skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say that since the idea apparently started with Lucas and he specifically stated it was done to prevent bidding wars because they simply couldn't afford it at the time supports the thought.

I don't think it was the sole intention. But two things stand out to me that was part of the deal. The fact that the HR departments would inform each other if their employees were applying for a job at a company within the group; which by the way should be considered a huge privacy issue. Also that when an employee was made an offer, they only received a "final offer" to specifically avoid a bidding war. Those two things directly relate to wage suppression to me.

As for your example, that's quite true. But in the end it still stifles those employees' ability to increase their income because these companies directly conspired to not recruit from each other. It is not in the employee's interest to worry over if Company A wants to give them a pile of money to simply leave Company B but not work. Two companies coming to such an agreement for their benefit is a detriment to the employee, which is what the lawsuit is about.

Never mind the fact that the whole thing is clearly illegal under multiple federal and state laws. Therefore, their intentions are irrelevant.
Urban Age Cities Compared (2011)
Not a single report came in. They’re good services, but if the thieves are smart the odds you’re getting anything back are slim.

My wife lost her iPhone 3G a few years ago and oddly it eventually turned up on Find My iPhone (which I use very frequently) a month or two ago. I have to wonder if at least in a phone's case, it uses the IMEI or something in its tracking rather than merely the iCloud login since you'd expect a phone to be wiped/reset within such a long timeframe. Maybe iCloud should (or does?) do a similar thing with MAC addresses or some other sort of internal serial number when it comes to tracing lost/stolen devices.
I never though I'd see someone on HN extol the virtues of a pharmaceutical company executive and Republican!

No doubt that there are more incentives than just money, but you do realize that John Crowley is filthy stinking rich from the sales of his company to Genzyme, right?
Isn't this good, because it kept the insane rents in Silicon Valley down a bit at least?
How To Drive Quality Traffic To A News or Entertainment Site
Even if you are a minimalist, one of the few things you should have if you have something non-negligible to lose, is a safe. Most thieves don't bother touching one if it looks sturdy and a good one will withstand fires, so that's where you can keep regular backups.

If you don't want one, building a tiny backup PC to hide somewhere (in the attic with WiFi etc.) is also feasible nowdays when you can get 1TB mSATA drives.
Every time I read a comment like this I know I'm at Hacker News. Did you read the article? These companies all held illegal discrimination pacts designed specifically to prevent them from needing to shell out a little bit more cash to keep their best employees from leaving for other employers that offered a better deal. The wages were, by definition, held artificially low.
At bars and cafes, the conversation is the same old echo chamber; re-affirming the world changing nature of the next Snapchat copy.

I hear this stated as fact all the time, but is it really true? I can't speak for cafes, as I'm not a coffee drinker, but I'm in a lot of SF bars, very often, and I very rarely hear talk like this. Certainly not in my friend groups, and rarely (if ever) from adjacent conversations that I overhear.

Sure, this is anecdotal, but pretty sure all the reports I've heard of the opposite are anecdotal as well. Or maybe I tend to frequent bars that don't feature a tech-douche clientele.

Widening the net a bit, my conversations with friends and acquaintances does not include this sort of vapid tripe. The nature of the next Snapchat copy is a topic of derision, not re-affirmation. I wouldn't consider myself to be the most extroverted person in the world, but I do tend to meet and converse with a decent variety of people.

So really, who are these people all over SF who talk like this? I just don't encounter them regularly, or even non-rarely.
Housing is expensive in SF because it's in short supply. You know who helps alleviate that short supply? Real estate developers!

Seems to me the villain here is anybody who votes for more rent control and tighter restrictions on new development.
Absolutely sincere, but pre-coffee as well :)
I agree. Static pages (with proper markup semantics) are automatically optimized for all browsers.

I know this may sounds sarcastic, but I am totally serious.
"the idea that we should make sure to reserve places for people who can't afford to live there makes no sense at all."

Tell NYC that.

I'm all for living where you can afford.

But not everybody on Google is a high payed SW engineer. And there's not only top engineers/managers/designers living in a city.

And for $4300 I can live in a very nice place even in other high valued cities.
Tristan Walker: Technology, Culure & Content Marketing
Yes, because publicly funded research institutes have enough money to cover multiple drugs in development (a majority of which will fail), clinical trials, and manufacturing, etc...

There are legitimate problems with the current system, such as Pharma typically doesn't produce drugs for rare diseases - there just isn't enough money in the market to justify the lost opportunity costs. Publicly funded research is supposed to help those instances where the economic incentives aren't there.

This can lead to a perverse switch in motive. Instead of trying to help patients who legitimately need help to trying to get as many people to buy a drug as possible, regardless of need. But in case you haven't been paying attention - public funding for science isn't exactly growing. So if we want to see some of these next generation cancer drugs with small markets, you need to have the ability to charge large amounts.

But the public institutes just aren't equipped or financed well enough to handle it on their own.
I am learning how to make desktop apps with Reactjs + Backbone + PouchDB and Brackets-Shell just for fun and learning purposes, so far it has been a very exciting experience.
> Does anyone on planet earth feel like engineer wages are/were artificially low?

Yes. Just because wages are high does not at all prevent them from being suppressed.

There's actually pretty strong evidence that wages are suppressed across the board in tech. In near-perfect labor market equilibrium, you'd expect employers to not have open headcount for extended periods because if they're unable to hire for a position they rationally increase its salary. Yet in tech you see many/most companies with near-permanent open headcount who still steadfastly refuse to increase salaries outside certain predefined bands.

Whether such behavior is consciously profit-driven or unconsciously motivated ("non-managers should never make more than $200k") I don't know but it's largely the reason for the longterm hiring crunch.
How  To Avoid Dying Unhappy
:TCTYP GLASS
My brother use to have a book (well, probably still does somewhere) called The New Way Things Work. It had simple explanations of how tons of different mechanisms work, but it had an entire chapter dedicated to explaining how digital systems could work, using woolly mammoths and various sorts of pie transportation devices. Really brilliant and detailed illustrations throughout.

I have always thought it was a wonderfully delightful way to introduce children to those sort of concepts. It was more EE/CE than coding (and the rest of the book was heavily ME), but I think the approach adapts to coding equally well.

(http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Way-Things-Work/dp/0395938473)
We do have English, German French, Spanish, and Italian now actually, but the experience of switching between them could be improved.
Only Textmate then ST2. Other editors like Scite, Notepad++, Ultraedit have huge amount of users but they aren't passionate about the subject...
If they know all your accounts, passwords, PINs, etc, that's one thing - though you have to trust that, if and when the business dies, they properly wipe their hard drives.

But if they have your digital life (all of it), and they go under, then all your data is gone. So: Your approach of having them have your passwords and PINs is better than "one stop shopping" where they alone hold all your data.
At least at Google, there was a 10% raise at the start of 2011.
No worries, it just puzzled me, particularly since it was repeated across multiple comments!
Anecdotally salaries at the major tech companies just shot up in early 2011, which was soon after the DOJ started its investigation. It's hard to infer causation though, as this could have been because of rising competition from Facebook for employees, or it could have been because of the large amount of seed capital sloshing around in the startup world then, or it could have been because of the Fed's easy-money policies.

Connecting this to current events, this was also the start of SF's rent-and-eviction crisis. 2011 was when new grads started getting 6-figure salaries to work in tech, and experienced senior engineers started getting up to $250K/year in total comp. Turns out that when a large number of workers start getting big salaries in a region where the housing supply is basically fixed, much of that money goes into rent.
>I think he might mean "shaking things up" (which Node certainly has done)

How has it "shaken things up"? It is yet another irrelevant mess of crap a few dumb web monkeys use. There's one of those every other month.
Loving Vincent - Bringing the paintings of Van Gogh to life
Reading the Tea Leaves of Venture Capital Today
Hmm. Hadn't updated my view to account for the ACA.

That could be a problem for healthcare costs in general, in markets where competition among insurance companies is limited. I bet we end up changing that provision sooner or later.
If THAT makes you uncomfortable, then obviously you haven't seen THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo
Honestly, all these languages, even Matlab, are quite decent at maintainability at the scale they are typically used. Almost anything would be decent at that scale. And speed matters, but you can always rewrite particularly crucial piece in Fortran when you know it all works.
If your thesis is that what people really care about is expensive rent, then the first suggestion ('get tech CEOs to push for affordable housing') has at least the potential to actually fix the real problem.

If San Francisco didn't have such restrictive zoning, you could build more dense developments, and housing costs would come down. If you wanted to be extra nice, you could even have some set-asides for rent controlled units.
Researchers at the Imperial College of London are developing an EEG that fits in your ear:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518356/device-could-spo...

By nestling the EEG inside the ear, the engineers avoid a lot of signal noise usually introduced by body movement. They can also ensure that the electrodes are always placed in exactly the same spot, which, they say, will make repeated readings more reliable.
Wait a minute, didn't we meet at Punspace a few months ago? Hope all is well and glad you're okay.

Thanks for writing this post! I finally took a moment to enable FileVault :)

Best of luck on your travels!
While I appreciate that it's possible to cut down the upfront costs with talented staff, it still seems that things like clinical trials will cost hundreds of millions of dollars (at least that's the price range I've seen for anti-malarial vaccination clinical trials) and still have a substantial chance of failure at later stage trials.

It would seem difficult to raise that kind of money from other than big pharma or typical pharma capital market sources who would want to see a large pay-off from such an risky investment (i.e. selling it in countries which could afford it).

Best of luck in any case!
The last time I got an Rx, the doctor actually made the decision along with my insurance company (at least how much they'd pay).

So you're saying that drug advertising is pulling the wool over the eyes of the entire industry so that they give patients nothing more than placebos?

Most drugs, even those that offer a benefit over current therapies, don't sell themselves. Physicians need to learn about new drugs, have an opportunity to try them before you ever see widespread use.
When you are a vilified public figure with a shady and well documented history promoting illicitly obtained images, this is a good way NOT to act.
While technically you're correct, it doesn't mean you're right. It's not so easy to uproot a family from their home and start new somewhere else. It's been stated several times in each of these discussions that many of those who can't afford the housing increase are the ones who've spent generations in the area. Pushing out area natives and alienating the poor for not 'living where they can afford' is no way to build a community.
That sounds great and all, but cancelling doesn't exactly speed things up either...
Ya. People seem to think that every Googler, Twit and Facebooker is a millionaire. A friend of mine works at Google. He lives a little more comfortably now than before he started there... but he's certainly not snorting coke off of hookers with $100 bills.
This is where he crosses the asshole line over to scumbag and crook territory. I say this as someone who respects Jobs deeply for his product vision.
Google's (outgoing) servers will use STARTTLS if it is advertised by the destination mail server.
You have no idea how much it costs to keep a mouse colony fed, taken care of, given veterinary care, etc... and then there's the breeding and genotyping, and treatments. And if they die, you need a pathology report. Mice get expensive fast. These are usually very well engineered mice strains that cost a lot of money just to develop in and of themselves.

And that doesn't even cover their plans for world domination.

Here's a link to Ohio State's per diem fee for mice: http://ular.osu.edu/rates-and-fees/ (It's around $1/day per cage there)

I think you can house up to 5 mice in a cage, and it wouldn't be uncommon for a reasonably sized lab to have a colony of around 200-300 mice. So you'd have maybe 75-100 cages (males you house at a lower rate). So your daily rate at OSU is on the order of $75-100. At other institutions, it can cost as much as $1 per mouse. And this is just for housing them. You start getting to real money, real fast.
>So the money that would have gone to the programmers goes to the upper executive layers instead. This merely moves things around slightly, and if anything further squeezes wealth into the top 1% as opposed to top 10%.

Citation needed. Where do you see that it went to the people at the top and wasn't invested back into the company?
Engineers should make more money than what they are making now. The largest number I heard lately is $240k for a data scientist from Apple. That's too low! That person can make Siri better and make millions for Apple.

Why aren't we getting paid like lawyers? If they win $20M they will get paid at least $2M. But if we make a product that generates $20M profit, at best we get $20K bonus. This has to change!
Non-profits don't have shareholders.
Which the people upset about rent also probably also wouldn't like -- what they want is the what the current rent gets you for lower prices (at least, relative to their own income), not denser packing with the resulting crowding and load on shared services for lower (relative) prices.

Really, what they mostly want is greater effective income.
It's interesting how one of the reasons doge was picked was because of its low difficulty. Yet other then bitcoin and litecoin, it has the highest difficulty.

Understandable though considering dont know of many coins other then bitcoin, litecoin, and now dogecoin
The solution here is the same as the solution when Zuckerberg complained about employees leaving their jobs too quickly[1]: Pay your employees more. Figure out what kind of value they bring, and the amount of cost if they were to leave, and adjust their wages accordingly. Make no mistake about it, the ultimate goal of stifling competition is to depress wages. While maybe described as "disrupting operation", it is really just allowing a company to not pay an employee what they are worth.

Analogously, if 2 companies sold widgets, one in state A and one in state B, and they each had a near monopoly in each state, if they each made a closed door agreement not to enter into each others' states so they could each maintain their near monopoly, I think people, and courts, would certainly cry foul. Certainly competing would disrupt each others' operations, but the competition would bring better products and better prices to both states, and that's the point.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/facebooks-zuckerberg-if-i-w...
Personally I didn't even check what the FB link was since it was clearly a link to a Facebook album. For anyone interested in data munching, a graphic is worthless, you need the numbers. And more data, always
The worst part for me is that the two authors are Ph.D. candidates in MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) [1]. They aren't even tenure track faculty at the school and aren't really in a position to carry the name of the school on their shoulders. Yet from what it seems, it will be the school itself that will be hit with most of the public shaming burden (ex: the FB post's headline).

As a Princeton alum, I'm a bit saddened at the course of events :(

[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~spikelab/people.html
It's US culture - people are easily and often fired. Very different other places, even in tech, e.g. Israel, Germany.
A few years ago I would have gone with Sublime, and TextMate before that. I haven't tried extending LT, so I don't know how easy that is for a mere user. Both Emacs and Eclipse are very extensible, but only the former provides a smooth path to go from tweaking a few config variables and defining some macros, to writing serious extensions. I gather LT is mostly in ClojureScript (?), which suggests it's more like the former, but I would have to spend more time with it to say for sure. I played with it a bit, and it looks pretty, but it's not aimed at the projects I'm dealing with now.
And for those who, like me, like seeing others wonder "WTF!?", make this your ringtone:

http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3
You're completely ignoring the other half of the insurance business which is selling plans to employers and individuals. Insurance companies can't just raise premiums willy-nilly without incurring the wrath of the big employers.

Every single insurance company director I've ever talked to HATES the current pricing of drugs.
What could the wage data show you? That everyone in all these companies were being paid much the same for similar positions? Doesn't seem like that would prove much of anything.

You would have to somehow compare data from these companies with companies outside the group. But even then, I'm willing to bet it would show little because these companies were the big guns in the area. Very few companies would be able to outbid them in wages in the first place.

Wage data is probably not really needed here. From what I understand of the law, the mere fact that they had the agreement was illegal. Meaning they didn't even have to implement the agreement, just that they made it. That they seemed to have implemented it and attempted to hide it only adds to their problems.
they're angellist. all they do is equity for private companies. though if you mean companies not planning on exiting, they can still get a stake, and maybe get a dividend later?
Well, sure. They have a right to explore it, just as Facebook has a right to make fun of it. Maybe it's not the original authors' fault it blew up, but that doesn't mean Facebook has to ignore the consequences.
Shouldn't said lawyers have made sure there was an expiration date on the original wording of the offer? If not on the packaging then somewhere in the fine print? In the absence of one you might successfully argue that it was open-ended.
...and? what happened next? Did you find it?
Programming with Apache Twill (Hadoop YARN made easy)
All of this is so very Godfather ... we should be glad no one woke up next to horse's heads.
It's 32+16 pages, which totals 48... so if you're happy with 50, it's a bit strange to be upset about 32 pages of story and 16 pages of activities?

edit: It's much shorter than 50 pages full of text -- but I think this project looks great, especially for the target audience. IMNHO there's a pretty thin line between children's books like this, and when those actually interested (and a little older, maybe) can get started with any old programming book (many of the Ruby and Python books should work fine -- if we could learn 68000 asm in a foreign language from a magazine at 12, surely most of the "proper" books should be within reach of a motivated 10 year old?). What's needed is some books and materials to make the field interesting and fun to get into.
Vim fork with multithreading support
It's the ASCII art social commentary about the cultures surrounding various popular programming languages that I hope people will find the most offensive about that video. Well worth pausing and zooming in when he mentions your pet programming language.
well not necessarily die by 2018, just the fact that social media is mostly moving fads. everyone wants to be the social network that high school and college girls post their vacation photos to, if you are that then you will likely be somewhat relevant for the lifetime of these girls.
How Google controls Android's open-source software
Opa should be more popular.
Viral video site in hot water for selling plagiarized love story to Coca Cola
Indeed it's awful. I just thought it was ironic that email obfuscation, a tactic used against malicious address-harvesting programs, would also be useful against "helpful" obnoxiousness.
With iOS7 and Find my iPhone enabled, your phone cannot be restored without entering your iTunes username and password. Your phone is literally worthless with out it.
Even re-investment back into the company could lead to increased revenues for the people at the top.

Regardless, I find it doubtful you could possibly prove such a thing, even if it were true. One just has to assume that such things helps the company, which in turn helps the people who profit from the company doing well.
Sounds like Lockheed needs to rethink its software development process. It has clearly failed.
Simplest thing would be to build apartments and shops for all their emploees on company land.
Facebook was the company that broke the cabal based on everything I've heard from friends at these companies. I think it actually started a little before 2011, more like the end of 2009, early 2010. Facebook was (obviously) not averse to poaching employees of other companies, and was particularly good at hiring ex-Googlers by offering large stock grants and relatively high salaries (~150k + 100k+ in options) for someone with 2-3 years of experience out of school. Google made some jaw dropping counteroffers to those who left and gave everyone a large raise and bonus at the end of 2010 as a result of the increased competition.
Why dont you make it a real startup?
It should read the other way round - Julia, Numpy, especially Matlab have array operations like Fortran 90, since they are designed by people from that background.

The problem with Fortran is interoperabality with other libraries; if you leave scientific computing, you're basically out of luck. Writing a GUI is just not going to happen. It is really fast, but it is also not as easy for prototyping since it is also compiled like C.
Finally, Fortran does have the kind of stigma coming from older versions like 77 - and it's still really easy to write REALLY bad and unmaintainable code with it if you're not minding the newer language features.
Especially OOP (since Fortran 2003) feels a bit tacked on.