skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to be smarmy:

but that's worked out SO well over the last oh, year or so.

The grave old men in suits I mean.

You know, the ones who weren't actually able to stay in business and the ones who didn't go under were acquired by another bank that totally and utterly screwed you. Or your bank was simply shut down by the FDIC.

It's time for new thinking - FDIC insurance will protect you up to, I believe, $250,000 now.
What is the practical purpose? Looks ridiculous to me.
Anyone else dislike the use of 'recur' to indicate iteration?
I did look at the bank website and at the team before I posted .

As I mentioned, the features of SimpleBank do not appear to be much different from what is available from my current internet bank. As far as the team goes, they may be bright, but none appear to have worked at a bank before, either brick and mortar or digital.
Watch this space. I will soon be offering you the best damn guide for making a living off content (as a developer/designer) that's available anywhere.

For sale, of course ;)

But if you want less-compiled, less-curated info now... check out my old blog: http://slash7.com. I talked about the book, you can see some of my marketing first-hand.

My new, biz-focused site is http://unicornfree.com. But it's still ramping up, as you can see, since I'm focused on growing http://letsfreckle.com at the moment to >$10k/mo.
ChromeOS and recent acquisition of Palm will have a big impact on the web app ecosystem. Things like jQtouch ( checkout how our HTLM/jQtouch app looks on iPhone and Andorid HTC Desire http://blog.smartupz.com/2010/05/htc-desire-and-iphone-smart... ) will only speed up the process of turning web apps/web sites into fully touch enabled apps.

I don't want to brag or anything but our app was designed to be touch friendly (the UI has big buttons etc.) and we made this decision before the iPad was announced :)

http://blog.smartupz.com/2009/12/islate-aka-apple-itablet-my...
I'm not sure that one guy who "specializes in strategy consulting for financial institutions" make me feel all that much more confident. Are there more members of the team missing from their "Team" page?
Be very pleased that you didn't get a job there - if they treat job applicants like this they will probably treat their employees just as badly.
FormData interface coming to Firefox
accept benologist $100
Gently sarcastic minds think alike :-)
They haven't launched yet and got a huge press hit today, take it easy.
Read my other post, but I'll elaborate here. People with schizophrenia definitely "hear voices." I've read a bit about this and forget the exact scientific theory for why this happens, but my high-level understanding is that the "self" part of their brain is disconnected from their consciousness so--i'm sure this has happened to everyone when they're very sleepy--when they hear "recordings" of voices, they aren't aware of the fact that their mind is producing them.

The person I roomed with heard angels and demons. He was very religious, so it's logical to see how he arrived at such conclusions. They usuallly slip into such "episodes" when under stress. I remember one day, he came in very angry, jumped into the shower, punching the wall yelling at "Satan." It was surreal, but I kept my cool because I had read a lot about this. The most insane part was trying to talk to him about the voices. In his mind they were real. And when I implied they weren't, he would become stressed because I didn't understand him/believe him. At this point you relize, reality is so insanely relative to your experiences and how your mind processes stimuli. Any "bad" wiring in the brain and you're either too religious, or too rational, or too "insane" to hear voices that aren't there.
they will need someone with actual banking experience on their team - http://banksimple.net/team/
Ok, so go nail them. If you need help putting together a pointed letter that does not limit your options you're free to run it by me (email in profile) I probably won't make it worse :), but it might be smarter to ask a local lawyer.
Is it clear that they are actually going to be a real bank? That bit about FDIC insured through their partners implies that they are more of a marketing driven company that off-loads the actual banking business to real banks providing white-labeled services.
"If you want something that is free and private, you're just a whiner"...unless you contribute your own computing resources to a P2P network that implements the application.

But how to run a social network over P2P, I don't know.
Cheques are earth-shatteringly non-secure. The entire system runs on trust. I've had a several-months-post-dated cheque I wrote cashed by a bank and accepted by mine without apparently as much as a look at the date field. (They also dinged me an overdraft fee. Reversed that when I complained, but not the cheque withdrawal itself.) A while back, there was a pretty loud story about an payday-advance business suing the maker of a subsequently cancelled cheque for the money and winning the amount.

The sooner North America weans itself off cheques and external for-profit inter-bank transfer systems (Paypal, grrr), the better off we'll be.
Could also be a matter of developer cultures.
Steps to writing an annoying article:
1. Deny you're calling your husband childish while comparing him to a child.
2. Proclaim that you're impervious to abuse by touting your toughness as if those in abusive relationships are not physically tough enough.
3. Highlight your suffering martyrdom as much as possible while claiming that you refuse to suffer.
The Russian Doll Principle: re-writing functions at runtime
They most certainly do have ATM access - more so than any other institution I've banked with. It's completely free at every CVS and Walgreens.
Ask HN: How can the oil leak (edit: was 'spill') be stopped?
Is there a good idea out there that isn't being considered?
Tiny sensors in cell phones to map toxins in real time
Guys guys guys, great idea, I applaud your efforts but...

More than once I'll be typing banksimple and hitting ctrl+enter so I'll go right to a phisher's page ready to empty my bank account as soon as I type my id/pass.

Really, get a dot com.
Jabmyeyes.com   high hopes   great read
FWIW it's pretty easy to write a {% macro %} tag for Django: http://alexgaynor.net/2008/dec/25/building-a-function-templa...
"Sufferers are no more dangerous than anyone else. Don't believe me? Then look in the paper and you'll see most crimes are committed by the sane."

This is a fallacious argument. Non-schizophrenics outnumber schizophrenics by a huge margin. Schizophrenics could, hypothetically, be ten times as dangerous and most crimes would still be committed by sane people.

This study is somewhat outdated (1990), but: "The crime rate among male schizophrenics was almost the same as that in the general male population, whereas among females it was twice that of the general female population. The rate of violent offences was, however, four times higher among the schizophrenics." http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/157/3/345

In other words, making friends with a schizophrenic should make you about as afraid of violent crime as making friends with four non-schizophrenics would make you, assuming your friends are representative of the general population.
It's not a strategy; they didn't shut down voluntarily and it's only for a few hours.
Two existing alarms that also work on this premise:

- One has a light that brightens over the course of an hour to simulate the sun rising. Supposedly the natural progression of brightness in your room will help set your internal clock (or something like that) [1]

- Some sort of monitor that you wear that monitors what phase of sleep you're in. You set the alarm to a certain time, and the alarm picks the right time to wake you up, depending on your sleep cycle. [2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/EZ-Wake-Digital-SunRise-Alarm/dp/B0002...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/aXbo-Sleep-Phase-Alarm-Clock/dp/B0014R...
Did you seriously just equate curating the App Store with raping children? And get 5 points for it?
Not to mention that you retain ownership of something awesome.
Why do you care about any of that? The vast, vast majority of people don't lend their money to "the bank," they lend it to the government. If your deposits are FDIC-insured, you don't lose them, regardless of what your banker wears or where his offices are.

If these guys can beat the big banks on overhead and usability, they'll do extremely well.
Well, we must be living in a different UK then. I would be actually willing to pay a monthly fee for a bank account at a bank that has a call centre with staff who actually speak English.
Reading between the lines of the banksimple website, I wonder if they are going the same route.
I love web apps, but...

can you monetize them as easy as the AppStore?
Agreed, it would be nice to get a better look at what goes on under the waves there, but I'm not aware of any news sites that would carry that kind of thing.

Scary if you think about how much oil is being liberated there and how big an area could be covered with a .5 mm thick film based on the daily output of that well.

If I were BPs execs and shareholders I'd be very worried about the continued existence of the company, their stock is already down 25% since when all this started.
Folder Printing For Office Needs
Every office uses folder printing products for marketing and document management. There are many categories of business folders. They are used extensively for this purpose.
Ask HN: Local data
How would you go about compiling a database of all the major retail companies and their store locations in the USA? This is information needed for a project that I'm working on and I'm struggling to find an efficient solution.

Can this information be bought somewhere at a reasonable cost? Would you scrape it from somewhere? Use Google & Yahoo local APIs? How do you think Google & Yahoo got this data? How would you do it? Thanks!
What is the right tool for cross platform work? Do any of the frameworks really generate a proper native-feeling OS X application? Or are they just "good enough"?
Perhaps they didn't hire you because they are having money troubles? It sounds like that could be a problem with them.

People will generally do something if it becomes more of a problem for them NOT to do it. You said it's been 2 months and you've ONLY sent "several emails."

You need to set aside 15 minutes per day and call them every single day until you have your money. You need to become a big pain in their ass so much that they know that at 11am they are going to receive a call from you asking where your re-imbursement is. Don't email because they can easily be deleted. You need to phone and be polite but firm.

You are definitely right here to get this money.
Hah! Pardon me for assuming you'd actually read the post before writing a 4-paragraph comment dismissing it :D
Actually Palestinians have the highest literacy rate of any Arab nationals: http://middleeast.about.com/od/middleeast101/a/me090425b.htm

Good on them, in any case. We need more of that in the Middle East.
ING is part of AllPoint's network. You can get instant withdrawals. There are 32,000 surcharge-free ATMs located in all 50 states, including major retailers like Target, Rite Aid, 7-11, and many others.

For deposits, I use direct deposit via my employer which works great. I get my money the same day everyone else does. For depositing checks, I use my credit union (2nd bank). Since I only get a few checks/year, this is not an issue for me.

I use ING direct for checking, savings, bill pay, and personal money transfers.

It is, in fact, a competitor.
Much more money is made on the web than in the app store in aggregate, and it's made by far more people (I would guess several orders of magnitude for both numbers), so I would say most definitely yes.
This brings into focus one of the App Store's main advantages-- a micropayment platform that users have actually adopted in large numbers.

The only reason that media companies need fear cannibalizing app sales is that people have become accustomed to paying for Apps (even apps that are 99% content) but not paying for web sites.

Imagine for a second if Apple rolled out the ability to pay for anything on the web (that made it past a review process-- ha!) with your iTunes Store account?

Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some serious traction).

See also my previous comment on this topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498
> This reflects one of the cooler aspects of polyphasic sleep

That "aspect" is called sleep deprivation.
Yes. The technical requirements for a piece of commercial paper---sometimes called a "negotiable instrument," or a check---are that it be a writing, payable to the order of someone specific or simply the bearer, that it be signed by the maker or drawer, that it be for a sum certain, that it be unconditional, that it be payable on demand, and that it be payable in currency.

Technically, you can make a valid check out of a napkin with a Sharpie.
I think the Diaspora group should consider "outsourcing." Hold a competition to pick 6 projects, which will get $20k each. At the end of the 2nd phase, they should pick the "winners" and integrate their code. The winners get another $20k.

This gets the initial pressure off of them, allows for a large amount of audience participation, and could attract a lot of programming talent to their project.
OK, it's your life. But I'd like to draw your attention to this idea:

You can't do all things at once. Yes, naturally.

So you choose to focus on the things you can least control.

Does that make sense?
I'm really curious about this banksimple and I hope they have really cool "grave old guys in suits" with them. They'll need it.

previous discusion at:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049961

My previous comment in that discussion:

I work for a bank (not from USA though) and what I see as the toughest barrier in initiating a Bank is the massive amount of banking regulation that every institution must comply (not negotiable). Also the impact of new regulations on the systems running the business are usually non trivial. Missing any of these, means that you cant operate (or you can't do certain operations, generally critical).

As I said, the effort put in keeping with all this is very big. Usually the split is 50/50 with regulation vs new features (my view is as a software developer). The bank being global only makes things worse, as only adds more regulations from different places to equation.

Well that was the boring part. I think theres a place for new financial services but perhaps the way to get started is providing those new services and avoiding being a bank. As the institution adds more services and grows, it can begin to take into account the regulation little by little. That was my simplistic view ;)
This is actually considered a good sales number? Making $30 a day? Or actually less, I guess, since I assume the Android market takes a cut?
One would have to run the numbers before coming to that conclusion. A gyro spinning in a vacuum is very efficient and Li-ion battery amper-hour rating are quite impressive (meaning it could be small)

Even something like an actuator that rises up over the thumb to indicate an object might be better than an audible tone. In the city, traffic could easily swamp your little speaker.

The thumb could rest on the actuator and have 5-degrees of freedom.

Woot.
There are lots of good ideas, but the fact is that the people that are trying to solve this right now have:

1) tons of experience in deep sea work

2) a pretty good idea of the situation (which the rest of us mostly lack)

3) a very large budget and an inventory of resources at their disposal

4) are far from stupid.

So if this is going to be solved in the short term I doubt it will be an outsider.

Occasionally outsiders do come up with great solutions, one I remember was the jet engine strapped to a tank to blow out the gulf war fires. That was sheer genius.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/01q2/stilling_the_fires...
seems a pretty obvious outcome, but only for apps/webapps that are content-oriented, not for apps that actually use custom mobile device hardware. like gps, sms, multitouch.

in the meantime, my android browser doesn't seem to be caching websites aggressively enough, because it seems to take up to several seconds to load the (few) bookmarks i have. so native content-oriented apps are faster, for now.
I think it's a promising business actually. Have you decided who should be your customers? Women who see your ads and buy it directly, or men who buy it for their girlfriends/spouses? Since G. Ads seem to be expensive for you, then you'll need to switch to guerilla marketing and try to go viral. Hire a few local kids and film a sexy+funny sketch, post it on YT/FB/Vimeo, etc.; link to HN and ask for help with your site ('check'); promote it as a better gift for mother's day/birthdays/etc. Post on wedding registry sites to target bachelorette parties -- in fact, generate a bachelorette party package with free tiaras and pink bags; don't think about dildos, think about a fun accessory that will improve your customer's sex life...
Yep, and that's what we've done. It was interesting to contrast what we have done (now) with Steam, where they went for pretty much the same look/feel that they've had on the Windows side. They do a pretty good job at it imho, but I'm not a UI person myself.
[FROM OP:] Wow - almost 1,000 extra hits in four hours ....
The fear of all sums: Mathematics in the housing bust
This has been my experience too.

For my American friends: all "checking" in the UK is free. All ATM use for normal ATMs (those you find at banks, not the shady ones at the convenience store) are free, even if that bank isn't yours.

This is obviously only a day-to-day thing, but I think most people have expressed feelings of ambivalence about banking in the comments here: it's somewhere to store money. In the general case, the UK banks do that better.

I do not have any experience with anything advanced like mortgages or loans.
A bank that wants to do things differently and be known for customer service should conspicuously publish their privacy policy and reveal their network of partner banks.

It's not clear what happens with the statistics of your bank usage nor where your money actually is.

Is this version 2 of Mint with banking 'features'?
Even if there's no contract per se, this looks to me like a textbook case of promissory estoppel.
That is all kinds of awesome!
If only they got the check scanning thing USAA-style...
Whoa, well look at that. I've not checked on them since their very early days
Try an American bank some time (I had a British bank account for much of the 27 years I lived there, and have had various US banks for the past 6 years). Of course there's always room for improvement, but if you haven't tried banks in both countries, you really don't know how good you have it in the UK.
Every time I read about compatibility layers, I flash back to this passage:

Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down into the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.
> After decades of nuclear power development, no one earth has successfully run a nuclear power system without massive government funding

PG&E does. So do the other private power companies in the US that have nukes.

> or control.

What do you mean by "control"? The US does regulate power companies, but it's unclear that such regulation makes it possible for them to run nuclear power plants.

> Right now, the federal government provides very large subsidies

Nope. It limits their liability, which is different. If you think that their without-such-limits liability is close to correct, the liability that we apply to other power sources is hugely wrong (on the low side).

Which reminds me - are there any privately operated power producing dams in the world? If not, then surely hydropower .....
Closures - A Simple Explanation (Using Ruby)
Cross graphics-API (D3D to OGL) development is especially difficult.
I've heard one of the biggest risks with global warming is that as the ocean water changes temperatures it has the potential to alter the flow of ocean water currents.

I'm wondering if this oil spill somehow has the potential to do the same thing. Maybe the change in consistency of the water in the gulf. Maybe the layer of oil on the surface will cause water temperatures beneath it. Maybe the lack of oxygen beneath the layer of oil will wreak some unknown consequences.

Any good resources on this topic?
Ron Conway uses the "copypasta" angel investment strategy, as anon would say.
That highly depends on the target. In case of games, I rarely see them using the native widgets anyway.

Otherwise it depends. Right of the box you will at least get "good enough" (with Qt for example). If you want to support OSX-only stuff, of course you need some tweaks and platform dependend code.
There aren't great cross-platform tools that provide good native-feeling results, mostly.

There are a number of cross-platform toolkits. GTK+, Qt and wxWindows all come to mind as possibilities. But in general, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of the front end as native code if you want it to feel like native code.

However, if you know you may be porting, you can separate a lot of the back end out of your UI code and make it a separate library in separate files. That makes it much, much easier to write several different front ends and still share most of your code.
How do you find the time to do all of these angel deals while working full-time (presumably) at Google? Can you give a rough estimate of the amount of time/effort that goes into investing?
One thing I'd like to point out: this is not an oil spill. Rather, this is an undersea gusher, an ongoing, uncontrolled oil leak that is dumping the equivalent of the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill into the Gulf of Mexico about every four days.
And they're hiring.
The bulk of SCO Group v. The World (them vs. IBM and Novell) wasn't as I recall based on crackpot legal theories, their problem was that the facts weren't on their side. I.e. they didn't own UNIX(TM) and IBM didn't do anything illicit with UNIX(TM) anyway.

That's in part why it took/is taking longer, there have to be findings of fact which a judge can't do (Novell's summary judgment win on ownership was reversed, so they had to put it before a jury, where they won).
Arizona Immigration Law Challenged by ACLU in Suit
For a good, unromanticized, fictional account of schizophrenia watch "Revolution #9"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253586/
There are certainly features that are better suited for native apps, but the ones you stated aren't necessarily them. For example, GPS is doable on both Android and iPhone OS. Multitouch is also doable (check out Google Maps on the web on iPhone for an example here).

Accelerometer, native graphics, etc are the key features I think about that are not well suited for web apps.

My startup, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), is a huge believer of mobile web apps, and we even have a private alpha going on for monetizing your mobile web app (check out an example like fortysquires: http://fortysquires.com ).