skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Clearbanc, a financial services company, uses multiple Stripe products

If Clearbanc tried to use a Stripe product today, it obviously uses the words "investor" and "Fund me" on its landing pages, "democratize access to capital," - so it sounds like crowdfunding, even though I know Clearbanc's business isn't. Your contractor compliance team would say no, but a Stripe W2, who is equipped for this kind of nuance, would say yes.

However: "We provide the capital to grow and, in return, are paid a percentage of revenue until we are paid back plus a small 6% - 12% fee... no dilution, no board seats" is clearly describing a loan. Here's a link (1) to an SEC filing where in plain language a Clearbanc loan recipient describes receiving a "loan" from Clearbanc. So it's clearly a "lending instruments" and credit service, in violation of your AUP, no doubt about it, you even use the word lending instrument to provide the flexibility to account for this sort of stuff. And here, a contractor would not be able to figure out what I just did - they'd say, "oh their landing page is not using the word loan, which is a keyword in my script" - but a W2 would!

I get it, you want to have it both ways, I get that reality is just, "It is case by case, and in reality, we decide for (1) totally random reasons, like whether or not you are reviewed by a contractor or an educated W2, and (2) the cut of your jib." Maybe you guys permit loans in Stripe Connect.

Maybe these Clearbanc guys really did invoke some kind of magic, by not using the word loan but instead using the word advance and fees, even though their own Fast Company article says loan and the recipients (correctly) account for and legally define the money they received from Clearbanc as a loan. I don't know. It's actually really surprising and I'm trying to cut to the core of the AUP question and why it generates so many problems for you guys.

Is your real takeaway: "Oh, I can't say specific companies." I believe this is wrong! I think you should not be afraid to say Clearbanc, and then find out they make loans, and you should be able to just say, "No to AngelList and no to TransferWise." It's not that big of a deal that Clearbanc makes loans, which is against your AUP, you can work with whomever you want! Which is really what I'm getting at, which is to facilitate a conversation, something between educated people who aren't trying to gotcha each other, that is what we're having, about what the potential of the platform is - not a situation where, oh man, what do I put into this "What do you want to build with Stripe Treasury" box on the invite form? Because if I put in the wrong keywords, I am shut out from something really useful to me, not because I am doing something weird and want to skirt compliance, but because it is free.

(1) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001700895/000114420... "During 2018, the Company entered into several loan agreements with Clearbanc in the amount of $670,443, bearing interest ranging from 9.25% to 15%. Interest expense on these loans totaled $26,560 for the year ended December 31, 2018. The unpaid principal balance was $291,214 as of December 31, 2018."
Great summary, thanks!

The two main things most developers will benefit from is how we manage the automatic partitioning of your incoming data (hypertables), something which is non-trivial to do yourself even though other tools exist for it. And because we do it with a time-based focus, we can be really efficient and smart about it.

Second, we've improved the query planner in PostgreSQL around the parts that relate to querying time-based, partitioned data, and provided special time-based functions. These improvements help you efficiently query data that time-series applications most often need. A quick example is something like "LAST()", which retrieves the most recent value for a given time-range. There are ways in SQL to do something similar (LATERAL JOINs or CTEs for instance), but they're usually slower and bulkier to maintain. When dealing with time-series data, getting the most recent value for an object is usually what you're doing the most often.

When you add those two foundational features, everything else that @drpebcak mentioned become amazing value-adds that you just can't get elsewhere.
Increase Applicaiton Security Awareness by Building Trust
Paying them like cost co does its store workers might help
I'll try to clarify/refine where I'm coming from: Systemically we as a culture care more about our quick cheese than we do about the hundred of years of trash. Ideally the price of the fancy cheese and everything else should include the cost of disposal, and right now it doesn't, and that's not right.

Would you agree?

I do believe that our culture is too focused on economic efficiency, and ignoring numerous consequences of that. That might be a separate discussion?
Ray Dalio is giving $100 for you to donate to charity
Show HN: Terradactile – Generate Hillshade or Elevation Cogs
You also need to turn off the Bluetooth, cell, and wifi modems, and keep them off.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if baseband processors eventually start logging and asynchronously sending gps data to the cell carriers behind the operating system’s back, so you should also keep it in a mylar sack.

Similarly the accelerometer can gather all sorts of information (passwords, text typed on the keyboard, are you driving, flying, walking, etc), so you’ll probably eventually need to keep the phone in a drawer to avoid leaking that information. Similarly for the microphone (some surveillance libraries already snoop sounds in various primitive ways).

To recap: keep it off the network in a stationary, electromagnetically shielded, sound proof box. That’s simple enough, and from there you can use it as normal.
This is where the Tennessee Ernie Ford song comes from, "Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't call me cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store."

There was an episode of South Park last season where they played this song as a backdrop to Amazon workers in a warehouse.
Duplicate post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25290629

And a link to the actual source from the NSF, which these twitter accounts reposted: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/arecibo/
This pattern sometimes happens in other businesses: Banks with a culture of yelling at the compliance department. "Independent" Auditors getting pressured to sign off on the books of a company, etc. The pushback is not always entirely unjustified — I've been annoyed myself at how much easier a legal department finds it to say "no" than "yes" — but it's often a warning sign.
Ask HN: What to do about government agencies with terrible technical standards?
I currently work in a data engineering context that requires consuming data about FCC licenses from the FCC's ULS database. Understanding the data is crucial for complying with FCC licensing and transmission regulations. It appears to be a zipped collection of pipe-delimited files, but it cannot be parsed using any standard CSV parser, let alone specialized ones (like CleverCSV) which attempt to sniff out the correct format. (We've solved the problem with a custom parser).

Even if you succeed at parsing the files, the data quality is horrendous. Core data is missing. Geospatial records use non-standard serialization formats and often result in invalid polygons. Licensed frequencies may be outdated, or even impossible (such as lower_frequency > upper_frequency). There are cross-table inconsistencies. Incorrect codes are used everywhere.

Because the ULS doesn't actually process all of their rules regarding interference with adjacent licensees, sometimes a license that has perfect data still results in an incorrect representation of the license rights because an adjacent license has incorrect data. Therefore, the data quality problem is actually viral...bad data for one license can result in dozens of licenses not knowing their actual license rights.

This data is meant to be authoritative. It has been used in court cases and regulatory rulings. It is the first point of reference in license disputes. From our testing alone, which is not exhaustive, over 70% of licenses (in the subset of bands that we process) have at least one data quality error, and the virality of bad data effectively means nobody knows their license rights. What can actually be done about this? I'm starting to think that suing the FCC is the only way to get them to fix their problems, but that seems extreme. There have to be better options. Have any of you accomplished the task of getting the government to do a technical job better?
Federal Labor Agency Says Google Wrongly Fired 2 Employees
> Yammer is a social network and if Yammer counts for Microsoft as a "chat app" then Google gets to add Buzz, Reader, Orkut, G+, Wave, etc to the list.

The list of supposed Google chat apps up the thread did in fact include both Buzz and Wave, so I'm just applying the same criteria. Hangouts was the chat part of G+, so I think it'd be double counting to include G+.

> Groove wasn't exactly a chat app either

Neither are Duo and Meet, which were in the list of supposed Google chat apps.

> Kaizala is in the process of merging into Teams, and the Lync line (last Skype for Business) is considered to have already merged/migrated

I don't understand. The entire thing we're supposed to be mocking Google for here is that they launch chat apps, and then force users to migrate away. Now you're saying that all these Microsoft ones don't count, because they've either already killed them and forced a migration, or are already in the process of doing so.

> Skype, Qik, Yammer, and Groove were all acquisitions. (None of Google's messenger churn has the excuse of being an acquisition.)

Fair enough that this is different. But first, note that when Google discontinues a product they got from an acquisition, HN does not consider that to be an exenuating circumstance. I think it's fair to apply the same policy here. And second, nobody forced Microsoft to buy Skype when they already had a popular app doing just the same thing, which they then killed to make room for Skype.
I dont understand it either. To me yes BTC supply is limited, but there are lots of cryptos so BTC is nothing special. The secret could be if lots of important and smart people are invested in BTC you have to trust that it will keep being special, and better than other cryptos. It sounds sketchy to me, but the network effect is real so there might be something in it.

It seems lots of well known financial people are getting on board right now. It seems like a ponzi to me but those people aren't dumb.
Try now! Something weird happened with the dates: https://boringstartupstuff.com/newsletter/nov-24th-2020-fini...
I’m sure everything has been creaking and making noise. They probably went up inspect it. I can see a few frayed cables before it starts to give way.
The price of the house structure itself decreases with time. The price of the land the house sits on might increase, depending on where it is.

Land prices in very, very few areas have increased sufficiently to match a risk adjusted return (or even the nominal return) of a broad market index fund, such as VOO or VTI. Especially considering the liabilities and ongoing maintenance costs with owning housing structures.

The labor adjusted return is far better too, you spend minutes and a few clicks investing in an index fund, versus hours and days on real estate.
How does a Workers Council differ from a union?
> I'm also willing to bet that people who support complete legalization are users either casual or frequent (not necessarily addicts) so there's a personal agenda going on here as well.

this is kinda unfair and also close to an ad hominem argument. people don't generally advocate for anything unless they have some sort of personal stake. I don't currently consume anything that isn't legally available, though college was a different story. I support legalization because several of my friends have already died from tainted drugs, not because my habits would change if more drugs were legal.

in practice, I find the "think of the children" argument quite weak here. when I was in high school, alcohol and cigarettes were far harder to obtain than almost anything illicit.

edit, just noticed this:

> The current opioid epidemic is the result of legalization through medical usage.

how can you even compare abusing the trust people have in their physicians to push drugs whose risk profile the manufacturer lied about to legalizing them for recreational use?
What is your opinion as to the likelihood of your union adopting the poison pill that I mentioned above? Do you personally find it convincing that unions that are anti-xenophobic should have poison pills that protect against them becoming vehicles for xenophobia?
Thanks for your thoughts! Feel free to let me know how it goes.
>>How do you manage / version assets? Git? Git LFS? ...?

Perforce!

https://allarsblog.com/2014/09/25/setup-perforce-digital/

I use perforce to track game content and GitHub for code. UE4 has support in the editor so you can checkout and submit changes as well as see other files that are checked out by your team. It is incredibly helpful and 100x better than using GitLFS (which I started with in 2014 and a contractor highly recommended switching to perforce and he was right!)
Delete.

Be realistic: 500 picture per day. Most of them must essentially be duplicates and/or poor quality, and you're never going to go through them again.

It's fine to take plenty of pictures especially now that it's free. But the benefit is not that you can keep so many pictures, it's that you can take sort them afterwards and keep the good ones without worrying about having missed something.
The dollar was just created but is not irrelevant.
There is also a land cost. I'd be surprised if we determined that plastic is better than bio-plastic, but until we are making bio-plastic with a low land footprint land will continue to be a factor here.
Here is a commercial installation of solar + storage at $0.04/kWh[1]. And it’s not unique, that article links to the cheapest solar + storage in the US at $0.025/kWh.

Additionally, these are today’s prices, as per this OP article the price for renewables is dropping exponentially every year. And if Elon Musk is to be believed (which I do) the price for storage is also dropping exponentially.

Given these trends it seems a no brainer that the developing world will skip fossil fuel entirely. Barring air travel, the entire worlds air and space travel will likely continue to use fossil fuels for the next decade or two.

[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/09/10/los-angeles-commissio...
Cheers - I had missed that.
Stripe Treasury thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289626

This looks like a good article but we probably shouldn't have two on the front page at the same time.
It has a specific definition that you can find by googling: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."

Don't assume that others are naive, imprecise, or uninformed about what capitalism is and how it affects the world, just because your own understanding of it is limited.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Open source software vulnerabilities exist for over four years before detection
Anybody can easily create a coin, but if the coin has no market share or broad usage, it has no practical value.

We can make infinite coin types, with each coin type having an infinite number of tradable units; all that matters is adoption. Bitcoin is far more likely to be accepted than a coin you invent tomorrow.
That would be amazing and I wholeheartedly support it despite never trying this drug and having friends struggling to quit. Governments should make drug taking as safe as possible. People who use black market drugs experience most problems from contamination and unknown strength. Then these accidents are attributed to the substance itself. Prime example is teenagers overdosing PMA thinking it is ecstasy and MDMA taking the blame. At least you can see which media are trustworthy through this lens of dishonest reporting.
You don't need both. The new treatment is only a bi-monthly injection.

Study participants only needs both the injection and daily oral medication due to the study design. Since they were comparing the new (injection) treatment with an old (oral) treatment, participants needed to go through the motions of both so that they could be properly blinded.
See you in the gulag, comrade!
>Good idea. Fighting it only makes the product more valuable, and the cartels more powerful.

Yes, but those cartels can still offer more than the government is offering (or use other, nastier means of persuasion) and their primary market doesn't live in Columbia. Not sure this will help all that much.
In my experience I actually got A LOT more from this approach using postgraphile/Hasura in front of my DB and later moved to dosco/super-graph in order to add custom functionality that was kind of a pain to do on the DB.

I really liked the mixed approach of have the DB do everything that it can and have a light backend that can handle http requests, api callbacks, image manipulation and whatever else.
I respect a history lesson, but honestly, I think old comrade tales are not helpful.

I don't mean that it's irrelevant, strictly, but we hear more of these than 2020 tales, 2020 strategies and concerns. This is 100 year later, and despite of how many union die hards see it... most workers aren't likely to buy int a centuries long struggle. They're interested in their own lives & jobs.
> However, the aim of this stack is simplicity, but it is incompatible with serverless products, which I now vastly prefer for ease of use and lower effort- traits

The issue with this statement is that you're comparing things that works on different layers. PostgREST is for someone to host the database without any backend, serverless as you describe it is just a SaaS service you use. If there was a SaaS that exposed PostgREST as a service, it'll be a similar experience.

So unless you're comparing running a serverless platform yourself with running PostgREST yourself (which would be pretty obvious which one is the easiest), I feel like you missed with your argument here.
What happens to all of the government employees who have been given extensive experience in combat against the coca industry? Will they suddenly end up unemployed with a skillset that is primarily based on violence and imposing control? Even if they have used those skill for what they believed to have been positive goals, when they need to feed their families, who is going to be the buyer for those skills? Hopefully the government has considered this and has some sort of plan for easing these people into other lines of work.
Now do WFH with remote desktop that is on a shared VM a few states away with a bunch of other devs. Its horrible.
A related article and discussion are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289523
Yes. I have the X13 which is quite similar to the T14s (just smaller) with the same processor/ram and I'm quite happy. Best keyboard I've had on a laptop. Does suspend to ram/suspend to disk/hibernate work you for you though? Using Manjaro on 5.9 kernel and X, and most things work out of the box well enough for my purposes except for suspend/hibernate and I can't find any info online for how to fix it completely.

Added "idle=nomwait amd_iommu=off resume=<swap UUID>" kernel params and this seems to sometimes work but usually not...

And what is your battery life? I get ~5 hrs (up to 6.5hrs with most processes disabled except firefox), with around 6-8 watts discharge rate (using powertop --auto-tune).

Typical trials and tribulations of new hardware with linux. I was thinking of trying out Fedora/Ubuntu/Pop_OS to see how they are.
the counter point is that minimum wage is artificial. if you aren't actually providing that much value, businesses will just cut the job altogether. if you are trying to raise a large family on minimum wage, well then that's obviously a big problem, but it's highly likely to be a problem you created with your life choices.

on the other hand, if you are in high school or college, minimum wage is likely fine as it's just extra spending money. raising minimum wage significantly more than likely just kills these jobs in favor of a kiosk that can do the job just as well.

if we want to make it so that everyone can live, that is a job for gov't with things like universal healthcare, universal basic income, social safety nets. forcing businesses to pay people more for a job than the job creates in value is not a solution. in the long term those jobs will just go away completely to a technology solution.

give people a safety net so that they can not be in poverty, but don't force businesses to pay more than the market says a job is worth. kind of a silly argument on a post about amazon anyways, since they pay well above minimum wage, and in fact have campaigned on raising it (not out of the goodness of their hearts mind you, they want to put small competitors out of business and they know they can't afford a large min wage hike like amazon can)
Wasn't it expected to fail at any moment? I imagine they've been watching pretty closely with drones for the last few days/weeks.
As I understand it, we don't know. People in different areas have very different gut microbiomes and correlations with health outcomes are not the same between different populations... At least that was what I remember reading some years ago.
This sounds more like a "professional organization". I wonder if this would be a good thing for software engineers, where it's not a union for a specific company but just a lobbying organization to push for legislation that is beneficial for software engineers and maybe a legal arm available to members to sue for violations of those laws.
Play with Go [audio]
alacritty?
While I love how NL handles drugs, its not legal there, citing wikipedia [1]:

Cannabis in the Netherlands is illegal, but is decriminalised for personal use. Recreational consumption of the drug is tolerated, and it is available in coffee shops.

Much better compared to pretty much useless decriminalization-only approach some trump as holy grail - while miles better than punitive imprisonment of consumers like in US (or half the world), it still keeps all money flowing through drug cartels and very bad quality of potentially lethal substances.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_the_Netherlands
It's not always about just waiting in a line. If I have a small store selling pre-packaged meats, I may not have enough money to staff a deli counter.
We do pay for proper disposal - Often through taxes that go towards waste disposal, but some folks pay direct. The cheese plant pays for this sort of thing too. It simply isn't entirely in the cost of the cheese itself.
If things aren't getting properly handled, unfortunately that is a political issue with legal solutions.

Having someone slice the cheese at a counter comes with its own risks: Have they cleaned properly? Are they treated fairly? Is the price going to go up because now places need a staffed deli, sinks, and equipment? Will it be just deli products or is everything in the grocery store going to be more expensive to pay for this extra stuff? Heck, what sort of impact is all of this stuff going to have on the environment?

I'll add that no matter what, we all are paying for things that we, personally, don't do, haven't consumed, or disagree with. It is part of living in a society. If you buy a pair of pants, you are covering the cost of theft and loss. If you go to the doctor, you are paying for other people's care in addition to your own (heck, that's what health insurance is). You may or may not feel you get much back for your tax money, which is really dependent on where you live in the world.
Discussed at length 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25267204
Dr. Masky FTW :)