skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a couple of times in my life when I was quite poor (for someone living in a G8 country...) The biggest thing I learned was to use cash. Cash is awesome because you can see how much you have and you can't spend more than you have. Even now that I am relatively well off, I have my habitual routine of getting cash at the beginning of the week and spending only that for the week. In fact, I make sure that there is always a bit left over at the end of the week (because there are always surprises).

The thing that is frustrating for me in western countries is that using cash is becoming more and more difficult. The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

In the UK, I used to use my Oyster card (a pre-paid travel card for public transit in London). I could basically use it like cash. You put in whatever money you want at the beginning of the week and then you can use it without worrying about over spending. If you ever travel in London, be aware that the payment system is buggy as hell and they will over charge you badly. With the Oyster card it's great because I can notice that my balance is lower than it should be, go online and get a refund (seriously ... it happened at least 3 times a week for me!!!) But now they are pushing using your bank card as a payment mechanism. They have access to all of your money and you have many less ways of detecting when they have overdrawn (or penalized you for the failure of their equipment to register your badging in).

Again... these companies know exactly what they are doing.

As an aside... I often wonder what happened to the laws about accepting legal tender. There are a number of times that I've been refused service because I wanted to pay cash (hotels and car rentals being the biggest culprits). Is this actually legal?
That's because 'itty Russia is the 'upidest country.

Seriously, being Russian, you kind of get used to the constant feeling of shame. Almost everything that happened to the country and people in the last 100 years provokes deep feeling of shame and helplessness.
Maybe it's an age thing, but these kids with their hats on backwards or even worse, sideways, look retarded to me. Live and let live though.

Admittedly, I've turned my baseball cap around backwards once in a while but it wasn't to look cool. (The brim of a baseball cap interferes with a rifle scope for example.)
Wikipedia is non-profit, chance it's not going to cave.
Eating to Break 100: Longevity Diet Tips from the Blue Zones
How to Stop Overplanning (Even If You’re a Perfectionist)
There's a scene, one of my favorites, in The Wire, where a gang member goes into a hardware store to buy a nail gun. He asks an older, white sales dude to give him the skinny on the nail guns on display. The sales guy picks up one and says it's the Cadillac of nail guns. He buys it and goes out to the SUV where his compatriot is waiting, where he tells his co-worker that he got the Lexus of nail guns.

Here's the scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDpvkwBBu6U
Fuck the banks.. when u down they will punish you.. and even creating a new bank means you can punish.. FUCK THEM ALL
If it were possible to send a modern software engineer back in time to that era, would they have any usable or employable skills in such an environment? (besides the uncanny ability to correctly predict the future)
Deep Packet Inspection won't help you versus HTTPS (unless you're CIA and have crypto backdoors).
They recently implemented a similar ban in Chicago. Now stores just give out thick "reusable" plastic bags. The whole thing has been an all around failure: it's strictly worse for the environment and consumers indirectly pay for more expensive bags
> No. Emphatically, no. It IS robbery. Have you ever been a poor person?

Yes, I overdrew my account when I was in college and had $50 to my name. It was my mistake, I made a purchase unsure of how much money I had.

I also used to work for a bank that gave out RALs so I'm perfectly aware of the unethical behavior that happens in banking. So call it unethical, call it what it is. Using inaccurate alarmist language does not help the matter.
One of the guys (white shirt and brown corduroys) is Mike Courtney. He and I worked together at Seattle's Retail Computer Store, alongside Bob Wallace (Quickwrite & Shareware) and Tim Paterson (MS-DOS).
Couldn't wait until the next day to make the purchase? Couldn't use cash or a credit card instead?

You're an adult. You're obviously literate or you couldn't be posting here. Unless these fees were not disclosed to you (a MAJOR breach of the law if true), you had every opportunity to know that this would occur and to prevent it. Try taking responsibility for your own actions.
Banks make keeping track of the money in your account intentionally difficult. You can't just check your balance and assume that you can spend what's there.

Instead, your balance includes only processed transactions, whereas your account also has a list of pending transactions that can hit your balance at any time. Pending transactions can also disappear from your account, only to come back as a confirmed transaction. In effect, you can't be sure of exactly what's in your account unless you manually keep track of every charge you've made.

Banks do more than this to make overdrafts difficult to deal with. For example, Bank of America intentionally processes your transactions from largest to smallest, ensuring you'll git hit with the maximum number of overdraft fees.

e.g: if you have $10 in your account, and you make a $3 purchase, a $4 purchase, and a $12 purchase, they'll run the charges in the order of $12, $4, and $3, hitting you with three fees instead of one.

tl;dr: banks love overdraft fees and do whatever they can get away with to hit you with them.
Interesting! It's hard for a single person to tell, because you can only start one way digging into machine learning. However, from a teacher's perspective, this is a useful observation. I also started with Matlab since it was the language that was used in my classes. However, I think this is also a little bit context dependent: For someone who has never programmed before, Matlab may be more intuitive. I think in an ideal world, you should let your students choose what language they want to use to solve the problem :).
Octave/Matlab are "great" but good luck trying to integrate them into a production web application. Since you cant really do that - avoid using them unless you are fine with implementing the same algorithm twice. Matlab licenses cost money also, and the toolboxes cost additional money.

R is useful because there are a lot of resources as it has been along for so long and is used by a large portion of the stats community. It also has a lot of useful libraries that have not been ported over to other languages yet (ggmap!!!). But you still still run into the same problem that you cannot integrate R into a production web application.

I am pretty sure Hadoop streaming does not support R,Octave, or Matlab either
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Bank of America had some pretty bad practices where they would reorder the sequence of debit transactions, largest amounts first, to maximize the number of overdraft transactions: "the bank mixed up the order and delayed the timing of debits and transactions to maximize the possibility customers will overdraft accounts".

They got sued and settled for $410 Million in 2011: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-02-05/bank-of-am...

[edit: spelling mistake]
Thanks! reporting issues and pr are all welcomed!
To add to jschwartzi's comment, what if there was a snack food that tasted good, but you could only consume two handfuls before you felt like you couldn't eat anymore?

Some people might find this situation perfect because it helps to limit consumption. In reality, snack food companies see this as a defect in their product and attempt to engineer the limitation away.
I am not talking about a temporary flashcrash. People used to think of Bitcoin as a safe heaven when else goes downhill. Just like gold. I don't think that's the case anymore.
Why do you think it should be?
The unethical behavior in question is robbery. End of story.
I'm not really in the know, but I'd guess "back in the day" it legitimately cost somebody something to deal with a cheque with a value greater than the balance of the account. Nowadays, it should be the same $0.0001 worth of computing/networking power which is already spent if it's a good cheque. I'd welcome corrections from someone who knows more, but I figure modern fees are just a way for the bank to extract money from people too harried to fight back. Perhaps some of it is legitimately used to subsidize general account maintenance, and maybe the banks are passing on a real cost specifically charged by a clearinghouse for bad debits -- but somewhere down the line, the bulk of it has to be lining someone's pocket.

If someone were attempting thousands of bad charges in a month, maybe they "deserve punishment" for abusing the system. What the fees do now is just taking money from people who already have little, and/or just lost track of their balance and made a small mistake that would have no bearing on anyone else if the bank didn't fine for it.
I think the conclusion really resonates to the Handmade Manifesto that was posted a few days back.
Their argument for doing is compelling. They figure larger purchases like rent or car payments should go through above smaller ones. It feels like the person doing the reordering was a different person from the one setting charges.
As a Brazilian, the whole concept of "overdraft fees" feels truly alien.

I am not aware of any banks that will charge you like that and wouldn't be surprised if it were forbidden by the central bank. Some of them will even charge you nothing even if the account sits in the negative for a set number of days (10 usually). The others will just charge as if it were a loan, by the month's end.

Now, here is the interesting part. You can expect to pay, currently, over 10% per month on any outstanding loans. In the case of a negative balance, charges upwards of 30% are common. So it's not like they aren't robbing people either. They are just doing it in a less visible way.
This might be the ultimate cheat sheet for women entrepreneurs seeking funding
> The more I investigate, the more I recognize that kudzu’s place in the popular imagination reveals as much about the power of American mythmaking, and the distorted way we see the natural world, as it does about the vine’s threat to the countryside.

When I was fifteen I came to US. We were driving around in the South and I remember being so fascinated by the Kudzu. I was saying how beautiful it is. The Americans told me what it is and how it spreads uncontrollably and how it is a not something beautiful but something horrible like a disease. Every time I see it now, I remember that conversation and how quickly my perception shifted due to it.
The idea is interesting, actually, it's better to sell your student equity than to get into debt.

However, it's not something that would allow people to evolve economically.

It would be financially rewarding for people searching for low-risk investments, but it's not something that will increase the life standards of the poor and the middle-class in comparison to what exists today.

Instead, we should just accept that that the formal education system is fucked up and that efforts to empower informal education should be done.

Society would undoubtedly benefit.
Of course they would have usable skills - general understanding of computing, superb analytical minds, 36 years of advancement in education, excellent problem solving ability.

At most they would have to learn a new lexicon of programming languages and operating systems which are FAR less complicated than the current range of languages and design patterns software engineers must master today.

A few weeks (days?) of studying and figuring out how to pre-optimize for much smaller workloads and they'd be able to keep pace easily.
I go to a thai place in SF that skirts the ban by using the heavy "reusable" bags as disposable ones. There's no difference between these and actual disposable bags other than that they are thicker. They're still small and worthless to reuse. And there's no chance to ask not to get one.

The problem in my eyes isn't how people use them, it's that the businesses hand them out in place of disposable bags as if they were substitutes. If we can't ban them from doing that, then can't we let the plastic bag surcharge be for the smaller less impactful ones and have the bag fee pay off carbon credits or something.
I'm sure investors will be lining up to invest in poor minority first-generation college students.
Being in college with $50 to your name does not qualify you as poor.
It has a distorting effect on the industry, on tech culture, and on the communities that we live in. Easy money doesn't bring out the best in people.
GynePunks Pushing the Boundaries of DIY Gynecology
Buzzfeed has Wikimedia Foundation's full statement (in the end of the article):

http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/russia-says-its-banning-wi...
More like a Halt and Catch Fire episode
I came across letsencrypt while looking for a free provider and it seemed wicked. Then I noticed it hadn't been released yet. tears.
Post-it notes were just gaining initial popularity around that time, in fact they weren't even called "post-it notes" until 1980.
I love the hacking approach in the post: a tool is only a tool to do something valuable and not the goal itself. The Python ecosystem is the right tool at the right time, nowadays, because of the data science explosion and the need to interact very quickly with non-specialists.
For now... QE 4 is coming, there is no doubt. It's the only tool in the chest. This time around though it won't be parked directly in the banks, but more likely it will be helicoptered directly to consumers, probably in the form of tax breaks, directly or indirectly. QE 4 will happen, but it still won't work of course because the economy sucks and people won't spend it, it will find its way back into the banks after all.
If I'm not mistaken to create NT Microsoft hired a bunch of DEC people and put Dave Cutler at the helm. Like you say, none of those people were particularly fond of Unix.
I believe it was tried already with My Rich Uncle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyRichUncle. They folded in 2009.
They're not asking for a loan, they're asking to withdraw their own money that they put in the bank. The bank deliberately chooses to turn this into a loan if they accidentally ask for more than is currently there.
Parents' Math Anxiety Is Contagious to Their Kids
Define great? 1600x1200 60fps?
I would give quite a bit to own a DECSystem 2020. You couldn't really run a KL-10 in your garage but man you could run one of those. These days simh can run all your old TENEX, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 code but nothing quite like the real iron. The last working one I knew of was running in Mark Crispin's garage.
> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only.

This has more to do with the hotel's liability. If you steal from the hotel or damage the room, they will apply those extra charges to your credit card. Even if your credit can't cover the costs, your verified credit card information tells them that you didn't provide a false name, and they have someone to chase after to recoup the charges.
If you're in the US, ditch your bank and find a credit union (or failing that, a cooperative bank). They are financially beholden to their customers (what a novel idea!~), so they don't pull this kind of shit.

Ever since dealing with unwanted overdraft shit from Citizens Bank (may they rot in hell), I swore off the adversarial relationship of commercial banks and found a nice credit union. With them, I once overdrafted my account slightly (forgot about an ATM fee or some such), and they ignored it for months. I only found out about it because they casually mentioned it when they called me about something else. No fees whatsoever.
When I first moved to the US as a student from Germany I kept most my money in Euro cache and only covered what I needed in the coming weeks because the Euro kept going up pretty quickly. I will never forget how furious I was when I got an overdraft fee. It took my wife quite a while to even explain the concept to be because it seemed so completely nonsensical coming from Germany. In Germany the bank would be set on fire for this by leftists.
I'm really not sure why this is news. It's been covered all the web previously that banks make a lot of their net profit from overdraft fees. Here's a couple recent articles:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/06/17/bank-of-ame...
http://247wallst.com/banking-finance/2015/06/17/banks-making...
>...VCs treated their LPs a bit like mushrooms, keeping them mostly in the dark...

The full phrase is to treat your <insert business relation> like mushrooms: feed them shit and keep them in the dark.
I've worked at a credit union for many years. The fees from overdraft charges probably come in second or third behind loan interest income. There are a few community banks / credit unions that don't charge a fee if your overdraft is less than $5 or if you bring the account current within 24 hours. I think this is a step in the right direction.

If you overdrafted at the credit union, we gave you a $500 limit and 30 days to pay it back. For $35 you could borrow $500 for a month. The problem is, people would pay the $500 back and the next day withdrawal it again. They would be caught in a cycle of this, very similar to payday loans, for months or years.

There we so many fee reversals at the credit union I was at the instituted a policy that said any fee reversal had to be approved by the CEO or VP of Retail operations. We were refunding millions of dollars in fees a year. That cut down on the reversals for sure but didn’t help the consumers.

I have an overdraft loan ($500) that just draws (transfers) funds to the checking if I go over. The only thing I pay for is the interest, which is a lot less than an overdraft fee. That's if you can qualify for a loan though, which can be tough if you don’t handle your finances properly.
Another take on the ridiculousness of overdaft fees is presented by Louis CK in this "I am broke" skit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4DRcGJQo8

Some quotes:

"Did you ever get so broke that the banks starts charging you money because you don't have enough money"

"Sir you only have $20? How can you only have $20. -- Look, I am not being broke just to fuck with you, I really just don't have any ... money. I am not trying to be a dick"

"So they charged me. They charged me $15. That's how much it costs to have $20. Here is the fucked up part, now I only have $5. What did I pay the $15 for if I don't get to have my $20!?".
"In fact, roughly half of respondents to the ICBA survey say that overdraft fees constitute their most profitable non-depository and non-lending product, despite regulatory changes that have crimped their income potential."

http://independentbanker.org/2014/01/finding-more-fee-income...
No, it's the same system that allows the lottery to exist. It's not "fuck the poor", it's "fuck the stupid" (alternatively, "fuck the bad-at-math"). If there's a high correlation, I don't think anyone is going to be terribly surprised, as uncomfortable as that may be.

I have been poor. I have also been the opposite. I have also been a bank employee, and a professional investor who studied security analysis by looking at banks. The feds have rightly come down on banks via recent regs about how to charge overdraft fees, because banks did in fact used to play bullshit games with how they charged fees. A lot of that has been fixed. But the uncomfortable truth is that the people who repeatedly fall victim to these fees these days are simply irresponsible. You might as well complain about the high price of parking/speeding tickets - every opportunity in the world is there to avoid it.

I'm sure this will get about 50 downvotes but whatever.
> The most telling was a statement calling men “scumbags” (for those readers that don’t speak American/Canadian English, this is a word that only a woman would ever use to describe men)

I am a man, and I use this word to describe females when appropriate, along with other "bag" words. Recently, I've called two female government attorneys "scumbags," in public and to their faces.
There are a few of reasons that powerlifting (squat/bench/deadlift) is more popular than weightlifting (Snatch/Clean and Jerk). The technique is much harder to learn for the explosive lifts, as the bar and lifter must move very fast for the lift to work at all. Olympic lifts generally require bumper plates (significantly more expensive than iron), though it is possible if painful to lower the weights back to the floor. And there is a much bigger genetic component to your limitations in explosive lifts than in the slower ones; the fraction of your deadlift that you can clean is very difficult to improve.

That said, if you can get the technique down (internet coaching or otherwise) it's a wonderful feeling to rack a power clean.
Ask HN: How to save my browsing history to access it later?
Browser: Google Chrome
"Objective: to save the each URL i visit through the browser"

is there any extension that can be available or programmed to do the same.
or any other effective technique?
Australian supermarkets have recycling bins specifically for single-use plastic bags. Don't the U.S. supermarkets have them?
The problem with the system is not that it's too hard to get more money into it. That's actually the opposite of the problem.
And the best part is, you're being downvoted for this..

I dunno, apparently a lot of HN thinks that it's impossible to believe that banks are generally run by bastards while simultaneously believing that 99% of these instances are completely voluntary and completely avoidable?

If you keep track of what you're spending your money on, it's not a problem you're gonna have to ever deal with - and I say this as someone that's played this game with Wells Fargo in the past.

But apparently, advocating for people to be responsible for their own actions is a radical and terrible thing nowadays.
Pearl Jam is old music? Man, I feel old.
Not "hard" as such. Just requires a completely separate code path than the local cursor and selection machinery. That isn't too much of a barrier though... I look forward to its implementation in Prosemirror!
I was working at a credit union during the same time, and I found the immediate change in rhetoric really disheartening.

Overnight the line for overdrafting your account went from, "You're being financially irresponsible by not properly balancing your account - you deserve the fee" to "Overdraft Protection is like an umbrella - nobody expects it to rain, but if it does it's nice to have protection.

I was shocked at how much fighting there in the industry to carve out transaction types from the opt-in behavior.
Oh it's better. I've seen a poster on a commercial bank in the US which advertised a usurious loan (I forget the exact rate but it was up there with pay-day loans) that was only in Spanish while all its other products were advertised in English.