skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Except almost all of that money will be immediately spent by the recipients, greatly accelerating economic activity. It should provide quite a boon to local entities and the federal government through taxes. Not to mention the various businesses who will suddenly have more customers with money to spend.

Economics is not a zero-sum game and trying to treat it as one will always lead you astray.

P.S. If total US household income was 13 trillion and we assume that the top 1% took home half of that we can just tax the uber-super-mega rich at 50% and pay for a basic income for every man, woman, and child in the US.

I'm also willing to bet that those rich people will end up better off as the resulting economic spending boom circulates through the economy and ends up back in their pockets.

If current trends of automation continue there simply won't be many jobs (Foxconn is deploying a million robots right now to replace "cheap" Chinese workers). How long do you think society will last under those circumstances? Makes a 50% tax look like a bargain.
Aside from all the other stuff that people are pointing out, the 'human nature' and motivation argument is a bit stale at this point. We existed in communal hunter-gatherer societies for millennia before our current system emerged, and tons of research has shown that money is a cosnsitently bad motivator for creative productivity. People like pretty pictures so here's an old RSA animate on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

There are shortcomings with ideas like basic income, but I don't think the ones you've mentioned are particularly valid.
That's absolutely hilarious. I love how Uber made them redact their "secret plan" for the online edition!
Can we please use this opportunity to erase the "we only use 10% of our brain" myth completely from the face of this planet?
No one really cares where you went to school anyway unless it's literally a top three school for your field.
Five to ten years would be my guess.
So are they no longer allowed to use public roads? How about public utilities? Does the fire department show up at their "un taxed" businesses, how about the police? Can they hire students that received their education from public schools? The fact that there existed a group of people that posted that modern society would be even remotely possible without government is far more likely to be seen as ridiculous in 50 years.
I wonder if tourists will be able to choose from a number of different signs to stand in front of at Facebook HQ now.
I would focus on oligopolies that have formed or are forming... cable TV, internet access, banking, Credit Cards, etc. There need to be nimble competitors in these industries that eat away at the bottom lines of these industries.
Also heard there still is some shady taxi company, named G7, that has an almost monopoly of the french taxi market.

Not to defend Uber, but I still don't believe you can solve anti-liberal policies by just breaking everything in a niche market like this one, and pretend it's for the sake of progress.

Also, the day Uber rides get taxed like all other taxis, and end up costing as much because they align with french policies, I'm sure Uber will quickly vanish.

Many french medias already talk about the uberisation of society. I don't know if that's already the case in other places. But I think it's totally normal to see people getting angry at an american company who makes profit thanks to an economic model which is not really compatible.

There is already a lot of talk and disagreement over inequality, so in my mind, it's again normal for people to relate this to be another form of capitalistic looting.
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

The greatest thing a startup can do to increase the prosperity of everyone is simply continue trying to be successful, within legal bounds. Every startup is inherently working to lower the cost of living, whether that's their stated goal or not. Even a seemingly useless app startup - if it becomes successful - will (1) add jobs to the economy, (2) give employees and their families more purpose and well-being (working brings people fulfillment and joy), and (3) contribute to lowering the cost of living[1].

Obviously, some startup industries (education, medicine, etc.) have a more direct influence on this process than others, but they all contribute in indirect ways to increased prosperity overall - even if motivated by purely "greedy", capitalistic ideals.

If basic income were somehow to be implemented by providing basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc. rather than currency) without the involvement of other people/companies providing those needs, then I believe it could work. The trouble is, even in a world full of automation (and less need for typical jobs), the resources will still be controlled by organizations, governments, and people - and not always the people who have the most need for them. In that environment (and lets face it, certain people, countries, organizations, etc. will always be better suited at doing things than others), the economy is actually zero-sum in the meta sense. No one can consume without another party producing - even if the producers at some point are just owners of machines. And in a competitive economy, things like basic income just become factored into the cost of living, so it's kind of a moot point.

From another angle, if basic income is ever implemented in terms of currency ($x per month), it will not solve poverty. I have plenty of first-hand experience to tell you that a large number of people will choose to live in poverty (or forgo what most of us consider to be basic necessities) by spending that money in foolish ways (gambling, addictions, frivolous purchases, etc). Those people will not accept responsibility for having wasted the money, and we'll be right back to where we are now: people demanding more welfare services from the government.

[1] A successful but useless (practically-speaking) app/game means that people are willing to pay for it. Paying for a good or service that otherwise would not exist contributes in indirect ways to technological progress (e.g., by gaining more adoption, the technologies powering that app will be in a better position to improve and contribute to aspects of our lives that have more practical value), including more investment into things that do improve our quality of life per dollar spent.
No, I am not talking about trade schools. The jobs staffed by trade school grads already do a decent job of not being beholden to university signaling. I'm talking about white collar professional jobs that rely on those signals for reasons having nothing to do with job aptitude.
This is a challenging research problem -- perhaps harder than nutrition and diet research to answer anything definitively.

In the present, everything is connected. Giving someone basic income may mean that they demand higher wages for, say, working as a waiter in a restaurant. But if you only give basic income to some people, then those people still benefit from low-paid waiters (which wouldn't happen if it were on a national scale).

On top of that, it's a dynamic system. Traits like work ethic are partly cultural or passed down in families. Maybe the first generation of BI benefits more from work ethic, but it may decline in a few generations, perhaps undermining BI. That may not be apparent in a small study even of taken over a long time, because the participants will not be isolated from the surrounding culture.
honestly i didn't expect this news in this decade. well done.
To be fair, you can build a lightweight CMS with a markdown editor in a couple hours. I speak from experience.
Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

We need a better system for measuring and distributing the value of our work. We lose so much collective value because of the system of inefficiencies built up around how we quantify that value. When 70% of working Americans don't give a shit about their job, we're talking about trillions of dollars worth of "productivity" wasted...

Prosperity comes from people doing meaningful work and exchanging that for an abundant lifestyle. I love the idea of basic income, and am 100% in support, but it is only a tool that will (hopefully) enable people to find their meaningful role in society by alleviating the struggles of poverty consciousness.
The stuff that you're quoting is not the stuff that the `demo.py` script generates, but "latent dirichlet allocation" (whereas this project appears to generate based on a different alternate algorithm, the sentence-based one).

The sentence-based one has a major flaw: it mostly "settles into" a given speech from its training set for a few paragraphs, then transitions to a paragraph from another speech whenever the statements become sufficiently generic.

Another bug: it can sometimes lapse into an infinite loop. Here's the tail end of one of my runs:

accordingly , the committee rose ; and the speaker pro tempore ( mrs. drake )
having assumed the chair , mr. gilchrest , acting chairman of the committee of
jurisdiction would ask the counsel to explain it ; and if it is a drafting
error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
if it is not a drafting error , then that could be corrected .
[... continues for many, many more lines before ending ...]
Note that this is in stark contrast from the post last week titled "Unikernels are unfit for production"[0]

One of that articles main ideas was:

"...the most profound reason that unikernels are unfit for production — and the reason that (to me, anyway) strikes unikernels through the heart when it comes to deploying anything real in production: Unikernels are entirely undebuggable."

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10953766
Did anyone else read this post, and think, "Wow, what a dream job. What an opportunity to actually study something in real-life with real people that could make a fundamental difference in the evolution of humankind."

It is harder to conceive of a notion more beneficial to the fate of humans than the notion that all humans deserve the basic essentials of life, and that the first task of a civilized society must be to provide those essentials, without regard for any judgements of the worthiness of individuals.

It should be assumed that everyone gets to eat and have shelter.
They served together on the board of United Way; they weren't just random acquaintances. The social proof conditions necessary for Bill and Paul Allen to make their pitch to him had been satisfied both through their parents' credentials, social connections and the fact that they both went to Harvard. Not to take anything away from Gates' technical skills and business savvy. But this goes to the crux of a lot of startup stories. It could all have been very different if even one of those 'background variables' had been different and the meeting with IBM never happened.
Won't that only work if the land is in high demand?
It was hard for me and Erin to do 7 years ago (our kids are teenagers now), and we're economically very fortunate. I can't imagine how hard it must be for people trying to provide for families on $15/hr to manage child care.
This comment seems dismissive. I will never be good at chess or go, let alone the best at either. That in itself doesn't bother me. I'm fine with that. But to have your entire species demoted to second place? That has to have a negative psychological effect, and not just on the individuals with raging egos.
Hiya. Reporter here. On the press briefing call Hassabis said that the single node version won 494 out of 495 games against an array of closed- and open-source Go programs. The distributed version was used in the match against the human and will be used in March. Distributed alphago used in the October match was about 170GPUs and 1200CPUs, he said.
Hong Kong has become a Special Administrative Region of China and has it's own justice, education, and political system (mostly). I think it would be a great idea to have several of these regions across the us to "beta test" different policies to see whether they would be good or bad. Changing a policy or law of an entire nation is hard and risky; trying these things out in special regions, where you have a known trial period, would allow much faster innovation in the political space.
> Nonsense. If I ran an AP computer science class we would never touch a computer.

That would be as about as engaging as a biology class without microscopes or a chemistry class without labs.
Following PSR standards doesn't make a framework less simple, and it has the benefit of making lots of middleware instantly usable by that framework.

Number of files isn't a useful metric because other microframeworks can be run without ever loading the router or any of the data storage classes. They could be run with less than 10 files loaded. And even then, it still doesn't matter because number of files just means number of classes, which doesn't say anything about the readability or simplicity of the code.
With regards to college tuition, the relatively easy access to capital via student loans has increased the cost of tuition over time. The demand for post-secondary is relatively inelastic since it is a strong factor in higher incomes down the road. If we apply this same logic to basic income, how can we ensure that basic income won't just further drive the increase in cost for all basic necessities that a basic income would contribute to (e.g. housing, food, utilities)?

For better or worse, the only way to "control" the costs would be if each of these basic necessities were led by government institutions or regulations as well as healthy competition for the production. That is a large step politically and socially but may be inevitable if we want to see a basic income succeed.

If anyone has any research or studies on related phenomena I would be very interested.
You do realize that book is ideologically motivated? There is a wave of neo-thatcherite-reagan-pinochet wannabes who want to replicate the agressive liberal policies of US and UK from 70-80:s in Scandinavia.

I'm not saying they are necessarily wrong, but that their goal is not to be 'right' in the scientific sense but to rather to drive policies which steepen the income inequality (which - as it is- is still quite low).
I wonder if we are thinking about the housing cost problem properly. I live in NYC and there are a lot of affordable options. That's certainly not the case about the most desirable locations. But ipso facto those locations will continue going up in price. Perhaps the problem is not so much about housing cost but transportation and access to services (eg uber, doordash), which seem to be advancing and making a lot of progress. Would love to hear your thoughts about this.
The area surrounding the Delhi metro, the Istanbul metro and the Paris metro don't look like those either.

Picking out a Hong Kong specific feature and using it to explain why NY has vastly higher costs than, well, everywhere, doesn't really make sense.
You make a good point, and I hear you. I'd be interested in any specifics you have to offer that would target smaller businesses.
Heroku Private Spaces
And skill-based discrimination.
It isn't clear what we should optimize on.

Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?

The "idleness" seen in playing video games seems very close to most jobs. Many factory jobs have more mental idleness and less fulfillment than a video game.
Artificial Intelligence Mastered Go, but One Game Still Gives AI Trouble: Poker
Obligatory: causation, correlation mention - surely people who are sicker retire sooner?
I take Uber almost daily from the train to my office because it's about 30% cheaper than a cab. If it wasn't I'd just grab a cab at the cab line. It's so much easier.
Yes. If you read the paper, that's entirely what they're doing: each sentence should be a verbatim quote from an actual congressional proceeding. If there's a flaw here it's that the lambda=0.5 parameter that I used above keeps it within a single speech for too long.
I think it's pretty funny that on the HN front page right now is a NYTimes article from the company's Google beat reporter about how trying to interview Larry Page is "emasculating" and then this announcement is accompanied by an image "shaming" the NYTimes web site for being unencrypted.

As to the feature itself, I don't think it's a big deal at all. We all know that the average internet denizen doesn't understand HTTPS at all and would just as likely ignore it as anything. The only people that would see and understand this new red X for what it represents would know that it doesn't really matter that the lolcat meme they just downloaded came through an unsecured channel.
Go players react to computer defeat
> Now he's at Netflix (i.e., he has as far as I can tell no vested interest in either that Docker/Solaris derivative

Well he probably has historical interest in Solaris, and generally any platform which supports dtrace, though he's been doing Linux work (http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html) for the last few years, given Netflix is mostly Linux-based with some FreeBSD (for the CDN nodes).
Show HN: Bayaa – Bookkeeping and Taxes for Startups by Pro CPAs
Here's an interview Page and Brin did with Terry Gross in 2003, when they were more accessible I suppose. There's an amusing exchange where one of them tries to explain idempotence ("When I type 'Google' into Google and click "I'm Feeling Lucky", it just takes me back to Google.") to Terry:

http://www.npr.org/2003/10/14/167643282/google-founders-larr...
APM mostly means that bots can have perfect micro-management of units (within reason; a bunch of goliaths or dragoons in a chokepoint simply cannot really be managed ;)). This translates to slightly higher income in the beginning [1] (and thus certain strategies can be a bit faster. For ground armies in open fields this can mean a large advantage, although humans are quite good at this as well.

APM doesn't really help in creatively coming up with a good strategy to counter a certain build. Just today I watched a game between two Protoss bots, one of which went carriers, the other zealot/reaver. That's ... not really an optimal decision.

Tactical manoeuvres like flanking or attacking at different places at the same time are also mostly absent for now (although APM can help there, of course).

[1]: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/484849-improving-m...
Interesting! Looks like there's certainly a lot of room for experimentation.
Whether I agree or not with this (mostly, I don't), it fails my test of "being something a startup can do".

Whereas a startup that had a really good solution for inculcating the kinds of skills and values white-collar employers are looking for could outcompete universities instead of legislating them out of the picture.

When people discuss the value signaling provided by elite universities, their first example is usually "the diligence and hard work it takes to get into the university". That strikes me as the kind of value you can find ways to signal just effectively without asking for $150k.
Studies typically have a set duration. If you offer people a basic income for the duration of the study, they'll need to plan differently than if they have some reasonable chance of having a basic income indefinitely.
I think you're underestimate the number of jobs that can be done with extremely little cognitive skill, and over-estimating the speed with which technology will make them go away.

I agree on the education front, but disagree that there are significantly many negative-margin-value people. Personally I think a huge amount of that perception comes from the fact that people just don't fucking move to better economic opportunities. That problem may be solvable as things like distributed call centers and other location-independent work becomes more common.
It's possible the negative income tax experiments results were more complicated than thought -- especially with how the results were portrayed:

http://www.widerquist.com/karl/Articles--scholarly/Failure2c...
This is a terribly flawed analogy.
She says right after that it was for a prescription. In this case, the doctor prescribed her some medication, but didn't administer it at the hospital.

In Canada, medication dispensed through pharmacies isn't covered by our provincial health insurance plans. This gap is usually filled with private insurance, which presumably she didn't have, so she had to pay for it out of pocket.

Thankfully, there's talk of implementing a public pharmacare program that will fix this situation and I hope the new government follows through on this promise.
Alice is going to have other projects on her portfolio because she didn't spend a year building a CMS like Clyde did.

In my experience people like Alice have resumes full of novel things, rather than a bunch of B2B-sounding internal apps.
I think that there ought to be a maximum wage that is linked to the minimum wage (we can switch over the baseline to the basic income if we ever get basic income implemented).

The idea is anyone earning over the maximum income[calculation] will pay almost all of the amount over the maximum wage as income tax.

Calculation: I propose that the maximum income be a hundred times the current federal minimum wage times two thousand. The assumption is that a full-time employee works two thousand hours a year. Under my proposal, we will raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour which will set the so-called maximum income at $3M a year.

Of course, we do not want to penalize people from making more money. Nobody shall go to prison for making more money. I just think that any income over the maximum income should be taxed at a higher rate which I propose should be 90% of the income over maximum income.

If/when we get a basic income system working, we can switch the so-called maximum income to a hundred times the basic income. I hope the mega rich will support this plan as unlike the estate tax, this is not a tax aimed at the eroding their assets. As long as they do not take distributions from their corporations/ trust funds/ "charitable" funds, their assets should remain safe.

I know the federalists will turn in their graves as I say this but we cannot afford to have state and local governments do as they wish. When Texas steals business from California or Kansas steals business from Missouri, the consequences are just the same as when China steals business from the US. We need to federally enforce standards that prevent some states and communities from being "business friendly" at the expense of the people.

Edit: will the downvoter please care to say a few words?
30 years from now, right?
Yes they would have access to all that stuff because their taxes would be paid for by YC as part of the program.
Qualifying tests and apprenticeships can make that work for almost all cases. Some of that is already in place for professions that need practical experience.
1. The value network is trained with gradient descent to minimize the difference between predicted outcome of a certain board position and the final outcome of the game. Actually they use the refined policy network for this training; but the original policy turns out to perform better during simulation (they conjecture it is because it contains more creative moves which are kind of averaged out in the refined one). I'm wondering why the value network can be better trained with the refined policy network.

2. They just run a certain number of simulations, i.e. they compute n different branches all the way to the end of the game with various heuristics.