skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's one question, regardless of if you believe this is "fair" or not, around whether structural inequality at this level is harmful to society regardless of fairness. I tend to believe it is, based on historical precedent of what happens in highly unequal societies (it tends to not be good), but that's a separate question from the one about fairness.

To analyze whether this is "fair" or not, I think the best perspective there is Rawls's framework, which is the maxi-min idea. To summarize, the idea is that inequality is okay to the extent that it improves the minimum position. For example, if you start out with some totalitarian society where everyone makes $25k, it's okay for someone to start making $200k so long as it doesn't mean that someone else now makes less than $25k. Economically, that comes out as something like: it's okay for the top end of the wage spectrum to increase because they're producing more value and capturing that value for themselves. It's not okay for them to increase because they're capturing value that other people are creating instead. If someone making $500k starts making $1MM because they're producing $500k more in value, that's acceptable. If they do that and they're only producing $300k more in value, and the other $200k increase is coming from other people's productivity increases, then that's not "fair" and shouldn't be acceptable.

So, which one is it? Does anyone have a compelling argument? In the financial sector, for example, I think it's pretty easy to argue that it's the latter: people who privatize gains and socialize losses are enriching themselves far out of proportion to the value they create. When it comes to startups and new businesses, it often works the other way, in that the person starting the business, even if they become hugely wealthy, does so by creating even more value than they capture. I'm not sure it's obvious if what's been going on for the last 40 years is one way or another.
This presumes that only the "top end" has access to those levers. That's only true through the patent system and, incidentally, Dean Baker points out that the patent system is a good predictor of inequality.

So levers for me, not for thee has precisely the result we would expect. Fascinating.
Maybe I misunderstood, but he said Coffescript's significant indentation solves Javascript's bloated syntax. I was just saying that code that uses significant indentation can't be minimized, as JS files often are.
http://bodil.github.com/coffeescript/#compress-slide
IOS Tools and 3D Engine/Rendering positions at AdJitsu/Cooliris
Doesn't work in IE or Opera
My understanding is that a state can only require you to collect sales tax if you have a physical presence in that state. Thus the Amazon affiliate fiascos, where states claim that if Amazon pays affiliates there, that's sufficient to create a "nexus" and make them obligated to collect taxes.
"while technology gives the top end ever more powerful levers"

Technology can create entirely new ways of delivering value and generating income, it can multiply income and it can eat existing income streams.

Inequality is not such a bad thing if technology is the vehicle of economic mobility. Technology can act as a enabler in both directions of income generation.

However, when wealth or power or technology prevent economic mobility at any level, that is a bad thing. Inequality is not the problem, its access to economic mobility, which presumably means access to empowering technology.
Modern GPU: World's fastest GPGPU sort, book-length tutorial
The whole premise of the blog post is wrong, since it is based on a Techdirt story which botched the facts. The change in EU copyright law does NOT remove anything from the public domain.

It's a good rule of thumb that when someone blogs about a story based on Techdirt, it would be better to submit the Techdirt story directly. Techdirt reporting is poor enough in general that it is rarely a good idea to add another layer of interpretation on top.
How about opening trade-relations with China--a country where forming a labor union is punishable with the death penalty--didn't that happen around that time?
My explanation of the 1947-1979 middle class bulge is the spoils of World War II for the United States. It gained brain power (smart immigrants), oversees market domination, and a premium on capital (other countries capital and people destroyed by war).

Those spoils paid high wages for the US middle class because it needed those workers for its factories and companies. After a few decades the advantages of the spoils of war evened out with other countries (catch ups in capital, education, strong legal systems) and technology for outsourcing and cheap shipping broke up the US middle classes prior monopoly on US factory/company jobs.
The items you mention have not increased in price due to trade.

1/2. Rent/land: Remain cheap in the midwest. Very nice 3 bedroom houses in suburban Texas can be had for $125,000; you can easily buy one on a software dev's salary (in other words, 1950s style where the husband as only worker). Insist on living on the West Coast? Well, you can blame the obscene housing prices on a combination of population increase and zoning laws.

3 food. Ok, we're looking at maybe 50% increase over raw inflation from the 1950s. Aside from this being a small increase, most of this increase can be attributed to additional food safety and even more importantly surging price in oil due to larger world population.

4. Education: Sure, it's surged, but again this is due to lower taxes and more social programs, not trade. Besides, education ($60k tuition for 4 years in public school) isn't that bad compared to the the savings on cars alone over a lifetime.

5. Has this gone up? Assuming your spouse was working in the 1960s that is.

6. In all fairness, life expectancy is significantly higher now than 50 years ago.
I am keeping an eye on the upcoming Build conference. That should have more details for sure.
refrigeratorboxinmyalley.com
Income equality has a broader meaning than just people doing the same job having similar wages. It most definitely includes the difference between the boss and the workers.
No Dhalgren or Triton, by Samuel R. Delany?
Windows 8 Isn't for Desktops
> Branching code in no way affects the code that has been branched.

Usually it requires a repo admin - hence "team awareness".

> So far, the only advantage I see to Git is the ability to make offline commits

That's more important than you imagine. It also means nothing takes longer than a few seconds - branching, diffing, committing...

> I don't get it. I can make as many branches in Subversion as I want.

But you can't do it offline. You can't even check-in without the central server, let alone make and use branches, merge them, share them with another dev, etc.

When you're offline you aren't using a VCS at all.

> presumably they sync when I have a network connection

Hah, no. That's half the fun.
Are they effective to the right people though?
So what of the uneducated man from a developed nation? Unemployed, by your statement.
Chasm City is my favorite book, but not by far... The first book (Revelation Space) set a very nice backdrop for the character development and story in the 2nd book (Chasm City).

My only gripe with Chasm City is that there is an (not essential to story) interlude which breaks hard sci-fi canon (ie, superluminal travel).
I know Krugman is more knowledgeable that me. I am simply suggesting he was not given the right data, or he did not look at recent trends, before judging Bitcoin. The system may be deflationary by nature, but people are sure not treating it as is.

Or else you would not have seen the value drop from $32 to $4 in 4 months.
For one thing, because there is no evidence I'm aware of that any tangible, real-world action originates from the belief that the poor should be "elevated" in some other manner.

When the government gives poor single moms peanut butter to make sure that her kids have protein to eat, that gets measured, and we can perform efficacy studies on it. When the government gives housing stipends to poor families so that they have a home to live in, we can measure that too.

If the enormous segment of the population that doesn't believe the government should be helping the poor is initiating some kind of private action that has broad, measurable effects on the plight of the poor, I would be delighted to hear about it. If not, then this claim that some other action should be taken kind of seems like a red herring in the discussion, because that means that the only practical options on the table are for the government to do something or for the government to not do something.
The algorithm for the simplest variant of that problem (take a single random sample from a list of a priori unknown length) can be derived by simple inductive reasoning. If the list has size 1, the problem is trivially solved. Otherwise suppose we have a list (x:xs) and we recursively solve the problem for xs. If all the recursion returns is the random sample from xs, we clearly have insufficient information to take a random sample from (x:xs), so we need to strengthen the induction hypothesis by having the recursion also return the length of xs. Let (r', n') be the random sample and length for xs. Then the result for (x:xs) is (r, n) where n = n' + 1 and r = x with probability 1/n or else r'.

Another way to derive this algorithm is to notice that any solution must implicitly or explicitly compute the length of the list as a byproduct. If you start by writing down the recursive function for computing the length of a list, composed with the straightforward recursive function for taking a random sample from a list of known length, you can apply a standard fusion and deforesting transformation to combine them into a single pass, and you end up with the same algorithm as above.

Here's a fun problem to ponder. Find the most frequently occurring element of a list in O(n) time and O(1) space. You may assume that this element occupies more than half of the list's entries.
EU Officially Seizes The Public Domain, Retroactively Extends Copyright
Also see: http://visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/04/has-middle-americ....

Incredibly stable since 1960.
I think the argument is that technology is great for the people who use technology.

If every programmer and engineer got paid $500,000/yr, that would be great...for ever programmer or engineer, it wouldn't matter much for others.

I do tech support for a web hosting company and I've definitely seen people with low incomes who don't and don't want to use technology, they are falling behind.
The best thing about Apple's win over Samsung in Germany
Chef is a nice idea written by people who don't understand Unix. (evidence? check out popen in their source, try to figure out why subprocesses occasionally get SIGPIPE, and then grep to see where it's used and count the file handle leaks. I've had to reimplement that six or seven times and theirs was the one with the most subtle errors. Yes, I'll submit a patch when I have time, which at the current rate the day job is pushing me will happen shortly before hell freezes over) I like the design but the implementation scares me.

Puppet is the more mature technology of the two, but (so I'm told) there's an important limitation in that there is no way to automatically e.g. reload the web server if its config file changes. Both these systems have some issues with information flowing in only one direction.
Plus there was always investing in other companies, spreading capital, creating new sources of wealth.

Wrong period, but wasn't Jay Miner financed by some dentists when designing the Amiga, initially? This is the sort of thing I am thinking of.

Then there was a period in people largely borrowed against their house/assets to start a company. That is now closed to many.

On the flip-side (looking through pg's eyes), the cost of starting many classes of companies has now essentially dropped to just the time required, as much of the infrastructure, process, software required is free or can be generated or outsourced cheaply.
I don't share grandparent's views of the 1960s, but the cost of additional material goods are trivial.

The main reason you need 2 incomes to support a household is because you assume you have 2 incomes when building the household. In other words, (if 1 income was desirable), a couple lives in way too nice of a house. They also end up with two nice cars instead of one average one and probably eat out more than they could afford on one income. That's pretty much it; all other costs are trivial.

(Practical example: I'm paying $12,000 a year for a room in San Francisco. Car probably runs around $3,500. In comparison, the price of all my aggregate post-1960 technology -- cell phones, computers, internet, etc. is well below $3,500 -- the price of the car.)
The Patent Trap
so I'm getting quotes for bandwidth right now, and I have a correction: he.net and Cogent are the only two major players I was able to get in that range. There are smaller players in that range, too, but only two major players, so it's probably wrong to call that 'premium' pricing. None the less, he.net is under $1 per megabit, so someone in a he.net data center, very likely, is paying very little indeed for bandwidth.
There's already couchsurfing.org which appears to be hugely popular. I've used as both a host and a guest and it works extremely well.
Bing: What’s More Evil Than Satan Himself? 10^100
Chef seems to be gaining much more traction, at least from my memory of blog posts, tweets, conference talks, and comments in the past 6-8 months. Completely unscientific, but take from it what you will.
Entire staff of TechCrunch threaten mass suicide unless Arrington gets his way
I wish they stop making traditional tablets and focus on e-ink displays. Or at least don't confuse names.
"If brick and mortar shops are required to, why aren't shops online required to?"

Because that law hasn't been written. Don't confuse fair with law.
i was also thinking about using Google Code Jam problems to practice from. anyone else tried this or has thoughts?
But, if, for each class of worker, there is income equalization, you will find that large companies tend to have an equalizing affect rather than an unequalizing affect. In this example, it's not interesting that bosses get paid more than workers, it is interesting that all bosses tend to get paid the same amount.
> Python's auto-concatenation of runs of string literals is convenient but I don't know of another language that does the same thing.

The C preprocessor (in GCC and Clang at least) will concatenate adjacent literals, so add C, C++, and Objective-C to your list.
What's with the biased JS examples in the beginning?
Wow. Obviously, if you are not Oprah, you would want to think that she is only 5% better than the next best candidate. I am sure others disagree. What if you apply this to other fields e.g. Steve Jobs is only 5% better than next CEO? Does it make sense? I think this is a nonsense approach to decide how to tax someone.
>Then the result for (x:xs) is (r, n) where n = n' + 1 and r = x with probability 1/n or else r'.

Do you mean r = x:r' instead of r = x?
Boring ;)

I think there's a good reason many people watch The Daily Show instead of the evening news. Or TMZ over Entertainment Tonight.

Or TechCrunch instead of NY Times Bits Blog (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/)

What you want is out there, it's just not interesting enough to keep going back to in my opinion.
They're going to need a really well-designed app or mobile site, preferably the former. I hope they don't try to do too much too fast, or they could end up with a bunch of confused workers and pissed off customers.
No, r has the same type as x. The logic behind that probability split is simple: We have r' (the random sample taken from the tail list xs) and x, and we have to choose between them with some probability based on n. Clearly x should occur with a 1 in n chance.

When you approach it inductively the way I did, there really isn't any choice in the matter, which is why this algorithm design technique is so powerful. Udi Manber developed the technique in his paper Using Induction to Design Algorithms from 1988 and later used it throughout his great old book Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach from the early 1990s. Here's the paper in case you're curious: http://akira.ruc.dk/~keld/teaching/algoritmedesign_f05/Artik...
More information on Google's new web language, Dash
Reasoning goes like this:

- If a company is really about "we don't care about how much vacation you take", then why not to give me minimum vacations? It seems intellectually dishonest.

- How I do know how much of vacation I can take and whether that amount is preventing me of getting raise/bonus/promotion?

- This policy means that my vacation will vary depending on manager and current project. I cannot commit to travel with my kids, I cannot commit to visit my parents... because who knows: I might have a different manager next month.

- If I take two weeks vacation and none of my teammates are taking vacations, am I going to be fired? Are they going to consider me that I'm not a team player?

- I can lose a job after working for year or so without taking any vacation, but if I did accure vacation I will get some money (kinda reward for working hard for a year and not taking vacation), while in case of "flexible vacation" I get nothing.
On a somewhat related note (especially given the anniversary coming up on Sunday), Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to give a speech on the importance of 'Star Wars,' ballistic missile defense systems, on Sept 11 2001.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40697-2004Mar31?la...
In general, I'm surprised that there isn't some sort of printf symbol for a shell-escaped string. Seems like this is something that would have been immensely useful even in the 90's. This would negate the possibility of 'semi-colon injection.'
Plenty of web interfaces on routers have VERY poor security, a bug that gives you access to the web interface may have just given you a shell aswell.
Copies of most of the Self papers in PDF can be downloaded from the official Self language website: http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html
Doesn't matter either way. If you are in a production environment, using coffee-script would almost always involve a one-time compilation step to minified JS.

If you are sending real users coffee-script over the wire you are wasting a lot of their attention.
I found that whole part of the presentation to be a real turn off. All those guys (beards or not) deserve admiration. Any one who creates a language that's used by hundreds of thousands of developers probably did far more right than they did wrong.

I understand it was just a stupid joke but when your stupid joke insults a person who deserves praise you should probably reconsider the joke.
And finally: "vandownbytheriver.com"
To the contrary, Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981. The trend had already changed before that. There were major changes to our economy in the late 60s and 70s, including the "great society" programs of Johnson and Nixon, and the stagflation of the Nixon and Carter (and into the Reagan) years. I'd look into those things for a root cause, if I were looking. Which is not to say that Reagan's policies didn't possibly make things worse, too ;-)
I wasn't one of the downvoters, but my guess is that the logic is something along the lines of "don't feed the trolls."
I daresay if you included "...and you'll need to add this certificate to your browser..." you could get a good number of people installing your Totally Trustworthy Root Cert(tm) and do a bit of HTTPS MitM as well.

Makes it more likely someone will notice and you'll get flagged though I suppose.
"Leaked" FBI psychological profile of the Anonymous leadership
As a side note I wonder what our future will look like when we enter the age of humanoid robots with strong AI . Lets assume that we figure out how to maintain control over them so that they never revolt a la Terminator or Battle Star Galactica (re-imagined).

For one thing our purchasing power will go up. Or rather things will become so cheap to produce that we will probably lose our drive to hoard material possessions. There will probably be no excuse for poverty.

What new things will we fight about? Certainly not wealth anymore. Probably religion: one group trying to tell the other group what to believe in or how to live their lives. The future will probably be stranger than fiction. Hope I can live long enough to see it.
but spend your time reading code, not paper.

These things are not mutually exclusive. I agree that you should definitely read code also; good and bad. However, this is a post about one specific thing: great papers.

Admonitions

That's a bit strong. I listed some papers that I like and believe important. I don't recall providing admonitions if you didn't read them.

re-read "Out of the Tar Pit" every six
months is just bad advice to my mind.

That's just me. I like that paper and so I re-read it. I wouldn't say that you nor anyone else should do the same.

It's a good way to convince yourself
you're smarter than everyone else.

I'm sorry, have we met?
sigh it was also a $50 credit, not a 50% discount. It appears that what they are trying to say, and not terribly successfully is that the "customer feedback" was the need for an SLA...which is really what they are charging for...and what gets lost in all this confused information and repricing and remeasuring nonsense.

Personally, we're not big enough to really care about the SLA...
I suspect that supply and demand have a lot to do with it. Capital and innovation is scarcer than labor, especially unskilled or lower skilled labor.
Google is in serious need of a professional community interaction manager, this bouncing about of plans and pricing, lack of a conversation with the customers, etc. just reeks of amateur hour, not a $30billion/yr company.
California, a few years ago, cracked down on this. Entry level programmers are not exempt. I think because they lack responsibility or skill or somesuch. I found this out only when I had to start filling out time sheets. I became exempt again after a raise, apparently there's some salary floor at which point they assume you have to have responsibility because you're paid too much not to.

FWIW, CA appears to exempt outside sales but not inside sales, so probably all groupon salespeople in CA have a case.
When I was a teacher, if I did not have the entire summer off, I would have gotten a gun and come in and shot the entire administration. Not because I am crazy, I've had a psych eval for security clearance

Um. About that clearance...
A great article. I loved the last line:

... maybe we can look forward to watching the Empire go
bankrupt after convincing itself to buy two Death Stars,
on the theory that different models will drive down costs.

The article linked to a Navy project, but my mind went directly to the Joint Strike Fighter [1], which used the same (sensible sounding) rationale.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program#Pr...
"I think the key to the answer is the large corporation. The period of flattening coincides with the heyday of the large corporation.

Large corporations tend to decrease economic inequality. "

I think this is off the mark. This time period corresponds directly to the rise of the financial industry which is mostly independent of firm size.
Interesting...our new monthly bill is showing a strange ~$.30/day charge increase over everything else which averages out to about $9/mo. I'm looking forward to them fixing the new billing preview a bit more and will take another look.

If you are right, their solution sounds optimal. It's been my understanding that what the $9/mo was really for was the SLA, but frankly I could give a hoot about the SLA, but I need the instance scalability.