skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to take a slightly controversial position here - so please read through my logic before you downvote me into oblivion.

If you read the article, you'll see that what's happening at Zynga is not "Taking Back" stock, instead it's talking about _future_ compensation. Every time I've been through a Compensation Review - one item that is made very clear to my manager, is how much _unvested_ stock I have in the company. That plays a role when they reviewing my salary and bonus, because Unvested Stock is a component of my forward-looking annual salary.

All Pincus is doing - is looking at his executives, and saying, "Hey, You are going to make $10 Million dollars NEXT YEAR, but you aren't doing $10 Million dollars worth of work - we're going to have to bring your NEXT YEAR's salary down to $1 Million" - He isn't talking about stock already owned by the employee.

California is an At-Will employment state, Zynga is located in California - Pincus could just fire these people and be done with it - as long as he wasn't discriminating unfairly (Based on Age, Race, Ethnicity, Marital status, or any of the other protected classes) - it would be completely legal, and, if these people weren't performing, completely rational, albeit really quite brutal.

In the scheme of "How can my company screw me on stock" - I put this in the 50 percentile category.

With all that said - dick move. I wouldn't want to work for someone who would do this to me.
I would use it mainly as a historical archive. To "see" a program evolve. I think that is a very interesting use case, even if limited.
There's a de facto death penalty for being sufficiently troublesome. I'm not sure whether a do-not-try-to-start-an-independent-labor-union law is actually on the books or not.
changed it a bit. thanks for the advice.
Moving from an engineering/technology company to a marketing/product company. It needs to happen, or your companu becomes schizophrenic (like Google has been). But doing so without killing the technology culture is hard (I can't think of any successes changing this late off the top of my head). I hope he succeeds.

I do like Page's focus on "sit down and work it out in person". So much time wasted trying to do that over email.
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While this is technically true, it's one hell of a selection bias. Clearly, my ancestors all existed and got together. If they didn't, I wouldn't be reading that poster.
So, I don't really see the point of it...
Feds Shut Down 100 Rogue Servers, Allege Massive ‘Click Hijack’ Scheme
> I think it is really important that people understand that stuff like this can happen

Yes. As another example: Several hardware companies did reverse splits + share issuance (to holders of preferred) right before IPO. Atheros comes to mind iirc.
What are the down votes for?

Some one care to enlighten me how the censorship of wikileaks is any different to the great fire wall? (Slightly different scale, but they both illustrate censorship).

Or the suppression the of the Occupy Movement is different from the concept of "suppression of dissent". That is the forcible removal of people with views the government doesn't want to hear.

I haven't even mention the Patriot Act and how it has been exploited...

Rocks and glasshouses...
Great way to show such large numbers using a visualization. The problem with large numbers is that it's usually hard to relate to them at all - which this graphic overcomes to a large degree.
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I find it hard to believe that adding a CTA that resulted in an increase in conversions would come as a "surprise" to an even mildly sophisticated company today. A CTA should be a standard feature on any page from which you wish to see conversions.
> I could finally have the ultimate set of curtains to ensure cave-like darkness on the brightest day.

BTW, If you really do need this, aluminium foil taped to the windows blocks light completely. It's not a curtain, but if you need it really dark, it works very well.
You've got it completely scrambled: Nobody is being asked to describe the feeling of being harassed. That was the word Udo chose to describe the feeling of dealing with a salesperson.

I simply found it odd (very odd) that someone who uses a word that denotes aggression or attack to describe that situation would simultaneously find it totally alien to think of it as competitive.
I assumed that XAML was the silverlight team (why duplicate effort) and if silverligth is gone how much core knowledge stays in XAML?

Personally I stuck to C++ and moved MFC->wx->Qt !

.Net is interesting for the way it allows things like Ironpython and F# in as first class languages and wpf is fun to play with, but if you can't write something like Office or photoshop in it then it's just a toy.
Tutorial: Breakout in HTML5's canvas
I think this is true. Additionally, as other commenters have mentioned, daily life in china is a bit of a health risk due to the crazy traffic, air pollution, poor food safety etc.
New Samsung Device Bridges Gap Between PCs and Tablets
Love it.

Another question someone asked me once was:

1) if 99% of a molecule is space

2) if 99% of a molecules atoms are space

3) if 99% of an atom's sub atomic particles are space

4) if 99% of quarks are space..

We exist?

Or are we just the energy exerted in the forces between tiny bits of matter?

:)
I prefer "Craigslist" as a verb, as in "Netflix just Craigslisted's Blockbuster", meaning to destroy their revenue stream with new technology.
It communicates to IPO investors: CEO is such a dick that he will happily screw over employees in order to enrich himself.

Believe it or not, there will be a coterie of investors who will get behind that. (They will perceive that their interests are aligned with the CEO after IPO.)
Infrared is not all the same. For one thing the frequency depends on the temperature.

But more importantly it absorbs infrared light, and converts it to heat. Heat and light are not the same thing! True, hot things emit light, but that doesn't make them the same thing.

Most practically you can cool the device once the energy is heat. Or just dilute it in a heatsink.
koders.com has most of the features of google code search, minus the regexp searching.
It would seem that this could be solved through negotiation. Pincus needs the shares now to recruit top talent, and without the shares everyone's chances of a great exit are diminished. Pincus could sell his own shares, but would risk losing control.

So Pincus should be willing to essentially write futures contracts on the proceeds from his own shares and trade those with employees, who should be willing to accept them in trade, even at precisely equal expected value.
Puts don't start trading immediately after the IPO. (There are also lockout/reporting requirements on derivatives, but I've always wondered how enforceable/detectable such transactions are.)
Many submissions don't make it to the front page given what I've seen on "new", but here we had a rant that - like it or not - made a number of serious allegations against MongoDB; some number of which, after examination by HN regulars, were confirmed by 10gen in a follow-up piece by RWW.

I don't really understand your position or complaint - are you suggesting that the anonymous nature of the source is sufficient to disqualify it outright? Who determines 'baselessness', isn't that a consensus process? Are you commenting on a general feeling that HN promotes a lower number of quality links then "in the earlier days"?
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hmm there is not much to hold ground on any browser other than chrome. Filesystem api wasn't stable the last i checked in FF. Any public implementation that runs on atleast 4 major browser is still atleast 6 month away :( My app is in chrome webstore so i don't have to worry about browser support and chrome also updates automatically so if it works in latest stable, i can launch without thinking twice :)
This is ludicrous. If people are coasting in a company, those people should not stick around (dis-incentivized is a word I've heard used before).

The fact that this is happening right before launch is pretty reminiscent of Skype's fiasco prior to exit (sale to MSFT). In fact, both of these companies have one VC that's in common, Silver Lake Partners: http://www.silverlake.com/partners/investments.php?page=inve...
I have to respectfully disagree with your logic. If you read the article, what is actually happening is they are retroactively trying to reduce restricted stock grants that were already made.

So, if I say "come work for me for free, and in exchange I will give you 10,000 RSU that vest over 4 years", then 3 years down the line say "just kidding, you don't get these last 2,500, but you get to keep working here", that is absolutely trying to take back comp. They can certainly withhold future restricted stock grants, but trying to take back already granted shares, vested or not, is beyond the pale in my opinion.
There is photovoltaic, and solar thermal. One uses heat, the other uses electromagnetic light.

This black stuff would help with the solar thermal type - but for a power plant a difference of 1% is completely unimportant, so this will never be used for that unless it's extremely cheap.
I like the last sentence... It has a very lispy feel to it.

> And there are awkward or unnecessary words and sentences, most of which I catch in successive passes near the end. It's interesting how often the last sentence of a paragraph can simply be deleted.
Silicon Valley isn't a special place for invention and for startups because of special infrastructure or special laws, but because of special ideas and special norms. Those norms don't hold up in court, and they erode a little bit every time someone like Pincus only thinks about what they can get away with instead of what's right. This reduces the perceived value of equity for everyone in the valley, makes everyone less open, less trusting, less willing to take a risk. In the end, we all lose for that.

If I had my way, Pincus would never work in this town again. Anyone involved in this decision should be made a pariah. If we don't defend the norms that make innovation possible, we'll lose them.
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That is not true. A perfectly reflective silver object still emits blackbody radiation.

And a perfectly blank one will absorb light, heat up and also emit blackbody radiation.
I wrote a tiling window manager for X11 in Node.js a while back: https://github.com/mixu/nwm

and a free book about Node.js: http://book.mixu.net/
Mark Pincus, the scum king of lead gen [1:5], is behaving in an unethical manner? I'm shocked. Shocked!

Is it rude to think these employees laid down with dogs and are bitching about fleas?

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/horrible-things-slink-back-...

[3] http://cdixon.org/2009/09/28/the-new-economy/

[4] http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/08/zynga-to-stop-all-in-game-o...

[5] http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/scamville-hotornot-plentyof...
This is true, but ultimately I blame Christensen for applying the word "disruptive" in a different way than its common meaning. Because people already know what "disruptive" and "technology" mean, they get rightly confused when "disruptive technology" means something more specific.
I just asked irb to generate me a random string of decimals, and it gave me "95307035382862516268483317510515387284259666415834482486542336". Jesus, the odds of that happening are like a gazillion to one!
The real news is not that they're taking back stock, it's that their initial stock plan was so screwed up that they have to do it.
Maybe that's the case, and if so, maybe there is room for a new site that serves curated articles approved by an editorial board. Right?
Apple somewhat with the transplant of objective-c and next step into apple?
I'm still waiting for my investment in zombo.com to pay off...
Racket is just awesome. I don't know why it doesn't see more use. That list of features is awesome. This, just a few months since they redid all of Racket's graphics library. Well done!
It seems the author is simply objecting to the perception that you gotta call your idea disruptive if you want to succeed (regardless whether it is).

It's of course o.k. to call it that if it is, but if it is not-
In the end, is it just about making people happy or is there some sort of due process requirement too?
I think it's actually quite clever, with very little downside, either morally or ethically.

The worst that happens is that they configure the education program so you can only buy one system a year (or some other such limitation) - which seems eminently reasonable for an education program.

As long as Apple was willing to sell unlimited numbers of Macintoshes in the bookstore for a discount, not sure why a clever and hard working person _wouldn't_ engage in a little arbitrage.

This is the kind of behavior you quite often see in successful startup founders, btw.
The Asus MacBook Air, sort of
Some cities have worse police departments than others, but I haven't seen any of the Occupy protests assaulted with tanks.
The typical option agreement says that the stock you may purchase is subject to a right of repurchase by the company, and that right (by the company) lapses over time. So, I imagine that is totally negotiable until such time that that right lapses. It means going back on your word from the time of hire, but corporations go back on their word all the time, usually because it's believed to increase value for shareholders overall.

I imagine one way to make it non-claw-backable is to give the right to purchase outright right away, or to have a much shorter vesting period, although that may have tax ramifications, and be messy for the stock plan/s to deal with.

Regarding whether anyone's contributions really are worth $4B or whatever -- that's the lottery. Lots of start-ups fail, and lots of possibly valuable contributions are then valued at 0 stock. If a person contributed to a healthy start for something that grows really big, they may win the lottery; that's part of the appeal of Silicon Valley start-ups. The more companies close off this lottery ticket avenue, the less that ticket will be worth, and the worse the ecosystem will do in the long run.

But if you stand to make billions in the short run, who cares about the long run? Probably true on both sides.
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And those penalties are based on the cost to the other guy.
So if warner falsely demands your youtube video is taken down - you lost no money so even if they lied the penalty is zero.

If you request a Warner file to be removed they will prove that they lost $billion dollars. After all, an industry that claims star wars made a loss can prove anything.
This is great, but I'm a little worried about the custom Maybe function that slipped in about halfway through. Unless it's part of a standard framework (like ActiveSupport), if you use it in your projects you're likely going to find that:

a) Integrating with other codebases that don't use Maybe will result in code with an inconsistent style, and

b) If Maybe (or something like it) catches on enough, you'll hit collisions where two projects or libraries have different ideas of what Maybe means. (Maybe one uses NilClass, the other the custom NullClass, for example.)

(The PHP community has taken this to the extreme, with developers getting burnt over and over again with differing "standard" components using the same set of names.)
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I have always looked at this sort of stuff from a Bayesian probability point of view. What is the probability I exist? 1.0, 100% because I am bothering to ask the question, and the probability of my existence given my existence is 1.

Now comes the nasty part. What is the probability of your existence given my existence? Most of that info graphic does not come into question, as anything that went into making me can be assumed true. So it is higher then zero, but it is certainly not bigger then the initial 1 in 400 quadrillion number.
It seems that Zynga is using a provision that says that all unvested stock grants are returned if the employee is fired. This is a pretty common provision from the contracts I have seen.

They then seem to be saying "give us back some of the stock voluntarily or we will fire you and you will lose it all."

If you want to make this impossible you can make your contracts such that unvested stock is not lost when one is fired. However, in that case you may end up with a lot of stockholders that are previously fired employees which may not be good for the company.

You can put in a provision in the contract that says that people can only be fired for good cause and that cause cannot be that they did not want to give their stock back. However, while this seems a very fair provision, it will invite a lot of lawsuits and may cost you a lot of money even if you do follow it.

You can put in a provision that says that one cannot ask employees to give back shares in exchange of not getting fired, but it is doubtful that will be effective. The courts usually allow contracts to be renegotiated if both parties agree to it, even if the provision that is to be renegotiated is the one that says "no renegotiation."

So, honestly, I cannot see a good way to "handcuff yourself" as you put it. You may as well just rely on being a decent person.

__________

PS: None of this is legal advice. This is just hypothetical discussion regarding a hypothetical situation. Please do consult a lawyer for your specific situation.
So long as you insist on using them incorrectly, no.

:)
That's true, but the alternative that we're already familiar with is simply firing the employee, which is not any better. If we're OK with being fired, shouldn't we be OK with this?
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Yes, for me too
Doing probability backwards like this is not useful and leads to fallacious conclusions and magical thinking. How is this any different from people running around misapplying quantum terminology for feel-good conclusions?
Facebook.com redirecting to Microsoft.com
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Err, Craigslist? Destroy with new technology? What about Craigslist uses even the slightest glimmer of new technology?
I am not sure, what point you are trying to prove, but there is a Chinese satellite YH-1 [1] onboard of Fobos-Grunt.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinghuo-1
This happening for anyone else? Any explanations?
The odds that I exist, per my definition ("cogito ergo sum"), are 100%.
It's a cute idea, but it doesn't really make sense. It's like asking, what are the odds that this pile of sand is structured exactly the way it is now?
"Hard to prove damages" hasn't stopped the RIAA and Sony from claiming $750 per song and winning.
By 'right of repurchase', are you referring to the right of the company to purchase your vested shares, should you choose to sell them? If so, it's not related to this issue.
Look at it from his perspective. He knows what the IPO is going to value the company at now. He's looking at some low-performing employees and calculating that they're simply not worth keeping around if it means giving them $20 million (or whatever) in the IPO.

If it's ethical to fire these people (in which case they lose all unvested shares) then it stands to reason it would be ethical to renegotiate a deal that both parties think is fair.
Here's a video of a recent (July 2011) version of the talk.

http://confreaks.net/videos/614-cascadiaruby2011-confident-c...
There are ways to hedge though, right?
I always refer to it as a 'cargo cult' theory of human interaction
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Here's a thread from a German discussion forum about the particular meaning of "Simpel".

http://www.gutefrage.net/frage/du-simpel
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!

-- Richard Feynman
They're not saying "you give us some of your compensation back", they're saying "your future compensation will be less than you expected."

It's kinda like if someone gets you to join their company by offering to pay you 100k/year, but then 6 months in drops your pay to 50k/yr.

And really it's not even that. It's "you got hired at 100k/yr, but then the company was WILDLY SUCCESSFUL and you then expected to make 10M over the next year but they're dropping your pay to 1M for that year"

Skeezy? Definitely to some degree.
Theft/Illegal? I don't think so.
Sliding Hernia
No, i am referring to how vesting is actually expressed (at least in some grants I've seen). Another way to say it: "like it or not, unvested shares are re-negotiable." Get in early and vest as much as you can, if that's important!
Browsing 69 slides was painful in Mobile Safari, but the big picture message + simple example is good: encapsulate code to improve readability (it's not just for classes in OOP).

The modeling of:
writing prose <-> writing code

reminds me of:
micro air vehicles flying <-> birds flying.
Good points. Any idea what a good solution would be?
Russian sources [1][2] don't tell us much more besides that the error is probably in software, the people responsible are preparing for the worst-case scenario and that the damage to the budget is in ballpark of $160MM (of which ~$40MM are insured).

[1] http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1812141

[2] http://www.vedomosti.ru/newsline/news/1415670/situaciya_s_fo...
What slides from the presentation were sexist?
"Trimming a bloated ship" made me immediately think of layoffs. Then I read the article, and the tone was quite different, it looks like he's just re-focusing efforts and killing unpopular projects.

IMO, "Me Too" products only make sense if you have the valid hope to be able to offer something better than the existing products. Gmail for example was vastly better than any existing popular browser based email client. Facebook is sufficiently "good" and hard to improve further, so I'm afraid Google will have a hard time coming up with something that will convince people to make the switch.