skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Standard Treasury wants to bring banks up to speed with the modern era. The Silicon Valley startup is developing a white label collection of APIs and webhooks that will allow commercial banks to give customers access to core banking services in their apps and backends.

Stripe, Braintree, Balanced Payments and several others already use APIs to enable online payments. But companies transact with banks in a number of other ways, and often in high volume. When done manually, such transactions can be tedious and time consuming.

Standard Treasury thinks there’s a better way. To that end, the Y Combinator-backed startup has created a menu of APIs that will enable banks to give developers access to a range of transaction types, including electronic checks (ACH), foreign exchanges, and rate-quoting.

For an idea of how Standard Treasury’s platform might work, imagine companies like Uber or Airbnb who regularly send out electronic payments to a lot of different people. Such companies could potentially benefit from one of Standard Treasury’s REST APIs to easily send electronic checks from their bank accounts via their own backend systems.

Another example might be U.S. company with an international subsidiary. Everyday the company turns Euros into dollars and sweeps those into a central bank account. Normally a treasury analyst or other staff member would have to manually log into the company’s, sometimes several times a day, to complete the process. Standard Treasury APIs and webhooks would automate that process.

Standard Treasury cofounders Dan Kimerling and Zac Townsend both hail from the tech financial community. Kimerling is the former COO of Giftling and Townsend worked at Stripe. Before launching their own venture, the two spoke to heads of more than 100 tech companies in Silicon Valley and NYC to get a better understanding of what firms needed from banks.

What the pair learned was that much of what went on in the financial back office in terms of treasury management and commercial banking was a painful and laborious process. Even something as simple as opening up a new account could turn into a multi-day affair.

Kimerling thinks the timing is right for what Standard Treasury aims to do. He explained:

“Banks are more comfortable now in building tools for developers than they were a few years ago, but they don’t have the in-house engineering capability to build the beautiful APIs that developers have come to demand and expect. That is where we come in and say, we have this platform as a service. You pay a monthly fee and we’ll do the backend integration work and hosting.”

Standard Treasury charges anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000 per month for its service under a two-year contract. Although unable to name names yet, Kimmerling said Standard Treasury hopes to close between two to four deals before the end of the year, two of those being with major top-10 banks.

“The sales cycles are long,” he said, “but I am optimistic.”
I just find it very strange that you can't apply a license-for-distribution without actually distributing. That means if I want to make sure a piece of software is GPL, and nobody can take that away in the future, I have to perform an action such as uploading to github or burning a single CD and giving it to a homeless person. And somehow giving away that first single copy is what makes the GPL kick in for all other copies in the world.
Typically Conspiracy requires more than just "dreaming". It requires an overt or concrete action being taken in the implementation of that daydream.

If that were the case then any number of "spy thriller" type authors would be potentially guilty of conspiracy for publishing their "daydreams".
LLVM Intermediate Representation is better than assembly
Enjoy the Rules
< PEBKAC > So the email verification needs to be fixed. My email is brianw.stearns@gmail.com and it won't accept the '.' as part of an email. I don't have an email that is only chars and numbers. Can you fix this? </PEBKAC>

Edit: Sorry!
I considered not approving the full time jobs because I wanted to gear this towards contractors, however I really need jobs to be listed.
Do stats exist on the reasons YC start-ups failed? From my casual reading of news.yc it seems most start-ups in general fail due to social shortcomings, not failures from inability to solve technical issues.

The tech world in general has some bias against what it takes to be a social person. See talks about meritocracy and engineers running the planet. There is definitely a lack of respect for the effort and ability it takes to actually deal with people, which is what most of life involves.
it will apparently ship with erlang or be erlang-capable, so it's entirely possible that you could put the high performance cowboy web framework on the device.
My response was poor because I was responding to your post 'random internet user' and also your ancestor post about the right to do basic independent unauthorized security testing without being clear. I think I objected to the characterization of the people with something to lose as "random internet users" which I inferred from your posts and you may not have stated.

Having said that I have certainly read of a number of cases where a difference has been made although it may not be a big difference to the overall world.

And while manually fiddling a couple of URL parameters would seem to me a valid sanity check of the service you were using I don't think that would give you the right to run nmap against their servers looking for vulnerabilities or running an automated fuzzing of the URL parameters or crawling the returned results.

This does not mean that I think the crimes with which Weev was charged or the sentence is remotely appropriate. From what I have read he may deserve to be in jail (mostly for harassment, threats and blackmail) but that is what he should be charged with not this AT&T case. Given that he eventually handed the data over to a journalist I would give him a lighter sentence (if any and I was judge/jury) than I would give to AT&T (if it was in the UK and I was the Information Commisioner). I don't know of any data protection requirements in the US (for non-health data) so they may not actually have been criminal but they certainly were negligent.
This constant 'Microsoft is doomed' meme is really beginning to annoy me. Yes, their heyday has past when everyone had a PC running Windows in their homes, but that does not mean the end of Microsoft.

"Tablets and smartphones are the future of computing" to which I say bollocks. If I'm working a 9-5 job and need a computer, I don't want to be two finger tapping on a virtual keyboard. Can you imagine the epidemic of RSI that would ensue. I want a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor, and I don't give a shit what they,re plugged into, but I highly doubt it's going to be a £400 iPad with no access to the file system. I'd rather use a Raspberry Pi if I have real work to do.

Yes, the vast majority of users just want access to Facebook and Twitter, but in business you want a Windows, OSX or Linux PC.

If developers were to actually start developing all iPad apps on iPads I might consider the battle lost, but as far as I'm concerned the PC maybe in decline, but that's to be expected after a boom. It will level out eventually.
The flood of new users refuse to downvote anything.
We obviously just have different definitions of security. That nightmare scenario of having to live the rest of your life on exactly what you have now is extremely rare. There are so many people who manage to live comfortably* throughout their lives without such a massive nest egg. I don't think it makes sense to describe them as financially insecure (which to me says that they are in a bad or dangerous position) because they don't have the most extreme contingency covered.

* Note that I define this as owning a house and supporting a family without having to worry about money, not living a jet-setting life of extreme luxury or whatever.
Reads various tea leaves to make a case that the NSA is blanket recording location data, which is necessary for a particular highly desirable use case, specifically:

You have suspect A on your radar and he only communicates with B, C, and D face to face. Phone call metadata won't likely help, certainly not directly. Location data will only help you if you can match it against a very large data set including B, C and D's movements.
Apple is not the problem. The (horribly proprietary) iCloud is just Apple's solution to the fundamental problem of people collecting data but not being able to manage it.

The article calls out smart devices. I've fantasized about having smart devices of my own, but in my fantasies they answer to me and collect data into my systems. Which means I need to learn a bit of embedded programming and some electrical engineering to build my own, after I've learned how to set up my own servers. I don't see this as viable for normal consumers.

Even I don't manage all of my own information. I switched to Gmail because I just can't keep up with spammers. I have a life.
I wonder if someone could shed some light on this (from type composition straight and curly quotes):

> Computer sci­en­tists and doc­u­men­ta­tion writ­ers, take note: straight quotes and back­ticks in soft­ware code should nev­er be con­vert­ed to curly quotes. Those marks are, of course, part of the func­tion­al syn­tax of the code and must be re­pro­duced lit­er­al­ly. While fans of LaTeX have of­ten writ­ten me to trum­pet its type­set­ting su­pe­ri­or­i­ty, I’ve nev­er seen any LaTeX-cre­at­ed doc­u­men­ta­tion that’s got­ten this right.

As a LaTeX user (and not a very good one) I'm not too sure what I've been doing wrong.
Repo: https://github.com/Rich-Harris/Ractive
Doomed is obviously used for dramatic effect. Needs to, and is struggling to adapt, yes.

Nevertheless, as the article hints, work (and even consumption and creation at home) is routinely done at desks. Whether we continue to call that "desktop computing" or "using a PC" or any other untrendy phrase is a matter of language. I believe tablets are sexy because of what they do, not necessarily that people like having to hold them or like small screens. They are great on the go, but when I am at home or at the office, I want large form-factor. I would prefer immersion.

I feel Microsoft needs to steadfastly improve their principal area of strength: work and play at desks [1]. I also think that with the nascent swing back to users recognizing the value of control, Microsoft should take the (daring?) position of being the only tech titan to encourage a decentralized cloud.

Reviewing my blog rant on Microsoft again, though, it's the nearly-last point about MSDN pricing that just has me shaking my head in disgust. The pricing is so unbelievably out of whack with today's development model.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
For some reason the theme music from "Hunt for Red October" keeps playing in my head...
>* "Harm"? Seems to me that learning about other cultures is very seldom harmful -- in either direction.*

Or course. My comment was against "learning about" another culture, it was against being educated only in the "other culture's" ways of seeing. Especially if it's a hegemonic culture.

There are lots of cases (in lesser countries) where people that have gone through that return indoctrinated with concepts that belong to the ideology of the country the studied, and often with concepts that reflect it's low opinion on their own country and promote it's interests.

For example, Europeans that have studied economics in the US tend to come back as neo-liberals and wanting to abolish the welfare state etc.

I'm speaking mostly for fields like economics, political sciences, history, diplomacy, etc, not stuff like literary theory (of which noone cares about in either place).
We want to be encouraging the web because it's open. The web is accessible, in one way or another, from any device capable of displaying HTML. Apps are not. I don't want to live in a world where content is balkanized between iPads, Android tablets, Surfaces, and whatever other platforms may arise in the future.
So how do you tell TeX where the ends of sentences are? I rather like the simple interface that is 'press space bar twice'. Do I have to put something on abbreviations instead?
It's doomed because Windows on PC is losing ground. Linux gaming is on the rise and it will push Windodws out even more.
It's just your personal taste.
Would like a copy too.
To become an evil dictator, it's often necessary to be a clever politician.
The big thing that the Web provides that apps don't is the ability to move smoothly from one page to another. Apps live in their own silos most of the time, and provide an extra barrier to use in that you have to specifically download and install that one app in order to run it.

You would need something like a browser that masks the download process like it does for Web pages. Then you're left with Web pages that spawn independent, standalone programs. Flash, anyone?

Of course it's possible (and likely) that something completely different will be invented, but I don't think individual apps for everything that's currently a site is the answer.
How much do you refactor?
Microsoft joins the startup love fest and launches new Berlin tech centre
Isn't this the same libel that that has been used to punish journalists who write about inconvenient truths? It seems hypocritical to stoop to that level.
Perhaps the summary could be automated and be based on keywords like the experience needed, location, salary etc. That might be enough to give someone the gist and get them to pay.

Right now though, I'd rewrite the current job posts on there so they're unique.
I think dealing with people is much more harder than dealing with codes. Could somebody tell me how to learn the social skills?
imho that's the point, the consumer market will rely almost exclusively on smartphones and tablet, while the business market will remain just the same. So, in the worst case, Microsoft will became a purely business company, a new IBM if you will. Microsoft will do just fine.
Strangely enough I just considered moving to Royston as it's slap bang between Cambridge and London.

This has changed my mind instantly.
The root of the issue is in the reason that an entrepreneur is perceived of as smart.

Clients who think you are smart because you provided them an excellent service for less money than they think its value should be is good. I do data recovery jobs that work out like this.

Clients who think you are smart because you provide a solution that causes them to make a lot more money than they paid you is good. I do web design/promotion jobs that increase conversions which seem to fall into this category.

These are a completely different perception of smart than the kind generated from books I wrote or public speaking that I've done.
This is my experience as an entrepreneur who may not be as smart as some people think YMMV.
This would make sense if it was written in the seventies.
> “Parents say they want to be involved, but the children have overtaken them,” she says. “That’s awful. We must be like the first generation whose children learnt to read and write, and we’re all blundering about like illiterate ignoramuses.”

I think this is a fascinating quote, because the analogy seems extremely apt to me. Yet she somehow thinks this is a bad thing, as if the invention of literacy was some kind of terrible event, rather than a blossoming of the human intellect.

The younger generations are doing amazing things that the older generations couldn't have even imagined, but her only reaction to this incredible transformation is to say "That's awful."
Having been raised in a community in Los Angeles with extremely affluent people, I am highly skeptical of this article. From my experience, money leads to malaise and depression, and isn't a great end goal. There are plenty of miserable rich people -- and why? Because it isn't a good goal. You'll always strive to be richer.

I think there are enough people striving to be rich in this world, and not enough people working to make it better. This is especially true of engineers. I find that most people I find trying to save the world are activists, while as an engineer, I know I can change the world in a very immediate and practical way. I'm fine with making a good $100k salary, I don't need to make $100 million to be happy. There's something to be said for a healthy balance between making a good salary, and doing something worth while. There are enough entrepreneurs just trying to get their social app to be sold to Google or Yahoo or Facebook. There are DEFINITELY not enough Engineers without Borders.
Wat is een gezond Paleo ontbijt?
Programming Languages - Hyperpolyglot
“outside the US/UK/etc” means “in a country with weaker constitutional protections against government search and seizure”, for the most part. Be careful what you wish for.
What exactly did he do to other people?

If a person is a criminal in general I don't really care if hasn't done the one particular crime he is nailed for if he is clearly guilty of others, but just being an ass should not be criminal.
Microsoft Ventures Unveiling in London
I guess I don't quite understand the controversy. To my knowledge twitter never claimed these were legitimate tweets, and they certainly looked contrived. Who is getting fooled here and at what harm?

This strikes me as typical silicon valley gossip news—ultimately worthless except to drive people to news aggregators and the offending sites. I even went on twitter for the first time in a month!
Just because you're smart or talented doesn't mean you're not naive. Investors like naivety, just like record labels like naivety.
Oh goddammit! I thought we were over Russia and the US doing that cold war bullshit.

Seriously, if you're going to fight a war fight an economic war, much less destructive to other people than the little proxy wars the big boys seems to love so much.
He's a politician.
Microsoft is far from doomed, but it is interesting to see Digital compared to them. I have said since the iPhone came out that if Microsoft fails to compete within the mobile devices market that it would become another IBM or it would be merged into some other company. So far all signs point to failure on usurping the market from Apple or Google.

I think that we are still a ways off from this situation, but I cannot see Microsoft as its own entity in two decades.
Nice - looks very simple and lightweight! I especially like the effort put into the interactive tutorial documentation that these frameworks have. Angular and knockout both had stand out docs too!

Is there a particular niche for this framework would you say e.g. small, fast to market apps like news stories - or is is suitable for larger projects where you might normally reach for more of a "framework"?
Moz Report: 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors
Hmmm ... I'm pretty sure I've seen Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Sebastian Thrun, Marissa Mayer referred to as blindingly intelligent. Doesn't seem to be a handicap.

Edit: upon further reflection, I think the operative statement is 'rocket scientist'. I suspect that being introduced as a 'rocket scientist' is in fact a handicap because 'rocket science' has a connotation of being a kind of useless knowledge (i.e. what can you do with that). Other the other hand, think about how people react to someone being introduced as a 'computer genius'? Lots of people will find that very interesting because there are lots of practical and profitable things you can do if you're a 'computer genius'.
I do not subscribe to the premise that fonts hold a greater value because they are about 'fashion' and are based on more than just their production value.

App store games, music, etc. are vastly cheaper and hold more than their explicit production value. They provide entertainment, and to an extent, even an artform.
Do professional fonts, then, come in restricted versions with fewer options at a lower cost

Sometimes you do see that quite directly. A font might be available as a basic version, probably with enough characters to set text in a few common Western languages but few frills, and a “professional” version, which might have a much larger character set, more support for OpenType features, or other enhancements.

There are other ways that pricing scales as well. For example, professional-grade fonts are almost always presented as part of a family, with different variations of weight (often far more than just regular vs. bold), style (roman/italic/slanted) and perhaps other characteristics. Buying a single font (just one style/weight variant) is usually disproportionately expensive, so most people would buy a bundle. An entry-level bundle might contain just a couple of weights and plain vs. italic versions of them, and those four variations might be more than enough for a lot of users. On the other hand, professionals typesetting a book or magazine would almost certainly want a wider typographical palette, and would therefore buy a more comprehensive bundle with perhaps dozens of different variations within just one font family. The price-per-font for both bundles might be about the same, but that means the comprehensive set is many times more expensive in absolute terms.

Another common means of scaling is that, like software, computer fonts tend to be licensed per device. That means someone buying one copy to use for a personal project will pay far less than a company of 500 people that wants to install a font for their new corporate look on every employee’s PC.

There is also the possibility of exclusivity. Some professional-grade fonts start life as a commissioned work for the exclusive use of a specific client, again usually as part of a branding exercise. Of course those clients will pay a premium for that work, which is far beyond the budget of most of us. In many cases they will only pay for exclusivity for a limited time, and the font’s creators can then add that font to their public catalogue for others to buy.

As a final example, with the rise of fonts-as-a-service on the Web, we now commonly see licensing based on page views, so large sites with many visitors are paying significantly more to the hosting service (though almost certainly at a lower cost per individual page view). Given that a major web site will receive orders of magnitude more hits than a typical personal blog or small company, that can make a big difference in how much a font service brings in if their fonts are chosen for major sites. As far as I’ve seen, the fonts themselves tend to be identical in these cases, though.
Side point, but '.'s in gmail addresses are not significant so email to brianwstearns@gmail.com will still reach you.
Google's latest misguided attempt to manage your Gmail is easy to turn off
Compare a filter where the user has to opportunity to opt out and thus get access to everything they have access to today, with something like the Australian filter (no opt out) or the Chinese filter (no opt out).

The filters already exist for many people using mobile technology - mobile phones with data plans or mobile broadband dongles have exactly what's being proposed.

I agree that it is a big difference that the filters are opt-out. And I have no idea what websites will be caught up. Wikipedia? (See photographs on articles like Anal Bleaching or etc etc.)

> Also, I am right in thinking, this hasn't been proposed as a bill yet to the house of commons/lords? I feel as Cameron has a long history of broken promises.

It could be pushed through as a voluntary agreement with industry. "Self regulate or we'll regulate it for you".

See the history of UK legislation around computers is scary. Reading some of the documents they clearly have clueful people giving them advice, but then you read what the politicians say and they're idiots.
Not necessarily "forced", but I was certainly much uncomfortable. A brick and mortar type of school is good if you need access to equipment and labs, but fortunately, my interests don't include practical nuclear engineering or brain surgery.