skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you bank with us, you're money resides in an FDIC-insured bank account. You have the account and routing numbers and can transfer funds in or out at any time. We try to make banking anything but "scary" :)
This may be one of the few times I like the original name better than the one a company re-brands itself as.

I wish companies could so something like a pretend re-brand and make a fake post on their blog, submit it to HN and then see what the feedback is before just jumping in. HN provides some of the best and most brutal feedback I've seen in a community that simply can't be replicated by a focus group or board meeting.
Really now? Next you'll be telling us that "then" is used ironically instead of "than", even when "than" is what people mean.

Face it, people say "I could care less" for the same reason they say "then" instead of "than". There's just something about the English language that makes most of its native speakers unable to use it.

You came up with this irony theory because you've made the same mistake yourself, and your ego wants to deflect the accompanying shame.

The word "not" is not a particularly big word, but then again, most native speakers can't use "than" either.

It's amazing what an outburst of theorizing wankery your comment sparked.
Khan Academy 2.0?
Right. The version is often stripped out, but the server software tends to stay in there.

Totally possible there's extra heuristics in there though; I totally can't remember from when I ran that thing but it took about a week to run and spent most of its time waiting on other people's servers, so burning a bunch more CPU doing extra analysis wouldn't cause Netcraft any issue at all, I don't think.
Google Talk & Hangouts close to go native in Chrome
"I'm not generally opposed to things that allow law enforcement to do a better job with fewer resources."

While I freely concede I'm making a "balance" argument and as such there can be reasonable disagreement on where the correct balance is, there is a bound on how far you want to take that. It is not a bad thing that law enforcement takes some effort, as it serves as a sort of natural counter on excessively zealous enforcement, one far more effective than any law or ACLU lawsuit could ever be. The goal isn't to make the police job as easy as possible, the goal is to serve justice.

This makes it easy to keep an eye on a much larger number of people with little increase in manpower, and the problem there is that by increasing the amount of data, while at the same time reducing the quality of the priors on the data that the person (or perhaps rather the vehicle) in question has committed some sort of crime, you will start encountering the classic signal processing problem where you will inevitably start to get more false positives. Requiring a warrant to drop these on somebody's car, and therefore requiring some sort of prior probable cause, isn't just good civil liberties (because those false positives hurt real people), it's good statistics.

Doing "the same thing as before, only more easily" is still an important qualitative change in law enforcement and security in general, and I think you need an argument more powerful than that to justify the change in question.
Based on what?

Building really cool technology that you decide to give a way sounds a lot like how many startups have failed.

You've attributed arbitrary value to peoples worth when you have absolutely no way to know if you are correct.
That's true enough, but only the military and EMS need robots that can instantly handle unfamiliar terrain. Meanwhile, the Japanese are most of the way towards a consumer product, since the interior of a building is highly predictable.
In the first half of the biography, it's mentioned numerous times that due to his fruitarian diet, Jobs believed that he rarely needed to bathe.
Just about every car built in the past 3 or 4 years has a GPS tracker installed at the factory. It is called OnStar in GM cars or Sync in Ford cars.

Should any police officer be allowed to view the location records for any vehicle without a warrant? How about view all the records for all vehicles?
There is a difference between a premium brand, and a premium brand that promotes fair trade. As a friend used to work in a supermarket used to say, when the oranges got a little old we would relabel them as organic and increase the price.

Note: I buy organic food, but I try and verify it's a bettor product before it's a habit. Otherwise it's vary easy to spend more money on something you like less.
It's ok, I could have been much clearer (but then I would also repeat what's in the article). I have the feeling people commenting here did not read the whole article or are just nitpicking, it's one of the best articles about the history of work and its current status I have ever read, everyone should read this.
Man, whoever their PR person is, they're sure good at getting to be #1 on HN. It seems like every month there is a new BankSimple story and every month the same comments pop up asking who they are and how they work.

I do think maybe they should pick a better username though.
Will Simple ever integrate with, say, kingstrade or another investment program? That [!] would make things amazingly simple. I suppose that would take away their own income, though :)
He was not a visionary entrepreneur, that's the whole point. His vision led him to create product flops for 20 years. Markkula on the other hand got it correct with the Apple II from having the right industry knowledge.
Interestingly enough, the site hasn't changed much since the 90's here is a link from the Way Back Machine

May 30, 1997

http://web.archive.org/web/19970530212007/http://www.berkshi...

The latest version has this interesting bit on the head

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828">

It's only interesting to me because in my short life as a developer its the first time i see this MSHTML reference, if you are like me here is a good read:

Trident (also known as MSHTML) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(layout_engine)#cite_no...

According to this version 8 was the first to pass the ACID 2.1 test, the article links for reference this blog post from Microsoft that is dated 2009 - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/01/09/the-internet-e...

I'm guessing the latest update to that site wasn't long ago, makes me think about the process they have to change a site like this, for such a clean site, i think it has passed the test of time, and it reminds me how much Microsoft rules on the Corporate world.
HP weighing sale of webOS unit
What on earth does a conservation entrepreneur do?
They're upfront and honest about the requirements. I don't see the big deal.

Simple (from what I can see on their site) is about creating a wonderful banking experience for its customers. There is nothing wonderful about scanning and uploading checks. If the service requires a smartphone, so be it.

From a strategy standpoint, it can be assumed that most of their launch market is going to have an iOS or Android device.
"Oracle Corp might be among the likely technology firms interested in the asset, one of the sources said."
I think they mean it's wasteful in the way having a chauffer is wasteful. (I don't agree with that contention). "Look, I have the time and money to learn a dying, inefficient art whilst you order yours thru Amazon --like everyone else. This makes me a little special."
Yeah, and the lending feature is good and would actually result in good marketing.
Ask HN: Good ressources to learn (Web-)Design
I am a solid Programmer and I know pretty much all I need to know about Backend- and Frondend-Developing.
But I would like to get deeper into the Design-Aspect. I am not talking about HTML, CSS, etc.. More about what makes a good Design actually a good Design. I already read "Don't make me think" and "The Design of everyday things", but they were more about usability then actually what makes a design beautiful.
Any recommendation what (online-)sources I should try to teach myself?
Their proof is an unoptimized video vs an optimized video.

Their product is a standard recommended video optimization.

The people behind RayStream are either lying and/or don't understand what they are talking about.
You're right that they both needed each other. You're wrong that Jobs was best at building a company. Markkula and Scott built the company. But I agree Apple would have failed without Jobs.
Should the police have "unlimited surveillance powers"? Of course not.

Should the police be allowed to employ technologies that allow them to monitor every car on the road?

My answer to that is no, but we're technologists, and, be honest: 15 years from now that information is going to be available to the police by default, no matter what we do. But no: I have a problem with the notion of law enforcement dragnetting every single vehicle on the road. It's a power that has been abused with things like roadside sobriety checkpoints, which inevitably turn into revenue-raising boondoggles that inconvenience law-abiding motorists.

Should the police be allowed to employ technologies that allow them to designate specific vehicles in the course of actual investigations and monitor them using telemetry instead of manual patrols?

I say yes. For the same reason I said before: the telemetry is actually less intrusive than the power they already have, and the benefits are common sense: overtaxed investigative agencies can cover more ground more easily, fewer cars are on the road pointlessly following people, &c.
Hi, cofounder of Simple here.

We're in the same position that your current bank is in when it comes to fraud and theft: we're insured for it, and we follow industry-standard practices when something bad happens.

Most likely, what would happen is:

1. You realize that your account has been compromised.
2. You call us up.
3. We investigate your claims with our partners.
4. You get reimbursed.
5. If there was a security flaw on our side that we can fix to prevent this from happening in the future, we do so.

We have a comprehensive security review process and participate in internal and external (third-party) security audits. We're also taking steps to make it more difficult for attackers to compromise your account through multi-factor authentication and other mechanisms.

If you have any other questions about our security practices, please contact us: hello@simple.com or security@simple.com.
make it 0USD payed to others, you still have to give salary to the legal department.
you shouldn't be afraid to spend a little more for quality where it matters

It's more likely that they don't see any reason to spend more than $15. Someone knows they can get a pot that looks OK for $15, whereas the $50 doesn't have any immediately obvious benefit.

I love tools, but I'm far from a tool snob. I have lots of cheap tools because I'm never going to wear out, e.g., a screwdriver. It's worth more to me to have five $3 screwdrivers than a single $15 one. But I just spent $200 on a wire crimping tool because I know that the $15 ones won't do the job right. But if they did, then there is no way I'd buy the more expensive one. Most people are just like that: they won't spend more than they have to unless there is a clear benefit.
You should support Windows Phone as well.
It means the _normal.mp4 file was encoded in an absurdly high bitrate for no reason except to make their claim of 90% compression.
No, attaching anything to my clothing is extraordinarily intrusive, and the police do not in fact have the ability to monitor my every movement, unlike with my vehicle, where virtually all lawful movement is already subject to monitoring.

I don't think this is an arbitrary or subtle difference; I think it's night and day. I specifically think that warrantless monitoring of vehicles is reasonable.
Longevity Technology (Anti-Aging Regenerative Medicine)
Your stretching pretty far here. "Vision" was what led Steve Jobs wrong for 20 years of his life. Markkula knew the industry and knew what would work, Wozniak had the best engineering ability of anyone. This was the magic combination and what founders should try to emulate.

It's not just scale either. Jobs was also famous and perceived as successful. He could be a complete asshole to people and they would still work with him. You should try that in your next startup...
Read this page: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-x264.html
Each of the keys in the string has a value which is explained in the document.

Basically they're claiming something revolutionary, which in the end is just using the x264 encoder with the right fine-tuned options.
I think it depends on how you define "idea". If the idea was to automate indexing and improve search, they were hardly the first and it was not a good idea that propelled them anywhere, but rather brilliant execution.

If by idea you mean something like "the bulk of the pagerank algorithm" then yes, that counted for a lot, but I think fleshing out that algorithm from the concept of "automating indexing" is part of what most people would call execution and even part of what a lot of people would call programming (developping the algorithm is often a key step of writing the program), and even then they executed the details like their page design and UI choices well.

They succeeded largely because they were hardworking people who executed well on a hard problem, though as PG says in the essay there was also a luck factor in play as there is in most of life.
Why Is The Defense Department Snooping On My Phone?
If so, then we need to wait until somebody got a copy of it and then distribute it. Since GPLv2 should have clauses prohibiting the any parties from baring redistribution given the same license is used.

But just one thing... according to Wikipedia [1] it is actually based upon Hotspot, but they also entered an undisclosed agreement. In such aspect, Azul may have licensed Hotspot not through GPLv2 but through different terms with Oracle. If that is true, they may be able to keep part of their code out of GPLv2.

Also they had some open source stuff released under GPLv2 at another website [2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Azul_Systems&o...

[2]: http://www.managedruntime.org
You will receive interest. In fact, we automatically move your money around behind the scenes so you earn as much interest as possible.

I don't know when we'll start publishing our interest rates, but we have some additional info about interest rates on our FAQ: https://www.simple.com/faq/
This is crazy... the website is a shell of an investment pitch. These guys need to get reported. Anyone want to make some money off the collapse.

Wow, their first 'contract' is with a company called edgefactory OMNIMEDIA, which I think is owned by martha stewart OMNIMEDIA?

edit: Wow, I just posted a link to this article and this thread on their facebook account and now the item has been deleted off their wall within minutes. everyone should let me know....

http://www.facebook.com/RaystreamInc
Yes, but why rename install to syncing and search to query? Why not just call it install and make it -i for install and -s for search which is still search. I think that is what the OP is trying to say.
A perfect example of how the media is complicit in spreading half truths.

They show no more than 20 examples of letters and expect you to believe that he has received thousands because they are numbered. There is no evidence to prove that he sent out 4,800 letters and even less to show that he received 3,100.

Not to mention that the return ratio defies common sense.

Edit: My comments are based on watching the video where it would be typical to substantiate a claim like this with more images of boxes of replies along with some random checks of the actual large quantity of replies.
My guess, based on the man page for mencoder linked on the page where he got the mencoder options, you can encode a source video file to target video file aiming for either quality of frames, or speed of frames (per second). "Very high quality" options results in a video output of roughly 6 frames per second. Comparing the file size of the output file hoax.avi, its basically identical. So the revelation is that this company's miracle method is simply delivering video at 6fps.

If you've ever played a video game that was too much for your system, you've seen 6fps before, and you know it is intolerable.

That's my take on it, I really wish the author would have elaborated more on the result.
Sport book line
They're not "fine-tuned" in the slightest; they're cargo cult options that are going to give worse results on a compression-per-speed basis than the presets that already come with x264. Many of those options are completely redundant; they're specifying things that are already default!

There are quite literally dozens of scam companies built off x264, claiming in many cases that they made an "incredible" magical proprietary encoder with "revolutionary" compression. Of course they just run x264.

Fortunately it is extremely easy to identify an x264-encoded stream, even if all the headers are stripped and rewritten: it would be extremely difficult to modify x264 to cloak such a stream entirely unless you knew the code line for line, and even then, some of the features of x264 that are responsible for much of its compression advantage are extremely obvious in an analyzer (variance adaptive quantization).
Read Tufte and there was a book that came out recently called 'Design for Hackers' that you may find interesting.
How to Sell Out - Lean Startup Seattle
Microsoft confirms move to align Windows & Windows Phone development
It's marketing ignorance: it's like selling a Facebook like button for 1200 euro's as a "social marketing" (true story BTW).
How is that simpler than, e.g., Python's matplotlib?
"Real law enforcement" is trained and sworn in. The TSA is not. Random people in the government can say whatever they want; they could also call mall cops "law enforcement" of a sort. The fact is that words mean things, and TSA "agents" are not sworn officers.
Yes -- the vast majority of IIS implementations are run behind corporate firewalls -- they won't show up in surveys like this. These stats don't show web server popularity, they show the popularity of public web servers.
IBM Open-Sources Potential "Internet of Things" Protocol
Fine tuned in the sense then that it's beyond the defaults.
But I was replying to tdoggette not vaporstun, who was making (I think) the opposite point.

So my response was to point out that actually the banks we think of as not having "bank" in the name do, and it hasn't stopped us from referring to them without it. So if they stuck with Bank Simple, it would help people initially understand what they do, then once (if) they become a household name, people could refer to them as "Simple".

Of course, this is all ignoring the whole legislation stuff.
Huh? Since when have technical details of any kind not been relevant to a discussion on HN?
The Evercookie: Like trying to kill Steven Seagal
That's true in the Bay Area at least, but not necessarily everywhere. Back when I was their customer I recall visiting NYC, and asking several random strangers if they knew where I could find a "B of A", and none of them knew what I was talking about, until I clarified, "Bank of America".
Google lures college students to Google+ in effort to speed adoption
There was a point, a while ago, where drawing the line between Design and Art Direction was all the rage amongst design bloggers. If you read that link considering this particular distinction (that is, Design as opposed to Art Direction), the impression it gives is that the author is considering function, yes, but not preaching anything about style.

To be sure: he chose a minimalist ("under-designed") webpage on purpose to make a point. To wit: well-crafted Design (as opposed to Art Direction) can produce a User Experience orders of magnitude better than beautiful Art Direction that's not functionally tied to the content it surrounds.

EDITed to add: In fact, at no point does the author say that minimum is preferrable to flamboyant. What he says in his conclusion section, rather, is: "Design without context is not design. It’s noise." That is: form without function is not design, and in fact it adds noise to the overall message.

Another EDIT: I stand corrected about the definition of Art Direction. It is so much more than just the bling, and it's also supposed to be functional. But "pointless bling is noise" is still how I read the original article. Here's a nice link on Art Direction vs Design: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/art-direction-and-design/
Daily Mobile Minute #49: Mobile is a gap filler
OpenJDK? "The Zing™ JVM is a full-featured JVM based on Sun HotSpot" according to http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/virtual-machine

Edit: I upvoted you moonboots, thanks for the pointer below.
Sadly, this is not one of the honeypots Wesley Tansey recently suggested I set up (http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/10/28/hackernews-needs-honeyp...).

As someone who has seen dozens of Woz-founder-only startups march into the meatgrinder of obscurity, I can tell you that if you have to be one or the other, you're better off being Jobs.

Not that you have much choice about it though. If you're a natural Jobs you're not going to have much luck trying to turn yourself into a Woz. And vice versa.

More generally, I'm tired of these articles where people make up a straw man version of Steve Jobs and then attack him. I feel like I know more about Jobs than nearly everyone who writes this stuff, and I don't feel confident making generalizations about his character.
Politicians' Previous Jobs
Foro gratis : Foro Bibliotecas Escolares
How We Landed Our Webapp's First Customer - A look back 10 years later
Not anymore, the stock is down more than 50% since 11pm yesterday!
Hi, cofounder of Simple here.

This is a good point.

We think there's a difference between "simple" and "stark" or "minimalist". Our goal is to create an experience that's inviting, explorable, and clear. That doesn't necessarily mean doing away with all visual ornamentation.

Sure, plain text is "simple", but iconography, texture, and other design elements can contribute to that ideal as well. Thanks for your thoughts!
Should they be allowed to track everyone? No. I'm comfortable with the limitation that someone has to actually walk up to the subject vehicle and attach a device to it.

If you want to talk about things like dragnetting every car on the road through things like OnStar, this is going to be a very boring conversation, because I can't imagine anyone on HN --- myself included --- is comfortable with that idea.

(Even though it's inevitably going to happen, not because law enforcement is grasping, but because technological progress is going to make access to that information the default).
Even public is debatable, many web application servers or servers requiring accounts likely won't be hit. The percentage of all HTTP requests that are to servers they measure will likely be pretty low.
พระร่วงยืนหลังลายผ้า วัดพระศรีรัตนฯ - พระเครื่องในประเทศไทย
Republic Wireless - Anyone heard of this?
I agree they should be able to designate specific vehicles and monitor them using telemetry, but I would call this process of designating "getting a warrant." Otherwise, I don't see what prevents them from, say, designating everybody the suspect knows. To me, it seems almost inevitable that this will go the way of sobriety checkpoints if there isn't any force holding them back.
> You're missing the point of scientific publication. The entire point of publication is so others can reproduce your work. Speed doesn't work if you need a billion data points taken over 20 years to prove a long term issue.

In theory, that's the point. In practice, no journals ever publish replications, so nobody wastes their time reproducing others' work when they could be working on something publishable or their next grant proposal.
OP should contact some hedge funds with this info. If true they will be quite interested.