skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's going to be a game changer is when stories start breaking about owners who rent out their space as a way to lure in people for killing or torturing them.

I agree 100%. However I ask say how in the world did you think about this?
They also have a spiffy web-site and app that does a nice job showing off properties and assisting you in finding the properties you want.

But yeah, they are essentially just middlemen. They benefit from keeping the buyer and seller apart until the deal is done and they get their cut.
Sheesh - it was meant as a bit of a joke - hence the :)
The rules also mention:

If the total prizes won for any drawing, exceed 200% of the net sales for that drawing the prize amounts will be based upon a formula detailed in the Rules and Regulations or Administrative Bulletins issued thereunder.

which has to add a little FUD into the thinking.
First, I didn't write this, I just found it and submitted it because I thought it was cool.

I didn't have time to check all of them to see how this differs, but I compared it to 1140grid and found that Columnar uses numerals instead of spelled-out numbers (i. e. 8 instead of eight) in class names and that it has more IE6 hacks. That's enough difference IMO to write a new one, and I'm sure I could find more material differences in a more thorough examination.

Also the market isn't saturated for fluid CSS frameworks (not even close) so if someone makes a nice website for one and can get more people to use it, I think it's a good contribution to the web!
Somehow, I doubt USA Today will be thrilled about being manipulated that way...

Somehow, I doubt USA Today will even notice. They get served up far more egregious statements on a daily basis.

And, by the way, the statement is literally true, regardless of the number of prior incidents (within reasonable bounds). They aren't claiming a perfect 2million night streak in the quote-- rather, "a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good." If they had had 2000 prior bad incidents, they could easily argue that a 99% problem-free rate demonstrates that "people are fundamentally good."
The claim is they're a craigslist where you don't get to find out who the other person is until after the payment processing, which would seem to most people to be negative value.

Exactly this. The first blogger to go public with a report of a place being trashed by an Airbnb guest pointed out that with Craigslist, it is EASIER to contact the guest individually beforehand. Airbnb subtracts value from the typical transaction that would be arranged on Craigslist. That's because Craigslist makes its money from help-wanted ads and a few other ad categories, and doesn't need to monetize transactions for short-term stays in people's homes to keep right on making money.

Airbnb claims to be a force for disintermediating the short-term rental industry, but it desires to be market-leading intermediary. It isn't offering a market-leading level of customer service after a problem happens. Nor is Airbnb doing as much to prevent problems as other startup companies in the same space--several of those companies take much greater care to verify guest identities before setting up the transaction. What Airbnb appears to want, compared to other market participants, is to be paid as an intermediary without providing any particular value as an intermediary. That's nice work if you can get it, but that's a business model that is ripe for disruption and not a business model that I would invest in.

After edit: I hope everyone is reading the newly submitted article here for the details of what the Airbnb autoresponder message replying to the "urgent" help email address at Airbnb looked like not long ago. As the host thought after his place was trashed, "This freaked me out when I was frazzled. Hundreds of millions in venture financing, millions of dollars in fees, and no 24-hour help desk for emergencies? What am I paying them the exorbitant fees for?"
Asana tech talk: rethinking web app development
Ask HN: Hacker/Startup Living Spaces in NYC?
I'm hoping to find out about any communities, hacker houses, or the like that have space for startup founders trying to live very minimally in NYC while working on their startup. Any leads are much appreciated!
Yes. That was fixed in r31875 which was committed before the 1.9.3 branch was made.

http://svn.ruby-lang.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi?view=revision&revision=31875
Also, if you're already using rvm, don't forget to do a `rvm get head` before. I always forget to do this.
Ha ha! A fool and his money are soon parted. Anyone stupid enough to waste real currency on bitcoins deserves what he gets. Bitcoins are the modern equivalent of speculating on "limited edition" Beanie Babies.
The truth hurts so I expect all the bitcoin fanboys will downvote me now. Go ahead do your worst. :-)
Pros: generally "feels" faster than 10.6
- repairing permissions seems to stick whereas 10.6 would always have 10000 broken permissions.
cons: - Removed ability to use resize icons by clicking and dragging slider bar. now you have to set in view options
- stubborn settings like having windows reappear upon restart despite disabling feature.
- you STILL have to get plugins like totalfinder to set up finder with tabs. default is like opening up a new browser window each time you want to go to a new link.
Video:

http://asana.com/2011/07/reactivity-sync-and-cosimulation-a-...
Let's not forget even four-star hotels are not immune to room-invasion burglary, as Alex Trebek learned in SF last week:

http://www.baycitizen.org/crime/story/alex-trebek-crime-figh...
People will dv you for any reason. I stopped trying to rationalize it many moons ago.

Edit: c'mon, you guys can do better than four downvotes.
Same story submitted several hours ago, which a great deal of discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828122
I don't have an iOS device, so I can't comment on the app itself.

The flavour the site's design adds is excellent. Major props for that.

I think it'd be cool if the background was `position: fixed;`.

I also really like the social aspect on the site ("Super awesome monsters created by our community."). I think a "monster of the day" would be an excellent way to get people motivated and involved (as sort of a competition).

Judging from the video, there doesn't seem to be an undo button in the app. Seems like one should be there.

Sadly, the site loaded slowly for me (~15 seconds; I'm on a low-bandwidth connection), and in that time, things were shifting position and some text was unreadable.
I'm starting to think that Chrome might be one of Googles greatest contributions to human kind, just because the way all browser vendors have been forced to focus on speed since it's arrival.

Edit: And de-cluttered interfaces as well with better utilization of screen real estate.
This place is pretty sweet! I know Borski personally and he'll make sure you are taken care of and that everyone's happy. He's a man of drive, passion, and integrity. If you ask nicely, he'll make you pancakes in the morning. :)
Sorry about that, I missed it.
Apple has spent decades working on its reputation. Success today depends more on what you were doing 5, 10 years ago.
When you're doing performance optimization, C++ is basically C. You restrict yourself to an almost C subset and maybe end up doing some clever stuff with templates.
Two words: mapping structures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_mathematics has a worked out example for a lottery that involves picking 6 distinct numbers from {1..49}. It would be straightforward to adapt that to Cash WinFall.
That AirBnb page was added like a week or two ago in response to the EJ affair.
> Might have even been the same meth c[r]ooks.

That's what I thought as well (both are SF Bay Area), though it's only a guess. The combination of meth-heads and identity theft seems weird to be repeated. I would even tentatively guess at the meth-heads trashing apts being a cover for someone else who got the idea of using AirBnB to acquire documents for an identity-theft ring, but who knows, it's possible there are actually meth-heads who are also into identity theft, or who at least know someone to sell the documents to.
Yes, although historically it's clear that the payouts make it profitable to buy tickets on rolldown days, the actual formula used to calculate the payouts was opaque. I heard that one of the lottery syndicates actually made a request under the Massachusetts Public Records Law to get the lottery commission to reveal the formula, which they eventually did.
And that exact benefit is the source of trouble.
Try reading the post.
to disrupt the industry run by government and the mob?
<3 pancakes.
So, it was meant to be a joke. Sadly, it wasn't a funny joke. And it adds nothing to the conversation. Hence, downvotes.

HN observers often assume we don't have a sense of humor around here. Actually, I've seen a number of funny comments upvoted, and have done so many times myself. It's closer to the truth to say that most people aren't nearly as funny as they think they are.
My wife and I watch a lot of murder mystery movies as well as true crime stuff. AirBNB is a "48 Hours" episode waiting to happen. Ann Curry and Keith Morrison will have a field day with it.
> If she has received offers for help, why hasn't she taken it?

That might depend on the strings attached to said offers.
Why doesn't the attacker have the key? It's a public key cryptosystem, so we should assume the attacker has the public key.

The attacker can encrypt all 128 ascii characters under the public key that was used to encrypt the whole string. The fact that the author was missing (which was pointed out later) was that two encryptions of the same byte under the same key will produce different ciphertexts.
That's the point I'm making - MRI is slow.
Why would he mention HBGary when the fine folks at the Chertoff Group would be happy to help you with that.

(http://chertoffgroup.com/cgroup/2010/03/general-michael-v-ha...)
I'm also shocked that EJ did not avail herself of it.
If I were to write a programming language
You should guess that; since it's what she said. I don't know why cletus didn't pick up on that.
Also, depending on the damage done the house might be fit for occupation until some work it done.
Someone's been watching Hostel.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if there have already been cases of hosts faking complaints to AirBnB about "that guest stole X Y and Z"-- but because they're only after money in the first place, they're a lot easier to shut up.
...is that not what I'm saying? Your grandfather took a situation where he had an advantage and leveraged it to make money. That's what programmers should be doing, too, if they want to make money.
She won't be the last either, unless Airbnb makes some sort of fundamental changes.

Not only is all of this press bad in terms of basic PR, but now the word is out (to those so inclined who weren't tech savvy enough to previously realize it even existed) that Airbnb is a good place to rent a temporary meth lab as long as you're capable of some basic identity theft.
There's lots of ways to protect yourself when renting to strangers. The fact that EJ and others do not avail themselves of the necessary insurance, etc. is what's reckless.
Don't forget about the inevitable hidden cameras...
Speed kills!
Python ships with a standard datetime class which is powerful enough to represent time, and there is a ubiquitous module, dateutil, which extends it to do nearly anything people need to do with dates regularly.

Additionally, one would normally use an array of names and index it:

days = ["Mon", "Tue", "Wed", "Thu", "Fri", "Sat", "Sun"]
that_day_you_wanted = days[x]
Daniel Pink also has a book called Drive which goes into this in detail. Highly recommended read.
FTA: "Many successful people are persuaded not to try. For most people, a steady $500K/yr is enough to keep them happy, especially if they are protected from the risks of the business."

I'm pretty sure he's starting out making $500k (as a quant, I guess), not $42k. Other sections of the article imply that he was working at in finance and then decided to go out on his own.
If you were gathering documents for an identity theft ring, would you go on a juvenile and pointless rampage in the houses you pilfered? Probably not, since that would only tip off the person being targeted to lock their credit. This is absolutely small time amateur shenanigans.

Imagine how the whole deal sounds from the angle of a drug addicted person who is comfortable committing petty/medium property crimes to fund their lifestyle. Unsuspecting urban/suburban dwellers will let you in their houses, unmonitored, for days or weeks, leaving them full of valuables and personal information, in exchange for a small fee that will never even be paid? Sounds like a criminal paradise to me.
Oh, don't worry, I'm sure there's going to be a glut of these stories queued up for about 2am Tuesday morning.
Maybe it is. Windows isn't, and I can't see it getting there.
Ottima guida di Londra
Una buona guida di Londra scritta da chi ci vive. Gli articoli sono ancora pochi perchè il sito è nuovo, ma la qualità sembra molto buona. È gratis.
Homeowner's and renter's insurance are not the only types of insurance there are. Who insures traditional BnB's?
We could be charitable and assume that he graduated from high school and college in 6 years, and was immediately hired into a well-paying job at age 20. With four years of pre-tax income at $140k, $200k in savings isn't out of the question. (Assuming a 30% marginal tax rate we get a post-tax savings rate of 51%.) Not typical in the slightest, but not impossible, especially if you're from a pampered background.

That aside, claims like this show a lack of perspective and the slightest overconfidence can cut everyone down.
I love the design,congrats! Although I don't have an iOS device to test it on
The Boston Globe isn't local?
Theoretically you can work to make money, but what if nobody's hiring?

Seriously, was that your best argument?

Supply and demand. Right now there is a demand for BTC which means people can supply them for a cost.
Question: is NYC as strong a place to found a startup as SF/the valley?

Obviously the valley is where many companies are hqed, but NYC's urban atmosphere is much more appealing to me than suburban California.
Does anyone know how those settings are discovered? I've tried running 'strings' on a few binaries but haven't uncovered anything.
I made this point again.. as carr did in a recent article. All of you need to stop vilifying these people coming forward. She did nothing wrong except to believe all the hype of how great it is to rent out your living space to a complete strangers. Her only mistake was believing all this hype of disruption without understanding that there are reasons why hotels, and investment properties have certain laws and insurances to protect their businesses. Yes its time that people know and understand the possibilities of what can happen by renting out your personal living space to strangers. Ultimately what happens to Airbnb is up to them, but we need to stop placing and shifting blame on these people for using their service.
This looks great, apart from the fact that the height appears to be only 105 cm. Can you confirm?
And that's not even factoring in the cost of car ownership, which is at least 4-5x what you pay for a monthly subway pass.
Meth addicts seem to like identity-theft, so that correlation is not especially unique. See for example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us/11meth.html

(Identity theft is also the perfect precursor to evading what payment- and identity- checks do exist in an AirBnb-like system.)
Huge Adwords Loophole is Victimizing My Site
This already happens on classified ad sites, people regularly go into strangers homes to purchase a wide range of goods with close to zero pre-checks. And yes people do get killed when they turn up at someone's house with 5k in cash to buy a car.

Doesn't seem to have stopped the classified business from working...
Facebook Vs Google Plus | Google Plus Users
AirBnB never should have set up such an unsafe system, but surely the decisions of the renters are at fault as well. I personally would never even consider allowing people who were not carefully screened by myself to have free reign with my property.

I'm pretty sure this is getting large enough to garner the attention of politicians. That may be a positive thing, since AirBnB and their clients are apparently not taking care of safety and procedures adequately on their own.
It doesn't matter that Airbnb renters are not businesses.

There are a number of ways in which this reduces to an insurance problem.

First, Airbnb could purchase liability insurance to indemnify themselves against claims made by people like EJ. This would enable them, under certain circumstances, to make generous payouts on occasion while maintaining fixed expenses.

Second, Airbnb could easily offer optional insurance to their customers (in this case, the hosts) whereby a small fee is paid for each night's stay, and damages are paid up to a set amount, with proper documentation. (Naturally, Airbnb would then, in this case, attempt to recover the money from the renter who committed the damages.)

I see no legal obstacles to such solutions, nor any reason to think it would be too expensive. Believe me, you can get insurance for pretty much anything, and the rate setting follows predictable patterns.

Insurance may very well be the whole answer here, and I imagine we are discussing it because a) Airbnb isn't adequately insured, and b) they screwed up the customer relations/PR side of this one enormously.
I thought it too when I heard about the service and how little vetting is done (i.e. not, it is all left to the users).

A fair number of rape/murder/other cases involve an unwitting victim being lured into situations that they naively (or just incorrectly) think should be safe. It is far from a daily occurrence in any given area but such cases are in the national news often enough (and fictional realms also) to figure in the minds of the more paranoid!

1. think of using AirBnB, 2. perfectly healthy paranoia kicks in and starts listing worst-case scenarios, 3. book into a large well known chain hotel instead...
"But there's something "off" about EJ's position here. Why is a vandalized apartment leaving her homeless?"

Put yourself in the position of a person who has just had their apartment burglarized (remember: they stole her personal documents and valuables) and their keys stolen by probable drug addicts. Also, remember that the police have arrested one of the vandals, but probably not all of them.

Ignoring, for the moment, that the place would be unlivable for a while, wouldn't you also be wary of middle-of-the-night retribution (or just a repeat performance) from a bunch of psychotic drug users? I would, and I'm not exactly a fearful guy.

There are many sketchy details about this story, but EJ's fear of retribution isn't one of them.
That method of entering accents seems really backwards to me. Why not a Compose key?
Paradoxically, these incidents could solidify AirBnb's lead. If they've been clumsy in the past; they can't afford to anymore. They have the money to implement a leading solution, and they have to become synonymous with the best protections to get the most listings/searches.

And, the components of a potential solution – costly one-time background checks, longer reputation histories, insurance pooling, deep experience with all abuse variants – all benefit from scale. Participant fear enhances the winner-take-all nature of the market... if the leader can best assuage that fear.
And here I thought you were going to mention O.J.
While that is true, robbery is not the crime EJ is describing.
They did steal things from her, but they also set out to totally destroy her apartment and take things of sentimental value to her. I'm not sure what that sort of crime would be called, but it's clearly more sociopathic than a regualr robbery.
I'm not sure that a standard homeowner's insurance policy would pay out in a case such as this. Airbnb is putting hosts in the position of a business; one of the services they could (and should) be providing is some form of insurance (for an added fee, of course.)
Or it might depend on Airbnb offering to pay for physical damages and "EJ" holding out for tort-level compensation.
Interesting; thanks for the link. That's kind of a fascinating connection between drug chemistry, socioeconomic settings, and crime. Given that background, two meth-use-with-ID-theft incidents don't seem as weird to find in an AirBnB-like setting, which seems almost perfect for the kinds of people described in that article.
That's interesting... I wonder why there is no GAAP measure for accounting for pass-through revenue. I can see it both ways (this problem exists for Groupon as well, who counts the full amount of the voucher as revenues even though they pass half of it on.
Why is the Facebook like button on the lightbox of video rather than the front page? After I closed the lightbox, I tried to find the `like' button but failed.
"kwote" means "amount"
It's just inelegant. A better approach would be an array where you return the content at the index.
It sounded like you were making a special case for being a software developer (since you tied it specifically to a CS curriculum). If your statement is simply, "Having useful skills that other people don't pays." then, well, uhh, duh.
You're the one drawing the lines here, not 'cletus. The comment you're responding to goes out of its way to attribute possible fault to Airbnb and is comparatively ginger about what "EJ" (or, far more likely, the legal representation "EJ" has almost certainly acquired by now) may be doing tactically.

I don't have a strong opinion about this story, except that the "red team / blue team" mentality commenters have about this issue is driving me fucking nuts. You don't have to think anything negative about "EJ" to think that we're not getting the whole story from her. All you have to think is, she (very sanely) got a tenacious lawyer.
Not just 'no vetting' is done, but they actively discourage you from making your own outside contact with the other party until you've already paid. Craigslist doesn't go that far - they do hide your email, but they don't stop you from trying to do your own vetting.
I can recommend layershift.com. I have a couple of VPS with them. Great service and support and based in the UK.
By building a market for buyers and sellers of otherwise unused low marginal cost assets they are clearly creating value. You can argue that by not vetting they invite random disaster which may be more expensive than the cost of the vetting itself. But you can't say they are not creating value overall.
While you're right, it hasn't stopped them, "classifieds" have largely been eroded by things like Craigslist, which do allow you to do a bit of research and contact on your own. They don't prevent it. And I typically am not paying for the privilege of meeting my ransacker/assailant.

What's more, CL (and others) actively try to scare you with warnings about how not to get scammed and such. ABNB doesn't seem to take that approach, trying to wrap the whole thing up as a comfy/pleasing experience.
Ok, I'd love to hear this. What things make sense to govern at a quater-dozen timezone scale?
Whoops. Good point, when we swapped the site from the holding page to the launched state we forgot to add that back. I'll have to fix that.
Nope. I'm just as pasty and blond as he is, and that was my first thought as well. I would have put him at ~35, but he definitely doesn't look like he's fresh out of college.
> it's possible there are actually meth-heads who are also into identity theft

Not just possible, it's actually quite common, and has been for awhile. For example, see this article from 2004:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4460349/