skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you need to step back even farther: what is the point of money? If you don't have a good answer to that question, how can you reason about the benefits and drawbacks of different ways to distribute that money?

I'm going to out on a limb and suggest that the point of money is economic growth. This may seem like a circular argument, so let me expand on that a little. Imagine you have a farmer. This farmer wants to grow food and he has plenty of land. However, he does not have enough seed to plant all of his land. He has nothing to barter with until after his food is grown, so he ends up "wasting" part of his land (letting it go unplanted) because he could not get enough seed.

In this scenario, everybody is a loser. The farmer grows less plants and will not be able to barter for things he needs in the future. Society also gets less plants. So it makes sense to give the farmer more seeds so that he can plant his whole field. In fact, because he can do that, he can repay the favour in the future by giving up some of his fully grown plants.

Money is a kind of token that can be used to trade for things. It is very useful for society to give people money if they will use it to trade for things that they need, which will in turn produce things that will improve the quality of living for everyone.

Money that is piled up and not spent is not helpful to the economy or society. If there were a limited amount of money (and in some ways there is), then we could say that people who hoard money are a burden on society because they stop people from making use of that money to improve society. Ideally we would split up all the money in the world and give whatever amount is needed to the people who would be able to use it. In a really ideal world, each person would be motivated and able enough to spend the money in a way that would produce benefit for society.

Of course this is not the case. There are many people who hoard money (bad). We can also see that there are people who would spend money improving the beer brewing industry (maybe not so bad) at the expense of investing in life saving medical research (arguably seems better than beer in some ways). In fact, quite a lot of people simply want to consume goods and distribute money around, as opposed to trying to improve things. Those people are at best neutral to the system, though better than the hoarders.

From a societal point of view, it is best to distribute money in a way that maximises people's ability to use it beneficially, while minimizing people's ability to hoard it or distribute it arbitrarily (buying shiny useless toys or food/shelter that they don't need). So already we can see that depending on what people want to do with money, it is beneficial for society that there is an inequality.

Having said all that, I think that the inequality that we have reached at the moment is far from ideal. Now the really interesting bit is that what I wrote so far seems to favour a fascist economic system. I suspect we can do better, though ;-)
Conflicts of interest like the one that Michal Greger has himself, as an employee of the Humane Society? He literally gets paid to put an MD stamp of approval on anything vegan and attempting to discredit anything that is not vegan.

Have you actually critically read anything from this bullshit factory?

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-il...
I had a much less sophisticated go with the Punch Card chart, a few years back.

Example Chart: https://github.com/jammaloo/PunchCardChart/graphs/punch-card

Repo: https://github.com/jammaloo/PunchCardChart
It's always possible to "teach the standardized test". The only way to avoid it is to make the test subjective and non-standard. But then students who failed will complain that they were treated unfairly.

The key point is that unfair treatment of some students should be considered an unavoidable risk, because the alternative is unfair treatment of all students.
Paypal closed my account a few years ago - my friend panicked when her own account was closed, and ended up taking me with her. Looks like I'll get $3 as a result of this class action lawsuit.
This style of response is ideal and we should all emulate it.
What country are you thinking of? Backing up CDs is legal in the US.
>Whatever we do, we have to ask our clinicians and teachers whether measurement is working, and truly listen when they tell us that it isn’t. Today, that is precisely what they’re saying.>

The simplest solution, which very often turns out to be the most effective and least expensive solution, is to ask those personally involved in a system to improve it, themselves...if they have trouble getting started offer incentives for them to do so...

That (first) step is all too often skipped in our "age of impatience"...
If you think there are things people should not be able to buy (political sway) then would it not make sense to focus on those who are both selling this service they shouldn't be and also the ones that are actually buying it? There are plenty of things the average person could afford if we let them, the answer to that wasn't "no one gets any money".
The phenomenal binding problem.
1. He says I say economic inequality is "a good thing." I didn't say that. What I said is that it has multiple causes, some bad (lack of social mobility) and some good (Larry and Sergey starting Google).

It's interesting and probably important that he doesn't actually come out and say whether or not he believes economic inequality to be a bad thing, either.

There is significant evidence that a high level or economic inequality has bad consequences for people - it can literally be bad for your health, via psychological mechanisms. This is important since if inequality is bad in itself, then you might want to eliminate some of the ostensibly good reasons as well, after having eliminated the bad reasons.

So instead of taking a stance on the badness of economic inequality (yay or nay), he bangs on the drum that one should first go after the bad causes of economic inequality. I doubt anybody else in the discussion would disagree with that, which makes the whole first point rather pointless.

On point 2, "So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality."

Does pg realize that perhaps somebody might not agree with that? This seeming lack of understanding makes the second point rather pointless as well.

On point 3, "I called out lack of social mobility as one of the worst problems contributing to economic inequality"

Is he aware of the argument that economic inequality can reduce social mobility?

Since I doubt that pg is wilfully ignorant of the potential subtext that goes on in the heads of the people he responds to, I can't help but have the impression that people are talking past each other. I guess part of the problem is that the people he responds to aren't making their arguments very well (at least from the perspective of a highly technical mind), and another part of the problem is that pg seems to be insufficiently aware of the large body of work on the topic in disciplines outside his "home turf".
Ask HN: What Podcasts are best for keeping up to date on software engineering?
Wait, did you read the essay? He talks about closing tax loopholes and even calls that 'stealing' (search for it in the essay). He also argues:

> For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.

I believe, though I may well be wrong, that PG isn't against taxing the rich in order to provide social services and increased education, healthcare, what-have-you.
> In fact I suspect much if not most of the angry reaction to it was a result of people not understanding what the term "economic inequality" means.

Like "global warming", the term "economic inequality" has become something people use to refer to all of the related issues. PG's essay was controversial because he used a narrow definition. He says other people are confused, but in this case, I think he is. The fact that his essay necessarily strayed outside of his own definition proves the point.

> ... and talked about how I had personally seen the effects of it in the relative scarcity of successful startup founders who grew up poor.

And yet PG has never made any effort to help founders from poor backgrounds. In fact, YC has chosen to provide the majority of their help to people from the same elite backgrounds as themselves. Literally turning away thousands of people from poor backgrounds. It truly is "the Harvard of startup accelerators".

It sure would be amazing if the most powerful person in Silicon Valley decided to help more poor people do startups. Nothing has the same potential to increase social mobility in the U.S. like thousands of new startups run by poor people solving problems they care about, like maybe helping more poor people do startups.
Amazing project, really! But please, for the sake of users (like me) who live in countries where ISPs set a "quota" on DSL connections: ask the users whether they want to start downloading Sintel before doing so :) Now I'm afraid of opening the website again.
It's not about recovering a large amount of data; its about recovering a large % of your own stored data.

Amazon starts to charge you extra anytime you exceed restoring 5% of the data.

If for example you save all your tax-related documents in Glacier, then you are audited then the accounts department or the government will want all the information. Not 5% of it. Not 10% of it. Everything. At that point Amazon will have you over a barrel, because getting the data out at a reasonable time frame will cost exponentially more than dripping out the data over the course of 20 months.
I strongly DO NOT recommend using devicemapper as storage in Docker. Every time we have tried, and every customer who has tried, has failed medium to long term, in bad ways. It became so painful that we literally blacklist devicemapper as a supported filesystem in the Discourse installer.

We waited a year for this to "stabilize" but it never did.
The article presents a lot of correlations, but it'd be good to see a little more investigation into which are actually explanatory.

Fitness is associated both with income per capita and the share of adults holding a college degree, but income is strongly related to education already. If you control for education, does increased wealth still correlate with fitness? From reading TFA, it doesn't look like the study author tried to figure that out.
AI bound to a bounded volume are not immortal.

By the Bekenstein bound; they would eventually run out of states to be in, so the total length of their experiences (if they have any) would be finite.

Humanity cannot conquer death.

Of course, the number of possible states is very very large, so, extremely long lived, sure.

But not immortal, unless expanding without end.
Motorola EXORciser simulator now emulates EXORterm
I really have respect for the work of Weston A. Price. Although his work seems to be discounted and too fringe for a lot of people, I have learned a lot through his Foundation about nutrition as well as practices like culturing foods, soaking grains, making broth.

He was a dentist who started looking into the relationship between diet and teeth in the early 1900s. He decided to do a series of ethnographic nutrition studies in villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos and Indians of North America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori and the Indians of South America during the 1930s and find out what common denominators they had in their diets that contributed to their great teeth and good health. He published these in his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

I'm not exactly sure why his studies are neglected, but I agree that it's possible to learn about nutrition using other methods.
Are you saying that people who nearly died from OD have a good change of becoming productive members of society?
> 10 pounds of celery
> an abundance of fiber

You seem to be misinformed. 10 pounds of celery is most probably a very bad idea. There is no such thing as "good food" if you push it to the limits and eat too much of it. Celery has a lot of active component, just smell this taste and you will know. It is mainly good but as an addition to a normal meal's main component, which is traditionally white rice or noodles in the East, bread or potato in the West.

Among these I would guess the best is rice. But even rice you cannot eat 50 pounds of eat without harm.

I think the main issue here is that food is not science, and should not be the subject of science. Some chemical reactions are, but not nutrition. Nutrition is a cultural thing, much more connected to health, well-being and social living than to chemical reactions, milligrams of whatever and parameters of our bodies.
Well the encryption is just standard luks. You can do it 2 ways (or 3 if you want to be fancy).

The simplest way is just to do a long static password and combine it with your normal password. So you type '1234' and then hit the yubikey button. The problem with this is that temporary access to your yubikey allows somebody to steal your static password.

The better way is to use the Challange-Response mode that send your password, the Yubikey sends back a hash (HMAC-SHA1).

Their is very new way that you can use that uses time based authenication, but this was just presented at 32C3, see: Beyond Anti Evil Maid [32c3]
Headphone and Amp Impedance (2011)
Falcon lands on droneship, tips over post landing.
This entire debate over the quality of school lunch is myopic. School lunch food isn't the problem, American food culture is the Problem. I'd bet, (I have no data for this - I'm just a windbag of opinions) that in most communities (countries --> neighborhoods, whatever scope you want), school lunches will generally reflect the status quo of food quality in the community. Because if they didn't, parents would flip out.

Status quo meals in Norway and France are pretty decent, I suspect. I've spent some time living in France and that certainly seemed to be the case. Status quo meals in the US? Terrible. The average American eats poorly - incredibly poorly - and it shows; in our health, waistlines, and, of course, in our school lunches.

So the real challenge is to move the needle on American food culture. School lunches can and should be one vector for effecting that change, but we need to recognize and tackle the bigger picture. As others have mentioned, proper regulations on marketing to children is a must.
Study that said Diet Coke can help you lose weight was funded by Coca-Cola
Disruptive trends that will transform the auto industry
I'm glad he's brought this up and in a way sort of made it a challenge. I find PG's essays to be very precise in scope and to then try to back that point up with arguments. It's good writing. Seeing people "reply" to him and effectively just make a grand standing post against poverty with the occasional "and this rich guy thinks..." thrown in is imo disgusting.

There's no way people have missed that he doesn't think economic inequality and poverty are synonymous (I kind of feel sorry for him because he sort of has to give them the benefit of the doubt and keep going as if they're just mistaken), it's a core point in his original argument, which means they're apparently fine taking him and effectively throwing him under the bus by making it sound like he's pro poverty.

I'd love to see a reply to him that's intellectually honest and stays on point. Rebuts his arguments, doesn't put words in to his mouth, and acknowledges those that have already come out of it. Sadly amongst the pile I've read, none seem to have tried to do that and instead seem to just be aiming for audience approval with emotional statements.
Interestingly, what I see is a divide between North and South, more than East and West. The exceptions being Detroit and Columbus in the North and Atlanta and San Diego in the South.

Perhaps this has more to do with urban planning? I just got back from Dallas (Plano, actually) and I've never experienced such relatively dense development be so actively hostile to pedestrians ... sidewalks would just stop for a quarter mile and then start again for no apparent reason.
are emoji (or real Chinese characters) examples of "sparklines"

in math LaTex has an extension called Tikz where can easily place graphics within text if you size them appropriately
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/216245/tikz-node-as-c... and http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/65932/aligning-a-tikz...
Years ago, I used to work as a labourer on building sites, before getting a 'proper' job as a programmer.

When I physically worked hard all day, I ate a ton of crap. Burger King for lunch, a loaf of bread a day, hardly any veggies but massive amounts of cheap carbs and meat. I was technically overweight, because I put on so much muscle and I'm not a tall guy. Obviously I did no gym-type exercise. No-one, looking at my diet, body-mass, or lifestyle data would think I was fit, but I was all muscle and in the best shape I've ever been.

The older guys I worked with could lift more than me, for longer, with less visible effort. You'd never look at them and think they were fit, and they ate like pigs too. Again, if you looked at their data they'd be a huge diabetes risk. But they were fitter in their 40's than I was in my 20's, and I was pretty fit back then.

Now, 20 years later, after spending most of those 20 years sitting on my arse pushing little buttons, I'm going to the gym and eating well (diabetes is an effective motivator!). Look at my data now and I'm a bit overweight, but with a good diet and exercise regime.

But compare me with my good diet and exercise regime to those older guys who spent their working lives doing physical labour and eating like crap, and I'm a weak, blubbery mess.

Either the "fitness" they're measuring isn't what we understand to mean by the word "fitness", or they're not measuring actual fitness.
This.

The data I care about is already backed up on two different multi-TB drives at home, and another one at work.

Glacier is the contingency for "something took out the original data and all three backups in two different locations 7 or 8km apart - if I'm still alive after whatever just happened, I'll consider whether or not to pay Amazon a grand or so to retrieve it quickly from Glacier, or wait ~20 months to get it all for single-digit-dollars".
Doesn't mean it's not true.

> “This research was published in the International Journal of Obesity, a peer-reviewed journal, which means the data and conclusions have been scrutinised by other scientists. We therefore stand by the findings. It was funded by a range of bodies including the NHS and European Union, as well as ILSI Europe.”
Yes, exactly. The article seems to want you to believe that fitness is caused by high education levels and high income, but all they've done is point out a correlation. In fact I suspect that all three share some of the same underlying causes.
I did. You didn't mention a fuel source. There is no fuel source on Earth that can be converted to hydrogen other than natural gas (unless you're speaking of water, which is terribly less efficient than using a battery directly).

What fuel source are you suggesting for fuel cells?
Source for that? The top result for me was the following review.

> Published data suggest that all fatty acids with a double bond in the trans configuration [produced either by industrial hydrogenation or by biohydrogenation in the rumens of cows and sheep] raise the ratio of plasma LDL to HDL cholesterol.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20209147
One of the tricks to Ikea furniture is to use wood glue in all the dowel pins. With this trick it survives multiple moves for me.

Other people have the same stuff and after 1 move it's loose/wobbly without glue.
To be blunt, if people are misunderstanding pg's essay, what it means is that his writing skills were not good enough to tackle a topic as complex as economic inequality.
I read his essay and came across with a bad taste in my mouth as well. I think he has surrounded himself with too many yes-people that told him this was a great article to post, without being honest to him about the repercussions.

It's fine because everyone makes mistakes. This is a life lesson that he needs to internalize.
I'm not sure I've understood your point, but that has some problems.
My parents are high school teachers in Italy. Right now the government is requiring a basic evaluation system for teachers. Tests here are hardly ever standardized and can vary a lot; tests for things like Latin that is still taught like 100 years ago would be impossible to standardize anyway, so assessing student performance is impossible.
They could not come up with some metrics for whatever reason, and now teachers have to decide these criteria by themselves. Of course nobody agrees on what such criteria should be, and those I've heard from my parents are hardly useful to improve teaching quality.
Brin has arguably created significantly more value than the 40-year-old Doctor. A doctor who likely uses Google to research medical information on a daily basis (as well as uses it for looking up personal information), possibly using a Google device, who gets from place to place using Google Maps, and searches for information for his next published paper on Google Scholar. (and so on, even putting aside the recent expansion of Google into Medical technology).
“The Beauty of Falling Petals” and the Man of 50,000 Deaths
"Where? Much of this stuff you describe was true in the mid-60s where I lived (suburban MN), but not in 75."

Aus. In a lot of ways the US was far more advanced than the rest of the world in '75. You can see that in the every day technology. There's another cause, I lived right on the outer fringes of Melbourne [0] and to give you an idea how small, most of the kids I went to school were delivered by one of two local doctors. [1] The thing that strikes me re-reading my post, then yours is how shockingly fast the Australian caught up and passed the US in a lot of ways.

As a kid the US sounded like a large and interesting place. Somewhere you might be aspire to move too. Now? not a chance. Aus has mostly free medical care and education, little gun violence, less advertising, advanced technology [2] and I'm asking myself, "what the hell happened in the US from '75 to now to make it as it is now?"

Btw, this isn't a criticism of the people of the US. What caused the structural tangle of politics, violence and religion that makes the country a place to avoid?

"And a famous '69 music festival."

Duh, where do you think Shultz got the name? The point I'm making is the concert here was better known by a weekly comic strip than the music on the radio. Certainly available on LP though.

[0] Remember "Melbourne is the artichoke end of the world" ~ http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/

[1] http://seldomlogical.com/profile/

[2] Unaffordable housing, world #2 obesity rate, higher working hours, some political instability.
Astronauts grow their first flower in space
>Glacier, as the article points out, is difficult to grok because there are provisioned bandwidth costs.

It does go against their slogan "only pay for what you use", though. You're not using that 15GB/hour for 744 hours, and haven't explicitly selected provisioned IOPs.
Indeed. Despite my snobbery, I appreciate that it's not a purely moral issue. And I suspect that an effect of mental energy is being able to withstand marketing and cultural forces, peer pressure, etc.
WebRTC will anyway become obsolete with IPv6, right?
Very interesting how the jet engine is a complex mechanical device. Sure there might be some software controlling it from the cockpit but the bulk of the work is mechanical.
well, except that openvz is an example of linux containers for which Google can't take credit.
No it doesn't. They've had an open-source CLI tool since at least 2013.

https://github.com/sreitshamer/arq_restore