skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oof. I’ve had the user account one before from Play for an app that had no user accounts. Apple isn’t much better though - currently trying to argue that asking for user location (when a user clicks ‘use my location’) for a real estate app is reasonable. They are insistent it’s not a valid feature and won’t accept it til it’s removed.
The Danish system has the same problem as all other means-tested systems: massive effective tax rate once you start working.
People already don’t have a willingness to work. If you provide the three basic needs plus medical and the internet I’m retiring tomorrow.
That's a good thing, right? What used to require a human toiling will then be made by a machine!
That has nothing to do with desire to work. Shitty jobs are shitty jobs, and if employers don't pay enough to justify putting up with the negatives, people are naturally going to do something else. I presume your spouse didn't quit after a year to sit on a couch, she quit and found some other job which was (hopefully) better.

A lot of shitty jobs out there rely on the fact that people need to settle to pay the bills. There are people with little experience or going through rough times who simply can't afford to wait for a good opportunity to come along, they need something to hold them over for a few months or maybe years. The employers know that these people have few options and will leave as soon as they do, so they offer low wages and overwork their staff and replace them when they are used up. UBI means people don't have to settle for the first low paying, undesirable job that comes along, they can hold out indefinitely for something better. Yeah, people are still going to need to get their foot in the door somewhere, and some opportunities might be too rare to be considered realistic, so we're not all going to be working our dream jobs, but the worst abusive employment anti-patterns will go extinct.
UBI has to be under the average, not the median. If wealth disparity increases too much, the average wealth will be much higher than the median wealth, but unfortunately that wouldn’t apply as much to income.
Firefox isn't Safari - if you say "Works best in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge" then you're fine
Doesn't it also make a difference that you lose welfare benefits when you start working? Maybe you could just work part time if all earned income was supplemental with no welfare gap.
The "So what" is that if pay for waiters and labourers has to compete with UBI, the cost of service, food, and housing increases significantly, putting it out of reach of more people, and contracting the entire economy as a result.

You can postulate about how much we should value these jobs, but the reality is that most people wouldn't be able to afford a meal at a restaurant where all the staff make 50k, or a packet of strawberries picked by pickers who make the same.
> I reached out to my old boss and asked for my old job back

I'm sure it varies by company, but did they bother with a standard interview loop?
Yes. As the number of dimensions n increases above 3, the interior angles at each vertex of an n-cube get smaller and smaller[a], while the n-cube's hypervolume gets more and more concentrated near its hypersurface, which is itself a hypervolume of n-1 dimensions.[b]

Lines and areas are different animals; we cannot reason about them apples-to-apples; we know this intuitively. Areas and volumes are different animals too; we cannot reason about them apples-to-apples; we know this intuitively. Similarly, n-dimensional objects and (n+1)-dimensional objects are different animals; we cannot reason about them apples-to-apples.

As human beings, we find it so difficult to reason "visually" about higher dimensional spaces, in part, I believe, because our puny little brains have spent a lifetime learning to model three dimensions (with a fourth dimension, time, flowing only in one direction).

--

[a] See this comment by scatters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29969181

[b] See this old thread for intuitive explanations about how and why this happens with n-spheres as we increase the number of dimensions n: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15676220
Exactly. Part of the appeal of UBI is that it doesn't come with a ton of bureaucratic overhead.
> Success is not the universe sprinkling good fortune on mankind at random.

Yes. Yes it is. For every successful person in the world, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of people with just as much courage, work ethic and intelligence who didn’t get the same opportunities presented to them.

Do not mistake this position as “it’s unfair that everyone isn’t successful”. The world does not distribute potential equally. What I’m saying is that there are further barriers, completely out of one’s control, that can keep worthy people from success.
> Google is already choosing the optimal bid prices based on the page & individual so why would they charge their slush fund when just charge the advertiser's account.

To artificially increase the competitiveness of advertisers who use Google's ad tools, as said in the article.
Not necessarily. Leaving out that word is highly unfair to the authors.

It turns a defensible but also boring claim into one that draws attention, but is as good as impossible to defend.

I think that, looking at pensioners, UBI will lead to people working less. Many of those who can afford to happily are unemployed.
> landlord and food companies just raise the prices

Which is exactly what has happened (in the US at least) as people received mini-UBI called "stimulus checks" and their bosses got PPP "loans" (that didn't need to be paid back)
There are some interesting points here. It's really about the exchange of data to US servers that seems to be the problem, as Google is obliged by law to disclose data if asked for by the U.S. Intelligence service. Do you believe they will fix this?
Is it really important to report mild cases determined by self testing? Frankly if I have the sniffles due to a cold, allergies, or even covid…I simply don’t see why the government needs to know. If I am not utilizing health care resources and self isolating, its nobody’s damned business but my own.
Isn't the gullibility scale a spectrum though? Perhaps if the emails sent purportedly originated in nations of higher repute, he would scam all of the most gullible people and in addition, some less gullible people, resulting in a greater profit.

After all the marginal cost of sending out extra emails is basically free. It's not as if he needs to only select the most gullible people to save on costs.
Ironically, Matrix MSCs will have the same exact “problem” of “too many extensions”.
We have an internal bug reporting process where internal developers talk about why each others code isn't working for them.

Perhaps I need to add a function to accommodate a specific item we didn't anticipate. This isn't a bug.

However if I have a function that does x,y,z and it turns out it can't do z or it doesn't do y as it should then we consider this a bug. We count these numbers and we ask each other to submit something that states their logic and design process. We also consider inadequate design or lack of a process a bug as well. Poor planning.

We also track time on how long it takes us to fix these bugs and implement the original design. We also ask each other for estimates on how long it would them to implement and we build a schedule on an average of these estimates.

I just ran the query for last year. I had 1 bug each quarter. One of the developers has 178. The last hire has almost 400.

I implemented a plan to reduce draw call overhead. It took me 3 months. That was almost double what other developers estimated it would take them. So far just one issue has been reported and it was more an error using to0 few words in the code comments but I added an `assert` just to warn the developer to look at this and I also fixed the code comments and provided an example.

Edit: Yes, higher ups do and look at this quarterly and I'm not sure what they do with the info to be honest.
> Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot.

I agree, but is this feasible or wishful thinking?

As a society, we’re decidedly split on whether we should wear masks or should or should not get vaccines, despite the science or despite whatever seems like a rational decision. (Admittedly I’m introducing my bias here).

Would raising pay for retail workers or people acknowledging that we need to treat them with respect - would either of these actually lead to the right outcome? Or would it fuel another voice that vehemently sees these jobs as a stepping stone and not entitled to respect and dignity?
Good point. As production technology improves alongside automation, bringing us closer towards a post-scarcity civilization, society will be able to make more guarantees, as they are materially trivial to create.
No, this is literal school policy in the US.
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> "children are forced to only earn crypto onchain"

What use do children have for cryptocurrencies? Buying items in World of Warcraft?

> "I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents."

This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda. To "cash out" they'll need a bank account which will accept their shady funds, and they'll have to prove they paid their taxes for it like everybody else. Until then, they can't do anything with it.
Guys, you're missing the point. The scenario being discussed are the set of programs that collect large amounts of data, not about programs like Calc.exe or Apache that don't do anything like that. That's the whole point of asking whether data or code is of prime importance.

Banks are probably one of the few examples of very old COBOL code that's still running (although they've been trying to get rid of it for years), which is the exception that proves the rule. Regardless, if you approached bank executives and said, "we've compromised all of your systems and we're going to delete either all of your code or all of your data, you pick", which one do you seriously think they're going to pick?
If you give people basic incomes it would follow a Pareto 80/20 rule just like everything else. Duhhhhh
If someone’s job involves receiving verbal abuse, perhaps they should be paid extra to compensate for the fact that it’s a very difficult job. If a job like that paid enough, people will still take it. Basic income would just mean that employees couldn’t pay poverty wages for shit jobs. In addition to being fairer, total utility could even rise because companies would be financially motivated to remove the need for the most unpleasant jobs.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rotating+hypers... Lots of animations come up on YouTube.
Thanks! I completely misunderstood his tweet. I somehow thought he bid 2 million.
I want UBI to be proven workable, I am actively rooting for it. Philosophically, I believe that any market in which people are coerced into participation through threat of homelessness/poverty is not, at its absolute core, a free market.

Philosophically, I believe that UBI is at some level a question of whether or not free markets actually totally work, because a truly free market is one where people are not forced to choose between bad options -- where they're not being coerced by wage slavery, where they have a choice whether or not to participate in the market itself. So I have personal stake in this, because if UBI gets proven not to work, it then leads me to ask uncomfortable questions like, "is a truly free market actually possible?" Which I don't want to think about. I want UBI to succeed.

But having said that, this is one study undertaken by a small group of psychologists, and it should be viewed through that lens. I understand it's simpler to just say their conclusion in the title, and it doesn't break any site rules, but it misses that every study on UBI is an approximation of what UBI large-scale implementations would be. I feel like people look at isolated experiments with a lot more confidence than they should. I don't like when individual studies get framed as, "this proves X".

It's extremely difficult to reason about what the long-term impacts of UBI will be using short-term studies because people's long-term patterns often differ from their short-term patterns. I do think we should be experimenting more with UBI, I think it's good that this study was done. I'd like to see more studies like this, more real-world tests, and in instances where UBI doesn't work I think we should keep trying different strategies to make it work, because a world where people have universal stability is preferable to a world where they don't.

But it's important to keep in mind that this study doesn't really prove anything, it's just another data point. We don't actually know whether or not basic income would reduce people's willingness to work long-term, this is one data point that suggests it might not.

This pops up in a lot of areas (UBI, inflation, etc) -- basically anything involving the economy. People get very confident about things based on a few data points, and then we get threads talking about how people are 100% certain that stimulus checks caused the chip shortages or some crud. Just make sure you're taking a step back and thinking about these things like a Bayesian, economics is heckin complicated, and I think complicated systems like economics are particularly susceptible to the falacy of, "I've done several hours of research on this, maybe even a full day, and therefore I have a complete, fully formed theory about the entire system works that I will treat as fact."
I think it's sort of unfair to reduce the whole argument to a one-liner like that. Sure, many people do take advantage of generational wealth, setting your children up for success is a basic human impulse. There are also a ton of data supporting the case that actually a huge percentage of successful/wealthy people did not get that way through generational wealth but in fact, just worked hard (also luck plays a factor).

Also, yes the rewards are unfair, life is extremely unfair pretty much all of the time.
Agreed, isnt this exactly whats been observed from pandemic financial aid? Increased pressure on employers to pay more and give workers a better work environment? Maybe someone has a better link to back that up but heres one at least.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2021/10/14/employ...

Also isnt there some possibly-not-totally-fantasy narrative where at least some of these jobs become automated in response to workers not wanting them and its maybe a good thing?
Project manager driven decision-making. Everyone wants to make a name for themselves, so every update gets a big UI overhaul even when it doesn't need one. Features get taken away when they don't need to be. Workflows get redone when they don't have to be redone. Imagine if this were to happen for something as important as Bash, people would revolt and fork, but in the big tech world you are beholden to these corporate products.

It's not just apple, its everything in big tech. Venmo just released an update where they moved key workflows around for no reason at all, and now I don't have muscle memory for the app anymore, but I'm sure some project manager justified it with telemetry and got a huge bonus for rolling out an update and showing downloads grew by 1% (which they probably would have anyway).
On macOS, it's already decoupled.

On iOS, there's nothing stopping them from releasing a critical fix to iOS that auto-installs as quickly as a decoupled update would.
But the systems I’m referring to do not suggest taxing the hard work of people. They propose taxing the work of automation.
>If UBI could be implemented in around the same cost as the welfare programs it replaces, it would have a net zero effect on inflation

It cannot, unless you're ok with screwing those already on such programs. Do the math, and you'll find it is not even close. Welfare programs (unless you include SS) are given to a tiny amount of people - spreading that across a large group of people simply screws those who need it most.

If you include SS, now again you're screwing old people who many times need the money to give it to people capable of work.

>The downside of nearly all current forms of welfare (in the U.S.) is that they largely enforce the poverty gap. You get to a point where a small increase in pay causes a large decrease in benefits, and you become trapped unless you can get a large enough pay increase to jump the gap.

This common claim is not true. There are ample people moving out of such program regularly, and many of them have limited lifetime benefits.

>would UBI be the same cost as current welfare programs,

No. I've been down this set of math lots of times. Do it - all welfare budgets are public, population is public, it's easy to estimate.
> My thesis is that people have the right to use a medicine that is effective.

Yeah, I can agree with this.

Was covaxin deemed effective by the US? Not all countries agreed on it.

By the way, the COVID vaccines are a more complex issue because they are all currently rationed. If their situation change, I'm sure your choice will get more diverse.
Yeah, I've tried out zig and it's about at the point where Rust was when there were like 5 different pointer sigils and a GC was still included.
You've learned nothing the past two years
Doesn't Alicia Boole Stott's ability indicate that solid intuitions are plausible though?
https://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/life-society/sci...
Brushed metal worked because you were already touching a surface that was a similar texture as the UI.
> it affords you anonymity

What? Bitcoin is radically transparent. The vast majority of crimes are committed with standard currencies like $USD. If 'crime' is the only value you see, you're extremely ignorant.

What is the bull case for $USD? What properties does it have that make it superior to currencies like $BTC in your opinion?
A majority of people are duped into voting against their own interests all the time now, why would UBI change it?
Dear Author,

Software Safety and especially AI Safety are hard technical problems. You're not going to figure out how to add a few 9s to the reliability of a computer vision system by studying org theory.

Making progress on The Hardest Problems requires hiring the excellent ML engineers and scientists, and then having even half-decent management. Management does matter, but the strong IC talent is a precondition to progress.

If Defense had armies of competent ICs but was still failing, I guess focusing on non-compensation-related organization issues might be reasonable. That's not even remotely the case.

Just shy of 70% of CS PhDs from US institutions are foreign nationals, which means Defense is already talent-constrained. The 50% or so who are qualified to work on AI safety and qualify for relevant clearances would probably want a close to a 0 added to what Defense offers (and not even for moral reasons... security clearances and "must work at the office" are real drags on quality of life that require significant additional compensation).

I've seen first-hand that defense systems are insecure and unsafe because defense chooses not to purchase excellent IC talent. The biggest organizational challenge in Defense is the lack of adequate compensation for engineers and scientists.

The largest management problem in the Defense industry is figuring out how to get the org to pay for excellent engineering and scientific talent. Your competitors in the labor market are paying high six or low seven figures, don't require security clearances, don't require drug tests, and have much more hybrid/WFH flexibility. For me to take a job in defense to work on ML Safety, you'd probably have to pay north of $1M.
There's a key difference between how we perceive and think about two dimensional space and 2+n dimensional space. If you want to seal in one geometric object with other geometric objects like in this example then in 2D it's sufficient to let the enclosing objects touch each other at their widest points, but in higher dimensions they have to touch each other at their narrower points, overlapping into each other in many cases. And in the first example which was the 2D example the outer objects touch each other at their outmost points. In 2D it looks like a full enclosure with no way for the inner circle to get through. But our brains assume that the higher dimension versions will be 100% sealing it off as well, because we saw it in the first example, right?

This is an example of a misleading first example. What actually will happen and what you expect will happen are not the same, because you got tricked by the first example.
Automation is good. Automation in a capitalist society with unlimited IP laws results in dystopia.
Sorry, but that's provably false, just look at all the Bitcoin knockoffs that forked off the main chain and the amount of money people put into them.

If someone managed to somehow own 100% of Bitcoin, it would make it worth much less, but it would not make it without value.
> And sure enough, it worked on you as intended and you've taken away the message Boris wanted you thinking about.

You’re saying he wanted me to take away the message that he’s pathologically dishonest? Because that also looks a bit like maybe he shouldn’t be allowed to lead a country, or even his dog around for a walk without the supervision of someone more responsible.
Even noobs can love languages. I'm a noob at compilers and I routinely beat my head against implementation. I do this, not because I will succeed, but because I enjoy the challenge.
That's fine. With one, (still) cheap subscription I'm entertaining people in three different households right now. It's well worth it. I don't even like much of the content on Netflix anymore, I'm just glad I can entertain so many people without three cable bills.

When they take away multi-household family support, I'll either cancel or pass the buck to someone else.