skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's because touchscreens can't right-click or middle-click.

I'd prefer a halo ring around the button that appears when you touch or mousedown that presents additional options related to the button. If you touch, move your pointer, then release over a secondary function, it activates, otherwise a simple touch and release activates the main function.

Similar functionality is available for gamepad devices, where a choice wheel appears, and a directional input can select any of the 1 to 8 available options.
> having people sit around idle probably isn't

Basic income doesn't aim for people to sit idle, and in practice basic income doesn't seem correlated with idleness. Some studies show an increase in work hours [0], and another showed a slight decrease in work hours among new parents and teenagers [1].

Loss of self-worth need not occur when people are given the freedom to say "no" to unfulfilling and unproductive jobs, the freedom to take time off to care for their own or another's health issues, and the ability to pursue their passions -- teaching inmates, launching a startup, or becoming a world-class gamer.

[0] e.g. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2268552

[1] http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf
I think the key here is to help people redefine who they are. There's not a huge material difference between people who call themselves "starving artists" vs those who call themselves "unemployed", but it is a huge mental difference.
Re: what startups can do to increase prosperity for everyone:

Find ways of destroying harmful institutions by replacing them with better ones-- a perfect example to pursue is the institution of health insurance in the USA, which is explicitly harmful to people, inefficient, inhumane, and completely entrenched in multiple other institutions. Find a way to get people cheaper and better care, and they'll flock to you.

There's other ways, of course, but the gist is that rather than focusing on relatively irrelevant problems (getting takeout easier, booking flights easier, etc), startups could choose to tackle actually difficult problems such as political corruption, exploitation of the poor, existential angst, etc. These issues aren't traditionally simple to monetize.
I use mine to stand up for free speech. Who does this harm exactly? Who is the victim, specifically?
"Ask HN: What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?"

I think we need a way to have a faster iteration cycle for trying sociopolitcal ideas. The problem is, its almost impossible to change the laws necessary at a governmental level in any reasonable time scale. This is exacerbated by the fact that you are inside a "monolithic legacy codebase" in which you can only afford to make minor changes over many years to take you from point A to some goal which is point B, and you still can't verify that point B works in any practical way.

Ideally, you could have at least an entire city (population ca. 50k minimum) where you could just try out all this stuff, and continually carry out sociopolitical experiments. I suppose that's not feasible, but any idea that goes in the direction of increasing iteration times and improving the testability of ideas like this would be a good direction I think.

What do other HNers think about this?
A leverage against slumlords in the same way social media gives leverage to consumers against companies
I had no idea osx had a hypervisor framework. It showed up in 10.10!

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/...
What we need is to study is what changes we need to make to the education system to support societal structures post-employment. Mass unemployment is coming yet we are doing nothing to prepare the population.

We need new "career paths" where people are prepared for a life without work so that things do not devolve into what we have seen in remote communities here in Australia.
Yes, because they're not allowed to offer a taxi service. If they want to do that, they have to follow the regulations of taxi services. But that's not in uber's interest, because they want a monopoly on the market.
You make a fair point. That said, one of the nice things about React is that even a moderately experienced JS programmer can learn the basic mechanics (including how to use JSX) in a few hours. That’s a reasonable investment for a useful tool, and React has a much shorter learning curve than most of the larger JS frameworks.
There is also about:performance, though I'm not sure whether that has made its way to release yet.
If you try to micromanage peoples' spending, you will spend more and you will hurt them. Believing that poor people will waste their money on cell phones and XBoxes is a common justification for trying to attack them, but this sentiment is evil disguising itself as morality. For example, poor people need cell phones because it's impossible to get a job without a stable phone number.
If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would look to HR would be irrelevant.
1) How is this more inefficient than our existing welfare system? Seems a lot more efficient to give everyone money rather than spend $100M on bureaucratic infrastructure for verification and employment tracking.

2) It benefits society because you no longer have to work to live. This affects how you make decisions about your employment. You would be more likely to change jobs when you're unhappy, for example. This is good.

3) Whether you make $40k, $100k, or $500k, the $10k isn't there to prove "additional income support". The system could be set up so that after basic income is implemented, your disposable income is the same as it was before--people making $40k wouldn't have $10k in free money to spend, because their taxes would go up $10k a year, for example. The key here is that if they choose not to work for some period of time, they can. That's not how I think it ought to be implemented, but the principle is true.

4) If government handed out $10k to everyone, they could tax everyone $10k and it would be like nothing happened. The difference in implementation would be that the additional taxes would be progressive, while the benefits are flat. So if you make over $100k a year, you might be taxed $15k more than you were before, but you would also receive $10k. Without a doubt, an effective basic income would require a more progressive tax structure than what we have.

5) "If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc.," not familiar with this reference, but presumably a basic income would eliminate extreme poverty. Do you mean like, for example, what would someone who was physically incapable of working receive? Is the basic income enough?
Here is another thing that is different from many other frameworks. The Bear Framework API is designed, so you don't write all the time "vendor\", "Vendor::", "use vendor\" and so on. You write "$app->assets->getUrl()", or "$app->data->get()" and we believe this makes your app much more personal. You might even forget that you are using Bear Framework :)
At 2.25% that's $14,925.87, right? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have had a ~$15k windfall right after high school, but I don't think that would be comparable to an ongoing basic income payment.
Related though not necessarily helpful section from Brave New World (1956):

> of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be
perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or
four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they
wouldn't. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half
ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was
the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma;
that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far
from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take
a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for
labour-saving processes. Thousands of them." Mustapha Mond made a
lavish gesture. "And why don't we put them into execution? For the
sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with ex-
cessive leisure. It's the same with agriculture. We could synthesize
every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep
a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it
takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides,
we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every
change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so
chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is
potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a
possible enemy. Yes, even science."
neutral things like "flowers" "gardens" "landscapes" or "dessert"... musical instruments, bicycles, buildings, furniture ... why was "sexualized woman" the first thing ... give me a break.
- 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.

You need to watch this: Digging down is for the 1% it would seem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0
>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.

Don't know where you live, but here in Pittsburgh anyway the soup kitchens won't turn you away just because you participate in a tech incubator.
woah, it's really fast
I use evernote to take "notes" and WIP stuff(this makes it searchable). Then I have trello boards with higher level planning. To stay out of the weeds I roughly use GTD/khanban/agile that I have made work for me. It took quite a while to get my system dialed in but once it clicked I easily got 40% more productive because of the gained focus on what I "SHOULD" be working on.
> What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?

Startups as a whole can do nothing -- it's like asking "what can car companies do to increase prosperity?" except that would be a little more reasonable given the amount of resources and relative free-time those companies have.

In startup land, you typically don't even have a sustainable business let alone vast amount of resources lying around to fix the world's problems. They cannot be concerned with something this vague.

What they can do is work on the correct problems that will put them in a position to make a legitimate societal impact down the road. Even better if they work on problems that is directly correlated to society's well-being.

You mentioned food. If a startup could compete with the likes of Monsanto, but wasn't run by a bunch of scumbags, they might be able to create such a rich company that it starts shipping food crates free of charge to places in need. This depends entirely upon the kind of person running the company.

Since I respect that you have to view startups in the aggregate, I would probably turn around and ask you, what can you do to fund better startups by better people with long-term Do No Harm terms? The terms might even be bullshit like "You will do everything in your power to help the world rather than just helping yourself." It wouldn't be something you hold up in court, but it would be a major internet foul to find out "Super Rich CEO" signed those terms and "Super Rich CEO" was found being immoral. With the leader's reputation at stake, you might have a chance at nurturing Good Guy CEOs.

At any rate, startups have enough to worry about. If you want to help the world, you'll find a way. If you want to make a bunch of money and fuck the world, you'll find a way to do that too. The problem is cultural and resides at the individual level.
I knew I was an entrepreneur when I realized I would starve to death, suffer great pain and be a social outcast rather than simply work for someone else.
>disincentivizes work

Why is this a problem? The market allocates work, the market has decided that a large and growing number of people's work is worth $0, the market is still producing enough to keep everyone happy and fed.

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

Put another way, we have made an amazing collective achievement: 100% effort from 100% of people is no longer necessary or even desirable to maintain/improve standards of living. Life has collectively gotten much easier, and coerced labor (yes, starvation and homelessness due to unemployment are coercion) is no longer necessary.
The suggestion in the book is a negative income tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
As the other responder stated, even in cases where this law applies the employer can opt for "pay in lieu of notice". So 60 days severance pay obviates the notification requirement. That aside, there are a lot of scenarios where this doesn't apply (e.g. "If 50 to 499 workers lose their jobs and that number is less than 33 percent of the employer’s total, active workforce at a single employment site"). I'm not going to pretend to have numbers to back it up, but especially in the software industry this exemption seems like it would cover a fair number of layoffs.
No, but it's clear who's stronger on average.
> 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.

Is this really a problem in Western societies? I haven't heard of famines or people starving to death here.

I believe that most people work for social status, so they can keep up with the people surrounding them.

> I also think that it’s impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income.

Is this a good way to recruit researchers? After all you wouldn't want the researchers just to produce a paper that reinforces what you believe already.
Related to the cost of living factor: what about research on the interplay between guaranteed income and rents? I get the impression that rents will increase to take up most of the guaranteed amount, based on how people allocate for living vs. discretionary expenses, but would like to see something rigorous.

Example of the dynamic: Winston Churchill liked to give a story [1] about do-gooders who saw that a bridge's tolls were a burden on the poor, so they bought out the owner ... only to find that rents right afterward went up by the exact expense of crossing the bridge twice daily.

Considering the necessity of this crossing, that was like a sudden basic income of the cost of crossing the bridge, and got eaten up by rents. But I'd like to see something more rigorous and what can be done about that phenomenon.

[1] ctrl-f for "bridge": http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-...
The idea of basic income is to provide something. Enough money to ride public transport. Enough money to rent a room (location dependent, but even in my neighborhood rooms can be $300-$600/mo). Enough to buy food.

It is a lot easier to look for a job when you aren't spending your entire day trying to stay out of the sun and scrounge up enough money to eat. It's a lot easier to look for a job when you don't have to choose between food and public transport.

It is very difficult to scrounge up enough money to take care of the basics while job searching. It isn't impossible but it is very, very hard.

Basic income helps to prevent people from falling that low. If you were moved by a woman struggling on $10k~, try listening to the struggles of the homeless in your area. If you are fortunate not to have any in your area - go to somewhere you know they are. Just talk to them for an hour, it'll change your perspective a bit.

My biggest issue with BI is the logistics behind it. To get it to work is complicated, seemingly prone to corruption, and possibly not sustainable. But it is going to be necessary to figure it out in the coming decades, IMO.
And busy is relative.

Some stay busy napping. Some stay busy zoning on TV/internet. Some stay busy actually creating stuff.

All of them may believe themselves to be "busy"
There are lots of interesting questions in an effective basic income system.

Sybil and fraud resistance come to mind immediately.

If I were in the top 0.01% of wealth, I'd really like to see research into basic income. It would help with deflationary spirals, social order in an automated future and increase the supply of good ideas because it would free more people to explore high risk areas.
Core Team Face to Face, January 2016
Way to miss the point. If you don't have a job, even if you have some kind of meaningful work or hobby on the side, your self-worth will still suffers from that.
I haven't, I just discovered this book and thought it looked useful. The book I have been getting some mileage out of, even though it's a bit dated, is Fundamentals of Neural Networks: Architectures, Algorithms And Applications by Laurene Fausett.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0133341860/ref=oh_aui_deta...

I've also been looking at Neural Network Design by Martin Hagan.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0971732116/ref=oh_aui_deta...

That one is also freely available online:

http://hagan.okstate.edu/nnd.html
It could be argued that there are many other aspects of human nature that would drive many (but certainly not all) people to work and earn increase their income - such as altruism, ambition, personal goals, greed, vanity, wanderlust, nest-building (e.g. wanting a bigger house), etc
C++ and Lua.
Microsoft announces first technical preview of Azure Stack
Hackathon Preserves Holocaust Memories at Yad Vashem Museum
There is a simple flag you can set (it's called "Add Liquidity Only" or "Post Only", depending on the venue) which will result in HFT's never trading with you. Strangely, most "real traders" never set this flag.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/how_to_not_get_rippe...

The reason is that it's not a matter of waiting a whole second and being guaranteed a fill. It's placing an order and accepting execution risk; maybe you get a fill, maybe you are stuck holding a tanking stock.
Go and Python deployment aren't quite that equivalent. I've seen build and deployment problems over multiple years with widely-used Python libraries including Python-MySQLdb and Python Imaging Library (PIL). The Go equivalents for such essential libraries are typically in pure Go, so it's much easier to avoid C build and link errors when choosing project dependencies. The prevalence of pure-Go libraries is likely to remain high in the long term even as Go's base of libraries expands.
The secret to being happy from 'world's happiest man'
My assumption about basic income was always that at it's core, it provides the money for food and shelter. This reduces bureaucratic overhead in terms of trying to provide people those goods, and gives them the freedom to make their own choices and not have to work to survive, and the government is no longer forced to create the infrastructure to try to find ways to provide food and shelter. This may, however, require work in terms of providing affordable housing options to everyone, but I don't think you have to solve one problem first to solve the other.

Health Care and Education are a separate (but still related and important) set of problems. Both of those require greater infrastructure on the part of the government to provide effective solutions, so again this is a problem that also requires a lot of thought and effort, but providing basic income doesn't seem like it would preclude health care/education reform. Nor does it seem like solving health care and education reform would change the structure or overall effects of a basic income program; they're simply additional solutions that would certainly improve our quality of life and possibly the efficacy of the program.
A public good is a technical term in economics. One useful way of categorizing goods is to place them along two axes - excludability and rivalry. Public goods are categorized non-excludable and non-rival. Non-excludable means you can't stop people who don't pay for the good from consuming it - like clean air. Non-rival means that one person's consumption of a good does not affect another person's. Digital goods are typically non-rival.

A cash transfer doesn't really meet these conditions - it's excludable, in that you can restrict access to citizens or to whomever. And it's rival - there are only so many dollars to go around.

That said, I think inflation is a very real concern for any basic income scheme.
If there were a basic income, I might quit my job and look for a new one full time, rather than looking in my spare time, increasing the chances that I would find a better fit between me and the new company. There must be some utility or public good in that.

That might also provide some needed competition for lower wage/skill jobs, since they'll have to compete with scraping by on basic income. As it is now low wage employees are disposable and disrespected; "flexible" schedule means something different at Best Buy than at my current engineering job.
There are lots of Chinese, Russian etc... developers but they just stick to websites in their languages mostly, especially Chinese devs.
WP Freshstart v3
I believe this[1] write up would be to your liking then. It's an entire competition dedicated to StarCraft: Brood War AI competitions.

[1]: https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~cdavid/starcraftaicomp/repor...
Of course it does, it's the same thing with minimum wage increases. When businesses have to pay all of their employees more, that just doesn't come out of their pockets. Price increases across the board are passed down to customers.
1.) We'd have to implement it so that starting somewhere on the pay scale, taxes increase so that by some point you pay back to full $10k you received. 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.

2.) You probably have to say "everyone over 18 gets $10k, each child up to 3 per family gets $2k"...or something similar. Getting $10k per child creates some crazy incentives. (2010 there was roughly 70m people under 18, so it's only $2.38 trillion! ;)

3.) You can probably remove a ton of welfare programs if you do this, but not all. You can't completely remove the safety net, but a lot few people should have to be serviced by said net.
Yeah but the team was in charge of consumer solutions (Workstation and Fusion), not datacenter solutions (vSphere, etc)
Parallels is awesome, and stable.
France. Typically, working for the government means trading salary for job security.
With basic income, that woman could quit her current stressful job, get a better job that only pays $9k, and be wealthier and happier with the resulting $19k income.
> the reason people are suffering now is the level of monetary inflation

I don't think any respectable economist actually agrees with you on that. The increase in the monetary base during QE was paired with a collapse in the money multiplier. Most of that cash stayed in reserve at banks (see 'Repeat After Me: Banks Cannot And Do Not "Lend Out" Reserves'). Price inflation is nowhere in sight; inflation is below historic levels and even slightly below the Fed's inflation target.

As for the original question, the general idea seems to be eliminating most other forms of government welfare programs (TANF, SNAP, social security, etc.) since basic income will replace them, along with redistributive increases in income/capital gains/wealth taxes.
Yup, it's expensive so generally only used in expensive projects. But it's a way of manufacturing land (or rather, saving land that would otherwise go for garages, storage, or other facilities that don't need windows). This makes housing cheaper because you then need to pay for less land per housing unit.
Georgism is another option to tackle the housing issue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism