skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To you and foldr, I was only responding to his comment, that such reasoning still sounded like the pie fallacy. If you really need my personal opinion, I believed that wealth inequality is a problem before I read pg's essay because it seemed persuasive. I still disagree with a bit of it, but I don't like shutting off others' ideas due to my biases[0]. You make an interesting point though, the idea of how wealth is distributed after does have an underlying value judgement, as you point out.

To be fair to pg, he is responding to an often used argument that assumes wealth is a zero sum game rather than it being who gets more of the wealth created. He is right then to claim that given his values (and those shared by most people in America, remember, we still are center-right on most things) and within that moral framework where ownership determines who reaps the benefits, his logic is correct. However, with your values where it seems that benefits should go to those who invest more[1] should earn a proportional amount, it may be suspect.

[0] At least the ones I can identify.

[1] On second thought, many in America would agree this is a worthy moral framework. I do too.
This is a great article which raises many important issues, but I'd like to offer a couple of criticisms.

I'm not convinced 'fragmentation' is the best way to summarise these trends. Small businesses are in fact still losing ground and importance to larger businesses (see for example http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/...). What definitely is happening compared to the mid 20th C is that the economy is more complex and thus there are more diverse industries represented in government, and also the lifespan of large companies is reduced, particularly as technology advances faster now than ever before. Jobs are also becoming ever more centralised in cities due to their increased need for direct communication which hasn't been countered by technology yet (despite a minor trend for remote work). These are the major trends for me.

I'd also add that while networks of smaller companies may have some innovation advantage over large companies (depending on the industry and innovation), many are focussed on industries where they can reduce labour rights, safety standards, avoid tax and lower wages e.g. in construction industry subcontracting, clothing manufacturing, hardware manufacturing, etc.)

Whats also glossed over here is the advances to society made through mechanisms which aren't people trying to get rich, or seek a 'market price' for their 'wealth creation'. Lets not forget that most of the true computer pioneers were people in the corner of some university or military institution somewhere. Similarly in medicine and most sciences, research which is not profit-driven has been core to much of the 'wealth' of the 20th century across the world.
> If you can come up with a viable set of general principles
> that would make HN significantly better, I'd like to know
> what they are. I personally have found it to be a hard
> problem.

How much transparency is there into the decision-making process? It would be great to see the measurements you're making to come to the conclusion that "Some users would like to see two heated discussions about income inequality on the front page, but I can assure you that many others would not."
As I understand it, this is a bot AI, and not a unit AI. Am I wrong?
Subpixel rendering isn't implemented in the demo but just requires running the calculations three times with 1/3 pixel offsets. It still would only need to read the texture data once. I didn't implement it in the demo because there's no way to ask the browser what the display's subpixel order is. If you're viewing it on an ipad and switch from portrait to landscape your subpixel order changes.

Hinting was necessary back before good antialiasing existed but I don't think many renderers use it now. This technique renders each glyph differently according to its subpixel position - completely the opposite approach to hinting, which snaps features of the glyph to integer positions on the pixel grid.
While the article is rather long and touches on many subjects, I believe I agree with the underlying sentiment. Namely, that income inequality is rising and social cohesion is eroding (whereby the former is largely responsible for the latter in my opinion). Looking at historical income inequality in the US, we see that it's just returning to pre 20th century levels. This is not surprising, since the 20th appears to be at odds in many ways with other centuries. Especially the rise of the middle-class (which quickly was understood as a society's default state) seems like a purely 20th century phenomenon. The real question is whether societies in developed countries will accept a return back to more divisive wealth distributions (where people are either clearly upper or clearly lower class).

Furthermore I think it's very important to differentiate between total wealth and wealth distribution. Some (probably rather right-wing politicians) advocate total wealth creation and others (rather left-wing politicians) promote (equal) wealth distribution. Economically speaking the former is clearly preferable, while for social cohesion the later is clearly preferable. Which way we go is (hopefully) up to the democratic electorate (ie. you). And should that not be the case, then at the very least we can all agree that fixing the democratic (legislative) process must be our very first priority - no matter if you seek more or less taxation.
Is there a history of similar efforts (albeit in different topic areas)?
But that only happens because automation and globalization are barely harming the US. And its not like the oligopoly is not trying - why are there so many appeals for more H1Bs?

If you need skilled workers and the varying skill of a worker produces magnitudes of difference in wealth created of course you need to both be huge enough to afford them and centralized enough to take advantage of them.

The article itself seems like a blinders on interpretation of the US tech industry. Corporate consolidation is at all time highs in areas like food processing, farming, finance, raw materials, and industry. Mom and pop shops the world over are bellying up for Walmart and Starbucks. Startups and creative culture in the tech bubble are against the general grain. Its why money in politics is being considered such a larger problem now than twenty years ago - as dozens of economic effects interact, from people having less spending money to companies consolidating and having guaranteed revenues to regulatory meddling in their favor.

Fundamentally I think that newer generations growing up on the Internet are turning out much more hive minded than their grandparents, because there are just more of them as a fraction of the population. The perfect white nuclear family of 1970 still only accounted for a stark minority of the American public - it is just strange that a disproportionate number of people on HN ended up coming from that class. There was still extreme social unrest throughout the century - prison camps for the Japanese, the KKK, segregation, and the banning of many chemicals due to being "foreign" like opium and marijuana. Just because one microcosm of the American economy that produced most of us was homogenistic doesn't mean the era was exclusively defined by it.
Most of those people using an Amiga don't like Apple or Microsoft and want an alternative that is not Linux or used with a modern computer that might have an NSA backdoor in it.

https://prism-break.org/

Even if they used Linux the BIOS might have some sort of backdoor in it.

Some people use DOS machines with a Pentium 1 or 486 chip because they were made before backdoors got added. George R. R. Martin uses a DOS machine with Wordstar because he finds it more reliable than Windows.

The old Amigas were very reliable, and the Guru Errors got fixed as of Kickstart 2.0 and up. The more modern AmigaOS 3.1 and up have more apps for them via open source and shareware.

These people love their Amigas because they don't have the bloat or crap that modern systems have. AmigaOS runs on a low memory footprint and uses low CPU cycles.

There are CPU accelerators for every Amiga out there to replace the 68K CPU with a PowerPC or 68040 emulated custom chip. Even if the Amiga One uses that SAM440 chip used in Microwave Ovens it runs very fast because of the low overhead of AmigaOS.

There is still a niche market for retro tech.
“Pro Level” React book released
No one who cares about performance enough to be using C++ would do something like this. Allocating on the heap when not necessary is a sign of a dangerous amateur.
Same with Yahoo in the past week. I think about new years eve the search results suddenly shifted to what they should look like using a Chinese only training set.

Results were all Xinhua and such, wikipedia, imdb, etc are no longer results numbers 1, 2, 3 anymore instead seeing a lot of qq, baidu, xiami etc results for song lyrics, movies, etc.

But it seems to be closer to normal today.

The normal internet speed has been maybe halved or thirded since about the week before Christmas, VPNs are all sketchy, there seems to be a regular interval when all connection is cut for a short time. You see pings oscillate between 40 and 400 ms quite regularly.

Chinese domains are always rock solid though. Can stream music off qq or xiami or stream youku without issue for extended periods of time when ycombinator, bbc news, etc are down. Yahoo and Bing stay up when most western sites are down.

However haven't been seeing as much total blockage as usual when they kick up the security. Lots of social sites that usually go black for a week or two are up just fine.
That of course depends on whether you consider a magnesium supplement to be "meds". If one is legitimately deficient in some micronutrient, then I hardly think ensuring one gets sufficient amount of that micronutrient to be considered "medicating".
"The majority of drivers are classified as independent contractors, are not protected by core employment and labor laws, and often work under arduous and unsafe conditions."

Yeap, Uber is awful. Oh, wait, this is actually a report from 2007 describing the Taxi industry: http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/Unregulated_Work...

There's a lot of propaganda about how Uber is reducing the welfare of drivers, but it all seems based on some ideal of the taxi industry that isn't actually true.
Do you believe in property rights?

It seems like we probably benefit from an arrangement where we control the things in our immediate surroundings that we need in order to maintain reasonably stable and predictable lives. For instance it makes sense for me to control access to things like my glasses, bike, pajamas, etc. Property rights work pretty well for defining that arrangement.

At the other extreme, we have situations where property rights can be overridden, such as taxation and eminent domain, and entities whose value depends on a stable money system provided by the government -- I see no a priori reason why the workable way to manage those things is not through a system of limited property rights. In broad terms, one such limitation is an agreement that taxation is not a violation of a fundamental human right.

The more abstract and artificial "property" gets, the more reasonable that property rights are balanced against other things, such as redistribution.

This is the core of our system. And that system will always generate inequality.

Sure, and to the extent that it works, it's OK. When it doesn't work, then it seems reasonable to manage it in order to make it work better. Some broad-brush ideas are for the government to provide a functioning money system, and a way to redistribute wealth against the tide of inequality.
When I added my American Express card to Apple Pay, it started sending me push notifications for every transaction. It's crazy how fast it is, before I can even put my card back in my pocket my phone buzzes. You see pre-authorizations too, so when you swipe at a gas pump it usually shows a $100 authorization check.
You can still use alloca in C++
BlackBerry Will Continue Operations in Pakistan
Not true for food or energy, hard to find (imputed) rent vs income.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/you...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10891
"Employees rise through an organisation until they're ineffective at their job"

That is the Peter principle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle), not the related Dilbert principle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle) "leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow".
Zizek phrased it kind of nicely once, in a way that stuck with me. He probably borrowed from somewhere, and I'll continue to lossily reproduce whatever the sentiment was, but it goes something like this.

How is it possible that we are completely and utterly optimistic about breaking all sorts of physical barriers, like landing on Mars, and reusing rockets, and communicating worldwide via little handheld microcomputers, and reattaching body-parts, and aiming to live forever, and do all sorts of crazy biological engineering.

And yet trying to imagine a world were you don't have billionaires having lavish parties while people starve or drone in soul-sucking jobs, or where sweatshops are deemed "bad but better than the alternative", or indeed any sort of radically different social arrangement is seen as hopelessly naive or regressive.

He had better examples, something about a dude with a bifurcated tongue. But the idea stuck with me- what's up with the bounds of our imagination? How come they're limitless when it comes to facing off against gravity, and completely defeatist when it comes to erasing class distinctions?
IOW, innumeracy is widespread among journalists. Surprise!
Very nicely done. Awash in insight about the past and likely also about the future.

Should connect with the role of social media.

In particular, explains much of why the heck I, first, got a technical Ph.D. and then became an entrepreneur.

Did I mention very nicely done and full of good insight.

Gee, all that time people spent in courses in history, economics, political science, B-school, and STEM field education, and the really good stuff is right there in PG's essay!
OpenCore and Python moving to GitHub
That isn't about value semantics, what you are describing is a combination of copy elision and ownership.
> But once it became possible to make one's fortune, the ambitious had to decide whether or not to. A physicist who chose physics over Wall Street in 1990 was making a sacrifice that a physicist in 1960 wasn't.

This is perhaps not the best example, as a physicist in 1960 might've faced a choice between academia and Fairchild Semiconductor.
Since it is inequality were talking about, the simplest thing to do would be pure redistribution. Put the money in the hands of everyone equally as a dividend.
When I lived in Canada almost 10 year ago, most pumps have contactless readers... so if Canada can do it then it's probably doable here.

(It wasn't NFC exactly, but similar technology)
Which is also in contradiction to Grams perspective. Its insane to claim that you need to keep wealth concentration uncapped to incentivize innovation, because a supermajority of novel innovation comes from people at the bottom becoming rich, not the rich getting richer.

Its important to distinguish enabling upward mobility through entrepreneurship and incentivizing that with reasonable taxes and stopping billionaire bank tycoons from buying houses of legislature with overseas bank accounts and ownership stake in half the multinational corporations in town.

It also contributes to why that wealth concentration is a problem, because it snowballs - in an unbiased economy with modest inflation the rich must reinvest somewhere to maintain their relative wealth or lose it. When you have enough to use force of law to distort the market so you don't have to take the same degree of risk in those investments, or even make them at all, you break the system.

So while wealth inequality is a symptom of globalized economic forces, that wealth inequality perpetuates itself in how it will be used to stymie innovation and promote selective growth for those first to get there.
You could always dissolve the legal concept of the publicly owned corporation and only allow employee owned corporations. Thats actually less government, because right now we have a government that has to write and enforce laws for both forms of business.
There has been quite a bit of work done to make cross compiling packages for ARM with poudriere. A fairly good tutorial on how to set that up can be found at https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/building-arm-packages-wit...
Just tried it, it's pretty easy to use. I would suggest making the List more prominent. Also, maybe a button to directly tweet out the image?

One UX Note - I didn't know that what I posted would be publicly listed in the List (didn't matter for me, but some people might accidentally post keys or credentials or something)
Coffee supplis the illusion of fullfilling two or three enssential ones of these, hunger and thirst and sleep, but it doesn't actually provide the associated value.

You know, for many, that's a completely irrelevant factor in their appreciation for coffee.

And by the way, I'm pretty sure it does quench thirst, seeing as it's 99% water.
Or maybe don't even Zopfli it until it gets 100 some hits. Cost some amount of cents of CPU time to do the compress... unless maybe you made the uploaded so it.
We are not talking about Europe, we are taking about the US, there is no real safety regulation on the streets, and people heavily mod cars on the war tank model (rigid box for everybody). It's not 30 sketchy tanks in a State the size of Germany that will add any significant risk. Every single handy US guy will weld his own tank instead of buying a plastic one because it's manly and DIY. And they love gas: for the home generator connected to the AC in the summer when the electricity is out, because in the wild everything works with gas engines, because of boating, for preparation to the apocalypse etc. So many reasons to make your own welded gas tank.
> But the prescribed fix is to "raise taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy".

Yes, as a first step. Then you use the proceeds to subsidize college tuition and health care to help level the playing field for young people, so they can get into the workplace with an education but without crippling debt. And then as a side-effect, the ultra wealthy will no longer have as much disposable income that they can use to influence politics, so maybe we can get enough non-corrupt legislators in office to roll back some of the unfair laws that were passed that allow, for example, Wall Street bankers to commit massive fraud with impunity.

If you're going to criticize and idea you should at least criticize the whole idea, not just a little piece of it. You can make any proposal look stupid if you ignore 80% of it.
> they are no real different appart that they hold way more gas in them

Steel tanker trucks must be able to withstand more of an impact without issue than a plastic bladder in a van, no?
No, you just linked to an article proving that it's illegal and prosecuted when it occurs.
The opportunity is the luck though, since its out of your control, if you take it that the constituent parts of personal behavior that present you with opportunities come from your own motivation.
Makes sense, considering Bing powers Yahoo!
I don't know why this is controversial, in Julia type annotations to expressions are basically asserts
which they then use to create laws that allow them to extract rents (by, for example, paying lower marginal tax rates than less wealthy people)

How is someone who pays 10x, 100x, 1000x the taxes of the median taxpayer "extracting rent"?
Communism happened. It killed lots of people, and made radical changes in the social order unappealing to most. Now ideas don't just have to sound plausible, but you also have to prove that they won't lead to the deaths of millions.
The best new board games we played in 2015
Science converges on truths, so similar (and even the same) ideas form in many minds, often at the same time. And fundamental ideas like these are often -- in hindsight -- revealed to be pretty old; you can trace their lineage and formation across papers, talks, and books. Many people in the field, with a good measure of "conceptual agility", will get this quickly and be able to discuss at length. Not to detract any credit from individual discoverers: they are absolutely critical for the quantized improvement of ideas; often a single person will move science forward in ways the rest of the world could not. And sometimes it is many people that do. A constructive memetic environment is good for both. (it is unfortunate that Credit is THE scientific currency today; it interferes negatively...)

No doubt colah's excellent blog post dives much deeper than this essay, but please note that this was wrtten for Edge.org's http://edge.org/annual-questions book, for a general audience, with very high level perspective, with very little space, and without the ability to get technical. Don't pit them against each other! They complement!

By the way, for one interesting example of the "conceptual agility" of scientists at the very edge, check out this interesting story about Feynman -- from a David Deutsch interview (with Sam Harris) -- in which Feynman derives months of Deutsch's work in a few minutes (listen for ~5 min):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg&t=6524 (1:48:44 - 1:52:40)

Scientists' minds are well primed to understand, derive, and formulate ideas -- they are super fertile memetic environments. And what's more-- they have the epistemic filters to annihilate untruths and converge on scientific knowledge (the best explanation not yet falsified). In math (inc. computer science), it's even better because we study and manipulate the objects themselves, not data from measurements of the things. The formulation, derivation, convergence, remixing, (and so on) of ideas is much, much faster.

Knowing both colah and davidad, I confidently assert they are both among the most brilliant young scientists alive. Humanity stands to gain much from the constructive interference of their minds. As readers and commenters, let's foster that.
Have been playing AoE on and off for a while now. Still like the game. Wish I had more time to play it.
It has certain playing qualities that hold one's interest over time. Even when compared to other more modern games.
We're talking about getting a couple volunteers to Mars one time, not forcing billions of people there permanently.
When pg writes "a Duplo world of a few giant companies dominating each big market." he is referring figuratively to double size lego bricks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Duplo

Notice that Duplo bricks are twice as long, twice as wide, and twice as tall as ordinary Lego. I wrote "double size" but they are, in a sense, eight times the size of ordinary Lego. They appear hugely larger. Also one tends to have far fewer Duplo bricks than Lego bricks ( 1/8 ?), about the same total volume, limited by storage space in the toy cupboard.

This lets the figurative use of the word Duplo serve double duty, both suggesting that the parts are eight times the size, while also suggesting that the grand total is about the same, there are just one eight as many of the big ones.

It is literally a childish metaphor, but still an apt one.