skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The people who receive checks from the government every month are already preselected for failure. You don't get a government check at random, you get it for being disabled, for being too old to work, for being incapable of holding down any sort of job, etc. Looking at them to see how the population at large might react to basic income is not going to be informative.
Except that there are strong social incentives for anyone who is capable of getting a paying job and going off welfare to do so.

If it were socially acceptable for an artist, scientist or entrepreneur to fall back on "welfare" for some amount of time to work on a project, improve themselves or bootstrap a startup, I think you'd see that more often (including outcomes that end up contributing back to society.

Which is why basic income is such a good idea. If it's unconditional, and not tied to an assertion that "I am poor and cannot feed myself otherwise", I think you'll start to see more capable people leverage it for uses other than basic survival.

It still doesn't answer the question of whether that investment (as a society) would pay off, but its a fair bet that it would at least be a different group of people leveraging it.
I consumed product data feeds from companies that ran affiliate programs through companies like Commission Junction, filtered/stored the product data offline, indexed it, and displayed it in any number of ways through the web.

In retrospect, I should have spent more time marketing the site and getting feedback from users instead of focusing on the technical infrastructure :-)
Yes it will guarantee housing prices for rent rise to the guaranteed income.

Just like college prices magically rise to the amount of available loans.
The counter-argument is that those cheques stop if those people start working. In a worst-case scenario, you can end up with a "dead zone" where you make the same amount of money working 30 hours a week at a poorly-paying job as you get doing absolutely nothing. Why not do absolutely nothing, then? Advocates of UBI stress that the non-means-tested nature of these benefits prevents them from causing that trap. Even if you're only working for a penny, that's an extra penny minus tax that you keep.
Slack is down
Slack's desktop app is stuck loading.
I think this might be part of the issue though - I saw another article about this plan that said people often _don't_ try to contribute because their welfare benefits are subject to them not doing certain things.

For instance - you get $X from welfare, you could make $Y doing some work despite your disability, but $Y < $X, and if you make $Y, the government won't give you $X - therefore there is no reason to pursue $Y.

Even if you don't have money, often if you're on disability anything that might show you aren't "so disabled" can stop it. Therefore even if you want to, there is really a strong reason not to try to do things.

That is what basic income is meant to really alleviate - there becomes no reason not to do other stuff, because it's unconditional - those already on welfare no longer have all those requirements.

I'm not saying it would be perfect, but I do think it would address at least part of this problem. I wish I had an actual study on the numbers of people that don't try to get jobs/be productive while on welfare because of the risk of losing the primary income stream they get from welfare, but I can't find anything. I have known several people in this situation though, and watching the system treat them that way was kind of heartbreaking.
> he idea behind basic income is to remove day-to-day struggle from people's lives. If only they didn't have to worry where their next rent check is coming from, then potentially a huge groundswell of human capital could rise out of nowhere and carry us all into a new age.

That is not at all what basic income is about. The point of basic income is not as a means to enable anything; it's a natural byproduct of and solution to a problem, the problem of ever increasing automation removing the need for human labor. There will come a time when exchanging labor for capital is no longer a workable system because the demand for human labor will have collapsed due to automation and robots doing everything. Thus without the ability to sell labor, most people no longer have capital with which to participate in an economy. That's what basic income is meant to solve. It's in no way meant to release human capital to foster in a new age, it's meant to allow humans to live in a new age where labor simply isn't necessary and thus labor based economies no longer exist.
I recall the Apple II+ floppy drive would produce all kinds of choking, strangling, and coughing sounds when playing those copy protected games. When I got my next computer, my first Mac, I remember my shock at the silence of the floppy drive. Many times I thought it was broken (and since they were so slow to load, you had to 'wait it out' to be sure).
Forgotten to you, PCMag. I've never stopped playing these bad boys.
|...and I'm not convinced you're going to have better results.

|he built a dust collector and band saw from scratch

I'm guessing he isn't building things because they are the cheapest option, he's likely building them to say he did.
That's great, I hadn't heard a term for that before, but that's exactly how I've been describing Bitcoin for a while. There's so much ideology in the space that governance is a toxic idea. Many like to ignore the reality of people coming together and having disagreements.

However, I wouldn't quite say that it describes Bitcoin, or rather, it only describes it up to this point. The real, ultimate strength, I think, would be a Bitcoin that has a market for governance. To wit, you'd have competing implementations, each of which would adopt some protocol changes, but perhaps not others, and each node and miner would be voting on the network (by participating, mining, etc.). Any majority would eventually create a longer fork and win out. This is what Gavin has been talking about for some time.

The real question is whether the network can withstand the constant possibility of forking, and some frequency of actual forks. I think it can, and would represent a dramatic shift of how Bitcoin operates. I see it as a bright new future and the ultimate in anti-fragile structure, while obviously others see it as a fundamental betrayal.
On the other hand, those 5 million additional people probably aren't going to sit around doing nothing. That's not how human nature works, either - most people are happier doing something rather than nothing! Self actualization and all that.

So are they going to contribute as much to the sovereign wealth that funds the basic income as the citizens?

And is the basic income extended to guest workers / temporary residents as well as citizens? I would think it would be limited to citizens.

So you would actually have immigrants contributing to funding basic income without benefiting from it until they obtain citizenship.
People still like to have more money. A job might well look more attractive if your basic needs are already covered and so you can afford to only work part time, for example. And it will certainly look more attractive if there's no monetary threshold you can cross that will yank your government benefits.
No, this is wrong. The people already receiving government checks do so with a stipulation: if you start receiving money from anyone else besides the government, then the government will stop sending checks!

This works to disincentivize people from contributing their time and effort to the economy for fear they will lose the "basic income" that the government provides.

A real basic income is different: the governments says here is a check that should meet all your basic needs and then some and please feel free to do whatever you want with your time, including contributing it to the economy by starting a company, interviewing for a job you actually want, or what have you.
Has anyone built a decentralized, egalitarian system on any foundation? Call be cynical but at some point you run into human nature, and we're not fundamentally decentralising or egalitarian.
Idea bad. Idea gone
The 8 Unexpected Rules of Business That No One Teaches but Everyone Should Know
Actually, I'm increasingly convinced we made the right choice there. In some other areas (exception safety) we're discovering that adding new traits to the language that infect everything has dramatically negative effects on usability.

I think of things like the leakpocalypse the same way I think of security advisories like the Go one from a few days ago. Yeah, it looks bad on paper, but the odds of being affected by it in practice are so incredibly low that it's not worth worrying about.
Would anyone, personally, take something like this as an opportunity to do open source work and/or research projects? Or do you feel like you want/need money as a motivator to be your most productive and a way to keep score in the game?
No, the idea is that they have to sign a legally binding covenant beforehand, agreeing to not sue. If not then their DRM doesn't get into the standard in the first place.
Great essay, Sam! I want to expand slightly from a founder's perspective:

You always have two constituencies to think about: (A) your users / customers, and (B) your not-yet-users/customers.

"Before growth", you should really pay very very little attention to constituency B. If you're doing anything interesting, there will always be a torrent of skeptics, doubters, and haters. (That sucks, but it's very human, and you just have to ignore it.)

Focus entirely on constituency A. There are three "R" metrics to look for: (1) Retention. (2) Revenue. (3) Referrals. (Note: these are the three "RRR" of the classic "AARRR" model.)

Initially, constituency A might just be your friends or extended network who you can convince give what you've built a try. You may be able to get them to try your new product once or twice, but that's about it.

However, if they keep using it again and again voluntarily, that's a really good sign (Retention). If they voluntarily and happily pay for it, that's great (Revenue). And if they voluntarily tell other people they know about it (Referrals), that's amazing!

Until you have those nailed -- or at least retention and referrals if you're deferring monetization -- don't worry at all about the "B" group (i.e. don't worry about acquiring new leads at the top of your funnel), because you don't have product-market fit yet.

Once you do have a product that the constituency A people love, only then can you start thinking about constituency B and how to turn them into new happy users / customers. (While continuing to make your constituency A happy!)

I think Sam is going a step further to place extra emphasis specifically on Referrals out of all three of these metrics. This is a subtle but powerful insight. Whether your product is B2C or B2B, most purchasing decisions have a huge emotional component. If your product is so good that your users want to tell other people about it, that's a huge step above being merely satisfactory, and goes a huge way toward powering your growth.

I don't care if you're buying a burrito, a car, CDN bandwidth, or an analytics SaaS. You as a buyer want a reasonable degree of certainty that you're going to feel good about that purchase after you've made it. Hearing that referral from your peer, whether a friend who tried that food truck before, or another engineer who used that SaaS provider before, goes a huge way toward giving you that pre-purchase confidence.

If your users aren't excited enough about it to be talking about it with their peers, you may have to adjust your product or your segmentation of the market until you get there.
> Plenty of people already receive checks from the government every month that they live on. Like, a whole lot of people. There should already be a not-so-huge wave of accomplishment coming from all these people. Not to belittle them and their abilities, but there isn't.

I'm not well versed in the structure of European welfare systems, but when you look at the US welfare system there are some absolutely perverse incentives that discourage people from working their way out of it. Numerous programs have a sharp income cliff: make more than $x and you no longer get this benefit at all. I have talked to people who have quit a job because they got a promotion and would no longer receive benefits to help pay for the place they were currently renting.

It's bewildering to me that there's no political will on either side to fix this. All it would take is requiring graduated income checks so for every $1 you make more in wages you lose less than $1 of benefits.

So I have some optimism for basic income that if you have a truly inalienable source of income with no strings attached that it'll open up a ton of creativity and value.
ChakraCore/AsmJSCodeGenerator.cpp
Nothing as yet on http://status.twitter.com/ but its also down for me.
Would you feel better if the title were "Disrupt Uber"?

Since the workers already own most of the capital (in the form of vehicles they own and maintain), it would make a lot of sense for them to form a cooperative and capture more of the profits they and their capital are generating. Creating such a competing network does not require actually seizing any of the assets of "Uber Technologies, LLC".

Would you argue that Uber et al. deserve to be protected from that alternative, other than by outcompeting it?
A really good example to look at is (apparently) the case of how Arab migrants feel 'included' in Belgium vs. in Canada.

Apparently, in Belgium, the welfare system is targeted towards providing financial incentives to less-fortunate people, awhile the Canadian welfare system is more directed towards 'fulfilling life'. Apparently a lot of immigrants to Belgium migrate to Canada even if they make more 'free' money in Belgium, because of this reason. Tyler Cowen's written a bit about it, and you might need to look it up, but I found it verrry interesting.
Are there still any active servers? TW2002 is by far my favorite game of all time, but I had a lot of trouble getting a good reasonable-turns game (~750 - 1250) with high engagement humans.. or at least passable bots! :)
I came across this Real-Time 4k Panoramic stitched USB video camera it was featured at CES 2016 http://www.getpanacast.com/
Ownership and Lifetimes != Reference counting.

Reference counting is code smell that you don't have a clear ownership model.

Take a look a Rust for something more along the lines of what I'm talking about. There's been quite a few people who've re-written their C/C++ code to Rust only to find out that they didn't have a clear ownership model and found architectural improvements because of it.
That would require collusion between landlords. Otherwise one landlords rent hike of $800 would be countered by another one who is only raising the rent by $750 ... etc until you get back to logical market pricing.

Yes some landlords would definitely try it, but I think they'd be quickly corrected by the market.
I never said anyone should be left out of the discussion. I didn't even disagree with you (as I explicitly said). But I do think your position is vastly more complex to defend if these are the only two sample sets you have to base it on.

Part of the problem with things like disability pay is that it introduces a complex calculus about whether it's worth it to keep getting it or not. A basic income is designed to alleviate that. There are many situations where someone on disability is presently encouraged by the system to not be overly productive (even if they could be or might like to be).
You know what's interesting here, nobody mentioning MajorMUD. That was (and somewhat still is) the kinda-not-a-door-game door game serving as the engine of a lot of BBS use. Unfortunately, MetroBBS (the company that owns the IP) is still holding out for some kind of MMO or movie deal or something and the pricing for this game is silly. Also, being from the KC area, I have it on very good authority that some of the source code for MM was lost during an office move. And this is why (in addition to having lost their main programmer) there haven't been substantial updates in years.
As you might have noticed, the problem with this thinking is that you (or I) don't decide what Zuckerberg or Gates spends his money on - they decide. However much you trust them to make their decisions, they're ultimately not responsible to you or anyone else how they do it.
I travel frequently to China; the best solution that I have found, that works out of the box on handset and laptop is shadowsocks, pointing to a secure [ie; your own] server.

I recently used this in Iran with success as well.
The balance is finding the amount of assistance that reaches two points, reducing requesting even more aid and removing the tendency to want to take another persons stuff.

I believe that this is one of those long term deals, it won't be the first generation which learns to live with it but following generations will. By the third it should be entrenched and cultural norms will be that you don't another persons stuff and your needs are met.

As of right now there is too much opportunity to game the system which in itself requires a much more robust system within the government to track all the aid dollars it spends. The danger is that this will force a move away from physical money. This is because it allows government to manipulate the money you have. It leads to totalitarian control as they can simply outlaw an activity by preventing expenditures on it. So in the end the money will need to be independent of the governments as well. (it will be sold to stop terrorists, drug dealers, and other "bad" people)
Wouldn't debugging / testability imply this is a fairly large proportion of programs? Having a calculation give different results on different hardware would make testing difficult: http://yosefk.com/blog/consistency-how-to-defeat-the-purpose...
Yup, this is exactly like Rust's Result<T,E>(with E being std::error_code).
You realize your first sentence is practically the definition for a democratic republic?

I wasn't taking issue with the proposed decision making mechanism. I was taking issue with the idea that there are purely "technical solutions". In math, the most intangible of disciplines, I was taught that when working solving an open problem, the most important question to answer will always be, "So what?" It's easy to come up with novel but trivial proofs all day long. If you can't explain why the new proof is important, then, so what? Go play with Legos.

If such an intangible discipline requires some justification part of its most foundational task, then surely there must be some broader justification in software development. And I'm being specific when I use the term 'software development'. It's not like we're talking about computer science or applied mathematics.

Software development builds things that are to be used by end users for a purpose. There is plenty of room in software development for non-technical perspectives, and non-technical discussions will never be black-or-white. Often a software development project with be built specifically for a non-expert. In that case, to say that the end-user "should not necessarily be ignored" is such a bad tenor to be set for the discussion.

Last, I'd like to mention the idea of a do-ocracy, which is what many OSS projects have organically turned into. In these cases, the technical expert and the novice alike can do whatever they want, because folks will either choose to work with them or not. But in a do-ocracy it's not likely that someone will be forced to do something they don't agree with or at least sign-on-to.

If you want a "buck stops here" set-up, then go to a company that has a hierarchy or pay people to do what you tell them to do. But otherwise, there is no Utopia where programmers can go write whatever software they want and that others will be required to use without getting to share in the decision making process.
Finland is in very early stages of "just thinking about it". it probably will not be implemented. International media can not even get this story about a country in Europe right. Imagine how bad or incorrect their news reporting about "other" countries is.

source: http://yle.fi/uutiset/kela_to_prepare_basic_income_proposal/...
While removing DRM would certainly help Netflix, it doesn't stop them from offering such edge boxes already; ISPs can already host a box on their network that supplies Netflix videos to that ISP's customers.
Free temp email
It wouldn't - and couldn't - work like that: where would the extra 5M * 800€ come from? Basically everyone would get the 800€ added to their gross income, but income tax progression would be simultaneously steepened so that in practice middle and high-income individuals would not see a change in their net income.

For low-income households Finland already has a housing allowance system. It would be one of the benefits probably obsoleted by basic income (though there are good yet-unanswered questions on eg. how to handle geographical differences in rent levels).
I'm not opposed to basic income, and I do agree that the dynamics you're presenting might actually happen, in some cases for some people.

I think though, that it's going to wind up being Just Another Government Program, if it were to be implemented in the US.

There's just not enough money around to give everyone an income of more than maybe a thousand dollars a month. You'd need to really change how government finance works in order to be more generous.
> The whole basis of the US tax system rides on the "General Welfare" clause

No, it rides on the 16th amendment which explicitly authorized income taxes.

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
That is different. The college market is nothing like the housing market. There is no way to say "College A and B are exactly the same merit but College B costs more, so I will choose College A". So many people do not make college decisions based on price (besides the broader decision of private university vs public university vs community college).

With rent is is different. If a landlord tries to change the price of an apartment because tenants have more money, people will look for another apartment immediately. Unless they collude or there is a shortage of apartments, the pricing should stay sane.
YouTube rentals and purchases use DRM (and the downloaders don't handle those); normal videos just use obfuscation.
"Paying someone to not have to participate in the economic system"

No, again, basic income is about the government providing an income to meet basic needs without any strings attached. The government isn't paying you not to participate, they are saying you may participate and how much is up to you without fear of starving.
Why? It doesn't change supply, and I don't think it would have much of an effect on demand, either -- it's too cold for Finland to have much of a homeless population.
It's a nice story, but it's unconvincing. I would agree that a fixed supply of money might become more valuable as human population increases.

But I'm utterly unconvinced that 'prices can only increase' for the economy to work. For example, in electronics prices for hardware have generally fallen in nominal and real terms and yet it's still a pretty big industry.
Seriously? It takes me 1 minute to make a great cup of coffee. In the excruciating 4 minutes that it takes to brew, I check my email. Or just contemplate.
Side question: is it normal in French to stylize the title as "lemonde"?

It would be strange in English, to my eyes, to refer to a newspaper whose name was "The World" as theworld.