skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Compared to most countries in the world today, would you say the Chinese government exercises relatively more or less control over their economy?
Literally the opposite. We do so much useless work that our productivity curve remains flat even as technology makes us extraordinarily productive at the tiny fraction of actually meaningful and necessary work
'inflation' is probably not the right term; money is created and destroyed more or less at will by the financial system as set forth by the nation's laws. UBI is not 'funded' by just turning on the printing presses and letting 'er rip.

But, yes, of course, if there is a scarce good (there isn't enough for everybody) and due to UBI now everybody can afford this scarce good, then... guess what, no they can't.

But that's economy at work, and entices the populace to work, so they can supplement their UBI and get scarce stuff they want.

Perhaps you mean that certain goods are so price elastic they will just cost whatever it needs to cost to squeeze every buck out of the lower-income populace.

That IS a risk, but I'm not sure the current common western economic model is any different; the _vast_ majority of these economies do have a minimum wage already, and the majority of the workforce... works, or otherwise enjoys an income that is somewhat close to minimum wage at least, leading to the same problems.

Seems silly to put the onus on UBI to solve problems that aren't particular to UBI, no?

Note that these problems are solvable, and UBI can actually help solve them: Due to UBI it is _much_ simpler to just pick up your stuff, and move to a place that is in the toilet, economy-wise: A backwater with extremely low housing prices, nearly free land, and no jobs. With UBI, hey, you can make a decent living because your UBI bucks go a lot farther out in these boonies, which should push said boonies up.

It also moves negotiating powers to the workforce: Instead of companies that are offering jobs have to compete with the notion of being either destitute/homeless, or having to jump through hoops to prove that you are unable to find work (which is how many western economies are set up today), the job offerers are competing with 'no job, live on basic UBI'. This should allow the workforce to for example demand that they get to work from home a lot more, opening doors to letting them live in places with cheaper housing.

And then, if the -entire nation-, from stem to stern, has rents set up to gauge those living on UBI alone or on UBI+scraps, there's something very wrong with your nation. Go make some laws.
I want compassionate people to have more money. I want less compassionate people to have less money. A compassionate person will invest their fellow humans. A person lacking compassion will buy themselves trinkets and hoard wealth. I came to this conclusion when reading this borderline hateful comment.
> Rich people may not eat more food, but they may eat food that is shipped in from all over the world.

Or they may eat farm-to-table and shop at local farmers' markets. On the other side, step into any Wal-Mart or dollar store, and almost everything there was manufactured and shipped from Asian continent.

> It taxes fossil fuels at the point of production

How does it work with fossil fuels refined in Middle East and delivered to China?

> tend not to take public transport as much

The first thing that happened after California approved driver licenses for undocumented aliens is that used car sales surged and public transport dropped (LAMTA and Metrolink specifically). For a lot of lower-income customers buying the car was aspirational and signified the rite of passage. In their price segment they're not typically shopping EVs either.
SpaceX and its Boca Chica Texas launch site
The ire is because they are saying this in a context where they are implicitly talking not just about their personal preferences, but furthermore about the opportunities that should or should not be made available to others. They are saying this in a context where it functions as an argument against Basic Income, on the grounds that leisure is bad and everyone should be made to work as much as possible, to provide as much for society as possible.
BetterLoopy to autorepeat music videos - https://github.com/piyushsoni/BetterLoopyForYouTube
democratic socialism does not mandate a command economy see: market socialism, anarcho-syndicalism
>Research, engineering and trade are some of the real reasons for rapid growth.

And how is that not the combination of capitalism and technology? Trade is capitalism and research and engineering create technology, as you point out, funded by capitalism.
Most people prefer to pay a fixed fair price instead of potentially being ripped off because they don't personally know the seller. Haggling constantly is an awful waste of time
I like that idea too. Though it definitely may lead to some troubling scenarios where bad actors try to get their modules listed as dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. You could alleviate this by not funding dependencies of dependencies but there are some low-level tools (say, CSS autoprefixers) that are rarely used in their "raw form". It's tricky.
Cool, and absolutely terrifying.
And run some Flash apps on them to keep the fires burning!
UBI is Communism Lite.

Communism is when the government owns all property and all factors of production. UBI does not involve the government taking over anything.

Very likely ends badly, as voters seek to increase UBI to infinity.

Considering how much doubt there is among UBI in the first place, I don't know why you would assume politicians and voters would just want to endlessly increase the size of monthly payments.
Please no. How many times do cities have to try and fail at public housing for us to realize that the government cannot provide nor maintain it efficiently. There are much more effective ways that government can provide housing:

1) Allow actual competition. Adopt Japan-like zoning to make it easier to build. Landlords cannot freeload if they have competition. Make it harder for small special interest groups to veto new development.

2) Set property taxes appropriately or implement a land-value tax so that landlords have to pay for part of the surrounding improvements.
The biggest problem is that you have a central planner deciding what the “good” jobs are.

There are more straightforward mechanisms for the government to invest in future-oriented endeavors.
I'm not sure if we're disagreeing here, but in the context of this article "a lock" is a kernel lock. What that implies will obviously depend on your kernel, but in Linux it means your thread may wait for an unbounded amount of time.
This is just ignorance. Almost all US treasury bonds are owned by hedge funds, and most of the rest are owned by governments. Retail investors are a tiny share. Whether the hedge funds and governments continue to buy them is not related to how many hours of Netflix Americans watch. US govt can honor its treasury bonds because we have a productive economy. Consider the total assets of the United States, valued at over $200 trillion vs our tiny debt of $20 trillion.
Cindy Munoz Miami Realtor
Henry George had it right: Use land value tax to fund UBI. Abracadabra, all the birds get killed with one stone: Real estate prices calm down, income inequality calms down, environmental costs are valued into use, and poverty is eliminated.
> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check.

Seems even easier to increase the standard tax deduction we already have and are familiar with. Then you can increase tax rates to make sure those evil rich people don't see any benefit.
Oh correct, it's as you've said.
Many sellers on Amazon have their own stores, be they brick and mortar and/or website. Amazon in these cases is just a middleman processing sales that the third parties are already capable of making themselves. They simply lack the web traffic. This is not true of all the brands carried by Best Buy. Many do not do direct-to-consumer sales.

There are less obvious differences such as the contract terms agreed between brands and Best Buy versus the ones between sellers and Amazon. Those details often are only discovered through litigation.

To suggest Best Buy was already doing what Amazon is doing is nonsense.
This not the same; at the time when they were postulated due to mass defect in nuclear reactions, there was a reasonable mechanism of detecting them, if nothing else the principle of microscopic reversibility. With current dark matter there literally is no known way of detecting them that doesn't beg the question, and all of our attempts to identify them are literally "shots in the dark".
Nah, it's a pretty standard slippery slope fallacy.
Trump asks FCC to clarify responsibilities of platforms vs. publishers
not the person you replied to but they probably mean that mental health is defined by a range of acceptable behaviors and they are close to the edge of the range.
Flexibilty would have been my first guess. Are there any other reasons besides flexibility?
The standard deduction doesn't allow for negative rates, which means it can't be used to replace means-tested assistance programs in the same way as a UBI.

The EITC does, but it has a cutoff with the aforementioned problems, and if it didn't (and the amount was high enough to replace the other programs) it would be hard to distinguish from a UBI, outside of the easily-gamed income requirement which does little more in practice than discriminate against honest homemakers who don't get to claim it.
But also inflation.
Yeah, sorry. I should been more clear with my tone.
I don't think it's bad for the local business to know who you are.

I can see why it sounded that way.
I admire the saints, and in an abstract way, I admire you.

But I also take the counsel of Ecclesiastes, which says in essence, nothing that you do will matter. The earth will turn, the rivers will run to the sea, and it will be that way forever and ever. Victory does not come to the righteous, but rather horrors come to us all without discrimination.

Take what God has given for the moment, a few specks of relative happiness, and be happy with that.

Jackboots of whatever flavor may be coming, but there is little we can do. Prepare as you can. I hear hoofbeats.
Great stuff here. Do you think these are fundamental dealbreakers? Put another way, could an entity like GitHub build satisfactory solutions to these?

Forcing donors to fund their wallets with ACH transfers seems like an easy way to sidestep a lot of this (except the trustee issues).
Ask HN: Do you need eng management support on your startup?
Background: 15+ year software engineer that moved to management about 8 years ago. Worked in multiple startups and now as a Sr Manager at a FAANG.

For the past quarter I've been consulting with a startup (video games) trying to help them get their engineering organization healthy and more productive. Basically, helping them grow their tech leads into proper tech leads, mentoring the managers (and growing people to be managers), helping them put some process to create good eng practices, etc. About the same thing I do at work every day but with a smaller team.

I have to say that I've been enjoying this a lot and it seems that it could be something relatively profitable, but I have no idea if there's enough market. So I'm here asking HN to see if you're running a startup and don't have a technical co-founder (or maybe you do, but they don't have enough experience) and are having issues retaining talent or helping them grow within your org. Is that something you would want to have support (as in consulting)?
Oh, you're one of those people that worries about the value of the US dollar like it's not entire world's reserve currency already or a measure of American "strength".
> If they have that much of an advantage it’s not at all obvious why they need a $765M taxpayer investment.

Are the goods being produced for the taxpayer? Why yes, they are. Thus it makes sense for the taxpayer to pay for the goods. This is pretty much the end of discussion on who should pay for the goods.

As to your estimation on how many engineers should work on something, there’s ample other engineers that would disagree. Go ahead and amaze us with the next iPhone or Tesla with only a handful.

Also, all your arguments apply to funding startups from private markets, yet above you seemed ok with taxpayers funding startups. (Despite high failure rates....)

I think you really just want taxpayer money for startups.
Going to a graveyard had profound effect on me
Nobody in my immediate family is dead so I don't automatically get negative thoughts whenever I happen to pass by one in a car. It's just another fact of life for me. One time I tagged along with someone else and went to one.

When I went there I saw small identical tombstones all the way to horizon, front, left and right.

Many feelings came over and it wasn't sadness. I felt all my worries become a joke, suddenly I felt free.

- All hate for others gone

- All things I felt mattered a lot, such as career. Etc, lost interest an instant

- Suddenly a wave of gratitude

like i was reborn and just happy to be here. Whatever I got was good enough.

I'm learning some religions recommend going to graveyard often, is there any research on psychological benefits of visiting graveyards?
It also works over Ethernet!
That invisible inflection point in a company's growth, where the prevailing attitude switches from "we succeed or fail together" to "I could still succeed, even if you fail."

This is the earlier post, BTW:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964905
How does that change anything besides making a "ha, gotcha!" point? That's your definition of universal, which is (I assume) limited to citizens of the USA who are adults.

EDIT>> Also there is plenty of precedent for limiting things which are worded in such a way as to suggest they cannot be limited, eg: "shall not be infringed"
The problem I see with that is that if a huge number of people take that route and happily (let's assume) live their lives without working, they lose access to the ability to participate in a meaningful way in the economy by producing something of value; if they're not producing value, no one is going to value them, and they'll eventually be locked out of the new, smaller elite group that controls the means of production, and the power that goes along with that.
Is it necessarily true that consumption requires carbon?
How come all the best tweets get deleted? C’mon
I'd rather that them saying "no" didn't mean they were perjuring themselves
Fair enough.

Though the ability to curate your personal pool is an important piece of the puzzle.
You're neglecting that the carbon-intensive activities would now be at a disadvantage compared to carbon-free ones -- which would shift consumer behavior.
Apple says they have that right, but I have not seen them do it.

Here's apple deducting a refund from me in 2010, and the amount is exactly what they paid me.
https://imgur.com/a/KwKlMXh

First screen shot is a week with one refund (-$1.40) and ten sales ($14.00 proceeds).
I see this being a major issue in the NPM ecosystem, lol. One thing is you could make transitive dependencies strictly opt-in, or have a decay function.
> Rich people may not eat more food, but they may eat food that is shipped in from all over the world.

Everybody, except for people in the poorest and most isolated of developing nations, eats food from all over the world. Most African nations aside from the land locked sub Saharan nations have access to the global food market. Almost all of the worlds cashews come from Vietnam and almost all of the worlds Almonds come from California. Much of the fruit consumed in the US is grown outside the US, especially in South America. Likewise South America imports most of its locally consumed fruit from the US.

I am currently living in Kuwait where fresh fruit is available everyday. If not for a global food supply the only fresh fruit available here would be a single variety of date available during a single 6 week window. Even then those date trees are completely dependent on irrigation to survive.

Growing up in Texas perhaps the only food dependent upon local growers were pecans and watermelons.
Software Has to Lead Hardware in the AI Dance
I always wanted to know, if it would be ok to publish an audio book "creative commons", that has been licensed Audible exclusive, since it would be the creative work of a private narrator, that has no financial interest.

But since the author is the owner if the base creative work, this must be forbidden, if the content is licensed to a specific company.

Another interesting question would be, how this would fit to a text-to-speech approach while not letting a human read the book but a machine...

Can someone tell me more about this topic?
Oh come on. It was a three way vote tie and there was a constitutional process. He was displaced by a junta, and they slaughtered innocents, and you want to complain about Allende's election?
That's helpful; thanks. I guess coming from much more of a software background, having the ability to write C code (which feels like an acceptable veneer over the hardware to me and works well across chips) and having programmatic access to the pins feels pretty empowering and all-encompassing. However, it does make sense to me that someone coming from a hardware-first view of the world would feel those barriers to direct hardware access much more acutely and recognize the limitations that I don't.

I appreciate the thoughtful and detailed response.
Use YC's Work at a Startup to apply for hundreds of jobs with one application
> Cultivating my garden, writing software nobody uses, or music nobody pays for, isn’t what I mean by work.

That's great, but if a significant number of people feel that way, then there is a noticeable loss of productivity in the economy as say 35% of people are not producing anything of economic value. That impacts tax revenue. It probably also means there is work not getting done, like the stuff nobody wants to do.
So someone born into an environment not conducive to academic development, or with mental challenges etc does not deserve enough to live off? That's exactly the problem UBI would aim to solve, but you seem against it.

No SWE makes as much as top sports players, even though the first group would be, on average, smarter than the latter. Is that unfair?

UBI gets rid of a lot of such gatekeeping, and aims to give people enough to live off. What you do with your time is then up to you, and who knows what the net effect would be. Maybe your local janitor finally gets some spare time and money to reduce work hours, and start a hit podcast. Maybe they spend it all merely supporting their extended family. Maybe they blow it all on drugs. Are we really in a position to dictate how people live their life? I'd rather everyone gets a base level of opportunity in life, and then they can further lift themselves upwards, should they choose to.
They could repair themselves.
Ask HN: Does your company spend more than 1 salary on open source?
Economists distinguish between three scopes of emissions https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/06/20/how-much-can-f...

It gets complicated as direct taxation just encourages moving the dirtiest link in the supply chain offshore.

E.g. manufacture tire in the US and be subject to a high emissions tax, manufacture them abroad and then import them into US - and you're golden.
I hear you, it's just such a difficult problem. I was just thinking of what the bare minimum is we could do to ensure no one is really living without basic necessities, until the point where our political climate makes it actually feasible to blindly give everyone X,000 a month.

I'm sure there are issues with welfare coupons, but being able to go into a grocery store and buy items you need without having to apply for anything has to be an improvement. Like I said though I need to research more so I could be wrong.
Thank you!

With modern 4k screens in very small displays the old argument of "computers don't have enough resolution to show justified text properly" becomes absurdly outdated.

We now have the technology to have nice justified text everywhere. Please use it.

Right aligned jagged text looks ugly.
Yup. Leaving aside that we have never yet to send an unmanned lander there, and it has roughly the surface area of Russia. If it were as densely populated as Manhattan over its entire surface it would have a population of less than half a trillion (appr 442,000,000,000) people. That on less than a thousandth of the W/(m^2) solar radiation of Earth.

I'd be really interested if anyone is bored enough to figure out a trillion person's population energy requirement and see how long a 50% mass/energy efficient fusion process could sustain a population of that size of a fuel base the size of Pluto. edit: assume 1 year at 1 GW-year per 1000 kg fuel for fusion power.. global energy use is about 18 TW-years, and round the population to 10^10 people. Not entirely comparable, but 10^12 people -> 1.8 * 10^3 TW-years or 1.8 * 10^6 GW-years. So about 200 million kgs of fusion fuel burned per year? And how much of the H in Pluto's water would be T or D?
One thing I've recently rediscovered is most thinkers of the enlightenment time including some founding fathers seem to mention that inheritance tax are a necessity of a liberal democracy. And I've been pondering on that.

Kind of like in sports, you need to reset the seasons once in a while. Otherwise last year's winner starts with too much of an advantage and the competition degenerates.

Now maybe you have to reset this throughout someone's lifetime, or maybe only at their death on inheritance I'm not sure. Like maybe you tax people for how long they've had their money for. If you've been sitting on that billion for X year, then you get taxed Y times X amount on it where X is the number of years you've had it. This would include asset holdings.

And maybe this tax goes to pay UBI.

What I like about this is, it retains the capitalist idea of having the right to enjoy your profits. If you've earned yourself the best of steaks, you are allowed to eat it. But you can't just get out of the game and continue to earn. If you are so self made, you should be able to make it again next season, starting from the same footing as everyone else.

I think it would require getting the right weights and equation in place. Like obviously you want to allow for retirement. And you don't necessarily want to reset things too often, people should be allowed longer period to acquire momentum and succeed. And maybe you want something more complex than just a multiplier of years. And the reset over one's life doesn't need to be to zero, same for the inheritance, though I'd imagine the inheritance one honestly could get close to zero.

Thoughts? This isn't something I'm clamoring for, still thinking about it, but I found the idea interesting. If you acrue a billion dollars, good for you, but why should your children get to start with that money? Unlike you, they didn't provide value to society. Why can't others have an equal footing with them? And even you, do you just get to sit on the company you setup for the rest of your life just taking money from it? Seems ridiculous, the amount of risk taking and effort being put year over year no longer corresponds with the reward. Why not let someone else a chance to shine, prove yourself that you're still this valuable ten year after?
Ask HN: Best resources for escaping the rat race?
I am curious to know what your favorite resources are for escaping the rat race.

Is it a website? YouTube channel? Book?

What inspires you to keep working on something?
Machines made child labor redundant. Minimum wage law made child labor unprofitable.
He did not start the Linux Foundation.
A look at the best new features in Python 3.9
Why would you need more space on a people farm? Is it free range, probably not.
I typed in a symbol and hit the search button and it just sent me to the “sign up” page. Is it possible to see data before signing up?
It looks like you mismatched USA with Britain Empire.