skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>but both Citi and JP Morgan recorded their most profitable quarter in their entire history this morning.

Does this say anything about their ability to provide a decent user experience, or good customer support though?

A few years ago, I had no choice but to use a bank like RBS for my business account. It was rife with unreasonable fees, a terrible website and a ridiculous sign-up process. They got my custom because there was no alternative.

Monzo, Starling and e.g. Tide are doing pretty well here as a result of the poor show that other banks have been putting on for years.

>If you are complaining about their customer service, don't hold your breath when it comes to startup bank customer service. Chime, the largest funded neo bank in the US, had a 3 day outage in the fall when nothing worked (app, transactions, ATM) and could not handle the volume of calls or chat requests at all. People were literally stuck at the grocery store or gas station. That can't be the future of finance, either.

Not all challenger banks are like this, though. I've found Monzo to be much, much more reliable that the various incumbents in the UK (who don't operate a status page, don't inform customers properly when things are broken and _still_ schedule multiple-hour maintenance windows every year when BST begins/ends).

Customer support can be variable, unfortunately, but I think this is a problem which has arisen mostly as the bank has grown. It's still better, for me at least, than a legacy bank.
I can't think of any test, no.

But I don't think this makes discussions about consciousness useless. If you tell me something about your consciousness I can check if it fits my experience, and you can test something I say for yourself.

What this means is that there might not be an absolute truth about this, only relative truths.

But then, this applies to anything, as no experience can happen outside of consciousness, so all of science is the same way.
Alright, a response:

> It's very upper-crust early 1900s

It's nice to expose children to a wide range of lifestyles, particularly ones that reflect their own cultural origins. Gives a jumping off point for discussion.

> There's an open fireplace, fer chrissake!

I have an open fireplace in my house. I don't use it often, but it's there, and it's cozy enough. Wood smoke isn't that great for you, so I only light it at Christmas usually.

> What's up with the little old lady whispering "hush"? Who is she?

It doesn't matter. Nanny, grandmother, not important.

> Turn the light off. No kid goes to sleep with a light on

Yes, that would have been a good addition. "Goodnight light".

> The green-and-red color scheme makes it look absurd.

I think this is an artifact of the printing technology available at the time.

> A bowl of mush? Mush what?

It's gruel.

> Margaret Wise Brown also wrote The Big Red Barn which has a lot of the same sort of problems.

Ahh, I love that one too, though!

> Why did the big white hen stand on one leg? Why did the smaller breed of chicken have a clutch of 10 eggs, vs the white chicken's 1 egg?

Maybe a farmer would have had answers for that. Maybe it was common knowledge a generation ago.

> Where did the children go?

Now they're grandparents, no doubt, and wonder the same thing
Probably not, but the code is a hell of a lot cleaner! I looked through it and thought that even I could work on it. The new macro expander is even possible to follow :)
Apple Patenst Possible Future MacBook Enclosure with 'Living Hinge'
Didn't the FBI or NSA push for flawed Elliptical Curve Crypto in the past?

Could be the knew about it for a while and had milked it hard until they caught someone else using it. Or like the parent said, previously discovered flaws meant that someone might catch this one, too.
Hotels have less of a monopoly on travel than airlines. Plus most hotels are franchised, so the brands don’t have an incentive to lower commissions paid as they still get their royalties from gross revenue, and it all comes out of the hotel owner’s pockets.
Not really. All the match.com's owned apps (Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge etc) have very successful subscription models. I follow the top grossing apps for iOS and Tinder, Match, OkCupid are always on the list. It's more so that here, the Match.com people want to squeeze every dollar out of their users and are willing to compromise their privacy by supporting ads.

I understand and agree with the point about subscriptions leading to an incentive to keep users on the app. But this is also true for ads supported ones. Dating apps have conflicting goals with user goals. That's why Tinder grosses so much money - because it's a mostly hookup app where quantity matters. So people keep coming back to the app and Tinder keeps making more money.

I do think if the data for the vulnerable groups falls in the wrong hands, it can destroy people's lives. Imagine an international student from Iran visiting US and having a profile on Grindr. If this info somehow gets leaked back home, his life is in danger next time they visit back home. This also has higher chances of being used as blackmail material by someone else.

This is one of the cases which the 2 Nigerian brothers have against Jussie Smollett's lawyers - the lawyers had made a claim that the brothers were attracted to Jussie. The brothers make the claim it's not true and that also puts their life in risk when they visit back home.
err.. You know that emails transit un clear text, right?
Sure, but a lot of these companies are not even profitable. The HOPE of massive profits seems to be worth more than the proof that a business can be in the black. And Sikorsky, honestly, could probably have higher margins, but they are in the business where billions disappear on boondoggles.
> Then, when the system finally imploded and people could no longer make their mortgage payments, the taxpayers bailed out the banks that were making money hand over fist.

I'm not happy about what happened either, but what do you think would have happened if none of the banks had been bailed out?
Work life balance is a priority for most people but the issue is that everyone is only concerned with their own work life balance, rather than society as a whole. These people work themselves to death and trample on others in order to reward themselves with work life balance later on in life. Then you realize that if only everybody helped each other out and stopped trying to compete with each other, we wouldn't be in this situation. Unfortunately this is how life works and is a classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
Cryptoindex AI Daily Predictions and News for 01/14/2020
One of the best managers I've ever known described herself that way.

She may not have been a great engineer (I'll never know), but she gave us the tools we needed to do our job, shielded us from the upper management pressure and BS and got out of our way. In return, the team shipped a ton of functionality in an impossibly short timeframe that she later confessed she never thought we'd be able to achieve.

Excel at what you're good at and the rest tends to take care of itself.
Only 5 of the listed companies are actually in LA. All the rest are in SF/Bay Area. No thank you,
> what you're talking about sounds a lot like corporate welfare.

What if it is? What if the only way to make longer term speculative investments work in a place like Canada is simply to put some government muscle behind them?

> I don't know if anybody ever considered Blackberry tech cool enough for it to be a "halo" product

Did you miss the 2000s? Blackberries were THE phone for anyone in corporate / political life. RIM's play should have been to make their mobile device management software control iPhones and Androids as soon as humanly possible, and Blackberry Messenger should have been brought out on every platform right away. Keep the enterprises under control and use that steady money to regroup and find a way to make phones that compete with the iPhone later.

Instead they just doubled down on stupid until it basically killed them.
Banks, especially big ones, are a special breed. I've recently had the misfortune of working with people who work for a large US bank ... boy was it eye-opening! I've worked in fintech for nearly a decade, most of our clients are in the EMEA region. And while banks generally don't seem to attract the biggest talent, and usually don't seem to be organized in a way that makes any sense to an outsider, at least they're somewhat functional.

The US bank, on the other hand, is the single most dysfunctional organization I've ever dealt with. Every single person I've worked with borders on incompetent. There are so many useless layers of organizational abstraction that everyone is always on the phone trying to make sense of their own organization. And when things go wrong, Someone Has To Hang™, so when they're not trying to figure out whose job something is, they're trying to cover their own asses. Doesn't leave much time to get actual work done.

As near as I can tell, the only reason many of these big old banks are still around, is because reality hasn't caught up with them yet. And, of course, because they're sitting on a pile of money.
Typically I measure CPython at about 40× slower than C, and SBCL, V8, and the like at about 2–10× slower than C. What cases are you seeing where those runtimes are hundreds of times faster than CPython?

People don't normally update to new versions of Lua, because they're not backwards compatible; it's not like Python or JS. WoW is still using Lua 5.1, as is MediaWiki. It's unlikely that this will ever change.

Probably at some point someone will continue LuaJIT development. It seems as likely that they will diverge in a different direction as follow PUC.
100% agreed, and said as much in a sibling comment.
That's fair. The one I emailed was a solo developer I believe. I think if enough people make noise about it (make a post on such apps abusing the system on /r/apple) and then send it to Apple, they will take action.
My only concern with the consciousness debate is purely from a self-preservation PoV. Here is a scenario to elaborate:
1) In fifty years compute horsepower is enough to be able to fully simulate a brain.
2) population of earth is 10B and climate change is really making the planet unlivable.
3) we believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon
4) we decide we'll invest in computronium and just continue our (& other species) lives in cyberspace
5) civilization opts-in to shed the mortal coil and jump to cyberspace.

now at this point some super advanced quantum computer realizes that wait a minute, we made some subtle mistake and there does seems to be something else (perhaps quantum) aspect to consciousness that we missed. so now essentially we have committed genocide on ourselves. I just want to be really really really sure that there is nothing else to consciousness before I give in to the 'emergent consciousness thesis'.

Personally, I like Roger penrose's 'Orchestrated objective reduction' theory of consciousness where he posits that proto-consciousness is an innate property of universe due to quantum wavefunction collapse. so essentially everytime there is a wf collapse its like the system had a conscious moment. human brain is just an instrument complex enough to 'catch' phenomena and turn it into a conscious experience. The 'how' part is where it gets murky, there have been some attempts to link it to microtubules in brain cells but nothing concrete yet. IMO its worth a serious look from biochemistry point of view.
When I told people I took a full-time remote job at my previous company, they all asked me if I was going to miss seeing people.

And that just confused me - I do sports so I hang out with people, I take language classes outside of work, and on top of that I am married and we have a pretty active social life.

If you only see people at work - I think that's a red flag. Get a hobby where you see people, it's good for you. :P
I recently converted to jrnl.sh a few months ago and I am loving it. I used to run my own private wordpress, and it was nothing but headaches, and fear of dataloss.

I use jrnl.sh on mac, and I can easily have it in my documents folder and sync it up to iCloud. I also back it up to a few other places, and since it's encrypted, I don't worry too much about people being able to peek.

The format being very simple has made it easy to hack up python scripts which allowed me to bring all my old livejournal entries, medium entries, and wordpress entries together into one diary.
TypeScript: On Generic Type Argument Inference
They definitely use Plaid or a similar service to scrape data. The few banks that offer APIs do have it.
It was de-fanged a bit by being paired with a rent-control bill. Still a great step.
We see it up and down the supply chain, from manufacturing to warehouses to transport nodes.
> Could someone clarify: does this allow the creation of fake certificates that are accepted as authentic by any crypto library?

No, only the Windows native one. For instance, Firefox (which uses NSS) would be safe.
The idea is that the components will be available 50 years from now, because you make sure you have them. All of them.

My answer to your last paragraph is: Test your backups! If you don't, then you don't actually have backups; you just have a nice dream.
No, I don't see how this is part of foreign intelligence/surveillance/espionage work. It is good that these vulnerabilities are fixed, of course. But shouldn't that be at least a separate partially independent branch of the NSA?
Otherwise you get a large conflict of interest.
The surface book has a removable but rigid keyboard. So, it seems to fit the criteria. Am I misunderstanding your criteria?
And there are even compilers targeting .NET and Java.

https://www.gtsoftware.com/products/netcobol/netcobol-for-ne...

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overv...

And naturally cloud deployments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9cYwbDdobc
American Khrushchyovka
I think the part about the budget was accurate but it might have also just been difficult to attract top talent without the name recognition.

I have my opinions which I will not share for why Hipmunk stagnated but I will say, it had nothing to do with scaling or technical obstacles.
I relate to the OP's frustration but it's clear why these Banks get away this - there doesn't seem to be any money in retail banking at all and as a result most banks do the absolute bare minimum unless you are very high net worth individual.

With Stripe, you are the customer and treating you right is it their best interest. Retail Banks try their hardest to charge you $50/mo for the privilege of maintaining a database row.

I would imagine for CitiGroup retail banking makes up a small percentage of their revenues. The engineers CitiGroup hires that would rival stripes aren't working on Retail Banking products - those products are probably fully outsourced.
The Atomo Modular Electronics System Is Like Lego for Electronics
In this case, it seems like you didn't read the discussion either. Many people have been talking about UA Client Hints here, before you commented.
The rent control thing is fairly loose in some ways.

Article doesn't mention Minneapolis' reforms vis a vis exclusionary zoning either. Seems like another big omission.
Have you considered the possibility that the future behavior of consumers and lawmakers is not that easy to predict and people have different opinions about it? We can't reliably predict which products will be popular, the next election, or what laws will pass.

Past results are that the advertising-supported Internet is enormously lucrative. Things are changing though. We will find out what happens when it happens.
Also:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/atomo-modular-electronics...
I literally just watched it several months ago - maybe 3 - and saw the same news feed item.
Thanks for this, lots of good nuggets of wisdom!
Yeah bro go pick up a girl while you working. Totally rad bro
Thanks for the comment and the kind words about me being nice. I'll try to live up to that.

On the technical depth point, I agree. A lot of folks tell me they love the "meaning of life" questions. I love both the technical and the philosophical. My hope is to more and more try to go deep technically with the ML, CS, math, physics folks on the topic of their expertise, and find productive points of passionate disagreement or insight. This isn't easy, and I fail often, but I'm working hard to improve.
I understand what you mean. Yet when you are told something you have to be able to think "yes, this fits my experience, I can interpret it the way you say", otherwise you will not accept it as true.

You seem well versed in the matter, can you recommend sources to learn more about all this ?
This is the perfect metaphor and the one I use.

Just because we can build a Ferrari doesn't mean that a Ferrari is efficient in all situations.

We have race tracks (smooth, evenly surfaced roads), highways (generally smooth roads over long distances), city streets (some potholes), gravel roads, dirt roads, and no-roads.

A tank isn't great for a race track. And a Ferrari isn't great for no-road.

The author muddles up the question to make their point.

What they're really saying is "no-code tools aren't a good fit for general purpose coding" (for all the reasons mentioned).

Which seems fair and accurate. But all coding is not general purpose coding.
Banking does have some strong regulations around it (with good reason, IMHO) but I can corroborate the author's intuition about established company's disdain for self-service customer interactions.

I worked on a product a few years ago that would have turned our sales-led product into a turn-key hosted solution - just supply your credit-card and go. It was nearing deployment with 7 figures spent on development when the sales team got wind of it and immediately killed it.

Although I believe that the product would have been successful and brought in more money to the company as a whole, it would have gutted the performance bonuses for the sales team by bypassing a whole department. This could not be allowed to go live.

That is why real innovation tends to come from newer, smaller companies.
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198181 . If you tell Safari SameSite=None it treats it as SameSite=Strict. If you tell Chrome a couple months from now without SameSite=None, you get SameSite=Lax. There's no way to do this without UA sniffing.
Not porn and Kamasutra in particular, but yeah I’ve read books, blogs, Reddit, ... definitely experimented a bit (not at every opportunity though).

Just because people cringe at some information doesn’t make the whole thing dehumanizing. You’re right though that most people don’t want to know how the sausage / burger is made...
> "Resource" being dehumanizing doesn't make "stakeholder" dehumanizing.

This is such a poor thought process, and a strawman to boot. I never made any claims about causality between them. I pointed out you can't defend "stakeholder as dehumanizing" by claiming it's more specific and the example I used to demonstrate this was that "resource" is more specific than 'people', yet 'resource' is considered dehumanizing whereas 'people' is not.

I'm not even going to bother answer your question.

you're using stakeholder to mean "anyone in any way involved", much the way resource means "anyone I manage". That is not what that word means in agile vernacular. When you mean that, just say people.

I've seen several people recently using it this way. Fast forward 5-10 years and people will be bitching about stakeholder being dehumanizing just like they do resource.

Your usage is akin to calling a garbage truck driver a stakeholder in the city wide trash system. That's not how that word was meant to be used.
Discussion of original source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22046094
You might be right.
> should I tell the user to tap

I always use the term "tap". MacBook / Magic trackpads literally have an option called "tap to click".

> should I tell the user to drag-and-drop

Both mobile and desktop support drag and drop, so not sure why you'd want to disable it for either.
>>> Unprecedented Content Leverage

The other day I was in the mood for some "Crossy Road". I had deleted it from my Kindle years ago to curb my time suck. Now it's not in the store anymore. Replaced by a new version from the same developer, "Hipster Whale", but re-branded as a tie-in with Disney characters.

The new art is flat and unremarkable. Where the original was really charming. And actual user performance is virtually unplayable. A far cry from the immortal re-playability of the original. Not to mention the ubiquitous promotional dark patters, the pernicious in-app purchase harpings, the auto play trailers with 1x1px cancel buttons that link to a store and thrash game state, loot boxes, and characters from edge IP no one has ever heard of. Instead of the original's unforgettable characters such as "Frankenstein" "Disco Zoo" and "Kimchi".

And yet this version is probably more popular than ever! With a burst of revenue to boot. If the market is speaking it really begs to question. Besides ISVs on zero budgets, who will invest in "pure" action-arcade oriented video games?
Systemd service sandboxing and security hardening 101
Can someone who knows more about Forth clarify this for me: what "level" is something like Forth? Is it higher or lower-level than something like C?

The reason I'm confused is that I see Forth in a lot of areas that look like they're typically for "C and lower", but looking at the syntax, Forth looks like a high-level language.
>the large back-wheel and push mechanism felt super innovative and provide a very tangible improvement to quality of life for steering the case around in streets compared to existing designs

I knew I'd seen it before - it's basically a laundry cart. Obviously different build quality but the innovative 60 degree handle and large back wheels? Laundry cart.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22046094
Ok. So how would you deal with information that would be dangerous if made public? Weapon specifications, names/locations of military or other clandestine operation personnel, the names of intelligence sources, records of ongoing investigations, etc etc etc?
I don't understand you using consolidation and abuse of power as a reason to dislike regulation. There are plenty of non-regulatory incentives for consolidation. Why not simply regulate consolidation? Target large holding companies and megacorps with aggressive taxation policies on revenue or headcount or market cap or similar? And then enforce the regulation with teeth?

There are always going to be creative people coming up with new ways to be bad actors, so regulation has to be an evolving constant. But responding with an aversion to regulation is just giving the game to the bad actors.
I just did. I'm more of a lurker on HN, but might as well be open. I get criticism sometimes, but I it's probably good to just take it, accept it, and grow from it.
On original verge article: "Update December 6th, 8:20PM ET: This story was updated to reflect that Erin Grau does not identify as a person of color."

I'm curious about the story of this update. Original reporting claimed Erin Grau identified as a person of color (near context of "“The stuff you said was hateful, even racist. You no longer have a job at this company.” Emily, who is a person of color, was shocked. “That was jarring — three white people telling me I was racist,” she says.")

Did Erin Grau previously identify as a person of color at time of reporting? Does she no longer identify as a person of color as a result of this article? (I saw her get a lot of ridicule online because she very much looks white.)
The lists for cookies in uBlock Origin never worked for me, I don't know why. It was the first thing I activated on new uBlock installations, now I don't even care to do it.