skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was once put in exactly this position. Our IT Manager was fired and I was put in charge of about a dozen sysadmin and helpdesk people. They had over 130 open tickets and claimed to be too busy to do anything. Bear in mind I knew little about infrastructure (I was an applications dev and tech lead who had become a 3rd line application support leader).

I spent a month doing triage, and sorting out their process (they were doing triage, but gave it to a relatively weak member of staff who couldn't spot patterns or kill off tickets effectively). The number came down to 30, and the team was far more focussed. I also got to see who was helping and who wasn't, and sacked another member of staff who bullied less knowledgeable members of the team (while doing literally nothing but spreading FUD).

The point (obvious to anyone who's read The Goal, which I hadat that point) is that the graph doesn't tell you jack about what's going on. You have to go and look. The incoming tickets pipe was the first place to go because it's the simplest firehose to plug. That gave people space to get off the ticket treadmill and work on longer term tech debt.
Have a large glass of water before sleep (real water, no soda or juice). A lot of issues and tiredness after long sleep is caused by dehydration.
I think you were too hasty at assuming malicious intentions. Sounds like it was an honest mistake that the person checking you out made or some sort of glitch. It could even be related to the data breach they've had through Experian lately.
Osxlockdown: OS X tool to audit and remediate security configuration settings
Aren't a lot of startups using dynamic languages because those are more popular? We use Javascript everywhere since that makes it a lot more easy to hire new people.
There was a kind of interesting boomlet in the 1930s-40s when U.S. and Soviet management literature had a lot of interests in common, and pretty openly borrowed ideas from each other. Some aspects of the Soviets' rapid industrialization were seen by American management theorists as very modern, basically taking to the next level the "scientific management" idea that the U.S. industrial trusts had pioneered. The Soviets were in turn also very interested in American management literature, especially the more rationalized/scientific approaches aiming to quantify and optimize factors of productivity. They would've loved the current trend towards pervasive metrics!
I think he's saying that most OOP languages have single dispatch, while multiple dispatch is more like the real world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_dispatch
End-of-buffer checks in decompressors
It is still possible but it is very difficult.

Google will show results by changing the ranks a little bit for random people to see which one has better CTR but mostly they are unchanged. It also probably knows that you would prefer your essay so it shows it higher than normal.

And digg/reddit/hn results were manually de-emphasized by a google update, I think it might have been the Panda update or before that, so starting a link aggregator is also much harder than before.

Google has given these websites a free moat.
Nice work! And nicely uncorrelated with most of the stories people post here.

We added "Show HN" to the title because that's the convention when sharing something you have personally worked on.
And it's not like the existence of the UN means much (2003 Iraq invasion) when a certain western superpower can bend, break and bulldozer members' arms to get their votes.:

"The Institute for Policy Studies published a report[10] analyzing what it called the "arm-twisting offensive" by the United States government to get nations to support it. Although President Bush described nations supporting him as the "coalition of the willing", the report concluded that it was more accurately described as a "coalition of the coerced." According to the report, most nations supporting Bush "were recruited through coercion, bullying, and bribery."" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
I couldn't agree more. Capitalist wealth comes from repeated consensual and mutually beneficial transactions.

If you want to get rich, create value for people. It really is a wonderful system.
Ultimately, they have to "contribute to society" because enough of us believe that that is how society should operate. If you're looking for a "society molecule" to study its properties and see if "rich people gots to pay more" is one of its properties, you won't find such a thing, because all of this is human inventions.
The Sudden but Well-Deserved Fall of Rahm Emanuel
Can you create a named struct on the fly? Don't you have to define struct before?

return (firstPlayer:localPlayer, secondPlayer:connectedPlayer).

You'd have to create the struct before you can use it?
Tuples allows usage a couple of times before you'd define a struct/class.
Nixon enacted price controls on oil in 1971. This meant that US prices for oil could not rise, and the oil from non-Arab sources got shipped to other countries who outbid the US. Price controls prevented finding new sources of oil.

There's more, a thorough treatment is in George Reisman's book "Capitalism" pg. 188.
I don't think anyone will argue with the idea that working hard should and by nature results in good rewards. but what about the idea that one person putting in 500lbs of innovation generates less than a tenth of another's same force?

what if the outcry against inequality refers to the capacity to join the upper echelon and the requirement of other 1%'ers to groom and select future 1%'ers, not it's elimination?

not to mention the people who affect the largest change are folks in the 1% club

One culture or group thought should not keep other cultures from affecting the world.

IE the rich white guy you hear about that has it so easy when compared to someone of lesser means.
They aren't referring to the color of their skin.
They are referring to the family ties, the unfair education, the modeling of the 1% clubs culture, which opens an incredible amount of doors by itself.

It is not that we are upset with some people having more money than others, it's that some people have unfair tools and advantages to get wealth, and that wealth directly translates into influence and power. Thus, where you are born, what culture you grew up with, where you went to school, have profound affects on how others treat you, the influence you have on this world, and your ability to create true change.

I'm not saying this is something new, but just as civil rights have been huge issues in the past, the current issue, an new issue to tackle, to advance our society and understanding is inequality of ability to amass power/money/influence.

IE at one pole we might find that incumbents to money are no more likely to generate additional money than those without money, at the other, the only way to generate wealth is to have wealth.

It's a fascinating issue, you know where I am if you want to nerd out about it.
Phone Monitoring Startup Carrier iQ Goes Under, AT&T Buys Assets and Staff
My experience is very different from yours.

I've been spoilt by pairing, I no longer prefer to work solo.

I've also seen organisations trying to substitute asynchronous code reviews for pairing. They aren't really substitutable. Just as pairing has antipatterns, so do code review systems.

As an analogy, I've coached olympic-style weightlifting. The difference between coaching in person and coaching online is night and day. And coaching beginners pretty much demands fast feedback to be most effective.
Any time before 2007-2008, not sure the exact year.
The last paragraph was the whole point:

>I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its consequences.

A few people making rules didn't cause this to happen. It was the entire world reacting to things the entire world did for the past hundred years. A few people making rules can't stop that kind of force, even if they have good intentions for everyone else.

>What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people... That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem

He mentions this:

>You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.

I think you're looking at a lower scale than pg. From how I read it, he's saying that yes, you can do a little bit to ease the inequality, but you're not going to fix it unless you stop all technology from happening or you stop paying people their market rate. He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that; the most you can do is take from people at one end and give to people at the other end.
You're correct. Using swipe to type on my phone can lead to some dumb mistakes...
I tend to think the diminished role of counterculture in the US is the result of having a lot more choices available within the mainstream. The narrow conformity of the 1950s PG discusses has been supplanted by a much wider range of acceptable/marketable cultural styles. Generally people today are more tolerant, meaning there is more room for more diverse people and lifestyles under the tent of the mainstream.
That's what I thought too, but how could a loan be taken out without an explicit contract with my signature on it? To my knowledge, I signed no such document (granted, it all took place on an apple store ipad, so who knows). Also, apple doesn't even let you purchase phones on a 'tmobile loan', they want their money up front.
You clearly have not thought though the consequences of your proposal. Here are just a few of the problems:

* What if I own a house but have no cash? Will I have to sell it and live on the street to pay the taxman?

* What if the ultra-wealthy buy property and then mark it down? I.e. they buy paintings, then "accidentally" "damage" them. Whoops, a billion dollars in artwork gone, sorry IRS. Later, it is miraculously repaired. Will the IRS have to start sending undercover agents to inspect people's art collections?

* A 3% wealth tax is still less than the growth rate of many financial assets. I.e. the stock market grows at ~7%. So the rich will still get richer. And if you increase the tax to say, 8%, congrats, you just destroyed the financial markets.
Design Like an Astronaut
Empirically, the transition of American workers from large corporations to smaller ones described both here and in PG's 'Refragmentation' has not taken place.

If one considers a firm employing > 500 workers to be large (as per the Government's definition), the percentage of employed individuals working for large companies has remained nearly flat (actually increasing slightly). The same holds true if your definition of large is employing more than 1000, 5000, 10000 etc [0].

A dead giveaway that this observation was anecdotal rather than empirical was Paul's statement:
> you find what most would have done back in 1960... was to join big companies or become professors.

The percentage of individuals working as professors has historically been such a small percentage of the overall workforce that their inclusion in a statement about national employment trends highlights the author's dependence on the availability heuristic rather than data.

[0] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/bds_firmsize.x...
I think Paul missed an opportunity to identify economies of scope, not scale, as a major lever in advancement.

He says:

> Incumbents faced new competitors as (a) markets went global and (b) technical innovation started to trump economies of scale, turning size from an asset into a liability

It's true that innovation trumps economy of scale, but that's because economy of scale doesn't really apply to software; all software is instantly scalable to 100% of humans at virtually 0 cost, more or less.

But the software giants have something up their sleeve that no startups have: economies of scope. Look at Shazam/SoundHound. Google has released Play SoundSearch which leverages all of their internal AI research + advanced computational and human resources that aren't available to the public. In effect, a megacorp can replace an entire company by saying "Let's throw 15 engineers on it for a year and see what happens." And if a startup pops up that seems promising? They buy it out, adding it to their trophy wall of innovations they can leverage. And megacorp employees can easily stand on the shoulders of giants; instead of stackoverflow, megacorp employees can search through massive archives of top-notch, fully-working code that was designed by some of the best engineers on Earth.

More and more, it takes something truly amazing for a startup to grow enough to compete with a megacorp. Not only does your technology have to be profound, but you need to withstand aggressive buyout deals from several megacorps.
Yeah, I think so. In fact, I get the feeling that he originally wrote "exponential", and someone talked him out of it. I'm as opposed to the misuse of "exponential" as anyone -- and it is frequently misused by science journalists and others -- but in this case I think it is appropriate. For one thing, polynomials don't have a flat left tail!
On a road filled only with selfdriving cars, I don't see any obstacle to raise the speed limit to the physically allowed speed limit (i.e. you can only drive through a curve with a certain speed or your car will be sent flying off).
I disagree. If you take the 3 billion poorest people in the world and properly account for their future earnings, it will certainly exceed the combined expected wealth of these 80 billionaires. You couldn't have anything close to this sensationalist statistic.

Also, global poverty is not the fault of Western riches. It's not something we (Westerners) can do anything about either, except engage in mutually beneficial trade. Most of the world is being held back by bad governance, dictatorships and democracies alike. The West has the only economies of significant size that still have the broad outlines of a true free market system.
I cant believe you're serious. People didn't vote with their dollars. They needed to eat so they sacrifice the long term for the short.

companies like Walmart are able to leverage their miniscule effective tax rate compared to mom and pop stores to offer cheaper goods, combined with the FACT that they artificially lower prices to a point where an individual store loses money all for the sake of driving the local competition out of business which has no other operations to soak up losses.

Walmart has innovated in logistics and supply chain management but make no mistake they offer poor quality goods which exploit cheap foreign labor at the long term expense of our middle class
Ode to the Selfie Stick man
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822640

Since you used the date to falsely justify an ad hominem—the polar opposite of a "larger point"—it's not a quibble how wrong you got it.
No, I've worked for several small businesses over my 35 years after college, and none of them aspired to meteoric growth. I think they're the lions share of new businesses, but consistently overlooked because the media is interested only in businesses with meteoric growth or products that become the next new new thing.

I think the willful blinkering of business interests toward only the .001 percent business that's exploding RIGHT NOW is a greater contributor to the fragmentation of business today than the fading priorities of WWII ever was. The idolization of the Gambler on Wall Street (or in SV) has misdirected our priorities away from respecting those who seek to build a sustainable business where normal people want to make a sustainable living. Now the prevalence of jobs at yet another ephemeral startup or large corporation awaiting it's next merger/buyout has greatly destabilized the workplace, much less made the job of corporate leader/ visionary/ innovator next to impossible. Instead of creative invention, corporate CEOs now focus instead on cost cutting destruction, and Wall Street applauds.

I wouldn't call that fragmentation so much as disintegration.
Outrage is necessary for social change. Gawker doesn't want social change. Gawker cries sexism and racism at every out of context quote to sell electronics. If something heinous is happening then the story will be reported with less sensationalism on a more reputable site.
Yep. In the past five years they've had four different suitors. In 2011 it was AT&T (blocked by FCC/FTC), in 2013 is was Softbank/Sprint (could not get enough assurance from FCC/FTC the deal would not also be blocked) and Iliad (French telecom, couldn't raise enough cash to meet DT's asking price), and in 2015 it was Dish (similar situation to Softbank/Sprint). My guess for the next suitor will be a cable company like Comcast or Time Warner Cable shortly after the 600 MHz auction.
I agree with you. One notable difference between a bug and a feature is who will pay for development/testing/support time.
An HFT isn't entirely useless.

You might want to sell 66 shares of Apple stock and somebody else wants to buy 145 and for you both to get a timely fill, there has to be some kind of middleman.

If you think HFTs are bad, just take a look at floor traders -- the kind of people who will front run you if they see you coming and they know what you want, or will take a bathroom break if they don't want to trade with you.

Reg NMS, which set the stage for HFT passed because of a scandal involving the members of the New York Stock Exchange which is as good of a group of rent seekers as you'll find anywhere. Plenty of hanky-panky goes on with HFT, but it is a less corrupt system than what it replaces.
Despite the difficulty in norming on fairness, the arguments I've seen put forward are:

1) The progressive taxation stance suggests that since you're taxing the rich higher rates for money with less utility, that tax is less burdensome, so everyone is experiencing a similar or fair level of inconvenience or economic pain from the tax.

2) The disproportionate benefit stance suggests the rich should pay more because they receive a disproportionate benefit from the state through its investments in protecting their wealth, deploying the infrastructure that the rich need to get richer, negotiating trade agreements, and providing tax relief deemed corporate welfare.
That's absolutely right... on its own, the graph tells you nothing at all.

However, if you know for sure that there are tough problems going on (related to growth, limited dev capacity, code quality issues, etc), then having well-functioning planning tools can be useful. A tracker that looks like this, and the process that leads to this trend is a problem that is worth fixing in that situation.

So that's what my follow up essay will cover. How to put a very simple process in place that gets you back to the point of reliable project prioritization and measurements, without putting in a large time investment.

Because I think even smart, capable teams can end up in this situation due to various forms of external pressures, knowing how to dig out is pretty important, and ideally long before it hits the tipping point I had been at when I started helping with this particular project.
I think his mother made off with a lot of the cash that should have been his.
> Citation needed.

Actually just a bit of research was needed, but I've done that for you: Internet Archive[1] and previous Hacker News discussion[2].

If you want people to take your points seriously I wouldn't recommend such unnecessary and unwarranted sarcasm.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.paulgraham.com/corn...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=189873
Did these researchers just create an autistic computer program?
Sadly I don't think that's the case for me. I drink too much water if anything.
I do. I simply don't have any reason to doubt that he's being truthful when he says he read a certain book. Given that he clearly enjoys reading, I find it hard to believe that he has any reason to be dishonest in listing his favorite books.
There are actually a couple of implementations of this. I think that I most recently saw it in Pulsar[0].
I'm kind of glad these have never gotten too popular because to maintain a healthy swarm using the BitTorrent protocol, peers should not be prioritizing chunks sequentially.

[0]: https://github.com/steeve/pulsar
Yes, startup founders will become rich if they are successful, but what good does a startup founder having $10 billion in wealth vs $100 million? I don't think anyone outside of soviet russia is suggesting the hyperbole that is being discussed in this article, but let's be real - the reason for people working hard is to make more money, yes, that we know that is what keeps us from becoming an economic hell-hole, but there needs to be some limits here. At some point, the the cost of keeping so much wealth at the top is not being paid back by encouraging more and better entrepreneurs.

Also, let's not kid ourselves. It's not a zero sum game, but it's not the opposite either. He is discussing carpenters making a chair or whatever, and then comparing that to something completely different - the founders of facebook, sorry, they did not code every line of facebook themselves, they have thousands of employees that actually GENERATE the wealth. And, to be hyperbolic myself, if a wealthy founder gives away all his money to his employees, yes, that seems a little zero-sum if you look at it that way.

It get the article, he is trying to keep his founders from getting lynched, saying that they aren't a part of the problem, it's the rent seekers. But he is again trying to paint a black and white picture, saying "no, those guys are all bad, my guys are all good"
Within the European Union (EU) returns for online sales are affected by the Distance Selling Directive: http://www.columbia.edu/~mr2651/ecommerce3/1st/Statutes/Dist...
I have one word. Technology.

Think about technology as outsourcing and you realize what the problem is because you are realizing the trend;

Technology will compete with higher and higher levels of abstraction and so you either have to be really skilled in an increasingly competitive space or you need to accept taking jobs at wages that are as low as they are because of the increased competition from technology.

And until economist stop treating technology as an externality they wont understand whats going on and we will keep debating this as if its a political problem. In my opinion its not.

And so because technology ends up favoring the one winner paradigm it pushes wealth into the hands of very few.
How are pseudo-native widgets coming along?
The problem of learning functional programming
This article was flagged by users, presumably because it is a dupe of the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826838.
Transparency Report and Warrant Canary for the Secure Email Service Tutanota
Absolutely do. Ex-MSFTer. This exactly fits with the kind of behavior you see from him internally.
Patents are VERY different than property in that they expire in less than 20 years (at least in the US).
Regrettably, these folks use the "cream of the crop" technologies, but get the wrong answer. (7mbps/768kbps DSL shows up as ~2mbps/560kbps...)