skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> actually, people having or making different amounts of money is inherently wrong” (war on inequality).

This is a misrepresentation though. There isn't anything inherently wrong with people having or making different amounts of money. The complaint, as I see it usually, is that the degree of inequality is unacceptable. That is, millionares aren't inherently unethical, heck people who make millions annually aren't inherently unethical. But people who make billions a week, might be.

That is, I can comfortably and easily donate enough each year to support a few working families. Bezos could match the Child Poverty Tax Credit to every child in poverty in the US each year and still turn a profit.

(For the math here, its ~$3000 * 11 million children, which comes out to ~35 billion, or half his income this year). And remember: he could do that every year and his wealth would increase.

The key issue is that personal wealth, after a point is wasted. Creation of vast personal wealth doesn't really serve society, so why should society encourage it? That, again, doesn't mean that no one should have any personal wealth, just that the ROI, after a point, should lessen.

How much do you really care after your second billion anyway?
Trying to buy Arm.

Multiple competition investigations permitting.
I love RMS but unfortunately his skepticism doesn't get treated well by the vocal mass. These days people like to view things in a very black and white manner and if you dare to express your skepticism in a topic that is considered clear cut by the mass you get ostracized.
I depends what you mean by "alternative sources". Lot's of places still have local papers that are pretty good for local news. There are international papers that have a different point of view to the American corporate press, which is quite useful from time to time. There's also good bit of quality opinion and some reporting on substack. And then there are some select reporters that have a narrow beat who do great work in their niche, but may work for a place that is overall questionable.

American news consumers should be critical, and pay attention to times when major competing news outlets are running the same headline about a complicated story.
Your point that "AWS has a bunch of other benefits to where people just accept the bandwidth costs so they can leverage those other benefits" doesn't actually counter the original claim that "the bandwidth costs are outrageously overpriced".
> but I suspect you are much more likely to build wealth with the more established tech companies

FANG: low variance + moderate reward

vs

ENTREPRENEUR: high variance + high reward

The Kelly Criterion can probably be applied here on how much to "invest" in each opportunity. Ultimately it matters how often these opportunities come up.
I was under the impression the gigafactory is a major factor in being able to deliver cars at the price point Tesla does. A decade later, and other manufacturers are still just starting to catch up in pricing and performance.
For starters The State isn't just one thing. Additionally there's so much money involved. The United States M1 money supply is about 4 trillion dollars. Finally, I'm not sure this is the right word, but

"unit transaction inertia." (UTI)

The higher some system's UTI the less likely it is to fundamental change.

So, ordering food at a restaurant or getting a taxi is mostly a one-off. It's UTI is near 0 and rarely moves. Paying rent's UTI is a bit bigger. The renter is staying there for a while, the rent is a significant amount of money, the land lord has invested a lot in the property. Also a marriage is going to have a large UTI, just not in terms of money. Ostensibly each party is in it for life and they interact many times every day.

Now, on to the state. Any State's UTI is going to be huge. Lots of specialized workers have invested a lot of time and The State interacts with a lot of people and for usually all their lives.

Certainly you could use fleas to change the course of a train. But it'll take a lot.
It doesn't have to be pure charity. I was a subscriber to Deadmau5's livestreams back when he was doing that. Monthly subscription and you had access to a private stream that was almost always live when he was producing in the studio. That particular example is boring if you're not into music production, but there are certainly things an artist can do to make a subscription worthwhile. Will it make a superstar artist more money than the usual means? Probably not. But it also doesn't have to include zero rewards.
Have you never spent time configuring an operating system?
Federal law applies when crossing state lines and in cases of trafficking.
Maybe SPACs Are IPOs
> What's stopping hedge fund management firms from racing to the bottom by competing for customers?

Regulatory capture.
It's the memory stupid!
Because he's famous (especially among the HN crowd), he's certainly smart, and it appeals to the bubble of internet startuppers that lurk in HN.

Paul, and to a similar or even larger extent Sam Altman, and others, seem detached from reality, in the sense of the common man.

Perhaps each one of us lives in a bubble of sort. His is immediately apparent to me, despite I kind of belong to the same crowd he preaches to.

I don't think his intent is evil nor bad. I think he genuinely enjoys writing and thinking about deep stuff, and I am grateful that he shares his thoughts with the world.
I do wish the technical criticisms and the social criticisms were separated out a bit more. The social aspects of this article heavily imply there's another side to the story.
> The tech companies behind the top 100 fortunes also form a well-differentiated group in the sense that they're all companies that venture capitalists would readily invest in, and the others mostly not. And there's a reason why: these are mostly companies that win by having better technology, rather than just a CEO who's really driven and good at making deals.

I'm sorry, but this is utter bullshit, told to one's self to feel better about the real facts on the ground. What we're seeing in "tech," over and over, is NOT an effort to come up with "better technology," but the play to capitalize on some particular niche, and then MONOPOLIZE it. This is key.

It's not good enough to provide nice co-working spaces; the goal is to own every rentable building in a city. It's not good enough to provide a ride sharing solution; the goal is to run taxis out of business, and own the ONLY ride share in town. It's not good enough to run a respectable social media site; you have to be the only one that people use for a particular purpose.

VC's are NOT looking for the next big idea; they're looking for the next MONOPOLY. That's where all the money is going. It's what our government and society has now optimized for. Other companies (like the latest $20B Microsoft gobble) are scrambling to own a monopoly vertical workflow stack of their own, but it's all the same idea in play.

We're heading directly for the cyberpunk, citizens-of-multinational-corporations future that people have been writing about for decades.
There's a bias some people hold that people who are very wealthy must also be very wise.
Do you need to ban cash if you simply phase it out of existence? Turn up instant payments, and any notes turned in at banks and to the government get shredded. Look to China and Sweden [2] for foreshadowing of digital currencies and the eventual deprecation of physical notes.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=china+cashless

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+cashless
there are some very real counterexamples. It's hard to argue that the US did not undergo both decreasing inequality and growth between 1860 and 1900. Decreasing inequality (well a good chunk of the population was no longer chattel slavery, if nothing else), and the US went from "utterly destroyed by a civil war" to "nascent superpower"

more quantitative measures of inequality between 1860-1900 (that probably doesn't take into account slaves) https://voxeu.org/article/american-growth-and-inequality-170...
There are relative winners and outright beneficiaries of climate change. There was study/map projecting mortality per 100k, with some countries gaining life. Same with GDP/development. And with geopolitics, someone benefits from neighbors water wars, destabilizing regions with climate refugees etc. Or that global south projected to be most vulnerable but are also least developed and most incentivized to pollute their way into development. There are too many competing interests and contradictions for global warming to be taken universally seriously, or at least seriously as scientists thinks it needs to be.
I'm sure Microsoft could survive a court challenge. That is not the same as saying getting agreement on this has no value to them.

The user was incorrect because they said, "anything you discussed via Skype granted to MS a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, etc. license to anything mentioned" in the context of their parent comment that said, "now they will be able to listen what you talk about. Where is this going?" These terms have nothing to do with listening to your conversations and they don't grant any rights to them.

That's not to say Microsoft won't ask for such licensing in the future.
I would say that it allows one to write statefu, long lasting workflows or processes in a durable and persistent way using all the niceties of regular programming languages such as Go/Java, like control structures, abstraction, etc. In a similar way that generators in Python/JS allow one to write even complicated iterators much more easily than manually keeping track of state yourself, Temporal allows one to easily define long-lived stateful processes (on order of years even) with the simplicity of roughly:

while(true) {
Thread.sleep(1, MONTH);
sendReminderEmail(user);
}

...which would normally require one to manually keep track of state in queues and key-value stores and idempotent updates, but with temporal the developer can just focus on the simple business rules. The runtime of Temporal takes care of compiling that down into proper state-machine logic.
Yeah, to be honest her exit was the least traumatic thing that happened. She's just collateral damage in my brain's attempt to section things off.

I've been watching the MDMA treatments with some hope that they'll become legal and mainstream in the USA.
Fair point, but most forms of pollution are fairly local. If a country wants to ruin their ground water we can complain on humanitarian grounds, but it doesn’t directly impact the rest of the world.
I just do work stuff on my Linux machine and play stuff on my Windows machine. Couldn't be happier! I've been running Manjaro Linux on 3 workstations for over 2 years now and, as a web developer who does mostly Node/React/React Native, I haven't needed anything from Windows. The best part is not having to fiddle with Windows specific issues all the time.

I have even worked on .net core projects with vs code and run SQL server in a docker container.
Making 1.5M/Year by Re-Imagining Local News with WhereByUs – IH Podcast Notes
> I was out of the loop on this

Summary: https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/
Indeed, although I'd say for a majority of situations, Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch service is a complete non-starter.
This is common knowledge among people growing potted plants to use tap water that stood for a few days in open container.
How do skip links help with blurriness? I thought they are mainly to prevent disappearing gradients?
There's a cycle with blogs. The author starts a blog and they have a distinct, somewhat original voice with distinct, somewhat original views. In PG's case, the startup advice about building stuff that doesn't scale, not worrying about competitors, Lisp, etc. were quite fresh, at least to me. The author's blog becomes successful and their ideas become well understood throughout a community. But a person's ideas don't evolve that quickly. They start repeating themselves. The posts become variations on a theme. Maybe the author goes outside their area of expertise (No offense, but I trust PG's advice on startups a lot more than his advice on macroeconomics). By the end people are wondering what you're wondering. Why are we listening to this person?
Well, the entire point of the FSF is to be an advocacy organization, which means that "making a show of things" is part of their job. They need to explain to people why Free Software is a thing people should value. Related to this is the need to defend why they themselves are worthwhile figureheads to continue the fight (as opposed to other organizations with similar stated goals, such as the EFF, Mozilla Foundation, or hell even the OSI).

This isn't "just a show", I specifically stated that you also have to actually follow through with changing your character to match. If Linus had merely said "I'm too toxic, it's blocking work, I need to change" and then a week later put someone on blast and insulted them for PRing something that broke userspace, that would be the extremely superficial and infantile thing you're railing against. But if he had also just said nothing and quietly stopped being toxic, people would still be mad about his prior behavior. You need both messaging and action, and the FSF has been lax on both with the RMS reinstatement.
Torrents or file sharing in general is maybe a good parallel. My impression of torrenting is that crackdowns have made file sharing a niche instead of mainstream activity. Of course it can't be 100% wiped out, but the general public is now wary of file sharing because the message is out there that it's risky.
Clever and clean, Nice work!
I think this is true in the common case, but I thought Bezos was raised by a single mom who had him at 17 and his step father was a cuban immigrant?

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/statement...

There's also the donut king: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25241898

I'm not trying to just pick rare counter examples, but I'm skeptical of the claim that there's little demographic distance or the implication that it's a prerequisite. One of the reasons people like the US is an immigrant can come here and they themselves (or their children) can become the richest person in the world (or the vice president).

I'd agree there's a randomness element, but it's less lottery and more placing bets with odds that are hard to determine. Some people have better initial odds, but that's only one part of it.

If anything - I'd hypothesize that extreme outliers share something other personality trait more relevant than demographics, willingness to take huge risks. You could argue that someone who has more of a safety net is in a better position to do so, but someone who has nothing to lose may also find the tradeoff easier. It's possible that most people in a relatively comfortable position would be less likely to take the big kind of risks that outlier payoffs require (I'd guess this is one reason why we have few people like Elon Musk).
I like reading PG's essays, but...I read a book on pretty much the same phenomenon ("Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty) a few months ago. It took a lot longer to cover the same ground, but it also covered it a lot better, and a lot more persuasively. Not unsurprisingly, it is also a lot less sanguine about the impact of recent wealth trends.
The point isn't that the FSF should have a political stance on topics outside of free software, the point is that to do their best job of promoting the free software movement they need to create an inclusive organisation that runs safe events, otherwise most people won't want to join, go to their events, or invite their representatives to give talks.

Unfortunately this point is very easy to miss for those of us who are not typically discriminated against, excluded, or made to feel unwelcome. I'll guess from your inappropriate username that you're a guy, maybe you should read some of what women have said about working with RMS? I wonder how much better the FSF would be if he hadn't systematically made certain groups feel unwelcome?

I have my own feelings about all sorts of political issues, and I don't expect those to always align with organisations such as the FSF. I do however expect to not shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to getting their message out.
The GET (Guaranteed Entrance Token) Protocol https://get-protocol.io/

The protocol offers blockchain-based smart ticketing which eliminates fraud and prevents scalping. This has the potential to get huge when events start coming back post-covid.
Also if you've ever hit play/pause on the keyboard it launches Apple Music.

And not macOS, but in iOS they've had a giant row offering an Apple Arcade subscription trial at the top of Settings for a while
> Firstly, Gini coefficient is based on income, not wealth.

The Gini coefficient can be applied to any statistical distribution, including wealth.

From Wiki:

> The Gini index or Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality or wealth inequality within a nation or any other group of people
Regarding the "escape velocity", it really isn't that tough IMO to save enough to retire when you're making 5-10x the median household US income, even if you're wasting $3500/month on rent. Yeah, milk and gas cost about twice what they do in the rest of the USA, but since I moved to the Bay Area I've been saving over a third of my income without even trying despite having a kid, eating out every day, and buying every gadget and gizmo I hear about

~5 years of savings can buy you a house out in the outside world so you can take a stab at building a ramen-profitable startup

~15 years' worth can probably cover regular old retirement at a level that'd be comfortable for people from https://old.reddit.com/r/FinancialIndependence
Oh completely agree -- wealth raises the floor, not the ceiling.

I'm not discounting that at all (and I recognize all the advantages that that class receives), rather pointing that generational wealth is normally created once, not multiple times in a family. Probably as a function of environment and not having the same drive - but thats merely speculation.
He’s a good writer in that he’s able to convince people who know next to nothing about the subject matter that he is making good points. Neither history nor economics agree with his hand waving statements.
We used to have a word for defending the accused, "Justice".

Accusation by a single terrified and led witness does not give license to treat someone like a convict.
By the way, confounding income with wealth is as bad as confounding market cap of a company and GDP of a country, e.g. GDP of India vs Apple's market cap [0].

[0]: https://www.profgalloway.com/scarcity-cred/
Have you never heard of the network effect? It would be extremely difficult to get users of GNU/GPL software to switch to alternatives after they're already made their choice.
False. I personally know multiple people that have done it. And I knew them before they got rich
They are licensing ARM cores; which as of now cannot compete with Apple silicon.

While there are using some future ARM core, and I've read rumors that future designs might try to emulate what has made Apple cores successful; we cannot say whether Apple designs will stagnate or continue to improve at current rate.

There is potential for competition from Qualcomm after their Nuvia acquisition though.
Definitely true. I realized talking to my therapist that I was afraid I would be chastised for talking about my trauma or abuse.
Ah. I see how you are reading that now. Now I'm not sure how to take that sentence.
Naming new businesses is hard but come on- this type of horrible name should actually create a stock sell off.
Not just the most hard drive space, but the very specific fast kinds of hard drives you need to farm it efficiently.

The idea that you can do a sustainable cryptocurrency that remains sustainable no matter how valuable the tokens become in real money terms is self-evidently ridiculous. There's always some limiting resource you'll hit first, and if the cryptotokens are worth real money, that resource will get scarce.

But Chia is a good example of a brilliant person being so seduced by a challenging technical problem that they lose any ability to see foundational problems that people with a tenth of the brampower would be able to spot instantly.
Dependent types and homotopy type theory for general purpose programming. I am definitely excited about it, but not really sure if those hopes will ever materialize as some useful (even in the limited scope) technology.
At the same time, differing costs of living reflect differing values.

The reason the Bay Area is so much more expensive than Tulsa, Oklahoma is because many people would much prefer to live in the Bay. Adjusting completely for COL ignores the reality that living in the Bay is, to some extent, a luxury.
> Moreover, inequality now is extremely high, and growth is decelerating. China has less wealth inequality than the United States, yet is growing substantially faster.

Growth is a second derivative. Income inequality is a function of first derivatives. You can't directly compare the two. If I had to guess, China's wealth inequality in China is growing at a much faster rate than that of the US.
Join the upcoming Tempo Hackathon “Unstoppable Together” this April 28-29
It definitely takes a bias toward "wealth accumulation is good" to present the following as good news:

> "The reason the percentage of heirs has decreased is not that fewer people are inheriting great fortunes, but that more people are making them."

It's likely that many of the inheritances of 1982 were the echo of the corrupt and monopolistic industrialism in the 19th century. Is it a bad thing that the great individual fortunes that were built a century earlier couldn't be amassed in the 20th? Have we returned to a 19th-century environment now, with technology taking the place of railroads and telegraphs? On that note...

> "the major sectors of the economy were either organized as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic corporations."

Unless I see a FAANG company go out of business, soon, and as abruptly as it appeared, I'm inclined to think we're entering a new oligopolistic era. Just because these companies were recently startups doesn't mean they aren't entrenched now.

(As an aside regarding the wealth tax, that actually would have worked to reduce the number of heirs at the top of the list in 1982 had it been enacted some time earlier.)
Granted that on the internet, people argue for fun. But in meatspace, people usually argue about things that they think art important and should be different. So in this case, parent seems to me to be saying "the downslide of the FSF is bad, and we should fix it, and I think RMS does not help fix it". Or, "it's not irrelevant yet, and shouldn't be, but RMS is making it so".
Advice straight out of The Onion, 18 years ago:

https://local.theonion.com/i-should-start-some-sort-of-huge-...

"Working security at Rite Aid for $6.55 an hour is just not cutting it the way it used to. But I'm not worried, because last night, as I was standing there staring at the rows of shampoo bottles and disposable razors, the answer hit me: I should start some sort of huge corporation!"
You hit the nail on the head!

It also didn't discuss that it seems more so that there is a new technology which is enabling a shift on riches, but it's likely that the next phase is one of inherited wealth again. Unless he believes that the children of those new fortunes won't inherit anything or will keep being surpassed in riches by the next generation startups. But I'm not so sure, I think it's just a cycle, refresh most company from a non tech based one to a tech one, and once that's done, it'll go back to consolidation and inheritance, until the next big technology.
Yes! This would be fantastic, I'd love to see this happen.

If anyone is working on this, and is looking to hire a computational organic chemist-turned-ai engineer, let me know!