skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assuming the anonymization holds up, they can profile a person, but not link it back to you. This determines whether the information can be used to invade your personal life, blackmail you etc. This is a critical distinction, whether privacy means not having information collected at all, or being protected from having your data used against you. Personally I believe there is a middle ground, but it needs stronger protections, due to the incentives always pointing to greater exploitation of our data.
Changing term limits is outside the power of the executive branch in the US. If we did, I'd agreed the world would look very different before, as, and after for sure
Ah. TIL!
That's absolutely a fire-able offence.
I really don't see how servo can live on. I can't imagine the core team being very enthusiastic about taking up the reins and not getting any pay for doing it.
> it shouldn't be hard to implement

Yeah it seems like it's just a flat/un-informed probability distribution and I'd guess your models are general enough to accommodate that.

A couple use cases come to mind:

1. If I have no data but want to test out various/arbitrary schemas with just a bunch of dummy data. Of course, I could generate it myself (either with ad hoc scripts or building a more general CLI that does this for me), but if Synth just makes it a one-liner in the command line, that's appealing.

2. If it's too burdensome to convince others in my org that you've "built it so that our servers never have to see any sensitive information". Even if I trust you, I then have to make arguments for others to also trust you, when really if all I need is some random data for an empty schema, then that's a whole can of worms I don't need to open.
> it's not an enormous power, it's economical power to create new things. It's a productive force, unless there's a bad incentive to influence politics.

Like how the waltons use their great creative power to extract taxpayer money in the form of underpaid workers on assistance? (1) Like how bezos' amazon exploits the generation forced out of retirement by the 2008 crash as an underclass of temporary seasonal workers (2)

Billionaires got there by exploiting loopholes and viscous cycles that drain money from many people, to consolidate it in the hands of a few. There is an inherent problem with any society that allows the existence of billionaires, while some of their citizens starve as a result.

(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...

(2) https://www.wired.com/story/meet-camperforce-amazons-nomadic...
Surely Musk would retain control of the board like he has with Tesla
Philosophically I love the idea of a wealth tax in a capitalist economy. The wealth tax is your cost of entry to the economy. The government takes that cut and corrects externalities and provides basic services.

Things like keeping your citizens alive with the military and healthcare. Educating them and building roads and basic infrastructure, etc. Providing basic income.

Whatever capital you hold (your wealth) is some part of the US economy that you are controlling and someone else isn't. If you can't add more than 1% per year in value then your money should be redistributed to others who can.

In my mind this kind of system turns us all into capitalists. It's much easier to bootstrap yourself with a McDonald's job because you'll almost certainly have no wealth. Everything you earn you keep. From there modest amounts of wealth are more than enough to beat the tax rate.

The case made in this article doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you did something in your 20s why should you get to live off that 60 years later without doing something to maintain the value? You get a huge opportunity up front, continue with that contribution and you'll still be ahead.

How do these numbers compare to the 1/3 of my income I pay in taxes every year?
> Nobody has ever explained to me what it means, what its goals are, what constraints it has on the system or the protocol

You answer it later on. They want something like NX. We can fill in the details as one pleases.

> We know how to design much more resilient systems than that.

I think you are overstimating the progress of computer/network engineering. Anyway, CORBA's "transparency" might be a thing of the past, but what's the point here? Unless you plan to make a graphics API explicitly asynchronous, what alternatives you have? Sending PostScript over the wire? :/

The users want graphic primitives sent through the wire.
There is not much alternative other than CORBA style RPC.

> Not to mention that ever since the introduction of the MIT-SHM protocol, which is used by most everything to transfer image data, it hasn't even been true in practice for the last 20 years

That is not true. See how many commercial Qt engagements were stuck with Qt 4 because Qt 5 initially forced to use Qt's local rendering and only pushing the final pixmap to the server. Multi-million CAD machines slowing down to a halt because the clients were suddenly sending megabits through the pipes * . Eventually they had to backpedal and Qt5 now offers coreX/Xrender rendering too. _Most_ toolkits _to this day_ still render with X by default, and people do notice when this changes (see Mate). Sure there are exceptions and likely amongside the most used software (e.g. browsers), but I'd hardly claim "anything but MIT-SHM is all that matters for the past 20 years".

> is a network-designed fork of the protocol,

Yet compatible (to a high degree, at least). Up to the point the "transparency" illusion is maintained.

> Problems like remote desktop and streaming can be solved by other solutions

The biggest problem is that once you drop the codeflow on most opensource programs that renders using X, it's code that's rotten forever, and this entire method of "network transparency" will never be workable again in the free desktop world. Everyone and their mother will draw in a different way.

We'll have to resort to full video streaming or the like that have their own share of disadvatanges. There is absolutely no technical reason behind this, it's just a "code is done by volunteers" problem.

* And please don't say VNC/video here, since this is CAD. It's mostly a several megapixel black bitmap with a couple million white lines rendered on it. Relatively easy for a "drawing primitives over the wire" solution, insane for anything that tries to encode it as realtime video.
Have fun with this until google makes it impossible to use.
It really depends what you started with - I've never touched 6502, but I did a lot of z80 assembly back in the day. Since Zilog was started by ex-Intel people there's a lot in common.

For me jumping from z80 -> x86 was only a small change. The same notion of paired-registers and very similar instructions made it a simple enough change.

Of course these days there have been a lot of changes, but the basics are still basic, albeit idiosyncratic.
Thank you for that context, even if it mostly relates to your personal experience and back story. I agree that we should be careful how we use words, but I don't think you can easily argue that "democracy" has become meaningless out of context, while also imposing your own idiosyncratic context to claim that the US isn't a democracy.

As to your question, I would say that the U.S. constitution defines (indeed, guarantees) the country as having "a republican form of government" (at the state level, but this is maintained at the federal level), and that the processes and principles that it puts in place, such as representative elections, qualify that system as democratic.
Rules are rules, right?

Selective enforcement of rules is far worse than rules you just think can be broken because “hey, this would be harmless, I without any authority have decided!”
People. They will track people, not consumers.
One question I have never heard a good answer to:

Wealth (standing still, unused) doesn't have an impact on anyone. The money doesn't go anywhere, influence anything. It's when money moves that affects people.

So why should people worry about taking wealth? Why not simply continue taxing the movement of money? When money is generated or transferred -- isn't that enough scope to achieve the desired outcomes of a wealth tax (which would otherwise be very difficult to implement)?
Preventing people using your software on other hardware is not anti-competitive.

It doesn’t do anything to prevent others from developing their own hardware or software.

It’s not as if Apple has a monopoly on good operating systems or developers. Apple’s software isn’t magic.

It’s just well designed and managed relative to the competition. There is no reason it can’t be bettered, except that nobody is trying.

As far as the ‘at every level you can’t substitute other components’ definition of ‘anti-competitive’. That doesn’t work. Every company is like that. The only things which aren’t are certain open source licenses.

At any point where you want substitutable components, one must have agreed interfaces.

As I said earlier, the competitors failed in the early 2000’s because the process of agreeing on interfaces was hopelessly political. At that time the prevailing wisdom amongst VC’s was ‘there’s no money in hardware’.

The only way around that is for competitors (or open source contributors) to establish a truly open platform that commoditizes Apple’s core asset, and then for them all to realize it isn’t in their interest for anyone to seize control of it. That, or someone to just outdo Apple with low end disruption.

I’d like to think that this is what Google will do with Fuchsia, but anyone else can do it.

I actually agree with you that it would be good to have competition at levels other than the platform.

I believe that over a time it’s possible that such an ecosystem could be better for consumers than Apple’s ecosystem.

I do not believe that you can create such an ecosystem by forcing Apple to open certain arbitrarily selected parts of their system.

If anything, I think this would prevent the emergence of a new model indefinitely.

I also don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it would be better - only that it is a possibility.

As for the cash reserves. Those look quite wise in the present situation. At Apple’s scale, geopolitical risk is real. China as a last resort in the trade war with Trump could easily make it impossible for them to continue to work there. Trump could do the same.

$200B seems like a reasonable hedge against needing to rebuild their supply chains without Chinese cooperation.

It’s also just a concentration of wealth.

Look at all the other players with concentrated wealth who could just as easily be funding a competitor, and actually have a business interest in doing so.

If your argument is that Apple should be funding its competitors, surely that same argument should apply to anyone with enough money.

VC funds, Hedge Funds, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

The part we agree on is that someone should be funding serious competition against Apple.

There is plenty of capital outside of Apple which could be doing this.

The reason it hasn’t been doing so is that there have been much quicker and easier ways to make money. Advertising engines, Ride share services, Office building scams, etc.

Any way you look at it, building a giant company slowly over decades is a bad way to make money compared to a quick investment in a Unicorn which never even becomes profitable.

That’s what we should be addressing.
I'm utterly shocked at how many people assume that "The Cloud" is both run by people infinitely more intelligent and more competent than they are and that everything there is backed up.

What a crock of shit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
> They'll have to renounce their US citizenship.

So what? US citizenship has the unique disadvantage of making you a subject to the IRS globally.

If the US imposed a wealth tax to the tune of 2-3%, you bet that many nice countries will be welcoming to all that capital in exchange for citizenship. Also consider that most Americans have some sort of heritage abroad.

> And the wealth will get reinvested in wherever it produces the highest returns, like it already is right now.

Sure, you can still invest into the US market after leaving the sinking ship. On the other hand, a little bit of traveling brings perspective, if you're now a citizen of some other country, why not also invest and build there?
That's why I don't live there! But the topic we're attached to is "1-Euro Houses" and that's exactly the kind of places you'd find these in Italy or Spain as well - depressed rural/small-towns with no jobs and where all the young people moved to the cities.

Also not sure what counts as looking bad to you, a lot of these villages or small cities are actually quite nice looking (we often go to such places for a day trip) & if I was single/childless and wanted to live a quiet life without much disturbance I'd definitely check them out. They are mostly just not in easy commuting distance to jobs.

In fact some of the places in Berlin with the highest rents (like Kreuzberg) are often a lot uglier than sleepy Brandenburg villages & small towns.
You're gussying up a "silicon valley" libertarian viewpoint in "philosophy of taxation."

> When you just store, you don't benefit, and taking it is a purely negative experience. Many people are willing to share part of their new earnings. Few are willing to give up something that has always belonged to them.

That's a real stretch when just a sentence earlier you talked about earned benefits and taxation of those benefits. Storage is just the accumulation of earned benefits beyond your spending habits. Value isn't created in a vacuum nor is it used in one. And current taxation doesn't preclude future taxation, it's why us common folk are told to do any of our retirement funding that we can as pre-tax, since who's to say something that is taxed today (and is expressly stated as not being taxable in the future) won't be taxed again later on appreciated or total value. So, by this alone, the government saying taxes now, and deferred taxes later if that valuation meets certain thresholds isn't something that the government can't or even shouldn't do.

And, in many cases, the tax wouldn't apply to startups or their founders unless they're already sitting on multiple tens of millions of static personal valuation; which is where this whole argument really breaks down, and shows its disingenuous colors. When someone like PG talks about these wealth tax valuations in general terms of percentages, many of us are still thinking on OUR terms, which means we're thinking on "normie" scales of 10s or 100s of thousands, or maybe a couple million, where a 1% drop in valuation YoY would make a significant dent in what we can and can't do; when a wealth tax is floated (at least in the US) it's looking at $10M+ in static assets at the individual level, and applies to a wealth class that only a small percentage of people can actually comprehend. And, when a wealth tax is floated in the US, it also has discussions around non-realized asset valuation (such as small businesses, start-ups, etc) and what classes of assets contribute to the total value of an individual wealth tax.

Applying a wealth tax in a general way like how PG has done it is a bit disingenuous, not wrong; but is prone to personal wealth view biases. It becomes even more obvious when we take your example and put it towards something that would actually be taxed... $100M; which you end up with $81M for static assets or $550M instead of $672M in PERSONAL assets. Most only think of numbers in these terms if the "win the lottery" so who in the general public thinks the difference of $122M over a lifetime of nearly 3/4 of a billion dollars in wealth (not earnings, but accumulated valuation) isn't a bit of a "whatever," they'll pay more in taxes on that Mega Millions winner and won't bat an eye. (this also works for the usual lower bound as well, $10M, but $100M is guaranteed to be included in any of the recently floated wealth taxes).
He's talking about user agent spoofing.
Would you mind stop telling everyone that they don't understand compounding interest?

I've read a lot of comments and your replies and I have noticed a disturbing amount of normal comments being greyed out while you explain to them that they don't understand compounding, because if they did understand it they would be against any form of wealth tax.

Pretty much everyone who owns stocks or invest money, which quite a lot of people do, understand the effects of compounding interest.
Pebbles are hard for me to imagine, instead I think of those coin games at the carnivals where you'd put in one going and a pusher device would then push things off the edge (if you were lucky).
>This was all planned

I generally agree with you on a lot of points, but I felt that this unsubstantiated portion took a lot away from the other parts.
Sure, everybody reducing their meat consumption to their share of what is produced on marginal land would be the optimum, even better than everybody going 100% meatless. How much of the typical meat consumption of a current-day nonvegetarian would that be? 5% perhaps?

And it wouldn't be the same 5% that we see with "almost vegans" today who argue "less but better" to only eat premium cuts while proudly announcing that they avoid all grinder meat. If you want to eat the steak, don't scoff at the sausage.

Back to grazing marginal lands, yeah, I'd also hate to see the animal species that have accompanied us throughout human history go extinct. But we're very far from that.
That's just a generic rant with maybe 2 or 3 actual problems. Overheating and previous generation bad keyboards are obviously not what is supposed to be what you get with the product (the hardware), but things like personal preferences on where buttons are located or a certain redundant field not being in a certain list and then ending it with a 'this must be poor engineering' note is just useless to make a general judgement about.
>The vast majority of beef is not grazed on lands incapable of naturally supporting more intensive forms of agriculture.

The vast majority of beef is grazed on lands incapable of supporting at a sustainable price point more value dense forms of agriculture. If those ranchers could sell you boutique sustainable tomatoes they would do so in a heartbeat (or as fast as they can given the fact that it's basically a career switch).

You get crops like soybeans and corn where the land will support that and less value dense crops (like beef and timber) in places it won't. You can grow other products on cattle grazing land but you won't be price competitive with the farmers on better land. The fact that this land is used for beef instead of some other crop is a reflection of how efficiently we use the better land. As vegetable product fillers make their way into lower and lower end beef products (as price, technology and consumer preference allows) the land used to farm beef will likely shrink from the least viable areas (the areas least suited for beef) with demand and/or be pushed out of the most viable areas (the areas most easily suited to other crops) by more value dense plant crops. Obviously there's some serious switching friction otherwise you'd see this play out with every little change in commodities prices.
NASA Researchers Track Slowly Splitting 'Dent' in Earth’s Magnetic Field
Like the 2 year old zero-day story posted yesterday? And that aside, MS does EOL products.

And if you're frustrated with mouse or video bugs, I'd suggest you stay away from *nix OSes.
> Historically I'd argue most nations could trust the US government only to wield economic sanctions against our adversaries, but the current administration has made all nations our adversary.

https://www.dw.com/de/us-senatoren-drohen-sassnitz-zu-schade...

US senators are threatening sanctions against the German harbor town of Sassnitz https://www.dw.com/de/us-senatoren-drohen-sassnitz-zu-schade... to prevent the nord stream gas pipeline from being built. They’d prefer if germany bought liquefied gas from the US. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, but the threat is a new escalation)
> Some facts are so well stablished in human knowledge that there is not need to cite it.

So, your statement is true because you say that it's common knowledge that it's true?

> Primary and secondary production, is a big fat chapter in any Ecology handbook

OK, then kindly provide one of these ecology handbooks that proves your point

> If nobody is trying to produce a natural sized cow sculpture made of vanille beans, there must be a reason

What do you even mean by this?
There is a VR game by the same name that is absolutely fantastic!
Yeah, like the GP said.. only a few. And I think you have pretty rosy glasses if you think people pay taxes cause they care about their fellow human...

Try explaining this to BILLIONS of people across India and China who are now for the first time in their family's generations being able to afford and access a diversity of protein-based and vegetarian cuisine (available all the time, in and out of what they used to know as the season of availability).

The point is it will take a regulated solution or some sort of new product that creates a serious incentive to adjust mass behavior.
Did you receive the Genius Bar contract and training regarding moonlighting. I doubt it.

> actively hunting down

I realize the article was hugged to death, but once it comes back online you should reread the story, where this is explained as mandatory reporting not active hunting.
Erm, you keep having a panel in the back through which the battery can be easily replaced; users buys a battery - you provided the full specs for to the market to avoid obsolescence, right - and replaces it when you warn "battery should be replaced; do you want to downgrade performance to extend battery life".

Apple are served by keeping a closed ecosystem, making repairs only possible by licensed people, not enabling device longevity but instead fetishising updated hardware.

Society should be punishing this sort of behaviour as it stands firmly against sustainable use of resources.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200818181027/https://lowendmac...
Like a Livescribe pen?
I don't think this would work for me — tracking time spent relaxing feels counterintuitive!

I have some hobbies with intrinsic goals outside work (sport / music) where I want to improve over time but I actively avoid trying to quantise too much & make it a different kind of work.
> Doesn't this assume the owner receives no other income? I assume owners either receive a salary from the company, or are paid a dividend with which they could use to pay the monetary-valued tax.

Not always. To use the extremely adversarial example, Bezos' annual salary is (famously) $82,000, and Amazon pays no dividends because our tax code incentivizes re-investing surplus into R&D rather than enriching shareholders.

The wealth tax, as a result, adds the incentive to increase shareholder dividends and/or inflate executive compensation just for them to be able to maintain ownership in their own companies.
It may be a controversial opinion, but I actually agree.

Languages need a strong direction, with specific goals in mind. Otherwise, they just wind up being a little bit of everything and not really great at anything (or wind up with a dozen duplicate implementations of the same idea).

I don't think Rust should be limited to just a browser engine language though, multiple companies are already looking at it to 1:1 replace some C++ for its security improvements without sacrificing significant runtime performance.