skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "produced some items taken in the alleged theft"

I really dislike the word "alleged" in this sentence.

A person is innocent until proven guilty, so you could say "the alleged thief". But to say "the alleged theft" casts doubt on the victim's complaint, and on a crime having happened at all. Saying "alleged theft" conveys the possibility that the theft itself didn't happen.

We don't have a "presumption of no crime", and the word "alleged" is, at present, inappropriate referencing the fact this woman's possessions were stolen.

EJ is presumed innocent of lying about the theft until proven otherwise, therefore the fact of theft must be stated as though the crime did happen unless proven otherwise.
Oh yes. A thousand times yes.

The one time I /needed/ a job, there was a Brass Ring job fair happening in San Jose; one of those affairs where you can (and I'm not kidding) smell the desperation and fear as too-well-dressed people tender their fancy (but essentially vacuous) resumes to harried booth staffers who ("please, dear Lord") just want to end their lives. If you've ever been on the booth side of one of these, you know what I mean.

I went to a booth belonging to a start-up I'd never heard of, presented my resume and mentioned that I had about 20 years experience doing C.

"Really?!" I've never actually seen someone's eyes light up with real light, but the guy I was talking to came really close. The interview the next day was a breeze and I was sitting in a cubical in a Mountain View start-up incubator (The Landings, natch, third time there) within a week. Nice to have a paycheck again.

But.

I won't bore you with the details, but this is where I learned the phrase "Train Wreck," from a guy who left two weeks after I came on board. Let's just make a list: Patterns, Cargo-Cult Programming, a product with 200K SLOC that could have been replaced by 1,000 lines of Perl, and some of the worst code I'd ever seen. Add to this a VC fight (the banks interviewed us worker-bees to try to figure out what was going wrong) and the execs bringing in a psychiatrist to interview the employees, ditto. When I quit, six months later, the prez broke down in tears, begging me to stay.

The interview goes both ways. Oh, yes.
FTA: "Even if you don’t believe they are nice guys (which they are, among the nicest of all the people we’ve funded)"

Why anyone would believe somebody with a vested financial interest is beyond me.
Astroturfing Works
I’m more worried than laughing. I would laugh if what’s happening were inconsequential to me.
Can we please stop posting this stuff? I get it, the woman had a tragic experience, and Airbnb is getting blamed. I still think this is getting wildly overblown--the number of rehashed posts on this topic here is like watching CNN. I don't think HN is for blow-by-blow updates to the story of the hour.
Good catch, and make sense given the context. My mind is stuck in HFT mode and constantly has me worried.
Would an effective way to forestall this be to set up a website and start suing anyone who visits it from the UK for copyright infringment? I would expect that such lawsuits would be laughed out of court, or strongly ruled in favor of the defendant, especially if you started out by suing fairly powerful or influential people.

(Also, is it legal to read books in the UK? The brain and eyes make a temporary copy of any inputs, and memory could be considered to be a derivative work.)
Here is what I find interesting about the story. Much of the public outcry is centered around the fact that Airbnb didn't go far enough, hasn't been more proactive, didn't offer enough emotional support. Basically, didn't treat her as a friend.

But there was one case when AirBnb acted in a way appropriate in dealing with a friend, but questionable in dealing with a customer. The very "we're in the middle of a funding round" thing that caused another wave of public outcry. Basically, AirBnb is saying "Look, dude, here is our situation: we will help you, but can you take down this blog post, it's really going to hurt us?". Did EJ treat AirBnb as a friend? No. Her response was "why on earth would I care about your situation, here is my situation!"

So, do we want companies to treat us as friends? And if so, do we have a moral obligation to treat them as friends in response? Because the approach "I want you to treat me as a friend, but I'm going to treat you as a cold soulless corporation" does not seem fair to me.
I think that when you've been victimized and it involves your home, you are very likely to go through the process of itemizing each and every little thing you can to see what is missing and what is changed. You won't want to keep finding new issues every day. You'll want to take full stock of the damage up front. At first it seems weird, but I think that the emotions involved would drive this behaviour.
Offering a web service and ignoring the pleas of those who know a minefield when they see one is evil. Launching it anyway despite unprecedented pushback is evil. Pretending it's somehow new and unexpected, like wow, we didn't think anyone would care... is evil.

Also, right now, you're right, this doesn't matter. You can just ignore their dumb little toy and go on with life. Trouble is, future services are planned to be integrated. That means you either suck it up and create a profile (thus running into the Real Name fiasco) or opt out of anything which needs one.

Using one thing to force people to do another thing. Where have we seen this before?

If you're inside the company and you care about this stuff, you're probably freaking out because it reflects on you, too.

From a business perspective outside of the company, it's brilliant. It means there will be a lot of people looking for alternative ways to do things where they were previously relying on the big G since it was good enough. I guess I should just shut up and let them keep digging that hole. It'll mean more business for the rest of us.
Did anyone in Lockerbie commit the "Lockerbie bombing"?

Was the calendar at fault for the "9/11 attacks"?

She's the "AirBnB victim", conveniently classifying her among all possible victims, by using "AirBnB" as a noun modifier adjective indicating the most notable, newsworthy, or distinguishing difference from other victims.
The "rails doesn't scale" mantra was discredited 5 years ago, when people realised that it scales exactly the same way as PHP. Remember, scalability != performance.
> So you can pretty much stick each one on it's own server with it's own database and it'll be fine.

That is not a scalable solution. Yes, it'll get you up and running out of the box, but as you keep spinning up servers to host each store and it's database you'll have to keep adding exponential resources (hardware, software, meatware) to the problem and keep you from achieving economies of scale.
Show HN: iPhone word game I created in 5 days - Word Fever
I'd like to take that off-line, but you don't have an email address listed. J@ww.com.
Wow.... EJ got into this situation because she trusted the nice words on the AirBnB website. They need to clearly warn about that stuff - just like craigslist does.
Maybe PG/YC/Airbnb see this for what it is. A great deal of notoriety that will help this startup after the situation lands on the front page of every major paper as well as the nightly news. Then will come EJ on 20/20, morning shows etc. telling her story as a word of caution. Airbnb will respond that they've fixed the problem though. Then even your aunt will know about airbnb. What's that publicity worth.

In the end, this won't hurt it will help. (Think of all the weird stuff selling on ebay like dead bodies, dead body parts etc that were constantly publicized many years ago. At times it seemed like there were new stories weekly.)
well there are efforts for updates etc.
but yes, you have limitations with sparql, thats why i think it is not the final solution. but it is a first approach to push the possibility to query data to a different layer.
I'm sorry, but very little of this story rings true for me. "EJ" reminds me of a roommate I had in college who was a serious drama queen. If she felt wronged by you there was no remedy short of spending every moment lavishing her attention and apologizes (and who has time for that?) that would appease here and it was never enough. I don't doubt AirBnB offered assistance and "EJ" herself said so. However, with a drama queen it is never about finite forms of attention (money, vindication, etc) but renewable sources where she is able to maintain victimhood without taking a shred of responsibility for her part (no matter how small) in the events that are alleged to have unfolded. I mean what kind of drama queen psycho ex carries on about a CEO wanting to meet her for coffee, but not asking about her feelings? What are they dating or something? Nobody cares about her "feelings" feelings are transient and not fact. What they want is to solve the problem and since they are men, they're having some real problems understanding what a losing game they're playing when the opposing side is a drama queen.
Yeah but URLs are not intended to secure data. They tend to leak out in unexpected ways.

Did you know Google will still index URLs prohibited by robots.txt if it finds a link to them (it just won't crawl them)?
Seriously. Look at the list of top links (EDIT: by which I mean /best ) - 6 out of 30 are related to this story, and the top two (of three stories with more than 900 votes) are about this. Until something genuinely new happens, it would be really nice if people stopped upvoting and posting this stuff.

Of course, that's not going to happen, because of the large contingent of users who want karma and think that this is interesting. This story is a really good way to get karma right now, as well as playing into the current meme of bashing Airbnb that's going around (last week it was bashing G+, before that it was bashing Dropbox. I treasure the moments when HN is not up in arms about something).

EDIT: Am I being downvoted for my (admittedly cynical) analysis of why this story is so prominent? It would be nice if one of you would explain why, so I can avoid making the same mistake in the future.
Yes, its not an ideal solution for the long term, but its something easy you can do to scale quickly if you have this architecture. It'll make sure your site stays up.

Afterwards, you can spend the time doing it properly when things have calmed down a little.

That's a lot easier than scaling something like Twitter.
Sounds like an article about my mom. If I recall correctly in the late 50/60's she was a secretary at Virginia Power in Richmond. She took an aptitude test for programming, along with others, and did well then began a 30+ year career programming on/for mainframes.
Yeah, I get that, but we are all aware that that warning is meant for the retailers of the pillows not the owners, right? I'm really just confused that it would be even worth mentioning in the same sentence in the other things.
I was skeptical of that theory, too. For a few reasons:

1. If it was motivated by some kind of short-term meth-lab operation, why trash the place? The minimal amount of planning it would have seemed to require to rent the place seems inconsistent with the orgy of destruction that ensued.

2. Having never used Airbnb, I'm assuming that Airbnb's booking procedures are strict enough to discourage the casual teenage tweaker. Is this not true? Why would a 19 year-old drug addict go to all the trouble to rent out a place on Airbnb when I'm sure there's plenty of suitable venues in the Bay Area with lower barriers to entry? Or does Airbnb really make the barrier that low?

3. If it was a meth lab operation, I'd expect this wasn't an isolated case. Any other cases of this happening with Airbnb?

What I'd really like to know is what would the economics be behind a meth lab operation on this scale? Does it make economic sense? Was this planned as a short-term meth production enterprise that went out of control? Or was it something else?

Still doesn't add up for me.
In this case the 'someone' happens to be PG, a complete stranger to EJ and somebody with financial stake in airbnb, who got EJ's contact info from another complete stranger on the internet?
That salary graph isn't very useful. Who cares what the top superstar earns? Tell me what the average senior developer earns.
"Obviously, the financial damages have been significant, but it has come down to a matter of principle and how I feel they disregarded me and my situation," she said. "I still hurt, and I don't know how you make that right."

But she does know. She implicitly states that Airbnb should have reimbursed her for her financial losses, and since they didn't nudge, she will now crucify them because of her "principles". By all means i was sympathetic towards her, but this is getting tiring. Spiteful even.
I did not know that. Makes a whole lot more sense now.
Do you have some sort of personal interest in this story? Your only comments since you've created your account a day ago have been made in relation to this whole AirBnB situation.

Edit: Reply was to jcunningham.
The Internet in 1995 on MTV
Are you saying you don't believe me? First, I don't wish to have my email address passed on to other people without my permission. Second, I can't imagine what would be accomplished by my emailing you as opposed to addressing - or simply retracting - your unfounded statement here. Finally, your actions and assumptions you've related here today thoroughly creep me out and I do not wish to have private conversation with you.
For banking and stuff with way too much Javascript I use a second browser, and I do a complete wipe of all private information after every use.
This is a little out of hand now, and it really isn't because of anything fundamentally wrong with AirBnB. The vast majority of the issue is that AirBnB is not reacting well to the crisis, and that the PR is being handled about as clumsily as possible.

Y-Combinator needs a PR firm. That much is clear from the AirBnB fall out over the last few days, and I'm not talking about a PR firm to cheer lead for YC, or a PR firm to respond to this or any particular incident.

Instead, they need a PR firm that will evaluate risks of the evolving start-ups, in particular focusing on ones with lots of funding and press exposure. The firm's role would be to anticipate and plan for potential fall out. In times of trouble, the firm would be poised to jump in and coach the team on the appropriate way to respond to crisis in the public eye. A good PR firm would know that saying the word "funding" to the victim was simply not a good idea, and would have advised the founders as such before any meetings with the victim.

I think public relations is like a dirty word in the valley, but PR need not be an unethical or otherwise bad practice, and in this case, the right support would have made a world of difference. The firm really could just be an observer, except in times of crisis. It may be beneficial for the firm to interact with the start-ups, but I think this would at least lead to resistance, given the culture of technical-centric organizations. Simply having an impartial observer with a nose for media problems would avert some crises.
We have bunch of shit heads at the top making these laws. Fuck them.
I don't think I buy that the idea of "total amount of suffering" makes sense. That suggests that a world with more people, who are each suffering less, would be a worse world overall by virtue of having more "total" suffering. That strikes me as strongly counterintuitive, and very hard to justify rationally, though I'd be happy to see the attempt.

And in fact that seems to be the world we're living in. For example, in this TED talk[1] Steven Pinker makes the argument a person being born today — anywhere in the world, counting Iraq and Darfur — has less of a chance of dying at the hands of another person than at any time before in history.

So I'm a little skeptical of the idea that the only way to make the human race feel better is to have less of it.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
Yep, the tags are meant to inform the purchaser of safety stuff and whatnot.

http://money.howstuffworks.com/removed-mattress-tag.htm
I feel like this entire house of cards that is the international financial system is going to completely collapse in my lifetime. I'm not extremely familiar with the details, but the more I learn, the more fragile and arbitrary the whole thing seems.
I like the graph myself (it was snagged from someone's flickr account according to the credits). The second section does show the average salaries for various positions in and out of the Valley, and the third position shows that those Valley salaries don't even remotely start to compensate for the higher cost of living there, which means that Valley salaries are not only not really competitive at all, but are underpaid by a considerable margin. Cool graph for showing that.
My understanding is that if journalists don't say that things are alleged then they open themselves up to lawsuits - or at least that's the rationale I've seen presented for things like this in the past. It fits the meaning of the word, too: "asserted to be true or to exist".
Yeah.. but being disappointed with how EJ and AirBnB handled the situation aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, I frankly don't care all that much how gracefully someone who's apartment gets ransacked handles things. It's not as material to me as the way a company that I might choose to do business with handles the situation.
I'd be surprised if the appellate court could give you a set of criteria for what exactly makes "a distinctive chemical identity and nature".

Inside the body, your DNA is packed up into chromatin by wrapping around other proteins called histones, and then coiling those thicker strands around itself a few more times. One could make the argument that it's shape is different from isolated DNA, which doesn't have the histones, and is going to be much closer to a short string. However, trying to make the claim that this is a chemically distinct molecule is dubious at best, since the chemical structure and identity of the DNA molecule is unchanged.

There are, however, chemical modifications to the DNA itself that that may not get preserved in the extraction technique (but that really depends on your technique), and almost certainly won't be preserved if you need to amplify your sample to sequence it. The most common way is to put a methyl group (CH3) onto a particular part of the DNA molecule. Single-molecule sequencing techniques exist (but aren't comparably cheap to Illumina or SOLID sequencing yet) that would preserve this chemical structure.

Finally, Illumina sequencing (and probably SOLID too, though I'm not sure) involves adding on extra sequences at the end of your DNA fragments, which allow the sequencer to start it's work. I'd doubt if the patent covers this approach, so doing high-throughput genome sequencing like this ought to be fine, based on their "markedly different structure" standard, but who knows what the court would actually say.

But the appellate decision Friday rejected Judge Sweet’s reasoning, saying that since DNA is a chemical, the chemical structure is what matters and that “informational content is irrelevant to that fact.”

This paragraph is the most troubling to me. In the most obvious definition of the terms, the informational content and the chemical structure of DNA are two different ways of saying the same thing. It would be like saying, "the shape of the splotches of ink on this paper are what's being patented, and the informational content is irrelevant"
It looks an awful lot like the Millennium Falcon...
Is there a more neutral source for information on the impact of this? Intuitively I'm thinking that the precedent set is more complex than is made out here.
Wow, an effing moral panic here. I thought KissMetrics was a darling startup?

Anyways, assuming they could offer their service tracking only on a customer's site, they should be serving from a subdomain, no?
I think it is more symptomatic of the terrible job market than anything else. For most jobs available today (talented engineers in NY/SV excluded) there are usually hundreds of applicants for almost any half-decent position, and so employers have the luxury of culling based on any non-protected class that has any sort of predictive value, even if the correlation is extremely weak.

If the economy ever turns around, I suspect this issue will disappear. I certainly don't recall this when unemployment was at 4%.
That detail helps indicate the bizarreness of the situation, which goes beyond strictly gain-oriented criminality. She/they hung out doing crazy things, too. (The detail in the original blog post about burning duraflames in summer with closed chimney also served the same aim.)
> This is proof positive that Chesky lied in his written statements over the last few days when he said there is a suspect in custody.

I don't think a recap of the story as related to us by USA Today, not exactly an investigative outfit, sheds any new light nor does it provide proof of anything. Nor does the one posted in the Chronicle. This hide and go seek game that EJ is playing is allowing her to avoid any scrutiny while she hides behind her blog. Personally, I think Balloon Boy's father has something to do with this.

Also, last time I checked, Brian Chesky was not in the employ of the SFPD as a jailer nor does he have any legal connection, responsibility or obligation to the accused.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't address what I said.

I know the lisp community stands behind Edi Weitz and I respect him, but compared to Python's "Batteries Included" or Perl's standard regular expression library, your solution is problematic. Consider: Weitz's library is just one of five possible regular expression libraries listed on Cliki! Why did you choose his? Weitz's library isn't even the top choice! Are the others broken? Unreliable? Do I have to try them all?

Now, I realize such simple questions as these may not be "breaking new ground in programming theory," but a lot us just want a turn-key solution that works everywhere; the sort that sysadmins use everyday to keep companies humming and the internet buzzing.

That's the definition of "practical" that I'm hung up on.

If I want to do command line text processing with pipes--and many do--how does lisp help me more than Awk? Awk is brilliant in its problem space; it's fairly standardized; it's guaranteed to be everywhere. Choosing Awk or Perl or Python is practical--not being a slave to fashion (trapped in the popularity contest you allude to)

I think you know this, and I think you know just how practical Python/Perl/Awk/Ruby are, which is why you subtly changed your argument from "practical" without qualification to "managing huge and complex problems" by the end of your response, even though the parent specifically includes hobby programming in his classification of "practical" problems.

I think it's cool that you've done "web, database, scripting, 3D game programming, etc" in lisp and can even think in lisp. And I admire your willingness to battle past CL's 1000+ page spec and then the sea of competing libraries to find the one you like and are willing to debug yourself if something is broken.

But that doesn't invalidate all the other tools--it just means there can be more than one way to do it.
What if somebody gets raped?

Seriously. I am not trying to be stupid.
Yeah. Ok.
If Airbnb worked with the police, and the police said they had someone in custody, maybe he didn't know that she might have been released. Anyway, maybe she hasn't been released but was transferred to county.
What's the point of an apology?

Homeaway.com, VRBO.com, and roomarama.com all offer similar products, and they built their businesses without dishonesty or spam.
Many technologists make money when they automate tedious processes executed by humans.