skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I recently came across the article by Paul Graham on modelling a wealth tax. Where with simple mathematics of Geometric progression he makes the case against wealth tax because in about 60 years nearly half of your wealth will go to the big bad government.

Well, that would be a red flag in PG's argument already. Who said it's bad for your wealth to go to the govenment (assuming you still have wealth to spare and take care of all your needs and even your grandchildren up to 3-4 generations, as this is about big wealth)?

In a normal country, the governmnet is not some enemy, it's the public pool of resources and planning public goods/policy/infrastructure/protection/etc for a country.

If on the other hand live somewhere where the government is an enemy, then you have bigger problems than part of your wealth going to them, and you should fix those first, not the tax.
Immutability doesn't actually solve much in the way of real-world problems. Most contract lawsuits don't concern accusations of secretly forging altered contracts, or any disparity between copies: they concern interpretations. And if you've ever read a typical boilerplate contract for most any serious transaction, you'll see they cover "if-then" situations about as much as can be reasonably be done.

Explain the mechanism by which a smart contract in this instance would both have made it impossible for Facebook to make this move and, if they did anyway, avoided the necessity of Palmer to sue them over it.
I think he lives in the UK
Does Wealth Tax promote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization
I remember reading in the early iPhone days that Apple recognised virtually no spending on R&D. That wasn’t because they didn’t do research or develop new products, it’s that they simply didn’t see that as separate from their normal day to day operations. I think that’s the same attitude as You’re describing with Elon Musk. It’s all R&D all the time. That’s just how products are developed.

Now it’s different at Apple in that they do recognise a lot if spending on R&D but I think that’s for tax reasons.
> 10 seconds to travel 10 lightyears

You can look at the equations, but you will literally go back in time if you do this. This is simple I believe. Go there, go back, you've gone back in time, up to the SoL time slows then after it reverses. But you can't go 10 seconds to travel 10 light years, speed of light is absolute so no time travel for you.

People believe wormholes are a loop hole because they puncture space or something something Event Horizon.

This I also believe is untrue. Go through a wormhole, either it takes the equivalent of the speed of light to get there for the true distance, or it's not possible to send information through.
Him helping that elderly person undermined Apple's highly engineered brand interaction with that customer. Apple is there to have you bring your computers in to the genius bar and interact with you to build brand loyalty and sell you more things. The customer is then supposed to go tell their friends how wonderful the Apple Store is.

Instead, an Apple employee undermined the precision-crafted brand experience with this customer. Worse yet, if he would have messed up the transfer, he'd be making Apple look really bad when the customer told their friends about how unreliable getting a new Mac going can be due to their experience.

This is possibly their narrative on this issue. Companies like Apple worry endlessly about this, which is how they have earned their reputation with customers.

I can understand a warning or write-up being an educational opportunity for the employee to understand the problem here, but clearly there was no malicious intent here, firing someone over this is really poor management unless they are a repeat offender after a warning.
For context, Plaschke is the senior sports writer for the Los Angeles Times. I have been reading his columns (mainly Dodgers coverage) off and on for at least 20 years. So my subjective experience was that this definitely felt like someone I “knew” as opposed to a random journalist. Also this is the only time I recall him writing about a topic other than sports

This part hit me especially hard as it describes one of my fears:

“I wore a mask everywhere. I followed all the rules, but a couple of weeks ago I didn’t follow my instincts. I briefly let my guard down. The coronavirus came out swinging.”
I would also note (generally I'm a fan of PG's writing, but as an economist this one was pretty juvenile), while PG implemented a basic cost calculation on wealth with an assumption of no growth, aside from not including growth/returns on his wealth, nowhere did he model the benefits received, either to himself or others, from the revenue apportioned from the taxation.

That's why its called cost/BENEFIT analysis...
> I see most those people who would have been millionaires anywhere they moved to (e.g. top 10% Harvard law grad)...NYC has jobs, but it needs talented people.

This is kind of my point (and, I assume, the OP's): most of those people move to the city to become millionaires, not because they already are millionaires and prefer to live in the city.

In that regard, cities do sort of spontaneously generate millionaires in that most wealth is produced there and not (there's probably a better way to phrase this) imported.
Aww, thank you.

FYI it was very little effort. You can do it too! I followed two links to the paper, looked for "how did they test this thing" (because I was skeptical about that bit), then skimmed the three paragraphs in section 4 "Feasibility Study". I'm hoping that people that care more than I do will read more.
That wouldn't work. Modern chips need to be built on epitaxial surfaces, and the only plane they can reliably produce an epitaxial surface on is the horizontal one.
Third, the market is (with exceptions) global. If Google moves its headquarters to Toronto, that doesn’t open up an opportunity for a new American search engine.
Governments have killed more people than anyone else in the 20th century.

What are your thoughts on the wars the US is currently fighting?

Why not pool all resources, and let there government handle everything?
Some feedback for the author - including statements like "Or how not to be stupid", "half of your wealth will go to the big bad government", "moronically ignorant of basic economics" and "apocalypse hasn't happened" really detracts from their arguments and makes it seem like more of an angry screed rather than a well thought out argument.

It would have been a fine article without the childish attacks.
Dark money finishes it's journey in the form of ad buys. That seems to be the point where news orgs lose interest in covering it.
Thorium plants also have the unfortunate characteristic of not existing in deployable commercial form (and only very barely in experimental form).
Thanks. I'm wondering specifically in terms of compensation. The reason we are looking for a technical cofounder over hiring developers directly is to have someone who is a co-owner of the business, aligning their interests with ours and allowing us to budget funding for employees and marketing.
I played through a few of the scenarios, this is quite interesting.

The failure states seem quite harsh though when I'm trying to explore the paths. For example, while playing through the "How a Bill Becomes a Law" example, if I make the mistake of introducing the bill to the house before a committee, I get a warning "WHAT BILL ARE YOU INTRODUCING? What could you possibly be introducing?". The all caps part is a font choice, so it doesn't look like users could disable it which might scare some players. I would have expected a much calmer explanation of the problem.

The other thing I would have liked is an easy link to a study guide or external resources. I know the whole point is to learn by exploring the decision tree, but I would have liked to stop and read more about what a committee is, or to learn what a "rule" is that I'm assigning to a bill (I still don't know). It seems like it's easy to get a rough overview of a process, but not to dive deeper than that.
I’m not so familiar with all of the programs, but the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan program is probably what I was looking at
Is there a dialect of BASIC that has scoping/namespaces or even locals?
Class action lawsuit ending in a $20 coupon for next Oculus purchase.
Yeah that's why you make friends with a recruiter who works with your own company.

They'll happily give you $5-15k of their cut, and you get to hire your friend.
To be fair, there isnt much content to this post other than an inflammatory remark ("he is almost moronically ignorant of basic economics") and some graphs which can be summarized by "tax rate is offset by growth rate". What would be more useful would be some discussion of the research about how this has played out in France, Switzerland, etc.
Having collective resources doesn't imply killing people, war, or collectivizing everything.

Maybe it could fund the 2008 and 2020 corporate socialism
I pay far more in taxes than the benefits in receive; clearly that is the case for most that are paying; if you factor in the debt and inflation it's even worse.
I'm sure you can run Apache or nginx on the pi zero w on this and communicate with a walking robotic teapot.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/robotic-teapot/
Will we get a pay cut?
My suggestion is not to quit but to ask for a 3 months no-pay leave (LOA). Firstly, take care of your body and mind by taking a break. Then take the time to figure out what exactly you want to do including your startup ideas. Please note that GOOG policy on LOA may restrict on what you can work on publicly.
Isn't he always on the lookout for older civilizations?
Yes, I think that is a risk in the absence of a true "Proof of Deletion". Perhaps though it would be so expensive to maintain a copy of all this data that no one is paying you for that nodes would be incentivized to just perform the actual deletion, since the rewards of keeping the data are unknown and the time horizon for maintaining that data at your own expense is unknown.
Well, sure. I mean, a valid reason to not use boring technologies is because you're bored with them. Devs need to grow and be challenged, or you're going to lose them. That's where management makes its error; they'll pick technologies based on what is popular ('easy to hire for'), or currently in use, or they used in a former life, and miss that none of those equate to good problem domain fit, dev engagement/challenge/growth, ability to attract talent (i.e., jobs offering Java vs Kotlin vs Scala vs Clojure, will attract different types of people, despite all being JVM languages), etc

Where devs make their error is, if they're junior, likely missing the technical tradeoffs (yes, other tech may be better for X, but it's also worse for Y), and if they're senior, likely missing the organizational ones (i.e., do other teams want to learn it, does devops/QA/etc have to do anything, what's the ramp up time, will the proposed productivity gains offset that, etc)
>> It would have been a fine article without the childish attacks

But probably wouldn't have got the same number of readers ;)

Edit: I thought the <sarcasm> tag was not necessary, but apparently it is.
Ok, many problems with this article. First the main theme is just wrong. It is quite a stretch to say that ruling minimal flat fee schedules illegal led to the billable hour. Flat fees are still legal and many lawyers use them. It is only illegal to have the bar association set minimums.

The article is also not quite correct to imply that the billable hour causes more misery than flat fees. If you have flat fees the partner will make the most money by forcing an associate to the largest number of flat fee assignments possible and that would still result in overwork. There are other worse problems with flat fee arrangements. In a flat fee situation you get paid the same regardless of how much work you put in, so there is incentive to finish the task with minimum amount of work. But if you are a perfectionist and/or a lawyer that takes pride in his work, you will spend extra time to do the job right when it requires it. And that will make your life extra miserable because the partner expects you to finish a certain number of tasks regardless.

So the problem is not billable hours or flat fees, the problem is that the partner makes money from associates labor and wants to squeeze out as much labor as possible. This is an issue in many careers of course, but it is somehow worse in law.

And yes, I have worked in top law firms (if you haven't noticed by the bitterness) and have worked both for billable hour and for some flat fee arrangements. I much preferred the billable hour stuff. If you are in a top firm you can just assume you will get the more difficult assignments so you shouldn't be taking flat fees.
Mutton Karhai – karahi mutton – karahi gosht – mutton karahi restaurant style
Sounds like you're comparing dense areas with lockdowns to less dense areas with little or no lockdowns. Because churches would obviously cease to be a factor if they implemented the same restrictions as done in NYC.
TL;DR: He had a fever and cough and is fine now.
Note that the ipy notebook is not rendered on mobile AFAICT. Switch to "desktop site" if you're having trouble.
Isn’t 2% just the inflation? So back to the Paul’s model if you take account of it.
Sure, but Paul Graham had the same chance to do that analysis. Instead, he opted for 500 words and a chart that can be summarized as "wealth taxes compound annually".
At some point, it may be possible to leverage this, but I agree: at present, it's a purely theoretical compromise, and you'd be better served by either picking the lock -- which might be as simple as just raking some pins -- or by re-creating the key from an image[1].

The image attack offers way more opportunities there, as you just need to be able to see the key (as opposed to the hypothetical sound attack, which requires that you capture the sound of the lock being unlocked).

As an aside, If you're keen to learn more about locks and security, I suggest having a look at LockPickingLawyer on YouTube[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AayXf5aRFTI
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ
Isn't this analysis orthogonal to pg's claim that the wealth tax is taking away X% of your startup equity?

Yes, if your startup is growing by 10% YoY your wealth is still going up even under the tax. However instead of you owning A% at the end, you only own <<A% because you've been selling equity every year to pay the government. Just look at your first plot between 1% and 3% tax. A delta of 2% tax results in losing 70% of your value.

Your post seems to suggest the idea "Since you're making so much anyway it's ok to take away most of it." Though of course there is a balance, I think this kind of trade would greatly reduce risk-taking and entrepreneurship.
It looks like this model doesn't account for the fact that when you pay a wealth tax, you have to liquidate cash — and doing so will generally trigger taxable gains (which could be taxed at close to 50%, between state and federal taxes).

As a result, you have to gross up the cash liquidation amount to cover the income taxes that will be owed, and this can substantially increase the amount you need to liquidate. For example, if you need $100,000 to pay for your wealth tax, you might need to liquidate $181,000 to end up with this amount after taxes (assuming a 45% combined rate). You can get lower rates with qualified dividends or capital gains, but I imagine if there is the political will to enact a wealth tax, the capital gains rates will rise up to be the same as wage rates.

As you can see, accounting for income taxes can nearly double the required liquidation. Perhaps I missed it, but it would be interesting to see how this affects the model.
God forbid we show any kindness to people with attention deficits.
I have a hard time believing Edge is any more private then Chrome, it's just a question of who gets the data.

I'd love to be proved wrong on this though.
Was there any doubt that this would happen? I mean, it's always the same game: naïve developers with an outstanding product, huge company willing to buy-out technology while lying through their teeth making promises. It's Edison scams Nikola Tesla all over again. I'm baffled that technology pioneers and makers make the same naïve mistakes again and again for over 2 centuries now.

I'm sorry for the following statement.
Deal with it. You want shiny new products and technology. You develop new magical technology. You write insightful and groundbreaking scientific papers. Why are you dependent on investors, publishers and giant tech-firms? They exist because of you, because you need them. And they know that. So, please, rid yourself of the illusion that your product/paper can only survive if you give it away to someone with power and influence. You give away power, for money, that's why Facebook, Apple, Google got so powerful in the first place. It's your fault. Deal with it, you can do better than that.
That's closer to what I've done, but in practice that also lowers the value of the company. There is a sweet spot you have to hit of giving up control. Just because you ask for something doesn't mean you will get it. In fact, you normally don't have the advantage in these types of sales, so you don't get to specify these things.
>> nowhere did he model the benefits received, either to himself or others

Fair point about others, however with regards to themselves, I believe you missed the point of PGs article. Without the extra wealth tax they would have almost certainty been better off because they can choose how to benefit from that money.

Regarding others, I believe the onus should lie on the government before implementing the tax to show that everyone - including people paying the tax - will be better off because of the benefits from the wealth tax to others. Given how (in) efficient government can be in spending tax money, it's not an unfair expectation to have.
I suppose if your theory was that god created life that would definitely make Mars just as likely a starting place, or if the theory is that life actually came from some meteorite impact, but most theories for life's origins do not seem to favor Mars.

I mean when you say theoretically and then make a big not necessarily obvious statement you should actually point out which theory you're using.
About the only person that has the authority is Linus because we all know he is tongue-in-cheek. :)

This on the other hand is uncalled for and unnecessary. The analysis stands on its own by just saying "Paul Graham is wrong about this."
> TL;DR: He had a fever and cough and is fine now.

"I lost my sense of taste, smell, and five pounds in the first four days."
Jte 1.0
Hey everyone! Due to my frustration with JSP at work, I've written jte during lockdown - a small template engine that gets out of the way as much as possible. Frontend can write plain HTML to display stuff and use plain Java to receive data from the backend. At the same time the jte compiler understands HTML and does context-sensitive output escaping at compile time. jte also has full IntelliJ support for code suggestions, refactorings and highlighting. Unlike JSP, the jte plugin does not require the Ultimate Edition!

Any Java folks around? I’d love to hear what you think about it :-)
This is utterly terrifying, I barely go out but to know someone following all the precautions could still get it freaks me out so much. Every allergy attack I've gotten throughout the summer has plunged me into fear I've got it, or every slight cough.

Honestly I was starting to think the dread of the virus was worse than the virus itself, but the more articles like this I see the more I realize it isn't.

Has anyone here had it? Especially as a younger person I read the advice saying things like "the risk is low" but I'm terrified of having to face this.
Who says horizon won’t get released? Also Carmack is one person. You’re judging a product due to one person leaving?
Yes and no. Alone you could never afford the defense of the US military. You could never afford even a single nuclear warhead or a single aircraft carrier.

So while you can exceed your specific benefits in local government, the reality is that the pooling of resources does in fact provide you with much more than you could afford alone.
Especially considering that VR devices film your whole room constantly, I think I will never connect my Rift again.
He ran a sustained 102 F fever, had chills so bad he chipped a tooth, lost two of senses, and shed a pound a day for several days. And his case was mild.
Perhaps it also went like this:

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
See also the older blog post about the OpenGL/Metal backend at https://blog.tensorflow.org/2019/01/tensorflow-lite-now-fast...

Would be interesting to see updated graphs about iOS vs Android that the OpenGL post had.
Hypothetically, let's suppose I wholly own a small business. Maybe it's a SaaS. Maybe it's a restaurant. Maybe it's a plumbing contracting company. Doesn't matter.

Let's say the business generates $1M/year in free cash flows.

Give me a number: What's my net worth? How much wealth tax should I be asked to pay?

(With income tax it's relatively straightforward: you're taxing actual transfers of cash or cash-equivalents from account A to account B that happened in time period Y. If the societal goal is to achieve more progressive redistribution of wealth, isn't it much simpler to just modify the income tax brackets and rates?)
I’m guessing the upside is that if you ever lose your password there’s an actual account recovery flow based on identity verification.
Well he had a "bad" fever and cough.

Fever and cough range from so mild you dont notice to so bad it kills you. I dont think summarizing it as just a fever and cough is meaningful.
Articles like this don’t take into account the bigger perspective. They are all very anecdotal. In the same way, I can tell you that I know many people who got it and experienced none of these very unpleasant symptoms.
I believe that GP was referring to buyer's brokers. In their case, if the client pays more, their commission grows. Furthermore, if they can close quickly, by making a higher offer or purchasing something that isn't quite the right deal, the buyer's agent increases volume, leading to the same effect.
> Well, that would be a red flag in PG's argument already. Who said it's bad for your wealth to go to the govenment

PG didn't say it was bad. That was a motive imputed erroneously by this author. He simply provided a model of how much it would cost, and what people might do in response to that cost.
Which are all common results of the flu, and other diseases. (Losing the ability to smell is what causes losing taste.)
Good ol’ cable dying a slow painful death.
Here's a taste at least[1]. You have both a former VP and the US military warning of climate influenced political instability. These ideas are definitely out there and circulating as part of the decision making process on things like homeland security. Books are written[2] and think tanks produce analyses[3]. Not everyone in our governments have goldfish attention spans and their information sources go beyond news-entertainment. I would never claim this is the only factor, but the ideas are out there and taken seriously.

[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/brexit-climate-cha...

[2]https://www.amazon.com/Storming-Wall-Migration-Homeland-Secu...

[3]http://www.ourenergypolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Is...