skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried to get an invite for one of them using the "IRC interview", and I was berated for not having "studied enough" because I didn't know the detail of some pedantic rule (I think it was about some detail on which format trumps which) and I explained something else in slightly different words.

The entire thing was super-pedantic and super-silly, and a massive turn-off for that community (I didn't try again). As far as I'm concerned there is no good alternative to what.cd.
I haven't died in almost 4 years, so yeah, I guess I've got that bit covered!
Ah, the bottom 90% of Americans, ever on the edge of being able to feed themselves.
GP is talking about the 90th percentile. If you want to quibble about exactly where that line is, whatever, but it's not the point. It's very clear that the percentage of people who can afford to invest is broader than the top decile.
How to Launch a Profitable Startup in 2020
What? The point is that lack of funds for investing is clearly not the problem if they're buying so many lotto tickets.
You would not seek employment with the company under servile terms unless you needed employment to survive. The company needs you less than you need them, so they can get away with bossing you around.
I don’t think the progressive leaders who have been championing a wealth tax have been unclear about that though. The point of a wealth tax as described by Warren, Sanders, etc. is specifically to fund programs for poor and struggling middle class, not just as some penalty for being rich.
I think the fiber industry prefers wavelength division multiplexing over simple directional couplers. You can certainly have multiple 10Gbps customers on a single strand of fiber with passive equipment, and many ISPs will happily sell you such a circuit.

(Gpon, mentioned above, is mostly time division multiplexing. I have worked for 2 ISPs that use gpon, and we've never sold anyone an asymmetric plan, except for the "free plan" that Google Fiber had. Gpon is perfectly happy to be symmetric, but it does have a limited bandwidth shared between multiple subscribers.)

The biggest problem I've found is that the Internet isn't really ready for customers that can download at 10Gbps. When I set up a 10Gbps connection for myself, I had a lot of trouble finding anything on the Internet that would send me data that quickly. Even my own servers were AWS instance types that only supported 5Gbps burst. So that is probably the reason why you aren't seeing consumer ISPs selling you 10Gbps circuits... even the servers don't have 10Gbps! A new wave of upgrades are needed for this to become viable; 100Gbps networking equipment is still pretty expensive.
What the Greeks actually did and what was understood by contemporary political philosophers could be quite different.
Agreed. I've been saying that for too many decades.

My version of that is "The big safety questions are 'how big is it', 'who owns it', and 'who locks it'. C helps with none of those."

Most of the things done with pointer arithmetic are really array slices without the right syntax. If you're doing something with pointer arithmetic that can't be represented an array slice, you're probably doing something wrong. I once proposed adding slice syntax and array sizes to C. This was discussed on comp.lang.c at some length, and looks backwards compatible. But the political problems are huge.
Or maybe you're being downvoted because "I did great and you're dumb lolol" is never a good look, or a useful helpful contribution? (or because you're whining about downvotes and attacking the downvoters based on imaginary reasons, which is against the site guidelines).
Not true. Anecdotal experiences should not be counted when far more reliable source exist. The life expectancy of an average Chinese 76 while that of an average American is 79. It is quite significant when you compare the healthcare cost of either countries. Do you want your doctor babysitting you or spend that time curing more patients?
Probably less lucrative than the government blessed monopoly on data and media distribution they developed that required virtually no investment in anything other than lobbying.
This reminds me of https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/daniel_patrick_moynihan_1... “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” they wouldn’t have developed their own physics and universal constants. Of course if they were tens of 1000s of years ahead of us and deliberately cleaned up who knows what’s possible. We could be the evolved pet like in red dwarf
It's pretty clear that we're discussing the far greater majority that actually can feed themselves and have money left over to invest.

Also people go through different stages in life, as you claimed in your comment. You might have been too poor before but I assume you can invest now right?
None of this makes any sense to me at all. I'm reading through it but there are logical fallacies abound. In the first few paragraphs..

> Which means by helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders.

No. Just...no. Founders should be starting companies that reduce inequality. By definition. The idea of a healthy marketplace for both startups and for regular people doing regular things implies a reduction in inequality. Not just a reduction in poverty, but a reduction in inequality. That is easiest done by lifting the poor out of poverty.

PG's take is to stop all progress because he is straw-man arguing against something that nobody is even taking the position on that he's arguing against. The logical fallacy count in the first few paragraphs alone make this piece difficult to read.

What happened? :(

Continuing to read...

> But some are good, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin starting the company you use to find things online.

No conversation at all about the pitfalls and issues that Google has also caused in the world? This is a carte blanche to Google that 100% of their work has been positive and it's not worthy to discuss anything they might have done that would hurt people in the world? Not everything about Google is "Good".

These takes are all so one-sided, close-minded, and wrong.

> The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.

Wait. What. PG thinks that this is a fallacy? I'm going to have to stop reading to protect my sanity. The rich are definitely getting richer at the expense of the poor. The world did not start on some level playing field. The rich had privilege and status and help that the poor do not.

Every action that a rich person takes to enrich themselves rather than trying to level the playing field is by definition taking from the poor.
This is the rich person's point of view, but it is not one that is compatible with majoritarian democracy.
It could be a problem, or not. E.g., 16% of a 5x bigger pie is worth more than 30% of a smaller pie.

The quote does not state that not everyone is participating (though it's true). Just that the least wealthy 90% own 16% of the (huge) US stock market.
It's easy to specify a font in CSS and then watch to see if the browser downloads it or not. JS isn't revealing anything which you can't already trivially get.
While wealth creation isn't a zero sum game, certain important markets are zero sum.

Housing is an example. If a bunch of founders make a pile of money, they can (and do) suddenly outbid everyone else (like say the school teachers and firemen) buy a bunch of land and build mega mansions that squeeze a lot of other people out.

The issue today is that the gains/rewards for certain ideas (at certain times) are disproportional to the actual utility to society.

An example of that is the contrast between Tim Berners-Lee's networth and Mark Zuckerberg's
The causes are by regulatory and political capture when money in politics corruption is allowed in ever-increasing amounts becoming a self-reinforcing, vicious cycle. Beyond any notion of "pie," this also permits greater and greater wealth transfer poor -> rich, through raising taxes on the lower classes, raising fines, increasing prison terms and cutting support services. It's often touted as "austerity," "reducing bloat," "reducing regulations," and "private-public partnerships."

When inequality becomes too extreme, a country becomes a third-world country with high corruption, low civic involvement and is often perched on the cliff of revolution. Brazil and the US come to mind.

Another problem is the word "democracy" doesn't have one meaning. The most wide-held view would seem to be: officials are elected and do the people's work. The US, as with many developed economies, has become a de-facto klepto-plutocracy masquerading a democracy (psephocracy, technically) because very little attention is given to the people's problems with most policies, money and effort going towards catering to and subsidizing the rich. Furthermore, "democracy" has a different meaning in diplo-speak, it means "whatever the prevailing hegemony wants" in that context. In addition, regular people often conflate democracy with many of elements anarchy, which also doesn't scale in the real world.
Good luck and safe travels!
how long can a virus live on a face mask?
It's pretty clear 2008 was the inflection point and it went up for three years afterward. You'll find endless reasons to stay out of the market so I was offering at least one simple rule to follow.
Is there a name for the phenomenon where someone that is amazing at something (e.g. investing and helping to grow startups) then somehow is given more credibility to talk about everything else?

The exact opposite is true with under represented folks — their “take” needs to be 10x better than than the rich guy with a popular blog to be listened to.

He should write a post on influence inequality.
We are the first nuclear civilization.

We know the expected isotope ratios too well and test them too often. This is how we discovered evidence of a natural nuclear reactor from 1.7 Gya. Any other nuclear civilization would have changed the isotope ratios in detectable ways in some part of the world.
I haven't used it (yet) but RacketScript is a thing
https://github.com/vishesh/racketscript
Facts in this case can only be reached through consensus of the scientific community. Journalism can only confirm so far as to when who did what, they simply don’t possess the professional knowledge to assert the truthfulness of a scientific theory.
Not in a market where your skills are in demand. This single input single output equation breaks down relatively easily.
> The only question it appears to answer is, "given some words, what are other words that are likely to follow them in a typical blog post?" The fact that the words are syntactically correct is unimportant, when the fluent words convey no information relevant to the input.

You say that like that's a bad things. That's literally all it's been trained to do.
It's a quote of a quote of a quote of a 2016 figure from this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24085

(It's value.)
As in Minimum wage should be raised to meet the Median.

As a result, the majority of people will have equal wage.

In BC, Canada:

Minimum wage is: $13.85 CAD

Median wage is: $23.98 CAD

Minimum is going up to $15.20 in next 18 months.

It’s not that far...

Edit:

”in developed economies, the minimum wage ranges usually from 35 to 60 per cent of the median wage.“

https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/wages/minimum-wages/settin...

US is 35. France is 60.

BC clocks 57 right now. Will go to about 63 with minimum wage hikes.

So, yes, a higher ratio is worth thinking about....
Being a boss isn't inherently evil, it's just workers are exploited in most current circumstances. Worker-owned co-ops and organized labor are the ways out of this, but requires workers to first summon the courage to risk being fired.
Over the last week it seems Julia has become the new Lisp of HN.
>> Scandinavia

How easy is it to immigrate into Scandinavia and become a citizen?
Benefits of Edtech Startup in Indian Education Sector
Here's the more sciency source for that claim (several links later): https://www.nber.org/papers/w24085

Here's an excerpt:

> The sharp fall in median net worth and the rise in overall wealth inequality over these years are largely traceable to the high leverage of middle class families and the high share of homes in their portfolio.

I.e., the middle portion (affluent or frugal enough to save, but not so extremely wealthy as to be set for life) largely invested in real estate in preference to the stock market, and the real estate market tanked.
> It's pretty clear 2008 was the inflection point

It's clear now. But (a) there are lots of starts that stall and (b) it's impossible to differentiate them 3 years afterwards.

At the end of the day, timing the market is incredibly difficult. When one decomposes returns of the world's top investors, timing is pretty much random.
"Flexible schedules" in retail make it so low-wage workers are always on call and must curtail the rest of their lives even during their "free time".
While I agree with much said, I believe there seems to be a flaw in how he groups wealthy individuals based on how they create wealth.

> In the real world you can create wealth as well as taking it from others. A woodworker creates wealth. He makes a chair, and you willingly give him money in return for it. A high-frequency trader does not. He makes a dollar only when someone on the other end of a trade loses a dollar.

In a market economy, people and companies are rewarded if the market sees the given service or product worth the price. The woodworker didn't create wealth out of thin air, and he gains wealth by taking it from the people that buy his wares. Same goes for a high-frequency trader, even though she doesn't build anything with her hands, the process of trading is seen as valuable by the market and if done well rewarded accordingly. The only groups that can "create wealth" are national treasuries which can print money.
How is this mathematically possible?
"Winners"

I would go open a business today which has a fairly good chance of being successful (there is a huge demand) but I don't have money neither the connections to get it. I know kids from rich folks who do nothing all day and sleep on their phones, waste cash on microtrans online. I wish, I had folks like that. I could take risks to start different ventures, afford moving out and getting necessary medical treatment, going to a good school, attending events, hire a personal trainer for improving communication skills, posture, public speaking, learning different languages, etc.
I can do some of them right now but it's learning on hard mode with increased worrying about everything else in life because you can't afford to lose. Years are lost on one loss while others with family capital gains or connections can afford to stand back up again immediately.

One thing is absurd is poor environment forces you to decide on poor life choices. So the claim that poverty and difficulty may make you stronger is dubious or based on survivorship/exception bias.
Poor people don't know how to manage their finances, search for valid information, not to fall for scams or make long term plans because they have been trained not to.
I've always felt like there's a real missed opportunity for progress by tying the pro-choice movement with a movement to legalize sex work. People should be the masters of their own bodies.
This is an incredible essay and one of PG's finest in my opinion.
It depends on the country and your origin. Not too hard.
Won't someone please think of the rich people?
Mosquitoes don't pollinate, but they're food for a bunch of other animals up the food chain, no? (e.g. frogs?).

So if we did eliminate mosquitoes, it's probably not going to be a clear win.
Given the number of ways of fingerprinting, how can we reduce our uniqueness? Is it even possible not to be unique?
Wealth tax discussions aside, then they should talk about "getting rid of poverty" instead of "inequality" which puts "us vs. them" spin on the whole discussion.
This is true! It's an individualistic, non-political way to balance the power of money. Shouldn't the rest of the population have access to decent living and working conditions though? Going to bed, gn all. :)
>The reality is that the typical customer use very little upstream bandwidth.

I’m not trying to disagree with this especially since you are talking about coax, but the new mmwave WiFi installations at places like Ohio state stadium have shown the opposite. The vast majority of their traffic were photo and video uploads to social media. Consumers want upload; it’s just overshadowed by streaming.
You can buy Epyc v2 CPUs from Newegg. It's just that AWS doesn't have instance types that use them.
How to Contribute to Open Source Software
Well for one thing, any ceramic or other durable remnants of a civilization prior to ours would only have had to have lasted for several hundred million years at most, not billions, since before several hundred million years ago life of such complexity would have been vanishingly unlikely or impossible. Secondly, for any prior civilization, the whole sun and cinder thing doesn't apply anyhow and finally, if we or some civilization before ours had vanished, at least some of our durable goods would be conserved in some sort of preserving environment. As another reply here mentions, we have wonderful fossils of some extremely delicate creatures from deep history, a toilet or two would hardly need much to pull off the same degree of conservation and later be discovered. Your notion of it being extraordinarily unlikely doesn't really fit existing circumstances.
"The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy."

........<really?>
I imagine usage patterns in the home and at an event are very different.
> I don't think that's just random

Why would he expect aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa to be less random than for example acatgagacgtctaatgttagacatgcatgac?
> "You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startups... Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups"

I feel the opposite. What keeps many people from starting startups is financial risk (the prior probaility of success is quite low!). Increasing the safety net, even if it means decreasing the gains, might cause more people to take the risk.

> "For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process."

How does this not contradict his earlier point about driven people no longer wanting to start startups if
they can't get rich doing it?

> "One of the most important principles in Silicon Valley is that "you make what you measure."

I'm completely behind this statement. Attacking wealth inequality by, say, robbing the rich, is not the right approach. But I think he's mixing up what people mean when they say they don't like inequality and what they actually want to do about it. Nobody is claiming we all go back to being hunter/gatherers.

> "I think rising economic inequality is the inevitable fate of countries that don't choose something worse. "

This is a huge statement. I'm happy to see PG has iterated over every possible economic system under every possible level of technology and come to this axiom though; this will save the economists of 2532 a lot of effort they might have spent running this simulation :)

> "The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley has been happening for thousands of years... You do not want to design your society in a way that's incompatible with this curve"

What acceleration? Uber and Instagram are hardly quantum leaps from what we had > 10 years ago. The iPhone I have in my pocket today is functionally not all that different from the one 5 years ago. What's even worse is that it's questionable as to whether or not the things churning out of the valley are even good at all. No one is betting a curve: the curve is in his imagination. Change feels linear lately.

Also, where is the talk about externalities?
It's extremely common for ISPs to block inbound packets with a destination port of 80, 443, 25, etc. Of course they don't block them outgoing (with the exception of port 25 commonly). He didn't "imagine" anything and it's quite out of form on HN to claim something like that.
> "let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process."

This is a pretty good article as Paul distinguishes the "good" (creating wealth) and "bad" (rent seeking) sources of economic inequality, and suggests addressing the bad and attacking poverty vs. simply punishing the rich.

Consider the current presidential candidates - Bernie and Warren seem to talk a lot about punishing the rich, while Andrew Yang emphasizes a more bottom-up approach of giving every American a dividend of $1,000/month. The former sounds more like a vindictive blanket punishment, the latter is directly eradicating poverty and helping people.

Given Paul's focus on the value and promotion of entrepreneurship, it would seem that Yang's $1,000/month would do more than any other policy being discussed to further that cause. I'd imagine way more people would start businesses and take greater risks in general if they knew worst case scenario they'd have $1,000/month to fall back on.
Not mentioned, they don’t want to support residential customers serving web sites (or anything else)
Nonsense, the stock market can (sometimes) help on retirement, but apart from professional traders, I haven't seen anyone who got rich simply by investing in stocks, and I know a lot of people who make good money. This is a myth propagated by the Wall Street.
Rich people can make political donations, lobby, run for office, dictate private law (corporate policies), fix wages etc. Wealth is power.
The wealthy have been lobbying for laws that benefit them at the expense of the poor and middle class for awhile

Tax cuts, carried interest loophole, limited income tax tiers
This essay makes me uneasy. I feel PG builds a straw man. He takes, in his own words, the most naive take on inequality and ends up concluding that "Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups".

A simple example, would a tax on wealth above 100 million USD discourage startup founders? I don't think so.
I suppose it’s possible an ET civilization had an outpost on earth and that outpost is now in the middle of the ocean. I think the discussion is an earth based civilization, then the chances of all their cities, discarded equipment, lost items haven’t left a single mark is very unlikely.

What about fossils from that era
I’m the short-term, yes. The assumption is that the company cannot invest the cash into its operations at a larger rate of return than an individual investor could therefore the company (whose sole purpose is to enrich the shareholders) should return the cash.

In a way, the company has an earnings yield of EPS/stock price (or inverse PE). If the company cannot invest the money in its operations that makes a larger return that the earnings yield then the stock is actually a better investment. The huge issue is that when markets crash is when technically a company should be buying back tons of its stock but rarely do companies ever do this and instead elect to hoard cash when buybacks are best & spend money on buybacks when it’s the worst ROI (when the market is hot & earnings yield is minimal).