skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Politics and morality are intimately related.

There are SOME free market ideologues who believe that unrestrained corporations will enrich the poor, however I believe they are in the minority. You may be one of them.

The majority of libertarians believe that individual property rights are sacrosanct and that it is wrong to forcibly redistribute wealth to prevent poverty, hunger, suffering. This is the argument of the Tea Party to my knowledge. Am I wrong?

Right now the excess wealth is in the hands of the rich, especially the top one-tenth-of-one-percent (0.1%). Society is presented with a choice: (a) we can take it from them and redistribute it to the bottom 80%, or (b) we can let them keep it and allow people to suffer.

(a) is a moral statement, that the poverty of the poor trumps the property rights of the rich.

(b) is a moral statement, that the property rights of the rich trump the poverty of the poor.

Almost all proposed actions in this situation amount to either (a) or (b). The wealth of society can increase over time, but at any single point in time it is a fixed quantity whose distribution is intimately related to whether poor people exist or not.
What bothered me the most is that they originally said the new pricing scheme is in response to customers feedback.
Yeah, it clearly says 'wages and overall compensation'.
So it's UDP vs TCP? And why can't these be going over the same pipes?
Programming Jokes :D
In Miami people are nude on Google Street
Office 365, Google Docs go down again, could give pause to the cloud-wary
Sandbox Corners (regarding OS X Lion's app sandbox)
I don't believe the problem is economic inequality. It does not matter if the rich get richer. What matters is that the poor are getting poorer in absolute terms: how much they have to work in order to make rent, buy food, enjoy a vacation. I do not believe that the poor would even notice how many private jets the rich have if they had food on the table. A staggering number do not.
Yea, I did something similar a while back and really enjoyed it.

> But I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would rather have more time off than money.

I suspect you're right, I think debt holds back a lot of people.
Google Analytics profile
Is there an app that can easily backup your google analytics profile? tyvm :)
Online Store Owners: Why Don't You Collect Sales Tax?
I was pondering over the Amazon/California Sales Tax story and wondered why more eCommerce sites don't collect sales tax. If you don't collect sales tax from your customers, why not?
Netflix's Webkit-based UI for TV devices
I have tried it, and the UI is just sluggish and barely usable (Chrome, i7 CPU, 8GB RAM). Have you thought of optimizing the whole thing, like maybe "rendering" the tune into WAV raw data, and playing that instead?

The social aspect is questionable too, it seems users just add random tunes, and just one user can ruin the tune built by the rest.
"""

Another thing to consider in terms of whether the rich “deserve” their money, or whether those rewards belong to the society that bestows them is the consolidation of labor. Consider Oprah Winfrey. She s probably only marginally better than the next best candidate for talk show queen. Yet she has amassed 100′s of millions while the next bes candidate for her job has no such job at alll. So we have two people, one tha is maybe 5% better at being a talk show queen, her income is 100 million, and another, 5% worse, and her income is some middle class wage like 50,000. Because of consolidation, the society only needs one Oprah Winfrey. We are paying 100 million to the role, not the woman. That’s the key point. She herself is worth 50,000 plus 5%, and the role of talk show queen, which could have been filled almost as well by many, many other people, is worth all the rest of the money. That role belongs to society, not to Oprahe Winfrey.

You see the same thing with CEOs, bankers, and others where consoliated and mass production allows only a few highly productive roles. The wealth associated with those roles, which is to say the consolidate dower, belongs to society not to the individual lucky enough to get to fill the role. This is why tax rates of 91% on the few that occupy the most consolidate roles was thoroughly appropriate and part of an economic approach that led to America’s greatest period of growth and general prosperity. High taxes on those who wield societies greatest powers on behalf of society are normative. The power, the influence they wield belongs to the society that allows and enables it, not to the individual who fills the role.

"""

[ comment by 'Sharn cedar' on 'DEAR RICH FOLKS: Get Ready For A (Tax) Revolution In Which Your Money Will Be Taken Away',
http://www.businessinsider.com/tax-increases-are-coming-2011... - sic, a few typos uncorrected ]
There are lots of third-world countries that will offer you what you want, but you'll give up (exactly) the LCD TV, your car, and the technology.

If you are good in English, you can teach it in some third-world country, while making some money in the side with the Internet. That will afford what you want.
That’s really hot! Thanks for the link. I’m forwarding it to my girlfriend.
You wrongly equate material possessions with happiness.

I'd easily go back to a 60s quality lifestyle if my wife didn't have to work and I only had to work 40 hours a week to own a nice house.

In the 60s they had most of the same electric appliances that we have today, save the microwave oven, personal computer, and the cellphone.

I'd bet that eating food that can't be heated in a microwave is probably more healthy for you. Losing the PC would be a real loss, especially the Internet. Losing the cellphone is probably worth it, since we'd have landlines and can still call anyone we need to.

You say we have all of these great things, but most of them are not important to living a quality life. Having time to spend with your family without having to have two wage earners working 60-70 hour weeks is worth more than a flat screen TV and a second car will ever be.
Everything You Need to Know About the Aol TechCrunch Clusterf*ck
I'm firmly in the middle in terms of household income. I was comparing myself to the middle income earner from 2 generations ago.

My point is that the vast majority of Americans have more material wealth than their equivalents did 50 years ago. Everyone has more.,

Also Cable penetration is close to 60% in America, so at least half of the bottom 80% can afford it.
Resignation at European Central Bank Reveals Split
We're talking about the first graph, right? If your "statistical artifact" point is to have any merit, then you would have to demonstrate that something changed significantly in how those statistics were obtained after 1980 - because that's when the behavior of those time series changes significantly. If you cannot do that, then the other theory - namely, policy changes - seems the far more plausible explanation.
If you're not legally required to, why on earth would you?
The common view is that 'economic growth' is a tide that lifts all boats. But unfortunately its lifting some boats much faster than others.
Here's another that's better for learning Vim, it combines the cheatsheet with a tutorial to make a four-step progressive cheatsheet:

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...
Out of interest, how does coffeescript scale, and can it start to get unreadable?

I worry the compression, while cute, could start to get a little extreme after a while, for example:

class Shape

constructor: (@x, @y) ->

centre: -> [ @x, @y ]

area: -> 0

is starting to look close to unreadable and overcompressed (in particular, the constructor implicitly declaring member variables).

Also having a quick look through the bug reports, there seems to be some interesting inconsistencies, such as:

x for x in [1,2,3]
# x == 3

x for x in [1..3]
# x == 4

I also see a complaint that:

foo bar: 'baz', quux('onoz')

Won't parse. I understand this should parse as:

foo({bar:'baz'}, quux('onoz'))

Both of these, and other little things I've seen, make me think coffeescript is more of a giant bag of good ideas, rather than a well-thought out language. In particular, is there a clear unambiguous grammar for it anywhere? I can't find one.
I don't buy pg's argument, but I don't find it implausible at all that an economy dominated by a few large employers will tend to have more similar compensations for the same job class than one of many small companies.

If you did a survey of developer compensations in Silicon Valley, do you think (a) developers who work in corporations with over 500 or (b) developers who work in companies with under 50 would have more egalitarian compensations?

My intuition suggests the former, in line with pg. I'd love to see actual evidence of this, though.

My disagreement with PG would come with whether that's the primary driver of inequality. For that, I'd argue it's the increasing power of generic capital over generic labor, instead of competition between specific types or quality of labor.
The poor are not getting poorer.

In absolute terms real income for the bottom quintile has increased. In addition, technological progress has drastically reduced the cost of many luxury items and put them in reach of the poor. Today the "poor" in America not only have clean drinking water and electricity they also have cell phones, internet access, large screen tvs, dvrs, cars, refrigerators, dish and clothes washers, etc. In short they have the ability to live at a much higher quality of living than in any previous era.

Sure it sucks to be poor, believe me I know, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that the developed world is devolving into some dickensian nightmare when nothing of the sort is happening.

Edit: a helpful graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distr...
> The irony is, with private health insurance and a limited welfare system, the penalty for taking a risk and failing can be a lot worse in the US than the UK.

You're assuming something about what happens when you fail in the US that isn't true.

> But growing up in the UK, ambitious young engineers dream of going to work for Microsoft or having a successful career within a big accountancy firm.

That "UK dream" is the US backup plan.

Seriously - health insurance and welfare isn't one of the things on my "what happens if I fail" list because I'll just go get a job.

Oh, and the health insurance costs aren't actually that significant. I know, because I've had the backup plan fail and had to do them out of pocket. Since I'm "old", I'm pretty much a worse case.
Peldi-- I believe you to be correct in your fear. It doesn't scale unless you ensure the managers layers below you encourage their employees to take time off and are as flexible as you.

I'd also strongly recommend looking over that shared vacation calendar and identify anyone who may not be taking a reasonable amount of time off. Some people are just love their jobs ... I'm one of them, and it's not as big a deal (though, I believe nearly everyone benefits from some time off, even when forced). But make a point to ensure they don't think the "we don't track vacation time" equates to "we don't take vacation time".

I'd also steer clear of the "laptops to the beach" comments. I don't take frequent vacations, but when I do, I need to go places where I can barely get a phone call and have no internet (I fight with myself on this topic every time, but when I go on a cruise or camp in a remote part of the state that I live in, I always return more refreshed than when I go somewhere that I can keep up with e-mail). I don't know the culture of your company, but at my company "laptops on the beach" would be code for "obligation to carry your laptop with you at all times".

Just my 2p, you sound like a decent leader and I appreciate the transparency.
The problem with this kind of 'testing' is that the question "Which of these two websites has the most compelling copywriting? (ignoring the design)" is what I'll call a "focus group" question. It's not a task-based usability test.

That is, you shouldn't be interested in which design people think is better. You want to know with one is actually better, i.e. which one converts more people to buy. Henry Ford, "faster horse", etc.

Thus Jacob Nielsen's Basic Rules Of Usability:

-Watch what people actually do.

-Do not believe what people say they do.

-Definitely don't believe what people predict they may do in the future.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html

P.S. Had a nice chat with the owner of the blog over his "snap engage" widget. That thing is awesome.
Why don't you go back to a 60s lifestyle? It is definitely possible; plenty of people live low impact non material focussed lives.

My point is that there is a reason that it takes 2 incomes to support a household now--All the extra stuff we have. I was refuting the people who keep asking why we have to work so hard just to have a normal life.
Salary does not factor into the computation. The pure definition is GDP / Hours worked, though as with all statistics, there may be proxy variables and other subtleties involved.
I guess I'm a little confused on the legal requirements surrounding sales tax for online vendors. If brick and mortar shops are required to, why aren't shops online required to? I understand that technically it's the shopper who owes the tax, but though businesses were required to collect it on their behalf.
Hacked NBC News Twitter Spreads Fake Attack News
Yeah, the company I work for does not track it but there is always sort of a sneering attitude towards people who take time off "You are not hardcore enough"
Do women complain about men more?
And I would have requested the refund just before expiration... if I'd known the Groupon Promise and the Mason blog post were misleading. (Actually, I probably wouldn't have bought the Groupon in the first place. I bought it right after being impressed with the Mason claim, and thinking, "what a smart policy, it takes all will-I-use-it-or-not anxiety out of buying a Groupon".)

But I trusted them, and was burned. Miniscule amount of money, but now I know that they strategically deceive about the refund policy, so I won't be trusting them again.

I'm OK if a particular business wants to grind out their margins from fine print, 'breakage', and other gotchas. I'm all for caveat emptor. They could change the "Groupon Promise" to read "If your Groupon experience ever lets you down, let us know and we’ll refund your purchase. Period. Except for expirations." And Mason could fix his blog post so that it doesn't portray the 'completely open return policy' as the preferred remedy for people with expired Groupons.

I just hate the act that they've got Nordstrom/Bed-Bath-Beyond/Costco/Zappos/etc-style customer service, when they don't. Together with the other reports of dodgy advertising claims, encouraging businesses to raise their prices pre-Groupon to inflate discount percentages, and pushy sales practices, it gives me the impression that they've ranked 'honesty' far below 'growth at all costs'.
I never liked this quote. A missed shot implies that a shot was taken. It's like saying you've lost every presidential election since you were born.
I wish Techcrunch would have spent more time investigating, following up and seeking out interesting start-up companies then they did posting just to create buzz and pageviews.

At least 25% of all posts on Techcrunch were 'in the know' pissing contests or insult articles, designed only to create social buzz and spread from only the 'gossip value'.
Well, that about wraps it up for copyright
A lot of sites are primarily driven by a single author but would seem to be disqualified by your criterion. There are very few popular full time single author tech blogs that I can think of offhand...

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=John%20Gruber%2CRob...
I've always maintained that there are two types of science fiction. There's the "Star Trek" kind that does social commentary, and tries to get the audience to think about something directly by sidestepping the trappings of modern society. Then, there's the "Star Wars" kind that is basically a far-reaching exercise in world building that only has a plot so that you're not reading a technical description.

Stranger in a Strange Land is perhaps the purest example of the former, because it's very meta: the thing Heinlein wanted you to think about is the very idea of preconceived notions and full understanding. He spends the first half of the book explaining that you can understand something intellectually without understanding it emotionally, and the last half systematically questioning more and more ingrained ideas (at least at the time) so that you think about them intellectually.

Most of the list is the other type. I'll pick on Dune, since it happens to be number one on the list. Herbert introduces you to a universe that's really completely unlike any other conceived: people fly around in spaceships and have enormous mental powers, but there are no computers (they are illegal), people still fight with bladed weapons (all others are rendered either useless or too dangerous), and universal government has become feudal in nature (for various reasons). People send messengers. A bioengineering project and a social engineering project (gray projects by the same faction, no less) collide, and turn the universe upside down.

As far as hard SF goes, I'd originally clustered that with the world-building type, basically because every good example I've read happens to be in that category. Now that I think of it, though, it's not strictly required. It's really just a question of how much effort they put into reasoning out the science.
Yes, definitely. If you have an android device and would like to beta test it, email me (boxcar.io/about) and I'll send you a link.

Please help spread the word in return. :)
No, it's like saying that you can be president without running for president.

You must really hate epigrams.
because those employees did not produce the increase in productivity, technologists did.

The technologists and the entrenched oligopolists ate all of the surplus while the commoditized worker drones got nothing. Which is inline with free market theory. The wealth goes to the people who produce the wealth and the people who corner the market.
I always characterise it as the difference between being customer informed and customer led.
I think there is a lot of value in having one go-to site for exclusive news about start ups and tech companies. TechCrunch's chokehold on tech news does not bother me. They are the master of breaking tech news and that makes it easy for me to find breaking tech news. Plus they have great bloggers who are actually good writers and story tellers. I disagree with Fred Wilson though that their value stems from their 'fuck you attitude'. Conversely, I think this attitude has proven bad for the site. Too much bickering, anger, pettiness, and one-upsmanship pervades the site these days. Maybe this passion and emotion is what propels their bloggers to break stories and get the story right, but why does it need to spillover into a bunch of personal sniping and blog posts which are incoherent or lacking in context?
Ten keys to create a variable pay scheme (For the WHOLE company)
So by extension the current economic downturn is entirely Obama's fault then? Also, take a close look at the graph. Looks like things had stagnated in the early 70s, but the graph does it's best to hide that. Now off we go to partisan bickering about who was in control of congress blah blah... it's all BS.

It's silly for presidents to talk about the economy at all. It's just another way for politicians to take credit for something they aren't responsible for. Do you think Jobs and Woz started Apple because of Carter's economic policy? Do you think Microsoft succeeded because of Reagan?

Of course some companies rise and fall along with the political tides. I suspect that a close examination of these will show you bribes and favoritism. Companies that depend on a favorible political climate probably aren't adding to the economy at all.
Does that get charged to the business or does Groupon cover the loss? I was under the impression that Groupon sells businesses on the fact that a certain percentage of users will never redeem.
How to get new insights
"debt exceeded income in 2001"

I read until I find a fundamental error like comparing two values with different units. Only if it doesn't make any fundamental errors do I consider whether it's valid or makes any subtle errors.
There is a certain convenience to common things being commonly available in common languages. It's just nice to be able to jump between languages and have a lot of things work the same way, or to be there at all.

I suspect that lambdas have gained enough modern mind share with developers that it's just a nice thing to have. A lot of tasks these days probably have the look of "put lambda here" to a lot of people.

Whether Sales Guy and Manager are playing chess over the matter, it's just nice to be able to write the code the way that you would naturally write it.
Short story of American inequality:

The economic growth since 1978 was, for the most part, produced by the efforts of 10% of the population. It's true. I'm a leftist and I must admit that. That's not to say that the other 90% aren't working hard and don't deserve to share in the gains-- they obviously do-- but those gains are coming from a small percentage of people. Many, many people work hard and deserve to have good lives for their contributions, but only a small percentage (about 10%) have the vision and creativity to push increases in productivity; most are adders, few are multipliers. (Many politicians are dividers, but that's another story.)

The gains since 1978 have also gone to about 10% of the population. Maybe less than 10%. Income gains are often offset by increased prices in the Unholy Trinity (housing, healthcare, education costs). Quality-of-life is also going down in most of the country, and where it is increasing, housing prices are absurd even now. Even people whose incomes appear to be growing may be back-sliding. 10% is generous, but let's go with that.

These 10%'s are not the same people. (Sorry Randists). There's an intersection, but it's only about 2-3%, or 20-30% of each. The first set are the creators of wealth; the second set are capturing it. Startup entrepreneurs are in the first set (and if lucky, can enter the second). Well-connected rich kids who get staffed in private equity firms at 24 and get to draw fees from economic activity regardless of success or failure (because they'll get promoted anyway) are in the second set.

Speaking as a member of first set, and merely on the outer fringe of the second, I'll just say this: no, the economic inequality in the U.S. is not desirable. Hard-line egalitarianism is ridiculous and impractical, but inequality has gone too far. We know this. The only reason the absurdity is tolerated is that 10-30% of the American population has insane social and religious views that impel them toward degenerate politics.

Anyone who has traveled within Latin American societies at all can see where we're heading, and it's not pretty: massive economic inequality, desperate rural poverty, and intractably corrupt, plutocratic governments.

I'll admit that what bothers me most about American equality is what drives the inequality. If it were reflective of differences in intelligence, the correlation (slight, but positive) between intelligence and empathy would be enough to impel this smart-and-rich elite to give back to the rest. At least, I hope that is the case. But that's not what we have. Increasingly, the inequality comes from inherited social connections (social capital, mostly implicitly generational) and, as it increases, the decision-making elite becomes more insular. That's what most elites become (generational social networks, not meritocracies) and that is how societies rot.