skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to try it again this a.m., but last time I tried to switch I couldn't do it. It's mostly for ridiculously minor stuff that I have a really hard time getting past.

Here's what I noticed in playing with it again for about 3 minutes this a.m.:

* Fly in animations. When you expand a folder (down) the folder contents fly in from the right instead of just sliding down. WHY? Mixed design metaphors like this drive me insane.

* Harder to distinguish folders from files in sidebar, making it harder to navigate around.

* Find in project appears in very slim opening at the bottom of the window. No highlighting of search terms so it's extremely difficult to visually parse.

If I find/remember other nitpicks I'll put them here.

These are super minor, but for me even the most minor of distractions or frustrations in my text editor can have a big impact on my productivity.
The solution for AirBnB is (or was...) simple.

1. Make this person whole, at least in terms of material possessions and safety, to the extent possible. And do it FAST

2. Ask them to take down the blog, and replace it with something along the lines of "my situation is resolved. Thank you AirBnB. But I can't discuss the terms".

3. Work on strengthening your internal processes to make sure the chances of a similar incident are further reduced by a couple of orders of magnitude

4. Improve your customer-service department.

But it's been almost a month, and they still haven't done any of this. They just seemed too concerned about what this will do to their valuation. This is pure bullshit on their part! It shows that they have absolutely no idea how to operate in a customer-facing industry.
Oh great, so I was still using some gated linked. Thanks for the original, it's even easier on the eyes than my source anyway.
I agree that they haven't solved the identity/trust set of problems.

However, in the absence of a solution to those problems, it's the customer service issue that's killing them.

If they had been aggressive in their customer service, reaching out to EJ, and doing whatever it took to resolve the situation, plus some, they could have turned this into a PR coup, or at least, mitigated the fall-out substantially.

Instead, they magnified the problem significantly.
If Honda advertised that their cars were safe, but in some cases under normal operation their cars had catastrophic failure despite the owner not doing anything out of the ordinary, then yes, Honda would have a major issue on their hands.

If you look at the advertising for cars, it's always along the lines of safer instead of safe. A LOT of lawyer-hours went into protecting them from exactly this scenario.
Powerpoint obviously.
lie: An intentionally false statement.
"If Airbnb pays for this incident, they effectively become an insurance company."

If they don't, they very well might become a non-company.
Gmail Man
The pirates must love this — hope they're adding some noise to the positions to the ones of the somali coast!
Minimum wage laws are there to prevent employees from being paid peanuts. They don't apply to the self-employed.
Khoi Vinh has no control over the content of the website. He has to listen to many bosses.

He should have been honest and come out and said that. Instead, he chose to be a jerk.

Guess what Khoi, we do this for fun, so no it's not a waste of time. You clearly do not do your job well, nor do you enjoy it.
You are correct, of course. Eventually some user would figure out they can rotate "aaaaa" and "bbbbb" every other week to avoid having to remember a better password. That being said, they could just follow up with "ccccc" instead of revert to "aaaaa" (or go through the words of some pop song, which would arguably be a somewhat safer pattern to follow). In other words: creative users will find ways to cheat whatever measure you come up with. The only solution is giving them no choice in the matter and to randomly generate passwords for them, but that opens up another can of worms as they will start writing them down on post-it notes attached to their monitors.

The only real solution is educating users. Comparing to the previous password (provided by the user when changing it) is close enough to the spec to be able to get away with it in most circumstances (possibly combined with saving a history of password hashes, so you can see if people don't repeatedly use the same password).
Here's my unsolicited advice: stop talking. You aren't going to win this by talking about it here of all places. Have a meeting today - all hands - and figure out what you are going to do. Don't invite your lawyer. Two agenda items: 1)how do we fix this for her? 2) how do we fix this problem with the model (insurance, renter background check)? Privately fix #1, publicly fix #2.

Don't talk publicly about what you are doing to help her until it is all done.

Do this right and your company is set. Do this wrong, and your company is dead.

Good luck!
Task killers don't do anything, the issue that created a need for them was patched in 2.2. Now they're just a placebo.
Bizarre Money Shredding Alarm
You will wake up or you will lose your money!
Maybe that's because Vim and Emacs have a steep learning curve so it's hard to switch to another editor.

Or it may just be because they do all what we can want from an editor (and even more).
Neanderthals were outnumbered by the first modern humans
Is this really climate related? My initial suspicion is that as technology advances, we just have more complicated (expensive) systems and infrastructure that are harder to repair because of the expertise required. We also become more and more reliant on technology every day, but also more and more incompetent when that technology suddenly fails. It is sort of a 'house of cards' effect.
I guess you are right - If the CEO had any doubt he could try to float that angle. And if it were a planted story you would expect it to come from the mainstream press instead of bubbling up organically.

I would just like to see some basic reporting from a mainstream news outlet instead of just repeating blog posts.

Speaking of fact checking - I just checked out some of her old posts and they are pretty extensive and point to the fact she is probably a travel writer - that would explain the excellent writing. I thought there were only 3 posts on her blog, there have only been 3 this year - but there are dozens of extensive posts with many pictures going back 2 years.
Note the name chosen, and the second and third words that (s)he quoted.
Citation plz.
How Google Dominates Us by James Gleick
Those predictions about ARM's notebook market share keep rising and rising. They went from none, to 13%, and now 23%. I don't think I've seen a more "classic" disruption than ARM vs Intel/x86 in recent years. To me, it's by far the most obvious disruption from all the tech paradigm shifts going on right now.

Too bad Intel can't see it, too, and they'll waste years on it fighting with their "old" technology against the disruption, which is pretty much always a mistake. Or maybe they do see it, but they just really don't want to believe it, and the conflict of interest is too great.

Make chips with tens or hundreds of dollars in profit? Or make chips with several dollars in profit? Tough choice indeed. But they're choosing the wrong option right now.
Umbria country house
Locanda del Gallo is a beautiful country house in the quiet and green region of Italy named Umbria, surrounded by nature, with a big, enchanted garden, spa with Turkish bath, pool, outer Jacuzzi and 28 hectares of gardens, terraced lawns and woodland.
In this country house you can find nature, relax and nature, beautiful panoramas but you can also reach in a very little time Florence (Tuscany) and Rome.
For more information please visit: - http://locandadelgallo.it/
OK, perhaps I misworded it, but... it wasn't that it was happening but that it was happening regularly enough to get into the top 10 queries - that strongly implies that it's deliberate.
This has turned out exactly like the Windows PC situation, it seems. Computer comes loaded with so much crap it's almost unusable, and you have to have a tech-savvy friend spend a day cleaning it up (or doing a clean reinstall) to make it usable. I wonder if Google will do more than Microsoft has done to try to retain control of the end user experience.
Supply-side economists, take note.
> In return she would sign a NDA

It depends what’s in the NDA. If AirBnB are acting honorably and correctly, there is no nead to silence me about what happened to me and how they responded.

About the furthest I would >personally< go is agreeing not to disclose the exact amount of compensation. That’s a fairly normal term, and the usual reason is to prevent scammers from being enticed into fraudulent claims of damages, or for others to use my settlement as a baseline for negotiations.

Other than that, asking me not to talk about something that actually happened is wrong. If they do A and B and C in the negotiating room, well, they ought to stand behind my talking about A and B and C, at least in general terms.

Trying to “buy my silence” would raise my hackles, and I would immediately presume that they were an untrustworthy organization that prefers guile and miscommunication to honest dealing.

>JM2C, it’s a matter of personal conscience to decide what to accept or refuse. But it’s also a matter of public perception. If I read that they settled with her and she agreed as a term of the settlement not to talk about it... I would make certain inferences about AirBnB. Of course, this has not happened so we are speaking only of a hypothetical situation.<
XBee delivers WiFi for DIYers and Arduino enthusiasts
1. I'm not sure where you went to pick up the phone but I went to an official Verizon store and got the same exact phone a few weeks ago and they set it up for me while I was there. I just had to be able to type in my GMail password.
2. The camera app that wouldn't rotate? I agree. That would be nice to have but certainly not a deal breaker.
3. Your battery is getting scorching hot because an app that you're using is broken.
4. My battery lasts a long time if I'm not constantly using the phone and I have decent service.

Overall I agree with your points though. The user experience is inconsistent from phone to phone and it makes purchasing one really difficult because you can't rely on hearsay from someone else who doesn't necessarily have the same brand/model.
Sadly all of our sysadmins have been moved off site and across the country (actually, most of them decided not to move to Texas and quit instead). I'm thinking of them today but don't ever meet them or know what they look like.
I don't think that's fair. Being able to implement if doesn't mean that the entire remainder of the system is built without any conditional instructions anywhere in its implementation. (The point, after all, isn't some sort of mystical purity; it's that if you can implement if then you can probably also implement whatever other control structures you happen to fancy. Which you can.)
Agreed. I think the reason it starts at -1 is to make sorting easier.

I usually use a category for string comparison so I don't have to think about it.
I don't know area code of my mobile phone number (mobile area doesn't even make sense!) and I don't have a landline.
Norwegian and American Justice
You may be glad that your 100% pure orange juice is in fact highly processed orange juice product, but most people would be rather shocked to find out what is happening.

And you may not be correct about the pasteurization of milk. There are many who feel that natural unpasteurized milk is healthier. Pasteurization is perhaps more necessary in a mass production environment, but it is not necessarily better for our bodies.

This story adds more proof for me that we should consume nothing that "comes in a box", so to speak.
Do you think in this instance putting down a credit card would have helped? The vandals were obviously criminals intent on abusing a renter through the airbnb service. Wouldn't they have simply used a stolen credit card number?
Can we all admit that techcrunch gets page views by spreading FUD? Read original sources for this case
The point was that since Yahoo uses Bing for its search you should not expect different results from Bing (that is to say, there is not point searching 'search' on Yahoo after you did it on Bing).
I thought that you didn't have to distribute the source with the binary so long as you made the source available to anyone that go the binary from you. I.e. if I distribute a binary to someone and they email me looking for the source, I have to give it to them (also I think that you have to make it clear in the distribution that this is the case, though just mentioning that the software is GPL is probably enough).
What's totally missing here is some kind of compassionate reaction from Airbnb.

Regarding that joke in the FAQ about guests stealing the grand piano: I think it's okay to make such a joke IF AND ONLY IF the reaction to a case like this is in the same vein: The minute they learned about this ordeal, they should have stopped working, cancel all meetings and help her. And if that means mopping her floors themselves then do it. They did the opposite, they acted greedily and stingily and thereby didn't just let down the girl, but everyone in the startup community who admired and rooted for them.
AirBNB cannot afford to make 'pay them to shut up' a policy.

Are you sure about that? I imagine it depends on how often it occurs, and what kind of liability insurance they can arrange. Since they claim to have over 2 million uses of their system, and this is the first case we're hearing about, I'd suggest that it may in fact be the case that they cannot afford not to have a 'pay them to shut up' policy.
The article suggests using placeholders to show the format by example.
We can still play Minecraft.
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال السودانى والرجاء البيضاوى بث مباشر
مدونة يلا جول الرياضية تقوم ببث واذاعة مباراة الهلال السوادنى والرجاء الرياضي البيضاوى المغربى بث مباشر فى دورى ابطال افريقيا 2011 اليوم الجمعة 29/7/2011 وموعدها الساعة 19:00 بتوقيت القاهرة لو بدك او عايز تتفرج على الماتش ادخل و وشاهد المباراة على النت بدون تقطيع اون لاين
الهلال السودانى vs الرجاء الرياضي البيضاوى المغربى
All vendors lie, some vendors lie compulsively. If certain vendors told me the sky was blue I would go out and check.
I think it's relative. If you're like me, and you grew up glueing libraries together, then that is fun. It's relative. Sure, I know how to write assembly and C, but I don't want to.
Leaving aside your frenzied name-calling, you are unclear on the concept of criticism. It is possible to make and even promulgate value judgements on the work of other people; further, to suggest that some ways of spending your free time are objectively more useful or interesting than others. This applies even if you don't pony up the cash to fund alternative works.

As a rule academics, writers, artists and critics (for example) have all felt reasonably empowered to say all sorts of things about each other - often in language that would make my 'why is this interesting' stuff seem positively tame - without giving undue weight to the fact that the target of the criticism could be otherwise spending time watching soccer or masturbating. When I got my ass rightfully handed to me for trying to get a mediocre paper into SIGMETRICS a few years back, not one reviewer made positive mention of the fact that at least I was writing lousy papers as opposed to, say, punching people on the street or making a color-sorted collection of my nose pickings.

Casual internet forum judgements are worth very little, and one can ignore them one sees fit. I don't remember the bit where I proposed making further research on the Hurd illegal or running them out of town on a rail. One might even muster up a coherent argument against such judgements that doesn't depend on the All Important Right of Enthusiasts to Exist in a Plane Above All Comment on the Relevance of their Work.
Do average users, let's say facebook's audience, use tab to navigate between fields? I always assumed tab usage was mostly reserved for the geekier keyboard/hotkey using crowd.
Imagine negotiating insurance for a mobile business where people are flung around 30+ feet in the air with no safety harness, others stick their heads in the mouths of lions or are "sat" on by elephants, and still others stick flaming swords into their throats. Meanwhile, children are riding on devices assembled by people who may not have a high school diploma (at least that's the impression I get). These businesses are generally very well insured.

There are insurance companies that deal specifically with unique, high risk insurance situations that are only applicable to very few clients. You don't buy these policies from Nationwide (directly), but they likely have a subsidiary which handles policies like this. In turn, those subsidiaries take out insurance policies on the high risk policy (it's turtles all the way down).

Disclaimer, my FIL used to work for an insurance company who dealt with high risk policies.
Posted several times, some with relevant comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818407 : 3 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819411 : 2 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820611 : 0 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821072 : 2 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821210 : nothing relevant

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821635 : nothing relevant

========

ADDED IN EDIT: I've started a poll about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822041
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're saying bcrypt is reversible? It's not... it's "based on" a block encryption algorithm in the sense that it uses the encryption algorithm's key scheduling functions. Irreversibility is the intent.
Finding Lines : A Photo Safari in LA
I'm glad yours is working out. I know people that absolutely love their Android phones. I know some others that don't like them so much. After 5 phones, 3 manufacturers and 2 carriers I have seen enough to believe it's not an isolated thing, but I also realize my experience is not necessarily representative of the majority of Android phones. Still, it's enough for me to avoid them. It seems to me like a pretty hit or miss proposition. In any case, my wife and I are happy iPhone users now.
What country are you from? In the UK and US area code is pretty obvious to everyone (even in the UK where the "area code" of a mobile is basically just how we split the number based on landline numbers, despite mobile numbers not being geographically based).
Haha true. I didn't think of it that way because my mind saw the homepage button and the search as you type button as "the same button" but yeah you're right. At this point (assuming you didn't disable scripts) the Google homepage needs nothing beyond an empty text field. No buttons, nothing. Weird.
Yep I'd be on for that.
Dublin would be preferable.
get in touch via mccanney [at] gmail dot com
But equals: can use conditionals to decide that as well. The system shown there is just as complete as one with a syntactic if-statement. At some point your branching logic must terminate either way.
Perspective: An Entrepreneurs Greatest Tool
Of course, there's actually a much deeper and more important connection. The huge cash hoards of Apple, Google, Microsoft and other big multinational corporations are a direct outgrowth of clever tax strategies they use to shift profits to low-tax countries and avoid US taxes.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us-microsoft-tax-i...

Corporate tax payments as a percentage of total tax revenues are low and historically low compared to the size of the economy.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Tax-VOX/2011/0209/Corporat...

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...
Poll: What should be done about the endless repetition of stories?
One thing that bugs me about HN is the apparently endless repetition of stories. When something is interesting it gets taken up by several "sources" and then each of these is dutifully submitted by multiple people.

This has some undesirable consequences. One is that it dilutes the "newest" page. That I don't mind so much. What bothers me more is that otherwise interesting discussion gets split over multiple pages, and the same points get made in each discussion, with some non-overlap.

I sometimes revert to my native "engineer" mode and try to do something to fix this. Usually I put cross-references into one or the other so point people to where the discussion is, or might be. Some people don't like this and down-vote them. Others do like this and up-vote them. most people don't seem to care.

I really don't mind the constant dribble of down-votes that I get for trying to prevent the splitting of discussions, but I do care that I'm not seen to be harming the "community".

Hence this poll.

What, if anything, should be done about the incessant repetition of stories?

PS: If you care enough to vote, please upvote the item so people get a chance to see it. If you think I'm karma-whoring and you want to punish me for that, find some of my comments and downvote them as scapegoats.
Do nothing - leave it alone
Continue to cross-reference them by hand
Force submitters to do a search for the story first
Provide a "merge" mechanism
Other technical solution (please outline in a comment)
Go away. Just, go away.
This story is beginning to smell fishy. I was burglarized in a similar, but not as extreme manner. My landlord was involved immediately. Why is there no mention of the property owner in any of these stories?

In my case, the "investigation" was over in about 1.25 days. There's not much the police can do. SFPD would not spend 2 months investigating a burglary in an illegal sublet.

Furthermore, there are no photos of the damage, the victim is anonymous, and there is no description of the neighborhood or apartment complex. If someone was bent on catching the burglars, more info would be disseminated, not less. The articles are written as though the author has an axe to grind with AirBNB, not that she wants to catch the thieves.
> She wasn't even asking for an opinion.

Bullshit. If you make your views publicly known, they are open to criticism. bfe was incisive but not uncivil. Your pious attitude and haughty implication that bfe's knowledge is only a result of an evening's browse through Wikipedia is far more offensive to me than anything he/she wrote.
The quote is usually assigned to Reagan. Quoting a russian proverb (that really does exist).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
How to stop wasting time and focus on (learning) development
Don't new users show up as green?
Trust problem with AIrbnb? Or trust that if you let a random person into your house they aren't going to do anything harmful. I don't think Airbnb is to blame at all here, its kind of like blaming craigslist because you go ripped off when trying to sell something but got ripped off instead. If you rent your house out to random people you should protect yourself against having your life ruined if something does happen.
Actually, that really is how Smalltalk does if.