skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rather than income gap or quality of life gap, I personally find "opportunity gap" to be more important. And I believe that gap is proportional to wealth disparity, i.e. rich people have a lot more opportunities than poor people.

Basic safety net in the rich societies may ensure a decent quality of life even for the poor folks. But does that mean they have opportunities to escape poverty, and have means to pursue whatever they are interested in pursuing?

Since you asked for concrete evidence in one of the other comments, here is one example showcasing opportunity gap - a child in Atlanta raised in the bottom fifth of the quintile has only 4% chance to rose to the top fifth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom...

EDIT: tptacek, seems I cannot reply to you here as well. But you are right - the biggest advantages of being rich today is that you have better life today and you have better chances to be rich tomorrow, which means you (and your heirs) will keep having better life than others.
Tautology. You can't say that a benefit of being rich is being rich, or having ways to be rich. What are the intrinsic benefits of education? Do the poor in capitalist societies have more access to those intrinsic benefits, or less?

(For what it's worth, I dropped out of college after a single semester).
As a GA pilot, I cringe everytime I gas up and spill a little on myself or on the ground. That lead can't get out fast enough!

But it is also incorrect to draw a parallel to cars, because there was enough volume for cars to transition gently to unleaded gas; you could get both for a while. There is not enough volume of 100LL for FBOs to have two tanks, so, the switchover will have to be all at once. That's why the "drop-in replacement fuel" search is going on... Don't know if it will come to fruition, but if it does, sure makes the problem a lot easier.

Today, though, it's frustrating to have an airplane that I know could run fine on ethanol-free, lead-free 92 octane motor gas, but am required by law (unless I buy an STC) and by practicality (what airports sell) to use leaded fuel.
I responded to your appeal to opportunity downthread. It seems tautological. The benefit you're reduced to allocating exclusively to the rich is "becoming rich".
> Are the non-rich getting drastically worse access to teaching and learning resources?

Yeah, that's what I'm arguing if you're going to point to online certificate programs that get advertised on the subway as evidence for equal opportunity. You could make a better case for online self-directed research, probably, but I don't think there's a substitute for 19yos being exposed to great minds with tough expectations -- that only happens at good/decent universities [1]. And that's without even getting into the whole 'learning starts really young' thing with good school districts compared to lousy ones, etc.

[1] If you want to take that point and argue for investment in good state universities, I'm entirely with you, but the current power structures seem to disagree[2] as evidenced by funding decisions.

[2] I realize it's silly to term an emergent outcome as 'disagreement'
You can avoid the propagation time by creating a new DNS record that hasn't been cached anywhere yet.
I love it. How would one go about doing it though? Scrape Wikipedia? Manual data entry?
I disagree. I recently installed Linux Mint 16 (with Cinnamon as the DE) on my laptop and the experience was basically hiccup free:

- Install was smooth (since I was installing on a separate drive, no fiddling with manual partitioning etc.)

- Everything that a typical user wants worked post install without any extra steps - Music/Videos/Wifi connectivity/Internet/Hibernate/Suspend etc. all worked

I didn't have to launch the terminal for any of the above.
that article is from 2007. Nowadays everyone knows NPP are the worst technology human has invented and doesnt knows how to use and decomission. See whats happening at fukushima, its killing the pacific ocean. And making a lot of seals sick in california. If you heard about it you know the details. And its only the begining because man made radiation does not go away, it stays and its bleeding radiatiation as i type.. that means years from now, it will be more acumulated.

Cesium is a fission product that emits radiation. Has a half life of 30yrs and when you consume it, you body thinks its Potassium because of similarities in structure. Therefore accumulates on the muscles, specially the heart and emits radiation on closeby cells.

Strontium, another fission product that emits radiation is similar to Calcium. Once consumed is transfered into the bones.

Sites like enenews.com can tell better news about NPP.
> I think this is a great idea and oddly something I was just talking to a coworker about. There's little incentive right now for a company to hire inexperienced developers.

Yup. The primary objection I can see to this is "this privileges people who can spend three weeks learning to do something new, who probably already have privilege," but it seems better than "we will never hire you" by a country mile.

> The company takes on the responsibility of training the developer and the developer can just leave at any time for greener pastures.

I suspect this danger is overstated, especially in the first few years. Even people with Computer Science diplomas- but nothing in particular to point at- are in far less demand than people with experience.

> a company could take the risk of training new developers for 6 months, they should also get the benefit of selling the employee

Why would you write this in response to an article that begins with a photo illustration of two African Americans.
Hardly. If you suppress overt pricing system, hidden ones always emerges. Usually, they're based on "favors" and "threats." Of course, they're a lot less effective and far more dangerous since they're dictated by, and subject to, the whims of the socialists.

"Women also submitted to Beria's sexual advances in exchange for the promise of freeing their relatives from the Gulag. In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya - a well-known Soviet actress - under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha where he offered to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted. He then raped her telling her 'scream or not, doesn't matter.' Yet Beria already knew her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, from which she survived."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
The causative mechanism is the body of research done on the brains of criminals. We usually find reduced function or actual damage in the frontal cortex, and other regions associated with empathy and emotional processing.

The other group of people we find this in is those suffering from childhood lead exposure, and we know that the regions of the brain most affected are those which occur from lead exposure.

While not going so far as to imply everyone with this pattern becomes a criminal, it certainly increases the statistical likelihood that they are, and studies on people with extreme issues - i.e. psychopaths - tend to show that's its a pattern of life experiences which determine whether you learn to function in society, or go another path. Notable is the neuroscientist who was studying psychopaths and discovered he has the same sort of brain structure as one - but, is a scientist, married and has children.

Since we can't really control an individuals life experiences through policy, but they roughly sort out statistically based on socioeconomic status, it seems pretty clear that exposure to brain development inhibiting neurotoxins is going to give you a higher then expected fraction of criminally-inclined young adults.
If it's really the case that this corn would be produced anyway, then why do we need subsidies?
I was under the impression that yahoo was against the Obama administration's surveillance policies. It seems I have been misled.
Non-trivial examples include:

* High-frequency trading [1]

* 3D graphics and CAD systems by Symbolics

* Operating systems by Symbolics [2]

* Computer algebra [3]

* Supercomputing [4]

* Embedded, real-time forensic fingerprint systems (fingerprint analysis, embedded databases) [5]

* High-frequency auctions

* Performant compilers (most Lisp compilers)

* Perl-compatible regular expressions (sometimes 2x the speed of perl) [6]

And I can assure you, there are extremely many other things.

Generally, if you write absolutely correct and robust C++ code (that ensures there will never be buffer overruns, integer overflow, etc.), you'll see your code will slow down a lot. Lisp ensures these things don't happen (among many other things), and only when you tell Lisp that you are absolutely sure such things cannot happen, then your Lisp code can and often will be competitive with C or C++.

C++ has also benefitted from corporations funding the research and development of the compilers, whereas Lisp hasn't. So, as a result, the speed is partly an artifact of the implementation, not the language.

Lastly, as my own aside, the supposed "raw speed" of C (and lesser so C++) is no excuse to architect an entire system in it. There are hot paths in code that need speed, and perhaps attention should be given to those.

[1] http://www.hpcplatform.com/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)

[3] http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

[5] http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5625

[6] http://web.archive.org/web/20080624164217/http://weitz.de/cl...
Agree. See this tweet from before reading this: https://twitter.com/dmourati/status/457641268525289472

Hint: remove Joe and Nate from the sentence and then pick I/me, you'll get it right every time.
Yeah, billions of them apparently.
I don't know. My 19 year old self went to a decent state research university. The lectures I sat through were much less effective than watching Gilbert Strang on Youtube at 3x speed with arrow keys to get him to repeat himself when I miss something and a pause button so I can work out problems after he writes them on the board but before he explains them. There was 1-on-1 time at "real" school, but it was with TAs and a room full of 19 year olds. I feel like the Internet addresses that use case better as well.

(Fair warning: I've been pretty successful in my career, but I dropped out of school after a single semester).
There's a difference between process and discipline. A lot of what you're describing is discipline: you have an internal compass that keeps you oriented on the stuff that matters: helping your wife with the house and kids, doing home maintenance, and taking care of periodic tasks. Basically, you make a to-do list and execute on it.

Process, at least in the corporate context, is about a bunch of stuff you do regularly to check on whether on not the stuff that matters is being attended to. Getting your kid dressed is not a good analog to the 'process' that is being referred to in this sense. Process is a tax on hiring people that don't have that internal compass, or on operating in an environment that stifles that internal compass. If the to-do list isn't there, isn't being followed, or doesn't work in some other way, process exists to find out that there's a problem so everyone can sit down and talk about what to do to fix it.

Put simply: you're defining a culture in your household that is healthy. It's exactly what the author hopes for in a company, and that's not process, it's discipline.
Well, like I mentioned, we don't have the subsidies where I farm. But in the US, it is about farm stabilization. Corn, historically, has received the most funding because the crop had the least economic value. The money was intended to keep the farm solvent through those growing years.

As to why corn continues to receive the funding it does even when ethanol has created a use for the crop? That just seems like poor policy making. I don't think the subsides are necessary at all.
Isn't the JVM too big of a performance compromise for large scale software where every bit of performance matters?

Actually no - having a good concurrent garbage collector actually helps a lot.

Consider any message passing system. Messages come into the system, you create an immutable object, and send a reference to that object to other subsystems. Eventually, when each subsystem has processed that object, it is garbage collected.

In C++ you need to manually handle tracking the object and deleting it when it's no longer needed. This dramatically hinders the sort of systems you can reliably build.

Further thoughts on this here: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/why_not_python.html

As for low level performance, the JVM is actually very fast - i.e., nearly as fast as C. The main places where it becomes an issue is that you can't always control the cache locality of objects.

class Foo {
val bar: Bar
val y: Int
}

In C/C++ you can demand that foo.bar be stored in the same page. On the JVM you can't.
Relevant xkcd http://xkcd.com/1296/
I stress this, too, when I privately tutor. One interesting problem (albeit not directly relevant problem) that came up was "How would you determine the average radius of a hair given the number of hairs on your head?". This actually wasn't obvious to me, but my student figured it out right away! Put your hair in a pony tail, and measure the diameter of the ponytail, figure out that area, and divide by the number of hairs. Brilliant!
Until hardware manufacturers find financial incentive to change, this will continue. As it stands today, hw vendors do not derive any (significant) revenue from updating software and so it's small wonder that these devices are not updated.

Personally, I'm perfectly happy with a "dumb" TV with lots of HDMI inputs and a Raspberry Pi with XMBC installed.
I'm only part way through the book, but to give a counterpoint from it, one of Piketty's examples is from a Balzac story, which describes a situation where basically those in the top 1% of jobs earn nothing compared to those with the top 1% of accumulated capital.

So imagine if you can't even earn money through a good invention because the money would go to the project's financiers instead of you. This is the sort of world Piketty is worried will return and stifle invention.
Speaking of toxic, do you think you could be less so? I realize you're a throwaway but you wouldn't need one if you weren't being abusive and rude.
You're completely wrong and missing the boat.

If someone is a child of a farmer and hangs out in a tiny farm town without internet access, doesn't complete high-school, their odds of creating great wealth are zilch. They may start a hardware store but don't get your hopes up that they'll be the next Sam Walton. Whatever they hope do, it will be much harder. Some of the doors are closed, some doors don't matter.

If someone where a Ruby developer and wanted to work for a startup, a degree probably wouldn't matter as much as say MegaCorp.

But if someone goes to an exclusive university, graduates and then lives in a large city and has lots of friends, their odds of wealth dramatically improve versus the former... if they were ambitious, many more doors would be open to them (vendors, partners, investors, customers, etc.). Being close to the action with the right contacts is a world of difference from being a random person without successful, helpful friends and pedigree.

Furthermore, it is valid to be self-reinforcing because it is. Without wealth, it's impossible to capitalize on opportunities to make smart investments which one would otherwise have to pass on while others with more wealth may have the chance to make more money on them. Also, people with wealth have plenty of pseudo-"friends" pitching them opportunities to make wealth, whereas someone without wealth is unlikely to have a full calendar of people trying to get investment from them. Think of how many deals Mark Cuban can pass on just because he doesn't like the terms, and how good he's gotten good at negotiating favorable equity terms and knowing which deals are good/bad. Someone that's totally new is likely to be totally inept at some part of the business dance and will likely get rooked. Someone with the right friends is far more likely to get good advice from them about what to do or not do in a business setting to make fewer mistakes.

It's harder to get from zero to having VC's for friends that send you sweetheart deals to invest in, but that usually requires proving oneself (rich) first.

In conclusion, rich does not assure itself but it tends to be self-reinforcing.

(I took the ten-year plan and barely finished because I subconsciously resisted due to the conscious futility of it. Box checked, not about to start Dr. ... PhD)
I've heard a lot about it, but I never knew what it was. I just looked it up. Pretty neat. Yeah, definitely a similar idea to some degree.
You can grab a firmware image from any closed-source appliance and immediately find dozens or hundreds of security problems that you know will never be fixed except possibly in your copy. They probably won't get fixed even if you talk to the manufacturer about them; in fact you run the risk of the manufacturer convincing the police to raid your home, or of the manufacturer suing you.

Now try the same with open-source software. There will be far fewer problems to find, because all of the obvious ones have been fixed already, and most of the difficult ones too. Even if you do find a problem, as soon as you put some information out there about it it'll be fixed. Upgrades invariably happen more quickly with open-source software, even in firmware roles, so the population is covered more quickly as well.

That's what is meant by 'given enough eyes'; not that all bugs are found and fixed immediately, but that all bugs are found and fixed eventually. OpenSSL simply didn't have enough eyes, for a variety of reasons. Developers in the US were discouraged from contributing, since our legal system has in the past been a risk to that kind of project. Many developers avoided it because they didn't know anything about old systems like VMS, or about cryptography. Most of the rest of us avoided it because it wasn't obviously broken.

Edit: We also generally assume that the NSA has 'enough eyes'. If they decide that they have to attack product X, then they get a bunch of people to look at product X and find its bugs. It doesn't matter whether it's open source or not, it's just a question of the number of eyes you apply to the problem.
I feel sorry for Marissa Mayer and Sam Altman.
I agree that no-hire agreements are harmful to employees, but non-solicitation is beneficial. Cold calls are obnoxious and I'd be glad to see them stop forever.
EDIT: Whoa, took a while to post this and then parent was gone. I should've quoted them, ah well. Their comment was along the lines of, "Why are companies hiring people for $40k to write this stuff (and getting bad products as a result) instead of hiring someone for $140k that'll turn out better products."

Management doesn't look at it that way at these companies. The problem is hardware companies don't grok software (not just companies, US DoD has such a heavy background in hardware they often don't have a clue how to handle software, see the F-35 and attempts to "modernize" old systems, wonder why budgets on new systems get out of control? It's probably the software.). An anecdote, but one that I'm told by others was representative of their experience with hardware companies.

The company began by making sensors. It got into software because they wanted a way to sell the complete package to their customers (buy our sensors and this control panel, your building/bus/train/plane will be safer and you don't have to write the control software yourself!). Before my time there they had 4 or 5 people in software. 1 coder. 1-2 testers. 1-2 QA. Their test suites were ludicrously incomplete. No one thought that this was odd, except for those of us in software who came to the show later. The higher ups considered software to just be a necessary inconvenience, it wasn't until our shop started delaying deliveries (because it was understaffed, underpaid, and inexperienced) that they started hiring more people (all underpaid and inexperienced as well) in an effort to throw more bodies at the problem (seriously, see the F-35 for a repeat of this exact behavior).

Short version: Hardware organizations don't get software. It's an inconvenience to them, and they'll screw over the poor sap that gets stuck managing the project with a pitiful budget, and absurd deadlines and requirements.
Really? So in your opinion letting people learn about prime ministry level corruption and ministry level threats of starting war with Syria is not whistle blowing?

I think you also believe the recordings are montages.
> Yeah, I’ll just keep using Debian..

trollolol
Yes. We all agree about that. The question is: how much does that matter? Maybe it matters a whole lot. I won't be surprised if it does, because that's what I intuitively believe too. But if it's so obviously true, we should be able to marshal evidence to support the idea the idea that distribution of wealth matters to the welfare of the whole population.

So far, arguments against the comment upthread boil down to two things:

* Arguments that appear factually incorrect, like, "the wealth gap means the rich have good nutrition but the poor don't".

* Arguments that wealth inequality means that the poor can't become wealthy, which is like saying "the problem with wealth inequality is wealth inequality".
16 Leadership Lessons from a Four Star General
I was referring to "science" in your description of "Rejecting the entirety of a science because it deals in confidence values". It does not give confidence values. It is not science in the "scientific method" sense. It is a descriptive discipline, yes, and it can be useful - but it could be a random correlation, or correlated through a hidden variable. An observational study is, scientifically, not a valid way to establish cause and effect.
Why? They are 1%ers now.
What kinds of opportunities? Who gets to decide? Should everyone be given some prime investment opportunities and the ability to make a lifechanging investment? That way, your entire decision and the outcome is based on you (including realizing that the market may or may not be rigged), but there's absolutely no risk to your current life if you make a bad investment choice. That's not an opportunity many people have.

You're still drawing lines in the sand whether you're talking about capital or opportunity equality. 'How much inequality is tolerable to the economy?' and other such questions. I haven't studied American capitalism much, but any system becomes weird when you can use/abuse the rules of the system to change the rules of the system. Eventually you start calling it something else.

One of the major points in the interview/book is the amount of inherited wealth, so to turn your example around, the programmer gets decent pay after building something of value while the simpleton who has contributed nothing has a mansion, several vacation homes and a fleet of vehicles. There can be some natural resentment when hearing that story and it's going to be a focus of the inequality debate.
Yeah, this launch has been delayed and rescheduled over and over again for various reasons. Too many to count actually, the customer (NASA) will always be the primary concern and they did not even have to allow Spacex to run these tests while transporting their cargo.
It's a decent argument, and the arguments about lower taxes and increased innovation sound sensible. But as I said, some high taxes countries are quite innovative.

And in the end, the role of innovation should be to help people and equality, safety net and the like have great value for many. On the whole it's hard to argue social Democratic countries offer a worst deal for people than capitalism.