skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is almost self refuting - objection (2) is killer.

Immigration is probably the most important issue of our time. If we have a BI, we can't have immigration in any form remotely resembling what we have today, let alone some ideal situation where we have drastically more immigration. It's as simple as that. The cost of a BI (and the welfare state in general, really) is that millions of people are stuck in Haiti, India, Afghanistan and other desperately poor locales.

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/whyimmigration.pdf http://dipeco.uniroma3.it/public/WP%20163%20Liberati%202012....

I'm not an open borders activist. Most of the countries I mentioned are desperately poor due primarily to the people living there - any immigration policy needs to turn Haitians and Sudanese into Americans rather than turning the US into Haiti. But at the same time we need to recognize the tremendous humanitarian benefits of immigration.

If we prevent a Haitian person from selling his full time labor to an American employer for $7.25/hour, we are cutting his income by 90% (Haiti has a GDP/capita of $1300, cost of living adjusted). I can't see any benefits from a BI that would remotely justify doing this to millions more people. In fact, near as I can tell, virtually any policy which requires further restricting immigration is almost certainly a nonstarter for this reason.

A much better policy is the Basic Job, which is like Basic Income but you need to work for it (see FDR's CCC, jobs are things like improving public parks, planting trees, etc). This also has no disincentive effects and you get some productive labor out of the people who choose to make use of it.
The difference here is that we wanted to implement a multiprocess architecture. We don't want to implement (P)NaCl, since we don't think they're good for the web. We have no qualms with integrating code from other sources, we've done a lot of it. (Google Breakpad, WebRTC, numerous image and video decoding libraries, Freetype, libffi, ANGLE, the list goes on...)
I don't understand what change you're describing.

Initially they went to work in the defence industry because it was their only option unless they wanted to stack shelves.

Later they continued working in the defence industry because it was their only option to put bread on the table and pay the mortgage.

Those both look to me like "I'm doing it because it's the only option I have that uses my skills to do something that pays decently".

What I'd find more interesting would be if people tended to shift (1) from "I do this because I think it is a noble way to serve my country" to "I do this even though it's horrible because the alternative is poverty" or (2) from "I do this because the alternative is poverty" to "actually it turns out that this is a noble way to serve my country".
DropBox is one of the most useful products to come out in the last decade.

I still remember seeing the original 5 minute demo (1).

My jaw was on the floor, I instantly needed it.

And it's still the best, even at a premium price (marked in cost of GB of storage).

The article has several interesting points, but the takeaway for me remains "[Solve] a worthy problem."

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE
Hm.

The NSA is different from all your other examples, though. Finance, social gaming, ads and pretty much everything else is or can be regulated by the rule of law.

Intelligence agencies cannot.

There is no precedent of a surveillance society that managed to keep from turning authoritarian. Why should anybody assume that this time is different?
You would still need some bureaucracy to make sure people are not double-collecting, that people stop collecting after death, etc.
> For example, setting an email forwarder to an account an attacker controls in most cases won't even be noticed.

Setting a forwarder where? You can do that now too. It's exactly as safe as what we have now.

> I think it opens more attack vectors than the good it could do to have this kind of integration rather than just a password manager.

I disagree. As long as you have password resets sent by email, whoever has access to your email has access to your accounts.

> Giving more control to a single manager (in this case an email account) also means you will have to set greater security standards for it.

Again, that's exactly what everyone already does.

> For example, are you going to type your password (which also controls all your accounts) to your friend's, school's, airport's, etc's computer that could be infected?

No, I don't log in to my email from anywhere that's not my device, and it has 2fa enabled.

> having 1 account with 2 factor auth controlling 20 accounts with 1 factor auth isn't exactly helping. At all.

How is it not helping? Now you have all your accounts requiring two-factor auth to log in, rather than just some of them. You also only have one server to secure, which will presumably be run by people whose sole job is to secure that server.
I don't think anyone here is saying the concept of personal genetic testing is bad.
Yes, of course. But the real challenge is to determine that it's your virtual indirection that's causing the problem. Once you know what's causing the problem, fixing it is (relatively) easy.

The danger is that benchmarks like this encourage naïve programmers to use complex constructs as a matter of course, when simpler would usually be better. "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" and all that...
Has something to do with sleep cycles.

But don't worry about what is written. Just give it a try and see how much you naturally sleep for and when you wake up and go from there. This can be as simple as just laying your head down on a desk with an eye patch and ear plugs. Airline tarmack type ear muffs also work well for this and completely block out most noise.

Everyone is different. I don't care much for what has been written about this I just experiment and have found what works for me.

I have been doing this from way before there were even things written or it was something that was even considered a strategy. To me it just made sense. I don't really care what others do or whether they think it's good or bad.
hasn't this always been possible with a desktop email client?
That's what Apple has been doing. It's still not enough.
"I don't intend to build in order to have clients; I intend to have clients in order to build."
I'm confused as to how you think libertarianism is the path to get to that society, the only path, or even the best path. If we are dreaming futures, the goals you mention could just as easily be met by a system in which super-sentient AIs plan all the details, and robots provide all the labor. After all, the only monetary 'freedom' that is better than having complete control over one's money, is the freedom of not having to even worry about it.
But you must have an Nvidia card around some where to test your codes out first? It looks like the best bang for the buck is a GTX 760.
Travel. That's what I wish I had done. I'm going back to school for my masters soon, and when I get done I'll be traveling for a while. Don't waste your youth sitting around, there's a lot of world out there.
"CNBC lets you watch live TV on a iPad but not on Android. In many cases you see that vendors see Android as a threat but don't see iOS as a threat precisely because the iOS is perceived to be a niche market and that Android, in the long time, will eat everything by being cheap."

I would think that "with iOS, we have a place to go if people start cracking our software" plays a part, too. Why would CNBC see Android as a threat?
I recall reading that anything over an hour disrupts your sleep pattern. 20 minutes might be a magical number for best effects.
It also might be the length of a lunch someone gives up to nap after eating (or could be the full lunch).
Microsoft first should make Bing to support, not even use by default, HTTPS.
"I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened." - not quite right. The problem in hand was that good Q&A was buried in discussion forum type apps.

The whole point of SO from the beginning was to build a Q&A site for programmers that didn't suffer from the shortcomings of using apps such as phpBB etc, where threads get hijacked and pages upon pages of extraneous discussion and arguments take place making it difficult to find and answer to a specific problem.
Spoilers for a bug report... that's a new one! Very thoughtful. :)
I think its worth noting that this isn't just prevalent in the workforce, but before many individuals get to the workforce, the cram and jam lifestyle of college student start carving this rut long before they are employed. I have to assume after anywhere between 4-8 years (sometimes more) of late night, caffeinated (sometimes worse substances) cram sessions this type of mentality and habitually terrible sleeping would be difficult to get out of.
BI shifts spending from investment (money the rich would otherwise have saved) to consumption. Investment goods fall in price while consumption goods rise in price. CPI measures the price of consumption goods, hence it rises.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that Google is possibly thinking of dropping Gmail service as well? Think Google Reader.
My mom couldn't. Nor about 95% of the rest of my friends and family. But clicking export and then download? All of them can do that.
I don't think anyone actively works to do evil things in engineering. However, it is possible/easy to end up making something that is used for evil by someone else later - and justifying making weapons through notions of "defense" has been commonplace for years (although I don't agree with the justifications, generally).

I've never quite been happy with open source licenses for this reason - and I've considered writing a pacifists' OSS license with a clause along the lines of:

"No license is granted for any purpose of deliberate harm or death to humans [and other intelligent species]; whether in a deliberate weapon or implement of torture, or whether in a targeting or guidance system for any such device. Missile 'sheild's, designed and only usable for blocking incoming weapons are excluded from this category."

You could hypothetically write additional clauses for other objectionable things, pornography and fossil fuel drilling/mining come to mind.

It wouldn't stop people reimplementing your code from a specification/summary, as many companies do with OSS that they need to use but can't re-release, but it does make making weapons and such more expensive to make (which will decrease supply, assuming your code was ever in contention for use in such a system.)
Well some of us can't nap. I just lay there with my eyes closed for 20, 30 or even 40 minutes never coming remotely near unconsciousness.
> Where you draw that line is a sliding scale of course

I disagree. As a libertarian-socialist, I think we can take care of ourselves while pursuing freedom in regards to economics.

In our current system, we judge people based on their employment, history, and need, and then select people to give benefits to. There are problems with this. Bureaucracy, favouritism, politicking, etc.

With a basic income, we can reduce spending by abolishing all social assistance, reduce the amount of government employees by firing the bureaucrats who used to deny/approve people for benefits, and simply guarantee everyone a minimum amount of support. This has the benefits of reducing bureaucracy, favouritism, and politicking.
"Two weeks ago App.net launched Broadcasts, a tool that lets you send and receive important messages via push notification....Broadcasts slice through noisy social feeds and cluttered inboxes, and are only delivered to users who explicitly subscribe to the channel."

This looks like an ongoing treadmill of "these older media are too cluttered and noisy to get through so here's a new, more obnoxious medium that cuts through the noise (but only because not everyone has started using it yet)". Anecdotally, I'm the only person I know who turns off almost all my push notifications and everyone else's phone I've seen is already cluttered with them so Broadcast might be too late.
I think everyone knows that GPU can be used for visual graphics like gaming and drawing things on a page with webGL. I'm more interested in computational powers like how it's able to compute bitcoin hashes. Are there cases of GPUs being used in other non-graphical computational cases? Like a mongodb/mysql index search?
The .NET and Java VMs are in fact able to do some inlining on virtual/interface calls and do other sorts of smart dispatch. So the cost of a virtual method in .NET and Java is not necessarily equivalent to the cost in C++.
How to tell if you’re old based on how you use the Internet
This is the second time in as many days that I've seen a position reduced to "You're like a kid, and I'm like a grown-up." Cool argument.

edit: I hereby coin The Argument From Maturity - of which the simplest prototype is, "Grow up."
I'm not sure you can buy heroin with Bitcoin anymore either, all the online markets have shut down one way or another last I heard.
Branding For Developers: CircleCI's New Logo
Since it's decentralized, it doesn't need banks to prosper. That's the beauty of bitcoin. It can function as a currency while still being seen as a commodity in the eyes of the law.
Why Isn't Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?
These fluctuations, however, show that Bitcoin cannot fulfill one of the central functions of currency: Exchange for goods.

How many of these multi-dozen-percent downward fluctuations will it take before those storeowners and shops that take bitcoin stop doing so or start maintaining an insane markup on Bitcoin prices?
You're right; but I figured 95-99% in population centers and much more than 50% everywhere else, which ends up being more like at least 86% of the people in the United States used the internet in the last year.
> In-Q-Tel, a non-profit venture-capital firm established by the CIA

Good old Mussolini style fascism is steaming full speed ahead in the land of the free.
The article explains this. We built the infrastructure, and we used it for out-of-process plugins on desktop, and for Firefox OS, but we went in search of lower-hanging fruit on desktop. There was also (IIRC) some worry about breaking extension compatibility, which would make it a nonstarter. I think there are some planned mitigations for that now, and we've fixed a lot of the easy wins for responsiveness, so we're pursuing this again.
> "Public health care" is interesting, because it usually involves first forcing everyone to pay for a government healthcare system, then (usually) regulating the private system into oblivion, or destroying it outright.

You seem to be using a strange definition of "usually" -- every OECD country has "some degree of public healthcare" (what the grandparent post suggested support for), and yet most of them have some degree of a private system.
Simple solution, have X amount of savings, or a job lined up. I'd love your opinion on the merits of anyone else being allowed into a country without X amount of savings, or a job lined up.
Are Online Platforms and ISPs Responsible for Third-Party Content?
That's the thing though. How does one weigh the good against the bad in these cases?

If you're building stuff at the application layer, maybe the use is obvious, but if you're writing a library or a service, how can you know how it will be used? Should you expend time enumerating and assigning probabilistic weights to all the good and evil that could come from it?

Far simpler proscription: as a human using a tool, don't do evil with the tool.
Does anyone thing that Google isn't keeping a copy of every bit of data they have on everybody that has ever used any of their systems? I cannot imagine they would ever throw data away. Even if they restrict the end user from it doesn't mean that they destroy the data for their own use.
Someone who likes to figure out how things work. This usually involves breaking things and using them for purposes other than what they were intended for, which is why they get such a bad rap.
Features vs Benefits
"Is there a way that a company with closed source and proprietary infrastructure can prove that it's not up to any funny business?"

No.
> Keep it legal, do good work. Go home and play with the kids.

Tell that to the people whose kids got blown up at a wedding by a Hellfire missile that was guided by your TwitterTerroristLocator.so
The missile guidance systems used for targeting offensively is similar (not the same) to the missile guidance systems used for intercepting incoming ballistics.

Are you then suggesting that guidance systems for missiles that intercept (like a thaad or mim patriot) should not have been created?

That is one way things are actually used in the world. I would think a case such as that could be seen to be morally ambiguous.
Actually, there is the term "civil service" that denote all other government jobs that are nonmilitary. I always referred to my mother as a civil servant (she held a government job for 35 years before retiring)

My husband is a career sailor, in his 3rd enlistment, Iraq war veteran, and he takes more of a "it's a job" look at it. He still doesn't really know how to respond to strangers' "thank you for your service" even after 14 years.

I think people say it because they respect someone's willingness to risk their life. Especially since we are taught that the military defends our freedom.
Everywhere I've worked (for the most part) you had to be there between 8-5 (roughly). You just couldn't leave early even if you came in early. I know it's not like that everywhere. My current job I am almost always the last one here by 5 and it's just hard to break the habit that I have to be here until closing time.
Exceptions were made if you made arrangements with management but usually only people with families or college/schooling got any leeway.
Close Encounters With GMOs: The Good, the Bad, and the Glow-in-the-Dark
I am genuinely curious: have you ever actually used Windows 8? I mean more than just clicking around it a few minutes. I ask because I find it hard to imagine somebody who actually uses it ever referring to "Android/iOS/Windows 8", as if they were roughly equivalent.

I currently spend most of my time on a Windows 8.1 desktop with more than 20 different languages and development environments installed. I never "check email/text" on it, and only rarely use it to watch YouTube (have other boxes for that). To me, the "Modern" UI is little more than a souped-up Start menu.

The misunderstanding that Windows 8 is somehow a lesser Windows is getting old. After more than a year of general availability, surely somebody on HN should know better.
Not for me. I can get 10 hours of sleep at night but I'll still hit an afternoon lull post-lunch. I'm sure if I really worked at it I could figure out why (too big a lunch? blood sugar spike?) but regardless, I'm good to go for 6+ more hours w/ a 20-minute nap. Meanwhile everyone else sits and forces their eyelids open, stares at YouTube videos, and downs espresso shots...
Not impossible, though I'm guessing gmail is used widely enough that it would be a PR nightmare if they did this, much worse that the greader fiasco. They're probably forced to keep gmail alive, whether they want to or not.
While I think it is much more useful to learn from others' success than others' failure (lessons from your own failures are invaluable), let's not forget selection bias. A lot of startup success is luck--or, in other words, factors outside of the control of the founders or their advisors.

Many, if not most, founders aren't even aware of these factors, don't appreciate them fully, or won't acknowledge them out of ego. In many cases the advice should be "work hard, be smart, and buy the winning lottery ticket."

My advice is to attempt startups in the center of a confluence of macrotrends; that will tilt the odds more in your favor.
IIRC, the last time Google gave a service the ability to download (export) data, they closed it shortly there after. (RIP Reader)
> You could tax the wealthy heavily

At what % do we draw the line on taxing the wealthy? 35% 40% 50%? These numbers would be outraging to any other section of the populace.

> dismiss all arguments regarding a basic income harming poor people in the form of "inflation"

Scare quotes on inflation? Lower and middle classes feel inflation the most when it affects the costs of basic needs: bread, milk, etc. Those are the very items a basic income intend to give ubiquitous access to. Practically by definition a basic income would raise the prices of those items.

> and took on more debt, hoping this can pay for itself

This is the critical assumption here. There is an ongoing debate whether or not college degrees can even pay for themselves in many areas of study. This is a heavy handed gamble, and one i would be unwilling to risk our fiscal futures on.
Hey, they recruit on LinkedIn like everyone else, leave them alone! /s
Why can't you just start off with copying wikipedia? Create a wiki branch and link it to your branched site for every article. Make a chrome/firefox extension that allows anyone to easily do that.

What is something you'd change/fix?
Bitcoins are seriously worth a thousand dollars now? Now I feel stupid for spending my coin on Humble Bundles.
you've said this much better than I ever could. I wish I could write so clearly. Much respect.
Yes, for the ultra-wealthy basic income is essentially a fixed taxed deduction. I think almost everyone would agree that basic income would provide a marvelous opportunity to simplify things.

Inflation seems like the biggest risk to basic income, but I don't think anyone can say how big of a problem it will be in practice. I think people have already put up potential ways to remedy it as well.
I wouldn't say the whole Ars team, just Peter Bright (not to offend -- it's his opinion and I myself don't really have one), who is mostly responsible for MS coverage.
What is the justification for taxing the wealthy disproportionately to their income? Is it out of moral need, financial expedience, or economic efficiency?

If you wish to tax them out of moral need, you hold a normative belief which is unlikely to falter, so I will not challenge it.

There is no financial reason why a 'progressive' income tax is better than a flat tax, as the 'progressive' system encourages evasion, and makes it easier, as well as greatly increasing the scope of government, requiring regulation of marriage and more.

Economically, the 'progressive' income tax is completely unjustifiable, as the wealthy invest disproportionately in economic (and job) growth, while lower income people spend more on consumption goods.

Your idea of borrowing money by way of government securities is not a long term solution, because interest gradually becomes an increasingly large part of the budget. In the long term, interest will either gradually take over the entire government budget, or an interest rate increase will force the government to default; in either case, borrowing to finance regular spending will eventually fail as a policy.

The 'inflation argument' against welfare policies is flawed as you point out, because it has never been demonstrated that wage increases cause inflation (so called "demand-pull inflation"). Whether or not some type of government welfare program should exist is an interesting question, and your answer seems to presuppose that the counter-factual is that there would be no social assistance program at all, whereas I would think that private charities would do a better job than the government, while avoiding coercion. If you require a government welfare program, I agree with you that a negative income tax is probably the least harmful, as it does not encourage unemployment.
Next week, a communist case for the private ownership of the means of production.
I fail to find ethics in libertarianism. Unless you're talking randian ethics, which are a far cry from ethics themselves.