skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inheritance taxes on their own will do nothing to change the situation because then you'll simply concentrate all the wealth in corporate structures that transcend the death of their owners.

Even if you make it impossible to 'pass down' these structures as property, you will have de-facto inheritance through nepotism and clan structures.
Let's Kill the Word Cloud
What state are you in? California requires PTO to be paid out when you leave.
Oh wow, on closer inspection you're right. I initially skimmed the article and clearly made some assumptions. It's more focused on the biological and physiological effects of socioeconomic status on fetal development... which is actually pretty interesting.

To be fair, most of the article alludes to those factors and effects in a way indistinguishable from if he had mentioned cultural elements instead. I just assumed that one of the paragraphs I glossed over would have mentioned diet.
In a nutshell, its a framework that allows arbitrary code to be injected into apps and android itself.

https://www.mysonicwall.com/sonicalert/searchresults.aspx?ev...

http://blog.itsnotfound.com/2013/04/xposed-framework/
> Concatenating two "strings", is not particularily difficult, it just needs to be done with care.

Driving home is not particularly difficult, it just needs to be done with care. Consequently tens of thousands die every year doing it.

Really, it's probably the case that if you find it simple, you shouldn't be using C. You will make mistakes doing that, and if you don't think so, those mistakes will be released.

Now, about things C was intended for... It was intended for everything. Nowadays we have better options for most uses, but it was indeed intended for web development.
Yes. Working less than 0 hours would make me more productive.
Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed to Iraq [Matt Mazur]
> globally increasing inequality

At a global level, inequality has not been increasing. Globalization has been a huge win for developing nations in this regard (and the people who have paid the price are low-wage workers in developed nations like the US).

This is not to say that we have to conclude that globalization has been a good thing overall for developing nations - there are lots of problems it has caused for them at the same time. But it's tough to criticize it on the basis of increasing inequality globally, because it's done the exact opposite.
I have been thinking about this since last night, and here are my thoughts. I totally agree with Amjad on avoiding framing programming as an intuitive activity. But on the other hand, framing it as a hard intellectual activity for beginners is also troublesome. I am facing this now as I am helping my younger brother in his Computer Science B.Sc. program, and taking different isolated courses for few months two or three times a year makes academic/intellectual studying for this industry without experience a hassle. I keep listening to him and one of the most common complains he says is: "I don't know how all these - OS, Automata, Java, Web, Algorithms and Math - pieces fit together."

I think I can relate to this frustration/confusion because I went through it when I was obtaining my B.Sc. degree but I cannot exactly remember nor reproduce how I overcame this phase, or made sense of "it" all (for lack of a better term).

Can you folks help me with this? How would you guide or help a beginner like this person in programming?
Kernel Patching 101: How to Make Repairs Without System Downtime
Why not? How else have they managed to accumulate 40% of the wealth? This must be the case, mathematically. Wealth is the integral of net income over time. And savings rates are heavily skewed by income: http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/513125876bb3f7db400...
Yeah... the example you gave is meaningless. Knowing that wealth concentrates in 1% of human beings is not a meaningless statistic.
One of the journals in my field requires you to strip out all identifiers before submission. This is remarkably difficult. Consider the things that might give you away:

- GitHub, FigShare, institutional repositories etc. for code and data

- Information on the location of the study

- Statistical packages used (hope you didn't author the one you're using)

Of course, anonymity will be shattered the moment anyone talks about their work at a conference. Furthermore, several systematic reviews and meta-analysis studies I've worked on benefitted greatly from being able to email the authors directly with questions.

I'd also be concerned that people will mentally assign things to a "Big Name" in the field anyway. "Ah, another paper on HAART. Must be out of so-and-so's lab..."
Not really, because you get none of the money back.

However, you can take the charitable tax deduction this year, instead of future years when you plan on giving money to charity. Also, the capital gains/dividends/interest that the DAF earns isn't taxed, so if you plan on giving to charities in the future, this is one way of increasing that amount.
(downvoted to -1 points yet again, even though it had 4 points)

46 days ago, on the original thread[1] announcing the acquisition, I wrote the following comment, which proceeded to get downvoted to the bottom.

"Did Diane's bebop even launch? I can't find their website. It is kind of frustrating that everybody involved (employees, investors) in bebop are getting a payday, without really putting in much work, or verifying their ideas. Just leaves a sour taste in my mouth (old boys network) as a two-time failed entrepreneur."

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10597896
Automattic (Wordpress) proves a remote distributed workforce can be successful
You changed your criticism. First post:

"PG insist on confusing extreme economic inequality with normal economic inequality"

Last post:

"Most people have nothing against the inequality created by most startups"

His point was that startups can produce extreme income inequality (without the system being rigged). The whole point of his essay was to not lump all the causes of income inequality together.
PGs argument does not take into account the majority that make it possible for the few to create things, but instead of being bolstered by those few, are instead being left behind. Its sad to say, but his current social position is definitely influencing his thought process.

I turned down a job in Silicon valley. Even a 100K job doesn't mean anything when most of it goes to rent and my free time is spent sitting in a car or on a train commuting. I can imagine the stress the rent hikes are having on everyone else.
I'm a little confused. Are you saying that a tenure track prof wrote a paper on how to evauluate fitted power law curves? Was it something else besides least squares? Because I can't possibly see this getting accepted to a statistics journal.
Perhaps I am an ignorant. A little background about me:

* I live in NYC

* I live with my parents, still very young as a recent grad

* I don't make tons of money, but with overtime I probably make 80K? I don't really count my money these days.

* I do spend money on monthly gym membership (I should suspend that to save $100 since I am too busy haven't been there for a few months), netflix and couple other stuff.

* I give my parents allowance (almost half of my paycheck) to help with mortgage and stuff

* I am single all the way (that seems to be a pretty saving...)

* only been working full time for one year

And yet, I am still able to afford nice meal if I wanted to, go to nice places if I wanted to. Of course my wallet will bleed and cry if I were to spend too much, but on a daily basis I have a comfortable life, so I don't really feel an economic hardship, I don't make millions and the wealth is still controlled by that 1%.

It doesn't bother me, until, if I were to have kids to raise, and a mortgage entirely on me.

I think the attitude toward economic inequality needs a context. If you want to go on a cruise 365 days of course we can't afford that. Going to Italy and France once a year? That's gonna bleed for most of us. But in case of affording a good meal? Little but not too much. Then for those who makes significantly less than I make, they will feel the pain the most and I don't see a way out of it.
I disagree, simply because it comes down to how much money the MBA graduate has available to him at any given time, given the country's laws. No one is asking him to pay it off all at once. Having a loan you have to pay off over 30 years amortizes your losses, allowing you to have a net profit every month. And if he ever had the situation of the slum dweller, he could declare bankruptcy AND get rid of the student loan by claiming "extraordinary hardship". Finally, the social programs in this country mean that even a homeless, jobless person is richer than some employed people in Africa or Indian slums.
Great article! I had a similar experience, a Java programmer turned Linux Kernel programmer. The first think I remember doing was debugging a kernel panic using crash. It is not doubt challenging for Java/PHP programmers to debug C coredumps/KP, when there is pointer reference involved. But at the same time I learned a lot, specially memory management.
It's worth keeping in mind that we do live in the propaganda bubble of the Soviet Union's arch nemesis.

For their KGB, we had our J. Edgar Hoover. For their political purges, we had our House Committee on Unamerican Activities. For their later economic struggles, we had our great depression.
Looks pretty cool. Will check it out. Oddly, I have an App that crashes only on the iPad Pro, so I cannot return the favor. :(

Have you posted on stack overflow? I have a question, but that may be a better place to ask.

Here's is my app, circa 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXlkzZubHnM
I used to VJ a lot. Here's the app in action at Thump Radio, circa 2001 (for a clear view, goto 0:40 sec): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W1jmovV5SM

EDIT "only"
it's blocked for me, I get

We've blocked this page

O2 Wifi takes public wifi seriousl..
Here's a proposal: Bayesian scientists shouldn't select their own prior. Instead publish how your results would update any prior, including the one picked by me, the reader.

I certainly haven't thought this through, but maybe this would make science more modular: combine the updates from M studies and calculate the new, combined update. Statisticians, does this work?
FWIW, it seems to me that a major benefit of the Bayesian approach is to make bad reasoning (in the form of, say, an unreasonable prior) transparent and obvious. I've never heard it claimed that the Bayesian approach was robust to sophisticated idiocy (neither on LessWrong nor mainstream writing on Bayesian methods), except in the narrow techical sense that the posterior asymptotically approximates the likelihood given infinite data (provably true under some assumptions but irrelevant to the objections in the OP).
> ...I'll simply start taking days off without pay, which is something payroll seems to really hate for some reason when it concerns salaried folks.

At the risk of sounding too glib, the short answer to why they hate it is it creates work for them. In the US, all of the major payroll processing services are geared towards either hourly or salaried templates. Most companies' payroll procedures are built around the core assumption that if you are salaried, then it is X salary divided across N weeks/months/your-pay-period. If you take days off without pay, changing the salary, someone in payroll has to manually key in the delta off your normal pay period processing numbers. That sometimes has downstream ramifications upon unemployment insurance reporting and remittance, for larger companies there are other regulatory-originated reporting that this can impact, and put in common issues like tax liens and family court-mandated levies, just for starters, and it gets hairy. Generally payroll processing is still built around a set of assumptions that are at odds with emerging knowledge workforce trends; the trends can be accommodated, but it's a hassle.

If you have a good enough relationship with your manager, then you are far better off negotiating a sub-rosa agreement to (in your example) work Wednesday this week and take off a couple days next week (or leave a couple hours earlier each day), and net out to zero change in time worked over a short (sub-month) period and leaving payroll none the wiser to any change in time worked, than making the payroll department perform an exception-based processing of your payroll.

US payroll processing trivia to illustrate how rigid payroll processing systems are today for the small business, and for flexible work arrangements: if you are a really small, micro-sized business, like say an Etsy seller with a couple full-time employees, set up as your own LLC or whatever, you will run payroll, except unlike larger businesses you will frequently want to know how much to pay yourself (after paying off all employees and vendors) including all employER-side tax liabilities, and not just the employEE-side disbursement. All of the top-ten payroll processors have no capability to compute that for you; you have to iterate to an approximation. In other words, if you know you can afford to pay yourself only $10K total this month, payroll processors force you to key in a employEE net pay number then they spit out the gross including the employER side, and only then do you see if you are over/under the $10K amount. There is no feature that lets a small business owner say, this pay period, I can only afford at most $X cash out the door total including all tax liabilities for so-and-so employee, iterate and solve for me what the best result is to achieve that.

US payroll processing can get really complex, really fast even for small businesses, so I can imagine what a nightmare it must be for the designers and developers of those systems. However, I believe there is still plenty of room for someone to create a disruptive service that caters to and appeals to small businesses.
This is pretty silly.
Also, Paul Graham's premise, I'm sorry to say, is sensationalized (by invoking concepts like "inequality" and "startups") but wrong. The premise is, basically, "inequality has bad CAUSES, but startups and technology are never one of them."
Only at the end does he hint at what I believe to be the more accurate analysis: AUTOMATION and OUTSOURCING lowers demand for expensive human labor, therefore reducing one of the main ways that money trickles down to the middle and lower class. The better and more widespread the technology, the more I can
1) Outsource jobs to regions with a lower cost of living, leading to two losses of trickle-down:
1a) local workers don't get the job, and the money goes to someone in another country
1b) either way my company writes the expenses off its taxable income, but my country doesn't get the tax $$ from the worker's income to spend on social programs, safety nets etc.
This by itself is fine, unless you're a nationalist, because it helps reduce poverty where people are poorer, which is outside your country. However, technology also enables:
2) AUTOMATION, which means I now reduce the amount of HUMAN workers, and once again it has two aspects:
2a) Now, the demand for human labor drops, and since the supply of workers remains the same, their average wages drop.
2b) The worst one: monopolies with server farms, contracts of adhesion, and all the power. Like Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, etc. extracting rents from users and providers, until open source disrupts them.
By commoditizing the providers and workers, they get squeezed. See Amazon's dealings with wage slaves, and its tactics with publishers (middlemen which it eliminates). But those same workers are also supposed to be spending money back into the economy on things they need.
It takes time to invent new industries and educate everyone, there is no guarantee that will happen forever, and there is no guarantee that demand shocks for labor won't be severe. So, there should probably be unconditional basic income, negative tax or some other scheme for people to KEEP BEING ABLE TO AFFORD THE BASICS even if they face no prospects of making money, which a growing unemployed class will.
On the bright side, automation will help wean countries from their dependence on an ever-growing population to fund social security schemes. Endless population growth is unsustainable, and countries are currently worried about birth rates mainly because of that. So in a global sense, the solution is: tax the gains from automation, redistribute the proceeds, use condoms.
Well, generally speaking, if you order a computer online (as most people probably do) you give them your name, address, and phone number so they can ship it to you.
Changing the law is not the only thing that would need to be done.

You would also need an executive order to change the way that federal contracts are handled. Currently, huge numbers of salaried professionals employed by contractor companies have to punch the clock as though they were wage-earners in order for the company to get paid for their work.

If you don't log X hours during a given week, your salary for that week may be docked by N/X. If you log more than X, you are not necessarily paid any more for overtime. The contractor-employer could set X to be 40, or 45, or 50--whatever it wants.

If an executive order said that no individual could work more than 30 hours total in any calendar week on any combination of federal contracts, unless that person is paid an additional 10% of their normal weekly salary for each hour in excess of 30 (aka triple-time OT), while the company still gets paid the same rate, then lo, nearly everyone in the military-industrial complex would suddenly have a 30-hour work week.

As it is now, the contracting arrangements dance around the fuzzy edges of labor law, to the detriment of the workers and to the benefit of their employers, and possibly also to the benefit of several additional layers of middlemen. Changing the law is meaningless if you can't enforce it.
This is a general argument against statistics. Or math, in general. Yes, dressing your bullshit in math can make people believe you more, but it doesn't change the fact that you're lying. Are we supposed to stop using math for good because evil people are using it for evil?
> I don't know how it works in the US, but in Canada you can use charitable tax receipts to lower taxable income in future years if you don't want to use the whole thing in the year in which you made the donation.

I don't know how this can be a tax-dodge of any significance. Surely you can only offset your tax by the amount you donated anyway so it makes no difference to you in the end.
Are you proposing that compilers emit actual load instructions for every memory access you write in your code?

No, if the compiler can reason that that there is no aliasing between pointers, there is no need to emit a load. Reordering operations so a value remains in registers is desirable, even if an out-of-bounds write would otherwise have had the side-effect of changing the value.

The problem (in this context) is limited to optimizations that reason that the value of the read is "undefined" (as opposed to "implementation defined"), and that the compiler no longer has any obligation to be faithful to the source code for any actions that follow.

For example (conceptual rather than exact) if I set all the bits in a region to 1's, and then somehow manage to write an unaligned load from within this region, I do not want the compiler to reason that this value is undefined and that all consequent code can be ignored.

I'm fine with a compile time error, and I'm fine with generating assembly that attempts the load and uses the result. Getting SIGBUS for the load on some processors is perfectly acceptable. I'd probably even be OK with skipping the load and using a constant, although I'd hope this would at least be accompanied by a warning message.

What I don't want is for the compiler to silently omit the load and all the rest of the code within that function on the theory that once undefined behavior has been encountered it no longer has any obligations, not even the obligation to inform the programmer that it has perversely optimized the function to nothingness.

(And while most of the lack of clarity is probably my own fault, I do now realize that I was being thrown off by an unfortunate typo in the original post: presumably he meant for the second argument to be a 'float *' rather than a 'float'. Please ignore my comment about 'stack variables' higher in the thread.)
IT Outsourcing Risks You're Overlooking
Show HN: Neural Net Writes Fake Kanji in Your Web Browser, Stroke-By-Stroke
It is like that Laffer curve. If your tax rate is too high, you get less revenue because of the negative effects.

It is not just that "taxes kill the economy", but also that when the tax system is corrupt and inefficient people don't pay the tax. For instance the situation is crazy in Italy where officially 30% of the population is unemployed but actually most of them are working "off the books".

This is to not to say Laffer was right or wrong that tax rates were too high circa 1980, but there is truism that taxation has good and bad effects.

In a "perfect equality" scenario there is not incentive to raise your game, but the same is true in "perfect inequality."

We did the experiment in Ithaca where local activist Paul Glover started "Ithaca Hours", a local currency. The system is still there, but it has mostly failed because a few businesses that accepted Hours could not spend the ones they got, so they have accumulated in a small number of places and do not circulate.

Also I see people in situations where inequality causes them to "not try". For instance I know people with student debt or who owe a lot of child support who perceive that if they make another dollar it will just get taken away, so there is no point in busting your ass or taking things seriously. I funded a business run by one of them, by a guy who knew his market so well and had many of the skills of an excellent salesmen, and it ended it tears.

I know some people, both black and white, who really have been the victims of poverty, discrimination, and such and feel they "can't win." You can point to examples such as Barack Obama and Ben Carson who overcome both real and perceived discrimination to succeed brilliantly, but most don't.

Once when I was teaching I had a black student who was intelligent and very much liked by myself and the other teachers and we all wanted him to succeed and we were all proud that he got a respectable grade in the end in one of the most difficult classes at our school but had his own challenges and one day came around and told us we were treating him differently from other students and he was right, yet it was not at all that we did not want him to succeed but that we didn't entirely understand what to do to help him.
> This is a meaningless statistic

It's only meaningless if you cherry-pick your examples and draw your opinions from those examples. For 99 percent of the population, wealth is a fair reflection of the actual comparative wealth of individuals.
I've heard stories of this happening (shopper club data -> insurance companies), but it's never been substantiated.
It is further ridiculous that the wealth itself is circularly defined with being rich.

Own a house in Denver = Awesome
Own a house in Manhattan = Super Rich

Own a Dinghy = Awesome
Own a Super Yacht = Super Rich

So by this simple example the Denver Dinghy owner is much less wealthy on paper than the Manhattanite with a Super Yacht.

But you can see that the Denverite has both a house and a vessel and may not need a yacht or a downtown house. The extra 'wealth' is of no impact to the happy Denver guy.
Bitcoin engineering
If you think of paypal as 'the easy to use payment service provider' then it makes good sense and it is a compliment.

The merchant issues that some of us dealing with PayPal are facing is of no concern. Just like being called the 'google of X' does not immediately link with supremely bad customer service. It's a short-hand, nothing more.