skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think PG is attacking a straw man at all. In my career as a software engineer, I've run into a significant number of outright communists. Like most of us, they keep their political opinions to themselves most of the time. But occasionally, they let slip how they would welcome revolution. I don't want to name names or expose people who don't want to be exposed, so I'll just give one prominent example.

Steve Klabnik is an extremely talented programmer. He's a core developer of Rust and is the main author of The Rust Book[1]. He is also a communist. (Edit: This is not 100% accurate. Klabnik is better described as anti-capitalist. See downthread for details.) Don't take my word for it. He wants people to know this. Read his blog[2]. Look at his Twitter[3]. Judging from his follower count, he's not exactly alone in his opinions.

I wish you were right. Communists should be straw men. 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.

1. http://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

2. http://words.steveklabnik.com/an-introduction-to-economics-u... At the end: "…this post is basically my own little summary of Capital, Volume I, chapters 1-7, by Karl Marx."

3. https://twitter.com/steveklabnik
Surely a cool, calculated, orderly effort to solve the problems described by the GP would be better than bloody revolution, which is a mere outpouring of anger that might not even solve the problems and would probably create entirely new ones. Do you think that no other option is possible at this point?

Edit: Talk of revolution makes me think of the song "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who, particularly the closing lines, "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
Clearly written by someone who has never lived in China
Show HN: Visual Travel Search Engine may win over TripAdvisor some day
> a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction

When we apply economic thinking, this interaction is actually not zero sum - antelopes in general benefit from the signal that they need to be faster.
Why is there a problem then?
Slaves weren't cheap, but the income and wealth inequality of those times was incredibly larger than today. In many jurisdictions slaves actually were just property, not people. Wealthy slaves owners still could kill slaves just for fun, without feeling much financial loss. Like today someone could buy a Tesla and then decide to burn it.

(Though we should recall that the rights of slaves and whether slave-owner could be prosecuted for manslaughter obviously depended on era and jurisdiction).

I find it astonishing that people compare modern-day income equality and the position of the poor in our time, in the Western world, to that of historical slavery (slavery in United States, or slavery in other slave-based economies in the New World prior to 19th century, not to mention slavery in the Old World which continued officially well into later half of 20th century).

In the West, no one is legally killing, whipping or dismembering the poor workers for not being obedient. Even the poor are still free to leave a place if they find life there unsustainable. Modern-day comparisons to "slavery" typically involve something along the lines "you are expected to do something in exchange for money that is given to you and you feel unpleasant about it".

It just doesn't compare with the actual, terrible injustice of real slavery.
This is huge. A capital expense can be amortized (feature dev falls firmly in this category) where a defect (typically) ends up in operating expenses.

Many devs are blissfully unaware of the influence accounting (the other nerds) has on an organization.

Lots of PM groups are driven almost exclusively by "new features" and poor estimates on their value. I have been hard pressed to find a PM that will do a one week project that adds 100k to the bottom line over a 10 week one that adds 500k even though the former has a better ROI.
You and the other responder to my comment both raise a point that is extremely important and near/dear to me. I talk constantly about the need to establish tech "utilities" that can offer pure commodity services without being compromised by things like a profit motive, need to grow, etc. Authentication is a perfect candidate for this.

However, even given such a pure, charitable utility, OAuth is still the best way to do this stuff, and that's really what I meant in my comment. Authing through a universal standard means you're not tied to ANY parties, and you can always offer the best of the bunch as an option. In fact, any such "utility" should enforce interoperability/standardization as a primary feature, lest it leave its users subject to economic/political volatility.

As for forcing customers to be on google/facebook/whatever, I see this as a sub-optimal practice insofar as it does NOT include such a pure utility, but not for any other reason. I don't have up to date data on the topic, but offering both Google and Facebook OAuth surely covers almost everyone, and even for the occasional user of neither it would still significantly reduce account proliferation and bad practices if everyone forced people to sign up for one of a few select accounts vs. the alternative of everyone rolling their own.
> pure common sense in a democracy

Does not exist. Democracy means that 51% of the people can destroy the life/liberty/property of the other 49% whenever they feel like it.
Looking for part-time/moonlighting.

Location: Chicago

Remote: Only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: fullstack dev, prefer nodejs and angular

Résumé/CV: http://jeremyphelps.com

Email: jeremy dot lee dot phelps at gmail dotcom
One thing I learned in my 20+ years in this field is that relying on anything from Microsoft leads to inevitable regret down the road as they cannot restrain themselves from turning every thing they do into a means of vendor lock-in.
A practical problem of wealth accumulation is that it eventually becomes a moral hazard. If you have people with more $10B and a system of unlimited political contributions as in the US, they have so much power that it is difficult to maintain the democratic equilibrium. It is now known that the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have more power over the republicans than the RNC, having elected hundreds of local and national politicians. In the left there is George Soros and a few others. Are we really willing as a society to give away so much political power to billionaires? I think a very practical solution is an extreme large tax on billionaires. There is no reasonable reason why a single person would like to have more than a billion dollars. This is practically an inexhaustible amount of money that should be considered as a practical limit. After that, you can happily pay 99% tax and enjoy making this country better.
I love coffee. It is one of the great pleasures of life, like chocolate and strawberries. It provides positive value to me.
Sanders also, least in my mind, poses the question to us, is this morally just? We have a large group of people who are born and cannot afford to go to college, are strapped with debt to go to college, or simply can't make it in college. Do we allow an economic natural selection to weed these people out and suffer or do we as a society take a road based on moral principles to help each other by all of us paying in. Something interesting that I've been thinking about. I also wonder how much it hurts us in expansion of ideas. We have all this engineering talent focused on how to get people to click on ads, optimize e-commerce sales, and much more. What more could be done? Also when food chains break down and fully automate drive thru restaurants.. we'll there go lots of labor jobs... random thoughts feel free to ignore me.
Huh; I almost don't think of that as font-atlasing. If you know you're continuously zooming—and therefore are going to throw out the atlas at the end of the frame—it's almost more like a "glyphs rendered this frame" cache. Which changes things a bit, because you don't need to preload the entirety of the "font"—which might be a unicode font!—into the atlas, but only what you're rendering.

I have no argument against that kind of font-atlasing as a process; it's fairly more stateless, more like a secret cache inside the black box of the glyph-rendering kernel.
It does too. That scenario typically leads to civil war and two democracies, at least for a period of time. Sometimes it works out, as with the U.S. democracy declaring that people are not anothers property.
Just based on the headline, I had guessed that some enterprising miscreant had figured out how to siphon off some of the gas as customers were fueling - perhaps through a small tap on the line.
> Why do they have to "contribute to society"?

In my country, it's part of the basic law (constitution). Specifically, 14/2

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html
So perhaps you can explain why, whatever this wealth was providing Denmark's 'economic status' the Nazi's didn't plunder it when they occupied it during WWII?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark_in_World_War_II

AFAICT, Denmark (and Germany, Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, and everybody else) have whatever 'economic status' they have due to a lot more to what happened during the post WWII years than to colonial times.
> his essay [...] reads as a loosey historical narrative manufactured to defend his belief that the fight against "economic inequality" will undermine innovation by disincentivizing the next Zuckerberg

Well put.

The argument that general taxation disincentives innovation has never made any sense to me: no matter how high the tax rate, your post-tax income still scales linearly with your gross income. If your object is to make increasing amounts of money, how does a tax give you less incentive to do so?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826635
Just add a link to the "how c#" somewhere; I didn't notice that page existed. It's exactly what I wanted!

edit: oh, you did already. never mind!
I really wish nobody would pay attention to quintiles. They cause more confusion than anything, because they don't follow people.

Even high earners spend maybe 25% of their life as high-earners and the rest of their life as low-income. That does not mean poor, just low-income. They might be college students, PhDs, doctors in residency, or just building up their careers still.
Hi -- great points, see comment I posted to the other responder: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=allworknoplay
there are instant coffee brands with extra caffeine added in as well... you can die from drinking the previous quantity of this new brand of coffee!
How many days before significant changes appeared ?
Yes, it's trivial. For board games all AIs essentially use Alpha–beta pruning + scoring function and an approximation to that scoring function can be autogenerated using standard machine learning techniques.

For (classic) video games it's actually somewhat similar but rather than a board being fed in as an input you just feed in a bitmap of the display (sometimes at a lower resolution using compression techniques to reduce input features) and optimize moves made to maximize the score at any point rather than end-game.
I get down voted for posing a logical question?
Asp.net MVC vs. Middleware Performance
Sure, I agree that the products in my life seem better than the products I would have had in the 70s. I am just wary of this argument because it becomes an argument for substitution (which is one way that government fudges the effect of inflation on the poor)... There are also a lot of things you aren't taking into account. In 2016, your phone costs $100 and has to be replaced every two years. Your phone in the 70s might probably still work today (I think most PBXs still support rotary). Has the improvement in quality of life tracked this increased cost?
I haven't read through the links you cited, just the excerpt. A lot of non-communists cite Marx. My economics professors in University certainly did, including one who advocated eliminating corporate taxes.
That graph perfectly describes my personal TODO lists: they grow and grow, until I switch to another app/website/notebook, then the cycle repeats. This way only the most urgent and some of the important tasks get done.

The solution for me seems to be to say No to more things.
None of those things make people happy.

Childcare, healthcare, education, shelter, world travel, free time, organic food.

Keep your trinkets and baubles.
You could also try meditation. It helps one to find a way to turn off the brain when it is not needed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10817320, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10821735
> Graham is arguing against an enormous straw man.

This is a very hard case to make when Graham's money quote, at the start of the essay, is from a Nobel-Prize-winning economist saying, pretty much in so many words, that rich people get rich by taking stuff from poor people--which is exactly the claim Graham is arguing against.

> Nobody is suggesting that we “prevent people from getting rich” or “end all economic inequality”.

I think you're missing Graham's point. His point is not that people explicitly suggest these things, but that the discussion is framed so that they are implicit assumptions, so far in the background that nobody even thinks to question them. Judging countries by their Gini coefficient, and the criticism the US has gotten because its Gini coefficient is too high, is an obvious example. Everybody argues over what Gini coefficient is "too high" and requires action to correct; nobody even asks whether the Gini coefficient is the right thing to judge by.

> institute an unconditional basic income as an alternative to means-tested welfare programs

A key argument for which is that unconditional basic income would do better at reducing income inequality than means-tested welfare programs.

> allow every citizen/resident into a single-payer healthcare system

This I agree is pretty much irrelevant to reducing income inequality; it is aimed more at reducing the impact of income inequality on access to health care, without doing anything about the inequality itself.

> go back to the tax structure of the 1950s–70s

A key argument for which is reducing income inequality by taxing more of what rich people make. The point being that none of these measures ask why certain people have more income, which is a key piece of information. Graham's point is that if one person makes more than another because they're more productive, you don't want to "fix" that, because it's not a problem, it's what fuels economic growth. It's true that there are other ways for people to make more than others, which are not based on wealth creation, and Graham explicitly says he wants those to be shut down. But after you've shut them all down, you won't have "fixed" the "problem" of income inequality, because people's productivity will still vary, and the more technology advances, the more the variation will be amplified, so the more unequal incomes will be.
Trumping political discourse on Twitter
PG, and his ilk, are increasing inequality in this country largely because they are exploiting the carried interest tax loophole whereby they are able to re-classify regular income as long term capital gains which is taxed at a much lower rate (now approx 23.9%, but used to be 15%). In any case, both are lower than the top federal rate of 39.6%.

Even worse than the VC's are the HF mangers like Dan Loeb and Einhorn who set up re-insurers in Bermuda and push all their earnings here (except the are not declared as earnings (and taxed) but as reserves against future claims (and not taxed)).

Carried interest isn't the only bogeyman, but it's by far the largest one at the individual level. There are tons at the corporate level (which is then monenitzed by Tim Cook, et al, by paying themselves in stock which goes up in price as their burgeoning untaxed corporate cash hoards accumulate).

I am free marketeer, but all these crony capitalism set asides are anything but the free market in action.
I'm a Basecamp 2 user but have started to migrate over to http://getflow.com which has a nice combination of ordinary lists and cards which you might I want for some specific projects.
At my own surprise, I now often blame the developer (the team and me) and not the business, in such a situation. There is 2 reasons:

1. You can develop 10x faster than what you think. Learn functional programming and more importantly, learn to code bottom-up. Even if you do object-oriented code, that will do.

2. As a developer, you must take the initiative and drive aggressively the projects. They must listen to you, not you listen to them. Literally put your job at stake, often. If you do so and if you got results (see point 1), you gonna gain respect very quickly, then take the initiative and become unstoppable. But, before thinking about that, you need point 1.

You are the code pro, if things goes wrong about code, you are the one to blame. The spiral is you thinking you are the victim. You must understand than software must serve the business, not the opposite. Finally, nobody told software development was easy.

EDIT: I should say something here: I'm talking from experience. This is what I do, and I can testify it works. Also, it's not supposed to solve the problem, it's supposed to prevent the problem to happen.
Unless you want to run the captive portal, you don't need to keep the java stuff running once the access points are configured. I have it installed as a service in an ubuntu VM, which I just enable when I need it.
Nick Hanauer believes so...

https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...
I suspect the term 'Native American Indians' was simply used to distinguish between the other 'Indians' that are active participants in this forum. :-)
Not much better on the continent, either - except for the right-side driving, of course. (There actually is a law around these parts that says "no trucks in the fast lane" - guess how effective it is)
Open Decision-Making
Central planning of the US economy & powerful big government (1930s & beyond) was a Progressive Era initiated reaction to the era of robber barons & crony capitalism (1870s-1910s).
A fantastic description of how the process of how founders should run their companies. Being a CEO myself, I wish I'd run into this article earlier, as I strongly believe in instilling autonomy and responsibility in my team as well as that best decisions evolve when I involve the whole team.
Et Tu, DevOps? How to Embrace DevOps and Evolve Your Data Center
Earthbound Battle Background JS
i don't have enough f's on my keyboard to pffft hard enough.
There's a reason why in the US, the federal Constitution contains explicit clauses to stop things like Congress voting themselves an unaccountable salary increase (it can't take effect for any individual member until after their next election) or creating/giving raises to other government positions they'll switch into (after creating or raising the pay of a position, they become ineligible to hold it until after their term in Congress expires -- which led to some interesting debates over whether it's legal to reduce a previously-raised salary to its original level in order to appoint a current member of Congress to it).
One very simple answer is VC money. They want you local and their talent network (of people for your growing startup) is local. Who knows how different Boston would be if Facebook stayed there? (Just one small example)
Excellent! Thank you for your work on this. I'll be very excited to see where it goes.
You know, typed clojure is pretty excellent.

http://typedclojure.org
The real solution here is to have contactless chip & pin systems at the pump, but apparently that is years away because of cost. In the meantime I find the best way to monitor my CC expenses is to enable SMS/Push alerts for any transaction above $0. This way I always expect to get an alert at the point of sale for any transaction. Anything unknown is a red flag and it also works well for subscriptions that I may forget about and want to cancel.
Agreed.

In supermarket lines, for example, you let people choose their queue because you can see what people have and let them judge which queue they should be in to incentivise them to go to the queue which packs them in the most. I always feel a bit guilty when I purchase dry ice (for science) at the supermarket because it causes queuers to make an error in judgement as to the length of the line.

At banks and the DMV, because there is no way to judge how long someone in front of you is going to take, it doesn't make sense to let people choose, so there is a single queue that is distributed at the end of the line.
Retail traders don't have liquidity needs on a sub-second basis. They'd all be better off with exchanges that used batch auctions. HFT is a tax on our economy.

http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-lewis-high-frequency-...
Happy people leave jobs they love all the time. Not everyone is an in-demand tech genius with no life outside their career. Not everyone has a buddy at another company who can promise a job. People leave jobs they love every day not because they want to, but because they have to.

Real people have real families. Kids grow. Parents age. Sisters have car accidents. Dogs rip their ACLs. At any moment any realworld person may have to walk away from the job they love to accommodate the needs of a family member. Maybe they need to go to a higher-paying job (if they are lucky) but more realistically they need a job at a different location or time so they can spend more time dealing with things totally outside the job.

Real people have real bodies. They get sick. They have heart attacks. They get devastating news from doctors. They need to spend less time at the keyboard and more time at the gym. The job you love, that you are willing to spend 24/7 working to improve, is often the job that is killing you.

Want to keep employees onboard? They want two things more than anything else: Either more money, fewer hours for the same money, or some balance between the two. That's what keeps people from leaving. It allows flexibility when that day comes that they would otherwise have to walk. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
The way I've seen it done around here (Southern California) is more social hack than technical hack: the enterprising miscreant comes up to you with a gas canister while you're pumping and gives you some sob story how he lost his wallet and needs a few gallons to get back down to San Diego.

The article involves a scam that is slightly larger potatoes and was newer than I expected. I was under the impression that skimmer problem had been largely neutralized (not sure where I got the idea, maybe something to do with new chip card rollout). Guess not.
MiniProfiler was originally developed at StackExchange for production profiling.

It gave admins a clear picture of what is going on, all the time, and transformed the way we reasoned about performance.

rack-mini-profiler is a port, I use it in development and still predominantly in production!

The key is that ONLY and ONLY admins get access to the features, and we only do profiling for admins. To achieve this nothing is measured unless a request is explicitly authorized.

Very odd to hear this DDoS concern.