skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes - why not? Are you saying that civil war and defeating communism means that the US is immune to internal problems? There are many previous examples of societies that survived a civil war and defeated similar sized opponents, but later collapsed. Why not this one?
What's a better comparison? Tsarist Russia? The Ottoman Empire? Rome? What goes up must come down. Sometimes it is fast, sometimes slow.
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/

Specifically, the upgraded/tuned rtl:

http://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/

It's $24.
"Is using mathy concepts to dress up poor reasoning worse than not using anything to back up your reasoning?"

I believe so. If your belief is baseless, or based on flimsy evidence or simple bias, it's best if that's obvious. Dressing up weak reasoning to seem stronger is a form of lying. It's what we call sophistry. A big part of the problem is that for a lot of people don't understand the math well enough to point out what's wrong with it or have a bias towards explanations that seem complex or sophisticated but really aren't.

It's true that sometimes we have to make a decision based on poor or no evidence but it should be clear that that is the case when that is the case. Dressing up the argument only obfuscates that.
To be fair I don't really notice a difference in the sound level between those types of cars. It's only advised to be quite in those cars but nobody can do anything against you if you are loud there.
Your statement here: "he's mainly arguing that inequality is good"

is contradicted by the second paragraph of even his simplified version:

But economic inequality per se is not bad. It has multiple causes. Many are bad, but some are good.

His main point isn't that economic inequality is good, and he says as much.
I agree (and I suspect tomp would as well - it's generally best to give others the benefit of the doubt when they've been silent on an issue) that estate taxes are insufficient. I disagree with the implication that they are not a critical component of a solution.
Personally I believe that open code, raw data, and cleaned datasets should be requirements for publication in any peer-reviewed journal in which a paper claims that computational mechanisms were involved.

Failure to distribute the data and code not only greatly devalues the contributions of many scientists, it makes replication far more difficult, and opens the door for outright fabrication.

If computation is a necessary element of the research, it ought to be a necessary element of publication as well.
When I read Graham's original essay I laughed. In my mind, he's a force for greater wealth _equality_. After all, he takes money from rich investors and puts it into startup companies, the majority of which do not produce great wealth.
>Re: His last line about extreme positions -- Any position with "all" in it is extreme.

Therein lies the joke.
Except that's the "official" unemployment number. Here's how it's calculated, cribbed directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics [0]:

* People with jobs are employed.

* People who are jobless, looking for a job, and available for work are unemployed.

* The labor force is made up of the employed and the unemployed.

* People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.

Think about those points very carefully. They mean that:

* People who would like a job but have given up actively looking for one are not counted.

* People who have a job but would take more work if available -- the underemployed -- are not counted.

[0]: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#concepts
Yup. Actually, a common theme on LessWrong was realizing that with better reasoning tools you're more able to bullshit yourself, and so you need to be extra-careful.
Don't chalk up to hype what you can easily explain by jealousy.
> For example, I would rather make $500k per year and have $10k net worth, than make $100k per year and have a $1 million net worth.

Why? Are you assuming that you'll quickly build up your wealth in the first scenario. Personally, I'd be way more comfortable with the second - no worries around how long your income stream will last.
Something tells me the same about anarcho capitalists
Yes - Laplace originally proposed this, it's a good approach (and incidentally the basis for Bayesian meta-analysis). Google "skeptical prior" for more.
A POLITICS FOR TECHNOLOGY
The article also mentions that DLC and free-to-play games (along with in-game purchases, I'd assume) weren't counted in the Steam sales numbers, so the Steam marketshare shown could be a low estimate.
> I'm mostly concerned about the last one - inheritance

What about rent-seeking? Like the article notes, this is a way for the rich to become richer, without creating anything new.

At least with "inheritance", there are "resourceful genes" passing from one generation to the next :)
Maybe not but it's a fair tax especially for those who apply to the "just work hard and reap the benefits"

Also you can actually guard against that even in corporate structures. Denmark is doing it. However it's not IMO a good thing (and not fair as it taxes the company and removes capital from that company)
I'm not sure about defeating communism. I'd say communism was destined to defeat itself from its inception, and it did.
Seems like a ripoff at $199. Aesthetically it looks pretty nice, but it requires a phone for GPS and music. For people that run often or longer distances I don't think it makes much sense. For $50 more you can get the Tom Tom Spark, which has an internal GPS and internal MP3 player.
As of a few months ago, no. They only open up the API when you license it. They may change it in the future as they no longer have a strangle hold on the hypervisor market, but traditionally, they withhold that API functionality in the free version.
> because then you'll simply concentrate all the wealth in corporate structures that transcend the death of their owners.

That's OK, as long as the ownership of these structures is dispersed (as seems to be the case now for many public companies, which are owned by pension funds and/or sovereign wealth funds). That would also prevent nepotism.
We are all makers and takers.

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.

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.

Competition of economic and other varieties is a key to a healthy society, yet, for business to exist competition must be imperfect.
Yep. Money is power when one has the freedom to choose where to spend it.
Wall Street has been on Apple's ass re: its cash holdings for years and years now. Until recently, by sheer force of its market growth, Apple has been able to shrug off these concerns. Not as easy to do these days.
5 big enterprise application development trends of 2016
"Expensive" spans a whole range of values. The Big Dig was $24 billion.

For point of comparison, the population of Boston is around 700k, and the per capita income is 33k. That's... $23 billion.

I support infrastructure projects, and at this point think we should consider the Big Dig a learning experience and not a political punching bag. But can we really say it's a success, considering the countless other uses of the money that we had to pass on?
That and the "hairball graph"!
Guess the PCI Compliance thing works at least. Otherwise why do they need to ask his credit card authorization?
>but the dev flat out absolutely refuses to get on Steam, because he thinks the game ins't ready for that

I once read an article that said you only get one release. There are exceptions to this rule, but it seems to be true.

If you choose to debut your game on Steam with the early-access model, it's usually your one shot to impress customers with your product. We all know that it isn't complete. However, the update tempo and promise tracking can easily tank your product if you fall behind. Taking an extended break, even with the early release model, is pretty much suicide.

I can only think of a handful of titles that hyped their early release AND got a second round of hype on full release. For most, however, the first time you put your game on Steam will be the only major press that you get.
I would leave my simplified response at: income inequality prevents creation of startups and is generally bad for society.

We don't want more income inequality at the end of the day. Our wildest dream is not to have a world in which everyone passes by but some are opulent, but rather a world in which everyone is opulent-- no inequality. In lieu of this greater dream, merely reducing inequality is a good start... the motions about being able to reduce poverty without changing economic inequality are laughably out of touch, still.
There's one thing PG seems to implicitly which is that the movement from small company to large, dominating company in a vertical is a good thing.

Ultimately startups seem to be producing winner-take-all companies. I do not believe this is a healthy thing for the economy or even rights of the consumer in the long run. There are a lot of services where if you do not like their terms, there may not be a great practical alternative.

I don't want to see much changed, but I do feel the government should be encouraging competition much more than it is today. I do not think Facebook should have been allowed to buy Instagram, and I think WhatsApp should have been fined an enormous amount for blocking the words "Telegram" to stall their competitor. We put in the Sherman Antitrust laws to reign in behavior in the Gilded age and we should have a modern equivalent to encourage not one Google but 10 Googles in a market.

I'm clearly asking for too much, but after all the recent Airline consolidation several studies have proven that prices are now higher in certain markets as a result of lost competition. Capitalism doesn't magically prevent monopoly or oligopoly - it is up to us to put the right checks and balances in place.
You can opt out of the 48 hour directive in your employment contract in Britain, I expect this is true of most of these type of City jobs.
> mostly everybody agrees with that

What???

/me suddenly understands what's meant by "privilege"
5 years in review: Indonesia’s growth in startup funding since 2011
"That's a lot of extra work, but it's also a huge security problem."

What is the security problem ? Simply missing updates that might fix vulns ? Genuinely curious...
Yes and yes and yes!

ETA - caveat to the 2nd question: ... unless you've restricted your prior to exclude the truth.
I suppose you would equalize this by counting the MBA's future wages as an asset. Even after subtracting out his MBA debt, the MBA has much more earning potential than the slum dweller.
You've reframed the problem to wealth influencing politics, which still isn't something that needs to be fixed by taking money away from people. Redistribution is a decent solution to resource problems, but this isn't that kind of problem.

Ending money in politics is hard to do using the levers of democracy since those levers have already been purchased, so I understand the desire to end extreme wealth instead. There is another solution, though. 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/
Sure, it's "worth it" when taxpayers pay for most of the price, but would drivers thing it was worth it if the tunnel had a $5 toll to pay for it?
With you on inheritance, that seems like a great place to start. It would have no impact on startups and would have a great effect on the corruptive forces behind generational aristocracy.

I've been thinking a lot about PGs assumption that you have to kill startups to decrease economic inequality. Is that really what's driving economic inequality's increase? Couldn't you quite likely have a world in which first generation entrepreneurs continue to be increasingly successful, but economic inequality doesn't increase lock-step with that?

For example, decreasing generational wealth, more of the proceeds from the increasing number of technology enabled companies going to more people (this certainly is a major factor at Google now for example), poverty decreasing (as PG suggests should be our target), and more seems like a world in which these ideas could co-exist.

It seems absolutely true that decreasing inequality for the sake of decreasing inequality's sake would be bad, which seems to be PGs point - you have to be targeting something that is specifically bad on its own, and perhaps which has a byproduct that is bad which is increasingly economic inequality. That seems right. But the idea that economic inequality will inevitably increase UNLESS we destroy the ability for people to start companies can't be correct.
I would argue that a reading of the PG essay that doesn't describe it as a series of arguments for ignoring / tolerating / encouraging economic inequality is, at best, flawed.
Right, that's true. Then let's say "nationally increasing inequality". I'm pretty sure that emerging nations will follow (some are already following) the trends of concentration of capital very soon.
The Weak/Strong Dance in Swift
And then there is a dozen other databases, and none of them have shared standard API. So your best bet is a generic dashboard, with a plugin system, which you can write to extend the dashboard, to pull metrics from your metric query system or from custom JMX/PG command.
It's hardly cherry picking. I don't know exactly the percentage, but let's say 50% of the US population is net in debt. So all these people are poorer than the millions in developing nations without a penny to their name? As above, I would argue no, they are not. Hence this statistic doesn't mean much.
So let me get this straight, statistics can be misused? I almost stopped reading as soon as I saw the image from the big bang theory. (That show presents nerds the way other people want to see them. Not the way nerds actually are.) It appears that the author of this article is just a journalist:

http://www.johnhorgan.org/

I don't see anything in there about him ever being a scientist, a statistician, or anyone who would actually use this theorem. In fact, he even went to school for journalism.

I really don't understand where this author is coming from when he says things like, "I conveniently decided that Bayes was a passing fad." Why should we care about his opinion on the matter? Is he reporting to us what Bay Theorem is and its significance, or is he giving us his uniformed opinion on the matter?
5% unemployment does not mean that the majority is happy with their employment(s) or not stressed by it.

GDP per capita is an average and does not reflect how the wealth is distributed.
Paul Graham, like nearly everyone in today's politics, fails to appreciate the near-universal validity, at least when it comes to social and economic policy, of Ron's First Law: All extreme positions are wrong.

I realize this is tongue-in-cheek, but never forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

One could say that the modern world is largely a result of continuous middle-ground reforms that have built up into in an unfathomable and pathological state. Some radicalism might indeed be in order.
What is "an ATS"? Applicant tracking system? Above top secret?

Can you share roughly how many employees would have come in the aquihire? $380M is a big number.
The case for open computer programs
I think that large income inequality has been harmful in the past because of scarcity. If a small number of people had a lot more money than the masses, it meant the masses were starving.

Technology has the ability to potentially change this. It hasn't yet; it's mostly just given us the ability to play Candy Crush and look at what our friends ate for dinner while waiting in line at the store. But it will. And it's a mistake to assume that because income inequality in a world defined by scarcity causes social ills, it will necessarily do so in a post-scarcity society.

Unfortunately using political influence for rent-seeking is a huge problem. I would like to believe, at least in our humble little democracy, that the masses are slowly awakening to this. At some point billionaires won't be able to use social-issue boogeymen like abortion and gay rights to convince poor people to vote against their own economic self-interest. I hope.

I think that's implicit in the argument PG is making. Income inequality has always been bad in the past, but the future is not the past. There are variables that may change that.
In my field (Epidemiology), when doing Bayesian analysis, it is very common to set one's priors to be a distribution. Sometimes the point estimate and spread of a previously conducted study or meta-analysis, sometimes merely a uniform distribution with upper and lower bounds ("It is extremely unlikely that the relative risk of disease for this exposure is below 0.01 or above 100...")

It's been argued that frequentist analysis is essentially a Bayesian analysis with a prior distribution centered on zero with bounds from positive to negative infinity.
Very neat, but they're only indexing CRAN and PyPI right now. In my short time doing scientific computing (staff member at a university right now), I've seen a LOT of C and C++, but those don't have canonical package repositories. I think that finding all of those codebases (even if just limited to GitHub) and indexing those would be very interesting and would be necessary to have representation from a few fields.
> The extra 'wealth' is of no impact to the happy Denver guy.

No one is making any arguments based upon happiness or "Awesome"ness or cost of living.

And yes, the Denverite is less wealthy than the Manhattanite, supposing that they both own houses that were sold to them at the median price of their geographic area.
Now we have proof that the centre of the earth has Death Star-like pillar structures and what looks like a power core.
The global decrease in inequality is barely there, and some argue is an illusion due to the wealthiest individuals being adept at hiding their wealth. What is there is only due to India and China starting to have something resembling a middle class (but even so their standard of living would be unacceptable from someone who grew up in the US.)

In the rest of the developed world (US, Europe, Japan, etc.) average wages have been totally left behind by the growth in wealth for the millionaire and billionaire class. In the US especially, average incomes have actually decreased when adjusted for inflation while the billionaires see tremendous growth year after year. It's horrendous.
Well of course, but this is not accounted for in Oxfam's analysis, hence it's pretty meaningless.
Pwning Gnomes: Where CTF Meets 2015 SANS Holiday Hack (Write-Up)
They may be a critical component of a solution, but given what I said earlier about nepotism and clans, I'd argue that they would make things worse because they would further reduce the ability of the poor and middle classes to gain traction against those with corporate power. This is not dissimilar to the Soviet situation.

So, even if they are a critical component, they are irrelevant unless someone can articulate how these other components would work.
Ask HN: How are you building real-time web and mobile notifications?
I recently noticed that I've built multiple realtime notifications systems from scratch, often inspired by the Facebook notifications experience.

There have been a variety of features and combinations, but I've often needed:

- Context-based fallback from websockets to mobile and then to email when attempting to notify a particular user.

- Suppression of notifications if the user is online and actively engaged in the relevant context (e.g. in a specific conversation).

- Merging of multiple notifications about the same topic (e.g. "John and Jane liked your post").

- Retrieval of the latest notifications and read status (to show count badge).

- Support for desktop push notifications (service worker in Chrome/Firefox or Safari Notifications).

What do HN readers do when they need these features? Is there a product out there that I just haven't noticed, or is everyone rolling their own?

There seem to be a few services concerned with just the simple notification transport and channel subscriptions (e.g. Pusher), but that only solves part of the problem.
Title: How Facebook's news feed algorithm works

Second Paragraph: "No one outside Facebook knows for sure how it does this, and no one inside the company will tell you."
Not in the developed West it isn't. I'm a fortunate young professional in that I have a stonking great mortgage and still owe (some, it is the UK) of my student loan. In wealth terms I'm doing OK but not great, certainly not in liquid / disposable wealth terms as well as before my property.

In the long run however my decisions will likely lead to me being much wealthier than if I maximised my present wealth at all times. I'd say for many people in the West that income is a greater factor.

I know plenty of posh people who have inherited money but who have decent but not spectacularly well paying jobs. The cost of modern middle class living in the UK quickly reduces much difference between what they can afford and what I can.
> over-hyped

For the past 5-6 years or so I've been working extensively with Stripe, Braintree, WePay, and PayPal, on a number of different eCommerce and marketplace platforms. Some supported only one of these gateways, other platforms I've been heavily involved with support each of those 4 gateways in parallel depending on their merchants' needs.

Stripe wins, hands-down, for the best documentation and well-thought-out API architecture. It's not even fair to call it a race, they're so far ahead. Braintree has caught up a fair bit over the years, but they're still nowhere near Stripe's level, and now that they're owned by PayPal I don't really expect them to ever get there. (As an aside, I also had a pretty frustrating experience with Braintree back in the day because they took too long to support card tokenization, and one client had no feasible way to only charge the customer once inventory was secured. Lame customer experience.)

WePay is doing some cool stuff, but, as one example, their ruby SDK gem is a 100-line thin wrapper around the core Net::HTTP library, which means I have to dig pretty heavily into both their documentation and Ruby's various Net::HTTP exceptions to safely handle errors, whereas Stripe has all of this built into their ruby gem out of the box.

My time is limited, and I'd much rather invest it towards designing great customer experiences than reading and understanding lacking documentation. Stripe is the only platform I've seen that gets that their documentation is their product. If the price is I'm on an over-hyped platform, I'm okay with that. :)
I've had surprisingly good luck on craigslist, I find both small and large companies post on craigslist. Networking, as everyone else has mentioned, is definitely the easiest approach and usually produces good quality leads.
Statistics and Facts in the Accounting Industry in the USA – Infographic