skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty, but few/none that solve the problem Disque solves. You could easily use Kafka or RabbitMQ, but Disque aims to provide simplicity rather than be full-featured. @antirez described it as solving the case where you just need a queue with very basic guarantees and good performance without all the bells and whistles that a more complex system has. Disque is (spiritually, not technically) a lot like Mongo was five years ago compared to something much heavier like Postgres. In that sense, there are few (if any) product-ready alternatives that solve the same problem.

It should also be noted that you could probably successfully use Redis for much of what Disque does (Disque is based on Redis). Disque adds nice features, though, and removes most of the features of Redis that are outside its scope.
Lots of window dressing to serve up PG'a core thought:

>So let's be clear about that. Ending economic inequality would mean ending startups.

PG also called those who questioned Mark Zuckerberg's altruistic intentions "losers." In reference to Altman's bewilderment at the criticism of Zuckerberg's donation to his LLC.

I have tremendous respect for PG on startup related manners, but in terms of making a better society, I prefer those that study this sort of thing for a living.
Luminosity – Choreography by Hamilton Evans
Increase productivity at work
The usual bizarre thought processes:

> So when I hear people saying that economic inequality is bad and should be eliminated, I feel rather like a wild animal overhearing a conversation between hunters. [...] They don't even seem clear whether they want to kill me or not.

Doesn't consider the obvious conclusion: they want to improve society to be more egalitarian. The opposite of killing/hurting anyone: no longer needing police/military to maintain a world based on radical inequality. (Police to ensure wage-slaves obey bosses for food/shelter tokens; military to ensure other countries don't build more successful societies which cause everyone to question the status quo.)

His sentiment apparently is sincere. Despite having government protecting the wealthy [1], with police and military, privileged people often fear that the dominated will beat them up. But in reality, it is the dominated who must fear armed men daily.

> You can't end economic inequality without preventing people from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startups.

Startup startup startup. Half the time, "startup" is the small-business boss's pet magic word to justify low wages.

An improved world can obviously have "startups"; if that means a team of people supported to automate away drudge work, research immortality drugs, etc. Note that our current system doesn't do this: nowadays, technology means we work more hours, not less. [2]

> Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality

Many highly productive people would happily work with compensation equal to everyone else. Was Einstein or Chomsky driven by the profit motive, for their greatest accomplishments? Many enormously "productive" people find it insulting to be considered animals doing it for material rewards.

To do well in a market, you must get money from those with money. Such a system predictably caters to those with more power. In contrast, many highly productive people rather focus their energy on those with no money nor power to compensate them. (Though there are startups which find ways to siphon money from government/funders for it, in return for surveillance or ensuring those in poverty remain in a handout-system...)

No, when you're successful, you need to defend it from higher-productive competition by building a "moat" [3]. This isn't new; 19th century economist Friedrich List called it "kicking away the ladder". The wealthy obviously try to do this.

[1] Adam Smith: "Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor.")

[2] Anyway, real tech advances come from the government sector: taxpayers. Then it's handed to private power to reap the profit. http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/

[3] YC's leadership literally look for a "moat". https://www.quora.com/How-does-YCombinator-affect-the-succes...
And yet, in an efficient market, the woodworker charges almost exactly what the dollars are worth to the customer. And the customer pays no more than what the chair is worth to the woodworker. So they don’t “both benefit.”

As to whether the industry is artificially constrained, I am not arguing for artificial constraint, so I don’t need to respond to that. My point was that making a chair creates wealth. That's true whether you make a chair for yourself, or for someone else.
For databases, C/C++ is still the only reasonable choice. For OLAP cubes in particular, you want to keep as much data in memory as possible as efficiently as possible, and drop down to SSE intrinsics where needed. C++ lets you do just that. Frontend can be in any language you like.
In a capitalist system, you become wealthy by creating value for people in mutually beneficial and consensual transactions. Tax discourages that kind of value creation. You can try to hide this effect by using really large numbers (they'll still have $500M!) but that's deceptive because, even if their motivation wouldn't have been affected (which I disagree with), these uber-wealthy people are the exception, not the norm. You can't base a tax system on taxing them alone.
I don't think C++ supports variable length arrays?

So, if you want to allocate N objects, where N is not known at compile time, (I think) you have to use heap allocation anyway. Normally I just use vector<>, and call reserve() if I feel like extra performance-y. Sure, it's much slower than C99-style variable length arrays, but 99% of the time it's still fast enough.

More importantly, it plays nice with other C++ functionalities. For example, zero-copy construction using emplace_back() inside a for loop. (And if you throw an exception in the middle you're guaranteed that destructors are called exactly for those that are already constructed.)
is this compatible with BitTorrent Sync? because that what BT Sync does exactly...
The secret to rails speed is not using rails at all.
The thing to me is Silicon Valley is the place in the US that still looks like that post WWII America. Large monopolies like Google, Apple and FB utilizing fantastic profits and paying amazing perks to employees. Everyone working in and on the same mission acting as a social fabric tying people together. Glass Door and the Internet in general replacing trade unions by helping balance a knowledge imbalance so that workers can maximize their benefits.

The irony of regularly lecturing the rest of the country and world about what the future holds from the position as a final bastion on unassailable US hegemony of last century (2nd only to Hollywood?) perplexes me.
"The evolution of technology is one of the most powerful forces in history."

I find this part funny. It seems that one of the most powerful forces in history can be stopped just raising taxes.
A lot of those lavish benefits would inject money into to the system instead of sitting in an offshore account. That helps everyone.

As Paul Krugman says, "your spending is my income", and visa-versa
> What's to stop parents afraid of vaccinations from taking their draft-age children to New Zealand?

This reminds me of something a friend of mine told me over Christmas: Her 65-year-old uncle is not currently allowed to travel abroad from Ukraine because 25 years ago he was an Army officer and anyone with military experience is being held in reserve. So the answer to your question is simply "police at the borders".
The only reason to use net-worth for such a statistic is to have demagogic sound bites. Most people have negative or very low self-worth because of totally normal and serviceable debt, regardless of whether they're poor or well off. Net worth, i.e. wealth, ignores future earning potential, which is most people's main asset. Repeating the statistic again doesn't change that.
fits nicely with the stuff @pmarca has been tweeting and retweeting recently. taking absolutely asinine stuff from the likes the national review (everything the left ever did was wrong, starting with the french revolution) to grover norquist (government employees get more money from the government than they pay in taxes, this is disgraceful).

there is some massive headfuck going on, don't know if its because of the upcoming presidential election or what. the ghost of ayn rand is wandering the halls of rich white guys again.
That's a great quote. McLuhan had a genius for that kind of objectivity, so I'm not sure your comparison is entirely fair.

Many of McLuhan's comments that seemed cryptic and oracular in the 1960s sound commonplace now. It's astonishing how much he figured out decades before the mass internet.
Perhaps people choosing to use sites which are inward-looking. It's not really the sites themselves' fault.

And this really is a choice thing. Many people (myself included) can't afford not to be on Facebook, but I'd argue we do have the choice of whether or not to use it much.
Ah never seen dynamic memory allocation written as DMA before. Maybe obvious from the context but DMA really only has one meaning for me :)
> A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized

> than it used to be.

I really do not want to be jerk here but this is 'white guy point of view'. The US politics is more polarized than it used to be because black, latinos, women, gays, socialists, etc. have some voice in politics now. Before they had absolutely no voice or very little.
> ergo, walmart employees are, at the moment, practically, a conduit of welfare from the state to the waltons

This doesn't make any sense (though you have paraphrased Sanders accurately). While technically true for some definition of "conduit of welfare", the same is true of almost everybody in society. Welfare recipients are integrated into the economy enough that "if X didn't get welfare, person Y wouldn't be as rich" is true for many, many, many values of Y (neighborhood stores in poor areas, people benefiting from reduced crime ("stealing bread to feed your family" used to be more than a trope), etc). To give an example in microcosm: if you buy a used car on Craigslist from someone, the fact that the seller is a welfare recipient doesn't mean that you're a beneficiary of welfare because you're not paying him enough to live off of.

To the extent that society is responsible for helping the poor (FTR, I personally believe in this responsibility), it makes absolutely no sense to claim that employers (as opposed to the welfare system) are responsible for filling the gap between "market value of a person's labor" and "how much income he needs to reasonably survive".

This particular claim of Sanders is absolutely idiotic: people are blindly pattern-matching it to support for the poor when in reality he's arguing for shifting the burden of subsidies from all of society to arbitrary consumers/business owners/employees affected by artificial wage floors.
Also how many of these people are preserving their wealth by diverting their justly earned income into rentier activity, such as property?

In addition many patents are rentier activity. They are taking collected human knowledge and ring-fencing an area to derive economic rent.

I'm not even sure I'm interested in Graham's writings on lisp. Economics, forget it.
How many startups from 1995-2001 are still around that took seed-money and a few rounds and then stagnated (newer took off) since 2001? How many small companies (self funded) survived from the same timeframe? Startups have usually a goal IPO or get bought or the disolve themself after some time - right?
I'd not have thought that this would be a controversial statement given the current nature of US politics. Both parties are highly dependent on enormously wealthy donors. It's hard to believe that these people are getting nothing in return for their money. Graham's surprisingly naive about this. He simply says "The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy." I couldn't quite believe he said this after we've seen the complicity of Facebook, Google etc. in the surveillance state.
I've never tried Red before, but I've played around with Rebol. What impressed me most was how quickly you could build working applications, and I'm talking insanely fast, IIRC just by following a beginners tutorial I built a working email client with a simple GUI in about 15 minutes.

Perhaps Red can fill a similar niche, for quickly coded apps with a GUI.

EDIT: If anyone wants to see the Rebol tutorial I mentioned before, you can see it here:

http://easiestprogramminglanguage.com/easiest_programming_la...
It's more complicated than that. You need to live in a cheap part of town to afford rent but your city is un-walkable and has poor public transportation? Buy or lease a car so you can reliably get to work on time. You have a family and want to send your children to the best (or even decent) public schools? Live in a more expensive area - you have to buy access to good schools in many places, and the monthly payment on a mortgage for a house is cheaper than renting. You want a college education? Pay up. You want health care? Better have good insurance.

There are many reasons that people have debt, and it's not all exorbitant spending. At the same time SOMEONE is profiting off that debt, and they have a vested interest in keeping that debt alive. This is a good talk that discusses nonintuitive pains the middle class is experiencing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A
Is CRISPR-driven homozygosity more likely to transfer between species than any other? I suspect not. Would it be a problem if several different quasi-species of mosquito lost the potential to incubate malaria? Again, no.

The thing to remember is that wild populations are still subject to selective pressure, even with "driven" genes. If a gene is introduced that makes an individual incapable of reproduction, that will have no long-term effect. Even if the handicapped genetics can be spread widely through the population, it will disappear within a generation, while non-handicapped genetics will thrive. The trick will be to introduce changes that are benign enough in survival terms to make it to the point of fertilization. At that point the driven homozygosity will pitch in.

One could imagine a change that was subtle enough to survive but severe enough that a population could get pushed out of its ecological niche. That's a good reason to try this on pests rather than e.g. endangered megafauna, at least until the consequences are better understood.
I remember when Paul Graham pointed out that, « internally, most companies are run like communist states »
(in http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html )

The picture he paints here of postwar-America as a bland, uniform country dominated by a few mega-institutions reminds me of the USSR.

How ironic.
Lorenzo, thanks for bringing up these points. I'm not 100% sure what my motivations are either, but I want to do something. This amount of money is very little to me, so I'm not actually expecting anything in return.

In fact, I feel like this desire for tit-for-tat returns and legal frameworks for ownership and remuneration are some of the problem -- they destroy our innate generosity and humanity.

I'm fascinated by the gap between smart people who can execute and traditional systems of funding and employment. Some people get lost in that transition, and half the time it's because they have to tweak their project to meet these expectations of return. This makes the project "not theirs" in a way, and kills some intrinsic motivation.

And motivation is everything.
Kivy 1.9.1 released
I have been hearing for YEARS how much better off we all are, thanks to Walmart, Amazon, and so on. I have been hearing for YEARS how it’s only a few mom-and-pop stores who suffered, and some overpaid auto manufacturing jobs that went overboard, and so on.

And yet... People outside of our cozy little tech industry do not think they are better off.
PG's urls are simple and memorable enough that you can type them into a text message. I direct people to paulgraham.com/wealth.html, paulgraham.com/love.html, paulgraham.com/hs.html and paulgraham.com/essay.html all the time, from memory. It's useful!
Why would I respond to "her feelings" when the facts of the matter is that SHE actually attacked and insulted/harassed the person she portrays as an evil harasser, and not the other way around? My response is that her account of what happened is wholly inaccurate and tries to reverse victim and perpetrator e.g. DARVO or "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender"

Not to say that she hasn't provided any proof for many of the claims made.

How do "her feelings" in any way matter over the facts of the situation? This doesn't make sense, I can't discuss anything based on "other people's feelings".
Pre-paid plans seemed to have started their lives as a huge ripoff, and I think they still have that stigma. But MVNOs have made them an amazing value now, and T-Mobile has helped a ton too. Even buying directly from the other big three providers, the cost has come way down.

I wasn't aware of any Verizon MVNOs though, it seemed like they all went away or got bought up. Mind sharing which are available?
Am I the only one that is totally fine with startup culture disappearing? All it has ever really meant is the rich deciding through funding rounds which technology deserves to survive (often with stupid results). Paul Graham is just a blind startup optimist, there is no real substance to his argument.
Right, it just meant (as mention in pg's parallel article today) that more compenation got rebranded as a corporate expense or non-taxable fringe benefit.
I live in an older house where parts arent always the same sizes as now. I learn to buy a couple of the nearest best guesses and return the less better.
PG is an amazing writer and the wood worker analogy is very smart, but I am just amazed at how biased he is against finance.

I do not know a single person who gets in to finance because 'they want to be rich'. Most people go in to finance because it is viewed as a meritocracy where all your coworkers are really smart. I'm disappointed that someone as smart and experienced as PG has not taken the time to understand such a large a diverse industry.
Facebook or bust. If this is the definition that we're expected to accept, I will say that as a consumer and human being, I prefer interacting with and being a part of small businesses more than startups.

It would seem this definition paints a startup as a proto-bigcorp. If the prevalence of big corporations is not a cycle we want to repeat, would we not favor businesses that do not intend to become big corporations?
Frank & Oak ships a box full of men's clothing in Canada every season and you return what you don't want. I used to do this before just getting bespoke suits/shirts made. Rogue Territory denim in LA also has a good return policy and free hemming/repairs if you pay return shipping.

I've only been hosed trying to return broken fitness equip from Amazon, since I didn't bother reading the fine print about only allowing US domestic customer returns
What I thought was useful/interesting was the idea that it doesn't make sense to try and fight the fragmentation, and that it makes sense instead to focus on how to live well with it.
> They usually try to shape the world around them

Least of which are:

Bill Gates: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/

Warren Buffet: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2013/07/09/buffett-makes-his-...

Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.facebook.com/chanzuckerberginitiative/
Glad it was helpful. I do need to start blogging more. 2016!
I used to travel internationally for work. I signed up for their international plan, but it didn't work. I called their customer service via satellite phone, and they had the most incompetent customer service I've ever experienced. Out of the eight different people I spoke to, all kept telling me contradictory information, and none were ever able to make my account work.
That is a pretty bad extrapolation on his part.

I don't think anyone here (or for the most part) would say the rich getting richer is the problem. The concern is that the poor and the middle class are stagnated. I was really hoping he would talk about those issues.
It looks good, but we changed the URL from https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3z1pfp/the_sad.... HN prefers original sources.
Indeed, it almost seems like loathing of the customer is no longer considered a good business plan.

I'm surprised it took this long.
At least this is an opt in function.

Those with flip phones or those worried that their full identity and address is on a smartphone that could be hacked via malware or otherwise do have a choice.
I think those other things can be worded in a positive way though. That could make it worth it?

Optimized website.
Improved loading time by .3 seconds on average for all users.
Created cleaner and more efficient design and implementation.
Etc...
He probably still uses the ViaWeb tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) (HN tech)
If Rust code is slower than equivalent C++, it's a bug. We track performance bugs, please file them :)
I've had the opposite... Even though I get a strong signal in the city, I still can't get good data connections. In the suburbs the signal is weaker, but data throughput is much better.
A Renaissance Merchant's Life in Clothing (2011)
The problem is that these measures leave out most people's most valuable asset, their future earning potential. There's nothing wrong with having a serviceable mortgage or car payment. I think you misinterpreted me.

Yes, people do profit from that debt. Good! Because otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn some of that future earning potential into buying power today. This ancient innovation, the loan, allows us to do that. If the lender didn't stand to profit from interest, he wouldn't lend. It's a triumph of capitalism.
I strongly disagree. As an entrepreneur and a mentor, to me a startup is just a new business that is pioneering something new.

Most new businesses are replicating an existing business model. E.g., if you open a new corner store, it's probably going to end up being like every other corner store. If you're starting a games company, you're probably going to end up like a bunch of other games companies.

Startups, on the other hand, are tackling something deeply innovative. That means early on you have to optimize for learning: understanding customers, iterating on product, seeking product-market fit. It's a very different set of behaviors for the entrepreneurs than the normal new business.

I think you're thinking of venture-backed startups, which require a large enough amount of high-risk capital that nobody will fund them unless they expect to be worth $100m+. But there are plenty of smaller startups that are self-funded or bootstrapped. They can be perfectly stable at small scale, although many of them do choose to grow substantially.
Seconded. I learned assembly code on a DOS 2.0 machine by disassembling tons of random bytes and making a hex->assembly lexicon that I could use to write programs in hex. Not because I was trying to be hardcore, but because I was in an information, and software, and hardware desert. My kid, on the other hand, has a 24-hour, 50 gigabit connection to any information he wants, a computer made in 2015, and his choice of nearly any IDE and any programming language he could possibly want.

> Opportunity has increased _massively_ the last 20 years.

The only problem is that it's increased for everyone else, too. Used to be you were a king if you had a board with a nail in it. Now everyone's packing Uzis.
I don't know it at that level of detail.