skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There must be some form of intellectual protection for books, painters and user interfaces.

Every manufacturer had failed for many years to build something really good -- and the ones without internal problems (Nokia, Microsoft) copied Apple's ideas to compete. So ideas aren't "worthless".

The ones doing the copying might end up eating Apple's lunch.

You can make an argument for that real innovation (not moving libraries from IE into the operating system) should have some form of protection.

(-: I'm doing a Devil's advocate here, thanks for the down votes, people... :-)
If that AirBnb co-founder really asked her to tone down her post because it would mess with future financing, that's just sad. Talk about inappropriate timing and priorities
Did the company start the mess?
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I put in the hostname of my virtual server, but it did not tell me about any of the sites I host there.
Right -- I'm pointing out that experiences like yours are probably fairly common.

In the comments to the other story, people kept talking about how it is safe to rent using AirBnB. If the owner here had been less understanding, I'm guessing you would have at least spent the night in jail (assuming you speak German and everything else went well).
"These problems were detected only 5 days before the official Java 7 release, so Oracle had no time to fix those bugs" -- this is very, very broken. They had time to not release a version of Java with known wrong-code and crashing bugs affecting real code.
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Wow. I love AirBnB, and I hate to say it, but that was a completely boneheaded move. There is absolutely no doubt that EJ is very public on this issue. If it's true that AirBnB tried to cover up the problem, then why? Did the founders think that EJ wouldn't turn around and say that they're asking her to remove the post?

Handling this situation should be a top priority for AirBnB. There's the potential that the mainstream media could have a field day with this. The incident will undoubtedly be part of the hotel lobbyists' list of reasons AirBnB should be made illegal. And if the investigation reveals that they were cooking drugs in the place, that's even more damning.

It's disappointing to see this happen to one of the most interesting startups as of late, and I hope they turn around their attitude for the better. This is already really damaging, but it could be way worse if things don't change.
I rather like the fact that there is one branch of kernel dev that favors practicality, expediency, and commercial viability in their worldview and another that favors a strident free software philosophy. The world is a better place for having people working on both paths.
AirBnB gives the illusion that you can just rent out your apartment without any precautions. I've stayed in a few dedicated holiday apartments and almost without fail:

1) They are furnished with the basics and that's it. No valuables and nothing that can not be easily replaced.

2) The owner or an employed managing agent interacted with us (either at the apartment or when we fetched the keys) when we arrived and left.

3) They had insurance in place and 80% of the time when I signed for the apartment I was also signing my own liability.

If you are prepared to rent out a fully furnished (and in this case full of valuables) apartment to strangers you need to be prepared for the potential massive downside. 99% of your guests may be hassle free but it just takes that 1% to wipe out any financial upside and even then they may not even do it on purpose - accidents can and do happen.
"they might be concerned about setting a precedent."

Well, they sure have set one now.
Nitpick: there are no such things as "UK libel laws" - England and Wales have one system, Scotland has a completely different set of laws.
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I doubt Airbnb cares what pg thinks.

I'm just guessing, but it seems likely Airbnb see themselves as "underdogs, displacing the hotel industry". The fact that they care so much how EJ phrased her post after her home was completely destroyed (look around you right now --- imagine all of that being gone and never coming back) indicates they have an ego to match. So no, pg can't help them, and no one else can either. It's up to them to fix or break their billion-dollar company.
Yeah, first the craigslist thing, now this. They seem unconcerned with "evil". I guess that's how businesses succeed in our system.

I get the feeling that it's pretty chaotic over there. My first AirBNB experience was filled with crazy bugs (the messaging system, logins). It seems they're trying to get huge fast rather than taking the time to polish the experience.
I honestly think that there's three proper responses:

1. Work on your system to help prevent something like this doesn't happen again.

2. Add a couple dollars of "insurance" to the cost. If the PR statement is accurate and there's been "2 million nights stayed" before an incident like this, having a couple bucks per renter would have more than covered the cost of this theoretically isolated incident.

3, which is far more important, figure out a way to reimburse her. This is already far overdue, and I realize there's a couple lawyers that'll say "But it opens the door for a fault-based civil suit", but that's an issue for the lawyers. It seems like human decency here, and it would be a transparent PR tactic to have waited 5 weeks to do it, but it really does seem like it's something they'll have to do to recover from this, especially if she keeps blogging about it.
Khan Academy has to some extent gamified educational exercises and [video] study. I have reservations about this sort of thing as it focuses on reward fulfilment rather than fostering a love of the topic by engaging the learner.
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'Veiled threat' is strong language not yet supported by the other details provided.

It's not surprising that communication became colder after the initial blogpost. As soon as a company knows something is likely to be played out in the court of public opinion (or actual courts), there are new risks for them to consider in every interaction.
It's even bad for people who supported Cleanfeed as a solution to those "worst of the worst" problems as this is going to raise a lot of questions about it's use at all.
Airbnb really needs to pull their head out of their ass on this one. This seems like it could literally destroy their company.
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I've used it a few times (for international video calls, easier and more reliable than Skype). My anec-data is that many people don't know what it is or what it does. I've introduced it to about half a dozen iPhone 4 users.

There's also the anec-data for me that video chat is just meh. I'm about to jump onto a skype call with an international colleague - do I want him to see me in my t-shirt on the couch? No. Do I want to shave, suit up, and head to me home office? No. So voice call it is for me in a majority of situations - only I believe FaceTime is either video or nothing, with no voice-only option.
I know Brian personally and he is one of the nicest persons I've worked with in the valley. He also sincerely cares about his customers. I am surprised that anyone would think of him in that way.
Ironically, much like AirBnB as a company, I like to assume people (even ones who run companies) are generally good.

This is certainly making me rethink that stance, at least in this specific case.
How fast are Java Datagrams?
What's telling about this whole story is how Airbnb tried to "manage" her.

I thought the whole point of being a startup is you don't need to fall in line with the dehumanizing bullshit that you find in big corporations.

That's why I'm in a startup at least and it works for me on that level.

But there's such a stench of insincerity about the Airbnb approach that I will never use their site now.
First we know IQ is correlated with income.

We might guess Mac (hence Safari) users are correlated with income.

We might guess Opera users are correlated with income for several reasons.

We might guess Chrome users are correlated with income.

We might guess Firefox users are correlated with income.

We could guess the same of Lynx or any other niche browser more likely to be popular with well educated, higher income bracket people.
Theres a few of these out there. I use ghostery myself: http://www.ghostery.com blocks lots of tracking cookies and stuff as well.
I absolutely agree that Apple has always played hardball. There are, however, different kinds of hardball you can play. Back in the day it was laughing, confident, grinding down and humiliating the competition because you were just that much better.

Today... it looks more like the desperate, defensive hardball you play when you're backed into a corner. Throwing everything out there because you feel like you have to, rather than stepping back and focusing, first and foremost, on winning.
This is a seriously damning essay from someone who's clearly working through PTSD issues (or is an amazing liar).

Part of the issue is that young fast-growth CEOs don't major on empathy, typically. It's somewhat contrary to the necessities of the job. These co-founders have absolutely no concept of how this woman feels, or if they do, they have determined that they won't let her know about it. The best thing say Paul Graham could do would be to hire them a crisis management coach, stat.

While the co-founders are reportedly worrying a bit about valuation right now, they could (and should) be turning this into an amazing PR story; massively over-compensating her, setting up a Lloyds-based insurance coverage program, appearing on something like Oprah to talk over how it felt, and what we can all do as we're moving into this awesome social-based home sharing..
"Healthy" means free of disease.

"Fit" is another matter, and it implies "for a purpose" or toward some goal.

I'd start with a mix of body composition (your body fat percentage, nut just scale weight, and certainly not some crap bogus metric like BMI). You can come up with a pretty good estimate just by eyeballing, or you can take tape or caliper measures and run them through a model. A good online site for same: http://www.linear-software.com/online.html

If you want some fitness basics a good start is here: http://liamrosen.com/fitness.html

For books, "The New Rules of Lifting" is decent. You can do the workouts at home, though a gym helps: http://www.amazon.com/New-Rules-Lifting-Maximum-Muscle/dp/15...

I actually prefer a good 5x5 program for beginners (simpler, brutally effective). Check out http://stronglifts.com or look up Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength .

Fitness metrics: body fat, strength, speed, flexibility, endurance, heart rate, lipids, etc.

I've worked in tech for 20 years. I've contributed to some major open source projects and worked at some significant organizations. I've also taken fitness pretty seriously after letting it slide. I do lift weights, hike, bike, swim and row. What you do with it is up to you, but I've found that the investment pays off very high dividends.

I've eaten at a McDonalds once in the last 20 years. That's not food. Neither is Coke refreshment.
What's happening on the scripting front? Looked at the network graph at Github, but it does not seem to work currently. There is a branch for 2.2, but not for 2.4.

Scripting is definitely the feature I'm waiting for.
Just be a good company and take care of the customer. This isn't rocket science. Hire someone who is her personal assistant through the process until the process is over, help as much as possible.

Concerns for setting a cost-inefficient precedent? BS. Not helping her has become the real cost-inefficient precedent set in this case. I had no idea this had been going on for a month now.

This is a shame. Take care of your customers, so much more when they're in your backyard.
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I think it has already started: http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2011...
Apple captured two thirds of available mobile phone profits in Q2
airbnb need to realise this will not go away. The way I see it, their two main options are:

1) hire a PR firm, lawyer up and let the spin doctors handle things. With the amount of money they have, this is a real option. They could probably convince or coerce (bully?) the victim into accepting a settlement in exchange for keeping quiet. The PR machine would then be free to write (or rewrite) the story as they see fit.

2) Come clean. Realise that it's never the victim's fault. Compensate her financially for her loss. Offer to provide counselling. Help her with the logistics of finding and moving to a new place. Work with the victim (and other airbnb users) to figure out how to reduce the chances of this happening again. And all the while, document everything. Brian C speaks of openness and transparency - show us, don't tell us.
While that is an absolutely ridiculous requirement, couldn't it be satisfied securely by creating on the order of 1-10k modifications of each password when created, and hashing those? That would be enough to add numbers to the end, switch case, reverse, randomly change letters etc.

It's a lot of trouble to go through just because of the ignorance of a client, but it would be enough to check that magic box on the requirements list and be done with it, rather than having to go to all of the trouble of trying to educate the client and risk them going elsewhere.
Here's one: http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-not-safe-the-renter-st... and it showed up on the first page when i searched for AirBnB on Google.
And there's a Techcrunch post on the bottom of the first page as well.
For what it's worth, I apologize. No insinuation was meant, I just misspoke. I'm not a parent, and I certainly don't know how to be a good one...
Agreed. Maybe techies gotta band together and create a better online infrastructure for the whole homeschooling process. Just combine Meetup with Khan Academy and you can have decentralized collaborative homeschooling@!
It'll be the way they handle this bug that will make/break my confidence. If they fix this quickly enough (even though they have this bug set to a low priority right now) then I won't mind too much.
Here's hoping that "press blog users to take down negative reviews" is one they don't try and follow up on. This had "Streisand Effect" written all over it, even before this post.
I didn't know what to say. I can't believe the logic. I wanted to help this kid, but it seems his parents are set on him not turning out any smarter or better educated than they are.
It seems both of those could be interfering with the investigation. She made the point that she had not posted pictures as an example of cooperating with the process between AirBnB and the police.
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Heh!

Well, for context: this is a news-aggregator site run by a venture capital / incubator company, and inhabited by a bunch of really serious techies.

Who would have a rather more diverse range of experiences on health and fitness than your initial prejudices might lead you to believe.

Enjoy your visit.
If they go through a rough patch and get acquired or there is a change of management, it could happen. Patent reform is what we need, NOT anti-competitive patent stockpiling.
"Airbnb was mentioning their funding to a victim of ransacking? OMG that's bad..." (quote from TC comment)
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Social engineering was my initial suspicion as well. However, that really doesn't fit with the auditor's obstinate response. At this point an intelligent auditor should be coming clean so that this doesn't go public (and so that his company doesn't lose the contract and get further heat).

I have the same concern you do that he shouldn't need this information. Reading some of the other comments here, though, leads me to believe that there really are people who feel like this is "security". I've definitely encountered sites and password systems that require you choose drastically different passwords from any you've chosen in the past. This may be what the auditor was getting at (though in my opinion it's a weak, even counter-productive security measure)
I'm making this analogy extreme for the sake of clarity not because I think it's legitimately comparable:

Charles Manson's friends and followers were pretty fond of him too.

Leadership of a company tends to attract rather extreme personalities in all kinds of directions. One of the tendencies that is extremely common is sociopathy. Sociopathy is usually found is charismatic, likable people, but those people don't actually care about your welfare.

I don't know if Chesky is a sociopath or not, I can't say one way or the other, but the way he spoke to EJ smacked of the single-minded self-absorption of one.

But that doesn't mean a sociopath can't be charming as hell at a party. That's how they succeed.
Sun never offensively used patents, despite having an impressive pile of them. Then they got bought, and Oracle started suing.

I like Google, and I see that they need this deterrence, but let's not pretend that bad stuff can't happen.
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He's a spammer. He hired people to poison the well. He'd have to dedicate his life to feeding baby seal orphans to get upgraded to douche.
SO basically its a scale thing? Small companies, less chance of tripping over these issues?
As I noted in another comment, the way he spoke to EJ smacked of the way a sociopath speaks to someone in pain when they're really interested in something else.

Pretty jarring.
that is correct. The person who put up the listing claims to be friends with the tenant. The tenant has not paid rent in 4 months and his contract explicitly forbids subletting. So I am staying in this apartment illegally. Luckily, the owner is nice enough to let us stay for the remainder of our time without compensation. I have no idea how common this situation is but this is only our 6th time using airbnb and if this is a common occurrence then airbnb has a HUGE problem on their hands. Don't get me wrong I'm a big fan of the business so I'm hoping for better countermeasures in the future against this kind of thing. It's a very very tough problem to solve.
So somewhere between, "we need to appear to have taken responsibility for this and done everything in our power to help the victim and prevent future incidents", and "we need to take responsibility for this and do everything in our power to help the victim and prevent future incidents", Chesky et al went seriously off the rails. If there's anything worse than doing nothing, it's saying you've done the right thing when, in fact, you clearly haven't.

I know pg isn't likely to talk about this while the situation is still ongoing, but it'd be nice to hear his thoughts on the matter. This is the kind of behaviour you expect from a major airline or telecom, not a YC startup. It certainly doesn't speak well of the character of the founders.
I read all this almost a year ago on CBC's website: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2010/09/08/f-whats-in-it...

I stopped buying orange juice entirely because of it. "Perfume packs"... gross.
"I for one would not be the slightest bit bothered if somebody added orange juice to my orange juice."

Me neither but the deoxygenated-reflavored juice just tastes crappy, so I'm all for a law obligating the producers to disclose this practice and stop misleading people with the "100% natural juice not from concentrate" bullshit.
The only people I've heard complain about Panda are the SEO and content farm crowd.

I'm not a member of either crowd. Here's me complaining: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767018

And I'm not the only one who has a quality site that was adversely affected. There was collateral damage. It would have been practically impossible for there not to be. The only question is the matter of scale.
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Or it might just be that the guy is under a lot of stress and making bad decision. Watching your company potentially go up in flames with one incident is probably not an easy situation in which to make decisions.

We don't know the whole story. I understand the host stance also, basically on both sides they see things they've invested a lot into (her personal life and belongings, the company) be destroyed.

I'm not saying they are on the same level here (Her personal life and stuff is not easy to fix and she can't fail with that, at least not as easy as doing another company to me).
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>Facebook has forced some fairly annoying changes with their chat interface

They didn't force that change, you can just turn it off.
He then addressed his concerns about my blog post, and the potentially negative impact it could have on his company’s growth and current round of funding. During this call and in messages thereafter, he requested that I shut down the blog altogether or limit its access, and a few weeks later, suggested that I update the blog with a “twist" of good news so as to “complete[s] the story”.

If this is true it is downright appalling. Does he really think this woman that just had her life turned upside down gives a shit about his next round of funding?
I wanted to try it, but there seems to be no way to use the "im feeling lucky" button any more. Its on the home page, but as soon as I type something it dissapears.

Is the button only a decoration now?
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Apple has greater cash reserves ($75.9b)  than the US government ($75.8b)
In the private sector, excellence in the absence of pressure isn't worth any accolades.

Incidentally, the same is true of moral character.
SEOmoz's duplicate content detection is seriously flawed
A better method would be to save previous password hashes when a password is changed, then check hashes of permutations of the new password against the previous ones.
yes I am extremely grateful that the owner is a nice and understanding guy. We are doing whatever we can to help him in this situation because it just sucks for him. Funny thing is I had just visited checkpoint Charlie so I was in a cold war state of mind. Then a few hours later this guy in a thick Russian accent knocks on my door demanding what I'm doing in his house. For a moment I thought I was in a bad 80s movie.
>Yeah this seems like it would have been a really easy opportunity for them to get some positive PR?

or "Don't Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste" ((C) Rahm Emanuel ?)
It is how one rides a crisis what separates winners from losers.

>And yeah, seeing the amount of screening done (zero, you just need Paypal or a fake credit card), it's really risky for hosts.

well, one can make a case of how it can be risky for guests - just for starters, how can you be sure that the "host" has any rights or any traceable connection at all to the place s/he rented to you
Yes that seems to be the correct understanding. The thief probably stayed at the place and made a copy of the key. Afterwards they rented it out on abnb.
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Making sure that the people excited about Java 7 wait until this gets patched http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820204
Upvoted for "coding takes very little time" ! Most often, you are making 100s of small but significant decisions of algorithms, runtimes, libraries, memory footprints etc that the actual coding part ends up being the less significant aspect.

Also, I really admire the polite but confident way you responded to eropple's borderline trolling. Good show !