skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, interesting that Yegge stresses project in his post when he clearly says job in the video.
I would kickstart a little for this.
Doesn't AirBnb require a credit card from the renter? Wouldn't it be straightforward to find the vandalizing renter using their credit card information? I'm sure that I'm missing something here...
The point of the quote is that if the the decision is made by some person somewhere, then it isn't science. The "you" is everyone. The quote is meant to be taken at the micro / personal level not at the macro / universal level.
This is why AirBnB will never be the ebay of spaces like they aspire to be. Our personal spaces are always at risk with AirBnB unlike product transactions on Ebay.
Makes me think— Who says someone else has to insure Airbnb? Let's say they add an invisible $1 insurance fee to each booking, that goes into a fund to pay interim damages only when an actual crime is committed.

Cases like this are so rare, and although the damage is horrific to one person the dollar amount is trivial on the scale Airbnb operates. Seems like a perfect case for a shared risk pool that actually works rather than insurance.

Then they could peg the cost of the insurance fee at a realistic share of your risk, and the theoretical cost of someone trashing the place would be built into the cost of the room.
Totally blowing things out of proportion. 35 years? Secret Service? Just for JSTOR data...it's unusual punishment

Everything Aaron does is out of good intentions. I know, I've worked with him before.

His crime isn't "borrowing" the data...it's getting caught.
Insurance for what though? What if the guest steals the host's identity? What if the guest physically assaults the host? It only takes one of these to fuck things up.
> Google had a working search engine and they were building their own hardware with less than 100 employees.

But now Google has over 20,000 employees and is still hiring. It's possible that Dropbox is building on its core product and developing entirely new products to amaze us and entice dollars out of our wallets.
> Is it really possible to have a license that says "you can't challenge the validity of lawsuits that stem from patents we own/profit from"?

If you mean "challenge the validity of the patents," then it is absolutely possible, and it is a very common thing to put into a license. You don't want your licensee to insulate himself from suit by signing the license agreement, and then immediately turn around and sue for a declaratory judgment of invalidity. Having this clause puts the spectre of an infringement suit into his head, and it makes him less likely to challenge your patent's validity.
You ruined The Wire for me. I just started watching season 1.
I'm not whining, it's just in bad taste. I actually up voted your post because it was useful, and I DID buy that book this morning (just not through your affiliate link).

This isn't the place to be using undisclosed affiliate links. Had you disclosed it, I would have happily bought it through your link as it would be a legitimate referral.
As was pointed out before, it's not possible to get insurance for this - homeowner's insurance specifically disclaims damage from renters, and it's generally not legal to rent your premises like this unless you comply with all the hotel rules, so AirBnb can't take out insurance either. All they can do is self-insure, and if they start paying out, people will realize "Hey, I can get a new TV if I let my friend come and trash my old one".

And yet your analysis of this particular case is spot-on. They stand to get CRUSHED by this story.

Damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
Mule Query Language - a LINQ inspired DSL for the JVM and Web
My wild guess is they're going after the enterprise market.

Dropbox would need to expand in some big ways to provide a secure "all-cloud" filesystem that enterprises could use to replace their own data centers with.
I imagine it's possible, but there's probably a whole mountain of paperwork and cost involved in insuring property in various countries.
Really? If they reimbursed her, wouldn't that make them liable for any other future incidents?
This works fine for me in Chrome.
His crime is also having those good intentions relate to opposing the current political establishment.
Growing desert architecture using microorganisms to bind sand into sandstone
I would imagine this would be a situation that homeowners insurance is for. But I bet homeowners insurance won't cover damage caused by running your home as a hotel.

If not, then Airbnb should have some sort of insurance for these situations. Can't have all of the upside and none of the downside.

Not to mention if this happens a few more times, Airbnb's business model will be legislated away.
Yeah, that front page demo is totally laggy on my MBP in safari.
Call the White House Boring on Twitter, Get Rickrolled
And for when your shortened URLs break:

http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/ipad/#documentatio...

FTFY
Conspiracy theories anyone? Maybe someone from the hotel industry sent somebody to do this?
"Dislikes JavaScript" prefer to elaborate?
> What would you have rather AirBnB done in this situation?

Make their user whole with a big fat wad of cash that approaches the value lost in the described crime. Relocation assistance. Go completely above and beyond.

> Do you not think it's a little unreasonable that AirBnB would have to take on the role of the insurer here ?

In general? Sure. Here? Absolutely not unreasonable. This is the absolute worst case scenario. The only way you top this is burning down a house and killing someone's dog.

Airbnb did not plan for this and did not appropriately set expectations. What they did set expectations for was "an Ebay of spaces," a safe and orderly way to monetize your home. The victim here argued very persuasively that because you can't contact people before the transaction, the onus is on Airbnb to ensure that they aren't sociopaths who will destroy your home and steal your identity.
Worlds Skinniest House
Haven't read the paper, yet, but if they've really established heritability of Parkinson's risk, that is a positive result in itself. The first hit for a Parkinson's Disease twin study suggests that genetic factors play a limited role in the disease's etiology, at least in late onset:

http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/281/4/341.short

RESULTS: Of 268 twins with suspected parkinsonism and 250 presumed
unaffected twin brothers, 193 twins with PD were identified
(concordance-adjusted prevalence, 8.67/1000). In 71 MZ and 90 DZ pairs
with complete diagnoses, pairwise concordance was similar (0.129
overall, 0.155 MZ, 0.111 DZ; relative risk, 1.39; 95% confidence
interval, 0.63-3.1). In 16 pairs with diagnosis at or before age 50
years in at least 1 twin, MZ concordance was 1.0 (4 pairs), and DZ was
0.167 (relative risk, 6.0; 95% confidence interval, 1.69-21.26).

CONCLUSIONS: The similarity in concordance overall indicates that
genetic factors do not play a major role in causing typical PD. No
genetic component is evident when the disease begins after age 50
years. However, genetic factors appear to be important when disease
begins at or before age 50 years.
In general I prefer being alive to being dead. It seems extremely likely that if we're capable of reanimating people who were dead we will be able to give them youthful bodies again. People don't seem to have huge problems with voluntarily supporting expensive invalids (children) for decades if it's a free choice. By analogy with asylum seekers immigrating to the first world I expect that people with radically lower human capital in their new environment normally adjust to their new lives and are relatively happy with them (otherwise they could go home or kill themselves)

So; assuming technology sufficient for reanimation allows for rejuvenation I expect that people would very slowly adjust to their new surroundings (unless the differences between societies are larger than between Hmong hill tribesmen who had never seen a tv and 1960's America) and be generally happy with their new surroundings. Given that rejuvenation implies the possibility of eternal youth and health I assert that people could eventually totally integrate with their new society, though not all would. Still, if you're back at peak mental and physical fitness and you have more than 10 years to adapt to the culture and acquire education/human capital/skills why couldn't it work?
It's not unreasonable, it's their business model.

Airbnb is built on smoothing over the process of renting your house to a complete stranger. If they don't have a solution or even a process for the possibility that a complete stranger will trash my house, they just lost a huge part of their value proposition.

I don't think anyone is saying Airbnb is legally liable— just that they should take responsibility for their own sake.
If you lined a number of these up, how would the noise be?
That sounds a lot like Intellectual Ventures too, not sure if it's intended :)
The other big discussion indicates that the SFPD have already made an arrest. I think it's more about the bell that cannot be un-rung at this point.
Thanks for the input. I've thought about unbounce, but as you guessed, I'm a little reluctant to share the idea. The barrier to entry is fairly low. Success will depend on the domain name (which I have) and the relationships with certain third parties (which I'm developing). My idea isn't one that will require a terribly sophisticated back-end. The tech is all pretty straight forward. My thinking is that if I do it well, and affiliate with large national organizations, that it will gain momentum others won't be able to easily replicate. For that reason, I'll probably require confidentiality agreements from third parties involved until launch.

Is there some reason I should change my approach?
I remember I had difficulty contributing to Kickstart since I'm in the Netherlands.

Is there someone here that can set up a Paypal account for this gal? I'd happily donate a few $.
My experience is usually more along the lines of "Jesus christ, how can you stand so much blinky bullshit assaulting your eyes all the time?"
>and it's generally not legal to rent your premises like this unless you comply with all the hotel rules, so AirBnb can't take out insurance either.

can UberCab happen here, ie. some zealous DA would come down on AirBnB itself and/or subpoena the records of people renting out?
Citation? I got in on the $99 + $5/mo deal at Christmas, and I have not once received an upsell request. I have, however, received updated results every month since then. Now, either they're holding results back in order to keep me on the hook, or they're actually running new tests as new papers are published.

I just checked a few of my recently-updated results, and all of them had new papers cited with recent publish dates. I spot-checked a few upstream from the most recent update, and it seems that half of the updated results had papers published in the last three months, and half of those were published in June.

I don't know where you got your information, but I've been quite happy with 23andme.
I was just thinking this. Presuming most AirBnB users rent regularly, you could quite easily swipe some jewelry (stuff at the bottom of the box) before anyone notices. Even if they do notice, they might go "I wonder where they went...?" and not even figure it was theft for a long time, if ever.

Even if theft was presumed, not only would multiple users have been in and out by that time, but you'd have no way of proving who took it, let alone have enough for the police to get a warrant. It sounds like the easiest money in the world.
So basically his inspirational talk turned into "I was pulled over to the Google Plus team, but I said never mind and went back to working on developer tools"?

Kind of a let down. :(
I've worked on teams with that attitude - and a _single_ mis-hire created large problems. Sure, you can fire people, but

a) Once you hired somebody, you already spent a lot of money on them

b) It affects team morale. No matter what skills people have, team mates still form personal attachments. Seeing somebody go is hard.

c) Firing means HR and legal need to spend a lot of time to make sure this is handled properly. So, more cost.

So, I'd rather have false negatives than false positives overall.
So people know what they do is wrong and do it anyway. How does this make people "good"? It makes them knowingly evil.
Mostly a joke. I would hope that any sysadmin with experience wouldn't have a lot of reasons to "like" JavaScript. Hopefully, we could give them a few.
Maybe language shapes thought. Or maybe thought shapes language. Or maybe they both influence each other.

Actually, that last one, I think, is the most likely, since it's less simplistic than the previous two.

Now, much has been written about the Piraha, and whether or not studying their culture will revolutionize linguistics.
See this very interesting link http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge213.html
"We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken..."

http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor-statement-misu...
But we were talking about patents in general. And those are quite old:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent#History -> "Patents in the modern sense originated in 1474"

And of course, the Watt's steam engines patents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt#Patents
It Never Hurts to be a Joel Fan - more on Fog Creek Recruiting
pg often asks people to change the title if they're editorialising. I posted the Nissan Leaf campaign page with the title "We don't need Flash(TM) anymore for anything ever!" and he emailed me and said "don't editorialise in titles" and changed it to "Nissan Leaf".
Well, AirBnB certainly didn't create the idea that someone would rent out their home to a stranger, they just made it easier. My grandparents were renting out ski houses in Tahoe for a few days at a time 50 years ago.

And a few hundred dollars? The people I rented from in Paris were pulling in over $4k a month through AirBnB per property and they owned several.

If they simply charged a refundable deposit against damages like your average vacation rental, made people sign a damage contract and AirBnB secured the identity so you could prosecute someone if they destroy a place completely, a lot of these problems would go away.
Easy Install HBase/Hadoop in Pseudo Distributed Mode
He ruined 1% of it. Keep going :)
The top minds behind Lulzsec are worth more to federal authorities ALIVE - when (or if) they are caught. By alive, I mean: not in a prison cell.

Frank Abagnale Jr. comes to mind.
Most cults don't imprison people either, they are physically free to leave, they are just brainwashed not to want to.
Thanks, I had confused myself. You're right: shifting with a negative value (or far too big) gives undefined behaviour in C. (The type punning stuff is formally undefined too, a memcpy would be more portable, but gcc promises to make the widely-used union trick work.)

Regarding the second point, the posted code works fine with 1073741825U (the literal for 2^30+1). The algorithm doesn't need the float to keep full precision, because only the exponent is consulted.
Where do we draw the line on decency?

* Guest trashes the place, takes off with host's camera, iPod, laptop, jewelry - should AirBnb chip in for the cost?

* Guest scratches a hardwood floor that's pretty expensive to fix - should AirBnb chip in for the cost? Or just buy a rug to cover it? What if it's some Mongolian oak that's custom-ordered at $5000 per sq.ft.?

* Guest overflows the toilet, causing some floor damage and a call to plumber - should AirBnb pay for just the floor? Or cover plumber's visit?

* TV is not working on guest's departure, guest claims to never have touched it, owner says it worked perfectly before the guest arrived - should AirBnb just buy a new TV?
Techcrunch is just the beginning. Douse this now. Ensure everybody knows that this experience was an outlier and that Airbnb exists for its users; make the girl whole.
Face Recognition System Causes Problems for Massachusetts Drivers
How any project can get started with Backbone.js
If you are writing sequentially, then you can write more than the number of seeks.

And that is exactly what LevelDB is doing: writing a log (sequential), and when the memorychunk is full, it is writing it to disk sorted (this is also sequential).
You need to know assembly nowadays to do system administration?
Maybe station-to-station. How long does it take door-to-door? (I'm pretty sure FB isn't in downtown Palo Alto any more, so it's non-trivial).
The counterargument here being that blog post's title was so generic sounding as to potentially not bring enough attention to the importance of the issue. The HN submission's original title didn't misrepresent the contents of the blog post in any way and helped attract more attention to the issue.
This opens Airbnb up to the risk of significant insurance fraud. Insurance companies have the infrastructure to deal with it, but Airbnb doesn't - and presumably doesn't want to build it.
I feel safe knowing the Secret Service was on the case. Wouldn't want any of that published scientific knowledge falling into the hands of the public, after all.
I'm willing to go on record as saying the line is drawn at a sociopath willfully destroying someone's home and stealing their identity.

It's pretty simple. If the user can't pre-screen and validate the guest's identity before renting, the onus is on Airbnb to ensure that they will not destroy your home.

Besides, that's the only way this company can work at scale. Without trust in the system, who will use it?
Well look how SQLite does write ahead logging (assuming I understand it). Transactions can go into the log and commit, without modifying the original data. Now and then, it can "checkpoint" to move those logged transactions into the database. This way, transactions are mainly sequential writes, with a bit of maintenance now and then.

I've used a similar approach for a constant database. The transaction log goes to disk, but also stays in memory. Scanning it linearly isn't that slow. When it grows too large, the log is converted into a disk-optimized format, which is a rather quick process. This way, it can take tons of writes, service reads acceptably, while still being able to store much more data than RAM and offering fast access to on-disk data.
What AirBNB could do is help the victim sue the criminal for damages in court. Lend her the support of their legal team.

Of course, the odds that the criminal has anything left to take are low...
545 or 550 get you into / out of SEA pretty easily from major eastside hubs.
I didn't say it was a cult any more than I said it was a branch of the (or a) military.
Then every political opinion that more than 10% of the population strongly believe in should have the majority at some point, all of them. It seems that this is a simple and obvious counter-example.
You know you've been Rickrolled too many times when you recognize the tinyurl shortcut.

Sigh. :)
"Hey, I can get a new TV if I let my friend come and trash my old one".

Fraud is a problem with all insurance policies. Deductibles and investigations go a long way to curtail it.

They can also set the premium high enough to cover the costs and get to claim that it's available if the homeowner chooses, even though most won't do to the high price. It's a feature that would make them stand out among their ever growing competitors.
It shouldn't matter what Steve Yegge decides to work on. You can still start working on big, important problems if you want to.
I don't see what they stand to lose if they take the same stance as homeowner insurers do— if you file a police report, they'll pretty much take your word for it.

In fact they have an even better guarantee, since they know (ideally...) exactly who the perpetrator was. They're not giving you the money to replace your stuff, they're lending it to you until they can recover it from the criminal. If the person who you claim did the damage claims they didn't, that's a problem they have with you, not with Airbnb.
Google+ U.S. Visitors Decreasing, Spending Less Time on Site
> I don't care what the long-term implications are, I don't care about precedent, I don't care about policy, I don't care about cost.

Do you care about your company continuing to exist for more than six months?

If you ran AirBNB and paid out to this girl, you would probably be flooded with similar complaints and legal assaults.

You'd feel great about the several people you helped, but then you'd be looking for a new job.
An agressive competitor (say, a hotel chain) could do things like this every month, and kill airbnb as a business.
Ah man, child pornography, once again the edge case that screws up reasonable planning. Can't explain, for fear that if the user wasn't really guilty, you're taking a pretty serious step in accusing them of peddling child pornography. And also can't give them their data, for fear that if they were guilty, you're redistributing child pornography.

The only thing that might be nice, besides some personalized review of hard edge cases, is to allow users to export "untainted" data, if it can somehow be isolated. E.g. if one gallery was flagged, still let him export his uncontroversial email archives.
>I was wondering, why is the reaction to this incident so different than the tech community's response to all of the CraigsList incidents? (Which include theft, prostitution and even murder.)

CraigsList isn't a party in the transaction.

>Seems like as soon as you pay for a service, your expectation goes much much higher.

How it could be otherwise?
Humblebundle sells $500k in 24 hours
Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg: Anonymity Online 'Has To Go Away'
>Where do we draw the line on decency?

"If damage incurred through malice or gross negligence exceeds a reasonable proportion of the overall value of the establishment" where reasonable proportion might be defined as anything from 0.5% to 5%. The cool thing about legalese is how it can define a whole lot of undefinable things.

I am not a lawyer and never will be.
If the premiums were juicy enough, an existing insurance company could cobrand with them to offer it. They can also limit their liability with a cap on the damages covered.
I doubt it. I'm sure Airbnb new exactly what risks there were in offering this service, and had lawyers very carefully craft terms of service that protect the company from damage done by renters.

A good lawyer would argue that this is a criminal case between the renter and the home owner, not a civil case between the home owner and Airbnb.