skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To pile on a little bit to what Erik shared here. There were several use cases that we could not have imagined when we set out on our path.

First, there was a case where a high school girl was equipment manager of her school football team. She was gang raped by some of the players. She was talking about that in chat with her friend, talking about committing suicide, and talking about how she couldn't tell her parents. She was afraid of what they would do to her. To her! Our engine caught much of this, and flagged it for the parents. It worked out in the end. We found out about this after the fact when the parents contacted us to let us know how our software probably saved her life.

Then there was the situation where there was a father who was a community fire chief. His child installed the software on his father's computer because his father was abusing him, and was spending time in really really bad chat rooms. The kid was hoping we were monitoring the alerts. The child eventually reached out to us asking why we hadn't sent the police. It was heart breaking.

Lastly, there was a kid who was buying drugs from a contact online. Is this a sexual predator? No. But a predator nonetheless. Our software flagged it.

There are bad people out there. Some of them are the Chris Hanson predator types. They aren't all sexual predators, but they are still looking to gain access to children without parental permission.

Children and young people react with "this software violates my rights!" As a child, under the age of 18, in the US, has no rights. A parent is supposed to parent. They have no right to privacy.

The software was not meant to record chats. It worked as a sort of a sliding window, and only when there was a flagged issue would a parent get a notification. That notification would include some of the chat around the offending line to give context, but nothing more.

With regard to access to kids - parents can look into a living room and ask "who is that?" Well it's Johnny. He lives down the street. The parents can talk to Johnny's parents. When a child is in an MMO and has a "friend" list a mile long, parents can't really ask "who is Fragg3rKill3r225?" Worse, their kid may not really know who that person is either.

At the core, IMSafer was about helping parents manage the relationships their kids were building online. As a parent, it is your job to know who has access to your kids, and how they are influencing them. Most parental control software is billed as keeping porn of the computers. IMSafer was about keeping the bad guys out of the kids lives.
Can you imagine the gerrymandering crap we'd have to put up with if state lines could be redrawn?
Facebook isn't a technology because it requires... PHP? But PHP isn't a technology because it requires an OS to run it on. But an OS isn't a technology because it requires a server to be installed on. But a server isn't a technology because it requires steel machining. But steel machining isn't a technology because it requires electricity. But electricity isn't a technology because it requires electrons. But electrons aren't a technology because it requires a universe. But the universe isn't a technology because...
Ask HN: Rails or Nodejs
I am an experienced web developer 10+ years and use aspnet mvc. I want a new framework for my next project - just for fun.

There are tons of awesome gems for Rails but I feel like the future is node... Which one should I go with?
Developers speak out about why they use Ada and what they love about it.
It's a euphemism, and it feels strange to have euphemisms for your standard business practices.

Note that the screenshot in Jacques' post shows that he's done a search for "advertising" on his page. None of the text matched. Labeling ads as "Recommended Content" seems quite dishonest.

Edit / Aside: I do generally hold Disqus in high esteem, and I sincerely appreciate your willingness to dive into this discussion. I believe Disqus has faltered, but I don't mean to lay that critique at your personal doorstep.
Not the negative effects? "Shell Violated Air Permits for Arctic Ships, E.P.A. Says"? "Interior Dept. Expedites Review of Arctic Drilling After Accidents"? "Rig Runs Aground in Alaska, Reviving Fears About Arctic Drilling"?
Well, a member of my own family has not had such a wonderful experience with them. Nor have I found my own interactions with them ideal. I expect they are like anything else, some good and some bad. It's a fact though, that IRS agents have a tremendous amount of power to wield over a person's life. Taxes being such a contentious issue, it's not surprising that people are sensitive about having their assets seized.
The Dangers of Software Evangelism
We've yet to find anyone associated with Chrome OS who even knew Jeff Nelson existed. Perhaps there is someone, but there are few people left who could possibly fit that profile. Who's more senior than the original developers, Sundar Pichai?
That's more or less what they're working towards. Although Safeway.com can already deliver that.
I don't understand the levers of reality. I pull this and that lever--everything's the same. It's reasonable enough, I suppose.

When I think about it. I would be lucky if the dynamic status quo lasted the rest of my life. Health is okay, do what I want all day. Not bored. Listless and slightly empty due to delusion and not reality, but I guess that's life.

God says...
C:\Text\2CITIES.TXT

e in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was
to come into fashion, Jerry!"

III

The Night Shadows

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is
constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that
every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret;
that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that
every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts

----

I don't have my OS to work on anymore -- it's done. I have done every idea I ever wanted to do. I certainly don't want to do slave work. So long as I put work into loving God, God is just. Leavites were supported. I don't consume much and I pull my weight loving God.

God says...
C:\Text\Words\AUGUST.TXT

sent to the
memory by itself but by its image: because if it were present by
itself, it would not cause us to remember, but to forget. Who now
shall search out this? who shall comprehend how it is?

Lord, I, truly, toil therein, yea and toil in myself; I am become
a heavy soil requiring over much sweat of the brow. For we are not now
searching out the regions of heaven, or measuring the distances of the
stars, or enquiring the balancings of the earth. It is I myself who
remember, I the mind. I

----

My jobs were supernaturally CIA torture.

----

I live with supernatural pleasures. :-) "measuring the distances of stars" "Balancings of the Earth"
The Chronicles of the Cannon - Where it all began
Does it mean that Americans are loosing jobs? no.

Do you have any proof to back up this statement?
Big Thicket is a nature preserve that is almost entirely within the areas of Houston and Atchafalaya on this map and not in the area called Big Thicket.

The area called Big Thicket on the map would be hard to characterize as a whole. It is primarily Llano Estacado, northern Texas Hill Country and Piney Woods.
What kind of bugs have you found?
The Most Honest 3 1/2 Minutes of TV....Ever
While that's impressive, that's not even the new version. The new conversion is here: https://preview.crocodoc.com/
I'm waiting for ThreesomeApp.
If you're a scrappy startup, you better not have engineers wasting time setting up servers when there are great hosted products out there.
What about swift.com payments? That should be able to reach approximately every possible bank account in the world ...
What is wrong with cap and trade? I don't have a strong understanding of the proposed law but it stands to reason that the free market would be able to find the most efficient method of reducing emissions.
As someone who uses Amazon Fresh, there are still things you want to leave the house for such as produce. Fresh has different categories for freshness, but I've found it not to mean that the produce is going to be ready to eat anytime soon.

I've found myself using Fresh for basic things, which the vast majority are on amazon's normal site.
>I'll . . . ask if they have any other option.

The other option would have been to choose not to take VC money -- or to have chosen a "business model" not heavily dependent on high-quality uncompensated contributions from users.
No meeting Wednesdays
Philosophical question:

Is it really a bad "beta", or has your preconceived notion on what a "beta" should be been radically altered by the sheer number of startups that throw the word around now?

Gmail was in "beta" for about a million years, and was incredibly stable for most of that. I think it has become the allegorical metric these days. But I remember back in the late 90's and early 2000's when making the choice to use beta software was a decision not to be taken lightly because you probably would find tons of very easily reproducible, obvious, critical bugs.

Don't forget that before "beta" was widely used as an adjective, it was a noun and it was immediately followed by the word "test".
I don't argue for a mind-numbing office life. I argue that being stoned 24/7 doesn't fit how _I_ would spend my time if I were (f)unemployed _by choice_. I would backpack, ski, travel, hack, learn new trades, build things, etc. Maybe some of that requires money, but not all do.
I (and probably several other) members of the board will be on this thread to answer any questions.

Van Lindberg
Chairman, Python Software Foundation

Edit: I have been asked what sort of statements would be helpful. I can't tell you exactly what to say - it needs to be your statement, but we need to make it clear that when someone says "Python" in relation to software, or a "Python server," or with "Python experience," they are referring to Python-the-language.

We also want people to testify to their understanding that Python is distributed by the Python Software Foundation.

These are not exactly the same, but this gives a flavor of some of the things that can be helpful:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zxn212k5r8mg1k7/WitnessStatement.p...

In case anyone wants to know, it is CTM Application No. 10848208 PYTHON & Device in the name of POBox Hosting

Edit 2: I have already received a book written in Spain, job postings about Python, and a number of statements of support. Thank you! Please, keep sending them. We need to make sure that it is clear that "Python" is Python across the entire EU.
Presumably you could write a script to extract the "raw data" (whatever that means) from the charts themselves.

Unless you mean you want finer-grained data. Which is just as easily faked.
Got it. If the question is about how clear it is to users, then yes that's important and something that we've adjusted along the way. We're going to continue making changes as we learn from feedback.
Its worth $2/user not to have to set stuff up on my company servers. We're a small company though (6 people now) so maybe the economics are different where you are.
I believe board seats and lead investor/pro-rata rights are just negotiation terms and not a must for a Series A.

Your other point is a good one. If there was no valuation and only convertible notes were issues, then I understand why this would not be a Series A.
"Our initial hypothesis was that life on Haight Street would be a grim, Dickensian hellhole. Instead, we discovered a world of misunderstood, modern-day nomads, blithely toeing the line between poverty, drug dealing, and hippy nirvana."

We had to interview homeless people in DC as part of a college project, and found something similar. I think the common perception is that homeless people are just people like you and I who hit hard times, but almost everyone we talked to was homeless by choice (and some probably had mental illness). Talk to homeless people sometime, it may change your ideas.
> Facebook isn't a technology because it requires... PHP?

Straw man. Facebook is a company whose purpose it is to make money by offering social connections. The fact that Facebook does this by having a network presence is coincidental -- the network aspect of Facebook's business is a means to an end, and the means could be something else with no change in the company's goals.

In principle, Facebook could accomplish its ends with two cans and a string across the back fence. Different technology, same goal.

> But the universe isn't a technology because...

Do try to think this through.
They are obviously not a charity company and its totally understandable the need to make revenue. However, when i sign up for a service and i am asked to link to an external JavaScript file, i expect that file to do as advertised, i can understand the functionality changing a bit without me being notified but not when they do such drastic changes, in that case they should either go with an 'opt-in' option or disable there commenting system until i approve that i am okay with this new functionality. For all those that say 'you can stop using them if you don't like what they do', of course you can but there 'malicious' code still rendered on my webpages right? As an example, what if tomorrow they added 'functionality' to there widget and they started forcing pop ups, would that be okay? There is a certain level of trust needed towards a company that wants me to link some external code on my website that they can change at any given time, actions like that destroy said trust.

Here is the thing, if they done it the proper way i am sure most people wouldn't opt-in, if you are running a website that makes a revenue from ads, you probably already have all the ads your webpage can 'support', if you are running a website as a hobby you probably aren't interested to make any sort of revenue so you would rather not have the ads. Its way more profitable for them to just force there way in, specially if they see that there users don't care.
I believe the issue is you say "Recommended Content" rather than "Ads by Disqus" which, obviously, infers that the site is recommending something they are not.

Saying "Ads by Disqus" will probably annihilate your clickthrough, but you have to make a choice between cashing in, or keeping your partners happy.
> You're assuming that because someone owns property in NYC that they're rich, which is clearly not the case, especially if they've been there for half a century.

You need to read what you wrote again. "Just because someone has a very valuable financial asset, doesn't make them rich." ORLY?

Let me quote from a news story:

"These listings, along with several others at the extreme low end of the market, are well below New York City's median sales price of $635,000, according to StreetEasy.com, which excludes foreclosures from its data. They're also below the bottom 10th of the city market, which has a median sales price of $160,000."

Even if your place is worth less than 95% of NYC properties, it's still worth $160,000.

Your argument is that someone who has a giant diamond but little liquid income shouldn't have to pay taxes on the diamond.

People who are having trouble paying property taxes are RICH people. Their problems go away immediately if they sell the giant asset they are holding onto, or if they even take a loan against its value (and payable when the asset is sold, perhaps when Grandma dies).

Does your argument work for all taxes? Should I just convert all my money into a single diamond and then claim I don't have any liquid cash to pay my income taxes?

"Oh, my diamond is too big to carve up to pay the taxman! Whatever shall I do!?!?"

Not actually a problem.
Apologies for hijacking the thread, but I'm wondering:

We're using Campfire right now, with the Propane mac client, and we have a dedicated room for notifications (currently exceptions from Errbit, monitoring alerts from Nagios, CI build failures on Jenkins, app deployments from our own custom tools).

It works pretty well, but we're a team working on a whole bunch of unrelated but overlapping apps, and having everything in a single room is getting to be very messy, and at times the Propane icon is bouncing almost continuously. And Propane doesn't support controlling when to notify me when there are new unread messages, so I have no way of filtering out the noise. Splitting out into multiple rooms is not a workable solution as the "spheres of interest" are not mutually exclusive.

I'm curious if anyone is using Campfire or some other tool in a similar way, or if HipChat could solve the problem (on first glance it looks fairly simplistic). Email doesn't cut it and direct IM through some bot is not really an option. A dedicated notification app/gateway seems like a better fit, but I haven't found one since Notifio folded.
Nah, they changed their name to Omniva and used their technology for corporate email/document management (read: delete those emails before they are subpoenaed). Then they were bought out by Liquid Machines, and the product lives on as Liquid Machines Email Control.

I think the money just wasn't there for public use.
minutia. my point was: its minutia.

You're other points are meaningful, though.
As someone who has lived in the Haight-Ashbury for 9 years now, I can say this is a well-written and balanced perspective. Although, it glosses over the additional crime (mainly property theft, occasional assault) brought by the street kids. The key thing noted here is that the vast majority of street kids in the Haight are there by choice, up to and including the choice to panhandle to make enough for $18 bags of organic dog food.

It's refreshing to read, because I'm tired of the two extremes usually presented, either that the street kids are people to be pitied or trash to be thrown out. The street kids are more just a fixture. Like the trees in Buena Vista, they were not here originally, but they're a fixture now, and they'll be here for quite some time to come.
The Lone Wolf Coder
I used this service before: https://www.singlefeed.com/

It's worth it if you don't have a ton of development resources and are trying to get exposure fast.

However, if you can do it yourself, you can take advantage of optimizations you just can't get from canned solutions.

Also, all your competitors don't have the same advantages you do.
>That's why I get irked when people talk about housewives becoming "braindead" from being outside of the economy.

Every housewife I know has some kind of mentally stimulating hobby, and most of them make some amount of income from it (photography, crafts etc...). In fact most of them shouldn't really be called "housewives" any more than male remote programmers should be called "househusbands".
This story reminds me a lot of this old "Hipster Animals" gag.

http://hipster-animals.tumblr.com/post/5609675345/raccoon
about the most impressive thing other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved

Funny thing, that. I was thinking about this topic recently, as I don't feel like I've exactly "accomplished" anything worth talking about up to this point in my life (and I'm 39). But, that doesn't bother me because, the way I see it, everything I've done in my (adult) life up to this point has been taking steps along the path to this startup that I'm working on now. Or, to put it a different way, I've actually been building Fogbeam Labs since I was 19 or so, even though it's only existed as a legal entity for 2 years or so.

I'd love to hear some YC applicants chime in and share their personal "what's the most impressive thing you've done" stories. If I had to pick one for myself, I'd probably go with one of these:

1. I was formerly Fire Chief of a volunteer fire department, and one of the youngest people to hold that position in my area.

2. I was one the youngest, if not the youngest, Firefighting Instructors certified by the NC State Fire & Rescue Commission.

3. I ran for Lieutenant Governor of NC, appeared in a statewide televised debate with the other two candidates and got about 125,000 votes (roughly 3%).

What I can't claim is to have achieved anything specific in terms of building a previous startup or having any particular financial return, blah, blah.
I would have called it Vireel.
I'm a 23 year old with purple hair, but I'm also a PhD student at a top 10 university for computer science. I've hung out in tons of squats and punk houses, and briefly been a street kid, but I got a 2380 on my SATs. I lived in a non-residential warehouse for months - months when I was taking Physics, Linear Algebra, Computer Science and Sociology 321 - Class and Inequality. I've dug through dozens of dumpsters, and I've hiked hundreds and hundreds of miles on the Appalachian Trail. I've been in jail and won the prize for Best Undergraduate Research at my university.

I fell out of touch with the anarchopunkier half of my friends when I got serious about artificial intelligence and computer science - I love these things and they're very important to me, and in the coffeeshops we always talked about how to get rid of tyrants and inequality. I have always believed in technology. OLPC, Ubuntu, Khan Academy, Coursera, solar panels, cell networks - the list goes on.

Startup folks and street punks have a lot of similar ideas about what we want, but really different aesthetics. The punks I've known are much more well-read and just as bright as the grad students I spend time with now. On the other hand, they're in denial about capitalism. Both groups have a lot to learn from each other, if only they can look over the other's smarminess/smelliness.
Tesla tears down NYT Model S review with car’s own logs
Been using it for an hour or so and haven't run into any issues - what have you found? Just saying critical bugs is pretty unhelpful to everyone.
Went for a walk through this area about two weeks ago. As you near the park, lot of dealers pop up. In the park, on every corner of the paths people offered to sell me drugs. Marijuana, LSD, Mushrooms were all offered. I could sense different groups competing for territory in the park. I felt uncomfortable.
We definitely allow you to manage lists in a consistent manner. Can you email me directly with your exact use case and I can help you get started? andrew at firebase dot com.
> Facebook is a tool designed and built to solve a set of problems. If that is not technology in a core sense, I don't know what is.

Facebook's purpose (sell social connections) and its method (networking) are distinct and separate. Facebook could accomplish its objectives in any number of ways -- networking is coincidental to the company's purpose.
FarmLogs (YC W12) Is Going To Change The Way That Farmers Manage Their Business
Anybody remember the article a few days ago with the author complaining about the Google bus and the invasion of tech folks into the Bay Area and how they weren't improving the community?

And how a lot of people were like "Hey, well, it's putting wealth into helping San Francisco!".

Well, how's this fit into that calculus?
You are ignoring two items and concentrating on the least relevant third.

The marking speak is where you say:

"When new users sign up, they also are introduced to what Promoted Discovery is and have the choice to configure it."

Let me re-write that for you:

"When new users sign up, we explain to them that we have a revenue sharing advertising program with links that look like content."