skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on the article, assuming the $80 mil in savings was over 1 year, that means the average Zynga employee costs $153k per year.
You know what the problem here is? There is no material difference between a 10 person game studio and a 3000 person game studio. Zynga likes to pretend that their Z-Cloud gives them an advantage over their competitors. Maybe it does in terms of operations, but games isn't an operations business, it's a hits business. All of the optimization in the world doesn't help if you can't keep making wins and Zynga can't make wins because they're too cluttered with layers of middle management FUD.

520 employees is a lot of people out of work, but I have to think they saw it coming. My advice to people in similar positions all throughout tech is this: there are three signs that indicate an impending downsizing.

* Depressed Stock Value over long periods of time

* An Acceleration of secrecy and fiefdom claiming within the culture

* You look around and no one wants to come to work anymore

If you find yourself in this situation, leave. Find another job. Being caught in a downsizing sucks, but if you pay attention you can avoid them. It's important to make friends and to be able to tell the temperature of your local environment to avoid such devastation.

Edit: This can best be summarized as the well known phenomenon: "There's no such thing as a Free Lunch".
Best Online Resources for Entrepreneurs, Organized
Computers that aren't powerful enough to run Eclipse are already in use by people in the developing world. Very few of them have an Android tablet with a cheap Bluetooth keyboard.
I think this is the responsible approach. Someone else made the important point that "if I choose not to send something, respect my choice".

I commend you guys for trying something new and working to make your product better, but even more now for realizing you need to think this through a bit more..
> They are only "transmitting money" in the same way that people who buy things from Amazon or eBay are when they buy products.

Per the FinCEN guidance on virtual currencies [1], " An administrator or exchanger that [...] buys or sells convertible virtual currency for any reason is a money transmitter under FinCEN's regulations, unless a limitation to or exemption from the definition applies to the person."

So, no, the situation isn't the same in the eyes of the federal regulator, and its not really surprising that state regulators whose scope of authority is set by the federal rules view things the same way as the federal regulators.

[1] http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001....
I think it can be triggered automatically when a major shift happens in a stock. I remember a few of these back in the 2000s when things were crashing left and right.
Job of a great cofounder
Stock trading can be halted after big news is released to prevent a panic. It gives the traders enough time to cool down after hearing bad news so they don't all sell at once.

If there's any chance to prevent a crash, a stock halt will help. The crash can still happen, of course.
Surf Air raises $7M dollars, passes FAA tests
as a former Zynga employee, i'm pretty sure the entire management team knows what they are doing, and have expected this for quite some time.
... though I guess if you look at the rationale behind all these features as "get people who buy into these features so tangled up in them that they can't use anything else, or reasonably port their applications to another OS", then it all makes sense.

Of course, that is the opposite of what I as a software developer want.
Feedly announces support from Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I almost want to just do a reset of the feeds I'm blocking. I did such specific blocking that now I really only see posts from the same group of people and most of those peoples most interesting/original thoughts are very certainly not going on Facebook. I've essentially created a large social network only to cut off most of it.
Are there any concise (non-book-length) tutorials or online courses about the Hawkins Way?
scala has also macros since 2.10.0 : http://scalamacros.org/

Is there something special in clojure macros ?
"..Zynga can't make wins because they're too cluttered with layers of middle management FUD."

Right on.
Why do you call it the business model? It's the 'payment model for employees'. Some jobs (typically older, simple manufacturing jobs) pay by-item, but that doesn't work for e.g. software. (Paying by the line of code wouldn't work really well, for example). Therefore most jobs where it's difficult to estimate employee's performance fallback to by-hour wages.

The business model has nothing to do with how the corporation pays it's employees.
You did include "too small to buy legislators" so that takes away a good deal of the irony.
I think the conclusion here is wrong. There may be fewer negative ratings, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they are less valuable for making recommendations. In fact they may be more valuable. If people go around indiscriminately "liking" random things, but reserve their "dislikes" for things they really hate, then "dislikes" might actually carry more useful information about their preferences than "likes".
Goodbye Atul Chitnis | The Startup Guy
Very nicely put!

It's interesting that if you want sandwiches made, you don't necessarily have to make them yourself. In fact, it will be slower. Yet getting into a position where you can incentivize other people to make them for you is quite tricky, but rewarding.
If a stock falls by x% in time t, it's automagic.
Does anyone happen to know if it supports inline assembly (64 bit) yet?
There are some newspaper websites powered by Facebook comments. I wish I could downvote some of the comments I see there. I see some of the most terrible comments get liked a lot and the commenters become star commenters (or whatever FB calls them).
Has Numenta done any of the empirical evaluations that are standard in the mainstream applied machine learning communities? For example, if they're doing image classification, one of the standard shared tasks from the field of vision research. When you ask what research supports Numenta's approach, they always point to the Hawkins book. It's a nice story, but there's quite a history of nice stories in AI that haven't always been ready from prime time.
"Hire people that you could describe as animals." - who the fk is this guy?
My Arduino can beat up your hotel room lock
That's the famous App Engine Golden RAM.
I guess this disproves the old "People are more likely to go online and say something bad, than something good."
Jekyll 201: Beyond Hello World
I know how it feels to be in that situation. Best of luck to all the people who got the lay off. Make sure you hit the job search running and be sure to network as much as possible.
This is absolutely shocking to me. Had my ACL replaced in the UK privately about 8 years ago (no health insurance, paid out of pocket). Total cost was £3000 (+ £600 for initial scan). I could have got it done for free on the NHS but it would have messed up my term time at university.

Like the OP I had meniscal tearing too so more or less directly comparable. (Although obviously 8 years is probably a long time in medical devices so worth bearing in mind).

To put in perspective, that is approximate the same total cost (~$5000) as just _one_ of the pieces of equipment ("Cannula Fast Fix CVD") that the OP lists.

It's one thing if doctors are more expensive because they have to carry higher insurance charges to protect against negligence lawsuits, etc, but that the equipment alone is multiple times the cost seems crazy.

Mental.
CEO Update
Yeah it just turns into "oh my golf friends would love this, but everyone else would think its uninteresting" or "oh, my friends who are passionate about politics might be able to start an interesting discussion here, but having older relatives also comment will turn this into a clusterfuck" or "My poker buddies would love this, but I don't want most of my friends knowing I gamble." Groups seems like the main answer, and I suppose this is the main reason that I mostly use Groups when I'm actually using fb at this point.
We're not talking about baseball cards here.

You're right, we are literally talking about the buying and selling of random numbers. However, once again, Bitcoins have zero inherent value. There is no person or organization that has any obligation to buy or otherwise exchange them. They only have value to the extent that others will buy them.
Slight reduction in our standard of living, eh? Didn't happen to notice the record high structural unemployment in the U.S. and other western nations did you? Also, the escalating poverty rates in those same nations, including record high child poverty in the U.S. In 2013.

Those are some of the heavy costs to which I referred. It's not just one less dinner out, as you'd like to make it sound. So ignoring these very real tradeoffs makes you come off like a ranting idiot.

And in your brilliant explanation of continuous labor exploitation, I didn't happen to notice your explanation of what happens when the previous pool is no longer the cheapest (aside from one less dinner out, that is). Do they magically evaporate? And when all cheap pools have been exploited, then what? Does all the world just work for the same slave wages?

Because, you also didn't mention that through it all, corporations are realizing record high profits and the world's wealth is accruing to a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. We are seeing global economic inequality on a massive scale and it is only accelerating. If you think that story has a happy ending, then I (and history) will have to disagree.

Let me guess: you're probably the kind of person who argues the above and also argues that the U.S. needs to cut its debt and kick the entitlement loving free loaders off the government dole. And, like the other "free market at any cost" drones, you probably fail to see any contradiction in holding both positions.
Agreed. Just after college is the time in your life when you're freest to take the biggest risks. However, way too many people are saddled with crazy college debt that the only logical option is to "play it safe."

An unfortunate dynamic. At http://www.thinkful.com/ I've encouraged our interns to consider how much savings or debt they'll have upon graduation. It's something they basically never consider, and immediately when they do all sorts of priorities change about their spending habits, goals, etc.

Well worth the exercise.
> There is also no guarantee in entrepreneurship that you'll spend a substantial portion of your time doing things you enjoy.

If your start-up turns into a successful business with real customers, you almost certainly won't.

At the start up I worked for, I watched as the founder quickly became too important to do much if any technical work. Can't very well spend time sitting and futzing with algorithms when you're busy making PowerPoint presentations and poring over contracts.
People can take note of this - Stalin fought the Nazis and liberated Auschwitz and other concentration camps, with over ten million Russian soldiers sacrificing their lives in the process. So who does this person say Jews hate? Stalin. Reflect on this gratitude the next time you hear someone lamenting that the world did not care when the German right began mistreating Jews...

In another context, ask any Palestinian what he thinks of the foreigners who invaded his home in the 1940s, and massacred his kin and are continuing to increase the bloody settlement of his land...
Full new version or Service Packs?

I agree with you but a Service Pack should suffice esp. right after you've release a full new version/update to a major product/tool like VS.
Interesting...

An example of what a date night might be would be cool. Will you be geo-specific or general? ie: how about italian tonight or how about dinner at The Chophouse downtown?

A tie in with specials / promotions might be cool too: "2 for 1 drinks at this restaurant tonight"

I think if you collect some more information, you could produce better results: q: do you have a vacation planned and where? and you could provide a place to eat, something to do, etc...
For comparison, the full cost of a hernia repair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inguinal_hernia_repair) in a private hospital in Poland is below $1500. Sure, this is a much simpler procedure than the OP's one, but still -- it involves an operating room, a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, assistants/nurses, and 2 days of hospital care. I don't imagine the materials are much different to the ones used in the US.

Even accounting for the lower cost of labor, the prices in the US are insane.
The one sign for impending bankruptcy, sellout, or similar forms of doom: desperate last measures by top management to raise the stock price, presumably so they can make a last profit. E.g. SUNW changing its stock symbol to JAVA just before selling out to Oracle.
lol. well put.

i do think there is wisdom in joining a startup run by veterans out of college. at least then you get the experience in running a startup.

if you join a big company, you get educated in the skills needed to succeed at a big company, which unfortunately are very different to the skills needed to doing something on your own.

i do like his quote though that it will take about 10,000 hours to get good at anything...
Does TI-85 assembly count?
Empty, derivative Facebook games are not any more "skinner box" than anything else we either enjoy or do out of necessity. Almost any game ever created could be described as a "skinner box." Completing work units for a salary could be described as a "skinner box." If there is something especially bad or manipulative about Facebook games, it isn't that they are a "skinner box."
You see the same thing a lot with disruptive startups -- where they are hailed as the radical new future of a particular industry and it is argued that they should not be compelled to obey the regulations of the industry they seek to enter and disrupt (and, often, a substantial part of their operations rely on them being allowed to ignore those regulations or having the regulations rewritten to support them.) See, e.g., Airbnb and its issues with many cities regulations of short-term renting.
> [...]but people go on Facebook and G+ to feel good[...]

Very true, but to add to that another factor that shouldn't be underestimated is that it's companies advertising on these platforms that are footing the bill for their operations.

Fewer companies will want to advertise with you if their company/product page can be disliked. To name an example Monsanto has ~22k likes (https://www.facebook.com/MonsantoCo) they'd probably have at least two orders of magnitude as many dislikes if people could "dislike".
It was $1,600 have ACL surgery on our dog. Think about that one for a while.
We hear about medical tourism from the US to India, Thailand, etc., but with these kinds of price discrepancies between the US and UK private practices, I wonder why there aren't more Americans who go to the UK for surgery?
He's already done alright for himself, because he was wise enough to take money off the table when he had the opportunity to do so.

What I don't understand is why he's still at it. This must be an enormously stressful time. Why wouldn't he take the rather impressive amount of money he's already made and just go enjoy his life?

Evidence, I suppose, that some of us are just wired differently.
I'm seeing that trading will resume at 3:25 pm ET (in about 10 minutes from time I'm writing this). Grab your popcorn!
That was so classy. I remember when that happened and then I remembered that RIMM just changed to BBRY... Research in Motion to Blackberry... HMMMMM.

I'm just saying.
TL;DR: Jobs bad. 1. Make things. 2. Make sure people want it. 3. Keep trying this for a long time.
Contrary to the reddit example, I think downvotes here on HN work out decently. I've mostly only seen spam, off-topic, rude etc. comments downvoted here.
This highlights the disconnection between motive and work. I think the motive for most people to try the startup game is to free themselves from the constraints of typical work environments.

Success means the freedom to use your time as you prefer, but there's no guarantee of success. The alternative is status-quo drudgery.
I was involved downsize a couple years back, and it turned out well for me. At least with my company they gave a severance package at departure. Better deal then just leaving for a new job.
Out of curiosity and because i am too lazy to pretend i want some and request a quote from the vendor, does anybody know what is a ballpark figure for the cost of those displays?
What if you've never heard of SEO but are being attacked by competitors planting spam links, taking advantage of Google's broken algorithms?
Well I thought it was used somewhere else in the conversation... Sorry if it was confusing. Specifically I meant the employee's way of making money :)
There is some good stuff in there, but also a number of tautologies and platitudes, e.g.

"Make something people want."

This is a great sound bite, but it's not really actionable advice. Same as "don't die" or "get lucky." If you start a company unaware that you need to make something someone will want, you have no business doing so.

Furthermore, it's absolutely nontrivial to start out making something people want. A better piece of advice (still flawed) would be: develop a process to make sure you don't deviate from building something people want, and/or converge towards something people want. You can always rewrite history (e.g. Twitter, Google) and make it look like you always knew that you were building something people wanted. In reality, Google tried to sell itself to Yahoo for $1M in 1999 (and Yahoo said no). Those of us who were around at the time remember this.

I find it very dangerous to "tweet-wrap" advice that is the result of long slogs, and requires context. "Don't die" or "get lucky" sort of make sense if you know the back story. Otherwise you might as well say things like "grow wings" or "remember you always have a friend in the diamond business."
While the data is interesting, my understanding is that pales to: if your posts get Liked, you keep using Facebook, and if your posts get disliked, you stop using Facebook.

Some people think Facebook is a drama creation engine. That's a bit unfair: it's a usage creation engine, which does allow usage by people who are prone to creating drama. (Talk to e.g. teens sometime: for some people, implicit competition within real-life friend groups for who gets the most likes on their photos is A Thing.) Facebook is not unaware of social patterns like this, so they make product choices which make them less likely to negatively affect Facebook's interests.
I have only passively been paying attention to Zynga. I do feel bad for people who are now out of work. However, the staggering thing about this article to me was that 520 people only represents 18 percent of their employees. That means that after this, there's an astonishing 2300+ people still working on Farmville and friends. Coming from a nonprofit biomedical research group where I struggle to get single digit numbers of developers, that is mind-bending.
I disagree that it's ugly. Usability has been fine for me on the desktop, where I use it most. Mobile usability is weak, but I'm usually not trying to participate in forums on my phone.

That said, I would probably use a forum that I did find ugly if the content was interesting enough.
It is typical to briefly halt trading in a stock, if a company makes an announcement (or undergoes an unexpected external event) likely to have a non-trivial effect on its stock price. This is to allow time for significant news to disseminate into the marketplace. For this reason, you will frequently see companies make major announcements outside of trading hours.
@lsiunsuex

Thanks for the feedback. The things you've mentioned are definitely a huge part of what we have planned. The email reminders will include Date Night ideas of the type you're recommending.

In the near term, recommendations will be either NYC specific OR general enough to work for people anywhere. However, our goal is to become extremely geo-specific once we've built the technology to a point where we can gather that information (as well as interests) easily. Promotions are also part of the idea; we're working on building partnerships right now to make that part of the offering possible.

Thanks for the feedback; it's great to see that our ideas and the things you're recommending are in line.
A long time ago I read an article about companies would actually use rumor and gossip to signal to it's employees that layoffs are pending without actually explicitly saying that. In theory you should be able to use signals to predict things.

In practice I've seen friends completely blindsided by layoffs and I've dodged many a bullet but still didn't see it coming for the other people. I think it can be real difficult to predict these things other than to use your gut if you think something's afoot and be prepared to act preemptively.
After 10 years in the workforce it seems to me the most important thing to focus on is getting a job that'll give them exposure to new things.

Our students at http://www.thinkful.com often find themselves a couple years out of school, languishing in their 1st jobs since college, wishing and yearning for more.

Unfortunately, incredibly talented people take the safest job they're offered because they have crazy college debt. A couple years later they're totally unfulfilled and want more.

Planning how to "not sell your time for a living" while in college (or before) is just as important as not being compelled into a "steady" job at the point in your life when you should be exploring new things.
Docker 0.4: Remote API, Build, Openstack Integration
So why don't you want to be a "maker" at Subway? Because while the sandwich line workers are the ones making things, it's the store owner that has the leverage--he gets other people to make things for him.

This also perfectly describes the relationship between startup founders and VCs.
Haha, it's funny because if how accurate it is for me on HN. I see both up and downvote buttons, and it simply slows me down with a risk of pressing the wrong one. I never downvote comments I dislike, I just ignore them and upvote good ones. So I'd prefer to hide my downvote button.
I mean, can you give a real-world example where this technology has resulted in an increase in user happiness? The only way I could see this being helpful is if you aggregated the data and made inferences across multiple users. But then, you are spying on everyone.

If you are going to use it to engage a single user one-on-one you run the risk of revealing you were spying on them. I, for one, would rather not have to constantly feel like I was hiding something when talking to my users. Users are comfortable with the idea that you can see access logs for page transitions, and use that to help assist them. They are not comfortable with the idea that you can see things they typed and decided to not submit to a server.
Large companies that I've worked for, yes. You might get passed up if you don't have the "Full Stack" keyword on your resume.

It's a shame that good developers can be passed up because they don't have the right keywords.
I wish they would dedicate more time to improving cl.exe and link.exe in terms of performance and language support and less time with these hokey team visualization gimics.

Every release since 2008 has been getting slower and slower for C++, the C compiler is awful, PGO instrumentation in Win8 is less capable, and there's no equivalents in the Windows ecosystem to gcc's likely/unlikely, oprofile, or valgrind.

It's at the point now where developing on Windows vs Linux is a serious performance and security impediment due to their withering native toolchain. But I guess nobody over there gets promoted for fixing the hard stuff.