skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Social mobility and income distribution are not the same thing, and people leap to some intellectually dubious conclusions when they conflate the two.

A lot of comparisons are being drawn, for example, between the 1920s and today. While the income distribution curves look startlingly similar, the concentration of wealth is very different. Most of today's 1%+ are "working rich," i.e., they receive the bulk of their income from salaries and bonuses -- not from ownership or direction of capital.

Most of the turn-of-the-20th-century rich were actual capitalists/industrialists -- "robber barons" who secured monopolies on commodities, trade routes, new technologies, and so forth. These robber barons built generational fortunes whose relative scale and unshakable concentration are unmatched by anything since, including today. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren enjoyed lavish fortunes not of their own merit or creation.

Today's income gap appears troubling, and I don't want to downplay it. But the frequent comparisons to the Gilded Age are superficial at best, and they veer us off topic. This is true whether one is looking at the comparison from either side of the politico-economic spectrum: the pro-capitalist side (because the majority of today's elites are not capitalists, per se, but wage earners in highly paid fields like finance), or the egalitarian side (because what, exactly, are we proposing to redistribute? Opportunity? Wealth? Salary? Market demand? And how will we do this?).

And that's not even touching on globalization, which seems inevitable, and which has had a major effect on the disappearance of working-class and middle-class jobs. The article touches on the effects of new technologies, access to them, and ability to master them -- but this seems pretty meritocratic unless access is restricted to the children of privileged families. That's where we need to turn our lens. That's where things start to look less meritocratic and more aristocratic.

It's time we took a more nuanced view of this issue. For one thing, we should look beyond the present income inequality and toward the future implications. Is social mobility going to suffer for the next generation? Is wealth concentrating in generational amounts? Is the current power-law distribution crystalizing into a caste system? By some indications it is, and by other indications it's not. Let's go there. Let's dissect this. We need less hand-wringing and more investigation.

I'd be much more troubled by an uneven playing field than by uneven scores at the end of the game. By many accounts, today's playing field is fairly uneven -- and that's where we should be focusing our attention and effort. At the same time, we need to be comfortable with the probability than a perfectly even playing field will still produce uneven outcomes. It might produce more uneven outcomes, depending upon one's choice of modeling. Nevertheless, we're looking too much at the symptoms and not enough at the underlying sickness in the system.
Was going to just clean the text up and paste it here, until I realized how long it was.

Converted the .doc file to PDF and fixed up the formatting to be a bit better:

Left Justified: https://s3.amazonaws.com/hnstuff/GoodAbtMenAPATalk.pdf

Full Justified: https://s3.amazonaws.com/hnstuff/GoodAbtMenAPATalk-fulljusti...

Also provided URL to original document in header of each page.
Turning your iPhone or Android camera into Microscope
"Previously large swathes of the workforce were never expected or enabled to progress"

The article listed several reasons why little social turmoil was expected... I suspect the old "divide and conqueror" will be applied to the above historical facts. "Sure we're all getting poorer, but the white guys are getting poorer at a faster rate than we are, so its OK".

I suspect this will be a popular "calming" strategy.
The novel part is that a business person with prior success on a large scale is doing it. Hardly anything is actually novel.
What kind of opportunity are you referring to? Strip it to nuts and bolts as much as you can.

I ask because, for instance, it is harder to run a company in Denmark than in the US. Danish employment law requires months of notice before terminating an employee, and allows termination only with cause. It also appears to be somewhat expensive to incorporate there.
Does Digital Age Overcomplicate Design?
I would do it in RGB space. Run kmeans to get a set of Voronoi cell centroids, 5-6 should be good. Then take the Delaunay triangulation of that and pick a color midpoint between Voronoi neighbors that maximizes the distance sum from all the Voronoi generator points.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Delaunay_Voronoi.svg

[2] http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/isu/reu_2001/voronoi_pap...
Obviously written or heavily edited by LinkedIn attorneys.

If they wanted to set the record straight they'd say something along the lines of:

Like other Internet companies, we ask people for the login and password to their email account. We then suck all the contacts out of that to promote our business in various ways. Some people evidently misunderstood that they were actually giving us permission to do this when they logged into their email account through our site. This led them to believe we were logging into their account without permission. But in fact they gave us permission - they just didn't know they did that. It's not really surprising they didn't know that. Maybe we could've made it more clear - after all we actually prompt them with:

Quickly grow your professional network

Join John, Joe and 127 others who have found people they already know.

But after testing making it crystal clear that our user is giving us access to their email account, fewer people opt to do that.
Check the bottom of the post. The tweets themselves are actual sentences from a book, not gibberish.
Elements don't drag from where I click. They seem to snap.
Show HN: Onions.io – secure and open-source text storage in the cloud
Beta Codes:

ebcc8d74-edee-46c6-a640-020741a9b2eb
15ea4fa0-3ad6-46ea-a3b8-07136117f722
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59bd9776-ee53-401f-9d20-8a259a25007f
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9cd734ff-e28e-42e4-95df-635f7d487dcc
b4261b97-e6a9-4b10-a219-21f7b36913fc
14d108b3-652b-4123-88f7-bdf8e3d87c04
a8090aaa-b9ec-417f-9e62-98f0972587d4
949c1467-40c1-4b93-bca8-97d80b756926
b61fc80f-0f9e-45a9-82f3-61b0deaf52c9
84b449d5-6b0b-4775-b4b0-531d50f25afc
a09023fd-4ff2-4e8d-aabb-ee3c94dec08b
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21092de4-c521-4329-9bc7-1793dd3c1b4a
4ea9e54c-cc31-40b4-bcf7-fadf75859964
He was not independently wealthy and didn't do crime for cash. He was broke and living on couches, and those claims were him trolling.
I was born and raised in the U.S. (have lived in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, SF Bay Area, and Atlanta), and now live in Copenhagen

I see you say that people in Denmark, including expatriates like you, can "can start companies or nonprofits or whatever without worrying about ending up homeless or without healthcare." Is that what you are doing, running your own business in Denmark? I recall that there are a couple of other HN participants who are Americans living in Denmark. Is the labor market for American expatriates that flexible everywhere in Europe? I have read of other countries in Europe where it is certainly possible to start a business, but then very complicated to hire workers as the business begins to grow. I'm curious about how that issue plays out in Europe.

And, to answer your question, I think that's what my family likes about America. On the one hand, the labor market is very flexible here, so we can trade off time with our children by adjusting our employment--my wife and I are both self-employed, in different occupations--to maximize our family life and personal schedule flexibility. My late dad had a catastrophic accidental injury just more than a decade ago--it would be catastrophic in any country, with any health-care system, because he was paralyzed from the chin down after the accident--and that hammered our family's time and thus our income for the last six years of his life, but I observed that the United States safety net was adequate enough to keep both him and us from becoming homeless. Taiwan (where my wife is from) has a single-payer national health insurance program that covered us the last time we lived there (until just before my dad's accident) but even though that is a vibrant, thriving country that I enjoy living in (and I can speak Chinese), we still prosper better here in the United States.
Ask HN: How do you deal with ever expanding read later lists?
How do you prioritize? I keep adding stuff to my read later list from the likes of medium, HN, reddit, RSS and when I decide to read them and shrink my list, I end up adding some more stuff. Goes on and on..
There is also a huge desire among highly skilled professionals to immigrate to the US, so much so that there's pressure in Washington to amend immigration laws to allow for it. It's hard to make the claim that those doctors and software engineers are all conned by Hollywood.
but he concludes stating that giving everyone a grounding in STEM is a good idea.

Insisting there's a shortage is an economic method to inflate study in that area. How would he rather things change? I sure hope it's not "You need to take a heap of courses you're not interested in because maybe it will help you later"

That's the same line someone gave me with art and literature courses. I am not fond of that person, BTW.
The question is would LinkedIn users and LinkedIn agree on whether "permission" to access email contacts has or has not been not granted?

Evidently not, hence the lawsuit.

It's probably true that LinkedIn does not "hack" email accounts. However it is also probably true that their requests for "permission" use dark patterns[1] and users do not clearly understand what they are agreeing to allow (note, this is speculation on my part; I have a LinkedIn account but don't actively use it and am not familiar with their tactics in the past few years).

1: http://darkpatterns.org/

Edit: I originally posted this comment on the now [dead] copy of this submission.

Edit 2: and it seems that this comment is [dead] as well. Interesting.
Bit Gathering Via Multiplication
I don't really see how Twitter could identify these as "Gibberish". They're normal English sentences, albeit meaningless because they lack any real context.

How could or why would Twitter be able to identify these seemingly undetectable tweets as spam? They don't look like gibberish.
Was This Whistle-Blower Muzzled?
For those who aren't aware, "Drink more Ovaltine" is a reference to the movie A Christmas Story [1]. The boy in the story is excited to decode a message from the Ovaltine fan club using his decoder ring and is let down when the message is just "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." [2]

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085334/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_decoder_ring#Messages
Blurring the Lines of Feminism: A Criticism of the Criticism of “Blurred Lines”
Where are the trends better? What you're evaluating here is his choice of whether to live in the US or Asia. What place in Asia do you think offers better macro trends?
Pretty cool, thank you for sharing
I think that's a little unfair. Admins' responsibility to keep everything running, all the time, is their top priority. As an organization scales, it pays off greatly to enforce some homogeneity - especially as the ratio of non-technical users increases. Not everybody can manage their own browser/office suite/mail client, but they always need it to do their work.

If you want bleeding edge software across the organization, admins need to have enough extra free time to coordinate the rollout and get the training to support it. Recall the administrators "prime directive" - fix what's broken. If the admin team is swamped with tickets all the time, you'll be stuck with legacy stuff, because they don't have enough time to adapt.

We have a joke at work that new stuff gets done during our "infinite amount of free time".
Europe does not generally have a duty to retreat at all, as I understand it.
"The American Dream" was a myth from its very inception, perpetuated to suppress labor and preserve the capitalist status quo.
Since 2001.

Stackoverflow seems to be the place where my JS searches lead me.
Definitely.

I only remember one thing that I didn't agree with. The narrator at one point said that the whole process doesn't
require any trust. But that's not true.

You still need to trust: your software implementation, the initial block chain you get, the network as a whole.
Sure, the network has excellent abilities to dominate malicious members. But it's still possible to have a large population of malicious nodes, or (far more likely) a software bug with a common implementation.
While I agree with the sentiment, as an American, it becomes a bit difficult to not let the verbiage of the media and power seep into your vernacular.
I complain about glaciers, but they're really just the tip of the icefield. Most of the ground here is some variety of permanently frozen (permafrost)[0], so that's all going to melt at some point. Most of the population here does not live on/near permafrost, despite that map. However, if you do happen to go to Fairbanks or some more northerly hellhole, you'll find all the buildings are built on stilts, elevated a few feet off the ground. If they were not, the ground underneath would melt and sink (ice is less dense, remember), and eventually you'd be making a nice cross-stitch for "Home Sweet Bog".

So there's that. There's no soil in most of Alaska; it's either been scraped away by glaciers or the frozen layer is too close to the surface for much to develop. In some places the pine taproots can only get a meter or so down, and you'll have endless forests of man-high spindly pines. In many other places there are no trees at all. This is generally what we call taiga. When the permafrost underneath this melts, you're not going to have fertile soil left behind, at least not for a really long time.

On the plus side, Alaskans are probably not going to complain a whole lot about a warming trend, and the Northwest Passage is finally a thing. Maybe my friend will finally be able to grow avocados? It's hard to come up with a lot of other things that might be beneficial -- maybe we'll have more opportunities for strip mining now that the glaciers are gone. Maybe in a few million years the Alaskan Bog will be a good source of petrochemicals.

Really it's pretty hard to come up with good things, especially compared to "most of the ground will melt". Siberia is likely to be much the same story, as well as large parts of Canada -- you can find your own permafrost maps for there. Oh, and we have problems with coastal storms here too, and are already having to relocate whole villages (Newtok, Shishmaref, etc)[1][2]. Probably the only really good thing is that not a lot of people live here now, otherwise it'd be pretty easy to call the Arctic as the region most severely affected by AGW.

[0] http://i1109.photobucket.com/albums/h427/m4135/ps9_zps5c9b1b...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishmaref,_Alaska
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/alaska-ne...
What is the basis for your conclusion? I don't see any evidence of modern America being "largely stripped of middling jobs". There are millions of generic corporate, retail, or otherwise "non-elite" jobs being held by millions of Americans.
US almost detonated two nuclear bombs over North Carolina by accident
FWIW,it can absolutely be that way, and I have visited at a few gyms that I would never go back to. I also know that at my gym, if a coach notices you breaking proper form at all they immediately work with you on it, or have you back down an bit be it in speed or weight.

I am in no way saying that the bad behaviors described above, and you can absolutely get a cult like mindset focused around entirely the wrong thing. I would also say that I think some of the nature of the workout strategies in general may attract these kind of behaviors.
Not in the literal sense. But you can't not have a distorted vision of a country you haven't even visited.
I work on the assumption that at least some of my behavior is irrational hoarding. It feels good to have acquired an item I can read later; the actual reading may be secondary.

If I never go back and read stuff I assume it's because it really isn't that important.

I've kept tabs open for a number of days, and then when I go and take a closer look I cannot recall why in the world I wanted to keep this tab open. Oh well; close it and move on.
What's the Difference Between Developing for Android and iOS?
An alternative to keystrokes in js
The Brics Announces A New World Internet Independent From US & UK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Asian_Tigers

"The Asian Tigers or Asian Dragons is a term used in reference to the highly free and developed economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. These nations and areas were notable for maintaining exceptionally high growth rates (in excess of 7 percent a year) and rapid industrialization between the early 1960s and 1990s. By the 21st century, all four have developed into advanced and high-income economies, specializing in areas of competitive advantage. For example, Hong Kong and Singapore have become world-leading international financial centers, whereas South Korea and Taiwan are world leaders in manufacturing information technology."
If PyPy is 6.3 times faster than CPython, why not just use it?
Coverity Tackles Open-Source Defects
No, the logs were taken out of context. They have a "special" sense of humor, but they didn't intend to actually do any of what was in the logs.
They also continually refer to "IT workers". "IT" is very different from "programmers". You wouldn't expect an engineer to be interchangeable with a mechanic.

I'm still trying to find out if this is a mistake, a failure of vocabulary on my part, or an intentional equivocation
Coding the Curriculum: How High Schools Are Reprogramming Their Classes
Haha yup, the pirate in that video's name is Patchy the Pirate :)
List of Cool Apps on Mac
IC? What's that mean?
> government does not care about one person

"You wrote a letter critical of the governor. Let's see what's in your file, ..., hmm, it says here you went to LA when you told your wife you were going to SF. You wouldn't want us to tell her about that, would you?"
As one of those highly skilled professionals, I'm starting to have doubts about my decision to immigrate to the US. I'm treated as a second-class citizen, viewed with a great deal of suspicion (the government audited my H1B application three times, at great expense to me), and am not even allowed to start my own business until I get a green card (if they don't reject me for some bullshit reason).
If you're talking about enterprise companies--the type of company where suits often make engineering decisions--they seem to rarely release any of their "tools, clients and community documentation".
The article in one page http://www.eweek.com/print/database/30-years-ago-the-rise-fa...
The average faces of women in different countries
dBASE was my first "real" programming language (.bat & basic don't count) and we used Clipper. (circa 1993)

Of further note was the mention of FoxBase, which became FoxPro and is what we used to develop one of the first online offender databases for our state sheriff's department. For some reason using FoxPro seemed less like "programming" than using Clipper. (too much like Visual Basic)

Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
Its hard to test a very large scale theory based on optimism about human nature, but you can downscale it and try it on smaller scales like states and cities. So why didn't your example of Instagram benefit West Virginia or Detroit?

If a self organizing phenomena doesn't happen at a small scale in almost all examples, you need a theoretical reason why it doesn't downscale if your claim is some time in the future it'll self organize at a larger scale.

The future of the whole country probably resembles WV or Detroit much more than SV. This has certain startup implications; for example, creating a luxury electric car startup in a permanently down-trending country seems unwise, in comparison sharing photos sounds like something poorer people can continue to cheaply do as they gradually become permanently poorer and poorer because even the 3rd world has mobile phones.
Didn't mean to come off as arrogant but there are existing tools that would make this a lot easier. figlet(1) would make the pixel conversion pretty easy. Pixels to binary really isn't that hard. You could do it with a regex.
"suppress labor" and "preserve the capitalist status quo" seem to be completely antithetical goals.

And really, I disagree. The American Dream to me is the simple idea that if you work hard, you can climb the social ladder. This is as true now as it ever has been.

There are no castes in America, only people born into classes of varying privilege. For some people, therefore, the American Dream is attainable more easily than others — but that doesn't mean it's a myth.
And so you're saying that he'd be better off as a middle class person in... Singapore? Hong Kong?
This should sound familiar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
From what I've observed - a lot of immigrant tech workers have family or friends that had already immigrated to the US for jobs that can tell them what the situation is really like, so I would say the majority of them know what the US is really like. Plus 4x or greater wage increase doesn't hurt.
I think I see what you're saying there. I just disagree with it. I would argue that "rate" affects "size" in a real way.

For example, Greece was getting killed on their bonds: they had to pay 8%, 10%, 12% on them. Which means that in order to raise $10B now you had to promise $20B (or more) at maturity of 10 years. That was because they didn't have a central bank to buy their bonds on the secondary market and effectively reduce the supply, thus driving their price up and the interest rate down.

Here what we're seeing is that the Fed IS buying on the secondary market and the banks are aware of this. That reduces the supply of Treasury bonds (absent the Fed's intervention) which, everything else equal, drives the price up and the interest rate down.

Furthermore since the banks KNOW that the Fed will buy the bonds off of them, potentially at a small profit they don't have any problems going to the auction and buying the bonds to flip to the Fed. If the Fed dried up as a buyer of Treasurys it's entirely likely that the banks would stop buying, the auctions would be less successful and the interest rate on the bonds would go up as the price of the bonds goes down.

So what I'm arguing is that I would agree with you but only if the Fed either 1) didn't buy Treasurys on the secondary market or 2) the Fed couldn't create money to buy Treasurys from the banks who are buying them at auction. Since neither of those conditions is met, I would disagree. I would argue that they're monetizing the debt but indirectly. Just because it's indirect doesn't somehow make it not happen. It just makes it harder to follow.
Yes. I was suspecting this but since this works pretty well on the desktop as well (I actually prefer it over the normal interface) I think a volume button might be useful.
Interesting. Why did you decide to immigrate here?
The unlikely fusion of eSports and HTML5
Though didn't Sinclair admit to embellishing the conditions in the meat packing industry to stir up emotions in his readers. The stories of workers falling in rendering vats and being included in the final product were almost certainly apocryphal.