skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unpacking the whole context and philosophical debate (e.g. between libertarians and Marxists) requires a book-length argument. (But to briefly answer your question, no. “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle.) So folks responding to Graham are mostly not going to do the topic justice.

(Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph Stiglitz’s several books about inequality [to wit: “The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.”] was such a ridiculous oversimplification that I suspect either (a) Graham didn’t actually read any of Stiglitz’s books, or (b) he has extremely poor reading comprehension, or (c) his argument is not only self-serving but also entirely disingenuous.)

But anyway, you can’t just strip out all the context and pretend Paul Graham is having a purely abstract argument in a vacuum. The context today is that the level of inequality and centralization of political influence in America is at a level unseen since the 1920s, or perhaps since the gilded age. There’s a political discussion going on in the society at large about whether this development is healthy, and if not, what to do about it. Many people are angry, to the point that Paul Graham’s essay itself is full of paranoid fantasies about being “hunted”.

Anyone making an argument in modern America is implicitly talking about what direction we should be going from where we are currently, and what social/political changes we can make to get there. Most readers are going to understand such arguments with that context in mind, and only bad/lazy writers will ignore it.

* * *

Graham grew up in a well off family, went to Ivy League college and grad school, worked for a few years as a programmer for his own well-timed web startup then cashed out for tens of millions while he was a relatively young man and transitioned into venture capital, where he has been very successful. As far as I can tell he has basically never worked in any jobs other than being a student, running his own startup, or venture capital. He apparently surrounds himself with other rich techies and has no regular exposure to people outside a tiny cultural bubble. From what I can remember, his only essays which talk at all about folks less fortunate than himself are about his school experience, in particular what I can remember is whining about how English teachers are idiots and how the jocks mistreated him.

From such a position of privilege and ignorance, Graham hand-waves away all the concerns of the vast majority of people in America (not to mention the world), and spends his time justifying his own wealth and prestige and insisting that he shouldn’t have to contribute any of it back to society, with the bulk of the argument being “startups are good”, without further elaboration or analysis.

As you might imagine, this seems awfully cheesy to folks reading along who don’t happen to be multimillionaires themselves.
(author here)

So in terms of compensation I would argue that your example is just direct payment. Instead of attention-via-ads proxy, you're paying the publisher directly but in this case it's state owned. Even if it wasn't and was just funded by donations or taxes or whatever, it's still a direct transfer of currency from you as an end user to the content owner/producer.

The internet is a perfect demonstration of how advertising is a great model. It funds a lot of content and services (of tremendous value like Google, Facebook, etc) without costing the end user anything. Many people can only build the companies they do because advertising is viable, whether they're a media company or some other business.

It's also fast, anonymous, and egalitarian. Your wealth doesn't determine your access and there's no loss/refund issue if you consume content that you feel isn't valuable. I can't think of any other that model that comes close to that much freedom and flexibility.
I might have agreed with you but the way you're presenting your argument makes me want to dismiss you outright. There's a lot of ad hominen and strawman in your post, maybe you want to rethink how you're making your point?
I've looked at the video and I honestly do not see anything that would support the events that this person is claiming to have happened.

I'm just curious, but does anyone else here have the same opinion?

I mean ... only 8 or 9 out of the last 10 of these types of stories turned out to be everything but what the perpetrator + media claimed them to be initially.
If you pay any attention to current political discussion, e.g. the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality. They describe it as a problem just as the Democrats do.

And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?
They're somewhere in the vicinity of 100% efficient as heat producers. Even the energy that goes into producing light just decays into heat after bouncing off a couple of walls.

Less "efficient" than using a "heat pump," and possibly more expensive than using gas (I don't know anything about energy in Minnesota). If you're using electricity to heat your home, though, you might as well use something like SETI@home and put it to use :-)
>Biology has always been largely hypothesis-free.

I think Dr.Lander is talking about having open infrastructures and databases cataloging human genome variations; that allow everyone explore the datasets to find new patterns.

You are right searching through BLAST is easy. However, maintaining and updating entries into the NCBI BLAST databases is not. Genomes are sequenced, assembled and submitted to NCBI every day. Cataloguing the variations in different strains of the different species, and identifying real novel evolutionary variations compared to just noises to existing reference genomes is not an easy task (1000 Genomes, dbSNP, malaria genome network, etc.)

It is analogous to saying, Googling is easy but building and maintaining a search engine is not. I get what you are saying that some important discoveries are made by accidents, but the open data and intuitive platforms need to be there for the inspirational late night "Showerthought" googling-that-leads to-insight to happen in the first place.
It's fine.

pg is wealthy. One of the benefits of wealth is that you a choice about what you want to see and hear, especially about yourself. And that by default, you will only hear good things.

pg has made a conscious decision that not only does he only want to hear those good things; but that he will never respond to critical voices.

So the arguments about style and tone are moot, because a man like pg will dismiss my argument either way. He's not going to wake up tomorrow, admit that nobody is asking for 100% income equality and that he was a dishonest sack of shit for pretending otherwise. He just won't do that. It would involve admitting so many flaws and wrongs... It would involve admitting that all of the people who reviewed his essay were also kissing his ass. It would involve admitting that he lives in a bubble.. It would involve admitting that he's lost touch with reality.

So it really doesn't matter how I say any of it. I can be polite or rude; I can be academic or casual; I can be concise or long-winded. pg isn't capable of hearing my message, because to hear my message would be to recognize how he lives; and to do so would shatter his beliefs about why he has so many relationships with interesting and successful people. To do so would shatter the myth that it's about his genius and amazing intelligence. To do so would be to admit that he's just a rich guy who started doing early-stage VC at a point in time where even a barely skilled individual money could do very, very well; and if they applied even a modicum of skill, they could experience a massive virtuous cycle.

So I don't really care about these complaints about tone... because pg can't hear me anyway. He's made sure of that. He's too busy writing fiction about what it means to oppose massive income inequality; he's too busy willfully misunderstanding the situation; he's too busy pretending that he's far far far more special than he is.
Not really, it's a contributed guest post that I've made as objective and informative as I could.

I see now that perhaps those 2 sentences out of the entire article might be out of place but I couldn't resist. I think the rest of the text stands on it's own and I hope it helps provide readers with more insight into the whole ad blocking situation.
Fuck working hard for people who don't care about you.

Fuck working hard for another dollar to spend impressing people who don't care about you.

But, when you find those things that are their own reward, then, work hard.
Can't you buy a PC or even better a workstation from Dell, HP, Lenovo etc?
Devil's advocate. Doesn't that mean that you would stop doing something that people value and start doing something people don't value as much? I'm for BI but this makes it sound like you would do something that people don't want and that you might be worse at doing than your current job.
Draw a 2x2 matrix of people who "got rich" (i.e. experienced significant rise in wealth) and are "fairly driven". This will give you four groups:

1) Got rich and weren't driven.

2) Got rich and were driven.

3) Stayed poor and weren't driven.

4) Stayed poor but were driven.

pg statement says he's been exposed with group 2, which he highlighted. You seem to accuse him of implicitly highlighting group 3, and would prefer he implicitly (explicitly?) highlights group 4.

Is that the gist of the argument?

The statements "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven." and "Most people who are fairly driven tend to get rich." are not logically equivalent.
The amount of data is so tiny and unreliable on top of that. We can't even be sure to be seeing a seashell. It's important not to ostracize who did this claim, but I too believe it will shortly turn into another example of jumping to conclusions violating Occam's Razor because the explanation excites us.
It just makes sense to me that you would want to do as much of the construction on-site as possible. It's probably easier to ship raw materials through the solar system than assembled solar panels or whatever, which are potentially fragile. However, I must admit that edeployment is an interesting possibility.
Don’t know about life, but my attention span is too short for long posts. Thanks Reddit.
David Bowie’s genre-hopping career
Not surprising. Last week HN celebrated the "death" of IE, but this week will bemoan the passing of their dear Windows 7. Windows XP was ended last year. Do you want to support two major versions of your software for years? No? Well neither does Microsoft. The "legacy systems" explanation of maintaining outdated software is vanishing with the rise of the modern web browser and the cloud. The local machine has less and less responsibility to run anything beyond a browser. And coders recognize they can no longer lock users onto Windows XP using IE 7, or the modern equivalent. Progress marches on, and at an ever quickening pace.
I think there is in one site a problem with the press business model. People do not pay most of the time for the information they read, so journals are not considered anymore exactly a public service but an investment for funds or controlled by debt and governments. In the other side there is the politics of gross investment in R&D for economic growth and a new diplomacy of rankings about everything education, transparency, business friendly policies to attract investors. The problem as I see it is not in the excesses of the system but in the system of knowledge economy, as we know it. As long as you convert intangible assets in into a patent of so you can speculate with it in the financial economy. Anyway, an interesting approach I've seen lately is sites like theconversation where real experts write about their field, besides every post includes a release statement about their personal involvement, and conflicting interests on the subject. Also this link about the technology of measurement is interesting https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-10-20/rank-has-...
You should go read the article rather than assuming it's restating your favorite straw man.

The specific claim of the article is that a) inequality isn't intrinsically bad, b) bad things can cause inequality (SF nimbys creating a housing shortage), c) good things can cause inequality (Uber), d) we should focus our efforts on (b) rather than inequality.
"After July 2017, the most critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for these [Skylake] configurations, and will be released if the update does not risk the reliability or compatibility of the Windows 7/8.1 platform on other devices."

I think this only refers to driver updates and the like, right?
> My money is geology over biology.

Says the biology.
Yep. Pg is a good enough writer that he knew what he was doing; and he would've explicitly stated if he wasn't making the social darwinism argument.

Social darwinism has always been popular with the top 0.01% (and those who strive to join thes. Whether they earned their money collecting taxes, collecting rents, as entrepreneurs, or as the product of crime, the wealthiest have always written in the manner pg did.

Part of me is outraged by this, because I used to respect pg.

Part of me is realizes that perhaps I'm the fool for thinking that pg was different in any meaningful way than any other plutocrat.
Commenters stating that the essay blames poverty on the poor really are reading something into the essay that wasn't there (at least for me). The topic of economic desparity has become such a hot and emotional one that it seems impossible to have an honest conversation about what it really looks like, what are the causes and effects, etc. It seems very important to me that we drop the tribalism and fighting so that we can have an honest /argument/ about this topic.

There really is severe suffering at the bottom of the economic scale here (SV/peninsula), and in my opinion it is the shared responsibility of those of us who have lots of options to figure out how we can help to relieve some of the suffering. However, I don't thing that needs to be the singular focus of every single discussion of economic inequlity, and I don't think it's productive to pan this essay for not really addressing that.
Black Desert Online System Requirements
I thought everyone knew that PNG and insisted alphas in general wasn't exactly "friendly" to GPU's.
Stop Working So Hard
Show HN: 3 Good Things – Track life's positive moments
Funny story: not being american, my red and blue are the other way around. I'd recommend not interpreting this in terms of US politics. I'd even more strongly recommend not making claims about the beliefs of the side which you don't support.

If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".

Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.
My LED bulbs work well (Philips), but have one flaw: they do not redden when you dim them. I would like the color temperature to be much lower than 2700K when they are dim- to more approximate an oil lamp.

Anyway, perhaps this work will lead to efficient incandescent bulbs that provide nicer light when dimmed.
There are many. I can list few:

http://www.greyorange.com/
limeroad.com
https://www.oyorooms.com/
paytm.com
flipkart.com
snapdeal.com
I have indeed worked at a very large (both capitalization and payroll wise) company. I've also worked at small and medium sized companies. But, as relates to my experience at the very large one, this guy would have been eaten alive for putting out that response. Perhaps your definition of large is different from mine. However, my point had nothing to do with the size of the company and everything to do with the role the company plays within the OSS movement.
Emma Watson 10 years ago and now
If a corporate app needs Windows 7, can it be run in a client Hyper-V VM on top of Windows 10?
Odd,

In Manhattan, the initiative requires buyers in sales of
more than $3 million to be reported; in Miami-Dade
County, it requires reporting on sales of more than $1
million. In Manhattan, 1,045 residential sales cost more
than $3 million in the second half of 2015, worth some
$6.5 billion in aggregate, according to PropertyShark, a
real estate data company.

So now illicit money laundering in will effectively shift from luxury real estate into the normal real estate markets..?

In its investigation, The Times found that nearly half of
homes nationwide worth at least $5 million are purchased
using shell companies. In Manhattan and Los Angeles, the
figure is higher.
If you truly don't think he is contributing to wealth creation, I can only surmise that you really don't understand the job he performs and the wealth created by people who are good at that particular job.

Angel investing and venture capital are jobs that are also prone to the Peter Principle. What makes them different than many other jobs, especially angel investing, is that the person has promoted themselves to their own level of incompetence. Just because some (maybe many) angel investors are incompetent and don't contribute to wealth creation does not mean that none do.

His essay focused on one particular lever, technology. His original lever was technology. Now he uses other levers, economic capital, social capital and experience to create wealth. Extracting value from economic capital alone is rent seeking. This is what banks do with loans. Providing economic capital with advise on how to most intelligently make the most of the capital goes beyond mere rent seeking and enters the realm of wealth creating activities.
3.3 megabyte image right at the top of the article (picture of woman sewing) Size is: 5,206px × 3,471px
Anyone know where to find the full report?
My point is that his justification of why his article is important - that it demonstrates how science is done these days, including the importance of bioinformatics - seems pretty phoney to me.
If I thought that pg was capable of hearing my argument, I'd make it far more carefully.

I think that it is 100% useless to attempt to persuade him away from his rediscovery of social darwinism.

The man thinks that those concerned with income inequality want communist style income equality. He's detached from reality. There aren't words that will fix that sort of broken. This has become a situation where you can't reason a man out of a situation that he arrived to unreasonably.

He has beliefs that... aren't reasonable, that aren't related to reality... he is surrounded by rich people who share those beliefs. I'm just some poor whose net worth is only in the single digit millions and who only makes a couple hundred K per year. I'm nobody to him.

so y'know... why try? Why not just make a throwaway account, and engage in angry honesty? Sure, it's not polite... but it's deeply honest.

---

edit: and to be clear, I don't think pg is like, some bad dude. I've met him, I think he really loves helping people, and I don't mind that he got rich. But that essay... that essay showed that he's become disconnected in a dangerous and fundamental way and it makes me sad and angry and disappointed.... it's horrible to see somebody who used to use their skills and knowledge to generate such good start using them to lobby for social darwinistic bullshit. it's awful, and painful, and sad... and I know that nothing I say will make him change. Nobody who goes down the road he's on comes back reformed a better man. He's just going to become a bigger piece of shit as he gets more powerful, more financial successful, as more people will line up to tell him how right he is. And that's incredibly sad.
I've been looking for something like this quote from the original World Bank report:

“The economics of the internet favor natural monopolies, the absence of a competitive business environment can result in more concentrated markets, benefiting incumbent firms. Not surprisingly, the better educated, well connected, and more capable have received most of the benefits – circumscribing the gains from the digital revolution.”

My assertion is that this is actually due to the nature of the TCP/IP protocol. IP addresses are assigned hierarchically and packets have a hop limit. Together, this makes a mesh network impossible. The TCP/IP Internet is an engine that centralizes power. I'm working on a side-project to create a (free and open) scalable (wired) mesh network protocol.

I'm really glad I saw this, it'll make a perfect citation for my requirements doc.
Anyone disagree with the above? I'm looking to try to strengthen my arguments.
If you mean lifecycle efficiency, then it depends on the fuel used to generate the electricity. If it's coal or natural gas then pretty inefficient to use electricity for resistive heating since the heat byproduct of combustion was lost at the generating power plant.

If the energy source is wind or solar, then it's very efficient as there is no heat loss in generation.

Both scenarios involve the inherent transmit losses of electricity distribution (15%?).

Natural gas has little transmission loss, and modern condensing furnaces reclaim much of the waste heat from the combustion exhaust. You can also zone a Nat gas heating system so it only heats the areas you want at any time.

Also heating with electrical resistance will be very expensive as the cost per unit of energy for electricity is much higher than natural gas.
The biggest problem with the U.S. economy is housing prices. Why not ban foreign investment in U.S. real estate?
Yes, this should be fully supported.
If windows 10 didn't have that metro ui and wasn't plagued with spying accusations most people wouldn't be bemoaning the death of windows 7. However because windows 10 comes with many different ways to track users, I see this not as an effort for "progress" but just another screw for microsoft to turn against their users.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2016
Technically, a scientific hypothesis requires it to be testable. Given this is at least partially scientific, the person saying it is a hypothesis should probably present a way to test if it is true or not. Given we don't know how to test for it yet, we may be left with continuing to explain what it is we're seeing without saying what it is. Which, I suppose, is a big challenge with space based discoveries.
Current OS X runs on Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros from 2007. For a five year old 2011 model, the only likely disadvantages are a lack of Retina display, and probably the lack of an SSD unless upgraded.

I'm pretty sure Apple hasn't make any computers obsolete since the release of 10.8 in 2013, when they stopped support for many earlier GPUs. If you were using Ubuntu or Mint on a Core 2 Duo you would have careful choice between Gnome, Cinnamon, MATE, too because of the graphics. I'm also pretty sure that 10.7 is still getting security updates, which would make it like 2012 LTS.
Neil deGrasse Tyson will not answer any questions about his race for this reason.
If only that new found prosperity wouldn't be used directly for terrorism I would agree with you.
Lack of prosperity and poor education, didn't contribute to the sanctions been put on Iran but of direct action by the government. Lifting them will not help Iran become western democracy or less fanatic it's left wing bullshit.