skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to take this seriously when pg asks us to believe, on the basis of a single out of context quote, that Stiglitz is a simple-minded victim of the "pie fallacy". Stiglitz explicitly anticipates and addresses this criticism:

> One can think of what’s been happening in terms of slices of a pie. If the pie were equally divided, everyone would get a slice of the same size, so the top 1 percent would get 1 percent of the pie. In fact, they get a very big slice, about a fifth of the entire pie. But that means everyone else gets a smaller slice. Now, those who believe in trickle-down economics call this the politics of envy. One should look not at the relative size of the slices but at the absolute size. Giving more to the rich leads to a larger
pie, so though the poor and middle get a smaller share of the pie, the piece of pie they get is enlarged. I wish that were so, but it’s not. In fact, it’s the opposite: as we noted, in the period of increasing inequality, growth has been slower—and the size of the slice given to most Americans has been
diminishing. [my emphasis]

More generally, it's unclear what pg is attempting to do here. None of the arguments presented is at all original, and they are not presented in enough detail to be properly evaluated. So what are we meant to take away from this? That a rich dude is ok with income inequality? Quelle surprise.
> there are now languages that can compete in terms of performance

Such as?
Is there a product-ready alternative to Disque?
Click on the "web" link above.
Sometimes outrage is completely necessary though. As in the case of ongoing scams....
> I say this as a manager who loved big open offices, until I read on HN - 1000 times over - how consistently employees hate open offices

Why did you have to hear this from HN instead of your direct reports?
> Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.

Nonsense. Plenty of companies start out as small companies and suddenly find themselves on the upwards slope of a hockey stick, others start out as aiming for that hockey stick and end up being 'just' sustainable businesses.

This whole start-up naming thing denies 125 years of objective reality. You can't start a scalable company deliberately any more than you can reliable write an evergreen book. Time will tell what you've got, not your label of it.
I've never heard anyone begrudge innovators for getting wealthy. It's about crony capitalism and CEOs who enter a company, and siphon off wealth for themselves before getting "fired" with a golden parachute.
I switched 2 years ago. Then they added this and I've become a massive T-mobile evangelist. No more swapping SIM cards - seems like a small thing if you only do a country here or there, but when you're hitting up 10-20 countries a year, it's super nice not to have to waste that time-on-the-ground messing with setting up your phone line.
> Why should a very wealthy person be pre-judged to be worse than others without knowing the whole picture?

Who said anything about judging them? Bill Gates is obviously a good person. That has nothing to do with whether or not we as a society want to allow unlimited financial returns for success in business.
> I am also weirded out by the "hunter" metaphor. The people fighting income inequality are not predators out to get pg's billions, they are working class people who can't afford healthcare or to send their kids to college.

The rabbit deems the wolf no less a predator because the wolf seeks to keep itself and its cubs alive.

As Graham notes, many of those decrying inequality really do want to improve the lot of the poor, not hurt the wealthy. What they don't realise is that they are very likely to kill the goose which lays golden eggs: the wealthy are, in very many instances, wealthy precisely because they have created circumstances which have benefited the great mass of mankind; if they are punished for improving the lot of others … they will stop doing so.

And then inequality will be less, but everyone will be worse off, rich and poor alike.
Because the self-made rich don't stop working. Because hugely productive people work on open source. Because hugely productive people work at non-profits. Because hugely productive, active, socially beneficial people spend their lives in poverty working for the benefit of others.

It's a bizarre mind that can simultaneously believe that you need huge rewards to motivate people AND know that 95% of startups fail.

Startup founders I know well (n=20) are intrinsically motivated and only superficially extrinsically motivated. They don't stop once they get "f-u" money. They do the same thing over again, with a nicer car.
Small observation: why title the file re.html? Why not just spell fragmentation? Is there a reason to do it this way? Why .html? Doesn't that make it hard to update all the pages at once such as menus and footers? The design is very minimalist, but it's effective.

We're definitely in a winner-take-all economy, whether it's real estate, stocks, the dominance of companies like Google, amazon, and amazon, or web 2.0 valuations.
But welfare payments are paid according to need.

My understanding on Sanders' statement is that it could be paraphrased: "If walmart employes didn't get state welfare, waltons wouldn't be as rich, because they would have to pay more (employees who can't afford food and shelter can't work for you) ... ergo, walmart employees are, at the moment, practically, a conduit of welfare from the state to the waltons".

(That is how I understand his statement -- I don't agree or disagree, I don't know the details well enough to do either)
I read a comment once that the steel industry collapsed in the US because they failed to innovate or continuously improve (much like the Big 3 automotive companies).

Do you know of any concrete examples of this? or books about how US Steel lost?
There's nothing wrong with someone getting rich provided they contribute a proportional amount of value to society. Problem is that since the post-WII period (also called the Golden Age of Capitalism) such rewards have been happening less and less [1,2]. In fact, I think reducing inequality is essential for promoting productivity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_econ...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/US_produ...
> Amazon or Walmart, on the other hand... Some of these disruptive industries make a lot of people poorer by driving businesses into bankruptcy.

Amazon and Walmart make the poor richer, because they need spend a smaller proportion of their incomes on food & goods. That's why Amazon & Walmart out-competed the mom-and-pops of a generation ago.

This was bad for the owners of the mom-and-pop stores, but it was good for the poor: in fact, the only way it could happen is because the poor voted with their dollars.
> He is defending what he is doing and what Y-combinator has been doing.

But that is the straw man. Those of us who think extreme economic inequality is a bad thing do not think that YC is a bad thing, notwithstanding that it does contribute to economic inequality.

The problem is not YC, the problem is that extremely rich people use their money to buy political power, 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). It's the positive-feedback effect that this creates (more money -> more political power -> still more money) that is the problem, not YC, nor (obviously) the creation of wealth.
> People still got rich when the top tax percentage was 90%.

Yes; in a world of blind people, the one-eyed will be king. But the poor were much poorer then than now.
> Is there an actual model of light based on his work?

Yes: classical electromagnetism. It's an outrageously successful model of how light behaves. It doesn't predict photons, but that doesn't mean it's not an "actual" model of light.

You can include photons by taking Maxwell's equations and doing something called second quantization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_of_the_electromag...). That gets you quantum effects that can explain behaviors like shot noise, but it misses things like photon-photon scattering. (Nonetheless, I would still call this an "actual" model of light.)

Then there is full-on quantum electrodynamics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics), but that doesn't capture certain behaviors, like what happens to photons at the electroweak scale. But I would still call QED an "actual" model of light.
Sure, everybodys bias is painfully obvious here on HN.

But I don't think that negates the fact that to develop anything at all for OS X I have to buy a whole computer from Apple, since it's damn near impossible to get a stable OS X experience by running it in a VM or directly on non-Apple hardware. Furthermore, remotely accessing Xcode on a Mac from a non-Mac computer is really painful since the only option is VNC - the bottom of the barrel, lowest common denominator of remote screen sharing protocols.
A war in Europe could definitely happen, the outward unity belies the inner rivalries. There is also the option of civil war. Breakaway provinces wanna be nations, religious factions, old hatchets barely buried. The potential for war has never gone away.
It's not. At least not directly. PG touches on this at the bottom of his essay.

High income equality indirectly erodes social mobility because the ruling class rigs the rules to benefit their children. For example, in the 60s Ivies added ridiculous criteria such as "manliness" and height to discriminate against Jewish applicants. Today, schools reduce the weight of grades and tests to discriminate against Asian applicants.
But he's defending against a strawman. Almost no one is arguing for flat payment where everyone makes the same amount of money. What most want is equality for opportunity (something that YC and other VCs might give).

In many ways, startups and access to capital could be a great equalizer for opportunity equality. It allows individuals to control so much of their destiny. The alternative is to pass through a gatekeeper at some large company, spend years working up the ladder (if any progress is made at all) or even worse to not even be able to make it into that large company.

The problem is when wealth in one generation guarantees wealth in the next generation, and where upward mobility is nearly impossible. Opportunity equality is what almost everyone is pushing for, when they talk about economic equality. It's now possible to teach oneself to program and then make a six figure a year salary. It's now possible to start your own company and get funding in a way that just was never possible before. The problem is that opportunity equality right now is only limited to tech. In almost every other area the opportunity just isn't there.
"Dynamic memory allocation", not "direct memory access".
It's not clear to me that they would have to pay more. In previous generations people leaved in much worse poverty and still managed to show up to their various jobs.
The entire point of capitalism is to exploit individual's self interests for the betterment of society.

> those genes completely determine one's physical self

They also have an impact outside of one's physical self.
Shallow comment with no provided insight.

vs.

I read the comments on HN looking for the dissenting view as that's where I often appreciate the most value. I'd love to see you expand upon your reason for both disappointment and then provide some concrete counter examples that highlight Paul's lack of historical rigor.

Which of my comments do you prefer? (Note: I prefer the latter. Since you're the only dissenting view I've seen so far, I'm asking you to expound if you would, please.)
These sorts of discussions always go downhill because they very quickly turn into defending (and attacking) people as if their identity is inextricably linked to their wealth, which means that policy discussions are read (and sometimes written) as personal attacks. Can we do better than that, please?

I don't see a claim that any of these folks are bad people for their money. Gates, for instance, is doing extraordinary good in the form of philanthropy; it's a stretch to imagine that the "offensive economic inequality" is a judgment of his character (although you may be correct that parent's choice of word "offensive" was risky). There are grounds to criticize his richness based on the anti-competitive actions of Microsoft in the '90s, but his richness per se isn't valid grounds to condemn him.

What is to blame, what is "offensive," is a society that allows people to become fantastically wealthy like this. What would the harm for society be if, through whatever means, it was much more difficult to become this wealthy? Maybe it is high taxes on the ultra-rich, maybe it is an unwillingness to allow high CEO salaries, maybe it is a serious estate tax, etc. Is it really true that Gates, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin, etc. were motivated primarily by money to found Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.? If they had a 99% marginal tax rate once they have assets of $500M (on any form of gaining wealth), would we have a weaker Microsoft or Facebook or Google doing less good for the world because they wouldn't be working as hard? Would the good done to people on the lower end of the scale not outweigh any possible harm here? That seems hard to imagine.

And it is precisely because these people could be less rich that the comparison to racism feels ill-placed. A society biased against people of a particular race cannot make existing people cease being of that race, and preventing new people of that race would be grossly immoral. A society biased against billionaires can in good conscience make fewer people billionaires, and it can even prevent hereditary billionaires without any particular immorality (although I think most of the people on that list are self-made).
> I would certainly struggle to give up working for a year and try and bootstrap a startup from what I can save (it's possible but it would be tough).

Any risk is tough, otherwise it wouldn't be a risk.

And would Spain permit you to keep enough of the potential rewards to make it worth your while?

(as an aside, if you have enough saved that you could bootstrap a company, then you are rich in comparison to the vast majority of mankind throughout history and today)
Heh, who needs vi4gra when one can have an ultrasound touch [1]. Given the right modulation and frequency, I bet it can be very effective.

[1]http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2014/december/haptic-shapes-using...
SEEKING WORK

Location: REMOTE, interested in short or medium term projects

I'm a full stack software developer with most experience in back-end development(7+ Years of experience).

Python: (Pyramid, NLTK, web scraping)

PHP(Zikula, Slim)

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Show HN: ThreeJS Hot Module Replacement
That depends on the supply and demand ratios of wood and chairs. A chair isn't intrinsicly worth more than wood, and by making chairs you dilute the value of chairs.

If I make a trillion chairs, I'll have to drop the price of them to sell them, and the bottom will fall out of the chair market. Meanwhile, wood will become scarce and the price of that will go up. You'll probably even end up with an industry of people dismantling chairs into wood for use in other purposes.

So it's not a simple as "creating wealth" at all.
I think he was using a new acronym for Dynamic Memory Allocation rather than Direct Memory Access. I also was confused the first time I read it.
It's one metric. And yes, one of its weak points is that my student loans making me less wealthy than the debt-free homeless person is (of course) not the whole story. But that's one narrow slice.

On the scale of 80 people with billions upon billions vs. half of everyone else, it's hardly a disingenuous statistic.
> Have you seen a source that shows this to be true overall, or is this just in your area?

RootMetrics shows them improving coverage significantly, especially in the last 18 months.

In my area (entirely suburban + rural Michigan), they've more than doubled their native coverage footprint.

http://i.imgur.com/SG8ePYe.gif for a nationwide overview of the improvements.
I am sorry, I don't see how it follows. Even if such people exists in statistically significant quantities, a lot of people don't work for free at all.
This. Another way to express it is that for an interval [a, b], multiplying two numbers c, d within that interval will be within [aa, bb], and for 3 numbers [aaa, bbb], but it's super convenient to that for a=0 and b=1 these are always [0,1]. Other numbers would work, but would become cumbersome.
GRRM confirms GoT season 6 will air before book is released
> Globally the trend has been in the other direction.

I think that this is misleading. Every global culture is fragmenting, but the biggest fragments within countries tend to get along much better then they used to. There is a "global culture" now that contains a bigger share of humanity then ever before, but inside each nation it still looks like fragmentation.
PG used the system behind yahoo stores (which he wrote) to make the not-a-blog. It may serve HTML, it may very well generate it statically, but I am almost certain that he does not edit the layout by hand.
It's missing the one key thing every language site (particularly for upcoming languages) should have: a sample program right on the home page. Even if you click over to About, there's a YouTube video followed by what I gather is some kind of Flash file, followed by multiple offers to download a PDF of some slides. Really? Can't you just show me in plain text what the language looks like?
I do the same, but how long will it be until that's some sort of TSA violation that will get us on a list?
> the rise in inequality is a ntural [sic] consequence of fairness. I wonder, then, if those opposing the rise in inequality aren't like King Canute ordering the tide to recede.

The subset of people complaining about inequality that I actually take seriously[1] are concerned with its effects (for example, on the health of the economy[2]), not what the cause of the rise was relative to the previous era.

Another factor in the (reasonable) complaints has to do with the perception that income inequality is driven by (and driving) inequality of _opportunity_. Basically, the rising inequality is seen as an unfortunate side effect of a positive thing (the aforementioned "fairness"), and the good (IMO) proposed solutions involve increasing said fairness, instead of just rolling back to what we had earlier (warts and all).

[1] i.e., excluding the people who dislike it without any understanding of what its potential causes or implications might be (IME these people exist for every single possible POV). Included in this are people who think that we can magically re-create the economic environment of the 50s (wherein half the world had blown itself to pieces and the other half was emerging from under the heel of colonialism or being smushed by the heel of Communism).

[2] http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-imf-inequality-idUKBREA1P1P...
Seems like it might be a kind of survivorship bias. A hundred years from now, will people look at our era as one with a rich ecosystem of startups, or as one dominated by a half-dozen Facebooks and Twitters?
It's only me? because when people talk about inequality they are talking about poverty even if they are formally different things. If the lower income segment has good education, health, food, basic housing problem solved, transportation, basic services, and good opportunities based more on their capabilities than their connections the inequality discussion will be more about luxury.
Because those 80 people don't exist in a vacuum. Consider that there are probably tens of thousands of people required to facilitate the profound changes these few people made. This includes people in the food production chain, education (and as such, textbook publishers and paper manufacturers), and product manufacturing. I'm not even including the scientific advancements that made their change possible.

So yes, there is offense in the inequal distribution, when one unique snowflake controls 1% of the world's purchasing power, while roughly 1% of the world's population was required to make that power possible. Whether that offense is moral or evitable is a separate question, but I understand why people frame it as an offense.
> If this is true, then the children of billionaires would rise to the top even if they went to the same state schools and had the same resources/networks as everyone else.

No, because those private schools are part of the parents' choices about upbringing. Moreover, it's impossible for state schools to be good because it's politically impossible for state schools to teach unpopular truths.
Master should now be stable such that the console appears and you can type into it. You should also be able to Alt+Tab between the two shells.

Please note though, the codebase has been being transformed for the past 2 months and there's more work still to do which means most of the disk, file system and PCI stuff is unstable (related commands will cause the OS to freeze, crash or similar). We expect to be back to full functionality by March.
I think you mean 'condemns,' not 'condones,' rent-seeking.
And they keep trying to sell it.
"Democracy can be destroyed by wealth inequalities which then create power inequalities" : citation?
I really don't see your point.

Piketty shows (with data, by the way) that, below a percentage of economic grow, capital returns are bigger than labour returns.

The conclusion is that there is a trend (very important, it is a trend) to bigger inequality inherent to the system.

What do he propose? A communist revolution? The abolition of inequality by the proletariat?

No, just tax capital so we can redistribute it to all the society.

Of course, if you are a billionaire (except maybe Warren Buffet), you are always to be in favour of "laissez faire", that is, in favour of not changing anything. We are just right now like we should be. Everything is perfect, we don't want to kill innovation.
Seems really impractical. Better go use a distributed filesystem. Here's a little-known one that's used with supercomputers:

http://sector.sourceforge.net/
Pointers (smart or raw or whatever) get used when you need reference semantics. It's true that value semantics are usually better but not always (eg inheritance).

To be sure, though, being able to make proper value types is a strength of C++. Also we should point out most non-trivial value types make extensive (and necessary!) use of the heap under the hood (eg string, vector)
Opportunity has increased massively.

When I was a lad I got my hand on a great prize: a copy of Delphi 3 (already obsolete by then), which got me started coding. Today anybody can download much better tools (Visual studio, IntelliJ, etc for free). Any question you have can be searched on the internet, etc. Opportunity has increased _massively_ the last 20 years.
From the article, you don't hand the police your phone--you would authorize the officer via the app to view your license on their own device or laptop.
Good design == lower churn, higher LTV.
Exactly.

Warren Buffet has said an increased tax rate would not make him work any less hard.

The desire to change the world is a more powerful motivator than money.
Sure we do, but I also insist on paying healthcare and higher education for my neighbors (who I have never met) kids too.