skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another angle is that the label "startup" is being applied retoractively to companies that, at their beginnings, were in no way similar to contemporary startups. I can't picture the founders of Google, Apple or Microsoft frequenting "startup events" of their time, spending time on figuring out valuations, or "growth hacking" strategies, or drinking beer together and dreaming out loud of the world domination they're going to achieve. From what I remember reading, the founders of those companies simply did the work and were focused on it. They didn't dream of taking the world until they already found themselves in the groove, being half-way into orbit and already after first stage separation.

Contrast that with what we call startups today - companies that deliberately attempt to be that "evergreen book", trying out every trick in the book to force themselves onto growth path. They live within an ecosystem, a big part of which is a mutual adoration society, with additional large layers of parasitic actors trying to suck out some money and status by just hanging around. And surely a good strategy was found - hence contemporary standard business plan of bullshiting customers with half-made shell of a product to quickly reach the point of getting acquired. It seems to work better than "just" starting a company, at least for the founders. Not necessarily for the world at large.

In a way, I think that early Apple and Google had more in common with a pizza place than with a contemporary Instagram clone.
> Australia, and we have no desperate people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Australia
I'm playing it on MacOS using VMware Fusion. Works well.
The COMPare Project: Tracking Switched Outcomes in Clinical Trials
Thanks heaps Nate for the writeup!

Some other resources on rack-mini-profiler are:

https://samsaffron.com/archive/2013/03/19/flame-graphs-in-ru...

https://samsaffron.com/archive/2012/07/12/miniprofiler-ruby-...

Some history: https://samsaffron.com/archive/2011/06/09/+Profiling+your+we...

My talk, measuring Ruby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWyEWUD-ztQ

And Off the Rails https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP5NNkzb4og
There is a lot of talk here about income inequality being a fairness problem, but not as much about it being an economic problem. But if people don't have money they can't buy anything. If those poor people had more money they would just go back to Walmart and give it back to the Waltons, which is a good thing to have that economic activity.

Wealth gains are not a zero sum game. It is about how much we produce. If the economy is not operating at peak productivity (for example with a lot of people out of work), then not as much wealth is created. And this will happen when there a lot of people who can't buy much, making demand low. It is a vicious cycle.

In the US the wealthy have lobbied to push down their taxes, and this is an example of what people mean when they say the system is rigged. This can help those rich people on an individual level and in the short term. But it also effectively takes that money out of the economy, since the rich typically don't go and spend that money but save it instead. If that money went to taxes it would have stayed circulating in the economy, whether it is used to pay for college tuition or used on some pork barrel project.

This is the argument made by some for economic inequality hurting the economy.
You've identified one link in the chain. Why not consider the management of the FCC by the Daughters Bell via lobbyists and the revolving door? (The SEC and FTC are captured by different industries.) They all dearly love extant USA spectrum policy, because they know that without it they would cease to exist in a few short years. The way to thrive without pleasing customers, is to write the rules that keep real competition out.
Or start small, grow to a modest, profitable size, and be sold. A friend of mine recently retired (in his 40s or 50s) after selling his high-end catering business for a few megabucks.
I have just started playing AoE2 again. I have some complaints.

The units are so stupid and frustrating. They will casually walk into the range of enemy castles and towers. They will chase units across the map if you don't put them into defensive mode. If you do put them into defensive mode, they can easily be take out by archers without fighting back. They will open gates and let hordes of enemies into your town. They will stand there and continue cutting wood while an enemy army approaches them and kills their coworkers. The monks won't attack units unless you specifically order them to. Etc, etc. It makes parts of the game very tedious and unenjoyable.

The campaigns are similarly tedious. At first it's really fun and challenging, if you have the difficulty right. It's a challenge to figure out how to repel the big attacks and build up very quickly.

But after building up, it's no longer a challenge. And to win, you just need to spend an hour clicking through the enemies base destroying their structures. Even though you basically won an hour ago.

The multiplayer is terrifying. I tried it once and within like 10 minutes my opponent had surrounded my base with cannon towers and trebuchets. I haven't played it since.

The AI scripting is really cool. It's super simple to learn, very easy to modify other people's scripts, and very powerful. You can do a lot with just a few lines of their domain specific language. And you don't need any programming knowledge at all. And it's very extensive. There are tons of variables and functions available that let you do all kinds of things, and it's well documented.

But it's also extremely restricted. You can't do basic things like store variables, compare numbers, etc. There are arbitrary limits on how many conditions you can have in a conditional, how many lines you can have total, etc. They are workable, but I have no idea why they are even there. The only people modifying AI scripts in the first place are probably willing to accept if the game runs a bit slower because of all the extra code they put in it.

There's also no way to speed up the game. You only get "slow", "normal", or "fast". You need to use Cheat Engine to make the game run a hundred times faster. This is necessary for testing those AI scripts, or getting through those tedious offensive parts I mentioned above. They should have just let it be an option in the game.

Same with other variables like population limit, that's restricted to 200 for no reason. If I want a higher limit, I'll accept that the game runs slower. Just let it be an option, even in a hidden menu with a big warning or something. TBF, the new HD edition does let you go up to 500 IIRC.
Unless you want to keep each friend's contributions private from each other, I would:

1) do (A)

2) incorporate all comments as necessary, crediting each participant with the issue raised (i.e. in a footnote). This both allows all participants to benefit from everyone's participation and acknowledges the contribution of each... and gives the opportunity of a de facto peer review of those contributions

3) do one more pass with the "final rev" candidate
Sorry but if you are just going to dismiss my sources because they are too biased then there is no point in continuing this conversation. Not to mention the irony of following that with a Krugman article which as biased as can be.
Smartphone 3D Printer -- to Retail Eventually at Just $100
Of course the individuals who act in their capacity as government employees affect all the outcomes of state action. You may be more of an Austrian than you think if you refuse to recognize "society" and "the state" as independent actors.

> The assertion that taxation is legalized theft enforced through the threat of force is a popular one in certain circles, but it isn't the self-evident fact you believe it to be, either.

What other collection of individuals claims this privilege but the state? (see what I did there ;-) )

Seriously though: if I get a band of guys together and point a gun at you and force you to hand over 25% of your income to us, wouldn't that be illegal? But if I wear a badge and the band of guys is the enforcement arm of the IRS, that's any different?

A more complete analysis: https://mises.org/library/taxation-robbery
The [1] book is exceptionally good for beginners. He completely rewrote it with C++11 and refocused beginners on some key changes to the language to make it much easier.
It's missing Havasupai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havasupai
>If you have to resort to name-calling to make your point ... you're wrong. It's that simple.

Except when you're wrong, and you can actually look at research that demonstrates the bullshit people gullibly believe about their society is incorrect.

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Selling stolen gas should be penalized with a lifetime ban on owning or operating a gas station.
> Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds its founders become rich. And while getting rich is not the only goal of most startup founders, few would do it if one couldn't.

As usual, the investors and founders are teamed up, with employees in the background. In contrast with founders, there is no certainty that employees will get any life-changing financial gain from working at a successful startup. The only certainty is that whatever the founders make, the employees will make several orders of magnitude less. In fact, all employee wealth put together won't usually add up to the founders' share.

I understand why founders are OK with this and have a long list of justifications including "personal risk" and vision. But why do non-founders continually sell themselves short?

I find it ironic that's there such a blatant economic inequality even among those who create the wealth.
I have cards from Chase, Citi and Barclay. Every charge yields a notification just like the AMEX.
Yeah! I'm pretty positive. We're at a pinnacle point where for a lot of big problems, technology / private industry is going to be more effective than the solutions any nation state will be able to provide. Interesting times ahead; governments will need to adapt and focus on what they're good at rather than react defensively.
I don't run Cisco, but thanks for worrying about that. Also, stateless ACL's should protect against overrunning the control plane.
> ... thousands of policy changes ...

I'm all for reducing the size and complexity of govt, including the frequency of policy changes. A progressive tax can be a small-govt solution.

> ... Progressive taxes simply point a bigger gun at the heads of those who perform better in the economy.

A progressive tax certainly takes more from those who have performed better in the past. I'm concerned about creating jobs and encouraging situations where people can succeed in the future. The people who will create the jobs of tomorrow are not the ones who created past jobs. It's small companies who create jobs, so don't tax them as much; it's the struggling entrepreneur who will create jobs, so don't tax them as much. Instead, tax those who have already succeeded and who are not creating as much relative economic output.
What will happen in 2016
+1

I'm not an active practitioner of meditation, but I've been using some light mindful exercises [1] when going to bed, and it helped me falling asleep faster. It used to take me 30-45 minutes to shut down my brain; now I can do in 5-10.

Melatonin also helps, particularly when it's getting late and I'm too excited to sleep. I only take 300mcg, which is enough to make me want to sleep. But I use only as a last resort. It sometimes causes very vivid (and infrequently even lucid) dreams, and then my brain doesn't rest as much, and I wake up tired next morning.

[1] Nothing too fancy; just some tips from "Search Inside Yourself" [2]. Basically control your thoughts, empty your brain, focus on breathing, and consciously think on every muscle of your body. Rinse and repeat.

[2] http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0070XF474/
Oh, but most startups are not trying to become big corporations. They're trying to be bought by one. This is the "get rich" part of the startup get-rich-quick scheme. Which is even worse for customers, because you can at least somewhat trust that a successful wannabe-big-corp will at least try to still sell/maintain their original product for a while.
I think the best book for complete beginners is "Jumping into C++" by Alex Allain. From there, move on to "C++ Primer Plus" by Stephen Prata.
"Inequality was so much less in the 1950s/1960s"

To a first approximation every single person on the planet had far less in the 1950s/1960s.

"Equality" sucks if it means that everyone is equally impoverished.
> Does D have code for: [...]

He covered this, specifically out that Numpy has an advantage in the number of libraries and other resources available for it.

> because everyone else in the world knows and uses them;

No, everyone working in some specialized niches does. And those niches don't even scratch the surface of the number of people who regularly do simple operations on multi-dimensional arrays but who don't need most of what you list.

And sometimes people even in your niche that does depend on the other stuff run into things that are just way too slow, that they have to rewrite in a lower level language.

There are plenty of people for whom this will be very useful without having all the support infrastructure around Numpy in place.

> I can't think of any reason I'd ever reach for D.

D is for people who wants a "C++ done right", where it is implicit that you want a C-like language, and share ideals of C++ such as to whatever extent possible not paying for what you don't use.

Specifically in this case, you'd reach for D if you need multi-dimensional arrays and either prefer a C++-like language over Python or your Python code is too slow and you prefer to avoid a lower level language like C.

That may not be for you, and that's fine. Just like Numpy isn't nearly universal for numerical computing.

> Yes, my np.mean() might be slower than your map(). I almost always don't care.

I find this an amusing objection... I did my MSc thesis on methods for reducing error rates in OCR, and included methods that used various nearest-neighbour variations and statistical methods on bitmap slices and similar.

I did it mainly in Ruby (with some inline C where absolutely necessary for performance - if I remember correctly it was about a dozen lines of code in C) because I cared far more about readable code than fast code, and Python would in my eyes have been a double loss: not the speed of C, yet still ugly and annoying to work with in my opinion.

Seeing the D code examples, I might very well have picked D for it today.
Yeah it is a delusion. In general startup environment thrives on and needs delusions to operate. They are part of the deal so speak.

I think in this case there was a need to have an explanation of how start world relates to income inequality. At some point someone is going to confront some YC company founders after they talked about they want to save the world and make it a better palce etc etc, about "so what do you think about income inequality" and the idea is they'll pull the the gosspel -- pg essay ;-) and quote from the book of Econ chapter 2 verse 15.
VC-funded companies, almost 100%.
I agree that's a problem worth fixing. No issue there.
You do realize that these things were already being studied in the 90's, right? The Grefenstette paper mentioned in this article makes use of an architecture from Das et al. in 1992. More generally, people have been talking about functional programming and relationships with AI since there was functional programming. However nice Colah's blog post is, he most certainly did not come up with any of these ideas first.
Either you're trolling, or you completely misunderstand my position.

Thought experiment: Let's make the minimum wage $1000 per hour. I'd like you to think through the ramifications. What would happen?

> Sometime in the future I'm sure we'll be able to produce enormous amounts of wealth with minimum man power

We already do! The amount of productivity possible by a single worker today was completely unheard of 50 years ago, let alone 100 or 200.

> What will everyone do then?

What do we do now? We continue to work, even though we're far past satisfying all of our material needs. Why didn't everyone just stop working more hours than it takes to eat and stay warm?

Come up with answers to those few questions and you'll be well on your way to being an economist ;-)
>Are those all in standard libraries, fully documented, backed by 60 year old, fully debugge code (LAPACK, etc) ... yes, my np.mean() might be slower than your map(). I almost always don't care.

Hmm ... LAPACK itself is only 23 years old (1992). Its was implemented to be a faster replacement of the "standard" LINPACK library, by effectively exploiting the caches on modern processors.

For most serious users of numerical computing, performance is extremely important.

Also, I think you might be putting far too much faith in an arbitrary assortment of Python libraries. If you think that NumPy is just a thin wrapper on LAPACK, and you are using it in mission or life critical operations, then I think you have some code vetting to do.

Even if some of your chosen libraries do use LAPACK, and even if there is some code in LAPACK that is 60 years old, that does not suddenly mean that all of your chosen Python libraries (and your code on top of them) is all correct. Most serious users of many of the routines that you mention (e.g. "machine learning" and "financial calculations") implement and test these routines themselves in order to ensure their correctness. In very serious model vetting operations, it would be customary to even invest in two different independent implementations of the same routine.

> I reliably email to anyone across the world and they can immediately run and modify my code because it is such a standard?

I don't think "reliable" and "emailing scripts" normally go together. It would be more customary to use a source code control system in a high reliability environment. Personally I have found reproducing Python installations to be very tricky and I would take extreme care in any critical operations that assume two different Python installations produce the exactly the same results (high reliability, like some of the 60+year old codes run by NASA, would even require bug for bug reproducibility).

"Python/Numpy/Scipy/Pandas/Matplotlib" are not the last word on anything, theyt are not standardized as you imply, and they leave vast room for improvement in all dimensions (performance, correctness, reliability, productivity, etc).
They are getting down voted because of the phrasing of the "question". If they had asked:

"Why would you want to install FreeBSD instead of Linux? Are there advantages?"

They would have a got a list. Putting "who cares" in any part of the question sort begs for a down vote rather than an serious answer.
There's no solid evidence that increasing the minimum wage will create fewer jobs. From Paul Krugman's review of Robert Reich's new book

> Other evidence points indirectly to a strong role of market power. At this point, for example, there is an extensive empirical literature on the effects of changes in the minimum wage. Conventional supply-and-demand analysis says that raising the minimum wage should reduce employment, but as Reich notes, we now have a number of what amount to controlled experiments, in which employment in counties whose states have hiked the minimum wage can be compared with employment in neighboring counties across the state line. And there is no hint in the data of the supposed negative employment effect.

> Why not? One leading hypothesis is that firms employing low-wage workers—such as fast-food chains—have significant monopsony power in the labor market; that is, they are the principal purchasers of low-wage labor in a particular job market. And a monopsonist facing a price floor doesn’t necessarily buy less, just as a monopolist facing a price ceiling doesn’t necessarily sell less and may sell more.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/robert-reich-chal...

There's also something similar to your subsidy idea today called the Earned Income Tax Credit [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit]. Guaranteeing a minimum income does seem like a promising idea, but it will probably have to be tried elsewhere before the U.S. will adopt it (if ever).
Could you post your address? I'll bet you have a lot of stuff that other people could use, and since you don't believe in property, you surely won't have any objections to them taking it.
There are people out there working harder than you, but are stuck in poverty. They were born at the wrong time, or in the wrong family, or didn't go to the right schools.

You ought to be self-aware enough to know that blind luck plays a huge part in your employability.
Let them eat cake!

(The concept didn't work out so well for Marie Antoinette)

If a revolution comes and you find yourself thrown up against a wall somewhere, remember your comment this evening.
"I think the propaganda of "The Communists" has been drilled into the American public so solidly"

You mean the part where communists murdered 100 million people in the last century? That "propaganda"?
Wow, you sure did destroy that straw man over there.

Now, do you want to try engaging with the actual argument (property is a useful legal fiction, not an inherent moral right)?
Learn functional programming <- I remember hearing the same argument for object oriented programming 20 years ago. The good old golden hammer :)

Learn the tool or technology that fits well your problem space whatever it might be : golang for highly concurrent server side, functional for something that maps easily to math stuff, event based programming for request/response, etc.
Do plasmodia compete with each other for insect hosts? Is there some other plasmodium waiting in the wings to wreak deadly havoc, if only it were free from its nemeses P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, P. malariae, and P. knowlesi? This seems far-fetched, and besides why wouldn't the genetic changes that make mosquitoes unsuitable hosts for the malaria we've had for millennia also make them unsuitable hosts for this new malaria that's going to evolve overnight?
Looks very interesting, do you have any examples online?
The point of the essay is simply this:

If you're seeing a massive amount of problems in your organization AND you have what appears to be a badly broken prioritization/triage/issue tracking process, you need to fix your triage process before you'll be able to solve the real underlying problems.

There's no situation in which opening 500 issues in four months and only closing a tiny fraction of that amount is healthy, regardless of severity or whether they're feature requests or bug reports, or whatever.

The graph makes that point, and I'll hold the fact that this is on the front page of HN, /r/programming, and lobste.rs as evidence of that point being sufficiently informative and well understood by the vast majority of readers.

I would have updated the image on the first report of the issue if I was able to edit the post, but this is an archive from an email newsletter entry. It is worth fixing, and I will fix it in time for the followup essay.

I am just generally bothered by how incredibly, unbelievably pedantic it is to fixate on this one point and act as if the whole essay isn't valuable because it took an extra few seconds to read the graph.

But hey, this is the internet. We can ignore the larger points and focus on fine-grained details, and that's normal, right?