skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm weary of government intervention in capping prices, but I'm not sure what's the alternative here

Instead of capping prices, you could simply require any fees to be paid by the cardholder. Combine that with a standard for payment processing so that lots of companies could compete for payment processing and fees would drop really fast.

If someone is using a POS terminal like Toast or Square, it should be trivial for them to support lots of new payment companies if they're all adhering to a standard. If consumers have to pay the fee, they're going to shop around for the lowest-fee card (just as many shop around for the highest-reward card now). You wouldn't need government caps.

You could tell stores "once you accept payments with the new system, the consumer is responsible for the fees." This would drop fees really fast - even for stores that didn't upgrade their credit card machines. If Walmart, Target, CVS, etc. all update their machines quickly, I'm going to find a card with a low fee. Then when I use that card at a non-upgraded shop, they have to pay the fee, but it's a much lower fee since I had shopped around for a low fee.

The issue right now is that the person choosing the card doesn't feel any of the pain. As the article notes, Visa (Canada) charges 1.25% for a regular consumer card or 2.08% for a premium card. I will pay with a premium card since it will give me nice rewards and I don't feel the additional 0.83% that the store has to pay. If I did have to feel it, I would make different decisions.

If you're looking to change behavior, align people's incentives. Another commenter said that they're capped at 0.3% in Europe. Consumers might hate the idea of paying 0.3% additional, but I think credit card companies would drop below that cap if consumers had to pay it. I think they'd look to make it up on interest or other things. As you note, credit cards can come with 2% rewards so they're essentially giving you the whole interchange fee back already. Make consumers shop around for the lowest fee cards.

The problem is that stores need to take the cards that consumers have with little option to forgo the fees. If Bank of America had a no-fee card while Chase charged 1.5%, consumers would move to BofA if they felt the fee.
One interesting thing I think I've noticed is that public buses in general in the U.S. kind of suck compared to elsewhere. The reason why I think I've hit on is that they kind of don't have a place to go, and so most bus routes kind of meander around their local areas going nowhere in particular. It turns short, as-the-crow-flies, trips into long ones. Anecdotally, I've lived in places where it's literally faster to walk slowly between two locations than take the bus -- the car alternative was less than 1/5th of the bus time.

However, once an area builds real transit, like lightrail, or a subway or something, there's pressure to integrate the systems, and suddenly bus routes will optimize to connect people with those systems.

This is completely anecdotal, but I've noticed massive bus route redesigns in a couple places where transit comes on-line. A 45 minute meandering bus "loop" turning into a 15 minute direct route to the local transit station, which also works well for commuting as offices tend to be in high-density commercial zones near transit so the total commute time is within spitting distance of just driving.
It's also a grand waste of resources, not to mention quite a tasteless flaunt of the enjoyment of a level of privilege that very few have access to.

If you saw an article about how Bezos bragged openly on the internet about how much he spent a day on gourmet food flown in on private jets from faraway countries, do you think you'd respond any differently? Why or why not?
> I keep wondering what would happen if Apple were to license iOS.

Much the same thing as happened to Apple when they licensed their OS in the 90s, I imagine.
A browser with features not broken by design? Scary.
pdftotext in python works pretty well:

import pdftotext
import sys

with open("test.pdf", "rb") as f:
pdf = pdftotext.PDF(f,physical=True)

for page in pdf:
print(page)
They must have some art!?
> I went to UCSC, which at the time was known for not having grades. Instead, teachers wrote "narrative evaluations" which were slightly more personalized and detailed. In most science classes, the evals were generated programmatically based on your test scores.

Apparently UCSC didn't have grades for the first 35 years of its existence:

https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/UC-Santa-Cruz-To-St...

I think it's good for UC to have different campuses with different academic environments.
People steal bud light because they can’t afford or don’t want to pay for it, not because it’s illegal to have or consume. The war on drugs had done untold damage to our society by reframing drug problems as a moral problem rather than a medical problem. Black markets pop up immediately once things are banned because, as long as there is a market for it, supply will meet demand.
Well that too, but there’s plenty of money made off the transaction processing fees. My point is that if you want to make comments about a complex system, that you can’t just take one component of that system and ignore everything else. If you wanted to make claims about what income brackets contribute what revenue (and what liabilities), and to who by using credit cards, then create a model to show your work. Focusing only on one component that you might find objectionable isn’t enough to draw such a conclusion.
You don't have to salt all the roads, and if we really wanted to we could electrify them for ice melt - https://cesticc.uaf.edu/research/yan-heatedrunway.aspx

I'm surprised we haven't had "ice mode" for EVs, you'd think they'd have enough computers where they could handle bad roads better.
Ok I've done that and still hated it. I've spent weeks staying in apartments in France and Italy with a grocery store on the bottom floor, restaurants, and retail a few blocks away. Good suburbs have these things within walking distance too. It is just a much quieter, calmer walk.
Different CC brands target different parts of the demographic. Amex targets superprime, BoA/Chase is more prime-subprime, Discover leans subprime, etc.

Different brands also have different business models. Amex relies very heavily on interchange, Chase is a balanced mix iirc, Citi is more interest, and different companies have everything in-between. This is a deliberate strategy -- issuers split people into transactors, who never carry balances and pay off their CC bills every month, and revolvers, who carry balances and pay interest. It's a core strategic decision to target how much of your customer base you want to be one vs the other.

To a first order, defaults are subsidised by the high interest rate that they pay. Transactors primarily earn the banks interchange revenue, which is a more stable part of the business, and revolvers primary earn the banks interest, which obviously carries with it much greater credit risk. To a second order, some issuers securitise their portfolios into different tranches, and the default risk is thus pushed to the debt purchasers. It gets much more complicated from there, with different scoring models to determine spending patterns, default risk, bust-out risk, etc. (As an aside, there's a fascinating story around Synchrony switching from FICO to VantageScore a while back, thus making it much more complicated to securitise their CC portfolio)

But, in general, credit card interchange is a cost built into everything you buy, and on which the prime-superprime consumer receives a rebate.
That’s not quite true. The simple reason Americans drive cars is because it’s impossible to live without one. I spent a week in Austin and the difference between its suburban layout and that of any European city is stark.

It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
Did you also do the math for how long it takes to accrue that many points and how much money you need to spend to get access to them? I don't see any evidence that you considered those factors.
Visa & Mastercard do not keep any of the interchange fee. It all goes to the issuer of the card. Visa & MC charge "scheme fees" which are much lower (except for cross-border txns).

Interchange is public information:
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-in...
Thanks. I wasn’t sure were you suggesting it was fine or awful!

I’ve only ever taken the Gold line, and it’s been uneventful. But, as I say, not often.
Sounds like it might be breaking some kind of building usage code.

But the VC might have a free nighttime security guard, and coffee machine warmed up for breakfast time.
Not sure if it's in the app, but on their website, if you go to Settings -> Data Control, there's a button to export all your conversations.
Yvonne Ho, Linus's wife.
Cash is more expensive to take as a payment method than interchange unless you’re cheating on taxes.
Thank you for the explanation. I remember vaguely hearing it somewhere but couldn't find it again.
Maybe comment or check out https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/54276 that proposes transformer plugins?
Tech giants should help pay for 5G, say Europe’s mobile operators
Europe’s telecoms providers have released a proposal today calling for tech giants Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple to be made to pay their “fair share” towards 5G and super-fast fibre broadband internet services across the continent.

“The next generation of tech — everything from connected cars, to home automation, to virtual reality and the metaverse — will rely on high-speed mobile networks,” Michael Witts, director of communication for GSMA, which represents the mobile industry, tells the Standard.

“But that costs money and it’s only fair that the companies that benefit most, from the access to consumers that we give them, help pay the cost.”

In fact, Mr Grant says analysts who research network capacity found European telcos have more than enough bandwidth to run 5G networks. He thinks the telcos are overstating the problem and their finances.

He thinks the row might also have something to do with the prices telcos charge to connect the tech giants’ data centres to their networks, which has led to Microsoft and Google building their own fibre networks.
This departure carries significant weight, given Hinton's crucial role in advancing AI technologies like deep learning. Explore the reasons behind his exit, including the impact of Microsoft's OpenAI-powered Bing on Google's AI division.

Let's delve into the implications this holds for the future of technology and the job market. What's your take on it?

#AI #DeepLearning #TechTrends
386 with an ethernet port would be an insta-buy for me.
> At the same time I recognize now that in the grand scheme of things the average German high school is better than the average American one

What evidence do you have of this?

If you're thinking of the PISA tests, Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. <https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.

Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
Public transportation operated by public entities in the U.S. outside of a handful of large, dense cities always sucks. The reason lies with the "operated by public entities" bit. Heck, even in NYC, private companies built the lion's share of the subway system, then the city "nationalized" them and very little additional development was done.

Around the world governments "nationalize" what they allow themselves to, and at each level they nationalize the most salient and notable industry that's not too small to be small potatoes. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't allow itself to nationalize anything, the States do allow themselves but they can't bring themselves to hurt their industry as they compete with other States, but cities don't see themselves as competing with other cities, and cities allow themselves (and the States allow them to) to nationalize public transportation.

Take Argentina where a strong national government has at times nationalized steel production, oil production, etc., but they wouldn't deign to bother with nationalizing bus service -- it's like it's beneath them -- and so Buenos Aires has one of the most fantastic privately operated public bus systems in the world. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for a bus during business hours. But in the U.S. you're lucky if buses run more often than every 30 minutes at rush hour.

Do you want Americans to not drive their cars so much? Fine, it's easy: allow private companies to operate all public bus services, and also to operate small buses without set routes (a sort of Uber of buses). If you insist on the cities running public transportation then you can be sure that the public transportation system will never ever be good enough that Americans will be happy to relinquish their cars.

It's that simple.

And no, trains won't cut it. Laying tracks down is unbelievably expensive, will never pay for itself, and you can't ever change them afterwards, and you won't be able to place them where people can use them because that would be way too disruptive unless you make it subways, and that's even more unbelievably expensive.
Yes, the elite, priviledged lifestyle of waking up at 3:30 three days a week, to spend 8-10 hours on a plane and public transport, because you can’t afford housing on campus.

Just rich kid things!
You are well out of date.

As I said, this was over a decade ago. The Debian Almquist shell has been a required part of the operating system for Ubuntu and Debian, and several (perhaps all) of their derivatives, for all of that time. They switched it over to a mandatory ("essential") package years ago.

The Almquist shell is the /bin/sh on NetBSD. A slightly variant Debian Almquist shell is the /bin/sh on FreeBSD. The Debian Almquist shell is in Core in Arch Linux (and Parabola Linux and Hyperbola Linux). The Almquist shell is the sh in busybox. The Almquist shell is the sh in MINIX 3.

One has to travel quite far to the likes of Illumos or OpenBSD or Toybox on Android to find an operating system where it's not in the box as a core part of the operating system. And on several of the ones where it is a core part, it's actually /bin/sh already.
I wish Vice has elaborated on this with some specifics. He "responded to" tweets that were anti-Semitic, but how did he respond to them? Positively? Negatively?

I don't think there's much substance in this article, which is a shame because I'd love to see some proof if the claims made by it are true.
GPAs encouraging and facilitating laziness in graduate admissions doesn't seem like a good justification for them.
If running everywhere is actually a constraint (likely it’s not) and transpiling is a consideration, you could use Golang, that statically links and produces standalone binaries that run more or less anywhere. Though if you have a CD pipeline to transpile and deploy such, you likely have enough control over your environment already to have a less constrained choice to begin with.

Normally I’m not very fond of Gos verbosity, especially compared to bash, but i take anything over bash, it is just so filled with footguns, every single line has to be super carefully scrutinized. Note that I say this as someone actually quite good at it, not because I don’t understand it. In fact the more you learn, the more scared you get.
For full context, this is someone with a wife and two kids[1] who had a couple of semesters and just needed a temporary solution, not a 20 year old kid. Different then the title might suggest.

[1] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/05/15/uc-berkeley-la-plane...
If you’re into this kind of thing, I’d like to recommend Historic Brewing Techniques, The Lost Art of Farmhouse Brewing by Lars Marius Garshol.[1] Absolutely fascinating and practical. It does focus on Norway to a large extent, but covers a little from other north-eastern European countries too. His associated blog is also great reading.[2] The author was really instrumental in the mainstream exposure of kveik yeasts.[3]

Another interesting little book I have is Old British Beers and How to Make Them, by Harrison and the Durden Park Beer Circle. Not medieval, but still some really great recipes for approximating a lot of old beer styles.[4]

There are also some good blogs still around on this subject. I’d recommend Shutup about Barclay Perkins[5] as a good starting point. The most recent article there is about brewing a stout from 1812.

[1] https://www.garshol.priv.no/download/historical-tech/

[2] https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kveik

[4] https://durdenparkbeer.org.uk/index.php/product/old-british-...

[5] https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2022/?m=1
It is a lot for most small businesses and they tend to pass on the cost.
That has already happened, but the libraries are being utilized at runtime with associated overheads, and in fact the hoops jumped through are larger and uglier than if TS had plugins.

There is no bloody reason why a custom JSON.parse shouldn't be able to look at compile time at what the expected type of a JSON blog is and compile time generate validation code.
Depression and suicide (unsurprisingly the second most common cause of death after accidental injuries such as car crashes) are serious problems among college students. I expect that inflexible and punitive grading and/or academic policies don't help.

It's heartbreaking to hear of a student dying from suicide. These are young people with amazing potential. And they're our fellow humans.
Clearly they could have afforded housing on campus if they just saved all the money they had spent on that credit card.

The luxury of affording your credit card bill every month as a college student, and living a lush life on all the things that money affords, then attending a prestigious school with a near guarantee of stable high income in perpetuity, is not a chance many get. By definition, privilege is the enjoyment of things that many others cannot enjoy.

Do you have a point to make or is this just a kneejerk reaction from a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire"?
> The fact that you have to step outside the language with @Data rather proves the point.

You can trivially write a class with public fields without using lombok, you wont get some cookie cutter logic for hashCode and equals, but often you don't need it and with mutable data you may not even want it.
Office Brainstorms Are a Waste of Time
> The existence of credit cards is basically an automatic 2-3% inflation on prices.

If you want to draw this conclusion you’d have to calculate the cost of the alternative. What would the impact on prices be if there were no electronic payments? What would the impact on prices be if every bank had to implement its own electronic payment system with every merchant? The credit card system integrates a huge portion of the worlds merchants with nearly all of the worlds banks. It’s massively more efficient than the alternatives, apart from other conceptually similar systems that have exactly the same type of costs. Your claim that removing this efficiency would lower prices seems entirely implausible and to me.
New Hampshire is the only state that doesn't require insurance or a bond IIRC
Yea, AppStore search is terrible. I often revert to my webbrowser/search engine to search for AppStore apps, because i can't find them in the AppStore.
You would be wrong, this lower fee only applies to business with annual charges below $300K/$175K CAD for Visa/Mastercard.
> Python people have a saying that the standard library is where modules go to die.

That's just a quote from a 10 years old talk by Kenneth Reitz, and it's quite an overstatement.
What's old is new again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment
A few things:

1: Indian wages are going up. The difference gets smaller every year.* Note that many of the best Indian developers are paid in USD, and even for the developers that get paid in Rupees, the company they are hired by locally often does get paid in USD by the American company that buys their services, so the fact that the Rupee goes down doesn't necessarily offset their wage increase for the American company that hires them.

2: American workers can still meet in every Tuesday. It's hard from Hyderabad.

3: Time difference can be a real issue (but of course it can also be an advantage).

4: It's often easier for Americans to understand American English than Indian English.

5: American developers might understand the American market and competing products better.

* https://www.statista.com/chart/25729/india-annual-average-sa...
For me, it is unclear what the persons were blowing the whistle on exactly. What was clear to me is the improper distribution of information by O'Boyle and unauthorized media interviews with Russian media outlets by Friend. Further, the outspoken decision to withhold information to the subcommittee by Jim Jordan is alarming.

Beyond this, we are lacking necessary information; there are gaps that need to be filled in. The idea of FBI abusing its power and authority is a given. However, we didn't hear this evidenced in the testimony of the former FBI employees, IMO.

What is also unclear to me is why these persons need their security clearance in order to obtain future employment.
Sure. But the XDR is meant to be a professional reference model - those stands are among other things built with magnetic latches so you can detach and pack up the screen and take it with you site-to-site.

To compare, Home Depot sells a $32 cordless drill and a $300 cordless drill (and more expensive rotary hammers and the like). They are not the same product and are not necessarily meant for the same people or the same uses.

Enterprises who are getting XDR monitors for employees when the Studio Display exists do so as a perk.
> It’s going to be funny to see if the rest of the world adapts to the stupid amount of ads beeing shown on american TV, now that youtube seems to embrace that road (.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "rest of the world".

If you mean broadcast tv services in the rest of the world, they already have 30 second TV commercials. (They're actually the norm.)

If you mean other streaming services, Hulu, Peacock, Pluto, Paramount+ etc all already have 30 second non-skippable ads.
This is only in Canada and only for small businesses (<$300k on Visa, <$175k on Mastercard).
I’d add to that the sub question of whether anyone has seen — and under what circumstances — “self organising” teams work/fail.

I’ve only seen self organising teams in a flat structure fail, on count that if everyone is responsible for everything there are many things no one is responsible for. I think “bike shedding” is very much a thing. Most people will hitch their contribution to what they can understand leaving many of the hard and but vague things in the wind.
> There’s tons of work todo
> hustle culture and bloated adminispheres seems so normal

A lot of useful work that could be done is building better stuff, physically improving the local infrastructure and environment. That requires tradesmen doing hands-on labor. Giant portions of our labor pool wouldn't be caught dead doing that kind of work. That's why we have a flood of bullshit jobs where people shuffle paper in air-conditioned offices, float around to conferences, stay at business hotels, etc...