skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds to me like Paul Graham has made a fairly fundamental and common mistake, which is to say believing the AirBnb people when they reassure him that everything is under control and there's no fire here.

Paul, if you actually read the statements made by the CEO on news.ycombinator.com, it's very clear that AirBnb are the primary, if not only, ones at fault here.

I don't want to call Paul a liar, since it seems likely to me that he has just made a mistake of believing someone else. But he's putting his own reputation behind AirBnb, and AirBnb is lying. That's unwise.

Let me compare a different response that I'm familiar with. A friend of mine had her apartment destroyed in the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks. Insurance companies came and set up booths in Manhattan and were cutting checks left and right, without even SEEING the damage. My friend had a check in her hand on 9/13 if I recall correctly. She didn't get in to SEE her own apartment until a month later, and the insurance company didn't see it until much later than that.

As of today and yesterday, there are articles in newspapers across the land. There are phrases like "As of Friday afternoon, Airbnb had not returned calls from The [Washington] Post requesting comment." - that's a quote from a WashPost story, of course. One thing I know: when the Washington Post calls and a company has something good to say about themselves, they take the call (calls, actually).

It's apparent from the latest newspaper stories that AirBnb is now reacting in a cover-it-up fashion - they're trying to offer the woman a sum of money with the condition that she shut up. That's fine, I guess - very corporate of them.

But frankly I expected better. I guess I sort of expected that even if AirBnb was being dumb, that when the first article hit news.yc, that someone would call them and straighten them out. Instead it seems that PG, also, is blinded by "going to be as big as Ebay".
> I've passed her contact info to PG and him being the smart man that he is I'm pretty sure that he can come up with a solution that will satisfy everybody and will allow the victim to move on and get AirBNB past this crisis.

Did you do it with her permission?
Yeah, blogging about launching and posting it on HN is not actually launching either. But still worthwhile! Talking about launching is silver, launching is gold.
Makes me think what would happen if someone excels in this course but is primarily from a college in third world country. Would they be tempted to call him/her to stanford? That would be very exciting if that happens.
I find thought-topics like this fascinating.

- What, if anything, would change if we confirmed this?
e.g. I still have a mortgage, I still want my kids in school, etc.

- We manifested ourselves into a dream world, forgot we did it, and eventually got advanced enough to re-discover it. Inception!

- Who created the hologram? How? Where/when does it exist?

- Are our concepts of physics real or manifested?

Interestingly enough, if anyone has ever looked into remote viewing, namely the US-funded, 10-year long program in the 1970s[1] it may be of interest to note that one of the fundamental tenants of remote-viewing is that the universe is a hologram and that "any part contains the whole" which is what, they claim, makes remote viewing possible.

Another interesting thing I like to think about is how would one go about proving this to somebody?

If someone stood infront of you and flew around, walked through a wall or made a basketball appear out of thing air, I think most of us would go to 100 other explanations, including "oh god, ghost-basketball!", before settling on that our entire existence is a hologram.

Not to mention a large subset of humanity that would just categorically reject it, no matter what you showed them.

I'm open to most any explanation; I need proof, but I'm certainly open to it. I accept that there is always something new to learn. Every time I hear someone talk in terms of limits (to science, humanity, technology... anything) I begin to tune them out.

If the last 100 years has taught me anything, it is that there seems to be as much to be discovered as there is hunger out there to discover it.

THAT makes me wonder at times if elements of our existence are (sub) conscious creations, because the discoveries never seem to stop.

If you enjoy topics like this, I'd strongly encourage you read the entire Wired article "Faster"[2]. It is a wonderfully inspiring story of what is possible when you refuse to accept the limitations (physical and mental) put on you by the people around you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing#US_government-fu...

[2] http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/features/fas...
I'll add more as they come up or people share them. I'm pretty happy with the upgrade, and nothing broke for me, really. My VMWare Fusion system kept chugging along, etc.

Also, full disk encryption is amazing
The Piggyback Rider Success via Virtual Collaboration
> I passed her contact information to the one guy that I think can keep his head cool enough to solve this in a way that is beneficial to her. You may disagree with that but that's fine with me.

PG has a vested interest here -- he's an investor, not a neutral party.
Positive sum doesn't imply everyone is a winner. It merely implies that at least one person is a winner, that is, that the sum of all outcomes is positive.

Not sure if even that's true: after all, if no one is buying, is business positive sum?
The only time this happened to me, after being ignored for nearly a year I just threatenened with small claims court, and they paid with in days. I didn't even send anything official.

What I did do was research into late payment law and found that not only would they have to pay the court fees, but also a standard 8% interest on the debt. I think givin them that info helped encourage them to pay up.

Hope you get what you're owed.
I think that no matter who you are and how big you are (Facebook) you have to come out clean.

If you say that every developer has the same deal going on, no matter how much money they pump in, you should give them the same tools. If you DO think that who performs better should get better deals, as every business would, then just say so.

Playing the way they played so far (giving poor support, shutting down apps, making subtle deals, etc) do Facebook think they can really leverage developers with the HTML5 platform when they release it?

The only reason why developers want to keep working on Facebook is for their (official) userbase. Facebook knows that and they didn't do anything better than showing muscles so far.
The impossibility of “It’s going to be ok”. (Python Community Thank you)
It's simple, I would have probably done that had I thought it through, but the thought that she would object never crossed my mind, my bad.

> : forwarding identity to PG. : you seem like a very smart guy. this can not have been an omission.

All I passed was her email address and her first name, both of which were very easily found*, and I told her exactly how those were obtained.

If you think that I did that purposefully bypassing her permission then I can simply respond with saying that that is not the case, you can believe whatever you wish.
Re: 10 microsecond latencies. I wonder what a trading algorithm could possibly do in a few thousand clock cycles that is still profitable.
Thank you for your explanation.

> the thought that she would object never crossed my mind, my bad.

I believe you!

And here then is the point for all geeks present: Clearly even smart, informed, people make mistakes. The notion of 'buyer beware' is the ethics of hucksters, not Hackers.
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Ask HN: Need help/advise on a good Windows virtual server hosting company/plan?
I need to host a ASP.NET web-app and am looking for a good Windows 2008 virtual server hosting company.
Second this. I also request a 50% deposit before I begin work, and tend to price projects at a level where I won't be completely put out if they never complete the project.
I trust PG to be able to overcome his bias and do the right thing here and have every reason to believe that he can and possibly will. Yes, he's an investor, he's also a human being.

Hearing both sides of the story is crucial in that, as long as he's hearing just one side he probably should not be commenting on this.

The alternative is that he will let AirBNB solve this by themselves, based on the data available so far I think that will not work out well.
To think a business can only survive if the savvy feel at ease is itself naive, though. Most people in the world are deliciously ignorant about the dangers of any activity. People still take hitchhikers for a ride, still cross the road without looking, still share their public details on Facebook for everyone to see, and still use Bed and Breakfast services, still get on one night stands with complete strangers.

Change is often a good thing, but I don't think they should make hasty "significant structural change" because it's clearly not what's needed right now. Subtle evolution is much better to improve trust.
In my years of experience, I've found that huge ass blocks of code where % is useful in finding the beginning/end of a block are usually in need of massive amounts of refactoring.
>Paul is not just 'some AirBNB investor'

I know we're posting on the HN temple of the YC church, so I always expect a little bit of fanboyism in attitudes towards PG, but you've really gone off the deep end if you think that in this situation Graham is anything but just another investor.
Or rather, a good problem to have.
Size isn't the problem with SQLite databases. It's that it's unbearably slow with even fairly trivial joins and most of the other operations where it'd make sense to actually have an SQL database. SQLite is fine for tabular data, but then, so are a bazillion other things. Basically it's the perfect SQL database for the times that you shouldn't be using an SQL database.
> Yes, and I helped her doing just that by pointing out which parts of her blog allow people to figure out who she is.

Maybe you think you are doing the right thing - but think about this from EJ's perspective: A stranger contacts her and points out all the ways she can be identified from her blog... he then passes her contact details on to an investor in Airbnb. He goes on hacker news and comments about how easy it was to identify her.

If I was in her position, feeling vulnerable and suspicious, I'd start to wonder whether your "helpful advice" was in fact a veiled suggestion that she should take down her blog post, or face the risk of being publicly identified and humiliated.
You can generally include an arbitration term in contracts. Arbitration can be cheaper and faster than suing. In some cases, arbitration can be even more binding.

Point in case - you get a contract with a Chinese company, and state that the appropriate court for all claims is in your home town, in California. You sue the company, and win (as they don't even show up). Then you go to the Public Security Bureau (police) office in their town, and ask them to help size assets. The Chinese police will ask for a Chinese court order, but when you go to a Chinese court they tell you that your contract explicitly states that you should be back in California, and they have no right to intervene. On the other hand, if the contract is worded right, international arbitration treaties will kick in (so the Chinese courts should accept the arbitration decision), basically everyone worth speaking of has signed them. At least, that's my (unprofessional) impression from reading the China Law Blog (i.e. http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/02/arbitration_in_your_chin...)

But I am not a lawyer, and this is not advice.
+1

Effective Java is a must-read once you understand Java. It points out what is magic and what is not. What takes up processing time and what doesn't.

It pulls the sheet back on the abstractions and shows you how everything works and what you should be aware of.

Doug Lea is a brilliant developer in the concurrency space. With his Executor framework that went into (Java 5?) he suddenly made threaded programming as easy as possible to get right.
I was expecting: http://bp3.blogger.com/_snss6u0-WRI/RdzBKNfBTtI/AAAAAAAAAH4/...
Pakistan tries to ban encryption under new telco law
It always astounds me how people can completely blend out one major thing: consciousness

Is it possible that machines develop consciousness like ours? THAT is the question that needs to be answered and which is far more interesting than "from a technological point of view only"
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30/10/10
I wish Arrington didn't try to make himself the story so much - I know it's his schtick but it's very distracting from the actual story here.

He's obviously on HN regularly - if he had a problem with the way he was characterized in a HN comment the easiest way to respond to that is right there. Anyone reading pg's comment would see his rebuttal, pg would see it, and people could directlly make up their own minds.

Instead he makes a "oh god look at this liar" TC post because he enjoys using his bully pulpit to shape public opinion. No wonder he lets people like MG call out random CSR lies on twitter and get them fired at AT&T.
I've butted heads with PG more than most here and to call me a fanboy is really hilarious.

Yes, PG is an investor (or, more accurately, YC is an investor), but I've seen enough of Paul to know that he's more than 'just another investor' and if it turns out I'm wrong about that I'll be most surprised, I have not seen any evidence to date that PG does wrong by anybody when he has all the facts.

And that last bit is where I think the problem lies.

Calling YC a church and HN a temple is really ridiculous.
Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings
Haven't upgraded to OSX Lion and probably won't purchase MacBook anymore in the future (I currently own a 13" MBP).

Setting up development environment in Linux seems more sane not just for Python but for almost everything else (Java, Ruby, typical LAMP stack) except if you're doing iOS development.
Have you considered Amazon AWS? EC2 in particular?
They offer Win2008 server images you have complete control over.
I've been in this situation maybe 3x in 10+years, curiously, including my very first web project.

My solution: Turn off their web site. Replace their home page with a message: 'Site down due to non-payment. If you are the owner of this website please contact the administrator immediately' And a link to your own site with your logo on it. (Make the logo BIG! lol)

Never took more than 36hrs to get payment using this method.

Of course this is last-ditch effort, after other options such as asking politely, have been exhausted. And after they pay, I promptly end the business relationship because it's not worth it to do business with customers who drive you to such lengths to get your hard-earned cash.
I bought a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan privately. For less than $500, I got full dental and medical, including maternity, for my wife and 3 children.
The original submission at reddit had several interesting threads including strings ready to paste in Mathematica and attempts to run it in WolframAlpha.

"Do you like Batman? Do you like math? My math teacher is REALLY cool"
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j2qjc/do_you_like_batm...

It's shameful of HardOCP and others not to credit the original submitter.
Counterpoint: I just began developing my first Android app a few days ago, a turn-based strategy game. I've only had an Android device for a month or so so the platform is relatively new to me, and I didn't even know Java (although, to be fair, I knew C# fairly well a couple years ago, which is arguably the same thing plus type inference.) In a few days, with relatively few problems, I was able to build an app and I'll be releasing it in various markets soon (once I stop polishing and let it go, which is hard for me to do.)

I found the experience to be straightforward and intuitive. I was able to find tutorials for any task I couldn't figure out myself and the API documentation is perfectly adequate. Working with images and settings files are two areas where I was very pleasantly surprised at just how easy it was.

There were some minor frustrations. The Android emulator fought me a little so I started just debugging on my actual device. Debugging certain problems can be difficult, Eclipse can cause headaches and throw random nonexistent exceptions, etc. but overall I think you've vastly overstated the difficulty level of jumping into Android development. "The depth of knowledge of in design patterns required is so great..." It's really not. With almost no experience with Java or Android, I've put together a working app in a few days that, in my opinion at least, is pretty good, and that works on various mobile devices with different resolutions and capabilities.

Some other things I'm happy with about the Android platform: the SDK is free, Android is open source, you're very unrestricted with regards to what your app can do, and Android Market developer accounts cost a one time fee of $25 instead of $100 a year.
How long are your lines, how small is your font/letter-spacing .. du-duh! One line!
Wait, what? Why would environmentalists build oil wells? That's precisely the opposite of caring about the environment. Unchecked human development is recklessly irresponsible. But growth and development aren't necessarily evil - far from it. Understanding the ENTIRE impact of ones actions, rather than just the portion that affect you, is (imo) the most important tenet of protecting the world we live in. From that perspective, you can make intelligent decisions and grow, but not at the expense of everyone around you.
I guess this illustrates one of the downsides of Google Android being free software: when just about any manufacturer can create a sub-standard phone that runs the operating system, it can really damage the brand as a whole.

What a shame.
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I disagree. If someone says they would prefer I take notes, I will say "no thanks, it gets in the way of my listening." If they say "you must take notes - it's part of the job". I will do it, and suffer the extra brain-load (possibly while looking for a new job).

If someone means "you must" and says "you might think about", then it's just weak. It frustrates everyone.
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Start by telling us which legal jurisdiction?

Edit: Which two I guess, you and the client.
Uptime Monitor - What is an Uptime Monitor
Uptime monitor is the form of the technique which allows the user to perform different functions. These are the form of the computers that are being used with the internet websites and thus they allow
Programming is like religion: there are a few beliefs and people tend to choose.

Here are some of the beliefs: the hackers, the pragmatics, the engineers, the scrappers, the academics, the oops, the functionals.

They are all pursuing different ways to achieve the solution in their respective space. What matters for you is to pick one (or two) belief that you like the most as of today.
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I'm assuming YC still holds an interest in Airbnb? Seems like I would be distancing myself from this instead of getting into the 'he said, she said' stuff. Neither side will provide proof, so why risk getting involved when you can't be certain of the facts. I realize these people are friends, but this seems like a weird strategic move.
Go ahead and get on their nerves. Nobody likes to pay for stuff. Hopefully your users like your stuff enough that the mere thought of paying for it doesn't drive them away. If it does, you need to get back to work.
Ask HN: What are the best resources/guides to learn SEO
The web is filled with SEO guides but which ones have you found really useful?
I only do Linux/web development; and it never really bothered me. Of course, I'm doing Python development, which means I rarely run into issues (and if I do, homebrew fixes them easily). I also run VMware fusion with Ubuntu/Fedora VMs for deployment testing. And throw in about 4 windows VMs for IE/compat testing to boot.

So, I disagree that it's "more sane" - I spend plenty of time chasing down crazy outdated versions of Python libraries the apt/yum repos contain, etc, and well, I don't like spending my time in linux window managers (I dislike the UI) so it's a wash, and getting a linux dev environment setup on my mac is as simple as booting a VM and swapping it into fullscreen.

But to each their own. If I wasn't running OSX, I'd be running Linux. I just prefer one OS' aesthetics over another.

See also Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/) - runs off of virtualbox if VMWare isn't your thing.
The Häagen-Dazs conundrum
All 50 academics and history besides all have it wrong! The first wholly new interpretation of the moral teachings of Christ for two thousand years is on the web. Radically different from anything else we know of from history, this new 'claim' is predicated upon a precise and predefined experience, a direct individual intervention into the natural world by omnipotent power to confirm divine will. "correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries." Like it of no, a new religious claim testable by faith, meeting all Enlightenment criteria now exists. A religious revolution appears to be getting under way. More info at http://soulgineering.com/2011/05/22/the-final-freedoms/
I wonder what in this blog post is more than pure and unjustified opinion.
Yes. But so are 99.9% of the rest of us. Get on with it.

By the way, it's not the education that's better.
Same here, happened 2 or 3 times in 10 years. You need to decide if the amount is worth the continued ongoing aggravation of trying to collect. A direct phone call is a good place to start if you haven't already, it's easier to ignore email and letters.
I used to do a lot of contract work and you need to have a good no nonsense contract. I always had a payment schedule in the contracts: 50% upfront and 50% payable immediately on delivery with milestones so they can check the progress of the work. Of course, when building Web sites or Web apps, it's easy to do. Sometimes, for larger contracts, we would have a 50%, 25%, 25% schedule. Of course, you either put the site/app in production with the last payment or advise it will be put offline if you don't receive it.

It just works. Worse that happened was a bad client who changed his mind at the last minute and we lost about 25% of paid work. If you profitability margin is within standards, you take your losses (which are almost none) home when you see they'll never pay unless you go to court (which they probably won't pay anyway because they're crooks in the first place). Not worth the stress or waste of time and money.
Air BNB is specifically not an insurrance company.

They technically have no obligation to pay in the case of any damage.

For them, the best possible course of action was to bury this case. However, now that it's come into the public light they're torn between (a) trying to re-iterate to everyone that they do not have liability and (b) trying to look good by doing the "Right Thing".

As a business owner, I feel for them. As a human being, I feel for her. I too am torn, and think that there is going to be no satisfactory resolution to this situation. Someone is not going to come away 'whole', and most likely it will be AirBNB.