skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Back then, we did not have as much inequality, but the super-rich did not deserve their wealth. Now, we have more inequality, but the super-rich [like PG himself] really deserve it, because they are innovators."

Indeed. Or to elaborate a little:

"Back then, we did not have as much inequality, but the super-rich did not deserve their wealth. Now, we have substantially more inequality and compounding human misery, and I am super-rich.

Because I am unable to identify any specific moment in my life when I made unethical decisions personally it is not possible for me to understand a view of the world that sees my current existence as the product of an unjust system."
At least Gladwell's writings are not so obviously self-serving.
The spyware is called Red Shell and it got packaged with a bunch of popular games. Yes, it mines user data.
Price gouging is the practice of using outsized leverage in a particular market to charge excessive prices. Like snow shovels doubling in price after a snow storm. Or $10 water bottles after a hurricane.

So for AWS the term is arguably correctly applied.

But I'd be more worried about the market if AWS was artificially undercutting pricing because it would kill the incentive to create competitors or innovation in the space.
the skepticism he was most criticized for was playing devils advocate for a convicted rapist

I support skepticism, but you don’t make arguments like that for the same reason you don’t say “hitler was great for the german economy” - it plays a major role in minimizing abhorrent crimes, whether you intend it to or not. Fighting that concept in any way makes it incredibly hard to distinguish the argument from support, especially when you’re doing so from an armchair. RMS is (was?) an expert in one thing, and outrageously naive in most other things he’s written about.
Genuinely curious, how could publishing a list of redirects on a static website be harmful?
Loads of results on both Google and DuckDuckGo. But they all seem to reference the alleged George Floyd quote, so meh. Strangely, limiting the search by date doesn't work for me on either Google or DuckDuckGo: Limiting the search to before May 24, 2020 still shows tons of obviously current news sites and tweets. This is surprisingly useless.
These are the kind of heros we need.
DawnOS, TempleOS and I am sure a lot of
others that I do not know about yet.

Both are amazing achievements.

For someone to look at where we are today,
and say it sucks and -tries- to do something
about should be massively encouraged.

Perhaps neither will go anywhere but attempts can
fuel other ventures and spawn ideas.

(and yes, I still think TempleOS can give people
ideas even though the man behind the amazing effort
is dead)

I also think that inclusiveness and code of conduct
needs to be revised to include non neurotypical
people of all sorts.

Unfortunately, they often end up the target of hate, ostracism
and ridicule.

I can say as a non-neurotypical that there is very little room in today's world for us.
Could you point out where my comment implied that they shouldn't be allowed to do business? I didn't mean to (and don't believe that) so it would be helpful to see how I could adjust the way I communicate this.

They should be allowed! It's just that maybe we need to adjust our society to this reality.
> 1. Rents are included in the CPI.

Rents have remained low in my city but housing prices( which GP is talking about) have gone up over 30% last 2 years.

Its pretty easy to find a rental but almost impossible to buy a house here.
Vaccine Efficacy Questions
Sounds like his priorities are in order. This woke-cult witch hunt doesn't deserve the attention its already been given.
If you tweak your prng to output the "interesting content" at the beginning then you've created algorithmic content which is very interesting and can look a lot like compression at first glance.
Nice work!

> The end goal is to have an application running on terminal or raspberry 24/7 plugged into my home network, without access to internet.

As far as I understand you're using it as the primary interface for all your data, but in case you want to import some external data sources too, you might be interested in a project I started [0]. You can take periodic snapshots of you online data, and then use it as a fully offline programmatic API to integrate with other services, and potentially use in your dashboard as well. Perhaps if you glance at the diagram [1] it might become clearer how it fits :)

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html#fs
I had a friend who rather enjoyed being sad. He would purposely watch sad movies just to experience the tear jerker moments.

He was otherwise a generally happy person.
People aren't robots, they are emotionally connected biological beings. Emotions are a biological response. You can't just 100% control your emotions any more than you can 100% control your thyroid.
Every Mathematical Theory Is Held Inside a Physical Substrate
Similarly if you try to delete your Facebook account, the only option is "Deactivate Account". Or at least it was for me. They don't give a whoot- until their bottom line losses reflects the damage they cause.
There's tons of businesses that are happy to charge less for bandwidth; so it's clear Amazon (and some of the other high tier cloud services) are overcharging on this maybe by a factor of 10, although since transit bits are not all equal, someone with more detail could make a case that the overcharging is less.

It's easyish to compete on bandwidth costs, but Amazon has a lot of other features many people want; it's harder to replicate all of those, especially the part about having a long history of operating such services and not making a lot of changes to make things more expensive or otherwise more difficult. Having to pay a much higher than market price for an easily replaced good in order to get a good that's less easily replaced is textbook anti-competive bundling.

If your bandwidth usage is high enough, maybe it makes sense to send it all through AWS direct connect, and pay for transit yourself; although even then, the AWS direct pricing seems a bit high.
> False accusations -- real or imaginary, against me or against others -- especially anger me.

I feel similarly and wonder what this is called or how many others feel similarly. It’s curious to me as I try to solve problems and filter truth from false just in general everyday life so when someone says something that seems false it sticks out to me in my thoughts. I stopped trying to correct this as it seems most people aren’t very receptive, to say the least :) I’m not sure if people don’t care because being wrong isn’t the most important part, or they already know it’s false and don’t care.

It’s fun learning about how different people see the world and I think it’s cool how many different people there are in the world and people have really different world views than I.
Absolutely. It's like how async can be replaced with a struct and a giant switch statement, but that's a PITA to write manually.
Finally news from Nvidia that really moved markets.

Nvidia +4.68%,
Intel -4.65%
AMD -4.47%
This brings to light an issue I have encountered recently which has caused me to rely on console.log more than I would like.

In a recent project I have started using async/await, and seem to have lost the ability to use the debugger effectively. Breakpoints no longer seem to work properly. Its a huge negative, and im thinking of rewriting a lot of the code to remove async/await if I cant fix this issue.

Has anyone experienced this? If so, is there a way to fix it, or is this what I can expect when using async/await?
That's good and dandy until one changes one case block to normal statements instead of a terminating one, forgets to add a "break;" and someone has a nightmare debugging session trying to figure what is going on.

Go did good by making case blocks break automatically and requiring the "fallthrough" keyword in one of those very rare cases you need it do.
> Keep in mind the stress here is on the personal opinion - and not statement of fact.

I wouldn't have taken issue with your comment if you had stated it that way. The problem was with classifying it as wrong to challenge something simply because it's an opinion. Ridiculous objections and ridiculous requests are of course not deserving of a response, but that's not how you phrased it.

A good example is this other reply to my comment: "Please explain, in detail, why you believe there should be a high barrier to entry for expressing opinions, how doing so would lead to anything but an impoverished marketplace of ideas" That is misleading because a reader will infer that I actually said either of those things. Anyone posting something like that should be prepared to justify or withdraw the comment.
People are somehow downvoting this but it's a fact that my attic is a lot cooler for longer after solar was installed despite much hotter summers. The solar panels are shading my roof and the main thing heating it is the hot air.

Tesla's fancy solar roofs take this away and are very likely more expensive over the long term due to higher AC costs.
I enjoyed reading this. We are in a tech growth phase where the cloud, SaaS and AI are eating up both businesses and antiquated business processes (aka digital transformation). Find a niche and help them evolve.
When you use the phrase "reward", are you talking expected value? Or top of the distribution?

Because if it's expected value, I doubt "entrepreneur" is high reward compared to FANGs "moderate reward".
I've built a few solutions with graph databases (cypher is my query language preference, oddly) and use an RDF/OWL ontology for some personal documentation projects, and what I think holds it back in production is it is too powerful.

"Too powerful" doesn't seem like a thing until you realize it undermines DBA's skill investments, means business level people have to learn something and solve their own problems instead of managing them, disrupts the analyst level conversations that exist in powerBI and excel, seems like an extravagent performance hit with an unclear value prop to devops people, and gives unmanageable godlike powers to the person who operates it. (this unmanagability aspect might be what holds graph products back too)

If you don't believe me, the list of companies who use them also get a rep for having uncanny powers because of their graphs, FB, twitter, palantir, uber, etc.

Using ML to parse and normalize data to fit categories in RDF graphs is singularity-level tech, imo and where that exists today, I'd bet it's mostly secret.
It is funny to read pg's take on wealth tax, given that Piketty has produced massive scholarly literature suggesting the exact opposite of what pg writes.

If the pg's wealth tax blog was supposed to counter Piketty's work, it is comically pedestrian.
> Twitter’s mission is to serve the public conversation

And in the first several words, they've already lied through their teeth. It is very clear that Twitter's primary desire is to steer and shape conversation. One look at the 'passive voice' editorializing of their 'trending' feed is all it takes to confirm that.
> It's more that the way that the console reflects how the language works, and the console is not a log, it's a REPL (so console.output would have been a nicer name than console.log).

That is entirely irrelevant. The primary purpose of `console.log` is and has always be to generate output from normal, non-interactive programs.

And it's completely wrong, `console.log` was absolutely intended as a logging method, as evidenced by its siblings `debug`, `info`, `warn` and `error`, pretty much like every logging API out there.

It's also ahistorical revisionism "the console" was added very late into the history of the language, it and the entire console API were added by Firebug in the mid aughts. The language had been a thing for a decade at that point.

> I think it would be more confusing if the console did not work like the rest of the language does.

It would be the exact opposite. When I try to output something, my intent is to show the state of that thing at that point. That JS consoles are lazy (and even deferred) has systematically been a pain point and a pain in the ass leading to eager deep cloning to ensure I can see what I actually have on hand at that point, especially in mutation-heavy code.

I'm absolutely certain the number of times I've considered the behaviour a feature rather than an annoyance is 0.
Is it possible that we just don’t know about people inheriting great wealth nowadays? Is there a world registry of wealth somewhere to track this stuff or does Forbes just search public information sources? Maybe the richest people are secretive.
I always loved the idea of a ZUI but never found a good implementation. The idea of integrating all these interesting ideas into one system is really cool and I'll give it a go.
Capture US regulatory agencies while you can.

This has already had varying levels of success with the Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase being the acting chair of the OCC and telling banks it was okay to custody crypto and settle transactions on cryptocurrency networks instead of just SWIFT, ACH, FedWire

There are some at the SEC, and the new SEC chair was pro-crypto when he was previously the chair of CFTC

Cabinet level positions and the Federal Reserve and Treasury would be ideal

If this is important to you, you don't have to be just a passive holder or entrepreneur. Use your platform to assume power. Make the world as comfortable for your generation as older generations did for themselves.
I'd be super happy if there was a focus on partial migrations to Rust. I've last tried a while back (2 years?), and it's absolutely possible, but the build systems banging their heads into each other was a major hurdle. For a large C/C++ codebase, I guess avoiding Cargo altogether might be the best way to go - the more so the smaller the pieces being migrated are.
To the OP: that article is extremely biased in favor of RMS and focuses extremely narrowly on the Epstein/Minsky e-mails. Unfortunately I do not know of a good collection of his other failings (outside of the Minsky e-mails) to provide as a counter.
I feel bad for the engineering team on this, for a myriad of reasons, but right now having their Apple review rejection played out in public.
This statement from the CEO of an exchange about the utility of cryptocurrency for crime reminds me of those old prohibition-era "warnings" on grape juice, that told you to avoid a very specific set of steps or else you would end up creating wine.
Somehow all of those explanations seem to gloss over the fact that you generally need to be born into a wealthy family in order to have the cushion to take the risks that allow you to collect billions. As an example, Paul Graham would have been far less likely to attend Cornell and Harvard if his father had a blue collar factory job instead of being a nuclear physicist. Almost none of the 'bootstrap billionaires' of the tech world come from less than an upper middle-class background, but like PG they are quite fond of suggesting that their success was entirely due to 'merit'.
> I don't know, can someone explain why his work is so popular?

It's a prosperity gospel for nerds: you are the special chosen ones, therefore you deserve every blessing. Anyone who says otherwise is sinful and blind to the holy truth.
The U.S. rail system is different from Europe's rail: we chose freight over passengers, so it's difficult to make direct comparisons if (as other HN commenters are) your rubric for superiority is train speed.

But in a nutshell: (a) the US rail system is cheaper. The entire freight rail system costs less than what France pays for its significantly smaller system each year, (b) more throughput. Millions of tons of goods travel by rail every day. It's cheaper, faster, and more ecologically friendly to ship by rail than by air, water, or truck, (c) America's rail system is designed to withstand weather features that would obliterate most of Europe's rail lines, like tornadoes and hurricanes.
So it's parachutes all the way down.
This is a really funny and pithy description of both HN and reddit - and according to Google, you're the first person ever to say it.
Is the timing of this statement a coincidence, or is it possibly a jab to take the wind out of the sails of another top exchange set to go public in two days?
https://tryfinch.com

It's an API for Payroll. The number of use cases is pretty amazing!
> Wait until you hear about cash.

Cash is extremely difficult to use in criminal enterprises, especially with the USD. Large amounts of cash are bulky due to $100 being the largest note. Massive amounts of cash is difficult to convert to/from other forms of assets due to CTR, SARs and fed surveillance.

Cash as a vehicle for facilitating criminal activity by now is largely fiction. Even diamonds are easier than cash.
Non-fungible tokens are one way to create artificial scarcity.

However, just because something isn't scarce any more doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Lots of people want to support artists whose work is important to them. Platforms like Patreon may be much more important in the future.
Three problems:

1. Humans are humans, and they pretty much always judge their success by comparing themselves to others. Or, rather, humans are primates. Take a look at the famous study of the monkey that got cucumber while the other monkey got tastier grapes.

2. Income inequality in and of itself can be a problem because the mega wealthy can essentially buy laws that benefit themselves. There have been many studies that show that politicians are much more responsive to the desires of the rich than the desires of the average person.

3. In any economy, limited resources always go to those on the top of the wealth graph, regardless of cost to produce. So while you may be able to say everyone's standard of living is better, that's cold comfort to someone who won't be able to buy a house in their lifetime because limited land supply goes to the richest.
I was more referring to the fact that EA promotes philanthropy instead of asking why we have inequalities in the first place. So it evades questions of redistribution or fairness in a similar fashion as PG.

I'm not quite sure how strong the analogy is though.
I don't think Patel was saying that there are an endless amount of copies of Swift's music on the internet. He was saying that there is an endless selection of music available, which you agree with in your second paragraph.

And that hurts Swift's point - if music implies art, and art implies important and rare, and important and rare implies valuable, and valuable implies it should be paid for - that doesn't explain why so much music is not paid for. It also doesn't explain why some people create music for free.
Why on earth would you assume that? Middle Ages aristocracy lived comparatively miserable lives - no daily hot shower, no climate control, nothing resembling health care, no running water or sanitation, no access to information, no international supply chain for food or products (eat only what your community can preserve for the winter). I would wager that any of those aristocrats would gladly amputate their limbs to live as an average person today.
I'd also note, on "security, acceleration, deceleration, max speed"

Security is really the same as any bike, though it's much harder to steal the wheels!

On acceleration & max speed, obviously it depends on the particular scoot, but mine is much better than a typical human on a bike. That's a Ninebot Max, costing about £600 ish
>One thing I want to mention is that there needs to be a high level of trust for it to work well.

This is a great comment. And it's really hard to build that trust if people have zero understanding of what your work actually entails and how much work is required to do something.

It's actually easier when you come in a consulting role. You are perceived as somebody who has come in temporarily to do something the team cannot do.

When are working in a team, you are not seen as an outsider. People will try to understand what you are doing by fitting it into what they are doing. A lot of mistrust can arise from this.
Nice. I modified Dashing to do something kind of similar many years ago. Dashing then got discontinued and I didn't have time to extend it as much as I wished. Still own the domains I bought for it.
I love the name "Grace", after Grace Hopper.
Connecting People in the US with State Covid-19 Vaccine Information
I would guess the "Telecommunications Act of 1996".

https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.txt

Probably the text starting here:

SEC. 702. PRIVACY OF CUSTOMER INFORMATION.
Title II is amended by inserting after section 221 (47 U.S.C.
221) the following new section:
SEC. 222. PRIVACY OF CUSTOMER INFORMATION
Javascript and Typescript replacements.

Started learning Clojure / ClojureScript and keeping an eye on ML languages like ReScript and ReasonML.

I wish soon I'll be able to never write JS/TS code again.
In theory things like YouTube and Patreon could provide that gap - but not sure it actually will.
Because Twitter has really elevated the level of conversation in the West.
Once you get to a point, preservation of wealth is the most important thing.
> No offense, but I trust PG's advice on startups a lot more than his advice on macroeconomics

That's the key bit for me. I've found his writing about startups, software, hacker culture, product development, etc. to be mostly great and informative. But whenever I see anything he writes about society as a whole, I tend to find the conclusions he draws to be pretty out of line with reality, or at least (in the cases where I don't have data) counter to my experience and opinion.
>That's why founders sometimes get so rich so young now.

It is true. Sometimes young people get really rich while they are really young. Sometimes you can toss a coin 30 times and you can get all heads. I don't see why deceptively call it "sometimes" when in reality saying almost never would be heck of a lot truer.

>You could get rich from starting your own company in 1890 and in 2020, but in 1960 it was not really a viable option. You couldn't break through the oligopolies to get at the markets.

I am guessing by PG's definition having an internet connection is "getting at the market". To create a startup at 2021 in tech sphere you need to have a ridiculously unique skill-set. I haven't heard of any recent succesful start-ups that just does writes to DB and renders something on the screen. If there was such a low-hanging fruit big companies would simply copy the best features overnight and make you obsolete.

When tons of people are getting at a market it means lots of competition which means you need to further reduce the competition space by using geography, connections or wealth.

Tl;dr: You almost never get rich from starting a company.