skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on definitions of "good portion" and "top wealthy people", but I don't think the numbers show the conclusions you are drawing from them.

The numbers vary by year as people enter or drop out of the Forbes list. However generally speaking you can probably divide that list into rough thirds. One third is the first generation experiencing any wealth. One third was born into enough wealth that they likely would never have to work a day in their life, except they decided to work and were able to compound that wealth into a obscene amount of money. The last third was already born with that extravagant wealth and may or may not have done anything to increase it.

Back to the topic at hand, a wealth tax would not have prevented those first two-thirds from earning their fortune. It would only negatively impact the starting position of that last third. The primary impact of a wealth tax would be to decrease generational billionaires which serves to increases the meritocracy.
> The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies.

Not at all. The aristocracy was a legally special class of people based on your ancestors. The end of aristocracy, especially in America, meant for a long list of rags-to-riches stories, and lots of politicians who came from very poor beginnings. The end of aristocracy also meant the end of officers being drawn solely from the aristocracy, which made for a far more effective military, as talent was not related to your parents.
If you're in a country with half-decent consumer protections, you ought to be able to return the device, as it no longer functions as sold.
"We will contact affected users shortly and offer..." I'm not sure how I expected this sentence to end, but it certainly wasn't anything as useless as "our deepest apologies".
Rich people building bunkers sounds like a conspiracy theory.

No billionaires are going to go to Mars for the lifestyle. Country estates, super yachts, fur coats and Rolexes on one side, and a plastic bubble habitat and nylon jumpsuit in a freezing airless desert on the other. How many of the elite are really going to go for the second? It just seems like fantastical thinking.
I'm saying that "a local protocol that can function as a networked protocol" isn't always an ideal design decision. We should consider designs that allow different local and remote protocols, and consider the tradeoffs in each space separately.

> Yes, you can use a network protocol to chat between local processes as well as between remote processes. Desirable? It's impossible to avoid...

Using a network protocol to chat between local processes comes with a lot of drawbacks. UNIX local sockets support features like datagrams and FD passing, and of course you can communicate resources in a shared namespace (e.g. a filesystem paths). So limiting yourself to the lowest common denominator of a TCP socket restrains the kinds of tools your protocol can make use of.

> X isn't a remote procedure call system.

It has requests, and it has replies. Xlib will block on a reply by default. That's the building blocks of a classic RPC system. It has all the messiness of distributed systems, but none of the innovations from the past 40 years. Error handling is particularly gnarly in Xlib; since all resources are global, another client can stomp on or delete your window behind your back. You can't be sure of anything before you try, and get an error back. In theory, you can make a lot of requests without blocking, but that's a super annoying process and isn't easy to do in practice; lots of information requires getting a reply back from the server.

> which has nothing to do with X other than being descended from one of the low-bandwidth X extensions

It has a lot to do with X11! It's championed as an example of the success of X11's "network transparency", but instead is very much a custom design suited for the network.
This is known as the Poor Widow fallacy.

edit: https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html

edit: A solution to this problem is to allow seniors to defer payment of the land value tax until the next purchase of the land, at which point the next buyer will receive the deferred tax burden.
Exploiting the weakness of capitalism sounds like a joke, because capitalism is the ideal American claims to be persuing but somehow if China wins, it's exploiting the weakness of capitalism, and if America wins it's another victory of our democracy.
The article mentions many years of tenure. Maybe he was a manager and one of his subordinate got him fired to take his position. That's one way to go up the hierarchy.
This is great advice until Facebook blocks your secondary accounts, which might end up costing you access to any data/saves/content tied to your oculus or whatever linked services. Just look at how much destruction Google causes people and businesses by closing down all of their accounts for even accidental associations with flagged accounts.
> hotspot

hotjava?

I don't know about memory usage, but I was probably running such things on a 48MB Pentium 1 then.
I think you're externalizing "nature", but my guess is that Bateson would include our own biology, impulses, instincts, and cognitive biases in his definition of "nature". We are a flawed biological brain that can also perform some logical computation (in the same way that you can implement a digital computer using analog electronics). The latter often conflicts with the former.
Yeah, I'm not really sure what all the hate is about. MS shipping and updating their browser as an OS component is super reasonable and not unexpected at all.

Like there's plenty of reason to be mad at all the different ways MS pushes Edge in Windows but shipping it with Windows Update would be pretty low on my list.
They left a tiny amount of clay. It’s not some special toxic chemical clay either. It’s literally the same clay people use for face masks.
Pro-immigration Cato Institute is responding to a study from anti-immigration Economic Policy Institute. Cato analyzed data from the Department of Labor and the EPI study, and is making the following arguments:

- 100 percent of H-1B employers offer H‐ 1Bs at least the average prevailing market wage for similar U.S. workers"

- 78 percent of H-1B employers offer wages, on average, above average market wages, 20 percent above

- The lowest skilled H‐ 1Bs were the most likely to receive above market wage offers.

- H-1B employer requests at higher wage levels have doubled since 2010.

- H-1B workers’ median wage was double the U.S. median wage and growing twice as fast as all U.S. wages

These arguments potentially refute the idea that H1B workers are brought in at lower wages.
It’s not very democratic. Someone was in the right place at the right time as much as they earned it, do they then deserve to have basically 100s of orders of magnitude more influence for their life? Just doesn’t add up.
Yes, and that's the mainstream argument.

Yet, Bell Labs weren't the only corporate research lab. And on the big picture, they did disappear at the time that merges become common and most markets turned into monopolies.

This article has a very good argument for why only the market leaders would invest on those labs, and yet they are caused by the enforcement of competition rules.
I find billing hourly makes this easy. Being on salary or working on my own projects makes this quite difficult (understatement).
Are we talking about the same company?

The one whose business idea it is to lock up all the world's information?

The one that, together with Quora and Instagram, shove a login screen in your face when you haplessly click the wrong link? When all you really wanted some some local business opening hours or contact information?

The one that already owns your contact information, and aren't afraid to tell you so, because they tricked any one of your friends into letting their app suck their contact book dry?
I'll say it again: they don't work.

You can't really use them for anything. A polygraph machine might have an application though: doorstop.
>You see Mars is, a priori, just as likely a place for life to start as Earth.

Asserted without evidence, and considerable waving of hands detected.
I've had a Rift for several years now. I haven't had a Facebook account in far longer.

I've also spent a bit of money on Rift games. This is angering.
Longevity Bundling
Voting up because of thought put into this, but I agree with clintfred.

I'd love if you were to put this in a blog post and post it to HN.
Huawei Semiconductor Project to Start from the Root – 45NM Process in Sight
My information on this topic comes from classes, books, scientific papers, and 8 years working in the environmental protection sector. There is a decades-old and growing scientific consensus that we have a multi-dimensional sustainability crisis incoming. And political factors are absolutely a part of this since shortages will happen regionally first and geopolitics will ensure that nations will act in self-interest. Things like the US-MX border wall and Brexit are arguably early impacts of climate change since it can be viewed as a strategic attempt to separate from areas likely to see large numbers of climate refugees in coming decades.
third party cookies allowed means they can follow you around logged in or out. They can also follow you around by your fingerprint (IP+various browser info bits that uniquely identify you)
Writing Excuses - podcast by a bunch of famous authors about writing

Barside Chats - a podcast by two Wheel of Time fans about the books and the upcoming TV series from Amazon Prime

The Moth - Storytellers telling short 5-15 minute stories. Very good!

Our Opinions Are Correct - two Hugo-nominated/winning authors (Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz) talking about sci-fi themes

99% Invisible - about the invisible parts of life... This week's episode is about the increasing number of police on the roads

LeVar Burton Reads - LeVar reads short stories!
IANAL but I don't think that's the test. If a person commits to not doing something as part of a valid contract that's all that matters.

The point you make may be relevant for deciding damages, but even here there is a concept of Liquidated Damages [0] which is essentially the damages amount set at day 1 so the question of ascertaining the extent of wrong does not arise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidated_damages
> Apple is a company, not a sodding religion.

Just like a baseball or soccer club is a company. They can still have fans who keep up with rumors, news and products more than the average.
And it has a simple solution, albeit an unsavory one to many of America's more free-market minded persons: If they are effectively a public space, then nationalize them and make it official.
There's lots of alternatives out there, but the good ones aren't free - ProtonMail is one, FastMail is another. There's others as well, but those are the one's I'd recommend. There's also Hey, but I'm still not sold on that one.
The species may have been different but they were constructed with the same calcium skeletons that are claimed to be much under threat from acid producing C02. Yet they thrived and left fossil remains in environments that were much much much more C02 rich and warmer.
> But did Facebook add any value (i.e. engineering money/hours) to improve the device? What you've listed are all negatives, but there have to be at least a few positives to come out of it.

Can't help but think of this comic: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
Synology DS1815+ with 16 GB RAM, and a DX513 extension cabinet. While early versions were marred by the Intel Atom bug (I had mine replaced under warranty), it has been a solid performer. I backup to an DS1511+ (also with an extension cabinet) hosted at a friend, and host his extra box in return. The management software is very nice, and as it can run Docker, it is straightforward to augment with additional functionality.
I’ve been wanting to buy an Oculus Quest since lockdown started, but I’ve been having trouble finding one in stock for a reasonable price. I guess I’m glad I didn’t succeed in purchasing one, and now I won’t be buying one at all.
Hopefully Palmer Luckey has more foresight into how technology can be used in unintended ways now that he is building autonomous defense and surveillance system at Anduril Industries.
There is a certain irony in the source code for a package manager expecting the key package needed to build that package manager to have been installed by some other package manager.
> This day in age, the expectation, for better or worse, is that the State sponsors research

But the state (at least the US state) has been cutting spending on research over the last several years - and those cuts have accelerated under the current administration which does not seem to understand the value of basic scientific research.
I should be responsible for where I put my money, and to the extent of the support I brought to whatever entity committed something illegal I should be paying for it. Isn't the market supposedly full of rational actors? Those people surely know where not to put their money then, and the others can pay for the mistake. Does that mean a lot less "safe" options are available to people wanting to put their money somewhere? Yes it does, and I would argue that's a benefit to everyone.

The difference between the loan and the investment is that I took a loan because I couldn't afford paying for it cash, otherwise there's no reason I would augment my costs and risks (although you're going to tell me that there are ways to restructure financing to come out on top, which is exactly back to my initial point). I'm basically making a sub-optimal choice that, for a rational actor, implies coercion (i.e. I have to do it in order to get to my job, for example).

Investment is money that I say I have and consciously decide to put into the system in order to make a profit, so the comparison falls flat. Why is it that we should be for example "eco-conscious" when it comes to our consumption (what you eat, what you buy, and so on) and not our investments?

The real bullshit in this system is that we've added layers where we bet on the lack of rationality of the actors while designing systems that have that (broken) assumption baked into it.

The problem is hard because we're being wilfully ignorant, not because it's magically beyond human beings.
Or one of the pioneers, Shock G as Humpty Hump.
I'm curious -- I have a Facebook account, but I have the app platform disabled.

It seems that the app platform may be used for managing logins on third party sites. Are they likely to require it for Oculus devices?
SteamVR/OpenVR. It's fantastic.
What are your thoughts about the new york times covering political issues? What about them endorsing candidates?

What about people writing books about politics?
My point is that there's nothing inherently impossible about a tax based on illiquid, difficult-to-value assets. A tax on wealth > $50M will obviously not be a regressive tax.
There's not too much point in citing this ruling anymore since it would never go this way again. Every non-Windows OS ships with a default browser (including Linux distros!) and locked-down platforms like TVs, DVD players, iOS, consoles, fridges, you can't even install another browser.
NYPD used facial recognition to track down Black Lives Matter activist
I agree with everything you said, but the fact remains that the US constitution defines what the US government can do, and Facebook is not a part of the US government. The first amendment does not have anything to do with the policies Facebook may choose to create and enforce on their private platform.
Self Made is interesting. Does your family background have enough to cushion you if your startup fails.

It costs at least 20k a year to live (rent and food). You can gamble if you have 100k of funding, but that's setting you back a lot on things like 401ks and property ladders. If you have security from your family then shoot for the stars, great.

Same applies in many cases, it's not always as simple as how much wealth has been transferred from one generation to the next.

One example want to get a traditional 'good job' in London, lawyer, jouranalists, finance, etc, you need to take an unpaid internship and low paid start to your career for 5 years, all while maintaining London expenses. If you live with parents in commuterville you can do that, if you 're from Newcastle you're screwed. After 5 years of rent free living with parents you're £60k better off even with no cash injection, that's enough buy a house which means you're paying far less than renting, you start building your wealth.

But taht assumes you get the entry level jobs on merit, and not because of parental contacts, which happens a lot. Work experience at your Dad's squash partner's firm will get you rolling, yet wouldn't factor into your 'self made' list.

No man is an island, no man is self made. Those who 'succeed' do so through grit and luck and are often blind to their own advantages. Those that fail do so despite working hard.

The American dream of 'work hard and be rewarded' is bollocks. So much relies on advantages you don't even realise you've had.
His success was largely as an engineer hacking together prototypes and as a hype man, pulling in the interest of bigger names like John Carmack.
Some time ago I worked on a tool [1] to do just that, unsure if it would still work. I also got lost between feature development and fixes in my git branches at the time, and never had time to finish this. Looks like upstream [2] became active again and merged some of my improvements, unsure if it works with the trove. I was also just made aware of this new project, dedicated to that issue [3]. I'd advise someone to start looking at the last one.

I don't usually do this, but I don't think it is against the TOS, so here is my HB referral link [4] Here's also a 20% discount on the humble store for 30 days for one lucky person who isn't a subscriber [5]

[1] https://github.com/MayeulC/hb-downloader/tree/next-next

[2] https://github.com/talonius/hb-downloader

[3] https://gitlab.com/silver_rust/trove_downloader/

[4] https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription?refc=Y9dywp

[5] https://www.humblebundle.com/subscription/activate-discount?...
They say it's designed to provide significant durability :
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurabili...
(99.999999999% durable over a year per object, and able to sustain data loss in 2 facilities).

Given the peeks that amazon has provided into the scale of S3, I don't know if you CAN 'back it up'.
I expect people to pay for services they utilize to get wealthier.

I am not including myself as any sort of beneficiary in this. Most likely I would be taxed more. So keep your comments about my supposed sense of entitlement to yourself.

In fact, my entire support of a wealth tax IS TO REWARD THE PEOPLE THAT DIDNT GET PAID OUT FOR SAID WEALTH GENERATION.

But sure, compound interest for people that live hand to mouth is a valid strategy. Better than trickle down economics at least.
It's not other people's money, it's the government's money! They printed it.
There are bad 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6)s, it's a tax status and implies nothing around its governance and outcomes.
It's true for a single configuration, but not if you want to bind different keys per program with the "Automatic Game Detection" mode.

I mainly use one profile for games and set any keybinds I need in each one, but I've used automatic game detection for other software like repurposing the DPI adjustment buttons for quick shortcuts to blender's popup radial menus.
I guess I was assuming that if they were to put in a wealth tax, the point would be to tax the very rich more (and thus everyone else less / provide healthcare / some sort of ubi). It could certainly be done in a regressive way, but I don't see that as innevitable or any worse than the status quo, since income taxes can be raised just as easily.

Either way - I think we fundamtally agree that there needs to be more tax on the rich, be it investments, wealth tax, inheritance, or that sort of thing.
Oh, that's a good point, I forgot about those... despite owning quite a few non-voting shares of GOOG.
… What? No, they aren't. https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/ Clearly less than "everything they can".
We have no good evidence or accepted model for how life started, besides "randomness" in a primordial soup, which is as good as "no idea". As such, it seems like a reasonable assumption to explore.
There's usually a catch to these effectively free real estate deals. Like the home is a registered historic site so you're on the hook for tens or hundreds of thousands in maintenance that all has to be approved by some council of greybeards who won't accept anything that isn't made in exactly the same way it was 500 years ago. "These replacement stones were worked with power tools, they've lost their authenticity!"

By the way the land is on a consecrated ancient battlefield/holy site, so you can't put a shovel in it without a full archeological review.
There could be a liability issue here. The customer knew the employee worked at an Apple Store. If the employee offered services to the customer while they were in the store, and something goes wrong, a good lawyer could make a case that Apple was responsible. We do not know where or how the offer of services was made.
It's not a great experience, and it doesn't work at all with everything that uses video acceleration (like a modern browser, and as a corollary all Electron applications).

In contrast Windows RDP protocol works much better, even if it's sending the whole desktop as a video stream, and works even on modest connections (like a 20mbit/s ADSL).

In fact nowadays I would argue that the method used by Xorg is no longer ideal: the commands that needs to be sent between the application and the GPU are too big to be sent on a network connection. Instead we got much better video compression algorithms, so it's better instead of sending on the network the commands to draw the application to just have the server GPU render the application and then send a compressed video stream to the client.
He was also homeschooled, so it's kind of a triple whammy as far as naivety goes
They don't need an excuse to fire anyone, the majority of the US is at-will employment, which means your employer can fire you without cause.

EDIT: What's with the downvotes? it's true.
Jack Boyd retires from NASA after serving continuously since 1947
Thanks for the pointer to meson. Ten minutes into it and it's already far less broken than other build systems I've been test driving recently. I'm sure it will let me down soon, but so far ... :-)

(My reaction to CMake's scripting language was unprintable).
Relevant for who? I will always strive for using the language that fits my needs regardless of what the majority thinks
Without Facebook's capital and Zuckerberg's commitment to VR, I doubt the Quest would exist. That project was announced in 2016 and was likely in development for a couple of years before that. Still it took until mid-2019 to be released to the public. IIRC, Carmack said that development on the Go was started after the Quest, yet the Go went to market a year sooner. I can only imagine what kind of hell it was to get a 2016 phone SoC to do VR with 6DOF inside-out tracking.