skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the idea of a basic income on principle, and this article has some great arguments for it. (Though I agree it is far from being paid for--and a land tax essentially means it only gets paid to the landless, so you'd need to exempt "reasonable" owner-occupied land).

But let's simulate how it would look in the real world. I think mindless consumerism would go way up, especially in the lower classes. Advertising in all media would simply encourage this. The well-off would buy stock in Walmart and low end electronics makers with their extra income, thus capturing the income of the less savvy. Without local manufacturing, much of the distributed income would go to China. Paternalism and its religious affiliates would rise up again to capture the income of the not-yet-emancipated (by that I mean women and children). With perceived abundance and linear income, the birth rate would rise.

So I think we need to solve some of these issues first. Education should be the beneficiary for the first trillion in new taxes. Hopefully that could mitigate the consumerism and prompt more entrepreneurialism, as well as reduce the paternalism and birth rate. As mentioned, doing universal health care right would amount to the same thing as a universal income as well (more security, less worry, more productivity). So I wonder if those two aren't bigger priorities.
Interview on general purpose AI and its theoretical risk [video]
Here's what we used at Allmyles: https://github.com/underyx/footlong

There's an Android app that lists the daily menus in Budapest, Hungary, where we're located. From there it was just a matter of finding the internal API of this app, and hooking it up to HipChat. We migrated to Slack and haven't yet got around to updating footlong to post the results there, though. I checked our HipChat yesterday and it was practically nothing but footlong posts.
I read the article and the reddit posts and follow /r/basicincome.

I see how it can help someone this year and next year but I clearly see this vicious cycle it can create over a decade where things get much worse and probably actual poverty instead.
It's not fridays off in my experience. It's you can work your friday afternoon hours during the rest of the week. 4 days for 9 hours and 1 day for 4. Alternatively, if you get your work done, its the same as flex time.
HSTORE, XML, JSON, JSONB OH MY (PGCon 2014)
The appeal to UBI for me has always, apart from being a good way to stop welfare traps and increase income equality now, is that it marks the beginning of the new phase in our economic system: one from a cash-work model to a material-existence model. I do subscribe to the total job automation theory being every so increasingly talked about, and what these proposals tell me is that government and to a larger extent society is beginning to see that we can indeed provide for everyone using our productivity gains. The cash part of the deal I think is just a carry-on from our ageing economic system that will be replaced by some other form of value transfer mechanism which honestly, I can't imagine what would look like.
Another strawman. No one is claiming that identity is tied to the molecules that make up the body, even in aggregate. There's a sense in which a car remains the same car even after continuing comprehensive maintenance has replaced every single part, but that car stays different from the next car off the production line. Does that example make sense?
Ask HN: Does anyone feel Product Hunt drifted away?
Product Hunt used to be a place where you would discover cool startup products/projects. Now it seems so random, like the front page is just a bunch of random software's and sites.Does anyone feel the same? Did their mission change from being startup oriented products/projects to just any type of tech?
In addition, every rule to catch the "undeserving" will catch some people who really do need the help and who you were trying to help in the first place.

> So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

Possibly a daft idea, but what if a company paid by the hour worked (or some other measure of work produced), but had a minimum that was always paid even if you didn't work.

Rules:

1. Nobody gets fired for not working.

2. You can get fired if you attack / something else normally fireable not related to your work itself.

3. No other jobs on the side? Less sure about that one. Could be interesting to support people trying something new but with the ability to do work on the side for you or come back. Paradoxically, I think that knowing you can leave but come back reduces the chance you'll leave forever. Quite a few careers allow sabbaticals of a year for this reason.

Sort of similar to:

1. Everyone gets BI

2. You don't get it if you're in prison

3. You can't go and live in another country and still receive it
I'd probably use it to work on personal projects for 12 months at a time after doing consulting rounds.
I also found the idea very interesting, but I don't necessarily agree with all the risks you have identified.

- "at the condition that we suppress all other forms of benefits": mostly agree, except for benefits related to disabilities. I would still make a distinction between people who are able to work, and people who not only cannot work but need help (sometimes costly help) just to stay alive, and everything in-between.

- "this will lead more people to stop working": could be, or it could be the opposite, but it's hard to know without experimenting. Single mothers or fathers working 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet would probably keep at most one and spend more time with their kid(s). Students would probably just focus on their studies. But on the other hand unemployment benefits and related schemes are so badly designed (in general) that for lots of people currently collecting welfare, working would result either in the same purchasing power, or more likely a net decrease in purchasing power. I don't know the situation in US, but it certainly is like that in France. Unconditional Basic Income means every dollar earned on the job is a dollar (minus x% of taxes) extra spendable income. I believe money to be a better source of motivation than some vague sense of duty.

- "mass immigration": there are already societies living on nearly unconditional basic income, where the only condition is to have the right citizenship -> Qatar, etc. The result is not great for the poor immigrants doing the actual work. This is the IMHO the biggest issue with Unconditional Basic Income: how to make it work when getting it will never be quite that universal, but depends on which side of the border and/or citizenship you're standing?

EDIT: typo
Could you elaborate? I would be interested in hearing more
There's been a few aid projects towards impoverished villages in Africa that have a BI setup. There's also Alaska and some other natural resource based payments.

In general I think BI is the social safety net equivalent of Greenspun's Tenth Rule:

Any sufficiently complicated social welfare program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Basic Income.

So getting there may be a case of slowly making existing benefits more universal, more cash based etc. I think one suggestion was to just keep lowering the retirement age as BI and state pensions are roughly analogous.
On the other hand, the article choose a pretty high monthly value ($1k). Going with $600 or $800 should greatly alleviate this problem.
> it implies new huge tax

There are countries (especially Northern Europe) that already spend a large amount of money for unemployment and social benefits. In those countries the basic income could be implemented in a cost-neutral manner, just refactoring how the the sum of money equal to the present benefits, is allotted.
Interesting responses. Java and C#.Net are by far the biggest languages used in developing enterprise business software at the back end. Also big tech companies such as Google use Java extensively.

A company will assume if you graduated in CompSci in the last decade or so that you have used Java fairly extensively.

Java is fast to run, and pretty fast to develop in due to static typing and when using an IDE although there might be some additional boilerplate code. I enjoy using it and there are plenty of Java options if you want a more RAD style of development like Rails e.g. Spring Data/Batch, Play, Grails etc.
Well there is some hope for a technical miracle in things like Freicoin. But very limited hope given the scale of the issue and the power of entrenched wealth...

http://freico.in/
All these different mutable/shared/etc. combinations look inherent to the problem, i.e. inherent complexity. You'd have the same problem in another language with the same intended goals. So what is the accidental complexity that Rust is adding to the problem?
> it is not fun to have grand economic ideas experimented on a live population.

True, but unfortunately there is no other way to test the validity of economic theories. You can't simulate a human society in a lab.

At best, you can start experimenting on a small subset of humans and expand once you're sure that it's safe. Guess what, there have been several UBI experiments in various places ranging from Namibia to Canada, and the results seem promising.

Japan does sound like a good place for large-scale experiments like this. But even that might be too ambitious for now, with 130 million lives at stake. Perhaps we should try Norway, Finland, Switzerland and/or Iceland first.
BeeWare – The IDEs of Python
> What are all those people going to do once this happens? Find another job? Yeah right.

Yeah, right, exactly. Remembers farmers? You know that almost everyone was a farmer like 150 years ago in the now developed countries? When we started to automate farming jobs, people did not simply become unemployed and started dying off. They MOVED on, you know. And found opportunities to learn new skills and apply them elsewhere, which massively benefited society in the end.

It's the same VERY old story again. Yeah, the "wheel killed the jobs of slaves", but then humans started doing more stuff in the end and progressed on to greater things. Please stop with the old, overused rhetoric.
Url changed from http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/27/jawbone-sues-fitbit-for-st..., which points to this.
A lot of that money will be spent, going back into the economy.
For all your news about Rick Santorum http://www.santorum.com/
As I said. If you want sushi and no one else does, just go get fucking sushi and let them eat each other's toe jam if they want.

Why must you eat lunch with your coworkers every single day?
Judging by in what context I have read about Hola so far, I guess the biggest use case is to circumvent geo block to access things like Netflix.
But yeah, ever since I learned that I am acting as an exit node for others I have stopped using the service as I do not want to be the one answering for stuff others have done in my name(IP).
Submitted 9 hours back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9614993

The duplicated submission detector didn't pick up, possibly because is treating http and https urls as different resources.
In the UK the government has recently being trying to increase the birthrate by giving more money to those who have kids, so its interesting to see you suggest this would be a problem with BI.

I assume this is a general problem with advanced economies as I read an article recently that said kids in school were being given better info on how to get pregnant in some countries, in another attempt to lift the birth rate.
I don't see how the phrase 'Bad Thing' alone is a copyrightable work. And even if it was (say, it was typeset in a particular fashion, or part of a greater work), registration would be unnecessary.

Sarcastic use of the trademark (™) and registered trademark (®) symbols is a common rhetorical device, but copyright doesn't make much sense. The "intellectual property" propagandists do their best to confuse people into thinking that copyright, trademarks and patents are the same thing, perhaps that's why you're confusing the two?
One thing I've always wondered about the basic income is wont it just mean prices go up because people are greedy? Take the article about trailer parks that was on here a week ago: The business owners said that they had to be careful when raising prices to make sure tenants can still afford it. If their tenants suddenly get an extra $1000/month, what's to stop them putting the rent up by $1000/month?
> The increased cost for extending that type of benefit to everyone, while removing the bureaucracy of maintaining the existing programs (eligibility compliance and case workers, etc.), is actually not as dramatic as it first seems.

You are missing one part, though. If you start giving cash for everyone, it's very likely this will result in raising prices for all commodities. And there you go for a another downward spiral, where you have to readjust the basic income every couple of years to make up for the inflated prices.

Ever heard of minimum wage? Yeah, that one did not work as expected either (and created massive unemployment when the threshold was set too high as well).
Sounds like an amazing place, frankly.

One thing I miss about Australia (I live in Thailand now) is places to get good fresh bread/sandwiches etc., at short notice.
Pretty sure most banks already do that on business accounts. I know mine does.
I vividly remember the first time I saw LA: it was 1982. I drove in from Santa Barbara, and when I got to Van Nuys I looked around and thought, what a horrible place, I'd hate to have to live here.

Six years later I was living in Glendale, and 22 years after that I left, having fallen deeply in love with LA. It's a terrific place, but it demands practice and patience. Finding the good parts of LA isn't easy. But once you find them, LA is deeply rewarding.
List of Pakistani Services Available on Internet.org Service
This blog post changed the way I think about accounting in a deep and powerful way.
I was shocked by the "magic of markets" analysis. When there's no more bread, people make more bread ? Nope, bread becomes more expensive. Especially with automation : it's harder for new baker to start in the market, so those in the market get more powerful. That's concentration.

Basic income will make less poor but more slaves. Slaves that will be dependent on those (I assume it's the state) who define the exact amount of that uncondional income. Since a huge part of the population will be out of the "producer", thus the producer will have more power.

What must be done instead is to make sure power doesn't get concentrated. But this means less efficiency : one big optimised company is surely more efficient that ten smaller ones. With less power, the workforce can still negociate, the workforce can still share the remaining work, those who have no job still have a chance to get one if they want/need to. With basic income, there's no need to do that anymore...

So I don't like that basic income.

For example, there's a lot of unemployment in my country. People gets some allowance to live. The problem is that the lack of work is not acknowledged => those people are stigmatized. Anyway, they do get an allowance, kind of your basic income. The problem is that because of the unemployment, the employer are in a very strong position to pay people less (since many do want/need a job). So work valuation diminishes...

Competition is the problem, if companies would compete less, then basic income could work. There would be more space for choice : do I work or not ? can I share my work ?

Basic income means : let's detach ourselves from the consequences of competition.
"Ever heard of minimum wage? Yeah, that one did not work as expected either (and created massive unemployment when the threshold was set too high as well)."

Citation needed. Your assertions do not match my understanding of the facts about the result of the minimum wage. (Though I would have agreed with you ten years ago, a better understanding of it has altered my opinion significantly.)
I'd counter with it's even easier to just eat what you want, alone on a particular day.
I spent the last three months in SF and I visited LA as a tourist twice during that time. I really wanted to see the city, but I really couldn't find anything worth seeing. Combined with the fact that you have to drive hours around the city to get anywhere, at the end I always got the feeling to just get the hell out of there. I imagine living in (some parts of) the city is quite different and I'd probably enjoy it, but as a visitor, I couldn't find anything interesting enough.
Are you telling me that you aren't molested in your workplace everyday ? I was made to believe that all Indians are bred as little monsters in the cauldron of a rampant "rape culture".

I'm completely confused having read this post, esp after a similar one on the US appeared last on HN,

https://medium.com/@katylevinson/sexism-in-tech-don-t-ask-me...

See, it's even on Broadway!

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/theater/review-nirbhaya-a-...

(sarcasm).
The biggest problem with paying welfare to immigrants is that it has to be paid upfront, long before there is a profit or cost reduction compared to not paying it.

The problems with not paying are manifold: They are an underclass, without most rights and very poor. A proper healthcare system can't refuse them treatments, for all sorts of reasons, and poverty and lack of rights just increase health care costs. Then there is the lost potential: Those people do have children, often naturalized, or not, living in the country, but not getting the care, food and education they need, which also means they don't fulfill their potential benefits to society.

I think refusing children basic welfare is about the stupidest thing a society can do. Both for financial and for humanistic reasons. It is completely irrelevant whose children they are.
Yes, automation.[0,1] We're approaching the knee in automation uptake. It can take decades to implement policies like this. Time flies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555295

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561068
Accenture: UK Government Should Regulate Bitcoin Wallets
This is a little bit overblown--the security failings are unfortunate but not surprising and realistically it's on a separate physical port for a reason.

Have an administrative VLAN for your physical box control plane and maintain physical-level control of the ports with access to it and you're way ahead of the game. Treat it like you would an unauthenticated KVM-over-IP device because that's pretty much what it is. (you should change away from the default username/password, but if you're horrified about the idea of not doing that, evaluate why because that's the real issue)

That said, 300k IPMI devices on the public Internet is a travesty. Don't be one of those guys.
Isn't this just what datomic automatically does?
Now a days I read mostly in kindle as it is convenient. I really miss flipping pages to scan and go to a part in an earlier chapter for quick reference - navigation is so inefficient in e-readers.
Stompflow: Hassle-free project management, private beta
Dan -- the themes and ideas behind this are rad and I'd love to chat with you to find out more about what you'd like to do with this.

I've been bootstrapping a concept that shares "the personal API" concept for 12 months now with a team of three and we're going to launch it in a couple of weeks.

Since other services' API rate limits and terms makes depending on them nearly impossible at scale, we decided to give everyone an API and a database.

The database stores data in community-driven schemas called the JSON Archetypes: https://github.com/servant-app/json-archetypes.

The project is Servant -- The Amazing Personal Database (https://www.servant.co)

Anyway, I just starred the Me API. I'm in Oakland, if you're nearby, and you can contact me whenever you like: austen [at] servant.co I just like hanging with similar thinkers.

Cheers
I started going through ledger recently (after a fructuous discovery in a HN comment), and it's truly a great tool with a great documentation for someone not used to accounting!
One problem of minimum income is that it will make it very expensive to find people willing to do "dirty" work. Unless you think robots will take care of nursing (which is grueling and dirty when dealing with disabled people and it doesn't pay well), farm work (they already have trouble finding workers), cleaning, etc.

Automation isn't nowhere near to eliminating those and I'm guessing it would increase labor costs very disproportionately - diminishing marginal utility of income and all that. This would then make related products/services more expensive and further lower your global competitiveness.

This can be mitigated by immigration (ie. not granting minimum income to immigrants) but that has a bunch of issues on it's own.
> unintentional side effects, edge cases, and bad incentives.

I'm reminded of Department of Agriculture v. Moreno (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Agriculture_v._Mo...). Congress passed a law refusing food stamps to people who lived in shared housing with non-relatives. Of course this was targeting hippies (which is illegitimate in itself--to quote the majority, "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest"), but it naturally hit the very poor especially hard.
Ask HN: Which VPS provider do you use for personal and professional use?
I have been searching for a good VPS provider for my personal use and one for my startup.

Currently I user Digital Ocean, but it lacks a lot of features needed to setup a proper system.

What are some good cheap vps providers for personal use?

For startups, I know people have been suggesting AWS and Azure, but are there any good alternatives available?
I am Swedish and my impression is that the avability of benefits is not the cause of the unemployment. Instead, there appears to be very few jobs left to go around for those who can not or choose not to go through a higher education. Many industries have become significantly more effective through the use of computers, eliminating much of the need for manual labor, for example.
> when I'm out and about meeting people / working, etc, where it would be both rude and annoying to check my phone every time it buzzed. A quick glance at my wrist is enough to know whether I need to respond soon or not.

Checking your watch while in a meeting / talking to someone is also rude, at least to me.
Tips for Faster Builds
That'd probably cut AirBnB's customer base to 1% of what it's now.
Heh, once I started using ledger[1] to track my personal expenses, I get super annoying (and cranky) when someone borrows money from me.

[1]: http://ledger-cli.org
The GC itself is a bit complicated. The internals are mostly invisible, but not entirely.

Without language support for a global-GC switch (which is never going to happen) I don't think a "simple" Java-esque GC would happen.

With language support there's still a decently simple GC possible IMO.

Without language support at all, some things (eg interior mutability) become unweildy if you want to have GCs in them, and we have to create new abstractions for it. It's not too bad though.

(The GC isn't finished and we haven't tried using it much so I really don't know how well it will turn out in practice)

====

regarding general cognitive overhead, it's not too much once you're used to it. And one needs to get used to any language they pick up anyway before using it seriously (just that the curves are different).
People that wouldn't work wouldn't have to live in highly contested areas with a high rent. Workers could afford them, others would live outside of those expensive areas, keep their guaranteed income and decide what to do with their lives.