skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UK Banks, hahaha. Don't make me laugh. While it is great to have a bank that actually pays interest, they have only just started to move away from signatures for all transactions, and towards pins.

Plus, they have required huge bailouts as well, I think the RBS is now 70% owned by the government.

Australian banks are actually ones that have come out very well, limiting there exposure to toxic assets, no gov bailouts. Of course, Australia has maintained a very strong economy so far.
Smiley Face Screensaver App .99 USD
Best Hosting Company
What he seems to be asking for is [aardvark](http://www.vark.com) this is _exactly_ what they were trying to pull off prior to Google buying them.
I wonder if Flower Garden is an anomaly or if there are quite a few indie developers that Apple's money machine has "freed"?

Would be interesting if everyone was as transparent as Noel...
<--- Reddit is that way
The receptionist vs. the 21st century
The counter of that is that they shouldn't be publishing the names of defendants in the first place.

If someone is exonerated (unlikely in this case, but still) then their lives are still ruined, especially if their name is rare.
The heart of an SDK is blueprint template, think of a class definition, and various programming languages, toolchains and platforms have instances of that blueprint. So you need to design the parts they all have in common, and leave the platform specific parts to the lower bootstrapping layers; build utilities, configuration files, even host introspection (if you can ask uname(1), don't ask the user.)

If the SDK is for a web API or an RPC style service, then you start by designing the data-interchange format. If you have a few messages to pass around, you can create the specifications for those messages, leaving enough room for exception handling, security, logging and auditing, and most importantly versioning. E.g.

message {
bool: error?
error: error-value
struct: {
int: count
values
} result
float: api-version
struct: log-info
}

This is the prototypical message in RPC style APIs when there are few, less than 20 different messages. And this is very XML-RPC API you will ever come across.

Another approach is to structure the RPC API around a query language of some sort.

If you have many CRUD and reporting operations that act on different data types, you can roll out a SQL, or even a hash-table like set of operations over RPC/Web Services. For example, instead of having:
ListEmployees
GetEmployee
GetNewEmployee
GetUnpaidEmployees

ad infinitum

You can have a "select" operation, with various arguments, and take care of the query parsing on the server side.

Get(Type, Where &optional GroupBy, Having, OrderBy)

then to get unpaid employees (where everything after &optional is optional)

Get("Employee", "payment_date <=" . Date(..), "employee_id")

Or something similar.

This takes a bit more work on the server side, but it's doable in a week by a good hacker. Look at the Zuora SOAP API for an example of this.

If you want to see a "NoSQL" flavor, take a look at SugarCRM's SOAP API. It's entirely getter/setter based and very clean.

What matters is that you treat the server side query processing as a mini compiler project, which is what it is, so don't hesitate to pull out the formal theory to make sure nothing unexpected slips past. If you cheat and whish away the complexity by coding for a best-case scenario, you lose.

-----

Those were data-oriented remote message services. There are many many more styles and flavors, and as the only API junkie that I know of (I practically make my living integrating software) I feel I should do other styles a little justice and do a separate writeup.
my guess: (s)he loves <cars>, but all the (wo)men (s)he dates hates <cars> and if (s)he married that (wo)man (s)he'd have to give up <cars>.

Replace <cars> with the tag of your choice :)

(^ one of the biggest crimes of political correctness: making everything so damn hard to read and full of strange punctuation!)

Either that, or (s)he is typically extremely busy with very fulfilling things, and is looking for either a similar partner or a partner who is simply unusually low maintenance.
Not to sound glib, but:

it is a hard problem. Extremely Hard

Isn't that exactly what an ambitious entrepreneur should look for? Especially someone who's had some startup success in the past?
First thing that came to mind was Smalltalk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk.
Developed in the 80s but have no idea where it went.
.
Hi Max,

I understand where you're coming from.

The simplest answer is: if you don't want to bank with us, then don't. We don't imagine that we'll replace every bank ever. There are plenty of traditional banks that may be going bust left and right, but hey, you're free to do business with them.

A more complicated answer is that BankSimple will have the backing of established, traditional financial entities who are fully FDIC insured from the get-go, so the risk to you as a customer is quite low.

There's no such thing as banking without risk, but I understand why you feel drawn to more traditional financial institutions. They certainly do a good job of marketing themselves as stable and dependable.
I'm pretty sure Flower Garden is definitely an anomaly. It falls in that category of not being a super-hit, but not being a flop either.

Check out some of the other sales figures by Nimblebit http://nimblebit.com for games that did much better.
Yes. They do get 100x as much money when they raise series A rounds, and I don't consider the ones that raise series A rounds to be headed for disaster as a result. Nor empirically do they seem to be.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to state "not a person alive who gets to that age..." - The whole mid-life crisis thing is a function of societies that are a little higher up in Mazlo's hierarchy.

I assure you that the significant part of humanity that is trying to track down enough food, clean water, or even a warm place to sleep each night - let alone adequate medical care or education, doesn't suffer from ennui. They, of course, suffer from hunger, thirst, and exposure - problems, yes, but they certainly have clear priorities.

Sometime happiness suffers when we are provided everything that we need, and we end up asking ourselves, "Isn't there more?"
I was just as dubious about what could really be done until I talked to the guys who are now my co-founders. There's actually a ton of good stuff that can be done, today, in the current regulatory environment. The future looks good.
Ex-Harvard senior charged with fabricating life history, stealing grant money
Accelerometer would work just fine, if iPhone OS exposed a javascript event for it. (Not even all that CPU-intensive either.)
EconomistsDoItWithModels- Andy Rooney Gets it Wrong on Gambling
Eat Peanuts for Snack
I had always thought touch-screen didn't make sense in a desktop environment.

Then my mom got one of those HP desktops with the touch interface. I figured she'd never touch it, just use the keyboard and mouse.

When I was showing her how to do a few things, I found myself using the touch screen WAY more than I expected.

I would be very surprised if your next desktop/laptop wasn't touch enabled as well.
We'll get there. Running lean right now.
There are regulatory challenges, but the other two BankSimple guys (the real brains) have figured out a ton. I'm confident we can do some cool stuff.
I actually built it, but I never released it.

It's lots of work getting something like that built and built properly. I can vividly recall the day when it first booted and then a few months later when it became self hosted was really amazing.

I've dumped some source for you here: http://ww.com/task.cc http://ww.com/task.h , it's the kernel itself and the main header file for the process structure. It's 'hard real time', something I wished linux would get on to in the standard releases, and switched on by default.

Maybe there are some ideas in there that are useful to your friends. If you guys get something working let me know please, I'm always interested in stuff like that.

It's funny when I look through that old code, how simple it all looks, blood sweat and tears to get it right though. That was definitely pre-burn-out code :) Since then I've done only much simpler stuff, with the occasional venture in to something a bit more ambitious.

greetings & thanks for the exchange btw.
I always feel sorry for Botzman: Encountering fierce resistance from the scientific community for his statistical theory (bedrock now but very revolutionary at that time), he committed suicide.

So much for the high school history of science, where better theories immediately replace inadequate ones. Even Einstein didn't get his Nobel for his Special Theory.
The SD card in Android is a gibbering nightmare in far more ways than that.

For starters, that it's necessary at all! The first devices all had only 256mb of flash, but then the OS got bigger than that (can't upgrade older devices cleanly!), so they just doubled that to 512mb instead of doing anything sensible. Is there a single "Google Experience" Android device with more built-in Flash than that?

What's worse is that they use it sparingly themselves but essentially force everyone else to -- Apps don't fit in the onboard flash, you can't even run Apps from the SD card, so everyone has to hack together their own asset system. Now the SD card isn't removable without breaking your running apps!

It's a heap of ill-considered shit. Nobody would even propose these idiocies at Apple, much less get them past their manager. Even Windows Mobile wasn't this bad, but mostly just because they didn't try to do very much. The Android team thinks they're clever -- but when the WM diaspora (http://www.xda-developers.com/) are the community that fixes up your shit, you're clearly not.
It's a pretty cool AI problem
* How do you hear about the startups you invest in? (Introductions from people you trust?)

* What is the one piece of advice you would give to people who pitch their startups to you?

* How do you add value?
I wonder if the 'hive mind' is really that much smarter than an expert in the field, but for brainstorming (which is what this is about) it might be useful.

I'd hate to be the BP exec to sign off on some harebrained scheme coined by a non-expert, they'd have a problem even if it did work.

It may come to that yet though.
The "valley advantage": what attributes of a business makes a company most able to take advantage of the valley? Do this apply to b2b as much or just consumer tech?

PS for the uninitiated, AMA = ask me anything
Why iPad apps won't help magazines
Net Neutrality: From ships to bits
Yep. It probably already is the largest man made ecological disaster and the magnitude of it is still largely hidden from view.

It won't be for much longer. If I was living at the south east coast within 200 miles of the spill I'd be selling my property at a very good price right now.
What maximum % of your net worth would you allocate to angel investments?
When investing, how important is a founder's educational background and work experience? What do you think is the best indicator of a successful founder?
Well, it reports how it determined it was unique (i.e. the browser characteristics), so perhaps you can look at that.

When I visited the page 10 minutes ago, it said I was unique. I cleared everything and then went back to the page, and then it was "one in" 400k something visitors has the same as you. Did it again, and I was one in 200k something visitors. So, at least in my case, it at least seems to realize that the three visits had the same fingerprint.
>> Why your Android app doesn't need an exit button

Please go to the Market and check out how many people downloaded a task killer/manager.
Against Internet Memes
Totally agree for myself - I still use my Laptop from 9:00 - 6:00 AM) - The iPad doesn't do everything. In fact, it doesn't do a _lot_ of things very well. I use my (unJailBroken) iPad about 3-4 hours a day. Here is where it is Bad:

o Multi Tasking (Switching between
email, irc, IM, web, Terminal -
don't even try to do all at once.
o Long Form Typing
o Terminal Sessions
o Sunlit Use

Here is where I _really_ use it:

o Games (Field Runners, PinBall, MirrorsEdge, PvZ)
o In Person Social (Photos, Web Pages, Games
when hanging out)
o Video (I watch all my TV through iTunes on my iPad)
o WSJ - Guaranteed - 45 minutes a day. Awesome App.
o Good Reader (for PDFs)
o Kindle - though not as much as I thought I would.
o Email/Calendar - though not that much
better than my iPhone.
o Time Magazine. (First time I've read Time in 4+ Years, now I read it weekly)
o Marvel (I'm addicted)

With the exception of meetings in the office, where I still carry my Laptop, the iPad hasn't been more than 15' away from me in 30 days.

Can't wait to see what Applications are built over the next year.
Coming from Perforce, I'd say that git's model seems overly rigid. In Perforce, workflow looks like this:

- edit files A, B, C, D, E in the default changelist.
- put A and B in changelist #1
- put C, D, E in changelist #2
- oops, C is the wrong changelist. Move it to #1.
- edit file F (starts out in default changelist)
- put F in changelist #1
- send both changelists out for review.
- edit file B based on review. Run tests to make sure both CLs work together.
- commit one of the CL's

So the basic idea is that I have multiple changelists open simultaneously and the contents of the changelists are fluid. I can keep changing my mind about them until commit.

Of course, since Perforce CL's are file-based, this all breaks down if I want overlapping uncommitted CL's. Git handles that better, which is why I'm using Git now. But I still miss the ease of use of Perforce when working on multiple CL's. Sure, the commits in Git are only local and you can always edit them until you do a push, but it seems like I have to plan ahead more and commit more often, or I end up having to split or merge CL's using commands I'm not very comfortable with.
It will be in the interest of every other device manufacturer to expose such things to web apps, and that will pressure Apple to follow suit.
Mac OS X has the best "community norm" for installing software:
1. Download compressed .dmg from Awesome Software Inc.
2. OS X unpacks it automatically and mounts the drive on your desktop (with a new Finder window open)
3. Drag your app to the Applications folders
4. No step 4.
Hi Joshua

Would you invest in a pure mobile play (i.e. Something you needed a specific type of phone for)?

Reason i'm asking is that I quite often hear "yeah but what about everyone who doesn't have an XXX".

Cheers,

Einar
Yeah, I don't know. You could convince me. But I didn't bring it up because I want my CarWoo experience to be better (I am weird in that I enjoy the actual process of buying cars, and so am I a poor candidate). I brought it up because you don't usually get a chance to convince people, just their first visit to the page, and this copy (not the idea, the copy) rubbed me the wrong way.

I'm just a data point.
Man, I have to say that "Batcane" sounds like one of the worst product names I've ever heard of...
Yes, it's messaging that really forces clean encapsulation. Otherwise, you can end up in getter/setter hell, where everybody still knows everything about everything, even though all data is private.
I actually ran win32s (!) for a bit. Needed it for a PCB layout program, and couldn't swing NT at the time.
I wonder how the character spacing issues are resolved - for example ff and fi generally should overlap and physical print typography uses different characters for this. This is definitely possible in PDF (though I'm not too sure of the details), but then how does this translate back to HTML?
Used it earlier and got the link from someplace other than here. Great tool, useful and should be great for people to use and help others with it as well. I'd been wary of Facebook's wacky features before all of the hoopla began, so I didn't have to change much but...I know lots of folks who just won't think about it. Well designed and easy to view, too.
This year's nebula award winning short sci-fi story.
Ask HN: Which DSLR Lens?
Dear HN,

I am hunting for my second (the first being a stock kit 18-55mm) DSLR lens. I know I want a telephoto zoom, but am unsure what I can get around the $300-400 range for a Canon DSLR? So far, I've found this somewhat useful article:http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/dslrlens.html

While you're at it, I am still a semi-noob dSLR enthusiast and wouldn't mind a few pointers at taking better shots :-)
A virus needs to be 1) stealth, 2) have a malicious payload, and 3) be self-replicating.
I'm dubious on this matter. While, yes, high frequency traders are (in some ways) making the market more efficient, it is still extremely difficult to think that a hyper-efficient but potentially unstable market is preferable to a moderately-efficient but much more robust market.

I mean, a bug in my coding means someone potentially doesn't get an email with a download link. A bug in theirs potentially means millions of shares are tossed around, possibly even confusing other "well-coded" terminals to trigger a feedback loop.

I am interested to know if the stop command was a "save your own skin" move or a "save the market" safeguard.
He wasn't emasculated. He was free to actually leave any time he wanted. She just called his bluff and he turned out to be unwilling to really go through with it.
I've run into that dating. The conversation was along the lines of...

"So, it's paid off since I bought it with cash. The insurance is cheaper than an economy car. The parts are as cheap as economy cars, save for wear parts. It actually gets pretty decent mileage to boot. Why would I have to get rid of it?"

"You just would, that's why!"

I had hung out with her for two weeks and apparently her idea of a happy marriage was giving up everything I have, selling all my furniture (despite the fact my apartment has won AWARDS), and buying whatever she fancied - presumably an over-sized home not within walking distance of anything, that'll be a maintenance nightmare after 20 or 30 years, and a crossover.

I'm all for compromise, but some gals demand total capitulation instead.
Anyone running 1.2 on Google App Engine? Smooth sail?
Unlike old-fashioned specialists on the New York Stock Exchange, who are obligated to stay in the market whether it is rising or falling, high-frequency traders can walk away at any time.

Can anyone explain what the first half of this sentence means?
On the contrary, I found the author to be remarkably mature. Not many people would have had the patience, much less the world-wisdom, to recognize what her husband was going through and let him get through with it ... on his own.

In one sense, this woman has an extreme faith in her husband. How many people would be able to believe that he would eventually find his own way out of the rut? Such trust, such maturity. Amazing.
* What do you like to see before you invest? idea? product? traction?

* What do you give more importance? idea or team?

* You've had incredible dealflow recently, how are you getting into all these deals? (Foursquare, Square, StackOverflow, DailyBooth, Canv.as)

* Since you don't lead, if you run across an interesting startup, do you make introductions or only co-invest in deals that come from other people?

* Better location for a pre-funding consumer internet startup: NYC or Bay Area?

* Bootstrap or raise money? Any particular reasons to choose the former or latter?
1. What matters most to you: team, market or product?

2. You've said that you typically don't lead rounds and let others lead instead. What other angels do you respect the most?

3. Are there any deals that you regret passing on?
WinX DVD ripper for the iPad now available for free
I think that in many ways, physics today is in a similar place to where it was before relativity and QM; it's almost entirely explained, which just a few nagging anomalies around the edges. Today we have QM and relativity, which contradict each other but are very complete, and just a couple nagging issues of matter vs. antimatter and how gravity, inertia, time, and subatomic particles interact. Back then they had a couple issues with the speed of light and a couple other minor details, and famous physicists were quoted publicly as saying that a grand theory of everything was just around the corner. And then along came Michelson and Morley and Einstein and Planck and Heisenberg and blew our understanding of the universe wide open.

Sadly, since we've explored domains with sane timescales and mass / energy levels pretty thoroughly, it's unlikely that new physics will result in anti-gravity hovercars or vacuum energy devices or starships or time machines any time soon. But it might make something we haven't thought of yet, like understanding of time dialation and the speed of light gave us GPS!
Facebook's Privacy Troubles on the Horizon
The winner of the MIT $100K this year was a PhD student who has created a new type of cement. If organizations like the $100K didn't exist, what would be the options for this team? Sure they could try and find some advisors through academic connections, but the absence of a third-party organization that you know isn't going to screw you out of your IP is a huge advantage.

Business Plan Contests are not for every team or every startup. However, at a place like MIT startups are competing vigorously for exposure with companies like Google and Microsoft who are throwing around cash (and free pizza) to hire students. Creating a bit of fanfare and excitement around startups seems to me to be a win/win.
off topic for HN, but:

Why do you want a telephoto lens? Do you shoot mostly wildlife?

If you don't shoot wildlife or have a specific use in mind - skip the telephoto and go for a prime lens.

A prime lens doesn't zoom, but they usually better quality as you'll get a much bigger aperture.

Definitely own the 50mm 1.8 lens, and be comfortable shooting it. That is where I'm at in photography. The 50mm 1.8 is cheap, < $200, so you have no reason not to own that.

Good luck.
Whats the range of your investment size?
I guess junior is opposite to senior. I don't sit on boards, I don't lead deals, etc.
Ugh. This reminds me of a week or so go when I referred to a hypothetical object "responding to a message" and my coworkers looked at me like I was insane.

They thought I meant an MQ type message, and were completely unfamiliar with the concept of message passing.
I've had a very similar experience.

I sell 1 game for $1.99 and two others for $0.99 each and I was at a steady 7 for a couple weeks right after launch, but now I'm at around 15-17 per day on the $1.99 app, and the others trickle in every day too.

My apps have only been in the market for about 60-70 days.

The free versions of 2 of my apps have been downloaded about 10k times each, the puzzle game is only at 4k, and not many purchases, but I think it's picking up steam as well.

It's been fun, and keep in mind that my games are not graphically awesome, my skills are not in that arena, but my games are fun, and it seems like they are picking up steam.

Odd side-note: My most downloaded game gets a lot of hate from comments and ratings, but still plenty of buyers - so even though I think I need to change it, the people who buy it love it as it is, so there's not much I can do :)
It is the boltzmann equation of kinetic theory. It is a differential equation for a 6 dimensional function f(r,v) which describes the number of particles at location r, with velocity v. This distribution changes as the particles fly through space and collide with one another. It has important applications in the theory of hot dilute gases (e.g. rocket engines) and the theory of conductivity in solid-state physics. There are already practical approximations and numerical methods used by physicists who need practical answers to these problems so I think this is mostly of interest to mathematicians...
Soon, Christmas lights will be considered a hacking tool.