skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forbes 400 represents mostly principals of public business enterprises that are super-successful, and is dominated by stock wealth. It doesn't capture private assets. It's also ephemeral -- for every Bill Gates, there are plenty of multi-billionaires who decend into the depths of multi-millionairehood when their stocks implode.

Beyond that, you're going to have trouble measuring stuff. There are folks in upstate NY still inheriting and generating income from property acquired during the Dutch colonial period. Many, many people are members of LLCs or corporate officers who have the ability to direct money their way and control lots of money that doesn't necessarily "pass" to them and trigger inheritance taxes.

I have some family members who are wealthy enough to think about generational wealth for their descendants. So they structure their life to compartmentalize risk and maximize the ability to transfer wealth at low/no cost. Their homes? Owned by a pseudo-anonymous Nevada LLC. Cars? Owned by another LLC. Investment properties? Owned by individual LLCs, which are in turn owned by some other corporate entity.
Can you list down some of them please ?
The most appropriate solution for SF is to build a vehicle and rail tunnel just under the bottom of the bay that goes from Candlestick to the on-ramp of the GGB.

It sounds crazy, but much easier than digging through the city (and going above ground is a non-starter).

BART did this at reasonable cost (less than $2b in today's dollars) from SF to OAK in just four years with the Transbay tube. So it's very doable and would solve massive traffic issues in SF.
>In the long run this leads to oligarchy and possibly even economic and societal collapse. We are nowhere near there [...]

False. We are there. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
This is a very interesting mixture of two ideas I hadn't really considered before. Has this been discussed or brought up here previously? Is the only real obstacle to this adoption? It seems like an extreme transparency, but the lack of a central authority while maintaining reliability is very compelling.
So where do you go to discover non-Steam games? These days I only browse for new games on Steam, and I know I'm missing out on some great stuff, but I don't know where else to look.
Seems people will always find ways to turn their data into grids :-/

Also, use pandas ;-)
That's against the site rules, which ask people to use the original title unless it is misleading or linkbait. Submitters: note how that does not say "add more linkbait".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Obligatory..."what's new?" Especially now that the site's down.

I mean, is it different from Project Oxford, the Microsoft API that's been around for awhile and is still quite amazing?

https://www.projectoxford.ai/demo/vision#Analysis

I actually tried it out early this morning, to compare it with a stock install of OpenCV 3. It got the faces correct, and the ages very well too.

Here are its guesses for the Star Wars TFA poster: http://imgur.com/XT7RmX6

Of course, perhaps users have trained it...particularly ones sympathetic to Carrie Fisher. Though I'd argue that they would've also corrected Boyega's face.
I started having the exact same problem on my Windows Phone FB app. Took some time to realize it was a bug and not a weird deja vu of mine.
> I've been saying this for years, and this is a large reason why I find the LessWrong folks to be almost entirely full of it. Their inability to come up with accurate priors is completely lost on many of the folks who follow this kind of thinking.

I assume you're saying LessWrong folks are more prone to miscalculating priors than most. Could you give some examples of this?
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I wonder what the full story is. As told it would paint a pretty bad picture of Exim and Chinese construction labor. Presumably its out there to try to discourage people from dealing with Exim (a cautionary tale of the form "This happened to this guy, don't let it happen to you.") but I doubt that tactic will really work unless the story gets a lot more traction.

And this is the part I don't understand (and conversely why I think there is more to the story); If you are in a contract with a 'no fire' clause, then you only get there by adding 'final approval' clause. That is to say you have final approval on the work performed and if it isn't up to your standard the contractor will re-do it at their expense until it is to your standard. Your only method of putting pressure on the contractor is to deny approval, thus increasing costs which cuts into profits. The people who were enriching themselves on those profits won't want to give them up to re-work costs, and will put pressure on the workers and their supervisors to avoid failing approvals.

So if you don't bother to inspect, and you sign off on work that later fails, you are at fault. While it may be considered rude and unprofessional, there are a lot of people who feel that getting away with extra money while following the letter (if not the spirit) of the agreement as a great pastime. Manufacturing and construction is an area where such people can really turn a small short cut into a big payout for themselves. You have to realize that going in, and they won't be mad at you for calling them on it when its allowed and they will be very pleased when you miss out your opportunity (they consider that a 'win'). You will meet these people during your career, treat them appropriately.
A fair question, but any benefit from property value increases is limited to the landowners.
"Looting and rioting is critical component of a public protest, and it's morally justified."

No, it really isn't. Quite aside from the immoral way you have just cheerfully sacrificed strangers' homes and livelihoods in the name of your transient political goals, looting and rioting leads to businesses and productive citizens leaving and a collapse of the local economy. Go to Detroit if you want to see how that works out in the long run.

Incidentally, even if somehow rioting is okay as long as just people of the appropriate skin color are the ones being harmed, perhaps you should keep in mind that the folks who start businesses in low-income areas of American cities tend to be either local black people or immigrants. That's who suffers when buildings get burned down in the name of "justice."
The most valuable forms of inheritance are the attitudes and connections of one's friends and family. The only way to stop that would be forced isolation/extreme desegregation.

That almost sounds like a plot for a Hollywood reboot of Ayn Rand -- "In a world where rich kids are forcibly distributed and forbidden from having rich friends, three teenagers find each other and, surviving their bizarre love triangle, start a mountain colony where rich kids can get together and par-tay."
It's harder because the violation is coming from the user. Padmapper was hitting their site with their equipment.

Also, it's less of an issue because CL still gets the visits -- the problem with people taking your data is they siphon off your users. CL needs to cut off anyone who is rehosting data in any way before it becomes a problem.
If you can't fire them, how can you possibly hold them accountable?

From the article:
>“Baha Mar Ltd.’s decision to file for bankruptcy is the direct result of its failure to secure adequate financing and its mismanagement,” the Chinese company told the court.

Which is ironic, because it essentially translates to "By agreeing to use a construction company that couldn't be fired, what did you expect? That's just plain mismanagement right there!"
Really interesting. I wonder how politicians would rate.
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How about your native population? And your police force is still shooting former slaves on a daily basis.
The current article title is fair enough i guess: "Who Controls Your Facebook Feed"

(i guess they changed it themselves, as the URL shows this old title)
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Ah great! Thanks.
Humans have incredible propensity to acclimatize to the environment. That's the only reasoning I could arrive at when I was poor and saw people around willing to do the most mundane back breaking work than to seek other forms of employment.

The lever that is used in society today is desperation as opposed to higher pay per hr in the "Looking Backward" case. The sanitation worker doesn't enjoy their work and no amount of lower hours may compel them to be scarred by the experience. On the other hand desperation and hunger forces them to take what ever job they could salvage. Most of them would would get used to it while some would work their way out.
I find I have to think about them too long, and I think the rendering details contribute to that. There is nothing wrong with double y-axis graphs if you don't just slap them together because the x-axis has the same range. I think the lack of concern for the rendering details make these harder to immediately read than they should be.

Why are the axis labels not colored the same way the lines are, or the entries in the key not positionally associated with their axis (rather than being in the center). The triangles and circles on the lines on "Steam Sales" offer no utility (except, perhaps, for color-blindness or if it was printed in black-and-white, but then dotted-vs-solid would be a better choice). There are horizontal tic marks, but they are separating the dates, not centered on the datapoint, meaning the data is being presented as a column, which a line graph is not best for (that is, the choice of graph given this data may not be the best one).

And that's just the problem with one graph. There are two graphs on this page, and both have different rendering details. Consistency is important because it means understanding the rendering of one graph translates to the understanding of the other. Why doesn't the second graph have shapes over the data points? Why doesn't the second graph have tic marks along the x-axis? Color is used inconsistently: the unit for the blue line is units sold in the first one and dollars in the second one, and the side the graph the blue line is associated with switches. Despite that the axes that are denominated in dollars are showing different things (totals vs discrete values), there is value in having them both on the same side of the graph (and in the same color)—that the blue one switches sides means the viewer needs to concentrate harder on the key and layout leaving less time for interpreting the data. It would actually be better if four colors between the two graphs were used since there are four different domains of data being shown. They both show the same time range, but the dates are not formatted similarly along the x-axis.

In both cases, the units on the labels are too exact. "60.00%": why is this 4 significant digits, a whole number percentage would do. At this size, the decimal point and percent sign almost get lost with the unneeded zeros. "Steam Sales" has units that are so big with so many zeros you have to think about the order of magnitude; these should be truncated to "$300M" and "65M".
Isn't this exactly what the Zucks are doing with they wealth?
Here's a tip: bookmark https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr and you will always see the most recent feed. I've been using this for months now and it hasn't unset the most recent setting yet.
I think they should have a weekly character limit and let users use those characters as they want. That way you get a limit to prevent just reams and reams of characters in tweets, but allow flexibility with how you tweet.
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PG:"We will not do a good job of fixing the bad causes of economic inequality unless we attack them directly.

But if we fix all the bad causes of economic inequality, we will still have increasing levels of it, due to the increasing power of technology"

I still don't get what PG is trying to say.

For example few years ago Google and Apple bosses made secret agreement to not hire employees of the competing company. The goal was to transfer wealth from engineers to shareholders and bosses. There are a lot of other examples. That's why the essay had so much negative comments. PG should clearly condemn these practices.

PG:"we will still have increasing levels of it, due to the increasing power of technology"

That is just narrow VC point of view. Think about what cheap printing technology did for our civilization. There are countless of other examples. Today UK monarchy can only dream about the power they had.

I had a dream that the technology (Internet, DVCS ...) will make legislation process more transparent. Tax loophole? Just file a bug, propose a fix, vote for the fix. Think about what Stack Overflow and Github did for software development. Something similar can be done for the law.
Thanks for the hint! I'll look into that!
how do you define tautology?
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There are natural monopolies and there are government granted monopolies and personally I believe the later are doing more harm than the former. Historically technology has made natural monopolies obsolete, but technology cannot bypass the law. Because when that happens, new trade agreements can be made and the law can simply be changed.

If getting rid of monopolies is the goal, we could get rid of patents and copyrights, government granted monopolies which are about creating artificial scarcity.
Well... some back-of-the-envelope math. Assuming average characters-per-word of 4.5[1] and also add 1 for space/punctuation for a word unit of 5.5:

10000/5.5 = 1818 words.

1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes.

A 10,000 char (7 minute article) expansion looks to me like a "micro-blogging" platform rather than "tweeting". I'm guessing it all goes back to Twitter trying many things to become bigger than traditional Twitter. Hence the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513237

(It goes without saying that not every "mega" tweet will use all 10,000 chars.)

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=average+characters+per+word
People have absolutely no idea what trade off they're making I these cases. They just think they're getting a discount.
Sorry we got that wrong. 2011 was the earliest copy the Internet Archive had. I've put 2003 up for now, but that's probably too late as well.
It's not as astonishing as you describe it. It's basic intuition that the relative growth of something will be greater in real terms the lower your starting point is. Robinson Crusoe finding a second stick to pluck berries with has doubled his capital structure and his output, but that's not particularly impressive. Starting from nothing, you can afford to just pump resources and treat the economy like it's a hydraulic system. It's what you do once you're up to parity that matters.

By all means, planning was inefficient. You had chronic surpluses and shortages. The attempt to replace profits and losses with "socialist competition" resulted in a disincentive to create surpluses, because it would quickly be integrated as a benchmark in the next Five Year Plan. This then resulted in the phenomenon of shturmovshchina where laborers would mostly idle and then expend massive crunches of labor during the final quarters.

The first seven years of Soviet rule were marked by massive hyperinflation. Wages were determined on a purely piece-rate basis, leading to workers toiling and factory managers manipulating quotas for greater wage returns. Attempted reforms under Khrushchev based on bonuses then only encouraged more homogeneity of production and made wage rates more volatile.

The reason Soviet planners could even calculate in a system of purely vertical transfers of resources was because of the establishment of the Comecon in 1949, piggybacking on Western price indexes. Kosygin introduced a reform in 1965 allowing some measure of profitability and sales, resulting in some growth but no movement in aggregate productivity because of the underlying Five Year Plan incentives. More radical reforms involving decentralization and minimization of bureaucracy in 1973 and 1979 were both rejected.

The Brezhnev era was marked by a large stagnation. Couple that with oil shocks affecting the key USSR exports, perestroika opening up the flood gates and the failed coup in 1991, the USSR was doomed to its failure.

It had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan or anyone "ending communism". It ended itself.

The Soviet system was a disaster and I can't imagine how anyone could say otherwise.
You can donate to a "charity" that employs your friends and family, not society at large.

I can create a Betterness Foundation, and donate all my income to it, and you can do, and the Foundation can spend its resources bettering the neighborhood where you and I happen to live, but no one else lives there. This is a scam loophole to avoid Federal taxes that are intended to benefit society at large.
>Failure to distribute the data and code not only greatly devalues the contributions of many scientists, it makes replication far more difficult, and opens the door for outright fabrication.

Reasons why labs don't produce code:

(1) Fear of being scooped; suppose you put in tons of man-hours into a custom population genetics association study for malaria in Africa, you don't want your competitor lab to sequence a bunch samples in SE Asia and run your code as-is and publish a paper when you have the sequencers to do the same.

(2) Fear of competitors not being able to replicate stochastic ML results; some machine-learning and artificial neural network papers applied to Biology are stochastic. Past authors have been accused of "cherry-picking" the most "optimistic" runs that show positive results, e.g., (https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/the-network-non...)

(3) Focus on science, not tool production; most labs' focus is to produce publications, not open-source software. User base for scientific software is very niche, unlike Web MVC frameworks; making the payoff calculus of packaging and supporting external users not so great. Furthermore, most labs have custom databases making integrating external software, externalizing internal software difficult.
dank m8
The great life of Ian Murdock and police brutality in context
I too prefer the 4-3 split as it gives me enough contiguous time to concentrate on work and my hobbies.
I like this idea, or let users filter by what they want to see. 200 character, 500 character, 5000 character.

It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
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This is not a one sided discussion.

Both have pros and cons. One con with having names on a paper is that it can give it attention purely because of the authors name at the expense of something else.

However I agree that scientist wouldn't do it (which kind of supports the idea of nameless papers IMO)
1) Maybe. I remember an associate professor years ago who applied for a job teaching English in Aspen, Colorado. It would have meant a considerably larger paycheck than he got at the university. It would also have definitely taken him out of the academic world he aspired to. However, the size of the school system must have been vastly smaller than San Francisco's.

2. Yes, but good teachers? My impression from childhood, matched by what I could see of my son's experience, was that one can expect to have a good teacher every other year in the primary grades, and that the mix of good and bad doesn't change that much in middle and secondary schools when one has different teachers for different subjects.

3) 45% seems pretty steep to me.
"But if we fix all the bad causes of economic inequality, we will still have increasing levels of it, due to the increasing power of technology."

This is the sentiment of the man who is certain he will be at the top of the heap when the dust settles.
Meadian doesn't make sense when talking about inequality.

3 people having $1, $2 and $3 have the same "median inequality" as 3 people having $1, $2 and $300000000000.

You need either mean, range or quantiles.
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Why would Twitter implement a feature that makes you use the the service less after you've hit a quota?
I personally hate traffic enough that if I had to chose between a commute in bumper-to-bumper congestion in the late 90s across an entire city or paying a $5 daily toll to avoid it, there is no question I'd go with the later, and I imagine a lot of people would agree.
This doesn't make sense to me. At the end of the day, all stock must be owned by actual people, even if it is through a network of other corporate entities and trusts.

A corporation may transcend the death of its owners, but if I own 50% of a corporation, and I gift my shares to an heir (or even let them purchase it at a discount), the government will still take their cut.
i want to invest.
I agree with pretty much everything you say here, but then I think the article conflates Yudkowsky's Bayes-flavored woo with what most people mean when they talk about Bayesian statistics.
the 160 character limit on twitter helped me learn to speak more concisely.

I've had an account since 2009, but didn't start using it until 2014. It was work at first - I didn't "get" it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts.

People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs, not so much.
I read it as the following:

- I don't need firearms.

- I need encryption, as it is the equivalent of a weapon in the information age.

- I have a right to bear arms

- The Feds consider encryption to be a munition.

If these assumptions are true, I think you can make an argument that wielding strong encryption is conceptually equivalent to having a rifle.
Oxford is cool indeed.
But imposing those extra costs to being verbose encourages people to be concise, unless they REALLY need the extra words.

Make the words cheap, and twitter will turn into just another prolix platform in a sea of noise.
So they can charge premium users for more characters.
Except that many cities have no interest in building the necessary highways to make more driving practical. Washington, DC, where I live, is unlikely to ever have any more inbound highways constructed, and the ones we have are already congested. Any new transportation capacity into the city will almost definitely be mass-transit. There's simply no political will within the city to do the kind of awful urban-renewal-style tearing up of neighborhoods that'd be necessary for it, and frankly we don't really care if suburbanites want to more easily drive in in their self-driving cars.
You get me thinking about side projects... http://getstream.io provides Twitter-like feeds as a service. For personal use wonder if it's possible to build a better newsfeed that Facebooks on top of the same content?