skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that "power users" are making so much money from Airbnb indicates just how poorly hotels serve travelers. Rather than curb users to 1 listing, why not try to embrace their energy to create a better travel service?

These negative Airbnb articles simply indicate that Airbnb is growing faster than the company can keep up with its users. Every issue outlined in the article-- fire safety, tax compliance, banning Ellis Act abusers, regulating "power users"-- can be mitigated or solved completely. Not without effort, for sure, but it's going too far tarnish their brand without a solid thesis about how one could build a better Airbnb. (And if somebody's going to make that argument, they might as well start a competitor or join Airbnb given the market opportunity...).

These sorts of articles should send an important message to future founders with wildly successful products: if you can curb growth and yet still outpace your competition, do that instead of "blitzscaling." You want to scale quality, you don't want to lose the faith of your users and the media in your ability to execute, and growing fast (without competition warranting it) will benefit investors more than your customers.
Marktplaats is extremely frustrating for a non-professional seller that has come from ebay.
The main issue I had with it is that the bids are not binding. So getting someone to commit once they have bid is extremely hard. Ebay should just shut it and redirect it to its own superior site.
Idea for solving two problems at once: require every prospective college student to spend a certain term (six months, whatever) performing agricultural labour in order to qualify.
10 years is an awfully long time - if your first and only LP fails oh well - at least it is not your money. Plus if you don’t let any of your companies IPO then no one will know if you have failed or not for a very long time.
Sure it could. "It's hard" is not a rebuttal to "it's possible". That ad-networks might need to implement a system to let content-providers review and approve a set of ads that might be served, that have a TTL until they expire, and generates a JS to be included in the local site with SRI hashes to be integrated might be hard, and it also might cede some control to sites as to exactly what ads they are willing to serve, but it's also a responsible way to deal with ad-delivery and would in all likelihood have made this hack if not impossible, at least much harder and likely caught and mitigated with far less exposure. Sure it's harder on both parties (but there are benefits as well), but sometimes things are harder because you are not longer taking unsafe shortcuts, and I have no sympathy for that.
First off, was Edison born with a passion for inventing? It's easy to retroactively name a great achievement, but it doesn't mean that anyone who decides they really, really, really want to do X can do it. If you believe in a universal inherent potential for greatness, you might believe anyone can be great/successful/famous/devoted at something, but they don't necessarily get to choose what that is.

Edison may have been lucky to get free training as a telegraph operator in return for saving a three-year-old from being hit by a runaway train[0] (stranger than fiction!) He was lucky not to die then, an unremarkable boy (see fictional[1].) He was lucky to arrive on the scene of ~70 years of experimentation on the general idea of a filament in an enclosure[2]. He was lucky that a chemist overseas invented a pump which became a "key tool" to his bulb[3]. He's lucky to have lived in a time when he could hear about innovations on another continent and not have to pay too much (anything?) in patent royalties. He's lucky that somebody else didn't beat him to the punch and use the pump in the 14 years between its discovery and Edison's use, given that carbon filaments had already been tried but failed due to air in the bulb. He's lucky that a judge ruled in his favor instead of Sawyer's[2].

I realize I am mostly critiquing just one possible form of just one invention of Edison's, but it's perhaps his most famous achievement since you alluded to it (he's lucky that pop history has chosen to remember him.) And, I don't find it plausible if you were to respond "He definitely would have still found another way" if the conveniences above were removed. There is only room for so many opportunities, ideas, coincidences, that can happen in one person's life. A favorable alignment of those to produce a notable outcome is "luck."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison#Telegrapher
[1] fictional http://www.changingthetimes.net/samples/preww1/young_hero_di...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Histor...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengel_pump
Interestingly, even after it had failed Homejoy was one of the few startups YC specifically called out as on the home page as examples of what the program could provide. I've only just now seen it updated not to include that section.

What was it about Homejoy that got it so much attention, promotion from its investors and press from the media? What's the underrated startup that everyone has been overlooking during the same period?
So in actuality, they never failed to correctly determine the scurvy-preventing capability of a given fruit when they tested it, they just spent a lot of time working under the un-tested and incorrect assumption that lemons and limes would work similarly, based on an un-tested hypothesis for the mechanism of scurvy prevention.
Agreed, although I believe the end goal of my comment was that after leaving the store, the term "Android" is completely forgotten, whereas "Apple" is almost a household term because you see them everywhere in pop culture—movies, the news, in schools, etc.
I wonder how they set this up w.r.t regulations. I was under the impression the process to setup an ISP involved a mountain of red tape. Did they get away with it because they are a non profit?
The surname meaning for "Tobin" is also wrong, it comes from a Norman surname "de Saint Aubyn", which I guess the native Irish had a hard time pronouncing. The website suggested it came from "son of Tobias" (which I guess might have happened at some point, but is not the usually given history of the name).

Interesting that the three surnames with incorrect histories highlighted in the comments (so far) are all of Irish origin. Maybe the site is particularly poor with Irish surname origins?
Of all possible secessions, the secession of the big cities from the country that surrounds them is probably the least practical, even if it would probably be welcomed by rural residents.
I'm pretty sure I'd hate it. (I had the opportunity a few years back but turned it down because it wasn't the right time to leave Google. Also, my wife is an institutional investor, but in philanthropy and not tech.) Some of the downsides:

Your life is consumed by pitch meetings, and you have to say no to the vast majority of them. You have to constantly be out hustling for deal flow. If you miss the wrong startup, you've probably missed your chance to get a return.

You are a support role. Your job is to direct resources to the people who actually make things happen, not to make them happen yourself. You don't usually get to build things yourself, and when you do, nobody can know about them.

When things go terribly badly, you are frequently on the hook for cleaning them up.

Your compensation can be pretty awesome, but your liquidity sucks. Many times, you have to buy into the fund with your own personal money. The fund is locked up for 7-10 years. During this time, you basically can't leave, or if you do, you better be comfortable with someone else calling the shots for a significant portion of your assets. You draw a salary which (if you're not a GP) is fairly generous & adequate but is not going to make you wealthy. The way to get wealthy is off the carry of the fund, which, of course, requires that you got into one of the hot startups of your era.

I would much rather be building things. Even if I wanted to get rich managing money, I think that running a hedge fund, doing prop-trading for a big company, or managing the endowment for a pension or university is a much lower stress, higher-return option.
If you're going to commit a certain number of resources to solving a problem, you'd better make sure you're not failing to solve a more important problem that could use those same resources.
At risk of reductio ad hitlerum -- at the time Jefferson wrote the quote given in the article, the wisdom of the rural folk was that slavery was awesome and should continue forever. It was the out-of-touch urban interlopers who thought it should stop
Have you found that doing less things helps? Basically significantly reducing the demands on your time, and the overall number of things you have to tend to in any given day.

I've found that as I've gotten a little older, my tolerance for unnecessary complexity, unnecessary time demands, and doing pointless things, has plunged. I have also found that I'm much happier and more productive after stripping away as much of that as possible. There are various costs to doing so, but it has been worth it so far. When I was 20, I felt like I could juggle anything and everything (and no doubt reducing how effective I was in the process).
1. Because Google (it's not just the Google Cloud console).

2. Good point. I'll see why that isn't the case (I agree strongly, it'd be nice to know if this hasn't been used so you can revoke it).

3. A lot of systems require a user/email to identify the "person" taking the action. So this one is a crazy auto generated one for you. You didn't say it, but I'd love to be able to name them (like "Default GCE Service Account" or "Service Account for that Binary I built for deploying stuff").

4. This is something Google Cloud is behind on and we're working on it. For Storage (and PubSub) there actually are much finer grained ACLs (and you could add them as just a VIEWER role, etc.). I don't recall if we yet support the "Bob can use GCE but not BigQuery". Expect updates here soon.

Edit: more blank lines
I think AirBnB relies on those power users to have the volume it does. It's unlikely they would ever set that rule because it would basically break their business model (hotel listings, basically)
It looks nice and easier to read, but I signed up to this site a few days ago because of the bad/lack of css. I don't mind having to zoom in manually as I do on reddit too.
It's worth remembering in recent times many companies that write software are not software companies and ones that are don't focus on the quality of software but rather the amount of revenue that can be derived from it.

The only industries that have good software practices are those that are regulated heavily enough for it to matter, see here medical, aviation, military etc.

Unfortunately the vast majority of software is not regulated in this way despite handling data that is potentially just as sensitive from a personal or even financial perspective.

At the end of the day most companies are motivated to produce software quickly and quality is second unless it's causing a reduction in velocity, even then this is simply treated as a debt that is paid down periodically to maintain velocity.

There are exceptions for things like banks that rely on the quality of software to avoid losing money, but we are talking in general here.

A brilliant example of what happens when you have sloppy security/bad incentives AND you underestimate the damage a breach would cause is the Ashley Madison situation.
Many companies are in the same situation and have just been lucky enough to avoid a catastrophic data breach.

Sadly velocity is going to be valued over quality (which in turn means security) for the foreseeable future.
Can someone explain why you would want to fuzz ffmpeg?

What's wrong with ffmpeg crashing when you feed it invalid input? What's the alternative to it not crashing? Should it continue transcoding or should it exit quietly?

What's the problem here trying to be solved?
A large part of the US culture is homogeneous, and we share more language with each other than we would with anybody else on the planet. There's much more to a culture than rituals and politics.
He talks as if fiction and all kinds of literature don't exist, as if writing is only useful for conveying advice and commentary. This particular kind of writing might suit him well but this is not how it works in general. His idea that only "poetry" and some "bogus end of humanities" need complex prose is narrow. Also formal reports are more formal than usual for a reason.
Criminality has been dependent on internal mental state since the dawn of time. Like when you kill a person, it ranges from self defense to manslaughter to murder (and maybe terrorism now). That is not what "thought crime" means.
If a proprietary IRC network that is managed as basically an API layer for a service that isn't primarily about chat is the primary tentpole for a platform...

That doesn't seem like a really fantastic outcome for IRC. I guess if you're looking to come up with a conclusion that IRC has more users it is a useful tool. If you're looking to see what the future of distributed and local FOSS and corporate software team communication is? Less so.
Well considering the 50K is basically a rounding error to most VCs the money is not an issue. Given the difficulty of assembling a world class team to let one disintegrate just because their current idea is poor is not a good use of a limited resource.

Actually why VCs think good ideas and good teams should come as a package has never been explained to me. The is no reason to think that the best teams will have the best ideas. If the limiting factor in success is the quality of the team then why let great teams work on anything but the best ideas.
Nuclear waste is pure FUD, I'd say it's one of the most successful examples of it in history. It's created in small quantities, it's much less dangerous than many waste material created by the chemical industry, we know how to manage it, and properly sealed it's harmless if left alone. The amount of attention nuclear waste gets is nowhere near commensurate to the danger it poses; it's seriously, seriously overblown. I'd wager asbestos is more dangerous.

The proliferation argument is a good one, and it limits available solutions. Some thorium-based designs are indeed more difficult to hijack for production of nuclear weapons.
I seriously doubt it ever will, but you have to start somewhere.

I've used Parsec before and it is certainly nice. Honestly I think it's a bit weird to try and shoehorn it into C, but hey maybe something interesting will come out of it.

What bugs me is the suggestion that just because bison works well enough, nobody should try and make a new parser generator in C. They will probably not take over the wold, bison is big and battle tested after all, but bison is itself also a replacement for older tools. And hey, maybe mpc here will succeed and revolutionize parsing for the best; then we can have this discussion again in 20 years about someone attempting to replace it.
As far as I know, Y Combinator invests a lump sum and then contributes mentorship. Their only real recourse is to say, "Sorry, we've decided that you're not worth our time" and to terminate all work with the company.

Which, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
A new version of the invisible hand
Doesn't work well on Iphone 5s landscape. I usually checkout HN once a day on my phone. I find most sites that try to cater to phones degrade my experience...
> Homejoy was led by two software engineers. Both wildly talented humans, but both wildly out of place given the nature of the problem we were solving.

A tangent: This is something that scares me about many Bay area startups. What do software developers really care about home maintenance? This is a serious question. Some startups you can tell the founders are in love with the idea. The founders ARE the idea, and they're devoted to it. They believe it entirely independent of making money.

Home care seems like a nuisance and a real world problem. But why devote your life to it? Again, this is a serious question, not a stab at Homejoy. It doesn't seem like a problem that anyone could seriously put their life's work into. It's not like you're a home repair person crafting the finest cabinets you can for clients. From an outsider's perspective, this seems like the founders could only superficially be in it for the money. For the

> majestic startupville spell

, but not for for the true, deep love of the idea.

I've seen the Stanford engineer dropout start the clothing company. The bored engineer spin up yet another time tracking app that they don't use themselves. The car-less developer vagrant try to "disrupt" auto sales. I've been there before, brainstorming "startup" ideas. I'm glad none of them panned out, because I can't imagine being attached to any of them. Fringe ideas to make money and solve problems I didn't have.

I don't know what makes a company successful, but to me a red flag is a mismatch of founder lifestyle and true, obvious investment in the idea. Can a successful startup be founded by someone who's only in it for the money? Probably, and many Bay area startups are probably in that category. The money's here, after all.

Is it an unattainable ideal that the founders of a company truly believe in the product, entirely independent of financial success? Does that correlate with company success? I'd like to think so, even if just a fantasy. As an outsider, Homejoy doesn't appear to fall into that category, because I have a hard time believing two software engineers cared about the idea at their core, outside the obvious desire for something you build to succeed.
Keep. But make voting arrows bigger.
Thanks, I hope you guys can get somewhere. I'm preparing a complaint to file with the ICO and looking into other options since nothing else seems to have worked and I have no idea what else to do, but really I just want to have my account deleted and move on. I can't believe a simple support ticket spun out into this debacle.
It's built into many products and workflows that accept user submitted content.
"These differences wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the fact that the nation's urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation."

Ask someone in Central VT what they think of the way the state caters to the population mass in Burlington. Ask someone in upstate NY what they think of NYC running the show for all of NY. Illinois and Chicago. Ask someone in North Adams MA about what they think of the people in the Boston area. You'll often get something like "they're nothing like me but they basically run the state and tell me how to live my life only because there's so many of them"

Here's an example. Some hillbilly who wants to shoot a deer in upstate NY has to pay his way through all sorts of red tape in order to put an animal that's generally a pest (since there's so many of them) in his freezer. I talked to a game warden from NY who mentioned that even though it's illegal to take deer with .22, more deer are taken with .22 than any other caliber and his personal opinion was that because the policy and procedure around firearms and hunting permits/tags was expensive and bothersome people who intend to keep what they shoot just shoot what they please when they're given the opportunity (i.e. see deer on drive home from work, stop, shoot deer, put deer in truck, continue driving home) and .22 is the most convenient caliber for doing this because .22 revolvers are (relatively) cheap and plentiful. He went on to say that the rules and regulations are in tune with what a suburb of NY might want and not really appropriate in the rural areas and that it causes a lot of grief because once people start ignoring parts of the law it's a gateway to ignoring other parts. All of this was in the context of fish and game.

From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense to favor the many in the city over the few in the countryside but there's usually a limit to how far you can apply general rules to social issues...

"At my house, I worry about whether the well will go dry. I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 p.m., I go to the door armed. Each night, I check the security lights in the barnyard and watch to ensure that coyotes aren't creeping too close from the vineyard. I wage a constant battle against the squirrels, woodpeckers and gophers that undermine the foundation, poke holes in the sheds and destroy irrigation ditches."

...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live. Pretty much nobody has security lights, some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not specifically security lights. Nobody without small livestock (sheep) cares about coyotes. Once the dumb ones do something dumb they get turned into evolutionary dead ends via some hot lead.
Are you sure? They rural farmers, in the south, would have competition from the slave plantations. And the farmers in the north were generally of the northern protestant branches which saw modern slavery in a very poor light.
I'm not sure how you conclude it would be better. I suspect you'd end up with something approaching Slack, only without interoperability with the rest of the IRC ecosystem.

The stuff IrcCloud, Slack and HipChat undo? That's the stuff that seems to be alluring to the steadfast IRC users. Inscrutable commands, nick and chanserv and unencrypted passwords sent via a command that could very easily be typo'd to broadcast in a channel, obscure partitioning behavior that is very much not what most businesses want, a lack of accountability or verifiability, a lack of robust logging and search...

I say these in a negative way, because that's my perspective. For many people they'd list many of these in positive ways like, "improved anonymity", "off the record by default", "network robustness", etc.
While wrong by a statistically significant amount, Millikan's initial value was still much less than 1% off. It's really not a good example of the scientific consensus being completely wrong, because there was no consensus until Millikan's number had been shown to be wrong.
I'm not terribly familiar with these things, but they look like fairly straightforward temperature data. What is there to understand?
A Republic of Texas would solve a lot of problems.
If they can fix this, then I'm all for the new layout!
Note that it's not just individual choices that have led to this. Minimum parking requirements, anti-density zoning laws, and other car-first regulations have forcibly shaped our communities to be hostile to walking, biking, and transit. A huge loss in spontaneous community interaction is the inevitable result.
Why are so many lottery retailers buying winning tickets?
Yeah, see a lawyer and sue these idiots for libel. People who do stuff like this deserve to lose their company.
Release notes?
Just to add to your comment, I've always thought of plantation owners more like feudal lords, or the large estate nobility of the Roman era than farmers.
Except that where I live (rural Southern Oregon) there is some of the highest rates of welfare and foodstamp dependence in the West. Sort of tears apart the premise of this story. Note that the author is with the Hoover Institute.
The winner writes history...
Enjoy getting sued for libel.
Another possibility, but not a likely one, is that the site has been hacked by someone that is trying to make them look as bad as possible.
Much better than the last attempt at mobile, and much better than no mobile styles at all. Please keep!