skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"We are saying painful goodbyes to about 18% of our Zynga brothers and sisters."
This is where i puked. Seriosly, in whatever company, when you suddenly do not have coworkes, but brothers and sisters - please run, resign, leave. Now!
> A good reminder to not get stuck in local fad maximums.

That's a good goal - but how do you know in advance whether it's a fad (like Zynga) or the real deal (like Facebook)?
Hmm, is it dangerous though? Presumably, if the advice is not considered by the listener to be actionable, no harm would come of it. It seems the more common case would be that the listener might seek further clarification and come to understand the context. At that point, having the advice condensed into a one-liner is beneficial because it's easy to remember (and thus has a greater likelihood of being followed).
"...it could have been much worse."

Yeah, you could have been laid off like 520 Zynga employees just were.
Matt - thanks for jumping in the comments.

Can you confirm that the disavow tool is automatic? Or do people need to file a reconsideration request? Is the answer different depending on whether there is a manual penalty or an algorithmic decrease in rank/trust?

I ask because you recommended it for people who are concerned about potential negative SEO, and I'm want to be clear on how that works. I think there is certainly a perception that a reconsideration request is some sort of admission of guilt, and I can imagine people being reticent to file one if they weren't responsible for the links in question.
Have you missed the news? C is dead on Microsoft tooling, they have deprecated it.

http://herbsutter.com/2012/05/03/reader-qa-what-about-vc-and...
Law may say what it wants. The reality is people trade things for things. Some other people define certain things as special and force you to comply based on their definitions. No one outside the legislative structures gives a rat's ass about those definitions. When you and me trade something for something, we don't care about someone's definitions, we only care about the value that we get in result. And your friends also don't care. Only people who have power to force you to comply use that power to play with words and mess with your mind.
You expect better from Zynga? Isn't this the same company that fired people immediately before the IPO so that founders could take back their stock options? "Being a meritocracy is one of their core values."

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&i...
You wouldn't have paid anything like $68k. As mentioned in the article, those prices are inflated for charging the insurance company, who in turn negotiates a much better actual price. Similarly, the hospital would have likely worked out a better deal with you. Or, if you qualified (and it sounds like you would have), then Medicaid would have initially picked up the tab and they would have negotiated a better deal for themselves.

In none of these scenarios does anybody actually pay the made-up $68k number.
Twitter is broken at the moment
Studying history is always useful. We should have known from WW1 what happens when we don't help rebuild effectively, and from WW2 what happens when you do, simply speaking. Yet we pretty much ignored all that info for Iraq.

Also, "intentionally" can always be fudged. We "intentionally" bombed the house with the suspected terrorist in a dense neighborhood, but "unintentionally" killed a lot of civilians in the surrounding area. We don't seem to be revolted enough by that to stop doing it.
I might be nitpicking here, but the very first sentence reeks of bullshit & PR spin.

"...saying goodbye to 18% of our Zynga brothers & sisters..."

Who says that in real life? "I'm sad, because yesterday 25% of my family had flu"
Since I've got some free time between meetings, I'll go ahead and debunk this one. http://trafficplanet.com/topic/2372-successful-negative-seo-... is a claim from April 18, 2012 that claimed that negative SEO worked on justgoodcars.com.

Here's the problem with that: the site they selected was spamming, and Google had already taken action on that site. The site had been spamming for years; see e.g. http://growabrain.typepad.com/growabrain/2007/10/fiat-126.ht... for a spam comment pointing to justgoodcars.com from January of 2008. Here's another spam link from April 2008: http://www.punny.org/money/ditch-your-ancient-car-and-get-30... . Or check out this low-quality directory link from years ago: http://www.easyweblistonline.com/News___Media/Automotive/ Or this low-quality directory: http://www.whatclicks.com/shopping/automotive.html

Google found a bunch of spammy links like this dating back years and years, and we took manual webspam action regarding this site before this so-called "detailed expose" of negative SEO ever came out.

Like many of the reports of "successful negative SEO" that we've investigated, the claims didn't hold up. In this case, we had already caught the site in question for spammy links going back years and years--long before the negative SEO campaign started.
Put another way: Facebook is for friends outside arm's reach, people you don't want to forget but who are not part of your current "inner circle". Real current friends are not maintained via Facebook precisely because you do connect with them in other ways. It's for those you don't want to lose, but don't want to put much effort into either.
http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=Tradehalts

http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=tradehaltcodes

LUDP - Volatility Trading Pause

Looks like the circuit breakers were responsible.

Edit: Oh, there were two!
Using facebook as an example of the "real deal" may be a mistake. A better example might be Intel.
Chicago Sun-Times will train reporters on ‘iPhone photography basics’
its all time pass, too many points to even bother reading. There are soo many thing involved in starting a business you just can't sum up things like that. Its just dumb. Every business is different and so is every person.
Interesting read, and a valid criticism of the costs associated with ACL repair in the US.
It would be nice to know, however, how much your insurance company actually paid for the procedure. There's probably a large discrepancy there.

My own thoughts are that if there were a true free market for healthcare, with insurance only for real medical emergencies, the costs of a lot of these services would drop, including physician fees, equipment etc. Most of the population would not, and likely could not, pay 68,000 for an ACL repair, which would leave medical providers the option of 1) lowering prices substantially or 2) being out of work. Having put ourselves on high deductible health plans, we are super vigilant now about how we spend our healthcare dollars. And having realized the impact of this, since we are medical providers ourselves, we are now transitioning to a model where we are not participating with many insurance plans, but our fees will be completely transparent - published online - and fairly reasonable (I think).
I think constructive criticism is underrated. Criticism often leads to improvement which most everyone benefits from.

As far as his data, sure most people can't be bothered to criticize something they don't care about. But imagine if Picasso hadn't criticized Matisse or Matisse hadn't criticized Picasso. It's not really popular opinion that matters, it's the few people that give a shit that makes all the difference.
United Airlines offering "subscriptions" for baggage
Update 3 was the last one.

Maybe Microsoft is tight on money. :)
I highly recommend this book: http://www.sunypress.edu/p-2237-educating-the-democratic-min...
I want to start by saying that's controversial. Famines were frequent in that area way before the Soviet Union even existed. Can you attribute these to Stalin's policies alone? Nobody would blame Coolidge for the Dust Bowl.

But you're right that 1.5 million is too small. I read again and there's about 3 million officially recorded victims. I cannot trust or distrust the higher figures, as these were reported either by western media or political dissidents, both of whom have very good reasons to demonise the USSR.

Just as the USSR spread a lot of lies about the Western world, I don't trust the Western media about these controversial subjects.
Life of a Startup Girlfriend
Apple was on the upswing when they did that though. It didn't feel like a warning sign.
I've never had to bribe anyone, ever in the US. In my parent's home country this is absolutely not true.

I hate this overly cynical "i get all my politics and ideas from wikileaks and reddit" on how horrible the US. The US is a fairly pleasant place to live in. If you think a speeding ticket is oppression then its really time to grow up.
This may be common knowledge to some, but it wasn't to me: I complained about titles to a friend who writes for a pretty big site, and she pretty much admitted that the author's don't really pick/control the titles. The editors do, and it really is pretty geared for link bait.
In my opinion, despite the protests, the logo has clear similarities to Pinterest's, and my first impression would be that it's trying to glom off of Pinterest's popularity.

I am aware they aren't identical, but that's not the relevant measure. The question is, could they confuse an average person, and in my opinion, yes. It is ultimately a question of what the judge would think, but I sure wouldn't care to stand in front of a judge and make that argument.
Is building a Kilometer sized telescopes really that difficult? What about a formation of satellites.

Impossible is a pretty strong word to use for something that is possible but economically infeasible given current technology. I'd be curious to NDT reasoning on the subject.
Examples:

https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter%20status
https://twitter.com/StanfordCIS/status/341638347741097984
I love UFO stories, and I love history, and I love pseudo-science. Hell, I even like counter-factuals. What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Patton had actually commanded the Normandy invasion? And so forth.

But these things are the province of speculation, not knowledge.

Think for a minute about what this essay is asking "What if action X did not end the war in the Pacific?"

Well dang, Action X could be just about anything. The fact of the matter is that all of the actions, taken together, were the reason for the war to end. Yes, Stalin played a big role. But it's not an either-or situation; it's an amalgam. The logical structure of trying to support a statement such as "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan" is flawed. It's like saying the landing on Tarawa didn't beat Japan. Well no, and yes. The assertion itself is flawed.

While I love all sorts of semi-non-fictional essays, I have a little warning bell that goes off when I'm mostly through an essay and the essayist starts telling me a story about how I've been misled. Smells of a political agenda and manipulation.

Japan was threatened on many fronts and made the best choice it could. That much is clear. Atom bombs did not cause as much building and population damage as the fire-bombing did. That's also clear. But atom bombs represented one thing that Stalin and fire-bombing did not: the end of Japanese culture. A few dozen atom bombs would not only have made huge holes in the landscape, it would have erased the culture of Japan.

Nobody is finding comfort in simplistic stories. In fact, the more details people know, the happier I am. But dropping the bombs on Japan saved millions of both Japanese and allied lives. It served as a quick end to a long war, and it saved thousands of allied prisoners whom the Japanese were ready to execute. It also allowed the great Japanese culture to continue.

Most serious historians don't get into counter-factuals, except maybe as fiction. It just doesn't work.
> ... they use VS because that's all there is

On Windows there are lots of compilers to choose from.
"Make something people want."

That is extremely actionable advice. I witness lots of founders talk about all sorts of things except that and it's pretty easy to predict failure.
Not to leave a perfectly valid point to argue to a joke, here's my stance on ad blocking: You don't get to decide what content recipients will fetch. Content is commonly split into multiple separate requests for data which some users and clients won't even have the means to turn into useful information. The interactivity and selectivity in receiving said content is inherent to the protocol, and by all means what makes it different from other mass media. You can't deny users the ability to "receive" whatever part of the content you want unless you are willing to deliver it in another, more intrusive way. What you are really saying is that people are "just short of thieves" for not requesting content that an HTML document merely presents to them as an available resource.

What's your stance on turning down the volume and preparing a sandwich during a TV commercial break? Would you be just short of a thief, or would you simply be doing what's reasonable when having the ability to opt out of information you are not interested in? Don't try and turn a flawed business model built on an infrastructure not meant to support it into a question of ethics.

Also, as some pointed out, to the user, free can really be free. Ever maintained a personal website? How did (or would) your visitors pay for it? Everyone with an internet connection has the option to deliver free services and content at no additional cost.
I think the larger question is whether people could confuse this service for one by Pinterest - and I'd say the answer is Yes.

"pin" in itself isn't an issue but the logo and typography are visually similar and could lead to confusion. You also directly use Pinterest as part of this service.

I say this from the perspective of someone who has received formal cease-and-desists from Facebook, Coke (http://bit.ly/17Tulqr) and a few others :)
"Just like its features, Facebook algorithms are equally stupid. Share more, get noticed more. Originality be damned."

This isn't exactly true. The FB algorithm dictates that a post hits an average of 18% of your network for personal accounts (15% for businesses). It's an average, because if you frequently share content that has low engagement (likes, comments, shares) FB shows your content to a smaller % of your network.

On the other hand, if you produce content with high engagement, it will get a higher % share with your network.
Digital divide - SJSU online college course experiment
Try R# with VS.
"Ownership" of a word is not the issue here. The standard for trademark infringement is based on a "confusingly similar" basis. Unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule here: it's up to a judge to decide. That final points made in the article are exactly how one would go about mounting a defense; but again, you are at the mercy of the courts here and fighting this would cost.

(IMO the PinPigeon logo is indeed confusingly similar)
I saw a doctor right away, but they still wanted to wait a month until ACL reconstruction surgery (cadaver achilles heal) so that all the mobility could be returned before the operation to help speed up the post op rehab.
Any iPhone can be hacked with a modified charger in under a minute
>I am not entirely convinced that it was so, but I do think it is reasonable that a few days is not sufficient time to understand the full magnitude and novel nature of such an event.

The article addresses this.
Without a face in the boardroom, how do you stop yourself from being diluted out to nil?
Rhinehart himself states my concerns with his project:

“I am no biologist though,” he admits, “and can’t isolate the placebo effect in a sample size of one.”

Which is why I am glad to hear the following:

Rhinehart plans to raise money on the Kickstarter platform – a popular method of crowd-sourcing investment for entrepreneurial schemes. Next will be a large-scale controlled trial that’s been greenlit by an ethics board.

Soylent is an interesting product that has received a lot of hype. I look forward to seeing the results of a well designed large-scale trial.
> "The reason? Mobile"

I don't buy this at all, nor do I believe that this is a

It seems like everyone blames everything on either the economy or a shift to mobile these days. Intel, Microsoft, EA, and now Zynga. All of this despite the fact that dekstop traffic has remained steady or grown, even in the last two years. Yes, more people are accessing the web via mobile, but it's still only 15%. [1]

Do you see Activision-Blizzard and Steam talking about how mobile is stealing their lunch? Nah, they're too busy eating Zynga and EA's lunches.

I have yet to see any data showing that EA or Zynga are shrinking based on forces beyond their control. I bet the guys on /r/gaming - annoying though they can be - could give you a better idea than journalists who buy the PR lines. This isn't some totally-unforeseen and cataclysmic surge to mobile.

We're talking about a company with a reputation for churning out unoriginal copies of smaller/indie games. THAT is their problem. If Zynga wants to grown, they must focus on original and high-quality games. Costs and risks are much higher, but that's what people are willing to pay real money for.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/report-mobile-traffic-to-local-s...
honest question, is the Windows kernel written in C++? If not, what does that team use to build it if "C is deprecated"?
Top Best Vehicle Wrap Designs
With the advances in vehicle wrap technology and creative graphics teams the possibilities of what can be done with a vehicle wrap remains endless. Every year new companies and teams continue to raise the bar in creativity which raises the question, “what is the best vehicle wrap?
Wonderful, wonderful stuff. ePaper has been an interesting technology paired with a closed ecosystem for way too long.

I had seen the displays for sale on adafruit but to see the whole picture is really great.
It seems to me that you should be able to roll back an built via a Dockerfile back to any step in the build, and then rebuild from that point. A deployment via another CM tool would probably lose that ability.

Perhaps it's my inexperience, but I find chef scripts to be very fragile because of the large amount of external dependencies they generally contain. All of these dependencies are very stable: nobody takes down tarballs and packages randomly, but a large number of low probability events can add up to a high probability.

That makes image based deployments appealing, but you still need to have a reliable, repeatable capture of the steps that went into building the image...
It's interesting that you mention the Porsche thing. I've always found looking in the company car park on the way into a job interview a pretty reliable measure of how a company is doing and in particular how it treats its staff. Seeing reserved spaces for senior management full of high end executive cars and SUVs, and then a handful of unreserved spaces for everyone else full of much older vehicles without a single high-end or enthusiast model is not a good sign.
To anyone at Zynga looking for an interesting meaningful challenge that also pays well: Transportation is changing, and InstantCab is on the forefront. We are hiring smart people to join our team of a excellent hackers who are also good people. We are hiring for almost every technical role you can think of.

We have been growing at double digit % every month for several months. Helping people get from A to B seems like a simple problem that anyone can solve, but the real world complexity required to scale such a company demands pretty ingenious solutions and behind the curtain, we are building just such solutions.

Email me: aj@instantcab.com so I can give you more details in a private conversation.
Well, from what was immediately observable to anyone who wasn't in the city at the time, the result really wasn't uniquely dramatic. The radiation and the fact that a single plane with a single bomb did it were game-changers but to anyone outside the city looking in it would appear to be another fire-storm bombing, albeit larger than Dresden and in a far shorter time-frame than Tokyo.

That is why I think it really would take more time for things to settle in after a single bomb. The second bomb drives home the "yes, this really is what it looks like; this isn't like before." factor.

I think it would have taken more time for a complete appreciation of what happened at Hiroshima to sink in. Whether or not a complete appreciation of that single bombing would have lead to surrender is debatable, I'm inclined to think not.
Twitter is having some issues...
Lots of Internal server errors - check it out.
Fidelity Now Selling Mutual Funds, Data Centers
I actually prefer the all-caps menu. I find that the letters being the same height improves readability for me. I wouldn't want to read a book that way though.

It's similar to making notes by hand, I'll generally use all-caps when doing so.
RIP Atul. Like many others, PCQuest with the bundled CD's was a special joy every month.
It happens regardless of precompiled headers, so I don't think that's the issue. I do think it's an include problem, but I don't know why.
The two examples given were of a singular leader responding to something that called for immediate action.

The Japanese were hardly in a position to strike back against the atomic bomb. In the absence of an obvious response, it's not surprising that it took time for their leaders, a group, to come to a decision to surrender, considering their culture and society.

(I do agree that the role of the Soviets is indeed underplayed, but in its desire to make a point the article overreaches.)
Yeah, it's broken

https://twitter.com/twitter
I got my ACL replaced in Argentina and the cost including rehab was about U$S 3000 having one of the best insurance companies (about 120 U$S a month). If I wanted to use the public care, it could probably cost almost nothing.

It always amazed me that in the US the health of a person is not a right and if you get hurt doing anything you have to pay huge fees.
I'm starting to think not many people actually read the article. Though to be fair, the first 3 or so pages are just build up, and I almost ejected out of skepticism, too.
BrokenAPI - REST Broken Link Checker
Imagine Apple with a stock symbol of IPOD.
The disavow tool is automatic for any algorithmic rankings (such as Penguin and Panda).

If you have a manual webspam action, then you should get a notice after you verify your site at google.com/webmasters . In the case of a manual webspam action, our advice is try to get any spammy links that you put on the web taken down. If there are some spammy links that you can't get taken down off the web, you can use the disavow tool for those remaining links and then do a reconsideration request.
Hard to tell from the post, there was zero mention of staff costs besides the surgeon and anesthesiologist. So they fit in to the bill in one of two places equipment\drug cost or facilities. My guess is some of both. Time spent changing iv fluids is probably covered by the iv fluid line item vs time spent changing sheets being part of the facilities line item.
What confuses me is how Pinterest could get a trademark on the word "pin". It's a far too common word that logically could be used to represent virtual "pinning" of information.
Host your own spell checker with MySQL
I am actually 4 months out from my own ACL surgery, tore mine skiing and one thing the OP forgets to mention is many insurance will never pay that $60k as they have pre-negotiated rated with the hospitals and doctors. My surgery was done in SF (not the cheapest city in the world..) and according to the bill came out to just over 100k, but, my insurance paid 17k. What happen to the rest? Well I assume it was just inflated costs that the hospitals adds to the bill so the insurance can negotiate down.