skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True that. Even LOLCODE can scale :) Twitter's problems are very specific to twitter - Mega throughput (~7000 Tweets per second) in realtime, sharded DBs requiring multiple connections etc.

Ruby will give you a significant time to market advantage especially if you are a startup.
Meth lab is IMO implausible (the neighbors would have complained to the police earlier; the place would have probably burned down too).

Meth users having some kind of tweakfest is highly likely; you're fortunate to not live in the kind of place where this is common. In the trendy parts of SF, there are enough tweakers that this is an obvious possibility.
Absolutely.

I'm not one of those who feels that Airbnb has to compensate her for everything or even anything.

BUT, I do think Airbnb needed to do more to inform potential users about the risks involved. No, I'm not talking about a microsite or bolding fine print on their terms of use... I'm talking about messaging along the process.

As I said in another part of this thread, Craigslist does a good job of messaging on the search results page and on the actual posts itself by displaying links on how to avoid being scammed.

On an eBay product page, there is a large buyers protection module and additional text near the product description like "Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing."

While some people aren't going to read them, they at least help set expectations.
I've often wondered this this isn't part of the "foundations" portion that is mentioned in the description of the YCombinator program. Not only a PR firm as you mentioned but a couple of training sessions in PR AND ethics before launch even happens. A core set of skills and knowledge is more than merely a founder and a great idea these days.

I count at least three YCombinator startups that have stumbled severely with PR not once but multiple times: Wakemate, Dropbox and AirBnB.
What is your biz about ? .. I already aplied
Exactly. And if she's not the homeowner where is the actual homeowner in all of this?
It seems like AirBnB is now, because of this event, creating a framework to shield the company and their users from similar mishaps (details provided in the article). Which shows they are listening.

I think they should be judged on that framework, when it is finally in place, instead of this single incident.
-Neither language, it is the algorithm that is (physically) located closest to the internet backbone. Microsecond delays from travelling a mile make a huge difference.

-Who says OOP is the best way to write a HFT algorithm?

-Being first to market doesn't mean you will gain the upper hand. If your poorly planned algorithm loses all your money, well, doesn't matter how often you can tweak it...

In terms of substance this article is all fluff.
How does this mean Chesky lied? If they moved Faith Clinton to another county where she had warrants out for her arrest, then she's still in custody. That hasn't been confirmed. Brian wrote the response on Thursday, but the article doesn't say when Faith Clinton was out of custody. The response could have been referring to a conversation Brian had with police earlier, not literally the day of writing the post (unless he specified the timing otherwise).
This whole situation doesn't feel right. AirBnB definitely screwed up, how far back that was is not clear, but EJ doesn't pass the smell test either. Caveat that we likely are still a mile short of posessing full details.
Kanban Development Oversimplified
Anonymous steals 390MB from U.S. cybersecurity contractor ManTech
"Offering a web service and ignoring the pleas of those who know a minefield when they see one is evil. Launching it anyway despite unprecedented pushback is evil. Pretending it's somehow new and unexpected, like wow, we didn't think anyone would care... is evil."

You and I have dramatically different definitions of evil. Basically you are saying that yes, launching a service that some people, in your eyes (or in someone's) will not like, is evil. Pretty narrow little circle of goodness you've left yourself with, one that likely encompasses nothing.

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

Except there exists no force.

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

That is why anonymous and pseudonymous activity will exist and thrive as it always has, because there is a market for it.

Funnily enough that also roughly describes the effect Facebook is having on the broader web, in many ways. Hundreds of millions of people prefer the safe confines of Facebook to the broader web. They have found it to be the better alternative way to do things. Apparently, there is a very strong consumer demand for that market, as well. Real names is not a hindrance to Facebooks success with that specific market, it is central to it. Facebook is not a small community.

What your argument boils down to -- is that Google is both stupid and evil for wanting to serve both markets, to have two types of services. EVIL, mind you.

It just seems an odd criticism that is far over-the-top, relative to the actual situation of offering a web service to compete for a market that is obviously huge, in demand, and dramatically underserved (choice of 1 real name social network, basically, vs in essense hundreds of thousands of anonymous networks).
"For example, wouldn't all access points send the signals at exactly the same time?"

Yes, apparently there is a timing issue.

Maybe can resolve the timing issue by having the transmitters send timing signals. Then maybe one transmitter becomes the 'central timing' source.

So, maybe discretize time into, say, time windows where each window is, say, only a millisecond or so long. Maybe get a new window each, say, 3 milliseconds. Then at the beginning of each window, each transmitter sends. To get them all to send at the same time, use the central time source with each transmitter knowing its delay from the central source. So, for a window, the central time source says "SEND", and each transmitter knows just how long to wait after receiving the "SEND" message before starting to send.

Maybe some such.

"How can they insure the interferences won't have changed between the test signals and when the real signals are sent?"

Use the test signals every few milliseconds to recalculate all the transfer functions to all the receivers. If occasionally a receiver moves a little too fast, then depend on TCP to handle the error.

Maybe.

Do ask that mostly each receiver B is logically connected to nearly the nearest transmitter A. Then for transmitters a long way away from A and, thus, also B, they should be able mostly to f'get about the signal from A to B. That should help the timing issues.

So, in some area with a lot of users where want a lot of data rate at the one frequency available in that area, put in a lot of transmitters. Then expect that each user will get associated with a transmitter of their own that is nearly the nearest transmitter to them.

The location of each transmitter is essentially fixed; if the location varies a little day by day, no problem. The location of each receiver is essentially fixed over, say, a few milliseconds; that should be okay if redo the 'test signal' handshaking each few milliseconds.

Remember that are only sending digital packet data and looking for latencies only less than a few milliseconds. So, get a little time, a millisecond here and there, to send test signals, do the handshaking to get all the transmitters sending at the same time, buffer up at each transmitter the data to send during the next time window, etc.

For the communications between the central 'smart box' and each of the transmitters, have lots of options including, say, some form of multi-drop passive optical.

To make money, a key will be to keep the costs for installation down. So, need to be cheap at the central box, the communications from that box to the transmitters, the transmitters, and the card in each receiver.

Hmm, to 'wire' a suburb, go to a homeowner and rent a few square feet in their attic! Put in the central box and, say, 100 transmitters. To this house, run, say, 10 GbE over optical. So, that would be 100 Mbps per transmitter. Put a UPS in the attic. Hope to give really good service to, say, 25, maybe, 50 houses.

Cute solution to the 'last mile'!

If an attic gets busy, then light another 10 GbE wavelength in the optical fiber to the attic and put in another 100 transmitters.

Maybe!
Agreed. There are certainly some people who can't use the JVM for some reason (client libraries being a common one), but I think most people would be best served by using JRuby. There's a lot of innovation going on there, and platforms like Torquebox[1] have some compelling benefits.

1. http://torquebox.org/
A-haha, no, I live in the place where people are too poor even to do meth. (This is hyperbole: I know specifically that there are people here doing pot (which grows fine here), cocaine (which doesn't), and pills of diverse nature. Also, last year, witnessed some adroit customer service across the street involving oxycontin, an overdose of some sort, and assurances that the oxycontin was legit. Ah, capitalism in action.)

We probably make your meth, which you tweak as you fly over us.
try grails http://www.grails.org.
Java/groovy version of ROR.
It also has a clojure plugin
Hi Tobi, I was wondering how you guys are doing multi-tenancy.
Oh, this is embarassing - I thought I was commenting on the Android/iOS article.
I'm fairly happy. But I've also been using the betas for several months now.

For my day to day (Rails and iOS programming) there isn't a huge difference in the two.

Obviously Lion has more UI changes than SL. There are some nice little things - lots more polish.
I don't really use the Mission Control stuff on Lion nor the LaunchPad (gives it iOS app groups/paradigm).

One nice thing about Lion is restarting the machine. You can have it pin the apps on different desktops on startup and 'resume' where you left off. This also happens with Terminal - open a new tab and you're in the same dir as the previous tab.

Some disk access/app launching seems faster in Lion. Other than that, there's not a lot of stuff that feels different. I suppose you'll have to upgrade at some point just to not be 'left behind'.

But overall, imo, very similar experience.
Technology + Politics = Facepalm
Maybe Elizabeth May suffers from the Dunning–Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Does this journal article break the record for number of authors?
I am not sure that this website is the place for affiliate-tag encumbered lists of Amazon products that have not been updated since 2006.
The best article on Kanban I've found so far. If you know other good resources on the topic please tell me.
If people are unable to read the TOS, which states Airbnb does no background checks not sure how it's Airbnb's fault when something goes amiss. They do not vet either the hosts or the renters. Either party could be throwing major shade and basically if you're a person devoid of common sense and good judgment the services provided by Airbnb probably aren't for you. Personally, I could not use either because my HOA expressly forbids short term leases for the reasons driven home by this incident.
More detailed information about the case is here:

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2011/890.html
What would you advise then for app developers - how easy is it to operate a closed beta on Android or iPhone, for example?
I can't help thinking that if my apartment had been trashed and I was receiving threatening/blackmail comments ("take your blog down or limit access") I might be more than a little upset...
When the story of the hour is a YC grad tripping over their feet in PR and the shit hitting the mainstream fan, then yes, I find it multiply pertinent.

There comes a time in a successful startup where this kind of thing can make or break. AirBnB looks perilously close to the latter. Which sucks, but it behooves us to watch.
Cheap Nuclear Fusion Reactor in 4 Years
Hmm,

In my understanding of it, in outline this was handled the way conventional PR firms have handled corporate problems - fix it in private and ignore it/deny it in public. Especially, offering aid contingent on silence (which MJ's kind of indicates was done).

It seems like "The Ole' PR stonewall" just isn't a good model for startups. Instead, a better model is do the right thing, from the start, publicly and privately (obviously, you need to articulate clearly what you're doing so you still corporate communications). Google, at its best, has benefited from this approach.
All that talk of "doubling the size of its customer service staff" sounds good, but it doesn't mention numbers. Did they go from 1 to 2? 100 to 200?

When they say they will be "creating a "Trust and Safety" department, they again don't mention actual numbers.

What are the figures?
Wow! Here today, gone tomorrow. Good call Kyro!
If you consider outputs for equations other than Cartesian graphs, then Quines should get you what you want.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Quines
That may be what caused us to get to the current situation, but the status quo being how it is has led to other problems in the meantime. Sexism is a very real problem in CS, both on academia and the professional side (sorry not really sure how else to distinguish, academics are also professionals obviously).
From John Carmack's tweet ( http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/973754624472637... ):

I semi-joke that after conquering space, I want to work on nuclear fusion. I hadn’t seen this before: generalfusion.com
Today's journalists overuse this word. It's only relevant when speaking of the "alleged" suspect or the suspect's "alleged" actions when the person's participation or their actions are not yet proven. Once proven, the word alleged or allegedly is inappropriate, and it's also inappropriate to describe a crime or characteristics of a crime as it wrongly casts doubt on the victim.

See this for a clear explanation of how this term is often used in error:

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/alleged.html
Twitter started looking at Scala before the Summize acquisition. Also, to my knowledge, Scala was not being used at Summize.
Les RPG un bref historique sur  les origines et ce qu il est devenu
I quite liked these guidelines for documenting code:

1. explain the motivation
2. give at least one example of usage
3. explain implementation choices

(Not saying this is the best way - there are lots of different guidelines for documenting code that I like!)
I wouldn't be surprised if EJ doesn't have a PR person nudging her along. Her statements about being "violated" and "unsafe" means she sounds like she wants AirBnB to do the impossible and repair her, not her belongings. She sounds like she's inconsolable and nothing can be done to make it right, but boy, does blabbing about how upset she is in every possible media outlet make it feel a little better!

I think she's looking for more than just replacement, but a sizable settlement. I won't be surprised if we see legal papers in the next week.
I really wish there was a site where these observations were all collected, common wisdom metrics. It would give us all hard goals to meet or exceed as we planned our companies. Maybe a wiki where people who wanted to share like Fred could add to the collected knowledge.
To an extent, you are at increasing risk of ruining your life, if you lose your job and you are unable to make money in any other reasonable way, such as through a web-site, or through consulting.

And if you don't have savings you can be completely screwed basically.

A lot of people in this country have gone from: high-paying job, lots of credit card debt, living lavishly, to poorer paying job, living frugally, low debt / savings.

If you don't owe anyone money, and have a low burn-rate, and can live frugally, this gives you substantially more options in terms of taking a lower-paying job and making it work, or striking out on a start-up which may limp along for a couple of years.
Your app looks great. Nice and simple interface, multi-play and fast paced action. Good job!
I think warning stickers are just an odd artifact of an adversarial legal system designed to achieve safer products and services. People don't 'need' 40 safety stickers on a ladder or a 'warning: hot' label on a cup of coffee. In litigating personal injury suits, plaintiff's lawyers simply use e.g. lack of a sticker as grounds for a claim. The defendant says fine and adds another sticker. It's a messy system that sometimes results in pointless measures, but overall it has resulted in goods and services being much safer than they otherwise would be. And if the coffee reference refers to the McDonald's case, I think that one is totally different: they handed that lady a 180+ deg cup of liquid - that was negligent of them.
I recently read a fiction book, "The Panic of '89" by Paul Erdman, which discusses a hypothetical terrorist plot to create an international run on US-priced financial instruments and institutions. Interesting hypotheticals abound.

It also mentions the Gramm-Rudman act, which I had not heard of prior to reading the book. It was an 'Emergency Deficit Reduction Act' from 1985.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Rudman%E2%80%93Ho...
Thank you for the clarification (and especially that link; it's an amazing clear and concise description of the issue).
I've never really felt that I learned much of anything by asking questions of potential employers. It either got a rehearsed B.S. line, or I made them uncomfortable and they were less likely to then hire me.

I do, however, come away with very clear opinions of employers, but this is based entirely upon their behavior during the interview. Not focusing on my answers (one guy brought a laptop to the interview and browsed his email while I was talking), asking keyword trivia, or generally coming across as a prick means I definitely don't want to work there.
That's just the stereotype. I worked for a small PR firm, on a portfolio of small tech companies, where I felt proud of how we operated.

The good firms realize that the most effective way to combat crisis like these is to over-deliver on your obligations to anyone hurt, and to lead the charge in providing information to the public.

I've never worked PR for tobacco or big oil companies, but I imagine that's where the stereotype comes from. It's pretty easy to do good, ethical PR for a bunch of nerds programming computers.
Can't be a UFO. Hasn't been spotted flying.
My 0.02:

Buy the woman a new home, what ever she wants, furnish it as she wants and pay her a largish sum of money to compensate for those things that cannot be replaced.

Get insurance to cover the renters in future cases of theft or damage, and there will be future events.

Get a company that conducts background checks on applicants that wish to rent through their service. Anonymize the result and get the renter's approval before the transaction can proceed.
It doesn't sound too much different than QE1 & QE2 -- where the Federal Reserve created a trillion dollars out of thin air and used it to buy US debt and mortgage securities.

I'm not a lawyer, but don't the courts usually sort out conflicting laws? It seems that's the case -- congress demanded the executive branch spend money -- and congress has now decided the executive branch can't spend money. Why doesn't Obama take it to the courts?
At this point, it did occur to me that she is angling for a much bigger settlement than just her furnishings. And if so, I imagine it's not a PR firm coaching her, but rather a lawyer.
Still the original computer girl...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
It's happened, on couchsurfing rather than airbnb, but it's happened:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205794/Rape-horror-...

Doesn't seem to have stopped the growth of couchsurfing.
I agree, something about this whole thing just seems off.

She said was "growing a very thick skin" because of accusations that she was part of a plot by the hotel industry to discredit Airbnb

Has Airbnb been looking into this possibility?

EJ blogged, And I was - but no longer am - scared of Airbnb’s reaction, the pressure and the veiled threat I have received from them since I initially blogged this story (http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare...).

But that doesn't fit with PG's description or the profile of the founders (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822721).

Nor does it fit with EJ's original account: I would be remiss if I didn’t pause here to emphasize that the customer service team at airbnb.com has been wonderful, giving this crime their full attention (http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...).

And there are these green "jcunningham" types that keep popping up on HN (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=jcunningham) trying to demonize Airbnb.
I'm in Florida, where I hear Humana has great plans as well.
That's very cynical -- can't she just be articulate and feeling violated?
Shift gears on Toyota's bike with your mind alone
Why should I as a hypothetical employer be particularly keen on hiring someone who has taken extended leaves of medical absence? There is a strong financial risk and no reward for doing so.
There is such a thing as deserved attention and it doesn't come by itself to the rest of us. PR is not smoke and mirror, it is plain work. Still, it's the part of 'launching' that few have worked out how to do just because they don't take the time to do it.

If web development could be reduced to 'just sit down and write a program and put it on the web' then PR could be reduced to 'just find out what journalists and bloggers have readers that would be interested in your stuff and ask them to write about it'.

It is as simple as that and as with programming, it only takes a couple of years to get a good grasp of.

(addition in response to your addition: so make sure I get to know when you post something you'd like me to upvote. See, then you're doing PR work. If you think attention will come by itself, then you could sit in front of your TV and expect your software write itself as well)
"Getting insurance" isn't just a small expense to tack on. Depending on the cost - and after this incident and the public nature of the product, it won't be cheap - it may prohibitively harm the company.

Who knows.
Can Microsoft Make You ‘Bing’?
Problems like having to patch and build your own Java runtime because (if you are lucky and there is a working one) because Sun made it illegal to distribute modified Java distributions that had not passed the test-kit, and everyone should know that Sun/Oracle do not give access to the test-kit to anyone that doesn't pay them a ton of $$$.
Why is it up to YC? They only have a small chunk of Airbnb, there are many other larger shareholders. The most motivated investors to have a smooth fix here would be the ones that just sank in over $100M at a sky-high $1.3B valuation.
Normally I don't pay much attention to Scoble, but he's making a lot of sense here.
Thank you for this. I am continually amazed by the technical detail and the wonderfully human aspect to your writing. Your contributions make HN a much, much better community. The HN family, indeed.
Ask HN: Beer tonight in San Francisco area?
I'm a developer out here for an interview, staying ~2 miles south of fisherman's wharf. Anyone in the area want to meet for a beer tonight?
Mint Data Shows Where Our Gas Money Goes
I don't think your comparison with reading is a good one. A cache copy persists and can be used, reused or passed on if desired whilst a visual appearance in your brain can not ... until we get really good at reading brain waves!
The image grabbed from Flickr was of the gorilla costume. The salary graphs were from http://www.focus.com/fyi/silicon-valley-salaries/