skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting that you focus on the individual when it comes to wealth creation. This is not random, and it predisposes you to believe that there is a pie fallacy going on when in fact there might not be one.

The truth is that almost no wealth creation is done by individuals. There is a vast range of levels on which wealth creation is a shared enterprise and it would be boring to trot them out again, but usually, all or at least most of society is involved directly or indirectly (if only by agreeing to the social contract of peacefulness towards one another).

Because of this, the question of the rewards for wealth creation is one of distribution from the very beginning. Logically speaking, there is no single point in time where the startup founder's product can be declared to be just his or her own according to a universal philosophy.[1]

There is no neutral default distribution that you can derive from first principles.

Instead, in the example of startups, to what extent the overall benefit of the creation should go to the startup founder, and to what extent it should go to employees, the people providing the underlying tech stacks, and other parts of society depend on your value system and on your objective function.

So, to make explicit what this has to do with the pie fallacy: Since wealth creation is generally not done by individuals, inequality is a concern even when the pie is growing, and even when each individual's absolute income or wealth is growing, because despite all this growth, the resulting distribution might still be unjust.[2]

Graham tries to side-step this discussion, and unfortunately our society is generally not well-equipped to defend against such rhetoric moves. You may end up agreeing with him,[3] but I hope you at least recognize that if you do, you do not do so by purely applying logical deduction from first principles. There is necessarily a subjective value judgement that reasonable people with different values and objectives will disagree with.

[1] It is also no accident that Graham chooses the example of a woodworker at the beginning of his essay. Since woodworkers have existed for millenia, including through time periods where people really were more self-reliant than today, it makes the reader subtly predisposed to be mislead into accepting the story of wealth creation by individuals.

[2] And/or it might be inefficient, but that's a different can of worms.

[3] And you may well be right to do so, depending on your values!
Not only that but actual diversity of issues - if let's say I am pro/anti gun control right now - I also (involuntarily) make statement on access to abortion (which is topic that I just don't care about at all)
Sure, that's actually very similar to the the system we built internally. But I don't see how Kafka as a messaging layer helps in your system, either. Presumably, the consumers won't advance their offset in their partition until the job is done, because they are not ready to start a new job. So you will still get the same blocking behavior.

In addition, I don't see how you implement priority in a system like this, since Kafka partitions are append-only. One has to process the former start_job messages before you reach the higher priority items.

Having a broker hand out items in priority to workers makes a lot more sense to me.

The job system you described is definitely something missing from the OSS world, and we'd love to open up our system for this eventually. While Disque is not that piece, I think it makes more sense than Kafka.
This is spot on.

I think it is important to evaluate PG's essay within context. He, like most people in Silicon Valley, is stuck in a bubble and views the rest of the world through a very distorted lens. That's where much of his rhetoric about wealth creation comes from: he's surrounded by people (founders) who create value in the form of software. When a portion of those founders become rich, he looks at himself as a promoter of inequality.

What he doesn't realize is that the vast majority of wealthy people did not become wealthy by creating value, but by playing zero-sum games -- and then by influencing politicians and bending the system to their will so as to guarantee that they will hold on to as much of that wealth as possible.

I think the question PG needs to address is this: what is the justification for non-founder executives getting paid tens of millions of dollars at the expense of other employees? What is the justification for those top-level salaries to exist even when the company is doing badly and regular employees don't see a dime in raises or bonuses that year?

Bottom line is that the type of wealth PG enables founders to create, and the subsequent inequality, is not the type society has a problem with. Sure, some people may balk at the idea of an instant-messaging app being valued in the billions, but those controversies tend to be completely detached from the inequality debate.

Now, if PG ever starts preaching that founder CEOs should pay themselves millions of dollars while keeping salaries as low as possible... that would be a different story. As things stand though, I don't think he's part of the problem and measures to address inequality won't really affect him and his crew.
Since screen resolutions have scaled far more slowly than memory sizes in the last couple of decades, surely it makes even more sense to cache font rendering nowdays? If we both agree that it was a win for low resolutions (say 640x480), back when a computer might have 2MB of RAM, surely it's far less of a cost now that we have 4k displays (only a few factors bigger) and well over 1000x the amount of memory.

Just about everything in computing is a form of caching. It's rarely stupid, so throwing it out is short-sighted.
What are the downsides with SQS if you expect a small number of large massages (well, not larger than the 4K limit I think)? The bill should be a lot cheaper than running a broker your self. Are you worried about lock-in? SQS APIs are simple enough to replicate with a REST service backed by a database for low usage scenarios.
The Rise of “Worse Is Better” (1989)
OneRing: How I bootstrapped my Kickstarter video on a High Schooler's budget
The features given to their random forest classifier appear to be:

* assembly language instruction features: "token unigrams and bigrams"

* decompiled lexical features (unparsed decompiled text): "word unigrams, which capture the integer types used in a program, names of library functions, and names of internal functions when symbol information is available"

* syntactic features (from the parsed AST of the decompiled text): "AST node unigrams, labeled AST edges, AST node term frequency inverse document frequency (TFIDF), and AST node average depth"

* basic block features: TF-IDF weighted "unigrams and bigrams, that is, single
basic blocks and sequences of two basic blocks"

source: http://www.princeton.edu/~aylinc/papers/caliskan-islam_when....
I thought it was a good article (I agree with some of it, but not everything).

It would have been helpful if the many quotes were visually distinct, it would make for an easier read.

I also think both you and PG aren't in as much disagreement as your response indicates.

My interpretation of PG's article was that he primarily wanted to highlight the wealth-creation aspect, and contrast it to rent-seeking. I think you'd both agree on many concrete fixes (reduce rent-seeking in the financial system, a political system mainly driven by money, health-system reform, etc). Though this is my guess obviously.
Ad hominem doesn't quite mean what you suggest.

The two postings are directly related and not an attack based on his wearing of red shirts on thursdays.

From the wikipedia """Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact or when used in certain kinds of moral and practical reasoning.[3]"""
With all due respect, content like this is better served in an article format, rather than a comment to an existing (and already very crowded) discussion.

We have had many submissions in the past that were responses to another submission. In my opinion, this submission was wrongfully flagged, and should be unflagged so that it can go back to the top where it belongs.
> It would be insane to go to war just to induce more national unity.

It's probably out of the scope of this essay, but we have in fact been at war for 14 years. It's not at the scale of WW2, but it's war none the less. I think it has not induced national unity due to precisely what Graham describes - fragmentation in society.
Does an executive at such a large company really have any internal behavior? If your emails are going out to 1000+ employees is that really any different than a public statement? I think there is a point at which executives, through their various assistants, act internally in the same way as celebs act publicly, at least when they speak beyond the confines of the board.
Look into instant-runoff ballots, where you simply rank your candidates in order of preference. If your first choice does not reach 50% of the vote, your ballot is reverted to your second choice. This allows you to vote for a candidate who most accurately reflects your views with a second-choice of the next-most-accurate, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
Generous return policies in the US have historically been significantly more prevalent than the author states. Stores like Nordstrom have accepted anything a customer would return up to and including tires which the do not and have never sold. Mercantile stores had a similar policy. Same with LL Bean. REI until recently had unconditional returns. North Face has repaired 20 year old products for me. Returns for credit only were primarily only enforced in specialty retailers and independents.

Of course warranties and returns are figured in to the balance sheet of every company. It's not really free. The cost of such policies are baked into pricing decisions. Ultimately it is one component of a retailer's value proposition.
We really don't have enough of these resources. We are trying to raise our kids to respect and understand Native Americans.

This site leaves a little to be desired :), do you by any chance need a little help :)? Seriously, contact me and I will be happy to help.
Lightweight, low-overhead to use, iterable, self-documenting object
PG writes that the 20th Century was "a world in which it was socially acceptable to work for Henry Ford, but not to be Henry Ford".

I feel that this viewpoint is still common today. Success is often glamourised, far more than hard work.
You don't know a SINGLE person who got into finance because they wanted to be rich? I find that shocking. I work in finance (fintech, but but serving mostly traditional finance) and outside of those working for financial inclusion/wellness, getting or "doing well" seems to pretty much be the universal goal.
do you consult your doctor before trying a different brand of coffee?
>If total war was the big political story of the 20th century, the big economic story was the rise of new kind of company.

Typo.
The limited space of the front page is the defining constraint of HN. We often treat follow-up articles as duplicates for that reason, so the flags are acting in a moderation capacity here.

Some users would like to see two heated discussions about income inequality on the front page, but I can assure you that many others would not.
You are deciding whether to violently take away wealth from the rich. It might even be a good idea, but the real manipulation here is to pretend otherwise and get all offended when it's pointed out.
If you want to provide support for people during a "major stressful event in life", have the government provide that support (paid for by taxes of course). If you try to force private businesses to do that on their own, they will find ways not to, you'll have lots of expensive lawsuits, you'll be adding lots of crazy laws.

It's worse to force companies to employ someone for forever. That's a great reason to hire as little as possible, and fire within the trial period even if the employee did well, so you're not on the hook forever. Best case you end up "too big to just fail" like GM, worst case you die in just a year or two because you got unlucky with one turned-useless employee which your small business just can't afford. Those people will end up unemployed anyway when the business fails.

If you want to give people money because you feel bad for them, just (have the government) give it to them, that's the least adverse-incentive-prone way to do it.
Hacker Scripts – Based on a true story
No worries. I just asked because Brits have weird attitudes towards the mainland.

Thanks. I'm in that situation (kind of) though somewhat by choice.
I think people tend to overlook a very important factor risk. Majority of people are quick to want to share in the profits of risk takers few would want to share the risks they take. For every Zuckerberg there are hundreds of thousands of people who tried and failed. Unless you are ready to backstop failures what right do you have share in the profits?
A great read on the subject by Matt Levine: "high frequency trading may be too efficient"

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-02/high-freque...
The federation I imagine would have a transport mechanism like Ye Olde Usenet, but a sophisticated application layer like reddit's. If ISPs had local reddit/imgur/Facebook caches from which anyone could run a leaf node, that would be a big selling point, and work towards democratization of the Internet. Open-source the application layer. Use and contribute to standards-based protocols.

That's what I mean by Federation. I don't really care if you get there by having tax-funded regional networks, or tons of private ISPs from big multinationals to mom-n-pop shops serving individual communities.

We currently live in a Republic where the masses have some degree of representation through government committees and administrations, but really it's a handful of big-money private interests with the most in the game.
They built something that people wanted.

Most startups today aren't really creating brand-new "value" (which is a horribly nebulous term, hence I'll leave it in quotes), but rather taking part in a shifting of existing "value" from place to place, and the VCs who fund them glean some profit out of the process.

And some of the most controversial startups are doing this not by offering genuinely better products or services; they're doing it by offering a similar-quality product or service, but bringing the price down by simply ignoring laws and regulations their competitors are required to abide by.
Most surprising bit is that the Russian bash.org is so alive whilst the original has been dead for years.
FWIW: the government doesn't have to spend more if taxes on wealthy people get higher, you can just have lower taxes on the less wealthy (or increase the no-tax area at the bottom).

Government expenditures stay the same but rich people pay more and poor people pay less.
Second System Effect
>I think the question PG needs to address is this: what is the justification for non-founder executives getting paid tens of millions of dollars at the expense of other employees? What is the justification for those top-level salaries to exist even when the company is doing badly and regular employees don't see a dime in raises or bonuses that year?

I definitely agree that its a shitty situation. However, as far as I understand it the justification is that executive salaries are public which led to a salary arms-race where companies are forced to throw more and more ridiculous sums of money at executives.
But it, IMHO, is unlikely Kim Kardashian would be awarded the Nobel prize for literature (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/...)
If you called and asked I switch off your contract plan to a new one they would have happily worked it out.

While it would be nice I just don't expect them to go out of their way to get people to switch because it's a lot of effort to orchestrate for minimal gains.

It would be great to see a good faith "hey you would save $ by switching to our new plan" from t mobile I can't help but think they don't because people hate dealing with phone companies, even if they're trying to do good stuff.

Most people don't want to be sold a new "better" plan, even if T-Mobile said it was cheaper. A lot of people would ignore it just like they ignore any sales pitch, such as a new Comcast deals they get calls/emails about. No one wants to switch plans and exert that effort unless they have to. If they want to save money they'll be the ones initiating the change. At least that's how I'd think about it.

But seriously, call t mobile and ask if there's anything hey can do, maybe they'll give you a short term deal to make up for the extra you had been paying. They've been awesome in dealing with these types of problems when I've talked to them. They're more interested in customer loyalty And happiness than a little extra $$ at this point.
PG's perspective is quite US-centric. The aftermath effects of WWII in Europe or Asia was rather different. Among most nations' peoples there's long been little cohesion due to the lack of unifying forces like media or of ethnic homogeneity.

I agree that the economic dynamics of 20th century America won't repeat. But I'm not sure most countries will enjoy a stable predictable trajectory this century. Asia and China are far from being mature ecosystems (economically or politically), and the likely loss of jobs due to further globalization and automation, just as the promise of US-style consumerism is arising portends a bumpy ride, especially for totalitarian-ish societies like China, Saudi Arabia, and even Turkey.
>but bringing the price down by simply ignoring laws and regulations their competitors are required to abide by.

You're right, in a lot of cases (Taxis vs Uber comes to mind) the government has created these sub-optimal local maximums with its unnecessary regulations and industry protectionism. Technology is the big energy input needed to break free and move to a new maximum.

When I use Uber, I get much more value than I ever did with a taxi. Not only does it cost me less, but it's faster, the experience of ordering is painless, the cars are nicer, the drivers are honest, and there's accountability for bad drivers. Uber is most definitely creating value.

More generally, new ways of doing things displace old ways of doing things. If you're a company doing things the old way, adapt or die. That's progress. In capitalism, the destruction of old business models is as essential as the construction of new ones. They are two sides of the same coin.

Addressing your argument again, lots of the businesses being displaced were basically profiting from regulations that kept out competition. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

As for your general point that the valley isn't really creating much value, remember that all of those wild valuations are just risky speculation by a small few, given that there's no open market for buying and selling shares in these companies. Risky speculation is a valid investment strategy for a portion of your wealth. Beyond all of the hard-to-believe valuations, there's also thousands of small technology companies making small profits and providing real value, but not getting any media attention.
>Bottom line is that the type of wealth PG enables founders to create, and the subsequent inequality, is not the type society has a problem with.

Seems like people are increasingly displeased at founders' preferential tax treatment of their shares though.
True.

Also, these devices can help by providing feedback that you might not yet be attuned to receiving without the devices.
Just like the 1950s, which we all know were a disastrous time for US industry?
"lower class are basically slaves"

You're going to compare working graveyards at 7-Eleven to slavery?

You should read a little bit about slavery and human trafficking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery I suspect most slaves would not agree with you.
I'm building a node.js application now and WISH we had something half as good as Sidekiq written in Javascript.
You are not top 10% if you have connections and recommendations past 50. I would say you are bottom 10-20% if you don't. I'm not talking auto-hire/top employees - just people who know who they could talk to if they lost their job and would get picked up in a reasonable amount of time. It's really not that high of a bar. It's very likely that a person past 50s stranded competing with 20/30 yearolds willing to take junior positions without references is the kind of person that you don't want to hire in the first place and that's not even taking age effects in to consideration
2016 Email Security Roadmap
Haunted by [big] Data
I stumbled across this talk, and it really left an impression, although I'm just a humble web developer.

At the end of the presentation, he talks about sampling and using transient data, rather than storing and mining it. Are there any academical papers that support his statement, that a little fresh data is better than a lot of it, with a big chunk being "stale"? What's your experience?
Why of course. What else would you do after a giant M&A deal?
Absolutely. I was responding more to this conversation than the author; they specifically said "new" languages :)

Your points are all legit. Unfortunately, the only way to get an old language is to start with a new one, and then let time pass.
"Kivy is an open source Python library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps."

In case anyone else didn't know.
You might be arguing against a straw man. I don't think PG was saying "Current, actual proposals will significantly dent inequality".

I think he was saying "People misunderstand the issue. They're concerned by inequality, but think that reducing inequality amounts to the same thing, and inequality is per se bad."

Reading this in combination with other essays, pg is likely worried that a seemingly innocuous change could have an outsize impact on startup formation, precisely because they're so marginal.
Your comments about having lots of visitors and it being more interesting than working alone make it sound like your lab would be a nightmare for getting work done that requires actual concentration.
I think it's useful to draw a bright line around the 'value creation' that PG is referring to, also. It's not just creating chairs, it's aggregating great wealth by 'disrupting' traditional industries. Those traditional industries have workers and shareholders who lose out.

What makes successful startups so profitable is they displace a large and less-efficient system with a small, efficient one. Efficient in terms of human capital, oftentimes: look how few people AirBNB employs directly, yet have a market cap larger than Marriott. The returns on capital its investors have seen is a result of the substitution of capital for labor (in part).

Of course, to the extent that the creation of a marketplace unlocks value, it can create value de novo, rather than shifting wealth from one sector/company to another. But with 'smart' startup founders seeking monopoly rents (cf. Peter Thiel, writing/speaking virtually anywhere), those returns are also concentrated, and will not trickle down to the larger population.

Furthermore, the wealth inequality cryoshon is writing about is not driven by startups, it's driven by a general breakdown in the implicit social contract between capital and labor. As OP notes, Piketty goes into great detail about the historical causes and likely effects, but the tl;dr (and his book is _very_ tl) break down to: when returns on capital are higher than overall economic growth, wealth will tend to aggregate.

As fans of numbers and algorithms, I hope HN readers can appreciate the simple beauty of that formulation. Piketty's suggested policy response is simple: high taxes on aggregated wealth. Which, after reading (~80%, honestly) of his book, I have to agree with.