skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The entire argument (lackthereof) is summed up in this conclusion:

> Honestly, I wouldn’t be remotely tempted to quit the 2016 me so that I could be a one-billion-dollar-richer me in 1916. This fact means that, by 1916 standards, I am today more than a billionaire.

For reasons such as this one:

> Your telephone was attached to a wall. You could not use it to Skype.

In other words there is no argument, by 'most ordinary americans' the author means: 'I am an ordinary American' and 'I wouldn't exchange my current life with a 1916 billionaire' -- which has nothing at all to do with 'wealth' nor with 'most ordinary americans'.

edit: I don't see why this is down-voted, if you found some substance in this article that I didn't please feel free to make these points.
I wouldn't conclude much from that development which is largely a retail and restaurant development in a long rundown industrial area (former Ford plant). [1] It was basically cut off from most of Sommerville by highways. There was long a plan to put an Ikea there but there was a lot of pushback from various groups and Ikea eventually walked.

Much of Sommerville away from the highways is essentially a gentrifying, historically somewhat downmarket, version of Cambridge. Generally low-rise houses and some condo complexes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_Square
I'm incredibly surprised they didn't use stemming to combine singular/plurals consistently. It's totally standard in information retrieval.
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I dont share the other commenter's criticism of the structure of your comment, but I have to admit to being a little unimpressed with the twitter suggestion. The US/Pakistan relationship is something that I find very interesting and confusing. Maybe the most recent tweets are not indicative of the normal quality? You have to hope that the linked twitter account is not the best source out there. The books you mentioned are certainly part of the standard literature as far as Af-Pak politics goes, but they say little to nothing about the India/Pakistan relationship or the multitude of Pakistan's domestic conflicts.
What a JOKE! There's NO control on how and where the government chooses to store your data, even if the javascript is GPL-ed. So, what gives?

I had to double check if this was a buzzfeed clickbait or real FSF article. Travesty!
Because of this ambiguity, they could easily configure the stemmer to only de-pluralize instead.
Most ordinary Americans in 2016 don't have the same level of power and influence - which many people value in and of itself - as Rockefeller did in 1916.
What about by the quality of the discussion in the Apply HN submission? This was (as I understood the original experiment) to be the primary mechanism for selecting finalists.

Pinboard's application had the best discussion.
similar in the effort to make links easily pronounceable. Different in many other ways.

Say, since https://sayable.co/ uses three words to link to any web address, and http://what3words.com/ maps any geographic coordinate to a set of unique 3 words, do you suppose they could be tied together into a tool to convert any web page into a geographic coordinate? :-)
I want you to erase the notion of "missed opportunities".

Re wind the clock a scant 16 years. Linux was barely a thing, you were buying servers from sun, putting them in a cage to "start up". There wasn't really a way to be technical and be "ramen profitable".

Look at the environment now. You can start up a SaS business with the skills you have acquired, and probably what you spend a month on coffee from Starbucks, or a few lunches out.

Just build something, then go build something else, keep building things till one of them starts to get traction, and then iterate on that... wash rinse repeat. Will you get rich? who knows? But the more arrows you shoot, the more likely you are to hit a target.

It has never been easier to just do something than it is today.
For me, the plain box gives me cheap Chinese vibes. It brings to mind badly damaged cardboard boxes with dubious electronics inside.

The Japanese illustrated box is innocent and kind of cute (certainly not "rapey" as another commenter put it) and in a Western country, stands out from the things around it. Perhaps if you're in Japan, surrounded by Japanese media it might seem generic but I don't think that's a problem elsewhere.
I wonder if you could have gotten a similar result from the same models holding the old box?
You can get a PCIe bus parallel card on Amazon for about $10 or $15. I've got one I use for programming an older FPGA board.
Influence is relative though. It's the difference between, say, being a superdelegate and an ordinary voter. If everyone only has the equal share, nobody really has meaningful influence, but things are more fair.

So in some sense, the more fair the influence is, the less any particular person has of it.
I'm not sure I buy the argument but I do always appreciate being reminded about our modern day conveniences.

Sure life is incrementally better now, but isn't wealth truly about power and luxury as much as it is about convenience?

Rockefeller was extremely influential. I do like my iPhone and accurate quartz crystal clocks, but he was definitely "richer".
Exactly, every 2 weeks, sometimes less, we consistently release what has been accomplished in a sprint. This "blogger" is talking out of his ass. Like always, declarations like this stir the anti-agile rage pot. It's getting more and more laughable as the years go on.
An arduino is not interactive the way a personal computer is.
Wealth is not the number of pieces of green paper in your pocket. It's the things you have and what you can do with those things. I would much rather be a lower middle class person in America today than King Henry hundreds of years ago.
It depends on the audience.

Someone who admires Japanese culture will likely not have the same reaction as someone with little exposure to Japanese culture.

The picture is not even on the same planet as 'rapey' Whoever that was either said it to get a rise or they have some distinct issues.

One solution, perhaps, is avail both packaging options to buyers.

The typeface and font, I think, could be improved. It kind of looks like an afterthought. I don't see "branding". It's not Lobster or Comic Sans... but...
Why do think I kept leaving!?
The article is lacking in substance - but has an interesting core argument - "Americans in 2016, live much better than even the wealthiest people did in 1916" which is true - while we may have problems, and our economy might be broken in certain ways, we are light years ahead on a pure technological level than we were in 1916.

From the influence angle, even with the pervasive power of money, even the very very rich today are not as powerful and influential as they were a century ago.
That's really the sole counterargument. That, in spite of likely dying younger and being less comfortable, information starved, etc. etc. in many ways, being a powerful person would trump all that. And for some it probably would.
Um... perhaps by sexualising a young girl?
The customer doesn't need to know the number, that's the point. The only sensitive info is what is being sent, so there is absolutely nothing to gain by spoofing a number and sending junk to the user.

It's like me telling you I'm going to email you the passcode to a gate. If Bob overhears this and knows your email and my email, he still isn't in a position to do anything if he can spoof emails. Best case is he sends you the wrong code and you don't get access until you get the real code from me.
6:13 AM here, and worth it
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636167 and marked it off-topic.
Maintaining property values by eg keeping out poor people.
I grew up in a rural area with its fair share of dirt/gravel roads.

Vehicles definitely see a lot more wear from driving on dirt roads (beyond the superficial constant dust covering). I expect that the cost of pavement is less than the cost of additional maintenance for all the road's users. (This also explains why it makes sense to leave some dirt roads in very rural areas.)
Yeah, pretty sure if customs kept seeing boxes like that appearing they're going to start investigating people...
I was completely unaware of this! Do you have a link to their website?
It appears that the author is not aware of what money or inflation is.

In 1916, Rockefeller was worth $1 Billion before adjusting for inflation.

Methinks there is some banana-peel smoking going on in there somewhere.
I like my subscription. My biggest issue has been shipments that end up in my mailbox melted. It would probably not be possible for new packaging to fix this, but this would be an area of improvement worth higher cost.
Another really cool thing is:

Even slightly discouraging the use of unsafe via Cargo will push crate owners to find already trusted "miro-crates" which abstract their usage of unsafe. Imagine something akin to left-pad existed solely to abstract unsafe. Most crates already use it, so most teams already whitelist it. Using finding and using a micro-crate might mean less friction for users to add your dependency into their application.

Benefits:

1. Smaller the crate, smaller the surface area, better the audit-ability.

2. The more people using the same crate, the less probable there is a bug.

3. If a relatively small crate exists, solely for its abstraction of `unsafe`, and it is relatively popular, then that could be a good indicator for moving that logic into `std`.
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> In every software company the people who are the most influential, and the best paid, are in management or sales.

I don't think that's necessarily true in Silicon Valley, where companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, etc. have parallel career tracks for individual contributor vs manager, with equal salary bands. I'm earning way more as a high-level IC than mid-leveled managers.
The article gave quite a few reasons why, such as health care, to support his argument.
Dammit -- free markets and new technology do it again!

Not the best written piece in the world, nor the most tightly argued, but the underlying facts do certainly get at a certain truth: that things get better. For everybody.

Bread, for example (the production of which used to consume the vast majority of human labor for many thousands of years). What was once an 80-hour-a-week-job (growing wheat, turning it into bread), can how be had for $.99 at a corner store (or the equivalent of about ten minutes' work at minimum wage. The second argument being, science.
~12 years of professional experience: 3 as a translator/researcher, 3 as a salaryman, 5 (full-time) as a bootstrapped solo software entrepreneur, 1 as CEO of Starfighter (current gig).

I go back and forth on this one, as I know why I did it, but: I burned way, way too many years on two jobs which were dead-end and not teaching me at sufficient velocity to justify the use of time. In hindsight, it would have been a better use of my time to be in a different organization for those 6 years. At the time I felt like I was optimizing for personal growth and figuring out this adulthood thing but in the clarity of hindsight I'm pretty sure I could have found that out while not being miserable for 90 hours a week.

I should have aggressively applied for jobs early in my career, including jobs I felt were likely to turn me down, rather than constraining my own choices to places I thought I was reasonably well-qualified for. (Specifically, I should probably have applied to Google, and AppAmaGooFaceSoft for that matter, immediately out of college and regularly afterwards.)

I was happy and pretty fulfilled with running my own software company, but I would have been happier, more fulfilled, and more successful with a better choice of projects for my 2nd major SaaS. In particular, rather than doing "a good business which I know that I will not be terribly interested in", I should have taken Peldi's advice and done something which both pinged my interests and made use of the various forms of capital I had built up prior to then. (Perhaps email marketing software or something else targeting the software industry, rather than something which helps you if you're the office manager at a dentist's office.)

With regards to Starfighter: we decided to bite off two very ambitious development projects then run a boutique recruiting firm. We should have run a boutique recruiting firm for 3 months, then done one not-very-ambitious development project, folded it into the recruiting firm, and then ramped up recruiting and development in parallel.

Things I'm generally happy about:

Skipping grad school.

Choosing to write down what I was learning while I was learning it: A++, would write 3 million words again. If I have a regret here, it is not writing more the last ~2 years.

Side projects: lifechanging for me.

Getting exposed to a variety of people, companies, and problems by doing consulting, while also getting paid handsomely to do it: great decision. (Probably should have banked more while doing it rather than assuming I would always have a consistent income level and choosing to overspend on some things.)

Bonus round: Definitely, definitely say yes if Thomas Ptacek invites you out to coffee. (We met for the first time in late 2009. That conversation altered my trajectory to consulting. A similar conversation in late 2014 resulted in Starfighter.)
Just a FYI: The pictures stopped working here: https://www.candyjapan.com/mini-assort
Sure, and I agree to a large extent, but if I'm doing woodworking and my blades are so fragile that they snap with the tiniest amount of friction, I'm probably not going to be very happy working like that for very long.
Facebook was down for a year after its IPO. It now trades at 3x of its IPO price. "Always take money off the table whenever it is offered." is terrible advice.
Just the opposite. The right policies would make city living cheaper.

See eg https://www.jstor.org/stable/3159005?seq=1 (Sorry, can't find an open source right now. Basically, regulation caused the elimination of cheaper housing.)
The big difference is that three months into a two year waterfall project, if someone complains that we're behind schedule, no one believes you or gives a shit. They keep hoping for a miracle.

Three months into an agile project and everyone already knows there's a problem.
There's a really interesting debate between Baldwin and William Buckley up on youtube. Riviting stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFeoS41xe7w
This sort of capitalist meme badly if not intentionally misunderstands human nature.

Yes, being able to afford dental care and fly around the world is terrific. But John D. Rockefeller was arguably the wealthiest American to ever live. You simply cannot quantitatively compare the ability to afford a $150 SouthWest economy-class flight and an air-conditioned hotel room at DisneyWorld to running a globe-spanning empire and building a philanthropic legacy that will last for hundreds of years.

And this is not just some angels-on-head-of-pin debate, it's intimately intertwined with why inequality is so destructive and why classical economics has such a hard time dealing with it. Subjectively, each person's relative economic position is at least as important as their absolute position.
In addition, Japanese products are not unknown for overpackaging. It's probably not surprising that Apple took some cues in their packaging from Japanese product packaging to signal "upscale" meticulousness and attention to the customer.
Linux won the UNIX wars, by bringing an end to them - yes BSD exists - but in both mindshare, and marketshare Linux beat the rest of them out. Beyond that, sysv was never relevant for BSD - and I don't think many Linux distros went with rc.d either.

So in the end, because of compatibility shims on both sites - and that our software build systems have evolved to support multiple init systems, its largely a moot point.
Things are certainly better for the middle class. Making the non-argument that things are better today for the middle class than they were for Rockefeller is nonsense.
Its possible you missed the Falls Church reference, as you are missing the other half of the comment. There is hiding in plain sight, and then there is hiding in plain sight in the center of a country's defense establishment.
> Wealth is not the number of pieces of green paper in your pocket. It's the things you have and what you can do with those things.

While wealth can also be your loved ones, your personal relationships, your experience and memories, the nature and culture of the land etc.

As long as we are talking about economics and standards of living this should be defined in a way for which statistically significant numbers can be obtained e.g. the relative purchasing power, or relative employable labor relative to a time. (note that none of these are provided.)

Yes, you couldn't 'Skype' in 1916 but I also can't employ Leonardo to draw paintings for a modestly large income as I could in the 16th century. You can't pull historical details out of their centuries and call that a worthwhile comparison because there is no equivalent.

A subjective "it's the worst poverty because I'd have to use a rotary phone in 1916" can be your opinion sure, as is "it's poverty to lose my experiences and the significant people in my life to be rich in 1916" - but neither of those do anything to support the title which states:

> Most Ordinary Americans in 2016 Are Richer Than Was John D. Rockefeller in 1916

Since the use of the generic 'most ordinary Americans' indeed requires the use a broadly applicable and numerically supportable definition of wealth (if one is to make the argument) rather than a personal one.

I would have no objections if the title was "I an ordinary American, am richer today than John D. Rockefeller was in 1916" -- but that's clearly not what it says.
In Japan you have 30 year olds (and older) who dress in that manner[1] and behave in that manner and speak in that manner. It's just different --so viewing it under a western lens probably introduces misinterpretation.

[1]Just look into Rorita fasshon, etc.
Who pays in 30 years when it needs to be repaved?
Thanks for the link! That's awesome.
Two (seemingly young) girls, one of who is winking at the recipient? Plus this: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=candy
Couldn't agree more about not exiting software engineering completely. Had this experience at a prominent tech company (wherein promotion = no more coding) and it became so bad I had to walk away.

I'm trying to tailor my career now to be primarily programming-oriented, but with opportunities to explain ideas/concepts and think about value creation. A relentless focus on creating business value is a huge differentiator in software engineering.
Rapey? A cartoon person giving a box of candy to another cartoon person, no touching, both fully clothed, both smilingly happy?

I think you're projecting your own issues quite considerably.
I think a typical oil company/country does not keep Tesla high on the agenda. They probably worry about Russia, policy changes of USA, wars around them and global economic stability. Tesla started - or contributed a lot to - a revolution that they should worry about in the long run, but they have a different perspective than a Tesla enthusiasts like myself.
Excuse my ignorance, IC?
Yes. The government should have been made to put that money aside when they promised it. (Or at least to keep the commitment honestly on their books, instead of hiding it.)
I'm not sure that being able to watch "The Kardashians" on my iPhone while stuck in commuter traffic really counts as "living much better" than Rockefeller.
tl;dr gentrification
The Spitfires that nearly broke the sound barrier
Designer here. If there's anything I wish I had done differently from the beginning it would have been to learn the "professional" soft skills like delegation and diplomacy early on, particularly with management/business-type people. I have always sucked at that and am still trying to get better.
That 30 day shipping period is a killer. Candy is an impulsive treat. :)
Yet, his main argument was not really about it.
"Individual contributor", as opposed to management. i.e. for a software engineer, someone who ships code for a living rather than shipping Gantt charts/emails.
I never got a rapey vibe from my grandmother when she winked at me while sneaking me a bit of candy out of my mother's eyeline.

Maybe I'm the weird one here?
‘Half a Magellan’ with the Defense Secretary
We looked inside a secret chinese Bitcoin mine
MyPy works surprisingly well once you add this in a few places: # type: ignore

The (now documented) --silence-imports option will remove the most frequent use for ignoring types though.

This project is very similar to TypeScript or Flow and I have found it provides a similar huge boost in reliability.
> Wealth can also be your loved ones, your personal relationships, your experience and memories etc.

Yes, but I wouldn't see any reason those should be different in the past than now, so we can compare only the difference in material goods.

I'd certainly rather be an average person in this day and age than an average person in the stone age and I think most people would as well if they understood what it entailed.
Hence the banana-peels. If you're going to make an argument about people being richer and poorer, without discussing money, wealth, or inflation, you're doing everyone a disservice.
I recently read my first two Baldwin books (Go Tell It On The Mountain and The Fire Next Time) and in both cases I was blown away by the completeness of his treatment of racism at a time when black people were fighting for much more basic civil rights.

I also recently read some of the popular modern books about race in America (Between The World and Me, The New Jim Crow, etc) and I found Baldwin just as essential to understanding the world in 2016. Particularly with 'The Fire Next Time', I felt the book achieved its goals perfectly.
The "someone" who described that picture as "rapey" has some deep issues.
Humans fundamentally judge their situation relative to everyone else. It's one of the (many) arguments for reducing income inequality. People don't get hugely happier just because everyone's technological situation has improved - that's just the new norm.

I suspect most people would be happier as one of the most extraordinarily wealthy, admired, and free people of a given time than they would as a (relatively) struggling nobody in a later age. The fact that your car breaks down somewhat often is probably less likely to bother you when you know that it's the best there is.
It exists, and demand for talented people outstrips supply. I find recruiting new people for my team to be tough. Literally had a candidate fail at FizzBuzz yesterday.

If you're on the Microsoft stack then Xero and Trade Me are the most obvious choices. Mobile development and Ruby on Rails are somewhat popular. Wellington is a government town, so there's a fair amount of work maintaining legacy platforms if that's your thing.

Quality of life is decent. Good weather most of the time, better traffic management and city planning than Auckland, good food and coffee. The place feels like it has a personality.

You will not be paid well compared to Australians and Americans. The cost of living is lower than in those places, but still high relative to salaries. Food is expensive, housing is expensive, broadband is expensive and somewhat slow, anything you want to import will have to travel a long way which raises the price, and all purchases have 15% GST.
Their latest may well be that when logind do not find a functioning journald it will dump its output into /dev/kmsg, potentially swamping vital kernel output.

https://plus.google.com/+StevenRostedt/posts/RCCcWG5A5Lb
One confounding issue is that some are captive participants --that is someone is controlling their behavior (i.e. making them do it) via manipulation, threats and codependence, etc.