skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't consider myself very liberal but basic income makes sense to me just from a simplicity perspective. The amount of complexity right now in the welfare state almost certainly introduces all kinds of bizarre unintended effects. With basic income, you push all that onto the (hopefully fairly efficient) market. It would also let me sleep well at night knowing that nobody could game the system, since everyone, from the rich down to the poor, get their basic income.

I guess the biggest question with it is what is the differential in outcomes for people. What % of people who work now out of fear of living on the street would stop working if they could be sure they would have the bare minimum to survive. I can't imagine many. Everyone always wants more for themselves and their children. If people choose to not work, basic income puts a cap on how much of a "drain" they are on society.

There are a lot of nice properties to this concept and it would be interesting to hear well-founded opposition arguments. Unfortunately I have to assume that almost all of the arguments are going to be along the lines of "doing this will encourage people to be lazy" without any real evidence that this is the case.
This is nothing but a censorship and will make HN useless.
Big Breach Of Patient Data In California
There is an underlying premise that only the US will have a basic income. If robots/AI do most of the labor there is no (long term) reason why all countries can't offer basic income to their citizens.
shit so when I use the '-U' on wget I am also committing identity fraud? Did gnu set me up for this? If I call something a spade which clearly not a spade, am I committing identity fraud? I am so confused now.
Providing a basic income for all people, regardless of their merit to the society as a whole, is problematic. It's not enough to just hand over a couple hundred dollars to someone and say "have fun". We need to ensure everyone is getting the proper basic services, first.

I'm talking about shelter, food, water, and a basis for living comfortably. We have the resources to do this, today. We just don't have the distribution infrastructure. Money should be something you spend purely on things you want, not things you need.

Given that we built a distribution infrastructure of some kind to automatically and evenly distribute the total food resources of the country, we would see a dramatic change in how money is looked upon and how we use it. No longer will we require money, instead, money is something you earn and use for things you wish to do. We can focus all of our time and energy on furthering our technology, our minds, and the human race in general.
I'm not yet sure how to feel about this, but I have one question that remains unanswered: Will this apply to submissions (possibly in the future) as well?
I think there are sufficient disincentives for living in Alaska to cancel that out.
"Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle"

To be clear, you mean you are going to stop maintaining the codebase of HN, not stop actively participating in the community, right?
> PC hardware comparable to PS3/Xbox360 performs significantly worse under real world conditions due to the way the graphics stack is set up and programmed against.

I doubt the significant part. And even if this was true 7 years ago, it's definitely not true now. Comparable hardware would mean something like a GTX 760 (both the PS4's APU and the 760 have around 1800 GFLO/s). That card can do everything current consoles can.

Mantle is for lower end cards anyways, mid tier hardware like the GTX 760 and what's inside current consoles won't see a change that dramatic.
I wonder if this will this lead to more karma whoring?
It's important to note that the "Mincome" experiment provided a Guaranteed Minimum income, not a Basic Income. The distinction being that the former started to drop off if the recipients earned more than some threshold (at a rate of $0.50 less per $1 earned, so as not to serve as a disincentive).
I think this change makes the mistake that people with lots of karma are good contributors.

I think it should be based on weighted karma/comment in addition to total karma. Imagine two users - one with 1500 karma & 1.1 karma/comment versus one with 600 karma & 10 karma/comment, which one would you trust to be able to judge what is a good comment and what isn't?

The total karma weight is to give at least some favor to frequent users, but not too much.

In addition, if someone replies to your comment, you should be able to at least see their comment regardless of your karma or whether it's been greenlit.
I agree there are immense benefits but it fails to recognize that markets rule the world. Once there would be a Basic Income, that is when market prices would go up to cancel out the benefit. You underestimate the rulers of the world (wealthy) to hold onto their advantage.

I see it as many times better than welfare or unemployment since it is distributed equally to everyone. If there is a limit it will eventually be too low, so even rich people would get it, they would have to or it would be destroyed.

Social security is an insurance policy really that doesn't hit wealthy wallets much beyond what everyone pays, but people still want to destroy it and this is against workers directly paying in their whole lives for a subpar investment, yes small businesses pay the full 15%ish and social security returns 2% annually and also props up our dollar big time with investment in t-bills. So even benefits like that are too social for many.

But a Basic Income distributed to everyone would lose the current perception of welfare/unemployment being bad when really these are helpful to keep the low end propped up and in the end I believe it saves money. You'd have to keep moving it up like minimum wage as the effects are normalized, it really is a travesty that minimum wage hasn't gone up as well.

People in America really don't like helping one another so this and other programs with even a hint of social aspects will not catch on. But if someone gets a benefit that the complainer also gets, they would probably be ok with it. However this does not redistribute and would eventually be cancelled out in pricing.
Thank you thank you thank you! We're excited about it too and pumped that you see how useful it is.

We're definitely working on parsing things better, and I agree, tabular view might be beneficial. We'll work on making it a pretty table.
Your statement is correct, but not relevant. Even if they had total market dominance, it would be a stretch to compare them to somebody using physical violence, and they certainly don't go out of their way to lock you into using gmail (compared to Yahoo, for instance, who didn't let me set up email forwarding without upgrading to a paid account).
WebRTC 2-player 2048 on same board with matchmaking
I support the idea, but there are other things that have to go with it in order to really work and not end up like the broken economy that Argentina had to put up with when doing something similar.

It would need serious tax reform, changes to how business are treated locally and internationally.

One suggestion for tax reform is to apply taxes strictly on only sales tax, not income tax. Certain property taxes may still be effectful, but it's really a huge mess that will really function if not taken all together.

I suppose an analogy is when it comes to extreme programming, you can't just take what you like and get all the benefits--not that basic income specifies these other things, but I believe there is a bigger package that has to be considered.
I worry about timezones, what percentage of users with 1000+ karma are in low-population timezones?
This is especially troublesome to me with regards to posts that quickly drop off the first page. Will there be enough page views by users with karma > 1000 on posts like that to get any comments approved?
This sounds like a feature, not a bug. :-)
Thanks. Maybe they should change the title/tagline as it's a bit misleading.
Perhaps the strongest value of this will be to slow down the threads that involve a dozen replies from someone in a short period of time. Rarely are those comments substantial enough to be meaningful, often they're just someone reacting in a reflexively emotional way to a discussion.
It's a strange dichotomy, but at least in my experience it almost seems like although most people drive faster than the speed limit, most are also instinctively against the idea of raising those limits. (Perhaps because the majority of people believe themselves to be better than average drivers.) Or maybe they believe that people will simply continue to drive faster than the limits even if they were raised, so the status quot is preferred. If that's the case though, surely there's a better solution.
True, but that's nothing that couldn't be done in either a separate file or in the .m?
Here's the thing: I believe that millions of years of evolution have baked into every living thing a deep need to work, and we'll feel bad if we don't (because for millions of years lazyness meant death). We need to struggle.

Further, I think we need to bad times to help us recognize the good times and a basic income would do much to soften those bad times...

I worry that Basic Income is in the long term practically unavoidable, but at the same time will create new levels of depravity in mankind.
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.

Is there some timeout? If not, commenting on a several-day-old thread will guarantee that you can never post another comment, since once threads drop off the front page it's not likely that many 1000+ karma users will even see those comments, never mind endorse them.
With the current settings, a comment has a day to make it out of pending. If you delete a pending comment, it's no longer pending.
Surely the only society that could stably operate as a "resource managed economy that eliminates money all together" would be a post-scarcity society.
I think this is a very interesting development and I'm excited to see what impact it has when it goes live. That said, I have one perennial bone to pick.. ;-)

So if you're not sure whether you should endorse a comment, don't. There are a lot of people on HN.

This is true, but so much good stuff flies by on /newest without picking up an upvote (or just one or two) that I'm not entirely convinced enough people fully participate here (or maybe /newest just isn't quite the right way to do that job either, I admit I don't go there every day myself).
Hey PG,

I think you're doing the right thing. I've watched HN start to turn into a place full of snark and very useless comments. This is a great measure, but is the 1000 points karma a high threshold for the endorsers? Why not 500 or 750?
The first option could lead to easier theft of the gun, putting guns into the wrong hands; it also means bars have to be responsible for something they may not want to deal with for moral or political (i.e., PR) grounds; the second amounts to a stigmatization of gun owners in the form of an undue burden upon them and no one else.

Make what you will of those arguments, but note both options could also be applied to car keys of people entering a bar (check your keys so we can evaluate your intoxication before giving them back). In fact, one could note that cars are a tool much much more often used by the intoxicated to murder (commit manslaughter, if you like).
Except if you post a comment in a dead thread, your account is practically banned from participating again.
Can you explain what you see as the problem and why the solution to that problem is not to tax income?
Sam didn't start this in a vacuum. He started it after women in the tech community laid a lot of groundwork educating the community about gender diversity problems.

Are there specific things the technology community could do to open the doors to the Pacific Islanders community? I'm sorry to say, I don't actually know the answer to that. If you do, write blog posts and meet with people and try to organize other people like yourself online and work to educate the rest of us on what we can do. I absolutely think there would be plenty of people who would be more than happy to help tackle these problems if someone led the way.

But if there's no one out there already leading the way on a cause that's important to you, the absolute best thing you could do is to try to do it yourself. There's an old slogan, "Be the change you want to see in the world." It makes a pretty good point.
My comment is more of a statement about what you should expect if competency is evenly distributed in both populations, but one population is larger than another.

More competent people and more incompetent people would be expected from the larger population, if competency is evenly distributed.
Will users with 1000 or more karma be able to reply to unendorsed comments?

Will there be a "show pending" setting (for users with under 1000 karma and/or those with >= 1000 karma)?
"that guy who does all the stuff that we don't know how to automate." is the operator.

The sysadmin is the guy who can think and figures out what must be done to keep the system healthy, and decides on how to do that (tooling, manual work, buy hardware or go to the cloud, etc)
Are you at all worried that the increased comment friction will cause us to lose a lot of users? I guess the counter argument could be made that if we lose people because they are upset they can't post angry/useless comments, we might be better off without those users. And if it's so many that HN ceases to be useful to everyone, it might be better for the world if HN didn't exist. Which is a sobering thought.

The other failure mode I can think of is that there are plenty of high karma users who make occasional intemperate comments. I myself have been guilty betimes. Are you at all worried that such folks will just go back and forth endorsing each others' bad comments?

Re: your plan to check out of HN. You will be missed.
Think about this in absolute terms. On this deal you are stressing and risking a potentially profitable relationship for what $30/mo. Not only should you pay him the 20% he wants you should probably offer him 50% of the 1st month on each deal he brings in as a bonus.
Hmm, trust cperciva to find the thing I'd overlooked.

I'll add a pending page that collects pending comments. Maybe that will solve the problem.
Money is a sign of poverty so I wouldn't expect basic income to really fix the welfare problem either. It would alleviate some issues for some people but I agree inflation would just eat any benefit the income offered. The same way inflation ate any benefit minimum wage offered.

I don't think anything other than an economic and social Ragnarök is going to fix the poverty problem. Both capitalism and socialism don't seem to have the answers.
My guess: It's about sympathy and compassion for those not at our level.
This is exactly the kind of comment I wouldn't endorse :)
That might increase by a lot the number of new account created by people who don't want to wait to comment.
I have long been interested in these issues. The overarching issue is that labor is becoming less valuable in relation to capital. This is evidenced by increasing productivity but stagnant wages, a decrease in labor's share of GDP, and an increase in corporate profits share of GDP.

The simplest solutions are to redistribute wealth such as through a basic income or a negative income tax. These programs can be viewed as fixing capitalism, and are not necessarily socialist. Unfortunately, most of these redistribution programs will need to be implemented by governments.

As an alternative to governmental redistribution, I have thought about an e-currency with a time based demurrage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)) fee. The demurrage fees would be paid out equally to all consumers. The demurrage fee plays the same role as a job in the current economy by circulating currency from producers to consumers. Since it is an e-currency, it would be independent of governments. The good news is that if in the future wealth inequality causes economic output to shrink, businesses might be forced to accept these types of currencies in order to grow.
I think this is a great change. It's great that you're still iterating on HN and changing the fundamentals.

Can someone with over 1,000 karma start replying to a fresh comment before it's endorsed? Or will the reply link not be there until it's endorsed? If it's the latter, I'm worried that this might stifle the (admittedly rare) back-and-forth discussion between two experts, such as tptacek and cperciva. People who want to reply probably won't sit and wait until the reply link is active, and since replying to a different comment than intended is taboo, they're likely to say nothing instead.

That's a minor concern though.

EDIT: Also,

Since I'm going to check out of HN at the end of this YC cycle,

If I'm reading this right, does this mean you're going to leave HN entirely? I'm sorry to see that happen, but I understand why you'd need to.
Women, less-attractive men lag in the effort to find financial backing
What worries me is that FBI or NSA could've established a sort of relationship with Microsoft, where they don't even need to get court orders or warrants, because they can get them from "Microsoft" voluntarily, and Microsoft can just take the data from the users without any other judicial step, and give it to them. Wouldn't this type of loophole work in theory? I wonder if this is what the Snowden documents meant about Microsoft and NSA's "team sport":

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
Please consider making pending comments anonymous. Let the comment stand on its own.
The obvious big concern here is comments about minority groups and social justice. Are the 1000+ karma users going to shut down those voices?
It sounds like users with over 1000 karma also need to go through the pending stage. So in that sense you are still on equal footing with them. You just won't be able to vote on other pending posts.
Do you have any idea of how many abuse addresses are /dev/nulled?

Sadly: black-hat takedown pages are sometimes your best sources of information. A few weeks back, a site I visit periodically was pwned via what appears to have been a Wordpress bug, based on similarities between it and other sites listed by the black-hat hacker. I fired off mail to the standard contact addresses for the site (abuse, webmaster, postmaster), all of which bounced. The listed WHOIS contact actually worked (an argument against domains by proxy), but I also reached out to the upstream hosting provider, who had several other hosts similarly taken down, though other providers were also affected.

Sadly, and from my own experience, monitoring abuse for smaller shops (1-2 man admin team, far too many fires going on) is often a very, very low priority.
I can't speak for other longtime HN users, but I wrote my own news reader and regularly browse threads that have disappeared off the front page. Anybody with an RSS reader or other similar thingy would do the same.
It could balance itself out. If not enough people work, BI will drop and some of the people on BI will decide it's worth getting a job to live more comfortably.
How were you able to trigger the double spend on mtgox anyways?
I think this would result in a worse off situation because by allowing users with X karma to remove comments and prevent other users from commenting, it is effectively censoring them.
Is there a 'pending mention' for the author of the comment ?
During boom times, yes. During those times I think we would reduce it -- but not eliminate it -- or severely means-test it. But when the economy is not performing efficiently -- the way things are now for example -- this will do nothing but increase aggregate demand.

Think about inflation like this: More bidders for the same goods and services. Well, right now there are goods and services on the sidelines.
I'm guessing there's an implied "in that thread" to that particular rule. I'd still rather see a timeout than give people only one shot at a thread.
As an early HN member who has seen comments decline since the early days, I like this change. This comment you've written falls in line as one I would not endorse. Would you say that Amazon is censoring their products because not all reviews show up on a given page? The community decides what shows up, that's not up to Amazon. Same thing going on here; the earliest and most active members are the ones who decide what comments are worthwhile. I welcome this change and think this is a great idea/experiment.
So if you have over 1000 karma the site will look exactly the same, except for a bunch of "endorse" links?

Are the endorse links far enough from the flag links to avoid fat-fingering issues on mobile devices?
So let's assume this was implemented.

Some citizens, with their guaranteed basic income, will spend it wisely to cover their needs...as envisioned by proponents of this approach.

Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs.

What then? Simply increase the amount of basic income awarded, and hope that by throwing more money at the symptoms of poverty, the cause will be addressed?

And where does this money come from? Not immediately, of course, but 5-10 years down the road once society has been changed by this policy's implementation? Why would the financial engines of today, which could theoretically fund such an endeavor, continue to run as efficiently in the future?
I'm thinking that if Google was recording logins at work that info would probably be a story.
http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders shows at least a hundred with over 1000, and probably many more than that considering the falloff in points becomes more gradual as you go down the list. My comments are nothing special and I have >6000 karma. Even if only 10% of those people are still active, there will be no shortage of endorsers for the livelier discussions.
that's pretty nice. :))
I'm thinking along the same lines. I'd really like to find a chemist to work on the project with.
Based on the feedback so far I'm planning to go ahead with Python. Looking at Flask and Django they both seem like pretty popular frameworks. Are there any reasons to prefer one over the other that I might not realize until I've been using one for a few months?
> This is by far the most prosperous time in human history. It's not like we are living in some dystopia

Believe me, I don't disagree with that. Maybe I should emphasize that, even though I live in the Silicon Valley now, I grew up under communist dictatorship in Eastern EU. So I think I know a thing or two, from a practical standpoint, about Dystopia - the indoctrination, the forced labor, the rationing of electricity, fuel and food, the permanent fear of the secret police. That - I have not forgotten, for how could I.

All I'm saying is - this golden age could be even better, far better, if it weren't for the constant skimming of the cream that goes on all the time at the top.

If anything, it's the relative prosperity that makes it unlikely that the situation will ever be fixed. People don't rise as one, in anger, unless they are literally hungry and cold, in a physical sense. That, too, I know from first-hand experience. I've lived the incandescent emotions of the rioting mob while being one of them, out on the streets, 25 years ago, back home, in the dead of winter.

But when they are more or less sated, and provided with adequate (if not highbrow) entertainment, people will allow astonishing amounts of corruption, bribery, and downright theft to keep going at the top of the pyramid of money.

Is my belly full now? Yes. Am I more or less free to do most of the things I want? Yes. But do I still see corruption and injustice at the top, to the benefit of Big Money? Yes.

I guess I'm one of those people who are strongly motivated by principle. Injustice remains injustice no matter how pretty the makeup.