skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 'Return' on an increase in valuation isn't a real return. It's exactly like poker.

Completely false. Let's talk about how investment money is used, and how that impacts valuation.

Say that a friend has started a new farm as a business and he's seeking investment. He'd like a cash investment in order to buy a tractor, harvester, and combine for the farm, which he can't afford himself. So I make the investment and the farm buys the equipment, which enables the farm to grow substantially more crops (vs tilling, planting, and harvesting by hand). By growing more crops with that equipment, the farm has vastly more revenue and earnings.

This farm has actually grown more crops than it could have otherwise - the investment led to the creation of wealth. The crops are net additional wealth, and the farm's ability to grow and sell them for revenue leads directly to the increase in the farm's valuation.

The farm grows and hires more employees; it's also an engine of job creation. All made possible by the investment, without which the farm could not have gotten started.

> Hedge funds and the like.

And what do hedge funds do with the investment money they receive from the wealthy? Do they put that cash under their mattress and somehow generate returns by doing that? No, they invest it in companies which use the cash to create wealth.
>you're saying you don't think it's a racial issue.

Correct, it isn't a racial issue. Take the two most well-known cases for instance, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

Trayvon Martin assaulted Zimmerman unilaterally (Zimmerman never threw a punch,) had him in a ground-and-pound position and was bashing the back of Zimmerman's head onto the sidewalk while Zimmerman repeatedly screamed for help. If any white seventeen-year-old had done the same thing there would be zero outcry about recognizing the need for self-defense on the part of the neighborhood watchman. If a white kid in a hoodie was walking behind houses in the rain and looking into windows, nobody would label it "profiling" when a neighborhood watch leader called the police, since that's obviously questionable behavior.

Michael Brown had just committed robbery at a convenience store, then he assaulted a cop who asked him to walk on the sidewalk, then tried to wrestle away the cop's gun. Forensics shows Michael Brown didn't have his "hands up" when he was shot, meaning the witnesses all lied about the situation. Again, if a white teenager had committed strongarmed robbery and proceeded to try to grab a cops gun there would be literally zero sympathy or outcry when he was shot in self-defense by the cop. People would basically just call the dead teenager "trailer-trash," or something equally derogatory and move on.

The only factor race plays in any of this is that we would never have even discussed or heard of these absurd cases had the so-called "victims" not been black. If race enters into the narrative at all it's in the form of black privilege / supremacy, in that black communities seem to believe these incredibly violent assaults are fine and don't merit self-defense for some reason, solely due to skin color.

More accurately, it's all hyped up and manufactured by the media to stoke division because nothing sells ad space like impassioned controversy.
What does "Duplo" mean?

"the Duplo economy" "Duplo world"
Apologies for not using the exact terms. While I have your attention: Would you agree that PG is not arguing against a straw man? That you, in fact, would like to prevent people from getting rich and end all economic inequality, and that many others share your beliefs? Considering that jacobolus's comment is at the top, I think it's important to know whether it's correct or not.

BTW, thank you for all your contributions to Rust, Rails, and countless other open source libraries and modules. Your work has benefitted millions.
I really enjoy his reviews. He gives perspective why the book at hand is relevant, and succeeds in telling me what to expect from it, not only in terms of content, but often also style.

I haven't read many of his recommended books, but quite a few have are on my Amazon wishlist for later buying.
It was a nice riposte. Altough the concentration on income inequality overall is perplexing to me.

Income can be measured and is emotive ( I earn X but my cousin earns 10X ), yet I think concentrating on this metric is obscuring some bigger issues. You do touch on them in your counterpoint.

Karl Marx in Das Kapital explains the situation post Industrial Revolution and prior to the World Wars. The landlords conspired with the factory owners to keep rents high and wages low so that workers had little ability to move or leave.

This lack of freedom in a self determination sense is creeping back into Western economies. Mortgages and rents are so high that workers spend most of their wage paying that.

So never mind that middle class income equality is 17% lower than middle class income equality 1980. House prices and rents have climbed more than enough even if 'equality' had persisted. ( Also prices for the very rich have increased too. )

But instead of a landlord class and factory manager class conspiring the prices have risen via market forces and lax monetary policy and the relabeling of debt as 'credit'

Another factor is opportunity equality. Meritocricy has greatly reduced since 1980, and is acutely poor now. Entry into elite jobs like CEOs, the Media Class, (cough) VCs and Private Equity firms are chosen from just a few streams. Harvard, Wharton, Ivy League in the States and moneyed private school in Europe. From outside those circles it is a struggle to join.

Paul touched on WW2, but I would go further and say both WW1 and WW2 were the genesis of a burst of meritocracy unleashed by mass death in Europe at the same time as vast strides in technology.

Getting a good job was easy in 1960 because everyone had died in 1915 - 1945 and there were many new classes of job.

These days, people are working and living longer and it is harder to get to the top... your boss didn't die in battle, you'll have to wait.
"At the very least, we should strive for a non-regressive tax system, which is what we have now."

I'm super pro regressive taxes. Regressive taxes are fantastic for the poor. They get more than they put in AND the elite are less able to avoid paying them. The socialized promised lands of Scandinavia are highly regressive.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/why-im-soft-on-s...
Oh, no, I was not debating what someone else should call themselves. I was tossing out an off the cuff suggestion as to why a particular site may have used the phrasing it used, even though I am not the author of the site, so I don't actually know why it was called that. I personally find every one of those expressions -- Indians, Native Americans, Indigenous Peoples -- problematic.

Indians: Columbus thought he had discovered India. It thus completely annihilates the identity of the peoples of this continent by assuming they are something else entirely and, oh, hand wavy, SKIN COLOR, close enough! --- we don't really care that they aren't.

Native Americans: There was no "America" to be "native" of before white peoples came and stole the lands of the indigenous peoples. Nor was it even called America when Columbus first found it. He thought he found India. It was called The New World for a time. It wasn't named America until Amerigo Vespucci came here. (No, I don't recall all the details.) It is rather insulting to retroactively designate them by a country name that didn't exist when this was their lands.

Indigenous Peoples: Most Americans hear that and think you mean tribes in some other part of the world, not tribes native to this continent.

I don't think we have a really good expression for the entire group of many different tribal peoples who are descended from the people who were here well before Europeans discovered this continent and ....lots of events later a country called The United States of America was formed. Even the term "America" as a means to refer to citizens of the U.S.A. is problematic when speaking on the Internet because Canadians and people living in South America and Central America (etc) feel like we are appropriating a term that could also refer to them.

The arrogance of mainstream culture in the U.S. is incredible and galling and I am not fond of it. But I am only one person and often use terms I do not like because I am just one person and I need to communicate with other people and communication requires that we use terms that will get us understood, no matter how much we think their history and usage is deeply troubling and problematic.
The middle class has shrunk because more people have become rich. So it seems that today there are greater opportunities to sell expensive hardware, particularly since even the lower classes are (in absolute terms) richer than the middle class of the Apple II era.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...

As for 5k products, like fancy drones, 3d printers or high end bicycles, was the apple II non-niche?
Uber hired lobbyists because they had no choice. Traditional companies have captured the regulatory system so bad you have idoitic laws designed to protect them.

In London one law was proposed for a minmium wait time of 5 minutes. It was directly aimed at uber.
Flash Player Patch Fixes 0-Day, 18 Other Flaws
So, someone who needs a car to get to work at their new job but has no existing wealth can afford the car equally with or without financing, just based on spending and saving habits???
Did YC fund Uber? I had thought they weren't a YC company.
Thoughts on Tech Workers and Therapy
The people I know who really hate HFT are hedgies because they'd like to make big trades for free.
Canada somehow did it. So did the UK and much of Europe. The US is not a special case.
I don't think Uber is a YC investment. It's certainly not listed as such under CrunchBase, nor have I seen any public article mentioning them as an investment.
>So once again, let me be clear: I do not want to kill Y Combinator, nor do I want to kill Uber or AirBnB.

AFAIK Uber is not a YC portfolio company.
I don't know if I would really "blame" the attendants, but underpaid and low morale people in position of security are a risk anyways, being an armed guard, a gas pump attendant, a cashier or a money conveyer. I still don't really know how the people in power think about that, because they are the people perpetuating that.
I believe this is the case with any credit card placed into an Apple Wallet for Apple Pay, regardless of the card issuer. Every charge initiates a notification.

I found this useful when I was wondering about a charge that I wasn't expecting pop up. I logged into the card issuer's online portal and found that it was something I care about, but simply forgot it was pending. Though if it was a fraudulent charge, I could've just gave them a ring. It certain can help in noticing fraudulent transactions in a much shorter time frame than simply waiting for a statement.
Our Review for 2015 and Predictions for 2016 in Asia Technology Landscape
We are developing a device that will increase adherence to medicine, send me an email at viktor at pilloxa.com and I'll explain more in detail!
I am out at a bar with friends, so I have not read the article. I just check things every so often and saw that I was mentioned. It's an inherently complex subject, and like I said, the details don't really matter unless you really care about them. It's just important that if someone calls me "communist", they don't think that I have no criticism of anything related to communism, because I do.
It's nice to believe in superpowers, but this is a matter of scaling rather than one of a high constant value - even if you are 10x 'faster' (which does not mean better in many cases), when the issues piling up are scaling superlinearly compared to your organization's development capacity, you will still have a problem.
You could probably have a worker system that eventually produces a Zopfli compressed file.

User uploads a provided PNG, you perform the quickest compression compression but then queue up a Zopfli compression. Up front you're only returning the less compressed file but after time you begin serving up the lesser bandwidth file.

If the uploaded file or associated post is deleted then you can wipe it from the queue.
Late 19th century, early 20th, Sweden was one of the poorest countries in Europe. The wealth of Sweden was accumulated post-WWII when the rest of Europe stood in ruins and needed to be rebuilt, not by being a colonial force to be reckoned with (it never was).
> They are stealing stuff, but let's paint them even darker by saying their trucks are unsafe

These things are literal rolling bombs. Diesel is not as critical (it doesn't emit explosive vapours and you need higher temperatures to get it to burn, and unless you vaporize it it will just burn and not explode), but take one of these trucks with 1 ton of petrol in plastic tanks and you got yourself a pretty nice fire/explosion hazard. Not to mention that ordinary plastic gets attacked by the petrol and thus will be weaker than the same tank filled with water.

All this needs to go off is a single drunk driver slamming into such a truck. To those who still think "ah that's harmless, just a fire", go visit your local fire department at an exercise session and watch how powerful just a liter of burning petrol is, then scale this up to a 1-ton-payload truck spewing the stuff everywhere.

There's a reason why ordinary fuel trucks are heavily regulated (e.g. in Germany, they're not allowed on roads in environmentally protected zones, must carry a number of fire extinguishers, have a speed limit of 60 km/h on country roads and 80 km/h on Autobahns, the drivers must be specially licensed).
Zopfli is a general purpose compressor. It's not unpacking the png data before compressing it.
The problem with chip and pin is:

A) you want me to type my pin into a compromised device, the pinpad at the pump

B) you expect me to remember seven pins, I carry seven credit cards (yes that's excessive) and each should have a separate pin for security, right?
"All lives matter," as a response to "Black lives matter," carries roughly the same implications as "Everybody hurts!" would, as a response to "I'm hurting real bad right now!"
Another low tech scam involves thieves swapping pump handles on two sided pumps. You swipe your card and the thief on the other side of the pump gets a free fillup. Takes a bit of coordination to not get caught, but most people don't pay attention when they're filling up.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/3869514-181/low-tech-thiev...
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/678653529288916996

PG on Uber. "No, just a user."
>"Selling something that people want isn't equal to providing value. Let me be pessimistic: coffee doesn't provide a positive value, because it's a drug that get's people addicted however little and subliminal. Maybe that is a value to society in general, but it isn't to the individual."

If you don't think someone selling you coffee that you want is providing value, then perhaps you should try make your own. Once you have to "spend" time to physically make/get yourself the good/product that you wanted, you'll quickly learn what "value" a seller provides. Technically, not the seller as much as the actual producer, but the seller provides value as well. And in most examples represents the entire supply chain.
I think all ranges of emotional involvement are highly useful in evaluating your own work, but knowing when to act on them, and when to shut up and reevaluate your gut reaction a few minutes, hours or days later is the real trick.
Yes that is true, bribery is illegal and this kind of conspiracy is bad. But if you spread it out and do not put anything in writing, it will be hell for the IRS to prove this. And if you are the type of person who attended this, you have a personal lawyer that you got when you turned 16. It will be very difficult to ever press this to a conviction. And remember, the various departments of the executive branch are in on this, they are the ones laundering the money and further removing it from the original bill that released the funds from the treasury.
Sigh... it really needs to be reformed, you essentially can lose money twice on such investment.
Nobody Wants Bitcoin
Devil's advocate: If more income takes more work, and I'm already rich, then the extra work is only worth it to me if I get a really substantial return, not just some minor increase.

(In reality, only totally naive people believe that any billionaire cares at all about making more money for the sake of the money. It's actually about power and about irrational desire to be higher in the rankings compared to other billionaires… unless they have other motivations that aren't related to their profit, of course)
* http://tech-insider.org/linux/research/acrobat/960112.pdf See the Byte Benchmarks Results on page 12 for a laugh. (I mean, really. That is the funniest performance benchmarking chart I have ever seen, in half of a career that involved a lot of performance work.)

I can personally vouch for the 2x performance slowdown using (a derivative of) the Mach microkernel under IBM's WorkplaceOS project.

* https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/osdi99/full_papers/spat... figure 8. Note that Scout is a microkernel that does no memory protection, Linux uses two domains (user space/kernel space), and the "Accounting" version of Escort/Scout uses 4 or 5. Performance is roughly proportional to the number of protection domains.
"Not everyone wants bitcoin yet, but that’s ok. Not everybody wanted the internet in the beginning either."

Basically, the author argues that bitcoin is a low-demand currency.
> The socialized promised lands of Scandinavia are highly regressive.

No, they aren't. Regressive means that the rich pay less, percentage-wise, than the poor do.
Mr. Garret quotes Sanders:

> The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.

I am rather puzzled that this idea gets so much traction. Does anyone really believe that if only the rules weren't "rigged" local shops and businesses would be able to compete against Wal-Mart and Amazon? Do people really believe that it's only because of "rigged" rules that big employers are downsizing and shipping production overseas?

It's wishful thinking. The rules don't drive rewards to the top. It's intrinsic to the free market.
I've often wished for a central location for learning how and when to visit tribal reservations respectfully (i.e. not merely being a bumbling tourist gawking at people's homes and such). I'm back to traveling full-time, and will be passing through tribal lands across New Mexico and Arizona in the next few weeks. It'd be cool to be able to learn more about tribal history in person, but it's surprisingly hard to find the right ways to go about it (the web presence of tribes is not always strong!). Sometimes, there will be native history museums in larger cities, and I visit those every chance I get, but that's also often far-removed from reality.

Hopefully, that kind of thing might find its way into this project...or maybe a new project will spin up to tackle it. Regardless, I think it'd be really valuable. So many folks live within a few hour drive of tribal lands, and yet I doubt most people ever visit (except to gamble or buy cheap cigarettes or alcohol) or go to the trouble to learn anything about the history or culture.
Speed limits and road restrictions are all well and good, but if a tanker catches fire those extinguishers are not going to help. They may help prevent some external fire from propagating to the tanker, but if the tanker itself is burning ... run.

Diesel might seem better, but there are issues. Gas will burn/evaporate away and be gone. Diesel gets into soil and lingers, creating more environmental damage than if gas was left to burn away. The driver is safer hauling diesel, but the environment is safer if he hauls gas. This conflict is more dramatic with propane trucks (bigger fire risk, but no real chance of soil damage).
From the FAQ:

"be aware that while Kivy will run in Python 3.3+, packaging support is not yet complete. If you plan to create mobile apps for Android or iOS, you should use Python 2.7 for now."

http://kivy.org/docs/faq.html
I disagree with most of the post, but here is one point that I'm particularly at odds with:

> We have no obligation to stop someone from “becoming rich”– but we have a strong obligation to stop someone from becoming poor.

I don't see a way to stop people from becoming poor. The most common way of becoming poor is not to produce wealth. How could we fulfill our "strong obligation" and force people to produce wealth?
It's possible and I'm sorry if it does come off that way. When I write, it is a tough balance between being showing humility and taking the tone of "here's what I've learned and I might be wrong" vs. "HERE IS WHAT I'VE LEARNED"
Thank you for the story!

Below is most insightful part of your post below ( in case anyone happens upon this post but skims through without reading).

> "If you can possibly adopt two children at once, do it"... Of course it was very challenging at times, especially at first, for both us and them. But I am so glad we took that advice. The feeling of isolation that children in these situations have to face...it's probably the hardest part for them. And it makes sense to me that in any situation, no matter how hard, it's much easier when there is someone in your same situation you can talk to about it.
The U.S. had plenty of centralized planning in the form of protectionism well before the 20th century.
I've tried out Skylight, but if you already have New Relic, didn't see anything new.
Sure, my point is you get there because developer didnt do 1 and 2. Once there, I agree with you, solutions are different.
Partially devil's advocate: Women not working en masse means single-income households as a norm, which means all the real economic value of someone staying at home to take care of home issues and a general supply-and-demand situation where workers needed to be paid enough to make things work on a single income. Flood the market with twice as many workers, wages go down and the expectation becomes two-incomes, and thus people end up working harder (there's still work at home to do), but they aren't richer for it.
Lets add increased sales tax for all domestic yacht purchases also, it's not like wealthy people can go elsewhere or do other things with their money.
Use numba to compile python loops or array expressions to fast llvm, and problem solved. I'm sticking with python.
http://paulgraham.com/progbot.html

Bottom-up is the art of coding a project from scratch. If you got the mastery of it, it means you can start and finish a project very efficiently. The idea is that you make the codebase evolve, you scult it. You code like the painter paint. By doing so, you can get a prototype very quickly and then refine it into a final product. Whatever is the time you're given, you always have a working code with every features - like a painting has everything in it even when it's not finished (and it never is). The only thing that can be missing are relative details.

I know it might sound like every other software development methods. The thing is that most developers are actually bad at it - that's point 1.
Redefining Work