skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not "watch TV instead of programming", watch TV before bed instead of programming.

I have to do this. I've got a zone of about an hour before my usual 11pm sleep time where if I'm programming, I will not get to sleep until around 2-3am, and the next day will be at least subpar and possibly worse. Sometimes I get so into it that I just don't notice and end up blowing past it, and I pay every time.

It's actually kind of nice to have an hour where I can read for light entertainment or watch some video content or something and do so guilt-free by even the most rigorous standards of productive time use, because I don't have anything net productive I can do in that time. In fact, budgeting entertainment into that time slot is just about the most productive use of that time.
IMO, this was principally expressed in raised real estate price/value.

Some of this is hedonic in nature; if you watch "Fargo" second season, you see in pretty good detail how people lived 35 years ago. I'm pretty sure this would be considered something much more like poverty now. Of course, I'd be ignoring any inflation in price of the homes shown, by design.
The hell are you talking about? The argument could easily be made that AirBnB exists because of the efforts of the YCombinator team. It's not like Paul Graham is personally just sitting back and collecting money. He works hard to advise and provide seed capital to hundreds of startups at year, at a stage when their success is far from guaranteed.

For whatever you think about his views on income inequality, it's difficult to make the case that he's rent seeking.
Sacred Reading: From Augustine to the Digital Humanists
> Defending against a strawman

That is what I was saying too. I wasn't being direct though.

Yes he is defending against a strawman to bolster his position and to justify and bring context to a certain narrative that revoles around startups. It makes sense to create these PR stories so to speak, masked as simple blog posts, to provide conext and interpretation for those who follow him.
> While the current system, at least in the USA, is not perfect, it is still better than other systems tried in other countries.

No one said it wasn't.

> Things that I would fix is decrease corruption as much as possible.

As would I.

> What you are advocating is communism.

No it isn't, tax reform is not communism, I suggest you bone up on what communism actually is before continuing this conversation, nothing I said is in any way communist.

> I don't want to sound harsh but there really are people that deserve what's coming to them. In my high school too many kids wasted their time while trying their best for me to also waste my time. They had all these incredible opportunities to better themselves and still ended up as losers destined to work minimum wage. And now you are saying that that is unfair and they deserve more. I think not. They deserve what they work for.

You are suffering from the just world fallacy.
Since when is "Darwinian" synonymous with "zero sum"? Even social Darwinism, a corruption of Darwinism, isn't zero sum.
>"We should think about all the variables an outsider might bring to our attention, and then about how to embed that outsider perspective as an integral part of our organizational culture."

>How many times has this question been asked, with the common answer of "We do, and then ignore or dismiss 'the outsider'"??? Far more than most care to admit I suspect.

What makes this so interesting to me is that this seems to a property of social systems in general (individuals included). There is a constant push/pull of "maintenance of identity" and "importing novel information from the environment." Take "human conversation" or "argument" as an analogue of this situation and you come to the same conclusion: people prefer to maintain their identities/boundaries/opinions/perspectives/etc.

And you're right, the answer to that question is overwhelmingly negative in reality: that seems like the point that the author is making. Something about how "innovation" involves the way that organizations and outsiders generate interdependencies/come into conversation.

Very interesting article (I need to read this a couple more times).
I agree with you. He's the right person to engage in a dialog.
It's not just China:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/02/internet-cen...

I still remember when Google exited China and Microsoft tried to take advantage of that by being an even bigger lapdog than it was before to the Chinese government. Unfortunately for Microsoft, that didn't even work in gaining it more market share, so it may have been trying to please its Chinese masters for nothing:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-china-insight-id...

Of course, when Google got hacked back in 2010, it was through its own voluntarily setup PRISM-like access point for the NSA, so I guess there are no "innocent" parties here. It's still disappointing to see these companies making it easier for governments to control/arrest/assassinate their citizens through censorship and surveillance. Hopefully history will not look with favor upon these actions (although IBM still seems to be doing pretty well decades later after its Nazi genocide collaboration and Cisco is still making a lot of money after starting to sell surveillance-enabled routers in China and worldwide many years ago).
It's a useless way of thinking because many things seem natural until they're proven not to be. We though being tied to terrestrial transportation was natural for a very long time, but it turns out there's no natural law preventing human bodies from taking flight after all.
His point was not about blacks, whites, or even the Civil War.

> Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person.

There is a difference between "slaves" in the popular sense (chains, beatings, whips, rape), and "slaves" in the economic sense, but both are premised upon the unjust abrogation of freedom at the hands of another.

This article describes the latter case quite well:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/the-new-american-sla...
... and this is a real professional talk. I'm tired of newbies being baselessly overconfident...
Elkington Lab
> Yes, and these incentives are likely to cause companies to use subsidiaries and contract workers

Only if the proposed change in rules contains such glaringly obvious loopholes; but I doubt that'll be the case, as the people trying to solve the problem have thought about it for more than 5 minutes.
And here we have a case of why microbenchmarks don't work. What you're measuring here isn't a speed difference in the mathematical code, its a constant time overhead from calling into the numerical libs. Up your array size by 100 times and this will become evident.

Why do I say this? Because inlining the python function to

means = numpy.mean(numpy.arange(100000).reshape((100, 1000)), axis=0)

from the original example in the article cut the benchmark time in down from around 215us to 205 us in my testing. That was done by removing a single python bytecode instruction.

Its quite likely that the D numerical code is actually slower than the LAPACK based python numerical code, but you're hiding this in the constant time overhead of a few python function calls.
Support orgs and networking groups are really vulnerable to this kind of bullshit when the line management is too comfy or someone clueless or inexperienced is put in charge without adult supervision.

One place a support manager told me that he couldn't keep his indcident queue under control without 10-15 more people. The tickets weren't being assigned and the staff was doing nothing. (The manager dude was trying to get people promoted and gumming up the works for ticket assignment)

Another case a network org had a 20 business day turnaround time for trivial firewall changes. The average request took 40 calendar days, and a small sampling we did showed that many had to be reopened several times -- in one case a DBA's request took ~200 days from open to close.
It is much older than this. People have started to come up with all kinds of differentiable structures ever since they've found out that the leaning rule back-propagation of error can be derived using the chain rule in the early 1980s or so.
Whenever I have a chance to learn some of these legal means of avoiding excessive taxation, I do in earnest. I see very wealthy people and it only drives me to emulate their business and investment strategies more. There are more than enough legal means of structuring your businesses, transactions and investments in ways that drastically reduce taxation. I made it about 4 years without paying any state or federal income tax. True it took a lot of work and planning, but the income retained was more than worth the effort.
US median wages aren't low compared to Western Europe. Modestly lower than the Nordic countries yes, but modestly higher than France and Germany and so forth.
You use this if you want to _appear_ smart, and you use structs if you actually _are_ smart. Smart programmers do not introduce gratuitous complexity into their code.
I once tried to sell a car like this. I put an ad in the paper that said, say, $6000 and dropped it in price over time. It didn't sell.

Years later when I went to buy a house the real estate agent explained to me why. The market for houses (and presumably cards) include lots of people who are watching and waiting for months or years to buy. They get into a steady state where they only look at new listings and ignore the ones they've already seen.

So if your house or car doesn't sell relatively quickly, you move from the seller-arrival queue to the buyer-arrival queue. Which takes disproportionately longer and it's likely that you won't be getting the best price for it.
Yeah, but I expect that to be rather expensive, requiring high tax rates with limited chance for evasion with everybody who bothers to work. The fact that it never seems to have been implemented on any large scale also makes me think it's unpopular, perhaps due to people not wanting to subsidise people who choose not to work.
I'm sure it can be done. This was just my experience... how long did it take for his first job?
Exactly, simple rule changes like that could radically alter society. Not that I agree or disagree, but that example does support the main point, the rules matter and can be changed.
The GP's point was that Bill Gates is essentially in a sample size of 1.

Comparing him with the others may be inaccurate.
Did they try to keep you on board when you announced you were quitting, or was it the case of "okay, see ya" because they don't need you? My current company makes it very easy to switch teams at the boundaries of a release if you can find a team you want and that wants you (and has headcount), which is a lot easier than actually searching for a new job while still getting you out of toxic teams/hierarchies. I'm not sure how common this is at other BigCos.
I almost skipped your comment as I misread as Church. Looks like a great project!
More casualties of the Cloud.

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/meet-walking-dead-hp-cisco-dell...
Why /s? That's actually a really good question.
Not justice, nor healthcare, housing, education, or political influence. But when it comes to sugar water Virginia yes it's true: we're all equals.
So this is the game I played years ago. Thanks. I found demo of this game on one of the cd that came with Digit mag.
Luck is far more than just opportunity though; luck is also all the things that didn't happen that could have, things that caused others who followed the exact same path to fail. Sudden disease, unexpected deaths and disasters, all of which are invisible luck for those who haven't been affected by them.
Flying a drone with apple watch hand gestures
> And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?

Honestly, does it even matter? Everybody knows all politicians are liars. It's common knowledge; it's beyond being a trope and basically a synonym. But then somehow a large part of the population still cares about what politicians have to say. They know that the politician they oppose is full of shit, and yet they feel obliged to engage with said politician's arguments. And they support another politician, conveniently forgetting that... he is a politician too, so he won't make good on their promises.

Basically, everyone got the memo. Those who were to heed it have already done so.

This is something that confuses me about humanity. The amount of denial and cognitive dissonance going on in general population's interaction with politics is so great you could fuel a power plant with it.
A phrase used repeatedly throughout is "creating wealth". This is contrasted with "zero-sum game" to get rich. Does anyone have a precise definition of "creating wealth"?
weirdly this is the most useful insight to me of a insightful article

[6] I wonder how much of the decline in families eating together was due to the decline in families watching TV together afterward
Yeah but perpetuating a clear delusion isn't healthy for any group of people.
Depending on how you look at it, this idea has been around for a long time. At least since the 1980's it's been known that functional programming can be considered the logical basis of all of math [0]. A hardliner might even say that the notion that all math is functional programming goes back to the 1920s with Brouwer.

In particular, optimization, being a branch of math, is itself a type of functional programming. Similarly, neural networks are functional programs. Programming with differentiable functions as a field on its own goes back at least as far as the 1960s. Closely related ideas like algebraic topology go back to the 1890s (this would be programming with continuous functions rather than differentiable).

The language of type theory is typically the province of computer science. The corresponding language in math is category theory. There are a few mathematicians who have been working on a categorical theory of neural networks. But this is pretty far from a mainstream research area.

Perhaps with people like Colah and Dalrymple pointing out these connections from a more applied point of view, these ideas will pick up steam.

[0] There is are technical caveats here that aren't interesting when talking about math that can be done on computers.
I like social democracy. (I was just establishing the burden of proof, not taking a position.)

I'm skeptical that America has enough social cohesion for such a thing to be fully implemented here. Literacy and median wages are fine for the white majority, so we've got most of the trappings of a social democracy for white America. Why would Americans use the state to benefit all people when Americans aren't even willing to put agents of the state on trial when they kill unarmed black people?
Employment Trends of the Hogwarts Houses by Industry
It can all be reduced to the problem of man-made law. It is wide open to abuse. So, yes, the ultra-rich abuse man-made law to make more money. But then again, machine guns easily overrule money. That is why there are now islamic insurgencies, in 30+ countries, of which the primary purpose is to get rid of man-made law (and to establish their favoured alternative). The problem goes way beyond the distribution of income. At some point, everybody who believes in the legitimacy of man-made law will have to prove that he is willing to risk his life and die for what he believes in.
> But is it wrong for a rich person to hoard wealth, or to spend only on luxuries for themselves? Why do they have to "contribute to society"?

Well, in a non altruistic and Ayn Rand inspired world, rich folks don't owe us anything but MORE IMPORTANTLY we don't owe them anything either.

I mean no bailouts, no tax breaks, no "Job Creators" incentives in public policy, no privileges or special treatment whatsoever. We're all equals and we all should be treated as such!

It was a gigantic public policy catastrophe all the 2008 bailouts extended from the US taxpayer to Wall St. that they used to preserve their wealth and then denigrate the general public for not being as successful as them when it was the general public that saved their asses in the first place.
Many of us do not like the term native american. Native, related to nativity, means born somewhere. When we use this term other people will inevitably say, "Hey I just realized something, I'm a native american too - I was born here just like you."

Use of the term Indian is considered rude in Canada where "First Nations" is widely accepted as the preferred term. However, Canada did previously use Indian, such as their law known as the Indian Act. The term "Aboriginal" in Canada has generally replaced Indian in legal and formal contexts outside of the Indian Act to inclusively refer to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples collectively.

In the US, American Indian, Indian, and Native American are all used. Among younger indians NDN, and Skins are popular endonyms. These terms probably should not be used by those who are not Indian themselves though unless they have been given the go ahead, any more than one would use the term "homeboy" inappropriately.

In both US and Canada indians generally prefer the names of their nation when dealing with issues specific to a particular nation or their own culture. But there is also a need for a term to distinguish indigenous peoples of the americas collectively, hence Indian, American Indian, West Indian, and First Nations.

Why do we use an english word? Because there are hundreds of different indigenous american languages represented. English is now a commonality in the US and when we use the term we often do so when we find ourselves speaking the English language to someone. Historically, there was no one term used by all nations that had the same sort of meaning. Many of our native languages don't use any term exactly like "indian" in meaning. However, in many native languages of what is now called the United States, our own word to collectively refer to the original peoples of Turtle Island, distinguishing us from the invaders and occupiers (sometimes called white men), is red man, red skin, red person. So that would be the most appropriate sort of term were we to use something with an indigenous perspective. Unfortunately, these days there are some activists claiming these traditional concepts are bad. So it is quite common to find whites tell us that redskin is racist, to tell us that indian is wrong, and to tell us that we are all natives, including them, the illegal alien white occupiers of and squatters upon our sovereign lands.

As far as the term "Indian" is applied to the many various peoples groups east of the Indus River Valley, that term used with them is a european construct as well. It was not used by people in that area to describe themselves until european colonialists and occupiers arrived and promoted the term. So to say it is correctly applied to people from that region, but not to us is a claim that comes from historical ignorance.
If people enjoy reading history like this, I highly recommend Jeffrey Frieden's "Global Capitalism: It's Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century."

Overall, I think a dimension perhaps lacking in PG's otherwise fantastic writeup is that this 'fragmentation' opens up a space of freedom. I mean, our society basically interpolates individuals (younger generations at least) as existential subjects - no set path on what we should do with our lives, no God, no religion, we have to make our own meaning. Painful and difficult, but a source of freedom either way. Today I can travel as a digital nomad, found a startup, work for a rocketship, work for a stable, high paying company, freelance, or switch careers altogether. I get to choose who I associate with and date and marry (and it's even acceptable to not marry), while choosing from a much larger, more open pool, and for the most part, I get to choose who I am. Not everyone has access to this freedom, but it's still the point in human history when the largest number of people have ever had access to this freedom.
No, but there is someone who's basically made a 'modern' version of War2 in the browser: http://www.littlewargame.com/
A command-line version would be nice.
I was under the impression that Keynesian economics is/was said limitless facing off against gravity. However as was already mentioned, when these sort of experiments go wrong (e.g. Communism), they tend to go terribly wrong. It would be nice if we could actually perform these experiments on a local, entirely voluntary scale however the Fed seems to have captured that market already.
QubesOS uses a Linux system with 300MB of RAM for the firewall? I just installed OpenWRT 15.05 Chaos Calmer on my router, with 32MB of RAM and 4MB of flash, and almost 1MB to spare. There are some differences between QubesOS and OpenWRT, but that still seems to be excessive by an order of magnitude.
Nope. The economy is bigger than you are, and it's keenly in your enlightened self-interest to have each other person in your economy producing at maximum.

The "excluders" in the antebellum South lived under a rather delusional post-hoc rationalization of slavery. John C. Clahoun wrote of this belief system at length. This was minimally modified in the Reconstruction South and after.

My maternal grandmother raised 9 kids during the Depression without the assistance of any men after divorcing her husband. She worked very hard; so did the kids.
My wife does all of the the financials and product management, while I Concentrate on the tech side of things.

It really made our relationship stronger. We also see each other 24/7, which could be a problem for some couples.
What happens later if the company is doing poorly and they need to reduce the workforce?
Show HN:Quicknotes – simple notes differently (quicknot.es)
There is no single entity that holds a monopoly on the use of force and effects taxation, so I don't see anything worth granting a proper noun. Part of the reason I am not an Austrian is because I prefer my political science and economics to deal with concrete actions and actual people and organizations, not Abstract Capitalized Entities.

The assertion that taxation is legalized theft enforced through the threat of force is a popular one in certain circles, but it isn't the self-evident fact you believe it to be, either.
There are different kinds of property rights. We have intellectual property - the use of state force to impose the idea that information is scarce when it is naturally not - we have real estate, where an arbitrary box of space relative to planet Earth is assigned to you - and we have traditional goods, where you can have an apple and claim it is yours.

The first two are complicated, because they are extremely political. To own geographic space is entirely divisive from owning just the dirt under a house, or the physical material that composes it. To own an idea, a trademark or a patent, is to assign exclusivity to thoughts. Its much easier to say "we have scarce goods, so those that create them can sell them, and the buyer owns it". Its why I think goods property is a good thing, but our attempts to strong arm real estate and IP into the same formula is a cause of constant economic tension because they aren't a good fit.

Just in this context for reference, I'm an IP abolitionist and think we should adopt homesteading of property again. Both forms of state granted monopoly to space and idea are being rampantly exploited by market forces and were conceived of in an age when technology did not enable the information exchange we have today. It would have been much more complicated to verify usage of a plot of land a hundred years ago than it would now, to know who previously owned it and for how long it has been unused before you could claim it as your own.
i mean, these features resemble basically every MVC ever