skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google Voice + Gmail, you can:

* set GV to forward txts to GM, replying to the email will reply to the txt

* have transcribed voicemails emailed to you with a link to play the original in the email

* use the "Call phone" button under chat to make outgoing calls via the web for free (for now)

I think that's what he meant, at least. Only one of those things (the last) isn't available outside of Gmail itself.
I think what he meant was the ability to place calls through GV from GTalk (chat window). On a side note, Google's released a great Chrome extension for GV.
He's right about giant corporations becoming stifling to innovation, but I disagree about Norway. There is no reason why Americans should need to pay over twice as much per capita to provide the same barely adequate health care for their employees!

Startups are even more vulnerable to high monthly startup costs than they are to lack of financing. You can get by on credit cards working out of your garage, but not if you rent a large unit in an office park and not if you need to shell out hundreds per month per employee for health insurance.

Right now, college students are creating most startups. That's not only because they know the newest technology. They have no responsibility to pay for or protect a family. The single greatest innovation that would prompt the formation of more mid-career American startups would be any reform that takes the cost of health insurance off of corporate balance sheets. It seems most likely that would be some kind of "Medicare-for-All" system, though other innovations may be possible.
You can use any unlocked tri-band GSM phone as a phone on any GSM networks, but many of them use different bands for 3G. In the US, the only other GSM provider is T-Mobile, which doesn't share AT&T's bands.
Yeah, I tested Sparrow a while back - shame it's no longer possible to try it out. :(
I'm a lot like the OP [Xtac]. I was born in Oklahoma and raised to speak English. I picked up Hindi off my parents, who are from India.

It's not difficult for me to speak Hindi, but it's not easy either. My limits are very basic Hindi, or phrasing answers that are very based on the question asked.
Hell you could just do it on the airport shuttle bus.

Or at the passport issuing office. Now that would be chaos.
> you don't get to use that money, ever, until you retire

You can typically loan to yourself, especially for things like first home ownership (considering the average age here, most of us are probably in that bucket).
Why The Daily Is So Yesterday
How exactly is he a troll? He's been one of the leading fighters against software patents, and has presented years of good analysis.

The notion that he's some kind of troll seems to have originated at Groklaw, most likely because he violates the Groklaw Prime Directive (do not criticize IBM).
SAT Collision made easy: Part 1
The interesting thing is that fingers with the prints removed actually always do have damages that make them unique. In fact, it is usually easier to identify a print from your fingers now, than before. So good luck with that.
P.L. 104-191 contains changes in the taxation of U.S. citizens who renounce or otherwise lose U.S. citizenship. In general, any person who lost U.S. citizenship within 10 years immediately preceding the close of the taxable year, whose principle purpose in losing citizenship was to avoid taxation, will be subject to continued taxation.

http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_778.html
A minimalistic Node.js framework that makes setting up an MVC project a breeze
Neuron Robotics is a Boston-area startup making a little USB device for prototyping hardware and robots with really easy to java libraries.
http://www.neuronrobotics.com/neuronrobotics/store/dyio/
To summarize: Google is asking Oracle to provide evidence of specific devices that are infringing on Oracle's patents/copyrights. Oracle suggests, and author agrees, that this constitutes Google throwing its partners under a bus. Author goes on to make somewhat questionable claims that this might eventually cause Oracle to sue popular app makers.

"Instead of holding Google responsible for the downstream, Oracle might then have to enforce its rights against device makers, telcos, app developers, or users. I doubt Oracle would sue every app developer or user out there, but developers of wildly successful apps could be at risk, and it wouldn't be a comfortable situation for corporate users that have thousands of Android devices in operation."
This guy is the epitome of concern trolling.
I have been using Sparrow since christmas and I really like it. On a large screen, Mail.app just does not look right.
Loving the gmail keyboard shortcuts. Seems like every app I like must be keyboard friendly now: From Things to The Hit List, from Mail.app to Sparrow, from Textmate to vim. I blame vim.
Aha, good explanation, thanks. I still have to think with all of Google's brainpower, they could figure something out. They already allow "starred" results, which I presume would function somewhat similarly to a blacklist from a technical standpoint (just showing instead of hiding).
Give it a couple of days. The Free, but ad-supported, version is still under Review
This is the best, congratulations.
Ask HN: Equity Agreements
When asked about shareholder agreements, can anybody give some insight on the ideal response? Is the #1 reason investors ask so they can make sure that the founders are comfortable with their stake?
Are they understanding if certain founders carry a sizable chunk or does that lead to more questions than answers?

When we originally sat down to go over our percentage breakdown, we considered some of the following:
-idea origins
-research & development
-recruiting/hiring
-tech contributions
-money invested
-time commitment
-expertise
-future contributions

After talking things through, here was equity breakdown for four co-founders: 60/20/12/8

Do prospective investors just want to know that we've talked things through or would they challenge (e.g.) myself for holding a significant portion more?
This is really cool but feels a lot like Wave and I cannot help but feel the goal of Convore is to replace it. More power to them I know several people that loved it(students mostly) and miss it now that its gone.
Things OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice could learn from Microsoft
OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are two of my favorite open source office suites, and LibreOffice is quickly becoming an even bigger favorite.
BTW, I'm the author of this software. So I've been trying to figure out how to save things locally for awhile. I realized that HTML5 has a File System API which in Chrome 9 can FINALLY write to the local SANDBOXED environment. This feature is planned!!
Well, it's hard to tell. When looking at the photos without any frame of reference, the phone looks enormously thick because it's hard to visualize how much smaller the face is. Apple had a similar problem when they announced the iPod 5G - it was thinner with a wider screen, which led to the illusion that the device itself had actually gotten wider.
Good point. I'm studying Software Development and Business Management in year 12 this year, so hopefully that will give me an insight to which one I enjoy doing more. But I think the programming route seems the most exciting!
it would be mostly useless. the content today on the web is very different from the content even a couple of years ago.
I've been to Peru a few times in the past couple years. Every time I passed through the immigration counter, they swiped my passport through a reader, and up on the customs officer's screen came a list of my travels since getting my current passport. Yeah, Peru sees a lot of tourism traffic -- more than many countries, but they're also not exactly first world, and technology penetration is spotty, at best.

So, yes, they do track you.

(FTR, my passport is pre-RFID.)
That's not the way I heard it.

I read once of a guy who went on a picnic with the Gates family when he and Bill were both kids.

Mary Gates was always doing stuff like, 'lets see who can set the picnic table the fastest' and 'lets see who can put the forks out the fastest' etc

The guy came to realize that every single thing was a contest with a winner and a loser and for every winner there was a little reward and for every loser there was a little punishment.

If Gates was raised like this all the time it might explain why he did stuff like I personally heard from the horse's mouth.

This fellow told me that he was a salesman for the OS company who made a multi tasking OS way back in the day, their logo was three chain links, and he was at a trade show and Microsoft was there, back when they had ten or so employees.

During the pre-show construction phase, Bill Gates, during his mug shot era, walked by and spotted them and started screaming 'We're going to destroy you, we're going to whip you out!' etc.

The guy then says to me, 'That's exactly what happened, but he didn't have to be so mean about it.'
Try misspelling a few other well known domains. That tactic is still in full force. I.e. http://goggle.com/ (hint: this is not google, so fill it in at your own risk).
I am not used to seeing Jobs express so much emotion
I've had border guards order me to replace a passport that I carried with me in a rainstorm. It was perfectly readable, but they didn't like the way it had visible damage. Maybe the "security" features were less checkable.

That was in the days before RFID. My passport has a bar-code and every entrance station already has a reader, so RFID is redundant anyway.
Actually, roman numerals are easier to sum than arabics. To sum two roman numerals you just write all the digits together and collapse them as much as possible. There is no carrying over of digits and such.

Otoh, arabic numerals are a lot easier to multiply/divide. Before the wide adoption of arabic numerals all but the most educated couldn't perform simple multiplication/division.
It depends.

Just about any passport issued in the past decade or so has a machine-readable text strip on the photograph page. When the passport control officers take your passport they don't just compare your passport photo to your face -- they swipe the passport.

The RFID chip just allows them to store more data and get at it faster than the older machine-readable passports. The information that your passport (and its bearer) have arrived in country X is still available to country X's immigration database the moment you're past the checkpoint.

(Other risks of RFID passports include tracking or cloning, if the owner isn't keeping it in a tinfoil wallet or if the issuing agency's private key gets leaked. See also discussions on comp.risks passim.)
I've been using Sparrow for at least a couple of months now ("new"? Really?), and I'm very glad I switched from Mailplane. The minimally-obtrusive Tweetie 2 style interface really sold me on it.

I didn't know there was a paid version -- I'm using the free version with ads disabled. I'll glady pay up.
miss stating things on purpose is called LYING!

Sooner or later the money paths to his handler will show up..
By "barely adequate" health care, I mean that we should focus much more on nutrition and lifestyle and less on drugs and prosthetic organs. It doesn't matter how many surgical robots a country has if we make food choices that amount to poisoning ourselves and lifestyle choices like we're trying to turn ourselves into veal. Forcing people to pay cash on the barrel-head for health care won't improve that because humans make emotional, not rational decisions.
I'm not aware of a single book that covers all of those topics well. The New Turing Omnibus might be a good place to start for getting an overview of CS topics, but since you say that you want to become "much much better at the fundamentals", you might consider a serious study of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming.
For my mother, writing basically made up the majority of her work. Accordingly, she spent practically a decade of my childhood making sure that I could write. She nitpicked my essays down to the last word and criticized me both on small-scale issues (e.g. sentence structure and word choice) as well as large-scale issues (structure of an argument, etc).

At the time I didn't quite realize how useful this was. As a kid, I was rather annoyed that I had to spend so much time to write short essays. Everything I did was a back-and-forth process between me and her -- in retrospect, rather like a code review.

Today, for me, writing is basically second-nature. Even when typing on IRC, if I want to, I can write reasonably well without putting much effort into it. The most surprising discovery for me as an adult was that this isn't normal -- that, particularly outside of our community here, most people really can't write without significant effort. From my perspective today, those years of nitpicking school writing assignments were the single most useful thing my parents did for me, and if I raise kids, I will ensure that I do the same to them.

One consistent observation I've made over the years is that the highest concentration of "good writers my age" during childhood was to be found in school scifi/fantasy writing clubs, text-based RPs such as MUSHs, and so forth. I don't know which direction the relationship goes in however: do such activities attract good writers, or do people become good writers through them? Or is it both?
Chirply (YC S10) is Threadless for Paper Goods
They definitely do; that's the whole reason why you are required to have a passport in the first place. RFID just makes the process more efficient; there's nothing on the chip that isn't contained within the combination of your passport number and their database.
It all depends on what you're building but Drupal is an awesome CMS framework that you can extend and mold it into whatever you need. We run a small consulting shop and we leverage Drupal for a lot of our projects. From internationalized corp sites, ecommerce sites (we have a groupon-esqu clone), web apps, and even just as a back-end data store that our mobile apps interface to.

Unless you're trying to really do something super high performance, or have a real good reason why it absolutely needs to be in rails, as we always hear with startup advice, JFDI!

FYI, I know Drupal 7 was just released and its real pretty and shiny but make sure you look into all the compatible contributed modules. Many of them havent been ported over or fully tested for D7.
Hi earl, I was informed of you calling me a "liar" here and I understand words like that are used in online discussions without being meant personally. Anyway, I had provided links to where the code could be found -- in the public repositories of Android 2.2 and 2.3 (i.e., the currently most relevant versions for smartphones).

And in addition to the general repository, the code could also be found in various source availability packages published by Motorola, LG and Samsung: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/android-device-maker...
Dell and HTC left those files out.

Most of the confusion resulted from a very aggressive blog post by Ed Burnette, who runs a ZDNet blog that officially covers all sorts of software development topics but is overwhelmingly about Android evangelism. I'm an Android user, too; my blog is hosted by Google, and I use other Google services (even Buzz, really). But I'm skeptical of the IP situation concerning Android (and WebM, to be honest).
I've been programming for a solid 5 minutes now, so how do I make an MMORPG?
Yes you can probably whip out the Louis CK. I'll admit that part of it is acclimatization. I've come to expect good results all the time.

That doesn't detract from the fact that results are bad for many searches and that the google monoculture has thwarted it earlier success. I'm absolutely sure that my satisfaction with their product has declined. I know I look forward to a better search engine than google. In 2000 google was the better search engine.
I used to have severe atopic eczema on my hands and fingers (it cleared up about a decade ago, before the fingerprint nonsense came in). Typically between 2 and 6 of my fingers at any time would be so swollen or inflamed that the fingerprint was distorted or entirely absent. This varied over time.

Eczema isn't that uncommon (although mine was pretty severe) and frequently affects the fingers and hands (as well as elbows and backs of knees). If the biometric-with-fingerprint passports had been standard back then I'd have been in a world of hurt, with fingerprints morphing over a period of multiple months.
4chan isn't just /b/ and /b/ isn't all of 4chan as the saying goes...

Most of my time there was on /g/ /w/ and a few other boards like /mu/, but I first got hooked because of the raids on Wikipedia. 4chan is a fascinating place, not just full of CP as some would think.
Writing systemd service files
Advice for resume/position with big VC
Hi, Hacker News virgin here.
Long story short, I have a once in a lifetime opportunity to interview at one of the big VC firms, which I find surprisingly intriguing. Problem is, I've been working on startups for the past 2-3 years and I'm not sure how to write about these experiences without looking like a total amateur/buffoon.

Here are some accomplishments I'd like to highlight, but I'm not sure how to phrase them -- or even if to include them at all...

-- the fact that I am bootstrapped (perhaps this is a bad thing?)
-- I currently monetize the site through affiliate programs
-- I've had over 100,000 pageviews (which sounds GREAT to me, but to a VC will sound really weak)
-- my site pertains to motherhood (will this hurt my chanced because they will think I am too family oriented?)

Anyone have advice for: what to to highlight, what to omit, what do they really care about, etc?
TIA
Show HN: Magic file tracking (OSX)
I wrote this little Obj-C class to watch for and report changes on a list of files. The MAGIC part is that, like iTunes, it tracks the file even when its path changes (eg if you move it in the finder).

It's part of a larger project but I thought this part was particularly useful.

https://github.com/ptrsghr/FileWatcher
You are right about the Groklaw/IBM "prime directive". Groklaw actually linked to my NoSoftwarePatents campaign several times in 2004, and the relationship turned sour in January 2005 when I criticized IBM's patent pledge. Groklaw was then against me in connection with the Oracle/Sun debate, and completely flew off the handle in the IBM/TurboHercules context.

I have repeatedly (and even somewhat recently) tried to engage with "PJ" in a constructive dialog. Unfortunately, I didn't walk through an open door there.
WebOS is coming to PCs later this year
listening to Spotify and actually believing you are doing something better for the artist than those who pirate is no less than delusion.

That’s sad to hear, and I hope it gets fixed, but

But

I didn't sign up for Spotify in order to "do something for teh starving artists" I, and the people I know who signed up for it, did so because

1) it's legal

2) it's cheap

3) It gives instant access to a wealth of music beyond what I could ever listen to in my whole life. It’s not every song ever (for instance there’s no Frank Zappa, no Coil, and the cusswords in Cake’s songs are blipped out) but it's close.

The artists were starving when the major labels were ripping them off, the artists are starving now their songs get copied and torented. It’s sad that Spotify doesn’t solve that problem, and that it doesn’t cure cancer either, but hey, at least Spotify didn’t make things worse.

Spotify’s competition is yes, illegal downloads. Illegal downloads have the advantage in price - they’re free, but they lose out to Spotify in not being legal and being less searchable.

The "instant music" really is a distinguishing feature. e.g. Gary Moore dies -> Play some of his music on Spotify. Friend says he’s been digging a band called "Aesthetic perfection" -> Listen to them all afternoon on Spotify. As ever, casual listening, if the artist gets paid or not is a gateway to finding new music that you really like, leading to being a fan and buying CDs/MP3s, gig tickets and merchandise.
Clickable: http://sharedstatus.com

Looks like an interesting PM tool, will have to check it out a little later during my off hours. Thanks for sharing!
I'm all for allowing individual expression, but those signatures are really something.
The part where they put a giant white earbud in his ear is priceless, especially when he looks somewhat suspiciously at it.

EDIT: direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzDBiUemCSY&t=0m35s
HP tablet has integrated social networking built into the OS
How To Recover Video And Audio Files From Scratched CDs or DVDs
Product without price is no product.
Groklaw's take:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110209012513344

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110206222954641
Do any of those providers offer you a free choice of operating systems? i.e. install any operating system you like, any version? Or control of the full server?

Yes. I find it very odd that you seemingly don't understand your competition at all.
That's interesting, I also forgot to mention that my parents spoke punjabi, and I find myself understanding punjabi more so than hindi. While alike they are very different and often confusing.
Starbucks' iPhone barcode app easily scammed by screengrab
I was actually just trying the ad-supported Sparrow yesterday and earlier before this was posted. Great looking client imo but one thing I would have loved is a button to label and archive at the same time. Right now they only have a labeling button.
As a stopgap fix, the anchor links for the news items include the year. Obviously not ideal, but useful if you're really curious or confused about one of them.
...ok, I'll go to this thing if this scrolls up and tells me welcome...you know...the regular system card. So put it in, I go "It's gonna work!" and I hear the disk work and everything and this thing scrolls and goes right past the screen ... "where!?" So I pulled one of the ROMs out and I saw I had bent one of the pins under...after hours of getting this thing where I'd watch it scroll...

...at which point Jobs looks visibly bothered that the story just won't end. Was that Woz off-screen?

Edit: For some reason this reminds me of a scene in Raising Arizona: "...and all Pancho wanted was a hot roll and butter. So... why do you use the word 'trapped'?"
Neither Oracle nor I claim that the Android ecosystem is Oracle's property. It's just that if one or more of Oracle's patents read on Dalvik, every Android phone and every Android app can potentially be viewed as infringing material.

As far as I'm concerned, those seven patents are way too broad and fundamental. But they exist.
Being a founder broadens your perspective
HP’s WebOS TouchPad reveals iPad’s multitasking weaknesses
I take it as the total inability of most living species to plan resources on the long term for the best of everyone. Given the look of the population graph and non-renewable resources since 1900, its hard not to make the parallel with us.
Agreed. I saw Sparrow highly touted by friends on Twitter, but I couldn't wrap my head around it. But maybe because it reminded me of Twitter for Mac, which I can't wrap my head around either.

The new Postbox release is pretty solid and does almost everything I want.

It just saddens me that it's basically the future now and we still can't seem to get email clients that don't suck. Some are better than others, sure, but they all seem to suck in some fundamental way. FWIW, in Postbox it seems to be speed.
selena: is this not a conflict of interest with troll academy?
Thetopspace - How Long Has it Been
So why not move even further up the risk chain to all Emerging Markets or invest at greater then 100% equity by using leverage? Fact is, adding a small amount of fixed income investments smooths investment returns and has very little effect on total return whether you accept standard deviation variance as a measure of "risk" or not.