skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Why you should never use AirBnb and why hotels still rule

I feel like this title is a bit linkbait-y...

Sure there are plenty of reasons not to use AirBnb. There are also plenty of reasons to use it. If you are going on a special/important trip in which the variability of AirBnb isn't appealing, don't use it. But NEVER use it? Sounds a bit extreme.
Getting started as a new member is hard. Getting started as a new programmer is even harder. You have to ask questions carefully, and search for a previous answer like mad. It has taken my a year and I still feel like I am just barely a member.
Does anyone use Hadoop for job management?

We have millions of XML documents in a document database. Many of the questions we want to ask about those documents can be answered through the native database querying capabilities.

But there are always questions falling outside the scope of the query capabilities, that could be answered by a simple map function applied to each document, with a reduce to combine the results.

Seems like a pain to always query for the documents you want to process, find some place to store them on disk, then run a program locally to get the result, vs. writing a map and reduce job then pointing it at the documents in the database to run against (this document store has a Hadoop integration API). Hadoop also seems to have a lot of nice job frameworks and monitoring tools and APIs to track job progress.

Anyone have similar situation where you used Hadoop just to get job management and tracking and flexibility in performing data analysis tasks? Are there easier ways to accomplish this goal?
I was going to be more cynical, and say one could use it to determine ringleaders in a network of adversaries.
Because, sadly, browsers are the most portable runtime we have available.
I don't think that there is a religion on the world that will pass a skeptic mind's scrutiny. So the answer for me is no.
So what's to stop the NDA / GCHQ hiring moles to put trojans inside these networks / organisations and getting the info anyway? I thought this was already happening.
> The chicken or egg problem shows that at some point you lose the connection to the predecessor and the process goes around in endless circles.

No, this isn't so. It's a myth about biology that's repeated by people who don't understand natural selection. An egg is a chicken's way to make an insurance salesman.
Twitter / jbqueru: Just started a new job at Yahoo
Dan Goodin from Ars Technica shares more details about the paper:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/fatal-crypto-flaw-in...
You will if you don't have a backup/redundancy strategy other than "it's AWS, we don't need one!" Seems like there's an AWS outage every week.
Death is definitely what others here are referring to as an "out of bounds error". It is simply the ultimate definition of incomprehensible.

It's like a physical computer not only losing power, not only being gone, not only nothing, but never having existed at all. In my mind (haha) death is the end of both space and time. Oblivion.

And that's pretty crazy to shove into a finite brain.
> If all of this collection stops another 9/11 style attack where thousands of lives are saved, will it be worth it?

There's a Ben Franklin quote that gets tossed around a lot -- and appropriately so -- in response to questions like this, but this time I'll let Patrick Henry answer for me:

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"

Also, "The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them."

And, "Fear is the passion of slaves."
Games and leisure activities are a great way to build proficiency with a new technology. Then, when a need arises, that mastery can be put to good use... But that would not have been possible without having fooled around with the technology beforehand.
It's not a "failed pricing strategy" per se, the problem is that they want offers that are really attractive, they are able to provide them, but those offers are so good that too many people use them to upgrade. Which you can't blame them for, but it puts OVH in a position where it wants people to not upgrade too quickly, but still provide those good deals.

The obvious solution is to re-instate installation price, but Oles has never been a big fan of it as it increase the entry cost for new comers. Remember, they don't want to penalise new installs or growing stack in anyway, only (too) quick rent/upgrade cycle.

An alternate solution might be a "un-installation" price if you stop a server AND grab a new more/recent one to replace it after only a few month of renting, but that would be too impractical and hard to explain.
FileRock will be discontinued as of Nov 20th
The author is upset because he was accused, and charged, for breaking a bed that he says he didn't break. It also sounds like the customer service wasn't great on AirBnB's part.

This is actually an interesting point, but unfortunately the message is weakened by references to the murder rate in Chicago and insinuations of covered-up rapes and murders in AirBnB apartments.
This doesn't seem useful to me. It doesn't matter if you "find" the optimal people to send a message to. The important thing is the message, and whether they will find it interesting enough to spread in the first place.

If it was so easy to get something viral, then a blanket message sent to a large group of people would automatically result in viral marketing. ie - spam. And we see how often spam becomes viral....
Here is the email I just received:

This e-mail is to announce you that the FileRock service will be discontinued as of November 20th 2013. We ask you to please back up all the files that you have stored with the FileRock service: after that date your data will no longer be available.

We would like to thank you for having used the FileRock service until now:
your support and feedback has been invaluable.

Note that while the FileRock service is being discontinued, the top-security technology at the heart of FileRock is being embedded in another product with a completely revisited offer. If you are interested in receiving more details, please let us know by writing to info@filerock.com.

If you have any questions or issues, please don't hesitate to write to support@filerock.com.
And when you use "Flickr, FourSquare, Frienster, Last.FM, Digg (from Dec 2010), Yelp, YouTube and so on," you participate in the research.
Or, more simply, charge enough for upgrades to cover the actual costs.
If you're just an employee in a big corp choosing a vendor, of course you choose AWS - it's not your money, so who cares?

But for those who are in charge of a startup, every cent that goes towards cost counts. AWS can be 10 times more expensive than a regular dedicated server(for the same amt of resources)
>>Ya I have data, here is the current debt: $16,744,814,606,837.32

That does not point to a crisis.

>>Or how about a quotations from our president:

When you grow older (snicker) you might learn how to distinguish rhetoric from fact.
"Man up and walk it off" is not uniformly distributed around the country. I give good odds that the rdstc is not from one of those areas.

As usual, accusing huge groups of hypocrisy is not well-founded unless you can establish that the hypocritical attitudes really are held by the same people.
I think I'd have stuck around if their interfaces weren't so awful.

There were literally 5 different control panels I could use, it took me a support ticket to actually find where my server was residing (only in a single control panel version). Love that they're making a sixth control panel to fix that.
> I did not intend to say that the blog should work simply because we threw it on a large instance...

That's precisely what you said:

"You thought a large server would be enough to handle a single wordpress blog..."

> when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog.

A competent developer should be able to set up a load balanced WordPress blog (with Nginx/PHP-FPM, Varnish and a separate database server) in a day or less. There are a number of well-written tutorials on this.
But it's conceivable that SF basically becomes the Mahattan of the Bay Area, a playground for the rich, while everyone else gets pushed into the outlying boroughs and beyond

Isn't this already basically true?
Homeless Brother And Sister Create App In Hotel Room
Simplest rvm installation guide
If you have a family, there are benefits to setting down roots and buying a house. When you rent, you never know what the future holds. The owner might want to sell the property at some point and not renew your lease. This becomes a very disruptive life event for children. Homeowners of course do relocate for other reasons, but it tends to be on their own terms and not someone else's.
For a lot of people, what the author says is absolutely right, but I think a lot of the comments here suggesting that only a handful of institutions are solving Hadoop-scale problems is simply inaccurate.

Yes, there are companies that are trying to appear more attractive by using Hadoop, but there are plenty of cases where Hadoop is replacing ad-hoc file storage on multiple machines.

It's primary use is as a large scale filesystem, so if you are running up against problems storing and analyzing data on a single box, and you feel that the amount of data you have will continue to accelerate, it is a good option for file storage. It doesn't replace your database, it complements it, and there's work being done to allow large-scale databases on top of Hadoop, although the existing ones aren't mature yet. But there's a lot of institutions that are taking on problems that a single-box setup cannot handle.

And MapReduce isn't a bad programming model, but it should be thought of as the assembly language of Hadoop. If you are solving a particular problem on Hadoop, writing a DSL for it is the way to go, or see if one of the existing DSLs fits your needs (HIVE, Pig, etc).
Lean startups still need vision
For reference, finding the median is an O(n) problem on a single computer, and sorting is an O(n log n) solution.

An O(n) algorithm is Quick select. It is basically like quick sort but you only recurse on the side of the pivot that contains the median.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickselect
Rockstar Games – After the Love Has Gone for PC Gamers
This is cool but what is it good for?
It's to the point now that I almost feel like the only durable and consistent solution would come from a Constitutional amendment that directly addresses the concept of privacy. It would at least partially satisfy textualists, originalists, and strict constructionists, while addressing the concerns of modern data/privacy activists. It could also potentially address privacy concerns across both government (e.g. NSA) and private (e.g. Facebook) spheres.

There's obviously a huge hurdle to overcome to make that happen. How would it be phrased? Very difficult to work out. And, what would cause sufficient outcry for the public to push for it?

> As he often does when extolling the text of the Constitution, Scalia criticized his colleagues for their "activism" in creating new human rights not articulated by the framers.

Argh, comments like this make my blood boil. My reading of history is that the Constitution was not intended to create any human rights, but rather to prevent the government from limiting the rights that we all have naturally. Which would include privacy.
Easy Custom Kendo UI Mobile Icons With Font Awesome
Interestingly, WD40 is a lubricant. I used to think that since it was a penetrating oil/water sealant it wasn't a lubricant, but that's not actually the case. They even have a "myth" that discusses the idea floating out there that WD40 isn't a lubricant.

http://wd40.com/about-us/myths-legends-fun-facts/
I understand. I ran a hackathon in San Antonio this summer and problems crop up where you least expect them. Definitely not an easy task.
Ah yes, more and more consumption is just such a great thing.
World Rocks Game, created by homeless brother and sister
"Had Google+ focused on a metric of “Users who choose to go to Google+ and share at least 2 updates per week“, they would have focused their efforts on delivering value to users rather than popups that drive numbers."

The Google+ foundation is all there -- they already focused on that: it really is the foundation of a brilliant social network, and I prefer it purely given that they don't decimate photos by the horrid overcompression that Facebook does. Their problem now is purely a network problem in that people don't see the point of sharing updates there given that many of the people they share them with aren't there. I fail to see how this example supports what they are saying whatsoever.
I've been using Julia a little while now for my scientific work, and I have to say, it is a very well-designed language. I remember reading a few days ago on HN another user commented that he thought it was the best-designed language after Clojure. Not to mention it's much easier for people used to conventional programming languages to pick up and get started with.

I was actually thinking this would be a great language to use for web development; it's just that no one's developed a really good framework for it yet.
I'm curious about the CPU usage as well. The Chrome worker process on my system is pegged at 108% just sitting at an idle console :(

Still, this is extremely cool, especially seeing an architecture from the OpenCores project being used.
What a great way to stifle dissent - find the people most efficient at spreading it and neutralize them via arrest, National Security Letters or "other means." No wonder the military is funding this. They aren't interested in marketing - they are interested in the control of the flow of information, period.
Seriously?

Believe it or not, outside the VC bubble, businesses need to make money to survive. (I know, right? Shocking!) Without revenue, there won't be a New York Times anymore. The paywall seems to be helping with that (see: http://allthingsd.com/20120806/the-new-york-times-reports-a-..., http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-12-20-the-new-york-ti...), and it's low enough that it's never seriously inconvenienced me as a non-subscriber. (Though it has prompted me a few times to think about becoming a subscriber, which is a feature, not a bug.)

So what's the beef?
I agree with all of your post except the first sentence.

I do not think this will be a popular post, but still I will try to articulate my disagreement in a readable manner.

People seem to confuse 'rationality' with 'scientifically verifiable' or at least 'based on scientific data'. Maybe this comes from the vantage point that beliefs and opinions not based in science are not rational.

From the standpoint of a logician, I disagree.

Can faith be scientifically tested, proven, or known without doubt: no. But I do not see how that precludes it from being rational. In general, many faiths and forms of belief are exceptionally rational if you accept their base assumptions.

Now that's a big IF. If you do not accept the basic assumptions of the specific faith, it will be forever in your mind 'irrational'. So can faith as a consensus be rational: no, not ever. Can faith be almost perfectly rational from a logic standpoint: absolutely, as long as you accept the base assumptions.
# scummvm
This is a pretty clever hack. The problem is if the tipping point theory is correct (#) (that you will perform behaviour X if a sufficent number of your immediate circle also are performing behaviour X) you still need to find a subset of the network to start the ball rolling.

The solution is simple - say the tipping point is 20 friends must do X for you to do it. So walk the whole network and find everyone with more than 20 friends. Remove those with the most friends (say the those > 99th percentile).

Now walk the network again, and find those with more than 20 friends and again 99th percentile goes. Eventually you remove the 20th friend from everyone and those left have 19 or fewer friends.

Now tell all these seed group to do behaviour X.

Now put back the very last set you removed. And they are guaranteed to have at least 20 friends, and all those friends will be doing behaviour X. Now put back the penultimate group, and because the most recent arrivals are now also doing behaviour X ....

Problems:

1. For any social network at a given point there is just one seed group. Right now (or 6 days ago) this group is being identified. And sold.

2. the tipping point theory as a whole is a bit dodgy (see below).

3. Feasibility - they only mentioned orders of magnitude smaller subsets. Lets be kind and suggest that its 3 orders of magnitude. for LinkedIn that leaves a seed group of 100,000's. Not the size you can just invite into a focus group.

Overall, really a cool hack, and I swear its worth ponying up on and selling to excited digital agencies

(#) Good article on Debunking of tipping point theory - http://www.fastcompany.com/641124/tipping-point-toast

Edit: Wanted to rewrite my below comment that got a bit confused
I could make it that way, it's still pretty small at the moment. Here's the current list:

Theraputic refactoring - Katrina Owen, The Future of Programming - Bret Victor, Simplicity matters -Rich Hickey, Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey, Programming with nothing - Tom Stuart, Connections: Faith in Numbers - James Burke, Growing a Language - Guy Steele, Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming - Jim Weirich, Cool Code - Kevlin Henney, We Really Don't Know How to Compute! - Gerald Jay Sussman, Keynote: Architecture the Lost Years - Bob Martin, Computer Heuristics - Richard Feynman, The Power of Abstraction - Barbara Liskov, The Mother of All Demos - Douglas Engelbart
This goes back to the old adage "the right tool for the job".

As @davidmr points out, there are jobs on smaller data sets that can still benefit from the distributed nature of HPC.

That said, my own experience with startups echoes much more what OP writes - python scripts and csv processing has saved me days of headaches in resource constrained environments. I was able to quickly produce analysis and make crucial scaling decisions using data that would have taken days of engineering resources to produce. I happened to have the right tool for that job handy, and it worked out great.

You really have to think things through before restricting yourself to any specific direction.
Maybe linking to Google's I'm Feeling Lucky with the NYT title as the search term will work

http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky&q=let%20...
Thanks. I sometimes wonder, is there a way in Haskell to display a type signature of a function for a particular instance? For example, is there a way to display type of get when used as an instance of State ? I know I can derive it but I would sometimes like to see if I am correct..
What no one talks about when building a team: letting people go
Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not yet seen. Even scientific inquiry requires at least a scintilla of faith. One forms a hypothesis with the hopes (but not the certainty) of finding something meaningful at the end of the journey.
Technical merits and uses aside, I'm still floored that this kind of thing is even possible.

I've loaded it up and there's Monkey Island running on ScummVM running in a Linux VM running in Chrome's Javascript VM. Stunning.
It’s as if Quora don't care about their "mission"
It is not your property. If it were your property you could build whatever you wanted so long as you don't bring harm to others. The word you're looking for is not property owner but "tenant."
If your needs fall towards JS as the target vs. the source language, then it's worth having a look at Fay[1] and GHCJS[2]. Both allow calls from regular Javascript, but Fay currently has a much better interface for that vs. GHCJS' still very low-level support.

[1] https://github.com/faylang/fay/wiki

[2] https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs
Though, to be fair, you need a backup strategy regardless of where you are. If you don't have one, it's not anyone's fault but your own. AWS in particular is built with the mantra of "expect and embrace failure".

Redundancy is dependent upon your usage case (and budget), but if your livelihood is on the line, you'll want a redundancy strategy as well regardless of host. Again, you are ultimately responsible for catastrophic failures that result from poor planning.
>> the ship will be scrapped, but it had to be moved in a proper place first.

You mean a POORER PLACE first?
Can you imagine saying that you don't want to read the opinions of negroes or women? No? You should stop being such a racist and give white men the same courtesy you give everyone else.
Android-Friendly Linux Code Gets Big Boost From Mobile Companies
It doesn't help that it's a completely anonymous post. If they had put their reputation behind it maybe it would carry more weight. On the other hand, it's much easier to attack someone anonymously as there's no way to respond to it.
Faith is different from these other things, in that it's still a sort of truth claim.

Fun, beauty, love, etc. are irrational and vital to the human experience. However, they're purely emotional. Basically, they provide the goals which our rational faculties seek to fulfill.

Faith goes beyond this, because it ultimately says, "I believe that this is true." The others are simply "I enjoy this" or "I am compelled to do this" or "this satisfies me", but faith is different because it's fundamentally making an objective claim. And there is every reason to reject that due to irrationality, even if you accept these other things.
So many posts on HN encourage startups to charge their customers and not to fall into the trap of offering everything for free...

When it comes to content, I think we should be encouraging companies to find ways to fund high quality content. That's what the NYT has done with their metered pay wall, and it feels like this is something that should be encouraged. Otherwise they will become yet another newspaper that is sold off or shut down...
How the heck does a 7MB image come with an entire OS, emulator, and a fully functional game?! You have to wonder how much of our stuff is bloated.
Like Karunamon said, it's all about who you follow. I use Twitter exclusively for work, Facebook for personal use. Remember, Twitter is completely open, so think of it as an extension to your work persona.

Using Tweetdeck, I have a few columns set up, one displays everyone I follow, another few which aggregate specific hashtags. Since I work with a specialist piece of .Net software, I can have a column serve only tweets for that area. I had no value in Twitter before this and found out about more stuff relevant to me than through HN or Reddit. It does depend on how you use it, e.g. setting up a #aspnet search would likely yield to many irrelevant results, but follow someone like Scott Hanselman or Jon Skeet and you may learn a few crazy things!
that hardly makes it boring... it's just inappropriate for some kinds of task
iOS App Store now allows legacy downloads to support older OSes
Just to be 100% clear, increase = worse in this context, correct?
Yes, I'm all for their right to have fun, too. But please, don't let those who can't afford it become obsessed with shiny gadgets and internet karma points too. There are many other ways to have fun.
A look at WeChat security
Auto-hiding scrollbars in IE10