skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Arbitration can be a bitch.

The Arbitration company has a tendency to rule in favor of whoever is going to bring them the most repeat business.
Depends. You just need to make sure you get paid the proper amount in the end. Some clients want hourly, some want fixed cost. In either case, you must invoice periodically, not all at the end.

If you work hourly, begin with an up-front retainer. If you bid fixed cost, get 50% or 25% or whatever up front. Don't start coding until you get a check.

Once someone has paid up front, the chances of them paying in the future go way up.
Indeed, it's annoying. I'm sure most spammers, phishers etc love their mom and are cool guys when you meet them over coffee or drinks. It says nothing about their business ethics.
Plenty of companies do huge transaction volumes on dynamic languages. Twitter is a freak outlier. If you try to solve problems long before you actually have them chances are you'll come up with the wrong solutions.
True. But the people getting the checks weren't writing blog posts warning people not to buy apartments in NYC either. I'm not saying Airbnb is right or wrong, but to make a matter like that a public spectacle might influence insurance companies to behave differently, not just Airbnb.
It's softened by "I've found note taking to be fruitful." Perhaps that's true for the author. I have found it to be a distraction.

If you're going to give me arbitrary orders, do it. Don't try to soften it with some meaningless explanation.
Genes Are Patentable, Because They're 'Separate' From Your DNA
It's true that, if you tell people you make social games, many will respond with a snide comments about your annoying games. I guess it's because the industry to becoming increasingly mainstream, so opportunists appear more often than in the past.
OP is an ontwik posting bot. Thanks.
> AirBnb is technically not liable for those damages right?

Totally irrelevant. This has obviously gone beyond "technical liability".
The tragedy about this is that everyone involved here could have done something to avoid this except maybe EJ.

In order of culpability, here are the mistakes they made:

AirBnB's clearly inexperienced leadership has done a horrible job at communication. Sadly, this makes any real action they have taken to help the victim irrelevant to the public. Then again, their business has a fundamental risk, one of crime, which they seem unprepared to address or mitigate. Given their past resourcefulness, I have a feeling they will find ways to improve their product to make this less likely. I am not so sure about their ability to improve their communication.

Michael Arrington's job is to draw more eyeballs to TechCrunch and he invariably picks stoking controversy over responsible journalism. If it wasn't already clear to everyone including pg that he will do this at any cost, it should be now. Michael could have done some real journalism and talked to the police to find out more details, probed AirBnB for more details up front and may be even the victim on the one hand. On the other hand he should certainly have avoided comparing AirBnB to scamville, I don't think anyone thinks AirBnB is scamming users. But that's just who he is. He also takes great pleasure in calling people names. Notice that his latest post about pg has "Liar" emblazoned on the top. Can't say I expected any different, given his past behavior but at least pg will remove his blinders now that Arrington is treating him exactly like he treats non-luminaries.

The fact that PG had to jump into the public fray may have seemed inevitable given AirBnB's incompetent response, but it is almost always a bad tactic to have multiple people presenting the public face of a company. Even minor differences between what they say will be highlighted and will cause more confusion. PG even made the tactical mistake of responding emotionally to Arrington's "make the story more interesting without giving a shit about anyone else" approach, but in the long run this is a good thing. As I said, he'll now remove his blinders about Arrington.

EJ is not at fault except that she should have known that she was taking this risk when she rented her home to complete strangers sight unseen. This may be a flaw in AirBnB's model and their lack of focus on safety on their site, but if EJ had been my 6' 5" wrestler brother, I'd have waited a sufficient amount of time before giving him a knock upside the head and asking him what he expected when he handed over keys to an apartment that held all his belongings to a complete stranger while he was abroad. If EJ were my sister I'd tell her the same thing, minus the knock upside the head!
it's still slower than ruby 1.9 is it not? I was under the impression the current perf hierarchy was 1.9.2p290 w / gc cleanup patch (ree inspired) > jruby > 1.8.7 (ree) > all the other rubies?
Are Internet Explorer users dumb? - CNN
My brother and I had this exact idea and started to build it, but we've both been too busy with our normal jobs to be able to do anything with it. We even have a pretty decent domain name (I think).
Biocement
I like to present paper on biocement so I need information about biocement.
different tastes I suppose but I've never found springboard type apps visually appealing.
In retrospect, I should've said depending on the environment and the willingness of the devs involved, but yeah, they always find a way back to Java.
I voted it up, although I disagree. I believe the power of TechCrunch lies not in the amount of RSS subscribers, or Twitter followers, rather it is the most connected player.

What I mean by this is they are arguably the biggest influencers of influencers. Here is a related Ted Video: http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_netw...

If I understand the autor's argument correctly, TechCrunch is an "epicenter of the saga", but this does not mean they are influential to the outcome.

Following the insights derived from "Network Theory" you only need a hand full of highly connected nodes broadcasting the same information and an idea can be spread to in the entire network. Interesting article how only >10% of the population with an unshakable believe can "convert" the entire population. http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/07/28/minority-rules-why-10...

I asume this understanding led Mr. Chesky & Mr. Graham to mainly correspond & respond to articles posted by "the epicenter of the sag".
This is great advice on contracts: http://vimeo.com/22053820
Political discussions tend to derail into ideological rants far more often than technical matters. They also tend to turn into echo chambers, attracting like-minded individuals who circle-jerk their own opinions.

That said, I'm a fan of Debate and Discussion subforum of SomethingAwful, which is remarkably intelligent and reasonable (although admittedly slanting heavily towards liberals and libertarians).
"Pretty standard phrase, at least here in the UK."

No, it's definitely not.
The 'cyberpunk' thing always sounded cooler than any implementations actually were. You're currently living in an era where the contemporary, witnessable equivalent is steampunk.
Physicists Simulate the End of Time
Agreed. I have no love for Apple and I'm developing directly on my jailbroken iPhone through SSH and even then the documentation is very useful.
Airbnb victim describes crime and aftermath
Seems like a less polished version of the kind of shows we facilitate on http://www.vokle.com .

For an example of the kind of interaction we allow for http://www.vokle.com/events/19937-its-going-down
That is indeed the issue if you want to convert an existing rails app to JRuby. But if you're just starting out, it's a different story: you'll end up much more JVM-focused since the best option is generally to use the java equivalent instead of a ruby gem, but there are options.

I've been using rails for almost 7 years now (holy crap) and run a medium-sized site on it. It works just fine, but if I were starting from scratch today, I would still use Rails, but I'd run it on JRuby.
Now that I revise my data, that proportion is quite accurate.
I submitted this article (a little warily because I know the front page has been inundated with this story) because it appears to contain the new-to-me information that an arrest in the case was made on June 28 and that the SFPD verified this on July 29.

(edit: Whoops, misread the date - sorry. This story does still seem to have more info from the SFPD than others I've read.)
Best Buy's "optimizes" computers prior to purchase. They charge something like $40 to remove the bloatware.

http://m.gizmodo.com/5439590/best-buys-optimization-is-offic...
I'm not defending KM, and I'm not disagreeing that "Hulu has no business," but ...

If Hulu sees that noticeable numbers of visitors to sites like goat-sucking-maggot.com, or that site and a combination of other sites, tend to watch movies of a certain genre or other attribute, they can offer more movies like that, and suggest them for visitors to g-s-m.com. Which does improve their product, especially for visitors to g-s-m.com.
Lines spent
Flagged for this reason.
The Science of Slogans: The Best and Worst Ad Campaigns of All Time
The irony of course is that the story didn't go viral for almost a month after it was written. That was plenty of time for them to make things right, take good care of the woman, and get an NDA and non-disparagement agreement in place. Based on her account they didn't even attempt to do so. Instead they chose to "let it ride" and as a result have lost way more in goodwill than this could have ever cost them "making things right."
No advice here, but an interesting story.

A friend of mine was owed about $10K on a contract. He had been working for the company for a couple of months and they had already paid him $15,000 more or less on time, so when a month finished and he was owed another 5K and it didn't come right away he didn't really sweat it.

Things went down hill in the middle of the next month when the employer said that they were retroactively reducing his rate because they really thought that they weren't paying him hourly, but rather a full time salary (though his contract specified an hourly rate) and they expected him to be working at least 50 hours a week for that salary.

He promptly quit, though the employer begged him to stay on for one more week as a "professional courtesy". Being the kind of guy that he is he stayed for the following week. The day after he quit the company (really just two people and a couple of other contract developers) got TechCrunched (they have been multiple times since) to announce a rather large round of funding they had received. I remember him joking that night that at least he was sure he would get paid now.

Fast-forward a three months and a check has still not arrived despite his boss saying that it had been mailed several times. Then it changed to "I'm putting it in the mail on Monday." Eventually he sent a polite email saying how he was really hoping to get the check soon because he was planning on using that money to support his family new family (his wife was 9 months pregnant at the time). A check finally came but only for 9K instead of 10K. I think he was just incredibly happy to have finally gotten something after all those months.

It turned out that other developers/designers were in the same boat as my friend and never got paid, or were only paid part of what they were owed. This all happened at the same time that the company was getting press and raising more money.

I remember just being shocked whenever I would see this company written up in tech blogs while thinking "But, these are the same people who are totally screwing my friend and at least three other people they hired. How can they actually be getting positive press, they're total scumbags."
That's not the right thing to do - it seems like you are just freaking her out more.

A better way would have been to pass PG's details to her.
Heh, this reminds me of this:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuppers_self-referential_form...
I'm actually really glad to hear it. Though, I wonder about the "rails doesn't scale" mantra, is that really more for active record? In your experience is active record the biggest out of the box bottleneck?
To AirBnB:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Since I've started to frequent HN, I've learnt a lot about stuff I wasn't initially very familiar with (mostly the non-technical stuff posted here). Recently, however, I find that more and more of what I read is slight variations of what I read before; I don't learn as much anymore. I think that this is not HN but me, and I think it's good.

Basically, for me, it may very well be that reading HN for the first few months is launching, but reading HN for over a year isn't.

Needless to say, it looks like I'm not launching anytime soon.
What's unclear to me is why people expect Airbnb to operate as police inestigators, and insurance companies. People get robbed all the time, every day, in every city. The only thing that's different is this lady willingly let her robbers stay in her house while she was away, without meeting these people or verifying their identity in any way.
The Hiring Bias Against the Unemployed
This is why I don't bother with cookie monitoring at all, and why I plug my ears and say "la la la" and pretend that everything will be alright. I really don't want to spend the time figuring out how to make my bank work.

I suppose when the government gets in the game, either through direct tracking or just making laws requiring tracking companies to keep particular data for particular lengths of time, then it will be a civil liberties issue and I'll care more. But it will probably also be illegal by then to circumvent tracking.

But that's just crazy. That would be like the government demanding that ISPs keep credit card information on their customers.
Apple is great at understanding a customer's user experience. They are making the most profit per handset, too. Making a couple of bucks via bloatware might be driving unprofitability.
That's where the comment voting would help, but I guess it's still not a perfect system. I really just want a place where I can have political discussions/debates with people who form their opinions based on facts instead of being strictly democrat/republican because that's the way their parents brought them up.
Software as a Service: Study and Analysis of SaaS Business Model ... [pdf]
Users can demand privacy. It's not a given who has rights to what, privacy or data.
Cincinnati Reds jerseys
The problem is that one thinks that they can control and manage such a large organization. There are inherent structural dynamics that will always come to fore.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.” F. A. Hayek
When that day arrived, the next question will be whether you have the guts to do it. How many companies dare to rewrite (even with the assumption you can do it peacemeal style)?
> Basically it's the perfect SQL database for the times that you shouldn't be using an SQL database.

Well, that comment resonates with me. I feel the same but can't support it well with arguments. Care to share what you would use instead? F.ex. to replace fopen() with like the OP describes.
That is not a good site for politics, unless you like the echo chamber. r/politics is dominated by one group, another group has their own subreddit etc.
Ironic thing about this is Zynga sees their relationship with Facebook as one of the weakness, as reported in their S1:

"Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, the filing explains...Any deterioration in our relationship with Facebook would harm our business and adversely affect the value of our Class A common stock."

So Google+ could even benefit from working with Zynga, if they wanted to that is.
It's already shipping in some:

http://blog.sidstamm.com/2011/05/clearing-flash-cookies-usin...
With the release of Java 7 (invokedynamic) the performance of these dynamic languages (like ruby and python) may become much less of a factor (JRuby and Jython). At least that's what the JRuby folks imply: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2011/jruby-1-6-released-now-w...

Punch Line from Link:

"There’s a very real chance that invokedynamic could improve JRuby performance many times, putting us on par with our statically-typed brothers like Java and Scala. And that means you can write Ruby code without fear. Awesome."
I think I understand the message this is meant to get across ("my time is valuable; don't waste it with formalities") but it wreaks of a different message to me: "my time is more valuable than yours; don't waste mine with stuff that I would rather you waste yours with"

Also, it states that you should not have to be told something twice but then he comes back later to say that if something is not clear, get it clarified. These seem very contradictory to me. I, for one, prefer emails because I can always go back and refer to what someone said without taking down quickly written hand jotted notes. Miscommunications can be referred to directly and fixed, in writing. It seems counter intuitive to have a face to face meeting and then expect that every bit of communication will be completely understood.
Why don't the people telling these horror stories ever reveal the company names? Keeping silent only allows these scumbags to swindle more people.
The title I find a little misleading. The term 'embrace' implies it was a free will decision on Youtube's part. Considering they are just a Google division I would think "Google adds Hangout support to Youtube" would be technically more accurate. Then again perhaps I'm just being picky and semantic in which case ignore me :)
Heh. iphone-gcc sucks.
Arrington and TC irritate the crap out of me! There was a time when I loved to read TC, but now they are so obnoxiously arrogant and dirty that it makes me cringe to see links from them in HN posts. Why would they drop Paul Graham's name into this empty story?

Can someone explain to me how this is anybody's fault other than the jerk that robbed the lady (and maybe the lady's naïveté)?

I know AirBnB has made a lot of people angry with their business tactics, but how are they responsible for this crime? Can you imagine if the Hampton Inn sued Expedia for someone vandalizing a hotel room or expecting restitution from Kayak for what a vandal did in their hotel?

AirBnB should listen to their lawyers and not accept responsibility for the act of a criminal or the poor judgement of a user.
If a product is crappy, no one will see the advertisements. If a product is great, people will use it, and see.

Google is nothing but an advertising company, yet 99+% of us only ever see them as a search, email, blogging, and cloud docs company. A huge number of us use their products, because they're good products. As their products improve, their cash accumulates.

I've never been in a Google meeting, but I suppose Google's marketers have some input into product development; at Google, that input is probably based on data.
Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success (video)
The problem with /r/politics is that it's thoroughly dominated by left wing / socialist types. If you show up there and try to have a reasoned debate that promotes a libertarian ideal, for example, you get shouted down and/or down-voted into oblivion. By and large, the members there only want to talk to people who already share their own beliefs, they're not really interested in being challenged, in debate, or in rational discourse.
I think most of us are quite ambitious and really want succes. Alain de Botton presents his view on succes. If you like it, his book Status Anxiety is also a great read on this very subject.
Am I? Are you sure? The Finns, not the Sami in particular, have been observed to be the world's foremost eaters of red meat in general, as noted in my other post. To the degree that non-Sami Finns dieted on pork and beef instead of moose and reindeer, they have tended to consume all the more saturated fat.
The counter might be, what's it like living in 1984?
Since when Denial of Service == DDOS ?
Mind-machine "brain cap" user interface turns thoughts into motion
From what I read, "rails doesn't scale" is really a misnomer, because there are number of things that can be done to scale rails. I think Haiping Zhao of Facebook made it clear, that it's really just an efficiency problem. Bottom line, rails requires more computing power than jvm for sites like twitter. Which are only a handle of sites.
When it comes to the kinds of businesses we are dealing with here, operating and researching not only can be done concurrently, but they are often more valuable together. Particularly with tech businesses, we are often pushing some boundaries somewhere, and the only way to really figure out whether what we are reading is valid and useful is to actually put things in action. By having a business in motion, you have direct context in which to interpret information, as your research is also informed by the additional information that can only be obtained by operating in some capacity.

All of this is why the minimum viable product approach can be so valuable. In many cases, you absolutely do not need to make a huge number of decisions before operating. Treat the business as a largely blank canvas. There's a core idea, so put that out there and start experimenting.

Don't worry that you don't have all the features of a similar or competing business that's been operating for a couple years. Don't worry that you don't have everything figured out. In the kinds of business we most frequently discuss here, it really doesn't matter. You will make mistakes (and even your most competent competitors will, too). You will tweak. You can pivot. Most importantly, you can grow.
What does "more than just another investor" mean? Like everyone here, I'm a PG fan, but I don't know what's being implied.

It's okay to connect her to Paul because...

- he's smarter than a typical investor?
- he's more involved than a typical investor?
- he's more wise than a typical investor?

If anything, PG and YC are much less involved than a typical investor (VC) when the company is at this stage. No board seat (for starters. But also he's invested in 100+ companies over the last few years. The other VCs involved here focus all their time on the 3-5 investments they have made over this period.

So I guess I just don't see the point. As far as I can think, either you're saying he's different because he's way better, which may be true but not fair to assume all would know or agree (see the church/temple posts above), or because YC's investment model is different, which to me would be true but with the opposite implication.
Removed two Norton apps on a Packard Bell laptop my grandpa chose (and bought) for himself just yesterday. Hope they will not come back. We spend some time teaching him to do basic internet access and (me) assuring that it's no rocket science (by the way, he's an old-school soviet rocket (and not only) engineer, so ;).. )
Three Tips for the First Time Half Marathoner #sm21k
A sure fire way to make sure you don't back out!
US says Iran supports Al-Qaida - really?
I'm pretty sure he said "4x" rather than "Forex".
New Avatar of Weekender For Curious Souls