skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even though Fred Wilson said "We couldn't wrap our heads around air mattresses on the living room floors as the next hotel room and did not chase the deal."

...with regards to not funding airbnb I somehow feel that that might not have been the case.

I think Fred's age (49?) and experience in life basically made it hard to understand how an idea like this couldn't have potential problems such, as only one example, this situation.

Hold on a second before you say "it only happened this one time".

How do we know that? People seem to think that either your place gets trashed or it's absolutely fine.

It's not digital it's analog. There's an in between state.

Something could get stolen that you don't know even about until much later. It won't always be the obvious thing like jewelry (and why would you leave that actually) it could be one of many little things you don't realize you have until missing. Or something could be broken.

The fact is there is no way for airbnb to insure against any number of minor type things that could happen. Where minor becomes your problem and your aggravation.

Have you ever seen how big of an industry shoplifting prevention is? Do you really think that only a minor % of the population commits petty type crimes?

And there is the reverse situation.

If you stay at someones place what if they honestly think that you stole something of theirs because they can't find it? Honest mistakes like this happen all the time. And the most obvious culprit tends to be blamed.
I agree whole hardly. I was doing C# and WPF dev right out of Uni and really loved the total power that you were given to create cutting edge apps (I worked primarily with the Microsoft Surface).

I don't really have anything bad to say about WPF but when I first got my hands on UIKit and Objective-C I fell in love.

In WPF you can do anything and customize everything. UIKit is Apple's magical black box but it will get you like 80-90% of the way to your goal so you don't need to engineer everything like I did with WPF. Couple that with Foundation and their other great frameworks like CoreLocation and so much boilerplate code seems to be hidden behind Apple's walls.

I'm also probably in the minority but I like the verboseness of Objective-C and the dynamic nature of it. Honestly it is a small thing but not having to put null pointer checks all over my code is the thing about the language I love the most.
How does using a hotel when you travel, help prevent your home from being burglarized while you're away?
Well, the reason this is not as simple as you would like is this: clearly, the original incident was not AirBnB's fault; it was a crime that happened in the same context as any other rental or lease situation, and (as I've posted in volume elsewhere) it happens. I've had tenants, so I empathize with her immensely, but it's still not even close to AirBnB's fault.

So insofar as the original incident is concerned, you're not wrong. She wasn't victimized by AirBnB.

And in fact initially AirBnB reacted quite admirably - until she posted in public. Then AirBnB stopped reacting admirably.

There have been some rationalizations for the fact that all contact with the company ceased except for some apparent invitation for a coffee, there's been a request and no doubt a fervent desire on AirBnB's part that this not be quite so public, or at least if public, not quite so eloquent - so you tell me. When a company cuts off contact with you because you endanger their funding, then lies about it in the industry press, is that victimization? I don't know - but neither do you. Which is why I said it's a tougher question.

Also, I'd really like to differ with you rather vehemently with your oblique assertion that the Internet should be seen as a "substitute" for a real community. Where do you think you just posted?
"Other languages" cover a vast range of possible and required levels of ambiguity. Distilling that to "English is hard to parse" is pretty inaccurate.
Huh, I was expecting something like this:
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1870

Thankfully, this link wasn't quite as depressing as T-Rex's Expected Real Life Batman Generation Rate.
Okay, so she wasn't victimized by AirBnB. The Craigslist Killer also didn't work for Craigslist. I don't think anyone reading the headlines, story, or comments really are misinterpreting what's being said. But it's disingenuous to completely remove AirBnB from the discussion, too. If nothing else, it was a catalyst of sorts. I don't find two blog posts spaced out over a month to be ridiculous and appreciate the caveat she's offering others by doing so. More than that I'm enjoying the honest discussion around security considerations of renting out your home. If it spurs AirBnB to make things safer for its clientele, all the better.
"Nobody here is claiming that she is 'on trial', but when you go public with a story there will always be questions."

By now, it should be pretty clear to everyone that she is 'on trial', although perhaps not by choice. I've observed with events prior to this that anyone can start one of these public trials by posting an accusation publicly. Then that opening statement is responded to by the defendant, also publicly. At which point its 'game on' as it were.

I suspect it is a natural consequence of the desire to know by the folks involved, whether its poor EJ here or 'geohot' or Charlie Sheen. Everyone wants to know "what is right?" or "what is the real story here?" and that process that people go through and the community that participates in it, has all of the elements of a trial. Evidence is uncovered and presented, testimony is called for and presented from various people involved, pundits line up to endorse or discredit evidence and/or folks testimonies.

So there are a lot of questions. Clearly there is a lot of outrage here and elsewhere. Hopefully it will be sorted out to everyone's satisfaction, and it certainly will provide a test of AirBnB's management team.

Like many here, I share the outrage and the commensurate desire to help. I recognize that being effectively outside the event horizon (wasn't a witness, not a personal friend, not an investor, not a freelance plaintiff lawyer, etc etc) I'm limited to offering moral support.
This is the first big PR blow-up for Airbnb, but they are not a brand new company any more and they had to expect that they would have an event like this (or even worse, a rape or murder) that would raise questions about their business model and force them to respond publicly. The weak response to date shows that either A) they weren't anticipating this likely bump in the road or, B) they were anticipating it and their gameplan was to try to cover it up. Either of those circumstances is disappointing to me.
If you have a typical Java programmer and typical C++ programmer, each with a few years experience writing a typical Object Oriented Program, and you give them the same amount of time, the Java programmer is likely to have a working program earlier

Citation seriously needed. That's more dependent on the programmers and environmental factors than it is the language.

Also, what is a "typical" object oriented program?

Java is faster to market so you can take advantages of changes in the market/requirements.

Again, really, you need something to back this up.

Overall a poorly written article that read as one giant "yay Java" opinion piece, poorly masked as a real study.
It's not terribly clear what the relation is between this and the source article... guest post?

OT, I'd love to hear what people think of RTSJ for the problem space in general.
building infrastructure that will help other parts of the project --part of why I call myself a ‘middle-end programmer’.

Brooks called that role the toolsmith.
What we can learn from AirBNB and ransackgate
Definitely— but that seems like maybe it's going too far the other way.

Or to put it another way— It's not a race. There's room enough on this big ol' internet for patient folks who keep up a steady pace for years, and for insatiably driven folks who hammer out a for-profit app over the weekend.

The only thing that matters are your individual goals— is reading Hacker News too much stopping you from launching when you want to? You should probably cut down. Just the same thing as if reading Hacker News too much is stopping you from hugging your baby enough.
That's pretty myopic. People go through periods of unemployment for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they had a child, or wanted to travel the world. I have a computer scientist friend who took 6 months off to hike the Appalachian Trail (no, really). According to this logic, he would be a no hire. It would be the company's loss though, and I wonder if that company would be one writing blog posts about how "it's impossible to hire technical talent."
You haven't described the circumstances, but if you haven't been paid it most likely that the client is short on money, and that means there's probably a bunch of other people who haven't been paid either. The one to get paid first will be the one who is most annoying.

Be the most annoying.
"There's probably a reason for it" is a vile and disgusting justification for discrimination that is sadly heard quite frequently.
EJ neither said communication stopped after the 25th, nor stopped after the 30th. She said the communication was very frequent and emotionally reassuring before the 30th. After the 30th – about when she wrote her 1st blog post – it was more 'occasional' with a cofounder.

Lots of people (including the parent and grandparent post here) have been treating this as a 'cutoff'. That's how EJ felt. That feeling comes across in how she chose to describe everything, but the real message she's sending is that she stopped liking the communication after June 30th, not that it ended.

My theory is that's because some initially empathetic support people were replaced with a 'just-the-facts' cofounder. Let's say he's trying to help by concentrating on the tangibles – do you have a place to stay? ok. is the perp caught? ok. will you call if you need anything? ok. is there any way we can twist this ending for you so you wrap things up on your blog more positively so people know AirBnb helped? er...

That style of communication could rub a still-stressed victim the wrong way. And a request like the last one could have been intended as a way of asking, "how do we help you so much that you can balance the fear and anger of your June 29th post with something better in an update?"... but instead be misinterpreted as untoward pressure.

That's just a theory, but it's a better theory than the one that AirBnb are jerks, or the false idea (based on various misreadings of EJ) that no offer of financial support was made and no communication happened for weeks. EJ's own posts refute those ideas.

When dealing with contentious, emotionally-charged situations, give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt.
Antirez was a known quantity. He was known for hping, way back before Redis was a glimmer in anyone's eye.
Going from awesome to further awesome is easy. To mix metaphors there - the first million is hard.
I'm working at a company right now that have a very big Rails stack. Hundreds of models, probably thousands of files (not including plugins and gems) across the whole app. They are experiencing scaling issues but not for requests per second, but for developer productivity.

I'm reading a great book called Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails, by Paul Dix. He states a lot of the issues that our team is running into with a monolithic app. Seems also that these issues can apply to other frameworks outside of Rails (I've run into some of these same issues years ago with Java web apps).

The main point of the book is figuring out how to abstract out various layers of the app into standalone services. I've talked to people about this and a lot of the time they recoil at the fact that you would increase the complexity of the app by adding yet more parts (services) that require separate machines, deployment dependencies, and their own data stores. However, looking at big sites like Amazon or Twitter shows how one needs and can break apart their systems to make it easier for developers to focus on particular pieces as well as increase system performance.

I'm going to be joining a new startup this year as the technology lead and all these things are on the table. I'm evaluating node, some NoSQL dbs, some cloud paas', etc. I'm also going to be designing from the beginning fast fail and services - or at least an architecture that makes it fairly easy to start migrating parts of the system over to their own standalone services should the need arise. I don't think you can plan for everything, but with the way technology is moving forward and the tools available today, you need to keep SOA at least in the back of your mind.
What are you talking about? I posted the story here after a month had gone by with no word of what the outcome was. It was picked up and went from there - I do not know her and nobody who does had anything to do with it.
"...do you really think they are so dumb that they don't realize it's not worth the bad PR to save money and effort in this situation?"

I think it's about not positioning themselves as some kind of guarantor of a situation which will open up an entire can of worms going forward with their business model.

They can't say "we vet people" (to the degree necessary) or they open themselves up to lawsuits from people who say "you didn't do your job here".

This happens with hotel, right? Person raped they sue the hotel "you didn't provide security" etc.

As another example, I saw a sign in an office parking lot. It said "security camera not always monitored" or something like that. In this litigious society the mere appearance of a camera gives the obligation to monitor the camera or a level of safety that the office lot is not willing to undertake.

Insurers don't have a model for an airbnb type operation. They will have a hard time wrapping their heads around insuring something that appears to be more of the business model that people would like airbnb to be. Insurers won't insure for reasonable prices what they can't calculate risk on.
Sorry, when I said low-review anomalies, I'm talking products that are not reviewed enough (i.e., 5-star from a single review). They likely give an inaccurate view of the product.

Comparing two separate products, of which one has 100 reviews and another has 7, I'll take the 100-review rating as more "interesting" than the 7-review product, even though the 7-review item maybe rated higher.
The autocomplete and "instant replay" features are also very handy to have when you need them (from iTerm2).
New community TeX blog launched - choose topics you would like to read about
Any thoughts solving scaling issues with node.js..
What a weird article. He says companies are desperate to hire talent (not true) and then gives three examples of perks, the first two of which are prostitution and gambling, both of which are done as one-off events, and neither of which are perks in any reasonable interpretation of the concept.

The third example, of entrepreneurship classes, is not unreasonable, but even better than that would be dropping the clauses on contracts that seize ownership of everything employees do on side projects in their own time using their own equipment, as well as the insane and common contract clauses claiming ownership of work done for so many months after ones leaves. I doubt that is going to happen any time soon, that seems to be a sacred clause to many companies. So instead they offer entrepreneurship classes, with the obvious understanding that should you actually act on them and start a side project you will be sued into oblivion.
Isn't GC pause good enough reason for anything of this kind? I'm perhaps not up to date in the latest JVM GC performance profiles, but if shaving even a few usec is important then I'd think avoiding it altogether is paramount.
For emacs: change the system-wide keyboard shortcuts for mission control (Ctrl-up and Ctrl-down have better uses).
Don't anyone ever get sick then.
UK ruling makes Internet browsing a copyright risk
> Clements says the rudder pedals are rarely touched during flight, something unheard of for most pilots, especially those who fly small twin engine airplanes.

Is this really that unusual? In the Bulldog (which is very small and single-engined) you can get away with not using the rudder at all during normal flight.

Edit: Asked a friend who knows these things, it's not that unusual for a twin engine to not need a lot of rudder, but also not a rule either.
Mulberry norge
AppItUp contest for WP7 Mango announces winners + more free devices
They're as useful as the code is well written for each language.

You think the Ruby code could be faster, and thus the comparison is skewed? Go ahead and help everyone understand by improving it.
No one will ever be in the position of handling so much real-time data as Twitter is. The rest of us can just get on with it and stop trying to pre-empt situations that will probably never happen to us.
It's also a perfectly reasonable justification for making (correct!) decisions in many, many situations.
Convoluted TOS and "Open" APIs Will Be the Death of Us
Although not having used Android specifically, I can easily see the UI designer being poor compared to iOS's. I still have yet to see anything as good as Interface Builder for any other platform, and I think a lot of it just boils down to the fact that when IB was designed it was actually considered to be "the right way" to make pieces of your app from the beginning, as opposed to something bolted on later. Making a nib less app is really hard in Cocoa. A lot of stuff in Cocoa/Touch just makes more sense from a UI builder perspective than a hand-coded perspective. The new constraints API which is absolutely awesome is a good example of this for desktop Cocoa, and the storyboarding stuff is a good example for Cocoa Touch.
Well, there's two possibilities. Either it's a crashed alien spacecraft, or some kind of rock.

Therefore it has a 50% chance of being a crashed alien spacecraft.
The convention is to quote article titles and emphasize site titles, so I'd recommend:

"Reading Hacker News is not launching"

Perhaps this is a good reason to use formatting in submission titles?
Yeah. I mean, pay people well, give them something fun to work on, treat them like people, and let them go home on time - it should be enough.

There are definitely other industries (eg. big firm law, finance) where the bigger the hiring perks, the shittier the job - is this really where we want tech to go?
If they actually do this I think any faith I have left in the US's monetary system will be gone. This is just too absurd.
oh, wow. so it is. has that changed? i thought back at the beginning it was external requests only (because i looked and understood i was barred). anyway, thanks for posting this and sorry for my misleading answer elsewhere.
In his own forum, unprovoked, PG called MA "bullshit", "in typical Arrington fashion", "not cool".

In his own forum, MA responded and made a big deal of out this comment.

I think it is a fair response. Not to mention, why would anyone expect MA to not jump on it?
In other words: Programming, motherfucker.
got you. i should go to where i am already known... :)
Long term, this kind of problem isn't going away for AirBnB. To ignore it would be as foolish as a retailer avoiding the problem of shrink. To treat this case like it is an isolated, unique event, is also ridiculous. AirBnB might be tremendously safe. But so is flying, and people have irrational fears of flying because the odd disaster happens. Airlines have entire disaster teams in place to handle these rare events.

Honestly, I think a big problem here is that you have men handling a situation in which they were completely oblivious to the feelings of their customer. Men can't possibly appreciate the sense of vulnerability most women have walking down the street alone at night, let alone the sense of violation that occurs from events like this. What the woman in question implied in her blog post was anger that the men were cold and not paying attention to her feelings. My advice would be to find a woman with great customer service experience and give her authority to personally handle this situation, in-person.

That would take care of the immediate problem. Long term, AirBnB needs to develop a strategy for handling these sort of cases. Reports of insurance being offered is a good first step. But they need to think about having disaster teams in place similar to the ones airlines and insurance companies have. They are in the same boat as these companies; when something goes wrong, it goes very very wrong. That leaves people in severe distress and it takes more than just a standard customer service response to deal with situations like this.
The other two have been applied to hackers for much longer than "rockstar."
ya gotta "burn the boats". I have done several side projects and could not keep up. while you are working 20hrs/wk or maybe 40 if you are a super hero, someone else somewhere is working on a competitive project full time and spending probably 3 times as much time as you. so they win.
Plot thickens in Airbnb vacation rental horror story
How to Use Fake IP address?
The Thick Edge of Quora
Devs on Git #1: An interview with Andreas Linde
"sliced tags off pillows"

Does this mean something other than what I think it means?

That's just... weird for someone to do, but even weirder for someone to notice and care.
"Starting with Flash Player 10.1, Flash Player actively supports the browser's private browsing mode, managing data in local storage so that it is consistent with private browsing. So when a private browsing session ends, Flash Player will automatically clear any corresponding data in local storage."

Source: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/privacy_mod...

Local storage here refers to "Flash cookies".
That's certainly true in tech now, when companies are scrambling to get any talent they can. But the unemployment in many other sectors of the economy is much higher, and there's not much of a competition between companies for talent.
In case you don't know, this is the appropriate title for this story because this is how Michael Arrington titled his. In most cases, using the original title is the way to go.
Krugman is even talking about this on the NY Times blog.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/lawyers-coins-an...
So, is America now a complete laughing stock abroad? I really wonder what non-USian folks think about all this political posturing and willingness to play chicken with the financial reputation of the US.
Innovation is all about iteration and refinement
You know what BitCoins themselves are too, right? Huge in this case is effectively infinite.
Come on, "Reading HN != Launching" is clearly the optimal solution here.
It's amazing what a real journalist will be able to confirm compared to TechCrunch.
Amazon stops publishing new Android Apps from german developers
Another Redis case: Centralized logging
Would like to know what logging strategy people have been following in a distributed environment.
Meth addicts do bizarre things for reasons that only make sense in their manic/paranoid hallucinations. Compulsive and repetitive cleaning, redecorating, arranging, painting, burning, cutting, whatever.

The mere fact that such tags usually say "don't remove under penalty of law" may have convinced them it was a listening device. Really.
Laughing stock abroad? Hell, they're a laughing stock in the US right now.