skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Give me a frigging break!

I don't care what the long-term implications are

Clearly you’re not a business person if you wouldn’t care what the long-term implications of your company’s response to this were. They have responsibilities to investors, employees, and other users—they’re (rightly) making a decision with those stakeholders in mind, not the woman who had her house ruined.

I don't care about cost

Again, clearly you’re not cut out to run a business if you don’t care about cost.

If my business does this to someone I make it right.

Airbnb didn’t do this to her. The people who did it to her did it to her. Airbnb provides a marketplace for these interactions to occur—nothing more. The users cannot abdicate their personal responsibility not to use the service carelessly. I mean, we’re talking about letting people into your home here.

Is a car manufacturer liable when a driver runs over a jaywalker because they were texting on their phone? No. Is the phone manufacturer liable? No. Should I be sued when I recommend my accountant to my friend and the accountant defrauds him? No. Should Craigslist be liable if precisely the same thing happened through Craigslist? No.

Anything less is simple villainy.
This is a test of human decency.

Calling this villainy is one of the most hyperbolic statements I’ve heard in living memory. So is declaring, as if it were agreed upon fact, that Airbnb is evil if they don’t reimburse her.

If you are going to enjoy the rewards of your business, you have a moral obligation to ensure that you make things right when that business harms someone else.

If your company actually does something to somebody, then sure—but not when you’re company doesn’t. Airbnb didn’t do anything to her: she let a stranger into her house for a week without thinking about it! I’m not blaming the victim, I’m blaming the people who did it to her—but I’m certainly not blaming the middleman.

What happened to this girl sucks, but your post is overly emotional and absurd. It’s not Airbnb’s moral responsibility to do anything about this. They may choose to from a pragmatically-motivated customer relations, reputation, and corporate image standpoint—and sure, it would be an all-around charitable and nice thing to do—but I completely disagree with the claim that they have any moral responsibility to do so. Airbnb can do whatever they damn well please and what they believe is in the best interests of their business.

What I think is indecent is creating an artificially high and illogical holier-than-thou moral high ground divorced from the realities of running a $1B business that you then use to drum up a public crucifixion of a company that doesn’t live up to said standard.
WebOb maintainer here. What's your alternative to copying body to a temp file if you need to make it seekable?
For those of you who visited our site, what are your thoughts?
There are databases for convicted felons and molesters, but other than that, how exactly do you ensure someone is not a "sociopath willfully destroying someone's home and stealing their identity"?

Even if AirBnb had a way to check this guy out, it's quite possible he doesn't habitually destroy homes and steal people's identities.
If everyone followed this rule, there would be very little innovation, none of it disruptive.
It may just be that Breaking Bad is back in season, but it sounds like she unknowingly rented her house out to be a meth lab with cooks who probably used a bunch of meth in the process.

> The death-like smell emanating from the bathroom was frightening (and still is) and the bathroom sink was caked with a crusty yellow substance. Various pairs of my gloves were strewn about
Stem cells dude, they're totipotent[0]. Work is ongoing into infertility treatments based on them too[1].

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_potency#Totipotency

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell_treatments#Infertilit...
There's an increasing trend toward startups that disintermediate between traditional providers / purchasers.

eBay and Craigslist were early instances. I'd count eTrade and other online trading startups as another instance. Blogs, generally, cut out the middleman in publishing.

There's couchsurfing.com, various direct-lending startups, etc. And now AirBnB.

Some of these are fairly low-risk activities.

Craigslist, having been in the business for nearly 14 years (the domain was registered 11 Sept 1997) have a prominently displayed and long list of ways to protect yourself against fraud, including very explicit warnings and suggestions. It smells very real. And there are still a ton of posts to the feedback/help forums asking / warning / telling of scams attempted or perpetrated. And a few notorious headlines.

Startups especially like to portray the world as consisting of mostly nice people. This may be the case, but the exceptions to that rule can be, well, exceptionally bad.

Close family friends run a B&B. They've done it successfully for nearly 30 years, and have mostly good stories to tell, as well as some cool celebrity guests. It takes a mindset, especially when you're inviting strangers into your house (their current setup has separate guest cottages), and it's a lot of work.

Ultimately, AirBnB is going to have to look at whether or not they want to put a bunch of rank amateurs in touch with one another (with the inherent risks), or serve as an intermediary for more established entities (much eBay and CL traffic is now through at least semi-official dealers and brokers).

I can think of some explicit steps EJ could have taken to protect herself: having a storage locker and moving valuables off-site would have been a good first step. Meeting the guest another. Some sort of in-apartment surveillance, at least of entry an exit areas, a third. At the very least this would help track the perp / establish whodunnit.

AirBnB could self-insure or take a guest deposit of some sort (possibly encouraging credit-card fraud) against such issues. I suspect they'll have to or fold with the publicity of this story.

One of the lending companies I spoke doesn't assume systemic risk (based on credit scores and such), but does assume all risk in the event of identity fraud. This would be a very good model for AirBnB to follow. Bruce Schneier has long railed on how credit card / debit card fraud proliferates in large part because banks bear little of tye risk (most falls on merchants, some on cardholders).

This will be interesting to watch.
"Only they decided to go and start suing everyone left and right."

The idea that Apple was the first person to sue anyone in mobile is laughable.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9ucqq8ZMD1qa34geo1_r3_500...
Airbnb is a brokerage for what is probably an illegal activity in a lot of places. The hotel industry is regulated for the same reason taxis are regulated. I love the concept of Airbnb, but I just can't see how it can really make it in the long run.

In this case, and in all others, Airbnb can not be responsible for this kind of stuff. Also, I highly doubt a homeowners policy is going to cover it because the person was renting out their place (again, probably illegally).
This is precisely what insurance companies are for. Airbnb gets insured, it's customers file claims with Airbnbs insurer when things go sour.

Insurance fraud is no joke and it takes a hell of a lot of stupidness to attempt it.
Notice the green in the username? Nobody on team actually sticks with an identity, particularly Marak (currently barracks on HN).

Lots of sock-puppeteering going on.
And I'm calling out that the article was about software pattents being possibly bad and the response was simply, "no, patents are good" without any real substance.
Their attack surface is way, way lower, though. Airbnb would only be insuring the contract between two parties that Airbnb knows, so they're lightyears ahead of homeowner's insurance when it comes to recovering money from a claim.

Fraud would mean the owner having an accomplice renter who destroyed something, Airbnb compensating the owner, and then being unable to track down the accomplice for redress. That's only a problem if a significant number of renters are able to use Airbnb without Airbnb having any way to track them down.

And if that's the case, they already have a problem.
But this is why such organizations fail (EDIT: or succeed sub-optimally with a horrible culture that doesn't resemble the fairy tale policy document) . They create a culture of "policies and the like" in which individuals are supposed to be perfect examples. But the reality is that each business unit (of any size) is run as personal fiefdom based on the ego and personality of the person in charge. Such "policies and the like" are guaranteed to fail.

And the reason that they fail is because regardless of whatever they put in print, the people in the organization are still ego machines. They still deal with emotions rather than content. They deal with the meta-message ("this person thinks he is clever than me") instead of the message ("this idea failed to produce dollar value"). Their brain is wired to produce the meta-message and what it means for them and their future, instead of the message, and what it means for the company and the company's future.

So basically you got as far as reading that Company X has a Policy and stopped reading, instead of getting the whole point which is that this company's policy is nothing like any other company's policy.

That was poor, superficial analysis on your part. Go and read Principles and come back with a better analysis. http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgew...
As above, airbnb already exists in a kind of legal gray area. There are very few places where it's actually legal according to municipal/zoning rules to rent out rooms this way. Not to mention the significant legal intricacies incumbent in offering insurance to consumers like that.
I have no idea if they're real or not. They could be fake, but there are quite a few women who have cleavage like that, at least with a push-up bra (a smaller number without a push-up bra).
> Clearly you’re not a business person if you wouldn’t care what the long-term implications of your company’s response to this were.

Doing the right thing is more important than making money. I'm really glad I learned that before earning my business degree.

I'll tell you a story.

A couple of years ago, during the height of the financial crisis, I decided to quit a pretty safe job, move across the country, and focus full-time on building and selling iOS apps.

Just before the move, with cash tight, I shipped a new app.

It was doing... so well. A nice bit of press, good placement in the App Store, and revenues like no other project had yet produced.

There was just one problem: sometimes, you could enter a shitload of data into the app – and then it would crash without saving. A lot of work lost. Not all of the time, just enough to make you suspicious of the app. And as a result, a worthless tool.

The fix was very easy. Absurdly easy: one line of code. An over-released object. But Apple doesn't work quickly now and definitely didn't then. I had a choice: two weeks of selling what I knew to be a worthless app or destroy all my momentum and pull the app until the fix was ready.

So I pulled the app. Lost the high ranking that would have led to even more sales. Donated all the sales from that first day to a worthy cause, since I couldn't issue refunds. Fuck, did I need that money.

But I never looked back. Because it was the right thing to do.

You profit from creating value. If you do harm, you take responsibility and put things right. Anything less is unworthy of your humanity.

That's it. If my passion for doing the right thing makes me bad at certain things, oh well. Money comes and goes. My conscience is with me until I die.

> What happened to this girl sucks, but your post is overly emotional and absurd. It’s not Airbnb’s moral responsibility to do anything about this.

Sorry you feel that way. We'll never have common ground to work together. Good luck!
Events like this present a pretty big moral dilemma about Internet anonymity - at least in context of this category of services.
Really, I couldn't care less about my email client supporting CSS. I much rather emails in plain text than distracting formatting.
Or, it just means that the insurance industry has not caught up with a new innovation.
What version are you using id I may ask? I've 11.50 and it's not working for me (as it is not full screen, just full window).
Taking the same stance as homeowner's insurers do implies that they would be the insurance company. That's an enormous can o' worms.
It's not onerous until you consider that desktop computers and flat-screen TVs are "valuables".
I would argue that their actions, at the very least, are getting people thinking about the privacy and security issues we face. Their methods are blunt and can be damaging, but you can't deny that people have been talking about these issues much more, and I think that's a good thing.
Does this system have transactions and ACID guarantees?
Which comes to these questions: "What happens if they know something I don't? What if they know something I can't find out before it's too late?"
Minute 1: running a few whois queries, found weeklydigest.me

Minute 2: opened tabs in my browser with cheap-domainregistration.com, wufoo.com, addthis.com, uservoice.com, google analytics (I already had those last two open actually)

Minute 3: while waiting for them to finish loading (my internet is down so I'm using my phone at the moment) I copied the template and virtual host config on my server for pimpmysalary.com and tested it on weeklydigest.mockups.decalcms.com

Minutes 4 - 9: added a domain to my DTC config, pasted in the GA, Uservoice and AddThis code, made the Wufoo form and plugged it into my email backend at flymessage.com, and pasted the code in, then updated the text on the page

Minute 10: went through the domain registration process using my saved credit card (okay this may have taken more than a minute).

Were you the guy that wrote that article the other day after I posted "my 15 minute project" doubting the authenticity? These things are just pages copying something I've done before with a Wufoo form. There's nothing there, it's just an idea.

I didn't even have the idea, I got it from this Tweet from Mo Koyfman:

http://twitter.com/#!/mokoyfman/status/96189723537715200
"Libraries over frameworks. In Soviet Framework Russia, you don't call code...code call YOU." -- exactly! Very few people get this, which is a shame.
Firefox has had fullscreen HTML5 video for some time. So no, this is not the first HTML5 fullscreen video.
Google can say whatever they want about Hitwise, but as far as I'm concerned, if it weren't for Gary Vaynerchuk, Baratunde Thurston and Chris Messina, I'd be left to reading my own posts. I have over 100 people in my circles and there are virtually no postings outside of those three and the Google+ people.

It's early in adoption, Twitter provides a much-wanted relief from Fb refugees and it's still a slog to post items of interest. Also, I still spend more time on HN as focused interests tend to weigh heavier in interest than random posts.
Yeah I noticed that! must be something dodgy with the UserVoice code, I might open a ticket.

Thanks for the feedback on the email address! That's a good UX snippet I'd not heard before.
Dude, did you just predict that AirBNB is going to be used for mobile meth labs?
Agreed. And the laws should either be changed or enforced. I don't fault Airbnb for that.

However I don't agree that because there are legal intricacies a company valued at over 1 billion dollars shouldn't protect its financial future.
>LevelDB is slower with random reads, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it for unordered data - it's still quite fast.

In a positive analysis (should rather than shouldn't), assuming no default choice, it seems rational to use Tokyo Cabinet or CDB _hashmaps_ for unordered data, and LevelDB for ordered data, from a datastructure and performance standpoint. To assert more would probably need a specific use case for context.
Why? They insure one specific thing: a contract between two individuals that they trust. The only way they lose out is if they don't actually have any realistic way to enforce the contract on the renter— which would surely be a way bigger problem for their business than having to pay out some fraudulent damages?
No, the worst-case scenario would be that guest copies keys, returns, and rapes and kills the owner/occupant.

Remember: once you've allowed physical access to your resources (computer, accounts, home, ...), all bets are off with regards to future security.

AirBnB has a pretty intractable problem here.

People aren't fundamentally vettable. It's an age-old problem. TSA, the HUAC, lie detectors, loyalty oaths, pledges, blood bonds, FICO scores, PGP webs of trust, are all attempts to solve that problem.

We can identify, authenticate, predict, track, audit, and prosecute.

We can't know the future.
Hopefully this sheds some light as to why fb is being valued so highly.
Your home owner / contents insurance almost certainly doesn't cover you for this, and never did.

Letting a stranger stay for a few nights in exchange for money is not novel to Airbnb, and will be excluded.
murder would be worst...serial murders that get turned into a movie(i.e. the craigslist killer) especially
First thing I thought: "Sure, he might have looked like a stoner, but the invention exchange showed that he had more of a work ethic than Mike". Then I read the headline again.
Oh, hey, yeah, I'm going to "stage an intervention" to get people to switch to the company that's going to yank their email with no human to complain to, whenever they feel like it.

This is ham-handed and frankly not nearly as funny as I'm sure it seemed on campus.
The original title is "Watch Out! International Space Station To Crash Into The Pacific After 2020 Retirement".
Sounds interesting. Not sure whether I agree with his philosophies or not, but here's a PDF of Principles, the book that the article referred to:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/274/Principles.pdf
Yahoo and Microsoft are not cutely asking you to stage an intervention to save your friends from their own misguided proclivities not to use them. So yes. Deserving of some derision.
Currently not it seems. It doesn't seem to matter from where I call videoElement.webkitEnterFullscreen(), it always works (in Safari)
I understand the problems of setting a precedent.

I don't, actually. If the financial industry has taught us one thing, it's that you can insure anything.

Let's assume that this is a very rare occurrence and that the total cost of making this right (say, tops $100k?) can be amortized over the profit being generated. I have a hard time understanding how it'd be rocket surgery to get something in place to handle these cases, especially just after a $112 million cash infusion.

Everyone keeps bringing up fraud, but fraud is nothing new to insurance and there are centuries of practices established in that industry for dealing with such – i.e. it will happen, it can be minimized by establishing premiums, requiring police reports, and, again, amortizing the cost of fraud over the spread of valid commerce.

[Edit replying to parent's #2 edit]

Sure, this one needs to be out of pocket. Actually, it'd probably be easier for them to insure now since there's a data point for how often this will happen per x number of rentals. Handling one of these out of pocket can't be a biggie for a company with several orders of magnitude more cash in the bank. And with a multi-billion dollar valuation, there will be institutional insurers that will be willing to build up a risk profile for them and work out a policy to handle these these things in the future.
I had to check the FAQ question about the piano. It used to be at http://www.airbnb.com/help/question/31 but they seem to have removed it.
An identity thief or general criminal likely has access to any number of stolen credit cards.
International Space Station will fall into the ocean in 2020
> "we've made sure our customer is whole."

When it gets to personal things like "found ... grandmother's jewelry" and "I don't have the mental energy to take those last few steps into my apartment. It's too creepy in there anyway."

It's really hard to "make someone whole" with a cash payout. There's a lot of distress involved. It's not just a case of "TV was stolen, TV costs $500, here's $500". There's family heirlooms and emotional trauma involved.

Aside from that difficulty, you're perfectly right.
Here is the presentation: http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf
I personally prefer Allman, but if I'm working with existing code, I'll use whatever style the code already uses.
Paying for Google services doesn't mean you get good support, FYI.
a small improvement:
site:news.ycombinator.com inurl:"user?id=" -"No such user"
Nope. I think you either missed the title of the post, or the first sentence of it ;)

System engineering, including systems programming. Assembly can be useful, especially disassembling. It's also an indication, I'd think, of a particular interest in systems engineering.
Google+ Traffic Falls As Users Spend Less Time on Site
You can totally message a person before being made — I personally don't rent out my rooms to anyone who hasn't messaged me first and I at least got a bit of personal information. Or do you mean messaging via email rather than through Airbnb?
You’re patting yourself on the back for not selling a buggy app to people? That's a completely different situation than that in the story at hand. Airbnb worked precisely like it was supposed to—there were no bugs. It’s just that Airbnb is in no way supposed to prevent things like this from happening.

If you do harm

Again, you’re not addressing the simple fact that you’re working from the assumption that Airbnb itself did harm here. They simply didn’t.

Doing the right thing is more important than making money.

Clearly Airbnb does not believe that doing so would be ‘doing the right thing.’ You’re simply calling them evil instead of recognizing that they have a different—and quite defensible—point of view concerning their responsibility.
"Some" fraudulent damages? If people figure out a reliable means to defraud you, they will do it until you fix the problem. And, congratulations, now your primary focus is fraud detection. You're now an insurance company.

There's also the fact that insurance companies are subject to many laws and regulations that other businesses are not.
An accomplice renter - or destruction or property - isn't necessary. The owner can just claim theft, at which point it's their word against the renter - "They stole my HDTV!" "There was no HDTV to start with!"

At that point Airbnb is put in an impossible situation - they either pay for what may be fraud, or they refuse to compensate what may be actual theft.
Developer tools are kind of a big deal.
One of the fine thing about email is that (unlike social networking services like Facebook or Google+) it's based on open and widely used protocols that works across service providers. Why would I ever care what email service provider someone else uses? I trust peoples choices. Hotmail/Windows Live Mail is quite nice these days.
Thanks for the link! You could theoretically just compile this file against SQLite-based BDB:
http://code.google.com/p/leveldb/source/browse/trunk/doc/ben...
And get the numbers yourself. (If you do, please post them here.)
Regardless of what Steve does in his professional life, I, for one, am going to stop procrastinating on all of those R links I've been saving up on Evernote and get down to some science.
Anyone know how LevelDB compares to Voldemort? From a cursory glance, they are identical in their simple API (get, put, delete)
Anyone wanting to know more can check Bostrom's Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap:

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...

Very technical, but gives a good idea of what is required.
It's handy for whipping out gdb to investigate segfaults at least.