skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is five years long enough to get a real reaction? Unless somebody is on the verge of retirement, and they want to keep working after the experiment, they must consider staying in the job pool or have difficulty getting hired in five years. To see how people would react to a government-provided basic income, which would presumably be fore life, the study may have to emulate that more perfectly.

Nevertheless, I'm very excited by this project and seeing what comes of it.
Personally I think its not nearly as impressive as state-space comparisons would have you believe. The initial difficulty in cracking Go was because we were using standard game AI techniques that works on games with a much smaller state space. Once we developed methods specifically for Go, we started making progress in leaps and bounds. But this doesn't represent fundamental progress in the AI of games, but rather a recognition of using the wrong tool for the job.

The difference between Chess and Go is critical here. I don't know if there's any formal analysis of this sort, but the difference seems to be that in Go multiple paths to the same board state are very similar in evaluation. And so sets of moves can be evaluated as a batch or stochastically. I think it was an algorithm that exploited this property that saw one of the first significant jumps in computer Go strength. Contrast this with chess where different paths to a given board state vary so widely in evaluation that you must evaluate them all. I suspect it is this property that allows Google's technique to be effective in evaluation positions. But I don't see it extending to games that aren't similar to Go in this regard, like chess.
One of the biggest fallacies of the BI movement is they suggest that when AI automates many menial jobs it will lead to mass unemployment. This assumes that the average person is incapable of more skilled labor, when history has shown time and again that people adapt to the changing workforce. Yes there can be lag but it's not insurmountable.

Another problem I have with BI is it equally distributes assistance with no prejudice to those more needy, i.e. the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, etc. So you take many funds away from people such as 70+ year olds who are on medication, SS, assisted living (which cost >> BI provides) and distribute available funds to able-bodied people who are "discovering themselves".

Further, having considerable able-bodied people leave the workforce by choice delays global human progress and achievement.

Instead, I am for additional public-sector money being spent on country- and global-level goals which the private sector cannot achieve nor make profitable. These include environmental, energy, medical, transportation, and infrastructure research. By putting public money into these research fields (which is hard/impossible to make profitable) you incentivize progress in areas which further human progress that cannot be met through private means. If you instead incentivize able-bodies to not work, not only do you take money away from needy (not much savings in admin costs) but you delay human progress.
Canada has demonstrated that (single payer) public health insurance works better than America's current public/private model while our taxes are comparable to living in California. Yet the US political system has yet to even be close to adopting it. Data doesn't always translate to political persuasion unfortunately.

I'd expect Canada to adopt basic income before the US does as well and possibly provide the data this study is looking for on a much larger and contextually relevant scale.
Because I lie (a lot!) to the Internets, IBM still have me (after 15-odd years) on their mailing lists as "LORD X Foobar" (without verifying whether I am actually entitled...)
The researcher we choose will be fully a part of YCR / YC. He or she will be able to bounce ideas off us at any point, and we will help out however is requested.
It's worse than that -- political contributions from LLCs are unregulated in New York, so who knows who is influencing who.

Once shady money gets established in the US, you can do things like setup LLCs and trusts domiciled in South Dakota to provide multi-generational tax exemption. http://www.sdtrustco.com/About-South-Dakota-Trust-Company/Wh...

This type of nonsense is a great example of the incredible harm done to the United States 40-50 years ago when the pro-segregation Democrats joined forces with the Western republicans (i.e. The ultra-conservative folks dependent on federal leases to extract minerals/oil/graze cattle) and took over the GOP.
The way Apple keeps on changing OS X, I worry about how viable Fusion is in the long run if VMware stops updating it or their QA slips as they update it.
I'm very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood.

The typical basic income program I've seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a]

1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional income support.

2) As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T!

3) If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc., you just reproduce the current welfare system that exists in the US, which balances available government revenue against our desire to help poor people.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income, "all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money ... in addition to any income received from elsewhere"
With the ubiquity of virtualization today it's easy to forget how magical this was in 1999. "I'm running another computer within my computer! At (close enough to) FULL SPEED!"

Thank you chipx86 and everyone else who brought this sorcery into my life.
As soon as software can convince the majority of humanity that it's conscious, the question will be academic.
Interesting project, but personally I would be more interested to see the funding of a study on "basic financial freedom".

The test is quite similar, but instead of giving them a basic income participants are still required create their own income - however, they no longer have to pay taxes on their income. They are encouraged to create businesses and those businesses are also free from tax, and those employed by said businesses are also free from tax.

50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used to allow government to take our money ;)
My personal viewpoint is that you should be guaranteed survival and some opportunity by society, but not guaranteed income.

That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free (this also implies free child care). But you don't get to buy a cell phone or an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that.

In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to PAY for this, if we're not even willing to pay for the necessities of life?

People still die from untreated diseases, and I believe there is significant research to show that poor health CAUSES poverty (rather than poverty causing poor health). If people are healthy they will likely be more productive members of society.
> I just think that socialism and communism (which basic income basically is - it's paid for by the working class) ultimately leads to the destruction of the economy.

Trouble is, isn't some form of socialism inevitable? As automation continues to progress, more and more no-to-little-skill types are eliminated which then requires people to gain further education and experience to continue to qualify for some type of job. At some point we're going to automate so much that you'll essentially have to be an expert in a field to be employable.

At least that's how it looks like to me. Today socialism doesn't work (at least to a degree; some socialism-like services I could see working today like health care) but in the future where every job but the ones with the highest skill requirements are automated, what do you do?
What happens now if everybody is jobless, does the jobless still feel bad about it?
Yes, it will be possible unless you specifically construct your definition of consciousness to make it impossible. However, having a mind is unnecessary (and inefficient) for the most intelligent possible machines. Imagine extremely advanced future branches of statistics, which have yet-to-be-invented but still entirely statistical methods for discovering state spaces and causal rules, all with formal proofs of optimality. Imagine that, even if executing these methods is impossible in physical hardware, future computer science is capable of proving optimal sampling methods for a given problem and level of available computing resources. A machine that executes these algorithms is smarter than us, but does not have a mind.

Will we construct machines with minds despite that? Since "to see if we can" is usually sufficient motivation for humans, I expect yes.

Biologically-inspired computing techniques will probably lead to computers with minds, and I can see these computers eventually becoming smarter than humans. Will we make such machines before we invent enough of future-statistics to make a mindless machine that's smarter than us? I don't know, that's an interesting question.
I am thrilled to see that there is some private interest in exploring the possibility of BI/UBI experimentally within the conditions of the USA. A properly executed study of this type could be definitive in the shaping of our society.

I expect that some form of radical redistribution of resources is going to be the next modality of human civilization, and getting started on the colossally difficult questions (how to ease existential angst of purposelessness and how to kill the work ethic) is just as important as the very-difficult particulars of implementation (how the heck do we find what the right amount of money is, and how do we pay for it) and measurements of efficacy.

I'm extremely interested in the opportunity to lead or be a part of this research group, and will be applying in the coming days.
I don't think you've thought this through very carefully. Most orders in the market aren't "market orders"; they specify a price. Meanwhile, assume you resolve pricing in an automated auction: there's a spectrum of prices. Who gets the better prices?
It's still quite a lot of money, but I think the basic assumption with a guaranteed income is that it would be accompanied by a tax increase such that net income is neutral for some percentage of the population.

Taking the extreme example where no one's net income is decreased and people below median get the full $10k net, you've already halved that number. I think most formulations of actually paying for such a guaranteed income would include some degree of reduction as you approach median and increased taxes at the high end of the income spectrum, further reducing the cost. As mentioned exhaustively, you also can subtract the cost of many of the pre-existing social programs because they get replaced by the guaranteed income.
A negative income tax would solve that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10982391
I often have the same inclination of thought with regards to university education and government-guaranteed student loans. If I'm a university executive, and I know that the average student can afford $X, and I know the average student can also receive a guaranteed $Y in student loans... Why would I not set my price at $(X+Y) and take the full rent that I can?
I think one of the main arguments I've heard for basic income is that welfare is a pit of failure. Where you can make more on welfare then you can at a minimum wage job.

However, if you have a basic income that "replaces" welfare then no matter what job you get you always make more money. So it's better to have the basic income and work then to just have the basic income.

Of course the problem is MUCH more complex than that, and that is also dependent on replacing welfare not adding basic on top of welfare. Hence the research but this is the basic idea I grab onto to think of how a basic income could be better then welfare.
The games were all played on separate days. As Fan Hui mentioned in the video, he changed his strategy after the first game to fight more, so that may explain why it seems his performance changed.
Probably the federal poverty level will be higher than $15,930 in 20 years. For reference, it grew by 59% in the last 20 years.
Inflation is the obvious issue here IMO. If basic income is X, then X really just becomes the new zero. We either need to provide products themselves (free food, housing, healthcare) or somehow lock the price of those things. I suspect both of those tactics will have identical challenges in terms of implementation though.
The Henry George Theorem talks about spending on public goods.
I use my spine to stand up to this regressive and harmful attitude.
How much would that $10k grow in 18 years? Bank of America's "Platinum Honors" interest rate is 0.06%[1], and over 18 years of compounding interest that's only $10,108.55 unless I've messed up my math.

[1] https://www.bankofamerica.com/deposits/bank-account-interest...
This is key.

No one has ever said "I'm going to stop making money because I have $1."
When VMware talks about End User Computing to be its taking about their Horizon View VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) products for enterprise VDI and not Workstation and Fusion.

Completely different products and categories.
I've always wondered if its actually the joblessness that degrades people's self worth or the job search that must not be going to well and thus keeps them jobless. Would a person without a job but with a basic income and thus not feeling pressure to get a job experience the same hit to their self worth?
Seneca, a Microservices framework for Node.js
Almost sounds like the plot for "Trading places".
Being unemployed isn't the same as feeling unemployable.
I believe that Lee Sedol would sweep all the games if he were to play Fan Hui under the same conditions, which makes the wait until the official match tantalizing. It's fair to say that AlphaGo has mastered Go, but there is a very large difference between a professional who has moved to the west and professional players who are competing at the highest level in regular matches. It's fair to represent Fan Hui as a master of the game, but misleading to represent him as equivalent to currently competing professionals. It is great that we'll get to see a match up against a player who is unquestionably one of the best of all time.
Yeah if it's 5 years i would be very worried about finding employment the day after and having a 5-year gap in my resume. Would the hiring manager care that I was working on my art?
There will be a live broadcast on our YouTube channel, I think the date will be announced soon.
There are lot of people coming to same conclusion, learning low-tech is probably best way of doing learning. Because Computers themselves have become such a distraction, social media or tech journalism etc. There is a story in the book "Deep Work", where a finance dude Mastered programming (javascript,I would guess), with a textbook and flashcards.

If this does not change any thing, it should give all us a minute to think, the mind-numbing was technology is being pushed with a claim for improving education, but nothing empirical to back it up.
> imaginary internet points

In defence of the internet points, they are real, unless everyone is just imagining you have lighter text.
Along with all the other reasons why this is terrible, I would despise this because I just can't write as fast as I type. Having to use paper/pencil for the SAT was troublesome enough.
Disco: running commodity operating systems on scalable multiprocessors (1997) [pdf]
My worry about automation is less about people being left without jobs and more about that production ends up concentrated behind those with the capital to purchase automation tools.
Super awesome research project.

Definitely something we should look in to for the sake of humanity.
Obviously accomplishments like this are interesting for their own sake. But the really interesting question for me is, is there anything here, that is new, that can be used outside of tree-based games of complete information? (A much weaker question, is there anything new here that can be used in other games?)

Let's take the ability to match the best humans at various tasks. If we put doing long multiplication better than the best human at "1", and passing the Turing Test at "10", where is a Go playing engine? I'd say less than "2", but still higher than chess.

Much higher (but still short of general intelligence, obviously) would be beating the best humans at language translation, proving math theorems, or answering factual questions phrased in natural language. Then, if and when computers can write novels which you'd prefer to read over the best human author, now we're talking.

So I think, we don't need to worry about our humanity here yet, and we're not remotely close. Over less than a century we've gone from outperforming humans in arithmetic to outperforming us in things that are a little less like arithmetic but still discrete games modeled by trees and precise searches.
Ask HN: Best way to save page for offline reading?
What's the best way to save a website page for offline reading and archiving purposes so it can be used several years later? I don't want to rely on a service such as Pocket. A consideration is that sometimes the layout of the page is important so print preview and saving as a pdf is not always optimal.
I want to add the following idea, which I have mentioned here on HN several times:

I humbly submit this as my solo-founder, idea-only HN application;

The Standard Pantry.

The standard pantry is literally just that - a pantry of a set of basic ingredients that go along with a range of standard recipes and a weekly menu schedule.

Provide this standard pantry as a partially subsidized offering and teach people how to make a set menu from the basics. Certain components used are refilled at a regular interval as a part of the standard pantry - other ingredients will still need to be purchased, perhaps in conjunction with basic income.

The goal is to help people cook, themselves, more healthy and affordable meals. and overall increase their quality of life.

---

When I was first learning the basics of cooking from my grandmother, she used to be able to tell me to the penny the cost of each meal we cooked. How some dishes were "$1.43 per person" etc...

It drove home to me the value of cooking and not wasting food.

Cooking is therapy as well. eating well / better is good for every aspect of life.
How is giving a blanket benefit to every citizen in an area not a public good?
Could you post the link of your blog? I'd love to read about that.
Alice will have several orders of magnitude more projects on her CV than Clyde has.

When Alice is applied to a harder problem (that can't be solved with Wordpress), she'll be able to solve it far faster and more effectively than Clyde because she won't have the not-invented-here hubris and will stand appropriately on the shoulders of giants to construct something that will likely be far more maintainable, broken down into saner components, and on the whole, more effective.

Clyde will be valued as a 10x engineer at his company forever, but would probably find it very difficult to start somewhere else where he doesn't have the luxury of having written the entire codebase.
Misleading title and limited content aside, one sentence stood out to me:

"This wasn’t such a big deal when I was actually doing computer programming homework, since people who can code at typing speed are pretty rare."

How does everyone else feel about the "rareness"?
JavaScript functions always return something, yes—but unless you have a return statement, that something is `undefined`.
Swift Snares and How to Avoid Them
That's always a hard thing to tease out of psychological studies. The tests have to be very clever to do so, and they'd have to be wide ranging. Essentially, yes, but it'll cost a lot of money.
Presumably progressive tax increases would accompany a guaranteed income such that some percentage of the population would get no net benefit, at the least. The point is that it's much cheaper to administer than traditional safety net programs and less nannyish.
>I assume it would be an account used only for professional reasons, allowing students to reach out to their teachers.

We already have that. It's called email.
Awww, of course.
And in particular, if they know they cannot count on the basic income indefinitely? Studies on this in the past have hit that exact problem.
I think a related question to ask is "What will people do with themselves when technology has displaced a large majority of jobs, and how will that be financed?" When technology has displaced all the jobs, the only thing that will be left will be research and the Arts. It seems both of those have an infinite amount of work to still be achieved, and technology will never be able to automate away those fields completely.
So, background info. B. Gregg was at Sun before the evil Oracle acquisition. He quite literally wrote the book[0] on DTrace. Now he's at Netflix (i.e., he has as far as I can tell no vested interest in either that Docker/Solaris derivative [his interest is probably just getting great performance out anything that works rather than some plebian Mirage/unikernel vs on-the-metal BS we saw on Friday]). (Side-note, if you're reading this Mr. Gregg, your 2009 cheatsheet for DTrace[1] saved me countless hours on a production FreeBSD machine circa 2011. I owe you big.)

I've read his work on-and-off for a long time and there's little no to incendiary click-bait junk, or bias in most (if any) of what he publishes. Obviously he can't dedicate 60-hour resources a post-doc might, but he conducts most of his tests with rigor, and this blog post is no exception to the high-standards to which he presumably holds himself. I'd love to see Anil (one of the MirageOS leads (co-founder IIRC; pedigree - PhD from Imperial or Oxbridge)) comment. Either way, this is an example of how one should construct posts (I know we're not in academia, but there's no excuse for that absolutely abysmal post[2] made on Friday).

Thanks for raising the caliber of conversation, my good man.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0132091518/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/brendan/resource/DTrace-cheatsheet....

[2] https://www.joyent.com/blog/unikernels-are-unfit-for-product...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10953766 for the discussion
So $2T not $3.2T. When compared to social security, it's not that bad:

> In 2015, over 59 million Americans will receive almost $870 billion in Social Security benefits.

Therefore basic income would be about 2.3x the cost of social security but 3.4x as many people would benefit.
Put them into a larger bucket together, a "kids 401K" type of thing.
I've always heard it pitched as some sort of sliding scale. Basically you'd get a certain amount based on your level of current employment but it doesn't require many of the checks Welfare has. I've also seen people say doing a basic income then eliminate food stamps and welfare and it ends up being a cost savings.

It sounds good in theory that this very odd system of income could end up _saving_ us money, but I don't actually know if that's true and is probably highly dependent on whatever scale is used when deciding how much basic income a person receives.