skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Learning to read code is just like learning to read English. You can guess most of the words meaning once you know some of them. Personally, I think being able to read code is the best skill you can have as a programmer. Just as a good musician is able to listen to music properly. (I mean 'listen' as in analyze, understand, notate and copy).

Yes, that's very true, but it's also a red herring. Not all code is worth to read, nor is it worth to write. Certainly not either the copy+pasted mess that would result of not using first-class functions, or all the _noise_ introduced by their half assed expression using classes.

> The other point IMHO is that scattering your code with anonymous functions points to bad design and is as bad as scattering "GOTO" everywhere in BASIC code. It leads to spaghetti code which is an unmaintainable mess.

Spaghetti? Really? As in flow of control? You _really_ don't know what you are talking about. Sure, it does enable some trickery, like Continuation Passing Style, but if you are arguing that such a technique is a 'con' for the existence of what amounts to just both functions and lexical scope, you are grasping straws.

On the other hand, you have simple abstractions that are enabled by first-class functions, like map or the folds, and you won't have to hear of silliness like the 'Command Pattern' or the 'Strategy Pattern' to work around the restrictions that make them necessary. And the subsequent explosion in code, to be found later shoved in other classes and packages. They make dispatch tables easy, they give you a simple way to make asynchronous code, they allow wrappers for guarded code, they...

Do yourself a favour and take a good look to the first two chapters of SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/), most of their charm is displayed there.
Feel free to ping me after August 5 if you still have questions.
Is there a good library for doing graphics in Java? I was thinking about trying processing, but it doesn't seem quite appropriate.
Did you miss the part about his parents owning a hotel or are you willfully ignoring it? That is the definition of vested interest.
Ok. I don't comment on Hacker News much, but this article sent me reeling. <rant> The sheer hypocrisy in this thing is unbelievable. First of all, TechCrunch has already stated their opinion on AirBnB, and even published follow-ups attacking the pro-AirBnB counterarguments. Fine. You don't like them. We get it, there have been like 10 posts including the words "scandal", "fiasco", and "the plot thickens", despite an almost total lack of actual information. Yeah, it's a shitty situation so let the police, EJ, and AirBnB work it out. You think they won't have a post-mortem? Please.

This article, however, kills me. He bashes Huffington Post's decision solely on the title. With a title like "You know what's not cool? A Billion Dollars. You know what's cool? Basic human decency", TC is playing the same game here. Except they're even cheesier in their delivery.

The only other example of lack of "basic decency" presented in this article is AirBnB, which anyone coming from HN could probably see a mile away. Same quotes, same rhetoric. Could you possibly be caring about anything except getting more eyeballs on your site? Please, go watch some Alexis Ohanian talks. Make a good product. Engage people. Don't bash your own bread-and-butter techniques like you're on some higher moral ground.

The AirBnB guys made a big product, and it's been super convenient to me. They're reaching the point where their popularity leads to difficulty in control and direction. This just happens to be the same effect touched on in that Amy Winehouse article. Hey TechCrunch? You are getting really bad at journalism and your opinions are nothing but twitter fodder. </endrant>
Psychological theories for CFS have been around for decades and have yielded very little by way of testable hypotheses or treatment, despite millions of dollars spent on research.

Wessley's highly controversial views and work have been subject to much criticism -- absolutely none of which is reflected in this disappointing puff piece. There's plenty of more news-worthy stuff that's been happening in the CFS world (both good and bad) in recent times than years-old revelation that people don't much like Simon Wessley.

The core problem is simply that this conclusion isn't true: "But a psychiatric explanation would not delegitimise CFS. And it might improve treatment and help patients get better, at last." Wessley's theories have been studied. They offer very little to very sick people. They don't get better. It does delegitimise the extremely severe nature of the illness. If they did legitimise, and -- far more importantly -- cure sick patients, great! That would be wonderful. But they don't. We know they don't. Shame on the Economist for not saying so.

Psycho-social explanations of CFS seem to be nothing more than "hysteria" rebadged for more modern times. It's easier to say "Well, maybe it's your fault!" than to accept the hopelessness of not knowing what's going on.

Actually, that's not true, there has been (and is) plenty of work on the physical abnormalities. For those interested in current happenings in the CFS world, it's worth following: http://phoenixrising.me/ .
> And now he's accusing these poor guys of "losing their souls".

When you call up the victim and ask them to close down their blog because or restrict access because you don't want it to affect your round of funding, you're not "poor guys" anymore. When you ask her to add some positive spin to the story when there's no positive spin to be had, you're not an innocent bystander anymore.

Nobody's saying the founders are responsible for the damage, they're saying the way the founders treated the victim is deplorable.
It might be that you need to update Safari to get the latest root certificate authorities. I'm on 5.0.5 on 10.6.8 and don't have the problem.
Their issue, like most other startups, is that they're focused on growth, building cool stuff, changing the world, etc., and probably have a hard time slowing down to handle an exception successfully. Also maybe having a hard time empathizing with a really distraught person (which isn't really a skill set most people outside the clergy, ER, military, etc. are going to need, at least professionally).

For most startups, handling the worst case as well as possible (i.e. above a minimum standard) isn't the goal; it's to handle the best cases exceptionally well, or to handle the average or 90th percentile or whatever really well.
This reminds about me when games started shipping with non-inverted mouse movement. I'm okay with Lion's new scrolling as they don't ever start disabling "normal" scrolling.
I think it actually is different now.

When I was in college (1989-1993), people did CS stuff because they thought computers were cool and could do things that were kind of amazing. Some were more visionary than others, of course. There was a vague idea that you could make a lot of money doing it, but it wasn't why one did things.

Now it seems the opposite of that. Especially here. Everyone is all startup, startup, startup. Honestly it makes me feel a bit ill, because there is very little talk of why one might do things and what is ultimately important.

I do think the support network built up by YC is great, and it is really exciting to see that young people just out of school can find support to go and do something new and interesting. But I think the actual projects coming out of this process are usually kind of bankrupt when it comes to things that I value.

I went to YC Demo Day a year ago with the intention to definitely invest, but I got so disheartened by the projects being presented that I never ended up investing anything. (Actually I wanted to write a check to Leftronic but they never returned my email.)
Yeah, arbitrariness in enforcement defines totalitarianism, I think.
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I've seen this bouncing around for a while now. Numerous times.

I've yet to see it substantiated beyond "sources claim" and I tend to want data any time someone wants to claim numbers which seem unusually high.

Real issue? Attention-whoring bloggers? Impossible to tell without better data.
Linkbait article's dirty secret: actually some Android models have 30-40% return rate. Of course the article makes no attempt to estimate aggregate return rate rendering itself pretty meaningless.
While it doesn't handle every case, using a database migration framework with Up/Down style methods as part of your deploy process can work pretty effectively.

Another option is to use a VM for your database and do a snapshot before deploying.
Lets stop conflating "default" and "cutting spending". The US government has sufficient income to pay off it's interest and debt. It does not have sufficient income to pay for the spending it is currently planning.

I'm in default if I don't pay my mortgage. I'm not in default if I plan a trip to Vegas but can't come up with the money to make it happen.
Nice work! With this, coderwall and all my soccer trophies/medals... my parents' fireplace will never be the same again :-)
Unless I'm misreading the question, it's actually a good deal trickier than FizzBuzz - the difficult part isn't computing the "sustainability scores" from the input strings, but in maximizing the combination of product offers across the set of offers and customers. It's actually analogous to a rather well studied combinatorial optimization problem (that I won't call out by name here so as to avoid letting potential job applicants look up the answer too easily) that has a fairly non-obvious pseudo-polynomial time dynamic programming solution. The naive solution is exponential time (and still a bit tricky for a novice). I suspect the intent of the question is to find applicants that give the optimal solution rather than the naive one (and to weed out applicants that can't give any correct solution), but I could be mistaken.
UI replacements, vendor bloatware, slow updates and variable quality hardware. Stick with pure android devices, they are better. The iPhone is clean - no bloatware,etc. Demand the same from Android.
Please, like AirBnb will cost his parents their living... AirBnb will always remain a very small niche
My general feeling is that if this were really practical, there's no way we'd be hearing about it.

It is not practical.

From the article, a sphere 1 cm across could only stay wake and drag free at speeds of no more than 1 cm/second. If the object is bigger, the limiting speed goes down even more.
Yes! To both.

Calling Tupper's formula "self-referential" (which he did not) is essentially cheating: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/how-does-tuppers...

But someone has made one where the output contains everything:
http://jtra.cz/stuff/essays/math-self-reference/

A little discussion on Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/i75t1/tuppers_formula_...
tl;dr:

VCs are not normal humans. They exist solely on pitches, it is what gives them life force.

If you see a VC who is talking to a person that is not pitching, run and tell a grown up immediately.
On the other hand, when PG says they're run by very nice guys, it's irritating 'cause it's an empty statement. We don't care if they're nice. Everyone thinks they're nice in this world. Nothing special about being nice.
US Intelligence is smart enough to check EXIF data now?
Not sure why this has turned into another airbnb discussion. It was only a few paragraphs of the post, which was for the most part valid.

Attacking the author's background or interests is completely beyond the point, and at some level, only supports his argument; nothing could be more petty.
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Recover Trash Mac
Ever dragged some files to Mac Trash bin and then right clicked the Empty Trash option by accident, but later found you have made a huge mistake and wondering if there is a way to restore deleted files from Trash Mac? Common belief thinks the answer is no and will just stay panic about their fault. But the real answer is YES, you can achieve Mac trash recovery as long as you believe yourself and take the right steps.
In Finland there is a government agency called Kielitoimisto ("Language bureau"), which has as its mission to keep the language pure from foreign influences. They've recently tuned it down, but I remember a lot of proposals from them in the 90s similar to the ones you listed
Has anyone had any success using the osx-gcc-installer he mentions? I'm really curious how well it works in comparison to Xcode.

https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer
The bad press is already out there. This isn't going to fix the problem of things like this happening in the future and buying a house for everyone that is vandalized is just not a scalable business model.

It would also show the world that Airbnb is taking the blame for this. It isn't their fault. They are just as much a victim as this women. Victims shouldn't be paying for other victims.

"Get insurance to cover the renters in future cases of theft or damage, and there will be future events."

This will most likely increase the service fees substantially..maybe beyond what people are willing to pay.

"Get a company that conducts background checks on applicants that wish to rent through their service. Anonymize the result and get the renter's approval before the transaction can proceed."

This is probably the best suggestion.
Scoble, from the discussion thread:
"the problem is that that batshit crazy drama queen is more believable than anything Airbnb has said this week"

Classy.
...am I falling victim to the effect where everything I
know how to do looks easy?

You could try it and find out. :-) I ended up using a third-party library which implements an algorithm I hadn't heard of before. (My response to the challenge is below, with the useful hints X'd out.)

Hi, guys. This is not a gungho-serious job application, though I have
been sniffing around machine learning/coding jobs for a long time and
could be persuaded in the right circumstances. I saw justin_vanw
mention your Code Challenge on HN and decided to give it a go for fun.
Didn't realize when I started that the upload mechanism at Code Eval
assumes a single file, so I am mailing it to you for evaluation,
instead. I must admit, I don't have much formal algorithms training,
but after about an hour's thought I just googled "XXX," and the XXX
algorithm happened to be the top of the list. I have a PhD in Applied
Mathematics from MIT, and I have been focusing on Bayesian Data
Analysis in Computational Biology, so maybe it was just a lucky
search-engine hit. But in general, I am a reasonably quick study. My
solution is at <http://XXX>, and is tested on python 2.6.5 with scipy
0.7.0. Untar the download, go into the XXX directory, run "sudo make
pyinstall" (I had to add -fPIC to Makefile's CFLAGS assignment to make
this work), and then the solution program is in
milo-challenge/solution.py:

met% python solution.py < test-input.txt 2> /dev/null
XXX
XXX

BTW, XXX is a C implementation of the XXX algorithm from <http://XXX>,
and is the reason I couldn't easily go through the Code Eval framework.
It sends some garbage to stderr, which I haven't bothered to clean up.
DIDO explained
I hear Ann Arbor can be OK.
Google Acquires 1,000 IBM Patents
According to the SEO by the Sea blog, Google bought 1,030 patents from IBM earlier this month, its first major step to shoring up its Android OS against an onslaught of patent infringement suits in the tech industry.

Read more: http://www.newtechie.com/2011/07/google-acquires-1000-ibm-patents.html
Maarten Van Der Horst, Central Saint Martins Show  2011
Arbitration has its place. Maybe it shouldn't be legal to have mandatory arbitration clauses in employment contracts, or in other contracts without genuine negotiations of the terms.

A non-negotiable clause for a contractor going to Iraq is a whole world away from two companies negotiating a contract to construct a web site or something.
This really doesn't fit with either my experience or with what numerous very qualified (VC, big VC raise, startup accelerator, etc.) people have said.

There's the Mark Suster "lines, not dots" (http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-line...). Talk about what you're going to do, then do it, and when you meet up later, you'll have a track record.

There's all the stuff you can learn from VCs (I've learned more from people at Sequoia and Kleiner, among others, about my market, than from a lot of other people) -- what trends they see, what the market looks like to them, etc. If you pick a domain-expert VC (I've actually found a few partners in computer security), you can get some distilled knowledge from a lot of customers.

In my experience, VCs are really clear about "let's chat", "meet for coffee", etc. where a super formal pitch (deck, etc.) is inappropriate. Showing a demo, having some talking points down, etc. is great, but you do NOT need to have a polished presentation for this.

You don't want to start the "deal clock" by announcing that you're looking for funding (basically, if you start looking for funding and don't raise any in a month or two, you look stale...), but informal early stage chats don't do this. It's great to be in a startup accelerator or have some other external deadline where you can say "we're not raising money until after xxxx".

That said, maybe there is an alternate reality where this advice is beneficial or accurate; I just don't think it's Silicon Valley in 2011.
Why so cheap? Because $500 is the base, not the maximum. $500 is the base reward for Google and Mozilla's web bounty programs as well. Another similar bounty program, from CCBill, lists a maximum payout of $500 (although I can confirm that they can and will issue higher rewards under certain circumstances: https://twitter.com/#!/williamlbell/status/97379423816384512)

[Note: I've participated in the bounty programs for Google, Mozilla, and CCBill. I've submitted security vulnerabilities to Facebook as well prior to this bounty program]
Christian Louboutin Spring-Summer 2011
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It's an opinion piece. You can pick any two sentences out of the story and realize this is someone's personal view. It isn't a clinical trial or a judiciary verdict.

I think it's largely irrelevant that his parents own a hotel. Having a particular view on something which invariably arises out of the sum total of your cultural and personal influences is not a vested interest.
I think it actually is different now.

Oh yes it is different now. You know what's different? That you can be a housebound lonely widow and be able to share your needlework tips with somebody an ocean away. That you can be gay in a small town and not think you are the only person who feels like that in the world. That you can be a kid in a remote village, and sitting outside the closed town hall, leech the wi-fi so you can look at the space station video from NASA. That you can be a parent whose kid is having chemotherapy and can find people who can tell you how to nurture its failing appetite.

I don't care how many money-grubbing heartless villains (real or imaginary) there are on the internet, if someone thinks its net contribution to mankind is negative, they must have led a lucky life.
Old news, massively misleading, etc.
I realize that you had to preface your question with context. However, all the context points to a lot of risk without much reward.

To answer your specific question: you have a lifestyle business. At $100k, you are in the friends and family range, not angel range. F&F can fund a lifestyle business. Angels won't fund a lifestyle business.

To give you some critical feedback...

$100k will not give you a 2 year runway. That's a 10-14 month runway. I don't care if you live with mom and dad, eat top ramen for every meal and don't shower to save on your electric bill...you can't make $100k last 2 years. And if there is ANY chance of a lawsuit, forget it.

You described your competition as 'a solidly established market leader'. Have you ever built a business that took market share from the single incumbent? If not, you have no chance in hell of success. If you have done it before, then you might have a chance. Of course they are a 'horrendous' company with a crappy UX, crappy customer service, etc. However, you're assumption that 'offering better service' is enough to take market share is simply unrealistic.

If it takes you 2+ years to get to ramen-profitability, this is absolutely a waste of your time. The risk-versus-reward is simply absurd.

There are SO MANY opportunities for a hacker out there, that you really shouldn't waste your time on this opportunity. I realize this is the best idea you have right now, but don't bite on it.

Keep looking for a better opportunity. You really don't have to look that hard to find a much more reasonable (i.e. lower risk, higher chance of success and bigger upside) than this.
Blind Hindsight
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"Owning a UK hotel" or "managing a large chain" is a long way from being someone like Steve Wynn, the Hilton's, or other large controlling entities that might actually care if this was actually affecting their business. Furthermore, Paul has been pretty vocal about what does/doesn't work in the hotel industry. I'm pretty sure his hotel ties don't give a rat's backside about his article, TC, and the issues AirBnB are facing.

The conspiracy theory angle is pretty dumb, in my opinion. Might there be people trying to take advantage of the situation? Sure. We've seen at least one article here on YC about an AirBnB competitor plugging the need for customer/host verification. I don't think the hotel industry really cares at this point.

VRBO and other rental sites as well as CL are the near term losers for AirBnB. Two million arrangements in 2+ years is a drop in the bucket for the hotel industry world wide. Furthermore, the majority of the traveling populace don't use such services.
Too many AirBnb stories, and too many comments - so it's possible my input is duplicated. But I COMPLETELY agree with you.

A month or two ago, someone was visiting SoCal (San Diego) and needed some help - I was about to offer him a place to stay at my house, for free. But I had to think about things a little. It's unfortunate. I wanted to be kind, and help someone out. The problem: I have a large family - comprise d of boys and girls - teenagers at that. Would my charitable acts backfire on me? Not sure. Maybe, maybe not. Ultimately, I didn't make the offer. It wasn't a SAFE decision for me or my family. It would have been irresponsible, even though it would have been a nice gesture.

I would NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER offer up my primary residence to a complete stranger - NEVER! I didn't do it when I would be "present" and I definitely wouldn't do it when I was an absentee. No way. It's IRRESPONSIBLE. A secondary residence? Maybe! Of course! Maybe they vomit on my couch, or piss on the carpet. No problem - that's, sadly, somewhat expected of "renters" --- but to provide a complete stranger to your primary residence, with all your private material, documents, property and what not in place, is just NAIVE! I'm sickened by what I have read, and I think AirBnb has no "social" or "business" obligation in this matter. In fact, I'm wondering where my mental wiring has gone wrong to have such a strong feeling. WHY on EARTH is everyone siding with this person? Because of her gender? Because she's a good writer? No? No... they've handled the whole thing, publicly, wrong. This is a great lesson for them - but they are NOT AT FAULT - not in my opinion! But, that's just my opinion, and clearly not that of the masses.
Reply to DHS Claims that Travel Dossiers are Exempt from the Privacy Act