skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> UBI is first introduced at any arbitrarily low amount higher than $0. The fiscal authority then gradually increases the payout until the maximum-sustainable level of UBI spending is discovered

> Notably, since this policy is proposed to be 'funded' by a monetary policy contraction, it in theory requires no tax or consolidation of existing government programs to implement; nor does it necessarily imply a net increase in the overall money supply.'

What happen if this CBI maximum happen to be a very low amount? Too low to be an ‘income’, for example 10$.

I’m saying that because there has been periods where monetary policies have already been very tight [0] (recently following the subprime crash).
According to my understanding of the paper, in the periods there would be no leeway to fund this CBI.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1470953/monthy-fed-funds...
This is very telling. The American Empire didn't even work for Americans. Who really benefitted? Just the Elites? Why should common people care about propping up an empire if the people in power don't bother about them. For context, read this thread.

https://x.com/yishan/status/1906592890845028405
French Guiana is in the EU.
They are part of the EU and are part of the EU customs area, there is no practical difference with other EU territories regarding trade.

They are not part of Schengen (but EU citizens don't need any visa, it's mostly intended to curb illegal immigration from South America via Guiana) and have the ability to use different VAT rates from mainland France, but that's all.
this is probably my favorite comment on this post so far, super interesting

if you can find the article I'd love to read it
I really wish people would learn to keep emotion out of this topic. There is really one ultimate question here: "Is this the best use of our tax dollars?". Not: "Does this feel like the best use of our tax dollars?".

Show me how much UBI saves police departments, social welfare services, the health-care system,etc.. and how many new tax paying consumers it produces. Is it a reliable investment on people or is it a poor gamble? I've been hearing about this since before the 2016 election, there should be ample data on this, instead of speculation. And I have no problem with cities/states re-attempting and retrying new approaches to UBI.

That said, are there any studies or experiments out there where instead of a blind UBI, people are put in a labor pool of some sort where they get guaranteed income but if they're able-bodied they must make themselves available to perform jobs for the state or clients of the state? I'm thinking this should be the alternative to things like prison labor. Again, take the emotion and speculation out of it, what do we have left?
More likely that prices will go up and wages will stay the same.

Factories take a long time to build and businesses know that Trump is erratic and therefore have no idea how long these tariffs will be in place for. So opening a totally new and otherwise unneeded factory is a big risk. (Some companies have made recent announcements about opening factories in the US but largely these factories were planned to meet existing marker needs, just not yet decided where they would be.)

The price of a product will only go down when the majority of demand can be met by tariff free means. Until then a US company will sell a product at the same price as the imported, tariffed product because that's what they do. Same happened during the recent inflationary spike. Businesses put prices up more than their costs went up as they had an excuse.

Large businesses hate putting up wages and the level of desperation in the US is such that there is a large pool of people to fill low paying factory jobs. The post-pandemic wage increases were noticeable for the opposition to them and that was a very short 12-18 month spike, with wage growth now back to normal.

Yes, either way, the working class, indeed the median American, suffer.
A promise of money in the future is worth less than getting this money now. Present value (PV) here would be - how much you would pay now to get $X after T time.

Turns out that sum of PV($X in 1 year) + PV($X in 2 years) + … converges even though the series is infinite. Look up “perpetual bonds”.

The value of $10 paid annually forever is probably $200-500 depending on [things].

Source: I work in a bank but I’m also shit at finance so take this with a large grain of salt.
Not necessarily, you could give restricted access to a client
I mean, if you respect the law, you don't get fined. How hard it is?
There are no stable orbits inside the event horizon, and my understanding is even things like atom vibration can't move further from the sigularity so I'm guessing timespans would be limited!
He's been articulating this policy for his entire campaign. Half the country voted for him. If you are saying that the details of its implementation are insane, then are you suggesting that Trump actually personally developed and scrutinized those details? Because I don't think any coherent theory of Trump would comport with that.

I do think a lot of the details are bad. But Trump is not exactly a details guy. And while I think they could have been better (by a lot, fairly easily), I do think they are an accurate, if crude, representation of the policy vision Trump has been consistently articulating for decades (he's been talking about tariffs and trade deficits like this since the 90s).
Isn't that essentially what they are doing when the let the employees keep them?
>ThinkPads are durable but every day they get older, slower and more difficult to source parts for as collectors entrench themselves and the requirements of operating systems (and the "modern web") worsen

That's true for every computer. But people still buy old C64, Amiga, Atari, IBM or Apple computers.
They’re sanctioned up the wazoo

> U.S. total goods trade with Russia were an estimated $3.5 billion in 2024.

Among European Union members:

> The total bilateral trade in goods reached €851 billion in 2023.
Effectively everyone has an official, state issued ID. If you know someone who doesn't you should say so.
> The US doesn't have the people to do the actual manufacturing

The core issue is that, historically, experienced workers have passed down their knowledge to new generations, ensuring a steady accumulation of expertise. However, when factories close and seasoned workers retire or move to other fields without training successors, a vast amount of valuable knowledge is lost. Rebuilding this expertise is both difficult and time-consuming. Subsidies will be required to support local production - initially yielding lower-quality or significantly more expensive goods - until the Western world relearns how to manufacture at scale.

Furthermore, if you want to build something, you likely won’t do it by hand. You’ll need machines to automate the process or enable complex material operations. Rebuilding this capability from scratch will take time, as existing manufacturers lack the necessary capacity. Additionally, similar equipment is produced much more cheaply in China, creating another challenge that must be addressed. What’s likely to happen is that Chinese manufacturers will establish companies in the United States that replicate their production facilities elsewhere (e.g. mainland China). They’ll ship in parts, and final assembly will take place in the U.S. This approach allows them to bypass trade restrictions while maintaining cost advantages. I already know of several cases where this is happening.
They do it for investors to show off the hiring "activity" and company growth. Bad moves though.
Or escalate? Roll back defense guarantees.
Retaliatory tariffs are just dumb. They're literally a tax on your own citizens.

The only reason to implement them is to protect local manufacturing, which is usually a bad thing in the long run (they just become less competitive)
Reading Borges is anything but easy. It requires a certain state of mind. I myself would pick Cortazar over Borges any day, buy I have appreciated some of his writings.
The issue with the current system is it gives a lot of money and power to banks, and finance.

The issue with the proposed system, is that debt is actually a good thing for normal people. For example if you are young, productive, and come from a poor background, then you might buy a house with a mortgage. If debt is more expensive, then you are less likely -- and older people (and rich kids) are more likely -- to be able to afford these houses.

You might say that the current system is unfair, because wealthy people won't need loans and can put their money to work exploiting poor people. But in a system where we redistribute wealth this way, the impact is harshest on the poorest people. The things that are limited in supply and high in demand will immediately go up in price. The things they wish they could buy, and plan long-term, will become unattainable. And I've not even gotten onto how this would affect productivity.

Everyone is focused on how the rich are getting richer. This is inevitable in liberal societies.
The goal should instead be to stop the poor getting poorer, and I'm going to need some serious convincing that handing people a CBI, instead of providing debt, is going to actually benefit and not hurt them and the whole economy.
Nelm, a Helm 3 alternative, is generally available now
The guys on TV told them the people who supported it were communist and unions are for lazy people and welfare queens. They were told by the people on TV that if they vote against this, then those people will have worse and they'll have it better.

45 minutes down the road was a town with a large black population. When people talked about "those people in (town name)" being lazy or "those people" getting jobs or "those welfare queens" somehow benefiting from anything, everybody knew what they were talking about. It was better to be racist instead of caring about the future of their children

Now, decades later, it's still the same. "Welfare queen" isn't the word that's used much anymore--everyone knows it's used as a substitute for various racial slurs and it's hard to deny it. Instead, they complain about DEI and woke. They replaced the word, but the meaning is the same. They still deny that it's meant to refer to "those people", but they always mention "that" town name when talking about it.
My R60 which I got around in c. 2005 still works with Linux mint. I replaced the HDD and battery, but rest of the stuff including the orange light (to be used as night light) on top of screen frame still works! The hinges are a bit loose, so they need some support at times.
I wouldn't even bother with this one.

Either 100% not hiring (they've been posting the same role for over two years now) or the post is a misdirect. I applied two years ago when it was "US remote, San Francisco/PST preferred" and was told I wasn't in the "target region" (I was in California), with no follow-up when asking for clarification. I've known associates who've applied since and they've gotten similar vague/odd rejections.
People are sticking up for LLMs here and that's cool.

I wonder, what if you did the opposite? Take a project of moderate complexity and convert it from code back to natural language using your favorite LLM. Does it provide you with a reasonable description of the behavior and requirements encoded in the source code without losing enough detail to recreate the program? Do you find the resulting natural language description is easier to reason about?

I think there's a reason most of the vibe-coded applications we see people demonstrate are rather simple. There is a level of complexity and precision that is hard to manage. Sure, you can define it in plain english, but is the resulting description extensible, understandable, or more descriptive than a precise language? I think there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.
It's faster, but a big reason apple silicon is ahead is because the memory is co-packaged on an MCM. This is the direction things are going.
Inventing the automobile has clearly made humanity less fit. Should we stop driving?

No. Going back to the stone age is not the solution. For the majority of our day, commuting without a vehicle will be impractical. So will coding without AI, especially as AI improves.

To retain human competency, we will have to find a novel solution. For walking, we created concentrated practice time - gyms/outdoor runs. Some evolution of leetcode, or even an AI guided training, might be the solution for coding skill preservation.
Ironically Quake was like that in 1996, and, partially, Deus Ex.
Well, they are saying, EU market is harder to operate in (because everyone pays VAT) than the US market (no VAT, also lower regulatory barriers it seems), and also EU firms have a "home advantage" benefit, for example the regulation is written for their benefit.

So US is easy to sell in for everyone, EU is "hard" to sell in for everyone, but maybe less so for EU car makers. So there is something to this argument, it's not entirely without merit.

Additionally, US car tariff used to be 2.5%, whereas EUs is 10%. The imbalance is short in justification, though across the board, EU and US charge each other similar tariff amounts altogether, so there are other areas where the US charges more.

Whether that justifies broad brush enormous tariffs in everything, and whether US does the same in other industries (defence for example) is an exercise I leave for the trader.
Cheaper code-signing certs would be great. I don't like how the CA/B is so focused on TLS only. PKI is a slightly wider landscape. I sincerely hope PKI-centric code and package signing makes its way to the Linux world where most influential people in these discussions live, so they can appreciate the importance of having a "letsencrypt" for other types of PKI usage like S/MIME and Authenticode.
It is correct that training 1 model is a lot more expensive than running that same model 1 time. But when you have many people using AI, then you also get a lot of emissions.

The key challenge with greenhouse emissions is that the sources are so diverse and so distributed. We need to look at all the emitters, even if they are only in the range of 0.1-1.0% of global emissions.
Now control the SEC so the privileged won't get investigated for insider trading.

That's how you devolve into a 3rd world country by the way. I've lived in 3rd world countries and seen this over and over again. That's why 3rd world country stock markets don't go up - because locals and international investors have a distrust in them. Locals know insider trading is rampant.

Once this kind of corruption is accepted in society, everyone will need corruption in order to stay ahead.
What a sad loss. Why do people sail into a storm with 100+ km/h winds and 7.5m waves?
The perspective of the article is completely delusional. The idea that the author thinks they are above the petty "tribe" politics and have based their views on rationality and scientific evidence is complete bollocks.

The author has less self-awareness that the classic "I voted for the guy everyone else is voting for" guy. At least the later has a hint of consciousness about his own limitations.

Every ideology under the sun thinks they are based on objective truth. In reality our political views are shaped by the friends we have, our family, our upbringing, our social class, the media we consume, the experiences we made, our deep core vales and so much more. Most of it is not even conscious.

If you think you are above it all, you are just deluding yours. You just enjoy being in the enlightened centrist tribe or whatever.

Not choosing a stance is also choosing stance. If you see injustice and decide to stay neutral you decided to side with the oppressor.

In the end it is up to you to decide which tribe you want to belong. Do you want to march with those that fight for human dignity and social progress or those that want to oppress the many for the benefit of the few. Or do you want to sit by the sidelines while other people are striped of their human rights?
HN was also better before the advert and sales people flooded it.
Since display technology does not update as fast as CPU technology, and keyboard technology rarely updates anymore at all, you might still expect the entire mainboard assembly to be upgradeable.

Would certainly be more "green."
There are two issues with this thinking:

1. It is authoritarian. Democratically elected leader's duty is to present the policies he plans to implement so that voters can decide if they want them implemented.

2. It is based on the "4D chess" myth - that the leader is way smarter than the rest and is capable of outsmarting other countries. The history shows that it is never true. The leaders are normal people. And the institutions are as good as the founding principles that are honored by them.
Abstracting away the software paraphernalia makes this more clear in my view: our job is to understand and specify abstract symbolic systems. Making them work with the current computer architectures is incidental.

This is why I don't see LLM assisted coding as revolutionary. At best I think it's a marginal improvement on indexing, search and code completion as they have existed for at least a decade now.

NLP is a poor medium for specifying abstract symbolic systems. And LLMs work by finding patterns in latent space, I think. But the latent space doesn't represent reality, it represents language as recorded in the training data. It's easy to underestimate just how much training data were used for the current state-of-the-art foundational models. And it's easy to overestimate the ability these tools have to weave language and by induction attribute reasoning abilities to them.

The intuition I have about these LLM-driven tools is that we're adding degrees of freedom to the levers we use. When you're near an attractor congruent with your goals it feels like magic. But I think this is over fitting: the things we do now are closely mirrored by the data we used to train these models. But as we move forward in terms of tooling, domains, technology, culture etc, the data available will become increasingly obsolete, relevant data increasingly scarce.

Besides there's the problem of unknown unknowns: lots of people using these tools are assuming that the attractors they see pulling on their outcome is adequate because they can only see some arbitrary surface of it. And since they don't know what geometries lie beneath, they end up creating and exposing systems with several unknown issues that might have implications in security, legality, morality, etc. And since there's a time delay between their feeling of accomplishment and the surfacing of issues, and they will be likely to use the same approach, we might be heading for one hell of a bullwhip effect across dimension we can't anticipate at all.
There is still more trade with Russia than many countries in the list. Even Syria and Iran got tariffs.
I think it is deeper than the theory of class struggle.

France rebuilt its educational system under Napoléon to teach science to bright kids from all backgrounds.

Fast-forward 200 years, it degraded into a system that teaches anachronistic humanities to smart and docile kids of upper middle classes.

P.S. For non-French, I am talking about the system of Grandes écoles [1]

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_%C3%A9cole
The first step isn't from natural language to formal language. It's from the idea in your head into natural language. Getting that step right in a way that a computer could hope to turn into a useful thing is hard.
Judging by the woooly explanation of pricing maybe this is a low-fi, and clumsy, play to get bought out by a tool maker, or even Microsoft?
There are literally dozens of links in these threads showing how wrong you are.

>Name one person who can legally vote but was prevented from voting from this.

Literally thousands of people were barred to vote by last-minute voting roll purges. Virginia, Georgia...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/eligib...
It was a good essay- thanks for writing it :)
Heh, not in Southern Europe. They are like the spark of the Western Civilization from Law to Arts to Mathematics and Science.
Personally I think that their bet is - it will hurt US, but it will devastate EU and hurt China more than US. EU is fragile economically and political instability will follow if its economy crashes. Especially if US pushes OPEC to jack up the prices.
I do not care, in all .NET microservice based and distributed application where I worked, we always used RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka, Azure Service Bus or whatever messaging service was needed directly or maybe with a custom wrapper made by us.
Arathorn I'm a bit confused that Element pushes Element X so much already when your own Element One service doesn't support it yet?
If big companies are allowed to pirate content to train their models, so do I. I have to train my brain after all
From my experience, if no one is willing to engage in hypothetical antagonism, you inevitably end up with toxic positivity.
US is good at bits and bytes but not in actual atoms i.e. manufacturing. That role has been outsourced to China. Without real manufacturing in control of US, it is beholden to what China says which is bad for American empire and its power projection.
32 years after my father died, I still only get 1.9x the pay he used to get for manual labour. Given that inflation goes roughly double every 20 years, its clear I am getting less pay then he did. I also had to leave my village, because there were simply zero good opportunities to work in IT. The young leaving rural villages are pretty much common, and has almost nothing to do with how people vote. Neither in which country they actually reside. Its a downward trend, everywhere.
Factories are not coming back to the USA in large number, for a lot of reasons, at least not until full automation + tariffs makes them economical. But the biggest reason is that what's going to happen is that the average joe is going to suffer a bit, then will vote against these policies in the next election, and that's only 3.5 years away. If it takes a year to build a factory -- and frankly these tariffs could be adjusted again or removed in a few months -- and then they're likely to be fully removed in 3.5 years, I'm just not sure it makes sense to invest in a factory.
EU's fines are not tariffs. They are fines for breaking the law. EU companies are also fined.
Totally agree with all of your points. Specifically the framing of information. Simply checking if facts are true is not enough, it also depends on how they're presented.

It might be possible to extend this approach with the question "What else is important to understand the full context?" or something similar, and then search for that and present it.

One example I keep hearing about is the Trump<>Zelenskyy conversation, where news (at least in Europe) almost exclusively reported on the last 7min of a 1h conversation. Would be great to have something to cover these things too. But right now the cost seems prohibitive.