skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it can be crazy painful to the point that Non-technical people just don't do the query unless it is business burning critical. In large part because the technical people often are tasked on projects from IT, and to get them to do a query required middle management department to department deal making which is slow and painful.

At ExxonMobil, a place I worked, you're going to have VP's asking eachother and IT is going to hedge with, yea if we do this then project X will be late (it's going to be late anyway but they've kept quite about it and no one knows).

My personal solution when I needed a query was to bring a six pack of beer down to IT friday afternoon, mostly because I wouldn't be given access to write queries because we had BI software.
Looks impressive and very interesting, signed up to review and compare with Teradata/Netezza.

Can we run more complex in-database processes implemented as stored procedures on this platform or is it going to be limited to pure SQL querying/analytics?

And does anyone have an idea how to upload 1 TB of data to this service using Internet connection from your in-house company server? ;)
That's key. I didn't deeply parse the announcement, but I don't see any mention of transfer - just the per GB storage rates.
We do support almost every country, but depending on network congestion SMS is not that reliable.

If you are waiting for the registration PIN? Click the text-me the pin again (if you do so twice) the button changes to call me. Then we will instantly call you. Let me know if that works.
The tone of your comment was not necessary. Keep it constructive and positive.
The author seems to think that there has been "no innovation" in the digital advertising space in 18 years. I'm not so sure I agree with that. I think we've seen numerous innovations. I mean Google built a business around the innovation that was AdWords. There have been other examples like those stupid hover links that block content and text link ads that Google ended up pretty much killing. I agree that these may not be the best things to come but there have been changes. In the mobile space we've seen all kinds of new formats such as dropping and icon on the desktop and push messages (as annoying as they both may be). We've mide strides it's just that no one has really found something that completely replaces banner ads, and then mobile throws a wrench into everything.
The reason why I hate features like this is because it now puts the onus on customers to detect fraud, not the banks. If my understanding is correct, you have 60 days to reverse any fraudulent checks on your account. If you're someone like me that doesn't look into their bank account too closely (because you don't spend a lot), then you could be the victim of fraud very easily. And in the age of Photoshop, you can make a very convincing check image very easily.
Ideally you could specify an HTML element to place the notification near, and then pass whatever element the user activated to trigger the notification. Or you could specify target coordinates, and compute the desired location yourself. Both of those ought to use optional parameters, though; defaulting to center seems reasonable.
Great list - thanks. Finally .... no more callback hell. (yield)

Vitno, thanks for the heads up on webRTC. I can see that having a dramatic impact too.
People said a lot of similar things before the iPhone launched.

I agree that this is just incremental improvement that actually already exists some places, but it seems like Simple is the first "bank" that deeply understands both software and the importance of user experience. (And perhaps also platforms, which could be incredible in banking/finance.)

That's pretty unique. And it's taken them a remarkably short time to catch-up to current banks. Personal finance is definitely a schlep industry.

Simple is going to compete on experience, not features. This has worked time and time again for lots of product companies, so it will be interesting to see if it works in banking.
Making the border any less obtrusive might make the notification blend into the page too much.
Should Harvard start admitting kids at random?
Think about sites like Hacker News or Craigslist. They are arguably not very "tasty" designs, but they are simple and they work.

That's an important point to digest. Just because something looks nice doesn't mean it's effective. It may be the opposite.

Sure, the website looks "nice", I guess, but is that the goal? Or is the goal of the site to get sign ups, generate referrals, make money, etc?

When you're done plugging in Bootstrap, does the design serve your goals? Or does it just look nice? Have you saved time or merely punted the design farther down the road?

Again, I'm playing Devil's advocate because I do see the value in Bootstrap. I just rarely hear any contrary opinions on Bootstrap and it's important to understand (or at least discuss) the trade offs in using a canned design.
Sorry for my ignorance, but the pricing is a bit confusing for me. Let's say I have 1 GB of files, and I do 1 Terrabyte of downloads per month, how much would I pay?
All of your reasons are common complaints, and I share them (with the exception of USAA). I work at such a bank, and can tell you from painful firsthand experience how difficult it is to do good UX design work inside of a traditional banking environment. I think Simple had the right idea to essentially decouple the "backend banking" stuff from the UX by partnering with a bank and somewhat removing many of the constraints a full-on bank has to wrangle with.

What's interesting though is that despite these complaints, consumers generally are averse to switching their banks.
78% Book Travel in Advance: Debunking the Last Minute Booking Obsession
Very interesting debate format. I like it! Great way to combine the strengths of the internet with expert opinions.
My (poor) understanding is that the "size" of a black hole refers to the size of its event horizon, which is directly related to its mass (more mass -> larger event horizon). That mass is still compacted at the center in a single point of zero (?) size.
Yup. Already passed on to the team.
Looks great on my iPhone. Thanks for the nice lib!
Wasn't Wolfram the guy who said that Lisp was completely inadequate for mathematical computing, being too slow by a factor of 100 or summat?

Mathematica owes much of its lineage to Macsyma, a computer algebra system that really was Lisp on the inside; its spiritual descendant, Maxima, is written in CL.
There's a curve of cost vs durability out there, and many phones fall all along it.
Cost per TB for storage is a tiny proportion of the total costs of a data warehouse.
Smiling Andrew Mason Tells Henry Blodget That Groupon Doesn’t Suck
Well since his username is a slight variant on the parent's username, he's probably trolling and making reference to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
First use case for the tldr.io bookmarklet and someone typed one up.
I currently use Simple for my discretionary spending account. I really love the interface. However, if they are serious about converting people to use it as their main bank then their entire focus should be on allowing multiple people on one account. I can't add my wife to my account means this can't be my primary bank. It's that Simple!

...oh and after that, please create a mobile site that allows me to login from any device. I despise having to use my wife's iPhone to check my balance!
what are the regulations on things like health records, personal information, etc... stuff that has tight restrictions on how the data is handled. Can these types of data be stored on Amazon or similar services and still be in compliance of data protection laws?
> Why is the year only two digits? Y2K led me to believe two-digit years means accidental ICBM lanches.

On long term things yes it's questionable. But credit cards all expire within a short date period so it's not a concern.
I didn't realize cheques (checks) were still widely being used. I haven't written a cheque in almost ten years, either personal or business. We've received a few cheques from large companies, but very rarely.
For Joomla, it's probably worth mentioning that's it not just an add-on any more.

The whole of version 3 is built with Bootstrap: http://joomla.org/3/
If only I could get an invite, I could find myself being interested ...

I requested one at least 5 months ago.
Results are in: Teaser emails + blog posts. Are they worth doing?
Surprised Stripe isn't on here ;)
I assume that anyone who agrees with this post doesn't actually do programming, and would struggle to instantiate a Redis client and then use it in the simplest manner.

You cant have a RELATIONAL mapper without a RELATIONAL database, and you break nearly all of the constraints with many of these "NoSQL" solutions that the Django ORM relies on.

If you want to use NoSQL, use it. There's no reason the Django ORM needs to support it. Programming isn't hard.
What's wrong with that?

We take security seriously, and our product is rock-solid. That doesn't mean we need to act as if we were distant/dead.

If you ever contact support or read our documentation etc you'll notice we are very approchable and don't bother appearing serious/distant like other enterprises do - our product speaks for itself.
Google’s Mobile Apps: Google Drive Now Supports Spreadsheet Editing On Mobile
Do you really need to wait until law enforcement to do anything about it? This seems to me like CloudFlare doesn't really care.

Don't you know that most law enforcements ignore DDoS attacks when the damage isn't done to a million/billion dollar business like Mastercard?
Technology Begets Insanity – Part II
A Wind Power Innovator Dies Too Young
According to the re:Invent keynote Amazon has dropped aws prices 20+ times over it's 6.5 year lifespan. Google doesn't need to tap into it's records to know Amazon is playing the high volume\low margin game.

Edit: typo
Interesting. I feel like the difference is that trips which require air transportation are planned in advance, so people start thinking about them long before they plan a trip down the street via lyft, sidecar, uber, or the like.
This seems like a good point on the surface, but since it takes only one outlier to dominate the universe (by Bostrom's train of thought), then it would have happened anyway. It's the law of smart for one, dumb for all. Assuming most life forms would decide to live minified, any life form not deciding so would have immense advantage to consume all untapped resources. Following this logic, and since any sufficiently advanced replicators would all be competing for the same space, the most overwhelming kind would take over all others.
Sending Dragon Capsules to Mars: Transorbital Railroad
I limit it to 132 characters, the standard line printer page width.

I follow it completely, regardless of language.
Sergey Brin was only working on open sourcing the "pure language" part of it [1].

I share the dream of an open source Mathematica. It's so rich, elegant and powerful, using it would be a no-brainer. But in its present state? Nope. I've been bitten too many times by the proprietary nature of Matlab, in which I have invested a lot of work, to repeat the mistake. More specifically and from the top of my mind, I found that proprietary means:

- I cannot run my code on my personal PC
- some people I'm collaborating with cannot use my work
- when I move to a different job, there is a good chance I cannot reuse my code
- even when my new workstation (or my colleague's PC) does have the software installed, there is a good chance the version is incompatible with my code or the license doesn't include some toolbox I'm using
- some work I want to make freely available is of no use to someone who cannot afford the software

Notably absent from the list is the notion that I cannot check what is happening in the proprietary code. That is because the Matlab functions I needed to check were written in Matlab and perfectly readable. I'm sure the issue is real though, and I would be concerned if a new kind of science developed that produced results through opaque processes in closed source proprietary software.

[1] http://www.bestofama.com/Stephen_Wolfram/qisot
Agree. This is happening, slowly but surely. Hopefully we at authy can help make it faster.
AWS has pretty good support for taking external drives and importing them to S3 which could then be used with this service:

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

I am assuming that you have 1TB to start, not generating 1TB per day which obviously changes the equation.
"resolving the manager/queryset/model-method wackiness"

Care to elaborate on this? I'm just starting a new project and had settled on Django, but the whole server-side selection process has been a pain in the ass.
Here's the examples link: http://fabien-d.github.com/alertify.js/

I love that someone already made a pull request to update the readme with it.
Suddenly granted an audience, another student voiced the immortal query, "Would you rather fight 100 duck sized horses, or 1 horse sized duck?"
This looks beautiful. But I'm curious, do users no longer expect/like their platform's native dialogs for these things?
Various games do it differently. For example Doom3 last i I heard has head/body/aim movement the same while Hawken will be separate. Some games like ArmA currently have ability to separate crosshairs from view when using something like TrackIR.
The headline is sensational, and Mongodb support is a poor yardstick. And, using Rails as _the_ benchmark is another poor choice.

That said, as a full-time Django developer, the headline resinated with me, although I can't put my finger on exactly why. It feels like the last 3 releases (1.3, 1.4, the 1.5 betas) have been lacking in terms of their vision and scope.

Some things I'd appreciate seeing:

* Cleaning out django.contrib, and shifting to a more modular methodology for not-quite-core functionality.

* The default settings.py is just downright laughable compared to what one typically uses for production. Rolling your own environment-specific files (ala local_settings.py) could also use some attention.

* Django admin is still a killer app, but the visual design is long in the tooth. Integrating twitter bootstrap, Zurb's foundation (or any modern HTML/CSS framework) would be a huge improvement.

* Merging South (or any db migration system) into core would be great.

* Revisiting management commands (both the layout and the features) would be great.

* Easier/cleaner support for eventlet or gevent would be nice. At least at the routing and view level.

* PKs with some sort of UUID

* A vision for loosely coupling apps together. 1.5 will be including custom User models, which is handy, but doing something globally would be great. It will always be up to individual app developers to get to the last mile, but some sort of plumbing in Django core would be very handy.
Since you're only using 1GB, you would pay 9.5 cents for the storage a month. Then about $122.76/month for the bandwidth since the first GB is free and it's $0.120 per GB afterwards up to 10TB.

Making it around $122.855/month total. This change doesn't really reduce your costs by much since most of it in bandwidth which hasn't changed.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ (standard storage pricing hasn't been updated yet)
I like the idea of using stars to indicate favorite tracks. iTunes has a 5 star rating system that I use to keep my music organized and I wish Rdio had the same.
PNC as well. Just used it yesterday.
Funny, your TODO list looks a lot like mine.
Wild speculation: our first evidence of advanced alien societies carrying out the transcension hypothesis?

http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM
Besides Air, there was Mozilla's Prism/WebRunner/Chromeless, Fluid for OSX and several others. What advantage does Chrome Apps have other those previous failures?
No. Spanner is a globally distributed database which supports transactions. It is meant for applications which need to make frequent updates to a database, but the storage for the database may be distributed around the world.

Redshift is a different usage model. You upload your data once, then ask questions of it - but you don't update it. Google does have something similar to Redshift: BigQuery (https://cloud.google.com/products/big-query).
I considered that too.
I tried to find the best sleeping time and duration for me, so I tried 6hour sleep, 7 and 8 hours.
I didn't notice any change, and I can say I generally have solid sleep.

Now I sleep around 7 hours, and I think I found my most productive hours.
Wolfram seems to have a penchant for hyperbole. However, at the time, that was likely true. My understanding is that v1 of Mathematica really was just a rewrite of Macsyma in C.
This is just rocket-based combined-cycle propulsion that has been proposed and studied by various organizations over the years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-based_combined_cycle

http://investor.gencorp.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=7085...

http://www.isset.org/nasa/nano/www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/AERO/bas...

The concept is not new, but Reaction is probably the closest to a commercial implementation. Also, it's not fair to compare it to the jet when RBCC isn't a fundamentally novel form of propulsion, just a combination of existing ones (like a car that is both gas and electric propelled). This is not something that could supplant the jet.

Some people are comparing this to SpaceX's pure-rocket approach. Up until yesterday, SpaceX and Scaled were working on their own type of combined-cycle launch with Stratolaunch: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/stratolaunch-and-s.... The difference is that the jet and rocket would be separate vehicles instead of fitting into one nacelle. It'd have some of the advantages of using air as propellant as with a RBCC engine, but easier to design I think.
You might be right that the "SQL-agnostic" argument was not well formed. I basically meant that the Django ORM has always been very object-oriented, and it has avoided SQL-specific concepts like WHERE clauses as much as possible. And because of this, it wouldn't be so hard to make it work with MongoDB, except for more complex relations. In fact, this has already been done by django-nonrel for 1.3.

If anybody thinks the article was satire, it was not. In fact it was written during a MongoDB conference. ;-) I really am worried that as MongoDB has passed the hype phase and is now becoming a regular and supported part of web technology stacks, Rails is the only heavy-weight framework/ecosystem that really supports it.

I also think that MongoDB currently adds most value to small/mid-size web projects, whose development speed can benefit from the schemalessness and other flexibility compared to RDBMSs. It's not that relevant whether it can actually be used to build the next Facebook or Twitter.

(I wrote the original article.)
The native alert is very hard to customize and extremely bare boned.
You can have economies without commercial acumen. And you can gain commercial acumen without a college education. Many have done this by growing fruit and then selling it.
I work for a company that's in direct competition with Amazon (in one of the many areas Amazon operates in).

Handing our customer lists, source code, finance and sales data to Amazon in plaintext form seems naive to me. There's lots of people at Amazon, and it only takes one ambitious middle manager who wants to get noticed by cleverly anticipating the competition. Most likely there's no audit trail, and no chance of getting caught.

What do you think, am I unreasonably cynical?
There are startups for that, i.e. Parse which he mentions in the post. And of course iCloud.
As I mentioned downthread, it is incredibly tough to do good UX design inside of a traditional bank. I actually gave a talk on this recently for World Usability Day. You have regulatory and compliance issues, a patchwork of legacy systems and a huge array of 3rd party vendors to contend with. It's not that banks don't understand the importance of UX; it's just a very difficult environment to actually deliver it. Simple did a great job abstracting most of that by partnering with a bank instead of actually being one.
The new GStreamer SDK is out, with Android support
The (Re)Designer's Itch
I need something more binary. Deciding between three and four stars seems totally arbitrary.
Demoscene: The Art of Real-Time. Different sub-culture, but most definitely geek/nerd.
Hi - Josh here, co-founder at Simple.

You've nailed it. We can't outcompete banks with gimmicks. We can't afford to lure people in with teaser rates or rewards programs that look great in an ad, but never work as well in reality.

Instead, we're competing on experience. Crafting that experience, especially given the cruft of banking, is a schlep. And its a huge competitive advantage for us.

To the grandparent poster, yes, switching banks is hard, but $30bn of revenue switches retail banks each year because of negative experiences. Thats a tiny amount for the top 4 banks, but a large market for a startup. If you can deal with the schlep.
Once I called Wells Fargo to ask about a fee on my account that didn't make sense, and when I looked back later I noticed they had added a charge of $2 for the privilege of talking to them on the phone about the original suspicious fee. They are not trustworthy at all.

I then moved over to ING. It has been great, but they were bought by Capital One and I am worried that things will go downhill (and I don't particularly want to do business with Capital One). Simple looks like a great alternative--I wish I could get a guarantee that they won't be bought by some shady megabank a year after I take the time to change over.
You can click to select your location on the map if you don't have a zip.
Yeah, that's an interesting one. I wasn't sure how to group it. Seemed weird to put "Joomla" in the "Joomla" category, but maybe if someone was looking for a CMS that used Bootstrap they'd appreciate it.

What would you suggest?
'Who's more valuable'

Exactly. The title makes it sound as if this is some sort of binary choice. Different businesses need different pieces or backgrounds.
Thanks Microsoft, after fixing the image/screenshot, to remove the alleged "offensive" image/news item, "Hacker8News" is officially live in the windows store...it implements both search and share charm functions!
Far too much like spacebox.io for me.
So he is saying that you don't need to store all the data, just its most common learnt representations. Isn't that a fancy way of saying online learning or summary statistics?
I don't think so. Geeks like to win arguments and value facts above opinions. Scientific arguments are generally irrefutable. Of course the only scientific of the 3 is the Dunning-kruger effect.
I'm new to HN, and have been using At the Pool for quite a while now. The two communities appear have a similar goal of fostering meaningful, interesting discussion -- so a HN pool seems like a perfect fit to me!
Until now, you couldn't deposit a check to Simple.

You still can't get a savings account, joint account, or a checkbook, so for most people it can't be the only account.
I've worked at a bank for several years, and agree 100%. It's basically impossible for them to pull off something like Simple.

So the question is – how valid is that research given consumers haven't had a real alternative?

Now that we're (finally) moving away from paper payments, seems to me that it's a bad idea to bank on consumer complacency. Either way, I'm just happy that there's a decent alternative.
Can we add flash in the pan "Bubble 2.0" startup founders to the list too?
CSS3 Working Boxee Box Remote.
Choosing a Two-Factor Authentication System - CloudFlare blog
When the blog post author (Larry Osterman) states that a quarter of 100,000 is 13,000, and that 10% of 13,000 is 130... I start to question if anything the author writes is in any way reflective of what actually occurred.