Live data from Hacker News

I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

twitter.com

471–480 of 562 posts

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#471
post #469

Has anyone understood how this has been done? how can you place a message in a transaction like this? If not mistaken this was done via contactless payment, right? how is that possible to add a message? (maybe you can in some country)

When I send a payment I can either include a structured message (a code in the format xx-xxx-xxxx) or a "free text" message in which I could easily write "found your wallet contact me on abc@email.com"

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People being paronoid pyschotics shouldn't affect my ability to take a poop in peace. Those suitcases full of explosives you are hallucinating about? Has NEVER HAPPENED.

First 2 links I found googling it, > United Airlines Flight 629, registration N37559, was a Douglas DC-6B aircraft also known as "Mainliner Denver", which was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage on November 1, 1955. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_629 > An explosion at the New Tokyo International Airport (later renamed Narita International Airport) occurred on Sunday,…

Those are both checked luggage. Not briefly unattended luggage by someone who is in the bathroom. Where's the articles about unattended luggage?

Also you got 1955 and 1985. 64 and 34 years ago. Checked luggage wasn't even inspected back then. It is now. Still stuff gets through.

Are you arguing here that we shouldn't have checked luggage? Those are your examples. Checked luggage. Not unattended luggage, which almost certainly has already been inspected anyway when going through security. What now? Do we ban checked luggage and carry on luggage even after both have been inspected?

I love all the downvotes from the haters and the crazy supposed examples that prove my point for me. Facts and reality are not important. What's important is hysteria and fearmongering, and to shut up anyone that talks rational sense or is interested in a reality based approach to threat management.

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#474
post #469

Has anyone understood how this has been done? how can you place a message in a transaction like this? If not mistaken this was done via contactless payment, right? how is that possible to add a message? (maybe you can in some country)

It's not a contactless payment, it's a bank transfer. The person who found the wallet sent payments of £0.01 to the owner. When you make bank transfers you can include a short payment reference which can be any text you want, and it appears on the other person's statement.

The UK has the Faster Payments Service which enables most bank transfers to be completed in a few seconds, so they would have seen the messages immediately as soon as they logged into their bank account to freeze the lost card.

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not the least bit worried about your suitcase being stolen?

Or having items planted in it.

What items? Drugs and bombs that someone managed to sneak past security already? In that case isn't the real problem improper inspection? What if the proposed mad bomber, after having successfully managed to sneak all these explosives past security, and hoping to transfer the explosives from his own suitcase to that of a stranger on a specific flight who went to the bathroom, in plain view in front of everybody sitting there waiting for that flight to board, finds that no one has gone to the bathroom without their luggage on that day? Wouldn't that ruin his plan? Not a great plan to be relying on someone on a specific flight going to the bathroom and a whole room full of people somehow not noticing a guy openly transferring an entire suitcase full of explosives from one suitcase to another. Wouldn't one of the other passengers waiting for the same plane at this point say hey wait a minute, this dude here is transferring a bunch of explosives from one suitcase to another! Maybe I should say something!

Yeah that's the argument. Someone's gonna plant the explosives while I'm in the bathroom.

You know what? That's never going to happen, it's never happened, and it's a crazy thing to imagine would ever happen. It's just hysterical paranoia and fearmongering to go on about someone planting a suitcase full of explosives in another suitcase in plain view of everyone during a few minutes when some guy is in the bathroom.

This fear and paranoia is actively harming society. Parents won't let their children walk to school or a friends house or play in the yard because they are convinced the children will be abducted by a mad kidnapper. So their kids become waddling obese paranoid kids fixed on their screens, depressed, miserable, high blood pressure, having been raised in a culture of fear, years shaved off their lives from the stress.

All these irrational things, none based on facts or reasonable threat assessment, are actively harming society, and the people pushing this fear are doing it intentionally. But to what aim?

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#476
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago, I worked in a record store, and David Byrne came in to the store to shop. He was wearing a red plastic hard hat, yet gave a disparaging look to everyone who seemed to "notice" him. When he left, I discovered he had forgotten to take his credit card from the counter. I called him (we also had a video store with contact info) and he was incredibly rude and told me just to cut it up because he couldn't be both…

Oh, that's disappointing, I've always loved David Byrne :(

As per someone else's comment, everyone can have a bad day. I try not to judge people I don't know (unless there are repeat stories, then it's hard not to).

Oh, and never read about your heroes!

Edit: just -> judge. Damn auto-correct!

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with hitchhiking is that you don't pick someone at random, someone decides to pick you up. If you pick a random person, they'll almost certainly be a normal, honest person. If you advertise yourself with a giant sign "I WILL GET IN YOUR CAR IF YOU STOP", then a small percentage of random strangers, but a large percentage of opportunistic criminals, will stop. I'd argue she got very lucky.

I have reservations about the explanation that a consistent positive outcome can be chalked up to pure luck. She may not know what she was "doing right," but I think it more likely she was doing something that helped foster positive outcomes.

> I have reservations about the explanation that a consistent positive outcome can be chalked up to pure luck.

It's not even necessarily much luck: if the per-day probability of a violent attack while hitchhiking in Mexico were 1 in 50, which would still be extremely dangerous, it would only be slightly better than average results to go a month straight without an attack.

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#478

Interesting that there's an 18 character limit. In Australia, with the NPP (equivalent to UK's Faster Payments), your description can be up to 280 characters including, of course, emoji. Out of curiosity, does Faster Payments allow you to pay to any other identifier (email address, phone number), or only bank account number? More importantly... does it support emoji?

> does Faster Payments allow you to pay to any other identifier (email address, phone number)

There is a system called Paym which lets you send money to (the bank account associated with) a phone number, but you have to sign up for it explicitly to associate your phone number with your account, and I personally have never used it nor heard of anyone I know using it.

> does it support emoji?

I believe it's limited to some subset of uppercase ASCII only. However, some banks allow emoji for transfers to other accounts within the same bank (e.g. Monzo).

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some do (that happened to mine when I forgot it once, bank called me). Others do not. The best ones require that you take your card before they do the thing you wanted it to do (as a measure to ensure you don't forget your card).

I live in Germany, where ATMs always require you to take out the card before giving you money. The reason I've heard for this is to avoid a particular scam that goes like this: 1. Eve spies on Alice as she enters her PIN into the ATM. 2. As Alice takes her money, Eve taps her on the shoulder and gives her a 10$ bill, explaining that it fell down to the floor when Alice didn't notice. 3. Mallory uses the distraction t…

[deleted]

Re: I just lost my wallet on the way home from work

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK Advice is moving towards "Clever Never Goes". http://clevernevergoes.org/ Honest grown-ups will be annoyed that a lost child refuses to come with them to the obvious "lost children" place, but they'll put up with it while somebody tries to figure out where the people responsible for that child are. Somebody with nefarious motives will probably need to take the child somewhere else though - by refusing to go they'r…

Wow, that site is awfully bad. I had to go through 3 pages + one excruciatingly slow video all of which just told me how amazing their organization is, but I still didn't know what "Clever Never Goes" means. tl;dr for the rest: it means: "Never go anywhere unless it was planned beforehand".

Yeah. Funny this is they have a good UX but terrible copywriting. No info at all on what they do unless you dig deep.
Post reply on HN