skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dear HN, I'd like to fact check my outrage...

If I understand correctly, credit card terms forbid stores from offering two different prices (one for paying with and one for paying without), because if they didn't, some stores would offer a 2-3% discount for cash, and customers would switch to cash. Meanwhile, most people I've spoken with are happy with the system, because they feel like they're getting money back for free through cashback/reward programs, so credit card companies are incentivized to keep increasing their merchant fees so that they can give more money back to their customers. Restaurants/shops that don't accept credit get less customers, and are forced into the system as well. While the government could do something about it, they don't because they can track every credit card transaction (-> tax revenue), but they can't track cash. And cash-paying customers get to pay the 2-3% "credit card tax" on every transaction, which is so ridiculously backward.

I hope Walmart's decision snowballs.
The following incentives from the article seem key.

- No purchase taxes

- Exemption from 25% VAT on purchase

- Low annual road tax

- No charges on toll roads or ferries

- Free municipal parking

- Access to bus lanes

- 50% reduction in company car tax

- No VAT on leasing
When Apple introduced its main new programming language for OSX and iOS, it went from dynamic typing (Objective-C) to static typing (Swift).

One of the more interesting contenders in the "compile to Javascript" universe is Elm, which is also statically typed.

Perhaps are simply unaware of what the major "new languages" are.
On coding
Well that's really all that is wrong with it: you are adding epicycles instead of working on a better theory. In analogy: once a language is turing complete you can do anything in it, so you can keep using brainfuck to make a gui, but probably it would be easier in java...
Why a negotiating ploy? I doubt there is any other replacement for Walmart that accepts Visa and offers comparable level of price and range of products. Thoughts?
In the US those terms no longer apply. Merchants can offer 2 different prices (and many already do) for payment with card vs. cash.
> tring theory is the only theory we have so far that predicts all known observed phenomena.

That would have been impressive if it didn't also predicts even more that is neither known or observed.
I think you vastly underestimate both the buying power and brand loyalty shown by people who choose to shop at any retailer, especially discount ones like Walmart.
Even better yet, don't keep a logged-in session for these tracking-giants. I only ever log onto gmail in an incognito window (and if I had Facebook, same there). On my mobile device it's a different story, so even more better yet, also turn the search-history off (you're using DDG anyway, right ^_^)
Macbook meets OLED
The prices have to be the same for everyone. The fee is paid by the retailer. The more people use a card with a high fee the more likely the retailer has to raise the prices (for everyone). At least in my country that is so by law, you cannot let customers pay fees for their payment method of choice. It's the reason (that in my country) we see "minimum purchase" requirements posted if you want to pay with a card, and that credit cards are only accepted at pricier stores - or at large retailers who managed to negotiate a better deal for the fee.
In some countries, there exist electronic payment processing networks other than Visa/Mastercard.
I don't have a problem with Google, Facebook and Twitter dominating the web as such because I don't have any accounts with them: They are commercial entities filling a need. Capitalism at work I suppose.

We all have a choice not to use them and I think this is the point he's missing (or the article is omitting).
The opening paragraph should be "Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has warned that the internet has become the "world's largest surveillance network for those that use Twitter, Facebook and Google".

I have had lengthy conversations with my family and friends about Facebook and Google and what they do with your information and the majority shrug and say either "I'm not bothered" or "They would get bored looking at my stuff". I don't bring it up with anyone anymore.

I feel that something monumentally bad will happen in the future related to the information these companies have amassed, something epically bad and the public will (perhaps) say "Enough is enough" but it will be too late... just my $0.02
Probably back in day the card used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch_(debit_card)

A few years ago the pinguins took over (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x48eLs8tnJo) and basically every card in the UK is now either Visa/MasterCard/Amex and very few Maestro.
>I can give a sort of counter argument.

You can't because you clearly have an incredibly shallow understanding of string theory (I do too). For one thing, you're completely stuck on the metaphor of the 'string' and you're trying to apply it to a very shallow understanding of Quantum Mechanics and complaining that it doesn't make sense. Okay.

I think it's cool to talk about fundamental research but taking it one step further and saying that some theory X isn't correct because it doesn't make sense to ME, a non-professional physicist, is a step too far. Be more humble.
While this article is about Canada, in many Midwest US communities Wal-Mart is the store. Mom and pop grocery stores shutdown years ago after not being able to compete. The nearest Kohl's/JCPenny's could be an hour drive away. Everything you buy on a weekly basis comes from Wal-Mart. A policy change like this in America would drastically affect many Midwesterners lives.
It reminds me a little of the phenomena of efficient market theory in economics / finance. Academics were drawn to it partly because it enables them to do a lot of fancy mathematics whereas if you look at inefficiencies like the stuff that went on in the movie The Big Short then the academics don't really have much of an edge against people working in the field. So much academic stuff goes 'assuming efficient markets', blah blah... which is not actually wrong but maybe a misallocation of resources from looking at bubbles and crashes which could have helped avoid the whole 2006 episode.

I agree the blog seems very good.
Idea of credit cards still puzzles me.
Reminds me of the guy in Her. I guess this could be automated with a neural network - http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html
Err on the side of caution in this sense would mean fabricating your own proc. Are you going to do that?
Huh? No major retailer can afford to stop taking Visa?

This is a good way to make people notice that at the end of the day, it's the retailer that sells you stuff, not Visa. They merely run a bunch of servers and rent-seek.
Maybe, but Costco doesn't accept Credit Cards for the same reason, and they're doing fine.
Target Canada went spectacularly bankrupt last year: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...
What's wrong is that you're trying to make a round peg fit a square role.

The problem was not that it was discarded, but what happened between new data and getting discarded and how long it took.

You don't want Epicycles because theories should be "simple" and Epicycles are added exceptions
Why should, say, pip packages have any problems with each other as long as they aren't imported directly in a python sourcefile.

Are you suggesting that package versions should be explicitly provided as part of import statements? Or that import statements should be mangled depending on the versions specified in setup.py?
Maybe, but.. I bet you exchange emails with people that have a Gmail account and you are in photos with people that have a Facebook account.
Recently we did factor out the code in sage for Cython signal handling (so you can hit control+c to interrupt blocking Cython code!) into a separate library called cysignals. We changed the license from GPL to BSD when doing this!
As a 'non-tech person' I can affirm that setting up a simple static website (to host my paintings) is far from a 'point and click' process unless I take the Squarespace/Weebly route, and they have annoying restrictions unless you pay a subscription. I investigated setting up a web server and serving from my ADSL connected desktop but in the end the downtime would be too much (power loss, regular maintenance etc.) plus configuring Apache seemed like something I shouldn't take on as a first task, so I took the Github Pages route, which still means I've to teach myself HTML/CSS3/Git. Fortunately I like tech, but what if a typical "grandma" wants to securely publish her site? Seems like the web is not quite at that level of intuitiveness yet.
This is my problem with strangers saying hello out of the blue - they think I should stop everything and give them my attention. And in their head they think they're doing something selfless!
But lowering the fees is a good thing. It's a cash cow for the credit card issuers, and you pay it in the end - and you also pay the higher retail prices if you yourself don't use a payment method that the retailer has to pay a high(er) fee on because the fees are priced into the items. The only thing bad is that the large retailers like Walmart have a much easier time negotiating significantly lower fees while small retailers have to pay whatever the card processors are asking for - which in my country is as much as 2-4%. Here is an example calculation: https://www.cardfellow.com/average-fees-for-credit-card-proc...
> Setting a minimum wage to $100,000 would filter most of the sweat show applications out.

Along with new labor trying to enter the market.
It isn't affiliated with visa or mastercard at all. It is called interac. It is not a special debit card, it is just your normal bank card.
What happens to you if you move and then get in a terrible accident? Does your former province cover you during this in-between residency establishment phase? Do you need to move back to your old province (or be moved back) before the waiting period expires? Or are you completely SOL?
Never understood why anyone would spend time creating any trading method given even if it did work (possible, but unlikely) the SEC would audit you and then leak how you were making the outperforming returns.

Welcome any thoughts, in part because legally beating the market is possible, just don't get the SEC & OPSEC aspect.
In Canada, most CC agreements with merchants do not allow the merchant to pass the fee on to the consumer. You can't charge $102.04 for a $100 product if the customer is paying with Visa. Thus the total cost to consumers is completely hidden.
I lived in Singapore and I still have a bank account there. A year ago my bank bumped foreign transaction fees on credit cards to 3.5%. This is a robbery. I immediately cancelled that card. I recall the website said the most of the fee is what Visa (or Mastercard) imposes on them. Either way that's not acceptable.
Since this is in Canada, you use your bank card like normal.
Also doesn't apply in Australia. Aldi charges extra for paying with cards.
I'm curious, how do they frame it? Is it a discount for paying with cash? If it's allowed, why doesn't every merchant offer it?
When did this change? I know a lot of smaller stores do it, but I always thought they were breaking the rules.
http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html
Are they allowed to give a discount for paying in cash?
Stop talking about fundraising
It doesn't quite work so easily because of some parts of sage use pseudotty's.
In the United States it used to be this way up until a couple years ago. Now you can offer discounts for paying with cash. There was some case and settlement in 2012/2013(?). Most have to offer a "cash discount" and not a credit card surcharge.
Interesting article. I do something related, and here's my take:

Data mining is useful because it gives you things that are predictive that you might not have considered at first, but make sense after. This is mainly due to combinatorial explosion in the potential number of formulas.

You generally have a vague idea of what might be predictive, eg cheapness vs earnings and cash flow, but there's a huge number of ways that might show up in the data, and there's a huge number of ways it might hide in the data.

So for instance an old school analyst might do a ranking of price/earnings as well as cash flow, or whatever bespoke formula desired.

A data mining approach could take all the fundamentals and generate formulas mixing the variables, yielding a number that seem to be effective. Out of those, you'd look at them and decide that they capture some thesis (low P/E, upward trend in earnings). Then you'd look at whether the formula is sensitive to small tweaks. For instance, if you regressed the last 6 earnings and it had phenomenal performance, but with 5 or 7 it wasn't, you probably conclude it's some sort of random result.

There's funds that take the mass approach to an extreme. They have huge databases, with a genetic algorithm that generates expression trees, and a battery of stats (incl backtests) to decide what works. They end up with many thousands of strategies that are a great deal more effective than your standard one-trick pony fund.
But for the tall buyers it's close to a deal breaker. It's not like I'm 2 meters, just slightly above average in my country. I love Japanese manufacturing, engineering and design. I have three Japanese guitars.
However it's less likely I will ever buy a Toyota. Attitudes can change but I'm not going to get any shorter soon.

In today's world the brands resemble each other a lot, and are in fierce competition about some percentage points of fuel consumption, to the point of cheating. But most of the things that are mentioned in the advertisements or reviews don't matter if the seat is slightly uncomfortable, or you have to bend your knees a little bit more, or your shoe scratches the foot space ceiling if you're not careful. Indeed, a cramped car can scuff your leather shoe. How is it not possible to find a few centimeters more in a vehicle that's 4 meters long? It makes me feel they are either incompetent or just don't plain care.
Compare that to something like even eighties-nineties vintage Volkswagen Golfs. They are not big cars, but I wouldn't even keep the driver's seat all the way back - they had excess space. Bliss.
Every car has it's assortment of design mistakes, you just get to choose what they are. It's a bit counter intuitive considering how many billions are spent per model, but I guess the designers still have a self centered approach.
Canned and cartoned(!) coffee is all over the place now in the UK. Starbucks make a lot of it, and there seems to be quite a few smaller brands popping up.

It's all full of sugar though, more like slightly coffee flavoured milkshakes. Combination of the sugar and caffeine really works though...
In the U.S., Visa charges banks a 1% foreign-transaction fee. However most banks in turn charge their customers either 2-3% (tacking on another 1-2% themselves), or on more premium cards, eat Visa's fee and charge the customer 0%, while advertising it as a "no foreign transaction fee card".
> At least in my country that is so by law, you cannot let customers pay fees for their payment method of choice.

Which country is that? And are discounts allowed?
A few years ago the Illinois Secretary of State wouldn't accept VISA at DMV facilities because they weren't allowed to pass the fee to the consumer. (Mastercard and Discover let them though.)

https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-blogs/why-dont-illinois-secr...

The link mentions that Indiana had the same problem but they paid the fee because Customer Service was more important.
The Visa/Mastercard fee is nowhere near 3.5%. Your bank is trying to make profits for itself.

"Visa and MasterCard each charge 1 percent of purchases as a foreign transaction fee. Most banks add an additional 1 percent or 2 percent, leaving your total fee at 2 percent or 3 percent. "
I don't know the details of the fight between the merchants and the credit card companies but this is what eventually came out of it.

Since Jan. 27, 2013, merchants have had the ability to assess a surcharge on customers who pay with credit. However, if they choose to take this step, there are a lot of rules that must be followed, including:

- Notifying consumers that they’re being charged for using credit, both at the register and on the receipt. On the receipt, the merchant is required to state the exact dollar amount you paid in credit card surcharges.

- Charging customers only what they’re paying to the credit card payment networks in swipe fees (again, this is usually around 1%-3.5% of the cost of the transaction). In other words, merchants are allowed to pass on the fee to the customer, but aren’t allowed to make a profit on credit card surcharges.

- Staying on the right side of state laws. As of August 2014, nine states prohibit retailers from passing credit card surcharges onto consumers. They are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Texas.

- Limiting surcharges to credit card transactions. If you pay with debit, the retailer isn’t allowed assess the fee. This includes debit transactions where you sign for your purchase as opposed to entering a PIN. Only credit card users can be hit with a surcharge.

Source: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-cards/credit-card-cha...
Whaa? They accept cards. They were exclusive to AmEx but they are now exclusive to Visa.
I'm not sure I see anything illegal in there (from the perspective of PA employment law anyway). His biggest beef seems to be that they mined data without their employee's consent, but most of the places I work explicitly state that emails, chats, electronic and physical documentation (work products) all belong to the organization.

On one hand, this feels a bit scummy - on the other hand, I'd rather work somewhere that's not toxic. I think the biggest issue is that I doubt their technique is good enough to a) find all the toxic people (one of the most toxic people I ever met was outstanding at never putting it in writing) and b) will exclude people that could have improved the company.
Alas, wasn't Facebook collecting information about people not having an account these days?
Apple Energy deeper dive: Is this Apple running its own microgrids or more?
nice I stand corrected. The first list is what I knew about!

This is actually an interesting dividing line. As you get more sophisticated modeling fuzzier concepts over just synonyms (synonyms are just one tool for this) then I think you get out of algolias sweet spot. When text pushed into a feature space (which happens quite a lot when you're mapping vernaculars) you begin to gain more from Solr and ESs depth of customizability.
I am a Swede with Danish and Norwegian heritage and I think this is pathological. If you try to resist and be social anyway, you will seem a bit strange or even feminine if you do it in a seemingly smooth way...
How love and marriage are changing, according to NYT wedding announcements
Probably. When their business model is to exploit people then it wouldn't surprise me that they are collecting on an epic scale, even from those without an account.

I assume that's what the Facebook buttons on websites all over the place are for but I use NoScript and UBlock Origin so I don't exist as far as they are concerned.
You might want to move our copy it to another directory. I had this problem recently when I wanted to use an env that had a bunch of packages that take a long time to compile, but since it didn't work I had to reinstall them in a new env.
Why are so many bankers committing suicide?
I think Ron Gilbert uses Squirrel in his upcoming game Thimbleweed Park.
Murder for profit
Sure, it's possible to host your own mail server, except that you need to host it in a place that isn't port-filtered (eg: not on most residential ISP connections), and if you want anyone to be able to receive your emails you need to make sure you're not blacklisted-by-default by the big spam filtering engines. (eg: DNS settings, but also monitoring successful delivery rates and working with spam filter operators to determine why your emails get flagged and trashed.)
My Costco used to only accept Amex and all debit cards, but about a few months ago started accepting Visa and no longer accepting Amex. I have always used my debit card with no problem, and now am able to use my Visa for bigger purchases.
Quite distressingly common.

>"9 out of 10 employers rate blind and partially sighted people as either 'difficult' or 'impossible' to employ" (DWP, 2004) [0]

Which is stupid beyond belief to anyone who spends much time with folks who have a visual impairment. Just off the top of my head I can think of a barrister, a librarian, a bunch of IT and development types and several qualified and practicing tennis coaches who are VIPs. And that's just out of my personal acquaintances.

So while I almost bounced off this for the tone, in the end the tl;dr is 'we overcame our bias and it turned out to be no biggie'. As someone who spends a lot of time working to generate positive PR for VI I'll take this as a net gain.

[0] https://actionforblindpeople.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/ke...
Of course but my point is that no one is forcing me to do that. Sure, it sucks that they are harvesting stuff from me even though I am not part of their conclave but, as much as it pains me to say it, I could decide not to send or receive any emails from gmail.

Facebook is a bit harder to avoid I admit... not sure what you do about that although I have had a few people lately ask me if it is ok to put a picture of my son on Facebook... never had that before.

Inconvenient and incredibly tin-foil-hatty but possible.

Imagine if we only had a state-owned ISP and VPNs were banned... that's what we need to watch out for.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and <insert other big co.> will not be around forever: Even tech giants fall - Look at Nokia!
The idea of carrying around cash for every transaction puzzles me. I pay almost exclusively with credit. I get a push notification to my phone for every transaction. At the end of the month, I get a nice CSV file with all my transactions for analysis and budgeting. I get a 1-3% rebate on all my purchases. If my card is lost or stolen, I hold no liability. With cash, the liability is all mine. I hate using cash, and only use it when I must.
this seems ilke a re-hash of Schneier's piece from 2013...

http://us.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surve...
The deck of cards analogy is sort of getting to the anthropic principle -- the natural laws could have come out any number of ways, but most of the other shuffles wouldn't result in us being here to contemplate them.
Something like this? https://blind.guru/brlpi.html
Cash is not free for the merchant: there's a cost associated with handling it.

Also, some merchants cater to a demographic that likes to use cards a lot and is sensitive to convenience; and making that distinction may cost the merchant in terms of customer appreciation.
Two Years Later, Russian Submarine Requalified as “Swedish Object”
You can easily get a prepaid Amex if your credit is not good. Or pay by check (do they still do that in Canada?).
I understand why this may be formally preferrable, but it still suffers from the same conceptual clarity issues.

What I mean by conceptual clarity is knowing for sure, without looking at the documentation of each function, that it returns either an error or data for further processing, but never both.

That's not the case with your solution either. You're just packaging the same conceptual ambiguity in a slightly different way.
I personally like to bridge Elixir and Python via nanomsg with MessagePack serialization.

Here are some useful libraries:

http://nanomsg.org/

https://hex.pm/packages/exns

https://github.com/walkr/nanoservice
The two aren't really comparable -- SageMath integrates a huge list of systems which don't have any support in Julia at all (for example, group theory, my personal area).