skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd been hoping those AirBnB pricks would be cratered for having built their business on spamming, not for something like this.
Not 1 closet. That's not a house.
I understand that to be the case when not using synchronous. The point of synchronous full is that sqlite should only consider a transaction committed when it is fully flushed to disk. Assuming a 7200rpm disk that isn't lying to you, at most 120 dependent transactions a second should be even possible.

(this should apply equally to other databases that have a similar option)
I agree that its financial porn. I disagree on the "dubious field" and "no value to society" premise - In the past, I've interviewed with and worked for several s/w startups that were/are much more dubious and useless than finance.

Also, "attracting all sorts of people into the field" is really stretching it. Getting into the field to make a serious non-trivial impact - like running a derivatives desk or managing say a non-ferrous futures portfolio or even something straightforward like a 130-30 long-short equities fund takes a whole lot of expertise, something a whole lot of people simply don't have. For example, the codebase for one of the largest 130-30 fund in the world, run by Blackrock out of the Howard street office in SF, is actively managed by 3 Applied Math PhDs, 5 Java Programmers with CS Masters, and a dozen SQL , QA & misc scutwork CS undergrads. The guys using the codebase ie. the portfolio managers and the junior portfolio mgrs, are another dozen econ grads with CFAs and some 50 years of combined market experience. Its a pretty challenging job, and they've come up with a +ve alpha through most of the crisis, which is a minor miracle in itself.
> definitely the right time

what kind of low-latency phone do /you/ have? :-)
...person who was downloading public domain documents...

I hate being pedantic[1] but I keep seeing people make this mistake: JSTOR is not just public domain works, and there is no indication that the downloading was limited to public domain works. I think people are getting confused due to the release (by someone else) of a torrent of public domain material from JSTOR, but that's not a torrent of what Aaron downloaded.

[1] Not really, but I hate that I don't hate it.
Save your friends! Make them use all Google products!
Make them give their details to Google, their emails, their browser, their lives, and make sure to reload those ads while you're at it!

Internet in 2020: Using a Google Laptop to access the Google.com with a Google browser, using a Google search engine that searches mostly through Google services (other services died), talking to people via Google talk, phoning them via Google Voice, checking you Google email, managing your documents on Google docs, your schedule on Google calendar, share your pictures on Google picasa, your videos on Google youtube, your life on Google+

Heck, you don't see it coming yet?! What do you need more?

Internet will be Google and world domination is rather near. Yeah I know it sounds funny but it's not actually just a joke - it looks pretty damn much near to our actually present already.
Got some pride issues? Help is on the way...
dgrogan and myself have been batching changes to LevelDB from our internal code repository to put them on the Google Code page. Playing Google Code site admin didn't seem to me like a good use of Jeff and Sanjay's time.
Aubrey's foundation funds tons of lab research that wouldn't be otherwise done, as well as editing a very well regarded journal about human aging (Rejuvenation Research). The fact that he isn't in a lab doesn't make him any less of a scientist; sometimes having the ideas and doing the high-level synthesis work is more valuable than doing lab work that any number of people can do.

I suggest you read his book (amazon: Ending Aging) and then make up your mind about his ideas, rather than after having only heard the soundbites.
EBay stock value plunges over $1 billion amid ‘Anonymous’ boycott
The problem is, as other commenters have pointed out, the activity facilitated by Airbnb is illegal in an increasing number of states. I'm sure that complicates insurance.
This reminds me of the Richardson Spite House, which was 5 feet wide and built to block the windows of another property.

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GON/GON005.htm
"Good support" is a pretty vague term, so I'm not sure what you mean. But you get a SLA and 24/7 access to support. Not sure what more you're looking for.
Ask HN: How do I get traffic on a shoe-string budget?
I launched my web app on HN about 3 months ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460406 - (100 days to be exact) and am struggling to get traffic.

As a result of low traffic, I don't know what to optimize, because I feel like I don't have enough of a sample size to accurately tell me what I am doing right and wrong.

I have tried guest post blogging, submitting my site to lots of 'galleries', plugging it where appropriate and helpful - but I am at a paltry 5.5K uniques since launch.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

P.S. The web app is targeted at designers/photographers/creatives.
Yes that's my point. You have to be careful about "clearly pseudonymous accounts"
Not really in the sense he was talking about. He literally stood up at a major conference and urged the development community to go learn bioinformatics and work on the cure for cancer. No developer tool will ever come close to the amount of positive impact on the world that a cure for cancer would.
Sorry, but the moment of truth has already passed because the moment of truth was when Airbnb didn't bake effective safeguards against this sort of behavior into the very heart of their website for lending your home to complete strangers.

Honestly, if you explain the business model of Airbnb to any ordinary run of the mill US citizen not residing in Silicon Valley, their very first question is going to be, "Why would I trust a stranger in this situation?" Airbnb's response was a joke in their FAQ about a grand piano.

It shouldn't have been. I have rented vacation apartments in Europe and there are plenty of ways to do this RIGHT, starting with identity exposure. There should have been a set of procedures for people to identify and vet one another BEFORE completing the sale. Of course this would have meant that some Airbnb customers would cut deals directly with one another and screw Airbnb out of its revenue share. OH WELL. Safety has a price and a clever entrepreneur would devise incentives - rental history, quality public feedback and ratings - to discourage people from going outside the system.

This isn't just one incident Airbnb needs to respond better to. It exposes a deep flaw, not only in their systems for preventing these types of incidents but for responding to them as well (it took 14 hours and a friend's intervention to get a call returned from the "urgent" hotline, wtf?).

What is especially infuriating about this is that, in an effort to bolster their income statement and become a hot company, Airbnb has created very bad publicity for a FANTASTIC and growing form of lodging.
I know at least a few people who change their reddit and HN identities rather frequently. Some people just want to be relatively anonymous and I'd be wary of attributing it to anything more than that without good reason.
A way to harness your desire and your need: Spend your day working on the SaaS app and then devote your evenings to the betting app. You'll be very satisfied from working on the betting app and that satisfaction will get you through the morning. Plus you'll be looking forward to the evening when you get to work on the betting app.

This way you'll get both done while still being happy and satisfied.
Ask HN: So, is "search" really that hard?
I've been thinking about this for quite some time but what triggered the thought this time was this Hacker News submission (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812555): Isn't it a tad disturbing how such an open world as the web is limited to pretty much just one searching tool (Google)?

I am not asking from the "Is Google evil?" perspective, I am only asking to find out why.
20 SV Startups To Watch (Flotype & SwipeGood YCW11 made the list)
Ask HN: Would you use a smarter calendar?
How US Debt to GDP ratio has changed since Obama took over
I've never needed support from Google so I can't speak from personal experience, but I've read many blogs and comments here on HN complaining that paying for gmail ought to mean good customer support, but in fact it's just as bad as it is for free users.

I'm in bed on my blackberry and about to drift off, so I can't be bothered to find examples. Will take a look in the morning.
how many of those 400 are going to be engineer hires?
Did you watch his talk?
It doesn't, but you can't help but feel his excitement during the talk ... and yet ...
One of the ideas that someone sent through in the form which I think is great is doing it by number of messages, rather than regular times.

I got about 30 people sign up and it'll only take me 6 hours or so to do a basic version of this so I think I'm gonna go for it later in the week (maybe Sunday night whilst watching movies :)

The ideas I've had emailed so far are:

1) arbitrary grouping (ie. aggregate multiple source emails into 1 group - so you could have your weekly newsletter digest)

2) choose your interval

3) choose to have it recur based on number of messages

to this end I've just registered emaildigest.me instead of weeklydigest.me and I'm going to do it like this:

groupname+interval+number@emaildigest.me

where interval is hourly,daily,weekly or monthly, groupname is just your own grouping for this (single word tag only) and optionally you can include a number argument which will "purge" the digest.

For example, you could forward all your twitter notifications to:

twitter+daily+40@emaildigest.me

and you'll receive a daily digest of your twitter emails - but if you get 40 in a day you'll receive 2 digests.

I'll also allow you to set your timezone and time of day to receive digests.

What do you reckon?
Chrome adds experimental extension permission API
Thats sort of what +1 does. So, in essence, the ability to comment on a user's +1s?
It's something they do collectively and pervasively, and I mean sock-puppeteering literally here.
> The upside is a few dollars here and there

I am an airbnb host. If the upside were a few dollars here and there I wouldn't do it. The upside is 60% to 120% of my rent every month. I imagine it could put a similar dent into a mortgage.
LA has a diverse and historic tech industry. UCLA and UCSB were two of the first four nodes on the Arpanet. JPL, Electronic Arts, Disney, Sony, Digital Domain, Lockheed, and Symantec are a few places I've worked for, interviewed at, or visited colleagues at.

I'm always a bit puzzled over the comments that there is not enough talent here, as if building websites is so excruciatingly difficult. It's pretty mundane most of the time, with the exception of scaling them to facebook size. The need for that is pretty rare actually and could be imported when it occurs. It's just a matter of opening the purse strings wide enough.
Cool idea, I'll mockup one up and add a link to it on the page, thanks!
Complaining about ego minimization is a hallmark of egos.
Integrate Facebook Like into G+ posts and G+ +1 on FB posts
Or a direct link to their website:

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...
Ford is not installing CDs in their cars anymore
Retiring FedThread
> There are databases for convicted felons and molesters, but other than that, how exactly do you ensure someone is not a "sociopath willfully destroying someone's home and stealing their identity"?

Dunno. That's going to be Airbnb's problem to solve if they want to enjoy ongoing business. That's their job if they want to be the "Ebay of spaces."
If you look at the history of this person you'll notice they have a history of attacking any posts relating to Nodejitsu.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alnayyir
It's not just that technology advances; patents eventually expire. The problem is that the electronics industry advances an order of magnitude faster. A patent in the farm-tractor industry takes two years to start making money and is still non-obvious 25 years later. A patent in the handheld electronics or algorithms industry takes two weeks to start making money and can be obsolete 25 months later. It's still a giant clusterfuck, but it's close enough that it only needs a major reform.
San diego real estate
The San Diego real estate market is home to some of the most desirable real estate in the country. Within the San Diego real estate market, you can find the some of the most luxurious homes, as well as more affordable homes.
Getting your data out (Data Liberation)
Wired Web Design - Mississauga
Wired Web Design is an independent web design company based in Mississauga, Ontario that specializes in a wide range of web design services. Our mission is to connect your business to clients by providing cutting edge graphic design in key areas such as web design, logo design, flyer design and business card design.
Steve says bend over and gives you no choice otherwise. Screw Apple.
Simply integrate this with a rating or flagging feature. Make it strict -- one 'dispute', such as this, and you're on watch. Two in a short time frame and you're banned. etc. They can afford to pay for a couple of HDTVs so a couple of smart guys can profit off the service, and the legitimate users can keep on legitimately using.
It should be possible. I see this as the exact same situation as http://www.getaround.com/, who are, according to techcrunch, "The Airbnb For Cars". They have a policy with Berkshire Hathaway that covers any damage to the rented cars.

You can write insurance for anything, if you're willing to pay enough premium. I can't imagine this premium would be that exorbitant for Airbnb to pay for it's users, just as Getaround does.
Sentencing a criminal to jail is theoretically supposed to be for the good of society. So in a case like this, they'd better ask themselves if society would ultimately benefit from having him behind bars.

The actual damage done here was negligible, especially considering the questionable locking-down of the content in the first place (i.e. maybe it should always have been free, and it was still valued at only $50,000 by the school, not $1 million). Swartz maybe did something stupid, but his ability to contribute to society is still far greater out of jail than in. There is also every bit of evidence to suggest that his intent is to contribute positively to society.

In other words, if he serves more than a few months in jail for this, or is actually asked to pay a million dollars, I will be incredibly disheartened by the "legal" system.
" Is this due to ext3's relaxed notion of fsync?" -- I believe so, especially given the warning about ext4 at the bottom.

>The preceding numbers are for an ext3 file system. Synchronous writes are much slower under ext4 (LevelDB drops to ~34 writes / second, TreeDB drops to ~5 writes / second; SQLite3 drops to ~24 writes / second) due to ext4's different handling of fsync / msync calls. Even LevelDB's asynchronous write performance drops somewhat since it spreads its storage across multiple files and issues fsync calls when switching to a new file.
I own a summer home and I was genuinely considering using Airbnb next year. No more.

I can understand that they can't be too forthcoming, as people will trash their own place in hopes of a free remodel.

However, if law enforcement says this is a legit case and even caught a suspect, Airbnb should have had someone onsite with a check in their hands the next day. How much amazing free press would this have generated for, what, $25k? Even if they offered $5k to get her place livable again they could have demonstrated some integrity.

I don't know how much money they think they saved by betraying one of their business partners, but they should debit 5 or 10 years of my waterfront rental from that amount...
It's INCREDIBLY important to teach children to obey authority figures WITHIN REASON. If a teacher, cop or fireman is asking your kid to do something that doesn't seem quite right, their first instinct should be to ignore them, and get help from someone they know. The only people a kid should blindly obey is their own parents.

As far as I know, very few people teach their kids that it's OK to question authority (within reason - and yes, respect authority always. If you're in a teachers classroom, you follow their rules.)
For those too lazy to click the link:

all search results show "no such user"
> there were no bugs.

The utter destruction of your home at the hands of a service that aims to help you monetize it is ipso facto a bug. Intent: create value. Result: destruction of value. Bug! It would be like a roach trap that helped roaches breed instead of killing them.

It's pretty simple. You can't talk to guests until the transaction is consummated. If that's so, it's on Airbnb to make sure that they're not sending a dangerous creep into your arms.

They failed in that task. If they want to be the "Ebay of spaces" then they need to provide for some basic level of safety and security.

It's okay that you and I have different value systems. They're incompatible, so we won't ever work together.
OMG he's still here!
35 Years seems a little over the top.

Gilbert Bland Jr traveled to university libraries around the country for years, stealing maps from irreplaceable antique books, by physically removing them with a razor blade. The total value of the maps that the FBI was eventually able to recover was over $500,000. In the end he paid $70,000 and served 17 months in prison.
or bitcask! in its current incarnation, it is hard to use bitcask without erlang.
This reminds me of Flatland
AirBnb is illegal in some of the states (and when states/hotel industry/cities get a wind of this story, it will probably be illegal in all the states), so I doubt any legitimate insurance companies will be handling this affair.
He did something stupid? He knowingly and willfully tried to go around the University block. I don't think I would send him to jail. A HEFTY fine and some community service would do.
Apple Store for Grand Central (NYC)
Thank you for a rational response to this. This is far from crippling for AirBnB; if some of these things haven't been worked out yet, then there's no reason they can't handle that.

The main damage will be from the publicity from this story. Now there's at least one cement example of somebody suffering greatly, that fear will penetrate anybody who uses this service from here on out.
Tarsnap. http://www.tarsnap.com/
Back up iOS 4.3.5 SHSH Blobs  with TinyUmbrella 5.00.07
PayPal users mistakenly charged as much as $4,000 for Mac OS X Lion
You might be someone like me whose Mom can't resist clicking on every effing through that makes it past Hotmail's sub-optimal spam filter. I've tried to get her to go GMail for years but she can't grasp the concept that she doesn't have to tell everyone she has a new email address.
Well isn't this a pickle, according to ars the two patents that the judge have been found infridged have been ruled invalid...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/07/itc-judge-says-mac...

...
[Litigating Apple] noted that on the very same day that an ALJ ruled that Apple infringed two of S3's patents, the USPTO made initial determinations that the relevant claims of the two remaining patents are also invalid due to prior art. Apple can ask the ITC to review the infringement decision in light of the USPTO's invalidation of those patent claims as ipso facto an invalid patent claim cannot be infringed.
...

ars's source:
http://www.litigatingapple.com/blog/2011/7/24/why-htcs-court...

And the soap opera continues.
I think you're being a little harsh on me but perhaps it's my own fault for not explaining in more depth.

I certainly don't think that the way large organisations are currently run is the best way for them to be run. In my own very large organisation I actually introduced a (bespoke) system to allow communication that cuts across hierarchical boundaries.

I've taken some serious knocks pushing my agenda and it's taking a long time for the culture to change. Only now are some (20%) of our large number of directors starting to "blog" openly to staff rather than sending messages up and down the hierarchy. I hope to get managers beneath them to start using our internal social tool too.

I know that policies fail. I'm well known as a rule-breaker within my organisation but I'm also known as a person who can "get things done". I don't just mean that in a technical sense, or in a works-very-hard sense, but in a will-ignore-your-rules-to-get-things-done sense. Inevitably this means that I tread on some toes.

However, policies do have their place in large organisations. Very few people actually care about achieving any kind of significant change in such an organisation - many are happy to work 9-to-5 and just do what they're told (and do as little as possible). Policies are designed for exactly these people.

In an ideal world every worker would actually give a damn about their work and innovate in their own little area of responsibility. But it turns out that the way things are structured doesn't encourage this sort of behaviour. It's very hard to pay someone more than a lazy person with the same job title if they have the same job title.

I acknowledge your point about how people in large organisations will often look to better themselves at the expense of the company rather than seek to better the company and then hope for commensurate reward. I could talk about that for some time, but it wasn't really in the scope of my reply above. I do understand that many people act in this way. I could talk all day about why individuals might pursue goals different from those they're actually paid for but I'll skip it for now.

Coming back around to your point (per paragraph 3), I'd have to say that I do understand (as much as an individual can) the nature of large companies. My "company" is the fourth largest employer in the world and figures for how many people work for us tend to vary. However, it's somewhere between 1 and 2 million people. We have a very developed notion of "corporate culture" where I work :-)

My original point was that all companies do have a culture, as do all groups of people. Past a certain size it is always beneficial (to the shareholders) to ensure that the individuals within your company do not act as individuals so much but instead act in a way aligned to your corporate goals.

I did glance at the document you linked to but I don't really see the point of reading it all just to reply to your comment :-)
Not a Obama defender by any stretch, but he did have to deal with the largest financial crisis I've ever witnessed.
"The hotel industry is regulated for the same reason taxis are regulated."

Yes -- to drive up prices for the cartels who control entry into the market.