skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure this is much of a counterpoint. The Inca didn't have a centralized currency, but we really don't know whether they had private property or not, how disputes were handled, or so on. They also seem to have had civil wars, child sacrifice, and other violent traditions.

That being said, many things are possible in groups with smaller populations, I've heard stories of large communes being fairly successful with up to several thousand people. However, at some point they tend to become too disorganized and break down, in one way or another.

In contrast, the concepts of private property and trade have enabled our human family to grow to 7 Billion, and population growth is barely even slowing down yet. Civilization allows things to work on an entirely different scale by providing a somewhat standardized framework for our territorial disputes.

This is also the most non-violent time in history by far, according to researchers, presumably due to the end of tribalism.

So, for me personally, there would have to be extremely compelling arguments to even begin to argue against the utility of private property as a social and economic system.
I still play a ton of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, which is just a Star Wars re-skin of AoE2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrou...
The HD Edition has a new AI[0] that's much stronger than the old one. It's built by Promiskuitiv and Archon, two well-known AI scripters in the Age of Empires scene :)

[0]: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934...
You have to prove that they accepted stolen gas. Which isn't exactly easy, given the number of gas stations. Also, the Mafia is experienced at moving and selling drugs in larger quantities than the gas thefts here - I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any "neighborhood fuel delivery services".
Age of Mythology is still one of my favorite games ever. What made it fun is not the real time strategy, but the custom scenario maps that people could create. This wasn't just the terrain, but the mechanics of the maps themselves. It was part "programming" as well as part design.

The multiplayer servers are still online, but the certificate expired years ago. You can force AOM to connect to them with fiddler2, but you have to have an existing account.

But now there is the steam re-release, and of course Voobly/GameRanger for the original release, but the steam version is full of bugs that have not been fixed in over a year.
Given that zopfli was created in the Google office in Zürich by non-Swiss people, blame it on your fellow Swiss citizens for lack of intervention.
From what I recall, Brotli is tuned pretty heavily for compressing English text and HTML. It's got a huge built-in dictionary of common English phrases and HTML fragments. I don't think it'd perform well on image data.
The Volcker Rule
And how much of those future earnings will go right back into the pockets of the mega-wealthy through rent and interest payments and profits on goods that they buy from companies owned? Nearly all of it, I'd imagine.
> In the end private property is indeed theft, more exactly the imposition of someone's moral values over the other's by intrinsic force.

I'm curious how that follows? Many actions require force but are not theft (depriving someone of rightful resources). If your 'moral' values deprive someone of their own rightful resources you probably deserve to have some intrinsic force applied. In that way private property would seem to me to be close to a moral good.
Clickbait spasm: Gizmos I used in 2015
Guaranteed minimum income has a lot going for it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income

U.S. politics has gotten strange, people complained about welfare mothers not working when that's shat the system was designed to do. IMO, hand out a small fixed amount every month, then flat tax everything last that point and get the government out of micromanaging the economy. Upside, no tax breaks makes everyone's taxes easy, downside would never get implemented.
> Why do smaller files decompress faster?

The same reason why "no code" is faster than optimized code. ;)
Consider that each "e" may be slightly differently aligned to the pixel grid though. So using an atlas is lower quality than drawing each "e" from scratch exactly as it aligns to the screen.
The people producing heroine are mostly poor farmers, not rich startup guys. And magic weight loss pills are simply fraudsters, nobody defends those.

As for casinos and F2P games, what about them? Certainly some people get hooked, but 95% of casino players don't[1], yet they still enjoy it. What's wrong with that?

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gamble/etc/fac...
Upon skim: I think it has some good points to make. Women are more likely to take time off for family obligations. If women do just give up more than men, they stop counting you as unemployed when you stop bothering to try. So the statistics would not show those women.
“Uber for doctor house calls” idea is basically doomed
Well, the medium for some artists isn't really the material, it's more purely conceptual. Of course all art spans both, but it's a question of proportion.

Divergence stems from practice because when two people put thousands of hours into the same task, specifics of the individuals and their environment inevitably become calcified in their skills and process.

That all said, I think we're on the same page. The stereotype you are applying to VHS art is not unfounded. I just generally hate stereotypes and I think they hold me back, so I try to question them as much as I can and use better ways of seeing when I can.
One of the common ways to get out of poverty in the past was indentured servitude. People would voluntarily sell themselves into slavery because it was preferable to their current "free" position. You can't eat freedom.
> the availability of capital or lack thereof is the main catalyst in this equation not technology.

You mean if you can't afford a computer and an AWS account you can't get started? Sure, maybe not, but it's a far cry from the capital you needed in the 1960s to get started. I bet a lot of the readers of this forum know people personally that have made a million dollars or more with their laptop (to a first order approximation).
I used to see Steve Ballmer at the gym every week or two, and never heard him "talking shop" or acting like anything other than a dude at the gym. Take that however you like - I guess he could have been Jedi-mind-tricking all of us.
One of the greatest breakthroughs of my life was realizing that you only had to type "cheese steak jimmy's" once, then ctrl-c, then ctrl-v as much as you want. It was a great day.
> If one woodworker makes 5 chairs and another makes none, the second woodworker will have less money, but not because anyone took anything from him.

Are you sure? What about that limited supply of high quality wood required to "create wealth" by shaping it into chairs?
I know both Simple and Capital One (their credit cards, at least) offer near-instant iOS and SMS notifications of all transaction.
We are at war remember...with terror.

And winner-still-takes-all... some extremely large corporations were made in the last 15 years.

Sorry, don't see the difference between then and now.

I appreciate you attempting to identify the cause of our current crisis, but alas, I believe you may be too entrenched to find it.
One of my favorite strategy games growing up. It also encouraged a healthy interest in history that persists today.
Immutable business objects
> It is the CC issuer who most often takes the real hit.

Well, in the end customers are paying with the (exorbitantly high) CC fees. It's all priced in.
I wonder if it would be secure enough/cheaper to retrofit these pumps with NFC readers.
> At first sight, it might seem surprising that an old language like Java wins this award. Especially if you take into consideration that Java won the same award exactly 10 years ago.

!
The first faster refers to total time spent decompressing being lower. The second time speed is mentioned he's saying the rate is the same.

With constant rate, smaller loads are completed faster. And the rate is constant but the load is smaller.
Picketty explicitly claims the opposite of this. According to Picketty, the rich invest in the economy and achieve a growth rate r. As a result the level of capital stock grows more rapidly than incomes (which grow only at the rate g, for r > g).

In contrast, money spent on consumption does not grow at the rate r. Picketty even speculates (providing no real evidence however) that only the rich can achieve growth rate r - investments by others will only achieve r' < r.

Did you even read Picketty? (The math parts, not the mood affiliation.)
I'm sorry to inform you that slavery is alive and well in Western Europe: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/16/lithuanian-guil...
I don't agree with the point about the pie and the idea that startups 'create value'. I say this because I've been a 'victim' of YCombinator (and VCs in general) on two occasions. I don't mean to say that it's all VC's fault - I just want to make a point about how VCs can make a poor person's life difficult.

About 6 years ago, before Weebly came out, I was working on an open source drag-and-drop (user-friendly) content management system - I had spent 2 years on it (all my spare time) -
I intended to offer it as a service eventually. Then I found out about Weebly (who got funded by YCombinator) - They had a huge well-funded team and so they were able to quickly develop a great product and they got massive traction. To be fair there were other competitors in the space, but they also had lots of funding - I decided that without funding, I could not compete with these products (in that space) and I so ended up just giving up my 2 year project.

Then I started working on a new open source project (3 years ago); in the area of realtime data; my plan was to build a tool which would improve how data is transferred between the database and the frontend client.
Unlike my last attempt, this time, my open source project got a lot of traction; I later found out about Meteor (YC), then later Firebase (YC)...
I'm still working on this new open source project though; I have decided to keep working on it forever (or until it becomes completely outdated) I intend to turn it into a service - I feel that no matter what I do, some great company will come out of YC to make all my work economically meaningless so I might as well keep going.

Basically YC is just churning out competition and putting huge amounts of money behind them. It's taking opportunities away from the poor, hard working engineers and giving them to the few lucky ones who happen to be selected by YC.

It's not just YC though, it's VC in general; the huge amount of funding that they give out creates an artificial barrier of entry for newcomers.

Basically the idea is that if you don't have a good social network, you cannot raise funding and if you cannot raise funding, you cannot succeed. If VC funding didn't exist, the system would be a lot fairer.

I think YC does select good founders, but they miss a lot of really good ones too and these suffer greatly.

If you're an investor, you should be mindful that for every investment you make, you're probably hurting someone else somewhere in the world - So make sure you're investing in the best of people (not just your friends).
Wow. That is good news. Those games are some of the ones I've had the most fun on.
As long as I can get the data, it's fine. What I'd be worried about would be if apps become the only way that an end user can get access to information about their environment. That would seem like a massive step backward for all that those applications, as part of a broader context, may enhance services.
In what way is Apple a monopoly?

(I'm also not sure if Google or Facebook are either, but at least in those cases it's obvious what you mean)
It's tax policy, plain and simple. Stop paying taxes and you'll get richer, relative to those paying taxes. All the communication and technology changes have made it much easier to evade taxes. That and government complicity.

For the last 40 years, we were promised a better living standard in exchange for lower taxes. It backfired. We forgot about the vice that has no bounds - greed. That's why we have to set limits. Paul alludes to the correct and only solution - make tax rates so high to discourage accumulating wealth beyond a certain point.

It's a wave, but the wave has crested. Tax rates will rise, the loopholes will be removed, and the existing tax laws will start to get enforced. Too bad, it could have been different.
> When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders.

No, it's the speech of the management. The shareholders only have indirect control. The only power they generally have is to replace board members. And sometimes they don't even have that. Google, for example, is completely controlled by Larry and Sergey. Facebook is completely controlled by Zuck.
Hmm, I always thought that forming an AB would allow you pay less tax. Instead of drawing a salary, you'd just take dividends once a year.
Though probably missing something here, but that would let you get away with a lot of money. Or you know, just base in Switzerland.

So "the elite are" are certainly avoiding it. Unless by elite you mean the average employee.

I might be wrong here, I hope someone will correct it.
I am also pro-regressive taxes, but they need to work. Not sure if they can with the mobility or definition of "the elites".
Update about a Song of Ice and Fire -The Winds of Winter
> they are acutely aware of the issues affecting black people

See...I really don't think they are (or at least were before they got shellacked). I think it's so profoundly pervasive that even at the highest levels it hasn't been An Issue until very recently. So it's pretty tough for me to see that. (While I don't know O'Malley, I don't pay attention to inconsequentials, I think Hillary Clinton is a status-quo-favoring moderate on most things, which probably doesn't make me more sympathetic.)
Well, we have things like access to education and access to capital, in contrast to a nebulous "ability to create wealth". I think the former two are more fruitful ways of thinking towards fixing the worst aspects of income inequality.
The benchmarked code is ALREADY a comiled C function called from Python and it still lost.
Ways I would fix the App Store: App Review (part 1 of 9)
I don't think it's an immoral position or anything, just a mistaken one. I covered why in my last paragraph:

> If there's any societal system that has been shown not to work, it's communism. That experiment has been tried so many times, in so many countries, with varying cultures, geographies, and levels of development... and not one of them was successful. Yes, capitalism has had failures, but at least it's had successes.

If your response to that is, "No true communist state has yet existed." Well… the same goes for a true capitalist state. The real world is full of implementations, not ideals.

When we look at implementations of capitalism, some are amazing successes (South Korea, US, UK, Canada, post-WWII Japan & West Germany, Taiwan, etc). Some are hellholes (the Belgian Congo). When we look at implementations of communism (The Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea, China before Deng Xiaoping, Venezuela, Vietnam before Doi Moi, etc.), none of them are successes and many are hellholes.

I'm not an ideologue about this. If communism led to better quality of life than capitalism, I'd be fine with that, and I'd vote for communists. But the evidence is that it doesn't, so I don't.
Legit oil carrying trucks are everywhere, and they are no real different appart that they hold way more gas in them. As far as I know every single accident involving a volatile liquid carrying truck has led to a fire. There is no real push for double hull or stuff like that in the oil trucking industry. The only safety is segmented tanks, but as far as I know they don't really stop fire propagation (but they stop waves, so they are tremendously useful anyways).

edit: of course, you'll have the prepper, the boat enthusiast, the car or truck modder, the american wild lover, and a bunch of other people carrying sketchy home made gas tanks everywhere around you in the land of freedom.
> Why do they have to "contribute to society"?

Because we're in this together. Collaboration allowed us to thrive as a species. Greed and the "fuck you, got mine" attitude is what is going to ruin everything, starting with the ocean level rise in the near future.
lol that is some pretty rosy thinking, I hope you're being sarcastic about the math on this.
There are two separate issues here and it is important to distinguish them clearly.
PG is correct that there are two basic strategies for making money: rent and productivity.
1) rent, although it has a positive aspect (it helps to efficiently allocate scarce resources to where they are most valuable and provides an incentive to add scarce resources to the economy), provides an inherent redistribution of wealth which makes owners of capital richer at the expense of non-owners. Piketty etc. have noticed that capital owners have recently been able to gain a greater share of wealth. This is socially and morally a bad thing, especially when it keeps non-capital owners in a state of relative poverty.
2) productivity, in general, is more positive because it provides a net gain to the whole economy as PG points out. If the incentives to a small number of people are very high for adding productivity, then there is no particular problem with this. So in this sense PG is correct.
However, this is largely irrelevant as the main problem is that productivity gains are predominantly going to NEITHER workers NOR entrepreneurs. Rather they are going to existing owners of capital. The biggest problem with massive wealth accumulation by founders isn't whether it was deserved, but that when people stop being productivity enhancers they become capital owners and CONTINUE to earn wealth excessively not due to further productivity gains but through rent.
There are many solutions possible, but none of the sensible ones would affect new founders very much. PG can sleep easily on this account.
The reason PG should feel "hunted" is not that he is a founder enjoying the rewards for benefits he has provided to society, but that as a successful former founder and now capital owner he is continuing to gain excessive wealth by extracting rent from his YC investments such as AirBnB, and even worse, helping PASSIVE YC investors to capture that rent also.
I'm quite aware :)

Most people have experience running processes in isolated VMs for security reasons. I was trying to use that as an anchor point to explain why one might want to have components of a single operating system run as separate servers, for much the same reason -- compartmentalized security.
You can absolutely avoid it. Inequality was so much less in the 1950s/1960s and we still had police and property.

The disconnect here is that property rights are "more guidelines than actual rules", they are quite literally "made up". It used to be that keeping a black person out of your store was a "property right", until we decided it wasn't, and then we got rid of that one. It used to be that preventing airplanes from flying over your farm was a "property right" until it wasn't, and then we got rid of that one. You can only do that if "property rights" are artificial.

I mean just look around you. We live in a world where Smartflash has a "property right" to your in-app purchases, Apple has a "property right" to your iPad, JSTOR has a "property right" to publicly-funded research, etc. etc. That's because we made it that way; let's unmake it, and do it differently!
Ask HN: Can you short later stage startups?
Is there anyway to short startups, specifically bet against their growth or projections. The idea was all inspired from the big short where the folk started seeing that there were fundamental underlying problems with mortgage. Is there anyway to short the startup market?
Here's the differentiable stack/queue/deque paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02516

It is indeed similar to some work from FAIR, where one of the tasks was binary addition:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01007
>Any such question and any possible answer are still pheonomena that arise inside consciousness.

This is an important point, but I don't think the best course of action is to mark consciousness as something that lies outside the scope of science. I certainly think that there are some broader problems to be solved which involve how one deals with investigation into a domain that appears to be reflexive. "Consciousness" is a valid domain of investigation, but the question to ask becomes "Can we come to an agreement over how to distinguish what we are investigating?" Additionally, can we really call consciousness an "object" of investigation? The problem is that we, the subject, are investigating an object, which is us, the subject. It seems like there is some analogue of the subject-object problem that injects itself into the situation at that point.

The investigation of consciousness (among other things) becomes muddled when the majority of participants in the discourse can't stabilize on how to actually
distinguish or demarcate consciousness as an object of investigation - that problem is tangled because the act of explaining consciousness presupposes consciousness.

Similarly, we must use the condition of living in order to explain life, and we must use the condition of "being embedded in language" in order to describe language.
One cannot escape those systems in their attempts to describe them. A scientist's description of consciousness must necessarily account for the process by which he describes it.

But this isn't anything too radical or new. I'm not sure this means that it's something beyond the grasp of science.
I think the argument is more that it will disincentivize innovation in your tax jurisdiction.
I was being serious.

Have a look at how things are done in Scandinavian countries, Australia, New Zealand.

We have very few obscenely rich people in Australia, and we have no desperate people.
If Magnesium doesn't work for you, you may also consider trying a Melatonin[1] supplement about an hour or so before bed.

I have also seen a big impact of turning off the electronics and reading a book[2] in bed for the last hour or so of the day before trying to go to sleep.

Lastly, if you are a loud snorer or carrying more than a bit too much weight, you might want to investigate any sleep apnoea[3] issues.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin

[2] Actually, I'm usually reading ebooks, but on an e-ink display, not a light-emitting display of any sort, which is the point.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_apnea
As I'm reading this my 14 year old daughter and my 12 year old son are playing a game while discussing strategies and having a blast.