skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two other major reasons for payday loan places to exist are identity theft (especially of elderly) and money laundering, and neither will go away because the post office is competing.

Several problems exist that haven't been discussed.

One is coupling / product tying. If you screw up financially, no other bank or financial player will want to cooperate with you, universal default and all that. Bounce a check there, they won't accept a check over there. So... if you default on a post office loan, that means the P.O. will stop allowing you to send or rx mail, right? I mean, they gotta get leverage somehow. So... if the P.O. is in the loan biz and my letter carrier knows his job exists because people don't do biz with capital one, then physical spam from capital one might not make it into my mailbox, just sayin. Or even worse, old people who still pay bills physically might find that car payments to loaners other than the P.O. might often not be delivered...

Another problem is consistency. Nothing sounds dumber on the internet than people all over the planet arguing with each other about which multinational cellphone provider has better or worse radio coverage in their house and by extension the entire world... or their local post office is either great or sucks. Fix that first, of be doomed to endless dumb sounding complaints on the internet. Banks are fairly consistent, at least compared to cellphone coverage or postal service.

So your bread and butter main line product is going away because people are switching online both for personal-ish mail and spam. So your bright idea is to enter yet another field where virtually everything is moving online and paperless as fast as possible. Brilliant.

Finally I don't see any synergy. If there was a flaming roaring demand to merge postal services with banking services, why doesn't every bank/CU have a UPS/fedex branch office? There seems to be an immense synergy between food stores and banks, its almost like there's a law locally that food stores must have a colocated bank branch. Admittedly very few freestanding bank branches sell bacon and doritos. Still I think it far more likely and realistic to see a bank selling ice cream, beer, and popsicles than a post office selling mortgages.
this sector is so scummy is because of the bad reputation it carries

Wrong way round. This sector has a bad reputation because it is so scummy.
We are getting fatter because our lifestyles have reduced the need to walk, run, exert and generally, move around. There is no need to climb stairs due to escalators/lifts, there is no need to carry bags as there are trolleys everywhere in the supermarket, our jobs mostly involve sitting on a chair in an airconditioned office for hours and hours and since we working longer hours, whatever meagre free time we have, we spend it on the chair in front of the computer/couch in front of TV. All this inactivity makes us sick and then we pop pills and another cycle starts.

Health is a complicated issue but sometimes it is as basic as that.
There's also a Dell UHD for 450

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00IOUBOB2/
Ask HN: How did you find the courage to try again?
I really could use a Gandalf right now...

I'm 24 and from Atlanta, Georgia. I grew up playing with LEGOs and computers. I began to dream of building a "world changing" startup at 17 motivated by the problems I saw in the American education system. I started learning design and code to build a MVP before my 20th birthday. I gave up before launching after seeing projects like Khan Academy, Knewton, and Coursera come out. The domain I owned was www.academiia.com, my original choice was already owned and the guy wanted at least $100,000. At least I learned a lot before starting college...

After that, I took on a design and marketing job at Myriann (www.myriann.com) while taking classes at a community college. I worked on TalkHotels.com and RoomSailor.com among many other projects. I had to leave because I felt burnt out from working on things that didn't excite me. I had notebooks full of ideas and UI's for problems that should be solved but haven't been by the looks of HN and Twitter. I knew I couldn't waste any more time not living my dreams...

I quit the job and dropped out to take some time off to "collect myself" and in the process went through depression, a bad breakup, and even suicidal thoughts knowing that I had nothing to live for if I couldn't help solve world problems through my technology. I thought I'd missed my chance because all the great founders were way ahead of me at this age, that no investor wants someone outside of California and NYC, and without a degree no one would give me a job if all else fails. Unhealthy thinking looking back in hindsight.

Right now, I work at a financial company working on the hardware and software for ATM machines. I study design and code for hours every day because some new ideas I have keep me up at night like when I first started on this path. I don't want to go back to school and waste more time. I want to save enough and apply for App Academy or something similar as a fall back plan. I just have to be a player on the field and not a spectator in the stands. My soul will be crushed if I don't realize my potential.

How did you get back up after failing? After seeing other people create what you envisioned? After burnout? After seeing all the media about brogrammers and sexism? With the neverending talks of a coming bubble? Please help a brother out. I'm sure I'm not the only one needing some guidance. Thanks.
> Information is only valuable if it's asymmetrical

That's very true. The question is - how do you use the internet(which i believe is more suited than book stores to that task), to find such valuable asymmetric information ?
Yeah, little problem there. It's almost impossible for non-incumbents to enter the sector now due to the huge regulatory compliance cost. Between the burden of Banking Secrecy Act and the challenge of regulatory capture, only very wealthy individuals and companies can enter the sector. And they have little incentive to do so, given the sector's schlep factor and poor reputation.
How is a student going to do any math if you never teach techniques? And how are you going to know if the student actually learned it if you don't test them? I never said they should be the focus, but you need to test them sometimes.

Also, algorithmic thinking is one of the more powerful ideas we have right now. You can trust that a Turing machine has certain properties without being a genius yourself, for example.
The UK had something similar.

Royal Mail was the delivery of postal mail, and the counters at post offices that did post office services (sold stamps, weighed parcels, did some government forms, did 'postal orders' etc). They got split out into separate businesses to allow competition in both spaces while making sure that postal mail was treated the same on mainland UK.

Part of the PO couters service was to convert some benefit recipients "giros" into cash. The giros were subject to masssive amounts of fraud and theft. To solve this PO counters started offering "basic accounts" - money could be paid in and benefits would be paid directly into the account. You got an ATM card with no debt facility at all.

This concept was expanded and all banks now offer something called "basic accounts" - these allow BACS transfer but do not allow overdraf at all. They are fantastically useful.

I have no idea how they're paid for from the banks point of view. No debt and small account balances means not much bank income. UK banks didn't have much choice. They are pretty unpopular in the UK and they need to do some better PR to avoid extra regulation.

There's also a gently rumbling problem of the conflict between "protecting peoe from fraud" and "allowing people to hae their cash". One of the banks has been asking people who withdraw a few thousand pounds what it's going to be used for. Obviously this causes outrage. But then other people clear out tens of thousands of pounds from six different accounts (including the max overdraft limit of a business account) because they are he victims of fraud and the bank fraud control doesn't spot it and those people ask (while acceptig their responsibility) why the bank didn't step in.
One of my long-term goals is to write a chess program that plays more like a lower-level human. Every program I've played seems to have the same pattern: play like a master for ten moves, then make an insultingly obvious blunder to let me catch up. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's neither realistic nor fun. Might as well play with a handicap.

Real players at each level tend to have characteristic weaknesses that are expressible in terms of the same factors used in a program's evaluation function. Consider some of the following, which players at a certain level will exhibit and then get past as they improve.

* Bringing the queen out too early.

* Missing pins and discoveries.

* Failing to contest the center.

* Creating bad bishops.

* Bad pawn structure.

* Failing to use the king effectively in the endgame.

These are all quantifiable. They could all be used to create a more realistic and satisfying opponent at 1200, 1500, 1800, etc. All it takes is some basic machine learning applied to a corpus of lower-level games, and a way to plug the discovered patterns into the playing engine.
Parent post is extremely clear in its meaning. You have taken half a thought, the entirety of which is a clear argument, and demanded explanation. It suggests either intellectual dishonesty or simple laziness in reading.

The shortest part of that statement that it would be reasonable to quote alone is: "Government has every right to think its what people want. Or, to put it another way, it is not what they don't want." You don't have to agree with this at all. But it is a single self-contained idea that can be comprehended and understood, before attempting to justify or refute it.
Just like SWAT teams are used sparingly...
Android 4.5: End of Road?
As an illustration of how big news this is rated as in Sweden, try to find the news on Aftonbladets front page: http://www.aftonbladet.se/
I disagree, as I find it perfectly consistent attitude towards content restriction to be both for GPL, and to pirate content when its proprietary.

If people ignore content restrictions by pirating works, is that not consistent with the people who uses copyright to prevent content restrictions? Is it not also consistent with people who breaks content restrictions by breaking DRM?

In each 3 cases, content restriction is problem being dealt with. Preventing, ignoring or breaking, either way its dealt with.
You are shifting the argument by cherry picking Australian beef production (vs meat production in general). Overwhelmingly most meat production is fed using harvest from cultivated land, hence the claims are irrelevant to the general discussion in addition to being factually uncredible.

About the questionable facts: the 25x claim is not substantiated in any way. It doesn't in any way substantiate why use of fertilizers to grow plants for human consumption would be worse than growing grass for the equivalent nutritional value of cows.

Lastly, even if you ignore the irrelevance and the bad claims, it concludes that ethically you should only eat rangeland grown meat and kangaroos, a clear counterargument for the usual meat eater diet!
LOL makes me want to dip my penis into your coffee
The JavaScript answer from @user1886419 is a great joke. lol
I'm probably one of those programmers you think "use SQL quite happily". You're wrong.

SQL is an abstraction with myriad problems in both its core design and its disjointed implementations. ORMs and similar interfaces are crappy abstractions on top of a crappy abstraction. You get the problems of SQL combined with the problems of the ORM.

Preferring to remove a set of problems and be left with only the problems of SQL is not the same thing as liking SQL, it is merely preferring the lesser of two evils.
Have you considered getting a set of keyboard pedals, so that modal keys -- ctrl, alt, esc, etc, can be mapped there, leaving your hands open? Also, have you talked to your doctor about exercises -- using resistive elastic bands, etc, to help restrengthen your muscles?
In that, Emacs is very close to Smalltalk environments. Everything you see on the screen is a Smalltalk object and its behavior can be redefined at will. I'm not sure how much the design was influenced by Lisp machines or Emacs itself.

I once crashed a Squeak image by telling it "true := false".

Since then constants became a little more constant.
I would definitely prefer jmpeax's answer.

Although, there was a question/discussion similar to this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-kkf76TDHE#t=2584

The gist was that, if the interface and the structs that are supposed to satisfy that interface belong to the same package, and then you want to prevent any outsider from implementing that interface, you can actually include an unexported method:

type HtmlStringer interface {
ToString() string
isHtmlStringer()
}

Since it is unexported, no outsider struct can actually satisfy this interface anymore.
Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking
what do you mean? just click play a game

http://en.lichess.org/
Help us, Thomas Piketty: The 1%’s sick and twisted new scheme
Fasting accounts for the calories in, what about the calories out?
> So I guess we should start preparing for the Civil War.

Preparations which then will be used to reinforce the "justification" of mass surveillance by the gov't.
"the utility of a money order as a check-like form of payment"

... is extremely high and growing over time with poor people.

People don't pay high M.O. fees because they're ignorant or stubborn but because they can't open a bank account without having the contents seized legally (child support, debt collectors, maybe on the run who knows), or more likely the bank will refuse to open an account and offer then credit (which is what a checking account is) until they pay off past due debts A, B, and C.

This becomes a problem with the "P.O. is a bank" concept because large segments of the population need an anonymous payment system of some sort and I suspect the P.O. will be extremely interested in all your demographic information especially id documents and postal addresses.
>Two other major reasons for payday loan places to exist are identity theft (especially of elderly) and money laundering, and neither will go away because the post office is competing.

Are you suggesting that payday loan operations are conducting or facilitating money laundering? Then please produce proof of a single payday loan operation that has been convicted or even accused of the charge in the last 10 years. I'll even make it easy for you to search last year's investigations:
http://www.irs.gov/uac/Examples-of-Money-Laundering-Investig...

No, payday loan operations don't need to launder money, because they are making an absolute killing ripping of the poor, and they know even the slightest hint of money laundering will strip them of their license.

Only the big boys like HSBC have the political connections to engage in money laundering and keep their licenses.
Sort of like Netflix getting into original content a la Kevin Spacey and House of Cards. Brilliant.
If I understand intermittent fasting correctly, you eat the same amount (so calories in/calories out don't change), you just don't eat for a part of the day (e.g. 12 hours) or every second day and eat that much more in the "allowed" window.
{i wanted to upvote you. I might have accidetally downvoted you. Sorry!}

Doesn't the US have credit unions or savings clubs and co-ops and so on?

These are ways for financially excluded people to save and to borrow money at reasonable rates.

Other ways payday lending can be improved is to have an association that has some rules: do not allow people to extend a loan; do not allow people to get a loan to pay pff another payday loan (both of these cause spiralling debt); check people are competant to get debt; etc.

Better information about he costs would be useful. APR gives very high numbers for payday debts, so they need to be able to give the APR as well as give sensible realistic repay rates and the costs involved.

There's probably an app in here somewhere to help people budget. You work out when their money comes in. Yu get them to photograph all their receipts and bills, and ask them to document all their outgoings, and give them advice about where to save.
One contractor I worked with recently (hardware design) billed every month or $4k which ever came first. This works well, and keeps everyone aware of how costs are adding up.
"Alternatives". VimL lets you set and inspect options, invoke other functions, all kinds of stuff. The other language bindings (particularly Python, but I assume this is true of the others) give you a high-level list of open files, the ability to send individual key-strokes to Vim and the ability to eval a VimL expression. All the vaguely-complex plugins I've seen have some sort of algorithmic core implemented in another language, and a whole bunch of VimL to wire the core up to Vim.
Don't forget HBX Live too.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/05/28/harvar...
"John, don't run."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/
you miss the point
Popular myth. Definitely. There is hardly anything as beautiful and simple as SQL.
From the review, this book seems like a rehash of Taubes' two excellent and well researched books on the same topics. Taubes was the first to make the broad historical connections that also seem central to this book. Even the book title, "The Big Fat Surprise" is a play on Taubes' famous 2002 New York Times article "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?". What, if anything is original to this work? From the Economist review, we have no idea.
You can only say those are bound to different functions because they are visible to you. Are you sure Via, under the hood, is not the same? Also (can't check it right now), these lisp functions can all be calling the same mechanism with different parameters, being only declared separately for convenience.
What do you mean? Postgres is probably one of the most popular NoSQL databases. Its SQL-support is among the best as well.
Some source code and assignment info from Spring 2014 available here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/15-440/S14/assignments.html
Yes that way also works!

But the xboard way allows me to modify the engine, get debug output, try various different weights for pieces, put two engines against each other to see how specific features affect game play...

It helps me demystify such sophisticated software.
If you have used a Lisp Machine with something like Zmacs for an extended time, then one often manipulates with the mouse. Same sequence: mark, execute. For some things there is also modifier-click on something visual which creates a region.

Thus the whole select the object, execute sequence is the same:

* emacs keystrokes

* mouse manipulation

* Lisp functions: get the arguments, execute a function

Thus it is a very consistent model.
I can't answer for the OP, but I was homeschooled and I was around a lot of people from other cultures that were also homeschooled.

In the case of the Americans, they were homeschooled primarily because the parents felt they could do a better job than the US school system, and because they wanted to use Christian-friendly learning materials. For social contact and 'real-life' social education, they'd put their children into a variety of (sports) clubs.

In the case of my parents, it was a practical necessity, as we lived in a developing country. The nearest international school was a long drive away, it was expensive, and reintegration into the Dutch school system would have been much more difficult.

Instead, their solution was the get a just-out-of-school teacher to have one or more exciting years volunteering and practicing their craft on me and my siblings, which my parents would augment with personal attention and long-distance help from retired teachers back in Holland. The teacher would use a Dutch 'long-distance learning' approach that was the defacto system for Dutch expats. For high-school material, this meant a book that explained, day by day, what should be read and what exercises should be done.

Now, I personally feel the results were so good, that I would do everything to make it possible to either home-school my children (if I have 'em), or to get them into some alternative school (montessori, etc.). Aside from some difficulties adjusting to Dutch society, my siblings and I did quite well, and I believe on the reasons we are all active learners and autodidacts is a direct result of not having been part of the normal system.

The primary argument I hear against home-schooling when normal schooling is possible is that it hampers a child's social development. I never bought that. Kids get a lot of that from playing out in the street, or being part of clubs. Furthermore, for a significant portion of kids I believe their 'normal' schooling can have a negative social impact, through various degrees of bullying, and the group pressure to believe that learning is stupid. I did not have a clue that voluntary study was stupid and nerdy until I returned to high school at age seventeen...

(of course, I also understand that for many people home-schooling isn't a practical option. I think that's a shame. And I also understand that some parents might not be any good at teaching, and that a mandatory educational system can be a benefit in that case.)
> For them, dist-upgrades are well understood and not blind luck.

Ubuntu specifically tells you not to do a dist-upgrade, so your supposed evidence of how easy it must be doesn't even pass the smell test. The "correct" upgrade process is do-release-upgrade.

Unfortunately, that process still is not a complete solution, as demonstrated by the multiple clusterfucks I've had to clean up when people tried to use their upgrade process.

Even if they had succeeded, that would tell you nothing -- Ubuntu is a commercial operation with a substantial amount of money behind it. Linux Mint is not. ReactOS would be a perfect Windows clone if everything a funded corporation accomplished were easy.
"Movement" is a bit much, no? It is a solution for a niche problem.
In what sense SQL is bad?
> They believe that a college education should be free, so they behave as though it is. Where a college education free, then getting a relatively worthless degree would be perfectly fine.

I don't know. I'm getting my university education for free, but I still have living costs (which may be mitigated by a part-time job) and "losing" five years that could be invested in some relevant work experience. So if I was going for a useless degree, career-wise, I would be at least be a little worried.

I guess some people think that people like me should be living it up while they can, and not worrying so much about the future. But there might be a mortgage to worry about in 5-10 years, and buying your own apartment/house is becoming more and more expensive (which might change in 10 years, for better or worse). And even though I am well-off by world standards, the future seems more unsure then ever; having some sort of economic independence seems like something that is worth working towards.
Of the ten software companies I have worked at, I found that the best ones are run by people who write software.
A habitable environment on Martian volcano?
There was this controversial art performance where the guy killed a cat with an axe and masturbated on the corpse to (among other things) make a point about killing animals for our enjoyment. He was sued and convicted for animal cruelty. The guy is currently a prof in the most prestigious art school in Finland. One of my heroes.

http://www.quodlibetica.com/what-does-it-mean-to-kill-an-ani...

edit: As a metapoint, interesting how heavily my other comment is being downvoted. I hope it's because it's sligtly off tangent, an not because HN'ers are in denial about what they're doing with their eating.