skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are Ali and Omair of Abhi (http://abhi.com.pk/). We are a financial wellness platform in Pakistan, focusing on providing early wage access to the salaried class.

Most employees in Pakistan live paycheck to paycheck, not having savings for emergencies or random bills. Many pay their bills late, as payroll disbursement often does not coincide with bill cycles, incurring hefty payment fees. Fewer than 20% of the population have access to formal credit; banks are stringent in their underwriting and have not been focused on consumer lending due to high returns on treasury investments. In a population of 220M, consumer finance products have a total value of less than $3.5B. Meanwhile the total value of monthly payroll processed in Pakistan is between $6B and $8B. Without access to credit, people turn to friends and family, try to get advances from their employer, or resort to loan sharks.

The idea for Abhi came from first hand experience of constantly being asked for money by friends and family and speaking to companies on how often they have seen requests for salary advances. We also have seen how it takes over 45 days to get a loan from a bank or get approved for a credit card. My cofounder Omair, who was working at Morgan Stanley, had also been studying the early wage access model around the world and the uptake it had in emerging markets. After running a small pilot with 400 employees, we decided to work on a B2B2C model to provide advances to consumers via their employers to reduce delinquency risk.

We partner with employers to offer financial well-being benefits that improve retention, productivity and employee engagement. Our mission is to help millions of people across Pakistan live healthier, happier financial lives. We do this by offering: access to their salary as it is earned; affordable advances; and engaging financial education. In surveys we have found employees using these funds for utility bills, home maintenance, fixing their vehicles, medical expenses, and weddings.

We provide instant access to earned wages to all employees of any company that has signed on with us, without the need for any documentation. We allow this through 4 touch points: a mobile app, 2 way SMS, WhatsApp, and a web portal. The funds get sent to the employee within a minute, to their existing payroll account held in any bank or mobile wallet in Pakistan. We also provide advances when needed, for which we charge a flat 2% transaction fee. These are collected on the next payroll, eliminating late fees and loan shark interest rates.
Hello HN! We are Antonio, Felipe, Joaquin and Francois, founders of Chipax (https://www.chipax.com/). We are helping SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses) in Latin America handle their finances. Chipax is self-serve online software that works with real-time data collection from the IRS and banks. We all know how painful and time consuming it is to manage finances and keep payables and receivables up to date. So we are shortening this gap with technology.

We got started in 2015 when our friend's business was about to go bankrupt. He asked us for help. Antonio used spreadsheets to figure what was really happening; their finances were a mess. These spreadsheets did the work, but they quickly became really hard to maintain and existing software solutions made the problem even worse.

We turned those spreadsheets into a web app to make it easier to work with. We shared the web app with some friends and then we realized this was a very common problem among SMBs, so we decided to found Chipax. Right now, we have >1000 paying customers between Chile and Mexico.

We focus on cash flow, the heart of the SMB. We sync invoices and bills, tax and bank records so you can reconcile and get AR and AP reports accurately faster. We automatically categorize invoices and bills to get simple yet powerful P&L reports to track company or project numbers. We automate reporting on what’s most important: cash flow, income statement, debts payable, etc. Our customers are not looking for complex solutions, robust AI models or overly advanced technologies. They simply want to know how their business is doing and have peace of mind to operate it.

We are very excited to be at this point, we have been reading HN for years. We’d love to speak to any of you that are curious about what we’re doing or if you have any ideas/challenges for us!
We’re Aditya and Karan, the co-founders of Warrant (https://warrant.dev/). We build APIs and infrastructure to help developers implement authorization and access control in their apps.

Implementing flexible authorization that grows with your application is difficult. Many products only need authentication early on but eventually require authorization; however, adding complex authorization to a mature, high usage product is even harder. We’re building Warrant to better abstract the complexity of authorization and reduce implementation cost and maintenance drag for engineering teams.

Warrant abstracts your authorization rules and access control logic outside of your application so it isn’t coupled to core business logic. We adopted concepts from Google Zanzibar to make Warrant flexible enough to support any access control model. Authorization rules are easy to enforce in backend and frontend code at runtime through simple API calls. Both developers and non-technical users can modify access rules through our dashboard to change application behavior without needing to change code.

We’re taking a service-driven approach to authorization. As companies get bigger and build out multiple services, authorization logic needs to be re-implemented in the new services or some central service. Whether you’re a small startup with a monolith or a company with many microservices, we think decoupling your authorization and having a dedicated authorization service is the right approach. Check out our demo app (https://github.com/warrant-dev/warrant-demo-app-ts) for an end-to-end example of how to use Warrant.
> "barely middle class".

Inflation. Being a millionaire or having a six figure salaries used to have much more weight during the 80s.

Pretty much any senior level engineer at FANG can be a millionaire if they saved, but they can barely afford a standalone home in San Francisco. What does the term 'middle class' even mean if they can't afford a home?

Only 20% of millionaires surveyed feel they're rich.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/12/net-worth-to-be-considered-w...
That's like a carpenter who has never learned how to use a circular saw. Sure, you can work your way around it with all the other tools you have, but why would you? Just put 1 hour into studying it, and have a new tool under your belt.
That’s not the “dominant narrative”, it’s historical fact. Slavery, segregation and genocide of Native Americans aren’t fabricated stories, they actually happened.

Patriotism is for fools. Civil spirit starts with not rejecting citizenship for tax reasons.
Fractal | Systems Engineer | Backend Engineer| Remote Full-time/Fixed-Term (i.e. 6mo) | https://www.fractal.co/ Fractal is building the world's fastest browser by streaming it frm the cloud. Load pages instantly. Use 10x less memory. Enjoy complete privacy. Fractal is a supercharged version of Chrome that runs in the cloud.

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What's unfair isn't this practise per-say, but the fact that it's not equal.

I think keeping hold of foreign citizenship represents an unfair advantage to some degree, as a kind of "fallback" - e.g. if things go to shit you always have the option of returning home.

but other nationalities generally don't need to pay to remain citizens while they are abroad, so Americans are treated unusually.
The 3dfx Voodoo1 card _might_ be classifiable as the first GPU, I'd say. While SGI had display hardware with more processing before that, it wasn't (afaik) in a form that could be moved to a different system.
UK politics: Keeping old computers going costs government £2.3bn a year
Everyone goes through this phase where we laugh at non-optimal solution to a problem, and proudly cut a line or ten, or hundred from someone's solution.

But after 20 years in the industry, I find this trivial and expected even in code by people who are quite smart. Sometimes a solution evolves in a way where the initial variant wasn't subject to simplification, while the current version is. Sometimes there's an edge case that's non-obvious and solved by a complicated solution (comments help here). Sometimes the coder had their mind elsewhere so they approached the problem in a seemingly odd manner.

But none of this matters in the big picture. What matters is all this code is wrapper in a function that goes like "getFirst42Bits(int)" and it returns that. And so the only thing that matters is if this function has the right input, output for the bigger problem to solve. The implementation is a detail.

Of course, I'm excluding vulnerabilities and vast performance problems in hotspots, this matters.

But a specific instance of inefficient solution doesn't matter. A pattern of inefficient solutions may be ground for being demoted or laid off. But any instance is irrelevant. WE ALL DO THIS from time to time, but we don't realize it.

Heck, the primary reason why I hate most "web frameworks" is that they do in 2000 lines of boilerplate what I can do with my own APIs in 100.
I am hoping this was meant to be a joke. If not fire him ;-)
Flat earth, Q and friends are not part of the endemic beliefs of the general population. These are fringe beliefs. People might have the wrong impression about their spread because people like to write a lot about them. Curiosity makes luminaries waste out time or offer us entertainment. Also attractive to people that aren't too sure about themselves and try look for reassurance while looking at the clearly absurd. "At least those are more stupid than I am", "If those are not afraid of X, why should I be?".

Ukip, Brexit, AfD, Trump, FN are different phenomena in my opinion.

Some of Brexits arguments were objectively correct and there are no certainly correct or wrong opinions here. Especially on hot button terms like sovereignty and self-determination. It depends on what level you look. Self-determination against the EU or Russia/China/US? There are different answers here and none of them is entirely true. But the opposition just shut them down, so people responded in kind. That it was basically 50:50 is surely accidental, but I like to see it as a hint.

The AfD is radicalized now, but it was firstly headed by someone that has been vindicated by projections other economists failed at. He isn't in the party anymore, but what do you think happened with those that shared his beliefs? Those were correct too, what do you think they believe about their opposition today?

These beliefs aren't mine, but I understand their distrust. In many cases it is distrust that was earned, not by their failure to form an opinion, quite the contrary their opposition was in many cases completely incapable to understand the nature of their opposition, which paints a shadow on their own judgements.

The indignation against people not being able to think is misplaced in many cases, that is also true for the other way around of course.
It's worse than this. You not just need to aim for zero bugs, but zero bugs despite working with hardware that can degrade with use and who's firmware often does have bugs.
I’m sure the indoor cat having their toes chopped off (which is a procedure derided by pretty much everyone these days) has nothing to do with it.
Maybe this is a necessary crapfest though, to demonstrate how absurd these measures are.
I might have phrased that ambiguously, I mean "an affront to me" as in "to me, that's an affront", not that you have somehow insulted me.

I say let children be free, no court is going to indict you because you have baby pictures on your phone.
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Looking for full-time junior full-stack positions
It doesn't seem like a bad thing that they do care. The end result in the study was that people trusted the person who doesn't make time for them less. But that's exactly the right result. You should be less close and show less trust toward someone who won't make time for you, since they are, by definition, not going to be there for you as often when you need it. It seems quite natural to move trust and closeness to a party that, for whatever reason, isn't going to decline invitations to engage. Nothing wrong with the other party if they have other priorities, but it does mean they aren't a good person for the inviter to depend on. Sort of avoiding codependency.
So this is a... forum? Something like Forem? I'm not sure what I'm looking at here.
You inspired me to the lifespan of Japanese macaques, and it is 27 years; the previous alpha male was 31 years old, which suggests to me that he must have been pretty over the hill.

Given that she is smaller than the average male macaque, I imagine that this is not a terribly stable situation.
> The way I use passwords is way safer than Keyri

I don't see how that is possible.

(1) Keyri private keys cannot be stolen other than through smartphone malware, which is exceedingly rare, while password managers and older USB keys are vulnerable to desktop malware, which is much more common - both credential stealers and, in the case of older generations of Yubikeys, keyloggers. Hardware OTP devices are additionally vulnerable man-in-the-middle phishing attacks (though the HN audience is generally savvy enough to not fall for phishing) - https://github.com/kgretzky/evilginx2.

(2) As long as you rely on passwords and TOTP, you're relying on the shared secret paradigm and trusting the relying party to handle your credentials properly. If the relying party's credential store is breached and the credentials were improperly stored (common even today), your credentials (both your password and OTP secrets) can be used by a bad actor to access your account. Public key systems like Keyri and FIDO2 substantially reduce this risk.

> As I said in a comment below, the fact that companies "can afford" is not the same as "it's worth it" to them

Please see my response below regarding account sharing. In short, eliminating account sharing in order to enforce TOS is an opportunity to (a) improve security (b) improve UX in cases where provisioning multiple users access to one account is warranted.

> Finally, with OpenID, I can set up my own identity provider, or use a privacy conscious one.

As you note, the vast majority of web services don't support arbitrary identity providers or use privacy conscious ones. History has proven that people don't set up their own identity provider. Additionally, the universe of "privacy conscious" OIDC providers is limited (non-existent?).
Isn't this how we hear directionally? 300m/s means 150mm distance. Ears are only about 250mm apart, so if you couldn't hear a 0.5ms diff you'd have no idea where sound was coming from right?
Seoul. Seoul. Seoul. So Good I Had to Go Back Three Times
From the sublime to the ridiculous. The city that has it all.
I dont honestly believe any ill intent by most of the individuals who are like this. They all react to the media ecosystem we live in. We react to what we hear about and if we dont hear about it we tend to forget it exists.

The inconsistency (where it exists) on an individual level is reflective of an inconsistency on a societal level by who holds the puppet strings. That isnt you. Or me.

Moreover 99% of individuals could act perfectly consistently individually and yet the accusations that get amplified vs. those that get muted will reflect the interests of whomever has a dominant voice.

>there's absolutely no space for abusers in a liberatory movement.

If your contention is that Richard Stallman's weird and slightly creepy business card constitutes abuse you are likely more interested in sabotage.

I'm not gonna argue that Stallman definitely ISNT "an abuser" but I have definitely read articles that implied that he was based upon evidence like that.
> The best thing to do is forbid them re-entry into the country

Given the track-record lefty authoritarianism has, I'm always a little nauseated to see people pull out the truncheon and jack-boots to enforce "economic justice". That and suggestions like this don't even make any sense, and rarely ever do. It always looks to me like retribution is the aim here, rather than effective economic policy.
It's partly the same in much early writing instruction in the UK and there are pedagogical advantages to encouraging learning writers to embrace ambitious word choice and grammar and risk making mistakes. This should not be the final goal of writing instruction.
Google Co-Founder Larry Page Allowed into New Zealand Despite Closed Border
Bitwise shifting isn't that important, unless you happen to work with binary formats and protocols, which should be distinct low-level layer in any app, and ideally relegated to a library that does it better.

Back in time it was known for being a fast way to multiply and divide by powers of 2. This hasn't been true for a long time now, and in the rare cases it is, most optimizing compilers will bitwise shift where in your source code you divide or multiply.
Hmm, I seem to recall hearing Australians also have complicated rules about being an "Australian resident for tax purposes" that is not the same as an Australian resident for other purposes, especially when you don't have Permanent Residence/Green Card and are on a time-limited visa (even if it's years long). So they don't technically fall into the "America and Eritrea" bad list, but still tax many Australians abroad. I forget the exact details though.
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What percent of wealth does the top 1% possess vs the bottom 90 percent combined?

Wikipedia says the top 1% possesses precisely 38.5% of the country's wealth, so it's more than reasonable that they shoulder at least 38.5% of the taxes. [1] This stat is also from 2016. That divide has grown immensely these past few years.

The stat the Tax Foundation presents is made to make us sympathetic towards people who control basically the entire nation's wealth and pay, frankly, very little. There's a reason they're not putting their wealth in the EU or developed Asian countries--they'd be paying more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
The city on the west coast of Denmark? Is that a typo?
IRS thinks Green Card Holders who are non-citizens and non-residents owes them taxes on income on their country of residence and citizenship.

They're effectively the only country that believes they're entitled to non-citizen and non-resident income, but we're the "selfish lot" for relieving ourselves of a double tax burden to a country we don't reside in? No thanks you can have it back.
I'm pretty sure generational wealth has the most to lose from printing money. So they can try to continue being exploitative. But the government should print money to fund competition.
Second Hottest July in Europe on Record, Third Warmest July on Record Globally
A reflective collar with a bell stopped my cat from killing birds.

She still "hunts" birds but hasn't been able to catch one since I put the collar on. I suppose eventually she will get one, but it helps immensely.

The only issue is about once every two months she loses the collar (it has break away elastic) and it has to be replaced.
I bought Robert's book "Game Programming Patterns", and although it is a bit OOP-heavy for my taste, I have enjoyed it and the illustrations are excellent.

Also, cool to see him pull a Knuth and writing his own typesetting and build system for the book!
> The implications of her highschool are just inappropriate and so I redact it.

Right before you link to the page where you pulled your self-redacted quote from. So all you really did was call more attention to it. Clever trolling.
She was rescue cat, I would never declaw a cat and my wife felt we were the only ones who could take care of her. We don't let her outside as she has no way of defending herself and we live the deep south with plenty of animals that could kill her.
Ok, but that’s not the result of a random collision. Those are all carefully engineered.

What is the actual attack you are imagining?
I had the same thought. My friends and family are all mostly in the same income bracket, and "don't have the money" would be an obvious lie for all but the most expensive event (recent example was a luxury safari in Africa at >$10k/head).
> It would have to make a static inference

Not necessarily a static inference... could be speculative.

Code folding golf is a bit of a hobby of mine. For example you can optimise through the string-integer conversion by storing a special string that remembers it was originally an integer and returning that value again instead of re-parsing. I work on a compiler that does that one for real, for example.

I don't seriously think Rust does this right now, but would be a challenge to try.
Will Remote Workers Get Left Behind in the Hybrid Office?
Having no prior indoctrination or opinion I had always just assumed it would have coincided with proliferation of agricultural. Whoever says the forests disappeared 1000 years ago, after agriculture had been in full swing for millennia, makes a weak argument without some supporting evidence.

Even in the US, where land clearing has only been in practice for a few centuries, we’ve seen drastic changes to our landscape. I’d love to see how things looked before American chestnut trees went “extinct” and how people used them in the past. Apparently it was quite the resource.
If you're worried about people being oppressed, moving away from basic principles of freedom and liberty is probably not the path you want to take.

If libertarianism would result in a great many oppressed people, any sort of centralisation of power will result in even more oppressed people. Beefing up government power is no solution to oppression; the worst oppressors are invariably governments. The worst of the great catastrophes and oppression of the last century were perpetrated by strong centralised governments.
Lack of device drivers mainly, I would assume.

Could be something else, I know there were projects attempting to do things with Darwin in the past and none were successful.
That's not what contagious means--that's heritability
Right, it seems people can detect the .5ms phase difference in the timbre. It is a noticeable difference, but they aren't detecting the delay, per se.
Yeah, there are clearly cases where you don't have an easy way today to take a package from point A to a relatively nearby point B.

But it's really hard for me to imagine what delivery problem drones solved for the average Amazon package. At first it really seemed like a PR stunt but, by every indication, Bezos was actually serious about it. Which I honestly don't get.
Yeah he is amazing! Such a diverse chap :-)
Indeed. And, amusingly enough, most of the open standards stuff still exists too.
I never have used a bitshift operator in production code but I think it’s important to at least know that these fundamental operators exist.

Also, whenever I see code that takes a number, converts it to string, does some manipulation and then converts back to number , I always assume that this was a quick hack that can be done better.
Whoah, 6.5 million native speakers! That's several orders of magnitude more than I was expecting. It's also significantly larger than the native-speaking populations of languages like Catalan, Basque, or Romansh, which might be more familiar to North Americans or Europeans.
The stimulus checks allowed them to afford to renounce citizenship.
> in half a millisecond it travels about 17 cm, which, I would guess, is larger than the average distance between our ears

What is the speed and variability of neural signals traveling through the brain?