skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My feeling is that if she is generally vulnerable, and genuinely private, it doesn't make a lot of sense to rent out your apartment with your belongings inside it and then leave for days. I could never rent out to AirBnB, because I'm also fairly private and I don't like thinking of people being in a position to touch my things.

I'm not saying that she invited what happened, but that the risks were very clear, and only she could decide how to weight those risks. If she's the private person she's painting herself as being, I really don't understand why she used AirBnB in the first place.

I don't think she's a liar, and what happened to her was terrible, but I can't help but feel that this has gone over some threshold of "I want to get this sorted out between two amicable parties who are seeking a resolution" to using the positive press for her to see how much can be extracted from AirBnB.
My advice. Don't do contract freelance work. It is risky in that if you're not a good business person, you will string yourself along under the illusion of paying the bills. But you'll slowly be moving backward as projects take longer than you expect, you undercharge, etc..

You really may need to uproot your family. I know that the tech economy is booming in several major urban areas. I'm up in Toronto, and have headhunters calling me like crazy. There is a dearth of programming talent. I know several people in San Francisco and they say that the valley has the same problem.

The situation is so desperate that I know several companies that would entertain hiring somebody in Michigan to do work for them remotely. It might take a trip up to Toronto to meet with some folks, but that's just a several hour drive.
I didn't take it so much as a "skill" as a, "my lack of employment is not because I can't pass fuzz tests"
> and the facts available to you

OK, time for a quiz. Someone who has made an investment is going to take the side that is

a. good for investment returns, or

b. bad for investment returns.

This isn't rocket science. And if basic observations of human nature are "unnecessarily agressive", then so be it.
Their... woe?
Some outrage is short-lived, other outrage is not. Why do you think forming via the internet rather than via personal contact bears on this?
Is anybody looking into the big hotels and any possibility they are connected here?
I'm done with the ideological purity tests of environmentalism; it's time for pragmatic engineering to take the helm. If you ask me, this guy should be the head of the new environmentalist movement: http://fora.tv/2011/06/27/Peter_Kareiva_Conservation_in_the_...
no frameworks or engines. I wrote my own primitive 'word game engine' for another app (a cheat app for Hanging With Friends) and decided to reuse it to make my own game.

All the design was done by me as well... it's not the sexiest, but I think it is good enough for now. I used Opacity - http://likethought.com/opacity/ - to create all the graphical assets, which was a real time-saver.
Using Masked Identifiers to Reference ActiveRecord Models
unfortunately that's out of my control since app.net is a 3rd party service I'm using to host my landing page.
Any hotel firms connection to AirBnB fiasco?
Just saying, it would be really interesting if they facilitated a house thrashing that got very public very quick.
There are different modes (timed, endless, battle). "1 Minute" mode is free, and you can unlock the other modes with in-app purchases.
They didn't attempt to "cover it up." That's just media spin. They attempted to resolve the matter silently, which, honestly, is a perfectly reasonable request.

But clearly the issue is beyond reconciliation as the woman is requesting something Airbnb can't fix (and technically didn't cause). Perhaps exposing the situation to the world might help her find the "problem" and thus the solution.
Don't underestimate the power of 'cold-calling.' While it's terrifying for people not used it to it, you'd be surprised how friendly people are when contacted out of the blue for a legitimate question. Find some developers on open source projects you like, see where they work (either location-wise or company-wise) and send them an e-mail saying "Hey, I wanted to thank you for writing/contributing to the X software package. I've noticed you live in / work at Y; I am currently seeking a development job in Python or C and would be interested in moving there/working there. Do you happen to know of any opportunities available? If not, again accept my thanks for X software." Don't attach a resume, if the person is responsive the first thing they will do is ask for one.

The key here is to actually want to move to that area, work with that company (whether it's 10 or 10,000), or work in that field. People detect insincerity relatively easily, don't contact people unless you actually want to work with them as opposed to anybody. On the flip side, never let yourself be discouraged by thinking "nah, I'm not good enough for them." The worse thing that happens is the person doesn't respond; this may feel bad but you end up with a thicker skin and learn how to do it better the next time.

Also: do not spam. Again with the insincerity thing above: this technique only works if you want to work with them instead of anybody, and I promise you they can pick up on that.
Video: F-16 Fighter Jet Crashes On Runway
Yes! Thank you. Exactly (was later than I thought).

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

"Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones..."
I think it's been discussed several times already. In many cases, you can't get rental insurance for services like airbnb.
There’s a long rant about this by one of the characters in Ivanhoe.

http://books.google.com/books?id=zzQJAAAAQAAJ&dq=ivanhoe...

"Truly," said Wamba, without stirring from the spot, "I have consulted my legs upon this matter, and they are altogether of opinion, that to carry my gay garments through these sloughs, would be an act of unfriendship to my sovereign person and royal wardrobe; wherefore, Gurth, I advise thee to call off Fangs, and leave the herd to their destiny, which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort."

"The swine turned Normans to my comfort!" quoth Gurth; "expound that to me, Wamba, for my brain is too dull, and my mind too vexed, to read riddles."

"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba.

"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."

"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"

"Pork," answered the swine-herd.

"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"

"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."

"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."

"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon. God's blessing on our master Cedric, he hath done the work of a man in standing in the gap; but Reginald Front-de-Boeuf is coming down to this country in person, and we shall soon see how little Cedric's trouble will avail him.—Here, here," he exclaimed again, raising his voice, "So ho! so ho! well done, Fangs! thou hast them all before thee now, and bring'st them on bravely, lad."
+1. It solves the problem of having to sign up for facebook or some other service
Don't be fooled by Vanity Metrics
great comments.

we're planning to follow up with a post that has the technical details of the Etag stuff (sorry about 'light on detail', it was a press piece after all).

you're right in that it's been a known method that has been written before (samy had it in evercookie which we site in the paper and a few others have blogged about it). what seemed new (at least to me) was actually encountering it 'in the wild' on a top50 site like hulu. if this type of thing been written about before, definitely let me know so we can cite it.

fwiw, yes noscript would block the javascript that kissmetrics uses to respawn using html5/etags, however there's still the swf that regenerates using flash cookies. also josh highlights ways the you could do this with javascript disabled using CSS (kissmetrics actually also uses hidden values in CSS as well if you look at the src)

either way, blocking javascript/flash would render hulu, and other 'rich media' services like it, largely useless unfortunately.

RE: foxnews/polldaddy. actually they were naming their database 'evercookie' some time ago although they've seemed to have changed that (now it's just called pd_poll__). you can see the script they use here which they use html5 and swf databases: http://pastebin.com/0ieZ2i22 (prettyfied from http://static.polldaddy.com/p/4424060.js )

it's likely that polldaddy/foxnews are using these techniques so to ensure that a given computer only gets to vote 'once'. however, i think there are probably much better ways to do this.

hope that helps. i'll link a blogpost down here somewhere (which means that i actually have to start blogging finally ;)
>accusations that she was part of a plot by the hotel industry to discredit Airbnb

or like market analysts would say : tin hat market shows signs of improvement

> Has Airbnb been looking into this possibility?

ie. whether they seriously looked into the idea of blaming their own screwdup on a "plot by <> industry" ? do you seriously think that bad about them?
You can, for example, find tons of studies about so-called 'attention window' or 'working memory span', but they didn't even mention that those characteristics could be dramatically reduced under stress or any other state of overload.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=working+memory+under+str...

Yes, you could call his Interpretation of dreams a hack, but he developed and extended a more general theory of mental dynamics, which, ironically, was known for aeons in the East.

Which, by the way, is all scientifically unsubstantiated bullshit until you show me some properly documented and controlled experiments demonstrating otherwise.
I actually thought that Airbnb were having their PayPal moment--where PayPal actually realized it was not in the business of payments, but in the business of anti-fraud and risk management. Then I realized this is probably a bizarre one-off case, and the responsibility lies on the renter, not on Airbnb. Although they could supplement renters with insurance, I don't think this is their 'big test'.

What happens next time? Airbnb will either settle with the person quietly (as they've done successfully in the past), or the renter will sue the person who damaged or stole their property. That's all there is to it.
Partly true. cow is beef, pig is pork, sheep is mutton (but rarely if ever eaten), but lamb is always lamb, never mutton, otherwise "mutton dressed as lamb" would make no sense.

Venison is still venison, (who's ever heard of buying "dear meat"?) Chicken was always chicken as a meat, "poultry" refers to the livestock as a collective noun.

I beg you to go to your local butcher (or butcher's counter in your supermarket if you don't have a butcher) and order a kilo of "swine flesh" and see how widespread that usage is!

Whoever wrote the section of the wikipedia article you quoted clearly doesn't speak English as a native language, or was having a joke at your expense.
Bloggy, the lightweight blogging system without MySQL
I recently interviewed a Ruby programmer, who was unable to write a Hello World in C, despite the fact he studied C and C++ in university.
She does not seem to have accepted Airbnb's financial compensations... So I don't think that's the issue.

I'm almost absolutely certain Airbnb would have asked the question "How can we make this right?" Anyone would ask that question.

What I suspect is that the girl was not able to answer that question when Airbnb asked it and thus doesn't know what she needs to fix this situation. So naturally she needs an outlet and so she blogged about it.
the coin doesn't hit the economy but it enables further borrowing which does.

surprised at all the 'no this is actually quote ok' arguments. you can't print value out of thin air. you only print volume which taxes the holders of existing USD.
Is there any evidence this is actually true? Currently, IronPython and IronRuby do not have great performance on the CLR despite dynamic support.
I think it might have something to do with the articles about how saavy the founders are, how some who passed on it regretted doing so, etc., than purely their involvement as investors. This story does not mesh well with that message.
That is already the case: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/3044794...

It is difficult to ignore the thought this is the perfect censorship mechanism with built in plausible deniability.

Should I continue to entertain it, the next logical thought is that this is how "official news agency" propaganda organs will be established to address your 'anticipated' complaint of "then how am I supposed to know what to click on?"
So apparently Airbnb did offer a new home and financial compensation like that... What else can they do?
First, let me say I am a huge fan of PG and YC, but...

I have to second (third, fourth, etc) the several opinions already expressed here. This is about the customer's response: http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare...

If she's a liar, let us know. Thanks.

Trying to silence a customer? - this is getting me to doubt how trustworthy HN is - who else is being silenced??? If PG supports guys like the AirBNB execs then what does that say about him?

Again, if the customer is the liar,just please let us know. OK? Thanks.
I don't believe this is Airbnb's fault, BUT since it has happened and gotten big they better get their act together and fix it somehow.

Renting out short term is a good business IF someone is around the entire time to watch over guests. There should really be a host present the entire time for the guests. Otherwise there is an increased risk of bad things to happen.

Potential hosts needs to be aware of all the risks (even if small chance) and be prepared to accept it if they're not vigilant.

It's much easier than running a business, but it could really bite you on the ass if you don't run it as a real business.
Airbnb should be very cautious right now and re-think their home-rental policies carefully or it could come back to bite them in the ass. Airbnb cannot put EJ up in a 5 star hotel, get her free stuff and get her house redecorated because that would result in a lot of copycats and opportunists who would rent their houses on Airbnb and then themselves trash it and blame Airbnb for it. Because there won't be any other proof other than the victim's word, and the Internet would again rally against Airbnb, they will have to repeat the same pattern again and put the victim in 5 star hotels etc etc., and before they know it they're hemorrhaging more money than they make and fighting to keep their startup alive. So don't rush to conclusions about the hard-heartedness or ham-fistedness of the Airbnb founders. This has happened to them for the first time and they're bewildered that they're getting so much hate from strangers and I believe they must be helping poor EJ in some way or the other.
It doesn't look like AirBnB tried to settle this case in any meaningful way. Chesky's posts on HN and in other sources are full of weasel bs like "we're doing everything possible", "we're working on it".

If, instead, they'd put out a bullet point list of what they've done to mitigate the disaster, public would have been tamed and considered the incident over.

Internet hate machine started working against airbnb, they should better begin doing something meaningful before they might very well become a non-company.
Here is an old presentation from a year ago.

http://www.slideshare.net/nkallen/q-con-3770885

Now, at the time they were doing peak 2000 tweet/s. The fan-out was 1.2M deliveries a second... So if we go with the current 600:1 ratio at 7000/s, that's about 4.2M/s. I actually know it's much higher now since I work there but other things to consider is we have a large data warehouse, search, API, pipelines to external parties for the firehose, logging at terabytes an hour, in-house metric collection doing 3M writes/s, etc.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/59830692/Cassandra-at-Twitter

It add's up very fast.
It may or may not be a fundamental problem with Airbnb that the situation happened in the first place, but their response to it has frankly revealed deeply fundamental problems in the moral character of the company. As a long time admirer of Airbnb it's hard for me to admit this, but it's true. It's not a matter of good PR or bad PR, it's a matter of simple moral decency.
Looked into why the story changed because it may be a sign that she is now being coached.
This was at EAA airventure in Oshkosh, wi. It's an annual fly in with more than 10,000 airplanes flying in.

Same place Burt Rutan is being honoured for his work. Recent HN thread on one of his planes: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/07/burt-rutans-boomerang-s...
Any recommendations for a probability course materials comparable in quality to Strang's?
Yes, but the same is true for Bitcoin and other topics.

It's human nature. People vent their anger by upvoting and commenting on this stuff. Give 'em a break, it's just two or three additional entries in the Top 30.
Why VC returns suck in four words
Mobile photo-sharing app
Where are all these obstacles you refer to? You're immediately jumping to the dogmatic conclusion that if there are less women in computer science right now, it must be because someone else is setting up obstacles to hold them back. But we don't actually know this to be the case.

It may instead be down to a lack of interest. It may be because the best and brightest programmers are all hackers who have been obsessed with computers since age 12; that's the kind of person you need to be, it seems, to keep up in this field, and that's a very male profile. Are we to cry "discrimination!" if it turns out that 12 year old girls are genetically predispositioned to prefer socializing with friends, over intrinsically loner activities like tinkering with computers?

It may even be a matter of aptitude. It's well known that although males and females, as groups, have roughly the same mean IQ scores, males have a greater variance in their scores. This means that if you look at the extremes of low or high intelligence, you'll find more males than females in either direction.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

Programming is not only an intellectually demanding career, but your potential as a programmer seems to correlate with your intelligence more tightly than in most other occupations. And if you take the group of people with an IQ higher than x, with x >> 100 (or lower than x, with x << 100, for that matter), you'll generally end up with more males than females. This may be taboo to speak of, but we shouldn't let dogmatic value judgments cloud a discussion about empirical truth.

So what am I saying? I'm not claiming to know why there are more males than females in computer science. If there is some sort of hidden institutional misogyny keeping women from succeeding in this field, then of course that's a bad thing and should be fought. But we can't just leap to the conclusion that anti-female sexism must be the cause of this discrepancy when there are other possible explanations we haven't ruled out.

We must treat everyone as equals, in the sense that we give everyone the same opportunities regardless of gender. But that doesn't mean we're necessarily doing something wrong if, at the end of the day, we don't have an even gender distribution.
The article was fairly devoid of the necessary details. One of the main ones being: how many events are we talking about? 10 events/sec? 100/sec? 10_000/sec ? And what is the size of these events? How many event emitters are connecting to the Redis server?

With the details, it would be a much more interesting post.
This was indeed my interpretation. I read this (second clause) as a linear chronology:

"Old english smeortan; related to Old High German smerzan, Latin mordere to bite, Greek smerdnos terrible"

Thank you for the correction.
Ask HN: Has anyone taken money from family and had it totally backfire?
We seem to always hear about success stories, especially where financing is concerned. I especially wonder about taking money from family and friends, a typical way to jumpstart a company. I know it's a sensitive subject, but I'd love to hear about the other side and what to watch out for.
The power of advertising at work! At the Perl Lightning Talks on Thursday at OSCON there were dueling advertisements for Grant Street Group and Booking.com. Grant Street Group does remote work out of Pittsburgh and Booking.com is based out of Amsterdam (but they will pay for relocation).

Granted these are both Perl-oriented jobs, but if you really are 'at the end of your rope' then I would make an attempt.

[I say the power of advertising at work because they both successfully pimped their employers]
This is disingenous to the extreme.

Where on these sites does it warn you that all your browsing will be recorded without your permission? So they can sell your personal data?

I'm all for having advertising on google mail but this is totally different and any attempt to defend this position is treading on extremely thin ice.

This has nothing to do with entitlement and everything to do with immoral business practices. This is worse than being one of those 'we'll wipe off your debt' companies. It's a modern day scam that legislators have not caught up with, pure and simple.

Kissmterics are utter scum.
Lovely, I like word games, I've left you a review.

Why did you decide to go portrait instead of landscape?

What was time spent on design (not the graphics, but planning the interactions and the rules of the game) versus time spent on implementation?

edit: Also, do you have any go-to books that you use for game/app development?
List of books before you can visit HN: I'm on board with that idea. HN study group. Let's make it happen.

No books on entrepreneurship allowed. :|
I'm actually looking to move back to Toronto, where's the best place to look for these jobs? Most of the stuff that I hear about are corporate Java and/or C#/.NET type jobs.