skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding 3) Mozilla already runs free sync servers, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to allow syncing of contacts (In fact, extending Mozilla sync api/service to support Thunderbird might be a good idea...?).

Other alternatives are syncing contacts via IMAP or LDAP -- although I'm not entirely sold on either of those...

As for "liberating" your contacts from Facebook/Google/Etc -- your browser might actually have an advantage -- everyone that uses these sites, already trusts their browser with the login information. That's not much of a stretch to implement some wrappers around the various apis to get a "local" (in browser profile) copy of the list(s).

Firefox (or Iceweasel) already manages many of my passwords, I'd have no problem syncing my contacts with Firefox too (although I currently don't see much of a need for it. Might make a good addon either way -- makes using disconnected webmail services even easier if Firefox has my address list...).
Personally I don't care if they never produce another hit, Minecraft is amazing and rarely does such an awesome game come along.
I LOVE your idea. Since I live in Italy and not SF, I can't grab a coffee with you, but I will still honor your project by borrowing your idea and applying it here. (if that's ok with you)

I am going to be in SF in January (not for YC, haha) so I will contact your for an American coffee in a few months.
The User-Agent field is a great way to detect a polite robot (and even, if it supports robots.txt, to ask it to avoid certain pages). So this header field is a useful signal for analytics.

It's not at all trustworthy, but in practice it's useful.
I agree that the primary advantage to the state is in rationalising the complex system of benefits and payments down to a single system of assessment.

It strikes me that the disincentive to work can possibly be countered by employing on a limited-time basis those seeking the "benefit" in what would otherwise be uneconomic work. Litter picking is a classic example; sorting recyclables is probably a similar thing. Basically anything to act as a token contribution to the community.

>Specifically, say you were poor but wanted to make something, would the amount of money you'd need increase and by how much? //

Certainly. We run a location-based business and want to move it to address a larger market but the cost of moving is prohibitive.

Similarly I've a couple of inventions I'd like to work up; one of which I'd need access to a decent workshop and a couple of months [proper] income to spend on testing and prototype development.

On a slightly different tack there are educational opportunities that my kids are missing out on which require finance - they're low level costs but still out of reach. (Example, we do basic [chemistry|physics] experiments at home, a bit more money would enhance them considerably).
These are the t-shirts we wore to launch Satago at Techcrunch Disrupt and then at Web Summit. I almost chickened out of making them, till a) I saw Transferwise's campaign, then b) a PR guy I know said to "go for it"!
Totally agree. As a kid of course I hated having to do all the work I was told to do. Now I much more appreciate it and have my own son mow the lawn, etc. I see my neighbors kid not wanting to mow the lawn (and they let him) and instead plays call of duty all day. Will it make any difference - I don't know, all I can continue to rely on is my own experiences.
How serendipitous. I'm heavily using Font Awesome at the moment, and finding the right search terms to use has been kind of frustrating. Not super frustrating, but this will definitely save me time!

PS. Might I suggest adding Font Awesome More? [1] I'm not sure it is still maintained, but it has a bunch of very nice icons that the base Font Awesome doesn't.

[1] https://www.riversports.com/hg/plugins/font-awesome-more/doc...
Hmm, it doesn't seem to work in Safari 7, but does in Chrome. Didn't think anything of it (it was just a orange background in Safari) before you asked. But, yeah, a coffee pouring.
Even better -- you can now tweet them a $5 starbucks gift card. https://www.starbucks.com/tweet-a-coffee
Unfortunately, everyone is biased in some way or another. That mixed with your logic means the whole book is fiction, right?

The reality of it is that being biased doesn't mean you cannot make factual statements. It does mean you may highlight facts you want and ignore facts you find inconvenient. It also means you can lie.

In this case she is saying the author made statements of fact that were not true and is trying to point that out. As the book is an unofficial biography, you have to assume the likelihood of factual error is increased.
The Definitive Inside Account of Lorde's Rise to the Top
> it has a ways to go before it will actually be a competitor. And it doesn't have a few features that I find incredibly invaluable as an Evernote user:

[list of features snipped out]

As an Octave developer, I frequently hear exactly the same things about Octave vs Matlab, and if I listen too closely, I find it disheartening. Why work on something that will forever suck and not be a competitor, and can't implement the full list of features because we don't have the giant budget of our non-free competitor?

But then I remember that people are typically more flexible than they appear to be when they write these lists, and you'll discover that they may do without some of the features that they list, at least in some circumstances. And that there exist many other people with different lists of sine qua nons who will use the free as in freedom alternative you're working on because they have different needs.

So, to the OpenNote developers and to anyone else implementing a FAIF replacement I say this: don't let these giant lists of features and suggestions about how you'll never be competitive grind you down. There are many people out there who will appreciate your work, sometimes even the people who compiled these lists. Look at the lists, see what you can implement, and don't be disheartened by the parts that seem impossible to implement. Who knows, maybe some day someone will come along and help you implement the parts that seem so hopeless to you.

Keep your chin up, free software devs!
So if it's not fun, don't do it. Does that sound like a healthy philosophy to pass down?
I watched a 60 minute talk from Tarek Ziadé a few months ago in EuroPython 2013 which was very interesting. His point regarding the missing features that made them launch project Circus were realtime stdout/stderr, realtime stats, powerful web console, remote, clustering and scalable.

You can check out the slides here: http://blog.ziade.org/slides/pyconireland2012/
Nice idea, but… 115 MB video!?
Show HN: Column is a Yeoman generator built for hackathons
Personally; I'll leave that up to others - as a Rackspace employee, I'm more focused on improving what we do, how we do it, and what we offer and being transparent about that than with direct comparisons to other competitors (real and perceived).

Ideally I want to get the code in place to empower others to run the same set of tests on the host of their choice, but I personally won't participate - just like the fact we don't comment on, or take advantage of others' downtime[1], I don't want to get in a shooting match, especially as I represent one of the vendors, and can be accused of bias.

[1]: https://github.com/rackspace/social_media_guidelines/blob/ma...
How to write a bad column about millenials
Lavabit creator launches Kickstarter campaign for dark mail - encrypted emai
Show HN: Sentinel - Be alerted when the Internet changes
South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping
If nothing else, it's 'employee benefit programs' which can include education and conferences.
Pretty nice! Honestly after reading the "Let's have coffee" link submitted I considered building my own.

Problem with the autocomplete, though; it doesn't always seem to work, and so I'm having a lot of trouble adding new skills or favorite restaurants. (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0)
The book author Brad Stone (who I used to work with) responded to Mackenzie's review and I think his comment is spot-on:

"I'm certainly less biased than Jeff's wife."

http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-wife-reviews-book-...
ok, i'll go first: i love https://github.com/seamusabshere/upsert because it seems like a new idea and https://github.com/seamusabshere/fuzzy_match because it feels like i've combined string similarity and array enumeration to make something truly useful.
I've toyed with Hazelcast under Scala. Anything in particular you think it's missing? Is it under-the-covers optimizations you're looking for like serializing case-classes or something more obvious at the API level I just haven't run into with my experiments yet?
The Git learning curve is far too steep for non-technically inclined people.

You must write a DropBox-like client.

Example UX:

In the special folder, each folder starting wit a "+" is a repository.

Each user has his own branch. No master. Provide a good online UI for diff reviews and merging, and a way to locally commit (the how is left as an exercise to the reader).

You can branch by creating another folder with the same name plus the branch as a suffix.

+foo // user1 branch of the "foo" repo
// It may be displayed as "user1+foo-bar" in the web UI,
// to avoid confusion.

+foo-bar // "user1-bar" branch of the "foo" repo

baz/+qux // the username branch of qux
// "baz" is just a location, and may vary
// on a per user basis.
// If user2 wants to place it elsewhere, let it be.

baz/+qux-quux // you get the idea...

Educate the users to pick unambiguous repo names.

Profit!
Show HN: My YC demo, but not good enough
Of Course Gas Stations Will Use Facial Recognition Tech to Serve 'Relevant' Ads
Legitimizing the 'Civilized Internet' - China's Seduction of U.S. Media
Author of book on Amazon.com responds to Bezos's wife's one-star review
I had a friend in new york ask if he could have a virtual lunch with me over skype to get my advice. He called up eat24 or something and ordered me food to have it delivered when our lunch meeting was scheduled to start. Totally surprised me, albeit pleasantly.
Stupid Apple Rejection of the Day
Infiniminer wasn't much fun. Minecraft is. That's about all there is to it.
iTunes operates on a bit of an honor system, it seems to use a preauth for a small amount, and then batches following purchases. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_gamed/6/

Of course you will get locked out of updating your iDevices if you have an outstanding balance.
it's just the sidebar for textmate2
Twitter IPO More Expensive Than Facebook Without Profits
This is what I was thinking. Sounds pretty much like big banking as usual.
This is just too creepy.
Animated SVG Icons with Snap.svg
Based on your comment and your username, you must be in bed, drunk and surfing the internet! :-)

Here's an idea for a simple app that prevents you from phoning / texting your ex when you're drunk in bed. You have to (previous to being drunk) mark all of your contacts that you aren't supposed to contact when drunk and give reasons. Use the acceleromter to test if the user is able to stand up straight. If not then block certain outgoing calls / texts.

Then place ads in bars that say, "Don't drunk text your ex tonight. Download the app... DTP (Drunk Text Protector)". Hint: You can charge a little extra for the app because the user is probably part drunk anyway. ;-)

So, as the user, you get drunk and get home and text your ex 'Anna' and the app says:

Your message to Anna was blocked. You previously told me that she
was "some crazy bitch who slept with your best friend".

If you really want to text Anna, then you can use one of your "go on
be a dumb ass" credits to bypass this drunk text lock.

You currently have [0] credits. Click here to purchase some now.

If you really want to text Anna then you can, but you have to buy a "I'm an idiot" credit pack as an in-app purchase, which gives you a number of credits to text / phone people you shouldn't.

Profit!
Chrome also thrives because so many people use Google's search engine and they keep telling you to install Chrome...
I'll bite. I wrote a a parsing library for python on top of PLY, that provides many high-level features such as EBNF syntax and automatic AST creation, and the trees a query-able with CSS-like syntax.

It's on github and I get immense joy for every little star it gets (https://github.com/erezsh/plyplus)
How to utilise Knowledge Graphs for Content Personalisation & Discovery
Interfaces in need
Mozilla Talkilla
Microsoft giving away free IT training, and a job, to soldiers
Very nice! The improved performance in the reworked architecture is impressive.

> Pick a language framework, pick a web framework, heck, pick a web server or entire application we can throw apachebench at with one of the 120GB monsters we have and we’ll put it together

We've asked Rackspace to run our suite and the introduction [1] still contains the following sentence: "How does EC2 compare to, say, Rackspace Cloud? We don't have the data now, but if you have a Rackspace Cloud account and are willing to run the full test suite, we'd like to be able to render that here."

We'd love to see Rackspace Performance Cloud as another hardware tab alongside our current i7 and EC2 results.

Separately, we had a contributor who put together some Windows Azure scripts but we've not heard from him for a while and I think we need someone else to volunteer to pick that up.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=intro
BitTorrent Sync Passes 1 Million Users, Gets iPad Support and an API
It would be, but GPLv3 states, in section 7, paragraph 4:

If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a
notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a
term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.

So the author just didn't read GPLv3 and added meaningless additional
restrictions.
Build a Community to Test your Startup Idea
Don't waste time and money building a product to build a community, test your community idea with Pivto. Generate a Wordpress blog, install our Plugin, link your twitter account and ask your twitter community to contribute and interact in your Social Feed. Download here: http://bit.ly/1dIkJi9 Instructions here: http://bit.ly/19weNI0 Ask me for an ID at alex@pivto.com
"Could I learn to be a passable car mechanic? Probably but I don't care to make that investment of time."

I would take minor issue with that advice because "we" live in a downwardly mobile society where the median is poorer every year, and upward economic mobility is immensely less likely than downward economic mobility. Its much easier to learn how to change your oil when you can trivially afford substantial backup labor from tow drivers and pro mechanics if it all goes bad, up to and including simply buying another car, than trying to learn how to change your oil after you've been downsized and ageism means you'll never work above $10/hr again, medical induced bankruptcy and job loss, etc etc. Also its easier to learn "poor people skills" at 25 than 50 or 75.

Yes, yes, it only happens to other people, not people like me, or us, because I / we are special. Sure. Culturally, poor americans consider themselves merely temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Anyway, learning/maintaining skills is exactly like buying insurance when you might need those skills.

There is also an aspect of management where learning/maintaining skills makes you a better consumer. How do you intend to manage your relationship with your mechanic if you intentionally have no idea what you've hired him to do for you? Oddly enough business relationships based on unidirectional blind trust never work out very fairly.

This doesn't mean you have to do everything. Last time my thermostat failed (open, thankfully) I learned how to replace it and whats involved and basically threw away $200 on labor to have a mechanic do it, because I can easily afford it and there was no way I'm doing this in six inches of snow and slush in February. If I couldn't afford to throw around $200 like pocket change, and maybe some time in the future I won't be able to, I could have done it. May have ended up with frostbite or pneumonia but I could have done it. On a nice sunny 70 degree day in May I'd probably have done it myself for fun.
Getting into YC shouldn't be your goal. Build your own business is.
And they've all been hacking around our hacks!
Apache Subversion 1.8.4 released
Successful Pivots by Focusing on Small Positives
Başarılı Gece Fotoğrafları
Agreed. The entire concept of "financial crimes" has only been applied in a widespread manner with the advent of the war on drugs, which many of us oppose for a variety of very valid reasons.
I don't believe everyone is biased, but I do think it's reasonable to consider that Ms. Bezos might be, due to her relationship with her husband. It's not across the board, as you state certain facts bear themselves out, but several things she addresses are subjective in nature.

I think it's more important we consider the fact that someone can raise valid points while also holding a natural bias, as opposed to the all-or-nothing state that it's become (which is what I believe you're referencing.)
The trade-of here is individual liberty vs what we know the consequences will be from allowing truly anonymous exchange.

For all things in life: cui bono. Illegal operations (the vast majority of which are doing tremendous damage to society) stand to gain the most from anonymous money exchanges. So that's who end up using the service.

So even die hard libertarians who value personal freedom such as anonymity a great deal have to acknowledge that the real life consequences of exchanges like Liberty Reserve are a net negative to society. Leading to less bottom line Freedom compared to the current situation where society tries to make life difficult for gangsters and enterprises that harm us all.
>if you gave a person making 0 per year 30K per year they would suddenly have an apartment, healthcare, transportation, and all those other things that most other people who make 30K per year have //

It's a poor premise. There's a wearing down effect that poverty has. Over time one can rely quite a bit on past wealth - for example clothing starts wearing out after a year (shoes) but can last decades depending on wear. [estimated periods:] A house needs re-roofing in 20 years, a boiler needs replacing in 10 years, a car needs replacing when it's 15 years old, et cetera.

It's quite easy to live on a low income for a shorter period. In 6 months you're still using all the things you had when you were better off - probably you still have some foodstuffs. Coming the other direction in 6 months of higher income you'd still be spending on those things that have worn out.

The $15k for 6 months would make a dramatic change, IMO, but not necessarily one that a casual observer would notice. As an example, I would probably still be wearing worn out clothes but the house would be in a good state of repair, we'd have a fully working cooker and washing machine, etc..

>we shouldn't care how much money anybody makes, but whether they live a comfortable, happy life and have access to opportunity //

Yes, amen.
Nice, I was thinking of doing the same, too. Plus coffee here is basically a given, so it feels very natural.

Where in Italy, if I may? Fellow transplanted milanese here.
GAP Sign: Hello Mr. Yakamoto and welcome back to the GAP!

John Anderton: Mr. Yakamoto?

- _Minority_Report_

I'm surprised we haven't seen overt retail use of face recognition yet.
Looks like you got some spam on your blog

*actually, it looks like you've been compromised. There are spam links all over your home page.

http://www.johnmurch.com/projects/noteparse/
How To Make The Best Long-Term Decisions
I've read this entire paragraph, a couple of times, and still have no clue what your idea is.
Software Practices to Develop By
Mercurial 2.8 Released
Ah, so there was supposed to be a video?

In Firefox 26 (Linux x64), a cup of coffee briefly flashes up in the background then disappears. I was confused by the "footage from Beachfront B-Roll" notice at the bottom of the page.
I see things other than quirky "fun" tasks like pickling beets (?!) as also a valuable part of a regular life. To me it'd be sort of weird to have a life that is made up of nothing but 1) paid work; 2) fun/relaxation/leisure; and 3) sleep. I like to do some productive things for myself, as opposed to saving all my productivity for an employer.

To me, at least, part of the satisfaction of being a regular adult is that I take care of myself to some extent. I can't do everything of course (e.g., I'm no doctor), but I usually cook, clean up after myself, do laundry, sort my recyclables, sew on buttons, the usual stuff. Cooking in particular I like to do, partly because I get better at it, which means I can do things like cook for friends, and partly because I understand food better by doing it.

I tend to hire people for things that are non-routine and where a specialized professional seems like they'd be much better. For example I do have someone come and clean a few times a year, because while I can generally keep things reasonably clean, a professional cleaner does it to another level. And of course I eat out sometimes, and have professionals do home repairs (that's one area people traditionally knew more about that I know virtually nothing about... I can barely use a hammer).
Thanks for the comment. I think there's a lot of truth to what you have to say. At this point it's about building up enough trust with someone that I'd want to take them on as a partner. And vice versa as well.
This seems immensely cumbersome and error-prone. Why not just a client with a simple GUI (ie buttons)?
I Bought an Apartment Just to Rent It Out on Airbnb
I ended up building this into our data warehouse system as managing my own UI for a KVP data store became a nightmare with rapidly changing requirements. It's in PHP but allows reporters and producers to enter their data in a spreadsheet and then allows us to publish it out to JSON for use in D3 or leaflet.

It's greatly sped up our process for visualization.
Show HN: Chained — taming promises with Harmony
Currently: Front End Developer. Hopefully I'll be transitioning into e-commerce business sole proprietor soon.
Can you remind your front-end team that next gen pricing is now completely unavailable?

http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/
Landscape: Hosted continuous Python code metrics
Yep. Several years ago the Eastern Technology Council (a local business association) had its annual party on the campus of one of its member companies named Safeguard Scientifics. The local paper reported it as a Safeguard Scientifics networking or recruiting event (I forget which, but no mention of ETC), and claimed that resumes were being exchanged (I was there and didn't see a single resume, just people from various companies chatting, eating, and exchanging business cards). The article was so off-target that people on the Yahoo finance board for Safeguard Scientifics were claiming that this was a sign that the company was in great shape because it was on a big hiring spree. Reality: The company allowed a party to take place on its property, that is all.
Which pretty much sums up the book in question. This is circular.
That's an important consideration, and it's one I wish Apple would contribute in terms of thought leadership to the industry. We need more of this, not less of it. I'm sure it's a huge competitive advantage for Apple, but if more companies took that approach -- individual ownership vs. management-by-committee, it seems less likely things would fall through the cracks.
The Perverse Incentives of Angelist Syndicates
Your algorithm becomes a bit implausible at step 4 & 5.
Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles
Looks very nice. Most likely the biggest problem is the single founder aspect, I'm in the same boat as you there.

I have a feeling that when you select "yes" on that red flag option, your application goes straight into PG's queue.

Keep at it, my man.