skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If that's all you get out of it, then you're intentionally ignoring the years of talk about "openness" from Google and its criticism of competitors who don't adopt open standards.
It was invented so you can not be understood via your vocab/grammar/spelling/phrases etc.
You haven't addressed his actual point, which is that progress is not inexorable—it may not even be monotonic—and it certainly does not occur through the pure application of reason and logic.

Your view is of course a very popular one. In fact, that's what he's saying is the problem. But it's far from the only philosophy of science that's out there. And it's a particularly naïve one in my opinion. It's a shame that as soon as you encounter someone with a different philosophy you stop taking them seriously; otherwise you might learn something.

Personally, I no longer have much time for the "inexorable progress through reason and logic" theory, which essentially boils down to the idea that if you just make sure you follow the One True Scientific™ Method to the letter then the right outcome is guaranteed. I've seen people claim that if you just make sure you follow the Waterfall Method to the letter then good software is guaranteed to come out of it. I don't have much time for that either. Before you complain about the comparison, note that both are essentially projections of the same philosophy (logical positivism) into different spheres.

I attempted to summarise some of the history and why it matters here:
http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/politics-of-reason/
but in short, I disagree that the problem is just with journalists (or just with scientists, for that matter). It's a problem for all of us as a society in how we think about science.
I'm curious, how would you guys handle this situation if you were running Airbnb?
Link goes to Google Form. If there's enough interest, I'll reach out to people and find a good time/location.
Hubris is another good one.
Not having used AirBnB, I was incredibly surprised that they don't have a policy like getarounds, where the owner is fully insured by getaround.
US Federal agents, particularly those deployed in the field, are generally not 'Fat and Slow' cops.
For future reference, title is currently:

"The Moment Of Truth For AirBnB As User’s Home Is Utterly Trashed "

Previous submission's title changed from:

"AirBnB: Crimes committed against a host"

to

"Violated: A traveler’s lost faith, a difficult lesson learned"
The White House just Rickrolled a Twitter user
IMHO AirBnB is no more responsible than CouchSurfing.

Whilst AirBnB charges a fee, that's purely as middleman for connecting two parties.

Of course it's horrific for the person, and this is an extreme example, but it's a lesson learned of how to rent out a property.

Take AirBnB out of the equation, and they've just let a complete stranger free reign over their apartment with a key for a week whilst leaving their own possessions on view.

To not ask a neighbour to hold onto the key, or meet the person beforehand, or get them on video chat, or remove all sensitive documents, or require a deposit, or a way of monitoring the property, is negligent on the owner's part.

Could AirBnB do more to vet users? Sure. Should they be responsible for the combined actions of two parties? Not at all.

A tough, hard-learnt lesson for the owner.
Thanks, and I totally agree.

What I was really aiming for was "don't do yourself down" - and "don't underestimate the impact a well-placed tool can have".
John Siracusa sells 3,000 copies of free review in 24hrs
Dump Truck - Register for early access to Dump Truck - Giganews
It seems like a pretty unbiased and accurate description to me.
Appsumo is running a $99 special today for unbounce, http://t.co/wMyEDoV
LevelDB is for if you need ordered data

LevelDB is slower with random reads, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it for unordered data - it's still quite fast.
If you write full disk blocks, wouldn't the disk cache hide the seek latency?
it is hard to be hired there. That creates relatively closed system where software is in the state that can significantly benefit even from short professional generic programmer involvement - at least it was on few occasions i or my friends happened to touch it.

With respect to open source work - the field is wide open. For example, as "data mining/big data" was mentioned, the interesting recent development synthesizing advances in general availability of cheap server farms (hardware and software -wise, in particular cloud/hadoop) and a new approach - "meta/shotgun sequencing" - enabled by such advances can be found here http://bowtie-bio.sourceforge.net/crossbow/index.shtml

Also may be interesting to look at http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/jcvi-cloud-biolinu...
I'd prefer eastside, all of the cool kids meetups tend to be downtown and traffic sucks to get from here to there on weekday evenings.
Yeah, a throwaway computing device in the network closet, which he then pulled the data from over the net (or, even better, which then uploaded the data to another server) would have dramatically reduced the risk he took.

It's 20/20 hindsight, though. It's obvious from the way he behaved that he didn't think this was anywhere near as big a deal as it's turned out to be. And I might have easily made the same mistake.
There are many crimes for which you can go to jail even though you are not a dangerous person.
The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist’s View
Dream come true for a law firm. I bet they can make Airbnb pay up in court.
And the support people get from @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com and @aol.com addresses is better? Unless you're paying for something, don't expect support. You can pay for Google Mail if that end-user support thing is important to you, but I've never had a need for it.
Of course they're not financially responsible. That doesn't matter. "We encouraged you to do something that wrecked your home and sense of security, but we didn't accept liability, so we're off the hook." It's legally true, but it's atrocious PR and bad karma.
Towards Auto-sharding in Your Node.js App
"What's wrong with taking a successful product, and making a similar product to compete with it?"

Zero. I'm very thankful that Android exists and webOS and WP7, competition is good.

"But in this case, it just amounts to an attempt at stifling competition."

I think it's a bit myopic to look at only this. You have to ask yourself the very important question of whether the iphone would even exist to be copied if there were no protections to keep people from copying too closely. If not, then there's a good argument that we'd all be much worse off.
How I Evaluate and Decide to Purchase New iOS Apps
Anyone else find TC's stock image annoying for this story? I guess it fits the tone, but it twisted my imagination a good deal, even after I'd read the original story. A real photo would have been valuable, but a generic one is distracting.
How To Use a Commuter Check Card to Purchase a Caltrain Monthly Pass
...and rather than update the answer to reflect the traffic they'll be receiving to that question, they just removed it.

I guess they're still in hope-this-goes-away mode.
It may be significant that the changed title on the other article is actually the title of the article; the older title is not. (Unless someone persuaded the author to change the title on their own site as well as changing here...)
Yeah it was requested long before I even started using it, they just haven't bothered to DO it yet, no matter how many people ask.
I would imagine they have a very smart team of lawyers that has informed them that the action they are taking currently is the smartest, quickest, and cheapest way to settle the issue.
I was kind of horrified how bad the arguments against cryonics are[0]. As far as I can tell noone has ever gone to the trouble to seriously and in good faith argue against it, they just apply the absurdity heuristic and say its advocates are freaks/frauds etc. (And yet I have not made my contract of immortality with the cult of the severed head.)

[0]lesswrong.com/lw/1r0/a_survey_of_anticryonics_writing/
Hire bright smart people, and then train them. Give them Safari online and the tools they need. Tell them they need to be solid in X in a week or two. Give them a simple project that will be indicative of if they've achieved the goal.

Looking for someone with 16 years of iOS experience is just making it harder on yourself.
Insurance probably requires a hotel reception-like presence (person on site, cam surveillance, security coverage, signed contracts, in-person ID validation and a way to prove who did what in case something bad happens).

I can't imagine any insurance company signing up for insuring "rented your home while being away" guests at rates that would be considered affordable for the rental model, nor a lot of AirBnB audience willing to turn their property into a de-facto hotel establishment.
Mushroom Burial Suit
Heh :) They seem like each other's opposites but both are incredibly successful and liked by their respective employees. Maybe the truth about great corporate cultures is finding people who believe in your principles above anything else no matter how crazy they might seem?
I, for one, want to become proficient enough in sysadmin to painlessly run my own mail server and MUA, know how to back up properly and automatically, filter spam, set up SPF and DKIM. Oh, and host my own name servers too.

No sarcasm. In the meantime, I'll stick to Gmail.
Excerpt available here: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/fully-unde...
I wonder who advised them against reimbursing her... their lawyers? It seems like a no-brainer.

I've been fascinated with AirBnB. I'm taking a week-long vacation in August and have been considering listing my NYC apartment to help offset some vacation costs. Their response in this situation totally turned me off from the idea. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
How Paper to CAD Conversions Changed Businesses Forever
Now, resources can be saved in manifolds since everything can be prepared and tested in a virtual environment which is bound to be and guaranteed to be error free. This will help the world create more effective products while remaining global friendly in the process.
What they do is in my eyes the opposite of professionalization, AirBnB and Getaround are already done with hotels and rental cars.

It's like growing vegetables in the backyard.
Why is it a triangle? that'd be a lot of wasted space if these were being stacked vertically.
I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one.

But I am sure you would be one of very few. This is sadly the world we live in.
They did do the journalism with respect to the jurisdiction issue. The Secret Service has jurisdiction in 'computer crimes' and 'access device fraud' via USC 18 S. 3056.

http://www.secretservice.gov/criminal.shtml

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00003056----...
Do you have a link on crbug.com?
If an insurance company won't write a policy for it, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
On the 2nd point, most already explicitly exclude sublets and unlicensed rentals. Not directed at AirBnB, but due to shenanigans that have being going on for much longer. The short-term stays thing is relatively new (and largely popularized by AirBnB), but unlicensed rental for longer periods has long been common, especially in college towns, and insurance usually wants no part of it, especially in college towns.

(From what I understand, Couchsurfing is closer to a gray area, because of no money exchanged. Having a guest visit is considered a normal use of a home, and it's not clear if an insurance company could successfully argue that Couchsurfing guests aren't "real" guests.)
I feel really bad for all involved, including AirBnB. They must feel awful, and this is obviously incredibly stressful. I agree with the consensus that they have thus far failed to use this as a marketing opportunity (a la Tylenol) or even to mitigate much of the damage.

That said, I would be absolutely fascinated to learn how this is playing out. It would be a huge service to the community for someone to release a blow-by-blow timeline from inside the company about all these responses and the thinking behind them. I have enough humility to know that they have a lot of really smart people thinking through this stuff, and it's likely much more complicated than we all realize. I'd love to hear about that thinking.
Two-sided marketplaces are perfect when all actors are reasonable, but upon mainstream adoption many services invite whole range of unreasonable actors. Services that exist in a known niche probably can't scale the way that mass-market services can, but the actors are probably far more predictable.
I'd be curious if anyone can comment on this line:

“Apple’s license agreement with Intellectual Ventures presumably precludes Apple (and Google) from this unless they risk losing their license to those patents and potentially many others (up to more than 30,000).”

Is it really possible to have a license that says "you can't challenge the validity of lawsuits that stem from patents we own/profit from"?
Here's what homeaway has to say about it:

http://community.homeaway.com/docs/DOC-1357
manhunt for a slender guy with a backpack riding a bike on MIT’s campus

Well that must've narrowed it right down.
AirBnB's model depends on the two parties not being able to contact each other before a purchase is made. This is a restriction that does not happen on Craigslist, and as such, I'm able to vet just about everything I need to know about a candidate renter before he/she even knows the physical address of my place. For those prospective renters who don't have any real online identity (and decline to provide any other kind of info, such as proof of employment), I don't respond to their emails.

This is something you can't do on airbnb, so it's not at all fair to compare using their service to letting just some stranger in willy-nilly.
Indeed. They're almost solely responsible for protecting us from the hacker scourge of role playing and card game vendors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._Un...
From the announcement: it has already been ported to a variety of Unix based systems, Mac OS X, Windows, and Android.

It's worth noting that the makefile includes options to build for iOS. I've successfully done it and my next iOS app will include LevelDB. Also worth noting, thanks to the iOS devices SSDs, it's much faster than with the traditional HDD machines.
Why don't you have a local copy?
>This is "the guest you sent me destroyed my home and sense of safety."

Not to mention the theft of personal documents and potential theft of identity. The (very real) potential of being bushwhacked by additional fraud years down the line due to this incident is pretty horrifying.
... especially in the US
I can't wait to use this line.
this sound like an opportunity for an insurance company to me. i'm sure they can come up with a rate..
Looks duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2766756
I've been talking to a friend who works in recruitment for the last couple of hours and the biggest thing I've gotten out of it is: Slow down. Even though I used to work in sales I've failed to spot that a lot of recruiters are basically doing a sales push on me, and rushing me and making things far more stressful. It's almost 11 at night and I'm frantically editing my CV because a recruitment agency I've been in contact with for less than 12 hours wants me to send it over ASAP, tomorrow at the latest? He's introducing me to the (to me revolutionary) idea of slowing down and actually /using/ the recruiter's skills, getting CV feedback from them, finding the right jobs, etc.

I'm actually looking forward to dealing with recruitment agencies with this in-hand now! (although I will of course like you not be speaking to those that insist on being high-pressure).
Surprisingly, this also works in Opera
The ethernet port on that motherboard is horrible, especially if you plan on streaming video or moving lots of data onto or off of that server. I strongly suggest you get either a different motherboard, or buy an Intel card. Given your design goals, it's worth it, as you'll see significant performance gains in throughput and cpu load.
Definitely seems to be a play at getting them on Google+. After all, they are your "friends."
Wonder why the share on fb/twitter links are commented out. Share on G+ - really just preaching to the choir there...
I will ask my lawyer girlfriend this question (IANAL), but based on previous conversations I've had with her, my bet would be that any reimbursement could be construed as an admission of guilt/liability, and could be used as evidence in a civil trial. (Consider the extra costs of a trial alone, plus the possibility of punitive damages for pain & suffering and whatnot if they lose.)
> Regardless - 400 employees for a $5 Billion company is on the absolute low end of where they will be if they actually justify that (rumored) valuation.

This is backwards thinking reminiscent of the bubble. "I want my company to be worth $5B, therefore I need 400 people working for it."

The lesson, which apparently was not sufficiently relearned, is that a public company should be worth about 1-3x revs or 13-18x earnings.

Ah well, another bunch of 401k money will go to money heaven just like it did last time. On the plus side, it will be taken by technologists who apparently have no compunction about relieving financially illiterate people of their retirement cash.
At the least, I hope someone starts a fund for this girl. I'd contribute. This is a terrible story.
"This is a test of human decency. I hope they don't fail it."

Technically, they've already failed it. Now they just have to admit that they failed, and actually fix the problem (financially). If this was my company, a "worst case scenario" money chest and an itemized plan-of-action would've been the first thing I created. Investors are protected (in a number of ways) from the financial risk of investing in Airbnb (or any company); the clients should have a similar expectation of security, considering that they're creating the value for investors.
Creative Indian IIT student suspends computer over his bed
My robotics training hardly qualifies me to asses the output of their academic research. However, I applaud their commitment to publishing results it top-tier academic journals.

Off-handed comments (in a thread about Google) calling 23andMe's scientific research "misleading" seems a bit snarky. Educated discussion has a place -- eg. in HN threads related to the company [1] or (especially) in the peer-review process.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813270 (currently on HNs frontpage)
tl;dr: He didn't quit Google (just his current project, sort of).
I thought it was about fixing Gmail.

http://www.email-standards.org/clients/gmail/
Show HN: My new approach to online dating
Please kindly provide us with feedback. Thank you! :)
The only blessing in this story is that the miscreants made their damage so plainly obvious that the problems were identified quite quickly.

If they'd been a bit more subtle and a little patient, they could've engaged in massive identity theft and financial fraud without ever making it clear that AirBNB was the attack vector.
Is LevelDB batching writes

Yes, updates can be done in one atomic batch. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Tokyo Cabinet allows it without Tokyo Tyrant.
The quora links are great. Thanks, man.

I'm a young attorney. While I'd say I'm among the more tech savy attorneys around, that's not saying much in the HN community. While I have plenty of money to get a site designed/developed, and money enough to fly around talking to investors, I intend to keep my day job as long as possible. Though I think it would be fun, I simply don't have the time to learn a programming language. Hopefully I won't need to.
LinkedIn, GitHub, blogs, and online "presence" in general have been opening up more passive candidates to the average hiring manager (from whom, when a passive candidate, I'd much rather take a call or e-mail than a recruiter).

However, I agree there are still people not adequately accessible by online social tools, so a good recruiter could add value in this regard.
I wonder if there is a reporting bias for people who have had bad AirBnb experiences, given that renting out your apartment is not always legal.
Fair enough, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that painting Steve Jobs as shooting lightning from his fingertips is a little on the juvenile side.
Yes, there is an extremely tenuous connection. That's why I made the comparison. However, we don't publicly condemn someone who posts a picture of a man doing manual labor, accuse them of objectifying men, or attempt to tie their use to the picture to the slavery. On the other hand, apparently we do publicly condemn someone for posting a picture of a woman with cleavage, accuse them of objectifying women, and attempt to tie their use of the picture to human sex trafficking.

It's hard for me to understand why you can't see the ridiculousness of this. Even if you believe that the use of the picture was inappropriate or sexist, it is unrelated to human sex trafficking.
Yes, I hate that many of my friends (even my wife) use gmail, so my personal email ends up in google's hands for analysis.
Yeah, I was half way through the article before I realized it was a stock photo, then I was annoyed.
Having write disk cache on would certainly explain it. But that leaves the question of discrepancy with numbers with competitors.

You turn off write-through caching on disks when you run a database unless you are willing to accept corruption (which is worse than data loss) on power outage. And that's why you can't get acceptable write performance out of database without a battery-backed RAID controller (or something other kind of RAM-based write cache with a battery backup).

Here's a simple way to test # fsyncs/s (a.k.a. commit rate) on your system:

sysbench --test=fileio --file-fsync-freq=1 --file-num=1 \
--file-total-size=16384 --file-test-mode=rndwr run --max-time=10 \
| grep "Requests/sec"
Scots law: age of consent (and age you can enlist) is 16, drivers license is 17, drinking and voting is 18. And this is Scotland, so the age of criminal responsibility is 12. (Until recently, it was eight: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7916561.stm).
> Technically, they've already failed it.

The book isn't closed on this yet. I don't know these guys personally or anything but hearing Brian Chesky talk about his company and his struggle, you can tell that these guys aren't assholes. Right now they're getting stupid, shitty, short-sighted advice from people who've convinced them to do the wrong things.

I want to believe they'll turn it around.

If they don't... well, as I said.
Your lawyer girlfriend would probably say that offers for settlement or reimbursement are usually not admissible as evidence of guilt.

I think the bigger problem is that if they reimburse this person they can set up an expectation that everyone will get reimbursed for damages to their home, and they cannot afford that.
What would you have rather AirBnB done in this situation? Do you not think it's a little unreasonable that AirBnB would have to take on the role of the insurer here ?

People should know the risks they're taking in letting a complete stranger into their house without even meeting in person. Just because someone found you through AirBnB doesn't mean you can take the risk for granted. You're still letting a complete stranger have access to your house and belongings.
Well that goes against HN etiquette, which I guess is also your choice to ignore :)
Zencoder is looking for an awesome designer + front-end developer.
Come now, these aren't exclusive possibilities. There certainly is a lot of sexism in society. That doesn't change the fact that some people will find sexism where it is not actually present.
"But an insurance policy would further cut into their revenue stream."

If the value of the service is so low, and the risk so high, that it's essentially uninsurable, then perhaps that's a sign that it's a bad business model.