skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Corporate profits are only way up for international corporations. That is to say, the S&P 500 and similar.

And they're up so far, because many areas of the world such as the BRIC nations, have seen a boom the last decade while America has not seen a real improvement in its situation. We're taking on water, while nations like Brazil, India, Russia, Canada, Australia and China have seen impressive gains (some of the gains are immense, as in China).

One reason labor in the US isn't do well, while corporate profits are booming, is because America's most successful corporations make most of their profits outside the US now. Companies like Apple and Microsoft hugely tilt the profit numbers, while earning very large portions of their profits from the global economy.

Some examples: Exxon gets 45% of its sales overseas; GE 54%; Ford 51%; IBM 64%; Boeing 41%; Intel 85%; McDonalds 66%; Nike 50%; Dow Chemical 67%
So perhaps the actual blame lies not with the change from trolleys to buses, but rather the change from light traffic to heavy traffic, as the automobile industry took off.
According to Phoronix benchmarks some workloads benefit greatly from the changes in CPU frequency scaling.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_312...
This is because of the different service providers and the decentralization that is applied from within the government.

It leads to inconsistency but it stops some of the mistakes that result from an overly centralized government.
I hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks out from total boredom and frustration.
> Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google

I think a lot of queries aren't on par with google.

I'm bullish on DDG but it's got a long way to go if they want to deal with the spam issue that plagues tons & tons of queries.
That's a design task, not labor per se.
It's not demonstrably. Asking for a raise you're not going to get after you just got one is going to get your name on all sorts of lists such "person unhappy with his or her compensation", "ungrateful employee", and "people that haven't learned the game yet." Is that worth an extra $1-2k per year if you can just get $10k more somewhere else? Even if a company did give a small retention raise the employee would just be docked at the next review time.
so wow. much smile.

Great job on this. Made my day
If he rigged the system the way you say, I'll be angry on your behalf. With that said, I'll nitpick:

Paul Graham can respond to your post however he wants. He _could_ simply say, "I don't care."

You _want_ an apology because you _think_ you've been wronged. A blog post entitled, "I want an apology from Paul Graham" sounds whiny--I get it. Still, from where I'm sitting the title, even with the "probably" proviso, sounds like a power-grab that denies Paul Graham's ability to give whatever response he wants to you. Also it looks linkbaity to me[1].

[1] I dislike linkbaity titles. I don't deny their effectiveness; I clicked the link!

disclaimer: I teach public speaking professionally, so these kinds of less-than-explicitly-conscious word choices stick out to me.

Edited to emphasize that I agree with the spirit of his post, and that I'm nitpicking because I enjoy picking nits.
If merely controversial (as opposed to low-quality) posts lead to a personal penalty that applies to all of one's comments, then that's a seriously fucked-up policy. Offending no one means you are saying nothing.
WHERE DO I CLICK ON THE COOKIES??!
Interestingly, I do not even think the main point of the talk is to actively seek independence for Silicon Valley, but rather, it's simply projecting a future that will happen, and in fact, is mostly a continuation of the trend that's been going on for a while. It's not a matter of if, but when and how. Technology is going to be more powerful than many laws and regulations, and "code" becomes the de facto law in many contexts. This insight suggests that you'll have leverage if you build things that will facilitate life in that future society that will inevitably happen.

What I do not see in this talk directly is arrogance. That is not to say that people in Silicon Valley are not arrogant. This talk is not.

Also, I personally think the WSJ article is pointless and whiny. Even if Silicon Valley comes out as arrogant to the outside world, it is quite justified. That's not hard to see. Just look at the appreciation rates of stocks by category in the past 5 years, for instance.
We're not blocked, according to this. Score one for the Chinese.
Probably, although not necessarily. Managing 1 KW worth of ASICs is easy but 1 MW worth is considerably more expensive.
Fuck Sand Hill Road, fuck TechCrunch, fuck YC, fuck every venture fund, accelerator, and all the hype.

They are all distractions. All of them. If I start my own company I'm going to do it without all of that frivolous shit. I'm tired of disruption. I'm tired of "changing the world", "changing the way we X", and all the blithering idiots who made Snapchat a $4b company. Think about it. Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter and all of the other successful companies would have succeeded despite all of this shit. They were awesome ideas. They would have succeeded anyway.

I refuse to participate. I'm tired of it. I can't be the only one who's disillusioned with all of this nonsense.
Actually you pay them for whatever you agree to pay them for.

As a freelancer, I'm able to accept or reject any proposal as I see fit. If someone wants me to shoulder the risk of an app being approved by Apple, that's fine with me. Much like an insurance policy, I'll calculate in the risk and charge them accordingly.
how about using this instead? https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne
> games such as Avatar and Empire (a star-trek like game), which had both accumulated more than 1.0 million contact hours on the original PLATO system at UIUC

I hated these dudes. Play on your own time, I gotta do another CircuitTutor unit.
If the exchange rate does hit $400 or $500 imagine how many more people will jump on board with the idea that only 3 months earlier bitcoins were $50... further driving up the difficulty when those newcomers buy rigs trying to strike it big.
The problem is that the WSJ's main premise about SV needing the rest of the US is wrong. The internet is decentralizing that control faster than SV's economy of locality can produce more.

Look at Berlin, Kiev, Riga, and a dozen other places. SV's monopoly on world-changing does not have "USA" as a dependency.

Indeed, soon if not already "not US-based" will be or already is a feature.
Also, I think it is in their best interests if the community buy into the idea. Rather than if they mine everything and horde it all.
It is only "smart" to invest in Bitcoin with hindsight. Bitcoin is a pure gamble, no one can predict what the price will do and if it will all crash horribly tomorrow. There is very little difference between "investing" in Bitcoin and pulling the lever on a slot machine. In either case you may make a killing or lose everything you put in - so only put in what you don't mind losing.
Most revolutions replicate what they rebel against. Marxism was just an extension of French Revolution logic (1789) and not surprisingly, has followed a similar path: executions, social engineering, fanatical militarism and finally internal turmoil brings it down.
There was also a piece in the leaders section (i.e. the more "editorial" area) of this week's issue on this topic. There they specifically call for "a narrowing of the difference between tax rates on individuals' income from capital and labor"
> It took one worker in the household to pay the bills; now, two people work and can't make ends meet.

People forget this, mainly because they want to, but also because their TVs say we're living in the golden age.
That's a rather weak analogy. I know a carpenter who builds furniture for his house in his spare time, a graphic artist that expands his portfolio on his spare time, and a cook that, uhm, well, cooks in his spare time. All of them are creators and builders of sorts.

Although I would agree with you that some would prefer young ones without responsibilities and a lot of spare time over those with more experience but with families. I guess this reflects more of a certain company hiring philosophy more than anything else. Energy to the young, wisdom to the seniors.
SV needs biz models that dont rely on the the assets controlled by the largest lobbying groups in the US congress.
It's only fair. Before the State, people were born into a homeland. Just by virtue of being born, you were entitled to a share of the natural resources around you. (Of course without a state, murder and such are allowed on a who-can-get-away-with-it basis. That's the downside.)

When the state stepped in and seized control of our homelands, and then said: "This person, with this piece of paper, now owns these resources", essentially creating out of thin air the concept of "wealth", they took upon themselves a moral responsibility to see to it that wealth was distributed in a way that everyone gets at least a living share.

The current system, where you are either born into a dynasty with resources, or you are for all intents and purposes enslaved to people who are (albeit with some small chance of moving between groups) fails at that promise, even though the poor largely fulfill their end of the bargain by making themselves available for labor. Many go without their basic needs taken care of. A basic income would fix that. The situation is absurd, and it's an utter waste of human capital to throw talented "low" class kids into the thresher.
I know lots of people complain about Paypal being shitty for orders, but this is why I still prefer to use them. They have great consumer protections.
Not really. If I recall correctly, three such reports within two years results in the taxi medallion being revoked.
Great exposition. I don't know if there is a growing number of "us" but I do know that the ideas of basic income, automated industry etc...are seeming to become more pervasive. Especially as we are actually seeing the automation of driving (see: Rio Tinto/Google) and other goods I hope the ideas will start permeating beyond technologists and singulitarians.
If staying at home to watch the kids and scrub floors was so much more satisfying than a "real job", why didn't more men stay home in the 1950's and send their wives to work? It wasn't possible? But the '50's were the height of American economic achievement, no?

The trend is clear: As more satisfying and economically rewarding career options became available to women, more women educated themselves for those careers and took them. A young middle class girl today doesn't take $40,000 in college loans to become an accountant because she's desperately in need.
> If you guys think that machines are going to decrease our standard of living-- that the separation of (production value)/wages is going to cause poverty

No we don't. We just have to show that the benefits only go to a select few, and the "workers" generally get screwed (as in paid a lot less than their value).

If you accept the above, then relative poverty is rather easy to show (99% vs top 1% etc)...

EDIT: To simplify my point, relative poverty has a massive effect on standard of living.
Alphaoverlord is 100% correct. While standards and norms may vary from place to place, the textbooks that I have read on medical ethics are in agreement. In my pre-medical, medical, and postgraduate-medical training, I have always been taught that my mandate is to do the right thing for the person sitting in front of me. This in itself can lead to population-level problems, but that is a separate issue (social justice, the 4th of the principles that alphaoverlord outlined).

Also, a nitpick: it's nonmaleficence (doing no harm), not malfeasance.
Yay, looping just for those who're upset.

very mad is true
many mad
plz console.loge with "rawr rawr stop posting amusing/funny things"
wow
It's not about nostalgia.

It's: what do you get for your labor, what can it buy and for how much, what kind of savings do you have, how hard do both parents have to work to make ends meet, what does an education cost and what income can you get for it, how many jobs are available?

Simple questions that can be easily answered with real data that was available in 1970 and today.
You'll have to go through the same know your customer at a Bitcoin exchange (twice if you go through two exchanges) and then the exchange may also randomly decide to decline your transaction due to "risk".
What's Riga's biggest tech company?
No, the preferences can be controlled (marketing), or even forced (addiction).

No one ever thought "I need coca-cola", it was a created "want" invented purely through marketing and addiction...

EDIT: typos
Good lord. I'm just relaying a story that is relevant to the topic at hand.

I thought it was interesting because, before talking to this CEO, that all banks were the same. He corrected me on that.
More evidence. At +12 and 1-hour in age, this thread (which I did not submit) isn't even in the top 120, whereas other less successful threads (Sunday nights are slow) are in the top 30.

The first time my blog was penalized by HN (to my knowledge) was related to this post, "Don't waste your time in crappy startup jobs": http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-yo...
Some solutions are very elegant and intuitive. It's probably the right tool for a number of jobs and the wrong one obviously for others.

When you get pretty far into it, you start to get into several real-world realities. First is side effects. You have to decide how pure you want to be.

Another question is efficiency. The first few chapters of most books will be about look how cool this stuff is. Then much of the rest will be exposing inner workings so you can word your solution to skirt problems or give the interpreter hints. Red and green cuts come to mind.

One thing I'd really like to know is how well can the unification algorithm be split across multiple cores/processors.

Erlang takes many features from Prolog, such as the syntax, and also solves a number of questions such as side effects and distribution, but I'm pretty sure they've omitted the unifier. It might be neat that was in there too.
That's exactly what they did. Screwed the buyers over good and plenty.
One thing the author mentions is he asked the developer for a few small graphical changes.

As a freelance developer, this is what we call changing the requirements. In layman's terms, the author is re-negotiating what he wants done. It's accepted practice that this means the developer can renegotiate the money.
yes, Dan has a randomized simplex with polynomial time. I don't remember the details, but the paper (not paywalled) can be found here http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/spielman/Research/SimplexStoc.p...

It was published around 2009 or so, iirc.
Curiously, most c programs with 2^30 element arrays will probably have 64 bit ints, and will therefore work. In the time the code original code was written, I suppose the ints would have been 16 bit?
If you have customer service skills that rival development work, there's a lot of people who are precisely flipped, myself included. I would suggest finding a Yin to your Yang, but only if you felt inclined. Its not to stick you with the customer facing parts only. It could be a mentor/partnership where you build that up in someone while they mentor/partner your developer chops. This may be unmanageable and hard to find the right fit where you aren't the one giving more than taking. I just think there's some pretty high value in domain knowledge and customer service skills that if you have deficiencies that eventually halt progress, finding someone to throw you over a wall is a definite advantage. I just got a flash of coop games like splinter cell and the analogy seems way too spot on. Co-founders should help you reach places neither of you could alone in a "single player game". Now if I could just remember this when the time comes to put myself on the market, so to speak :>.
ooo, nice link on the simplex bound... I'll have to add that to my infinite read pile.
It's like what the Republican Party did when it had a severe image problem (thanks to Bush) and needed to invent the Tea Party: a 180-degree change in image, a "revolution" of style without substance. More here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/vc-istan-4-si...
Same thing. Blogging used to have a different connotation, but it's lost it, and Graham's site fits squarely into the modern notion.
Given your username, I can't tell if serious or jest.
Should you rely on other people?
Except the largest country (by population) in the world is a product of that line of thinking.. So where is the "internal turmoil brings it down" happening?
hate to say this, but I once did something like this for the Pokemon character Pikachu (even though I can't stand Pokemon), and then the South Park character Timmy, and then generalized the two to make a configurable system for characters with one-word vocabularies to be able to program.

I really wish I hadn't deleted that program.
To expand on my motivation for open-sourcing Inkpad and Brushes:

The biggest reason is the ideological element. For all the usual reasons, I’ve come to feel that software should be free/open-source. I feel really good now that these apps are free software. I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy to be working on them. I’m fortunate enough to be in a position where I can pursue other values in life besides dollars. Turns out I really like GitHub stars.

In addition to that, I experienced serious burnout after we spent a year (2012) rewriting Brushes to be a more modern iOS app. This was in response to Procreate which, in my opinion, blew all the existing painting apps out of the water. (Now that Brushes is open-source, I can feel free to compliment a competitor.)

Despite our own impression that we had radically improved Brushes with minimal UI changes, the update was poorly received by many existing users. At that point I essentially lost all motivation to pursue it as a business.

Ultimately, I decided that rather than letting the apps rot on the store, or trying to sell them to another developer, releasing the source code was the right thing to do. I’m hoping to collaborate with other developers, and keep Inkpad and Brushes alive as open-source projects for as long as there is interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30DGoRz1rLo#t=41
I love R, and it was actually the first language I really learned to program with (for obvious reasons, I wouldn't ever recommend this). I can identify a lot with the "one-off scripts" problem of R. When I look back at some of my R code, I find that it is just a giant mess of commands mixed together semi-randomly.

As I learned to program properly, I solved the reuse and "good code" problem more by moving towards using Python than by making R packages. I occasionally use R for data exploration and visualization, but Python has support for almost all of the machine learning and statistical functions that I need.

I am very interested to hear how other people have solved this problem. Do you only use R, or R in combination with Python/Julia/Java? If you only use R, are you using it purely academically?
The author should have given him a one-star review for holding the source hostage for the review. Now how will others know this guy is an unprofessional dirtbag?
In America, people who cannot afford the latest $1.99 app created by some startup ending in -ly or .io are getting surgical care provided by some of the best surgeons in the nation. This is because the people who cannot pay end up at their local hospital, which for many people (in, e.g., Baltimore, Boston, New York, etc.) ends up being the nation's best hospitals, where they are treated by some of the nation's best surgeons supervising the best surgeons-in-training.
I'm not sure GitHub commit frequency is an accurate indicator of productivity.
If labor costs (ie wages) get exceptionally low, it starts making sense to develop more labor-intensive technology. Consider how the industrial revolution started by replacing expensive weavers with cheap migrant workers using power looms.

There could just as easily be some sort of technology or industry that takes off tomorrow because it's more able to use this abundant supply of low-skilled workers we're worrying about.
Interesting, thanks. ( Like your username too, despite him being slightly denigrated in the linked article. ) I personally think that it is good to have a basic grounding in some kind of fundamental "real" programming language before you get into s-plus ( R ) or any other more domain-specific language. The main reason being that you will better understand the compromises, limitations and shortcomings. I like R but as a programmer I've seen some awful code written in it!
The output from all devs (on sane projects) is github.

A better solution would be to not falsify five star reviews when people act unprofessionally, so the ratings system can ACTUALLY WORK.
It's been so long since I listened to that album. Thanks for reminding me.
Typical Rabois shock-truthiness but he's really just playing with definitions.

In the resulting argument thread, he just labels as "corporate blog posts" any example of a successful entrepreneur who actually does blog.

What he's probably right about is that when they blog it's mainly about their business. But that's a very different, much more limited and not as shocking claim than "nobody successful blogs".
I'm 100 percent serious. Sorry about the username but make no mistake; I meant every word of what I've said.
Few people blog. The question is thus, "are bloggers represented proportionally among startup CEOs"?
There is a fixed curve that determines the rate that new Bitcoins come into the Bitcoin economy. Right now, that adds 25 BTC per block (or about 3600 BTC per day, or $720,000 USD/day). The number of coins added per block halves about every 4 years, and has halved once already. This is the primary method of introducing a sort of 'inflation' to the economy to help bootstrap the Bitcoin economy and the miner network. [1]

The other method of rewarding miners to perform block hashing proof-of-work computation is through transaction fees; even now some (most?) miners do not accept transactions without a small fee attached, currently an equivalent of a few USD cents per transaction.

The idea is that at some point, transaction fees will have to take over from the block reward as motivation for mining.

Regardless of the costs involved, since the work factor corrects for the amount of mining activity, even a single interested person mining is enough to keep the Bitcoin network going (though that invites some bad scenarios - a group of people is much better...) As things are going and with ASIC mining becoming commonplace there will definitely be enough interest to keep things going on the technical side for the far future. [2]

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply
[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining

also, the FAQ:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_does_the_halving_work_whe...
I don't think Paul Graham owes Michael O Church a damn thing. PG has always been clear that he built this site as a place for a certain type of reasoned discourse with a certain tone. And he enforces that as he pleases, as he should. He did, after all, build this place with his own two hands and he pays for it out of his own pocket.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if people have a secret "tone score" or similar that is assigned by moderators every time they make a nasty comment. And if that is the case, looking back on Church's comments it should be pretty clear that he'd have racked up one of the highest (lowest?) tone scores on HN. His comments are full of bitterness and hatred and scorn.
Troy, NY tried this for a few years. They got rid of it because it's expensive and ineffective.

http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Troy-will-turn-off-S...
Have done freelance in the past. Can confirm. Author blew it.