skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m defintely not making an argument for communism. I’m simply trying to make the point that there is a stark opposition to anything but pure capitalism in the US and a lot of the position seems to be based on a percieved freedom level. Buying endless crap and having unlimited food supply is a logical reason to favor capitalism. Opposing all other market forms (either holistically or partially applied) without consideration because it violates a perceived real or unreal freedom level doesn’t make sense to me.
The laws of nature are simply that life is inherently a struggle. Imagine being born on a planet with no-one else, if you don't gather food and build shelter you will die. You are constantly on a path of poverty and death unless you fight against it. Since humans are social creatures that love each other we don't like letting that happen to others even if they can't create enough value to sustain themselves. But once society gets big and anonymous enough, that requires force (taking something from someone else that provides greater net happiness for them both).

For the record I am pro balanced socialism, just making the point that it inherently requires force and reduces freedom.
I think the biggest mistake people make when counting this wealth is that if it is hoarded and never spent then it might as well not exist and should be viewed as anti-inflationary.

What if all the billionaires in the world decided 'let me just hit delete on all of the zeroes in my bank account' what affect would that have on the rest of the world?
Exactly, this whole conversation gets sidetracked by assuming that communism is the primary alternative to the current system.
Most people who are that poor are not educated enough about reproduction to prevent childbirth due to lack of sexual contraceptives or information about safe-sex. They are born to absolute poverty and know little outside of their little town or country. Sex to them might just be seen as something you do with little to no consequence or something that just comes easily.

What you see as suffering might be seen as normal daily life to them which is terrible. The way most children in richer countries live might seem foreign to them. That being said, infant mortality is also very high in those countries so a chunk of those children born will not make it past 20 years old.

I do believe that as countries get richer the people of the country start having more responsibilities and jobs and those overwhelm the time available to take care of kids.
Dark mode may be the #1 feature I want from any app or device. I tend to shy away from anything I can't enable it on. I have an Android phone and each version gets brighter.

I am in the apparent minority that knows that a screen isn't a piece of paper and not in the majority of people who still believe myths about keeping the light on when you watch TV.
You have in fact scratched the surface of a very important and fundamental insight about human society. The conclusion that I have come to is that blaming institutions and policies is basically wrong. Blaming circumstances is wrong. It is the people of a society that determine what that society is, full stop. If tomorrow everyone in the united states were made to be good with high intelligence, high morality and so on, all of our problems would disappear. People get caught up on "You can't define what a good person is so you are wrong" or "a person is the result of nature as well as nature." These points are actually irrelevant. Just because you can't define something precisely with modern methods doesn't mean anything. And the way that a person becomes a certain way doesn't matter. The face remains that it is people who do and create everything and therefore the characteristics of those people determine the outcome. So if you don't like something, don't go to a protest. It would be infinitely more impactful to educate and mentor a child you know. But it would be much less noisy and visceral, so not many people do it even if they are aware of how important it is. Anyway, besides giving these poor countries the tools to succeed, there is nothing we can do. Like was pointed out in the video, allowing all the best people to leave and come here only makes the situation worse. Also eugenics is good. Take a moment to actually think about eugenics before disagreeing with me. Most people never get past the hurdle of seeing past the propaganda where eugenics means Nazi concentration camps and forced sterilization. There is more than one way to skin a cat and the benefits of eugenics not only include saving billions from needless suffering at the hands of genetic diseases (ie most diseases directly or indirectly) but also preventing our country and the world from slipping into a dark eventuality that can be recognized immediately after my aforementioned insight: letting the scales of a society slide toward "Petty and stupid" will, like magic, cause any country to fall into a third world state.
"If you have a little bit of money, do you hire a freelance programmer?"

Long before you spend any money trying to build this, you should probably do some research to see whether there would be any market for such a product.

For example, see if you can find 50 people (average folks, not data scientists) who think this might be something they'd want to use.

Personally, I can't think of any uses I'd have for such a product.
Can't they just claim it's an upcoming feature they are testing internally before release, that will be rolled out soon?
A more accurate title would be "Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all capital by 2030". Wealth is not equivalent to capital. The vast majority of capital is tied up in the market capitalization of corporations, and only a small fraction of the market capitalization corresponds to actual physical wealth. If tomorrow the global stock market took a 10% dip across the board, then nearly 10% of the world's capital would vanish in the blink of an eye, but the worlds material wealth would not change at all.

There's no doubt that there is dramatic capital inequality in the world, but as long as that capital is being put to productive use (generating and distributing wealth) all is well. There's also vast wealth inequality (though, numbers wise, it's not nearly as bad as capital inequality), but as long as the minimum wealth is not desolation, wealth inequality is not a fundamental problem. As humans (or just as animals), we will always crave what we do not have, but if the cost of fixing wealth inequality is transferring capital to those incapable of applying it productively, thereby lowering the worlds total wealth, I do not believe we should bear that cost. Rather than focusing on wealth inequality, we should focus on building solid safety nets and proper incentives.
Keep in mind the modern supermarket is a pretty recent thing. We take it for granted that you can get just about anything at any time of year, but it's not something most grandparents would recognise. Heck, even I find there are things in supermarkets that weren't around when I was a kid (Quinoa for instance).

So finding stuff without gluten might have been pretty hard.

Also with anything complex like medicine there are just so many confounding issues that until you have the actual cause, many things sound like they could be it. There would be lots of dead ends and things obscuring the the true cause.
In this sense typing is like unit-testing it would seem. You can make your program "better" by adding more unit-tests to it. But more tests you have the more work it will be to modify your tests, to accommodate the changes in your program.

The more strict your type-system is the more things you can prove and thus understand about your program. But if you need to change your program it may no longer compile with the existing types. Does your type-system then make it easy to change your types so they reflect your new program?

Now assumably when you are developing a new program it is changing all the time. If you fix its types early doesn't it actually make it more work to create your program?

Once your application is done and works and is big it is essential that it is "typed" so that you can see what changes don't require changes in the types vs. what changes would require a lot of rewriting of the types all over the place.

I think the fact that many useful programs are written in dynamically typed languages speaks for this. Small programs don't need types.

Does this mean that optional typing is a good feature?
A Stroll Through the Minefields–Avoiding Startup Tarpits
But "Linux compatibility" describes the binary format and that's what I care about: Whether it's runnable on my Linux-based operating system.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15735789

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798275
The banks are using the zeros to back loans.

Most wealth already isn't hoarded. It's things like amazon.com and jets and buildings and so on.
As I said in another post, you can get a hosted build server from Visualstudio.com (VSTS) with unlimited Git repos, with 5 users and a hosted build server with 240 minutes per month. You can get a hosted build server with unlimited minutes for $40 a month. If you need more than one simultaneous build - buy more build agents.

VSTS has hosted build servers for Windows, IOS, Linux, and Android.

It's even nicer not to have to maintain servers at all.

I try to avoid maintaining servers. We are moving to serverless functions with Lambda and serverless Docker with AWS Fargate.
Maybe you mean they tend to be dictatorships that rob the people of their countries wealth.
I don't disagree at all. I just don't see how railing against the notion of inequality does anything to address this - the US collects enough in tax revenue to solve these problems already. What it needs is better policy.

I should also mention that I live in Canada which, though flawed in many ways, seems to have struck a better balance.
> Are you somehow not the product for DuckDuckGo?

Of course I am, but I'm okay with a more honest business model: when I type the words "wallaby porn" into their website, they'll show me ads from people who have bid on those words. (I assume there is porn for that, because there is porn for everything. I don't really want to know.) When I later search for "crosscut saws," they'll show me ads for saws, and not try to "retarget" me with wallaby porn, or mountain bikes, or whatever else I once browsed. They won't become a world-bestriding colossus, but they can make an honest living showing ads next to search results. I remember a company that used to do that. Name started with a "G".
I believe we are going to find it increasingly essential to view corporations as a second government that has a particular relationship with the nominal one.
>Since collision resistance is a stronger notion of security than preimage resistance and second preimage resistance, achieving collision resistance achieves all three.

Under what assumptions and definitions is this true? For instance the function f(x) = x is not preimage resistant but is very collision resistant. I've never heard the claim that collision resistance implies preimage resistance, although clearly collision resistance implies second-preimage resistance since a second-preimage is a collision.
>> Top 1% of earning, not necessarily top 1% of wealth.

When it comes to hanging the rich nobody cares about such details.
This was one of the more interesting comments on this thread! Thanks for sharing.
[video] Will Wright: Using machine learning for interactive storytelling (2001)
To put it in perspective: today you are in the global top 1% if you have at least $744,400 in household assets.

You are in the top 10% if you have at least $71,560; top 50% (median) if you have at least $2,220. And the mean wealth is $52,819 per adult.

source: https://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21710771...
Imagine you and I cannot afford each others services because all of the money is owned by those greedy 1%.

So like slaves, we sweat away for them. Day in. Day out.

But if we agree on a new currency where you and I own 100000 coins each, we can happily start working for each other.
I totally empathize with your situation, but globally the numbers are irrefutable.

That's not to say that many people aren't still struggling - we can always do better, but I think there's reason to be optimistic.
irony: http://nordic.businessinsider.com/facebook-delete-sent-messa...
Your $30 phone likely cost far more to build, perhaps hundreds. You bought it at a huge discount probably, since you said it was after the platform was dead.

Therefore, this statement doesn't make sense to me:

"For a $30 phone, it was incredibly fast and smooth."
TORNAADOS – A mobile feature checklist
It's arguably unstable though, regardless of quality of life improving overall. Things can, and have, changed very quickly. And so far the species hasn't adequately predicted the sequence of events leading up to destabilization, and how to avoid the inevitable equalizer: war

The top 1% should worry, but there's something euphoric about being that wealthy, almost like oxygen deprivation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheide...
You are right. The fact that your personal data is not being used for advertisements does not mean that you are not the product still. Perhaps that phrasing is indeed too harsh for some of the services on the list.

I changed the link for Windows. When I saw this source, there was no `Update` clause. I don't use Windows myself so not sure what I should add there instead and what category I should move it to. From what I know, Windows shows you ads in the OS itself which I find absurd.
And if nature/world/universe was sentient, it would be angry at us and it would want to fight us. And if tumors were sentient, they would assert their rights to live and write their own rules.

Alas, we're the only sentient beings in this comparison, which makes tumors bad and universe a resource, by our standards - i.e. the only ones that matter.
Hello, sorry to report but Roboform only backs up your favorites. It does not sync favorites. When I delete or add a bookmark, it does not sync bookmarks even to the Roboform system. And when I add or delete a favorite within the Roboform backup, it also does not sync with the other brownsers, thus making it invalid. What roboform does is just a backup of bookmarks and not a bookmark synchronization. So correct me if I'm wrong because I could not get it to work.
> Income/wealth inequality always happens and probably always will - it's trivially easy to show how this happens using game theory even if trade is relatively fair.

Do you have a reference for this? Interested to read more (game theoretic basis specifically).
Who would be considered "poor", however? Unemployed individuals, or simply low-earning ones, and in which country? Giving the declining birth rate in first-world countries, reducing reproduction in rich countries would further increase the population imbalance between rich and poor countries.

It must also be asked, is improving equality a goal worth pursuing? You could improve equality by making every single individual dirt-poor. Improving average living standards would be a better in my world-view - and by all metrics, that has been going up since the start of the industrial revolution.

Birth rates almost invariably go down as a society gets richer and more educated - therefore the goal of improving average welfare could be better served by improving the lives of third-worlders directly, which would naturally decrease their birth-rates in the long-term.

Another argument could be that many "poor" individuals have positive economic impact - they are consumers of goods increasing overall economic output, or provide useful labor at a low price, allowing many others to have goods and services they could not otherwise afford.
I dont have any issue with editing comments. I use the edit feature constantly myself.

Im just making clear I am not trying to cause agitation. Thats not the intent.

I try to be sparing with opinions. I dislike having to type prefix or postfix statements with "IMO" again and again, but I want to make explicit what is only an opinion versus what are facts or observations because ("IMO") opinions are almost always worthless. I prefer facts and questions.

Most of the volume of posts I made the past few weeks were not opinions but were excerpts and pointers to articles: facts and some journalists opinions.

The truth is I waste too much time "interacting" with this addictive forum. Its a distraction.

If you ban me from ever posting anything ever again on HN, in all honesty, you will probably be doing me a favour.
>Communism went away.

Not really. Plenty of people now pushing for the equality of outcome. Which is a cornerstone of communism.
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Methods, Computed, and Watchers in Vue.js
> Could articles[5] be used to do things like pass variables or instantiate objects?

I wrote about something similar to this (called "type-named objects") in a post last year[1]. The idea is that for small utility methods, you shouldn't have to interrupt your main flow of thought to come up with names for your formal parameters; in fact, you shouldn't even have to name your locals. If you're working in a language with a (perhaps already verbose) static type system, you can just leverage that.

So, for example, instead of this:

appendNode(node: Node): void {
this.tail.next = node;
this.tail = node;
}

... you can do:

appendNode(Node): void {
this.tail.next = the Node;
this.tail = the Node;
}

This does introduce some precedence/binding gotchas that I go more into. But that hints towards further improvements. From the aforementioned post, you could end up with a language that allows:

the ControlMessage's id := defocus

Or, if you add support for "passive voice" to your language:

id from the ControlMessage := defocus

Completely unrelated, but related to the use of "the", Carmack wrote a tweet[2] that I've got embedded in the comments of a project of mine.

> I have moved to naming global singletons with a The* prefix -- ThePacketServer, TheMasterServer, TheVoip, etc. Feels pretty good.

Since then, I stopped creating "proper" singletons altogether. Instead, it'd be a quasi-singleton, where I write a `MasterServer` class, and then bless an instance as `TheMasterServer`. Application code will always import, refer to, and otherwise operate on the latter, but tests are free to instantiate their own. This is especially useful if you have implemented some sort of developer switch in the UI that allows you to launch an embedded test harness within a live, running instance of the app. In that case, you don't exactly want your tests to be fiddling with your "real" singleton.

1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2017/02/16/novel-ideas-for-prog...

2. https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/575788622554628096
I removed Iridium from the list. You are right, 5 months is too long for no updates in a browser.

Also I agree with you on WhatsApp. I mention now that it does use Signal protocol. However WhatsApp sends user's entire contact books to their servers as well as them logging all the metadata around messages which is very revealing.
> This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine.

'Allopath' is considered a derogatory term by the modern doctors who are aware of its origin.

> If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind of treatment sometimes opposed by homeopaths and naturopaths.

The core of the resistance to vaccines is an opposition to the idea that a disease's context doesn't matter. Improved sanitation, refrigeration, insights into adequate nutrition, and other improvements in technology have done just as much as vaccination to vanquish the diseases of antiquity.
Actually, government is generally a limiting factor on the power of wealth, just like it is a limiting factor of the power of violence etc. That's kind of why we have governments.

Now of course wealth tries to subvert that, and particularly in the anglo-saxon countries, the US first among them, it has been particularly successful.
And you've missed the point that RTBF isn't automatic, and that it is balanced against the right for search engines to publish information.
Riches are not working at all, so it is not important how much taxes they will pay, because all taxes will be paid by workers.
That depends on the specific details. In publicly trades companies they sell their shares, causing the shares price to drop and the company valuation to drop. This will make it harder for the company to get credit and will lower the value of the owners shares.

Bigger investors can have more direct force, either in voting power or in assigning their own director to the board.
Author here. Yes, vial-http is not a REST tool, there are no discovery and navigation and all other high level stuff. But it can provide pretty comfortable experience with REST services too. SEO :)
> Which they are not: real wages for the bottom four quintiles have been stagnant since the seventies and the 1% have captured essentially all income gains from productivity growth since then. That is the source of the discontent.

I'm talking globally. The American middle class has done uniquely poorly during this period. (I'm not American)

Still - if you can tell me with a straight face that you'd rather be poor in the 70s vs today, I would label you crazy. It's almost impossible to account for the changing quality and abundance of goods - huge advances in medicine, computation, a plethora of high quality goods and services. Life today is qualitatively different than it was 40-50 years ago.

>You're trying to pull a fast one here. The statistic about "a billion people have been lifted out of poverty" has been greatly overblown: it's technically true, but it turns out most of those people are in China

How is that a fast one? A billion people is a billion people. If the fact that they're primarily Chinese bothers you we'll need to have a different discussion.

> "It's only class warfare when we fight back".

Who are we fighting? This is an entirely unhelpful rhetoric.
Poverty is relative to local cost levels and living standards.

It's the level at which, within your local market, essentials of life are not attainable.
By some reports Cadillac CT6 has the best autopilot implementation on the market. And as a BMW owner myself, after the 4 year mark things do start to break down, and boy is it ever expensive to fix. I still like the car, but for my next one I’ll be looking at American luxury brands.
Having to define the schema is the major hangup for me in my workflow. I would prefer a wrapper that could run within unix pipelines around arbitrary text data files, but they all use SQLite.

I personally have been using harelba’s q (the un-googleable utility), which is just fine.

It would be great not to shift gears into SQLite syntax and date formatting all the time. Does anyone know of a similar tool that runs over postgres?
One could just as well make the opposite argument (and many have, mostly famously Rousseau): humans originally lived in a condition of equanimity and plenty and it was the development of complex social organisation and property which led to all of the maladies which you ascribe to 'the laws of nature'. IMO there is no 'neutral' description of the abstract nature of the social condition as such.

All forms of social organisation require force. Capitalism is based on a particular configuration of property and contract relations established and upheld through coercion. It is not 'neutral' or 'natural'.