skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This topic isn't going away, and it is the weekend, which means all the tech blogs are looking for something to write about - so I wouldn't be surprised if at least one blogger isn't following this up.
大拇指足球改单
Has Airbnb even claimed to have actually done anything? I've seen empty words and no action or even claim of action. Have I missed something?

The full story is pretty irrelevant. What we have is clearly sufficient to know that Airbnb doesn't have a clue how to handle this, either with regard to the particular customer, or the wider PR disaster.
tl;dr "Maybe, but somewhat homomorphic encryption definitely can be!"
The term "rant" is so wildly overused lately that it's lost virtually all meaning. Whether you agree with it or not, this is an argument, not a rant.
In almost all of these cases a State or local government is providing those things or could easily provide those things.

Very very few things make sense to govern at a scale the size of the continental US.
The premise is intriguing but seems pretty far fetched. Quora is better organized than the current web, so eventually it could become the framework of the web.

Maybe, but if it's not centralized around Quora, may not do them much good. The web itself will probably become better organized and Quora will just be one of the pioneers. Google+ is also better than the current mess of blogs, RSS feeds, twitters, facebooks in a way. But will it be the new web, instead of hosting your own blog you use G+? Or post on Quora?

I don't see it. These services could creep in under the hood through APIs but individual websites should be able to introduce new technologies faster and have an edge of over centralized services.
The only response that matters is the CEO's response. PG's response is, at the end of the day, an investor's response. It will always be construed as an investor's response
djcapelis,

Seems empirically like you are the most knowledgeable on the thread on this topic. Maybe you can help me understand the current state of this research a little better.

I understand that there are reference implementations that show fully homomorphic encryption in action but there is an efficiency issue, but just how severe is the inefficiency? To me practicality comes down to whether or not any application given current algorithms is worth that inefficiency and if it works at all it seems like there must be some edge use case where even the most severely inefficient implementation still meets a need.

So two questions for you-

What is the definition of 'practicality' at this point (i.e. how efficient does this need to be)?

What is the current efficiency (and how is it being measured, big O notation per key length?, something else) ?
It's a bit late to be wondering this at this point. A better question would be "What preparations did you make starting 10 years ago when you saw this year's events were inevitable." For me that answer is that it's been a lot of things. Among these are learning to grow my own food, how do canning, how to hunt and skin an animal, having a well dug, and drastically cutting my dependency on electricity and petroleum.
It's a rather compelling monologue until you realize it's published at Tech Crunch, a division of AOL that demonstrates much of the same behavior that AOL's Huff Post does, is run by a wanna-be Angel / VC, and regularly shills for vacuous startups who happen to have met the right TC writer over drinks.

Sure, there are problems in SV tech - and there always will be when people are making a lot of money. But when your paper is for the most part happy in a co-dependent relationship with all of this and only cries foul when your editor gets his feathers ruffled by someone like Paul Graham disputing their reporting - you're not doing any of us any particular favors.
Mediation was helped me with this problem. I don't do it in any religious context - it's like concentration practice. It also mellows me out.
Personally, I do not need "complete information" - whatever that is. I doubt I could express another opinion again if that was the standard.

Airbnb is on trial, I think, because people think they acted like jerks in trying to get someone to be quiet. Internet folk generally do not like people who try to silence others.

Regarding their actual obligations - as far as I'm concerned and legally, the risk is on the host. Of course, for their own benefit it'd probably be a good idea to help her out.
The parent comment was referring to the URL when he/she said "address". You obviously haven't actually tried the linked service.
Apparently, I can't do what I thought I could. So, I am going to delete this phone number shortly (I will go to bed at
~2230 (MST).

edit: removed.
In Australia, there's a much bigger market for lamb (meat) than there is for mutton.

The reason for this is that mutton is supposed to smell a bit funny, and lamb doesn't.

In any case, you can get some really tasty lamb dishes down under (e.g. my Mum's slow roasted lamb shanks).
I'm not sure I would call it an accomplishment. More like a happy accident, but in retrospect I should have been doing that sort of thing all the time.

Frustrated with my inability to find employment, I did a series of hacks which became really popular. One succeeded because I like hacks which produce pretty pictures and so do a million other blogs. Another involved AJAX, which was a hot buzzword at the time (2005), and that got attention from from employers, who started calling me out of the blue. Whereas a few months prior I'd washed out of an interview with a local website that did used car listings.

I was well-prepared for the mega-hyped trend that was AJAX and JavaScript (self-taught comp sci, graphic design, web experience), so I was lucky. I had to prove myself in other ways afterwards though. The point is, these days, having code out there that people can download and evaluate will at least get you through the front door.
I've always had a bizarre nostalgia for telegraph operators. When I was a Boy Scout as a kid, we had to learn both morse code and semaphores. I wonder if they still learn them today (I suspect not).

Edit: Yay, it looks like that merit badge still exists: http://meritbadge.org/wiki/index.php/Signaling
I think the significance of it is that the story has hit USA Today and AirBnB still hasn't done anything to make the victim happy.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? --Mark 8:36
@SomeCallMeTim
>I submit it would be better for everyone if there were a single cross-platform engine that everyone used.

>What would have been better is a library that abstracts away the fact that Android is its own unique OS, period. When I write code, I don't want it to be Android code, or iOS code, or WebOS code, or Windows [Mobile] code, or Linux code.
---

There are options out there. I'm one of those 3rd parties soon releasing a comprehensive middleware solution for app dev including a lot of game dev oriented effort that provides a clean abstraction layer via a component architecture that uses a large majority of advanced Java language features under the hood without sacrificing performance.

Keep a watch out for TyphonRT; drop me an email via the contact address and I'll be glad to discuss more and make sure you get early access. I'm aiming to get it out ASAP and before I give an all day game dev workshop at AnDevCon II in November. I suppose one thing that makes TyphonRT unique is that it's a tool, framework, and future platform (PaaS). At the heart of things you can pick and choose individual blocks of functionality (tool), or utilize the runtime framework (framework), and soon there will be optional PaaS features aiding Android and cross-platform dev in the coming year after launch.

Another Java based cross-platform effort which is similar in purpose though significantly different at the architecture level is libgdx. For C/C++ check out Battery Tech and the Proton SDK for similar cross-platform efforts (both of these with even more device coverage).

TyphonRT provides that layer of sugar you seek without losing performance and creating full cross-platform execution for OpenGL apps without changing a line of code for J2SE -> Android. TyphonRT is not limited to OpenGL though and can utilize any graphics API potentially allowing a hybrid UI, but the rest of an app still being cross-platform.

Having worked intensely with Android since v1.0 and the G1 hit my hands in Oct '08 I have more than a few stories on the difficulty of low level development / games, etc. across different OS and major device hardware generations. I've experienced first hand a good deal of general engineering blunders and have found and reported a few major ones myself (you know when big G fixes a bug immediately upon being reported you found a good one; the 3.0 & 3.1 / NIO immutable endian swap issue comes to mind!).

Middleware will mature and soon provide a lot that the Android SDK lacks for certain app development areas. In many ways the Android SDK while novel in several areas is still being developed from an old engineering model, but that is seemingly unavoidable for a large organization such as Google. There are of course additional inherent problems with tying the SDK to firmware, but such is life.

I do agree with your last point though that generally the SDK in addition to the particular ecosystem quirks that have occurred over time isn't exactly indicative of satisfying developers.
Related tidbit: the Spanish generally use the generic "carne" to mean red meat from cows. But there is also a specific word, "biztec", which is a corruption of the English "beefsteak".
Nothing. I don't rely on the government's debt for income. The world is not going to fall into anarchy. The dollar is not going to crash. We're not at a stalemate or a standoff. All we have is a game of progressive chicken. Each party is going to get as much as they can from the other and then pass a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
I don't understand the singling out of Web 2.0 as some kind of outlier in the history of capitalist enterprise. As if the Rothchilds & Morgans of the world were saintly characters who didn't see their customers the same way while they were coercing government entities to tip the scales in their favor.

The rest of the piece was fine, if not another instance of piling on. But I couldn't get over that initial thought.
Direct link to the project: http://github.com/etsy/deployinator
Anyone have these slides in a non-Flash format? I try to advance the slide and it just corrupts the display. Using flash to swap out static images. Dumbfounding.
I had no idea a "semaphore" meant something other than how it's used in programming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line
I looked at that challenge. Is it really that much harder than FizzBuzz? Seems like it requires more string manipulation and about the same level of mathematics as FizzBuzz.

Or am I falling victim to the effect where everything I know how to do looks easy?
I was going set up a startup to serve the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome community but, somehow, I never got around to it.
God says, "fallen delivered openly dangerous restraining disgraced
shaggy ungodliness irritate inserted gotten pg Prophet
liar Many institution Image cheerful bless boyish brackishness
silently Unto piece BOOK tender friend REMEDIES inspecting "
tldr: Find a role model and emulate.
It's exceedingly unlikely that any sort of survivalist scenarios will come to pass, so stockpiling is sort of pointless here. About the only thing that might make sense would be to diversify your investments to include some denominated in other currencies; but that's a good idea in these times in any case, regardless of default likelihood. In the (imho still unlikely) event of a default, though, the dollar crash will be relatively gentle, because China will not let the US dollar crash too fast or too deeply since we're still their main market.
The issue they have doesn't seem to be scaling, in that RoR is scaling linearly. But if you have hundreds of machines, raw performance saves real money, which means RoR is maybe not ideal for massive deployments and the JVM languages give you more performance on the same hardware. Though unless you're working on a top 50 site I wouldn't worry so much.
Amusingly, that's even a different definition for what I was referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore (although principally the same thing).
In French (at least in Canada), "roast beef" is "rosbif", with almost the same pronunciation :)
Erez Lieberman who inspired Cal Newport latest 'stop procrastination' method is a hero.
Am I the only one who finds the writing in the economist to be about as deep as a 9th-grader's book report? I mean I basically learned nothing from this article.
>unnamed co-founder asked her to "shut down the blog altogether or limit its access," and suggested she "update the blog with a 'twist' of good news so as to 'complete[s] the story.'"

Its as if they forgot about the 5m incentive & industrial strength NDAs. Nothing good can come of this for Airbnb, so fix it...quietly & speedily.

She is justifiably distressed and clearly willing to post what is essentially a PR _disaster_ online, so why isn't Airbnb on top of this, doing everything in their power to make her feel better? At the very least they could set her up in a hotel & meet her face to face. Clearly they are doing something very very wrong here:

>Airbnb’s reaction, the pressure and the veiled threat
You're correct - it can do just about anything. Technically it can't make ajax calls back to a domain other than where the page was served from - but you could get around that by just inserting more javascript tags.

iFrames do offer a little more security here - but in this case I would still go for just script since I don't see that the downsides outweigh the added security. (you can still do a whole ton of damage from an iframe)
@tptacek thanks for saying this. Cleveland really isn't terrible and there are programming jobs here. There is a bit of a startup scene and they are looking for programmers. I can try and dig up contacts if some one wants me too.

Columbus also has a pretty good tech scene. Battelle has good reputation in the area and there are a number of other good companies in Columbus as well. I am attending PyOhio this week and there are lots of Python people here as well.

In general I believe Cleveland has more VC chasing after ideas than Columbus, particularly biotech ideas (between Cleveland Clinic and Case Western there is huge amount of expertise in Cleveland on biotech). However, Columbus is in general more of a growing city.

Conclusion: there are jobs in both cities, and you don't have to be desperate to live there.
Game-changers: Can Philanthrocapitalism Rid Australia of a Dubious Distinction?
"we want to build a portfolio just like those companies have, with licensing approaches broadly like they have ... I want to achieve what IBM has achieved [getting $1bn per year from licensing patents]."

The difference between IV, Lodsys and IBM is that IBM isn't a patent troll and doesn't threaten small businesses with ludicrous IP lawsuits. If anything, they've donated patents in the past to open source projects to strengthen those against IP lawsuits.
"For example, to correctly implement asynchronous HTTP requests is an entirely different challenge in iOS and Android. On iOS you use the built in libraries, and if your user happens to change applications during the request, you can be sure you have up to 30 seconds, usually more, to complete whatever actions need done before termination. On android, you must implement the `android.app.Service` API for all your important web calls. The app can be killed at any time, and you must retain your arguments, and retry the call in case it happens to die."

Except... no, you don't. :/

The first sentence of the documentation on Service: "A Service is an application component representing either an application's desire to perform a longer-running operation while not interacting with the user or to supply functionality for other applications to use."

Do you need to do either of those things? If you say no, then don't use Service.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.h...

In the Processes and Threads documentation: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/proce...

It describes how when the user leaves the activity in a process, it goes in the background. It doesn't kill the process. You can continue doing networking. You don't need a Service to have background threads in your process. (In fact again from the Service documentation, a Service is not a thread at all.)

Just continue doing your work, and if the system needs your RAM for other processes, it will kill your process, but otherwise you can continue downloading in the background.

This is exactly how for example the web browser, and any app using a WebView, works.

This is similar in many ways to iOS. Not surprising, iOS seems um inspired in its multitasking design by Android.
Yes it is a funny video but it isn't really representative of the city. Yes Clevelanders have all laughed at this video. For a positive take on the city see: http://juliaincleveland.tumblr.com/
Number of times I've commented on an HN story: 0

Number of times I've followed up on GitHub related news, anywhere: n + rand(50..100) # => always

Times I've thought that Github is growing sickeningly commercial, that my attempt at best practice and code sharing is equating to (millions of) dollars in their pocket, and that other seemingly like-minded individuals want to capitalize on their successes to achieve notice: At least twice.

At least when Dr. Nic made this widget, it seemed original.
Does anyone know if this talk was recorded? It's the sort of deck that leaves you wondering what the presenter was saying.

Edit— Found this from NYLUG in April: http://www.archive.org/details/NYLUG-2011-04-20-Etsy-Deployi... (Talk starts at around 4:20, runs to 1:21:06.)

Haven't watched it through yet, but it looks like mostly the same slides.
I only learned about semaphores from Monty Python.

Coincidentally, that's the same place I learned about Wuthering Heights.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oHw6niE9e8
What damage can you do from an iframe? You don't have any of the permissions of the site containing the frame.
Sometimes there are hard limits though. People think that because our knowledge of the world has holes in it, that therefore everything we know is suspect. WRONG! There are some topics that we understand very, very well.
PDF format: http://bit.ly/qRhsj4
I'm glad he led with the irony bit, considering the irony of someone on TC spending a paragraph calling someone out on link bait headlines.
Agreed. You can achieve very high productivity if you use Scala and Java properly.
"Air can be perfectly still and powered flight works just fine."

No it can't. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction"; if the plane is experiencing lift a.k.a. an upward force (in the fully Newtonian sense of the term) from the air, the plane must be imparting an equal and opposite force downward on something else, in this case the air, which will cause the air to be accelerated downward. A plane flying through the air does not merely cut through the air, it actually causes a downwards net acceleration. Nothing else is possible. (That's not to say it doesn't do so by some clever work in the details, including on the leading edge of the wing where some air is briefly pushed upwards, but I'm talking about the net force on the air considered as a whole.)

There's an amazing amount of misinformation in this area and a lot of people have managed to talk themselves into positions where somehow forces are distinguished from the masses and accelerations in question, or some other similarly gibberish splitting of unsplittable concepts. ("F = ma" is a mathematical statement saying precisely that there is no difference between a force and an accelerating mass, there's nowhere to wedge the two apart, they are fundamentally, deeply, profoundly the same thing. The school system does an incredibly poor job of teaching what equality truly is and a surprising amount of subsequent failure to teach math stems directly from that simple oversight... but I digress.) A vehicle accelerating upward must be doing so by pushing something else downward, be that rocket exhaust, electromagnetic radiation (theoretically possible but impractical on Earth), or, yes, air. (Or more generally, any vehicle that is accelerating with less that the acceleration dictated by gravity towards Earth, but I think it's easier to see if we postulate an aircraft actually accelerating upwards.)
Thanks, I ask because in terms of geography and distance, it's an order of magnitude different than, say, a programmer coming to the US on an HB-1 or an American going to the UK. It seems like they could get some decent American programmers without the new hires having to move too far. But probably not without visa help, right?
Improved Ach and NE neurotransmitter performance using DHA & EPA fatty acids
Move to India.
Anyone Can Access Microsoft's Location Database and See Where You Have Been
Move to NYC. We're short on Python devs here and there's plenty of work for anyone who's really good at it.
Nobody claimed that the Rothschilds and the Morgans were saints - but the undercurrent that has powered the technology revolution (and the way the industry likes to be portrayed in the media) is that of educated people, wielding the powers of science and technology for the betterment of lives.

In other words, these technological wunderkinds were supposed to be better than the robber barons of old - a new breed of entrepreneur... getting rich and making the world better while they're at it.

This attitude is reflected in the industry's shunning of traditional business culture, the constant focus on passion (that even bureaucratic giants like Intel are embracing as a public persona)

Web 2.0 has mostly failed that test, so far, IMO. I'm inclined to side with the author. I'll buy that Facebook has revolutionized socialization and communication... but who else is willing to step up to the "dramatically disrupted and made better" plate?

Funnily enough, I see AirBNB as one of the better startups to come out of this bubble - they tapped into enormous unrealized demand (for both hosts and travelers) in an innovative way, put enormous pressure on the slow, lumbering, and inefficient hotel industry... if anything AirBNB represents the startups that the author is looking for.

My real complaint is the masses upon masses of "we're like X, with social!" startups.
Tablet smackdown: Galaxy Tab 10.1 vs. iPad 2
Simple bitcoin payment solutions for brick and mortar establishments
I agree, it is unlikely a survivalist scenario will come to pass.

I have only considered one aspect of the crisis, the financial one. Fortunately I have no family to support. I do not particularly depend on any financial aid from the government (virtually zero medical bills, for now!). My wealth is already well distributed evenly between hard assets, Euro-based assets, stocks in multi-national companies, and Bitcoin. I would consider moving back to Europe or any foreign country if the job economy worsen too much in the US.
The slides without the talk are mostly useless, you're better off reading their Deployinator blog post:

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment
Howard Kunstler writes and talks about this kind of stuff. Check out his book The Long Emergency and his excellent podcast at http://kunstlercast.com
Link to the other thread (with ~20 comments) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2825402
I stopped following current events a year and a half ago, so I stopped reading the Economist. But from what I remember, no they do often have pretty deep articles. But sometimes reporting is just reporting, and I'd rather have the facts reported than a story blown out of proportion.
Ummm....move to the East Bay. Past the Oakland/Berkeley hills it's between 80 and 100 through the summer, and you can always Bart into SF. Rent is going to be a lot less too.

Of course it will never be as HUMID as in Michigan, but...do you really want that?