skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How much is having your office trash can emptied worth to you? floors swept? toilets cleaned? ...and other labors which aren't worth much, labors which have little joy therein, yet cannot be abandoned completely? Offer those current workers (of whom there are a lot) the option of doing nothing yet getting paid the same pittance they are satisfied with (and many are), heck yeah they're gonna quit and you're gonna start wondering who's gonna empty the trash and clean the toilets while you're enjoying your labor.

Their labor may not be worth much. It still needs doing, and you're compelling others to take away any incentive to do it.
It's only adults, and only citizens. By my calculation that's 4.72 million people and $158.8 billion. Switzerland's GDP appears to $632B [1]. So that's 25% of GDP. High, but hardly equal.

Also:

It is unconditional (i.e. it is given to everyone regardless of wage) but it is also taxable. So if you have other income you get it, but some of is recaptured in taxes.

It replaces every other form of welfare: unemployment, maternity leave, student stipend, basic retirement support, health care premium subsidies, and so on. Some of these programs provide more income, so in those cases it is a net savings.

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Edit: N.B. that's at the official exchange rate, which is what you want to use if you are directly converting the Swiss stipend into dollars. If you want to use PPP then you need to adjust the stipend that way too. You should still get the same 25% GDP.
I know this is about Ives' contributions; but when I think about the credit given to Jobs, I tend to think of it more as Dennis Ritchie and Jobs being the modern day Tesla and Edison.
"Future of JavaScript" doc from our internal "JavaScript Summit" (2010)
What would be really great is if we had control to put notifications back in the center of the screen. On a 27" screen, notifications for calendar events often go missed.
Friends don't let friends spend significant amounts of time debating about their IDE.

(Eclipse's tabbing scheme is awful, though. Like the author said, its like they have an algorithm to detect which tabs I'm going to need the most and then they hide those tabs.)
I have literally no problems with Eclipse, been using it for years.

Regardless of whether we're talking about Eclipse or some other tool here, one often doesn't recognize the pain points they experience if they don't have any perspective on other ways of doing it.
> Simply giving everyone a check won't cause fathers to stay with their kids and won't keep gangs from filling in the power vacuum created by their absence.

That's true, basic income doesn't solve the problems resulting from the fact that the US is the most eager country in the world to incarcerate its citizens.

But neither does paternalistic welfare. Obviously.

> A check isn't going to replace work as a framework for structuring society nor give people the fulfillment that comes from work.

OTOH, an unconditional check -- unlike means-tested paternalistic welfare -- avoids providing an economic disincentive to work, and avoids hampering the ability of work to promote economic and social mobility.

> It's possible that paternalistic welfare is simply unworkable in practice. But I think advocates of basic income ignore the fact that there is a rationale behind paternalistic welfare that isn't addressed by basic income: that poor people lack more than just money.

The opponents of basic income ignore the fact that paternalistic welfare is a staggering failure at providing those things "more than just money", as well as being an incredibly inefficient mechanism for providing the money part.
Do you know more events like this one?
In a industry with high capex and low margins, access to capital is often the deciding factor in competition. Especially for something, as posited in the original article, that "merely" improves process efficiency by 10%. (Order of magnitude would be a different matter.)

Big Chemical might make a huge capex investment to build a new plant. And then some Chinese company eats their lunch, because that Chinese company has access to low-interest loans from a state-owned bank.

This happened in batteries. This happened in solar panels. What's to say it won't happen in ammonia?
Not exactly sure what you're suggesting, but I'm not assuming the poor don't eat. On the contrary, I'm saying that the poor spend a greater percentage of their income on food and rent, and that overall price inelasticities of food/rent would result in inflation for that class of goods.

Let me put it this way. If you were the only grocer[1] in the neighborhood and you knew that everyone in the neighborhood just got a 10k raise, would you not consider raising prices? Or, put another way, if you're the only grocer in the neighborhood, and everyone gets 10k/yr of free money, and that induces, say, 10% of your workforce to quit for various reasons, then you have to pay more for labor and pass the costs to customers. Either way, food prices rise.

[1] Note, that's not improbable in many poor areas.

[2] I'm just armchair speculating here... so, like I said, I could be way off base.
For many modern societies, I would consider the fact that they're free market economies their defining characteristic, rather than their being democracies.

The idea of capitalism drives laws and lobby. It hides deep structural problems our societies face, influencing public discourse. A misunderstood idea of what capitalism is supposed to be causes many people think "not my problem", and "those lazy bastards" instead of actually looking at the problems others face with empathy.

In summary, it removes human dignity from the center of our considerations.
I like "multiplatform" -- current winner :)
Show HN: Daily email summaries to keep up with your team
Being a monopoly isn't illegal. Taking unfair advantage of it can be.
I sure hope this doesn't become a thing, and if it does, that existing ad blocking and/or anti-malware tools pick it up and warn the user against it.

When you start appropriating other peoples' computers for your own purposes, secretly, without their approval, that's called a bot net.
Minimum cash transfers are one of the most effective methods of sustainably increasing the wealth of a population. There's a pretty successful charity that does this kind of work in Africa:
http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cas...

There's a guy at Columbia University that's running studies about giving drug addicts guaranteed cash, and it's actually allowing them to more easily break their addictions:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/science/the-rational-choic...

My only worry about this program is if it will indirectly inflate the cost of everything.
Yes its the best thing ever.
MongoDB stores JSON (in binary form) - serialized Javascript objects. That there is what looks to be a large and polished library for mapping between the two is a huge red flag to me.
I'm not asking one person to provide a basic income for everyone. Here is my question: If a majority of the people in the country support this, why are they all not already doing it? And if they do not support it, then the referendum will not pass.
No idea. I'd hope so... learning it for me was a bit of a pain as all the relevant facts are split across the manual, the reference manual, the scripting manual, the forums, and answers website, some random websites, the google groups, the mono documentation and references and resources, etc.

I mean, it's not really that bad, just that some things that should be easy to look up are hard to find, and some things that are easy to look up and easy to find have to then be translated from "scripting and drag/drop/click" into actual code (particularly frustrating when you're just starting).
Well, as evidenced by this discussion, we do very often nerd-out on social psychology :) !

Here is a Seattle-based program that mitigates the huge costs of alcohol addiction by providing free housing and some realistic rules for staying there. The structure of the program both protects society from their addiction, and "them from themselves".

http://www.desc.org/1811.html

The built-in (and often clashing) drives for "fairness" and for "charity" often bubble up as we examine a program that helps someone who may not seem to deserve our help. But there are practical reasons to help people, with measurable results.

Still, when programs are developed, they must incorporate and mitigate the potential social side-effects!
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=yang+liu+east+meets+west
I think it's fair to ask tough questions before one experiments with the fabric of society.

It will likely be interesting and exciting if the legislation passes, but will it be better or even good?
I've heard it observed before that current generations will assume this meant that the sky was blue, or perhaps black, that being what many televisions display when 'tuned' to an inactive input.

Before i got to your comment, reading the grandparent about this being a 1980s future immediately put me in mind of something else William Gibson said in ~1993:

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed"
Ask me in 6 months :)
I only used GDP to compare how astronomical the costs are. It's not a question of what kind of society you live in, I'm just trying to understand the plan. I personally think that at some point, every country will migrate to some form of basic income because robotics, and software will squeeze humans out from almost every corner of the economy.
I did not know about this program, thanks for sharing.

I see a glaring difference though. Instead of taxing everyone on their person income the government took a portion of the profits from the natural resources of the state and set it aside for an endowment of sorts. The fund itself is invested and the dividends are paid out. Most welfare plans do not operate this way, even if they started out with that intent.
Thank you, I'll have $20 glasses from China. Can't imagine I'll ever pay a ridiculous amount for a pair elsewhere.
It's not an argument. I'm curious why swombat is more comfortable with the government using his money for something he himself has decided not to do.
The real trick to consistently beating this game is to always horde at least 75 scrap, and buy a Teleporter as soon as possible. Then, buy extra crew members. Preferably, these will be Mantis > Rock > Most Others > Engi & Zoltan. Then, near the start of every battle, fire a single volley to set things on fire / distract crews, and immediately send over your boarding party to begin harassing them. If there are too many, pick on them, or attack things while they try to put out fires. Often, this will cause them to give up on one repair, wasting time while they run around the ship. If they're a small crew, then just roll over them with Mantis / Rock strength. Just make sure you don't attack too much, or you may kill your boarders.

This is doubly effective, as if you kill all of a crew, then you (almost) always get the best reward possible, which often contains bonus equipment, and up to 50% more scrap.

By the end, you'll often have so much money that you'll be capped on energy, and just buying alternate max systems. Also, always destroy rebel ship Medbays, and the Fire Beam and Bio Beam are devastating for this strategy.

Finally, as noted in another person's comment, Teleporter makes the last boss remarkably easy. Just Teleport into each of the weapon rooms and kill the operator (starting with Missiles). Notably, don't kill every crew member, or the Super AI will take over for the final boss and it goes into crazy, Ultra-mode.
Checked it out - looks awesome and will be downloading the free version to try it out first. Anyone else have other suggestions?
This was seemingly inevitable whether this is actually useful or not. Microsoft has been getting increasing heat about our stack ranking system, both from employees and from external people.

But I don't think stack ranking is our problem. I think our problem is that we value this notion of the brilliant and excellent individual contributor instead of valuing employees that value teamwork and team problem solving. I suspect this is an institutional problem, having been started by exactly that sort of person.

It's this that causes the backstabbing and the mess that people attribute to "stack ranking". Until we put value in changing this culture, I don't see too much changing.

(Disclaimer: my team at Microsoft is sort of odd - we're not in Redmond, and I don't see a lot of this backstabbing that is oft-reported. I do see our managers overvaluing the brilliant IC and I do see my organization undervaluing teamwork, but at least we're not doing that stupid game playing like joining weak teams to get great reviews.)
> Mass markets are driven by marginal costs, not one-time engineering costs.

If you define "mass market" as "a market in which the quantities delivered are so high as to render the amortized initial fixed costs negligible in the final cost of goods", this is, of course, tautologically true.

Of course, that that doesn't actually help with proving that any particular market is a "mass market" in that sense with regard to any particular proposed bit of one-time engineering.
Does the kit contain Methylamine? Red Phosphorus? Ergot alkaloids by chance?
There are already two problems, if you're building a rich client-side web app. Have you done this? If so, you would understand the problem.
yeah, but think of the pro: "you can help pay for this website by pressing this button and leaving this window open for an hour". You could help SETI by just visiting a URL.

By fertile pasture I mean that both malevolent and benevolent communities will support this. This could see a lot of optimization if open sourced (is it?).
I really like the "I like, I wish, I wonder" style of communication. Gives everyone a framework and helps the quieter employees have a voice.
Bill Gates improved the world!
To clarify, you feel that using Eclipse is more work than breaking a file into multiple shards and setting up a build process to recombine them?

(I'm not trying to be snarky and I apologize if the above comes off that way.)
Open source web app for database version control
seems more like an metaIDE framework
As a libertarian, I feel the government should stay out of people's lives, and yet I feel this actually achieves that over the current style in the US of needing to be deemed 'worthy poor' by the majority.

Assuming this replaces all other government payments: most tax credits, food stamps, social security it create an amazing administrative savings.

I'm thinking through the implications for the child support model in the United States. As I understand it, the child has a right to receive compensation from their birth parents to pay for housing, food, clothing; but if the government is taking ownership of all human beings, it seems the birth parent would have no responsibility to provide support in excess of the basic income.

Orphanages, foster parents, or current custodial guardians would just receive the basic income and act accordingly. The implications for this sort of program seem huge.
Opensensors - publish IoT data at scale
Animating 3D characters' faces with live puppetry
We will continue to invest in a generous rewards budget, but there will no longer be a pre-determined targeted distribution. Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget.

Is this not in effect the same as a curve? Giving higher bonuses to one person means giving lower bonuses to another. Giving everyone the same bonus discourages high performers from staying (and also working on the same team). People who receive little to no bonuses take the hint to leave, just as if they had received a 4 or a 5. Considering only 10% of employees receive a 4, and 5% receive a 5, I'm thinking that effectively, there has been no change.
One day, I will be able to compile my golang apps to work on browsers without losing considerable performance, multiple threads and concurrency. That day, I'll be very happy.
Capitalism is a human-created system that stratifies and organises the behaviour and status of people.

How could that be anything other than a political system?

Capitalism is neither eternal nor universal it is merely a system that most humans adhere to currently.
The best way to approach investors: four tips
Thanks for checking us out! We're trying to stay away from trying fruitlessly to track individual productivity (it's exceedingly inaccurate, not to mention creepy) and focusing on overall team progress instead. We don't aim to replace daily standups, just supplement them. Let us know if you have any concerns or suggestions!
Actually, my assumption would be less disease leading to more prosperity leading to smaller families. The current correlation between disease and population growth in any given part of the world is pretty strong. Hans Rosling has some good talks on the subject.
The SQL layer (which is compared to Google F1 in the blog post) is open-source (it is not yet released; an older version is on GitHub: https://github.com/FoundationDB/sql-layer). This means that the SQL parser, query planner, execution engine, etc. can all be audited, examined, and changed.

You are correct that the FoundationDB storage engine itself (transactional key-value store) is closed-source. (It is free for production use in smaller cluster, and available for license for larger clusters.)
Is this how Google plans to bridge the JS performance gap to get web apps running at "native" speeds?
TextMate 2 Basics
Hey Blahah, I'm an undergraduate in Biophysics at a highly regarded US university. I have a few years of experience in coding, bioinformatics, computational biology, and wet lab research. I find the Cambridge Plant Sciences department's work really interesting- are there any summer programs or internships for foreign undergrads ongoing there, or any that you know of in the same field at another university?
Which might be why this version of Unity updates to MonoDevelop 4.0.1.
Wanted to comment that I downvoted not because of your first sentence, but because of the second. Hackers have not proven themselves more rational than society at large and I wish we would stop arrogantly thinking of ourselves that way.
I think it's would be mostly the same with just a couple substitution. Even though some of the chemicals aren't used anymore and are considered harmful overall that doesn't mean they don't belong in a chemistry set for learning purposes.

I'm just thinking of the first time I saw a piece of sodium dropped in water. So I can imagine that just because its a waste at the professional and real world level doesn't mean it's necessarily a waste at the toy level.

But as for this specific chemical I have no idea if this is true about it or not.
How many levels of backups for your backups do you need?
Obamacare Website Launched Without a Full Security Test
"I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain."

The "same", meaning he felt like Britain was stuck in 1980's version of the future? Or the past? Strange, my experience and I think the usual experience of Americans visiting GB/Europe is of feeling like you've timewarped into the past. How far depends on where you visit. Paris/London may feel twenty years back, other places fifty or a hundred.
Thank you for writing this. I think it's valuable to step back and look at whether accepting donations is in line with the set of values that led to open source in the first place.

I am reading Ben Franklin's autobiography and came across this quote which I think also neatly sums up a point you omitted:

"...as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
Capitalism is an extension of the right to property; the details of what counts as rightful property is certainly a political question.
Only ships to the United States, sadly for me and my son.
>But in 10 years of 252 trading days of 6.5 trading hours, there are 58968000 seconds. If you'd traded AAPL a million times every second, you'd have made $30132648000000000

This makes no sense whatsoever.
If it's voluntary on the user's part, then I'd be all for it. I was more concerned about the "in the background without attracting attention" part, which implies that it is done behind the user's back. I could see users opting into distributed computing tasks if given the choice.
- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable spaaaaaace, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan's portal is so much more popular than Google's.

I second this theory. A similar version of this happened in China too. A few years back, when Baidu was still copying Google's minimal design pixel by pixel, they suddenly discovered that it was losing traffic to a random site with only one static html page setup: hao123, which also fit into the 'cluttered, link-rich' interface category. Baidu ended up acquiring hao123, spending close to a million dollars on a few lines of html. Note that Chinese language bears quite some similarities to Japanese, they are both character based and typically a hassle to type in large chunks.
New events? New sectors? New systems and subsystems?

New content from Chris Avellone?
Be interesting to see if this becomes a target for other languages, e.g. allowing browser applications to be written in Python.
Yes, but there is no forced curve fit.

A healthy organization will always "manage out" people who are not fit for the job. At Microsoft, folks are given the hint early enough that they can explore other internal options before leaving the company entirely.

Though, to be honest, if someone just can't cut it, they will leave the company.
At least now there is a 'base income' of sorts, and if you are unsatisfied with your job and/or the bonuses you get, you have ample time to find another job. You also have the opportunity to try to improve. This is a great improvement over 'pack up your shit and leave.'
maybe paid plans are 2000 (free) subscribers + X (paid) subscribers? Otherwise it's pretty flawed
User cylinder claimed that peer-to-peer aid cannot make a meaningful impact on society.
Open Source tutorials for Backbone
Github repository:

https://github.com/thomasdavis/backbonetutorials
Harvard - Boston + Silicon http://www.thisplusthat.me/search/Harvard%20-%20Boston%20%2B...
JQuery Find ≠ Context Select
Why couldn't you use a CDN for the JS files? We most certainly do.
Actually Debian testing has :
nodejs 0.10.21~dfsg1-1
Inside Ad Tech Fraud: Confessions of a Fake Web Traffic Buyer
> Here is my question: If a majority of the people in the country support this, why are they all not already doing it?

Because they are not a psychically linked hive mind. The way the majority of people in a country coordinate the flow of resources through society is through the government. That's what's happening here.

This is a bit like asking, "If you want peace, why don't you just drop out of the war?" The coordination is an essential part of the outcome.
Hush looks great if you're using the Pomodoro technique. You don't have to remember to re-show notifications - they just reappear when it's break time.
If it's not the best, why would you bother getting the job done with it when you could be having a better experience?
> Nobody asked you, or anybody else.

Huh? And nobody asked you to reply to his comment. My goodness tptacek, this is a discussion board. Open-ended conversations take place here that drift off to all places. Sometimes they lead to interesting points, sometimes they don't. I see no reason to mock someone for that.