Hacker News Reader

sunsuon Outbox, The Startup That Digitizes Your Postal Mail, Raises $5 Million Series A

I would much rather have an Outbox mailing address that I can give out. Would be much easier for Outbox to manage as well.

sunsuon Customer Outreach Startup Intercom Raises $6M Round

We at BetterVoicemail.com love Intercom. We'll probably continue to use it with the new pricing, but we have a slightly odd way of doing things and might have to change some things around. We currently create an Intercom user in the first step of our sign-up process BEFORE he/she actually gives us their CC. We do this so we can send them reminder a reminder email the next day to complete the sign-up process. Unfortunately this counts toward the user quota now.

sunsuon .io domains down?

Intercom.io is down as well. Particularly frustrating since its preventing me from replying to customer emails.

Technical details of permanent delivery failure: DNS Error: Domain name not found

sunsuon Someday, you may use bitcoin without knowing it

Interestingly, I just had a local law enforcement official ask me to "explain bitcoin" to him yesterday. He said that "it came up" in a case they were working on and he had no idea what it was.

This is just evidence that its becoming a lot more mainstream.

sunsuon Would you use PhoneGap again?

The author's comment that "Sencha does also come with a Look & Feel, but again, it’s the Sencha Look & Feel, not the Android or iPhone one" is false and also is, imo, a silly reason not to use Sencha. Sencha is entirely themeable and it even comes with iOS and Android themes that you can easily enable.

Sencha does, however, have a steep learning curve. I think thats probably why the author didn't dive into it deep enough to grok the themes.

sunsuon Dear Class of ’13: You’ve been scammed

If you actually are as good as you say you are, then don't go. Spend the time getting real work experience.

sunsuon SIP from Twilio

Works very well too. Plivo also supports SIP Out...outbound calls from SIP devices and registering SIP devices to their system.

sunsuon SIP from Twilio

I've been using Twilio's SIP Support in production at Better Voicemail for a few months now. The implementation is rock solid and adds a lot of value to Twilio's offering especially when it comes to integrating with existing business systems. Also, supposedly outbound calls through SIP endpoints is coming "in a couple of quarters".

sunsuon From Show HN to Funding In Less Than 3 Months

Looks very similar to https://www.postmaster.io/

sunsuon Open-Source Speech Recognition: Simon 0.4.0 Released

I have the most experience with Nuance's NDEV API. It is not really for very long audio. I'd say < 2 minutes.

sunsuon Open-Source Speech Recognition: Simon 0.4.0 Released

I've spent a good bit of time trying to get CMUSphinx to transcribe audio with any amount of reasonable accuracy. I never was very successful. Resorted to using paid third party APIs.

I really wish there were better options out there. Hopefully Simon will help improve the landscape. The automatic contributions to Voxforge should help.

sunsuon Code Your Own Holiday Card with Codecademy Code Cards

Honest question: Isn't it bad that they put this under a subdomain? Google won't credit your root domain for incoming links to a subdomain, will it? Similar to why it's better for your blog to be at example.com/blog instead of blog.example.com.

sunsuon Microsoft Kills Expression Suite

Capital One Venture card is 2% and you get all the Visa Signature benefits.

sunsuon Stripe updates policy: free refunds and chargebacks

Try http://postmaster.io. Its like Stripe for postage.

sunsuon Forbes 30 under 30 in 2012

Congrats to Darian! Radius is doing some amazing things!

sunsuon Watch 5 Hours of Airplane Takeoffs in 30 Seconds

The more interesting video was the crosswind landing one at the bottom of the page. Really incredible!

sunsuon Plivo (YC S12) raises 1.75 million from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, others

Whats interesting about this is that SV Angel invested. Ron Conway has a very close relationship with Twilio and The TwilioFund is "powered by 500Startups and SVAngel".

sunsuon A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy

“Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist.

The problem is not that the wealthy won't invest if they are taxed at higher rates. Its that they will have LESS to reinvest with after gains are taxed. Its strictly a matter of who you believe distributes resources more efficiently: the government or the people.

sunsuon Show HN: Voicemail hasn't changed in 15 years. We're reinventing it.

Thanks for the feedback! We're working on plugging into other products like Google Calendar. Those additions should make it a piece of cake to have a reservation system.

sunsuon Show HN: Fun, simple feature tours for your website or app

This is great and I'll probably use it! However, I think I might fork because I don't like that the bubble is an image. If it were just css it would be much easier to style. Is there a specific reason why it is an image? I guess it would be fairly easy to replace the sprites with others.

sunsuon Taskbox - Turn your inbox into a task list

Solid team behind this app. I've also met the CEO and he really knows his stuff and is a great guy. Even though the app isn't available quite yet, trust me, it will be great.

sunsuon Twilio’s Biggest Partnership: AT&T Will Resell Its Cloud Telecom Apps And API

What do they mean by "resell its cloud telecom apps"? I run a Twilio driven product (BetterVoicemail.com) that we've been selling to enterprise customers. Is my product an example of one of these "apps" that AT&T will resell?

sunsuon AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python

Price! Heroku is vastly more expensive.

sunsuon Handle passwords with Keychain

Except...you're kind of SOL if you want to log into something from your mobile away from your computer, right?

sunsuon Mars 360-degree panoramic view from Curiosity

See this discussion and article from earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360502

sunsuon TapIn.tv (YC S12) Brings Instantaneous Live Video Streaming To The iPhone

If I could just live stream without saving it at the end I might use this, but I can't stand it if it automatically saves. Same issue I had with Qik.

sunsuon Show HN: Markupwand, magically convert your photoshop files to HTML & CSS

I'm on a MBA and can't see the bottom of the tutorial images. My browser height isn't tall enough.

sunsuon Phonegap 2.0 released

One interesting new feature is the "Cordova Webview". This will make building hybrid apps much more straight forward.

"Cordova WebView - This allows for the integration of PhoneGap, as a view fragment, into a bigger native application."

sunsuon Ask HN: how to acquire customers which are small businesses via internet?

Radius provides an excellent tool to make selling to small businesses easier: https://radiusintel.com/

They used to be Fwix, but saw this huge opportunity and shifted to saas.