skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awkward. Let's reorder and compare them (differences are in italics):

1) “I welcome Google's commitment to defending Android and its partners.”

2) “We welcome Google's commitment to defending Android and its partners.”

-

3) “We welcome today's news, which demonstrates Google’s deep commitment to defending Android, its partners, and the ecosystem.”

4) “We welcome the news of today's acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem.”
Version numbers aren't meaningless if you have a good system, e.g. major/minor/patch. You just can't use them to compare between two different products. I know Moz wants to be a bit more like Chrome with frequent releases but it seems like this could be done a bit more sensibly wrt the version number.
You can't code around patents, there is too many of them for any one person to know if you're infringing or not.
Wow. Mind: Blown. What a great insight.

Words can't describe how well this resonates with me.
This is how I remember it:

http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/soft...

Guess I'll have to fire my Mac SE (and the Word 5 disks) to be sure...
Who's the hostage? It looks like they are trying to say Google is now responsible to ensure Android is defended. Perhaps they are trying to get it on the record that Google will not try to sue them? I'm not a lawyer, but it almost sounds like some kind estoppel thing.
Decorators and Doctors
Nice to see a large company (LG) having a Ph.D as a CEO
A character who can do magic no other can: sufficiently advanced technology.
If the version number is meaningless (hint: it doesn't have to be) then why bother mentioning it at all?
Who's intellectual property is this? Surely this valuable idea can be monetized by it's IP holder.
I believe the point is that google can now produce closed source motorola specific software, and not that android is no longer open source software.
Android is also a component, isn’t it?
None of these are good reasons for Microsoft to buy the failing RIM. The Playbook is a joke, the distinction between enterprise and consumer is rapidly fading, and while yes, RIM is profitable, they won't be for much longer. And re-energizing RIM employees? By all accounts I've read they're as pissed and frustrated as could be. Not an employee base I'd want to acquire.

My guess is the author of this article owns RIM stock...
Android is a component, not an end consumer product
A common misperception is that you need to be a non-profit in order to pursue a social mission but this is not necessarily the case. As a charity you can raise money but are limited in your ability to generate revenue. A for-profit organization is self-sustaining and doesn't have to rely on grants or donations.

Here are a few links:
Unreasonable Institute http://unreasonableinstitute.org/
Ashoka http://www.ashoka.org/
Social Edge http://www.socialedge.org/
B Corporation http://www.bcorporation.net/
But, see, the US can't install broadband because the population isn't dense enough; we're too spread out here.
In node.js, JSON is actually faster than msgpack: https://github.com/aikar/wormhole/issues/3

Also, due to V8's poor C++ API, msgpack doesn't support deserialization of 64 bit integers.
Not sure if I'd call that "advertising" -- it's a small green number on a green background. Before the rapid release schedule you'd have a 72pt version number hitting you in the face when you went to their main page within a week of a major release.

Never the less, I see what you mean about it being still "visible" to the user.
If he likes Legos, the Lego Mindstorms kits are awesome. You get to build projects and then program them to do things. I'm not sure how the kit is currently set up, but 10 years ago it shipped with a basic, graphical programming language. You snapped together programming blocks to create the logic. Would probably be perfect for a younger kid.

When your kid outgrows the graphical language (I did after a while) people have ported Java and C to the Mindstorms too.
I usually don't mind the sender knowing I've read their e-mail, but I do mind them knowing exactly when I read their e-mail, and I mind them being able to infer when I read e-mail in general.

I mind the sender being able to delete messages from my mail archive. The sender being able to update the message they sent me is fine, so long as I can still get at the original message and forward it to my boss.

If you can remotely delete spam after spammers have sent it from your server, then spammers can update all your sent messages to be spam as soon as they break into your server.
Pages has full screen writing mode, can open doc, and can export in doc and/or PDF. I never understood why it wasn't more popular than.
Google always could. The Google apps you find on your Android phone are not open-source. HTC's Sense or Motorola's Blur aren't open source either. In fact, everyone could. My Nook is full of proprietary software. Android is just a software environment people build apps on top. The open-source core is fairly decent when compared to the competition, but no phone manufacturer I know ships only that.
Yeah, the app had to be developed during 48 hours so I thought using Twitter for login would be better for me and also for users that don't want to fill forms and stuff.

But don't worry, I'm planning to add a way for non-Twitter users access it too.
Motorola isn't the only manufacturer to fail their customers like that. Samsung is worse and HTC is only slightly better, but overall the outlook for any Android phone getting promptly updated over the duration of the contract period is bleak at best.
I'm starting to become tired of such liberal use of the words 'hack' and 'hacker'. _Maybe_ 'marketing hack' would have been ok, but honestly there isn't even any programming involved here.

On an entirely separate note, nice product name. And that does seem like an interesting method for picking one.
I think what you're seeing is not written by the same person, (Google couldn't be caught impersonating the owners of their partner companies) but probably a set of statements written by PR assistants all on the same "Please give us a statement on..." request using the same source terms out of the press release. All of them are toeing the corporate partner line for now.
Defend against what?
so, who wrote this one statement originally and passed it on?
You are trying to tell me that someone like Warren Buffet with a net worth of $50 billion can really actually make good use of all that money? I know, "there can never be enough" out of principle. But really, with 50bn I imagine you could not (sanely) possibly spend it fast enough in a way where you get something out of it or in return; it would grow back faster in interest than you can dish it out.
That can change whenever Apple feels like it. Not so with Android. With mobile exploding, Android is excellent insurance for the future.
Guess which Web Browser
A simple Firefox addon to validate markup (even locally)
Android tablets are being pulled from shelves. What should they do? Just concede the market to Apple for the decade or so a serious attempt at patent reform will probably take? They're still not offensively suing anybody.
I think his analogy had more subtlety than might appear on an initial reading.

There's the component factor- android is a component used by multiple manufacturers. Thus, while the iPhone is always supply constrained (and growth is limited by the amount of supply they can produce, rather than the amount of demand) android phones, coming from multiple manufacturers have multiple factories and thus can produce more than enough supply to meet demand.

There's also a premium positioning implication in his analogy- the BMW is a fancy european car, while the Yamaha engine is japanese component. The iPhone is on the high end of the market right now where Apple is capturing something north of %50 of the entire mobile device market profits, while most of the adds for android phones I've seen have been of the "buy one get one free!!!" variety.
i hope they hire a few new product designers while their wallets are open. motorola phones aren't vanishingly minimalistic enough.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/237278/google_exec_says_apple...
GitHub repository: https://github.com/bpierre/simple-markup-validator
I would also note that it is worthwhile to be wary of the "double tax" rhetoric. At best, it is an ideological point of dubious worth - i.e., that there is a moral injustice in taxing some money twice. How much moral injustice? Well, I don't know - how much worse is it really than the idea of taxation itself? If I'm okay with being taxed, I'm probably more concerned with how much I'm being taxed, how fair it is compared to other folks, etc., than I am with whether it's two smaller taxes vs. one larger one.

At worst, though, it's a shell game that distracts from what's really going on in the tax code. In everything I've seen, taxes occur on transactions, not on stored wealth. So it's pretty easy to point at any income and outflow and argue that the money itself is being taxed twice. One could argue that the sales tax is a double tax - I'm paying income tax when I earn my paycheck, and then sales tax on the same paycheck when I spend it on groceries.

Anyway - in your example, the non-investor pays taxes on, let's say, $50k of income, then buys a car with it. The investor pays taxes on, let's say, $40k of income, invests it shrewdly, then takes the final $50k out of the investment and buys a car. The non-investor pays income tax on his $50k; the investor pays income tax on $40k, then capital gains on the $10k he made on the market.

The government could have easily taxed the investor on the entire amount withdrawn. That would obviously be pretty dumb, though.
Show HN: make phone calls when you can't talk. I would love feedback on this
Hello,

The idea is to be able to make phone calls when you can't really talk, by using text-to-speech and typing what you want to say instead.

The original incentive was a Twilio contest and to see if that would technically work. Now that it mostly does, I would love to read what you think and in particular if this is actually useful :) (and thus if I should look into ways to make it a "real", even if small, product)

Thanks a lot for your time!

The URL: http://speakforme.timotheeboucher.com/
I'd be curious as to what the sales of this are like. It's something I'd be tempted to buy at maybe $5-10 or so, but for ~$20 I'd just use either the System Preferences firewall, or drop down to pf. There aren't that many things that I want to block that it'd be worth it, I think.

Is the price based on dev time, relation to similar products (little snitch is ~$40), or random guesswork?
You could also argue that Einstein was procrastinating from dealing with the hardships in his life by immersing himself in physics. He was using physics as an escape from the troubles of his life (job, parents, etc).

Not that it really matters, but it is useful to look at the situation in both lights. There have certainly been situations where I stopped procrastinating on one task because a newer, more unpleasant task presented itself. "Boy, I bet I should clean my room instead of deal with these taxes!"
Fluid Simulation for Video Games (part 1 of 10)
Warren Buffett: misleading Argument, left out the effect of corporate income tax
Job Front: Tech sector hiring picks up
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

> The problem with the libertarian perspective is that it irrationally assumes the best of people when there is no incentive for them to do so.

I assume no such thing about people regardless of whether they are rich or poor.

I think crux of our disagreement is about the involvement of government in peoples lives. I heard a quote recently, "The more the government tries to do the less well it does everything", I might have mangled that slightly.

Your supposition is that we need the government to force us to be nice and act in a way that is beneficial to society, if so isn't that a losing proposition from the outset?. Who is the moral arbiter here?, I would really like to minimize the amount of situations where government passes judgement on its citizens.

What I am really against is mob rule, the state is a necessary evil, a large state is a larger evil.

I am convinced that while the last century's politics was dominated by left versus right, this century will be dominated by authoritarian versus libertarian. The world isn't black and white, in certain situations we can't avoid making those kind of judgements but where we can avoid it we should.
GUI vs CLI: Operation vs Expression
This is far and away not the best solution, but it works for me, and I can use it with only mild annoyance from a computer where I haven't "installed" it, by using an online sha256 generator. On a mac, replace "sha256sum" with "shasum -a 256".

I hope this is useful for somebody: https://gist.github.com/1013465

I also suggest that if you have multiple accounts on a single site, you run "mypass user@domain.com" instead of just domain. It works fine either way, just be sure you are consistent across all sites, lest you forget your scheme.
Clickable link: http://speakforme.timotheeboucher.com/
Now we are going to see how non-evil the Google's definition of "do no evil" is going to be. If we take Google's comments about the acquisition at face value, then the people making these quotes are right: This is a good thing as it helps Google a lot in their defense against the patent threats.

On the other hand if "do no evil" means "do no evil as long as it helps our bottom line", then this could very well mean the end of Android's openness. And it doesn't have to be obvious: It could just be that in the future, we'll see cool "Google Android" devices running so-far unreleased OS versions.

"The code will be coming - it's just not quite ready for our partners yet" will be their line.

But the code won't be arriving. Either not until the even newer "Google Android" device is out, or not at all.

We'll see how this will develop.

Personally, I would love to believe Google here because that means that we are going to see awesome pure-google phones which will both be a pleasure to use and well-built hardware-wise, while nobody else will be pissed and will continue to be able to sell their phones - maybe even without paying Microsoft for FAT in the future.

If Google doesn't follow through with their promise, we'll still see awesome devices from them, but the rest of the manufacturers will be stuck with an outdated, possibly not updated any more, version of Android which is a shame because I would really love to see Android on devices that are not pure consumer-phones (like barcode scanners which still run Windows CE or Windows Mobile 6)

The part of Motorola which Google didn't buy, incidentally is a huge producer of these scanners after their acquisition of Symbol Technologies a while back. They continue to produce Windows CE devices to this day.
Most excellent! I had dreamed up a similar idea years ago, but would compare listed price against KBB or edmunds valuations.
If there is one company I trust to not screw this up it's Google and I think they have a good shot at getting this right. I'm sure their partner companies are going to be a bit ansy to start but they all compete on hardware / price anyhow which this doesn't change. A few points that pop to mind:

A. They already had to compete with Motorola, so they haven't lost or gained a new competitor.

B. They don't pay for Android so Motorola hasn't gotten some new financial edge. Google just has to ensure that all companies still get source releases at the same time. What they do with them is up to them. (aside: I expect we will see MotoBlur disappear with some of its key features rolled into future Android releases)

C. This will allow Google to protect Android much better which is very beneficial to their bottom lines, especially if it keeps patent licensing costs off of their products.

D. Google just has to be sure they don't play favorites but from what I have seen up until now they have been good about that.

E. This may have just brought the competition for who gets to build the next Nexus to an end. (unless the next Nexus is already basically "done" at another partner company)

I think they can get this right... and now hopefully we can get a whole line of nice Motorola hardware with current Android and unlocked boot-loaders, etc. I might have to reconsider the Droid 3 again (more like Droid 4 one day, since 3 is already in the wild as is)
Naming A Company Right Can Spell Success
I'm not sure I'd agree with that last part. Perhaps hardware to some degree, but Android has lead in terms of software. Look at the intents system, notifications, and their implementation of multiple application support vs iOS. iOS may have the polish, but Android has a very nice system in place when you look at how things work.
How hank computer
Is there any good reason for this requirement, or is it just inertia?

If I'm submitting something read-only, PDF seems like the obvious choice. If you're going to edit it, maybe .doc is the solution, but really, Google Docs would make collaboration easier.

What does a Word file have that other solutions don't, other than mindshare?
A hack does not have to be about programming. If you want to qualify hacks as 'marketing hacks' or whatever else, you would need to qualify your preferred kind of hacks as 'programming hacks' as well.
> We welcome Google‘s commitment to defending Android and its partners.

Only in the patent-crazy mobile market would you get four CEOs applauding Google's acquisition of one of their direct competitors saying that it "defends" their interests.

Looks like everyone is gearing up for some serious litigation, and unfortunately the only winners in that will be the lawyers.
Great idea if the caller types decently fast. I really wish Twilio were available in South Africa.
I see your point on the first item. Going to have to give that some thought.

Archive history for any messages read will probably be necessary no matter what. I'll basically have to version all edits and make sure access can be granted in some cases to archived messages both for the sender and recipient.

As for the last point, that can basically be done on any email provider that allows you to store messages on the server.
¿Cómo Ganar Plata en Internet?
I'm not sure that you can assume that corporate tax revenues, if not taxed and left with the corporation, would all accrue to shareholders in dividends or dividend-equivalents. In an idealized setting that's true, but I'd be surprised if empirically there wasn't more interaction of variables, with some of the revenues accruing to other parties, like management or other employees, due to effects such as: cash-flush corporations tend to pay higher salaries and spend more money on perks.

In other words, this article claims that two situations have equivalent effects for shareholders:

1. Corporate tax rate of 35%, and dividend tax rate of 15%

2. Corporate tax rate of 0%, and dividend tax rate of 50%

But I am not at all sure that that's the case in practice, i.e. that empirically if we changed from #1 to #2, it'd make no difference.
I don't really believe in pricing things based on dev time. I'd rather price them according to the value they provide.

I wanted to price this one below Little Snitch, but not in the single dollar range. The halfway point seemed good to me.
I did this with a site of mine a couple years ago, and it worked great.

BUT -- because of the site's nature, 1) a hacked/compromised account would have been a minor annoyance at worst, and 2) users weren't expected to log on more than once every month or so.

I think it depends very much on your site's profile.
Yeah, it doesn't look like there are massive changes in 6. 7 is where the changes for memory are coming in, I'm rather looking forward to that.

On the other hand, the list of fixed bugs is pretty massive:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/6.0/releasenotes/buglis...
Any tips on where / how to start? Which books / tutorials worked for you? My background is in software engineering and the only thing I know about DSP is a very very basic understanding of the Fourier transform :)
MeeGo was stillborn.
Can we just all make a pact that we never spew out such canned, meaningless dribble when put in the same situation?

If you're not going to say anything of meaning, please don't say it.
In $12.5B Deal, Google Gobbles Up Motorola Mobility
Universe or Multiverse? Could our universe be just one of many?
Google is going the Apple route and building well-integrated hardware and software. The problem is that they're taking a detour into mid-90s Apple where other manufacturers were cannibalizing Mac sales. It's inevitable that Google will one day decide that it makes more sense to make $350 from every Android phone sold than from only 15% of them (or whatever Motorola's Android marketshare is).
Good point on fast typing.

Amongst other things, I wanted to add some customizable preset sentences accessible through keyboard shortcuts (e.g. "Hello my name is Tim and I can't really speak right now") as well as a log of what you already said in that conversation (again, with KB shortcuts).
A good piece of advise which does not in any way invalidate putting some effort into getting good tools.

To use the chef analogy again, you wouldn't say "sharp knives don't make you a good chef, therefore use dull knives."

You'd say, "focus on learning to cook. Don't spend 4 hours a day looking for the world's sharpest and most durable knives. But yes, do get some reasonably sharp knives. Then carry on with the chopping."
Why not use OAuth or something similar so you deal with auth tokens, rather than passwords?
Watch Griff the Invisible online free megavideo 
watch Griff the Invisible online free megavideo
Griff (Kwanteen True Blood Ryan) is a complacent Schmuck of the day, wear for hours in a crappy office job
This is why I rather enjoy discussing horrible hairy corner cases like this - there's always something I've overlooked :)
Dr. Asimov never liked it when his name was misspelled. My name is common and rarely misspelled, but I think I would feel the same. It's just a matter of respect.
This is schemaless. Protobufs require a .proto file that describes the data being serialized. A .proto file serves a similar purpose as the `struct` keyword in C.

MessagePack uses type prefixes to describe the data. For instance an unsigned 8-bit int starts with a `0xcc` followed by a byte.
Yes, but people call our taxcode Progressive, when as Buffet point's out it's regressive at the top.
I debated the name and really tried not to, but I think it does fall under the definition of a hack... I could be wrong. Sorry if I mislead. Was not the intention.
Things I’ve never heard a successful startup founder say
If you have to silence apps manually, how can you know if an app will phone home?
Thank you - I will take a look.
Why do the professions of those at the bottom of the top 1% matter?
Adobe Intros Muse Web Design Tool | Product News | The Mac Observer
I did this for some gold currency systems I wrote a while back (2002-2005), and it worked well. There were some differences. I only allowed one to be active at a time, and inactivated them as soon as they were used (in favor of a session token until the end of the session). Also, users could upload their public key (PGP, GnuPG) and we would then encrypt all email from our system, so between that and SSL-only, I think it was quite secure. I'm in agreement with other repliers that plain text email plus long-lived tokens is a recipe for trouble, though.
Can't download to try before buying.
Lost my interest.
The current reference Android phone isn't an HTC. It's a Samsung.