skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Humans still devised and implemented the algorithms those computers are using. I'd count that as a win for the meat side.

Then there are things like http://www.sscaitournament.com/ going on. The bots there are still quite bad compared to competent human players. There is still hope :)
And in Bend that would be a delicious beer!

I'm thrilled Deschutes Brewery has started distributing here in DC. Also, count me among the many who have no issue with the use of Amazon affiliate links.
All of those problems are political; ie, we already know how to build more densely, how to make better trains, how to zone, etc. etc. For that matter, I doubt Uber for Houses would be successful (ignore all permits and just build).
I get your points, but at least with custom code you have security by obscurity. Using out of the box stuff puts you in a higher level of security risk because anyone can access the code and find bugs and how to exploit them. At least with custom code, it'll take some time for them to find something and attack you.

I mean for crying out loud, just installing Wordpress invites people trying to get in using automated tools. You can deploy a wordpress blog at it's default state, and wake up 3 days later to it being spammed.
Things that would help everyone, regardless of income, without depending on a radical restructuring of entitlement spending, that seem like things startups could actually do:

* Equally credible alternatives to university education for professions that don't involve students shouldering $100k-$200k in debt based on decisions they have to make when they're 18 years old.

* Empirical, blinded, skills-assessment based turnkey hiring solutions that outperform interviews for non-technology roles like marketing, purchasing, &c, so that people who avail themselves of alternatives to universities can get good jobs regardless of social signals.

* Tools that make it possible for companies that today exploit the 1099 labor classification to cost-effectively offer benefits and handle taxes, to make on-demand employment legal and fair while remaining competitive.

* Alternatives to patient-present doctor-mediated health care to cover the 80% case in which doctors are expensive overkill; some combination of telemedicine and nurse-practitioners.

* Technology-mediated services that drastically improve outcomes in K12 education.

* Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality child care.

* Products that offer serious competition for incumbents in the financial sector to bid down the 7-10% of the economy taken by financial services.

* Tools to improve engagement with local elections and make it easier for people to take flyers on standing for election.

* Modernized fee and fine collection for things like traffic and parking tickets, which currently default out to "charging minimum wage workers $2,000 to get the boot off the car on which they happen to owe 3 parking tickets".

* Similarly: a way to do things like enroll a credit card with your local government to automatically pay fines and fees at their reduced early-payment rate --- which is something you might be able to do without getting permission from local governments.

Later: I added some things
Regarding startups and prosperity for everyone.

If "everyone" means "all US citizens" then startups can help increase transparency in government. It's much easier to figure out who to vote for when there's a clear picture of somebody's track record and who their political allies and funders are. Everybody should want this, regardless of political persuasion. If massive data gathering can't be stopped (and it looks that way) then the least we demand is real transparency. Without that there can be no accountability. Most political information people come into contact with is disinformation or shameless propaganda by some special interest. It is getting completely out of hand, but there's no obvious solution.

If "everyone" means "every person in the world", then we need startups to fight for sustainable energy and universal education. All scientific papers must be freely available to everybody in the world (few exceptions, e.g. how to manufacture anthrax can stay secret). Music and literature should be available to everybody, preferably at no cost. A single college textbook costs a month's salary in many parts of the world. That's just cruel.

There isn't much overlap between things that are super important for society and things that are profitable. The civil rights movement wouldn't work as a for-profit venture and future civil rights movements will be no exception. Often enough people who have contributed the greatest value to society never benefited from it personally. Duchesne or Flemming didn't get rich from their discovery of penicillin but the contribution to mankind is immense. In contrast the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation -- with their many billions -- struggle to make a huge impact. To really improve the quality of life across the globe a social revolution of some sort is needed.
The Australian welfare system has lots of perverse incentives, but the tapper off is not too bad. The effective marginal tax rate is quite low and we have a very high minimum wage by OECD standards.

The real problems come when everyone in the community is unemployed. We really need to work on new societal structures to make sure that we don't follow the same path our remote communities have fallen into.
How a DIY Network Plans to Subvert Time Warner Cable's NYC Internet Monopoly
I don't think this is equivalent to socialism and communism _at all_. Socialism and communism propose an alternate _structure_ for the economy - one of state-directed planning. This has been demonstrated to fail pretty spectacularly.

Basic income is an extension of the welfare state, which is itself a capitalist construct. It does not presuppose a state-planned economy or really threaten capital ownership or free exchange at all.

Yes, many communist countries have attempted some kind of unconditional income. Was this what sapped people's desire to work? Not really. What sapped their desire was a complete lack of a reward structure. A universal income doesn't destroy the reward structure; it destroys the penalty structure. The big question is whether or not the economy survives that.

On top of that, though, most communist economies imploded because decoupling production from market forces also destroyed incentives towards efficiency, innovation, and satisfying demand. Those are the biggest failures of the state economy and those are not related to universal income at all.
No non-strawman BI scheme that I have seen proposes just giving everybody the same net basic income, somehow pulling the money out of thin air. Everyone's gross income would rise but middle to high income households would have their income taxation increase to compensate.
I read that as containing even future machines. I would agree that the current supercomputers can't reach a human-level AI using AIXI-approximation.
Yeah, he says that – between the lines. He also never misses an opportunity to mention how brilliant he is and how his Wolfram products are the greatest tools in the world.
There are long term studies of unemployed in multiple countries that have social safety nets that would be worth reviewing (for example: http://amzn.to/1nosUtx Cultures of Unemployment: A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and Urban Poverty published by Amsterdam University press in 2006) For many the impact of unemployment (for instance following closure of UK coal mining and steel industries) its not just the loss of job in the economic sense, but the disconnect from the workplace, community, changes in sense of self-worth for individuals and long term cultural and regional impact. There are proven strategies that work and lots of examples that failed. Learning from these and seeing which opportunities map to actions that start-ups can effect through mobile, social and learning technologies might be a useful starting point.
What a cop-out calling it "basic income". As if it's somehow "free money". Really it's just a further institutionalization of theft, of course making people more dependent on mother government. Imagine the debate, should we raise basic income by x or 2x?

The solution is not more laws, it's less. For example ending the war on drugs would have a immediate effect on the lower income brackets. If I didnt pay >1/3 of my income to support our $T war complex I could hire more people.
I'd like to see this sort of research too...

I'd also like to see things like the tax system be used to make changes to income inequality - both in terms of like for like pay as well as to some extent evening up the pay professions each sex choose to go into. i.e. if you are a woman you get tax off up to a certain amount because society screws over your pay for getting pregnant.

I'd also love to see meat taxed on a trading system where by everyone would get a meat quota that was quite small - if you want to eat shitloads of meat great - go for it - but you have to pay someone else for their meat points.

You could set the level of everyone's meat tokens for the year at a level to raise people out of poverty/or alternatively just to reflect the costs to the environment.

I'll releasing more totally unworkable economic policies soon... :-)
Regardless of basic income, fixing housing is super important since it's one of the biggest drains on everyone's income and the fixed nature of it suggests that just giving everyone more money will cause a lot of that money to just end up in landlord's pockets.

I think a lot of the change must be policy change though and cannot be purely free-market oriented since there is a public interest in seeing more housing stock built than a capitalist would want.
You think that's bad, checkout the buzzfeed 'article': http://www.buzzfeed.com/h2/bfam/sofi/swears-you-can-use-when...
Planning your code is part of coding. To truly "code at typing speed", you would have to do no prep-work or research and type your program beginning to end with no bugs (see: http://www.hackertyper.com/). I'd say that's pretty rare.
I can easily grant "than is available", but not "will be available".
Is there any evidence that shows that Basic Income (that you DON'T lose if you happen to find work, as in the USA system) will cause people to sit around idle?
Maybe increasing prosperity for everyone in a finite (and diminishing) resources world, occupied by ever growing number of humans, is not feasible.

I'm also not sure how we'll go about defining a measurable prosperity?
Apple iPad Pro Specs and Price
Deschutes Brewery is just the tip of the iceberg - they're the 'big company' brewery these days! I actually get a discount at 10 Barrel because I signed up for their bike team, so one beer could probably become several before exhausting my vast haul from affiliate links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

At $1 the second dollar is useful, at $50,000, I'm good for the year and will not pursue additional dollars. Replace $50,000 with whatever amount you need to feel content.
Cloud Data Migration
Does anyone know how strong FanHui is? I know Google ranks him as professional 2Dan but the rank may not mean the same thing as it is in China/Korea. I know he's the European Champion, but I've heard there is a large gap between the Asian professionals and their counterparts elsewhere. The ranking in general is also very skewed because it depends on the number of tournaments people win and which specific tournaments. Its a lot like Tennis where some tournaments have a rating of 1000, while others only have 500.
This is a great list! I will, selfishly, riff on you 6th point to add:

* Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality elder care.

If working this sort of thing sounds interesting to anyone then check out hometeamcare.com and ping me. We're hiring for basically every role in the company. It's a very interesting business!
Excavation is expensive and that's the main reason people don't use it. Trains are hard to build in established areas but self-driving cars, ride sharing, and hyper loop point to new ways enabled by technology. I agree that zoning is the big political obstacle. But I feel like some development entrepreneurs could convince some cities and make some great examples of dense livable neighborhoods.
I was thinking in addition.
Thanks for the downvote - I was referring to actual coding. And with regard to note taking, I never had the problem of transcribing instead of summarizing because I was typing.
5.X just came out a few months ago. It's pretty good.
Now we just need access to the papers themselves. I can't help but think of Aaron Swartz.
I'm so happy to see this kind of forward-looking work. The writing is on the wall with the constellation of automation, inequality, free agent nation/gig economy, the Precariat, the end of lifetime employment, and the desire for greater labor fluidity (on both sides of the table.) Taken together, these things make the GBI an incredibly important think to start thinking about right now. The fact that a prestigious organization like YC is interested in it is a hopeful sign / leading indicator.

My ideas for making a GBI possible: https://medium.com/@opirmusic/the-missing-piece-in-the-basic...

Short: figure out how to make essentials (food, housing, education, health care) cheap. Obvious, but thinking about how to get there is critical if for a GBI to ever happen.
As we say on the site, here is a explanation why we build this service:

The primary motivation behind Spotifytube was my friend that was trying to make an audio CD to play music in his car. He asked me for help because he has a Spotify premium account and can download all his tracks for offline use. We figured files are located on his hard-drive, but we couldn't find a way to access the encoded files containing the audio files.

We've been reading about how Spotify protects and encodes their music preventing users from downloading the audio files. We looked for a solution online, but it seemed there isn't any Spotify downloader available online. We figured we can find Spotify tracks on Youtube and convert Youtube videos to the mp3's without doing any harm to Spotify.

To our surprise, it worked so well that we wanted to give other people way to convert their Spotify tracks and make audio CDs to listen in their cars.
Finland already has a quite thorough social welfare system - no-one is homeless unless they have a bag of other problems than a lack of income.

Mental health - not so good. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...

You will notice Finland has way more suicides than US.
>> I'm curious of privacy implications.

> a broker service run by your browser vendor

That means that Mozilla, as an example of a browser vendor, knows anything any site which uses that feature wants to notify me, including mails and messages from those sites?
Teaching people to control their costs, ala "mr money mustache" makes sense.

I personally believe that you can control your costs and raise a family on $30k/yr if you are educated on the bad choices not to make...several cars on loans, larger houses than needed, etc...
There will always be idle people, some of them poor and some of them rich trustafarians.

Basic income can liberate a lot of people to focus on bettering their situations, rather than just trying not to drown from day to day.
The first thing to realize when it comes to Basic Income is that it's purpose is not to optimize how the workforce will work out, but to deal with the fact that there will be no workforce in the future.

In other words. If you expect ex. income taxation to be part of the way to deal with Basic Income it's doomed to fail.
Feel free to make it workable -- I am not a financial gains expert! :)

so is the core idea flawed, or just my vision on execution?
I think the correct definition of a 10x developer includes what you're describing as a 0.1x engineer. It's not that they are simply more prolific, but that they are more prolific, impactful, and efficient.
The page process and the GPU process are duking it out in Chrome to see which one can most fully peg a CPU core.

I'm watching just the three cubes at the bottom of the page.

GPU is holding steady at 97-99% for several minutes now.
voxel.css is 80-90%.
One of the best ways to increase prosperity for everyone is to make living more efficient/affordable. Look at the average American budget from 2013[0]. The top of the list is housing. Figure out how to make housing cheaper and more resource efficient and you could lower both housing cost and utility cost, potentially saving people hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Other top items would be transportation and taxes. A $10k safe and energy efficient vehicle would be a great first step.

Though it may be unpopular in some circles, the fact is taxation is one of the least efficient ways of allocating capital. You have administration costs, fraud, waste, and abuse. If we lower the cost of living for everyone, we can lower taxes as well and allow that capital to be invested more efficiently.

[0] http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget
HN discussion about another article regarding the same event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10981729
A couple things I am curious about:

- Basic income is usually proposed as a replacement to some or all services and income support people currently receive. I wonder if it is feasible to simulate that -- e.g. adjust it downwards for people receiving more public assistance (other than things like medicaid of course), or paying lower taxes, etc. -- this of course would depend on the funding model(s) to which results need to be applicable. Otherwise, following the study, people will surely say that what was tested is very different from what was proposed.

- Systemic effects would be relatively hard to evaluate with such a study, an example would be the change in both absolute and relative prices: e.g. I would expect that after a wide adoption, housing prices in cheap and mid-level areas might rise more than in currently expensive areas, because the added income would change the purchasing power of lower-income households by a much larger percentage -- or perhaps not. I guess it might be possible to try to account for things like this at the data analysis stage.
This is how it always should have been.

It was mind boggling that mixed content was "insecure" but HTTP was "secure." HTTP is and always has been insecure and should be marked as such.

I know there are a few people who will moan and groan about how overkill HTTPS is, but this isn't about banning HTTP it is just about reminding users that they shouldn't be entering sensitive information into a HTTP site.

Even phishing sites should be DV secure.
AlphaGo Full Text - PDF :
https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-data/assets/papers/d...

Facebook Paper - PDF
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06410v2.pdf

Pachi Original Paper - PDF
http://pasky.or.cz/go/pachi-tr.pdf
From the linked article above

"Some of the factors responsible for the game tree's enormity are shown below. (A comparison to chess is shown in brackets)

the size of the board : 19x19 (8x8)

the average number of moves per game is around 300 (80)

the average branching factor at each turn is around 235 (35)

players can pass"

It's been 10 years since I did the math for this in my AI class but a simplified example would be to compare the start of each game. a go player has 19^2 or 361 possible moves. then on the second turn there are 360 possible moves (since one space has been taken up by the first move) so after two moves there are 361*360 or 129,960 possible go board configurations.

a chess player is more restricted by the smaller size of the board and the way pieces are permitted to move. so there are a total of 16 possible pawn moves on the first turn plus 4 possible knight moves leaving 20 total moves available. On the second turn the second player is similarly resticted to 20 possible moves causing the total number of chess board configurations after two moves to be 400. Once more room opens up on the chess board the branching factor does increase a bit but it never comes close to the hundreds of potential moves at any step during a go game.

this "branching factor" is the key to the size of a search space. in chess it gets messy to calculate due to the variety of piece types and their allowable movements but it's easy to see that at any given board configuration there are fewer possible moves. to calculate the search space you multiply the number of potential moves at each step until every board configuration has been accounted for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_factor
One thing that I haven't seen considered is the cost and complexity savings of a Basic Income safety net over our current patchwork safety net, in addition to being more effective.
Why shouldn't basic income be $100,000?

Most napkin math proposal for basic income are between $10,000 and $15,000. That's quite hard to make work but it's maaaayyybbeee posssibly achievable. It's at the outer limit of doable but meaningful.

In the US 36k per person would account for 66% of GDP. It'd be 85% of GDP in France. These are not viable figures.
org-mode

It makes it very quick to create new directories and files, each project has a directory with an index.org which has various sub-folders, combined with it's ability to internally link files and export as HTML and PDF it makes it easy to generate lists/todo's etc that can be shared with others.
@sama - since so many people here are in The Bay Area, i'll give the obvious answer for the region -- high density housing. I'm from NYC and we support a lot more housing in a much smaller area. This is accomplished by stacking upwards towards the sky. I appreciate there are earthquake concerns, but I also understand that many of the barriers for high density housing are political and social.

I'll bet many problems in the Bay Area would be resolved with high density housing. A selfish list: shorter commutes (--> more time with family), lower rents (--> more people willing to move here --> fewer developer "shortages"), less cars on the road, less pollution.
Regulating taxis is good.

Not issuing new taxi medaillons, creating a lack of taxis in Paris and making taxi drivers slaves to taxi companies (like G7) who rent them the medaillons (or slaves to banks when they have to pay back a huge loan to buy their own on the black market) is not.

It's not good for consumers, it's not good for taxi drivers, it's only good for monopolistic taxi companies. Yet the drivers don't understand that and think their enemy is Uber.
10.000$ per person in the US would cost 3.19 trillion dollars per year.

36.000$ would cost the taxpayer 11.484 trillion dollars per year.

The US governments actual revenue for 2015 has been 3.249 trillion dollars.
Alice learns that problems can be solved by changing problem scope and re-using existing tools. She ends up fighting with her customers over what they really need and fighting with her tools over what they were designed to do. Someone who isn't averse to writing code fixes the problem.
The restricted stock is not tradeable for at least 180 days after it was issued.
I've talked to him again his stock were issues and purchased at around 90$ per share now they are worth under 50$.
He had about 400 stocks under RSU scheme some where issued as part of an employee compensation process some were purchased he definitely lost quite a bit of money.
The process at VMWare for him was that he was getting some of his compensation in RSU, he was also allowed to purchase some of the stock from the company with his per-tax income (this was capped) after the purchasing round ends the stocks are issued and then need to vest for 6 months, during those 6 months the stock lost about 50% of it's value.
> Any chance DeepMind may publish some of the internals about how many instances were used, how computation was distributed

The computation requirements for training and running are given in the paper in both the body and the appendix details.