skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the alcoholic takes their entire check and blows it on booze? Don't care.

I specifically have to not care, so as to not erect a gigantic, wasteful government program designed to protect someone from their own short-sightedness (in my high-and-mighty opinion). In order for UBI to work, we have to give up substantially all notions of controlling what other people spend THEIR money on. That's the most appealing aspect of UBI to me. As someone who works hard and would end up shouldering the expense, I'm not particularly enamored of it, but the "get out of everyone else's business" aspects really do appeal.
iTunes has almost every movie ever. It costs between $4 and $6 to rent. That's sounds pretty reasonable to me.
There are plenty of cameras like what you're describing on the market today. Modern incarnations of the Panasonic Petcam. Search 'WiFi IP camera'. You just don't hear about them because they aren't hyped to high hell like Dropcam.
>It would completely remove the necessity to be productive. That can't turn out well.

As seen in welfare states in Scandinavia or Germany, where almost no one works because of the unemployment benefits.
I bitch about the mortgage interest deduction on a regular basis. A national policy that drives up housing prices is plain stupid (and it obviously isn't helping the ~1/2 of the country that doesn't have any wealth build wealth).

I'm ambivalent about a minimum wage. I think the arguments about the imbalance in negotiating power have some merits, but the GP answered your question about why it is a problem with their next sentence, it likely makes some productive tasks uneconomic.

I think it's important to try to characterize the actual economic impact of a minimum wage though, just pointing to the expected negative marginal effect isn't a very useful argument.
>This is not a server platform upon which you will host websites, run server infrastructure, etc

Yet they demo'd a website being hosted via the Linux sub-system -_- thanks microsoft!
Without government intervention, corporations control the labour market. With no minimum wage, no basic income, and increasing automation, do you really think corporations wouldn't drive wages down to zero?

There are countries with little to no government intervention, and countries with lots. The latter are objectively much better places.
Depends how you sunset it. Depends on the reasonable life of the product. In Europe at least Consumer Legislation has an expectation of a reasonable life. It's not reasonable for instance for lots of your fridges to die after only a couple of years. Car makers have to provide spare parts for, I think, six years after the end of production of a model.

I think a lot more could be done to sunset products gracefully, and with consideration for the paying customer. We'll be ceasing updates for this in a year, we'll keep the server active for x years. Be aware there will be no security fixes. Like the phased EoL of Windows releases.

I think quite a few examples of smart things are getting dangerously close to, or already passing, the line that would fit the legal definition of unreasonably short. SaaS only? We need to wait for case law and legislation to catch up I think.

Eighteen months life, then intentionally break your $300 product, with only 6 weeks notice? I think it would make an interesting test case with reasonable chance of success.

I trust Google very little as far as sunsetting their many releases.
Had the same question in my mind.
Everything starts as a toy – Steven Sinofsky
I think the parent comment was operating on an assumption that "staying busy" has its own benefits for people.
> It would completely remove the necessity to be productive. That can't turn out well.

Take a look at mobile games. People do lots of things just to be 1 rung higher on an artificial competitive ladder (reset every month) about endlessly punching a "Battle" button. I think this idea that necessity has ever driven productivity (look around at your job) is a long running joke.
What do you mean by "boils down on your infrastructure"? Is that for both too?
How to BUILD Your OWN ROGUE GSM BTS FOR FUN AND PROFIT
The only downside is that you can con the government into paying you to commit tax evasion.
There are corner cases in which stored procs don't totally protect the foolish, but they fix 95% of the problem. What "Right" solution are you using that eschews stored procedures completely? [EDIT:] Of course if your use case allows you can just get by with a tiny whitelist. Nice work if you can get it.
There's no necessity to be productive now. Most (all?) of the minimum wage jobs in the United States aren't productive to society except so far as that they have some minimal amount of money to make violent property crime slightly less attractive.
I do think that's a different issue but I'm with you that the assumption that poor people will spend money on drugs or alcohol is pretty far off base. After all, aren't most people in the US forced into debt because of healthcare? Getting sick shouldn't be viewed as a vice.
If all of the copyright holders agreed, I think they they could relicense under any licence. This would be especially straightforward for any revision for which Oracle is the sole copyright holder.
It was comedian Bill Burr's idea. He pitched it to Vince Vaughan's production company, who then went to Netflix.
Sure wish they'd discuss a release date...
Cool. Now you will be expected to replace your smoke alarm, thermostat, and security system on a 6-12 month cycle like they already expect you to do with your telephone. Anybody willing to invest in smart windowpanes? Attic stairs as a service? Is there any way that we can rent people's own hands back to them? Some sort of a glove that analyzes everything you touch and only pays taxes in Ireland?
How can you make that claim? One of the largest costs for an airline are the union labor costs associated with their operations. So another 40 minutes should very much matter to an airline. The longer a plane stays at a gate the less gates are available for other flights. Its not uncommon to have to wait for a gate or a jetway now after landing. It happened to me last week and we sat on the tarmac. You can't tell me this sort of inefficiency doens' contribute to labor costs - unionized labor costs at that.
Future of BaaS
>>A Basic Income from Govt comes at a huge price of loss of individual liberty. If someone gives you free stuff, they will expect controls like where you are allowed to spend your money and time.

No. The entire point of basic income is that it is unconditional. You get a check from the government at frequent intervals. Unlike food stamps, you can spend the money on whatever you want.
TSA paid IBM $336,413 for an app that only pointed right or left
> If someone gives you free stuff, they will expect controls like where you are allowed to spend your money and time.

Yeah, that's why they should pay you in cash. Every basic income discussion I've ever seen has been on that basis.

> model of taking from the productive sources and rewarding everyone else

No, you take from productive sources and reward everyone, even the productive sources. Basic income is not just for the poor.

> I spend extra effort doing something else which is harder and my earnings are taken away

Only a portion of them. I fail to see how your argument is not also an argument against all taxation, period.

> The productive people are dragged down and discouraged

The productive people produce if they want more than the minimum. If they do produce, then they get whatever they can earn, and they pay a portion to the government in taxes.
This is one reason why a UBI really needs to be attached to something that can't leave the country, namely a land-value tax.
Startups in Montréal
I'm not saying it's an ideal outcome for a company to sunset a product, but why is the consumer expectation so different for pure software vs a connected hardware device (i.e. software + hardware)? Consumers experience sunk cost when any product gets sunset, whether it's hardware or not.
Predictive modeling of kickstarter http://sidekick.epfl.ch/
I daresay plastics are the cost issue here so I'm not sure swapping out the cover would help. Personally, I'd have done this as some sort of cooler add-on kit in a custom cloth case of some sort and pitched it as letting you use your existing cooler or pick the cooler that meets your needs. But then, as I said elsewhere, I'm not the audience and don't see the attraction :-)
I agree that it would be much better and fairer to have a negative income tax as the only form of social support. One of the worst things about the current social support system in the U.S is the welfare cliffs. There's a gap between $25,000 a year and $80,000 a year where there's a greater than 100% marginal income tax because people lose access to benefits at these income levels. This chart displays it very nicely:

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user9218...

The full study examining this phenomenon is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/273843288/Welfare-Report-Final
Playing devil's advocate, what happens to businesses in the presence of an even higher regulatory and tax environment and what will the impact of increased taxes be on employment and business viability as well as the cost of living?

For the sake of argument, think about businesses with razor thin margins like restaurants. In the presence of increased taxes, their margins significantly diminish, if not vanish, and it becomes increasingly unviable for the business to stay in business. Once they shutter their doors, the tax base and employment decreases. Extending the argument, consider other organizations that have a healthier margin and are growing and hiring. The presence of substantially increased taxation raises the costs of growth (re: hiring) and raises the costs of employing Americans and earning money in America which reduces their ability to compensate employees / develop new products etc. Yes, they might have the margin to pay the increased tax rate, but the tradeoff is they lose money that goes into R&D, increasing salaries, hiring more people, and other business activities we think are good and useful.

As a consumer, I'm also curious to know what this does to my cost of living. Prices will not stay static and if businesses are incurring higher costs to produce goods and services, those get reflected in price. Given wages aren't keeping pace with inflation, what will a sudden price shock do to the cost of living in the face of businesses adjusting prices to address the new taxes? This could take people who are getting by now and turn them into a new wave of impoverished as necessary goods and services increase in price or it could prevent UBI from achieving its goal because prices keep rising to offset the tax rate which puts goods and services outside what people can afford on UBI.
Elasticbeanstalk is the answer to App Engine and has been around for many years.
For those that haven't seen it, this isn't the first time (or even the second time) that Microsoft has released a POSIX layer for Windows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
Those improvements are nice, but ultimately 3rd party terminals should be able to handle display completely by themselves. Is this now possible?
Yup, that's right. Half of building a bot involves getting the machine-readable data, and that's the part that we try to make easier.
I read any NIC can be translated to basic income by raising income taxes. So, they are very similar.
Nice idea, anyway why all sections are 'restricted content'?
> it artificially increases the cost of labor

That's the point. A floor. Through which people should not have to work below at.
>This model of taking from the productive sources and rewarding everyone else will have to break at a certain point. how come you get rewarded for enjoying the gossip column and I spend extra effort doing something else which is harder and my earnings are taken away?

That's an argument that can be made against ABSOLUTELY ANY TAXATION.
The trouble with negative income tax, or at least the simplest models is, that you have to be very careful with the models. I once tried to calculate an admittedly very simple model and the results were a rather absurdly high tax already at rather low incomes. A slightly larger parameter space then produced a model of taxation with extrema.

Plus there are a lot of very good reasons for tax breaks (for example screen readers for the blind). So while I fully agree that a well engineered tax system would be a lot simpler than what we have now, I am not sure if a basic income should just be dealt with by taxation.
It's just an outlier to the trend. So "exclude" in this case is just a qualifier to the statement and doesn't reflect an actual desire to treat the company differently.
> I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal

Nope. Increasing good employment is a good goal; jobs which pay near minimum wage are not that.
Basic income is necessary to distribute benefits for citizens with intangible value creation.

Ex: Stay-at-home parent raises children while breadwinner works. Breadwinner is freed from tedium and can be more productive at work. Children receive enough attention to become well-adjusted and productive adults.

What is the non-breadwinner worth? How do you calculate it? How do you compare value to non-working person taking care of sick family? Or a community volunteer (especially when the community needs volunteers and can't pay them)?

And that's why universal income makes sense.
> I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal

I don't agree, and I'm not sure why people would see employment for its own sake would be a good thing. I want to increase some of the things that employments brings (purchasing power, a sense of purpose, etc...) and not others (loss of time, feeling trapped, etc...).
>sell 1.5MM a year

Is MM a typo or a legit way to write million?

I decided to find out and here's a reddit thread explaining: https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/2sd9bm/why_do_peop...
Long read but very much worth it.

"As the drums of war sounded in America, Egyptians believed that we could not accept a foreign invasion of another Arab country. We were furious that our government, which was allied with the United States, allowed American and British warships to sail through the Suez Canal toward Iraq. I had an intuition that if the United States attacked Iraq, Egyptians would take to the streets."

There is so much irony in that paragraph combined with the title it is hard to know where to begin.

And what became of Egypt is also really not quite what he intended.
Most of what I discovered came from this post that was on HN a while back https://gyrovague.com/2013/10/30/half-the-donut-why-an-entre...
No. You can run native windows stuff from msys.
For the kinds of things medium-big spenders spend money on (mostly, largish amounts of network storage and the network to connect it to app servers) AWS was the first major provider to be decently competitive. I remember pricing this out at the time, a lot of what you're paying for on EC2 is proximity to EBS, which other providers at the time either didn't have an equivalent to or charged several multiples of AWS prices.

If it's 2010 you're used to the costs of a hosted or coloed system with tens of TB of NetApp storage starting your next project on AWS was compelling in a way discount providers was not.
Note that if you read carefully, the guy was actively supported by the U.S. at the time he prepared the "revolution." He claims he's disappointed by Muslim Brotherhood gaining power, but it was he who even helped them, he being then just "an activist" and they being a real "political group":

"I negotiated agreements between activists and political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood."

Note also that the Muslim Brotherhood was actively "the choice" of the U.S. at the time of the revolution. Now I'll quote the author once again as he describes the power struggle between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood:

"The election represented Egyptian politics since the revolution: a power struggle between military dictators and religious fanatics. And the Muslim Brotherhood—whose religiosity, I believe, is a trojan horse for pure political ambition—treated activists just as harshly as the military."

I personally don't believe the religion of Muslim Brotherhood is "a trojan horse," it's where they get the the goals of their political activity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood

"The Brotherhood's English language website describes the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood as including firstly the introduction of the Islamic Sharia as "the basis for controlling the affairs of state and society" and secondly, work to unify "Islamic countries and states, mainly among the Arab states, and liberating them from foreign imperialism""
Yes, and a fish is smarter than a snail.

We in the west are oblivious to the damage socialism like this does. Go ask people in former Eastern Bloc countries, they will tell you all you need to know about socialism.
Are you implying that receivers of government aid can't decide for themselves how to use their money?

The point of UBI is to do away with those restrictions, because people usually know how to allocate their available funds towards their needs.
I'm on the road right now, but here's an in-depth article I read awhile back.

Note that I'm not against the idea. In fact, I think it has huge merit. But just like everything else, the devil is in the details. Just like in startups, in policy an idea is mostly useless. It's the execution that matters. We really need to see several dozen different governmental entities give this a shot in order to start having any kind of intelligent discussion at all. Look forward to seeing that happen.

(PDF link follows)

http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa773.p...
The top marginal tax rate would have to be dramatically increased to pay for it

Someone should do the math! Sure you could increase the top marginal rate, but where does that get you. Yes, the top 1% is very wealthy, but there aren't many of them.

I would bet you'd have to increase income taxes well down the income ladder, dipping down into what most people call the middle class. You simply can't avoid it, that's where all the money is.
Sometimes econ 101 is macro.

I feel like a lot of the people who think economics is all terrible nonsense start off with macroeconomics (and maybe never get to microeconomics because of it).
"Get out of your car, we've got a free Uber ride for you"
TSA paid $1.4M for Randomizer app that chooses left or right
Example code would be helpful.
I'll bite, UBI is in my opinion the least worst antipoverty program I've seen.

What else can you do when someone's broke, homeless, and can't provide enough value to sell to get a roof over their head? Just telling people to "Work Harder!" in a market that's become increasingly hostile to unskilled labor seems callous and short-sighted.

We can't just get rid of nonproductive people.
There's a non-obvious danger for basic income: rent-seeking behavior. Landlords charge whatever the market will bear, so there's a huge risk of funneling money through the recipients without improving their quality of life. And it isn't just landlords that hold that kind of rentier position - universities, for instance, would also extract more out of their position as employment gatekeepers.

Attacking rent-seeking behavior would likely have a bigger impact on the everyday lives of the poor. Land-value taxes are a good place to start.
Trust me, its not mortgage interest rate deductions that are driving up demand and prices for homes. Overseas buyers paying all cash are driving up prices - and stock markets pumped full of zero interest cash are causing soaring prices.

If you are suggesting that mortgage interest rate deductions are fueling another housing bubble, then we are about to witness another amazing sub-prime real-estate crash.

Considering I just purchased a new home under the new underwriting rules / regulations, I can assure you that this marginal deduction is not qualifying a huge number of home buyers to the point it makes a difference on the price in comparison to the rest of the home market environment.
While I love The Intercept, and First Look Media, its parent company, it is important to understand that this is not a typical scenario. The Intercept runs at a loss, which it is allowed to do because First Look Media's founder and president is Pierre Omidyar (eBay). He cuts checks for The Intercept when they need funding. They don't have an economically-sustainable journalism operation, which is why they are currently working on new for-profit initiatives.
Sure. Sorry about that; it's hard not to miss a few.
Sounds like the ideal candidate or at least the one most likely to succeed is someone who has seen the problem or a version of it before. Hope your other problems are in the same class.
I would think that a requisite for a basic income happening would be tax revenues growing faster than the cost of living. Is that happening? I'd be surprised, but maybe somebody who knows better can enlighten me.
> There is so much irony in that paragraph combined with the title

The irony is more apparent when you read further in the article that the author received support from the very same U.S. for his activity of making a democratic revolution. However he was just an "activist" and Muslim Brotherhood the "political force." Which developed exactly how it sounds, as he also describes.

My other comment here contains some more interesting quotes.
Can't "gas stations" just swap out your empty battery for a charged one, the way you can swap out an empty propane tank and $20 for a full one?
MSYS2 is very up-to-date. https://msys2.github.io

It uses pacman from Arch Linux as its package manager and it contains many libs in addition to just the compilers (and the unixy tools)
The counter argument is that human labor has an actual cost. That is the cost to keep a human alive and in some level of comfort. Government benefits of many different types have "artificially" lowered this cost. Where employees refuse to pay enough for a human to live on, the government picks up the slack. Raising the minimum wage may be "artificial," but its not the first control placed on some otherwise natural labor market.
Actually automation is replacing the work that humans have to do - this means that most activities left will be the ones that are not in high demand, with low or no pay. Imagine we have machines providing us food and all the material possessions we ever need, without any human input. Traditional capitalism/distribution of wealth through employment makes little sense under this scenario.

This model of taking from the productive sources and rewarding everyone else will have to break at a certain point. how come you get rewarded for enjoying the gossip column and I spend extra effort doing something else which is harder and my earnings are taken away?

a) The "productive sources" are mostly automated. b) you also get rewarded since the basic income is universal. whatever work you do provides you with extra income - people who work hard will still be rewarded accordingly.
There are probably still enough companies out there which are using Windows 7 as their standard installation. And as long as that's the case msys(git) would still be needed.
You couldn't eliminate social security payments since for a lot of folks, they take home more than $10K. You could lop off the bottom 10%, but a lot of spending would remain.
The key to the UBI is that there is no means test (which introduces bad incentives, etc).

UBI with means testing is known as the Guaranteed Minimum Income.