skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Working backwards:

4) 'over the long run, it’s very hard to get a “good” job if you have been living on a basic income rather than working; employers do not like the signal sent by resume gaps' Economics would change significantly. If you wanted a "good" job and lacked the education and training you have the opportunity to pursue it on your own. I have a feeling there would be a huge increase in non-for-profit work (both in the traditional sense and in previously unseen markets), apprenticeships, and likely more internships (working for free at for-profit companies). I can't find any citation, but I remember recently reading about women joining the workforce significantly reduced the amount of volunteers for charities.

3) Politics would be very hard--but politics follow the people's will. If there's enough support, it'll happen (even if the transition is messy). I haven't seen strong, widespread support (or even wide knowledge of Guaranteed Income) just yet.

2) Admittedly, I'm not quite following the point. Society and government are the rules we all decide to make up and follow. The argument sounds very similar to politics, except 2) is convincing the people and 3) is convincing the politicians and people implementing it.

1) Cost is exactly why we're looking more seriously at this now (although, we may not be there yet). Ideally, it would be cost neutral or a net win to transition off of the quagmire of various welfare systems--similar to the argument for a flat tax rate. As a whole (speaking for the US) we're more prosperous and can afford to take on more of a social burden (or transition our social burden from various welfares to a simpler system). We're also moving toward a society where we don't need to have every person working to survive. I don't know if the statistics back up the narrative of city's factories getting closed and a majority of the population transitions to welfare and disability--while on the other side of the coin entertainment and the service industry are the largest growing markets.
"cramped" solidifies the objection I couldn't quite put my finger on. I think it would work if the whole thing were significantly bigger, so you have room to spread out and the plants don't feel like they're going to poke you in the eye.
" then it seems likely that employers would have to stop thinking of resume gaps as an indicator."

Exactly what I was thinking. I don't understand why it's so hard for people to consider that when social changes are introduced, some of the current ways we value things will change, and current judgements can't necessarily be used as a gauge for future behavior.

Employers looking at 'gaps' and never ever inquiring from anyone remotely interesting why those gaps occurred are just throwing potentially great workers to the competition. "I took 18 months off to care for my dying parents, who passed away last month" is a totally different type of person from "meh - there's just too much quality day time television beckoning me to sit on the couch to bother looking for work".
Most doctors in rich (i.e. insured patients) hospitals have no idea. My ENT was quite surprised when I told him the charge (>$1000) for his quick look down my throat. And that was only after a lot of shopping around and negotiating on my part. And it didn't include any "treatment" - it was just to look and possibly diagnose.
The encoding of kinetic energy in the colour of the particle trails is innovative.

Did you encounter the effect I call "lost" momentum that occurs around very close approaches when the time quantum is constant? It manifests by particles seeming to gain kinetic energy over time until they fly away. One way of minimising it is to switch to a more precise and accurate force calculation whenever the distance between two particles becomes less than $\epsilon$.
Negative income taxes are an elegant solution, but they entail literally paying people to commit tax evasion, not just in the "if I evade my taxes I won't have to pay as many" sense but also in the "if I evade my taxes the government will give me money" sense.
Lost about $8000... made it back within not long. ughhh my stomach
Requiring people have a job to receive the benefit turns the system into a subsidy for low-wage job providers who get to act as gatekeepers to the program.

The whole point of guaranteed minimum income is to make participation in the job market optional: workers are free to sit out the market if employers try to give them a raw deal.

For instance, Milton Friedman noted that it could be rational for a worker to voluntarily work in a dangerous environment and trade his long-term health for short term money, because his health in five years doesn't mean whole lot if he starves today.

The government's response to this is OSHA, a bureaucracy designed to publish and enforce minimum standards for workplace safety.

But with guaranteed minimum income, nobody's going to starve, so employers will have to offer a safe work environment to entice workers into employment. No bureaucracy is needed to protect workers in desperate situations because there aren't any, everybody can make their own decision about how much risk they're willing to accept to work a given job knowing that their basic needs are provided for.
Hmm...does that ryhme with 'absurdity'?
> Ideally, it would be cost neutral or a net win to transition off of the quagmire of various welfare systems

Ideals aren't convincing. Numbers are.
Why?

People know best how to spend their money. The government shouldn't effectively force people to consume healthcare.

Especially when there's evidence out there that programs like Medicaid provide no net healthcare benefit to recipients. Health outcomes might even improve, if the money that would be going to Medicaid instead goes to people spending more time on self improvement and health.

ETA: That said, feasibility is always the question. Given that, I'd be happy as a duck to make the basic income only $8,000 a year or whatever. Then again, I'm one of the austere basic income advocates--I'm on the fence about the Swiss proposal because I think it's far, far too generous, even considering the higher COL there.
To be fair, this data is old. I personally know quite a few SA expats who've gone back in the last few years, pushed by UK recession and a realisation that things are not that bad back home after all. Mbeki is gone, Zuma should go next year, the sort of feared Mugabe-like regime hasn't materialised.

Yes, there has been a (white) exodus in the late 90s, but it looks like the correction might have been a one-off.
Percentage of people in Greece at risk of poverty rises, tops EU list
aha! just as I suspected... during 1951-1964, he published 16 papers, better than one per year.
But, after his breakthrough, he eased back to 9, over 1965-2013... and only the first 3 look to be research papers (the remaining 6 seem to be historical recountings).

Now, I don't blame him - do something incredible, why not slack off? He's way more accomplished than I could ever hope to be.

But if you want an exemplar of doing great work, the pace before his breakthrough, leading up to it, seems the better guide. i.e. one per year.
So how does a negative income tax get implemented, you mail people a "refund" after they file their taxes for 0 income for the previous year? What do they do until then?
Chargers store
chargers store
" during which here is literally nothing to do besides playing other games"

Read a book.
Re question 1: you read correctly. An investor just get its money back in a change of control. An investor using this form of safe would have to be very confident that the safe would be amended to match a later safe with better terms. To be perfectly honest, this form of safe may not be very popular for this reason, but uncapped notes with an MFN clause have been popular, so we decided to have a safe like that too.
Re question 2: if the company has drafted its IRA to exclude the safe holders from pro rata rights, then the company must give those rights via side letter instead. Many investors feel very strongly about pro rata rights, so we drafted the safe to ensure that the company had to give them, but with some flexibility as to where (e.g., in a side letter rather than in an IRA).
Don't feel bad--I got net two downvotes above for pointing out the numbers showing that federal spending on healthcare and Social Security together gets us substantially closer to being able to fund it (I'm pretty sure they're not wrong numbers--if so, whoever's down voting, just point it out and I'll happily hash it out).

Zealots exist anywhere. Here, have an upvote.
I like to compare it to free to play. It could possible work if the high end becomes the whales that F2P games require to allow most people to play for free > 95-98% and then the riches made by the highest advancing 2-5% players provide the revenues to provide for the whole system. If there was some base level free to play number, it would be an evolutionary step as big as moving into modernized farming and what created markets, maths and the thinking man/woman due to extra time not having to survive all the time. Somehow the system would have to allow for the tasks noone wants to do though maybe by rewards. It could skew actual needed services ahead of more greedy ones.

All of the biggest games and internet product companies are free to play, maybe society is next or it will have to be when labor is limited, new things will have to be created and more freedom is needed to solve these problems.
Incidentally, the clevy whose responses you see on this thread is safe author Carolynn Levy.
> Is there any other use case for Erlang/Elixir?

Yes, the use case is usually for highly concurrent system. There just happen to be quite a few of those in recent years. Multiple things happening at the same time colloquially speaking. Now it won't be good for fast concurrent problems, like say multiplying matrices, or computing FFT, you'd use a GPU and Fortran for that perhaps. But think of large game server with multiple worlds, and players trading with each other. Think of a large distributed database (like Riak). Think of the backend of large VOIP systems with multiple calls happening at the same time. Or maybe a large chat system (Ejabberd).

Erlang as a general purpose programming language is also interesting. It forces you to think about problems in a different way. Actually 2 ways: -- functional and using actors.

Also, its primary characteristic and design goal is fault tolerance. That was #1 item on the TODO list when it was designed. It is one of the very few languages and systems that has that as the primary goal. Many of the other features -- concurrency, isolation, run-time code upgrade, immutability of data structures, kind of fall out of that. So that is another general area that you might consider where using it makes sense.

On types -- many criticize Erlang for not having a static type system. Not all is lost. Erlang has a way to analyze its types using dialyzer. It is a success typing system. http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/typespec.html . The more you annotate the code the better it gets. Dialyzer will not catch all the errors BUT when it complains, it is guaranteed to be an error.

To go hand in hand with that. It has very neat (3rd) party testing tools available. One of the most interesting ones are for Property Tests. These allow you to specify model constraint on your code and it will automatically generate tests to try to find failing use cases that break the constraint.

Anyway, hopefully this gives a bit more of an idea.

To go hand in hand with that, on the testing side it has
School is an obedience/memorization test, the exact opposite of the real-world applied thinking skills that are needed.

Private schooling is bad; public schooling is even worse. That's where ideology substitutes for academics as well.

Memorizing 20 ways to do something, and then finding a way to cram in each one on a test in an "applied" situation, leads to indiscriminate use of technique and poor debugging skills.
Anyone fascinated by this will find this wikipedia article convenient to get going!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary
From the Bitcoin FAQ:

But if no more coins are generated, what happens when Bitcoins are lost? Won't that be a problem?

…The Bitcoin protocol uses a base unit of one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin ("a Satoshi"), but unused bits are available in the protocol fields that could be used to denote even smaller subdivisions. [1]

Won't loss of wallets and the finite amount of Bitcoins create excessive deflation, destroying Bitcoin?

…Bitcoin, however, offers a simple and stylish solution: infinite divisibility. Bitcoins can be divided up and trade into as small of pieces as one wants, so no matter how valuable Bitcoins become, one can trade them in practical quantities.

In fact, infinite divisibility should allow Bitcoins to function in cases of extreme wallet loss. Even if, in the far future, so many people have lost their wallets that only a single Bitcoin, or a fraction of one, remains, Bitcoin should continue to function just fine. No one can claim to be sure what is going to happen, but deflation may prove to present a smaller threat than many expect. [2]

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_gene...

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Won.27t_loss_of_wallets_and_t...
Handy tool for doing this type of stuff: http://unicod.es/
It's a crude, sarcastic form of reductio ad absurdum. TrainedMonkey said, in effect, "making it difficult to focus is fine because the brain is adaptable". 001sky showed that "the brain is adaptable" is not a strong argument. This is true precisely because the brain's ability to adapt is not infinite. Energy you spend adapting to something is energy you're not using to do directly useful things, and that energy has to be justified with more than a statement of "well, you can do it and there might be some benefits" (which is almost exactly what TrainedMonkey said, just phrased less flatteringly).
Why am I disappointed that I'm not on there?
Especially when a wide spread service like coinbase keeps crashing at peak times and locking people out of their accounts because it counts failed log in attempts as legitimate attempts.
I'm usually asking the receptionist or other office person - they handle most of the billing stuff, and the other response I sometimes get is "oh, we have to run it through insurance first". They just run a code, and get told what they'll get paid (apparently), not necessarily what my cost/price is.

The system is so fundamentally out of whack, and not at all 'market driven' and yet somehow... my 'free market capitalist conservative republican' friends (I have a few) are really against "socializing" medicine/healthcare. As if, somehow, what we have now in the US is a bastion of free market enterprise.

The cynic in me thinks that the conservative elite really really really enjoy having a dependent class, and ensuring people are at the mercy of private health insurance companies vs the federal or state government helps ensure that dependency in a way they can still control. But... I'm overly cynical, it's late, and my words aren't coming out exactly as I think they should. :/
I don't quite get why you think this is useful info. Koch brothers are just people promoting a political agenda, like George Soros or any political party.

Everyone has a political viewpoint, and it's hard to see anything wrong with writing articles consistent with that viewpoint.
Yes thanks, so if the articles just authorize the issuance of common stock one needs to amend them before using a SAFE?
Don't be foolish. If letting people die in the streets when they got cancer was a viable option, letting people die in the streets of starvation would be too and you'd have no rationale for a basic income.

Private health insurance is much more expensive per-capita than Medicare and Medicaid and you would have to increase people's basic income to be able to afford it. Except that wouldn't work for people with preexisting conditions--they would be left to die in the streets. You'd have to regulate health insurance companies to accept everyone, but then no one would buy health insurance until they were already sick, at which point everyone has to buy health insurance, at which point you might as well implement the Canadian system because that's already less costly, per capita, to the federal government alone, than Medicare and Medicaid are.
It creates a steep marginal tax rate.

Imagine that there's a basic income of $12,000/year. It's means tested so that people making $36,000/year don't receive any funding.

If you go with a simple flat implementation of this, it amounts to a 33% tax rate on the first $36,000 of income. And that's at best--if you go with something that causes basic income to phase out only between $24,000 and $36,000, you go from $24,000 regular + $12,000 basic income to $36,000 regular and $0 basic--a 100% marginal rate.

You can make it phase out over larger and larger income ranges--say, make it phase out at a flat rate between $0 and $100k--but at that point you get very little of the cost benefits of means testing.
Presume you're just updating, but I'm getting a JS error on line 21

query.ascending)(
Cool!
I like it!
I'm not touching bitcoins because I don't want to destroy anyone's retirement.
Why Reactive Programming for Databases is Awesome
You have a JS error that breaks the whole site.

Here it is:

var query = new Parse.Query(Procedure);
query.limit(1000);
query.ascending)( <---- error
query.find({
First rule of politics: uniting people against something is easy. Actually suggesting alternatives is more difficult.

The author is not an anarchist or an antagonist, they are merely an armchair anarchist.
People have been predicting the demise of the workforce ever since the industrial age (and probably before that, too). With every technological innovation we cry "it's the end of work as we know it!" Yet here we are, hundreds of years in the future, with jobs abound. I'm skeptical that will ever change. We humans are great at coming up with shit for people to do for a dollar.
What is being discussed here is precisely the scenario when their name is being called, specifically the frequency with which it's called (if I may stretch the illustration). That your colleague is one of those who can concentrate with other conversations happening is wholly irrelevant; AFAIK, whether one's concentration is helped or hindered by ambient noise is genetic.
People often claim that, but it's not a particularly credible argument. Emergency room visits account for less than 2% of total healthcare spending in the US.

http://newsroom.acep.org/index.php?s=20301&item=29928
yeah I shouldn't be so touchy. It's probably just controversial issues in general that make people downvote based on the perceived motives of the poster rather than the argument.
There will still be people who have employment gaps and those who don't, even with basic income. With enough resumes to filter through, that will still be a factor.
The interesting thing is you can still use bitcoin to convert RMB to USD regardless of bank policy, by investing in mining. If you can pay for the costs of mining (hardware + electricity) in RMB, you can then sell the coins you mine for USD, completely bypassing capital controls. Even if you are mining at a slight loss, it might still be worth it to someone really keen on turning more RMB into USD then otherwise allowed.
Bitcoin price converges around $770; Mt.Gox flails. 
See http://live.bitcoinindex.es/. Mt.Gox is under such burden that their API doesn't return any results.
> I don't understand why it's so hard for people to consider that when social changes are introduced, some of the current ways we value things will change, and current judgements can't necessarily be used as a gauge for future behavior.

Ceteris paribus is quite prevalent in economic discussion.
> I've noticed that sometimes her friends look at her oddly when she holds up her index, middle, and thumb for the number three,

Hmm interesting. I have been trying something different as well. I have been counting with fingers with my kid using different fingers every time. The idea is that it doesn't matter to associate a finger with a number as long as the correct number of fingers is up. Like say most people start with the thumb and move left or right. Sometimes I start with the ring finger.

Counting is also fun in general. We count steps, count trees when we drive. I try to never make it about teaching but more about fun.
The problem is when people start to say that money for xboxes, clothes, and new iphones should be covered by a basic income.
We're using both Mt.Gox's streaming API as well as HTTP polling, and we're barely getting relevant data to assess their price. The fluctuation is remarkable.
This is cute, but it is based on a flawed premise. There are not "prices" for medical procedures and even the providers don't know what they are going to charge. Anecdata: when my wife was pregnant I asked the hospital what are the basic charges for normal obstetric delivery, since we were paying out of pocket. I got a reply in writing that it was $20k, a suspiciously round number without itemization. The baby comes and there are no complications and no anesthetic and the attending physician never even showed up for some reason. So it was in every way the cheapest possible way to have a baby short of squatting over a blanket.

Needless to say that this American hospital would not even have admitted us without a certified check in advance, so we had spotted them the $20k. Over the next six weeks I get literally dozens of bills. I get a bill from the attending obstetrician who wasn't even present. I get bills for anesthesia that wasn't administered. I get bills in total of over $31k. I was uninsured but I'm not some chump, so my attorney sent these people sternly worded letters and we held the line at $20k which I think anyone would agree is already a ridiculous price in the first place.

Point is, nobody in this system has any idea what the price of anything is. There's no rate card. It's a collective emergent phenomenon that prints invoices. Nothing more.
Went from 780 to 650 and back to 890 in 50 minutes.
The tl;dr is that YC made a new method of funding startups that's better for the startups due to less paperwork and tax advantages. Other people might not use it because most of the things that are good about it only really help the startup, but maybe they will because pg is awesome and they decided to share it with everybody.
With market activity like this, it seems humorous to hear stories of employees' [0] salaries being paid in BTC.

[0] - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57614544-93/kentucky-police...
I completely agree. There are two aspects here; what do we want out of a society and what we can do with the resources we have (the numbers). We're clearly moving towards the resources, which is why I hedged so much on the topic of cost (and put it last instead of first). I'm just interested in moving the conversation in that direction. I like the idea, but I'm not entirely sold on it--it would be /very/ disruptive.
> I don't quite get why you think this is useful info.

Because I'm repulsed by everything they stand for. The world would be a better place if they were dead.

> Koch brothers are just people promoting a political agenda, like George Soros or any political party.

Well I guess I should get rid of that shrine devoted to George Soros that I have then. Or what's your point?

> Everyone has a political viewpoint, and it's hard to see anything wrong with writing articles consistent with that viewpoint.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
Here is an example using the ycombinator to transparently add memoization to a function. This enables you to get the performance boost of dynamic programming in java without having to rewrite recursion as iteration. (The code uses jdk8 but could be done without it).

http://pastebin.com/as5xcWXp