skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The simulation studies of Bouchard & Mezard show that, regardless of initial conditions, wealth distribution ends up a Pareto distribution with a small percentage taking almost all of the goods. The take-away of Bouchard & Mezard's studies: the very rich aren't rich because they earned it (i.e., because they are skillful or knowledgeable), they are rich mostly because they are lucky.

All my life I've assumed that, when people had a going concern or were rich, that they _earned_ their wealth. But Bouchard & Mezard says they're, for the most part, simply very lucky.

If luck, rather than skill, is the source of one's wealth, then has one "earned" that wealth? How can one lay exclusive claim to something given by chance? I would contend that no such claim can be made.

In particular, I would contend that income gained through luck is fair game for government acquisition through taxation, and if it is possible to distinguish that portion of wealth due to skill from that due to luck (and such appears possible), then the "lucky" portion is open game for acquisition to be spent or redistributed as decided by the powers-that-be.

Wealth Condensation: Why the Rich Get Richer (and the poor poorer):
http://iwillknow.jesaurai.net/?p=387

The Mathematics of Inequality:
https://www.austms.org.au/Jobs/Library4.html

FWIW Bouchard & Mezard are not the only researchers whose models say this:

Chance helps the rich get richer, simulation study finds:
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/110722_chance.htm
I do have a laptop at work that I can use to mess around with. I can't work on any classified materials on it (but I don't deal with that much on the design side).

I will experiment with these tools when I get some time. I doubt if you'll see a reply to this thread by then, though. Perhaps we can find another way to communicate.
"we looked everywhere for someone who'd be willing to work 7 days a week with no overtime at an annual salary that does not keep up with region's cost of living, we really tried, so it must be that there are no workers available."
Hmm, I'm not sure if codebase with millions of lines is 'medium' or 'large' but from my experience const is great even there. Of course, modifying existing code to become const correct in interfaces where previously it was not can cascade to a point where a majority of the code needs a rewrite, so I can see situations where adding const to an old interface can cause lots of grief.

But from my experience const really helps in enforcing directed graph constraints on logic and data flow which is great - and forces code to be easier to reason about.
> Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it.

I think this depends a lot on how you do the training. Sure, if you think of training as something very separate from the work, then doing lots of it could be expensive. But the last team I put together was very collaborative, with pair programming being the norm. In that environment, a lot of training comes essentially for free.

In a rapidly growing startup, I think building your processes with a strong bias toward staff development is the best way to scale. No matter how much experience a new person has, they still have very low knowledge of the product, the audience, local process choices, and the local code base. So startups always need to be educating their staff. Adding some technical education on top of that doesn't seem hard.

Personally, I've never quit a place where I'm still learning a lot. But I've hired plenty of people because they felt like they were stagnating in their current jobs.
Getting a pro male fighter in an armbar would be unlikely for Rousey however if she got in position I wouldn't bet against her.
An armbar works on the principle of leverage, in this case the bicep muscle vs the same muscles used in a deadlift. If Rousey had a male fighter in an armbar the strength difference is not going to be the deciding factor. Also all fighters know how to defend an armbar, RNC, triangle etc yet they still tap to them.
I've always assumed the reason is because only a tiny sliver of Christians have actually read the whole bible - so they probably have no idea what it says. A quick google search seems to confirm my assumption [1].

[1] http://www.christianity.com/1270946/
I think the quote (cannot find the video) come from the thought of a non MMA fighter trying to fight her in a MMA match. I thought it was a Sports Illustrated video where she explained it further.
Was going to comment this. Used NFS years ago and was incredibly happy with them, they're fantastic.
> Or just cheap labor.

No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor. For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).

For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term. They take more time for supervision than it would have taken for a senior developer to just accomplish their project.

If you assume that interns are actually cheap labor, I have to assume you've never run an internship program.

> I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are.

So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term, training actually makes the shortage more acute (as you have to move senior engineers into training programs).

The far more sensible solution is to just bid higher until you can get the senior developers which are actually out there. Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.

Of course, they would always like to pay less for developers (just like I'd like to be paid more and would like to pay lower taxes). Fortunately, unless you have a magic training program which compresses 10 years of experience into 4 weeks, salaries are likely to stay high for quite some time.
>> Can you provide any examples of trained women vs trained men fighting in a martial arts competition?

Here is one example: Lucia Rijker vs Somchai Jaideea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsaTPtUl4vs

Wiki's description of this fight:

An exhibition match involving a man verses a woman was sanctioned between Lucia Rijker who was then undefeated and Somchai Jaidee who considered a journeyman amongst his division, they both were almost identical in weight apart from the arbitrary weight discrepancy of 1 pound, during the opening minutes of the first bout Rijker proceeded to stand virtually toe-to-toe with Somchai whos strength advantage was already apparent, however Lucy shows impressive speed, Lucy then makes several attempts to kick Somchai to which Lucy bounces of him and loses her balance on multiple occasions due to the lopsided physical superiority of Somchai, Lucy however did not make it to the end of the fight when she attempted to brawl the stronger male Somchai and was knocked completely unconscious, many believed that it served as an example of why a women should not be sanctioned to fight a man(hungdaddy patriarchy), the match was since then dubbed the "cook the man some eggshibition".
>My pet solution to the problem is to prioritize quota slots by pay tiers, as a rough proxy for how rare the skills being sought really are.

That is absolutely brilliant.
There are a lot of obstacles to me turning my ideas/hobbies into businesses. Yes, getting paying customers is the hardest piece of the puzzle. On my last endeavor, I got way into the server-side weeds with profiles and accounts and billing. It was a neverending spiral because I had designed something far too complicated without a test suite; I decided it could never be completed.

I think my biggest challenge was my consistent inability to form functioning teams around my ideas. I've usually flown solo or been taken advantage of by my team (me doing all the work, them contributing nothing, waiting to see it reach "critical mass".) On the last go, I even offered a guy an equal partnership, but that was not enough and he never committed. It tempts me to think my ideas were not viable when I could never convince my peers to jump on the bandwagon. I always had users who seemed to get value out of my services, and that kept me going.

I've never gotten a huge amount of attention or gotten funded, and frankly I like the autonomy, so I have never sought any funding. Of course, that means if I have any hope of getting financial rewards from bootstrapping my hobby work, I've got to be very organized, which I never have been on past projects.

For my current project, I've decided to open source my new codebase with the AGPL. In the business I'm looking at getting into, open source is common with the popular services, but these projects rarely get any outside contributors. Hopefully I can at least get code reviews, bug reports, and maybe even some code contributions if followers don't mind assigning their copyrights to me.

On this new project, I've got a really tricked out client-side JavaScript development environment with Gulp, Webpack, Karma, and Closure Compiler. I'm really happy with how simple and powerful the build system is, and I'm hoping that by making it easy to build and test, I can attract devs to join my team.
> When you visit a (fundamental) church you see elderly people, and the sick and disabled, the sort of people who need God. You don't see very many of the young adults who are healthy, if there are any young people they come in with their parents.

An observation of the fundamental church at large reflects your statement. I would delimit that statement though to say that there are pockets of thriving 'resistance', so to speak. I happen to belong to a fundamental church that bucks the trend of an ageing population.
Exactly. You want to know of a true shortage of workers? 7 ft centers who are aggressive, not injury prone, and can hit a free throw. They're so rare that 17% of all 7footers in the US play in the NBA. It's why Deandre Jordan is making 100 million over the next 5? years. A shortage of programmers, ha!

There is one kind of shortage though, and one that is adequately compensated; programmers willing to work at below average wages for lottery tickets (read: technical cofounder equity) that happen to hit, and therefore end up making millions -- they don't even need to be exceptionally skilled, just right be in the place and right time (I've known several of these). But show me an Anthony Davis of coding who is paid as such, and I'll show you someone who is a skilled manager/entreprenuer.
An apt comment. I wish I had seen it before I started the post. I had read good fraction of this essay before I had the slightest idea what it was supposed to be all about.
Shoot me an e-mail (cf. profile). I'd be happy to host it.
Domains for Sale – Jacques Mattheij
The Christian faith is anything but arbitrary. It is predicated on the Bible being true, and the Bible is a collection of documents, many of which are grounded in specific points of both space and time.

In particular, the factual claims about Christ, his life, his death, his resurrection are central to any evangelical Christian's faith. Disprove them and it's game over for Christianity. Paul says as much in his letter to the early church in Corinth [0]. Beyond factual claims about Christ, there are many other sections of the Bible which would become fatal to the central Christian message were they proven false. (The flood, the plagues in Egypt, the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, the prophecies in Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, etc.)[1].

Start with any one of them and offer a credible disproof and you can go down in the history books as the person responsible for dismantling the arbitrary Christian faith.

[0]: https://www.bible.com/bible/59/1co.15:14-19

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_and_messianic_prophecy#V...
The Cooper Hewitt (to my knowledge) was the first museum to post their museum metadata on github:

https://github.com/cooperhewitt/collection
http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2012/releasing-collection-githu...

There are a few other museums that have done so since: https://github.com/tategallery/collection https://github.com/artsmia/collection are the two I can think of right now

The Rijksmuseum and the Walters both have CC0 metadata + images, but through a queryable API instead of downloadable csv/json.

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/api
http://api.thewalters.org/
Telepresence Robot Crosses Atlantic Five Times Trying to Get Home
It is also true that computer science curriculum doesn't really cover anything but a specific subset of the software development jobs out there. The same may not apply to other STEM fields, but it is certainly true for software.
Her mother is also pretty damn smart, and I would expect the daughter inherited the same intelligence. That is a pretty nasty combination of brawn and brains.
I never agreed with those that maintain that code not split into many very short function or method definitions is bad code. Except for one line that is way longer 80 chars, I don't think there is anything wrong with The Monolith:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/crista/exercises-in-progra...
It's my opinion that the whole "People with BAs in liberal arts work at Starbucks" thing is a joke that someone took seriously.
I knew this kind of practice was pretty common and was just wondering what are people's thoughts about it. Isn't this considered domain squatting and generally deplored?
> The hospitals do have to pay for medical school. If they didn't, nobody would go through it.

What? As far as I know, hospitals don't directly pay for medical school.

Rather, the cost of medical school is reflected in doctor salaries.

(Just as the cost of training is reflected in developer salaries.)
Most political groups commit the modern sin of hypocrisy. Old 'conservative' people decrying taxes and welfare yet exploiting it as much as possible for themselves, and organizing in force whenever it is threatened.
Aspose.Newsletter August 2015: Working with Multiple File Types and More News
Those versions of IE might represent 25% of web users, but any given website will probably see them as much less than 25%.

I run multiple sites, and most of them have IE (any version) as under 10% of users. One of them doesn't; IE represents ~13.5% of users on that one.

My untested theory about this is that IE users are generally less adventurous web users, sticking to sites like Gmail, YouTube, local news sites, etc.

TLDR: unless you're working on Gmail or a site where you expect to soon see the world turn up at the doorstep, it might be safe for you to mostly ignore IE.
The issue for the US is that they want to keep those good jobs here, and so they need to keep the good companies here. If the price is driven up -- and it is being driven up -- but you can get good devs in Estonia, India, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, etc, at a far more affordable price then:

a) US companies will hire those remote workers, causing cash to flow out of the US

b) companies will set up in those countries to compete with the US companies, but without the burden of the US' skyrocketing salaries.

This happened in manufacturing: the US had high salaries, so costs of manufacturing were too high, so the US started outsourcing to Asian, and now the manufacturing industry in the US is so bad that companies can actually afford to hire US manufacturing workers again.

The solution: when wages skyrocket, bring in foreign engineers. When wages are depressed, don't.
>The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it (and they do, extensively). Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it.

"Training" is far too broad a term for this to be accurate. Training can mean anything from training someone how to use git to training a non-programmer to be a data scientist. We can't expect a company to spend multiple years on the latter, but even the smallest, leanest startup can afford the former.

Where do we draw the line?
Implementation-defined behavior is still defined, in this case probably by the platform ABI. It's simply not portable.
$70K is not much in SF.

Based on the economics, I'd assess based on the a) the quality of the work you'd be doing and b) the quality of the startup.

To take two extremes, if you're working on creating CSS templates for a Django website, stay in school. If you're working on a deep learning model for speech recognition, this becomes interesting.

Same with the startup. Is it a startup with a bunch of customers already, or is it just an idea? Are the investors good? Are the founders people who seem like they can create a successful business? etc.
The more I read articles like this the more I hate america.

america wants to be global hegemonic power without paying the price for it.

america only has 5% of the world's population and deserves only 5% of the world's GDP, and should limit itself to absorbing only 5% of world's resource.

American multinationals who also control america's govt want to absorb the best of the world's labour and force wage suppression on its own people.

Guess what - its working so well that they can even ignore to invest in their OWN infrastructure, education and people.
Re: “Cowen is merely repeating the talking points of the propaganda campaign against the estate tax planned in the mid-90s…” Cowen’s argument is not the same.

1) Cowen is saying that the rich engage in tax avoidance. While, in the article Meagher is describing “how and why the estate tax became part of the pro-family agenda of social conservatives.”

(There’s a ton of data on it: see “Tax Avoidance Saves Wealthiest Americans $3 Trillion Each Year” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/07/tax-avoidance_n_242...)

2) re: “This seems very speculative.” The point that I’m making is about the time value of money. (I’m not making a Reaganomics supply side argument.) My point is, a dollar before a death tax is worth a lot more than after the death tax --- there’s enormous evidence for that (and even without a death tax based on time value decay alone it is true.) Admittedly, I am assuming that rich people would rather not voluntarily give money to the government, even if they don’t want to give it to their heirs. (ie. The Giving Pledge the super rich make to philanthropy.)
The economics of that theory don't (seem to) make sense. If you expand the supply of a factor of production, you expand the supply of the output. The employer pays less, but has to sell for less too.

If widget specialists flood the market, their wages go down [1], but so do widget prices. The factory owner doesn't necessarily benefit, just like grocery stores don't benefit from higher tomato prices. (In fact, they may lose in greater shoplifting costs that can't be passed on to customers.)

On top of that, there's the public goods problem, of how other employers, who aren't expanding the supply of programmers, can hire them just the same.

So I don't see the monetary incentive to fund these things like you claim.

[1] Of course, just like your claim about programmers, this ignores systemic/ecosystem effects: maybe the lower price of widget labor will lead to investment in capital that depends on widget labor, which leads more investors to look for better uses of widget labor, which bids it back up. This isn't an unreasonable dynamic to expect in software, as more app ideas might get pursued than otherwise as more programmers come on the market.
It's the truth, and it didn't strike me as particularly egotistical.

If you're having trouble hiring, maybe you need to wise up to the idea that some of these "snotty and egotistical" developers are worth every penny.
"go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job"

EXACTLY! I've been knocking them off for years. Most modern problems are variations on older ones. First step is to see if someone solved it already, how, and if I can use it. So, stopping code injection for example, I find that all kinds of hardware from 1960-1980 tagged memory & used CPU in ways that prevented it. Stack overflowing S.P.? Use a reverse stack like MULTICS. Pauseless GC? Put one in memory controller on your FPGA/ASIC like a Scheme machine did. I could go on all day on this stuff.

So much wisdom in relatively, few books and a bunch of papers. I wish someone would figure out a way to collect, organize, and spread them. That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."
They cannot get 130k, they just think they can get 130k. They won't pass the interviews, or even the recruiters most of the time.
I'm sure many of us did some sort of business when we were kids.

Trading anything with your friends (cards, etc) is a business, especially if those trades make the value of your collection go up or down. Buying these items new (cards in a pack) could sort of be an investment scheme.

If you held onto anything worth money from your childhood, you could call that a buy and hold scheme.

Creating in-game value by trading, selling and acquiring items in an MMORPG is a business if you could cash out that value through trading sites.

Some kids sell weed and other illegal items.
Not all tech companies are the same. Google needs engineers with skills that most tech workers don't have. You might have a CS degree from a great school and 15 years experience with J2EE, but you're not experienced with say... reactJS. If Google (or Facebook, or startup that just raised $25M) is looking to hire a team of reactJS devs, then they can very quickly exhaust the supply of locals who have used it. From Google's perspective, there is a shortage.

But some other companies, usually 'IT' more than 'Tech' from my experience... yeah... they can get a bit squirrely. When a company gets newly 'redundant' workers to train the new migrants, they can't really claim that there are no suitable qualified locals.
I'm slightly squicked by the idea that someone would test your reeds on their bassoon before you get them. Did I read that wrong?
The IEEE points out regularly that there's no shortage of engineers. Otherwise, salaries would be going up across the board. Whenever some employer complains they can't find engineers, ask how many people they have in off-site training right now.

Companies need to be paying for training that's just conversion from one skill set to whatever skill set the company needs right now. Most programmers who are competent in at least two languages can easily learn a third. A combination of explicit training and someone to answer hard questions is usually sufficient. (There's startup potential there - offer conversion training courses, where people who already know A are taught B. A "hard question" answering service, sort of like StackOverflow but paid, with a service level agreement, and without the clueless closing of questions, could work as a business.)

This industry has forgotten what management is for. Part of the job of management is to organize the division of labor. Not everyone can do everything. It's the job of management to divide up the job so that no one part is too hard. Instead, we see a demand for "full stack developers". That's a confession of incompetent management.
Based on my own reflections on the Christian community I am part of, I'd have to agree. I believe one of the things holds the community together is that every sticks to the same set of rules. And is willing to change if they find they are living outside of the rules. Not everyone's cup of tea but it's a life I enjoy. Perhaps similar systems outside of religion could help people.