skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a major distinction in kind between the two examples you give: one of them is conducted in the open and involves input from society at large - ie, acting through the government.

If the execs didn't think what they were doing is bad, why did another major CEO refuse citing that it's probably illegal? why did they take efforts to hide it from the public and employees?

Tariffs aren't done in secret, nor is there a lack of public input on the practice.
Thanks! I've made enough posts like this that I was thinking of writing up some 'bitcoin nuts and bolts for coders' blog posts.
The re-engagement models listed seem glamorous and certainly are the current hot buzz. But, I doubt I'd call them sustainable. An established $40m company might try some of these, but should not rely on them as a core business model.

Incorporate flash sales as a daily deal feature, creating re-engagement and perhaps pushing lesser known or tough to sell products. I'd even argue that scarcity is good for a quick grab, but might be a turnoff for regular customers of a site that isn't focused solely on flash sales.

Subscriptions are a slippery slope for physical goods as well. You have to be careful to provide the customer with enough perceived value, while enforcing the notion that the value will be the same every month. At the same time, you can't strain your inventory or infrastructure to maintain the regular flow of these products.

Loyalty programs are probably the oldest, and safest trick in the book. Often times, can be done for free. Perhaps purchases earn points which are only redeemable on products you specify. Could help move problem inventory while saving a few points in payment processing fees.

One should tread carefully with all these options. Like the author mentions, there's plenty of room for innovation in this space.

It's possible that the $40m company is king of it's niche hill. If that's the case, they might look at leveraging their experience and infrastructure in other markets. All the while, working to keep the core business sustainable.
No you just need to understand what I am actually saying.
Here's the thing, the software-is-eating-the-world explosion really took off in the early 90's (or at least that's when myself and a bunch of friends I knew got into it). All the people that got into writing software back then are aging and most that I know aren't planning to stop. I myself am on the doorstep of my 36th birthday. For those of us that have slogged it out for multiple decades now aren't simply going to go sit at home and wish we were 20 again. The sheer number of aging engineers will cause this problem to reach a breaking point. Those of us that have been instilled with the "disrupt the establishment" ethos in the 90's and 2000's will find a new industry to disrupt...our own.
Yeah, I think you're aware of why you're full of it, here...
Very interesting. How large is the binary size?
The NSA's legitimate targets are those bearing arms against the United States, and foreign intelligence more broadly. If you were to export a single chip to Iran, you would be the legitimate target of the FBI, which is an internal law enforcement agency, and not a military intelligence agency.

Internal law enforcement bodies are bound by laws and procedures, yet while rules of warfare exist, they are what one might term fairly permissive. Even more briefly, "War is Hell," and we do not bring Hell home. It is a universally applicable principle that the use of any military force against its own people is a treasonous offense; almost a tautology. More than this, it is sheer stupidity. Why should we seek to use the engines of war against the shores that bore them?

No one will deny the legitimate use of military intelligence-gathering. May we all be eternally spared the brutality of conflict, but if it must be, let it be conducted with wisdom and swift sure purpose. I'm not particularly bothered by the US military investigating bellicose nations and/or nationals, but I'd prefer to avoid military operations in allied territory to whatever degree possible -- we should pretend to some degree of civilization. Using military forces against civilians is generally considered criminal, and using them against citizens -- why don't you come up with some descriptive adjectives?
Maybe you wouldn't. But you can't risk your source's identity because you assume everyone was brought up in a good house. It's good to be good. It may be okay to be naïve if you're the only one involved, but if there's someone's job at stake, it's your duty to be a parnaoid son of a bitch. If not for yourself, then for the other person you try to protect.

A cop in a dark alley with a shady guy won't think :"I'm a good guy who's been well raised. I don't stab or shoot people.. This fellow citizen must be an upstanding one, let me just turn my back to him". If a cop thinks that way, he chose the wrong profession. I used the word naïve, but at that level of naïveté, it's being a stupid person or someone who doesn't want to live.
Problem is employees are getting into agreements the full terms of which are not known. In effect part of their contracts/understandings are written in invisible ink- A non-compete of which they are not aware.
Nose can detect one trillion odours
I wonder if this is true (March 20, 2014):

"is #bitstamp about to become another #mtgox ? Uk trader seeks high court injunction to cease Uk trading operations"
https://twitter.com/frankieterrier/status/446638248761503744

"#bitstamp getting sued for $1.2m Uk trader seeks freezing of assets in high court action. #bitstamp not processing withdrawls."
https://twitter.com/frankieterrier/status/446637903721287680
"There should be no issue in people hiring from each other..."

These internal policies did not restrict hiring for the most part, they just restricted cold-calling and active poaching.
Isn't one of the common arguments that they're isn't a shortage the companies just aren't willing to pay enough to get people interested. I mean when I think make BIG money in IT I think startup and all the risks involved or management rather than high level engineer. That will have an effect on who joins the industry.
> When you say that sentence, replace the word bitcoins with gold.

Let's suppose that this gold is Nazi gold, taken from Jews. You know that Nazi gold will be traced to you(because each gold atom has an address). Would you still accept that gold as payment?

I'm not an expert on bitcoin though, so my analoy could be way off.
JavaScript Testing Recipes
I believe there are preliminary plans to implement a JIT compiler for PHP 6. FB has certainly helped push changes being discussed into the ecosystem given their problems scaling PHP.
I don't really get the pragmatism behind ageism in tech entrepreneurship. That is, in a field in which human abilities are augmented by ever-more faster computing, and in which ideas, experience, and relationships would seemingly be as important (if not much more) as youthful energy...how is it logical that its best people would solely be among sub-30-year olds? It just doesn't make any sense.
If I were an SV employment lawyer, I'd be making a copy of the "careers" page referenced in that article. I suspect that would look very very bad as Exhibit A in an age discrimination case against the company in general. Sure, there could be other interpretations (maybe) but...
> The people have the government departments they deserve.

Yeah - and they inflict it on the rest of us.
'Shrapnel' risk to future Moon surface missions
It's not a capability thing. It's a make-you-work-more-hours-for-less-money-than-the-older-engineer thing.
Some companies are addicted to long hours & naive employees.

It's also a natural progression of an engineer to start off as an employee & then take an independent identity. So it's common to see older engineers become consultants & business owners; who then hire the younger, cheaper, more impressionable employees.
If you were arguing that Google was hiring all those people in a way that was short term and unsustainable, you might have a point. But unlike the US steel example [1], you haven't made such an argument. You've just argued that competition can damage companies, which of course is part of the point.

One way to look at anti-competitive rules is that the point isn't to protect companies at all. In the steel case, the point is that dumping will destroy the American industry and then--this is the crucial part--China can hike up its prices way above current levels because there's no competition. If China couldn't do that for whatever reason, then that would be great for American consumers, who would benefit from cheaper steel, and--in principle at least--the competition rules would do nothing about it. In other words, in theory, the law doesn't care about the American steel industry; it only cares about the long-term well-being of steel consumers, which requires sane pricing. That industries have co-opted that in all sorts of ways to ironically entrench their positions in anti-competitive ways should not distract you from the core purpose of the rules.

So applying that here, since the rules in question are meant to protect the workers, the problem would be if Google were hiring all these people to destroy Apple and then be able to slash salaries, since no one would have anywhere else to go. Since that strikes me as implausible, and at the very least not established, I can't see how we can think of Google's poaching as anti-competitive.

[1] I'm not sure I buy the US steel argument either, but that's a separate discussion.
Okay: Googled K-fold. It's a case
of resampling. To justify it, use
a finite group of measure preserving
transformations, which I figured out
and published about 16 years ago.

But we still have not made clear what
the heck the assumptions are.

Confusion matrix: Wikipedia has nothing
on it, but Matlab's documentation does.

But there's a problem: Suppose
we have some data on cats and dogs
and want to have a 'classifier'.
So, we do what Matlab said: Take
half of the training data and build
a classifier. Then we test the
classifier with the other half of the
data.

But suppose the classifier finds three
classifications instead of just the
two, dogs and cats we already know
exist. So, if we apply such methods
where we don't know in advance the
number of classifications we might
get three classes and be quite wrong
and not know it.

Again, the methodology looks like just
pushing some data into some software
with too little in assumptions up front
and too little about what we are getting
out on the back side.
I have to say, the only person that disappoints me in all of this is Sergey Brin. I guess I kind of expected everybody else to be a douche, but he's fostered this free-thinking Tony Stark/Ironman persona and this just makes him seem like a coward, who caved the instant Steve Jobs came-a-ranting.
Guess what, there's a lot of software being written by people not in their 20s in places like Kansas City, Boston and Nashville. The world doesn't revolve around Silicon Valley.
Would you lend $10 to a business in your neighborhood?
Just seeing if any of you would do it!
The general quality of nationally-distributed commercial bread in groceries is poor. It needs stabilizers and preservatives and has both an incredible shelf life and an incredible lack of taste.

However, many supermarkets have their own in-store bakeries, which range from slightly better than bad to very good; urban areas almost always have decent bakeries; and some of the best bakeries in the world are in the US. In the SF area finding a good loaf of a rustic-style sourdough is only slightly harder to do than finding a good cup of coffee.
When I use the on-board "sound card", I get to hear... something (my CPU? memory access?) that is directly related to stuff going on. I.e. Running some programs idly in the background gives a certain static fuzz, files being read are shorter or longer bursts of noise, moving windows around sounds a certain way etc, anything involving the GPU is even louder, and so on. It's obviously annoying, because it's certainly not filtered to sound pleasant, but also kind of fascinating.
In my world it's makes no different. My employer deciding how other people may approach me. I don't even know what to say.
This is slightly revisionist. The App Store is really just a centralized portal for software purchase and download. People were purchasing software online and downloading it well before the App Store.
The odd thing is hiring older workers is generally a great idea. From an organisational perspective programming teams don't scale vary well so hiring less skilled people is generally a terrible long term strategy. Personally, I have worked with a few hundred programmers and I can only name 3 that where competent before 30.

Outside the valley you find a plenty of really competent programmers mostly in there late 40's along with a few people that are nearing retirement age and while often gruff tend to blow your minds. As in "we stopped testing his code years ago." Or just calling someone team _. As in you could get 15-30 people working on a project or if your lucky Bob.
So then my question becomes: which networking events should I attend?

And I'm from Ballard, but I have access to a car so anywhere in the Seattle area works for me.
Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokata...
Machine learning algorithm existed since medieval times
Who's more unemployable -- an older developer? Or, an older developer with noticeable plastic surgery? I suppose there's some truth in the article, but most older developers, or even just technically astute individuals, that I know would never consider plastic surgery. And, as an aside, most older developers I know would never settle for the younger developer lifestyle of sacrificing their free-time and non-tech-relationships all for some street cred, adventure and a healthy paycheck. Good older developers I know are just interested in different things.
And that's really the thing a lot of these articles miss. While 20-somethings are making software to automate burrito delivery to other 20-somethings with drones in San Francisco, there's a whole world full of developers solving real problems each day. But it's hard to convince the rest of the world that there's more to the software industry than the Bay Area echo chamber.

Edit: I know not all of Silicon Valley is doing pointless startups.
One of the biggest indirect causes of ageism I've seen is the traditional career path forced many engineers out of engineering - there is/was an attitude at places like IBM of: "If you want to make bank, you need to go into management or sales". Years later, an engineering crunch makes engineering into "where the money is", but you largely lost a generation of technical experience that took a break of a decade or two.

My father got lucky in that he was successful in his transition out of engineering, and was 67 by the time his position went extinct, but there are a whole bunch of folks who would rather have been engineers than otherwise, but ended up missing out on a couple decades where the daily tasks of building software changed dramatically so gained less in technical expertise than they should have, and were left hanging around age 50.

I have a ton of cultural criticisms of the current tech industry, but the one thing that it is absolutely getting right is valuing creation. The damage that could have been caused by the Google/Apple cartel has been limited largely by the startup industry that, for all its faults, has as a crucial belief that the act of building things is valuable, and that people who make things are the ones who create the most value.
Superman with a GoPro [video]
How does it compare to HipHop or fb's newest offering?
I worked there as well. The problem is that the kind of selective agreements are a form of market collusion that is enshrined as illegal in anti trust law. So even if it "makes sense" it also infers with market dynamics.

Finally, the notion that this was an individual thing and there were no class impact is not so. The reason is that these companies have "brackets" for pay. If you are at a certain job title you make $X - $Y and corresponding amounts for options etc. These companies are also very interested in equity among the employees so if prices start rising they will have to draw up the low end affecting prices across the board.

To the doubters, I point to the Facebook/google incident. Google was forced to give across the board 10% raises to every single employee because Facebook wasn't willing to sign anti poaching agreements.

It's interesting that arguments essentially from das kapital are being raised here. Wages vs productivity. Intrinsic ideas of fairness are universal (and possible primate, studies showed).

Google is in a weak position here.
I suspect people can "feel so sure" because they can feel, and see no evidence that computers can.

But that's a dangerous edge to walk regardless. Humans feel, computers don't - most would agree. Humans feel, animals don't - many would agree, many would not, many would draw a finer line between e.g. mammals and others. Humans feel, inferior-race-X does not (frequently argued about slaves) - many would disagree, but obviously many do think this is true.

For myself: I've seen nowhere near conclusive proof either way, and continually-increasing evidence in favor of human == machine.
Could this radar spot Malaysia's missing plane?
So a guy I know took his Yale scholarship, bought a boat and sails around the world and made the diff by working summers. Can't do that anymore.
> Then shut up and wait for him to crack.

I don't know if this is what would happen. We don't know whether Jobs believed what he was saying about the fellow who programmed mainframes. But I suspect that Jobs was also playing upon the fellow's desire to do the project in order to better his own bargaining position.
Just of of curiosity -- is it possible to do something similar using the Google Maps API?
Experience is a liability. You learn all kinds of things as an engineer that quickly become obsolete. Even in the web environment. If you're still worried about hasLayout or rounding corners with images, or god forbid using tables for layout, or even setting explicit widths on your web pages instead of responsive media queries, you're adhering to obsolete ways of doing things that are hurting you more than helping.

Edit: Am I being downvoted because I'm wrong or because you just don't like what I have to say? Both are wrong reasons to downvote, but you go, you go downvote. My comment is reality. It may not be what you want to hear, but it isn't a low quality comment. I'm so tired of this silly site and it's potato filled echo chamber.
Read the article in more detail.
> nmap -Pn -A -T4 nsagate.apple.com

Starting Nmap 6.40 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2014-03-23 21:27 CLST
Nmap scan report for nsagate.apple.com (17.254.0.48)
Host is up.
All 1000 scanned ports on nsagate.apple.com (17.254.0.48) are filtered
> we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy.

Au contraire. Many Americans and Europeans would get a huge and valuable smack with the clue-bat if there were no immigration restrictions, and if licensing schemes designed to create arbitrary shortages of e.g. doctors were eliminated.
http://pastebin.com/uahBR4HC
You left out physical access to peers. We formed study groups, and meeting in person to discuss and work through problem sets can be much more effective than mediated through telepresence. It would have been harder for me to graduate without that.

It's also hard to get a degree in most arts (eg. fine arts, dance, drama, and music) without physical interactions and without access to the physical resources that a university can provide. Yet that doesn't fall under any of your 5 categories. Perhaps #4 is the closest, but you argue that it's only really relevant to hard science or engineering.

Your last bit sounds more utopian than with basis in reality. I don't see why it's any harder to contact leading lights in chemistry, biology, mathematics, philosophy, history, or poetry than it is hackers. Nor do I believe many of those leading lights - hackers included - really want to engage in much unpaid "learning opportunity" to strangers.
You are comparing a legal practice that demonstrates real market value to an employer - i.e. here is a document that shows another participant in this market is willing to pay me $X for what I can do - in a salary negotiation to an illegal practice which distorts the market by decreasing competition.

A legal practice which increases competition and increases the allocation of resources to productive individuals can't be compared to an illegal practice which decreases competition.
Then please clarify, because it still reads like you were arguing past the post entirely.

You said:

"With BI it always is beneficial to work."

As an aside, this is not quite true - if I value my time more than the wages offered, or if working has associated costs that exceed my wages, it might not be beneficial - but it is certainly the case that you don't wind up with less money because you worked because of BI.

However, more importantly, this doesn't disagree with thaumasiotes's comment and I don't see how it's relevant to the parent discussion.

"Even if you only work for a couple of months a year (for instance picking strawberries) you will make more money than not doing anything."

This is true, and a great advantage that BI has over conditional transfers or assistance. It's still not actually relevant to the parent's point. Absent BI, this is still the case, and the incentive will be higher.

"So if anything BI incentives people to work even if only for once in a while."

This seems entirely false, in terms of anything that was presented here. It is the case that people remain incentivized, but it is not the BI that 8provides* that incentive. The change due to introducing BI is that paid work is less incentivized, which is the same as saying "BI disincentivizes work."
The article bends over backward to avoid anything resembling a rational explanation, preferring the woo-woo "reasoning" favored by New Age thinkers.

Here's an example of a rational explanation. Bob walks up and says, "I flipped a coin 20 times and guessed every singe flip correctly. Without psychic ability, that's impossible!" Alice, Bob's scientifically trained friend, says, "Actually, no, the probability that this can be explained by chance is 2^-20 or 1 / 1,048,576."

Bob replies, "But doesn't that mean the same thing?" Alice replies, "Not at all. if a group of a million people flipped 20 coins, the probability that one or more of of them would correctly guess all 20 is 61%, better than even. That means if you pay attention to the world, coincidences appear all the time -- we tend to filter out the boring events and focus on the rare coincidences that fuel irrational belief in magic."

In short, they're called coincidences for a reason.
Not necessarily. Keep in mind that the wages at the big tech companies affect wages at other firms. If the big techs drive down wages, then wages will go down at the smaller firms as well.
Personally, I don't like anti discrimination laws for similar reasons.