skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These are not so much "outrageous flaws" but conscious and reasonable choices. For example, not counting things like SNAP as income makes sense because a government policy targeted at reducing inequality is not the same as that inequality not existing.

It is far more desirable for those programs to be minimized by eliminating the inequality in the first place.

Also, keep in mind that Gini is most useful as relative index.

Making the changes you suggest would obviously result in a better number in the US, but when recalculated for all thee other countries it would not change the situation much.

In fact, since both taxes and the social safety net are low in the US, it would probably drop the rankings.
No you do not have the hardware required to win the F1. There is more to an F1 car than “engine” and “wheels”. The specs you have to conform to are a rule book several pages longer than any nation’s Design Rules for passenger vehicles.

As for winning the F1 Grand Prix, you have a lifetime of experience in race driving to acquire before you are even going to be crossing the finish line before the race is over.

Please do not engage in such absurd reductionism, that kind of comment is what I would expect to see in /r/selfdrivingcars or /r/cars from the rabid Tesla-haters.
Crypto doesn't need more "slander" pieces when it is demonstrably helping destroy the planet through rampant wasteful electricity usage
Thanks for that comment, I largely agree. Let me try to summarize it:

Old money wants subjects, new money wants worshippers.
Recently I made the oldest startup mistake in the book:

Exercising too many ISOs and incurring the AMT to the tune of $350,000.

I have talked to probably a dozen various professionals - accountants, lawyers, wealth managers, liquidity providers, etc - and they all give the exact same advice:

1. Borrow from family or friends.

2. Leverage existing assets (mortgage, stocks) to pay it.

Every one of them has mentioned those 2 ways are how "most people" in my situation deal with it. Neither are an option for me.

To put it another way: already be rich. Whether personally or by proxy.

Paul Graham also neglected the necessity of the wealthy in creating new wealth because he is one of those gatekeepers. Whether they're the VCs benevolently funding your startup, or the "rich uncle" floating you a 1% loan for a year to pay AMT: it's much easier to become wealthy if you're already wealthy or have access to wealth. You need the wealth to fund your startup. You need the wealth to exercise your ISOs. You need the wealth to cover your AMT obligations. All of this is after you've managed to get the capital for a good education and everything else that goes into joining startups.

Oh and the wealthy get a cut every step of the way. The AMT may be flawed, but the wealthy also tax the rest of us. Not only that, but if we do get rich, since they've done you so many favors, now they have a new wealthy friend in their network to fall back on or raise capital from or obtain liquidity from. So many people who get rich from startups give their money right back to VCs to join funds. It's almost seen as an obligation to help out others. It's not. There's plenty of capital out there. Let the VCs risk their own, not yours. Build affordable housing or bootstrap your next thing; don't effectively give VCs their money back.

And let me be clear: if I do become wealthy from these lottery tickets I'm jumping through hoops to attain: it will be luck. I'm just one of hundreds of people who have built this startup, and if we do exit: the value will be as much more a factor of external market dynamics than intrinsic value created by the company and its labor. It's luck. It's lottery tickets. Don't let anyone fool you otherwise. A good product is one tiny piece of it.
Yeah, the US has become quite comfortable with disgusting advertising problems. It's normal to be a shady disingenuous company here, so what's the difference if Adobe is being shady and disingenuous too?
> but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax.

I disagree. If you want to sell something to a market then you should tailor your product to that market. That means doing some basic research about what the local taxes and laws are.
Why has climate economics failed us?
>> In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals.

> Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige.

Someone getting rich in 1982 isn't old money(!).

There is nothing except some kind of rose-tinted glasses to indicate that the rich in any era were particularly responsible in their use of wealth.
The problem is all down to the basic human need of a home. In the 70s and 80s even 90s someone on a teacher's salary could own their own home in a major world city - say London. Now, literally zero chance. Because homes have become an asset class and the rich can outbid regular people so they are pushed out. That's the problem. I couldn't care less how many billionaires there are if regular people can afford a decent home
> 40hr per week income tax rates are very often higher than that.

You do realize that the wealth tax is on top of the income tax, right?

> It only mildly hurts the idle rich.

And therefore there's no issue! Lol. I shared elsewhere that France tried the wealth tax and then killed it after 42k French millionaires left the country. Why would it work in the US when it didn't work in France and 8 other European countries?
So true. The thing that put me on the path of discovering parsers was a tweet that said something to the effect of “if you want any relatively complex regex, what you actually need is a recursive descent parser”.

Now as a self thought dev I haven’t really been shown in school what those were and always thought of them as some wizardly magic that only compiler writers dabble in.

But after that tweet I looked around and discovered https://github.com/dmaevsky/rd-parse which is a 100-ish line library, and using it you can do https://github.com/dmaevsky/rd-parse-jsexpr/blob/master/src/... which is a 200-ish lib that parses all of freakin JS expression syntax.

Now whenever we have various custom unwieldy regexes to parse some input, I can refactor that into a clean and easily understandable parser.

I guess thats why you need at least a little bit of formal education in CS.
No, I said “either these negative opinions are coming to the fore”- as in, I haven’t heard them before and they’re suddenly quite loud- which is entirely possible as people do not have a place to vent I guess.

Or people who have some form of vested interest in AWS succeeding (whether directly financial or indirectly benefiting from AWS being a monopoly) are influencing the discussion.

I was mostly thinking that in previous threads on this same subject these voices were not quite so loud.
Lots of other things also vary city-by-city, like rent and income or business taxes. Equal MSRPs impose an unfair burden on retailers in expensive places in pretty much the same way as local sales taxes. Businesses everywhere else manage these difficulties without cognitive burden for customers.
Can anyone eli5 the breakthrough that this (seemingly bright!) student made? I read the paper earlier but a lot of it went over my head!
In a hypothetical society which leveled the playing field and started over again from scratch, I’d expect the two most important factors in wealth accumulation to be 1) an aesthetically pleasing facial bone structure and 2) g-factor intelligence. Lacking just one of these is enough to take you out of the game, and lacking both is all but a death sentence for your prospects of becoming a contributing member of society.

Both factors are almost entirely determined by a person’s genetics.
You can approximate this by dragging the scrubber on the youtube video back and forth while the object is being rotated. When it's about half-way rotated, then it all makes sense.
I don't get it, what are you trying to say?
Why deal with changing the inputs if we already know what we want the output to be?
Tire makers race to turn dandelions into rubber (2014)
Data Breaches, Class Actions and Ambulance Chasing
This comment is so tone deaf.

Tons of people will be so naive as to either not read closely, or just not know that the cheaper one comes with a catch.
Yes, but would we have TimescaleDB, CockroachDB, ElasticSearch, Docker (containers at all) and projects like these if there wasn't any money at the table?

Not saying you're wrong, but it's a multidimensional problem. One could argue AWS is nothing like shared hosting providers(compare scale), and a webserver is essentially "stateless" which means easier to build than say... A database holding sensitive information that doesn't break. I assume this is why postgres HA and horizontal scaling still really isn't a thing, while CockroachDB funded by VC "solved" this problem.

I think it's fair to let companies monetize on the service they built, while allowing people to run it on their own if they can. A problem here though is that the companies incentives mismatch the opensource project they're eunning. CockroachDB enterprise having killer features that the opensource version doesn't have and that noone will be able to PR because the company will reject it.

TimescaleDB went ahead and opensourced all their features, aligning their incentives with the project, but I don't know of anyone else who has done this.
But is the portion of people without those restrictions increasing or decreasing? How would you measure it?
Hancock, Rogan, Carlson
(Hope this ends up in the right thread) I’d suggest “what we were doing all that time” was living in subservience to whoever the kings and slave masters were for thousands of years. Freedom as we know it is only a couple hundred years old. It took us this long to get out from under the boot. Before that we had serfdom and monarchies ... and before that, the Roman Empire. And so on and so forth. If the king didn’t want to learn anything, then nobody would learn anything. Knowledge has definitely increased in these times, as the Bible said it would. If you run a calc on how many people could have lived post-Adam to pre-Noah, you come out to something like 9 billion people by the time Noah comes along. That’s plenty of people to have all kinds of civilizations, all kinds of potential societies and advancement, especially if it was true that lifespans were longer... this could mean knowledge would increase quicker with greater amounts of latency with average age spans into the 500-600-700-800s if that was even possible preflood.
If the purpose of the interview is to demonstrate your c++ or java skills sure.

If you want to get something demonstrable done quickly so you can iterate on it and have that all-important conversation with the interviewer then I'd suggest Python or some other less verbose language.
Don’t be cute
The deep learning library fastai uses this. Their source code is also their documentation. They use something called "nbdev" to accomplish this. And I have also seen other projects both related and unrelated to deep learning adopt it. This idea stems from Knuth.
The main international airport is keeping the intra-France flights. It's the other, regional, airport that's not.

(Although the regional airport may serve the entire EU. It does not serve the major international destinations in the US or Asia however.)
You'd have to embed the whole file in the blockchain for that. At that point Filecoin is not relevant. That's not censorship-free either - the use of Eth network can be banned too. And LE or govs see who to target too.
> The idea of NFTs is incredibly appealing to artists because the technology could allow for artists to sell music that can only be played by some client if the NFT for a track or album was authentic.

That's nonsense. DRM is just DRM and there's no way to stop piracy. If one person can listen to the track, that person can copy the track end of story.
Homes in the US today are much larger than they were in the 1970s. About 2x as large! Per square foot, the average home is actually cheaper today than it was then, inflation adjusted, and this isn't even factoring in the modern 2.2% mortgage rates vs the 13% mortgage rates of those days.
The seller decides on the price, and labels the goods accordingly. Whatever "recommended retail price" may be printed on the box is of course covered with a sticker with the actual price.

It's about consumer protection. Buyers must know exactly how much they will need to pay to purchase an item BEFORE they pay. It would be unfair to expect consumers to calculate these things.
In the US at least, it is definitely decreasing. Income inequality is growing, as the original essay noted.
Yes, this! I signed up for Creative Cloud for a year with monthly payments, but I was absolutely not prepared for the fact that if I didn’t cancel by the end of the 12 months then I would be signed up for another 12 months.

This is not how subscriptions usually work, but with Adobe it is.

With every other subscription I have ever had if I have it for say 14 months or 16 months and then want to cancel I have been free to do so.

But with Adobe when I wanted to cancel after 13 months I learned that I had automatically been committed to another 12 months and would need to pay a hefty cancellation fee.

I like the software that Adobe makes but I hate hate hate the subscription.

When I leave Adobe after my subscription ends this time, I hope to never have to sign up for their subscription again.
Santa Clara will be just fine without Intel, guaranteed. Regarding #2: that would be the beginning of the end for Intel. Gelsinger is reminding me of bringing in Mayer to fix Yahoo. Intel is done on design. AMD, Nvidia, and Apple are all smoking them and the gap is only widening now. Intel would need a miracle to turn around their terrible inertia. Investing into being the US fab play, their only expertise, advantage, and existing massive facilities, seems like the only reasonable path forward.
> if a debt goes to collections that ends up on your credit report

Once it's on the credit report it can then be disputed.

Good luck getting a court to uphold a contract where the terms weren't clearly understood by both parties.
Inequality is a normal state in most systems.

"The climate disaster is disproportionately the fault of the rich".

Most disasters would affect a poor person more than a rich person. If I lose my job but have years of savings, it's no factor that I lost a job. Sorry, I don't see that as a strong argument, not even discussing the evidence for it.

But you got me at dogs.
It's already starting. I've heard that Nvidia developed a cutting edge computing audit system, that was developed to detect, in real time, that GPUs are being used for calculating simple hashing algorithms and sniffs out all computation. The next step is just government mandated cpu firmware, installed in all Intel and AMD CPUs that can detect when a computer tries to calculate a SHA hash, and immediately reports it to the fed. This leading edge tech is already being shared by Nvidia with the FBI. I've heard it's unhakable.
New wooden satellite is part advertising, part student project
DigitalOcean App Platform is a compelling alternative to Heroku with the simplicity of Buildpacks and reasonable pricing.

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/

Are there other PaaS providers with Buildpacks support?
Sometimes it's just funny what HN commenters choose to defend—and a little sad.
>I love the fact that I have access to Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max and can cancel/renew individual services pretty much without friction or anything more than a month-to-month contract.

Well, first, it's entirely probable that month-to-month contracts will at some point end, as people cancel things, etc. But more importantly, do you not remember when no one else cared about streaming rights and Netflix just had, well, everything? It was nice (and cheaper)
Try and read the source to Metafont. It's a scattered morass with blocks of code broken out from it's point of usage for expository purposes.
Look for a company who's business model includes uptime, security and scalability. And is big enough to not outsource those parts. And in a mature market where customers can tell the difference.
I love Render. Really nice services, good UI, and they keep iterating.
It is great tool, looks good. will use it
You also have to consider the cut for developers, lawyers, servers and everything else that goes behind getting music to you.
> And so on and on. While I would still recommend everyone to pursue the dreams over never trying to do so - being poor is the single most powerful force that prevents people from doing that.

IMO this is what offsets the dystopia of the coming human IPO market. Many millions of humans would economically benefit from having their own board of directors.
Negotiation resources
This. 100% agree
Economy is closer to a zero-sum game, after all theres limited resources in a period of time. We cannot be all rich because we cannot all own the capital, if we did, who does the work? To invest you need workers, to produce you need consumers, to rent you need renter, etc. Then the rich class exist because theres a poor class, a zero-sum game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities

The intro paragraph is enough for you to get their point.
This is pretty accurate. When I went through that essay (by PG), I got the similar idea.

The essay read to me like, "Oh, you are white guy, your parents are well off, you must have been studying in some tier 1 school, why not risk 1/2 yrs of your life to start a company, while you are in college. Chances are you may get some money from us too! You should try a lot. Infact the more you try, the better we earn."

edit:
What PG misses is worldwide perspective. Everything in his essay is limited to Silicon Valley and the social circle around it. Some people from east may have connections with the valley, and that can benefit them.

He even goes to mention, startup succeed because of social factor. There is a very small chance that people in US would trust a revolutionary product built outside. So unless the product is able to bootstrap itself in the home country, the chances are slim. And not every part of the world is as fortunate as SV folks and have startup culture.

You may say, why not move to one with good culture. My answer, "Goodluck getting out of third world country."
Even older -- both come from Latin formica, which also just means "ant."

On the other hand, the plastic called formica, familiar as a countertop surface, has nothing to do with ants but comes from "for mica", for which it was originally developed as a subtitute.
I don't think there is a very clear line where money turns into political power. After all, the most influential non-elected people in Washington aren't billionaires or close to it, and if the 2020 election cycle taught us anything, it was that the effect money has on political advantage is hilariously overestimated.

How much did Bloomberg sink into his own race, as well as into backing the Florida Democrats, and also into backing McConnell's opponent in Kentucky? In excess of a billion dollars, and all of his backed candidates including himself failed spectacularly in their races.
There was a house for sale close to where I live. It was at a fairly comfortable price, a normal family could have potentially gotten a normal mortgage for it and paid it over time, eventually owning it. It was a modestly sized house, perhaps around 70-80m² enough for a couple with one kid and a dog. It needed some repairs, not anything serious, but some work over time; and the homeowners could live in it, perhaps get some savings over the next 5-10 years before starting the costly repairs. I was hopeful. I did consider it, but I thought if I didn’t get it some other nice working class family could move into it.

Alas, no mortgage agency would loan for this property, there was no central heating system, and the roof was suboptimal. Only people that had $200k at hand could possibly consider it. And off course a cash offer came from a rich family who lived there for a week, did some renovations and sold it again for more then double the price, more then anything that a normal family could afford, even with a mortgage.

Things are bad indeed.
> No matter how unknown they are, if you listen to an average number of streams per month then they'll get at least 70% of your 10€/mo

From what I understand the number of listens that month is pooled globally/in buckets for the purpose of distribution. So if you listen to your friend's band once and nothing else, and someone plays a 31 second song on repeat 83612x over 30 days nonstop, your friend's band gets {{payout rate}}*1. And the other artist gets {{payout rate}}*83612. Rather than both artists getting ~70% of their listener's $10 subscription.

And then the payout rate is a bit complicated because it comes from a variety of buckets. Some regions earn more/less than others, some account types (free trial, free with ads, family plan) earn less than others. Some specific labels or artists even get their own special buckets. 30% take overall is still correct. If you check their 2020 Q4 "Cost of Revenue" was about 73.5%, which is almost entirely royalties.

In practice though, I don't think it matters too much. I don't think many people listen to one artist exclusively. Or if they do, it's probably a pop or children's music artist getting many streams already. But in the rare case of some person listen to one specific relatively unknown artist as most of their streaming, I'm pretty certain that artist does not receive an equal majority of that subscriber's money.
Why would an exchange allow a "meme stock"?
Thats not what the graphs show, though. It shows the rich getting quite a bit richer, the middle getting a little bit richer, and the poor remaining approximately as poor.
My past 2 subscriptions with Adobe has resulted in them continuing to bill my CC after any cancellation.

Account is cancelled, so there’s nothing to log into.

No choice but to chargeback or attempt to engage via Twitter. Seems like a well established occurrence.

I recently discovered the Affinity suite of tools to replace much of the use/need I have for creative suite.
I grew up in a family of 7 (4 younger siblings), during civil war, father was into gamling and drinking, mother was unemployed and constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown (understandable given the conditions she was living in). To paint the picture, I have vivid memories of vomiting a boiled onion I ate after not eating for days (I think I was arround 5 years old). And we were poor well into my early 20s untill I left home.

It took a long time to get out of that, and material problems were an issue for sure, but I would say the biggest obstacle for me was that I had no rolemodel and was forced to discover everything on my own. In retrospect I had plenty of opportunities to get out of my situation way earlier and I could have done a lot of things better, and it was pretty common sense to most normal/functioning people - but I didn't have a lot of those arround me.

And that wouldn't change if you gave my parents money - after my grandparents died my mother inherited some land and a house, in a year she managed to squander it away with terrible spending decisions and no long term planning (coupled with the sense of entitlement and expectation that things will just work out).

I also never viewed school as something relevant, teachers were hardly authoritative figures (from my perspective their job was to babysit me and they were poorly paid - why would I accept them as authority on anything).

So I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone, having functional parents is always going to set you up to do better in life.