skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take a look at how the masters pull this off. I'm not claiming everything in this article is true - just pointing out how it is surmised that some families protect wealth in a way that transcends both death and taxes:

http://www.icij.org/offshore/secret-files-reveal-rothschilds...
The 5% is meaningless since it's based on how the government define it. Being unemployed means actively looking for a job. So there is a waste amount of people who are not in that statistics. Also a lot of the jobs people have don't pay for their basic expenses.
Pharmaceutical companies still make generic medications that are no longer covered by patents as well as over the counter medications. As for approval costs, the biggest cost for these companies is marketing, plain and simple. The actual people doing the research, I'm guessing are not solely guided by their pay or patents for that matter. I would presume that many people just want to make society better.

I am not suggesting that patents go away entirely, but their scope should definitely be reduced... extension patents in particular should not receive the same 20 years that original patents receive. The patent system has resulted in generations of gaming the system to the point where it no longer works.

I'm unconvinced that patents serve the public good in this day and age. I am convinced, however, that the vast majority of patents granted should not have been.
I have my technician license, I'd like to transmit.
#2: Citizen development. This has been going on for years already. And the tool of choice is Excel.
I had a professor in graduate school who suggested exactly this - each study should conduct a meta-analysis of all previous studies on the subject, use that estimate as their prior, update, and publish for the next study...

The problem is, having tried it, this is much more difficult to do in practice.
Please explain how ownership would be dispersed and nepotism be prevented?
It sounds like a good idea for the topics that are highly skewed by the political agenda. Like global warming.

Imagine a situation when some climatologist makes a discovery that global warming is a fluke. In the current political climate no reputable journal will accept his article on this topic. Moreover, no scientist will even SUBMIT one because of the possible damages to his reputation.

On the condition of anonymity, it may stand a chance.
Sure- you can absolutely figure out who wrote the paper given enough work. Yet, I really do like the idea of first the paper being reviewed on it's own merit/ideas/findings, and then potentially people seeing who was involved as a secondary thing at some later point after judgements had already been made.
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/22/7871947/oxfam-wealth-statistic http://fusion.net/story/44648/why-its-silly-to-add-up-wealth... http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding...

Can we just stop repeating that line?
Does anyone know how Oxfam computes that "the top 1% control fully half of the planet's wealth"?

In particular, if someone has more debt than assets does that count as negative wealth? Negative, in that for the purposes of the calculation it would offset the wealth of others with positive net worth?
Why does everyone miss out on Sphinx search engine?
Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
It is also important to realize that startups might produce jobs but they are mostly capital intensive companies NOT labour intensive. This is especially true with technology companies who are notoriously hiring relatively few compared to the capital they spend.

This trend will continue as technology removes more and more functions.
And people actually pay rather than download a compiled binary? I've sometimes advocated that this could be a viable business model for an open-source project, maybe even have the license forbid redistribution of binaries, but each person I've proposed it to basically said the expected outcome is for people to just download the (illegal) binaries and give you no money.
Is that true, or are you just saying it?

E.g. this article argues that the numbers are indeed misleading: http://fusion.net/story/39185/oxfams-misleading-wealth-stati...

I have no idea if it's accurate, but you just saying that his comment is a "cherry picked example" doesn't ring true (since most people in the US are indeed in debt). And anyway, you don't provide any reason to think you're right.
What Apple Watch? Wearables Market Expands
Ford's Developer Challenge for Drone Programmers
I'm not quite sure what you're saying. Doctors don't observe probabilities or enormous frequencies. Either way, there are good odds that this is information that someone is communicating to them, not the result of their personal experience.
Yeah I can relate to that. Even I thought of doing some freelance stuff while I was in college, but you can't compete against people with $5-$10 per hour rates.

Also there are a couple of companies which are trying to simplify the hiring(interview, visa etc.) process.

1. https://underdog.io/

2. https://triplebyte.com/

I haven't used their service before. But sometimes ago I read their blog and it sounded interesting.
Job-Hunting Tips for Mid-Year CS Grads
This happens where I work- one of my coworkers is here Monday - Thursday (10 hour days) but takes Friday off. He's the only one with knowledge of a lot of our legacy systems, so a lot of potential work doesn't happen on Fridays. I'd argue that more of us should learn what he knows to avoid "hit by a bus syndrome" but we don't have enough spare man hours to devote to that.
Chicago has pension problems because it promised benefits that it couldn't afford, not because the funds in it underperformed.
I'm not disagreeing with that... I just found that the more I tried to create my own, more complex controls the easier it was to just use HTML with JS, and bypass the WebControl paradigm entirely. Which is a huge part of why I really liked MVC.

Though today, I'm more into writing a front end almost entirely separate from the backend. Coupled service layer in node, that acts as a gateway from front-end to back-end... Much less of a disconnect to work with. Doing things the "hard way" is usually easier once a project reaches a certain complexity.
Volkswagen to face $90B lawsuit by U.S Justice Deptt
This looks like a rushed to market experiment. The same features as a much cheaper model, with most of the interesting features requiring a smartphone. If I have to carry a smartphone anyway, I might as well use it as my tracker. If this was 149.99 it may be justifiable but for now I'll stick with a standard 99 tracker. If anything I rather get a Withings Activite.
> In elementary macroeconomics you learn it is impossible to make a profit because in a competitive market because it is rational for me to lower my price by one cent to get the deal and then it is rational for the competitors to do that until the point that profit is zero.

Elementary economics fails (as many other social/economic theories) by assuming the ideal state; if the state is not ideal (i.e. the market is not competitve yet), there is a lot of profit to be had. This doesn't mean that you have to abuse monopoly powers to profit; you can simply be better (faster to innovate or spot opportunities) than your competition (until they catch up).
I don't understand why the author says server-side load balancing is expensive or must be done with expensive hardware. Yes, you can use hardware accelerated boxes to speed up things like SSL termination and HTTP compression, but they're not required. Two alternatives:

1) IPVS with DSR. You'll get about 1M PPS through each "load balancer". Regular, cheap Linux boxes do well here. You can get fancier here, but a pair of these would scale most games just getting started.

2) Run a dispatch server. This is what we used in MSN Messenger. I'm not going to go too deep into the details, but the gist of it is that we had two groups of user facing servers: connection servers (CS) and dispatch servers (DP). Connection servers is where your client TCP connection terminated and was responsible for updates to your client. The DP server merely "dispatched" you to a CS upon initial client connect. The DP had no role other than seeing which CS servers were alive and sending you to one of the least loaded. The CS servers advertised their existence and load on a multicast address. Yeah, we had a hardware load balancer in front of the DP servers, but we very easily could have used a software implementation. We were part of Hotmail so there was loads of networking hardware to use.

Client -> Cisco CSM -> DP server -> redirect to CS -> CS

After that, the CSM and DP server were out of the loop and everything went to/from the CS directly. Might not be super elegant, but it worked really well.
My problem with the news feed is how non-deterministic the results are. There have been so many cases where I will see a post/photo/video that I find interesting, but fuck me if I ever want to find it again on a different device or at some point in the future if I didn't bookmark it or remember who posted it and when. It always seems like a random shuffling of the deck when I load the page, and it's incredibly frustrating.
We never had several deliberately inflicted famines killing millions of people. In every single example you listed Communist countries were demonstrably worse. Humanity is capable of some pretty awful things under any system of government - Communism, or perhaps the way it comes about, has consistently demonstrated that itself better at enabling our worst impulses compared to democratic capitalism.

That people, included in the UK elected representatives, make a case for the Soviet Union and Communist China having done more good than bad is a a terrible failure of history.
They certainly have no criteria for emoji significance. Some Japanese handheld has an obscure character? Put it in the next standard for all to puzzle over.
- and heavily in debt to the rest of the world.
I saw the same thing - MN looks like a flat, frozen corn field in that map. I think the data is suspect.
A different article, yes, but I think the currently submitted one is a reaction to the linked one. I was going to link to the previous discussion, too, as I think this discussion and that one are necessarily related.

Which makes me think maybe HN should have some mechanism to say "This article is related to this other one", and point to the HN submission for it.
building a lane of high speed urban transport is really expensive.

And a rail lane has 50 times the passenger capacity of a private motor vehicle lane.

So if the problem is linking people to sfo, rail is much cheaper.

You need to get the link to rail at both ends right. Maybe you need baggage check and parking available in Marin county where you get on the train.
Tax inheritance => rich people inherit stock => they must sell stock to pay taxes => ownership dilutes.
Impressive not only in that it looks nice, but engineered well enough to withstand playtime with a toddler. :)
I say this over and over again in all my comments on the subject, but wealth passed on through inheritance has fallen a lot.

I don't know why its always assumed to be true that all this wealth that's driving inequality is inherited. It's not true.

> Over the past 30 years, the origin of the wealth of the richest people in the United States has shifted away from old, inherited money. Our new metric, the self-made scores developed for the Forbes 400, shows that increasingly we find self-made billionaires among the ranks of the richest people in the country. This has accompanied the incredible increase in wealth of the members of the Forbes 400, which has jumped 1,832% times since 1984, when the total net worth of our list was $125 billion, compared with $2.29 trillion today.[0]

> There’s no doubt that entrepreneurship is thriving globally. Fully 1,191 members of the list are self-made billionaires, while just 230 inherited their wealth. Another 405 inherited at least a portion but are still working to increase their fortunes. [1]

[0]http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-a...

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2015/03/02/inside-th...
The only thing I don't like people to repeat about 1% owns 50% wealth is because that's just a mathematical truth from Pareto principle.

If 20% populations owns 80% resources. Just recursively applying Pareto principle. You see 0.8% populations owns 51.2% resources.

So we are in fact now efficiently using resources around the world to support 7 billions populations.

Of course this ignores our biological tendency of protecting our offspring. So we try to pass down what we have to our children by non productivity related measures (such as lenient estate tax, immigration restrictions). That's the real reasons for the 99% population feels 'unfair'.

If we are really fair, we should open first world border to all poor people around the world, right? But we don't. Same as people of wealth want to pass down their wealth to their children as much as possible. Or even try to starting a dynasty.
Show HN: EmailMeTweets – schedule Twitter List notifications
I think this is more of a competitor to the Apple Watch than to the Spark or the Forerunner.
Your concern is totally valid, I luckily do not live in a country that I feel I need to be on guard at the level you do but it still doesn't mean I appreciate all the data collection either.

That said, there are things people can do with companies like Acxiom to help reduce the data collection. At least in the US (not sure overseas) if you as a consumer submit a request to be removed from their lists they must honor your request and remove you, many US states have strict laws about this and I believe the Federal laws also have strict restrictions. The catch 22 to this is that you can wind up back in the collection at a later date because of activity you take or because of a timeout period (from what I understand). You can read about Acxiom's policy and opt-out here: https://isapps.acxiom.com/optout/optout.aspx

As a point too, you may check out the data collection from Acxiom, as I believe they actively collect and use data in your home country, as they do in many counties. Equifax, Experian and TransUnion all also work in the US and overseas and collect/sell vast amounts of data on individuals. The very fact they collect so much data does make people (including me) nervous because I personally feel they do not take security of the data nearly serious enough, as recent security issues have shown at most of them. But that I guess is a different issue/post.
Your example of a recent MBA graduate is absolutely a cherry picked example. Even if it wasnt cherry picked example, it's still a bad example for your argument because a cohort of MBA graduates will quickly pay off their debt because of their high earning potential.

Your entire argument is based upon two faulty assumptions, that people in poorer / developing nations (1) have a lower standard of living than all Americans and (2) have no debts themselves.
Seems pretty stupid to agree that the construction company could not be replaced.
This is an excellent piece of software, well worth it's cost. I really do enjoy tinkering in it.
I could not agree with you more. It is a disconcerting trend to see high impact papers using an "in house program" or "a modified version of a previously described tool", without providing any details about software versions, analysis steps and any custom filtering applied to the data. There could be bugs, unintentionally (or intentionally) introduced biases, or other things such as outlier removal that are not explained in the manuscripts methods.

This is also very true for statistical analysis, many papers do not provide R scripts for their analysis and only a brief overview of the analysis.
Altec Lansing's livestreaming DJ headphones
Hacking Business Negotiations
You can stop reading at the second paragraph which has your TL;DR "No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you." but it is an interesting article so maybe give it another shot.

Bottom line is that it constantly changes just like Google's algorithms for search change, and if you find one person to explain it to you correctly one day they will likely have it wrong next week.
What about the increase in property value, and all the other ways it improved Boston's air quality and overall look?
It's a very common idiom in English as well. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nerve%20center
I've seen this type of writing before. It's a kind of twisted pseudo-criticism you write against a group you dislike. You can compose stuff like this against any group. It sounds believable from the outside, especially if you start sceptical to begin with. But take a closer look - it's actually full of ad-hominems, cherry-picking facts and presenting them in worst light possible. I've been a part of several groups that were targeted by such prose - first the religious group I grew up in, that is a minority in my country; then the school I went to. My university year used (a very lite version of) such criticism against another, so I've seen it from the other side as well. Hell, people write shit like this about HN!

It's hard to defend against such criticism. You'll get boggled down in refuting specific accusations, but this is something you can never win. The only winning move is to ignore it completely. Personally, I shun and shame people who write such stuff, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with their victims. Dishonesty is a poison that destroys societies.

TL;DR: this text is harmful, malicious bullshit. If it at least offended people with style, there would be something to save it.
Interesting that Diane is donating her $148MM - why pay that much to acquire her if it's going to be just donated?

Not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just curious.
I really like double-blind peer review.

This was more a note that, when the paper is accepted, those identifying things go back in. The proposal to have papers be anonymous would have to leave them back out, stripping the paper of important context, and making open science a bigger pain than it already is. Which is kinda contrary to the goal.
> In elementary macroeconomics you learn it is impossible to make a profit Business, however, is all about making a profit, because even if discount personal gain, nothing can be sustainable unless it can get paid for and you need compensation for the investment you make and the risks you take.

You're confusing two different definitions of profit.

Economic profit includes opportunity cost (which includes the "compensation for the investment you make and the risks you take" that you're talking about). If the economic profit is zero, then everyone was compensated appropriately for all investments, risks, etc. Put another way, if the economic profit is zero, there is no better way you could have spent your money or your time (by definition, not by assumption).

Accounting profit is what businesses deal with on a day-to-day basis. If the economic profit is zero, the accounting profit is positive.

> yet, for business to exist competition must be imperfect.

It is true in practice that competition is usually imperfect, but it's not true that this necessarily must be the case in order for businesses to exist.
I wonder how they test it.

I've unfollowed all but a couple of my close friends, the stories that show up are inconsistent (some date all the way back to December 25th but will show up every now and then). Most of their "liking and commenting" activities show up in the news feed but not in the close friends list. It's a mess.
Ah. No remote login.
The problem is that advocates do treat it as a magical thing. They extrapolate from the fact it is proven to the claim that all knowledge is Bayesian, to the implication that all Bayesian reasoning is knowledge.

This fashion is why, for example, BT has been used to both prove the resurrection of Jesus, and to prove that Jesus didn't exist: both to a very high probability.
I wonder is PageRank was applied instead how well would that work.

As for recommendation algorithms, I still believe Last.fm is one of the best around, so there might be something to learn from those guys.
They could do what Satoshi and Bourbaki did: submit pseudonymously.
I don't understand the obsession with wealth inequality, the focus should be on eliminating poverty not eliminating the number of billionaires.
I do this every once in a while, and my most productive hours tend to be... the two hours left in my day after everybody else has gone home. The office is silent and there are no distractions or emails. I can just get "in the zone". Maybe I should start doing this more often...
that's an awesome piece of work
Thanks, they should interview you or someone with your experience actually using the product when writing these articles!
When I am modifying code this assumes that I am testing that part of the code. That's the whole idea behind the cleanup I mentioned.
U.S. Govt Reviews Impact and Efficacy of DMCA Safe Harbor
I read pg more as describing a phenomenon than trying to justify its existence. I'm not sure why so many people are so hostile to a simple explanation of what is.
No idea. I don't know what Jekyll is; I'm not really a web developer and I'm in the early stages of learning Rails.

I read that talk by Maciej Ceglowski and it made me really want to build something of my own, so I did.

There are probably other solutions out there that do the same thing, but I really wanted to roll up my sleeves, write something, and fling it out into the ether to see what happened.
> ...countries which were colonies before – mostly in Africa, Asia and South America – tend to have less wealth and prosperity

The US, Canada, and Australia are rather prominent counterexamples.
Nvidia's Autonomous Car Computer Makes 24 Trillion AI Operations a Second
Faraday Future Talk of the Town Concept Car
You can sue them but it is a long process and you won't get U.S.-style amounts for payouts. That's if you can get that far. The staff cover for each other and use processes like the Ombudsman to delay and obfuscate. Also, the UK is not a litigious culture and my mother and other family members simply didn't want to go through more trouble.
There's inheritance and there's inheritance.

I suspect most rich people don't actually inherit money/wealth (in the legal sense). Instead, they set up trust funds for the benefit of their families/children, and so protect the assets and avoid taxes at the same time.

Also, with the sheer number of tax havens and offshore secret bank accounts available nowadays, I'm very sceptical that the official statistics are able to reflect the true concentration of wealth.

Which is exactly the problem - there are so many loopholes and workarounds that we can't even imagine the true extent of wealth concentration!
How to Teach a Robot to Build a Rube Goldberg Machine
There are some companies that take their customers seriously and others do not.

I bought a Coin on kickstarter and they got blindsided by the EMV transition and rather than shipping me a piece of junk on time, they shipped something that addressed the major problems later.

A lot of people complained but I felt they acted with the highest integrity and if they do another startup or come out with another product I will want to do business with them.

I have bought products and been contacted sellers who had sincere desire to have me be happy with the product and encourage me to return the product and get a replacement if I find any defect at all. You can find these people in Peoria and you can find these people in Shenzen.

I bought products from Fitbit which all had some problems and found that the people there would try pretty hard to not give you an RMA.

Maybe other people have different experiences and I don't know much about their situation, but I did buy a Withings scale and it worked perfectly from day one and if I do get another fitness tracker it is going to be a Microsoft Band or one of the seemingly hundreds of other products in what is a crowded marketplace.