skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a difference between everyone getting some money and some kind of pure communism. Proposals for a basic income aren't arguing that in a 10m-population country, each person's basic income will be equal to 1/10m of GDP.

In addition, many of the gains from technological advances are currently not reaped by the people who actually produce them, because technology is a very interlocked system, and monetization does not track it perfectly. For example, some technologies are produced by a chain involving basic-science research, applied-science research, engineering R&D, and product research, but the earlier parts of that chain are, in many cases, not really cut in on the profits. Sometimes that's because basic science/math is not patentable, partly b/c capturing every bit of value you create is in practice difficult, and partly because there is no good mechanism for capturing longer-term value, e.g. if you invent something today which produces a commercializable product in 30 years, any patent will have expired.

Sometimes that's a good thing: the general technological level increases, and technologies become essentially owned by humanity in general. But "owned by humanity in general" is a fairly nebulous concept, since they don't necessarily benefit people equally: the people best posed to benefit from the common heritage of previous generations' technological advances are those with sufficient wealth to utilize them, e.g. to build new technologies on them or factories to produce them. (Admittedly not always... whether new technologies tend to concentrate wealth or dissipate it varies and depends on a lot of factors.)

Dystopian fiction fairly often poses this thought experiment: Take a situation where all human food needs can eventually be produced by purely mechanized means, and that this has been the case for 100 or 200 years. Does this mean all human food needs are solved? Not if the land and robots are owned by a small subset of humans: in that case you have the strange result that a subset of humans has control over all the food, even though they neither produce the food by their own labor, nor invented the technology that produces the food.

Overall, I don't think the basic-income solution is a particularly radical one. If robots are doing an increasing amount of work, and some portion of today's robots are the result of our common ancestors' ingenuity, it's a really rough floor function on "what portion of robot labor should go to human X?". So everyone gets at least some smallish portion of the robots' output, or put differently, a smallish portion of the automation dividend. Then the rest can be allocated with regular market mechanisms. (One advantage from a pro-market position is that a basic income might remove political pressure for other kinds of social-support policies that interfere with markets more, like making it hard to fire people.)
Silicon Valley builds spy tools, is horrified when they’re used for spying
Boxee wants a buyer
Those comments are 2 and 4 years before the submitted article. ???
Your phone doesn't emit any signals at all when turned off. If it did, people from the FAA to every geek with a spectrum analyzer at work would be screaming bloody murder.
> If you want long term economic security, own something.

Ah, let me commend you on your effective and nuanced translation of the French original, "Le peuple n'a pas de pain ? Qu'il mange de la brioche." Very idiomatic.
In situations like this, do startup founders leak the word that they want a buyer? It seems like they wanted to put the word out there, but doesn't that kill their leverage in acq discussions?
I never argued against this for "fairness" nor did Krugman mention the societal opportunity cost.

It's more an issue of signaling. People won't go through the pain necessary to learn a new skill if there's no incentive. High wages are encouragements to endure the discomfort inherent (for most) in change necessary for the rebalancing of the labor force. Low wages signal that the skill is not in high demand (relative to supply) and that there may be other more opportunities more attractive.

The negative income tax reduces the incentive to move from one segment of the labor force to another and could be analogous to a tariff, in a way.
One more thing that's been getting a lot of traction recently is CSS transitions. Some devs are using them for hell everything, because they can. When it's too much of it, it feels like old shiny GIFs whenever you change the zoom level of the text.

I've saved in bookmarks one page that made my eyes bleed due to it, but I don't have access to it right now. Stay tuned, I'll post it on Monday :)
disclosure of investments, assets and other sources of income is an annual requirement for everyone (or nearly) that works at these agencies. The forms are very thorough and clearly get examined carefully and checked against other sources - if you accidentally omit something it is very likely they will contact you about it. Except for some specialized jobs, this constitutes by far the most serious security review employees are regularly subject to. If anything it seems like those subject to the financial disclosures go out of their way to avoid anything that could even slightly be interpreted as a conflict of interest.

While I'm sure there are cases, I think the controls in place to guard against that kind of abuse are probably some of the most effective in government. More effective than polygraph programs to screen those moonlighting for a hostile party, for example.
Guessing that either a) they moved themselves up the supply chain or b) they are selling at a loss to try an boost sales (to try and get to A). B worked for Amazon, but it's also been the downfall of a lot of co.'s.

Regardless I wish them best of luck, really like the product!
Definitely not a unique idea (see also: http://www.threadless.com), but I wonder if it could be bigger if it were more community oriented (Get your weekly r/pics or r/WTF shirts!), somewhere between the Shirt Derby (weekly, but with themes curated by Woot) and Teespring (highly specific, one time designs for a community and cause).

Depending on the size of the community and distribution of votes, it need not necessarily even come down to a single tee choice. Perhaps the top N tees.
A 27" 2560x1440 screen. One of those cheap IPS panels that came out of the box with a couple dead pixels. It's on a monitor arm from Monoprice.

When I get home, I hook my 11" MacBook Air up to it. Portable when it needs to be. Tons of screen real estate when I need it.
I couldn't have said it better myself. The problem with programs like these is that it's almost impossible to roll them back. They are like a snowball: small at the very beginning, growing larger over time, until at the end they become a catastrophic force (usually for bad).

I wouldn't have trusted either Bush or Obama with these powers. Government officials have proven time and time again that they don't always have the general populace's interests at heart. The saying "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" is the first thing to come to mind.
>>Would I prefer less data collection and stronger privacy protections? Sure. I'd also prefer universal healthcare and a reforms in federal educational funding. But I'm not going to rant and rave about the END OF DEMOCRACY if I don't get those things right now.

The part where your analogy breaks down is that not having universal healthcare or reforms to federal educational funding are not things that infringe on people's freedoms.
http://btcfile.com/ - same product, but no commissions currently.
how your "useful" subset of the 1% creates technologies which benefit humanity in the long run, but harm large numbers of individuals in the short run

I think you forgot to add "in the current economical/social system". The technology never hurts anyone objectively, it always helps. It's us, humans, who decide that someone should be punished for the technological progress. ("You've been replaced by a machine, go eat cake. To celebrate our newly redoubled productivity, we'll let you starve.")
> Where will AI be in a "full generation"? I don't know, but a good bet is getting very close to human-level intelligence

LOL, no. The amount AI would have to advance from its current state to "very close to human-level intelligence" would have to be orders of magnitude more than it has evolved from its initial state to its present state (over the last 50-60 years). Pray tell, what technologies can you name that evolved faster in their second half-century than their first?

Does that mean we definitely won't have human-scale AI in 50 years? No, because revolutions are impossible to predict. What it does mean, however, is that human-scale AI is not the predictable outcome of existing evolutionary trends. Indeed, developments in AI more or less stalled out in the 1980's, most of what we've seen to date is new applications of techniques pioneered decades ago.

To use an analogy, what do you think CPU clockspeeds will be 10 years from now? It's possible that some breakthrough will happen and we'll have 20 GHz processors, but projecting existing trends suggests that the increase in clockspeeds from 2013 to 2023 will be a lesser percentage than what we saw from 1993 to 2003.
Holy shit, you just made me realize Snow Crash is coming to reality (for certain parts of it) faster than expected :)
Ask HN: Dedicated Hosting vs The Cloud
Where do you guys keep your projects? Is it in the cloud (Appfog, heroku, amazon) or in a traditional shared/dedicated server?
You keep both development and production in the same server?

What would you recomment for a freelancer developer looking to host his mid-size projects?
New "future visualization engine" helps kids choose career tracks
A great story (and awesome title).
You are failing to see the scope of this.

Imagine a world where your latte is served by a machine, your taxi drives itself, when you had surgery the guy operating the waldoes was working from his office in Mumbai, you do your own lawyering with the help of Watson running on your iPad, the malls are self service, and the cops are made by Boston Dynamics.

Now imagine being sacked because your boss has a Watson too, trying to get a job - any job, and realizing that that the system doesn't need you - you are underqualified for the purely human jobs that remain, and your minimum living wage (covering rent, food, utilities and no slack) costs more than a burger flipping robot's amortized installation expense.
Guaranteed basic income doesn't mean guaranteed employment. So if you invent something that lets me get rid of 90% of my work force, I can still buy it from you, fire my people, and you can still get rich.
When Sarcasm Hits Amazon (Read the Reviews)
From http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/x110.html

"A public and private key each have a specific role when encrypting and decrypting documents. A public key may be thought of as an open safe. When a correspondent encrypts a document using a public key, that document is put in the safe, the safe shut, and the combination lock spun several times. The corresponding private key is the combination that can reopen the safe and retrieve the document. In other words, only the person who holds the private key can recover a document encrypted using the associated public key."
Put it on your own server.
You can simplify this further: we are all hard pressed for time in the modern first-world, it's likely the most valuable thing in your life, even for kids and non-breadwinners.

I feel that the lack of free time is attributable to a large number of "ills" for society, from the lack of participation in civic duties, to lower voting rates, etc, etc.
OK, but can you put the missing pronoun back? I cringe at the idea of you enshrining my lack of proofreading.
I'm really, really sorry that most of today's developers (it seems) consider checked exceptions to be a bad practice. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world still advocating their usage.

You're not alone. I find checked exceptions to be an invaluable language feature.
How else should s/he make the point? As someone with "normal" eyesight, I should not have to enable accessibility aids in order to read the clock on my iPhone.

In a sane world, iOS 7's graphic design decisions alone would already have knocked ten billion dollars off of AAPL's market cap. Slavishly copying the people who slavishly copied you in the last round is not the way forward.
infraprint.com just started one about two weeks ago. I haven't had the opportunity to test it yet but it looks like it has all the features that you might need.

I'm planning to use them to print and mail custom letters through the USPS for a credit repair site I'm building.
I meant from a moral/ethical standpoint, not a legal one. Obviously people who are not US citizens or residents have no legal protection under US law.

What I'm saying is that the effect of either action is more or less the same. The NSA is secretly obtaining the personal information of a lot of people who are in no way a threat to the US. Whether those people are American or Chinese doesn't matter one way or the other to me.
The Cost of Design
After the boxee box fiasco, no wonder sales are going down hill on the new device.
I can see firmware updates being a problem.

If the malware can hijack the firmware update process, then it copy itself onto the Trezor (making the device worse than useless.)

I assume it will display a fingerprint of the new firmware and the user will need to press the button (like with a BTC transaction.) Still, a few users will probably be caught out by this.

Unless they Tivoize it (then the "open source" claim is rather dubious, but I think this may be the best solution anyway.)

So don't buy a used one.
Wow. I'm sure there are examples that might prove your point, but those are some of ugliest icons I've ever seen. The second one looks like it's straight from Windows 3.1.
IOS 7 and change
If we're talking about incentives, I don't think we need capitalism to provide sufficient incentives. Humans are weird creatures. We don't care about absolute wealth so much as we care about relative wealth (processing in relative terms is deeply ingrained into the human thought process at every level). I bet a society with no more than 10 different income levels, set based on productivity, would provide sufficient incentive to get nearly everyone to contribute at near peak capacity.
It is fairly well-studied; it's called chopMD in the literature. It has been shown to be indifferentiable from a random oracle [1, Theorem 3], provided enough bits are chopped.

[1] http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~puniya/papers/merkle.pdf
Monitoring single page applications
Why would we get into this business? Because of shirts like this: http://i.imgur.com/QNQqXnD.jpg

In all seriousness, we really dislike the inefficiencies of this industry ourselves. We used to contract out our print work, but we opened up 3 facilities (California, Pennsylvania, and Indiana) to improve on the quality and efficiency issues in the industry.

This is an industry where everyone uses the same equipment, same consumables, and same method of decoration, and still charge high prices because everyone else does. We differentiate ourselves by having the technology and processes (from the manufacturing side to the ordering side) and scale to move orders in and out more efficiently than anyone else.
T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless Shielded from NSA Sweep
I don't think keeping the government from seeing information that low-level IT people at AT&T or Facebok can see is, in Ben Franklin's terminology, "essential liberty." Indeed, I'm far more concerned about what kind of protections exist to keep my bank or my credit card company or my health insurance provider from seeing that information (i.e. none).
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/former-nsa-empl...

Dr. Charlie Miller, former NSA global network exploitation analyst, @0xcharlie: While I was at the NSA (2000-2005) we were told it was against the law to spy on Americans and if you did it you'd be terminated. In retrospect, it was going on even then. I'm not surprised the heads there lie to Americans, but I'm surprised they lied even to their own employees.
Athens was a tiny city-state in a world where every other political. The Roman Republic did get fairly large and lasted a while, however.

After the classical era and prior to WWII the only major democracies were Britain, the U.S. and intermittently, France.
I was thinking of something similar years ago. Except replace google image search with wikimedia and so you'll have access to public domain images (and possibly higher resolution files).
How to write effective FAQ answers: answer quickly
On fulfillment: Order to fulfillment has manufacturing essentially baked into it. The process goes from manufacturing > shipping. The manufacturing part is where most of the hard work is and will remain.

The pain point of some company making tshirts for anything less than 1000 people is negligible from a revenue standpoint. And if your the api or conduit they do it through you will literally make pennies. Unless you setting the prices and baking your profits into them. We used to make a ton of money making tshirts, but that is because they were all custom design, cut and sown to our specs. As such, this was useless for us. Even usher wore won :)

http://bit.ly/1992yiQ

Promotional merchandise is a minute part of this printing business. This solution makes that market more efficient in ordering only, not actual fulfillment.

And I have no idea what you mean by this:
"Also, for promotional merchandise, there aren't great marketing tools that are tightly coupled with this to make the swag effective in getting customers (i.e running contests / giveaways /etc)."
Even in bulk, the cost of transport from Sunnyvale to SF is not trivial.
Maybe the trick isn't to make ordering more efficient but rather the printing process?

Or maybe even consolidating the printing process? When every other t-shirt printing website you see online contracts then subcontracts out to a network of small, medium, and large sized t-shirt printers I can see just being inefficient.

Shirts.io has their own production facilities across the United States. This is more akin plugging into their workflow, a magic black box where you input in requests and out comes t-shirts to your customers.

At scale, low margins is good margins.
Aternative to Google Apps for Business?
So my small business (in Europe) needs to stop using Google Apps. What alternative serious solution do I have?
I submitted the original (better) article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5883006
I don't get it, unless Snowden's published his public key somewhere and Wired has some really, really important information for him?
A solution would propose a "how to"; I did not. I am merely pointing out a long term historical trend. If a person makes their living based on selling their time and specialized skills in exchange for money (as I currently do), there is no one size fits all strategy to take a wage earner and turn them into an owner that will work for everyone.

Labor is a market like any other. If it's too crowded and competitive, it's best to consider other options.
TechCrunch took this article, excerpted it badly, and gave it a misleading headline -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5882123
Sure, but who decides what the right number is for a basic income? No matter what number you pick there will be a portion of the population who sees that number as "good enough" and will cease to work.

As the basic income grows, more people will choose not to work. This is good as it reduces the supply of labor, thus increasing the wages of those who do work. But it also reduces the amount of income available for taxation, as this basic income isn't taxed. And as the tax base is reduced through a higher basic income, more money is needed to pay that basic income. That drives up the tax rate. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to find yourself in a situation where the math simply doesn't work.

This analysis also neglects the increase in prices that might accompany such a system. The higher the basic income the more likely you are to see an increase in prices that guts the effectiveness of the basic income.
Yea see then it makes sense to me, sort of. If you have your own manufacturing ability then for sure go for it.

However, I will still say that most of the money to be made is in actually selling your own designs.
Kirk would infamously defeat Spock at chess by making surprise moves that made no sense, thus confusing and destabilizing his opponent. A good rationalist should see genuine irrationality as part of their toolbox.
I think this gets played out with the "normal" population all the time....
Krugman's trying to juggle two contradictory viewpoints: one (the Luddite view) holds that the purpose of work is to have something to do. The Luddite petition is arguing that allowing these people to fall into idleness simply because there is a more effective machine to do their job will be toxic to society. This is somewhat confused by the Luddites also throwing out a lot of half-baked economic arguments, but those can be safely ignored in hindsight.

Krugman then proposes a solution from an entirely opposite viewpoint: that the purpose of work is to produce useful things, and if the constant disruption of jobs is the cost of efficiency, we should just give the affected a handout to provide for their needs.

But because the guaranteed income doesn't solve the Luddite's complaint, it misses the point entirely.
prediction: the collection won't stop, NSA will simply become an even better funded service bureau to provide evidence and information "for official use only", for random court cases etc...thus paving it's way for this kind of collection to become broadly socially acceptable
It'll likely cost $200 just to have a repairman show up, and that's actually reasonable considering his time and overhead.
Some of these examples are good, others not so much.

Consider the first one. The conquest, while brutal, was merely the finale of a horrible civil war that was going on before we got there. And a military dictatorship that was only able to maintain power because we supported it really wasn't a legitimate government no matter how you slice it.

Now Laos I grant you. But the conquest of Cambodia put an end to one of the worst genocides since WW II. The Khmer Rouge killed 20% of the country. Unfortunately after they were evicted from power, the USA took the approach that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and supported their attempts to retake power for decades.

There is a lot of legitimate room for debate about that one.

Some of the others, of course, I'm in full agreement with you on. But you really should have just stuck to your best examples. (That would be the crushing of would-be democratic governments in post-war Eastern and Central Europe.)
It's also compatible with assistive technology (though be sure to note the edge cases): http://www.html5accessibility.com/tests/form-labels.html

(based on discussion 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890631)
More likely that it's a publicity stunt, raising awareness of strong encryption that the NSA (probably) can't crack yet.
It's fine for personal use isn't it?
PyPy: Py3k status update #11
My well that's kind of disturbing... not that they do such correlations (everybody does), but that typewriting/handwriting are considered "eccentric" to the point where they don't even read the letters.... [I mean... if they actually read them, surely a good argument and moderate tone would outweigh any initial judgement from slightly non-mainstream presentation?]

So if you want them to read your letter, you'd better write it in Microsoft word, using Arial, at medium size, without any formatting, and print it out on an inkjet printer on A4 paper?

[And sorry for the snarky/argumentative tone, it's obviously not your fault and you can't do anything about it, but it really is disturbing...]