skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> While people could theoretically survive off the charity of others, advanced artificial intelligence and robotics are likely to increase the portion of the population who are unemployable.

We've been hearing this kind of arguments for literally centuries (the steam engine is going to put people out of work, cars and trucks will create unemployment, oh no Silicon valley is going to kill all manual work out there through automation, and then robots will take over the world and there will be no more jobs for people). This is really, really old and tiring. If anything, technologies increase the amount of economic growth through increased opportunities, and so far the market has clearly demonstrated that it's providing a lot more jobs to way more people than when we were still 1 billion on this planet.
The government assistance for these situations is often not enough to live on as it is (at least where I live), so I'm not sure how moving to this would be a negative. Also consider how difficult it is for someone with a chronic illness to actually find and access the myriad of services that provide the support they need, and at the end of they day it's still usually not enough.

It would be a shame to not move to something better for those people simply because it isn't perfect.
Oh good, shifting standards.

That alone reduces the positive impact of this change, and keeps the negative. Eh. Less interested in this than I was.
It's done this way in many other countries. For example, in Canada, each party receives $2 per vote received in the last election to campaign in the next election. Corporate donations are banned, although small donations by individuals are still allowed.

You're paying now through the distortion of the electoral process and the indirect increase in your cost of goods and services (the hundreds of billions spent on elections comes from somewhere). Don't you think it's worth it for your taxes to go up $2 to eliminate those costs?
Well, it's the only way to be able to dissuade people from programs like welfare and food stamps. Practically, it's the only program that can succeed in doing so in the US. You don't think it would be a better system than we have now where making past a certain amount has a NEGATIVE effect on your income if you're a single mother?

It's better to make closer to $30,000 as a single mother rather than $50,000 - you'll get to keep more of it because you qualify for more government programs.

I think it's easier to disassemble these really perverse incentives if you replace it with something simpler. Then you can reduce social security benefits because of this, then turn to alimony and child support (no longer needed), etc.

You can't do that without first giving an alternative to the status quo
It should be possible to endorse something without agreeing with it.

You honestly think that's going to happen? Thanks for the chuckle Paul.
There are currently still 3 perfect brackets on ESPN.

1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=576318
1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=4155737
1. http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/en/entry?entryID=10928050

http://games.espn.go.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2014/e...
I wouldn't feel inclined to endorse every and each "non-mean" comment. I'd assume there are a lot.

What's wrong with the current system, by the way?
The second comment refers to a small portion of the first comment's reference.
Absolutely more will be added.

And any listing of bike weight is bullshit. You have to find the bike and weight it, because manufacturers weigh different things (and different sizes). So we won't be adding that.
Hmmm, yeah. I see your point. If two people really just want to shoot the breeze (I don't mean that flippantly), or get to know each other better, or talk about off topic things, then an e-mail is a much better way to do that.

I'm specifically thinking about topical conversations or discussions, where someone asks a question in a thread, or brings up a point and someone else finds it somehow and answers the question, which can lead to a series of enlightening posts/responses.

I like the HN comments because they have people who disagree, as long as the disagreement is civil, informative, and doesn't seem to have too much ego tied up in it. I like the reality check the comments offer.
Looks like the final perfect bracket (even though it's ineligible for the Billion Dollar Challenge) is about to be busted anyway with VCU on the verge of beating S.F. Austin.

edit: March Madness.
You actually raise a good point about testing it. If you have heard of the Sea Steading Institute they are proposing that we establish a bunch of "startup" style countries to examine which policies and solutions will work and which won't. The problem with basic income though is that it relies on captive individuals (value producers who pay tax) and given the choice they are most likely going to move to somewhere that doesn't force them to pay as much tax. I can't see how socialism can survive without forcing people against their will.
And how many philanthropists practice charity by giving away money no questions asked?
Sorry for being unclear. What I mean is that downvoting something because you disagree with it has always been legitimate on HN. I'm too lazy to dig up the many links where this was discussed, but the point is that if upvoting is a legit way to agree, then downvoting is a legit way to disagree. This is a good thing, because it provides a silent way to disagree when you don't have anything substantive to add to the discussion.

The idea that downvoting for disagreement is not legitimate is a classic instance of the canonical invasive species on HN, the Redditism.
This stunt actually makes me angry. Not a good PR move imo.

"I have enough money that I can risk giving up a billion $. And I may just give it to you if you can beat the odds that's harder than getting hit by lighting multiples times in 1 year."

How about offering pot of 100 million to top (aka sweep) 16 instead...

But never mind, it's their money...
So take from the rich and give to the poor.
> It would seem unfair at that point to tell some people try and get charity funding (which might dry up at any point).

This is already the status quo. Less people being reliant on charity is a good thing.
I think it does have this risk, not in the sense of deliberately driving users away, but simply the fact that the cost of posting would be much higher and engagement would drop as a side effect.
> Not sure, but wouldn't basic income induce increased prices for commodities?

Yes, it would be expected to shift the demand curve somewhat, because you'd be redistributing income to people with a higher propensity to spend, increasing demand.

> If disposable income increases for everyone, then there is an incentive to increase prices everywhere (including accommodation which is a significant part of monthly expenses), thus negating the positive effects of basic income.

Reducing, not negating: the normal effect of more money in the hands of people with a given desire to buy a product is that the price goes up somewhat and the market clearing volume traded goes up somewhat, not that the whole increase in income is reflected in price increases.

> Then you know what would happen next... people asking for an increased basic income, and the thing would spiral to the end.

If you tie it to a dedicated revenue stream and set the benefit amount based on the revenue divided among the eligible population, you establish a control mechanism.
Oh no, does this mean I can't add "first!" w/o knowing for sure it's actually first (or one of the first)?

Serious question: can I delete a pending comment? And does that allow me to comment again?
I've largely moved on from HN anyway, and I've been way more productive. This should only help.

Who is the heir apparent for HN? Lobste.rs? Back to Slashdot?
BI is required if we ever went to a flat tax, which I firmly support.
Assuming this is how the endorsers actually behave. There's a good chance that they will end up acting more as 'curators' than endorsers, and only treat the endorse button as a 'like' button.
> it's going to be rather difficult for them to reach the 1000 karma threshold - certainly more difficult than it is now.

Then again, if their comment does become approved, it will be more visible than under the current system (less noise) and therefore likely to receive more upvotes. Also, their bad comments won't be punished with downvotes.
I finally beat it. This seems harder than 2048 since with 2048 a simple strategy can do well, where as with this game I had to search through more opponent AI moves. Is there a simple strategy for 8402?
Sure you can print interlocking bricks with a 3D printer, but there are some problems to solve if you want to even approach the quality of legos. The lego interlocking bump mechanism alone is a precision interface which requires tight tolerances and a controlled surface finish, both of which are currently impossible to match with 3D printing technology. The outside dimensions of the parts are quite important as well, particularly the vertical dimension: deviations run-to-run and-part-to-part will give you trouble with accumulating height offset errors in stacks of bricks. Where bricks should match up, they may not.
You can tell someone they're wrong about something without 1) thinking that person is generally stupid 2) being mean, of course.

(e.g. if someone says "I think bitcoin is the first digital currency system which has attracted VC interest", I'd love it if someone from Flooz/Beanz (late-90s), or DigiCash (1980s-1990s) or various stored value systems would comment and say "Actually, ...")
I wish instead of making computers do things that Humans are doing, people put more effort into making the Humans' job, instructing these stupid beasts (I mean the computers), easier.
I fiddle with some tutorials, get frustrated with readability / pacing / coverage of core concepts, then knock out a project or three with the help of Google, StackOverflow, and the docs for the language and any libraries that seemed relevant at the time.

Across, I don't know, 20-25 languages at this point? Although I only actively use 3-5, depending on how you want to define actively.
Please offer an opt-in to see pending comments (without the ability to vote).

Maybe they'll remove the ability to reply cleanly - but it's a better option than filtering based on the whim of others.
Interactive git workflow animations
Here are two PG comments with slightly different takes on downvoting to signal disagreeing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589#up_1006808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683#up_658691

My takeaway has been that HN does not have Reddit's "don't downvote people just because you think that they are wrong" rule. Interestingly, PG's observation that people do not tend to downvote people who's comments are already gray does not seem to be true at all on reddit.
Comments are often used as communication between specific users and not necessarily intended for widespread consumption.
>It's not like the economic incentive to work will be completely gone though. Presumably BI would be, at least to start, roughly the bare minimum required to survive. Any luxuries would still require earned income.

Curiously, I think Basic Income would drive creativity in some people to acquire luxuries without working for someone else (building their own stuff, or unfortunately, stealing). I think many would wear that as a badge of pride. We already worship business leaders and entrepreneurs. Imagine the praise of successful entrepreneurship of one's life and possessions and not just his business.
It sounds like you are referring to password hashing. Neither BLAKE nor MD5 should be used for password hashing. At the bottom of the article make sure to read his section "P.S. this isn't about hashing passwords"
It's a problem on multi-output USB interfaces for a lot of people. I suspect system configuration issues but I don't think you should have to take a barebones system approach to get decent timing. I mainly sequence in hardware so I haven't gone to great lengths to get to the bottom of it.

DYI http://www.gearslutz.com/board/electronic-music-instruments-... although you'll have to wade through some non-techie voodoo interpretations if you peruse the whole thread. Also, bear in mind that this is a particularly fussy demographic. I sometimes think if you are that obsessed then maybe MIDI isn't the protocol for you, but OTOH there isn't much in the way of OSC hardware on the market :-/ It's notable that there's a bit of a CV renaissance underway though, a lot of people prize timing/resolution over versatility.
There's a huge gap in the market if no programs are coded for non-English non-males. You're argument is quite a silly one to me as clearly it's not that big of an issue, people can normally make things for a different target market to themselves by testing it with their target market.

If you truly believe that large sections of the the market are not being served then I'd recommend that you start targeting them, they are clearly under-tapped.
For non-cryptographic applications that don't require top-grade security, but do want a short reasonably-unique identifier for a file to detect duplicates, MD5's speed and ubiquity made it a natural choice. This is the first thing I've seen aimed at restoring some security to that particular niche.
As a computer scientist I can't help but now ask: what is the complexity of this problem? If it's in P then this game is not very interesting (in that I can't hope to fool the AI).
Seeing this comment downvoted is amusingly ironic (although perhaps undeserved).
From a game design standpoint, that was one problem with this design. Since half the tournament occurs in the first round (well, not counting the wildcard round), there's no drama; everyone gets shot down immediately. In the movie version of this, it'll come down to at least the Final Four before our hero gets knocked out, no matter how implausible the odds of making it that far are.
There are plenty of people whose basic needs are substantially larger than the average citizen. For instance, many people need expensive motorized wheel chairs, which would be difficult to purchase on BI. Currently, the state provides motorized wheel chairs to many, but there are many stories of this program being abused. It's quite possible that a charity could step in here to supplement BI to make chairs affordable, and could do better and more efficient needs testing than the state.
What indication did I give you that leads you to believe I'm making that assumption?

You said we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone lived at an American standard of living. That would only be true if it took a full one planet's worth of resources for everyone at the standard they are living at now. But it doesn't; we aren't using the full productive capacity of planet Earth now, not even close, and a lot of what we do produce gets wasted for political reasons. If we got rid of that waste, we might well be able to support everyone at an American standard of living with just one planet's worth of resources, not 5.

I simply suggested that as poor nations evolve, their people will consume more

That's part of what you suggested, but it isn't all of it. See above.
It's not clear at all what you are trying to say. If you think there are other more important factors, why don't you just say what they are?
I would argue that as a PR move, it's pretty brilliant. It's been brought up countless times since it was announced, and it's been pretty hype up until now. Sure, it was basically a sure bet for Buffet.. But it spawned a community in itself[1] and captured the imagination of many. I'd call that a good move.

[1] http://www.takebuffettsbillion.com/
This is the type of attitude that hinders progress, and for no apparent reason. News flash: you're already rewarding people who sit around doing nothing with your tax dollars. GBI does the same, but at reduced overhead.

Starting a business is hard. Starting a business while working full time is near impossible. It's not about laziness or incompetence. You just don't get the same business opportunities you do when working a full time job as you do when you're able to network and market yourself during regular hours. It can be done but it's really, really fucking hard. Also, working a full time job while in college isn't a good thing. Our country needs to provide education more universally if it wants to stay ahead of the curve. Saying "you can either live in indentured servitude to your student loans, work a full time job while in college, or be born with rich parents" doesn't really cut it. Sure, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and all that bullshit, but let's get serious here...the country doesn't work like it did in the 50s.

GBI makes it possible for your average person to take an idea from conception to reality a lot easier. I'd say for all the companies I've started, the largest overhead was by far salaries and making sure the founders were able to put food on the table. With GBI, our businesses would have been 10x more successful, because investment capital would last 10x longer! This is good for business.

Yes, you'll have lazy people who take advantage. But I'm willing to bet for every lazy person who just wants to sit around all day eating Little Debbies cake rolls, there are 100 who get bored and decide to actually do something with their lives.

Let's also take art into account. Sure it's useless and stupid because the free market doesn't approve, but imagine a world without it. GBI would provide for those who thanklessly and actively make our country a more beautiful place.
Ask HN: When is MongoDB the Right Tool for the Job?
I've recently been helping a friend through the process of learning node.js to find a new job.

When it is time to teach him a NoSQL database, I have trouble recommending he learn anything other than MongoDB. The absolutely one and only reason would be that all of the jobs I have seen available in my recent stint on the market, have been for MongoDB.

Now, I do have my favorite toolchain, which I'll add into a comment to avoid this getting sidetracked too much. It's also not really relevant. Suffice to say, my current toolset works pretty well for the kind of thing I need it for, but mostly ... I just haven't ever seen the reason to learn MongoDB.

The only reason that seems to come up is that everybody uses MongoDB because it's popular. Tautology aside, I don't really have any idea of what it's sweet spot is.

What kind of data structures, access and write patterns, and volume of data is the situation where you would choose mongo over any of the other NoSQL db's (including things like redis).

I'd love to get some real feedback on this so I know what to tell my friend. Also, I would prefer if people didn't just point to things written by mongodb.com, because that feels like yet another tautology.
> I know MD5 has it cryptographic security issues [1] but I almost always assumed that the main reason it was a 'weak' hash was due to it's speed

No, for hashes, you definitely want speed; that's not the problem with MD5. For applications where speed is not appropriate, such as password hashing, you want an iterated hash of some kind. (Disclaimer: as with most crypto, you want one of the existing implementations, not something custom.)

The cyptographic security issues with MD5 concern breaks to the hash algorithm that make it possible to find hash collisions more easily than the number of bits in the hash would imply. A 128-bit hash should require 2128 hashing operations to find a collision against an existing fixed value. (Finding two independently chosen values with the same hash is far easier, due to the birthday problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem ) MD5 has algorithmic weaknesses that make it far easier to find collisions, to the point where a current system can find some types of collisions in seconds.
Debt slavery is probably a more accurate description of the citizens of developed countries with high house price to income ratios.

(Or large student loans. Will the basic income be enough to cover student loan repayments?)
The centralizing power of automation is much more pronounced now than it has been in the past. This stems from the current focus on knowledge work tasks rather than repetitious, small problem-space labor. IBM's watson will price out radiologists and their pattern finding ilk. I found Martin Ford's [lights in the tunnel](http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/) enlightening and concerning. He too suggests a basic income.
Unfortunately many people think that having to work for a living is somehow inhumane. I think the best solution is to let them form their own country and live amongst themselves so that those who value hard work and think it is a virtue can enjoy the fruits of their own labor.
We still have pets, and they're rather well taken care of.
You may note I did not say it's possible now, but it would be absurd to think that it won't at some point in the future. You could have said the same about early digital cameras, which produced incredibly shitty pictures compared to even a polaroid. And that even when polaroid began to get utterly destroyed by digital cameras they still weren't really up to snuff, other factors overrode their low quality.

And if Lego wants to survive it when it does come, imo they should be thinking about this now.
> empirically ethical society

Did you mean "ethics informed by empirics" or something like that? "Empirically ethical" is a logical contradiction.
You'd guess wrong. In 2012 the entire defense budget was $689 Billion.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258
I don't understand. None of this applies to HN. It's apples and oranges.
This does seem silly. According to the article, the odds of picking the correct bracket are less than 1 in 128 billion, so there is practically zero risk.
Addressing #1:

"Photoshop" is not a verb (and should be replaced with the equally-easy-to-say verb "enhance using Adobe® Photoshop® software") [1], but that doesn't stop people from using it as such anyway. The presence of an extra 's' doesn't impair meaning and focusing on it tends to be a distraction.

[1] http://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html#photo...
If you have the bright idea of converting your JPEG images with precious EXIF metadata, beware you might not be able to get it back out.
https://code.google.com/p/webp/issues/detail?id=176
> A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want.

I haven't seen the reduction in services implied anywhere. It may, however, be a reality when implemented, but the intention isn't simply to change how government funds are spent on the poor. Generally, the aim is to redistribute wealth from the 'rich'.
I apologize if I have missed the answer, but the thread is very long.

Will clicking endorse automatically upvote the answer? It would only make sense to, and you wouldn't have to click twice.
Someone who is expressing an unpopular opinion honestly, as opposed to just baiting or venting, can take care not to be disrespectful or accidentally provocative. I don't see why such comments wouldn't get endorsed.
The best strategy for those who disagree with the change is to ignore HN. Get some work done for a change!
So you are arguing that a barter system provides more freedom than a money based economy.

I'm genuinely interested and open to being convinced of that, but you've only said "I would argue that.." and then offered conclusions without actually presenting the argument.
Printing money causes inflation, which is effectively a wealth tax.
This would definitely be interesting, but it would work a lot better if most people had more than one or two internet choices.