skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Income inequality is growing, yes. But are the wealthy somehow responsible for it? Is their "getting richer" directly responsible for it? There seems to be a growing consensus on the left that they are. I have yet to see a convincing argument to show this though.

Someone who builds a company worth 100m didn't have to steal money from me (or anyone else) to do it. If they did steal, then that's what needs fixed. Prevent the stealing.

The individual who has 100k to invest can watch that 100k grow if they invest wisely over time. They can pile the earnings on top of their savings from their salary, and get richer faster than someone without the 100k invested. The rest of us who don't have 100k to invest don't see that same benefit--but merely because the 1% chooses to invest and to watch their money grow isn't a bad thing. Now if they're doing corrupt things with that money, then yea--fix that.

This concept of a wealth tax "fixing" income inequality is folly. It won't fix anything. It's at best a band-aid attempting to treat a symptom caused from underlying issues. We need to treat those underlying issues--not the symptom. Wealth tax happens to garner a lot of support though because many of the 99% love the idea of receiving something for free that's taken from the 1%. But it's not the governments job to legalize theft and pick the winners and losers, it's the governments job to fix the underlying issues.
"If my memory serves me right, most rich folks successfully escaped both the Holocaust and the Communist coup."

Black swans are by definition uncommon. Being a Loyalist in America of the 1770s was a huge black swan, for example. While their counterparts a little bit to the north in Canada did just fine.

Prague is full of big villas and other real property whose original owners perished with their entire family. There was literally no one left to claim them after the war. Same in Poland or Germany.

People back then did not want to believe that something as barbaric will be done to them, until it was.

I do not think that exact stats exist how many rich and poor survived the Holocaust, but considering the vast amount of abandoned valuable property after the war, including the infamous sleeping accounts of Switzerland, I do not believe that most rich folks escaped successfully.

Surely they had better chances to act in time, yes. If they had the foresight to do so. One of my points is that once you are a part of the conventional elite, you are motivated to try to weather the problems in place, because uprooting yourself and your family is a huge loss.
People who do not need cars or who have access to an alternative to ICE don't have a problem. Obviously.

The issue is the large number of people who rely on cars for work, and especially who rely on vans for work. There must be viable alternative to ICE vehicles for these people, otherwise hitting diesel (or petrol) vehicles can have the consequences seen for instance in France with the "Yellow vests".
I mostly agree, but I think it's important to note that the necessity of administrative overhead (and associated friction) scales with team size and project scope. I expect a lone developer to be the most productive by far in the narrow sense of producing working code. However, at some point a single person just can't do everything that needs doing themselves.

So I'll agree that as things grow administrative overhead will necessarily creep in. But I expect that if you can find a way to turn a profit, a smaller team will probably involve significantly less overhead. So if (as in PG's hypothetical) the developer is worth $80k at a big company, how much would you estimate them to be worth at a company of only 4 people that has a good idea and funding?
Its because your argument fundamentally does not hold water. "It would be too hard for manufacturers..." just is not true. You are trying to tell us that the only way to price something is printed on the original box (not even the product! just the box) and that it would be too onerous to expect them to price at each location accordingly. Are you really trying to insist that a sticker is too hard? Too onerous a task?
>You could say the same about every law. All you can do is make it more expensive; murder still happens despite all our efforts to prevent it. But you can make it rarer, make it a less profitable business. Eventually it becomes non-worthwhile for most of the people currently involved in it.

You can say whatever you want, but what matters is the evidence, and there's no evidence AML laws have reduced illicit drug use.
Half-assing it with everything you've got (2015)
Policing is pretty strong.
Sure, but why does the Xbox One support it then, but not the PS5? And wouldn't it be possible to somehow incorporate the licensing cost in the console by means of a paid software upgrade (like on Windows) or a 'premium' version of the console that has it by default?

As far as I know Dolby Atmos can be seamlessly mapped onto to 5.1 or 7.1, so from the developer perspective there should be no effort/cost to provide Dolby Atmos audio. I might be wrong about this but I assume the licensing cost would be for the playback device and not for the 'right' to bundle an Atmos audio track with your game?
Yeah for sure, the current ones are disgustingly expensive and atrociously hard to use though!
> HSBC does a lot money laundry for rich people around the world, and now it is worrying about risks?

Says a lot about the 'risks' involved with that business model.
Java vs Kotlin – Which Programming Language Is Best for Android App Development?
Doubleplusbueno.
True but this would indeed be considered very unusual and surprising for software if it wasn't indicated explicitly.

I just checked and while they do only indicate "X €/month" on the product page, as soon as you enter the checkout process it says "yearly subscription, monthly payment - Y €/month" with the additional options "yearly subscription, advance payment - X €/year" and "monthly subscription - Z €/month". I'm not sure how they're getting away with the misleading prices on the product pages tho (usually there's at least an asterisk indicating this comes with additional conditions and obligations).
I can speak for Hong Kong, the return on investment on a rental property is around 2.5% (in the case of the apartment I rent it's 2.6%). The reason why rent is so cheap is I believe due to a lot of speculation by people buying in the hope that the price will increase. But this creates a lot of landlords who want to rent and unfortunately for those renters the people renting can only pay so much a month.

Landlords still expect to make a profit with the rising prices though so think that the rent being this low is not an issue but between the NSL and the changes by mainland China, it's unlikely their bet will pay off

I've seen a similar situation in Malaysia where there's a massive amount of speculative investments in luxury condos leading to 38% of the luxury condos being empty. The landlords are just buying it for speculation they don't expect to make money with rentals and that drives the prices of rentals down
> Worst case the price going up means they take less, which seems like a somewhat positive outcome.

No, it means my car gets broken into.
Unless you have a static site, in which case there are loads of options out there, there doesn't seem to be a free tier. Wouldn't fly.io be the modern version (I'm not saying heroku is outdated, I think it's still brilliant)?
WebAssembly (and asm.js) add additional attack surface to V8, and multiple attacks (including this one) are not possible without that
Half of that is caused by their own past decisions and the other half by their own present decision to not put 100% of their effort into changing it.

>being poor is the single most powerful force that prevents people from doing that.

IMO absolutely wrong. The real reason is people dont try and risk it all. And they search for reasons why they would not be able to make it, including the oh so unfair starting points in this "game". Yes its unfair very very unfair even. But it is so for almost everyone. And more importantly it can not be changed and even if it would, it would not retroactively have an effect on existing people.

Everyone has one life and the number one reason to not reach a set goal is if it was not set and not attempted. You can make up all the good reasons why you would not attempt it because life is unfair but that doesn't change the fact that you yourself reduced your chance to reach it to zero by your own decision to let circumvention stop you from trying.

>Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom.

Failing is an possibility if you try, if you dont, its certain.
Also what exactly is so "scary" about failing? Do people think they end up homeless under a bridge or something? I see a practically zero chance that could ever happen to someone who fights.
You need to have some serious mental health problems and probably drugs to fall this deep. And given that health in unfair too you may get this anyway so even more reason to get yourself in a poison where health problems wont make you fall to the bottom.

Ive financially failed before, as long as zero is the bottom (I dont make debts) is just a setback its not stopping me. I certainly had a good start in life but money was never given to me. I started form zero as a teenager and I almost went back to zero in my early twenties partially do to circumstances outside of my control partially due to bad decisions. I could have another 50 years trying so why would that stop me.
My goals a higher than ever and the speed at which I chase them only got faster.
Goodbye Zebras!
I was trying to figure that out too.

Part of the problem is that the figures are apparently percentage of value, which might give misleading figures if a country produces a lot of its high-value requirements: producing all your own asparagus isn't much use in a famine if you still rely on 90% imported wheat.
> You have to do a lot of work to get there.

Oh no! I have to do work? Guess it is time to roll over and just die. You can't expect me to work for something!

> All that work is wasted years compared to someone who was just born there in the first place and can focus 100% on their actual path of getting rich.

All your work of getting rich is wasted years compared to someone who was just born rich in the first place and can focus 100% on their actual path of getting uber rich.

How's that sound? Maybe instead of focusing on some abstract definition of rich you should focus on what amount makes you happy?

First step to happiness is to stop having destructive mindset of "bah, he started with more money than I did".

I probably won't buy Ferrari in my life, and I'm okay with that. I probably won't buy luxurious house or start unicorn startup. And I'm okay with that. But I will achieve relatively wealthy and good life and be content with that.
They really are a new church, telling us what is acceptable to think, censoring bad sounding names from us, all for our own "safety".
You have a glaring mistake in your very first paragraph: 2% of $60 million is $1.2 million, not $120k. The calculations on your Google sheet look correct though.
>>Will English speakers police the rest of the world, regardless of their language?

It's not English speakers, it's Americans specifically. Their corporations and their media have infiltrated the rest of the free world and are basically telling everyone what is and what isn't ok. People grow up watching American films and shows, accepting American morality and norms as "standard" even though frequently they absolutely aren't elsewhere. People use American social media from young age, letting American corporations censor and control the content they are seeing, again, even if the content shouldn't be controversial where they live.

Yes, I understand the hypocrisy of posting this on an American website. But I believe there is a large portion of non-American users here and it's important to remember that this is happening and should be fought against wherever possible.
https://kaboomjs.com/ seems a better URL
Kind of a dishonest characterization - Flash was sandboxed too. WASM is simply easier to sandbox and has additional constraints that make it easier to keep code from trying to break out.
That is just modern art. But... if in the previous week you paid someone those same 7 figures, or you paid N people 7 figures/N for their creative dance with walnuts, then the tax people might be justified in their curiosity.
Kind of - There is an option to always add specific frontmatter when creating a new file. It's however in the pro version.

I'm yet to implement proper templating support.

Could you please vote on the issue? https://github.com/GitJournal/GitJournal/issues/20
All values given in USD I see. Well, someone is going to extract real money from this.
It is certainly that way in the credit scoring system. You essentially are negatively impacted until you dispute and prove your innocence.
You're right, that's a great video.
Yes, we should all resort to playing chess in our heads. Though it's troublesome as we'd have to communicate the pieces names. Kings have opressed people through history do that wouldn't work, since at some point in history a far distant relative of mine was killed in a war initiated by kings orders.
I wouldn't want to work at a company with controversial business practices and "screw you we do what we want" attitude towards their customers, no matter what a great environment is inside.
Cinnamon spice is actually a bark. Unless you're literally referring to the bark in which ignore this.
If you want anecdotes, look at the LineageOS forums where people complain frequently that passing Safety Net on unGoogled phones is no longer possible even with the old workarounds, so now their bank apps won't work.

> Less apps are required, in lieu of web apps on their websites.

Some banks require you to install their phone app for 2FA – they have phased out separate code cards or code calculators now that everyone is assumed to carry a mainstream smartphone. So, even if you want to log into their online-banking website, you need an Android or Apple phone in order to authenticate.
Your example comes from 1881, about 75 years before the US would become anything close to a superpower. So the simplest explanation is that the French simply agreed that it sounded weird in English to have it on all official letters, in stead of a superpower bullying it's allies into submission.
I’m pretty sure people are referring to https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

Tl;dr: trans men are men, trans women are women, non-binary people are fine too; singular “they” is ambiguous and it would be better to use a non-ambiguous word, so he plans to use a non-ambiguous word, though others are welcome to continue using “they” if they want to.

(As a non-binary “they” myself I’m fine with this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s like if somebody hated how the word “one” breaks so many rules of pronounciation and decided to always use the spanish “uno” to refer to 1 of anything - good point, weird solution, I’m not going to try and get anybody fired over it...)
I suspect that only young people can be that ruthlessly data-driven. Us older people tend to have experience that we're attached to, and a certain psychological resistance to the idea that the stuff we've been doing for most of our career was actually a waste of time.
There are self-hosting services such as https://gitlabhost.com/ for gitlab which can host you a private instance on a (sub)domain as a SaaS.
I love Heroku. But I hardly use it anymore.

For personal use it was excellent way to spin up an app and see if it is useful etc. That part I had to stop doing because they changed the free-tier pricing model. So I had to sunset most apps, keep a couple on the free-tier and Hobby-tier, but with no room to add new apps.

For work use it is useful for demos and some small apps. But the main problem has always been scaling Heroku apps beyond a single monolith. Most work projects split and scale across a lot of apps/services etc and that stack part was never easy with Heroku.

So for my personal apps I now have an overkill of a K8s cluster (or 2, maybe 3...) that I chuck all my new apps in. As someone with k8s skills that is ok, but obviously I know that Heroku did 1000% other things in the background that I now have to do myself, and pay for...
Note, that kind of zoning is US specific issue. The situation zoning wise is quite different in Europe. At the same time Europe also has a housing crisis.
Or, you know, simply do whatever you want in a VM.
Now if they’d leave their own damn logo off I might buy some.
While the empire continued until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (depending how you define "empire") the Justinian plague did effectively end the campaign to retake Italy and reunite the Mediterranean under Roman rule. But it marked the beginning of a prolonged slow decline rather than a collapse.
The US will do nothing except threaten more sanctions.
I worked on the article posted here. I think it's come up again because anti-war US writers are now noticing more hostile editing of their pages[1]. Philip Cross was banned from editing in the area of British politics (which, in my opinion, was done reluctantly by Wikipedia arbitrators after Hacker News[2] and later BBC[3] exposure), the account now continues with the same kind of editing, but targetting people that fall outside the area of the topic ban.

Here's an example: Philip Cross had little interest in Max Blumenthal's Wikipedia entry prior to the Wikipedia topic ban (edited only 11 times from 2007 until Cross was banned from British politics in July 2018[4]). Since then, it's been edited by Cross 552 times[5]. According to WikiWho, Cross is responsible for 56% of all content on Max Blumenthal's Wikipedia page. Before the ban, Cross was responsible for 0.9% of the content.

[1] https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1381746315659509763

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109290

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csws6q

[4] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Max%...

[5] https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Max%...
Well, the 1800s were also when not bending to the will of European powers was likely far harder and more damaging than not bending to the will of the US (even today) in many parts of the world. There has been some improvement in the overall bullying problem, in my book, and hopefully that will continue.
> The answer is to solve the underlying problem. Do the opposite on the supply side; increase competition so much that nobody is making any money at all. Decriminalization. And then address the problem on the demand side through regulation and treatment programs etc. rather than prohibition.

Problem with this statement is it's not only about drugs. Yesterday it was heroine/cocaine, today the cartels are laundering avocados, tomorrow it can be whatever else high-demand product of the western world that is available in Americas. The mafia cartels will always find a new field to profit from.
That's dumb. The purpose of decentralization isn't to simply demonstrate the strength of the decentralization. It's an element that helps something achieve a purpose. In this case, the ability of a person to be their own bank. Not being banned also helps that purpose. Why would cryptocurrency supporters lobby for government bans?
Right, it couldn’t possibly be a request to an ally based on the coincidence of a totally fine French name with an unfortunate meaning in English. Similarly, if for some reason the French end up on Merde Avenue, we should be equally offended when they request a different name with which to correspond. Because this matters. A lot. And it’s absolutely worth a mortal slugfest in a comment section about the great evil of the western world making an accepted diplomatic request of precisely zero consequence several thousand years ago.

You fight the good fight. Show us our follies. Perhaps France should have invaded Maine over this inordinately egregious insult of insults.
What does bloat free mean in this case? There seems to be no explanation
Why can't bitcoins price "stabilize" by fluctuating inside the 1000 to 200000 range?
It's fascinating and well worth a read. Back in June or so, Hertz was going bankrupt. Their stock was going up anyway, trading volume was way up. Hertz decided to ride that wave and asked to make a new stock offering so that people would give them a whole bunch of money right before they went bankrupt.

In the paperwork to apply for a new stock offering, they openly said that they were going bankrupt (hell, they asked their bankruptcy court for permission to make a new stock offering!) and their stock was going to become worthless very soon (I understand the SEC thought about the act of selling new stock to rubes as one final payday, and after conversation between them and Hertz, Hertz withdrew the application to sell new stock in a company that openly said it was going bankrupt). Their stock kept going up. They'd openly said they were going out of business (soon after that their stock did indeed become worthless), and they were telling people this, and the stock went up anyway. It seems that the majority of buyers were buying it based not on analysis or on any real idea of future earnings.

The best estimation of the future long term prospects of the company was that they'd go bankrupt and all shares would become worthless; yet the share price was yomping upwards because a terrible estimation of the future long term prospects of the company was that they must be recovering because, hey look, they want to sell some new shares!

I guess where this is going is that I say that the price of a stock reflects the current price at which you could probably buy or sell one of that stock (assuming there's a market for it), and any interpretation of its meaning beyond that comes with caveats and conditions. Sure, often, there's some kind of link to the company's "value" or "potential future earnings" or some such, but by no means always and to make a blanket assertion that the stock price "reflects the best estimation of the future long term prospects of the company" is a dangerous simplification.

Many many examples? Yes, I think so. Stock price is the market price; it's not set by anyone based on careful analysis. Some people decide the price they're willing to pay based on analysis, but the actual price is pretty much by definition what people are willing to pay for it, which has no inherent link to what it's "worth".
Letting bishops "capture" the child-like pawns is also in poor taste.
I've been enjoying for some time now how people who have never read 1984, or have no actual idea what Orwell was alluding to in it other than "bad government", keep invoking that book. It's funny.
>They assume that the superrich can't just leave.

This isn't even a downside. In a savings glut this is actually a desired outcome. Of course we don't want literally everyone to leave, only those on the margin.
Yes that's very helpful.

I cannot imagine any founder being deterred to start a company because of this wealth tax. With or without it you'd be very rich under PG's assumptions
I think you didn't visit that link i provided...
Hey fellow zoids fan, first of all i never said people creating value shouldn't be rewarded, i think they should be rewarded extremely well but at the end of the day, no individual can survive without a society, this is a fact. What we need is a more balanced society where people can start at some base level and can gain based on their contributions. As for your Usain Bolt analogy, for me its more like Usain Bolt is a great runner so he gets 99.9% of sponsorships but theres some kid in Uganda with even more potential, yet he becomes a farmer because he can't find a sponsorship. There are talented people all over the world, a good society affords them the opportunity to realize their potential, something which i don't think is possible with uncontrolled winner take all in the economic marketplace.