skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I may be downvoted to oblivion for this but I really don't think my neighbors in Boston would like it if I rented my room out on a nightly basis to people they don't know. There are 20 units in my building so seeing many random people coming and going would trigger great unease and I cannot say that I would blame them for that.

I've used AirBnB and I love it but I think the biggest issue is not the commercial property taxes (the gov't would likely disagree) but the negative impact it could have on those living around you in other apartments. It kind of goes back to the saying, "I don't care what people do in the comfort of their own home," except the entranceway, stairwells and halls of an apartment building are the shared property of all residents. This is not so much an issue when people rent out their houses on AirBnb but my guess is that apartments in major cities are some of their most frequently booked listings.
Why are there so many submarines?
I bet $100k that Marcus Badperson will die on the morning of 15 June 2013"; best way to collect is to do the deed yourself (or subcontract.)

But don't you need someone else to take the other side of the bet?

You can't just bet X and get more. You can only get what Y bets in opposition. Assuming no one else agrees with you and makes the same bet, because then you'd have to share what Y put down.

And who's going to be the opposing side in these bets?

I happen to know Marcus Badperson is a janitor for the federal serve and will spend all day on June 15th cleaning the gold bars inside the safest safe in the world. So I bet a billion dollars he does NOT die between the hours of 9am and 5pm on June 15th. Unless someone else bets more than a billion, the best I can do is simply collect the same billion I put down.

I was hoping to find an elaboration of who could be the counter party in the Wikipedia page, but nope nothing there.

I think the assassination market is very probable if you completely skip the question of who's the counter party. Or if you have no idea how betting and payouts work in the first place. Otherwise this "assassination market" is total bullshit.
A major problem with this is liability the first time this causes major damage to systems because the rootkit had a bug or because someone in your organization legally redistributed the data outside your organization, with approval, but without realizing the consequences.

Especially as it is unlikely this would affect serious criminals: If tech like this becomes common, then nobody sane would open stolen files without ensuring it was done in a self-contained environment and with software that ought to be unable to execute any of this crap. It will be trivial to stop for all but people who are unaware.
Scientists Build Record-Setting Metamaterial Flat Lens
Very neat! Works great on my Pebble.
In Chicago, I've seen hipsters zipping around in contraptions more dangerous than that Uighur's bike. The requirements for a road-legal vehicle (Assuming you're not mass producing and selling them) in Illinois are pretty spartan.

DIYers have a ton of freedom. As soon as you start commercializing and selling them- that's when you run into red tape.
There are many different projects which implement distributed bug tracking[0], some better than others. The question of how much distributed bug tracking makes sense depends strongly on the structure of the project. If the project is developer heavy (such as developers responding to user help requests) it can work well, but if the project has several strata of developers and support people and users then it might not make as much sense.

[0] http://travisbrown.ca/blog.html#TooMuchAboutDistributedBugTr...
Rather than producing a few world-class products, Google produces hundreds of mediocre products that only seem world-class because they have the shiny Google logo on them.

I would argue that if you limit their competitors in the space to free versions (for products which Google offers free), they ARE world class.

The problem is in the intervening years since that, competitors have also gone free, or prices have dropped enough that it's easier to make a comparison between the Google free product and the competitor with a nominal fee.

Honestly, Google is probably doing the right thing cleaning up all these products, but they'll just introduce new ones. Meanwhile, my confidence and attitude towards Google erodes every day.

You get what you pay for.
I keep watching for a meta material pair of glasses that I can wear which correct my vision but are basically flat. While focusing UV light isn't that useful for me, a friend of mine at Intel pointed out that UV lithography in 3 dimensions can make for some interesting resist patterns, and that may be applicable to MEMS manufacturing.
>>> No. It's pretty much entirely because he and his group spoke loudly about what a horrible job AT&T was doing.

Nope. It is because he stole tons of private info from AT&T and then boasted about it and then said he would totally do it again and with worse consequences to the victim. Law enforcement usually doesn't like people that say "I'll do it again and worse" too much.

>>> Sure, and a photographer who'd just taken an incriminating picture of the police

Very nice, now do you have anything to say that is not wildly offtopic?

>>> Your main reason for thinking that he's no Ghandi is that he's a douchebag.

My main reason to thing he's a douchebag because I've read about him and his actions. My main reason to think he's no Ghandi is the same - nothing in these actions points at anything but being a docuhebag. Name me what he did that nominates him for being Ghandi - is it GNAA, maybe?

>>> about how the smelly hippy should have given the police the memory card

Very nice, now do you have anything to say that is not wildly offtopic?

>>> They're kicking a hornets' nest.

There's no hornet's nest. There's a bunch of douchebags on the internet that could think of nothing better to do that cause mayhem and suffering to those around them. Those despicable and miserable creatures would be around us forever, probably, but they are not honey-bees. They're more like dung flies - both by their tastes, their places of habitation and their behavior, and their attractiveness. Of course, even dung fly can cause an epidemic, given improper sanitation and bad luck - but I wouldn't be too proud to be one.
I don't know how AirBnB works, but do they charge sales tax and ensure that all relevant tax documentation is provided for renters?

I know Quebec has been cracking down on tax evasion during the last couple of years, enforcing the usage of MEVs (module d'enregistrement des ventes, essentially a sealed sales recorder that prints the bill in a standard format --- an example of the receipt is shown at [1]) for all restaurant sales to prevent the use of "zappers" [2] and educating the public that they should receive such a receipt for all restaurant sales.

[1] http://www.revenuquebec.ca/en/a-propos/evasion_fiscale/resta...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_sales_suppression_dev...
Why doesn't HN get the hackernews.com domain?
Though blast fishing is inconsiderate to the fish, I'm not sure that I would personally justify a man losing his arms because he was acting in a detrimental way to the local wildlife.
Want to build the perfect tool, the better alternative? That's great, but why don't you start with a single product, say, a word processor, or a spreadsheet?

Or take a step back, look at the ways people need to collect, manipulate and share information today, and consider whether a new application that fits into an established category like “word processor” or “spreadsheet” is still a good tool in the first place.

I don’t know what will eventually displace MS Office as the universal toolbox for these things, but somehow I doubt it will look very much like classical office applications at all.
So what's worse? When it's driven by people thirsty for power, or people thirsty for money?
Good luck for them breaking out of the VM their software would end up getting run in.
Because it's taken.
That investment is a sunk cost. It definitely may make sense to finish, but throwing more money after your initial sunk cost shouldn't be why.
We shouldn't be doing the opposite either, which was Rayiner's point.
Sandbox everything, in effect. I already have a dozen or so different VM's for different types of projects mostly because it's easier to reproduce environments that way, but if there was even a remote chance of something like this, I'd sandbox every untrusted app.
Does it say anywhere how deployment would be restricted? Even if it's the case, it's both dangerous (I could easily imagine this getting deployed by accident because a contractor set it wrong) and one hell of a slippery slope.
I use only legitimate means to consume entertainment right now, but shit like this really makes me wonder why I should let them use my money to take away my freedoms.
This has changed when https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=811824 landed...
I know that -- I mean, has YC tried to buy the domain from the current owner?
I've read the other AirBnB threads on here discussing the externalities. And I still think the cities would be better off with AirBnB than without it.

The opportunities for property owners to profit as well as providing tourism/business visitors with $40 rooms is massive.

It's opening up a huge new bnb industry, provides a large flow of new revenue for tourism businesses in the cities, greatly expands the amount of tourists/business visitors who can afford to visit.

I'm curious which of the externalities you think can't be addressed by property owners? For example, they can have a no-airbnb policy in the rental agreements. Or liability safety waivers. Or security policies to limit flow of non-tenants. Or handled via disputes between property owners or police such as sound violations.

Besides, the incentives mentioned in the article are a) the market incumbents "Montreal’s Bed and Breakfast Association" want protection and b) the government wants to protect existing tax revenue/regulation fines.

At this point, it's not about externalities. It's about protecting current revenue streams. While ignoring the potential for far greater tax revenue and social benefit.
Based on your comment, I can see that you have not read the paper. The section with rootkits is about thwarting active, targeted cyber espionage. Organizations should have the right to protect files on their own networks by any reasonable means. They are not proposing a mechanism by which organizations would be allowed to distribute rootkits.

I certainly have the right to disable my car remotely if it is stolen. I also have the right to lock the doors and take pictures of the assailant who stole it and send them to the police.
They're used to harvest sea cucumbers, which I'm guessing is a culinary delicacy.
> This is the most exciting and interesting thing in the release:

Absolutely. My expectation is that this alone should dramatically increase app response times for any reasonably DB-dependant application.
To play devil's advocate to this argument, what's the difference between having new tenants entering the building every week and a resident having random friends over every week?
can u elaborate a little more? i checked out the website, i'm not that impressed about the execution or the idea.
PayPal should have put the reward into a trust for them for a year if there were legal issues.

Kudos for them being honest with both the bug and their age regardless.

The future is probably filled with teenagers discovering things, good and bad.

Teenagers are still prosecuted as adults but legally treated as less for other responsibilities.
Kinda a meta-model. They used bricks to represent the scaled up bricks of the smaller model.
Not that I know of. But since the site mostly exists to promote ycombinator, and doesn't directly make money, I would see no point in their doing so.
Work hard on the boring stuff
The single-table inheritance mechanism failed to locate the subclass: '1'
Your experience doesnt really apply to how production systems are managed. And 30 packages is enough and is useful. Production systems dont update themselves just because theres a new package in the repo, thats what people regular users do.

In production systems updates are rolled out only if there is a must have benefit, or a serious security patch.

I dont really get your point if you dont like linux then dont use it, its pretty easy to manage.
Quotes from page 80:

"Informed deliberations over whether corporations and individuals should be legally able to conduct threat-based deterrence operations against network intrusion, without doing undue harm to an attacker or to innocent third parties, ought to be undertaken."

"he Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and law enforcement agencies should have the legal authority to use threat-based deterrence systems that operate at network speed against unauthorized intrusions into national security and critical infrastructure networks."

Apart from the proposal that starts "In the future..." and ends "The Commission is not ready to endorse this recommendation", that's as crazy as it gets.

-------------

edit: after reading the boingboing article I see it's about 20 words and two out of context paragraphs.

The first paragraph specifically states that "such measures do not violate existing laws on the use of the Internet." It is simply recommending this as a measure to protect corporate IP, not as something that should be changed.

The second paragraph is immediately followed by noting that such actions are currently illegal, and then recommending deliberation on whether it should be made legal.
The Man Making Jet Packs Possible
Chapter 13 is about protecting against target cyber espionage, so within that context, it would seem that the malware would not be distributed.
A phonebook as trie would only apply if you had tabs for each letter all the way down. It's a vector of pages.
What qualities do people look for when buying movies and music?

1. The content they want.

2. Quality (i.e. resolution, bitrate, etc.)

3. Reliability (it actually plays)

4. Low annoyance (no ads, warnings, etc.)

5. Safety (guaranteed freedom from malware, etc.)

The movie and music industries haven't done a perfect job of delivering #1-4. Region coding means the content users want is frequently only available through pirate channels. Lower quality releases (DVD vs Bluray) are also often all that is available in some regions. Bluray is not reliable if users don't keep their hardware/software up to date. Nearly all DVD's and bluray discs on the market are utterly infested with annoying advertisements and warning screens.

#5 was the one thing that legally purchased media had an undeniable edge in over pirated media. If users lose trust in the safety of legally purchased media they will be driven to piracy in unprecedented numbers.

It is tempting to give RIAA and MPAA the rope to hang themselves with, sit back, and laugh. However, let's not forget that every piece of code they write and every root-kit they successfully deploy will soon be taken advantage of by black-hats, quite probably in ways that will cause damage to systems completely unrelated to media playback of any sort. The only way I can see to let the MPAA/RIAA proceed is to require them to post a significant bond (in the billions) to pay for damages their rootkits will cause. Managing how damages are going to be awarded is going to be a legal nightmare though, since this will not affect only U.S. systems and citizens. If the U.S. permits this, I sincerely hope other nations hold the U.S. government responsible for damages, so the U.S. had better make sure Hollywood is ready to foot the bill.
You are arguing a different point, but I do agree with you. I am not arguing that the ideas are necessarily effective. I am just pointing out that the BoingBoing article is wrong about many points.
The founders on stage at TC Disrupt NYC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo
Unshortened URL for the release notes: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.6/
If "they" are both the planters of the rootkit (taking over the computer) and the ones claiming to be wronged, looking for recompense, doesn't this create an unreconcilable conflict of interest as well as a worthless chain of custody for evidence of any wrongdoing? What would stop them from simply taking over computers, planting evidence and profitting (extorting) hugely?

I would think that once my computer spends any length of time not under my direct and exclusive control, I would no longer be solely liable for any actions that may have been taken with it. There would be huge doubt, no?
Err - you seem to be talking about WordPress.com, i.e. their hosted version.

If you host it yourself (from WordPress.org) you don't have to pay for fixing/changing stuff as well as have more freedom to do with it what you want.
What about trying to make a very basic functioning OS kernel?
This is Hacker News. And these are some pretty darn impressive hacks.

Why not just appreciate what they've accomplished by their ingenuity, without adding all this geopolitical drama?
I wonder what will happen when someone declines to leave the rented space. Do they have any law protecting them? Do the property owners have a law that protects them from this? It would be interesting to see how a magistrate would interpret a property owner renting out the place on airbnb. They are not hotels and are not licensed as such.
In some cases their schooling might have been derailed by the Cultural Revolution.
Maybe they can offer their services to the Spanish Navy:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/24/spain-submarine-s-8...
I was in the same batch of YC with them, so I saw them fairly frequently. We had a discussion about Gettier Problems ("justified true belief") entirely sober, as well as normal startup stuff, so they are obviously smart.

The "rapper/swag" thing is not all of their personality.
If this were a startup that was trying to grow as fast as possible, it would be a good idea to own the domain. It would make the site easier to find. But we're not trying to grow, so we don't want to make HN easier to find.
I too wrote a 7 minute workout app, only this time as a shell script.

https://github.com/vlaube-de/7min-workout
Pretty pitiful that the authors assume only 100 color graduations for her added color axis, and that normal folks can differentiate almost exactly 1 million colors. "99 million more" is such a random stab.
This is from Douglas Crockford's talk, "An Inconvenient API - The Theory of the DOM," which is perhaps the best title ever for a programming lecture. The way he adapted Al Gore's cover art is so inspired, it's just sheer perfection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Y0U-2qJMs
> Privacy advocates do not have a principled approach to the problem of how to reconcile the legitimate needs of the police with privacy rights in the context of modern communications.

Yes, we do. If you're trying to get information not accessible to the public, get a warrant. If you're not prepared to defend your request to a judge, you have no business making it in the first place.
I can see gradient step on my HP 2335 (1920x1200) IPS display Monitor (with an LG display panel that was similar to what was used in Apple Cinema Displays of the time). Just giving verbosity of the monitor details for reference. Interesting read though and I found it surprising that even 24bit color can have issues like this. Possible that some high res IPS displays since mine have eliminated the issue (since the 2335 is 4-5 years old now). Wish my 2475 wasn't dead or I would test against that as well. I don't really consider either of these a good comparison, but I don't see it on my Nexus 7 or my Galaxy Nexus (though that's a Pentile AMOLED screen).

Some that cannot see it might have missed the author's advice at the bottom:

I received some great feedback from readers. Most importantly, it was pointed out that some low-cost LCD monitors down-sample to an even worse color depth such as 18-bit or lower. In fact, some readers were not able to see the difference in the colors above precisely because their monitor removed the difference by down-sampling.
I purposely expanded 'for the lulz' into something a bit more succinct.
Maybe we have a different understanding of how this would work. My understanding is that the malware would not be deployed to remote computers. Rather, the malware would be embedded in files that were never meant to be distributed outside of your network. You are either in possession of those files or not, and whether someone believes that you have them or that you owe them money is not really relevant.

The issue of IP theft is not simply moral panic. There are national security implications, as we saw in the Chinese attacks on defense contractors.

(Not that I believe that embedded rootkits would have been helpful or anything)
#14 would be the least "politically correct" of these as the working robot seems to be modeled with the appearence of a black guy.
Disqus is worth way more than $40 million. It's going to become one of the largest ad networks on the web with its insane publisher base.
JNode: Java New Operating System Design Effort
La cigarra y el teléfono móvil - La salud esta en tu hábitat
Absurd. If I have a contractual relationship with another party to keep information shared with them private, law enforcement should not be able to force disclosure without a court order.

By your rationale, there is no warrant necessary to search the secured offices of a corporation that employs an outside cleaning staff.
Sure, and I agree that the benefits of AirBnb ultimately outweigh the negatives. I wouldn't continue supporting them with my business if I didn't.

But there are more than two choices here - there is a third choice besides "let AirBnb continue as is" and "stop everything AirBnb-like". Things like adhering to sanitation standards, paying of hotel taxes, and the rights of residents in AirBnb buildings are all legitimate reasons to oppose AirBnb in its current model.

> "For example, they can have a no-airbnb policy in the rental agreements."

This is already the case. This is also already the case in many condo/con-op rules. In fact, in most jurisdictions I've seen stopping AirBnb is as simple as enforcing existing laws and contracts - we don't even have to create new ones. AirBnb owes its existence not to friendly legislation, but to a lack of enforcement - a lack of enforcement that is coming to an end because of these negative externalities (and yes, lobbying by the hotel industry).

> "Or liability safety waivers. Or security policies to limit flow of non-tenants. Or handled via disputes between property owners or police such as sound violations."

And such is the definition of a negative externality - to offload the costs of these effects onto other tenants and even the city, without any recompense. AirBnb has created this need for additional legal cost and even additional policing yet is paying for none of it. The way your'e describing it, it sounds like AirBnb is laughing to the bank and leaving the cleanup to everyone else.

In any case, my original point is not specific to AirBnb. Your original post is one that I see on HN a lot - whenever a disruptive product is opposed we scream about corruption and the greed of entrenched players, and conveniently ignore the many legitimate reasons why people might find what we do problematic. My response is a more general complaint against our collective holier-than-thou attitude where we can do no wrong, and our intellectually dishonest trend of blaming said opposition squarely on simplistic villains rather than acknowledging that technology and disruption are nuanced. Our refusal to treat our opponents with basic respect, and our propensity to label them with simplistic titles, is aggravating and annoying.
Rather than thinking the chinese as just competition, we should also think of them as a world asset.

I'm sure it'll be great for the world and all, but what happens when they aren't quite as thankful for you as you are for them?