Their landing page and generally content on their page is terrible but maybe nobody stumbles on their site randomly looking for this. People are reacting to their pricing after seeing the title but I dont think that's what they are selling...
I'm not really sure how that link helps explain it since it's about other other languages that they sell, but the TLDR of this language is that it's cross platform Delphi. Although Delphi is cross platform Delphi, so I'm still confused.
I am curious about your comment on 100-1000x fewer formulas. Is there a simpler example you can show how your product will do it relative to Excel? When I read your comment, I was thinking, SUM in Excel operates over many cells. You can have Arrays, etc. in Excel. So I am not sure how formulas work in your product that is fundamentally different. Is this like a function that I can define and call that function so it is easier?
Great question! Quite often in financial models, you're dealing with "dimensions" (e.g. your revenue is broken down by product, geography, and time). To model this in Excel you have to write complex SUMIF/INDEX/MATCH formulas. Then you have to drag these formulas over 1000s of cells (if you make a mistake you're screwed, see https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/).
Causal's building blocks are "variables" and "dimensions" which makes it much more powerful to work with dimensional data.
Also is you want to jump to page 63 its not enough to find the place to jump to, you also need to flip each page individually and put in back of the stack to have proper ordering. You cant just take stack of 62 pages and put in to the bottom.
If pages are numbered, the largest page number is still on last page. Just look there.
Or alternatively: The first step of your binary search is to look at the page number on the flip side of page 1 and determine to flip the stack or not.
I am not a professional developer (never gotten paid to write software) but now do some prototyping code in Haskell so real engineers can pick it up from me later.
For me, Haskell has been a huge productivity booster. It forces me to write good code and 90% of mistakes that I normally make are all caught at compile time. I use servant for creating my API server and it is pleasure to use (being able to create APIs declaratively is very easy for me to understand as a non professional). I recently had to write some front-end code in JavaScript and I noticed how simple mistakes can take 1/2 hour to debug (you pass in an array of objects instead of an object and you will wonder why `for (k in obj)` logic is not working.
I refactor huge parts of my code - can gut a particular API endpoint response and rewrite it without worrying about introducing more bugs. This allows me to start writing code without a lot of planning and refactor as I go instead of spending a lot of time upfront thinking through the implications.
Using Hoogle or Hayoo to search for functions based on types is just simply awesome. If you want a function that returns the index of a list that satisfies a predicate, you don't need to come up with search words instead you just look for it based on the types like so: http://hayoo.fh-wedel.de/?query=%28a+-%3E+Bool%29+-%3E+[a]+-.... This does not mean you can solve all problems this way but it is very quick to get easy answers than Googling or putting it on SO.
Most developers write their APIs and need to spend more time documenting it. With servant I just derive documentation directly from the types so my documentation moves in lock step with my code.
That said, using Haskell has its challenges (especially as a beginner).
* Compile-refresh cycle is frustrating. With Python or Go, you make a change and refresh the page, it is there. With Haskell, the 30s wait can become painful. My code is organized into modules but it is hard to avoid dependency related compile issues -- I tend to put most of my data records (mostly related by business logic) in a module and if you add anything to this module, you will end up recompiling everything that depends on it (which is most of the code). I am sure a pro-Haskeller would do it differently but whatever suggestions available online is not steering me in the right direction.
* Starting out with a fresh framework is not trivial for a beginner. servant is really nice because it came with very good documentation and also a tutorial by someone on how to use it with wai (http server) and persistent (an ORM). Without it, I would not have been able to get to where I am now.
* Not all libraries are created equal -- some of the common use cases are well documented or has enough documentation that you will be ok. But once you venture beyond common use cases, trying to use a library is not easy. Most of the time, types help and being able to test it in the REPL is nice but it can only take you so far. I recently looked at a library for creating a MIME string but got lost in some undocumented library.
* Haskell's community is great. You will always find someone to help you. However, as the author was saying, you want to get some work done and you cannot wait 2 days for an answer on Reddit or SO. IRC is great for specific libraries (say servant or Yesod) but general #haskell can be daunting -- 90% of the people seem to be discussing Lenses or Free Monads and your stupid type error is not going to get any attention.
* Easy parts of Haskell are very easy to pickup and the hard parts seem impossible to fully comprehend (I will think I understand Monad Transformers and will try to implement some logic but will get stuck in type check hell and quickly give up).
Btw, I did not know about fieldLabelModifier until now and it will cut down a lot of boiler plate. That said, I cannot wait for GHC 8 and its Duplicate Record Fields! Records are really annoying for writing business logic driven API servers.
"Haxl users at Facebook do a lot of development and testing inside GHCi. In fact, we’ve built a customized version of GHCi that runs code in our Haxl monad by default instead of the IO monad, and has a handful of extra commands to support common workflows needed by our developers."
#haskell has always helped me, provided that I did my homework first. If they don't tackle your question, wait a little while and break it down into smaller pieces. It makes life easier for everyone, and usually allows them to help you faster.
In regards to changing data records I've suffered the same problem as well. At best I've isolated what I can into separate modules so the impact is smaller after a small change, but obviously isn't universally applicable.
Note that there is also a #haskell-beginners IRC channel where it's sometimes easier to get a responses to certain questions than the much broader #haskell channel. Both channels are full of incredibly nice people for sure.
I too did not know about fieldLabelModifier and am excited about the GHC 8 changes as well!
I did not know about the basic bank account in the UK. What do you need to apply for a bank account? Do you need to provide some form of govt. ID to get it or can you get it any piece of item in a retail store?
In the US a good portion of the unbanked also happens to be undocumented immigrants. There is also the problem of AML/KYC process in the US which has been stricter in the US than in the UK (as you could tell from the UK headquartered banks getting fined by US Regulators -- not saying it is better though) and as a consequence the cost of compliance goes up for the bank. They pass on these costs to the consumer but with an upsell mentality that you had mentioned (increased min balance requirement removes fees, for e.g.) -- this leads to the upper middle class paying nothing and the poor and middle class paying bulk of the fees.
The economist had a very nice article about the cost of being poor: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21663262-why-low.... This is a very difficult problem and will be hard to address properly without adequate support from the govt. For example, the govt. could provide easier access to banking license for those who want to serve low-income customers and allow for innovative solutions in this space.
> What do you need to apply for a bank account? Do you need to provide some form of govt. ID to get it or can you get it any piece of item in a retail store?
In order to stop money laundering and fraud they do require some things:
- Proof of address (2x of the following): Bills (e.g. utilities), council tax bill, benefits agencies, a UK driving license, tenancy agreement, or a letter from your employer.
- Proof of identification (1x of the following): Passport, driving license (even foreign), national identity card, letter from benefits agency or local authority, or a verification letter from an individual in an trusted position (these are verified, and only individuals in certain notable roles are trusted, like commanding officers in the military, parole officers, and your priest, etc).
Interesting. If they accept foreign passports, it will be amazing if we can relax the regulation in the US along the same lines with a specific carve out that information cannot be used to enforce immigration policy violations. Then most undocumented works can probably get a bank account without a SSN and not worry they will get deported -- convincing undocumented immigrants that this is safe is going to a tough battle though.
It's actually much easier for foreigners to open a bank account in the U.S. than it is in the UK, since the UK banks have this silly list of documents which no-one who's just moved to the country will be able to provide. I had no problem opening a bank account as a British person in the U.S., but every American I know in the UK found that it took around a month to get one.
While your statement about payment promptness is correct, people with good scores tend to save more than others (scores do not use savings or income or wealth into account, however).
Credit scores only penalize you when you don't have any credit but most of these good score folks tend to have (or had) a mortgage or have had auto loans, etc. Just because they are not actively opening new accounts does not mean they will be penalized -- credit scores look at pretty much everything in your report and they get credit for their historical good behavior.
Another thing to consider is that good credit scores leads to a positive cycle: you don't pay high interest rates on your loans and the extra money saved here allows you to pay down obligations faster, which in turn allows you to save more in the long run.
What about people with no debt? If you own your home and don’t carry any consumer debt then you look like a bad credit risk despite being one of the best risks.
It depends on what you mean by 'no debt'. If you mean, they have never ever had a loan then they will most likely not even have a score or a poor one (they will be categorized as a 'no hit' or 'thin file'). Don't have stats top of my head for this group but my hunch is no-hit / thin-file are people with poor access to credit and not many actively avoid debt altogether.
If you mean, they had debt but they paid it all off, then they will still get a lot of credit for it. Credit scores look at your 'oldest tradeline' and maintaining good credit over many years is viewed favorably. Their scores will not be as high as someone who had recent credit transaction and managing it well (all else being equal), however, it will still be very good. If you look at the FICO Score, anything above a 760 or 780 is usually just bragging rights -- it hardly changes your rates on mortgages or loans.
I'd lived in the US for about five years before I bothered to get a credit rating. I remember when I was renting an apartment the agent looked shocked that I didn't have one.
"How can you not have a credit rating? Don't you have a car? Or a phone?"
I said "Uh yeah, I paid cash for my car, and my phone is prepaid".
I had a helluva time convincing him that someone who never has to borrow money (and can buy brand new cars for cash) is a better credit risk than someone who borrows money all the freaking time.
Eventually I gave in and got a credit card for the sake of miles. Sheesh!
It is amazing this isn’t it. Being rich enough to not need to borrow makes you a bad credit risk.
We seem to have some very knowledgable people here so why is it that credit scores don’t start at a default value and go up or down based on your credit history. Why is a rich person with no debt and huge amount of assets more of a risk than an undischarged bankrupt?
Because not having a credit rating is the absence of information, not evidence of being rich/responsible enough to never need credit. You're an unknown quantity, it's impossible to establish what a default score should mean, except "we don't know you, so we're gonna err on the side of not lending you money". What you really want is to be able to record evidence of having bought a car with cash, of consistently saving etc with the credit rating system, but that doesn't exist.
The system optimises for what it (probably correctly) perceives as covering the large majority of situations. Sure, sometimes that leads to some curious corner case situations but it's hard an indictment of the system.
>> Why is a rich person with no debt and huge amount of assets more of a risk than an undischarged bankrupt?
Good point and as mseebach points out absence of information is a signal and these type of no-debt cases are very rare that is hard to build a model around.
At our start-up SimplyCredit, we look at things holistically, not just your credit score and that should help with your concern. However, it is harder to do this effectively without proper data at scale. I wish the govt. made different types of data about the borrower available to lenders (with permission from the borrower of course) -- for example, it will be nice to know electronically someone paid for mortgage outright or their income statements, etc. Right now people attempting to use this information have to resort to approaches that Mint uses (scraping, partnership with banks to not block them, etc.).
That said, credit scores actually work in a manner similar to what you suggest. Credit scores are 'centered' around a value and good things get you +score1 and bad things get you -score2, bad things you didn't do +score3, etc. It is not exactly what you suggest as no-hits don't automatically get neutral rating -- most case those apps will get rejected.
People without a credit score fall into three categories which really have nothing in common in regards risk. 1. The unbanked (i.e. very poor). 2. The very wealthy or the moderately wealthy with an aversion to debt. 3. Recent immigrants. While I suspect 2 is relatively small, both 1 and 3 are quite large pools. Treating all three as a greater risk than someone with a history of poor debt management seems perverse.
The risk profile of a recent legal immigrant with a PhD and a high paying job is very different to someone that has never had a bank account and who has worked for cash in hand. Why treat them the same? At the very least let someone with no history of credit establish a credit score baseline based on their international history, current income, and assets.
Get a free credit card, put a little spend on it every month, and pay it down every month. Yes, it will take a little bit of discipline, but showing discipline is what having a good credit rating is all about.
You won't pay any interest or fees, and it will go a long way to establish a positive credit record which will come in handy if you will need real credit down the line. Even if you think you won't, having options is always better than not having them,
This is a very interesting study. Anyone who has worked in the consumer credit industry will know that credit scores are correlated with a whole bunch of things -- your standard credit default to insurance claims to employment. Anytime you need to identify 'responsible' individuals, credit scores can act as a pretty good proxy although using credit scores is legally kosher only in certain situations.
I think their trustworthiness hypothesis is probably weaker than other parts of their analysis. I have my own hypothesis based on my experience working in this industry: Staying in a committed relationship may not be really about 'responsible' behavior but could be due to similarity of financial management styles. Most marriage counselors talk about 'sorting out your finances' before getting married; credit scores are essentially capturing that issue -- people who have very good credit scores tend to be savers (although credit scores do not use income or wealth into account) and ones who have poor scores tend to be financially poor and for the large part spend more than they can afford. Also people with good scores tend to be manage finances in a particular way -- pay bills early, monitor balances regularly, etc. -- while the ones with poor credit scores do not usually pay much attention to finances and miss payments frequently.
When you have two people with two different styles of managing money, it can lead to a strained relationship and subsequently lead to separation.
To me, it's simpler. You have people who 'believe' in the current system and their role in keeping it stable and sustainable. And, you have people who don't believe or just don't care.
I am unfortunately a believer. I've always wanted to disregard the whole silly, archaic system, but I can't. I'm very 'responsible' by nurture. My spouse is also a believer. We have a very stable relationship, we're very responsible, trustable, and, of course, have perfect credit scores all because of our silly beliefs.
>You have people who 'believe' in the current system and their role in keeping it stable and sustainable.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'believe' but it makes it sound like there aren't obvious, objective benefits to paying bills and having a good credit score. I don't like the system either, but it results in me not having to pay higher interest rates on loans, not having to put down large deposits for rent, getting to purchase things on credit, etc.
I think what contributes to separation is a feeling by one party that the other one is "not responsible" with money. As with everything else, they then have to make a choice: let that affect the relationship, or not. There is also the fact that if one party earns way more than the other, then its bound to affect the relationship, especially in modern societies which believe in financial independence as a pillar of personal achievement.
Does it help a relationship if you have two non-savers together? As you rightly point out, money problems are major cause of relationship conflict and breakdown, but are these less common if you have two reckless spenders in a relationship rather than just one? I would have thought that having two reckless spenders would just accelerate the process of hitting money problems.
That's a good question and I was thinking about the same when I read the paper. I have never investigated this aspect of credit scores in my career so don't really know the answer. My guess is people who have similar score, even if it is bad, probably tolerate each other more than when they have very different styles. I am not sure if the paper looks at this deeply (they seem to only compare differentials and stdev at formation).
The study could have answered this question, but they don’t seem to have looked at it. All their analysis is comparisons of couples with different scores, not what effect absolute scores have on relationship robustness.
My anecdotal experience is spendthrifts have a lot of relationship problems that are not helped by being with another spendthrift.
Agreed. You are probably right about the outcome. It is easy to just add an interaction of nominal score group (high, med, low) vs. mismatch/match and see if there is an effect.
At our startup we get depersonalized credit data but we don't have a nice panel like the Fed :) so cannot really do that analysis on our end. I would be nice if they released this data publicly -- once it is setup for modeling (with just a few variables), it is so hard to re-identify so the risk of privacy invasion is low. I doubt that will happen though.
If I were the authors I would be writing the follow up paper explaining exploring this - why write one big paper when you can salami-slice the data up into a couple of papers.
>> Yup, but so too do credit scores in general. If Harry was unlucky, lost his job and missed a few credit-card payments, then his credit card will suffer regardless of whether he is now actually likely to default
While it is true but that's completely under Harry's control. Consumer unsecured credit is a volume game so it is not going to be possible to underwrite based on personal history. So you need to look at the historical behavior of similar people and the data will show he has a higher risk of default.
That said, Harry can definitely improve this situation by getting a secured credit card from a credit union and build his credit back up. However, if he gets dinged for his friend, he has no way out of it without unfriending everyone from his prior life on Facebook.
Lending can be more personal but the economics of unsecured lending makes this challenging. Credit unions get closest to this but the smaller ones who can provide such a service are struggling.
I understand FCRA and ECOA very well and it is very unlikely we are going to get a different interpretation of these regs just because Facebook wants to get into the loan origination game. I see a number of issues:
1. Reason Codes: FCRA reason codes that the lender has to generate will be a PR nightmare if they decline the loan application based on Facebook data -- imagine a consumer getting a rejection reason as 'Your fiends have poor credit rating so we don't want to give you credit'.
2. Discrimination / Disparate impact: Most people who are poor also have poor friends and this type of analysis will lead to disparate impact that the article talks about and there is no way around it -- even if they get a slightly different interpretation of FCRA they are not going to solve disparity easily.
3. CRA Regulation around data quality: Credit Reporting Agencies (CRA) has specific mandates around providing accurate information about the the borrower. If a borrower thinks it is wrong, they can request the CRA to fix it through a dispute process -- this is a very time-intensive, expensive process for a CRA. I doubt Facebook would want to build a process for disputes and the disputes are going to be worse -- before I will say, I paid my credit card on time and you got it wrong to the credit bureau. Now I may say, I don't think my friend's rating is low and Facebook has to due diligence before they can claim it is correct.
I can see a few ways they might go about this:
1. Second shot at approval as opposed to decline: A lender may reject an application and may choose to use Facebook data to give the borrower a second chance. This is better for the borrower and the regulators may be ok with this type of approach. Although they need to be careful with banks not suddenly changing their FICO Score cut off to something very high so they can fall back on this.
2. Only make it available internationally: not all countries have such strong protections around consumer credit data. Also, many countries don't have a robust credit bureau and this may actually help consumers.
3. Focus on alternative payday lending: CFPB is keen on opening up newer sources of data for certain segments that do not get any credit today. They may be open to this approach if fb can show that it will allow lenders to provide credit to people who they wouldn't have before.
I have strong views about FCRA / ECOA and I feel most of the provisions in there are actually beneficial to the consumers. Even though my startup SimplyCredit is in the fintech space and would greatly benefit from relaxed regulation, I do think it is good to have strong consumer protection and that's why we don't use anything outside of what will be considered as 'payment behavior / financial management'.
I cringe every time a new fintech company claims they monitor how fast you can type or analyze your github profile to give you credit -- either they say these things for marketing but really using it for underwriting or actually using it and breaking many provisions of FCRA. The last thing I want to do is decline a person with disability for typing slowly -- especially when the focus is to really help consumers and not to showoff your power to analyze such realtime data!
Instead of data sources like Facebook, I would welcome a cleaner source of data with verified income and employment.
Their landing page and generally content on their page is terrible but maybe nobody stumbles on their site randomly looking for this. People are reacting to their pricing after seeing the title but I dont think that's what they are selling...