skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A basic needs guarantee (or even basic income) might be the only way to guarantee that a chunk of the population doesn't fall into total destitution.

Once so much is automated, would it not be feasible and practical to provide basic needs (food, clothing, housing, etc) to every human being?

Also, a politically acceptable alternative to basic income might be Keynesian economics:

-> In one case, the government taxes the middle and upper classes, and gives out that money to everyone -- no strings attached.

-> In Keynesian economics, government similarly hands out money to people, but requires them to do something in return for it.

Both involve high taxes and high government spending. I just realized this similarity between Keynesian economics and basic incomes, and I'm amazed by the parallel.

With Keynesian economics, the governments gets to makes people "do stuff", in return for what would've been "free money" with basic income.

If a government uses this to direct the population towards productive and meaningful endeavors, then could this be better? Government could provide "basic income" to all the unemployed arts graduates by funding the arts. Similarly, we could encourage every smart person to pursue pure research, and then instead of "basic income", fund them to do research!
Sometimes people forget we are on Hacker News
That's too bad. Is there a writeup of the conclusion of the project?
This is awesome! Definitely not the safest thing to do, but I'm glad that they worked.
YourMechanic (YC W12) Is Looking for Director of Ops, Data Scientists, Engineers
"Want to keep reading? Download the app for the full version!"

What? You go to the work to support web in addition to an Android app, but only for a couple pages? That seems like the most difficult way to do it.
Is big city life that fulfilling? For me all the high end cuisine and art galleries started to blur into each other. It was like constant stimulation, very sugary, and I got burnt out. So I quit my job, moved into my truck and will just ski/climb/hike for a year.
Software Development Under High Tropicality Conditions
Food stamps have a funny way of skewing the prices of the things you can use them for. What's wrong with cash? Why do we need to everybody like irresponsible children? (Giving new meaning to the word nanny state, eh)
Doesn't sound moralistic at all. It sounds like an appeal to analysis of sources of information. I don't see how you can go wrong.

We went from Eisenhower to Kennedy in a few years.

I think this, and the fact that people move too much are largely the whole story. See also Peter Whybrow for more on this.
I agree with GBI for the interim, but one thing everyone is forgetting is that we're resource bound as a race. GBI will deal with the distribution issue but not overall consumption. And I hate to say it but the more prosperous the average family becomes, i.e. less death and hunger, the faster the overall population will grow. At the same time the faster technology grows the less need we'll have for average person to work.

The environmental problems we are experiencing are mostly an issue of our population relative to the environment. Ultimately there needs to be a population control/reduction mechanism.

It won't be easy, pretty, or likely even ethical but it will happen and it will be a source of great conflict.

The alternative is we end up space ferrying before that happens.
I was mainly referring to this year's election and the mainstream media. Sadly, the decision-makers these days.
Things are always more bearable when not forced. The same is true for having to stand in the presence of awful people who are saddled with awful circumstances, and suffer both them and the circumstantial misery simultaneously.

Jail, and places similar to jail, where presence and schedule are compulsory, are neither fun nor interesting. Such places bring out the worst in people. I don't feel a shred of guilt or shame for being negative.
Or Taliesin/Mobile, or Kare Biology! Literally art work.
The Psychology of the Breathtakingly Stupid Mistake
But the technology for "flying cars" never arrived. It would be totally economically unfeasible to have mass market flying cars (helicopters, I guess?) today.

On the other hand, even you admit that "self-driving" tech is already being deployed one way or another.

So I don't think they're particularly comparable.
Thinkpad X230. 8GB RAM, 480GB SSD. Debian Testing.

Con:
Crappy screen.
Touchpad isn't great but usable
lenovo is hard to trust

Pro:
keyboard
trackpoint
battery control with TLP utilities.
connectivity, VGA, full size Ethernet etc. (try giving a presentation with circa 2003 projectors)

I got about $2000 stipend for a machine and looking for something to buy. the X260 was my goto but it's botched. no USB-C for example. 12.5 is a tad small, 13" would be better. 16:10 or had 4:3 would be awesome but not available. looked at XPS friends who have it hate the Touchpad under Linux.
The troubling thing, at least for me, is that as I get older I realize that most puzzles one encounters as a software engineer are related to non-problems.

When I was fresh out of college I would jump at any such puzzle that was presented to me and would not sleep until I had solved it. I never stopped to think about the larger picture where that puzzle was embedded in, and if it actually required solving or if a more pragmatic solution was at hand and would lead to the same outcome.

Now that I have some years of experience in the industry, I realize that 80% of the "puzzles" I face at work are bullshit. They are usually complicated situations generated by organic and uncontrolled growth in codebase complexity that lead to horrible scenarios requiring a lot of brain power to solve. The thing is, if things had been more properly thought out, those situations would have not occurred in the first place, because the code would have a lot more sound architecture. But because it was allowed to grow without thought and refactoring, it now offers many "puzzles" that the younger people in the team don't even question at a more fundamental level.

Sorry for the cynicism but it's honestly the way I feel about most of the work I do these days. Too much in terms of stability, maintainability and soundness is sacrificed for performance and for pushing things out the door asap.
Go, the language, is better than Go, the PR. The early promotional materials claimed way too much. Some of those documents are still out there, especially "Effective Go". But the language, although overhyped, came out OK.

Go is really the successor to Java and COBOL. It's what you write your business logic in. We needed that. Java had accumulated too much excess baggage.
I would love to see AlphaGo vs itself.
It's happened to power plants and hospitals. You might want to recalibrate your idea of what is realistic and what is hyperbolic.
Says ps4fanboy?
Check out Seattle’s new light-rail station – and how it could transform the city
> How will they fit into the new economy?

The reality is the social safety net will have to be expanded.

Too many people will be unable to transition this economic turmoil without serious societal problems. It will have to be paid for by higher taxes which will further anger the Republican base in the US which could be problematic.

The simple truth is a large swath of the US is simply going to be living off the dole during the transition period.
One thing that iStatMenus is better for me now than this is that it shows me the top 5 processes that use memory or CPU. However, I like the fact that putting all the information about the current status of my computer from my taskbar to the notification center, declutters my taskbar. Congrats for the execution, it looks beautiful.
The GPL has its use cases, for an OS/Embedded software I think it's the best choice because they could be 'stolen' easily, but for libraries/frameworks maybe not, again a lot of companies are afraid of GPL licensed software (that's wrong but it's difficult to explain as the article says) so the choice is to have a (morally right) GPL licensed piece of code that nobody uses because of fear or a less open licensed one that is used, tested and have contributors
Thats what I do, didnt know about pattern matching though.
"You will need to swamp SFBA with housing (tens of thousands of new units a year) in order to drive down market prices."

Or just wait ... what, another year or two ?

Every 5-8 years you have an opportunity to buy SFBA real estate at fire sale prices. If all of the activists and hand-wringers and bloggers[1] spent half as much time doing some simple financial planning instead of bemoaning the end of SF as they know it, they'd all be owners instead of renters and the "character" of the city (as they understand it) would be saved.

Or is it different this time ?[2]

[1] http://www.48hills.org/

[2] No, it isn't.
Funny how most guys in that video are in the bay area currently (stanford phd, or bay area tech company)
I don't much socialize with the people I work with. The people I do socialize with are not from within my industry.
The answer can be found in this excellent analysis of modern economics by E.F Schumacher from 1973:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful
The nice thing about most of this deep learning stuff is that you can use a million machine hours to train your model, and almost no time to make an evaluation. So the single machine version has all of the pattern recognition given to it by the cluster, but a few ply less tree search depth.

So to me this underscores the relative importance of the deep learning model vs the tree search.
I use a yubikey neo + gpg smart card feature with SSH enabled gpg agent. I disable password logins and have backup key stored offline.
fake and gay. throwaway for obvious reasons. im a software dev...

I just posted this list of horrible torturous schizophrenia treatments to reddits /r/mentalhealth.

it was downvoted and silently removed. this is the 2nd time theyve done this. the second article was about the lobotomobile.

before you even think a doctor should go near you they should explain this.

repost of article because THEY ARE SILENCING THEIR CRITICS.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

wtf. I'm not pleased. I googled the treatments for hearing voices, figuring there was a cure by now after 100 years. This is the list of the most popular historical treatments for hearing voices.

- Hand crank drill to the skull to drain blood away from the brain
- Icepick lobotomy (making a retard with an icepick to the brain)
- shock until KO
- sterilization/eugenics (chemical castration)
- 24/7 straight jacket
- tied to a bed 20 hours a day
- drugged and locked away
- lithium (a chemotherapy drug, so toxic its used to kill unkillable mutant cancer cells)

and more bizarre surgeries. these were used for decades each on thousands of people, or at least the old, young, weak, or dumb.

does anyone believe these are actually valid treatments? theyve not yet cured 1 case.

i propose that they are punishments for fighting the matrix or talking about aliens.

not one doctor has even thought to test the environment for radio/emf/infrared/ultrasound? theres 50+ patents for mind control tech via RF/EMF/Infrared/Ultrasound..

worse they might be causing it with mercury, mercury was known to cause mental illness since 500BC

[1](https://www.reddit.com/r/reptiliandata/comments/3za5e7/mercu...)
[2](http://www.dartmouth.edu/~toxmetal/mercury/history.html)

how can you cure mercury toxicity or mind control with pills? you cant. but schiz pills alone is a $10,000,000,000/month business.

and the reddit admins delete the posts about mind control.[3]

[3](https://np.reddit.com/r/TargetedIndividuals/comments/46d2tv/...) better wake up. you cannot post any anti-RX stuff to any sub cuz it gets removed.

my voices finally went away with $1 earplugs and a $2 tinfoil hat. I suspect all mental illnesses do go away.

I'm only advising testing your environment for RF/EMF/Infrared. Testing equipment can be found for $12, and shielding as low as $5. /r/gangstalkingmkultra

Now anyone who says aliens on reddit is told they are "schiz" "delusional" and "needs meds"... google lobotomobile for more horror stories of icepick lobotomies for haunted people.

I also wrote an article: Psychiatry fraud (https://www.reddit.com/r/gangstalkingmkultra/comments/4a4y1d...)
> but the more prosperous the average family becomes ... the faster the overall population will grow

All statistics point to the opposite. Education and higher income correlate with lower number of children.

In countries like India, the educated middle and upper classes have a very low birth rate -- most families have 1 or 2 kids. It usually the poor and uneducated families that have the most kids.

Most developed countries also have a birth rate that is below replacement. As people get more educated, the human population (for whatever reason) seems to be at risk of collapse / rapid shrinkage.

I don't know why educated people chose to have less kids, but that is what the statistics are telling us.
Could you expand on that a bit.
Great news! (Wondering if it was Jackie.)

Peninsula, but moving to the city shortly. Nice to hear they are more common up there. Always a delight to watch two Bostons play together.
I use ssh-agent and 1 key per computer.

If a computer and/or key is compromised, well, I just nuke all the related keys.

I don't understand the desire to manage a large number of keys since the attack surface is pretty clear:

A) The machine is not compromised and the key is safe.

B) The machine is compromised and the key should be replaced ASAP.

C) As a byproduct this forces obsolescence of keys in the ~3-4 year timeframe and you really should be swapping out keys every so often anyway. This keeps you from ignoring this fact for a decade :p
Competition. It's not that we really have to work that hard to produce a product or service. It's that we have to work really hard to beat the other people trying to do the same thing.

Increased productivity doesn't help, because everybody is still running flat out to compete, at a higher level.
Also, automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrades without permission: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4a5edx/psa_window... Any goodwill they gained this week by other actions, such as porting SQL Server to Linux and R tooling for Visual Studio, is now lost. How do you trust any company that starts behaving like that?
There are a lot of ways to invest that don't produce interest income. Easiest example: buy a house in San Francisco.
I was like that and it did catch up with me when I was doing that for around 11 years. I still work in startups but no longer the crazy hours and to my continued surprise: we get everything done still while no one works crazy hours.
No one will ever collect $200 dollars again
SSRF in imgur's video-to-gif service
By that logic it's also regressive to give rich people free access to roads, free access to public K-12 education, etc. Money is fungible, and if progressivity in an income tax pays for the "free" resource, it's disingenuous to call it regressive. It becomes a matter of practicality. Do you want both an IRS and a Department of Basic Income Administration?

Also, by definition a flat tax is neither progressive nor regressive.
, so I'm pretty confused about what you're talking about. Note, flat doesn't mean fair by everyone's definition.
I agree that it may decrease the security of the individual by sharing their particular security practices, but sharing good information may benefit the group.

Thanks for asking the question.
This article seems to have been written like clickbait. It's kind of hard to take seriously because if that. Plus Apple has done this with Safari, and no one has batted an eye at that. This just seems like an overreaction.
Wait until AI starts producing AI ;)

That's already happening, at least somewhat, right?
I think of it more of a compatibility with Fortran, which is a definite plus to me.
On the internet we assume everyone is an American

Who's we? ;)
This article is a bit sloppy. Just because we use our cars 5% of the time does not mean we only need 5% as many self-driving cars. That assumes there is no overlap in when we want to use them.

Also, all those words and not one mention of the liability shift to the manufacturer when cars go fully autonomous. That's one of the biggest issues with the transition. Software will have to be near perfect to avoid bankrupting manufacturers through tort suits. (It's not just an insurance premium shift, it's liability for major tort damages in fatal accidents that often bankrupt the responsible party.) So we are more likely to be in a semi-autonomous, driver-assistance world for quite some time. And that invalidates pretty much all of the article which is predicated on driverless vehicles.
That is probably one of the reason but not conciously for most in north EU. So religion is absent in their lives just some of the habits instilled by centuries of teachings die hard.
I literally cannot agree with you more. I've noticed that the bulk of my "searching behaviour" of about the last 2 years, has been a constantly increasing level of "aggressive specificity" to fend off the SEO spam. Multiple quoted segments, parentheses, OR keywords, the insanity that is the "required term flag", all used with increasing frequency to get decent results out of an increasingly irrelevant pile of garbage that I get when I perform basic "simple searches" for facts, references and other topic related information while working.

Don't get me started on the disgusting amount of stack overflow close sites I see frequently rated higher than SO itself due to content spam tactics, keyword stuffing and other grey hat SEO methods to make the sites more "appealing" in technical topic search results.
Some dentists can be pretty scummy. My mother in her early 60s didn't have dental insurance and went to a local dentist that was affordable for cleaning. She had a little bit pain in her mouth and her dentist recommended extracting all the teeth and replacing with implants for $1000s! She calls me up and I go visit with her to get an better idea. He gets ticked off because he though we were ready to go right ahead. I was appalled how he could care more about his profit than someones health.

I remembered my own dentist complaining about some swollen gums in my mouth and wanted to surgically treat it because it had gotten too bad. I just told him to deep clean in and lets see in a 6 months. I started regularly flossing and using mouthwash during this time. By 6 months he was surprised that it all recovered with a little cleaning.

Anyway, I took my mother from that place to my own dentist, have them clean her teeth properly and now 10 years later all her teeth are still there any have no pain.

In summary, I don't had trust in most dentists to do what is right for you.
Yeah, I trust Moxie. He's worked really hard on security for a long time. If the government came to his house and threatened to shoot him unless he sabotaged Signal and WhatsApp, I expect he would get shot.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but "traces" can mean amazingly small amounts these days due to testing sensitivity. Remember this when you read "traces of [insert toxic metal] were found in drinking water!!".

I don't know what the testing limits for cocaine are, but parts per billion wouldn't surprise me. For some metals, it can be parts per trillion. Ppt would he equivalent to one microgram in a cubic meter (one metric ton) of water.
Do food stamps cover tampons? Sanitary pads? Painkillers? Which type, aspirin or ibuprofen?
Are landlords required to accept housing vouchers? Are they required to not ask for more rent than a housing voucher provides? Will the housing vouchers also help me pay my mortgage? What about hotels, if I suddenly lost my house? Why don't you want me to save money by moving in with my partner? Which other scenarios have you not considered? How much money do you want to spend on micromanaging everybody's lives?
Agreed. Microsoft keeps going on back and forth on this...
Much of the busywork comes from a lack of comparison between ones' decision processes and randomness. Doing so would be temporarily depressing, but in the long run quite liberating.
In theory, that implementation of negative income tax (NIT) would cover everyone and seems to have nearly [0] the same effect as a basic income (UBI). However, in practice, the effects will not be equivalent.

With UBI, future checks are already coming, and thus can be relied upon. This gives people the freedom to leave undesirable jobs/relationships without worrying about funding tomorrow's basic needs. With NIT, people would need to apply for an adjustment to their benefits and find a way to self-fund until the application is approved. That hurdle will prevent many from leaving undesirable jobs/relationships and impede numerous others.

As an example, many citizens eligible for food stamps don't {re-}apply. Some don't know they're eligible, some can't navigate the application process, some don't want to go through the application process (many invasive questions, time consuming), and others don't want the stigma of receiving non-universal benefits. [1] [2] With a universal system like UBI, everyone is eligible, the application process can be simple and non-invasive [3], and there is no stigma.[4]

Bonus: UBI (hopefully) allows for elimination of some bureaucracy, instead of folding existing bureaucracy into a new program.

[0] While adjustments can be made to funding and payment structures to make NIT and UBI financially similar, no adjustment in NIT benefit timing addresses the fact that it's non-universal.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/14/food-stamps_n_37570...

[2] CA study of Food Stamp participation: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/cpns/Documents/Network-FSO-...

[3] Alaska PFD one-page application on p.9: http://csd.wustl.edu/publications/documents/pb09-65.pdf

[4] "Money for Free" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hidqABq4Yc&feature=youtu.be...
Even knowing what rules one is using isn't always clear.

I did some work for a Forex trader. He had devised an algorithm for trading and used it daily for modest gains. He engaged me to automate it for him via the vWorker freelance website [1]. I got the engine going getting the realtime price data etc. But when it came to his system it didn't work. In practice he didn't always act upon the signals he thought he did. We ended up in payment dispute because he insisted that if I had done the work right then the bot would be making money. By this time, I had learned the error of his thinking. We arbitrated on 50% payment - I wasn't too pleased with that but I had learned about trading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VWorker
Thats not true at all. The people in charge understand that general privacy impedes their ability to dictate.
Earlier HN discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262037
Those HP printers were some of the most reliable I ever dealt with. Fond memories.
Hi Joi.

I think you wrote down a list of facts and anecdotes that are valuable, but you need to proof-read your work or collaborate with a greater intellect to make a coherent point, maybe Eben Moglen?
If you're too good at that, DoD gets annoyed. One of the great suppressed inventions: Airadar.[1] A phased array radar with a conformal antenna for light aircraft. In 1973. Worked fine, and was reviewed in Flying magazine. The USAF was very unhappy, because it was better and much smaller than military radars of the period, which were still "dish in the nose" mechanically scanned devices.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=NWzlTqj0gQ4C&pg=PA66&lpg=P...