skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Currently the government is spending via inflation far more than it takes in from taxes. So, if you want to add $3.6Trillion to the budget-- more than doubling it-- in order to give everyone in the USA $12k a year, it's going to have to come from somewhere.... and I don't think you can get that much by raising taxes. Since income from taxes is around $1.4T [1] you're talking about more than tripling those taxes.

For many people who are on a lower income that alone will wipe out much of the improvement from basic income.

And for people who have a lot more money, tripling income taxes will produce all kinds of consequences that lead to reduced tax income. (Laffer curve and all that.)

For instance, I would simply move to another country, form a corporation there, and earn all my income thru that corporation. And I'm not even rich, but I'm currently giving up %20 of my income-- you start taking %60 and I consider that slavery.

So, whether you intend to or not, you're talking about inflation... because you can't pass something like that size of a tax increase.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

Edit- I see you edited. Yes, food stamps have driven up the price of food, this is one of the things that's making it hard for people to make ends meet-- food is too expensive, and even for poor people their taxes are too high, not just income but all the built in taxes that show up in the price of food, etc, because the companies have to pay taxes, they have to pay their employees more so their employees can pay taxes, etc.

Raising taxes raises prices too, because it raises costs for everybody.

Price increases come from many factors, including supply vs demand, but also cost of production. And all income and corporate taxes, as well as burdensome regulations, increase the cost of production.
I'm looking forward to reading it. Your visa story is well-written.
I lived outside the USA for 6 years. There's definitely a cost to doing so- for instance, not having Amazon or the inexpensive goods we often have. But that cost is less than a doubling of my taxes. A basic income as proposed in the article, as I understand it, would triple income taxes. (or have the same effect via inflation if they just print the money.)
They are equivalent if you consider limits of nets rather than limits of sequences.
So, one can only send encrypted mails to other users of the platform?

http://tutanota.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/470724-...
I don't understand this panic in people minds.

Java is free to develop with.

Java APIs can be copied and used, with one condition - all APIs from JDK should be used and nothing can be removed. Google failed to comply with this.
Why is this voted down? The author here isn't being flippant nor religious nor obtuse. Yin/Yang represent the idea that head/tail, good/bad, pretty/ugly are dependent on your perspective. When working with complex information, realizing that you can approach the problem from different perspecives is critical to communication.

Look at this poster's history. He's got a track record of thoughtful contributions -- this post is no deviation. Just because you don't understand what he's saying doesn't make his comment incorrect or irrelevant.
> For that I would need to see actual, regular controlled experiments from PL researchers showing that a given language or construct yields measurable dividends over another, such as reductions in deficits, program size, or development time.

There's certainly a lack of empirical user research in the field, when the research has that aim.

However, the point of many research languages/features is not that it reduces development cost, etc. but that it exists at all. The article gives examples of non-PL research, eg. the discovery of an incremental algorithm to calculate convex hulls, and these are legitimate results on their own; regardless of whether they "lower convex hull discovery costs", etc. The PL angle is the discovery of general abstractions, eg. a language for incremental computation, of which convex hull discovery is just one of many programs. The discovery of such an abstrction is also a legitimate result on its own; regardless of whether it "lowers incremental algorithm discovery costs"; etc.

These results are a "pure" basis for language and library implementors to work from. If that incremental computation language only existed as, say, a collection of Java classes, then it would be difficult for other implementors (eg. in Javascript) to know which parts of the architecture are fundamental to the approach and which are artefacts of using Java.

Of course, when investigating which primitives to use, there may be no existing language capable of expressing them (short of embedding an interpreter; in which case, you've just created a new language anyway!).

Few academic language creators expect their languages to be adopted. They're usually proofs of concept, or meant to inform and inspire future work. Only a few are meant to be used for real work (for one thing, it places a maintenance burden on the researcher!).
> The Sunvault / Edison Graphene Supercapacitor is completely safe to use, it will not catch fire, does not require safety equipment that can fail and poses no risk to the environment

What happens in case of an (internal) short circuit? That energy has to go somewhere.
>No one here is arguing that a basic income should be paid for through inflation.

Actually, I kind of am!

I suggest that we absurdly just give $1MM to everyone and ask what would happen to prices. They'd skyrocket of course. But what else would happen?

Consider an economy with just 2 people. One with a net worth of $7500 and the other with $10MM. Give them each $1MM. What happens to their wealth relative to each other? The less the first guy has, the more it does for him. (Even if its done simply by "printing money".)

"Give everyone a million bucks" doesn't seem so outrageous to me after all. Sounds like swinging a giant scythe at inequality if you ask me.

Its like a fine work of un-dodge-able flat tax and a social safety net all in one. This is why I like UBI.
I find it difficult to read longer articles on a computer, mostly because it's so easy to get distracted by so many things - other links in the page, other tabs in the browser and other apps open on the desktop. I tend to get easily distracted reading printed books, however. Mostly my thoughts will wander, or if I'm outside somewhere I'll get distracted by some sort of external stimuli.

I was actually thinking this morning, it'd be great if I could have some sort of mode in Chrome that shows only the article I wanted to read, in full-screen, with nothing else visible. And to encourage me to read the article to the end before changing task, I wouldn't be able to change the tab (via CTRL-tab or CTRL-pageUp/down), I would only be able to close the tab. I'm actually not 100% sure this would help, but it would be an interesting experiment.
The point is, if you add traffic into consideration, you can't have almost anything precalculated.
I'm a graduate from a bootcamp, and I can quite confidently say my company would hire again. I've been there almost a year and feel as if I contribute a significant amount to the team. Feel free to ama
Fixed. Works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE
Working in email right now I can tell that this data is canonical. The email age graph is probably the most interesting.

As I interpret it, most people keep some very old mails for a period of time, mostly because they use it often. This might be because they contain useful information (like a password...) or because they represent a task. If it is the latest it becomes a perpetual problem because it adds some kind of noise from this feed of info you get everyday.

In our business we tried to separate these by either saving the useful part and discarding the rest (highlight and save) or by putting the thread somewhere else (in an Important category).

For all the rest it appears it is just temporary info, updates, FYIs, etc...
So we basically decided to reverse our email usage. Instead of focusing on the inbox we left it untouched but saved everything that mattered in other panels. We still have work to do to improve the usage but it seems promising. You can check it at getnimb.ly if you'd like
Hadoop demand falls as other big data tech rises
Google Developers – Dart for IoT
This is exactly what I thought of as soon as I read it.

"Hey, this is just CQRS by a different name!"

It works well, but it is very hard to get large teams of people to all do things this way. All it takes is for one guy to do a direct write, and his reviewer to miss it, and boom, inconsistency.
I've studied accounting at school and I've always hated it since then.

To me, accounting is a data model gone wrong. Redundancy, race conditions, unclear semantics, too generic...

I've tried countless times to make sense of it (the latest being today when I read the post with great hope), but I always came to the same conclusion: there must be a better way.

Yet I know the value of the model as a log to record transactions.

We're all confronted to accounting (when we read our bank ledger)... Ask the public, and they'll tell you it's good if there's more money in the credit column than the debit column. This "common wisdom" is false in accounting. What's a debit card? a credit card? What's an account? Isn't it a container for money? not for accountants.

Accounting turns many concepts upside down... and I always fail to bend my mind enough to grasp it.

I admire accountants for succeeding where I fail so miserably, but they're also responsible for the problem. There must be a better way... I was so bad in accounting at school...
When you consider how many people leave "Accounting 101" classes without really understanding anything the traditional way starts to look quite bad
This is awesome. I started working on something very similar about a year and a half ago (but of course dropped the ball on it) that was based on oauth2.0 but followed a model somewhat reverse of what we are used to. It setup the user as the oauth provider so they could control the permissions when authenticating with a "social service". The social service would request what permissions it required from you and then retrieve the information you allowed it. It would also be required that any information that you publish to the site be published back to your repository. ie. you post an image to Instagram (assuming Instagram would ever implement this) and Instagram would also save it to your repository.

It was a bit overreaching and ultimately why I dropped it. I was struggling with the looming "adoption" issues of how do I get a social service to implement this. But if it was combined with something like this, that piggybacks on the way things are today adoption by users wouldn't require adoption by social services and change could be pushed for more gradually.

Awesome work. I look forward to setting it up and trying it out.
Here's some scientific evidence of the Russians throwing over 20 million human lifes [1] into german gun barrels: take a look at the original post. You mentioning the winter twice seems quite cynical in context.

[1] I've recently read a newish book about the casualties on the eastern front which suggests (based on research by western scholars) that the actual numbers were probably well over 32 million people and due to political reasons had been down played a lot by soviet sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...
Interesting, but very first book I clicked on led to a 404 error.

http://hackershelf.com/book/274/rails-deep-dive/

Then the very next book I clicked on had another 404 error.

http://hackershelf.com/book/90/big-fat-rails/

...
As far as I know, that leads to terrible performance.
Which city in Britain has a strong crime culture? London?
I am trying it now
I found that article to be rather obtuse and very complicated (I think it was an intellectual exercise rather than a primer), but that's my personal opinion. Definitely not the "light reading" GP wanted. A useful primer would, in my opinion, start with the accounting equation, explaining its components, and move on from there.
I've come across many developers who have been through the bootcamp process. Some were great, some less so.

The worst thing that bootcamps can do is to encourage developers to simply "pad" their GitHub accounts with exercises in order to have used as many technologies as possible. I've seen developers bragging solely about the number of repos and commits they have in GitHub.

Generally speaking though, some people come through the programs having gained an incredible amount of skill, some people were already very good and simply looked to extend their skills, and some came through without gaining much at all. Much like any education program.
Open Source Circular Economy
I would agree with many of your points about CS degrees, I certainly got most of my experience from internships outside of the course.

However. I think I got a huge amount of intuition on a wide range of engineering problems from my degree. I did modules on compilers, real time systems, operating systems, control systems, security, genetic algorithms, databases, web services, and many more, and while the depth on each of those topics was not great, I feel that if presented with any of those problems now I would have a very solid starting point, and more importantly, when looking at problems in my day job, I have a far broader set of experience that I can draw from, which helps me make much more informed decisions.

I don't think it's the mathematical intuition, I think it's the engineering intuition.
Tell me about it. I'm an Electrical Engineering with a Computer Science and Mathematics background. It's been tough!
As the author points out, the path into tech in India is seen as a lot more broadly applicable; it's a pathway into middle-class job like being a doctor. It's also a good base on which you can move overseas to work in the Middle East or Western countries.

An interesting point she brings up is that gender bias in how one looks at STEM subjects is not universal. In many countries there isn't a prevalent idea that girls won't do well in math or programming classes. This helps with the "pipeline" problem because you end up with more educated women with expertise in these subjects.

As someone who's lived both the US and India I also think one shouldn't consider Hacker News or tech blogs as particularly representative of the US software industry either. Narratives of conflict make for juicy reading, whether on Twitter or in the mainstream media but they are not holistic representations of how it is to live in a country or work in an industry.
We scrape more than 120,000 web pages per day.

Cost of spinning up VPS instances, maintaining the software needed (to automatically close/open new ones and provision them) could be higher than the 20$/GB pricing Luminati offers.
It the other way around. Accounting didn't turn the terms upside down.

Accounting invented these terms, but the public has one sided view of it.
How do you browse internet with this setup?
Why don't we just cut taxes for everyone who makes less than $50k a year? Cut them to zero for all of those people. At least federal taxes, but it would be nice if there was a moratorium or movement to do it for state taxes as well.

For someone making $50k a year, right now they are paying around $7.5k in federal taxes. That right there is close to the $12k the Basic Income would provide.

And this would be a lot easier and simple bill and thus hopefully less contentious-- just make the minimum exemption $50k. Could even be one line maybe.

I think this would be much more effective.... and I don't think that the basic income will replace all the other bureaucracy etc.

For instance, the welfare programs primary job is to hand out money, and it costs them $75 in administrative overhead to hand out $25! Do you think a new federal bureaucracy is going to be more efficient? IT might be a bit in the early years, but of course these things grow as people need to build fiefdoms for themselves etc. etc.

And can you imagine the howls from the federal employees unions if you try and get rid of the Welfare and other federal programs to be replaced with Basic income?

If you don't get rid of them then basic income is just going on top of them.

And if you don't eliminate taxes for poor people, then they're going to end up paying higher taxes too to pay for basic income.

That's the absurd thing right now-- people working part time and getting welfare are still paying taxes.

Since welfare loses %75 of those taxes, it would be much more efficient to just let them keep the money in the first place!

Eliminate taxes on everyone making $50k or less and you have a program I can get behind. Give that 5 years and see if we still need to think about Basic Income.
What was your programming experience like before the bootcamp, and then after it? What sort of depth did you learn to?

Would you feel confident in starting a job at a company that used a language you don't already know?
If you're taking things like that back in time, make sure to translate them to French. Also, learn French. Not knowing French in the 17th century is like not knowing English today.
Knowing Me Knowing You
Actually, is there some analysis on that?

I always suspected that, with all the high-tech equipment, after the initial stockpile is gone (and a few hundred planes is not a lot if you look at WW2), it's much harder to scale up production (if one country alone even produces all the necessary parts like semiconductors, rocket engines, etc.).
I can respond as both a graduate and as someone who was later involved in hiring bootcamp graduates. About two years ago, I entered into the first Code Fellows JavaScript bootcamp. The course lasted 8 weeks and I was offered a job at around week 6, which I accepted. Most of my time has been spent on loan to a Fortune 100 company. I entered into the program with technical experience in a non-development role and some hobbyist development experience. However, I never viewed my course at Code Fellows as the source of everything I would need to know. Instead, it was about three things: motivation, resources, and credibility.

Everything I learned in class, I could have taught myself. However, working with others and having built-in schedules and accountability helped me learn what I may never have followed through on alone. Also, being guided toward achievable milestones is immensely valuable. In those ways and others, the course helped maintain my motivation. And, as inevitably happens when learning something completely new, I encountered some hurdles. Usually, it was worth working through those problems myself. But there were one or two that I encountered that stymied me, and might've killed my momentum. Having access to fellow students as well as the instructors was invaluable in those times, and allowed me to continue learning.

Most importantly for me, the course gave me some level of credibility. I had an atypical background and, while development was something that interested me, I didn't see my resume getting any traction. Code Fellows gave me an in, and allowed me to show what I was capable of - that is ultimately what got me hired and has brought me success since. Since being hired, my salary has almost doubled and I have risen from an entry-level position to an architecting role in one of our top teams. If that sounds unlikely, I've had trouble accepting it myself. All it has shown me is that there are ample opportunities for capable people who are willing to put in hard work.

Finally, hiring. It is difficult to find good developers for entry positions. It isn't that hard to find experienced developers, if you're willing and able to pay. But new devs are difficult to sift through. Many look good on paper - maybe they left a good impression at a meetup, or their GitHub profile looks solid, etc. However, it is amazing how many of those people really are... not a good fit. Bootcamps have helped us to weed out those we aren't interested in, and given us a slate of candidates that have a much better chance of working out.
Github link is in the lower-right .. uses MapBox, which in itself is a beautiful mapping service, but .. its not open source.
Do you think on $1,000 month people are getting out of the trailer parks? There aren't a lot of $500 a month apartments out there-- and if there are, they will disappear quick as everyone can now more easily afford them, so prices will go up.

IT's not like prices would go up only on trailer parks.
The problem with this question is that there are probably a long list of attributes which are much more important than technical skills. The bootcamps largely only address the technical skills. They can't turn you into "great to work with" or "smells nice."

Edit: So, you can't say that a candidate is a good or bad hire based on which bootcamp they attended.
This is the thing. I could imagine hiring a person with a basic knowledge in that set of stuff to work on a typical startup Rail app. Great.

But if the company decided that they needed a new component that would be a standalone Java service (or whatever), I a) wouldn't feel confident that the person would be able to pick up Java in a reasonable amount of time, and b) wouldn't trust them to structure the application in a good way, as they just don't have the experience building real things.
In all companies I worked on (around 20 including consulting clients, at least half in various cities in the US), I've never came across this "inevitability". Bad sample?
>If there are two minds, and they come in to this form of contact, which survives?

Neither? Both?

You get a bunch of new memories and some shifts in your personality. If the new memories and personality shift come suddenly, I think a lot of people would consider that a 'death'. If they come gradually, I suppose it is not a death. But either way, the new mind is going to have the memories of both, is going to 'think' that it is both, so if you want to claim that this new mind is actually one or the other of the original minds, you're probably going to find yourself arguing against the very subject you're making the claims about.
The Google Doc is on comment only mode.
How I learned to program computers
I cannot reply for whole of India but from where i come(Karnataka) girls usually do very well in exams be it Math or Science. I didn't know the notion that women do not do well in STEM fields until i was exposed to western media. Now whether they can pursue it further is a different topic.
I guess the best students of your program managed to find something they liked a lot (like machine learning, compilers, embedded, etc.) and got specialized in it, while the majority of the students just followed along somewhat passively - I don't mean to be condescending, it's sort of to what happened to me as well, and still now I regret not to have taken more time to think of what I wanted to do and pick my courses more carefully.
Ask PG: How did you come to that conclusion?
Hi :) In the book by Alexis Ohanian "Without their Permission" he writes something very interesting on page 108:

When it came to the question of DIGG being a competitor to Reddit, Alexis quotes you saying that "Digg wasn't going to defeat us (Reddit). We'd either defeat ourselves first or they would defeat themselves for us".

I find this soo smart, and I would love to know what parameter you looked at to foresee this development? Would you mind sharing it with us?
Wow, so one anecdote nullifies everything that happens in the country? Are you blind or deaf ? So you're saying sexism in India is less than that in USA ? I don't see women in USA fearing quitting their jobs if they earn more than husbands. Nor are they forced to stay at home to cook/housework essentially killing their dreams of having a career. Step out of your bubble buddy and ask the women around you what they feel when they travel on our public transport, then ask some people who traveled on public transport abroad.