skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps. It's hard to know what exactly the cultural repercussion of such a big change will be.

Bu, one of the strong ideas behind basic income (or negative income tax currently exists in some places including the US), is that it does allow people to receive it and still be incentivized to work. A person receiving social welfare (or worse, some sort of disability allowance) loses part or all of their benefits if they work.

Social welfare works like a huge marginal tax rate (sometimes over 100%, effectively) on the first dollar earned.

It's not impossible that unemployment actually goes down. What I expect you'd see less of is people working as long for low wages, the proverbial 3 job poverty. Say you make $6 per hour after tax (basic income would probably require income tax to kick in on the first dollar) and you start with $250 per week. The difference between working a 40 or a 60 hour week is $610-$490.

But, this back of the envelop stuff only goes so far. There are a lot of side effects that are complicated in ways even economists will admit we don't understand.
I'm baffled why any libertarians support basic income. It's basic wealth redistribution. It's forcing those who work to financially support those who don't work at threat of jail time.
TIPS are not normally considered "liquid" (at least not as liquid as cash, which is the standard most people have) as they have minimum terms of ownership.
Two players die at world chess event in Norway
"There are a lot of people that believe a big government/market crash is coming. And they're absolutely desperate for ways to weather it without eating their own toes off."

Those people would be best served by buying ammunition.
> [...] because the moment you sign up for things, you will almost certainly be entered in a database somewhere, [...]

Oh, you've lost the game long before that. Grandma's email chain? Welcome to the database as soon as anyone on that list gets their email compromised. Apologies to all the grandmothers out there who know how to use the BCC field.
> As someone who was still in college myself only a few years ago, the idea of the financial burden imposed on me for the rest of my life simply for doing the thing that society practically strong-armed me into doing seems, to me, ridiculous; for that reason I am hesitant to call any form of Student Debt collection "ethical" simply because the laws which govern it are atrocious.

What happens when you don't pay your Student Loans for years and years? Since it's a "guaranteed loan", it can't actually (continue to) impact your credit rating, can it? So could you effectively decide to just "let it ride" until you die of old age, never having paid a cent of it?

If so, I think this is basically the idea behind of guaranteeing the loan in the first place: to give the people who can't pay their debt the ability to just ignore it forever.
Why is that aspect very controversial? It's not like Warren Buffett would suddenly not be paying tons of taxes. $1k/month is dwarfed by the taxes he pays.
Never? 126,000 Swiss people formally requested a referendum about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Switzerland
Why Your Company Needs To Write More Open Source Software
I came to write the same thing. I use org-mode + Jekyll and it couldn't get any less complicated. It's not slow and not badly designed either, IMO.
No. Every single time someone supposes that any piece of technology is approaching its limits, the answer is no. Technology will continue to improve and advance as we make new discoveries. The simple fact is we do not know the future, so pretending like we know what things will be like in 20 or 50 years is just pointless. What's with this obsession of taking today's technological knowledge and assuming that things won't drastically change? Nobody should ever pretend to know what the future holds.
Glitter sprinkles?
Basic Income cannot replace Social Security and Medicare. It can only provide a floor for it. Same for Welfare.

The intent of basic income is to enable a family of minimum wage earners to have a much less stressful financial existence: 2 minimum wage jobs ($9.00/hour in California) + 2 adult basic incomes at $12,000 each = $61,440. By no means a king's ransom, but certainly gives a family of four a fighting chance to live in a less unsafe place, feed the kids a little better and maybe take a modest vacation once in a while.

Lower financial stress across the entire country will free people up to focus more on raising their kids. Many, many social problems subside when families do better.
I downvoted you. I'm interested in reading counterarguments rather than comments like this.
Services like Parse - https://parse.com/
This used to be a y-combinator company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3971693
I wrote connecting Happiness and Success via Kindle. Got it to #1 on 2 Amazon Best Seller lists using KDP select. Wrote it in word and paid $50 for kindle to convert it. The process was really simple and more people should try it. It has opened a lot of doors and got me a lot of press. Not a great way to make living, but definitely a good creative outlet that supports your business.
A quick Googling would have shown two REPLs for Go, though they're old and haven't been updated in a long time. I'm guessing the Go playground and "go run file.go" compiling and running so quickly, make it not a real concern.
I think you need to go look up the definition of Libertarianism and Anarcho-capitalism. Hint: It's not the definition you find on MSNBC/Fox/CNN/whatever.
Glitter sprinkles are available where you are? Well aren't you just living the dream!
Does anybody know more about this? I've seen ads for places like that and they set off my scam-o-meter, but I've never dug in to see how he scam worked.
What about just this: for every dollar that is created, 50 cents of it goes to a basic income fund. Right now, banks and government contractors receive a disproportionately high amount of the newly printed money.

Also, we need to reform corporate taxation. That would reduce wealth disparity and ensure stability of the social safety net.
> when it's disclosed that .govs run nmap it's time to patch your TCP stacks?

They don't just nmap the internet, they systematically compromise vulnerable targets as per the article and the slides. And unlike common criminals, there's no hope of them being stopped by any law enforcement agency.

If they're really going after every non 5-Eyes machine they can compromise, people living outside of the 5-Eyes need to protect themselves.
This is a really wonderful comment. What I was trying to get at is that you can't just show up and pray along with the group, like you can do in some Christian churches. There's no way to stand in the back and follow along.

In my experience, the biggest challenge you face in visiting a mosque is that people will make a sincere effort to convert you to Islam. They do this out of generosity and kindness, but it leads to some intense conversations. It is best to be ready with some good deflecting answers, unless you are considering becoming a Muslim.

I was very surprised to find myself invited to enter nearly every mosque I visited in Yemen. The only exception was the Great Mosque in Sana'a, which is closed to nonbelievers. My guess is this is because Sana'a sees a relatively large number of tourists compared to the rest of Yemen.

It would be hard to overemphasize the positive, welcoming, generous attitude of Muslims towards anyone with a sincere interest in their religion.
The product's name is not north. North is more like the design/dev agency.
Way to back that up with an actual reason.
I would suspect most of the people who are defaulting on debts don't have significant assets or income to make it easy to recover debts, even with a court order.

The option to sue is reasonable because otherwise people who are too rich to need credit would often find themselves in positions where there's little-to-no incentive to pay back. But these aren't the bulk of debts that these agencies are working with - the bulk of people who are defaulting on loans aren't people with money, they're people without money.

Frankly the harassment techniques that a lot of debt collectors use are disgusting and they prey on those who already are suffering. The FDCPA makes a lot of these techniques illegal, but the protections the law provides aren't widely known.
:) Salaamalaikum
anyone? please.
While I realize HN loves basic income, it honestly is not a good idea. I would love to hear people's arguments for it.

Make no mistake, no one wants unemployment, poverty, starvation, poor health, etc. Like any government program, basic income will alleviate some of these issues. And in that sense, it sounds great. However, like any government program, it will create other problems.

People seem to treat basic income like a panacea, as if somehow just giving people money (as a tax to the rest of society) will somehow solve all of their problems.

People are not good at spending money. Why don't we give people money instead of food stamps? Is it because it was politically untenable? No, it was done because giving people food stamps (actually, now debit cards redeemable at grocery stores) is significantly more effective than just giving cash at solving hunger issues.

Basic income, granted, looks great on paper. However, it only provides those benefits if people are rational and relatively interchangeable, which they are not.

I didn't even get to the negative incentives it creates, which is a whole other can of worms. For example, subsidizing income on the lowest level generally leads directly to price inflation, which is highly regressive. It's not clear if that, by itself, will cause more problems that this helps.
Seems to be a lot of complaining about the City of London's semi-autonomous status, without actually explaining why this is a bad thing. I've always thought it was just an odd historical quirk. They're still subject to the general laws of the country, still subject to the same taxes and regulations.

The articles main complaint seems to be about banks and other financial bodies using offshore tax havens, but that has nothing to do with the City's odd status. That could happen - and does happen - anywhere in the world...
What is grep and How do We Use It?
Indeed so we should tax people for being poor to make them work. <sarcastic> There are two extremes at work here, either you try to help and incentivize not working (I will lose my free student aid if I make more then X) or you punish them for not working (lazy tax). Sometimes it seems like the best solution would be to do nothing, though I know there's a fine balance that could be struck that's better then "nothing" it seems our current political climate does not do a good job of finding actual solutions to problems (I.E helping people improve their lives/conditions)
I use spaced repetition every day for technical knowledge. It's very easy:

Every small piece of information that you want to memorize, create a new card.

Let me give some examples from my current technical deck:

Q: This is an open source data collection system for monitoring large distributed systems. It's a distributed data collection and analysis system in Hadoop. It runs collectors that store data in HDFS and it uses MapReduce to produce reports.

A: Chukwa

Q: This is an Apache templating language and processing engine that can be used to generate Java code, HTML, JSP's, Hibernate modules and most anything else that can be generalized.

A: Velocity

Q: In Ruby, what command lets you determine whether you're running as a main program?

A: if __FILE__ == $0

Q: This C++ function rearranges the elements in the range [first, last) into the lexicographically next smaller permutation of elements.

A: prev_permutation
> Should the LEO disclose he's wearing a camera? "Hey, I notice you just fell in the shower and are naked, soaking wet, and in an awkward position. Just FYI... I'm wearing a camera."

All good concerns, but we have to remember that the TV show Cops has been doing this for what? 20 years now?

I assume they have to get releases from everyone to put videos on the show, but they sure aren't getting releases when they walk into a house.

If police-cams are mandated the footage should be put into a case file and only released under court order.
"expensive middle class entitlements"

It was an incentive created by legislators, so they could increase home-ownership in their populace. Wow, way to turn a government-legislated incentivization of middle-class individuals for home-ownership, into an "entitlement".
It's controversial because when something is merit-tested you can hire lot's of people to test merits, those people are your new votes because you gave them jobs. Also those are jobs with opportunities because merits are malleable so with a small gratification to your local civil servant that makes him very happy you can make it even if you shouldn't be eligible.

Basic income will be very politically unpopular not because of some conservative rules but because if you enact it suddenly million civil servants that evaluated "merits" will you their jobs and will not vote for you again ever.
You can find over an hours worth of arguments for the idea in Basic Income: The Movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViywrpAyVdY
No, prices would NOT be discovered quickly, because the bank cannot proceed without getting a response from the debtor... or waiting long enough that they can legally treat it as rejected.

That probably means at least two or three snail-mail notifications and a month of waiting time... Defaulting debtors correlate heavily with people who cannot be contacted or will not respond.
They are British colonies, which has no real place in the modern world, they should be properly part of the UK, hence Europe.

I guess if they voted for independence we could let them, but then they should not have the benefits of being in the UK. One or the other.

(Also the inhabitants are citizens of the EU, but live in a non EU country).
Thanks for owning up to it. I figured I'd get a few ;)

More "detail" added above.
We can't close this if we leave either, these are companies incorporated in Ireland and the Netherlands. It is not the EU that created this.
Priorities can be mandated. Dealing with externally-set priorities is a fairly regular subject on this very forum (damn you, marketing!).

No government agency should be solely responsible for selecting what is and is not its job.
It's not legal to get seeds from your neighbor if your neighbor is using seeds with any patented genes (a la Monsanto Soy beans). In fact, if seeds from your neighbor's field are blown over by the wind to your field, and you harvest those, you can be sued for patent infringement. Monsanto has done this and won. They even (in)famously hired Academi (nee Xe nee Blackwater) to find 'patent violators'.
I have been using cable internet here in the suburbs of SF since 1997 or so, which is currently owned by Comcast (it was originally @Home, then ATT Broadband Internet, then Comcast or something). The product they own is top notch. I got near 1 MB/s download speeds on Napster when it came out.

Of course Comcast is just a puppet of media companies that are trying to monopolize consumer communication and monitor/identify users. I do indeed believe I have experienced poor quality service due to the controls they have been implementing, but overall the product has been quite a satisfying experience most of the time.

The problem with Apple's service is that it really doesn't even exist. There is no way to talk to anybody at Apple about the technical issues with their products. They just tell you to take it to completely clueless people at their retail stores or mail it in for replacement. This is all fine and dandy, as long as you bought the product a year ago or pay for Apple Care.

It's difficult to compare to Comcast.
Beautiful page!

One small nit: when loading up the page on a mac, I see OS X window chrome around the examples, but Windows style C:\ file paths
The elegant thing about basic income is that you won't need to lose social incentives. We aren't talking about a soviet-style redistribution of wealth here. If you were earning $100,000/year, and you are now getting a $12,000/year basic income, you aren't going to be quitting your day job.
As an American ("no taxation without representation!") I've always... admired the House of Lords. They are able to say and do things which no elected politician can, and provide a sort of stabalizing feedback to the UK's parlimentarian system. Not unlike the relationship of the American congress with the appointed-judege court system.

I was sad when I found out that the House of Lords is in the process of being reformed, with membership moving from peerage to either elected or elected-appointed positions. I fear that this won't end well for Britain :(
Heck of a drive: OC to SF
Just drove up to SF from Orange County. The team and I are new to the Bay Area. Would love to meet other founders for coffee, lunch, or to go out in town. Will be here until Sunday evening.

Thanks for the help guys...

Meesh
I would say that AM2R deserves to be on this list (it's a remake of Metroid 2): http://metroid2remake.blogspot.com/p/about-project.html
I think those are solvable problems.

There's already a big incentive not to repay debts. Some places give up without doing anything, some will offer to discount your debt even before sending it to collections. This might make the incentive a little worse, but the jerk would still get the negative credit report entry, which is presumably the bigger punishment than having to dodge some collector for a while.

Regarding the latter, I expect the stable solution is that the bank offers a package of 1000 items, the agency offers a price per dollar of debt, and 14 days later the agency receives the 880 accounts and pays on a per debt-dollar basis. It adds some risk, but debt collection agencies are experts at pricing risk.
I doubt that "free $1000 check every month" would receive any more support than "free healthcare". And it will be even more complicated than the so-called ObamaCare by the time it gets to the ballot box.
The British diaspora: And don’t come back
Umm it fits the definition of entitlement exactly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

It is a benefit (tax credit) given to a specific group (homeowners). Whether the goal is worthy or the means effective is another question, of course, but it is CLEARLY an entitlement.
I agree lets be careful about stating better performance unless you can post some stats. It may be true but I'm an engineer and like to see why 1 vs the other.
Guacamole is either going to use VNC or RDP protocols. Both are relatively known quantities.
I have used Guacamole on Ubuntu 14.04 desktop servers to provide HTML5 access to LXC (linux container based) Ubuntu remote desktops.
That requires some configuration w/x11rdp and xfreerdp etc but there is a freakin great toolset with the odd name of "ScaryGliders" http://scarygliders.net/2012/05/23/the-scarygliders-x11rdp-o...

that hss the build down to an art. They GIT the latest code, do the required build and then install for you on your system. After that you just install Guacamole server side and you are done.
PwC put together one of the more comprehensive reports regarding the 'value of collection agencies in the U.S.'

http://healpay.com/assets/2007_pwc_collection_industry_study...
Could you provide sources for the efficacy of food stamps vs cash?

From the perspective of someone outside the US, the food stamps program always seemed totally weird.
We depend on government for such a huge range of services by now that distributing basic income wouldn't be unique leverage the government has over us.

The last thing any government want's is unrest. An you can bet that going late on monthly basic income could cause serious unrest.
Darkcoin Continues Its Mission Of Being Private Cryptocurrency
> certainly gives a family of four a fighting chance to live in a less unsafe place

Of course if everyone has basic incomes, then everyone can bid more for housing and push up the costs of both safe and unsafe housing.

It isn't clear that a basic income would make neighborhoods safer or make it easier for the poor to move to safer areas.
I'm not trying to be argumentative but lets assume Bitcoin becomes as liquid as USD (ie you can spend it on everything you can on USD without paying any higher transaction fees) what keeps the availability/depreciation matrix in check.

That is, if it is a great value store why won't people horde it, thus decreasing availability. If it becomes readily available, why wouldn't it become worth less?
How to Take a Social Media Vacation
libertarians would be (and are) completely opposed to basic income! Basic income is basically a monetary redistribution, which aligns more with socialism than anything else.
I think something like circles could be done right -- if each circle had a custom background, etc. so that it looked and felt like a different website. I'm not worried about posting political rants to LinkedIn because it's obvious I'm on LinkedIn rather than FaceBook or Google+; I wouldn't be worried about posting to my coworkers group if there were very obvious signifiers that I was in that group.
Ok, but zero profit = zero flexibility on meeting unplanned expenses.
> Basic Income cannot replace Social Security and Medicare. It can only provide a floor for it. Same for Welfare.

It can replace those things. Whether it is desirable is a matter for debate (but I don't see you make the argument that its not, just asserting it.)

> The intent of basic income is to enable a family of minimum wage earners to have a much less stressful financial existence

I disagree: the intended beneficiaries of Basic Income are not just "minimum wage earners", further, your calculation of minimum wage + basic income is misleading since many BI advocates advocate eliminating the minimum wage with the adoption of BI. (More libertarian and less liberal BI supporters tend to do so; more liberal and less libertarian supporters tend not to.)

I would say that the intent of BI as a replacement for means-tested welfare is to (1) increase short-run efficiency but eliminating costs and perverse incentives associated with means-testing, (2) provide a system which is easier to scale up as automation reduces the relative demand for labor as compared to capital, and (3) reduce financial stress generally, and increase labor market fluidity.
Make ≈ Puppet
I mean, unlimited or infinite basically have the exact same meaning. I don't see what's wrong with "infinite". It's completely correct.
You're missing something. Horse-like animals actually did develop cars. They only had to evolve into humans and build up a technological base before they could do it.

Over a very long period of time, animals developed cars. Now that same development process is remarkably faster, and robots are being developed. The horse analogy is perfectly valid.
This seems like a problem that the bitcoin protocol could help to solve, at least the tracking part (aka no double selling of debtor lists, knowing who actually OWNS your debt). To try and retroactively do this is probably suicide but I could imagine where all new debt sold off is kept track of in a system like this and people can at least know they are paying to the correct collector.
There is a way to turn knapsack algorithms into a good candidate qualifier --- if solving knapsack problems is related in some reasonably direct way to the role you're hiring for --- just create a work-sample test based on solving knapsack problems. Allow the candidate to work on the problem on their own time in their own home or office or whatever.

There. Now, instead of asking for CS theory from candidates in the most hostile imaginable setting (that's what a job interview is: hostile) and telling yourself a cute little story about how you're determining how candidates handle interesting problems that require them to consult the literature: you actually allow the candidate to demonstrate how they would do that.
Create a pull request https://github.com/piranha/osgameclones/