skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
A surprisingly long time ago (2013 was a busy year) I
mentioned a new plan to improve the quality of comments on
Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6009523

Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this
YC cycle, this was my last chance to get this done.
I didn't want the people who are going to inherit
HN from me to have to build it as their
first project, because it interacts with so many
different bits of the code in such subtle ways.

So I found time to implement pending comments this
past week, and with any luck it will launch tonight.
Since it's a big change, I wanted to warn HN users in
advance.

Here's how it currently works. From now on, when
you post a comment, it won't initially be live.
It will be in a new state called pending. Comments
get from pending to live by being endorsed by multiple
HN users with over 1000 karma. Those users will see
pending comments, and will be able to endorse them by
clicking on an "endorse" link next to the "flag" link.

Someone who has a pending comment will have to wait till
it goes live to post another. We're hoping that good
comments will get endorsed so quickly that there won't
be a noticeable delay.

You can currently beat the system by posting an innocuous
comment, waiting for it to be endorsed, and then after
it's live, changing it to say something worse. We explicitly
ask people not to do this. While we have no software
for catching it, humans will notice, and we'll ban you.

Along with the change in software will come a change in
policy. We're going to ask users with the ability to
endorse comments only to endorse those that:

1. Say something substantial. E.g. not just a throwaway remark,
or the kind of "Yes you did, No I didn't" bickering
that races toward the right side of the page and no
one cares about except the participants.

2. Say it without gratuitous nastiness. In particular,
a comment in reply to another comment should be written
in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith
to figure out the truth about something, not
politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent
the other side.

People who regularly endorse comments that fail one
or both of these tests will lose the ability to
endorse comments. So if you're not sure whether you
should endorse a comment, don't. There are a lot of
people on HN. If a point is important, someone else
will probably come along and make it without gratuitous
nastiness.

I hope this will improve the quality of HN comments
significantly, but we'll need your help to make it work,
and your forbearance if, as usually happens, some
things go wrong initially.
> I am not at all an economist, but I wonder: if everyone had the same amount of fixed income (in addition to whatever else they made from their jobs), wouldn't there would be continual inflation, rendering that money worthless?

Not necessarily. You'd expect some inflation, but if the level of basic income was set at a low enough level (what that is depends on the overall productivity of the economy) it wouldn't be "continual" (well, if you exclude all other effects on price level but the basic income and its effect on price and the effect of that price change on wages, and the effect of those wage changes on price, etc., the effect might be "continual", but it would be asymptotically approaching a finite limit, so not unbounded, which is really where there would be a problem.)

> Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage?

Yes.

> Do they double it?

They pay whatever the work is worth to them.

> Do they pay zero? If they pay zero, what incentives workers to work at Macdonalds?

Nothing, so they don't pay zero.
X-gif – The GIF tag the Internet deserves
At the current rate of consumption, it isn't likely that animals will be treated better. A "better implementation" isn't going to happen for a very long time (in the US, 99% of animals are factory farmed [1]). Demand is at such a high rate that it isn't financially feasible to eliminate factory farms. There's also the environmental aspect - meat is very resource-intensive, and a huge source of pollution [2]. A UN report from 2010 stated that "a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change." [3]

This goes not only for meat, but for animal products in general (the dairy and egg industries cause just as much, if not more, suffering than the meat industry).

Eating meat can be morally justified if it's done in a humane way, I think. The problem is that unless you have your own small-scale farm, it's almost impossible to find animal products that aren't the result of suffering. I don't find it very likely that things will change unless we, as a society, move towards a (much) lower consumption of animal products.

[1] http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/factory-farming
[2] http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-wastes...
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report...
In US people around median income and above see immediate tax reduction by quite a significant margin.
This question comes up every time - here is a great explanation of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
Sure, that's why when things got out of control, they put Mario Monti and removed Berlusconi. Suddenly the population wasn't wise enough to make the right choice.
We used that for a long time, but it stopped scaling at some point. We ended up building IMVU istatd, the highest performance real time counter database we know of.
Github.com:imvu-open/istatd
Could be a back end for statd, or an alternative entirely; your choice.
Another missed advantage:
it moves the job market from demand/supply type of market to easy/difficult type of market: the highest paid jobs will be the ones nobody wants to do.
I don't really understand how you can think there's a root cause but not be able to say it on HN. Since ggreer says he can't say, can anyone explain what he's getting at?
Or alternatively, it could cause the wage to increase, as people won't be as desperate for just any job, driving down the demand for such jobs.

It would start to make financial sense for McDonalds to invest in automating several tasks which are currently cheaper for McDonalds to hire someone for. Imagine if you order and pay through a machine (I saw one of these at Jack in the Box already).

The person behind the counter could instead be working on their dreams of being a musician, artist, studying for college, etc.
And also, I suppose, the fairly common practice of faking an email from an employee to a journalist to show to the employee before he's fired?
For Microsoft, this is very much a win the battle, lose the war situation. While they were perfectly within their legal rights to access the Hotmail account, it was horribly bad optics. It just looks bad. And it's stuff like this that makes cloud services a hard sell to a large demographic.

So while this may blow over, people will be more paranoid that Microsoft will decide that they have the right to look at your data, just because it exists on their servers.

Google isn't much better in this regard. Amazon so far is better positioned because they don't offer any other private "consumer" services that they'd want to review. But really unless you have the hardware in your physical possession, you will always be subject to these problems.
Who Should Pay For Netflix?
bureaucratic overhead with proper tech is close to zero. Basic Icome is too a big leap in social and political context. I am very much in favour of Minimal Activity proposition. It's way more easier to implement.
And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...
> How does MacDonalds work?

I'm not an economist either, but here's how I'd like to see the McDonalds example play out :

Presumably, McD's pay folks on top of their basic income to entice people to work for them.

Eventually, these wages get high enough (and robots become cheap enough / advanced enough) that it becomes cheaper to automate away those jobs. The gained productivity allows McDonald's prices to drop, and a (properly configured) tax eats a healthy portion of McDonald's new profits. That tax goes directly into the basic income fund, lifting all citizens basic income by some amount.

People are still incentives to do icky jobs now (because they get more than basic income) and as they disappear, those efficiencies become profit, which is taxed and dumped into basic income which then goes up (so we lift everyone to higher standards of living as we destroy jobs people no longer need to do)

Eventually, that process repeats in every business and every industry, until we live in a Star Trek style post-currency economy, where people only work for exercise / interest / fun, and all necessities are covered by machines for some amount near free.

It's not an overnight thing, it's a "spread out over the next century" type change, where basic income started at the US minimum wage, but (over 100 years) eventually gives folks the 100-year-from-now equivalent of 100k/year salary as basic income.
just an aside - this is the first time I've seen a TLD this long actually being used...

interesting.
check your copy/pasted numbers
Twitter #music will be removed from the App Store
The idea that you absolutely must work hard in exchange for the necessities of your life, is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness, like a fundamental law of conservation, that it seems a lot of people cannot conceive otherwise.
> I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.

The short term effects of redistribution downward on the income scale (and thus generally from those with a lower marginal propensity to consume to those with a higher propensity) would seem pretty clearly to be some degree of demand-pull inflation.
How does this all interact with debt? Can I get a lump sum payment in return for my future wage? Can it be taken away to pay creditors, child support, back taxes, etc. ?
If anything like basic income happens expect immigration to be halted and birthright citizenship grants to be ended. The value and meaning of citizenship will rapidly change and tolerance for outsiders taking a slice of the pie will rapidly plunge. I think there will be a lot of ramifications like this that most people probably aren't considering.
Yeah, somehow I don't see the IRS and the various other federal institutions than have grown up around revenue collection closing their doors any time soon.

The good thing about guaranteed basic income is that it has the positives of welfare without the negative incentives (i.e. if I make over X amount, my check stops coming). If you implement minimum income without replacing the current provisioning system, then you haven't really solved any problems.
I just did the same attack using WeevTech against att servers. Witness: picture of a 32gb iphone https://2.ecom.attccc.com/catalog/en/skus/images/apple-iphon...
Can someone tell me what's the point of this? (I seriously love to know, not criticizing it.) Why would I need to have docker containers to install stuff on them instead of just installing stuff directly on host?

Let's say I develop a new web app, I would install NodeJS, PostgreSQL and such on my machine. Before I deploy the app for the first time, I'll install them in the necessary servers. Now, it looks like I would need to do the same, except adding the step of building Docker containers.

I think I must miss something important here because the number of GitHub stars for Docker is impressive and this is usually a good indication of the usefulness of the project.
To your first point: not necessarily. Most serious suggestions of a basic income don't involve just printing a huge amount of cash and mailing it out. They're about taxing high earners more, saving a bunch of money on other social programs (and probably police and stuff as well), and then distributing that money to everyone. If you balance that out instead of just increasing the money supply, it might not cause crazy inflation.

To the second - they pay whatever they need to pay to get the workers they need. Everyone is already getting $X a week from the basic income. Fast food workers will make a total of $X+Y a week, and doctors will earn $X+Z, where Z is probably a lot more than Y.

Also, remember basic incomes are typically suggested to be enough to live on and no more - so if you want some luxury items (whatever we decide those are) you'll probably need to get a job somewhere. So there's still incentive to get a job.
I'm in favor of this.

Do we have any examples where this has worked before?
White Blotches
HN is a site where some users say things like "tech feminists never seem interested in taking the high road, and instead optimize for maximum drama", while unironically claiming that they are reserving judgment.

HN is a safe-haven for sexism and bigotry.

It's great that samaltman claims that he wants to undo some of the damage that pg enabled, encouraged, and actively allowed. However, I'll believe it when I see it.

p.s. User johnbm made the comment I quoted, along with some other pretty great comments. And he got upvoted for it, because that's the sort of community pg built. samaltman has a huge job ahead of him if he wants HN to stop being sexist.
"Cart Life", IGF 2013 Grand Prize winner, released as open-source
I think it was this one, but unfortunately I can't find the whole video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp4z2eK1Avw

http://johannesbrodwall.com/2007/02/27/crud-rest-rails/
The inflation theory assumes that everyone will go out and spend exactly as much more as they are now getting in fixed income. Obviously, that is not the case. Some people will save more. Others, above a certain threshold, will have marginally less money, because we would need to pay for a fixed income with taxes. I did the math a while ago, but can't find it now. My recollection was that at about $70,000 of income per year, an individual would break even between the extra income and extra taxes. People making over $70,000 would actually pay more in taxes than they receive.

Also, just because it replaces minimum wages doesn't mean McDonald's doesn't pay its employees. It means that both sides, employees and employers are working in an elastic, free market, so the wages will be set depending on labor supply and demand.
Except for the T&C you signed with Hotmail when you signed up to explicitly allow them to go through your email.

If you are actually stupid enough to leak trade secrets for Microsoft's premiere product, while using Hotmail to do it, well you really deserve what you get.
Real questions because I'm not an economist.

If I have money does that mean I am assured that the goods required to fulfill my basic needs exist and can be purchased by that money?
It was successful when trialed in Canada so I'd say its viable. But ya, I don't trust our politicians to be sensible and cut spending to pay for a new program. [e.g. Use this to remove the most inefficient $ for $ welfare related programs so more of it ends up in the hands of the people that need it]
There are many online-services, where there is no such right given to the hosting company to read the data contained in the service. I would say, that such a statement is rather uncommon (may be changed by the eMail providers MS and Google).

And: In my opinion, they just pretend! In my country, such a behavior could well be contested in court in my opinion, because we normally have strong rights protecting communications.
I agree.

Unemployment runs no lower that 70% among disabled people in the best of times.

Anyone that is not literally perfect (beautiful, slim, brilliant, healthy, emotionally well centered) faces huge obstacles from the powers that be in our society.
Clever two-tiered upgrade system.

You can upgrade to silver using someone else's code. But to upgrade to gold, you need someone to upgrade to silver using your code.

The forced ad impressions are very annoying though.
What is the deal with an 8 GB iPhone 5C?
As in an Intelligence Explosion (http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/.) "Success" is really a bad way of wording it, I just mean if it happens, none of those things will matter. Regardless whether it is friendly or not. Either we go extinct or the AI is so far beyond us, our present progress doesn't make much difference.
There isn't exactly a lot of evidence that plants feel pain or can suffer in the same way that animals can. Even if they could, you'd still be minimizing the amount of killing by not eating meat, since animals have to be fed.
> And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...

I think you missed the "worth it" part, which substitutes for the "fulfilling" part. Unattractive but low-skill jobs would see higher wages (and, thus, greater incentives to find labor-saving alternatives) until the utility people doing those jobs provided to others was reflected in the reward people doing those jobs received.
So what should the basic income be? $10k/yr? 20k? 50k? 100k?
I once stumbled upon a YouTube video consisting of a woman who received ~$1,400/mo entirely supplied by Government Assistance Programs.

I once saw a job posting for a Web Developer/Python position where the client stated: "$1,000/mo is enough in Belarus."

I stopped to think for a bit: "I hardly made $800/mo when I was freelancing, and I was happiest when I was not working."

I think the biggest argument for Basic Income is to normalize what is already an existing systemic exploitation of a broken system. Professional exploiters and accidental/system-justifier exploiters need to be cut off, which might motivate professionals and invalids to assess our system as more just. I'm sure a positive network effect will follow.

Why not just try it? Why not stop arguing these speculative points and just try it?

It only works if you test.
Looking at the evidence is not enough. You really must repeat the experiments

As you point out, repeating the experiments is sometimes not feasible, at least in the near term. Often, as technology and understanding develops you can perform other experiments to try to render a theory false (which is all you can ever do- you can't prove a scientific theory true, after all).

But until that time comes, which may be decades off, you need to be able to independently analyze the evidence.
Right now, there is no shortage of things to work on, and things that have not been done yet. I am not currently aware of any horizon past which that won't be true. I don't see any problem yet, and at any rate, there are tons of other kinds of programming to do.
But the pie grows larger as more people enter the economy (though it may be sublinear).
Its not the just stupid. Its the gun. They are anything but harmless. It would almost be better if they were evil.
Sadly, the data seems rather shallow. Look at the output from one of the example API requests:

http://bikebook.io/?manufacturer=fuji&year=2014&frame_model=...

They have somewhat seperated the data into component groups, but individual parts are not identified, so I can't search for all bikes with a specific brake lever or tire of certain size, since its all just unprocessed raw strings.
But the real fix to this problem actually is metered billing. The ISPs screwed themselves by offering "unlimited" plans to begin with. It's the same thing that happened to the wireless providers.
I'm also not an economist. I think, though, that basic income breaks a lot of assumptions that hold for economics today, but wouldn't hold in such a scenario.

Basic income might lead to inflation. It's impossible for the basic income to become worthless, though, unless all money becomes worthless. Even if everyone gets $X a month, any other amount of money can be expressed as a multiple of X.

McDonalds in this situation could pay zero wage, if anyone wanted to work at this price. I doubt many would, though. Instead, they would pay $Y in addition to the $X that everyone already gets.

Ideally, no one works at McDonalds, because it's automated. If it can't be automated, then McDonalds has to pay people enough to make it worth working at McDonalds, not just enough to survive. This increases the price of things that aren't automated, which increases the reward for those who can figure out how to automate it.

(Objecting to this automation by pointing out how far away we are from AI / useful robots is like objecting to flight by pointing out how many joints are in a bird's wing. An automated McDonalds will look different than what we have today. Perhaps insisting on human hands preparing and serving their food will become an affection of the wealthy.)
The current mess is not only poorly implemented, it's based on false assumptions. We just need to stop pretending there's something wrong with people not being able to find a decent job, and stop punishing them.
To quote from the article:

"Google said that their users should assume that anything electronically sent through Google’s servers is fair game to used for ads, or other purposes."

To put it bluntly, Google says, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties."

So nope it is within the context unless there is a legal requirement to use users data for ads or other purposes.
I think this is for "just the facts." You would use this data on your own review site.
I am glad my experience helps fellow entrepreneurs in its own little way!
It's AWS-style metered and billed monthly based on the number of time-series or "data streams" you're sending us.
Really?.. I think BI per se might change the landscape somewhat - and that depends on its scale - but "rapidly change" - no, you don't principally differentiate strangers with passports from strangers without.
Gotta say, Sam, I'm finding hope in my cynical old heart.

What I liked:

Listening, and acknowledging there is a problem, is an excellent first start. That's progress for YC, which up until now seemed to have its head in the sand.

The quick roll up of what you've heard most recently, also good, shows it's more than lip service.

*Acknowledging publicly that confidence shows differently for women than for men is enormous. I've had people try to claim I'm not confident in my product. Outrageous!

Some other thoughts:

Female founder events are nice, but let's see PG and the Old VC boys show up there too, so it isn't a pink ghetto.

Earmark your startup founders conference to be 50/50 male/female. Or some such realistic but achievable number.

Understand that women need special help fundraising. The signals, games, and rules are male created, and male oriented. Women are at a distinct disadvantage in the fundraising process as a result. I have found most women cannot give good fundraising advice, because they have not raised money, or have they invested money. Would love to see YC write about this, specifically for women. A rule book, if you will.

There's probably more, but as you keep engaging us, I'll keep thinking.

To those who might still be angry/cynical: This is a start. I believe we have to allow room for organizations and people to evolve and change their minds, lest we all freeze into pre-arranged points of view. I hope that doesn't happen, because the world needs all of us right now to tackle the challenges we face. Let's see what happens. This is more than we've seen out of the valley in quite some time.
> However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income)

Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation. At least one person (more realistically, a large portion of the population) still needs to be creating wealth.