skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree the what comes back in taxes is a bit of hand-wave, it's hard to find stats on the average marginal tax rate.

I think the non-elderly middle class net effect will be close to if not a wash. They'll lose various tax deductions, but they'll get $11,700 x num_adults_in_household x (1 - marginal_tax_rate). And tax deductions only kick in when they are larger than the standard deduction to begin with. You need to be closer to the "upper middle" side of things to get there or have an unusually large deductions.

I don't think you need to get the gap amount wholly out of new taxes, as I said I think you can get some of it out of reduced aid to states, and/or as suggested by the poster below, military spending cuts.

As to your overall point, I concede that it is a tough sell.
I used to have a lot of problems with that, due to my crappy home-grown blog software, but it's pretty solid now. I think what may have happened is I had it backwards in the code originally, noticed the problem when pasting the code into the article, then fixed the code but forgot to fix the article. Maybe. It was late and beer was involved.
I'm almost tempted, as a kid growing up in England in the 80's and a complete science and technology nerd a large part of why I'm into computers is because I realised I was never going to be an astronaut but technology was just so fascinating.

I had that logo on everything, a family member who visited the states even brought me back some astronaut food with it on :).

NASA was worth every penny they spent just in PR for America.
I think your QED is premature.

You're using arithmetic to model your scenario. I contend it requires differential equations.

For example, Mark Zuckerberg owns ~500 million shares of Facebook. If you only use arithmetic (multiplication) of share price, you get ~$40 billion. That's a theoretical number that journalists can calculate but it's not an accurate model of reality. If he was to really liquidate all those shares to 0%, his final sum would be much less than $40 billion. When he sells the first 10 million shares, the market will see that as a "signal" and react which sends the shares down in price. The final 10 million shares could be $1 each if the market was sufficiently spooked about his selloff. To model that requires a differential equation instead of arithmetic.

So to apply that logic to your example:

GDP of USA: 1.5 * 10^13

This assumes GDP stays the same if millions of people decide to quit working because they have basic income. If we think GDP will drop, we need to model that somehow.

Basic level of sustenance for a person in USA: 10^4

This assumes that prices will not go up significantly as landlords, grocery stores, etc respond to everyone having basic income. How can there be extra money or "inflation" if we're just shuffling money around? Well, women with children qualify for welfare+foodstamps but single childless men typically don't qualify for anything. Perhaps they live with their moms or sibling. Also, prices will go up because there are less low-paid workers manning the stores. I don't claim to know all the complexities of side effects but to think prices won't change at all doesn't seem reasonable.

Lastly, I do think the USA has enough "wealth" to provide some type of basic income. The question is what the USA can "afford" and that word can have several interpretations.

The level of "afford" I'm thinking of is a scenario where the USA suffers zero productivity loss and the middle & upper class do not see a decline in the standard of living. I'm not convinced that the USA can provide a dignified level of basic income without affecting the goods & services the middle class' enjoy today (points back to claims of a constant GDP instead of a declining one.)

Show some Diffy Qs, explain the assumptions behind each of the variables, and throw them into a Google spreadsheet.
> Over 50% of government expenditure is on social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, and other social services.

This is wrong (unless your definition of social services is broad enough to include things like schools and I doubt you want to dismantle the public education system).

> A large percentage of that is inefficient and wasted.

This is also wrong. Social Security is a direct cash transfer and Medicare and Medicaid are among the most efficient insurance programs in the world.

> I imagine state taxes would go down as a result of UBI too.

Sometimes I like to imagine a world of dragons and unicorns. But then I wake up and resume living in the real world.

Do the math.
You are not wrong, but Zuckerberg was competing against thousands of people with just as much privilege as himself (and some with a lot more). All of that same privilege didn't guarantee the Winklevoss twins success.
I'm curious about what your definition of using vs abusing is. Can you completely stop for a month and have zero side-effects?
Canada's Mr. Robot Premiere Censored by False DMCA Notice
I'd say anyone who puts that much time and work into it is allowed to call it whatever they want. Besides, as DannoHung pointed out, it's actually quite appropriate.
UK Police Arrest Prolific Pirate Bay Uploader
I wish more companies supported people like Stripe does for Aphyr. Research is so valuable, but there's so little incentive to be in academia. There's a certain irony that undergrad left me with so much debt I couldn't really consider joining a research university...
What exactly was wrong with FDR's public works adminisration and works progress administration?

They built a ton of stuff we still use today.
Ya, you and I are definitely within the margin of error in our analysis of the situation. Thanks, by the way, for the very substantive comment. This is exactly what I was hoping for. I think a lot of people just say "UBI!" with close to no understanding of what they are proposing. I think it's very educational for them to take a look at the real tradeoffs involved.
Driverless Golf Carts Tested on Public Garden in Singapore
The article reminds me of this quote from Carl Jung: "Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose."
Ask HN: Is PCI compliance something that every web developer should know?
>You sound like some bitter guy who's tinkered around with some self help stuff and gave up after a bit. Or maybe you haven't even tried.

And you sound like a guy who likes ad-hominens (and still believes in self-help books).

>For one Bill Gates who worked hard to become who he is, there are tons of other people who were in similar or even better situations than him who didn't.

You forgot the tons of other people who worked as hard or more hard than Bill Gates, but didn't get anywhere. Which is the whole point of this thread.

Nobody said that Bill Gates didn't work hard. Just that working hard doesn't mean much as a means to be a billionaire for three reasons:

1) You can work the same or even 2x as hard, in the same business, and get nowhere. Or do you think that failed Microsoft competitors didn't work just as hard, or weren't smart enough?

2) It's many times easier for someone with the backhistory of Bill Gates (the family, the education given to him, being white etc) to be able to even try to do what he did, that for people with less fortunate back histories. And that has nothing to do with smarts or hard work. There are tons of hardworking smart blacks, latinos, LGBT, Nigerians, Sudanese, Venezuelans, etc. Just being white and middle class (or upper middle class even better) means you play life in "easy mode".

3) And obviously you can work 2x or 10x as hard and/or smart in another business, as a scientist, coal-miner, surgeon etc and never get nowhere near making millions, much less billions.

Of course you also overestimated how hard Bill Gates actually worked to get where he got -- because you thought backwards to support your belief: "oh, he is a billionaire therefore he must have worked much harder than people that aren't billionaires to get there".

Instead of making an empirical observation: lots of company owners, in startups etc, bleed sweat for their company, often working 16 hours a day, toiling for years etc, and then fail. And that others are often made millionaires for being in the right place at the right time (Google's first cook, for one).

Gates was smart and worked hard indeed, but there were lots of CS pioneers who worked harded and were much smarter, without billions to show for it.

In fact if Digital Research's boss haven't blown IBM lucrative DOS contract for totally BS reasons, Microsoft would probably have gotten nowhere fast.
> The time devoted to all things outside of typing code dwarfs any gains had by counting keystrokes with vim. It's an illusion of the first order.

Editors are, or should be, the sole tool necessary to sculpt a system. Using poor languages, yes, there's a lot of ritual outside of coding which is necessary. With powerful languages, the design is the code and the code is the design and it all lives within an editor.

The editor is the interface to the documentation; it's the interface to the running system; it's an interface to the debugger; it's the interface to the world.

> Because if you are popping between Verilog and Python with a range of other languages across server, desktop and embedded while using multiple tools and IDE's you start valuing tools that can help you context switch. And, no, I do not want to waste time messing with source for the two dozen tools we use on a regular basis. And, no, in this context vim has no real measurable value whatsoever.

Which is why I use emacs, which is able to provide a seamless interface between server, desktop, laptop and embedded environments, in which context switching simply doesn't have to be necessary. Emacs provides a whole heck of a lot more than vim. Vim is a powerful editor; emacs is an ultra-powerful environment.

Yes, it's also important to have large monitors, lots of memory and a great work environment. And kudos to you (honestly) for providing that.

> We are knowledge workers, which automatically means we spend far more time on things other than typing code.

Which is why I use a tool which enables me to work with units of knowledge, not just letters and symbols.
Tried it when it was posted last time. It couldn't run it's own source files.

I was wondering if anyone had tried to use cling in any project? It uses llvm's own parser/jit.
Location: Vancouver, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: HTML(5), CSS(3), Javascript (jQuery, Backbone.js, Angular.js), LESS/SASS, Git/SVN, Bower, Grunt, Protractor/Selenium, PHP (CakePHP, CodeIgniter, SlimPHP), Java, RESTful APIs, MongoDB, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, HANA

Focus on web development technologies, with experience on both the front and back-end. More recently focusing on front-end work; having users happy to interact with something I've built is what keeps me motivated.

Most recent project has been architecting and leading a team of 12 developers to build a next generation SaaS crowdfunding platform with a front-end built in AngularJS.

Resume: https://www.dropbox.com/s/db29lpydd6ag6uo/Jay%20Huang%20-%20...

Email: See resume
Do you still live in Detroit? If not, how long ago did you move out?
Surely this is not someone trying to leverage the Streisand Effect as a marketing tool?
Gorilla marketing perhaps. "You say what gorilla no like, gorilla beat you up."
I wouldn't have guessed that from the title. What I got was something security related to MariaDB. And that's because I got used to the funny gifs and the `hacking is cool` mentality of the security industry...
Facebook Takes a Step into Education Software
The Dutch are currently running active experiments with UBI in a few cities. They've only launched in the last few months, though, so it's too soon to say what the long-term impact will be.
Show HN: Navi: An Open-Source VR Input Innovation Using Your Smartphone
I wonder which 15 years this is referring to (i.e. ending what year)

That line is in the very first revision of the page, from 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UniVBE&oldid=4989...
AKA: bikeshedding is a waste of time.
Birth of Joint X-Road Community – Estonia and Finland
I don't know what Linux does, but Mozilla puts out security advisories for every release.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/
Yep, together with Zaphod Beeblebrox. Those two together mark the high end of fantastic naming and few others come close.
3-D Printing Breaks the Glass Barrier
http://www.cringely.com/2015/07/21/ibm-is-so-screwed/

This is? any idea when you saw it?
> it sends that cookie to you as part of a URL in the confirmation email

This certainly isn't a web cookie in the sense that I'm used to (a cookie would be a part of the HTTP header, and you can't specify that header in a URL). It is more like a token as I understand it. Maybe what you are describing is how the web cookie term was started (based on the behavior of generating a thing that someone else gives back to you) but it doesn't sound like a cookie at all to me.
The page mentions Phil King as if that is a name I should be familiar with. This game was just before my time, is this some industry big-shot I should know about but missed?
Ann Arbor has more venture capital per capita than Silicon Valley

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20141212/BLOG007/141219...

http://www.mlive.com/business/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2015/04/po...

http://vcwithme.co/2014/12/02/greatest-concentration-of-vent...
Katahdin -- the northern terminus -- is the hardest climb of the trail and is the biggest focal point regarding the discussion of overcrowding.
The water is just going to stop at the level of the lake, so it will still be flooded. By far the most likely answer is that it gets filtered out into the bottom of the nearby lakebed. I'm guessing there are pockets above the passage that the water flows through where floating debris gets trapped (full of ping pong balls, etc...) and the flow rate is too high for dye to remain detectable.

Damming off half of the river and then cave diving it would be awesome, but tremendously expensive and only good for answering a trivia question.
Progressive tax brackets. Basically, if you had an income of $80k/yr before UBI, and UBI is $10k/yr, you'd get taxed on $90k/yr worth of income.

Current tax rates on UBI-only levels of income is basically zero.

It's essentially a way to get higher income people to pay more for UBI without having what is easy to interpret as a tax increase.
Study: HIV prevention pill Truvada is startlingly 100 percent effective
Would you care to explain why you think their current approach is cavalier? as I'm fascinated in a world where half our secure infrastructure (or more) is running on Linux of some description.
There's also the problem of undecideability as outlined in "Large Limits to Software Estimation": scribblethink.org/Work/kcsest.pdf, plus supporting material: http://scribblethink.org/Work/Softestim/softestim.html

Between psychological (biases) and neurological issues (like 5 +/- 2) and mathematical limits, estimation is pretty hopeless.
Internet Donates Over 800 Copies of Banned Novel to South Carolina Teens
Dungeons as portrayed in every video game ever are a fantastic concept. It's not like there are actually anything like real dungeons outside of our imaginations (digging through rock is hard). The closest real analogues would probably be cave systems, like Carlsbad Caverns or Mammoth Cave, which are formed by irregular natural processes.
Also, less bureaucracy to languish and become inneficient, entrenched, and corrupt.
The reduction in politeness is also interesting. As someone who really enjoys formality, I like to think that forms are a kind of social guardrail to reduce the likelihood of misbehaviour (which would of course include betrayal), but that's probably far too pat.
My assumption was that Social Security typically only effects most US citizens after 65 and/or working(paying income tax). For example, while debated and likely not highly accurate, ~10% of the US citizen population doesn't have a valid id. Also, the amount of those with identification with the valid current address is even lower. When you are talking about the bottom 1/3rd of the population especially there are a lot of people outside the system who are actually US citizens. One can definitely argue that these people will receive a net benefit for entering back into it, but they will also be back into the system as opposed to now. Like I said before, I'm not against it, I just chuckle about the fact that it creates a larger percentage of the population tracked by the government.
Also not related: Urbit.

"Ur-" is the Germanic prefix for "original or primitive," which obviously appeals to functional programmers. And of course, Abraham was originally from there:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ur-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur
SEEKING WORK - Toronto - Remote or Relocation

I am heavily interested in user research, user experience (UX) and user interfaces (UI). A lot of my work has been in data analysis on big datasets and finding ways to visualize them in intuitive ways. Also have experience in informatics, computational biology and bioinformatics.

Technical:
Python, Java, PHP, Perl, HTML, CSS, Javascript, databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL server, Oracle). Experience with statistical software such R, Matlab, Octave, and SPSS. Able to work in Windows, Linux or MacOS environments.

User experience and research methodologies such as prototyping (rapid, whiteboard, paper, useable), wireframes and sketching, requirements solicitation, user stories, user interviews, user surveys, analytics, competition studies, and card sorting.

And constantly learning!

Resume: http://www.garon.la

Portfolio: http://www.garon.la/issuu or http://www.garon.la/portfolio for a PDF version

LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/lagaron
Not with that attitude you won't!
It's a fairly long running and well known series. The first one was published a couple of years ago and was themed around the Carly Rae Jepsen song titled "Call Me Maybe" that was popular at the time.

From that a testing harness named Jepsen was also developed.
It's treated as income and consequently requires no additional enforcement. Whatever agency pays out this amount would also send some sort of 1099 like document. This information would be available to the IRS (which would also have greatly simplified tax rules with the other things GP is proposing). So if you fail to report your $11k on your tax documents it'd be glaringly obvious. If it's your only income, you pay no taxes (and don't get a refund, no taxes have been taken yet). If you have any other income, you might pay taxes on it at some marginal rate.
> When people on the far left and the far right agree, they're usually onto something.

In the 1930s the global far left and far right agreed on authoritarianism. While I personally think UBI is a great idea, I think that invoking a principal of that the points on which the far right and far left half similar views are likely to be correct to promote it is probably a substantially less great idea.
The 3 months were spent using the previous version, so you didn't get the benefit of the improvements in the upgrade. But this scheme means you paid for them anyway.

Anniversary date: March 1st
Upgrade announced: June 1st
You get around to purchasing the upgrade: September 1st
You get to use the new version for 5 more months (until March 1st) before your upgrade premium expires.
Mines?
It strikes me that a land-value tax is the opposite of what is needed. To me, cities' great failing is that they so completely destroy the natural environment that they become inhumane and unlivable. This is largely because undeveloped land is seen as an economic inefficiency rather than as an asset. Having green spaces, undeveloped fields, and the like mixed in with the rest softens the harshness of urban life and helps the city seem like somewhere for humans rather than simply cars and concrete to live.

This is the idea of "nature deficit disorder", the idea that exposure to natural environments helps be be more happy/creative/healthy/etc. Governments should subsidize undeveloped land ownership rather than taxing it out of existence.
Yeah, I posted a comment on this bozo's article but I do not think it will go past the "approval" part...
The opposite. When they had to stop constraining wages, they were forced to give raises to their employees. That is the definition of success: from 2005 to most of 2010, they successfully underpaid.
They don't have an app for this yet? There's an obvious startup here.
Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161826
Not arguing against a calculation. Just the fact that any result should be seen as a first step in a longer series of questions.
For those interested in seeing the project in action take a look at this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32SZAMq16QY
Hi everyone! Dave Messina from Cofactor Genomics here. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.
Getting from Earth orbit to Solar orbit is cheap but slow with solar sailing. And the pure energy cost is not that high in getting up to Earth orbit, just 33 MJ/kg (need another 32 MJ/kg to escape Earth orbit). Rockets are of course very expensive, but mass production would change that. And there is the possibility to bring material from the Moon to build stuff in orbit before a metal asteroid is captured, so everything doesn't have to be lifted from Earth.
The paper underpins the political philosophy of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
> The 20 year-old version of Mark Zuckerberg beats the 20 year-old version of me every time.

What basis do you have for saying this? If Mark missed out on the social media boom, what are the odds that he would find another industry waiting for a multibillion dollar company to come along?
Considering the population involved in taxation is ~48% I feel like 100% is a bit higher. There is certainly additional tracking based upon the listing of dependents ect. but I'm confident it's less then every single US citizen.
Yes. I thought that really artificially skewed the scores, though. When we went to the finals one team member (who normally achieved one run, one pass), keep flubbing his entry. His protracted time in the seat meant the rest of us were artificially restricted at getting our problems done. I had an entire program written out but was never able to even type in. I suppose you could argue that we should have managed that resource better, but you cannot realistically predict someone is going to have an off day; it was 'clear' that he understood what the problem was and the next change was going to be successful. Ah well, it was a lot of fun.
App Release Notes Are Getting Stupid
Jason Scott has some interesting things to say in the comments section for this Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/reis...
But then you can't have fun with them!

http://www.stilldrinking.org/trolling-marketers-for-profit-a...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/utm-mangler/ngddln...

(The questionable one mentioned in the article was removed from the add-on.)
Methylene blue is available in hospitals, often as a vasopressor of last resort ("four pressor shock").
WhatsApp has 900M monthly active users–but still no business model
It has nothing to do with security. The series is about database consistency - whether or not the data stored in distributed systems is valid.
...and keep track of every single one of those US citizens' addresses and/or bank accounts. Every single one.
Again, I have only one vote, just like you. I don't think I have any particular right when it comes to setting policy.

But, if radical redistribution of wealth is wanted by voters, then the population can enact laws to make it happen.

I have no doubt that automation on a scale beyond what most people think is possible (and maybe desirable) is coming. Today, any talk of basic income in the US isn't going to go anywhere. However, at some point enough people are going to be out of work that they will be a big enough voting block that politicians will start restructuring the economy to make those voters happy. I'm not sure I see any other possible outcome.