skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've built a small Ansible role to generate a certificate and configure it for automatic monthly renewal.

It isn't really set up to handle all possible scenarios, so I only made it available as a gist as opposed to a full role available in the Ansible Galaxy. For example, it expects an Apache virtual host to be configured already instead of allowing Let's Encrypt handle it - I do this in another role specifically set up to handle Apache.

https://gist.github.com/JamesChevalier/a5d78be0febfe505a7e5
That's cool, but I am waiting for one practical application: dusting Roomba.
He is defending what he is doing and what Y-combinator has been doing. One of the most important roles of a leader is to create vision -- build a story that explains and interprets reality based on it.

In general, startup world lives on hopes and ideals. More so than other industries. Founders have to have a "burning desire to change the world". It could be building a better future, moving the technology forward, making people happier, more productive, healthier, etc. Early employees are sold on hopes of changing those 10000 options into billions of dollars during the exit or the IPO in exchange of a decent salary etc. There is talk of getting paid less but "you are compressing you career of 30 years into 5", so working nights makes sense. Investors hope the company will grow a horn and hooves and become a unicorn. Etc, etc.

So it is important to have a story that interprets how startups are related to inequality. Whether we agree or not with that is a different story.
I'm not advocating either of these policies in the slightest. I'm pointing out their increasing popularity in light of a heterodox renaissance post-2008.
It set off the flamewar detector. Looks like an edge case in the algorithm.

Btw you should email hn@ycombinator.com instead of asking us questions here. It's pretty random whether or not we see the latter.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rMhvYeQPOcE/maxresdefault.jpg

People with more money pay taxes at a lower rate than people without. It's very easy to pick obvious cutoffs where people are wealthy to the point of absurdity compared to their "peers".
This correlation of equality breaks down in regards to the justice system however, where the poor are systematically curb-stomped and viewed as revenue generators for local governments while the rich can literally destroy the world economy through fraudulent mechanisms and walk away scot free.
I think this is one of the most interesting essays he's written in a while, and it echoes many of my own thoughts better than I could express them.

PG seems to argue that the fragmentation of society is a question of efficiency. A natural effect of this is that the world will become more cut-throat. Efficient systems turn hyper-competitive, as seen in university admissions, startups, financial markets. It seems to me that too much "liquidity" mostly causes burnout, depression, dumb risk-taking, and a few really successful winners. Tech is really guilty of this phenomenon by tending to produce one winner for every thousand losers.

In many ways the 20th century was an anomaly -- the wars were more violent, the rate of growth was faster, the cultural shifts were huge and multifaceted -- but we still use tend to see it as a normal state of things. A hundred years into the future we'll be looking at an entirely different world and consider it normal.
This seems very much like a variant of oil booms ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_%28containment%29 ) which have been field tested for years in oil spills to pretty good effect. Something like this, which is mostly passive, if it collects 90% of the plastic will still cut out a significant amount of pollution from the ocean. We can worry about the other 10% with another pass, or further developments.
I don't see why low social mobility would necessarily be a consequence of high income inequality.
Adding gadgetry to meditation is kind of self defeating if you ask me. Typical modern approach to basically everything: add batteries and its automatically better!
You could add Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage" and a few others I think (Huey Long and "Every Man a King" for instance).

In the case of both Kennedy and Obama the book was used in combination with great oratory skill to introduce the candidate to the people: You hear an amazing speech by the candidate and want to learn more. You find they have written a book and decide to read it. The book gives you a feeling of intimacy with the candidate which turns you into a supporter.
You and I can't possibly have the same definition of DMA. It is essential to low latency data communication both in the embedded and server domain.
This assumes an obligation on Wal-Mart's part to pay people according to their need. In a market economy, people are paid according to their ability.
Thank You. Paul Graham says:

'Louis Brandeis said "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." That sounds plausible. But if I have to choose between ignoring him and ignoring a polynomial curve that has been operating for thousands of years, I'll bet on the curve.'

You mention a very important argument which Mr. Graham seems to have missed, or simply written off: Democracy can be destroyed by wealth inequalities which then create power inequalities. At this point the "polynomial curve" which was made possible by democracy begins to turn down or flatten as we return to corruption, graft, and cronyism.

In other words: We have to baby-sit the growth of this enormously beneficial polynomial curve, for if it gets out of control it will destroy itself (by destroying democracy).
They did break up. Also, many wealthy Britons moved to Barbados to avoid the taxes.
Pikaday – lightweight JavaScript Calendar
The weirdest thing is he seems to have written this alongside another article which points out that for various reasons post-war America didn't have the same economic incentives for startups, yet Big Industry and seemed to do just fine with innovation and popularisation of relatively novel technology. You didn't get 140 characters, but you did get jet airliners. For all it's inefficiencies according to neoclassical economic theory and lack of startup culture, it's usually classed as a golden age.

Economic analysts obsessing over equality aren't assuming the pie stays the same size; they're asking if that growing inequality might actually be a factor behind the pie growing at a slower rater than used to, despite all the claims that structural and technological progress has made it easier and more financially rewarding to grow the pie than ever before. And whether, if certain measures suggest median incomes aren't growing in real terms, startups (and other, more common routes to large growth in personal incomes) actually are bringing that much good.

That's a complex and difficult claim to assess even when you don't have a deep appreciation of the work ethic and skills and close personal interest in the outcomes of an unrepresentative subset of people who might be playing something closer to a zero-sum game than you realise. Sometimes looking at macro-level data can yield more useful information.
> His startup essays tended to be bit artificial, as if he had to force himself to write them.

He was basically doing content marketing for YCombinator, which is understandable and probably served him/them well. But this is probably the sort of thing he's actually more interested in writing.
Datasets Over Algorithms
> The actual sale of the chair to someone else is a NOOP, it’s just shuffling assets around.

Nope, because the chair in the woodworker's posession is worth less to him than dollars, and the dollars in the customer's posession are worth less to him than the chair. The actual sale leaves everyone better off.

The woodcutter, the truck drivers who transported the wood, the factor who bundled and graded it, the woodworker, the customer, the Internet entrepreneur who built the website the customer used to compair & contrast chairs: all are better off than if the entire Internet-chair-buying industry were artificially restrained. There are externalities regarding over-harvesting of wood, truck pollution, road construction, factor oligopolies, unsafe chair construction, Internet oligopolies and consumer-protection which need addressing as well, of course.
Url changed from http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/29/10685710/disney-vertigo-r..., which points to this.
Opinion? Both sentences were questions. The first included a hyperbolic approximation (i.e. "50th") and the second included a legitimate direct question that infers an indirect question about the weird pace of churn and factionalization that seems to infect the Node.js community more than any other community.

If every other month a new thing was made, marketed, HN'd, and Twitter-culted that did basically the same thing as Nginx but had a slightly different config file format or shared-object handling mechanism or some other random detail I'd think that was also weird and somewhat superfluous.

It makes me wonder if building MVC frameworks has become so technically rote (time investment notwithstanding) that the simplicity of it has pushed them into Parkinson's Law of Triviality territory, such that everybody has their two-cents on how this weird metaprogramming trick is better than this other weird metaprogramming trick so now I can write my routes and handlers in this shape of quasi-DSL instead of that other quasi-DSL, and so then goes and makes a whole "new"... sorry... "modern" MVC framework.

How far away are we from realistically being able to replace the idiom, "bike-shedding" with, "MVC-frameworking"?
This was my first thought when I woke up to a bunch of my server monitor alarms at about 4am on Christmas day....
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826643 and marked it off-topic.
> it’s just shuffling assets around.

That's kinda what I'm saying, since the money supply is fixed. The act of selling the chair puts a greater percentage of the money supply in the hands of the woodworker, since the value of the wood (and other COGs + paid labor) is less than the value of the chair.

pg is declaring that "creating wealth", others are declaring that "wealth aggregation", which contributes to inequality.

But really the heart of the matter is: How is wealth measured? Because if you do it in a currency with a (relatively) fixed supply, then people who profit more than they spend are going to be wealth-inequality creators.
Having access to a large repository of files without actually downloading the files to your computer already exists at large corporations, but you want a more traditional serving hierarchy in order to get acceptable read/write latencies.

Bittorrent is more useful when 1) local peer transfer speeds exceed the transfer speed from a master copy, and 2) everybody wants an identical copy of the data.

For example, if you want to deploy a new version of Facebook.com to a far away data center, Bittorrent is great (you only have to upload maybe 2-3x the size of the binary to the datacenter, and the thousands of nodes inside the datacenter can share the pieces amongst themselves).
I agree entrepreneurial drive is something Rands didn't account for. For some of us, it's just an innate, inevitable part of our being.
The trend is that wealth inequality will become almost the same as IQ inequality. IQ is more much important today than a generation ago in influencing individual economic outcomes. 100 years ago in an economy dominated by manual labor, the difference between a 90 IQ and 120 IQ wasn't that important, but now it is.
We're doing much of this with PricePlow, and the readers DEFINITELY let you know when you take it too far.

A top ten list is exactly what it is. Readers are in buying mode there. But for other content, if you can educate the consumer and cite sources (our last major article has 110 citations), they don't mind you showing some links to stores.

The fact what we're showing up to date price comparisons also helps with trust.

But the second you over shill without backing out up with research... You will hear about it and lose fans.

Readers aren't as stupid as the media loves to believe. Anyways keep that in mind.
Disque is definitely exciting, and looks like it can replace RabbitMQ, which has serious flaws in its clustering design. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

However, if some constructive criticism is permitted, I have to say that, having written distributed applications for many years, I have come to dislike the "classical" push/pop queue data model:

* Acking is a bad idea. It requires the broker to manage a lot of state, including locking and timeouts.

* Re-queuing invalidates total ordering.

* On the performance side, parallel distributed queue consumption (which also breaks total ordering) is directly at odds with this model.

* Queues as opaque objects — you can only inspect by popping the top message, and you cannot access older, dequeued messages. Fortunately, Disque allows you to read the entire queue without mutating it, but it doesn't look like you can read old messages.

* Complicated queue topologies (fanouts, dead letter queues, etc.) become a logical necessity of the strict FIFO structure. (These topologies need to be declared every time the client starts up, and introduces the possibility of schema conflicts.)

* Logical de-duping is probably not possible.

Apache Kafka gets the data model right. It wisely acknowledges that queues are linear and should stay that way: In Kafka, queues are strictly append-only logs where every consumer has a cursor to the last position it read. In this model, many of the classical concerns melt away: Acks/nacks are unnecessary (consumers simply "commit" their position); total ordering is always preserved (since the queue cannot be reordered) and parallelism is made explicit (through named partitions); de-duping is trivial, and complicated topologies are largely eliminated (AMQP-type "exchanges" that fan out to separate queues are unnecessary because multiple readers can all consume the same queue without changing it, as their position is independent of the queue); and you get to choose either at-most-once or at-least-once delivery consistency by how carefully you manage your offset.

Since logs are strictly linear, you are also given the choice of how much history to keep — all of it, if you want — which opens up some interesting use cases that are not possible with classical brokers.

Kafka isn't perfect. It's a huge pain if you're not in Java land. There are no modern, mature "high-level" client implementations for Go, Ruby or Node.js. Its reliance on the JVM and on ZooKeeper makes it fairly heavyweight, both on the server and on the consumer side (the new API for broker-stored offsets simplifies things, but non-Java clients are far behind). I would really love to have a lighter-weight, language-agnostic Kafka-like implementation without the Java baggage.

Last point: The fact that Disque calls its messages "jobs" makes me a little disappointed that it is, in fact, not a job management system. I'd love a solid, distributed job manager.
See the CAP theorem [0]. Disque is designed to guarantee availability and partition tolerance, which according to CAP means Disque cannot guarantee atomic consistency (the C in CAP is not quite the same as either the A and C in ACID [1]) between nodes. No atomic consistency means no guarantee of a single action to single response correspondence, which means race conditions are possible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistency_(database_systems)
A fun privacy review of 2015
If this is true, then the children of billionaires would rise to the top even if they went to the same state schools and had the same resources/networks as everyone else. (Obviously the billionaires don't agree with you since they send their kids to exclusive private schools that cost more than a normal person earns in a year.)

If this were true (and I am not arguing that it isn't), a very high inheritance tax could be levied - the kids of billionaires don't need it because they will rise to the top anyway, and you can cut income taxes and corporate taxes to incentivise startup creation instead.
For me, the issue with economic inequality in the US is that somehow it has lead to INEQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY, which makes our economic system unfair.

Sample evidence:

* US children of wealthier parents grow up to be wealthier than US children of poorer parents, regardless of whether the child was adopted or not.[1]

* US children whose families are in the bottom income quartile are eight times less likely (!) than children from the top quartile to get a college degree by age 24.[2]

* According to test scores of US children in public school, those from low-income families are far less proficient in math and reading than their better-off peers.[3]

* Poorer US children eat a poorer diet, with negative consequences for brain and body development.[4]

* Poorer US children are more exposed to lead, with negative consequences for IQ and behavior.[5]

I gathered this evidence through a quick Google search, but there are lot of other data points out there suggesting we have a real problem: if you are born poor in the US, the odds are stacked against you -- you get worse healthcare, a worse diet, worse parenting, worse teachers, a poorer education, less support of all kinds... the list goes on.

WHY should wealthier children, who simply got lucky and won the "ovarian lottery," have more and better opportunities than poorer children?

Wouldn't we able to create EVEN MORE WEALTH if our economic system offered the same degree of opportunity and support to every child, regardless of parental status?

--

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-peo...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2015/02/05/wealthy-c... / http://www.pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-Indicato...

[3] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140901-ameri...

[4] http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/29/news/economy/poverty-schools...

[5] http://www.environment.ucla.edu/reportcard/article3772.html
It's not that a single request is 40x faster (it may be no faster), it's that 40x requests can be handled in the same amount of time. The limitation is then the processing of the connections both in userspace and in the kernel, and the cost of all the system calls.

This is easy enough to test with ab (apache bench), siege, or jmeter, by just cranking up the number of concurrent requests. I've seen 100x differences in implementations of web servers before, 40x for python vs c++ is pretty believable.
I think this essay ignores the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and feminism in undermining the 1950s. The world of the 1950's wasn't one where women could work, despite that having been the case since the 1920's. It was also the world in which Brown v. Board of Ed. lead to federal troops being deployed in the south to safeguard the rights of citizens, and ultimately lead to the Freedom Summer which radicalized a lot of New Leftists. So perhaps the 1950's was a world based on certain kinds of exclusions, that once removed, broke down.
These are very interesting points:

"the average elapsed time between key algorithm proposals and corresponding advances was about eighteen years, whereas the average elapsed time between key dataset availabilities and corresponding advances was less than three years, or about six times faster"

"we might already possess the algorithms and hardware that will enable machines in a few years to author human-level long-form creative compositions, complete standardized human examinations, or even pass the Turing Test, if only we trained them with the right writing, examination, and conversational datasets."
That's true. We are not having kids, but if we were then I'd pay for every advantage for them. How can we make sure that working class children have equal access to the same opportunities and resources? Would I vote against legislation supporting them? I hope not.
I'm a Linode customer. I have been calling on a regular basis because I have a hosted service for my customers (thousands of them) that has been all but dead for 24 hours now. If I hear 'we are working on it' one more time, I may lose my mind. My customers are suffering severely, and I'm losing thousands of dollars as we speak. They keep telling me they are working with their upstream provider and that it's out of their hands. I'm not paying their upstream provider. I don't have a service agreement with their upstream provider. I'm paying them based on the service agreement I have with them. This is either a completely new level of DDoS or they are just completely incompetent in their way of handling it. In any case, I believe that Linode is going to suffer greatly for this in terms of lost customers. They're going to lose me by the end of next week, that's for certain.
Do you think things are possible just because you want them to be?
Interesting piece. It will take some time to digest.

I wonder about the arrow of causation for conformity back in the 40's. This essay describes WWII as a spark of a generation of conformity (preceded by the New Deal for some). But it's really hard to imagine modern society signing on to a world war. What's to stop parents afraid of vaccinations from taking their draft-age children to New Zealand?

Was there something else that was already more conformist? Or was there another proximate cause, maybe even one as simple as a perceived global threat (communism, fascism) combined with a lack of individual physical mobility?

The essay is good and makes a strong point in and of itself, but I wonder if there's other variables it (and I) are missing.

If pg is reading, one piece of concrete feedback:

> the LBO wave?

LBO wasn't defined in the text previously and I had to google it (it's leveraged buy-out).
We Cooked a Peacock
On the one side we have very huge corporations that have a (near) monopoly on a sector (big, small or niche). On the other side we have many small players "fighting" [not the best word] for the remaining niches ...the rest. And they dream to be the next big player by betting on a raising sector (new technology) and sometimes disrupt old players that are too slow to adapt. Or they fix it with cash. Absolute monopoly is often bad (for everyone except a few (shareholders)), so anything else (fragmention) is better.
The Economist asked the same question in August, but didn't try too hard to answer it.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21660180-what-go...
Mind elaborating? What's psuedo-historian about it? What would make it less disappointing?
Interesting to see that PG agrees with something I've been saying here for a long time, about the role of globalization in economic inequality [1] [2] [3].

Of course I grew up in the Rust Belt, where the average person used to be able to make a good living with a high school education in the steel or automotive industry, but now most of the factories are idle, rusting eye-sores, most of the ambitious, talented kids want to go somewhere else -- anywhere else -- and the closest thing to a growth industry is health care for the folks who earned a good retirement during the glory days and are starting to get old.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9868017

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9560872

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7152378