gist

That's why I think few politicians currently understand how to convert between wealth and income taxes. You can tell from the way they talk about the subject that they don't understand the momentousness of what they're proposing. But I'm optimistic that we can teach them. The answer's not hard to understand, once you realize the question exists.

What a pompous and uninformed "I am smarter than others" way to think. And very 'parental' (ie 'we can teach them').

Note that Politicians (in order to remain in their job) need to think in terms of the people they represent and getting re-elected by those people. You may not like it it may not be good for you but understand that in the position they are in why they do it.

In the median case, US state politicians talking about adding a "mere 1%" wealth tax are talking about causing the residents of their state to have the highest taxes in the world. That's not the sort of decision you make lightly.

The missed point is that a 1% wealth tax 'only for a select group' can easily become later a 1% (or higher) wealth tax 'for a less select group'.

It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate, even though that's mathematically the same thing. [2]

I am fully against any wealth tax but 'Don't get this'?

Who says they don't get it. It doesn't serve their purpose so of course (like anyone selling) they are not going to disclose it.

It is a pity we don't hear more about the truly brilliant researchers.

Reason? What is the value of that other than entertainment? And it's not in the interest of companies to make celebrities that then are poach targets (if they can avoid they would yes there are exceptions as noted elsewhere in this thread).

And if you did 'hear' (via articles) to what extent what was said even be correct vs. a writer just fluffing things up to the max.

Tech is not sports where you can actually see the superlatives and know that the person who praise is being lavished on actually won or threw or caught and so on. (Or even music where you can hear it and see the stadium that is packed with fans..)

Damn this is like a variation of the Streisand Effect [1]

I am not involved in this industry so I never heard of the company or the youtuber before reading this. I am tempted to buy one just to make some things (that I don't need but might be fun to make).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

This is exactly true. Very similar reactions when in the mid 80's in typesetting the purists said also it's not real. (I was in the business back then and remember it well. Anyway a few things happened. End users (not everyone but many many) liked it enough to replace professionals. AND it got better than the initial version which people were evaluating.

For one thing comments here appear to apply to the quality and issues today not potentially going forward. Quality will change quicker than anyone expects. I am wondering how many people at HN remember when the first Mac came out with Mac Paint and then Pagemaker or Quark. That didn't evolve anywhere nearly as quickly as AI appears to be.

Also I am not seeing how anyone is considering that what a programmer considers quality and what 'gets the job done' (as mentioned in the article) matters in any business. (Example with typesetting is original laser printers were only 300dpi but after a short period became 1200dpi 'good enough' for camera ready copy).

Have been following Trump since the 1970's. This is a negotiating tactic of his and actually it's a somewhat common negotiating tactic that many people follow when in a negotiation for something they want. Behaviorally anything less than the original demand seems more acceptable. Think of if you were diagnosed with a dreaded disease and then found out you had a lesser disease. The lesser disease by contrast seems less threatening.

I don't know what the angle is (haven't thought that much about it) but there is an angle he is pursuing with this. Trump is a master of FUD and also you can't typically tell what things he says he'll do that he does vs. those that he decides not to pursue further (and tha tis part of the magic of how he gets what he wants the unpredictability).

To answer your question of course it's an over reach happening in plain site but people tend to be numb to it at this point since it doesn't directly impact them day to day.

The issue here with the negativity is that it appears to ignore the potential tremendous upside and tends to discuss the downside and in a way that appears to make as if it's lurking everywhere and will be a problem for everyone.

Also trying to frame it as protecting vulnerable people who have no clue about security and will be taken advantage of. Or 'well this must be good for Anthropic they will use the info to train the model'.

It's similar to the privacy issue assuming everyone cares about their privacy and preventing their ISP from using the data to target ads there are many people who simply don't care about that at all.

I'm a bit shocked to see so many negative comments here on HN.

Very generally I suspect there are many coders on HN who have a love hate relationship with a tool (claude code) that has and will certainly make many (but not all) of them less valuable given the amount of work it can do with even less than ideal input.

This could be a result of the type of coding that they do (ie results of using claude code) vs. say what I can and have done with it (for what I do for a living).

The difference perhaps is that my livlihood isn't based on doing coding for others (so it's a total win with no downside) and it's based on what it can do for me which has been nothing short of phemomenal.

For example I was downvoted for this comment a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45932641

Just one reply (others are interesting also):

"HN is all about content that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity, so if you are admitting you have lost the desire to learn, then that could be triggering the backlash."

(HN is about many things and knowing how others think does have a purpose especially when there is a seismic shift that is going on and saying that I have lost the desire to learn (we are talking about 'awk' here is clearly absurd...)).

Your website (luniv.tech) is (for lack of a better way to put it) 'all over the place'. You are (from what I can tell) a 1 person operation. Nothing wrong with that. But you should try to focus on at most 3 things that you can do well and cut your site down to talking about those 3 things. Then (despite what everyone here seems to be telling you) you should cold outreach to people who can use those items and learn from the failure (and rejection). If you keep at it you will get results (and you will learn).

Also register and use lunivtech.com as your website (it's open now). Don't use .tech as your primary domain.

I recognize that this wasn't your decision but I would say having that HN Christmas banner (or any religious holiday banner) is a form of proselytizing. (Not disagreeing with what you said in reply btw.)

I feel that having a banner like that shows a sense of entitlement that people who celebrate (or have been raised to believe in Christ or another religion) have with this entire time of year.

(This is irrespective if the same is done for other holidays which apparently it is but HN history doesn't show this (when searching for stories from a particular day)).

That is such utter bs it's amazing that Microsoft PR thought that somehow that shows anything of benefit to the suffering users.

Could be crackpots or could be regular people who are so frustrated they express themselves that way.

And the truth is if the 'Bill Gates' had to deal with this frustration himself (most likely let's say he doesn't he has people who deal with it for him when he needs something from another company or his own) he'd implement changes to keep users happier. Noting of course that you are always going to have a segment of people that will both get angry and have edge problems.

Did or does 'Bill Gates' ever actually try to be a regular user of Microsoft support actually waiting in the call queue on hold for 10 minutes to an hour and even getting disconnected?

Does anyone at the company (in a position to order improvements) ever do this?

(This applies to many companies obviously 'bill gates' and 'microsoft' are just placeholders.)

I think it's underestimated the amount of psychological pain that some of the software (of Microsoft and other companies) has caused people over the years.

There is this tendency to phrase questions (or statements) as "when did 'we' ".

These decision are made individually not centrally. There is no process in place (and most likely there will never be) that will be able to control and dictate if people decide one way of doing things is the best way to do it. Even assuming they understand everything or know of the pitfalls.

Even if you can control individually what you do for the site you operate (or are involved in) you won't have any control on parts of your site (or business) that you rely on where others use AWS or Cloudflare.

I am not a programmer, but I have used awk since the 1980's. And normally I would read this type of info or really many things about typical unix tools. I've done a small amount of helpful things with awk (again dating to the 1980's). (Wrote an estimating system using awk and flat txt files as an example).

However given what I've been able to acomplish with Claude Code, I no longer find it necessary to know any details, tips, or tricks, or to really learn anything more (at least for the types of projects I am involved in for my own benefit).

Update: Would love to know why this was downvoted...

Claude didn't interpret the prompt correctly. It could have come to the same conclusion w/o privacy concerns. For example if I asked the same question and the handle was 'boatlover' it could have figured out something to say 'only thing I can say is perhaps this person loves boating or boats or is involved in the marine industry'.

Install claude code to do that: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

"Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" is also very different from a business having machines consume large volumes of data posted on the Internet for the purpose of generating value for them without compensating the creators.

The fact that value is being created is irrelevant. The fact that they are making profit is irrelevant. As is non compensation to creators. There isn't any law being broken. Is there?

Bottom line in real world terms there is no expectation of privacy with a freely open and unrestricted web site. Even if that website said 'you can use this for single use but not mass use' that in itself is not legally or practically enforceable.

Let's take the example of a Christmas light show. The idea might be (in the homeowners mind) that people, families, will drive by in their cars to enjoy the light show (either a single home or the entire street or most of it). They might think 'we don't want buses full of people who paid to ride the bus' coming down the street. Unfortunately there is no way to prevent that (without the city and laws getting involved) and there is nothing wrong with the fact that the people who provide the bus are making money bringing people to see the light show.

Thank you for that idea. I've experimented with that trying this to start then asking how do I 'tell you' to use this (which it replied to).

"This is where I would keep track of things that I always want included in any bash or other routine I write that is executed on the command line. I will add to it as I think of new items:

    When listing database items in a list across the terminal screen, always take into account both the size of the screen as well as the line elements using a width that can consistenly show (if possible) all of the data across the screen (but truncate if necessary

    All scripts should in the code show the version number as well as time and date of the latest version."

Sorry. I meant platform is MacOS.

This sounds like a bad idea if you're trying to convince people from NYC to move to FL

People will typically come to Florida (despite this) because it's Florida and a nicer place to work year round than NY etc.

This is the Qualified Small Business Stock Tax Exclusion. Basically as long as you wait 5 years before selling the business, you won’t be taxed on the first $10 million dollars. This isn’t some loophole, this is exactly what it was intended for so that people are encouraged to take risks.

First this doesn't work for a Sub S only a 'C' corp.

https://carta.com/learn/startups/tax-planning/qsbs/

Second, this wouldn't work in many cases when someone only wants to acquire the assets of the business and not the actual corporation in order to avoid liability going forward.

https://www.brickbusinesslaw.com/blog/should-i-buy-the-compa...

Note that typically the buyer would decide the issue (sure you with your 'small' business could say 'has to be corp' but that would potentially limit companies that would want to buy)

My point is the OP makes a broad statement "Business owners have the most flexibility of everyone to not pay their taxes. I personally think these things are questionable but its what I have seen others do over the last few years and what has been recommended to me by every top accounting firm in New York." and the benefit (like anything else is specific as far as the exact situation).

Edit: Want to make clear the liability is more than the money liabilities it's also potential lawsuits that hold over to the company acquiring.

How is it trivially connected to your real identity exactly?

I am not seeing how it is at all.

In any case this is business and in many cases how business operates. Nice try on Sam's part to try and make it like it's a bad thing and everybody is for the good of the purpose.

I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.

To most people I'd think this is mainly for entertainment purposes ie 'palace intrique' and the actual facts don't even matter.

The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.

That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.

What conclusions exactly? Again do most people really care about this (reading the story) and does it impact them? My guess is it doesn't at all.

I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in.

This is a well known trope and is discussed in other forms ie 'NY Times story is wrong move to the next story and you believe it' ie: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.

First he is not paying someone to edit these (any person I've seen appears to be unpaid and affiliated with HN in some way). Second he's not (as far as I can tell) angling these posts for business purposes (for example if the head of some corporation were doing that that would make sense).

I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read.

Is he really 'broadly published and read'? Most people outside of tech have no clue (and no interest) in what PG says.

Yes there is 'nothing wrong' except if you put yourself out there as having good unique thoughts why does it not show that you are lacking confidence to have others (again in this situation maybe in another I'd agree) always review what you are posting on your personal site or blog?

And very importantly he doesn't allow comments (on his blog) the only comments are on HN which he doesn't link to. It's unknown if he even reads the HN comments anymore. Or (last interaction over a year ago) comment on HN anymore (to defend his thoughts or position).

Many reasons for this of course but if you can't handle criticism and think so little of what people on HN says why are you publishing at all? That's your biggest audience isn't it?

(Side note YES HN is can be a brutal crowd for sure. Would be interesting if he ever publishes the changes he makes in the essays or what the people reviewing the essay have to say).

Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes).

Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).

I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.

The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything.

I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that) can be boiled down to the following:

"I am smart. That's why I was successful at what I did. So I need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I am damn smart"

The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable about them.

Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable age by accomplished members of that community.