skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try Plivo instead - it's about a third of your current cost. $3/month is dramatically better than $10.

http://plivo.com/pricing/ (Disclaimer: I was in the same YC batch as Plivo. I do really like the service compared to Twilio or Tropo.)
..well, it tiles your windows
The issue with digital goods is also the matter of uncertainty, the issue to do with scarcity or lack thereof and the trickiness of information as a good itself. In essense there is a built in inefficiency for information goods. But the points you bring up are correct and extend beyond digital goods.
Original paper has also been posted here, for those interested.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4582700

Male Microchimerism in the Human Female Brain
Germany (read: Berlin) is surprisingly affordable, but hold off until the springtime, unless you're looking to better understand how your laptops perform in sub-zero temperatures. Berliners also pretty universally speak English, and there's a decent-sized startup community there as well.

You could come to Tokyo, where I live. Don't. It's ruinously expensive. But you could go to a lesser-visited part of Japan for a not-unreasonable amount of money, and while people's English skills are lacking here, the public infrastructure is fantastic.

Taiwan is like Japan, but with better food and cheaper living costs, but without as much infrastructure. Still one of my favorite countries in Asia, though. If you decide on Asia, avoid the summer at all costs, because the entire region turns into a gigantic sauna.
Landlines have long been killed. Unless you didn't notice, Magic Jack killed 'em. It is much cheaper and it just works. You have to be really crazy to be paying $48 for the landlines.
Other than buying new hardware, there isn't really much to say. Maybe check for a firmware update. It should not be possible in a well designed system to blow the machine via CPU usage from userland.
We're at startup weekend - hoping to have an MVP tomorrow for pitch. Working fervently right now!
Varies by area, but $40/mo sounds high for the US too. AT&T's basic landline (w/o caller-ID and other add-ons) in Texas costs $21/mo.
The average person doesn't know Google Voice exists. This product is marketing to people who likely have never heard of GVoice.
This is a wonderful idea. It would be really interesting if you could "ally" someone else to combine mini-maps. With this feature, you wouldn't just know where everyone has been, but you can also map their social graph!
I had to login just reply to this... Google Voice is used by all kinds of people. I can think of at least ten people over the age of 50 in my family alone who use it. Hell, my 81 year old grandfather has a GV account that forwards his old landline to his cell.

Almost every one of my non-tech friends uses it as well.
Current discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4589465
Nah. I don't agree with the premise of this article. This was not one person's decision. Many actors had to be involved in the decision making process. For some reason Apple decided that kicking Google off the platform was worth the abuse they'd have to endure with Maps.

Those who keep saying "Maps is great" need to leave an egocentric view and realize that there are millions of users all around the world with different experiences.

According to the apology letter they serve about 500 million searches in one week. That means two billion searches per month. What does this mean in therms of customer experience?

http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/

According to this either 60% of the locations either incorrect or missing altogether. I'll be generous and propose that Maps, world-wide, might have an average of 5% incorrect or missing locations. I don't know if this is too low or too high. It's just a number that I pulled out of my imagination in order to get a sense of proportion.

If only 5% of the data is wrong and we have two billion searches per month, that means 100 million bad searches per month. I'll let the reader guess as to how many users that affects. It certainly is in the millions.

If data errors are larger than that the situation is far worst. Again, I'll leave it up to the reader to guess as to how much user anger would trigger Apple to post an apology letter on the front page of their site.

If you live here in California, and, in particular, the Bay Area, please refrain from posting how "Maps is great and it is beautiful". You do not represent the experience of the vast majority of users who had almost no issues whatsoever with Google Maps.

Oh, yes, on the whole "Maps is beautiful" mantra. Who the f* cares? 3D view? Who the f* cares? First make them dead accurate, then add eye candy if it makes sense. Accuracy is far more important than bling when it comes to maps. Nobody is going to want to use a beautiful map that takes you to the wrong place. And 3D view. Really? Get it right first. Then play.
Well, not really. Getting an app on a docomo phone for example was extremely easy, as in create the app and put it online. You had to be a verifiable company to touch the encrypted bits (user ID, encrypted NFC etc) or to make payments (which are then carrier handled payments), but that
about all.
The other carriers needed paperwork even for free apps, but not so much more.

About the software, it was barebone compared to iPhone apps, but you could run an app for three days without crashing or dropping a single call. The scrutinity towards quality was equivalent to home appliances' level. The iPhone brought the expectations of reliability close to Windows PCs.
Ask HN: What do you suggest for action-triggered email?
http://investopad.com

We have created a social network for startups and while the in-platform notification system works great in our private beta, I believe that transactional email notifications (those triggered by user actions) are critical to user retention.

We intend to use Mailchimp for newsletters, but what services can you recommend for transaction (automated following user actions) email?

Sendgrid seems to be the popular choice, but Mandrill is another option– and as its a Mailchimp product, perhaps this could work for us?

We need something that's easily implemented and scalable.
Ah, I see that too. Clearly problematic since there doesn't seem to be a way at all to load up the intended 428 University Ave address. No good.

Still though, "really really bad" makes me think you have experienced many other issues. I'm genuinely curious about how Maps performs in the places it is "supposed" to be at least passable. Got any other examples?

Meta: please don't edit your comments to respond to sub-comments. It makes the flow of the conversation very difficult to follow and makes my previous comment seem irrelevant and out of place.
It doesn't, according to Moxie Marlinspike and others.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysi...

If you haven't seen any of Marlinspikes presentations, you are missing out on some fascinating stuff.

Moxie @ Defcon 19: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIiklPyS8MU
Almost every single person I know uses GV. My 81 year old grandfather uses it.
>Getting fired is not that big a deal.

I'm glad that's true for you, but for most people, it's a pretty traumatic life event. It put the OP into a year-long depression.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes_and_Rahe_stress_scale#Ad...
Ironic that as I tested out that address example, I noticed an Apple story across the street from the actual address.
You're exactly right, we think the target market is older and less comfortable with technology than the Hacker News crowd. The most common reaction we get when we pitch the service to someone is "I wouldn't need that, but it could be great for my parents/grandparents/inlaws/etc". Ideas about how to best appeal and market to this demographic are welcome.
Thank you, out of interest on a appliction I work on every now and then showed a 50% improvement with the code as is, not heavy decimal at all, mostly int's though still a nice speedup.
I can't contradict your claim (since I don't work on mass-market sites), but I test my work on a VM with 1 CPU and 1GB ram; if the site doesn't run well in that, it's not good enough. I wish more people tested their software that way. I often find myself performing optimizations that are generally best-practices under V8 (and also work well in Firefox) that most in this community would consider "premature optimizations," at least until you point out that the difference between the two are 20-50x, and something that once cost 40ms now costs under 1ms, meaning your UI is just that much more responsive. For some reason, "it works, I'm done" seems to be a pervasive mental model. How unfortunate.
My parents are in this exact same position. They have never heard of Google Voice but paying for an expensive landline.

I would immediately recommend a service like this.
Great idea! Please do android next. And make the data open and exportable.
Hello, unlimited liability, goodbye house, car, clothes on your back.
Is there any book or reliable source explaining all the process of incorporating? Pros and cons, vesting, stockoptions etc...
This is the exact same problem my parents have. They pay $50/mo for a landline that rarely gets used but still need because no one will call them on their cells.

I can't imagine trying to explain Google Voice to my parents.
Yep - having to guess at your boss's needs is like the worst of both worlds. Either have a boss that provides meaningful structure, communication, and leadership or work for yourself.
Buenos Aires and Rio are pretty cheap
This is exactly why we started Entelo. We felt that online sources are quickly becoming the "new resume" and that if you draw the trend lines on the data, if it's not obvious now, it will be very soon. Remember, none of the sites referenced in the post (Github, Stack, Coursera, etc.) existed five years ago. What will exist five years from now?

Also, an emerging trend is "Github for X". You have sites like Grabcad (Github for Mechanical Engineers), Dribbble and Behance (Github for Designers), Benchling (Github for Biology), Proformative (Github for Accountants), etc. As these professional communities grow they'll increasingly be looking at by employers.

It's early for this trend but we believe deeply in it.
Just from the descriptions and photos, it looks like the mini will be breadboardable.

The bigger one almost certainly not -- it's arduino compatible and the gap on one side is visibly smaller than the other. Also, it's not clear if the big one will have pins dropping down below the board (just looks like female headers).
Have you looked at Pyramid? It's pretty awesome, really the ideal framework philosophy in my opinion (i.e., actually a framework instead of attempting to be a crappy domain-specific language/replacement standard library). It's also Python 3.x compatible and has been for several months (they replaced the one library they had been holding out for).

I gave Django a couple of truly honest tries, but I just couldn't bring myself to tolerate it. Pyramid is by far the best.
I didn't say it was working great in Bay Area, the person I responded to did... But apparently even that is not true.
I just looked. Slackware still ships with UUCP. Quaint.

I wonder who's still using that in some deep dark corner of their infrastructure.
Not bad for a Startup Weekend project! Congrats to Philip and team. It'll be neat to see if this can turn into something self-sustaining!
if all companies grow slowly, that puts a cap on the maximum growth of the overall economy.

Yes, but not a meaningful one. For the purposes of this discussion, "slow growth" is anything under 100% per year.

I'd love to see some numbers on companies that are big but got there slowly. I suspect it doesn't happen

Interesting. I don't have any data, and I'm failing at finding any right now, but I think of Coca-Cola as being a company which reached its current size primarily through steady growth. I'm sure there are large pharmaceutical and chemical companies which have had slow growth curves -- while any one product may have a sharp growth curve, the company as a whole won't. Insurance companies and banks also tend to grow slowly, and of course Berkshire Hathaway is an example, with a highest ever Y/Y growth rate of 59.3%.

I suspect there's a certain amount of observation bias: Companies which grow slowly are boring, so we don't think about them.
> One awesome thing this would allow is for people to create and curate special-interest travel guides.

I think there's HUGE potential in an online service that takes care of all the aspects of a trip. Right now you have the choice of either doing everything manually (which is a big time sink) or going on a package tour (which is bland and one-size-fits-all). In between you've got a few options like Expedia and Travelocity, but they're more like extensions of the package tour idea than a rethinking of the concept.

In my vision, you'd give it the dates you want to travel, where you want to go, your budget, and access to your social networking accounts (so it can figure out your interests/hobbies). Then it uses the data you've given it along with preexisting curated travel data (which could be based on crowdsourced info, both from previous customers and from 3rd party sources) to create an optimized & customized travel itinerary and take care of all the purchases (plane tickets, hotel reservations, Uber reservations from the airport to the hotel and between sightseeing locations (if needed), tickets for different sightseeing locations, etc.) so that you just have to pay once, to this service. You don't have to worry about when places are open/closed, how long it takes to get between them, etc. - that would be automatically calculated (should be pretty straightforward with Google Maps API access).

Then you'd want to have an associated smartphone app that will (in real-time) display the itinerary, give directions between the different places, suggest restaurants to eat at (maybe make reservations using OpenTable), etc. The itinerary could even be dynamic. For example, if there's an outdoor activity planned and it starts raining, it would automatically rearrange your itinerary as necessary, etc. You could use GPS and/or NFC at museums and other places to play back audio explanations of various exhibits (they already have this at many museums, but you have to pay extra for the privilege and wear an iPod or some other clunky device for the duration of the tour).
Everyone that's saying Google Voice: You can't port landlines easily to GV. It was my first thought too but did some research and turns out they don't support it directly.

Now: To pull this off you need to make it super simple and intuitive. I want to come to your site with inviting colors, a clean layout, and a very clear call to action and easy signup. This should be so easy and inviting that I will want to do it again after I'm done. This is where good design comes into play. If you make it hard, the copy hard to understand, a pricing plan that is confusing and not straightforward, then it will scare people off. Your biggest chance of success is a UI that is so easy to use it's mindless and "just works."
Intel started a contest and later forgot about it
Thanks for your comment. One thing I take away from what you said is that the solution to problems like this is BETTER government, not ZERO government.

All the libertarians want to use any government problem as an excuse to just scrap the whole government. But you make it clear that the problem is not ALL government, the problem is BAD government, and government CAN be improved.
You probably already know that you can do Win+<Left/right arrow> to maximize to half of the screen, Win+<Up/down arrow> to maximize/unmaximize, and Win+Shift+<Left/right arrow> to send to other screens, right? That's already a lot of the functionality promised by a lot of OS X tilers (Though Slate clearly has quite a bit more, too). Divvy is also available for Windows (http://mizage.com/windivvy/), and if you look around there are quite a few other options for "Windows tiling window manager," some of which are a little more "genuine" in that they force the tiling. You can also get alternative shells that provide tiling.
Opinion - Campus question app 
Goal: Help a lot of students improve their campus lives

Building an app, where students in a campus can interact and collaborate

Purpose of app is to ask questions to entire campus to get help with everyday decisions like --which course to choose, which professor is better, sublease apartment, campus jobs and any other question they can think of, which they want to get help with of campus life

thoughts about this app? possibility of scaling this?

Inputs appreciated. Thank you
I remember hearing a landline is useful in case of emergencies. Something about emergency services are able to connect it to an address quickly. Also a landline is less likely to get clogged and drop your call in case of mass emergency.

Are these still the case? i don't know but i keep my landline active. It's insurance I guess.
Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers.

I'll always ask for live code from people at interviews, if only to filter out the total posers.
I'm not aware of any standalone articles, but something of that nature would be really fantastic. Such an article would probably be best if written by someone outside of the Persona team.
This exact point is the basis for semantic versioning. Major version changes, e.g. 2.x.x to 3.x.x is expected to break backwards compatibility for the sake of progress. If you are happy with 2.x.x. stick with it, just don't expect any new features, just maintenance in the language and libraries built around it.

http://semver.org
That's a misstatement of Moxie's position, which is unfortunate because Moxie's position is important, probably correct, and needs all the credibility it can get.

What's broken about SSL/TLS is the current CA model. Since SSL/TLS was introduced, we've been running with almost exactly the same trust "UX": a hidden browser config panel listing a series of complicated-sounding trusted root CAs, each with the authority to sell or transfer their business to some other entity, or even to delegate the authority to sign certificates to other organizations.

That's absurd; it's a security model that clearly can't work in the real world --- and, more, demonstrably hasn't worked. SSL CA's have been caught red-handing selling their authority for dubious reasons. For instance, Trustwave sold a CA=YES certificate to an undisclosed third-party corporation solely for the purpose of making it easier (not "possible" but merely easier) for that corporation to monitor their own users.

We need a radical rethinking of the UI/UX and trust model behind SSL/TLS, and Moxie's idea of decentralizing that trust --- so that, say, the ACLU could operate a sort of CA root that would vouch for Verisign's signatures on core ecommerce sites but not accept a crazy delegation from Iran.

The protocol, on the other hand, is for all its warts the best-tested crypto protocol in possibly the history of computing. Baby & bathwater, and all that.
So wait, it works for you in the Bay area so you don't get what everyone else is complaining about? I'm laughing too hard to type accurately.
You need to incorporate if you want to release on the app store under a name that's not that of one of your co-founders. So that's about half of the companies.
We don't have a good path for native apps, yet. There have been a few experiments using Persona in native iOS (Pancake) and Android (Soup) environments, and it apparently works great in PhoneGap apps, if you use the ChildBrowser plugin.

The bug to watch is this one: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/2034 supporting environments without popups will clear the way for good native SDKs.
I love the concept but $4.99 is a bit much.
Cool I'll definitely watch that. I have mixed feelings about the ACE survey. On the one hand it seems like one of the most important studies ever done. On the other hand, a lot of the data is really questionable if you look closely enough. E.g. are rates of things like suicide and domestic violence really 5x what they were 50 years earlier? (I'm writing this from my phone, but if you look at the actual study and calculate the differences between the cohorts for yourself then you get something like this.)

I still cite it all the time though as it seems like the best data we have, although I wouldn't be surprised if large swaths of the data were incorrect.
Software innovation and engineering go hand in hand, but not necessarily the same thing. Innovation will and have to come from innovators, some of whom would be engineers; but execution requires engineers. No India is not on the innovation train yet, but that is not an impediment for creation and supply of engineers. You seem to be trying to argue about certain lack of innovation in India and whether engineer migration is good for India. Those are separate subjects altogether.
Hi! I've been hacking on this as a side-project for the past few months and finally decided to show it off to HN :). If you are interested in more information on how it works, I wrote up a small explanation here - http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/w91oh/i_just_releas...
I use the zap colors bookmarklet:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
> Yes, "show me the github" is one of the worst trends for software developers' careers.

On the other hand, there are benefits to posting code online that they can review. Instead of spending hours writing code for each company that you're interviewing with, you can just write code that you're actually interested in and throw it online.

Say you're talking with 20 companies. Each of those 20 interviews have an associated overhead of 3 hours (if you're lucky): 1 hour screening call, 1 hour technical call, 1 hour live coding call. So 60 hours of screening, versus writing some code that might actually be usable by others in the future.

Don't be afraid to say no to live coding interviews. Unless you have nothing to show :-).
In fairness the TI launchpads are astoundingly cheap -- as far as I have seen, very few of the other competitors have dev boards at that sort of price.

The mbed board is similar to the mini, but with an online IDE (not a fan) and community. There's not much difference in price there, at least not from the mbed suppliers here in the UK vs the kickstarter prices.
One of the advantages of a landline in emergencies is that landline phones don't require their own electricity or batteries to operate.
These arguments that the only worthy developers have tons of public facing open source projects are tiresome.

Probably less than 1% of developers have GitHub repos and there's no correlation between skill level and having a GitHub repo.

If you have extensive and current open source contributions, for most people it means you're unemployed, or you're violating your employer's contract terms.

Evaluating a GitHub repo for a summary of skills in not a trivial task, as scanning a resume is.

When all of your work is online, it suggests you are not spending much time contributing value to whoever is employing you.

Companies that can't find developers often have bizarre and useless criteria such as "must have GitHub repository" or "must have LinkedIn" or "must have FaceBook", none of which is correlated with ability.

We hire lots of capable people without GitHub repositories.
Do you have a cite for GV awareness?
Ask HN: What are your in-office hours expectations?
I'm curious what the experience has been for you software engineers (specifically in the bay area) when it comes to expected in-office hours? I'm suspicious that my experience so far is not the norm. Regardless of work put in outside of the office, we're expected to be in the office over 40 hours per week and pressured for even more. Sometimes it feels like time-in-office is used as an arbitrary metric to gauge commitment and effort. I just wanted to get some perspective from others with their experiences.