skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is if you have replaced the drive unit four times in the first 30k miles (as with the Edmunds car), just how many times are you going to have to replace it once the warranty expires?

Your parent sees extending the warranty as a form of damage-control against this (quite reasonable) fear.
When I think about how IE is faster on my machines, I'm mainly thinking in terms of page rendering performance after the first byte and animation/scrolling smoothness.

Lately, I've actually found myself lamenting that I needed to further optimize a couple sites so they'd run smoothly on Chrome and/or Safari, when they were already buttery smooth in IE. That's something I never thought I'd find myself thinking.

(BTW, I see that someone downvoted you, but that wasn't me. Your point about AJAX caching is a good one.)
"Each robot has simple capabilities, and is susceptible to many errors. To compensate for this, they must work together."

Just like people.
Right, actually I created one as well.
Also, I've been thinking of this for a while, but Project Euler needs to be open-sourced. I think this would help people who don't necessarily want to contribute money. I thought rather than just making suggestions, I could make a pull request for implementing OAuth/Persona/OpenID login -- then I realized it wasn't open source...

I've been keeping this idea close to the chest, mostly because it's something I want to do, but Project Euler could easily become a great training tool, an easy-to-install packaged django application(I mention django for it's nice out-of-the-box admin interfaces, doesn't matter what it is as long as it's easy to manage for admins and users)
What do you think "take control of as many machines as possible" means? Asking them nicely to hand over their SSH keys?

"The covert infrastructure includes so-called Operational Relay Boxes (ORBs), which are used to hide the location of the attacker when the Five Eyes launch exploits against targets or steal data (Figure 18). Several times a year, the spy club tries to take control of as many machines as possible, as long as they are abroad. For example, in February 2010 twentyfour spies located over 3000 potential ORBs in a single work day (Figure 19). However, going over the port scan results provided by HACIENDA was considered too laborous (Figure 20), so they programmed their OLYMPIA system to automate the process (Figure 21). As a result, the spies brag that they can now locate vulnerable devices in a subnet in less than five minutes (Figure 22)."
If the basic income replaces social security but is available to all adults, a large number of working people are going to quit and retire prematurely. SS isn't supposed to be a total retirement plan, but it is for many and this would increase the number - probably to the point where it all falls apart. What is the incentive to work under this scheme?
If someone sells you debt at 1/1200, that simply means they believe the debt is very bad and unlikely to collect. Even at that price, you could be a total sucker, since perhaps you will not collect a penny.
parallelism is a big omission from pg for me. for all of the language features (and they're awesome), the thing that is the most glaring omission is parallelism. i understand it's been and on-again off-again project that seems difficult to implement. i still love pg, though so it's not a deal-breaker for me.
Stream Processing with a Spreadsheet [pdf]
I'm curious to see which companies were examined - if any were investigated and were found to be meeting regulations, or could be held up as exemplary.

The paper details 30 companies investigated and found lacking, but no mention of how extensive the survey was. Was every single company they looked at in violation? Did they check out 100 companies and find 30 that didn't comply?
Basic income is not practical today, at least not in the political sense. The political climate is in no way configured to do so, and won't be for years.

The Democrats are never going to be okay with removing federal programs (even if basic income could cover several of them), and the Republicans won't touch something that would be seen by many as socialism.

I think proponents of BI are ignoring just how radical it is. Basic income is a massive change. It would more or less completely change our society (or require our society to completely change in order to even happen). Democrats and Republicans hardly work together on small issues today, what would cause them to work on something which threatens both parties in various ways?
I guess, for some definition of liquid.
Read the Docs adds Badge Support
It's probably the same thing like gambling to those people. Or penny stock trading. The reasoning is probably like this: at 1/1200 rate, I can cheaply buy a whole crapload of debt. And based on the time-honored principle "if you throw enough shit at a wall, some of it will stick", if just a small percentage of those debts pays out, I will make a profit even if the rest are junk.
I don't know about practical, but purely from a theoretical point of view I'm getting a "this is happening" vibe. People can whine and theorize about it as much as they like but I don't see a path that leads to anything other than basic income happening...at least in 1st world countries.
Judge asked to stop tuition charge at Cooper Union
For me, the saddest part is that all this fight over an unethical practice by both companies is keeping true innovation from improving the services.
I wish Lyft and Uber teams were as creatives for improving their services instead of damaging the other.
Are you actually confused about the terms, or just trying to be facetious?
Debt collectors usually do not have the ability to target specific people's debt in the debt packages that they buy.
Never mind working with other languages, it's a problem just linking between different compiler versions.
I must be the only one who thinks basic income is insane.

Let me explain. On paper this sounds great, everyone gets income to cover living costs (housing, food, basic utilities) in an economy where the workforce demand is dwindling. However, I personally don't trust my government (US) to implement this properly without any special niches carved out for someone. The corruption is rampant and by the time it gets through our government they will absolutely put loopholes in it or help special interests groups with something.

My second problem with this is those who mismanage their money. There will absolutely be people who abuse the system and use this money to not cover their required expenses and use it for a variety of things they don't need. At the end of the month if they don't have any money left how will they cover their necessary expenses?

Everyone keeps looking at basic income as this perfect solution and I just don't buy it. In a perfect world where the government aren't so corrupted and incompetent along with people who knew how to properly manage their money I feel this could work. However, I just don't see this working and it will be another money sink from our government.

Maybe someone can convince me otherwise.
>mutual funds

Vanguard offers many low-fee mutual funds.

Non-depreciating: The long-term return of stock indices and some bond indices beats inflation.

Attainable: $1000-$3000 minimum to open an account

Liquid: Funds can be bought or sold easily (with no fee), money is accessible via ACH.

I hope you are not suggesting that gold is a better investment than a diverse portfolio of stocks and bonds.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170545

This is a great idea - just as cars are about to go out of warranty, Tesla are getting ahead of potential reputation issues by offering it "forever."

Because Tesla offer an aggressive buy-back program on their leases, they're also incentivized to improve their cars' depreciation curve, so this makes a lot of sense.
I doubt it. You see it mentioned frequently enough in HN-esque circles, but I've never heard it mentioned once outside of it.
No, I'm curious what financial instrument meets all those requirements.
And then there's those of us who have non-existent debt sold on to these people.

About 12 years ago, I started getting letters from a debt agency about a medical bill that I did not owe. Letters that I forwarded to the insurance company.

Then the phone calls started, with people trying to convince me to pay a bill I didn't owe.

It took about 9 months to get it sorted out. What had happened is that the doctor had improperly billed the insurance, for a fee they had already billed for, and the insurance refused to pay it.

The doctor's office sent it to collections. And the collections agency would only stop harassing me if I got the doctors office to call them and admit they had billed incorrectly.

That was not fun.
You are not too late to the game
"They are using a tool I know, therefore it's ok"
>Medical debt rankles me like nothing else. The US, supposedly the most advanced nation on Earth has the worst notion of all: health care for profit. Simply evil. Health care is a basic human right. Full stop. Health care should never be based on one's ability to pay. Never.

An injured person has no capitalistic value. They are injured, and can either work limitedly or not at all. Therefore, they are worth little to nothing.

Why would a capitalistic government like ours care about someone who will be a drain on the "system"? I's better to send them in the insurance mill or die in the ER.

yay usa.
You would prefer the current welfare system, which requires the government to make decisions about who gets what money, to a system that is designed to require zero judgement on the part of any government officials?
First link on the page to

http://todomvc.com/architecture-examples/oraculum/

doesn't work, hope someone can fix this while this story is on the front page. I really need to see some code before I want to study how "the entire paradigm [has] to change".
And what would the alternative to basic income be? Letting the unemployed starve?
Was that made by the MS folks, or it is only hosted on their site?
As a startup founder who develops payment software to collection attorneys, this story really resonates!

Every account has a story behind it and the BEST way to collect is to personalize the settlement experience in a compliant, secure way

Having been in the space for only a few years, the depiction of the industry -pre 2010- seems incredibly accurate from what clients tell us.

Modern interpretation of the FDCPA is desperately needed. In 2014, contacting consumers via cell phone and email is against the law or at best a very grey area.

Sending letters via snail mail are mandated over email. Moreover, ACH payments are still preferred over Card payments… IMO, a 3-5 day settlement time should NOT be the standard way to move money in any industry.
It is offensive to tell someone to work hard and stay out of trouble when:

a) they work harder than you do

b) they face daily hardships greater than you ever have to face

c) trouble comes at random

It's easy to tell people to uproot their lives, and live as fugitives, on a nerd message board. It's nice to believe that we got where we are because of our superior drive, rather than random good luck.
>Also the fact that debt is being purchased for 1/12 of a penny is completely just...unbelievable.

It seems that the particular deal you're referring to was a fraudulent transaction. It had been sold (at least) twice, and having paid $41K for $50M worth of debt, the agency lost money on it. It doesn't sound like legitimate deals are offered this cheaply.

However, you are right that insanity runs rampant in the industry, even among the banks themselves. There is an interesting documentary called "Queen of Versailles". In it, time share king David Siegel is shown telling friends at a party that he offered to keep making interest only payments on an $18M debt he owed until the economy improved. The bank said no, and that they were going to auction the debt. He sent a third party under his control to the auction, where he was able to purchase his own entire $18M debt for $3.2M. He concludes the conversation saying "I'm glad they did it, but who the hell makes decisions like that?"
> There will absolutely be people who abuse the system and use this money to not cover their required expenses and use it for a variety of things they don't need.

And judging by any recent history, availability of easy money, specifically, availability of guaranteed easy money will encourage vendors to sell products as "free to you, just sign these papers turning over the next 9 months of your basic income to us".
That's advice you're entitled to give if you've done the same ... not if you won the genetic lottery of being born in a Western country like the US.
Your comment is downvoted, and people are posting comments like "ok, try", "this is offensive". Doesn't sound like a hackernews thread :)

There are some things you have to do before going to a mosque: unlike churches, you can't get in a mosque "just to visit" (except if they have open-hours for non-worshippers/tourists, which is unlikely for a mosque in the middle of Yemen). You have to be in a state of purity (http://www.onislam.net/english/reading-islam/understanding-i... Also, joining the prayer if you're not muslim can be troublesome, but by all means if you just get in the mosque and maybe observe people praying, I'm not sure you'll get in any trouble.
Theoretically, even a rude behavior in a mosque shouldn't cause you any big problem (a man once urinated inside the prophet's mosque, and the prophet stopped some believers that wanted to punish him and just covered the part where that man urinated).

Muslims are really friendly with non-muslims that are geniunly interested (even in mosques where there are some rules to respect)
What does your question mean? Let's assume that we accept that "it is financially viable to run a possibly unethical debt collection agency". So then you must be thinking of some behaviors that the agency will not engage in, which will cut into its profitability compared to an agency which will do those things, possibly to the extent of making it not financially viable. What behaviors do you have in mind?
Never trust a government plan that says "we're going to add this new program, and replace these others", because the latter will never actually happen. The creation of the new program and the deletion of the old would need to happen in exactly the same bill.
The problem with "basic income" is that by definition it's not merit-tested -- it is a guaranteed base income regardless of the recipient's activities and efforts. You need to understand that this is politically a very controversial idea, and not just with conservatives.
The Burrito Cannon
> Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario

No it's not, especially in this scenario. Anyone who espouses this BS should be removed from their position.
The goal is zero profit in health care.
"On paper this sounds great"
That pretty much sums up almost every single government wealth-redistribution program ever.

It's oh so easy for us all to play arm-chair "fix-the-world" with other people's money. Yet, I don't see anyone proposing a voluntary and opt-in solution to any of these problems. It's all, "screw you, you're paying for it".

Well, except for the freedom-loving individuals in the anarcho-capitalist and libertarian community. They seem to be on the right track when it comes to giving people choice.
This math works because the average person over 65 receives approximately $24,000 in federal benefits which would be cut in half. There are other groups who lose but this one is by far the biggest.
The ACA exchange model is large risk pools with community rating. They implicitly cross subsidize the sick. So if the basic income is large enough to pay for an exchange policy without additional subsidies then you've replaced Medicare and Medicaid. However, a basic income of $12,000 is far away from that number at least for an individual. ACA subsidies the purchase of insurance at up to 400% of the poverty line.

As for social security, politically I agree that a basic income that was lower than when many were expecting would be a non-starter. However I don't agree that it would fail a social insurance scheme. The social insurance aspect of social security is preventing elder poverty, a universal basic income does that by preventing all poverty. The regressive formula for calculating social security benefits was a canny political move (making it look more like a pension) but it isn't necessary to its social insurance function.
My main concern with most articles about basic income, and in fact most articles about the intersection of economics and politics, is that public choice theory is almost never satisfactorily addressed.

Looking at raw numbers is very important, and this article seems to do a good job and make a compelling case. But there is very little mention on the internal economics of government, and whether such a system is actually feasible in some specific government, given the incentives that apply to political behavior.
> I personally don't trust my government (US) to implement this properly without any special niches carved out for someone.

This is already the case. Except this solution eliminates a lot of the existing opportunities for corruption by generally simplifying the model.

> There will absolutely be people who abuse the system and use this money to not cover their required expenses and use it for a variety of things they don't need.

It's a thousand bucks- pretty hard to live large on 1k. Besides, comparing the issue of poor people abusing handouts to corporate welfare is molehills to mountains. If your concern is abuse having a detrimental impact on the society as a whole, don't look at poor people.
You don't think that's possible on JavaScript/PhoneGap?
You know theory means explanation, not imagination, right?
On-Stack Replacement in V8 (2011)
Have you read Road to Makkah by Muhammad Asad? It reads similar to your writing and I greatly enjoyed it. After reading your article, I think that book merits a reread for me.
I'm aware they are in it to make money and I don't mind them operating with reasonable margins. It just sounds like hundreds of them are willing to use the "make the debtor's life as miserable as possible" tactic.

I was mainly thinking of a cost plus model of debt repayment when I said "ethical". Trying to squeeze every last penny out of people who are [mostly] decent folks who just fucked up is the main part that bothers me, honestly.

Thank you for taking the time to answer. :)
"We wanted the whole family to have the same last name for consistency." then "Michele will continue to go by Michele Cooke for work..." Obviously they can do whatever they want with their own names, but from an outsider perspective it seems weird since now both of them are going to have troubles (at least for the first year I guess) remembering they changed their name, both having dual names because of work history, etc.
Basic Income: Bots are going to force the issue
My accent is Australian, but in most accents there are two ls. Cut Spelling is not my scheme - I have just used it for CutSpel.

I think you might be missing the point of cut spelling. The rules say don't cut where the cutting will cause confusion. It has a "if in doubt don't cut" rule. This one of the major reasons I used it for cutspel as I wanted to only implement a subset of cut spelling.
The title gave me a rush thinking it was going to be about this hadith :) Nice to see someone quote from the hadiths. http://sunnah.com/muslim/12/76
You idea of doesn't sound tenable. The "ethical" agency would need an extremely high conversion rate. Something probably in the 75% neighborhood, to cover operating expenses, the 25% that doesn't convert and then a little left over for profit.

Judging by the value of write off debt (pennies on the dollar) the implicit conversion rate of collecting is probably closer to what you might see on a Facebook advertising campaign (3-5 percent??). To make that work the agencies need to charge close to the original charge off amount.
Ask HN: About SICP book
I don't know where to post this kind of question, but since SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) is a computer science related book, I though maybe here I would get an answer. So, I want to buy the book and Amazon says it has 683 pages. A paperback version would be ok? I mean, in terms of paper quality. I bought recently the book "JavaScript The Definitive Guide" (more than 1000 pages) and the paperback version sucks.
Anyone has the Amazon paperback version of SICP?

(The hardcover is a little expensive for me).
(I know that I can read the online version for free, but I want the physical book).
The author may not be very knowledgeable on this front. Fortunately, there are many economists all over the world working on exactly this idea. A basic income would not mean dismantling SS as Americans don't have Universal free healthcare. This is one of the ways in which implementing a basic income in the US would be different from say Sweden, and also more difficult.

The idea, from what I understand, is that income tax would disappear and be replaced with a consumption tax. This consumption tax would operate exactly like sales tax in that it would be levied on all goods purchased. The consumption tax means that any time a transaction takes place - eg. any time someone consumes a good - they are paying for this system. This, then, naturally levies a tax bracketed by level of consumption. Exported goods would be sold without the tax. Imported goods would have the tax added to their price before sale.

This is, obviously, a simplified explanation and the implementation in the American system would likely differ widely from this basic model, but it's likely the template from which any such system would start.

For more information I'd highly recommend Basic Income: The Movie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViywrpAyVdY
You don't have to take it so literally. Remember we're humans, he probably meant unlimited in the sense of human experience.

If a human's brain never gets full in a lifetime, the it's seemingly "unlimited" for our purposes. Just like how having 500 PB on a camera SD card would be unlimited for any photographer, yes, it has a limit, but you would never reach it without doing some crazy shit.
You can't steal someone's identity, but you can go and impersonate someone. The reason why it's so easy to impersonate someone for the purpose of bank fraud is left as an exercise to the reader.
BREAKING: Government has discovered nmap.
> I must be the only one who thinks basic income is insane.

No, you have plenty of company. A basic income that isn't based on merit is a political hot potato for reasons that should be obvious.

> I personally don't trust my government (US) to implement this properly without any special niches carved out for someone.

That's one problem, but a bigger problem is that, for those who have jobs they don't like, or who think working for a living is beneath them, this offers an incentive for narcissism.

> At the end of the month if they don't have any money left how will they cover their necessary expenses?

Oh, that's easy -- more basic income. :)
I think the best way to make people subservient to their government is to keep their subsistence dependent on it. There has to be a better solution for this.

Automation might make many goods and services readily available without requiring extensive labor, but that also means more people will have access to cheaper goods. Who knows what demands might come up in this new society that people with low skills might be able to cover.
A big thing I've heard stated is that basic income would basically have to be completely untouchable. You couldn't sign it away, it couldn't be garnished, you can't lose it in divorce, nothing. You just get this check and that's it.