skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's already several digital Blackwater's so to speak. HBGary Federal is the obvious unsuccessful one, but you also have much more successful ones like Endgame Security.

Personally my view is that the 'physical' Blackwaters of the world haven't demonstrated an awful lot of adherence to the moral requirements associated with such work, so why would the virtual ones do the same? If you sanction a company with the ethics of Blackwater to do offensive work, do you really think they only side they're ever going to fight on is yours? Do you think that they'd represent your interests, or theirs, and do you think there'd be any hope of the kind of transparency or limitations that you'd at least expect to see in a state run equivalent?
What happens when you buy something from a site and they send your receipt (and possibly a software key) by email?

Where I work we get enough mail bounces from customers whose mailboxes are over quota, or who spelled their address wrong, and so on that challenges from the few using C/R systems are lost in the noise. No one has time to go through all of these, find the challenges, and jump through whatever hoops they want to get the message through.
Image Recognition vs. QR Codes
A good dose of common sense regarding standing desks is in order. Basically you're trading one set of hazards for another.

"Individuals spending most of the day on their feet every working day are at greater risk of health problems including varicose veins, poor circulation and swelling in the feet and legs, foot problems, joint damage, heart and circulatory problems and pregnancy difficulties."

"Chronic heart and circulatory disorders are linked to prolonged standing at work. Prolonged time in an upright posture at work may cause hypertension comparable to 20 years of aging."

http://www.hazards.org/standing/index.htm
The MS mind set is often unaware of subtleties, and doesn't see a reason to place much of any value on them... I think that's why they get flack all the time, despite doing what they were asked. They then get frustrated since it seems irrational to them. Like getting a doughy croissant vs. a flaky croissant, they'd just see you got a croissant, what's the problem?

I had a MS usability researcher (actually a whole team) come on site and during my interview tell me he will be "triaging my usage" of one of their popular non-technical applications. To which I gave him a blank stare, and said "you want to know how I use it?" Sort of reminded me of Feynnman asking the NASA engineers if by "pressure induced harmonic oscillation" they meant a "whistle" during the Challenger investigation -- albeit NASA engineers are allowed to be out of touch. ;-)
quora, livejournal, stackexchange
I think I've seen it suggested on HN that many huge companies got that way with some shady past behaviour. I can't help thinking on that with regard to AirBnB - if they started up demanding full ID, who would use them? Who trusts giving their full ID to a little known company? Nobody. So they start up with a reputation based trust system because that's the only option they have. Now they've got lots of users, big investment, and a horrible event twisting their arm to do something (e.g. requiring ID which they couldn't do before, or spending more on security staff teams which they couldn't afford before), and it might not hurt them much to do so.

Viewed from the future with hindsight, perception shifts to show them as a large company with a shady past "a very insecure system to gain traffic followed by a switchover to a legitimate system".

(This is not the same thing as saying AirBnB planned bad things, it's a musing on how things happen and how things are perceived.).
You can always do that if you trust the person enough. The idea with exchanges is essentially to act as an escrow service, but one where the two parties don't have to directly know who each other is. I don't think you can decentralize trust, realistically. Someone ultimately has to be responsible for a bad transaction or handling of BTC.
Apologies for the tangent, but I had that and needed to drop into single user mode and do a fsck to fix some errors.
I just paid $22.87 for an iPad2-64GB and my girlfriend loves her Panasonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $675 which only cost me $62.81 to buy. Here is the website we use to get it all from, GrabCent. çom
So - if we happened to be ~16-20 in 1990 and had a good start with a commodore/amiga/vc-20 whatever - is that relevant?

Sure, the experience is bound to be more similar to current hardware, but you can easily be 40 now (I'm now, early thirties) and claim a little more experience.

The next argument could be 'is experience > $someThreshold enough'?
I don't think many non-Australians know about the E3. I told my employer (very) late in the process that I needed sponsorship, and explained how easy it was to get an E3 and that I was willing to do all the work.

I think this helped as I imagine the last thing a startup wants to waste time on is dealing with bureaucratic immigration issues, but I can't say for certain.
This has been long fixed with Windows Server 2003 SP1 and later supporting TLS authentication, BTW.
I for one believe you have a very good point.

In fact it's always saddened me that experiences with different health issues isn't shared between doctors.

Until that is solved (and that will take a very very long time) you could potentially provide something of great value.
You make it more difficult for the spam filters to determine the difference between spam and non-spam.
> computing arbitrary polynomials is all you can do to data. Everything you do is somehow adding two numbers together, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing.

What about conditional branching?
As an ML/AI guy, I'm curious about the problems encountered by HFT systems. What I would love to see is some data, along with the desired outcome. Maybe also include the amount of time available to make the said decision. One could go further and institute a "Netflix prize" with such data.

Right now, I'm clueless about what kind of data these systems deal with, and what are they supposed to do.

Any HFT/ULLT people willing to share data?
But it depends on what is real money. If your dad is a doctor and your mom a lawyer, sure. But if you grew up poor then 150k loos like real money.
Hacking the Massachusetts Lottery
Does anyone use a service like mailinator or spamgourmet?
> The story here is that people are doing things that in most jurisdictions are illegal.

Agreed; I believe the problems posed to AirBnB's model are more severe that most commenters seem to recognize. Further, the countermeasures many are suggesting are problematic in their own right. e.g. Troy in Techcrunch post said:

"Also, go with your gut. My gut said something wasn’t right about the people that rented my place, but I didn’t know how to handle that gut feeling..."

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that depending on specifics, both the Fair Housing Act and the ADA can apply to hotel rentals. If you create a situation where people are empowered to decline a rental because they "got a bad gut feeling" about the renter, you open up yet another legal can of worms.

I have nothing against the AirBnB guys - I'm actually rooting for them. However I think it's time for them to step up their game and start tackling these issues head on instead of hiding from them, which seems to have been their strategy to date.
Neat trick! Thanks!
Only if entire bitcoin concept itself is not a mistake or a racket or a scam or the other names that just all, uh, competent economists call it.

After a long series of bank failures, the US learned that financial regulation plays an important role (despite from being far, far from perfect).

Bitcoin's organization stems more ideological predelictions than an understanding of the problems of the existing financial system.
Is there any way to play "quant dev" with representative mock data (or historical data even) with similar constraint, etc? I doubt I have the constitution to do this for real but it would surely be a fun game.
$1100 is cheap for the Bay Area ... You might be able to do better in Oakland/Berkeley. Not ideal, but more and more things are in SF these days, and they're a quick BART ride from SF.
Link to studies confirming these risks?
I am speaking of my last 15 years in London working in derivatives/front office IT, and interviewing for many jobs in front office IT. It is very exceptional to find banks that will organise IT to report into the front office structure - this doesn't occur, and I almost never hear of such a thing when I see job specs.
Google Native Client 0.5 : released with stable ABI
Then why do we need airbnb at all? Use craigslist for hotels too. The big issue here is that airbnb claims from the start that they are more than just classifieds, giving people a sense of security which is false.
Indeed, by definition people in the USA don't buy exported goods.

And speaking as someone who used to work in the business of building electronics parts in the USA, parts that were then sent to Malaysia for final assembly: Lots of things undergo final assembly overseas because that's one of the least automatable manufacturing processes, so you save a lot of money on hand-assembly by paying lower prices for workers. But that doesn't mean that all the parts of your "made in China" goods - or of the machines that are used to make them - are made overseas.

And as Apple's accountants will tell you the profits are not in the assembly step. For example, lots of machines with "Intel inside" are assembled abroad, but the processors are made in the USA - largely by robots - and a lot of the value is in those processors.
Hi T,
What you're doing sounds similar to Skweal, which allows customers to reach management privately rather than complaining publicly, though not anonymously -- see http://skweal.com/
With complainator, I'd like to know how you inform the business of the complaint so they can fix it?
The slider in finder is still there, but you have to turn on the status bar to see it
It's interesting to note the pattern between EJ and Troy: in both of these cases, the renters were not home, which means they were treating Airbnb more like a "vacation rental" service. They both had a gut feeling that told them the rentee was "off" in their communication. They both didn't meet the people in advance. And the rentees were both meth addicts.
Bootstrapped API Management Like the Moodstocks API
I encourage introspection. Even laced with irony.
I switched to http://typematrix.com keyboard about 5 years ago when my wrists started hurting. I've been happy with that decision. The unmarked one I purchased at first really made me focus in my touch typing.

One downside: When I go to a co-worker's computer with a normal keyboard I feel like I can not type.
Yes, but remember you benefit from combined spam filter heuristics based on the aggregate of all user's marking email as spam. So if you falsely mark legitimate email as spam you're pissing in the well for everyone else.
If sales won't go so well, or if you would like to try a different marketing approach, you might consider this:

Instead of asking for money upfront, you should give the app for free with a few sample monsters. Then you can provide the full package with in-app purchase. The logic behind it is that it will be easier to convince the parents to pay for it, after their kids love it. Another reason - with a $2.99 price point, it will be hard for you to hit the top list, which has the most influence on your sales. But you could charge that in an in-app purchase without affecting your listing in the free apps.

If you decide to do it, make sure to ask the user to upgrade in strategic locations (For example, after they launch it several times, after they finish all the paintings, etc.)

Good luck!
1. August
1.August , 1.August , 1.August , 1.August ,
1.August , 1.August , http://www.psdmate.com/index.php/2011/07/31/1-august/
And benefit from downplaying the risks of renting / putting a property up for rent
I have seen sites like meetup.com that disallow the "+" sign for spam reason. Instead of having proper spam detection and filtering they just added arbitrary rules like that.
How many hours do you typically spend standing per day?
I use C for very-soft real-time, and have very little memory management code in practice.

I think you're misrepresenting the situation about control. With C, you can (and indeed sometimes do) manage a list of things to "free later". You have full control over when to free things.

I use GC'd languages too, plentifully, and agree that GC beats a lot of the average manual memory managed code. People using C write a lot of unnecessary mallocs/frees. But I don't think GC would work well for the kind of code I work on.

If I wanted a high-performance GC'd language, why would I use Go and not Haskell?
I figure anyone actively discussing tools has a certain bent for nerdery.

In fact there's a relevant Steve Jobs quote: "... That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Clickable: http://complainator.com
Hm. Well, we did also consider the name Monsters Ink, but stayed away because we didn't want any trouble. Seems hard to tie your shoes these days without someone filing a lawsuit.
Ultimately, AirBnB is making a bet they can effect change on the laws relating to subletting.

That's an important point. But Airbnb hasn't won me over to writing my elected representatives to ask for legal reform related to subletting by its recent behavior. Indeed, as I reflected on what Airbnb's business model means to me as a renter, I recalled that basically every police call into my neighborhood in the past several years has been the result of the behavior of visitors who were NOT on the lease agreements for homes in this townhouse neighborhood. I like that my landlord checks the background of tenants before renting space to people who live in my neighborhood. I'd hate to see the safety and security of my neighborhood undermined by a business encouraging my neighbors to breach their contract with our landlord.

Wimdu thinks it can beat Airbnb by providing better customer service.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2829859

Based on Airbnb's performance with its pile of capital so far, I have think that that might be possible for Wimdu.
Are they really things you learned here that you couldn't mostly have written down before by thinking on "how should a company interact"? They sound pretty ideal, but what when you can't "be fair" and also "err on the side of the customer"?

What when you can't establish a single point of contact because you don't have the resources? What current state of your company will you deprioritize to make that a priority?

What does "don't spin the company line - be thoughtful" mean? If your company line changes as soon as you put thought into it then (a) where did you get it in the first place? and (b) in what way does it represent your company, anyway?

What if it turns out AirBnB believed they did respond quickly, fairly, thoughtfully, got the authorities involved, didn't officially let anyone else speak for them, etc. and this situation still developed because human communication is like that and other people didn't perceive the same intentions in their behaviour as they did?

Did I miss any good lessons here?

You can't please all the people all the time? You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs? No gain without pain? Whatever you plan for won't be the thing which trips you up? The best laid plans of mice and men? Shit happens? It's what you do with it that counts?
I think requiring a log-in is actually against the CAN-SPAM regulations.

FTC.gov's web site states:
"an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender"

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...
Yes, BTC is inherently deflationary, but one of the fascinating things about it is that since it can be infinitely subdivided, this may not be as much a problem as it for meatspace currencies.

Currently BTC is divisible down to 8 decimal places, enabling a maximum possible 2.1 quadrillion atomic units. But that is only an artifact of the data structure used in the current implementation, and could potentially be modified to allow even more granularity.

So, as the value of BTC rises against goods, services, and other currencies, the market can reprice in smaller and smaller increments of BTC, and the incentive to save/hoard that is typically associated with deflationary monetary systems may be weaker with BTC.
What are your best suggestions for someone starting a new job?
The expected Google News search turned up the article submitted here, from a source that appears to be liked by several HN participants, and also another article

http://ca.ibtimes.com/articles/186513/20110725/airbnb-cheap-...

that appears to date from before the recent sensational Tech Crunch posts about Airbnb.
Don't think in terms of assembly instructions, think in terms of logic gates.

A nand gate can be represented as a polynomial (over a binary ring) as

result = (x+y)*(1-xy) = x+y-xy
We have a free version. Our hope is to signal a premium product with the $2.99 price for the paid version and so drive trial of the free version in order to monetize with IAP. We'll see if it works..
Except Asimov himself saw issues with it as the story progressed and created the Mule and Daneel to explore obviously flaws in this type of model.

I agree with Asimov additions in the last books of that series ("The foundation series" for those that haven't read it). Its a nice idea, it may even work to some degree, but it cant handle black swan events and hence isn't something you wouldn't want to rely on it the long term. Maybe something to use as an extra guide for caution than an actual oracle.
Apparently a different branch of the multiverse that forked from ours way back near the beginning of time.
Part of the definition of spam is that it's unsolicited, in the sense of spam filtering. The more casual and loose definition includes anything unwanted and that's fine but we shouldn't extend that definition to spam filtering. If you signed up for it then unsubscribe if you don't want it.
The site design at least is very beautiful, congratulations! I especially like all of the extra content you've added, the store, the "freebies", etc. My only idea to make it even better would be eventually writing some kind of subtle animation into the monster, or alternating the monster for different sections of the site.

To pay HN back for all the feedback and buzz, consider writing up a blog post about the process, and how sales and marketing go. I, at least, would love to read about it and learn from your experience.
Marc Andreessen's Thoughts on VC and Entrepreneurship
That isn't how salaries work though. For most jobs, someone who works 25% longer is more than 25% better. Someone who works 80 hours is generally better than 2 people who work 40 hours because that one guy has all the aggregated contacts and operational knowledge that would otherwise be divided across two people which would come with the overhead of those two people syncing up and communicating with each other. If this wasn't true, then every company would hire 2 people to work normal hours rather than one person who works twice as much (doctors, HFT, whatever).

I actually think that a good model for the way salaries work is with regards $/hours^2. So $500k for 100hr, that means its $50 / hr^2, then 50 hour weeks would get paid $125k, and 25hr weeks would get you $32k. (I actually think that is breaking down once you get down to 25hr though) If you are able to pull $100k working 25 hrs / week then you could be making a lot more than double if you worked 50 hours per week.

(I'm assuming you are a software developer or related job. I actually think this is job dependent; eg CEOs and janitors probably don't follow that trend).
Gevent, Long-Polling & You
http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

What's the main difference between this project and awesomium ?
I think this is a smart thing to try, especially because the purchasers are likely to be parents who are used to blowing $2.99 on physical coloring books that last for one dinner. Unlike, say, college students buying games, parents who want this probably won't relate much differently to 2.99 than .99, I would guess.
My company (in the US) has just started upgrading to adjustable height desks in the past year or two; they're not motorized, but have a mechanical system that allows you to adjust it easily despite the weight of the desk and monitors. I tried alternating between sitting and standing, but I've fallen back into the habit of sitting again. Perhaps I should give standing another try.
I like how you cite 'Anonymous Coward' as if there is only one. :)
If you liked this you might like this Stanford ecorner presentation (this is what led me to the older one)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2829998
The main variable here is how smart you design your tutorials. Which cmds do you introduce at which reihenfolge?
It has a compose key already in Option; this is more discoverable. (or can you figure out how to write ē easily on a US keyboard?)
My favorite new feature is the revamped FileVault. The old version of FV was a huge mess: it only encrypted your home directory, it didn't play nice with TimeMachine (since it saw your home directory as one giant encrypted file) and was generally a nuisance.

Lion's FileVault is full-disk encryption and operates at the file-system level. This means that every program sees your encrypted file system as just ordinary files, while HFS+ is transparently encrypting and decrypting on every read and write from the hardware. This makes full disk encryption so simple and problem-free that I recommend everybody turn it on, immediately.

Ars has more information on how this all works (http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.a...).
It is an abuse of a system designed to stop unsolicited email. You're basically ruining that system every time you do that. Someone who wants to get that email may now miss out on it. If you signed up for it, unsubscribe from it. Hitting spam is very selfish.
If I didn't opt-in and they send me a message that I have to log in to opt-out, I mark it as spam. Sometimes I'll also log in and remove myself, but not always. Depends on the company.

On the other hand, if there's a simple 1-click link, I will usually click it and merely archive or delete the mail.

Webmasters: It's in your best interest to make it easy to unsubscribe. It only makes people mad. It doesn't make them stay as customers.
Seconded. If I can't unsubscribe from an email with one click (at the very most two), then I mark it as spam.
Fortunately, Pearl has distilled the highlights of his book _Causality_ into a 50-page paper that makes a great introduction to the modern theory of causation:

http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r350.pdf

Through this paper, and others like it, Pearl's ideas are gaining traction.
CL is free and arms-length for rentals, while AirBnB is an active broker and financial participant in their rentals.
The Clueless Novice. The Clueless Expert
i love it!

2 useless notes

"shit" doesn't sound right (but sounds fine from espeak on the command line)

japanese characters come out as random english characters eg
す(su) comes out as "y"

you're fucking awesome :P