skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Printed money just gets given to banks (for free, effectively), I don't see the issue with just giving it to somebody else instead.
Ah, I see, and both "climb up" and "climb down" are used, so it's not equivalent, you're right.
The website is a bit glitchy on my phone. Whenever I scroll, it zooms out a bit, which is disorienting.
>There is a rate of population decline that's consistent with economic growth. But its very small.

I didn't say economic growth. I said living standards. The important difference is that living standards can go up while GDP is falling.

>We are turning into Japan, not China.

Japan proves my point. The country isn't exactly impoverished, nor is it getting any poorer. They have very low unemployment and GDP per capita has grown about 10% between 2010 and 2018. That's compared to 12.5% for the US. Not a bad outcome in spite of a steep decline in population.
I am not an economy expert by any stretch. Just going to share my take.

Growth cannot go forever due to these factors I observed:

1. More and more wealth seems to be captured and locked away somewhere while the rest of the populace is left to having to cope with globally dwindling redistributable capital.

2. Population isn't even declining everywhere but I've read several times here in HN that white people in first-world countries procreate less and less. Reasons can be a lot and my anecdotal evidence is that the cost of a basic life and some small extra affordances goes up every year. Families get more and more conservative on their spends and/or jobs. Many people here in Eastern Europe just decide to live on welfare and half-day crappy jobs somewhere but at least these jobs aren't stressful and don't require 2-3 hours in traffic every day. When you do the math such a way of life nets them 70-80% of what they would otherwise make so their choice is really quite logical. In these conditions the economy stagnates and companies get desperate for good staff while the government couldn't care less.

3. The population declines at places because people view raising kids as a huge financial and stress investment and not as the life-fulfilling purpose that raising kids is usually viewed as. This is mostly related to how much time is needed for a young person these days to actually start contributing to their raising (or new) family. Many people are just scared if they are going to be able to be financially stable for 25-30 years in the future. Others like myself are just burned out.

4. The economy gradually seems to be taken over by the very classic breed of venture investors that don't give a hoot about organically growing your customer base or actually taking care of your employees. Even in a presumably more conservative market like Europe, I see this more and more. Can we even discuss growth if, even against all odds, your company becomes hugely successful BUT has to return the investments tenfold? Again, this is a captured wealth going to somebody else's pocket (and they don't seem to be interested in redistributing it).

---

I could be gravely mistaken and be a victim of living in a filter bubble. Of course.

But it's what I am seeing periodically and it worries me. People just don't care that much for making kids or looking for jobs since it all just guarantees suffering and sacrifices and nothing much else.

Many elderly people tell me that they regularly chat with their kids (now 30-45) and are convinced that having a fulfilling life was easier even as back as 20-30 years ago. They might be right.
It's a patronizing podcast. He interrupts his subjects a lot. Rife with access journalistic "both sidism" which has destroyed the NYTimes.
I’ve found amdgpu to be a terrible driver for high end displays; 8K doesn’t work, for example.
I agree with you that the majority is exhausted, but unfortunately there is a very vocal minority in the liberal sphere, and they are not particularly known for being reasonable people. It makes it seem like the average person's problems and concerns are getting put on the back-burner, while the liberal favored special interest group of the day gets the spotlight. How can someone not be resentful?

I also want to point out that it's not just twitter/tv. You can see true policy changes happening in the schools and workplaces--at least within the west-coast liberal strongholds.
No, it becomes 20k-40k salary + 10k UBI depending on your employer.
Good points! People would much more prefer to live in a society with more equality.
Oh goodness, this thing has only been up for 40 minutes and it's already got 20 comments...

I will say that the basic thrust of the article seems to resonate for me, in that I did come to hear of UBI first because of a utopian ideal.

In my case, it was tax policy. I was very interested in what sort of tax policy would be agnostic about your family structure, imagining a utopia where the government does not need to know about weddings and divorces in theory.

If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it.

But with a little bit more insight, that deduction turns out to be significant if it creates a negative output: if you don't give people back this money, then your system is not actually family-structure agnostic. And with a little bit more insight, when you pair that deduction with that flat rate, you are giving everybody a universal basic income.

One detail in the article also kindles some remembrance... The criticism “An affordable UBI is inadequate, while an adequate UBI is unaffordable.” I do remember trying to work out the numbers so that the IRS could still collect the same tax amounts on a flat-tax-plus-UBI model and indeed that was... underwhelming. You can just download their info split out by tax bracket and muck around in Excel, but yeah, I remember that if you cap the flat tax at 30% or so the UBI that this equal-IRS-income-tax-revenue assumption generated was... well, it seemed like not very much, heh. I don't think it would have improved the financial state of the bottom, say, 50% compared to progressive taxation; it helps out the bottom 10% way way more than progressive taxation does, and we either have to go to very high tax rates (shifting tax burdens more onto the rich) or just eat the cost at that middle-class level.
Exactly. People who want a service for $5.00/mo aren't viable customers for SaaS
All the current proposals for UBI seem to be talking about relatively modest anounts of income... between 10-15K a year... that's not going to go very far unless the cost of rent, essentials, and services drops dramatically.

The reality is if we end up with a large amount of people that are not working then our economy is going to be totally hosed because it runs on consumption. If people don't have the money to consume then it just stops functioning.

Giving people free money is like putting a bunch of taped together printer paper over a hole in the wall and calling it "fixed".
UBI generally needs to be funded by increased taxes, either on wealth, capital, value-added, or income primarily from people who can afford to pay them. As such, it's a wealth transfer that is reducing inequality to a degree, not a magic handout to the poor that comes from thin air.
Tempted to try out the Mac Pro with 2x2 Vega2 pros / PlaidML.
At $10k, you get 132gb Of hbm2 memory, 4x of a Nvidia v100.

PlaidML got acquired by intel, but looks like amd support is still included.

I wonder if I can convince our hpc people to buy some Mac Pro racs
Summary: "We took a classroom of students and measured their performance with coding challenges in a situation that bears no resemblance to actual business operations with no middle-management, insane CEO requests, or office politics. The top performers didn't excel at the mundane tasks, and we couldn't find many 10x performers in this classroom of students."
so he should seed a torrent instead of a wget command?
I never thought it'd be possible, but this blog post made me actually want to buy 99 smartphones.
"giving people free money" is how the macro-economy has functioned for a long time now, except the people are banks.

I fail to see the major disaster if it becomes somebody else instead.

E: to the downvoters, look up how money gets "printed" in the USA
All of these are pretty good points. It makes sense that there aren't many jobs specifically focusing on WASM yet or that anyone working on it now is still seen as a Front End Developer who just does the WASM stuff.

Thanks everyone!
CSS has gotten great, but I feel things have gone in opposite direction for general web dev.

Careful cascading styles and clean and readable markup have gone straight out the window.
I don't want to detract from Aeson. It's a great library. If you control both ends of your channel, it can be more convenient than the equivalent encoding and decoding on Javascript, and making a JSON library that is more convenient than JS is no small feat.

But it's a very complex library. It may not show at your code interface, but that complexity is there at the documentation and type errors. It is also famous for generating bad runtime messages. There is even another library for fixing this, at the cost of even more complexity.

If you fall outside of its optimum usage scenario, it won't afford you more functionality than a low level parser, so you are much better saving that complexity and going with the parser.
Show HN: A simple weather app made just for Apple Watch
Ask HN: Golang tutorial about its practical stuff?
Anyone here know of a practical tutorial to Go language? - not the language constructs(I have the Go Programming Language book). But, the practical stuff like how to Create, import, share modules; how to layout a project; what to use when with some real-life examples etc.
Works fine for me on iOS 13.3
My work sent out an 'anonymous' survey .. didn't bother filling it out.. email contained a button (not even just a human readable url) and the link had enough crap on the end of it to make think it was anything but anonymous.
I’m a little tired of people coming to San Francisco, staying only in the tenderloin, spying on the homeless, writing about how disgusting the tenderloin is, and coming to the conclusion that the city is a liberal dystopia. Every city has places like the tenderloin, ours is just more visible than yours. That doesn’t make San Francisco a dystopia.

The writer of this article should probably also visit Noe Valley, McLaren Park in the Excelsior, Merced, Hayes Valley, visit Salesforce Park. Go on a walk in Golden Gate Park on a Sunday, browse dive bars in the Mission, and see a show at the Castro Theatre. Walk up Potrero Hill at sunset, get some coffee at at Trouble in the sunset, visit the MOMA or Academy of Sciences, and sit around at Washington Square.

Then write your article on how San Francisco is a shit-filled dystopia.
The parent was making the point that generally Americans refer to dates such as "May 2nd", "April 14th".

But one of their biggest holidays is explicitly called "4th of July", changing the ordering.
The article does not support the title. Tech companies are hardly mentioned at all. The article devotes the entire length to blaming the city government and lax criminal policies.
Kleiner Perkins has already blown through much of the $600M it raised last year
Imo the key word is informal settings, I think most people would use those but higher class people were taught when not to use them.
> It’s extremely easy for me to create a tech company that scales to millions of users.

That's probably because the public does not have much at stake with a tech company. Especially with all those data leaks which happen regularly and nobody does anything because nobody cares.

If a tech business fails or misbehaves, it's probably only founders will be losing money and time. And then can even protect themselves from the users with a TOS which basically says "nope, your virtual losses are your virtual losses", and everybody is trained to just tick the check box.

While if a physical business fails then there are real people at loss who will have to look for a new massagist, a new hairdresser, a new shop, etc. And that's not even touching the subject or running business poorly: damaged joints, botched haircut and poisonous or otherwise unsafe products are way more tangible and likely to lead to action with more weight than shitposting about yet another serivce.
They draw in huge numbers of well-paid employees, who place enormous pressure on the housing market and have the buying power to allow it to skyrocket in value.

If you believe that housing is a key concern, then the effect of the presence of tech workers cannot be overlooked.
OK DOOMER
New Finnish study confirms that BMW and Audi owners drive like idiots
Because of how they utilize that money. The poor will spend it, because they need to. The rich invest their money since they do not need it all. Those investments are continuing to grow. Even if you transfer some of that money to the poor, they are spending it where? At Amazon etc...
So if you say the world is flat is the correct perspective and I'm wrong.

While I say the world is round is the correct perspective.

Are we gas lighting each other?
That's exactly why targeting people to pay $5.00/mo for software as a service is a mistake. At that tier SaaS gets people who complain about $5.00 cup of coffee.
What are some of these "good economics blogs" you mentioned? Would like to subscribe.
I disagree. Why would it be reasonable to assume "multiplication without a specific implementation is constant"? By definition, Big-O complexity describes what happens as a certain parameter gets arbitrarily large. If we say "ok but if we restrict that parameter to common sizes, it's actually O(1)", then everything is O(1). There is some constant C where Bubble sort will sort any array that fits into your RAM within C seconds, so is it okay to call Bubble sort constant time until you use huge array methods that process arrays on your hard drive?
I don't see how UBI will be any better than food-stamp-esque social welfare.

If a person is poor enough to need UBI, then their major concerns will be housing, food, education and medicare.

All 4 of these are taken care off (to varying degrees) by social welfare structures in place in various western economies.

I do not see why UBI would be a better alternative to instead directing funding towards welfare programs for the above 4 amenities instead ?

I dislike UBI, because it pretends the problems are not of total free-market capitalism's own making. UBI won't solve the problem by addressing the symptom. Centralized regulation and collective bargaining instead address the problem head on. Thus, I find them to be better solutions.
That's very strange. What phone do you use?

It's built from a template, so I wouldn't expect many problems.
If i was shown the fizz buzz question in a job interview, and i answered using the “hard way”, how would they respond?

Would they be impressed by the math? Or would they complain about the number of lines of code, readability for code review, etc?
Are you kidding? Median household income in the US is ~$60,000/yr. $10,000/yr/household would be enormous to over half the population.
The article points the finger at tech but in my opinion utterly fails to make a connection.
I like to think of it as a dividend paid out in proportion to our collective success in terms of productivity/efficiency.
Im not sure I agree. These things are relative, and I would argue that "Capitalism" is an environment that is beneficial to "competition, innovation, refinement, transformation, and others" relative to other things. Im not sure about what the "thing" is. Rule system? Laws? Societal norms? But I hope you get the idea. Things are obviously not universally perfect, but what are they in relation to other comparable things?

Also, from my econ classes, isn't capitalism fundamentally just property rights and freedom of trade? Some argue that capitalism is more specifically about gaining rent (money) through capital alone, and they criticize that this is undeserved and to the cost of others. But in my view, such criticism ignores risk of loss and potential long term changes.
I think a point to consider is that for jobs for "tasks only humans can do", the precise job/opportunity for employment may not exist, but I agree that some opportunity will be created that utilizes that human skill that hasn't been displaced yet. This lag between human-replaced and human-finds-job could be problematic to the structure of society (also, consider the current human-job-search). A UBI here could be a shim (also, government welfare/unemployment support) to help support society during the lag - a buffer against the unknown which can help with the necessities (imagine having to find a job and deal with the prospect or being homeless because your were replaced and couldn't pay rent, that will exacerbate the problem.)
Warcraft 3 Achieves Lowest Score in Metacritic History
Unrelated story. Back in the day, I got myself a T510. It was a tinkerer's dream - heck, I even learned how to hand-solder SMD on it.

Besides the standard mods (swapping the screen and upgrading to the W-series heatsink), I noticed that there was a spare spot on the PCB that looked like it was made for some component. Looking up the teardown of the more professional variant, turns out that it was missing a connector for a mini-PCIE slot. An ebay hunt and hours with a soldering iron later, I had a seemingly-working miniPCIe slot. Didn't really have a use for it though, other than bragging rights.

I eventually killed that laptop by bricking the BIOS, and then ruining the motherboard while trying to resolder the SPI BIOS chip.

Now, I have a 701CS lying around. Been trying to find the right hardware to restomod it.
I wouldn't be so quick to diminish the severity of SF's crisis. As per the article:

> But one statistic stands out: almost half of homeless people in the United States are in California, according to a recent White House study.

> And San Francisco, a comparatively small city that is home to tech giants such as Twitter, Uber and Airbnb, has the highest rate of ‘unsheltered’ citizens – at ten times the national level.
An AI revolution is not required to eliminate jobs. Robots are already doing the work of millions. You can see it everywhere you look. Was your laptop hand milled out of aluminum? Nope, a CNC machine did it. Do you see 12 cashiers manning 12 checkout lanes at the grocery store? Nope, 1 cashier is manning 12 self-checkout lanes. Do you have a secretary that schedules your meetings? No, you just use Google Calendar. That is what automation is. The 1970s sci-fi robot is just a distraction.
So those in cheap areas with no jobs can never move to the areas with jobs?
Scary, that could kill someone.
Great idea! What source do you use to identify coffee shops? Yelp?
This makes sense. You can't have an internal monologue until you learn a language.
An association between temporomandibular disorder and gum chewing. (2014)
Intriguing! Can you please provide a bit more of context?
Demotivated to work like retirees, spouses in single income households, and people who can live off the fruits of their investments like the wealthy?

Perhaps they’d produce art, or seek out experiences and education that wouldn’t otherwise be afforded to them. Maybe they’d take on risk and start that business they’d always dreamed of if they weren’t taking of their parent with dementia or having to work fewer days to watch their newborn.

Maybe risking their and their children’s health and educations because they might not be compelled to tirelessly feed their lives into a labor machine like they were once is too simple and dehumanizing a way to think.

I’m not for UBI yet because society is still too unbalanced in favor of rent seekers, but I could see it being the next target on the agenda within the decade, assuming a Sanders presidency.
Align incentives. Trickle down economics basically means that the more unequal society is the better society is off. This is trivial to prove wrong. When a business invests in automation workers lose their job while corporate profits soar. The success of a company isn't tied to how well it treats its employees. If one could reverse this situation and somehow make workers look forward to losing their jobs only then can we truly say that increasing inequality makes everyone better off. UBI is one way of achieving that. As a country's GDP grows so does its UBI.
I take "aujourd'hui" to mean "today" and "au jour d'aujourd'hui" to mean "to this day", which is not the same.
The difference between a hypothetical person and a fictional character is that the former can exist and the latter cannot.

Your argument was not dismissed, it was deliberately engaged. The person could exist with a nontrivial degree of probability, and therefore, gendering the person is inappropriate.
I get the weekly print version of the economist, although it’s only slightly delayed gratification. Covers all the stories of the week fairly thoroughly imo
Pick the 10%ile speed, assume that people sent doing that voluntarily.
I've been using laptops now for 28 years.

I can't think of a more rugged, long-lasting, and well-performing laptop than the Thinkpad series.

As a result, I can see this product being a total hit. Most of my students buy used Thinkpads because they're inexpensive and easy to upgrade, so I'm going to show them this link!
So invest heavily in the stock market and when these megacorps start automating all the jobs ride the likely massive gains?
Food is not enough. People also want a purpose with their life where they are important for other people.

Denmark has kind of an UBI: a single mom + one kid, no work for past 20 years, gets more than $2300 per month. Such a person has enough money for food, good apartment, etc. All what UBI wants to provide.

But many of these people end up depressed, inactive, feels like a failure, etc. Many just give completely up.

They don't feel "UBI" is like having a long vacation and a meaningful life.

budget: (notice that the mom can afford a $1000/month apartment)
https://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/politik/danskpolitik/article...
The number of human jobs will shrink over time as the machines approach human intelligence.

Fewer jobs with more people seeking them will drive wages down.

So the last gasp of human labor will look like a few excessively educated, qualified and well-connected people competing fiercely for the few remaining low-paying (but still paying!) jobs. The rest live on government benefits or rely on the charity of the trillionaires.

Those with pre-existing capital use it on automated businesses to multiply their fortunes. (And I bet they'll also automate personal security, a necessity when a trillionaire can still be killed by any of the other 10 billion humans. That's how you get private armies.)
You say that as long as there are tasks that only humans can do, "we will have jobs". True, but if and when only highly qualified/specialized jobs (doctors, researchers, engineers, etc.) need humans, most of the population will not have a realistic chance to get a job.
Really? Tools like React and Angular have made my life much easier when it comes to styling and readable markup.
I wish I could, I just had the dialog pop up out of nowhere while I was using my laptop. I have no idea why it wants this access.
Something similar from 4+ years ago, but in C#

https://gist.github.com/RichardVasquez/6780214
> A set of dates obviously has an earliest date.

Uhh, no you’re thinking in terms of a finite set. From the set of all dates, what’s the latest possible date, or conversely the earliest possible date. The temptation is to say infinite BC is the earliest possible date, but infinity is not a number.