skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking about mortgages in terms of a bank in my home town. Being a smaller bank, I'm not sure I would like to be carrying a lot of loans, but I could create them for other's to carry in return for a commission. You are right, I might be confusing banks and brokers.
Meetup.com. They are social network that involves real people physically interacting with each other.
Revenue reality of a book on the New York Times best-seller list
There are A LOT of rules around money transaction services and the feds have only gotten stronger in their enforcement of them post-9/11. You'll need to watch out for so much fraud from carders. Best of luck, but perhaps you should talk to the textpayme guys, who did some very fancy things to avoid regulation.
There is a law going into effect July 2010 which requires banks to ask you whether you want to be in the overdraft program.

If you decide not to be in it, your debit card will simply be denied at the point of sale.

If you elect to be in it, you will be allowed to overdraft your account, but will be charged a fee like now.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/12/news/economy/overdraft_fees/...
There have been many proposals to do something like that. There is a proven way to use something called digital cash using public key encryption.

Digital cash allows you to send a long number which represents a single payment and can only be used for that single payment. Thus if the number represents you paying $100 to priceline.com, it can only be used for a single transfer of 100. If someone else tries the same number again, the bank will say, sorry this one has already been used up. In addition to being secure this system can provide absolute privacy.

So theoretically, it is possible but it has not happened. I think one reason is that credit card companies like having people's personal information and being able to see all their purchases.
Paper outs "anonymous" commenter, job loss ensues
ACH uses the check clearing system (since that's exactly what they are: checks). This system was originally designed in a time when checks needed to physically move from bank to bank, and while there have been attempts to speed it up, debit cards have removed much of the pressure for making this timely.
I've wanted the same thing, but I wanted to be able to view both numbers: the "real" balance and the "projected" one.
I think most banks already set aside the money from online bill paying services, though it may only be symbolically like you said. You have a good point about letting customers enter manual checks before they clear to help keep track of how much money you really have.
In South Africa (I moved to New York five years ago), it is common for people to transfer money from their bank account to that of a friend's electronically - either online or on your phone.

I was quite surprised coming to the US that it is not common here as well.
Why would the cost of making a Verizon/Sprint compatible phone outweigh the profit from those customers? What would the cost be to make a phone with both radios?

I just really can't imagine Apple not wanting to be available to the most consumers possible if the costs are low enough.

Edit: also I just found this, so at the very least, it does look like there would be chips available to support this - http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/06/iphone.may.hav...
Aloha « Peer News
Into the Uncanny Valley
This is the startup from Pierre Omidyar.
It's perhaps more a matter for regulation, but the current disparity between the value of the service and the cost should go. The customer should pay small, reasonable fees for everything. It is highly distortionary and is symptomatic of a dysfunctional market for banking services.

In the UK a few years ago the 'public debate' raged over ATM fees. Banks stopped cooperating and started charging about 2 pounds to the customers of other banks. It was pointed out that the amortised cost to them for a withdrawal was 30p. There was outcry and now they charge nothing. Apparently there are but two stable pricing policies - exorbitant and 0.

In general all basic banking is free, and they make profits by getting people into debt, or selling daft insurance schemes, or giving terrible rates of interest. Of course for the sensible individual this is not wholly a bad thing, if you can weather the hail of junk mail/promotions this business model entails and are prepared to move your savings account every year to make sure it has a reasonable return.

In my mind there is no reason for credit cards to exist at all - if you want a loan or overdraft, then get one - really they are a conflation of services: Visa/mastercard + overdraft + purchase insurance. What is desirable is a debit card that has visa/mastercard (encouragingly these do exist more and more, but are not the norm) and purchase insurance. i.e something functionally equivalent to a credit card, but without the capacity to get the owner into debt.

I like some of the other things people have suggested as well. Of course most of the ideas being voiced here are not exclusive!
They're trying to support more standards -- by definition, they're just reinventing the work others have already done. So it's grunt work, only useful for their future influence and power.

They could ship IE9 with WebKit in addition to custom rendering modes for IE<=8, and consumers wouldn't even need to know. It'd save MS a lot of work, that's for sure.
That was it, thanks for the clarification.

I still can't believe they're maintaining two distinct HTML renderers...
Wasn't there a rick roll virus spreading between jailbroken phones just last week? I'm guessing the next one could be a lot more malicious and with enough phones involved cause some service disruptions.
I find it interesting that we keep acting like Apple somehow invented the App Store. These are issues we've been dealing with for a LONG time, in a variety of different ways. Handango, for instance, has been functioning as an on-device app store for getting close to a decade.

It's interesting, then, to look at their product and see how they never really solved these issues particularly well either.

The BIGGEST issue for Apple isn't really touched on in the article. It's about proper discoverability. The problem with app-stores in general is that they have a lot of trouble allowing the best apps to filter to the top. The more apps that clutter the store, the more difficult it becomes to differentiate between them. If there is a password manager that everyone universally loves, then how do you grant exposure to a new password manager that may be better, but doesn't have the user recommendations (yet) to match it.

It's that problem that plagues these stores. Handango (and others) tried a number of approaches. The "what's new category" isn't enough really. The exposure length is to short. Staff picks are nice, but that becomes an exercise in political maneuvering as opposed to app quality.

It's this issue that really mandates a review process. The review process at least serves as a rudimentary filter that keeps the REALLY bad apps from competeing for mindshare with the quality new ones (thus increasing exposure, even if it is for an already to brief period).

Ultimately the app store lives and dies with it's ability to put the best applications for a purpose into the hands of customers looking to solve problems. Apple is starting to deal with the problems of scale, and that is where it should be focused.

-----------------------

Oh, and for the love of god give me some ability to get a refund for an app. Read reviews and count the number of times folks have essentially gotten ripped off by a product that barely functions (or sometimes doesn't function at all). Eventually we all are no longer enamored with the novelty of iPhone applications and we want some accountability behind our purchases.

I'm very wary with paid apps at this point for that reason alone.
Just One Thing - Defining a Clear Value Proposition
The Wired article references the below quote from timesonline.co.uk:

"Industry experts said that Saga would want to maximise returns on its investment, and could still make wider use of data that some subscribers may find uncomfortable. Pooled and anonymised information, for example, could be sold to academic researchers or pharmaceutical companies."

Personally, I find the concern to be a little premature based on the terms of deCODE's privacy policy.

"deCODE will under no circumstances provide any 3’rd party, including insurance companies, health management organizations, hospitals, and government agencies, access to any of your personal data or data derived from your samples"

Pooled and/or anonymised information would fall under "data derived from your samples" and therefore would be a breach of the policy.
It is amazing to me how credit card companies allow these scams to exist. If somebody does charges people without their consent, they are bound to get a lot of chargebacks and this is just a headache for the cc companies. Also, it is not in the credit card companies interest to allow the credit cards to be conduits for scams.

My parents used to have a business and even though it was a completely legitimate business they were constantly scared of chargebacks. They knew that even a small percentage of chargebacks can cause them trouble with the CC companies and offerred their customers money back whenever possible to avoid chargebacks. And again this was an honest business selling real tangible things to people that knew they were buying those things, not some online scam.

But now you see some companies use credit card billing for nothing but scams and somehow they are allowed to keep their merchant accounts.
To explain my theory, basically I propose that the brain has two parts: the part that processes thoughts and patterns, and the part that processes incoming sensory data. With depression, information coming from the thought processing part of the brain becomes more salient, and the information coming from the sensory perception part of the brain becomes less salient. And basically the way to fix depression is by stimulating your sensory system with the right amount and type of sensory stimulation at the right time.

More specifically, my proposed mechanism is that during a state of depression, outside stimuli don't get processed properly because they are more than the brain can handle, thus you are essentially suffering from the effects of mild sensory deprivation even though you are surrounded by a normal amount of stimuli. And the way to fix this is by starting with less stimulation and then layering more stimuli on top so that you can 'jumpstart' the brain, so that it goes back to being able to normally process the level of incoming stimuli in the outside environment.

Note that this doesn't contradict any of the established ideas about serotonin deficiency, and I'm not at all recommending forgoing the traditional treatments.

My thinking is that the reason SNRIs and traditional treatments work is because they either involve stimulating the sensory processing part of the brain, or else (with CBT) they help people to avoid triggering excessive rumination.

What's the data? Look at both the recommended treatments and also the ways people self-medicate: there is listening to classical music, wearing more cologne, cuddling with someone else, cutting themselves, TMS/ECT, SSRI/SNRIs, acupuncture, exercise, increasing social contact, etc.

All of these are activities that increase the activity in the sensory perception part of the brain, so my thinking is that you can purposely increase the activity in this part of the brain by applying the right stimuli at the right time, and thus ultimately fix the problem by bringing your sensory perceptions back to the proper salience.

Anyway I was doing a little reading on depression a month ago on behalf of a couple friends, and this is just sort of a pattern I picked up. Not sure what to make of it, but I think it holds and is also very easy to test empirically, although I'm not a scientist so take it cum grano salis. Obviously there are purely biological or nutritional causes as well, but based on the extremely high efficacy of non-drug treatments it seems like there is something similar to what I'm describing going on.
You would be pretty surprised. The loan books on most tiny banks are mostly comprised of single family mortgages.
Border radius!
It does seem odd that almost anyone can get a no-fee credit card but it's hard to find a no-fee overdraft line of credit.
All-in-all it sounds like everyone was really pretty reasonable. I don't see any losers in this. The TSA recognizes that they had a policy mistake and has reacted accordingly. It sounds like the police and the TSA investigators could have been a bit more...nice. Other than that, good for everyone involved:)
The best questions we got while raising venture capital
I read an interesting article some time back that strongly relates to this case, by (I think) a retired policeman, but I can't recall where.

Anyway, the gist of his point was that there's a tradeoff between evidence in plain view, and invasive security checking.

Police are allowed to use evidence of other wrongdoings while investigating a completely different matter, and switch their investigation priorities, as it were. For example, a car might be stopped for some minor infraction - a broken taillight perhaps - but if the officer sees (say) drugs in the back seat, they can change their priorities. Evidence in plain view is the general scope.

The other side is that security checkpoints at airports go far further looking into things than would meet an "in plain view" test. The problem with being able to switch investigation priority in this circumstance is that it evades protections against unreasonable search.

His suggestion was that officers could do one or the other, but not both. Security screening should be strictly limited to physical security, and not seek evidence of other wrongdoings.

There is some evidence in any case that judiciary are starting to push back here, even in cases where actual wrongdoing is discovered by security searches:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020455680457426...

> A federal judge in June threw out seizure of three fake passports from a traveler, saying that TSA screeners violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.
First I would cut the "Checks take N days to clear",

The only way to do this unilaterally is to loan your customers money you don't have for certain, yet. Legally, checks can be revoked up to six months later, so how many days a check takes to clear indicates nothing more than the confidence the bank has in final clearing, which won't happen for some time after that. So, people with bad credit, or who have previously overdrawn, are probably higher risks for depositing checks (especially personal checks) which may be revoked later.
Yes, but if someone (say a health insurance co) were to buy deCODE, that purchasing entity would no longer be a 3rd party.
Full Circle Magazine
Hmm,

The reasoning involved in the experiment seems rather tenuous to me.

if we tried to under a computer only by how many 0's it wrote to memory for a given input, our understanding would be rather limit.

If a brain is highly tuned and complex thing, our ability to read the meaning of certain things firing or not firing for certain events is going to be limited.

The thing is the real progress is being made in far more detailed approaches than this - simulating whole fly brains or large parts of a cat brain. I suspect that this is where any real understanding is going to come from.
This is to buy the source and an instance of it as your own startup, and optionally the rights to re-sell it.
Canvas or GTFO.
I believe that was because many people never bothered to change the default password for the OpenSSH app. It's seems like that kind of thing could be exploited regardless of venue.
Humans can rationalize anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-ration...

You frame a problem in a context, or a time frame, or a motivation and you can argue whatever point you want.

All predictions about the future are by definition opinion.
Tech earnings hurts stocks
Never call me on the phone. The promise of that alone would make me want to switch banks. Calls for security reasons are fine.

Seriously, the number of times my bank calls me is ridiculous. Usually it's to sell me extra stuff. Sometimes it's "to make sure my experience is satisfactory". It would be satisfactory if they'd switch to using email ;) Asking nicely to stop calling has not worked. Getting mad stops the calls for a few months. Then they start again. I guess their telemarketers are paid commission only.

Have an awesome web interface. Something like Buxfer, but built right in. In fact, I think Buxfer should become a bank :)
*SUBMITTED WRONG - Tech earnings hurt stocks
Sweet Moses yes. Rounded corners should be a setting, not a project.
Behold Tarjan - Destroyer of Parties
Is it still conspiracy theory to suggest that they are the ones with the most to lose from a universally reliable JS and HTML implementation, so they should want to do enough to keep IE competitive, but not enough to make it fully compatible with everyone else?
Could someone tell me why my comments were downvoted? Was it because the downvoter disagreed? Why not polite discussion rather than downvoting?
I tried it out, it's super viral... I think it'll spread very easily, just like Paypal did.
You are probably right. We reviewed this paper about a month ago so i probably mixed up the names.
Thanks a lot for chiming in and clarifying this.

Azure not being MSFT-stack specific is an interesting move. It certainly will open the platform up to many more applications than otherwise.

As for getting tokens, I found that it actually takes a lot longer than “a very, very short time.” For me, it was about just over a week and some other people have mentioned waiting much longer. Is there a way to speed up the process or at least get a realistic time estimate for a particular case?
Thanks!

(I am contracted by M80, working with them and Microsoft to promote Windows Azure)
I have a project, http://elev.at - it's a web API to convert data from HTML tables, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, etc. into XML - the premise is to make information that is published for humans eyes, into computable form so that other apps can consume the data.

So far I'm only supporting XML as the output, but am wondering about other outputs. One obvious format would be JSON, but I'm also wondering about others, such as Avro. It is similar in purpose as Thrift or Protocol Buffers, but unlike these two, you don't need to pre-gen the code files to process the resulting data sets, i.e. the generation and consumption of Avro data sets can be more dynamic than with Thrift or Protocol Buffers.

I was wondering whether anybody here has experience with Avro.
To me, it's interesting that Apple doesn't seem to have performed an audit (or hell, a search&replace) after the first time this came up.

Fool me once...
I definitely mean S3 when I say S3, take a look at the paper that I link to.
Four reasons why new websites flop
Arguably, some late-sixties AI really did think an imperative program could simulate human intelligence.

It seems like there has been enough research that present day researchers don't think the brain is very much like either a single-CPU computer or "the cloud". This indicates some progress.

If anything, I'd say contemporary research seems to err towards mostly doing simulation rather than attempting to understand what "general intelligence" is. This has different dangerous - if we really really wind-up able to build intelligent machines but are not able understand them, dangers that were once confined to sci-fi will become more real.
I have found the best non-PayPal solution to be iTransact (http://www.itransact.com/marketing/referral/S33oOO). They combine the gateway and the merchant account, and have lower fees than their competitors.
The actual staff report linked in that article is well worth the read.

These companies are basically running shady private tax schemes. No value-added.

I'm glad the senate report provides a list of the 'partner' commerce companies that have made over $1MM using these schemes. I'll be thinking twice about giving any of them my business.
[PDF]http://commerce.senate.gov/public/_files/111609EXHIBITSTOSTA...
Three adoption patterns for educational social software
We're talking about methodology though. Something which is very meaningful in an engineering context but, and this is purely my opinion here, significantly less so in the business world.

There is, for example, a best way to build a bridge. I'm not so sure there is a best way to build a company.
Marketing Idea - Make checks "Viral":
Add "Deposit this check into a new account at X bank and receive an additional $100".

is for the disclaimer on back with legal requirements. $100 or $50 or whatever you think your new customer acquisition costs should be.

Different way of banking idea:
Get rid of checking accounts all together. Instead you have a 2 Line of Credit accounts plus a Money Market account.

1 Zero interest LOC (ZLOC)and 1 variable interest LOC (VLOC).

At the end of the month the money in the MMA pays off the ZLOC completely assuming 100% coverage. Any overage goes to the VLOC.

Having the ZLOC eliminates the NSF fees a customer gets when they go over but it lets the bank generate interest fees on the VLOC if not payed by the end of the month. The deposits go to the VLOC first until it is zero, then move to the MMA.

Bank collects interest on MMA from the FED and makes money on loans fees/interest since you are bypassing the 10% reserve requirement and not even using the sweep method.
Social Media and Contracts: 6 Terms to Know and Understand
Take a look at the source code ;-)
Academic researchers have shown that anonymized data can
be correlated with other data to identify people.

Very true. Just in the last year or so, the credit reporting agencies figured out how to match anonymized subprime mortgage borrower information with their own database of individual credit scores.

http://www.equifax.com/cs7/Satellite?c=EFX_News_C&childp...

Then they sell the joined database to hedge funds and banks (still anonymized). They that before a borrower defaults on his mortgage, he'll first max out all his credit cards. Also, late credit card payments appear within 30 days. Late mortgage payments tend to take 60 days of delinquency before blipping on any radars.

Fortunately it's hard to argue today that this practice is hurting anyone. In fact, some day this could help good borrowers stand out better and receive a lower interest rate.
There's a reason CS courses don't teach the latest language. For one, the professors have other things to do than try every new language that comes out. Second, the concepts are the same. Most of the difference is the syntax sugar and the backend (yes, I know this is flame war material).

Having a social club for people interested in programming is fine. Just watch out for freeloaders. The people who don't currently have the initiative to try a programming language will just show up and expect you to use your free time to teach them everything.
The TSA detained the man (possibly illegally), called the police, threatened him, and ultimately only acknowledged their bad behavior under the threat of a lawsuit.

If that's reasonable, I'd hate to see unreasonable.
Yes, saying bad things about Microsoft is frowned upon.

OOXML & bribes, anyone? SCO? Patent threats? Netscape? Holding back the web for 10 years? Countless other acts of evil bullshit?

I guess this is the same kind of denial that makes HN throw a hissy-fit at trying to bring up the very real problem that is Islam (in Europe).

See no evil, hear no evil.. What a wonderful community of very intelligent people we have here, heads firmly lodged in their asses. Let's never talk about anything that really matters in the world.