skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could that be because the experimental ones have already moved into Ruby/Python years ago? The Rails world certainly has a lot of ex-java programmers.
There only seem to be two possibilities, here. Either Airbnb is lying or EJ is lying.

I don't really agree with this. It's too binary when the real world is more analog. Two entities (people, companies, whatever) can have truthfully held beliefs, that appear contradictory from an outside perspective. Perspective and point of view matter, and lots of things are shades of gray, not black-and-white.

I think it's entirely possible that EJ and AirBnB are both being (mostly) truthful, relative to their perspective.
Less, usually, depending on the platform. IBM mostly uses DB2 to sell its fancier hardware.

But occasionally you gotta spend money to make money.
Call it whatever you like. I call it "interfering", without positive or negative connotation. When you interfere in a situation, with positive intentions, there are all kinds of things you have to consider:

1. The expectations of everyone involved. Does EJ have an expectation of privacy? Could she be expecting to keep her personal life, as much as possible, separate from the whole flap on the internet? Does AirBnB have an expectation of handling this without PG's assistance? Does PG have an expectation of not being dragged into a situation in which he could have involved himself if he so wished? (I think it's pretty clear at this point what my opinion of jacques' actions here is.)

2. All of the possible outcomes, and the likelihood of each one. Is it possible that tracking down someone's contact information -- using information gleaned from their blog -- will emotionally harm them in a situation that has already made them feel extremely vulnerable? Is it possible that there are currently unknown legal complications now, and that PG cannot become involved? Is it possible that attempting to involve him could make the situation even more complicated?

3. Whether or not the interference is even needed. Look, EJ has managed to get her story into the print edition of the Financial Times. It's spreading like wildfire online. I think it's very clear that she can handle herself. And, if AirBnB can't handle themselves, with all the money they recently raised and all of the resources they have at their disposal (monetary and advisory and otherwise), then they have no business being in business.

I've interfered in others' lives and situations on numerous occasions. I've seen the results of my actions go sideways. I've put more and more effort into understanding and considering a situation before leaping in. I've, finally, more recently, resolved to quit screwing around in other people's situations as much as possible.

Perhaps putting his internet detective skills to work only to let the woman know that her identity was at risk would have been a smart thing to do. Passing her contact information on to a third party -- regardless of who that party is or why -- without either her permission or that third party's permission, was a rookie mistake. It might have been well-meaning, but it was still a mistake.

The guy getting unfairly downvoted up above is exactly right: we should all be shutting the hell up and getting some fucking work done. (Myself included.)
I kind of hate the Zynga revenue model more than anything. It doesn't seem like an ethical way to make money, and has absolutely nothing to do with any of the things that spurred me to get interested in game development in the first place.
All of Alain de Botton's books are a complete delight to read.
Facebook launches a Bug Bounty program
The turtle wins the race.

Startup blogs and gurus often give the sense of false urgency. But if you keep your burn rate low and stay on course, you'll probably get there just as well. Worrying about competitors beating you to market seems silly to me in most cases. Definitely in mine anyway.

You have to find time to sip your coffee, play with your kids, read HN, and maybe even pull the guitar off the stand once in a while. Did I mention the wife in there? Life is not something you'll starting living after you make it rich.
I wrote an alternative, MacTerm (http://macterm.net). I think it has some advantages over the iTerms or Apple's Terminal.
There was a TV executive a few years ago who stated that getting up to go to the bathroom during a commercial is theft.

It's the commercials that make non-premium TV possible in its current free-ish structure. It seems that broadcasters should run their business with the assumption that a certain number of people are going to go the the bathroom and miss some commercials. And web companies should run their businesses and still be able to provide their free-ish services if some people decide to opt out of tracking.

What if everyone went to the bathroom all the time and missed all the commercials? That doesn't seem to happen.
2009 Software as a Service Valuation & Capital Efficiency Benchmarking Study
> It's okay to connect her to Paul because...

Both EJ and Paul stand to gain from resolving this situation quickly and orderly.

And both could lose considerably if this is allowed to drag on much longer and/or hits the mainstream press.
The combination of the ambiguous word "is" and the mixed capitalization styles in the title is interesting. When I first read the title, I saw it as:

ReadingHackerNews.is_going_to_launch? # false

And wondered who the Reading Hacker News team was, and why they decided to scrap their launch. After a couple seconds I saw the forest for the trees and realized it said:

ReadingHackerNews !== Launching # true

Now, what's interesting is the interplay between:

- capitalization conventions in human language
- capitalization conventions in programming languages
- the author's specification of [Reading Hacker News]
in the article, that indicates that he is referring
to it as an object in itself
- the requirement for him to use brackets instead of
merely case to indicate this, because he needed to
capitalize "Reading", and "Hacker News" to be proper
english anyway.
- the way the brackets were left of in the submission
title
- the fact that programmers often use things like
CamelCase in english to communicate concepts
analogous to those found in programming, like
object-ness.
- the existence of a lot of third party HN tools, such
that one of them could conceivably be called "Reading
Hacker News"

There is a lot of stuff going on in this title for the brain to process. I wouldn't have noticed it at all except that my brain glitched and produced the wrong answer for a second or so.

It's crazy to think about (1) how many difficult background questions our minds silently get right, and (2) how many of these questions our minds silently get wrong.
It doesn't make sense for the same reasons that a 'Hacker news' for religion doesn't. People attracted in such topics are usually too invested emotionally in their personal beliefs to entertain the idea they might be wrong.
Prepping people for yet another war? This is why I think it's in USA's best long term interest to default now. They'll just never learn otherwise. They won't quit warring and wasting money as long as the economy is "not so bad". I'm afraid a major economic collapse needs to happen in order to start prioritizing the budget in a more sane way. USA needs some tough love and go cold turkey, in order to save itself.
Or, just do what you want and don't try to fit some label for which thousands of people have thousands of different definitions.
Power is held by people who are believed to hold power. If people -think- TechCrunch is powerful, it is. That's all it takes.
Counterpoint, and like I said on the original post:
Within a few days of programming Android I had published a few apps. You just need the App-titude, and the attitude as they say. I'm on day 60 and have done 65 Android apps thus far. Perhaps my live-coding video that was up last week would help? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8bu8nNUZSY&feature=chann...
First Look at 2011 Sony VAIO Z
There's a couple key issues with it: current comment voting techniques don't do a good job of differentiating validity from user sentiment (how many times have you had someone need to rebuke the community for using the arrows to denote disagreement?)

Secondly, you will always to deal with trolls. If you have mechanisms in place to make people spend less time responding to trolls, you'll retain the sanity of the sane users and diminish incentives from trolls.

Thirdly, you have to rethink the way stories are voted on.

Thankfully, we're building that. If you sign up on forrus.org, I'll let you know when we roll these features out which should be in a month. We're actively just inviting people who are enthusiastic about these ideas because we want to grow the community slowly but with lots of quality.
First, develop your "spidey sense" for detecting bad clients, and don't take those gigs. That's the most important thing to learn, as it will drastically cut your loss rate.

Second, check the statutory limit for small claims in your jurisdiction. If the amount in question is under the limit, file in small claims. It's easy; and generally, lawyers aren't allowed. If the defendant is outside the jurisdiction of your local small claims court, you may have to file by certified mail. You'll get a judgment against them, but collecting will be more difficult.

Finally, as others mentioned, get half up front. Those people who are inclined to rip you off will hem and haw and give you all kinds of excuses about why they can't or won't pay half in advance. When you hear that, walk away.
A lot of the pain a site like Twitter will have comes from GC (they wrote their own Ruby GC), and JRuby has a much better garbage collector over MRI and probably better than Twitter's.
Objectivity and reasoning need on be founded on data, and data is a collection of single events, unusual or not. All this guy said was "we surveyed A1 square miles of arctic ocean and found N1 live polar bears and after a storm we surveyed A2 square miles and found N2 drifting dead bears, so basic arithmetic gives an estimate of X% of bears getting killed by such a storm in such an environment." And yeah, the small sample size results in a huge margin of error, but it's one perfectly legitimate datapoint. What connects it to global warming is that the environment in question has lately become increasingly ice-deficient, forcing the bears to swim long distances which is apparently very dangerous for them.

Global warming skeptics are free to provide their own data, but they seem to be more intent on personally attacking those who disagree.

Frankly, at this point anyone who claims that global warming isn't happening is either a paid industry shill or has allowed themselves to be brainwashed by such because he doesn't want to believe in something that implies his lifestyle is not sustainable. You can have legitimate arguments about the extent, speed, and cause of global warming, but claiming that it is not happening is neither objective nor reasonable given the undisputable evidence of shrinking glaciers and arctic ice covers.
The "batman" image and icons are under IP protection... I wonder if this equation automatically falls under that umbrella. And what about the particular result of that equation , when graphically rendered. Could I sell T-shirts with that equation's rendering on them?
> Does PG have an expectation of not being dragged into a situation in which he could have involved himself if he so wished?

PG dragged himself in to it by standing up for AirBNB's actions in a public forum.

He probably should not have done that.

> Passing her contact information on to a third party -- regardless of who that party is or why -- without either her permission or that third party's permission, was a rookie mistake. It might have been well-meaning, but it was still a mistake.

Agreed, and I have apologized to her that I did not seek her consent first, based on the note I received afterwards it seems that she is ok with it, but that does not diminish my mistake and I should be more careful with stuff like that.
Romantic Ideas for your Wedding Night - 100WeddingTips.com
That seems to be the case. The view/controller layers can be scaled via more machines. Its the database layer that requires synchronization. Thats a universal problem, though.
Yeah, even though oil companies bid for drilling rights and then sit on those rights, don't drill, and bid for more rights.
If it was $15/GB, I would be happy. AT&T charges $15/200MB.
I suppose you can read all the startup stories you like but in the end you won't learn anything unless you just jump in, see how it goes and iterate from what you learn.

I think Hacker News has taught me a lot though, i'm not saying learning from others isn't important, it is. But in the end you have to launch something and learn your own lessons.
I agree that Lion implements Full Screen poorly, and I filed a bug report with Apple to point out their problems and suggest fixes (like keeping windows on their original displays, keeping unused displays free, allowing other applications' Full Screen windows to use open space, and taking less time to animate).

In MacTerm I didn't bother with an option, I just keep my original behavior. I see no reason to change it; my Full Screen is instantaneous and works with 2 displays.

The maddening thing about Apple's new APIs is that the only way to get an official Full Screen icon on a window frame is if you use their Full Screen command. There appears to be no way to let users trigger older mechanisms with the new icon.
Sorry, I haven't been ignoring you, I've been struggling with how to respond. I think for now I will have to leave it at:

(1) since I'm a patent attorney, looking at your code and advising you on its chances of patentability would constitute legal advice and potentially initiate aspects of an attorney-client relationship outside of any retainer agreement, and I'm not going to do that;

(2) in the off chance that you ever do want to try to patent something that involves software, your future patent attorneys will thank you for starting to train yourself now to get out of the habit of making public posts about how ludicrously unpatentable your work is, no matter how much you might think of any current project at the present moment; and

(3) talk to a good patent attorney of your own, one who spends all her time on patent law subject matter, as soon as possible in the process, which will almost certainly be before you think it should be, about anything and everything you might ever possibly want to patent in the future.
Why is this comment not at the top. They need to define what "unlimited" really means.
Lua's threading is just as broken as Python or Ruby. Maybe even more so.
Money greases the wheels of justice. Oil money is particularly greasy.

EDIT: spelling
David Bowie's stance at the end is interesting - just a few years later he launched his own ISP called BowieNet.
Forestall the "Debt Crisis": Mint a 5 Trillion Dollar Coin
But the correct answer is "1 or more".
I hope bloggers will think twice before using this crap.

Please read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699610
Every image can be rendered by an equation. How do you think JPEG works? Why would this be any different?
I noticed that every time Twitter acquired a company, they also accrued a new language:

* Summize brought Scala

* BackType brought Clojure

Has anyone noticed that pattern elsewhere?
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no politics, dude.
You think her story adds up? Interesting. It didn't for me.

(I'm sure the event happened the way she said it did, by the way. I'm not one of those people that thinks this is an elaborate scam.)
There's probably a correlation between intelligence and technical skill (using a computer), if you're intelligent you've got a higher chance of actually learning how it works or picking it up faster.

Many of those which are intelligent and technically challenged are just less likely to rely on a computer. So if you don't understand how to use your computer efficiently you would just use the browser which comes with it. To you there aren't any other choices, Internet Explorer is just 'How I get on Facebook and my AOL Mail'.

How can people be expected to know they need to upgrade to Windows 7 or Internet Explorer 10 without either doing some research, being told by a technical friend/family member or reading about it.
> it's very clear that AirBnb are the primary, if not only, ones at fault here.

No. Some terrible human being who should be in jail is at fault here.

Airbnb and YC are all run by great people. Responding to a crisis like this is never easy. Responding to your first crisis like this is hardest of all.

I wouldn't blame Michael Arrington at all, either. I think he's done a great job at reporting this. But it's not his first rodeo, for some of the other people involved it is, and so I'm not surprised they've made some mistakes.

Also, in regard to the so called "coverup", it's totally natural when someone says bad things about you on the internet to ask them to take them down. That's not a "cover up". That's "being human". Imagine if someone posted a diatribe against one of your children. As a parent, wouldn't you want to get that taken down? Airbnb is these guys' baby.

I grew up in a political family and all the time my father and my family would get slammed in the paper and online. I used to have a knee jerk reaction and email people asking them to take things down. It hurts when people say shit about you, especially if you haven't developed really think skin. EJ is a great writer, so it makes the post that much more stinging. It shouldn't be taken down, but we shouldn't imagine Airbnb's asking for it to be taken down some nefarious "coverup". It's only human.
No.

Do people with a lower IQ tend to not think about changing the default software provided? Yes.
That trick always seemed incomplete to me because the output only contains part of the formula; it's missing the constant that actually encodes most of the information. Has anyone ever made one where the output contains everything you need?
But of course this tech is built into YouTube, the most popular video streaming site on the internet. It pretty much automatically becomes a mass market tool.
Awesome. Thanks so much for the recommendations everyone.
> No. Some terrible human being who should be in jail is at fault here.

Not really, at least where the unfolding PR catastrophe is concerned.
doesn't HN accept story like this?, it was my first submission though.
Redesigning The Netflix API
I agree with this post with one caveat, I've done this, I've shipped many times, all failed projects or what I consider temporary embarrassments. Shipping is not enough. People must want what you are offering, and you must have a means to reach those people. I've learned a thing or two reading hacker news, some sort of balance is important. Taking a break from news feeds to focus on your work is a good idea, but don't think launching is enough.
This is to be expected, I think it's good that Google isn't doing what companies like Yahoo are doing and rivalling their own products or releasing a half hearted integration between products. Google is linking all of their services neatly and much like you can use the YouTube Player on Google+ this is interesting.

I will also say that YouTube have had a 'streams' feature in TestTube since 2007 which let you line up videos and chat and in a way was Turntable.fm or this feature in Google hangouts before either. They simply scrapped the rivalling YouTube product which failed to reach a level of success and replaced it with another Google tool which is more powerful.
Topic clustering? A la Techmeme, Google News?
> not making it would involve millennia of avoidable human suffering

This premise assumes that in the situation where we "don't make it," the total amount of suffering by the end of the human race would be more than one in where we "do make it." Given that human suffering is caused by everything, I would say that if the race were to survive, there would be infinitely more suffering because we would have more time to inflict it. The premise seems to take for granted that the only way humans suffer is through harming our environment, which is of course not at all accurate. The only way to avoid human suffering is to immediately get rid of all humans; being in favor of existence, I have to argue that this is a fruitless position.

Likewise, if animals can suffer, then the existence of animals causes suffering. Animals attack each other, eat each other, steal each others' food source and offspring. The only way to prevent animal suffering is to have no animals. If plants can suffer, then the existence of plants causes suffering as they compete for sunlight and nutrients and the 'losers' wither and die.

I suppose my point is: any argument that involves potential existence causing suffering must ultimately come to these conclusions. I don't believe there is any other choice. Plants will never stop competing, animals will never stop competing, and humans will never stop competing.

Also, if the crux of your argument is avoidable human suffering, then I would be very interested to know what defines unavoidable human suffering.

[Just enjoying my Saturday morning by carrying out some debate]
1, 2 and 4 are probably wrong and I haven't really heard 3 and 5 asserted. Wadhwa always seems to be on the wrong side of things and I can't tell if he's just a contrarian or just mainly an academic.
Surprised no other person brought this up.
Autotranslation: http://translate.google.com.ar/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&#...

It says that the crew made a mistake, but I think that the real question is: How easy is to flight a plane after you loose the anemometers in the middle of a storm?
I agree with you, and I also think the reason it's been out of the mainstream media is because of lack of pictures. It's much more powerful to say (on the 10 o'clock news): "look what they did", instead of "let me describe to you what they did"
Assuming copyright/trademark in place on the image, probably not (although, IANAL - so take the following with an appropriate dose of salt).

The short reason why is that bits have color ( http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime for a concrete example.
I'm a programmer, but believe it's important to be well-rounded. To balance my programming skills with sysadmin skills, I've started reading "The Practice of System and Network Administration":

http://everythingsysadmin.com/aboutbook.html

http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration...

The book was praised by multiple HN commenters ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1665915 for example), and I'm glad I listened to their advice. I've only read a few chapters so far (it's a big book!), but I already like it. It contains a lot of good insights, and I like that it's not focusing on a specific OS / platform. Also, you don't have to read it in a linear fashion, you can pick and choose chapters depending on your current needs (moving into a new data center? implementing a security policy?). Thumbs up.
I guess this puts to rest the issue of whether or not she is lying...
I have a feeling that a lot of businesses will start looking like the device-centric "Netflix API requests by audience" pie graph in the near future
I disagree. Giving EJ PG's details, and putting the onus on the victim to reach out to PG, is (IMHO) the kind of attitude that got us here. I think this is what happened with AirBnB too: they probably gave her a number to call "if you need anything", and then just moved on.

The victim shouldn't have to go around knocking on doors to get help. Sometimes it's nice if the help comes to victim on its own volition.
Job interviews go both ways
So put her friends on trial then. I really though society in general grew out of punishing related persons for the crimes of others....