skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ego minimization is a hallmark of cults, inflicting torture, and the military. What Dalio is looking for is a reliably top-down-authoritarian company.
When someone first told me about AirBnB I immediately dismissed it - just like Fred Wilson did. It fell in the group of ideas which I just find puzzling because the concept is totally alien to something I would want to do/buy/participate in.

I don't get why anyone would want to rent out their couch or spare room to a transient stranger - even 'vetted' within a community (and we can see that vetted is very lose here).

Sure, I sort of get the appeal for the renter but I'm lost as to why a homeowner would want to do this - especially considering the risk/reward here. The upside is a few dollars here and there, the downside is $10k's of damage - like this.

If you've never owned a house, you won't know that it's a labor of love and something you invest more than just your money into. Why you would want to risk someone destroying it, I don't know.

AirBnB needs to offer insurance as part of the deal - just like the car sharing programs seem to have negotiated their own insurance for the duration that the other person is driving your car. Otherwise it just seems an unwise risk to offer accommodation on AirBnB.
It's a panel discussion -- you want different viewpoints. Aaron Barr almost certainly has a very interesting viewpoint w.r.t. anonymous and computer security in general, having been on the receiving end of a highly-publicized attack. Sometimes it's just as useful to hear about how something is wrongly done.
They always shoot the messenger.
One of the critical measures though is that most activists openly do so. Someone up-thread mentions that MLK was a criminal, and he was. As was Ghandi, and others. But they said here I am, here is what I am doing, and why I am breaking this law. And for civil disobedience to be effective, here's the kicker, they welcomed and expected the punishment.

The idea that we would arrest another human being for sitting at a lunch counter, etc, is designed to provoke outrage at the unjust situation.

The Crito is an excellent place to start in examining I suppose the philosophical roots of civil disobedience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crito
There is certainly a war in the bay area for skilled iOS developers. We're a small startup and pay market to above market rate, relocation expenses, sponsor H1Bs, hefty options, cater awesome lunches, offer mentorship... whatever is takes basically and even finding an engineer that has done more than create HTML5 apps is a daunting challenge.

I've been halfway through negotiations to steal away someone from Google only to have Google turn around and offer the person a truly ridiculous bonus.

Recruiters call one of my iOS engineers daily (he routinely wins all the major hackathons) and he always asks them if they're willing to take on new clients since we need engineers too and they almost always reply that the have all the clients they need.
Sadly, redis diskstore doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
I think its a troll.

"Apparently, the answer is that patent trolls do not manufacture the technology that is embodied by the patents that they seek to enforce."

This is a strawman. The issue isn't that patent trolls are generally NPE's. The issue is that they seek to leverage dubious and obvious patents that never should have been granted in the first place. By capitalizing on the overburdened USPTO's tendency to grant patents by default, they are retarding innovation in the industry and leeching profits off companies who are doing nothing but implementing obvious solutions to problems.
Oh, okay, so that makes it okay for the site to be Chrome-only despite Google's constant proselytizing over "openness."
interesting is also that even after this post got pushed back down, it got 12 votes in 10 min and didnt make it to the front page where as there are 2 posts that have <10 votes in one hr
It's hard to believe they'd go to all of this effort to catch someone who'd placed a laptop in an unmarked closet. There was no indication that a student was not allowed in the area, according to my reading.

In hindsight we can think of lots of ways to defend against this kind of detection, but which of us would really think they would get the Secret Service involved to catch a person who was downloading public domain documents under a legal license awarded to the library of one of the most tech-savvy places in the world? It really should have been expected that something like this would happen. It's almost conceivable that it's not really unusual to see MIT students going to a wired connection in a network closet if necessary.

While there are lots of ways to keep things private, most of us aren't constantly on maximum guard. There has to be a cost-benefit analysis, and apparently someone at JSTOR has friends high up.
I'm unsure if this is supposed to be something like processing.js that is porting all of vvvv to the browser, or it it is supposed to be porting the vvvv model of programming to the browser. Can it handle the multi-media creation/live interaction settings that vvvv really excels in?
You're supposed to keep going until/unless they actually get an injunction

I do not know if you have ever been involved in a lawsuit, but they can be enormously time consuming and ver expensive. In short, even if you are in the right they can play absolute havoc with your life.
Dropbox has some rather tough competition ahead of them from Amazon, Google and Microsoft at the least - they know they'll need to be rather sturdy to stay the leading provider of convenient cloud storage for consumers. Best of luck!
I would like to see a Microsoft Outlook contacts importer.
Didn't Capcom did something like that with their old console games? I think they had an app with some demos and were selling their games as IAP. Might work!
Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists — What Blag?
Some folks will tell you that death is merely a transition to an alternate form of living. Some folks will tell you that if your cells are cryogenically frozen can get defrosted later. Both ideas are taken on faith, they may both be true, they may neither be true.

I live in an apartment building, but I haven't seen behind my neighbor's door. It could actually be a portal to Mars. It could lead to a few rooms consistent with the geometry of the rest of the building.

Not every pair of unknowns are equiprobable.
Yes, we know. That's the point. They shouldn't have because there was no reason to.
I agree with you, its perfectly OK to set a tone and personality for the site – but that information to me is critically important to users of Airbnb and why to this day I haven't used Airbnb. It never seemed clear what would happen in this event and now we know. You are on the hook.

FYI In her blog post, EJ points out that Airbnb also lacks a 24 hour customer support phone number.
The synchronous writes benchmark is interesting. This is normally bound by # seeks your disk can do per second, which is mostly a function of rotational speed. With 7200RPM drive you get 7200/60 = 120 of these a second. So the 100 and 110 numbers for competitors make sense. 2,400 for LevelDB does not.

Is LevelDB batching writes or is there something more interesting going on?
Am I the only one that would have presumed that AirBnB would not be financially responsible? They're a forum for helping people find short term tenants. They can't possibly vet everyone who's going through the system.
CPR brings people back from the dead; before the 60s, they generally stayed dead.
Or consider that your privilege has blinded you and sexism/patriarchy/kyriarchy is awfully damn pervasive.
Google+ traffic fell last week in the US, is the rush over?
> Nonsense - I have a common variant of one blood clotting factor known...

k.

"Of course, this is one study and one disease, and maybe other stuff will come out that validates the approach. (I have no dog in this fight)"
AirBnB will lose control of the narrative if they frame this on narrow legal liability grounds: they are too large and well established and will be judged by a very different standard than is this had happened a few years ago. This will be a part of someone's advertising and PR campaign, either AirBnB, a plaintiff's attorney, or a hotel lobbying group. AirBnB looks like they are mindful of the legal liability and oblivious of the public goodwill risks.
First, Isn't what he wants in medical studies completely standard practice?

It probably is (I don't have a habit of reading medical articles.) But there are still people writing papers like "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" (see http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam...) so it's not clear that implies that they have their shit together...
"Save your friends from outdated email"

Google has set up a dedicated website to help push people towards using their email service.

That's just one side of the medal. The other is that Google wants people to stop using their current email provider and move to them.

"Save your friends from YOUNAMEIT"

Maybe we'll also see more sites that help you save your friends from continuing to use Gmail, Facebook, Skype,...
Except that it isn't a cult. It is a company, where people are compensated, and free to leave. The comparison isn't serious, so don't take it that way.
Bindings for Node.js if anyone is interested: https://github.com/creationix/node-leveldb
He posted it himself, so that would hardly be affected.
You're so right. I had the same reaction to this and the New Yorker article covering the same.

I got interested in hedge funds in high school after reading a lot of articles like this. But after learning a lot about economics and finance I learned to pick up the sensationalism in these articles.

I think just about every article about a hedge fund has a line like, "consistently beats the market...which most economists say isn't possible." That's not even true. The free market hypothesis has not been given much stock outside of the University of Chicago (Eugene Fama) since the 90's. Most economists who even study such things focus on under what scenario can an investor outperform the market and what types of securities tend to be undervalued.

I'm even amazed that the article doesn't begin by mentioning Ray Dalio's childhood as a chess prodigy/math olympiad/other thing that only really really smart people can do.

These articles typically have a set format:
1. Intro into the mysterious culture of the hedge fund
2. Background on the precocious child prodigy turned market whiz
3. Description of firm's hiring practices of PhD's etc
4. Questioning value of Hedge Fund's to society
5. In conclusion, this hedge fund makes a lot of money...

I almost want to run some NLP scripts over a corpus of profiles of hedge fund managers and automatically generate a dozen of these, print them, and see if I can get a job at Bloomberg.
I found it ironic that the renter's 'name' is Dj Pattrson when I read this in a related article:

"This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels."

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/25/fawlty-logic/
There would be no way to plagiarize, because the professor would have direct insight into each part of your writing process as he saw bits of your essay fall into place.

I fear you give too much credit in that respect. This does not mean you could not lift passages out to integrate with your work without a professor being any wiser. It might make copying a complete text a little harder, but even there it wouldn't be hard to integrate some deliberate errors, let him catch and then revise. Finally, it would do nothing at all to stop you from hiring someone else to write it for you as long as you could either pay that other person to participate in the e-mail feedback or you were willing to do the revisions yourself.
Agreed, but having a sense of humor is fine until it becomes reality.
The Most Common Traveling Scams
I am planning to build an iPad app for it, if it hasn't existed yet after the API release
Nodejitsu is hiring a Systems Engineer
Airbnb should partner with both and turn it into a business opportunity.
the newspaper hacked his phone
Really? I thumbed through the complaint (thanks for the link), but I'm still really disturbed by this. It's presumably illegal to help yourself to free subway rides. The law protects the MBTA. How is it a crime to talk about how it could be done? The talk wouldn't deprive the MBTA of any revenue.. the application of information in the talk by third parties committing illegal acts would. It's akin to giving a talk on lock-picking, no?
I feel the same way.

That said, unlike Craigslist (and other forums), they do take a percentage of the cut.
Interesting way of putting it. I would have said "removing the data from his possession"

This is part of a standard narrative to treat copyright infringement as theft analogous to theft of "tangible" traditional property. You will also notice terms like "documents were stolen" in the original indictment. Although to be fair to JSTOR, their official statement did not use such (imho) misleading language.
The synchronous writes benchmark is suspect--on a 7200rpm disk it seems impossible to get 2,400 dependent transactions (or even sqlite's 430) with a full disk sync. Is this due to ext3's relaxed notion of fsync?
1. Your idea is just a hypothesis at this point. So goto http://unbounce.com, sign up and put up a landing page that describes your idea. A lot of people are worried about people stealing their ideas. But imagine if there's a guy that is smart enough to understand, adapt, build, execute, market, scale your idea... then he probably has hundreds of his own ideas jotted down somewhere on his eternally long TODO list.

2. Throw some ad words and redirect to your landing page(saying Coming Soon etc.). See if anyone is even willing to leave you their email address. If not then move on to the next idea.

3. Iterate on your landing page, some people even take a survey of potential features. Find a reasonable product/market fit.

4. Then make some rough mockups explaining your idea.

5. Then hire someone to do it, but you need to put in the same amount of time as the dev/designer. So beware!, quite a lot of outsourced work fails because the client isn't as invested in his idea, and wants someone else to fill in the gaps. You can decide on paying someone or offering equity. But to be honest, you won't find good devs interested in equity right now. The market is in a boom, so your idea better have a definite appeal to the dev.

If you need help with Step 5, ping me at http://www.sidmitra.com :-)
BDB is a key\value store for unordered data more similar to Tokyo Cabinet hash databases. Tokyo Cabinet hash databases are a much faster option than BDB if you only need unordered data.

LevelDB is for if you need ordered data, and a more appropriate comparison would be against a B+\tree database.
I think a lot of "it's much harder to learn X when you're older" (languages for example) is more about not caring as much or not having as much time than it is about having less ability to learn given those things. At least I hope so, since I'm rapidly approaching 30 and there are vast and deep realms of knowledge I'd like to explore but am just getting started now. =)
"Until now, the lack of true fullscreen playback has been the biggest limitation of HTML5 over Flash video."

I thought the biggest limitation was protecting premium video from being downloaded/accessed. Isn't that why Hulu won't go HTML5 yet?
Quirky & Radio Shack « a quirky blog
Something is missing..

Why was a Secret Service Agent on campus in the first place?

Something is just not adding up as FBI has jurisdiction not Secret Service..

Plus, what is the other 2% that was downloaded that was not JSTROR stuff?

Or ie ah do some journalism before writing the article?
I see plenty of connections in both of those things.
Big discussion on this tragic situation here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811080
LOL, "First Use Anywhere:	3/1/2008".
"Rogue Academic Downloader..." Strong title for someone who you claim "He is also a general friend of Wired.com" I guess you know your real friends when you get in trouble.
The Squint Test: How quick exposure to design can reveal its flaws
I have seen lots of companies add that button, and I have never seen a company remove it!
I think certain parts of FAQs can breathe a bit more and inject humor. Others can't. Payments, renter sec., etc are sacred ground. Funny is a disarming quality; you want these sections to reiterate strength, confidence and professionalism.
That Helvetica Neue (UltraLight) is seriously unreadable. It's a beautiful typeface for headlines and accent text, but blocks of it are mush.
Agreed. Though I think the more important reason is that no company can cut me off from my 20 years of email history on a whim, like has been happening recently with Google.
They might ask for 35 years but if the judge gives him 35 years i'd go out to the prison with some free Aaron signs and do a hunger strike.

I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. That would be outrageous. Actually any jail time would be ridiculous, he's not a dangerous person at all.
TechCrunch is reporting I spoke to Airbnb about EJ’s situation. They won’t reimburse her for damages, they say, and they do not insure against losses. They are helping police track down the person who did this, but their help ends there.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-air...
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AirBnB is one rape case away from disaster.
"I spoke to Airbnb about EJ’s situation. They won’t reimburse her for damages, they say, and they do not insure against losses. They are helping police track down the person who did this, but their help ends there."

...

Fuck. That.

I don't care what the long-term implications are, I don't care about precedent, I don't care about policy, I don't care about cost.

If my business does this to someone I make it right. Even if that means going into my own goddamn pocket. Anything less is simple villainy.

If you are going to enjoy the rewards of your business, you have a moral obligation to ensure that you make things right when that business harms someone else. And let us be clear: this is harm. This isn't "oh dear, my careless guest spilled wine on my TV. Buy me a new one guys."

This is "the guest you sent me destroyed my home and sense of safety." This is completely beyond the pale, an incredible stretch no one, clearly, bothered to imagine. Crucially: it's completely documented by law enforcement.

If it's true these guys aren't going to make this right, Airbnb is dead to me. Fuck Obama O's, to hell with their Cap'n McCains, and all the struggle that earned my admiration. I'd say that to their faces, I'd say that if I worked there, and I'd quit if I worked there and this wasn't made right. This is a test of human decency. I hope they don't fail it.
I'm not sure of the html5 limitations, but I do know that Flash only allows you to enter fullscreen on a keyboard or mouse click event, so I'd hope the browsers copy this requirement.
> I spoke to Airbnb about EJ’s situation. They won’t reimburse her for damages

This is bad news.

They're going to backtrack on this. The sooner they do it, the better for them politically.

I understand the problems of setting a precedent. And there really is no getting around the fact that the hosts do have the final responsibility for screening travelers (and travelers for screening hosts).

But rightly or wrongly, they're going to end up on the wrong side of this story unless they make things right for this gal and can tell Arrington and other journalists, "we've made sure our customer is whole."

After saying that, they can use this as a learning exercise for their community about how screening hosts and travelers yourself is important.

--

[Edit]: Is she in San Francisco? It looks like she is. She called SFPD. This is an easy one. Brian, Joe, or Nathan needs to be out there to provide a shoulder to cry on and an open checkbook to fix anything that money can fix. Nothing in that apartment costs more than the value of the ammunition this is going to give to their enemies.

The earlier they do this, the more quietly they can do it, which serves their purposes as well.

[Edit #2]: Some form of insurance might be a worthwhile addition to their offering, but that's something they can debate and decide on after they put out this fire. [added:] Also, insurance doesn't solve the safety issues involved here, so they're still going to need to emphasize the importance of screening travelers (and hosts) carefully.

[Edit #3]: EJ doesn't sound particularly litigious in her post, but consider what happens if she does decide to sue AirBnB and any part of it makes it to a jury. I mean, HackerNews is lining up against them. Consider what 6-12 normal people might decide. The wise move would be to make sure that she's fully satisfied with the way they treated her.

[Edit #4]: Arrington updated the article after speaking with Brian Chesky. Brian, Joe, Nathan and company did the right thing here, as you would expect.
It's almost like comparing countries.

Some are dictatorships, others are free and more democratic.
Maybe because Google constantly markets itself on its use of open standards.
Funny, when I saw VVVVVV in the Humble Indie Bundle yesterday, I thought it was VVVV :)
That is not unusual. The Secret Service has a very long history of investigating computer crimes.
Shodae Final Window 7 Theme
That headline out to be taken out back and shot.
I agree with you. It's INCREDIBLY hard to get this information out of some recruiter. I've made it a personal policy that I tell the recruiter I need to know at a bar minimum the company's name and the job description before I discuss anything else with the recruiter, send them a resume, or give them the OK to submit me for the position. A majority of the recruiters that I have told this to either refuse to give me the information, hang up and pass me to a coworker, or INSIST on why I want to know this information. If they ask why, I respond with something like, "You don't buy an unknown car based on the color and price alone, do you?"

For the really pushy ones, I make it a point to tell them I'm not willing to work with them because they are making the process a high-pressure environment. I also tell them to take me off their list.

I've had one recruiter call me up, give me his 2 minute spiel about the job position, and ask me when I was available for the interview all before I had said another word other than "Hello." I told him I wasn't interested, he stuttered, then asked if I was interested. I responded that I was NOT interested. He hung up, called me back 10 minutes later, and repeated his spiel. I told him that I was not interested. He was shocked that I was not interested and asked again if I was interested. I responded that I was not. He asked when I had time available to be interviewed. I was IRRATE at this point. I asked him for his name and his company's name and after he supplied the information, I told him not to call me again and that I was blacklisting him in my search for a possible new job.

All the while, I was happily employed and was just seeing if I was interested in anything else.
I'll put python/java/php sources up once I got the specs for the proxy more set (currently still could get some changes that could break the whole functionality), but in short it provides the images either base64 encoded jsonp if browser doesn't support XHR2, if it does, it provides it as an image with CORS enabled (prefered as it is slightly smaller than base64 encoded).

For the HTML, it just checks a simple charset check and does the same as for images.

There are plenty of examples of the script embedded on the page though, and you can always download a copy from github and try it on your own page meanwhile.
Addendum: the 'document' extras: http://tiny.cc/kaktu

webkitCancelFullScreen
webkitCurrentFullScreenElement
webkitFullScreenKeyboardInputAllowed
webkitIsFullScreen
onwebkitfullscreenchange