skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “If the system of capitalist liberal democracy which has triumphed in the west is to pass the big test of globalisation – and the assault from radical Islam as well as its own internal pressures from post-crash austerity – we need some new thinking on ways to widen opportunity, share ownership and philanthropy. Fast.”

Sprinkle in a little radical islam fear mongering for kicks. This was funded by the Labour Party - not saying the message about inequality isn't true, but really strange to see that completely out of nowhere.
What? No. They're not launching an SMS interception/hijacking service, they just have a few numbers that you can use.
This is a very good point. It's like trying to trouble shoot a system failure in a bullet train based on a 19th century document detailing train locomotion.
Wizard for Mac – new kind of statistics program
The "richest 1%" is the top 1% of the population when sorted by wealth.
That'd be ideal of course, but as of today, blockchain doesn't force equality. China had a good grap over Bitcoin where the big money miners where due to cheap electricity.
Third option: Zuckerberg said, “just fucking do it,” and they just fucking did it. Total control is very much a double edged sword, especially when the person in control seems to have only a tenuous grasp of human nature.
This feels like a large disconnect?

Assuming these two sets of people are not the same -- there are a lot of people in the west earning > $32K a year and having less than $770K in assets.

So they are in the top set but not the bottom. Since the cardinality of the sets is the same, where are all the people that have more than $770K in assets but earn less than $32K a year.

Even a fairly modest 5% return would produce more income than that, or are the stats excluding investment income?

People with that much equity in their home wouldn't realize the income ... but how many people in the west even live in $700K+ homes and yet have less than $32K in income a year? Maybe some seniors, but surely not a very large group.
> Google paid close to 3 billon USD to stay the default search provider on iOS

And yet... they purposefully have ipad mini google search results only show in a crappy 'mobile' format, vs the regular way it used to ('normal desktop' for safari). It's bizarre, has been broken for years. Doesn't matter if they're "default", we've moved to yahoo and ddg for ipad searching. :/
I know we're in brainstorming mode, so please don't interpret this as criticism of your suggestion.

Don't named variables serve the same purpose as pronouns? What's an example of a pronoun-like usage in a hypothetical programming language?
> As a secondary source, there was recently an Ask Hacker News thread of people who had started their programming careers in their fifties, I sadly cannot find the like :c

At first I though you might be mentioning the “thank you” post[1], but that developer is in their thirties. A bit of searching led me to another post[2], but from 2015, so it may not be the same you were thinking about.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16640599

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9497721
UK: 'jack the lads' used to have lumina phones - the ones that you could get for £100 or that came with contracts. I used to see those a lot outside the local football ground. The central messaging queue seemed popular and video watching &c.

Then they disappeared to be replaced by huge Samsungs.
Facebook: If you want privacy, expect to pay for it
Ah memories,... The VIC-20 was my first computer too, as a 14 year old in 1983. Programming in Basic exhausted the 3583 bytes of RAM too quickly. So I spent all my pocket money on the VicMon 6502 assembly language cartridge ($84 I think it cost, about $250 today). That summer holiday, I copied out the entire ROM disassembly into old school exercise books (I couldn't afford a printer!), and reverse engineered the floating point math routines. Then I wrote 6502 assembly programs, including:

- a text to speech program, using phoneme production rules I found in a 1976 IEEE paper "Letter-to-sound rules for automatic translation of english text to phonetics"

- a 3D graphics toolkit, that drew antialiased lines, circles, cuboids onto a pixel-addressable display. The VIC-20 only had a 22x23 character display. I remember having to fill the screen with ASCII chars 0 to 255, then forcing the video to use doubleheight 8x16 pixel characters with char data in RAM rather than the video ROM. Then the graphics primatives were written into these characters by bitwise operations. I had to write my own arithmetic routines as the 6502 could only add two 8bit numbers. There was not even a multiply instruction!

Ah, happy days!
Capitalism is so ingrained now, nobody can even imagine that alternative system could exist. In the minds of most, communism is a synonym of authoritarianism. Communist governments tended to be authoritarian, but it's not clear to me if it's a natural consequence of communism. It's more likely that authoritarianism is a consequence of violent revolutions. Is it possible to combine communism with democracy?
It would have to be scales beyond the observable universe then, because it appears to operate as expected. If distance scales change things, then nearby galaxies would behave differently from very large clusters, quasars should display odd behavior, smaller galaxies would behave very differently from larger ones.

We don’t see any of that.
Right now someone, somewhere, is complaining that "the media" has ignored this very event.
I think the next iteration of the being known now as capitalism, which is actually just trying to be a collection of principles for resource allocation, must take into account the impact that currently isn't tracked or quantified by money.

It's imperative that the government or some superior structure (preferably decentralised) that doesn't exist yet enforces this improvement of economical performance tracking.
I'm having the same problem recently with the Kindle app for Android...
"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything"
I'm an academic. If I get in 3-4 hours of deep work I'm done for the day and can relax.
Android isn't, but surely Google is for having the google play store, services, and apps?
That's why I said new blockchain. A blockchain for the rest of us.
With wealth comes decision making power whatever lies you were told in school. If you think those whose interests aren't aligned will make decisions that are aligned with your needs you haven't thought this through sufficiently.
Communism and socialism were disliked primarily because they reduce freedom. Every additional unit of socialism, is one less unit of freedom. Full communism dictates almost every part of your life.

I am pro balanced socialism, just making the point that it inherently requires force.
I mean come on, let's not be coy here: Mark Zuckerberg literally can access and manipulate any Facebook data he wants. That's kind of his entire MO.
I mostly work alone, as of the past few years. Occasionally take consulting work or contracts. When I do have coworkers, my relationship with them is typically good to very good.
Yeah, I'm not sure "communist" was ever a particularly valuable label, in that anything large and nominally communist was more statist or totalitarian oligarchy, just painted red. My understanding is that as envisioned, the state would "wither away", devolving power to the people, but in practice people who like power were quite happy to seize the levers of the government and never let them go. Oopsie!

As an aside, I strongly recommend Iannucci's The Death of Stalin [1], which is in US theaters right now. The material would be horrific in a serious film, but treating it as a black comedy makes it endurable. I enjoyed it much more than I expected, and the cast is first rate.

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_death_of_stalin/
Any student of history is well aware of these cycles of ever increasing concentrations of power and wealth followed by violent grassroots overthrow of 1% types where control and wealth returns to a more productive distribution ... rinse & repeat ... for example look at Italy from the years 1000 to 1400 which experienced several such cycles ... its a natural expression of the will to power ... the real crime to humanity happens when poor children are starved of education and opportunities while 1% blithely hordes resources in blind faith that more is better when in-fact everyone is better off when the people at the bottom are maximally lifted into self actualized individuals knowing they have skin in the game ... anything less than this is wasting human potential on a massive scale
The World's Longest Car Has a Jacuzzi and a Helipad
My only real exposure to it is the course I took, csc438 at UofT taught by Steven Cook.

There are pretty complete notes for the course as well as assignments here [0], but not videos or planned lessons. You certainly could learn about it by reading them, but I don't know if it would be the most efficient way.

[0] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sacook/csc438h/
I was specifically reacting to the section "What are hash-based signatures good for?"

I should have said I do like the article. The explanations were well done and appreciated.
what other ways can we use to measure worker's output quality and quantity other than the easily quantifiable factor of "time"?
> Having your sensors fail doesn't mean they're not providing data.

That is one possible failure mode. But you're right, it's not the only one.

There is an extensive literature on how to detect and correct sensor errors resulting from all kinds of different failure modes.
This seems like a strange sentiment when the trajectory of wealth accumulation and power in Capitalists societies track pretty closely with the analysis of Marxism. Unless your saying that all ostensibly communist societies are actually examples of State Capitalism.
Its profoundly unclear how merely throwing the word blockchain does anything useful for equality.

Having a different way to record ownership doesn't change how ownership is distributed. Logically the blockchain would be a good way to record ownership in a more equal society in same fashion as forks and bricks would be useful tools in a new and more equal society.
Nah, people say such ridiculous garbage that they need to be called out. Especially here where people seem to take delight in disparaging your work in the tiniest way they can think of.

I don't think OP needs to pussy foot around some stranger on an internet message board. It's free shit.
Max Roser (https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser) collects a lot of data about trends in living conditions and economics. He was the source for a lot of the graphs in Steven Pinker's latest book.
As long as the institutions are insured against fraud, they have a greater incentive for usability than security.
I think we have all learned the era of cheeky hijinks like these is over. Trespass in a building like they did and you might just be reading about yourself on the internet in a whole different context, with an unflattering mugshot to boot.
Someone else on HN commented that the poor need to stop reproducing in order to improve equality. At first I found the comment kind of troubling, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense.

Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE

Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been able to yet.

(It's worth remembering that a good percentage of people reading this will be in the top 1% despite not being "rich" by western standards).
Apple planning to ditch Intel chips in Macs for its own custom silicon in 2020
If you're using Plug (not sure about other plugin managers) you can just load it on demand.
The overwhelming majority of businesses don't have investors to care about. Ignoring that, investors demand growth because that's basically the definition of investing. If businesses don't want to be pressured to grow then they don't have to take money from people who want growth.

Removing inflation wouldn't stop people from chasing growth. People want to make more money. 2% annual inflation changes the calculations a bit (towards more proactive investing), but in a world of 0% inflation people would still want to make money. They would just be a bit more conservative since there's no penalty for holding.

And yes, slow growth is a bad thing. Our population is growing. The pie has to be grown if we don't want living standards to nosedive.
Also tagspaces it is an interesting evernote alternative
The future AI systems at the head of the major multinationals will surely be creative in coming up with a new method of global resource allocation..
Plutocracy is to economics as inbreeding is to genetics.
AR-15s are only $500 dollars now.
More and more companies have monopoly power over workers’ wages
Definitely it’s not obvious that gluten specifically would be the cause, but seemingly obvious to test specialized diets?

So I guess I’m surprised people didn’t discover “avoid wheat” a lot sooner even if it took until the late 20th century to actually understand the mechanism.
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLgvdS3VEQk
BART Traffic Delay Map
In the US, a large part of this trend is due to the tax code. Examples: 1) in real estate, a "1031 transfer" allows the tax payer to not pay tax on the gain from the sale of property so long as they purchase another piece of real estate. 2) Capital Gains tax rates are lower than Ordinary Income tax rates. So, the tax you pay on income derived from wealth is lower than the tax rate you pay on income derived from employment.
Maybe read an introduction to eugenics?
Combined with this with the role bread used to play. It was a massive part of diets until relatively recently when we turned bread bland and relatively nutrician free with mass production techniques.
How would you fix it? It looks like a structural/technological issue: less people needed to produce the same/more amount of value. Whereas previously you needed thousands of workers, now you can have a craigslist make hundreds of millions of dollars with 19 workers (they had the record at one point for most money per employee).

Labour is just less valuable now, and the system will need to change - not that it broke.
Subscription form for static sites with FlowXO and Mailgun (1 setup, n websites)
Top 1% of composers are most of all classical music played ( probably over two-thirds ). Of their music, maybe 1% of their songs are the ones that get most of that playing.

Celestial bodies also have exponential inequality. Get a little mass, get more gravity, get more mass. Inequality is within nature itself.

Actors in hollywood. They release one movie, now they get 50 offers for other movies. They quickly get more than 2/3 of the opportunities, relative to an unknown. Inequality will always exist because trust exists, and if you trust someone, you will want to work with them.

Capitalism is great, because even if you're an unknown, you can do a good job(at whatever field you want), and get more opportunities, and do more good jobs, and get exponentially more opportunities.
In addition to the ISP you use, the DNS you use sees all as well, doesn't it?
You seem to be including the halting problem in your definition of type soundness, those aren't the same things.

Java has always had covariant arrays, which are not sound. Whether it was intentional or not is irrelevant to the question of 'does this language have a sound type system?'.
Wonder if Apple will take the same stance on the cut it takes off apps. Ie if you look at the value add that Apple provides by running the app store it has a fixed cost, whether the app costs $2 or $200.
That would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Looks like there is a small typo: should read “higher in CO2” whouldnt that produce faster plant growth?
There is something along those lines that I've been thinking about: Human languages evolve over time.

Programming languages also change from version to version, but it is the creators of the language making the changes. In human languages, the changes are organically created by the users. Changes that don't end up being useful never take off.

I think it would be practically possible to build a pipeline for this to happen: allow users to extend/modify the language [0][1] and allow those extensions to be shared.

Some languages already have a process for taking popular 3rd party libraries and eventually integrating them into the standard library distributed with the compiler, the same could apply to language modifications.

[0] Modifying the language could involve _removing_ features .

[1] This may need to be more complicated than syntactic macros, which is currently the most common means of extending languages.
You can't really intercept SMS with this, you know that, right? You can't just write any existing number and start to receive messages sent to that number. You can only use this to receive messages sent to phone numbers assigned to Mailinator, and frankly, if you're using their numbers as a 2nd auth factor, you kinda deserve what you get. It's no different than signing up for any service with a Mailinator email address.

The only bad scenario was if they somehow got hold of real mobile numbers that real people were actually using before but that were lapsed and got recycled, without those people removing the numbers from, say, their Gmail accounts.
Yup I am sure China planned to be up to their eyeballs in debt, their money flooding out to Canada and Australia, and cultural revolution 2.0 underway.

Yup, all planned out
You can't send a packet with a list of destination addresses.

There is multicast, where clients can register "I'd like a copy of all packets to $address please", but it doesn't work on public internet. It's used by some providers for TV streaming inside their networks though.

There's also peer-to-peer approaches, where clients share the data they receive with other clients, similar to Bittorrent.

The most common approach is individual streams from the servers to the clients though.
Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, has a pretty compelling section on wealth/income inequality. The basic position - and I think the data supports this - is that it really doesn't matter what the top 1% are doing so long as the bottom half are seeing improved living conditions.

Furthermore, wealth isn't a static I win/you lose proposition - much of that wealth has been created in recent history. People spend less as a percentage of income on food and housing, have better access to healthcare, and more leisure time than ever before. It's a remarkable story.

Over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty over the last 30 years thanks to globalization. I think that's much more important than how much money Warren Buffett or Bill Gates have.

Income/wealth inequality has been the state of humanity for all of recorded history, and it seems unlikely to go away any time soon - it's trivially easy to show how wealth accumulation occurs using game theory even if trade is relatively fair. The only events that seem to reliably reset the balance are global wars, huge famines, or natural disasters.

I think it's a natural human inclination to fixate on the rich and to demonize them, and perhaps some are deserving of such demonization, but it doesn't seem to be a terribly useful way to think about improving the human condition. It just spurs on class resentment which is, if history is any guide, just about the worst way to go about things possible.
It's just propagnda.

Capitalism is also freedom limiting. Just ask low wage earners struggling to pay rent and afford healthcare.

And on the other hand, the nordiis seem to do quite well.
Except measures (and measurements) and all of this stuff just don't seem to work. In the abstract they sound good, but in implementation they always look incredibly lacking and seem to just further perversify incentives.

It's not that we shouldn't try to improve these things, but in my opinion your position is a forlorn hope that is destined to be disappointed.

The times when nations have worked better and more efficiently are times when there have been other sources of unity and a combined sense of national value which the modern world, and perhaps historical distance from the reckonings of the past (in particular world war 2) have been inexorably weakening.
Worldwide, if you make over $32k per year you’re 1%. I suggest folks think carefully about this fact before suggesting hanging the rich or anything else Marxist-Leninist.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
In the same place. Love my Elite x3, will stay on it as long as security updates keep coming every month. May end up having to suffer iOS if nothing new comes out, but I'll never go back to Android. Definitely hope the Librem 5 works out, though have doubts that it will.
Microservice Patterns and Antipatterns
We do network analytics delivered as SaaS, selling to enterprise and service providers, but I'm happy to talk (for free, of course) about VCs and the funded life.

I have felt like a cultural anthropologist in the land of VCs (mostly positive, some not) over the last 4 years. I know a bit about the Chicago VC environment but more about SF, NYC, BOS.

Email is my first name @ kentik.com
Freedom is also a problematic word. I guess you could say that Europe has "more units of communism" than the US. But if you ask where a poor person is more free, you'd get quite different answers from different people.
However this is something you can put in /use/local/bin and use alongside other command line tools with pipes
We need to think about it before running out of phone numbers.
How I developed a captcha cracker for my University's website
There's bad stuff like Telegram and the Tor browser bundle in the alternatives section. I feel that's somewhat misleading and possibly dangerous to someone not tech savvy enough to do his own vetting.

I like these kinds of list, though, as I sometimes I learn about things I didn't know existed.
Capitalism is like "Enter to win a chance at freedom! Remember, you can't win if you don't play."
Does it matter? The expenditures for the US in 2016 we’re nearly 4 trillion. Trillion. The top 10’s wealth if siezed wouldn’t even come close to that.
I agree. It does feel weird. I suspect radically differing methodology may be at play.

Then again if you take a teacher who made $40k/year for 30 years but has a decent pension and owns a normal home maybe it's possible?
There's a difference between having less choices by being less wealthy than being forced by others to do things. Can you point out an example in pure capitalism where people are forced by others and not the laws of nature?
I really liked the look of the Lincoln Continental but when I found out it wasn't rear wheel drive (or a rear wheel drive biased all wheel drive system) then I lost interest.
> Programmers often use other verification tools like unit testing or contracts to get strong assurances of similar properties.

Neither unit testing nor contracts are verification tools.
RTBF wasn't invented by lawmakers, it was invented by a European court.
Ask HN: What do I need to know about distributors for retail electronics?
We're getting ready to launch a small electronic device for a niche market and have started being contacted by distributors and retailers. Suddenly I'm in a panic because we've been so busy building the thing and I've no idea what I'm doing regarding this part of the business!

What do we need to know? What margins will they expect and are fair? What do we need to consider for terms and contracts? Are there differences between brick&mortar and online? We're a US company and some of them are international - how does that work? Should we expect them to ask for exclusivity? We plan to sell the product on our own website and are still considering the whole distributor thing.

I'm going to go breathe in a paper bag for a bit. If anyone has some material to share or advice we'd be so appreciative.