skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel badly for the person whose placed got trashed, and it seems Airbnb is doing what they can to remedy the situation - but am I the only one who feels there's a certain risk to be assumed with online transactions such as this?

If a girl meets a man on match.com who claims to be single, but after getting into a relationship with him she finds out he's married - is match.com to blame for this? Could they have done more to verify his background - perhaps, but that's also the risk we take.

It's an unfortunate incident, but trust me other than hacker news, techmeme and techcrunch (that's where the FT got it from) this is not really headline news, and it's not going to affect airbnb's performance in the long run.

On a separate note, I hope pg realizes with 423 comments on here it's hard to make heads or tails of what to read - hopefully the comments rating system will be brought back.
Non-relational databases have nothing to do with SQL, they have to do with trade-offs in data structures, consistency, availability, fault-tolerance, and distribution.

You need to understand how ignorant you are, because until you do you're going to have a calcified and incomplete understanding of databases.
Can anyone provide more info when the site says "...the file locking logic of many network filesystems implementation contains bugs (on both Unix and Windows)"?
The girl who's house got ruined doesn't care if AirBnB falls apart, and the founders have to work for a red-tape, boring organization for the rest of the lives.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
HTC CEO Calls Pro-Apple ITC Ruling a “Distraction"
There's a fine line, though. If the cost goes too high, why not just stay in a hotel? They have a specific budgetary window to aim for.
Europe is a big diverse place... I would imagine you couldn't really generalise to accurately.

Also offset by comparative minuscule military spending and far more efficient health and corporate/public welfare. But [citation needed], just generalisations from an antipodean armchair.
Number 7 is a great enforcement of 6. Standing for less than 5 minutes shouldn't be a problem for anyone without a medical issue, which would surely not fall under this "rule"
After Google published the WebM spec, who didn't see this coming? My only surprise is that it's only 12 companies. I'd expect more to pile on over time.
Well, we take (I took) a 'Computers and Society' class, where we talked about the consequences, morality + responsibilities of S.E.. Other than that it was just a bunch of programming etc classes. If you want that 'certified' feeling, maybe find a local school where that course is offered, take it, and then join the ACM.
I posted before the parent was deleted.
I'm a little concerned as well - I really enjoy Mac OS X as it is - in Snow Leopard - with the Macbook Pro hardware and I really like Xcode.

If the release after Lion ends up being iOS on a Mac, I'm gonna have to just install windows on my Macbook Pro ( hey, it'll still be the best laptop on the market even if it's not running OSX)
I'd love to work for someone like this if ... they lived up to their side of the implicit bargain.

I have had bosses who made demands of this sort but were stunningly, despicably unworthy of them.

I wonder what exactly is the breakdown between "demand exactness but doesn't provide it" and "demand exactness and does..."?
As I've been talking to people about IP/software patents, I've had several say "This has been going on for forever.". Is this the opinion of fellow-HNers? Is it just more in the spotlight because the patents are being consolidated amongst "big players" in the media and mobile spaces or am I just more in-tune to it recently?
I sometimes post a cross-reference to say "here is where the still live discussion is". I have never been downvoted. I suspect comments of that sort get downvoted when they come across as somehow ugly -- like they are being critical of the new submission for having been made at all or, worse, are actively discouraging real conversation from breaking out because it didn't happen in some prior submission. I think it's rude when someone remarks that it's a duplicate in a negative sounding way and then links to something where the conversation is long dead. I recently saw this done in a piece where the previous submission was from 12 days earlier. I just thought that was asinine behavior. I replied to it, then thought better of it and removed my remark. (Glad to have this chance to remark on it here though.)

I don't know what a better solution might be. I am just saying I do know that how you comment on the existence of a duplicate and frame the cross-reference matters.
When your bandwidth is limited it becomes difficult to get many more gigabytes as that is the whole point of a throttle. So when that throttle is applied to the power users then they physically can't download as many gigabytes as they used to. So my theory is that over time the difference between the 99th percentile and the 95th is going to decrease as the power users who used to raise the bar higher are throttled down to a more normal gigabyte per month usage.
$a = passwO_rd1; $b = ($a striped down to lower case); $c = ($b's metaphone); $d = md5(md5($a.'salt1'.b).$c.'salt2'); $e = md5(md5($c.'salt3').$c.'salt4'); Store $d as encrypted password then store $e as a string to check against. have $e saved in a separate communal database so to brute force $e and then guess the missing characters and the right user it would be. ([missing characters]^[character set])^([password lengh] ^ [users])^2 or something along those lines
Is it any surprise that the group running VP8's main competitor is trying to convince the world it's vulnerable to patents?
Google: Reports of Google+ Traffic Decline Are Incomplete
i think this must be more stable largely because the two engines are closer together (effectively one "side boom" is moved to the centre).

couldn't you do even better with a push-me pull-me configuration? then power would always be aligned correctly, whatever failed. perhaps that is less efficient, since the pusher is in the wake of the puller? it wouldn't look so fugly...
Everybody would be better off except for the ISP's who would now be exposing the ridiculously high dollar per gigabyte rate they are charging.
Researchers Expose Cunning Online Tracking Service That Can’t Be Dodged
"If you must prepare reports for me, review spreadsheets I've created. Copy the style and format."

This is so incredibly important. Not only is it great to have a unified reporting look on a team, this promotes comprehension. If you present me a spreadsheet that looks like how I make a spreadsheet, I'll understand it very quickly. Likewise, if you start making spreadsheets that look like mine, you'll understand mine better.
You can always go the other way get Vim commands in Emacs with Vimpulse.
The file is hosted on DropBox, a file storage service. What you describe is a highly unlikely outcome.
Wait--so the guy who trashed the house is a victim?
I think had they done that, it could have actually made people really comfortable with the risk involved with using AirBnB. I wonder why they backed off. It also seems that something like having people submit scans of their drivers license or other form of ID would help prevent these kinds of problems.
If a boss of mine gave me a set of rules like this, I would quit immediately. It sounds like something a narcissist would write.

The rules themselves aren't necessarily bad. I agree with the majority of them. Nor is this list necessarily rude. In fact, if you pay attention to it, the wording is actually pretty polite.

The giant, waving red flag here is the underlying sense of entitlement. Notice that each rule is of the form "Don't do this, I like that." Of course, the thing that's being left out of all of this is how the person who's reading it works. I don't care if you're the boss. You can't expect efficient teamwork without taking the team's desires into account.
Well, the USDA disallowing a cheap and effective test for infected cattle is true. I was conjecturing on the misdiagnoses - I was being up front about that.
TweetFire - new Twitter client for iPhone
Another beautiful piece of non-obvious design.

I instinctively look for symmetry in my designs (and my purchases too I suspect).

I wonder if the reason it never 'took off' commercially was that people instinctively disliked the lack of symmetry?
MediaNet is a product of the labels.It started in 2001 as Musicnet, created by Real Networks, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann and EMI.

In my time at a label I tried to work with them, but their technology is kind of awful, so I wouldn't be shocked if Turntable is looking for a better partner.

Essentially they are a proxy between the label catalogs, reporting for royalties and DSP's (digital service providers) who license and distribute content.

Or as I referred to it internally, the "API Model"

Regarding the user uploaded stuff, that's under DMCA.

Of note: Turntable really falls into two licensing camps: DJ and listener. Very different terms required.
How to Liberate Your Data from Google (And Why It Matters That You Can)
Why jump to Windows instead of some other Unix based OS?
Spot on.

Heat -> electricity

beats

heat -> mechanical motion -> electricity.

That being said, I've yet to find the paper on the microreactor they are using from the Microsystems Technology Lab [1] perhaps it will come out in the 2011 annual report.

One fascinating use proposed for these is to power monitoring systems for high-level radioactive waste using the heat generated by said waste.

Personally I'd love to have something I could put on my dashboard that would power a fan to circulate air through my car while it was parked in the bright sunlight.

[1] http://www-mtl.mit.edu/wpmu/annualreport/?cat=6
There are a number of promises made in that document which had damned well better be held to, or this is a recipe for disaster.

Yes, but spelling out the promises clearly is at least a step towards making sure they are followed.
Unintended consequence of reading the article: I need to rethink decades of conditioning. I thought Republicans opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I would say it is certainly a legal concern to download movies via bittorrent. To avoid problems, I would suggest services that don't make you discoverable to 3rd parties, such as html downloads or even newsgroups or irc.
Hulu sued for patent infringement
Bah, missed that the story was essentially ripped off from: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/29/us-hulu-lawsuit-id...
Exactly, and the information that the manager is asking for is what will save your ass when the company is deciding which project is going to get the axe. If you play by these rules and properly prepare for the meetings you can be confident that the manager you are working for has all of the data he needs to defend the project, which is much more than I can say for places I have worked.
Perhaps this was couched in a fairly direct tone; but then I suppose that is what I like

I like directness too. But this is also the oldest excuse in the book to cover up being an asshole. "Don't like how I call you a fucking moron? I'm just being direct. Quit being so sensitive!"
Can't you edit the link?
It seems like it didn't take off commercially because it was just never pursued:

> Like many of Rutan’s creative designs, the Boomerang never went
> into production. There was never even a second example built.
Actually, verification of hosts is not THAT tough and Airbnb already has a solution - "Airbnb verified" photos of the listing. Airbnb offers (in big cities at least) to send a photographer to your address and have him take pictures and upload to your listing page. This verifies to a reasonably decent degree that the person listing the property is the owner too.
I'm a chilean entrepreneur looking for a cofounder to apply to Startup Chile: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2824118
It's not their fault that this happened. But it is their business. So if this turns off customers, because they fumble this rather expectable occurence, then yeah - that is their fault. If you run your own business there just are no excuses. That's the flip-side to not having to put up with a lot of BS.
While my first thought is that I would rather use native APIs for each datastore, I do use SPARQL and SQL a lot so there is some sense to a standard query language.

The problem is having too abstract of an interface that does not allow easy access to functionality of different datastores.
World’s first ‘printed’ aircraft
I agree that they should not (and should not be able to) call a limited plan "unlimited". However, I don't think that going to a true pay-for-usage plan is realistic. Most people don't use much bandwidth. Those people are effectively subsidizing the high-usage clients.

Let's assume that the average data usage is 1GB (the actual amount doesn't matter). Right now, everyone pays $30 whether they use 1kB or 1TB. Imagine if instead we go to a pay per MB plan. A MB currently costs $0.03 (on average, and assuming 1000MB to the GB). We know that the top 5% are using 12x as much data as the average user, so the top users are around 12GB, while the average user is around 420MB. So if we keep the usage price the same, the average non-top-5% user will be paying only $12.60. The top users are paying $360.00. Of course, the top users aren't going to continue this kind of payment. They'll leave for another provider or else drastically cut their usage. So now AT&T is serving less data (yay), but they're also bringing in about 42% as much revenue.

And bear in mind that this same calculation could be done for the next 5% and the next. The person using 1MB today paying for the 999MB they don't use so that someone else can use it. After the new plan, their fee goes down to $0.03, and someone else's goes up by $29.97. A lot of people would simply stop using any significant bandwidth and force AT&T to raise the price per MB drastically.

I think tiered plans make more sense, where instead of a true pay-for-usage, you basically have pay-for-max-usage. I think this might be where we end up. And the reality is that what we'll probably see will be $30 for "average" or slightly-above-average usage (1GB in my example), and other tiers for "exceptional" usage. Maybe $45 for 2GB and $60 for 4GB. AT&T isn't going to take a big pay cut on average users, because exceptional users by and large will not make up the difference. They'll just stop being exceptional users.
The risk is nonzero, but it's hard to tell what level of risk you will find to be reasonable.

Data point: http://unitedtechguys.com/2011/06/10/50000-people-sued-for-d...

Anecdote: at least 1% of the people I went to college with were sent "piracy letters" by the school's ISP while attending school.

Edit: data point from Hn in the last hour: http://imgur.com/vsnmm
To play devil's advocate: does cutting back on the transfer rate constitute a data limit? Users that hit that 5% threshold aren't blocked from sending and receiving data, they just don't get the same transfer speeds.

Granted, it sucks to see this happen, but if transfer rates aren't also specified in the plan/advertising it's hard to argue that this represents going back on an "unlimited data" promise.
I hadn't seen that one before so I came up with a similar script that updates both git and mercurial repositories: https://bitbucket.org/tednaleid/vimrc/src/tip/install.sh

Tammer's has some nice things in it that I might crib, thanks for the link
Yes.. that's the thing of course. And I suspect that the majority of people that say the things in the email the OP posted are... basically assholes.

However some aren't - and for me they are the people I want to work for and learn from.

As I said; Ideally I'd love to be that sort of person. Unfortunately I have this horrible suspicion that most people feel that way - and in reality are not at all like that.

I keep myself going on the hope that because I have figured out this irony I might not fall into it.. (and, yes, I appreciate the extra irony there).

I just hope that when my first underling tells me I am a dick I don't laugh at him.
The article focuses mostly on legal measures (e.g. lawsuits, regulation), but my guess is that those would only deter the largest companies. What I'm more worried about is why 'incognito' modes in current browsers don't appear to stymie this tracking, and how likely it is that that can be fixed.
Homesteading on the indie web
In every case where I have worked with someone who enumerates a list of rules like this, I have observed:

1) that the author believes he is being highly original;
2) the rules are enforced unilaterally, and adhered to by the author at best grudgingly if at all; and,
3) whenever a superior tells you, "I'm an X person," for whatever X you like (people, no-nonsense, pure as the driven snow, bullshit-free-zone) you can rest assured that the opposite is the case.
I don't think anybody is 'blaming' airBnB for the incident. However, when you facilitate a transaction, there is an expectation that you are working to the satisfaction of both parties involved. If you give your credit card to a merchant and they ring up extra charges, it isn't the credit card companies 'fault', but you both want them to know about the issue and expect them to take care of it for you.

I think in the end this is a huge opportunity for AirBnB. They are getting tons of press that they otherwise wouldn't get, and in this case their is no such thing as bad PR (I don't believe that to always be the case).

As more people are likely to be renters than rentees, this might for a short time limit the availability of accommodation, if renters are concerned about their property. But more renters will become aware of AirBnB and in the not too distant future people will remember something about a renter who's property got damaged and it was a big deal. That memory may actually be a good thing! The details will be forgotten, but it may be remembered that something happened and AirBnB had to take care of it.

As a home owner, if you are looking to rent out your place and your options are 1) a site you haven't heard of 2) a site that gained world-wide exposure when there was an incident regarding damage to a persons property, wouldn't you be inclined to go with the one that people are paying attention to?

Rock stars trash a lot of hotel rooms, nobody blames or avoids the hotels.
I was a Mac user in the late 90s, been a Mac user again since 2007 or so, although as an "adder," not a straight up switcher.

Speaking for myself, I have had misgivings off and on but ignored/glossed over them earlier this year to buy a new 15" MBP. Unfortunately, the last few months (and especially after installing Lion) those misgivings have been growing stronger, and I'm definitely uncomfortable with what seems to be their increasing indifference to pro users. I don't object to making things easier by hiding features, but I do object to doing so by removing features entirely -- for example, the way Expose and Spaces were gimped in favor of Mission Control in Lion. It's easier for the average user, but it's really messed with the way I manage windows and applications, and I quite honestly Do Not Like It. Anecdotally, from talking to a few friends who are also power user types, they hate it as well.

At any rate, I've been thinking more and more lately about switching back to an all-Windows environment. My day job is web development on the .NET platform, and I generally love C# and ASP.NET MVC -- they are just a fantastic environment to work in. Since I already have all the tools, there'd be no real burden to switching back to all-Windows. Lately, I've really been thinking about using my MSDN sub to bootcamp the MBP, or maybe just selling off the MBP entirely for a T420 or Samsung Series 9. I do really like the MBP's hardware and especially the trackpad, but now that we're finally seeing Clickpad-equipped laptops coming out that's much less of an issue for me.

Mind you, this is all just my opinion. Others may disagree, and I'm sure they will. :)
Agree completely. CodeIgniter used to use this as an argument for supporting PHP4 (!!?!?!?), but it seems so bankrupt. I (anecdotal, I know) don't know a single person writing an application (what these frameworks are designed for) who would deploy to a classic shared hosting environment over a VPS or app cloud service.
Improving Mexican economy draws undocumented immigrants home from California
The other company in this space: http://developer.7digital.net/

These guys have much better tech.
One new measure is a step that may reduce the data throughput speed experienced by a very small minority of smartphone customers who are on unlimited plans – those whose extraordinary level of data usage puts them in the top 5 percent of our heaviest data users in a billing period.

If 1 out of 20 people qualifies, then it's by no means "extraordinary". "Extraordinary" should be something like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. If 3 people on your block fit the bill, then that's just called "ordinary".
Correct: that is what I learn from my experience. Of course even small companies might have issues with "innovations" for low level employees, but big companies have people, processes and revenue structures in place which are essentially incompatible with innovation.
Yes — about repeating, I am extemely scrupulous about making sure notes are taken. Actually, I often go far beyond notes, when appropriate. I may not have an eidetic memory, but I+computer does.

But people who say they hate repeating themselves annoy me greatly. They often repeat mistakes, which is a far worse problem. As you point out, they scapegoat others for constantly needing to repeat themselves.
you'd probably make more money on ads than on affiliate for $1 mp3s.
This is the kind of mechanical device where I could support patents, especially for a ~5-10 year span.
Ask HN: U.S. based development firms
I'm looking to find a good development house to build a web application. Aside from the most obvious players (e.g. Pivotal) what are the strong firms that I should be looking at. Any notion on cost/dev/week would be highly appreciated.
IPhone 4 noise cancellation chip demoed
is there any indication on where the data is stored?
Statistically safe? Probably, it depends on the movie. Morally wrong? Yes. Harmful to the state of IP law in this country? Yes. If you're a developer who wants to get paid for what you do will I judge you as a hypocrite? Yes.

Will I make your decisions for you? No.
Facebook encourages its users to add lots and lots of friends to your main friend pool, and always has. It's spent most of its existence trying to get lots of users and build a huge social graph. Having hundreds upon hundreds of "friends" is the norm, not the exception - there's no emphasis on keeping your set of facebook friends small and tight-nit.
The question is how many patents essential to those 12 companies does Google hold. Quentin Tarantino should do a patent sue-them-up movie.
The DMCA says the provider has to take down the specified file, but since Cox can't reach into your computer and stop sharing that file they just disable your whole connection. This has been going on for years.

The DMCA was meant to apply to hosting providers and there is some debate about how it should be interpreted for broadband, leaving leeway for ISPs to interpret the law the way Cox does.