skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way things are right now, maybe this blows over and the AirBnB business model continues just the way it was, with its associated massive valuation. If they help everyone in the way you are suggesting, the model is _definitely_ finished, because you cannot create the expectation that AirBnB will pick up the pieces every time something goes wrong. And the more people use the service, the mores cases like this there will be. Also, AirBnB are almost certainly getting legal advice that says not to have any unnecessary communication with EJ in preparation for a law suit that looks to me like it's inevitable.

So your sentiments are admirable, but not practical. My heart goes out to that girl too, I have to say. She's clearly a sensitive soul, and this has really messed her up. I hope she can get over it and move on.
Is it possible that she made the story up?
But where does it stop? Do programmers get a day? DBAs? Testers? Business Analysts? Network Engineers?

All of these do things which aren't sexy and aren't appreciated (most developers don't spend their life changing the world, they're bug fixing and writing reports for the guys in finance). Can they have days too?

(And then the cleaner, the office manager, the interns...)

The point isn't that Sys Admins don't do good work, just what makes them different to everyone else.
> YC should be getting blamed here?

What emphasis if any does the YC program place on ethics?
Your assuming that the person interviewing him knew what the answer was supposed to be. It sounds like the incompetence goes all the way up and he was probably hired by a businessman who had no idea what PCI even is, much less the details of proper security.
Having known the crew at PIE for a while now, I can confidently say that Google made a great choice.

Special points for co-founder Rick Turoczy; it's clear he's worked hard to make sure PIE is the success I always knew it would be. He also runs a quality blog covering the Portland startup/tech scene (in his spare time?) at http://siliconflorist.com/
You can surely use Redis as a caching solution, but if your data fits in memory you can use it as a full featured and absolutely safe database:

1) with AOF you have innodb-level durability.
2) with replication you can do your HA setups.
3) RDB files are self-contained files holding all the dataset that can be copied and backed-up while Redis is running.
4) with the upcoming cluster you can have fault tolerance without too much problems, but for this there is to wait this fall.
edit: I just read her blog & she said she had no contact w/ the CEO, Brian Chesky so far. It was another co-founder who asked her to take down the blog it seems.
slim shaddy?
"Related plaintext" should not be an issue for any competent password hash (classical crypt and bcrypt are based on a block cipher, which means this should work; PBKDF2 is based on a cryptographic hash, which means this should work; etc.)
Vandalised home puts pressure on Airbnb
It's not a woman, it's a man. He even cleared that up in this article.
The value is in the bit where the client also have to fetch 15 JS and CSS files from you. Getting those from Google instead is very likely to be faster. Also, they may very well minify and compress them, and lump them in with other sites that uses the same (ie. automatically making you use http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/).

Also, if you get a prominent link to your somewhere, this services will very likely be able to discover that all the searches for "cute kitten" returns the same page, and cache the results for you, keeping your server from crashing.

Yes, sure you and I know how to make a site fast by employing these techniques, but (a) not everyone does (b) why should we spend time on this if Google can do it for us?
Because as with this instance they threaten to sue.

And being right in a court of law just means you win, it doesn't mean that you don't get your time, energy and money sapped so really, where's the benefit for the person exposing them?
"It's not a woman, it's a man. He even cleared that up in this article."

From the blog post:

"I do exist. I am a real person using a nickname my parents stuck me with long ago. I do not work for the hotel industry, though I admit I love a Four Seasons as much as the next girl. Oh and on that note, I am female."

Sounds like a woman to me.
Perhaps one day we'll evolve into intelligent designers.
> And I see absolutely no reason why it won't happen again.

It will happen again. And it was clear that it'd happen at some point. And worse will happen. Shit happens, especially at scale.

> I think this problem kills the business model.

Nah. Let's do a little back-of-the-napkining:

• Let's assume that this is the first incidence of such.

• Let's assume that Brian's quoted 2 million nights of rentals is accurate.

• AirBnB's fees are 6-12%. To make things easy, let's assume an average rental of $50/night and 10% fees.

• There. AirBnB has now made about $10 million in revenue.

• Total cost of fixing this is maybe tops of $100k.

So this eats into their margins by 1% assuming the numbers are roughly correct and assuming that insuring against such would cost about the same thing as paying out of pocket (but would also cover the more catastrophic cases). Maybe it's a bit more and it's a couple percent, but it doesn't destroy the model by any means.

Also, if they offered insurance, they could do it as a default-on-with-scary-red-confirmation-text-if-you-uncheck upsell at a premium (say, cost + 20%) and make more money.

> But they have to change their company to address this problem

Going over the top on this one is the cost of waiting too long. They need to turn this story around. The next time, when they have a process in place for this, they just let the process take care of things and don't end up with a shit-storm on their hands.
There's nothing new in the actual story. I thought it's placement on the front page (below the fold) of the print edition was significant. It's not exactly a tech publication.
Thanks for a great reply. You seem very systematic in your evaluation of the idea. Any tips of books i can read that teach me about this kind of process.
Yeah, my mistake. I have a tendency to misread things (a lot).

Carry on.
So he writes an article that makes it sound like he has this problem, but he's really just holding a pity-party for other people that he's imagining, and -I'm- the one that gets modded down?
Once you do this as a matter of policy, you are open to fraud. Now you have to spend a significant amount of your resources on fraud detection - perhaps most of them. That's what I mean by they become an insurance company; their day-to-day operation would be indistinguishable fromt that of an insurance company.

Both ebay and PayPay went through this, and that's what they spend most of their time doing. But ebay and PayPal don't need to support the open-ended kind of claim - "My entire apartment has been ransacked and my identity stolen" - that AirBNB does.
They have root on your box. It pays to be nice to them. ;-)
30 web design trends for July 2011
It is, I believe, fairly well compressible: down to about 200MB (from about 800MB).

(I think I got this from the book 'Genomes' by Brown, 2002.)
Angel Investors in Montana | Flathead Beacon
IIRC Tru64 or OSF/1 (nee Ultrix) was a mainstream Unix based on a microkernel.

The problem with microkernels is their advantages (in terms of, a component of the kernel crashing won't take down the box) has rarely been worth it in light of the disadvantages (all that message passing hurts performance). So "better" depends on your POV.
The enduring myth of music and maths
> There's the potential that the mainstream media could have a field day with this.

It's on the front page of the Financial Times today (Friday 29 July) in London. The article is fairly short, is based on the original blog post and the reaction to that, and it also talks about AirBnB's finances (as is appropriate for that newspaper).

It's below the fold - the headline is about US government debt. But still.
I understand that it's defamation (which combines both libel and slander) but what other differences are there?
If letters can be evidence so can Facebook posts, says expert
I'm surprised that most of the reaction and commentary on this seems to be about either 1. the vague health claims that fresh-squeezed is better than old OJ enhanced with flavoring or 2. the sugar debate

What I want to know is, why should I pay $4.29 for a carton of old flavorless juice enhanced with a flavoring cocktail, rather than $5.99 for fresh squeezed? I personally don't see the value proposition in the Tropicana any more, and while I have been buying the fresh squeezed kind (that they make from the oranges in the store) I definitely won't be buying the Tropicana/Florida's Natural again. I think if this was more well known there would be a lot fewer people willing to plonk down premium money for a fake premium product in the future.
My advice would be to forget PR, forget trying to spin it. Just tell the truth, do the right thing for the victim, and figure out how to prevent it going forward.

That's all they have to do.
The ethical problems of the CISSP and (ISC)2
Back in 2005 I decided to implement a tag-based source code snippets repository over a weekend. Mostly as a way to keep my hand in with Rails. So I did. It went fine and built up over a couple of years to serious traffic but only about $800/mo in Adsense. I sold it to Dzone for low/mid 5 figures and they still run it (but they have proper big name advertisers).
What backup plan can you have for someone destroying your house, copying all your documents, and stealing your grandmother's jewelery?
Insurance (and by extension dealing with insurance fraud) for this sort of thing is a solved problem. They don't need to do it in house. They just pick up a policy from one of the institutional insurers and pass on the cost with a markup.

Edit: To clarify, by "this sort of thing" I don't mean "Airbnb like businesses". There's nothing particularly novel about insuring homes, their contents or vacation rentals. An institutional insurer can crunch some numbers (with estimates on the average values of contents, caps on liability, frequency of incidents, cost of claims inspection, rate of fraud) and figure out what the risk profile on that is and then mark that up and sell it to Airbnb.

What's actually unclear to me, however, after crunching out a revenue estimate for Airbnb (which I'd assumed was higher) is if they're a big enough fish yet for an insurer to bother with them.
You could require users to enter their old password when changing it. That way, you can compare two plain-text passwords without the need for plain-text storage (or pre-computing, like other commenters suggested).
Noticed a small mistake in the MySQL section:

Error Based:
AND (SELECT * FROM SOME_EXISTING_TABLE) = 1

Unless SOME_EXISTING_TABLE has no more than one row, that query will fail. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/comparisons-using-sub...:

"For a comparison of the subquery to a scalar, the subquery must return a scalar."

It's easy to fix: just add LIMIT 1 to the end of the sub-select.

---

This document is very useful. I've been doing web app security for a while and I haven't run across some of these techniques before (eg: PROCEDURE ANALYSE()). I didn't realize that PDO_MYSQL allowed for multiple queries by default either (although it makes sense, since historically other RDBMS have supported it).
The Entrepreneurial Lottery
It's dead because he copy&pasted the exact same text on the other thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821305
Though in the long run, antirez wants to implement a system whereby data structures are actually manipulated in-place on disk, which sounds pretty amazing. The main loop and memory operations would still be single-threaded, but there would be threads in the background handling the disk IO. This is post-cluster though.
Good Defensive Patents Are Bad Patents
What's telling is not that AirBNB tried to manage her, but that a company allegedly valued at billions managed her so very incompetently. I am devastated to find that they are doing such a bad job at what arguably is the single most important thing for them right at the moment.
Java Tools: Source Code Optimization and Analysis
we are standing by, and we just contacted her again telling her that we will do whatever we can to help.
Then they're an intermediary for the same kind of insurance that hotels and bed-and-breakfasts have. I don't know if that's even possible to do - how do you approach a company for a policy that covers hundreds of thousands of homes around the world?
If you care for the reaction from someone who doesn't really know/understand what Airbnb is:

"Who lets strangers into their home, unsupervised?"

Does make some sense, right? Who would?
> I don't know how JVM bytecode works, or if it's even possible to assign discontiguous ordinal values

That was my first thought as well, but I double checked and the ordinal() method is final, so you're guaranteed not to get anything other than continuous values for your enums.

> in C compiled to x86 assembly language, a switch statement on (mostly-)contiguous values can be converted into a jump table

Ah, this is probably the intention. The JVM can probably optimize the switch. I just checked it, and when there are multiple switch statements in a class only using a few values in an enum, it tries to make them all sequential in the switch, that's why it uses the array. I guess it's just a mistake (or lazy coding) that it always makes the array size TheEnum.values().length rather than how many it's actually going to use.
The tabloid they owned that was tapping the phone lines of celebrities.
Firebug 1.8 released
Not sure if this is the study previously mentioned, but it seems appropriate:
http://professional.diabetes.org/Abstracts_Display.aspx?TYP=...
I'm a little surprised it took this long to start showing up in print, as it were. I'll also be interested in seeing if they do a followup with her latest post.
Why my Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone
In light of today's developments, I no longer think they're nice guys. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820615)
Hey sysadmins, how did you get there? Are there books, articles, blogs, etc. that helped you significantly? (Frisch's classic comes to mind.) Or is the skill 90% about getting your hands dirty? But then again, how did you go from sandboxed sysadmin to your first real, critical job?

Today is your day. Please write away!
Zotonic 0.7.0 released yesterday
On the surface, Zotonic is just a CMS based on Erlang. But when you look under the hood, it's a feature rich application framework that allows you to write truly pluggable modules and host multiple sites on a single instance. It's main components are based on Erlang of course, Webmachine, Erlydtl, Postgres and Nitrogen.
This is something I struggle with too! One thing that's helped me lately is to adopt the Pomodoro Technique: work with laser-like intensity on one thing for a short burst, then take a break and slack for a few minutes. With a timer set to keep you on track, you can gradually increase the length of the focused "dashes," and if you're on a roll at the end of a dash, you can always extend and keep going.
Quite a few managers and auditors really don't understand the difference between a password hash and a password.

I expect the auditor was asking for password hashes, although he was using the phrase "plaintext passwords". Who knows, but that part of the story may just be a wording misunderstanding.

Not everyone speaks geek, and it's important to know when you're talking to someone who does not ;)

Edit: Not sure why this is being down voted as it is a true statement. I've had to explain what a password hash is on several occasions. And even after that, there was still some misunderstanding/confusion.
> EDIT: downvotes for trying to explain myself diligently for you guys, thanks...

Perhaps people are just passing along the torment.
I'm not a juice-drinker myself but I'd like a little more detail on what is actually done to the by-products. I think one thing people forget is that for most of us the choice isn't between natural/industrial, it's the choice between industrial and nothing, at least most of the year. Can you grow oranges in your backyard? In Oregon I can't and I hate grass juice.
Of course it's possible. Is it likely? No. Especially since airbnb already responded and acknowledged the situation.
Oracle will kill Java
Airport Taxi
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It's amazing the consistency of quality of experience between Mac and Windows.

The cross-platform license is also fantastic. There will be those days where you, for some reason, arrive on a Windows box and having Sublime Text around will make your day substantially less painful.
What does "standing by" mean?

What does "whatever we can" mean?

Why did you say yesterday there is a suspect in custody if the victim claims the suspect was released a month ago?

Do you think it's a problem that we have to parse your words so carefully now?
I was thinking of a scientific study I read a couple years ago, the citation for which escapes me at the moment. How I long for the day when I can install the Google brain history page implant beta. But five seconds on the present-day Google uncovered both: (1) a Wikipedia page on Finnish cuisine that shows a picture of a butter-slathered pastry and mentions stuff about hunting, red meat, buttermilk, and fruits and vegetables being unavailable nine months out of the year until recently; and, also on the first page of results, (2) a scientific review paper in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons by an M.D.-Ph.D. Yale professor indicating that Finland has both the world's highest consumption of saturated fatty acids and the world's highest ischemic heart disease mortality rate, and the highest rate of myocardial infarction of any of the countries surveyed in another study; and that "it is generally established that the Finnish diet of fatty red meats, butter, and bread, is highly conducive to heart disease." The best part is, it's a review article that cites 64 other scientific articles, so you can follow up with those to learn more. Here you go, with my bonus url cruft:

http://nutrilearning.com.ar/docs/articulos/interes/alimentos...

The study I had remembered reading, which I'll track down this weekend sometime when I'm not on Hacker News while getting ready to go to work, was more recent and shows new improvements in Finnish health metrics as they have moved away from their traditional diet and begun eating a lot more food from the rest of Europe.

And I share your agreement with this particular post on Kristen's blog.
How do I pitch ASP.NET over PHP to a potential client?
It should be noted that when they changed that story title, they were changing it to the actual title of the blog posting. That is pretty standard practice here, to prevent editorializing via the title. Although, I can see how it would come across wrong in this case.
Though I've never used it, Loosecubes (http://loosecubes.com) is doing just this. Offices list their spare space (on a daily or monthly basis, for a fee or for free) and the types of people they're looking to work with, and people seeking office space can apply for those spots.
Airport Transfers
UK Airport Cabs is best in quick airport transfers from airports to any place in UK & London. Book your Taxi online and make your journey more comfortable with our luxury, saloon, estate,8 seater, MPV Cars.
Airbnb should have had a backup plan, not the victim.

Note: i feel terrible for the Airbnb folks. I hope they get out of this mess.
Add Linux to that, I couldn't be happier with it's quality.
The fact that this occurred 5 weeks ago yet nothing has been done to rectify this and that the co-founder wanted the victim to put a spin on the situation is astounding.
I agree with most of your comment.

What I meant isn't that this is funny but ironic because Emacs is the FSF/GPL flagship. That said, I fully understand that RMS is taking this seriously because he wants to sort this out. Maybe he'll make a joke about this one day if it turns out to be a harmless oversight.
I disagree: I would say it's about the customer since you have to imagine what it's like to be him in order to sell well. Sure, you need to make the sale to live, and maybe you need some visualizations of what will happen if you don't sell and that could motivate you, but in the end, it's all about how you can relate to the customer's world to understand what he needs and sell it to him.

If you think only about yourself, you're not going to be empathetic with the customer.
I agree with quite a bit of your argument. However, what exactly do you think do "computers build from gates" depend on if not the laws of physics?
For an updated thread on vim bindings:
http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=221...

Github code:
https://github.com/lunixbochs/sublimevim

Will try it later today.
There's only one problem with your thought process: even if the "thugs" were sent by the big bad hotel industry, they have no influence over the way that AirBnB responds to the incident. If they would have handled it in a responsible, savvy way this would be a non-story, or maybe even a big PR win. The "devious" plan only works if AirBnB bungles the ball, which they have done. They have no one to blame for that but themselves.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter who caused what to happen to this woman, does it? AirBnB have obviously given credence to the basic tenants of her story (she is a person, she used AirBnB, she was ransacked), that is enough. The only thing that matters after that is the way they handled the situation.
Hadn't seen this before, looks pretty neat. The mini-map is a nice idea; just wish I didn't have to give up Vim to use it.

...figures, someone's already on the case.
I'd just go with "T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM", personally.
There's no way this could be faster.

Actually it can be faster due to peering. If you and I use the same ISP, then your assumption is correct but as soon as we enter the real world, the services you use often have different ISPs than yourself.

Google can easily have faster & more direct access across long distances than your local ISP.
And even tells that you're on Windows (characteristic ClearType).
It didn't sound like your heart went out to her.

Sounded more like your lawyer went out to her.
"derailed_cuke" ~ using Cucumber Test independent of Rails
I heard from a few friends at google that there are pretty intense discussions going on right now about what they can demand from their partners.

They had to bend over backwards for the carriers and manufacturers at first because they were the new kid on a very crowded block. but now they are the market leader and should use that leverage to demand a certain standard for Android units.
Agreed AirBnB can't create the expectation of covering the cost of apartments being "trashed" for fear of abuse of the policy. You can be sure that their lawyers are vetting all messages too, for fear of creating a chain of liability, should they start covering the costs.

That said, what about offering a generous bounty? Say $1m in this case for the successful apprehension and prosecution of the guilty party (or parties). This figure would have to be ratcheted down after the initial PR success for fear of people committing such crimes in future with the intent of enriching their friend/relative who turns them in.
Good to read that as I'm currently going through my call calling scripts (not for selling but for interviewing potential customers to get a feel of the market).

I also find it scary, coming from a technical background, to pick up the phone and ask for things to strangers.

Thanks for sharing that!