skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have several comments.

1. We're talking about literally 400 years between the height of Venetian power and the creation of the Libro d'Oro (1315) and its decline (17th to 18th century). Forgive me if I'm not quite ready to accept the author's core premise here.

2. This sentence made me LOL:

"Public schools are starved of funding... This is the new Serrata".

The premise of the statement, that public schools are starved of funding, is preposterous. NYC spends upwards of $20,000 per pupil per year. But even beyond that, comparing moderate variation in school funding levels to the creation of an ACTUAL OLIGARCHY is just, hack-city. That might be the kind of tortured analogy that gets you a favorable slot in the NY Times during election season, but it's sheer nonsense. Look, I can make any argument, on any part of the political spectrum, that way!

"High income taxes ... this is the new Serrata."

"Occupational licensing ... this is the new Serrata."

"Immigration limits ... this is the new Serrata."

"The Yankees spending $200m a year on their payroll ... this is the baseball Serrata."
I almost caught the point you're trying to convey (ignoring the "you're missing the point").

Oligarchic elite in western societies converting the state from inclusive to extractive (consciously or not) is not the _analogy_ being drawn, it is the current state (according to the article).

Incentives are not "being redrawn," they already favor the elite.

Give the OP a little credit; his addition to the discussion is pretty good.
Startup = Whatever
If they broke the confidentiality of the test subjects, which is against federal law, then they should be stripped of their positions and degrees for that alone. This is not disagreement, this is law breaking. Their should be a chilling effect on people breaking the privacy of subjects, especially those who are underage.

Disproving research is great and noble. Breaking the privacy of human research on which so many depend and is always a touchy subject could have a huge impact on future human research. Endangering further research is the unspeakably terrible idea.
Cyaegha: Since we're talking about graphs generated from source code, they will always be finite. These are not abstract infinite mathematical objects. All finite lattices are posets, but not all finite posets are lattices, so I stand by the usage. And "Program lattice" sounds a heck of a lot better than "program bounded poset" :-)

The second sentence is intended to be redundant, it gives further explanation as to the implications of the first sentence. (This doc was never intended to be a tight mathematical definition, only to give a quick introduction to the concepts, with links to the strict mathematical definitions.)

The reality is that the lattice or bounded poset formulation is only needed to understand that the specific language constraints described ensure that the dependency graph of any valid program can be statically determined to be a partial ordering. The compiler doesn't even need to build a DAG internally, it just needs to ensure the specific language constraints described are in place, and as a result, the language will be able to be parallelized in any manner consistent with the partial ordering of data dependencies.
The article only touches on lobbying, but that's the key mechanism by which wealthier people gain an unfair influence on government. As campaigns have gotten more expensive, the system selects for those politicians that raise enormous amounts of money – people who cater to the lobbyists. Lawrence Lessig did a phenomenal job breaking down the campaign finance / lobbying problem in his book Republic, Lost: http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Money-Corrupts-Congress/...

I also found the Lawrence Lessig / Jack Abramoff interview very illuminating in understanding the corrupting influence of money on government. It's long but worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkvIS5pZ0eI
I think it should be:
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/ls:_the_missing_options/
> Gee, I wonder if he has a vested interest in advancing that viewpoint?

Of course he does. Does that make what he says wrong?
This. The problem isn't that the government doesn't have enough rules to control business. The problem is the government is so involved in every aspect of life it's become far more efficient to co-opt the state than to compete with other companies in your sector.

For some reason people on the left think if only the government was more involved, this time it would work to rein in powerful people instead of making them more powerful like the last 97 times.
First, you should know that computing is done with electrons, not nucleons. That means the fundamental limit is at a length scale of the size of atoms (i.e. electron orbits) and not nuclei. Atoms are about 0.1 nm in size, whereas nuclei are about 0.00001 nm = 10 fm across. That's a difference of four orders of magnitude, so it's pretty important.

Second, your intuition is off. The jump from "being able to manipulate X in a laboratory" to "being able to build useful devices with X on a large scale" is large. We've been able to handle individual protons and neutrons with the right equipment too, but that doesn't mean we're close to building computers out of them.
"Where in my comment did I say you were running a smoke and mirrors shop? Show me the words that implied that in my comment?"

You mention that he's "got the proper degree of BS mixed together with things that [he's] learned in a short period of time and the ability to take advantage of people's generally trusting nature", and then immediately following that you bring in a story about how when you first started you tricked a major client into thinking you were running a shop with several employees, with the implication that you were also able to "take advantage of people's generally trusting nature"
Not sure what the original problem was because the OP's been edited but probably, that sounds like something I'd say… sorta ;) I rarely use the r-word ("rich") but there is definitely a list of problems I categorize as "Great Problems to Have."
IIRC the game emulates a CPU (either 8 or 16 bit can't remember), which means that at a basic level the binaries and source will be the same thing since the only language supplied with the game will be a form of assembler.

Of course we can expect people will create compilers (I believe some already have) to compile other languages down to the assembly used in the game.

The viruses/trojans will be an interesting thing, I believe notch said that it will be up to players to protect themselves from these.

There's a risk here though for essentially turing complete griefing, so hopefully there will be something to help protect newbies from accidentally running some horrible code.
How TaxCloud Stole My Code and How I'm Doing Something About It
It always pays off to be an elite. It's just even better now than it was in the 1950s-1970s.
The rapid increase in home prices also pushed up property taxes and still starved for funding.
A public comment is different from a private email.

Also? This thread is happening.
Show HN: idea for the future of document editing
The idea is that as you type, some relevant information about what you are typing should appear. Long term, it should integrate search into document editing and simplify the writing process. This is currently far from perfect, I just put it together on the past 4 hours.
Trillek was confirmed though.
I absolutely hate this trend of creating landing pages for bullshit and nonexistent products. Turning the public into sheep and testing ideas with no plan to execute on them is unethical, yet I hear it all the time from garbage theories that generally have the word "lean" in them. It's crap.
In watching my kids grow up I'm always struck by my inability to figure out why they did certain things. They obviously had reasons but when questioned those reasons were regularly things I would have never thought of. I always felt it was a bit like anthropomorphizing animals to make deductions about their behavior. You might think you have a good hypothesis but it's very difficult to know that you're working with the same variables they are.
I wish I could pull out a chair and have a long talk about marketing with you. Not because I think you are wrong, obtuse, or even a cynic. You are not. But due to the fact that you sound exactly like me some years ago. Hopefully, the following lines will save you the trouble I faced, and the failures I had to crawl out of.

Marketing is mostly about deception and half-truths, and promoting a product effectively means maximizing the positives and minimizing/omitting the negatives: "Look at this shiny car!" (engine leaks oil) "Buy our shiny lightweight computer!" (can't change battery) etc...

Marketing is about showcasing the world your ideas. It is not about deception, although some people do deceieve others through it. Real marketing, the one you and me experience at a hundred percent is something that you don't realize exists. You never heard it. Saw it. Or even thought of it. It simply resonates with your ideas, your self, and your values. The aroma of a pure rythmic parallelism between us and what we want to become. That is marketing.

In the 1980's, when Steve Jobs set out to market Apple, he understood the true meaning of marketing. Jobs set out to showcase the world the ideas behind Apple. That is why the original series of advertisements set out to show Apple as more than a computer company. It was an idea. A new idea. The computer did not have to be boring, or tied down to social structures. It was fun. Modern. The future. Apple was about freedom from the regular business computer.
That idea is still living these days in the form of iDevices and Macs. In a world of boring Windows-based PCs, the Apple computer and device are still showcasing the original Apple idea. There is a better way to use technology. Such way is the Apple way (according to their marketing, not my opinion).

Did it work for Apple? Yes. Did Jobs set out to deceive people? No. Could they have sold millions and millions of devices based on a marketing lie? No.

The problem with us hackers is that we tend to forget that the world is not all black and white. Not every salesman is out to get us. Some really do want to help us. Like that insurance agent selling Cancer policies. Go ahead and talk to one of them. Ask them how many people has the policies he sells saved from starving. How many children will have an education or even a roof to live because their deceased parent bought a Cancer policy from him/her. For a programmer, a Cancer policy is just a lottery. For the rest of the world, it can be the difference between life and death. That is why they are marketed like that. It is real.
>Public schools are starved of funding..

That made me laugh, too. Somehow this has become received wisdom for the press, but not only is it false, it's very false. Here in CA we're spending twice what we spent per student in 1970 (in constant dollars), and if anything outcomes are worse.
You should post this in a blog :) Agreeing with you 100% and want to thank you for going meta.
I think it really, singly comes down to just raising your rate -- am I wrong?

For me, it was two things:

1. Realizing that I should (and can) raise my rates in a simple type-in-a-higher-number sense. Yes, I knew this in a vague sense, but the book really drove it home for me.

2. The other rate increase that I plan to work on over the next 6-12 months is a transition from "freelance programmer" to "engineering consultant who delivers business results". Like you said in your example, if you're doing the work of 5-10 engineers, I think there's real value in being able to demonstrate this in a quantitative way and charge accordingly. And the book definitely helped in that regard as well.

Again, for me it was worth it to pay the money just to read some examples, hear about some rates that others were charging, and dedicate some time to thinking about this. $25 just isn't that much money to me in the scope of being able to improve my business. Maybe I could have done it without the book, but I figured it was worth risking $25 to find out if I could do it better with the book.
It also lost to Chapel from Cray.
Wow, that comment made no sense until I edited "unless that government is extremely hostile toward government" to "unless that government is extremely hostile toward business"
We'd all be better off without winner-take-all elections. It takes money to pretend to be all things to all voters.
The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

Shocking that income gains during a stock market rally (typically a leading economic indicator) go to the investor class while employment income (a lagging indicator) continues to struggle.

This is agitprop. Isn't there anyone other than Saez folks like the author can cite? Saez could have put out a "study" to show that the rich took a real bloodbath during '07-'08 while the middle class barely felt a prick for just the same reason. But he didn't: he'd rather be a hack and win unending favorable references in Times thumb suckers.
Health tutorials online
There is a lot of very good insight here, in particular the focus on foundational economic institutions (ie, truth telling and promise keeping). Even so far as the taxes and regulations being details (a couple percent here or there, not a crisis).

The issue that we are facing though, is starting to become of another sort. It is evidenced by the shift of wealth from the commercial centers to the DC area. It is evidenced by 80% of government spending not being on running government or protecting the population or even enforcing laws, etc. It is evidenced by (what was quoted in the article) of goverment borrowing (and printing money) to support the oligarghical too-big to fail banks. It is evidenved by the nationalization of private sector debt via student loans and via housing loan guarantees. It is evidenced by the failure to regulate derivatives or split investment banks from commercial ones.

It is evidenced by "Economists" in the keynesian tradition who support uncritical borrow and spend (as the answer to everything), all of which provides stability but none of which provides actual earnings/power to the working classes...etc. It just provides benefits to the rich and debt/taxes to the poor. The "Liberal" current administration has underwritten the most perverse transfer of weatlth from the poor/middel to the top, its almost comical they pretend to be for anyone other than themselves. They make the Tea Party, in Contrast, look almost perversely rational. There is too much fear. In the Left. Of change.
Well, I'm sure Norton will put out something. Of course, when running it, your ship's hyperdrive will become 50% slower.

(Sidenote: Ah ok. So that's how to reply on HN once a comment thread has reached a certain depth: click link then reply.)
>The moment you enter the game the advantage is already favoring the rich.

If you're progressive, the idea is to try to level the playing fields somewhat. We don't have to equalize them, just try to improve everyone's odds a little bit.

>My point is how is that default advantage the rich have, a disadvantage to the poor?

Because the more of the total percentage of economic activity gets captured by an oligarchy the less is available for everyone else.

Further more, the issue at hand is that across the west we're enacting policies that make tilt the balance even more towards elites.
Much of this depends on your time scale, of course. If you stretch out the time granularity just a bit, we really did make a pretty rapid jump akin to a step function.

Indeed, I wonder if historians will look back and drop all references to Moore's law, and just recognize that From 1950-2050, we developed the whatever-the-end-game-is transistor, and pretty much ignore all the interesting (to us) developments that got us there.
>>It always pays off to be an elite.

Sure it does. But the point is to become an elite you first need to do something to get there. Its not like a lottery selects a few people and just gives them money. Its their money and earn it.

Therefore even the distinction of elite. They earn it, so they get it. Just like everybody else can.
> N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere.

Idolized? Yes. Is it enough to make people purchase the phone? Not at all.

If a fancy UI and eye-candy animations were enough to be successful, webOS would be the leader of tablets, and I'd be using BeOS to write this.

What Elop realized was that Nokia was, indeed, sitting on a "burning platform". And MeeGo wasn't the lifeboat they needed.

MeeGo was fancy, but too incipient as a platform to compete against iOS/Android. No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it (plus the political fights with Symbian). It'd be a long, slow, expensive and bumpy road ahead. It'd cost him 3-4 years of development time, and the the board and investors would crush him well before he could deliver on the plan.

Symbian was completely f-ed up, broken to its core, so this was never an option (and it's laughable to read "Symbian was winning" as put by the OP). A much better review was also posted on HN today - "Symbian, a post-mortem" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648843.

So the only real options were between Microsoft or Google. Android offered no differentiation against Samsung/HTC -- and no insurance against patent lawsuits. And I guess Microsoft offering a pile of cash probably helped to sweeten the deal.

Will Elop be fired? Well, it wouldn't surprise me. The odds are against him, as they were since the day he joined. But I highly doubt it'll make things any better for Nokia.
After spending quite a bit of time outside of America, articles like this seem strange to me. Not right or wrong in assessment, just... very American-centric and lacking a lot of perspective (Venetian anecdotes aside).

I mean... pretty much everyone in America is rich. Stupidly ridiculously rich. The working poor in America are fabulously fantastically stupendously ridiculously rich compared to most of the world. I mean, staggeringly so.

It's like, as time passes, luxuries become conveniences become necessities... and thus, there's always this keeping-up thing going on. But the majority of American "necessities" are truly luxuries in, like, 2/3rds of the world's eyes.
You could argue they "Knew too much" but equally they could know too little. In other words they know enough about X to understand how to implement X but not enough but not enough about why to implement X.
FWIW there are actually 7 P's in marketing:
Product, Price, Promoton, Place, Packaging, Positioning & People.

However, I do agree with you that people often consider promotion = marketing when promotion ≠ marketing; its just one aspect of it and embracing all aspects of the marketing mix is beneficial to any company.
Reading too much from Mises Institute I presume.

I am really amazed anyone can take anything published there seriously, these guys always talk how mainstream economists always try to simplify human action in their models, such as when discussing the nature of money and how it came to exist, anthropologists are making the same points all the time.

But they certainly do love to forget this exact argument when they write their diatribes against ideas from people they disagree with them. Like you assuming what people in the past thought about an event without searching from some data to support your assertions.

Mind you I do not like the tone of the link and I thoroughly disagree with the premise of class struggle that those fond of Marx almost always take for granted.
Yes, I have come across now fewer than five programming languages called Flow since posting the Flow Manifesto. It already has a new name, but the new name and info about the new directions of the project haven't been posted publicly yet.
This is only intended to be an optimal solution to the problem of building highly parallel data manipulation pipelines.
I'm not affiliated with them but I have been using PaperKarma on my iPhone. I snap a picture of the offending piece of junk mail and they figure out who it's from and submit a request to remove me from the list. Still waiting to see how effective it is but it's very satisfying to get notifications that they correctly identified the spammer and have asked them to remove me from their list.
* the rich took a real bloodbath during '07-'08 while the middle class barely felt a prick for just the same reason.*

Explain? Curious to know; if you have a blog link or article to check out I'd appreciate it.
Patrick was writing prolifically here and on his blog for years with no relevant product at all, just a lot of interesting insight into his bingo operation. The recent lifecycle email course is his first product directly relevant to us, your comment about being tired of the pitch is confusing.
what's the problem? it sounds like a pretty good solution to me (although i don't have kids).

reading your comment i feel you think there's something so obvious (and wrong) that it's not worth even saying. but i can't work out what it is.
> Its not like a lottery selects a few people and just gives them money.

Being born is pretty much such a lottery.
For casual meditation, all that has been pointed out here is fair and good.

But if you want to delve deep into meditation, then I seriously suggest that you look up MCTB - it talks about several of the dangers that lie in that path.

www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/dharma-wiki/-/wiki/Main/MCTB
Thanks for informing us that wealth is directly related to effort and taking risks, now that I know the 1% is doing 99% of the labor I guess their salaries are reasonable. They literally are doing the work of hundrededs of people, and their compensation is totally unrelated to the better education they had, or the wealthy contacts they've made during it.

Those relatively wealthy Americans should look at India and see how well-off they are in comparison, and then stop being so lazy, because it really is just that simple.
>> If you're progressive, the idea is to try to level the playing fields somewhat. We don't have to equalize them, just try to improve everyone's odds a little bit.

Correct, but I believe that will come through opportunities. The poor will be given opportunities, but however remember using them and converting them to goodness is really their responsibility. And as a rule of thumb, opportunities always present themselves in the form for some work.

I would believe US is far better of at this than any other country I know of. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you people have county schools which are free? Don't you people now have some form national healthcare system? Don't you have social security? I would already consider these as very big advantages compared to many other countries. I mean the government can practically support you when you go broke, and then of course its up to you to take it from there.

>>Because the more of the total percentage of economic activity gets captured by an oligarchy the less is available for everyone else.

True only if the percentage of wealth created at any time static, which it is definitely not.

>>Further more, the issue at hand is that across the west we're enacting policies that make tilt the balance even more towards elites.

I think any economic system should reward getting wealthy, because that is good motivator to create more wealth.
Barely felt a prick? Really? That's 9+% unemployment to you? Or the millions of foreclosures?