skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. Dodd-Frank, the act that created the CFPB, mandates that the fines are deposited into what's called the Consumer Financial Civil Penalty Fund[1].

Money in that fund can be used for only two purposes by law:

1) Compensating victims of the wrongdoing
2) General consumer education & financial literacy programs

The key here is that #1 takes priority by law; #2 only kicks in if the victims are unknown or in a few other edge cases that would make compensation difficult. Victim compensation must always come first. If that drains the fund, #2 never happens[2].

I agree with the others in this thread who have serious problems with regulatory agencies that "self-fund" by using fines to keep the lights on. CFPB doesn't do this -- it cannot do this, even if it wanted to -- and that's what makes it different.

You might remember the debate in Congress over this bill. I was younger then, but still distinctly remember opponents of DF calling for precisely this kind of model during hearings. They were against CFPB receiving operations funding, and frankly I'm glad they didn't prevail. Nobody's issuing excess fines just to keep their jobs for the next fiscal year or levying themselves raises, and consumers get their money back in full. It just seems so reasonable, doesn't it?

[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/payments-harmed-con...

[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2013-10320/p-48
God same for me. I read this post and thought I had written it myself. I'm a very pleasant person to work with, I will never belittle others or be harsh about anyone as a person. I will absolutely say when code/architecture/system is poorly designed, and I will say why. This should be a good thing in our industry, but unfortunately it's not.

If a civil engineer came to a team building a bridge and noticed everyone was building something dangerous, he MUST say something or people will die. Imagine a world where the rest of the team poo poo's him for "not getting along."
>I bet none of those people will be made whole.

At this level of fine? Probably not. $1,000,000,000 is a substantial amount of cash but that would only be ~$37,000 a person if 100% of the fine went to the only the victims who lost their vehicles. Certainly enough to replace a lost car but far from adequate to cover damages from the effects of losing a vehicle and living with that repossession on your credit history.

And that doesn't even account for that 27,000 was only the number that suffered repossessions, not the number victimized by Wells Fargo.
This was originally created at UC Santa Barbara: https://tia.ucsb.edu/about-tia/success-stories/shadowmaps/ I've seen talks at academic conferences about the techniques over the years, but there's just been silence from Uber. Great to see they can talk about their work more publicly now.
the modern English accent would sound completely foreign to the English of the 1700's

The accent on Tangier Island in Virginia[1] is said to be the closest living pronunciation to Elizabethan English, and based on that I think some mutual understanding could be wrangled.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E
Adam Smith said that when people want to earn more money than needed for a physically-comfortable existence, it is to achieve esteem over others.

Note, by the way, that there is also esteem from being similar to others who like you, and esteem from meeting an absolute standard that others might or might not match too.
It is: it's called "renouncing your citizenship and moving to Somalia". Go ahead!

Oh, you meant to say that you want to be able to object to taxation but still freeload on all the benefits. Sorry, no.
I think the real problem is that we, as a society, have lost the ability to manage. Agile being associated with these problems is a symptom, not the cause. It won't fix bad developers and it won't fix bad management. But if the developers and management are good, then it can work fine.
Good points in general.

>What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society,

Yes, very true. Seen stuff like this myself. A couple of examples:

1. When living in Bhopal (city in central India) in teens, I used to frequent auto mechanic shops to get my bike or jeep fixed. Over many such visits over years, I was often amazed to see the way they innovated and managed with less resources, scrounged, adapted, etc., to get parts, to fix things, etc. I remember multiple cases where they were fixing a vehicle problem and needed a rod or wire or screw, and would just look around a bit, and almost inevitably would find some piece of metal nearby that fit the need, and make use of it, maybe with a bit of tweaking, such as filing, bending or hammering it. Of course, in a mechanic's shop you expect parts and scrap to be lying around, but still, it was uncanny. In North and Central India they use the word jugad a lot (some spell it jugaad, and it has a Wikipedia entry too, IIRC), for this ability or approach (not just related to mechanic's work but for anything in life), and that is what inspired me to name both my blogs "jugad", since the broad topic of both is software innovation. The older one, jugad's Journal, which was at jugad.livejournal.com, is not available now, after LiveJournal was acquired (except maybe via the internet Archive), but I've been blogging at the newer one, jugad2.blogspot.com, since 2008, except for some gaps.

2. In Pune, once, I was looking for C. K. Prahlad's book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid". [1] I first went into a well-known bookstore, Manny's, and asked the salesperson there for it. He had a lackadaisical manner and almost did not bother to reply, just mumbled something. maybe saying no.
Then I went out and just nearby, saw a bookstall on the footpath. I mentioned the book to the guy. Not only did he know the book title, he also knew the author's name, and mentioned a few other books by him. He then said he did not have the book right then, but could arrange to procure it in a few days. Sure enough, when I went back there a few days later, he had the book available, in the original, and I bought it. Very enterprising people, they often are, the roadside vendors and such, often more than more privileged people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_t...
Yes. This is the difference in perspective between a company founded by a technical person (or someone who has a competent technical "right hand") and one founded by a non technical person. A company can succeed for many years, 10+, with a non technical person. At some point the decisions made and the shortcuts will start to catch up.

Having worked on legacy code bases with version control you start to see patterns. While there are definitely those decisions made because they were required at the time there are also definitely those individuals who obviously were out of their depth or were willing to "hack it" to get it to work. And a lot of times, they are lauded as being "A+ top producers" when the reality was they just did it faster than everyone else because they didn't think about long-term quality.

The story version, I see in terms of manufacturing. If I was working with a parts supplier and asked for them to deliver a part I needed. The requirement was as fast as they could do it. They make good on the delivery. From a business perspective everything is great. We're making sales and we met our deadlines. The supplier was great in helping us out. Suddenly three years into our five year warranty parts from the supplier start failing (performance problems and fragile releases). It becomes obvious there's a major quality problem in the parts that were manufactured. We talk to the parts supplier but they've gone insolvent (the software engineer left the company). Suddenly we need to hire a new parts supplier (a new software engineer with years of experience) to rush the replacement parts that are required to meet our warranty. Which, (hopefully) having learned our lesson are paying the higher rate (proper compensation and reasonable time for quality) to guarantee a quality replacement part to prevent the loss of profits of another round of extended warranty replacements. At this point the company has just cost itself both monetarily and potentially in reputation by making the original decision to fast-track production to "get to market".

I recognize that the scenario above isn't software. It's a physical thing that's gone out into the world out of the control of the company that created it. But fundamentally the same trade-off of "deliver it now" vs "deliver it right" is made. And often made by people who don't never consider the long-term costs (technical debt) because "that's not now, that's in the future". And people will often rationalize their decisions in these situations. The often spoken:

Over confidence
"That happens to other companies, we'll be successful."

Lack of understanding
"I don't care about the outcome, we need it now."

Individual worship
"John said we could do it, so we're doing it."

Punting
"We'll deal with it once we have slack time."
But was it a fun memory for your parents? I remember renovations being exciting too but the reality of looking after children with an unsafe house, no proper kitchen or bathroom etc, gets old really fast.
> The lesson I learned was that the guy who was there before me almost always developed what he did under the gun and took on technical debt to make it happen.

The number of times I've spotted some terrible bit of code then go through the version control system to try to find out more of why that moron did what he did only to discover that I wrote the code is embarrassingly large.
> The intended purpose of "legalease" is to eliminate ambiguity and to clearly outline terms and conditions, however it's often used to introduce ambiguity and obfuscate the actual intent of terms and conditions or to redefine existing known and understood laws.

Brief plain English would be about as bad. English with similar verbosity would be much worse. Obfuscating meaning in colloquial English is so trivial it happens on accident when communicating through text on a regular basis.

I'm not arguing that legalese is good, I'm just arguing that it's better than English, specifically because terms have been carved out over time to mean very specific things when used in a legal contract, and that provides for less ambiguity. It does require foreknowledge, but so does every sufficiently complex topic.

> "Legalese" is a programming language that allows unsafe pointers.

With regard to clarity, if legalese is C, English is dictating pseudocode to someone else who is translating to assembly on-the-fly.

> Pretty much everything we advocate against in a programming language is permitted and encouraged in "legalese".

So let's make it better! But coming up with a more specific legal language will require even more training to understand than is currently required, and that's the opposite of making it easily understood by the average person.

My own comparison would be that Legalese is like Perl. It is familiar enough that most laypeople can look at it and get a good idea of what's going on, but it's definitely easy to write in a way that is nigh incomprehensible, either by accident on on purpose. In addition, the familiar appearance of the language hides some advanced conceptual differences that bite the unaware (context in Perl, specific meanings of common terms in legalese).

A new version of legalese might be more akin to Rust or Haskell. Very specific, very exact, but it requires much more up-front learning to understand exactly how everything works and what it means.

In other words, the learning curve would be steeper but the dividends paid for learning it would be greater.
Speedsums
Remember: This isn't the Trump administration. This results from the regulation that was put in place and the enforcement that was started before, and that his administration is busy trying to deconstruct.

Setting the political aspect aside, there seems to be a broader consensus that this "bankster" behavior is bad and needs to be reined in.

And investment depends upon a certain degree of stability as well as reliable financial and legal systems.

How this behavior is handled -- or not -- has more of an impact, down to start-up ventures and their environments, than people sometimes stop to think about.
Depends on what it is and how complex it is. Depends on how explicit the variables and functions can be named. Depends on whether the thing I want to express is a how or a why or a how to use. Depends on if it's a public API or an internal helper used in one place with an unambiguous name. Depends on whether the audience are first year CS students, 50 year old business majors, senior developers with years of experience, or all of the above.

Always do X, never do Y rules are rarely helpful.

Does the comment here really help with your understanding of the code? If you're just now being exposed to programming then it's not enough detail, if you've been programming for 20 years it's far too much noise.

// Assigns the value of the expression 4 + 5 to x
// where 4 and 5 are integer literals
// and + represents the mathematical process known as addition.
// This allows us to later refer to x by name, where it will be replaced by the value defined here.
x = 4 + 5;
Perhaps renice your job so that others don't complain about their noisy neighbor.

renice 19 -p $$ > /dev/null 2>&1

then ...

Use tar + xz to save extra metadata about the file(s), even if it is only 1 file.

tar cf - ~/test_files/* | xz -9ec -T0 > ./test.tar.xz

If that (or the extra options in tar for xattrs) is not enough, then create a checksum manifest, always sorted.

sha256sum ~/test_files/* | sort -n > ~/test_files/.sha256

Then use the above command to compress it all into a .tar file that now contains your checksum manifest.
As far as I'm aware those type of contracts do not hold up in court. (At least here in Ireland) Its well known by both parties that in 99% of cases the consumer will just click 'agree' without reading it in order to get access. So as far as the judge is concerned it doesnt exist.
Don't think anyone is, I thought there was a hacker news story on it but I could not find it with search, sorry.
Verge Has Partnered with PornHub
Show HN: Honest customer feedback, online reviews and referrals, on automation
Credentualisn hasn't gotten so bad that if I see a resume with certifications, I take that as a negative signal when I am interviewing candidates.

On the other hand, I've done a few certifications in my day but mostly to force myself To learn something. I usually leave the certifications off of my resume because of the stigma. I will talk about projects that I've done using the technologies.
I deleted all my Mint stuff years ago just because of the security concerns. If you mention the security concerns on Hackernews, a Mint employee typically replies with a link to the wikipedia page on their patented security model. Still, I'd rather not type all my bank passwords into an Intuit website.

I like your concept of the multiple credit/card style budgeting. That makes a lot of sense. There are even some of those multicards out there with an e-ink display to select different cards. A bank could just issue one of those for a fee where you can select the account (and have a way to transfer money/items around if you select the wrong budget option).

Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type (grocery, gas, etc.) but it does require you make all purchases with your Discover card, which a lot of people simply don't take.
Humans adapt to their environments? What's next? The tibetans and sherpas have adaptations to high altitude? The inuit have adaptations for the cold? Norse have adaptations for low levels of sunlight?

Is this really "news"?
For those interested, Sam Harris’ podcast (Waking Up with Sam Harris) has an episode with a Geoffrey West which is superb - one of the best episodes on that podcast. Also, Geoffrey West has a great TED Talk.
It's not that easy. 5G uses spatial multiplexing so multiple devices can send/receive on the same frequency bands at the same time without interfering with each other (4G also supports this to a lesser extent already).
This article again? In my opinion, this article is biased. The subtext here is that the author is claiming that his "lzip" format is superior. But xz was not chosen "blindly" as the article claims.

To me, most of the claims are arguable.

To say 3 levels of headers is "unsafe complexity"... I don't agree. Indirection is fundamental to design.

To say padding is "useless"... I don't understand why padding and byte-alignment that is given so much vitriol. Look at how much padding the tar format has. And tar is a good example of how "useless padding" was used to extend the format to support larger files. So this supposed "flaw" has been in tar for dozens of years, with no disastrous effects at all.

The xz decision was not made "blindly". There was thought behind the decision.

And it's pure FUD to say "Xz implementations may choose what subset of the format they support. They may even choose to not support integrity checking at all. Safe interoperability among xz implementations is not guaranteed". You could say this about any software - "oh no, someone might make a bad implementation!" Format fragmentation is essentially a social problem more than a technical problem.

I'll leave it at this for now, but there's more I could write.
Physicist here, so of course I've heard of ORNL, as well as been there. I did not know that ORNL was not on the GS pay scale, which is interesting.

I think you may get more responses if you change your headline to something like "Ask HN: Software Engineers, your opinion of Oak Ridge NL?". The software folks may not be aware that you are asking them. You could possibly even call them developers, but I'm not sure which crowd you are aiming for.
Russia Blocked Telegram Because Crypto 'is Uncontrollable,' Says FSB Memo
I've heard it said that people change their spouses more often than they do their banks.
Sorry - I should have been a bit clearer.

I was experiencing some errors on the website (i.e. songs not playing and showing a red x). When I looked into the browser console, I saw, among an error and some warnings, this URL. I shortened it a bit, because HN automatically translates URLs into proper links, which might or might not be a good idea here.
besides the lower prices due to operational efficiency that you mention, it's probably about having a different marketing mix (the 4 Ps--product, price, placement and promotion) to attract a different cusotmer segment. many of their customers probably don't even know or care that the sub-brand is owned by a high street bank. the sub-brand might also be part of a strategy to funnel younger, new customers into the fold.

i'd say the main reason the main banks don't have good customer service is that they simply don't have to, and the actors therein have selfish aims. the fiefdoms of the large organization will typically divert resources to themselves (increase revenue, decrease operational expenses, and increase managerial compensation/headcount). consumer inertia allows this to happen (which is why i advocate moving away from big banks to promote competition and better service).
Depending on the code, it can be freaking hard to track down what that 'i' means, especially when someone writes a coding standard (or a language) where it requires all variables to be defined at the beginning of the function instead of close to location of use.

on the other hand, if it was named something like number_of_records it would be clearer.
The situation you outline above is illegal under Dodd-Frank, the act that created the bureau.

Those who designed the agency were worried about precisely this kind of perverse incentive structure & required that it distribute all penalties back to consumers.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/payments-harmed-con...
Sounds like a perfect storm of terrible experiences. I've used them for over a year without any issues. Hopefully I don't come across the same experience you had.
Did dear leader buy his team a subscription to 2600?
Given that we don't know what his private conversations look like now, and that his actions still seem to support that position -- it's at least relevant. Deleting all Facebook executive messages by exception alone makes me think this wasn't the worst thing that could have been found.
Everybody forgot Google Wave.
I agree with you on most things but not the last part. Have you even seen Indian Engineering/Medical entrance exam questions? North American high school exams are a joke compared to Indian Engineering Entrance tests. And IITs are good schools. They aren't ranked as high because they don't fulfil the breadth requirements for those ranking studies. They are purely engineering schools.
Wow talk about drinking the kool-aid.

Dispensaries legalized in their respective states continued to be raided and robbed throughout the Obama administration, one has only to witness such a scene, where local police and sometimes even elected officials look on, as the federal government marches in and destroys a legal business.

Marijuana law up in smoke as agents raid dispensaries

https://mg.co.za/article/2008-08-11-marijuana-law-up-in-smok...

there was no 'resistance' back then because Obama was the chosen one, who would lead us all into a golden age. Well, Obama's gone, and he didn't change shit in regards to drug laws, or at the very least neutering the DEA.

However, aside from my arguments from very limited first hand experience, there is also, oh right, all those pesky facts. Poor, powerless Obama, he's a victim!

Obama’s War on Pot | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/obamas-war-pot/

(you can google search statistics yourself. i'm not going to list out links to someone who is clearly stuck on "talking points" from some publicist.)

However, he loved using the DEA as tool when it suited him:

The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obama-hezbollah-d...
Ask HN: Best jurisdiction for blockchain projects doing a token sale in 2018?
We've spoken with 17 different law firms in 5 different jurisdictions (USA, UK, Malta, Switzerland, Estonia).

It's difficult to get a clear picture of what the most future-proof jurisdiction is because answers you can get for free are limited and many law firms cannot share the list of projects they've worked on.

Right now Estonia seems like the most regulated and transparent option (Estonian FSA official guidelines: http://www.fi.ee/index.php?id=22715)

Is there anyone willing to share their experience here or privately about the jurisdiction they chose to conduct a token sale and key aspects of the decision?

Thanks in advance,
The battery argument is just misinformed. The real reason Google dropped XMPP was not a technical one. Yes, Google claimed it was not "cloud ready" at that GoogleIO. The same one where they announced Google Cloud Messaging, based on, wait for it, XMPP.
Oh my god, can we have one article on this topic without this comment? The whole problem is that 99% of websites people visit come with trackers.
But how the tool they use to do so is designed matters!

If there is too much friction then people simply won't adopt it
Whether or not they care about your beliefs and opinions, simply asking about social media is a sneaky way to filter/discriminate based on age.

Failing to supply a Facebook/Twitter profile indicates you're either antisocial (poor cultural fit) or old/mature/wise (pick your adjective) enough to know better. The ideal demographic has no problem participating in and sharing this information.