skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My intention was to show why comparing the two things you mentioned and claiming the comparison is outrageous was not a reasonable dismissal of OP's concern - because they were talking about the similarities of society predicated on wealth accumulation generally and not the violence inflicted to protect that wealth and how that has changed over time.

Many disagree with the tenants of capitalism regardless of how violent those in power are or how corrupted their authority is, the system itself can occur as strange, especially when it puts a lot of power into the hands of a few people - that causes uneasiness in many cultures and it is certainly something to think about as wealth inequality gaps widen, for better or worse.

I don't really have any stake in the result of this conversation and my views aren't as critical of capitalism generally, I'm commenting because your out of hand dismissal of OP's comment made me think that you might either be erroneously framing the comment or reading his concern as something far more serious than the casual comment would otherwise indicate (at least, that's how I read it).

Another way to read the OP would be something this - "Doesn't this remind anyone of how wealth was distributed in more clearly feudalistic times? Weird, right? - it makes me feel weird. I worry sometimes that this might be the beginnings of what we will consider to be a slip into a dystopian society. It worries me, and I wonder about it from time to time."

EDIT: copy/pasted a little too much and repeated myself
Mountains aren't formed by natural selection.
Very poor, there's no mention of continuation style passing interpreters.

If anyone's curious about tales from the battlefield, highly recommend Cliff Click's talks (any of them) [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/Hqw57GJSrac?t=341
Cool - thanks - so rather than provide any refuting evidence to something I stated was a RUMOR, you post this drivel. So - if you are so informed, please update me.
Someone imported and released Capybaras?
This statement makes no sense. If you feel that the company doesn't pay enough, there are two possibilities. 1. You get paid way more then your teams rate, proving the CEO is not being truthful (there is more money if people negotiate hard enough) 2. You are also underpaid and are doing yourself a disservice by staying
Perhaps you misunderstand the nature of this argument.

I don't have to be right all the time. I'm not saying that everything that can't be automated will automatically get more expensive. It's only necessary that some things do.
What's your site? Curious.
Imagine I find a way to create bread from thin air and don't tell anyone else how to do it. Assume the value of a loaf of bread to a consumer is 1 dollar. I sell 100 loaves for 99 cents each, because that's what the market will bear. How much money have I made? 99 dollars. How much value have I created for everyone else? 1 dollar.

Now imagine instead I give away 100 loaves for free. How much value have I created for everyone else? 100 dollars. How much money have I made? Zero.

Do you now see the problem with estimating a person's usefulness to society by looking at their net worth?
I don't get that tone. He suggested a vasectomy was good too. The critique of this method was only the effectiveness, not that it was unnecessary.

There's a lot wrong in the comment but I don't see what you see in it.
Is it async. with one thread per "work"? If so you are in trouble. I tried to see if you can abstract async. into a sync model but you need the callback and wakeup syntax which is a dealbreaker.

No, you don't need any callback syntax. You can use CSP or Actors, and there are probably other models. See Go, Limbo, Erlang, Akka, and a bunch of other languages and frameworks.
I agree but there is no religious test. The countries on the list are from Obama's State Dept recommendations due to terror threats.
While I completely agree that the incentives seem absurd on their face, a counterpoint I have is that while I worked in a CPA office for several years, I came to realize that a lot of people really have no idea how much they pay in taxes. Many people seem genuinely grateful to have received a refund, not realizing that it was money previously removed from their paychecks.

I have no idea what the correct policy would be, but I think a lot of people would feel very differently if they had to write a check for their taxes every time they received a paycheck instead of not thinking about it for 12 months and then getting a refund (which makes them feel like the government is doing them a favor). I'm not sure we can just dismiss out of hand the idea that the way people interact with their government affects their opinions on policy.

I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say we should make filing taxes painful, I'd personally just as soon never have to file a tax return, even if that meant my taxes weren't quite as optimized, but I know a lot about my tax situation. I guess it feels somehow more... honest (I'm not sure if that's the right word) if people viscerally feel how much they're paying in taxes, just like they feel how much they spend on utilities or groceries.
Eh, I guess...but a feudal lord oversaw hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I'm not suggesting feudalism was better than what we have now, or necessarily agreeing with the argument made above about this being feudalism. Let's just all agree that Bill Gates isn't a feudal lord and this isn't feudalism, but rather something else that is probably bad, but it may take us a few generations to figure out exactly why it's so bad and how to avoid it.
Flamingos are back in Florida now too..

http://www.audubon.org/news/wild-flamingos-return-florida
I think when computing profit you subtract capital investments into the company. These capital investments become assets/equity on the balance sheet, contributing to the wealth of the shareholders without being counted as "profit". Amazon did this a lot.
You're doing exactly what you accuse Pelosi of.

* The Communications Act of 1934 was substantially updated in 1996. Even if it hadn't been, age alone doesn't make a law outdated.

* The FCC classified ISPs as "telecommunications services", same as now, until the mid-2000s.

* The Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the FCC had the authority to classify ISPs as either "telecommunications services" or "information services".[1]

* By 2010, ISPs had begun to violate the consumer protection guidelines the FCC laid out in 2005. The FCC responded with regulations, but ISPs challenged even the most basic provision: no outright blocking of lawful content.

* The DC Circuit ruled the FCC couldn't regulate "information services" that way but suggested the FCC could undo the reclassification.[2] So it did.

* ISPs sued over that too, but the DC Circuit upheld it.[3]

Is that the FCC reinterpreting a 1934 law or a court applying a 2005 precedent?

After that was settled, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the FTC had no authority to regulate common carriers.[4] The FCC published the regulations Congress just overturned two months after that.

I'll believe Republicans want the FTC to enforce these exact same privacy protections when they pass a bill giving it that authority.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cable_%26_Telecommuni...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Telecom_Ass'n_v....

[4] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/08/29/1...
It is in the S&P; I'd argue that 10% compounding may not be an absurd stretch for a company like Amazon
Often the easiest way to solve these kinds of problems is actually to have a well regulated monopoly.
I think I would actually really love this environment if executed in a healthy way. Lately I've become a big believer in embracing my environment in positive ways if possible. A few years ago I would have said no way, but I'm beginning to realize when I shut out others it's not as productive as I think it is. There is so much more to learn from others than myself and I think viewing those interactions as ways to learn instead of distractions would be the way to go. Then again put in that environment I might change my mind but I'd be curious to try that out.
In late 80s they ran a TV show with Soviet and American audiences and hosts talking to each other[1]. Once they were a few seconds late to cut off a commercial being shown to the Americans and Soviet public learned that this show had commercials and demanded them to be shown to the Soviet side as well. This should tell you how much advertisement was there.

All I can recall is few absurd billboards like "Fly Aeroflot!" (the only airline) or "Keep your savings in the Sberkassa!" (which probably did not advertise the Sberkassa itself, since it was the only retail bank, but the savings accounts, still looked funny).

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.–Soviet_Space_Bridge
Hey, something I can comment on properly for once ;). Handed in my final Quantum-field-theory homework yesterday (or blood-sweat-and-theory as I called it, great fun) and finishing a MSc. in Computational science 'soon'.

From what I can follow, most of it is, unfortunately either varying degrees of wrong or just confusing as all hell. :\

Some assorted quotes:

>The electron is not in a single place, but instead spread out over all the positions, more or less. This is called "superposition".

No, the superposition principal states that individual states (contributions) can be summed in a linear fashion. I know this is not a very clear way of wording it, but it is one of those things I think is quite hard to word but very easy to understand once you see it.

(Although one could say this is a form of superposition, namely a sum of infinite delta functions in position-space. But this would be the most confusing example to use)

>The smart programmer would guess at a model containing more complex math that will get the array to model several particles, but no such thing exists.

Quantum field theory.

> These examples have used cubes with a width of 1000 voxels, and of 1000 time instants. The Universe use a width of something like 10^70 voxels. The same goes for time.

I assume this is (roughly matches) size-of-observable-universe/plank-length. But this is misinterpretation of the planck length. As far as we (I) know, spacetime is continouis. (string theorist migth disagree, I am not familiar).

Furthermore, the many particle approach is not at all reasonable. One would (usually) use lattice-QFT. where one simulates a field for each type of particle (the field can have several components) and particles are identified as excitation of this field. The most well known is lattice-QCD.

>Quantum Electro Dynamics

Quantum Electrodynamics ;)

>Richard Feynman got the nobel prize for figuring out a way of doing this. His Quantum Electro Dynamics is a sort of dynamic programming method

This part is right (I have no idea what the next few sentences are trying to say). Feyman diagrams (those fun squilly drawings) represent the results of some awful, awful integrals. The real analytical answer is integrated over two infinite spaces. But one can do a taylor expansion to get a answer which can be computed. Feynman noted that you can read off a few rules from this approximation and assign drawings to them. The answer can then be computed by summing all (topologically distsinct graphs) instead of the terms in the Taylor sum. It's much easier than it sounds (and sure as hell more fun than doing integrals), and you can copy-paste entire sections of your diagrams as long as the in and out-puts match up. perfctly suitable for dynamic programming.
> a lot of the excitement over this ruling is overblown, when in fact, your information is likely or could be for sale elsewhere.

That does not mean it is overblown. Sure particular websites sell your traffic. That is only traffic with that particular website. This ruling is about three traffic with your ISP, which is literally all of your traffic.
I do a lot of my news reading via RSS feeds to Newsblur. One of those RSS feeds is from hnapp.com which generates an RSS feed of Hacker News submissions with a score over 50 or more than 30 comments.

If there's something I want to read later I send it to Pocket which my ereader supports, so I can read them on my nice portable eink device whenever I have a spare moment stuck in a waiting room or on a bus or whatever.

According to my reading habits[1] I've averaged reading 690 articles that way in each of the last two years.

In order to track my article reading habits, plus follow up on articles in related forums such as Hacker News after I’d read them and such, so I wrote a litte PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API to help me manage all that.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

[1] http://www.michevan.id.au/tag/books/
It was popular among people who got to try the pilot program. That doesn't necessarily mean it would be popular among the general public, especially opponents campaigning heavily against it.
Hi!

Author here - I'd love to hear your feedback on how we can improve and answer any questions you have.

Thanks HN!

Dhruv
"the scope of what taxes are increased to support only increases under a democracy"

In addition to all those leisure activities you have been deprived of by "those people sitting around watching TV", you apparently have been too busy to acquire basic historical facts or exercise basic common sense (I vaguely recall various people being elected with promises to reduce taxes, and occasionally even doing so).

Since about the 1940s, there has been no clear trend upward in the fashion that you describe; certainly nothing that would substantially move the needle in how many leisure activities you can partake in.

So I suggest you go take that pottery class now.
I am sorry for sidetracking on this, but I need to understand why I am reading so much 'loose' here on HN.

Is this error being used with intent? I have no interest in shaming grammar errors, it's just that I am seeing this too often here, in the same place where I read great arguments.

English is not my native language, so maybe this is a colloquial use of the word?
With respect to Catholicism, I was getting at the fig leafs that were applied to classic (Roman and Greek) sculptures and paintings that depicted nudity and the general sentiment behind that movement.

Personally, I've never seen such explicit graffiti. The worst might have been "Call XXX-YYYYYY for a good time" sort of messages.
Jubilee also has station doors at new stations.
I'm curious what you think of my ad network[1] -- it allows for native ads that are non-intrusive and actually benefit the user. When you hover over an item in an image, an ad is displayed, but hovering off of it makes it go away.

Here is an example video showing that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_oTtDUV0yI

Although the ads aren't blocked by ad blockers, if they were, would you unblock them? Also would love any feedback!

[1] http://pleenq.com
I think some aspects of that are covered that well in the movie, in that she knew her daughter would die, and made a choice to have one anyways, and subject her husband to that pain presumably without his knowledge or consent.

The problem I had with the story, if I understood it correctly, is not that she chose to be committed, but that she actually had no choice. This is, essentially the part of the story I found problematic. It was explained enough to bypass my suspension of disbelief, but not enough to provide an explanation I could accept. How do you have free through without free action?

I would love to revisit the story and find evidence to support that point, or to find that I misread or misunderstood, but I unfortunately don't have a way to do that right now. :/
Very complicated systems, like computer hardware and software systems, particularly services and distributed systems, do have this un-intuitive property of amplifying competence differences.

healthcare.gov is one visible and notable example where thousands of "trained and certified professionals" made a huge mess, and like 10 volunteers from silicon valley cleaned it up.

You could hire 100000 or 200000 such contracted professionals and the value produced would be even lower. Sure, most of the blame is with the management structure, which the ~10 volunteers bypassed and overrode. But the results stand. A few people in the right place can produce more value than orders of magnitude more people doing the wrong thing for whatever reason.

EDIT to better address your point: very few people could have done as well as Bezos in his position. Take any of the CEOs HP has had in the last decade, put them at the head of Amazon, and it would have done a lot worse. Put them all there, it would have done worse. Bezos gets a huge value multiplier for practical reasons.
A person with a single dollar to their name will have a higher net worth than a significant fraction of the world. I have never found "more wealth than" to be a useful relation to think about.
How did you find the move from Scala to Rust? Any surprises?

Does Tokio have similar performance to Finagle/Netty?
what's wrong with doing <insert hash function>?
That's pretty much exactly what Jeff will end up doing. He can either give it away or the government will take more than half of it. Unless he manages to crack that whole mortality thing.
So use a similar technology, likely also infringing on Facebook's React patents vs. protection that only applies if you don't sue Facebook over patent issues?
That's the thing though - your example of an oil-changing
robot could be automated today - if we had standard
placement of components.

Business-wise this can be spun as a feature, not a bug.

How many different engine configurations are there on the road today? (Ignoring exotic cars and anything older than, say, 1970) 1,000? 10,000? Brute forcible, with money. And once you have a database with the location of the sump plug and oil filter on all common cars, that's a moat a competitor would have to cross. Scan the VIN on the dashboard to figure out which car is which.

Handling the sump plug would be easy. (Impact wrench to get it off, torque wrench to put it back on. If you're fancy, you can have some way to detect if the sump plug is beat up and give the customer the option to buy a new one. Some cars have a sump plug washer that you're supposed to replace every time, which would be tough) Replacing the oil filter would be harder. Sump plugs have to be at the bottom of the oil pan, because of gravity, which makes them easy to get at, but oil filters tend to be crammed up in the middle of the engine bay, with narrow clearances.
The original article was talking about simple tax returns. In fact, the 1040EZ is relatively new. Much newer than the existence of H&R Block. So evidently their efforts to keep taxes complicated aren't entirely successful.

Even a 1040 "long form" (2 pages) with itemized deductions for mortgage interest isn't that complicated.

I file about a 10 page return, 1040 with schedule A, schedule C, self-employment and various others and I always do it myself on paper.

If you are at the point where you think you need TurboTax, you're probably better off just hiring a local CPA firm to do your taxes.
The thing is, let's say Google reneged on their promises and started violating privacy on 8.8.8.8 - would it be up to the FCC to enforce that or the FTC to enforce it as fraudulent behavior?
In Europe, I have a pre-filled tax report. Of course, it includes only my employee's income and all the banks interest & dividends and deductions they can automatically get (wrt known family situation, loan interest, etc.).

For the rest, it is still up to me to declare additional incomes (e.g. rental properties) or deductions (e.g. donations). It does simplify though the process, especially for "W-2" employees.
Why does it matter if its discretionary?
Well, 25 years ago, he worked down the hall from me at Microsoft, writing docs for the Fortran compiler. Not sure if he ever wrote docs for the C/C++ compiler that I worked on (this was pre-Visual C++ or maybe just as VC got started), nor do I remember how long he was there. But I do remember being thrilled that a Nebula and Campbell award winner was a co-worker.
A preemptive rebate check only makes a difference in the first year of the system. If it's actually a advanced refundable credit, then suddenly you don't really have a flat tax, you have a flat marginal tax with a refundable credit (or a flat tax with an exempt UBI.)

Of course, then you need an even higher marginal rate to achieve revenue neutrality.
Xcode 8.3 produces binaries 3x larger than Xcode 8.2.1
Property is violence.

If I try to take something that "isn't my property", the state will intervene with violence (e.g. forced imprisonment, etc.) on behalf of the person deemed to be the "lawful owner".
Well, Vue is a different approach... I find Vue closer to WebComponents than to React.
This is pretty old, from 2003, and I think modern Intel processors nullify the purported benefits of "indirect branching" (aka "computed goto") versus switch statements. A few years ago I learned of gcc's computed goto (also supported by clang, IIRC) and I reimplemented lightgrep's core regex engine with computed gotos instead of the indirect switch statement. I could not measure a difference, and I went back to the clearer, more portable switch statement.
Even the fit but plain lazy like myself have been known to use them.
While making sure to tell TeXstudio to use XeLaTeX or LuaTeX, and never the LaTeX/pdftex (unless you live in such a small world you never need a single non-ascii English character of course. Then stick with pure LaTeX)
That said, it's not too surprising that it would be faster on MIPS. MIPS would have far, far fewer transistors working on branch prediction than x86.
Subway infrastructure should probably target a useful life of 100 years. Over that time, demographics will shift to an older population even as city population increases. It may look cheaper to skip improvements now, but long term I doubt it is the same calculation.
The Great Debate @ARITH23: John Gustafson and William Kahan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZAeZBVAzVw&feature=youtu.be
Audio quality is not great but there are links to slides from Gustafson and Kahan
If the binary you're downloading might have been modified, how do you know that the hash you're checking against hasn't been as well?
If you look at React components as components, it makes a bit more sense, at least to me that the view rendering is part of the component, and not the inverse.
Besides native UTF support and fonts what advantages do the XeLaTeX and LuaTeX ecosystems offer over LaTeX?

You mention writing a novella as your use case, but I don't think that's a particularly difficult task for a typesetting engine. If you found typesetting a textbook with "rich" margins, annotations, and figures significantnly easier I would be more inclined to learn about alternatives.

With LaTeX I can transform my research papers to comply with a publisher's template in a few lines of code. Sure there are some annoyances such as compile compile bibtex compile, but the ecosystem is mature enough that most of these are well handled.
Yes, but ...

It provides some jobs, yes. But mostly low-wage.

Broken glass is a key issue. It's especially hard to separate from paper. I vaguely recall that silicon is also an issue for aluminum.
Top 5 Vulnerabilities in APIs
Specifically, Certificate Transparency makes it possible to detect SSL certificates that have been mistakenly issued by a certificate authority or maliciously acquired from an otherwise unimpeachable certificate authority. It also makes it possible to identify certificate authorities that have gone rogue and are maliciously issuing certificates.

Interesting. I assume this either helped with the evidence for - or was developed because of - the whole Symantec CA dustup going on?