skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here Thomas, read this: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/reimagining-journ...

They’re not on one “team”, but these people have outsized wealth and influence without any kind of accountability to the public. By virtue of having so much money, they can drive the funding of political campaigns (now without any limits or accountability) with less and less counterbalance from the middle class, and do whatever they like to promote their own interests, whether those interests are aligned with the public or not. I claim this is per se bad, even in the case that the plutocrats care about their image or self-image and turn out to be relatively “enlightened”.

Even if Gates and Zuckerberg, e.g., are well meaning philanthropists, there’s no evidence that their interventions are better than anyone else’s would be. Indeed, since they tend to not have a priori knowledge of fields outside whatever made them wealthy to begin with, and they tend to have led relatively charmed lives protected from the struggle of those at the bottom of the social pyramid, their interventions often look like bumbling stabs in the dark, and sometimes cause more harm than they prevent. In education policy for example, Gates and Zuckerberg’s efforts (and the efforts of the Waltons and other billionaires) have mostly been disastrous distractions pushing policy in the wrong direction. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/got-dough-how-billio...

Beyond that though, all the good that Gates can do is undone multiple times over by folks like the Koch Brothers, who have explicitly decided to turn their wealth to subverting democracy.

It would be better if we had publicly financed (or small-donor financed) elections, more transparency/accountability for advertising and PR spending of all kinds, and if these folks were taxed at (let’s say) the same rate they were during the Reagan administration, and there’d be plenty of public money to fund whatever charity projects in a publicly accountable way.
I disagreed in large with PG's original essay but also see the challenge as being bigger than simply increasing taxes. As taxes increase in the US, the wealthy look outside the US for storing wealth and exploit tax loopholes.

The current tax situation is a combination of being low enough to make offshoring wealth attractive to only the super wealthy, whilst being not so high as to lose campaigning and lobbying financial support for each political party.

Increasing taxes is the solution, but ensuring wealth stays in the US and tax is collected is a whole other ball game.
I hope we can agree that inequality of opportunity is an intrinsically bad thing.

If parents are allowed to invest in their own children, then inherently, you have inequality of opportunity, since parents have different means and will invest different amounts.

while at the same time worrying about a system that allows Harvard attendees like Mark Zuckerberg to do that but provides virtually no opportunity for students at Orr Academy High School in Lawndale to get to Harvard

If Harvard accepted 10X as many students, it would not be Harvard. If Harvard accepted students based on a lottery, it would not be Harvard. Other than increase financial aid even more, it is not clear what additional actions Harvard could do to increase equality of opportunity, that it is not already doing.
Just as you can't say startups create jobs without considering the jobs it displaces, I think you can't hide behind the notion that startups are generally a force of good. That way you sweep all the startups that have a net negative effect under the rug.

Studies show FB can have a negative effect on happiness. In the tech startup playbook is stated that you need to make your site/app addictive. Well we've mastered that now and it must cost billions of dollars with people's time being wasted on crap.

Even startups geared toward productivity aren't that impactful in the grand scheme, they tend to make life more convenient and only when enough customers can be found at the right pricepoint.

We're training people to be distracted by trivialities and stuff that doesn't matter. Many venture backed startups are exposing the defects of the way economy functions and just how poor we are at delivering the value that is truly needed.

We don't really need another gadget or app, we need to fix the way society has painted a growing number of people into a corner. Income inequality is just one way to expose the symptoms of an increasing problem, a problem that isn't really being focused on by startups because startups are born and survive by exploiting leverage that can be turned into profit.
Your argument is uncharitable. You might not agree with them, but there are arguments about how wealthy people "steal wealth".

They're not usually focused on CEOs specifically, but the main argument is that wealthy people use their wealth to give them political influence, which helps them pass laws that "unfairly" benefits them. (Or, if you don't want to bring fairness and morality, we can just say that wealthy people pass laws that make it more likely for them to remain wealthy, regardless of whether other people are impacted badly by this).
i'm usually quite thick skinned about these things... and maybe I am reading too much into it, but using a stereotypically racist American/English misspelling of an arab name to convey some amount of untrustworthyness?

(the same could be said about used car salesmen... but i am not one of those)

this rubs me up a bit wrong... as humorous as the intent is.
Are you talking about the Medium post or about commenters on that story? I'm assuming it's the Medium post.

And if so... that Medium post is not advancing an extremist position at all. It's just disagreeing, loudly, with pg. My hunch is that any time someone declares there to be a problem with "income inequality", people like you and pg read that as declaring the problem to exist with any amount of income inequality, when in fact people typically mean extreme income inequality, given some ill-defined measure of extreme (people will always disagree over what "extreme" qualifies as, but I think most people in America agree that we've gone well past "extreme" by anyone's definition).

Edit: When I say it's not advancing an extremist position, I'm talking specifically about income inequality. The post is also arguing against the claim that startups create value, or really that the people who are getting rich in silicon valley are creating value, which is certainly a whole different discussion to be had (though it appears that the author isn't actually saying they aren't creating value, it's just saying that any value they're creating is subjective and not everybody agrees that it is, in fact, valuable). But the bits about income inequality are certainly not extremist at all.
Mr. McKenzie lived in Gifu for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifu_City#Industry Gifu is about half the size of San Francisco, and presumably the members of various trades in that city are just as much a small town as various trades are in San Franciso. Someone as gregarious as Mr. McKenzie certainly did not spend his time there flying solo. These are things Mr. McKenzie has said publicly, and they provide plenty of material with which to make a high-quality guess as to why Mr. McKenzie might be socially constrained and why he might prefer not to answer that question directly.
With all the fundraising activity, it should be about usability and put some aside for those instances.
Excuse me, English is not my first language and I said "most" when I should've said "many".
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> Can some one explain in clear terms why I would want to learn a new set of key bindings?

The whole point of Spacemacs is integrating things together around evil-mode in its only little package that's ready to go. If you don't have any interest in evil-mode, then I doubt that Spacemacs is for you.
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> cycle of poverty is strong in these rural locations because of the lack of public transportation

Because? Really? Because someone has to buy a car? I think your feelings are in the way of your cognitive ability.

>of low-income people moving to common destinations
I'm sure there are plenty of low-income people moving to the suburbs/rural areas because they are being priced out of high density centers.

Lets not forget, 5% of the population uses the bus, that's including major urban centers like NYC. Nationally, nobody uses the bus, its a joke throw back to a time before cars. Fuck buses.
Eric S. Raymond wrote a tool called reposurgeon[0] for just this purpose. Coincidentally, he used it to migrate Emacs to Git and clean up the repo, although I'm not sure how much manual work he had to do to besides running reposurgeon.

[0] http://www.catb.org/esr/reposurgeon/

[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6524
Would this interfere with phones that operate on the 800MHz frequency?
I thought this was really cool and I really appreciate the time someone put into it. Unfortunately actually looking at the data taught me nothing interesting. I wonder if someone else had a different experience?
I've never dropped more than $150US on a video card, and that was before the Canadian dollar tanked.

I'm thinking I'm going to be waiting a bit before getting into this business.
If you do all of those things, plus raising income taxes [otherwise you would not be reducing income inequality, but only wealth inequality], then you will, by necessity, be raising taxes on successful entrepreneurs and, therefore, reducing those incentives and reducing the ability of people to become wealthy.
I've been using Emacs for the past decade and I switched to Spacemacs after declaring my second .emacs bankruptcy sometime last year after it got support for regular Emacs keybingings, (setq-default dotspacemacs-editing-style 'emacs).

First one was four years ago, my configuration was rendered completely useless after starting to use OS X and I didn't know where to start, so I forked https://github.com/purcell/emacs.d and rebuilt my config on top of it.

Second one was because every time I take a break from a language like Clojure and Haskell for three months and then get back to it my config for the relevant modes get obsolete. Spacemacs has a big community that continuously adapts language layers to the changes on upstream and provides the best experience for development behind a few flags like "(haskell-enable-ghc-mod-support t)".

After switching to spacemacs my configuration went from 2023 lines of code in the original config I forked + 1005 lines of my own to a .spacemacs.d/init.el file that's 243 lines long (without comments). It provides 90% of stuff I want out of box, and provides many more features I never discovered/configured and most importantly it takes the burden of maintaining stuff I only occasionally use from my hands.

If you are not happy with some stuff fundamental to Spacemacs such as Helm I don't recommend it but otherwise give it a try, it is really easy disable Evil integration if you are used to regular Emacs keybindings.
"...yet the US is now the most prosperous nation on earth and our poor still have cell phones, a basic roof over their heads, and aren't eating rocks in the dirt."

Lot of reasons for this, don't need to go into it. People have written books on it, and I am assuming you aren't directly correlating it with the tax rate.

"The 'uber wealthy' pay more in taxes than they will ever use in their lifetime..and probably 10,000 or more people's lifetime."

This isn't true, yea maybe they won't pull or have the need for a social security check, but their businesses and investments rely on public infrastructure, education, and the federal military protecting their international assets and trade rights MUCH more then the average joe. This is compounded by the fact that our corrupt system of government you so aptly pointed out, has allowed the policy making to overwhelming favor the established crony capitalists.

"Instead of focusing on how much more money we can appropriate from the wealthy, we should first be making politicians and governments accountable for the money we are paying into the system now. Without this accountability, we will continue to run out of money."

You are totally right, we should be figuring out how to be less wasteful -- and there is also plenty of legislation that creates unnecessary waste and bureaucracy. I think this is beyond a discussion about taxes though, and more about restructuring our government in a bipartisan effort -- which starts with who we elect. I think you can separate the two arguments. But yea, totally agree. One thing to keep in mind though, all large human organizations become less efficient and wasteful -- so this is not just a government problem. See HP.

Lastly, I don't think that the NBA analogy really works here. Just because someone is born with athletic ability doesn't automatically make them draft ready. They spend 10-15 years honing their skills, spending time with world class coaches, and working hard to get to the NBA. Someone born into obscene wealth usually comes with years of investment management and financial teams built around the family to maintain that wealth -- with a high potential for the child to be very disconnected from reality and never have that same urge to work that the NBA player had. See the affluenza case for example. I am not suggesting we should punish someones children by any means for your own success, but there is a difference between providing your kids a nice life and supporting modern day princes and kings.

Obviously this last bit is more of a generalization, but I hope it shows the fault in your NBA analogy. Otherwise I do agree with the sentiment that yes, there are natural vagina lotteries, but being smarter or more athletic is a net positive for a society -- whereas being born into inordinate amounts of wealth could actually end up being a negative over the long term when your ruling class is further removed and further concentrated from the average.
Also a dark calculation in these people who won't carry (even catastrophic) coverage.

If I get a major disease and a half million or million dollar medical bill, I'm not going to pay it anyway.
My understanding is the evil-mode emulates Vim, and viper-mode emulates Vi. Vim is "Vi iMproved", so it has more to it than just basic Vi.
That was a great read. It's a thorough discussion of Kyle's approach and thought process regarding conflicts of interest. It's humble and honorable.
Agreed, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

If your labour has market value and you're taking crap from your employer, shop around for a new job. The other way of saying that we don't have lifetime employment anymore is that we don't have to suffer through lifetime employment anymore.

You don't have to tolerate stultifying bureaucracy. You don't have to suffer nitwit bosses. You don't have to deal with impossible coworkers. With an open labour market, you can work where you like.

A couple of days ago someone posted patio11's blog article on his experience working in Japan as a salaryman. The other side of the security of lifetime employment over there is that you have to tolerate horrible working conditions at your lifetime employer, and the labour market is so rigid that if you ever leave your employer, no one else will ever hire you.
> We attack both startups and inequality.

That would've been true if there was no non-profit startups.
I have seen that.
I have also seen that, but without the third step.

Its the fastest way to get a bunch of comments in your code(as well as code) that is probably meaningless if not actively bad for you to store in your brain.
Inevitable result of thinking that adding even more government intervention would result in better, cheaper plans.

If they were really interested in making better, cheaper plans, they would roll back most of the ACA, eliminate the restrictions on buying across state lines (actually allow competition), and transfer the tax incentives for getting insurance from employers to employees.

Basically, all they had to do to make healthcare more affordable was to open up the Federal employees plan to everyone and transfer the tax incentives to employees. This was actually proposed by both major parties prior. It would have been about a 10 page bill.
The most complex thing I used pipes for was to pull in content from basically every site around the web that I have an account on and aggregate them on a blog of sorts.

The whole idea was that sites I use for things come and go. I could jump from service to service, update my pipes setup. If a site died I'd just find a replacement and move on. I always had all my content harvested and stored in my own db.

Examples;

* any youtube video I added to my favorites would be auto embedded on my blog

* posts on blogger, wordpress, etc all pull into the one place

* images fav'd on deviantart

* pages book marked using diigo

* photos saved to whatever photo site I was currently using

Here's a screenshot from a long time ago when I originally set it up (2009):

https://fuzzyslogicblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/a186d-pi...
I think you may have overlooked the power of optimistic biases. A fair number of young founders do believe they stand a good chance of becoming very much upper class and base their financial decisions on this. Failing that, some people are willing to play lottery-ticket odds even with full appreciation of the risks.

That said, I think the answer hold even if you restrict the question to small self-sustaining lifestyle-businesses-size. You correctly state that there is no way of knowing how big a company will get at founding time. However, if there's an upper limit, then this may significantly affect risk evaluation. People will respond to the incentives they see, and you can't kill the incentives without affecting how people behave.
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Use Google apps. Comes with drive for uploading stuff, word, excel, presentation stuff that allows real time editing. Always in sync.
Generally I find all copies to be bloat.

Seeing the original code will not necessarily explain old behavior. When you make a copy, how much are you planning to copy? To debug ancient code that calls 5 functions, you might need access to the histories of those 5 functions; and the histories of any functions they call, and heck maybe you only saw correct behavior on a certain OS or with certain input (none of which you may have access to). If you don't have all those histories, the "correct old code" you are looking at may even lie to you, as it suggests it is calling functions you think you are familiar with but those functions have changed in some important way.

After enough time passes — and at the rate this industry moves, time is short — the only thing that really matters is whether or not the program currently does what its current users require. And if it doesn't, you define what behavior you need it to have and find a way to fix it.
Rails: how to add fullscreen video background to a section
I'm the "css expert" you desire to know. No issues are open at the moment in regards the typography you're referencing.
> But if we fix all the bad causes of economic inequality, we will still have increasing levels of it, due to the increasing power of technology.

So, PG's logical conclusion is that economic inequality is an inevitable byproduct of technology and capitalism. I'm happy to grant him that. But it seems to me that history (pick your favorite revolution) teaches us that no matter what the inevitable consequences of a given system are, the majority of the people will not stand by and see their economic futures reduced to scraping by.

Which is why I'd love to see more people in the startup community (including PG) discuss what steps could be taken to both incentivize creators while simultaneously making average people better off. Because that's the amazing thing about creating value and growing the pie. Win-win scenarios.
Duh, you'd be correct. I had a brain-fart
That kind of user doesn't encrypt their phone.

This is more worrying for a professional locked down corporate device full of sensitive data or trade secrets. For example, I work in health studies - my worry would be patient info getting into the wrong hands.
Emacs core requires FSF copyright assignment. Most of the configurations in Spacemacs use third party extensions which don't have the assignment.

But being non-core is not really a barrier to installation in my opinion. In many ways it is a plus, allowing for out-of-cycle releases and to experiment / break compatibility at their own pace.
2 seems solvable with reputation? If you trash someone's car you're banned from the service. Also your charged for doing it. They can stick cameras in the car to verify same as taxis have cameras.
The plans have been a disaster. They got rid of the only plan that makes sense for young people: Catastrophic insurance (deductible of over $10,000).

The plans that remain have high enough deductibles to be worthless, but low enough to be expensive. The plans helps almost nobody. The only people who gain value from the exchanges are those who get a subsidy.

To make things worse insurance companies are pulling out in droves, and prices are expected to go up 40% year to year.

Things are not looking good.
It is not Paul Graham’s job to fix any particular set of problems. However, given that he hasn’t to my knowledge ever engaged with such problems at all, and he has apparently himself led a charmed life in a bubble insulated from the day-to-day concerns of regular people he keeps dismissively handwaving away, I don’t see why he has any basis on which to pontificate about the state of the society in general, or tell everyone else how they should think.
The previous thread had lots of reasons economic inequality is instrumentally bad. I really saw nothing about how it's intrinsically bad, and I was looking. Can you link to a specific comment maybe?
I think this is exactly where people disagree with pg's essay.

He is talking abstractly, about whether economic inequality is bad and should be targeted. Most people will answer "no" to this.

The major criticisms of pg's points that I've seen are:

1. Your criticism - namely that economic inequality is, in itself, a bad thing. I.e. pg is wrong, we do need to target economic inequality. (I've actually seen this criticism brought up less, I believe)

2. Even if economic inequality is not bad, and we totally buy pg's abstraction that we don't want to target economic inequality on its own - in the real world, concretely, the wealthy are using their economic/political influence to give themselves more (possibly at the expense of others). I.e., pg agrees that we want to promote the good kind of economic inequality (building startups! yay!), and we should discourage the bad kind (stealing money), but misstates how prevalent each of these is. And the people arguing "against" economic inequality are actually just arguing against these specific "rent-seeking" behaviors, not against the concept of economic inequality like pg seems to think.

Btw, I'm not arguing which side is "right" here, I'm just presenting the major arguments as I see them being brought up (by e.g. Mark Suster, some economists [I think I saw Greg Mankiw talking about this topic]).