skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding the AI scripting, do you have good resources that provide a gentle introduction to get started with tweaking it? Also, are there any popular modifications that people make to the AI?
There is IRS accounting and GAAP accounting. You try to reduce profit for the former and maximize for the former.

Off shoring subsidiary profit shaving is a fairly common practice for IRS accounting. But all the profit stays on the corporate parents books in one way or another (they own the subsidiary). The point isn't to make the executives rich, but to make the shareholders richer by avoiding taxes.

Paying people in undervalued stock is common, but "off the books" sounds illegal. I don't know what that means.

Also most companies would never sell shares of it's subsidiaries. They like having total control of the subsidiary.

Big 4 firms wouldn't fuck over shareholders to get executives rich. Executives are small fish compared to the sorts of institutional investors who own F50 companies.

It's the Big 4 instead of the Big 5 because Arther Anderson got caught cooking Enron's books. It destroyed the firm. They aren't going to risk their entire business for some Walmart execs worth a couple million dollars.

F50 executives aren't the people who actually own the world. They are people who work for the people who own the world. If the executives are stealing, it's not something that is accepted. If found they'd be totally fucked.
Depends on the software but its easy to overlook. I'm just a solo dev, so every hour I spend on customer support is an hour I'm not doing product development, marketing or generally something that is a leveraged use of my time. For customers who pay less, that time is even less leveraged.

Also, for customers who don't have a strong command of english there's translation work, misunderstandings in customer service communications that are more likely to happen, pressure to provide documentation in multiple languages...all very time consuming and thus disproportionately more costly if you are doing that work with less margin flowing back.
Thanks for sharing! I actually thought this was going to point to 0ad [1]...which because it deals with ancient warfare, I had just assumed it was sparked by AOE2 community. Good to know of openage.

Out of curiosity...how much do you still play AOE2? I guess that would implicitly indicate how far along openage is...but I was also interested just how much someone has to love a game to rebuild it from scratch :)

[1]https://github.com/0ad/0ad
>But it misses the underlying point of wealth creation: if more people create more wealth, then naturally, there should be less poverty.

There is tremendously less poverty in the world now than 50 or 100 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/05.... There's only more poverty if it's defined in a purely relative sense, but the relative definition of poverty is only relevant to ideological arguments and pandering to peoples' envy, not to describing peoples' actual material quality of living.
Agree. Especially in a language like Javascript. For testing -

var myLib;
if(process.env.NODE_ENV === "test") {
myLib = require("../test/my_test_lib")
} else {
myLib = require("./my_lib")
}

or similar (you can obviously tighten this code up, too; I'm just being very explicit). Tada, you're injecting your test stubs in place of the real library when running in test.

For the actual production use that a DI framework gives you, you can do similar, or manually set things up, or create a layer of indirection yourself, that only applies where you need it (say an IIFE that has the logic to determine which implementation to pull in, and return that function/module as appropriate).

But this is, as you say, largely tangential.
> but high magnesium levels apparently can lead to arrhythmias

Not true. It is low levels of magnesium that can cause heart disease. See: http://content.onlinejacc.org/article.aspx?articleid=1121693
Oh yes, the villagers beating enemies with huge bones/clubs and the famous wololo :-)
> you're just really really attached to the idea that colonialism explains the modern world.

You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything of the sort.

I said that one can't understand Western European socialism (the kind which OP appears to advocate) without understanding this aspect of those countries' history. The implication is that calling such socialism "nice" is ignoring and whitewashing the negative side, both historical and contemporary.

In any case, I know better than to seriously engage in a discussion about this on HN; it's really not the forum for these sorts of conversations.
So, just to be clear here, the refutation to Piketty was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise by a policy professor from George Mason University and another author from the Institute for Energy Research?

Or in other words, it was published in the Libertarian Journal of Libertarianism by a libertarian academic and a libertarian think-tanker at a libertarian think-tank, funded by the Koch Brothers[1]?

This really doesn't pass the smell test.

[1] -- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Energy_Re...
How does the new AI differ from the original one? I don't see it in the change log.
It seems like a big loophole to get out of existential legal or debt liability.
Besides, one can pour money into the business and grow the crap out of it, largely avoiding the tax.

It's a question of liquidity.
Let's unpack that just a little bit more.

Posit a "desert island" scenario in which an adult is marooned with a small child. Assume that rescue is impossible (or at least wildly unlikely). No legal repercussions to worry about.

The child has collected some fruit, clams, or whatnot.

The adult is hungry.

In this situation, a Hobbes person would simply take the food from the child.

While there certainly are some real people who would do that, most of us would not. They would prefer to collect their own fruit and clams rather than take them from the child by force.

Even if there weren't enough food to go around, many would give the food to the child and choose to go without themselves.

As with many political theories, the Hobbes model says rather more about its originator than it does about people in general.
I've agreed with your general direction in this thread, but here you've tied yourself in a knot. If the un-"real loans" you cite weren't available, far fewer people would be willing to attend college, prices would fall, and far less would be loaned and spent on education. In other words, without the distortions introduced by lobbyists and politicians, all this wonderful education debt wouldn't exist. So we have indeed identified a case in which lenders "through the application of their profits can alter those systems so that more debt is required to survive."
> Does anyone really believe that if only the rules weren't "rigged" local shops and businesses would be able to compete against Wal-Mart and Amazon?

We're talking about corruption and you're listing companies best known for getting where they are through aggressive free market competition. Can't we come up with some better examples than that?

AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, AIG, Monsanto, Elsevier, Microsoft, Sony, Pfizer, Halliburton, Exxon, Lockheed Martin.

And it isn't that some startup would otherwise show up and dethrone Exxon as the largest oil company in America, it's that Exxon lobbies to make sure it gets a fat stack of cash from Uncle Sam for oil exploration while fighting against tax credits for electric cars. It's that Elsevier lobbies to have taxpayer-funded research behind a paywall.

These things put money in the pockets of the companies doing the lobbying at the expense of all the rest of us.
The quote was from Frederick Douglass, a black man living during the Civil War.

Impossible to know for certain, but I suspect he wouldn't be terribly pleased with a comparison of the current "lower class" to real slaves.
Here's the explanation for this phenomenon: the former is an example of man versus nature, whereas the latter is man versus man. We're rational animals, so we can try to use our intellect to overcome the insurmountable physical odds of living in an otherwise uncaring universe. However, when we're pitted against each other, we have no such luck.
What rules prevent you from replacing humans with machine labor?
Well of course people aren't equally talented. I don't see what that has to do with the economy, though. A market is a stochastic nonconvex optimization machine, not a tree of skill increases and level-ups in some MMORPG: it's not supposed to provide a neatly metagamed return-on-investment curve for your skills, it's supposed to match willing buyers of commodities with willing sellers.
> a monopsonist facing a price floor doesn’t necessarily buy less, just as a monopolist facing a price ceiling doesn’t necessarily sell less and may sell more.

The theory is that the buyers of labor in these cases will simply buy alternatives - specifically low-labor alternatives, like automation. Think of automated checkout stands at retail stores, but applied to fast food.

Time was, fuel filling stations all had attendants. Drivers didn't get out of their cars when they purchased gas. They drove up and were greeted by an attendant who operated the pump and took payment. We don't do that anymore - now that attendant job doesn't exist. There's nothing stopping that same kind of transition for many other service jobs.
> This newly dominant approach, originally known as "neural networks," is now branded "deep learning,"

Is this true? My impression is that "deep learning" is a series of mathematical tricks and design and implementation concepts that get you to solve neural networks of depth greater than 3-4, which becomes mathematically challenging.
I'm not playing it much, i'm actually pretty bad at it, but it's totally fun. We mainly play aoc in wine, which works very well on local LANs but is crappy via internet, same without wine, which was the initial spark.

Nobody had suceeded in creating a clone with potential at 2013, so we took chances and are still trying to do it the "right" way.

I think the last year I played about 40h of aoc, so actually not that much, and haven't played aoe:hd yet.
Instagram has broken their API for external galleries
I think it's fairly well established that money supply increase has led to asset price inflation (but not consumer price inflation like you said), but that has also meant bond yields have stayed low, letting companies and countries borrow cheaply to fund their various projects. So I don't think 'dead weight' is the correct description.

Of course, it may have had other, less pleasant, effects.
Now you're not talking about wealth, but rather some other measure that is apparently more interesting to you. If you're going to count future earning, you ought at least count future spending as well, which quantity may completely swamp the other. After all wealth includes past spending as well as past earning.
For the record, I didn't say you said that directly, which "putting words in my mouth" would imply.

It's my interpretation of your viewpoint.
If this affects more than a few otherwise nice, pleasant people, perhaps the dating and marriage prospects are not so dismal.
Please show me a quote where PG makes this argument.

I doubt Steve Jobs would have created more wealth if he were allowed to pay 10% lower taxes. Do you?
This looks interesting!

Currently, we have a huge background processing system built using Sidekiq backed by Redis. The biggest problem we are facing today is to run machines with lot of in-memory storage because jobs are queued to Redis and Redis works in-memory. These machines costs a lot.

I think the same issue will happen even here because this is also in-memory store and persistence works like how Redis handles it.
I would give the same kind of advice that financial advisors give for getting out of credit card debt: "find the card with the highest interest rate, make minimum payments on all other cards, and pay as much as possible on the highest interest rate debt until it is paid off... then recurse"

To make the analogy work the backlog needs to get rated on how much each open issue costs the company. Most organizations use some stratified measure of "severity". Few actually try to put a price on a problem, but I think it's worth the effort to try.
> Does anyone really believe that if only the rules weren't "rigged" local shops and businesses would be able to compete against Wal-Mart and Amazon?

There's at least one.

Mom and pop can easily compete with Wal-Mart and Amazon if there was a level playing field. You just don't understand how twisted the playing field is because you have zero experience with retail and logistics.

The big boys get tax subsidies when they move in, they get concessions from local governments, they get favorable treatment at the border with customs, etc. and that's just on the surface. They get huge discounts from UPS for infrastructure build-outs, but then UPS again gets subsidized through the roof in the same ways Amazon is directly. So on and so forth.

Mom and pop can get the same prices out of China, it has nothing to do with scale. After you're ordering a container worth of stuff, you're not going to reduce the price of whatever you're selling by buying more. That's why Amazon doesn't manufacture much and relies on the Mom and Pop to do that sort of thing, while still kicking Wal-Mart's ass.

As far as Mom and Pop vs Amazon ... Amazon wouldn't allow them to sell on their platform if they weren't a threat. But they do and they are. There's a reason eBay is a multi-billion dollar company and has been for a while.
The Netgate RCC-DFF 2220 is available[1] right now, and performs very well as a BSD router. It's not ARM, but it is an embedded system/SBC. I use it with pfSense, but it will run vanilla FreeBSD as well of course.

[1] http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-DFF-2220.aspx
> But why is it bad that a commercial party wants to respect local laws?

How far are you willing to follow this line of argument, should a company help with enforcement Sharia Law, or the North Korean weapons program also? (They conform to local laws!)))

Or are you only willing to follow this line of argument when it is deemed sufficiently profitable over the possible cost of PR backlash for a corporation (which is how I suspect they do their calculations).
Ask HN: Why is there no FOSS alternative for MiddleClick?
MiddleClick was a program enabling middle clicks for touchpads on OS X. The program seems to have been abandoned and no FOSS alternative has taken its place.

Currently the program has, what I consider, a serious unresolved bug that nobody has even commented on:

https://github.com/cl3m/MiddleClick/issues/18

Why is this? Is nobody in need for this feature? Why hasn't anybody at all tried to at least fork the project or in any way contribute to it?

https://github.com/cl3m/MiddleClick
Going from single player to multiplayer is like going from the pond into the ocean. The real action happens in the ocean, but it is not for the timid. I look at single player as just a tutorial for multiplayer.
Yes, similar.

There is a lot of work around this going on at the moment. Google's neural Turing machine is a similar idea.
Thank you for this argument! The "invert the sign" thing feels like it must be wrong somehow (even to someone who likes the argument for a basic income) but it does actually seem correct.
Top Mistakes I Made in My Life
I'm more likely to complain about the comically huge fonts on sites like Medium or various "modern web designer" blogs. When I browse on my old 1024x768 laptop, often there is literally less content on the screen than what used to fit on my old CGA monitor (80x25 characters). And about half the time they deliberately slow down the scrollbar to make it even harder to read. If I'm lucky, zooming out won't trigger an increase in font size, and then I can actually read the text for 30 seconds until "sign up for my newsletter" pops up and I leave.
Remember that Hobbes was writing at a time when philosophers liked to consider a "state of nature" -- the behavior of people before organized society, government, etc., come into being.

Many of these philosophers, including John Locke (who Jefferson cribbed heavily from when writing the US Declaration of Independence), wrote as if the morals of Enlightenment-era westerners would magically naturally exist in people living in such a "state of nature", and simply took them for granted.

Hobbes pointed out that this was balderdash. Our entire conception of propriety, of right and wrong, of what is or isn't acceptable, comes not from some natural moral law engraved into our hearts or deduced in an ideal pre-society state of pure reason, but rather is inculcated into us by the culture in which we live. So Hobbes dismissed the idea that people would be respectful and helpful in the "state of nature" and pointed out that, since that stuff only comes into being later with organized society, none of it would exist at that point. Hence the war of all against all.

Which is where your desert-island analogy, and most other attempts to tear down Hobbes' state of nature, fall apart: your stranded people come in with experience of an organized culture which taught a particular set of morals and norms. One of those norms is that the adult should go hungry to let the child eat, but there is no guarantee that some natural moral law written in the adult's heart would have produced the same outcome absent years of indoctrination in a particular culture's moral system (and in fact, in actual nature we can find examples of animal species where adults will kill and even eat young of their own species).
>The thing that bothers me most: All of those fancy technologies that PG emphasizes, those that some commentors here are happy to trade 45 years of real wage growth for, had their direct roots in that brief period of weird equality. What happens next? What happens after AirBnB puts all the hotels out of business and we're all staying in each other's spare bedrooms on trips? What happens after Uber has killed off all the taxi companies in the world and replaced them with spare-time drivers? Do things still keep getting better and better? Sure, my nifty new Galaxy Note is better than my old land-line, but exactly how much better is an iPhone6 compared to a 5?

The Google founders attempt to throw us out of cyberpunk capitalism by setting off a technological singularity.

I'm not joking. Look at their hobbies: artificial intelligence, life extension, robotics. It's really obvious: they are trying to play at being Vernor Vinge characters.

Which actually carries an important point: a lot of the people who do the real work of pushing the high-tech business forward don't particularly care for capitalism itself. They'd just as soon push for far more technological solutionism and alter socioeconomic relations to suit.
Check out Feudal Wars. It's really cool.

http://www.feudalwars.net
It's interesting that you faced this issue and came away with the exactly wrong conclusion. Economics is, at root, a physics problem. There's no way to get around that. Every aspect of the field comes down to asking questions about physical resources and their uses.

People can attempt to ignore the fact that economics is a special application of physics, but they can't escape the consequences of ignoring reality forever. The belief that it's all just conventions and cultural agreements is exactly like believing that the Moon is just a bedtime story.
the pin is useless without the chip. it's only one half of the something you have + something you know.
I'm curious in what ways Monsanto is corrupt. Forgive me if this sounds like an obvious point, but I've seen too much GMOphobic noise around this to know where the signal is.
I don't agree with that framing. I don't just work hard, I work smart, and I come from generations who did the same.

Capability is substantially more genetic than environmental anyway, equivocating and hand-waving everything away as "just luck" is extremely facile.

Some people are oozing with talent and potential, most people are not, that's the reality -- it's science and breeding, not luck.
As he pointed out in the article though, capital is playing less and less of a role in startups. Terms in SV have never been as "entrepreneur friendly" as they are right now.
That's pretty much what corporations are for though. When something goes wrong the corporation folds and that's it (with some fussing around to give debtors and investors whatever money might be left).

I'm assuming the assets sold at a fair price. If that is the case, it doesn't hurt the ability of the company to pay back the liabilities. If it isn't the case, it's headed in the direction of fraud.
Because in my case, before a judge ever looked at my initial filling. I had to put in 10 different motions, to dismiss, to change venue, etc. I didn't HAVE to do that, but it was important if I wanted to win. Then they went ahead and starting gathering evidence, which required half a dozen filing and the time to collect. Plus the whole point of not being able to defend a corporation except by hiring an attorney in that state. Even though the corporation had been shut down for 4 years. But by not defending the corporation, it got a default judgement, which meant that the chance of losing the suit against myself was much greater.
The current website is based on blogger. There are plans to rewrite it in "the future".
For starters, you can see the legit truck carrying flammable payload and steer clear, if you have concerns about your safety. "Bladder trucks" are specifically disguised to prevent you from spotting them.
Music Dance Viet Nam
The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution [pdf]
Remembered this so I decided to test it.

Sure enough loading w/o 1Blocker enabled reader mode.

Very interesting.
It sounds like you're saying job markets are not meritocracies? I'd have to disagree, at least to a large extent.
Because in my case, before a judge ever looked at my initial filling. I had to put in 10 different motions, to dismiss, to change venue, etc. I didn't HAVE to do that, but it was important if I wanted to win. Then they went ahead and starting gathering evidence, which required half a dozen filing and the time to collect. Plus the whole point of not being able to defend a corporation except by hiring an attorney in that state. Even though the corporation had been shut down for 4 years. But by not defending the corporation, it got a default judgement, which meant that the chance of losing the suit against myself was much greater.
In the end, I assigned obsolete patent to the suit filer, they went away and paid my attorney's fee's
I think that his critique of academic economics is spot on. Economists do not have a good way for thinking about where Mark Zuckerberg's money came from. In macro they would call it return on capital because he bought some stock from Facebook on day 0 and held it until it was worth billions. Great return. But that doesn't seem to be a useful way to model it. Economics needs a better way to think about what entrepreneurs do as neither capital nor labor.
Lol. I'm shocked by the number of Gates fans here. He is truly hated amongst the people I work with, him and Jobs. But they/we are probably little older and remember very different times.

But two things to learn at HN if you don't want downvotes: (1) Never speak ill of wealthy people, and (2) Do not even imply driverless cars are anything less than the glorious solution to every problem in the western world... that and bike lanes.
something not touched upon,

1 the huge pension liabilities that have been accumulated by states

2 the excess credit/currency devaluation and excesses risk taking created by central banks.
Try toodledo.com. It is more flexible and customizable than the others. Disclosure: I am the CEO.
you didn't provide a capitalism death count to compare it to