 'css' folder, and edit it to change the right paths

* put your color theme (3, 4 o4 5 colors) at the top of the file and define them as variables. declare everything else (links, topbar etc.) as one of these colors or a lighter(), darker() etc. variation

* there are tons of online color matchin sites, including the excellent Adobe Kuler - pick a color theme and plug it into less

* learn how to use less: http://lesscss.org/

* instead of using span8, span14 etc. learn how to inherit in less. for eg. a sidebar 4 spans wide would be:

#sidebar {
..makeColumn(4)
}

* use macro's to create your own custom gradients, for eg.

.lightblue {
.gradientBar(#5bc0de, #339bb9);
}

* use those mixins to create custom button styles. for eg. to create a custom topbar fill using the lightblue:

.topbar.fill {
.box-shadow();
.lightBlue();
}

* also, I wrote another script that will autorefresh your browser in OSX when you save your less. so the combination of this makefile and this applescript will build the css file from less and refresh your browser whenever you save:

https://gist.github.com/1326820
In a lame web service / trivia game I created for a distributed systems graduate class I used bcrypt. https://github.com/bgianfo/distributed-systems
The "different questions" are relevant. If this were merely a question of what the company can and can't do as a capitalist enterprise, the article would not have been written. Ethics are important. Would you be as dispassionate about this if you were a Zynga employee?
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Robert A. Lutz & Elon Musk
The details of a temporary CC number vary a lot by the issuing bank. Some services offer numbers that are are truly single use for a single transaction. Some are time limited to 30 days or some such. Some are limited to one merchant (my Discover does this.) Some have a dollar limit. There's also combinations of the above.

I gather that issuing banks are converging on limiting to one merchant and are phasing out other options for that. Remember that the banks are acting in their interest, not the consumers'. A merchant lock keeps you safe from a stolen number, and avoids most fraud scenarios; the banks do care about that since they're legally liable (in US law) for fraudulent charges. But this approach allows the single merchant to make recurring charges (which some customers want protection from); the banks of course have a vested interest in keeping a stream of transactions coming.
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I have longed for the day of no more println() statements
>Welcome Hacker News Reader!

>You should subscribe to my blog via email below...

Hello Maneesh. You have just guaranteed that I will never visit your blog again.
I'll wager it's generated within the code, based on report parameters or something similar.

That does look like rough going... though in my experience, a nasty-looking mess like that may not be so bad if you simply format it -- with indenting to indicate subquery levels, and maybe some color (like light grey for formatting/null check fluff and bold for SQL keywords).

Often a massive query like that indicates business logic and even display details built into the query -- are there lots of WHEN clauses? Big chunks of the query just managing formatting the output?

If SQL is your "hammer" to fix every problem, you can take a simple query -- say, fetching a user's full name and address from a single table -- and make it really damned long just by cramming everything into the query... is there an address2? A middle name? Did the user capitalize their names (you could fix that in SQL...)? Etc..

I have written some very long SQL before -- a few years ago I flattened many many pages of buggy PHP into a dozen carefully-designed (but a bit complex) materialized views that were the base for the final reporting queries (which could be pretty straightforward; the data involved was already neat & tidy).

If you blew up each view involved and removed all formatting, the reporting queries would be pretty tough to digest; that's the point, though -- all of the complexity was cut up & compartmentalized into well-named bite-sized pieces, so other developers were still able to maintain and extend it after I left.
Hey - (I'LL)Bcnu2day Productions
We've surveyed over 1600 Groupon merchants, and 75% say they would like to use Groupon again. In general, it seems they are pretty satisfied.

We did a text analysis of over 150,000 words of open-ended responses:

* Fewer than 2% of all these merchants even mentioned "cash upfront" as a benefit of running a deal. Not a single one mentioned it as a primary benefit/drawback.

* A few merchants did in fact complain that Groupon sometimes held on to the cash a little TOO long before funding their accounts

* FYI, the top stated benefits were "New Customers" and "Advertising Effect".

Groupon is in no way perfect, but its characterization as a check casher is pretty silly. I'm sure if you hunt hard enough, you can find an unhappy Groupon merchant and put words in their mouth.
Heroku use it for their Doozer datastore which manages their distributed grid thingy.

Info here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_go/print.html

http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/go-at-heroku.html

http://xph.us/2011/04/13/introducing-doozer.html

And of course google use it internally.
I'm sure many have tried, but language comparisons actually devolve into uselessness very quickly, because the things we can quantitatively measure and compare about languages are mostly not the things that people care about in practice. For example, I can tell you what classes of errors are possible in Javascript programs versus what errors are possible in Python programs versus what errors are possible in Haskell programs, but it doesn't really seem to affect peoples' language choices. Language comparisons tend to devolve very quickly into arguments about personal taste and little else. I wrote some thoughts on this subject a while ago: http://plsadventures.blogspot.com/2009/08/simple-patterns-fo...
I like go because it has good concurrency and doesn't use a boatload of RAM like the JVM.
I've just started playing with Bootstrap and I'm loving it. I have a pragmatic mind and less of an artistic mind - a.k.a I have no art skills. It makes it really easy to get a nice looking interface quickly so I can test an idea and actually see what it'll look like with minimal effort.

Plus, I can focus more on the implementation of the backend code and less time worrying about making all of the stylesheets, etc.
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Rigged how? I'm fairly certain that a centralized homogeneous voting system would be significantly easier to audit for security loopholes than the current implementation, but if there were a security breach one would imagine it would be far more disastrous.
When PG wrote about how the latest batch of YC startups were run by "operators" rather than your typical "shy tech guys," I knew he'd started to fall into the orbit of the boiler room crowd.
The US police/government/courts are less corrupt and have more resources to crack down on the more visible violence.

There is more violence in America than most people realize. It's considered mundane so you don't see it in the news as much.

The US is selling arms to the cartels in Mexico, so their violence is escalated there.

Mexican cartels aren't larger in the US than in Mexico because their supply sources are in Mexico, they lose momentum over distance and face domestic competition as they move across the US.
> Everyday there is a battle between pedestrians, bicyclists, and cars.

You better never come to Beijing!

By the way, in Beijing, geeks and rich people are plenty, and entrepreneurship is strong, even if still fragile.
How are you sorting these? I did a search for "border" just to try it out. It returned 18 entries with pretty much every variation of border-*, but border itself was the 16th entry almost at the end of the results page.
This sounds surreal. It's like the Godfather telling his family how ethical they all are. Cosa nostra ethics of course ... what happened to the good old "every dirty trick in the book" days?
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You don't just "break the encryption algorithm". If the people holding the database can get through AES-256 or 128-bit triple DES, the internet as a whole has far bigger problems than Steam's database being compromised.

This isn't CSI. You don't just throw encrypted text at an implausibly attractive IT guy and wait for him to furrow his brow, declare that it's military-grade encryption that will take him a little while, and then have him decrypt it by the end of the next commercial break. PCI-compliant encryption is the sort of thing that, barring incredible leaps in technology or the discovery of a significant algorithmic weakness, will never be crackable in our lifetime.
Get ready for the clubs tonight with a new haircut
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> Now, I have every reason to believe that Valve is smart enough to not use methods like the first

You'd be surprised.

The Steam Community is (or was when I checked, about a month ago) vulnerable to CSRF everywhere. Valve might hold their own when it comes to games, but I'm not too confident when it comes to the web development side of things.
Hashing algorithms don't necessarily need to be irreversible.

A cryptographic hash attempts to be as hard to reverse as possible (amongst other things).

So bcrypt has to do with cryptography, a bit.
You're about ten years behind on this.
A country selector should also address typing and nomenclature around addresses and zip/postal code.
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This looks really useful, thanks!

One suggestion: if you put "color" in the search box, you currently get "border-bottom-color", "column-rule-color", "border-top-color", and "color", in that order. It would make more sense to put "color", the exact match, at the very top. (And probably also to sort the remaining matches alphabetically.)
These employees were given options for some combination of performance and risk / opportunity cost from taking an early job in an unproven startup. For Pinkus to renegotiate with only the former in mind while ignoring the latter is bs. These employees need lawyers. But such self-dealing is what you would expect from someone like Mark; I can't understand how anyone believes someone involved in lead-gen scams the way Zynga was retains any ability to claim to be ethical, and particularly to be "proud of the ethical and fair way that we've built this company."
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Sencha Touch 2 Community Patches
Go is possibly easier to get into production than something based on a hefty VM, because it compiles down into one relatively small executable (except for any dynamically linked libraries being used through cgo). If you've compiled a binary executable for the target platform all you have to do is put the executable on the production machine and run. No additional runtimes, no extra libraries or vm extensions. Everything you need is right there in that executable.

I find this to be a big advantage for using Go over something like Python or Java. You still need any dynamically linked DLLs, but all the Go code itself and the runtime is statically compiled and linked into the executable produced by gc.

As for the concerns about it not being used in production, there's Heroku:
http://blog.golang.org/2011/04/go-at-heroku.html

All this is completely ignoring the fact that the language itself has a really nice syntax, and some excellent concurrency support. Nothing it does is particularly new, but I think Go is greater than the sum of its parts.
Generation Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay
Another interesting take. I especially like the way you can visualize the priority and status of posts at a high level.
Real drug lords are part of the 1%. Most 1%'ers only work in one industry or a few related ones.

US policy is less about who would benefit from legalization (everyone) and more about who would suffer. If prohibition were ended there would be massive cuts in the budget and staff of the ATF, DEA, police, the entire boarder security industry, infantry defense contractors, prisons, courts and law firms.

Many politicians went to law school. No one wants to put their friends out of work.
In fact, having re-read my own post from 2 years ago and found myself still agreeing with it, I find myself wanting to travel back in time to paste that link to the author of the linked article before he wrote it.
a nice spin to get support of the majority of the employees against the supposedly unfair overcompensated "old guard" minority. Playing on the low instincts of people seems to be an art mastered by Pinkus.
Know Why You Choose Your Tools
Onehub launches version 2
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Are you Lost?
The only way to make a dent is that problem is to stop the income.

It's a separate problem with no solution unless profit dries up.
edit: why downvote this? I've just expressed confusion that a cooperative outcome could not be reached.

While it's reasonable that Pincus wants to find some way to obtain more shares other than buying them, sending an email like this could not be beneficial to morale.

If it is truly in the best interest of Pincus and Zynga to obtain the shares, then it's also in the best interest of the targeted employees to give up the shares in exchange for something else with equal or greater expected value.

Since the hubbub around this reflects poorly on the firm as a whole, the employees refusing to cooperate are likely shooting themselves in the foot, though it also seems that Pincus has blundered significantly.

Pincus at least seems to be acting rationally about the future of Zynga, while the employees (even if they have reason to be annoyed by this) come off as being motivated purely by greed, spite, and short-term considerations.
1Password, which also is a Windows and Android equivalent:

https://agilebits.com/onepassword
Bootstrap is awesome. I've built my "about me" site http://sdball.github.com and http://movieterminals.com using it.

With Bootstrap I can think more about the app and defer the styling until I really care about it; but not run a bad looking coder design.
I love the site - it actually feels like you're trying to help the user, rather than just providing a data collection tool (which I've found a lot in similar apps).

I wanted to let you know that the big green sign-up button on the homepage doesn't seem to do anything in Chrome. I had to register through Login -> Sign-up.
It's actually now baked into rails itself. You can declare

has_secure_password

in the model and you're away.
needs support for hashtags: http://instacss.com/#background
When I looked at Zurb vs Bootstrap, I wanted to use Zurb but the default form styling turned me off. When I am looking for a style guide the first thing I do is find the forms cause that is IMO the most difficult part of styling a web app.
The great thing about developers is that they love to try new things, so even Microsoft's developers recognize that the Microsoft stack is not the best at everything.

Most of the people I find who have their heads stuck in the Microsoft stack are non-coders, and those are less common at startups.
Tubalr, a YouTube alternative... works on iOS now (for the most part).
Right now it just sorts randomly, which I admit is pretty bad. The search itself is very basic--it just takes your query and regex matches it on property names in the db.
They will start shooting cops and civilians over bootleg DVDs?

Fake designer clothing? If this hypothetical market existed they would already be there.
Joe Paterno Fired By Penn State After Sex Scandal Exposed
well what you are describing is hardly what katango was doing in their product. You are probably describing their big vision, which all companies use to sell their product (Color described themselves as the all eyes watching tool from Batman movie, far from reality). They did the standard lists of , location, work , school etc. Nothing as abstract that requires the AI you are talking about.
I don't think Google+ should be trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter in the traditional sense of the word. Just because a website fits into a niche of companies under the broad heading, "Social Network" doesn't mean that it has the same intentions as its other incumbents. Facebook more or less eradicated MySpace because it was a case of two websites being too similar in function, and Facebook was simply superior. Twitter and Facebook coexist without one or the other being eliminated because they don't directly compete - Twitter is useful for different functions that Facebook doesn't accomplish; but neither does Facebook or Twitter try to accomplish the other's specialties. While I agree that some competition is needed to expand user base and continually maintain attractive and trending features, it would be better for the social networks to specialize. A website like Facebook could never defeat Facebook - it has a de facto monopoly on vicarious, virtual socializing.

That said, you don't really go on Facebook to announce something to the world unless you have a really popular "Page" (as opposed to profile). You sign up for Twitter and tell your followers what the update is. It's much more professional for a working environment. Facebook is personal. I feel Google+ fits somewhere in between these two dichotomies right now, which is why it feels somewhat awkward for a lot of users. But I think it's still a very good network that has potential to specialize into something neither Facebook or Twitter quite accomplish yet. If it can create its own niche within a niche, competition won't be as important as maintaining its own superlative market share for specialized functioning. Otherwise, it will die out, because directly competing with Facebook will not work at this point in time.