AWS Costs Cheat Sheet - <AUTHOR> http://dmin.es/aws-cheatsheet <comment><USER3> I'd really love to jump on EC2, but every time I run the numbers it doesn't add up for my usage.

I currently colocate all my servers and I wanted to figure out just how much it might cost to potentially switch over to EC2. After much digging and benchmarking, it seems that an single ECU is roughly equivalent to 350 to 400 points on PassMark. With this information and load metrics, it is pretty easy to determine what kind of ECUs I might need to switch over (as RAM and disk are pretty straight forward): <http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php>.

Came to the same conclusion as I did a few years ago. For my scenario (about a rack of servers, established business, 24/7 usage, capacity to handle for a 10-fold increase in usage (and much more within a 2 hour window))... I save roughly $170,000 over 3 years doing it all (server costs included). This is with 3-year reserved instances.

It should be noted that I build our servers from the ground up and do all the ops.

<comment><USER4> If you include how much your salary, bonuses, equity and health care costs the business, does it change your calculations?

<comment><USER3> It does.

The setup took a couple months to research, build, and make "perfect". However, ongoing it takes little time to maintain (less than an hour a week, if averaged). Every three years, I build new servers and place them into service (2 to 3 weeks of time to perform). I also do periodic hardware maintenance roughly every three months (typically 1/4 of a day to perform).

Due to the cost savings, we also are able to do quite a bit of redundancy, such as: dual PSUs, SSDs in RAID 10 on non-SAN servers, RAID-Z2/3 on SAN servers, offsite backups, complete server redundancy, spare servers ready to be slotted (I live an hour from colo), spare parts on hand, even multiple physical colos.

If components are selected carefully (i.e. sharing components between server roles), regular maintenance is performed, and redundancy is ensured on a per component, per server, and per datacenter level, it's not very time intensive or costly.

I am a software engineer by trade, but love the ins and outs of hardware/ops. As such, everything is automated and scripted (that can be). I can raise/move instances in minutes, just like EC2 (currently use XCP).

Even with the research, it still saves roughly 100k per 3 years.

<comment><USER5> These kinds of numbers scare the shit out of me. Here I am thinking a couple of linodes may cover what I want (am intrigued by uptano (<https://uptano.com/>) linked above though).

How do I go about estimating my real needs? I mean, I hope you are running some major stuff for money whereby you _save_ $60K a year. Holy shit!

<comment><USER3> It speaks more towards the outlandish expense of EC2 (for us) than it does the true actual expense.

A few things:

Eliminate the middle men. Who do the small/medium datacenters use to build their custom hosting hardware? It's likely someone like Ma Labs where you get quite a savings over Amazon/Newegg, particularly when you buy components for many servers at a time.

Pay in advance, when it makes sense and is possible. Talk to colo operators, you can likely get a better deal if you pay for 1/3 years up front.

When you build the hardware yourself, you can do things no operator can do for you... tailor it exactly for your own domain needs.

Analyzing your domain needs to define server roles that you might need (e.g. load balancer, app server, relational database, hadoop cluster, nosql database, key/value stores like redis, etc) will lead you to commonalities in hardware/components needs. Now you can develop a few physical server types, order in bulk, and not have to keep so many spare components on hand.

For us, we are able to split out our datacenters by "critical"/"non-critical" for huge cost savings. Our "critical" datacenters host traditional production level servers. Things that MUST have up times of four/five nines. We can get 50Mbps 95th percentile, quarter rack, 10 amp for roughly $400 a month. These are great, but you have to make the most of each U.

We do a lot of machine learning, map/reduce, and general processing. The app needs this, but because I coded for it... if the uptime is, say, 99% and not 99.9999% it has VERY little impact on our end users (think of these as worker dynos). Now, I can have a whole rack here at the office able to handle for 90% of outages without issue. The nice thing about this is, I no longer have to make the most of each U. I can now build servers completely different than I would in a traditional datacenter. It also comes with little added expense to our normal operations (add redundant internet, networking, UPSes, and insurance). I can build a 1u, 25 ECU-equiv, 32GB, SSD based server for ~1.1k. Fill the rack! :)

<comment><USER5> These sound like excellent pointers. Do you have such large needs because of the type of pages/apps you are serving (streaming, for instance, or heavy analytical processes in the ML), or simply because you have a helluva lot of users?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Useful, but no reason to go through a redirector which may change.

The direct link to the blog post: [https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws- cost-cheat-sheet-...](https://blog.cloudvertical.com/2012/10/aws-cost-cheat- sheet-2/)

The direct link to the PDF with the data: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical- AWS-...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/CloudVerticalBlog/CloudVertical-AWS-Cost- Cheat-Sheet.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> Complementary chart:

<http://www.ec2instances.info/>

<comment><USER8> Having built a SaaS app that basically means spinning up a new instance for each customer, I reference ec2instances.info almost daily.

I only came into this discussion to post it -- glad to see somebody else already did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The AWS cost structure is byzantine in its complexity. This cheat sheet helps a lot. Thank you.

<comment><USER10> Try using <http://www.cloudorado.com/> . You just specify your requirements (RAM, CPU, subscription duration) and it finds appropriate options for you, including reserved, packages, etc. And it will give you price not only of AWS but other clouds a well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> my mini-comparison

      Cloud Static Storage (cents/gigabyte)

      site	      storage        bandwidth

      dreamobjects  7		7		http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/
      cloudfiles 	10		18		http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/files/pricing/
      amazon s3	12.5		12		http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

<comment><USER12> What about performance?

<comment><USER13> And reliability.

S3 is specced as being _very_ reliable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For a 'small timer' like me used to VPS or dedicated local servers it's still a bit confusing.

I don't know how much a value it is, but when looking at PAAS options (like openshift, heroku, appengine, etc.), I like appfog's braindead simple pricing: 2gb free, 4gb $100/month, 16gb $380, etc.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure if it's ok, but I'll shamelessly plug our cloud: digitalocean.com. We have really straight forward and easy to understand pricing starting at $5. -- Jeff

<comment><USER16> I was considering our options for a new setup earlier this month, and considered Linode, AWS, DreamHost's VPS, and DigitalOcean. I found the Amazon pricing so incomprehensible — even though I'm moving an established app, with known traffic and storage — that it was a non-starter.

I went with DigitalOcean and — while I'm still getting the server set up — I've been pleased with it so far. The articles on the site that help with setup are really helpful (like Linode's articles, but more up-to-date, and the prices are both good and simple.

(I'm not affiliated with them in any way.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool! This is useful for small deployments. We developed PlanForCloud.com to help with cost forecasting for big deployments, where you want to compare infrastructure options and cloud providers.

Also, don't forget that one of the key benefit of using the cloud is elasticity, and unless you model this, you won't get accurate estimates. We developed the notion of elasticity patterns[1] to let users do this, so you can say something like "my baseline S3 storage is 100GB, but every month this grows by 5% and in the Christmas it doubles".

[1] <http://www.planforcloud.com/pages/docs/patterns.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> Useful. QA Comment: There's a typo in Instance Sizes, "mirco."

</comment><comment><USER19> Great way to make the prices clear. 15% more for Japan, I think it's time to move my things back to US East (Virginia) and make some savings.

It had some pricing on S3 but I think it would be nice to also have the prices for RDS. A medium-sized one of those things costs as much as a medium EC2 instance (yes I learned that the hard way).

</comment><comment><USER20> This is very useful. Spot instance costs would be really doubly useful, particularly if you can put them alongside on-demand costs.

<comment><USER21> Spot instance prices change hourly, so they probably don't make sense to add to a static list like this.

<comment><USER20> Yep, I understand that. Still, spot pricing it relatively consistent over time, with occasional temporary spikes. A dynamic web version with this format would work too. It's less important to me that I can print it out, since I probably would just end up referring to this online as I need it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Aren't the on-demand prices a bit useless? Doesn't everyone reserve instances?

<comment><USER23> Depends very much what you're using it for. I do a lot of ad-hoc data processing and use on-demand all the time.

<comment><USER22> If you do more than occasional processing, it's probably worth buying at least light utilisation reservation. Most people who use EC2 professionally (and who don't use spot instances) would or should be paying a reserve price

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Finally a summary I can use.

</comment><comment><USER25> Helpful - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER26> This is really useful...</comment>


Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-paper-written-by-ios-autocomplete-accepted-for-conference <comment><USER2> Kind of the inverse of the Sokal affair, where a physicist got a gibberish paper accepted by a cultural studies journal. [1] Although this seems like a pay-to-present conference, so really just a scam. Still, I liked his quote: "I know that iOS is a pretty good software, but reaching tenure has never been this close."

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)</comment>


Show HN: Gifaro: iOS App that lets you parody the Stranger Things title sequence - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gifaro/id1294064974?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> Example creation: [https://media.giphy.com/media/3otWplKFLAwcgBo4KY/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/3otWplKFLAwcgBo4KY/giphy.gif)

Let's you customize title text, credits text, duration, color, and add an optional audio track.

I'm working on adding more title sequences, with Star Wars coming up next.</comment>


Cloudflare Access: Like BeyondCorp, but You Don't Have to Be at Google to Use It - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-access/ <comment><USER2> > Encrypted: As Cloudflare makes all connections secure with HTTPS there is no > need for a VPN.

If Cloudbleed has taught us something, it's that cloudfare idea of "fully encrypted" doesn't fully include what's happening inside their own (virtual) walls.

Some may still consider the way they do it ok for websites. I don't, encryption between my customer and me, not between them and cloudflare, opening their data to another actor they have to trust without even knowing it, especially since most of my customers and myself are in Europe not the USA, so I don't want any US authorities to be able to intercept my stuff through them.

But for your company internal stuff ? I get that most companies don't really get pressured to take good care of users data because leak usually hurt the consumers themselves the most, not them, and they don't get blamed for it much. But surely it's not hard to see how opening your own internals is asking for troubles ...

You give all access to cloudflare, you give all access to bugs in cloudflare's software (like cloudbleed), you give all access to any authorities with influence over cloudflare, you give all access to hacker who can get inside cloudflare (even if they only get one small opening into where you data comes through), ... And this time it's not your customers' stuff, it's yours (not saying it doesn't matter when it's theirs, but it's easier to dismiss by Mr Bean Counting Project Manager).

If I am wrong in assuming this and the connection is made user to final endpoint without decryption at cloudflare level I couldn't see it when looking at that page.

<comment><USER3> > If Cloudbleed has taught us something, it's that cloudfare idea of "fully > encrypted" doesn't fully include what's happening inside their own (virtual) > walls.

I think that's a little unfair. Cloudbleed specifically referred to an application that parsed HTML. There's a pretty big logical dependency between "able to optimize our HTML" and "can see our HTML". I feel like the field of homomorphic encryption and HTML parsing is... non-existent.

<comment><USER2> I both agree and don't see what it changes in my message. Yes, it's obvious that they need to see it to be able to do several features they offer. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to let them see it.

Trading security for convenience has never really been a good deal, and this new product is about doing it with your company's internal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those interested by the idea but who need open source, we've been using [https://github.com/bitly/oauth2_proxy](https://github.com/bitly/oauth2_proxy) for a while with great results.

<comment><USER5> I have also been using oauth2_proxy to allow users to authenticate via SSO and then access a application. It was easy to deploy and has been painless to manage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never worked at Google but I thought BeyondCorp wasn't just about SSO auth. It included a reputation system, 2FA, and geofencing, among other things. This just looks like a fancy authentication facade with logging.

<comment><USER7> The BeyondCorp paper is public: [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/44860.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does this compare to ScaleFT's zero trust web access product? Does Cloudflare do anything special beyond client certs to make authorization decisions after authentication? Seems like an easy pivot and nice accessory on top of argo and warp but there's little to no mention of logic used to detect on-device threats.

<comment><USER9> I'm with ScaleFT, thanks for the shoutout. We've been huge believers in BeyondCorp since the first paper was released, and have incorporated the concepts into our Web Access product - [https://www.scaleft.com/product/web- access](https://www.scaleft.com/product/web-access)

Similarly, apps are placed behind a reverse proxy, which performs authN via your company's IDP, then authZ against the policies associated with the resource. These can be basic RBAC or more device oriented decisions such as whether the client disk is encrypted.

We also believe a SaaS model is the way to make BeyondCorp a reality for companies who aren't Google, but there's more to it than a proxy service. We've found the more challenging aspects of a complete system to be the policy engine and device bindings, and have spent the past couple years working to offer with our product.

Glad to see CloudFlare talking about BeyondCorp, the more who are providing solutions in this space, the easier it will be for companies who are not Google to get there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't this mean granting Cloudflare access to all resources available? Does not sound like a very secure infrastructure concept.

<comment><USER11> Note that there are thousands of certificate authorities that hold the keys to the same resources. The threat is real but difficult to avoid.

<comment><USER12> Cloudflare also reserves the right to investigate you and your data. See [https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/](https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/) section 11.

I'd say this goes way beyond the theoretical means of (illegal) access CA might have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> With more and more corporate applications going to externally hosted SaaS providers, doesn't a service like this become less relevant over time?

<comment><USER14> Agreed on more workloads going to third party SaaS.

That might obviate a service like this, or else enterprises will want a service like the to broker auth and monitor access to their SaaS as well.

There are CASB (cloud access security broker) products now that do the monitoring and reporting aspect, though AFAIK don't participate in auth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This only works for HTTP, and all systems are not HTTP nor should they be HTTP.

We've gone far, far backward in networked system capability and efficiency by trying to shoehorn all possible uses of a network into a massively overloaded document retrieval protocol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stay tuned on non-HTTP. Or if you want to try it early: [https://goo.gl/forms/KtzfKYnWhK4SwQP03](https://goo.gl/forms/KtzfKYnWhK4SwQP03)</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs: "I Admire Mark Zuckerberg For Not Selling Out" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/23/steve-jobs-admire-mark-zuckerberg-not-selling-out/

<comment><USER2> I think the most important thing that Jobs said in those interviews was his reason why he felt Google was like Microsoft: because they were engineering companies first-and-foremost that lacked the "artistic" element or the humanity-aspect that Apple focused on.

I think after I heard that, I finally "got" Steve Jobs and his philosophy. He was technical, but deeply philosophical and artistic, so much so that when he was in college he took a calligraphy course, which ended up being why we have true-type fonts. He was the one that merged technology with humanity... he didn't insist on using true-type fonts because it would add 10% to the bottom line, or because it solved a problem, he insisted on it because it was beautiful to look at. I think I finally get it now.

That's why he believed that Microsoft and Google's applications sucked... because they were technology-focused as opposed to focusing on improving lives, or inspiring people.

<comment><USER3> I see, this must be why the iPod has improved people's lives so much whereas Google search and maps were merely about pointless technology.

<comment><USER4> This is actually the perfect analogy, you just didn't realize it. The iPod came in to a world where there were already mp3 players, but they were all pretty lousy from a design/user standpoint. Apple won the mp3 player market because they built a better looking and easier to use version. Google search and maps won significant market share because they were technologically superior to the competition.

One isn't "better" than the other, but they are clearly successful for different reasons.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I'm guessing that Google's clean homepage and search results were a huge reason a lot of people switched over to it. It certainly had a lot to do with my choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel it's a disservice to Steve's legacy to take portions of the book out of context and derive inferences. For example, in this article, I can't understand how any comparisons can be derived between Mark, Larry and Bill Gates. All three of these entrepreneurs came in at a very different time in tech. Their success and [minor] failures if anything were in a large way a function of the then state of technology, competitive landscape and natural evolution of their companies.

</comment><comment><USER7> Okay, I'm a little confused. I thought everyone hated Mark Zuckerberg because he sold out before Facebook even existed, as in, the act of him selling out caused Facebook to magically get stolen from those guys from Harvard he knew?

<comment><USER8> I think everyone hates Facebook because of their privacy and data mining issues, and I'm inclined to agree with those people. Facebook _did_ sell out in that way, and I think even Steve Jobs knew that. But Zuckerberg didn't sell his company to Microsoft so maybe that's what Jobs meant.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best framework for photo heavy web application? - <AUTHOR>

What are the pros and cons of Python/RoR for image based application? I am aware that Pinterest and Instagram use python and lesser known (stipple, mulu.me) image based companies went rails. <comment><USER2> The language probably won't matter so much. I think you will have just as big a job in business development, design and marketing.

So why not look for a technical cofounder who is quite competent in either python or ruby. Then you can have them do the bulk of the coding and possibly oversee some development by other freelancer/s. Head to a ruby or python meetup, ask if you can jump up for 2 minutes and introduce yourself. There will probably be cofounder speed dating type events in your local area as well.

To pipe up about languages and frameworks, make sure when you build that you are considering Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) so when the time comes you are able to break off the pieces that experience higher load. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture>

</comment><comment><USER3> Stipple went with Rails for the sole reason that we were able to iterate and release very quickly in the beginning when I was the only one coding on it, and my expertise is in Ruby and Rails.

We're now heavily Backbone-based on the frontend, however. You should use what you're most comfortable with, as being able to iterate quickly is most important at the start of a project.

As mhd says, the backend is really more important. We're using MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, and a custom Erlang/mnesia based store in ours.

(full disclosure - I'm Stipple's co-founder and CTO)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Very insightful! I admire what you and your team have done at stipple and I think it will be huge. With similar aspirations to 'disrupt' an already proven industry away from the norm I am inspired by your progress and feedback! Much success!

<comment><USER3> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use Django for <http://picc.it>

There isn't really any reason to pick Django over RoR besides the fact that you know one technology better.

Although, personally I prefer Python because scaling Python via Cython plugins is far easier than RoR via FFI plugins, since you just take prewritten code and annotate types and algorithms to get to the bare metal.

You mentioned that you are an idea guy with a budget, why don't you get in touch my email is in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the input and will do

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I don't dev much in either one except occasional python so I'm not an expert here (also probably python biased). But If I were to choose I'd go python because I know the PIL and pythonmagickwand libs are good. Plus python has a more extensive lib set ( in terms of areas i.e. systems, networking, etc) than ruby, and I would think getting Python programmers would be easier and cheaper than Ruby ones...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Lincoln Loop <http://lincolnloop.com/> is the leading Python/Django dev shop I've found so far. Please refer any others that you may know of. Thanks again

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is the wrong part of the puzzle to worry about. Pick whatever you're familiar with for the basic CRUD stuff. The two more complicated bits are a scalable backend and probably some reasonably "hip" interactive frontend (i.e. JavaScript). Whether that's something to worry about from the start is another matter…

<comment><AUTHOR> I apologize. I should have been more specific. I'm not a developer. Just an 'idea guy' with a budget. Vetting dev shops to build prototype, some specialize in Django and others in RoR. Just would apreciate and advice that may be beneficial. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My advice is always use what you know best and I think a lot of people will agree. I've always looked at these questions like this: "What brand of tools should I build my house with?". It doesn't matter. Use what you have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Advice received so far; PYTHON-Scales easier,Find more and cheaper programmers,

RoR-</comment>


Visual6502.org - VIC-II from a Commodore 64 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.visual6502.org/2011/05/commodore-8565-vic-ii.html

<comment><USER2> There are several projects tried to emulate a Commodore 64 as close to the original as possible. This includes emulating all undocumented features and quirks of the VIC-II chip that creates the video output.

This is important since many great games and demos for the C64 made heavy use of these quirks.

By using the die shot, you can reengineer all internal logic and find and understand those quirks fully.</comment>


Show HN: Dimage.js – Never settle for two dimensions - <AUTHOR> https://jjkaufman.github.io/dimage.js/ <comment><USER2> I guess the internet is getting old enough for fashion to start repeating itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> Time to open a PR at [https://github.com/dsalaj/awesome- quirks](https://github.com/dsalaj/awesome-quirks)

</comment><comment><USER4> the 90s are back, baby! the demo page and the animations casually remind me of animated gifs back in the day. just a bit more updated.

</comment><comment><USER5> Gotta give credit where it's due; CSS transform effects kick some serious butt!

</comment><comment><USER6> Your website is beautiful

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like this could easily be extended into creating UI widgets (for example left / right arrows could rotate it by X degrees).

That's pretty awesome, it opens up some new video game-esque possibilities for web design

</comment><comment><USER8> The sample images look very PaRappa the Rapper with this effect.

</comment><comment><USER9> With the transparency effect and multiple images overlapping as they rotate, I wonder if this could be used to create a sort of secure QR code. Maybe a new patent is in order.

<comment><USER10> What kind of security is a QR code lacking that this could add?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you could gifify an image, this would be it. Pretty cool, I wonder if this could add presentational value to social media.

<comment><USER12> going to be adding this as a widget to [https://gif.com.ai](https://gif.com.ai) \- will see if it works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a new wave of retro websites? Can't wait for blinktag.js

<comment><USER14> [https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/resurecting- the-b...](https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/resurecting-the-blink- tag/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You are absolutely insane. Never settle!

</comment><comment><USER16> How can this be at the top of HN?

<comment><USER17> People click a little triangle to the left of the caption and then it goes all the way to the top.</comment></comment>


The Technology of Nostalgia - <AUTHOR> https://blog.humphd.org/the-technology-of-nostalgia/ <comment><USER2> > the browser APIs necessary to make this "90s" effect possible, and when they > were first shipped ... In 2019 it only takes a few lines of code to do the > kind of creative things we struggled with in 1999.

Uh, none of the mentioned APIs are necessary to put trailing stars at the mouse pointer (i mean, it is a "90s" effect after all, the hint about the necessity of these post 2010s APIs is in the name) and in fact i cannot even think why they'd be necessary in the first place. I made such silly effects back in the 90s myself and there was no struggle at all, especially the trail stuff is ridiculously simple and i think you can even do it in Netscape 4.x with a few lines of code.</comment>


That's how it happened (Great showreel of green screen effects from...) - <AUTHOR> http://howithappened.com/post/385343136/great-showreel-of-green-screen-effects-from <comment><USER2> Again?</comment>


What if you got $1,000 a month, just for being alive? (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/11/14/13513066/universal-basic-income-crowdfund <comment><USER2> This article was originally posted in 2014, the author Scott Santens pretends to take an objective look at UBI, but in reality Scott is "Writer and advocate of basic income for all" according to his website [http://www.scottsantens.com/](http://www.scottsantens.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad, corrected the title.

I don't see anything objective about that article, it looks like an opinion piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think his patreon supporters would view their contributions as altruistic donations. They expect some output.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, bit odd to equate "successful Patreon" with "has a basic income." Unless he got them all on-board ("I want to run an experiment with basic income with the next three months of Patreon," etcetera), he doesn't have the option of stopping his writing and having the money keep coming for very long.</comment></comment>


Why Facebook went west and Boston lost out - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/09/09/why_facebook_went_west/?page=full

<comment><USER2> Kirsner didn't explicitly mention this, but notice here that it wasn't another VC that invested in the deal Battery passed up, but an angel. Angels are a lot bolder than VCs.

The big difference between Silicon Valley and Boston in my experience is that the valley has more and much bolder angels. The VCs in the two places are similar. Boston VCs have a bit less testosterone than valley VCs, but it's not a huge difference. The real difference is the angels. And unfortunately for Boston, angels are the deciding factor in how big a tech hub a city becomes.

<comment><USER3> Which brings me to a question I have always wanted to ask... If a startup already has Angel funding, is there any additional advantage to be derived from moving out west?

<comment><USER4> Advantages: more hackers, more angels(you can always get more funding, right?), more partnership opportunities, warmer weather, not everyone wheres a Red Sox hat, Arnold will be your governor.

Disadvantages: more expensive, have to build a new network, expensive to move(both time and money), Arnold will be your governor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone else _really_ _really_ bored with facebook and all the news stories/hype/hyperbole surrounding it?

<comment><USER6> No.

If you don't think it's interesting, then maybe you aren't paying close enough attention. Anyone involved with consumer web should be watching FB.

<comment><USER5> People are incredibly fickle. Wasn't myspace around this 'hype' status last year? What website will be next year? Probably not facebook.

<comment><USER6> Myspace is still huge (and growing), but Facebook appears to be much smarter and their platform is very important (especially to other startups).

<comment><USER7> plus you can't make a Myspace app :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think theres a far more subtle reason... because the weather _sucks_ here.

</comment><comment><USER9> I read this far:

 _an online phenomenon worth up to $6 billion_

Whatever. Until the next thing.

<comment><USER2> Whatever FB is worth, it would have been a very big deal by Boston standards to have them here.

<comment><USER10> I suspect even had Facebook gotten early funding from someone in Boston, they would've moved out to the Valley (or at least the west coast) for the same reasons many YC companies do. This is mostly a story about Battery losing a potentially good payoff, not a story about Boston losing its one chance to have a young software startup stick around.

<comment><USER2> It would depend on how much they raised. YC companies are unusually mobile. Most haven't raised enough to hire anyone, and it's employees that tie you down. Few companies move after they have 20 people, unless they get bought. So if FB had raised enough to hire that many people in Boston, odds are they'd still be here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think I probably would've passed on giving The Facebook money at a $15 million valuation during that first year. The article notes that the user base was in the small thousands, so not so much evidence that it had any traction. And there were certainly competitors as well (some of whom actually had a better feature set). Not to mention the whole uncertainty of deriving revenue from the site, an issue Facebook's still dealing with today.

edit: I missed the latter part of the article. It indicates that Thiel chipped in in half of Zuckerberg's "minimum," for well short of his proposed valuation to Battery.

<comment><USER11> I don't know what numbers they had bothered to graph up but it seems to me that the evidence of traction was very strong from very early on.

<comment><USER12> 1000-2000 users and a $15 million valuation? That seems pretty overpriced to me: even if you could see a positive future, FB's success outside the Ivy league crowd was no means guaranteed.

It's worth noting that Peter Thiel later put in $500,000 for 10% of the company, which would value FB at around $5 million, and that was a few months later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found the article disappointing; the headline and lead promised a story about why, in general, the Valley is attracting startups away from Boston, but the article was a story about Facebook in particular.</comment>


In Honor of Alan Turing: A message from the sponsor - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-magazine.com/content/view/full/55727 <comment><USER2> Count me among those who never suspected (though, in truth, the matter also never came up).

Jon: welcome to the Out world. Wonderful essay.

And thanks, Maddog, for all you've done for Linux and FOSS (and various techish bits before then) all these years.

<comment><USER3> I never suspected that, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wonderful contrast from ESR's disgusting article.

<comment><USER5> I may have missed something. Could you please post a link?

<comment><USER6> See [1] for his views on homaphobia, and [2] for his views on race.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157324> [2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3826846>

Edit: The link in [2] is dead, it previously linked to <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4270>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sorta sad that this is even newsworthy; his personal life has nothing to do with his work regarding technology.

<comment><USER6> Wider issues in society always affect what we do in our work lives, for a number of reasons.

Very few of us work purely in the technology industry. That is, our customers or market are not technical in nature, technology is usually used in support of other goals.

More pertinent to this case, Alan Turing's life and death shows us how issues such as sexuality affect technical work. Who knows what Alan may have done had he lived longer, or what he would have achieved if he wasn't side-lined when he was alive.

In particular terms of why it is newsworthy on HN, as per the guidelines "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." For me as a hacker, it falls right within this definition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The position and actions of various U.S. "churches" who actively promote harm to homosexuals both in the United States and in other countries. Their use of my tax dollars to sustain these churches in their fight to deny me rights particularly infuriates me."

Whaaaaaat? I don't think it's supposed to work that way.

Edit: a bit further down, it seems that he considers his tax dollars to be supporting Fred Phelps' church because if somebody tries to burn it down, the fire department will put it out. That's... certainly an interesting position, especially coming from someone who does not live in Topeka or even in Kansas.

<comment><USER9> I don't want to go church bashing and I don't know how it is in the US but in Australia church run enterprises pick up a lot of government contracts for job placement, school chaplaincy and delivery of social services. Also church run schools receive a lot of public funding (sometimes in excess or poor public schools) while still pocketing large fees. And they do this without having to pay taxes. I am mainly concerned about this in Aus because of the denial of qualified counselling services to kids in favour of evangelism and the Internet and games censorship lobby. But there is no doubt the anti-gay lobby here is primarily driven by religious organisations and I don't doubt they benefit from the lobbying capabilities and funding that comes from being close with government.

<comment><USER10> Be careful about the funding claims. Australian public schools receive their funds from both state and federal governments. Private schools receive funds only from the federal government. Generally (always?) public schools receive more government funding than private schools, but splitting of their income source may mean that they receive less from a single government source than a private school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well said that man.

</comment><comment><USER12> Kuddos to Jon.</comment>


Set Theory and Foundations of Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://settheory.net/ <comment> bubble-07 What is the first diagram on this page supposed to depict? Seems like a bunch of unrelated topics with random arrows drawn between them.

Also, the author seems more than a bit arrogant and deluded: [http://settheory.net/life](http://settheory.net/life) \-- I would _not_ touch any of this stuff with a 40 foot pole.

<comment><USER2> the whole thing you linked reads like he is going through some existential crisis triggered by spending too much time in his own head, or he is struggling to find himself. he calls others stupid but that might just be due to feeling misunderstood and a symptom of his alienation.

one thing I learned is that knowing more doesn't make us happy. knowledge can be the key that opens a door to insanity.

whether he is a lunatic or genius is hard to say without evaluating the quality of his work.

<comment><USER3> > But there are still many well-placed people who will never listen, cannot > grasp this and that keep denying the right for young geniuses to decide for > their own life.

This obsession with I am a genius is bordering on pathological narcissism, excluding oneself from the society because one's too smart to be understood by the world is a very dangerous slippery slope. On the other hand, while in a healthy way, I applaud when one sticks to their own ways. I just wish humility was mode widely practiced. We are not gods, we're just some creatures that have varying degrees of intelligence, but nothing special.

Good luck to you young thinker but remember we are to enjoy this life and the people around us. Don't be lonely and miserable trying to prove everybody wrong, it's pointless.

<comment><USER2> yeah it goes on and on. the Dunning-Kruger seems strong. I got the impression he is extremely isolated. sad really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a seminar on set theory and the foundations of mathmatics. It was very fun! But, coming from a computer science background, i found the foundations via set-theory unintuitive and a bit ackward to work with.

I know there are some type-system based approaches, how do they turn out in practice? How nice are they to work with "on a low level"?

<comment><USER5> Type theories, especially dependent type theories a la Martin-Löf, are quite natural to work with. They are easier to implement on a computer, and there are active communities around several such implementations (Agda, Coq, Lean,⋯).

Most computer verified proofs are implemented in systems based on type theory, not set theory. Most of the time you do not need sets of sets of sets… You want types whose elements are the mathematical objects you care about.

In fact, if you want to do set theory, you can do that inside type theory as well. You can define the type of iterative sets and define a membership relation on this. The resulting stucture will satisfy set theoretical axioms. This was first done by Aczel in the 70s.

<comment><USER6> "Set theory" itself is a bit of an overloaded term; most practical uses of naïve set theory in math do _not_ make use of properties like extensionality or the global membership relation, that characterize axiomatic set theory over TT. Thus, one could also describe the sort of "more natural" systems you reference in your comment as 'structural set theory' [https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/structural+set+theory](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/structural+set+theory)

It's true however that one can do material-set theory _inside_ structural-set theory or type theory, by defining a type of material sets (not necessarily "iterative" however, that's a matter of whether you want to model the axiom of foundation!) and a membership relation on them.

<comment><USER5> Structural set theory, which as you say throws out the iterative structure, is more like type theory than set theory (this is pointed out in the nlab page you linked).

Naïve set theory as practised in say a course in discrete mathematics certainly uses the iterative structure to construct say a pair. You will typically find the definition 〈x,y〉 ≔ {{a},{a,b}} instead of defining it through a universal property.

All the axioms of material set theory take this iterative approach, not just foundation. In fact foundation is not very critical (The Axiom of Anti- foundation is just as workable), as you can always just use the class of well- founded sets and work with those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The set theory formalism presented here differs from the traditional ZF system"

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT study nonstandard theories before familiarizing yourself with the standard theory. The standard set theory (ZFC) survived for over a century for very, very good reasons. Without an exposure to the accepted standards, you will not be able to tell what is reasonable and what is not in this set of notes.

It should also be noted that the author's field of concentration (geometric analysis) has nothing to do with set theory. A typical mathematician knows very little about axiomatic set theory and is prone to making imprecise statements about it.

<comment><USER5> While I agree that one could take caution when studying proposed alternative foundations of mathematics (there are a lot of dysfunctional theories out there, and the link may be one of them for all I know), I think it is unfair to presume incompetence based on the fact that the author has another field as his specialisation. ZFC is also not the one true way, there are many sensible ways to formulate set theory, and even valid criticisms of ZFC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related: Category Theory for Programmers

[https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp- pdf](https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> To me this looks like an interesting attempt to holistically give some overview of mathematics to lay people and could be improved if eg. those with correction proposals here would have some way to contribute back.

I might immensely enjoy such a wikipedia of mathematics.

<comment><USER10> Honestly, I would suggest looking at Wikipedia proper. It's coverage of mathematical topics seems to be currently quite good. You can generally easily google the proofs and the details for topics presented without these. The web altogether is goldmine of mathematical knowledge today imo.

Most things aren't explained "down to the elementary level" but anyone who spends significant time on this stuff will reach a higher level and appreciate not having the same elementary explanations repeated over and over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One should read about standard logic, propositional logic, term logic and nth order logics before, because set theory is founded by them.

<comment><USER12> Set theory and logic are too interdependent to venture far in one whilst steering clear of the other. For instance, you'll only really skim the surface of model theory without a basic understanding of infinite cardinals.

<comment><USER11> They can indeed be used together and are interdépendant in practice at "high level mathematics" But set theory is made of a lower level primitive (first order logic) itself being an extension of zeroth order logic. I was saying that in the context of learning the foundation of mathematics where set theory is not the first place to begin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This contains some falsehoods, e.g.

      (A⇔B⇔C)

is not the same as

      ((A⇔B)∧(B⇔C))

and the former doesn't imply

      (A⇔C)

either, but the latter does.

<comment><USER5> Interpreting A⇔B⇔C as (A⇔B)⇔C is utterly non-standard, but admittedly interesting.

A⇔B⇔C is usually not a valid expression in any mathematical formalism. But if used informally, A⇔B⇔C is usually meant to mean (A⇔B)∧(B⇔C), just as when you say A=B=C when you actually mean (A=B)∧(B=C).

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_biconditional](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_biconditional)

(A⇔B)⇔C has more in common with the other logical operators: due to it's associativity an interpretation that is, in my opinion, closer than A=B=C.

Edit, removed: Note that (A⇔B)∧(B⇔C)) is not one of the two ambiguous options: either (A⇔B)⇔C or (A∧B∧C)∨(¬A∧¬B∧¬C) this is wrong.

<comment><USER15> What? `(A⇔B)∧(B⇔C)` is exactly equivalent to `(A∧B∧C)∨(¬A∧¬B∧¬C)` which is equivalent to `A = B = C`

<comment><USER14> So it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish someone could give this a beauty treatment to make it look like Immersive Math, for instance ([http://immersivemath.com/ila/index.html](http://immersivemath.com/ila/index.html)). This typography and formatting makes it very hard to read these notes, although the content seems to be very interesting.

<comment><USER17> There are links to pdf files near the headers of the chapters, although the pdfs are called "obsolete", so I guess they are not the latest version or miss content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like it's hit by the HN hug of death. Am wondering is there any way for me to help out random people who I think have good content by mirroring their content and increase scale on their behalf?

</comment><comment><USER19> Category theory is an alternative view on the foundations of mathematics that literally gets rid of sets.

<comment><USER20> Well, there is the rather prototypical category Set. So I would not say it gets rid of sets.

<comment><USER21> It's more subtle than that.

True, given any reasonable well-behaved notion of "set", there is a category Set of all sets. (Its properties will depend on the specific notion of "set" chosen.)

But this observation isn't really relevant to issues of formalization. Mathematics can be formalized in lots of systems, set theory being one, type theory being another, and category theory (more specifically ETCS) providing yet another alternative.

All of these foundations are interesting, enjoy unique features, and are interrelated. In particular, ETCS and set theory are very similar from the point of view of foundations: Basically, ordinary set theory and ETCS are two different flavors of set theory: ordinary set theory rests upon a global membership predicate ∈, while ETCS rests upon the notion of a morphism.

Closest to mathematical practice is probably type theory. (But keep in mind that the points above still stand, and that most mathematicians work informally, not knowing any details about set theory, type theory or ETCS.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Question: Would you use 'set theory' to find patterns of sets in a hierarchy?</comment>


Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/skin-color-race.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15478902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15478902)</comment>


Guaranteed Minimum What? - <AUTHOR> https://granolashotgun.com/2017/05/05/guaranteed-minimum-what/ <comment><USER2> > Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as > possible.

Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience.

Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about it with you. They are there to take the most basic info (movie, time) and money, and give you a ticket. It's also always done thru a thick bit of glass that makes communication sometimes difficult if not painful.

On the other hand, the fancy waiter will make recommendations. Will tell you about other things, and is generally part of the ambiance and experience of eating out.

Honestly, do we really like interacting with the people with minimum wage jobs? Not really. Most people seem to prefer the automated checkout, ordering on their phone, etc. While sometimes the person doing the job can be interesting, or friendly, even if the person is amazing, generally these jobs are pretty repetitive, and could be done easier, faster, and cheaper with automation. Not only for the employer, but the customer. Most of these people also are not thrilled about their jobs and be lazy, or do a bad job (I can't blame them really, you get what you pay for). The only thing keeping employees around was that automation was more expensive (and more unreliable). Now it's the flip - labor is much more expensive and unreliable than automation. Now people in those jobs have to prove where they add value, if it's only to watch over the machines.

<comment><USER3> When I worked in the movie box, that was not at all true. People would come in and ask about the movie. How long was it, whether it was any good, should they see another one instead? We gave them real answers. Just because you have a minimum wage job doesn't mean you're a bump on a log. If you've lost sight of the value of basic human interaction with anyone not baked into your caste, I pity you, even if you are in the majority. Also, 99% of movies today are crap, so there's not much to talk about.

<comment><USER4> > 99% of movies today are crap

Survivorship bias. They always have been.

<comment><USER5> "Things are always the same" fallacy.

No, there are periods that are artistically more fruitful and interesting that others, and the history of art knows and documents several of them.

<comment><USER6> > there are periods that are artistically more fruitful and interesting that > others,

Sure, but the claim was just that there have always been bad movies.

Here's a test: If there's some year you know of where bad movies were exceptionally rare, let us know. Then we'll see if we can provide counterexamples.

<comment><USER7> My pick for year is 1878. I'd love to see your examples.

But really, how do you quantify good? Taste is subjective. The original Transformers move is a great example. I didn't like it. but i believe 14 year old me would have absolutely loved it.

It's similar to the statistics about Word users only use 5% of the functionality of Word. But everybody uses a different 5%.

I guess if you want to go by money, i'm going to pick 1939. I'd guess about $18,000,000 in production expenses, and about $240,000,000 in box. [1] (arbitrarily assigning 1,000,000 to the unlisted numbers, but keeping the box at $0 for unlisted numbers) Seems like a pretty good ROI. (although i think of, Gone with the wind, Mr Smith goes to washington, and the Wizard of Oz as subjectively good. 25% is a pretty good percentage)

Kind of a fun exercise poking through the years. 1997 was a standout, but everything i looked at had memorable and fun movies. I don't think any year would hit that 25% mark though.

[1] [http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/year/1939](http://www.the- numbers.com/movies/year/1939)

<comment><USER6> > My pick for year is 1878.

Very funny.

> I guess if you want to go by money, i'm going to pick 1939.

You listed several great films, but I'm not disputing there were years with several great films, that's a completely separate point.

> But really, how do you quantify good? Taste is subjective.

I will concede that if we adopt a radical skepticism towards all aesthetic values then the claim "every year has bad films" collapses.

However, if we agree to make that move... the original claim that "everything in the theater now is terrible" is also false. Or "there's something special (and bad) about the quality of film at this very moment" also collapses.

So I'm good with this move. I accept the gambit.

<comment><USER7> Oh, for sure. We agree "Everything I the theater is terrible" is false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment.

My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly.

Money is a complicated subject, but essentially it represents a transfer of a future scarce resource. For commodities, the cost is essentially the sum of labor to generate it (either to mine the raw resources, build the factory, etc).

If no economic resource is being added to the economy, then you are just devaluing money. That is usually very regressive, and in this case could be made worse by people slightly reducing their economic labor because of the extra income stream. I could see this leading to a bad cycle, where any economic gains due to increasing UBI are later undermined.

Anyway, it would be nice if it worked, but I've seen no evidence that it will in a large system. Comments appreciated.

<comment><USER9> Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there.

If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up.

The vast majority of stuff poor people buy is demand limited, not supply limited, so if poor people start buying more PS4's, Sony will just make more.

I'll also assert that food is demand limited, we have lots more capacity to increase production than people think. It doesn't matter though; the problem with poor people in the United States is that they eat too much, not that they eat too little.

The only thing that might see price movement is housing. That's definitely supply limited in many places. But maybe UBI will encourage people to move from high cost areas where UBI isn't sufficient to live on to low cost areas where it is. And movement will only happen in the margins -- most of the poor in the States already have a place to live, so demand shouldn't increase that much.

<comment><USER10> The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it.

Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving their business abroad instead of just running and developing it, resulting in recession.

Of course you can go with nuclear option and forfeit all their properties at once, in the name of social justice (does that ring a bell?) but you can only do it once, and eventually will run out of the money seized this way.

<comment><USER11> This assumes that the primary reason to start a company is to become fantastically wealthy, which I would contest.

Sure, most founders want to get rich, but I'd assert most would be just as happy to end up in the 8 figure range ($10's of millions) as they would in the 9-10 figure range. (And such a reduction would require taxes on a scale far beyond what UBI would require)

Few people are going to consider starting a company and then sit down, calculate their tax burden as a billionaire and decide that it isn't worth starting Apple, Facebook or Google.

<comment><USER12> Founders might looking for a good living and glory, but VC's for example are looking to really capitalize on 100X growth.

<comment><USER13> To play devil's advocate: you may not need VC's as much in a UBI world. You don't have to worry about income if your startup fails, so you're less likely to play the VC lottery in hopes that you can ride the funding into a successful exit.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. In a UBI world, the government becomes the investor for innovation. If an idea you tried doesn't work out, you try something else. It becomes much easier to start a business, and you no longer get kicked out on the street for failing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We can draw an interesting historical parallel from the Roman Empire in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Expansion had greatly enriched the Senatorial class (and the Equites). Meanwhile, middle class Romans (I use the term technically to refer those in the middle property classes able to serve in the military) had been the soldiers who fought in the campaigns the senators had used to get rich.

The soldiers' farms fell into disrepair while they were away campaigning and were bought by the wealthy senators when the soldiers realised they could not work them anymore. The Senators then used the slaves they had brought back from overseas to work those farms thereby eliminating the need for hired labour from the dispossessed. The now landless soldiers lived off the grain dole until popularist leaders came along and offered to pay them directly to fight for them. This was a key factor in the breakdown of Roman democracy and the rise of the emperors (princeps).

</comment><comment><USER16> _The early adopters will be the largest companies with the most to gain from improvements in efficiency._

This pattern is actually the one I'm worried about the most. New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies.

I see this in every industry I encounter. The middle class worker lost out over the last few decades. Now the middle tier company is going to get killed cause they can't change fast enough.

<comment><USER17> > New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost > every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for > these big new technologies.

Oohh, this very much.

Inside Amazon warehouses, there are tens of thousands of employees called 'Pickers'. They walk around with these handscanners with 300x300 pixel screens that tell them where to go and what item to get next.

For two years, my job was to make the UX of that application a little bit faster. Not the order to pick the items (another team) not the decision of which shipments should be processed next (also different team) or which items should be picked by which picker (you guessed it- a different team). Just the UX for the 0.9MP of screen space in front of the user.

Labour costs for that job are in the hundreds of millions per year, so any team that made a 1% improvement to overall efficiency would be covering its own costs a many times over. And we did.

Amazon can afford to get those small 1% gains multiple times per year, but for smaller companies the gains wouldn't pay for the costs. If they want to beat Amazon, they'll need to find a very big win that Amazon didn't see first. The only company I can think of that did that was Kiva Robotics- wait, it's called Amazon Robotics now.

<comment><USER18> I think the only realistic way for a small player to beat Amazon at selling physical goods is to charge more and convince customers that it's worth it.

<comment><USER19> At this point, if one could guarantee that what one is selling is not a counterfeit, one has a leg up on Amazon.

<comment><USER20> Yeah no, if you go into a normal brick and mortar store you can be pretty sure that what you're getting is not counterfeit. Stores are still not competitive with Amazon.

<comment><USER19> Anecdotally, it's enough to nudge me into alternatives. Other people are saying they know people who decline Walmart shopping for similar reasons but on the other hand with about half of US households using Amazon Prime it's a drop in the bucket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hate to say this, and this is in _no way_ a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor.

Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists.

People who have money, and therefore power, in the United States are not going to give it up so someone down the economic scale can have a modicum of comfort and dignity and purpose. They will, carefully and covertly, and maybe even inadvertently, remove them.

<comment><USER22> > this is in no way a troll

Really? Because this is this the basic premise behind one of the greatest examples of satire in history...

<comment><USER23> > Really? Because this is this the basic premise behind one of the greatest > examples of satire in history...

This one?

A Modest Proposal

For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public

By Jonathan Swift (1729)

[http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html](http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html)

<comment><USER24> This is pretty fucked up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >> I noticed iPads on the tables

They're tablets, from Ziosk. iPad is the Kleenex of this generation.

I rather like those, nothing like paying (and leaving) when I want instead of trying to track down the waiter for 20 minutes

<comment><USER26> Yeah, those are the best of both worlds when you're not dining at an upscale place. Don't have to use cash, don't have to wait for them to complete two round trips just to leave.

I never understand why waiters don't give me a chance to hand them the card immediately when they drop the check. I don't need to sit with it for 10 minutes, especially after it took 10 minutes to flag you down for it. Years ago I was a waiter, so I don't really sympathize with an argument that they're too busy. The whole system could be revised.

<comment><USER27> If you want to review the check you're going to have to wait for a round trip. If not, just hand the card when the check comes or better yet, give them the card when you ask for the check.

<comment><USER26> In general I don't review the check until it's time to sign it. I've been told that's a bad habit but...well, if anything jumps out at me when I'm signing, I mention it then. And I think you might be surprised how many waiters seem to drop the check and simply leave.

I'm not talking about restaurants where you expect excellent service. I'm talking about restaurants where you can't take it as a given that they're going to be attentive to something you say when they put the check down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> From Henry Hazlitts 1946 classic "Economics in One Lesson":

You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation.

<comment><USER29> Competitive forces are a thing.

If your competitors can hire cheap people for working there, you will never be able to justify hiring more expensively. But if they can not hire that cheaply, you will be able to spend more too.

<comment><USER30> You will also never be able to justify hiring more expensively if you can instead use a cheap/free machine, which is of course where we're heading, since people refuse to acknowledge the truth in OP's quote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> One thing that might cushion the displacement of workers by automation is if the workers themselves had an ownership interest in the automation technology. Yes, they would lose their jobs, but having an ownership interest would allow them to generate income.

Maybe instead of UBI, we should consider a scheme where we grant an ownership interest in productive property.

One naive way to implement that is to just grant shares in an index fund that tracks the robotics/automation sector, such as the ROBO Global Index ([http://www.roboglobal.com](http://www.roboglobal.com)).

Obviously, that's not the best way to do it, because if I've just been laid off and have to pay my mortgage, I'm going to turn all my shares into cash.

But there might be some more sophisticated way to grant ownership of productive property that would both generate income and also give influence to the very workers who are most affected by the technology's success.

<comment><USER32> Yes, communism would cushion the displacement of workers.

But that's not viable politically in many western countries.

<comment><USER31> What I'm proposing is not communism, where ownership is held by the state. In fact, what I'm proposing is starkly different.

I'm proposing the direct ownership of automation technology/companies by the workers themselves, not by their government.

This is in keeping with a political philosophy called distributism, which advocates for the widest possible (private) ownership of productive property. Proponents of distributism typically view both capitalism and socialism as systems that tend toward a small number of people holding power over a large amount of capital. (In the case of capitalism, super wealthy investors, and in the case of socialism, government officials.) They see widespread private ownership of productive property as a way of neutralizing the dangers of both Big Business and Big Government.

<comment><USER33> Socialism is literally where workers control the means of production themselves, and communism was the end-point where the state disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This feels topical: [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

<comment><USER35> I've read this twice. The writing isn't spectacular, but it's fun to see a future like this fleshed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have no idea why this is getting upvoted. A blog post that simply observes a bunch of self-serve kiosk machines, has a bait title, and is used on HN for an uninformative rehash of a UBI discussion that has taken place here over and over. I was hoping at least for a piece that made an argument or said something informative, not for some photos of a movie theater lobby and a restaurant.

<comment><USER37> The 'argument', and the admittedly more informative content, is distributed over many posts on that blog (which I like and follow).

This was a relatively sparse post compared to others from the same blog and is, in my opinion, mostly a 'look, more examples' kind of thing for the blog's regular audience. In this case, literally 'look, more examples of low-status work being squeezed out of the world'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax)).

UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massive (how do you even fund something like that in today's economy).

<comment><USER39> The issue with negative income taxes is that they create steep effective marginal tax rates. Suppose you set the floor at 12k, and suppose someone has an existing job at 12k. They immediately lose all incentive to work, because they could make the same amount by not working at all. Your effective marginal tax rate is 100%. There are ways to make this effect less pronounced, but those ways end up morphing a negative income tax to be closer to a basic income. If you get rid of the effect altogether, you get... A basic income.

Even if you make twice as much as the negative income tax floor, you're still facing really high marginal rates. Enough people would drop out of the market economy to make the negative income equivalent to a basic income in financial cost, but more inefficient both because low income jobs would be obliterated and because it'd be (a bit) more complicated to administer and more prone to fraud.

Compare that to a basic income. There, as a first order effect there's no reason for the person to quit the 12k job, because they're now making 24k.

It might seem silly to give someone making 500k 12k a year, but economically and fiscally it doesn't matter: they're taxed at a rate that covers their own basic income and plenty more.

<comment><USER9> If you set the floor at 12K, that means that people with no income get a refund of r*12K where r is the tax rate, not that they get a refund of 12K.

<comment><USER39> That's something fundamentally different from using a negative income tax to implement a guaranteed minimum income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > My best guess is that we're not going to resolve these challenges in any > intentional comprehensive logical manner. At least not at first. Instead > circumstances are going to overwhelm us until enough of the population is > miserable enough to demand real change. That's been the historical model and > it tends to be messy.

This is why I think we need to accelerate the pace of automation as much as possible. That's the only way of creating enough governmental pressure fast enough to reduce the suffering time of the first waves hit by automation. Counter-intuitive, but the faster we get there the less suffering in the transition and the faster society wakes up to the fact that we have to take care of our own.

The right to subsistence has been conveniently tied to the ability to work because that's easy to understand, but it's always been an artificial link.

</comment><comment><USER41> Right now, in the U.S., I'd settle for guaranteed basic/effective health care.

If you aren't going to outright kill people, and if you expect them to "bootstrap" and move on to the next job, you should put some effort into making sure they are healthy enough to do so.

Not to mention basic morality.

Nor that problems treated early are smaller and cost less. And that society pays that cost, whether through cost spreading by private healthcare (hospital critical care -- the last line of defense); Medicaid and government programs; or prison.

Unless you really are going to just bury them, and spring for a pauper's grave.

Sounds rhetorical? Look at Jeff Sessions' latest mandate to prosecutors: 'Lock them up! For as long as possible!'

Look at the widening gaps in longevity.

Follow the money (to the top).

</comment><comment><USER42> I always feel we will just scale larger and larger. We automate farming and move onto industry. We automate industry and move onto service. Now we are automating service and we will move onto something else, perhaps tech.

We are a long ways off from programs programming themselves. NLP and machine learning are still in their infancy. Program analysis and automated bug patching is still young tech. There is still a lot of work to be done and I am confident we will find ways to provide value to each other.

</comment><comment><USER43> "There will always be a need for someone to wipe down the tables, mop the floors, and take out the trash so a few minimum wage level positions will linger on."

Hah, yeah right. Boy is the author gonna be surprised when those jobs get automated too.

<comment><USER44> Seriously, we already have robots that mop and vacuum. Scrubbing tables and taking out trash are just more expensive - it isn't a technically infeasible thing to do right now, especially if you sacrifice some of the magic by just putting UV strips on the tables to indicate where the robot should scrub, or some such.

That eliminates the day labor, you would probably still want a weekly cleaning crew to come around and get in all the nooks and crannies, but it is also reasonable to design buildings around being robot-maintenance friendly, and the more and better of a job the robots can do the less often you need the cleaning crews coming through until you never need them anymore.

The problem right now is that buying a robot that can wipe tables is a large upfront expense few places want to eat up. Prices will come down, though, as they always do. The cost to manufacture machinery is fairly fixed by volume in the endgame anyway, you just have to overcome the R&D costs.

<comment><USER45> > The problem right now is that buying a robot that can wipe tables

I'm not sure how it would help with the "cleaning" part of things, but what if the tables were robots themselves? Could that help with cleaning?

It could help with a lot of things - for instance, imagine a conference center that could re-arrange itself between groups or conferences, then put itself "away" as needed.

Or imagine a garbage can at some venue that loiters around people with disposable items (and perhaps reminds them about its presence when it senses they need to throw something away - I experience this once at a "human level" at a 5-star hotel, where instead of visible garbage cans, there were people who stood around to take your "garbage").

One could potentially think up many such instances - where everyday items become robots for tasks (which might also help to keep such things clean, as well).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> That is a pretty well presented argument for mass unemployment. But it suffers from all such arguments in that is extrapolates "today" into "tomorrow" without acknowledging that there are literally billions of variables at work.

A simple example of the challenges this sort of reasoning present; assume you're a being that perceives time very slowly, perhaps your lifetime is a mere 100 milliseconds rather than 100 years. But your perception is fairly good and you can observe and measure things several yards away in all direction. And you're living in seawater near the beach. Through out your entire life, and for several generations, the amount of seawater above your head has been growing and growing. You believe that eventually there will be sea water "as far as you can observe" above your head.

As an outside observer with a different time scale and perception, we "see" that this being is part of an ocean wave that once the mass of water above the center of gravity moves ahead of it because of water below being slowed by the the beach, the wave will 'crash' and fall into foam.

Now if we could explain this to the creature in the wave, or if the creatures there had some sort of stored history, they might know that in the past there have been waves and the waves have crashed and that the seawater never extended so far into the sky. And there might be debates because _some_ waves reached a height that was higher than any other wave in recorded history and so maybe this time, this time the wave would grow forever.

Except from our time spanning view we realize that all of those fears and understandings arise from the the short lifetimes of the creatures versus the longer time of a wave cycle, and so few creatures will ever encounter another who has experienced "the crash".

These unemployment doomsday articles suffer from a similar myopia. Yes, technology does advance, and yes, it changes how people are employed and what it takes to be employed. _Technology_ shifts however have not resulted in a 'net loss' of employment opportunities when looked at in the full view, ever.

So rather than focus on the 'loss of jobs' let us focus on "transition" support. I point out to people all of the time that we have tremendous gaps between supply and demand in what have historically been called "the trades."

The reality of that was brought home to me when I started a bathroom remodeling project in Las Vegas. For that project I need a plumber, an electrician, and a mason. Three classic 'trades'. I _cannot_ find three people that I can schedule who are licensed contractors, any sooner than 6 months from now. They are all booked up, and as a result leaving money on the table from unfilled demand.

What is more, Las Vegas has very affordable housing. It was hit hard by the mortgage crisis and house prices have still not recovered in large parts of the city. So it isn't like a plumber can't afford to live in the city.

I really think we need to stop stressing out that the number of retail cashier jobs are going away and start figuring out why people aren't able to train for the jobs that are available and going unfilled.

<comment><USER47> > Technology shifts however have not resulted in a 'net loss' of employment > opportunities when looked at in the full view, ever.

This rebuttal suffers from the same problem, it extrapolates "yesterday" into "tomorrow". A computer isn't the same sort of thing as a steam-powered mill or a printing press. A robot isn't a tractor. When we create machines that are simply better at work than humans both physically and mentally -- there isn't anywhere to go from there.

There will always be jobs for people but we're eliminating jobs at a fast pace and there isn't anything replacing it. We aren't doing new things that require new jobs; we're doing the same things more efficiently with less people. This should lead to the future utopia of old science fiction but we will need to re-define what it means to be a functioning member of society.

<comment><USER46> I accept your point if you show me the evidence that supports your claim that we are eliminating jobs at a rate faster than before.

To give an example for you to think about, the machine gun eliminated more jobs for infantry than we have for cashiers. As veterans came home from WW II and 'mustered out' we provided the GI bill to train them in skills other than soldering. This provided an economy that transitioned a standard army to one tenth its previous size.

On the social justice side I am totally in favor of, and have advocated for, using tax payer money to provide the education and training to anyone who needs it to take a job that could use them. An example of how that has fallen down and needs our help was that the VA will not pay for veterans to learn to code[1]. _That_ is a problem we can do something about.

What I categorically reject is the notion that there is any solid reasoning for trying to artificially create jobs that happen to meet existing skill sets. My favorite example of that failing spectacularly was the railroad union concession of having people work on trains in jobs that were no longer necessary[2].

[1] [https://backchannel.com/thousands-of-veterans-want-to- learn-...](https://backchannel.com/thousands-of-veterans-want-to-learn-to- code-but-cant-7ed60c167a61)

[2] [http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2005/08/great_moments_...](http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2005/08/great_moments_i-4.html)

<comment><USER47> The share of U.S. economic output that's paid out in wages in at the lowest point since the government started keeping track of it. In 1964 AT&T was worth $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 758,611 people. Google is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees -- less than a tenth the size of AT&T's workforce in its heyday.

We're going to get self-driving cars in our lifetimes and the number one job in most states is "truck driver". My job as a software developer is to eliminate jobs (or simply prevent new ones from being required). I'm personally responsible for the loss of more jobs that I have.

> As veterans came home from WW II and 'mustered out' we provided the GI bill > to train them in skills other than soldering. This provided an economy that > transitioned a standard army to one tenth its previous size.

Of course, they transitioned into a world where all the other major countries had their manufacturing industries destroyed by war. Again, extrapolating from the past has it's issues; you cannot simply say "training" was the only, or even the most significant, factor. If you had a functional body, you could get a good job.

> using tax payer money to provide the education and training to anyone who > needs it to take a job that could use them.

I think right now we have an absolute glut of educated people; no time in history have you needed to be as educated as you are right now to get an entry level position. People are literally taking jobs that don't pay anything. The number of recent collage grads that are underemployed (employed in jobs that don't require their degree) is at the highest level in 20 years.

> What I categorically reject is the notion that there is any solid reasoning > for trying to artificially create jobs that happen to meet existing skill > sets.

Absolutely; it's a terrible practice. And the thing is, you don't even have to artificially create it. We already have "bullshit jobs"[1] that fill this vacuum already.

[1] [http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless- jobs-d...](http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david- graeber/)

<comment><USER46>
       > The share of U.S. economic output that's paid out in wages in at the lowest
       > point since the government started keeping track of it. In 1964 AT&T was worth
       > $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 758,611 people. Google is worth
       > $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees -- less than a tenth the size
       > of AT&T's workforce in its heyday.

I think this might be an interesting statistic to look at but I can't find it. I can find Gross Domestic Income (GDI) and the GDP which the Bureau of Economic Analysis ([http://www.bea.gov](http://www.bea.gov)) seems to think GDI has been about ~50% of GDP for a long time. I'm also having a bit of a challenge evaluating your numbers, yes Google has a high market cap relative to its workforce, but its contribution to GDP is only about $90B/year (not the Market Cap, but the revenue) and its 55,000 employees accounted for about a third of that. So its pumping into the economy. AT&T had revenue of $164B, not quite double that, and higher employment costs as well. It certainly _has_ been remarkable how much money Google, Apple, and a small number of companies have pulled out of the economy and into cash. Depending on how you measure it you can make an argument that is the entire source of unemployment in the current US economy. I expect at some point various governments will note this impact and construct the Tech equivalent of 'windfall profits tax' (maybe 'unproductive capital tax' or something) in order to liberate it into the economy.

       > If you had a functional body, you could get a good job.

If you are saying that you _only_ needed a functional body to get a good job, that has not been true for at least 50 years. The amount of education and training needed to be employable has gone up steadily as new job creation happened in industries that were growing.

> I think right now we have an absolute glut of educated people;

We need to be careful about terms, there are many people who have college degrees for which there is no career path other than perhaps teaching people who would like to get that same degree. They are 'educated' and essentially unemployable because the number of teaching positions is small relative to the available candidates. But working it backwards from the job to the employee does work, there are unfilled jobs available for people where there is also training available to teach people to do those jobs. Some are 'college' jobs and require STEM training, some are trades jobs and require skills training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> In the barista example, the robot clearly will be able to make a more consistent cup. Maybe the solution then is to make the barista experience more elaborate and enjoyable, sort of like performance art? Flair bartending is a good example of that, aesthetic differences aside. Humans, when properly trained in the creative arts, are still the best entertainers of other humans.

I wonder how this will impact the world of fine dining and establishments that have a great reputation with their community. Just yesterday I was watching a Japanese show about a restaurant owner in Louisiana who would spend all night in his store going between the customers and the kitchen, coming up with new menu items on the fly with his friends(customers), introducing people to each other, going to the neighboring bars to visit and try out their new drinks/food, and just really combining the best aspects of a chef, host, and wait staff. I doubt his store will be severely impacted by automation since you're not just buying food or a drink, you're there to be a part of something you really love and supporting a man and his business in keeping something beautiful alive.

Maybe this whole automation issue will give the big box retailers and chain restaurants a kick in the butt to up add a deeper human element to their experiences? Or maybe the space will be filled in by people who can make spaces for people to just have a good time and connect with their community, instead of being walked along like dogs through a programmed conveyor belt experience.

</comment><comment><USER49> Actually I would argue to social systems and people arguing like this blog post we already have some slowing that process and its effect. We are actually already doing "better" than nature in this regard, because of culture (if you consider sacrificing survivability in exchange for social benefits better).

In general this is just normal evolution, something more efficient replaces something less effecient. And it's not completely stopabble. Let's say you can create laws that force McDonalds to keep staff and not use robots. Then at some point McDonalds will get bankrupt and another company will take its place. Maybe you can make the laws that forces all companies in your country to employ people despite not needing them any more. Then at some point your country will be too poor and gets replaced by another country, either through invasion, or revolution, or both.

</comment><comment><USER50> There isn't enough 'high value' work to be done. We don't 'need' so many people to feed or house or even entertain the planet. We have a distribution problem of affluence, not a production problem. Even much of our current value 'work' only exist because we are externalizing the disastrous impact it has on the planet and its inhabitants. Maybe VR will offer a way out. Keeping the masses 'occupied' with virtual labor that has less of an ecological impact. Grinding lvl 863 mining in an MMO, not for fun, but for life.

</comment><comment><USER51> People have it tough. To compound to this the cost of things like food, housing and energy are sky rocketing, at least the have been in Toronto where I live.

I don't know if UBI is the answer, or even if the problems are tied to mechanization. But certainly I think we hit the nail on the head when we realize that things are glib and something needs to be done. If not UBI, than something big to ensure that everyone can share in the wealth our society produces and that people are not scrounging, fighting and drowning in debt just to barely get by.

</comment><comment><USER52> The following table (Employment by major industry sector) should be more widely known in this debate.

The most relevant column is the second one (Thousands of Jobs, 2014). Just seeing this table makes clear how broad the modern economy is.

[https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm](https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm)

Here's a more detailed version:

[https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_207.htm](https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_207.htm)

</comment><comment><USER53> Guaranteed minimum income is: sustainable, sufficient for basic life necessities, can be implemented for the current population levels. Choose two.

It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.

<comment><USER54> The current population is growing. Evidently there is enough resources to population at this level (food, water, space, air, energy, etc). If production of resources is automated why can't resources distributed to sustain current population?

<comment><USER53> The bulk of costs of living in modern societies: rent/mortgage, healthcare and education. Can't be really automated in the near future, expected to cost even more as everything else becomes more automated.

<comment><USER54> I believe education is currently undergoing a similar transition that music and film and been through. At the end of Education will be cheaper. It already is a lot cheaper in some cases.

Health care is tougher, due to stricter regulations (rightly so) and reluctance from doctors but I think the transformation there is about to begin. Look at what is happening with (open source) prosthetics.

Prime reason for rent and mortgage that I can see is wealth generation and in a society where wealth is less important perhaps these will also decrease. You can see more and more interest in open source, not just in software but also other fields, is this a shift away from wealth accumulation?

From another angle, people are beginning build homes with recycled plastic and by 3D printing this hopefully will reduce build cost. And hopefully that will filter down to the end consumer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is one of my favourite blogs. The author is able to extract thought- provoking stories and insights from very unlikely places. The heavy use of photos is no doubt an important part of the formula. Most of the photo essays fall outside of HN's typical interests, though.

I linked to some of my favourite entries here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13825177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13825177)

</comment><comment><USER56> > _My best guess is that we're not going to resolve these challenges in any > intentional comprehensive logical manner. At least not at first. Instead > circumstances are going to overwhelm us until enough of the population is > miserable enough to demand real change. That's been the historical model and > it tends to be messy. Big fun._

The historical precidents he, I believe, refers to were less _messy_ and more _bloody_.

</comment><comment><USER5> > _Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as > possible._

Well, that only works as long as many businesses don't do it.

See, business models tend to require people with jobs and money to spend. You can rip profits by catering to those still working if you automate your restaurant or supermarket first.

But it gets increasingly harder to make money for any businesses when those whose jobs got automated away get increasingly many.

</comment><comment><USER57> I found this debate to be helpful in my understanding of the UBI:

[http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/universal- basic...](http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/universal-basic-income- safety-net-future)

<comment><USER27> I listened to this debate on my podcast subscription. The TL;DR is the audience poll shifted massively toward UBI being a bad idea by the end of the debate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> > Instead circumstances are going to overwhelm us until enough of the > population is miserable enough to demand real change.

I'm not sure. During the great depression the USA did not embrace communism. Why should it be different with automation?

</comment><comment><USER59> 1\. Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-sum

2\. Basic income gives impetus to Social mobility

</comment><comment><USER60> Freakonomics had an interesting 2 part podcast series about this very topic. If you haven't heard of it, and these things interest you, I suggest you check it out:

Part 1: [http://freakonomics.com/podcast/earth-2-0-economics- edition-...](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/earth-2-0-economics-edition- part-1/)

Part 2: [http://freakonomics.com/podcast/earth-2-0-income- inequality/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/earth-2-0-income-inequality/)

</comment><comment><USER61> > We tend to think of that as social engineering and Godless communism.

Come on, you're making an argument for universal basic income, but you obviously aren't educated enough to make an argument for or against it if you think only religious bigots and those lacking your level of sophistication are the majority of the opposition. Learn some opposing views, Buddy

</comment><comment><USER62> yeah of course, I'm all for a guaranteed minimum income. I guess you are going to do a kickstarter right? I hope you are not proposing to forcefully steal my money through taxes.

<comment><USER63> I'd like to see you being forced not to use anything that was payed for by taxes, since you hate them so much. Like water, electricity and roads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> We already have guaranteed minimum income. Look at the people employed by the state. Doing mundane tasks, day by day, that could be automated cheaply and effortlessly. Literally sorting and storing documents, something the computer is proficient at. It is invented and completely senseless and stupid work. Depending on the country, we are talking about 20-50% of the population being state employees right now, in the first world. And the trend is that it's increasing, fast. There's your UBI, and as a bonus point, it keeps people off the streets and they think they are doing something.</comment>


How Baidu Beat Google and Won China  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_47/b4204060242597.htm

<comment><USER2> hmmm, no mention that Google actually had >50% search market share in China during 2001-2002.

Badiu' share only start to sky rocket after:

1) people in China having lag and latency issue surfing Google's website. 2) Baidu's deep linking of pirated mp3 music files. In effect Baidu acts like thepiratebay.com and the China's youths defected en mass to Baidu.</comment>


What questions to ask a developer during an interview - <AUTHOR> http://www.devtich.com/interview-questions-developer/

<comment><USER2> "Why do you keep asking all these stupid questions?"

<comment><USER3> As a continuation of that, I'd love to hear if anyone has walked out on an interview, or made it very clear that if offered, they would not be pursuing this job based on interview questions.

I have pet-peeves in interviews that would make me automatically not work at a place that used them, but I'm not a job hopper so a lot of these have been formed in my psyche without ever having to use them.</comment></comment>