skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing I genuinely don't understand regarding the basic income for all argument is that surely it just moves the goal posts rather than solves the problem at hand?

In the current system, you can go stay at home and get income support, which should provide you with the basics i.e. a home, food, electricity etc.
If you would like more than this, you can go and get a job and hopefully earn more (have a better lifestyle) than staying at home not working.

[Note the 'should' and 'hopefully' - This system may not always work, but when it doesn't it's generally a fault with wages paid not being sufficient rather than the benefits system being broken]

This therefore means there is an incentive to go work. There is also control, to make sure the money the unemployed person is getting is mostly spent on the basics (such as housing, rather than say drugs).

The problem with suddenly giving everyone a minimum amount of money, is that due to everyone now 'at least' having that amount of money at hand, this becomes the new 'bottom' of the market. If I get a job, I earn money on top of this basic amount, which means I can afford nice things and the person unemployed still can't afford anything.

To clarify, this works similar to pricing of items in different markets. A beer in the UK is ~£3.50 (£5 in London), a beer in Vietnam is about 14 pence. Both costs are fairly relative to what they would have to pay their work force to produce the item (plus cover costs and make a profit) and what the local market can afford to pay.

If let's hypothetically say, you gave everyone in Vietnam this basic wage, the cost of beer would not remain at 14 pence. The first reason is because the work force would find their existing pay negligible compared to the basic pay (so wages would have to rise to be incentive to work on top of basic pay) which would in turn cause cost of manufacturing to rise, but also the market would realise with this extra money available - the price could be set higher and would rise accordingly.

Now back in the UK if this was to occur, you would have slight price rises due to these factors which would in affect move the poverty line up higher, which would mean the people at the bottom are still poor relatively.

What's worse is that assuming the people who are unemployed are given the choice on how that money is spent, they may in fact not spend the money sensibly (i.e. on their housing) and end up homeless instead.

The final problem with this model is that the cost of living and economic output is not evenly distributed throughout a country. £1750 a month in northern England may give you a fantastic lifestyle, where as in London you'd barely cover your rent. (What happens to the unemployed in London in a fixed give everyone a basic income situation? They have to leave London and move where they can afford, which then makes it potentially harder to find a job and splits the country into two halves, the elite / the poor).
Well, then I restate: "Those proofs were not proofs of the theorems they/Bloch wanted to prove."
The point being: Proving is not just about your proof, but also about writing meaningful Theorems, or as it is more commonly called when programming: specification.

The implementer is not free of proving her implementation correct, given that the original algorithm was proven correct on some theoretical computational model.
Bloch argues that, since the original proof is not sufficient, the implementer needs to test. I'd add, that if the implementer would adapt/redevelop the proof for her implementation, she might forgo testing. Of course, this is practically impossible for many execution environments.
Its just a shameless attempt to advertise mtgox, who by now pretty much pissed off everyone in the bitcoin community with their crap.

Remember it was mtgox who caused the last crash and have since continued to screw users while getting into all sorts of trouble in US for dodgy going ons
Python eats drunk man in India
I have a better idea:

Universal no-income.

Instead of making costs higher by distributing money and thus making it less effective, distribute no money, lower costs and allow people to live more comfortably.
Very good point. After all, we all know how sometimes wonderful ideas can turn out badly [1].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
"Just look at how college costs magically rise to the availability of loans and grants. "

That's the universal problem with subsidies. That, and reward for non-performance.
Is it silly to assume that competition in a free market will produce startups trying to upset this situation in markets that do not have a high barrier to entry?
I followed this closely 2/3 years ago, skeptical, yet very excited by the possibilities of the outcome if true. I followed the heated debates on ecatnews.com, had a lot of fun but after almost 2 years of postponing a serious test, came to the conclusion it was a scam. I'm afraid this is yet another episode of a serie that just can't die.
Can we automatically downvote all Bitcoin news please? Seems like every owner of Bitcoin these days is either busy writing a blog or making a Bitcoin related webpage? - Ponzi
I would add another answer choice to the question 25:

25. When the Apollo astronauts were on the Moon, they did not fall off because:
(f) They were on Earth
Emigrate? I guess that could be the problem with universal income as well. You get £20k p.a. for doing nothing, so maybe you'll be doing nothing on a beach in Asia?
IT worker throws out hard drive, loses $7.5 million Bitcoin fortune
Citation needed.

The line on slide 111, "Engineers 3-10x more productive, smaller teams", is probably in reference to...

Slide 16: "Code is typically 3-10x smaller when written in Clojure."

Slide 110: "3-10x less code. Limiting factor in programming speed is essential complexity of the problem, not typing."

I have to take assertions like that with a sizable chunk of salt. The alternative would mean that there's a gigantic arbitrage opportunity that's being missed by a bunch of highly motivated people.

That there is a "a gigantic arbitrage opportunity being missed" is essentially the thesis of the talk.

He states the reason why (Clojure is cloaked in 50 years of Lisp misconceptions) on slide 21: "Lisp is an old weird AI language no one uses anymore. It's so slow it requires a supercomputer. It's impossible to hire people who know how to use it. Functional programming has been proven impractical. Also, parentheses."

The body of the talk is designed to dispel these beliefs.
Go forth and ask random people whether (a) the earth revolves around the sun, or (b) the sun revolves around the earth.

The proportion giving answer (b) will cause you to sob even more.

(Yes, I have done this. Afterwards, I hid under my bed bewailing the ignorance of my fellow hominids.)
except it barely mentions mtgox. If it wasn't in the title of this submission, I wouldn't know it was by mtgox.
There's a similarity between teachers and journalists in that they're supposed to double-check their informations before transmitting them. Not doing it plagues society.
Progressives seem to have lost all understanding of the concept of money. It is a means of trade. The spending power of the basic income will ultimately reflect the value its recipients produced in order to obtain it - zero in this case.
Yes. This was posted on hacker news a couple of weeks ago and attempts to put some basic (US) figures through a monte carlo simulation: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...

There was a lot of discussion generated from this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6725096
> If you would like more than this, you can go and get a job and hopefully earn more (have a better lifestyle) than staying at home not working.

Except this isn't the case, since benefits are usually cut when you starting working. This means that you start work in an insecure job with no necessary increase in quality of life.

With a guaranteed income, if you were to get a job, you'd have a guaranteed increase in your quality of life, since the benefits are always there, so there is actually more incentive to work.
You are missing the point here, in your example when new money is created (to be able to hand it to everyone) you simply devalue currency and create inflation.

Universal income is not being generated out of thin air by the government, it is being generated by tax. Therefore you will not find hyper inflation of the form you suggest.
I'm reading this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-ind...
Paper wallets using offline-created Bitcoin addresses are the safest means of storage. I etched my keys onto metal dogtags and have them stored in a fireproof box.
Sounds like what Packard Bell computers did. They were inexpensive. And if you bought two of the same model and opened them up you'd see different components. Different modems, ram, etc.
Basic income has potential but I think people are waiting for the governments to provide, while there is possibly another way.
Imagine creating bitcoin version that does not favor early adopters, but allows everyone participating to get the same amount of coins every week. Of course it's easier said than done, and it would need to be detailed a little more, but I think it's possible.
OCZ Declares Bankruptcy – Toshiba Interested In Its Assets
Nope, I say make sure poor people have that basic income.

You don't have to give it to everyone.

I live in a low income neighborhood - you can clearly see the difference in generational poverty and how help is needed.

You also can fix the problem by making sure that corporations like Walmart do not rely on their employees getting foodstamps as part of their income as a business model. It is a very unlevel playing field when entire cities are funding the "low prices".
Now that is a clean, friendly design.

I wonder how long until we need a crypto-currency lobby for congress.
This is why Rails fails.
You assume that those minimum wage shelf stackers will work the same hours for the same pay in the same conditions.

Prices rise. But costs rise too. The wealthy would be no more or less wealthy than they were before.
> Can we automatically downvote all Bitcoin news please?

Good idea. An entirely decentralised, pseudonymous, secure way of exchanging money is not something hackers are interested in.
When I took physics in high school, Gravity was introduced to me with an equation. After 5 minutes discussion, everyone in the room would have known how to answer the question about "Dropping a rock on the moon."

I find it hard to believe that a high school physics student, just fresh from studying gravity module, wouldn't realize that a rock dropped on the moon would fall down. Doesn't pass the smell test.
Do Americans have lower IQ than Brits? Is Boris Johnson right about IQs?
More fires.
> I etched my addresses onto metal dogtags

you mean you etched your keys, right? Nice idea.
> How much does this reactor cost?

Household version (released in 4 months, since 2010) is supposed to cost ~2k€. 1MW version purchased by "an unknown customer" (speculated to be acutally DARPA", supposedly costed 1MM$.

> Can't someone buy and review it, test if it works, etc.?

When making a purchase you sign an NDA. So, no.
Well, they orbit each other, don't they? [Edit, well, to be precise, they are both orbiting the barycenter, which, given the great mass of the sun, is much closer to the center of the sun than the center of the earth]
A few of my favorites are missing: RailsCasts [1] and Learn Code The Hard Way [2].

[1] http://www.railscasts.com/

[2] http://learncodethehardway.org
It's what make language that compile to JS worth using.

I've start using LiveScript on a side project and TypeScript at work. I can now use the future without browser compatibility nightmare.
Both a and b are true (after you fill in the missing information). With two objects it's only a matter of chosen frame (or point) of reference. I'd argue that since you're on Earth, b makes more sense.

The importance of the heliocentric model comes from the fact that there are more objects in the solar system. With multiple objects you could also hold any one of them still but it makes the model much more complicated and the attraction between the objects less intuitive.
> it's not because they're stupid or ignorant

They may not be stupid, but that's pretty much the definition of ignorance.
The Walton family alone has more wealth then the lower 42% rest of the USA.

So do I, and so does almost anyone with a positive net worth.
Actually, it's more like giving them an insurance discount when they carry around one of those black boxes that measures their driving. But it's not very different from what you said, really. Is it inefficient and bureaucratic? It's not that difficult to ask someone to step on a scale and measure their weight and height, or determine whether they have completed a college course. I think the benefits are worth the effort.
I think it is not just about moving goalposts.

What is different is that it frees you from the worry that you need to eat and have an abode. And the hope is that this comfort will make you engage in work you really want to do, rather then turn you into a couch potato.
See also:

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson%27s_construction_algor...

I implemented a sort of micro-grep in the past using the Thompson's algorithm, it was a great exercise in practical applications of heavily-theoretical CS stuff, with recursive-descent parsing of the regular expression, then using Thompsons algorithm to create a NFA out of the parse tree, then a simulation of an NFA with a DFA using two stacks. I used the Dragon Book for reference on this, all pretty awesome stuff.
There already are: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/26/bitcoin-lo...
Ack. Fixed and thanks!
Not necessarily. Inflation is caused by several things, but mostly an increase in the money supply.

If a universal income is paid for with tax money, then the money supply stays the same and it shouldn't have much effect on inflation. If it's paid for by printing money, then yes, it will contribute to high inflation.

(very basic explanation, there are other factors that may cause inflation, but money supply is the big one)
isn't it possible at least in theory to decrease this administrative costs using technology, But maybe it costs said much because there's no real push to do so and large resistance from the public sector ?
Simplifying the welfare system is a good idea, but my idea is more like gamifying the system and giving people rewards for doing good things. Simplicity is not the only virtue, what about tangible, measurable outcomes that have improved people's lives?
Does anyone know how the swiss proposal treats travel/residency?

I've long thought that a guaranteed income is an idea worth trying. But it did occur to me recently that such an amount would let you live like a king in many developing countries. Is there anything in the proposal to stop people from simply moving abroad?

More generally, how should a well designed universal income proposal treat travel/living abroad? If you cut off payments for those that are no longer residents, you suddenly provide a huge disincentive for travel. If you keep them, you encourage mass emigration.
That's correct Mike, it's not always the case (benefits being cut and working a job can provide you with a worse quality of life) - but I think that is more of a problem regarding the wages people are being paid in jobs, rather than the benefits system.

For a long time inflation, house prices and general costs have beat basic wage increases - leaving many working for less money relatively than they would've got years ago. Meanwhile, the big corporations report yet ever greater profits and the CEO's take ever higher multiples of basic salary in bonuses each year.

The system is broken, but the equality of pay and living standards is not to blame with the government, it's to blame with greedy corporations, share holders insisting they need to do anything for profit and wages being pinned down to the minimum they can be that the work force will stand for (to maximise profits).

If corporation pay was fairer (like it used to be) where perhaps a CEO only makes 10 times the basic workers salary, rather than 100 or 1000 times the basic workers salary, then the wealth from the corporation output would be shared more evenly and the problem would be solved (for people in work).

Not to mention corporations which don't pay tax causing governments to lose out on a lot of tax revenue which would in turn pay to support the poor!
Google forced CyanogenMod to pull its installer over no option to uninstall
They're just a brainstorm. The simplest and most effective would probably be measuring BMI for rewards. It could put some brakes on the obesity epidemic. Being paid to do nothing isn't exploitable, because there are no rules, but that doesn't necessary make it better, because there is no connection between effort and reward.
"This sounds like some communist plot. How can anyone take seriously the idea of paying people to sit around on their backsides?"

That's something a person that didn't experience communism would say.

Communists would never allow a person to just stay idle doing nothing if you don't have a job you would be sent to forced labor camps where people are needed.

Ask any Romania born before 1989 if you don't believe me.
actually on the ecat.com site :"Leonardo Corp guarantees a COP of 6 for the ECAT, meaning that it takes a required 1 kW of input power to produce 6 kW of heat", which is, granted, quite an achievment.
That's 42% combined. They have more wealth than 42% of the rest of the population combined.
Some things are not immediately measurable? Who is going to decide what is worthy? I may take care of my community by planting pretty flowers all day (like in Minecraft), would that fit your criteria?

You try to gamify and I think people would game it instead.

Instead, basic income makes you free to figure out what is a worthy endeavour.
No, because Google & Amazon don't ship nearly as many tablets. You're pretty much asking "Would you feel the same if the situation was completely different?" and I can safely say no to that.

Apple gets those benefits of the doubt because they're one of very few companies that ships tens of millions of a single product. Your comment is also filled with intentionally obnoxious absolutes. I never said that this is the case, or surely it must be, I'm just speculating.

I'm more than willing to entertain the idea that they did it simply to keep fab costs low and margins high. Maybe if Google or Amazon delivered consistently or shipped similar numbers, people would give them the benefit of the doubt. One good generation each isn't exactly enough to build confidence.
Dan Carlin interviews William Binney
I look at what happens when a geographic area experiences a blanket jump in income. Generally housing prices go up across the board.

Why? Because its the one item the broad population bids against each other on.

The more pessimistic will say the money will be spent on gambling, drugs, and alcohol.
> This therefore means there is an incentive to go work.

Yes and no. It's not an incentive to get a 10hr/week part-time job, for example, because you'd lose your benefits and so get paid less overall. Even making the transition can be difficult - most jobs won't pay you until the end of the month, but your benefits will be cut off at the start. How long does it take to save up a month's expenditures while on benefits?

> There is also control, to make sure the money the unemployed person is getting is mostly spent on the basics (such as housing, rather than say drugs).
> What's worse is that assuming the people who are unemployed are given the choice on how that money is spent, they may in fact not spend the money sensibly (i.e. on their housing) and end up homeless instead.

Sure. But the evidence is that just giving people money works better on average than requiring them to jump through hoops.

> The problem with suddenly giving everyone a minimum amount of money, is that due to everyone now 'at least' having that amount of money at hand, this becomes the new 'bottom' of the market. If I get a job, I earn money on top of this basic amount, which means I can afford nice things and the person unemployed still can't afford anything.

You can't have it both ways. Either employed people get more money than unemployed, which provides an incentive to go work, or they don't, which doesn't.

It's not like people with more money are going to start consuming twice as much food. The unemployed should be able to afford basic necessities; the employed will find it easier to buy luxuries, which is as it should be.
Who is Nathan Walker of WP Avengers? | thetorquemag
I don't think cost of administration is a big deal. The outcome of the system in people's lives is more important. Otherwise you'll end up creating a system where people sit around in idleness and drink themselves to death on booze. Paying for their needs is a good idea, but what about using the payment to motivate them to make their own life better in other ways?
In that case I would do whatever was necessary to get that required performance - but only after doing extensive performance testing to ensure that's really where the bottleneck is and providing copious comments and possibly supporting documentation to justify this approach.

99.9% of the time I have seen code do crazy things "because it is faster" it's not performance critical code anyway and there is no explanation provided.
ie. Don't write a programming language when you're supposed to be writing an application.
True, but some of them are easily automated. College credits, safe driving.

I think they were all just examples, so perhaps other examples that could be automated could be substituted.

Beyond that, probably less exploitable than the current welfare system (in America), and with less reward.
Too drunk to (quit)?
In the UK there is already a large subsidization of low paid people by higher rate tax payers. Its just that all the money is used to pay for services. The goal posts wouldn't be moved, you are just letting poor people decide for themselves how some of that redistributed income is spent.
No worries. Can you link/write a howto for that?
PORTAL author comments on OP: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/tor_appliance...

> This is a commercial variant of the FOSS PORTAL project that I released in September 2012 at Ekoparty. You don't need to run a closed source commercial device to get easy Tor anonymity, just use PORTAL on the RaspberryPi.
The term you're looking for is tautology, not 'null statement'.
I adopted the naming I once saw someone use for this, which is "stringly typed code".
7 Entrepreneur Oversights That Will Crash Profits
Arguments for Litecoin are fraudulent
Comet ISON: Faded Glory
Ditto. It really does seem to be quite generic.
The average top 1,000 web page has grown 150% in three years
But there is no overpopulation in Europe in terms of land availability or food supply (Europe's population density is 72 person/sqkm, the last famine was during WWII and not even then widespread). Sure, population density is very high in urban centers but there is still plenty of space in the country side. It just needs more incentives to be settled. So 'importing new people' really isn't a problem.

I cannot find any information on 'Replacement breeding in the emigrant nation' so I really cannot say anything about the validity of this statement. Could you provide a source?

EDIT: Fixed sqm to sqkm. Elaborated second paragraph.
Accidental time travel of my entire house, yes. I really should copy it over to my laptop, as that's a fair bit more likely to be useful if I end up in the past without a source of electricity.
The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community