skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No amount of governmental regulations can solve the current date breach trends.

I think there's a few things that could be done:

1. Invalidate all SSN numbers.

2. Force people to get a new ID card; make it like the smart-card passport card (or make people get such a card). That becomes your ID and number.

3. Getting that card requires you to be present physically for fingerprinting. Put the fingerprint data on the card, and no where else.

4. Make regulations that only allow for loans to be done in person - no more mailings, nothing online - if you want credit, you have to show up in person.

5. To prove who you are: Fingerprint, your card (with picture - and fingerprint data on the card), plus your pin number. Essentially chip and pin identification, with a fingerprint scan (and maybe a face scan too).

6. Make it so if you want to do online transactions - or any transaction for that matter - you must provide all of this. Basically, at home, a card reader that can read the chip, allow you to enter the pin, scan your fingerprint and face, and if all of that matches what's on the card, then an "acknowledgement" is sent.

Essentially the above would implement a 3-factor auth. I am not saying the above is perfect (I am absolutely certain I have screwed something up there - but the basic idea is what I am trying to convey), but we essentially have to do a clean break away from all current ID and credit/loan/payment systems - and move to a system that introduces a TON of friction.

Physical Presence (Something you are)

Physical Token (Something you have)

PIN (Something you know)

And all the data about "who you are" (face scan, fingerprint) stored on the card (hashed of course) only, no where else. Basically - the card, your presence, and your knowledge all have to be present, and the card's processor authenticates you.

And these factors need to be presented each and every time you do a transaction of any sort involving money or identification.

And no online or by-mail signup for credit. That should be done in physical form only.

Finally - allow for at-will changes of the PIN, and yearly a forced change of the PIN.

The problem with the above, though, is many-fold. It would be extremely costly - for everyone. It is also (seems in a way) draconian. But something of the above nature would need to be done, post haste, if we wanted this to go away.

And basically not allow any kind of storage of credit information or whatnot by -any- entity (and I am not sure how that would even work or if it could). Maybe all they have is a hash value and your name, and the card can generate that hash value as "authentication"/"identity" - but you have to have everything there (you, card, pin), and only the card holds the information, and only generates a hash.

I dunno - but again, this is the idea. I'll leave the details to people smarter than I on these things.

I don't expect something like this to be ever implemented, though. One would think this breach would do it, but it won't.
Hi Andre,

Are you someone I could talk to about something like this?: https://www.cipheredtrust.com/doc/

I have sent several emails to the 18F email address without luck so far :)

The approach outlined above addresses a much larger problem, ie a way to easily and inexpensively support information verification on the internet while preserving privacy and security.
wonder if they've already gone through arbitration
https://ripple.com/terms-of-use/
I grew up very middle class in a very middle class place. Doctors and small-time businessmen were what I considered "rich", then I went to university and was surrounded by people from big cities that had family jets, chandeliers in their homes that cost more than my family home, etc.

Besides having to recalibrate what I thought of as "rich", I was just astounded at the sheer number of people I met with trust funds and things like that. You see people like that in TV shows like Gossip Girl and stuff, but I always thought it was the tiniest minority of people.
If you search google using the url for the article and then follow the search link you can get behind the paywall. Here's a link to the google search result - https://www.google.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fc...
Rent gets unbearable way faster than every 10 years. My first place in the Bay Area had rent jump from $1800 (uncomfortable but doable), to $2300 per month. This was after just one year of being there, and since then I've noticed that 4 years later rents in that neighborhood are now at $3300 a month for a one bedroom.
> regular audits

is the government going to do those? it doesn't seem to be able to do that sort of thing now. how will the government gain the resources, the capability?
This is an awesome site, visually depicting how unaffordable housing has become in so many parts of the US.

It's truly amazing how much the Fed (with perpetually low interest rates) and local restrictions on building (making it more expensive or impossible to build) have increased the cost of home ownership over the past 60 years.

Anyone who's seriously considering purchasing a home should read The Housing Trap by Patrick Killelea, it's a short, amazing overview of how we arrived in the situation we're in as well as a practical guide for when to buy vs rent housing.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1479156213/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_Ki...
I made a mistake. I should have said 300 BC not 2300 BC. Also, yes, they are in an older form the language.
> (this is HUGE. I could write a whole blog post on this).

and please do
It doesn't matter much, it's all just sugar over virtualenvs (which are quite simple conceptually). Virtualenvwrapper has been around a long time and works pretty well.

More recent tools are Pipenv (which I've been using) and hatch - I don't think there is any One True Way since the days of virtualenvwrapper being the latest and shiniest.

If you want a really easy to use tool that doesn't require any understanding of virtualenvs, I'd look at Pipenv.

http://docs.pipenv.org/en/latest/
Yes. I do it with six lines of shell script: https://is.gd/bsNBve.
Yes we know. Often it has links to authoritative/reliable/substantive sources. I was particularly interested in seeing those for the last section [0] I referenced above, because it's the one that actually agrees with TFA, but at this time that section is effectively unsourced. So even though this idea about the red flags rule comports with my prejudice about how regulation typically works, I am currently unable to confirm it. Can you point to a meatier consideration of whether this rule purportedly intended to decrease identity theft actually had this particular effect of increasing identity theft? One thing that makes me suspicious of this idea is that I can clearly remember giving a false social security number to the phone company when I moved in 2004, which was before 2008 when TFA claims the rule started and 2011 when wikipedia claims the rule started.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flags_Rule#Red_Flag_Rule_a...
Barrett Brown Talks with Lauri Love
The most frustrating place to be in these scenarios is the IT (especially security) department.

Go ask any security guy if they think their environment is secure. Very few of us will say yes. It frequently boils down to we ask for things, and there are budget/manpower/time limitations in getting them implemented.

So a breach occurs, execs say to IT staff "Why was this possible."

IT staff says "We requested back in <month> to fix this, and its working through the slow process"

Execs say "Why didn't you scream louder, identifying it as a critical issue"

IT: "There are 1000's of other issues, just like this one. The attackers just managed to exploit this one, instead of one of the others. We can't identify all issues as critical, because then nothing is critical."

Both parties stay frustrated thinking the other isn't doing their job right.
We are talking about packaging tools now?
The point is these private companies are loathe to do anything that makes fraud harder or takes liability off the victims so yes, making laws is not only helpful it's the only thing that will ever work.
Personally I don't see how that is ebttee. Why is it better? Macros would be better if they were less invisible.

Spacemacs/viper has this great copy of a vim feature where :/ and :s/ commands actually show a diff view interactively in the buffer. It turned an old useful-but-opaque feature into an equally useful but interactive and novice-friendly feature. We need more of that in code editing.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15200955. (Although the stories aren't identical the discussion was clearly the same.)
https://www.fha.com/fha-downpayment-grants
Nowhere! If you're in SF, move out to the east bay

Besides that, hope residents use legislation to balance out the market... progressive taxes in aesthetically pleasing areas, education/public transportation in economically competitive areas, condos/up-zoning in popular urban areas.
Definitely. E.g. for a $1 million case, the defense likely won't even hire an expert. For a $1 billion case, you'll be responding to thousands of pages of expert reports prepared by half a dozen PhDs in various specialties (and deposing them, fighting over the admissibility of their opinions and the reliability of their methods, etc.). Not to mention that you'll get buried in discovery, etc.
What state do you live in? Credit freeze rules vary from state to state.
I'm a Toronto native. These are the forces driving this decision:

1. Provincial government is cash poor. The LCBO is a huge source of cash, what government would give up another source? This isn't taxes, this is profit. "Isn't this just another tax?" One might ask, but no it's not. The reason is that Ontario has fewer alcohol distribution centres than a free market would provide. Most people just do a bigger alcohol run and drive / walk / drive further than their American counterparts. There's queuing occasionally, but usually only before long weekends or holidays.

2. The current dispensaries are run by criminals. The optics of giving a windfall to law breakers aren't great. The police keep shutting them down, and they keep popping up. I'm not bashing them, I think cannabis should have been legalized a long time ago and I think it's unconscionable that we have Canadians addicted to heroin because they were given opioids instead of pot, because pot requires a huge hassle to get approved, and I think dispensaries alleviate that stress, but some operations are huuuuge and most certainly are funnelling money into real criminal organizations.

3. The union at the LCBO is huge and powerful. The jobs, even seasonal ones, pay well and Ontarians aren't outraged because the staff is generally competent and friendly and the stores are clean.

4. Controls over potency are a real problem in the current dispensaries and because of the sketchiness of the current people involved and their distribution networks, the government would have to get involved auditing anyway.

I hope that they keep the stores open every day of the week. Many Canadians use pot outside the medical system, but for medical reasons and fast access will mean the black market will finally collapse. I also hope there will be a system for legitimizing certain strains that gain popularity in the US, like the LCBO does for wine.
Why is H1B relevant here?
here are a few reasons: 1) anything GUI related is a pain 2) interacting with the host filesystem has to be explicitly enabled 3) containers are still somewhat heavyweight
I don't know about that. The OPM hack was even worse in terms of data released. Seriously, it included actual images of peoples fingerprints ffs. Along with all biographical information of the people submitted to receive a security clearance background check. I think it may have hit fewer people, but I expect the result will be the same: 18 months of free credit monitoring and after that we pretend that somehow your SSN and all other details must no longer be a threat to you being out in the wild. Sure, in 30 years when someone digs it up and ruins your life with it, why make that OPM agency liable for it? I'm sure they hired top-notch security guys, paid them handsomely, and structured things such that not even the president of the USA could contravene their practices, right? Right?

Oh, a computer was involved. So hire the cheapest person you can find who can half make it work, let even the low level managers do whatever they want, and when it gets hacked blame somebody else. It's computers. NOBODY knows how they work!
When the Musk Mesh is in place, this will be a captcha: "To submit this form, think about the ex you still have feelings for"
I believe it depends on your state. I'm in California and I had to pay $10 for freezing on Experian and TransUnion, although it was free for Equifax.
> I never consented to having all my eggs in those three vulnerable baskets

Your information does not just magically make it into the database of a credit bureau. It gets there via public record or because you allowed a creditor to report it to them. You are more than welcome to find a creditor that does not ask for or report to credit bureaus.

Not trying to justify the existence of credit bureaus but let's not kid ourselves. They aren't sending spies to your house or tapping your phone lines to get this info. You personally authorize a large amount of it.
The same page also has this:

“I wanted my kids to know me,” Mr Isaacson recalled Mr Jobs saying, in a posthumous tribute the biographer wrote for Time magazine. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

“He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That’s what made him so great,” he added. “Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, ‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done’.”
I love your idea. I would be game if something is happening in that direction.
>So why can't I have a mobile app (or three) for free

Yes, and I think it's a bigger question of why we have so little control over or access to our own data in the first place? It's a racket that they monetize our data by selling it to others, then charge us again to access and protect it. And, if you've ever had to go through the pain of having something corrected in a timely fashion, then you know it's doubly-maddening. They are purposely opaque and byzantine.

Yet, without our data, they'd have no business.
....good.
> also, obviously, after 20 years you have no more payments.

You have maintenance. And if something bad happens with the foundation, that's very expensive to fix. Unless you just plan to die and have the house demolished and the property sold (which is honestly preferable in some cases of inheritance).

I had to pay $25k to have supports installed in the crawlspace and other mitigation to avoid foundation work. I might have gotten ripped off, and the annoying thing is that I can't know for sure because I'm not informed about foundation work, structural engineering, or other principles.

Simply inheriting a house and trying to sell it turned me off from owning a home in the near future due to the arduous process of paperwork, red tape, maintenance, and a low-liquid market. I'll take a comfortable living van/RV over dealing with real estate again if it means I can reduce the risk of dealing with those things to zero.
Soc sec. number is used as an immutable unique identifier for Americans since that's really the only piece of information that can be used in such a way. I'm not aware of anybody relying on it as a sole means of authentication... if it's used for authentication it's always combined with additional information such as "you had a revolving credit account with: a, b, c, or d".
There are many spots on the Earth with longer LoS views. Here is an interesting list along with photographs people have made of them: https://beyondhorizons.eu/lines-of-sight/

The longest one with a photograph is 443km (275mi).
It's not inconceivable that the courts could prove that the defendant could access data. The data could be on an encrypted cloud drive that the defendant decrypts when he accessed his email this morning.

Or he already stated to Witness that he keeps his bitcoin keys there and he has been trading bitcoins lately according to Exhibit J.
"Just get money for a new device out of thin air and just replace all your paid or even cracked Windows software with subscription-based alternatives that will not work without Internet. Ah, also just relearn all your workflows."

Sorry, but that's how being in a bubble looks like.
How often do you talk to the staff at your liquor store?

The convenience of buying at a corner store at a convenient time outweighs any of those things in my opinion(US, Quebec, some locations in Ont).

With the dollar going back up it'll be better to simply cross the border to buy alcohol and gas again, instead of paying the ridiculous markup.(for context, a 24 of 355ml cans of 'budget' beer is nearly $50 CAD).
OP here. Really surprised at the quality of listings. I love how organic these projects are. A few hidden gems:

1) https://www.youraudiotour.com/

2) https://www.tenantupdate.com/

3) https://fauxbuy.com/

4) https://geoquizbot.com/

5) https://getbetterluck.com/

6) https://codeinperson.com/
That's funny, my takeaway was that the vast majority of the US has incredibly affordable housing.

But I suppose if your call center employees simply must be living in downtown S.F. the answer must be that we just need lax zoning and higher density!
Where are the blockchain proponents? Oh, right, this kind of thing isn't a pyramid scheme. It would be a lot of grunt work and wouldn't be worth a VC investment.
It's something that people don't talk about much, but just the allowed existence of credit agencies violates human/civil rights.

These companies earn revenue by selling access to a database of all humans, which ranks each of us as to how valuable/risky we are to profit off of.

Many companies are starting to make hiring decisions based on this data, and obviously whether or not you are worthy of a loan has been much of the purpose of a credit rating (and these loans are necessary for nearly everyone in the US, unless you're exceptionally wealthy).

Disputing an unfair or illegal mark against your credit is an absurd process with very little recourse.

This is far worse than what the NSA has done, in my opinion, and it continues without much criticism.

Obviously this giant hack of Equifax is a very serious issue. But why should these credit companies be allowed to keep this kind of data about us anyway?
thanks, fixed now
Show HN: derek – a GitHub bot to help teams manage PRs and issues
Also, shouldn't it be "cause losses" rather than "give"? It is unlikely that a corporation doesn't like being given money.
You should make sure your carbon monoxide detector is working.
Is there any possibly that Travis will face jail time?
I was thinking echoing. I don't know how loud a button tone needs to be for the entryphone system to accept it as an instruction to unlock the door.
Scroll to the bottom of TFA to see for yourself.
You also have to factor in the opportunity cost of what you could've done with that down payment (e.g. What would a $100k downpayment invested for 30 years in the stock market be worth vs how much is that worth in your home in 30 years?)

The NYT has a buy vs rent calculator that helps make some of these decisions:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
Nah, Canada is past the free market. We have learned that stricter regulations on addictive substances make society a better place.
He mentions it - https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/app-list/cascade/
> It's something that people don't talk about much, but just the allowed existence of credit agencies violate human/civil rights.

What human right is being violated, and what treaty is that right listed in?
Haha. I meant in all layers of the organization. Could be the IT Security Department, Policy Department, Could be the homegrown development team, anything.
But would it be possible to sell even $42,500,000 of Ripple right now?
This is an oversimplification. The average household has several kinds of debt, and generally debt should be paid down in descending order of interest rate.

More significantly, investment income opportunities need to have their interest rate (or equivalent) assessed. For example, in the past 12 months, the DIA has risen 18%. Thus, if 12 months ago I had money to spare, it would have been better to put the money into DIA rather than make an extra principal payment on the mortgage, unless my mortgage is 18% or more.

With the exception of bonds and CDs, it's not possible to know the investment growth in advance, so that creates some risk of course.
Quantum mechanics is about probabilities. Just because there's an infinitesimally small probability of something being possible doesn't make it a foregone conclusion.
Because in our justice system there are two sides. Prosecution and Defense. It's required (by law) that they both act in the best interests of their client. Those interests include getting experts that support their "truth" and discrediting the experts of the other side.

But,

We offer justice in the USA. We don't (except in limited circumstances) offer free or cheap justice. So, the side with the more money has "unfair" advantage.

This "justice favors the rich" is The Reason consumer protection and other regulation of companies is needed.
What event made XRP increase by a factor of 50 since March 2017, after years of going nowhere?
edit: [there was a typo, now fixed]
Ha, well in non-major cities you're right, but all the major cities cost an arm and a leg for the most part!
Regulators selected and overseen by elected officials aren't a foolproof solution either. Sometimes you end up with Scott Pruitt [1] running the EPA, whose objectives are apparently a) denying that climate change exists, and b) dismantling any environmental protections that businesses find inconvenient.

The self-appointed lawyer regulators at least have an incentive to do their jobs: they get a bunch of money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pruitt
And both were probably illegal at the time. When Social Security was created, people were concerned about it becoming a de-facto national ID system, and it was illegal to use SSNs as an ID for anything other than taxes and Social Security Biz.

Medical insurance companies commonly broke the law but skirted it by saying it was "optional", and of course not telling anyone about the option. At least several times when I applied for insurance, I filled in "Assign ID" and had to correct the first level agent who insisted that I needed to provide and SSN. Patiently insisting that they needed to escalate the call, the first higher-level agents who knew would immediately accept it.

This sort of sloppyness confusing an IDentifier with an authentication has now gotten us into a world of trouble.
Yeah, hopefully this is one of those wake up calls where the management realizes to funnel more resources into IT and security in general.
Let's Read Science “StackGAN: Text to Photo-Realistic Image Synthesis”
Don't forget the roof that needs replacing every 15 or 20 years. Appliances. Furnace. Plumbing. Septic tank. Water lines on your property. Tree removal. Re-decorating and re-modeling. Replacing windows.
Author here, AMA. This is an experiment.
Ha. It's powered by ArcGIS, the Oracle of the mapping world, meaning it's all proprietary, locked down and expensive.

If you want freer alternatives, check out CartoDB, Mapbox and QGIS.
As an aside, the Transition organisation here in the UK back a few currencies, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totnes_pound is well supported, this is not new, here's a good piece on 'time based currency' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system which has some traction in the UK, though their website could do with a little help, http://www.letslinkuk.net/index.htm