skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your goal is to have a free and open uncontrolled, uncensored chat-system that is NSA kinda proof then lets do that, Im all for it.

I just dont think XMPP fulfills the uncontrolled and uncensored and surveillence resistent parts. We need to look at web of trust, bitmessage and such instead, those are more fun problems than "to spite facebook".

But sure, any solution will benefit greatly if its bundled with the browser since that appears to be the only program most users actually use on their computing devices. Imagine if Tor and a tor-relay or even tor-exit-node came preconfigured with every Firefox and turned on by default. That would be fun.
Show HN: GlyphSearch – Search for icons from Font Awesome, Glyphicons, Ionicons
All I thought was: that's some expensive beer!
My brother wrote the games, and I played them. I remember playing his tetris for hours on end because he wasn't aware that speed had to increase (he'd only glimpsed the original briefly).
Hehe that's just in time, got rejected by YC today so... Still I think it is a major idea, you guys got any input as to get approved next time? I'm asking because I think I might have not stressed how big it is.
Basically the idea was inspired by Clear, the todo app, because I was fed up how the GUI works on the iPhone. So I found a way how to create more time by pinching ala Clear. I later found out this gesture is like a Lego building block, it's universal. I've always went with a pro approach to GUIs, I think people are much smarter then we think and to me gestures are the way to go. Like gestures should be like the axioms. Pinching should not just zoom in but zoom in in different ways depending on the context. Sort of like operator overloading, using the same principles to do new stuff which makes sense.
Any feedback appreciated and let me know why you got rejected too, make we can start like a help group :-) I'm serious!
Realtime Morphing Table Produces 3D Image of What It Sees
Thank you, I didn't know it was fixed. I did see your comment before and thought that those APIs still were not accessible. But I've seen good reviews of CSipSimple on Nexus 4 recently, suggesting that the problem may have been fixed.
Reading the review, I think I could create my own TL;DR:

Overall, there is confirmation bias. We see what we want to see.

This is as true for Ms. Bezos's review as it is for the author's biography. As is usually the case, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle area of consensus -- which we now know is anathemic territory for Mr. Bezos.

EDIT: would appreciate a reply to understand why this was downvoted.
Data entry & research. Used to spend hours for lists, contact information, etc. Can be done automatically. Lead sourcing is another big use here.

Competitive research. Having your VA research these tasks & put together a database of information becomes a 1-day task that has immense value down the road.

Customer Service - haven't done this yet - but having them take messages, be my secretary, handle refunds & answer 80% of the support messages that come in (usually variants of the same problem with a fixed, simple solution).

Basic writing skills (non-native english is tough here, but if you want just a paragraph or so written, they can usually do a pretty good job here - after which I have an native-english editor / copywriter go back through & clean up any leftover artifacts).
The Ghost himself!
First of all, NYC landlord-tenant law is so far past the "let people contract however they want" phase that it would be laughable to let AirBnB operate under these rules. Nearly 50% of the apartments in New York are rent-stabilized, meaning that the tenants can't be evicted except for non-payment of rent, and are guaranteed a below-market-rate rent with government-dictated annual increases. It's ridiculously unfair to landlords to allow rent-stabilized tenants to re-rent their apartments at market rate and pocket the difference.

All of these are horrible things (particularly rent-controls). Perhaps instead of crusading against AirBnB it would be better to focus your efforts on changing this system? Sometimes the only way to bring a bad system (an it is a very, very bad system) down is to abuse it to the extent possible.
Relevant: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Doom_clon...
Unconditional Programming
It could also be because they thought you were going automate them out of a job. People who aren't in the business of change don't like it as a general rule.
I do use the 1.5x feature but save that for the podcasts I actually listen to. By reading the transcripts I can "monitor" 3-5 weekly, hour long podcasts in 15 minutes.

As for the card, yes I use an AMEX Platinum but believe Visa Signature and MasterCard World Elite also offer a similar service.
Why sharing a private jet doesn't work
Show HN: Database and comparison site for courier services
www.goshippo.com
I'm looking for beta testers for our logistics startup. Get in touch if you want to improve your delivery processes. We're currently working with platforms that coordinate seller-buyer transactions but any company that sends stuff around the world is welcome as a beta tester. I'm open for any kind of feedback. Please be critical!
Biohacker Implants Smartphone-Sized Sensor Into His Arm
How so? That story is about Job being "tested" by having his life practically destroyed not being rejected.

Getting someone to say no to your donut requested is quite different than losing your entire fortune, business, family and kids.
"Streisanded"? I think that's the worst word I will see or hear this week.
A .doc file created 5 minutes ago in Word can't be assumed to open correctly in any other version of Word without testing.

I used to work at a research institute and the people who used Word always spent more time getting their papers to look as nice as the LaTeX users, particularly if you crossed platforms or had change tracking enabled (hello undeletable footnote in the middle of the page…). The barrier to entry was higher but if you needed reliably consistent formatting there wasn't really a better option, with the exception of HTML5 + CSS + your favorite MathML shim if you're submitting to a really web-centric journal.
It requires less wheel inventing as it is mostly declarative. It provides a higher level of abstraction vs rdiff-backup. Finally, it is more like Apple's Time Machine since t uses hardlinks to dr duplicate files. This means that you can browse all you backups in parallel and do not have to worry that one of the incremental backups being corrupt means that all subsequent ones are corrupt as well.
SaaS Metrics for Hackers – The Main Funnel
+1 for your defense of minecraft. -1 for Hacker's News staunch outlook on intellectual property.

"Inspiration is not the same thing as blatantly ripping off other games and passing them off as unique creations. "

Who said that was inspiration? -no one goes out to "blatantly" rip something off. Your lack of understanding speaks to your lack of creative experience, sorry.
You might consider that infographics repel some folks - they think "what a waste of time, I'm definitely hitting the back button now". I don't know the demographics, buts its probably bigger than one (me).
Has anyone noticed that the usage restriction:

"This software(OpenNote) cannot be sold as a product, as a component, as a service, or in any other way unless a distribution license is purchased from the author(J. Liscom)"

is incompatible with its (OpenNote) license (GPLv3)?
For the record, I'm all for the airline industry being disrupted. I've heard of a few of these Uber-like services being started, but never fully understood the challenges. I'm curious as to whether the objections the author brings up here are legitimate obstacles that insurmountable or simply 'old' thinking.
> But you do admit they are programs!

No, I don't – not in the sense that Stroustrup was using the term "program". strlen or malloc are not programs in the way that this term is commonly understood. His claim is not ridiculous, unless you're nitpicking by using definitions which are just not useful for the discussion at hand (i.e., is C++ better suited for developing non-trivial software).

As for the driver example: I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, unless someone actually implements a device driver in C and in C++ ;-)
streisand effect is a real and valid phenomenon; do you have a superior term in mind?
Talk about degrading family value.

Doing chores is beneficial and a nice way of taking a break.
Claims by biased entities are not facts. In fact, it's almost always the opposite.
Author of Circus here.

Major differences:

* Circus uses ZeroMQ, Supervisor uses XML-RPC.
* Circus is Python 3 compatible, Supervisor is Python 2 only
* Circus will let you manage sockets - see http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/latest/for-ops/sockets/
christ its about time there was an article about this, I knew it for about 3 years = (
I will say I would never hire anyone to do work I can accomplish myself - I don't care if it makes sense or not, I just couldn't do it.
Why? Because I and I would say most people that hire people to take care of their lawns and clean their toilets aren't then using their time more wisely or getting that oh so amazing hour of family time they could never have. They just don't feel like doing the task.
I agree with you and same points will keep me with Evernote for some time.

I'd love to see the app evolve though! Something that I can deploy on my server and have access to all the code is definitely great.
I wonder if the idea that what we're doing can and/or should be important or world-changing is particularly strong in our industry, if it's something more widely shared, or if it's more narrow (e.g. an HN thing).

We see it a lot here: People talking about how they want to change the world, how they wish they were doing something more meaningful, etc. The reality is that almost no one does work with any sort of profound (positive) impact on humanity or the world around us; the kind of philanthropic work that gets this sort of love just is not that common.

The vast majority of work available, and the similarly vast majority of potentially viable business models, just don't fit this mold. I'm not saying we shouldn't aspire to be and do better, but I am suggesting that the expectation that we should be involved in positive change at all times just isn't reasonable or practical.
>> The best advantage I have found with our VA is having them listen to all the podcasts I want to listen to, summarize the articles and send me the transcript. Then I can skim in 30 seconds what use to take me 45-60 minutes to listen to.

If you could produce a complete transcript, I bet the podcast hosts would be delighted to post it for each episode. Not only would it be useful for listeners, but it would help them show up in web searches on their topic.

Perhaps the hosts or other listeners would even help pay for the transcription.
Thanks for the feedback.
I fully agree with you that I should have written an explanation about the product. Your comment as well as the other have triggered me to try to improve the infographic.

I will create a new post on the blog shortly with an improved infographic and some statistics on today's blog traffic.
My dad worked at ISRO for 30+ years and is now retired - so what I'm saying has some merit.

I don't know where you are getting the impression that ISRO engineers aren't paid well. Sure, they are not paid Google salaries but they are no way paid peanuts. A fresh engineering graduate will stand to get around 40K INR per month. Please not that if you are not landing up a software job, in India, it's a pretty shitty market out there for other disciplines. ISRO offers are great when you consider for example, what a mechanical engineer makes in other private companies.

Working environment is also comparable to any software facility. Please visit the ISRO facility in Bangalore on old airport road. They have some of the most green and spacious campuses. I don't have pictures because security is super tight and they don't even let you carry your cellphones inside.

For a long time, ISRO offered some of the best retirement benefits. My dad and mom don't have to worry about their healthcare costs for the rest of their lives and my dad gets a handsome pension to take care of his day to day living expenses. This has changed with the sixth pay commission.

ISRO also offers housing in some prime areas, near the office facilities so that you don't have to commute much. Of course, not everyone gets this benefit and it's based more on a lottery basis.

The schooling for your kids is almost free in the Kendriya Vidyala schools - and some of those schools offer top notch education.

While you are employed, you pay next to nothing for healthcare (including surgeries). There is the CGHS card that you flash in almost all major hospitals and you are taken care of.

As if this was not all enough, you get to work on some really state of the art stuff that others can't even imagine. There is absolutely no room for error. You just can't say 'oh crap I'll just fix that bug'. One bug might destroy a satellite or screw up the rocket launch. So, there is a lot of merit in building such mission critical systems and a ton of satisfaction. This satisfaction cannot be compared with money.

During launch days, my dad would work 3-4 days at a stretch without even a phone call in between. Such was the pressure.

So, working at ISRO has a ton of merits and satisfaction. It's not for everyone though. There is no glamour as such in the job. You don't have crazy parties or drunken revelries or annual outings to Hawaii. There is an enormous amount of bureaucracy and bull shit that you have to deal with. But for an engineer who loves to build mission critical applications - the place is a heaven.
I use mine to research all the conferences & trade shows for the upcoming year that I might want to go to. They find out the price to sponsor as well as the price to attend. They even go as far to look for flight and hotel costs.
That's good to know, thank you. It looks like the only drawback is that rdiff-backup stores file diffs as well, so rsnapshot will have to store the entire file again if you change one byte in it, but, since most of my files will never change, it sounds very good for my use case, thank you.
It is, but the datasets involved are huge, and the various AJAX requests do need their time.

20 emails in the inbox view (API endpoint 1), directory information (API endpoint 2), Google Chat (API endpoint 3), your most-frequented labels (API endpoint 3) - and especially the email-endpoints are quite traffic-intensive!

So the GMail team decided they'll load with a progress bar instead of creating four or five widgets with "loading..." placeholders (unlike I do at readme.fm). When you got a lot of various and/or traffic-intensive assets, then you have to choose one of those two models.

(Of course, you can take advantage of IDB/WebSQL/LocalStorage/AppCache, but that is only helping a little bit)
A lot more people have less busy lives than you think. I know of at least two forks that started this afternoon. :)
Also (and I wouldn't have guessed this) but my VA at least is pretty fantastic at handling various social media outlets. Almost zero input from me & she "gets" it. Fantastic.
The idea of a marketplace for experts is intriguing. I can't imagine this will ever work well, though.

- Google is presently curating this list, approving everyone who would be a provider. This is fine for launch, but this obviously needs to scale.

- From a functional standpoint, this is the Human App Store. How do I, the provider, promote myself among thousands of search results for underwater-basket-weaving experts?

- Race to the bottom: I don't associate Google with any sort of premium pricing model. If I think my services are worth more than the low-cost providers, but I'm one of a thousand providers, am I going to have to go the only other route Google tends to provide -- paid advertising placement?

The idea is interesting, but I don't think Google will ever position it to be helpful to anyone but users and themselves.
You have not ordered beer in Sweden, right? ;)
You do know that's a weasel statement, right?
Took a job at Amazon – What’s good, what’s not (2010)
> LR's most basic criminal offense is simple: It didn't know or want to know the identities of its clients. They allowed people to transfer big sums of money without checking their identification.

That this is a crime disgusts me. I should be able to do whatever I want with my money without anyone knowing who I am. That's how it worked up to the past century.
Its not exactly that Western nations don't have problems they ignore or are not called out on. Its just easier for people to take cheap shots at India, stereotypes and such being what they are.

I don't think their political corruption is much worse than what the US has, we just have laws that permit too much of it. Fortunately the scientist of most countries want to succeed because of their interest in the unknown, in doing things, rather than worrying about politics.
Outsourcing by eating out has become much more acceptable in the past few years, but I can remember growing up that eating out was considered a luxury. But restaurants can achieve economies a scale that are difficult to get at home, especially if you don't have a large family. In many cases, eating at a restaurant or having food delivered isn't that bad of a deal.
> Because I and I would say most people that hire people to take care of their lawns and clean their toilets aren't then using their time more wisely or getting that oh so amazing hour of family time they could never have. They just don't feel like doing the task.

This is an emotional response to the economic mindset that the article purposes. In the article - the entire point is that it doesn't matter what you do with that extra time, but if you value your time at $100/hour and you do a task that you can pay someone to do for $10/hour, it's not an efficient use of your resources. That's the economic theory - whether or not you do anything with that extra time is up to you.
Firefox is (among other things) better than the rest of the browsers, because I can customize it.

I (having started this subthread) didn't suggest to start creating a Nescape Navigator kind of suite here. I'd just love to have a decent xmpp client as optional extension. Granted, this doesn't have to come from Mozilla.
Wave was really laggy and required a special chrome frame plugin to run in IE. It was laggy even in chrome.
Sorry - VA = virtual assistant.
Debating biases aside... An author not interviewing their subject is unprofessional. (edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearsay )
What is different about the government logging traffic between Lavabit and the user versus the SMTP between another host and Lavabit? With Lavabit's key, they can get all incoming mail (and many providers don't even use STARTTLS). Perhaps their logged traffic was incomplete or is difficult to search?

Email just isn't very secure as a protocol; people that care need something they can verify, like PGP (which Snowden used). It's unfortunate that the asynchronous nature of email (which we tend to view as an important feature) is incompatible with client-verifiable forward secrecy.
Yes, the strategy works better if you have a lower-latency network at your disposal. What it creates is a winner-take-all situation where the mining pool with the best optimized network, some function of latency-vs-cost, gets a disproportionate reward even when all miners are pursuing this strategy.
The simplicity of "switch to a whole foods, plant-based diet and you simply won't die from heart disease" has eased my similar anxieties. http://www.heartattackproof.com/ See also the related documentary, http://www.forksoverknives.com/.
Single page article here --> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/outsource-your-wa...
She also points to two other reviewers with 1st hand knowledge who dispute enough of the facts to put the book at least somewhat in doubt. E.g. the first says 80/20% correct/incorrect, which makes him wonder what 20% of the claimed facts he's not privy to are also wrong....
MacKenzie Bezos: Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book.

Brad Stone: Mrs. Bezos also suggests that there are a handful of factual errors in my account.

There is something slippery about the way Brad Stone writes.
You can have several versions of the same package. You can't have one package built multiple times to depend on different versions of the same package. This is the main cause of dependency hell.
Create yourself an http://angel.co profile and solicit funding & advice on there. The startup world is a tiny bit bigger than YC.
> They just don't feel like doing the task.

Why is there something inherently wrong with that?

The reality is that pretty much everyone outsources some tasks that they could in principle do themselves. Could I learn to be a passable car mechanic? Probably but I don't care to make that investment of time. On the flip side, could I eat out more? Sure. But I generally enjoy cooking.
I don't think you read the whole article or you would have caught this:

> (Oddly, it’s perfectly fine if leisure time includes those inefficient D.I.Y. household tasks that some people find rewarding and fun, like pickling beets or knitting.)

If you find it fun - do it. If not, outsource it as fast as possible.
Linux is a semi

windows is a car

templeos is a motorcycle

I cannot stand file permissions. They have no place in a common person operating system. The are need in a main frame or commercial server.

My operating system is an additional one for special purposes like the C64. At the time of the C64, it was for home. They had VAX computers at the time for business stuff. They did not attempt to make a C64 do business stuff. They did not use ASCII! Whooa!
Remote Control Car Teaches Focus, Mind Control
This seems like a bit of a puritanical viewpoint. Taking a nap for an hour can be more productive than raking leaves, if rest is what you need most.
Stay tuned, will create a follow up post on the results.
Did anyone continue to run with the Google Wave idea? I'd be interested in using a tool like that, it showed a lot of promise.
Looking for YC Applications? Try this search
I'm glad I was able to use it for those 8 years. Not bad for a free service.
I've used the Visa Signature service a few times from my Chase Sapphire Preferred. They've gotten me reservations at restaurants that had often claimed to be booked full.
Chinese Room Takeaway: Wiping the Anti-AI Slate Clean with Toilet Paper
What happens if the subject doesn't agree to be interviewed? I haven't read the book or much around it except for this article.

Is there a reason for not doing so? I agree it seems really unprofessional.
I did not evaluate bup beyond this statement in the readme:

> This is a very early version. Therefore it will most probably not work for you, but we don't know why. It is also missing some probably-critical features.

My data is worth more to me than that. However, based on the description it sounds like a more complex version of rsnapshot. rsnapshot uses rsync as the underlying protocol, and uses standard hardlinks instead of packfiles for deduplication. The nice result is that you do not need any FUSE plugin to browse full backups: they are simply stored on your normal filesystem.

I did not look at how bup is configured, but will say that from the "set it and forget it" perspective, rsnapshot is very well made: a single declarative config file will suffice to back up all your servers.
I agree with all you points.

Coming to ...

>>As an organization, ISRO is political and bureaucratic.

All set ups in India, regardless of private or government owned are extremely political. I've seen dirtiest form of politics in private companies, hailing to be champions of meritocracy which can put government firms to shame.

In fact politics in the number one reason which drives nearly every once-a-great-firm to ground.