skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on recent statements and enforcement actions from the SEC, I would highly recommend against considering "ICOs" as a way to "raise money".

ICOs for the purpose of raising money are likely to an investment contract under SEC rules. If your offering is an investment contract, then the transaction is considered a security and is subject to SEC requirements.

In other words, don't expect an ICO to be a simpler or easier or better way to raise money. It's not. Start by reading the SEC bulletin on Coin Initial Offerings:

https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and-bulletins/ib_co...

Not all coin offerings are necessarily securities, but if you're viewing it as a way to raise money, then it almost certainly will be. To determine whether an offering is likely to be a security, consider the Howey Test, which is a test created by the US Supreme Court for whether a transaction represents an investment (and thus may be regulated by the SEC). The test is whether:

(1) It is an investment of money (2) There is an expectation of profits from the investment (3) The investment of money is in a common enterprise (4) Any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party

If you are selling coins in an ICO with the promise of profit for the coin holders; if the money will be invested in your enterprise; if the coin holders are expecting to profit based on your efforts or those of others, then the ICO is likely to be a security.

Here is one example of an investigation by the SEC into one coin offering (the DAO), where it was determined to be a security: https://www.sec.gov/litigation/investreport/34-81207.pdf
You paid a lawyer for 1500 USD? Is that not a bit overblown?
This may be an unpopular opinion here, but I'd strongly advise you against working at a startup as an employee.

Some key things to consider:

* What comp are you giving up?
* Will your options be worth more than Facebook/Google/Amazon/Apple RSUs?
* Can you even afford your options?
* Will the options ever be liquid?
* Are you willing to earn-out after an acquisition?
* Will you have to do extra work? Are you compensated for it?

Starting a startup is great and you totally should. But working at one is (on average) setting yourself up to be worse off financially than working elsewhere. Make that decision deliberately and consciously only after really running the numbers and thinking critically about it.
This is why I’m a big fan of NFC payments when available. I find it to be pretty much instant, instead of having to wait what feels like 30 seconds for the chip transaction to process.

Though I’m in the US. I hear chip transactions are way faster in other countries where they’ve been using that system for a while.
This isn't a bug, it's the definition of how transaction fees work.
Broken English? I don't get what this is supposed to mean
Likely because it appeared here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917430
I agree with your plan of gradually ramping up the amount of the basic income to find the optimal amount.

However, I would question a couple parts:

> every US resident who has been a US citizen for at least X years

Why limit it in this way?

> conditioned to willing to have employment

Why? Isn't one of the biggest benefits of basic income that it gives more people more of an option not to work?

And what does "willing to have employment" mean? Every man has his price. If you pay people enough, they will work, no?
Crowdfunding Giant Indiegogo Opens to ICOs
> Unloading stolen goods is dead.

Street crime has simply moved on: From pirated movies to hacked phone cards to peddling forged goods trough legitimate-looking online fonts.

Peddling drugs is as lucrative as ever just like the various side-shows of gambling/red light district incomes, where there's often a very fluid line between commercialized "security services" and organized gang crime.

And let's not even start with "Internet crime" which is basically the new "street crime" not because it's that much more lucrative but because it's that much more convenient and less dangerous than physical involvement.

> Initial coin offerings, binary options, FOREX, and payday loans are the new big moneymakers.

That's what the Yakuza actually started out as: White collar CEO Gangsters.
As I understand it the only reason the Kantō Rengō can now take over that role is because Japanese anti-Gang laws increasingly cracking down on the established old-school Yakuza, thus creating a power vacuum these Kantō Rengō are filling.

They might be less traditional in their ways, but they are pretty much running the same racket the Yakuza have been running.
Sure, it's creepy, but unfortunately many people are still predominantly looking for tone and little else. It's hard to ask companies to stop doing it when people keep rewarding it.

Aren't most advertisements also creepy and manipulative? Do you expect companies to start having informative ads? Maybe when people stop rewarding bad behavior. If you don't do it, people will say you are tone deaf!
Huh? This is referring to a specific api call of a bitcoin library. The developer did not fully understand the API he was calling. This has nothing to do with a specific wallet GUI.
Well that was a bit of a waste of time - the stickers (they’re not emoji, they’re stickers) look nothing like me - got the color of my hair totally wrong, the shape of the face is nothing like mine, and the facial hair is completely wrong.

To top all of that off, I was immediately presented with profanity thats completely out of line with the store rating.

Nice try, but bitmoji was more fun and way more accurate.
> Now the proper thing would be for that money to be taxed in Europe

Of course Europeans like this argument, but is it really correct for those profits to be taxed in Europe? Did substantial value creation occur there? I'd argue not really, and at any rate Apple will have generated substantial sales, import/export, income tax revenues etc for those foreign countries in which they do operate. The IP that lead to these profits is however clearly mainly created in the USA.

I'm not stupid enough to pretend I have a good answer for this hugely complex problem, but it's clear that arguing that "the proper thing would be for that money to be taxed in Europe" is a gross over-simplification. When we talk about the EU we are talking about 28 separate sovereign States, each with their own separate tax collection laws and organisations. The body whose work that lead to those profits is for the most part 5000 miles away.
Except when you live below the API. Then your life becomes a dystopian nightmare.
Automated road tolling systems have the exact same economic problems as Patreon. And the pre-charged wallet with $xx minimum fillups is exactly the model they chose. Judging by the longevity of their systems, it seems to work fine.
It sounds to me like the GP was interested in companies proactively providing the salary range for the job, which doesn't seem to fall under the new law. The new changes also wouldn't prohibit an employer from asking for a desired salary range, would it?
that poor lil guy :( who likes cats when you got these
Such as e.g. affluent tax evaders in Zimbabwe and Venezuela, or in Argentina a few years ago?

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/31/africa/zimbabwe-bitcoin-su...
>Isn't the main benefit of UBI to make it so everything is streamlined into a single program and administrative overhead is reduced?

No no no. The Universal means it's given to everyone, not that it is the universal welfare program.
Ah, if that wasn't clear from my post, I think debit/credit is absolutely interesting. Analogous to how Twitch effectively gives you more "bits" to send to streamers as you buy more in bulk.

Creators all run vastly different businesses so pro-rating is always a thought -- one thing it seems incompatible with is in the fulfillment of goods, where the creator takes on a burden of cost. It would be difficult to consider what the patron receives in return if they only pay out a pro-rated portion of a reward tier. Curious how that would play out in your scenario --
Go code: Line of sight principle
> Why limit it in this way?

X can be 0. I didn't set it to any specific number to avoid discussing it (some people would want a cool-down period, others don't).

> conditioned to willing to have employment

Why?

"willing to have (employment and spending) tracked by researchers" :)
I don't think you can ask residents of the U.S. to voluntarily hand over all their housing property to a trust, or require them to be Catholic to reside in it.

However, I think it could be possible to have many, many such trusts which cater to specific interest groups. How about communities which cater to different kinds of artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, etc...? If something like 60% of the US population could be covered this way, it would combine many of the best aspects of universal coverage with the benefits of meritocracy and the advantages of a voluntary basis.
You must be joking. Wealth people? Depart with wealth? Willingly? They can pay their taxes now and don't; I wouldn't hold your breath waiting.

No, to tax rich people you have to seize the damn money.
Your numbers are wrong. The 5 wealthiest people in the US are well below $1 trillion and in just the US there are tens of trillions of dollars of wealth.

Even if you did manage to tax all the wealth without destroying it, it'd only provide 10 or 20 years of basic income. Which is a lot, but it is hardly enough to make or break a BI as long term policy.
I think they shift selection grid from user to user, so they get a statistical outcome with a great precision of where the sign really is. If some data points stand out, they should be simply ignored.
With a functioning justice system or government or social structure, with blame comes punishment and consequences that deter future behavior.

If top researchers refused to publish in or advocate their department pay for closed-access journals, they would die.

If the NSF required NSF funding could not be used to generate work that would be published in closed-access journals, they would die.

If the justice department broke up these journals for the public good or we simply made it impossible for certain IP regulations to apply to scientific research, they would die.

All of these actions require first to acknowledge there is a problem, second to blame corporations running closed-access journals, third to destroy them. You can't skip the second step.
>If we are talking about handing out cold hard cash as basic income, as the statement implies, then that is a recipe for disaster.

I've tried and failed to figure out a less confrontational-sounding way to ask this, but do you have any data to back this claim up, or do you just not trust the poor?
OT, but why don't programmers say or write "It's syntax". Different semantics, in the programming language sense, isn't what that phrase usually means.
V8 Native Code Coverage
India had tax rate of up to 93% in 1970s which was done all to support poor people. I am not sure it worked very well. But may be US is very different and 90% or so tax rate will drastically improve living conditions for everyone.
Like many anti-competitive behaviors, A and B are seemingly beneficial to customers, but in the long run they are harmful to the market by preventing smaller players from competing fairly.

> married to a bunch of economically dubious hate for (the equivalent of) toll roads and desire that there be no downsides to higher usage

I have never seen a net neutrality proposal that includes something that prevents higher charges for higher usage (except when mis-attributing usage, e.g. saying that Netflix uses an excessive amount of consumer ISPs' bandwidth, which is not the case, the people watching Netflix might be overusing their ISP's bandwidth, but Netflix is not using the ISP's bandwidth at all). This is a complete straw-man argument.
I made a GTA V cover maker app right around the time when GTA V came out. The app allowed you to put your own images into a GTA V style cover (like this [1]. And here's a custom cover made with the app [2]). The challenging part about this was that there was no way to work with non-rectangular View on Android, so I had to draw everything directly to the canvas. Because of that there was also a lot of mucking around with low level bitmaps and matrix transforms. That was the first app I made when I was learning Android development.

Then I made a minimalist ToDo app for Android.

Next I made a public transit live timetable app to learn iOS, which was pretty much dead on arrival when I released it, as the local transit company released an app with all my features and more right before I released mine (I took way too long to release that anyway).
Neither of those is in the Play or App store anymore.

Right now I am working on http://madewithreactnative.com where I interview developers and teams about their experience creating apps with React Native.

I’ve also had started other side projects, most of which have never seen the light of day however.

[1] https://media.rockstargames.com/rockstargames/img/global/new...
[2] https://i.imgur.com/M7AesBj.png?1
They have almost no say in what laws and regulations apply there - the US federal govt decides. It's part of the reason why they're in this mess.
Should we be worried about GMOs?
Graduate student tuition tax scrapped from GOP tax bill
> Take two video frames as big arrays of RGB values.

> Subtract one frame from another, that leaves us with samples of raw thermal noise values.

> Calculate the mean of a noise frame. If it is outside of ±0.1 range, we assume the camera has moved between frames, and reject this noise frame.

> Delete improbably long sequences of zeroes produced by oversaturated areas. For our 1920x1080=2Mb samples and a natural zero probability of 8.69%, any sequence longer than 7 zeros will be removed from the raw data.

> Quantize raw values from ±40 range into 1,2 or 3 bits: raw_value % 2^bits.

> Group quantized values into batches sampled from different R,G,B channels, at big pixel distances from each other and in different frames to minimize the impact of space and time correlations in that batch.

> Process a batch of 6–8 values with the Von Neumann algorithm to generate a few uniform bits of output.

> Collect the uniform bits into a new entropy block.

> Check the new block with a chi-square test. Reject blocks that score too high and therefore are too improbable to come from a uniform entropy source.

This reads like a highly ad-hoc process with nothing resembling a formal justification for any of its steps; nor its general outline, nor any of the magic numbers used in it. It's unclear what properties are being achieved and how exactly the steps guarantee those. There is no analysis of the predictability of the data by an adversary, either.

What does this get you that SHA512'ing the entire raw image bitmap doesn't? Using statistical tests makes sense to verify that the camera data isn't pathologically anomalous (say, all zeroes or all 255), but I don't understand why this sort of procedure is preferable to using a strong hash function to extract randomness from an image sensor's output.
Microsoft is making subreddits more searchable with Bing
Uh that's the point of Patreon. I like a newsletter, I give them a buck a month, it's a popular newsletter, so it's not unreasonable to say if only a few thousand people give just a buck then the guy has made a living out of the newsletter. And so on. When throwing in a buck I am like "surely there are many others, hopefully this stays alive but oh well if not".

When throwing in five bucks or more especially per creation I am like "you are one of my favorite musicians please give us more" (and then I put in Taylor Davis' Carol Of The Bells and just feel good).
Good for you! Not that I know what it has to do with the issue at hand.
Sam: "The millennials looked around and said, “Damn, I’ve got $200,000 of student debt. I have no job prospects that are gonna let me afford a house, or a car, or three trips a year to Europe. I better decide to shoot for something else.”"

https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-typical-household-wit...

"The average balance of outstanding student loan debt for households with some debt was $25,700. The median debt was $13,000, and seventy-five percent of borrowers had less than $29,000. These burdens are relatively modest given the annual earnings of these households. The average annual wage earnings among this population was $71,700."

Note: "for households with some debt".
>1) What would stop us from recreating the inefficient welfare state that already exists on top of this new one when some people inevitably blow their UBI on drugs/cheetos/whatever and don't have money for rent? It seems that for this to work we'd have to maintain some intestinal fortitude to say "no" - and that to me sounds like a serious culture change in this country...which gets me to my next, perhaps more contentious, point.

Exactly! UBI needs to go on top of our existing welfare system. It's a problem of freedom. Say I give you $300 and tell you that's what you live on this month. Well with $300 you can find a (crappy) shelter. You could buy food, pay your existing debt obligations, etc. But you can't do all of them. The money gives you freedom but not enough to do everything you need. Our existing welfare system is a god awful patchwork but the existence of all these separate systems makes sure that someone who is poor is still free to buy food AND pay for shelter AND pay off debt. UBI is adding another AND on to the list. We've progressed as a society, wealth is abundant but not shared so now you can buy food AND pay for shelter AND pay off debt AND ... whatever you can do with $12k a yr (or whatever the figure is.)
If there's something that you need—please use the chat box to tell us what you need. We have engineers that are constantly helping devs get their algos dialed in. If you're doing 501c3 work you can probably ask for some bonus credits as well (we love helping good causes :) )
I wish that they invested more in ARD. It was such a beautiful thing using a single program locally installed to control 500+ machines. But the ARD application over the years has just become more and more broken to the point where I rarely use it and our organization has moved away from Apple towards ChromeOS devices. (I work for a school so that makes since when we implement google classroom and other services.)
I waited a few days before canceling my $1-2 pledges, and completed my cancellations yesterday. So now today I had to spend some time going back through and re-pledging the stupid $1-2 pledges to lessen the screw to my beloved creators. What a clusterfuck!
>wealth and power are their own defense against redistribution

Right now, yes, that's definitely the case. But does it have to be? Our campaign finance system provides a direct and unlimited conduit between wealth and political power, but we can change that.
What Lurks Below Jupiter’s Great Red Spot?
you are quite correct about this - "lens closed" mode has least amount of entropy by our measure. However its clearly proportional to intensity of light hitting the sensor (and beside natural photon variance of light itself, the shot noise in sensor increases with more light). So in what we call "optimal" conditions - enough light to generate noise, not enough to oversaturated there is plenty of natural entropy coming from the sensor.
Honestly if you are going to give me free money + tax the hell out of me for working hard and going above and beyond I'll just relax and play video games and work on personal projects on my monthly stipend.
At some point, it’s ok to blame the system (e.g. lack of laws) rather than the mugger. You live in a country in civil war, cross the town at night, get mugged, who’s to blame? You, the mugger, the war?
Thanks for pointing to this; I've heard of the idea before, but never as cogently argued for. The NYT article is a really, really good read.
If we can help—let us know. We've got Intercom chat going and engineers ready to help you get going :)
For issue (1), the articles I've seen suggest that the vast majority of people just don't do this. Certainly some do, but I don't see why a couple bad actors invalidate a scheme which can work for most of the population.

I don't have an authoritative source on the above claims, but here's a 538 article which talks about the issue a bit. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do...

"[reduction in cash assistance] has happened despite a burgeoning economics literature suggesting that direct cash transfers are in many cases the most efficient tool to fight poverty."

Issue (2) seems less cut-and-dry to me.
If Apple had invested as much in AppleScript as other parts of the OS I’m sure we’d see a ‘Can automate other applications’ setting in the Privacy controls. Not sure that’d help much here as the app is a Trojan but it’d be helpful to limit the activity while removing it.
thanks for your feedback – we know it doesn't work for some people and are working to make it better. we'll get there :)

regarding profanity – thinking how to both let people who want to use it use it (as many do) while not annoying anyone with it.

thanks for trying the product, sorry it didn't work for you
What I personally do is commit the merge as is, with all the <<< === >>> conflict markers.

Then, in the next couple commits, fix each conflict via a normal commit that mixes and matches "mine" and "theirs" as needed + deletes the markers.

Each resolution commit is independent of the giant merge commit, and can be separately diff'ed and code reviewed via the github PR or any other tool.

Also easier IMO to make the complicated resolution you want, or reset back to a previous resolution attempt without messing up the entire merge.

The drawback is that some commits won't compile, but compilable mid-branch commits are not something that I view as a goal.
2017 DevOps Dozen Finalists Announced
It would still be awful, because it would disadvantage other forms of content that have the same bandwidth needs but are not video, and also anything that doesn't have "both ends".

And also, obviously, that ideal is completely unrealistic: Either the ISP gets to look into the video stream to verify that it is indeed video, which would be awful, or what you in effect end up with is a flat rate for "medium bit rate connections", which would be fine, but absolutely not what any of those ISPs want.
> "a bunch of people have guessed my email address and emailed me saying, 'I heard that you’re doing this. I’ll be in the control group just because I think this is important. I don’t need any compensation, I just believe in this idea, and I want to be part of the study.'"

This is hardly evidence that getting 2,000 control volunteers will be easy. Unlikely that the people who knew about the study and came forward are representative of the entire target test group on relevant criteria (e.g. income level). It's great to see support for the experiment and getting people to volunteer information without receiving money is a solvable problem, this answer just seemed evasive and promotional when a "you're right, it's going to be tough and we're working on it" would have been plenty justified.
Everybody Calm Down About Net Neutrality: In Favor of the FTC
I didn't expect myself to ever say this, but: Our Openstack containers are much leaner than that. (Swift ends up at ~95 MiB for example.)
Also, Linux code is owned by whoever wrote it (or paid to have it written I guess), so it'd a major effort to try and change its license.
The universal part just means there's not much process associated with it, you just get the payment.
> Doing some back of the envelope math, US gov revenue is 3.31 trillion and the population size is 323.1 million. Which leaves about $10244 per capita to play with.

> How would a BI work

By increasing revenue, for one thing.

> Seems like BI would need big tax increases to become viable.

Yes, essentially no one, including BI proponents, disputes this.