skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they advertise their own services

That's actually half of your answer right there - and the answer for the question why banks don't want you to automate your finances. They want you to do every operation through their webpage, mobile app or branch office, because they want to sell more financial products to you.

> they increase the chance that I'll just give up and phone them, -> increased call-centre costs

Being on a call with them is another perfect opportunity for them to do some upselling.

That said, your description of the authentication process sounds like a pathological case. Most banks aren't like that. The banks I use have all been streamlining authentication - but they do this by requiring users to go through the mobile app, which is full of attempts to sell you credits, insurance and investment accounts.

EDIT: two more points.

1) Some of the auth flow in banks may be (bank's interpretation of) regulatory requirements. This applies especially to banks that (like the ones I use) offer identity services for interacting with my government on-line. That is, one of the ways I can authenticate myself when filing taxes, or starting a company, or checking my medical receipts, or other stuff like this on-line, is through my bank's web page.

2) Let's look at behavior of banks through a different lens. There's one thing I want that, according to my research, no bank provides. I want a bullshit-free way to programmatically fetch my account balance. Say, an API token I could use with CURL - something I can set up and forget, so I can make myself an "account balance" widget containing up-to-date balances from one or more accounts of one or more different banks. I can't do that. It's an obvious thing to offer when building a digital service, but nobody offers it. There is a reason - and I posit that the reason is, they don't want to do it, because it would reduce my visits on their webpages / in their apps, depriving them of opportunity to advertise financial product to me. I.e. the purposeful creation of inefficiencies I talked about.
You shouldn't be surprised. There've been plenty of examples of people stating facts germane to the topic and nevertheless downvoted because some folk don't like that fact being referenced. Be nice if they had to offer a reason for their downvote. Quite a lot of bigotry around.
It's got to a point where in games like Skyrim I generally just sell the majority of potions and whatnot, because I know when I get down to it I'll always be thinking there's a better time to use it.

For whatever reason, I still can't let go mid-combat, but when selling it I have no issue.
I'm from the generation that had to go to the local FCC office to advance from novice. You copied code in a glass room with echo's that made things challenging. The FCC guys always seemed gruff and non-smiling like they didn't particularly enjoy the task. Some hams had to travel hundreds of miles to reach a local FCC office.

I would imagine the volunteer examiner program would be much easier. But it sounds like it could be made much better. However to an extent the FCC is still driving the rules. Governments are by their very nature bureaucratic.
Reflection on four years at Databricks
A fancy keyboard on its own is probably not a good indicator.

But I would switch this around and definitely say with my few years of experience, those that were “the best” were also those that were interested the most in their tools of the trade.

And whether that is a mechanical keyboard or a better screen or better performance or better IDE setups. Doesn’t really matter. Sadly many companies don’t seem to encourage this enough imho
> Thank you for Smoking

I once applied for a job at Phillip Morris in VA. On the reception desk (you had to walk about 30 yards from the entrance through the marble-lined lobby to get there), there was a sign saying "Enjoy smoking!"

Every office had ashtrays everywhere, and staff were provided with a carton of 200 free cigs every week.
> These upstart crypto-competitors

> in comparison to crypto.

I'm somewhat saddened to see Snowden adopt the highly questionable practice of shortening the term "cryptocurrency" to "crypto".
Sending 8 year olds to jail?
This is horrendous, even for 2 days. Trully despicable.
Economics are real, but the flow of currency is not economics. The flow of currency is politically influenced and has nothing to do with human trade for humans sake (economics as commonly understood but not actually since it’s conflated with currency movement).

What we should realize through the study of economics is just how screwed things are. Anyone with any math sense should see inflation deflates buying power for the public, and has nothing to do with real trade but belief that a billionaire is leveraging real property so well on his own… oh wait all of humanity serves him by not changing the rules to serve themselves. What a convenient self fulfilling prophecy.

The math makes it obvious which people are winning and science makes it obvious no one is more than one of seven billion. Somehow it’s miraculously a specific few winning big.

Stop listening to it all. People trade. That’s it. There’s no need to speculate and manage the behavior to send billionaires in space on empty promises of humans …magically… becoming the first space faring civ. Sure seems to give Bezos a helluva life. I’m crazy though; humanity has never succumbed to shared fallacy at scale before.

Who knows, maybe healthcare and education for all actually empower the kid who goes on to engineer the next big leap, but contemporary political memes filter those break throughs out by miserly tracking currency debts.
CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository
https://sourceforge.net/projects/peace-equalizer-apo-extensi... has a feature to set the eq based on your ability to hear certain frequencies
"Ugh, please don't bring morals and ethics into our technical discussions"
> is it at all possible that practice and study are insufficient to create further growth? What I think faizshah is talking about is that there is enormous complexity that goes into creating skill.

Sure there is enormous complexity and many factors that go into creating skill, but that's a generic claim, whereas faizsah was making some specific claims. In particular, they were claiming that talent does not exist (or "innate ability" is not a significant contributor to creation of skill, if you want to phrase it more softly). There is a mountain of evidence to show that innate ability is one of the largest differentiating factors between "masters" at a skill compared to "normal people" who practice that skill.

> a plateau is a sign of stagnant processes.

Nope, there are limits to achievable skill. If I practice height jumping, I'm going to plateau pretty quickly and make only incremental improvements even with the best of processes. Same goes for mental pursuits like competitive programming as well.
> style TUIs were kind of awful.

You might have disliked them but they were far from awful. They were some of the cleanest TUIs ever designed.

The other screenshot you shared isn’t a TUI by the way. It’s a GUI. It just happens it runs atop of DOS (much like early versions of Windows did). So it’s not really comparable to TurboVision.

Regarding TurboVision, I suspect you might be in the minority with your dislike for them too. Which I guess just goes to prove that everyone will have different preferences and thus you can’t please everyone all of the time.
I have no doubt Google will not use iOS default GUI components. They will come up with some sort of abomination that superficially looks like the native iOS components but are off in every way when you look closely, like Qt does.
No, she's just a racist. Motivated reasoning is an incredibly strong force.

(It's very tempting to regard people we strongly disagree with as insane, but it's a mistake that both impairs dealing with actual mental illness compassionately and fighting them politically. She's perfectly rational and sane, she's just reasoning from a set of beliefs and emotional values that you find abhorrent)
Do you think if he hadn't had those restrictions available he wouldn't have kidnapped Sarah Everard? Surely he'd have just used something else?
What about flutter apps?
You can get around many paywalls with 12ft.io

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/leaders/20...
I guess they don't think Flutter is a good experience for iOS apps. When you don't eat your own dogfood, why would you expect others to do so?
Or else, you can Google "davenport children prison" and find more articles on this. Or you can follow the "source" button to get more informations about the stats used in the article.
It’s not even a case of “for once”. It’s made abundantly clear if you’ve read or watched The Laundromat which was written by a core contributor to the ICIJ that significant tax evasion is happening in America.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine

Alternatively, tax consumption over a certain threshold as though spending is income. Effectively instate a federal sales tax after one has spent $X dollars.
She is up for re-election next year.
Ask HN: Dealing with peer who lacks technical background
I'm a PM for a technical product. Our customers are developers. At work, I have a peer that I'll call Sam (we share the same manager). Sam is great as a person, but at work, I have the impression from the kinds of questions he asks that he doesn't really have the technical background to understand the product he works on.

For example, I watched him a few times trying to sell his product to a customer based on the high level buzzwords, but when the conversation starts getting technical because the customer is trying to understand how their product might help solve a particular problem, he'll say things like "let's take a step back from the solutions and let me understand the problem you're trying to solve", even if the customer at that point really does want to talk about the detail.

Or, after I explain a particular customer's situation, he'll ask me "why don't they use [product X]" which is an irrelevant fit for the problem. I've had more productive conversations talking directly with Sam's engineers, and I've heard from some of them that they feel he's adding negative value due to his lack of technical depth.

Now my manager is asking me to work closer with Sam on a project, and I find it difficult because I feel like he's dragging conversations backwards or derailing them due to lack of technical understanding. Moreover, Sam projects very high confidence, and doesn't look aware of his deficiencies.

How would you deal with this? I'm thinking of telling my boss what I think about Sam and ask to be left alone, but part of me feels shitty about badmouthing Sam.

The extra challenge is, I sort of lied: Sam is actually a woman, in an extremely male team (~80%, and both I and my manager are men). I just didn't want my post to sound like a misogynistic rant... It causes me extra concern because I want to help her succeed as much as possible, and in my past experience when I've provided constructive feedback to women, on a couple occasions they told me they found it sexist.
kvark is a GPU expert who's worked on GPU programming, 3D games, and GPU standards for years now. And he's not the only one working on naga, either.

I'm also really not sure how you got the first point from what he wrote. He was not saying he was surprised to find "you need to have an entry point" he was saying the restriction made no sense, and that existing tools didn't even take advantage of having more than one entry point due to driver bugs.

The rest of your points are basically just opinions masquerading as something else. In any case I don't actually care how hard WGSL is to write, because I don't have to write it (you can go through a translation layer). What I'm not going to do is pretend that SPIR-V is a great choice for this intermediate layer solely on the basis of what I've heard from other graphics people who haven't actually tried to use it for that purpose--which is exactly what the article is about.
The whole idea that BH is a success due to good deals is wrong. BH has made good deals and bad deals, but that's not the main reason for their long term track record.

BH has a good record because they have structured their business to have a permanent edge: Their insurance&reinsurance business (half of the business) generates cash and float constantly. The side of the company seeks ways to invest all that cash. Often buying whole businesses.

In other words, BH cuts out several levels of middlemen. They are an insurance company, holding company, private equity & alternative investment management company and investment fund rolled into one. Cutting out banks, private equity, fund managers bring in huge savings.

The reason why BH has not been outperforming SP500 in the last 10 years is that cash is cheap for everyone (this is the longest boom in history) Once the water level drops again and we see who swims naked, BH will outperform again.
I'm not seeing that behavior; my letter/number keys simply repeat. But I'm sure I've seen it before. I guess there may be an option somewhere to enable/disable it, but offhand I can't seem to find it.

Or maybe this has changed (back) in a recent OS update? I'm running 12.0beta on this machine.
How on Earth using solar power on your own property be illegal or taxable in the first place?
you need to hang out in crypto related discords, maybe a community around the Ocean protocol you talk about. I'm familiar with crypto but from a glance I have no idea what these tokens are. HN is anti-crypto if you didn't know so better to go where crypto enthusiasts are
Yep. The reality is that tax avoidance may be immoral, it is perfectly legal. I pass the skyscrapers filled with lawyers and accountants every day on my commute.
Exactly. This is my problem with most apps. They are ad-ridden craps. It took me some time to find a music player that looks the way I want it to, support what I want it to, and not display ads or pause music to play ads.
> It's a story as old as time: investors (and employees with equity) will put up with just about any yahoo and their dictates (and noxious politics) as long as the money keeps rolling in.

It's a tech company, it's not a YMCA nor a progressive PAC. Obviously, a large number of people here just can't tell the difference anymore, but that's only a cultural issue, not a technical one.

The only thing obnoxious here is the people not realizing they can't have their way everywhere and can't impose their stupid petty identity politics everywhere they go.
"Optional (but recommended) UTF-8 BOM."

Why? Everyone else I've seen is not recommending the BOM and trying to get rid of them. They cause issues in various systems and you could just infer UTF-8 from the file extension.
> What 'brand of politics' is it to suggest that politics shouldn't be a major factor at work.

Let’s apply this to say the stereotypical 50s “Mad Men” office, gender gap and everything. To be political in that time and say hey women shouldnt just be secretaries and stay at home parents wouldn’t fly, it’s political. That’s what I think is meant by “a no politics rule means acceptance of status quo”. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people happy with the status quo, or who think it’s fair and equitable as is.

Not that the ones being “political” are necessarily correct completely or in part right now, but there were plenty who liked the status quo just fine back then too.
Capital gain is defined as an increase in the price of any capital asset, not just publicly traded stocks.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalasset.asp
As someone who recently moved from the UK to Switzerland, I can attest that "English proficiency" isn't the main issue - it probably helps (it would be even harder to move to Japan where I couldn't talk to pretty much anyone, nor read anything), but the main issue is bureaucracy - everything is in German - forms, contracts, etc. - and some foreign documents have to be translated (they sometimes accept English documents, at least).
> An acre full of pressurized hydrogen sounds like a Port of Beirut moment waiting to happen.

You still need oxygen to react no? If it’s pure hydrogen …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny goes back a long way.

The US separation of Church and State only means that a specific church doesn't get doctrinal control. It's specifically against the Church of England setup. Doesn't mean that the voters won't insist on Christian hegemony, or even the particularly white supremacist flavours of evangelical/baptist Christianity, just that you get a choice of which Christian church to attend.
You might have missed the fact that sharks are awesome.
Another consideration is that, at scale, no sql is way cheaper. I run a service with approx. 900k daily users, each generating about 210 object writes and reads that need to execute within 50ms, and I am running this on firestore for about $350 a month, incl. Elb, waf, regionally replicated compute, managed NLP and translate. I sync the no sql stuff to bigquery for analytical usage. Cheap, and scales without any problems as long as one observes the recommended patterns. And all of that scaled from a 5 user POC without a single adjustment in the infra setup or architecture.

Not doing relational again.
Honest question to HN readers: which Google apps are you using on iOS, and why?

I’ve bit the bullet and ditched Google ecosystem last year, moving email to Fastmail, buying an iPhone and the like. The only Google app i still use is Maps - they are vastly superior to everything else, with navigation, public transport schedule (extremely accurate in Prague) and reviews/recommendations built in. Essentially its a three-in-one application with no adequate replacement.

I wonder if I am missing something good from Google.
Not to be rude but your comment can be summarized as „one can mess up with SQL as well“, which is kind of „duh“. Absolutely every technology can be criticized this way. The more important point is that the layers on top of SQL always lead to horrible performance as soon as something non-trivial is done. And the trivial parts would’ve been trivial in SQL as well. People just really hate learning SQL to the extent that they implement their own, worse query language instead of wielding SQL with skill.
Good to see they embrace that platform's own conventions instead of forcing their own.
They do leak memory sometimes. Cito frees variables, but not temporary values. It also has no chance of knowing whether a third-party function takes ownership of an object or not.

The simplest example is string interpolation, I've just submitted an issue: https://github.com/pfusik/cito/issues/26
> The truth is: all these leaks didn't unearth as much dirt on high-profile politicians as the journalists hoped for.

I don’t think that’s true. Significant corruption has been found in this and previous leaks at multiple levels of government around the globe. The problem is not enough has been done about it.
There's a longstanding trend of treating black children like adults. It gets them into the school-to-prison pipeline earlier.
ESLint vs. Prettier
"Haxe can build cross-platform applications." Although it also has APIs as an example use case, it is more general.
When I still had iOS I mostly used Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.
They already do that for Flutter with the Cupertino Widgets.
“We’re pretty sure you don’t really mean it”
Corporate secrecy laws in Delaware are so strong that Americans don’t need to seek offshore tax havens, which themselves are often modelled on Delaware’s corporate laws.
I dunno. I think the line between "normal code" and proofs is a lot blurrier than many people make it out to be, and I don't think there's a huge advantage to asking people to run a type checker or inference algorithm in their heads even if you have managed to encode all your program's invariants in the type system (which is impossible or impractical in many languages). I say that as someone who doesn't use an IDE except when I'm forced to: I know I lose out on a lot of productivity because of it, and I don't find that removing the IDE forces me to develop better or more concise code.
Commenter could do better than just writing an emotional burp.
Doesn’t sound like this is the case from the linked Twitter thread: „App bars become UINavigationControllers. Standard controls just need light branded touches. Lists can align with modern UITableView and list-based collection view APIs. Menus are just UIMenus.“
Closing The Portal App
UI consistency is nice, but the reduced design space is also kinda boring. I guess balancing a unified look while keeping enough freedom for developers to express their ideas is a pretty hard job for the toolkit designers.
I use Gboard because it treats me as an adult, allowing me to type expletives.
> One of the reasons this extension was sent a C&D was that it was sending some data home to the author’s server

I think that this is incorrect.

The C&D included that as an example of banned things - beneath the actual list of what the extension had done wrong.

Per the wording, what they had done wrong was automation of actions, and unlicensed use of trademarks.

The letter: https://louisbarclay.notion.site/Unfollow-Everything-cease-a...
Maps and Keep (for a single shared shopping list)
> you need to be part of them in order to not fail at life.

Srsly? "Failing at life" would appear to mean dying.

I don't think a social media account is a matter of life and death. FB is basically a kind of entertainment, so if you don't like the T&C you can always join a sports team or a choir, or whatever.
I'd like to see some domain experts chime in on whether CAIA neuters this headline, and whether Ireland will swan on down the road with multinationals continuing on as before.
I still use drive and it’s related apps.

There are two things that makes them stand out, ux wise:

1. That round button in the lower right corner that has to be there because it’s material, damn the actual need.

2. If a pane has a horizontal bar, it means that pane is dragable - except of course in Googles apps. Then it’s just there to look at.

While Google maps is more accurate with data, I find Apple Maps good enough and nicer to look at. I occasionally go to maps.Google as a backup.
This is a very unpopular opinion but I think anyone who has already bought an iPhone has waived their right to complain about Apple. As long as they've got your money I don't see why they should care, and they obviously don't. Alternatives exist so people should vote with their wallet.
If you're missing "something good" really depends on what you have a need for. They've offered free SMS for years, which is pretty cool, but niche. You sound like you might like trying Waze, which is also owned by Google.

I wouldn't recommend using any of it, though. It's Google, after all. Not as evil as they come, but pretty bad.
I still think it would be better to not have any corporate taxes at all. If corporations have to pay taxes they also want to have a say in politics. But that leads to all these corporate friendly but human unfriendly decisions. Instead if you agree a state should do what is good for it’s people only people should be allowed to pay taxes.
Typer looks neat. I don't think it was well-established when I started on this, there were quite a few offerings but the only one I managed to find was python-fire. It didn't quite do what my team wanted and there were a few behaviours that we didn't quite like so we decided to make this.

Having said that bargeparse was meant to rely solely on stdlib as the environment we were operating in was tightly controlled and any 3rd party packages had to go through a lengthy review process to be whitelisted.

Additionally, since our team (and others in our organisation) were mostly using argparse, the goal was to provide a way to declaratively interact with it using existing features in the language itself.
It's not just a financial services enclave. The City of London proper is a whole other thing unto itself. For an interesting read, check out what it takes to become the Lord Mayor of the City of London. Quite a trip.