skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The discussed paper is http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18112 "The global landscape of cognition: hierarchical aggregation as an organizational principle of human cortical networks and functions"

Consciousness is mentioned only once:

>Our current data-driven results holistically demonstrated expanding amalgamation of function [sic!] over structural
depth [...]

>Fascinatingly, results suggest why the insular and opercular regions are some of the best candidates for
awareness or consciousness [62] [63] or why parts of frontal cortex are involved in higher cognition.

Wait, why is function uncountable?

>These conclusions are elaborated here:

>Sensory regions closest to inputs (bin1) in our hierarchy [include Insula and opercular]

>[...] hypothesized to play a role in multi-sensory integration and interoceptive awareness,

>[...] since it is the hub of the senses

>[...] the coordinating role awareness plays in cognition

>Further, middle regions, intermediate in distance from all sensory inputs (bin5) included hippocampus
and MTL known for memory and celebrity neurons

>Deep regions less connected to and farthest from inputs (bin10) [...] may support more abstract cognitive functions.

Aren't the first two quotes contradicting? Surely, awareness or consciousness is an amalgamation of function and distributed.

I'd rather thought the hippocampus was deemed central to cognition, as memory seems essential for re-cognition. Self-awareness is deemd a function of higher cognition and therefore an abstract concept. Why is it close to the concrete input stage? They talk about recurrent networks, does the hippocampus give feedback to the "input stage", maybe slowly as in conditioning? They "simplified recurrence into a continuum of statistical connectivity to sensory inputs" to probalisticly show a directional hierarchy.

Their methods are interesting, but far beyond me. They seem to build a model of the brain into a NN and test that, where a modified NN is the control group.
I love that The Refragmentation references Economic Inequality, and Economic Inequality references The Refragmentation.
Yeah, it's much more complex than I let on in my previous comment. You're absolutely right about it being hard to isolate causal factors, and right as well that the "powerful, popular people get read more" phenomenon is stronger than "authors accumulate power" phenomenon.

I still do think that the "pen" is a lot more powerful than people tend to give it credit for, just that its influence tends to operate over a long timeframe. I suppose in today's context, the "pen" = your ability to engage with people. In this sense, Donald Trump is wielding his "pen" terrifyingly well.

You're totally right as well, of course, that popular religious texts will be more popular and more powerful than any politician's. These texts are woven into people's lives much more intimately.

Your last sentiment is interesting, though. I generally feel that while the various prophets' work (as interpreted and re-interpreted by others, mostly) is incredibly popular, their "influence" is sorta... corrupted? Exploited? I"m reminded of a quote often attributed to Gandhi: "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Not sure if he actually said that, but you get the idea. (Applies to practically all major organized religions, I don't mean to single out Christianity.)
What I do know is that there will always be income inequality. There will always be poverty, but we can significantly raise the quality of life for everyone. In fact, I feel it is more important that we raise the quality of life than to fix income inequality.

Thoughts?
Great essay. I would quibble with the following though:

> [Technology] means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating.

The problem with this is that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. There's no question that technology is increasing ability. But it's less clear what's happening with opportunity.

Networks tend to be winner-take-all, which means that technology actually depletes opportunity at the same time as it increase ability. Which I think means that we're actually going toward integration, not fragmentation. Only this time we don't need another WWII to integrate society because it's already happening, it's just less visible.

E.g. the vast majority of the traditional media is controlled by the same six corporations. And to quote Fred Wilson's 2015 wrap up, "10 of the top 12 mobile apps are owned by Apple, Facebook, and Google."

There's no question that individuals are way more free than they were in 1950 or whatever. But I think it's more analogous to free-as-in-beer, as opposed to free-as-in-speech.
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It's a AP system. Race conditions come with the territory.
This is truly embodied in the John Galt mythos.
You can extend this point to the first wide-ranging standardization efforts. Those plaques and part numbers were mandated to facilitate not openness, but interoperability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standar...
I don't think the article assumes people enter a job intending to stay there for life. Rather, it assumes thst people will stay at a job so long as it meets their criteria for happy employment. The article makes a subtle point, which is that an employee will treat those criteria as absolute or fixed quantities until something -- an action, a slight, a struggle, or some other demoralizing event -- causes him to consciously reevaluate his criteria. At that point, the criteria become relative -- that is to say, relative measures of the current job vis-a-vis any perceived alternatives.

The only implicit assumption in the author's thesis is that people value stability and are generally content with the status quo until it is challenged. I'm not sure this applies to all people, though I'm willing to consider the possibility that it applies to most. And if not most, then certainly many.

All of that said, your point about changing life goals is a great one. People definitely leave jobs for reasons beyond those articulated in this article. Rands' thesis is not completely encapsulating. But it doesn't need to be complete in order to be compelling. So long as what he's saying provides a decent, rough framework for managers and leaders to keep in mind -- which I'm interpreting as his intent here -- then it's still valuable.
Nobody actually paid the 90% marginal rate back then. Going back to those rates would mean opening up a huge number of tax concessions as well.

Take a look at a historical chart of which incomes levels paid what percent of total taxes. If anything, the total burden on the highest brackets has gone up not down over time.
The problem with this line of argument is that relative poverty is a problem as well as absolute poverty. To pick the most obvious example, huge inequalities in wealth inevitably give rise to huge inequalities in power and influence, which can subvert democratic government.

Also, what rising tide? In the US at least, real incomes are stagnating or falling for most people.
> This is patently false: the best startups make money eating other people's lunch, and they concentrate this money in the hands of the founders.

No, they concentrate the profits in the hands of their founders, but the big winners are the millions of consumers. Yeah, Jeff Bezos is rich, but not as rich as a world with Amazon in it
In Portugal you get 6 months where you can fire at will.
No-Operation. It’s something from assembly programming, an instruction that does nothing (but is sometimes necessary for alignment purposes)

And yes, that’s the issue. The rich are purely asset-shuffling.

Most of the speculatant markets is just that. It doesn’t create any wealth for society, but just takes from people.
If we generalize to say that foreign threats can be used to create massive economic, policy, and social change through government fiat, then this is absolutely possible. We're still living with the Patriot act after all.

Also recall that prior to WWII there were "intense levels of political resistance" but as soon as our territory was directly attacked that changed. (It took 4 days from Pearl Harbor to our declaration of war)
Being unfairly imprisoned for political reasons is often a great career move for writers, artists and so on. It gives you serious legitimacy and street cred. But it's also VERY hardcore, like you said.
Regarding income inequality, I recommend listening to some of the speeches/debates with Bernie Sanders.

E.g. he argues that the greatest receiver of welfare in the US is the wal-Mart family, because they get even richer paying their workers so little that the workers have to live on welfare. (In other words the welfare is "paying" the workers so that Wal-Mart don't have to.) He proposes to rise the minimum wage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYFueqv0iIQ
>The ironic thing is that the wealthiest now try to live a rather stoic, normal life w

Erm, maybe some of them. I don't think extravagant displays of wealth have gone extinct just yet.
> spectacularly backfired

?? First TIOBE index cannot be taken seriously. Second a hypothetical forth place isn't that bad, right? MS managed to fragment the community. And they actively try to fragment the JavaScript community with ES6 and TypeScript. And with their Visual Studio Code (based on Electron/Atom editor).

> Microsoft extinguishing anything are over

Sure with $100+ billion in cash it's over. Microsoft was far less evil company between 2005 and 2011 than before or after that timeframe. Sorry for waking you up from your dream.
A full scale war today, excluding skirmishes, between two large conventional armies would be nuclear. It would be over very fast. Perhaps there is little to nothing to compare with WWII. A war in Europe could happen again but it would be quite different.

The use of militarism and nationalism does not require a full scale global war. Certainly it is being used right now in several nations under structural duress. The enemy may be real or imagined, and if you oppose or speak out against the changes you may be the enemy too.
I don't know. After 9/11 you probably could have convinced Americans to invade anybody.
Indeed it is. It wouldn't be this way if most hiring companies hired for talent and not buzzwords/trends. As it stands, half of developers don't want to touch a language that won't help them get another job. The other half suck so they have to pad their resumes with the new hotness to even have a chance at getting a job.
The most extreme proposals I’ve seen in America are ones like...

The most extreme proposals I've seen in America are a federal job guarantee and a permanent incomes policy similar to the Nixon wage and price controls of the early 70s. Post-Keynesians and MMT proponents are very enthusiastic about them, and they reject the idea of the basic income FWIW.
Most often you can pass stack values to and from functions without copying. This is because of move constructors, and named return value optimization. Often its slower to use pointers (the indirection).

For instance this does not do any expensive copies:

std::string getStr() {
auto huge_str = getDatabaseDump();
return huge_str;
}

void readStr(const std::string& str ){
//read str..
}

int main() {
auto str = getStr();
readStr(str);
}
Thx for linking to the Caruana video, very interesting.
It's an essay, not a comprehensive treatise that might fill 1000 pages.

I was glad to see some of the old pg back. His startup essays tended to be bit artificial, as if he had to force himself to write them.
That is so far away from anything that is likely to happen in even the medium term, it's worth filing under "cross that bridge when we come to it".

In the meantime, making things just a little fairer could help a vast amount of people.
> A person's station in life should not be tied to their parents' income level.

Why not? One's genes are rather intimately tied to one's parents' genes, and those genes completely determine one's physical self. One's upbringing is the direct result of one's parents' choices (and one's own reaction to them, which is itself a product of genes and upbringing).

It seems patently obvious that one's parents' lot in life (itself a product of their own genes and upbringing) must determine one's own lot in life to a very great degree. To think otherwise would be to assume that we are more than the product of our genes and our upbringing, which seems an unsupportable supposition.
I hear this from liberals all the time, often in more extreme form of "even if only a cent of a million is left there will be motivation to make that million!". But wtf are you so sure? I for one am not looking for a smaller bump in salary at 50% tax already as I don't see how additional effort would pay for itself. I imagine a lot of people don't consider an effort to found startups at this rate too.
>what we read here about Europe in the UK.

Just out of curiosity, I get the vibe you don't consider the UK part of Europe, is this true?
> To me, income inequality means: The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
But that is not the situation. In reality, the situation is: A rising tide raises all boats.

If that was the case, then most people's incomes (adjusted for inflation) would be higher than they were 40 years ago. But that's not true.

However, it can be argued that low-income people can now buy "stuff" cheaper than they ever could. Whether that positely counter-balances the fact that real incomes have been dropping for decades for most people, it remains to be discovered, but with rents and homes being pretty expensive and with college tuition putting many people into a lifetime of debt, I'd say we're in the negative there, as there's not much left from one's salary at the end of the month to buy all of that "cheaper stuff" (mainly electronics and food somewhat).
It is a straw man.

In general when people worry about inequality, except the most radical commentators, they worry about a trend, not about differences in net worth.

Maybe unconsciously, PG try to sell the idea that this a binary thing, you have 0 inequality or you should leave the market do its thing. This is not true. There is a balance and we have a lot examples that show that.

The pie thing don't pass the smell test, neither.

Is PG denying that the pie is now bigger than in the 70? I don't think he does, actually he is arguing the opposite.

Then why low and medium income people is increasingly in debt and have to worry if tomorrow will have enough money to pay the rent?

When you have a bigger pie, and inequality is the same, you get the rich more rich and the poor more rich. This is hardly what we observe even if we know that the pie is bigger.

So, the pie is bigger but people should to work more hours and should retire latter, and, of course, we can't afford healthcare for everybody.

He says "let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process."

I totally agree there, good luck with that.
The Nixon wage-price controls were a disaster. They also precipitated the oil crisis, which persisted until Reagan finally cancelled the oil price controls.
What's "Perl 5 day"?
The short answer is to make stuff people really, really want. You get wealth by creating it, and you get status from creating wealth. It could be software, but it could be anything, really.

If you build a startup that has users who love you, you can raise money from investors, get press attention, etc. Caveat being that it's a really, really hard thing to do.
That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.
I'd say the exact opposite: if industry requires trained worker bees, it can pay for their training. It is not our collective responsibility to meet workforce needs. State-funded engineering and CS programs are corporate welfare.

Humanities are the only departments that should exist on tax money.
I assume you are thinking through it's implications for WebVR+servo?

I can see questioning the utility for current 2d applications but this is really critical speed when the large amount of translation and scaling of many pages in a 3d environment is the expectation.

The css3d "portal" solution for webgl doesn't seem like it can get us very far at all...

I'd use this today in my webvr/gl project if it was source complete.
Yep, exactly. Wealthy people rarely keep to themselves. They usually try to shape the world around them, and in our society the best way to do that is to influence politicians to pass policies that they agree with and are favorable to them. And these policies come almost always at the expense of the have-nots.
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Yup, same deal here on the shore of the Gulf of Maine. Lots of plastic trash, both from the fishing industry and from the land. Plastic boxes, bottles, bags, beach whistles (tampon applicators), as well as hunks of rope and net.

I have trashbags in my trunk. I also have a trash grabber; it lets me get more stuff for a given investment of time.

I like this floating dam idea. Hope it works. Hope the rubbish they scavenge can be dealt with safely.
Everyone says this until they become parents. Then they work as hard as they can to give their own kids every advantage they can.
On paper, the tax rates were higher in the 50s. What isn't mentioned is that was the age of the tax shelter, the 3 martini lunch, etc. It is doubtful anyone actually paid those rates.
Reagan's deal to lower the tax rates included repealing all those deductions and tax shelters.
that would make sense given unlimited/non-competing resources, but if the resources (money, people, awareness, legislative effort) available to solve the problem are limited, it is wasteful to use them for something which doesn't work rather than something that would.

(I do not know if the specific thing works or not, just pointing out that "why not both" is not always a good approach)
The trash wheel is great, so much garbage used to clog the harbor after it rained, now there's barely any.
"They don't even seem clear whether they want to kill me or not."

When someone very influential broadcasts the idea that people who don't like economic inequality (let's arbitrarily call them "liberals") are waiting around to kill the rich for being rich, on the surface that is deniably close to expression of a fear. But it is also preparing a public case for supposedly "pre-emptive" suppression. Which would logically come in the form of violence, given how violent these people supposedly are.

Notice how no evidence was ever presented that those who differ with pg's politics actually are presenting a violent threat, yet we are somehow discussing it as a truth anyway. This is skilled manipulation.

I never had any axe to grind with pg's work encouraging certain startups, but when he suggests that I must be deciding whether to murder rich people merely because I am not happy with the degree of economic inequality in my country, I can't help remembering the blood libel.
Are we talking about net worth, or income? I thought we were talking about income initially.
While we're all on the same team, there's also a distinction in the functional connectome (often as determined by fMRI) vs the structural one (determined by viral tracers and electron microscopy). Of course the goal is to see how the two relate. The one described in the article is functional.
Mostly to seem fancy I think, although a wine can be bad in a screw top too (otherwise we'd see more of them).
> Version 1 of the national economy consisted of a few big blocks whose relationships were negotiated in back rooms by a handful of executives, politicians, regulators, and labor leaders. Version 2 was higher resolution: there were more companies, of more different sizes, making more different things, and their relationships changed faster. In this world there were still plenty of back room negotiations, but more was left to market forces. Which further accelerated the fragmentation.

I find this curiously close to a description given by a late-soviet economist who was working on economic reforms in the 80s: he described soviet economy as a bunch of heavy hard rocks, incredibly powerful, but without any flexibility and connection to each other, and small new cooperative movement as a sand that should've taken all the space in between.
That sounds like a very dangerous proposition. Cops have a tendency to take phones for guns, and shoot to kill.
I agree, Paul Graham sounds like the solution to fixing extreme inequality must be communism (the Marxist type). I'm a little surprised he is making this argument.
Thank you - you have been incredibly patient!

May I suggest a blog post on this. What you have written here on HN has been far,far more interesting than the original blog post and is making me excited to dive into the source code.
> If that was the case, then most people's incomes (adjusted for inflation) would be higher than they were 40 years ago. But that's not true.

It is true, just not in the USA and other select nations.
> A full scale war today, excluding skirmishes, between two large conventional armies would be nuclear. It would be over very fast.

The problem with this line of thinking is you assume that the enemy doesn't care if there's a world left for them to have greater power/influence/wealth/whatever in. Nobody really wins a nuclear war, some people just lose a little less.
Look at the quintiles in the second graph here, which adjusts for inflation:
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...

It's very clear that the bottom 60% of the USA hasn't risen even slightly in the last 50 years. And the 20% above that has only risen slightly. While the top 20% has approximately doubled.

(I suspect that if you broke it down further the rises would mostly acccumulate to the top few percent)
Many programmers have this idea. Oh, this is a big object. I better wrap it in a smart pointer to avoid doing expensive copies when I pass it around. They do it as an optimisation. However because of named return value optimisation and move constructors no expensive copies are done when passing stack values to and from functions. Using smart pointers is actually slower (because of the indirection and reference counting).
Interestingly, this actually gets closer to the original root meaning of the word than what it tends to mean these days:

> TECHNOLOGY: 1610s, "a discourse or treatise on an art or the arts," from Greek tekhnologia "systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique," originally referring to grammar, from tekhno- (see techno-) + -logy. The meaning "study of mechanical and industrial arts" (Century Dictionary, 1902, gives examples of "spinning, metal-working, or brewing") is first recorded 1859.

Source: http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=technology
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I'm just talking about the statistics that GavinMcG was citing. We were talking about income inequality, but the sensationalist statistic he cited is not.
It's not. Travis' Twitter/Github profiles don't seem to be up to date either.

https://twitter.com/mikermcneil/status/674307797832495104