skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This research is an awesome thing that YC could give to the world.

I do have a few very specific, big concern though:

>We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally distributed.

In order for this research to having meaning, we would need to see how the costs of things, especially real estate prices are impacted. One argument against basic income is that it would inflate the prices of basic goods and provide no real benefit. It would be worth spending a lot to figure that out.

Also...

> 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.

I love this statement, but the need to eat has been driving human beings for a very long time. It would be a truly profound statement if we could prove this.
Ya, we're definitely not focused on robots. But there is room for tremendous, tremendous improvement in the current standard of care delivered by actual people.
Glanced at their deck - Unity? Zendesk? How do they define a Nordic company?
Where in the story does it imply that Alice did halfassed or hacky work? And do not say because she used Wordpress or another off the shelf solution.
Beyond just the amount, I hope your project delves into the issue of effective administration and levels of personal choice. For the first you can look at the recent bio identity cards and direct receipt of a basic income in rice in India. Radical decrease in societal cost and increase in personal benefit. For the second it is a question of where do I receive a basic income for - eg Tiburon or Temecula - and how is this decided and administered. For this consider the troubled hukou system in China.
In the game against Lee Sedol, what hardware will AlphaGo be running on? Will it be a cluster or something consumer level?

Also, will AlphaGo have access to Lee's previous games? Will Lee have access to AlphaGo's games for preparation?
Thanks for the kind words, and I'm glad that cheatsheet was useful!

I'm sure if Anil or someone from the unikernel community is really interested in this, we'll see a better profiler soon (of either type). The initial goal should be to gather stacks for making into CPU flame graphs, which solve a ton of issues.
I feel like it wouldn't work as well once you consider the politics that goes into shared resources. What does the cook cook? Why should a person who doesn't eat there pay for the cook?

In many apartment buildings in southeast asia (especially those that cater to foreigners/wealthy immigrants) there'll frequently be a shop and a small restaurant at the first level that mostly caters to the people who live in the building. No reason we couldn't have something like that here, though admittedly the cost of running both those types of services are probably pretty high given regulations. Expect a lot of politicking at the condo boards though.
Right click on the desktop is no more discoverable, yet it's use is pervasive and it's universally understood. Discoverability isn't the only criterion for a "good UI". Frankly for something like Facebook (on which the median user spends hours a day) it's probably not even the most important one.
How about this question: Is there a space with no matter?
#1 is a solved problem. Ken Regan tells us how to do it. To my knowledge, no commercial chess app has implemented it yet.
> in Go multiple paths to the same board state are very similar in evaluation

Not at all, different paths to a board state also have widely varying evaluations in Go. Joseki is a great example of this, especially since these sequences have been thoroughly analyzed. In most joseki playing any move out of order will leave weakness and a skilled opponent will not just continue to play the pattern out of sequence.
Seems to me that five years is a long time. I could work on a degree for the first four. Or I could work on retraining myself for the first two. Or I could just take the first six months off.

Five years is a long enough time to let you do whatever you're going to decide to do with the first part, and then work on recovering employability/resume credibility/whatever with the last part. An interesting question would be how peoples' behavior changes through the five years, though...
> Yes, this is the way that Guix and Leiningen and rebar3 and a bunch of other things work, and it is wonderful.

Even in Nix/Guix, it's still ideal for upstream projects to express their dependencies in terms of ranges (semver-wise), otherwise we run into the problem have either really large run-time dependency closures, or problems around e.g. wanting to use multiple (overly specified) versions of C libs within the same process.

As the current maintainer of Nixpkgs' Bundler-based build infrastructure, I've found the lockfile approach that Bundler uses to be quite frustrating - in part because Bundler's design is antithetical to packaging, but also due to the build times and sizes of the resulting packages, compared to C libraries. (People give C a hard time wrt productivity and security and such, but when it comes to packaging, C libs are usually so much easier to work with than most other higher level languages.)

I would love to see more adoption of semver, and possibly Haskell's PVP (https://wiki.haskell.org/Package_versioning_policy). Granted, dynamic programming languages don't have the benefit of making API breakage obvious at build time, so perhaps the best we can do in such cases -- if we want any certainty that packaged applications will actually function correctly -- is lock down every dependency version precisely per application...
* Solve problems in hiring by hiring all applicants on a first-come, first-serve basis and then evaluating them for X days before recommending the best applicants to a client company. Scale this up by partnering with the government to eliminate traditional unemployment insurance.

* Various industries (TV, Print, Social Media) have effectively offered a product with complex infrastructure to the public for low or no cost by using advertisers to subsidize it. Could this be done with food or housing? Would a farm running on self-driving tractors and drones be able to feed people w/ ad-subsidized food for free?

* Lots of food gets thrown away because it's cheaper to ship it to the dump than to ship it safely to starving people. A startup could develop automation and logistics to make the costs competitive.

* Divorce rates would seem to indicate that the traditional family is not the most economically or emotionally optimum method of living/raising children. This may simply be a side-effect of increasing lifespans (i.e. 100 years ago, the average marriage lasted 15 years before a spouse died). A legal startup that offers tools for building new types of non-conventional families to optimize things like economic standing, academic performance of children, or changing employment environments.

* Micro-businesses in a box. Many businesses couple some talent or skill (e.g. software engineering, music, plumbing, creative writing) with administration (i.e. legal, marketing, accounting, invoicing, etc). Lots of startups offer to automate portions of administration, but a truly turn-key solution would allow a customer to simply input their skill, and the administration would happen automatically.

* Crowd-funding life.

----An apartment building with 20 units costs $1mm to build. An affluent person goes to the bank and puts $300k down to build it, and leverages the other $800k. Why can't 20 families each invest $15k and pay a group mortgage instead of rent?

----A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10. Why can't a thousand families buy all their bananas for the year through an intermediary handling the cash flow? Could they buy all their food this way and drive prices down?
Any idea of how long those initial cost savings will provide those services? Do you charge a certain monthly fee for food, energy, laundry supplies? Who decides the menus? It is really quite the logistical challenge to create a set of rules and procedures that people will be able to agree to. This is especially true when you start mixing omnivores with vegetarians with vegans with the myriad food allergies. I like the concept, but I'm skeptical that it could be successful as a cultural shift in general.
Thanks so much, Chris! Yep, http://interviewed.com/ is an awesome product as well. Glad that YC companies have been moving the needle in the hiring space.

High quality, repeatable assessments of candidate's real work is so much better than unstructured interviews with under-prepared and inconsistent interviewer training. We're looking forward to more integrations with all of the companies providing great tools that improve the relationship between candidates and companies.
There is still a path to become a practicing lawyer without going to law school. You need to pass a test and become certified, but going to school is only necessary for the pedigree. Arguably the simplest solution is to remove undergrad degree requirements from med / law school.

In terms of education there are two options. Ban mentioning degrees only credentials, or ban mentioning school names which deflates the ivy name recognition. In both cases schools would need to focus on education not name recognition.
The 5 year period of this study will be a significant limitation. An important part of a guaranteed basic income is the guarantee. If I was in a programme that I knew would end after 5 years, I would be very concerned with things like maintaining my employability when the 5 years are up. In other words, while I would love to dedicate 5 years to non-commercial art and science, my option to do this is severely curtailed if I'm expected to re-enter the same old job market with 5 years less experience than my peers.

But overall I am thoroughly supportive of doing the experiment anyway, as we do desperately need more data on this important concept.
Please don't ignore container formats like .rar .zip .tar etc. Also remember there are ebook formats to consider for documents.
If this trounces the leading human this spring, I'll be really excited if the AI experts start working on physical games. The RoboCup (robot soccer) hasn't had nearly the the improvements that more logical games have (e.g. chess and Go). I hope that combining game playing with physical movement with vision, and communication is the next frontier.
I think having a basic income would do more than ensure people have a place to live, as the social welfare system you mentioned gives them; it'd guarantee a minimum of dignity. People in homeless housing/shelters are certainly better off than in the streets, but, imagining myself in their position, I think I'd still feel like an outcast, out of step with the rest of society. If there was a way to give people a base level of dignity directly, that'd be the way to go, but I think basic income is an interesting avenue to try to do this.
Definitely and interesting read.

I agree that small towns are becoming more friendly to entrepreneurship (of the tech variety) and should only help innovation since talent that might not want to risk the move to Silicon Valley and instead take a safer job with an older company might consider startups closer to home.

This is definitely a net-positive for innovation.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10981679.
> the market has decided that a large and growing number of people's work is worth $0

Or rather is worth less than the legal minimum wage, which is not the same thing.

> Why should someone be incentivized to work when their work has no value?

Very few people's work has no value, especially if they're allowed to do what they like to do. Typically the problems arise when the value is lower than the costs involved (salary, ovehead of managing them, etc).

Reducing such costs should be a pretty important part of a basic income setup.

> coerced labor (yes, starvation and homelessness due to unemployment are coercion) is no longer necessary

The interesting question is what the end game is here. If we get to a situation where 100% effort from 100% of people is no longer necessary, but 100% effort from _some_ people is still necessary, how do you ensure that the people who still need to work keep doing so? And how will those people feel about it and what will the try to do as a result? A worst-case-ish scenario that seems all too likely is bans on emigration of "productive citizens" (defined as the ones whose 100%, or even 80%, effort is in fact still needed) who would otherwise decamp for other countries with lower taxes.
I think it will. To avoid it, a significant portion of Basic Income would have to be paid out as goods and services vouchers with redemption limits.

Rather than getting $50 a day as cash, you might get 4 nutritionally balanced but generally unpalatable meal rations, two payment vouchers for one day in one state-owned 250 sq.ft. housing capsule, 30 kWh of metered electricity, 100 gallons of potable water, 10 Gb of network bandwidth, etc. But you put redemption limits in place so that you can't use vouchers to pay for more than 1000 sq.ft. of capsules, 60 kWh of electricity, 200 gallons of water, or 20 Gb of electricity per day. It places limits on the amount of benefit any single person could suck out of the system at the expense of everyone else in it.

The state would also have to be a major wholesale buyer for those things, and sometimes also set up and spin off new competitive suppliers, otherwise the incumbent suppliers might be able to jack up the price and capture a portion of the benefits intended for the end consumer. Taxes and subsidies have a different mechanism of action economically than the entry of a new supplier firm.
commutation would also be guaranteed (when circuits would be switched) to be highly funky and generating peaks with rebounds... in non linear ways. And with the multiplication of sources (wind/solar) commutation/switching are to be considered. A highly distributed system tends to be already chaotic. Adding chaos to chaos does not seem a good idea.

Not to mention Biot Savart Law that says a long wire generates B ~= I/r

So where the electric current on average nullifies the Magnetic field in AC (other a period), on DC you would have to build with a constant F = qv vect I/r which means a constant magnetic field appearing and inducing resilient constant forces for every other charges in movement. 1/r decrease way less than 1/r² // 1/r3. That is what CE norms on electro pollution wants to avoid. A strong electromagnetical residual signal that can interfere with other electromagnetic devices.

I understand the concerns of persons that never had to learn electricity about the complexity of using Z (impedance) other R (resistance). But Fresnel law makes AC quite easy to grok.

In some countries it is accepted since a long time that the bug in AC is the side effect of loosing the phase (hence introducing peaks up/down phase). That is the reason why companies have to pay not only for the whattage but also for the disruption of phase. Some companies even get discount to regulate the phases (like train companies that uses a lot of electricity in peak fashion at trains start/stop and can accumulate energy selectively to charge huge capacitors and use them to correct a shift of phase).

I sometimes look at the electric cable in my cities. The way they are plugged anarchically and the transformers looking like not maintained, the electric boards with expensive gross protection, the corrosion at the connection points (yes surface effect with rust and water sure it does do weired loss) the fuse used in electricity/electronic devices .... And I feel like I was in Cuba in the 1986 in the middle of embargo.

I don't live in Cuba, this I see in Montréal, SF, miami ...

In supposed developed countries and I wonder if my eyes telling me it is broche à foin are right or my brain listening to all the assertive geeks and citizens telling me the opposite.

You know what, I do not know. I still have a strong feeling technology on the new continent is not as good as it is publicized.
What good are romantic thinkers?
You get a few of these BA/PM types in your daily grind and your stress level shoots up through the roof. And if they're a friend or family member, their solution to everything is to pay out the ass to get it done because their time is so valuable. They have absolutely no pride in DIY. Are these people a product of nurture or nature!?
If their intelligence is worth anything, they'll meet, setup a common picnic, no humans allowed.
So, they ended up not selling their time for less than it was worth in order to survive and, instead, added value to their lives.
This is precisely the case with me and my spouse.
Agreed.

Though sometimes we're trying to tech-fix things which are broken on a whole different level. Education is effectively free today. You pay to get the certificate. I think that's a broken system.
"And what if the client wants a CRM... Do you install a popular CRM plugin, and then tell the customer to ignore 90% of what's in their dashboard, because posting articles isn't something they want?"

No, you modify the template so it's not showing the stuff they don't want. Problem solved.

"If I as a client came to a company and said I wanted a CRM built for my company, and they gave me a Wordpress blog with a shitty CRM plugin, I'd request a refund and find someone who is actually going to build to my needs, and not hurry me through the tunnel to get my money and go onto someone else."

And if I was your boss, I'd fire you for wasting my money.

"But I believe in quality over quantity."

Nobody here is any different. The difference is that I don't think that the only one who can deliver quality is me.

"I'd rather spend time building a custom solution (Note, just because I am building a CRM doesn't mean I build the whole thing from the ground up, I use frameworks) that is going to make my client ecstatic and return again and again, than be like a friend's company."

And again, you're assuming that result isn't possible with an off the shelf solution.
YNAB gamified my budgeting in a sense. I've found it keeps me motivated. Though their new web app needs some work.
"Business people will be able to make financial calculations without developers using a graphical spreadsheet!"

Like that'll ever happen. Senior execs of IT are so stupid, amiright?

Everyone knows only programmers should be doing financial calculations with a computer, and that UIs are for losers.
/s
Physics is a field that is almost entirely taught within the traditional college system and probably would get less of a benefit than other fields. The problem is the college system is so expensive that those who COULD become physicists aren't because of economic reasons, and those who want to more than anything are being saddled with debt and a lot more burden which probably doesn't help them advance the field.
Only works if every university does the same thing.
Just enabled Chrome to show the little crosses by default for http:// and I already like having this showing. If you wish to be an early adopter go to:

chrome://flags/#mark-non-secure-as

It is good to see how sites that matter are mostly https:// already for me. The http:// tabs I have open such as this article actually are insecure when you think about the amount of trackers on them, so the 'x' is very apt.
I've often seen assertions like this that all / most code requires comments. I hold a personal view that it's actually the opposite, but can't seem to get anyone above to bite and show me useful real code provides a counterpoint to my view.

Can you point to an open source repo somewhere that demonstrates your point that comments are preferable to writing clear code without comments?

I'm sure you can point to repos where poorly written code requires comments in order to be properly explained. This is not really what I'm after, as I'd contend it's likely that writing the code better would be more useful to that project.
There is also a substantive blog post at http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10981729.
What about releasing clouds of chaff tuned to specific frequencies? To maximize utility, time certain transactions at the same time.
There is a big gap between Fan Hui and top Asian players.

But I think Demis is being very modest saying that the games were close.
> Naively: $25k income you pay back $1000 of the $10k in taxes at $50k, pay back $2500, etc. That way you, making over $100k, essentially get $0 basic income by the end of the year.

If I recall correctly about 50k is median income for the working population, so you're still paying most of your population at least $5000. And that's just the currently working population, there are so many non-working adults who will also want the free money, I can envision the divorces being had for an extra $10k right now... the incentives this creates are very bad.
Or New Zealand's research into the feasibility of implementing UBI:

http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...

Key takeaways:

"An income of $300 per week is just over the average (mean) benefit income – therefore a plausible
minimum income. However, paying a guaranteed income of $300 per week to every New Zealander
aged 16 years and over, excluding superannuitants, comes at considerable fiscal cost. The fiscal cost
of the GMI proposed in the first model (Model 1) is $44.5 billion (including the cost of all social
transfers – in particular, New Zealand Superannuation payments, would cost $55.5 billion), requiring
a flat personal tax rate of approximately 45.4%. Note that this tax rate and the others considered
below are cost-neutral – not fiscally neutral – as personal taxes currently raise approximately $6
billion in excess of current social assistance costs."

"Although the Gini coefficient improves under all models, many beneficiaries (including the disabled,
carers and sole parents) currently receive more than $300 per week and would be made financially
worse off under a GMI scheme. Therefore the GMIs considered could distribute money away from
those most in need of government assistance and toward those who have choices and opportunities
but choose not to work."
I don't think it's true that the dominant input to prestige university education is courseware and delivery expertise, nor do I think it's the case that a 4-year degree or something that purports to duplicate it from a computer screen is the ideal vehicle for inculcating the skills and values white-collar employers are looking for.

There doesn't need to be one universal answer to this suggestion; it would be a boring suggestion if that were the case. Instead, you could look at the market for white-collar jobs and break it down looking for lucrative subsets, and then devise some kind of apprenticeship scheme.

If you could eliminate the 4-year degree requirement for HR directors, company controllers, purchasing managers, or jobs like that, replacing it with something tailored to the specific job, you could allow people to get an early start on a white-collar career while offering them opportunities later in their career to get something like an MBA or a JD.

But because the only current credible signaling mechanism we have is a 4-year degree, there is currently no good way to get the kind of job that might legitimately demand an MBA or a JD without first getting a degree in Russian Lit.
Additionally, I wonder if basic income can be effective while there are still shitty jobs. Right now, somebody has to clean the toilets, because there aren't yet robots that can do it cheaply enough.

If you introduce basic income so that nobody has to do the shitty job, nobody will do it.

But one day there will be robots that can clean the toilets, and then there will be no shitty jobs left to do - and perhaps only then can basic income take hold.
Org mode is simply a markdown language. You can use it on Github, for example. Any file that ends in .org will be rendered as org. README.org, for instance:

http://github.com/melling/SwiftResources/blob/master/README....
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