skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might have to do with thinking styles instead of malice - and it's a very common way to misunderstand people not working in the tech or science industry.

If you have some free time, go read the book "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", which talks about the difference. It isn't always gender - the book is simply giving you familiar examples. But there does exist a sizable number of people who tend to think from feelings first, instead of fact and logic first. Always attributing this kind of writing or speech as malice would produce tons of misunderstandings between you and a lot of people.
I could make it for one round. @rrmckinley on twitter
I've not used Airbnb so perhaps I do not understand this correctly, but isn't the whole point of the service to hook up people with rooms or housing available for short term rental with strangers who want to rent short term housing?

I understand from their site that you can read reviews from prior hosts who rented to a given guest, but beyond that it is up to you to investigate the guest and decide if you trust them, and to purchase insurance if you want to be protected against misjudgment.

If so, I do not understand the fuss here. A bad guest ripped someone off. Presumably that guest will get a scathing review and no one else will rent to them. Why isn't that the end of the matter?

Surely no one is surprised that if you give strangers unsupervised full access to your home, without doing a very thorough background check on them, occasionally you are going to get a bad guest.

Now one might argue that Airbnb is in a better position than the average host to gather data to make a good estimate of the prevalence and impact of bad guests, and so it would be more efficient for them to buy insurance to protect hosts rather than leave it to the hosts, but until that happens hosts need to insure.
Duplicate polls are worse.
She certain can, but she also bears some responsibility for using the service. For instance, I wouldn't use it unless I had everything from my garlic press to my furniture and space insured to the hilt, and was sure my policy covered these tenants.
Oh, when I said it's a problem I meant it's a problem I have with it. Unless it's an event that I can influence while it is happening (and I think now that the major outcry happened, none of the talk here will make much of a difference), I'd rather read a summary of what happened one week later than reading piecemeal updates every day. I get the same information in the end (all the intermediate stuff, I'd forget anyway), and it doesn't take as long, so I have more time for doing other things.
I disagree. Of course this is all speculation but I see in EJ someone who's genuinely hurt, and genuinely private, and is not focused on financial remedies.

Her main complaint seems to be lack of genuine concern, not lack of financial help. Nothing about her attitude, her living situation, or blog (documenting extensive past globetrotting adventures) suggests she's hurting for money.

She's just hurting from having her home, sense of security, and sentimental possessions ransacked.
So, the pattern that I found in all of the documents I dealt with, is that if you are filling in /your/ name, it might ask you to break it apart, but if you are filling in /someone else's/ name, it asks for "full name". As you are not supposed to be filling in the name field on an I-9 or a W-4 for your employees, so you should not end up in a situation where your internal wbaite (or whatever) that asked for "full name" screws you. However, note that the "new name" field on the I-9, which is an area of the document you fill out, is not broken apart by first/last.
Google owns YouTube. YouTube isn't "embracing" it; Google is adding the feature to YouTube.
Most people don't, do the newspapers do mention it every couple of days.

Granted I am in Scandinavia so they are likely to be more biased but right now they are far, far more concerned with the terrorists reaction when he heard the number of people he murdered, who was buried first, etc, etc, etc.
Depends on how much you care about latency, right?

The easy solution is just, y'know, write the log to a file and scp it back to some central place every so often. But then you have to either (a) keep track of how much of a file you've copied, which is a pain; or (b) only grab files that you're no longer actively writing to (as determined by naming scheme or something), but that introduces some latency, depending on how often you rotate.
I think there is a pretty good legal argument that they had a duty to know the actual identity of each party. They failed to do that. When her house was trashed the first thing she did is ask them the real identity of the person who rented and then they revealed they had absolutely no idea whatsoever. This is a huge surprise to me, it was to her, and it is to everybody that isn't trying to defend this company's massive incompetence. The fact that they don't know the identity of the parties is openly misrepresented by their materials which indicate that the transaction is safe and intentionally try to distract the customer with jokes about the difficulty of moving grand pianos, which are an item few people would have in their house anyway.
> Also, in regard to the so called "coverup", it's totally natural when someone says bad things about you on the internet to ask them to take them down. That's not a "cover up". That's "being human". Imagine if someone posted a diatribe against one of your children. As a parent, wouldn't you want to get that taken down? Airbnb is these guys' baby.

It's totally natural, but it's dishonest. It's destroying the historical record. It's depriving the public of their opportunity to make up their own minds about what the truth is. Cheating and stealing and killing are part of "being human", too, but that doesn't mean we have to condone them.
> Presumably that guest will get a scathing review and no one else will rent to them.

That guest probably used a fake name and a fake credit card.

But yeah, I agree. We use AirBNB, both when hosting and traveling. We give our guests keys and tell them they're free to come and go as they please - but we wouldn't just mail someone a copy of our keys and go on vacation. That's something you do with a rental property - not your home.
No, sites go down all the time and need to rebooted, reconfigured, redeployed, strangled, etc. by a human who has to watch the servers 24 hours a day. I'm ignorant to the number of customers that Shopify is hosting these stores for, but let's say for example that one human can monitor 100 virtual machines during an eight-hour shift and you have 500 vm's running at the same time over a series of physical servers. That means, in HR terms, you'll need five people per shift or fifteen per day to monitor and act upon the vm's, along with at least two operations people, one of whom will be carrying the pager for the entire 24-hour period. That's seventeen people needed to run your operation not including sick/vacation/leave time that needs to be covered. In salary costs alone, that's over $1million/yr., not including recruiting and management salary, benefits and compensation. And does not take into effect any development, real estate, office essentials, hardware and software costs.

> Afterwards, you can spend the time doing it properly when things have calmed down a little.

That'll cost you an extra million dollars to develop and deploy while simultaneously running your existing operations and migrating your clients over to the new solution.

It doesn't scale.
Apple Will Release iOS 5 beta 5 for Developers Next Weak
I think you are missing a 0 ... it would be $100 200.

Still at that rate you'd figure the transaction costs of moving the money around would swamp most of the return
If it can be twisted (and someone will twist it) to sound as if YC were funding startups that result in considerate consumer risk, things could escalate rapidly to a place I can imagine they don't want it going.
I remember seeing Jack Welch being interviewed once about the press. He said for successful people it's a cycle - they're either building you up or tearing you down. If AirBnB wasn't so successful their problem wouldn't be news.

If he hasn't done it already you will see PG bring in a top PR person who is experienced in handling a crisis. Not just to get AirBnB out of trouble but to be a resource for future YC companies in handling episodes of this sort. Quite frankly I am shocked their VC's aren't helping them out this way.
I disagree with what you're saying about EJ having a PR person nudging her. But I agree with the rest of your sentiment because I got the same vibe reading her interview comments.

I'm wondering if Airbnb sensed this from their interactions with her just prior to the first blog post. It's possible the situation cannot be fixed, even with a blank check. Does she have a legal case? I don't know how she'd be able to sue Airbnb if that's what she decides to do because they have no legal obligation to compensate her. The person she needs to go after is Faith Clinton.
We've already printed and spent quite a bit of money, and while it has produced increases in commodity prices it has not produced hyperinflation. Replacing debt-backed money with debt-free money, while leaving the amount of money more or less the same, would also not cause hyperinflation.
God, I can't wait for this era of wannabe yuppies to end, yuppies reading about launching startups and talking about startups and thinking about everything in terms of startups. It's got to be the most boring tech news of all time, and I have no idea how anyone could be interested in it.
Not necessarily, though $5 trillion all at once would probably not be a good idea. The money supply is a bit tricky in these days when most transactions (especially large ones) don't actually use cash. Issuing new debt in a sense already is like printing money, because bonds can be used as cash-like instruments in many situations. That's particularly true of U.S. Treasuries, because they're safe and liquid enough that they can be used as quasi-cash, especially for large transactions, e.g. settling part of a debt by transferring title to Treasuries. It's a bit of an open question to what extent just printing $500b would be different from issuing $500b in new bonds, and heavily interacts with the background situation (e.g. prevailing interest rates, demand for Treasuries, liquidity situation).

There are a decent number of economists who think that the U.S. a year or two ago should've fought deflation by just printing $500b or $1 trillion or something, rather than pursuing the quantitative easing (QE) scheme, which uses financial trickery to get some of the same effect without officially printing money. The just-print-money option may have actually worked better, been more transparent, and had the added bonus of reducing our national debt.
It can only cause inflation when the money actually hits the economy. The effect would be no different than raising the debt ceiling. Some special book keeping (which is what this whole mess is) will do nothing by itself.
The fact the police were involved rules this out as a conspiracy. And it just doesn't follow that even if the hotel industry is taking advantage of the situation (they probably could care less), EJ was involved in a conspiracy.

Can we move the discussion forward please?
I don't think anyone is doing that. There is precisely no risk of sovereign default, even if we don't raise the debt ceiling for a couple years.
Sorry dude - I'm still relatively new to HN, but this isn't the place for trolling.

EDIT: For all the downmodders, here's an explanation. The original poll, "Poll: What should be done about the endless repetition of stories?", was posted 1 day ago here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2822041
US$100 200 actually.
Under-promise, over-deliver is our mantra in my team. You nailed it.
All that talk of "doubling the size of its customer service staff" sounds good, but it doesn't mention numbers. Did they go from 1 to 2? 100 to 200?

This is one of my pet peeves about journalism--quantitative statements that aren't anchored to any numbers. The most outrageous example most of the time is talk of government budget "cuts" that are nearly always "growth in spending at a slower than originally planned rate" rather than actual reductions in spending.
The key problem is that MA is reading 'we're not legally liable' as 'we're not going to help her'.

There is a huge difference between the two. Companies go out of their way to fix issues where they have no legal obligation to do so. However, they can still claim that they have no legal obligation with the offended parties to do so, they're just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (and reputation of the business going forward).
Facebook offers bounty to bug hunters
> I think there is a pretty good legal argument that they had a duty to know the actual identity of each party.

I think that's absurd. Would you say the same thing about Craigslist?

> The fact that they don't know the identity of the parties is openly misrepresented by their materials which indicate that the transaction is safe and intentionally try to distract the customer with jokes about the difficulty of moving grand pianos

That's not how I read it at all. They don't claim to know the identity of the other party; they claim that the transaction is safe. Which, it appears, it is. If they've had 2 million nights booked, that's maybe a quarter of a million bookings, and (they claim) this is the first time anything like this has happened. That's pretty safe!

I read the joke about the grand piano as an admission that the only thing that's preventing people from using Airbnb to rob people is that robbing people is generally hard and unprofitable.
I'm still not getting the futz they're making over their "scale".

So your inbound load is 7000 tweets/sec or roughly 250 MBit/s (assuming 4k per tweet).
Then you fan that out to (assuming) 20 append-only mailboxes on average.

Perhaps my assumptions are far off, but I'm only arriving at a couple GBit/s here and a low two digit number of terabytes/storage per year.

This sounds like "a couple racks" to me, not like "a couple datacenters".
Why are you not at PyOhio? The west michigan group carpolled. Broadly speaking: go to python meetups, network.
Having created several "enterprise" systems in Java, I'm now looking into Mono, because there are some aspects of Java that I'm simply tired of having to deal with again and again. So far it looks very interesting and it works really well on Linux and OS X. Anyone here got experience with using Mono (and possibly Fluent NHibernate, WCF, ASP.NET MVC, etc) in the "enterprise" environment?
> I've passed her contact info to PG and him being the smart man that he

Wow, that is some crazy talk. Given that PG sees her as the enemy and his friends at Airbnb the good guys beyond reproach he should not be contacting her. He has absolutely no business doing so. Also, unless she asked for it, it was a massive privacy violation to release that information to a third party. Outrageous. What is he going to do now? Hire thugs to intimidate her? His only connection here is he is a freaking major investor/sponsor of the company that has displayed massive negligence, cover up, and intimidation of the victim. Nothing whatsoever good or proper can come from you, whoever you are, violating her privacy in this way.

As far as the rest of your screed where you suggest she needs to be on trial and provide proof of damage with photos etc, wow, what a psycho douchbag move. Yes, you are a psycho. Please sue me for libel, I would love to go over this claim in court and call attention to your post above in the months leading up to the case. So Jacques, are you the lawyer or PR rep for bnb, or are you an investor? Why do you have her private contact information? Your position that you have explained here is utterly deplorable and insane and you are revealing yourself to be a dangerous person and menace to society.
Nice that you bring that up. Why can't it work like that? Sure the burrito lunch truck guy would look at me kind of funny if I tried to pay him that way, but that is what we have exchange rates for. Why isn't it a thing that I work out with my employer what currency I want to be paid in?

I don't buy all the mumbo jumbo about different economies rising and falling in different geographic regions and whatnot either. If that were the real reason then we should have seperate currencies for the west, middle, and east areas of the US. Hell, each city should have their own currency in that case, why should Detroit's shittyness drag down the economies of cities thousands of miles away?

Geography is a terribly abstract concept in this world where communication is for all intents and purposes instant and I can get packages to anyone regardless of location in less than 24 hours. Companies paying people with US currency just because that particular building happens to be located in the US is just absurd if you think about it.
As far as I'm aware, the closest US equivalent is jury nullification, which this guy apparently argued for. But the US government has waged a very effective PR campaign against jury nullification to the point where most people consider it immoral in all cases.
Atmosphere releasing more energy to space than climate models indicate
It's just an economies of scale thing. YC has hundreds of start-ups, and a few will have issues at any given time. I don't think it's up to YC because they are obligated to, just because I think it would be worthwhile.
Yeah, the implied YC association in all of this is a bit bizarre. AirBnB raised about 0.01% of their financing from YC. They've got a strong board comprised of some very experienced, good VCs. Saying that YC should handle this would be like suggesting that Bill Gate's Harvard fraternity should clean up Microsoft's faux pas. (That's a bit hyperbolic, but I think you see what I'm getting at.)

Interestingly, perhaps, I see YC's connection to this story as more that it runs the site that broke the story: this one. I suspect pg getting involved is more because he personally likes the AirBnB founders rather than that he sees it as the responsibility of YC.
A big part of the issue is that you are limited in how much you can learn about a potential guest because Airbnb specifically attempts to hide their full identity from you until after the first transaction as a means to avoid people using them as a matching service and then doing the money transaction outside of the system.

Also, as far as getting your own insurance goes.. good luck with that. Even if you have renter's or home owner's insurance it probably specifically denies any sort of coverage once you bring subletting into the mix.
This is the most intelligent comment I've seen about this whole business. The phenomenon isn't limited to YC companies-- we saw it in e.g. the reaction to Zuckerberg (at 20 or whatever) calling users "dumb fucks" and to Biz and Ev (jokingly) asking if they could cut in the food line at Facebook-- but the problem is at its worst with YC companies because we have to scale back on moderation.

When users work themselves into a frenzy over an ordinary issue and upvote a stream of mostly duplicate stories about it, we can just kill most of them. But with controversies about YC companies we can't or we'll get accused of censorship.

I don't know if there's a solution. We may just have to resign ourselves to the collective IQ of HN decreasing for a few days whenever there is a controversy involving a YC company.
No matter how good my idea might be, I won't build on somebody else's platform (for more than a hobby project) until I'm treated as a partner. The cost of developing something and the risk of having access turned off with no legal recourse is too great.

It surprises me that investors would be willing to sink money into companies that are on such precarious footing.
As I understand it -- and I might be wrong here -- the inbound traffic is not the real problem; it's the distribution to all the followers. If you have 7000 tweets coming in and you need to send it to the 120 followers of all these posters in real time, that makes a lot of data shuffling.
In unrelated news facebook reports bankruptcy.
It's quite possible the courts would punt on this one due to separation-of-powers concerns. If Congress passes a law requiring the president to execute some laws, but also refuses to fund him sufficiently to do so, resolving the problem arguably is the responsibility of the executive branch.
Believe it was upped from a threshold of 200 or 300 karma about a year ago.

Would like to see down-vote capability weighted much less on submission up-votes and more on comment up-votes.

Yesterday, someone noted how many repeats there are of popular stories on the front page; I would posit that this is, at least in part, related to the karma value of up-votes on submissions.
Ask HN: Anyone live in the South Florida/Miami area?
Just curious to see if anyone lives in the area and if there is enough interest to possibly put together a meetup.
My father used a variant of it to justify the idea of invading Iraq (a couple of years prior to us actually doing it): "Where there's smoke, there's fire."
I realize you're using a new HN account, possibly throw-away, or you may actually be new here. At the start of every month on HN is a "Who's Hiring MM YYYY" thread (which includes remote work), and a "Freelancer/Seeking Freelancer" thread.

The most recent were on July 1st, and on Monday new ones for August will be posted. The most recent are linked below, but keep your eyes open for Monday.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2719028

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2719083

good luck!
Google is massively run on databases, but that topic isn't as popular in media (or on HN). I think a big part is that it is such a highly visible topic that is also very romanticized, partially because its a field where serious inroads have been made (at least compared to expectations and last generations science fiction)
In a sense, Moby was years ahead of his time. He identifies the social underpinnings of the internet which went on to flourish in the form of Facebook etc.

"we all have this basic deep need to communicate with other people, so I think that explains the popularity of something like this" Moby
Interestingly enough, there are conspiracy theories that say JFK did something similar to try to subvert the FED's total authority to "print money" by doing something similar to what is suggested in the article. The order gave the Treasury the power to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.

See executive order 11110:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11110
They probably had considered the safer cap beforehand knowing that this could be an issue - and used this event as an excuse to roll it out.
The GDP of the US is 2,800 Zimbabwes. A couple trillion is a big number, but it's not going to be a huge problem for the US.
Is moving out of the question?
Have you considered a drastic move to SF, NYC, Boston, or another startup hotspot? Having no money in Michigan is no better than having no money in a more expensive city, so cost of living shouldn't even be a factor here.

Also, don't limit yourself to Python / C. Stress that you're able and willing to learn any programming language and solve any challenge that comes your way. I know there isn't a single unemployed Ruby developer in chicago, thanks to Groupon.

Finding a job as a developer is actually not that hard, in this economy. Be thankful you're in this industry and not, say, the automotive industry.