skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So much for sacrificing precision for sensationalism and a nice sounding headline. ;)

Chalk that one up to amateur copywriting.
Yes, I really wish there were fewer top comments on Hacker News rehashing "I can't believe a software company raised so much money!"

It's not that these valuations are above criticism, it's just there's rarely any real dialectic reasoning involved. I rarely see a comment from someone with a deep, nuanced understanding of the industry and market criticizing the funding round. It's just the usual incredulity that these numbers are big, which is not a sound basis for debate.

I'd like to see honest criticism of these funding rounds (or honest defense) from people who have a great deal of knowledge on the subject.
In Thailand at least, the prices are generally the same as supermarkets. I'm guessing it's the same in Japan.

In Australia there is definitely a massive gap between convenience store pricing and supermarket pricing, though. Probably to the point of paying 2x or 3x on some items.
My ex-wife worked long hours because she always wanted the acceptance of everyone. It cost her a marriage, a job, and ultimately, I think it will cost her the respect of our child. Anyone who is motivated to work long hours for the wrong reasons is doomed to pay a heavy cost.
Here's the thing: 12 months deprecation notice is abysmal for a key business demographic, enterprise customers. That's lightning fast for many of them. Planning and moving that much infrastructure, data etc. is non-trivial takes a lot of time and hard work.

You point out examples of longer deprecation, but that doesn't matter one iota to people evaluating the cloud. Track record isn't legally binding, unlike the contractual 12 months.
They don't sell it to me on an individual basis but are selling them on a group basis. Not a whole lot of difference.
Managing an infrastructure of peer to peer rental for >500,000 units worldwide seems like a reasonably hard task.

You're comparing apples to oranges here.

Arguably the value of the property Airbnb is a defacto manager for is higher than 500,000 cars, but they also need to expand.

Trust me, I'm totally on board with the unicorn hate here, this seems ludicrous, but I also don't know what is going on at Airbnb, so I try to think about why this might be a good investment, rather than why it might appear ludicrous :)
Honestly in comparison to other options - working too hard is probably a much better form escapism than most. Earning money, producing things that other people need, developing relationships with coworkers are all positive things.

And to be fair - there are plenty of people who attack their leisure pursuits with the same level of unhealthy obsession that workaholics bring to their job. Ultra-marathon runners for example. (Apologies to any actual ultra-marathon runners who might read this... I don't actually presume to know whether your level of commitment to your hobby is healthy or not, and would be interested to hear any opinions on matter).
Just wanted to note that you addressed this first and I hope that I added a little something to your point with my response. You touched on a very relevant point.
Well, we ended up using quill.js in our own system (it's rad, and pretty easy to wire into an operational transform system to handle concurrent edits). But at least at the time we were looking, discourse was markdown only.

We had a lot of needs that weren't met by other FOSS platforms, so it wasn't just rich text, but rich text was a big driver there.
Also, very few people on HN have seen the decks, metrics, or long term plans that the investors saw.

Obviously nobody can see the future, so it's totally reasonable to assume that said decks, metrics, and long term plans are total bullocks, but hey, at least they exist, and someone saw them.
Hmm... Maybe not. They seem like a legit operation.
Unless you have considerable expertise in Airbnb's core and peripheral markets, I don't think it's fair for you to say what is and is not possible for a company to need (putting aside the fact that "need" is used in the normative sense here).
It's common in the United States as well, though far from universal.
These things aren't conspiracy theories or irrelevant. The fact that these are all driven (pun intended) by software which is highly proprietary, and not available for inspection by the consumers, is a major issue!

The fact that it's an US company, at the will of secret US courts only makes it worse. And I didn't get into any of the car hobbyists who might want to modify their devices, or environmentalists who want to make sure someone isn't cheating on their emissions.
this is why, among the many many rules I've adopted in life, as an adult with an increasing amount of RL experience: (1) never fill out forms when it's not truly necessary, and (2) always pay in cash (whether USD or Euro or Bitcoin). Oh and use "ad blocking" and decline/disable cookies/js/etc as much as possible.

related: we also live in a world increasingly of "wallet-based pricing/acceptance". which means, if someone (a vendor, a thief) might charge you a higher price (or be more likely to attack/steal from you) if they have reason to believe you are upper income, then, you want to minimize how much information they have about you, esp about your identity. For example, if you're a software engineer by profession, you never ever want a vendor to know your profession (or your name, if a google of that can lead to your profession, eg.) before you hear from them the price, or the "availability" of the product. I'd love to think we live in a world where that shouldn't matter. But an increasing amount of the evidence I've seen, with my own eyes/ears (not theory, not second-hand), is consistent with having to take that into account.

generally, the less the other party in a transaction (vendor, fellow citizen, etc.) knows about you, as an individual, the more likely you are to receive an objectively fair/neutral price/response. They think you're poor? Decline. They think are minority? Decline. They think you have higher income/wealth? Higher price. They think you have lower income/wealth? Suddenly not available for <reasons>.
I wonder how people with monumental achievements feel about that. Did Einstein feel that his life would have been better if he'd accomplished less but spent more time with family and friends? How about Erdos? Jobs? Gates (does he feel that way now)?

I suspect that people with truly significant achievements probably didn't/don't regret how they spent their time. People whose achievements mostly involve climbing the corporate ladder instead of seeing their kids' soccer games? Yeah, I bet a lot of them regret it.
You don't need to know Java to use Clojure. Give it a try, you might like it.
There is a huge difference between aggregate metrics and detailed individual personal information. It's such an astounding difference, that I'd love to hear what you think is so similar between "people between 30 and 40 like your product", and "Leon Kowalski from 1187 at Hunterwasser, who is 32 years old, divorced, pays alimony, has $30,000 in debt, has been arrested three times, once for felony assault, buys fetish sex toys online, and participates in white supremacy forums likes your product."
Mathew Inman (the Oatmeal guy) wrote a book about his experience with running and why he runs [0], the crux of which is to escape. Like many things, it is clearly a coping mechanism. Not all coping mechanisms are created equal. What works for some may not work for others. But I'd encourage anyone to seek real help to solve the problems even if their coping mechanisms are beneficial in some way - they might not be beneficial overall.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Wonderful-Reasons-Distances-...
These are great reads for how it was implemented. As for how late see above.

https://www.bsdcan.org/2012/schedule/attachments/195_locking...

https://books.google.com/books?id=aY1pBAAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
Airbnb might be trying to take on the entire travel industry. It's not that insane to raise this much capital if they wanted to try their hand at EXPE or HST's market.
Pro tip: When you travel Japan and want to save money, don't buy stuff at 7-11s (except its 100-yen coffee which is a good deal, IMO).

I'm always fascinated by the logistics side of a convenience store. They micromanage everything to its maximum efficiency/profitability. In the case of 7-11, there are almost 20,000 stores throughout Japan, and each store gets delivery three times a day. I read they predict demands each day based on its weather/holidays, and change its supplies accordingly. They also keep curating their product lines (typically, about 3000) including perishables. The whole system is amazingly massive and complex. They cram stuff in such a small space without violating the fire regulations and whatnot, yet they know how to display them in a visually appearing and approachable way. It truly feels like an art. cf. http://www.sej.co.jp/company/tenpo.html

On the other hand, they have a greedy corporate side, of course. I read they always have backup staffs so even when a store manager dies (each store is a franchise business run by a family) they can keep the store running.
With dilution being .85/30, does it matter? If you could raise $850M with ~3% dilution, who would turn it down?

Also, you have to figure some of that money is going to early employees and investors who are looking to take a little off the table.
The interesting part is not that these databases exist; rather, it's a question of what happens when they're leaked online.
Or Google Scholar + Sci-Hub.

Seriously, for any research, an absolute godsend.

Thank you, Alexandra.
Besides, Astoria will lead to a second-rate UX for Windows Phone (WP) as Android apps on WP are coded as per Android UX guidelines, not WP UX guidelines.

If Microsoft is building a framework, I'd expect it to provide a great UX for their users.

If a compatibility layer is required, it would be better for MS users to have it in the reverse direction, to let WP apps run on Android, and use that to try to convince devs to build WP apps.

In summary, it never made sense for MS to provide WP users (their own platform!) with a second-rate UX.
My desktop, my brother's laptop, and a printer work well with Linux, perhaps because they aren't high-end.

On the other hand my mother's friend had a mysterious driver problem (screen glitching) with his NVidia card after upgrading to Windows 10.
Perhaps an editor could mark this (2016) despite this being the opposite of the usual custom? I've learned not to get excited when someone posts one a Dan Luu article, since it's usually something old that I've already seen. But despite the lack of a date at the top, and despite starting with references to 2010 and 2008 papers, this one is actually new!

On further thought, maybe it would better to change the title to claim it's from (2010), wait for enough people to complain, then "something", then use that momentum to convince Dan to finally put dates on his articles. Just need to figure out what that "something" should be...

--

I looked into Thread Sanitizer (libtsan) recently, and was happy to see that it's supported on recent GCC as well. Documentation is a little strange, as it's split between a Google Wiki on Github and Clang, while the source is in LLVM:

https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/ThreadSanitizerCpp...

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ThreadSanitizer.html

https://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk/lib/Transforms/...

I was spooked by this FAQ on the Google Wiki page, though:

Q: My code with C++ exceptions does not work with tsan.
A: Tsan does not support C++ exceptions.

Does this mean that it does not work at all on code that is written with exceptions, or that it might have false-positives or false-negatives when exceptions actually happen at runtime?

--

For other tools, Intel has offers their "Parallel Inspector": https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-inspector-xe. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like it would be useful for these issues: https://software.intel.com/en-us/get-started-with-inspector. Does anyone know how it compares with TSan?

--

An example of an atomicity violation is this bug from MySQL:
Thread 1:
if (thd->proc_info)
fputs(thd->proc_info, ...)
Thread 2:
thd->proc_info = NULL;

While definitely a concurrency bug, I'm surprised that this would happen frequently enough to create numerous bug reports unless there is also an undesired compiler optimization that's removing the "guard" in Thread 1. That is, the window of opportunity seems very small if the code is being executed as written. I didn't look at the details of the linked bug reports, but I suspect the compiler is able to reason based on something earlier that thd->proc_info must be non-null at this point, and thus has omitted the check.

If this is the case, it's possible that "Stack" would have caught this bug as well, or at least highlighted it as a place where the generated code was different than the programmer's intent. Stack is painful to install, and seems abandoned, but does catch flag some bugs that other tools miss: https://github.com/xiw/stack/

--

Does anyone know of other tools in this space? I'm still hoping there's a "silver bullet" I haven't found yet.
I used to think that using raw SQL is better than using ORMs because I have had a bad experience using django1's OEM. I will look into the ORM now. Thanks for the advice!
I think the difference is that these companies provide the data to anyone as a service (FB/Google keep it all in house).

That said, I agree there's nothing particularly newsworthy in there. These companies have existed for a long time.
I'm going to bet they will be opening local offices / retail points around the world. Help less tech savvy folks list on Airbnb as well as serve as a "check in desk" to pickup keys
Am I insane, or are you and the commentators below unknowingly describing Terraform?

https://www.terraform.io/
Yes git book is amazing. It can totally replace books, it being open source is just amazing.

Thank you for the appreciation!
I wish they wouldn't have called these a "Google Account", but you can use any email provider now to sign in/up with Google.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so if you sign up I indirectly ... take your money?
Well I was angry, I see that there is no point of that line, I'll remove it today.
No, they'd like self driving car litigation.

Airbnb needs liberal rent-out-your-home litigation
I know, but the thing is I have 0 practical experience in web app development, I work in the data warehousing field. So really have no idea about deployment, the only deployment I do is from the dev version of my to-do app to my own local version which I call Production :d
Despite me working on GCE, I have to give a shout out to all the hosts like DO that include a hefty amount of network egress in the price. The network is heavily overcommitted (how many of you actually send X GiB/month/droplet?), less reliable, etc. but for those that use it to serve images for "don't care" it can't (yet) be beat.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine and Cloud and want your business.
That's what they get from buying Fluent. They actively take in consumer data from all kinds of sources and marketing campaigns as well as sell data, and traffic for those purposes. Fluent does a lot of co-registration path stuff such as can be seen here http://www.nationalconsumercenter.com/flow.aspx and run sites like http://www.sweepstakesaday.com and http://www.getsamplesnow.com

Then you have Q Interactive which they also bought which was largely known for clickgen.com and coolsavings.com Like Fluent they are big in co-registration, lead generation, data collection & sales, affiliate marketing etc.

That's really a tiny bit of the data that gets traded on consumers every day. All kinds of transactions get logged and sold. Credit card declined transactions are an example that surprises many people however it's the kind of data that debt consolidation, pre-paid debit card and credit management companies love.
The entire article reads like a PR piece. There's nothing newsworthy there, it's just an ad for the company.
> What does a website platform need $850 million more for?

Like others have commented, at least some of this money will be used to pay off initial investors with a nice profit. It's a kind of pyramid scheme, really, that ends with an IPO.
> Now, when the country is again fighting against Russia—the conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russia-allied separatist that started in 2014 is still ongoing, despite an official ceasefire—these wreaths are doing the same symbolic work.

It is not true. Russia invaded directly into Crimea and East Ukraine, with very little help from locals. Moreover, Russians says on video that locals don't want to war. 70% of people in East Ukraine are Ukrainians, anyway. Official version was that Russia need to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from other Ukrainians, because they will kill them.
One could argue that swaying property owners in every metropolitan area of the world, and threatening the hotel industry is a greater obstacle than legalizing self-driving cars, which is almost unanimously agreed to be the future and in a market with many other players (every automobile company). There are few major competitors to AirBnB other than long-vested players who own expensive land and historic properties. Much of it will be used under the banner of local outreach.
Well mine isn't the first book created with git, my book is actually inspired from astaxie's book on Go, that too is on github
Yes, I will add that :)
Thanks for suggesting!
IAM is complex because it is powerful. Unfortunately.
> MacOS with the associated hardware lock-in

Macs will run both Windows and (with some EFI hacking) Linux. It's true that you need a Mac to (legally) run macOS, but that's lock-out, not lock-in. Essentially it is a $1000 license to the OS and perpetual updates.
Self driving car companies are messing with car insurance companies. Insurance lobbyists own pretty much everyone in congress.
The Traffic Safety report by DoT they refer to doesn't differentiate between people involved and drivers that caused accidents.

I'm thinking that some two-digit percent of deaths are really blameless, because it's some other vehicle crashed into them. Just for example, a young male driver was speeding and misjudged a maneuver and collided with a vehicle with a family of 4 inside.
And I misspoke in my initial comment; you could do it and be memory safe with Boost. Obviously iterators can be used in basically any language.
In a side thread, the quizlet folks mention their real-world experience and reasoning for coming to GCP. In your case, as a Firebase customer, the integration is already there and you could start adding pieces over time. As the integration between Cloud and Firebase improves, I'm guessing you'll find more reason to "just do it on Google Cloud". Ping the Firebase people about their current Alpha programs ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
This article is about 7-11 Japan, nothing to do with 7-11 USA.
I noticed the same comparing Thai 7-Elevens to those in the US. Nearly the same prices in Thai 7-Elevens and Thai supermarkets, whereas in the US there was a significant price difference (from what I recall, it's been a while since I've been back).
Perhaps you meant legislation, not litigation.
Lobbying really isn't that expensive. This isn't the answer.
You have not given any details, so I cannot evaluate what this nonprofit was actually doing - that is, there are two questions:

1) How much were they doing? That is, where on the scale were they from (a) just literally letting people know that saving was a thing and banks existed through to (b) actually going in with people to open accounts, making personal introductions, acting as guarantors etc?

2) Who were they helping? That is, where on the scale of 'relevance to systemic discrimination that I discussed' were their clients from (c) mostly educated white college graduates with good credit history and family money (though perhaps not much personal money) living in 'good' areas through to (d) mostly poor black lower class minimum wage workers with bad credit history living in 'bad' areas?

It is a relevent counterpoint if the nonprofit is mostly doing (a) and mostly helping (d) - otherwise, it is entirely irrelevant.

That is, because doing (b) firstly does not scale, so it only fixes the problem for a few people, and secondly agrees with what I said, about how you need these things in order to bank if you fit into category (d). And because serving (c) is entirely irrelevant to the point about systemic discrimination, as (c) are people that do not face this.

So, please either show that the nonprofit was mostly doing (a) and mostly helping (d), or retract your point, as it is wrong.
My solution is to buy as much stuff as possible from amazon. They know just about everything I buy, but they have mostly the same incentives as me, ie my information doesn't leak out of amazon. They may let people market through them, but they're sure gonna make sure nothing leaks out...
They might both take Google's in-house machine learning course.
No more room for corruption, CP warns officers
It would easier in a newer car to interrupt one of the leads to/from the ECU, which is already located in the cabin.

There's so many electrical systems in a modern car; interrupt just one and it's going nowhere.
F.E.A.R. is one of my favourite games, and the AI was really well done.
> (I have noticed a lot of old Japanese vehicles being stolen in the Bay Area. Go figure?)

Parts? Old Japanese cars are still on the road, running well. My son is driving my original purchase 1990 Honda.
In my view, valuations and fundraise are based on what the company is going to do and growth trajectory it is on. It'd be a mistake to assume (as I see a lot of commentators here wondering why a software company needs $850M) that Airbnb will forever be a booking platform for shared rooms or continue to do what it does today.

Of course, there is no disclosure yet about what they wish to do with this capital and it may become clearer in next few months. The reach Airbnb has today could get it into growth areas such as Airline tickets, B2B, advertising or possible acquisitions. Also, being a full stack company, cost of operations, support, lobbying etc. would also be a factor for more capital.
Well said. I guess I could rephrase it as helping people. The great influencers you mentioned all managed to helped a lot of people through their achievements. For most of us, it is easier to help directly through human connection.
Apple iPhone 7 to Come with 3GB RAM
My argument is that we first evolved to sweat, not wear the skins of dead animals

We may have come from Africa, but it was during the ice age that we really got going as a species. Rapid climate change forced us to develop improved tools and technology to survive. This eventually led to farming, agriculture, cities and modern civilization.

Without the cold, we'd probably have been quite happy staying in the trees.
NFC + PI + Switch
> at least some of this money will be used to pay off initial investors with a nice profit.

To clarify, do you mean some of the money will be used to buy back shares from early investors giving them a nice profit?
Pokemon Go Got Banned by the Iranian Government
That's not why <cloud provider> networking is so much more expensive than a VPS provider... All of the big providers have fairly serious networking investments (and I think it's fair and honest to say that Google's is the largest) that provide a network quality and performance you won't match with any VPS provider. Do you want to stream more than 100 Gbps during the Olympics to people all over the world? Don't try that on OVH, DO, etc. but you can do it on us. We (Google) in fact charge more than AWS for our networking because of our massive global network.

tl;dr: you get what you pay for, and you don't always need our crazy network!
Have you heard of Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice?
He affirms what you are saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM

He has other interesting theses as well. google him.