skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Add FedEx-like tracking to email with CommAssure
This came about from the inevitable solve-the-world's-problems conversation(s) that happen over beers.

I'd heard time and again how email could "never cut it" for "real" business communications because it was so unreliable, especially in the face of increasingly fervent anti-spam measures. The whole "I never got that message" trick has happened to us all; we've all had emails disappear and require re-sending. (People also lie and abuse that excuse when it's convenient for them! :-)

I decided to see if I could code up a solution that would be everyman-accessible and seamless to use, and integrate into existing workflows.

Commassure is my new SMTP-based service that automatically adds tracking, delivery confirmation and integrity verification to all your outgoing email. After a brief configuration step you use your SMTP-compatible client just like you always did. iPhone, iPad, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc. are all compatible.

I'm interested to see if this gains any traction at all. If there's demand, I'll continue to expand the service with new features to address whatever good suggestions come my way. Any constructive criticism is welcome.

Technologies: Ruby on Rails 3; PostgreSQL; Linux.

http://www.commassure.com/
How can they afford fuel on 8k per month?
The War Over ‘Mother’s Day Flowers’
> More importantly, the database exists without the application.

This. I'm continually amazed how many people think they will only ever have one application talking to their database. Unless your project promptly crashes and burns, you're going to find yourself using tools in different languages, and it's going to be incredibly painful not to have invested in competent data modelling that avoids relying on some specific ORM.
The completeness of our slashtags depends on the slashtag. Do you think /health has too few sites? Among the technical slashtags, /perl and /python are pretty complete, and the rest of the them are currently getting some love from the Stack Overflow community. It takes time for slashtags to mature, similar to how Wikipedia was less useful on launch day verses now.

By the way, there's a /google and /bing on blekko.
That said, I'm American, went to Oxford and am now at Cambridge, and I can assure you that most Humanities graduates are shockingly innumerate--I seriously doubt most Arts students given the Math SAT would be able to do more than shake a stick at it. The best evidence is probably in PPE; the only people who stick with E(conomics) did Math/s at A-level. The system doesn't encourage it. You do your 3-5 A-levels, and people tend to focus on the Arts or the Sciences, with little to no overlap.

Also, I was never offered sherry at a tutorial, but I did have friends studying English who were offered wine~

On a related note, this is a good summary of the differences between English vs American values/elite educations: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/apr/23/whats-better-o...
I am also fine with somebody that once in a while posts his own blog posts. Show HN is usually used for personal projects.
Oh, "for real?" Well, then I'd better listen to what you have to say.
I definitely agree the problem was multifaceted. I also believe the problem runs very deep at the same time.

Even if the courses were 10 minutes each like Khan, I doubt the view rate would be increased by much in this case.

Also, it is true that there are no immediate and visible penalties for not watching it, though at the same time, being penalized through completely artificial means (chasing artificial targets, aka what happens in school) isn't healthy for anyone and I believe contributes to one of the major problems we're having.

Thirdly, I never was ensured mastery (or even pushed towards it) in any class I ever took. I was ensured a good grade if I jumped through the right hoops just how the teacher wanted it.
They do see it coming and that is why they are working like crazy to boost the economy before the inevitable slowdown.
If you have to say that you're hiring the best, you're not. Programmers may be less social than most, but word still gets around. If you're truly the best, you won't need to advertise that fact, programmers in the area will already know and will be beating a path to your door.
I'm curious, what platform / technologies is Tasskr running on?
Things to note:
* Apple already uses Nuance code in their phones.

* Current iPhone speech is native, doesn't require network

* Nuance also offers iOS apps that do speech recognition over the network (I use this all the time to send "long" SMS/emails, and it works decently).

* Google's offerings are network-based, and exceed current iOS capabilities (anyone have a chance to compare the usability between the two?)

So if this deal comes to pass, will it be an extension of the current (native) voice, or network based, or a hybrid?
/usr/bin/diff depends on the following shared libraries for operation:

linux-gate.so.1 => (0xb7f31000)
librt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/librt.so.1 (0xb7f18000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7dc9000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7db0000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f32000)

Did you look any of this information up before making your statements? It looks like ulib.dll is a DLL for file utilities, which would perform an analogous purpose as librt and libc in any UNIX system.
Don't know why you're being downvoted, but I've been thinking the same thing for a few years now.

How you would go about actually using it, and not having it collide/break websites is another question.
Alright. Android it is then.
Did you just claim that engineers are usually irresponsible by saying that "engineers [tend to focus on] the ends rather than the means"?
"CommAssure keeps a complete record of the email." -- the problem is that the email may contain confidential information. Using FedEx, you are reasonably sure that FedEx envelopes and packages aren't opened by the courier service.

And the comment "We hold the same ethical standards as other email services such as Yahoo Mail, GMail, etc." doesn't really cut it for extremely confidential messages. You can tell, for example, if FedEx opened an envelope, read the contents, and put it back.
It has been known for at least a decade. I had some resource on this but they went bye-bye along with my hard drive. I'll see if I can find them and edit this post.
Well, you could, but that would leave your wallet (containing all your BitCoins) at a remote server, removing much of the point of Bitcoin. It would be just another Paypal basically (although you would be able to send the money between different "Bitcoin-PayPals" without a fee).

It would also make it much harder to send Bitcoins to other devices/people. With a native app you could for example detect other Bitcoin clients in near proximity via BT/same Wifi to make it much easier to transfer money, with the web you're stuck typing a long cryptic address.
A few reasons:

- They only make liveburns a few times a year.

- They experiment with different cheap fuels. One rocket ran on rubber and actually worked quite well.

- They're quite known around Denmark, so they get unbelievable prices on fuel from companies that want to be associated with the project.
As someone who went through CUED, I confirm that there are an awful lot of my friends in investment banking/consulting, however I know of a fair few (myself included) who now do startup's.

For example I do Mixcloud, and I have friends from uni days, who are founders in YC companies such as Heyzap, songkick, rapportive and webmynd. So not all of us turn to the dark side.... infact I would say a surprising number of them are now actively involved in internet startups.
Another answer: give me the choice of how my [tax] money is spent. I have no option but to pay you (taxes), and no say in how you spend it. Maybe its because I will never check the 'war' box and they need my money for it, I'd rather help pay for public education, social services for the elderly, disabled etc., and green energy research. If I had say on how my money is spent, we would not be having this conversation (I live in California and pay a gang load of taxes, majority of which goes towards things I don't support - naturally I'm not happy about the liberty taken on my behalf :-).
What's wrong with PDF support on Kindle?
Rails, Heroku, Jquery. Devise, nested_set, chronic, acts-as-taggable-on, acts_as_indexed gems. Spreedly for recurring payments. Getlocalization.com for translations. Clicky for realtime stats.
Yes. Facebook is much more intelligent right now. Last week I deployed an app for a client, it turned very viral, and facebooks bots stopped it in one hour.

The app only does this: you joiun, print on your wall, and must invite 3 friends to participe. That's all.

Anti spam bots suspended it.

So you can't run any viral app, except for the well known Zynga and all the rest of "parnters".
This is really noticeable if you go through A levels, then end up in a university course with a high foreign student intake. The first year is almost entirely catch-up, as those who didn't do A levels get the content pumped into them so that the course proper can start in the second year.
Actually I juxtaposed the definition of money and currency. The distinction is important. Money is a superset of currency and I got that wrong.

Most people think that playing the lottery is an investment strategy for retirement, I would not trust what most people think when it comes to economics. Little semantic games are hugely important to people. Look how pissed everyone gets when MS describe the MSPL as 'open source'.

Actually, my own private definition does add to the discussion, when enough people connote a word to have a different meaning it changes the definition of a word, all based on their own little private definitions of words.

Your views on semantic contexts are 'fantastic'. I'd suggest you look that one up on the OED if you want to understand the definition I'm using, most people would get it wrong.
Private, Not Anonymous
I'm sure a lot of people that traveled out here for YC interviews travel, do the interview and head back home. This guy is out meeting half of SV. That's the sign of a great entrepreneur. Props to Wesley for taking the initiative and making the most of the trip.
Yes from what I've read it was initially closer to what later became the Newton.

Here's a link to the commencement address (13 minutes) if anyone wants to give a listen http://ht.ly/4P7M1
I believe the analysis of item #3 is incorrect. The explanation of not actually owning the product, while correct, is not the rationale for this section of the document. Can anyone with legal knowledge back me up on this?

3. Licensing: The terms state, "You agree that the Service, including but not limited to Products, graphics, user interface, audio clips, video clips [and] editorial content ... contains proprietary information and material that is owned by Apple and/or its licensors, and is protected by applicable intellectual property and other laws, including but not limited to copyright."

That sounds confusing. Handel explained it this way: When we buy something from iTunes, we are paying for the license to listen to music or watch a movie on our iPhone or other Apple device. But we are not buying the product itself and so we can't actually own it, he said.
"When you buy a book, you own the copy of that book but not the actual material," Handel said "What you are buying here is right to use music on certain devices."

The reference here is not to the items you're purchasing but rather "Products, graphics, user interface, audio clips, video clips [and] editorial content" - meaning the stuff they use to SELL/MARKET the music/movies/etc in iTunes, not the products themselves. They're talking about the reviews, the images, the sound clips or trailers, the actual iTunes interface - not the stuff you're buying.
I can see calling the wiki, and blog part of it bloat but bug tracking seems like a good thing to keep with the repo. If you are some where without network access, and you commit a bug fix you can update the bug tracker right then and there. No chance of forgetting to do it latter.
What's interesting to me is just how early Jobs was booted off the Lisa project, way back in 1980 before Apple's IPO. That's what led to Steve's involvement in Raskin's Macintosh project, and what allowed it to move beyond the stage of research project.

It's been suggested that the Macintosh project was allowed to continue at Apple because it kept Steve Jobs out of everyone's hair.

Fast forward four years to 1984, the Lisa appears to be a failure and the newly-released Mac appears to be a big success (at least initially). The Lisa and Mac teams are reorganized into a single group called "Apple 32", with Steve Jobs at the helm of this new group. During the initial meeting of the new group, Steve's first words to the Lisa people were "You guys really fucked up."

Even more interesting, the guy who took over the Lisa project from Steve in 1980, John Couch, returned to Apple a few years ago as VP of Education Sales. He appears in the top-left corner of the org chart in the linked article.
PDFs are just a terrible eBook format. They bake in a fixed page size, usually 8.5x11 inches.

The Kindle's screen being physically smaller than that, your display options are limited to scaling an image of the 8.5x11 page down to fit into 4.8x3.6 screen, at which point fonts are generally too small to read, or attempting to reflow the PDF's contents on-the-fly, which is noticeably slow and typically only gives acceptable results if the PDF contained an absolute minimum of formatting.
That's essentially the thesis of this 1978 paper, though they group evented programming under the broader "message-passing" style: http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/duality78.pdf
That's an extension of your reasoning.

Nothing is forcing people to minimize costs at the expense of others. There are many things I could do that are not technically illegal, but cause great problems for others. Is the responsibility of corporations to make it costly for me to be immoral? That seems to be what you're saying.
Last time I looked over it (I don't actually use iTunes anymore), a lot of the EULA was devoted to the content and how you can't pirate it, and so on. That seems to me to be the very things that the RIAA and other groups sue over. So even though you are correct, Apple's specific terms of use have not been tested, the idea (and who knows, possibly wording as well) behind it has been successfully used in court by the owners of the licensed materials.
Paper phone
> “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”

Anyone cares to explain that one? It left me confused really... The way I read it, he's a visionary and doesn't care how things are achieved as long as business is good. And to be honest that doesn't sound good for me - more like a dictator who will eliminate failing VPs whether the fault is on their side or somewhere else in the organisation.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلي وزيسكو بث مباشر اون لاين 8/5/2011 دوري ابطال افريقيا
You are a worthless leech on society
I can't say that I'm a fan of these new avatars. I think that Google is making some serious blunders on the graphics front. For example, I thought that the old chrome logo was beautiful until they changed it into the super simplistic icon that it is now. I think that new technology like the Chrome OS should be accompanied by high tech or modernist-looking logos and graphics.
Git has many commands which allow fine-grained manipulation of the staging area; stashes are a crude afterthought in comparison. The problem is that highly encouraged workflows like "git add --patch" inevitably lead to toxic commits which were never tested because they never truly existed in the workspace.
Again we're running into the geeks-trying-to-understand-the-law problem -- they always expect the law to be as sensible and self-consistent as geometry. But the law has no patience with reducito ad absurdum, and judges and lawmakers are quite happy to declare that X is legal and Y is illegal even if in some sense Y is really analogous to X.

As far as alternative currencies go, my understanding is that they're illegal under US law but you can get away with them on a small scale. The moment they reach a large scale or start getting used for money laundering, though, expect to start having legal problems, because the US Federal Government has reserved to itself the right to print currency.

Apple is wise to stay out of it, with the potential for legal trouble outweighing the potential profit from app sales.
Have you ever tried to set up a Gitorious box?

Not that it's difficult (it is) but it is a complete waste of people's time. If I want to fiddle with every aspect of my development tools, maybe I'm not Fossil's target.

Next time I need to set a small coding project (I attend a few OSS hackfests every year), I'll definitely consider Fossil instead of git.
It would be interesting to see what could be accomplished with alternative fuels. Although, the exhaust from something like rubber is probably not so good for the environment? Best of luck to them, thanks for the response.
I wrote a book on AI: Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes
http://www.CleverAlgorithms.com

It's about algorithms drawn from the fields of Computational Intelligence, Metaheuristics, and Biologically Inspired Computation and is intended as a reference for research scientists, engineers as well as a bootstrap for interested amateurs. Each algorithm has sample code in Ruby. I wrote it out of frustrations I had as a PhD student in not having a consistent "little black book of algorithms" for my field.
This is the case even aside from alumni-preference. As recently as 2006, 20% of people admitted to Harvard got double time or more on the SAT. In 2003, College Board stopped flagging scores that were achieved under extended time conditions. The way to get double time on the SAT is to get a particular learning disorder diagnosis, something less wealthy students have less access to, particularly considering the lower likelihood of their parents being in the same social circles as local doctors.
Having a small community and not being well-known are not advantages. I am not sure I can agree with this. Smaller communities are often nicer. Think of all the talk around here of growing pains, loss of niceness, comparisons to Reddit or Dig, eternal September, etc. that have come about as the community grows.
I wouldn't consider the knowledge of proper mission-critical testing to be of any sort mission-critical scenario. You can choose to potentially put your people at risk, but I think those decisions should be left to the actual people who will be going up, and not to a person that wants to arbitrarily contribute to it like an open source project. Small patches can have huge consequences.
I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems to me that you are correct. They analyzed a different section (which is in several of their EULAs; under the Mac/iPhone App Stores' as "USE OF PRODUCTS AND THE SERVICES " and under iTunes' as "USE OF PURCHASED OR RENTED CONTENT") while quoting a section that stated that you couldn't reverse-engineer iTunes itself. A sample of what they're referring to:

Apple is the provider of the Services that permit you to license software products and digital content (the “Products”) for end user use only under the terms and conditions set forth in this Agreement.

[snip]

You agree that the Services and certain Products include security technology that limits your use of Products and that, whether or not Products are limited by security technology, you shall use Products in compliance with the applicable usage rules established by Apple and its principals (“Usage Rules”), and that any other use of the Products may constitute a copyright infringement.
"Again we're running into the geeks-trying-to-understand-the-law problem -- they always expect the law to be as sensible and self-consistent as geometry."

Well, there's only one solution then—we need to get more geeks in office.

Edit: Real geeks, not the "I own an iPad" that passes for geekery in Washington.
It means you can't hide behind excuses. If for example theres a problem with a vendor shipping components for a product line you're a VP for, it means you're responsible. It means the only acceptible answer is that you found a new supplier and we got the product out on time. Not 'we're late because our manufacturer couldn't hold up their end of the deal'. It's a great philosophy, to my mind it's what defines a true manager in any org. If only AT&T implemented it too.
If the janitor didn't have reasons to hide behind, then he should have taken initiative to get the new keys or pick the lock or break the door or whatever it'll take to achieve his goal.

The notion is that a VP shouldn't have reasons to hide behind. She must achieve her goal using any approach necessary, especially since her process is not spelled out for her like the janitor's is. A VP should take initiative even if it takes hiring a new team, or doing it herself, or changing the product, or getting the necessary partnership or distribution deal--whatever it takes to surpass Steve Jobs's expectations.

Steve Jobs doesn't have expectations for janitors.
> Rarely works. Doesn't solve any problems of the BIOS

Really? I don't think so.
you mean GLaDOS
People seem to be answering two completely different questions on that site. The first question is "Does Harvard give preference to legacy admissions?" The answer to that question is unequivocally yes.The second question is "Can you pay your way into Harvard independent of legacy admission." The answer to the second question is far more interesting and far less official.
Google doesn't have to accept it for people to use it on Android.
Where do they get 56 pages? The document they link to is only 20 pages if printed, and is really 4 documents:

1. The terms of sale for the the iTunes store, the Mac app store, the iOS app store, and the iBook store.

2. The iTunes store terms and conditions.

3. The terms and conditions for the two app stores and the iBooks store.

4. Their privacy policy.

They don't link to it, but there is a EULA for the iTunes application itself. That's 79 pages. However, it includes 18 copies of the license, in 18 different languages. The English part is 2 pages--and it isn't even all Apple. It includes separate terms and conditions for Gracenote's CD identification service and 3Com's Kerbango Tuning Service.
Mission failed.
Also to add that Git doesn't track files it tracks content.
Another way the rich get in to Ivy League schools is through recruitment for "aristocratic sports" such squash, crew, sailing, polo, golf, etc. Most of these sports are not offered at public schools, and even if they are, the only way to attain the necessary skill level is through expensive private coaching. Golden's "The Price of Admission" provides a thorough look at these practices.
MNPP v0.0.9 has been released
Support for php 5.2.*, Set the php version to use from app preferences, Add default config for wordpress sites and Runs MNPP from console with php52 or php53.
Indeed. And the corollary is that every possible performance benefit of non-blocking code is in principle achievable with threaded code, though some of the scheduler may need to be implemented in userland, with more explicit hinting of things like lifetimes of local variables in stack frames, etc., to get there. The true benefit of event-oriented network programming may be simply in what it makes explicit vs implicit. By making the tracking of state awkward, it forces its minimization and consolidation. By a process of Worse is Better, it ends up being more performant for scaling despite (usually) being more awkward to program (especially if you have any kind of nesting or recursion structure in your protocol).
Maybe you already know this link, but it's worth mentioning anyway:

— www.folklore.org

The whole story of the Macintosh, told by the people who built the Macintosh. A great read.
Password Utilities as a Single Point of Failure