skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whoa - flamewar like this will get you banned on HN regardless of what the flames are about. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.
I'm just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself

>"People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies?"

And my answer to that question would be, arguably yes. Why? Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige. The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that it's not at all about meritocracy, it's that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.

The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. This new, self-made entrepreneur class does not only think they have earned their money themselves, which as a sidenote is also kind of a fiction, but that they're intellectually superior, morally superior and virtuous in ways that anyone else just can't understand.

Old money might have ignored you and thrown a party, but Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparison.

C.S Lewis:

"“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
Minimizing Struct Page Overhead
I'm pretty sure that year that the global population of homo sapiens dwindled to about 5,000 members was worse than this...
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've done a lot of that, and it's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is it literally a ponzi scheme? Of course not. It's very abstracted but the concept is the same. The problem with your article is that everything they argue is reliant on the price keeping increasing. Everyone buys into the hype of something not fully understanding it. Bitcoin simply has a much larger cap before it falls apart, as bigger and bigger players start pouring money into it in hopes of those wild returns before it all comes crashing. The problem Bitcoin has not yet addressed is real-world usage. When the vast majority of transactions are gamblers buying up in hopes of making money, what do you think will happen when the price finally hits a ceiling and all those gamblers start to acknowledge that the price won't go up anymore, especially after several years? They'll start to sell, causing a panic. And you'll see it recover a little, but never reach past a certain point, making the next recovery worse, until it gradually drops down into nothing. By then people will either move onto other coins to gamble on or just give up entirely on it.

I will absolutely change my position on all of this the day Bitcoin becomes used in a way that justifies its price beyond "that thing that magically keeps climbing in price that everyone's gambling their money on".
It was this part I found most distressing. We found a way out and then it actually went backwards.
Every time I see wealth inequality being talked about, I remember this quote:

"It's not greed that drives the world, but envy.".
> Every time I read one of PG's posts, it seems like he's working from a narrative that he's trying to conform facts to.

I share your suspicion too. It seems most essays start with a prejudiced narrative, a climax in mind.

Then there are chains of weakly cohesive theories and numbers presented as pseudo-facts, some cherry-picked evidence to stretch the imagination, forever nudging towards the predetermined, targeted conclusion and a veneer of logic holding it together. All supporting the same narrative.

There's the same humble bragging, FOMO peddling, "trust me"isms; rinse and repeat.

Very much like a religious manifesto.

I believe this appeals to the hopes and false beliefs for those who already took the plunge. And at the same time trying to net newer fish.

I regard these essays now as promotional and propaganda material over substantiative, context driven sharing of knowledge from a unique perspective.
Sorry, but this is not true at all.

Some of the biggest changes within ES come from Lucene, like _massive_ reduction in memory footprint, enabling ES to use cases not even possible before.
An apartment (at least in the US) is well understood to be a yearly lease. Software purchasing not. Similar software may be priced monthly, annually, everything upfront, or even free. If you put a price and list it as monthly and neglect to mention anywhere that it requires a year agreement, then it's an obvious dark pattern. You know it is because they easily could add "annual contract required" underneath, like most others do when they show annual pricing as a monthly rate (IME).
Please note that CC ND licenses are not FLOSS licenses.
It may have been different a long time ago but I don't think Adobe is misleading if you want to subscribe. It's pretty clear it's an annual contract with a monthly payment.
While this quote was good at its time, I don't think it aged well. It is 35 years later, and I do not think the here called essence has appeared.
> User that is no longer with us

That sounds a lot like common idiom for a dead person.

Other than that you should probably share this when it's a bit more done.
The marginal cost is 0.

But don't you lose out on a lot of benefits of citizenship as well (visa free travel, etc.)? If you want to trade in US markets you are still liable for US taxes regardless.

As a US citizen permanently living abroad, I'm really annoyed at having to file, but I'm not even contemplating renouncing my citizenship.

Quite honestly, I pay slightly higher income taxes in the country I live in, and I'm happy to do it. If I were ever eligible for a wealth tax (besides the property tax almost all middle class people pay, which is very much a wealth tax), I would be fine paying it.
I had to put some whitespace in your echo because it was borking the page layout. Sorry—it's our bug.
Please give feedback on the project, it is only in its early stages but has a lot of potential, in my opinion.
Well, I don't want to present my view in an absolutist manner, but there is a lot of survivorship bias in success stories.

People tend not to note positive environment factors if they lived all their lives with them. And if you got burned through externalities beyond your control, you tend to be a bit sceptical on fairness of the game.

Last, but not the least - "don't do anything stupid" is easy post-hoc, but think of your teenage mistakes and consequences of "doing stupid" during those years.
It's not HSBC's role to decide which things are pyramid schemes. SEC is for that, and they have made it very clear that neither Bitcoin or Ethereum are one.
Or your cat just killed and ate all the one who tried and they don’t even try anymore.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.

It was the epoch of self-made tech billionaires, it was the epoch of stagnant median wages.

It was the season of free knowledge, it was the season of credentialism.

It was the spring of Hope, it was the winter of Nope.
True, my views are non-American. For example when I go to a convenience store, I pay the price listed on the item. I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else.
But was this the “worst year to be alive” mostly in Europe? How about in other parts of the world?
It tastes like licorice and gets you extra drunk due to the sugar and is greenish.

That's the complete list of effects of Absinthe besides the unique if not unpleasant taste.

source: drank the real deal a couple of times out of curiosity after it was re-legalized in my jurisdiction
Not at all. Flash was pretty much built insecure, WebAssembly runs in a sandbox by default (and this exploit does not break out of it).
That doesn't have a lot to do with tech companies. First, the ratio compares CEO compensation with stock options to worker wages (without stock options), whereas many of the workers at tech companies are also getting stock options.

Second, pg is talking about the Forbes 100 where the founders of tech companies are represented. The founders didn't get their stock by being granted it as compensation in stock options, they got it by virtue of founding the company. Whatever they have left, they have because that's what they were able to keep and not sell or get diluted.

For example, Bezos' wealth is mostly due to the fact that he owns ~13% of Amazon. He didn't get that as CEO compensation, he got it by founding the company.
If curious, past threads:

536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356 comments)

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4 comments)

Others?
A fair point. But it's also worth noting that Snowden recommends Signal, and doesn't say "don't use it on an iPhone" as a caveat.

To say Apple is benign is ridiculous. To say they're better on privacy than google is just true.
Google knows about (and has patched) the bug already. The exploit code has been shared wholesale.
The bounty model only works when a few individuals (businesses in that case) are very interested in the result. I'm not aware of any projects that run on a bounty model and also take small payment from thousands of sources to make it happen. Unless you have some super-fans willing to drop a lot of money, or price your bounty incredibly low [0], I don't see this working for a song.

The alternative solution doesn't address the above commenter's problem that you shouldn't charge for copies of music, but for the creation of it in the first place.

[0] And yeah, I realize expecting a high bounty is kind of hypocritical for an indie musician. I've made maybe $50 from my music sales/streaming over the past decade, so why should I be asking a bounty bigger than a few dollars for any song? Well, because with the bounty model I'm setting a ceiling for what I can earn from my work, which doesn't exist on a pay-each-download model. Maybe over the next 10 years I'll only earn another $50 from music, maybe I won't, but I don't want to lock that in.

Also, I am going to make my music regardless of any sort of bounty. The payment is just for whether or not I release the music. Open Source projects typically use the bounty to pay a developer to work on the project. They don't develop an entire project and then withhold release until they get payment. Software doing it feels necessary. A musician doing it feels stingy. It just doesn't feel like a comparable model to me.
I looked through a few papers, but I couldn't find more than: experts agree now formites are overrated. While saying that lab experiment shows formites can survive for days on surfaces (and then claiming that this experimemt was conducted with artificial high load).
Till the Party decides that they're not anymore.
Oh shit. I'm just using multiplicative inverses to reverse hash functions. Simply by inverting every expression from bottom to top.
https://github.com/rurban/smhasher/tree/inverse/inverse

Multiplication was the hardest, and several numbers were hardly invertible. OpenSSL has a nice inverter. Could be used to make crypto better.
"tons of people are struggling to meet their basic needs"

That's just not true. There are billions less people struggling to meet their basic needs now, than there was in 1982.

World is much more equal now than it was in 1982.
Git can also be an offensive word just like blame. It just depends on what attitude people have towards the context. I am not offended by git, blame, master and slave and I think it would be best if people who are offended just change their attitude towards the context
> corporate veil were pierced

This refers only to going after shareholders. Employees can always be held responsible for their actions.
The statement that P2P networks are superior to centrally managed ones stands far from reality. There is a certain class of problems where this is true. But like in most computer science problems, distributed systems have a ton of flaws and inneficiencies.

Moreover, trust isn't something mediated by computers. Trust is a question of human societies. Algorithmic trust is not arbiter of trust any more than the thousands of electronic trust schemes, which get gamed at some point or another and where human intervention is necessary for course correction given a measure of authority.

Computer systems aren't outside of human law or common principles of human trust or institutions. BTC and all those other networks are just as if not more vulnerable to being gamed as any other system.
Crazy ants? http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/urban/ants/crazy_ant.htm
> Clearly, it wasn't obvious to everyone.

Nope, it wasn't. You do realize that the concept you're so stoked on was actually tested in Mr. Piketty's homeland and failed miserably? Oh, the irony!

From NPR [0]:

> Normally progressives like to point to Europe for policy success. Not this time. The experiment with the wealth tax in Europe was a failure in many countries. France's wealth tax contributed to the exodus of an estimated 42,000 millionaires between 2000 and 2012, among other problems. Only last year, French president Emmanuel Macron killed it.

Capital is like water - it flows in the direction of least resistance. That part should be obvious.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/26/698057356/if-a...
A firm created at Rice University is actually trying to solve exactly that problem. [0]

[0] - https://statistics.rice.edu/news/student-founded-blockchain-...
Adobe is simply advertising their most affordable price. The options are clearly labeled at selection. They do not try to trick you. The way I see it, there are 3 possible alternatives to the current arrangement:

1) Adobe stops offering the annual paid monthly plan. This sucks because the consumer gets fewer options.

2) Adobe advertises the price of the true monthly plan. This sucks because Adobe is unable to advertise what, for many, is their best deal. If I intend to use this software for more than a year, which is a very common use case, then I want to know the best price on a long term basis.

3) Adobe keeps the advertised price as-is, but must add some kind of disclaimer or note which indicates the terms. I think this is pretty reasonable, and maybe should be implemented. Still, this sucks a little bit, not just because it’s more legal red tape, but also because it is visual noise in the same vein as the © and ® symbols.
What a strange story. Did the company not have a controller?
Drugs are the world’s largest market and we have given control of it to criminal enterprises.
The format is nice, but I can't help but feel it'd be much easier for a human to parse as just normal TS with docstrings for flavor. For some of the more advanced functions, it's all but impossible to actually figure out what the input and return types are -- one must parse the english to find the references to "(see the module description for the format)", then try to figure out what that means, then go there, then repeat, until primitives are reached. Compare to TS where the return type is either right there in the code, or I can at least hover over the function to see a preview or Cmd+Click to get to the type definition itself.

Not to mention the difficulty of manually keeping the english type descriptions in concert with the actual code -- some things computers are much better at than humans, verifying types is one of them.

All that said, the flavor text is well written and I'm glad the author took the time to include it!
That's part of the myth though, and your example is a great point supporting that. Sports franchises don't invest in top names because of performance, they invest in top names because it's marketing gold. These athletes of course have to perform well, but their value in performance becomes detached from their pay as they become more and more valuable for their marketing to the franchise. It's the same thing with CEOs and shareholders. When you pay outrageous compensations for CEOs, shareholders look in awe as that CEO must be amazing if they are receiving such high compensation, and as long as they do a decent job, they feel justified; it's one big positive feedback loop.

It's how mediocre CEOs like Marissa Mayer was able to get over $200 million in compensation, even though her background, while impressive, didn't warrant it. Yahoo shareholders ate that up. Take a look at someone like Shaquille O'Neal, who was able to command a 20 million dollar contract in 2009 even when he was at the end of his career and past his prime. He was marketing gold for his team.
This is actually a discussion that has been explored here on HN too.

YC has as a sort of a motto "build something people want", or something along those lines, and I doubt that founders are all equally happy to see their ideas become a garbage can of hamfisted revenue streams, but that's where you end up when you get VC money, give up board seats, and can't show "sufficient" growth.

On this last topic there was an interesting discussion a while ago about where VCs and founder interest is misaligned.

https://medium.com/@jodij/why-is-venture-capital-so-misalign...

https://www.livemint.com/Home-Page/vcHwylgEDmCC9JatZ0kTQM/A-...

This problem alone is probably at the root (or very close to) a disproportionate amount of dissatisfaction when it comes to startup software.

That said, there's surely more to this story, but this is already a great point to discuss, especially in a place like HN.
A PDF containing a graph of the process:

https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/live-boots...
For an example, the PBRT book is great.
This was my experience too: the AWS ES hosted offering was ok, but we had an outage and some associated needs and we basically lost all of our data.

However, we found that running our own cluster on EC2 with Cloudformation was relatively painless.
Context matters. Almost no pure software product has a cancellation fee. It's always a yearly cost or monthly where you can cancel anytime.

Some things like apartment leases are not only in a different context, but it's done for a clear reason. Reserved instances on AWS I'm assuming has a similar purpose but it's also in a different context and it's hopefully made very clear to the user.
> I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else.

Oblig: sales/retail taxes in the US vary city-by-city. While just like the rest of the world: US companies put their MSRP on products - 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. That's bigger than the profit-margin on many items sold at retail - and the simplest solution is just to have everything understand that the price on a box is the pre-local-tax price. And everyone (most people? or just most people on HN...) know roughly what their local sales tax rates are anyway (mine's around 9%) and as everyone pays by card having exact change isn't an issue.
This is precisely why it's unlikely any regulation will occur to stop this at the source. As long as American customers are happy to bend over to shady business practices by dominant American businesses, the rest of the world will keep experiencing the knock-on effects of this behaviour.
Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic.

Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to cement their wealth and power. Those are things Graham is clearly against. But an entrepreneur who gets rich by reducing waste and improving productivity by harnessing technology deserves our praise. They're not causing the "poor to get poorer".

And comparing the wealth distribution of today to that of 1980 is pretty silly. We're in a global economy now, so if you want to be fair, you need to look at it from a global perspective. Almost all Americans are going to fall in the top 10% of earners globally. And global poverty has collapsed since 1980. Yes, you no longer get a comfy middle class life just by virtue of being born in the US (regardless of skills) anymore. I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here.
How is it working exactly ? Since it is a change in the algorithm, could it be put on a GPU to go even faster afterwards, or is it too sequential for that ?
I hate that quote. Personally I’m not envious of the rich, I despise them. I hate the fact that there are rich people, not because I want to be one some day, but because they ruin the party for the rest of us. The climate disaster is disproportionately the fault of the rich, yet it is the poor who are disproportionately affected by it.

I don’t envy the rich. When I see the rich, I see pitiful humans that work too much, that have a miserably family life, who hate dogs, and have ugly houses built for them. If I ever become a person like that, I would hate my self.
"The accused admit their crime, you get a quicker resolution, and the government gets more tax revenue. "

The problem there is that the government has no need of their 'tax revenue' because no such thing exists in sovereign currency areas like the UK and the US. (As explained by Beardsley Ruml decades ago: http://home.hiwaay.net/~becraft/RUMLTAXES.html) If they don't get it from the fraudster, they'll get it from the next person in the spending chain. It all happens anyway. (And if they divert it, then the downstream doesn't happen and they lose 'tax revenue').

For the integrity of the tax system, tax evasion must always involve significant jail time. It's the most valuable thing you can take away from the people who undertake these sorts of frauds.
it would be interesting to see a smartphone dialer app that plays with different input designs specifically made for modern touchscreens