skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a sign, but not a sure sign.

One company I consulted at, maybe 200 people, went through a substantial internal process to make their values explicit. I wasn't there for it, but I understand everybody participated, and there was a lot of discussion about what they really wanted in a mission statement and a set of values.

When I was there, it amazed me to see employees at all levels actually pulling out the list of values when hard decisions were happening. They used it to remind themselves of what really mattered to them.

Admittedly, I've only seen it once, but it really appeared to work. It's definitely something I'm keeping in my pocket the next time I'm at something that crosses Dunbar's Number.
From the linked article:

> "But Marx's original critique of capitalism was not that it made for lousy growth rates. It was that a rising concentration of wealth couldn't be sustained politically."

I feel like this is one of the very most important things to consider in any discussion of wealth concentration. Economic growth does not necessarily correlate with a broadly pleasant experience for all participants in that economy. I think we came out of the 20th century with it being taken as axiomatic that some kind of tradeoff must be made to achieve both goals in concert somehow, but this understanding seems to be receding (really starting with the rise of austerity policy in the 80s, but coming very much to a head lately).
Its absolute wealth, not relative wealth, that determines whether your kids are likely to live to adulthood, how much leisure you're likely to have, what you'll eat, where you can live.

Capitalism has obviously excelled at raising absolute wealth across the board.

Relative wealth certainly matters when a society is foolish enough to vest massive power in a centralized political system, where it can easily be controlled by the wealthiest clade.

Which is the argument for more decentralized, limited government in a nutshell. That governments are run by the powerful is a tautology, and the iron law of oligarchy makes it clear that it isn't "the people" really running the show.
Maybe you could be bothered to link the paper? Otherwise this is no more than hearsay.
Ah the great "massive exodus from their service" update. Funny how this happens every update.
If he talks about capital and doesn't mention the Federal Reserve or the rise of fiat currency, he will have left out something quite important.

Slightly more than 100 years ago, all the major currencies of the world were backed by precious metals such as gold; now, none of them are.
I do not think this is a constructive comment. What was the point of submitting this comment?
The Crazy Redactions Of The No Fly List Decision
That may be true, but the article certainly doesn't prove it. The article repeatedly mentions C++11, but as mentioned elsewhere [1], C++11 has lambdas; even if you want to do the partial binding thing, there is no need for a struct, and obviously a static "add one" function can just be declared as a regular function. So what's the point of the struct declaration other than making C++ look bad?

Another sign of the lack of coherence of the article is that it displays unoptimized assembly output for the C++ example, then goes on to praise Lisp for being around as good. The optimal assembly is actually two instructions:

0000000000000000	leal	0x1(%rdi), %eax
0000000000000003	ret

Not that it really matters, since it will be inlined into any hot loop in both cases.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619116
I find this problem interesting, and I'm not sure what the right way to start solving would be. Is it that you like mailing lists and hate their web interfaces, or you like a forum/bulletin board style system and hate the way it notifies you of new content? I think each has a different solution, I'm just not sure what it is.

I think what I'd want is a forum that emails, but runs so completely off email that you don't have to log in if you so choose -- essentially, a hook on message save to email out if the preference is on, and a smart enough parser on receiving an email to post back to the forum (after email validation and verification, of course). That would be really fun to build, and may be worth some time exploring. If that's a solution you'd like, let me know - I could always use a hacking buddy.
ImpasseBreaker [Updated] – Negotiation as a Service
How intrusive would the developer environment have to be? We're a "host your own REST service" development shop so deploying and testing your own GitHub repo is done with a dashboard from a web page. In our eyes, everything outside of code development and code hosting should take place in a web page complemented with command line tools for advanced control.

The feedback we have heard is the editor of choice is near-and-dear to a developer and would be difficult to force a new tool on anyone to edit code. Code hosting has a good solution with GitHub too. Which leaves testing and deployment up to the platform. Since we focus on giving two free REST services for publishing your own Jobs we put the deployment and testing into our web dashboard (and cli tool). Testing a REST API is easy and already integrated into our dashboard similar to Postman. The only code a developer has to write is a Job which is just 3 simple parts (inputs, outputs, and tasks). For us we wanted the .Net debugging power for every developer from our dashboard so we built it to identify tests that fail validation based off your test inputs and outputs versus your test's expected outputs.

Let me know what you think here's our beta vision based off our feedback for quickly developing and deploying REST API services for your own Jobs:
https://flowstacks.com/developer/

Cheers
I guess this is it

https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/456844260328083456
For what it's worth, here's a somewhat negative review of Piketty's book from James K. Galbraith:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/kapital-for-the-twent...

I don't have much background in economics so I don't know if Galbraith's criticisms are sound, but it's an interesting critique.

TL;DR: "In sum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a weighty book, replete with good information on the flows of income, transfers of wealth, and the distribution of financial resources in some of the world’s wealthiest countries. Piketty rightly argues, from the beginning, that good economics must begin [with]—or at least include—a meticulous examination of the facts. Yet he does not provide a very sound guide to policy. And despite its great ambitions, his book is not the accomplished work of high theory that its title, length, and reception (so far) suggest."
Maybe, but there would need to be some way of initially vetting them so that you don't devalue the service by regularly sending unqualified handymen to your customers homes. It's probably not too bad if the person you send to mow the lawn is only so-so, but the person you send to fix the electrical issue better know his stuff.

Also, you need some way to ensure that they actually show up when they say they will which, from my experience, is a 50-50 proposition with most handymen.

It's definitely an interesting approach though and there are probably ways to circumvent the obstacles.
"... capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."

Whatever else you might say about inequality, "unsustainable" is an obvious falsehood.

Roman civilization, for example, lasted two thousand years. Eight times as long as the United States. Think about that. One hundred generations of men lived and died as Romans. And the Roman Empire featured radical inequality, of the sort that we could never have in modern America, no matter what the Gini coefficient was.

On one side was the Emperor and his soldiers, who could have you and your entire family tortured to death, purely on a whim (see Caligula). On the other side were slaves, who had no human rights at all and were treated as property. And between them, countless peasants starved to death every time there was a bad harvest, while countless aristocrats taxed their lands to fund lavish banquets. (In the Roman tax system, tax collection was outsourced; the tax collector was responsible for finding a certain amount, and anything above that he could keep for himself.)

That's some serious fucking inequality right there. And I'm certainly not saying it's a good idea, or that we should try to emulate them. But it was, as a raw historical fact, extremely sustainable, lasting eight times as long as the US has so far.
Funny you should mention XBMC. I had almost exactly the same issue as the one described here with an older version of it 6 months ago.

Old writeup: https://gist.github.com/njbooher/cedd5a49895d3d664474#file-g...
This article, and most reviews of Piketty, have to be misrepresenting or misunderstanding something. The idea that r > g is simply mathematically impossible, and I don't think it's actually what Piketty is pushing.

That's because r is part of g. If the whole economy looks like E(t) = exp(rt)+rest, and exp(rt) grows faster than the rest, then eventually E(t) ~ exp(rt).

Since g = log(E(t))/t, g and r must eventually be equal.

The only way I can think of to resolve this is to assume a permanent redirection of wealth from investment to consumption. This could potentially result in investment returns being r, but the growth of invested capital being only g.

It's also worth noting that Piketty's numbers significantly underestimate income for the bottom 90%.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwinship/2014/04/17/whither-...

See also Doug's comment on Robin Hanson's blog post: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/03/hidden-taxes-must-be-h...

Perhaps Piketty merely means that E[r] > E[g] (where r and g are both random variables). But that doesn't actually imply long term concentration of wealth at all, which seems to contradict the spirit of Piketty.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbzRrRkhhc1RNY0U/...
I've been "harassed" a few times over seas. Usually it involves accidently photographing near police stations or military installations, which is a pretty obvious no-no, except that the buildings were pretty non-descript and I had no idea what they were at the time.

It's only happened a few times: someone comes out and either tells me to stop, or yells at me in a language I don't speak very well, and I say "sorry" in whatever language and continue walking around.

I find that the trouble happens when photographers/travelers try to argue with the people harassing them.

Usually most the people I encounter just make a joke, smile, and encourage me to take photos.

Funny how far a smile gets you when you're traveling.
Well, it's a 700 page book that (I'm guessing) few of the reviewers have read, so it's entirely possible that you and many others are missing something.

That said, if the main point of a huge book, even among many other smaller points, is an observation so ho-hum that it would make a college freshman's eyes roll, something else is going on. Maybe he proved his obvious thesis in an unusually gripping way. Maybe he proved the obvious threat to democracy in an unusually gripping way. (But why would it matter? Does anyone still think this is a democracy?)

Or maybe all the lefty economists decided implicitly to push this particular warmed-over cliche as a great innovation. Who knows.
My best guess about why people are still using C and C++ is this: there is a massive, valuable ecosystem of software written in these languages. It is hard to write software in one language that links with software written in other languages, especially where performance is a concern. The fact that all commonly used commercial OSes are both written in C and expose C APIs has kept C and C++ alive more than anything else.

Performance? Lisp can give you that, as can OCaml, Haskell, and other better languages. Real time system? There is a mountain of research on real-time garbage collection and on using HLLs for real-time systems. Operating system kernel? OSes were once written in Lisp, and OSes could conceivably be written in other HLLs.

Throw in a requirement to interoperate with a C library and suddenly things get ugly. Yeah, sure, you have an FFI, but debugging across a language barrier is difficult (I have had to do it, it is agony). Suddenly you need to worry about pinning objects so that the garbage collector won't move them while some C library expects them to stay still. In some cases your code basically becomes C but with the syntax of an HLL, and you start to wonder why you did not just write that routine in C to begin with (it would have made your life easier). Performance matters but your compiler needs to set up a trampoline so that your code can provide some kind of callback, and now that is a bottleneck that kills all that other optimization work. Then some joker writes some C++ code, and the rest of your week is spent writing wrapper functions because your FFI cannot deal with the name mangler.

At the end of the day there is no particular technical reason for C or C++ to remain so popular, and a big pile of technical reasons to stay away from such languages. C made a bit of sense in the 1970s when computers were small and the understanding of compilers and programming languages was less well developed. At this point C and C++ are a liability that we are all stuck with. Maybe some day the expense of sticking with C and C++ will outweigh the expense required to switch to better languages, but I am not holding my breath.
I've had some good experience with iodine in the past, it's been useful at airports and on trains to bypass captive portals.

It's extremely variable in performance, and can sometimes require a bit of tuning on the client side to work reliably; however, for the most part the auto-detection works well, and will upgrade to raw UDP on port 53 if it is possible.
Full text search of Youtube videos.

How many times have you watched a video, maybe an hour long conference and wanted to go back to a point in the video where something specific was mentioned. You have to skim to the area where you think it happened, and then re-watch the video until you find what you're looking for. That sucks.

Even if Youtube allowed people to embed the full transcript of a video in some kind of search layer with corresponding points in the video that would be a dream.

Besides that I'd like a web browser built on 'the hive' that eliminates advertising. If you want to browse the web without being tracked, traced, prodded and harassed you could install the browser and a small, unnoticeable amount of your CPU is used to help power the hive. I would then like to see that operating system give a charitable donation every 6 months that says they will donate 1 month of computational power to a research organization.

One thing I've always wanted to create is a competition website like Kaggle but with real world results. Let's say I create this and go to Mount Sinai hospital in NYC and tell them that I want to run a contest. The contest is to anybody who thinks they can increase Mount Sinai's margins by X percentage within a particular area of interest. The agreement with Mount Sinai is that they have to give us all of the available data and we will open-source it. The challenge for open-source folks is to review the data and if you can find a way to increase margins by X percentage while still upholding the same level of quality, you win the prize. Let's say Mount Sinai gives us access to the entire spreadsheet of products they order from hospital gowns to radiation machines, or even lets say we fund a $100,000 bounty to anybody or any team who can reduce their emergency room wait times by 50%.

You could solve the problem in any way possible, improving hardware/software, or simply finding redundancy in logistics.

Hospitals are probably not the best examples but I hope you see what I'm getting at...
> ...quantitative easing serve to benefit higher classes much more than others.

While this is true, what it takes to route around this "power-law like attachment of nodes" that user orasis accurately described elsewhere in this thread has proven a maddeningly difficult problem to solve over the course of human history. The kind of top-down solution Piketty proposes ignores the kind of iterated game that plays out in the real world, and why the wealthy classes invest so heavily into political activity. It is not only relatively easy for the wealthy to eventually route around solutions like Piketty's, but even over the longer con subvert the original institutions into further means of command and control.

There are interesting developments afoot for this dynamic in our current era, and part of the reason why forums like HN are so fascinating.
I suspect a great many supporters of capitalism accept inequality as a part of it as well. They may even argue it's a feature, not a bug.
whoops, you actually need this Coupon Code for the discount:
CRYPTCOIN
The reason this book is important is that he's shown the r > g idea with data. As Picketty mentions in that article, it's a field of research that's an "academic no-man's land." It's traditionally too "economic" for history and too "historical" for economics.

Marx was espousing a theory. He wrote a manifesto. This is based on data that no one else has bothered to look into.
For the last 6 months or so, my life has been dominated by musical instruments, both playing them and modifying them. Ended up building a workshop for guitars because of it. Lately, I've been doing research into CNCing all the wooden parts of a guitar -- doing the whole body, the top, the neck, and the fretboard. I'm hoping to do a trial run in the next few months, if all goes to plan.

For those who aren't aware, renting time on a CNC is cheap. I found a nearby Shopbot that was being rented for about $30/hour. Estimating a total milling time of about 8 hours (to be very conservative), I'm looking at all of $240 to do the majority of the construction; pretty cheap, when you consider that a nice custom instrument can easily run $3k.
I use API's from 3 different sites:
DogeAPI.com, for doge payments, LiteAPI.org for Litecoin, and Blockchain.info for Bitcoin payments.

LiteAPI, and Blockchain, are great as they have callbacks (and are virtually identical), for DogeAPI I use EventMachine (Ruby) to poll DogeAPI to see if payment has been received.

My store is a custom version of Potionstore (Ruby on Rails):
https://github.com/potionfactory/potionstore
Usage of Facebook has been declining for years because of how slow they were to adapt to mobile. Sure, people still use Facebook, but they're also using other stuff, and Facebook's percentage is (and has been for years) dropping.
Sounds great! I think it's something that we need here in Guatemala
'they'?
That's not the point GP is making.
Iodine is pretty cool, but do keep in mind that even though this repo looks new and novel, the project has been around since 2006.
Well, but I think we have to figure out what and whether we can do something about it (inequality), how much, and for what cost (cost in the non-economic sense).

I think the observation that power accumulates in one way or the other, capitalism or not, seems to hold in any society.

Being naive and not an economist, I would still believe that money is a form of distributed trust and thus power. Lots of money means lots of power, in the sense of causing a lot of change (negative as well as positive).

And I do not think that there is necessarily something wrong with that. We all seem to praise the billionaire Elon Musk here on HN for making space flight more efficient. And I think he is a very capable individual who amassed a lot of power/money and is thus able to effect a lot of change. Why should I complain about this?

I would argue that the only things that hurt a society when it comes to accumulation of wealth/power is actually _using it in a detrimental_ sense.

Things such as:
- luxuries
- buying laws in your (corporations) favor
- using a lot of resources (ore, land) inefficiently

The more I think about it, and having recently read another person here on HN mention it, the more I think something that broadly falls under the idea of 'Geolibertarianism' would bring us closer to a more just society. And, no I am not talking about 'solving our problems' here, because I think having problems is inherent to being a human.

Actually taxing the bad effects of money instead of owning/moving/etc. money itself would also solve e.G. the problem on how to deal with the existence crypto-currencies without resorting to draconian measures.

Finally, I think that we as humans tend to shy away from even just criticizing the actual bad effects of power. I think this is as much a problem as the people with power misbehaving in the first place. Most of us, myself included, simply seem to have a very strong 'follow the leader' emotion, and we rather argue about secondary issues than the real problems. Or we invent powerless utopias and start to believe in them (Marxism, Feminism, ...), actually becoming controllable by the malevolent powers.

But maybe I am just naive.

*edit: typo(s)
From what I understand, they had a window on Friday, a fallback window on Saturday. If they missed the Saturday launch, then the mission would go to Orbital.

Maybe they technically could have waited until Saturday, but there is no way they would scrap one of their windows for a tertiary objective.
Certainly — it's just another parallel system. This is something things like CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) — and see FDR2/FDR3 for programmatic verification — excel at.
Looks like this is more primitive knowledge being rediscovered. Note how cavemen axes were stones tied to the side of a stick.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/evidence-uncovered-of-worlds-old...
"Quark has a horribly bad tech support department." [1994]
Another benefit of a successful implementation of this idea is that it could allow for a simple paper trail as evidence of good maintence which, in turn, may allow sellers to command higher prices: similar to vehicle maintenance records.
It’s a fucking startup. Why are you here?
I completely agree. I think that the effective way to start this would be to get a high-rise to buy into the idea. If you have 10 floors of apartments all in the same building, you have some good time efficiency and can start sharing resources - i.e., a big bin to throw bags of cat crap in that can be trundled down the hall from apartment to apartment.

I like your angle on how it'd help the elderly. It might be an interesting way to put together a 'senior living' neighborhood in conjunction with a developer. You could contract with the developer that your labor force would handle the big lifting duties; on the buy side, the rent would be marginally higher (and spread out over the development). Perhaps that already exists though.
I do think it would be valuable to fetch the value field, as then the user can format the text however they want - for example, I may want to say "96 minutes" instead of "1 hour 36 minutes".

Additionally, it's much easier to compare two values (e.g. if one wanted to compare distances between X and Y versus X and Z).
Second dns2tcp, although there's also Heyoka http://heyoka.sourceforge.net/, Netcross http://www.primianotucci.com/os/netcross-ip-over-dns-tunneli..., and a rather interesting presentation from Defcon a few years back that showed a more detailed and realistic scenario of using DNS tunneling to punch through a firewall and retrieve database records. I can't locate it right now, but I'll take a look if anyone's interested.
There's Learn You An Agda at <https://github.com/liamoc/learn-you-an-agda>, though it never got that far. (I've done comparatively little with theorem provers (v. model checkers), so I can't point you anywhere that useful!)