skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am unconvinced that fragmentation actually happened.

Sure, maybe there are more airlines, but are there more airplane-making companies or car companies now then in the '60s?

Or consider this:

> Kids who went to private schools or wished they did started to dress "preppy," and kids who wanted to seem rebellious made a conscious effort to look disreputable

How didn't this happen in the 50s too? "Greasers" are _the epitome_ of rebellious kids.

Or consider politics: I have no idea what politicians said in the US at the time, but back in western europe we had a political spectrum that went from "fascism is okaish" to "praise lenin".
At least, didn't the US had basically everyone on the same side regarding abortion and divorce, compared to now?

Looks to me the essay suffers from sampling bias, even if most likely unintentional. Sure a few things are examples of increased "refragmentation" but I am unconvinced this is a general, uniform, and strong trend.
"I think the premise that automation will just shift work to other industries will be severely tested in the age of the self driving car"

Look: we've gone from 90% agricultural workers to about 1% agricultural workers. Hand-weavers and spinners: gone (other than specialized or artsy-craftsy stuff). Neighborhood bakeries: gone (likewise). The list could go on forever.

People have been predicting massive unemployment since the days of the Luddites. It's never happened. What's special about driving that makes it an exception to the historical trend?
It sounds to me like the researchers trials were ignoring the reason queues exist. You dont choose to go to the bank or post office (for example) at an arbitrary time. You go because you have business which must be conducted and you only have certain time windows available in which to go there. The higher the overall demand for service is at this time the bigger the queue will be.

Also in the last served first system it would be possible for people in the bottom of the stack to never be served! As long as a steady stream of newcomers arrived.
It goes a little further than what the other people are saying. It's not just that the reply "All Lives Matter" is ignoring the issue of police violence against African Americans. It's being used as a defense of the police officers who did the killings, an apologistic post-hoc rationalization that the cop was defending himself. When a person uses "All Lives Matter", what they really mean is "cop's lives matter more".

The easiest thing you can do is donate to the ACLU. You could probably also find part-time volunteer work at any of the many institutions trying to end or mitigate poverty.
According to two different 'Outlook of M&A' panels I attended in the past two months, corporations have more uninvested cash on their balance sheets than is typical. I mention that because even the money invested by the wealthy into corporations does not necessarily get spent by corporations. This is part of the reason why the argument for 'tax cuts for the wealthy' doesn't hold up under current conditions.

Thinking about it in terms of supply and demand of goods, increasing wealth of the middle class increases overall demand, and increasing wealth of the wealthy increases supply, but only to the extent that demand will support.

Source from 2013 but still applicable: https://www.stlouisfed.org/Publications/Regional-Economist/J...
I have always wondered about this, thank you for the good explanation.
Also font and alignment issues cross browser can be brutal. There is a lot to be said for a tiny image that works everywhere, on any device.
Great to see so much discussion about this really controversial article.

If startups create wealth so much, then why is the overwhelmingly used (and accurate!) term about "capturing" value? Most startups do a MIX of adding some value while otherwise benefiting from network effects so that they get to be the ones that capture existing value. Go evaluate any example. Very few are unambiguously creating wealth. The whole concept of disruption is about moving wealth from one place to another.

The BIG issue is about POWER. Wealth inequity corresponds to POWER inequity. This isn't about whether a startup founder gets to have a huge house that dwarfs the poorer folks' homes. The problem is that money is power and the wealthy get to set the rules, and that undermines the democratic structures of our society (to whatever extent they existed at all or could potentially exist).
You'd be surprised how physical celebs can be. They generally have very aggressive or at least very unchecked personalities. I wouldn't expect Gates to be the type but equally I would not be surprised. Also, Sheldon Cooper isn't real. The bit is a hyperbolic statement for comic effect.
I like PGs essays normally, but he didn't address two huge societal changes since WWII, that is the rise in welfare and single-parent families. More people than ever are being paid to be non-productive and to procreate without any means or even real chance of supporting their offspring (a single parent poor household has significantly less opportunity to move up in income compared to a two-parent poor household).

This can't not have an impact on the social order. Perhaps he implies or assumes that this is an effect rather than a cause but to leave it unmentioned seems like a big omission.
I'd actually worry more about how efficiently the money is being used after it's been disbursed, not about how much government administrative costs eat up.

E.g. that chart says that ~96% of Medicare spending went to beneficiaries. That sounds good, but all it means is that 96% of the dollars were paid to hospitals/doctors/medical device manufacturers/etc. It says nothing about how efficiently those people are providing their services, i.e. how efficiently those 96% of Medicare dollars are being spent. A lot of those dollars get quickly chewed up by high prices (which I'd argue are themselves caused by the market distortions that these programs foster).
Are you sure? You wouldn't have a personal computer, a cell phone, or the Internet. You'd have a rotary telephone in your house only. You'd have a TV that looks something like this: http://www.rewindmuseum.com/images3/hmv2647side.gif

On that TV you can watch 1970s programming only. A 25" TV in 1970 cost $850 dollars ('77 Sylvania), which is equivalent to $5200 dollars today. I can hardly even find a TV that costs $5k today! For $4000 I can buy an 80-inch absolutely amazing Visio M80: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VQO5HSE - and they don't even sell TVs as small as 25" any more.

Your stove and refrigerator look like this, and work about as well as they look: http://airconvintage.com/antique/images/101_8149.JPG You also have access only to 1970s automobiles, which are nowhere near as comfortable, quiet, and maintenance-free as today.

If you're making this (hypothetical) tradeoff, then you're also limited to 1970s medicine and dentistry as well. Would you really choose 1970s medicine over today, too?

There are some people who would make this tradeoff, and I can respect that choice if you are one, but most people would not. Most people would prefer to live in 2016 with the products and services available today.
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ also show the fastest HTTP servers are written in C++.
I would guess that whoever said this meant "0-2 per week" when busy with work. Taken literally it means he takes almost no vacation, unless you assume there's a third label beyond work and vacation :)
The question is about amortized time-cost, though.

• Most frames won't involve zooming or text-change—and therefore will be handled at "zero" time-cost by re-using the pre-composited tile.

• The frames that do involve text-change (but not zoom) can benefit from font-atlasing.

• The frames that involve discrete zoom, where text goes from one integral font size (represented in the atlas) to another integral font size (also in the atlas) can also benefit from font-atlasing.

• The frames that involve continuous zoom—such as in this demo—can't benefit from font-atlasing, because the frames where the font is e.g. 7.037773pt large can't be served from the atlas.

Keep in mind that the only reason we do discrete zoom-levels in PDF readers, text editors, etc. is that font-atlasing is "the optimization we have", and it calls for discrete zoom levels. When the UX affordance is for continuous zoom—think about pinch-to-zoom in Mobile Safari, or about zooming into Google Earth—font-atlasing doesn't and can't work. But this technique can.

Now, in games in particular, "continuous zoom" is a pretty rare edge-case. GUI elements don't tend to get zoomed into[1].

And "in-VR" elements, like street signs in an FPS, aren't usually designed as a bunch of geometry[2], but rather as a very high-detail flat texture that maybe gets mipmapped from far away. "Zooming" by approaching a street sign doesn't make the fonts on it re-render themselves; there are no fonts on it, they're just baked into an image.

---

[1] Well, maybe; I could see a case for continuous zoom of the fonts—and other GUI geometry—plastered over units in RTS games. "Pan up" with units selected, they stay selected but their unit names+stats get smaller and smaller and eventually get obscured by draw-distance and atmosphere effects, just as if they were actually "there" in the scene instead of part of the GUI. (Makes me think of the windows in the TV show ReBoot.)

[2] This does make me imagine a Blade Runner-esque game full of holographic signs, though. Those could definitely benefit from this approach.)
I don't think we need to split economic power. I just think the people need to be able to reject economic power over them when they believe it is being misused. That's hard today because economic power is invisible. We can make it visible, then people can decide how they want to let economic power influence their lives.

This is merit capitalism. http://meritcapitalism.com/
Looking forward to Aphyr's Call Me Maybe for Disque.
citation:

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It

by Lawrence Lessig
I think you're very badly missing the point. Reading is how someone like Gates becomes Gates and stays Gates. This particular set of tasks we're talking about is exactly the sort of thing he wouldn't necessarily want or need to outsource.
What about an svg?
> Many countries in Western Europe have been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times

This doesn't change the fact that the current economic status of Denmark and Sweden today is directly linked to their status as colonial powers and slaveholders from the 17th-20th century.

> since the 19th century when slavery was practiced.

This entire subthread began with the claim that being "low-class" in the US is tantamount to slavery. If that's the case, there should be no problem with accepting colonialism, as it was practiced by Sweden into the late 19th century and Demark into the early 20th century, as a form of slavery, since it resembles slavery far more closely than being a member of the working poor in the US.
You don't try to make the distinction, you just regulate all political speech. During election time, you set aside fair slices of media time for every candidate, where they can make their case, and forbid all political speech outside of those times. Same thing with billboards, magazine ads, google ads, etc... The different candidates will police each other. Never going to happen in the US but definitely practically achievable as it is somewhat how elections work in belgium.
How surprised would I be?

HN should resolve to not tell other people they would be surprised by things in 2016.
Alternatively, he's buying loads of stuff so he should get a discount compared to consumers like you who hardly buy anything.
> it's easy to interpret efforts at moderation as disagreement with an opinion

It certainly is easy, but it's an uncharitable interpretation. We're moderating this thread less, not more, than we normally would.

One asymmetry here is that you're upset about a specific case, but we have to moderate HN in general. If you can come up with a viable set of general principles that would make HN significantly better, I'd like to know what they are. I personally have found it to be a hard problem.

A second asymmetry is that the cases where you dislike HN moderation stand out far more than the cases you agree with. (I mean "you" the reader, not you personally.) The latter simply blend into the status quo. Such perceptions are prone to bias, which is one reason it's easy to be uncharitable.
1) The capital is much more mobile now

2) If the US taxes in 1950s were lower, it indeed would make US an even more attractive place for capital. However, the US was going through an industrial boom because of variety of other factors then, unlike any other country in the world. Now, situation both in US and other countries is quite different, and tax factor is more important.

Basically, when you have the best goods on the market, it's OK to ask high prices, but when you get competition, it's not such a wise move to keep them high.
Amiga-like Black on grey is fantastic.

But nobody uses it.
Sure, but a start-up is more of a determination after the fact than something you decide to build. The only reason it works out for YC is because they start so many companies that a few of them due to the expected distribution end up being home runs. They still influence things as much as they can in that direction but there are absolutely no guarantees and quite a few of the go-big-or-go-home companies end up going neither big nor home, they end up being normal companies.

So unless you're willing to apply the start-up label only after the fact to the successful companies you're going to have to be a bit more inclusive than to just use it to describe Facebook, dropbox, google, Uber and AirBnB.

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

No, that's the exception. The rule is that start-ups were started to be companies like any other. At some point during their life span they found a groove that supported the property of very fast growth (almost always these are companies with some kind of network effect) and then retrospectively applying your criteria you can call those companies start-ups.

Anyway, no need to believe me, you can simply prove me wrong by deliberately starting a start-up that will scale. I'll bet you 1:50 that you won't make it.

The hard part then is this: your company has a fairly good chance (10% or so) to become just another company. Now supposing this is the case, will you then follow through on your 'go big or go home' slogan and go home and kill that company? Or will you do what everybody else does in that situation and just run it and milk the cow?

And even pizza places or grocery stores can end up scaling way beyond the original aim of the founders. McDonalds is a nice example.

If you want a single word that identifies companies that are growing very large, very fast I'd suggest this one: lucky.
I see this pattern all the time on GitHub. A promising project starts to catch a lot of stars. Issues start piling up, and the developer no longer looks forward to working on the project because of they have a boatload of issues to deal with first.

An issue is much like an email. Closing an issue requires communicating with (sometimes unreasonable) people. Furthermore, when issues start piling up, critical issues are hidden alongside less important ones making it even more difficult to prioritize.

One way of dealing with things is to maintain inbox zero. Take action right away - delegate, archive or save for a later date. This won't work forever though as your project's userbase grows.

Two high quality libraries with benevolent dictators handle issues very differently:

Peewee (coleifer): https://github.com/coleifer/peewee/issues

Tornado (bdarnell): https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/issues
The problem with this analysis is it assumes that the power to negotiate a wage is equal between the parties. The second is wages are set at the margins. This means it takes very little excess labour supply to drive wages to subsistence levels.
The advantage of vine-ripening is a myth, as I have discovered first-hand by growing tomatoes in a home garden. For optimal flavor, tomatoes should be picked when they have just a slight blush of color but are still almost entirely green, and then finish ripening OFF the vine. When allowed to ripen on the vine their texture and flavor suffer - they tend to taste and feel almost rotten.

The reason mass-market tomatoes taste worse, and your California tomatoes taste better, is because they are different varieties. The varieties that make it to e.g. Boston in the winter are selected to be edible after a long journey, not for flavor. The varieties that you get in San Francisco year-round are grown closer to their ultimate destination and can be selected more for flavor than for their ability to survive long journeys.
Wait, really? How the hell american kids count fractions until 4th grade? Btw, how old is that?

Every time I hear stories about math education in US, it frightens me
I found sidekiq to be better than celery for my needs because it was better integrated (although less configurable). It did what it said on the box without a fuss and without me having to debate the merits of and choose a backend, etc...

It worked with redis and it worked well.
> Anyone who made money from business has already created wealth and contributed to society, via the market.

What in your opinion would be the contribution of a high frequency trader to a society or an individual ? Getting markets to be arbitrage less at sub-mili-second time scales was a pressing problem for no one.

For some of the other industries, if you price the externalities, it is far from clear if they are providing a benefit.
Unfortunately, that's not your decision. It's everyone's. You might personally dislike the choices other people make, but clearly other people do think saving money via buying at Amazon is worth it.
Je suis Linode!

This is nothing less than cyber-terrorism, and I hope the FBI is involved.

A problem I see with people throwing Linode under the bus is that only the mega hosting providers (AWS/Google) have the resources to mitigate such attacks. I wound hope that the industry can find a solution out there that allows smaller players (Linode, Digital Ocean, etc) to run a hosting business without the threat of DDoS.

If everyone moves to the big players, it is a loss for us all: feature-wise, quality-wise, security-wise, cost-wise.
really hard to imagine modern society signing on to a world war

Military service used to be seen as an obligation and an honorable thing to do, and wars were seen as being a necessary part of defending one's country and way of life or eradicating great evil.

That fell apart after Korea and especially Vietnam, which were perhaps unnecessary and certainly bungled by politicians. This forever changed the trust and confidence of the public in politicians who send young people into battle.
When a for-profit corporation exercises free speech, it is actually the speech of its shareholders. Therefore, in the case of corporate speech it's still a group of individuals talking. The only thing you could do is put an individual limit on spending, which is then translated into a limit on corporate speech by summing up the limits of the shareholders, with foreign shareholders contributing zero, and domestic ones seeing their limit divided over their shares.
The "few milliseconds" was a response to "Your system will start faster because it doesn't have to do things like initialize the various pseudo-filesystems Linux has, or initialize the virtual file system, or any number of other tasks." Doing that init takes very little time and zero disk accesses. That and a few megabytes of ram are all you save by using a microkernel instead of linux in this situation.

Linux won't access the hard drive if it's unnecessary, same as the microkernel.
True. But if you look across the broad landscape Facebook is doing more then fueling lifestyle jealousy. For example, in many countries political/social activists uses Facebook as their main communication medium.

Facebook is just another communication platform. I tend to think it like a phone where you can make really cheap phone calls. Now what the user will communicate is based on their socio/economic/political/life preference. And that surely includes a lots of meaningless noise.

And I think that's alright, because freedom is inherently chaotic.
It's flawed logic because people only look at the reward end of the risk reward equation, even if the reward is potentially still higher nobody would bother instead of just taking a regular low risk job.
It's easy to say "raise taxes". It's hard to say where the new revenue should be invested, by whom, and how.

It's also easy, when someone proposes solving one problem, to say "well, you're not allowed to solve that one until you've solved every other problem in the world first". It's hard to say "OK, you seem to be prioritizing this problem, let's both make our arguments and because we live in a democracy whoever sways the most people to their side will win".
> Massive inequality in wealth breeds massive inequality in political power. No amount of mobility or opportunity can fix this one, only inequality reduction itself.

There is a solution besides inequality reduction. The problem is that our money makes the exertion of economic power invisible, so people have no way to reject its influence. If you don't want money to influence politics, you should be able to reject the power of money that has influenced politics over your own production.

I don't care how much money people have, but I do care when they use it to subvert our democracy. We can reject their power to do so, and we can do it without somehow passing a law through our government that has already become an instrument of entrenched economic power in itself. We can do it with individual action.

This is merit capitalism. http://meritcapitalism.com
That's what I was thinking too, but they really want it to be pixel perfect in every browser, email, etc. They have a good in-depth discussion about all the options and pros/cons of each approach here:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/optimizing-letter-avatar-render...
Which "State" are you referring to? I'm not aware of an organization by that name.

> Imagine perfectly egalitarian society, in terms of wealth.

The "perfect egalitarianism" strawman is, at this point, barely recognizable as either man or straw for all the beatings it's suffered. It is as useless a hypothetical in discussing the appropriate distribution of resources as would be "imagine the entire universe was owned by a single person".

The vast majority of people support the use of some degree of compulsion to obtain a more stable or fair distribution of resources than would be obtained in a state of nature. "Stable" tends to be the goal of the right, while "fair" tends to be the goal of the left. From there, everything is a subject of debate -- how much intervention is too much? what is the preferred distribution? can we reach the preferred distribution with a permissible level of intervention?
I don't know, most of the people who are replying seem to be quite rude about it. I certainly judge software by the community and I'd hate to need a question answered by them. /s

As for actually trying it... I'd love to, but every time I do I come up against limitations. Mostly because none of the projects I use write shell scripts for powershell.

But again, that doesn't justify PS being the only one that gets any official attention on Windows, hence me mentioning msys2 earlier.
Font atlasing can and does work during pinch-to-zoom: that was the point I was trying to make. You have to generate a new atlas each time you paint, but drawing multiple "e" glyphs from an atlas is much cheaper than rasterizing each "e" individually.