skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way the phrase is thrown about is unmistakably negative IMO.

For a start, 'inequality' is a phrase borrowed from far clearer grievances such as inequality in legal rights for women, minorities etc. By using it in this economic debate it already frames the question as one of harm to a group of people.

A neutral phrase would be something like 'wealth concentration.'
The military or close equivalent.
I think for me a large part missing from the discussion is power inequality.

Which, as it happens, nearly always is entwined with wealth and income inequality.

The ultra-rich get to have a megaphone for their agendas, ideologies and opinions, with a level of political influence none of us will likely ever come close to seeing.
I'd be happy if they just spec'd a 2mW WiFi, thanks. The fact that I can see my neighbor's WiFi is actually a hindrance, not a benefit, nowadays.
Imagine a factory that's dumping large amounts of arsenic into the public drinking water supply -- a factory that can't operate without doing so. Imagine also that studies show small amounts of arsenic are safe, but large amounts in drinking water can cause serious negative health effects.

Seeing these studies, someone comes along and proposes a regulation that limits the amount of arsenic this factory is allowed to dump into the public water supply, to keep it within safe levels.

A critic then comes along and says: "The amount of arsenic in the water is not the root problem -- the root problem is that arsenic makes people sick. We should focus on helping people not get sick when exposed to arsenic! That way, we wouldn't have to hurt this job-creating factory."

This feels like what PG is arguing for here. In an ideal world, where governmental systems were purely representative and incorruptible, and where markets were efficient and impossible to manipulate, sure, focusing on huge economic inequality wouldn't make sense. But we don't live in this world, just like we don't live in a world where we can easily make people immune to large amounts of arsenic.
Thanks so much for posting this, you've inspired me to try my hand at writing a similar parser. I'll definitely be using your code as reference as I go!
One of my best directors, all his movies are timeless.
Might as well take this to the logical conclusion and have some thermite set to go off if anyone tampers with the case.
"And unlike high incarceration rates and tax loopholes, startups are on the whole good." - pg.

I'm not sure I buy that claim outright. I'm not sure I like asking whether THING is good based on claims about the goodness of CAUSE OF THING. If hugs caused cancer, would that make cancer good? Not certain, but I do believe it would make hugs less common.

The problem with an argument like this is that it does nothing but preach to the proverbial choir. Either I buy into pg's worldview about where notional value is derived, or I don't. If a startup founder gets rich creating some new piece of technology, do they deserve the sudden windfall cash that they received? Did the VCs who provided the capital deserve that windfall? Do the workers who actually created a lot of the value in question through their labor get compensated proportionally to the value they built?

It's not an easy question to answer in the long run. Regardless of the goodness of income itself generated from VC processes, it continues to be worthwhile to question the economic engines that run off of global income inequality. When it makes economic sense to grow cotton on one continent, ship it to another for manufacture, and ship it to yet another for sale as a T-shirt, there's something fundamentally inequitable about how we pay people for their labor.

That isn't to say I've abandoned capitalism for outright marxism. But it is hard to really think about "attacking poverty" in any meaningful way that doesn't address the marked difference in wealth and potential to earn wealth between rich and poor, especially in a globalized, post-(and still)-colonial world.

So, sure generating any income in any way will cause income inequality by pg's formulation, whether it's billions from a lucky unicorn IPO or tens from a day's labor at a US minimum wage job, or far, far less making shirts in Bangladesh. The disparity is still something to remark on, especially because that disparity is really one of the major markers of power over one's own future opportunities.
My "pre-existing" condition was that I'd been to the doctor for heartburn in 2008 and been prescribed a 2 week course of medication.

Sorry - it wasn't quite the same as not being able to get insurance at all. Didn't mean I couldn't get insurance at all, but was 'rated' fairly higher than what was originally quoted.
Funnily enough, their XKCD806 "compliance" is pretty useless since whenever you call, you get someone who actually has a clue regardless. They don't have call centers. It's really nice, I miss them!
I remember just dreading Christmas shopping before Amazon. Sitting in traffic jams on the way to the mall, driving around in circles for an hour waiting for someone to leave, then getting jostled by hordes of rude strangers while looking at products - would my mother like this chrome unicorn maybe not but I need to get the hell out of here before I punch somebody.

Wrapping is a cinch compared to all that.
Ummm... This is progress and a big win.
For me, completely abandoning Windows at the moment is impossible. Obvious reason: PC game :p
Linux itself makes a excellent tinkering platform, though.
And for daily use I think it's relatively "user-friendlier" than
a decade ago. Of course I mean user-friendlier for the average PC users, not just hardcore geeks.
> And I tend to get bogged down over-abstracting when I'm working in something more modern. The simplicity of C is a boon, allowing me to focus on one small problem and easilly study the performance

Interestingly, this is why I enjoy working with Go.
Disregarding the fact that it's more like $1M of wealth for rich vs $2 for poor: Why is $1 for everyone not desirable in that case? Of course it's pure speculation, but a complete wealth reset like this would have to result in either: inflation where new $1 means old $2.01, crazy taxation where country keeps most wealth (but has to then spend on social support), or complete economy collapse.

Two of those results may be quite desirable actually.
Extreme income inequality is that which causes economic instability and has a deleterious effect on most people.

Determining an acceptable level of income inequality is a moving target requiring lots of analysis of data and whatever but there exists such a point at which you could say that income inequality is untenable, just the same as there exists a point at which inflation is untenable.

The "acceptable" level of inflation is around 3%, but even inflation in the low double digits isn't necessarily unworkable. It's somewhat arbitrary and a comoplex policy decision, but it's fair to say that such a level of income inequality exists at which it becomes untenable (even if we don't know what it is).
Not the clearest source, I'll admit.

These are better, and show Medicaid spending roughly $5000/enrollee vs. roughly $8000 per capita overall healthcare spending in the USA in 2011 :

http://kff.org/global-indicator/health-expenditure-per-capit...
http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-spending-pe...
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP
> If you were a driver, a rating of 4.5 could get you kicked off the platform. So, yes, drivers are rating you poorly.

Except I'm not a driver. 4.5 is, in any realistic rating system, perfectly fine.

Also, why do I care if you think I'm being rated poorly? It's not like it affects my experience in any way.
just to clear up. i am actually an arab.

i think apu's name is a joke on the exceptionally long names of sri lankans... and yes, it is casually racist - or at least pokes fun at a nationality if not a race (whatever the case, its not a good joke imo).

+1 for video.
Nvidia 's Drive PX 2 is a water-cooled supercomputer for cars
Location: Bangalore, India
Remote : Yes
Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Front-end and Back-end QA and Testing of Web applications , Mobile Applications , Web services. Tested on .net /Java based platforms. Tested IOS and Android apps.
Beginner in Automation testing. ( UFT and Selenium Webdriver 2.0).
Used Jira, Quality Center as defect tracking tools.
SoapUI and Postmaster for Webservices testing.
Jmeter for load/performance testing.
Good in Sql.

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1cza1ijy7qtaauu/Jayashree_Hemmige_...
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayashree-hemmige-7b47175
http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/cv/edit/350234

Email:hemmige.jayashree@gmail.com
The question is why is the first argument special? Also, it's weird that you have to explicitly mark the label as "_" to get positional parameters.

I find Scala's handling of named arguments much saner.
And many people believe the draft is morally equivalent to slavery (which they do not support either).[1]

[1] http://gregmankiw.blogspot.ca/2006/11/rangel-and-friedman-on...
This is a very confused post. A posterior is not an "average", it's a probability distribution. That distribution may have a mean value, but that's not a meaningful quantity in general.

For example, you're chasing someone and you come to a fork in the road. You know they must have taken the left or the right branch, so your posterior distribution on their location has two modes. It also has a mean value, in the middle of the forest between the two branches, but unless you have specific evidence they've abandoned the road, this is a very low-probability state.

The type of averaging prescribed by Bayesian decision theory is averaging of utilities, not of beliefs or actions. You take the action having the highest expected utility, where the expectation is taken over your posterior distribution. Assuming you actually want to catch your suspect, the expected utility of following either the left or the right fork will be much higher than the utility of dropping the pursuit to poke around in the middle of the forest.
I've been buying insurance for a more than a decade, in multiple states. (direct, not via employers). I can't say I've seen annual rate increases of 20% year in year out for 2 decades. That's simply not sustainable.

By way of example, my $100/month policy would be $3800/month after 2 decades of 20% year on year growth.
Well if those people are concerned about inherited wealth, I have good news for them; the wealthiest individuals are increasingly self-made.

> Over the past 30 years, the origin of the wealth of the richest people in the United States has shifted away from old, inherited money. Our new metric, the self-made scores developed for the Forbes 400, shows that increasingly we find self-made billionaires among the ranks of the richest people in the country. This has accompanied the incredible increase in wealth of the members of the Forbes 400, which has jumped 1,832% times since 1984, when the total net worth of our list was $125 billion, compared with $2.29 trillion today.[0]

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-a...
I have a Lenovo phone with dual sims that I bought from China.

I'm currently switching over carriers, and it's useful to be able to have my old SIM in for people and companies that haven't managed to get my new number.

So yes, the option does exist, just not in the American market. It seems to be somewhat unique to the Asian market from what I've seen.

It does mean that you're limited to the phones that have dual sim slots though, which tend to be less powerful than flagship phones.
The issue is not static levels of inequality per se. The issue is why inequality should increase. If the 60%th percentile incomes grew 40%, then it is not clear why the bottom 20% percentile income also shouldn't grow 40%. The fact that it didn't is suboptimal and studying this phenomenon makes sense. That doesn't mean that every knee jerk attempt to fix this problem is good.

Let me try to explain it like this. It is a valid question to ask why, if one income bracket grew X% over 20 years, did a lower bracket only grow 1/2 X. It is not reasonable to simply dismiss this question as irrelevant by assumption. Because society should want income to grow in all brackets, if possible
Probably should have included that.

Meanwhile, reviewing my post it reminded me of my US History teacher in middle school telling me that the Conquistadors in the Americas were after the 5 Gs: Gold, Gold, Gold, God, and Glory. I listed five things: Time, Time, Time, Degrees and Factors. I'd be thrilled if someone could say the same thing but with all of the words starting with the same letter.
> you have to buy a plan that covers things you don't need.

Well... isn't that sort of the point of insurance all together? There's always going to be someone in an insurance plan getting some treatment that I'll never need, no?
Thailand. It's not for everybody. But you can get world class medical care at a fraction of the price here.
That's why I'm suggesting you not bother memorizing 7 since there are higher numbers that provide similar utility for estimation but are much easier to memorize.
Because blogspot sucks, github is too geeky and wordpress bloats
But it's a subscription desktop app that accesses their cloud offering.

Why? Because Jesse says files are too hard; despite that being how YNAB classic works.

So... probably not what you've expected.
251 resumes in 18 months? I wonder if that'll change with publicity like this.
The United States' healthcare system undoubtedly is heavily regulated. It just so happens that it's simultaneously stupidly regulated: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2730786/
You're clearly trying to push some pro-tipping agenda, but if all you can cite is a single Uber driver blog (who of course wants you to tip) that's pretty flimsy evidence.

The vast majority of Uber riders do not tip. [1] There's not an expectation that you do (even the driver blog you cited admits that). I don't really know why you're trying to create this perception that it's expected, but it certainly isn't.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/to-tip-or-not-to-tip-drivers-that-i...
“According to almost every measurement, the world is getting better”
Doesn't the federal government continue to cover 90% of the costs beyond 2020? That's still a pretty huge increase in funding.
because only an english speaker partaking in casual racism would, imo, label a stereotypical arab as 'achmed'. from what i've seen its an exceptionally rare spelling of the name born of parody of the difficulties english speakers have with the 'h' (which is not the 'phlegm' sound btw)

if we call him tommy he is english, hans and he is german, pierre and he is french... achmed is the arab, with a badly spelled name out of ignorance to boot.
Increasing WiFi range doesn't mean much for most consumers, but it's hugely important for deploying WiFi to large public spaces (city streets, offices, parks, etc.)

(On an unrelated note, the fact that you can see your neighbor's WiFi seems like one of the smallest imaginable hindrances and a terrible reason to reconsider WiFi innovation goals.)
One of the things I found odd (or maybe just annoying) is how the Elm Architecture doc [1] keeps mentioning how you can cleanly model your code using modules. But the module system is about as primitive as you could imagine. The language would be much more expressive with ML's module system, and functors would relieve some of the pain of not having type classes.

[1] https://github.com/evancz/elm-architecture-tutorial/
Many of the Kurosawa DVD's available on Netflix are from the Criterion Collection. Highly recommended, and the commentaries are excellent.
Also known as design by committee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee
I hear that a large Seattle based software company known for being 'cheap' gives their developers the oldest/cheapest Macbooks that they can...

:)
Hey Rob- that was probably unfairly harsh of me. I have tried to like the syntax for the last year and I've had trouble.

Anyway, I know you are a big contributer, do you mind showing me the discussion where we determined '*ngFor=' and '[(two-way)]=' was implemented to play nicely with WC? I would be interested in reading. Thanks!
I just read "The Refragmentation" (I hadn't read it previously), and I had read the original essay on economic inequality previously.

Neither of these essays seems to discuss the good of startups in relation to economic inequality. All they discuss is the inevitability of startups, or really technology, increasing economic inequality. And "The Refragmentation" explicitly points out that a society can put a stop to this via high taxes.

(That said, it is late and maybe I didn't fully understand a sentence somewhere.)
Yeah, you can't just assume Amazon is price competitive any more. I think they're trying to rely more on convenience, like with two hour shipping, to move product.
i don't agree with that line of thinking... i'm just saying that this is what i perceive in others.
Operating system as a service just doesn't feel good to me. Just because they give it away, MS feels they can do anything they want now.
Use a newer version of Internet Explorer to render HTML in your apps
Writing this on mine right now. I went with the mid-priced model figuring the HDD size and extra RAM would basically cost me about the same if I bought and installed them myself.

After a year I took out the DVD drive and replaced it with a 512GB SSD giving me over a TB of storage. That hurt the battery life (and increased the weight) quite a bit but it dramatically decreased startup time, made everything a bit faster and made sure I wasn't constantly hurting for storage.

Next up is the battery which is definitely not holding the same charge anymore.

At work I have the latest and greatest and it is fantastic but most of that is just cake for most users. Biggest things I like about newer Macs? Retina and a thinner/lighter profile. For the really hefty stuff (games, graphics programming, 3d modeling...) I have a custom built PC from the same time that blows it away performance wise.

In the end, right tool right job.
But it's not pythonic to care if something is a "Card" or not. All that matters is if looks and acts like a Card.
Interesting. Total private + public health care spending in my province is around $5000 per capita, per year. That covers everything I listed above.
The problem is that, with the exception of the very small minority who give it all away before they die, these self-made billionaires are the first generation in a dynasty.
My code turns into "someone elses" code after a mere few years, and my coworkers code is already by definition "someone elses" code, in my experience. Replacing "our" code with a pre-existing library has been a great way to flush out bugs both in our replaced code, and in our calling code, as well.
There is an acceptable level of income inequality, the same as there is an acceptable level of inflation. The determination of what that level of income inequality is, is a complex social analysis task. It's somewhat arbitrary (for example we currently view 3% as an acceptable level of inflation, but that could well be 10% if we wanted it to and we could still make society work). There isn't a single level of income inequality that is bad in all situations, but for some given set of social conditions there exists a level of income inequality that is bad (even if we can't determine precisely what it is ... )
The name Koch is all over NYC arts philanthropy, but don't tell anyone.
Newer iPhones do this in hardware, not sure about Android phones but a software approach is far less secure than using a hardware chip.
Internet of Things: The IDE scandal. How to use npm to develop for the IoT
Was going to post something like this - you beat me to it.

"I don't think the role of government is to protect our country, because it isn't the government protecting our country. It's the government coercing others to protect our country, against their will."

Obviously, we have a volunteer force, but haven't always had that - conscription, as you brought up. It's fine to have a volunteer force, until we need more. Then force is brought in.
Excited about dataset api and ML pipeline.
I can't wait for the SFBARF case to reach the Supreme Court. That will change things.
Known or hypothesized?
I more would like the idea of laptops and smartphones being able to talk directly with low cost smart home stuff like your thermostat without having to have bridges or pay someone for access through some 'your data is now our data not yours' cloud services
In my copy there's a timescale legend inside the front cover, and I've mostly forgotten the conversions.
Bah, I might just have to learn PHP again - were you a PHP developer beforehand?
From skimming the links provided, my impression is that these authors or texts address increases in inequality or the importance of the middle class (which presumes inequality). Can you show more directly where someone is arguing for/against inequality per se (as opposed to an argument about the proper degree of inequality)?
Also remember Piketty, while concerned about income inequality, was most concerned about wealth/capital inequality. Thus his worldwide tax on wealth proposal. I would argue that Piketty did say that wealth inequality, on the extreme, is a net bad for society. He brought up many examples of how destabilizing extreme levels of wealth inequality, like what England and France saw at the start of the 1900s and what the United States is seeing now, can be for a society.

With that said, as it becomes easier to start and run a company with less and less human capital more of the value of that company is going to go to the capitalists who invested in said company. This I believe might make that self-perpetuating wealth cycle easier to get into. So, I can see a situation where the aggregate result of this negative pattern across all startups in the economy would outweigh any positive results an individual startup might have on society.

Note, the above is without any policy solutions and is why I strongly believe we need things like a basic income and wealth tax to help stabilize society worldwide as technology continues to make us humans more productive.
Any MongoDB client, I used Robomongo at the time. But when I tried again the next day I could no longer connect.
SEEKING WORK:
Location: Bangalore, India
Remote : Yes Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Front-end and Back-end QA and Testing of Web applications , Mobile Applications , Web services. Tested on .net /Java based platforms. Tested IOS and Android apps. Beginner in Automation testing. ( UFT and Selenium Webdriver 2.0). Used Jira, Quality Center as defect tracking tools. SoapUI and Postmaster for Webservices testing. Jmeter for load/performance testing. Good in Sql.
Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1cza1ijy7qtaauu/Jayashree_Hemmige_.... https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayashree-hemmige-7b47175 http://stackoverflow.com/jobs/cv/edit/350234

Email:hemmige.jayashree@gmail.com
So Sematech and Tata's LoraWan plan in India is vaporware? They claimed successful tests, and said their network is open to testing end-to-end by IoT developers.

This is a serious question, I just moved most of my stock portfolio into Sematech after that news. If Sematech's LoraWan is real, this is the best pureplay futurist stock I've seen since Tobii.
> Nobody serious said inequality was bad or good, not even Piketty.

From the Capital ...:

> Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it.