skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a matter of balls, it's a matter of understanding that the most important part of tax policy is compliance, that is actually collecting the taxes.

Even our current methods of evaluating quantities and distribution of wealth are vague estimates, and that's without people incentivized by taxation to hide or minimize it.

A wealth tax that turns into anything but a buildings-and-cars tax is a fantasy from an enforcement perspective, and significant property taxes have issues of their own.
>I get it that Peter Norvig is a very smart programmer. But can someone explain to me - like a farmer to his cow - how do these resources differ from typical programming challenges found on the web ?

By virtue of being better written and more thought out.

Also, they are not "programming challenges". They are solutions to programming challenges.
Thanks a lot!!! Great imagination!
> I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP.

Someone should tell this guy about SPY/SPX.
Are you sure that money and life are not comparable? After-all, people spend all of their lives making money. People die of hunger. And to be killed is not so much a matter of a loss of life, everyone is mortal after-all, we will all die, it is a loss of time. And time is money, and money is time.
I travel quite a lot and have friends in different countries. I don't really see the need the care about their daily live. However i love to just show up and give them a call and have hours of stuff to talk about.

I think this is just biased on beeing used to the 'Facebook way' outside of this bubble your arguments just sound strange. (like why would I care what they cook or how their children look right now?)
Tax the ownership interest in equities, just as we have property taxes for land ownership.

We could also take the route of the Federal Reserve purchasing up equities (The Bank Of Japan does this [1]), issuing deposit accounts to citizens directly (trivial for the Federal Reserve to support this [disclaimer: I work in the financial services industry, and feel qualified to make this statement]), and providing UBI to those accounts using the Federal Reserve as an intermediary/conduit (lookout Blackrock and Vanguard! there's a new index fund manager on the block!).

Voilà, Citizen's Dividend.

EDIT: The Federal Reserve operates independently of the US government, and does not require Congressional or Presidential approval to perform this "monetary policy". [2]

"Although an instrument of the U.S. Government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-18/boj-s-etf...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
> Brexit happens despite the upper class talking down and ignoring the larger population)

The Brexiteers as the leading group like to style themselves (I prefer BeLeaver), are a bunch of the most priviledged upper class old boys of the most expensive schools in England. Boris the Clown went to Eton. Jacob Rees-Mogg got his nanny to deliver election leaflets...and also went to Eton. Farage himself is an ex stock-broker and also attended a top school. This arguement does not hold water
> Every single person who has a job with Amazon is there because they choose to be.

That's not necessarily the case in the UK where people claiming unemployment benefits are compelled to spend 35 hours a week searching and applying for jobs.

Someone in that regime may well have applied to work at Amazon because they would have had a benefit sanction otherwise.
Sure, but that's not because of the SEC, is it?
I struggle with this week to week as I fight between strictly managing my finances and funding my YOLO 26 year old "holy shit I can't believe I'm making this much money" swagger.

I'm having a really hard time justifying saving above the bare minimum - despite my experience as a recruiter, I still can't convince myself that there will ever be a time I'm not hireable, unless all jobs have vanished (apocalypse, general AI), in which case my "nest egg" is useless anyway.

It's just a logical reach to justify my excessive spending I'm sure, but I've really got myself convinced here :P
For me, the slight added friction of tracking what I eat makes it a lot easier to avoid random snacking and excessive eating. It's silly, but "I'll have to put this in the app" is often a bigger disincentive than "I'll get fatter" in the moment.
Playing devil's advocate: I'm assuming that's because the things you have listed don't have a lot of (or any) laws/regulations around them. At least not to the degree that fixing wealth distribution does. Can you image all of the tax restructuring you'd have to achieve? Plus the fact that all of the lobbyists and other deeply entrenched parties that will oppose you.

If I were in a similar position I'd likely opt for the most fun-sounding futuristic project that doesn't involve all that pain.
> For example, a telepresence service tailored for the hearing impaired...

It should be illegal to use children, handicap, illness and death to promote products unless all of your money goes to helping just those things.
Would removing ME decrease transistor counts and save precious power? I just wonder if there's a small, but loud contingent of execs within Intel making that argument...
sadly you're getting downvoted into gray, but I have a feeling you're wrong for a different reason, Thiel will be remembered for many deeply authoritarian things, one of which will be his assault on the journalism. Gawker was a flawed organization, but they were also doing a fair amount of journalism that no one else would, not the least of which was sexual harassment allegations against people like Louis C.K. that are only now seeing the light.
well like many other attempts to inject more government control into our lives; usually to "get back" at someone who is "unfairly benefiting/abusing/etc/etc"; those with the proposal wrap it up in a grand egalitarian wording and market only the promises that sound good but are too good to be true. to sell it they sneak in seemingly related facts that are not debatable.

the one common response they all have when their plans are revealed for what they are and comparisons made to what others have done is always the same , we will do it right this time.

it is easy to prey on the greed of anyone by simply remaking it into the person having their stuff taken as being the real greedy one.
Money in a savings account is money invested.
A former lawyer on Planet Money discussed this case and said that it may not throw out the conviction. That the "Good Faith" exception may allow the conviction to stand.
I like his argument in the middle section of howcome IQ predicts income or social status despite the fact that general intelligence doesn't exist.

It seems to me that the categories of 'knowledge' and 'creativity' are more fruitful.
For example, his idea that intelligence is 'situational' reflects the fact that people know more about some topics than others, and also that our environment contains knowledge (e.g. a machine embodies knowledge put there by the designers that the machine operator doesn't have).
All I would hope is that the design be pragmatic, rather than heroic. The Trashcan was pure heroic design, throwing massive resources at a problem that barely existed, pro desktops being too bulky. The G5 tower was almost the exact opposite, simply an elegant, thoughtfully-designed take on a proven, pragmatic form factor.
> I have yet to see any mainstream outlet bother to mention that Reddit's default news and political subs turned into pro-Hillary/anti-Trump mouthpieces in the months leading up to the US election

Presumably because that didn't happen in the slightest, but I'll forgive your lapse of memory. Before the nomination, all the presumably "left-leaning" subreddits (like /r/politics) were firmly in Sanders' camp and out for Clinton's head. After the nomination the battleground only intensified, and the schism continued through the election. Meanwhile, the news subreddits like /r/news and /r/worldnews oscillated wildly between pro-Republican and pro-Democrat, major subs like /r/trees were vaguely pro-Trump (on balance, /r/TwoXChromosomes was vaguely pro-Clinton), and /r/all was completely overrun at all hours of the day by /r/the_donald's successful exploitation of Reddit's front page algorithm. Anyone claiming that Reddit was "pro-Hillary" must have been in a coma for all of 2016 (not that I blame them, I bet half of us here wish we had been too).
The difference between this and standard UBI proposals is that standard UBI gives everybody a certain fixed amount of money, whereas this gives everybody a certain percentage of GDP.
Homesteading act could still be applicable in modern times. Ownership of real property is low and a large part of most American's budget. If people didn't have to pay rent and mortgages every month, everybody but banks would be wealthier.
Coming up with utopian ideas like this are easy.

The hard part, which barely gets any discussion is:

* How do incentives work? How do you incentivize the production of new wealth?

* How does immigration work? You can't have open borders and mountains of free stuff.

* Does this replace or augment existing welfare programs?

* Does this actually make people's lives better? How do you know? What happens if it doesn't work out?

And so on.
For those curious, I'd recommend looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance.

Sometimes, right and wrong isn't always obvious. To know one from another may require effort and thought.

Often times, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and so we develop instincts that ensure we can take a step back and not immediately point fingers.

That's good; most of us don't think of ourselves as political idiots, where any dog whistle will make us jump through hoops, raging at some invisible enemy.

But there are times when the truth clearly falls much more on one side than the other. And in those times, saying "well I thought both parties were wrong, but it turns out that one was and is right" can be a rather scary prospect!

But I think it's better to be a little embarrassed than to run away from the world's problems.
8% CAGR is a fairly conservative CAGR for a broad-based stock investments (with dividends reinvested). It is not the typical growth in an "up year". It is the cumulative annual growth rate of up and down years. Said more clearly, you don't make up the down 10-30% at 8% per year; you make them up at up 10-20% per year during bull markets.

If you're shooting for a 8% CAGR over a 7+ year period, no need to play stuntman, just buy a low-fee broad-based stock fund (VTSAX, VFIAX, etc) and resist the urge to panic and pull the money out during down markets.
All of my math classes derived things and went through some problems step by step, and then often later a problem would be given and you have 5 minutes to try to solve it then compare with what was done on the board. It worked well and I don't see why you'd do it differently.
Analyzing Millions of SQL Queries When Each One Is a Special Snowflake
I was under the impression (admittedly I don't know from where) that the process of burning fat actually dehydrates you and that you need to drink extra water if you want to facilitate it.

But here you remind me that the process of burning hydrocarbons nets some water, making me question myself. Of course metabolizing body fat is more complex than that, so this doesn't disprove it, but now I'm wondering if anyone else has more concrete information.
Ajit Pai's Big Lie
my impression is that the predecessor of OSX, NeXT, was pretty much the OS of choice in sciences for a good ten years…
Ask HN: IO Domain Issues?
Has anyone else been having IO domain issues? Domains that I owned and paid for are no longer under my name, and I've had backorders no longer being honored. Is anyone else running into issues with the io domain? I've done all of these functions through nic.io.
The argument hinges on the meaning of intelligence. Indeed, if you consider intelligence to be exactly the thing measured by IQ, an explosion is probably impossible.

Suppose we considered 'effectiveness' -- the ability of a system to quickly achieve its goals. Would the author argue that a recursively self-improving machine could not exponentially increase its effectiveness? Why?

Wouldn't an effectiveness explosion have similar consequences for people -- making human ability nearly irrelevant since any goal we can articulate can be achieved so much faster by machines?
> Take every byte of traffic sent to a network device, and tunnel it to another endpoint?

You have to set up routing tables to decide which interface to use for which destination address. Obviously you can't direct VPN packets via VPN - that would be circular. They have to use your normal, physical connection to get to your default gateway. But what if your default gateway is also a local DNS server? You can't differentiate protocols in routing table.

Hardware VPN have it easier - they already know which packets to tunnel because it has designated hardware port for internal network.
Perhaps large employers could negotiate better rates?

Sounds like a great way to increase offer acceptance rates too.
Steem Magazine: A Geeky Dad’s Movie Guide to Wonder (2017)
Most people want to add some muscle mass too, not just remove fat stores.
Thanks for the links. My current application is not test generation for hardware, though. I'm working with autonomous robots that need to interact with real world obstacles that can't be easily predicted (laundary carts, golden retrievers, bride's maids....), need to navigate spaces where WiFi comes and goes, and need to interact with other automated systems running their own state machine that I don't control. Something that could identify "Recovery scenario needed here" has good value.
Japan's Mid-Sized Tech Firms Will Revive the Country's Innovation, Not Startups
Very good piece from actual researcher in the field.

I can see practical intelligence explosion when visuospatial intelligence develops and can be connected to rudimentary reasoning. Most of human intelligence seems to be bootstrapped from our ability to comprehend and visualize 3d space and objects moving there. It's also interesting how almost all problems look like boxes and arrows or connecting lines when you draw them on the whiteboard.

Eventually AI needs a sketchpad so it can write notes to others and for itself and participate in the culture by externalizing.
I would argue that it was his understanding of ownership and causality that landed him an OS sans building one.
Facial Fitness Flapper
I dunno, we had one of these at home for a while, as my wife worked at Apple and it was in the demo pool and we got to borrow it for a bit. It was my primary workstation for a while, and I was a big fan of anything not-x86 and a cheerleader for PowerPC at the time and this was the machine that made me realize what a dead end that architecture had become. I was sad when Apple went x86 but not in the least bit surprised, given my experience with that workstation.

Like others have mentioned here, its heat output was insane. I had to have the house air conditioner on on cool days because of that one room. In the winter, it was the warmest room in the house. It didn't even feel all that powerful to me, as I compared it to a newly build x86 system I had put together at the time.

Luckily Apple read the writing on the wall and corrected course accordingly.
Bullshit. It takes crazy amount of labor to ship in one day instead of the usual 2-3 days.

It requires employees on shift every night to handle any package immediately. It requires employees to work on Saturday and Sunday to cover week end orders. It requires employees to do longer hours to complete any burst of orders at any time.

What do you think happen to items that are not in the vicinity? They have to be transported overnight across hundreds of miles to a closer distribution center. Again, night and high pressure work.
Another downside of current gen matchmaking is just how SHORT games are. Back when I played Halo 1 pc's multiplayer, you could watch a single Blood Gulch CTF game go on for an entire WEEK before one team got the 7 captures required to win on that server. It created a really interesting dynamic where attempts at the flag were each unique events, requiring planning, preparation, camaraderie and teamwork in a game without voice chat. You could leave a server to go to bed, and wake up the next day, hopping back on and see the same people on the same teams still going at it. It was much more IRC-like in feeling

People built communities by just being on the same server often. Friendships were made, guilds too. But now all you have is 12 other little kids all free-for-alling shotguns for a brief 5 minute instant gratification fest
Inflation is not deductible, so the US (and most other countries) have defacto wealth taxes to the tune of INFLATION RATE * CAPITAL GAINS TAX RATE, or roughly 0.48% annually to high earners in the USA.
Probably not a bug but just a common search phrase and therefore expected behaviour?
I agree. However, the original question was more like, "if it's easy to see what will yield a huge return, what should I invest in today to get that return?" To me, it's pretty clear that investments yielding huge returns are only obvious in hindsight, and even an astute tech-savvy investor will, on average, only do slightly better than a normal diversified portfolio.
It's possible for a newspaper to publish a mix of quality material as well as more generally popular material... it might even be an objective to to that depending on your business model.
I actually did this for a couple of years but recently switched back to a dual setup. The dual setup is just better for web development IMO. One screen for chrome dev tools or the website and the other screen for sublime.

Also the 4K TV I was using only had a 30hz refresh rate, really bad for eye fatigue.
i feel the same way except i'm an American living in the midwest.

I make $70k in the midwest and save $3k/month. That's $3k after taxes, insurance benefits, rent, food, etc..

So I'm surprised the 120k guy isn't putting away more.
One has to be very thorough when reviewing the details of such investigations. For instance, we would want to look at details regarding the experimenter’s cable tv service. If it’s digital perhaps the viewing data was resold to fb.

At the most in those cases there’s enough info to suggest data sharing is going on at the least, but not enough to confirm anything regarding the fb app itself and the mic.

Worth investigating more, though.
Perhaps the correct question to posit is the following - is making people more dependent on the government ever going to truly empower people and their communities or will it eventually lead to disenfranchisement? Look at what happened with all the government sanctioned urban renewal projects in the 1970's. You had the government claim land by eminent domain in many inner cities with the idea that they would renew that area and folks would be able to move back to their homes. Instead you had large numbers of those folks who had been living with very little government assistance for generations move into housing projects en masse. Those projects are now hotbeds for drugs and crime, the residents never got to move back to their houses and it has created generational dependance on welfare. Don't trust that company scrip in other words - especially when the company is the government
How about a renaissance for art?
Just some data for the discussion https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/usa/

Note, they break out agriculture and animal products into a lot of categories
Founder of EnvKey here--thanks for the mention. If anyone's interested, EnvKey takes more of a saas plug-and-play approach to managing secrets and configuration and isn't tied to AWS services (though it does run on AWS).

Tools like this one (Strongbox), Parameter Store, etc. are great when you know AWS well and prefer more of a DIY approach on the integration side. EnvKey is more of a "just works" solution for when you either don't have as much DevOps expertise or want to get a secure setup up and running asap so you can move on to the next thing.

EnvKey also helps on the configuration management side with juggling multiple environments (development, staging, production, etc.), inheritance between environments, and keeping developers in sync with each other.
How is inflation a tax on people who has zero wealth?
I'm sure the warehouse workers spend a bit more time on jobs like this than a stint in highschool once.
> I hard coded my A->B->C dependency chain instead of injecting it

Read my above point about the cartesian product of tests...if you're doing this, you're almost certainly not getting particularly good coverage of edge cases even if your test coverage percentage is high. If I have test A1, A2, A3 that use a mocked B and B1, B2, B3 that use a mocked C and C1, C2, C3, I've essentially tested 27 different cases that you'd have to write in your hard-coded dependency style while writing only 9 tests. When an application reaches even a moderate amount of complexity and that dependency graph grows beyond 3, that ability for unit tests to cover a geometrically-increasing number of ways that the software behaves is going to be hard to overcome with integration tests like you seem to have been writing. But, again, maybe your dependency graph wasn't big enough to need this. Maybe there was some other mitigating factor that made your situation different. I don't want to speculate on any individual situation since I haven't seen the code and there's no universally correct answer.

> I'm more the YAGNI type: those changes you're trying to anticipate? They likely won't happen.

The one virtually certain thing about the future is that there will be change. Of course you mostly can't predict what will change, but you can be damn near certain that something will. YAGNI is not about predicting that nothing will ever change, it's only about avoiding guessing at what will. Tests on current functionality are not guessing about what will change. The whole point of a test suite is that it avoids ossification. What can be less rigid than something that can easily be pulled apart and put back together in some other form while being sure that it still works? Simple and flexible without that property of safe reorganization is still a landmine waiting to go off in the face of future change.
We probably don't share the same values, and would not be able to reach consensus on the "right side."

This is an acceptable and unavoidable situation that technocrats need to learn to live with. People will want different outcomes, and will have different moral matrices. People on the left and right will each disagree with the other side's characterization of their politician's sins.

Edit: Just want to note that the parent comment was substantially edited in ways that might make this comment seem weird.
I don't understand. What you call "crowdfunding" I'd just call "subscription", which is how all journalism was paid for until fairly recently. You're really arguing that openly corporate-funded "journalism" would be superior, and have a lesser tendency to promote a particular angle, like, say, the capitalism-cures-all-ills mantra?
The key point is the first part of that statement, "eat less because you don't feel hungry". It's not the best worded though, but the alternative "only eat until you don't feel hungry" isn't much better since someone can feel like they're hungry when they aren't really. Also your body burns through the muscles to maintain the composition of the other muscles/hormones of your body, because muscles and fat aren't made of the same components.