skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Incentives are powerful, and typically get the result they are incentivizing in the end. All taxes are a form of incentive, we should always be careful of taxing things that we want more of.

If you favor a wealth tax, you are implicitly arguing in favor of incentives to create less wealth. If you tax investment, there will be less investment. If you tax the rewards from great risk taking, there will be less great risk taking. So every tax is a trade-off: are we better off with less of the thing we're taxing and more in the hands of whomever is collecting the tax?

A related point would be that wealth can be created from nothing. It is not zero sum. My sense is that many people advocating for a wealth tax do not understand this conceptually.
No chance. Deciding when to retire would be a nightmare. Many would retire too early. Most on death would donate 100% to the charity of their choice.
It makes it seem really bad when you say "Government takes".

The truth is, you're contributing back to people and the system which let you make and run a business that makes millions starting in your 20s.
I got a nickname when I was 14, my life completely changed after that. I went from sitting alone at lunch, to having parties with over 100 people. Most of them only knew me by the nickname, or variants of the nickname. I went by it almost exclusively for over 10 years. I definitely feel like a different person than I was then.
> there's no vaccine against any other coronavirus, and it's not for the lack of trying.

It wasn't economical to develop those. So far, coronaviruses were responsible for either common colds (small impact) or MERS/SARS (which were quickly contained to their region).

We're now facing one with a global scale, and high impact (to society & the economy). Governments will pay for those vaccines to be developed, deployed and used. And if it isn't as effective and needs to be reapplied every X years, so much more economical incentive to develop a vaccine.
oh man if you find that inscrutable, I suggest not to watch Aaron Hsu videos on the matter :)

I'm not for overcryptic nor making people suffer.. I simply believe that people are underestimating how short syntax + repl + operators can be memorized and enjoyable.
OK, so replace "GPG secret key" with any other secret you definitely don't wanna email off to some random stranger :-)
except the wealth tax is not at anything other that the most ridiculously wealthy people in society. the wealth tax is proposed for precisely the reason that it slows down the growth of the ultra elite ruling class type society in favor of a more equitable one that is, you know, a society. bezoar shouldn’t have billions of dollars and influence society like he does... it’s obscene.
The difference is that (sadly) no one seems to care much about desktop Linux. Only Android this Android that Android those...
No.

The amount I will get in inheritance is more than the tax I will pay in my life.
Yes that's how it's used. That depends on people believing polygraphs work though, which is why polygraph companies for decades have been litigating against people who question polygraphs. Sometimes just the idea that there will be a polygraph test is enough to get people to be more truthful. It's like placebo drugs - if it works somehow, should we care about whether it actually works? By that reasoning, should we allow homeopathic drugs for healthcare insurance reimbursements? If Josie doesn't have a headache after taking pills, does it matter whether those pills are paracetamol or water with a story of it being very potent water? Fun discussions, not very productive, but still fun (for a while).
Old wise men know that young people forget history too soon, and we all know what happens when history gets forgotten.
I use LineageOS, which has step-by-step instructions on how to prepare your phone/install the OS. A list of supported devices is at https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/, with various guides on each device-specific page.
I live in a 2BR apartment where the second bedroom is my office. For me, I have two walls lined in desk with two completely separate stations set up. They use different equipment, different OS, different chair, etc. I also have Hue lights that I change from a brighter, whiter light while working to a more subdued, dark blue/purple after work.

The only way I can do it is to completely leave my workstation and never even look at it while doing my leisure activities. I've tried using the same setup for both before and it just messes with my mind to the point where it's never not work.

If you don't have the space for a secondary setup and are using a laptop, try moving to the dining room table for the last hour of your work day. Then shut down and do a chore before doing anything at your desk for the night.

Oh, one thing that I do recommend: shut down your work computer every single night. It takes 20 seconds to start back up in the morning. Do not leave it on. Do not sleep it. Do not let it tempt you. The second your work day is over, shut it down, unplug it, and leave it in the corner until the following work day.
Just for some historical context: US income tax rates started at 1% and ended at 6%, and applied to an extremely small amount of the population.
Good read. I like the new story format to rehash the lively startup vs big tech employment debate on HN.

It could almost use a part 2 to explain aspects of the conversation (how is the employee making a $300k investment, preferred stock, etc), but I don't think anyone is missing the joke.

The story format makes it clear how employees are getting a worse deal than investors. Still, employees receive cash dividends every few weeks (a salary), isn't that a positive?
That 90-day expiry window is the most archaic bullshit. Can't come up with 200K cash? Too bad, and thanks for all that hard work and long hours you put in.
I live in a nature reserve next to a medium large western European town. There are "wild" horses and "wild" cows there. Wild, in quotes because they are managed and monitored. I sometimes help as volunteer; e.g. when they are severely wounded, or sick, they'll be slaughtered. Otherwise the're left alone.

There are beaches here, where the horses love to come (esp. when it's hot); and where in summer thousands of citizens have parties, BBQs, Picnicks, familidays and whatnots.

Each year, some horses get cocky and steal food. Wild (untrained) horses are dangerous when they've overcome their fear for humans, they will damage cars, bikes, etc. and sometimes theyu will hurt humans or dogs (which technically aren't allowed to roam unleashed there, but we all know how it is when you take a dog for a day swimming...)

The solution is as simple as it is elegant: they move the horses to another area. As far as the other side of Europe in some cases, or simply a few KM away - across some fences. No need to kill them. And apparently, after some years, they either die, or forgot about humans enough that their instinctive fear for humans return enough not to attack humans and take their lunch.
Sure, but what about the people buying polygraphs?
> while the truly rich simply find loopholes

You'll have to walk through how exactly, otherwise this is just a hand-wavy and unfalsifiable assertion.
Using Kotlin without IntelliJ tooling is a pain.
Tip for those not up to scratch like me:

Click "Raw" to see the image
This hits me right in the tendies. How many times have I had this conversation to no avail
The little guide to CI/CD for frontend developers
I also think there's value in tools that allow our subconscious to override our conscious mind when it comes to making tricky decisions. (But never in support of probable cause.)

I'm reminded of the chick sexing story from a while back. About how no one can tell you what to look for to separate male from female chicks. But you can still learn how to do it through trial and error.

A device that basically tells your conscious mind to pause requires that you believe the device is working.

Even better would be training people to deliberately allow their subconscious to make certain decisions.
> For stuff you don't need to restore in a rush, it's cheap

That was my thinking. It seems a good fit as a last-resort backup. Low month-on-month storage costs, high retrieval costs. So we're essentially betting that we'll never retrieve the data. Which seems fine.

Also, it apparently has strong assurances against data-loss. Lots of nines. [0]

> how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy

It's all web-API-based, right? Is there a a decent FOSS GUI to navigate it?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/features/
Dividends? Rental income? People own these things for a reason and it's not necessarily just raw capital appreciation.
The money ears money thing is key. A wealth tax that equals the money you can earn from having money would prevent runaway inequality due to the "rich getting richer" effect.

S&P 500 has a long term annualized return of 10%. If you have a 5% wealth tax on stock you have in S&P 500 then you are still earning 5% returns (well above long term average inflation) without actually lifting a finger.
Catalina Boot Volumes
I am _happier_ to chip into HN while it shows so little reverence for its senescent founder.

It's one of the reasons HN stays relevant & influential (the other 95% is @dang).
That isn't up to the game versus JVM or any existing AOT compiler for Java.

It compiles slower, doesn't produce machine code of the same quality and requires a separate semantic model for heap management, the reason why recently they had a blog post about having to redesign it.

EDIT: Exactly for my experience with those languages and what went wrong with their adoption is why I will never use anything that isn't a platform language on production code. Either it comes with the platform SDK or no bother.

In Kotlin's case that is Android, as long as Google doesn't do one of their reboots and decides to focus on ChromeOS or Fuchsia instead.
Can someone provide some more context, it seem in danger but i cannot understand what is happening.
Delegation: Composition and inheritance in object-oriented programming
Bravo bravo bravo! This piece neatly encapsulates all the problems with ISOs. The biggest one is mentioned at the beginning - information asymmetry. I don’t really understand why most companies, especially small ones less than 100 people, can’t be transparent about their cap table with employees.

I do think the culture around 90 day exercise Windows is changing. Here is a list of companies with extended windows [1]. At this point I would never join a company with 90 day windows.

[1] https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows
You seem to have somehow missed the part where he dicovered a new outlook and gained the ability to feel.
Ask HN: Is it immoral to off-shore my startup to a low-tax country?
I have a small, bootstrap startup registered in South America and considering moving off-shore (reasons below).

Since I'm moving off-shore, I'm asking: should I go for the lowest tax possible jurisdiction? (I consulted a Lawyer to stay within legal boundaries)

I'd still continue to live in my country and pay taxes on personal income.

Since I benefit from living here, would it be immoral to off-shore my business to a low-tax jurisdiction? Or off-shore at all?

--- Reasons to move away from my country ---

Stripe doesn't work here. Paypal does but provides worse service and charges +12% to bill international customers.

Local regulations don't let me keep revenue in foreign currency. I have to exchange back and forth to pay suppliers in USD and lose +5% to spreads.

Local government charges +30% withholding taxes on international supplier payments.

Registering a foreign branch of my local company is prohibitively expensive in terms of local red tape compliance.

The country doesn't really help me be an entrepreneur. Everything is more expensive, riskier, bureaucratic, and/or slow. From a family and personal standpoint, I like to live here, though.
IBM Launches 7nm POWER10 CPU
Been working from home since march and never had a problem to switch off from work. Some days I would be working on something I consider fun and stay a bit later than usual, but most days I just move my chair 1 meter to the left to my gaming computer and go play something.
Yeah this is a garbage article that is intentionally misleading. It's like throwing a ball in the air and saying you disproved gravity.
If you want to know when to retire, you can just buy an annuity. That's what pensions are today.
There's even a plugin for wordpress that embeds matomo itself if memory serves right.
Having familiarity only with Switzerland’s wealth tax, I know that it is instead applied only over a given bound, and then very progressively so the impact at even somewhat large sums is lower than what is quoted here.

Sure it goes up when we’re talking about billions, but shouldn’t it? Isn’t the idea to make the wealth of huge excess fund something more of our society?
Yeah but if your wealth has compounded 400% over 40 years, and they took 40% compounded, then that paints a different picture. He’s playing games around the idea that 100% is the cap because that’s how most people would think about money.
This one SURELY goes straight to n-gate
This is such a straw man argument. No one is proposing something like that - most wealth tax proposals have a floor of like $100m, and a 1% tax seems extremely reasonable when most people can get 4-10% returns just from parking their money in a index fund.

I'm of the opinion that no one should have north of $100M. The difference in lifestyle between $100M and $1B isn't going to magically halt entrepreneurship or innovation, and it's immoral to have that much when most people living paycheck-to-paycheck in this country are miserable.
Can you recommend people who do automated id of structural plagiarism in texts?
I'm looking for benchmarked, fast algorithms that identify overlapping plots in novels, for example.
A salary =/= dividends.
You'd borrow against it, giving a bank the shares as collateral.
"Whatever the price"... in this case genocide and cannibalism.
What's strange is that the same cohort that doesn't deeply discuss higher tax rates on tens of millions in wealth, love to get out tomes of research to support the social cause du jour.
Yes, they invest it in dormant apartment blocks in Bangkok ...

Maybe we don't need a wealth tax, but a way of unlocking capital from banks to excellent resource allocators (to be defined).
This is pg's privilege to be able to write such a shallow article and get this much attention. There has been so many studies on this topic. There are places with Wealth Tax. France experimented with it and kind of failed. Switzerland has Wealth Tax. None of that was mentioned. Just a 4th grader math and a basic HTML table. God damn it I wish I was VC. Anything I say would be gold. This is pure @VCBrags material
> It can also matter for other resources which are finite, but land is one of the most crucial one in our current times, and why we are seeing such ridiculously large gains in housing costs in the past few decades after a century of housing costs remaining fairly constant.

If we were being restricted by land availability, we could fix that easily by putting more housing on the same amount of land. That problem was solved long ago.
I remember once at a previous job one of the devs forgot to setup google analytics which was the go to tool at the time. Client calls in wanting to get some stats for their site after 3 months, and we had nothing... thankfully awstats comes with cpanel without any additional setup, and we had something to show. Not great, but better than nothing.
There's nothing wrong with a tax on non-liquid assets. We already have taxes like that: property tax.
Perhaps a different way of thinking about it is control. For a founder in their 20s whose wealth is entirely in the stock of the successful company they created, assuming one vote per share, a wealth tax greater than 1% will force them to lose control of the company they created within their expected lifetime, even if they bootstrapped and never raised any money from outside investors.
> Even a .5% wealth tax would start to keep founders away from a state or country that imposed it.

In the US, health care is tied to employment for most people. Many people are stuck in jobs they aren't particularly excited about because they need, or can't risk losing, their health care.

If a new tax structure allowed us to finally implement universal health care, how much innovation would that inspire? We have this notion that the freedom to acquire great wealth is the only driver of innovation. But covering people's basic needs is a great driver of creativity and innovation as well, possibly even greater.
I think a wealth tax sounds good, but the implementation scares me.

What I worry about most with a wealth tax is calculating your wealth. Income tax is already hard enough. Now start adding up the value of your stock, your real estate, your personal property, etc.

And are you committing tax fraud because you have a million dollar painting that was hanging on your parents wall for decades that you inherited and never realized was valuable? Are you committing tax fraud if you have some crypto currency that you forgot about that has skyrocketed in value? If not, then these things can be used as tax dodges by the wealthy. If so, then it just makes everybody a potential criminal.
I missed over $1 million in options when one of my former companies was acquired. I still made good money but nowhere near the same. I was pretty sure it was going to sell, but I didn't know how long it would take (over 1 year for sure) and nothing in life is guaranteed.

If I had exercised all the options I would have had over $300k in paper gains for a tax bill. Instead I exercised 10% of what I had the ability to exercise. This is one major reason I will never work at a startup again unless I am the cofounder.
It's as easy as setting up GA in WordPress. Just inject the JavaScript snippet built by your Matomo instance when creating a new tracker.
Yeah I love how he starts the essay with "assume you start a successful startup in your 20s, so successful you never have to work another day in your life." It's just appealing to 20-somethings with a bad faith argument about a tax that would likely be linearly correlated with age.
Looks like they’re killing off the beats brand…
>This is something that a commenter on Hacker News should understand!

It pains me to see Computing, Tech, or Software Engineers that are the top paying job today and especially in Silicon Valley, are complaining about the cost of Hardware all while completely ignoring the Software Cost and Design Cost.

This left, free-ish mentality wasn't a thing 10 - 20 years ago. But has steadily getting mainstream. I have no idea why.
The first part is great advice but unfortunately not always easy for those in small apartments where that space is precious.

Yeah, I struggle with that for this very reason. I have one room in my apartment that was already my home-office / library where I would sit to work on my personal projects and what-not. Now with this pandemic inspired WFH situation, it's just the best place in my apartment to carry out my normal work day. It's also still the best place to work on my own projects or just sit and study. Sadly that means that A. I wind up spending way too much time in here, and B. change of room isn't much of an option in terms of demarcating the boundaries between "work time" and "my time".

But if I close down my work laptop, go take a bath (see other comment), and the later come back in this room with my personal laptop, I get a pretty good sense of having transitioned from one mode to the other.

Doesn't help with the sense that I spend too much time in this room though. I gotta get back into bike riding more again or something, to have an excuse to spend more time outdoors.
I did before I posted, and the rest of the article didn't explain that disparity at all.

That being said, it looks like the article has been updated to use new numbers now.
He would want the value of the donkey. The son would offer the value of the tickets. Lawyers would make it somewhere in the middle. Then the lawyers would walk off with all the money.
> this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform

Then they can spend their entire life in prison. Capital punishment adds no additional value.

> As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable.

The bar for putting someone to death is already very high. But when you put someone to death, you may be unknowingly excluding evidence that you are not yet aware of.

In most wrongful convictions, it is additional evidence discovered after the fact or a mistake found in the evidence previously used that indicates that the person was innocent.

But at the moment of death, everyone was sure they were guilty. Whoops.

For justice to be just, mistakes must be correctable when they are found.
Don't forget: Even if they are a unicorn, they won't IPO for 15 years and you'll be trapped because you can't afford the taxes to leave the company. Imagine working for Palantir.
Do you think it’s true that users can tell the difference between Apps and Websites?

That’s the question you replied to without answering before.
I don't think we'd know yet if there were one.
> The dollar value of shares tend to increase over time, a basic fact not reflected in this model.

This is not reflected in the model because the price of the shares cancels out: a higher price means a higher tax in absolute dollars, and a lower price means a lower dollar amount in tax. For a given tax rate you end up with the same fraction of the shares regardless of any appreciation or depreciation in their value.

A 1% wealth tax means that you cannot remain a majority owner of your own startup for longer than 70 years, at least not without sacrificing other assets above and beyond their own share of the wealth tax. At that point the government has claimed over 50% of the startup's value, regardless of any change in the share price.

A 2% wealth tax means you will lose your majority ownership within 35 years.

At a 5% wealth tax we're down to 14 years of owning your own startup.
While there are times where that quote applies, in the vast majority of cases, that's the programmer's cop-out upon discovering that the feature they thought was done is in fact broken and obtuse, and they don't care to take the time to understand their customer.

I don't want my email client automatically attaching files from my computer, period. I don't care how well or poorly it displays that fact. There's no use case important enough to warrant that kind of intrusion.
Isn't this capitalism? Labor and capital are two different factors of production. If you're willing to take the pay cut and risk associated w/ joining a startup, but are unhappy with the returns, why wouldn't you just keep your job, invest the $100,000, and get access to the preferential terms given to capital?
And Apple offered Amazon a 15% fee to Amazon for bringing its Prime Video app on the Apple TV set-top box.
Depending on the size of the startup at the time you join, I found it fairly easy to negotiate an extension to the exercise window. Likely because so few people even bring it up.
Secret Service Bought Phone Location Data from Apps, Contract Confirms
Will probably see TACAMO relay aircraft with VLF trailing wire antennas.
Samsung committing to three generations of Android OS upgrades
The fact that you don't see things like healthcare as a right is precisely my criticism of your system. Of course everything is subject to limited resources and external constraints. Enforcing property laws is subject to limits on policing resources.

How is "the right to not have your property stolen" any different from "the right to not have preventable diseases from killing or harming you"? In both cases there is some external problem that is prevented through the use of resources: in one case it's the police and legal apparatus. In the other case it's healthcare providers.