skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Google Voice app never purported to be a VoIP solution. It's simply a UI to the Google Voice API. When you attempt to make an actual call with it, it sends you off to the built-in dialer with a "predialed" phone number. The calls you send and receive via Google Voice use your cellular talk plan and not the data plan (which VoIP would do.)

tl;dr- GV is not a VoIP service; it's a call management service
Right now it is behind nginx. So unfortunatly it does not work for now. But we have plans to make it work:-)
I hear you loud and clear and appreciate your viewpoint and feedback. Keep an eye on us, wonderful things are in the works.
Tell HN: Khan Academy is hiring full-time devs
Only sending this link to HN for now. We're building our dev team, full details here: http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs/dev

Instructions to apply are at the bottom of that link, and if you have any specific questions feel free to email me. ben+HN@khanacademy.org

(For those unfamiliar w/ Khan Academy, check out Sal's recent TED talk: http://www.khanacademy.org/video/salman-khan-talk-at-ted-2011--from-ted-com)
It would seem that to trust no-one but be cautious of all reports is the correct stance.

We know there IS radiation and we know that pretty much ANY radiation coming from any plant that has the words "disaster" "chernobyl" "meltdown" "breach" or any other range of descriptors is certainly BAD.

So, take-aways == radiation escapes, radiation bad, don't know truth == stay very far away.
Is this specific to France, or a case of the EU data retention directive? (Which basically requires storing all calls you make, your position, your surfing history and email headers)

More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...
When looking for ideas, consider what you'd enjoy using or a tool you wish existed. Have a specific idea of something to learn with each project.

If you are looking to learn Python, Learn Python the Hard Way is excellent: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/index
Are you kidding? Pressing a button is way easier and faster than calling a person and telling them where you are. Seeing the fare and paying it on your phone before even reaching the destination is way better than settling with the driver using cash or credit cards while sitting in the car at your destination. This is a far better experience than calling a normal cab service.
Rockstar Games' Sam Hauser on Selection by the Tribeca Film Festival
The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival has broken with tradition and included the first video game to be honored as an Official Selection.
How to Hold the Right Kind of Attention
Geez where do we get these stupid fallacies?

>"There are some things that can't be self taught."

Do books not matter anymore? The most brilliant ideas ever conceived and implemented in society are written down. All information that goes into your head comes in as a concept in some form or another. If it can be conceptualized, it can be communicated (whether in a class, a book, or experienced through trial and error). What we're really saying is there are some concepts that self-taught programmers aren't discovering. Point them out and they'll find them (they're in books).

School is awesome. I went. But don't believe the hype.
Point taken - Ill redact such a statement made in a moment of heightened emotionality :)
...he goes ballistic...

Is this hyperbole or is there a Ballmeresque chair-throwing incident I don't know about?
There's a great message in here: All the hustle in the world is wasted on a problem no one wants solved.
this is why its essential to do your accounting, or have someone do it. Dollares add up and even the big boys make mistakes; $52M mistakes, to be exact.
Read SICP, do all exercises. No, don't simply read the book, you have to do the exercises.

Read Knuth's Concrete Mathematics, do all the exercises you can, but this time this is not a requirement.

Forget about Java related design patterns.

Now you know more about programming and CS than 99% of population. Problem solved.
"One in 50 combatants in Afghanistan is a robot"

Uh. No. There is one robot for every 50 US soldiers. The Taliban are not using many robots at the moment.
http://www.khanacademy.org/jobs/dev

and

http://www.khanacademy.org/video/salman-khan-talk-at-ted-201...
Early Access Program for JetBrains appCode, Objective-C IDE
> groan ...

Invalidated the entire point, I suppose?
Dennis Crowley: Don't think of Foursquare as a game
'We have a responsibility to live well' -Ronald Dworkin
Awesome, my client requested just that for his project.

I wish I was kidding.
Does the Motorola Atrix use your technology or has Moto rolled out their own tech?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVfs4zKrgk&feature=relat...

The first minute establishes the conditions.
Very true. I almost expected there to be an "Add to cart" button at the end of the article. :-P

But seriously, there are cases in which both hiding and flaunting prices make sense. If you believe cost is a competitive advantage and your competition is unable to match it, it makes sense to flaunt it. When one or both of those things aren't true, it makes sense to hide them, give quotes, etc.
Regardless of Apple’s reasoning, the move sends a clear message to potential advertisers: Stay away from the jailbreak market.

"Stop, or we'll ask you to stop again?" That's not really all that scary sounding.
Also, isn't the best way to defend against this once it's there not to try to clear it only to have it come back later, but to shuffle it's content so much that their perpetrator can't make use of it? The core of it is it's resiliency thanks to redundancy, so let's corrupt it so that the information becomes noise.
There's no taking away from "better than any launcher in history". On the other hand, the comparison to the Delta IV isn't as informative as you might think it is. Falcon uses kerosene for fuel and kerosene is quite a bit denser than the liquid hydrogen used by the Delta IV. Liquid hydrogen not only needs a larger tank, that tank also needs to be heavily insulated. One consequence of this is that you simply can't get as high a mass ratio with liquid hydrogen as you can get with kerosene. On the flip side, hydrogen delivers a higher specific impulse, so extra tank weight is offset by fuel that is substantially lighter.
Best Universities for Comp Sci in Europe
I am looking to study abroad as a CS major in college and was looking for suggestions of universities in Europe that I should be checking out. Thanks in advance!
"Apple isn’t saying why it asked Toyota to pull the app from the jailbreak community. The Mac, iPhone and iPad maker may be working to help maintain security on its iOS devices, or the decision could be about controlling all aspects of the platform, including advertising."

Or... the blindingly obvious reason. Apple doesn't want a de facto endorsement of the jailbroken ecosystem by a multi-national corporation out in the wild.
Lots of failures is "working as intended". The only way to understand the market is to try out lots of things and see how the market reacts. Remember, the point of innovation is to solve unmet consumer needs - if people understood them, they wouldn't be unmet.
"With Hipmunk I've been more cognizant about having a life. I work daytime hours, and I don't work quite as a late. But I also know a lot more, so we get more done in less time."

In another thread I got down voted much for saying work - life balance is needed. This quote brings to light that it's really a product of experience. That experience allows proper planning, a clear roadmap, and makes it easier to stay committed to a project/team/startup/X Inc.

Perhaps I should say that If you find your self working late hours, adding to an already 80 hour work week your probably missing some key knowledge and experience. If you can't plan at least a day or two in advance then try to look and find what knowledge your missing in order to plan and execute effectively.

A quickie on gaining exp:
- slaving away at some corp isn't so bad as long as you gain experience
- joining an existing startup is a good idea for learning the ins and outs without the pressure
- joining an incubator to boot camp these experiences

Obviously as the article stated working on something worth while is an absolute motivator.

I apologize for any grammar and spelling mistakes now because typing on the road from an iPhone is a pain.
Some Black Magic Python for n00bs
This really is impressive news.

Out of curiosity, is there a plan by any government to clean up the ever increasing mess of space junk in LEO ?
both plugins actually work surprisingly well together. Good combo and mitigates a lot of the whitespace issue.
To the naysayers:

What would you have to find out about this man to stop worshipping him? That he ate kittens?

Or are the facts simply irrelevant?
I don't think there's much to gain (at least right now) by using zmq in a simple single-client -> server setup.

I read the testimonials, which got me excited, so I then tried to make use of zmq in a system I was working on. Using plain old sockets, I could whip up a connection in a few lines (OK, python helps here), and deal with all failure modes associated with them. Mapping this robust setup to zmq, required multiple layers, async requests, and a polling mechanism. I don't recall now, but I may have had to throw a router in there as well. I'm not dissing zmq, as it's a great technology, and solves some complex problems well, but it's not for everyone, and people without complex problems will more likely be confused by it than helped.

The documentation is OK, but I think tries to abstract too much of what's going on, and just leaves you with a bunch of less-than-descriptive names for things that you have to take for granted. All the mamas, papas, and dealers analogies didn't help me at all.
Anecdotal evidence: My brother was doing a PhD at Yale and was a TA for a 1st year chemistry class. He was marking papers and gave a few of them an 'F' because they were terribly done. The professor told him to re-mark them because the school motto is "You don't fail at Yale"
To be fair, you should actually quote what I wrote which was:

"Personally, I think the differences come at the top end. I think computer science students who've spent a lot of time doing research (particularly Ph.D.s) gain something that can't be self-taught."

So, in this context, I think it makes sense. Yes, there will always be edge cases like Ramanujan (0.00001% of the population) but I took a little liberty not to qualify every single statement I made.

If anything, this was more about giving respect to the <1% of people who have Ph.D's. But I guess you were offended.
You jest, but unit measurement differences are very similar to radix differences. Being able to think in multiple units/bases is a useful skill.
> That's less than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.

Before anyone tries to estimate how much space tourism will cost, remember that the actual weight of humans will make up a tiny fraction of the total weight of any orbiting hotel. Probably need to multiply by an order of magnitude or two.
Probably more like "stop or we'll kick you out of our MFI program"
I hate to be "that guy" but are downvotes really warranted here? Wouldn't it be sufficient to provide a correction?
Phisher dupes Conde Nast out of $8 million with just one email
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Russia_To_Spend_2_Bln_Doll...
First try, 91. Once the fourth game comes on it gets really hard.
And self-preservation of the management political class. How often does a corporate reorg reduce the number of managers?
That was an interesting read.

And thanks for not having a graphic-heavy or obscure blog theme.
"You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella" - Tood Jackson, Product Manager, Gmail http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/14/key-to-gmail/
No one here wants to discuss Eleanor Roosevelt with you.
Активия
С изобилието си от добре защитени и лесно достъпни национални паркове, скалното катерене, спелеологията, водните спортове като каране на кану и каяк, и пешеходният туризъм също са популярни видове активия в Чешката република.
"It's awesome to see a fundamentally engineer-driven company like Google and a fundamentally designer-driven company like Apple become so successful."

Out of curiosity, what do you think Amazon is driven by, fundamentally? I'd put them right up there with Apple on the product innovation front.
I'm positive the second comma shouldn't be there. (I wouldn't normally comment on commas, but it seems on-topic...)
Is Gifted and Talented a Life Sentence?
Project Calliope: The Musical Instrument in Space
Says a lot about HN that you are only posting it here for now.
This is OT, but I have a couple tips that can help people who are counting calories.

1. You don't have to be exact on any given meal. It's OK to make errors that will be canceled out by other errors.

For instance, if you buy a can of soup, and it says it contains 2 servings of 200 calories each, and you are going to have half for lunch today and half for lunch tomorrow, you do not need to carefully measure out exactly 1/2 of the soup. Just eyeball it and count it as 200. You'll be off today, but you'll be off tomorrow in the opposite direction by the same amount.

2. Once you've got into reasonably good eating habits, consider tracking calories by weeks or even months, rather than days. For instance, instead of aiming for about 2400 calories/day, aim for 16800 per week, or 73048 per month. (This works best if you are single, or at least if you can keep your food separate from that of other people).

If you do that, you can switch to accounting for your calories when you buy them, rather than when you consume them. For example, if you buy a carton of milk (8 servings x 160 calories/serving), just record it as 1280 calories.

3. If you are trying to lose weight and you intend to remain at your new weight once you reach it you need to change habits. If you go on a diet, reach your goal, and go back to your old eating habits, you will go back to your old weight.

When you start begin by eating just like you normally eat but track everything for a couple weeks. You'll probably find some things that surprise you there. (My biggest surprise was just how many calories were in a #2 from Burger King).

You'll probably find several places where you can make an easy adjustment and knock a lot of calories off. E.g., if you get lunch every day at fast food joints, you might find that you can downsize one item each day (single burger instead of double, regular fries instead of large, medium soda instead of large) and not notice any reduction in your satisfaction with the meal, but you'll save a ton of calories.

Once you have an understanding of where your calories are coming from, you can then slowly work on changing habits. The key is to go slowly. Make a change, become used to it, let your body recalibrate to where that is what it considers normal, and then make the next change.
Obama, Zuckerberg To Hold Town Hall Meeting At Facebook HQ
But before I went to college I was self-taught and after college I consider myself to be self-teaching all the time. Learning should never end.

And while in college were probably self-taught too. As an ex-academic I believe formal education is about credentialing. Being able to tell someone that you've acquired a degree of mastery we believe is appropriate to some level. And that's fine, but I fundamentally believe that all learning is really self-taught.

Someone lecturing to you is just a different medium from reading it in a book or online video. In all these cases someone who knows the topic better than yourself has manifest some information in some way for you to learn. (It's not like anyone using the term "self-taught" actually means they learned how to do AI from first principles. They learned it by reading a book written by Russell & Norvig.)

And with that said, let me say that CS isn't programming. No more than a degree in biology is the same as being a doctor. In fact the profession of doctor is so specialized they created a special degree just for it, with residencies in specialties -- and you don't need a bio undergrad degree to get into med school.

And as a general rule, if you're passionate about an intellectual pursuit you'll probably be pretty good in it (not asserting how the causality works). Those that learn via books outside of a formal setting are self-selected as it requires a special type of discipline. Although as more people race to become founders and teach themselves, this pool probably gets diluted.
Also, there are many kinds of self-taught programmers. Some are task-oriented learners* , and will learn CS concepts they encounter on the way to achieving their underlying goal. (This seems to be the kind the article has in mind.) This has its problems. For example, rather than realizing that their problem is easily solved with parsing tools, they may just lean harder on the regular expressions they already know. Learning within a classroom setting would direct them to ideas they may not otherwise encounter, nudging them out of local maxima.

Others self-learners try to get a full overview of whatever niche they're working in. Perhaps they've been burned by missing concepts from purely task-oriented learning, or perhaps they find having some big picture understanding makes finding practical applications easier. (I fall into the latter.) One problem with this group is that learning everything by breadth-first search can take a while - I wrote a web server from scratch to figure out how web programming works, while some people would be content just going through a Rails tutorial or something. That kind of perpetual, open-ended research really adds up, though.

* just making up terms here.
I'm actually surprised things haven't gotten cheaper by more than a factor of 5 in half a century. (If anyone's wondering, $1.11 Billion is in 2011 dollars.) Does anyone know what the primary costs are? People, construction, raw materials, etc.?
I think you are answering your own question here... You ask if it can be good to travel, learn, get funded, have a strong product, and finally move to the US? GO FOR IT!
interested in knowing more abt it
I don't want to be rude either, but Chili is either the fruit of a plant from the genus Capsicum, or a tex-mex restaurant chain. Neither of those refers to the country Chile, which I presume is what you meant to say.
Riding the startup roller-coaster: The Madness
Creating and Changing a PowerShell Profile
Reddit should try this to get some extra funding for another developer.

Nice to see that ballsy phishing/social engineering tactics are still in play. I am reminded of the famous deposit slip scam...

http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/deposit.asp
Considering the first, I suppose it's best to try and integrate display into ordinary-looking sunglasses. Some work has been done to develop "covert HMD" like that. [1,2]

However, the prototypes don't seem to have solved the problem of inputting vision field video - there is no camera hidden inside the sunglasses as far as I can tell.

[1] Steve Mann - Intelligent Image Processing.
[2] http://users.cwnet.com/vvortex3/hmd/
This jumped out at me:

> With Hipmunk I've been more cognizant about having a life. I work daytime hours, and I don't work quite as a late. But I also know a lot more, so we get more done in less time.

This is my experience as well. I don't have the same energy I had even five years ago, but I still get a lot more done because I'm about an order of magnitude more productive than I was when I started out.

This suggests that the standard model of founders as young firebrands willing to pour three years of output into a year of development isn't the only model that can work.

The bigger challenge for older would-be founders is that it becomes harder to walk away from the steady income and job security that comes from several years working for established employers.
NowJS dev here: regardless of what you may think of our project, we are not responsible for this post. We posted a link to nowjs exactly once and also two unrelated projects/blog posts that did not promote NowJS in any way.

I'm going to put this to rest here: we do not endorse this dupe post.
Looks like there's an opportunity here for an entrepreneur to set up a consumer market. At $3,000 / kilogram you'd make a tidy profit if you could attract sufficient customers.
But wouldn't a Ph.D., as in reading research papers and arriving at some unique new insight, be closer to "self-taught" than "taught existing knowledge from someone's lecture"?
Translating MATLAB -> C isn't too bad and could be done without any domain knowledge. Just remember the pesky 1 start for MATLAB arrays... Having a quick glance through the code I haven't seen any major reliance on MATLAB built-ins. Also "most of the tracking code is in MATLAB" is false. The tracking builds upon the Lucas-Kanade tracker in lk.cpp which uses OpenCVs implementation. I'd estimate a couple of full days of work tops to re-write in C.

Qualifications: I have had to speed up (i.e. rewrite in C) a lot of complex MATLAB code.
"Doesn't have a CS degree" isn't the same thing as "self-taught." Though I don't have a CS degree and I suppose I learned the basics on my own, I was largely taught how to write software by my peers. I learned a lot by working with really talented developers, and finding places to rub shoulders with them - mailing lists, conferences, blogs, HN etc.

That said, I think the hardest thing to learn outside of academia is the big picture, the general landscape of computer science and software development. It's really useful to know what you don't know, but it's hard to get that without actively seeking out something resembling a CS curriculum.
Great thoughts. Entirely agree.
Do you actually believe the price of a Bitcoin would remain statically frozen in the present, if everyone was using it?
We do it differently. In a traditional bribery situation, one bribes the official to get a specific "exception" through. In the US, we declare that we aren't paying umpty-thousand dollars a year so that Johnny can get an F and that our contributions to the college will be going down if this continues, and in the spirit of American egalitarianism and fraternity, we lower the standards for everyone. Basically, we've collectively bargained the bribery rather than doing it on a per-student basis.

I'm not entirely clear myself on the exact breakdown of truth vs. sarcasm in the preceding paragraph.
I'm a mostly self-taught programmer (I took a class on QBasic and a class on Visual Basic in community college).

At the risk of generalizing, self-taught programmers tend to learn things as we need them, since our primary focus seems to be on making features or making products.

I will say that I greatly appreciate the academic programmers though, as without them I wouldn't have any tools to work with. I have no drive to create a new database storage engine, a more efficient bloom filter, or an experimental programming language, but I'm grateful that someone gave me those things to play with.
Edinburgh is pretty good and has nice new building in a central location in a wonderful city:

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/informatics/
How would you compare this product to the consumer-grade stuff Vuzix[1] makes?

[1] http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/