skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is this their fault? Your comments make no sense, because someone did not understand the inherent risks of using a service does not make it AirBnB's fault.

"How could this happen? Why did this happen? Despite it not being in New York... I LOVED my apartment nonetheless. It was my own private retreat, my sunny, bright, cozy loft that I would melt into on those rare occasions when I wasn't traveling. The space was simply decorated, minimalist enough to reflect a home life that was all mine, a place that was peaceful, and safe.

How could this happen? She decided to rent out her place - its not like AirBnB put it up on the market.

Thats the difference between a rental property and your home. If its something precious, it should not be entrusted to others.
To be fair, startups aren't any different. They do things they shouldn't do just as often. I honestly wish I could share some stories, but I can't. Suffice it to say, don't assume a startup is better just because it's backed by YC or some other fund.
Continuous Financing
Import Charts/Shapes from Excel to Grid Controls & Enhanced Printing
The long awaited version of Aspose.Cells for .NET 6.0.1 has been released. It includes several enhancements regarding Exception Handling and Chart’s Formatting modules. The performance is enhanced regarding Printing Worksheets and Worksheet-to-Image features. The grid controls (GridDesktop and GridWeb) now, support to load Excel files having charts and shapes. The desktop control allows you to export MS Excel 2007 files with more than 256 columns.
Absolutely and let's assume they don't. If the facts of the case are as stated, then Airbnb acted unethically in my opinion. Since their lack of ethics cannot be punished in a court of law, the author claims her right to smear the company publicly. That's all this post is meant to do and I think that's just.
Prediction: She will sue Airbnb. And win.
It might not be AirBnB who did this to her apartment, but it's definitly in AirBnB's commerical interest to kill the meme that "If you're happy to accept your place being trashed, then use AirBnB. If you don't want that to happen, don't use AirBnB"
Tough car insurance enforcement platform launched
Yes, you're certainly right that TaskRabbit is tackling the same problem in a different way. It was similar enough to remind me and achieved the same ends though.

I guess my point is that ideas really are unimportant, because even what appears to be the same idea on the surface can be totally different from a business perspective. All in the execution.
This should not be [dead] (and please don't downvote me because you disagree with him; on the other hand, perhaps someone should tell him):

"brianchesky 3 minutes ago [dead]

Brian Chesky (Airbnb CEO) here. My heart goes out to our host. My co-founder has contacted her multiple times, as recently as last night, and we have again offered to help her in any way that she needs. We will continue to make ourselves available to her to do whatever she asks of us in this time of need. We have encouraged her to reach us so that we can help her through this, and we are standing by."
Not sure why YC should be getting blamed here? I give them a lot of credit as it appears that hacker news broke this story. If there was anything sinister going on I think they could have just deleted the story.

Airbnb is another matter. Asking the blogger to remove the post sounds like such a bone-headed move that I have trouble believing it is true.

Airbnb has lost all credibility in my book.
I think people are taking issue solely with this particular case. Perhaps in this particular instance one could make a weak argument that Steve Jobs didn't lie. That's fine. But the headline as a generality is obviously true. Everybody lies, including Steve Jobs.

A recent lie is the whole "TweetDeck are having a nightmare dealing with Android fragmentation" comment for example. Or going further back, the little Woz "business deal" of old or even the G5 benchmark controversy.

We all lie. No need to defend Jobs at all.
For Google fans
As a self-taught English reader (recently listener and rarely speaker) I should note that understanding sound and rhythm of English poetry taught me so much.

I was able to semi-decently communicate technical things before I come to Shakespeare's "To be or not to be". It completely changed my view on English language. Before that I was reading English prose as a deformed version of Deutsch (language I learned at school). What worked for technical prose stopped working for verses. I had to dig deeper.

From my experience I think that someone who barely speaks foreign language cannot have an adequate opinion on that language verses.

And I think that GP is right about cheating.
1. Get a new place for EJ. Furnish it fully. Pay for everything.

They should definitely be doing better, but I think this particular advice is wrong. They can't buy a new house for everyone whose home gets vandalized. And any kind of "policy" would make this incident seem more likely to happen in the future, so no one would use the service. Irrational, but people aren't good at thinking about small odds (about 10 million to one, if Airbnb's numbers are right). Not to mention the rampant fraud that will happen when people destroy their own places to get money from Airbnb.
Whole Foods Celebrates, Monetizes Ramadan
Nope, this is something that everyone who rents out their place - on any service - must understand and come to terms with. Never gamble with more than you can afford to lose.
Gamification: How Competition Is Reinventing Business, Marketing & Everyday Life
> Lots of security standards require passwords to be changed every so often.

Which is almost as idiotic as storing a complete password history in plaintext, because it pretty much guarantees that passwords either (as you note) follow a simple pattern, or if that is made impossible, are written down in an easily accessible place.
Thanks to Bjorn for organising this, and to Peter/Bas for their interesting presentations. Looking forward to the next sessions! Oh, and a tip for anyone coming to the next session: arrive early so you get a chance to talk to people.....
It was a bit tacky that YC removed AirBnB's name from the title of the original story.
Researchers can predict gender based on Tweets
Researchers have put together an algorithm that can predict the gender of a tweeter based solely on the 140 characters they choose to tweet. Aside from stalking, there is market value in knowing gender. Looks like it should be possible to defeat the algorithm.
I get exactly what you're saying, but what about point 6? What do you do when this happens again? And I see absolutely no reason why it won't happen again.

Let me put it another way: I think this problem kills the business model. What they currently do is not sustainable. They can't swoop in and replace everything for every person who is a victim of a scheme like this with their current model. If that becomes their strategy, then they're really an insurance agency. It's not unprecedented, ebay and PayPal spend most of their resources doing fraud detection. But it will completely change what AirBNB is.

So, yeah, in this case, I think what you suggest is probably best. But they have to change their company to address this problem, even if what comes out the other side is not the company as it is today.
This is ridiculously short sighted. It is AirBnB's commercial interest -- if nothing else -- to make this issue go away. Thinking like this is what keeps PR people in business.
Yelling fire in a theater? Absolutes are of no use in this kind of discussion... better to go with "more" and "enough".
Georgia Apartments
Apartments For Rent in Georgia - Apartment-Advisor.com, an apartment finder service, makes your Georgia rental search easy
ClojureScript just compiles to JavaScript it does not care for cross-browser issues --> it does not add a browser independed standard library but ClojureScript works closly together with the Google Closure library (witch is used for a lot google products) and this library includes browser independend librarys.
you are right - I have it the wrong way around. still you need to do the calculations and find somewhere to store all of those hashes

but I can't think of any other way of making 'similar to' work
> because someone did not understand the inherent risks of using a service does not make it AirBnB's fault.

If these are the risks then almost no one should be an AirBnB landlord. YC companies aren't supposed to profit by tricking people into making financial mistakes.

AirBnB needs to patch their business model (perhaps adding a $x insurance fee for both renter and buyer to compensate future victims), and then add prevention features:

- verify that landlords actually own what they are putting up for rent (postcard + pin?)

- verify that renters are who they say they are (billing info + billing phone verification for first time customers?)
Argument from authority. Nice try.
It isn't disappointing, it is predictable. AirBnB has skirted the rules from day one, when they launched by spamming Craiglist. AirBnB brokers a service that is illegal in many jurisdictions, and they go out of their way to mask the serious risks their users (both renters and owners) are taking. And when the obvious happens, their response is self-serving.
RMS doesn't strike me as a very cheerful person either, at least in email conversations, so it doesn't surprise me you're getting upvoted for this remark.

That said, it doesn't surprise me either that as a person known for sticking to his principles he'd take this situation very serious.

Also, I think I see what you mean by irony but calling it that would be more appropriate if Stallman himself would have made that particular commit or even if he would have been overseeing the project actively at the time the commit was made. But neither is the case: Chong Yidong committed it according to [1], and when the commit in question was made 2009-09-28 Stefan and Yidong had already taken over the maintainer role [2].

So really, not all too ironic from where I sit... hope this isn't spoiling a good joke :-)

[1] http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/emacs/trunk/revision/97804

[2] http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/08/interview-with-chong-yi...
I know there's a lot of Irish folk here, and I'm sure meetups have happened in Dublin before, but would anyone be interested in getting something going (again)? Belfast is always an idea as well.
Asymco's "Rawr chart" is very interesting: http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/18/the-rawr-chart/

It shows market share and profit per device, giving total profit as the area in the chart. You can clearly see how Apple makes the most profit per device ($280) but has a relatively small market share whereas Nokia only makes $10 per device but has a huge market share.
It's an interesting idea, albeit maybe a crowded field (in 2011). Startups that come to mind that do that same thing include: Desks Near Me (http://desksnear.me/) and Kodesk (http://kodesk.com/).
> I think your view is common enough, and you had the courage to say it out loud.

Thanks, I guess.

Philosophical: seems to me that the tone of HN has shifted. Not in the standard way, it's not less intelligent per se. Rather, there is a greater proportion of big-co employees, academics, and college students. People without profit/loss responsibility, who don't deal directly with customers, who've never been through a media firestorm like what AirBnB is experiencing now.

While it's usually hard to pinpoint any particular change, it's safe to say the tenor of this thread would be very different if this was still Startup News.

YC alums need not say AirBnB has handled this well (i concur that the mere existence of this thread shows that they made objective errors, though in my opinion not normative ones). But they would not be so quick to trash the startup.
Anyone from Lisbon ?
Yes it can be confusing to a novice how Perl sigils work. Hence Larry Wall conceded this as an issue and so one of the reasons he went for invariant sigils in Perl6.

However there is logic in the madness. Perhaps Larry Wall/linguistic logic but none the less it does work! The best explanation i've see is the comment by "Matt S Trout" on devolving-sigils blog post (http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/26/devolving-sigils/).

Below is the key sentence from mst comment:

Actually, perl sigils don’t denote variable type
– they denote conjugation
– $ is ‘the’, @ is ‘these’, % is ‘map of’ or so
– variable type is denoted via [] or {}.
'Official' website: http://www.sysadminday.com/

It may have had something to do with the creation of Sysadmin Day, as it predates the first (2000) edition. From whois:

Creation Date: 09-may-2000
Improving Web Surfing with Acrylic DNS Proxy
瘦脸针的价格是多少
You might want to take a look too at coworking.info, which runs a directory[1] and allows people to add spaces or register their interest for one.

I've never used it so I can't testify to how easy it is to use, or whether it could be improved in any way.

[1] http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/29303049/Directory
I did customer development around a similar idea in London and discarded it. End users (desk seekers) want it, but it's a marketplace and the value proposition for desk sellers is more troubling.

You get useful postings in 1 of 2 ways:

* You keep the data fresh yourself
* Office managers keep their own data fresh

In the former case, you need to be making money to continue spending the time beyond its novelty period. In the latter, the office managers need to be getting good value-for-time or some related benefit which is enabled via their site activity.

Of the potential problem office managers care about, you've got:

1. Dealflow & advertising
2. Showings & deal closing
3. Dealing with current tenants

#1 is adequately handled by craigslist/gumtree. I thought it would be a pain point, but the office managers disagree.

#2 is a huge pain, but you can't resolve it without manpower that would require a much more profitable business model than exists here.

#3 is the most promising, and is a legitimate pain point, which is where I decided the most plausible business lay. If you can handle the billing for office managers, then they'll put their desk spaces on your site to be saved the problem of hustling tenants for payments. There are liability issues here, but it's probably a similar model to AirBnb.
Hello Balu, what happened with scripting is that it was merged into the unstable branch! So now it is part of Redis. The first stable version featuring scripting will be 2.6.
All startups do things they shouldn't do; they are in the business of experimentation, iterations and improvements. However the important thing is that most of the startups realize their mistakes, acknowledge them, learn from them and move on. In this case, the guy is insistent upon being a nutcase.
Increasing Performance by Caching Paths on HTML5 Canvas
Nomatime.com as well (mostly in Europe)
Some strange things to note about this case:

- she rants about airbnb, but not so much about the thieves.. in those Ebay scam cases the victim usually directs his/her anger and takes action toward the scammer, not towards ebay. She reports very little about the thieves and the progress of the police investigation.

- Are these psychotic rockstar thieves so expert at hiding their identity? its a very 'proffesional' job then.. which can raise more points to the hotel lobby conspiracy theory.

- I thought that you use airbnb to rent extra properties; not your home with your documents, jewels, money, personal diary and what not in there.
OK. So, on my site, a search request takes 200ms.

Search from me directly (assuming DNS is cached and no lookup is required):

You to Me: TCP setup, request send, 200ms, response send, TCP teardown

If you get that same thing through Google, assuming they're doing this on the fly like would be required (same DNS assumption):

You to Google: TCP setup, request send +
Google to Me: TCP setup, request send, 200ms, response send, TCP teardown
Google to You: response send + TCP teardown

There's no way this could be faster. They'd have to precache everything, or cache static and take the hit for dynamic, in which case, how useful is this really?

edit: As the children of this comment suggest, and after some more consideration, there is certainly some value, and some speed to be gained--certainly with static content of all varieties.
Trojan asteroid seen in Earth's orbit by Wise telescope
I aimed for 10-20/sec in dev on my macbook, but I have been doing everything on appengine recently, and haven't been getting consistant results on the live environment. It varies a lot in profiling - and I am thinking of slowing it down further since I have long-lived sessions on by default (set to a year) so password checks are rare

I made the session tokens crazy long though, and have one for the user session and another for auth, and a sanity check within the auth token that will add any IP that attempts to forge the session token added to the ddos blacklist after 3 attempts. The auth token generation is slow as well - which is something that is often overlooked in webapps. I got a bit carried away in implementing all of it - but it was fun
Considering the interests of the shareholders means that, if the shareholders want Airbnb to buy her a new house, they should buy her a new house. "Interests" doesn't always mean "more money."
That doesn't really make any sense. If it was a hoax, AirBnB would have come out and said that in their TC post. Instead they came out and said effectively 'yes, this happened, we're fixing it'. The victim is now disagreeing with AirBnB's assertion that they are fixing it.

Obviously AirBnB has confirmed the damage to her house. As have the police. So you are basically arguing that she trashed her own house and committed the crime of filing a false police report in an all out effort to crush AirBnB. Occam's Razor tells me the odds of that being the true angle here are slim.

As for your comments 'someone we know nothing about' and 'talented writer with no writing history'. You know nothing about her. You have never seen her writing before. But why should you know a random stranger? And most writers are not bloggers. The internet is not the universe. I've won a bunch of awards for my fiction writing, yet you probably can not find more than my HN posts online from me. Believe it or not, some things exist out there that Google can't find.
I think using it or not depends on people. If I am to become a freelancer, no, I won't use it, not when I'm just starting up. Maybe later, when am an experienced freelancer, It would make me feel like if I had a startup or something.
> Text cannot be selected and dragged into the URL bar

You can right click the text and select "Go to web address". It's quicker in my opinion.
Beanstalk Guides
ok, so without using wank words, can you describe exactly what you've done to help her in the last five weeks? What you plan on doing in the future doesn't count
Eenadu ePaper
Eenadu epaper: Read today eenadu telugu newspaper in online easily. Eenadu newspapers is Largest circulation in Hyderabad,Rajamundry, Karimnagar, Guntur, Adilabad, Vishakapatnam, Vijayawada, Tirupati, Anantapur, Suryapet, Nellur, Srikakulam, Kurnool, Warangal, Kadapa, Mahaboobnagar, and Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune.
Isn't it considered to be a signal which might help personalizing instead of influencing the entire general search criteria?
The follow-up article at http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/whatever-happened-to-... addresses this comment, essentially saying "my job doesn't suck, but what about everyone else?"
This reasoning I agree with 100%, and it directly addresses what pg said in his essay.
It's not just the issue of accurate information. Hotels have a security infrastructure in place and the rooms are checked regularly.

And they have much much less to lose if you trash the room. Hotel rooms aren't filled with a person's prized possesions.
True, but the gap is much, much larger between JDK Date/Time classes and Joda vs that between Joda and JSR-310.
If you leave it unoccupied for a week and it gets trashed you can probably claim from your insurance company. If you rent it out to a randomer online, the insurance company probably won't cover any damages.
See the great "No Signal" montage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZVcRccCx0
Perhaps Instant doesn't support every browser? (In particular, it requires Javascript...)
When building apps on Node.js, we use the same Backbone models and collections on both client and server. The difference is the Backbone.sync implementation:

* On client Backbone.sync does AJAX calls

* On server Backbone.sync talks to database

In some cases we also do Backbone.sync via socket.io

Note: Backbone.sync is the method all I/O operations on Backbone.js models and collections call. You can either use the default AJAX-based implementation that Backbone.js ships with, or override it with your own.
If the old password is "forgotten" and can't be retrieved by the user who made it up, then it doesn't seem like that big a risk.
What not to do in Android UI's (or how to do it better)
And just think, all these android users would have to get iTunes accounts.

I don't think you will find a international standards-body which will standardize anything which requires an iTunes account. I may be wrong, but I sure as hell hope not.
Vinh's response is really true of any collaborative creative environment, from the arts to engineering. To evaluate or re-design outside of the context of the original project (it's requirements, business goals, stakeholders, etc.) can only yield an irrelevant conclusion.
Who has the blog post with over 200 videos and articles about entrepreneurship?
Who has the blog post with a collection of over 200 videos and articles about entrepreneurship?
I've been searching google and hackernews for the past 2 weeks for this post. It was linked here a long time ago. What I can remember is that there were over 200 links and they were split on different categories (general advice/legal/raising rounds/tech etc). Thanks!
Here's to working 4 days in a row, sleeping behind server racks, bathing in bathroom sinks, and all those bags of potato chips and caffeinated soft drinks!
I have a simple question for AirBnB.

Did one of the founders ask this woman to take down
or limit access to her blog post?

When you cut through everything else I think the answer to that would be telling. If the answer is no, then it points to dishonesty on the part of EJ, if the answer is yes, then much has been learnt about how AirBnB dealt with this situation.
Please tell me you're not serious. What you're asking for goes well beyond taking responsibility and far into the realm of treatment given to pop stars.

Yeah, Airbnb could probably afford doing this out of PR considerations this once. But not for every single problematic hosting. And I do not believe the extent and support and compensation for crime victims should depend on their ability / luck in drumming up a social media / startup community shitstorm.

What Airbnb does need to do is find a sustainable method of dealing with incidents like this in the future.
The text rendering updates (it looks perfect and pixel-for-pixel the same as TextMate now) and the fullscreen mode in Lion make this an awesome upgrade for me. I can't believe how fast Jon kicks out his builds because they have huge new features every few days. It's literally a night-and-day development difference compared to TextMate and is one of many reasons why I made the switch to ST a few months ago.