skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sincere question about cheques: How do people in the UK (or other cheque-less places) deal with the transfer of large amounts of money between private or nearly private parties?

I own a small business and have worked for small businesses, and it's my experience that checks make the world go around in the woodworking field.

All of the shops I've worked for have paid me by check - nobody wants to screw around setting up direct deposit for one or two employees.

Several of them pay suppliers by check; suppliers don't want to take the hit on credit card fees.

And all of them take checks for payment from customers regularly (and I do to), for the same reason, among others.

The only downsides I see to cheques is that they're insecure and that there might be insufficient funds. If you're dealing with a trusted party (or at least somebody you reasonably believe to be acting in good faith), those are basically non-issues.

The upsides are pretty extensive:

1) They don't require carrying around large amounts of cash

2) They don't require third party cooperation (at least to write)

3) They don't require internet access

4) They don't require any sort of set-up, which reduces the friction for one-time or infrequent transfers.

5) There's basically no fee for the volume we use them in [0] except for buying the cheques.

6) If a payer does bounce a check (unintentionally) the payee can insist on a more guaranteed form of payment in the future. The friction is added to the party that screwed up in the first place.

Edited for formatting and to add:

All of this requires an informal web of trust. I've definitely used cash for one-time large transactions with people I don't have in my network. I've sold a car for cash to a random private person and bought a bicycle with cash from a different random private person, for instance.

[0] My business checking allows enough free transactions a month that I should be covered for a while; if I start exceeding that, I probably won't be super-worried about the cost of the fees)

[1] A buddy worked at a cabinet shop whose plywood supplier wouldn't take their checks. They switched to counter checks or money orders, or something else that guaranteed sufficient funds at the time of issuance. Hypothetically they could have gone to another supplier. In practice, finding a good supplier is a lot of effort, there aren't many in the first place, and word gets around fast if you make a habit of burning people without making it right.
But they hate us for our freedom.
As far as I can tell it isn't a generic fix. They had two functions that always crashed on a misaligned read from __security_cookie so they added a patch that forces the alignment for these functions. Since __security_cookie seems to be a windows specific stack protection mechanism it makes no sense to apply the workaround on all systems. Someone correct me if I got that wrong.
Uber didn’t transform the World. They offered cheaper taxis. Now wework actually transformed the world by bringing cheaper and flashier rental office space which has revolutionized the way most people use rental office space... /s Though in truth, neither did anything of notice. They used VC to undercut the market in a non-sustainable fashion.
As per the other responses, we have to also consider the possibility that we are also just getting better at finding these bugs, and similar bugs would have been found in previous processor generations if we looked as hard and proficiently as we do now.
I don't understand your point. Even the rich will have to pay 13% once they spend the money.
Sadly, our government works for the corporations as much or more than the citizens. It takes constant vigilance and due diligence to stay on top of it as a consumer. Most people probably just don't notice, allowing the problem to continue.
I’m operating under the assumption that the roads in question are already built and that the ongoing cost to maintain them is identical or less than the ongoing cost to maintain them if they were open to all traffic. In other words, no worse than the status quo.
less suspect that someone with actual headphones?
https://youtu.be/Eg34YTF-meA?t=13155
Huh, now there's a name I've not heard in a while!

Thanks for this - £30/35, line rental included? And a static IP? And a lifetime guarantee of static prices (unlike BT's bi-annual price creep to cover their purchase of football-coverage rights or whatever other bullshit it is I have no interest in)?

I think they'll have new customer soon...
Government as venture capitalist- a sure way to lose money and hide corruption. Invest in education. Stop anti-semitism.
Housekeepers and babysitters like to be paid in cash. Sometimes it's more than we have on hand, so we write a check.

I've pleaded with my housekeeper to accept CashApp or Venmo, but he refuses. He wants a check. He's, perhaps rightfully, distrusting of new payment tech.

Babysitters are 50/50 on Venmo.
And oil is much easier to transport over really long distances on tanker ships.
For small businesses, there is overhead in signing a long term lease

That's not how most people use WeWork. 40% in my building (they have 2 floors) are long-term leases from big companies. I don't have anything but anecdotal evidence for my next statement, but I have a lot of data points: the rest are primarily remote workers for non-small businesses.

Of course, there are startups that use WeWork and others. I don't think they're the majority.
The other day I tried reducing the length of a long winded pdf with outline.com It went as well as you'd expect. The site almost broke the link. Hear that HN entrepreneurs? There's an untapped niche for those who can reduce the volume of any technical book by at least 1/3 without losing any info.
Oh, that's right. They got a banking license in one of the EU countries, which allows it to operate as such throughout the EU. If that move was necessary to operate as they do withing the EU, i.e., if they cannot simply be money stores without being a bank even if they're not using fractional reserve, then Facebook too would need to register as such.
Here in Europe I'm mostly aware of rental car companies doing those kinds of things (there's always some extra insurance to be paid on top of the higher price that was supposed to also include reasonable insurance.)
It’s funny you say that, because about 15 years ago I setup a fax to email gateway for a payroll department that had to receive 800 faxed timesheets every two weeks and was always losing them.
> nobody wants to screw around setting up direct deposit for one or two employees

Then it's obviously too difficult to set up in America. Other countries do direct deposit, exclusively.

A company trying to pay in any other way would look very shady over here.
That tells me there aren’t enough such thoroughfares in London, so they’re being funneled from other streets to Oxford St. Also IIRC (it’s been a while since I was last there) the buses don’t yet have right-of-way through the intersections.
I just wish there was TypeScript support.
Oh they do. The most common one is fees for renting a cable modem (which you can avoid by buying, but almost no consumers do). The article cites an "internet cost recovery fee" as well.
Remember, in the US, your TV and internet providers are typically one and the same.
Why would Facebook not have the same level of support as a bank, when they launch Libra? Doesnt seem to be a strong argument.
I can't echo this enough! The one time I had an exceedingly positive experience with a recruiter, the role and company involved had been grossly misrepresented and had a very fractured org (which explained the rushed hiring / recruiting bit).

Good recruiters (i.e. retired software devs will likely not have bad intent or be clueless) will usually mean good, but can still screw you. Otherwise, most recruiters are econ majors or business majors who couldn't fill out excel sheets well enough to find a decent job, so they decided to try "recruiting". "in-house" recruiters, seemingly a new SF trend, generally aren't any more qualified (still have basically zero tech background) and seem to just be trying the hardest to "be cool" and set the stage for an over-blown behavioral interview.
Sure, but does it actually improve things for either side?

That couch business wasted both your time AND the sales rep's time. Who does it help to not post prices?

For B2B, sure, you can't give an exact quote until you figure out the custom logic, but the customer can at least ballpark what long term operation costs will be based on any published pricing you have. I've never talked to a SaaS vendor without some idea of ongoing price, even if we're going to need upfront work that will be priced separately.
Good point, added to to do list :)
> In Amsterdam, trams stops have a platform for people to get on and off. Is that not a thing in other cities?

Almost everywhere platforms in Zurich, but with very few exceptions.

> Also, if the tram stops cars, then cars also stop the tram, which means delays when car traffic is stuck.

Trams in Zurich steer the traffic lights (TF) => when a tram nears an intersection the TF will switch to let it pass and when it nears a section of road which is shared with cars that occupy it, the TF in front of the cars will let cars in front of the tram pass to free that section of street / lane so that the tram can pass as well.
Next, California will ban the Constitution.
From one side or both, faxes usually don’t reach an actual fax machine. eFax has been around for over a decade.
I've had two people ask me for a business card in 10 years. I don't even look to have them made any more.
Taxis only really worked in a few large US cities before Uber.

Now I can get an Uber almost anywhere.
Spam faxes are a huge problem in my experience. It was not worth keeping a fax machine around.
This is a first for me, too. Baby, baby, it’s a wild world...
Interesting how we tend to value life based on intellectual capability. I suppose its an emergent effect of our human-driven empathy.

You could make the argument that being an omnivore is the most "moral" standing (excluding climate effects), as it does not value life based on its similarity to us. It holds life to have intrinsic value.
This is incredibly naive. There are algorithm where CPU but GPU easily. There are also algorithms where a GPU beats a CPU easily. There are also algorithms where an FPGA beats a GPU and a CPU easily. You simply can't say x is better then y in general. They all have their own domains.
What about the US government funding of Fairchild Semiconductor by purchasing chips from it?

What about the US government funding of Palantir via In-Q-Tel?
That happens all the time. With any OS.

On Windows, if you have an application that draws stuff using GDI+ (20+ years technology) then you will discover that it is not moving today on high-DPI monitors. GDI+ is pure CPU rendering and the Moore's is over. GPU rendering is the only option these days.

Yes, GDI+ still works. You see it renders something in your applications on Windows 10. But you cannot use the application on your new cool monitor.

Same with CoreGraphics on Mac. CG is GDI+ alike thing by nature - pure CPU rasterizer. Something tells me that it will die pretty soon too.

Good abstraction/isolation layer is definitely needed for the applications that want to survive on the long run.

As an example, Norton Antivirus started using such UI layer (Sciter Engine - https://sciter.com) 12 years ago. First versions were using GDI rendering backend. Then we added Direct2D GPU accelerated backend. With the same API. Application code and architecture did not change all these 12 years.

Same thing on MacOS. Initially the engine used CoreGraphics. Then OpenGL gfx backend was added. And now we are working on Metal. And Vulkan for these matters.

But API of the engine is the same as it was initially.

TL;DR: Good application architecture is still the thing.
And an ad problem.
We will never have competitive chips that are open down to the transistor and process level.

Down to the RTL, sure. But a truly open competitive chip, never ever.

You might get one on some ancient process from 20 years ago, which will be handily outclassed in every single metric except openness, which people make noise about but don't actually pay for (so no business case).
It’s reasonable to assume if they could have hit a button to demonstrate profitable unit economics or profit in long running spaces, they would have amended the S-1 to show this as the IPO valuation was collapsing.
Looking at TerraPower's website, they're talking about a prototype by the mid-2020s, and they've already been working for 11 years. Would be nice to see this sped up. The Manhattan Project lasted only 4 years. We spend much more time on the ethical, safety, and proliferation considerations than we did back then, of course, and with good reason. But I wonder if this project could use a little Elon Musk hell-or-high-water drive to move it along. I'll probably get down-voted for that, but seems like a discussion worth having.
What's the Tamagotchi to get nowadays (in Europe)? I would like to buy some as gifts. There's a whole bunch of different models and I'm a bit lost.
Ok... Do you realize that productivity has no relation with how hard one works, don't you?
Fuck'em. Just torrent whatever you want to watch.
> with nets being installed due to people jumping out of windows

I see a lot of flak given to Foxconn (maybe because of them being Chinese). What is your opinion on the recent Facebook suicide? Also the articles on mental damage moderating articles in Facebook etc.
Any developing country can do the same as the US: prohibit their own banks from processing transaction to/from Libra. If the US decided not to make such a move, then users in those other countries could probably find work arounds, but it would increase the barriers of entry & probably adoption rates. And the larger adoption rates became, the easier it would be to shutdown major on-ramps & off-ramps from the currency.

As US company deliberately violating financial laws of another country might still come under tremendous scrutiny from US regulators.

Regardless, it wouldn't be perfect, and hopefully would still provide an (albeit difficult) option to avoid massively unstable local currency fluctuations. It would, however, exacerbate those instabilities which may be a net harm for all involved. I don't know though, these are systems complex enough that no single human can hold all of it, and consequences of various actions, in their head.
I'm surprised at the timing of the announcement, given that Mahathir's corruption/embezzlement scandal is still fresh in many people's memory: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/malaysia-najib...
My start-up (now dead) attended the first batch of the MaGIC's Global Accelerator program (GAP) by the Malaysian government in 2017. The talks were bad, the "mentors" were useless and everything was extremely inefficient. Most of the founders who came only stayed for the first few days, realised the situation and dropped their interns for the free co-working space, and left. The whole program smelled like money laundering or nepotism at best. I thought it was satire when I read this headline.

Also, at least >70% of the start-ups in my cohort have died by now. Maybe one or two good ones exited (who were already doing really well before joining).
They probably should’ve started porting their app to web tech 10-15 years ago rather than ranting about progress in native frameworks.
The information is obviously being fed to their servers in real time. The broadcast is what is being delayed...
The whole (US) cable provider industry needs to change. It is so anti-consumer. I was a Comcast customer for over 15 years. Once or twice a year I'd have to spend a couple hours talking to their customer service because they raised my rate, snuck some bogus charge on the bill, or signed me up for something I didn't want. They are borderline criminals.

My experience getting rid of the TV portion of the package was so painful, I cancelled everything instead and switched to AT&T. Luckily, they had recently laid fiber to my house. I was wary as they weren't the best company to deal with back when I had a landline. I figured they couldn't be worse than Comcast though. To my pleasant surprise, they've been perfect. 10/10. Their pricing was transparent and stable. The service top notch. No idea what customer service is like because I've never had to call.

I suspect it is only this good because there's competition here though. So YMMV. I'd love to see a heavy regulatory hand smack the whole industry.
7.1 cheques per household? I understand a rent check, but what are those others? Or, since that's an average, is it that most households write just one, but then enough elderly people are writing checks at the store (that I invariably am stuck behind) that it inflates the average?
Maybe when it's free speech.
Can you write some detailed stories of what led to those dumpsters being destroyed? I think there's not a good understanding of what leads to larger-scale food waste.

For instance, I've seen a few people online pitching "ugly produce" startups. But what prevents Campbells Soup and Jamba Juice from buying all the ugly fruit/veggies?
This is a lot to cover if it's a one year course (unsurprisingly).

I struggled with P/NP and that was in a 3rd year algorithms course.
Just confirming your 10% figure. Across a dozen or so products I've been involved with, the actual labor/SMT assembly costs have been about 10% of the total BOM (bill of materials). Very roughly the cost per component-placement is about 1-cent (USD). My quoted labor rates are about $7/hour, though I see $15/hour at a lot of other factories (and warehouses).
Whether or not they are absurdities is obviously a contention, and hence, whether or not they are being disrespected.

It's not contentious that you should show people you're in discussion with respect, nor that you have not shown said respect.
The company is in Canada (engineering consulting firm, large-scale infrastructure projects - mining etc)

Role is mainly around data/modelling work in water resource group. I have done bunch of tech jobs (from backed development, modeler-ml) - so this is relatively new industry for me.
Does that actually have anything to do with the problem in the article though? It seems like a standard case of opportunists pulling a pump-and-dump scam to get rich at the cost of victims, and in this case the asset was taxi medallions.

You can do that kind of scam on all sorts of things. The guy in the article who took out a loan to buy 15 medallions is an obvious victim of a pump and dump scam: He did something really naive in the hopes of a big investment win. The fact that it happened to be cab medallions isn't particularly important, if it wasn't those it could have been crypto or foreign currency or penny stocks just as easily.
That is pretty brilliant.
WeWork matched short duration assets to long duration liabilities. It was incredibly anti-robust and never going to work.
The Building an Indie Business Podcast- Hire Me
Mirage Men.
Cable, airlines, internet, insurance, food, cellular service, social networks, medical supplies, mattresses, search engines, and many more industries have very little competition. It's absolutely emblematic.
>No, the startup scene is a side effect of a lot of money floating around in a place where there is little job security and surplus of people ready to gamble a couple of years of their life in return for a very small chance at success.

Exactly, although the people you're describing are just the founders. There are people in the startup scene who're employees, and for them, getting and keeping a job at a startup for a couple of years, say, is a good enough launchpad for their careers in the industry.

And there's a surplus of such people that needs to be employed. We're experiencing a glut of highly educated people worldwide and academia simply doesn't have the capacity to absorb them. I think I've read on HN recently that there's more funding for startups than academia overall -- and of course I can't find it again -- but here's an actual comment from HN just two years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15380625

>Of the cohort of PhD students I went through with, from a rough guess (I haven't taken exact count), the most common role is now "startup CEO", followed by "engineer at enviable company", followed only then by "teaching and research academic".

Startups are the new academia.
> Sincere question about cheques: How do people in the UK (or other cheque-less places) deal with the transfer of large amounts of money between private or nearly private parties?
> I own a small business [...] woodworking field.

In Hungary it depends on whether the businesses are trying to evade taxes or not. If yes, cash is king. If no, then just transfer money to a bank account (I guess this is the same as "direct deposit"). All banks have online banking for this purpose.

> [...] setting up direct deposit [...]

There is nothing to set up for a one-off transaction. You log in to the online banking site or use the bank's app. Fill in the recipient's name, account number and amount, confirm with SMS code and it's done.

But it's equally easy to set up a recurring transaction online for every week/month/whatever.
A company is selling a product that provides a clear value to a specific audience; they're likely to be far more responsive and effective than Apple could be.
There is very little competition because the cable companies worked with cities to limit competition by convincing cities that the only way they would build out a cable network is if the cable companies were given a monopoly. It’s ugly. Competition is critical.
So there are no changes to address the privacy issues[1] introduced in Go 1.13. The issue raised[2] about this seems to be stalled as well.

[1]https://proxy.golang.org/privacy
[2]https://github.com/golang/go/issues/33985
I've been fascinated by Sanskrit because some of the words sound so much like old english/germanic. There need to be more study done on indian languages because there have just soo many of them and every region has their own dialects. It's as if the tower of babel incident happened over there.
If only I understood! Please, supply a single example of non-toxic masculinity that doesn't require your redefinition of commonly understood words and maybe I'll be able to understand better. You can hardly blame me for misunderstanding something you fail so badly at elucidating.
Congress members want Zuckerberg, not surrogates, to answer for Facebook’s Libra
I'm sure it depends on the job. I regularly use them at customer and partner events and as a way to remember someone/make a quick note at an event. I do use them a lot less consistently than in years past but I still carry them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6fb59XFbQ (The Net 2003)
One of my favorites was in Final Fantasy VI.

If you cast vanish on an enemy (especially Gabbldegak) then use Relm to sketch the vanished enemy, a number of things would happen.

Sometimes General Leo would join your team, your stats would get pumped massively, and you'd own something like 99 of hundreds of items. Unfortunately, a bunch of graphics could look wrong and your game could spontaneously freeze, or your game state would be erased entirely.

This bug actually played a role in me becoming interested in programming!

https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Sketch_bug
Very interesting post. I was going to cynically ask if this was another 1MDB scam ...
Six of the top ten YC companies were built using Ruby
Except if the new thing flops and the old thing doesn’t die - which is much more common in the Windows world. MFC is mostly dead. So are ATL and WPF. Win32 is still going strong though.
Apps are required to be notarised. You can turn the requirement off, but that doesn't negate its existence.

I hope you and your mother are happy living without open source software. No good deed goes unpunished.