skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've got a theory that democracy develops in step with military technology and how "equal" an individual soldier is on the battlefield.

Ancient Greece: Phalanx, requires groups of equal men to stand and fight in formation without breaking. Equipment and training was relatively even. The rich could afford better armor, but that wouldn't turn them into a super soldier.

Medieval: Mounted cavalry or mounted archers. Expensive to maintain a war horse and equipment, years of training required. But a mounted knight was extremely difficult to kill for groups of peasant infantry and the nobility could dominate the battlefield.

Industrial: Once again, large numbers of men wielding cheap firearms with much less training required than horseback combat. America being founded as a democracy probably had a lot to do with recruiting as many militiamen as possible rather than focusing on the interests of a highly trained military elite. One soldier, one vote reflects how much an individual soldier contributes on the battlefield during a time that spanned from musket lines to WW2.

Today: Highly specialized militaries, numbers aren't as important as technology. Based on how democracy has advanced or retreated with the importance of an individual on the battlefield regardless of his wealth or experience, as the scale tips back towards a highly trained military class using expensive weaponry, expect democracy to retreat as the few wield military power over the many.
by the :
One big difference here is that inflation affects everyone equally (not exactly right, but let's ignore that for now). A wealth tax would act as an extra tax on ultra wealthy individuals.
It's not a backup, it's the authoritative dataset.
There is also http://immersivemath.com/ila/index.html
>Do you think it might influence where they start it?

This has always been the argument, and I've never bought it.

Now, more than ever, is the time to start a company remotely, thanks to Mr./Mrs. Covid. Have we seen a massive move away from SV and other tech centers? Have we seen a massive wave of startups in 'flyover' country?
Yes, but that definition is circular: if the dataset is detailed enough that a particular person can be linked across multiple datasets (with X degree of confidence), it isn't anonymised.

So what you're really saying is that a detailed dataset is more valuable, and shouldn't be considered anonymized. Or, more succinctly, "anonymized" should not be boolean, but is a quantitative property of the dataset.
this is actually a nice idea, I'll try that.
When the tax rate is something like _half of your stock_ over 60 years, that starts to be a bit more... impactful.
I expect Apple sold more camera than Canon last year.
>but App Store gross margins are clearly likely to be in the 50-65% range, making its break even somewhere between 10-15% of developer revenues.

Apple dont booked their customer's revenue, only their receiving ( i.e ~30% ) end. So those are close to 100% Margin as well.

There are additional $10 per Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV per unit to Services for their OS, Cloud, Siri and Map Usage. That is close to $3B revenue, and again Gross is close to 100% margin.

The only thing that aren't 100% Gross is Apple Music. Where it has a clear unit cost and margin are likely to be Sub 20%. ( You can take a look at Spotify for margins, and Apple also pay labels a little more than competitors because it isn't part of their profit making branches ) And Apple TV+ which is Apple giving away their Services Profits for something given out for "Free". ( Which is one reason I hate Apple TV+ )

Apple are now basically subtracting all of their Software and Cloud Services Cost from Services Segment. Apple could argue part of the reason why you get 5 years worth of iOS update are from those revenue stream.

And yes, none of these Gross Margin takes into account R&D, marketing, operation and other expenses.

Personally I have no problem with Apple charging 30% for Games like Fornite. Which is the industry Standard across all gaming platform. I just wish they lowered the Apps section in the App Store ( Gaming being already in a separate section ) to 15% rather than 30%. And 10% for Subscription.

Considering the cost of running the App Store, and Apple's promotion of App Store credit. I felt 15% is a much fairer deal.
The Physicist Who Slayed Gravity’s Ghosts
Those figures include reinvested dividend income with respect to equity and reinvested rental income with respect to housing. In fact the return attributable to capital gains is only about 40% of of your 7% (page 25). Income is already taxed, at a significantly higher rate than any of the propsed wealth taxes.
Why is this being patented, it should be public domain.
Demo gives a 502
>What this means is that people arguing against a wealth tax are happy to disadvantage 330m people to protect the wealth of a low number of thousands.

By not giving 1% of your wealth to Africa you're disadvantaging a billion people to protect the wealth of one. It's not a disadvantage to someone that they're not getting a part of somebody else's wealth; we're not born with some divine right to other people's money.
Thanks for posting all those tutorials, I've learn a lot from those, great content! And keep up the good work! Also, if I may suggest, maybe you could update the React/Firebase series, convert to hooks maybe. Also, just out of curiosity, are you not a fan of TypeScript? You haven't really posted anything meaningful for that topic.
Oh, I'm sure they'll do something reasonable, but whatever it is, it either significantly scales back the goals or it turns Kotlin from a "there's nothing to lose" proposition to a "there are new tradeoffs and added risks to consider" proposition.
FWIW, I have positive views toward FP, but also ultimately decided, after a few years working in Scala, that it goes too far on the FP front.

The problem isn't that the language features Scala introduces are objectively bad. It's that they're in constant tension with the underlying platform. On the one side, you have Scala's FP features harming interop with other JVM languages. On the other hand, you have Scala's dependencies on the Java APIs and type system hindering its efforts to be more functional, and making a lot of things feel way more complicated and tricky to use properly than they do in, say, Haskell.

Kotlin isn't everything I'd want in an ideal world, but it's everything I'm comfortable asking for in the real world.
All they have to do is say “I smelled weed.”
Good luck complying with the GDPA.
Not even close.

I've been primarily writing Kotlin for the last.. uhh, 3-4 years I guess. TS and VSCode pairing is good, but Kotlin + IntelliJ is both more faster and accurate in terms of knowing what you want and when you want it. Autocomplete, code generation, refactoring, moving works so good it is a huge productivity boost. And the "peeking" at types (the implied type is shown in a small gray box) lets you keep your code clean but very readable.
Everyone seems like they have this all figured out. I am basically working from 9am to 10pm because I can't get enough work in during the day with a 6yo and 4yo. I have to make up the time after normal work hours.
Same here. :-/
Same here.

I simply just turn off the laptop and if I want to work on personal stuff I switch to my personal desktop machine. This means I have to switch over the USB dongles and switch the monitor inputs.

So it's enough of a hassle to go back to working on the work laptop and so I never do it.
Having a bit of attention does not automatically translate into a job.

If it's well paying, maybe. What makes you think I'm the right person for your job?
Are there any "Google Analytics" alternatives that aren't based on Python, Node, Go, etc but something with a PHP back-end that can be deployed to any commodity LAMP hosting provider?
Just a guess, but I wonder if a polygraph is useful as an intimidation tactic? Maybe you can't detect lies with any sort of accuracy but you can intimidate people into making more mistake when answering questions and that can be used to figure out if someone is lying? OR perhaps they can pressure some people into revealing more information than they otherwise would?
I’ve been working from home for 8 years and I’ve had to relearn how to do it during this pandemic as well.

My normal trick is to walk to a local coffee shop in the morning. After a few hours I’ll go to a coworking space or similar. Same thing in the afternoon.

For me, part of that is just having a routine. So instead of working at the coffee shop, I’ve been taking a walk in the morning to get a coffee to go and just walking back home.

I think any activity that involves getting out of your house — even just a walk around the block — can be a good reset before or after work.
"the Silicon Valley crowd is strangely avoidant of examining evidence or explaining their opposition with real-world data. It's all 101ism and polemics."

It's not strange at all. It's self-interest.
Indeed, but no more so than any interview process. Perhaps they should use a whiteboard instead?
> I'm highly skeptical of the claim that such tax would discourage startup founders.

It'd discourage the people who pay the bills (VCs, wealthy, etc.) from living in those states. Founders would simply follow the money to other states as they have done in the past.
I'm also fully in favor of wealth taxes, especially since the US has weakened estate taxes and other checks that would help mitigate increasing inequality.

I started mentioning land, as it's the most clear problem of idle wealth. But hugely unequal distribution of wealth also results in slower economic growth and overall less economic activity than if there is more equal access to capital and resources. Capital strikes can be just as effective as labor strikes, and though they don't get much attention they can cause great harm.
>>I could makes a similar claim about the US. How does the US do on the right to healthcare for example? Awfully.

Well first and foremost Healthcare is not a right. It is a Service that has to be provided based on limited resources

Rights are things like Free Speech, the Right to Self Defense, the right to not have your property stolen, etc

Aka Negative Rights

The right to be free from abuse

Things like "health care" are not Human Rights at all
Zombies on the web – David Chalmers (1996)
Matomo uses php
>Implicit in your question is that the terms are valid. Epic will make the case that they’re not.

What law would you claim disallows limiting payment systems?
> a wealth tax is a percentage of the dollar value of wealth, not a percentage of the number of shares of stock you own.

If I expropriate 5% of your wealth, and ~100% of your wealth is in shares of stock, what percent of your shares have I taken?
> money earns money. A conservative drawdown of 3% pay the most commonly proposed wealth tax while still leaving you wealthier at the end of the year.

That is only true if your wealth is in diversified ETFs or funds. That is not where most of the wealth of super-rich founders is. If 90+% of your wealth is in a single company (I.e. the one you founded), then there's no guarantee that this wealth will necessarily appreciate on its own (esp relative to inflation).
I wish hacking on X and getting patches in had the same coolness factor as hacking on the Linux kernel. The hacking complexity is certainly comparable. X is used by a very large number of people, and contributions can make a big difference.
Seemingly no api? :(
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This is exactly what happened with the US federal income tax. It was originally only a small amount, and only on the wealthy. Now it's gradually been expanded to everyone.
Same, maybe we already hugged it to death?
Which is good and fine if all you want is real value. What you wont own any more is your company.
DARPA was defense.
It's more sensitive than you'd think if any claims or settlements were involved. Or employers might want to snoop on their injured employees to find a reason to deny leave.
Let's say you have 1% wealth tax and $1,000.

Without asset growth, after 1 year you have $990.
If you include let's say 5% asset growth, after 1 year you have $1,000 * 1.05 * 0.99 = $1,039.

Then after another year, without growth you have $980.1
With %5 growth you have $1,040 * 1.05 * 0.99 = $1,080.

So the article claims that with 1% wealth tax you'll lose 45% of your assets over time. With any growth above 1% every year, you will actually at least break even.
100/40, the daily images are incrementals which average around 8GB, I take full images once a month
And it's "Wordpress easy" to setup and doesn't require special access or server config?
Micro-Optimizing .tar.gz Archives by Changing File Order
Your point has been noticed time and time again. It's called "a nice problem to have." A man who is living paycheck to paycheck would love to be able to just dip into his investments and toss away $20K without at all affecting his lifestyle.

Money is power. I can't request a sit-down meeting with my own senator or local representative and expect my request fulfilled. Paul Graham can, and so can everyone in his wealth class. This is a problem, because Graham is not a constituent of either of them.
>The state will, as always, become reliant on it and find ways to expand it to wield more power and pay debts that were taken on to “collect/spend in advance” as they’ve done countless times.

This hasn't been true for the income tax [0], nor the capital gains tax [1], nor (at least in Silicon Valley) for real estate taxes[2], which are closest to a wealth tax. It's a reasonable thing to consider, but given the evidence we have, should not be a driving consideration.

[0] https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Inco...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_Capital_Gains_Tax...

[2] https://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/decline-in-value/

edit: I was misinformed re: income tax, tracking only the top rate.
Even ignoring the several flaws in this toy model (which other comments have discussed), it strikes me that this model doesn't show that a wealth tax is "bad" in some sense.

The main takeaway is that the overall impact on wealth is larger than perhaps intuitively expected initially. This is not a problem with the wealth tax itself, it just means the correct tax level should arguably be <0.5%.
The amount of the wealth tax also appreciates over time.
I agree with Paul here;

A Wealth Tax adds a seemingly arbitrary additional rule that is based on less than liquid assets; It also adds significant complexity to the system.

Versus, a progressive income tax is less arbitrary and less "complex" (though many people do not comprehend the concept.)

To take the simplicity further; we should eliminate capital gains and qualified dividends special tax rates coordinated with the corporate tax rate to 0%; This structure already exists in the REIT tax code.

In addition, while there is an argument that Social Security is tied to an individual, the base level and Medicare/Medicaid are not; so instead of being "flat taxes" should be moved to be paid for by the progressive income tax. (Similarly, if universal healthcare were to become policy, this is much better as a progressive tax)
I wish you had made this as a top level comment. This should be at the top, not the pro wealth tax comment. Like you said, the net always gets wider and wider.
Meanwhile, capital gains tax is lower than normal income tax because that $10k of savings you used as seed capital to start your company was "already taxed" before it became $10b. The problem is that there currently exists a way to acquire wealth without paying income taxes. If the wealthy would like to avoid a wealth tax, I'm sure they happily compromise by closing the loopholes after making a one time contribution of 50% of their wealth to public coffers.

As an aside: I'm a startup founder in Denmark, which has a notion of a holding company. My holding company (which I seeded with 10k of savings) owns my shares in the startup. If the startup sells for 100x, my holding company will not be taxed on the on the capital gains. I can reinvest the money in a new venture without paying any capital gains. But the moment I buy a (hypothetical) Aston Martin, I pay normal income tax on the money I transfer out of the holding company. (income tax will be about 56%, cars have an extra 160% excise. A $1m fancy pants car will require $5.91m from the holding company. Ouch)

This system works well, windfalls can be reinvested easily, but there's no loophole to avoid paying income tax. There is one stupid side, which is that the barrier between private and commercial uses of money needs to be excessively rigid (try setting up a non-profit makerspace where people can work on startups. pain). Additionally, 1/200th of the Danish workforce is directly employed by the tax office, which is ridiculous.
Do you have link? I had bookmarked tweet for later reading, now lost them.
No you misunderstand- they only pay tax on income, but the % is based on their total wealth.

Eg if I have a total net worth of 2mn, my income tax might be 50%, and if I have a total net worth of 0, my income tax could be just 10%.

This would encourage people to earn more who have little now, and encourage people who have a lot to spend/scale back their earnings. Ideally it would lower the gap between lower and middle class people.
Modeling the growth does not change the results in any way that makes the tax seem more favorable.

Taxing away 1% of an asset that grows 0% every year leaves 45% of the assets that would be present without the tax after 60 years.

Taxing away 1% of an asset that grows 7% every year leaves 45% of the assets that would be present without the tax after 60 years.

However, to be more realistic, modeling growth makes the taxation even worse, because at times when your equity is at a high valuation, you need to sell some equity and then some extra on top of that in case your equity value crashes before the end of the year/ end of the tax period. You are forced to act defensively.
But asset isn't guaranteed to grow at 5%, it only grows that much on average.

What you say makes sense if the wealth tax is applied on ETF/index fund holdings, but for most founders, the wealth is concentrated in holdings in their own company. On average, across all founders, the asset growth might be 5%, but for each individual there is significant variance. For nearly half of founders, wealth tax would take 1% on either a flat or a depreciating asset..
> I think most people would agree that it's not worth violently injuring an individual to prevent a broken window or a stolen pair of shoes

A random "individual"? No.

The very individual breaking those windows, or stealing those shoes? I'm not sure as many would agree.

A car, or property - possible your property; I think many would demand violent injury as just retribution.
i just played with it a bit and it's kind of awesome! It takes like 5 min to get the hang of it. I didn't notice until I came back here about publishing completed maps, that's great too. Passed along to my (many) game playing friends. If you decided to open source it I would join on for sure.

Why is the hallway tool called "snap to grid"? That was the one I couldn't figure out how to get back to because it's a non-intuitive name imo. When I went back in just now and restarted doodling, I saw that was the tool highlighted.

Also, the way the wall tool works is harder to use than the way the "hallway" aka "snap to grid" tool works, imo the latter is more intuitive.

Just some thoughts! Awesome work!
How about a wealth tax that causes mandatory share dilution giving shares to citizens? Like not even state ownership.

The shares can become their own currency as not all people would sell them for fiat, and the company and largest shareholders wouldnt have to sell to pay the tax

The market would just keep lapping it up
The ability to have 100 million dollars is entirely due to the enforcement of laws that we all agree on. I think we should re-frame the wealth tax as guillotine insurance.
Only if your wealth is so far above say $50m that a few tens of millions is completely inconsequential. If it's closer to $50m, then it will be a whole lot less than 45% and possibly nothing.
Europe’s division over nuclear power is hurting the climate
Do the proposals include taking stock shares? Wouldn't you just get taxed on the capital gains when you sell them?
the entire conception of rights is tied to liberalism

Tied to, yes. But the liberals were using a framework that already existed.

The concept of rights was already used in a constitutional way referring to the "divine and privileges" of the King, the "rights and privileges" of Clergy, the Church, Aristocracy & such.

Rights were already seen as the basis of politcal systems.

Marxism is pretty vast, so almost anything can be marxist. That said, Marx himself didn't speak about rights positively, and was critical of liberalism. His premise was that rights don't matter. Material conditions matter.
NYC Is Dead, Long Live NYC
It's funny that when I saw this headline I thought, "That would be great for tar!" Admittedly I do have the ability to disable the bomb and can both create and execute archives (gzipped or not!) without a cheat sheet. But for pretty much anything else, I never have the confidence to do it without looking at the manpage, or my own cheat sheet.
I abuse the hell out of this and @DSLMarker. Such a small but amazing feature.
That is a valid concern which I acknowledged in my comment. It would probably result in investors seeking investments with an expected return that offsets the wealth tax by a decent margin, while also paying dividends. I am by no means an investment expert, but maybe those are the kinds of investments we should be encouraging people to invest in anyway? Hyper-growth, overvalued companies are often great investments, until they’re not.

Edit: if we don’t want the government picking winners and losers, another option could be deferred taxation; when you sell, you pay taxes for however many years you held the stock.
Frugal savers don’t really help the economy though. If we all were frugal nothing really moves.

And this would apply to people earning 10k as much as people earning 100k
Investigators check if MV Wakashio went close to shore to pick up WiFi signals
Show HN: ScreenFramer – Put iOS screen recordings in device frames
Hey, thanks, it does.

Why is the east side cheaper? I mean, I know it was occupied by the Soviet Union back in the day, but why is it still cheaper there now?
MX Linux Launches First-Ever KDE Edition with Plasma Desktop
> But hugely unequal distribution of wealth also results in slower economic growth and overall less economic activity than if there is more equal access to capital and resources

But wealth != capital. Wealth only becomes capital when it is realized/liquidated, at which point it is taxed. Before that happens, one person's wealth doesn't preclude someone else from investing or being productive because unlike land, wealth is not zero-sum.
That's not true. In some cantons, the very rich get extra deals, called Lump-sum tax, independently of their revenues. E.g. the Ikea founder only paid around 165000$ in total taxes in 2014 on a fortune of 46.5 billion US $ and all his revenues which he had.

Source: https://www.20min.ch/story/so-wenig-steuern-zahlte-der-ikea-...)