skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, I don't speak for Twilio but as a developer I've used their system quite a bit in the past and enjoyed it lots. Haven't yet used Tropo, but I think it's really interesting. Sorry for necroposting, but I just found this via search.

Twilio isn't indefinitely free for developing like Tropo, but they do give you $30 credit when you sign up, which goes a long way towards pre-production testing. Twilio can do international outbound calls, but as you say they don't yet have international inbound.

Twilio and Tropo both have a REST API. The main difference here is that you reply to Twilio with XML and Tropo uses JSON. Although proprietary, either one is easier to use than VoiceXML IMO.

Tropo has an amazing number of nice voices you can use to read off text to the caller. Twilio has just "male" and "female", last time I checked. On the other hand, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see where Tropo could play an MP3 to the caller, whereas there are lots of ways to play recorded music or messages to the caller with Twilio. As far as recording, you have to give Tropo a place to send recordings, whereas Twilio will store the recordings for you. Twilio also has tons of API methods to access data, like list all your recordings, call logs, and so on. I don't see that for Tropo.

Hmm, this is getting long. I think a comparison blog post is in order. I love the fact that there are at least two smart, highly motivated companies in this space. I hope Twilio and Tropo push each other to greatness.
The Internet Explorer 9 HTML5 Canvas Campaign
It's not a matter of how many ads need to be clicked to pay for the phone, it's about gaining mindshare, more searches, more people using gmail, mobile google maps ubiquity and so on. I have no idea how they could even measure revenue gained by Android use accurately, or even on what timescale they expect to really start benefiting from it, but you can be sure it's going to be huge in a few years.
I built this using twilio yesterday. It took maybe an hour, from research to code to commit.
Please show your support for the HTML5 canvas element in the next version of Internet Explorer. As a developer on the Freeciv.net project, I know that not having support for HTML5 canvas in Internet Explorer is one of the biggest problems with choosing HTML5 to develop a cool web service at the moment.
It's not free in the sense that you're still using your regular phone minutes. For those of us without unlimited talk minutes, this can matter.
I just sent an email/resume to jobs at veerwest.
"But I've still never seen any kind of link that showed brain function or learning capability linked to genetics."

This paper says IQ has 70% heritability, based on a twin adoption study. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2218526

Other twin studies have found 75-90% heritability for attention deficit disorder.

Schizophrenia is moderately heritable.

Migraine is well-known for running in families.
The internet already revolutionized my Magazine, Newspaper & Video consumption. The former, it revolutionized pretty much out of existence.

The iPad's form factor was instrumental in revolutionizing my interaction with books. I can buy a book whenever I think of it. Programming books? I can carry an unlimited number of them with me! In this it's just like the Kindle with two big differences: 1) it's much better for searching 2) it's a much better web browser/computing device.
The tax status then becomes quite complicated.
Okay here's a (hypothetical) use case:
I want to create a software product, say a database, because I see myself solving a real problem by way of creating my product. My whole idea is driven by a real problem statement and my passion. How does this fit in here?
Don't you think all those blocks are a little misleading for a product like this? Or like these: http://projects.apache.org/indexes/quick.html ?
If the iPad were a 1/100th of everything people make it out to be, the world would be transformed. Instead, it's just Apple doing a bang-up job on taking the slate to the next level.

Taking an aspect of computing to the mainstream is often referred to as a revolution. The whole World Wide Web could be considered in this light. By mainstreaming the slate, Apple is doing exactly this and making a handsome profit.
Replace the word "denialist" with "skeptic" and you have a semantically identical but implicitly reversed rant. Why are people so skeptical? Because they quite sensibly question dictates from institutions/corporations/government bodies/etc which demonstrably do not always have the public's interests at heart. Etc, etc. Any time you hear somebody loading up and firing slur after slur after slur after slur, it's best to look for a different rant.

Do vaccines cause autism? Apparently not. But, you know, it is possible and as long as we're injecting millions of people with pathogens, we are probably wise to consider possible negative effects. It's not "denialist".
the beauty of the iPad format is that it is based on thousands of years of trial an error for finding the perfect format.

But this is not just an iPad thing, this is a tablet thing. It's quite amazing to see so much power being put into such a slim device.

Nothing beats playing some racing game in crazy 3d and then turning the tablet around and realizing just how slim it is.

How can so much power be cramped into such a small device.

We surely do live in exiting times not just because of the iPad but because of the state of computing power and what it allows us to do.
Just and old time lurker, recently started commenting here..
Well, the alternative is adding a new keyword, and it's difficult to do that without risking breaking any existing code that uses whatever identifier they choose. Breaking old code is even less "Java" than introducing new symbols.

edit: Actually, now that I think about it, this wouldn't be the first time they introduced a new keyword with a language update. So much for that argument:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/nutsandbolts/_k...
Science doesn't rely on trust. But for those that consume the result of science, it sometimes does rely on trust of the scientific method and the scientists themselves.

The example given in the article is a good one: we can observe antibiotics in action, so we don't need to trust anyone that they work. We can observe people get better on them. But with vaccines, the point is to not get sick in the first place. Most individuals will never have the opportunity to observe that they work since they are preventative. Again, the science itself does not rely on trust. It's the non-scientists who must trust something they will likely never observe themselves.
An Advisory Board is a Startup’s Best Investment
It's still a mostly useless device.
Haskell Quotes
No, I've just made a lot of mistakes of enormous magnitude, iPhone among them. :>
What confounds me is that we have people saying they'd rather not see discussions on this event on HN due to its political nature, and yet the Everybody Draw Muhammed Day post two weeks ago was quite lively.

I mean, geez, people died on that boat and commenters are more interested in some sidebar widget in Twitter?
3 free licenses of Balsamiq Mockups up for grabs on FuelYourCoding
Actually, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy says it in its introduction.

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen ...". So, there.
Gruber seemed surprisingly happy about this considering it's Lenovo jumping on the Android tablet bandwagon.
It's interesting to see all the replies, they show the interest on the iPad, but to be fair with the parent he said the first generation.

I'm with him, as I am with the rest of you. I bought a first generation Macbook: battery problems who led to hard drive problem (tic tic tic no more hard drive) and fan noise problems. The worst of all? Dealing with Apple support. Horrible here in Portugal, paying premium for subpar service really gets you angry.

Am I buying an iPad? Yes, but I will at least check for problems with the batch I'll be buying. It's not expectable to see the regular consumer having this behavior but you should.
Shameless plug: for synchronisation with full file locking, take a look at Synctus. It guarantees no synchronisation conflicts, and LAN-only access means that it is more suited to office environments (no software installation, no extra account management, etc).
The ultimate email server for Windows?  This is it.
It will be interesting what the revenue / profits of this division are reported as, since they finally moved the Mac BU out of it.
I think the issue is that many people don't have the basic science or mathematics skills to even follow along. For example, combinatorial explosion is a very basic concept but I wouldn't have trouble believing that the majority of the US public wouldn't be able to grasp its consequences.

However I think that you may be inflating the degree to which we understand other fields a bit. I have taken just enough advanced physics to know that I know absolutely nothing about physics. Similarly for chemistry, biology, climatology, etc. My major is computer science so I would wager that I have a better than average knowledge in that field, but there are even some subfields in computer science (e.g., complexity theory) where I would be completely lost.

I think the concept in play here is what I like to call the "hard science condition." That is, people who are a member of the hard sciences or technical fields have a tendency to believe that because they have a good comprehension of a difficult subject they have a good comprehension of many difficult subjects (including other technical fields). This seems to me to be a logical fallacy because very rarely have the exhibitors actually put in the many years of work that would be required to really understand the field. In this way we all have to defer to experts at some point--that is, we must trust their results. This is why I think a scientific consensus is so important. When we must defer to experts it's important to be able to figure out what the experts are saying.
I think this is a good comment. Some scientific viewpoints stand for a long time as commonly accepted views then are proven wrong later. Sometimes the denialists are right and I think a more interesting article is why do humans subscribe to groupthink so easily?
I'm mostly being presumptuous about people I know from high school and college.
Thanks, but I doubt I will ever be so lucky, especially considering even if I did have an opportunity I'd probably lack in experience needed for such a job. Anyways, while fantasizing, my dream job would be to work in r&d on building those HPC machines (software and system wise, algos especially, not EE), or writing/optimizing code that runs on them, especially vector processing units. My area of interest is graphics research.
Another (possible --- depends on your usage scenarios) drawback is that cell phone text messages are not always "instantaneous". I've personally seen lags of up to 30 minutes between send and receipt, particular in fringe reception areas.
I'm not sure how our positions are really all that different, though I wouldn't trust a surgeon who exploited her ability and reputation to engage in emotional agression. Bringing out the fight response in others isn't generally conducive to open, honest, and creative discussion.

Smug emotional agression might not be a big sin in the grand scheme, but it is an annoyance. It can be a signal of immaturity or lack of certain kinds of awareness. It's like a musician who plays out of tune, or someone farting at a gathering of gourmets. I'd much rather spend time with people who aren't willfully or unconsciously annoying.
I believe a lot of their transaction volume is now coming via the iPhone app (which is not too bad)
If that were the only parameter in the argument, that would be true. However, there are two things, in this case, that make the OP's point valid: First, N=1. This is, for all practical purposes, a Gen 1 device. There really will be a significant improvement in Gen 2, annoyances removed, etc. I learned this the hard way with the G1, a phone I could not honestly recommend anyone buy. But I would council anyone to buy a Nexus One now, even though there will be something better later.

Second - By the time Gen 2 comes around, the apps will exist to make this device ever so much more usable and useful than it is today. Again, this is an N=1 problem that does not apply to N+1 where N>1.
You can try MadMimi.com and Aweber.com (not sure how the integrations works or their API's)
> Sridhar's whole argument hinges on this dichotomy between choosing great tools and having a great finished product ... It is a false dichotomy - In some situations you don't have to choose one to the exclusion of the other

And yet this is what happens when speaking about LISP developers ... they are usually those very smart kinds that learn things as they go along, so they never have to work through high-school / college.

The most productive communities (i.e. number of useful applications / number of lines of code / number of people actively involved) have always been those that favor handicapped languages like Basic, PHP, Java and C++.

That doesn't mean one shouldn't use LISP to get shit done (correlation is not causation), just don't get trapped in a never ending cycle of yak-shaving ... also keep in mind that personal preferences usually define who you are ... personally I don't want to be the brilliant kid that never finishes anything.
Apple brainwashed lots of simple-minded ignorant people to buy iCrap, so typical of the mainstream stupid people.
It is a false dichotomy.

Perhaps, but in practice communities centered around more esoteric languages seem to spend more time working on elegant hacks and self-referential tools than on producing working, useful products. I met a lot of very smart hackers when I was still seriously doing Common Lisp coding but none of them could show me anything actually useful they'd done with it, although they had a lot of very clever tricks up their sleeves.

For example, package management in Common Lisp was a mess. There were three or four completely incompatible systems in use and none of them were really polished enough to depend on. I was astonished at how quickly the Ruby community implemented and rallied around a single, simple, usable package manager, because I'd previously just assumed it was a hard problem to solve.
Wow. Slide screen looks awesome. These kinds of things get me closer and closer to ditching my iPhone.
I haven't downloaded it yet, because it's not clear to me who the target audience is, where the data comes from, etc (is it whole genome data, 23andme data?). Also, why not a web app, especially since (as others have noted, the screenshots seem to suggest that).

Having said that does look nice and I'll download soon to check things out.
The interesting thing about the treatment of addiction is that one of the most effective solutions (Overeaters Anonymous, AA, Narcotics Anonymous, etc.) is that getting a bunch of these "addicts" in the same room to talk about their addiction can actually help. The first step in all of these programs begins with the word "We".

One of the little euphemisms I've garnered from friends and such through the years is that "Wellness begins with 'We'; Illness begins with 'I'." Most addictive habits are actually resultant from one thing only, and that is loneliness. OA, AA, NA, etc. WORK for people because they actually force them out of their little isolated states, into situations where they can actually communicate their "feelings" (I know! such a dirty word!) to people who actually understand and "get" where they are coming from. Some of the happiest people I've known are members of AA or some other 12-step program. I think it's true: give more than you think you've received, and you'll be happier.
Out of curiosity, how did you lump Objective-C and D into this. I haven't heard of people banning the use features of Objective-C and D like they do with C++.

//well, except where the platform doesn't support the feature (e.g. iPhone::Garbage Collection).
How would you objectively measure work ethic?
The US postal service's mechanism for doing this is slightly less invasive; they charge a $1 fee to your credit card card so they can confirm that the card's billing address is one of either the "old" or "new" addresses.
I don't necessarily disagree with you but can you give some examples? I can think of counter examples, all things that went from commercial business tool to consumer not the other way around:

- computers
- internet
- email
- blackberry
- unix (consumers now find mac os x more dependable and durable than windows and prefer it aside from cost)
Boo for the JPEG. Would've been better executed as a PNG :(
I think it is very very dangerous to blindly trust Perfect Science as we've seen with ClimateGate.

I'm really not sure what you mean by this. I would agree that some of the scientists in the East Anglia behaved very unprofessionally. However, there was no proof of improper scientific conduct (e.g., data alteration) in this case. The point of the peer review process is that you don't have to trust an individual scientist (or human) to not succumb to competitiveness, greed, and deception, only that the vast majority of them wont. Given that it is highly unlikely that they will be corrupt in the first place, it is even less likely that they will be corrupt towards the same result. That is, given that scientists are practicing in completely different environments and countries all over the world it is highly unlikely that the incentives and disincentives will align perfectly for everyone. Therefore, when you see a scientific "consensus," the most likely result you should get from that is that there is supporting data, not that there is a massive conspiracy.
I am hoping LLVM / clang actually give GCC some competition. I like the direction of using the same code for the compiler in tools.
Thanks for your feedback. I'm less concerned right now about the website itself - it's just a placeholder. Did you happen to download the software? Did it work as expected?

But you are right I should explain it better. This is meant to be a software solution for companies that want to offer genome data to customers. Having a standalone application as a presentation option can allay many of the privacy implications of a web app.

With that said, I do want to develop a web app too, and be a "one stop shop" for the presentation and analysis of human genomic data.

Thanks again,
Simply that I'm potentially interested in Smalltalk, and don't know where to start.
Native Americans had beer and liquor extending back beyond written history.

Only certain native groups had alcohol prior to European contact. As far as I know, the Inuit did not, and alcohol is still a devastating problem. Also, hard liquor is a different level entirely. Europeans in Europe had a hard time dealing with it at first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze
So you're going to wait 5 iterations of Moore's law, or 6.5 years? (8x speed and 1/4 price)
I think 10x is a very good range. It's easy to convince yourself that your product needs to be earth shattering. It really doesn't. Just being way better is enough.

Was Dropbox 100x better than JungleDisk?

Was Wordpress 100x better than Movable Type?

Was Google 100x better than Yahoo?

When it launched the iPhone probably was 100x better. For everyone that isn't Steve Jobs I think 10x is a damn good place to start.
But isn't it strange that many climate deniers are skeptical of global warming, yet have total faith in a much more implausible idea: a coordinated group of scientists are systematically suppressing dissent to further their ideology.
It's not a product management tool. There are lots of great options to help you do that, some of which I use.

If you already have an idea that you think is a fact, and you are going to build it, regardless of what the world says, then you needn't write anything down. That's what most failed projects do/did.

The canvas is meant to help when you see your ideas as hypotheses. You document them, and then you go try to find out if they're true or not (by talking to customers, building MVPs, watching mailing lists, whatever). If everything is true, you move on to scaling the business. If some of your initial beliefs turn out to be false, which is probable, then you have a place to go back and document your new learning, and hopefully see how that change will impact the rest of your assumptions.
An undertaker might take issue with that:-)
That good of an experience? I'm genuinely curious, how is it "interacting with knowledge, entertainment, my pictures, and the web in ways that I had never done so before"? Is it not still just Safari Mobile? That's just a web browser. Without a keyboard. I love Safari mobile on my wife's iPhone, but I still prefer having a keyboard and spending half as much for a netbook that does everything the iPad does and more.
There is a lot of data on this question, and it flatly contradicts Asimov's claims. IQ scores correlate not only with academic performance but also with job performance as well as others' intuitive impression of how "smart" a person is. That's why the army gives intelligence tests to new recruits: high-IQ soldiers (and mechanics and carpenters) do better, on average, than their low-IQ counterparts. Other types of tests, such as the hypothetical test devised by Asimov's mechanic, either have no predictive power or are predictive only as far as they correlate with g, or general intelligence, which is currently best measured by IQ tests. The physiological basis of g is unknown, but it is highly heritable and correlates with a number of physical variables such as brain volume and myelination.

If you want to learn more about the subject, I suggest this book, which concisely disposes of these and other popular anti-IQ arguments:

http://www.amazon.com/Question-Intelligence-IQ-Debate-Americ...
Engineer #2 at Mint.com on when to join a startup
So, to some degree, we're actually at N=3 or 4, with the iPhone 3,3G, 3GS and various incarnations of the iPod Touch being where Apple finessed many of their elements like copy/paste. Also, the mature application development environment, and the 150,000+ Applications would not be what you'd typically find on a Generation 1 device.

What's ironic is that for the longest time, the major hit against Apple was that it didn't put much effort into providing backward compatibility with it's platform, unlike, say, Microsoft that would let you run your DOS Application in an operating system built 30 years later.

Now, the tables have turned, and almost all of your original iPhone applications run just fine on your iPad. It actually drives me crazy how friends of mine ignore the newer iPad apps so they can play the old school iPhone games that I transferred from my iPhone.
To misquote Churchill: "Science is the worst form of learning about the world except for all those others that have been tried."

Science isn't perfect. Far from it. But at it's best it's a very effective way of learning about the world we live in. At its worst, it's still better than any alternatives we've found so far.
We also use SendGrid and have been very happy with it.