skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The Baumol Effect, in case you didn't know, is the tendency of wage increases that come from increases in productivity to "spill over" into jobs where there have been no productivity increases. In other words, it's trickle-down economics under a fancier name.

Mr. Garret gets the definition of the Baumol Effect more or less right, but then mislabels it as trickle down economics and proceeds to attack that. Here is an example of the Baumol Effect:

As improving technology makes computer scientists more productive they will receive higher salaries in the business world. Meanwhile, computer scientist teachers in academia may not see similar productive gains (they still can only teach X number of students a semester). Nonetheless, universities must increase computer scientist teacher pay to prevent them from leaving academia for the business world.

In the context of PG's essay, he is saying that high pay for entrepreneurs forces companies to pay competitive salaries:

>anyone who could get rich by creating wealth on their own account will have to be paid enough to prevent them from doing it.

If Mr. Garret, or others, disagree with this assertion they should attack it directly. Personally, the logic and direct incentives at work seem self evident to me.
TIL people sitll play AoE 2! I used to play this game all the time at the all-night LAN parties my friends hosted. It was great because the graphics weren't so crazy that literally anyone could play it, so it always commanded the largest amounts of players, other than Counter-Strike: Source.
We can't even use jpg2000 everywhere yet. Maybe in another 15 years we can upgrade png...
Does D have code for: plotting, optimization, probability distributions, machine learning, Fourier transformations, masked arrays, finanial calculations, structured arrays (read a CSV from disk, get named columns based on the header), SVD, QR and Cholesky decomposition, eigens, least squares, Levenberg Marquardt, matrix inverse and pseudoinverses, integration, Runge Kutta, interpolation, bsplines, fft convolves, multidimensional images, KDTrees, symbolic equation solvers, merge/join of data sets, etc.?

Because I use almost all of these every single day (I don't do multidimensional images or b-splines much at all). Are those all in standard libraries, fully documented, backed by 60 year old, fully debugge code (LAPACK, etc), that I reliably email to anyone across the world and they can immediately run and modify my code because it is such a standard? I honestly don't know, but I'm guessing not.

I use Python/Numpy/Scipy/Pandas/Matplotlib because everyone else in the world knows and uses them; they are a standard. Yes, my np.mean() might be slower than your map(). I almost always don't care. That misses the forest for the trees.

The article might be a good argument for why library writers might consider building out D's standard library to support numerical computation, I dunno. But no one is going to use D for serious number crunching without that infrastructure in place. People moved from Fortran and Matlab to Python not because it is fast, but for the environment. These language tricks are cute and all (I like D well enough, don't get me wrong), but it ain't why we are using Python.

At this point, if I were to switch languages to something without a lot of adoption I'd lean towards Julia. It also have a modern language design, but it is written from the ground up for numerical computation. I can't think of any reason I'd ever reach for D.
I don't see any question.
> What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich and highly connected people.

My guess: Relax, what you want is well on the way. The biggies now, in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, are on the way to a land of commodity products, fungible work, high competition, and low profit margins.

Why? Because really powerful innovation they will need but don't much have.

The opportunity? For now, more in innovation.

The opportunity? Be the only guy who knows how to bake really good bread in a land of suddenly huge quantities of just dirt cheap wheat. Or, computer cycles, data storage bytes, data communications data rates per dollar are through the roof, and operating system, infrastructure, and OSS are all just dirt cheap. So, the challenge and the opportunity is to be innovative and make use of this dirt cheap wheat.

Or, 15 years ago, a Web server might have been on one or several single core processors with clock speed of 90 MHz. Now, for much less money can get an 8 core processor with a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Let's take that ratio in performance:

8 * 4000 / 90 = 356

So, now have one computer that does the work of ballpark 356 computers for less than the cost of one of those 356 old computers.

Find something really good for the new computers to do, guys!
Mining is becoming heavily automated. The work of a dozen men even twenty years ago can now often be done by two with a good computer model.

We are pushing very hard for computer vision, which is the real barrier to practical robotics that could replace your electrician, plumber, nurse, miner, driver, etc. There is no sacred cow of labor besides what is mandated by the molasses slow state (because I would absolutely argue that learning systems like Khan's Academy, the availability of resources online, and the technological organizational potential of software solve all the criteria to substitute teachers with a security guard watching the kids while they listen to robo-instructor, solve the problems themselves, and ask the neural-net for help when they run into problems - and the kids are of course not all in the same room in an expensive upkeep building called a school). That kind of change though must also be culturally accepted since a lot of effort goes into separating public education from market forces.

Point is, the jobs that we could not send overseas have tremendous pressure on them as a result to be absolved entirely by AI, robotics, and software. It is why the pencil pusher desk job of 1980 - rows of typists at typewriters transcribing documents - went the way of the Dodo and did generate a ton of unemployment that we still have not seamlessly solved.
> If you don't think that just as painful as slavery you're a grade A idiot.

If you have to resort to name-calling to make your point ... you're wrong. It's that simple.

When you're a slave, no matter how talented your are, no matter how hard you work ... you're still a slave and you will always be a slave, and your children too, will be slaves.

That situation is truly inhuman. Truly. So much so that the bible, the founding document of our civilization, had a built-in reset for precisely this. [1]

When you're free, your circumstances may suck ... but at least you have a chance to improve them, however remote that chance may be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)
Source for that first sentence?
Can you ballpark for me how much more the government spent on the Internet than private industry?

Because I'm pretty sure it's the reverse by at least two orders of magnitude.
It's an awesome idea, if only you'd let the person keep a part-time job and make this opportunity a part-time job as well, maybe that'd be more realistic?
That requires tracking individuals, which doesn't work for brick-and-mortar stores (yes, those still exist... ;).
E.g. mktemp and friends. Or more generally, a secure way to work with temporary files.

Subprocess control, e.g. popen seems different/hard. We are using Porcelain though, which is nice. This thread on the list about working with pty's didn't inspire confidence either: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.elixir.general/457...

Another Unixy thing that's missing in a hard-to-believe sort of way is Unix domain sockets. Makes connecting to Postgres irritating.
The tax code and it's loop holes designed for corporations and ultra-wealthy = bad rules. You "bait-and-switch" too.. pretending to care about fixing rules and making society better when you only care about billion dollar corporations that pay less taxes than the window cleaners working there.
The link provided. Look at the charts, not the mood affiliation.
His article is about social fragmentation, not economic. We recognize the economics are consolidating, but we are then talking about hundreds of combinatorial factors leading us to where we are today. Specifically, we are seeing more collective isolationism of social circles - there is an absolute Internet culture of connoisseurs of the blogosphere / reddit / social media today that is distinct from anything before, but you also have all the regional cultures of peoples now splitting from the whole because of incohesion with everyone else. Its harder to fit the mold when the mold broke because it was forged from flimsy material to begin with.
In the US it tends to be Native American but in Canada First Nations is the term used.
Terrific essay. It's really impressive how much of the world it explained and tied in with history.

One thing I would like to discuss though is this line:

The creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest.

This suggests that there are entire cities, even states, lacking in creative people. Now I'm sure PG was consciously generalizing, or else referring to the extraordinarily creative entrepreneurs like Musk, Dorsey etc. (creative in the business sense), so I don't want to nitpick.

But what do people think about this? Everywhere I've gone in life I've found creative, dynamic people somewhere in my midst. I know a frequent complaint from the Left is the slightly galling idea that if the capitalists abandoned us, society wouldn't be able to fill the ranks of the managerial positions and keep things going. What do other people think? Have you lived in (developed world) cities which felt entirely stultified and lacking the human capital to make things better?
jpg2000 is unfortunately encumbered by patents. I was going to use it for a certain project a long time ago, but had to abandon the idea due to that. It's a shame, because many of the ideas in jpg2000 are very valuable for the world.
Cultivate the Art of Serendipity
Yeah I was speaking in terms of actual product scams, when discussing products.

Sensationalist journalism and then throwing affiliate links in is indeed slime.
That's the cheat code for 1000 food[0] for anyone curious.

[0] - http://www.neoseeker.com/aoe2-conquerors/cheats/pc/
I'm biased because John Ennis played one of the lawyers, but that one was absolutely my favorite of these.
What is the end game of first past the post though? Its a predictable state machine, if the GOP fragments too much the democrats will take a supermajority of power in the country, adopt disparate ideals of its own until you rapidly get a newly formed opposition party that all the "anti-dems" rally behind to immediately replace the GOP. Then you can have the dems with an overabundance of conflicting ideals decay from within all the same.

You don't have more than two parties in a stable first past the post system. But that is what the US has always had. It takes a pretty big constitutional amendment to adopt an alternate or transferable vote system. But how do you fix a system where those deciding if they want to fix it are only put into power due to the nature of the system as it exists today?
It does decompress the source PNG and build a new file from the pixels. You can see the source here.

https://github.com/google/zopfli/blob/master/src/zopflipng/z...
>what's up with the bounds of our imagination? How come they're limitless when it comes to facing off against gravity, and completely defeatist when it comes to erasing class distinctions?

In my experience, that's only true in America.

People in Canada, Australia, England and Argentina and perfectly happy to discuss and debate ideas and ways to remove (or drastically reduce) class distinctions. Politicians even enact policy to do it.

I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly, it's not only un-American to suggest a change to the status quo, it's also considered utterly impossible.
I hate to continue on a tangent, but coffee is delicious and smells amazing and you'd have to be The Grinch to not enjoy the atmosphere in a good cafe. If you want some tangible benefits just throw in some sugar and cream.
Ask HN: How can I improve my resume?
I'm graduating in May and have started the job hunt now. Here's my current resume:

http://postimg.org/image/kw4ozymup/

What can I do to improve it? I'm worried that it might be too long and wordy, but at the same time I don't want to skip any important details.
Thanks!
A lot of this essay seems pretty fast and loose with history to me. I hope nobody passively accepts this as an accurate account of social, economic, or governmental history from the Great Depression, through WWII, the mid-20th century, through to today.

Perhaps a ycombinator readership can appreciate a telling example of the problems is in Graham's account of IBM's decision not to exclusively license PC-DOS. Per Graham, this "must have seemed a safe move at the time. No other computer manufacturer had ever been able to outsell them. What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones. Microsoft now owned the PC standard, and the customer. And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft."

OK, first, every indication is that IBM sought to deliberately create an explosion of inexpensive PC clones -- and that they were better off for it.

Briefly, IBM made a strategic decision that their position would be better if personal computers were a commodity with competitive suppliers rather than an artificial monopoly like Apple products. IBM achieved this aim. Competition meant that PC hardware margins were low, therefore IBM was ultimately better off letting other people make sell them. For years, this was a harsh blow to Apple which thrashed badly after the PC took off.

Second, it is misleading to say that "Microsoft now owned the PC standard, and the customer."

Microsoft has heavyweight influence but does not quite own "the PC standard". More to the point, figurative "ownership" of that standard is not a particularly valuable asset. The "standard" is the definition of a competitive commodity. Competition is hot. Therefore nobody "owns" the standard enough to exclude competing manufacturers in any significant way. Nobody "owns" the standard enough to extract significant rent on it.

Microsoft did gain a monopoly on DOS (then Windows) rents in the deal but (a) There does not seem to be any way IBM itself could have kept those rents while still making the PC a commodity; (b) Microsoft's rents on DOS and its control of what is in DOS have never once hurt IBM. (c) Microsoft's creation of a vast market of developers targeting DOS then Windows platforms has only helped IBM.

In short, Graham's snapshot of that bit of history is just plain counter-factual. I hope careful readers will look pretty skeptically on his accounts of "socialism", economic management during WWII (which was widely understood at the time to be fascist, not socialist), the typical experience of 20th century employment (not nearly as described), his armchair sociology....
People overestimate how quickly unacceptable conditions arise. The Bay Area can get even more congested and expensive than it is today, and most people will make do. Cambridge and some surrounding areas have San Francisco pricing now. It won't so much be a "dispersal" but a hunt for talent, which is why you get Uber and other SV companies in Pittsburgh, where you can live in a steel magnate's castle for the price of a condo in Palo Alto.
The free-marketeer response is that many of those problems have actually been caused by a lack of adherence to capitalist/free-market principles - eg. a policy of bailing out banks since Continental Illinois, preventing market discipline and leading to riskier behavior; heavy involvement of public policy distorting markets (both through laws pushing cheap housing mortgages, and through government-sponsored institution like Fannie Mae); land expropriations in China that force people to accept those slavery-like jobs (obviously not in accordance to strong property rights as
defended by free-marketers); government-granted monopolies (including patents), and many more.
Brand-colors just turned v1.0.0
tcc is fast enough for an rpi, it is a shame gcc/clang are so slow.
Yes, and these incentives are likely to cause companies to use subsidiaries and contract workers, so that their employee count is lower and the median wage of those employees higher.

It's not clear to me that's a win for anyone other than consulting companies, tax prep and CPA firms.
I could never get into aoe2 after playing aoe rise of rome for so long.
> It is possible to address this problem without killing the golden goose. How? By rolling back some of the legislation that was put in place by undue political influence.

Using the political system to reduce the influence of money in politics is prohibitively difficult because the system is already captured by money. We should try, but we need other options when that fails.

When government stops responding to the wishes of the people, revolution is the typical answer. Luckily, we don't have to do that. We can end the influence of wealth on our politics without needing the government to do it for us.

Instead of trying to get the government to stop excess political spending, we should eliminate the incentive to accept excess political spending. People accept money to influence our democracy because they can use that money to get whatever they want from almost anyone, including you. You can't opt out because economic power is invisible. But we can make it visible, and give every individual the freedom to reject economic power that they feel is misused.

This is merit capitalism. http://meritcapitalism.com/
you can just set bitcount to LOTS_OF_BITS (an arbitrarily large constant).

You don't even have to explicitly set it if you just let it go below 0 and automatically wrap around to FFFFFFFF.
Rust has been remarkable stable since the 1.0 realease.
"This suggests that there are entire cities, even states, lacking in creative people."

It just suggests a migration. Smart/educated/creative people often head to opportunity when they can. Go to any small town and many of the best/brightest have left. Go to Greece and you'll find the same thing. Certainly some folks stay out of necessity (family ties, poverty, and other reasons) or by choice (a love for the place).
You are right that it was a bad argument :). As such I've deleted the comment.
Pony: an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, high performance language
A more accurate title might be "Bing tries full-on censorship..". The author of the post notes:

> This isn’t happening anymore (as of January 2), but we’ll keep checking to see if any further changes are made.

But it's worrying that Bing seems to have enacted censorship (maybe they pushed a change to production too early and rolled it back?). Certainly something to keep an eye on.
Thanks! There's not a lot of info on the Secret Service's financial side (at least I didn't see much in Wikipedia) so it's hard to assess what's a normal use of their resources.
Im very glad to announce that I just updated brand-colors to v1.0.0!

Now featuring +400 colors and a neat search function on the homepage.

brand-colors is available on npm and bower supporting sass, less, stylus and vanilla css.

Major creds go to brandcolors.net for all the colors I could add in this update.
It does not really matter what value any one person sees in it, if people who have the resources to sustain a market want said market they will create it and maintain it.

Remember though that futures / currencies / even stock are just gambling at the end of the day. Its corrupt gambling where some players have much more information than others (and thus it is traditionally just a vacuum of wealth from the poor to the rich) but people are just betting on where profit will emerge with the intent to get some of it when it happens, and through their actions of investment are trying to cause that profit to happen.
Correct. The United States was strongly mercantilist throughout the 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_%28economics%2...
Running a Software Business on 5 Hours a Week (2010)
> I got rather involved in it in college, but was surprised that there were certain "basic strategies" that one had to follow to hope to even survive (e.g. getting to castle age within a certain time for a certain civilization).

This is always going to be true for a strategy game. Heck it's probably true in general for any competitive game that that there are certain things that you just have to do.

The more competitive the game is, the more obvious this is (which is why you see more people complaining about this kind of thing for Starcraft than AoE), but it's still always present, lurking in the background.
I can think of about a million sentiments more offensive than the idea that people who invest should be taxed and that we should have a social safety net.
The idea's been around for a while, this 2014 paper describes a differentiable renderer: http://files.is.tue.mpg.de/black/papers/OpenDR.pdf
If I could give away all my hn points and apply them as up-votes to this, I would.

The op explains very succinctly the problem in this quote:

> what is happening is that the ultra-wealthy are using their disposable income to buy political influence, then using that influence to get laws passed that allow them to collect rents.

My primary beef with American politics is the "solutions" are always in the form of bandaids - they focus on the effect, not the root cause. The recent healthcare laws are a prime example. How to handle the rise of ISIS is another. Both were caused, or at least compounded by misinformed short-sighted policy. The answer is rarely "more laws". Especially when more laws was what lead to most of these problems in the first place. It's like writing more code around terrible code when what is really needed is a total refactor and proper test coverage.

Ending cronyism is fairly straight-forward. But stacking on more law is only going to exacerbate the issue, because like the op explained - the well-connected are just going to buy more political influence and have the laws crafted to benefit them. Taxation is more complex. Increasing taxes is often a solution proposed. Fine, but first - the government needs to prove that they are good stewards of our money before reaching into my back pocket for more. Otherwise, that increase is going to end up as farm subsidies and in the pockets of "defense" contractors.
Do you believe in property rights?

As a useful legal fiction subject to the same limitations as others of its genus, sure.

As a natural moral right? Not in the slightest, because there ain't no such thing. The history of "ownership" of any given thing today is basically a history of force, fraud and the occasional lucky break. Who should own a piece of land? What moral claim do they have to it? The very best that can be said today is that they can trace a chain of transfers back to the person who most recently was able to stay on that land without being forcibly put underneath it by someone else. What kind of grounding for a supposed moral good is that?

So I believe in Thomas Hobbes' conception of the state of nature -- namely, that there are no rights, no virtues, no morals, nothing but all-out war for resources, where what is "yours" is what you can take and keep by violence -- and in his conception of government as what we introduce when we get tired of that, and that this arrangement is better than the "war of all against all" even though it comes at the expense of sometimes having the government decide that "my" property could be put to a better use.