skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People aren't asking for "income equality" they are asking for some level of humanity and democracy to be restored to our version of Capitalism, to strengthen that capitalism.

That phrase could mean anything in practice that anyone wants it to mean. If we're going to discuss these things, we should be specific. What specific policy is desired, and how is it going to help? "Humanity" and "democracy" are not economic policies, nor are they specific enough goals to design policies around.

I am unsure whether economic equality is a goal that we should strive toward. I wonder if a better measure for our economy would be how well off people are at each place in the distribution. Almost all middle class people in America today still have really nice TVs, mobile phones, Internet, etc., which suggests that their standard of living is quite good in absolute terms. We should be looking at absolute terms, not relative terms.

Taxing the wealthy has undesirable effects. It's not as if wealthy people take their money and put it under their mattress. No, they invest it. That investment money flows to other corporations who then spend it on goods and services, or spend it on their employees. All of the wealth that the rich accumulate makes its way back into the economy, except it's at the direction of the rich according to their investment decisions. The alternative, if you tax the rich, is that the same money flows to the government and the government spends it on programs.

That's certainly valuable, and I believe it makes sense for the government to have tax revenue to spend on its programs, but I don't necessarily think that more revenue for more programs will lead to better results. I'd rather that we spend substantially less on wars, for example, and redirect that money into infrastructure for our own country.

Take the F-35 development program - the government has basically thrown over a trillion dollars down the drain (I'm being hyperbolic, but it's really pretty bad). A trillion dollars!! The government would have plenty of tax revenue to spend on smart infrastructure investments if it stopped throwing money away on programs like that.

I'd hazard a guess that wealthy investors through their investments are more effective at creating wealth and raising the standard of living in the country than the government is (on a marginal basis from where we are today). Investors are far better at examining where their money goes, what effect it has, and doubling down on investments that demonstrate promising results, and pulling the plug on pointless ones. The government by comparison keeps burning more and more money on programs that are clearly ineffective - examine the Healthcare.gov or F-35 boondoggles. Private investors do better. Let them keep their money to invest it smartly.
I would not discount the influence of their lobbying efforts.

The Koch's helped to drag the debate so far to the right that even the Democrats look like a conservative party.

Perhaps their money won't buy them the party they want - but it certainly will kibosh any talk of significant tax increases on the wealthy, or single payer health care.

(disclaimer: I am from Canada - so an outside observer of US politics).
I traveled internationally with my T-mobile phone and had a few co-workers with me. One had Verizon, one Sprint. I told them I had free international roaming and they simply could not believe me. They told me, I didn't read my contract right and I'll be getting a huge bill at the end of the month. Nope, no bill, it was free and we used it too (Google maps, Uber, other stuff).
Haha, nominally affordable. Thanks to Obamacare, my health care premium went up 30% and everyone in my family had to change primary care doctors, including my kids, who'd been seeing the same pediatrician for 16 and 18 years.
But you can generate them with macros. The Boost preprocessor library can help a lot.

At work we use kind of a hybrid approach. We have generator macros that spit out named tuple classes that use a bunch of magic and template meta-programming.

It should go without saying that the macro implementation is ugly and only a few people understand it very well, but we don't have to change them much any more, and the resulting named tuples are easy to use and generally work exactly as expected.
This is basically the architecture of Arvados Crunch: http://arvados.org
I get the feeling the air is quite thin up in the ivory tower PG must be living in these days :)
Government run social welfare programs are actually pretty efficient since they have huge economies of scale [1].

[1]http://www.cbpp.org/research/romneys-charge-that-most-federa...
>Furthermore, the wealth inequality cryoshon is writing about is not driven by startups, it's driven by a general breakdown in the implicit social contract between capital and labor. As OP notes, Piketty goes into great detail about the historical causes and likely effects, but the tl;dr (and his book is _very_ tl) break down to: when returns on capital are higher than overall economic growth, wealth will tend to aggregate.

Yes, this is exactly it. I also agree re: Piketty being quite verbose... many of the same old points rehashed again and again.
"Nobody is suggesting that we “prevent people from getting rich” or “end all economic inequality”."

FWIW, I've met tons of people who suggested this. Eg., at Google, I had a co-worker who was probably the best programmer on our team. He loudly and repeatedly argued for socialism (he literally used the word "socialism"), and for government seizure of all private property over some low-ish threshold per person. He very strongly believed that no one could ever earn the right to be rich, and that rich people were so bad for democracy that well-run countries shouldn't have any.
Well, they have to balance (dis)pleasing both the old users and the new users. Not everyone will be happy, even those that may benefit later on have no way of voicing opinion based on the satisfaction that is yet to come.

On the human side, people do not like to stare at glaring mistakes all the time, if they can do something about it -- having weighed the cost associated with the change.

In 20 years if python is still a thing, it likely will not be because it was designed right from the get go. It will be because it changed enough to stay relevant despite the fact that some changes may have left incompatibilities in their wake. Users have to live with that.
I disagree. I think these services have significant values in our life, and switching them off is a bad idea.

Instead we need are other services that does the opposite of Facebook. Instead of containing us in a bubble it will help us exploring the diversity of internet; it will take us to the least visited corners of the web and introduce us with new people and new thoughts.
Here's an upvote.

Consider your audience. This is a message board with the startup crowd as their target audience. They are not risk averse by definition.

If you have certain obligations where stability is an absolute must then I understand, otherwise you got to take chances in this world to grow.
When jobs move from a developed / high wage country to one with cheaper labor, they effectively disappear. That pattern then repeats until the job finally ends up in the least regulated sweatshop in the darkest corner of the planet. Eventually automation will 'outsource' that job too, thereby completing the defragging process.

Does another job necessarily arise to replace each lost job? That's a question that only a religious person would answer.
Yeah, I submitted this article not because I think pg needs to have vitriol heaped upon him as much as the article really missed the meat of the issue and this was a good response.
But I think reasons that are directly related to the job are the only things that belong in this list. If your "shields down" moment is caused by some factor that is external to the job it's really outside of your manager's control.

His job as a manager doesn't really include making sure your children don't get sick, or convincing you that California weather isn't that nice, or that you don't really want to have the life goal of starting your own company. I'd saying restricting the list to questions that a manager could have an impact on is more valuable than a more generic list that encapsulates everything.
Any hacker working in San Francisco can take a look outside and see the rampant inequality our industry is surrounded by.
I'll give a short explanation as to why I flagged this:

This piece irrationally pisses me off, for purely petty social dynamics reasons.

1) There's a first-mover advantage to thinkpiece responses. Everyone obviously is going to read the first response, many people are probably writing responses of their own. This seems like a quick way to jump into a discussion and say "hey, look at me!" You better have something useful to say.

2) It's just a really poorly thought out response. It rehashes basically the same points everybody knows, adding zero new information or insight, without responding to the meat of what Paul's saying.

3) There was a time when I sincerely believed Hacker News was the one place to go to escape from petty thinkpiece nonsense. It continues to sadden me to see this community in decline. PG should start another website.
"Cut page load time by 90%" is also an accomplishment.
Seems I was born around the same time and this is how I remember it too.

Another major economic factor he seems to have left out is government policies encouraging (sometimes actively) the US manufacturing base to leave to other countries. This utterly destroyed the formerly thriving US manufacturing-based small businesses, eliminating a huge percentage of semi-skilled jobs in the process.
> I really think we are headed for bloody revolution, because most of the populace are angry, and its a rational anger because their survival needs are barely being met, in many cases.

From someone who grew up poor and identifies strongly with outlaws, I concur.

But unlike OP I think it needs to happen.
I'm curious about the name "Native American Indians". I had thought that "Indians" was the old-fashioned name for those who lived in the Americas before 1492 and that "Native Americans" was a replacement for that name.

"Native American Indians" suggests that the nomenclature is more subtle than that. So, what is the difference between "Native Americans", "Indians", and "Native American Indians"?
> However I’m not living into the illusion that I got everything right in the first release, so it will take months (or years?) of iteration to really reach the operational simplicity I’m targeting.

It's always refreshing to hear such good programmers acknowledging how hard building complex systems is.
Nice concept. It is good to question whether what you are doing is really worth it. Seems to me one of the challenges going forward with personal management is to not only set goals, but also to set constraints. What the author is doing is setting constraints by explicitly limiting the amount they can consume. That frames up the problem as to what to consume and what is more valuable to consume.
> It's missing a lot of basic scripting language functionality (e.g. wrappers over libc functions).

What libc stuff are you missing? (I'm rather interested in the answer to this question! :) )

It's entirely possible that the functions that you want are available in the Erlang standard library, which can be trivially accessed from Elixir.
As long as tmo doesn't adopt DT's peering policy, I'll be happy.
Malaysia Holding Back Visas from Israel Table Tennis Team
As a response to PG's article, I posted this:

>PG is wrong that he is a creator of economic inequality. Technology development usually brings prices down. This is deflationary; the 'big picture' way that deflation happens: that prices are discovered more efficiently, or resources are used more efficiently, or that idle labor capacity is recruited to fulfill a want or need that was not known before (esp: think uber/lyft).

>Deflationary processes are inherently anti-inequality. Think of it this way. If we never changed the minimum wage, then people's incomes, especially at the bottom segment of society would make their net economic potential greater over time.

>It is not the investment in technology that makes "tech drive inequality". It is the political structure around it. We have a structure where monetary policy shoves free or cheap money into the faces of banks and the investment classes in efforts to 'stimulate' the economy, where the secular (over decades, not over years) inflation drives low- and middle- class citizens into risky investment activity just to be able to sustain themselves in their later years (effectively a subsidy for the rich).

"families often consist of two breadwinners (& no children) with a hearty amount of debt, nothing owned, and few savings. The family unit itself may even be weaker because of less shared ownership. Wages haven’t tracked productivity for decades, so wages haven’t risen since the previous story was normal."

Is this because of rapacious capitalists taking wages? The nominal wage has increased since the early 70s, but the purchasing power of that nominal wage has gone down faster than the increase. This is policy, not capitalism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/opinion/krugman-not-enough...

Policy wonks like to argue that the fed should "pay more attention to employment". The irony is that if you think that people are consigned to being wage slaves, a national policy of total employment is keeping people there. There is a cost to getting people employed, and that is that those who are employed are going to be paid less, and the way you trick people into that is by making what people earn be less, even for the same or greater nominal amount ("sticky wages argument").

What happened in the early 70s? Prior to the nixon shock we had wage increases leading inflation and a trending toward decreasing of the wage gap that had momentum enough to continue till about the 2000s (if you think about it that momentum makes sense because entrants into the workforce in the 70s started retiring in the 200s) - during the bush/obama era we see income inequality turning the corner.

While we are certainly trending towards getting worse things actually are not that bad:

http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/d823a614-9e82-11e5-b4...

Everyone is worried about the far right side of the graph (which is partially a histogram artifact) but look at the left hand side of the graph and see how the lowest income fraction of society is far less populated than 40 years ago. (yes, between 2008 and 2015 it is getting worse, which is cause to worry)
Amazing how he can describe the post-war era (an era, including the 50s and 60s remembered as a period of ever increasing prosperity, integration, intellectual achievements, scientific and technical progress, powerful movements of social change, job security, every generation having it better than before, etc.) as some kind of "equality disaster".

Yeah, we're moving past it now, but towards something that resembles the pre-war years of robber barons, crony capitalism, and maybe even share-cropping (in modern form) more than some glorious future.
Getting Scrooged: Poor People Pay More for Christmas
The article seems to overlook the fact that most of the 'value added' is created out of thin air and people can only tolerate so much bs. So while something like the value of Facebook likes is not immediately stealing money from ikea furniture it is taking the attention away, there is still a finite pool of brains and eyeballs and people only have so much attention span. It's not like you can create value ad infinitum without adding eyeballs or resources. Hence Facebook 'Internet Basics' attempts and such
Because they're Old Guards.
As an engineer, you should be familiar with chaotic systems, which produce vastly different trajectories based on small changes in initial conditions. Very simple mechanical systems[1] exhibit chaotic tendencies. Control of such systems is possible on the small scale, but large scale chaotic systems may become uncontrollable.

Now imagine an economy made of millions of people who all have different needs, desires, abilities, environments, intelligence, etc. How accurately can you predict how a single policy decision will shape the trajectory of such a collection of people? Now the State pushes thousands of policy changes per year into the system without ever really monitoring the response to a single change.

> many economists throw up their hand and say macro economics is too tough and we just can't predict how it will work

The smart ones do, but the mainstream Keynesian school have the hubris to think they can predict the responses of millions. Most Western leaders have been advised by Keynesian economists for much of the 20th century, and the decisions of those leaders have caused vast displacement, pain, and suffering in the form of economic turmoil and war.

Remember, the State is also an economic actor, and it derives its income by coercive force. Progressive taxes simply point a bigger gun at the heads of those who perform better in the economy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum
Hewlett-Packard, founded in 1939, in a Palo Alto garage. By academics. They were educated at Stanford, go figure.
> So, just as "All Lives Matter" is not a good response to the "Black Lives Matter" movement,

It's tangential, but can you please explain this part? It seems to me that "All Lives Matter" really is the more apt phrase, because it shifts the focus from an us-versus-them conflict to actual justice.

Edit: Got it. I'll stop being part of the problem. The only remaining question is this: What's the most effective way to be part of the solution?
You do understand that this is basically the argument that slaveowners used to justify continuing slavery in the 19th century?
Wealth inequality may be seeded by value creation but it's perpetuated by (compound) interest. At the end of any time period, those who start with more money end with even more money.

Investing in startups creates wealth equality in so far that it increases the return on investment (interest) that investors (those who start with the money) achieve.
Got this far and stopped reading:

To quote Graham, mafioso of the startup incubators:

I have lots of valid reasons to be really grumpy about lots of things. I am also not a fan per se of PG. But any supposed debate that starts by basically smearing the character of the person you are debating is unlikely to be based on sound, objective reasoning. This piece is almost certainly not motivated by a desire to correct any logic missteps in pg's writing. It is most likely a thinly veiled excuse for trying to trash the man personally.
I am in my current job thanks to a who is hiring thread!
Yeah, that one dude's argument totally characterizes the entire progressive wing of the Democratic party...
Narcissistic pricks. Not only do you have to be saving the world, but as it turns out, you have to be causing all of the problems as well.

You Silicon Valley cunts have managed to begin asphyxiating yourselves from shoving your heads up your own assholes too far.

Go read Thomas Sowell[0], and stop wasting everybody's time with your self-righteous publicized ego deaths.

—
[0]: http://www.worldmag.com/2014/12/thomas_sowell_on_the_root_ca...
First, I will admit that it is extremely hard to know who wants to do something to get rich, but I can tell you that during the 3 years I spent at a buy-side finance company, no one ever talked about their personal wealth or making money at work. It was always fund performance, risk mitigation, etc. Maybe that was just the culture, but I met many people at different firms and I feel like it was pretty much universal.

People that work in finance can "Do well" in many industries. Most people who work for big companies in any management / technology capacity "Do well". There is a massive difference between "Get Rich" and "Do Well"
How about "no politician in the mainstream with any sort of influence or power" is suggesting that? How about "not even Bernie Sanders" is suggesting that?
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There is a common argument that by increasing taxes or redistribution, economic activity of entrepreneurs would go down. But I think this argument is false and can be empirically falsified.

If you think about taxation, ultimately it reduces the pie of money that the entrepreneurs compete over. For instance, 50% taxes reduce the pie to half. The pie is roughly given by the size of the economy (market for the thing). However, in the real world, we don't see economic activity depend too much on the market size. In particular, we don't see small countries to have less economic activity (per capita) than big countries.

That means size of the pie doesn't actually matter very much as an incentive for entrepreneurship. So you can have almost any level of taxation and people will still do it.
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I am a Big Data Expert with 15 years of experience. I started my Big Data experiences at Yahoo! over 9 years ago. I started a AdTech company sold to AOL, Director at AT&T, VP of Product at Sociocast and CTO/Founder at Nvent. Advisor to Concurrent Inc

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