skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you have an able body, it's pretty hard to starve (or even go without cable TV). I think you both know that.

I'm not so sure. I know people who are able bodied, college degree educated, and some months can barely afford groceries after all non-discretionary spending is accounted for.
The same way it works with social security today.
Well, this is politics. I gather that this is largely driven by the European Union...

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1937_en.htm

... so "the line" is basically whatever European Union says is "illegal hate speech" as per this announcement. (The announcement makes it seem that it is largely targeted at terrorism and racism, at least for now).

I agree with you, though, in that personally I'm not the biggest fan of "hate speech" laws. They seem like a ripe target for political abuse.
One of the big differences between the government writing checks and a private organization, are the tax consequences. Does anybody know exactly how that would work? Would it just be self employment income, with all the self employment taxes? Or would it be a gift (and tax free if under $14k/yr)?
Yes, some of the identifiers are very long. The aim was to make the APIs self-explanatory. It should be possible to read an API and know what it does. It's challanging to explain an inorder walk, and its direction, in a shorter form.

The goal of course is for all identifiers to be as short as possible.
This makes sense, and I think (and hope) it's probably right.
They're doing a pretty bad job of that, considering how many women affiliate with GG...
https://twitter.com/Nonsensicole/status/737680093946863617
Caltech Sues Apple and Broadcom Over Wi-Fi Patents
We're not sure how we're going to pick the participants yet, though we do know it will be a random selection process, in-line with randomized control trial principles.
If you know anyone from Oakland that has feedback though, feel free to have them get in touch! matt@ycombinator.com, or basicincome@ycr.org
Can anyone explain how this can be implemented mathematically? Assume 300 million people @ $12k / year, you are spending $3.6 trillion. That is already more than current government revenue, leaving all current government services unfunded.
If you were optimizing for happiness only and had no ethical concerns about methods, then yes, a very flat or close to flat distribution is likely optimal.

Like you, I believe that there are things more important from the perspective of society than mean happiness.
One of the points the author proffers is that displacing more targeted, conditional aid with UBI may not actually be better. The question of whether---if you just give people money---they spend it wisely enough to maintain their needs is an open question.

It's sort of the formalized version of "Don't give that wino a dollar; he's just going to spend it on more booze."

(The sense I get is economists lean towards "Yes, people generally look after themselves given the money to do so," but I believe this is an open question policy-wise).
Whatever percentage it needs to be ratcheted up to in order to ensure that everyone is fed and has shelter.

Seems like we can work backwards to determine that?
Not having any money or job is bad, though. I don't see the state as being reliable enough to care for the mass of useless and unemployed. They will probably set the UBI at a level below the necessary, there will be protests and riots, people will ask for more, politicians will tell them their excuses for why it isn't possible.

If push comes to shove, owning some land and cultivating it could be a job. The earth will hire people its owners to work it. That is, if people will be legally allowed to cultivate their own seeds on their own land.

I see a possible utopia where individual farms or larger agricultural areas will be owned and worked by communities of people. They will be independent as a community from state welfare. They will be able to implement their own lifestyle as a consequence of their independence. Technologies working for this are: solar, batteries, 3d printers and robots.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to lump "failure to budget properly" under "mental illnes".
Thinking about it, it seems to be around 1991 before they were forced to do things like cutting R&D. This would have been probably be a good time for Intel to buy it.
Could be because being a baker/brewer/bike tech has nothing to do with the jobs for which are you applying.
Or you know... I can have a job that works with my natural sleep schedule instead of forcing me earlier. This is the only thing I've found that works. I can steadily wake up at 9 or 10 am and feel well-rested, and setting the goal for 10-11 works even better.

Waking up early means that even with a full nights sleep, "good sleeping habits" (not sleeping in on weekends, etc)... I don't feel as rested as waking up later.

Not to mention that I randomly sleep through alarms when I'm on the wrong schedule.

These are things that a monitor under my mattress cannot solve - and in fact, makes the audibility of my phone alarm worse.
Does the word "yet" mean that this is a planned future feature?
While we have some impressive technologies, the way we apply them to real life is usually at best boring, and at worst depressing as fuck. I can't name any tech introduced in the last 10 years that made my day-to-day life better or at least more interesting in some significant way. Kindle, maybe? Definitely not smartphones.

My hopes for the AI field are dwindling. The current tide of hype will probably culminate in a few mediocre services from Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Etc. The services will have serious downsides, the downsides will be downplayed by the marketing, everyone will begin to integrate with them, and as a result we will get more complex, unstable and invasive software.

I still have a lot of hopes for VR, since it's not widely available yet and there is room for creating fundamentally new things there during the adoption period. Hopefully, the ideas of Bret Victor will not go unnoticed.
Facebook and Google at least have products that are mostly consumer-facing. One wonders what it would be like to work for Palantir.
GP understands this, I think. The assumption is that BI will replace food stamps and/or other social welfare programs. This being the case, the question is: what if the recipient carelessly spends their BI, and does not have enough money at the end of the month to pay for fundamentals (rent, food, etc.) given that the food stamp program has been replaced by BI.
Benching Microbenchmarks
>why don't we just top up everyone's income to the equivalent of the minimum wage?

That's what UBI essentially is, giving everyone about the equivalent of a minimum wage income.
Great point! We want to see how the income affects younger people as well. They still have the option of working, but they may have the freedom to do other things.
When you say it like you did initially, yes!
"Tough shit" sucks when parents blow their handout on lottery tickets and drugs, leaving their children in perpetual poverty.
Although it's true that tokens in localstorage doesn't expire, the token itself can expire if you set it to expire when using Json Web Tokens (JWT) for example.
I think the operating word is "some," not all. We know that UBI will sometimes be misspent. Most if not all aid programs have this problem. That doesn't mean it isn't worth it for those who would put the money to good use.
Additional safety nets would be needed. A transition wouldn't likely happen overnight. It would more likely be a gradual phasing out of old programs and a build-up of basic income as money is moved toward that program. At the same time, additional resources would need to be pushed into services to help people budget and manage their finances. A combination of traditional in-person financial counseling and software would work best.

I use Simple, and they have a good model for integrating budgeting into their bank app. A basic income program should follow the same principles, giving out a debit card with a budget along with a website and app to help people manage their money better. The first expense it can cover is a cheap smartphone for those that need it.

Analytics tracking the efficiency of the program should allow a lot of optimizations over time. There's no way to predict exactly what will happen without trying it, but data on a national scale should make beneficial adjustments to things like budgeting software pretty easy.

A basic income is not a perfect and ideal system, but I'd say it's definitely an improvement over the status quo. It does require having some trust in people to manage their money, but with a little assistance, I think people will be able to make better choices for themselves than a bureaucracy can make for them.
I wonder how power efficient new gen. cpus are compared to their ancestors.
Somewhere between 10 years and the-rest-of-your-life, you need to start taking geo-political risk into account. Just because a government says it will be forever, doesn't mean it will.
Hopefully more people will discover and patron anonymous messageboards that don't adhere to these ridiculous new directives.
+1 Couldn't agree more.

This story would have really surprised me 10 years ago but now I accept that the Economic Royalty (or Deep Government, or whatever you want to call them) use a lack of transparency to do what profits them.
Senior database dev in Toronto, working for a large utility. 112k salary. Contractors here earn between $50 - $90/hr.

I haven't examined alternatives too closely, but I get the sense that I'm approaching the top end of the salaried pay scale around here (GTA).
Yeah. Which means in order to meet this goal, they'd probably need to lower the threshold before automatic action is taken.
We're certainly not trying to answer everything with this one study--we hope it will be an important piece, but it's going to take a number of studies, a number of different approaches to know if BI really could or could not work.
We hope us taking a first step will help push others in the US to do more of the research we need.
What sort of emergency do you envision? Most of today's financial emergencies hinge on either losing your job or incurring extreme debt due to uninsured medical care. I can't speak for all BI proponents but I, personally, support universal health care in addition to BI.

With health care taking care of medical expense emergencies, basic income is left to take care of job-related emergencies. Your example of "my car broke down" would seem to fit that category. So what then? Joe loses his job but basic income will make sure he never goes homeless and always has enough food to eat. Instead of having a major crisis he can take a break from working and maybe upgrade his skills.
Don't forget mental illness as a cause.
Talk about giving the middle finger to reduction ad hilterum...
Cyber War in Perspective: Russian Aggression Against Ukraine
It's funny, I got started with web development relatively recently (2012 or so) and immediately started working on single-page/client-side applications, so I used localStorage from the start. It seemed easy enough to make a little Ajax wrapper for all my requests to tack the authentication token on (whether as a URL param, form data, or header data).

Imagine my surprise when I later learned how cookie storage worked! There was a brief moment of "oh, I guess not having to manually append this to my requests would be nice," only to read about CSRFs and other horrors cookies enabled.

Since then, I've fixed multiple existing CSRF exploits in production (or near-production) applications, and continued to avoid cookies wherever possible.
My argument is that a 'decent' life is completely relative, which you are basically making for me.
> There's only one way to study something like this.. and that's to do it

This is a dangerous thing to experiment with when you have a huge nation of 318+ Million population.

It's far safer to let smaller nations, like Finland (whose entire population is less than New York City), test this idea out for a few generations. It's far easier to "bail out" a city's worth of people than it is a large nation, if things don't go as planned.
Could you be more specific? Who's? If we're talking about an online context, barring the kind of censorship we're talking about here, that's strictly false. A tweet is a tweet is a tweet.
Very newbie question but is this always true? "Another distinction is that sessionStorage will expire when you close the tab rather than when you close the browser" So I cannot use session tokens in the same way as (secured) cookies for letting the user e.g. logged in when all tabs closed?
> Almost all of the _basic_ needs of a human, i.e. those that we received 50,000 years ago, could be provided for $1-$2k a year

Can you explain this? Basic needs include shelter, clothing, and food, which together cost much more than $1-$2k.
Wouldn't that be a version of venture debt?
Small Business Owner Fights Back Against Patent Troll
An absolutely key feature of basic income is the security it gives someone who is on breadline.

I can only describe the situation in the UK - but imagine this generalises. If you are on government benefits, and you accept some money to do a small or casual job, you face a choice. Not declare it, and face court and destitution if you are found out.

Declaring the income, on the other hand, is an administrative nightmare. Worse - it might trigger a recalculation, or removal, of your benefits. Most benefit seekers don't fully understand how their benefits are calculated, and, again, they could be destitute if benefits are removed or reduced.

So, for any long term unemployed person, it's often best to sit tight and not take any risks. Thus the person is trapped in poverty, plus of course the sense of self worth that comes from doing a job.

This is also true for an entrepreneur who decides to quite his job and build a business. Basic income can provide some security while you get that business going. This is not typically true of unemployment benefit.

Everything comes back to what unemployment benefits are - a payment conditional on not doing any work. That causes so many problems, and basic income can solve them.

On the cost: basic income, at substantial levels, is clearly very expensive. However, you simply tax that money back. This can leave pay after tax absolutely unchanged for everyone, while still delivering the advantages described above.
wrt India, there are also infrastructional issues. I note there is not so many of tech startups in India, outside recruiting/outsourcing, despite the huge number of tech workers there.
Will there be options to have code stored in Kiln/GitHub/whatever?
Sounds like fandom needs to find a different thing to be fans of.

Good luck, industry.
My concern with a Web Storage based token is additional latency. With this system, a page has to be served, javascript executed, and an XHR sent before an authenticated response can be sent. With Cookies, the very weakness the author points out - sending it on the first HTTP resonse - is a massive asset for reducing latency.

Is there a way to mitigate this?
I've thought about this as well.. It's certainly an interesting response to BI that I don't think is debated enough.

My thoughts on the matter is that regulation on how the money is spent is only necessary in the cases where it's being abused. Current safety nets pays for this overhead on every beneficiary, whereas it's only really necessary on the people who no amount of unsupervised aid will help them (something like addictions would fall into this category). At this point we could have a single regulation and if BI isn't enough for this person to survive, it can be deemed that this person isn't functioning as a responsible adult and can have other systems act as a sort of legal guardian until they can be trusted to survive on BI. Yes it sounds like house arrest, but we can just have this be completely optional and equivalent to the "next" safety net. It's not more money or more food or whatever, it's simply guidance.
This is interesting for me because I am moving to Toronto in July, I've done research into how much I should be expecting to earn but some anecdotal evidence is always welcome too.

The numbers compared to my current employment in Cambridge, UK seem fairly similar, I believe living costs are pretty similar too. Not all of us have the ability, or the desire to move to the US!
Honest Response solicited
This. I can confidently predict that most people will be better off (vs a control group) for having their income topped up for a fixed period by wealthy philanthropists, in addition to any benefit entitlements they may already be eligible for.

But that's not Basic Income. Basic Income is replacing [most aspects of] the welfare state with a programme that redistributes portions of income from each according to their ability to each irrespective of their need, with all the complications entailed by the variable incidence of the increase in taxes required to balance the books and the likely reduction in state benefits to some needier citizens.

You might get some useful insights, but you can't say much about the viability of a programme from a study which only evaluates the bits that people are unlikely to be upset by.
This article is shit, the bias is practically dripping off the page. This is not a discussion of how people interact on the internet, but an incoherent scatterbrained rant about self-superiority and entitlement arguing against straw-men and internet trolls.

Seriously you just have to look at his phrasing.

> childish uproar over Mass Effect 3

> that tantrum

> terrorist hate group GamerGate

> the nature of modern fan entitlement

> immediate access to spew any kind of hate

> other version of that makes you despair for humanity

> century's holy popcult warriors.

This article is so bad that even though I came into the article agreeing with his general point about political correctness I fished the article with a bad taste in my mouth.
There's a lot of skepticism about basic income, especially when it comes to how does it save money? The top comment as of this writing is questioning it:

> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed? If so, how do you prevent fraud without a department following up on Joe's twelfth "my car broke down" case of the year?

Allow me to digress for a moment, I've recently been reading "The Expanse" series, and they have a throwaway snippet in the second book (i.e., not a spoiler) where a Martian Marine is walking the streets of a city on Earth. There's a girl who sells her a hot dog. The girl says that she's doing it for work credits. After she accumulates one year worth of work credits, she can attend university and get a real job and make money. Otherwise, she'd have to be "on basic."

Like I said, it's a throwaway scene, so there's not a lot of detail, and even in the later books when they talk about being "on basic", it's not a detailed description. But the girl in the story distinctly mentions "money" after "getting a job" which came after "university." That implies to me that, on some level, money doesn't exist for those "on basic." (And to be clear, in this not-terribly-futuristic Earth, everyone's on basic.)

In other words, the term "on basic" implied to me that you get food, shelter, clothing, access to public transportation, K-12 education, healthcare, and basic internet automatically. But if that's the case, why would anyone want money? Well, the implication here is that the food is minimal: ramen noodles and vegetables and beef. Shelter are studio apartments. Clothing are Wal-mart quality. Basic internet is more like 56K than broadband.

In the Expanse Earth, if you want more than that minimum (and most of us would), then you have to spend a year working to prove your willingness to contribute to society, and then you can go to university for free, then get a job and make money. That money can buy you things like a house with a yard, a car, surf and turf, and vacations to the moon.

If we were to somehow (and that's a big if) go with the definition of "basic" from The Expanse, it's almost impossible to squander it. You aren't handing Joe $500 and saying "This is your money for the month. Don't blow it." The food and clothing are free. (Presumably with demonstrable need, but in a post-scarcity society, perhaps T-shirts cost virtually nothing compared to the previous welfare systems and you might as well just hand them out on demand).

I'm not an economist, and I don't know the ins and outs of basic income, but that one throwaway page in The Expanse made me think a lot about what I think basic income should look like... and I don't think it should look like a monthly check.
It's probably best to go to the EU press release:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1937_en.htm

It's still a bit vague, but it will give you a better idea. I think the focus is terrorism and outright racism more than offended snowflakes. From the release: "The European Court of Human Rights set out the important distinction between content that 'offends, shocks or disturbs the State or any sector of the population' and content that contains genuine and serious incitement to violence and hatred. The Court has made clear that States may sanction or prevent the latter."
Senior backend dev, many years of experience. I made $130k CAD/yr from 2011 to 2013 at three different local companies. I've been working remotely for a US company since 2014 and making $130k USD/yr, which translate to about $170k CAD. Wife also makes a little over $165k CAD/yr. All full-time positions, no contracts.
I've used gedit, but I'm not familiar with multi-cursor implementation in it. I suppose I've always seen the multi-cursor implementation in Sublime Text as top-notch with other editors struggling to implement anything like it. Intellij finally has pretty decent multi-cursor support but it's still a little bit behind ST's. For example, in IntelliJ the ease of applying multiple cursors seems to involve more work than in ST. In VS Code multiple cursors isn't nearly well implemented as ST or even IntelliJ.
> Will this open the market for new social media platforms?
My gut reaction to this was "Can't be a bad thing, let all of the hatred currently vented on Twitter and let it go somewhere else". But this is how Stormfront essentially works, and it's a bad thing - an echo chamber of "kill all the [insert group]" leads to thinking that's acceptable, or even a good idea. It's why mass shooters are announcing their plans on 4chan.

People need to be told that their ideas are wrong, not given a new playground where everyone agrees with them. Kudos to Twitter for saying death threats and jihadism are wrong and not supported on their platform.
> What makes you think most land is owned through birthright? Any stats to back that up? I would assume most land was purchased.

Purchased from whom? I would imagine a lot of land in the most desirable locations (cities etc) are owned by private individuals or family trusts/companies, so they have been/will be inherited (even if the owners change in between). And if it's owned by a corporation, I guess the same logic could apply.

> And if you levy a big tax on property, be prepared for the value of that property to drop dramatically. Money flows freely from one asset to another. If land becomes unattractive, those dollars will just go elsewhere.

Yeah, that's kind of the point. Land used for investment is the purest form of unproductive rent-seeking.