skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm highly skeptical of the claim that such tax would discourage startup founders.

Wealth tax proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million. This means that there is a floor on how "poor" the government can make you via a wealth tax.

This has two implications:

1. Most "successful" startup founders don't break that threshold of personal wealth.

2. For most startup founders, the startup is the only way to get to $50 million. The practical lifestyle difference between $50 million and $1 million is a lot larger than the difference between $50 million and the unicorn-founder $ billion.

Furthermore, as noted by glutamate: 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.
Universities can be punished by NIH in addition to the feds if they violate privacy rules in clinical studies. Columbia was threatened with losing all their research funding if they didn't get their act together after a big breach a few years ago.

But I know plenty academic researchers with a "move fast and break things" and "ignore all rules" attitude. In any highly-competitive system there will be those that gain an advantage by being amoral while everyone else follows the rules. Healthcare is probably especially vulnerable to this as the rules (and legitimate companies following them) has resulted in healthcare lagging far behind other industries in terms of new technologies.
Germany had a wealth tax till 1996.
Choosing iOS is an entirely reversible decision.
I’m still not sure why the debate has converged around a wealth tax rather than just making the income tax rate on every dollar above $1 billion 100% (or close to 100%).

That way, on the day that the super rich decide to liquidate their assets, they only get taxed on the capital gain, and for billionaires that means they only keep some small portion of it in liquid cash. You also wouldn’t have to amend the Constitution to do this.
Any practical system would probably be progressive. This would give a "soft" ceiling to wealth, and maybe actually favor small startups versus large well-established companies.
Did they use vodka instead?
Thank you! It’s surprisingly simple, but if you’d like any help, you’re welcome to reach out via Twitter (linked in post).
So many people here missing that PG is modeling "how much stock would you have to sell" not "how much would your remaining stock be worth."

Yes, your stock will on average be worth more over time but that is not what he is calculating.
Some of the things that seem to help me:

Having a work laptop and a home PC. The home PC plays games, while the work laptop only does work. At the end of the work day, I suspend the work laptop and switch on the home PC. Any personal web browsing is done on the home PC.

Having a dedicated space for the work environment. This one is pretty privileged, and will not be available to a lot of people. However if I need a break from work, I can walk out of this room and lie down or read comics or whatever. My office has my home PC in it as well, but the change of context from work laptop to home PC seems to be enough to kick my mind away from work-work-work mode.

For your situation with a 1BR apartment, it might benefit you to have "work stuff" that is out during the day but put away in the evening. So your work items all go in a tub that gets closed and put out of sight during the evening.

Keeping the work space clear of non-work related items, clean, and tidy. If you're constantly looking at a half-finished Lego model, or electronics project, etc, during work then you are getting distracted. Clear your desk of distractions. Having multiple tubs for different hobbies or areas of your life might also help.

Setting a specific schedule might also help. Showering and eating breakfast before "going to work" can have a significant effect on your psyche.
Get mental health treatment. No matter what the reality is about your work, you are experiencing a dangerous level of despair.
Free Virtual Conferences 2020
I don't see how that justifies torrenting it but most new movies are available within a few months on DVD/Blu-ray.

(Obviously there are exceptions for things made by streaming companies but even those get physical releases eventually.
The Manager's Guide to Engaging Remote Employees
60% of Amazon stock is owned by mutual funds & other institutional investors (like pension funds).

77% of Google is owned by mutual funds & other institutional investors.

62% of Apple is owned my mutual funds & other institutional investors.

79% of Facebook is owned by mutual funds & other institutional investors.
Real estate has such taxes, no floor.
For a guy who's always railing about the value of honest, rational discourse, he's unbelievably misleading and political in this post. He ignores asset growth and the fact that all the wealth tax proposals have a very high floor for the tax.

Saying the government will take 45% of your wealth above $100M is very different than saying the government will take 45% of your wealth.
It's very easy to spoof email addresses. Moreover, I too get many such calls and they are usually over phone. If Amazon starts using emails as evidence, sellers will move to other methods that are hard to trace. And methods that are hard to trace, are vulnerable to being faked.
12 states have an inheritance/estate tax. Definitely worth replicating in the others, too.
Most of the homeowners are probably retired and bought it for <300k.

Which is related, but not totally, to who lives there.
Tesla AI Head Andrej Karpathy Creates His Own Mini GPT
While I totally agree with you, I... have a theory.

It might be psychological warfare.

I would wager that a surprisingly large number of people think that polygraphs detect lies. An even larger number are probably open to the possibility.

If you hook up somebody in that group to a polygraph, you probably rocket their stress levels through the ceiling, which might push them to crack. Behavior under stress is a fascinating thing.

Honestly, I had a snarky comment ready for a comment lower-down about the rationale for polygraphs, but I thought about it a bit, and can't, off the top of my head, come up with a faster, cheaper, and safer way to put that kind of stress on a person.

Useless against somebody trained -- like, say, an intelligence operative -- but it might not be as stupid as it appears on the surface.
If you can, use a bike instead of walking for the same amount of time - you might love the long-term results.
If you set the bar very high, say $100 million. It’s usually doable to monetize assets (get cash out without selling). At low levels it’s unworkable
>Taxes are higher in most of the developed world. People still start businesses, people still go to work.

They still start businesses, but they start far fewer per capita: compare for instance the number of new Fortune 500 entrants over the past couple decades from the US vs from Europe.
The polygraph process is not a technical one, but a psychological one. The point is not to detect a lie by "registering it" on the tool, its to create a situation where a person self-elects information because they believe the machine _could_ detect a lie. Its a huge dog-and-pony show, and the poly operators play it as a big game.

So, polys _do_ sort of work, but not in the way they are presented to the public.
>tax combined with a 50% income tax

Properly managed capital gains are taxed at ~15% or less. One should hope that by the time you accrue $50 million your capital gains are properly managed.
This. What all of these taxes accomplish is preventing people from becoming wealthy. In this way it benefits the people that are already wealthy by making it that much harder to climb the wealth ladder. Many of the tax increases on the "rich" really just tax the upper middle class and do nothing to tax people that are actually wealthy.

If you want to tax the wealthy, then simplify the tax code and remove loopholes and deductions. Leave rates alone.
Then I'll suggest https://www.kleinbottle.com

"Glass Klein Bottles for sale - inquire within"
Very cool, hard to imagine the constraints they had when that was created. Reminds me of an interview I heard with Bill Joy a while back (creator of vi + worked on the Java language in its beginnings).

"We solved problems that do not exist anymore" — Bill Joy.
This is an excellent description. Thanks for sharing. Using a mental technique to objectify any subjectivity that arises. Surfing that boundary, interesting things happen.
>The whole point of marketing is that it works even if you know it's happening to you.

The point of most advertising is selling an emotion. (Advertising is a subset of marketing) Convincing the buyer to buy a product based on projecting a feeling on or drawing an emotion from that person. This is inherently a lie and thus manipulation. Most people don't realize what's going on.

Let's use Harley Davidson as an example, there are many. Their entire pitch is being a rebel, getting away, being cool, salvaging your youth. It's not, "this is a great machine and good bargain." If most people were wholly objective about purchasing a motorcycle based on utilitarian use and cost, they probably wouldn't purchase a Harley. Advertising to the rescue. It's a brain hack.
What you need is a signal for the brain that this is work time and this is off time.

Some people have mentioned different location, that's great if you have the space.

Clothes can work too, but I find shorts and t-shirt more comfortable at home than business causal. Also, I've been enjoying doing less laundry, which is better for the environment.

In the past I've used a different keyboard and mouse to great success. The work keyboard gets put away at lunch and once the work day is over. If you are using the same computer for work and home also create separate user accounts.

You could also have a desk lamp and put a sign on it that says "Work Lamp" turn it on when you start work, turn it off when you are finished for the day.

Finally, it could be as simple as a placard a la Lucy van Pelt's the doctor is in/out. Maybe it says "The Coder is In/Out" or "Work/Home".
background info:

the demo app is located inside the App Worker.

the drag events get triggered in main, while the handlers live within the App Worker scope.

I was sceptical at first, how the performance for a custom drag&drop implementation would work out.

Best to use Chrome (some polishing left for FF & Safari).

The TouchSensor is next on my todo list.

You can find the code here:

https://github.com/neomjs/neo/blob/dev/src/main/addon/DragDr...

https://github.com/neomjs/neo/tree/dev/src/main/draggable

https://github.com/neomjs/neo/blob/dev/src/dialog/Base.mjs
A farmer's donkey dies. His son gets an idea on how to make some money.

Sometime later he turns up at dinner with $200. "Where did you get that money?" His father asks.

"I sold raffle tickets for the donkey" his son replied.

"What?!?" Shouts his father. "You can't sell raffle tickets for a donkey that you know has already died! Weren't people mad?"

"Just the guy who won" said the son, "so I gave him his money back."
“Riskier”, but how much riskier? Having to beat inflation by 1% is not that much riskier compared to the gained equality in taxation. Bad argument. You can’t leave off the amount and implicitly use the worst case scenario to argue against all cases.
Yeah, if you don't work or even invest and do nothing for your whole entire life, while sitting on a pile of cash larger than you could ever use (and note: we specify you are NOT USING IT) you could end up dying (in a presumably stable society that hasn't itself killed you) sitting on a pile of cash only half larger than you could ever use (and we specify that you are NOT USING IT).

So persuasive. Gee, I'm really convinced. Certainly worth destroying societies over and risking violent revolution and the destruction of all those assets.
The time has come for a real wealth tax. http://www.cosmicweenie.com/wealth_tax.pdf
This only models a very foolish version of a wealth tax (i.e. with no lower bound) on very foolish wealthy people (i.e. who don't invest.) Really disappointed by the quality there. It's a straw man of what anyone's suggesting and what anyone's doing.
I think the point is that if you think you have a chance of accumulating wealth (either through founding a start up, or from stock grants from an established tech company), and you have an option of living in a place with a wealth tax or one without a wealth tax, you will very likely choose to live in a place without a wealth tax. Your right, it is a lottery ticket, but if you are going to buy a really expensive lottery ticket, most people won't want to give up a large chunk of the value of that lottery ticket, so they'll start businesses elsewhere.

Whereas some people think the government should tax wealth, this shows that governments are likely to have less tax revenue as people move out of that state/country. Given the recent shift to more remote working, this means that people are less tied to living in a particular place in order to have a certain job.
Ryan Gosling is the new Rick Astley. You can now get Ryan Rolled!
> Replacing current courtoutine implementation to use Loom threads or inline classes to use Valhalla are both implementation details that should not at all change the user facing API and complexity.

This is not accurate.

Re Loom, the entire Java platform will be built around a "single colour" structure. Kotlin, like C#, is based on a split, two-colour, model. It is true that under the covers it could map both colours onto the same one, but that will mean that Kotlin adds a lot of unnecessary complexity, and possibly make it harder to target multiple platforms (i.e. a lot of Kotlin code that will work well on Java will not work well on Android or JS).

Re Valhalla, it will allow multi-component inline types -- that's a user-facing change -- but those won't work on Android, at least not without significant overhead.
Also, inflation currently does the modeled loss at 1-2% already without a floor. Wealthy people are still fine.
But a wealth tax also targets owners of assets that don’t appreciate. It taxes both the winners and the losers, and for the latter it’s nothing but a forced divestiture of their ownership stake.

A capital gains tax, on the other hand, strictly targets those whose assets have appreciated in value.

Wealth is always eventually taxed when it’s liquidated. And if it is never liquidated, then it arguably doesn’t really matter.
I've heard a good one is to get a foreign company -- one you're in cahoots with, obviously -- to sue you... and you lose. Judgements across borders generally are hands off, and there are easy ways to keep that money out of the IRS once settlements are involved.
this assumes the weakest possible form of a wealth tax.

a progressive wealth tax would tax the increase of wealth on the margin rather than just "wealth". experience equity gains of $1M? you owe an extra $10k in liquid cash at the end of the year. if your equity doesn't grow, you don't get taxed.

in any event, the floor for these kinds of laws would likely be above the ceiling of most people's lifetime wealth accumulation.
"[T]he government will over the course of your life take 45% of your stock" seems a bit misleading? You can either retain ownership and increase your compensation (which is more expensive) or sell your shares to someone else and pay the government with the proceeds. Makes it sound less like the government wants to take over private companies and instead incentivize dilution of stock ownership.
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century advocates for a wealth tax of up to 2%. This is the only remedy to combat the structural rising inequality in capitalism.

He also admits the tax would be difficult to implement. He should know. France wealth tax has existed for more than 30 years. It was not a success, in part because the wealthy found ways to avoid it. It was as simple as moving residence to Belgium. The tax has now been turned into a property tax.
Absolutely using two different laptops. One for work, one for personal activities. What also helps, if you've got a personal project on the side, to switch gears is between work and project, either read a book or watch an episode of something silly. Then dive back into computer world.
You likely mean .ssh/id_rsa (or perhaps .ssh/id_ed25519). The .pub variants are safe to share.
Once the TouchSensor is done, I will create a demo for multi screen drag&drop (dragging an in app dialog from one browser window into another).

A blog post will follow.
I'm in Germany and work for an Australian company. What I do is make sure I have 4 hours overlap for comms. The rest of the day is mine to structure as I want. Sometimes, if there is a deadline looming, that means working until the evening (like today) and other times I take my kids out to the playground. Come back and do some work for a few hours, then go biking, then maybe finish something off... or not. However I feel within reason basically.
Appealing to mankind's "natural" state is lazy thinking.

Societies are massive, complex, ephemeral things. You may as well appeal that anarchism is mankind's natural state and that soon all governments will cease to exist.
Polygraphs are a joke for this reason among so many others: Psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists can fool them because they are able to feel zero (or are incapable of feeling any) biological fear or anxiety (i.e. 'stress response'), while telling complete lies.
Isnt there a loophole that you transfer all the money to a foundation and then your children control the foundation effectively getting the money but on the books they did not inherit the money.
Oh boy. HN eats pg alive.

Are there any forums like HN that aren't backed/funded by a VC firm/incubator/whatever? I forget why everyone migrated from /., as a lot of memes and dumbspeak from there appeared on here over the years.
This would only be true if you allow your money to rot and don't do anything with it for 60 years. Inflation would eat into that a lot more in that scenario. Average inflation is roughly 3%.

As others pointed out, equity returns are 5-6% so if you do something with your money this won't be the case and you'll actually increase your wealth a lot.

Assuming 5% return, this is an 18x return over 60 years.
S&P 500 rises to new record, surpassing high reached before coronavirus hit
I’d gladly pay 100% inheritance tax on exchange for zero taxes during life.

Would anyone else go for a deal like that?
But most people aren’t actually sitting on “cash”. That’s the whole problem.

You might be suggesting a tax on liquid cash, which would target way fewer people.
The way you describe it sounds a lot like the Typescript / VSCode pairing. Is that accurate?
From the bottom of the page:

>"Even a .5% wealth tax would start to keep founders away from a state or country that imposed it. That's more than a quarter of your stock."
“The Secret Life of Machines”

My god how I loved that show. Tim Hunkin is such a weird and wonderful person. And though the show sorta predates the modern internet, as soon as the tech was available/undertandable to him, he put the whole damn series online for download (initially on an FTP server) for free.

The episode where he and Garrod make a an audio recording with some rust filings and Scotch tape (sticky tape ;) was simply amazing.
Having some games not work on Linux is preferable to having fewer games exist.

Again, I understand the pain. I am currently only running Linux. If a game doesn't run in Linux without DRM, I can't play it. I know as well as anyone how bad it feels to see a game that I want to play, and can't, because the developer thought that Linux wasn't a big enough market to support.

Even so, it is better that there be a broad market where I can't access all of it, then there be a narrow market that only fits my criteria and can't grow. Some of the games that don't work on Linux will get ported later, or people will figure out how to get them working in Wine. I want those games to exist because eventually I'll get access to them.

> How is Epic Games going to afford doing projects like proton

They won't. Other platforms like Steam will do that. How is Steam going to afford to get old DOS games working on modern computers without DRM? They won't, GoG does that.

The market is better served when there are lots of people doing lots of different things. It's those conditions that force companies to innovate and find new market niches that were previously underserved.
This is absolutely incorrect. On day one of one of my university courses on negotiation, we did a group exercise that demonstrated anchoring. For those unaware of the concept it's that a final negotiated agreement tends to be strongly influenced by the first position (e.g. price) that is put forward.

After the exercise, we dived into how it worked and how to prepare and counter anchoring. Then we ran a slightly different, but similar, exercise. Even when highly educated students were fully aware of how anchoring worked, and that they were susceptible to it, and knowing ways to ways to counter it, deals still tended to be closer to the initial reference point.

It certainly helps to know ways in which you may be manipulated, but knowledge does not make you immune by any stretch of the imagination.
Ah I somehow misread that, thought they can restore videos but for photos they don't have the original resolution.
Wealth tax proposals would apply to very few founders

The wealthiest top 0.1 percent is fewer than 200,000 families. source:

> Warren would put a 2 percent tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 3 percent tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion.

https://www.wealthypersons.com/paul-graham-net-worth-2020-20... https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jan/31/elizabeth-...

IMHO wealth tax is not optimal way to distribute wealth, but it's not as pad as PG tries to make it.
> The original comment said “hate” not “is bad”

I read that as a somewhat hyperbolic expression of dislike, like "I hate spinach" – strong dislike, but not actual hatred. I might actually say that I hate spinach, because I really can't stand the taste, but I don't feel hatred towards it. But yes, I guess that may have caused some misunderstanding.

> just calling it “bad” seems to imply that there are better things, which is not really a statement about “tweaking” anything.

Like an improved version of that thing. Case in point: My last batch of salsa verde was bad, too few tomatillos, too much seasoning, so I'll tweak the recipe with a note to make sure the rations there don't skew that way next time. I don't have to give up on my recipe for good, or on salsa verde for good, or on food for good.

> A statement in favour of tweaking capitalism would be something like “capitalism on its own can not reliably produce moral goods”.

There are different variantions of capitalism implemented around the world right now; there are parameters that can be tweaked, like with the German "soziale Marktwirtschaft", which was a version of a capitalist market-based economy with socialist elements. Even in the US, the flavor of capitalism in Roosevelt's day was quite a bit different from the one currently in place, I believe.
All breakpoints in tax systems contribute to market inefficiency, because they incentivize manipulating your finances to stay below breakpoints instead of maximizing efficiency. It would be better to apply a flat wealth tax and correct for the regressive effect of decreasing marginal utility of money with UBI.
They would just take out loans against their assets and pay the interest using relatively small asset sales.
I personally favor using an assumed income on wealth and taxiing that as income. I would favor treating all income as ordinary income and adjusting tax rates to accommodate changes in revenue. Income is income regardless of source. Simplicity can be helpful. Remove all tax credits and deduction except a standard deduction. There is no sense in taxing the poor it's just kind of cruel.