skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true. In addition to basic income, many people need support to get out of their (inherited) impoverished habits. Many people come from dreadful backgrounds and so have no idea how to look after themselves and are surrounded by bad influences.

I often think that all some people need is to be extracted from their environment and transplanted into a new one somewhere else in the world with new friends and a different job. Cut-off from their unhealthy social network they would rebuild themselves and thrive.
Uber succeeded mostly by violating local licensing laws. And federal employment laws which they may still need to pay the piper for.
It depends on your schedule, but prioritize time to study every day in your down time. You don't have to do a "night before the test cram session" all the time, just a little every day and within a few months you'll find yourself much more prepared.
If you heard some of these stories, you would find that it's not just a lack of money that causes homelessness. To be brutally honest, it's a mixture of stupidity and often, an addiction. These people need other people actively intervening in their lives to keep them on track. The preventative measure should be the social worker, not the pay cheque.
Where are you getting figures that food prices have increased as a percentage of total income? I've only seen that they've decreased, and GP post gave a link supporting his position.
Each decision being made will be evaluated for its merits. "It's only a small change" doesn't actually work as rationale with this many people watching.

There is no slippery slope, it's a... grippy slope, because of all the... eyeballs.
Events are not cesspools of harassment
There's nothing wrong with Twitter providing tools to help someone being harassed. That, in and of itself, does not prevent free speech. If someone's Twitter goes viral and they don't want to deal with messages directed at them then give them a whitelist that they can add people they want to receive comments from and the drop the rest. This only affects the view of the person affected while not constraining what can be seen by the public.
To add to this, what about those unable to take care of themselves. Children, the mentally ill, those who are badly addicted, those who are easily taken advantage of (like in borderline elder abuse cases).
Isn't Facebook already using an automated report system?
Well the money is generally earmarked. Your Section 8 voucher goes towards housing, food stamps go towards food, etc. That creates a limit on how the money can be spent.
It’s a good question, and how basic income affects macroeconomic conditions (inflation, housing prices, demand for labor, etc.) is really important to figure out, but it’s honestly beyond the scope of this study. We’re focusing on the individual-level effects as a first step.
I am trying to reach a point where I can say - "Hey! Look I've designed this highly scalable website" to satiate my own hunger for this knowledge. And I know that one can't possible cover all (and maybe not even a lot) scalability topics while designing such a site but at least it would give me a solid start - something I can build on later on. Yes, I understand 2003 is very old and hence the question - does someone know something similar to MIT 6.171 that's more recent or if that course has been updated. Also, thanks for your reply :)
I think you both know that you're talking past one another, seemingly intentionally. It's absolutely true that, given even a minimal family/friend support structure, people to the very left of the earnings curve have a decent standard of living in the U.S. today. If you have an able body, it's pretty hard to starve (or even go without cable TV). I think you both know that.

On the other hand, some people obviously don't have able bodies or any support network to speak of. I think you both know that, too.

So, why he disconnect?
The Problem with Analytics
If I live in Oakland or know someone who does can I tell them to sign up for free money?
Says in the definition a palindrome can be a number then filters out number. Also, and most importantly, doesn't check to see if the items within the string are words.

The incredibly frustrating thing about interviews is that the interviewer is right, even if he is wrong.
Or that we tax the rich too little

The top 3% of income earners pay 51% of all income taxes.[1] You think that's too little? What should that number be?

[1]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income-...
So "gamergate" is the label for some organized group of people now?

edit: frankly i see it as the legacy of the "anonymous" period. It gave people that would otherwise not act out a way to do so under the cover of seeming to belong to a group.

As that wound down, individuals started looking for something, anything, that allowed them to continue their antics. Gamergate is just such an excuse, but other controversial subjects are also being used in this manner.
There is a risk that companies that service low-income people will increase their prices faster than inflation, negating some of the benefits of UBI. The only guard I know of for this is strong competition and disciplined consumers, people have to be willing to express their dislike of price hikes by shopping elsewhere otherwise the system won't work.

There are places where people don't have enough mobility to be able to do this.

EDIT: One of the interns at the non-profit I volunteer at landed a job, but had to give it up because he didn't have transportation that could reliably get him to his job. (Late shift.) He lives in Oakland.
Which is the parent's point precisely: basic needs is a social construct -- the physical basic needs are trivial.
Not really. The biggest need that's expensive to make work is shelter - the cost has not gone down over time. There are millions of Americans either on the streets or living with toxic family members they need to be away from.
No they aren't. They are a diagram of a process. Code is the instructions used to implement that process. You shouldn't be so smug either.
oh man GraphicConverter was awesome!
> "... there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate."

Sometimes speech is clearly hateful or 'civil', but certainly it is well known there is not a clear distinction between those two categories; there is a large, debated grey area.
There are people who claim to be "politically black", for whatever reason. https://heatst.com/uk/nus-at-war-over-politically-black-anti...

More substantive comment: why do we care about a person's race or gender when they use particular words?
So that is similar to an XSS in that it gains you the ability to inject arbitrary JS in to the page. That scenario is covered in the article with as I understood it the TL;DR being that lifting tokens is less practical in practice then using the browser directly to send malicious requests. The result of either attack are also similar in that as soon as your injecting JS into the page you've gained access to the users session.
I've recently been researching the structured settlement (annuity) industry. It seems like as soon as someone has a guaranteed set of future payments, you will get structured settlement brokers reaching out, offering to buy out their future payments for a (often low-ball) lump sum today, and many will take it. Will you permit these kinds of side deals?
One aspect of Basic Income that I am interested in is the idea of relocation - will recipients receiving Basic Income in this study have the ability to move somewhere where their dollars will go further? Or will they have to stay in Oakland where the study is being conducted?

It would seem like a good thing to have people try to maximize the impact of their payments and handcuffing them to a place with higher cost of living and increasing rents would seem like a bad thing.

edit: I see now that the post says participants are able to move.
I guess I'm not entirely shocked since Rakuten the parent company and Japanese ecommerce site has very questionable tactics like emails you can't opt out of and forcing new employees to sign up a large number of friends/relatives to the Rakuten credit card.
As a BI fan, this is a great question. While BI does simplify welfare distribution it does put more responsibility on the receiver. If we wanted to protect from misuse of funds we need a way to restrict how they spend their BI, like how food stamps work.

BI should be spent on life necessities while earned income should be disposable and/or go into savings.
It's an unfounded assumption, the reality is (and you can prove this with data) most people committing crimes today do it as an act of desperation. Professional criminals are definitely a real thing, but they'll exist with or without a basic income. However, if a basic income eliminates poverty, it may have a real impact on crime.
Yes, it does solve these. Because people who lost the faculty for time management or security can learn it again. Putting someone in a house and giving them an alarm clock is a very good start.
> Also it seems pointless to give basic income to well-off people.

Otherwise taking the basic income might be seen as a symbol of being poor. Also, well-off people might be envious of people receiving basic income.

(tl;dr people aren't perfectly rational)
There is a much much deeper question here. Which life is really better?

I took 10 months off where I lived with just two backpacks. I wasn't homeless by any means, I had my savings I was living off of (technically homeless I guess, but not in the cultural sense).

Even though I had a lot of expensive electronics, I didn't buy a lock until about 7 months in. Even then, a lot of hostels didn't have large enough lockers for my small back which contained my laptop, camera, etc.

There is a sorta social contract with backpackers I can't really explain. I still kept my stuff hidden, but I never had any real fear of people stealing my stuff.

Those 10 months were the best I've felt in a while. I was away from the cube. I was working on my own research (I wrote a lab manual for a friend's class based on some papers we wrote). I worked late into the night and walked around new cities every day. I was never tired, exhausted or irritable. I dreams of getting back into school and working on my PhD, but I'm still working on fellowship applications and I ran out of money .. so back to full-time IT work I went.

That "regular" life you talk about -- getting up early and working the 8-5 grind to get a paycheck just to keep on doing the same fucking thing day in and day out. That's bullshit. And that's coming from a software engineer who gets paid a lot and I have a lot of freedom in my work.

For those working low income jobs where they barely have enough and have to scrap and save every paycheck, that's super bullshit.

> For example, if you've been homeless your entire life, you've never had to lock your apartment door or carry a key around.

I live in a place with a massive homeless population and tent cities. People have their stuff spread out with them, but they have no fear of anyone taking it. Part of it is the poor looking after each other, part of it is if stuff is stolen, it's not like they have much to begin with. Suddenly you're housed and now you have something worth breaking into.

I'm getting a bit ranty at this point, and I'm not entirely sure what my TL;DR is. I realize being poor and homeless can suck terribly. But the things you mention...those aren't the bad things. Those are amazing ways to look at the world that are taken away when you try to bring civilization to the savages.
Part of the beta is to gather information on costs and usage so we can put up sensible pricing at some point. There will be always be a free tier but we're still figuring out the right caps/limits.
Yes. Obviously. So the "cost of UBI" is clearly not $10k times (number of humans in the USA), but more like $10k times (number of eligible people making under $10k). The article omitting this pretty important thing basically discredits it and probably its parent site
... unless, of course, that individual votes.

"Your opinion is worthless" isn't a useful debating tactic when you're talking to people with as much political power as you yourself have.
Yes, generally speaking the flatter the income distribution the greater mean happiness. However, even setting aside moral concerns about methods (which are tremendous), it's not a given we even _want_ to optimize for mean happiness.

E.g. A society that possesses greater mean happiness may also possess more starvation, more work, or less robustness against future threats.
He's not expecting the use of a regex to do the whole heavy lifting of checking for a palindrome, in the example he uses it for the replace functionality to remove non-alphanumeric characters.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e8553707cd6162040e7d12b2a1...

stringToTest = stringToTest.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z0–9]/ig, '');
Founder of delivery app scams investors out of payday
There's been a lot of research into this, particularly around the concept of savings as the big obstacle towards independence and freedom. The poorest people who struggle to achieve even a basic income (think participants in microcredit) face a difficult task of building enough savings to live past one catastrophic flood, one bad recession, one big purchase/investment (a new car that doesn't always break down vs. crappy money pit of repairs and bills).

IMO, research into developing savings capacity is arguably more important, and a much broader problem. But the wisdom of saving pennies is not a sexy idea. The people doing the most progressive work in this are orgs like Grameen.
> Are there any papers addressing the issue "basic income increases the returns to owners of scarce goods" issue? I don't know what the correct name is.

The correct name is "inflation", the effect to which this is effect is present for suppliers of any particular good is measured by "price elasticity" -- both price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply play a role (in a real tax-funded BI, which is redistribution of returns, it is offset in part for many goods by the fact that increased money chasing the goods in one segment of the population is mirrored by reduced money chasing goods in another segment of the population.)
DIY Google Glass AKA the “Beady-I” – All
Get Yourself a Bot
Autonomous-Car Startup Zoox Seeks Up to $252M in Funding
I just put in my YES vote for the upcoming Swiss vote on the topic. It won't get through mainly due to it being a very high-level proposal with too many questions open and a rather weak supporter camp. They could have done a better job of presenting models on how the economy would change which makes the financing part work.

Nevertheless, depending on what the share of yes-votes is it might trigger further discussion here and in surrounding countries.

Unfortunately, i'd be surprised if it gets more than 35% yes votes.
I think the idea is that a small number of corporations will have a complete knowledge of the lives and psychology of their users, be able to influence their behavior even without display ads, and be able to predict all of their behavior. Additionally, the government will piggyback on all of this technology too.

I don't think any of this is inherently nefarious. Hopefully with policy reforms and additional privacy preserving technologies, we will avert the future Moglen warns of.
"Basic income removes that harsh penalty"

The real challenge of a basic income isn't how to pay for it; it's how to convince regular people who get up every day and go work at jobs a lot shittier than most of us here have that that's a harsh penalty.

There is enormous social momentum behind the idea that you should work if you can.
If the whole game is zero sum, then thats great! The solution to a zero sum game is easy. Redistribute wealth from everyone so that everyone is equally happy.

There is no need to worry about innovation or discouraging people from working. Its zero sum, so we may as well go with the fair solution of 100% income redistribution and 100% basic income.
I had a job producing QTVR back in the day and there wasn't even a GUI to do the stitching at first, you had to use a program written in some Mac development environment (can't remember its name) and it was always crashing
My apologies for not understanding your comment. Please clarify.
>Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets"

At that point we would need to investigate to see if this failure is being caused by mental illness. Treatment would be much easier if our current homeless shelters could use their infrastructure to help people like this. They take your UBI check and give you a place to stay, treat you for drug addictions, etc etc.

Either that or you end up in jail, because making homelessness illegal would not be so immoral under a UBI system.
Except that isn't the case here. The EU has declared, arbitrarily defined "hate speech" illegal. This isn't just the big name volunteering their services.
> Twitter removes a lot more negative posts from those on the right side of the political spectrum than the left

Do you have data showing this? The last thing this debate needs is rumor and speculation.
The idea for Basic Income was that people have a better idea of how they need to apply money then one-size-fits-some programs government makes. This is the same argument that a market economy is better than a command economy, precisely because there are too many hidden variables for a mega-organization to understand.

What happens now, if someone has a financial emergency in our current system? Well, you're just fucked. Unemployment doesn't start until 2-4 weeks after you've been laid off/fired, and that's assuming they didn't fight it. Medical bills just linger, whilst the bill harassers keep calling. Your car broke? Well, too bad.

At least with BI, if money was disbursed every 2 weeks, then the crisis would be averted partially by that. Unlike now, if your car dies, you lose your job, and then no way to get a job or pay for a car.
>I am 100% for this experiment. But the assumption that technology will replace basic jobs seems naive. Throughout human history, we have seen rapid and accelerating technology improvements.

Arguments from "but this is how it always have been" have a tendency to break down when significant societal/technological changes happen.
Or we could teach them financial literacy. Kind of like how countries with socialized healthcare spend more on health education.
I see your image macro and raise you another.

http://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/

"With the right of free speech comes the responsibility to extend that right to others. Because if we leave who is heard to simply 'who can speak the loudest'... we won't find out when we're wrong."
Vivi – Headmounted Medical Display – Patient Vitals Monitor
BI proponents argue that all social services will be replaced by BI. So, those gov't services would be de-funded.
enum HATESPEECH_FACTORS { Race, Religion, Nationality, Feminism, Obesity }
Absolutely, as soon as you introduce ANY means testing at all, it is not longer UBI.
But did you read what they said? That's not the point of this. It's a pilot study to get their feet under them and get some idea of how the real, long-term study would go. The point of this isn't to draw conclusions about BI, it's to draw conclusions about how to study BI so as to help them set up the long-term version more effectively.
BI is immoral: why should anyone who can work get money for doing nothing?
For basic needs, I'd say that encompasses food, water, and shelter (at least in colder climates). A decent number of Americans don't have these met. Feeding someone on $3/day sounds somewhat challenging to me, and throw in shelter on top of that and I don't think your $2,000/year figure is going to cut it.
I applaud the move to push this forward, but the cynic in me can't help but ask; is the federal government really willing to make a portion of their employees obsolete? Are the people who run these large bureaucratic departments willing to give up that power? How will AFEG & municipal unions react to this?
Tents or other very basic structures exceed or match the quality of shelter that humans lived in for tens of thousands of years. There is no innate need for modern conveniences, other than the innate need to not be so far away from the other guy.
Who said I wanted a debate? Perhaps I'm having a bad morning and simply wanted to vent at the uninformed adolescent libertarianism all too common on HN.
Google Glass could come back as a snake-like flexible headband
I was homeless for about four years, so I know exactly what you are talking about with people losing or never having the basic skills to cope with modern life.

However, that's just not a reasonable argument against UBI.

Consider: Having too much money is never a problem. Quoth the sage, "If it is money, it is good.", also "Too much is always better than not enough."

Misspending that money is the problem. But if everyone around you has UBI too, their ability to spare time and effort to care for you and help you learn to cope with life is fantastically increased.

Helping others is hugely rewarding, fulfilling even, but most people are limited either by their real or perceived lack of funds, or by minor personal problems. With UBI the bottom Nth of people's BS is handled, freeing them up to help others whose BS is a little too formidable for them to cope with on their own.

If you take a step back and look at the larger picture, and take into account the synergy that will be unleashed by UBI, I think you'll reconsider. :-)
Photon – World's First Robot Which Grows with Your Child
We already have a basic income, at least in Europe, not sure about the USA. Unemployed people get welfare. Changing this system to what BI advocates propose is not a huge change:

- Simplification of the welfare system, you get money automatically, no need to ask.

- In the current system, if you get employed, you lose benefits, so the jump in your income is small, a disincentive to work. In the BI proposals, income vs income-plus-welfare curve is smooth. That's the main improvement I think.

- More money gets redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. Personally I think the current level of redistribution is fine.
I assume this would be resolved by making BI payments immune from bankruptcy.
not the other just by the virtue of their birth

What makes you think most land is owned through birthright? Any stats to back that up? I would assume most land was purchased.

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.
The EU is defining "hate speech" as illegal. This isn't an initiative led by the companies.
> when one country invades another

NATO? PeaceKeepers?
>As such, it's likely that this study will find, entirely correctly, that recipients are happier, more productive, etc.

I wonder what the right way is to measure happiness for a group. Say this test makes 20% of participants much happier, 70% about the same, and 10% overdose on heroine? And what metric can you use to quantify happiness on an individual level?
Social Security isn't earmarked. Food stamps have pretty trivial workarounds for converting them into cash.
You can't sell your social security benefits, so I would guess the same restrictions would apply.
The author repeatedly describes work as something done for social status and personal fulfillment. But his conclusion is that UBI will make people not want to work. Which is it, that people work in order to feel productive? Or just to make money?
Nope, Radio Silence only blocks whole apps/processes. Little Snitch is probably still the best choice for fine-tuning and reactive blocking.