skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> good articulation of the circumstances where I would rather die than continue living.

I did my alternative civilian service in a nursing home for people with dementia when I was 19. I have noticed 6 stages:

1) Fear that something is wrong with their memory and incredible efforts to hide it (this is usually before they live in a nursing home).

2) Anger, shame and desperation.

3) Internalization, they then either make melancholy jokes ("My head's not what it's used to be"), or they completely give themselves up. Often they refuse to eat. We did not have such a case, but I assume that some patients in this stage commit suicide.

4) Total confusion (that happens when the internalization is also forgotten), patients still have enough memory capacity to realize that something is terribly wrong (they usually try to return "home" or are searching for their children/spouses/parents), but they don't understand that they are ill anymore. The nursing home where I worked had codes on every door, but in this stage some patients were still able to trick the staff and wander off.

In stage 5), many patients fell into a child-like trance where they just consumed food and watched the world in complete wonder. I never had the feeling that they were unhappy, in fact they often laughed (e.g. when they saw children, when we played songs or when you just sat with them for a while). We had one old lady who happily recited poems she had learned in elementary school all day.

I never want to end in stage 6, but I am quite certain that the patients in that state had no mental capacity left to experience it.
Personally, I disagree with the whole idea of income taxes. You should be taxed for owning things, because the government enforces your property rights, not just for labor, for which the government doesn't directly contribute at all. I should be able to earn money for my labor without the government taking a fraction every time it moves around. Even if you move to the woods, you're still taking military protection from the surrounding government- even if you somehow avoid using any other service like roads, public education, etc.

I don't understand this widespread belief that you have a right to permanent ownership. Someone has to enforce that ownership, and that has costs. What does seem wrong in principle is taxing transfers of money, which are virtually free with modern computer systems, not to mention the increased economic friction in the labor market.

You raise a good point with liquidity. Personally, I wonder, how could we set up a system of fractional ownership that delays repossession in such cases? Of course, if you never pay tax on that heirloom, then you'll eventually lose a controlling interest- and I think this makes sense, especially for fundamentally limited resources like land.
I'm not going to approach your strawman about eating dirt.

I'm just going to say this:

There's microbes constantly in the air around you at all times that you're constantly inhaling, on every surface you touch, everywhere you go, every person you interact with. Billions or Trillions of different strains you encounter daily. Your skin is covered in microbes at all times. Your body has more microbes inside of it than it's own cells(google it).

At any point you could have a reaction to one of these but you don't because of your immune system.

Some people who have weak immune systems or are susceptible can have problems. BUT this is hugely statistically unlikely.

So for the media to be drumming up fears of microbes in the air is disengenuous and for people to be falling for it is truly something and says alot about the state of modern scientific education.
There isn't a framework. One of the things the article talks about is that the assisted death law in Canada requires competency at the time of death. Without looking, I expect it's often similar in other places.

When my mom's dementia progressed from a state where she needed a bit of help to where she needed regular attention, I had no qualms about removing myself from the equation, because I think that if she were healthy she would want me to live my life for myself. If that sounds right to you, it's something you can tell your family.
That's not what that means at all. Founding a business requires a significant investment of capital.
Plenty of the criticisms are not specific to a particular console.
> It should be the speed of culture progressing. I'd be happier with something like 10 years, and paying exponentially increasing fees to renew it past that mark in exchange for keeping culture locked up.

The exponentially increasing cost works well. Start off at a $10 registration for ten years, then multiply by 10 for each subsequent ten year registration. You want to renew that 120 year old copyright on an individual work? No problem, that'll be ten trillion dollars for the next ten years, see you in ten years when it's a hundred trillion.

Meanwhile 90% of everything enters the public domain inside of twenty years because it's not worth paying a thousand bucks for another ten.

> Trademarks? That's a consumer protection service and for a small percent of profits on marked items plus a flat fee should be allowed.

Trademarks are fine the way they are. Nobody is complaining about the term of trademarks, which is as long as you're actually using it.

It would actually be better if copyright required that -- so that if you want to retain a copyright it can't be out of print for more than ten years.
San Francisco spends $50k per homeless person. The problem doesn't seem like it's money
Wait, you mean that many HN readers have net worth of $30 million or over, and therefore they are personally worried about it? I'd guess 99.5% of commenters here will never be subject to this tax in their entire lives. And even if they barely make it above the threshold, say they have $31,000,000 net worth: That results in a tax liability of a whopping $4,000. Whoop-dee-doo.

The anti-tax rants here are just the usual run-of-the-mill white-knighting for wealthy people.
New coronavirus strain up to 70% more transmissible
> Or another example, I own a piece of art or a car passed down through my family that is worth 30 million dollars (maybe it's a mclaren f1 or something).

There is no meaningful reason that a society should want you to inherit a piece of art or a car from your ancestors. (The only practical one is that the sorts of families who can pass down expensive art also control society.)

You didn't work for that art or car; you simply had the fortune to be born into a family with one. Every single reason why it is unjust for someone to inherit a government role applies here. If you don't think King James the Nth should rule simply because King James the N-1st did, why do you think James Jr. should have 30 million dollars in financial power simply because James Sr. did?

Just like hereditary rule, hereditary property breaks the fundamental relationship between work and reward that is common to any functional society. If you work hard and get a spare $30M to buy a car, sure, whatever, we can say you were incentivized to work hard and produce $30M of value. But if you work hard and give your kid $30M, how is your kid incentivized to do anything?

And the argument that well-off parents have an inherent right to make their kids' lives easier leads directly to the correlation between class and race/caste. If it's moral for me to make my children better off than others' children, who is to say it's immoral for me to make my nieces and nephews several times removed better off, too? Who is to say it's immoral to make all the people in this town who came from a certain ancestral lineage better off?

And on top of all that, it usually doesn't even work. We associate "nepotism" with waste and corruption, not just distasteful behavior, because we understand those who are chosen because of their family relationships generally aren't more qualified than the rest of the candidates. Even at the smallest scales, when you hear stories of the CEO's college-age kid getting an internship, it's almost always the case that the child has not inherited any particular talent, and in fact is probably less talented than would be needed for the job.

Parents should be allowed to provide for their children to set them up for adulthood - they should be able to pay for housing and food and clothing and education. When they can't, society should step in to help them, and we're almost there: we have welfare programs and private charities for basic needs, free public education, and (at least among private colleges with sufficient endowments) full need-based financial aid. Parents should not be able to do more than that, in a society that prizes democracy and equality over the natural superiority of certain families.
I suppose another upside is that you can do token validation in the app and not need to have proxy communication on every request.
I can understand it too - I finished my PhD with 34. In the end, I could have seen it coming: my supervisor had 0 interest in supervising, so it took a huge mental strain on me.

I've also had immense luck - I've been a computer nerd for a very long time and I was programming a lot in my field (neuroscience). So all it took was a word from one guy I knew at a big software company and I was hired. I also have to say, that a PhD, or better said, a Dr. in my country still means something, especially if you have customer contact.

But I've seen things... bright people in their 40s who have to drop out in their 40s to be hired as a labor assistent at pharma. Associate professors who would run out of money and that's the end of the career. Doing a PhD was easily the dumbest and most risky decision of my life and I was extremely lucky to get away with only some mental scars. The only positive things I can think is the friendship with other PhD students (because you went through hell together!) and the confidence in my abitity to process and dissect huge piles of information. In the end, the latter is sole reason companies are willing to give you a shot. Dont undervalue it and sell it accordingly. If you have a PhD you most likely are very persistant and very capable of self-learning.
The FDA lacks statutory authority to regulate surgical techniques. That mostly happens at the level of state medical boards.
Unless I am misreading their graph, Java beats neither c++ nor koka in time or rss.
First of all, if I understand correctly, if they are worth less than 30M$ they aren't affected by this tax at all. This alone I think invalidates some of your comment altogether.

So the tax actually says that a founder owning 40% of a $100M valuation would have to $40k per year (0.4% of the 10M that they own over the base 30M0). By your calculation, they would have to pay themselves ~$200k per year to afford that, which would be ~0.5 employees for a company that can afford ~16 (simply doubling your numbers for employees and halving the increases because of the half tax).

This doesn't seem like such a horrible onus on a corporation. Now, if the valuation is wildly off, then perhaps there will be bigger problems - but that would also mean that this law gives better incentives for correct valuations of companies, a win in itself.
Code review and protected master are certainly important but not infallible. If I were a malware author with code running on an owned dev machine and my goal was to sneak code into a repo, I can think of a bunch of strategies that might increase the odds of slipping past a review.

Just running in the background, waiting to amend a big commit with many changed files/lines would probably go a long way. How often does a reviewer glaze over when reading through a diff where someone shuffled some modules around, causing a lot of line changes without any real implementation changes? Perfect opportunity to slip a few new lines into a long file amidst all the other changes.
I have bought Apple refurbished machines. I always understood them to be more-or-less unused returns. IIRC Apple cannot legally advertise returned machines as "new", hence the "refurbished" designation.

Moreover Apple has an essentially unlimited supply of machines. I can't imagine it would be worth it to actually take in machines and repair them (not least because it would undermine confidence in the refurb store if it was a gamble about whether you'd get a basically-new machine or beat-up machine.)
Plenty already have. Eric Schmidt, for example, is now a citizen of Cyprus

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/rich-americans-increas...
I still remember when I was first introduced to google in the 5th grade. Our computer class taught us about search engines and how to find information online. They showed us lycos, altavista, dogpile, ask jeeves, etc. and everyone in the class had their favorite site they would use when working on projects.

Within a day of showing us google, every kid in the class used google exclusively. They were so much better than their competition at the time.
Agree, it is very powerful.

2 other very good movies are the Canadian "Away from Her" and the French "Amour". But the plot twist of these two is that they are a view on the ones that remain and see their loved ones fading away.
I've got several concerns with wealth taxes in general too:

1) They are difficult to enforce. How to measure the value of a famous painting? What if the value does down? Is there a refund of wealth taxes?

2) They are an entirely new class of taxes that will give politicians the ability to increase the overall tax burden over time. At first, they will only impact the very wealthy, but it is much easier to adjust the threshold down a little than create a whole new tax.

The history of income tax in the US is a guide. At first, it was temporary. Then only impacted a few people, now it is a progressive system that reaches large swaths of the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni....
What happened had nothing to do with ethical AI research. People in power put themselves first. This has happened before computers as well.
> 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.

So, basically, whoever coded up the algorithm for personal COVID-risk forgot to take care of null-states for the location input.

So much for all the outrage over selfish intent.

Sure, it's possible that the admins purposefully created this glitch so as to have a reasonable fallback story in the case they got caught, but per Occam's Razor, I think it's much more likely it was a dumb, honest mistake.
This is quite the false equivalence.

> their location, their usage, their connections, everything

Which Apple-made apps have access to your location without your prior explicit approval?
The only "social construct" involved here is "private property". If I hire someone to install carpet and pay them $X, we sign a contract about that and that only. They don't tell me how I should paint my walls; and I don't tell them how to spend their money. That's kind of the idea. If they start issuing ultimatums about painting my walls pink, or agitate with the painters that it's wrong to not do it, I'm going to fire them. Apparently, in the old days, by custom that was not like that, and you were expected to paint your walls pink if they insist; perhaps in other places it was even mandated by law.

Then Milton Friedman showed up and said "Hey, you just acceded to your walls being painted pink but, by the rules, you didn't have to do that!" If getting this notion across is activism, then I guess I'd stop thinking of activism as a dirty word. I thought it was more like education on a common-sense notion.

Come think of it, an alternative structure you seem to be advocating is also a solved problem in this scheme - it's called a co-op, and there are many successful ones around, from farms to clothing stores. Go found an internet search coop, and as a co-owner you'd be able to decide how it should be run.
> The only reason ever given

Not true. I just gave another reason - to offset the built-in drivers of disparity. Transfers between wealth and income (i.e. labor) always favor the wealth holder. It's the very nature of capital, part of what makes it so great but also with not-so-great consequences that must be compensated for. The problem is not the progressivity of taxation, but the fact that it's primarily on the wrong thing - income and consumption instead of wealth.
that's the opposite of what I meant. I'm skeptical of the possibilty of a pandemic we couldn't defend against.
NASA ScienceCasts: The Lasting Impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
It's so bizarre that science-minded people are going along with this. Are they not familiar with Galileo and other heretics of their time?
What If We Nuke the Moon?
I've never worked in journalism but how does
"You know something sceptical’s afoot when you find Larkin on your bedside table instead of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld
" get past an editor?

I think I'm pretty smart but I've only thoroughly read half of the authors mentioned in the post which seems to intentionally render itself unintelligible to anyone who identifies as "working class"

Theres nothing better than getting done at the construction job site, having a few light beers, and arguing about arcane renaissance philosophers.
Agreed. They provide value to the consumer. They also are good for small businesses. People will scoff, but it's true. Compare them to other companies like Amazon or Uber who's model is to drive small businesses to extinction.
Device and Data Access When Personal Safety Is at Risk [pdf]
"Do you have a proposal for how?"

Placebo-controlled trials for surgeries, as there already is for drugs, could do the trick.
The case fatality rate is around 1.8% in the USA [1]. Current population is 330 million. So if the entire population becomes infected that’s 5.9 million dead.

The case fatality rate would likely increase as we overwhelm healthcare resources, so it could be even worse.

1% may sound trivial but it becomes meaningful at the scale of a population. The benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risks.

I was injected yesterday along with my fellow emergency department and ICU staff. People seemed giddy with hope and relieved to become protected. If you see enough people die of covid then the risk of the vaccine seems trivial.

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Seems far crazier to base spending not on a predefined amount of revenue appropriate for the various levels of government but instead on what those governments would like to have or do and then finding ways to pay for it (taxes or debt).
The same kind of “what’s their share” argument is made by conservatives to say “everyone gets the same share of services from the state, taxation should be more even”. You can’t just arbitrarily decide that a small group MUST pay more than the share they get out.
If Stanford truly used ML to generate the algorithm, there’s really no back-tracing to find where the decision went wrong besides looking through datasets. There’s your perfect scapegoat.
The US currently taxes the rich extremely low when compared to other countries or the US in the good old times. All this was rationalized with trickle down economics which have turned out to be utter nonsense. The wealth of those unfathomable rich was built on top of the society they live in and are part of. The acquired wealth is so beyond comprehension that the idea that any one person could have such a big positive impact alone to justify it is just absurd.
Yes "death tourism" is a thing and almost a business (business side is highly regulated but some association are borderline). Here in Switzerland where assisted suicide is legal, people from all over Europe are coming to die.
Yes, the charges allege that the defendant worked with the CCP and the PRC intelligence agencies.
Is IT more and more toxic in last years?
Hi, I hope this topic is to big OT for hacker news.

I'm in IT (programming) for decade now and I lately see a lot of arrogants persons who are able to laught to your face because of different point of view / way of programming or they just read half of text or they are not accepting others possibilities.

I saw a lot of sharing skills / knowledges / point of views or just serious talk about IT stuff 10 years ago.

Today people is able to kick you because of something for months / years - they don't know everything about something but they're kicking.
I'm not saying I'm expert on something.

I lost confidence in myself, I don't want to share my point of view or my code etc.

Is it just me or IT became more toxic with arrogants persons in last years?
I assume huge percentage of this site is IT professionals and software engineers.

I’ll have to ask then, what proof is there that Russia did this hack? Do you realise how hard it is to track professional hackers? You will have to trace the entire network commands up to a source and hope that it is registered under their name.

I genuinely cannot believe people here think that government managed to find the source of the hack in couple of days, that is just pure propaganda aimed for people with little to no knowledge about computer security.
It's great if you're already using TypeScript for the server and browser (non-WebAssembly) parts of your system. That way you can harmoniously share some of the same code and data structures.
If those babies work with thousands of potentially COVID patients and your father gets sick and get to a hospital, you will understand it.
What are the chances we'll find a cure for Alzheimer's using new mRNA vaccine technology?

Edit: Perhaps I should clarify that vaccine and mRNA based treatment approaches for Alzheimer's aren't exactly new and have shown some promise in the past.
“ Residents are doctors in training, who have graduated from medical school.”

It’s because you didn’t read the article. Residents are doctors in training, not just people living there - and they are interacting with sick people.
The federal government has allocated to states, and pretty much left it up to the states how to allocate internally. With some vague sort of guidelines.

Most states seem to be deciding to prioritize healthcare workers (especially those taking care of covid patients) either entirely or among other groups. So the way you do that is delivering to hospitals makes sense. CA presumably allocated a certain amount to Stanford Medicine, as a large hospital system. I don't know how CA decided what hospitals to give to in what amounts, but it certainly wouldn't shock me if political influence were part of it, why wouldn't it be, what sort of guidelines or transparency is there to stop it? There is not really any written procedure for how to decide which hospitals to get how much in most states, it's just... happening.

Then Stanford was clearly left entirely on their own to decide how to allocate internally.

This is far too important and too politically fraught (political in terms of POWER, in terms of distributing a resource for which demand far exceeds supply for something that can literally be life-and-death) -- to have left it up for everyone to just make up their own prioritization rules and medical ethics determinations on the fly, in a hetereogenous way. It means people will make terrible mistakes, and the powerful will take advantage to have their needs prioritized.

It is ridiculous there aren't much more clear/specific guidelines, and in some cases enforceable policies/regulations, from the federal government. It's like nobody's driving the bus here