skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually think Argentina would be a great place to impose basic income.

Argentina has a long time standing issue with 'welfare' programs being abused in corruptive ways, such as government employees cashing in, their relatives, etc.

Middle class despises the way those funds are used because they are not regulated or productive: as a foreign national, you could get welfare within 6 months of moving in to argentina. Plus free college education.

Also, argentina has a long-time standing issue with inflation, which in this case could be worked to its benefit, which is it can fund this strategy.
Currently, the government uses welfare programs to target vulnerable sectors and generate dependency, but if everyone got it, they wouldnt have that kind of edge anymore, and if they wanted to better one sector, they would be forced to help every sector.

But i will still think that although basic income is very forward-thinking, it has veery unforeseen consequences. We dont know what is going to happen to a city or a country if such a thing is implemented, for better or worse, in terms of sociology, more than economics.

I also wonder how to actually make it practical. By basic supply and demand, this should create a strong increase in demand, which raises prices and the very basic income would then become less effective.
I'm working on a product (http://parley.co, beta launch is next month) that will make it easy for anyone to send PGP encrypted mail using their current email addresses (especially Gmail).
"Ever needed to send hundreds of pictures to a friend? With Plug, we invented a technology to transfer files instantly. No matter their size, no matter their number. That’s also part of our job to simplify storage."

How exactly are they planning to make that a reality?

Say I've been out filming with my GoPro and my friend wants the clips, or I've taken some photographs with a DSLR (which are at least >5MB in size per picture).

It can't be instant.
If the intention is to reward in terms of karma, judging one liners is a lot easier (and quicker) than judging the quality of a software patch. The feedback is instantaneous, thereby explaining the skewed ratio of one-liners to useful patches. Regardless, those who currently exhibit a superhuman level of programming expertise will continue to do so while us mere mortals seek out cat pictures on Reddit.
In my experience, 99% of people don't know the first thing about taking a good photograph. They will not be helped by a 41-megapixel or even 41-gigapixel camera.

Beyond a point, all the pixel density does is dramatically increase their storage requirements - on the camera, on the computer they sync with their camera, and on their backup device. 41 megapixels is well into the realm of negative marginal returns.
Weird ad copy. The product is aimed at techies, but techies abhor patent-encumbered software.

I thought the days of using "patent-pending" as marketing puffery were over...
While Snowden's disclosures were a bit creepy my thoughts were: at least we (USA + NATO) have the homefield advantage on this

The I'm genuinely scared about is what about the Russian, Chinese, Iranian (?) intelligence services would do with information like that
Ah, but that is a feature, not a bug.
sort-by takes an optional comparator, so doing (comp - val) is a bit unneeded. Just add in > as an argument to sort-by:

(->> (string/split s #"\s+")
frequencies
(sort-by val >)
(take 10))

Just mentioning it here because I find it vastly more readable than (comp - val).
Why is that better? That sounds much worse in just about every way that I can conceive.
> When I leave the office building I work at the end of my day, the janitors are just showing up. They probably already only get paid the basic livable wage (probably less), so why would they show up to work if they were getting the paycheck anyways?

There's something that deeply bothers me about the notion that the above is a bad thing. Yes, you would no longer have access to low-wage janitorial services. But that's your problem, not your janitor's. Do you think he wants to be scrubbing toilets for a subsistence wage?

The world will not fall apart for want of janitors, or garbagemen, or baristas.

Imagine a world where, at some time t=0, there are zero people filling these jobs because of a basic income. It truly doesn't take all that much enterprise to see an opportunity in a world with no janitors. At t=1, there would still be janitors, but there would be fewer of them, the ones that exist would be better-paid, because they're now working for something approaching the wage that you might demand if someone asked you how much it would cost to clean their office.
I haven't looked at it all, but it sounds like you're wanting something like the functionality that SSH's "ProxyCommand"?

As an example, we lockdown our servers so that they are only accessible via SSH from a few hosts. I got tired of SSH'ing into server A just to SSH into server B, so I set up my ~/.ssh/config file so that when I "ssh serverB", it uses the ProxyCommand functionality to basically do that for me.

Here's what it looks like in ~.ssh/config:

Host serverB
ProxyCommand ssh serverA.example.com -W %h:%p

When I "ssh serverB", it connects to serverA first and then connects to serverB. I could be wrong but it sounds like that is what you were talking about.
CEO tears up products playbook in mega Microsoft reorg
The "execute inside SQL but ends up in C#" is because of the terrible decision of the C# language designers to make reified code (expression trees) have the exact same syntax as lambda functions that are normal code.

If you had to tell the compile if you wanted code or a tree, that problem would be solved. It'd also be one step closer to allowing type inference for lambdas assigned to locals.
I take issue with the idea that you can count PyPy as a +1 for Python's speed without also counting it as a -1 for libraries. Especially considering SciPy and NumPy are not yet supported by PyPy, which means you lose out on a lot of libraries that depend on them. (For example, sci-kit learn).

You can't say that Python has both speed and great libraries. It has one or the other. Hopefully this will change at some point and I'll be able to reap the benefits of both.
Looks like it draws energy from Ethernet to power the Plug Device and the USB drive. Is that right?

Do consumer-grade routers/switches deliver power over ethernet?
In practice, trading costs are very steep, and a single trading signal is almost never enough to exceed them, but multiple signals can be combined to make a decision while costs stay the same. For an individual signal study like this, a no-costs assumption can be useful to see if it has any predictive value on its own.
You're right about your point in the short term. My comment was considering the extreme (though inevitable future) where the majority of labor is obsoleted by automation. Usually discussions about basic income have a component about the increasing obsolescence of unskilled and even skilled labor and the necessary changes to society to accommodate such a future.
> Given that the vast majority of wealth in this country in held in liquid assets or in real estate

Source?

> There will be some complicated edge cases but there will be relatively few and the ability to game them is less because wealth is a simpler concept than income.

How is wealth a "simpler concept" than income. AFAICT, income is far simpler (and, in fact, involves a strict subset of the assessments necessary in assessing wealth.)
In fact, you already see this in places like Israel and the perpetually "studying" ultra-orthodox who refuse to do military service, have lots of kids, and, of course, take massive state subsidies.
The flood of newly minted BTC will likely cause exchange rates to crater. Hopefully the increase in available BTC will stabilize prices as individuals/small groups will have to expend more capital to influence prices in their favor.

The next six months are probably going to be a little crazy, hopefully it'll drive BTC out of the hands of speculators and into the hands of actual users of the currency.
i've been coding in python professionally for 4 years now, and i'm currently working on the biggest project i've ever worked on.
to me, being scared of changing the signature of a function because the static analyser will not be able to spot all the places i've used this function is a real problem ( along with incomplete autocomplete ). i do unit test everything, but i'd like to keep unit tests for things a computer can not theorically do.

since i'm still in the early phase of the project, i know that python expressiveness is an edge, but i'm looking right now at what's going to be the "definitive" language i'm going to rebuild my product for the next 3 to 4 years.

Python badly needs optional typing. really. i'm pretty sure that would solve both the speed and tooling issues. right now, for me, it starts to become unsuitable as soon as you reach 5-10k lines of code and a team of 2.
This is how I do this sort of thing all the time. But, the sort is O(n log n), so it's asymptotically less satisfying.
As you mention, inflation results in people losing real wealth proportionally to the amount of total (nominal) wealth that they have. On the whole, it's a fairly progressive form of redistribution, as long as wages are able to rise with inflation.

It would seem to me that an unconditional basic income could therefore be paid in part through this mechanism, with the inflation caused by simply increasing the amount of money in circulation. That is to say - the money could simply be created by the government. You can frame this as deficit spending (if you'd like) or you can frame it as the equivalent printing of money. This could (by act of Congress) be done without floating bonds to cover the deficit, but that might cause some conservatives to freak out.
Nokia are never gonna learn. Megapixels and Gigahertz don't matter any more. What matters is the experience. Jolla are doing this perfectly right. Focusing on the software to deliver an amazing and unique experience.
I Quit Twitter
The whole purpose of Cryptocat is that people are supposed to be able to use it without trusting the integrity of the server. That's practically the project thesis of Cryptocat.
Many of these arguments assume that in (say) 50 years, all the janitorial/toilet cleaning/fruit picking jobs (i.e. shitty) jobs won't have been replaced by robots. I think this will happen whether it puts people out of work or not, so maybe we stop people from needing these jobs in the first place. Sure there will be some manual labor left to do, but it'll be highly paid so you can do it 5 hrs a week instead of 50 for some extra cash for your house party.
To fix healthcare we need less technology, not more. People are getting cancer and diabetes because we've gone from eating nutrient dense high quality food to industrially processed corn, soy, and wheat-based junk. We have to stop the vilification of red meat, promote the health benefits of grass-fed meat, and try to get factory farms to employ some sort of holistic management [1]. Not only can we feed the world in a healthful manner this way, we can also reverse climate change.

Big pharma isn't interested in curing anything. It's financially beneficial to them to keep us sick. Why help them even more?

[1]: http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world...
Allow me to be surprised this time, I don't see much new here, compared to what we already saw about Prism (all the slides). Maybe the only thing newsworthy this time is that additional documents confirm that Prism exist?

I applaud this article of course, as it gives less chance for unnatural interpretations of the slides that we saw by pro-status-quo writers ("it's not really a direct access") -- now we have additional confirmations it's a "query API" access and a "start real time monitoring" access.

Unrelated, I'm impressed with the absolutely perfect timing for an article on the day when Microsoft presents the new reorg. Heh.

My question remains can anybody recognize something otherwise new here?
That would be the "Translucent File System" from Sun, patent #5,313,646 (http://www.google.com/patents/US5313646). Back when Sun was building a new source code control system (code named Avocet) they wanted a way to create a 'view' of the branch which included stuff from NFS servers and stuff locally. The problem is subtly tricky in some ways (creating 'whiteout' to delete a file which exists in one layer but not the other).

Its a really handy thing, and I was very impressed with it in the mid '90s when I was using it. Perhaps its time has come again?
Exactly. And it's not just about being paid to write code for your job. My open source contributions have had orders of magnitude bigger effects than writing on Usenet or commenting on forums.

- I made some of my best friends through working on projects in the same open source ecosystem.

- I attribute some of my best jobs to having built some reputation from OSS. Would I have gotten through Google interviews if one of the interviewers hadn't been a user and a fan of one of my projects? I'm pretty sure it, and having a long term public track record must have helped some.

- What little internet fame I have (and it is very little) is all purely attributable to coding something, releasing it, and then writing about it.

- I still get a kick out of looking at some old code I've written every now and then (like old Perl Golf entries). Every now and then I'll get to tell a good debugging war story to friends, or swapping stories with them about cool things we've coded lately. Boasting about the cool forum posts... Yeah, not so much.

And Hacker News? I don't think I've have had one business lead (which didn't pan out) as a result of a comment, but haven't interacted with a poster outside of HN otherwise. There's no reason to believe my HN karma will ever matter for anything. I guess it's nice to cross the downvote threshold.
I agree with all of that. What I'm saying is that blaming the current security state on 'unions' is like saying NYC exists because of, I dunno, greenpoint. Not necessary and not even sufficient.

Of course certain unions see an interest in the security state. Other, bigger unions are generally opposed but don't have skin in the game. Whatever. The security state is much bigger than the police and prison guard unions.

Fundamentally, the issue here is political game theory where there's no upside to fixing things and a lot of upside to painting your opponent as 'soft on terror' or 'soft on crime'. So policy only moves in one direction, and that direction is often stupid. Unions' wishes are just drops in the bucket compared to that.
No, you have it all backwards...

Working at a crappy job causes suffering. Not having ANY job causes MORE suffering.

The solution you put forward (making crappy jobs illegal) is not somehow going to magically make poor people suffer less.
If their kernel-hacking description is to be believed, it will hork your whole system every time you get a minor OS upgrade.
small but annoying thing in the article: microsoft≠silicon valley
>>>As Jaron Lanier points out, Kodak once provided 140,000 middle class jobs, and in the smouldering ruins of that company’s bankruptcy we have Instagram, with 13 employees.

This argument is just plain wrong. Kodak was not replaced by Instagram. Kodak was replaced by Apple and Samsung and a bunch of other asian manufacturers. They have way more than 13 employees.
LaunchPad LA Fall 2013 applications open
That would probably qualify as raising pay.

And I'm honestly wondering - what percent of payroll is the typical CEO or CEO bonus?
No, they don't save the non-tech savvy users. They click "yes, I want to see the dancing bunnies" every time they see a UAC popup.

They do make it reasonably pleasant to run Windows as a non-admin user though, and not the impossibility that was in XP.
Death To The Stock Photo
Hey, thanks for the interest - I'll be writing about it soon on my personal blog - http://ozkatz.github.io/
The creation rate of BTC is fixed every 10 minutes. More ASIC power does not equal more BTC.
Or, use a defaultdict(int), or more in line with yours:

d[word] = d.get(word,0) + 1

dictionary.get is quite useful.

Also, I'd consider s.split(None), instead of s.split(' '). It will group whitespace, so that any double space or other whitespace is collapsed into one delimiter.
What HTC did do a good job of was branding their pixels as "Ultrapixels". I see that branding used on all the major tech blogs when mentioning the HTC One's camera.

Nokia's making the mistake of pushing a camera with specs that isn't easily understood by many people, and from the looks of it, that seems to include people who consider themselves photographers.

I tend to think that the 41 megapixel count will turn off many prospective buyers ("Why the hell do I need so many megapixels?").
I don't understand how people oppose unconditional basic income without also opposing the fact that automation decreases the amount of working hours available for a person(or in other words, the amount of jobs), and thus decreases the amount of income per person, while maintaining productivity stable if not increasing it, thus making all sorts of goods cheaper.

Someone enlighten me. These discussions always seem so damn complex and heated for some reason. What am I missing, when I believe that UBI/BIG(basic income guarantee) is the future, and that in future people don't need to work 40 hours a week?

Before anyone counters with saying that "people don't need to work and thus just leech the system", I will cover this now. People will need to work, because UBI/BIG will not cover anything but the very basic income. This means cheap housing, cheap food, clothing and whatever else is considered basic income. Perhaps this would be something like 800 USD per month, or 200 per week, give or take some. People would most definitely want to have more income, and as such they would want to work. A full 40 hour week? Perhaps not -- maybe 20 or 30 hours a week. Whatever they feel fit best for them.

(note that I live in a country with the nordic welfare system, where most people live on a rent rather than own a house, which perhaps makes a difference, or then not. I don't know, hence why I discuss.)
I carry a Wave with a factory pocket clip at all times when awake. It's only marginally bigger/heavier than a normal knive with a pocket clip. I use it daily, I carry it on me all. the. time. It's saved my bacon again and again.
The market rate for investment bankers is more attractive than my job. Doesn't mean I can just be an investment banker tomorrow. Or a nurse.

If I live comfortably on my basic income doing whatever, how do I become qualified to work? Remember we have college grads who aren't qualified to work, and they've spent their entire lives being educated.
Projects from the docker community
Sometimes quitting may be the right step towards a brighter future
The speculation that relies on a known mechanism is more believable than the speculation that doesn't even propose a mechanism.
You're correct. You can see as much here in the implementation of `advance` (as you'd expect, it's very simple):

https://github.com/mozilla/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/itera...
You shouldn't, of course we could limit couples to replacement rate of birth, if that's 2.1 for couples or 1.05 for individuals, they could sell a fraction or all of their "right to reproduce" to people who want to have 3 or more kids.
It has a power adapter, I didn't read anything about PoE.
Indeed, but the point is that with BI, they would be on the hook for those excess costs. Preventative medicine is cheaper and when the excess cost of an ER visit comes directly out of patients' pockets, they will be more diligent about prevention.

Good analogy is car maintenance. Most people are very diligent about oil changes because they (inherently, I would argue) recognize the cost structure.
Is there any information that the marketing department at MS was even aware of the PRISM program? It's likely that that program was need-to-know, and anyone who did know couldn't stop MS marketing from doing a campaign based on privacy because that would be revealing a Top Secret program.
I went to "theSummit" last year as a speaker. The speakers were all asked to wear blinky badges so people could find them and ask about their talks. Unfortunately, in proper party fashion, they had the DJ playing crap music so loudly that any real discussion was impossible. There was little of interest in there, really, so I took my leave pretty quickly.

I much prefer to hang at the bars on the casino floor and talk to whoever comes around. They let you smoke, the music is better and less deafening, and you'll meet more interesting people.

There's a big element at DEFCON of people who read way too many Neal Stephenson novels, got a utilikilt and a mohawk, and are roleplaying as haxxors. Escape that. Find interesting talks. Find feds, because they're getting paid to do security work and are often damn good at it. Don't feel like you have to go to every talk.
Continuous video streaming in the background on a mobile device? Say goodbye to bandwidth and battery life!

Regardless, myself and many other app developers will still use this due to the tragedy of the commons.
Awesome idea and it seems very ambitious. I wish it supported USB3 and gigabit ethernet though, especially when you're talking about several Terabytes of files and streaming movies, etc.
Test suites are awesome
I doubt it. After the a few hundred (thousand?) blocks are mined, the mining difficulty algorithm will kick in, making mining just as difficult as it was before, relative to the new hash rate. It will mean gpu miners won't make anything at all, but the overall volume of new coins won't increase.

Further reading: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
Home electrical work is a great example.

Just pick up a $10 book at your local Home Depot and if you can read and follow the simple instructions and guidelines inside, you'll be able to do most simple electrical work.

Some electricians may say that it's foolish to do your own electrical work unless you're a trained/certified electrician.

Lots of people do most of their own electrical work without problems, and only hire expert electricians for the really risky or technical parts such as connecting to the utility companies or dealing with really high voltages.
This could be a good win for Google if they do it properly.
Long time ago I had an old Windows phone, HTC Diamond and some other wierd pda/phone type thing that was awful. Since that I went "Android" - I've used HTC Hero, Desire, Xperia Arc and Xperia S. Now I'm using Lumia 920 I got from my workplace.

I used to think that Google Maps was great, but after using Nokia's HERE maps I have to say, HERE is better. Not sure if it's the hardware, but first of all it's A LOT faster than Google Maps ever was. Secondly, HERE maps work offline (altough I just heard Google is finally enabling this with their maps).

Without wanting to sound like fanboy, the 920 is a great phone: it just works. The UX is better than in android, mainly because different apps all follow same guidelines on how to implement UI navigation/actions.

On the android phones I had, most of the time it was "free for all" with the UX as different manufacturers and devs implemented their own ideas on how nav/actions should work.

Other things I can say about 920: battery time is great, wifi (and wifi sharing) work flawlessly, sound quality is great both ways and the _camera_ is best I ever used in a mobile phone. It just puts all other mobile phones to shame.

I'm looking forwards to 1020 and hope to get one when they are available.

Only bad thing I can say is the Windows store and apps. I miss quite a few apps I used on my android phones. It's a shame so many devs only focus on apple/android.
An Interesting reader on Neocities
Yes, they could work from a branch, but then we'd have to give them read-write to the repo. There's no per-branch access control.

Working on a branch in their fork doesn't help. They still can't pull in updates from the original repo.