skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> some of my messages end up in Gmail spam folders (very recently received a reply to a message I sent 3 years ago because of that, for instance)

How did this happen if Gmail deletes spam after some weeks?
One of his criticisms was the (usual) critique of C's null-terminated char arrays (to be precise, that failure to include an null-terminator in a char array causes overflow, thus functions needed to be designed to accommodate such cases), and another was stylistic critique, one with which I agree with ZS, that optional curly braces should never be omitted, no matter how mundane.
That's sensible, but sometimes great things emerge from being not sensible (RAH's "all progress depends on the unreasonable man"). Provided the upfront cost is zero and it's taken as a fun, lighthearted project, the experiment doesn't seem harmful. And it gets you out in contact with "customers" - who knows what you'll learn?

1. Perhaps instead of the post's "to see if there is a demand for your service.", to also see what the demand is, i.e. how much people would pay.

2. Being first in itself is a competitive advantage (not a very secure one, but it is one). You have the opportunity to discover other competitive advantages, by understanding the many aspects of the specifc business and its specific customers, and creating solutions. These could be bespoke, but some could also build on top of open source (as infrastructure, like everyone else does) and ad networks.

It's not a safe bet! It's like a series of dynamic moves in rock climbing without looking first. No one would fund you! But if you are observant and capable, who knows? Even if you don't achieve what you wanted, you might achieve something else.

3. Why couldn't it start locally, grow slowly, and be bootstrapped - assuming the transport needed is local? I think a problem is, if you do demostrate the concept is viable, someone with capital will just take the rest of the market - and then the bit you did too.
You can "print" unlimited amount of money but Earth resources are limited, moreover its usage is overshot (Earth Overshoot Day is 29 July 2019). So the problem is how the money is spent. We should tax money that spent to decrease Overshoot Day.
I’m pretty happy with systemd timers, but I’ll put fcron on the list of things to have a look at. Thanks for the pointer.
Automation requires capital, not so much labor.
My point is that the gain in time could we be mostly due to automating other parts of the system that are currently done manually.
The problem with inheritance taxes, property taxes, etc. is that they erode the meaning of ownership and permanence.

For example, if I as a parent want to save up and give up my immediate gratification from spending that money so my children have a head start or even a luxurious cushion, what’s wrong with that? That’s me spending my utility the way I want.

With property taxes, ownership turns into renting - you never really own anything and even things you already bought can have their ownership eroded into nothing by subsequent policy.
Poor is fractal from this perspective. Like stack ranking, rich people would have to invent poor people in order to save their own hides when their turn comes around.
I see people throwing ideas and most of these ideas rely on politicians and/or govt doing something.

Is there a non govt or non politician dependent way of solving inequality? facebook connected the world not govt or politicians. Google made knowledge and information available to the whole world not a politician or a govt. (I understand there are down sides to these companies products but so is there to govts/politicians)

Even as a thought experiment I would like to see some ideas here to solve inequality in way that just keeps the politician and govt out of it (cos all they do is make the common people foolishly quarrel against each other while they retain power and do what they think is right)
Is that consumption measured by units or total value? I'm sure China could compete for cheap smartphone chips and microcontrollers but it would take them a while to make something like a Xeon.
It’s not just developers that need to be more involved in UI testing but scrum masters, stake holders, management, etc. Automated tests should be viewed as shippable code, and their creation and maintenance should be factored into every story.

Without those “above” developers on board, you end up with a hodgepodge suite of tests because developers/QA are forced to focus on delivering features instead of a testable product and reliable tests.
The flip side of this is that many new JavaScript features can be either transpiled to ES5 syntax, or polyfilled. It will be great when we don’t need to anymore, but I’m always pleasantly surprised by just how much modern JS can be used in, say, IE11, just by having Babel be part of the build step.

CSS unfortunately doesn’t work that way, so apart from graceful degradation you’re out of luck.
The life sciences advance one funeral at a time
This seems like a really uncharitable view of mentorship.

I have never felt condescended to when I was being mentored by someone with more skills or experience in any of my jobs, and I certainly hope that the people I help through one on ones, code review, and pairing now don’t feel as though there’s any condescension in it. I think mostly, we all just want to become as good as we can be at our jobs.
They don't have to be designed with motors and such accessible to contamination.
The seat is designed to fall away after the parachute deploys.
Local inequality may have gone up lately, largely due to loose monetary policy driving up prices for assets which most workers do not (and choose not to) own. Such paper wealth can disappear rapidly during an asset repricing (market crash), as we can see in this graph[1]. Also, this is the result of Keynesianist monetary policy, a far cry away from the persuasions of Milton Friedman.

However, global inequality - especially comparing the economic classes across countries - is way down. For instance, Chinese standard of living is far higher today than in the past, as is the cost of their labor - relative to an American worker. In due time, many a Chinese worker will find themselves uncompetitive due to increased costs - much like the American worker before them.

What would put things back into balance is a massive global re-pricing of labor. This is politically unfavorable and those countries that maintain a reserve currency can put it off for a long time.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/07/Top-Incomes.png
> The problem with inheritance taxes, property taxes, etc. is that they erode the meaning of ownership and permanence.

That's just it, we never really own anything anyway.

If the rich are richer than us, it's because we gave our wealth to them, or rather let them take it.

To he who has much, more will be given...
In California's Bay Area there are people sleeping under bridges a few steps from houses that cost millions of dollars.
Not always, though!

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

Poor pilot was likely gifted a new callsign after that one.
A political solution that doesn’t involve politicians or the government will just create its own politicians and government to sustain it. Look what happened during the American and French revolutions, or the Russian revolution. It always starts out as “we don’t need that” and in the end you simply recreate that.
>Also, imagine how annoyed astronomers would be if they found out the biggest most advanced space telescope in history was in space and pointing down

NASA's under-development WFIRST telescope is being built using old outdated hardware that the NRO didn't want any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
Do you not understand that if a top secret spy satellite is gifted to astronomers, a cover story - i.e. a lie - will be made up about how it is developed by brilliant civilians?
Sure thing, but what do we have now?

Most people are only successful because of their inheritance.

If you would be forbidden to give your kids more than a million that would solve that problem pretty well, I guess.
If people were less focused on acquiring wealth (such as property), or their estate needed to sell much of it when someone passed, it would probably bring the prices down as a whole - demand would be less and there would be much more liquidity. For things like housing, that would be good for everybody. All those houses wouldn't magically disappear, they would just be cheaper, because a lot of the investment/speculation demand would fall.
A 120mph minimum in rural areas is probably a way to get more people into rural hospitals in those areas...
As much as in theory inheritance tax is a solution for the problem, I don't think in practice it works well. The ultra rich will always have avenues to escape tax. The middle class instead, trying to secure a better future for the family, will get hit the hardest.

I am conflicted about this way of trying to solve the problem.

Also, this is assuming the tax money gets used efficiently and not to the advantage of the top earners.
My understanding of trickle down economics is that you get more economic activity by putting a dollar in the hands of the bottom 10% than the top 10%, which makes sense since the propensity to consumer is higher at the bottom. By investing, the top % supports invention and innovation. By consuming, the bottom % validates those inventions and innovations that are worthwhile, versus those that are worthless. Both functions are required in order to keep the economy humming along producing and consuming new goods and services at a rapid pace. There would seem to be some function which maximizes the utility of each group in their respective roles. That's what I would want tax policy to reinforce.
> Is there a non govt or non politician dependent way of solving inequality?

The guillotine?

No, I mean seriously, if you rule out the political process, you just leave violence as a way to change things. It is to prevent that that government and then democracy were invented. If you consider this process broken, you are screwed and need to revolt.

Concentration of wealth is a well-known and well-accepted side effect of market economies. This is supposed to be offset by income taxes and wealth taxes.

The economics does not have incentive laid out to smoothen inequalities. If you rule out the political process, what do you have left?
Speaking of the paranormal, has anyone ever made a serious attempt at replicating Rupert Sheldrake's [1, 2] experiments?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnA8GUtXpXY
All wealth originates from Nature. Destroy enough of it and wealth will increase for some. Enough people die off, land and property can be reclaimed.
The kinda conflates two very different events. I never made a case against something as serious as robbery. The real point is that unlike robbery, nothing very serious has happened when you see a picture of a naked body.
I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life. And I think most good software engineers are already close to that asymptote
That "figure out the median property value" is the hard bit.

The value is determined in a voluntary exchange, such as a sale, and results of sales of similar property serve only as approximations.

Same problem is with the land value tax. It's like trying to buy / sell your property every time you do taxes.

There is a known mechanism to limit attempts do show an excessively low value. Back in the day, the British Empire's customs reserved the right to immediately buy the entire freight of a merchant ship for the value declared at customs. That could work with land and even realty, too, but would be much more disruptive.
From a few days ago:

* CVE-2019-11500
: Critical Dovecot and Pigeonhole vulnerability (https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/08/28/3)

I still run my own mail server, but I hate having to keep up with these security vulnerabilities which can come up at the most inconvenient time.
Not everybody weights privacy (and decentralization and control) vs convenience in the same way.

By the way, how many times did you get locked out of your Gmail account vs how many times did the same happen with your own server?
Growing up in communism, under the Iron Curtain, we weren't finding too much milk in the eighties at the store, so our source for dairy was the country side, friends, family, grandparents, so I grew up with raw milk.

Raw milk from grass fed animals has a very different, much richer taste.

For one you can control what you feed your animals. The taste and quality of milk varies greatly depending on what they eat. You can feed them high quality grass, although in winter some cereals are fine. Anybody that drinks raw milk knows that the taste of what they eat really is reflected in the milk. E.g. if you let them graze on a field with flowers, it will have a flowery taste.

Leave raw milk on the table to turn sour and you get yogurt. It's quite good too. And you can't do that with the pasteurized milk from the store, it doesn't matter if it's whole or not, doesn't work.

Goes without saying that with high quality raw milk it's quite easy to make cheese too, which again, you can't with the milk your can find at the store.

As for why it's more healthy, the pasteurization process reduces the nutritional quality of milk. There are also weak indications that people with a lactose intolerance can tolerate raw milk better than they can tolerate pasteurized milk. It might be that it contains some lactase. Although this claim you should take with a grain of salt.

And in the US at least you can argue that the pasteurized milk you find in stores is ultra-processed. Read the following article:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-02-fo-62752...

Note that I'm not saying that you can't find a good source of raw milk from a farm with free range, grass fed animals and great quality control. But it's harder to do so and if you're living in the city, depending on the city, next to impossible.

I do encourage you to try find such a source. The difference in taste is well worth it.

And if you grow it yourself, it's much like anything else. For example tomatoes no longer taste well due to being picked too early. Grow your own tomatoes in season and the difference is night and day.
I mean for the last part, you can pay for it. Gmail yes but there are others that are still a product but not Gmail. Fastmail comes to mind.
> it's because we gave their riches to them.

This seems disconnected from reality. It is more accurate to say that they earned it through voluntary two party transactions.
Taxes on income and taxes on investment gains should be the same. In the UK, a 20 year old contributing to society by doing £45k worth of work every year keeps 69% (£30,737)

Meanwhile a 70 year old seeing their BTL property appreciate by £45k a year due to crossrail (paid for out of income tax the 20 year old is paying) keeps 87% (£39,060)
The very essence of capitalism is using wealth (ie capital) to gain income. A wealth tax very much would reduce inequality, both in wealth and income.
They end up just saying "well you have done that, but not enough times or for long enough (with no specific details about those criteria)."

Is they the internal decision makers or the HR/recruiters gatekeepers who kvetch about the 'talent shortage' in software engineering? Am I out of line here for feeling like that line could easily come from either group?

Asking as a guy who was rejected by a recruiting agency for my current job, and only got hired later on after discovering by complete and utter coincidence a friend (well, more of an acquaintance, a regular at my neighborhood pub) worked on the team, referred me to his boss who was absolutely delighted with my experience and qualifications, was a near instant-hire.

Sometimes I wonder (quite negatively and cynically) about the agency hiring model.
Yes, we also need to rewrite foundation law and trust fund law.
Yes, but only if the wealthy, liberal city-dwellers would be willing to zone for higher density and lower cost.
Naturally, but our population is kept in check by the same laws that govern nature, just as you say, we can't mow it all down. And that's part of the reason the population growth is slowing.
The wiki for the Cottingly Fairy pictures showed Doyle played a big role in his own deception:

> In a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television's Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet." In the same interview Frances said: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies?wprov=sft...
As Kuznets determined, it was after the American Civil War that the gap between the rich and the poor began to widen.

I wonder how much of that was counting blacks in the South as people (after slavery was ended). During the post Civil War era, they typically made half as much as whites for the same work.

I read a history book years ago which, unfortunately, I can't determine the name of. The current narrative is that minimum wage laws are oppressive racist nastiness, but this book asserted that the Federal minimum wage was intended to put a stop to the practice of paying blacks half as much as whites in the Deep South so as to bring the South more in line with the rest of the nation generally.
Ownership is a human invention. You can't take it with you, you're only ever really leasing it, and to the degree that you distribute it, what you're actually exercising is power to get other people do what you want (or delegating that power).

Ownership will exist for as long as there's support in governance and law for it. If ownership doesn't deliver enough benefit for the majority in society, then expect society to alter the terms of the bargain.
The legal and police system that protects wealthy people's private property rights is already the government doing something
Can a mod please collapse or detach this thread? There's nought but noise here, unsurprisingly.
I missed that bit, thanks!
What could you do with your private server room if you were willing to spend that much time and money, though?
The argument against that would be that you can give your kid a luxurious cushion, you just don't get to give him 1000x what the average person would need.

Keeping your kid safe from pretty much anything you went through doesn't require 80 billion dollars.
A Fast, Safe, Slimm Nuclear Reactor
Honestly I don't feel sorry for the USA any more. The rest of the world solved these problems 50 years ago.

At some point you conclude that the USA wants these problems. China could not ask for a better boogeyman.
True, and I use offlineimap for a different scenario where I do not have control of the mail server. However, it is still not the same level of control as managing the mail server yourself. I understand why some people don't want to do that, but again, I don't find it to be much trouble at all.
In South Africa there is the added complication that these taxes don't normalise income inequality—they exarcerbate it. One of the biggest problems is that regulation raises the barrier to entry and creats a situation where the "efficient" become more efficient.

EDIT: I don't agree with the other opinions that reply to your comment: I think the arguments about autonomy and and self-determination hold just as much in personal finance.
> The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps.

No it isn't. Competition with native apps is the completely wrong way to think of it. The web should complement native apps.
Google Apps for Domains is great too, has been rock-solid for years.
It is a gross exaggeration to claim that the US is regressing to third world status. See https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-living-standards.... Americans are better off today than ever before.
If they just block all ads (which burn performance), that's already a big improvement over Chrome, and probably sufficient to make people switch browsers.
>completed is absolutely a non-issue. Lots of employees are paid for piece-work, or equivalently have paid-for-performance structures.

Yes, those people are called "contractors"
Very true, in terms of poverty the world was never as equal as today. My guess is that Free Software had the consequence of providing a lot of value to people for free, taking part of the cost of the supply chain.

This is the real equaliser, it is not tax and it's not the market. In all honesty even in their example, the 1% in the US is not stable .. it's more like a game of chair, if you blink you can loose your seat.
NanoLog – a nanosecond scale logging system for C++
It’s true, but it is only half the story. I’ve used a paid provider other than gmail for 18 years. I occasionally had problems starting a couple of years ago, and every single one of them was caused by google not delivering a mail (or marking it spam, which is for almost all practical purposes, not delivering it).

I eventually caved in and switched to fastmail - and everything is good since then.

Google is giving you no trouble because the main instigator of trouble these days is google.

You may find it acceptable to use them with this in mind. I do not.
Is the Hacker News community open to alternative viewpoints on this subject? It would be informative to read a wide spectrum of opinions, like we get for things like microprocessor design and code libraries.
A History of Computer Art
You're just wrong. Just because no republicans voted for it doesn't mean that enormous compromise was necessary to get certain independents and conservative democrats to vote for it, which is exactly what happened. The entire legislative approach to the ACA was to get a 60 vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (and subsequently to prevent the bill from returning to the Senate because of changes made by the House), in a Senate that only had 58 democrats.
Do you mind expanding how you use that service?
And upgrade your server software within hours of vulnerabilities being published if you want to stay secure: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/08/28/3
In other words, this system relies on constant growth. We're hitting the first limit to that growth, CO2.
You're treating ownership as if it's some natural right. It's not. The idea of property and ownership is a social construct, so it makes sense that society gets to determine the rules of this construct.

And society has generally determined that your "ownership" comes with a fee to cover the societal costs that make it all possible. E.g., car and house property taxes to cover police depts, fire depts, etc. Without which see how long your precious possessions last.
It’s certainly strange to observe rural voters make political decisions that hasten the demise of their way of life.
And tt-rss works great with Fiery Feeds[0] (along with many other RSS sync services)... Fiery Feeds is an outstanding RSS client for iOS.

[0]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fiery-feeds-rss-reader/id11587...