skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not clear from the article:

- What hardship / not-boring is (i.e. Buffet's father became a congressman when he was still in his formative years; but that doesn't count for Bezos because his adoptive father was well-off).

- What proportion of "old" billionaires come from it

- What proportion of "new" billionaires come from it

- The difference between the two proportions, and whether it is significant. A brief mention is made of inherited wealth (which is arguably the most boring, by the author's definition) but isn't discussed further.

- Why billionaires are used as the definition, given that exclusively analyzing outliers is probably a poor way to assess class mobility.

The article optimizes for words rather than clarity of thought.
"without correctness you've got nothing."

Sure... but define "correctness".

Suppose my manager comes to me with some incredibly complicated problem. It's going to take six months to solve properly. Suppose in the first three weeks I implement a program that is 98% correct, and let's say it can detect the other 2% and kick it out for a human to solve. But it clearly does not fully and correctly eliminate the problem as brought to me by my manager. Have I solved the problem?

The correct answer is not "no, because your solution is incorrect and there is no such thing as an 'incorrect solution' because all solutions must be correct to even be solutions; you have no professional choice but to spend the next 5 months and a week implementing the correct solution". The correct answer is "the question is underspecified". I need to go to the manager and work with them on the question of what the benefit of just deploying this is, what the benefit of doing it "correctly" according to the original specification is versus the cost, and whether or not there are any other in-between choices. The business may require the full solution, sure. On the other hand, your manager may be inclined to thank you profusely for the 98% solution in a fraction of the time because it was far more than they dreamed possible and is way more than enough to make the remaining 2% nowhere near the largest problem we have now.

"Correctness" is only fully defined in a situation where the spec is completely immutable. Specifications are almost never completely immutable. So for the most part, everyone in this conversation using the word "correct" without being very careful about what they mean are not using a well-defined word.

It's all about costs and benefits, not correctness and incorrectness. For nearly two decades, Python's sort algorithm was technically incorrect: http://envisage-project.eu/proving-android-java-and-python-s... Does this mean that any program that used Python sort was worth "nothing", because it was not correct? Obviously this is absurd (in practice at least), so correctness must be understood in terms of costs & benefits to make any sense. And such an understanding must also be grounded in an understanding of the mutability of requirements as well, to make any sense of the real world.

From this perspective, it honestly isn't even 100% clear to me what prioritizing "correctness" over everything else would even mean. That we are slaves to the first iteration of the spec that comes out, no matter what? (Obviously not, but I can't come up with anything better that it might mean.) Correctness can't be prioritized everything else because it can only be understood holistically as part of the whole process. There is no way to isolate it and hold it up as the top priority over everything else. And there is no way for the correctness of a bit of software to exceed the scope of the specification itself, almost by definition, which in the real world tends to put a pretty tight cap on how correct your software can even be in theory, honestly.
Got it. Thanks for the clarification.
This puts a dark stain on Carlos Ghosn's previously model career. My bet would be that Renault will be outed next with similar falsification of data.
I think that's true for all of them except Bezos. I get the sense that, unlike the others, he's actually got some of the old-school visionary in him. But maybe that's just his mythical image.
I'm still curious to see if you would like to argue that that Japan was winning OR that the bombing was unjust. It would be interesting because the former is utterly unsupportable and the latter argument always rests on abandoning your first point and arguing that Japan would have surrendered without blowing up its cities.

If you wish to hold onto the fiction that Japan was winning you are literally arguing that an evil empire allied with the nazis taking over the world is a superior outcome compared to Japan losing the population of 2 cities.
As democratic as the US is or isn't, its government does not answer to me. China one also doesn't. So, what difference does it make?

If I'm developing some kind on tech, both have been caught using their state agencies to do industrial spying; if I'm active in some push for some non-mainstream activism (like, abolishing copyrights), both have done out of jurisdiction enforcement of their policies, and there isn't much difference on means either.

Personally, I'd imagine China spying on me is a smaller risk than the US, since my country is more under political influence of the US. But whatever you do, you will have to protect or subject yourself to government spying, thus there isn't any big difference.
> a widening chasm between the rich and everyone else also presents political problems

This is definitely something we're already seeing, with contempt between people of different educational levels, and the rising distrust between each other.

On a related point however, I'd just like to mention that nowadays, the Internet has made learning and information sooooo much more free and accessible. Although you have to have a computer in the first place, I think simple and cheap computers like chromebooks, or perhaps the smartphone you carry, allow you access to much more information than before.

Being in a family where our earnings are below the US poverty line in a high-cost area of residence, I am deeply appreciative of the wonderful people on the Internet that have opened up their information for free access, and especially to open-source for making programs and computing infinitely more accessible.

The problem with all this of course, is that you have to have a computer and a computing device in the first place. Internet can be very expensive, and can sometimes be easy for a lot of families to cut away because it may be perceived as unnecessary. The only solution I can think to that would be to provide free internet for everyone, and educate them on how to use it effectively beyond just the social media apps. Perhaps there are better ones?
That's the case today: ARM CPUs are sourced from different manufacturers and packaged together with other cores into SoCs, which have wildly varying support from their vendors. Some of these processors also have custom extensions. If you're worried about chip security when anyone can manufacture a chip, then sorry, we're already there, and RISC-V doesn't change that.
I'm looking forward to interning at Zynga when I was still in high school too someday.
Think you know how disruptive AI is? Think again
>", you should instead store time in UTC everywhere

It is not possible to store UTC unambiguously on the db server for all future local wall-clock times. (Previous comment about the erroneous assumption of "UTC everywhere" being a "simple solution".[1])

Therefore, redefining "correct" to be "store UTC everywhere" achieves the exact opposite: an incorrect and buggy program. That's because the "universal" in Universal Time Code doesn't apply to governments changing DST and Time Zone rules in the future.

Pure UTC doesn't have enough metadata to encode future unknowns. For correct handling with zero loss of data, one must store the user's intended "wall-clock" time in his local TZ in the db.

There's irreducible complexity when dealing with user-specified appointment times so an uncompromising fixation on programming a "simple" implementation with pure UTC-on-dbserver and localtime-at-only-at-browser-Javascript ... will lead to a broken calendaring program.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10990240
Maybe we are misunderstanding each other, but while you don't need an "extra" container, you do need a container with some known height to vertically center the content in:
http://jsfiddle.net/c20gq4pz/
A friend works in ARM and was extremely surprised (negatively) when I shared this link with him

RISC-V may, perhaps, compete in two fields with ARM: education, where ARM doesn't give a fuck, and hacker boards, which is a tiny market compared to smartphones, smarttvs and so on. There have been around 15 million Raspberry Pi (the most popular SBC) sold in 6 years. Samsung sold 321 million smartphones last year alone.

Whoever is thinking today about replacing some production anything with a RISC-V is insane to begin with, but this campaign ups the insanity further.
>3) The writer provides multiple counterpoint examples to the thesis in the text with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sergey Brin as being tech billionaires that came from nothing.

They didn't come from nothing - Elon Musk was 'bullied' but was still fairly rich. Bezos may have been adopted, but his 'new' father was an engineer with Exxon, and he went to a relatively fancy high school ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Palmetto_High_School ), Brin is listed as an immigrant, but his father was professor of mathematics at University of Maryland, Brin also went to a reasonably fancy high school ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt_High_School_... ). To me Brin, Bezos, Musk are far shots from the article's 'earlier' examples of people like Warren Buffett who grew up with unemployed parents.
Timehop Security Breach Affects the Company’s Entire 21M Userbase
But it got demonstrably worse afterwards. It went from a quiet thing to a well funded effort, all in the name of "defending 'merica from terrorism". GW Bush and his admin enacted the law which Obama just made worse.
> They didn't need to work their backsides off to get to where they are.

Isn't is possible that they got incredibly lucky AND worked their backsides off?

It should be clear that (1) abundant money and (2) abundant brains and (3) abundant luck are ALL necessary criteria for out-sized successes.
IQ birth lottery + upper-middle class parents + being at the right place at right time
Correctness then is a trade off against other factors. Also it seems correctness in this case is a continuum rather than a binary choice. And you would prefer to trade other important factors for "true" correctness.

But I'll assume that you want the software that calculates your paycheck to be correct.
Barriers to building wealth always existed. Large parts of the population had no chance to do what Buffet's dad did because of discrimination and other issues back then. Today it's a matter of the level of education you can afford to have access to.

The bootstrap mythos was always just that. There is typically a large degree of privilege and luck involved.
I interpreted this as advocating for using a model with the lowest-level abstraction that you think will work. If you start with the simplest abstraction possible, you produce a simpler and more maintainable system. You're also in a better position to incorporate further abstraction later as your understanding of the problem space evolves.

This seems like a good opportunity to recommend Rich Hickey's talk "Simple Made Easy": https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
i've used a mix of ides and text editors over the years but i've committed entirely to emacs for the last 6 or 7. the value of having a tool that i can adapt to my needs and use anywhere for anything greatly outweighs any capricious ide conveniences.
Dustin Moskovitz (number 5 at Facebook) and his wife Cari Tuna are very non-boring billionaires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Moskovitz

They started the Open Philanthropy Project, arguably the most exciting charitable organization on the planet.

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reaso...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08795-0
In my experience you need a paradigm shift then. If your earth centric approach is creating a need for epicycles of complex code, then you need to paradigm shift to heliocentric which eliminates the epicycles and replaces them with a simple elliptical model.
Thanks for the nitpicks! Going to update the Mac version too when I release the Linux/Windows versions, this is super helpful.
Combustion engines don't rely on heat so much as pressure (can be viewed as the same thing in some models).

There's no need to have "excess" heat in an engine.
> Nissan said all of the affected vehicles met Japanese auto standards. The data alterations were made by staff to meet Nissan’s own stricter internal standards, it said.

Seems unlikely that there will be any criminal liability unless Nissan wants to sue it's own employees.
Feels like the old maxim, learn from the mistakes of others. I wonder what they could have done differently? Seems like raising capital to promote the business was necessary due to competition, but ultimately the amount they raised was their trojan horse.
That's an excellent clarification since so many people aren't getting his nuanced view.

I also disagree. I have yet in my life see any programmer crank out a simple solution on the first try for anything that isn't a trivial requirement. The way I think most of us work is to create a complex solution first and to have to refactor at least a couple of times before we get to simple and elegant. That doesn't mean the complex version didn't work.

I've made plenty of code that is bug free according to the requirements. I tend to start with tests and I'm pretty good at figuring out edge cases and other ways to break my code before I've even written it, so what I end up with is pretty robust. But the first version is rarely elegant or simple. By the time I'm done with the first version I understand the problem space so much better and might throw out 90% of my original code in the first refactor. Am I the only one doing this? Sometimes it even takes weeks or months to get to simplicity. I keep understanding the requirements better and better and noticing how I could eliminate code, often after I've noticed some code I'm still not happy with and having slept on it. Sleep does wonders for seeing how to simplify.
> Today, Zuckerberg is a moral leader

Pardon?

Zuckerberg is anything but a moral leader, he's the polar opposite of a moral leader.
Did Warren Buffet really know more hardship than today's young billionaires?

His father - one of the few college educated of his time - was already a stockbroker when Warren Buffet was a kid, and a member of the US Congress when Warren Bufffet was 12. Warren Buffet is white, male and of the "greatest generation" that went on to rule what became the most powerful country on Earth.

I get it that he wasn't born rich, but he was middle class just as much as today's billionaires.
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No idea why this is here but man I'm glad it is, the descriptions are hilariously on point
"Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end"

. . . RFripp
> It's great for sure but there were deep dive books much more comprehensive than this on the clr and jit that I read a decade ago.

Out of interest, which books are you referring to? I'm always on the lookout for more (decent) technical books to read! :-)
> VAG just got caught first.

Sure. Since the VW incident, many cars from several of the big automakers have been found to fail emissions tests.

> I wonder if anyone will criticize the regulations instead of shaming auto manufacturers.

It's telling that the automakers have chosen to cheat rather than call out the tests for being unrealistic -- or build a slightly less powerful car.

By doing so, they forfeit any possible sympathy from me. You don't get to cheat on a test, brag about how you passed, and then if you're discovered, claim that the test was too hard. Too late.
From the FAQ:

> Are paywalls ok?

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
Interesting that he hit on the top three points in the pony philosophy[1] but in a very different order than they chose. For pony, the order is:

1. Correctness

2. Performance

3. Simplicity

4. Consistency

5. Completeness

I think I tend to agree with that order more. While simplicity tends to be helpful with performance and correctness, there are very few cases where you'd sacrifice correctness/performance for simplicity if implementation time/cost were not a factor. Let's not confuse a way of getting to the goal with the goal itself.

> Incorrectness is simply not allowed. It’s pointless to try to get stuff done if you can’t guarantee the result is correct.

[1] https://www.ponylang.org/discover/
Indeed, that jumped out at me as well. Whoever wrote that is either on the take or terribly uninformed.
I felt the same way during my lectures. I wanted to use Python because I had already implemented the fuzzy functions I needed for obstacle avoidance and it is overall simpler, but most people on class used C++ anyway.
How Much Safer Should Self-Driving Cars Be? Try 0%
US laws are pretty clear in that foreigners (AKA non-citizens) don't have those rights their Constitution give to their people, so, again, what changes?
So tech billionaires are boring and everyone else isn't? Name five non-tech billionaires who are more knowledgeable or interesting than Musk. Or Gates.
This. To whatever extent Mark Zuckerberg's success is attributable to luck, let's not forget that he's still probably one of the ten smartest people in the tech industry.
Without knowing the general driving population's driving habits, it's difficult to estimate how effective driving will improve fuel efficiency and/or reduce pollution. Sure there are known bad driving habits like sudden accerlation/sudden stops will increase fuel consumption, but what about road sign design, speed limits, traffic light designs and Electronic Toll Collection systems? Those are all factors of fuel efficiency.

Also, the government regulation on emission is going to get tighter and tighter due to incentives to push for EV adoption. So arguing emission test method is a moot point.
How is embedding software that changes the way the engine behaves during tests versus during actual usage not fraud?

The numbers may have been accurate _for an engine with the 'limit emissions' mode enabled_ but it's still fraudulent if you do not make that explicitly clear.
Isn't this like an enhanced SAT solver?
What is this comment trying to say? That a simple program that doesn't work today is better than a complex program that works today, but that might not work in some nebulous future? Not all complexity is reducible. The point of software is to work correctly, not to satisfy the author's aesthetic notions, which is what most of the modern hype over simplicity boils down to.
Take the dread out of writing API clients
Except 11 out of 10 such tools come as a command line tool that has to be integrated to your IDE, often by someone else.
A lot of the older billionaires who had more "interesting" backgrounds grew up during the Great Depression. A more likely explanation then, is that we simply didn't have a Great Depression 30 years ago for today's young billionaires to have grown up during. Zuckerberg and other young billionaires grew up in the 80s when the economy was pretty good.
Scary! Scary! Don't go in there - it's SCARY!

But scary for whom? For ARM maybe? Is it just me, or is this pure FUD?
Try to find a larger table, and manage your risk very carefully because you are still fragile and it is probably easier to go from $1M back to nothing than it is to go from $1M to $2M.

The thing you definitely shouldn't do is change your lifestyle, that way you will be almost certainly back to square #1 after a couple of years.
I grew up in USSR. History textbooks talked only about Great Patriotic War. 1941-06-22 to 1945-05-09, USSR vs. Germany, nothing elze.
> Which of those two counties has invaded dozen of countries over these recent decades?

Ehh... Isn't it both?
I've always found basic text manipulation lacking in the GUI apps I've used. "Make this comment fit in 100 columns without losing paragraphs" "move the next line up to the end of this line" "go to line 647" "move the cursor to the beginning of this method" etc.

My knowledge dates from the "one keystroke to convert this to a JavaBean!" era, though. I'm guessing people don't do that anymore.
> I'm seeing a lot of these poorly written articles lately. Journalists have a preconceived point they want to make, make it in the headline, and then pretend they're writing something that supports it but not really supporting their thesis at all, counting on the fact that most people are only going to skim the article and not critically evaluate it so they can put their idea into people's heads 'Hey, young billionaires are all totes boring, right?", inception style.

Honestly, though, isn't that what information is? You can try to make it perfect, but I bet you'd wind up inventing just as much new stuff as you would uncovering 'the truth'. It's a philosophical argument, what is perspective, what is understanding, what 'should' be conveyed versus what is simply being repeated, what has been discovered, what is the true representation of reality versus what is a selectively biased data set.

There's probably a balance of how much criticism a journalist can expect to obtain when they are looking to uncover something mundane and tailored to a crowd, versus something truly groundbreaking.

Honestly I think a lot of people are just exhausted from the internet. Everywhere you look, it's either extreme criticism on 'group think' or being uncertain whether to engage in agreement because agreement can be criticized as 'group think'. Then you get divergence of opinion, need to distinguish oneself, but you can be different in a billion ways and that still doesn't make every variation of different better than whatever base you opted out of, especially if that change is done in a lazy, circular, thoughtless fashion.

It's very circular. That doesn't necessarily make it bad. I don't think trying to speak out necessarily means one is trying to shove ideas into people's heads inception style. I honestly think if that's something you are afraid of, that's probably because you've entertained the thought at least once or twice yourself. And that sort of stuff just happens, being a fish of indeterminate size in a pond of indeterminate size.
It was rather popular in Russia for a while.
Best deals to go cruising
Or unstated.