skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anything on Cydia ever "broken the network" by using these private APIs, whether accidentally or maliciously? I'm starting to think this whole "cellular networks are fragile webs of tissue paper" meme got started from a pure guess, and even if previously correct, may no longer be correct for 3.5G.
I went through the same thing with my last startup. It ended with lawyers on both sides, both of us having to raise money to buy the other one out, etc. It was not pretty. Odd numbers seem to always be better.
It's also very easy to get around by submitting links.
Nothing but time can kill IE6. Just wait another five years.
Word.

1. I am confused if I text a shortcode, or if I have to text that 646 bullshit?

2. I should be able to click on step 1/step2/step3 in your animation in case I want to review the information contained in that slide a little longer.

3. You have to be EXPLICIT about fees on the front page.
Ask HN: Bank 2.0. How would you build a better bank?
I was thinking about consumer banking while reading this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948460

I came to the conclusion that consumer banks have a lot that are in need of fixing/improving. I posted a comment about how I would build Bank 2.0 if I had the means. I figured that I would post a discussion on the subject to hopefully get a lot of input from a lot of smart people.

My question to you is, how would you build your Bank 2.0? How would you make money? How would you be different from other banks out there? You have some seed money (for new banks, this might be about $20M), and your goal is to start a bank in your town. How would you start, and how would you grow?

I'd like to focus this discussion more on consumer banking (think, checking, saving, and small business accounts).
There are so many examples of both 2-founder and 3-founder companies being successful, but I don't see why everyone keeps trying to generalize the argument to say that one is better than the other.

There doesn't seem to be a 'correct' number of founders (though clearly having 4+ or 1 has been known to be more difficult). You should choose your number of founders based on what you think will give you the highest probability of success given your situation, personality types, etc.

The title of the article should be, 'How Having 3 Founders Worked Really Well For Us'.
I had the same idea. I figured that VoIP made it cheap enough for a computer to call me whenever someone tried to charge my card, and I would have to enter a PIN on the phone before it authorized it.

If the timeout on POS card terminals is long enough (about 30-60 seconds), it's enough time for a computer to call my cell, read me the amount to be charged, then wait for me to enter a PIN (not necessarily the same PIN you use on an ATM).

A bank could offer a web interface for me to authorize a list of "always allow" merchants and their charge limits so I don't have to re-authorize supermarkets and recurring subscriptions.

And finally, an interface to list "always deny" merchants.

I like the idea of cancelling an unwanted service by shutting off the flow of money, and then calling their customer support to notify them.

In fact, I think that should be a basic human right. I shouldn't have to argue with a Customer Retention Department (something that pisses me off just in the concept alone), I should just inform them (or let my bank inform them), that I'm no longer their customer.

Me: "Hi, I've cancelled my account."

Them: "I'm sorry, I'll have to transfer you to a customer retention representative."

Me: "No, you don't understand. I've already shut off payments, I'm just giving you a courtesy call. Bye."
Integrate Harvest Time Into Redmine
You disagree with my assertion that everyone can publish Flash apps because you cannot change the Flash spec and you have to pay for Adobe's tools if you choose to use them? I don't get your logic.

Even if I had to pay Adobe to create or publish Flash apps, which is not the case, they wouldn't be able to censor me. Big difference for me.
I've thought the same thing. Why isn't there a system that requires a small inconvenience or effort before a particular transaction goes through? Example: I go to buy something online, but before the money really goes from me to the merchant, I have to phone in, identify/authenticate myself, and identify some transaction details (perhaps an ID, the dollar amount, the merchant's name).

I'd be happy to go through a few minutes of inconvenience for a large purchase if it meant significantly greater security for my credit card.
The blog only has four posts on it? Why is he even worried about feeds at this point?

I think this is blown way out of proportion. A new blog like that with only four posts probably only gets a few visitors a day. He's getting more traffic over this "controversy" post than he would ever get from a feed.

He should thank Feedburner for messing up his feed because it gave him something to write about that would bring in traffic. At any rate the loss of the feed is nothing terrible when you consider how new the blog is.

I tried a hack to find out how many subscribers he has but he has feed "awareness" disabled.

https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?...

At any rate, I doubt he even has more than a few subscribers. No wonder Google didn't consider his "issue" to be high priority.
And then you still have to solve the problem.
Good sci fi. Silly for the government to care about this. I mean, really, 10000 years?

If future civilizations are technologically advanced, detecting radiation won't be a problem.

If future civilizations have fallen back to the stone age, spatially localized buried nuclear waste is going to be the least of their problems. It would be a rounding error in the annual death rates.
People who have written IE only, active-x infested applications are the "enterprise customers" of IE :)
I coincidentally reread In the Beginning was the Command Line three days ago. Neal Stephenson is an awesome geek.
Industrial-Strength Bias
Take some time to read about what Vernon Hill did at Commerce Bancorp.

Hill came from a non-banking background, he was an owner of Burger King franchises. As a result though, he really figured out that one of the keys to creating a thriving bank was to make a bank that had great customer service.

Mostly, innovations are used to get cheap deposits. If there is a bank that can innovate and do it correctly, then it can work well. Commerce is a great example of one that did achieve it. Their efficiency ratio was higher than most peers but that’s because they kept their bank open 7 days a week and they made it so you really wanted to visit their branches. They used nice colors, had super friendly tellers (they weren’t stuck behind bullet proof windows or a mini gate), and they didn’t make branches look like a post office or a jail cell.

Their whole idea was putting more money towards non-interest expense but they were able to charge less for deposits since they were more convenient. It definitely worked. If you could invest in safe assets you could earn a wider NIM than peers.

HOWEVER:

You can be the most innovative banker in the world but if you make bad loans you’ll go down.
We aren't talking about lambdas, we are talking about closures. Lambdas are simple syntactic sugar for a function definition that has a single expression, closures are a concept to capture the outer scope.
chickens are built to eat mostly bugs

Not to be too nitpicky, but chickens are omnivores. They will happily eat worms, leaves, bugs, grass, flowers, seeds, flies, small frogs, other chickens, and I've seen them try to attack small snakes.

And trust me when I say they don't have to be forced to eat corn. Next to worms, it's probably their favorite food.
It is starting to get old seeing people extrapolate principles from anecdotes.

It's probably just our engineering instincts trying to find the patterns in things.

Normative startup advice seems to be about as useful as normative life advice-- not very.
As of right now they are not charging... it is open beta... but i'm sure that will change.
Designing CSS Buttons: Techniques and Resources
The whole "we need a review board because otherwise VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN!!" is just a scare-tactic to justify Apple's draconian attitude towards developers.

Android is open, and nothing bad has happened in over a year. BlackBerry and WinMo have been open for years and nothing bad has happened. Quite frankly, if you believe that Apple line, you're a fool.
There's no inconvenience, it reads pretty normally, for example: http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/vi...
Python 3.0 introduces the nonlocal keyword which allows you to assign to closed over names.
I did too. The second time reading it seemed so much longer.
To start, my Bank 2.0 would do a lot to change the way credit/debit cards are authorized. clawrencewenham had some great ideas about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948965

Basically the owner of the card would have final control over charges on it. The bank could automatically call or text you and ask for a code before authorizing a transaction, and the cardholder would have white and blacklists with custom rules about when/how much a particular merchant could charge.

In my bank, I would probably stay away from mortgages and credit cards (I could offer them through a 3rd part supplier, but I wouldn't carry any of the balances). This is to make reserves more manageable. Today's banks have massive departments dedicated to managing reserves and working with overnight and discount loans. By eliminating/outsourcing these functions, I think more could be dedicated to serving the customer. Most of the money for the bank would be made through an agreement with someone like Visa or Mastercard, so that whenever someone charges their card, part of the fee that merchants pay goes back to my bank as the card issuer.
Nope, Outlook now uses the Word rendering engine, since it's part of the Office family. Totally makes sense right?
How about 10 papers per day instead?

Even one meeting in a day means zero time for deep thinking. Ever try to code when you know there's something unrelated coming up in a few hours? Basically impossible.
I'd like it much more if it made them irrelevant, or preferably bankrupt.
Nice, I'm glad you found it useful.

I would actually recommend her previous edition of the book. In this new version she trys to update it using color and it goes all wrong.

She is stretching her ability past her strong points. She is EXTREMELY good at the basics, but ask her to design something in color and its just bad IMHO.

This is the edition I like : http://www.amazon.com/Non-Designers-Design-Book-Typographic-...
You're still not telling us if you're paying or not for feedburner, if you're not paying, don't expect much support unless you're really naive. Not saying whether you're paying or not is dishonest.

Edit: you're not paying for feedburner as it's not part of their Enterprise support. So your critic of "not going google" is irrelevant.
That will work only if it is guaranteed that the sender phone number in an SMS message cannot be spoofed. Is this the case? Does anyone know?
Definitely a business with a looong shelf-life.
Particularly the Catholic church, who nailed it - they have their own bank, own army, own country. Not going anywhere.
We need to develop a word other than 'right' that means "not a fundamental human right, but something we collectively agree people should be able to get, if it can be made available at a reasonable cost, a reasonable price, and without forced labor". We could use it in the health care debate, too. Maybe the Spanish need it as well, although I can't tell if the PC Mag article is translating such a word into 'right'.
Ringtone companies are highly profitable, but not elegant and scammy. Good question, haven't seen many good answers yet.
The easiest way would be to encrypt the addon store on the user's hard disk.

MS could still install addons stealthily, but they'd need to violate the DMCA to do so, and I can't see even MS being that willing to risk the legal issue just for an addon.
NVIDIA 3D Vision now available on a 120hz laptop display
NVIDIA announced today the impending release of the ASUS G51J 3D laptop, which features a 120Hz LG display to enable NVIDIA 3D Vision support.
+1 on Amazon, amazing indeed what they've achieved and continue to achieve.
During my work at a utility with lots of nuclear power plants, my boss talked about this very issue. He described the problem and the proposed solution being the tall objects sticking out of the ground.

One of the young people on the team quickly thought out loud, "Sounds like Stone Henge!"
Here is what I want them to do: Release an IE shell that wraps WebKit. Leave all the Trident DLL's there since they're heavily baked in for help file viewers and other OS bits and parts.

No one (except for us nerds) care what rendering engine they use as long as things look ok and work. What people do care about is the UI the use to get to content. So the IE can go balls to the wall crazy with whatever UI they think users will enjoy, but just leave the heavy lifting to a way more capable machine (this is essentially what Google did with Chrome).
But who will protect us from crochet car cover plots?

http://www.sewgirls.com/yarn/US-Customs-Detains-Citizen-Over...
I think you mean TCO.
An article that combines the TSA, iPhones, and Ron Paul. HN gold!

Edit: Geez, people. Lighten up!
I think the proper term is "subsidized universal broadband".
Yeah this is totally what I was thinking?!?!
List comprehensions in Common Lisp
> being it for Google Apps Premier Edition or any of the free services.

Where do you talk about your support experiences with Google Apps Premier Edition? Your blog post only talks about your support woes with FeedBurner.

Are you extrapolating that you don't like Google's customer support for Google Apps Premier Edition just because you don't like their support for FeedBurner? Or do you really have a 'bad support story' in relation to Google Apps Premier Edition too?
They admit the flaws when the next version is about to come out. Standard operating procedure for marketing.
Thanks for the reference. In case anyone else wants to read about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Bancorp
Agreed -- I didn't think it was an "app store" it that sense, but it totally makes sense to make it cross platform. Django will run fine on ISS and I'm not sure a simple web interface and sftp is too much to ask for (so I could do updates from my macbook).

Btw, as a VMM developer I would be very interested to know if Azure is built off the type-1 Microsoft Hyper-V.
I don't see why you would not offer mortgages.

The point of a bank is to have a healthy net interest margin on the funds that they are borrowing and the funds they are loaning out.

Mortgages are like having a long term contract where that margin is secured. Also, think about it. If you are not making mortgages, you're going to be looking at more consumer-focused later credit stage loans.

Commercial real estate, construction, small business loans. All of these are loans that are more difficult to write and typically carry higher loss rates. When I look for banks to invest in, I am typically looking for banks that write mostly single family mortgages because they are more secure than those lending to local businesses/developments.

Also, I think you are confusing most banks with the dealer broker model - Bear/Lehman/Merrill/Goldman/Morgan Stanley. Those banks had massive amounts of overnight lending. Commercial banks like JPM, Wells, and BoA did not. That's why they are able to thrive and consolidate during the crisis.

A great bank will have sticky deposits -- low yield Savings accounts, checking accounts. Not high yield CDs.
I'm spanish and the price for 1mb of ADSL is similar to the price of 20mb in france or any other european country.
This is a very expensive right...
But then they couldn't render with Direct2D and DirectWrite, which has potential to be a valuable improvement.
The point is to have multiple levels of messages for different potential future recipients. The site will be clearly identified as a nuclear waste dump... to people who know what nuclear waste is. The vague lower-level messages are for people who don't know anything about nuclear science.
How do you even know that the problem is reproducible? You've only managed to trigger it once.
I doubt 'review' is ever going away. There's too much value to be gained by having a vetted store that consumers trust. And there's no way to kill review and retain that trust.

We hear about the times 'review' gets it wrong. But, by definition, we'll never hear about the times they're right. How many times they catch showstoppers or seedy code. (something I think they're looking for, far more diligently than we typically give them credit for)

I'm sure Apple wants to polish and apply their policies more consistently. But ultimately only they know how often 'review' kicks out a false positives. So only they know whether the right thing to fix at this time really is policy consistency (vs getting more bodies in the group, developing better code-analysis tools, etc)

It sure sounds like policy is easy to fix, but how many times have we seen false positives for things that are clearly allowed or have been previously allowed for some time? Even if the policy magically covered every possible situation, getting several hundred new hires to apply it consistently across hundreds of thousands of submissions is still a problem. And one of under-appreciated scope.
>Judging from the current state of the App Store, the review process doesn't materially improve the quality of applications.

It's hard to know that for certain. We don't see exactly what gets rejected. We only hear the horror stories of basically good developers encountering frustratingly arbitrary and trivial objections to otherwise solid submissions.

But the majority of rejection we probably don't hear about, and we don't know what exactly they are able to keep out of the iPhone App Store with this review layer. Apple may see a lot of apps being rejected for very good reasons, but we aren't necessarily hearing about those rejection.

Ultimately Apple is going to have to weigh things for themselves, balancing the frustration of good developers versus the legitimate protection of the end users from malicious or malformed submissions. So far they seem satisfied with the ratio, and are happy to prioritize the end user over the developer.
And this is interesting because...?
Another Papers user here, and I also use a combination of CiteULike ( http://www.citeulike.org ) and Bibdesk ( http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net ). I find either system both easier and more powerful than Mendeley.
That is pretty much how the dominant payment system in the Neterlands works (iDEAL):

1. The merchant shows a list of banks that support iDEAL (all major banks, currently 8)

2. You pick yours, the merchant sends you to your online banking environment

3. You log into to your bank account (with your username and password)

4. You review the proposed transaction

5. A transaction code is sent to your mobile phone which you have to enter (alternatively, a list with numbered transaction codes is sent to you using snail mail in advance, the website gives you the transaction code it wants which you'll have to offer; transaction codes are used only one time)

6. The transaction is made instantly and confirmed with the merchant. To the merchant's advantage, the transaction is irreversible.

The total cost can be as low as 45 cents for the merchant, with no fixed or upfront costs.
In terms of sensory deprivation tanks, Wikipedia says that it actually can relax you in the short term, and only causes anxiety after prolonged exposure (or lack thereof).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation
Faqja e Fillimit për Mozilla Firefox-in
Visual Information
Visualization is becoming increasingly important in a world that is covered by screens (TV, mobile, computers, etc.) Being able to effectively show an audience the intended message is critically important. What are the best blogs/websites which disucuss visualization and info. graphics?
vernon hill writes regularly at http://www.bankstocks.com/
Semi-related: Does anyone know why credit card transactions can be authorized in seconds but ACHs (or whatever underlies online bill payment) take days to go through?
Because both credit card companies and merchants want buying to be as easy as possible without any steps that may give you second thought. Credit cards are all about impulse buying.
SMS isn't secure.
Because we'd like to think professionals (particularly those who flog their platforms' security) would validate their input, in this, the year 2009.
Nope. See also: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-...
Remember our startup microPledge.com? Want to buy it?
I think the point he is referring to here is that spending the time to do something rather than spending half that time will provide you with more success than not.
One thing that irks me about banks is that checks don't appear on your balance sheet until they are cashed.

More and more people these days aren't balancing their checkbooks and simply using the bank website's readout of available money to determine whether or not they have enough money in their account to pay for something. However, this is flawed for checks as they aren't logged until cashed. I've had more than one occasion where I got burned by this thinking I had more money in my account than I actually did because I had sent out a check that my landlord didn't get around to cashing for a few weeks.

This seems like the way the world is headed and it still kind of boggles my mind as to why we have both the account ledger at the bank's website and a separate piece of software to balance our books. (Mint.com, Quicken, etc.) The only reason this dichotomy exists as far as I can tell is for things like checks which are outstanding and not debited against your account when you cut them. (Ok, obviously there are other things they do like budgeting, etc. but why can't that all be done with my bank's website?)

My ideal Bank 2.0 would incorporate things so if I pay my rent with a check or send a check to someone through the web billpay, it is deducted from my account immediately so I cannot accidentally spend that money which is out there. Obviously it would take user interaction to log the check they wrote to someone in the case of a personal check, but with the web billpay it could be done automatically. By reducing the balance when that check is cut, it should do it throughout the system (aka not simply symbolically) so if I go to the store and make a purchase with my debit card, my balance with the check cut is taken into account and it doesn't allow me to spend the money for the check.

In the event of a stop payment on the check or a lapse of a certain period of time, the money would be returned to my account, so a lost check wouldn't screw me over. This would eliminate this huge problem along with the pain of having to maintain an additional piece of software to monitor my account.
First I would cut the "Checks take N days to clear", "electronic transfers take 3 days", and other similar crap. Second I would allow the creation of multiple sub-accounts which can be used for single transactions, single receiver, or rate limited transactions. Think ING Orange sub-accounts but with external interfaces and on sterioids.
Yeah, as much as Wal-Mart is vilified, they do good stuff for people on low incomes. I saved a ton watching the crazies at Wal-Mart. Never had to spend a dime on entertainment through most of University.
In-N-Out Burger, Trader Joe's, Ikea
.... Shine Discussion Forum ....
Just be cautious of Tom Brown (the owner of that site). The guy is basically a huge gambler/perma-bull on banks. A lot of his insights were proven to be wrong during the crisis.
I would eliminate overdraft fees on DEBIT accounts.