skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a libertarian-socialist, I'd love for us to collectively and indiscriminately provide everyone with a fair and appropriate basic minimum income. The only problem with this policy is how you pay for it.

You can abolish all other forms of social assistance -but only if you can adequately justify the elimination of the bureaucratic government jobs associated with them. For an all inclusive basic income, no bureaucracy would be needed.

You could tax the wealthy heavily -in effect making the basic income a negative income tax policy. This also seems like a worthy policy worth investigating.

You could borrow the money by way of government securities. The only problem with this scheme however is that already you have people like myself, who are extremely skeptical of the long term health of the current world financial make-up of West versus Rest, which is already changing quickly.

Personally I dismiss all arguments regarding a basic income harming poor people in the form of "inflation". We're currently in a deflationary crisis according to the big banks, and the social and political benefits to these policy changes would make it extremely hard to simply get rid of due to "bubbles and pops" as we have that plenty as it is.

Can someone try to explain why something like this isn't possible? What if we increased taxes in the top most income bracket, abolished all forms of current social assistance, and took on more debt, hoping this can pay for itself (or to simply continue down the trajectory of more debt every year).

Can someone try to explain why something like this could be more simple than I'm guessing?
Yes.
But it also, I think, makes it easier to follow certain attack patterns that are already known and commonly used.

For example, setting an email forwarder to an account an attacker controls in most cases won't even be noticed. 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.

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. 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?

Passwords are insecure? Of course they are insecure. That's why we are trying to implement two factor authentication. But having 1 account with 2 factor auth controlling 20 accounts with 1 factor auth isn't exactly helping. At all.
Vegetal and mineral memory: The future of books
I'm curious what you're eating and when. Even my skinniest friends I've seen them gain weight when they started changing their diets. Lot of it is they may eat ice cream and other fatty foods, but not very much. Look into why we get fat by gary taube. Talks about the science of weight a lot. Insulin response being a key factor.
> It's not possible to predict the uses of one's work

Probably not in all cases, but you can often make an educated guess.

You could at least consider classes of activity, ranging from:

Primary, sole purpose is to cause direct harm. You'd have to be dumb or willfully ignorant not to realise. "This BabyFaceMelter technology will be so amazingly terrible nobody will ever want to fight us again!"

High likelihood of indirect harm - nominally for other purposes, but trivial to see simple ways in which it can be weaponised/made harmful. "Our Public Order Droid platforms are all equipped only with non-lethal electro-tickle cannons, and it'd be really hard to put actual bullets in there"

Moderate likelihood of indirect harm. Fairly compelling "good" uses, but still possible to think of ways it could go bad. Less toxic or higher power explosives intended for mining, perhaps.

Too generic to really know - finally, the weakest level that you present, something like better off-road vehicle tyres. Quite a lot of fundamental science (ie: not the "we hypothesise that X will make the Anthrax really angry" sort) has such wide application that you can't really guess.
Ditto basic algorithms in maths & CS, or software libraries (is OpenSSL evil?)

I don't totally disagree with you, but you might want to try painting with a slightly smaller brush to make your argument more compelling.
Most successful indies worry even less about multi-platform support, and very few indie developers roll their own tech. A surprising amount of indie games start as GameMaker games requiring porting for any sort of proper commercial release. The more technically proficient indie developers hopped onto the Unity3D wagon given how that engine is general purpose enough for any type of project and had great support for indies early on.

Subcontracting to a porting house is just as common if not more common for indies. If your game is successful on one platform a porting studio will be willing to work for a revenue percentage as indies are much more willing to give away significant percentages. Furthermore publishers are fairly willing to front the money for porting if you have a fully working game already designed and playable no matter what platform it was initially developed for. Indie games rarely push the computation and memory boundaries so porting isn't particularly difficult.

The general case for Indie developers is develop for whatever you're most comfortable and worry about that other stuff once you actually have something worth worrying about. The cost of porting a game is pretty trivial if it's worth porting.
"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. "Public health care" is fundamentally incompatible with liberty.

Your third paragraph is interesting, because you appear (to me at least), to endorse liberty, yet without believing in it.

>"given that the abolition of force and fraud is a moral long term goal, what sort of society would we want to build that would be likely to evolve in that direction"

My answer to your question, (as quoted above,) is that I believe liberty would allow for people to prosper, and all the fascist, feudal, and that regressive tendencies we see are a product of coercion. I do not understand your answer to the question, as it seems to open the door for any type of coercive means with the stated intent (but not necessarily with the result) of improving the welfare of the populace.

The ends which you describe in the last paragraph are all interesting, and nice goals, but do not (in themselves) justify the use of coercive means; especially since the coercion presents many discrimination problems due to the discretionary powers granted to those who would 'solve' the problems.
> Seems to me that the precursors to a volitional libertarian state are radical reductions in violence both within and between nations, a highly educated and healthy populace that is capable of taking care of itself, and the abolition of caste systems (e.g. sexism, racism, classism, guild systems, etc.). A basic income is a step in that direction.

Does the libertarian within you believe that the State will accomplish this goal, without worse repercussions? Why remove the state at all if you think it can engineer society for the better in this way?
You would probably make even more progress if you allowed yourself a good sleep schedule. If you "try to get away with as little sleep as possible", it is very likely you are sleep deprived, which leads to bad decisions and more frequent mistakes.
23andMe is incredibly naive.

>The FDA has been asking 23andMe for specific studies on the reliability and efficacy of its DNA test results as well as specific clinical analysis regarding health claims (for example, the risk of developing a condition that is associated with a genetic marker).

Makes sense. You're making certain medical claims, you darn better have something to back it up. What's their answer? Well:

>23andMe says it is working on satisfying those mandated requirements and admits it wishes its efforts were farther along.

Well, then you can't make those claims!!! What the heck did you expect the FDA to do!? Give you a break? Just this one time?!

> At the same time, 23andMe contends that the reliability of its test kits and data adheres to the highest standards, that its process matches that of a DNA test one would get through a physician.

PROVE IT! The reason why they haven't, I'm sure, is because it's expensive and time consuming. And possibly because the regulations around commercial DNA testing is out of date, maybe, but it is what it is.

>Last spring 23andMe began to ramp up the marketing efforts behind its DNA kits. This included TV and video ads and a direct-marketing campaign.

Of course that would be a problem. How you market your medical product factors greatly in whether or not you're going to be audited! Is this surprising to anyone at 23andMe !?!?

>Given the long history of dialogue with the FDA, you might imagine that 23andMe would have sought feedback about these initiatives--to see if any concerns surfaced or tweaks were requested

The FDA doesn't works like that. You're not going to get an a priori go ahead from them. The way it works is YOU have all YOUR homework done and ready, then go and market, and then if you get audited (and the FDA reserves the right to audit you anytime) the onus is on you to prove that your claims are sound and backed-up by proper evidence, that your quality system is in place and that your product is correctly classified and registered. If you don't have that, you get shut-down, and possibly more.

>The FDA, in turn, took no steps in the wake of this marketing wave to reach out to 23andMe and suggest caution or areas of concern.

The FDA is not your personal auditor or adviser. They don't work on your schedule. They aren't there to hand-hold 23andMe while they take their product to market.

Sometimes when you release a product in a new category, it may take the FDA a long time to come up with the right procedures and to amend the proper regulations, but them's apples. You don't go out, do what you want, and then be surprised when you get shut-down.
These days, the primary purpose is quite likely to be taking out hardened targets of one kind or another - unguided bombs are not terribly suitable for that, unless you use a lot of overkill (as in, nukes against low-tech adversaries hiding in caves overkill, most likely).
BTW, I found the source of this quote- it's from Craig Venter (he cites it as a reason for sending his DNA sequencer to Mars). I can't find anything supporting his statement, however.
I think you are wrong... but really, you should be advocating that it be tried anyways, because what neither one of us have is a lot of evidence.
In my experience, HBR very rarely has poor content.
Although (incredibly late) that does raise the question of how closely you could copy the HN layout in an implementation in another language?
You may be thinking of this: IIRC the standard recommends that compilers omit dynamic dispatch when the dynamic type is known at compile time - this essentially boils down to the case where a virtual method call follows creation of the object with 'new' or as an automatic variable. In my experience, this is commonly implemented correctly in compilers.

The other case where the dynamic type is known is in the constructor itself of course.
Hm. And here I was thinking I'd seen most of the accelerated deep learning implementations. Although this one seems a touch incomplete as far as features go. There are some other for those not aware:

[1] [Python] pylearn2 by the Lisa Lab @ uMontreal. Probably one of the beefiest of the bunch. Has a pretty extensive feature set, but IMO isn't the simplest to use.

[2] [Python] MORB by Sander Dielman. Just restricted boltzman machines, but very nice and intuitive to use. Also built on Theano.

[3] [C++] CUV by the AIS lab at Bonn University in Germany. Not strictly deep learning, but it's a fast CUDA-backed library written in templated C++ with bindings to other languages, including python. It's been used to implement deep learning models.

[4] [Python] DeepNet by Nitish Srivastava and co. at U of Toronto. I don't have as much experience with this one but it's built on cudamat and implements most of the main model types. Interestingly, they've taken the approach of using Google protocol buffers as a sustainable means of defining model configurations.

[5] [MATLAB] DeepLearnToolbox by Rasmus Palm. If matlab is your thing, here you are. Implements most models you are likely to want.

Not all of these developed equally as actively developed, but there is some good stuff above and I haven't found many instances where what I wanted wasn't (somewhat) readily available in at least one. I'm sure I'm forgetting one or two.

[1] https://github.com/lisa-lab/pylearn2

[2] https://github.com/benanne/morb

[3] https://github.com/deeplearningais/CUV

[4] https://github.com/nitishsrivastava/deepnet/tree/master/deep...

[5] https://github.com/rasmusbergpalm/DeepLearnToolbox
Earlier this year they added a free tier.

http://blog.app.net/2013/02/25/introducing-a-free-tier/
About a few months ago, App.net decided that being a Twitter clone won't work, so it is trying to be a data framework that anyone can use. (Which incidentally Dropbox is also trying to do.)
> There is no longer any good reason for an OS to be anything other than a public, common, property

For the three months ending September 30, Microsoft's Windows division reported $4.58bn in revenue, $2.24bn in profits. Sounds like a good reason to hold off the open-sourcing a little longer, at least to me...
.)
German speaking engineers can validate/reevaluate their "position" by checking out:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesinnungsethik

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verantwortungsethik

It's strange to see those wikipedia topics don't have an English translations (yet).

.)
It's certainly interesting to see in which ways engineers who chose to follow "Gesinnungsethik" justify their "choice"... interesting, in the sense of: not differently at all compared to any other profession. I think this is the result of last decade(s) or so of overdone and misunderstood "individualism" culture.

.)
IF software eats the world - and it certainly looks like this right now - we better make the human beings who wield and create these very powerful tools more sensitive to the responsibilities and consequences of their works.

.)
I'm sure true treasures can be found regarding this topic in similar discussions which took place in the non-software engineering community decades ago and I guess the statements and positions used there are applicable in the software world.
I never said taxing and banning wouldn't work. What I said is that taxing and banning will never happen because of health impact. It won't change until the health impact has a significant economic impact.
Your assertion that a basic income would drive up costs is wrong. What evidence do you have of that? If it's done without printing money, it will not cause inflation. There will be more demand for housing, but how much more? The homeless will now be able to get homes. So, how much demand is that? How much will that drive prices up? The great thing about universal income is that people decide how to spend it. And they will not all spend it on "basic items", and they will not all spend it on the same things.
It is an idealistic ethos. In my mind it's as naive as centrally planned socialism, but just at the other end of the spectrum.
What about the productivity costs of sleeplessness? It might be that you're actually hurting both your health and your product by shaving off a few hours of sleep.
This is the most even handed treatment of this topic I've read yet.

One topic not addressed (but important) is what we do when someone spends the entirety of their basic income and has nothing left for food or shelter. Do we just let them starve to death in the street? Or do we create a "secondary" safety net that prevents this? If so, don't we just end up with the same sort of inefficiencies and problems that plague our current system?
Faces of FreeBSD - Colin Percival
Every modern car as an 'ODB2' connector under the dashboard, which allows anyone with 99 dollars to monitor the statistics of their vehicles - engine temperature, fuel efficiency, air pressure, et al.

Thought experiment: If everyone all of a sudden had all this information on their dash tonight, how many would change their natural driving habits because of the visible information, even if no metric was any different than the every day before it?

I won't speculate. It's just a metaphor.
The Art of Newsjacking
> basic income would simply drive up costs of all basic things needed to survive especially if any of those are scarce.

Sure, you'd expect some price increase -- anytime a group of people get more income, the maket-clearing price of things they have a non-zero propensity to consume can be expected to increase by basic supply-demand analysis. At the same time, except with completely inelastic demand, the increase in price will not be so much that the amount they are able to afford decreases, by the same analysis.

> would likely hurt those just above that poverty barrier the most as they would no longer be able to afford basic shelter even though they are gainfully employed.

I'd really like to see an argument for this. Since the people "just above the poverty barrier" are going to see the same increase in income as everyone else (basic income goes to everyone in equal amounts -- it isn't a minimum guarantee that is reduced 1:1 with outside income), what is the basis for concluding that the real purchasing power of those just above the poverty line would decline?
No one was making a qualitative judgement against Windows Phones, just a quantitative comment about install base.
"but if you're getting sufficient amounts of quality sleep at night"

Ideally yes. But there are times that even with the best intentions that can't be done. Anxiety, sickness, some important schedule issue. Maybe a big lunch that you shouldn't have eaten.

Naps work very well for rejuvenation.
For financial assets, the term "crash" has typically meant a drop of 20%. This would apply to the recent bitcoin decline from $1,200+ to sub $1,000.

Edit: 10% drop is considered a "correction". 20% drop is usually a bear market.
Not to mention the data is just sitting right on Amazon's platters. If I were the NSA & Dropbox wouldn't comply, I'd just pop over to Amazon
This is worth a read, especially for this point:

However attractive libertarianism might be in theory,
“Libertarianism…Starting Now!” has the ring of special
pleading, especially when it comes from the mouths of people
who have by and large emerged at the top of the bloody and
murderous mess that is our collective history.

Social justice libertarianism? I was not expecting that. Very interesting. (the website is beautiful, too)
Yes I expect it could. If someone wants a throw away 'startup' idea, consider a baby sitting co-op using BitCoin. The notion of a babysitting co-op is not new, and a number of people you know will probably behaving babies soon, and there is the whole complex thing of trading hours for hours which as spawned such co-ops again and again. Often these things have token systems where you 'buy in' with some number of tokens/tickets and you 'cash out' by trading your tokens back in for cash. Do the whole thing with BitCoin and you've got yourself a very durable little system for what has historically been a cash only system.
Unleash The Game Creator in You By Entering Our Holiday Gaming Competition
Dependency Sorting in Ruby with TSort
No. How to be a responsible engineer who doesn't get people killed. There are situations in life that require one to grow the fuck up, and being a professional engineer is one of them.
Calling out bad design habits would be useful if people making those decisions were HN regulars. Otherwise you're just preaching to the choir and distracting everyone from the content.
There was an even bigger dive a few weeks ago to 300, news channels just didn't have a story, and I'm sure if Snoop Dogg said bitcoin was useless back then, they would have used that... "Bitcoin dive after Snoop Dogg loses faith in the currency..."
The calls into jump tables are generally static, so the jump table itself can be prefetched. The jump table code is then a regular function pointer call, which is also monomorphic and so can be reliably predicted. I'd expect the impact to be small compared to a regular monomorphic function pointer call.
Hitler mentioned
There's a "quiet room" in my office and I think i'm the only person that uses it. It's really nice to take a laptop, headphones and soda in there and just get work done without any distraction. And it has a window, with real light! There's also a "gaming room" which is now the storage room, but it still has a sofa and xbox that maybe somebody uses.
This is less of a problem for systems with JIT compilation (including Java, C#, etc). They can recompile the code at runtime, which allows some nice tricks for virtual calls. They can turn a virtual call into a regular call with inline caching (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_caching), or can even compile a specialized version of the code for a given type and inline the entire virtual function.
Quip for Android 1.0 released
Google moves toward Chrome as Oracle may establish Android's Java infringement
Hold on now. While i am going to do my best to avoid a No True Scotsman here, i have never spoken to a self-described libertarian who supports in reparation or affirmative action.

This is not by chance either. The idea of fiscal freedoms comes at the cost of fiscal safety nets. Where you draw that line is a sliding scale of course, but i still fair to see how this article is speaking a libertarian mindset.
A libertarian could be a minarchist, and anarchist, or simply someone who looks at our current governance architecture (state control focusing on finance and asset wealth growth) as counter intuitive.

> Does the libertarian within you believe that the State will accomplish this goal, without worse repercussions?

The libertarian in my worries that a state would either abuse a system for the benefit of a small elite, or purposefully skew results in favor for their brand of narrative (didn't work, too expensive, just not possible, abolishing labour laws because it needs to be done!, etc...).

Personally it depends on the policy details to me. If this leads to the abolishment of all other forms of social assistance, and can reduce the amount of government employees who simply decided who got them in our older models, then sign me up. A system would also have to not discriminate, neither down nor up in regards to income.

That said if our choices are current social assistance, negative income tax based minimum income, or minimum income for all without deductions, then both NIT-MI and MI work for me.
A fascinating article on this type of optimisation:

http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2010-04-08-inline-cach...
> Your assertion that a basic income would drive up costs is wrong. What evidence do you have of that? If it's done without printing money, it will not cause inflation.

Redistributing income can be expected to cause market-specific price increases in goods that the people benefiting from the redistribution have a greater propensity to purchase than those from whom income is redistributed. (And decreases in other goods.)

Adopting Basic Income is pretty clearly going to affect a redistribution of income.

So, the increase in prices for basic goods conclusion is sound (the idea that this will end up harming those just above the poverty line by giving them less purchasing power seems, however, far less sound.)
Yahoo’s Geek Goddess
StackOverflow.com rolls out new UI changes.
Anyone else not seeing Gmail as an option for archiving?
The Norwegian dictionary is very stable [1], so that shouldn't be the source of your problem.

1: http://språkrådet.no/Politikk-Fakta/Spraakpolitikk/
She mentions in the article that she's using Qemu.