skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: Point (YC W19) – First Debit Card with Points
Hi HN community,

We’re Patrick, Kenan, and Sid, the founders of Point (https://trypointbank.com), a consumer digital bank focused on rewards. After being fed up with the poor customer experience and tactics of traditional banks, we did some digging into why we put up with our own subpar banks. We've discovered that the way most people end up with their current bank is by default (ex: parents set it up for them), rather than by choice. The complete opposite was the case for credit cards; credit cards were actually chosen based on their qualities.

We began to wonder why a solution that combined the rewards and benefits of a credit card, with the simplicity of a bank account didn’t exist. After extensive research and testing of various existing products, we determined that everything came up short for our personal needs. That was the problem.

Whether it was simply the lack of a clean mobile user experience, or rewards that were relevant, nothing managed to fit the bill. Since banks are a fundamental part of our everyday modern lives, we shouldn’t have to settle for a less-than-stellar experience just because that’s the current standard. That’s when we realized, we don’t have to settle. This was an exciting enough realization for us all to quit our day jobs as product managers, designers, and engineers. We decided we needed to create a revolutionary bank.

In order to solve this problem, we created a new-and-improved debit card. We are focusing our efforts on debit because it is currently the most popular payment method. Although debit is the preferred method, in the real world, there is little incentive to use one over the perks offered by credit cards. This unfortunately leads the majority of the dissatisfied group to settle for credit cards, with their offer of limited perks that typically come hand-in-hand with unavoidable debt.

Our business model is sustainable because we are partnered with a smaller regional bank and don’t have the hefty over head of a branch network. The reason we don’t see larger banks offering debit cards with rewards is because of the "Durbin Act”; a federal mandate which slashed interchange margins of banks with more than $10 billion in deposits. This was done in order to protect consumers and merchants from increasing and predatory prices that banks were trying to instill.

If successful in our mission we hope to keep the up and comers out of un-necessary credit cards and raise the standards of user experience for banks. There is no reason why dealing with your bank should be as dreadful as the DMV.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on what we are building and are open to any and all suggestions. Feel free to drop us a line at hello@trypointbank.com and check out our waitlist on our landing page.
This sort of thing where both fans and haters have to talk about the same thing has been very good to AOC and Trump.
> In 1998 I rejected my target school because attending would have cost me a minimum of $12,000/year out of pocket. I stayed local and graduated with no loans. 21 years later, if I started in 2019, I would still graduate without loans from that same school.

In 1998. That's really the crux of your comment. As to the costs of your school in 2019, since you haven't provided a link to back it up, I cannot check your claim.

> I don't have rebuttal to this point, but based on your tone I don't think you have any interest in discussing it in good faith anyway.

I have read countless studies online (studies, not just newspaper articles) and have friends who've moved to and/or lived briefly in the US that have experienced it first hand. Sorry for not showing empathy but when one of the richest country in the world isn't able to provide healthcare for all its citizens, I think something is slightly wrong. Worst yet, the babysteps that have been made during the Obama era are now being rolled back by the Repuplican party. And yet, you're pointing fingers at me like I'm the problem. How about a nice warm cup of reality to start the day?

> "You bet" very wrong. The house I used to have in Dallas is worth $275,000 at the moment. Many of the houses in suburban New Jersey are less than $400,000, and some are even less than $300,000.[1] . Less stock in Maryland[2], but there are still many options.

Fair enough. In that case, I think it's expensive. The same price range gets you a very comfortable flat in Berlin, Germany's capital. [1]

> I'm sure you could, but it would just serve to further demonstrate your bias, condescension, and ignorance.

Still not OK with reality. That's fine, you'll get used to it. We all do after a while. :-)

[1] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/S-T/Wohnung-Kauf/Berl...
It's about the size of a new BMW 3-series, which is definitely practical in European cities.
Almost none of the important stuff. I own most of the books on scientific glassblowing, and they're pretty much all outdated and primarily occupied with information about apparatus design. If you're interested in calculations for distillation columns, designs for multi-stage mercury vapor diffusion pumps, and formulas for silvering glass, the books are great. Otherwise, not so much.

The rest of the knowledge seems to be passed person-to-person, mostly in informal settings. There's a decent program at Salem community college, but it's just too short to become a fully-capable scientific glassblower. That takes about 10 years of full time apprenticeship, which is why the field is dying out.

I've (briefly) studied with some extremely talented glassblowers (Sally Prasch, ...), and I found that helpful, but also most of the learning came from staying up to 1AM trying to replicate something that took them 5 minutes to demonstrate...
> I wish people still lived by the idiom "Don't believe everything you read"

When did they ever?

> It's like social media stopped all forms of critical thinking in society.

Human society as a whole is irrational and does not engage in critical thinking. Small groups of highly focused individuals, or individuals themselves sometimes can, but it takes too much effort most of the time.
Fortunately, nobody is "deleting" the "evidence". It will still be available for trial after Youtube has taken it down.
Post anything even remotely critical of the chinese government and your reddit post will be downvoted and spammed with whataboutism and FUD.

I posted a comment about the forced labor camps of Muslims in china and the same username replied two different times arguing two different things. In one reply the Muslims in these camps were terrorist and had to be arrested for the protection of the chinese civilians and in the other reply saying they're not labor camps they're trade schools to help them get jobs.
Some say that he can make a brick fly using only a banana and a pair of socks and that he's been known to reverse the wind; all we know is he's called the Secret Aerodynamicist.
I think this is an interesting subject, but I would remind everyone of Hacker News' excellent discussion policies on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Agreed. The most charitable view of the GP’s definition, is that few decisions are “intelligent”. In a less charitable view, it’s equating rationalizing with being rational.

His wife had a duty as a parent to call BS.
Jazz music: "cool" criminals pulling off a heist.
Residential water use is a tiny fraction of the states water use.

The drought surcharges are complete and utter bullshit.
uMatrix plus the firefox facebook container plugin goes a long way...
IL2CPP resuses the platform C++ compiler, and Burst builds up on LLVM.

It is not like Unity is building their compilers from scratch.

And the fact that the Insomiatic guys felt it was a good project speaks for it, given how they are respected in the gaming industry regarding engine optimization.

Also some of this work influenced C# 7.x features.
The number of TODO's that litter code in general, or issues file to "cleanup" are generally significant. You're making a great point that accruing technical debt at the cost of safety, is quite possibly technical debt, like all other, that will never be paid down over the life of the software.

I completely agree.
Is being arrested for drunken driving materially different than having not been arrested while drunken driving?

And hasn’t pretty much almost anyone driven drunk at least once?
Reading the article it sounds like the federal government never actually repealed the tax (Clinton vetoed the most recent attempt) but collection was ultimately halted in 2006 as a result of a federal court ruling. I guess the tax did actually go away but it was not voluntary on the part of the government.

Edit: Is this interpretation incorrect or just inconvenient?
Tesla is using the "we're just waiting for regulatory approval"-line for years on their Autopilot page. It's there to hide how far (behind?) development on this tech is.

Seeing how many videos exist of incidents where AP misbehaves (or even actively steers the car into barriers), it seems reasonable to assume that "regulatory approval" isn't the blocking issue for releasing full self-driving. (Could they release this feature with the traditional AP requirements of human oversight?)
Only people who stop at the headline. If you go to the flatearth subreddit they're pretty clear about what they are doing. They don't quite say it explicitly, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to see the game they are playing.

Though I have charitably believed in the past they are mostly having fun with each other rather than trying to troll the rest of the world.
> Regardless of what one believes, posting specifically to inflame or upset people is a form of aggression.

This is a ridiculous, not to mention untenable, position. I take it you never read Socrates? He saw great value in poking and prodding -- being the proverbial gadfly.
Yes, it is different. But how is that important in this conversation. Here the important bit is: have a tool that enables you to test your iOS code on your development machine. Emulation vs. simulation is not generally important in that.

Side note undercutting my point: there are places, like OpenGL where the underlying hardware is significantly better/different and the iOS simulation is not representative of the real environment. Mostly these only matter to high-end games, and there you better be checking regularly on a list of hardware.
> Does Apple's favoritism of its own products on its platform mean competing products cannot exist on the platform, or that they're less capable/visible?

That is what Spotify is alleging, yes.
Spotify also only recently became profitable [1]. I'm not endorsing their extremely low artist payout rates, but it's not because they're greedily hoarding money the way Apple is implying.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18214331/spotify-earnings-...
Yep, that's SOP. Lionize the D's. Brutalize the R's
I appreciate your concern for HN quality, but this kind of comment is the reason why we have a site guideline asking people not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence. If you think you're seeing abuse, the guidelines ask you to email hn@ycombinator.com with specific links so we can look at specific data. We always look. Occasionally we find it, and when we do, we crack down on it hard. But it's rare, unless you count users getting their friends to upvote their startup or whatever, which is a different phenomenon. And the cases we've seen have basically all been of corporate abuse, not nationalistic.

Overwhelmingly the most common case is people accusing others of posting in bad faith merely because the other's view is so far from their own that they can't conceive of them having it for legit reasons. This is a reflexive reaction—a feeling that we all need to recognize and stop ourselves from expressing in raw form. When people vent it into comments, the result is either war between the two sides, or, if one side outnumbers the other, an ugly mob dynamic in which a few people are ganged up on for being different. Those few either leave, or they become resentful and break the site guidelines badly themselves, as a way of lashing back against unfair treatment. All these outcomes poison the community.

Not to pick on you personally—it happens because of how human nature reacts to the weird conditions of the internet, which we're not wired for. It is hard for all of us to grasp how large and diverse the community is, and how divided it is on divisive topics. Nationalistic themes are some of the most divisive ones, and unfortunately are growing more common these days.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Boeing 737 Runaway Stabilizer – Baa Training
> When you see ESPN and Comcast argue...

Important detail you left out: Comcast is a regulated utility.

Things are different at scale. There is absolutely ample precedent for regulating pricing for large scale utilities.
But allocating effort to something is not the same as contributing to the economy. In a way, agriculture contributes the entire GDP to the economy: Without it, everyone starves and there is no economy.
How is that surprising given that shared hardships make people feel closer to each other.
> It's quite possible to support the goal and criticize the players, especially when those players repeatedly fail to execute

Repeatedly fail to execute? They've successfully rolled out several wildly popular fully electric cars. They've succeeded in making electric cars cool.

> And why should Tesla get the credit for making green cars a thing? True credit belongs to Toyota for introducing the Prius 2 decades ago when gas was king and getting consumers to see alternative engines as viable options, and to California for its green vehicles incentives for making possible the financial structure that has kept Tesla alive.

Toyota succeeded on one side of the equation: Creating the first commercially successful eco-car. Tesla succeeded in making them cool, and appealing to people who like cars. You need both of these things if you want to actually replace gas-powered cars.
This is true but the reason people were upset and leaving negative reviews is because the studios and media had already created a fake outrage and stoked political tensions for marketing reasons. That is what people were upset about, not that the movie had a female lead.
I expect this to become explicit in many other forums based on how I know internal mod tools behave.

This is problematic, because it is effectively the same way as saying "this person is a foreigner", and tribal identities overwhelm the initial intention of a information granting doohickey - see the fate of the upvote and downvote button today.
This type of precision in glass making is so cool to see mid-process, great link!
CowToilet, a Toilet for Cows
I think the author’s hypotheticals are off. In a world where blackmail is allowed, I think transparency would just be more normal, and secrets would be more rare. For example, people would be more open about cheating, sexual preferences, etc. I think in that world, along with blackmail, many taboo things would become more normalized.
So, I think a real issue is that it's not made clear how this archive exists. In Citizenfour, it was made clear that Snowden specifically gave the documents to journalists for the purposes of responsible disclosure and reporting. There was the suggestion of publishing the archive in public with all data, but that was shot down as it was too risky in Snowden's eyes.

So the archive is mostly a huge collection of documents that have to undergo editing for opsec reasons, so as to not endanger actual people or reveal enough that it might go from "journalism" to "espionage" that warrants a greater release.

I don't believe the full archive was ever public. Instead, it was privately held and being maintained by people for research and publication. The Intercept winding this down signifies they no longer care to sift through or maintain the documents. That means that the editing part is gone, and they won't devote further resources internally to it. The decision to host the documents isn't the issue -- moreso the maintenance, reporting, and sourcing.
I can't remember where I heard this, but I remember someone talking about creating the process/paperwork for government programs. They were saying that adding multiple steps and verifications atrophies legitimate people way faster than scammers. Scammers just have more patience and resources to spend than people who have a legitimate need.
Debian 10 'buster' is frozen; let's get it in shape
No, not any service. Read the actual proposed section 126a. The service must be related to one of the listed criminal activities to be illegal. In essence, this law is aimed at dark net sites like Silk Road.
Pulldown_cmark 0.3 Release Announcement
"The economic and social isolation, combined with extreme poverty, would be enough to drive many people to suicide"

Don't you think that, for young males, packing their things and moving to say Canada to fight for a better and less isolating life is a better handling of aggression that staying there until they suicide?

Why the passive route?

BTW, you labeled my post as racist and ridiculous (the last one twice). "This is one of the most ridiculous comments I've ever seen at the top of a HN thread" Those are the 2 most stronger arguments of your response. Why this unnecessary agression on your part?
A "one in 10k" coincident would qualify as mildly interesting at most. We run into coicidences all the time and I think it needs to be about 1 in 1000 to even register as a coincident.
1) A quick glance at the Steemit "front page" today (https://steempeak.com/) pretty strongly counters this assertion. Lots of art, photos, travel, music, etc.

Not at all what I would classify as "self-referential."

Perhaps you were only looking at the "Trending" page?
It's far better to see Steemit raw. Steempeak is a nice interface.

2) To understand the business model for any functional currency (STEEM, BTS, Bitcoin, etc.) you need to understand that the true source of wealth is not something external.

Wealth derives from the human soul. Jesus said "What would a man give in exchange for his soul?" Much later, R. Buckminster Fuller observed that wealth is our ability to "live into the future" and it is entirely based on the application of human thought/ingenuity to raw material resources.

Steemit (as any other viable, useful currency) is a "wealth magnet" that transfers existing human capital out of corrupt, inflationary fiat currencies (e.g. $USD) because it is a superior store of value and medium of exchange.

One of STEEM's greatest claims to fame is that it is a (reasonably) stable currency that is free to use and frictionless. Built on a Graphene blockchain, STEEM enables any holder to transfer wealth anywhere in the world, in a matter seconds, with no fees, no hoops to jump through, no questions asked. What other financial instruments can claim as much? And STEEM is tradable on major exchanges, decentralized and otherwise.

Furthermore, as a social media platform, Steemit provides a potentially perpetual free internet archive for content creators. You don't have to secure a domain name; you don't have to pay perpetual fees to maintain your work. The fact that the blockchain not only holds your content, but is the basis for a financial ecosystem, makes its self-perpetuation far more likely than your "average" public site (think Geocities, etc.).

BTW, I am the author of the Chicken article and I would be happy to address any specific questions about the machine and how I created it. Furthermore, you can see an example of what I mean by the archival nature of Steemit by visiting my Steemit Library:

https://steemit.com/a/@creatr/b

I hope this helps explain the present and ongoing value of Steemit. It most assuredly may not be trivially dismissed as a nonsensical "Ponzi scheme" that "suckers" buy into.
Another counter-example to the claim that "there are few/no myths of dangerous (Japanese) creatures:

"Kappa have been used to warn children of the dangers lurking in rivers and lakes, as kappa have been often said to try to lure people to water and pull them in. Even today, signs warning about kappa appear by bodies of water in some Japanese towns and villages."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_(folklore)
I feel like this is one of those ideas that sounds good to Chinese, in China, but will inevitably produce backlash and the opposite reaction in the West.
> That muddies the water a bit; my boss threatened to fire me if i didn't do my job is blackmail under your definition.

“I threatened to quit my job unless paid more,” fits either definition, so the problem isn't just with the revision.
Have you never been to the /pol/ board? 4chan is very much still a hate filled place that encourages harmful actions.
So your response is to find a bunch of features and assign an arbitrary 5% value to each of them and conclude Apple is doing you a favor?

> Apple handles chargebacks/disputes for you.

In many cases they forward the complaint on to you as the developer for "does not perform as described".

> If you ran payment processing yourself through Stripe, you might pay 3%. ... We also have fraud prevention and management, which Apple provides. An app developer never has to deal with fraud on the App Store.

You're double dipping. You already subtracted some money for Stripe, unless you're implying they _don't_ have fraud protection and management?

> Next you have to deal with a CDN for delivery of the purchased app. Where do you store the file? How do you secure it? Who pays for the bandwidth of distributing it? Who maintains that system? With the App Store you don’t have to deal with any of that. I would say that’s worth at least 5%.

Or Cloudflare for $20/mo?

> So the App Store gives you the ordering system, access to many more markets than you’d likely normally be able to handle yourself as well as the aforementioned search and discovery. There is also the trust factor: why would I download some random music player from some random site off the internet? That concern is going to create a high barrier to getting large numbers of people to download the app. Not so on the App Store.

> I would say all of that is worth at least 8%.

Sounds like an artificial barrier to me. "Insert roadblock, charge for roadblock, say I'm doing you a favor". I'm also not sure how you think you magically don't have to do any SEO or marketing just because you're in the Apple Store, let alone that it's automatically worth "8%".

No-one is saying that the Apple Store doesn't add value or manageability.

But I am questioning your magic calculations that just happen to reduce Apple's tax to effectively nothing.

Apropos of anything else, developers handling "millions" of downloads are in the single percent range. And can also afford economies of scale to support things themselves, CDNs, merchant accounts and the like. But instead they have to pay Apple's flat rate.
Yes, however I bet it might fall under 'providing material aid' if provided to a foreign "terrorist" entity.
They should then really say "technology readiness and regulatory approval pending".
I concur, and there should also be a simple UI option to disable both features.
Sure, a lot of them are trolls, probably almost all of them at first. But the problem with pretending to be an idiot is that actual idiots will rally around you and take heart.

Have you seen Beyond the Curve, the documentary about flat-earthers trying (and failing) to prove the earth is flat? You'd need pretty strong evidence to convince me that everyone in the film was in on it.
Good call - RGB greys risk being cold and clinical; a light tint is rarely a bad idea.