skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peter Thiel encourages founders to seek (legal) monopoly rents, but he acknowledges that they don't last forever, nor can extract 100% of the value created. I don't know why you think the public doesn't capture a good chunk, or even most, of that value.
This is exactly the taboo I'm talking about. Police, health care, mining, teaching, and surprisingly many others aren't going overseas right now. A lot of jobs are disappearing, and a lot aren't. Why assume that e.g. the American economy won't have enough jobs in the near future? There's no data on HN in all these discussions, and no real trends to extrapolate from except in very specific sectors.
>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.

Which would make it a problem "only" for about 30+ million people or so if they get fired...

That is, if the idea that "80% of people over 50 have recommendations/connections that can land them a job" is correct in the first place, which, hearing from people that age that have difficulty finding a job (in their field of course -- not getting a gig welcoming customers at McDonalds) when laid off, I don't think it is.
HN's Submit page sucks
I really admire HNs design. Its a bastion of elegant pragmatism in an age of bloat and irritating whimsy.. But the submit page sucks. Here are two problems I've just encountered.

1. I try to submit something and it says "Please try again." I can try over and over again and get the same message. Obviously something is wrong here, perhaps the site could indicate what?

2.Theres no link back to the HN homepage, and if I've tried submitting 10 times then I'd need to hit back 10 times in my browser to get back to it.
Thanks!

I've lived my life for years not adverse to risk, but at my age and with my startup war wounds and no financial success yet..I must tweak how I deal with risk.

There is a time when you get fed up with being the nice inventor who jumps at outlandish opportunities yet gets nothing in return.

I've gotten to the point where NO I WONT DO YOUR TV SHOW ... no Google I won't demo my tech to you, etc ... YOU PAY ME AND YOU PAY ME NOW, before I risk any stability in my life for your advances!!!
At that point in time, Toyota still did not have manufacturing in the USA. Honda did, but Toyota did not; they were still not sure how to do it.

Additionally, and more relevant - American suppliers could not make parts to Toyota's quality specifications.

One of the craziest parts of this story is that GM simply did not believe the stories that were coming out of NUMMI - for instance, NUMMI could change press dies (for stamping sheet metal) in under a 30 minutes where other plants took several hours.

It is crazy to think about, but GM at that point in history had enough cash to simply buy Toyota; being the biggest dog in town leads to self-satisfaction and complacency.

GM and the big three at that time had an inspect and reject batch lot production system. Each stage of production would make a bunch of parts that would later be used downstream, possibly a few days or a week later. These parts would be inspected for defects before being used, but by then there may be a buffer of several thousand parts - that may all need to be scrapped. Toyota ran on a lean system, which meant that upstream production could cause severe downtime if those upstream suppliers or plant operations failed. This caused 2 things - emphasis on more robust operations and less waste due to scrap.

The whole time period is fascinating no matter what business you are in.

Disclosure / disclaimer - I work for GM, but did not during this time period - I've just read a lot about it.
I'll admit that I read PG's piece coincidentally when it was just posted and formed my article shortly after, but I'd have been writing something else ("thinkpiece") around that period of time anyway if I hadn't come across it. I've wanted to start writing about economic inequality for quite some time, and this was a convenient stepping off point.

I take issue with #2, though: if everyone knows those points, why did PG fail to address them adequately in his original piece? The data supporting my perspective are quite compelling and not yet disproven.

I'll agree my piece isn't insightful: I considered it a diligence to reply point by point (by the book, perhaps) specifically because influential people cannot go unchallenged when they make faulty arguments.
You probably know this but just in case: That wasn't his article. It was an essay by Mark Twain that was hosted on his site (probably so he could link to it from somewhere).
Of course everyone believes that all lives matter. But the context is important. If someone says "black lives matter" and your response is "ALL lives matter", you're not just saying you think all lives matter, you're saying you don't think it's a racial issue. And willfully ignoring the problem of racism is what has allowed racism to flourish in, say, police departments.

So when you say "all lives matter" you're essentially saying "This problem that effects specifically black people doesn't matter. Let's focus on the more general and still important but less urgent problem that effects white people too, and maybe the problems facing black people will go away". It's like if someone comes to you with statistics about how horribly out of proportion police brutality is towards African Americans and your response is an anecdote about this one time the cops beat up a white guy. Or if someone brings up how serious sexual assault and harassment is for women and all you talk about is how men can be sexually harassed too. If you willfully refuse to recognize the problem, you're part of it.
Flattering? I think it flattering of Gates. The guys does has done some good work but, like Sheldon Cooper, I doubt the two of us could talk for more than a few minutes without him throwing a punch or two. Beyond the hypocrisy of his wasteful lifestyle, his and MS's track record re Africa and the developing world isn't great. In short: Billions out + millions in /= charity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAVpDZOgjt4
Thats's really cool!
I have only returned a few items in my whole life and all of those because of product defects. Flip side: my brother returns many items every month and I am surprised that he does not get, somehow, blacklisted as a customer. He does spend a lot on consumer items so maybe he has not tripped a bad customer alarm because of the large volume of stuff he purchases.

My question is how much do consumers like my brother cost consumers like myself due to increased costs? My brother is a great guy and I hope that I don't sound like I am dumping on him, but it would be nice if customers like me got some sort of discount.
That sounds extremely unpleasant. What can you do about it, and what are you managing to do?
How would you say it compares to something like Celery?
Yep but we're looking at the creator CI20 or CI40 boards as our compiler supports MIPS.

I tend to only listen to the positive stuff from Reddit and the like but that said, we've not had any notable amount of negative feedback online thus far which is rather remarkable!

Yeah cool projects are one aspect but we're also pushing the "if you understand low level, your high level and Web apps will be better and certainly much more secure"!

Thanks for the feedback about the videos. I have a pro microphone - Blue Yeti. The issue is actually the recording environment (my thin walled, noisy neighbours flat in Bristol) which means quality is lost in editing the noise out. I'm trying to organise I better recording environment for future videos.

Is there a link to the startup you're involved in? Or is it all in a language a I sadly don't speak? Haha.
Depending on who you ask "Native American" or "American Indian" or "Indian"[1] is acceptable depending on where you are. The tribal name also works. "American Indian College Fund" and "AIHEC" are educational organizations, so you can see that is still acceptable. I have never heard anyone use "Native American Indians" other than the internet.

1) I'm not going to get into the dot / feather comments other than to say I've heard the phrase.
The thread is clearly a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826838. Normally we bury duplicates outright. We're actually holding off doing that here, because some people seem to feel strongly about it.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Lb8ZgQP74
"2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery."

Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a large number of people to coordinate, inevitably shading over into a corporate legal structure... just like, say, a union, or a political party, or a newspaper. So how are you going to decide which corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech, whatever that means, and which aren't?
Did you contact any of the Tribally Chartered College?
FDR saved American capitalism with the New Deal. By instituting government welfare programs, not even actual socialism but the beginnings of a social safety net, he prevented the same sort of civil disorder and revolution that happened to Europe in failing, unequal societies.

Cultivating a happy citizenry is collective defense. When the electorate is well-fed, well-clothed, healthy, educated, and with career prospects, then there will be no bloody revolutions and disorder in the streets.

Better our taxes pay for UHC or free university tuition, than even more militarized police forces, drone fleets, and a larger surveillance state to maintain order.
You really think he would become angry with you to the point of becoming physically violent?

I'd think he would just indulge you in your insults and walk away, not remembering the interaction in any meaningful way.
"A high-frequency trader does not. He makes a dollar only when someone on the other end of a trade loses a dollar."

This assumes that (a) there's only one other party, and (b) they got nothing in return.

But trading is often about buying at one place and time and selling at another place and time that's more convenient for the buyer and/or seller. So it's quite possible that traders are earning their fees. Today, these fees are often very small (compared to previous market makers), so it doesn't take very much to earn them.
Except that no one is justifying slavery, it's just the opposite.
Nutpicking deserves to be mocked. There are plenty of progressive economists, spokespeople, or empowered politicians; any of them are fair game for criticism.
> I've worked with a few celebs over the years. Be them CEOs or models, they all have "people" to handling this stuff.

How many of them were largely self-taught engineers who made tens of billions of dollars and then started methodically giving all that money away? (at least then the comparison would be interesting)

It really is not much of a stretch to assume that Bill Gates is an outlier.
> 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 thing that I worry about is whether this feature is destroying the conditions that allowed it to become a feature in the first place.

He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, which I see as illustrative in another way. Would personal computing devices have become popular in a highly fragmented world? According to Wikipedia, the Apple II cost over $5k, accounting for inflation. Absent a healthy middle class, which was created by the era of conformity and relative income equality, would there have been enough consumers to create a market for a $5k computer? As we see income inequality rise, are we not also going to see the opportunity for wealth creation diminish as capital congregates in the hands of a class that largely conserves it?

I think we're already seeing this. As an exercise, try to think of something non-niche that costs around $5k, the price of the Apple II, for which there isn't some form of financing (auto/home/college loans and such). I'm hard-pressed to think of something and I believe it's because there's an increasingly small number of people that can afford such a product. We're already losing the conditions that allowed Apple to introduce the personal computer. There's a long ways that this trend can go before it becomes untenable, but the end result of income inequality will be an environment where it's quite difficult to get paid your market value because the market that funds the employment market will have dried up.
You know it is a good time to re-think the current economical distribution when the slavery looks like a valid alternative to the status quo.
Language can be used in a rigorous, technical way with definitions and as close to accurately as possible. Like in a technical manual or programming language.

Or it can be used in an expressive way, the way that normal people write and talk and communicate, where people say things that are technically inaccurate but express meaning and and allow the listener or reader to understand the position, emotions, facts, thoughts and experiences of the speaker or writer.

For example, "I'm starving, let's get a bite to eat." Do you say "No you aren't, that's technically inaccurate, how dare you minimize the concerns of the starving multitudes across the globe" or do you say "Okay." because you understand what he means? That first response is how the "that's not real slavery!" thread of discussion here looks to the rest of us.

I think what he meant by that was he is communicating in the second, expressive way.
I don't think Toyota got paid directly.

See my comment above, but it is important to remember that Toyota did not have any production facilities in the USA at this time; they were not sure (purportedly lazy) American workers could or would conform to the Toyota Production System.

Also, at that time GM had more cash than Toyota's Market Cap. [citation needed] [1]

1. I wish I had better source for this, but Roger B Smith spent 80 billion on automation in the 80's, and Toyota's Market cap was 31-45 billion in 1992.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jan2009/...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=toyota+historical+marke...
In the US, "Black Lives Matter" was a phrase adopted by a protest movement to draw attention quite specifically to the way black people are treated. Rather than addressing this injustice, the right wing responded by attacking the name of the movement. It was seen as diversionary and insincere, since the suggestion of the phrase "All Lives Matter" was not accompanied by any sincere effort to amend the situation.
It's a very American take on fragmentation and cohesion. The idea of wars creating cohesion is only valid in big, powerful, victorious nations. In Germany, defeat resulted in the rejection of nationalism. If you don't live in a great and powerful nation, or if you don't think your nation is as great as advertised, you might not miss cohesion on national lines.

Good thing PG is a realist: "we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its consequences."

But even that point of view is reactionary. What mitigation is good? The kind that preserves mass-market politics as practiced in America? The kind that can take us to war with some distant threat that is not even a blip in terms of national survival? The kind that tells us cops and doctors and uniformly good and competent? Surely not the kind that says "What's good for GM (or Disney, or Goldman Sachs) is good for America."

Skeptical, questioning, objective people with loyalty only to those we can personally qualify will be people less likely to be taken for a ride by the kinds of cynical mass-market charlatans it takes to harness national cohesion.

The weakest part of this article is about taxation and the wealth gap: If taxes rates are weakly related to wealth creation, the spectre of wealth-destroying taxation remains a boogie man, if a popular one these days.
It would be a mistake to say I'm advocating slavery by making this comparison. The slave to a master is just like an automobile: you have to put gas into it to make it go. Turning a human being into something the equivalent of an automobile is an abomination. But I don't really think wage slavery is really all that different at the end of the day. My point is both are abominable.
I see little value generated by treating money as an end rather than as a means to an end. Liquidity and better pricing of goods are the classic rewards of that gambler / investor culture. Meanwhile its demerits (like the 2008 financial meltdown) are blithely overlooked.

In fact, now that there's so much automated trading of all manner of financial instruments, there should be no real need for any new tradable vehicles. In fact, if liquidity and accurate stock pricing are the only desiderata of non-equity traders, and these ends are met otherwise, it sounds like we could easily do away with the entire derivative / option markets altogether as being purposeless and overly dangerous, serving only the professional gambler banker and his vain pursuit of gigabucks.
Interesting. If you are correct (I don't know if you are actually) it means that none of the 16 people who read drafts of this came to that conclusion. I say because I've always wondered why PG does this (so many people reading drafts I wonder if this is common in book publishing that can easily be updated and corrected just based on HN comments) and can't just leave his own thoughts to stand on their own.
> Now: none of the above, and families often consist of two breadwinners (& no children) with a hearty amount of debt, nothing owned, and few savings.

All of this is by choice on the part of the families. People choose to seek employment. People choose to go into debt. People choose to spend rather than save.

> The family unit itself may even be weaker because of less shared ownership.

"The death of the family is the life of the state."[1] When the welfare state grows larger, the family itself becomes less important. If you want to restore the family to its former place, then you must reduce the welfare state.

> Wages haven’t tracked productivity for decades, so wages haven’t risen since the previous story was normal.

How about total benefits, including those mandated by the State? Your wages haven't increased but your employer is spending more than ever on your benefits.

> We’ve lost all of that ground: not just some of it, all of it, and more. We’re back to the 1920s– wage slaves with few rights and no political ability to change things.

We've lost a lot of ground in the quest for liberty, that's for sure. But each June, the Supreme Court creates more "rights" out of thin air. What about those? We have more "rights" than ever, when you look at the burgeoning list of goodies the government doles out.

Income inequality is the result of a free society. Imagine perfectly egalitarian society, in terms of wealth. One day, a musical artist gives a concert, and people voluntarily choose to pay money to see it. Now you have inequality, and it was all voluntary. Should the State jump in and steal the excess capital from the artist and give it back to the patrons to restore equality?

[1] https://mises.org/library/welfare-states-attack-family
The missing piece of information here is that while the quantity of items may be increasing, it is likely that the severity of those items is decreasing. The truly urgent major issues get identified and fixed early in an app's life.

But to answer the question, once you get to the point that you have a large backlog of minor items, you stop treating them all as equal, and instead start looking for categories of items that can lead you to architectural and functional updates to the system that will both resolve a chunk of the backlog at the same time as carrying your product forward in larger leaps.
>I disagree. I think these services have significant values in our life, and switching them off is a bad idea.

A lot of people seem to assume that just because something exists and it's used (and does a few things) then life without it would be inevitably worse.

Not saying that's your case exactly, but I'm not sold that Facebook offers something net positive long term to the people using it. If it's for communicating with other people, we never had more options: phone, IM, email, Skype and tons of other things besides. I find FB a more poisonous version of these things, based on lifestyle jealoushy, shallow exchanges, and allowing people to "keep up" with others without making any effort -- so, helping isolate them in effect.
You're presenting a false choice. You could have a 1970 real wage and buy the stuff of today? My point is exactly the fact that we don't have that is a result of inflation. Please explain, mechanistically, why you believe that there are only two options here.
The Chippewa are also missing. You might want to find someone versed in the whole Sioux / Lakota / Dakota parlance.
I'd take options 1 in a heartbeat, my student debt would vanish and my rent in NYC would be almost nothing.
> Piketty's suggested policy response is simple: high taxes on aggregated wealth.

You need to go one step further and outline where and how the federal government should put this new tax revenue to work.

How much should we raise taxes? Which brackets? What form of wealth do we tax? Why taxation rather than issuing bonds?

What percent of gov revenue should we allocate to the DoD? How much to Social Security and Medicare? How much to public schools? Do we continue to subsidize higher education? Will this leave us weak to the threat of foreign attack? Will we have enough left to pay for the increasing number of elderly and obese?

A bad government with no plan, no cohesion, and no foresight will destroy value as the increased tax pool is simply drained out by cronyism, bureaucracy, lobbying, and dead-end projects. The money might be better left to a benevolent dictator, or to the private sector in the hopes of it "trickling down".

It's easy to say "raise taxes". It's hard to say where the new revenue should be invested, by whom, and how.
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Yes, that's true and it wasn't my intention to say otherwise. The rule of law is a very good thing and flouting the laws is ipso facto a bad thing because it damages the rule of law. I happen to disagree with a lot of those laws, on both the grounds of individual freedom and their own stated goals (i.e. I think that a lot of worker's rights and consumer protection laws are actually bad for workers and consumers). And flouting bad laws can bring good results. Especially laws that have only civil penalties, when people accept the risk of those penalties. It's a delicate issue that should probably be evaluated case-by-case.
But wait, some people start a pizza place or a grocery store or something similar. Those kinds of businesses are definitely new businesses, and people who start these kinds of businesses is what was traditionally meant by the word "entrepreneur".

But startups are qualitatively different - they are usually started with the express (and usually only) purpose of growing very large, very fast.

Call them startups or not, but we definitely need a term for the kind of company that behave in this "go big or go home" fashion, and startup is the generally recognized term for it.
Clarified here https://twitter.com/paulg/status/683389603877789696

"I'm claiming only that technology grows as f(x) = x^n, not f(x) = n^x."
Could this be related to the unexpected tax bill that may happen because of the acquisition?