skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not when you define "responsible" as "saving up and then buying when you can afford it".

But the lending agencies say "responsible" when they mean "profitable for us", so I can see how someone might get confused.
Do you think mac is better than Linux?
Neo: Create React web apps with zero initial configuration and minimal fuss
DuoSkin
I've known both types of people in that age bracket.

Some feel underconfident with credit cards, and avoid them either for self-control or fear of fees and hidden surprises.

Many more have them and use them liberally, but won't carry a balance. It's like a debit card with fraud protection and cash back, which seems pretty popular at all ages.
dozzie, could you remove the "Uhm, no." from that? It only adds snark to an otherwise good comment.
Cash isn't necessarily cheaper for merchants once you factor in thefts and handling costs. But I've found that some small merchants are willing to give a 1-2% cash discount if you ask.
I didn't consciously realized until you mentioned it but I use BBEdit as you do Sublime. Each time I come back they're all just where I left off. Used it for that for years.
Hey guys! One of the co-founders of Sway Finance here. We did a ShowHN a couple months ago when we had just built our Slackbot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162283) and are excited to now be in YC and building more full-fledged financial products for businesses. Happy to answer any questions here!
I really wanted to like this post. It's well written. With passion. Using a common metaphor (a house). And about the biggest elephant in the I.T. room today.

But I couldn't. Because it just skated on the surface of the iceberg.

OP is right. Technical debt is a huge problem that requires significant mind shift to address. And I can't find a single thing here that I'd disagree with.

There's a lot of academic theory and cheer leading here. And true, it's requisite to any further discussion. But what I would love to see are specific prescriptions:

How do you train to avoid the sins of the past?
How do you enhance process (peer review, QA)?
How do you conduct post-mortems to organize the attack?
How do you decide what to black box and what to rewrite?
How do you prioritize shoring up the foundation and keeping the lights on?
How do you find tools to automate the process?
How do you make technology decisions to set the new path?

And probably most of all:

How do you fix the broken data supporting all this bad code?

Because any treatment of code without diving deeply into the underlying data structure is too myoptic to be of much value.

I've estimated that half of the bad legacy code I've ever encountered would never have even been written if the data were properly structured in the first place. This isn't a discussion of DBMS technology, but a comprehensive treatment of how the business operates and how it's supporting data must be structured, regardless of technology. Fix the data and the code becomes a much more manageable problem to attack.

Of course, maybe OP just didn't get that far.

Nice article. I'd love to read the sequel, about 5 levels deeper.
> required you to read a lot of books

Actually these kids should be reading all those same books. Coding bootcamps, tutorials, stack overflow and cut-and-paste are the reason there are so many solutions that nobody actually understands.
The problem with the analogy of technical debt vs. real debt is that technical debt is the actual product itself. You aren't building a house using mortgage, you're building a house with shoddy materials and hoping you can flip it before it falls down on you.

I don't completely disagree with you at all -- there is a lot to building marketshare and having the dominant position. But I think you are way overselling it as an advantage. Being out in front and having the whole thing collapse on you is way worse than a slow start.

But again I think this conscious idea of doing quick & dirty is less prevalent than the debt caused by lack of experience and poor operations.
Fraud protection is required by law. The reason why the protections differ is because of different laws, Fair Credit Billing Act applies to credit cards, and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act for debit cards. The only reason fraud protections would not be identical between credit and debit cards is because Congress doesn't care enough to make them the same, and that might have something to do with being under the boot of the finance industry.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0213-lost-or-stolen-cr...
PS, I'm hoping you can't brick all the F-35's, missile destroyers etc, but that's probably optimistic considering all software issues that kind of gear has without it being attacked.
I will not / can not read articles with that type of advertising.
Even that - are using credit cards less - is unclear to me. Are there fewer millennials with open cards, or are millennials spending fewer dollars via credit cards (and thereby avoiding debt)?
Management is a part of the team that messed up the codebase, not only the engineers. That's why I am always wary of managers bringing in new methods (microservices, scrum, whatever). They had a big part in previous failures and if they don't admit their own failures nothing will change.
Will Reading Romance Novels Make Artificial Intelligence More Human?
Cleveland Stock Exchange
ffs, don't use dislike like a disagree button.

If this is a misconception, tell greenspot
That's basically my attitude.(And I also have a fair bit of reimbursed spend.) You can also get credits that are effectively cash (e.g. on Amazon) or even actually cash. They're usually theoretically worth less than the airline miles or hotel points but are a lot easier to use efficiently.

As another comment suggested, there are also a lot of games that you can play churning credit cards--as well as playing gift card games. My personal take on those though is that you really have to keep on top of introductory offers, using gift cards, etc. or you can easily end up in the hole. It's also essentially a hobby. Once it becomes work, it's probably not worth it.
At my bank, the fraud protection for any card with a VISA logo is identical whether it be debit or credit. Due to that, I never bothered with a credit card. I don't want the ability to spend money I don't have.

I did end up finally getting a credit card (in my mid-30s) not because I want one, but because I wanted a back-up card for when my debit card is out of commission for whatever reason. It's a constant struggle to remember to do transactions on it so it doesn't get closed for inactivity.
> it never was a secret that QDOS was heavily modelled after CP/M.

Indeed. In fact, when IBM first built the PC, they'd tried to reach a deal with Digital Research to get an official version of CP/M as the PC's flagship OS. The deal fell through for some reason I can't recall at the moment, so IBM went to MicroSoft and explicitly asked for a CP/M work-alike and a BASIC interpreter (which was considered MS's forte back then). This was really a no-brainer, given how supremely popular CP/M and BASIC were on microcomputers at the time.

After Digital Research heard about the QDOS/PC-DOS deal, they threatened to sue IBM, alleging even then that it infringed their intellectual property. But they gave IBM an option: also sell CPM/86 alongside PC-DOS, and IBM gladly obliged. Problem was: PC-DOS cost something like $50 whereas CPM/86 cost something like $250, and consumers voted with their wallets.

(I recently read somewhere that IBM didn't tell DRI about their planned price tag for PC-DOS, and Gary Kildall was right-miffed about the situation).

Besides those two, UCSD Pascal was also available to run on the bare metal of PC, essentially as an OS. I've never used it myself, so I don't know what its OS-y features were like, or if it had any at all.
Y'know, a lot of government organisations use Windows; I wonder how they feel about having all their information going to Microsoft …
> Everything does. Data without schema are just noise.

Love that concise adage. Will probably adopt it when explaining databases to novices.
I agree their documentation is one of the best around.
Mirror of the 'free files' for those interested: https://github.com/samgranger/EQGRP
It's a marketing term. It's rebranding refactoring/cleanup as "technical wealth", which sounds good compared to the "technical debt" companies are tolerating.

There's nothing wrong with good marketing if it's leading to a solution for both parties involved.
Show HN: How well is Puppet tested?
My wife and I fit into that age bracket, and we also exclusively use credit cards for purchases anywhere we can. Just this morning, on a rarely used card, someone used the card and in about 10 minutes and a few purchases ran up to the limit. If this was a debit card, we would have been out the money in our checking account, and the onus would have been on us to recover that money. Instead, the fraudulent purchases were removed and a new card was issued - this took about 5 minutes, including looking for the card in question to find the number to call.
Hackers Say They Hacked NSA-Linked Group, Want 1M Bitcoins to Share More
I sold all my shares today. I know jack about finance, but my gut said that $60 is too high.
This is probably a big concern for millennials in particular. The ability to "float" expenses is a nice way to smooth funds across a month, but for people without savings a sudden loss of employment can turn into instant debt.
Here in New York State you see all sorts of merchants with lower prices on items in cash. Saw the same in California when I lived there as well.
I literally went on eBay, searched for "usb nes controller" and bought the cheapest one :)
On the surface, that sounds more like a problem of data cleanup before insertion. Were you doing any validation/normaliztion of the data beforehand?
That's not a fair comparison though. I only quickly read the postgres benchmark you linked, but it looks like you stored the data on disk (!) on a machine with only 16GB of ram for the postgres benchmark, while storing the data completely in 96GB of very fast RAM for the mapd benchmark.

Unless I misread the post it's just comparing apples and oranges. If anything, the two benchmarks show that one piece of hardware (RAM) is orders of magnitude faster than the other one (SSDs). My previous comment was specifically about MySQL running on a machine where the whole dataset fits into memory.

Of course, I'm sure mapd is faster than mysql/postgres for some usecases. But the benchmark doesn't prove that in a fair comparison.

EDIT: Maybe I should add a disclaimer: I'm the founder of another open-source database product that could be considered a competitor to MapD.
How  You Can Implement to Make Your Company Customer Centric
Over half of my credit report are student loans. All of them are paid and closed, years before their original term (probably still in the future as of now).
Startup Waitinglist Time to wait
My question is basically how long does it usually take to get access to a Mobile App's Startups Waiting List to the app :) it seems like a very interesting app and would benefit me a lot
I came upon this startup just now -- AppAll Mobile (www.appallmobile.com) and twitter (https://twitter.com/AppAllHQ)

(they just launched from what it seems) and I signed up. Seems like a really cool and useful product for many.

From what I saw on their website and tweets today it's like a "Dropbox" but for Mobile Apps. So you can have as many apps as you want and your device uses up no storage.
Good to know it is still possible to disable them, but until when?

I disagree with the difference between phone and computer, for many people a smartphone or tablet is the only computer they own.
Sometimes self-control means putting yourself in a situation where you're less likely to make a mistake, saving your resolve for other situations.

Also, nobody in the article was blaming credit cards for lack of ability to spend.

I think this trend is just a reflection of how badly credit cards have worked out for a sizable portion the previous generation.
I can identify with this. As a 30 year old, I have never and don't ever see myself owning or using a credit card. The experience of my parents struggling with debt for most of my childhood remains emotionally powerful, even against the opportunity cost of not using credit cards.

I am willing to to take extra precautions against fraud and lose the cashback I otherwise would earn, if it means never inviting potential credit card debt.
Depending on your bank, you may be out the money that's in dispute until the dispute is completed. If your bank decides to spot you the money in dispute while things are figured out, you need to keep in mind that if the dispute isn't decided in your favor that loan will go away, and they will debit your account. If you were cutting things close, you'll end up in overdraft and the financial screwing begins in earnest.
Automate Android Actions Using Appium
Nice! Lately I have started doing Go and was wondering about it. I am going to try it.
There's a lot of confusion around how these cards work and what these statistics measure.

In this article they are talking about the sum of all balances on credit card accounts. Technically all of this money is borrowed, even if, as some commenters say, you "pay in full every month." You're just only getting charged interest after typically 30 days. Using terms like "revolving debt" to describe interest charges is imprecise, as is describing payments on interest-bearing debt as "paying late." Interest is interest, and debt is debt.

How do credit scores distinguish debt from interest from defaults, the inability to pay interest (sometimes principal)? It doesn't matter. Before Lending Club hid them, the variables that were strongest correlated with borrower race and borrow age were most correlated with default on loans. But debtors who accrue interest via credit cards and pay it are the most desirable, because obviously they are the debtors who make money for the creditor. The fastest way to get the best credit card offers is not to pay off your balance in full before interest is accrued; instead, accrue some interest and pay it off. Then you become Mr. Credit Card Offer, Eater of Spam Mail.

I think a lot of aversion to credit cards (and borrowing generally) is just financial illiteracy. Universally people conflate debt and interest. They get dinged by the horrible experience of forgetting to pay once, even if the total interest paid was less than 0.1% of their expenses in a year. Put another way, if you gave me access to low interest debt, of course I'd take it... And open a bank!

The real scam is mortgages. Financial illiteracy makes people minimize monthly payments instead of "finance charges," one of the most precise (broad and well defined) but poorly understood terms on a mortgage. There are millions of wealthy suburbanites paying 30 year mortgages with finance charges equal to nearly half the value of the home—a 50% markup for the privilege of lower monthly payments.
I find it amusing they got their inspiration from This Old House.

Between TOH and the head mechanic (also named Bob) at the bike shop I worked at in college, I get most of my work ethic from outside of software, and it shows. I had high hopes for the 'craft' movement in software but haven't seen much of it materialize.

I spent a lot of my formative years watching TOH, including the 'Pay the Piper' episode where two very nauseous homeowners found out their remodel went 2x the original budget. Part of it was scope creep, but there was always a hefty repair because the foundation was being destroyed by a tree or erosion, and a couple times the entire corner of the house (including corner beams) was rotting away from water damage caused by shoddy work on an earlier repair ten years prior.

I am forever looking for badly-sited trees and water infiltration in my code base, and I'm always agitating to throw out bad tools, get better ones, and learn to use them properly. Just like Bob and Bob taught me.
Notably, the suggestion that "it's fine if you pay off your card every month" or "loans are sensible if you get good rates" only holds for people with some kind of faith in stability.

With a stable job and some savings, paid-off credit cards and zero-apr loans are great tools. If you're worried about losing the job and barely making rent (like many millennials are) then even 'safe' debt becomes troubling.
> This article really just emphasizes the fact that we are living in an age of complete lack of personal responsibility and self-control,

I'm not in the age group the article is talking about, but... not having a card in my pocket that lets me spend money I don't have is my exercise of self-control.

Your attitude is so strange. The way I control credit card debt is by not having a credit card. That is the self-control you're lamenting the lack of.
That's rather the hallmark of an anxiety disorder: it's not necessarily caused by anything.
I have yet to see or work at a company organized like this. Usually it's dozens of people from multiple teams commingled in a single large room. Where I work now the entire company only has 8 people, but we have 5 different projects going on, of which I am only involved in 2.
Ok thanks! :)
In the UK, there's all sorts of consumer protection when you use a credit-card - essentially, the credit-card company takes on liability for suppliers' failings.

E.g. If you book a holiday on your credit card, and the travel company goes bankrupt, your card provider refunds you.

For the most part, those protections simply don't exist if you use a debit-card.
And as we saw from a recent Uber post about Postgresql, that automatic updating is not actually free.
Great to see RethinkDB covered (although it would have been better if it was included in the primary comparison tables too).

It feels like a second-generation NoSQL database where most of the drawbacks with earlier NoSQL-databases has been taken care of!
> Because obviously paying on time a $100 credit card bill every month is a good indicator on how you'll handle paying a couple hundred thousands loan for your house (/s)

I think this type of behavioral scoring is actually a great benchmark for determining responsibility. If you can't handle paying off a few hundred bucks here and there, it seems pretty reasonable that you're more likely to default on a far more expensive mortgage.
It's been about a year since I wrote any Rust, but one of the things I struggled with is having an intuition for the "right way" of dealing with the borrow checker.

I often found myself storing indexes into vectors/maps and not being sure if this was a good way of doing things; it seemed better than raw pointers in some senses, but it also felt like I was just bypassing the borrow checker and using a system that had less drastic failure modes, but othewise no guarantees.

I also found myself building up datastructures of these indexes that I would not have had to do in a traditional imperative language.

I would have really appreciated some examples of writing your own data structures where a traditional encoding would run into the borrow checker (eg graphs).
Server-side swift with zewo
> What does SJW activity actually refer to?

A new kind of Socialist class warfare where Democrats now divide the population into countless different "identity" classes that struggle against each other.

This reduces cohesion within a society and often leads to violence between these groups.

> People saying it's bad to shoot black people running away from police who aren't armed?

So a criminal suspect should have the universal human right to run away without being stopped by force? Bonus question: How can a police officer know that a person running away is not armed?

I don't know where you have read about these supposedly universal human rights, please point me to a link.

> Women should get equal pay for equal work, and have control over their own bodies?

Yes, what makes you believe that this is not the case? Please look up some statistics about labour participation by gender. You'll find that much less women work full time jobs than men do, so they obviously will earn less. They also tend to not pursue careers in high paying industries.

I'm not going to promote a part time worker to a high position in my company just because the person is female. I'm going to promote the person that works the hardest and has a skill set that is highly valuable to the company.

> It hurts the dems because it makes them look stupid

No, it makes them look criminal. That's why the FBI is investigating Hillary and the Clinton Foundation.

> , but it won't affect the election.

You contradict your previous statement.

> If there was a better demagogue than Trump running, it might affect the election.

You can believe in whatever you like, but you should be at least intellectually honest and recognise that this statement, like all of the statements in your comment isn't backed by any facts.
The assumption in the post I replied to was that being emotional was seen essentially as being weak.
Running your iOS consulting firm
I suppose the same argument will hold true for Siri, Google Now, Desktop/Phone/Browser search?
Umm? There is chip and pin, it's every debit card. They used to be swipe and pin, but since pretty much all cards have been replaced with chip, it's now chip and pin.

Credit cards in the U.S. are chip and sign, which is the dumbest piece of crap decision by the card issuing industry. Even though I have chip on both credit and debit cards, they become chip and sign when used in Europe. It's f'n hilarious being in a grocery store where the clerk is like "oh you have to sign, umm let me go find a pen" because it's that rare.

I think the whole chip thing is stupid. We're 20 years late to the game. We should have just skipped it in favor of a more solid contactless system rather than spend all this money changing over to something arguably obsolete already.
I'm curious what the credit score would be of a fiscally-responsible 30 year old with no credit cards. Care to share a ballpark, if you know?
That's MP3s. AAC/MP4 has better efficiency, and I can't imagine any devices in 2016 don't support it...?
When I think of specialist developers, I imagine being specialist in a business domain. This is not to say that being an AWS expert does not have its benefits. But if you do want to specialize, I will suggest going with a business domain. For example, if you are ReactJS specialist today, what guarantee do you have that ReactJS will be hot tomorrow ? Who knows. But if you are an expert in say cryptography, security, finance, healthcare etc, I will bet they are not going anywhere anytime soon.

My 2 cents. All the points I made are certainly arguable.
>Don't most credit cards offer rewards?

Typically cash back credit cards also have (especially) egregious interest rates for carrying a balance month to month. And some have a fee.

Cards without cash back typically have lower (but still very high) interest rates.
And amusingly, the best credit cards for those purchases are almost always obtained during the purchase.

An appliance purchase at Sears comes with 60 months of 0% interest if you open a card - it's debt, but not necessarily irresponsible. Using a normal card to debt-finance the same thing is far less responsible, and I'm not really sure what the article was trying to claim there.
> Jason Towner, a 32-year-old who works at a private equity firm, cut up his last credit card, from Capital One, in 2010. He did not have any unruly debts, but he had just watched his father and sister close the family furniture store after a bank cut off their credit line in the middle of the financial crisis.

I can't understand this mindset. A bank refuses to extend a business line of credit, so you... cut up a credit card? It's hard to imagine two things that look related but have less to do with each other in actuality. I would expect an PE professional to know that.

The idea that credit cards are bad is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what they are and how to use them to your advantage.
tell that to knight ...