skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are already lots of tracking to prove/disprove 183 days, as it would already dictate which state is entitled to tax more/first.

E.g. people who commute between NJ and NY or somehow do their work in both often have to justify to one (or both) state why they shouldn’t be taxed there.
Why do we (the FDA) have such strict standards for drugs but not for surgeries?
> Capitalism means capital that earns for you while you sleep.

That's a big assumption. Not all capital earns for you while you sleep.

> Those who benefit the most from the system should pay for it.

That's also a big assumption. Just because one has capital does not mean they're benefiting from the regime they're currently under.
Huh interesting, didn't know about George's tax system. Sounds intriguing and would solve some real problems.

As for losing money, yeah in that scenario it's worse. The dutch system sounds better in the regard that it only taxes gains, but of course you'd here have issues as well with volatile valuations where you have gains in one year and losses in the next.

Regarding your potential loss scenario, hypothetically if you've owned 100 million one year and then over the course of 3 years it went down to just 1 million. Wouldn't it be beneficial for society had you contributed a little piece of those 100 million to society when you still had it? Other than you just holding onto it, benefitting nobody, not even you, as you lost it :). In the scenario where your money is stable or increases in value, this is no issue.

That being said, I'm not the greatest fan of estate taxes. My main issue with them is that they basically force you to have some degree of returns otherwise your money disappears, which is IMO kinda sad as it encourages people to invest in even greedier ways. You can e.g. buy a rental property and come up with shitty reasons to evict the tenants. Or you can buy it and keep them around for as long as they live.
Seems like very typical behavior for university and hospital administrators.
I think it's pretty simple: the potential revenue loss to Facebook is much larger than the expected costs of cleaning up a PR mess.

And I'm sure they're right. It's important to remember that Facebook can precisely measure the impact of news articles like this. And even without messing with the newsfeed algorithms, they have way more influence over consumer perception of Facebook than a few news articles do. For example, they could introduce some new "privacy" feature and talk it up in in-app notifications. Or they have you review your privacy settings, something most people will glance at and move on, thinking they are in control. And they can do things like this whenever consumer confidence flags.

If Facebook loses a few more users of the sort that are tech-savvy and informed enough that this pushes them over the edge, that's fine. In fact, it might be even better, as the remaining population is more easily wrangled.
A lot of languages compile to java bytecode.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages
A wealth tax isn't crazy. What's crazy is NOT having a wealth tax and instead more heavily taxing people who are actually working for a living.
They’re real enough for the IRS to want their cut when you vest stocks or exercise options that you can’t sell.
The great thing about an algorithm is that when it gives you results that benefit you, you can accept them and then pass the buck on to it when people get outraged:

"According to an email sent by a chief resident to other residents, Stanford's leaders explained that an algorithm was used to assign its first allotment of the vaccine. The algorithm was said to have prioritized those health care workers at highest risk for COVID infections, along with factors like age and the location or unit where they work in the hospital. Residents apparently did not have an assigned location, and along with their typically young age, they were dropped low on the priority list."
I miss the days when fireplaces and campfires were commonplace. Now you can’t even gather brushwood at “protected” campsites without facing penalties. Campers are actually helping to clear out tinder. They’re not loggers.
In fact, they sort-of are, in the worlds that they have created.

GRRM is de facto a creator god of Westeros, and Tolkien of Middle-earth.
You do know you can voluntarily pay more in taxes today, right now...

Giving money to government is not compasssion, Helping people get food, shelter, healthcare,etc yourself is compassion. Voting for government to use guns to force people to pay what you have perceived as "their fair share" in order to provide those things to people is not compassion, it is self-righteous bullying.
Great question! I work at a biotech company, doing a great mix of software engineering and science. Been doing this for over 20 years at various companies in varying blends of code and science for both chemistry/cheminformatics and computational biology/bioinformatics. Also ran a solo consultancy for about 4 years in there.

Tech stack = Python (mostly for chemistry, currently), R (mostly for computational biology)

Recently having fun building web services around open source and proprietary tools + HPC using Python and FastAPI + the usual suspects (pandas, numpy, sklearn, altair, dask)

Tons of cool problems with work that can ultimately make a real difference in patients' lives.

Education: BS Biochemistry, PhD Biophysics

PS - we're in the SF Bay Area and are hiring software engineers & business/systems analysts; looking for people at the intersection of code and science. Reach out if you're interested (email in profile, I think, or post here if you can't find my contact).
> at least a year now (...) they show a privacy disclosure splash screen before turning on many features for the first time.

This has been the case from the start of the Apple App Store. Here is a 3 minute video of Steve Jobs talking about it in 2010 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo (Zuckerberg comes up too funnily enough).
> But that changes nothing about his right to the wealth he created.

I'm not talking about his worth as a human being, but exactly about his contribution to the wealth he now owns. His individual contribution to that wealth is not 188 billion times greater than that of any of his employees. It's just that the entire economic and political system as it exists today allows him to extract much more wealth from the enterprise he initially financed, proportionally, than 99.99% of the others who contributed to it - millions of times more than any engineer, marketing wizz, analyst etc. that has worked for him.

Is it normal and fair that he get the biggest slice of the pie that he helped finance and risked a lot for? Absolutely! Should his slice really be billions of times greater than everyone else's? No. But since it happened, the only chance to bring this back in line with the reality of his contributions is to tax him and others.

Ideally in the future, other measures, such as encouraging unionization, fair wages, even profit sharing instead of fixed wages, would make it so that everyone gets their fair share of the work they are contributing to a company like Amazon. Until then, taxes are one of the few instruments to balance the scales a little bit.

> If his money gives him political power, the solution is to fix the political system, not steal his money.

Now that is a fantasy. Imagining there could be a political system that would give equal power to someone who owns ~100k $as someone who holds ~100B$ is a bigger utopia than even communism.
I wonder if the "I'm feeling lucky" has stayed around because it's a good training heuristic for Google Home (and maybe other services?) even if very few people actually use it. I'm genuinely curious why they've kept it around.
According to the permissions page in Android settings I have no permissions granted to Spotify or Youtube.
I donno, for me early google was horrible. I always went back to AV because it gave me the results I was looking for. But over time AV just got slower and bloated and Google just got better.
> So, the fact that everybody has $X per month extra in my pocket every month, and everybody knows everybody else has $X per month in their pocket isn't going to raise prices?

First, not everybody has $X per month extra -- that exact amount of money comes from somewhere. So someone at the 75th percentile eats in a restaurant six days a week instead of seven and someone at the 25th percentile eats in a restaurant two days a week instead of once, but there is no additional aggregate demand.

But more importantly, how are they going to raise prices in a competitive market? If you're selling generic USB cables in competition with a thousand other sellers, and you raise your prices, your competitors are just going laugh at you as they take all your customers by leaving prices the same. Even if 95% of the sellers tried to raise prices, the customers would just sort by price and buy from the 5% that didn't, so there would be a huge incentive to continue to charge low margins and get all that sales volume.
That trope is really annoying. California has become more liberal because conservatives have left, so putting all of them into the same basket is dumb. Though I guess conservative Californians aren’t moving to ultra liberal cities like Austin for ideological reasons.
And then you get constantly badgered by notifications and your apps start shutting down because they need a new version of iOS and up-to-date version of app to run.

It's not just about the slider.
I don’t agree with this tax but one of the great things about this country is that each state can experiment.

California is experimenting with higher state income taxes. Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming are experimenting with having none.

I think distributed work will win this decade so people will be much more mobile than before. There will be a tighter feedback loop for policy makers to learn what works and what doesn’t.
Why would you need a cooling fan for the Pi? It doesn’t really need it unless you do a ton of video encoding for example.
Clearly for algebra you want to use algebraic notation because the conventions of algebraic grammar are suited for those tokens. You're right context does matter.

I'm more referring to naming as a means of communication. If your function is not intended for use as an algebraic operator and it does some complex operations like extracting the x y coordinates of the locations of dogs cats and baboons from a picture it doesn't hurt to place that entire description into the function name. It doesn't hurt to make the function name grammatically correct either as it certainly doesn't hurt when you try to communicate the same point in English.

>As with all of these types of things, there is a balance, I am arguing _for_ balance, not suggesting all names should be single letter or single word - but that they have their place. However in my experience very long names are far more commonly due to thoughtlessness, they include excessive redundant context and at worst even grammatical words.

I agree with balance. What I'm arguing here is that our general intuitive sense of what is "balanced" is actually off. People think "find_xy_coordinate_of_dogs_cats_and_baboons_in_picture" is an ugly function name and needs to be shortened but there is actually nothing logically wrong with it.
> I personally doubt they'd still be spending that money if they needed it, there's been plenty of time for a stability analysis by now.

I don't believe your logic follows. There's a lot riding on this vaccine working as advertised, thus there is considerable pressure on Pfizer/BioNTech to deliver on that promise. If they know their vaccine is at peak effectiveness when transported at -90ºC and that the effectiveness drops if handled at lower temperatures, and if time is critical as it is, then they have all the reasons in the world to just play it safe by going with the costly but reliable option.
They are probably hoping to benefit from the recent/ongoing AppStore fiasco. Some people already think that Apple is evil for their Appstore monopoly, so maybe they could be convinced that Apple is evil for protecting it's users from Facebook's data fetish.
I remember being blown away by how good google was around those times.

But I Waldo remember just how blown away I was when I first saw altavista do it’s thing. Altavista was as equally amazing in 1995 as google was in 2000. Innovation goes in waves.
It doesn't matter how "real" you think it is if the government insists on taxing you like it's real. In fact, that's part of the problem.
> unittest is an old horse and cart, while pytest is the batmobile.

I really wish more was said than just this. Why is it that pytest is often preferred and unittest is considered a bad choice? What is the impact on the quality of the tests?
I focus at least one third of my learning time on things that dont change, such as principles behind Hickey’s Simple Made Easy, Hamming’s You & Your Research, Brooks’ Mythical Man Month, functional programming, and technical things like SQL, shell.

New tech is a often a container around those, making it easy to grasp it.

Also, new tech also dont have such community & ecosystem around it as older tech, so I keep it on the radar, but dont use in production immediately. Focusing on boring technology, with a spark of novelty where needed.
Changing countries is hard, but changing states is easy. People do it all the time. If you have a private jet for visits to other states, it's especially easy.
edit: as tsimionescu kindly pointed out below, I misunderstood the 30M threshold. My reasoning seems correct to me but a key premise was wrong, and I agree the proposal is much less onerous than I have painted below:

I personally know multiple startup founders worth $10-$20M on paper who made $120K/year salary for years (or still are.) It’s hardly unusual, startup valuations are high these days, and VCs and the founders themselves want to reinvest in growth, not issuing distributions.

A founder owning 40% at a $50M valuation would feasibly have to double his salary to $240K to afford the $80K/year wealth tax, after paying income taxes on the salary increase in California.

That’s realistically one employee they no longer have the cash flow to hire. A $50M startup may have something like $2M ARR, so if they don’t want to burn investment funds, they could support maybe 8 employees at their ARR level. Knocking out one employee at that size is significant.

Or you could say they should get VC to support hiring more employees. Now the wealth tax is indirectly impacting the founder's equity—forcing you to sell your company.

We can argue whether they should be forced to liquidate a portion yearly for taxes, but let’s not pretend everyone worth $20M on paper can light $80K cash on fire yearly without consequences.
Why is Stanford in a position to choose allocations in the first place? I thought the government was going to handle allocations.
because of 0.4%

If California was well run, clean, and had otherwise lower tax, then .4% might be easy to ignore. But if you’re already on the fence, and not happy with things, and have been talking to real estate agents in Seattle, Austin, Miami, or Singapore, then this just the kick in the butt you might need to go through with leaving.
So you're saying that Russia's interests are entirely altrustic? That's quite a stretch. I don't think they hacked SolarWinds to "prove how insecure closed source, proprietary software is". Why don't they prove how "insecure" Kaspersky AV is, in that case? Seems strange to pick a software package that nobody's heard of, but happens to be used by thousands of juicy industrial espionage targets of their primary political enemy.
I wonder if Zuckerberg or the Facebook leadership really believes they're doing something good for the world and that the current problems caused by it are only a result of Facebook either not having enough data or not being present enough in our daily lives.

For example, disallowed/undesirable content on Facebook wouldn't be an issue if Facebook knew everyone's thoughts and prevented them from posting even before they wrote a single word. Ad fraud wouldn't be an issue if the only money that mattered was a Facebook coin (Libra?) and can be recalled or made invalid remotely. Election interference wouldn't be an issue if the only government you can elect is a Facebook-sponsored one. Etc.

It's an insane idea, but maybe not that insane if you look at it from the aforementioned sociopaths' points of view?
Sincere question: shouldn't the rate of taxation be more related to, say, the proportional amount of government services you consume and the benefits you receive from the presence of the government?

Undoubtedly, everyone benefits from the government in ways that are hard to quantify (e.g. what percentage of Joe Random's assets is due to the stability caused by the existence of the Federal Reserve), but at the same time there is something fundamentally unsettling about policy that boils down to "regardless of why you have a lot, you have a lot, so we're going to take a lot".

Not trying to start a flame war, and I'm not advocating any particular taxing strategy, but I am trying to understand the rationale for progressive tax rates. In some ways it seems regressive tax rates are arguably 'fair' in the most objective sense, but that simply doesn't generate enough revenue, so a flat tax rate does sort of seem like a pretty good compromise, and proportional taxation seems like it helps even out benefits that are hard to quantify. But is there really a fairness argument to be made for progressive tax rates?
Mathematician Dr Neena Gupta, Who Solved 70-Year-Old Zariski Cancellation
HN commenters are up in arms when e.g. Google stakes a claim on the off-hours output of their current employees. They would be even more furious if Google asserted ownership of future income of former employees. And if Google further claimed a right to lifetime earnings of former employees... I can only imagine the tone here. It's unfortunate that HN brings out the champagne when governments take similar predatory actions.

> that's a real sign of just how far American greed has gone

Glib support of expropriation shows just how far American collectivism has gone. Naked envy and resentment hiding behind a fig leaf of public mindedness.
Here’s another idea. Let’s figure out a way to cure, or simply slow, the disease.

Think it can be done within two decades?

The mRNA Coronavirus vaccines were produced in under a year.

That was after years of R&D, of course.

Now maybe it’s possible to convince people to spend more on fundamental medical research.

UPDATE

I see my comments are not appreciated. We’re going with “just shoot me if this happens to me”

Anyway, maybe the seed investments by Gates and Bezos will eventually lead to a treatment.

https://www.biospace.com/article/bill-gates-and-jeff-bezos-t...
Interesting. When I played God of War one of the things that really stood out to me too was how solid everything about the game felt. I can't recall many games where something like that was noticeably better than everything else.

Really one of the better games I've played.
That’s not a meaningful number because in practice prosecutors don’t bring cases to grand juries where the evidence isn’t sufficient to indict.
I was a loyal mamma.com user until Google came along. I always liked the quality of results and the UI. They were swallowed up by Copernic who appear to still exist in the desktop search space.
What if down the road advertisers discover that personalized ads is bs and standard non-personal ads work as effectively? What if FB/GOOG are just interested in supporting the hype around it for their own benefit?
Huh, maybe that’s what I was implying with my comment. Thanks for spelling it out.
What Apple is doing here seems like a good change! It is aiming to give users some control of tracking. If FB wants to engage in such tracking, it is up to them to convince users of the benefit so that they will choose to enable it.

When it comes to defaults being rolled out to millions of users, I like this approach. They aren't blocking everything a la uBlock Origin, or putting themselves in the middle as the gatekeeper like Adblock Plus.

Ultimately, though, I think Facebook's business model is the problem. It depends on users giving them something for free that the user really has little incentive to provide. Sure, on its own the argument that users prefer personalized ads over generic ones makes some sense, but when I think when users have to consciously evaluate that trade-off (personalized ads BUT you have to allow someone to track everything you do on the internet), that is a hard sell.
The reciprocal agreements are usually for social security and the like. You can still take the foreign tax credit even if the USA doesn’t have an agreement with said country. You get screwed in low tax/high fee countries (like Singapore) and have to start leaning on your housing deduction.
> “There’s An App For That” is why you buy an iPhone—but it’s Apple with the $930 billion market cap & not the app developers.

Oh yeah? Tell that to Facebook, Netflix, and the YouTube part of Google. Tell that to Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok.

There’s another principle at play here, and I think it’s an important one. Pleasantly, it also operates as a kind of Golden Rule for economics in platform development (and has legs at a wider scale, too, but I won’t cover that).

Specifically: Create more value than you capture. Apple of course captures some of the value of their ecosystem. So do other platform providers. The thing that distinguishes a healthy platform ecosystem from unhealthy ones is whether or not more value is on offer to platform adopters than the platform itself captures. Unsuccessful platforms generally fail at this, either because they don’t provide enough intrinsic value themselves (and therefore “end users” don’t benefit) or because they don’t make it profitable to operate on the platform (they try and capture too much of the value for themselves, and thereby strangle their own success).
> passed down through my family

I could go either way with wealth taxes—-there are efficiency and services arguments that go beyond just real property—-but I have zero problem with inheritance taxes.

You want a Van Gogh or McLaren, you go create value just as your deceased would-be benefactor did.
You don't think it's possible with in the decade?

I would not rule that out, combating 2010 tech to 2020 tech.
But why not have that expectation of literally any other country in the world? Except for the US and Eretria.
Yeah, these foreigners (Texas is my country) are moving to the central metros (Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio) which are blue anyway.
> No billionaire is just sitting on their money. It’s certainly tied up in assets or being actively managed.

Not literally sitting on them, but they are certainly not spending anywhere near as much of their money as someone who makes ~1M$ a year. A large part of their wealth is usually tied up in long term investments such as property or bonds, where it is safe but not productive.

And as I said, enforcement is a real problem, capital flight being a possible consequence. I don't know exactly what the solution is, but surely there is some better balance to be struck than today. Especially if the US government wanted to - they have enough financial and diplomatic power to enforce this type of tax almost world wide, even if California or France don't.