skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If so, that describes a third of Americans, down from half in 2002 [1]

Your source is from 2007. I don't have that particular figure; but in 2019, the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution continue to own almost nothing, the top 10% of the wealth distribution own 71% of all assets and the middle 40% own about 28% [1].

> A strong majority of Americans get more money from the government than they put in

This is literally the point of taxes: to redistribute resources.

> (b) own assets

See above, but ownership of assets is distributed incredibly unequally.

> (c) route discretionary income to consumption over asset accumulation

This argument that poor people remain poor because they make bad choices (formally called "culture of poverty") has been heavily criticized. Most economists and sociologists now reject it and have done so for over 30 years.

[1] https://wid.world/share/#0/countrytimeseries/shweal_p50p90_z...
The era of printers is over. Use PDF viewers to display and annotate documents. MacOS Preview app lets you add arbitrary text, drawings, shapes, and pretty passable signatures.

For scanning, download the Microsoft Lens app for your phone, it works well.

Stop buying personal printers. They're bad for the environment. We should make them a dead technology.
Those 4-5% interest rates on savings came with vastly higher rates in other areas, though. Mortgage rates of 10% versus today's 3% or so.

They just follow the Fed funds rate up and down.
Google is aware that it's a dead end: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.7855646,-122.4743446/37.7...

The application of Occam's Razor that feels to me like the simplest explanation here is that Google is sending the cars into this dead end on purpose, and the unusual sign in the middle of the road seems like an obvious reason they may be doing it.
Can you help me understand which part of this is not materialism?
Thank you for linking me to this this, it's a wonderful write up that I had not seen before!
Your last paragraph pretty much sums it up for the US.

The primary objective of the US government for its people should be to provide everyone with the same basic opportunities. What they do with those opportunities is up to them, like it is in any other country which already does these things.

Access to education and universal healthcare + a livable minimum wage at the very least.

Once your children are fed, happy and healthy and you don't have to work 2 jobs to make ends meet, you have more time to spend with your kids and provide them with an upbringing which will allow them to have a fair chance at becoming one of the people who make those decisions.

There's obviously a major influence on US democracy coming from the decision makers of the "economy".

So the question is, which is more important, and to whom? The majority doesn't have much of a say in the economy unless they band together, which is nearly impossible in a diverse and (intentionally) divided US.

A flawed democracy also means that the kind of drastic change that's needed to correct this imbalance can't happen.
Afghanistan did it thousands of years ago. Some of them still work. They are called a Karez IIRC.
Yes, I believe something with low certainty, at least partially because I can't fully articulate it. That doesn't mean I don't believe it, however, and I can't think of a better way to grow my understanding of something than to take a position on it on the Internet!

Almost all of my beliefs/opinions are built on some form or another of sand. Certainty is the real mind killer, IMO.
Air bubbles in the bloodstream show up clearly on medical ultrasound. Doctors use this to diagnose atrial septal defects.
"Maybe Lenin and Stalin had their reasons" is not a take I expected to see on HN today, but that's the lifecycle of all successful intellectually-oriented discussion forums I guess.
If the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 89% of all U.S. stocks, that means "everyone else" owns the other 11%. That may include other Americans, but what about foreign investors (sovereigns, institutions, etc.)? Surely they own a bunch of U.S. equity? Perhaps the article uses the denominator not of "all U.S. equity" but "all U.S. equity owned by American individuals and institutions".
And if we do the accounting, we'll find that most states paid no net federal taxes in 2020, and are wholly dependent on states that did.

Is there a particular point you are trying to make, here?
> > It doesn't help you know that the list of known hashes is complete

> Right, which is why I said it would have to periodically scan the registered clients to ensure a minimum number of clients has each block to ensure redundancy.

That's the easy problem, not the hard one I was referring to: doing what IA does requires you to be able to crawl web resources and identify everything which needs to be available for a page snapshot to be usable. IPFS only helps with that in the sense that you can tell whether you have the same URL payload without requesting it — you still need to handle dynamic behaviour and that's most of the work.

> I think a slow, cheap but reliable archive is better than "more expensive but lower latency", so I'm not particularly concerned with timeliness.

What I would be concerned with is “more expensive, higher latency, and greater risk of irrecoverable failure”. Relying on volunteers means that you need far more copies because nobody has a commitment to provide resources or even tell you if they decide to stop (“ooops, out of space. Let me clear some up — someone else must have this…”), and the network capacity isn't just a factor for user experience — although that can prevent adoption if it's too slow — but more importantly because it needs to be available enough to rebuild missing nodes before other ones also disappear.
The story of L0phtCrack, as well as other people / projects associated with cDc (Cult of the Dead Cow), is nicely recounted in the book Cult of the Dead Cow, by Joseph Menn.
The world’s top performers prove talent has nothing to do with success
That's kind of weird to see it as a sell signal. Couldn't it very well be someone hugely interested in buying it so it is a buy signal? Every transaction has a buyer and seller and both would be thinking they are making a good trade or they wouldn't be in it.
Because almost everyone who purchases anything pays 'sales tax' and almost all homeowners pay 'property tax,' but the problem we care about is income/capital gains tax evasion.
Facebook created its own PR nightmare
Seems likely hot wallet to hot wallet. There's a lot of dispersal happening to small accounts that have been around for a while.
nice thing about hjkl is that by pure luck it still has good placement on Dvorak.
MuJoCo: An advanced simulator for multi-body dynamics with contact
Just because you can do it with Postgres doesn't mean it is the best tool for the job.

Sometimes the restrictions placed on the user are as important. Kafka presents a specific interface to the user that causes users to build their applications in certain way.

While you can replicate almost all functionality of Kafka with Postgres (except for performance, but hardly anybody needs as much of it), we all know what we end up with when we set up Postgres and use it to integrate applications with each other.

If developers had discipline they could of course crate tables with appendable logs of data, marked with a partition, that consumers could process from with basically same guarantees as with Kafka.

But that is not how it works in reality.
> Keeping a command history from the start of time and re-executing all of it to undo one step?

Someone needs to play around with NLE video editors. Because yes, that's what they basically do.

The video editing steps are all items on the "timeline". When you hit the "render" button, the computer goes into overdrive: spinning up a bunch of threads (maybe even GPU-kernels) and actually calculates everything.

What you see in the preview-screen doesn't always match the final render. The preview-screen is just a quickie-calculation, much like how 3d programs (ex: Blender) have a realtime renderer (see Eevee) vs the offline, more accurate renderer (see Cycles).

---------

From an NLE perspective: the GUI is basically a glorified editor of commands.
> It's also worth bearing in mind that the socialized healthcare system the US does have - the VA

That I know of, the US has either 5 or 55, depending on how you count the Medicaid programs run by each state + DC in cooperation with the feds, socialized healthcare systems (Medicare, Medicaid (1 or 51), TriCare, VA, and the Puerto Rico public healthcare system.)

At 9 million covered beneficiaries, the VA system is smaller than Medicare, smaller than Medicaid, and even smaller than California's state Medicaid plan (Medi-Cal).

It’s kind of weird to pretend VA is the socialized healthcare system in the US. (Actually, you can argue that TriCare and VA aren't even true “socialized” systems but employment-based plans for current and former employees, for a subset of federal government employees.)
There’s Bref for the Serverless framework but it only supports AWS and they have no desire to support any other frameworks.
I'd add "Hobby project because you want the idea to exist." That's where virtually all my side projects land. They are different from (A) in that using new tech is not required and may even be detrimental to the goal.
> Democracy ought not be a meritocracy, but the economy should be

The Walton heirs have over $200 billion. I guess Alice Walton ($60 billion), who killed someone with her car in 1989, nine years before being charged with DWI for driving her car into a gas meter is one of those epitomes of meritocracy. Or the Koch heirs, the Mars heirs and so on and so forth. The economy is designed for the benefit of the heirs of the St. Grottlesex set, of this meritocracy you speak of.
"Better" for themselves --- no doubt. "Better" for others --- no way.

To do "better", submit to an audit to show their cash backing. Instead they claim 100% backed by "something" that is not even clearly defined and has changed over time. And the exchanges play along and collude to keep the "market" price at $1USD.
I envision more unarmed uses. I live in Washington DC, where the aesthetics don't matter as much as the operational capability. We're so used to helos flying around that spotting them has become a game: https://twitter.com/HelicoptersofDC

When a bank teller says "The robbers drove away in a blue car," the police want the ability to roll back the tape and find all the blue cars that left the bank in the past hour and see where they are now.
Everything is cheap unless it's on one of the really really high value chains like bitcoin or ethereum.

Also fees are based off of data/processing not percentage wise so 0.03 really doesn't matter that much in terms of blockchain.
The Hard Realities of High Standards
Growing up in the 1990s, I remember noticing that most of money-making computer initiatives were usually started in the US (think Bill Gates starting Microsoft), which geeks in Europe were more about cool and artsy pursuits (think Amiga demo scene).
I wonder if there is something here related to mindset on the two continents.
For more context on "very expensive," a MuJoCo license was several hundreds of dollars.
What Tether PR statement are you referring to? Do you mean Binance?
I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Speculation only leads to bad outcomes for people who don’t deserve it.
I've also been thinking, the population segment in the US most likely to have medical expenses and thus see a problem in the system to be fixed are the older generations. But, these generations are on Medicare and Medicaid and thus don't see the same problem as those with expenses who are younger. This is also a large portion of the population that, "doesn't want socialized medical care". So, they in effect, have socialized medical care and it's benefits but don't want anyone else to have it. Is this kind of accurate or am I being too cynical?
Ask HN: White Hat Analysis of “Vault 7” Release by WikiLeaks?
Description:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7

Has anyone examined or tested these tools, verified their utility or shown they are useless?

What is the SOA (state-of-the-art) regarding these "tools"?
Don't worry, you lost nothing.

You made the loss when you bought this fairy dust.
"Facebook's former director of monetization Tim Kendall says it's within the company's capability to improve the algorithm and crackdown on misinformation, but they don't because they won't make as much money."
If you're on Firefox, there's an add-on called 'Instagram guest' that allows you to get around their annoying attempts at lock-in.
Were they wealthy before owning that much or became wealthy as a result of owning it?
More money might also mean you're just really good at colluding, anti-competing, price fixing/gouging, arbitraging, exploiting, socializing expenses and negative outcomes, or monopolizing.

It's extremely flawed and naive to think a positive balance sheet means a positive outcome for society occurred in the process of obtaining it.
Quick Tips for Home Inspection in North York
you might still have concerns. And, you are right to do it because, after all the work, there are many unchecked things. However, you do not have to worry as you can always get home inspection in North York. It tells which parts need repairs in your home so that you can continue to live comfortably.
Odd that this article suggests that Intel ignored a new technology until it was too late in the Apple case, when the article that they link to back that claim argues for the other style of disruption---low-end product eventually claws up market share and performance to compete with the high-end.

The rest of the article seems reasonable, but IMHO and many other's opinions is that the Intel/Apple/ARM thing is classic disruption from the low end.
I always find it ironic how quick Silicon Valley is to argue about the need for "disrupting" industries yet how supportive those same individuals are about retaining the current health care system even then they acknowledge it needs to change.

The US health care system is by the far the most complex of any nation state and punishes the losers the worst. It strikes me as something badly in need of disruption. And it's not like we're talking about removing private health care entirely -- if that's what you're scared about?
"Are they listening? When you have a conversation with them, are they paying close attention to what you have to say, or are they busy delivering a message? You want listening :)"

- This is common advice anytime one talks about relationships and communication. Listening is a skill, listen 10, talk 1, almost to the point that is difficult to understand who's doing the talking if everybody is getting the same advice of listening. Then you have those, and some HR people came to my mind--just to keep things professional--, who listen and listen and then you realize they just did not (or did not want to) understand.

Now, my question is: if it is common knowledge that listening to your reports is important, along with being pretty cheap and not particularly challenging to do, why so few managers do it? Incompetence or there is an advantage in not listening much?
>The wage limit for 2021 is $142,800 and it's increasing to $147,000 in 2022.

While I always enjoyed having that extra ~6.25% in my paycheck after I hit the limit every year, it didn't make any material difference in my spending/saving or quality of life.

I expect that's the case for most (if not all) folks who exceed that limit.

And since removing those limits would keep the US social security and medicare chugging along nicely for the next 50 years or so, while not doing so will require cuts in benefits within a decade or so.

While it's not a certainty, it's more likely that we'll come up with better ways to fund healthcare in 50 years rather than in ten.

As such, it makes sense to remove those wage limits on FICA[0] payroll taxes.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fica.asp
Maybe 10% of americans are close to retirement age, and have been saving all their life in something called a 401k, which happens to be stock.

That would be ... not very outragous.

Sure, you can say 89% of stocks is too much and there must be other factors at work. But I refuse to be outraged until we control for the non-outragous factors, and see what remains.
Author says they make $8k/month from their job board.

That's the story I want to read.
The market is always too late in constraining resources often running counter to it. Higher prices for water will lead to more water being mined. High oil prices led to deep water drilling, fracking, and tar sands.
First Report of the Commission on the EU Digital Covid Certificate Regulation [pdf]
That's a definite problem for ISP duties. Law enforcement is used to "sorry no air support tonight, it's windy."
Washington is a weak link in the global chip supply chain
I mean, you are right. For people like us, the American system works out quite nicely.

But the further you fall down the income ladder, the worse the American system is.
IMO the most important part of RAII is really the other side, "destruction is resource divestment" - and that still works. That is the main purpose of lock guards, refcounting wrappers, file objects and so on.
I understand what they’re trying to say, but…this would also be true if they were just irrelevant.
> If you have good work based coverage

then you're stuck with your work. Because other work might not provide the same coverage. It's not too bad for programmers because they are spoilt for choice. For many other people it becomes servitude.
This is spreading misinformation:

> we may see advertisers being charged double for their ads.

Can you please dive deeper into this? Advertisers can either pay for clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). Neither of these are tied to "humans" or "accounts". How does this change double charge for ads?

[0] - https://www.facebook.com/business/help/716180208457684?id=17...

---

edit

> An impression is counted as the number of times an instance of an ad is on screen for the first time.

> If an ad is on screen for someone 2 different times in a day, that counts as 2 impressions.

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/675615482516035?helpr...
You've very much missed the point of my post. But from the tone of your reply, I sense we'd never see eye to eye anyway.
And stock in Amazon wasn't worth money until it was! Not defending Tether but just naming something unrelated and not even trying to argue similarity is pretty low effort and not compelling.
Healthcare in the US is a tool to control labor.

And an industry - not a service - aiming to find and charge the highest prices in a market where the buyer cannot refuse the service.
'spend on healthcare' not the same as 'pay in taxes'
I was 30 and 32. I just listened to the weapons inspectors. I wasn't surprised at all when all of Hussein's bluster was about putting on a domestic show of opposition and not appearing weak, apparently I understand dictators better than the CIA.

Also when Rice was testifying that if Hussein had HEU that he was 9 months away from a nuclear device I knew she was lying without lying, because I'm probably 9 months away from a (crude) nuclear device if you give me enough HEU (and let me buy some chemicals to make explosives).

The yellowcake nonsense was also clearly nonsense in real-time, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 because Hussein would have put to death any Salafists he could find.

I also was old enough then to remember this guy explaining why invading Iraq was a bad idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT7Ik_X1HU0

And fast-forward to today and Michael R. Gordon who put forward the argument in the NYT that Iraq was building a nuclear bomb (the "aluminum tubes") is the same journalist who wrote the sick Wuhan lab workers piece in the WSJ (which once again only quoted "intelligence sources say..." and was otherwise fact-free). When someone is getting you very, very angry at a foreign power you should question why (Democrats would do well to look at all the hype around Russia and all the nothing being done about the Trump administration by Biden).
> There have been some unfair benchmarks posted in the past surrounding io_uring that were called out by people on the liburing repositories.

Could you provide any links to these discussions?
Those seem like legal and not economic matters, unless you're saying all matters are economic matters, to which I'd carve out the matters that are legal as not meritocratic and therefore not "good" that we leave it up to "merit" (however that's defined).
In addition to this, OP should also prove that these people have others' best interest in mind. Without some sort of accountability, increasing most people's standard of living is irrational.
I've read enough early US industrial history and the history of the East India Company to see how this can get horrifying with a quickness.
GDPR right to erasure does not apply in front of God
This is still a pipe dream for some. It’s still very very common to wait months to see a doctor in the states, especially after the pandemic. I routinely wait months to get into my dermatologist, too. YMMV but this is absolutely not the norm.
The George Clooney example doesn't seem apt.

1. George Clooney didn't get rich from acting. He got rich from selling Tequila. Regardless, his children will likely remain wealthy despite never having been on a movie screen, much like the Waltons are among the top 20 richest people despite never having a job at Walmart.

2. Every year, fewer and fewer people get rich from having built something (labor), and more are just rich from being already rich (capital).

If in a free-market system, if you let the people with most wealth concentrate power, after n-years you are just left with a monarchy with a couple extra steps.
I believe the tradeoff of how specialized to be is dictated by your work opportunities - specialization of labor AKA division of labor [1].

If you can and want to work in a large corporation, you should be able to get a fairly specific job title. This is advantageous because two specialists with advanced but complementary skills outperform two generalists with intermediate but overlapping skills.

Division of labor allows sophistication in processes, which can increase efficiency.

The downside is, the job pool is more limited (both for employers and for employees). You need specific employees/positions.

A startup might not afford such specialization. For instance, if the finances only afford 3 people on payroll, you're not going to find a job working on a 10th of the pipeline, even with 20x efficiency compared to a generalist doing half of the pipeline with 2x efficiency.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour
It would not surprise me at all if this was done from a legal defensibility standpoint... if Facebook said that the accounts remain separate, but then it was discovered that they were for all intents and purposes linked behind the scenes, that's an even bigger problem.

I wouldn't jump to an insidious conspiracy to boost impression #s a couple percent (given that it's not obvious to me this affects their billing at all).
One of the reasons central banks and monetary policy have taken on such a strong role over since the 2008 financial crisis is an unwillingness to have honest discussions about taxation. If we want "nice things" however you define them, it's easier to outsource the details to an amorphous central bank than actually discuss a just and equitable tax regime that can support those things.
I find that an extremely low bar since you mention nothing of quality of outcomes. In any case, I guess the US system wouldn’t be “good enough” by your measure.