Hacker News Reader

footpathon Ask HN: How do you transfer money internationally?

How are you currently depositing the US cheques? Both TD[1] and RBC[2] offer cross-border banking accounts, meaning that you can open a TD/RBC account in Canada and a TD/RBC account in the US and link them together, which should allow you to transfer funds between them at an optimum rate. You should be able to deposit US cheques with their smartphone apps. The issue with this approach is that you will have to maintain two bank accounts that you may have to pay monthly fees separately or maintain a minimum balance.

There should also be some banks in Canada (including TD and RBC) that offer US Dollar accounts, such as this one from Scotia[3] that seems to offer direct deposit, so maybe look those up as well.

Otherwise, foreign exchange sites like XE or Xoom may be an option as others have mentioned here, but I'm not too familiar with them.

[1]http://www.tdbank.com/personal/cross-border-banking.html [2]http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/cross-border-banking/index.html [3]http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,59,00.html

footpathon Google Noto Fonts

It is possible. There is a technology called dynamic subsetting that only loads the necessary glyphs on a web page:

http://www.monotype.com/services/screen-imaging-solutions/dy...

http://en.justfont.com/

footpathon Google Account History

Note that before this existed, you would have to go into Youtube/Google Maps/etc. individually to view your history settings. Comments from here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6873032) and here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7804350) show that many users may not be aware that they had history turned on, so a centralised settings page will hopefully raise a bit more awareness.

footpathon Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

The creators of the drawing app "Colors!" for 3DS and iOS also tested their app's latency across a wide range of devices, and they achieved a 9ms latency in 2004's Nintendo DS:

http://www.collectingsmiles.com/news/measuring-latency-in-co...

  Nintendo 3DS – 23 ms
  PlayStation Vita – 49 ms
  Surface Pro – 100 ms
  iPhone 5 – 81 ms
  Galaxy Note – 71 ms
  Galaxy S3 – 104 ms & Nexus 10 – 99 ms
  Galaxy Note 2 – 132 ms
  Wii U GamePad – 53 ms
  Nintendo DS – 9 ms

footpathon Is Microsoft About to Announce an Info Pad?

There are actually several brands of pressure-sensitive styli available for the iPad, including Adonit Jot Touch, Hex3 JaJa, and Wacom's own Intuos Creative Stylus, and even more on the way such as the Hex3 YuFu and Adobe/Adonit's Project Mighty, though it does appear that none these offers come close to devices with actual Wacom active layers built-in, as most of these pens are bluetooth hacks that attempt to make up for iPad's shortcomings. It's really a shame, though, since I find iPad's library of note-taking and drawing apps to be significant better in terms of quality and quantity than those found in Android's Play Store and Microsoft's Windows 8 Store.

footpathon IFTTT launches on Android with deeper integration than on iOS

Thank you for the information. According to the linked XDA discussion:

"Evozi's fork is based on opensource 1.4.x, with tracking code and removes validation for undownloadable APKs as a fix for new play store. Besides this, it also removes the copyright header of background.js, adds more tracking and some textual changes (adding links to his own apps and social accounts)."

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=44032616&post...

footpathon Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

This is off-topic, but one of my favorite essays in English that deals with Chinese culture is this one by David Moser on Chinese "stand-up comedy": http://www.danwei.org/tv/stifled_laughter_how_the_commu.php

This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473

footpathon Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

妞妞牵牛，牛拗，妞妞拧牛。妞 means girl, 妞妞 is a common name for little girls; 拗 has two different pronunciations, ao and niu; the ao pronunciation is usually used as a verb for bending something, while the niu pronunciation is usually an adjective for stubbornness. I guess 拧 is better translated as to wring or to squeeze and twist, but you get the idea.

footpathon Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

That's the first line of a classic Chinese couplet (duìlián). The second line usually goes: Niūniū qiān niú， niú niù， niūniū níng niú. It translates to "little girl leads along the cow, the cow is stubborn, the little girl pinches the cow".

footpathon Microsoft ends support for custom domains in free email service

Zoho is the only one I know of that still offers free domain email hosting:

https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

footpathon Microsoft launches Office for iPad

Looks like the non-tablet iPhone/Android phone versions of Office Mobile have gone free to use as well, forgoing the previous requirement of an active Office 365 subscription:

http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/27/announcing-the-office-you...

footpathon Two Factor Auth List

There's Dynadot: http://www.dynadot.com/domain/security.html

Also NearlyFreeSpeech, though the domain selection is very limited, as it's primarily a hosting company: https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2014/02/28/price-cuts-more...

footpathon Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly

By better than, I hope you were referring to the image quality and special effects. In terms of filming techniques and the actual content of the movies, I do not think films made decades ago are categorically worse than films made today.

footpathon Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly

>>Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore.

That would be a great idea. However, the Popcorn Time website states that they only use torrents from YIFY. A brief perusal of the YIFY website tells me that they only have recent or big blockbuster films. I tried searching for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Intolerance", and neither showed up. As far as the status of the service goes right now, its main purpose is to stream pirated movies. This could change in the future as Popcorn Time opens up to accept more sources.

footpathon Microsoft Office Online

According to Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Online>, Office Online (in its previous incarnation as Office Web Apps) has been free to public since 2010.

footpathon Lenovo to buy Google's Motorola handset division

http://investor.google.com/releases/2014/0129.html

"Google will maintain ownership of the vast majority of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, including current patent applications and invention disclosures. As part of its ongoing relationship with Google, Lenovo will receive a license to this rich portfolio of patents and other intellectual property. Additionally Lenovo will receive over 2,000 patent assets, as well as the Motorola Mobility brand and trademark portfolio."

footpathon Hand Coding A Personal Website

Just like to add that if you're using FileZilla as your FTP client, make sure to not let it save your passwords, as FileZilla stores them in plaintext on the computer.

https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=30765

footpathon Firefox 26 is released

The Android version has received a facelift as well, and it looks nice. However, I suppose there still isn't a way to manually pin sites to the about:home page if they do not show up there already?

footpathon YuFu: The Stylus Perfected. Pressure Sensitive Fine Tip

Just some notes:

- The Pro version excites me much more than Pencil by Fiftythree, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6761297, because it provides pressure sensitivity and a fine tip, both of which Pencil lacks;

- It's touted to contain over 4000 levels of pressure recognition, while the most advanced version of Wacom tablets only has 2048 levels (http://www.wacom.com/en/us/creative/cintiq-22-hd-touch);

- It's also got tilt recognition, which I believe is also a first among iPad styli.

footpathon Lantern proxied sites lists – China

Lantern seems a lot like the Hola Unblocker (http://hola.org/faq.html#ub_cost), although Hola is ad-supported and not open source.

footpathon Google Wallet Card

Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6770398

From the top of the other thread:

"Let's clarify some things here, before the comment threads take off too much:

- This is a prepaid card. It does not proxy other cards, unlike previous rumored versions of a Wallet card.

- It only draws from Wallet balance. Funds can be added to wallet balance via various means (bank account [free], receiving a GMail P2P payment [free], credit cards [2.9% fee]), but this does not happen automatically.

As such, it does not appear to be trying to achieve the same "card replacement" that e.g. Coin is. No, it is simply providing another way to get at Wallet balance that doesn't involve transfer to a bank account or NFC payment. Could be useful for people who make use of GMail P2P payments."

footpathon Pencil

Sketchbook Pro is a desktop-only app; you are probably thinking of the metro version of Sketchbook Express.

Microsoft's own Fresh Paint app is another one that could benefit from this. One thing to note is that all of the Bluetooth styli released so far on iOS are exclusive to Apple's platform. An exception is Hex JaJa, which is cross-platform between iOS and Android, but it's not a Bluetooth stylus either - it utilises high-pitch sounds delivered via microphone.

footpathon Pencil

>>What I think is sad about both of these products is that they are tied to specific apps. These closed ecosystems get to be more powerful instead of becoming tools on top of which larger things can be hacked together.

There are a number of high-end stylus makers that offer app developers SDK integration with their tools:

https://github.com/Adonit/JotTouchSDK http://www.tenonedesign.com/t1pogomanager.php http://www.hex3.co/pages/developers http://us.wacom.com/en/developerrelations/ios

And many drawing apps have taken advantage of them, such as the professional-level Procreate app, which allows one to use any of the pressure-sensitive styli listed above interchangeably.

footpathon Unlocked phones are the way to go

The Net10/Straight Talk data cap on AT&T SIM cards has actually been lifted,[0] now it's just 2.5GB at full speed and then throttled until the month is over.

I find that the BYOP offerings of Net10 and Straight Talk don't differ that much: both offer LTE, similar APN settings, same throttling limits, etc., as both companies are owned by TracFone. The only difference is that Straight Talk costs $45/month while Net10 costs $50/month, although if one sets up recurring payments on Net10's website the cost will be reduced to $45/month as well.

[0]: http://androidforums.com/net10/763501-net10-t-sim-card-data-...

footpathon Apple Says New OS X ‘Mavericks’ Will Be Offered for Free

Is this really the case? According to a survey by Forrester[0], corporations are still largely dominated by Microsoft products.

[0]http://blogs.forrester.com/philipp_karcher/13-10-17-office_p...

footpathon Canvas Cycle: True 8-bit Color Cycling with HTML5

More information can be found in this blog post: http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_C...

footpathon Oldest Domain Names

Those can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_r...

footpathon The Surface 2

The Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus (what a mouthful) uses Bluetooth for pressure, which is similar to the Pogo Connect and Adonit Jot Touch styli. What the OP want is perhaps something similar to the iPen 2 <http://www.cregle.com/>, a pen and receiver combo that captures pressure sensitive data.

footpathon Newell's history of porting Doom to Windows to show it can be a gaming platform

Honestly, I do think that NeoGAF is one of the better video game forums out there, given that registration is strictly restricted to school, work, and ISP email addresses[0]. But even so, you still have wade through many unproductive one-liners to find a post of modicum importance. And as far as I have heard, NeoGAF is frequently visited by game journalists and developers alike, so the bar is already pretty high.

Some people have tried making more mature gaming communities, such as the owner of Insomnia who enforces a very strict posting guideline[1] and requires a paid subscription in order to participate[2], but I feel that these types of communities are often too restrictive in the types of content they can provide, often limiting themselves to specific discussions on higher level game mechanics of specific genres, and, as a result, lack the diversity found in forums like NeoGAF.

[0]http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=390708 [1]http://insomnia.ac/commentary/posting_guidelines/ [2]http://culture.vg/subscribe.html

footpathon Google makes Quickoffice for Android and iOS free for all

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Quickoffice used to allow signing in from multiple services? I remember using an older version of Quickoffice that allowed logging in with Dropbox, SkyDrive, etc. while this new version appear to only work with Google accounts.