skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Caveat: I don't agree with the author, I'm just trying to understand both sides here. But,

It seems to be a just an Economists (albeit a lefty one) looking for solutions in previous data.

1) That is the only conclusion that can be gleaned from the past century of data. Projections as to the effect of an "exponential explosion in AI/ML" have no data to support it.

2) I don't think he advocates for either. Though as a lefty he definitely doesn't advocate for busting of social programs (esp Healthcare)

3) Very True.

4) Labour doesn't necessarily ask for increased welfare, they ask for perfect employment. Which the author implies is a larger force for productivity boosts than something like UBI. It also gives the masses some control (therefore keeping the pitchforks away).

Historically, weakening labour has led to slumps in productivity for a myriad of reasons (that he could've done a better job at laying out). And we have no evidence that a UBI would increase productivity, but we do know it will destroy labour unions.
Without productivity increases (towards zero marginal cost), UBI may not be able to deliver on its lofty promisies.

On the flip side: Increasing power to labour would mean another concentration of power that can (and has) be corrupted easily.
Assuming you are a male in the USA you are in the 95th percentile [0] by height. And if you are 7 feet tall then you don't need to worry about low ceilings in council housing because you are probably an NBA [1] player.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr010.pdf

[1] http://www.truthaboutit.net/2012/05/true-or-false-half-of-al...
Getting Started with Exponent in 15 Minutes
The latter seems more accurate. Although 23andme can't provide you with a health analysis, they still provide you with their entire panel in raw data, which you can upload to other services such as Enlis and get effectively the same health report.

If Enlis grows, they may get a similar letter to 23andme, because they would be offering a medical analysis not approved by the FDA.
It seemed intentionally obtuse.
Pull request is welcomed :)
1) What I was talking about Google being one exception to the rule. The thing is that at least with AdWords you get related to your search. When I am reading some news, the last thing I care about is if I could be missing some opportunity to buy a car, or if be bombarded with ads from Coca-Cola, or some possible tourist destination.

Ultimately, there is no problem to be solved when people are visiting whatever source of content they are going for. That people that tolerate ads in web pages do it only because they think it is the only way to get the content for free, not because of the value-add of the promoted advertisement.

2) Yes, the best thing about digital ads is the data... for the marketers. The producers get very little real benefit from it and in the end are put in an arms race by the marketing companies that tell them that the only way to keep their market share is by outspending the competition.

3 and 4) "We wouldn't have nearly as many sources on the Internet if it weren't for ads." That would be great, actually. We need more quality, not quantity. What you list as qualities ("quick, passive and requires no decision willpower") is exactly what brings the quality of the content down.

And yes, I am saying that the linked article is worthless. Not because I just don't like it, but because I seriously doubt that the "huge market" would actually vote with their wallets to get that kind of content produced.

We don't need ad money to fund something like Wikipedia. Conversely, ad money is what makes Buzzfeed, Gawker and Jezebel to pass for journalism nowadays. And these are not even the worst around.

--

I truly believe that people accepting ads as a way to get content is one of the largest disgraces for society in the digital age. I like to make the analogy with the corn industry and the government subsidies since the 70's. People wanted to get "cheap" food, and all they got was externalized costs. Years later we got an obesity epidemic, huge costs in healthcare and corn-ethanol, which is energy net-negative. The Advertisement industry does the same thing for our culture, our education, our civic values (slacktivism) and the economy at large. This "just a business model" is morally bankrupt.
You're right to be unsure of (1); it is often claimed and simply isn't true. Of the top thirty jobs in the United States, 29 existed in some form or another 300 years ago. Only number thirty (computer programmer) is new.

I've linked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU many times and I'll do it again.

Recently I've been coming to the conclusion that whilst free market capitalism deals very well with a fairish distribution of scarce resources, it doesn't deal very well with abundance (or rather, it deals ruthlessly with it - the price drops to near zero). We're facing an abundance of labour, and I don't think things are going to end well if the market rate for that ends up so low that labourers can't eat.
Just as long as I'm still allowed to own a car, much as I'm still allowed to own a horse, I'm okay with this.
Athletics corruption on a 'different scale', says report
You're late to the game. Such high margin products have existed for some time. There are even published papers about them()!

The published papers tend to be by the same people making the supertweeters
It is a cool idea but I don't understand why you don't write your compiler in Swift so at some point you can compile your compiler with your own compiler.

Unfortunately, it is far from usable. It is unable to parse even basic Swift code.
This word, "transpiler", must die. Call it a translator or a compiler; there's no need for a new word in this case.

Looks like an interesting project, though. I'll keep an eye on it.
I'm guessing so you could use swift to write web front end code. And this goes from Swift -> JS, so you would still need to learn Swift
You become more mobile with basic income though. I don't live in the midwest, because the job market there is pretty poor; as a bachelor, I could have stayed on the couch of a friend's house while looking for jobs, but with a family of 6, that's less of a possibility.

If my family got enough in UBI to support us in Indiana, then we could move there and I could take my time finding a job. UBI doesn't eliminate inequality, but it can open up more options.

My bigger concern with UBI is that we may eliminate the parts of the welfare system that treats addicts, and a lot of sick people will get sicker under it.
In response to (1), link shorteners provide a very limited amount of clickstream insight and – in most cases – should not be used as a replacement for URL query string parameters.

Several link shorteners may impose their own set of query parameters, unless configured otherwise, which can distort clickstream and referrer data in Google Analytics, Omniture, and so forth.

That said link shorteners are useful for hiding complexity and for quickly and simply tracking how many clicks a link receives. This includes clicks on links to domains that you do not own, or sites for which you would be unable to view visitor and clickstream data.
> "UBI is a pittance offered to the proletariat from the elite to prevent us from revolting"

So does the author actually want a revolt? Because that's insane. It is not rational to want a war when you can get the essentials, enough to stop a revolt, through peaceful means. And, during and after the war, who will be hurt hardest? The working class! The very people the author claims to support!

This is why nobody takes people like the author seriously. They demand everything and are satisfied with nothing, and then threaten to burn the whole thing down instead of investing the effort to fix it.

Revolution isn't a solution. It's a threat which, if it is carried out, causes even more problems. If it is continuously threatened, it is a cop-out, a way to avoid thinking about how to actually solve anything.

Sometimes revolution is needed. Never think it solves more problems than it creates.
I wouldn't call that view "unfair and offensive to economists," just not super original or useful. There are huge financial and societal rewards to producing "better economics" than we have now (i.e., you'd do the world a lot of good and get paid a lot of money) so if you have specific improvements in mind, please please please try to work on them.
In this case you would have to learn JavaScript, since it compiles to JavaScript.
There's a lot that people can do without knowing how to code. QA and support are two tasks that are often horribly understaffed in OSS, and in larger projects, you don't want developers doing these tasks because other people can do them equally effective and developer time is better spent fixing things.
"A single nuclear plant can cost on the order of $10 billion U.S. That is a big chunk of change to plunk down on one plant. Only very large companies, like General Electric or Hitachi, can afford to make that kind of investment"

Sure, but I remember when only major corporations like GE and Hitachi had the kind of cash, facilities, and people you needed to buy and maintain this new thing called a computer...
I know a developer that earns well above 1500£ per day writing and maintaining x86 assembly embedded in C++ for finance applications.

That is higher than the going rate for Haskell in finance afaik.

So yes, still relevant.
Tax is part of the social contract, and you can opt out at any time by leaving.

Further, taxes are regulated through voting, which determines both how much is collected and how it is used. If the majority disagrees, well, most of the money is theirs, not yours, and you're free to go somewhere else.
There were plenty of bids before it dropped to $1 (Note: I work at 18F)
On the margin, having something to fall back on gives workers more freedom, since they have more alternatives. I think it would have complex effects on negotiating power.

Some jobs might pay more because they're unattractive and workers are less desperate to take jobs that are barely worth it.

Some might pay the same or less, because they're attractive from a lifestyle point of view (good location or prestigious). This would be similar to how someone on a trust fund can afford to take an unpaid internship, but regular students can't afford it.

Other jobs will be mostly unaffected since they already pay a lot more than minimum income.

I don't see any way that having more money is bad for workers. It might not be great for unions because it's about individual workers having more power on their own. On the other hand, it pays for some part of the strike fund.
It's worth thinking carefully about what you expect to gain from Open Sourcing code, before you do it. One of my projects (https://mitmproxy.org) is pretty widely used commercially (both as a tool for analysts, and as a back-end component). We have a vibrant pool of contributors, many of whom use mitmproxy in their day jobs, but the only financial contribution from a commercial user has been from Google, and that at arm's length via a GSOC sponsorship.

I would never complain about this, though - we don't solicit financial contributions, and I didn't start the project expecting to benefit financially. I get a lot of direct enjoyment out of working on mitmproxy, and I see it as a way to share something neat with like-minded people. In that sense, it has been immensely "profitable": I've met and collaborated with many interesting folks because of mitmproxy.

If you don't feel these indirect benefits make a project worth your while, you might want to consider doing something else with your time. There's no likely future in which small open source projects will be deluged with either contributors or money.
So like a GPL/commercial dual license?
The recording equipment won't necessarily pick it up. If the microphones are place very close the instruments relative to the other instruments creating the interaction.
"We'll have flying cars any day now..."
Not so much a price floor as a better BATNA - the ability to walk away without having to go and live on the streets.
> the godless machine age

Which began in the 1700s or earlier, with the Dark Satanic Mills.
"to get productivity growing again, labour has to become more expensive"

Productivity is the saleable value of the work, not the cost of the work. The latter is only a floor for the former (since work that cannot be sold at least at its cost will simply not be done - witness the rise of fast food robots).
It managed to use "its" correctly, which is more than the average native English speaker seems capable of doing. Even though there were some obvious mistakes and a few places contained awkward phrasing, on the whole I thought the grammar was quite decent.
This is a fine piece of writing but I have a problem with the following statement:

With the introduction of a UBI, employers would have a powerful weapon to force wages down, as they good argue that they needn’t pay as much any more, because they already had enough to maintain their standard of living.

If this was true, the employers would already be forcing the minimum wage down on everyone.

The UBI would give the lowest paid workers a powerful leverage they currently lack: the ability to choose not to work instead of accepting whatever wage the market offers. For other workers, the minimum wage or any viable UBI is small compared to their earnings, so it is hard to see how it could be used by the employer in salary negotiations.
For more (in the x86-64 specific context), see also http://tinyurl.com/x86-64-assembly
Plants can't "prefer", they are not conscious beings.
Feminism and the social left. Basically the same hive that will downvote this.
The Eleventh HOPE
In my anecdotal experience, econ PhD students are a lot more likely to take graduate math classes than cs PhD students. The PhD probability sequence was more or less a standard part of the econometrics course work in my program. Admittedly, I don't know that many cs PhDs, so maybe I don't have a complete picture.

I think a lot of these views come from the undergrad classes where, yeah, econ math requirements are pretty unimpressive. But, of course, the recommendation for students who plan to get a PhD amounts to "be a math major," which again isn't my understanding of cs...
Bradley vs. Rios Boxing Live Walter-Weight
No one is arguing that real household income has not risen sine 1945. The problem is that it's stagnated and even decreased since 2000, which is exactly what that chart shows.
> Sometimes revolution is needed. Never think it solves more problems than it creates.

I love that. I feel the same way about most forms of government regulation; in the small and short term they can be necessary to solve a problem, but in aggregate and the long term they harm competitiveness in an industry. I always thought "clean your shit up, or we'll regulate you" to be better at improving an industry than actual regulation.

Naturally, if you don't ever follow through, the threat has no power, so it is necessary sometimes.
> I am a Christian who is one of those weird people who believes that 1 Corinthians 6 actually tells Christians not to sue other Christians.

This makes you extremely vulnerable to affinity fraud.
Actually you'd have to adjust the numbers by money supply increase, which grows faster than inflation.
Delete the parent to this comment.
Ah, that makes more sense.

Though note that there may be strategic reasons for having some aluminum production capability.
> it just sounds like a waterfall with a few bandpass filters changing between the verse and chorus.

That's a good way to put it. I hate over-compressed music. It sounds terrible and is no fun to listen to once you notice the issue.

But, are you an audio engineer? I ask because I work in the field, and all engineers I know accept that dynamic range compression is a necessary part of creating recorded music. The problem is when you abuse compression to create a wall of noise with no dynamic range.

It's like autotune: you can use it to correct one bad note, or you can abuse it create T-Pain.

The engineers behind The Pixies and Nirvana [1], and all dubstep producers use or have used compression at various stages of the creative process.

[1]
I guarantee you that whoever mixed Smells Like Teen Spirit spent a lot of time doing the compression on that song.
Thats cool- positive vibrations for everyone
It would make for an interesting ADA claim...
Calling stated opinions 'revolting' and 'you should feel shamed' are not proper discourse; The first sentence was fine, the second was not.
If there is supply at $1... yes ;)

Of course, there might be supply at $1 for one such project, not tens of thousands of projects.
I think the main thrust was that if labour does not have sufficient power at the point of UBI's implementation, it is likely to be, at best, neutral for the poor, as welfare will be withdrawn at the same time as UBI is introduced.
It's weird to even think that because you pay a lot for something, the employees must be well-off.
As I sit here in a rather old house (1920's) though never very expensive house I would say there are good and bad things about it.
There's very little insulation, the heavy exterior is only a couple inches from some sort of plaster board on the inside causing many electrical boxes to be shallow. They really didn't care about the price of heating the house when they built it or maybe they did it to be cheap, but in any case that cost has gone way up.
I do like an actual wood floor and heavy beams used in the construction of the basement and such.
The plumbing is sometimes far more creative then is easy to fix now and I've found myself just cutting sections out and replacing it. I actually have some pipes made from lead going out so they can be bent in curves. Terracotta drains in the yard probably need to be replaced.
The wiring was the first thing I replaced, knob and tube without grounds was just scary. O, and since the entire house was painted (yes they painted the formed bricks, not exactly like in the article though still bricks) with lead paint I certainly wouldn't eat something grown close to the house. Also I have steam heat which is interesting all by itself. So all in all, a not super expensive old building tends to be a lot of work these days and I would rather have a newer even if flimsy construction next time. I think I'll go along with the commenter who said the surviving old buildings are a bias because they are generally the best of the best of what was built in that time period.
Isn't that contradictory?
Investing in technology that makes workers more productive would have a result of needing less workers?
Rules... fun! I still love my Spotify though
Abolishing copyright would eliminate a massive arts incentive. Whether that would be replaced with something reasonably equivalent or somehow better is a matter of speculation and faith, not an assertable fact. It's definitely not clear how many abusable corners it would have in a complicated real-world marketplace but my own faith says nonzero.
IMHO the problem with many competing social networks (Tsu, Ello, Diaspora, etc) is that they try to be exactly like Facebook. So in practice they become crappy subsets of Facebook. Then nobody has much interest in using them because Facebook is a much better Facebook.

The more interesting competitors tend to pick a narrower use case (say, sending secret pictures) and become really good at it.
EFF Challenges Informal Government Censorship
Show HN: Easy to use webpage backup for sharing/offline use
This is a pretty cool idea imo
Bournemouth vs Newcastle United – Match Preview
> The conclusions are only logical that this is an area where government support and intervention can reap vast societal benefits.

If it's not an economical proposition, involving the government surely can't help.

The issue is that folks want a very high caregiver/child ration, for what is essentially unskilled labour (any non-pathological adolescent or adult can take care of children acceptably). So the supply of workers (i.e., just about everyone) vastly outstrips the demand.

Why not just go back to single-earner households and extended families?
That would be true only if wealth were equally distributed to start with. So basic income should bring some inflation, but it also brings some wealth redistribution.
I gotta hand it to Butterfield's PR person because I see his mug everywhere, but there's such a thing as too much circlejerk and I think the guy's reached that point. Slack isn't a revolution, it's evolution, and despite Butterfield's PR saturation, I'm just not interested in suckin the guy's dick.

The thing that bothers me the most in Silicon Valley is the cult of personality that is cultivated to drive the hype machine. Very few are genius or special in any way, it's just luck, timing, and connections. If we allow people like Butterfield or that nutjob Theranos chick to tap into an unlimited ego feedback loop, we're just creating tech bubbles of bullshit that will harm all of us. It's irrational exuberance, just like the 90s.
This is a nicely thought out essay but I largely don't agree with it.

The author's basic premise that improvements in technology always bring an increase of employment will, I believe, not be true at all in the next few decades.

I think the rich will look at something like universal basic income as something to keep society civil, avoiding large scale civil unrest.
Sign+up+for+Kik+Contacts+-+Kik+Contacts+-+Find+new+friends+on+Kik+Messenger
Is childcare in fact expensive? According to the article it "can top 15 percent of the median income for a married couple". But considering that taking care of children used to be a full-time job for a housewife, isn't it actually surprisingly cheap relative to historical standards?

In general, if there isn't increased productivity because of technology, we shouldn't expect lower costs in terms of labor-hours consumed. See "Baumol's cost disease" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease)
It's only weird if the employee isn't directly responsible for creating that something.

e.g., You can buy a Lambo for nearly one million but the cars salesman who sold it to you probably isn't rich.

But when you buy a painting for nearly one million, it'd make sense to think the actual painter is doing pretty well.

A (good)public school teacher in America is woefully underpaid compared to the service they provide. They should be paid similar to doctors & nurses, imho.
Capital?
This is true. Mastering for vinyl is basically a completely different set of skills than mastering for other media.
At least you're not even pretending that taxation is supposed to be good for him (by virtue of services or whatever). No, simply "you owe" the mob, however much they demand.
How terrible that the people at the lower end be given more power. The peons and wage slaves should be kept in their place. /s
Obviously there is a difference between "excessive compression" (the term the GP used...) and "no compression at all" (what you seem to be arguing against).
Ok, this is freakin awesome. How did I not know about this coming out?
I'm even more confused now. The general point of a basic income AFAIK is to permit everyone to live somewhere and eat regardless of their employment status. Boosting unions and forcing companies to scale existing labor rather than invest in new labor, and thus increasing the number of people with no income, sounds like movement in the exact opposite direction.
> The way I see it, some time right after WWII, people in US suddenly decided to live in a poorly built and ugly looking dwellings regardless of their income level.

You could extend this to a lot of other things. Pre-war and post-war America look way more than five years apart.
CRUDE OIL Bull Pressure Sets for the 43.19/42.56 Zone