skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From half a world away I wouldn't say his motives are "Machiavellian", but his style and the subjects he wrote about definitely changed just after reddit and especially YC became important, mostly for the worst/not-interesting.

I think I started reading his essays in 2004 or so, and he was a cool guy, not as cool as jwz, for example, but pretty interesting nevertheless because of his story of actually making some good money out of having used LISP (which back then was like a Nirvana-reaching thing, I mean, making big money out of LISP) and for being a programmer who was actually showing interest for other things outside programming, like Renaissance painting (Christopher Alexander and his Turkish rugs' patterns was also a thing back then among programmers).

But then reddit launched, YC was founded, somehow they started making money, and things like Arc and trying to make LISP a world-dominating language became things of the past. That's when his writings became a lot less interesting for guys like me, i.e. for average programmers who just wanted to read what other guys smarter than them had to say.
Political speech is jot forbidden as a whole, just political speech that appears directly related to an ongoing election.

For example, right now, you should be allowed to make a movie about how Reagan sucked, but not one about how Hillary Clinton will suck if she gets elected.
>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?

To look at just one example, how long did it take to force Amazon to collect the kind of sales tax that mom and pop shops had to collect from the start?
I don't understand the hate against Walmart. It only has a profit margin of 3.12% [1] and return on assets of 7.69%. Now I suppose you could argue that all the profits are hidden away somewhere, but that sounds like an unfalsifiable statement. It certainly would be illegal to hide assets from shareholders.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT
It turns out people aren't all equally talented or employable. Shocking, huh?
I was one of the earliest users, and if you could construct good Boolean searches, you could get good results. The thing about Google was that dumb searches worked very well.
If anyone is interested in PNG optimization in general, a wrote an article about it a while back. The deflate step is only one part of it!

http://heyimalex.com/journal/png-optimization
>He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM,

And on that, as on so much else, he's more than a little wrong.

Apple and Microsoft simply couldn't have happened without the mega-corps - not least HP, but also IBM, and Fairchild and its spin-offs - which only existed because of post-war military and civilian "socialist" state support for technology.

By the mid-70s that support had been influencing economic policy for more than forty years.

Apple was a product of that system, not a cause of it. Companies like Apple do not happen in a pure deregulated neoliberal market paradise because markets don't have the kind of strategic intelligence that can fund projects like Whirlwind, TX-0, and the original Arpanet - all of which are essential steps on the road to making an Apple or a Google.

>Absent a healthy middle class, which was created by the era of conformity and relative income equality, would there have been enough consumers to create a market for a $5k computer? As we see income inequality rise, are we not also going to see the opportunity for wealth creation diminish as capital congregates in the hands of a class that largely conserves it?

And this is why they can't happen. You can't build your economy by impoverishing your customers with hand-wavey idealism about "market rates." If you try that, at best you run out of customers, and at worst you get a violent revolution.

The smart way to understand the economy isn't as a number of acquisitive centres for a vague thing called "money", but as a way of amplifying collective intelligence and distributing the gains as widely as possible. Status games for their own sake - which include most purely speculative and acquisitive activity - are the opposite of collective intelligence because they concentrate acquisition instead of distributing it.

You can get localised negentropic blips in a speculative economy, but the overall trend will still decrease collective opportunity over the medium/long term rather than increasing it.
I'd argue it's been happening at a stead pace already. It happened at a "manageable" level when progressive taxation came into place for example. Sin taxes, luxury taxes, property taxes, estate taxes, emigration/exit taxes... All of these things are arguably a form of "have nots band[ing] together and say[ing] why don't we take some of that for us."
Say that a friend has started a new farm as a business and he's seeking investment.

That's really not a good example of what we're talking about here. A single family farm is not a profitable business at all. There was an HN story about it just a couple of days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10823747

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.

No you don't. He might get a bank loan, in which case he is actually paying a fee in order to borrow that money. Now, if you were talking about the profitability of people paying you to borrow money, now you're in the right ballpark. I hear it's quite a profitable business.

Look I'm not talking about hypothetical small business hand wavy stuff, I'm talking about the trillions of dollars floating around at the top end. Most of which is currently flowing into real estate, powering various bubbles around the world.

I'll give you an example: from what I understand, Larry Ellison doesn't actually sell his stock in order to buy islands. He uses it as collateral to secure a loan. Those loans (something like 10 billion dollars worth at this point) can be spent/invested/leveraged, but it's not directly taxable because it's a loan. That's the kind of thing that you can do when you have a few billion. You don't even have to spend your own money. The net increase in the value of his real estate holdings is more than enough to pay the interest. Now, try playing that game if you have zero billions.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-25/larry-elli...

No, they invest it in companies which use the cash to create wealth.

Apple isn't a good example either. Companies do get cash from IPO's. After that, having a valuable stock is certainly nice. Apple doesn't fund operations by selling their stock. If the stock doubles, Apple doesn't get that money. Indirectly, of course Apple does issue stock as bonuses to employees, and buys back stock to return cash to investors. If Apple was privately held they'd make just as much money. They don't need the stock at all, it's just a side benefit that they can take advantage of when they make compensation packages.
> It's not healthy for society and I don't see it ending
> up anywhere good.

It's a symptom. The disease is the dysfunctional system.
The fact that someone got ripped off in an interaction doesn't say this interaction was a zero sum. It only says that said interaction was unequal.

Generating value out of nothing and ripping people off are not necessarily incombinable things.
Regarding witnesses and lying. Check out this Ted talk https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fraser_the_problem_with_eyew...
> It's a smaller file to send over the wire, and the smaller the file, the faster the decompression.

Can someone elaborate on this? Why do smaller files decompress faster?

> However, remember that decompression is still the same speed, and totally safe

Wait, what? Didn't we just establish that it's faster to decompress?
Audi 100 with Wood gas generator Made in LATVIA
According to who/what? I've never heard of this framework, but a quick glance at the source and I find it hard to believe it comes close to Laravel's features. I guess it's the week to post about Node.js MVC frameworks with the whole Sails/Trails thing
The Secret Service is a federal agency. They are arguably a step up the ladder from the FBI. Their people do not come cheap. In this case they are being deployed against scammers who are filling homemade tankers with gas ... not big fish. (fyi, the Secret Service really really doesn't like the SS acronym. I made that mistake in a memo once. They are the one US agency without cool initials.)

It is almost always better/cheaper to prevent a crime from happening by removing the opportunity. Without bringing in spreadsheets and US federal budget reports, having the CC industry deploy a technological solution is cheaper than investigating, trying, arresting and housing these criminals. Gas pumps are expensive units, require regular service, and each move thousands of dollars worth of gas every day. A few bucks for the chip reader is no great burden.
As just one example, tax reform[1], punish companies with high gaps between their highest and lowest paid workers. It's quite easy to force companies to do things, you just change the rules. When a company does better, the benefits of that productivity should not all go to the top; the employees should share in the wealth they created. Companies who share their wealth with their employees would get more favorable tax rates. Incentives matter.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-cali...
I played a lot of aoe I and some 2 as a kid. Nearly 30 now and have not so much time for gaming. But the online streaming community is impressive and the skill level is high. Also there was a 120k tournament last year for a 15 year old game. It's very impressive.
It's not about big business vs small business. It's about wages. Big businesses are not inherently bad, but so long as they are beholden to shareholders because capital gains are more valuable than production, the more they are going to screw over workers to reward investors.
Let's be clear that Thomas Piketty's book has been thoroughly refuted, not in some minor way, but Thomas claimed that all he did was objectively looked at the data, and that the conclusion simply showed itself. Unfortunately he cherry picked data, and fabricated bits of history to make it fit his claim. The following paper does a great job of completely dismantling it.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2543012

Not to mention that most people haven't even read past the first few pages of the book, and yet they quote it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10951407/Has-an...
My best guess is that Graham writes these "essays" because he is, like a lot of us, simply the kind of dork who enjoys writing stuff like this.
>Do people really believe that it's only because of "rigged" rules that big employers are downsizing and shipping production overseas?

Well yes, of course. If the rules weren't rigged, companies would be downsizing to replace humans with machine-labor.
Yeah I was wondering the same thing.
yeah, I got angry halfway reading OP since I remember colah's article.

upvote for visibility and making sure colah gets credit for coming up with the idea first.

colah goes deeper and talks about how it relates to algebraic types from functional programming.
I completely understand that for existing projects it might not make sense to switch, but as I say at the start of the article

why you should consider D for your next numerical project.
Reddit thread.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3z1qmy/adonisjs...
The RaceCapture app is desktop (OSX, Windows, Linux) and Android: https://www.race-capture.com/software
AoE is great. I was so happy after they released the HD release. The bad part is that there is no native MacOSX version available :(
One interesting thing about watching companies implode in the rear view mirror is that often one person leaving is enough to start a chain reaction.

In one example in my career, a big employer was trying to change its culture, and set up a group to change its practices. Hired a lot of good, pretty expensive people. And it all worked well for a while, until one person decided that grass was greener somewhere else. Losing a teammate led to another, then another. The people that left had new employers, and happily recommended them. Others that were happy before were less happy with enough good coworkers gone, as management did nothing to special to keep them. In 6 months, everyone in that change initiative, and a lot of other employees they had contact with, were all gone. They ended up having to outsource everything said department was doing, because too much of the knowledge and expertise had left.

So beware when people leave, because coworkers leaving can a very common trigger for shields to go down.
That's absolutely true. But while physical laws just exist, "economic laws" are a complicated combination of biology, psychology, social norms, the legal system, etc.

You can tweak the rules, but you can't run calculations that predict the results. Some of those legal arrangements might be unjust, but their results might be net-good all the same. We can, and should, keep evolving the social bargain, but upending it completely is very dangerous.
Interesting. This was also announced yesterday:

https://github.com/trailsjs/trails
I live in France, I can tell you that most of the countries you list here built their wealth before building their huge welfare state and that it's now turned into a money losing machine nightmare which are being urgently reformed as you read this. It's also turned people against one another and created more racism for a simple reason. Given that the welfare state takes money from people and redistributes it to others by force, as the "others" grow larger due to immigration, people start to hate on immigrants for shrinking the part of the pie they think they deserve (even if the welfare state is responsible for more people being on welfare, not immigrants). A huge welfare state also discourages many people from working, making it more difficult for immigrants to integrate like they used to and creating tensions and resentment from the part of the population that works and the one that does not. This is why most Muslims in the US are well integrated while in Europe they are pushed into ghettos and victim of racism. All this because we believe that it's better for people to be unemployed than being on a lower wage when in reality it's the opposite.
The faster people realize this the better.

What does the technology look like for achieving these kinds of goals?
I believe in property rights to the extent that they benefit our society. That means that I don't believe in property rights as defined by the rich.
Seeking Jagger’s Muse
"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"

I'm sorry to tell you but you're a moron if you believe there isn't mass suffering when you are poor and low status. The amount of psychological abuse you take and feelings of self worth and being treated as subhuman by society and the business community at large, you are just wrong on so many levels. You depression and mental illness are induced by capitalist society because your status is directly related to cultural expectations about your ability to live up to the ideology of the culture you exist in, if you don't live up to it you will be ruthlessly not associated with. It effects your love life/dating life, etc... as in you won't have much of one because nobody wants to date/marry a poor person.

If you don't think that just as painful as slavery you're a grade A idiot.
> top 1% of the population, which owns more than the rest of the 99% combined

http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf

This study that I found (after just 3 minutes of googling, btw) says that top 1% own only 34.6%. Do you have a source for your figures?
You're talking to someone who has spent most of his life in the Fortune 50 - working with executives who routinely hide the bulk of their wealth from any accounting. These techniques have been widely discussed in the press (if you look). So I must assume that you have, for philosophical reasons, chosen to disbelieve that the rich hide their wealth.

Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted. But I was in the room as we reassigned profits to offshore entities for accounting purposes. And I was in meetings with our senior executives who were arranging to pay themselves in undervalued offshore stocks "off the books". Those offshores provided inflated services and inflated goods to the corporation and avoided taxation while making the executives rich. The value of those offshore stocks was "reinflated" with a phone call. And that is just one company - the Big 3 accounting firms provide these services routinely for both the corporation and its executives. (And when we reassigned profits that had the effect of lowering profits - and even making income disappear. I've seen these techniques used at more than one company.)
Some decent points, but why can't anyone acknowledge the centralization of capital?

Sure, Uber lobbies city mayors, but what about the financial system that gives $6.6B to a single startup? The inception of all problems.

Politicians and lobbyists? I'd worry about the Fed.
Internet charges on my American Express shoot me a notification as well.
Thank you. Glad you wrote this.
Weath is never created from nothing.

Nature is zero sum, economies are not valued in those terms because people prefer houses to trees etc.

But, be careful: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2569
> “The stations know they’re buying stolen gas,” Scarince said. “They’re fully aware the fuel is not coming from a legitimate source. There’s never any paperwork with the fuel driver, and these transactions are missing all the elements of a normal, legitimate transaction between what would be a refinery and a gas station.”

This seems like the easiest way to tackle this problem (aside from chip cards). I doubt it would take much pressure on these guys to get the market for this to dry up, or at least considerably reduce the profitability. I'd guess the gas station owners have a lot more to lose than the thieves actually stealing gas.
That's ridiculous because it eliminates all incentives to invest time in training.

Why would anyone risk harm and spend years training to be an expert welder when he/she will get the same results as some person that throws some seeds in the ground to grow food for 4 people?

The fact is that some people's work is more important than others. That's why society in general is willing to pay more. The kid that rips my ticket stubs at the theater doesn't deserve the same thing as a neurological surgeon that spent the first 30 years of life in training.
Wow, you're right. I've published a correction.
> Do you believe in property rights?

Not the OP, but I think a lot more people nowadays should read (or re-read) Locke's "Two Treatises of Government". That book is famous mostly for the second part, where Locke actually intellectually imposes private property as a thing in the Western world, but I found the first part equally interesting, where Locke fights against a guy called Filmer, who was of the opinion (prevalent until then) that all property was rightfully owned by the King, transferred to him from generations past since Adam.

The thing I'm trying to say is that yes, private property is just a social construct, there's no divine nor moral thing about it, the concept came alive (so to speak) only because some guys in England didn't like that their possessions were in danger of being confiscated by the King's men.

In the end private property is indeed theft, more exactly the imposition of someone's moral values over the other's by intrinsic force (if you "steal" you might go to prison or worst). The sooner we realize this the better, there's no second-guessing about it.
Did you even read the link I gave?
You're right, they didn't. I've added a correction.
In short: running a firewall VM as an ML unikernel saves RAM, increases security. Source code available.
Except that the station owners don't even see this as theft. The gas is sold. They get the money. That, or insurance pays for this crime perpetrated upon them. It is the CC issuer who most often takes the real hit.
> replaced

This word implies creation of new jobs, but all examples that you discussed in the rest of your comment seem to be about the jobs that already exist, not new ones.
> You need to go one step further and outline where and how
> the federal government should put this new tax revenue to
> work.

Bernie Sanders's fine proposals probably make a good baseline.
It's happening. And not only for StarCraft =)

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id...

http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id...
If it's a default response for you (the generic you, not you specifically) to say it rather than think through the problem...I mean, that says a lot about societal awareness, and I can't really find much sympathy for that, but you're right in that some well-meaning idiots might view it as a surface-level thing. But those well-meaning, superficial people aren't in the discussion in the first place. Even Hillary Clinton--who should have known better--isn't going to BLM events explicitly as counter-protestors to chant "All Lives Matter" at them. Right now, as 2016 opens, "All Lives Matter" is the dog whistle of dog whistles.
> If my sister wants to buy her new phone with bitcoin she should be able to do so.

She doesn't, so give her real money.
"Others will say I'm clueless or being misleading by focusing on people who get rich by creating wealth—that startups aren't the problem, but corrupt practices in finance, healthcare, and so on. Once again, that is exactly my point. The problem is not economic inequality, but those specific abuses."

Given the 2001 dot-com fiasco and the frequency of ratchets in fundraising I'm surprised that Paul would make an argument that the abuses of finance are separate from the start-up world. In the current system, startups are frequently treated as an investment vehicle by specialized finance firms. There is a lot of moral hazard in the valley that Paul seems to ignore in his piece.
The Little Old Lady from the Upper West Side: How the New Yorker Stays Relevant
Which banker should have gone to jail, and for breaking what law?
Oh I'm a big fan of NASA and think we ought to spend a lot on space since it's the future, but that doesn't change the fact that the Shuttle and the ISS were terrible investments. For one thing, the shuttle could lift only a fraction of what the Saturn V (used for Apollo and Skylab) lifted. In fact, Skylab actually had more space than even the largest module on the ISS (almost 2x) and was launched all in one go with a Saturn V.

Think about that: Skylab was bigger and was launched in a single day by a Saturn V. It also only cost $2.2 billion vs $150 billion for the ISS. If we had stuck with Saturn V's and the Skylab solution, we could have around 50 space stations right now--as opposed to just one. Or better yet, we could have colonies on Mars, and deep space manned missions (remember...the ship in 2001 A Space Odyssey wasn't supposed to be science fiction), and many more super-sized space telescopes, and who knows what else.

Anyway, I look at what we've done with NASA for the past 40 years compared to what we could have done and I can't help but feel like we squandered an incredible opportunity.
> They built something that people wanted.

What about people that produce heroine? Run casinos? Magic weight loss pills? Free-to-play games?