skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Urgh, there is so much corporate styled lingo and behavior going on here that I feel like they forgot how to concern themselves with actual problems. It seems like at some point sounding "professional" became more important to their career than actual communication. I mean, a lot of those replies are so high level you can't even see the original problem from that height.

Instead of concerning themselves with better search results and better download links/navigation they somehow arrive at needing to "promote" some downloads because they're "cool"? How is showing crap you THINK a user is interested in going to solve the problem of them not being able to get what they actually want? You can almost actually see the original message degrade and lose meaning with each new email that gets sent out.
> This is incredibly naive.

No, it's based on all the existing evidence currently out there.

> It could be the case that this was a setup.

This is based on speculation.

> And it would be very easy to set such a thing up.

It's easy to do lots of things.

> And there's an entire industry with a lot of old money invested in that industry continuing.

So? Any evidence? Anything other than liking Airbnb/YC to suspect this?

> That means motive.

You've shown the hotel industry has motive. Not EJ. This is irrelevant.

> Nobody here can say yet with 100% confidence what really did or did not happen.

Nobody can say anything with 100% confidence when two stories conflict. We don't even require juries to be 100% confident, we ask them to be sure beyond "reasonable doubt." What you have here is not a reasonable doubt. It is concocted

> Could it have really happened in a non-setup fashion? Of course, and arguably it is/was inevitable.

Yes, it was inevitable. This is a good reason to suspect

> Could it also have been a "hit job"? You bet.

My water could have been poisoned by my next-door neighbor because I had a loud party one night. I have no reason to believe this, but it could be happening! In fact, that silly scenario has better motive (which you emphasize) than your concoction since it actually ties the accused to the motive, which you haven't done.

> Whenever you've got people in one camp with millions if not billions in existing revenue on the line, you have a motive. And the means and method are both easy and obvious.

That's a delightful story, but again... you've presented nothing but pure speculation.
It's about register: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

A lot of comedy comes from using the "wrong" register for a given situation, and a lot of amusement for English speakers learning German comes from the fact that Germanic languages gave us our informal-register vocabulary (our formal vocabulary came from Greek and Latin by way of French).

(thus, for example, a science student giggles a bit at the seemingly-informal "Wasserstoff", sounding as it does like "water stuff", but doesn't bat an eye at "hydrogen", even though the Greek root words mean essentially the same thing)
Apple, for the record, also understands this, and has a setting in Lion (that I even believe is default "on") that sets the scroll direction based on the kind of input device you are using.
JSIL: CIL to Javascript Compiler
Free Banner Exchange network
Update on Move
Both ideas and execution are worthless unless you have a product-market fit.
Even if you don't cache the page, you are still copying the information on the servers into memory to display it...
Practice-based learning.

I want to be able to do exercises instead of just reading walls of text.

See: www.codeschool.com
> It could be the case that this was a setup

It could also be the case that the founders running Airbnb have a mildly sociopathic personality style. (I don't mean that in a derogatory sense - I'm calling it a personality style, not a personality disorder... while such a personality style might represent a disability when it comes to forming intimate personal relationships, it would be an advantage when hustling to get a startup off the ground.) Of course, when such individuals are called on for a display of genuine empathy, compassion, or humanity, they will be left feeling confused and won't know what hit them - they might even start to believe that they are being victimized.
I've had good results with the pure Python "MySQL Connector": https://launchpad.net/myconnpy
Why does anybody have to be calling her anything for certain? If one believes that they don't have enough information to determine with any significance whether she's more likely to be telling the truth or telling a mistaken account of events (whether intentionally or otherwise), it would be best to not take her words as more trustworthy than Airbnb's or vice versa. "I don't know" is a perfectly legitimate point of view and "wait and see" a perfectly legitimate action given that point of view.
I'm with you. The discussions around Airbnb are a living example of how HN has turned into Reddit. When I read about this event elsewhere, I do expect to see mob mentality and cheap sentiment, just so I can confirm what the majority is reacting. Not on HN.
Summary: The guy who reported that the savants could generate primes lied - at least the guy who wrote this article thinks so, since he can not imagine a human (a savant) being able to do what was reported.

He does speculate on the savant using probabilistic prime detection methods, but decides that there is no way someone just came up with that on their own. (Without understanding math in the conventional sense.)

All in all, a worthless article. Long on speculation, utterly absent from information.
Move out of Michigan -- it would seem to me half your problem or more is looking for a job in the worst job market in America...
It's worse than Reddit. Reddit has funny photos and games.
> offering to fix it, from the very beginning

That does not contradict the victim's statement, but it ignores her statement that communications stopped after she went public with it and that she claims that she hasn't received any of this compensation yet.

There's a big difference between being nice and being on top of something before the media forces you to.

I think most people are much more interested in knowing if AirBnB tried to cover this up (with the victim and/or the journalist), than about details of miscommunication. As I commented elsewhere, it's very difficult for either party to provide evidence for or against this.

The elephant in the room needs to be adressed in non ambiguous language, to prevent Clinton-Lewinsky syndrom.
Here is my story. I graduated from Mechanical engineering 3 years ago. After I finished school I got a job at a small company doing embedded development, mostly in `c`. My salary was $78000.

Two years after I started my job, I decided to learn iOS programming during evenings and weekends. A few months later I quit my job and decided to do iOS programming full time. At the time, I was working on an idea and didn't have anything ready for the world to see. Months passed and I still wasn't ready. I realized that it would take me another year to complete so I decided to pivot and work on another product.

After 1 month of pivoting I released my first project on the Mac App Store and was making ~$5000/month. A few months later, a company came knocking on my door and gave me a job offer. I accepted and am now making more than I did in my first job. I still have my business running on autopilot. I am 27.

This is not to brag. It is to show that if you really want to get out of the rut that you are in, lock yourself in a room, build something and release it into the wild. If you don't have a good idea, copy someone else's. By doing this, you'll learn new skills and will eventually become valuable to others.

Best of luck.
The Single Best Vendor Lock-In Strategy
Since I just found it, and it's more CS focused, and it resonates: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2825480 (especially bignoggins' reply)

Individual empowerment seems to me to have grown astronomically in recent years. Do we really want to rewind time back to Usenet years?
All your wanks are belong to us
The dark side of social media just became a whole lot more fun. Thank your wank will let you +1 people that you've wanked to, and let you see how many people +1'ed you. You can do so anonymously or login with facebook (nothing is posted to your wall..) so that you can get access to more 'premium' features.

No one (atleast no one with a facebook profile) can escape a listing on the website. However it does allow you to login and disable your account. Imagine a prospective employer googling your name and finding out about your Wank Stats. Wonder if they'll be impressed.

It's a pretty interesting twist on what some might find fun or downright creepy.
Chances are good that important tables do do transactions don't change as often as other things in the system. This is why I support things like CouchDB to handle the non-transaction stuff.
网络营销外包
This looks really nice, but seems to fit into the same space as Coffeescript. Given everything else on my plate, should I wait for the dust to settle on JavaScript++ dialects?

(Tbqh, I like this better than CS, if I'm understanding it properly, but wary of using something that might disappear in another year.)
also i don't have health insurance.
Sometimes, the Illumina website descriptions aren't too bad[1-2]. Unfortunately, I don't know of any great resources targeted to a lay audience (which is not to say they do or don't exist). I work in a lab that does a lot of high throughput sequencing, so when I have questions about particular assays, usually someone in lab knows, and if not someone else in the building does.

Mate-pairs are essentially reads taken from opposite ends of a single fragment of DNA. This is useful for de novo sequencing, where they act almost like a single, very long read. The problem with random sequencing (both shotgun sequencing and current "next-generation" sequencing technologies) is that it's not obvious how a given read relates to the other reads you have.

Using the jigsaw puzzle analogy, mate-pair sequencing is roughly equivalent to being told that a given piece is 8-10 pieces away from another piece in a given direction. You still won't necessarily know exactly where to put either of the pieces, but it narrows the search space hugely, especially when you have one in place.

[1] Mate Pair libraries: http://www.illumina.com/technology/mate_pair_sequencing_assa...

[2] Paired-end sequencing: http://www.illumina.com/technology/paired_end_sequencing_ass...
Congratulations! You've now presented a counter-argument.
Introducing Digbuild: An Open-Source Voxel Game
I used this guy's example to do audio transcription:

http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_...

I thought it worked pretty well.

ymmv
Part of the problem is that any typical Web Application framework is ill suited to building a full real time system like Twitter.

I doubt their story would have been much rosier if had they gone with Spring MVC, Hibernate, and Oracle from the start.

The minute you start moving away from CRUD based application design and moving into SOA, you're already signing up for a significant rewrite, even if you stick with the same platform.
I did a little side project to learn programming. http://www.blueskycouncil.com it's more or less what you are talking about. I just never launched it. Feel free to take that over. PM me
Sweet! That was easy. Look out, Internet, here I come! I'm sure some of you out there are wrong IMO, and you must be told!

Maybe I'm just more irked than I should be at people who have rose-tinted glasses on (and they certainly do. to what degree is debatable, I'll leave it at that here). But I've encountered a number of people who seem not to, and they typically have incredible drive to mold the world into what they want, and rejoice in the changes they've lived through. They're almost universally fascinating, happy, energetic people. But maybe their glasses are in fact too blue(?)-tinted.

Still, I'd choose that over growing bitter and immobile.
Good addition. But wouldn't product-market fit be filed under execution? Before fully going forward, it's the executors job to analyze the market and make sure the product fits. If not (or the market changes or shifts), it'd be their job to pivot or tweak their execution plan.
Call it Startup News then, not Hacker News.

In general, hackers/techies don't give a shit about pitching, VCs, launching, etc. If you call a website HACKERnews, and also have wonderful tech links on it, you can expect hackers/techies to visit the site.
Yeah, sure, another method of curing procrastination. Making the situation even worse in fact.
I think the basic point is that you are talking as if there is certainty around your claims when there isn't.
Rather than "powered flight", it might be better to talk about "heavier-than-air flight". If you used this concept to create a shell around a neutrally bouyant blimp, then you could (in theory) move it through the air without at all disturbing the prevailing air currents in the area it was moving through.

You would generate some turbulence as you were getting up to speed or changing course, but when you're not doing that you wouldn't need to exert any net force on the air.
And this is why Apple's software and devices are more usable than Microsoft's: one very powerful person at the top, Steve Jobs, dictates what he wants, precisely. No inter-group fighting, or conflicting priorities.
You mean besides a very lucrative lawsuit or settlement?

EJ don't have to be a liar. Simply Interpreting the event differently and taking that to court could be enough.
Last paragraph of the blogpost:
EJ doesn't want other people to help her and strongly advises them to book a hotel room instead of using airbnb.. after all that happened to her, shouldn't that be of latter concern?
I mean being in her shoes, I would welcome any donations from people willing to help.. unless of course it's not a true story.

I can't be sure of course, but all the anonymity around it makes it kind of suspicious.
She's given extremely detailed, well-written accounts of everything that has transpired. Nothing she has said has been disputed by any party.

I think the better question is, where does this doubt come from, and where do the attacks against the victim come from (just a difficult customer, batshit, drama queen...)? I suspect purely loyalty.
2 days between the first and last email. No real decisions made in this time.
Nothing she's said has been disputed by anyone. Why do people suspect she's been dishonest if nobody even disputes anything she says?
This is bad advice. There is typically little downside in meeting up with VCs and plenty of upside.
In Russian roulette most chambers ARE empty. Most pulls on the trigger will NOT kill you.

I'm sorry, but I can't understand this "most people are good" argument in this context.
Phonegap is a common JavaScript interface to native APIs. HTML is only tangentially related.

Building apps with JavaScript is doable, but has performance consequences that are severe on low-power mobile devices.

It's hard to fault Google for providing an open-source Java-compatible OS. It's not their fault if other OS builders are not compatible and actively block cross-platform solutions.

I haven't tried it, but I don't know a reason why one couldn't write an Android native app on Objective-C. You'd need a cross-compiler and technical/legal ability to port Cocoa though, the latter which I suspect would be quite challenging.
I never heard it before http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190590/ which used "bag" if I recall.
Based on a very brief conversation I had with a Paypal engineer a few years back, it's SOP in modern financial transaction handling to store/log details of every transaction in many places and various forms, and there's plenty of (probably excessive) paranoia involved.

The context of the discussion was performance, scalability, and engineering resources, so we didn't get into how the logs are used, but it would be my guess that if the "primary" database had some sort of failure that lead to a rollback, affected accounts would be locked out until the transactions can be properly recovered from other storage/logging mechanisms.
After reading the lady's blog. airbnb dudes you really screwed up. You dare suggest she takes her blog down. I had actually defended airbnb yesterday before reading her side of the story. But am now inclined to believe that you guys screwed up and need to do some damage control.
Whilst I agree that a one liner teaser page is not good, I will disagree about "It’s a myth that people don’t read long copy. Of course they do."

They really don't. But the article is misleading, because the 'long copy' example provided, the highrise teaser page, is not an example of long copy. It's a well formatted bunch of meaningful information, strategically designed and placed carefully (flow) that keeps enticing users to read more of it.

It's a well documented fact that people DO NOT read long boring paragraphs. They DO, however, read highly entertaining webpages with a fairly big copy so as long as it breathes and attracts them.

So to wrap up, yes write more than a sentence, no don't write a book. Instead, carefully craft sentences to entice potential customers to turn into real future customers.
firefox/mozilla's product managers disagrees :(
The Airbnb saga and its lessons for wannabe entrepreneurs
Oh boy. If this happened recently, after Bill downloaded Moviemarker, he'd be terribly angry that some genius decided Moviemaker no longer needs a TIMELINE because apparently it's a feature that no one used.
And then there is the giant platinum coin option...
Anyone who wants to discuss this further is more than welcome to contact me by email (the address is in my profile). I'll give you lots more details about my case, if you like. I would love to play a part, however small, in stamping out the nonsense being advanced by people like Wessely.
Why 65 rush jobs instead of few polished apps?

Skillful Surround could be an attractive game if it got some TLC.
FWIW I agree that "web 2.0" has brought a lot of good along with the bad. I'd be very sad if rd.io, gmail, boomkat and netflix went away.
In India (and apparently some other areas of Asia), meat from sheep is available but not well liked, so "mutton" generally means meat from goats.
Here are a few of my favorite crowdsourcing links. They're not all directly related to Mechanical Turk, but you may find them interesting.

Research on crowdsourcing complex tasks, such as writing articles (open source):

http://smus.com/crowdforge

A company that adds an automated quality layer and/or automated peer review layer:

http://www.crowdflower.com

Crowdsourced translation:

http://www.mygengo.com

Audio transcription through MTurk:

http://www.castingwords.com

Crowdsourcing scientific research:

http://www.hypios.com/
7000 law enforcement officers details leaked by Anonymous Hackers
That's just standard Outlook email behavior. It works pretty well for corporate email
No inter-group fighting, or conflicting priorities.

I'd put good money on the opposite being the case. I get the impression there's a lot of passionate people working at apple, and passion doesn't yield lightly
Poor Dave...
People think the email is weird or unique because they are surprised that Bill Gates made 40 Billion dollars by running a company that builds products that bring intense pain to it users, and he appears to as frustrated as anyone else about the problem, and yet is completely powerless to stop it, even though he is in charge of everyone involved.

It's bizarre to see someone who knows he is doing everything wrong and is flailing about to stop it, yet is drowning in money coming from his mistakes.

Microsoft has been a slow-motion train wreck for 15 years, surviving off the phenomenal success of early Windows, and it has been fascinating to get peeks inside the conflagration.
I'm curious about how HN feels about doing feature management all in trunk with if/then blocks (Flickr, and I assume Etsy), versus a more branch-based workflow. By having config flags you can be very particular about what features or bugfixes are enabled/disabled at any time, but it seems like what you are saving in merge time, you are paying by having a bunch of dead code hanging around until someone gets rid of it.

Even in svn, and much better in git, if you can keep a sane release and merging strategy then it's not going to introduce much overhead to getting new features or bugfixes out. Our 20+ person team deploys a few times a day using a branch system of (sprint + trunk/QA + release), but always looking for different ways to do things.
"lucrative lawsuit or settlement"

How? If I'm not mistaken the terms clearly say the company is not responsible in these kind of situations.
The real nightmare is Airbnb's handling of this situation. Slow and inadequate response, a founder trying to put a spin/silence the victim (this is called a coverup) and another founder sending a feeble email stating he/she"would enjoy meeting" the victim. Sure, if I was the victim I would love to grab a cup of coffee with the founder of the company that created a service that was the direct catalyst of the most traumatic event of my life in recent years to "touch bases" and get to know each other. How about, "I would like to personally meet you to apologize and talk about how we can make this situation right. Here's my phone number, please call me any time of the day." You're in the same neighborhood, surely you can get in touch personally in five weeks if you tried hard enough.

And pg doesn't seem to have a clue when it comes to the "personal touch" either. "Fix it", in this case doesn't mean compensating all damages financially and maybe adding a little extra money for trouble. The victim's home and sanctuary was violated by people. If this was a natural disaster, maybe money would go a long way, but this person's trust in people was violated and she also lost "priceless" memorabilia etc. to vandals who are either social misfits and/or drug addicts that methodically deceive unknowing victims.

This situation is reminiscent of Sony's reaction to cracker attacks. The criminals attacked a glaring hole in the security model, company shifts blame to criminals. "A community built on trust" without security? What about trust and verify? The victim clearly states that Craigslist has a better security model and for all we know that couch surfing site too.

The lack of security measures in this case illustrate a glaring hole in the founder's approach to the problem. Any casual observer would conclude that the safety of users is only secondary to the company's goals of generating more revenues and obtaining more funding.

Airbnb, please come out of the state of denial and just simply admit:

A. We messed up big time

B. Any compensation will never truly fix this situation but we will do everything within reason to remedy it

C. Lessons from this disaster will be applied immediately to ramp up security and formalizing the response of such crises in the future.
"They will hire anyone even sort of qualified for the job"

Are you sure? When I read those job postings, I see stuff like:

Job Requirements: Bachelor's degree. Minimum of five years experience with Informatica or another comparable ETL product. Knowledge of data warehousing. Experience with development and trouble shooting within the HealthQuest PLIB, PM, IIP, COMLINK HL7, MR, PA modules and Q-processing. Experience with monitoring and addressing batch cycle activities.

Either they grossly overask, of you wouldn't have a chance if you're not an insider already.
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'm siding with pg on this one. I can't imagine any intelligent person making this PR trade-off just for some cash. I don't want to analyze the he-said-she-said, but I've been up to date since this went viral, and I don't see any logiacl reason that AirBnb would refuse to pay for her expenses.

Think about it logically... rather than emotionally.