skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The top VC funds seem to display alpha, but I agree the vast majority of general partners would be better replaced with a monkey and a dartboard.
I can understand that, but a discussion about a kid's first project wasn't really the best place to post such a complaint. Probably better save it for some commercial project where they actually have a budget that could be used for doing ports and suchlike.
I'm not saying this isn't true, but the post is on the blog of a short term loans company who have a vested interest in people believing a short term loan would be preferable to an overdraft fee, and there's no cited report or study that suggests banks make most of their money from fees.

A couple of articles that make me wonder;

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-how-a-bank-m...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/banks-fee-bonanza-dries-up-14096...
I'm a materials engineer I graduated in 2010 back when I was at uni very little of the curriculum was dedicated to non-ferrous metallurgy.

We probably spent as much time studying ferrous alloys as we did on Aluminium, Titanium, Copper and Nickel combined.

That said I suspect the reason is likely patent related. Metallurgy is not a new field but Aluminium alloying is relatively new wasn't really until after WW2. Alot of industrial research tends to be locked away behind patents.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Learn is a good place to start.

http://eloquentjavascript.net/ does a great job, especially in the later chapters.

http://learn.shayhowe.com/advanced-html-css/responsive-web-d... 'Responsive' site design is a must-have now-a-days.

http://alistapart.com/article/dao The philosophy and theory of web design

I have some other links you may be interested in on a blog post I wrote a while back: http://mygen.ca/develop-developing-developers/
Before drugs developed outside Japan are approved for use in Japan, as part of the approval process they will test the drugs on Japanese using "foreigners" as a control. And it doesn't really matter where the foreigner is from, either. Like you could have a drug developed in Germany and they'll happily grab a random Aussie for the trial. Years ago I knew a guy who made extra money every few months doing this.
The Untold Story of ILM, a Titan That Forever Changed Film
I remember when the ban first came about, HEB would make you buy the reusable canvas bags instead of having those heavy duty plastic bags. I don't know why they switched. Like you said, every other store in town will give you recyclable paper bags if you forget to bring your own reusables. Unfortunately, since HEB is the only low cost grocery store in town (besides Super Targets and Walmarts), their decision to give out an alternative plastic bag is hurting the effort of the ban.
About five years ago I worked at Wells Fargo as a teller while in college. During that time Congress passed a law prohibiting debit transactions from going through if there weren't enough funds in the account. Shortly after that we were told to start telling our customers about a new service called Debit Card Overdraft Service which was marketed as a "convenience" for customers when they were in a bind.

When I asked my branch manager about this service in person, he said he was told by his manager that the company was going to lose billions of dollars due to the new law and that this service was meant to alleviate those losses. I filed an ethical complaint since I believed that it violated one of their Team Member Codes of Ethics regarding "encouraging reckless financial behavior". It pissed off my manager, which pissed off his boss, and then I had a round table meeting with them. My manager then claimed that he never said anything about losing money, and that the new service was unrelated to the new laws passed in Congress. Since I couldn't prove he said those things I decided to drop it, but he told me I no longer had to advertise the service.

It still irks me that there was absolutely nothing I could do about the situation. After I quit some of my co workers told me that they were told that the service was used to make up for lost revenue also, but they were afraid of speaking up since they didn't want to lose their jobs. I had less to lose because I was a college student studying CS.
Who are the best VC firms and what are their returns?
Very interesting! Another book that touches on food history is Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which talks a bit about the domestication of agricultural crops. So much of what we grow today bears little to no resemblance to their wild varieties. Eg, cabbage, broccoli, kale, and brussels sprouts all come from the same wild plant. Organic and GMO fuss aside, humans have been very, very good at manipulating our environment and food sources for a long time...
Shipwrecks Under Istanbul
It took Whatsupp at least 6-7 years to get on the map in USA I would say. I remember the first time I installed it was during the BlackBerry messenger era when people wanted a nice iPhone but were freaking out about their BBMs. Telegram is awesome but it will take a long time until it goes mainstream if ever. That space is totally overcrowded now.
Why bother with a bank? Find a local credit union
I switched from mostly using R to Python about a year ago for gluing together my data pipeline (from data source all the way to production models and frontends/visualizations). It hasn't really impacted what I'm capable of doing or my productivity, except the standard extra googling that comes in the first couple years I use any language.

The main reason I went for Python is purely practical: it's a language people outside my team will respect and deal with. It makes it easier for me to collaborate in many different ways: share tools with other teams, transfer ownership of my code, get help when I need it, etc. Data science at some companies has the reputation of "hack something together and throw it over the wall for someone else to deal with". In my experience R only furthers this reputation. Which is too bad, it's really great at what it does.
USAA - The United Services Automobile Association?
I don't think story writers typically write the headline but maybe the online version of WSJ is different from the print version...
Take your pick at one of the dozen on-demand food delivery startups: [ Postmates, SpoonRocket, Eat24, GrubHub, Caviar, Munchery, ZeroCater, Eat Club ]

I've used Eat Club and actually think they are the best of the group. The startups that are focused on business/corporate catering will most likely fare better than individual focused startups.
> form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts.

Why in the world shouldn't you be fined for overdrawing your checking account? A checking account is not a loan, am I wrong in thinking this quote is B.S.?
https://www.usaa.com/
I guess the moral of the story is that ethical complaints should be anonymous?
Bank overdraft and NSF fees are definitely odious. It's part of the reason why so many poor people have switched over to prepaid and are opting to pay the $5-$10 monthly fee for those accounts - it comes out to less for many people and at least it's predictable.

These types of fees have been especially egregious in recent years, because the bigger banks have had their traditional revenue sources drastically capped/reduced (interchange & interest spread).
That's what credit unions are. You don't have many in the ghetto, because most aren't really communities, which is why they are what they are.
Lebron also broke onto the scene as a 16 year old -- high school all american as a sophomore, lots of other media attention and coverage (edit: SI cover was a couple months after 17th birthday apparently).
They're these. I don't think they have a brand.

http://www.makeblock.cc/42byg-stepper-motor/
Ask HN: It used to be that when stocks fall, Bitcoin goes up. What happened?
pretty cool! as a mostly chrome user, i'd love to see this land in chrome devtools.
How about opening an incognito window? (No charge.)
Even breaking it across multiple datacenters you're still hardpressed to do those speeds over a short period (weeks), let alone constantly over time [1]. My point was the physics in the parent don't work.

1. http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2015/07/windows-10-launch-hug...
> They know exactly what they're doing. They're rich bankers robbing poor people.

I can understand thinking that the "correct" thing to do here is to simply not allow a transaction when there aren't sufficient funds, but this language goes overboard. It's not robbing a person because they were unable to keep track of how much money they own and adjust accordingly.
I was bitten by overdraft fees few times, and after much complaining all fees were waived. BUT, every time I insisted on disable all kind of overdraft protections and simply dishonor ACH charge or paper check if balance is not enough. I've been told that even in that situation they will still charge NSF fees if check was authorized (and yes, recurring transactions are authorized.) They also offered to stop specific check. This will cost... same amount as NSF fee. Also, they can freeze account, it will cost... same amount as NSF fee, (and same amount to unfreeze)

This is local smallish CU...
Andrew Ng said in the Coursera Machine learning class that according to his experience, students implement the course homework faster in Octave/Matlab than in Python.

But yes, the point of that course is to implement and play around with small numerical algorithms, whereas the linked blog is about someone who mainly calls existing machine learning libraries from Python.

Ref. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485877
That's what I got from this story as well - the problem isn't that Austin is trying to solve the plastic bag issue, it's that Austin is going about it the wrong way. The article seems to dance around that but settles on just the ban itself.
Boulder stores charge a few cents for bags, but give you the choice to keep or donate an equivalent credit when you bring your own. The system seems effective to me.
Also, there are no post-it notes.
Those noisy line printers must have been running constantly all day long.
When are you coming back to do another tech talk at Pivotal Labs?
It's important to keep in mind that "overdraft fees" is a complete horseshit of a term. The banks could easily just deny the transaction... there's nothing in the universe that says you have allow your customers account to overdraft. As the link says, these really are not fees, but short-term high-interest loans, extended by the bank to the customer, with an intent little different from other high-interest short-term loan places.

These are LOANS, not FEES, at HIGH INTEREST rates, and they're aimed SPECIFICALLY at the poor, because they're the only ones without other options or recourse, and the least likely to fight the issue when it happens.
Time for a new OS
We could read 100 sob stories, or we could recognize that every single overdraft (other than errors and fraud, which do happen but are rare and these days invariably corrected) is voluntary. Yes, banks will make money any way that they can. Yes, they will happily take your last dollar, or even dollars you don't have and never will. No, they do not give one flying fucking rat's ass about you, your sister, or the homeless Vietnam War veteran who saves orphaned children on weekends and singlehandedly saved the world from nuclear annihilation last week. Twice. They don't care. Not one tiny bit. They're probably bastards.

So why in the name of all that's sane and holy would you give them money by falling into the traps that they set for you? You choose to write checks you don't know for sure are good. You choose to use your debit card instead of cash. You choose to keep poor records of your own accounts. These are choices that you make, or not, despite 13+ years of free public education that includes all the basic skills necessary to avoid this problem. And then you complain that the bankers are making too much money charging you a fee that you agreed to as a direct result of a transaction that you deliberately initiated against your account. You. Not the bankers.

If you can't or don't care to keep good records, you should use your checking account for only the bare minimum of transactions that you know for certain you can keep track of, only when you are absolutely sure you have enough in your account, and use cash for everything else. Basically, if it is at all possible to use cash for something, use cash. If you aren't sure of the terms on your account, get out your paperwork. If you lost it, call the bank and get them to send it to you again; they're required to do so. If you don't like the terms, find someone else; there are over 7,000 commercial banks in the United States.

There are thousands of pages of banking law and regulations devoted to making sure that you are aware of these fees, limiting them, obligating banks to refund or cancel them in certain situations, and on and on. It's your choice to pay them. It's your choice to hand those bastards a bunch of money for lending you literally a few bucks for a few days. Yours. Not theirs.

And they're not even grateful for it. You really oughtta cut those bastards off.
Post+to+Tumblr
I highly recommend USAA for checking/savings accounts. Been with them for 5 years or so.
Pearls of Algebraic Effects and Handlers
I have worked at SoHo Labs http://www.soholabs.co/ and Warner Yard http://www.warneryard.com/
Techstars is based in Warner Yard and the top floor is dedicated space for investors. I would consider giving it a shot.
I wish USAA would open their net a little bit to extended families. My brother is a doctor in the US Navy, but that supposedly wasn't 'close' enough of a family relation for me to qualify to do business with them.
Yeah, you are right. It is perfectly possible to wrap awscli by shell script and do exactly the same thing with what this tool does. However, generally speaking, it will be more and more difficult to test and maintain as a tool becomes large, especially if it's written in shell script. Python has awesome testing library (I love py.test), and the most importantly, has really cool AWS mock library moto (https://github.com/spulec/moto). These are pretty much why I picked Python, rather than bash alias or shell script for this tool.
In addition, the fact that they label it as "overdraft protection" is thoroughly ridiculous. Overdraft protection should protect me from overdrafts by denying a transaction. Instead, the worst effect of the overdraft, being charged an additional fee, is applied.
Thanks for the comment (I am the author of this article).

> I have a feeling the author will find their way to Julia-land eventually, in a couple of years or so.

I have a strong feeling that this will eventually happen :). In an ideal, less busy, world, I would love to use Julia alongside to explore and battle-test it further. Or even develop useful packages, libraries, and functions for it. The truth is, I am currently lacking the time to do that :(. I mean, Python works for me, and I am currently more into the scientific problem solving so that I don't have the time :(. When I say that Python works for me I mean that I am currently happy since it can do everything for me I need, however, this doesn't mean that Julia couldn't do certain things better ;).

Anyways, I really like your comment. I am wondering if you would be okay with it if I include it in a "Other people's experiences and opinions" section at the bottom. I think this would be extremely helpful for people who are new to the "data science field" -- my article is strongly biased towards Python as you noticed :P
I've never had good luck with the cheap ones. I use the numa with a built in transmission. Here is a link as a an example, I've never bought from the his place :http://omc-stepperonline.kancart.com/categories/4#!1
Thanks! Let me hear how it fits to your daily operation!
This? http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-price-slumps-following-bitfi...
Now it is a good moment to remember when they started to pass Data Protection laws in Europe 15 years ago and everybody was freaking out like "Oh my good, with this laws it will be impossible to do Internet business in Europe! All the companies will go to America!"

Profit...
It's a not consensual extraordinarily high interest loan. Robbery is a fine label to use for that.
Feels like a PR piece to me.

Obvious alternative for plastic is Kraft paper, although I'm sure the retailers would be concerned about the "carbon footprint" -- just like when Sam's Club was making a case that polystyrene cups had a lower impact than alternatives due to truck fuel consumption.

The other big costs are damage to wildlife and infrastructure. A family friend is a sewer foreman. He has a crew of 3 guys that roam around our little city clearing drains, sewage pumps and other sewer infrastructure. Anywhere from 40-60% of the clogs are caused by shopping bags. That's a lot of $$, borne by the taxpayer.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"
This has already happened with github, reddit, and several other lesser known sites. In all those cases access was restored very quickly, within hours/days, as soon as site admins complied with the Russian law. What's different this time?
The charge should be declined, no different than a credit card. Allowing it to go through and then charging usurious fees is wrong.
> These types of fees have been especially egregious in recent years, because the bigger banks have had their traditional revenue sources drastically capped/reduced (interchange & interest spread).

Maybe the lesson is that over-regulation and financial repression aren't so good for the people. These guys are going to make money somehow. You can create a system that allows them to do so with minimal harm while providing valuable services or you can take away every stream of revenue except the evil things they haven't thought up yet. America is clearly opting for plan B, and it's working about as well as you'd expect.
> You kinda wonder why these poor communities don't have community-owned businesses. Crowdfunded works so well, why not in ghettos?

They do: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674030710

Is the service better? Unclear.
This is all the more frustrating—no, enraging, when you learn how banks create money.
No. Emphatically, no. It IS robbery. Have you ever been a poor person? Have you ever been overwhelmed with depression and the panic of a lost job, a few dozen bills you probably can't pay, the shame of asking friends and relatives for help, and in so doing, risking your relationships with those people and your own self-esteem?

What you're missing here is that poor people KNOW that they are poor and right on the edge. They are already making a lot of adjustments that you probably can't even conceive of. They have a daily, hourly even, intellectual load from financial panic that more privileged people cannot even imagine.

The banks are the guilty party, here. They know that some of their customers are near the edge and in trouble, and they are strategically choosing to exploit them. Period, paragraph.
Because the bank should just deny the charge to the account instead, and have no fine. You are right that a checking account is not a loan--so the bank should not treat it as if it is!
Or, learn the Bourne shell (which is on every UNIX) with this:
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sh.html

Even better, it doesn't require registration and passing a CAPTCHA Turing test.
The Open Source Software Developer Career and Its Benefits
Great, now the missing link is SQL. Why are none of the online code schools teaching such an essential skill required for web development?
Here in Scotland, and also nearby in Ireland, we have a plastic bag charge (around 5p). Immediately after it was introduced, I started taking far less bags. If it was just two small things, I'd carry them by hand. I'd usually bring my backpack and put things in there. Only rarely would I buy a bag (usually when I forgot the backpack).

Net result: I've chucked out far less plastic bags.
I don't advocate anymore, unless there's some slight interest to begin with. I'm that weird old guy whose terminal is always running.
Towards the bottom of the page, there are two pictures of the mainframe that they used. The desktop computers in the other pictures were probably just terminals that were connected to it. It was a DECSYSTEM 2020. It ran the TOPS-20 operating system.

The text of the link calls it a minicomputer, but the links that I found called it a mainframe.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/digital/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20

The fans of TOPS-20 were nearly as anti-Unix as the ITS partisans. This may help explain why Microsoft has not been so fond of Unix and the Unix way of doing things. At least in its early days.
Raising the mandated minimum price of a reusable bag to $5 is what I presume click170 was saying penalized the poor.
Fine, say it's wrong. Don't say it's a "tax". You have no choice with regard to taxes; you have a choice to not overdraw your account.
Mozilla is not planning on supporting any addons other than Flash in 64-bit Firefox
I went through the very same process :). I really like your comment, you highlight something that I forgot to mention in this clarity "It makes it easier for me to collaborate in many different ways: share tools with other teams, transfer ownership of my code, get help when I need". Would you mind if I add it as to a "other people's experiences" section at the bottom of the article?
If the customer had set up the overdraft "loan" feature, then sure, I'd agree with you. But they didn't. How is it sane (and legal) to automatically loan someone money to pay something, without their permission, when you can set whatever repayment terms you want? Declining for insufficient funds is the only correct thing to do in that case. And yes, banks will usually charge a fee for that, too, but at least it'll only be a one-time fee.
USAA also batches their debts and payments differently than other banks, to help their members minimizes any fees incurred. Their customer service saying is "assume positive intent" and they have amazing service. I will probably be a customer for life.
It's absolutely consensual; it only happens if you overdraw your account.
I had a similar fee for not having a transaction into my checking account for the month. I visited the branch to contest it. They waived the fee, and I asked the branch manager, "So I just need 'a deposit' each month, right? How about $0.01?" She didn't answer me, but I setup my ADP account at work the next day and BofA's been getting $0.01 into checking every month for years now.

And you know what? I'm pretty sure it costs them more than $0.01 to process that direct deposit. ;)