skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that the bundling on PCs have gotten much better in recent years. I bought a Packard Bell laptop for my dad, turned it on, chose the windows language and basic setup, waited half an hour for it to do its thing, and then it was good to go. An almost clean Windows 7 Home Premium, the only extra stuff on it was a 30-day Microsoft something trial, a 30-day Norton trial, and... that's it. And it's not even hard to remove those things if you don't want them.

So the PC experience has gotten a lot better in recent years. I don't know why though, perhaps the industry learned? Perhaps it's not worth it to pre-load it with crap anymore?
sigh Inevitable, of course, but I've always secretly hoped that Google would try to take the more risky high road and work to invalidate the whole software patent system, or at least hugely correct it (e.g. 2-year patent lifespan, or something).

Maybe they still will, but their impetus to do so is diminished with every patent they acquire.
well in this case the tenant did not pay rent for 4 months, and instead rented it out on airbnb for those months and pocketed the change. If the tenant funneled the airbnb money into rent I'm sure it wouldn't be as big of a deal as it is now.
> Every single department was more likely to admit a woman than a man

Not quite; you can see several exceptions to this in the table in the article.

The key points of the partitioned data were:

No department was significantly biased against women.

Most departments had a statistically significant bias towards women.

It's interesting to note that the departments that ARE biased towards men have more female applicants; I wonder if being in a minority group for that department is an even more important confounding factor.
In today's terms, a printed publication is entirely below the fold.
I haven't downvoted, but I suspect the "she could have been broken into without AirBnB's influence anyway" is the anger-inducing part of your comment. I certainly don't like it.
\Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Emails leaked by #Antisec Anonymous
3-4k pesos per meal is already over 500k for one month, two people.

meal price * people * two meals day * 30 days

3k * 2 * 2 * 30 = 360k

other comments mention rent $300 (150~200k pesos?)
Maybe that correlates to experienced users often quoting community rules to the newbies that are breaking them.
New B2B startup, targeting other startups: http://schmetrics.com

Seems we've hit on a real need with our solution. It's testing super well, and we've quickly turned into a very lucrative business.

No time yet for design; we're a week old and only just now put up a website.

Let me know what you think!

kw
Ask AirBnB: Did you ask EJ to take down her blog post?
So far, I haven't seen any of the questions being answered in concrete terms, and there is alot of noise on the other threads, so I decided to ask the question separately: Did you ask EJ to take down her blog post?

Ideally, I would like a simple Yes or No.
It's not really that interesting, and the paradoxical/unexpected aspects of it go away once you start looking at everything through the lenses of conditional probability theory. e.g. http://uncertainty.stat.cmu.edu/ goes over it as early as chapter 2.
I need to convince pg that an open source Dwarf Fortress implementation is worth funding. Either that, or figure out how to build a cryptocurrency around it so that all of those Bitcoin miners can help simulate my fortress when its deflationary period starts.
MIT researchers develop sun-free photovoltaics
Could you give us HNers a more technical breakdown of "how does it work"? I'm curious.
If you have $1 and don't have a mortgage or other debts
This is another example of Arrington's increasingly low-grade "journalistic" standards. I wonder whether there are slander laws for sins of omission. Regardless, this, along with other recent infractions (like the @catarina bs), makes me want to check TC completely off my daily reading list. It is like the TMZ of the tech world.
Someone's not telling us the whole story, and it's unclear whether that someone is the company or EJ. (Or maybe even the police).

Whatever the case, Airbnb increases its PR risk the more people it puts in contact with EJ. It should have assigned one person to talk to her, so as to keep the story straight and maintain a consistent line of communication with EJ. And that person should have been a founder / C-level exec from the get go.

You could argue that a co-founder's time, especially in the middle of a giant financing round, makes the opportunity cost too high. Nonsense. The opportunity cost of the PR hit, versus the potentially massive positive PR of a crisis turnaround, is nigh incalculable. Possibly even worth tens of millions in intangible value and impact on future growth.

Take a page from the old 1980s-1990s Disney playbook on crisis management. Whenever a big PR fiasco popped up at the theme parks -- which was often -- Michael Eisner was the face of the crisis management effort. Now, obviously Michael Eisner himself wasn't personally up all night working exclusively on the crisis in question. No doubt he had a team on the case, feeding him his talking points. But he was the single public face of the company in all communications related to the crisis. Not some PR flack, or some customer service rep. Not some vice president. The CEO himself. It counted for quite a lot, even at times when it was bullshit.

(Note, of course, that I would never advocate the use of bullshit, especially in the EJ case).
Every time I think I understand the world, something like this happens. The only response I have to this is (without the question mark):

what
I find it helpful to see the list of mods in a given subreddit. Also, that's where the "Submit Link" button shows up on all but the front page.
The News Is Not Getting Better ... There have been reports of an unexpected side effect (vasogenic edema) in several trials, for drugs that work through completely different mechanisms.

It sounds like we could be on the verge of understanding something fundamental about alzheimers. I'd say that's fantastic news in the long-term.
IIRC, google pays like 4% taxes and apple like 25%.
Being from the upper midwest, I always considered "the South" anything south of the Mason-Dixon Line plus W.Va and Kentucky. Wow this is off-topic.

Little gems of insight like Simpson's paradox are why I studied statistics.
Pomodoro, reduce eye strain, GTD
I don't like turntable. While the idea is appealing (streaming music for friends or strangers), the UI is awful. There's too much color and illustrations are not helping. I would be happy to help if founders are reading this.
Facebook bug policy: Stick head in sand
I wouldn't be surprised if they start seeing legal trouble soon if it hasn't started already. I would gladly pay money to use it, if it comes to that, as I haven't had this much fun with a site for a very long time.
Landlords do this routinely. The last time I signed a new housing lease, part of the lease agreement was an agreement to allow the state association of landlords to share data about my history as a renter. Since I have a clean history, no problem. If I'm ever in a position to rent out housing units, I sure don't want to rent them out to people who have a KNOWN propensity to trash them. Nor do I want to rent to a renter with an established history of stiffing landlords on rent payments.
The problem with heatmaps like this is that they don't actually give any information to what is the cause of the changed attention. Has the attention span become shorter, has the knowledge of where the better posts are and how to identify them become internal or is regular visitor to reddit simply not interested in too many stories because they know they come back in a few minutes?

Only with some causal correlation between user behaviour and your site you can change your site to adapt to your users. I really would like to see more research on this.
From EJ's account, it does sound like "her account got switched from 'customer service' to 'damage control'", and that it happened the day of her first blog post. I have no doubt that's how she feels.

But EJ is a person who is still, by her own descriptions, hurt and angry. She's paraphrasing many communications down to just the excerpts that explain her feelings.

It's easy for misunderstandings to multiply. A recent less-emotional example was the Steve Yegge speech. He thought he said he was resigning from a project, based on context and word choice many thought he was resigning from Google.

If communicating over email and the phone with a person you've never met, who's still emotionally suffering, the potentials for hurtful misunderstandings are much higher.

You might say things that you think are reassuring/hopeful, that instead sound indifferent. When you ask, "are you OK and do you have a place to stay?", and get an answer like, "I'm set for the next few days and then have other friends to talk to", you might think things are settled, where the answerer is really just putting on a strong facade. If you close with, "contact us if you need anything else", you might think you've left an open door for all other needs, and will hear if there are any, when in fact she needs and expects more check-ins about her well-being. And so forth.

It's wrong to condemn someone's tone based on the accounts of one aggrieved side of the communication.
Knockout Style Data-Bind Attributes For Backbone
Another vico convert from Textmate here. There are still some rough edges, but overall a pleasant experience. Surprisingly Mac-like for an editor that is fundamentally un-Maclike. It's been my main editor for two weeks, and I don't feel like going back to TM as my main text editor.

The biggest change (other than the fact that it's now primarily vi modal behavior rather than MacOS) is the missing find in project command. I get by with the find cli command, but it would be great if vico had a dialog-driven Find command as well.

Bonus is I'm becoming much more fluid at vi/vim which pays off just about everywhere.
> vacation houses

Renting out your apartment to include all of your worldly belongings, not a vacation-purposed structure, or loaning your car to a complete stranger through a scaled web application is a relatively new phenomenon and the normals, who often view their vacation lodgings as part of the experience, simply do not participate in this type of activity as AirBnB wishes to scale. It's a very new and unique concept.

I'm shocked as well and I'm sure that incidents and misunderstanding have already occurred in the past and they've obviously been able to deal with them. And I'll bet that the AirBnB crew are shocked at what they're seeing right now, given the exposure that two blog posts have been able to generate.

Spats between businesses and customers rarely get this type of hype from a venerable institution like the FT this early in the story. This is the kind of exposure that you plan and pay for.
I really don't mean to imply pg is being dumb or anything like that — my experience is that even intelligent people tend to trust what their friends tell them. His comments seem to indicate that he hasn't been involved with the situation (which makes sense) and he's just repeating what he's heard from the AirBnB guys.

I don't know, she could be lying. But she has little incentive to do so. It's possible that somebody might give up a free house and become a transient just so they could trash-talk AirBnB, but it would be deeply weird. But a business owner spinning the facts to the benefit of his business? That would be deeply normal. Some might even argue it's his job. And a smart guy not extensively checking up on his friends when they tell him something? Again, that's normal.

Anyway, I'm not trying to say that we have to assume AirBnB is lying. We don't have a lot of evidence, so it makes sense to be tentative. But it seems unfair to very non-tentatively accuse EJ of lying when the facts seem to be on her side at best and on nobody's side at worst. You asked why people were downvoting, and I thought it was a fair question, so those are my thoughts.
"But the sheer levels of emotion she's experiencing over an event where, basically, her stuff got trashed, suggests to me that she probably had so many emotional stability issues to begin with that..."

Being traumatized by someone violating your home, privacy, and personal life is not evidence of "emotional stability issues", it's a perfectly natural and common reaction.

I think you're seriously overestimating the extent to which everyone else in the world's mind works just like yours. You may be too cool and rational to get upset at this experience (or think you are, at least), but that doesn't mean everyone else is--or should be.
I don't know if I'd call the textbook publishers parasites. Books with small audiences are more expensive to print.

Isn't a parasite something that takes resources against the host's will while providing nothing in return? How is that true here?

As with music, authors that appeal to large numbers of people have the most leverage. When distribution is very costly per copy, the take home for the producer will be reduced. Distribution is a real activity that needs to be performed. There's nothing parasitic about it.
This is an example of an anecdotal piece of evidence, and without a close examination of the "idiosyncrasies" and your definition of "practical", it is difficult to have a discussion. I recognize, though, that people have different opinions on what language is most familiar/useful to them, and at the end of the day, people get work done and make money, whatever they use.
SQL is pronounced as sequel, so I'd definitely go with uncool. Even though this actually can be quite cool.

Looking forward to explaining to a client that yes, we just need to run this one uncool query to get the report ;-)
agreed - i think they could make considerable $ on affiliate traffic with iTune/Amazon if they improved the process to bookmark songs and purchase later
That, and the lack of constant constants (class workarounds don't do it for me) are the only two "complaints" for me.

On the whole I really like significant white space (despite my suspicions before taking up the language). With a brace-blocked language like C, indentation can fool you into thinking there's a block when there really isn't.

This is very unlikely to happen in Python. A section of code that looks like a block due to indentation is virtually certain to be a single coherent block. I love that.
Yes, but if your payment gateway is going to shut you off based on this nonsense you call them up and explain the situation to them and then they investigate. There are too many parties involved for this kind of willful ignorance to be the last word.

I dunno, maybe it's true, but for me the story still isn't adding up.
Done, let's see what you've built.
tl;dr version - pirate gangs sell stimulants to pirates on 'credit' which they can work off with their piracy.

I love the title, it captures basically the whole article.

I am also entertained by folks who feel like its newsworthy that economic relationships in crime are the same as they are in non-criminal enterprises. I explained it once that economic relationships are like algebra, they make no judgement on the numbers they represent, they simply exist in form.

People were appalled and astonished by giving bonuses to people in the financial industry in firms that were participated in the disasterous policies there. And the argument was that you want qualified people running these things and if we don't pay these sorts of bonuses they won't come work for us. And Bank of America was trying to find a new CEO [1] in Oct 2009 under the imposed rules (because they had bailout money) and made zero headway on filling the position [2][3] even though the salary it was offering was quite high.

So pirates are developing their business models through experience, trial, and errors. And the economics prices out the cost of capital, the cost of labor, and the required distribution to keep it all running smoothly.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125545433529782763.html

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/17/news/companies/bofa_ceo/inde...

[3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395490457459...
The victim is such a great writer Roomarama should hire her for copy and PR
You could also claim that Sparql is already "a standard query language for NoSQL"

http://decentralyze.com/2010/03/09/rdf-meets-nosql/
It also happens with every Apple or Google press release though.
>The story Arrington wrote yesterday about Airbnb not offering to help was bullshit. He asked a company spokesman what Airbnb was doing to help her. The spokesman, who'd been told by their lawyers that he couldn't go into detail about that because of the precedent said "I can't comment on that." So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said "Well, unless you tell me I'm going to write that you're not willing to do anything for her." And he did. Really not cool.

Sounds like legitimate grounds for pursuing a case of libel.
Would you folks consider reviewing the assertions made by uxmovement.com sometime?
Is anyone else finding it interesting to see how a bootstrapped startup is implementing tighter security standards and accepts slower growth as a consequence while the startup du hour, fueled by massive amounts of other people's money, is pursuing growth at all cost and with little regard for the consumer? Reminds me a little of the YouTube founders who wanted to grow and be acquired as fast as possible and willingly accepted pirated content.

I think this has nothing to do with Roomorama taking advantage of the situation for their own profit. If anything, these guys have every right to be pissed off that a careless competitor is tarnishing the whole industry.
Airbnb set to become a Social Media Case Study
This woman has also had her entire faith in humanity destroyed.

I think option one is more likely.
Yeah - wouldn't it be interesting if the Google news style grouping of all articles on a topic also had a single threaded discussion about the topic as well? (complete with upvotes or +1's of exceptional comments and analysis from the user base).

I think one of the issues we'd have to contend with is the tremendous drive that the publishers have to generate new column inches. They really want to squeeze out just one more pageview (or competing web pages who each want their first pageview).

There will be a lot of incentive to figure out how to not be tagged in the "new grouping" sort of system.

If you head on over to reddit, they've got a great visual description of the "duplicate news" issue http://i.imgur.com/WANc1.jpg I think it's kindof relevant to this discussion.
In fact it makes one question whether or not to have a conversation. Meaning, do I want to even do business this way? Will they treat me that same way as a customer? I get the vibe, I do. But if you really want to help businesses (B2B in your post), then you have to make it business friendly. Startups are a business and I suspect that is your market. But that rough approach may give you trouble expanding beyond that market.
At one point Sony offered a no-crapware option on some Vaio laptops. Until a PR shitstorm broke out, they were charging $50 extra. One can only imagine how much they're earning per-unit on kickbacks.
a matchmaker app so my friends can help me actually get a date
China Blasts US On Debt Ceiling
But home invasions happen every day! This is a fact. And the likelihood only increases when you travel and leave your home... I'm not saying it would have happened if she had never been involved with Airbnb, I'm saying though that it's actually to her benefit it happened through Airbnb because now there's a intermediary offering to help her... Isn't that generally a good thing, someone saying, "Hey we'll get you through this"? If it had been a case of normal home invasion while she was away I doubt it'd be as high profile as this case is and as a result I doubt anyone would be offering to pick up the pieces for her.

It's awful it happened to her. But it's also awful to lay the blame on Airbnb and say they've done effectively nothing to help her. That begins to look an awful lot like someone is trying to make them look bad... I'm not sure that's how I feel, but I understand the detractors of her story more now that details are emerging.

Like all things: clearly there are multiple sides to this story, it isn't as cut and dry as Airbnb heartlessly ignoring one of their customer's awful cases in the name of profit.
A gazillion already-made programs (for example data visualization tools, analytics software, etc.) speak only SQL. If the choice is between reinventing the wheel for each NoSQL DB vs. using a SQL DB (such as http://luciddb.org/ [1] and soon postgres with their recent introduction of foreign data wrappers[2]) as an intermediate layer or even a full data mart that does what you want query-wise, a lot of people want to save time and just use the SQL DB. (Why do you think Hive exists?) There's more to DBs than storing user data for cat picture sharing sites...

[1] Disclaimer: I wrote a preliminary CouchDB connector for Lucid that'll get released separately with the upcoming 0.9.4 release.

[2] I believe one of the first postgres foreign data wrappers was around Twitter. So you move some API accessing code from an application layer that realistically only your application can talk to, to the DB layer, and now everything that can talk to the DB layer can access the data. (Unless they want it raw, then they'll get it from Twitter.)
Vacation rentals (through Homeaway et al.) are typically set up just for that reason, and thus have combo boxes, carry some insurance, involve a cleaning fee.

AirBnb democratized the process by allowing anyone to rent out any portion of their property, contributing to supply and more competitive pricing, but with this set up you get into weird situations where owner's valuables and jewelry end up in the next room.
I find it hard to believe they offered to buy her a new place and stuff before this story blew up, that just seems like bad business.

It seems like it would easily fix the PR nightmare if they sent all of their evidence of these offers to the media outlets which would quickly discredit EJ and put an end to this.
Yeah... Redis could probably use a subset of SQL, though, but I don't know if it would be practical.
How does this sort of legal uncertainty factor into the way investors view a product/company? On one hand, I feel like the risk could make it a less attractive investment since its an extra liability.

Or would it be a reason for founders to ask for more money, under the idea that they need a warchest of funds to fight expensive lawsuits?

On the other hand, being in a legal grey area could be seen as a barrier to entry for people who don't want a potential litigation nightmare hovering over their heads.
That's what it sounds like… Unfortunately, we've been on the verge of understanding it for decades now and we're still spinning in place. Long-term good news is no help to those of us who are watching our loved ones die before our very eyes today. It is a grim subject to research… so much work has gone into it and yet we still cannot even reliably diagnose it.

Not trying to be hopeless here: just remember to thank your local Alzheimer's researcher, the job has not been that rewarding to date.
MIT Startup Aims to Make Data Centers Efficient with Power Conversion Tech
I think you're the only one that thinks that -- substituting one disease for another is not really a cure.

Now, if those numbers would show something like 50% chance, that would be much better.
an investment property is and should be treated differently than your own living property. I think this is the main point of confusion for most people. Most of these other services that do vacation rentals are usually renting out investment properties or timeshares. Its a huge difference.
Personally, I look at it quite often while I'm waiting for RES¹ to load a new page of content. But I assume RES wasn't used in this test.

¹ Reddit Enhancement Suite (http://reddit.honestbleeps.com/)
how many times can I apply?