skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On one hand, I admire the guy for tackling such a worthwhile problem and also having accomplished so much so young.

On the other hand, I wonder if this may be the case of being extremely book smart and not so streetwise.

Why not wait till you finish your PhD at the young age of 22? You will be more mature by then and know quite a bit more.

If you already had built a working prototype(doesn't even have to be MVP) and experienced some sort of positive feedback, sure drop out.

Otherwise, continue working on your ideas in your spare time. Bill, Larry and Sergey only dropped out when they had something happening.

For those already in the workplace example of patio11 is very admirable.

The interview mentions that they are just getting started and are at least 6 months from a prototype. Unless Andrew has some sort of edge from his studies, this venture doesn't have any inherent advantages.

Disclaimer: I dropped out at 19 partially because I heard the PhD guys I was writing software for complaining so much about their progress. It took me 15 years to get back into school.
I for one exclusively use GNU wget for my surfing needs! Through GNU Emacs of course.
Here's the original source for Uwe's email: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/201107...

Not sure why a third level reference is being passed around.
manufacturers must pass the Android Compatability Test Suite[1] in order to be granted rights to the android trademark and the permission to refer to their device as android[2].

the problem is CTS tests API consistency with the goal of preventing platform fragmentation for app developers. there is also a separate set of tests that specify minimum hardware requirements for each version of android, and specs such as battery life, etc.

compatibility and android brand licensing also requires a certain set of minimum apps, such as the phone dialer, calendar, contacts, music player, etc. but (and quote[3]):

> The Android upstream project defines a number of core applications, such as a phone dialer, calendar, contacts book, music player, and so on. Device implementers MAY replace these applications with alternative versions.

and further -- the gmail, chat etc. apps are proprietary Google apps, and there are various licensing reasons why they can not be enforced as part of 'compatibility'.

API compatibility is good, but UI and app compatibility is very flexible - and given such flexibility, carriers will almost always go the crawpware route.

[1] http://source.android.com/compatibility/android-cts-manual-r...

[2] http://source.android.com/compatibility/index.html

[3] http://source.android.com/compatibility/2.3/android-2.3.3-cd...
Charting the American Debt Crisis
What about people that use both Emacs and Vim?
I wouldn't argue that email was 'destroyed' by spammers, but it definitely helped reduce its relevancy from my perspective considering that I assume 75%+ of all emails I receive on my non-work address to not be worth looking at.
As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to "make it right" for the customer, I completely agree. They must absolutely take care of this RIGHT NOW. And, in a personal, non-public way. If they try to make any more public statements about what they are doing, it will just look flat out like a publicity stunt.

This is obviously the best and only possible customer service and goodwill move at this point (to me anyway). Every single day that this conversation continues to happen they are going to become less trustworthy.

I do have one adjustment. They need to make it clear that this was an obvious hole in their model and while they take care of this user, this is a unique case and immediately going forward offer insurance as an add on option.

I'm certain there must be a third party insurance partner out there who would absolutely love this business.
You can preprocess and normalize the data before you put it in the database. City/state is probably one of the easiest fields to do this with.
Startup Idols one year later: Modumetal
I'd say your last sentence applies to renting out any kind of apartment. Once you catch the occasional deadbeat tenant (not paying rent for months, damaging the floors etc.), your business case is FUBR.
I think more importantly, could this have been prevented? They should have done the proper research on the risks involved.

They should also have provided users with a quick (even webpage) on risks involved and precautions people can take and make. And provide the users more background info on the renter. It's not as simple as running a hotel.

To me this looks and feels like a story of simple thinking and bad iterating. I doubt this is the only case out there. There should have been a lot of minor issues as well. And we all know it starts small before it becomes a tornado and tears your house and community down.
For the sense of duty that keeps all of it,ON. http://xkcd.com/705/
Free Online Health Insurance Rates
This is an interesting idea, but my very naive question would be:

Even if the datastore contained only password hashes (which is good), wouldn't it be (potentially multiple) orders of magnitude easier to brute-force password attempts in the event of a large number of potential permutations to be eliminated right off the bat?

Even though bruteforcing the stripped passwords wouldn't provide a full set of information, it might be a good starting point and quickly reduce the search or guessing space.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if this is a practical concern, just one that comes to mind when thinking about your suggestion.
>While I love love love my Android phone, it's definitely a geek's phone

Some geeks, like the Linux-user who authored the following long personal analysis, prefer iPhone to Android:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811768 -- "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iOS," discussed on HN 2 days ago.

ADDED. In other words, let us not fall into the trap of rationalizing Android's lack of universal appeal by saying that the person who prefers iPhone is not geeky enough to appreciate Android.
> I have been writing Java since I was 13. I am 23 now. I have been paid for code written in C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, F#, and Python.

Woah! You're 23? I bow down to your knowledge and wisdom ;) (I started programming before you were born).

> I am quite certain that I would be vastly more productive if the language wasn't consistently getting in my way

Again, then you're doing something seriously wrong. If you're spending more than 25% of your time typing out code, you're doing something very very wrong.

If your bottleneck is the language, there's something seriously fucked up with the way you program. As a programmer you should be primarily using your brain, to solve problems. Then you take a few minutes to splurge that all out by pressing some keys on a computer.
Funny comment :)

But serious: there is nobody stopping you from cutting down a tree to build a house. I think this also applies to programming. At home I am putting hours in programing my own stuff, stuff that is done before and available in libraries. I want to re-invent the wheel just to know how it is done.

At work it's all about cost. You don't have time to re-invent the wheel.
YC does not hide the fact that HN is a tool for their needs. They have made no claims to be an unbiased news source so we can't really hold them to that standard.
1. You just can't do it reliably, because there are people (entire nations/cultures) who don't even have names fitting first/last model.

It's a can of worms, very well explained here: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

and here's an interesting edge case: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/name.html

3. <input type=date> will use localized format for editing (browsers are free to use any format/calendar widget), but always send YYYY-MM-DD to the server.
Reminder: 1.usa.gov hack day today; sites in SF, SD, NY, DC
and the geeks will enter yy/mm/dd

More precisely, I think many geeks will enter YYYY-MM-DD — http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html — having lived on two continents, I use this format whenever I can.
The fact that it takes her calling you out in front of what amounts to the entire tech community to get you to act is appalling and speaks very poorly about how you value your customers.

You've known about this for five weeks and the best you've come up with is to just stand by and wait?
Canadian cell companies are a special kind of terrible. AFAICT, they exist purely to make the american companies look good by comparison. When I was there for 5 days, the cheapest way for me to get phone/internet on my Nexus S was to stick my Vodafone Germany SIM in and use roaming. (I was just using texts, twitter, and light maps; a total of 10MB for the weekend.)
Your ISP Is Screwing You
Wow... I'm replying to this from my HTC Desire, which I've had for over a year. I have had exactly ZERO of those problems. The biggest complaint I have is that I still don't have an update for Android 2.3 yet.
Can we PLEASE stop repeating that "30-40%" return figure? Even the source article says it only applies to SOME Android phones, which isn't really that big of a surprise - some phones, like the Charge from the sounds of it, are genuinely crap. No decent source is claiming that Android phones are being returned en masse, however, in fact I have my own source on some information: Phones 4 U (high street store in the UK) tell me that 40% of their monthly contracts were for Galaxy S II's, and that the return rate on them was "exceptionally low".
"He requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access"

If true, that's really sleazy.
On point 2, they also release at least 4 new phones every month to "stay competitive (with each other)". That can't be cheap.
This Week’s Most Talked About Social Media Tools
I've been working nights and weekends on a project since December, and will be launching within the next two weeks. I know it's a cliche, but you just have to make time. It's like exercise - sometimes you have to wake up at 6am to get three miles in.
Spam is a problem with a technical solution. Determining the 'goodness' of a person seems a lot harder.
Both t-mobile and verizon offer this. And I havent checked the others. Ive never paid for text and have incoming SMS's blocked too.
there's a lot of info at http://www.quora.com/Hows-life-in-Santiago-Chile but basically: if it's imported, it's more expensive than the usa, but if it's local then it's less so. so the cost of living depends a lot on your standard of living. if you want all the luxuries you might expect in the usa or europe, you'll need to spend a similar amount. but if you're happy living in a cheap part of town, eating local fresh food, you could get by on much less.

you could rent a small apartment in a good area (providencia) for $300 a month; a ride on the metro or bus is $1 - $1.50; bread is around $2.50 a kilo... minimum wage here is about $500 a month (the quora page is a bit out of date - the dollar has lost some value...). i imagine you'd need to pay around $2,500 a month for a decent programmer - less for someone with less experience.

so bring a laptop with you!
And the irony is, that Bing's advertising is all about how instead of 'searching', Bing is for 'deciding'. Yet they're not even on the first page for 'decide'. More SEO needed :)
You're right. And if they don't fix this and find a way to deal with it in the future, they won't have any one renting their homes out. Then they'll be out of business.

It is in their best interest to fix this, call it a first-time problem, and then find a long term fix. Otherwise, their model is gone.
> In return she would sign a NDA

Would work OK if she took it, but only until it happens the next time. AirBNB cannot afford to make 'pay them to shut up' a policy.

And if she took the moral highground, it would look very bad indeed. And the money could not replace the stolen personal items, which makes her accepting "take this cash and shut up about it" less likely.
Some believe that a default benefits Tea Party politicians, because it will hurt Obama in the 2012 elections. The ideas goes that history will remember the person that was president when the US defaulted, not the politicians that were actually responsible for it. Trump said so himself on TV. Why would anyone let insane people like this run the country?
As a famous man once said: "Trust, but verify".
There is a recent article by PIA: http://truereform.piausa.org/
where they claim mostly the same.
How Making Money Online Lost Me to Gambling
Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for the comment. Also, thanks a lot for Backbone, underscore, coffee and jammit. Half of our stack is your code :)
She’s pretty tech savvy –uses Gmail, has a Tumblr, does most of her emailing on an iPad

That is all it takes to be called tech savvy these days?
I see it just got updated.
You know what AirBnB is right? Its entire business model hinges on people renting out their principal residence to someone they don't know. And you don't think this story will affect their business model? I'm just baffled.
The founders hired the contractors. I don't think it's fair to call AirBnB spammers, and it's unreasonable to assume malice, but questions around oversight and transparency are reasonable ones to ask.
Springboard presents 10 startup graduates to investors
Ummmmm, nobody is going to check out your photo. It's awesome that diet is working for you (for now) but it doesn't for the other 99% who eat like that. Just look around you...
I think being pally with carriers is also whats gotten Android where it is. Among other missteps that Nokia has done - alienating carriers with things like Ovi is one of them - as a result Nokia phones are hard to find on most networks and customers cant buy what is unavailable on carriers. Yes Apple is the shining counter example but until the rest of the world figures out how to negotiate without conceding anything things are as they are.
I don't get it - couldn't it just be the first time (s)he has commented? I originally made my account in order to post my first reply to something.
South-Pak
5 Reasons Your Startup Should Have An Internal Hackathon
Sure...but the more people you bring into the conspiracy, the more likely it is to be found out. Of course airbnb will call the cops into investigating this. If this were a setup, EJ and her fellow perpetrators made it MUCH more complicated than it needed to be. The alleged homewrecking occurred over a lengthy time period and involved not only simple burglary, but destruction of walls and bizarre behavior (such as the picture moving). Moreover, they apparently left a lengthy e-paper trail. If EJ faked all of that, she gave the cops and airbnb a lot of avenues to poke holes in the story, such as checking timestamps, IP addresses, even the linguistics in these alleged email exchanges.

What would the hotel industry have to gain? The beatdown of a website that has yet to reach mainstream consciousness...Airbnb is a long ways from being the Netflix to the hotel industry's Blockbuster Video. What do they have to lose? Hmmm...millions, maybe a billion in liability and legal fees, nevermind prison sentences for the numerous people involved in such a scheme.

Also, look at the date of the original post:
http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/06/violated-travele...

June 29. I only found out about this through HN a day ago, and that seems like when this all went viral.

Maybe I'm underestimating the hotel industry's savviness and patience here...but why would it wait for a viral campaign to serendipitously happen, as opposed to going through their considerable resources of outreach and media contacts? EJ could've easily made a sincere-in-appearance call out to a Bay Area publication...hell, even Patch...instead, she apparently left only a blogpost.

And hell, her blogpost is terrible SEO: "Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned" One thing I would expect of big-calcified-industry folks to have at least down is their SEO bulls*.

If a major hotel company were clever and innovative enough to pull this off without being exposed (which would include not only faking the fake crime emails, but hiding the emails they used to internally discuss all of this...something that no business, such as the financial giants, have yet done successfully) it's far, far more likely they would've come up with a better Internet business model by now.
Damage control. That should have been in place for things like this. And it looks like there isn't.

I wonder how their risk analyses looked like.
Billion dollar weather disasters on the rise
Appreciated :)

I'm unable to access the site at all right now. HN traffic might have brought it down.
4. Hire her and pay her well (perhaps even with equity). She is obviously an excellent writer and an empathetic persona. But more importantly, she is an expert in addressing what is clearly the weakest link in your business model's chain.

I highly doubt she wants to work for them, given what happened to her and Airbnb's response.
Indeed, entirely the point I was trying to make; namely that it's not fair to call them spammers. In response to the fact that they hired them + that it raises questions - sure, but there are two sides to the argument and that needs to be highlighted.

UPDATE: Deleted. Sheesh. I know it was a meta-point, but legitimate - downvoting for trying to actually provide balance? I think it's worth calling that out.
The Debt-Ceiling: The Surprising Way a Default Could Crush Global Economy
The debt-ceiling debacle could force regulators to "haircut" U.S. Treasury securities used as collateral, which would lead to a round of global margin calls that ignites a massive de-leveraging cycle. And that deleveraging cycle, having been ignited by the debt-ceiling debacle, could lead cause global financial markets to crash, and ultimately crush the global economy.
Code visualization tools for python
I am trying to learn python and want to work on a large project to do it, ie be a maintenance programmer for a bit.

What I have had poor luck finding is tools to help me figure out how things are laid out, preferably with graphics. Call tree graphs would be very helpful for example. Any ideas where such things may be on the web?

thanks,

marc
Stegobot botnet uses steganography to steal your password from Facebook photos
I wrote this up yesterday and didn't publish it because my Facebook friends couldn't care less.

CyanogenMod releases faster, has more stable [stable] releases, uses better, more mature, widely embraced software (mtd over bml, ext4, etc), has more (and more consistent) features. Carriers are asking the manufacturers to lock the bootloaders to keep you from flashing CyanogenMod on it and your mom having a stable phone that receives fast updates.

They prefer methods of control that cause users to want to upgrade because half their phone capacity is already being spent running Blur, Sense or some daemons that have running to support their proprietary front ends. And none of it, of course, is truly necessary. Extremely complex theming options are available, again via an open source feature developed by T-Mobile and shared with the OSS community.

And before anyone says it, my mother hated her Droid in it's later Froyo days. It was faster and better battery than Eclair but was also more prone to freezing and being low on memory. I installed CM7 stable, she gets push updates that are seamlessly handled via Rom Manager. The only thing I had to tell her was to make sure the "Backup checkbox is filled in". If need be, restoration instructions are very simple for me to give over the phone, but in ALL my days of flashing nightlies on several (of my) phones, I've never had to.

Same story with the brother's Droid Incredible with the horrendous and offensive previous versions of Sense. The sad thing is, Verizon killed the Gingerbread update. It was leaked and largely fully functional, but no phone will ever see it.

Not all Androids are created equally. [Just to be on the same page, I'm not using this as an excuse. It's a huge perception problem. End users don't know that the Thunderbolt, Nexus S, and Droid X all have different interfaces and complexities going on in the background.] I'm also not sure if I "want" Google to do anything about it, besides be more emphatic that the "Google" branding on the phone makes it better. (That branding is reserved for the clean, near-AOSP roms)]
...or just get an iPhone.
Your underlying premise seems to be that a responsible business model isn't viable. Is your argument that therefore companies should be irresponsible where there is profit to be made?

Geez, that's a leap. I thought I made myself clear: they either need to change their company completely to deal with this problem, or they will cease to exist. I'm not certain that they can completely deal with this problem - the risks are much more open-ended than with ebay and PayPal. So I think it's possible the business model cannot survive - which I thought I made clear when I said it was not sustainable.

I'm arguing that their company may cease to exist because of this problem. I don't know how you connected that to advocating for companies to be irresponsible.
In France, most carrier subsidized phones are locked to the carrier.

However they must unlock it for free after 6 months.
Indeed, I exaggerate a bit. But I think @praptak above expresses the issue admirably. It's not a question of possibility so much as one of trust, and it's a customs agent's job to be wary.
Jon - I see you responding elsewhere on the thread. Would love some more info about how you build and develop on 3 platforms simultaneously, with the appropriate native hooks on all of them. Pretty impressive.
Is Alibaba's cloud-based smartphone OS Android in disguise?
I love this. Reddit's LI5 just turned into Quora for regular people and it hasn't even been up for more than two days.

Meaningfully curated answers and discussion about current events.
By that logic, one should never upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 unless it's a free upgrade.
The are already introducing an insurance scheme, or that is what they claim. They simply will have to adapt - or it turns out their business model is not sustainable.
partly, technically, yes. Remove the "again" from the quoted bit if you prefer. It is still Round 2 of saying "we'll be there for you", and Round 1 failed once they got what they came for.
This seems likely - the "police are dumbasses" mentality, and popular image of LulzSec as clever hackers really doing it for "lulz", allow them to present stories like this -and- gain support.

Not to dismiss the possibility entirely, of course - but it is awfully consistent with their previous attempts to hide the fact that they're on a sinking ship.
My first thought was "business opportunity to offer insurance to airbnb customers".

Apparently there are already websites up to do just that.
They reported all the normal numbers too, right? (Straight revenue, earnings calculated the normal way, etc.)

I don't really see why it should be illegal for them to include some extra numbers, regardless of how meaningless they are, as long as they fully explain how they calculated them. If investors don't buy Groupon's claim that their marketing costs will go away once they win the market, they can just look at the standard numbers.

Then again, I don't know much about S-1's and how much freedom one generally has to put more than the very essential information in them.
Skinny Fiber – A Magic Bullet that Kills Two Biggest Problem in the World
I actually think he is being facetious. It may be true to say "it's not android", but as far as they end-user is concerned it _is_ android. It's got the logos, came with an android sticker on the box. For that user, when it comes to purchase or recommend another phone, will they make the same distinction or will their previous android experience influence their choice?