skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This is the logical and likely necessary progression. And it really does require some leadership."
You can't just tout your opinion as "logical". We live in the real world, where people have their own opinions and wants/desires. Just because it's "logical" according to you for society to move in a specific direction using a specific political system, doesn't mean that everyone will agree with it, nor that it is logical for them to do so.

It's odd how all these political schemes always work in "absolutes", and never allowing anyone to take themselves out of it voluntarily. Hint: If someone doesn't like the political system, then you're acting immorally and violently by forcing them to abide by it.
Same in Sweden, but it's for pupils in secondary school and it also covers stuff like getting yourself out of ice holes and swimming in cold water with lots of clothing.
The vast majority of the population are already unable to afford electricity for their homes, and the price of goods (for them) is so dynamic due to local supply and demand that there is no guarantee that they can afford basic food stuffs.

Yes, entire industries will collapse. This has happened before (Indian slavery by the East India Company?), most would say we're better off for it.
Lawrence Lessig: We the People
Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. Capitalism is one method of allocating scarce resources. If some resources become so plentiful that they are no longer scarce, they are treated as having no value. I don't see how everything could possibly become non-scarce. Maybe energy, maybe even food, but we still need to build homes, transportation of some sort, to provide medical care, and go into court when someone screws you over. And because of that, there will need to be a way of allocating resources.

Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources. While it's nice to predict some moneyless utopia in the future, it presents real and insurmountable problems.
> Do you really think I "hate" you or are being hyperbolic to make a point? If so I think it was lost on me.

Yes, I think your position is essentially rooted in hate.
If you're ever in this position, and you own a massive chunk of a highly liquid stock, I have one word for you ... diversify
It's not really a matter of /wanting/ to work, it's structural disconnection from labor opportunities. As for why a basic income makes sense in an otherwise free-er market, there's plenty of both pragmatic and normative arguments floating around hacker news and the internet.
Interesting! I did not realize this was Marx's point of view.

> Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we not?

Well, it is because I figured people would want to feel valued and like they have a meaningful place in society. But, if people don't want to work and there is no need for it (assuming a low-scarcity future, as the author described), then sure. That should be an option too.
The AI experiment reproduced by Tuxedage: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gej/i_attempted_the_ai_box_experimen... . 3 wins and 3 losses.
Yes this is a very good point. I personally don't mind sitting in front of a laptop but my parents may find it much easier to perform small tasks using a tablet while sitting on the sofa. I'm not convinced reading a tablet in bed is a good idea, prolonged looking at a screen before bed time is supposed to be bad for sleeping patterns.
Not a lot of call for that in Australia. Brilliant mental image though. "Now it's time for your 'Avoiding Hypothermia In A Hole In The Ice Whilst Being Stalked By Polar Bears' Lesson, children! Line up quickly please!"
Most patterns I see there involve JavaScript, Ruby, MongoDB and lots of incompetent morons.

I think I couldn't bear with the "Shit Internet Says" version.
Had to upvote. Exactly my sentiments
"Multi-threaded: Whenever possible, Twitter API requests are made in parallel, resulting in faster performance for bulk operations."

That's not what threads are about.
When Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella was selected, among the specific points he mentioned was an increased role to be played in the company by Bill Gates as "Technology Advisor":

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/feb14/02-04ne...

Microsoft also announced that Bill Gates, previously Chairman of the Board of Directors, will assume a new role on the Board as Founder and Technology Advisor, and will devote more time to the company, supporting Nadella in shaping technology and product direction. John Thompson, lead independent director for the Board of Directors, will assume the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors and remain an independent director on the Board.

"Bill Gates welcomes Satya Nadella as Microsoft CEO - YouTube"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5BhQVuRcTk

As Alex Schleber (just some guy, but insightful IME) put it on G+:

But MOST WORRISOME of all is what he says next! - "I'm thrilled that Satya has asked me to step up, substantially increasing the time that I spend at the company... I'll have over a third of my time available to meet with product groups... and it will be fun to define this next round of products working together...".

YIKES! Precisely the thing that any outside CEO candidate was dreading, and likely making moving both Ballmer and Gates off the board a precondition for anyone to even consider the challenge (compare here: www.mondaynote.com/2013/12/08/microsoft-ceo-search-stalemate/ ).

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexSchleber/posts/PRZMqdmChsK
Anyone who is aware that the economy is not a zero-sum game.
No comments about how Paul Allen has been doing the same thing?
So maybe it's a good thing Americans are becoming more buoyant?

I'm joking of course, although the number of unintentional drownings in the US has been dropping steadily since the 80s, and researchers have not been able to fully explain the cause...[1]

[1]: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=190416
To be fair, Verizon stopped the fiber game, so I'm not sure we're going to get new pipes from the big providers.
Those in "leadership" roles will eventually enrich themselves and their cronies and you're back to having income inequality, but worse than before, since any chance at upward mobility has been removed.
It most likely consists of shares in far too many things to list. The amount of his money in MSFT doesn't matter unless MSFT outperforms the rest of his investments, no?
That would have been very useful the time I almost died falling into a frozen creek skiing in the Australian Back-Country. For a country that only has a few square kilometres of skiable terrain in winter, it's got some really nasty terrain!
You make valid points, but please stop saying that naive users are grandmas. I even specified he was my housemate - how many elderly people do you know share a house? It's even the wrong gender. The world's non-power computer users are not limited to grandmothers (who seem to be all about desktop use) and toddlers (who seem to be all about iOS).

Also, my colleague didn't give up on Ubuntu. He just noted four different ways to fix the given problem in four consecutive six-month releases.
I agree, that is terrible. In html we already have comments with <!-- -->
Fair point, though IME task-oriented apps tend to be more comprehensible than format-oriented ones.
The class was usually split up in to groups of about 10, depending on age / proficiency. There'd be a teacher leading each group.

There would also be the lifeguards from the pool. If I remember rightly, this was at least two, if not more -- there always seemed to be one sitting up in the high chair, and there always seemed to be one patrolling the pool edge.

It was a 25m pool, and while the school was there it was closed to the wider public.
Jaadi.js – JS Storage Abstraction
Part of it is about the empathetic circle of concern, and part of it is about reputation. Figuring out ways to both widen the circle of concern and build stronger reputation metrics should help quite a bit. You're not very likely to destroy the chainsaw you are borrowing from your next-door neighbor or your best friend, for example.

One could also argue that sole ownership leads to abuse simply because it is "allowed". For example, if you "own" a field, you can salt that field and leave it barren for many years.
He's not going to hold it as cash, it's going to be held as more diversified investments. He wants his foundation to far outlive himself.
It's a great and practical book, but I'd say it serves a different role than Illusion of Life. I take it from one of the other replies that it's fallen out of print :-(
>Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources

So I guess he never heard of the Incans.
Try telling the billions of people in the world living hand to mouth that the actions of some for-profit corporation will mean that they see an improvement in their quality of life.

Hundreds of millions of people in China who would have been living hand to mouth a few decades ago are now living much fuller, longer, happier lives because their nation provided cheap labor and manufacturing for "some for-profit corporation[s]". A global economy half today's size couldn't have supported them in that way, and a global economy of 2100 cut in half by lower growth rates will have many more relatively poor people. I'm not sure what the Koch brothers have to do with that. Your argument does not appear to coherently respond to what I wrote.
I think Gates has stated he won't be leaving anything for his children.
> If someone doesn't like the political system, then you're acting immorally and violently by forcing them to abide by it.

Do you really mean this? It seems completely unrealistic, and is just the flip side of the parent's comment.

I don't know of a single political system in the entire world which allows residents to opt out of its legal system, and nor should they.

Maybe you mean something rather specific by political system and I just don't understand what you're saying?
The state must die is not a call to violence, I mean to say the institution of political authority must be annihilated, not the people that currently hold that authority.

I wish all individual humans within those institutions long happy productive lives after they stop threatening everyone outside those institutions with violence.
Hamming, "Mathematics" (May 18, 1995)
For actual estimates of how far off human-level AI is, check out page 10 of http://intelligence.org/2014/04/30/new-paper-the-errors-insi... which has a scatter plot of predicted completion dates vs. when the predictions were made. "There is a strong tendency to predict the development of AI within 15– 25 years
from when the prediction is made (over a third of all predictions are in this
timeframe".
"He's clearly not selling because he needs the money; he's selling because eventually he ... have more use for cash than MSFT shares."

So, iow, he wants the money.
Technology has already destroyed capitalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading
My housemate didn't have problems with browsing or photos either. Things like a pair of bluetooth headphones, which had linux support, were a nightmare (for him) to get sorted. The desire to use a pair of bluetooth headphones really shouldn't require a power user.
There are two editions of the book which is a masterpiece (the longer edition is intended for serious animators). If you have any interest in animation you owe it to yourself to grab a copy.

I don't think that two of the principles are dealt with well in the animations — staging and pose-to-pose. The morphs are too subtle to really illustrate the principle well. (The elegance of animating a cube for each principle is fantastic.)
I think that was the point of the reputation economy the article speculated. Much harder to get away with that kind of abuse with a ubiquitous, trustable (ie. decentralized) reputation system.
Is A Reverse Merger The Way To Fund Your Startup?
And one key phrase in there that emphasizes a difference between the UK and US is "council pool". My experience in the US - even in Massachusetts where they actually have functioning local government and aren't too afraid of providing public services - is that providing a swimming pool is a pretty low priority for town government. Often a pool will be provided by the local school system, but access will still be based on a membership fee, which excludes a lot of people from access.
But the idea that capitalism will eventually produce the conditions of its own demise is /the/ Marxist argument. It's like Marx 101. Capitalism is a stage (and a necessary one) on the way towards full communism. (Unfortunately we've seen that attempts to move past that dictatorship of the proletariat time period haven't worked out so well)
The Philosopher of Global Warming
Parallelising Python with Threading and Multiprocessing
But nobody really wants to lose anything, even if the gain on the other side is greater than their loss.
According to some stories, Ballmer now owns more stock than Gates. I'm wondering if Ballmer will start selling off his stock and how investors will react to that.
Yup, I'm bookmarking this immediately. Of course we have to go deeper, so Shit Shit NH Says is coming soon.
Yes, that's how it generally works...Comparative advantage and all...

But luckily there's plenty of things that /can't/ be done from the other side of the world.
Followed! Hilarious stuff. :-)
The article didn't answer any of the questions I had. It reads a bit like someone was asked to expand the title into two thousand words. Half-thought explanations, some anecdotes, but almost no data.

So both prices and lifetimes have dropped... but how much and how fast? Are we paying more dollars per lifetime year?

What about interventions to fix the incentives in the market? What's been tried? Who's pushing for reform? Are we likely to see any? Are there some reliable signals of long lifetime we can incentivize?
Did they got to an on-site interview?

Because one thing that has happened is recruiters leaving you hanging on, so, they'll ask for some info, then no further communication (even if you ask)
I would like to request a Markov Generator of this.

BTW, enjoy the fun while it lasts because this isn't long for the front page.
"That includes public property, which is practically never for sale and are mostly hoarded by the state without any chance of private ownership/transfer. That's called a monopoly."

I don't see how that's a monopoly. They're holding an asset that they don't wish to sell, but there's plenty of competition in near-perfect substitutes. How is this more of a monopoly than Ted Turner's 2 million acres? You can't buy that specific piece of land, but there's lots of land for sale that might work very nearly as well for your purposes.
And as I understand it, one reason they did that was the threat of 'neutrality': FiOS only made sense financially if they could slowly turn a (numbers ballparked) $100 cable TV & phone bill into a $200 TV & PPV movies & games & video phone & PPV sports bill via "value-added" services. Neutrality would make that flatly impossible, though I think VZ figured out that even without neutrality, most of what they thought they were going to sell was going to be delivered over the IP connection by third parties anyway.
needs vs wants
GitHub monoculture
> I suppose there's the argument that most of the earth's surface is covered in water; it would be useful to not be afraid of it, to know how to move in it, and to be confident doing so.

Yet we spend our entire lives--with the exception of a few excursions--on land. I agree that it's a useful skill, I just don't agree that it's as basic as walking or driving or cooking.
It is actually "90% of everything is crud"
BitlBee: Twitter from an IRC client
Let me apply the necessary nuance to your argument to strip away the racism and sexism:

"I agree that we should be judged as individuals, but if you are white and male, then you should also be aware that you are perceived differently and generally more positively in many situations than minorities and women. If you apply for a job or a loan, you [MAY] have an advantage. Even without a Stanford MBA, you [MIGHT] have an easier time getting VC funding than [MANY SIMILARLY QUALIFIED] women and minorities."

In your statement, you ascribed stereotyped attributes to me, and to every situation I might find myself. In doing so, you ask me to accept the core premise that I always have an advantage over others, in every situation, because of my appearance and gender.

Yet, Heidi Roizen, in many ways (but clearly not all ways, as evidenced by her experiences) started from a position of much greater privilege than me. I hope you can see how these things are nuanced, and that sexist/racist stereotypes are convenient but inaccurate, and in aggregate, those stereotypes become very wearing on those of us who, as is often stated by those with your point of view, "do not inhabit positions of power" relative to you.

The "white man" stereotype used to roll off me, because I only saw it on the fringes of impolite society. Now, I see it said regularly and publicly, in popular if not polite company, often in contexts where I don't have "power" and I do find it both demeaning and threatening.
Honestly it's more than enough for many use cases. OSX is quite lean (for a non-minimalist OS) and memory compression saves quite a bit before having to hit swap. Activities such as word processing and typical (i.e not geeky 100+ tabs) surfing around workloads fit very well. My girlfriend has the base 2013 11" (Haswell, 4GB/128GB) as her main machine and it's perfectly snappy. I have an early 2013 base 13" Retina (pre-Haswell, 8GB/256GB), do loads of dev with huge terminal scrollbacks (a real memory eater) and a few throwaway non-GUI VMs (also, shared video memory) and it'll be fine for at least the next four years.

The takeaway is not everyone has the same use case. Also IMHO bloated DOMs and careless coding† are the real pain point.

† It doesn't have to be optimised to the metal but seriously, quite a few people just develop as if we all have ideal Turing machines.
a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources

I'd put it slightly differently. We need a method for the allocation of scarce resources and money is the one we have developed that has the least transactional overhead, and any methods that seek to replace it not only needs to look at achieving a better allocation, but also needs to be able to do it with less overhead or else you lose any benefits gained.
What if you could eat without any person having to work?
If monitizable a concept can be tested using Adwords,FB or bing ads.
> I own both MacBook and Lenovo laptops for work and personal use (programming) and have never owned a tablet. I have never owned a tablet and still do not see a genuine use for them when my laptops can do the same thing but better and the cost of ownership is not negligible,

You don't "get" tablets because tablets are not designed, nor marketed, to your demographic. You are the outlier, the 1% (or whatever percent, that's just made up), who needs a general purpose computer in order to "create".

But most "computer users" are not creators in the sense of a programmer. They are mere "consumers". And they treat a computer as little more than a glorified TV where they can "click" with a "remote" (mouse) to access content, then passively consume that content.

What little "creation" they do (posting something to their wall, twitter,, etc.) is easy enough to do from a tablet, so they don't see any difficulty that way.

You, however, are not a passive "TV" like consumer of others content. You are a content creator. Your needs are different, and as such, you don't see a tablet as useful, because it does not fit your use situation.
It's a society that shares everything. Logical mode of thinking suggests that leadership should also be shared.

A recent example of this is; San Francisco (I think) municipality opening up it databases to the citizens so that people can figure out a way to get involved in how their living space is governed.
The alternative is a continued and ever more absurd growth in the service sector. In the end 95% of the population will be cutting each others' hair and saying nice things to each other for money. With the most detail and attention dedicated to the 5% that actually does useful stuff, then trickling down. It does sound absurd, doesn't it? But we're already getting there. Does your kitchen really need a marble counter top? No, but you want to feel important/worthy enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, and a luxurious lifestyle includes a marble counter top, so you get one. Replace "kitchen" and "marble counter top" with whatever you want to.

The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great example of this. High-end prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all for providing emotional support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate modern workers, in my opinion, and most of us will be following in their footsteps soon enough.
Boy Scout summer camps, canoeing. The other guy didn't understand that you could, in fact, flip a canoe. Later, crossing an ice-slicked, narrow bridge in winter I fell into a creek (not very deep, not quite waste deep on me once I stood up, but certainly could've been more terrifying if I hadn't been comfortable in and around water and given it was about 20F outside and I fell through a thin layer of ice).
> Who will lead us?

Googles AI of course.
There is no such possibility.
you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily.

Nobody pays taxes voluntarily either, yet we collect them and use them to pay for services everybody uses. I see absolutely no reason why we couldn't do the same thing for all of people's basic needs.
I think there's a truth in that though. Rice cookers - decades ago they had no electronics, and was just a case of pressing a switch to complete a circuit to create heat. My grand mother use one that is older than I am. Nowadays rice cookers are full of electronics, I doubt they can last as long. Of course, survivorship bias is still in play here...
It sounds like you're actually defending the labour practices of China over the last few decades. If so, I can't argue with you.

EDIT: In addition, the improvement of China's living standards should never be used as an example of capitalist success. China was at a cultural and economic low due to the effects of the Chinese "Cultural Revolution". Anything would have seen an improvement in living standards across a lot of China.

The point about the Koch brothers is that a project with staggering environmental implications is being controlled by a very small number of parties, when the actual people living in that same environment are going to receive little or no compensation for the destruction of said environment.
> That's the feasability argument. The risk argument is that the consequences of an independent, runaway intelligent entity significantly more capable than humans would have such devastating consequences for humanity's future that even a small risk merits a significant effort to map out the territory.

While that argument would be sufficient to justify greatly increased attention to AI safety, I don't think it's the one that's being made here. A good overview of the argument by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is at http://intelligence.org/files/IE-EI.pdf . They don't think the probability is small.
No, the plan is to wind down the foundation within 20 years of his and Melinda's deaths. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundati...
I believe that if held more than a year, his stock is a long term capital gain and also only taxed at 20%.