skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In all my years working in health care as an ER and trauma nurse, I learned one thing: Do the right thing for the patient.

If the doctor is doing it wrong... do the right thing for the patient.

If the hospital is doing it wrong... do the right thing for the patient.

If a police officer is doing the wrong thing... do the right thing for the patient.

The ultimate policy is... Do the right thing for the patient.

AirBnb... Do the right thing.

Stop the spin. Don't tell the world what your security features are. Don't tell the Financial Times you are shocked.

Pull out all the stops and make this right, or this will be the end of you.

I've talked countless times with people about your service, and one of the things that comes up all the time is wondering what will happen, "When the first AirBnB murder happens".

It's not a question of "If it happens" it's a matter of "what are you doing to do _when it happens".

People get murdered in Hotels. People get murdered in rental cabins. I've been an ER nurse for years. Murders happen all the time. Someone is doing to die while using AirBnb. You're lucky this was just a robbery.

Learn from this.

Your policy needs to be: Do the right thing for the person.

Build a crisis response swat team that can get on a plane within the hour, fly to a destination and evaluate a crisis situation like this. For the love of gods you need to have 24 hour customer service. Give those people the authority and the responsibility to do the right thing then and there, on the spot.

Stop writing Tech Crunch posts.

Don't worry about telling us that you made it right. That's not important. Don't worry about the press. If you do the right thing, the press takes care of itself. Don't post in this comment thread. Ask your customer, "What do you need me to do to make this right?" "Is there anything at all that I can do to help?" Assign two or three people to the job of fixing this.

Do the right thing. Don't stop until this is right. Do it now.
Susan Wojcicki: Pillars of Innovation
There is a fascinating documentary - Botany of Desire http://video.pbs.org/video/1283872815/. The video shows that even fruits are grown in ways so as to make them taste better, and therefore more consumption.
How so? I don't think Airbnb is liable for any damages to her property.
Holistic Spa Treatments A Viral Fashion of Modern Century
But this what you explained is exactly the problem with Android. With iPhone, carriers, phone manufacturers and such are not allowed to install their crapware/bloatware on the phone. With Android, they can do whatever they want, and the only sane option for an end user is to root the phone.
Why It’s Safe to Pretend that Google is the Only Search Engine
This is true, and very shortsighted of me.
A tip for you: I work in support, and weasel words are the substance of our being. You tell the customer "Do A, B, and C, and that should get you up and running". They don't really hear the 'should', but it needs to be there because computers are fickle and anything can go wrong. In short, I guess I'm saying I'm a bit more practised at recognising weasel words for what they are - and in this situation, it's not really an "anything bad is possible from here"; the worst has happened. This is the point in support where you start giving the client the concrete steps that will be taken to solve their issue.

"again telling her" is the weasel words I'm referring to here. You've already told her this, and she claims that after saying this, all help evaporated - it's the cornerstone of her complaint, and you're announcing Round 2 of the same thing. This is a PR disaster for your company: it is not the time to engage in weasel words. Whether or not you plan on following through, you should sound like you absolutely will. Of course, you should follow through - if something like this happened in my company, the CEO would be absolutely roasting us for not following through and taking measures into his own hands, both because he's an honourable bloke, and because it's a giant PR issue.

jcunningham above points out other weaselly things. Again, whether or not you're giving her concrete messages about what kind of help you're offering her, you should also be announcing these publicly. "We are reimbursing costs of -foo-", "We are organising temporary accommodation of her own", "We are doing this and this to help the police", "We've assigned John Doe to manage her case and will be in contact this often". Be concrete, not hand-wavy.

The guy you're replying to gave five ideas for supporting her, and the response is a wishy-washy "we'll be there for her" - which is the kind of empty promise you hear drunk 20-year-olds tell each other before they sleep with each other's best friends. I don't necessarily think all the things the GP said are right, but using weasel words in this situation is a path to PR failure in my opinion.

EDIT: the reason why I wrote all the above is that I read your comment and felt angry because it sounded like another fobbing off, more promises that are not going to be upheld (as the first round was allegedly not). I do not think I'm going to be unusual in this.
No offense, but you need to stop with the Politically correct BS statements and just go ahead and do the right thing.If figuring out what the right thing is , is too hard, then maybe you guys have a much larger problem.
Like it or not, this may well turn out to be an inflection point for your entire business..its up to you to make it a turn for the better , not worse.
For that kind of problems you could accept any answer that reduces to the expected one, after accepting it you could then show its reduction (going from 6/9 -> 2/3) to enforce the lesson.

That way it would only show a sad face if the fraction entered is plain wrong.
Between the quality of this editor and the rate at which new (relevant) releases are coming out, I can no longer justify using Textmate.
The Gingerbread Keyboard is definitely available from the Android Market here: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.moo.android.inputm....

As a Galaxy S user, I definitely agree that the default Samsung Keyboard is pretty much useless to type on, but doesn't the SII also come with Swype like the S?
Well the complaint is somewhat moot. The programming he is discussing is professional, where it is results and business driven. If every time a company wanted to develop a product that uses a database, MVC framework, web server, etc, the programmers had to write some of those components from scratch, it would be a nightmare. It would take much longer than necessary and probably be riddled with security holes. This is not a sound practice for business.

If people are looking for the creativity in developing some of these things, they can do it in their free time. That is the beauty of programming, all you need to do it is a computer, keyboard, and monitor. There is nothing stopping someone from going home and writing a database over a weekend.
I doubt it is a solved problem or AirBNB would be using it.

Imagine what the negotiations would be like. They need insurance for:
-An open-ended number of people worldwide (constantly changing)
-Any sort of property from shitty apartments all the way to fancy houses (no estimate of value possible, requires appraisers)
-Damage/theft caused by people with unverified identities (all they have is CC, stolen?)
-Any and all damage (including accidental death of people staying there?), including stolen identities and fire damage (to other properties as well?)
-No security requirements for properties (fire alarms? carbon monoxide detectors? checking up on the place?)

I have a feeling that would cost more than 10%.
In fairness, this is stretching the meaning of `binary blobs' a little, right?

I may be misreading, but the issue is that some of the elisp sources of CEDET were generated from bison input files automatically at some point -- but they're still elisp sources; a user can still modify them if needed, and if an asteroid hits the house of whoever did the original conversion, development can still continue that way.

That doesn't mean that _technically_ we wouldn't be a lot better off if the bison sources made it into the next emacs release, for completeness and ease of future development -- but I'm not sure I see the GPL violation here.
And, is it true that you requested that she either take her blog entry down or limit access to it?

I don't want to jump to conclusions, but reading both sides of the story you guys don't come over as entirely truthful in this sordid affair.
This assertion (among many other gems) was originally stated in the Mythical Man Month, by Fred Brooks, published in 1975.
I am thinking exactly the same. I am primarily a vim user and even though Sublime Text 2 looks good, I am not sure how it compares. I might go and look for some feature comparisons.
To be fair we've only heard their side of the story on that. This is a very distressed individual and maybe their account is only one side of the story.
searched the Marketplace, but the Android stock keyboard isn't on there.

It's called "Keyboard from Android 2.3" and it's being compiled and delivered by someone else than Google. Works fine though and lets you download dictionaries as you need them.

Here, have a market-link: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.moo.android.inputm...
http://sunshineny.com/

Copy+paste business model. My impression is that it's an extremely volatile model and market.

> A lot of us are freelance developers and working from home is not very effective,

Is it? How many people have you spoken to about this? Is enough of a problem that people are really willing to pay for it? Is it a big enough problem that freelancers are wanting to throw money at you to provide them this service? Isn't one competitive advantage of being a freelancer that your overhead is low (and thus a lower fee than agencies)?
Hazards of being open to manufacturers. It is a clear trade off, one we seen before with Windows. OEMs and carriers love this access, but more often than not they just fuck a good phone up. Of course, there are clear benefits, such as the ability to sell a phone for $150 outright with $35 a month unlimited data plans. It is a compromise, just like the iPhone model has compromise. It just happens the iPhone's compromises work better for those who have tons of attention to detail and a few extra dollars to burn. But at the end of the day, the Windows model works, even if it is at the expense of some frustrated customers and the scorn of the power users. Most users won't care, smart users will either avoid Android or go for an Android without such BS, and the world will still turn.

Reminds me of a movie quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/quotes?qt0294371
The mini-map is the first thing I disable. Fun idea but distracting in practice IMHO.
for the tl,dr crowd:

It was noticed a couple parsers included in the source tarball are generated from grammar files that are not. This means they are distributing the compiled version without the corresponding sources (although the parsers are human readable) and that is unacceptable. The situation is analogous to distributing a compiled program without its source or, say, a merged-minified version of a JavaScript library without its original corresponding files.

The solution will be applied retroactively to source tarballs and previous tarballs that did not distribute these source files will be removed.

It's like the Emacs team just noticed the have been driving their car with a broken headlight for the past couple miles.

In the meantime, I seriously doubt many other teams would be so principled as that. Kudos for them.
> What Airbnb does need to do is find a sustainable method of dealing with incidents like this in the future.

What Airbnb needs to do is find a method of preventing this type of incident in the future. They have to work out how to change the economics of the relationship so that the host isn't bearing all the risk and the visitor has some disincentives that keep their behaviour within acceptable bounds. At the moment their current business model is toast, because a large proportion of their potential hosts will start hearing about this kind of incident (search Google News for 'airbnb' and see how far the story has got so far) and think that the risk of it happening to them just isn't worth it, whatever kind of support they put in place to deal with the consequences.
>>No, the iPhone and iPad and all of Apple's products have been built upon ideas and inventions created by others outside of Apple.

They also incorporated steel -- an invention centuries (millennia?) old...

Point was, they did something new with the iPhone. The same thing with the iPad, when they invented a way to make tablets which people would pay money to use.

>>I had to respond when someone claims these products were "totally new under the sun".

You really didn't get the point...?
Groupon's accounting practices under SEC scrutiny
Going forward, I think that Airbnb has to do a much better job at communicating this. Potentially a message as part of the flow just to reiterate this point.
4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank did the trick for me, but a lot of people find it too detailed/boring.

There's an ebook at custdev.com that's meant to cover the same content in a more accessible way, but I don't think it's a good starting place since it assumes you have some knowledge about the concepts. Just googling around and digging into "customer development" is probably a safe starting point, and then grab Steve's book if it resonates w/ the way you think.
Thank you for pointing this out.

The title was changed from "AirBnB: Crimes committed against a host" to "Violated: A traveler's lost faith, a difficult lesson learned" As you noted, this matches the title of the story on the blog.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."
It strikes me that each time there's link on HN or reddit pointing to something RMS said/wrote, there's someone saying this. Always something along the line of "Usually he is overreacting/a dangerous fanatic, but this time I like what he said and how he said it".

Once and for all let's admit that RMS is actually a quite reasonable guy and that when his reactions are "over the top" it is the exception and not the rule. Let's also realize that his "over the top" reactions are due to his role in the FSF and the GNU project. If he is not the one being obsessed by the definition of "free software" versus "open source" then who will be? It's a matter of drawing too hard in one direction so the "forces" compensate and the general direction is as close as possible to what is reasonable.
Wow.

AirBnb is /done/.
Not disagreeing with you, but just wanted to point out: this is why there are such things as trained spokespeople and customer service reps. I know these jobs aren't looked upon with much respect by those of us in the engineering and development community who would rather say things directly to the customer...but here, an innocent attempt to cut through the redtape and get to the bottom of things may have been misinterpreted by the customer to look much worse than it was...

I can totally see how the co-founder had the best of intentions and in his mind, was thinking "She'll be grateful to see me cutting through the layers of BS and giving her a straightforward invitation to meetup". Unfortunately, she saw the terse message and interpreted it in the worst light possible...and then reposted it to the world, with her interpretation.

When my car got wrecked by someone else's poor driving, I dreaded making the call to my insurance company to deal with it, even though all I had to do was report it to get my reimbursement.

The very first thing the customer rep said to me after I said why I was calling was, "Are you OK? How are you doing?" I was totally fine, and though this is most likely a script that they teach to anyone qualified to answer the phones...even if I were angry, it'd be difficult for me to rip on the customer rep (at that particular point).

In the airbnb case, if the co-founder had taken the five seconds to go through the motions of expressing the empathy that he felt, at the very least, this disgruntled customer couldn't claim on her blog that he had expressed no empathy for her situation and just wanted to get to deal making...which was probably quite the opposite of how he felt.

But yeah...it is a trivial bit in the big picture. It's a shame it could taint the discussion between her and airbnb regardless.
> Obviously AirBnB has confirmed the damage to her house. As have the police.

Sorry, but I've seen no proof of either and I doubt that you have. Even if AirBnB has seen the damage as reported by the host and the SFPD have a person in custody, what we have is the alleged destruction of property and alleged identity theft. Alleged, not proven.

> You know nothing about her.

Exactly, but what I do know is that there's a person who has made use of her blog three times this year: 1/22, 6/29 and 7/28. Two of those posts relate to AirBnB, drawing attention to the intense emotional trauma she's currently suffering and inattention and callousness that AirBnB is displaying towards her situation. Prior to that, we have an entry from 8/3/10. Nothing much to go by in order to assess who this person was prior to the AirBnB incident. Except we do have a blogroll link for "My year of getting published" dated one month ago. How odd.

Another thing that we have, and I'm drawing my own conclusions here, is the perfect recipe to get noticed in a sea-full of nerds: single vulnerable white female, lives alone in SF, violated by the actions of an unknown person or persons and who is crying out for help, appealing to the crowd who'll most like empathize with her: nerdy single guys who'd jump at the chance to put on their cape and save the day. It's too perfect of a recipe to ignore.

So what I'm saying is that she should get herself a lawyer, today, and have them handle her case and public relations going forward, because we all know that she's going to sue AirBnB and due to the amount of buzz she's been generating on the Twitters, my guess is that many a TV producer has been tasked with tracking her down for an interview. We'll see how that plays out.

If it took Chesky a whole month to address these issues of hers and implement changes in the organization to address them and those issues were real and valid, then shame on him, but something tells me that they may have expected this problem to go away.

I'm not trying to draw and links between this woman's complaint and those of the Groupon cafe owner, but it sees to me that, as always, people are engaging in activities whose potential consequences they know nothing about and in response they take to the web to generate outrage in support of their situation, but in those cases that I'm aware of, the stories start to unravel once they undergo any scrutiny beyond reading a blog post or two.

And if I'm still able to gauge public opinion correctly amongst the normals, most are going assume that you get what you deserve for handing the keys to your apartment to a total stranger for a whole week. It's something that is simply not done in the real world.
Infographic: The Most Expensive Keywords in Google AdWords - The Atlantic
The only explanation I can come up with is that they're in at the deep end in a way they weren't expecting. It's happened to more grizzled operators than any of us – look at the family Murdoch right now – but as long as they give the impression of either not caring, or of flailing wildly, then confidence in their marketplace is going to keep dropping.

Marketplaces live on liquidity, and lack of confidence kills liquidity, so it's existential crisis time.
Wait wait, you mean Apple does innovate?
Danger, Will Robinson.
This is Verizon's longstanding tradition of crippling perfectly good devices for the sake of restricting users to using VZW's media services. I had a Verizon phone that was perfectly capable of Bluetooth and USB transfers which Verizon's OS had deliberately disabled because heaven forbid someone may transfer content to the phone that wasn't purchased from the Verizon mothership.

It's plain to see what took so long for Verizon to carry iPhone was Apple waited for Verizon to finally accept the condition that VZW can not bastardize and cripple the OS. To bad Google didn't enforce the same policy.
RMS may not be directly responsible for this mishap, but it is his project so he is ultimately responsible for it. He's clearly taking responsibility so good on him I guess.
The author specifically stated that his mom was.
I can already use a shared jQuery or other library, I don't need Page Speed for that, though if Google can discover that the library I have is actually exactly the same as one it hosts on it's own CDN, then of course it can rewrite my page to make use of the CDN one.

My javascript on the other hand is (likely) not useful to someone else's site, and therefore that example isn't a very effective use.

I just remembered that Page Speed also has an image optimizer, which could be very effective here.

The search example obviously has some flaws, because yes, caching is likely to be effective at least for a few seconds (think Twitter search). What happens in the case of protected resources where a session cookie or XSRF token make the page uncacheable?
> maybe I'm just naive about how messed up the real world is.

Try coming into Enterprise software :)
Tools for Real-Time Data Analysts
I've seen a 30 day password requirement with numeric digits circumvented simply by month + year. jun2001, jul2001, etc.