skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What Airbnb needs to do is find a method of preventing this type of incident in the future. They have to work out how to change the economics of the relationship so that the host isn't bearing all the risk and the visitor has some disincentives that keep their behaviour within acceptable bounds.

I'm not sure that's possible, though. And the host isn't bearing all of the risk- a guest could rent out a room and have the host murder them in their sleep. It's fundamentally a risky proposition, though I'm agree that the host bears more risk than the guest.

(search Google News for 'airbnb' and see how far the story has got so far)

Eh, search Google News for 'craigslist killer'- Craigslist is still doing alright for itself. No doubt it's a giant hurdle to overcome, but this isn't the end of AirBnb.
As we are talking about portable miniature computers with phone capabilities, does anyone know an Android/Win7 phone that can do this kind of stuff...

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/04/how-one-radio-reporter...

I'd need audio in and decent non-destructive editing
looking at the web site some time ago also gave me the impression it's not thatwell planed prices. lots of missing info.

no wonder every thread about it raises the same basic questions.
"we are standing by"

Then stop standing by. Telling someone you will help is not the same as helping.
A little truth leaks out
Actually, hashed password ARE recoverable, technically. Though it would take a VERY long time to brute force the original passwords.
> Does AirBnB limit their pay out?

Yes. And make it clear that the payout is limited in the TOS. That way AirBnB/their insurer assume some well-defined amount of risk and it's not all on the renter.

The issue of insurance fraud is tougher though.
I think Nintendo's valuables are not in hardware (anyone can build a hand-held console these days) but in the huge library of very famous games.

If 3DS has lost the game, nothing stops Nintendo from re-releasing some of popular old games for iPhone (perhaps developing a descent emulator for iOS) and keep writing more excellent games in future.

Example: iD made another stash of green from Apple's app store when Carmack released Wolfenstein 3D for iPhone.
You're missing the point. It may be that the rewards possible from renting out your house for a few nights might not be worth the risks in letting strangers into your home (at least under the current terms offered by Airbnb).

That would mean that AirBNB doesn't have a viable business model, or that it's a much smaller market than previously thought.

Saying "insurance will handle it" isn't an answer. AirBnb needs to come up with some creative and effective policies to solve the real underlying problems first. A good start would be better identity verification of renters.

Once they've turned it from a bad risk into a good risk for a large market of people, then they can outsource the details to an insurance company.
Enough with the propaganda graphics. Please.

Political theory and hundreds of years of tradition holds that the legislature, not the President, is solely responsible for spending. That's why we have legislatures. That's their job -- to exert popular control over taxes and spending.

It's also a fact that the people you currently elect are responsible for the spending and policies that go on today. If new guys couldn't change policies and spending, then why have elections at all?

Please. Enough of this already. You want me to sign a letter saying your guy is awesome? Happy to do it. Just please cease and desist the posturing.
I think the problem is that you can not change your vote.

When duplicate stories appear in the front page then you will probably upvote the first one. Problem is that this may not be the one with the highest score, or with the biggest discussion. When you then realize that there is a better submission of the same story, you can't change your initial vote.

I think that if you could change your vote, the problem would be corrected by the community itself.
I don't know if I like it or not. If you know SQL well and want to switch to a NoSQL database, what's easier learn? The "proprietary" API of the dababase (like Redis, or MongoDB) or the limitations of unSQL?

I can't speak of other NoSQL databases, but unSQL doesn't seem to expose most Redis' features, like lists & sets.
how much is 40k in chile?

can i and 2 other cofounders move there and have a good place to stay each? ...maybe one or two with the wifes?
The debt ceiling is not analogous to your credit limit. Your credit limit is imposed by the institutions that loan money to you. The US debt ceiling is imposed by Congress.

The closest analogy to your credit limit is the interest rate for Treasury bills; as investors become more concerned that the US will either become insolvent or inflate its way out of debt, they will demand a higher interest rate for that money. T-bill rates are as low as they’ve been since the 1940s, so clearly the markets are happy to loan the government money; Congress is just arguing about how much to allow itself to borrow.
I've worked at a datacenter, partially as a disaster recovery guy for customers. 99% of the time, its no/improper input sanitation.
> My task killer was my most frequently used app.

Oh. You probably weren't aware of this, but task killers can cause every problem you list -- app crashing, UI lag, etc.

As soon as I got rid of mine, my phone was much more responsive and had about twice the battery life!
I also voted for merge. Perhaps when a comment formatted in a particular way recommending a merge receives n number of upvotes that could trigger the merge?

It's difficult because so many blogs and other news outlets in the tech media world travel in flocks. After one does some original reporting the rest jump on the story and (usually) cite the original source. However, the original source for the story doesn't always rule on HN in terms of hosting the main conversation. Sometimes this is because of the timing of the submission and sometimes one of the members of the 'flock' are higher profile and gain more knee-jerk upvotes (TechCrunch comes to mind).
The CS liason sounds like they were actually trying to serve their customer. The interactions with the founder sound like her account got switched from "customer service" to "damage control."

Yeah, I get it, the business is his baby. But it's just a business, and it's just ruined someone's life for who-knows how long. Get your priorities straight. The business is just effort and money, it's not worth doing this kind of damage to other people, not even 1.
True, but I wonder if Apple really needs to have a standards body overseeing it. They can still open up the protocol without going through a standards body, which is probably in their best interest.

Then third party developers would develop FaceTime apps for Android, etc.

But then of course you won't get the seamless user experience.
It's already too late for that. They've made their bed.
My fingers do emacs-y things on their own. It's a huge problem for me when I have to do something on windows. Especially C-a. That one's the worst.
I definitely get the point of MIT and Stanford having amazing entrepreneurial cultures, which is something that we don't have here in Newfoundland.

I'd love to be able to tell people about something that I've made -- but I haven't made anything. I have no idea what to make and no clue where to start.
How about a done-vote button?
What a huge missed opportunity for AirBnB! For a drop in the bucket of time & expense, they could have easily come out of this looking stellar & likely would have gained the business of many people who have been on the fence.

Instead the come out looking like they're trying to hide the flaws in their model.
This is Verizon's longstanding tradition of crippling perfectly good devices for the sake of restricting users to using VZW's media services.

Because, you know, if they force it on us long enough, we'll finally realize it's good!
they get you 40k and u have to put in 4k from your own pocket (the 40k are in the form of reimbursements - u spend something, they give u back in the following month). U have to spend the 40k during the 6 months (can't spend it all in one month for instance) and of course, you have to spend it in business-related stuff, like salaries, software, marketing, etc (they won't reimburse coffee or if you buy a car!)
The contract you sign is very clear: there are no strings attached apart from having to keep someone here for 6 months and presenting reports to get the reimbursements. So it's no "free lunch" - it's just a great example of what governments could (and should) be doing with their money. It fosters innovation, that alone is a huge return of investment for the country..

disclaimer: I'm in StartupChile's first class of 2011 (Novelo team from Brazil) and LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it. I'd be here even if they offered ZERO dollars!
I haven't made anything yet. How would the source from my course assignments/projects look on GitHub?
Not necessarily. It's impossible to measure things like lawsuits that didn't happen as a result of buying a patent portfolio, but that doesn't mean the investment is worthless.
It doesn't matter why this person's experience sucked with Android, it still did. An iPhone 'just worked' for this same person.

I know exactly what I'm getting when I get an iPhone no matter where in the world I get it. There's no carrier specific crap. All the models have well known limitations and features. I can trust, for the most part, any apps I get from the app store.

It's great that you can go onto eBay and get a used phone (or possibly new), but how scalable is that? Would you trust your mother or grand mother to do the same? How much effort did it take between bidding, paying and activating compared to the effort that most people are willing to put into getting a new phone?

I don't think Android is going to be a failure -- the phones will always be around. They have basically taken the place of Nokia's feature phones.

At the end of the day, Google should have maintained more control to guarantee a better user experience. They had an opportunity to follow in Apple's footsteps and put another nail in the carrier's control coffin.
Show HN:  Would you use this Twitter iPad App?
Any critical feedback of our Twitter client for the iPad (free) would be appreciated. Would you use this? A screensaver version? The ability to add other channels besides Twitter? I'm all ears.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/26/birds-eye-ipad-app-lets-you-use-twitter-while-looking-down-on-i/
Hey, let's report errors only when nothing is at stake
Wow, now I wish I'd thought of having a notexactly account.

Maybe I'll have to settle for yesbut
The customer is definitely not always right. But this one is very convincing.
I got the impression from last week's This American Life that a lot of large tech companies are buying defensive arsenals of patents. And that Google lost out on the Nortel patents because a group of other companies (including Microsoft and Apple) paid even more for them.

It seems that there are a lot of companies that would benefit from incremental but substantive patent reform, and lobbying for it could be cheaper than the billions wasted on patent defense now.
I'd like to see a tag mechanism where tags may be attached to a submission and voted on. Then, I'd like to be able to view the home page sorted by tags instead of by submissions.

Hopefully, that'd result in all Airbnb stories grouped together under tags representing different aspects of the story as well as automatically cross-referencing it with other examples of PR failure.
what's easier learn? The "proprietary" API of the dababase (like Redis, or MongoDB) or the limitations of unSQL?

That's what bothers me about this, too.

While I can understand the goal of making noSQL databases more accessible to people who already know SQL, as well as the need to unify the commands across all the different flavor of noSQL databases, there's something fundamentally flawed about accessing unstructured data via logic intended for structured data.
I'm not sure I follow. Distributing profits to employees (bonuses) or to investors (dividends) is bad? The employees and investors now have more money to buy things or to re-invest.

I'm not an economist, but I think that when money flows from A to B, the economy does grow. It doesn't matter if that flow is to employees as bonuses, investors as dividends, or to vendors as business expesnses.
Ok I'll bite; actually quite different - there are (very) strong indications that the NotW's problems were part of the culture there which makes the idea that the bosses did not know seem very unlikely. In this case there are no such indications afaik.

In any case I wasn't taking a position (I simply do not know enough to do so), rather I wanted to provide some balance to the assertion that they spam which was stated as if it was absolute fact.
I was trying to avoid commenting, but I totally agree.

One thing I'd do is rent her an apartment, not a hotel room. She really seems like someone who values the "home" aspect of it, vs. just the monetary or functional aspect.

I'd she would be willing to rent it via airbnb for $0 that would be even better for them (direct from Joe or Brian).
Although Android wasn't to blame in this article, I have sold my HTC Android to get an iPhone 4 as I was disappointed with the lack of international support.

Android didn't support the Thai language I needed and had to be installed via rooting and copying of font files. It also still doesn't have a native keyboard for the language.

I however booted my iPhone 4 and hey presto perfect Thai fonts and a native keyboard to boot.

Maybe it's not just Android because Thai fonts on Linux suck too.
It is an Android (the brand) problem though, because that's how Android is presented in the marketplace. When it takes rooting the phone to make it usable, that automatically means that most of the people who buy Android phones are going to get a sub-par experience.
We've had great success with using ElasticSearch to index our couch db databases in near realtime into it's lucene indexes, and then querying those.

It allows each tool to focus on what it does well.
RNG..58 of Japan wins 2011 Google Code Jam [Link to Problems]
: rolls eyes :

No. I'm a life long student of history and politics that was raised by a pair of history professors. I grew up watching news about the Vietnam War and the Nixon debacle. (Yes, I'm an old cynical fart.) Most people evaluate political news with the attention span of a day-trader or ferret instead of spending the time researching the causes and tracing the money.

Obama can't fulfill his promises nor do the morally and legally right actions to "fix" the situation. His hands are tied by his political obligations. That's why the general public is going to be fked some more. We've basically turned back a generation of progress in a generation.
"The planend hardware included a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, and 1080p output."

Is it just me, or does that sound like it might make a decent gaming machine, if you don't get too greedy about graphics?

If that's the case, the consoles are in trouble!
Why Twitter’s Promoted Tweets are a Feature Disguised As Advertising
That's what I thought too, but didn't disable it. Now I've found that it's great when you're searching within a file, because you can see the search matches highlight on the minimap. The same highlighting is also great when linting files (https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeLint) to see where errors are.
Do it like stackoverflow. Search submitted urls/articles and show in the article submission interface. Preferably ajax-y so as user types url and/or title it already sees if he is posting something repeated.
The perp also stole money, passports etc.
Google Introduces Hotel Search
Nintendo's in an awfully tough spot here. Their success in expanding the market to non-gamers (the "blue ocean strategy") puts them in exactly the wrong place for 2011 where it appears likely that most dedicated gaming systems are going to be owned by the hardcore going forward. Many of their newly-won customers from the last few years now have all the games they could want on systems they already own and those games have average price tags of maybe 20% of what they are on traditional platforms. And they're better connected for social, too.

So Nintendo doesn't have room to make particularly enticing hardware - it'd have to be super-cheap to tear people away from platforms they already own for other reasons but it'd probably have to be super-expensive to be different enough to be exciting.

And, even worse for them, the bottom has completely dropped out of software pricing. It's tough to pay $40 for a 3DS game that I'm likely to play less than something for $2.99 on the App Store. I'd buy Mario and Zelda for it, but that's probably it.

With the very Nintendo "make something cheap but that's so different and so cool that everybody with an iPad would still want it" option off the table, what can they do? Can they survive just selling <$10 games on somebody else's hardware? Maybe a partnership? An Android partnership doesn't seem likely to deliver Nintendo quality in the short term at least and Apple is quite unlikely to partner with them. No other mobile platform seems worth their time.

I do wonder if there's a team working on Zelda for iOS... And another team preparing a massive reorganization. Seems like a terrible option but I don't see what else is going to be available to them. Hope they can find a good way out of it because they're one of the most innovative companies in the world.
It seems like Canada is half way along the awesome scale to Europe.
you can only spend 350k pesos per founder, from those 40k. The rest should be used for other expenses, such as hiring, software (housing/rent is also refundable outside the 350k cap), etc.

350k pesos = 760 usd/month, which allows for some pretty ok living (a decent meal runs for 3-4k pesos, subway tickets are 500 pesos and so on).

I'm here with my wife, there's a guy here with SEVEN kids. :)
Spam is just one of many things that slightly reduces the reliability of email, and Bayesian filtering has reduced it to a minor nuisance. The implication that email was ever completely reliable is false, there has always been a risk of mail servers going down, for example, but it was also reduced to a minor nuisance by modern redundancy techniques (for example).

The implication that there even exists an actually reliable way of communication I don't think is true either, that's why email is still so widely used.
this is a very silly question, but what are the odds they will accept founders from Asia? i'm Indonesian currently working in Malaysia. if the odds are good, i'm willing to try. i don't want to waste my and their time submitting application if i know they favor certain countries of origin (i just pessimistically think they're luring people from Valley and the like, not just some random countries).
This is not the case. I have a Samsung Moment "with Google". The stock Android it ships with comes with unremovable apps (and unremovable game demos), a half-baked navigation app, a terrible voice search replacement, unkillable background services that count how many times you open the keyboard. It's also got a totally broken radio driver that violated FCC 911 regulations for over a year (google it if you care), and has been abandoned at 2.1 officially 10 months from release since it's no longer in Samsung's profit interests to maintain a terrible device that Sprint pulled from their product line. The only way the phone is remotely enjoyable is with custom ROMs. I bought it with 1.5 and accepted a sub-par experience because of Samsung's publicly stated promise that it would get 2.1 quickly, it took several months before an official 2.1 update was released and nearly another year before their radio issues were resolved.

The "with Google" branding meaning nothing in terms of actual phone experience, and Samsung isn't the only vendor at fault here. After my experience, and dozens of similar accounts like this blog post, I don't recommend anyone buy an Android phone that isn't a "by Google", like the Nexus line, and even then, only if they have some strong objection to getting the iPhone, which I would recommend over any current Android device.

I really, really, really wanted to like Android, but you can damn-near put an 18 month countdown on the majority of the Android phones before the manufacturer abandons it and you're stuck using XDA developers or the like for updates, patches and improvements, or just to fix the stock crap they ship. On a 24 month contract cycle, that's just unacceptable.
Graphics or simulation complexity -- I don't think it'd run Dwarf Fortress very well, for example.
I've gone from super alpha CM7 to CM7.1 and current nightlies without wiping, save for once, and that was due to Google Apps changing.

CM6 -> CM7 you have to wipe, but most OTA updaters will tell you that the OTAs from Eclair->Froyo or Froyo->Gingerbread effectively require a data wipe anyway. My mother had issue after issue after the Eclair->Froyo OTA and they went away when she did a factory reset (wipes /data).

>Ideally I'd like to see Google offer APIs to apps so that their data is continuously synced to my google account

They exist, though there is some fine print about device compatibility that is a bit wonky and NO one seems to use them for anything. I agree. I think this is the missing feature in a large way. I hate having to remember to turn off the loud beep in QR Scanner when I wipe my Droid (it's speaker is sooo incredibly loud). Things like that would be trivial to store in text config and/or sync with Google.
I would be a very happy man if I could filter out stories having Airbnb in the title.
So there are two points here: different articles on one topic may contain different perspectives, so they all should be preserved when merging; on the other hand, it would be better if there was a single place where people would discuss a topic.

Maybe a good solution would be to let people vote for merging several articles on the same topic, and once there's enough votes, merge them in one, say by concatenating both links and discussion trees?

If that's too heavy, maybe just extend each article with links to other discussion pages (say, adding beneath the text "This topic is also discussed here (link)").
She's not an expert in anything,

She's the world's foremost authority on personal suffering from the elephant right on Airbnb's critical path. Do not underestimate the power of this. I can visualize a team of people working on this issue and thinking that they're done with EJ saying, "No we're not. This isn't right yet."

Sometimes the pain of experience provides enough determination to outweigh all of our business plans, projects, and code. She'll keep going when others want a break. Which is exactly what's needed on this issue right now.

I'd hire her in a heartbeat.

[EDIT: I'd recruit her in a heartbeat. Only she could decide what's best for herself. It's just that when I say, "Turn lemons into lemonade," the OCD in me takes over and wants to go all out.]
<sarcasm> In a similar study, they do an association study between IQ and shower frequency... </sarcasm>
But then you lose most of the advantages mentioned in the linked summary.
Google's New Service to Speed Up Your Website
Fuck this shit. This is like when a Facebook user gets contacted by a raper using it; this is like when a Gmail account gets completly deleted.

Shit happens, and it will continue to happen to someone from time to time, but one case between thousands should not damage so much a single company.
There is too much discussion that spreads across stories though. The idea of merging sounds, uh, dicey, but it would avoid having fledgling discussions from being lost or preemptively killed.