skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. People are generally so focused on lowering their taxes that they forget what they pay for.

A simplified tax code, where it's still progressive, i.e. tiered, but no deductions would get rid of the feeling that we're paying more than our fair share because there would be fewer ways for people to game the system. It would also potentially recuperate the waste on the tax preparation economy.

And for people who don't think taxes/money is the solution to the education issues in the US, look at the difference between California's performance before prop 13 and after prop 13 passed. Prop 13 capped the amount that taxes could be raised on property for both individuals AND corporations, strangling the educational systems main revenue stream.
Morphine? Why not get a prescription for Imitrex?
Over the holidays I built a site which returns foods with the highest amount of a given nutrient. So for example you can get all the foods highest in potassium, vitamin d, iron, etc.

http:/www.getnutrient.com
Economic inequality is bad per se. Here's a good paper on the effects on economic stability of income inequality:

https://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/upload...

Income redistribution is a valid goal of taxation -- not because the government needs to tax the rich to fund the poor (the government can fund whatever it wants since it issues the currency) but because tax policy can reduce the types of extreme inequality that cause instability.

When people become wildly rich, they often misattribute that success to their own hard work, ignoring the social conditions that made their success possible, and the role that "good fortune" plays in all such success stories. This talk by Michael Lewis is an excellent summary of why this "meritocratic mindset" is dangerous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiQ_T5C3hIM

So yes, we should definitely address income inequality directly through tax policy.

We should also address the root causes of poverty, which are primarily lack of government will to pursue full employment since the Friedman/monetarist view of macro economics won out over the Keynsian economic theories during the supply side inflation caused by the oil shocks in the 1970s.
Speaking for myself, I haven't switched to Medium but I find that I probably get readers on Medium when I cross-post there that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. I don't cross-post everything there but if I write something that I think might be interesting to a broad readership I do.
As an experiment I tried rendering elm in the server. It's renders fine but I'm not sure that it doesn't re-render everything on page load.

http://blog.overstuffedgorilla.com/server-side-elm-with-phoe...
> But economic inequality per se is not bad. It has multiple causes. Many are bad, but some are good.

It also has multiple consequences. Some are good, but some are bad.

Something doesn't become good or bad by its causes, but by its consequences.
i'm not american.

i'm not entirely comfortable that this bothers me given the seemingly innocent intent either... but it does. the joke is as much on it being 'honest' as it is 'achmed' from my perspective... and thats a bit off.
You might notice the commented code mentions CVS -- even though it's now on git. If they had done what you're suggesting, it would almost assuredly lead to a dead-end for someone trying to look up the code.
I wonder what the most complex algorithm you've ever implemented was. The most complex I ever implemented was a toy crypto system that I implemented first naively, then again with simple optimizations. In neither case was there a simple way to describe what the code should do because it was inherently complex.
How to create DVD from video with DVD movie maker
My Angular 2 vs React post from Medium is currently on the front page of Hacker News and Reddit/r/javascript. I give Medium's platform some credit for that. Their tagging system helps get the ball rolling. It seems to provide enough eyes that someone is likely to submit it to the big aggregators. For many smaller bloggers, it's hard to get over that hump. I hit the front page a couple times on my personal blog, but most the time my posts just didn't get enough initial attention to create any buzz. I've been very impressed with my reach on Medium compared to my ~3 year old, post once/month .NET/JavaScript blog. In just one day today, my post got as many views as my biggest post of all time on my blog.

That said, there are cracks showing. Medium has begun removing features many loved. They pulled the full-bleed images that elegantly faded away as your scrolled down. They removed public inline annotations by the author. And any comments people make inline now cannot be made public anymore (very frustrating). All were unique features that drew me there. They're trying to simplify, but I feel they went too far.

That said, the writing experience is seriously luxurious compared to Wordpress. So that combined with the increased reach has me hooked...for now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10832996
"It's no coincidence that laser eye surgery, teeth whitening, cosmetic surgery is all generally affordable -- markets and competition have formed."

This isn't the best example to have chosen. All of these procedures are discretionary and nonessential. If I find the cost of an elective nose job too pricey, I can take my time and shop around. Or I can just go without a nose job altogether and be totally fine. The only thing that will suffer will be my vanity, and, well, it's suffered before. :)

On the other hand, let's imagine my kidney is catastrophically failing, and I need it removed or replaced. I'm probably not going to shop around at that point; I'm going to accept my doctor's recommendation that I be hustled into the nearest ER as soon as humanly possible, and I'll be stuck with the bill after the fact. I have neither the time, nor the expertise, nor the inclination to wait and comparison shop. For another thing, nobody is generally in a "market" for emergency kidney surgery. It's not something you anticipate. It's not something you expect to have done, much less seek out and shop around for. And there are no economic substitutes for the surgery. It doesn't lend itself to a market-based system in the same way that elective goods and services do.
Thanks for the feedback! These are both great things to bring up and also both on my mind. Couples already work fairly well as individuals because of the way "John and Martha" will be matched to "John Smith" and "Martha Smith," but it's definitely worth thinking about whether it makes sense to join them formally somehow.

Locations is one of the next big areas I'd like this to incorporate, but many of my ideas are fuzzy so any thoughts are (as always) appreciated!
In return you get longer flight times.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Money is power.

It's a very complicated issue. The Capitalist class does deliverer Capitalist development. But at the same time it immediately captures most of the value that it delivers leaving a system of servitude called employment... and systems which are homogenous but yet are functional in the form that is found acceptable to its logic of production and consumption through efficiency.

On the other hand the Capitalist class because it has money and therefore power, at times acts in corrupt ways destroying the environment, taking away people's rights, making things unnecessarily hard.

Given its fight with Communism, it was not as if it played it cool, sitting back and watching and saying, maybe Communism can do certain things better.

Instead it immediately went to war demonizing and fighting it as much as it could.

It seems as if the Capitalist class can only be subdued when it feels that its own game is over. And it seems like we have to let it do just that.

People are greedy and have many social problems. This was one way of ordering them. There are a million other ways of ordering them. Whose time will soon come.

Just sit back and watch the show.

Paul is fan screaming for the home team, when the game is over and they've won. But soon there will be no more games. Their time has come and gone.
I have an ancient mid-2009 MacBook. I walked out the Apple retailer and straight into a cut-price PC parts shop and upgraded the ram and hard drive to avoid some Apple tax. I am probably overdue to replace my second battery but I haven't been travelling much for awhile. My second or third HDD was swapped for an SSD quite some time ago.

It wouldn't be fast enough for some jobs but as long as I have browser and terminal I cope ok. I have been going to replace it for years but Apple keep on making more and more unserviceable hardware.

I am a very satisfied Apple customer who will never buy another Apple product. When this machine dies I will buy a quality laptop that isn't disposable and run Linux again.
"It's unprecedented for a company our size to hire a language creator," says R.Feldman of NoRedInk. http://tech.noredink.com/post/136615783598/welcome-evan This might be true, but it's also a very smart marketing investment. I would have never visited NoRedInk otherwise, and it's the kind of company that would benefit immensely from general word of mouth discussion
"Billionaire thinks current levels of income inequality are a good thing"

More NEWS at 11
which? i didn't intend to make mistakes. XD
It seems like you are actually agreeing with Paul Graham. You see the concentration of political power and the resulting erosion of the middle class, and you want to fix them. Great! Those are the kind of "bad" sources of inequality the original article is talking about.

Paul doesn't want to ignore these problems, he just wants to call them what they are. The only problem I see is that we don't have a good term to cover all these related concepts. Alternatives like "creeping feudalism" don't have the same ring as "inequality", even if they may be more accurate.
Paying more for something that you don't need is a sunk cost.
You can purchase it from the Criterion Collection: https://www.criterion.com/films/353-ikiru

Not only did they restore it, there are extras like a commentary track, documentaries on Kurosawa and Ikiru itself, and some writings. Yeah the streaming wasn't as convenient as one would like but we should support the Criterion Collection, which goes all out for its films and restores unappreciated masterpieces. It's a much better experience than watching a horrible compressed-to-hell encode by YIFY with inaudible audio.
For any other casual viewers unfamiliar with but interested in economics, the 'r' refers to return on capital and 'g' refers to the growth rate of the economy. This section of the wikipedia article on his book seems to give a quick and decent high level overview that puts this (and a few other comments) into perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
> What does it mean for the US, when we can't keep up with our demand to import qualified employees?

Is that really what's happening? If so, why are wages stagnant? The "importing" is not because of a true lack, but because it's a way to seek a lower price-point than they could get domestically. (If not in H1-B land, then at least in agriculture.)

Also, "demand to import" seems a little weird. It's like saying "the demand to recycle aluminum". What's actually demanded is aluminum as a good. Recycling simply happens to be one possible way that it can be supplied.
How a Mysterious Beaumont, Texas, Murder Was Solved (2013)
You apparently aren't allowed to question the rightness of socialism on a site spawned from ycombinator.
$25k a year covers about half the rent in a place where you will get paid six figures after school. I am not sure you know what financially independent means.
There's an exception to every rule, like in this case. It drives me perpetually batty when folks blindly stick to process, best practices, convention even when it doesn't make sense.
Much of that "people were happy under communism" BS is just that: BS. As anyone past the age of about 30 would tell you, you tend to forget the shitty stuff a lot faster than the good stuff. As a result we often hold these romanticized notions of how things used to be. Yet if you actually go ahead and look at some videos from 20-30 years ago from those parts of the world, you see North Korea. No one seriously wants to go back to that, except for US "progressives" who believe rich people should not exist.
I'm not against https at all, but I do think have http-support in parallel is useful in some cases, and there is no cost to do that(i.e. support both http/https as google.com does).

the benefit of having http:

1. corporate proxy can filter youtube

2. we can do content-filter for kids browsing

3. better caching support in proxy

4. much less demanding on hardware, ssl is very cpu intensive
etc
Work with Distribution Lists on Exchange Server and Format Forward/Reply Messages
The San Francisco Bay Area is a huge economic engine, however, there is a severe housing shortage which could potentially disrupt this.

What would Jane Jacobs recommend in this situation?
I just realized that this is the one that I use and love. Given the ample number of ports USB/Ethernet/Thunderbolt and SSD I have never felt a need to replace it. The lack of non-Retina screen does not bothers me much since I use it with an external monitor. Having read this article I am now worried about breaking it since it seems Apple has no better options yet.
Right now the practice is for the manufacturer to give people a refund on the product in exchange for their 5 star review. It is infuriating. Amazon should ban these companies from the store or they may lose me as a customer (and I buy nearly everything there.)
There will always be a "poor" if there is a "rich" but I have always thought poverty was about being impoverished, and was a separate issue. My understanding was that poverty was about lacking food, shelter and security, and I can easily imagine a society in which everyone has those things while there are still richer and poorer people
You must be CS Undergraduate
PG is still out of touch. His cited example about a plan to move forward:

> For example, instead of attacking economic inequality, we should attack poverty

The problem in America, and the world, is not poverty. In fact, by some metrics poverty rates have never been lower[1] and by others it's near all time lows.

The problem is the oligarchs avoiding taxes, while everyone else (even plain old millionaires shoulder the burden for them). PG reaps obscene levels of benefits from the carried interested tax loophole, so he avoids citing a plan to attack this specifically other than saying tax loopholes in general are bad.

Shame on you PG.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/05/news/economy/poverty-world-b...
I suppose for me it just matters the guarantee at the time of checkout. Many conditions can change between the time I put it in my cart and when I checkout, especially around Christmas.

The precision with which they can tell me when to expect a package at checkout is definitely an advantage over shopping elsewhere.
The article is comparing Amazon to, for example, Walmart online. Not Amazon to Walmart sales in general.
Except, cryoshon simply echos what a large proportion of the population feels.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/around-the-w...

> Americans and publics in Africa are less dissatisfied, but they are hardly happy about the way things are going. More than half of Americans (56%) say the U.S. economy is doing poorly. In the nine African nations surveyed, a median of 51% believe economic conditions are bad. Within Africa there is a particularly wide divergence of opinion. More than seven-in-ten Ghanaians (73%) judge their economy to be performing poorly, while nearly nine-in-ten Ethiopians (89%) believe their economy is in good condition.

https://www.salon.com/2016/01/03/the_middle_class_is_just_th...

> Down here at the pedestrian level, between 2010 and 2014 poverty increased in one third of America’s 3,000 counties, when compared to the 2005 to 2009 period, according to the U.S. Census’s American Community Survey. In fact, the “recovery,” that pastel-colored unicorn, was only seen in the 4 percent of the nation’s counties where poverty actually declined. The rest remained stagnant.

> It should come as no surprise. Millions of Americans lost their homes, and with them the foundation of their household wealth. During the “recovery,” census data documents that the median U.S. household income has actually declined for three years in a row and remains below its peak in 1999.

And the fact that the middle class has been hollowed out:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477/...
sure, but in case of something like symanitc versioning, the benefit, at least as far as I understand is to give you some sort of trust or guarantee, _ if you upgrade a package from 1.1 to 1.7 your app will not break_ if in practice 2 out of 10 times the your app did break, then is there really a point? should I trust it?
I love my current 17 inch 2011 MacBook Pro for a lot of reasons outlined in the article and will not be happy when I need to replace it.
I'm a little bit surprised that the closing remark of his blog post was "even if you remove all the bad causes, the good causes far outweigh the bad and will cause inequality to further increase."

I guess if one so brazenly believes that to be true, then it must naturally follow that PG would support further inequality.

So it is not that he is against economic inequality per se. He is simply sure (perhaps falsely) of its causes, and believes that if those causes are the majority drivers, then the benefits outweigh the cost.

If he were to be proven wrong about the breakdown of these causes... his opinion might shift.
I agree with this article on its descriptions but not its conclusions. In particular, the conclusion that we should not attack economic inequality directly.

Attacking economic inequality directly might be a good thing to do in many cases. It may be operationally easier and more efficient to have certain restrictions that prevent economic inequality. It can be thought of as a fail-safe when the more direct policy solutions are failing, e.g. legislation that attacks poverty.

For instance, having a maximum wage is executionally simple legislation compared to the legislation required to improve education, healthcare, transportation, etc. Not saying we shouldn't have the more complicated legislation, just that it will take more time and is more complicated and prone to failure. Additionally, not saying maximum wage is a good idea, just using it as an example.

I see what PG is saying, and I think he would agree with my points here, and I agree with the spirit of what he is saying. He's just not that great expressing himself through writing. He tends to make overly strong statements without nuance and write against hypothetical absolute simplistic counterarguments that don't really exist.
there is a stereotype of arabs as thieves and conmen.

"you thieving arab" etc.

it think its there due to piracy and the barbary wars... as a guess

i also think i am the only one who really took any issue, and its half-hearted at best. i know i shouldn't be offended - but i am.
Except that I can't buy it, it doesn't seem to have a stack, and doesn't have any open implementations to examine.

But, other than that, LoraWan is better.

Uh, yeah. Come back when LoraWan is shipping something other than vapor.
In CA, that's not the case. Our insurance went up maybe $50/person, but we got mental health care, acupuncture, and various other benefits we didn't have before. Oh and we have pre-existing conditions that would prevent us from being insured if we didn't have employer-based. And this is all PPO.
The replies to this post are all quite analytical and focused on the value proposition gift wrapping gives you.

I know it's more expensive to do it myself, but it's one of the few things I'm truly terrible at, and my family/friends all seem to derive great joy from my lack of skill, so I have begun to enjoy it myself.

I guess if I were concerned about the value of the cost of having someone else gift wrap a present for me, I would be more concerned about why I didn't care enough to do it myself but felt the need to purchase something for them. The only gift wrapping I paid for was 10$, and from Rapha, a high end cycling clothing company - because they give you a fantastic magnetic closing box with special tissue wrapping on everything inside it. (and I still put the entire gift wrapped box in shitty target brand wrapping paper anyway)
Radians are superior IMO. Using degrees for measurement is archaic compared to radians, but I imagine whole arabic-numeral numbers are more familiar than PI symbols in the learning process at the point in life when most kids are first learning geometry something related to angles. Understanding PI symbols for the first time could possibly come alongside an algebra curriculum, but I'm not a K-12 educator so if I had an opinion, it wouldn't be worth any weight.

Meanwhile, your response got me to look up whether there's a metric equivalent to degrees or radians. Apparently that exists and it's a measure called Gradians. There are 400 Gradians in a circle, and 400 is not divisible by 12. I guess that idea went the way of the French Republican Calendar.
Not like this.

Right before Affordable Care Act went into effect I checked my insurance quotes so I could later compare how much money I would save getting affordable health insurance (which is how Obamacare was sold - that it would put the insurance companies in check and make everything affordable).

It was a 300% increase.
Nobody serious said inequality was bad or good

Lots of very serious people say that inequality is bad:

http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/333/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ7LzE3u7Bw&mid=5328

http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2013/07/09/how-big-is-big...

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=11245

http://moslereconomics.com/2009/09/30/inequality-nothing-to-...
Here's Milton Friedman explaining why the first is politically unfeasible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8
Obviously, nothing with multiple disparate causes and effects is bad per se. But inequality does have at least one negative effect, which is that it distracts the attention of institutions (government, press, academia) towards serving and protecting the interests of the wealthy.

In my view the rhetoric of "attacking" inequality is overblown, even if I'm guilty of having used it myself. Instead, let's just say that some form of redistribution -- to use a broad term -- is not an "attack" per se, but simply a practical way to maintain a decent society.
...like the british english themselves. </stereotype> XD
I think 'honest Achmed' is just used as a stock character here, like 'the town drunk', 'the jewish-american princess', 'the frat boy', 'the absent minded professor', 'the indian store clerk', etc.

That doesn't mean stock characters can't be offensive or racist of course, but in this case I don't think joke is at the expense of the Arab people in general.
If I'm not mistaken, Paul Graham is asking to leave "us poor" startups alone because they need the freedom for founders to get rich, otherwise few would do it. Am I understanding that right?

Quoted from his original essay: "And while getting rich is not the only goal of most startup founders, few would do it if one couldn't." [0]

I just can't sink my teeth into thinking that's a universal truth. It's true right now because that's the current rules of the game. You build a company and then make a ton of money, otherwise, you failed. Yet, there are 500+ reasons someone or a couple of people go into a company together, but money being the default driver, seems really cynical to me if you think that's needed to keep people starting companies.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html
IIRC I needed some special service.

Once I was already there, and 'only' 10th in line, my time was pretty much sunk anyway.