skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for your comment, you bring up some very valid points. I think I might not have expressed myself clearly enough on some of mine so I apologize for that.

set the income tax to a flat 20%

The 20% I mentioned was a completely random figure, my guess is that it should be much higher, but this would obviously need to be researched properly. This also wouldn't solely be for incomes, but rather for all financial transactions, which I believe (though I may be misguided) would reduce potential loopholes that rely on declaring income in various ways (including not as income). I think this idea is more or less in line with your idea to "simplify or refactor the different definitions of income".

Additionally, with a flat tax rate, I imagine it would be much easier to subtract taxes at the source (e.g. as is done in the UK for incomes) which in turn would reduce administrative work and therefore overheads.

provide no (or very little) universal basic income

I am definitely in favour of a substantial universal basic income (within reason, of course). I simply believe that it would work better alongside a strong support network (i.e. education, healthcare, etc.).

A flat 20% tax rate means decreased government revenue overall, lower taxes for the rich, and higher taxes for the middle-class and poor.

Regarding "lower taxes for the rich", I'm not sure how true that is (again, if we agree that 20% is a made-up figure for now). The rich benefit from ways of skirting these things that poor and middle-class people do not have. This reminds me of an article by Warren Buffet in the NYT on how the rich get special treatment (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-...).

As for poor and middle-class people, I think it's important to look at the bigger picture. The initial tax spending would be, as you note, possibly higher, however relatively speaking this is money they would no longer need to spend on basic necessities, which for society as a whole seems more beneficial and a greater equalizer.
In my experience, the deadwood at Sun actually became deadwood at Oracle; most of the folks who left Sun (disclosure: includes me) were the ones who were drawn to Sun first and foremost by its mission, and since leaving they have gone on to interesting things elsewhere. So while there are certainly companies that are red flags for me, Sun isn't one of them -- and I say this as someone who knows Sun's failings better than most...
Unless they use different emails for different websites. This sounds extreme, but you just pointed out one reason that might be a good idea.
The problem with this is that it negates one of the biggest benefits of BI -- getting rid of red tape and bloat.

Printing and mailing checks can be done almost fully automated and would close down millions of welfare buildings, and give people back dignity.

There's a stigma that you get when you're on public assistance or welfare. It creates a feeling of less self-worth. This causes you to believe that the best job you'll ever get is McDonald's - so why even try to better your circumstance.

GBI on the other hand goes to everyone - even the wealthy. The message is that we're all equal and it's basically a reverse citizen tax on the government to ensure everyone can live and grow in nurtured environments.

The world I see in the next 20 years - there will be no more truck drivers. Fast food restaurants will be run by 1 manager alone. Gas stations will be ran by self-serve kiosks, and be fully automated, as will be grocery stores - including re-stocking. Other jobs that will be gone: Surgeons / Doctors (probably not fully but the need will be a lot less because of AI like Watson, where you once needed 30+ doctors in a hospital you might need only 3 or 4.), construction workers, trash trucks, oil rig workers, fishing, pilots, military (replaced by drones / droids), manufacturing, etc...

We will move from a society where it's expected that everyone work 40+ hours and sometimes two jobs to meet basic needs to a society where work is optional, and 20 hours is the norm. More focus and time is spent with family and having experiences that truly enrich one's life. GBI gives people the freedom to also pursue entrepreneurism, startup ideas, music, art, writing, and any other number of hobbies and past times that could enrich society in general. Studies have shown that truly happy people aren't the ones who have the most 'stuff' it's the people who experience the most that life has to offer (i.e. traveling, events, concerts, etc...)

For us to get to GBI we need to hurry up the automation revolution -- I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, and progressive democrat who's FOR robots at Wendy's and McDonald's as well as a $15+min wage... I see it coming. 40% of jobs will be gone by 2030 and never replaced. The faster we tip the scale and hit the dirt the faster government will need to respond or there will be riots when people are starving and losing jobs left and right. It needs to get worse before it can get better essentially.
Though it lets people live whether or not they can make an appointment, it doesn't let them live as well as they could and could leave them a bit of a buffer so that they can re-evaluate what they are doing.

For some people, the fact that they desperately have to make that appointment on time removes the motivation.

You and I enjoy our jobs because we don't desperately have to be on time. If I had to punch a time card, I'd be fucking out of here faster than you can type "logout" and hit Enter.

People can probably fix their lives with greater ease and probability of success if they can calm down a little bit.
>The real challenge of a basic income isn't how to pay for it...

No, actually that's the real challenge, as the author of the article points out. We would have to raise taxes tremendously to give everyone a nontrivial amount (the numbers are in the article) even if we ended all current income redistribution programs.

And we'd have to raise taxes even more than you'd think at first glance, since a whole lot of people would stop working in response to higher taxes and UBI.

I probably would. Even without UBI I would probably retire early if my taxes were raised significantly, and I can't be the only one.
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> What is a weekend? Whatever you need it to be.

I need it to be a time, not too far apart, and regularly occurring, when I can have a fair certainty that friends and/or family will be available for activities together.

As a knowledge worker, it's easy for my work to bleed into my leisure time, and it's already hard enough to fight when I've got well-defined personal time. I feel like abolishing the weekend would be a bad idea for the same reasons that "unlimited vacation" policies are bad ideas.
And 1/2 to 1/3 the market price for San Francisco or New York (adjusting for CAD vs USD).
Competition between colleges and universities hasn't done much to keep tuition costs in check.
It's not a serious dev environment. It's a playground with zero setup. If you've never even touched node, you can still start writing it and have it run right now.
I lean towards "tough shit" for all welfare. It's theft pure and simple.
> This is clearly the worst aspect of our system and shows that it was designed by the mathematically uneducated.

Actually, it mostly shows that the programs are not a system, and were designed separately from each other, with inadequate consideration of their interactions. The fact that they often have overlapping target populations and that benefit reductions due to means-testing are therefore sometimes much greater than 1:1 isn't due to problems with math, its due to the fact that the questions that were asked and which math was deployed to answer weren't even the right questions.
Wouldn't this give lower-income households the opportunity to move elsewhere?

I do agree that it seems likely to have some kind of inflationary affect, but it will also give more options.
IMO the spike in demand will cause shortrun inflation, then suppliers will scale up production/competition in response. IDK if 5 years is enough time to see this all through. Depends on what they end up demanding most of. Food seems to be in good supply so minimal inflation there. Housing is tight in bay area so likely to see inflation there.
This would be the case if the X dollars were being printed from scratch every time they were distributed. They aren't, though; they are coming from tax dollars.

Yes, it would most likely cause some inflation of consumer goods, since poor people spend more of their money on consumer goods than rich people (so when you transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, consumer goods will become more expensive)

This increase in consumer good prices, however, will also cause more resources to go into producing goods for poor people (who suddenly aren't so poor anymore). Depending on the limiting factors for these consumer goods, this will most likely cause prices to stabilize at a reasonable place.
This seems counter to the "unix philosophy". I would expect to use an archiving tool piped into an encryption tool. I'm not sure of the utility of something that combines the two.
There was a time when PC vendors had preinstalled applications — honest-to-goodness applications, not bloatware — as a competitive advantage. For Microsoft to forbid this would probably be called out as anticompetitive with regard to those applications, even though no one does that any more.
No. Property rights are absolutely, profoundly, completely, totally, utterly central, vital, irreplacable and essential. Licenses are an offshoot of property rights.

However, the arrangement of property rights as they are now being forced upon me - other entities telling me how I must go about managing my rights - this I do object to.

I know what I want to do with the property rights in this case, but I am often told there's all kinds of trouble in achieving this, because of these other entities enforcing their view of property rights upon me and the people who would form a contract with me (by choosing to use the software on the basis I am offering it).
Let's say that my application uses your library. Great! I code it, it works, and I release it for public consumption.

It get popular, so that Ubuntu packages the application and your library. Millions of people use it.

Now what happens when you release a new version of the library? All of the APIs with 710_foo become 720_foo. Which means that I have to rebuild my application to work with the library. I can't just link to the new version and get the bug fixes.

Even worse, Ubuntu has to rebuild all applications which depend on your library. Every time you release a new version.

This is why no one else puts version numbers into function / struct names. We rely on the C compiler to do type checks at compile time, and we rely on the linker to do symbol checks at run time.

If no one else puts version numbers into function names, it should be a strong hint that you shouldn't do that, either.

Similarly, 80-character symbols / macro names are just too complicated to use / remember. Pretty much no one else does this, either.
Larger problem: mnist, images, and speech are probably low hanging fruits with rich features, large datasets, balanced datasets, etc. for which off the shelf packages work very well today.
In fact, there's already an archiver named ARC from the BBS days:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(file_format)
And that is why size_t exists. And stdint.h with uint32_t and uijt64_t: always guaranteed to be that given size.
"Isn't a digital signal an analog signal with a particular interpretation?"

Yes, technically. I love hitting people with that when they say digital "killed" analog. ;) What I'm getting at is that digital computers with digital cells and RTL operate in a way that simulates abstract operations on non-existent structures (bits) usually pretending to be on only periodically and requiring analog for real world interaction. The analog circuits, even Boolean alternatives, are closer to how the brain works as it's primitive components acting on real, physical values whose input and output mapping is more like a mathematical function. It similarly has precision and noise issues.

"a digital circuit is always running (at the analog level) whether or not a clock pulse is hitting it"

It's an abstraction issue. Digital is an abstraction over analog. At the digital level, it's not running since it's not performing the digital function or only partly. At analog level, it may or may not be running due to power management scheme. Clock gating basically.

"I think if you used a genetic algorithm to produce digital circuits to model some function, you'd find it would use the logical gates well outside spec, taking advantage of intermediate states that we avoid by principle."

Did you read that or were you really guessing? If the latter, it's a really good guess. I guessed that too given genetic programming results on antenna design. Our guesses were validated by various optimization techniques being applied to synthesis of analog circuits, including digital gates. Irritated I can't find the specific paper where they evolved cells or something but it used the opposite building blocks of human designers with better characteristics. Did find these, though.

List of GP's evolved analog circuits that are human competitive in some way:

http://www.genetic-programming.com/eh2004.pdf

ATLAS - simpler tool synthesizing individual, analog circuits

http://www.ece.uc.edu/~dasan/iscas08.pdf

Analog framework for fully-automated, standard cells and more

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-71...

Note: Sorry I can't find the better stuff. Apparently, bio-tech, post-synthesis optimization, DNA computers, and analog synthesis of digital cells all use the exact, same words in their papers. Floods search results with garbage. Unreal. If you want, send me an email with subject like "synthesis of digital cell libraries" with a reminder to send you the paper if I run across it in future.
The ECHO IV Home Computer: 50 Years Later
> 1) jobs that mostly create economic value (doctors, farmers, programmers): the percentage of these jobs is already small and keeps decreasing with technology.

I really don't follow why job types 2 and 3 would grow instead of shrink; shouldn't job types 1 and 2 be the ones to increase with technological advances?

Technological advancements meant massive increases in output per farmer but farming itself does not require specialized skills, so the increased productivity lead to the drop in the farmer population. Contrast this with activities like programming and medicine which cannot be automated wholesale -- programming and medicine do require specialized skills.

For instance, we'll need more programmers in future than we have now since someone has to program/maintain code written for self-driving cars (for the rest of the population), precision farming (for farmers), telemedicine (for doctors) etc, and with efforts like Learnable Programming [1], more people will pick up programming as a career, so the ranks of people that identify with the programming profession would swell not decrease.

I believe the same increased productivity would eventually happen to the field of medicine -- if computers become really good at the basic stuff -- physical examinations that can produce an initial diagnosis that is fairly accurate, would-be doctors will spend a shorter time in training since they have less material to master. I think this will eventually lead to more people qualifying to become doctors.

So the point I'm making is that including farmers along with doctors and programmers as examples of job type 1 needs some rethinking.

[1] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
I'm sorry but I fail to see a difference between the two. In either case users are leaving/avoiding a platform due to abuse and this free speech on the platform is lessened (except, of course, for the harassers).

"You will be judged by the company you keep" is starting to bite these platforms, and they're trying to do something about it.
Agreed. I would do the same thing.
Your comment suggested a new tool/feature to me: what if we had something like Google, except it added the additional constraint where it only led you to sites/pages that were in that old retro lean static simple HTML style. The graph of text pages, perhaps with embedded images, version of the web.

Ideally it would be just an add-on feature to an existing web search engine like Google. But if you wanted to boot it up faster you could perhaps meta-spider/index on top of them, where your wrapper site added this constraint as a filter.

I'd love to be able to explore a curated web subset that was just text and images, no bandwidth bloat, no obvious SEO abusers, no pirated content farms, no ads, no spyware, no audio, no (automatically streaming/playing) video, etc.
My MySpace account apparently predates my use of Gmail for my primary address[1], so I can't find the welcome email. I may try to sort through my old Maildirs later tonight to see if I can find it, but my hopes aren't high. That doesn't seem like something I would have saved. Maybe I can get close by finding the first MySpace-related email I did keep.

It's pretty amazing how much Gmail changed my habits. Prior to gmail, I had piles of arcane procmail rules, and I'd sort and prune mailboxes meticulously. Now I delete literally nothing (I just archive), and I barely even use labels. I just know that I can rely on search to find a message if I need it later.

1. I signed up for an account shortly after Gmail launched, but I've been using my own domain for my email address since the late 90s. So I used that Gmail account only for experimentation, and moved my primary domain mail over after Google Apps for Your Domain had been around long enough that I trusted it.
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Of course it would shift - the financial incentives to start business come from uncountable factors, but one of the most significant has to be simply "where the money is".

UBI, by its design, creates incredible demand for a standard of living equal to it. Even if your margins are razor thin, the market is still very desirable because the revenue is some of the most reliable money there is (government money) and it is insanely consistent (people will need housing at the minimum level).

Which should terrify you. Any shift in real market demand for necessities post-UBI just represents how many people were impoverished without it, who did not have their base needs fulfilled and how much human rather than fiscal demand for needs was going unmet. The kind of progressive taxes necessary to redistribute so much money on so regular a basis would of course be significant for the higher earners, which would of course significantly curtail their economic influence, because while innovation is not zero sum, the annual allocation of finite resources is distributed in accordance with capital allocation to it - and that of course includes the spending habits of the poor.

It is a simple reality of markets that the more money you have the louder your demands are heard. So if you take from the rich and give to the poor, their relative voices change, but everyone grows together insofar as progress is always being made somewhere.
While I agree with you, Lastpass has been hacked in the past, and if you store all your passwords in one place it's really open-kimono time when there's a breach.

I've taken to doing the thing they tell you never to do: I write my passwords down on a piece of paper. Criminals can get access to my passwords, but they're going to have to travel to my house to do it.
> Look around you, how many of the jobs you see people doing in your office existed 100 years ago? How about 50? 20?

Close to 95% actually. Customer service and sales existed since the introduction of money; and 50-100 years ago, our company probably would have required many more employees to provide a comparable level of service that we do today.

Maybe that's not true for a silicon valley office, but for the vast majority of companies out there, the sales, customer service and management still comprise the bulk of the employee force.
Strings and the CLR – A Special Relationship
Any idea why this was put down? The concept of keeping critical functionality to "expertly maintained" libraries seems sane to me, otherwise we would all be writing our own encryption routines.
> This is clearly the worst aspect of our system and shows that it was designed by the mathematically uneducated.

The answer is no.

> I fail to see how there won't be some kind of inflationary situation amongst the lower class

Ignoring any potentially counteracting monetary policy intervention, there absolutely will be some price inflation for goods disproportionately in demand at the low end of the economic distribution. Reasonably, you expect both market clearing price and market clearing quantity of such goods to increase with a transfer of income to that group (and UBI funded by tax is a transfer, in effect). In short, nominal net beneficiaries will get more stuff, but by somewhat less than prices before the UBI would suggest.

Essentially, production will shift from things demanded by the net contributors to things demanded by the net beneficiaries.
I think, then, that you and the article are talking past each other. There's nothing in the article that says one should settle for he who "drinks, spends money like crazy, and flirts with every beautiful woman he sees". The examples given are "The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person" and "The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently", neither of which I see as particularly big sins.

Indeed, I'm a bit baffled by the commenters (in this subthread and elsewhere) that are interpreting the article's main point as "have no standards". It is not contradictory to have high standards and also realize that no partner is going to complete us or make us happy all the time. It just means realizing that momentary unhappiness is a part of life, and that it's worth forgiving the little things if the big things are in place.
There's keeping the monetary supply liquid, and there's pumping $2-3 trillion dollars into it with BI. Taxes won't pay for this scale of program, short of highly confiscatory rates, so the only way to fund this is to devalue currency by printing more money.

I didn't say "inflation was theft," I said forced inflation, with the goal of paying for something unsupported by government revenues is theft.
You lack context. Most hackers doing this live in Russia/China/Ukraine they are mostly untouchable but in the same time they have limited possibilities to escape from hell they live.

It is easy to be on high moral ground when you can just get a normal job in economy with <6% unemployment and rich family to back you up, funding your overpriced college.

NSA spy people and have probably more private information than your Ashley Madison "secret" email. There more dark web than you can imagine and hacking Tumblr is just silly.
Locking users into their service would seem like a pretty good reason.

I don't necessarily believe that's what they're doing, or that this is intentional or malicious.