skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once had a bank account with $100 in it. I went travelling and didn't access the account for a long time. Eventually, I returned back and found that they had sent me a letter saying that they had close my account for inactivity. The fee for closing the account was $120, which put the account at -$20. They were further charging me a $75 overdraft fee and informed me that my account was in arrears for $95 dollars. I did not pay them, but neither did I get my $100 back.
Large banks will do things like structure charges so as to extract the maximum amount of overdraft charges. For example:

You have $40 in your account. You spend $20, then $12,
then $5, then $120. One would logically conclude that at the
end of the day, the bank will resolve these *in order* and
you will have a single overdraft fee. Large banks *cough*
Bank of America *cough* will explicitly structure those charges
to resolve like this: $120, $20, $12, $5. Now you have 3
overdraft fees ($35 a pop when I was with BoA) instead of a
single overdraft fee.

Do you not see anything morally and ethically wrong with this?
Being legal tender means that something must be accepted as payment for a debt; it does not mean that it must be accepted as payment when no debt exists. For example, if you go to a restaurant that serves you before giving you your check then they are required to accept cash. However, they are allowed (possibly depending on jurisdiction) to insist on being payed by card prior to serving you.
And, as part of his adult responsibilities, he's obviously responsible for watching his bank account balance like a hawk. It's not like adults have to do anything else.

Also, you're assuming the "purchase" was something superfluous that could wait.
You can't imagine a scenario where a responsible adult has had a checking account with a balance over $5000 for many years and has never run in to the charge for dropping below that level, eventually forgetting about that $5 fee? Now if you managed to picture that and believe it's possible for a responsible adult to forget about an obscure fee his bank has never charged him before, try to imagine your home's AC goes out in the middle of August when it's 100 degrees out. Now you're stressed out but you've got enough money in checking to cover the replacement that day, so you call somebody out to replace it and schedule a transfer from savings the same day. Can you maybe see just a little how a mistake like that could happen to a responsible adult? Do you have every possible fee your bank charges committed to memory?

And finally, are you trying to add anything to this discussion or just displaying your self-righteousness?
And watch colleges raise their prices even more.
They were the days.
That's a ridiculous argument by the bank.

1. A person has many payments to make, some very large ones, but also some very small ones - and yet the variance in utility of making many of the payments is a lot smaller than the variance in the size of the payments to be made.

2. The utility of a creditor in receiving the majority of their payments is a lot higher than the utility of a creditor in receiving none of their payments.

A person requires BOTH shelter and food.

This month, your payments are:

1. The food payment is $20.
2. The rental payment $1000.

Let's say you have only $1000 for the month, and overdraft is turned off.

If the rental payment goes through, you have zero dollars remaining for food, leaving you hungry for the month, and will starve to death without assistance.

If the food payment goes through, you have $980 left. Send the $980 to the landlord and apologise and promise $20 will be sent the next month. Your landlord won't kick you out.

Ergo, largest payments should not go through above smaller ones, if we want to order in a way for the customer's benefit.

Therefore, taking into account of both parties, utility is maximised when a couple of percent of a large payment is skipped rather than when the entire amount of a small payment is skipped.

From the point of the view of the bank where they are usually the ones receiving the largest payments in mortgages and car loans, they will require a lot more customer support staff if there are lots of instances where people pay only 98% of their payments, because that's not a good reason to foreclose on somebody and at the same time they don't want them to continue skipping 1-2% of their payments.

What the bank is saying: Largest payments should go through above smaller ones, for the benefit of the bank!
I'm surprised and somewhat disheartened to here that there are credit unions which follow this practice. Doesn't seem to really fit with their charter.
> Do you not see anything morally and ethically wrong with this?

That's not the language the person I was responding to used.
MRU looks like they pivoted to private student loans, and then got caught up in the credit crunch, so I don't know if it's a perfect comp. It was probably just a lot easier to latch onto the largest-growing consumer finance sector than to try and sell an actually innovative product against a heavily subsidized existing alternative.
Thanks, i should probably mentioned the material i already went through. I really loved the Mozilla website, as it try to give a why behind any how. Going through Elequentjavascript right now :).
> 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.

Even better, if you have $10 and also a $500 paycheck hitting your account that night, which is to say that the bank KNOWS there is no overdraft and that you have the money in the account, they'll process them in this order: -$12 (fee), -$4 (fee), -$3 (fee), +$500 (most eaten by the fees).

And some programmer programmed that for them. Intentionally.
The professionals (programmers) are self destructing (LtU comment)
I don't think speed is the best argument pro the command line. If you're used to and proficient in a gui or cli, then it's going to feel like you're getting more done in your familiar environment.

To me the killer argument for cli is composability, combined with the cli history.

Most of us do a lot of things repeatedly, day in day out. For example I have to download one of the last files from an ftp server, open it, process it in some way, and possibly get some other files based on what's in the first file.

It's reasonable enough from the command line. But some of the operations are chainable with pipes, and all of them can be in a short shell script, so I only have to enter the one script name to get the whole thing done.

And it's in my cli history, so I only have to recall it, and change usually just one parameter.

I think I'd be hard pressed to do that from a gui. for one, I don't think there's a gui history. And how do you chain gui commands together? And then alter them with parameters?

"Write a $LANGUAGE script that you can double click on." Yes, but that's a higher barrier to entry, and it's in a completely different "language" than the gui language that you were working in when you discovered a series of tasks that you repeat. With a shell script you just pull together what you've already been doing, in the format that you've been doing it.

And then compose the shell script you wrote with other shell scripts that you wrote. Etc.

I double click on things too, and somethings it's merely a matter of whether I have my hand on the mouse or the keyboard. Not bashing gui's (pun intended).

Composability.

Composability.
What is the purpose of a fine? Before we discuss further why one shouldn't be fined, can we make sure we agree on why one should?

Off the top of my head, I see "dissuading behavior that negatively impacts the bank", and that doesn't seem to justify a fine in this case, but maybe you're thinking of a rationale for a fine that I and maybe others are not thinking of.
Wow, this is truly ridiculous. I recently moved to the US (yet to set up a bank account here) and did not know about this. Back in India, if you don't have funds, your transaction is declined. Plain and simple. And no fee for that, either. This is pure unleashed greed. Now I know why bankers are so hated out here. Banks have way too much power, way more than the benefit they provide. This whole system needs to change. Horrible!

And I am sure we are going to find this kind of shit in India soon, because from what I see, we are blindly copying the American way over there. The good, the bad, everything.
There are some alternatives to continue shifting the burden onto students in various disguises:

- Government subsidies as an investment into reaping future taxes and economic prowess. Many countries already do this.

- Co-op ownership of universities which allows students (or govts on their behalf) to invest in institutions.

Perhaps a combination of fair equity exchanging between universities and students would "align interests" so-to-speak, so that institutions and students are positively motivated to help, rather than exploit, each other. This gets students thinking critically about balancing the two inseparable aspects of education: the actual education and "keeping the lights on."
My family has been using reusable bags whenever possible for several years now, and they do require frequent cleaning.

Bags collect condensation from cold products, which attracts mold. They collect dirt from raw vegetables and from other surfaces they come into contact with. (Imagine how the seat of your pants would smell if you rode a city bus for a week without washing it. American public surfaces are filthy!) Worst of all, some grocers just can't seem to keep the bottom of milk cartons and other dairy products clean. A hint of stale milk + condensation + fabric + time = a perfect recipe for food poisoning.

One problem is that most reusable bags aren't designed for frequent cleaning. Canvas bags get ragged after only a few cycles of typical washing & drying. Some bags are built much stronger and heavier, but they need to be hand washed and thoroughly air dried. I just can't see getting enough uses out of them to offset their carbon footprint.
Isn't it ironic that Ironic is on there largely because people go listen to it because people tell them that none of the examples are actually ironic?
How exactly does a plastic bag ban unfairly penalize the poor?

The alternatives are not free. In SF, at least, your alternatives are to buy a heavy-duty reusable bag, or spend 10c per paper bag when checking out. 10c is a trivial thing to pay for most people, but when you're poor, it can matter.
I love the 70s computing aesthetic along with the fashion. So unapologetically idiosyncratic.
Civil forfeiture laws in the US. I don't feel safe carrying a reasonable amount of cash. Here the police can just rob me, and now I'm guilty until proven innocent.

In DC it costs up to $2500 for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, it's complex, expensive and it can take years.
Significant Mother cools its jets with “Edibles Wrecks”
This seems like a politically motivated conclusion -- I just can't find any evidence that it's necessarily true.

I really can't see how "over-regulation" is the cause of banks behaving badly -- their core business is ostensibly to charge interest, right? That's still legal and, in the US at least, loans (for school, homes, etc.) are an almost celebrated social rite of passage.

I just can't look at banks knowingly screwing their customers and react with "they need less rules." If anything, this behavior is evidence that banks cannot be trusted to act in the public interest, if only because there are much more substantial financial incentives to act like assholes. Regulation is in place because it's absurd to just say, "oh, they'll be nice, why would anyone be mean to people in exchange for huge sums of money?" It fills in the moral gaps that the market doesn't enforce.
> 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.

I remember hearing about this a while ago, is that still going on? I thought some sort of regulation came into effect that prevented that, and that's why I was just then hearing about it.
Sure. For well-educated, silicon valley types with a resident accountant. You're missing out on the part that says that the poor (which many times goes with lack of basic education) are hit the most by these fees.

Not to mention that overdraft fees are a ridiculous concept to begin with.
Manage PayPal Transactions with Control for PayPal Beta
If you don’t want your account to come with overdraft services, clearly tell your bank or credit union to decline purchases that exceed the money in your account.

Well, Wells Fargo charges $35.00 overdraft fee. Or if you choose to decline, they charge $35.00 for unaccepted charge. Either ways you'll be paying Wells. Oh well.
Some of us are from that era.

Yes, you would manage so long as you can handle a shell prompt and can grok simple assembler.
Or the private keys to a tonne of Certs from the cert authorities.

The massive elephant in the room is the cert authorities..
I wonder what would happen if for profit banks didn't have savings accounts that accumulate interest.
I'm not sure what you mean by "certainly not quite the South". Maryland is the northernmost state of the South. The Mason-Dixon line, carving along the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, is almost universally considered the demarcation between the North and the South. There are still several places in Maryland flying the Confederate Battle Flag. It's most certainly a part of the South.
Very right. Education, homes- all get more expensive as you make taking loans easier.
It's depressing how far we've returned to feudalism and serfdom.
Sounds good. I don't mind having to have some base or foundation file as long as the components can be picked.

I'm working on a project at the moment where I just want form elements :( but doing them myself because everything else is all of nothing.
Show HN: Draftalyzer – dominate your fantasy football draft with iOS app
The bank could have just declined the charge and let you deal with it

Wells Fargo will charge you $35 even if they decline the charge. So they don't pay because you don't have enough money, and on top of that they charge you for not paying.
The tutorial I linked to is of very high quality. Who, based on the information content of my post or the obviously disposable nature of my account, would waste downvotes on it?
Sign into Chrome with your Google account. They give you the option to save your history, bookmarks, apps and other things across browsers.
What an incredibly bad idea!

How do you underwrite the sale of female equity? My wife has taken about 3 years off to raise our kids. This would have a negative impact on a bankers ownership of her.

If this is the future, let's skip the bankers and form trade guilds. I'd rather payoff somebody to get my kid into the IT Guild than sell a piece of him to some banker. This is the kind of excess that sparks revolutions.
I live in Japan now. In Japan they take a photocopy of some ID containing your address for that purpose.

My understanding is that the reason hotels want a credit card is that they pre-charge it with a deposit and then refund it when they check the room. You never see the pre-charge transactions so you don't know about it.

I have successfully negotiated with some hotels to take cash by offering them a cash deposit. Some hotels refuse to do it, though. I don't even have a credit card any more (mostly out of choice, but also because Japanese banks tend not to give credit cards to non-permanent residents), so the next time I travel in the west (soon) is going to be an adventure...
They can't even be used as a garbage bag in a small wastepaper bin, because they're too small.
Show HN: NudgeSelect, a new way to use your mouse
You don't have to be local (2012)
It is robbery, I am perplexed how you fail to see it.
I bought myself the Dell XPS 13 (2015 edition). I'm very impressed with it.

Still don't use it as much as my desktop PC with 3 27" 1440p monitors. ;)
She, not he. The gang member in this case is a woman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia_Pearson
No one is excusing Microsoft, everyone is freaking out and fear mongering about Windows 10 but no one seems to care that the computers we carry around in our pockets daily tracking even more information. People are using their phones more than their PCs these days for internet activities, their phones carry all of their contact information (not just email addresses), they know where we are, where we've been, how active we are, and dozens of other things that PCs don't even begin to track. But no one seems to be outraged about that, they laugh at things like Blackphone and say it's for paranoid alarmists. If we're going to get outraged, lets spread it around and not just hate on Microsoft who happens to be very late to the party.
for how long they'll keep our browsing data?
The way Japanese houses are made, it is cheaper to rebuild than to refurbish.

The most expensive part of a Japanese house is the concrete foundation, and this is reused sometimes. The rest of the house is just cheap wood and plastic (yes, many times, the exterior wall is just plastic that imitates bricks or stone).

Also, the new houses are build according to the updated anti-seismic regulations so, obviously, people always prefer living there.
I guess the counter question is why is USAA only available to military members?
I hope you're seriously not implying that it takes an accountant to know how you're spending your money.

Every checking account you can walk into a bank and get provides you with a paper register...
It's probably because people usually grow out of the stage of political awareness where one imagines human beings to be atoms that aren't connected to one another. If you think that 'personal responsibility' or whatever allows you to judge someone as stupid, inferior, or deserving of misery, then you will have a bias that makes you see people as individuals cut off from all social and economic context because it gives you the most leverage to rationalize their misfortunes away.

People are all connected and all economic relations are social relations. If you treat everyone without their social context, you're basically saying that every powerful individual or institution can make relations with them a minefield because all that matters is that it's their weaker counterparty's responsibility to avoid all the mines. After all, everyone 'consents' to a 'voluntary' exchange. How could 'voluntary' exchanges be bad???

Your worldview is just a very immature way to rationalize predatory institutions and hostile power structures. Actions cannot be judged as voluntary except in context. The context that people like you and the grandparent tend to take is, at best, one of the law or some insipid moral principles based off of a rancid individualism.
Great idea, although the article highlights the biggest problem: adverse selection. Students who want to slack off will choose equity, whereas go-getters will choose debt. Given this, no provider of equity could be sure that they would be getting high-quality income streams, so they would charge more, worsening the effect, etc. etc. I doubt that all the analytics in the world could counteract this effect.

To get this off the ground, you'd need some sort of coordination, either at the school or government level, to enforce risk pooling. How about free education at state colleges coupled with a higher lifetime marginal income tax?
Here in HK and Shenzhen we have similar thing called Octopus card where you can use it on almost anything other than buying house or cars or "high-class" shopping. An even better part is that almost all octopus card scanner has a display for the amount just charged so you can dispute right away. To encourage people to use them, there're even discount stands on the street. A "discount stand" is basically a machine that you can scan your card and get $2 off your next purchase. Yes, that's its only functionality and you don't have to input email or any BS, just scan it. That's my favorite part of HK.
I've just finished installing arch linux after nuking my ubuntu/windows install, I've been doing a hell of alot of configuration but I'm pretty happy with I have.

More on point, I've been planning to buy a cheap laptop to test more experimental oses, like react and harvey.
They aren't the same meaning though.

The writer's analogy is much more accurate. MJ is widely considered the greatest basketball player of all time. To say someone is the MJ in a sport is saying that someone is the best in history for that particular sport. This kid doesn't even have a single gold medal.

Lebron James, on the other hand, was extremely hyped up as a high schooler. Everyone pretty much said he was going to be the next MJ. The potential for LBJ was limitless; same goes for the weightlifter.
I'm quite confident JP Morgan would invest if they saw a bargin in a under-valued minority student. Banks want money and returns; they don't have time for casual racism.
NT was the weird mutant love child of VMS and Windows.

There was a lot to like about VMS, including early sharding, solid security, and an impressive file system.

NT managed to lose most of it, IMO.
They don't have to because most people know that powerful institutions tend to act in bad faith in order to extract as much gain as they can from the vulnerable.
When hardware Kickstarters ship
If you work in assembly you'd be in good shape. Though you probably would pull your hair out with the hardware speed, memory constraints, etc!
Asian Shares Resume Slide
A lot of places use similar policies in the US, including Montgomery County, Maryland, which I lived in not too long ago. Rather than a ban, they cost 5-10 cents per bag.
Code School has a resource: http://campus.codeschool.com/courses/try-sql/contents
Microsoft developed a popular Unix (xenix), sounds like there was some fondness.
Matlab has a better interface, Octave doesnt.
> Off the top of my head, I see "dissuading behavior that negatively impacts the bank", and that doesn't seem to justify a fine in this case, but maybe you're thinking of a rationale for a fine that I and maybe others are not thinking of.

Great! Someone that wants to participate in reason and not just boisterous proclamations. I'm down.

So yeah, I agree with your definition and it applies in this case because the bank is negatively affected by having to shift money from other accounts to cover your overdraw.
From the perspective of a student, most of the good online analytics/data analysis/stats courses use R, so it is hard to get away from it while learning the material. Once you get the base concepts down, switching to python shouldn't be hard. I think most people still prefer ggplot2 for visualization though. Whenever I use R I feel like a statistician, I can feel that 'cold rigor' emanating from the language. But in the end I think it is advantageous to wield both languages.

Also I really see Jupyter as a new standard for communication. Your narrative and supporting code all in one place, ready for sharing.
Many times in the past, I've learned the hard way that when you ask the bank to STOP paying any charge that would take the account negative, they say OK but then have enough loopholes that the request is essentially meaningless. They STILL apply the overdraft and there's no way to turn it off! I thought laws were recently passed to prevent this behavior, but I guess not.
No, those are absolutely real. It's not up to you to protect or stop it. It's a life lesson. It's the same as copyright. Every kid starts some project using someone else's IP. We see it daily. Then someone explains that you can't use Homer Simpson in your app. You don't abolish copyright because some kid gets a C&D.