skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> economic inequality per se is not bad

So let's grant that economic inequality is good in some cases.

Even if this is the case, reducing economic inequality may be the most efficient way to solve a wide variety of societal issues. E.g. how many societies are there with high inequality where the poor aren't discriminated against or pushed around by those with money?

Sure, in theory inequality isn't the same as:

- Regulatory capture

- The political system being owned by the super wealthy

- Endless war

- Environmental atrocities

- The dismantling of public infrastructure

- The completely dysfunctional healthcare system

- The privatization of public resources

But 'not the same as' doesn't mean unrelated, since inequality is what enables these things to occur. E.g. the rich can bribe politicians to pass laws that make them richer by allowing them to poison low-income minorities or whatever. And while reducing inequality may not be the perfect solution for the reasons stated, it's not clear that a better solution exists. (Sort of like how democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried or whatever.)

Even if economic inequality is intrinsically good, which I think it is, it doesn't follow that reducing inequality is bad.
economic inequality is a mathematical fact referring to the idea that growth in outcomes in the US has diverged over the years between various income brackets. see this https://www.cbo.gov/publication/42729

when people say that inequality is bad, what they are talking about is that it is bad that, even though average incomes grew a lot, incomes for the lower brackets grew a lot less than incomes for the higher brackets. As you can see from my link, even taking out successful startup founders ( by not looking at 1%) shows the same trend.

It is a separate discussion whether or not startups increase income inequality ( just because startup founders get rich, it doesn't mean overall inequality has to increase because their products could raise average incomes in other brackets by raising productivity, for example ).

But, focusing on startups is just not terribly relevant for the inequality debate, again, as demonstrated by the fact, that there is a lot of inequality in the 60%th percentile vs 20th percentile, which has nothing to do with startups
This is cool. One pet project that I want to do (one day...) is to generate what a wealth distribution graph based on answers to a questionnaire such as:

- How much more should a 50 year old earn more than a 20 year old on average ideally?
- How much should the lifetime earning of someone holding a PhD be over someone with only a high school degree - there should be at least some premium for going through extra years of school right?
- What's a reasonable amount of inequality due to people choosing a career in which they will be happier, at some cost to the paycheck?
- Should people be allowed to work more (e.g. 50h/week) if they wish? This will increase inequality.
- etc

A lot of those questions would be very difficult to model, but I bet the graph would look a lot more inequal at the end than most people envision their "ideal" graph to look like (which is shown in this classic video on wealth distribution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM)
It's interesting you pointed out the scroll position in particular.

Of all the things the site likely tracks, the scroll position is probably the least malicious, however it is the most present. It has a real time 'we are watching you right now' feel to it which is possibly why it irked you more than the fact that they probably just logged your country, IP address, screen resolution, OS and browser version, language preference and keyboard layout.

I imagine they use the scroll data to determine abandonment of the article, which is very valuable to marketers and writers.

I wouldn't be surprised if the scroll data and other usage metrics are part of Medium's monetization strategy.
Even if they just sent the video stream itself over HTTP and did everything else via HTTP, now intermediaries could monitor what you are watching and block content selectively.

The pages themselves are so interlinked with account info & access ... that they really shouldn't be loaded without HTTPS. And weird mixes of HTTP and HTTPS are a pain to make work, because browser rightfully block mixed-content and it's way to easy to make security mistakes. Easier to just slap TLS on everything and be done with it.

Don't forget that loading a single page over HTTP gives a perfect entry-point for MITM attacks to redirect to e.g. a faked copy of youtube that steals data.

What downside does HTTPS for everything have for you?
This is a disappointing article. Economic inequality created by startups is ~0.0001% of the problem.
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Averaging different economists' predictions makes sense. They each provide an x-y curve. Those curves average together in a mathematical way.

Product design ideas don't average together in this way. If one person wants to design a knife and another wants to design a spoon, and you average them together, you get a spoon with a sharp blade on one side, or maybe the blade is on the handle of the spoon, but either way, bad idea!! Or best case maybe you end up with a swiss army knife, in which case it's harder to clean, etc. Adding the knife feature sacrifices the simplicity of the spoon, which is extremely valuable.
A better last paragraph which would make sense is: if technology distribution lags behind technology advancement, economic inequality would increase. But that seems like a tautology.
> (You have to multiply by 3.6, can you easily do that in your head?)

I think so, by multiplying by 12 and then 3.
Why do startups necessarily increase economic inequality? I agree that they do now, but is it impossible to have the good of startups without also increasing economic inequality?

Out of the usual reasons people encourage you to either found or work for a startup, "get rich" is not the primary motivator, and "get richer than other people" certainly isn't. (To claim that "get rich" implies "get richer than other people" is to invoke the pie fallacy, which Paul Graham debunked recently.) "Change the world," "have more freedom / creative control than a traditional job", etc. are, and those don't seem to require economic inequality.

For instance, Paul Graham writes in http://paulgraham.com/mit.html :

"For nearly everyone, the opinion of one's peers is the most powerful motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most startup founders, getting rich. [...] Even if you start a startup explicitly to get rich, the money you might get seems pretty theoretical most of the time. What drives you day to day is not wanting to look bad."

If you want to imagine startups not causing economic inequality, one approach is a radical restructuring of society, probably involving heavy taxes, as I suggested in a comment previously. But another simple one is to have more people do startups, and to explicitly invest primarily in people and communities that don't have other easy routes of getting rich.
You still misunderstood the point of the essay, even when simplified.

> denied the opportunity of such success because of their race, gender, social networks, or economic class ... which deny them access to the important resources such as education, financing, contacts, or jobs.

This is not "economic inequality", reducing "economic inequality" might reduce this or it might not. Its a proximate cause, whereas we should be focusing on ultimate causes. You even list them here: access to education, access to financing, contacts, jobs.

Focus on "economic inequality" is less likely to fix these problems than focus on fixing these problems is (likely even more detailed versions of them).
Once you saw the inverted caret thing at the bottom of the page instead of actual content, you could have just safely closed the tab, knowing you missed nothing of consequence. I did.
Most of it is pretty obvious. However, what I am still fighting myself on with Python is a project layout/module structure.

In languages with C++-like OOP model (Java, PHP) it's most of the time reasonable to settle on "1 file, 1 class" and to use directory structure the same way you use namespaces. Actually, in some such languages it's enforced.

For PHP it still leaves a problem with where you shoud put/expect to find anything beside classes, but it's fine, more or less. I hope some day we'll decide even more generally what works best, but for now it's decided per project/framework and it's mostly bearable.

For Ruby it's mostly the same as for PHP, even though the language is a bit more flexible. But it's still normal to use class as the main entity, so pretty much the same guidelines/problems apply.

For Python… I cannot decide yet, and what's worse, looking at the code on, say, Github, it doesn't seem like it's less of a problem for many others. Because some of "solutions" are seriously horrible. No project structure whatsoever, tens of classes in the same file. Classes, functions and even app-specific code (like GUI, CLI or HTTP-routing) all in the same file. Multi-thousand LOC files are considered completely normal. Ridiculous amount of code in __init__.py, that completely re-arranges submodule structure or even defines a bunch of new code. Hell, I've seen projects (more than 1) almost entirely written in the __init__.py! Please don't say you think it's normal.

I would say that things remind of "project-structure" in C, but (it's scary to suddenly realize that) it would actually be a compliment for Python, because even though large files are considered normal as well, with modern practices of writing C-code and all that "C-lang OOP" model stuff it's mostly clear where you should put something. With Python I'm never sure. The only way to find something is to use grep.

With things like that in Python, it's even no use to speak of a "project structure" in the more general sense, aside from what's enforced by the frameworks like Django.

So, any suggestions?
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Facebook backup plan would keep it running on Android
Second video has a shot of a feature list that says "Linux SDK."
After 15+ years writing software, I can guarantee you that keeping 2 files in sync (eg the source file linked to the spec file) for more than foo days is not going to happen.
Isn't he saying that the problem is that economic inequality is seen as the
cause, not the effect? I think that's in line with all of the points you brought
up.
React still eventually creates DOM nodes eventually, so I'm not sure what you mean.

How a custom element produces its DOM nodes are entirely up to it, and several approaches fit with a pure functional view of elements: 1) re-render and replace the entire component DOM, 2) Use a VDOM to patch the component DOM, 3) Use incremental-dom to update the component DOM, and yes 4) template systems like Polymer's can be easily used in a pure functional approach.

The key to being "stateless" isn't in abstracting away the DOM, it's in only using the inputs (attributes, properties, and children) to determine the DOM structure, and only allowing the host of an element to modify inputs so that the element behaves more like a function.

It's similar to mutable object that never modifies its own state, only has public state, and whose methods are pure. Method behavior is fully determined by state that the owner controls.
People have written about this before, but basically the US subsidizes medical expenses for the entire world.

That was able to happen because, unlike virtually anywhere else in the world, medical insurance in the US is private.

If the US changes that (which will never happen) I would expect medical costs to go up everywhere else to compensate, either that or research slows down.

One thing that might, might, help is forbidding medical companies from advertising at all, that might save some money. But the law of unintended consequences tells me it would have other effects that might not be so great.
And for one particular exception, I don't think any VR world could (or should) allow for enforcement regarding social norms of internal states—i.e. "thoughtcrime."

I think Tumblr has that one covered anyhow.
Is it impossible to have the good of startups without also increasing economic inequality?

Yes.

This is discussed in detail in the original essay and in The Refragmentation essay here: http://paulgraham.com/re.html
This comment doesn't make any sense without defining "extreme" vs "normal" income equality.

The argument is over economic inequality which I believe most take to mean wealth inequality, not income inequality.

Do you think that technology alone can't produce extreme income inequality? Why?

Of course not. You need people using the technology as well. Extreme inequality results from the simple fact (as exhaustively supported by Piketty) that r > g. Capital, by definition, is technology.
In this context, it stands for MetaLanguage, which is a language family (and was at one point a language itself, I believe). The family includes Ocaml (see the ml there?) and Haskell, among many others.
Income (in)equality doesn't depend on the kind of work the company does. One of the basic trends you can find in Picketty's "Capital ..." is that instead of investing 1/3 of company income into workers ("reasonable" split), the owner/worker salary gap grows more than ever - and that's the extreme inequality. What the company does is irrelevant in a more general overview.
They tell you how many viewers read your post in the post analytics.
See direct primary care (not available everywhere) for a partial solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_primary_care
> It’s very inexpensive, even when specced up. $1400 buys the fastest CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB disk from Apple

I had to laugh a little at this. $900 bought me a 5th gen i7, 16gb RAM, 1TB SSD and 256gb SSD. I do have to suffer through w10 and a lenovo backdoor though.
With single payer, the government suddenly holds a lot of cards even without explicitly making laws. Most drugs have alternatives. Facing the threat of having all drugs that have sufficiently good alternatives disappear off the approved prescription lists makes most pharmaceutical companies quite reasonable to negotiate with even for players like the UK government that "only" represents 60 million people.
Cologne Police Chief Condemns Sex Assaults on New Year's Eve
It's hard for me to understand exactly what it is that you're saying. You're trying to layer too many insights into your sentences, which which makes your comment confusing
While that might be true, keeping an old reference implementation around for 30+ years "just in case" you hit some aberrant behaviour or weird edge-case seems extreme.

It seems to me (and I may be wrong) that it would make more sense to either turn the reference implementation into a spec document (and keep that next to the code) or to dub that code the "canonical reference implementation" instead of referencing some ancient version of Emacs.

By referencing the ancient version of Emacs (and the subsequent change to the new code), the comment comes across as an anachronism. It was (seemingly) left there in case there were compatibility issues while moving to the new code. This seems out of place now because if compatibility issues haven't come up in 30+ years, then I doubt that they will now (or that there is much code relying on edge-case quirks from such ancient versions of Emacs).

At what point does the current implementation (and any quirks that deviate from that ancient version) become the reference implementation? In another 30 years?
>startups are on the whole good

Are they? Seems to me that question is far from settled.
How long did it take you to convert? Did you relinquish vim key-bindings and cross to straight emacs? I still prefer out of habit vim keystrokes, but I'm having to relearn everything else (buffer navigation, searching, definition navigation etc)
Xen, but only because its the primary target of pretty much every current unikernel build/deploy chain.

As that becomes less and less the case we may migrate or expand what we adopt.
The NHS seems to have approved it at ~17% discount (but may be towards a higher risk group because it is only available as a first-line medication if you have a chromosomal anomaly -- I am not sure of the relevance of this but it seems it's not the preferred treatment in other cases):

http://www.ukmi.nhs.uk/applications/ndo/record_view_open.asp...

That lists the per-pill price as about 51 gbp or 75 usd instead of 90 usd.
Look for a HSA that is backed by a money market account. If you are young and healthy then a HSA based plan makes sense as you can put money away until you needed it. Better than paying premiums you never use. If you start paying it at 20 then you are looking at decent amount later in life assuming the stock market delivers.

If you have ongoing healthcare costs then the math becomes a wash and usually sticking with a PPO type plan is the way to go.

Looking longer term I can see the HSA becoming the norm and employers will pay into that rather than offering insurance plans. At this point the exchanges should become competitive enough to drive costs down if everything happens through the exchange.
I am curious which specific point downvoters think here is incorrect. I am backing up what I am saying with data

Edit: to those downvoting, here is some more data

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/one-percent-income-i...

does it look like income growth of the 1% has much to do with startups from this data ?
I could see someone being ok with 100% overhead, but not with 400%. Last I checked (which was years ago) hitting 50% native speed in a JIT managed language was an admirable feat and not guaranteed.
In PHP you create classes for everything because there is no other encapsulating scope. In that circumstance, with the class loader hook the language gives you, one class per file is a clear win.

In Python, with module-level scope, it makes sense to group like-functionality in the same module (aka file). Maybe it only seems "wrong" to you because it's different than other languages you're more familiar with?
Market forces and legislation. Simple caps would defeat all attempts to do that. Realistically, the design of a system dictates how it will behave in many scenarios. Our system's properties lead to accumulation and concentration of extreme wealth. Even Citigroup's leaked docs describe it as a "plutonomy:" a system designed to shift most wealth to already rich. I like how they mentioned that voters were the greatest threat with the defense being to promote the illusion that everyone can get ahead.

Combine stuff like that with executives making 300x the average (not worst) employee to see system is clearly rigged against the many for a very few. Not even top 1%: a fraction of a percent.
Probably not for most use cases, but definitely if you have a dynamic host-based addressing scheme. In fact, my company uses a wildcard for an S3 compatible object storage service we've built in house.

A wildcard cert for example.com covers any <bucketname>.example.com our users create. Going round trip on requesting and issuing certs for each bucket would add significant delays.
Scroll data is also great for gauging how much time the user is actually reading vs just has a webpage open. I imagine they could feed that data into recommendation algorithms with the aim of increasing average time on site.
Are we really downvoting xkcd? I don't see anything wrong with a little bit of humour on HN.
Plus, when they were new, the 13" MBP (at least from 2010+) had 10 hours of battery life. Pretty good, even by today's standards.
Glimpse into the Future
You are obviously biased. Im sure those tech gods affect politics as much as the Kochs -- but it is the kind of political choices that you are ok with. Therefore, they are the good guys and the Kochs are the bad guys. Not so sure things are that simple. E.g. Bill Gates and patents.

Haha, I cannot believe I defended the Kochs.
I would be quite interested to see your data. A quick google search indicated to me that the vast majority of insurers pay out less than the ACA-required 80-85% of premiums and therefore were required to pay a rebate to their customers under the new law. Certainly 80% < "over 100%". They call this the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR), which I find to be an amusing term. It is interesting to note that it is considered bad for the MLR to be too high, because this indicates poor control over expenses.

It would also be interesting to see your data on government payout ratios as well. Government employment is at the same time notoriously stingy but also forgiving. It's well known that civil servants are difficult to fire even when they aren't performing their duties. I could believe that the remora effect of underperforming laggards could push overhead costs up somewhat but the statistics you suggest seem quite excessive.

I can't vouch for this website's data or slant [1], which suggests that Medicare's administrative costs are around 3% of premiums, while private insurance administrative costs approach 17%. Medicare is reported to be a good example of a system with excessive MLR which apparently leads to high rates of fraud. Sort of like not giving the IRS enough money to audit people, reducing the impetus to pay legally-owed taxes. In these cases it is better to marginally increase overhead.

[1] http://www.ahipcoverage.com/2014/01/03/myth-vs-fact-administ...
I would argue in some cases they don't. Take for example the artist who works for years, decades even, on their art without expectation of large monetary gain.

In a broad sense some people don't respond at all to incentives (assuming monetary) and others do respond but its not a recipe for personal happiness.

Personally, that's why I'm such a fan of some sort of basic income. While it reduces inequality it keeps the monetary incentive response as a choice, which ultimately equals more personal freedom.
I want an ARM MacBook as that implies OS X on ARM which means an iPad Pro should be able to dual boot
> This would be politically disastrous -- "we know the plans are expensive, but it will be even more expensive to not get one!" isn't a great selling point.

IANAL but it's my understanding that the individual mandate only passed Constitutional muster because it was not punitive. If it were a penalty or crime instead of a tax, the legal interpretation might change. Then again, the Supreme Court had been all over the place lately.
Income inequality, unemployment etc. are necessities for that dynastic wealth as well.

If you're not going to make money by working and creating wealth, you have to make it as a rentier, expropriating wealth created during surplus labor time of those who do work.

It causes a struggle for where the money goes - the worker who created the wealth by their labor, or to the heir in the profit of that expropriated labor time.

Poverty and unemployment are backbones of pushing that wealth towards the heir and away from the worker creating the wealth. That's why his note on ending poverty etc. is so phony. Heirs aren't trying to lower unemployment or end poverty, they work hard to create it.

It's not a secret. It's said openly in Businessweek - http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_44/b3653163.htm . The problem as they see it is when unemployment gets too low. It puts a crimp on their parasitism on those of us who work and create wealth.
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Don't you contribute your own money to the HSA? I know there are some tax advantages, but it seems a little disingenuous to call that $0.