skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We need to lower economic inequality so that more people have a chance to start startups, now you need savings and a lot of hard work only to convince an incubator or an investor and most people don't even have that chance.

Maybe we should start taxing corporations the same way we tax the average person, no more tax heavens and special tax laws, everyone pays the same unique percentage from earnings/profits and from the extra cash the government can provide a social service to allow everyone who meets certain requirements to start a startup.

Unfortunately governments are bought by corporations and they get special treatment, they get bigger and not only we all pay higher taxes because they pay less but it's also harder to start a company because of oligopolies and government special treatment for the 1%
Mississauga Carpet Cleaning
Vernor Vinge's novel, "A Deepness in the Sky", involves an spacefaring civilization that uses metric time (Ksec, Msec) after discarding Earth-based units. A feature of the book: the author never gives a footnote explaining how to convert these units to familiar ones, so you have to work it out yourself. Which means that you'll never forget it once you've done the homework.

(Also, there's the old rule-of-thumb from Grace Murray Hopper that "pi seconds equals a nanocentury".)
The source control system is like an attic (some even use that term). Commenting out code is more like leaving those dusty boxes in the dining room. I suppose one little old box might be ok if it has sentimental value.
Polygonal Planet Project
UnrealIRCD also has modules for this. You have to contact the site admin to acquire them. https://www.unrealircd.org/
Hmm yeah, that could help... but one problem remains, if you want to display an holographic forest, you'll need a holo-room the size of the forest.
Pretty sure I wrote this in my sleep or something. This guy says everything that I say! Sent it to a coworker and he said he's heard me say everything on the list lol
You're not alone. In Texas, they cancelled almost all (or maybe all) individual PPO plans (affecting about 367k people), leaving us to choose HMO or EPO plans (the lesser of two evils). And about a 20% increase (per year) in insurance cost for the last 3 years. I at least hope some folks are benefiting from the ACA, I'm certainly not.
It's controversial because it's largely a strawman. Income inequality is not a binary thing—it's a gradient. There exists a level of income inequality that any reasonable person would agree is bad. PG seems to be trying to muddle that fact.
I think some of this stems from history. There was a whole music publishing industry far before 'record labels' existed (before recording existed, really).
Actually this code /is/ horrible in many ways (single letter variable names instead of something descriptive?!?), as is 'the old style' in general - which is why those practices are uncommon or considered 'bad' today

it can still be solid as a rock and be needlessly difficult to read, written in a poor style. they aren't mutually exclusive things, despite what many may preach.
Sounds like a coil of heating wire around the chips that's triggered by cryogenic temperatures entering the computer case (or the PC's case being opened) would keep their secrets safe. I.e. if triggered, motherboard power is cut off, and the LiIon battery dumps power through the heating wire and quickly bakes the chips to 500 degrees.
The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements
You seem to be making the same extremist assumption that pg is, the same thing that people were complaining about with his original essay. There's a big difference between reducing income inequality and eliminating it, but you don't seem to see the difference. Trying to reduce income inequality across the board does not mean people who create value are no longer being rewarded.

And don't forget as well that the people who get rich off of things like medicine, electricity, computers etc. are often not actually the people who worked hard to create them.
I'm "this guy" who "got a bunch of things wrong" :)

Style guides are opinionated, and not everyone will agree. I intentionally made the style guide part of a Github repository so I could consider feedback from the community, and I've already incoporated plenty. As I mention below in the thread, I think you have a good point about "args" vs "cards" for your shuffle example.

Re: "The preferred place to break around a binary operator is after the operator, not before it", I think you mis-read this PEP8 suggestion. A binary operator is something like "and" or "+", not the "for" keyword inside a listcomp.

Re: your other disagreements, they amount to style choices of their own. When a style guide picks between two ways of doing things, there will inevitably be detractors, and I am OK with that.
Nvidia CES 2016 livestream 1/4/2016 6PM PST
I don't know that it's meant to shill the product -- rather, that's the tool that he has handy. I work all the time with Python, and frequently open an IPython shell to do some quick math ("what's the average of 4d6 pick 3?" "what is X% of my paycheck?" "how much do I need to contribute to max out my $FOO?"), simply because it's easier than a calculator.

I mean, sure, it's advertising Mathmatica, but it doesn't seem to be unecessarily doing so. It's more that it's ${programing-language-of-choice} for the author.
And then your limiting the incentives for the potentially high paid employee to do even better!

Is inequality really that bad if the low paid employee still lives an excellent life, and is out poverty? What difference does this make?
I'm really glad to know that this release is coming out in the next few days. I'm going to start building a new multitenant application soon and I'd love to be able to try row-level security.

It seems that the sponsorship levels are determined by years of sponsorship [1]. Not really defending these specific companies as they have been profiting from PostgreSQL for a lot longer than one year. However, they could be on track to become Platinum sponsors and we wouldn't know.

[1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Sponsoring
Perhaps what we need are reliable tools that will robustly port commits forward from old VCSs to new ones. Does something like that exist? The most common defense of this code seems to stem from a vague sense that VCS history is more ephemeral than committed code. With proper tooling (or better awareness of the appropriate tools if they do in fact exist), this anxiety could potentially be allayed.
Took the extent that amazon sponsors open source, I suspect that'll change as AWS RDS grows in importance...
It sounds to me like what you're asking is actually "Do people and markets respond to incentives?".

Broadly, I think the answer is yes. Yes they do.
There is nothing wrong about noun identification in itself, you have to solve the problem in some way. The functional approach avoids the nouns, the solutions can be more elegant, but man, coming up with those solutions is much harder. Decomposing a problem without nouns is like doing...math: it is much more difficult than just talking about it! Once you have done the math, you really understand the problem, but that is a very steep mountain to climb.

I keep coming back to RPG's "worse is better" essay. The problem is that while the artifacts that we create might be horribly messy, they are better than the artifacts that are never created at all. Evaluating at a program purely by its end resulting state does not capture the entire, or even most, essence of what it means to write a program.
Facebook just gave us one more reason never to trust it
Why Is the Pollution So Bad in Beijing?
The /64 boundary is the standard boundary for each LAN. An "end site" (that is, a customer of an ISP) was originally intended to receive one /48 each, so enough space for 65536 /64 LANs.

You have to forget the idea that addresses are scarce. They were with IPv4, with IPv6, they are not. The whole point of the design is to make sure they are not scarce. Never, ever, anywhere. Conserving address space is not a virtue. Making sure that everyone has addresses available whenever they need some, with minimal delay and minimal administrative overhead, and with little fragmentation in routing tables, that is the goal of IPv6. And there is no real risk that this will lead to address exhaustion, there is enough space for about 40000 /48 per person currently alive.
Cancer is (currently) just a part of life. Do you dislike cancer?
In principle, though, can it be fixed?

Won't some people always have more advantages than others because they know more people who happen to be skilled at various things (e.g. technologies) than others? I mean, you have more chance to recruit skilled technologists simply by virtue of being in SV and that fact itself attracts more skilled people to the area.

So people outside the area either relocate or can't compete at quite the same level. Sure, there are other places that are more or less as good, but you're probably not going to have the same connections growing up in, say, Strawberry Point, Iowa.
Gotta vehemently disagree with one of the issues listed: If you used OSSv1 or v2, or v3, you would understand why OSSv4 failed: You had to _pay_ for sound card drivers in linux.

I had an Opti OPL3-SA sound card. The card cost $19 new. In order to use it in linux, I had to pay 4Front $25 to use the damn thing in linux. if I didn't pay the ransom for hardware I already owned, I was limited to 30 minutes of sound output. then I had to not just modprobe, but wipe cruft from my filesystem and reinstall. It cost $5 more to buy a Yamaha sound card than I would've paid 4front, but they didn't deserve a dime of my money, and Yamaha's drivers were free.

Alsa may suck, but it's free and good enough. and 4Front doesn't deserve to have its code in the linux kernel.
How is it anything new?

There were always contexts where people could think, "Here's what people think is proper, but what can we actually do?" However, virtual spaces of the early 21st century are particular in the degree to which social/nonverbal cues are almost nonexistent or completely gone, and where consequences are so very skewed towards an amoral stance of, "What can we get away with?"

New VR technologies may well be a reversal of these conditions.

So, it's nothing completely new at the most simplistic level. But if you look more closely, it's the unintended consequences arising out of the details that are the most interesting and significant.

Are you referring to copyright? I believe these changes happened earlier, when printed scores started to sell big numbers.

Printed scores are manufactured objects. If you go back even farther, to when you had to have your own instrument and enough talent to learn music quickly by ear, you'll find a set of moral standards around the "ownership" of music similar to the one developing from today's environment of easy digital copying.
And by the time you uncomment it, the rest of the organism/code has mutated so much that the legacy snippet does something totally surprising or even destructive.
When the code was commented out, it would be several decades before Emacs would be switched in to a DVCS, then another 7 years from when the "please don't delete this" comment was added. Even if it was in the DVCS history, and there was a comment pointing to a commit ID, that would have been rendered nonsensical by the conversion from bzr to git.
Just because something motivates someone to do great things doesn't mean it is good to offer that reward. If someone was motivated by the desire to own slaves, etc.

In light of the fact that increasing wealth has diminishing returns in terms of utility, what if the desire for extreme wealth is simply the desire for power? How much power inequality is acceptable in a democratic society? Couldn't you motivate people with fame instead?
It's the circle of life.

I've been programming since I was a kid in the 80's, after a while you learn to stand back sometimes and let the bandwagon roll on past or as I've joked in the past "these days I simply get on every third bandwagon".
I have no more interest in a successful programmer's economic philosophy than a successful baseball player's. That is to say, not much. As a libertarian I'm a fan of economic inequality, I see it as the inevitable byproduct of liberty, but who cares? I'm not an esteemed economic philosopher and neither is Paul Graham.

I see in American society, and maybe the trend extends beyond that, that we idolize people who have a lot of money or notoriety and consequently invest a lot in their opinions on any topic, especially politics, regardless of their qualifications. It's inappropriate.
I love how he ignores the top response to his question: "If knowledge of a candidate's previous salary doesn't influence your offer, why do you ask for it and what do you do with it?"
I don't know in general -- I haven't read most of pg's writing -- but his original economic inequality essay was indistinguishable from fox news uncle. It's a level of understanding of economic history and a well argued theory (see eg Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Brad DeLong, Bernie Sanders, Paul Wellstone, others) you would expect from Glenn Beck. Mixed in with some first principles derivation that lead pg to claim

So let's be clear about that. Ending economic inequality would mean ending
startups.

with a straight face. Ignoring the fact that ending economic inequality in a sort of perfect equality is a goal of essentially (yes, I'm sure you can find one dude on a blog somewhere) nobody. And that startups somehow occurred in periods with much less economic inequality.
A. I recommend people never have -one- thing they do. Having -one- thing makes you dependent on the outcomes of that one thing, which will ebb and flow. Start putting energy in something else as well (I especially recommend strong relationships, or a physical activity pursued at the hobby level), and when your original project hits a low point, use your other activity to recharge.

B. Are they really newbie? Did they do 5 years of work in obscurity, and you just saw the point where they broke through?

C. Community glory tends to be a 'winner-takes-all-affair'. 8 people get 10% each, 2 people get %40 each. Try to live your life such that such long-shots are capable of enhancing it, rather than depending on it for your happiness.

D. You're not your status in the community. You're a worthwhile person for existing.

All of that is what you should focus on to not be so outcome dependent, and thats what I would suggest focusing on right now. There's also the legitamte question of how to have more of an impact on your chosen field, but I think that would require more ifnromation.
I've been using Emacs for 1.5 years or so, then switched to VIM for a brief time period and I fell in love with the way it uses keybindings in a grammatical manner, using verbs, prepositions, subjects and objects. For example, the key sequence di" means "delete in parentheses", and similarly diw means "delete current word". It's also very intuitive to switch back and forth between a 'text insertion' (INSERT) and a 'command' (NORMAL) mode, because quite often you do multiple commands at once (e.g. cutting things here, pasting them there). It seems very natural to have completely changed keyboard bindings for a command mode (instead of relying on finger stretches for each command). I also very much prefer line-wise editing (e.g. in visual line mode) now, even though I thought I would never like it. Then I heard about Spacemacs, that it gives you some peer-reviewed configurations and VIM keybindings and I was immediately sold.
I have this argument with people about comments in configuration files on production systems.

Their argument is "it explains the configuration". My argument is that it's more important to be able to quickly see what configuration is actually applied (which usually fits in a terminal window without scrolling) then it is to redundantly store help-text on the server (which also makes it hard to read what is enabled).
We had to write a scheme like language interpreter in scheme in grad school. I found it very meta, but interesting.

Northeastern Prof Wand taught the class, a quick google reveals it was 3 book versions ago. Still teaching in Scheme though the book is 2009 (Racket).

http://www.eopl3.com

And the git source from the book (more useful with the book though...):
https://github.com/mwand/eopl3
> now you need savings and a lot of hard work only to convince an incubator or an investor and most people don't even have that chance.

Or you could bootstrap it.
> the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability

that's not how copyright law works. you may argue that it should work that way, but it does not work that way unless you petition Congress to modify it
Great article, thanks for sharing it.
What is so wrong about that? You have to understand the problem in some way. Perhaps we could spend a lot of time at the whiteboard understanding the problem waterfall style before we design the actual program? Realistically, this isn't very effective either.
This is golden: I am just over 40 and I now know that I knew nothing at 29!
What exactly is/did Bebop make/do?
> The reason it wouldn't have helped, is that the Glass screen had to be on during photo capture/recording, and it's quite noticeable when it is to the observer. It's "a light".

A clear, recognizable red recording light is MUCH more recognizable and reassuring than the screen light and the, "I am totally not recording right now."

Also google's decision to market an experimental device in the most pretentious way possible still is a pretty amusing and cringeworthy. We got one and went through the sales "gallery" thing. We were struggling not to laugh the entire time.

Hopefully they'll be smart and hand out devices to people like photojournalists, doctors and other professionals who will help make the idea more... adult.
Not to my knowledge. It's very easy to fall into twisted Escher boxes and ego traps when talking about these things so I try to only entertain them lightly (says my ego), and I don't know if this kind of thing is discussed in "official" psychology/sociology.

At its core it is about raw physical "existential modes" and not the more superficial label of "personalities", and it's very hard to appreciate what that means even in the case where you think you know what it means. Like if you're a trained psychologist. Certain drugs might be windows into our fellow humans' worlds. Other than that, strokes and other forms of brain damage are the only cases I know of people that have experienced multiple "existential modes". For example[1].

I think in terms of hiring, the broad strokes are useful but I wouldn't dilly dally with the specifics too much since they can be misused easily, nevermind all of the other variables in play. And as far as I know there isn't really a central place on the internet that describes the scheme as a whole. Dilly dallying through MBTI forums was one of my pastimes in ages long past and that might be the way to make sense of it today, keeping in mind how slippery things get when everyone's self is involved.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...
It looks like PostgREST has already started updating its documentation for RLS: https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest
All the links in the docs TOC are broken: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/master/doc/DOCUME...
New York Wants Fantasy Sports Customers Repaid
When people talk about income inequality and lowering it in the USA, (in my experience) they tend to mean these things:

- Increase the capital gains and inheritance tax so the wealthy pay a comparable tax percentage

- Increase government funding for public education and trade schools

- Increase spending on infrastructure projects (broadband, public transportation)

- Increase the minimum wage

- Lower the influence of the wealthy in politics

Never heard of anyone asking to kill incentives for the ambitious or to stop people from becoming wealthy.
Same here. Had a plan I liked cancelled out from under me. Result is higher premiums, higher deductibles and much higher max out of pocket fees. Lots of little things not covered that were before.

And I wasn't able to keep my doctor either.
There appears to be an either-or fallacy here, that somehow addressing economic inequality means people are trying to eliminate it and will only accept perfection.

Like most things in politics, action happens in the grey area,and I don't think trying to argue against extremes poses much benefit.

Technology is increasing returns to capital vs labor. One day, robots, 3d printing, and AI services (e.g. self driving everything), may put the majority of human beings out of a job. How can entrepreneurs or capitalists even get rich if the majority of people's work has no surplus value?

In such an end state, the concept of regular folks working is practically extinct and there should be a basic income, so that the massive returns to automation continue to benefit everyone and provide income for people to spend. Think of it as an extreme version of social security: Instead of 1 worker supporting 10 retirees, you have 1 robot, or 1 AI supporting hundreds of "retirees" (from birth) using "wages" that are no longer paid to the robot (labor), but to the capitalist.

Hans Moravec in _Mind Children_ outlined a version of this 20 years in how increasing productivity from automation will gradually produce a society that looks more like a hunter gather society and less than an industrial one, in that the basic needs of the population will literally "grow" on trees (robotic manufacturing bush robots)

My point is, if you want to look at extremes, then extreme unchecked technology and inequality will produce a degenerate broken economy in the long run, so quite clearly, there must be mitigating factors to keep the capitalist system going.

I like PG's framing of the issues, but dislike his conclusions, which are unsubstantiated and basically fall to a kind of nativist/natural fallacy, that because something is a natural driving force, it should not be opposed, or else bad things will happen.

History is replete with humans changing their natural physical or economic environment, and we will continue to do so.

I think one can address economic inequality and it would not prevent startups or "big winners". Moreover, I'd argue that living in a society where failure doesn't mean abject poverty, possibly a life long impact, encourages people to take more risks, and that overall, if we have in place a safety net, and fix issues with racial inequality especially, it'll be a boon for the startup economy, not a negative one. That's an unsubstantiated claim as well, but if you comparatively look at other countries, you can't really find a tight correspondence between the level of social welfare and failure of startup culture. But you can see improved social mobility, and having superior mobility and racial/cultural diversity I'd argue helps in building companies which scale globally.