skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if the stock is needed now by Pincus to grow the company and he's hamstrung without it, then by not agreeing to a reasonable deal the employees are threatening the future of the company and their own future wealth just out of greed. What difference does being worth $200M on paper vs $100M on paper make? It only matters to someone who isn't thinking rationally about Pincus's options and the fundraising realities of the company.

Being an early employee should not entitle a person to sabotage the company's future just b/c the founder made a mistake, whether that mistake was being too generous with option grants, forgetting to change a password, revealing a secret about one's personal life, etc. Sabotage is sabotage. Creating the hubbub is essentially an attempt to blackmail Pincus and the company's current investors into complying.
I think one thing that is being overlooked is that the assumption is that these employees are "underperforming". And many ask, why not just fire them if they are.

I bet they are not underperforming in the "fire them" sense. I think the better word is "undeserving". The story quotes the Google Chef examples. I bet those early Googlers did not think the Chef was "underperforming", but clearly Pinkus thinks the chef is undeserving of $20 million from the Google IPO.

So some IT worker, who started early with the company, whose main job is to install new desktops, and fix the printers, and keep the network secure is "undeserving" of $20 million from the Zynga IPO, compared to the lead game designer who designed Cafe World, who Pinkus thinks IS deserving of the same amount.

It's more about thinking certain people (janitor, secretary, HR, finance, etc.) are not as valuable to the company as the lead developer or creative director or someone whose work is public facing.

And it is despicable.
Nice idea and initiative. I admire the effort.

Some feedback on the name: while it succinctly denotes how it works, I feel it has some negative connotations.

For a founding team and investors to commit 1% of equity to charity, it is a big deal. "1% is nothing" sound patronizing. Moreover, I don't know any single founder that wants to be associated with someone that characterizes the value of his/her startup as 'nothing' - as in 1% of nothing - i.e., your company is worth nothing.

Of course I understand the spirit of where you are trying to go, but as a byproduct you are generating this negative (unconscious?) connotations that I would try to avoid.

Perhaps '1% means a lot' or something along those lines would be more appealing.
This is great, I've been having a debate with a friend about this for a while now. This settles it (in my favor).
I've seen that worry expressed several times, but have never heard about a case where it actually made a difference. Does anyone have a cite? It sounds like FUD spread by a lawyer to drum up more work.
I wish this question would have received more love. I can't imagine why it did not, especially here on HN where you could get some really great feedback. I'm interested in hearing what other people might say. I like the response kstenerud provided. I'm commenting in hopes some others will see it in the new comments and bring some life to it.
Siri hack lets you create shortcuts to apps & system preferences
His point is that you would get sued anyway to intimidate you.

The people suing you have more money than you and lots to lose. They would just try to drag you into an expensive and endless legal battle hoping you could not afford it.
What do you call a company that can't grow without reneging on contracts with its own employees? Hint: the word is typically an ethnic slur.
one of these listing styles performed 15% better than the other in generating clicks on actual products. One of them results in 40% click through, while the other one generates only a quarter

That isn't 15% better. That's a 60% increase in click-through rate. That's massive.

We had already planned to remove a grid display from our app and replace it with a linear flow, but this seals the deal. Thanks!
Bah, anyone with common sense saw this coming years ago. Flash's future is not the Flash Player in a browser. Adobe has been making moves for a while now to change Flash into a development environment for full-fledged applications. What do you think Flex and AIR are for? The Flash Player is going away and I'm willing to bet Adobe could care less. There will be a day we will not install Flash Player in our browser at all, but most likely we'll still install AIR.

By the way, I'm one of those that believes Jobs initially banned Flash on iOS devices as a business tactic. Without allowing a third-party to create tools for the iOS platform then that would mean you would have to go all in on Apple products for development. Flash on iOS meant a Windows developer could create an app for the iPhone and that goes against Apple's business model. They eventually backed off. I believe they did so because they overstepped and banned ALL third-party tools including alternate scripting languages to be used inside the app. That was stupid as they almost banned a rather large number of games that were using scripting languages for game scripting code, such Lua.

Also, Adobe has been supporting HTML5 technologies since almost day one in their products that are not Flash. Anyone remember those? Don't be surprised when Adobe is there to sell you the development tools to help kill Flash Player in the browser.
Clover breaks stealth with a powerhouse team to shake up P2P payments
facebook.com
Does not sell your private information.

www.facebook.com
Can sell your private information.
Ripper can only parse static source, while ParseTree can give you the AST as it is at runtime. So with Ripper you give it the name of a file/line number and it can parse it, but it can't get any contextual information available at runtime, or anything that might've changed at runtime. With ParseTree I can give it a Proc object and it can parse it in whatever state it is at that point in time.

In a nutshell, how sourcify works is it gets the source_location for the Proc, which gives you the file name and line number. It uses Ripper to parse the file, and the Proc starting at that line number. It provides an object that can be fed into SexpProcessor to extract information about the block of code within the Proc.

Since it's bound to Proc#source_location one of the limitations is it can't distinguish between two or more Proc objects defined on one line (eg users.select { |u| u.id == 1 }.select{ |u| u.name == 'John Doe' }). However, that doesn't seem to be too much of a limitation.
I'm pretty sure they have a paper trail to support their case.

And this is where I thank you for your time and go find a real lawyer.
Yes, after my repulsion at the idea of Zynga clawing back early stock options, my second thought is that I can't respect a founder who writes to employees in lowercase and doesn't know how to use an apostrophe.
To each their own. It's largely a matter of opinion and getting forms right is tricky, but from an accessibility standpoint, I much prefer Zurb's forms... much better contrast and easier to read.
Thanks! Yes, I've been talking with some college professors, and it looks like the software would work well there too.

There may need to be some customization of the analytics to handle their larger classes, which we're open to -- we've basically just been building features based on the requests from our teachers.

Feel free to pass on my email -- m [at] classpager.com -- if the teachers/professors have any questions.
Unfortunately, long experience has shown me that it's not worth trusting McArdle unless you have all of her sources right out in front of you; I believe the polite way to put it is that she "massages the facts" a bit :)
Calling it Jobs' "prediction" is akin to calling the death of Netscape Bill Gates' "prediction".
Why You Should Choose an iPhone Instead of an Android Phone
Exactly how would we be better off for it? How many instances has a person's image been legally used to his/her detriment? Compare that to how many instances photos of unwilling (or unaware) subjects have helped society? Any kind of restriction on a right leads to a chilling of even legal exercises of that right. That's why it is legal to publish a lie in America. Not because our justice system encourages the publication of lies, but because any overreaching rule would people from publishing the truth out of fear of being sued on a technicality.
http://e.ggtimer.com/pomodoro recently discovered that myself, i find it useful, maybe other do as well.
Pages are pseudonyms!
If you want to keep it simple, you could just sort by length, with shorter property names first. I think that would work pretty well for most cases (border would come before border-color, etc).
There are a surprising number of organizations using Go in production for such an extremely young and fast evolving language, and they all seem quite happy with it, including Canonical, Heroku, the Open Knowledge Foundation and others

For an unofficial and incomplete list see: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go
Great stuff, unfortunately it doesn't catch my Devnagri letters.
why not AB test yours and share the results? My results are accurate and significant (statistically) but I don't know under what circumstances they are transferable. I have a hunch that I get these results because it's a small inventory of products, but with a large inventory, maybe it works differently.
>will never be crackable in our lifetime.

You might want to rethink this. "Will probably not be crackable in the next twenty years" is more realistic.
Nice! What are you using to generate your thumbnails? Are you outsourcing that to a thumbnail service, or is it roll-your-own? (Judging by the image URLs, I'm guessing the latter. Awesome if so.)
Pincus is attempting to make it sound as if he wants to claw back equity from employees who don't do their jobs. But if they aren't doing their jobs, why not fire them?

No, it seems to me that Pincus is looking at some people, perhaps they're middle-level employees, and saying, "you know, that guy might be doing his job, but he isn't worth $50 million."

Yeah, no shit he's not worth $50M. Few people are. But that's how the fucking game works. The fact that a Google chef got $20M -- why is that bad? It's not bad; it's cool. How many Microsoft stories are there about secretaries that made off with $10 million? Those aren't bad stories; those are good stories.

I'm sorry that Pincus fails to see things that way. And I'm sorry that he's decided to shit on a paradigm that's helped build Silicon Valley.
Given the Zynga fiasco, is this a good or bad time to launch a startup about donating early-stage equity?
A700 Android 2.3 GPS Capacitive Tablet PC
China wholesale and dropship tablet pc: A700 7 inch capacitive touch screen tablet pc, operating system is google android 2.3.support gps, DVB-T+ISDB-T Dual TV, 3d acceleration, hdmi and other more functions
Thanks for the great detail and analysis.

(First time I have heard the phrase "slap them upside the head" used in an informed legal opinion.)
Thousands line up for Hong Kong iPhone 4S launch day
This is cool... I really liked where your idea is going. This really has some good potential.. try to incorporate services to both the app owners and destination users to make either of their experiences better..
Cool idea. Simple, elegant. Do keep ur services as simple as this... the best part is, it is really useful.. In another 1-2 years when there will be a zillion apps.. this can be the saviour :)
Awesome - Needs some improvements/additions but if you did this much in 48 hours I think it won't be a problem.
Repl.it
I second Scott's work. Highly recommend
That's not good enough to explain why United Kingdom (or "the united kingdom of greAt britAin And northern ireland") sits up near the top when you type in 'A'. Who the hell formally refers to the UK with any word starting with 'A'? Anyone claiming to be from 'Albion' in a web form is just intentionally being difficult...
This is great, congrats! I would love to have access to Python docs this way (builtins, the standard library, etc.). And Django's methods & template tags too...
This is part of the reason why people use Tumblr over Pintrest.
Couldn't you make the same argument and say there's a similar conflict between rapidly growing companies and their early investors? After all, those investors got the shares at pennies on the dollar.

Early employees who have shares are also investors, but they pay with their time and skill. I look at the vesting period as an insurance policy for the firm that an employee who turns out to be extremely valuable won't decide to quit b/c of the ongoing upside.

The only incentive the company should have to keep any employee should be that employee's ongoing value to the company. Sure the founder might feel loyal to some of the employees, but his/her job is to allocate resources to pick the best talent, not to wallow in sentimentality. Even a company like Zynga hasn't "made it", there is still a lot more work to do.

Firing an employee before he/she is fully vested is akin to canceling an insurance policy. You only do so if you think the insurable event(s) you were worried about are unlikely to occur.
> [...] maximizing value for other shareholders in the company. But at what price?

Unvested employees aren't shareholders, so "other shareholders" is disingenuous. You meant "all shareholders".
Yup its generated on my server I don't really like the thumbnail generation services
Thank you for taking the time to write this up. Greatly appreciate it!
It says on the page

>Note: Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters are currentenly not supported, but I'm working on supporting them!
The past tense of "to hang" when referring to a human being (as in "by the neck until dead") is "hanged" - i.e. "Rascatripas was not hanged from the infamous overpass."
Thanks for the heads up and the tip, we are getting way more traffic than expected here...
I'm the author of backbone-rails, one of the main differences that I see is I provide a Backbone.sync method that plays nicely with rails conventions of namespacing your put/post params by model name. It also adds csrf-token to the header in the request for you.

However, I think both of our projects are mainly just about helping users learn how to use backbone.js with rails. I try to balance the pull requests I accept based on usefulness vs will this actually help or confuse a new user trying to get started with rails and backbone. Use either one that makes more sense to you, as long as we helped some users get started with backbone and rails then I think we did our job.
When that link was posted, the site was non-operational.
Not so fast there:

"On 1 November 1993, under the third Delors Commission, the Maastricht Treaty became effective, creating the European Union with its pillar system including foreign and home affairs alongside the European Community.[16][17] The 1994 European elections were held resulting in the Socialist group maintaining their position as the largest party in Parliament. The Council proposed Jacques Santer as Commission President but was seen as a second choice candidate, undermining his position. Parliament narrowly approved Santer but his commission gained greater support being approved by 416 votes to 103, Santer had use his new powers under Maastricht to flex greater control over his choice of Commissioners. They took office on 23 January 1995.[18]"

"The Schengen Agreements and the rules adopted under them were, for the EU members of the Agreement, entirely separate from the EU structures until the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, which incorporated them into the mainstream of European Union law. The borderless zone created by the Schengen Agreements, the Schengen Area, currently consists of 25 European countries, covering a population of over 400 million people and an area of 4,312,099 square kilometers (1,664,911 sq mi).[1]"
The answer is to create more stock that they can use for options. This is unfavorable because it means Pincus would need to sacrifice by diluting his own shares. So instead he forces others to sacrifice by diluting theirs or be fired.
Why is Comcast blocking access to the FBI?
Well in most cases most people don't read the TOS anyways much less find a real lawyer to comb through it for legal gotchas. So having this quick copy paste checker seems to be a huge step in a positive direction.
Exactly. When we last went through our PCI compliance rigamarole, they told us if anyone ever told us their CC number over the phone we were to open a text editor on our machines, type it without saving and then close it without saving when done. Apparently our writing on a physical notepad and destroying the piece of paper when done with it was not secure enough, so we had to introduce the possibility of keyloggers to our process.
Fun fact: Brad Fitzpatrick, author of the original (in C) memcached is now part of the core Go team at Google.

One thing he did was write this memcached client lib that is used for Go on AppEngine: https://github.com/bradfitz/gomemcache

But I'm not sure a new memcached server in Go is coming, I think he is more interested in his 'copious' spare time to hack on Camlistore: http://camlistore.org which is a really cool but a bit hard to describe project with lots of Go code.
dotCloud (http://dotcloud.com) supports binding arbitrary TCP ports to your application - and you can easily drop your favorite client implementation regardless of language.
Ryan Freitas Founder of About.me Interview Drafting your Startup Designs
Definitely needs a lot, if I have time I will improve this I really enjoyed developing it.
Thanks - had an old version of the scan in from when we weren't correcting for the www.
This is cool! I'd love to look into using the recognising algo in a rewrite of motion captcha. Similar concept.

Great site.
FYI, to renege is actually medieval latin, but I digress.
Norway's not a member of the EU but it's still part of Schengen. I bet the right to live in Paris/Berlin/Amsterdam/etc. will remain yours irrespective of what happens to UK EU membership.
Ambit Energy Scam or Great Deal?
Bronze Motorcycle Sculptures
Dude's got mad skills with bikes and bronze.
indeed! we need to fix the subdomain issue
I just updated the backbone-rails readme to reflect that it uses backbone.js 0.5.3
If You're Busy, You're Doing Something Wrong
Can you quit your job for no reason in Australia?
> In a piece directly about government, to use the word anarchy is this fashion is dishonest and in poor taste.

That's a fair assessment, I think. Good point.
We deliberated on the categories to include here and went with what we thought made the most sense and was the most clear in policies. A lot of policies don't make the distinction you describe =/
That's great, who's hiring?
We do plan to note changes in the policies. Considered a feature that lets you subscribe to the policies you are interested in and get notices if they change, or if in the news, it is mentioned that the site loses your data. What do you think?
Alcatraz Night Tour
How Panic away is useful?
Panic away conflicting by Joe Barry is an eBook which guides you about the acclimatized agency to afflicted abhorrence of agitation attacks and anxiety. This activity helps you to cure agitation disorders afterwards the use of any big-ticket drugs and all-overs suppressants. These acclimatized techniques don’t acquire any accessory effects.
Syma S102G Mini Black Hawk Gyro Helicopter (Toy)
Nautica N19513g Chronograph Mens Watch
It's more like the lead developer screwed up with Wave so badly that he lost all credibility and had to leave. Google gave him all resources he asked for and he produced a shitty overhyped product.
I had an amex that was compromised, cancelled, and beyond its original expiration date, and AMEX continued to charge Netflix charges to the old expired cancelled/compromised number ... flowing the charges through to my new account number. To their credit, they removed all of the charges once I caught it, but just helps to know that a cancelled number isn't always a cancelled number even when you've already reported the number compromised.
Advanced Email Newsletter Templates
Are you in the search of best email templates? then you are in the right place. We provide quality e-mail templates, business email templates, email newsletter templates etc... For more details visit bestemailtemplates.net.
Since it was just as easy as any other way I used bcrypt for my site. Seems common as of a year ago.
I tried really to get the thumbs up character, but no luck: http://i.imgur.com/YoWFh.jpg

Handy tool anyway :)
Cool, wonder if we can get some training data for "out of the ordinary" and screen for companies that are big frauds and then short them (like http://www.muddywatersresearch.com/ does)
My understanding of go is that it was designed for highly parallelized tasks like servers. That doesnt really seem like a good fit for a handset os.
Yeah this is a very good suggestion. We'll get a TOS up there so we don't get into hot water.
Yeah, I encountered the same issue. The only thing I can think of is that I'm drawing them in the handwritten style, but the recognizer probably needs them to be in the digital font style.
Actually, as a farmer myself, I'm not so sure. I spend about 2-3 weeks each year on my farm (small acre cash crop). Given the amount of time spent, I'm pretty proud of where my business is. I see others spending all day, every day, on their farm and are not making much more at it than I am. Granted, grains are a good business to be in right now.

However, just because there is always something to do doesn't necessarily mean it is smart to be doing it. Are the farmers who are always working on something better off for it? I unfortunately do not have sufficient data, but I wonder if working less could actually lead to increased profitability? Based on my anecdotal experience of observing neighbours, I think there could very well be some truth to it.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't statistical significance a function of sample size?
Or possibly just a lost backup tape.
In my mind, a hacker has a deep desire to understand

Extremely simple analogy: Most people are happy that when they flip a switch, a light comes on. They might even know how to install a switch and change a bulb. But a hacker isn't happy/content with this surface knowledge. Instead, s/he wants to know what's happening in the background to create the outcome. Once this background knowledge is gained, the hacker has a lot of tools available to solve/invent that the majority of others will not - this makes the hacker extremely efficient. S/he may also take this knowledge and apply it to other domains.

Apply this to telephony, networking, hardware, low-level programming, .... and you should be able to easily come up with similar analogies for any discipline.
I got pi on the first try: http://i.imgur.com/IPyn7.jpg
This is the part that scares me: "we want everyone to put zynga first and contribute to the overall success of our company...".

I have a life, I want to continue to have a life. That will always be more important than my job.
Touch support would be nice to have.
So what happens in Midwestern cities?
If, by your reasoning, the company is paramount, then all parties should pitch in. Founders, investors, all employees.

Why should these employees be responsible for saving the company from a mess caused by the executive team and investors?
Thanks, code is on a linode. Will be upgrading it to a larger version and doing some apache configs after we drop off the front page....
really? so, when did you read about this: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/132405488.html

a mom and kids gets caught in the crossfire. this was an accident, and how much news coverage does it get? had you heard about this story before?

the war is outside your house right now and you don't even know, because the casualties are almost universally poor people (okay maybe not outside your house because you might not be in the USA)...