skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is a duopoly like Visa/Mastercard allowed to make acquisitions in its own space?
Reporting back information on your home network?
I really enjoy instances where a tradition/belief/superstition results in a beneficial outcome for scientifically-verifiable reasons - especially when they're a shortcut or heuristic for that reasoning.

My go-to example - I have heard it said (I'm no expert!) that Feng Shui teaches that one should arrange a room such that a dragon could flow through it comfortably. Even if a dragon never materializes in my room, visualizing that occurrence helps to sub-conciously prompt for clear walkways, sightlines, and other aesthetically pleasing properties.
Leaving sex out of the equation was an unfortunate oversight.

STDs cause a lot of grief and arguably as much or more damage than diet. AIDS speaks for itself; herpes is implicated in Alzheimer's, heart disease and other ailments and is just a general curse without the modern antivirals (although many persons are naturally immune); gonorrhea and syphilis continue to mutate to new drug-resistant forms.
no one suggested that it was.

my point is that it's clearly not a dying dinosaur of a company. if anything, Visa has too much power in our financial system as more transactions are non-cash and non-ACH based.
Even if the accusations were completely false (which seems unlikely) you've got to feel for the new CEO. Hired in to wright the ship, taking the big step up to CEO. Now the woman accused of being a terrible boss is going to be his boss, he's basically been demoted and now he's going to be thrown into the middle of this situation where there's clearly going to be animosity between the founder and the employees who clearly want her gone.
I must say I was quite surprised when I read this comment. In Germany we have FinTS [1] with an open specification and I'm not aware of a single bank that doesn't support it. It's been around since 2002 [2] and is based on HBCI, which became available in 1998 [3].

I suspected it might be different elsewhere, but I had no idea that the situation was so dire that you had to actively go looking for a bank with an API.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Transaction_Services (German)

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebanking_Computer_Interface (German)
Good old GruntPage and Screamweaver. I miss the late 90s/early 2000s internet. As a web dev I cited the fact that I wrote HTML by hand as a competitive advantage -- my work loaded faster. In the days of dialup that was still a big deal.

Today, web developers still don't write much of their own work; they delegate that to JavaScript frameworks and components.
This is not correct. Studies have clearly shown that if you give someone a moderate dose of ranitidine, the NDMA levels in their urine skyrocket. upwards of 400 times higher if I remember correctly. This is higher than in people who have bladder cancer due to schistosomiasis, a disease causing increased levels of NDMA in the body.

There are somatic processes, likely starting in the stomach and concluding in the liver, which are efficiently converting ranitidine to NDMA. Here's just one study. https://academic.oup.com/carcin/article/37/6/625/1744630
From a public health standpoint it sounds like your pet peeve is that people don't tolerate "smoking in moderation".
> similar devices with dedicated SIM cards and cellular modems that can't be disabled.

All such radios can be disabled, if not by removing the antenna, then by enclosing it in a faraday cage. It is chilling, though, that these things may become necessary for basic things like appliances.
Harder to have the same growth rate coming from a much higher base (already being worth about $100 billion five years ago)
Looks like it's official: https://blog.plaid.com/plaid-and-visa/
CSS and JavaScript Not Working on Techcrunch.com
> Or am I just a lemur trying to figure out how an airplane works?

Unfortunately yes, all of us are.

This is not a problem with physics or abstractions. It's a problem with our intuition. Our intuition is based on evolution and life experience, which is all formed based on mostly solid objects from 1cm to 100m moving at 1m/s to 100m/s.

The universe however does not care what meatbags can experience with our senses. It doesn't mean that our complex math abstractions are necessarily correct - but they are more correct than casual intuition. You can train that intuition with enough work with the maths.

For example, you can map most of basic electricity to water flow and pressure, and some electromagnetic waves to waves in water - but you need to make a small jump to abstraction to combine both, and a large jump to get a gut feeling for special relativity to "feel right".

The crazy part is really that mathematical abstractions exist for all these things at all. There seems to be no natural reason that physics should be describable by small elegant formulas at all, let alone our experience of throwing rocks into a pond. Why isn't particle physics as messy as organic chemistry?
Mind sharing what tests your ran & with which setup? Thanks!
This isn't an exact answer, but the article links here:

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/

That page has some dietary recommendations:

- Eat more fibre (at least 30g a day)

- Cut down on saturated fat

- Get your 5 A Day (servings of fruit and vegetables)

- Cut down on salt (no more than 6 grams a day)

- Eat fish (at least twice a week)
I'm not sure what you mean by "nested function" as a cleanup mechanism, and couldn't find a mention of state machines for cleanup purposes either (but maybe I'm searching for the wrong keywords). Is there existing open source code where these can be found, or do you have a link to an explanation for these?
Looks like the acquisition price is $5.3 billion[0], so it looks like it's a real winner for its investors.

[0] https://www.streetinsider.com/Corporate+News/Visa+%28V%29+to...
The New York Public Library Calculated Its Most Checked-Out Books of All Time
I'm about 70% down the page, and this is the best comment I've read so far. I think you should write a book, and/or a blog. I'd read it, anyway. :)
The specific question is:

> Overall, how would you rate -- [the quality of healthcare you receive/your healthcare coverage] -- as excellent, good, only fair or poor?

That's quite obviously asking people to rate it on an objective scale, in comparison to some perception of "what it should be." Interestingly, half of privately insured were even "satisfied" with the cost.

> Likewise, do the want to drive everywhere because they've not built working public transit? Or do they actually want to spend $4-8,000 a year on buying, maintaining, fueling, insuring, licensing, and storing a car (Times two for two-car households)?

People like the idea of transit in the abstract, but tend to reject it when faced with balancing their other wants and needs. There's a handful of cities with decent transit (New York, Chicago, Boston, DC), but ridership peaked in all of them in 2014-2015: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattle-area-transit-ridership.... The only major city where ridership is growing is Seattle, which has the benefit of starting from a very low baseline.

Moreover, New York, Chicago, and Boston are all losing domestic residents to other cities: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/04/2-very-different-migr.... DC is growing, but Metrorail ridership has been declining for a decade, ever since Uber/Lyft became available. Most domestic migration is to cities with poor or non-existent transit, like Dallas, Phoenix, etc.
> Ok, now you seem to be intentionally mis-reprenting the facts.

> Assange had already been questioned about the case, denying the allegations. Later, Assange _asked_ to be interviewed by prosecutors before leaving Sweden. He was told (through his lawyer IIANM) that he could just leave, without having been interviewed.

No, it's just that when I'm presented with the well established facts [i] Assange met with Swedish prosecutors in Sweden on more than one occasion and [ii] Assange left the country and refuses to return, going to extreme lengths to do so, I am more inclined to believe the prosecutor's account that they communicated that he should show up to the police to be charged and he left the country instead instead than Assange's insistence that they only wanted a nice cosy chat and he was desperate to see them and leaving the country on the same day was coincidental and we definitely shouldn't read anything into the extreme lengths he's taken to avoid returning since. It doesn't help that Assange's Swedish lawyer was forced to admit in court that he wasn't telling the truth when he said the Swedish prosecutor didn't contact him during the week Assange left the country (and to change his story to 'actually I just couldn't get a message to Assange in time')....

> You realize this does not even make sense, right?. There is no need for a second questioning (and probably not even a first) to be able to charge or arrest a person for suspicion of having committed a crime. If the charge or arrest is contingent on the suspect providing certain information, then - the prosecutor can't know in advance whether or not they will charge or arrest.

See above. I'm afraid that I am more inclined to believe Swedish prosecutors' explanation that under Swedish legal procedure a formal charging procedure is made in person, with an internationally valid arrest warrant being issued if they refuse to show up, than the arguments of a random person on the internet whose grasp of Swedish legal procedure is probably not the best...

> I believe you mean the closing and re-opening while Assange was still in Sweden? Or are you talking about the events of 2019?

Both actually [with different lawyers]

> Add the UK authorities _known_ external pressure as far as the extradition request is concerned and the suspicions lead towards joint US-UK interests.

And the women's interests? Or do they not matter?
How complicated is the structure of these HTML pages? This sounds like something that could be accomplished with a limited amount of JavaScript.
Actually I think there is an easy answer: Security. One is willing to experiment and fail if one is confident that it will be safe to fail.
The lack of u'' in early versions of Python 3 is a valid complaint, but it's a separate one.

It's also not that big of a deal in practice, because you could always write a helper function like u('foo') that would call unicode() on Python 2, and just pass the value through on Python 3. This only breaks when you need a Unicode literal with actual Unicode characters inside, which is a rare case - and should be especially rare in something like Mercurial.
Yeah I just link one of those Intel NUC boxes to my TV and do everything through a real OS
JS can be a highly supported tool, but it isn't itself a primitive use-case. It is an enabler of use-cases and, to OP's point, JS for the sake of loading JS isn't useful if the content of the site really didn't need it.
Too bad no major internet company wants to implement a new version of TCP. We can’t even get IPv6 done after 15 years.
Sounds cool. How easy is it to do what I talk about in the blog post and send it a URL from my phone?
So... what do you want? A government program to promote the joys of being a housewife? Do you really think that will move the needle on a systemic socioeconomic issue?

Or would you rather see an authoritarian solution? I'm sure that will go over well.

Keep in mind regardless of what you want as a woman, there's very real economic risk to being dependent on a man. Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you. It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him.

Meanwhile, for those who are in the money with well-paying careers and considering quitting work to settle down, the opportunity cost of leaving behind your career is enormous: you are leaving tons of cash on the table even if you plan to rejoin the workforce later (as your career is not progressing for N years), you are giving up your dreams of vacationing abroad for maybe 18 years, and so on.

And this is all assuming the man even makes enough on his own to pay for the family. Many households simply require two paychecks in today's economy, and what you want as an individual will be trumped by the cost of rent every time.

I happen to agree that there's nothing wrong and nothing subservient with being a housewife. But to sum up such a complicated and vast socioeconomic development as merely "shaming two or so Western generations into believing that the life of a housewife is menial and subservient" is patently ridiculous.
Thanks for the reference! I looked it up and yes, the Sharpe Ratio pretty closely encodes what I think I meant by "how well it outperforms an index fund".

I'm pretty conservative when it comes to gambling my own money so I doubt I'd ever go near a hedge fund. Since getting involved in a debate on here about the Kelly Criterion I've wondered on-and-off what the best way to bet is, if you want to maximise the bottom 5th percentile of your profit.
The problem was that android makers were cooking these apps into the core OS build. Without root you couldn't disable them. An initially it was to allow for custom needs to be implemented, but they of course took advantage.

Google added a disable feature. Funny thing is you can disable the disable feature for certain apps.
No. Most NATs handle UDP sessions trivially as long as one end of the connection is not behind a NAT itself. Tricks like UDP hole punching are necessary only between two endpoints that are both behind NATs.
I believe they're referring to a 10 ft UI, meaning optimized for viewing from 10 feet away (bigger text, not requiring precise mouse clicks, etc).
Well, yeah, but that's bypassing the package manager. You can say that in response to pretty much every argument about "I don't like package manager X because Y".
But then what does that "healthy middle" actually look like without reverting the doubling of supply of labor?

I think you are overgeneralizing about "human nature" and under-valuing people's choices, based on what you're reading/hearing/seeing about one particular group of people.

It seems like you're suggesting "pushing" this group back into the rat race because of genetic disposition to respond to competitive pressure, but I'm highly doubtful that people who are already voluntarily dropping out of the competition/rat race, who aren't chasing the cars/glory/money/women/whatever, are going to be well-served by that.
I don't think "smoking in moderation" is the best answer for anyone for any reason. Stress can be dealt with in many many ways that are better for your health than tobacco.
Do the early employees get a huge payout on their options?
I would imagine it would be possible to set up their system such that they could edit the Markdown file, and a helper process would immediately pick up that the file had been edited and re-run the local rendering to static HTML.
Hmm, y'know what, I'm now reconsidering that part of my post.

Setting an alarm clock is definitely not coding. All the instructions are built into the clock:

if (currentTime == alarmTime) {
soundAlarm();
}

All the user does is set the value of alarmTime, a single variable.

But, what if the user can choose from a set of alarm sounds? I feel like that's still not coding, but I also can't describe how it's different from IFTTT.

There's a spectrum here for sure—any time you interact with a computer, you're giving it instructions. I was thinking about this in terms of the mindset required. When I volunteer at GWC, there's a very specific skill that I see the students coming to grips with over the course of the class. I don't have a word to describe it.
Is the viral non-ad ad the future of advertising?
Are you aware of any that support the "play this URL" use case I talk about in the blog post?
The very purpose of JavaScript is to be dynamic and changing. "Primitive" and "Basic" are not apt adjectives, especially when the page in question is entirely static.
In theory, you could use OFX, which is an open standard that powers the "Download transaction" feature of Quicken/MS Money

In practice, banks never tell you the address of their OFX server and you have to rely on community compiled database (eg ofxhome); many banks' implementations are iffy; some banks even charge you for enabling OFX support on your account. In the end it's just so much easier to outsource this to Plaid, which is why they are a billion dollar business.
If I actually live longer I don’t care if it was the placebo effect or not.
Open Banking is a sham. It mandates account access for "AISPs" which need to be registered, audited, etc which is unfeasible for a solo developer especially when releasing a free/open-source product. Worse, it doesn't actually mandate your access to your own account, so that still depends on the bank. The modern banks provided APIs even before open banking so we're good, but the legacy ones still don't provide personal APIs.
Every time you get in your car, you take the risk of causing a fatality to another driver or pedestrian. Have you sworn to walk everywhere? Real life carries risk. The rational behavior is to consider cost/benefit and make an optimal decision.

The car exec is pinching pennies to buy a yacht. I'm talking about switching to nuclear power to save potentially millions of lives with a marginal risk to a small number of people in the future.

It's like the infamous train problem, where you must choose between one life or multiple lives. Except in this case it's quite unlikely that future lives will be significantly impacted by nuclear waste.

To simplify further, you have 3 options:

1. Do nothing and allow continued fossil fuel related deaths and the likely progress of climate change

2. Ignore nuclear, bet on renewables, which have their own cost and may not come online quickly enough to avert global crisis.

3. Switch to nuclear yesterday, save millions (or billions) of lives from climate change and pollution, with a tiny risk to some future civilization.

Yes, the executive and I are both thinking "coldly", but the difference is that he is optimizing for pennies, whereas I am optimizing for lives and environment.
Yeah, I was around for the sidelines of PEP-461, reintroducing % onto the bytes type, trying to get things done behind the scenes, and it was just a miserable experience all around. I don't think anybody cared to understand our concerns about why we should bother making the bytes type useful. At times it seemed like they believed leaving in the concatenation on the bytes type was a mistake.

Read through the receipts here: https://bugs.python.org/issue3982
You fundamentally misunderstood what I said.

I agree with you, treat your software like a pet.

I am saying though, treat your infrastructure like cattle.

Infrastructure problems <> Software problems.

So yeah, if you have severe bugs in your app, go ahead and fix it, but that has nothing to do with Kubes or not Kubes anymore.
> Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty.

Interestingly, apparently in the UK (or maybe EU?) there's a defined period an appliance is required to work for, to be "fit for purpose". Note - not a warranty thing, it's a consumer goods thing.

Not living in the UK any more (thanks Brexit), so don't remember off hand the period of time though.
In the UK I'd suggest Monzo or Starling Bank.
It seems that even social smoking has a sognificantly negative impact on your health. I’m not sure the same is true with alcohol.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865193/
Thanks for the pointer, adding it to the article (with credits)
"All's well that ends well" neglects the costs to the community of bad decisions. It also encourages people to think that those decisions must not have been very bad, and not learn from those mistakes.

You can see that at work in the responses here. "And I still feel it was the right move. Somehow Python is even more relevant today than it was when this painful process began." I.e. success is thought to justify every decision made along the way.

I see this fallacy at work in Linux too. "Linux is successful, therefore haphazard CI and using email to track bugs and patches must be a fine way to operate".
What a weird title for an article. It's basically a very bizarre way of talking about word of mouth. I feel like good business people/salesman have been doing this for years. And it's not like this adds a lot of value to that paradigm...
Part of this is the cultural failure of western medicine to recognize all drugs as sacraments. It's also a failure of justice systems to ban discrimination based on drug use.

So for example, I wrote that I was a smoker once on an insurance application (at the time as a 2-3 per day, 1 pack per week social smoker) and my insurance went up almost $100 per month. But the risk of not being truthful would be possible denied coverage down the road if I ever did develop respiratory problems. So insurance effectively encourages lying as a financial incentive (since the vast majority of people don't develop problems social smoking) as well as a racket (a loophole that corporations can use to deny coverage).

But there's no way to talk about something like this in polite society, because people effectively lose their minds. For example, I hate that my parents smoke, and often wish that tobacco never existed. Yet I treasure my memories of social smoking at parties, and consider counterculture stuff like that to be part of my ethos.

IMHO the only solution is to be vigilant in denying corporate control over our liberty and justice. Which is increasingly difficult in these times. I'm hopeful that the 2020s will unwind some of the oppression that's happened since 2001 though.
Perhaps they'll just get visa gift cards... ;)
I agree with your frustrations about smart TVs but I also like the setup I have with my TV.

I bought an LG OLED last summer (a 55" C9) and to be honest I don't hate the software (webOS) on it. However my setup is not really normal.

Firstly my TV is connected via Ethernet to my router and is restricted to only Netflix, the LG web store and my internal network.

I don't watch live TV, instead my viewing is limited to Netflix and content on my Plex server. Turns out the LG Plex app is very good. The TV supports pretty much every video and audio codec so I can do Direct Play from my Plex server. I mostly have direct Blu-ray streams extracted and remuxed into mkv files so there is no quality difference with using Plex vs. the actual Blu-ray. The rest is a mixture of H.264 and H.265 video with AAC and DTS audio in mp4 or mkv files. Everything plays perfectly with quality on par with or exceeding Netflix to give a comparison.

This setup works great for me. I only really interact with the TV OS to switch between Netflix and Plex which isn't a big deal and the picture quality of the OLED panel is incredible with 4K HDR content.

The real star of the show is Plex though which is just god damn fantastic. As everything I have is Direct Play compatible I can (and have) run the Plex server on a Raspberry Pi with a USB HDD attached and it works perfectly. Even for 80GB 4K HDR movies (direct Blu-ray remux files are large!) plays back from a Pi running openmediavault and Plex media server in Docker.

In the past I have tried a few different solutions such as a HTPC running Windows plugged directly into the TV but nothing gave me as good picture quality with the same flexibility as using the native TV apps.

In fact the Plex on a Pi setup works so well for me I set one up for my mother when I visited over the new year. She can watch any content on my Plex server as well as anything I upload to hers (as she often wants things I don't care for so don't want using up my disk space :)

If you haven't looked into Plex I highly recommend you check it out. It really does 'just work' which is so nice when you want to sit down and watch a movie without having to deal with all the adverts and junk before the movie on a Blu-ray disc.