skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great question Josh. Big benefit here is being able to keep your voice application logic in your own code instead of in Asterisk. Often we find in business telephony applications, the really important information you want to get to and from the user isn't in the phone server, but in the CRM app or help desk app or support app that the phone server is trying to get to and from the user. The closer data like account numbers or service tags or support tickets is to the logic that directs your IVR tree or call queue, the easier it is to build experiences that delight users. Siloed telephony and business software manifest themselves in ugly ways like having to repeat information to multiple agents or waiting on hold while your account information is retrieved.

We think if the code that makes your customers happy and the code that makes your phones ring can finally live in the same place, some pretty magical stuff can happen.
I <3 Zapier. I hated the old site, but the new one feels like a straight copy of IFTTT. That being said, it's a tight space and the winner is the one with scale. It is, as they say, a volume game.

If I were Zapier, I'd look for a quick exit to a company like Dropbox, Microsoft or any of the other large storage companies. It seems like this tech is tailor-made for archival initiatives.
So it's Evernote, but with two panes and a white widget?
That's because many of the people founding these startups were in elementary school when it happened.
You know, I really avoid posting my articles on HN (or anywhere else for that matter) for some reason. I posted this one and I was just looking at that vote count to see if someone liked it enough to vote for it.

To see someone actually comment on it is really awesome. You really made my day and I'm glad you like the article.
That's a great idea - perhaps for my next post! I liked the idea of the ATA though since it's more of a proof of concept on how to interface Twilio with an older phone system.
Discussing this is hard because it's not even clear what the legal theory is behind the notice. You cannot claim copyright over someone else's picture of your product. As for trademark--you can only sue for trademark infringement if your mark is used as a mark in commerce. A trademark holder doesn't own the mark itself, just the right to use the mark to label its products.

The only thing I can think of that would even be plausible is if the review site used official images of the product in its review without authorization. But the notice doesn't even begin to hint at that theory.
Voicemail, 7-digit dial (most SIP providers only take 10), forwarding, filtering, etc.

Twilio could theoretically handle these things for you, but they're typically handled in a PBX.
>Health insurance is a goddamn mess and a company can't expect to get it right in an afternoon, but it is important.

How about just throwing money at the problem and outsourcing to someone like Trinet? Even if the company doesn't contribute much to premiums, I've always liked, as an employee, having Trinet.
Don't think Twilio has SIP registration, but they do have Android SDK for Twilio Client that will do the trick.
You aren't the only one.
VolDat: A standard format for exchanging volume data
Yep, right after you get hooked on it.
Good idea! This one was more of a proof of concept on how to interface with an older phone system using an ATA but I definitely want to do some soft phone tutorials in the future.
Not true in the least. Maybe for a tiny fraction of founders who can de-risk incredibly fast, get funding or profits and make their first hire. This is not the typical scenario by a long shot.
The Onion's funny take on side projects
>Online retailers can only use "authorised images" to advertise GoPro products?

I think it's more like "Only authorised online retailers can use GoPro's images to advertise GoPro products." Which is fair enough, since GoPro owns their photos, although seems like it will only hit the lowest effort retailers.
I've been contracting for a long time, I know the risks and it's not just about the money. It's about the self ownership.

Of course it's better for the company, they want the ability to coerce the employee and hold their livelihood/healthcare hostage.

With my arrangement, I keep the same healthcare plan no matter who I'm working for or what I'm doing.
Here is the same (more or less) in angularjs: http://tinker.io/4b0d7/1

I left out routing as these are baby steps. This example aims to be simple and clear.
github: silasb
I work for Braintree. We aren't early-stage anymore, but we really mean it when we say no vacation policy. Personally, I'm going to Europe for 3 1/2 weeks in June (in which I will do no work, but I might go to a conference at the end). I also took time off for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

No vacation policies are meaningful with the right company culture.
Yes, humility is important, but it doesn't mean you should be exploited by someone who has no such qualms at all.
Thanks for the pointer. Cal(Card)DAV issue still looks weird though. Why does Google need to make their own proprietary API instead of just using Cal(Card)DAV?
No need, they linked it in the article: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
From the Author's bio:

"I'm just this guy who used to enjoy tech, now I would rather build bicycles. I still work in the tech industry, for the money, but I no longer call myself a "technologist"."

So points well made that a guy with children, in mid-career, and without much of a passion for the field he's working in finds a Y-Combinator offer to be less compelling than a more traditional package.

But I'm not sure what the takeaway should be for Y-Combinator companies.

I'm sure you could come up with a whole list of why it's compelling to join a Y-Combinator startup, the one that strikes me is that providing great value to a Y-Combinator start-up puts you in a great position to leverage your own attention from PG and crew.

So at some level the lesson here feels like how can Y-Combinator recruiters (or CEO recruiters) minimize distractions from candidates that ultimately don't want the job you're offering?

The answer is to highlight the tangible benefits of being part of a Y-Combinator startup while candidly addressing what "you're not" so the wrong candidates don't waste their time, or yours.
I think that's because it's dropping it right on your Google Drive. It's taken out by nature, all the time, whenever you sync.
Well then people would just complain about "luring them in" with a free service and then charging them for it (5 years later).
It should be noted that there is no such thing as a DMCA takedown for trademark infringements.

http://chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID569

So yeah pretty much nothing holds up.
"Oops! An error occurred. Please click here to reload the page."

I'm getting it, too.
Google has just released an Evernote competitor called Google Keep.
The expected value of 0.5% of the equity in that startup should be 0.5% of the valuation. That said, not everyone has the savings or investments to offset that level of risk. For someone with a "low" risk-tolerance, that value drops dramatically.

Remember risk in our (assumed rational) finance market is as much tied to your ability to have enough liquidity as it is to have a positive outcome.
It was way down the list for some reason. Look for the yellow icon.
Very buggy. I get a constant loop asking me to reload the keep page with only two small test notes added in chrome.
Brilliant stuff that I have been looking for quite some time. I work in support and sometimes I really want to show this to our users, yet I would love to see something more human like:
Jennie from Sales Support just used word merge to print a letter.
Simple, isn't it?
What just actually happened?
The letter will go to post box, were postman will take it sorting center, where it will be distributed and sent to customer, who will read the letter, discuss it with the family and take number of steps to take a decision how to proceed further.

Or a guy from sales just received a call, but what just happened? The client was recommended by a friend after a splendid experience with the product, the client spent bunch of time reading number of sites and reviews and he is just about to purchase a product when sales guy's computer has crashed and he lost a client.
We always try to make people understand the IT more and the other guys will try to makes understand their processes more, yet it is going to be never ending dialogue, process, fight..
Because of the 'blood diamond' controversy, the diamonds get mixed up together, sold around, exported, smuggled, etc. There's no way to track them.

Canadian ice diamonds, on the other hand, are all laser-engraved with a serial number, making it possible to verify each diamond's authenticity and source. According to the jeweller I spoke to, the only guarantee she could make is 'Canadian' or 'not Canadian'; she couldn't even guarantee me African, Russian, etc.

She did, of course, offer to sell me a ring with 'who knows' diamonds and then remove them and put Canadian diamonds in, but at that point I'm paying for 'who knows' and Canadian diamonds, which seemed a little idiotic.
I would be far more happy to have a ring made for me then one that was just bought from a store no matter what the price difference for all sorts of reasons (unique, easy to just spend money, hard to actually make one wtc)
I don't see the point. There's always going to be someone making far, far more money than you make. It doesn't matter if you're an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor, an executive, or the president of a country.

That doesn't mean that you should feel so inherently entitled to the compensation that you do get. While some executive may be making 10x your salary, you're probably making 10x the salary of someone else who works just as hard as you do.
Imperial Barber Products - How To Shave
The Imperial. American man's five-step utility shave system.
He makes a pretty good argument really. You don't run a successful business with the mindset of 'i shouldn't be entitled', i have no idea why an employee shouldnt have the same mindset. Capitalism, your supposed to go after every tangible benefit possible, and minimize every cost possible.

How folks plan to run a business that way and yet feel its 'entitlement' for an employee to do the same thing is weird to me.
>The OP did not fire this individual nor escort them out of the room. Having con staff pull the person aside is an expected outcome, but being fired is completely outside of the OP's control and is, frankly, a huge overreaction from a company that would rather throw people aside than actually engage in meaningful sensitivity training for its employees.

The OP of the tweet is responsible for her actions. She publically attempted to shame them, with full knowledge that individuals outside the conference would be able to view, and/or react to the individuals who were not speaking with her.

There was no threat to the individual's safety. It was a "threat" to what she wants to hear. Shes throwing a tantrum over a minor squable.
I never said it was entitled to want to be paid the market value. Entitlement is a personality trait, not an aspect of rationality or reasoning.
You do know there are other Ruby frameworks than Rails, and other development environments than ASP and Ruby right?
Thanks! You can help it take off: try Persona out and let me know about your experience. Persona can't be the right solution without outside voices to help shape it.

Of course, if you think Mozilla is on the right track, ask a site you use to support Persona. :)
> "dismiss the amount of risk founders take on to get a company to the point of even being able to make their first hire."

I don't think this is really the issue. The issue is that the economics of startups don't really work if you expect below-market salaries to be a thing.

Founders shoulder tremendous risk and (the smart ones) live on starvation-level salaries for months, if not years, before they bring on their first employee. Sure - and they deserve to be compensated appropriately via equity.

Employees, having taken on only minimal risk, don't deserve much equity at all - equity at this point is a bonus and a motivator to act in the company's best interests.

This works great. The problem comes along when we bring in sub-market salaries. The reduction in salary or benefits demands an increase in equity - equity coming directly out of the founders.

And here's where it all falls apart: to make up for below-market compensation, the amount of equity that would be rationally required would mean too little equity to account for founder risk. The numbers simply do not add up.
Plus the product doesn't even work right with the page asking for me to reload it in a constant loop with only two small notes added via Chrome. Piece of junk.
I'd prefer this money had gone toward directly funding a Mars mission, vs. indirectly recovering items which might be useful for Mars, and I suspect Bezos may feel the same way.

Unfortunately there isn't a Mars mission which is "shovel ready" today.

Hopefully the Amazon products I bought this week contribute in an indirect way to Bezos's wealth which is later spent directly on a Mars mission.
... until they kill it because nobody used it.
I was never a user of Google Alerts until recently and noticed I rarely get emails. However, performing a search will reveal something completely different. By the time a Google Alert gets to me, I've already seen the site.

Google Alerts is largely useless for me.
Yeah, this would definitely be the way to go for an Android device. Use the SDK examples to build a little dialer and use the ACTION_CALL intent, and it works great for outbound as well.

Docs and download are here - http://www.twilio.com/docs/client/android
ah, which was thishttp://term.ie/blog/how-to-get-banned-from-pycon/ right?
Here are a couple ways that common stock can become worthless:
- The most obvious and common, the company fails / does not exit
- The company raises money and the investors have liquidation preferences. This means that the investor is guaranteed to make 3 times what they put in when the company is acquired. So, for example, if you raise 10 million dollars and your investors have 3x liquidation preferences, you have to sell the company for over 30 million before common shareholders see any money at all. So in this situation (and it is common), the common stock is essentially worthless.
Peter, I get this, I get this 100x over. When I put my time/effort into something I try to do my very best. A user telling me it's wrong/broken/sucks makes me feel like my best isn't good enough. My point was that publicly a response like this hurts far more than the satisfaction you get from posting it. Trust me, I have been burned by this before and I had to learn from it. I have never used Ember.js but I plan to, I think it looks cool and have seen a few projects that use it to do really cool things. A response like this makes the community look un-inviting, the whole "Figure it out yourself"/"It's not worth my time to help you" attitude is not productive. I may realize that one developer does not speak for the entire project but not everyone will and there will be people turned off by such a response. I would hate to see Ember.js suffer because one developer found it against his "rules" to respond AND took the time to make sure everyone knew how he felt.
> There are just too many wrongs in the world for someone like me to be complaining about not being able to save up for shiny new product X, Y days earlier

I don't complain when a startup can't afford me, it's just business.

But I also don't work for them.
Is there anything going on on that blog these days? The analysis of The Office was captivating, but I can't even find those posts by Googling for them...

What's the URL?
I have had a series of bad experiences with Trinet. Not so bad that it's ruined my life, but bad like "I can't believe this is the best we can do for HR". I like the idea of outsourcing that sort of thing so we can focus on the hacking, but I feel like that particular space is ripe for disruption (to use a clichéd term).
This was the comment that convinced me that you are a sexist.

I can honestly say that you are being over-sensitive here. It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. You should remove the stick.
As someone who is relatively new to Rails can someone explain to me why it seems to update more than anything else I've used?
Yes, I used to use ASP.Net MVC for pet projects, then switched to Rails - I also use CakePHP and Django for actual paying work/contracting.

But thanks for the passive aggresive comment.
Is there something in the article that made you think this person might not be financially independent other than the fact that he has a job?
I've been running Java and Rails since 2006 in my company (large), we use C# for a small number of desktop applications.

This will come out harsh, but I'm being honest: If you are not willing to fix/adapt/improve the framework you are using, you better not be using ASP.NET also (try a google search on asp.net issues), or any framework at all. In fact, developing larger more complex software might not even be possible without adapting frameworks for your specific problems.

That said, our run so far with Rails and Java (we are still using 2.3!!!):

- We have 38 patches applied to Spring

- 4 patches in apache santuario.

- One security patch on Grizzly (glassfish)

- Rails: One single pull request https://github.com/rails/arel/pull/174
For all the talk of focus after Larry Page took over, Google still seems to be releasing half baked products. I tried switching from Dropbox to Google Drive to get double the storage for the same price. Uploaded 100 gigs, got an error, and was told I had to re-download the 100 gigs to sync again. Using an early version of a Google product for a trusted system is riiiiisky.
I've got no time to invest in this. I'm too busy finding an alternative for Reader and seriously looking at alternatives for Gmail because I'm just plain torqued at Google right now.
Not happy? Do something about it: try release candidates, report bugs, and help triage and fix reported bugs.
Is this sort of an announcement that Google failed to buy Evernote, so they decided to create a project that does exactly the same things and that will be discontinued after a while because it's not Google's focus?
I keep getting error popup. Anyone else getting this in FF?
I loved the Firefox extension for Notebook. Hope they make one for Keep as well!
SIP From Twilio will send to any SIP solution you have, this was just a neat hack with one of our favorite hardware platforms.
I don't think we'll ever see something like the Arduino IDE for more advanced systems. Some chipmakers have IDEs like Cypress and their PSoC Designer/Creator, but that still focuses on the chip alone and not the outside world.

The thing about embedded is that you're crafting a very specific hardware and firmware design for the task at hand. The project may begin with a generic setup like Arduino or Beagle or Rpi, but at the end it's a totally unique animal. There's no way any graphic or assisted design environment is going to be able to handle it all.
I'm a little surprised that no one has brought up Gabor Mate's work -- specifically When The Body Says No (http://drgabormate.com/writings/books/when-the-body-says-no/) -- it's a good walk through what is and isn't possible with the weird little pharmacopeia you've got stashed in your head.
That is absolutely true, or at least I think it is. The single best thing we did it to allow our customer to do a purchase without being logged in.

If the email address entered on our checkout page is already in our database, we link that purchase to the relevant account. If the customer want to login, they can, if not, that's cool to. We get a lot of wrong matches which needs to be fixed, but that seems to be a price we can and will pay.

We have had customer adding orders to other people accounts, because their email address was entered wrong ( even though we require the customer to enter the email twice. ) and we have customers ending up with multiple account that we need to merge. Despite all the problems, customers love not having to log in before doing a purchase. It's hit and miss in a few cases, but we try to do what our customers expect, matching their purchase to their account, regardless of login credentials. That's what consumers want.
Nvidia gets into the server biz with Visual Computing Appliance
Yeah, it worked for a few seconds and now it won't load in any of my computers, even in Chrome.
IAm Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile, AMA (right now)
Same problem in Chromium
How is this

> […] handing that task to Sprockets instead of resolving internally […]

even remotely related to performance issues because of random routing? You're mixing two issues that have nothing in common.
www.spamhaus.org seems to be up.
I might argue that it was Activision that did it first - certainly for consoles (Atari, etc). They were the first company to explicitly name the programmers ("David Crane's Pitfall!", etc). But EA took it to the next level, and seemed to get behind 'teams' early on - Ozark Softscape, for example.
Interesting! That's what I expected but I think the vertical matters quite a bit. My old startup (http://getpressi.com/) that had more of a tech crowd focus definitely had more people signing up with email while the new one (https://makersalley.com/) has a more general population that tends to like using Facebook.

At this point our total users is in the hundreds so who knows how it'll turn up.

Yep - it's definitely just a data point.
Would you really be willing to give up the productivity benefits and developer happiness over a few mishaps? Also, it's generally a good idea not to upgrade to the next software version until seeing the repercussions its had.
I read this and laughed. There's two people on the planet that I've wished my struggle upon. Of course, I might have only meant it figuratively... or maybe not ;)
PyCon 2013 and Codes of Conduct, more generally
github: rennhak
Mostly to give people on forums something to bitch about.

Serious answer: a few months ago, some serious vulnerabilities were found in Rails. This apparently had a "blood in the water" effect on security people, who started dissecting the entire thing. Predictably, more vulnerabilities have emerged and rapidly been fixed.

All in all, it means that things are improving because it's getting a ton of attention.
I'm in the minority here, but I 100% agree with you. I could see myself posting the exact same response.
Yeah I don't think I'm going to fall for another product that looks like it'll disappear in a few years time when google HQ gets bored of it.
Huh?

You can basically always keep your health insurance. You just have to pay a higher premium than your employer paid for it. They aren't "holding your health care hostage", they're given you a benefit of being a part of a group; a risk pool insurance companies are willing to give discounted rates to. Get fired, or quit? Just call the insurance company and ask what it'd cost to keep your coverage as is. There's generally ALWAYS an individual plan available with the exact same benefit levels.

Health insurance used to be a hostage game due primarily to pre-existing conditions. That's becoming less of an issue thanks to new laws (and if you were employable, was never much of an issue anyway).

However, I did not mean "just" insurance. Contractor arrangements are terrible for both the contractor and the company, in the long run.
"The first day of the first full year after Man landed on Earth's moon" is probably a fair way to describe the UNIX Epoch in the far future.

I guess the other interesting events are first Fission (weapon or test), and when we first land on Mars.
It all depends. Dilution is a real killer. You may have 0.5% today, but what about after Series B? Or, heaven forbid, a down-round?

Even if you sustained no dilution, 0.5% of $100M is only $500K. Don't get me wrong, $500K is nice, but by no means is that life-changing money.