skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has always confused me. Now, I'm not an economist (I have a M.S. in CompSci and do security research), but isn't the correct model for growth in a majority of businesses sigmoidal as opposed to purely exponential?

For example, let's imagine a company that sells toasters. At some point they're going to reach peak market saturation where everyone in the world has a toaster. Now during this process right when growth in it's peak we see an almost ethereal phenomenon that capitalism delivers. We see the most optimized form of an idea materialize which everyone can benefit from and gain wealth. Wealth in this case would be owning a toaster in it's most optimal form according to the laws of physics and current engineering processes.

The problem is that once this epoch takes place the projected exponential growth for the business just vanishes. Instead we see gradual decline until the new market cap (replacing broken toasters etc.) is reached and an thus an equilibrium in the market is reached. During this process we see the nasty side of capitalism as the toaster company fights tooth and nail to prevent this inevitable conclusion. We see monopolization, deliberate weakening of the integrity of the product to increase time to EOL (which wreaks havoc on the environment), absurd patenting and copyrighting, digital rights management, lobbying and bailouts. This not only hurts the customer, but the economy as a whole as our political system is set up to encourage this type of behavior.

Now, one of the main themes I'm seeing in this discussion is the problem of demand. It seems like a lot of "things" that our economy has relied on consumers purchasing has hit this market saturation point and is being limited by technological advancement.

I think that we are at a point where we need to change our financial structure to one that helps create demand. With the minimum federal wage remaining relatively stagnant for the past few decades along with more and more low level jobs being replaced by automation people simply don't have the money to buy things let alone make investments. The only real solution I see is a push for a universal minimal income. But then again, what do I know? Like I said, I'm not an economist..
Bernie Sanders at the recent town hall meeting asked for someone to tell a story of their struggles. A woman in tears told of how hard it was to get by on $10k to $12k a year.

It makes me wonder. How happy will people who only get basic income be? How easy or difficult will it be for them to get simple work for a little extra income?

Now there is a big difference in getting $10k for free vs scraping it together from 4 different crappy jobs. But still I wonder. I came away from that story less confident in basic income that I previously was.
What's in it for YC?
I'm also a bit skeptical, which is why there is a need for experimentation on the topic.

Aside from that:

1. You'd have the freedom to quit your job without fearing homelessness or hunger. Suddenly, you're a lot less stressed.

2. We are wasting trillions on making new fighter jets or new wars we don't need, surely we can cut those programs and then spare a few trillion for something more useful.

3. An open question, I think. The guidelines for poverty would likely have to be open to change in order for a UBI to work.
Ann Selzer Is the Best Pollster in Politics
Only the social security number holder at 18 has access to the funds. I don't think it would be too hard to include methods to prevent abuse. I may too idealistic.
Ke Jie is the strongest go player. Sedol is the 5th strongest.

http://www.goratings.org

The difference is 100 Elo, which is substantial.

Edit: Ke Jie has 700 Elo on Fan Hui. About the same as the gap between Magnus Carlsen and the strongest player at my local chess club.
VMWare is running scared of Hyper-V, which is good enough now for most use cases and comes free with a Windows server license. For Windows shops, SMB's, etc this is a no-brainer.

On the cloud front, no one uses their expensive product. You'd use KVM, Xen, Proxmox, etc that you had the source for and could modify. If you're running linux you might as well run a linux hypervisor.

I suspect these layoffs were rational moves for a changing industry. We're testing Hyper-V at work to get away from VMware licensing, which is fairly stiff, for the few thing that aren't on the cloud/VPS. The industry is changing again and the room for big VMware shops is smaller than it was just a few years ago. There's way too much economic sense to move to cloud providers instead of hosting your own.
Note that the about 23% of the population is under 18 (possibly zero or reduced BI), and 14.5% is 65 or older (possibly offset by SS).

Also, since the census is tasked with counting all people in the united states, it also includes non-citizen long-term visitors and illegal (or undocumented) immigrants.

So it's not quite as simple as latest census count * 10k. It's still quite a lot though.
Or put it another way, money doesn't buy happiness but it lets you be miserable in comfort.
Research paper on VMMs by three of the people who later founded VMware.
It's at least plausible that we will one day expose external behavior that we're unable to distinguish from humans'. So you're right, it all comes down to what's going on in the machine.

What's not clear to me is that, in order for us to ascribe AIs the moral value of consciousness, there has to be an isomorphism between the digital computer's computations that generate their external human-like behavior and our brain's biological computations that generate our external human-like behavior.

For one, even if there is such a mapping, there may be difficulty in expressing it in ways our minds can understand. (Side note: would we have consult with the seemingly-sentient, newly created AIs to act as proof assistants to decide whether we humans should ascribe moral value to them?) So inability to for humans to confirm the existence of such a mapping isn't really that indicative of anything.

For two, more fundamentally, suppose that parts of the AI consciousness algorithm do map to parts of the human consciousness algorithm, but other parts don't. How do we figure out which are "key" to the One True Consciousness? AFAICT even in theory the only way to figure that out would be for an individual human to sign up for exotic (and impossible) surgeries to radically modify how their brain works to emulate the parts of digital computations that don't map to biological ones.

Honestly, it seems almost bigoted to me to say there's only one way for consciousness to exist, and that's our own. Biological consciousness supremacy.
All of these points are valid, none of them are unique to the Wordpress solution.

If you're writing a reasonably complex CMS, you will create security flaws you can fly a 747 through. This is doubly true if the CMS isn't the end goal and rather a necessary dependency for what's actually needed.

The only guard against security holes is battle-testing your code - Wordpress may not be the most secure thing in the world, but it's likely more secure than something you can whip up yourself in a jiffy.

Ditto maintenance and obsolescence - in fact this problem is probably worse for a homebrew solution than WP, since the number of people qualified to maintain this homebrew codebase is approximately one, whereas you can actually hire for WP plugin maintainers if you need to. Likewise, homebrewing your own solution and then moving onto the next project literally means it's not being maintained from day one, which is strictly worse than even a casually maintained plugin.

WP installs aren't always the right solution, nor is deploying some off the shelf code, but choosing to write your own code needs to pass a higher standard than is normally applied in most companies - it's silly to complain that some open source thing might stop being maintained when by default what you write yourself is also not actively maintained ;)
> all the studies of olive oil consumption that show a net benefit from consuming it

Well, where are they? I find it laughable how no one ever seems to be able to cite evidence exonerating unhealthy olive oil in these types of discussions.
AngularJS vs. ReactJS: A side-by-side comparison
it's more or less negative tax; part of your income is already tax-free, BI is just stretching the idea the other way than it usually happens. also don't forget to cut the cost of most welfare - BI should handle most of it. it might actually cost less if welfare administration is expensive enough!
The first point is a good one. As for the second point, I think that will be achieved only when we're close to realizing a general AI.
Because the cost of raising a child to 18 years of age far outweighs the $10k + interest?
Npm scripts work for very superficial tasks, but fail to deliver even for such a simple task as live reload:

- You need to run both server and watcher from the same shell, and the proposed way is to use parallelshell which is not a robust tool such as Gulp. Specifically trying npm run dev as suggested leads to some error that, after termination, leave 4 processes running in background that you have to kill manually, or else you can't access the same ports. Not fun.

- It requires to "highjack" your source files with script tags that I don't feel belong there:
<script src="//localhost:9091/livereload.js"></script>

Why Gulp plugins are better?

- Fast: use streams, no temporary files.
- Gulp plugins have uniform API: stream in, stream out; no massive command line options.
- Convenient and expressive node-glob abstraction to select files/directories to be watched.
- Less magic, more control and understanding of what is going on, less chance and dependence on bugs.

Here is the absolutely basic LiveReload setup that I wasn't able to achieve with Npm scripts:

https://github.com/dmitriz/min-server
Basic Income is probably the most efficient way of giving everybody food & shelter. Giving everybody food and shelter through standard government processes would probably cost way more than $10K/year.
50 Shades of Systems Calls
What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community
I love your idea. It's like a perpetual motion machine of money.
It's less than perfect. People could be migrating more because lyft and über are siphoning away fares. So they go where there is money, even if it's less than historically.

Which makes me want to clarify things. Are über lyft drivers better off than yellow cabs where these platforms have not yet disrupted? In other words, are they better off on über now or yellow cab historically? The answer, I suspect, will remain the same, but its far from cut and dried, I think.
I've never felt that using an app like model for websites was a good idea. Maybe for web services but the website itself, if I have a page for say news. I want it to be self contained... and using shared code libraries...
Here are some benefits:
- Lighter than most other frameworks (including the so-called micro framework). It's about 40 files.
- Fast and memory efficient. There will be benchmarks soon.
- Simple API. Perfect for newbies.
- Fast installation - just download and run. No installers.
- Addons support.
- File-based object storage for quick start.
- Some nice utilities for assets.

Some PSR standards are taken into account, but not all of them. The goal is to provide simple to use and extendable framework that helps you do projects of any size.
Based on what happens in remote communities here in Australia the result is not pretty. We basically have a basic income here in Australia via our welfare system. What we have found when everyone is jobless is there are huge levels of drug use, domestic violence, child abuse and general criminality. Other than this it works quite well.
Why not use primates?

They won't game the results. There was some research done, I forget date and author, something about 'origin of species'
Interesting. How would you compare and contrast this to something like HTML Tidy? (http://www.html-tidy.org/)?
Beyond Corp: A New Approach to Enterprise Security (2014) [pdf]
I don't think it's overblown at all. They make it clear he is the European champion and never imply he is the best player in Go, just obviously very good. Looks like he has won the last 3 European championships in a row (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Go_Championship).

Overall I think it was a well balanced article highlighting an impressive achievement, not sure why you felt the need to diminish it as not significant?
I think the cost of a lot of basic goods and services would fall. Employers would only need to offer relatively modest wages because the marginal value of those wages would be so much higher. This could drive down labour costs without driving down net pay for low wage workers. Basically a worker on $1,000/Mo now might be on $600/mo basic income and $600 wage after (fantasy numbers). This could make low wage workers much more affordable for employers leading to more employment and cheaper goods and services, leading to lower cost of living. A win for employees, won for employers and win for customers. Of course this is an idealised scenario, it would all need to be funded from higher overall taxation.
Affiliate tag free link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D97HPQI/
10% is a bit higher than we need to charge and 0% is not sustainable. This why Lyft is burning so much money. No need to do 0% percent, sensible drivers know you need to make some money too.
Are you looking to study this topic from a macroeconomic, sociological or psychological point of view?
That's a revenue number. It does not indicate any type of characteristic about the behavior of the individual customers.
Indeed you are correct! I was just tossing that out as a starting point so that people keep in mind the magnitude of the question.
> Computer science is not really about computers

He also added (prepended, to be precise) that it's not a science. :)
Really glad YC is pushing for research into this. This is a fascinating topic that deserves more research. There have many points in my life where many of my friends and I needed welfare just to purchase food. For all of us, we experienced unbelievable amounts of shame even considering the idea. As a result, two things happened.

i) Some of us didn't go on welfare to our detriment. Not eating = decreased ability to be a productive citizen.

ii) Some of us had to 'over-sell' to others and to ourselves our disabilities, out of the fear that we would be denied access to these services or be accused that we were gaming the system. The effects of overselling these disabilities were devastating on one's mental health.

Having a shame-free way of getting welfare could be a great thing.
We have to clearly start differentiating between "work", and a "job".

You can work hard at something which provides immense satisfaction and personal value (perhaps even value to others). But a job is strictly something you do in exchange for money.

A job doesn't necessarily contribute to your self-worth. Meaningful work, does.
Not sure what you mean. Can you give us an example.
I think about this a lot. I think privatization of wealth reallocation could be the best model. If you could directly inject capital into underprivileged communities to do social projects, you could have twice the benefit to these communities. I imagine a platform where you could see social project proposals or propose your own and have people apply to run them. You can pair them with experts, give them the funding and let them hire peers to help accomplish the goals. You then have given them a livable income as well as improved their community.

I don't think it is as pure as a basic income, but rather than just redistributing wealth, it also creates wealth specifically for underprivileged communities.
I recommend this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Unexceptionalism_...

From wikipedia: "Allister Heath, deputy editor of the The Daily Telegraph, wrote that the book shows how the “remarkable work ethic” of Scandinavians has been eroded by large welfare states over time."
(Of course, don't take wikipedia's word for it-- read the book yourself)

My take-away: Heavy socialism has absolutely stifled economic growth in Scandinavia. During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net private sector job growth was ZERO.

If you want to stimulate economic activity, instead of giving everyone $10,000 per year, why don't we just cut taxes and removed red tape.

(I know that Scandinavia didn't technically have a basic income, but I still think that this material is completely relevant and very telling).

Edit: I said "During the peak of welfare in Sweden, for example, net public sector job growth was ZERO". I meant private sector. Major mistake, my apologies!
This assumes people on basic income without jobs are idle. What about stay-at-home spouses and parents? What about community volunteers? What about people who take care of sick friends and relatives?

Furthermore, what is the economic benefit of the activities listed above? What would be lost if those activities were either abandoned or required to be paid at a fair market price? I know, charging grandma by the hour is a silly idea, but I say so to illustrate the benefits to society by activities not reflected in GDP, and to invite discussion about whether society would be better served by individuals living on basic income alone who spend their time helping others, without having to worry about making next month's rent.
It seems obvious to me - it's privileged because it's what's used to tell stories about your sensory data. It's very easy to identify with that part of yourself, but that's not the only way to go about things. One of the more common other ways is usually called "flow", where the sports-playing / problem-solving part of the mind is basically the entire thing that you're experiencing.

In other words, that representation is privileged because the environment often demands story-telling from you. In situations where it doesn't, you get very different experiences (like flow states, or long solo wilderness hikes).
"What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?"

I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make.

What could make a difference?

- applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term storage areas below ground instead of occupying valuable real estate.

- improvements in transportation. Making transportation faster and more comfortable means more people can affordably live within commute distance of prosperous urban areas (say, the SF peninsula)

- advocacy: pushing for changes to zoning rules to allow dense, livable communities, bringing more housing to our cities. For example, imagine turning a shopping center + parking lot into a pedestrian-only mixed-use urban area, modeled on the best dense cities out there (like Tokyo, Munich, Stockholm, etc). This requires a combination of property developers with a strong vision, changes to zoning laws, and a strategy for overcoming NIMBYs.
why, so they can be completely unemployable?

figuring out how to get your shit to work and debugging it on the computer you're using is the actual hard part of CS.
I wish they'd devote the same sort of attention to making a usable mobile app instead of the bloated monstrosity that exists now.
I think there is no major delay. I don't know too much about those very detailed development technologies. But you often see a hot topic on HN covered by a Chinese press after 2 weeks.

In companies, they're allowed to use vpn services to connect to those English sites.
Ask HN: How do you keep your notes organized?
I was going to ask specifically of people who are project managers, but I'm curious to hear from anyone.

Quick background, I've been a project manager for 3 years now but I have moved into a new role where I will be overseeing multiple large projects. So needless to say I have to attend a wide variety of meetings. I currently don't have any staff (we will ramp up over the course of this year) and I'm just currently struggling to keep everything organized.

So I just wanted to know what people do to keep things organized, especially when you work on multiple projects. I take notes but I'm wondering if it might make sense to have another notebook to transfer important items over to. Or perhaps utilize some other tools (we have SharePoint, and I will be getting a tablet soon). Curious to hear what people say. I really just want to maximize my efficiency.
I'd love to put it on a public go server and will try to convince people :)
However, this will have to wait until after the match in March, that's our number 1 priority at the moment.

There are graphs in the paper showing how it scales with more hardware.
Natural light may be adverse or health-giving. What do you choose?
Your perception of space is 3-dimensional.

The mathematics that model space fit conveniently in 3 dimensions without becoming unmanageably complex.

However, by employing additional dimensions, particularly dimensions in which the basis vector multiplied by itself is a product other than itself, you can sometimes simplify the math that describes portions of the universe to a shocking extent. For instance, using geometric algebra with one dimension that squares to positive one and three that square to negative one, Maxwell's Equations reduce to "nabla field_bivector = free_space_permeability * speed_of_light * current_vector".

Sometimes, introducing special-purpose dimensions with interesting geometries and constraints upon the multidimensional representation makes certain types of math easier. For instance, conformal representation employs two dimensions that square to zero to represent the origin and infinity, and regular space is represented as a curved subset of the hyperdimensional space. Otherwise complicated operations become simpler, as a translation and rotation through dimensions that do not exist that almost coincidentally lands the result right back on the constrained hypersurface that represents 3-dimensional space.

When we invent these extra dimensions for the purposes of doing the math, we have no good way of knowing whether they are entirely imaginary or just undetectable and inaccessible to us at our current level of technology. If the universe had a round dimension with a diameter of less than the Planck distance, we would not be able to detect it, because we can't measure a distance that small. But maybe certain properties in the particle zoo can be more easily explained using an angular phase value on a tiny round dimension perpendicular to everything else.
> But former Apple CEO John Sculley's most catastrophic mistake was committing the company's computers to the PowerPC processor, while Microsoft, IBM, and Intel teamed up to make Windows run on the cheaper, more popular x86 chips.

This is wrong in many ways. PowerPC had better performance at that time, and Intel didn't catch up until around 2000.

IBM didn't help Microsoft to develop Windows. Instead, while Microsoft was working on MS-DOS and Windows, IBM partnered with Microsoft to develop OS/2 and Presentation Manager. This partnership ended in 1990 and IBM kept on with OS/2 for a while.

Also, IBM had no interest in making the x86 popular. In fact, they originated the PowerPC and teamed up with Apple and Motorola to make it. This alliance tried but failed to get the OS/2 and Windows markets to switch to PowerPC.

EDIT: Actually, Sculley himself felt that the switch to PowerPC instead of x86 was a mistake. But he said this in 2003, ten years after he was fired from Apple. It didn't seem like such a bad idea the time. http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/john-sculley-admits-intel...