skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Root sunsetting the programmable bank
>from the article: “This enviable track record justifies Mr Pichai’s rich compensation package over several years, of $2m annual salary plus $240m in shares and stock options”

==It does not.== Consider this tidbit against today's discussion about UBI (Universal Basic Income)[#39 on the HN hit parade: article=<https://timjrobinson.com/universal-basic-income-is-capitalis... comment thread= <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259>]. No. Body. Is worth that kind of annual salary. And calling it "enviable" reveals a content-free value system. We've become an absurdist economy.
Because it's off topic
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My reading of the Vox story you linked is that Apple started Apple TV apps off at 15%, then the 2016 change standardized this rate to all video streaming apps (which makes it seem like it could have been a simplification of the rules overall, though that's not clear from either story).
Hardware doesn't cost that much. Think about the number of new projects or products Google just starts without a coherent strategy and then shuts down without monetizing them, pissing off both users and the original developers. Think about the wasted engineering time. That's why Google is inefficiently run.
Ask HN: Do you have any kind of “strategy” for StackOverflow questions?
I wanted to play a bit with SO. Seems like helping people could be a nice way to learn something new about tools I'm using as well as doing something good for the world.

Anyway there are a few problems. Sometimes when I write an answer, with a proper explanation, a solution and usually some links to docs, there suddenly appears a message that there is a new answer to the question. And usually it's as good as mine, so I don't even bother with sending it. It's a bit demotivating.

When I tried to browse questions without answers that were asked longer than 30 minutes ago there are usually just a bunch of badly formulated questions.

Do you have any tips how to effectievely browse StackOverflow?
Steve Jobs passed away nine years ago.
Have you seen literally any other software segment? This isn't just the app store, this is also the play store, webpages, windows store apps, playstation games, ...

The most successful apps are the ones that make the most money: skinner box slot machines with a credit card system attached. Your idea that software should have things like "intrinsic quality" or "benefit to the user" is not as important as how much money it makes, and if you put more effort into mechanics or gameplay instead of additional monetization techniques, you're losing out.
Install Fixer – fixes wget – sudo
Where did 60% come from? I don't think anyone ever said that.
I wonder how big of an economic impact such improved algorithms have. Must be in the billions of dollars in the long run...
> until the protests are over

What protests he's referring to?
> I understand that food insecurity and hunger is a logistics problem

I already agree that reducing production won't have as much impact on the distribution side.

If you look back again, my point was reducing waste will lead to improvement in the distribution which is slightly different. Perfectly fine food is wasted by retailers and restaurants within easy range of people who might benefit from discounted or free products.
How would you 'do it right'?
Very well-put, thank you.
Spotify’s Apple Watch app terrible because Spotify wants it’s that way. Other music streaming apps did build really good Apple Watch apps already[1].

I believe that Spotify just don’t want to integrate well with the system so that they can use it as a leverage.

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/29/pandora-shows-spotify-how-to-...
Scenarios where someone might have my password but not my SMS: keyloggers, password written down at my desk, video surveillance or shoulder-surfing, audio analysis of keyboard and/or CPU tones[0].

The stronger or less guessable a password is, the more likely it is to be written down or recorded somewhere where it could be compromised.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_cryptanalysis
this is the kind of thread i expect on HACKER NEWS
Simple problem to solve. Give them their 1000€ a month daily at 33€ a day. If they blow it all, they are hungry that day but eat the next. With a debit card it shouldn't be too hard.
I mean you don't have to be a trillion dollar business. Your ability to negotiate a deal is mostly how valuable you are to Apple, or at least how valuable you're perceived. If Apple doesn't need your business you're gonna be stuck paying full price.
Yes, we kinda have that feature, but in a different way. As most of our members are bootstrapping their own product. Any video if it is related to a particular product, it can be attached to the product. Like our member David creates a product called Remake, all related videos can be linked to Remake in this page https://indielog.com/product/remake
Pichai was never a SWE. He's an MBA with an undergrad in metallurgy.
https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&hl=en&tbm=isch&sxs...
I think your parent is referring to the fact that most medical bills are not discounted until the individual haggles after the bill is already sent. The sticker shock[1] can be quite something.

You seem to already know how what to tell the billing department but I'd wager most Americans don't.

Example: some hospitals have tried taking their debt collections against low income individuals/families to court and have gotten wages garnished. Those same class of defendants have won something close to 100% of cases with the help of pro bono lawyers who help get those bills adjusted to something reasonable. The list price for medical services in the US is ridiculous, but that's because not everyone knows that hospitals don't expect almost anyone to pay list price -- and also because those hospitals get to write off the discounts as losses for tax purposes.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/7/18137967/er...
GPT-3: What's Hype, What's Real on the Latest in AI (a16z Podcast)
You raise a very interesting point there. I do wonder, however, how having such boundaries in place would affect exchange of information somehow. That's something I can sense in practice by living in a country where a large portion of the population don't speak english, however most of the tech material is made available in english.

I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.
Northern Virginia’s first self-driving shuttle starts testing on Fairfax streets
Thank you :-) That's helpful feedback, and we genuinely appreciate your support. Feel free to reach out to us contact @ upupapp.io if you'd like to chat more. Would be great to hear more about your experience in this area.
Probably depends on country, but in Poland direct debit is sometimes used for recurrent payments. It requires written permission of account owner, and transactions could be reversed by owner up to almost two months.
On a per-dollar basis, you indeed get more marginal utility from the extra dollar than the government would.

But on a percentage basis (in a progressive taxation scheme, and especially in the higher tax brackets) the government gets more marginal utility from a 1% tax increase than you would from a 1% tax break.
> is it basically to charge each customer a custom price?

Yes. You just have a "contact sales" type of stuff on the website and promotional materials instead of an actual pricing page. Very common in high ticket B2B.

I don't understand the product or use case too well to suggest how to price it. But I understand that usage would vary widely between customers. Hence price should vary greatly too.

I don't know what's your situation and how well connected you are in this industry. But generally at this price point people won't just come on your site and buy it. There will be some back and forth either way. And you probably will have to do outreach. So going to have a lot of opportunities to discuss price.

At this point it sounds to me like your greatest priority should be to actually talk to some customers.
Where in the article did the author give any advice on using or not using Haskell? The article was criticizing the Haskell community, of which the author is a member, not Haskell as a tool.
From a language design perspective, C++ is worse than C. From a practical perspective, C++ can be better than C if the programmers are good and define a sane subset of the language to use.

D has garbage collection by default. I know it can be disabled, but when 80% of people use the default, using anything else means means you're a second class citizen.

Ada/SPARK I haven't looked enough into, mainly because Ada's extremely verbose syntax puts me off, and I guess most system programmers have a similar opinion.

Rust and Zig have big potential to become good languages, but they're too immature right now (no standard, only 1 viable implementation, etc). Maybe in 10 years using Zig to write an OS will be a no brainer, but not yet.
But simultaneously the App Store is overflowing with apps made by solo devs and small teams. I'm sure you can find someone it discourages but en masse sharecropping on Apple's farm for most people seems to be good business.
I don’t care what a study says in my case: chess makes you smarter. It makes you better able to concentrate, visualize, and plan. Not sure if it helps you discover anagrams or find number patterns on an iq test but who cares
Perusing their history for an example, the most recent is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23882425, which (lightly) thinks through the question "Are religions another form of MLM?" in response to another comment.

It's fine as comments ago, until:

> Downvote brigade has arrived, I love receiving downvotes for playing devil's advocate; respond to me if you're disagreeing, don't downvote and bury what you dislike.

Looking further, the next example is similar, ending with:

> Here on HN, we have our own orthodoxy, too. Those who work with Rust find safe haven for their views, and the downvote brigade on HN will descend if you even mention the word Trump.

Which seems to have been inspired by the next after that, which is an iffy comment in any case, but once again:

> Edit: Apparently someone downvoted this comment within 60 seconds...this seems contrary to HN's ethos. I asked a general question with a specific example; is someone triggered by the words "Donald Trump"? This is pushing a legitimate question about FB's effect on the world down into the gray...is that a good thing?

And so on:

> Edit: Someone want to comment and explain why this is downvoted to -2?

I liberally downvote low-effort, mean, and, if I'm not going to take the time to respond, objectively wrong posts.

More than any of those, though, I downvote people who complain about being downvoted. You lost some Internet points. Who cares?

Word of advice, WhompingWindows: Stop. You're always going to see votes in both directions, but being net negative is usually transient. In your case the downvotes are sticking most likely because you're calling attention to them.
The perpetrator is in one sense to blame but this isn't a good justification for lax security on the part of the card issuers.

You wouldn't leave your door unlocked at night because it's the burglar's responsibility to be a better citizen.
Thank you for the kind words and feedback. The search bar should be centered on all screens, but others have said similar things, so it sounds like I have some styling issues to deal with. Thanks again!
Scientists use drones to study great white sharks along California coast
FedEx, Walmart Are Being Investigated for Punishing Workers That Take Time Off
Apple/Android pay is generally unlimited here in the UK, but using contactless cards is limited to £40, blanket.

This is because contactless card payments have no cardholder verification.

I am quite surprised if you can do that with your cards in Europe as the limit is usually enforced on/by the merchant, not the card.
AdaCore’s Fifth Annual Make with Ada Programming Competition Launching July 31st
This is kind of neat, and of course looks pretty because it's made by Stripe, but the content seems a bit thin. Maybe I'm a tad cynical because I've already been through the wringer a few times, but I really think there's only two primary elements that go into fundraising:

1) Traction
2) Your network

You could have the dumbest pitch deck, but if for (whatever reason) millions of people are clamoring to use your widget, you'll get funded. And you could have no users, but if for (whatever reason) investor X or Y really likes or believes in you, you'll get funded. There's been cases where instead of spending hours and hours on writing, memorizing, and perfecting a pitch deck, I should've spent more time going to bars/dinners/events and getting more users.
Yes. I have an ink tank Epson inkjet, so there's no nonsense about overpriced ink cartridges. The trouble is, if I don't print anything for a week or two, I have to go through the nozzle cleaning cycle a few times before clean prints come out.
The argument that a UBI would cause a significant amount of inflation continues to be nonsense. Necessities do not have perfectly inelastic supply and would not be consumed in significantly larger amounts than they are already. The large majority of the US population already has access to food, shelter and medicine and pulling the remaining <10% of people into the market is not going to cause hyperinflation. There is a pretty good guess that it could relieve a lot of the existing regional high prices by making it more attractive for people to move into lower cost of living areas and use the UBI to offset the lower average wages there, until enough people have done so to bring down the already existing high costs in major cities.
I think that's it. If you can reduce your NP problems to 3SAT and 3SAT is in P then all P=NP.
funny thing is that I actually use Digg more now than I did before its implosion.

it's cleaner, nicer, and no comments. Refreshing.
Can you add new statements to Python's syntax?
If 3SAT is solvable in polynomial time, then P=NP. Which means that any problem that can be solved by brute-forcing an exponential number of possibilities (and doing a polynomial amount of checking for each) can also be solved with an asymptotically much smaller (polynomial) amount of work.

This includes anything from complicated optimization problems, to theorem proving, to inverting cryptographic hash functions, to any other NP algorithm that hasn't been thought up yet.

Whether this would have any practical use would depend on the polynomial exponents and constant factors, of course. But even in a theoretical sense it would be very, very surprising to a lot of people if it were true.
M2OS: A Small and Lightweight Ada RTOS for Microcontrollers
Thanks for letting me know, some others have had similar issues, so I think I have some css bugs to fix.
I'm sure Google's revenues would have gone down someday without the pandemic. But it would be a very surprising thing for them to suddenly go from record growth one year to down the next without any exogenous events.
We see UpUp as a piece of our overall fraud strategy. We lend $35,000 vehicles to renters without meeting them in person. Often we are up against very determined bad actors. What we have found is that if you make a fraudsters job a little bit harder they will move onto the easier target.
Are there any software development problems we should be solving with SAT solvers instead of using heuristics?
The medical system in America is fetishized suffering.

My partner is lucky enough to have "very good" insurance through their employer. They recently had to have a scan done to check for serious problems. We got a bill for $500, half for the hospital and specialist, and half for the scan itself and the people providing it.

I took a look at how the costs broke down. In fact, the "real" cost was $5000, and the insurance company paid 90% of that. I started digging and discovered that they pay just about 90% of all medical treatment across the board (for a very small set of in-network physicians and hospitals). Even putting aside whether $5000 was a reasonable cost for this 1 hour procedure (probably not), this left me wondering, why 90%? Why pay such an extraordinarily high percentage, but not all of it?

After thinking about this for a while, I've come to the conclusion that it's a combination of two factors. One is that it's absolutely unacceptable to Americans for individuals to ever receive anything for free. You absolutely have to suffer in some way for every good thing you're allowed to have. The other is that I think they want to actively dissuade you from getting the medical care you need unless it's crucial, because someone worked the math out and putting a slight disincentive on medical care works out slightly cheaper for them than just letting people have what they need with the insurance they're already paying for.

The result in human costs is enormous. My partner has cried about this on and off for weeks because $500 is a very consequential amount of money for us, and we didn't have even a ballpark estimate before the procedure of how much it would cost.

So yes, it's radicalizing as hell. Burn this system to the ground.
That most likely had to do with your purchase history pattern. Good banks will notice abnormal patterns and freeze your card/account until you approve the charges. Overseas charges are a pretty large red flag, particularly if you simultaneously have charges in your home area. It also depends how the card was run by this company for this second verification... Virtual Terminal vs. a normal checkout flow can sometimes be treated as a "Card Not Present" charge, which can appear more risky to your bank/card company.

Not foolproof, but is a help. Also... another reason to use a credit card for all online purchases... it's not your money, and almost always will be refunded in full if disputed (at least in the US). Bank cards/debit cards are your money, and you might have a fight on your hands with your bank if it's a large enough charge.
"How is Amazon going to pay sellers their money if Amazon has no data on what is bought and sold?"

I might agree with you if this sentence used a generic term instead of "Amazon". However it specifically refers to Amazon.

I think people forget that Amazon did not operate as a middleman when they first appeared in the early 1990's.

Amazon was originally a bookseller, not a middleman for other sellers.

Not only does the sentence above from GP assume the existence of Amazon, it assumes that Amazon must act as a middleman for other sellers.
I wonder what others will say.

I was sort-of in similar situation. Though I recognized I'm only an employee for simple reason - I was paid for what I was doing. In the same time founder of the company would not pay himself if there was a bad month (it's another story that when I was joining him I was told there is 1 million on the bank account...)

Are you paid monthly salary or do you contribute your time as investment (i.e. living on your savings)?

Also - this key executive - what does he bring to the company? Contacts? Money? Both?
Yeah, but the negotiating position is "if you don't discount this significantly I won't (and probably can't) pay it and you'll get pennies when you sell my bill to a debt collection agency." It's not "I think x,y,z should are overpriced."
This quote from Niquette's web site, "proving" that English has about 38,000 words, does not impress me:

> I took down from my shelf The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which is not the OED but one I happen to like a whole lot. Now, there are 1,491 pages with definitions on them. I did a quick count of the words defined on a couple of randomly selected pages and got an estimate of 25.5 words. You can do the indicated arithmetic, of course, but I'll save you the trouble: 1,491 times 25.5 equals 38,020 words.
Good points. FWIW, I took the article to assume a sort of post-human lifestyle/environment in which physical needs (food, safety, etc.) are met. E.g. "In principle the whole economy may eventually be entirely based on exploring the state-space of consciousness and trading information about the most valuable contents discovered doing so." I.e., all problems are solved except hedonism.
I was being sarcastic. Microsoft still has about the same dominance in two of the areas where antitrust was concerned - computer operating systems and productivity.

The third was the browser. No one cares about browser dominance except for Google because of advertising.
> take the hope of actually being able to support yourself by writing and no... even the most obsessive of obsessive writers will likely give up, from starvation if nothing else.

Millions of fanfiction writers would like to have a word with you... Not to mention all the authors of comments on this very site, some of which are, at least, good enough to be paid articles somewhere, or in cooperation with other commenters could be turned (as whole threads) into short books in their own right.

Put another way: the music industry could entirely vanish overnight, and people would still sing in the shower and when drinking with their buddies.

Some people tend to express themselves in some way, and they would do it regardless of literally anything. We've achieved high literacy rates, which gave a tool of expression that is writing to a correspondingly high number of people. It's not exactly surprising that we now have a flourishing environment of Web novels and all kinds of written content outside of the "market" and publishing industry as a whole.

But it's not something specific to our times. Plenty of writers in history did starve do death. One of "the three greatest" poets of my country did precisely that: he wasn't published, he wasn't even read much, and when he was, he was ridiculed for it. Yet he had been writing anyway; then, he died in extreme poverty, leaving just a lot of paper behind. It took some 40 years IIRC for someone to "rediscover" the stash of hand-written poems, and now his works are being taught in highschools.

In yet other words: no, not everything has to be related to money. Many things are, yes, but not all. Writing as a profession that published (and paid) authors do is all fine and good, but it's just one side of writing, not its definition.
Why wouldn't fluctuations of sunlight that cause instability in the green spectrum also cause instabilities in the red and blue spectra?
Comcast lost 477,000 cable-TV customers in Q2 amid 12% drop in revenue
I'd argue that a lot of the products could make money are instead geared up to protect their search income instead. Android, Youtube, Gmail, etc.
You can reclaim every amount booked(fetched) via IBAN payment for 13 month, except when you gave an valid mandate, then it's 6weeks where you can invert the payment.
If you submit(wire transfer) money via bank payment though, it is up to your bank, the bank of the reciever and the reciever to ack a refund.
Failed IBAN payments costs the reciever side like 10€ if they triggered it.
Also i have never seen a check beeing used except for people who won a lottery or something.
It's not, and SCA 3D Secure is a better solution.
This is great! Good idea, very useful.

I love figma, it's one of those cases that showcase the actual potential of the web, and that performs equally or better than native alternatives. And the API is really easy to pick up. Figma boom hasn't even started!
Yeah even I thought it would be concise demos or screen recordings of everyday progress but it’s just person talking. Is there a blog or Youtube channel which slowly builds a project which you can follow too?