skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the idea of a basic income is really interesting though one aspect of it troubles me and I would be interested to hear HN's solutions to it. The trouble lies in the creative and economic relationship. If a substantial number of people reduce or stop their usual working hours and live off the income to pursue entirely creative activities, such as making a website or art, they are exempt from the usual capitalist status quo which forces a venture to be good, popular and eventually profitable (there is no standard of quality necessary as long as its overheads are not too high). This could mean a substantial number of people are neither creating wealth through work or taxable business.

One counter-argument is that by freeing up people to pursue their interests, there will be more good businesses opened as well, which will be profitable in the long run. The other is that a person would not pursue a project that is not well-received for a long period of time due to negative feedback.

Neither of these fully answers the problem though of what the system would do to stop people falling off the economic grid and the impact on GDP/taxable income this would have. Any thoughts?
There's a very fine line between between removing too much essential complexity, and leaving programmers with too many limitations. Or the other end where the language overhead overshadows the original task at hand.

For instance multithreading should be handled by languages and frameworks 99.9% of the time. Take reading a file (something that should be handled by the language/ framework). Read it asynchronously, structure any dependant code clearly (which JavaScript does pretty well), if any problems are detected they display/ log the appropriate error. You shouldn't be kneck-deep in callbacks.
Haha, of course :)

However, I am not in favour of Government handouts. How much money did it cost to give me £80 back? £100? £150?

Would it not be better to reduce my tax so I pay £80 less each month?
how to become a politician
The Airplane Seating Arrangement That Triggers 'Air Rage'
Interesting how this article spins Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives while liberals would object to it. I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income.

The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern. Why should we keep paying people for unnecessary bullshit jobs? Why should we employ people to check and ensure that other people aren't secretly working? Let those people do something more productive.

I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income. People can and will still work to increase their income further, but when robots do more and more of the work for us, there's no reason to punish people for being unable to compete with robots.
Avoiding the Mess in the Hadoop Cluster (Part 1)
The benefit is not given to the banks - the money is added through asset purchases on open market sales. The Fed owns more assets (usually Treasuries) and the bank has cash. If you want to get in on it, buy Treasuries.

Next, the Fed avoid targeting zero inflation, because it's currently impossible to hit that number so exactly, and they desire to avoid deflationary spirals. The past 150 years has shown across hundreds of countries that the current solution is vastly better than the boom and bust cycles previous, and has also demonstrated the benefit of fiat over commodity (like gold). There are ample papers showing this in the econ literature, and is the primary reason not a single country tries to use previous methods.

Next, new money is added through asset purchases, not giveaways, so it's erroneous to think this money can just be handed to individuals as cash, unless perhaps those individuals were selling assets to the Fed of equal value.

Next, the target is usually around 2%, and the money supply is around 2T, resulting in 400B a year, or, 2K a year per adult, which is nice, but hardly a basic income. It's more like a tax break. It's hardly going to change wealth transfers, since most people will just consume it, and the wealth would go back to companies, mostly the ones you decry above.

Finally, when the Fed targets low inflation, that would dry up the basic income, and I don't think giving people such a variable and uncertain income would do well for planning and stability. Soon people would clamor and elect politicians that guaranteed the Fed would pay X per year, defeating the entire mechanism the Fed uses to stabilize markets.
Basic income except the rich and powerful cannot stop outside their home?
Well, holding a referendum in Switzerland means 100k citizens agree to put it up for referendum, nothing more, nothing less.

It's not some kind of endorsement of it as a good or feasible idea, unfortunately. As you point out, most pro basic-income people I've talked with here tend to hand-wave the "how do we pay for it" question as "implementation detail" or some idealistic rhetoric ("tax the rich more!") which is not encouraging me to vote in favor.

I would be happy to give my vote to a proposal that included a budget proposition, or a rational analysis of feasibility. The current one doesn't (http://initiative-revenudebase.ch/initiative/)
Wren's performance is pretty impressive!
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Back-end Python Developer (Competitive salary with stock options)

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We are working within a huge sector mainly dominated by big companies using outdated approaches. It is in massive need of change and we aim to revolutionise the industry. We provide mobile, online, card and payment products as part of an intuitive solution with unique functionality.

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* Actively contributing to the open source community whenever possible
* Other suitable work dependant on skills
* You will have the opportunity to work within a talented team alongside experienced engineers.

Requirements:

* Proficiency in Python and cloud technologies (i.e. AWS)
* Knowledge of Databases (i.e. PostgreSQL, DynamoDB)
* Appreciation for modern Agile development using Scrum
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* Proficiency in English with the right to work in the UK
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Why? It seems like a reasonable statement - surround yourself with people who think critically, not evangelically?
I came into the comments to ask if anyone could remember a guide that was popularly recommended on HN in the past and it was your first link, so thanks for those :)
Until the BI is implemented in those countries, and the companies there have to increase the prices.

That just brings another problem. You will have two kind of countries: some with BI and some without BI. How are you going to convince the people from the countries without BI not to move to a country with BI?
Think of a ship as a mid sized factory, not a large toy. A destroyer has ~250+ crew. They are very expensive to operate.

Now sure this does not replace a destroyer... yet... but one day the tech might.

$15,000 per day does not seem to bad considering the drone "crew" back home monitoring it and satellite costs.
>This could mean a substantial number of people are neither creating wealth through work or taxable business.

How is this any different than what we have currently? It could be argued that many employed persons are currently destroying wealth through unethical practices encouraged by profit/rent seeking that is prevalent in contemporary economy.

A basic income as you have noted will also allow for people to open 'good businesses' without as much of a pressure to turn a profit. Ideally society would start to look down upon the "I work for <expletive>'s people/companies because I need to pay the bills" attitude that is pervasive today and people would start taking their responsibilities to themselves, their community and our greater environment more seriously.
But we were not discussing whether those three countries were the cradles of European civilization (undisputedly so) but what Western Europe is in contemporary times.

No amount of calling bullshit is going to change the fact that Spain and Italy are mired by corruption scandals. The root cause of that is the mentality, the way of thinking, and lack of discipline: "to hell with everyone else as long as I have plenty to eat, guzzle, and screw". The results speak for themselves. For instance, what is the unemployment rate in Spain, especially among the younger generation? Why?
Things developers should care about
Gets much worse than that, for anyone having shipped AAA games on multiple consoles: 1) Ubershader program files (#ifdef's pepper generously everywhere) 2) Each console has it's own quirks and gotchas that you try to abstract 3) CPU/GPU interface is a nightmare and debugging is as painful as it gets.
If a baker can make the same amount of money not working thanks to basic income, it follows logically that you have to pay him/her more to stay and work, which increases the cost of bread for everyone. So now you have more money to spend but everything went up in price.
You sound really afraid of having to collect your own waste.
Although I advocate the empowerment of the impoverished, this looks like a very fundamentally flawed idea that would actually harm those it sets out to help. We need a different approach.

When you give everyone in the economy a $10000 basic income you drive demand without driving supply. This graph[1] demonstrates how we estimate the relationship between the two, as well as price. As you'll notice, an increase in demand without an associated increase in supply results in an increase in prices. Essentially we might expect that over time the $10000, with market forces as the causation, will become the new N=0 point. Your basic salary becomes worthless. Any economic freedoms that you have created are fleeting in nature.

A stricter socialist approach seems to be the better one: instead of investing that money into people's pockets, you invest it in job creation in services that assist these people. For example: aggressive funding of soup kitchens. The poorest of the poorest might not have money in their pockets, but it might be possible to provide even advanced (e.g. internet) services to them in such a way that they don't require money. This solution conveys no economic freedom - an ingredient for misery.

Point is: I don't know and honestly, we don't know.

Helping the impoverished is one of the most important goals of our race; but racing into poorly thought out solutions might result in the impoverished being no better off in the long run. I'd love to hear some counterarguments because the basic salary, at least superficially, has the attractive quality of being simple to implement.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Su...
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http://libcello.org/
In Search of the Perfect Music Dataset
It's not like we didn't have cooperative multitasking for 50 years. Having threads/processes and a scheduler is easier and safer, full stop. Potentially long-running portions of the program don't need to be arbitrarily chopped up to yield control back to the server, because they are pre-empted. Your system is no longer at the mercy of the worst code within it.

Both nginx and Apache's event MPM handle HTTP connections with events while the app backends are still using preemptive threads for running the HTTP handler code, so it's clearly not the case that "you need to make the whole thing event driven." You just need programmers who don't think, "well since the browser doesn't expose threads to JavaScript programmers, clearly they are useless."
Would Halide[0] be what he's looking for? It's a DSL, sure, but one that is embedded in C++, so you can at least program your whole pipeline in place, giving you a good grasp of the flow of the program(s).

[0] http://halide-lang.org/
Imagine two cities, Fortyville and Hundredsixton. In Fortyville, people make an average of $40,000 a year, while in Hundredsixton, the mean annual income is $160,000.

Would you expect the average rent for a room in Hundredsixton to be $10,000/month higher than the average rent in Fortyville? That isn't what happens in practice; rent doesn't go up one-to-one with income.
That's only for non-async stuff, which is very rare. If you're using some wacky 3rd party code which throws an Error instead of the accepted convention of (err, response) callback arguments (or returning a promise), I suggest not using it.
This is actually a good idea. In this specific case I wouldn't go through all the trouble since the code is rather obsolete (java 4) and so is the system that runs on it. We'd be better off just rewriting the whole thing.
Norway also exports and imports energy to Europe to exploit the potential for energy price arbitrage. In effect, any country that is connected to an international energy grid has partial responsibility for bringing down global CO2 emissions.

I don't see how this is an argument against electrical vehicles. In fact electric vehicles should increase the incentive to reduce the carbon emissions of electricity production since now at least improvements there will have a material effect on the carbon efficiency of transportation.

(Norway built out most of its energy grid before the oil industry got started, by the way -- but we do maintain out grid partly using tax money from the oil sector, just like all parts of our public sector).
I think most people will continue to work, simply because people generally like having more money. What will stop is degrading bullshit jobs for little pay. Businesses that rely on those jobs will disappear, unless they manage to make their jobs more attractive. Businesses will have to work harder to attract employees, because employees are less desperate for work. More of the profit will go to employees, less to upper management and shareholders. I think that's a good thing.

Unless those jobs can be automated completely, of course. But then, GDP is fine, taxes will probably focus more on corporations, and people will be freed from the degrading bullshit jobs, free to look for something better. And that, I think, is also a good thing. Let the robots do the stupid work, while we're off doing more fun stuff.

Make sure technology makes everybody's lives better. Isn't that the entire point?
How craig constructed the message that he signed
What would be nice is when you ramp up one component that it reduces another one to stay in the price range.
Gusto (YC W12) is hiring a data engineer
You'd still need some people to work on running welfare programmes. Not every basic need can be met by a fixed sum for everyone. For example, some disabled people need extra money to run a car, get equipment in their homes or perhaps employ a carer (if this wasn't otherwise supplied).
Since we are doing deja vu, I uploaded some new metrics that better highlights how insane GitLab's churn rate is.

http://imgur.com/a/4uaSR

What's really interesting is the number of contributors.
4 Ways to Power Up Your Company with Yanado
And the more you write, the more you define yourself
I take them only before bed, it's sort of meditative and helps me get to sleep.
"CPU/GPU interface is a nightmare and debugging is as painful as it gets."

I suppose this is one of the biggest main paint points. Not a verbose API, but the fact that the drivers are so complex that they often break the expectation that you can trust the underlying implementation if it's provided by a vendor.

No linguistic overlay is going to fix the underlying drivers provided by graphics card providers.

Before figuring out how to make the interface elegant I claim it should first become robust. If it's not robust then wrapping it in an elegant interface will only make things worse.
Ben Goertzel – Aspects of Artificial General Intelligence
How Western startups can scale, rather than stumble, in China
Silicon Valley actor hates real Silicon Valley
'Third world country' is an ambiguous term and a bit of a misnomer, because it originally meant 'a country aligned with neither West or East' (during the Cold War). Its use has become conflated with that of 'developing country', because the two meanings overlapped in practice. It is also considered derogatory due to its ambiguity and general connotation of colonial superiority.

It helps to be aware of those connotations if you choose to use a term like that (which can be a conscious choice to express your position). Although I agree that comparing it with racial slurs like 'nigger' is not really appropriate, there is some similarity in that these are words that are slowly moving out of the modern vocabulary appropriate for civilised discourse.

Just use 'developing country'.
Stereotypes exist for a reason, although people try to drown them out in public because they think that makes them look better. I'm just not being a hypochrite in this particular instance, that's all. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Sorry, but that article has something fishy.

Looking at the graph, there is something wrong. According to the graph (measurement) there is a reduction of the pollution from about 1.000 µg/m3 (minute -3) to 800 µg/m3 (minute 0) before the doors have been closed and before the system has been activated. That is a 20% reduction by nothing has changed.
The sum also depends on how much robots will make stuff cheaper. Remember buying clothes and appliances/electronics before the 90s?

These used to be major expenses, and much more expensive than today, adjusted to inflation (stuff got cheaper partially due to globalisation & partially greater automation).
The labour market is not going away with BI. It will just become more free. Currently, many workers are forced to accept crappy jobs for little pay because the alternative is starvation. With BI, they can afford to say no when they don't think the compensation is worth it. If those crappy jobs are necessary, they will have to improve, either by making the jobs more fun or interesting, or increasing the pay.
India’s Silicon Valley will die in 5 years, warns top scientist
Whatsapp is literally unable to comply with the order. It's like the judge ordered a submarine to invade Lesotho - it's not something the submarine can do, it's not within their technical capabilities.
I also voted for Pinboard. None of the other founders are credible...
Interesting - thanks for your answers!
Sorry, I didn't get your second point. Please elaborate.
Gresham Dollar - it’s a social experiment, not a startup.

Care to elaborate? It isn't designed to be a social experiment. It's designed to work even if people don't believe in it.
It's not just wealthier people who will be worse off - it's everyone.

Basic income is known to create a large disincentive for work. In previous experiments (Mincome) labor supply dropped by about 10% - double what happened during the great recession.

This means that fewer working mothers can find child care, fewer laborers to mow your lawn, fewer nurses, fewer teachers, etc. No matter how much money you give to people, fewer services provided makes us all become poorer. That's simple arithmetic.
I don't agree that anything close to a majority a people are working unethically or for unethical ends. Most people are doing jobs that have some economic and societal function. This system works so well because if the product you are offering isn't needed by society then it can't exist. I'm just wondering what the consequences of this subversion will be. If everybody opens a "good business" that doesn't make a profit or is needed, the services we do need will be compromised and the money we take to build schools and hospitals will be reduced.

The ethical net gain might be good, and society's impression of jobs may be altered but that doesn't answer the economic problem of how to encourage people to work in fields that are fiscally meaningful
That's because moral justification isn't at the center of our society. The market is.

So how much do you pay your friends to hang out with you? I've been going with $20 a visit, but I've heard that might be a little on the low side these days.
I might be generalizing, but I get the feeling this is how world-wide start ups have operated for a long time.
The reality I've seen (in France and Chile) is quite different from what I've heard of Silicon Valley Startups.
UK minimum ('laborer') wage is £13k, not 50.
Who or what is your society? Moral justification is absolutely at the center of European society. Sure, we have lots of criminal capitalists here as well, but morals is our way to deal with those people.

You seem to suggest letting these American-style gangsters go unchecked. Why though?

You also seem to be suggesting that studying until 23 is less enjoyable than working 9-17 from 17/18 onwards.

This all leads me to think you have a very upper-class, down-upon, shielded from trouble perspective.
Yeah, it's more like the people owning the waste companies that would try to drive up automation because of the high costs associated with manual labor.
Well sounds like they basically ignored the court[1]. If you don't bother turning up to defend yourself in court, you'll almost certainly lose.

WhatsApp should decide how much they care about Brazil. If they care, they could have bothered to send a lawyer. If they don't care, then they shouldn't complain about their service being cut off.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615056
I'm one of the people who supports excluding people under the age of eighteen from basic income.
I suspect that most (neoliberalist) governments do not feel that it is their job if the market is handling it. Also, people seem to trust megacorporations like Facebook more than their own government for private communication, although I am profoundly troubled by this naive majority view on privacy — I'd rather have my communications end-to-end encrypted without some huge corporation or any government harvesting my (meta)data; it's just too easy to abuse.