skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since this is Hacker News, and there are a lot of really smart, numbers-oriented people here, I just thought I'd provide a link to a dataset that looks at income distributions within the US from 1913 to 2008:

http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~saez/

Under "Income and Wealth Inequality" on that page, click the link titled "(Longer updated version published in A.B. Atkinson and T. Piketty eds., Oxford University Press, 2007)".

It is an excel file that contains a metric ton of tables, charts, and figures. If you have a few moments and want a deeper understanding of the issue, that excel file is the best place to go.

(Edit: I just wanted to note one thing. My favorite graph from the excel file is figure 1B, where you can see that we are basically returning to where we were prior to World War II. It makes you wonder what was so different about the post-war period that resulted in this shift. Personally, I wonder if the sudden subsidization of education for returning veterans had anything to do with it, but I have no data on this right now, so...)

As far as my own thoughts on the issue go, I agree with pg. For a boring, academic take on it, there is a wonderfully dry 1980s paper by Rosen outlining the superstar theory:

http://www.ppge.ufrgs.br/giacomo/arquivos/ecop72/rosen-1981....

Basically, thanks to technology and globalization the rewards to individuals that have the highest levels of abilities have been magnified. Their "reach" has increased relative to those below them, and their rewards have increased in line with this.

While interest in this seems to be popping up all over the place due to the current economic catastrophe in progress, the idea that communications infrastructure improvements lead to income inequality is an old one.

Here is Alfred Marshall (founder of neoclassical economics) in 1890 (revision from 1920):

http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP54.html#VI.XII.4...

As for myself, I have no idea about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (or whether anything could/should be done about the growing inequality). However, it is happening now, on a grand scale, so I think that it is important for everyone to have some context on the issue.
On some level, income inequality is intrinsically problematic even if you don't care about social issues at all, or don't think it's a zero sum game.

Rich people have higher savings ratios than poor people. As a larger amount of income goes to those who have more than enough money than enough already, the average savings ratio increases. This is a drag on aggregate demand that hurts the economy.

Supply side economists will tell you that savings are not a problem because investment will go up. But then why would somebody invest when the people who would be interested in your product don't have the money to buy it because they're poor? This is pretty much the situation we're in right now, where there is no shortage of capital, but rather a shortage of possibilities for profitable investments because consumers have become more careful with their spending.

(I realize that it may look different from where you are standing - I am not an insider in the tech startup scene - but that is the picture in the larger economy.)

Another question that I am less certain about is how inequality affects economies of scale. Basically, as society becomes more equal, the larger size of the potential customer base makes investments in efficient production techniques more viable. Of course, there is the other side of the coin, which is that rich people finance advanced technology out of boredom, e.g. space travel.
I don't think that we've added anything that we should have omitted, but I definitely think we added them before we probably should have.

Keep in mind that it really all depends on your goals, and my goals aren't to create a huge app that generates millions but to build something that's pleasant to use and supports me to the point that I can continue to work on it.

That said, I think that we probably should have invested in improving and polishing our existing features before adding source control and email integration. However, I'm sure those have generated a handful new customers that otherwise probably wouldn't have used Sifter. I think they fall into the categories of things that people need when they're evaluating software but that in reality they really don't end up using.

Really, there's so many variables that it's hard to contribute any level of success or failure to one decision. I'm really pretty happy with everything that we have or haven't done to this point. It's just a bit disappointing to pour effort into a feature and find out that it's only being used 2-3% of the time.
Your defense is that you badly misquoted what shows up on your screen?

That is weird...
Obvious troll is obvious.

As I've said in the past, the consensus is simply "use a CM system," especially if you have to maintain these machines for a while (or if you have 50+ machines to take care of.) It's much better than dealing with various shell scripts or whatever else.
>The economic growth since 1978 was, for the most part, produced by the efforts of 10% of the population

I don't see how that could be true. productivity gains have been experienced across all levels of the income scale so surely that growth is attributable to more than just the top 10%. Just because that's where the most income growth has been doesn't mean that that is where the growth has been produced, its just where it has been captured.

I think you are right in questioning what drives the inequality. I do believe that some people are more productive and thus deserve additional income and wealth. But i am not so sure that the amount of additional income that the very wealthy earn is actually proportional to their intrinsic productivity. The issue is that capital tends to create more capital because you can 'put it to work' so the wealthy tend to become wealthier. So the rich will naturally become richer because they have access to greater growth opportunities (though investing for instance they can capture growth produced by other companies).

Capitalism fundamentally favors people with excess capital. This is what makes it very effective and efficient because it encourages risk and investment. however it doesn't necessarily produce a fair system because the owners of capital have many means to capture and retain the returns of investment.

For example if in the proverbial pin factory innovations were made that allowed workers to be more efficient (say by specializing different aspects of the production of the pins) then all of a sudden the factory is more productive relative to the labor invested. Now the question is who should capture the gains of that productivity. Should it be the factory owner because he/she put up the initial investment, the factory workers because they are now more productive, the person who came up with the innovation? It's not really clear but i think most people would agree that they all deserve some share of the additional profits. The shift over the last 40 years has been that mostly its going to the owner (the capital investor) and the innovator and not the worker. It's tough to determine exactly how the profits should be divided fairly, because fairness is so complicated in this instance. This is one of the major benefits of labor unions because they provide a way for the workers to share in the additional wealth that they are helping to create. Now obviously not all occupations should have unions and not all unions are effective, but this is the problem to which they are the solution, but you have to admit that its a problem first.
Better = more reliable, more comfortable, more capable. There were many cars of the time that were unarguably better than the Model T, but production and cost were the biggest factors of the Model T's success.
Reaching More Lovers of Color: Color Stream iPhone App Acquired by COLOURlovers
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=a7jenngfc4um7_&#...

This is a log-scale graph, which is what you want in order to compare rates of increase. You can see sort of an inflection point around the early 80s, but I'm not sure if it's significant.
Yep, there is no silver bullet. Think, try, learn from mistakes - that's what lean is all about.
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

And women in these times.
The key phrase, of course, is that sales people are "usually" but not always exempt employees.

Actions speak louder than words, and treating a purported-exempt employee as a non-exempt employee (i.e., compensating them based on hours worked, or docking pay for not working specific hours) is pretty much all you need to do (as an employer) for the employee to be classified as non-exempt. The laws, and especially the NLRB administrative decisions, favor the employees in this regard.

The "expectations" bit doesn't matter in this case, because the specific actions of Groupon make those industry-standard expectations irrelevant. It's about what Groupon did, not what everyone else does.

Once Groupon began treating the sales staff as non-exempt employees, they became non-exempt employees, and Groupon became obligated to compensate them for time-and-a-half overtime.

Based on the facts currently available in the linked article and other sources online, I am saying that Groupon would lose if it gets to a hearing. But chances are better than 99% that they'll settle (or go bankrupt before the case gets anywhere in the court system).
The zeitgeist of the 80s had a lot of concern about Japan becoming "number 1" - US manufacturing was falling behind and people thought that Japan was top of the world technologically.

So while the authors are Japanophiles, they certainly tapped into the mood of the time - that the future was strange and asian-influenced.
I agree, but to a point. In spaces where there are a ton of competitors doing roughly the same thing, shipping too early can be fatal. The trick is finding the balance. Entrepreneurs, take the article's advice with a grain of salt.

On the other extreme of the spectrum, some companies build a beautiful product but wait too late to ship. I've seen these companies die without ever having shipped.

Don't live either ends of the extreme. Ship fast, but not too fast.
Food - I read a report recently that said the amount of hours the average person has to work to feed himself has dropped dramatically over the last 100 years.

Rent - accept 60s level housing and you can easily afford it, 1 bathroom each kid doesn't get his own bedroom etc..

Childcare - not applicable if you are living a 60s lifestyle you're wife won't work.

Education - Expensive b/c the govt subsidizes it.

Healthcare - problematic, but only b/c healthcare now is so much better than healthcare then.
Ries' own startup IMVU proves you wrong.
It's somewhat useful to think of integers this way but it can be dangerous. a lot of operations on integers are 'undefined' on pointers. for example integer subtraction (which is quite common for measuring size) is undefined if the pointers are pointing to different memory objects. same with addition, if you increment a pointer past the end of an array you can create an undefined operation and who knows what the compiler will do.

So pointers are integers but with a big asterix.
If the rich didn't actually pay the percentage in taxes as given by their tax bracket, then their tax bracket isn't relevant because it isn't something that was actually followed in practice.

Also, capital gains tax is really. You'd have to make less than $8,500/yr to be in a lower income tax bracket. This hasn't always been the case. So, one easy, legal way to pay less in taxes is to get paid via capital gains.
It's a very British (or perhaps European) thing to reserve someone's garden and pay money for it too.. Camping in someone's garden is great fun if it happens randomly and spontaneously but I wouldn't plan it for the world.
I find it odd that the initial announcement mentioned Aaron Swartz, but not Greg Maxwell. Aaron never actually released anything while Greg actually released basically the same things that they are 'graciously' giving out for free now... only after someone forced their hand and yet at the same time denying it is the cause.
Online store owner here. We do collect and pay sales tax for California residents, but not residents of other states. The reason we don't collect sales tax for other states is:

1. We aren't required to.

2. Doing so would be a disincentive to sales.

3. Management of, and compliance with, thousands of different state+county+municipality combinations that change constantly would be way way way beyond the scope of an organization as small as ours.
> It's my understanding that in order to take advantage of scaling, user will have to pay a minimum $9/month (or whatever it is) fee. However, free users are resource capped. However, if you pay for scalability, but never need it for some reason, or only need it a couple times a year, you may as well have just stayed free -- otherwise you're out $108/year!

Looks like they're retiring that. Instead, you'll have "min active instances", which you can set to 1 to always have a multi-threaded instance preloaded, and still stay under the free tier, while only paying for anything that goes over it.

Win/win, it seems.
Introducing The Zen Of Steve Jobs: A Graphic Novel
Right, I did read and notice that in the article, but the distinction I'd make is that there is a big difference from "having wifi at their stores," and covering every inch of a those very large stores. Many of them are >100K square feet[1]. To cover that adequately with wifi, in a fashion such that their business can reasonably rely on it at all times, is a significant investment. I'd guess that they are going to have wifi near the customer service desk or whatever so they can outwardly say, "we have wifi!" but not bother attempting to offer adequate coverage with the rest because, in addition to being quite large, they are often filled with items that would significantly attenuate wifi signal. (such as copper pipes, metal shelving throughout the store, etc.)

[1] http://media.lowes.com/history/
Ah, much better. They've fixed some things they should have done from the start (a few more free hours per day for some leeway, charges not taking effect before Python 2.7 is available), and new, more useful features (min idle instances, rather than pay $9/mo).

I was unsure about using GAE for new projects, but I'm definitely more pleased again now. With the ease of migration away from it with Django-nonrel, I will definitely be giving it a shot for production apps that are a good fit for it.
> We’re working on a fix for this. Until then you can comfortably subtract 48 instance hours per day from the estimate.
It's kind of hard to A/B test an economy.
I don't mean to speak badly of this bibliography. Of the papers in the list I've read, they're all great. And I'll add the others to my list and make sure I get to them.

But I think the premise of the blog post is a little flawed. Reading papers is a poor way to make yourself a better programmer. Read them in spare moments, sure, but spend your time reading code, not paper. At best, these things will help you avoid some design mistakes in the code you write for yourself in your own sandboxes.

In the real world, you're dealing with code written by people who haven't read these papers. And this is where you're going to spend all your time: maintaining and fixing and enhancing stuff that missed all the advice in the papers. This is especially true of "day job" programmers, but it's true at startups too, even at seed-stage oens.

Admonitions to do stuff like re-read "Out of the Tar Pit" every six months is just bad advice to my mind. It's a good way to convince yourself you're smarter than everyone else. It's a bad way to get better at debugging.
To be followed by: "crashinmybasement.com" and "hideinmyattic.com"
I actually believe that lack of democratic institutions and lack of regulations is enabling rich (either rich by inheritance or self made) to become more rich.

I'm not sure how large corporation has influence to this because at least, in Eastern Europe, raise of inequality (tycoons and such) goes hand in hand with lack of democratic institutions (sometime outright corruption but in many cases everything is "legal") and lack of regulations.

Unfortunately, regardless of reason of increasing inequality, history showed us that inequality is often fixed by events which are not part of capitalism teaching (revolution, war, crazy people end up leading the country).
I think I briefly mentioned why pointers are not literally just ints (though I didn't go into pointer arithmetic), but I feel that it's easier to tell someone it's an integer and then explain the ways in which the compiler treats them differently. I've heard people, for example, ask things like "does this function return a pointer or just an address?" (when they meant to ask "does this function return a pointer or a reference to a pointer?"), and understanding pointers in that sense seems more prevalent when you're just learning them than understanding the technicalities of how your compiler handles things like pointer arithmetic.
Believing that someone shouldn't receive direct help from the government isn't the same thing as believing that they shouldn't receive help. This is a false dilemma.

As, perhaps, a kind of silly example, a couple of weeks ago, my car wasn't working, I was immobile. I didn't and don't believe that the government should've helped me get my car working. But I did believe that I should be helped. I called a couple of my friends and now my car is working again.
After the whole Arrington drama I think it would do Techcrunch a lot of good to stop talking about internal AOL politics for a while. Reading articles like this doesn't help their credibility in my eyes, and I'd be very surprised if it actually helped their credibility with anyone at all.
You get even more bang for your buck if you combine two existing products.

Combine HootSuite and SocialOomph and you have a rockstar Twitter manager.

Synergy is a wonderful thing.
Economics is not like religion; there are actual correct and incorrect answers. As a newer field, we not always know how to find the correct answers yet. But that isn't an excuse to start treating it more like religion and less like science.

"we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer."

Using your feelings to guide your monetary policy decisions is no better than the creationists forcing ID to be taught in schools. If your hunch is that a Keynesian approach is ideal, cool. Many would agree. But choosing it because it's the obvious "moral" choice just dumbs down the whole debate, opens the door to all sorts of emotional reactionary ignorance, and doesn't get us any closer to the right answer.
New Patent Law Could Change How Academics Commercialize Discoveries
All this is totally dependent on your personal background.

It may well be easier if you're "old", since you've already had a chance to establish a career and make yourself hireable - but I can imagine it takes some balls to try to start a business immediately after graduating (or instead of going to college) unless you have a pretty good parental safety net. However, we see it all the time from US kids - and not so much from the UK.
Cool hack! Along the same (disturbed) lines, I wonder if it would be possible to do tcp/ip over SMS using a tun or tap type driver? i.e. take the packet, encode, break into parts, SMS to a remote gateway, undo the packing, reassemble and send it on it's way. Sort of like RFC 1149, "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers" but using SMS. Probably slower than pigeons though :-)
Indeed. Just got a 1000 page email asking I buy 100 of his new books. Makes me vomit in my mouth.
Does anyone else prefer the syntax of javascript to that of coffee script? Really, my only problems with javascript are no multi-line strings and type coercion (but type coercion issues are mitigated by always using ===). Otherwise, I think javascript is a fine language. Also, the with statement isn't that bad in my opinion.
"sleepinmycar.com"
Am I the only one who is amused by the irony of these guys?

i.e. "lets use Javascript end to end", and then the very same people go and create a new language to replace said Javascript?
> Out of interest, how does coffeescript scale, and can it start to get unreadable?

It works well enough if your API design fits the language's expectations. This generally means your function calls take arguments in the order: normal args, onlyOneObject, callback.

How well it scales is sort of a taste question. I like that getters/setters and some event handlers tend to be one line. Here's a pair of functions I actually wrote today (I'm building a proprietary wysiwyg text editor that isn't using contentEditable)

getBlocks: -> @_breakText(block.get('value'), block.getLineBreaks()) for block in @blocks

getSelection: -> try start: @input.selectionStart, end: @input.selectionEnd

Here's a random longer function:

_getWords: ->
if @words.length
@words
else
@_doWrap()
words = []
pos = 0
size = 0
Y.all(@wrapSelector).each (el) ->
size = el.get('text').length
pos += size
r = el.get 'region'
words.push el: el
size: size
pos: pos
top: r.top
left: r.left
right: r.right
bottom: r.bottom
@words = words

You'll either think these are neat or that they're horrible. Note that the first is a comprehension and the second is a try/catch block returning an object (it can fail in some older gecko browsers if the page is still loading).

> in particular, the constructor implicitly declaring member variables

I think this is excessively cute as well and don't use it. Nor do I use the `x = {a, b}` producing `x = {a:a, b:b}` trick, which causes problems with implicit object parsing when the object isn't the last argument to the function.

> In particular, is there a clear unambiguous grammar for it anywhere? I can't find one.

There is not and there probably won't ever be. Doing one would be complicated quite a bit by the rewriting pass that happens before the compiler starts working on the code. A grammar for the resulting, unambiguous code wouldn't be too hard but that comes from the rewriter handling most of the hard corner cases.
Not to forget, "stay-in-the-closet.com" very popular among the politicians against the LGBT rights.
ScienceShot: Meteorites Brought Gold to Earth