skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That fusion link nails it. Exactly my points elsewhere in this thread.
I think there is a better (though still rather disanalogous) comparison between the US with the decline of the Roman Republic into the Principate. Some of the same arguments apply to the EU.

In both cases a large (and roughly similar) number of people with different cultural splits (Red & Blue/North & South European) are increasingly feeling like their governmental structures are failing to represent them. Perhaps X00 million people is simply too many for our existing legislative structures to accommodate at this point in history.
This is a classic case of induced demand - build bigger/better roads and more people will use them. The money would be better spent on improving transit and walkability/bikability of the city (to encourage people to live closer to work)

A freeway lane carries around 2400 passengers/hour, a light rail line can carry around 20,000 passengers/hour. Heavy or commuter rail can carry around 40,000 passengers/hour.
It's not working less, some of us need 100% of our pay to get by and can't afford a 20% cut for less work (the stress of having less money > the stress caused by working more)
Great reply, although I disagree with the typical simplified assertions that the Soviet System didn't work. Without doubt the system had major flaws. But it is perhaps much more shocking that the system worked as well as it did given so many obvious problems with it. Taking a primitive peasant society and turning it into a space traveling civilisation was quite astonishing. One has to also keep in mind that for decades the Soviet Union had very impressive GDP growth.

The problem with discussing any of this is that the anti-socialism and communism feelings run so deep that people can't have a neutral discussion of the merits and flaws of socialism and communism. Anything positive can so easily be dismissed by the utter tyranny and inhumanity practiced by Stalin.

By the irony of this is that Stalin does reflect the nature of socialism nearly as much as people believe. Both China and Russia were terrible and totalitarian societies long before socialism and communism.

Still both the Soviet Union and China have turned into far more humane societies during socialism than they were at any earlier times.
Well there's a level of truth to that. The best programmers tend to be the ones who are autodidacts who are passionate about their career path and it tends to spill over into personal life. The best are the ones who were learning and building at a young age and accepted "technology" as a part of their personal identity and built their life around that. Hiring managers know this and target these individuals because they know these individuals will align their efforts to the companies interests and they reward them for it.

Personally, it's not worth the stress. I was in the hospital for stress induced heart failure last year and work was a contributing factor along with urban life. Now I divide my time amongst other things. The market where I live is competitive and anyone who expects me to work a 60 hour week for them all the time and attack me for not doing so can politely fuck right off as it's not worth my life. Thankfully I don't have to deal with this; companies don't like paying overtime and I'm thankful to work for a company that respects my time.
Dispelling the Killer AI Myth
My biggest problem seems to be a bug, not sure if it is FB or browser. But from time to time as you scroll down the news feed, FB displays the stuff you have already seen from the beginning. Sounds like a problem with request firing off and not able to retrieve and populate stuff from the beginning again.

There is also no way to "remember this" unless you like the post.
Wouldn't it be better to simply write utils to convert the stats to some format a graphing engine (like Munin or Graphite) could use?
If you are a salaried employee, the only thing payroll should need to know is whether or not you worked at all during the week. If the answer is yes, you get paid your full salary. If it is no, you get paid your full salary if you have a vacation week left. If it is no, and you have no vacation weeks left, you don't get paid. Simple.

If taking a day off during a working week causes them additional effort, it is only because they are grossly abusing the definition of salaried employee the entire remainder of the year.

If they want to handle employees as though they were hourly, they could just stop lying about their people being salaried exempt employees.

If you are salaried, and your manager is fine with you taking Fridays off, payroll does not need to know. If a deadline approaches, and you need to work Saturday and Sunday, too, payroll does not need to know. Salaried workers are supposed to be paid for getting their work done, and not just for punching the clock.

It seems as though many employers are abusing the legal definitions in order to bend labor laws.
Create your own relaxing melody with the sounds of Nature
My facebook timeline is the worst of all social networks. I unfollowed 90% of my friends that I don't care about, so it has very little data to show me, but instead of showing all of the content of those users, it still filters out most stuff by whatever criteria they use, so I often go days with the same content being shown on the top of my timeline (and missing a lot of posts that I actually wanted to see).

Setting the feed to "Most Recent" usually gives better content, but the option unsets itself every other day.
Innovation is the primary driver for improved quality of life. The kings of 1900 did not fly across the globe in hours, have access to the variety of foods of our lower class, and connect with loved ones in seconds. Basics such as a bed or filtered water came from innovation. Taxing or otherwise slowing innovation will put brakes on quality of life improvements for everyone. When have top-down mandates ever been as efficient at fixing problems as an individual grinding away at a cause they care dearly about?
Either capitalism is a new phenomenon and we don't have enough data to know how stable it is beyond outlasting communism, or what you call 'capitalism' is anything except communism - in which case it has failed catastrophically many times throughout history.

Democracy is relatively new, and has proven hard to establish in most of the world, so there isn't a lot of evidence that it's stable.
hackrf is reasonably priced, yes ? Very good support in GNU Radio.
> In elementary macroeconomics you learn it is impossible to make a profit because in a competitive market because it is rational for me to lower my price by one cent to get the deal and then it is rational for the competitors to do that until the point that profit is zero.

I did not take macro economics, but this does not sound correct to me. If the profit is zero, then why do it? Surely the statement should read

...rational for the competitors to do that until the point that the profit is zero _plus one exchange unit_.

If there is no profit at all, then it is not rational to do the thing. Profit can be extremely thin, but it should still be there.
The boy who put a star in a jar
True.

However, I'm very new to web development, and I went with what I'm learning.

Also, I wanted to build something that other people like me (who aren't necessarily web people) could use without having to think about it too hard. Heroku's deployment strategy (i.e., "git push heroku master") makes the whole thing dead simple.
The thing I would add to your comment is that inequality in productivity is increasing. And this is actually is good reason for increasing inequality of wealth distribution.

Rent-seeking, tax avoidance, buying political influence, monopolistic behavior, corruption and nepotism should go.

I'm somewhat torn on the inheritance issue though. From the point of view of young children, inheritance is unfair. From the point of view of the people who worked very hard to build wealth, not being able to give it to the most important people in their lives is unfair.
Worth mentioning is the default pricing settings on Steam create vastly different prices geographically.

We manually set out prices to match our store (https://www.scirra.com, sorry can't help myself!). Bit of a PITA as we have to keep it updated regularly for volatile currencies, but we'd rather people buy from us directly.

Geo pricing difference is significant, so depending on per country volume actual revenues may be minus a significant figure if those numbers are based on USD.
What about generic tools, such as webbrowsers? The web was invented at CERN by a researcher, so I guess webbrowsers must have some value to the scientific process :)
How does GRUB work or inside bootloader
Giant ape went extinct 100,000 years ago, due to its inability to adapt
Who buys the stock, and why wouldn't they organize into clans?
Very cool... can I get a link?
Honesty is an ultimate issue here. If my reasoning is shoddy, but I plug it into some math apparatus, then it'll likely make my problems obviously wrong. If my reasoning is very inaccurate and the data uncertain, being precise about it can at least make the results salvageable. Scott Alexander argues for this position quite well in [0].

Humans can lie with statistics well. But they can lie with plain language even better.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-...
"Why I Don't Write for Medium", they write on Medium.
Grid v4.0.0 now available – Now on LÖVE 0.10.0
Click the little drop down arrow at the top right of each post. On many of them (maybe not all -- I can't check right now), there's now a "Save" option.
FHS tries to stay relevant, but I'm not convinced it is. However the exact location is not the important point here.

If no repository is available you should not proceed with anything until you have a plan in place how to keep track of updates and security issues. How often do you update? Do you backport security issues or upgrade? There will be backwards incompatible changes upstream which fixes security problems, and you need to have a plan in advance when in panic mode.

And if no package is available you must first know why. Is it not supported? Is there a better way? What does that mean for your deployment? With this knowledge you create a package. Install it and keep a copy for future troubleshooting. Always use packages in Linux, unless you have a very good and specific reason not to.

Under no circumstances should you drop untracked files in your environment, unless it is a one man show.
> In the long run this leads to oligarchy and possibly even economic and societal collapse. We are nowhere near there

I totally agree with your point. I disagree with your opinion that we are nowhere near there... Just look at what the oligopoly practices of 'big banks' that were 'too big to fail' did to the global economy. They ALL used their money to influence the regulatory rules and the governments that governed them. Goldman Sachs was the worse at this, they were shameless in putting their ex employees into key White House positions.

They built a gated community around themselves to protect their giant profits and when it all went south, the TAX PAYERS, US, WE PAID FOR THAT.
Show HN: HerePin It's the non anonymous yikyak for travelers
Thank you, I see what you are trying to say here.
According to this UN report: http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_bg_pa... global inequality has been increasing despite convergence of inter-national mean incomes. The rich have been getting richer faster than the poor have been catching up.
You see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG

a.) These are not very accessible

b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these

c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter

d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like

{ textBlob: '...book quotes galore...'}

b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free bandwidth people, that's what we all want is it not?!)
Pretty sure it's also true of Denmark. :)
Agreed. I work on pharmacy data, which is additionally subject to HIPAA compliance. While the the pharmacy data does technically not contain anything identifiable, it is frightening how easily someone can match their own company's records up to a data set that is supposedly anonymous.
The richest people in Germany are part of families who inherited the money over generations.
Harvard team wins regional programming competition
Education just changes the rules of the game when it comes to working time. In the US, once you have your college degree, you morph from an hourly employee where overtime is paid, to an 'exempt employee' where extra hours are unpaid.

Over the years, the federal government has added more jobs to the exempt employee list. This means we get things like fast food store managers making $26K/yr putting in 60 hour weeks. There has been a push to change the minimum salary to $50K/yr for exempt employees, but employers have successfully delayed the implementation of this till late 2016.

Ideally, the US needs to rewrite the Fair Labour Standards Act to be more in line with the EU working time directive which limits the working time to an average of 48 hours over a period of several weeks. This allows overtime to be used in bursts, but not chronically.
> What is there is only due to India and China starting to have something resembling a middle class (but even so their standard of living would be unacceptable from someone who grew up in the US.)

I don't understand what you mean when you say it's "only" due to India and China starting to have a middle class. That is literally the definition of decreasing inequality globally: people who were previously below middle class have increased their standing.

> (but even so their standard of living would be unacceptable from someone who grew up in the US.)

As someone who actually has a very real sense of what middle-class standard-of-living in India actually is, I'd contest this claim.

But even if we ignore that, the fact that a developed country's standard of living is still below the US's standard of living doesn't contradict the statement that the inequality has decreased, because the difference between the two is much smaller than it was 50 years ago.
Why? I loved it. Both it and Aladdin? - they also were dos games.
The current fashion for BT really bugs me.

BT inverts conditional probabilities. If you can estimate P(E), P(H) and P(E|H) better than P(H|E) it will give you a better result. It is one of many probability identities. But someone it has become 'the one', as if, say P(H|E) = P(H&E)/P(E) isn't much use, but put two of those together: world changing.

I've seen so much crap come out of this fad. My particular favourite is in theology. William Lane Craig has demonstrated that Jesus raised from the dead, to a high probability. Richard Carrier has shown that there was no historical Jesus. Funny how few people ever run BT and find it contradicts their views.

I think part of the problem comes from a lack of understanding of the difference between frequentist and bayesian interpretations of probability. I've yet to see these folks show BT working in anything but frequentist data. And then they'll switch and use it to demonstrate why their Bayesian situation is correct.
It is far beyond least squares as it was and is practiced

There already was stuff in the stats literature in the 1990s that was much better but people in the physics community (such as myself) were not aware of that literature. On the other hand, stats people were not particular aware of the way power laws were occuring in physics.

I saw things that did not add up ten years earlier and Mark Newman did too but we were both so caught up in the rat race, consensus reality, collective delusion, whatever you call it that I left physics before I could address the problem and he suffered through years of bullshit before he could find the time to do something about it.

Watching Mark write great papers, write great book chapters and suffer from tremendous anxiety over his career was a big reason why I left.
Column A: shitty investing.

Column B: over-promsing.

Column C: under-funding.

Column D: pension gaming.

Column E-N: other stuff.

There's usually more than one reason when $63bn holes arise.
And how many people did Pinochet kill, compared to the number of people Stalin or Mao killed?
> I would argue that's not a fair reflection of the actual comparative wealth of the two individuals.

Why not?

Perhaps you believe this, because the Harvard MBA has greater prospects for a high-paying job, or maybe they have a family who will support them until they get a job.

But those pools of wealth are already be measured where they are--the high-paying job is with a company, and that company represents wealth that is controlled by its shareholders, partners, owners, etc. That wealth is accounted for in the measurement. Same with whatever wealth is held by the MBA's family.

Edit: In any case, it's clear where to sort a person with $200k in debt, no matter their future job prospects. They're not in the 1%.
Stats, Maps n Pix: From Anscombe's quartet to choropleth classification
> We tried it. It didn't work. No reasonable person disputes this.

I'd dispute that it was really tried, but I still don't think it would ever really work.
Perhaps that points to a problem with Germany's climate for entrepreneurship.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21587209-vigorous-sta...
10 years and $20B USD for a 40 station rail line spanning over 100km (20km in tunnels) sounds incredibly fast and inexpensive.

It took us (San Francisco Bay Area) 10 years and 6.5B US dollars to build a 3.5km bridge... and it still has some serious problems with no solution.
This is a good overview of how the money might be used to influence, and not be a purely altruistic gesture: http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-...
Doctors observe a result of the test, and know the basic probabilities (in the example, 99% test accuracy, 1% of population have the disease). The problem is that they [often] draw incorrect conclusions from those observations (99% test accuracy and you tested positive? well then you likely - 99% - have the disease, right?).

The question formed as 'your one patient tested positively' is more immediately relevant, I'd think. The correspondence with actual practice is obvious. The question formed as 'out of 10000 ...' could be remembered as a quirk of statistics, but not actually recalled when someone tests positively for cancer.
Testing virtual reality app for real estate in LA
I just finished reading The Masters of Doom and really got the impression that working more hours made Carmack more productive than nearly everyone else in the field.
This.

I missed repeated posts from a good friend asking for help. If I had seen them, I would have been there in 10 minutes. They committed suicide exactly 1 month ago. Just goes to show how incredibly important some algorithms can be.
Yes. When I was doing peer review work in my field (Mass Com), it took about a year to get the landscape sorted. That includes being able to ID people behind submissions, based on writing style.

Unfortunately, I saw submissions get down voted not because of the content, but because of some long standing intellectual feud (I found this out after I became a sought-after "tie breaker." The journal editors figured out I was indeed casting votes based solely on the submission in hand).
also, "written in go" fatigue. Can't wait for this trend to die.
Perhaps there are wealthy people that, through hidden inheritance, should be on the list. But what this article looks at is the Forbes 400 richest. Unless there are some Vanderbilts hiding somewhere with billions in offshore accounts, then I would say that inheritance is not driving inequality as much as you think.

Also, you have to consider that inheritance is often passed on is often wasted in a few generations.

> Indeed, research shows that family money rarely survives the transfer for long, with 70 percent evaporated by the end of the second generation. By the end of the third? Ninety percent

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873246624045783346...
> No, if the compiler can reason that that there is no aliasing between pointers, there is no need to emit a load.

Without strict aliasing? Then you destroyed a bunch of optimizations that lower for loops to memset. 4x performance loss if AVX would have been used in memset.

See: http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-... ("Violating Type Rules")

> What I don't want is for the compiler to silently omit the load and all the rest of the code within that function on the theory that once undefined behavior has been encountered it no longer has any obligations, not even the obligation to inform the programmer that it has perversely optimized the function to nothingness.

No, you need that optimization too. After aggressive inlining, especially of templated code like the STL in C++, it's often the case that large swathes of code are never dynamically reached, and people want that dead code to be removed. However, the only—or at least the easiest—way the compiler can tell that this is the case is by observing that, for example, a null pointer would have to be dereferenced to get to that dead code. Therefore the compiler is doing you a favor by eliminating that obviously dead code.

Again, all of these optimizations do not stem from compiler authors being language lawyers for the fun of it. They stem from their customers filing bugs on real-world missed optimizations.
Dōjin soft
True mentorships are organic things, not unlike friendships. Still you can try to strategically engineer the relationship.

Target someone likely to be in a good position to give solid, and thoughtful advice, say a C-Level, SVP, or Director type. Be very specific with your Ask. 'Any thoughts, how would you handle an X problem?'

Make a point to circle-back with that individual periodically with an update, especially if you took their advice. It opens the door to seek more guidance. Most people blow this one off-- it's vital to growing your relationship. Pro-tip: sometimes the hardest people to get to know, have the most interesting things to say.

Reciprocate-- offer 'is there anything I can do to assist you?' You might be surprised, the Old Guys value your insights and perspective, especially when it comes to new technology.
But you're missing the point of what I'm saying:

I suggest taking the notion that communism is always bad with a grain of salt, given that our nation has been propagandized to despise communism much as the Soviets were propagandized to hate capitalism.

The Soviet Union went from a third world country of farmer peasants to becoming the world's first spacefaring civilization in only 40 years. Considering where they started, I believe that is quite impressive.

During the cold war, each side's media focused exclusively on the other's shortcomings, turning molehills into mountains, so to speak. To not acknowledge the reality distortion field around reporting of the era is an assault against the historical record.
He states some causes are good and some are bad.
>Still both the Soviet Union and China have turned into far more humane societies during socialism than they were at any earlier times

What do you mean be this? Surely modern != humane
This sounds amazing and I'm happy you've found a solution that works for you. Unfortunately in my experience this scenario is basically impossible for 98% of people in the US - I assume when you say 'my country' that you are not from the US?
Except when

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
BBC iPlayer sees performance uplift after relaunching on NoSQL database