skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Credit Card billing practices
I just had an interesting experience with Brighthouse Networks, curious if this is a common practice in anyway.

We have autopay setup via a visa debit card, I had a new card issued because the bank decided to move to chip cards. I missed changing a couple of autopays immediately, including brighthouse. Not a huge deal, soon as I saw it I fixed it and never had any issues.

What is weird, is when I got the statement it showed Brighthouse tried the payment 3 times on the same day, first for the total amount due, then for 50% of the total, then for 40% of the total. In my case they were all denied because I had a new card issued with new details so it wouldn't even process. However, I got to thinking, had this been a situation where someone had a valid credit card or a debit card with just a low balance, then it technically could have created multiple overdraft (or over limit) charges at the bank. I think this is valid because two smaller payments might get "covered" with the overdraft/over limit fees, but the combined larger amount might be rejected outright. Hence two $35 or whatever overdraft fees for someone because the company decided to break the payment without first asking the consumer.

Is this a standard practice amongst companies? I have never seen it before, and while it didn't hurt me it seems to be a questionable practice. At the same time, I can partially see a benefit of a company doing this, for anyone that had a rough month it might keep their services on with the smaller payment until they get the rest of the funds together. But it just seems wrong the company does it without asking the consumer first.
ASUS and Google Launches Chromebit 4 $85,which Brings Chrome OS to a Monitor or TV
what is atlantean? are you a subsect of protestant or catholic? i tried searching and couldn't come up with much results.
Now all I can think of is Futurama's Zapp Brannigan declaring war on Tarantulon 6 against the Spidarians
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Tarantulon_6
Don't do this, go Norway http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/27/norway-terror-a...
New perspectives on the Holocaust
I am not advocating blissful ignorance or anything, but I'd be really bothered if religious and political talk become commonplace here. I mean we are inundated with apologies, cynicism and hyperbole from facebook/twitter/reddit already.

I will add something though. Why the apologies? The people apologizing have nothing to do with these acts and are pointless. Plus, why did all these barbarians start all this crap so recently ? Like after the 90's ?
That poll was a joke. It actually polled people about ISIS, using that word, while ISIS isn't used in French at all...

We use EI, EIIL or more recently Daesh.

The only people who had any idea of what was talked about where those reading the English language media.

My guess is that people aither thought about something else, or not wanting to be caught being ignorant stated a random opinion.
Redis Sentinel's semantics are an excellent solution for what I use Redis for.

Redis Sentinel's semantics are a terrible solution for things I use relational DBs for.

The fact that clustered relational systems accepts transactions in SQL and then just handle them wrong is completely unacceptable.

Redis has the advantage of making it pretty darn clear that it's best-effort, simple ops, non-transactional. If you spent all your time bragging about ACID semantics for Redis, we'd rake you over the coals at least as hard.

(And you don't. Thanks for that! Also, Redis is awesome.)
Thank you. How does Haskell manage to avoid evaluating find_i(...) before invoking p? Since the inner value is the argument to p, it's hard to imagine how p can do anything until it has that value.

EDIT: I think I see the light. The result of find_i(...) is not what's sent to p. Instead, Haskell passes a thunk that might never need to be evaluated.
I cant reply directly as HN has blockedit.

You're right but woman not being a breadwinner is no longer the social reality today. So do we change the law or go back to the old ways ?
It also takes you through the 32 -> 64 bit trampoline, which is nice, given your previous source. :)
Improving Web Debugging with Insights from the Native Debugger
Again, what's the magnitude of this? The way I see it, they aimed for just enough above the noise floor that they could notice some aggregate effects, but low enough that it's below what you'd expect to see in your life at random, every now and then. I honestly think journalists and advertisers do much, much bigger damage here, by constantly exposing us to fabricated, unrealistic dreams of things we can't be and won't have. Compared to that, Facebook is a fresh breeze of honest life experience.

Anyway, I see how people can have problems with Facebook's actions here (though I personally don't, and I'd actually encourage more of such studies - it's an unique vector that could lead to actually meaningful results in social sciences). But the point is, it was totally overblown in media reports, and it still is being totally overblown by commenters on Hacker News. Facebook could not drive you to suicide on purpose by this, so please everyone, stop saying as if they could.
Attacks Reignite Debate Over Encryption Practices by All Tech Companies
Steganography has frequently been a target of similar fear mongering, so they might apply similar scrutiny to all photos in this nightmare scenario and assume ill intent for all photos with a large number of layers.
Are you basing this argument off of the movie? It is well know to have many known inaccuracies. Where is the source of all these details.
Behind the Scenes of Austin Mann's iPhone 6S Camera Review in Switzerland
Personally, it's also less annoying to shut off uBlock/etc per site than to go into hosts, commenting out a domain, then uncommenting when I'm done when visiting sites that break when you cut off google analytics or doubleclick
Jessica Alba 'I don't know how to code, but I know how to put in a JIRA ticket'
I actually ask during interviews if a company uses any type of Agile/Scrum/Kanban/"sprint cycle" workflow or uses JIRA/Asana/other Agile-focused metric trackers -- and immediately reject doing any more rounds of interviews with that company if they do. I'd say about 80% or so of the companies I speak to get rejected immediately just for this reason alone.

I've found that this is one of the very best indications that a given company has dysfunctional management, doesn't prioritize engineering quality or craftsmanship, views software labor as a cost center of the business instead of a value center, and views programmers as easily replaceable commodity workers.

I totally grant that it's possible I am passing on some good companies when I do this. But the false negative rate has to be extremely low, since so many other companies with these tools have repeatedly demonstrated themselves to be horribly managed, talent-wasting career killers. I'm happy to suffer the false negative rate just to be super safe that I don't end up in another such place in my career. And to boot, even though I've turned down follow-up interviews with many places because of this, I've never regretted doing so, and have often learned after the fact that there was significant engineering dysfunction in that firm from other sources.

I would really love it if either DeMarco & Lister (who wrote Peopleware) or Jackall (who wrote Moral Mazes) would add new sections to their books specifically about the invalidity of Agile-like management techniques, and the way they are used for 'dexterity with symbols' (as Jackall puts it in Moral Mazes) to create political arguments for micromanagement and keep developers distracted, while devaluing their labor and disconnecting the field from the spirit of craftsmanship.
To add to this discussion, the pyramid scheme of constant population growth to pay for the elderly is not going to be sustainable forever in first world countries.

Maybe Japan is intelligently embracing these 'growing pains' (by which I mean the pain resulting from a shrinking population, which the west will have to face at some point) now, by investing in robots and automation. I think they are getting a head start in a race against ageing that we will all (all of us with birthrates below 2.1, that is) have to compete in at some point.
Why Algebraic Eraser may be the riskiest cryptosystem you’ve never heard of
> "It also highlights the product's highly distributed nature."

As far as I can see, that's not why the analogy was used. Clearly my interpretation was not clear enough, so to spell it out:

A mission to spread Facebook to those who haven't been connected to the Internet yet is not necessarily a noble goal. It is only a noble goal if Facebook is a net positive in people's lives. If it is a net negative then spreading Facebook further through a program like Internet.org could do more harm than good. The less problematic features of Internet.org could be seen as the sugar coating on top of a less attractive proposition, parasites that disrupt how people relate to each other.

I don't use Facebook that much, and I know some that are happy to use it casually, but I also know people who appear to be practically addicted to it. It's not too much to ask that we examine whether its benefits outweigh its drawbacks.
Hush. You're ruining my discount with math the companies should have done already. (=

I'm getting discounts on all my rides from home by using the carpool feature. In the last 3 months, I have had 0 people opt to share a ride with me from my house to downtown Austin. I'm 8 miles away from the city center.
I thought naming it "floown" was the mistake. Apparently the mistake was actually not firing everyone involved and starting over.

"our platform that helps organizations always know who's available to work."

What does that even mean? Is it a calendar? Ugh this .com stuff drives me up the wall...
"not able to be proven false, but not necessarily true."

You are unable to provide evidence, i.e. data, to support your claim (yet again). I cannot prove a statement false if there is no evidence to call into dispute. You do not have any concrete information that supports the notion that more people, in a direct comparison, would care about speeding, as opposed to government surveillance. Your statement is an unfounded assertion, not an accurate measure of what is just, valid, and/or righteous.

Without evidence, your statement merely explains what you want, not what society as a whole is looking for, or what policies should be put into place.
There's no way I would give away my phone number to any random website. Thus, I would never use two-factor authorisation that involves my phone, unless it's a bank or something. Most of "social" accounts aren't all that important anyway.
"And so inspired by Jennie Rigg’s brilliant tweet, here are extracts from George Osborne’s speech today, with “cyber” replaced with “spider”.

And it makes just as much sense."

No it doesn't. That's crazy. "Spiderspace"? The term "cyberspace" may be prone to abuse but it does mean something. "Cyber security" means something real. "Cyber-age" means something real. I'd prefer "computer" for the latter two, but it doesn't change the fact that "computer/cyber security" is a real problem. Nobody's going to hack into a spider and break all your grid electrical generators by over-revving them.

This is clearly just "I don't like X therefore all negative claims about X must be true". The claim that this speech makes just as much sense is so transparently ludicrous I can't imagine where else it comes from.
Just curious as to which suburb you live in that supports uber? As I live in a suburb of Philly, and uber doesn't exist around here.
For my own country Denmark, if you adjust GDP for population growth (which is due to immigration) and inflation, we did not have any growth for the past two decades.

However we did successfully create a housing boom/bubble, while the Japanese are deflating theirs.

Also as others have mentioned GDP can be an amazingly stupid measure where crime or an poorly organised health care system give higher output while harm.

Japan is a wealthy country.
How FanDuel, DraftKings and Daily Fantasy Players Can Win the Political and Reg Game
This was precisely my motivation for writing this. I used to write fabricated articles and posts trying to get attention and recognition. It ended up being more of the same boring, endless drivel. I'm motivated to move away from that and into pieces that truly represent me, regardless of how that is perceived.
Exactly! It's great when customers can pay less and only get what they need.
Declaration of Independence and our constitution do not even mentioned the word "democracy".
This is just wrong. France has been bombing ISIS for over a year.

I think ISIS is a horrible, horrible movement that should be destroyed. But their strategy has been very consistent: attack countries that attack them.

They left Russia alone until Putin decided to bomb them. It was only a few weeks before they blew up a Russian airliner.
I think it'd be cute to keep the absolute coordinate system, however create a simple web app which lets you point and click where you want it the brush go. For the Z coordinate, you could have a meter which goes up and down from 0-60 while you hold the mouse, and registers when you let go. (similar to many mini-game mechanics)

It could be done with the current Twitch stream in maybe 2-3 hours of dev work, thanks to Twitch using IRC for the chat backend.

Edit: s/coordinate system/absolute coordinate system/ s/but/however/
It would indeed come as a massive surprise to the 2008 Mumbai terrorists, who were well versed in in using encrypted channels to communicate --

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09mumbai.html?_...
That's great, because one of the things I wonder most is what faith is like in day to day experience. I'll send you an email :)
I did the dance too, initially, but quickly got used to the new model. I have > 500 friends, so the chronological show-all model would seriously degrade the utility of Facebook (though I am annoyed when I accidentally refresh the feed and lose the posts I only wanted to read).

It was a long time since I had < 100 friends, so I'm willing to believe the current model is broken for small amounts of Facebook relations.
I, for one, welcome... oh, never mind.
Oh, Baby is gonna be crazy. You cant stop laughing after watching this
"Astronauts insisted that there had to be something only humans could do"

Its been a common rationalization meme for many years because it feels so good.

However the actual reason is during the entire mission everything is either unrecoverable due to equipment failure (see actual disasters) or happens slowly and/or reversibly enough that some combination of human and automatic controls can return to nominal.

Except the landing gear. That deploys and you're done. Not like normal aviation gear where you can lift gear in flight. I would have to look at the L/D ratios and the heading alignment cones but it "feels likely" that an early deployment at any stage of the mission other than 15 seconds before landing means you're not landing on the runway.

Everything else you can compensate for or have an abort mode or so "something". You can only lift the gear on the ground with support crew not wearing space suits removing a spring loaded lock and even then the shuttle doesn't have the plumbing to lift the gear. Simplicate and add lightness.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/s...

This is something that never really made it into sci fi books or fan fic or thrillers or whatever. If you want to trap a shuttle in orbit and make it un-deorbitable you don't need to take a fire axe to equipment racks or fire rifles or all kinds of hollywood idiocy, just push the gear down button and its all over, that's one ship that won't be landing without extensive spacewalk work.

So... you don't need autoland capability unless a suicidal crewman or russian agent or whatever popped the gear, because you don't currently have a way to un-pop the gear... Pre ISS there were no failure modes that would result in the crew not being able to ride the orbiter down even if they had to be in suits (O2 failure or something). Post ISS if the O2 system failed rather than trying a landing in full pressure suits they'd probably have tried an auto-land... and guess about when they developed the autoland cable...

In practice if it happened in orbit, perhaps attached to the ISS, someone would figure out and ship up some kind of weird levers for shuttle astronauts to use to re-lock the gear, then do an auto-landing and hope it works. Also I think you have to boot up the APU(s) first before pressing the button would do much of anything.

Something to think about is the shuttle was originally sold to be all things to all people and the .mil probably didn't like the idea of the Russians being able to remotely steal a shuttle or remotely mission kill it.

As a meta question why would you launch a manned mission if an unmanned mission would have worked just as well?

And linked to above, if all you need is a "simple" 25 foot cable to autoland, why will the meme of "can't autoland" never die? Its like talking about mysql not having transactions, despite transactions having been added back in '95 or so.
There is also a SpiNNaker computer platform [1]

[1] http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/
What two adult spiders do consensually in the privacy of their own web isn't any of our business.
Http status code 402 via 21.co
I read the article instead of the clickbait headline, something that appears to be happening less and less on Hacker News. Is Eternal September finally here?
Given cooperation by a miner, you can probably do it in principle (though I have not checked), because of transaction fees.

The recipe is this: Create a transaction with a transaction fee corresponding to the amount of BTC you want to destroy, and reveal this transaction only to the cooperating miner. The miner agrees to include the transaction without claiming the included fee.

Admittedly it's a bit pointless given that a better approach exists (OP_RETURN, as mentioned in the article).
Dependency-free JPEG EXIF metadata parsing in one C++ file
I don't think the case that large debt destroys growth is as open and shut as you seem to imply.

You mention debt destroys growth by reducing available capital. This is because the government's borrowing of money increases the demand for capital. The government's increased demand for capital can drive up the price of capital to the point where many private enterprises can't afford it. This is called crowding out.

The price to borrow capital is the interest rate. If you look at the problem in Japan and most of the developed world you find remarkably low interest rates. This tells us that we don't have a scarcity of capital and a surplus of opportunities but a glut of capital and a drought of opportunities. We have a large supply of capital and not enough places to use it.

If capital was like any other good it would fall to market clearing levels. The problem is that there is an arbitrary price floor on capital. You can't charge anyone less than 0% interest. Which gives you a price floor of a real interest rate of 0% - inflation. This is why so many countries are trying to get inflation. Because if we can get an inflation of 4% we can have a real interest rate of -4% and reduce the price floor on capital.
Excuse me for this absurd comment; I have a cold and there was really no point for it.
> Islamic terror was directed at the US for many years before Iraq!

Al Qaeda had very specific grievances. They wanted US troops to leave Saudi Arabia, where they first put bases before the Persian Gulf War.

(Aside: Bin Laden offered his irregular forces to Saudi Arabia to help defend the kingdom from Saddam. He was rejected. That pissed him off some, but the presence of infidels in the land of Mecca pissed him off even more.)

Not saying terrorism is a legitimate response, but it's much more explainable than "they hates us for our freedoms."
Aside from the substance of the discussion:

> I cant reply directly as HN has blockedit.

Yes, you can reply directly. Beyond a certain depth HN may not show a reply link when you view the whole thread, but you can still directly reply by clicking the direct link to the specific comment (the one that has the "5 minutes ago" or whatever the time interval is), and then the reply box will be shown.

I think this is intended to make people think before replying to a very deeply nested comment as a way of curbing unproductive Ping-Pong discussions, but it seems mostly to get people to post lateral replies (that is, replies attached to a comment somewhere upthread from the comment they actually respond to), invariably complaining about the inability to reply directly, which is worse for the flow of discussion than if they just posted direct replies.
House Staff and Flash Boys
I am reminded of a scene at the end of the Sci Fi novel "The Mote in God's Eye" (note: title describes appearance of a local asterism - the book is a "first contact" type story). The alien ambassadors come back to meet the human politicians who throw a parade and start speechifying. The boss alien asks the translator minions "What is he saying?", to which they respond ... "but he has said nothing!"

"Then you shall respond in kind."
How much money are we talking about? Which country?

Just because you can't quantify the cost of privacy loss doesn't mean we shouldn't spend money on surveillance.
Defense Claims Courthouse Was Illegally Bugged
To be fair, Breivik was an individual, while ISIS is a movement.
RatticDB: Sharing password with your team
The report isn't a click-bait ranking, but a thorough report on fuel consumption by airlines, including factors that affect it. Here are a few excerpts:

* The fuel efficiency gap between the most and least fuel-efficient airlines on 2014 transatlantic operations was 51%. That is roughly twice the performance gap between the best and worst U.S. airlines on domestic operations (25% in 2014).

* Seating configuration and aircraft fuel burn (i.e., fuel economy of the aircraft operated) are the two most important factors influencing airline fuel efficiency; together they explain about 80% of the variation in fuel efficiency among the airlines studied.

* The impact of premium seating on emissions is substantial: first class and business seats accounted for only 14% of available seat kilometers flown on transatlantic routes but approximately one-third of total carbon emissions. For carriers like British Airways and Swiss, premium seating was responsible for almost one-half of their total emissions from passenger travel.

They seem to publish several interesting reports, including a similar report on US domestic flights, on diesel and electric cars. Does anyone know much about them (besides what they claim on their 'About' page)?
Is there anything stopping you from using it as a WiFi only device for $10?