skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might be useful for html sanitization. You can allow anything as input (including scripts, styles, etc), render it to a page in phantom, apply your whitelist on the effective DOM, and render it out as output. Of course, this might be resource intensive, and you have to be careful about phantomjs being sandboxed and having cpu/memory/timeout limits. The nice thing about this though is you that 1) you get your serializer/deserializer for free, 2) it's very forgiving on malformed input, 3) the output is WC3 valid since webkit corrects the DOM, and 4) you can support styles and scripts that affect the DOM.
I didn't realize how old this was, which tells you something about how prescient Yegge's writing can be. I would have added "pattern matching", though. At a minimum, keyword arguments or syntactic sugar for them.
Perhaps you can be honest with them, and work out a deal where they can buy the rights to everything you have done so far.

If your company has shifted focus to something you are already familiar with, they should have an advantage in working with you even more.
Thanks James. For the curious ... James' app is: http://www.quietwrite.com/
Disappointed how similar the sign up pages are (https://www.shopify.com/services/signup vs. https://rentpost.com/pricing)
The problem really isn't in figuring out who cheated. We definitely have the technology to figure that out. The issue is punishing those people who did cheat. At my Top 10 university, cheaters were more or less punished with a slap on the wrist.
What my local operator is offering is this:

ZTE S202

Specs:
http://wwwen.zte.com.cn/en/products/mobile/mobile_detail_291...

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CClXKPRDzLI&feature=playe...

The price is 70 euros. The buttons have nice a tactile feedback, it has a screen and even looks okay.

Sure, this thing has a better branding, nicer website but the product itself is inferior and costs more.
I think I'm detecting a trend.

Take an open source project (LVS perhaps, in this case?), scale it onto a bunch of servers running Xen (your own, Amazon's, doesn't really matter), wrap an API around it, and you've got the next cloud service.
While I'm not sure Scala is the Language of the Future™, it's relevant to this discussion to point out that the method_missing hacks that make ruby's dynamic typing so attractive are being actively prototyped in Scala.

An example snippet: https://gist.github.com/783394

The implementation: http://lampsvn.epfl.ch/trac/scala/changeset/23993
It depends on the rental market. Here in Pittsburgh, more landlords in the city are bad because it's such a heavy student population. What's the incentive to be good or to update apartment features? Every apartment gets rented out anyways.
What that web site does is start by assuming that the Bible is completely true, and then try to retrofit as much of science as they can onto their central Belief That Must Not Change.

They may well be intelligent, but that doesn't make them sane.
I see the customer service issues in the real estate industry (especially property management) as being created by two issues (and disclosure: I've worked in real estate for the past 11 years, from the front desk to franchise ops manager to consulting back to the industry):

* High staff turnover
* Procedures that suck staff time, instead of supporting them

Being a property manager is, for the most part, an awful job. If you sell real estate, you deal with the owner giving you grief; when you manage a property you have the owner, the tenant, and the suppliers all wanting a piece of your time, and rarely to say thank you. Because you don't need to be a rocket surgeon to work in PM, the pay is low, and most staff are young people looking for something better. When they leave, they take with them most of the corporate memory about the tenant and the property. If you hate your property manager, chances are it's because several times in the past year you've called and been put through to a different person every time.

Lack of procedures is linked to lack of investment in this part of the business (also reflected in low salaries and high staff turnover). Most real estate offices are run by salespeople, current or former. They see one sales commission worth $000s as being infinitely better than one tenancy worth $16 / week. So they don't invest in systems, processes, staff development, or great software. This is the market hole you speak of - but while there's a gap in the market, there may not be a market in the gap...

...EXCEPT that, ironically, a rent roll is traditionally the only asset a real estate business has to sell - without it, you just have a sales team who could go next door and open up tomorrow. PM departments also provide a regular income when sales decrease, which has been the case over the past two years in most of the world affected by the recession / GFC. I don't have enough evidence to support a claim that owners are more willing to invest in their team, particularly property management, as a result of this; but I hope it's the case.
There's nothing wrong with AbstractFactoryFactoryInterface if that's what you end up with after carefully evolving a design, driven by actual requirements.

The problem is that the people who come up with these designs are the ones that consider refactoring bad/hard/risky. They know very well that they need a hammer, but 200 what ifs later, they have this monster-factory, instead of just getting a bloody hammer, then, when they also happen to have a screwdriver and a saw, they build a toolshed, and refactor.
We pass the fee along.
Computer Science and Philosophy -- Undergrad Course at Oxford Comlab
Putting aside the question of the legal requirements (which can necessarily only approximate the ethical requirements), isn't it reasonable to just say that he should be hired if and only if the hiring committee thinks his beliefs will not unacceptably interfere with his job (including, for instance, the possibility that he is a "fraud")? Dawkins trots out all these extreme cases where we would be very worried in order about job performance to argue that religious beliefs should be fair game, but doesn't convince me at all that "if a young earth creationist is 'breathtakingly above the other candidates', then the other candidates must be so bad that we should re-advertise and start afresh." Rather, it just advertises a naivete about how flawed we humans are. If we rejected every candidate who has some self-contradictory beliefs because we take it "as a revealing indicator that there is something wrong with his head", we wouldn't be able to fill any jobs. Anyone who thinks they have reached some sort of platonic ideal of rationality---and that those who haven't should be ignored---is deluding themself, whether or not they may be more consistent.
You make a good point on the work orders. You have full control over deleting, closing out, changing the priority, etc of them.

Think of work orders as a support request for an online company. You get a lot of junk support requests as well, but you have to have something, and the tools to organize as needed. And this is WAY more efficient than speaking with someone over the phone or in person, or taking emails!
I applied for internships at both companies. Google actually mentioned in their rejection email that I should feel free to ask questions - so I did. No answer.

I would love to hear about this being brought up by someone else in the interview itself. "What are some reasons Google would fail to answer questions that they themselves asked for?" In fact, I would make this one of the first questions asked. "I don't want to waste anybody's time, so..." I'm sure it would disarm any interviewer who entered the room readied with a "GOOG IS GOD" attitude.
What you're describing reminds me of a company I stumbled on a while ago - Recorded Future.
This. The only people who pay by CC I think do it for the rewards/points.
I think he was trying to say that you should want to help your customers. You should be happy to receive a work order from them because now they are a satisfied tenant that can praise your apartments to their friends who have been trying to get their sink fixed for a month.

My friend is a renter and he has wanted a renters interface like this for years.
Why would you not be able to say no (with appropriate reasons) to "misc bullshit" requests online via Rentpost, versus doing the same on phone/in person?

Also, wouldn't receiving payments online rather than via checks/cash be easier for you, even if you, say, disable the tenant complaints portion of the site?

PS> I am not affiliated to Rentpost in any way, just amused by your dismissing their effort in strong words.
The Old Spice Guy Returns [video]
Don't mistake constructive criticism for not being sold on the concept.
My bank's automatic billing system prints and mails a check in my name to my landlord. So I'm using both modern banking and checks. They are not mutually exclusive.
In the past, a scientist religious belief didn't affect his contribution. I don't see how targeting them now will benefit the scientific community. Carl Gauss was a devote Christian; what are we suppose to do if he existed now, not recognize him?

"I am convinced of the afterlife, independent of theology. If the world is rationally constructed, there must be an afterlife." - Godel

Maybe Godel wasn't logical for his beliefs?

"An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God." -Srinivasa Ramanujan

Maybe they shouldn't have invite Ramanujan to work at Cambridge?

I find these thoughts disturbing, to judge someone's potential to contribute based on his religion.
Again, don't take it personally, but I've been doing real estate for the last six years and I've spent tons of time talking to other investors and landlords. I also still rent because the returns in SF for buying are so abysmal. So I've had plenty of exposure to the way the real estate industry works. And the customer service is almost uniformly terrible. I read your statement as saying that you didn't want to make it easier for customers to contact you, because they would just whine and complain about stupid stuff. What makes real estate different than any other industry in this regard? What company with good service is determined to not "make it easier for their customers to complain"?

And there are guys out there doing this right. I've lived in building that had online portals for customers to submit complaints and it didn't seem to be a problem for them. And I've talked to landlords across the country who run extremely efficient operations with low marketing costs, low vacancies, and high rents because they kick ass for their customers.
You might want to go through all your pages and do a spelling/grammar check. For example, take a look at this: http://rentpost.com/tenants

"Your rental property now comes standard with it's very own web dashboard"

When I see an error like that, I lose a great deal of respect for the company. Either it means it's worked by people who lack understanding of grammar, or lack the motivation to proofread their work. Neither is a great signal for me.

The website is BEAUTIFUL though.
Do you ever wonder if the dropout employees are being grouped together on purpose?
> Just doesn't work like that in renting.

Maybe not, but with more information available online now your next potential tenant will be able to take that into account. (And don't think I didn't notice you dodged the ratings question). Places with better reputations will attract better tenants and have better occupancy rates.
Good point. I used the URL (which was missing the "dubious") to fill in the title.
Cowen has an idea that technology will reduce the demand for human labor. So far, this hasn't happened. Humans are merely moving into more creative fields, leaving the repetitive activities to the machines. In other words, their productivity is increasing.

This stagnation, if it comes, won't be a consequence of 'everything possible having been invented', but rather external political factors. In fact, the modern state was given a great boost by the advance in technology, there is only a danger if it outgrows its support systems.
Yeah, it seems Facebook is overestimating the depth of the average connection between a member and each of their 467 'friends'.
I noticed the random DNS requests the other day when I had to tunnel my traffic over ssh from the local library, but didn't think to figure out what the requests were. Interesting that this article shows up now.

If anyone is interested, my auth.log shows: https://gist.github.com/797184
Facebook to Launch First Mobile Phone
This response indicates to me that you truly do not understand what it's like to manage a building with hundreds of tenants. It's not that I don't want to fix real problems (broken sink, heat, disposal, etc) but I can tell you that if have this accessible of a system its only going to make a landlords life worse. Perhaps if you had an option to send in a work-order based on a set of predetermined orders that the tenant could only check off and submit rather than an open comment box it would make my life easier. However, giving my tenants an open forum to tell me they want a new coat of paint, or to install an ac, or fix a small dent is going to make my life a living hell.

Disclosure: I spend 8-10 hours a day managing and talking to other landlords.
sometimes there's a reason for the :)
As a former tenant, I have never asked my landlord for all new appliances or asked them to discount my rent just because they feel sorry for me. I have been in situations where I wanted to contact the landlord about legitimate issues, ranging from “the guy living three floors above me puked out the window onto our walkway” to “the living-room window is still cracked and there’s no heat in the bedroom”, and found it difficult to do so. In the latter case, after getting no response from the landlord after weeks of complaint, I went to the city health inspector, who discovered a long list of code violations in the apartment, including a bunch of things that I personally would never have complained about if the landlord had addressed my immediate problems.
@pinksoda

We fix sinks and whatnot right away- If you dont,they only become bigger issues. :)

Its stuff like "Can I have 13 small dogs in my apartment" that gets to you.
> It works for int, float, BigInteger

Actually it is incorrect for floats.

For non integer types, the factorial is given by the gamma function [1]. So, the factorial of 3.5 is Gamma(2.5) which is 3.3325 [2] not 6 as your function suggests.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_function
[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gamma%283.5%29
Holding Signs on the Side of the Road – Robots Take That Job, Too
ApartmentRatings.com is pretty useless even from a renter's perspective. 35% approval is a great rating on that site.
I think 2 things need to be fixed in order to sell more apps:

1) Fix the payment declined orders problem. There are a TON of these going on.

2) Add PayPal. I know some of you hate it but I get requests constantly from people asking if they can buy my apps with PayPal.

EDIT:

3) The ability to reply directly to comments would be huge.

I think we may be losing sales because of false claims, or support requests in Android Market comments that we cannot reply to in order to show we are supportive, and you CAN do certain things in our apps that the commenter thought you could not.
Yeah, OOP which pretty much no one uses.
Rocket surgeon. Great mixed metaphor. :-)
Unrelated, of anyone in medicine, I think the only requirement I have of them is to believe in and uphold Hippocratic Oath and not let their personal beliefs interfere with performing their job or the oath. This example used, that of a person you would as a patient demand trust from more than a scientist (like an astronomer) is questionable fear mongering.
Preface: I'm an atheist, myself.

The funny thing about this argument is that it's made within the same protection against religious discrimination that Dawkins would like to discard.

Some of us might like to fantasize that laws against religious discrimination could be carefully disassembled so that atheists remain fully protected while all the theists get comeuppance for their objectionable views, but that isn't going to happen. If you get rid of laws against religious discrimination, it's not going to be open season on Christian creationists, it's going to be open season on atheists and Muslims (who poll almost as badly as atheists in the US).
@ryan

Sure, There is a line somewhere to be crossed/not crossed. The only example I can give is maybe along the lines of google. There is no support whatsoever, yet people remain happy for the most part when things break. People love google. But you cant call and complain- You have to jump through a few hoops and fill out forms first. Thats all I am saying- If you make things too easy, your costs will go up with no additional return on revenue in either the short or long term.
The page took over a minute to load for me. After hitting reload -> 4.5 seconds for the main rentpost.com/ to load, 12s for combine.php, 20s for typekit javascript (which seemed to block anything from loading until it was done, including resources from rentpost.com domain and jquery from the google ajax api). After these resources are in my browser cache, the load time is normal (400ms) but the first load and after a reload...ouch!
The Ultimate Obituary for Albert Ghiorso
I guess tenant retention isn't important to you?

Managers spend massive amounts of money trying to find new tenants for a unit. If you have yearly turnover b/c you intentionally stay disconnected with tenants, this will increase your overhead, not the other way around. Hire a college kid to sort through the work orders and prioritize them accordingly.
Dawkins isn't what one might call a deep thinker ...
Sounds like something we'd like to fix. Please file a bug at <http://new.crbug.com/>. If you'd like to dig through the code and post a patch too, that will likely speed things up: <http://dev.chromium.org/developers/contributing-code>.
Where's the bump on the digit 5?
Where's the bump on digit 5?
TED Launched Book Imprint (How Education is Moving to the Cloud)
As a tenant to several both tech and non-tech complexes in SoCal I would like to say that because you wouldn't use the product, because you worry about a paper trail, I would rather not live at your complex.

The difference in customer service between say, an Archstone community with amazing online customer service from online bill-pay to online maintenance requests to say, a complex that runs by paper and phone calls, is night and day.

This service solves such a big problem that I myself have been rough drafting a similar website but looks like these guys are way ahead of the game. Congrats and I hope it does well, I know I certainly would use it as a tenant.
Thanks for the suggestions.

We're working on a better homepage right now, but it's taking a while because we kinda (really) suck at design.

I agree that the click to reserve ux is bad. But I think it's also a thing you only need to learn once, then you'll know stuff is in the sidebar. Taking up the whole page is pretty strange because nothing else does that at the moment, but this might change. For now, we'll add some hints to direct you to the sidebar when you click on one of those available tiles.
Ok. What was your most compelling reason for not launching in an earlier phase of the development?
I'm gay. If I were a politician, I would oppose laws (actually like Dawkins does here) that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation (as well as religion.)

Would my thinking be suspect? Does that mean that I think that gay people shouldn't be hired or be able to get housing?

From the common / popular "pro-gay" view my positions would be characterized as "anti-gay" and I would risk being demonized by GLAAD, etc.

The problem here is that these terms "pro-gay" and "anti-gay" etc, are completely political and ignore all possibility of nuance.

Let me put it another way. I think a gay person should be allowed to choose not to rent out a room in their house to a mormon who, when he came to see the room, went on and on about how evil gay people are.

Clearly, this gay person is choosing to discriminate based on religion. Clearly, also, being forced to rent a room to someone you are not going to get along with is a recipe for trouble.

But, specifically, it is a violation of your property rights in the room you're renting out, just as forcing you to rent it out, or preventing you from renting it to anybody, or dictating the price at which you can rent it is a violation of your right to use this property as you see fit.

Further, freedom of association is the freedom to associate with whom you like and also not associate with people you don't get along with.

Discriminating against people (based on sexuality or beliefs) is a bad idea when you're hiring because you'll exclude people who would be productive in preference to people who might be less productive.

But discrimination is intrinsic in both property rights and freedom of association. (And freedom of association is simply another way of saying property rights in your own body.)

So, while GLAAD and other political groups would call me an anti-gay politician in this hypothetical, would you really call me a fraud?

I think in the end I'm agreeing with you that it is not black and white, you just hit on the political angle that I can speak directly to.

I've been called "anti-gay" because I don't support "pro-gay" legislation, even though my position is based in a (stronger than my opponents, I believe) belief in human rights.
Don't be Afraid to Ask the VC Tough Questions
Unless you have a history of success, it will be tough for you to get any investing without a site that has traction.
slumlord
I am really hesitating to mention this but maybe the discussion could help find a solution.

The submitter clearly pasted the correct URL and got a link to the original submission (1311 days ago) but went ahead and added "?" to the end of the url to fool the dup filter and submitted again. It is not even a case of two different urls to the same dynamically generated page!

I don't want to rush to accusation of karma whoring because maybe there is a value in reposting old article that some people might have not seen ... But something feels sub-optimal!

Maybe an automatic "best of this week in HN" page that shows the highest rated stories from a few years back that people can casually check for older interesting articles?
So, because he does what he's told, that makes it alright? He has a choice not to represent that constituency.

Let's take a different example. Suppose an American is being paid to do something that is actively bad for other Americans. Does "doing what you're paid to do" make it all right? There are no other considerations?
You forgot to mention that their tenant turnover is much lower which drastically reduces their marketing overhead ;)
"The second, and more important, way is that to become rich in the first place, they typically have to do something extraordinary. Some inherit their money, of course, but most build a better mousetrap, finance someone else’s good idea or at least run a chain of hairdressers in a way that keeps customers coming back."

Or they might have just been more successful at screwing over their competitors; could have lied, bribed, cheated, stolen, slept, or killed their way to riches; could have managed to convince a whole lot of suckers to buy crap that they didn't need or that was even harmful to them.. etc. All tried and true ways of getting rich.
Well written post as it covers a feature in ruby that I haven't seen covered before. Another piece of knowledge to add to the arsenal.
I wonder about latency issues - how much is added by the typical LB setup in this case?
States That Lead in Science and Technology
Facebook: We’re Not Blocked in Egypt