skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What frustrates me about this whole argument over wealth taxes is that the arguments aren't grounded in facts.

You say this, yet you don't provide a single citation for any of your arguments.

> There is a very strong case that one reason for sluggish economic growth is the concentration of assets and wealth in so few hands, and the continuing stagnation/decline in wealth/living standards/etc of bottom 40% of the US when measured in things like "healthcare", "education" etc. A redistributive wealth tax that was well structured could be a huge boon to GDP growth.

This seems plausible, but not self-evident. Give us evidence.
Moot might have been a millionaire after selling it, but it never sounded like 4chan was making him money. He was still living with his parents, and paying for the lawsuits was very expensive.
I think I was underestimating how much energy could be lost to x-rays on some of those. D2-He3, the aneutronic fusion everyone likes to talk about is still over 80% efficient but H1-B looks really bad if you're not driving a heat engine with it.
I'm not the one you're asking. But here's my take:

To some degree, wealth taxes break down the idea of private property ownership. "Your right of ownership is secured by law, but if you own too much, we'll take some of it away." I know that's not the way it's sold. But that is one aspect of the reality of it. I am in favor of the continued existence of private property rights, and for that reason I don't like a wealth tax.

Also, such things tend to grow with time. You're going to tax those with more than a billion dollars? Seems OK, no relevance to me, and those people can afford it. You need more money this year, and you're going to tax those with more than 10 million? Well, I don't have that, either, but it's getting closer. Need still more money, and so you're moving it to a million? I might, by then, especially if inflation kicks back up.

On the other hand, you could make a reasonable case that the existence of a wealth disparity of the magnitude that exists today is a threat to our society, especially if it can be inherited.

So I lean against a wealth tax, but I can also see reasons for it...
For me it comes down to a few things.

- I think wealth can be created and isn't always a zero sum transfer

- I think we want to incentivize wealth creation

- I think economic growth constrained by protection for human rights and environmental destruction is the best way to improve the quality of life for the most people the fastest.

- I think wealth taxes disincentivize a lot of these things with knock on effects (forcing people to liquidate their company equity, etc.). It's also repeatedly taxing the same money every year eventually down to whatever the cap is.

I'd rather set taxes/caps at generational wealth transfer if you're going to try and incentivize something - might as well go after dynastic wealth and the children that benefit from it without creating anything. I think focusing on housing and land use/zoning would also directly benefit more people by fixing existing perverse incentives.

PG writes about some of this in essays, Tyler Cowen's book Stubborn Attachments was also interesting on the growth aspect (though wealth taxes aren't specifically mentioned).

Why do we think wealth will be better allocated by a government? This money is largely already taxed either via capital gains or income. I'd suspect a lot of our problems are problems of incentives and competing priorities, not of available cash flow for government programs.

That's my take anyway, I suspect a 'hate the rich' motivated reasoning position pushing the idea of a wealth tax more than any serious thinking about incentives and what it might do. It seems political.

(I am nowhere near the level where the proposed tax would start and probably never will be.)
I was posting a tangent. It resonated, but it's probably a mistake that this is the top comment since I'm not talking about the article specifically, just how wealth is taxed and a way in which the public debate is misinformed.
This is the point. Any review process that's sufficiently mechanical to be duplicated at scale becomes a box-[ticking|checking] exercise with little actual value. E.g. you can verify that backups are made and can be restored but how do you find mission critical data that isn't subject to backup?
But this is a tool for development. So if you're loading up a site for development, don't you work on that site and can control the Same-Origin policy?
Time to open-source the news.
Perhaps. But masks are most effective on preventing someone contagious from infecting others and only secondarily in preventing you from being infected. As a result, you may find the risks are higher on airlines that are less strict than Emirates.
Let's see if NSA stops the surveillance then:

U.S. court: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal (reuters.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362047
The second fridge (freezer?) fully stocked with ice cream is.
Not mentioned is anything from media not owned by the wealthy. Who would that be? NPR, AP? The Financial Times' take on a wealth tax seems measured: https://www.ft.com/content/0bab153a-026b-11ea-b7bc-f3fa4e77d...
Also called "American dream".
> there was a counterbalance between big tech and the NSA that is now gone.

What?!?! Big tech was the primary facilitator of NSA surveillance through PRISM, they worked together to spy on billions of people. The idea that the general public benefited from this relationship is laughable.

> I'd speculate that Snowden singlehandedly added trillions in value to big tech.

Care to elaborate on this? How did Snowden add trillions in value to the companies that enabled the NSA to spy on everyone?
It's definitely a useless argument for a fairly lazy article. I don't disagree that the articles they link have weak arguments, but why not actually cite economic policy experts and economists that agree with wealth inequality? The lack of attention to such viewpoints, if their claim holds true, would better indicate media bias than them publishing weak op-eds.
In the US income tax rarely changes. But tax deductions are fair game and change year to year and administration to administration. Last year, Trump bragged about lowering taxes. He lowered it by increasing the standard deduction for some. But it increased for others, such as myself, who take advantage of other deductions that were cut back or removed.
It's a public institution. It's not "their" data. It's their shareholder's data-- the public.

Whether or not trusting the judgement of administrators over the judgement of law enforcement is the best way to handle these situations is an open question.

I'm not sure I trust public university administrators to do much beyond stimulate the local construction economy and wider investment banking industry.
Similar experience here. Although, the adderall always comes with this hard edge, which is enjoyably absent with microdosing. I know quite a few people who have stopped taking adderall because of the mood swings and increase in irritability / aggression, that would have benefited from having this as an alternative.
Product Qualified Leads (PQLs): Another way to use your data to generate revenue
Let's look at jeff bezos for example. He sells over a billion dollars worth of amazon stock each year [0] (those numbers have increased slightly since then actually).

Fine, he pays some of that to the government, and maybe sells slightly more. I don't see the problem.

If, in fact, your wealth only comes from ownership in a company and you have no other source of wealth, then yes you would be encourages to sell your shares to pay the wealth tax.

I don't see why this is a problem. That's kinda the point of a wealth tax, that yes you do get taxed on your wealth.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-bezos/bezos-is-sell...
You take for granted that private property and capital accumulation is inherently "fair".

Many people do, it is the organizing principle of most modern civilization after all but that does not mean it is indeed inherently "fair" or "good".
Indeed. One might even argue that the right solution is "Don't make it illegal."
I don't think anyone on HN that regularly uses CUDA would call graphics compute ergonomic, and I often see complaints about it. I also see graphics programmers using CUDA complain about graphics interop (although Opti-X seems pretty good), so it might be the result of different use cases, rather than anything better or worse about either model.
Hi, blog post author here. The idea behind effects in Nickel is to have very limited, use-case specific effects that can extend the standard interpreter. The goal is, as the example suggest, to make it able to interoperate with an external tool when absolutely necessary, such as Terraform or Nix. The idea is really not to have general effectful functions such as readFile or launchMissiles.
They announced in-app purchases a few hours ago: https://www.reuters.com/article/facebook-whatsapp-ecommerce-...
Civil liberties are liberties that you have from the government. That is, things that the government ought to allow you to do. So debates over whether suchandsuch interpersonal practice is polite just aren't issues of civil liberties, even if the people discussing such practices have related civil rights concerns. (It'd make perfect sense, for example, if the ACLU said that you ought to be able to put whatever letter you'd like in the "gender" field of your driver's license.)
This is the relevant passage:

> Nickel permits side-effects, but they are heavily constrained: they must be commutative, a property which makes them not hurting parallelizability. They are extensible, meaning that third-party may define new effects and implement externally the associated effect handlers in order to customize Nickel for specific use-cases.

This answers your question about why Nickel is preferable to general purpose programming languages--the side-effects are more limited. Further, it reads to me like the "side-effects" are something that the owner of the runtime opts into by extending the sandbox with callables that can do side-effects as opposed to untrusted code being able to perform side-effects in any Nickel sandbox.
say you had a 100m in stock. did nothing but borrow against it until you die. how much tax would you pay. as long as you borrow less than your stock appreciates.
> we've all been here before and it's very very hard, at the very least, get some IHVs or at least a team that does port work / emulation tech on board
Because a business cannot ask for private data in exchange for an unrelated service. The service has to be rendered even in the user does not give them. It can only be part of a contract for which they are necessary
So tired of reading this quote every time taxes come up like it's some profound statement. I see it so often to ridicule "silly poor people voting for lower taxes".

It's possible for someone to think that it's unfair for some people to pay a huge amount of taxes unfairly, without they themselves thinking "one day I'll be rich".
Compile Elixir applications into single executable binaries, with Bakeware
Arguably, that itself can be a sign that income inequality is far too high, as 50% of the population doesn't earn enough to pay meaningful amounts of federal tax.
There are also many who approve of a higher income tax (and capital gains) for the wealthy, but reject a wealth tax.
If the US Government were a charity, the rating would be 0-stars. Nearly all tax money is pocketed by special interests. The usual arguments "yeah what about fire and police" account for a rounding error in tax collection while the vast majority is simply pocketed by friends of your elected officials.

You know what'd be nice? Consent. I'd like to be consented before my value is forceful removed from me. I'd like to pick an efficient charity to give this money to.
"contributing fairly" sounds good but is meaningless. There are too many competing definitions of "fair."
There's no reason to believe Snowden or Assange have dirt on high level people that they've been sitting on. Why wouldn't they have released it already?
Wealth taxes that are too high in relation to peers (other countries/states) will often lead to brain drain, capital flight and others. From an individual's perspective, many will see it as a disincentive in starting something new, you may also be incentivized to borrow more money to ensure the leverage is high enough to limit taxation and optimize current quality of life. Your decision to leave assets for your next of kin can also become distorted and you may feel encouraged to spend the money now (on them and otherwise) as opposed to getting tax fleeced.

Many other things need to be in place and fully functional for a high wealth tax to work and even then, it is likely to work for a 10 to 30 year period, only to serve as a dragging anchor at a later stage. I would argue that many of the challenges in Europe from a technological innovation standpoint, can be partially derived in high taxation.

It is also difficult to determine what is the right amount of taxation while taking into account the importance of incentive mechanisms. Also, at what point do tax hikes stop?

Some of the key real solutions to many of societies challenges is to have its populace be more active in all of its inner working, helping them to better understand the constraints and opportunities as opposed to being a bunch of people getting of top of their little soap box. There is also a major need for strong reforms to tackle nepotism, corruption and laziness at all levels of society.
> we have to stop making it illegal to build enough homes for people that need them

There's already enough homes (in the USA, at least) to house all the homeless people in the country. Unfortunately, giving homes away wouldn't be profitable, and profit is all that seems to matter.
>And especially investors have a case that higher corporate taxes reduce the value of their investments, possibly to the point of not making them.

I know you aren't arguing against higher taxes, but my response to that is... and? Does Target benefit more from some random hedge fund buying up $20 million of their shares? Or from consumers buying $20 million in goods from them? Once a company has gone public, unless they're trying to do another round of funding, the share price is almost meaningless beyond the ghost of being taken over by another entity.

This belief that institutional investors mean more to the health of a business than ACTUAL SALES is baffling to me (not saying that's your stance).
I work a little on nanos..it clearly needs alot of usability work, stability, and feature work. but could you say explicitly what you mean by 'self service'?
It's not clear from the docs whether any Nickel program can perform side-effects or if the Nickel interpreter must be extended to allow programs to perform side-effects (a la Starlark). Can you clarify this point?
You can do many linear algebra operations on the adjacency matrix. It's a proper matrix, in the full sense, not just a table of numbers.
NPR? It's a non-profit.
My favorite tool: http://ami.responsivedesign.is/
I generally try to design APIs from a consumer perspective, and then usually I end up with something RESTful. Let the server do whatever it has to do, you know?
And the Court never had occasion to rule whether that was sufficient because nobody after Ford tried to have him tried for his crimes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcYeQxSFa8Y Terry Bush is asking: 'do you know what you're doing? - you should know just what you do, watch out, you might be dying!'
No one has mentioned that wealth taxes that have been tried before in other developed countries have not gone well, so based on that alone I'm skeptical. And I heard about this from Planet Money (NPR) so I don't think this is some idea planted in my head by "media owned by wealthy".
That's why I'm getting Apple Music promotions when trying to listen to my locally saved music in Music app? Apple is not as annoying as other vendors, that's for sure, but they're not innocent and they certainly trying to sell some services as well.
> This is good for the economy.

Not at all clear to me this is the case.
Applications built on pretrained bert don't necessarily need huge scale
I think this could be generalized to "amplifiers for everyone". There's just no barrier of entry left, except time and effort, to get your message out to millions of people.
Portland could do with a little more excessive force
I chuckled at "be specific" when it asked for issues you ran into when first starting to use Emacs. Whatever it was that led me to use XEmacs for a couple years at first is both completely out of my head and certainly irrelevant to people today. (I think it was something to do with OOTB integration with whatever print spooler I had configured!)
Fair, but that's a weak stance. We should debate the consequences, implementation, and rationale of wealth taxes, not ascribe motivations to their supporters/dissenters.
Can someone parse this statement from the abstract for me?

"Second, consistent across countries, exposure to health risks is associated with citizens’ greater willingness to trade off civil liberties, though individuals who are more economically disadvantaged are less willing to do so."
It is typical of Americans because most of their families came to the country with the allure of becoming wealthy. So it was important for them to tell themselves this story.
Really the main issue with the referendum is that it was treated as the worst possible set of constraints - going on a fixed conclusion with no implementation details.

The only thing it produces reliably is dogma and absurdities because it is insensitive to all input conditions. A proper "referendum" would produce a stack of plans to be voted upon. Instead the result is an incoherent demand is to spin straw into gold because mining for gold is too dirty. Even ignoring how they expect the rest of the world to give them better deals by being more selfish and with less leverage they expect an impossible border which neither divides Ireland nor limits freedom of movement within the UK nor ceding any territory. So they just have a buck passing contest instead.
> all surviving monotremes live in and around the water

Wait, what? The surviving monotremes are the platypus and several species of echidna. The echidnas are woodland animals without any particular aquatic adaptations.
And covectors 1xN matrices?
As Edmund Burke put it, "Those who attempt to level, never equalize."
Not really, they look like an asylum for criminals, actually. It's also the logical place that people think trump will flee to after he loses the election, because he is as corrupt as they come, and russia will welcome him with open arms. Not exactly a good look for russia.
VP of Site Reliability Opening at Google
What about the fact that those homes are not equally distributed geographically? There are reasons people prefer to live near their families, workplaces, places with good weather, etc.
MuWire (anonymous file sharing app) adds machine learning
Absolutely. I been thinking not so much about doing it, but how mechanic of OnlyFans is really useful for more then just porn. You can find my details in profile if you want to continue chatting about it. I feel like there is potential to do things in that space and it is fairly obvious to just go and pay for more information, as this pay would not be huge.
I wish they would do that when deporting people.

It's bad enough having your life upended. Sometimes sent to a country where you have never been and knowing nobody.

Or more mildly, and getting more common, just stuck in a country and wanting to go home, but overstaying a visa because you feel there is no safe way to travel home at the moment.

Now imagine being forced to face catching Covid on the flight if you know you're in a high risk category (eg. asthma) but the officials do not care.

Some people would give anything to be able to take that "low frequency special flight" you've described.
> That's spending 42% of take home pay to have roommates!

So, probably not affected much by a wealth tax.

> $400k per year is about what it takes to run a middle class family w/ 2 kids in such a city.

What? The median household income in NYC is about $63k.
> Doesn't everyone?

God I hope not. How empty would we all be if we all wanted to have more money than the next guy.
Interesting. This also implies a shift from financial capital (VCs, hedge funds, private equity) to production capital (reinvested profits) when corporate tax rates go up. In the Carlota Perez model, this is the shift from the "frenzy" phase (of huge valuations, founders entering and exiting startups, bubble mentality) to the "deployment" phase (where the technology diffuses through the economy and is adopted as part of the fabric of many companies). I never thought of tax policy as helping drive that, but it seems to correspond pretty well.

My other big question is how this interacts with monetary policy. Inflation tends to preference financial capital by a.) lowering the real cost of outside credit and b.) causing dislocations within the economy that create opportunities for new startups. That could offset higher corporate taxes to some extent, while if combined with low corporate taxes it could spark a mania.
>Almost nobody who went through the educational system in the last decade is even voting.

Do I need more proof that defunding education was a bad thing?
Yes, they also get location (coarse or fine), media type (text chat, voice or video call), duration, any attachments sent (probably including file type, name and size, and frequency of contact, - all timestamped as you say.
As it happens, I moved from Ansible to Chef not too long ago as my provisioner of choice.

It can be used with just SSH and Chef Zero (no need for a Chef Server), and it's built with Ruby and Chef's DSL and not YAML.

It took me several years to not hate Chef's approach, though, compared to the ease of use of Ansible.
I doubt the establishment's dimentia riddled puppet will take any dramatic actions in the name of freedom.
Her name might be best known from the eponymous college, perhaps without knowing the connexion: https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/about-somerville/history/

Its alumna Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin is particularly relevant in the context. (I recall when she died the obituary was quickly pushed off BBC news by the death of some actor/actress; sigh.) "... live simply and do serious things." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Hodgkin
Just delete all your social media already. It is cancer
If we tax wealth, people will be incentivized to generate non-wealth things.

Why buy a stock if Biden will take 1% of it annually? May as well just buy rapidly depreciating status symbols instead.
> They can absolutely have meanings assigned outside the usual "when multiplied by a vector" type of calculations. For example the "adjacency matrix" representation of a graph is very often never multiplied by a vector even in academic algorithm descriptions.

Not disputing your basic point, but I'm not sure "very often never" is entirely accurate. In the GraphBLAS API vector/matrix and matrix/vector multiplication is key for almost all algorithms that depend on breadth first search, this is because matrix/vector multiplication is a single step in a BFS which is the core operation of the GraphBLAS. The vector is typically used to hold the current frontier (and mask). See the "Shortest Path Lengths" example here:

https://github.com/michelp/pygraphblas/blob/master/pygraphbl...

(disclosure, I am the pygraphblas author).

> Purist test: aren't vectors just Nx1 matrices?

I like it. :) As an interesting point, the GraphBLAS defines both Matrix and Vector types, but internally in the SuiteSparse implementation, they are all just unified into one type and yes, vectors are Nx1 or 1xN.