skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The intermediary argument is over-used, but I doubt AirBnB is trying to fight hotel on the cost aspect: most of the time, they tend to be similarly priced. They don’t really recommend price at all. My impression was more that hotels (like taxis) abuse the market by strangling the offer, and forcing people to upgrade when they don’t care about luxury.

The company was started to help political operative (the most amenable form of interns) to find a dry place to nap during conferences: that sounds like a specific, unaddressed need rather than a tax evasion scheme.

> highly taxed, while most AirBNB rooms are not - apartment rents are often rented at submarket prices under rent-control schemes,

Actually, the handful of people operating ‘hotel-like’ plans (short-term flat-share, really) that you refer too are always doing it from recently build, not rent controlled, purchased flats, for all sort of reasons; they all explicitly mention that operating anything significant from a rent-controlled flat will get you out in the street faster than you can list your flat.

The classic case is this ‘let’s limit the number of license for safety reasons’: if you want high-grade manure, that is top-shelf bullshit. I went to San Francisco once, and I never felt so much in danger than in that cab: no seat belts, speed limits were for the wuss that he was honking at through-out, he gave multi-tasking an Olympic status; even looking at the (packed) road was too much for him. To the point we felt the need to call the company, if anything to make sure whomever would surely die in there soon would have proper insurance. Let’s say we were told in no uncertain terms that we were alive, therefore our livelihood was not supposed to be our concern. Same for rats in hotels: I don't mind an accident, but I expect action, not denial. I don’t understand how limiting the market is going to have a positive impact on service when the human touch is… lacking.

I chose AirBnB because they had interesting features, as in, creative business model that make they offer relevant to XXIst century dweller: personal contact, restaurant recommendations from our host that make sense, a Wifi router that I can physically access when it needs rebooting, free access to kitchen that won’t charge me a day’s worth of wage to toast two slices of bread at night, significant rebate when staying more than a couple of days.

> hotel rooms are highly taxed, while most AirBNB rooms are not

As you point out: they are intermediaries, and I’m positive they wouldn’t care charging extra tax. I would put them on a list, and that list could be artificially limited, making them possible victim of a lobbying effort by hotel chains who want to keep a stronghold on a market, rather than admit it has evolved and adapt -- so I understand their reservations. But passing taxes is generally a business-neutral act, so I doubt they care that much. Once again: look and compare, they are not trying to be cheaper than hotels.
it's not about the speed of coding, it's about navigating the API and the existing code quicker. Those little helps are just so that you keep your brain at a higher level instead of focusing on tabs and semicolons. You focus on making loops, renaming variables, throwing exception, not on specific syntax things. Somehow it's the closest working things to all those visual languages they tried in the 90's.

it's not really faster, it just avoid de-focusing, it's the continuation of the bicycle for the mind thing.
It wouldn't matter though, if once you tried a recommendation, you could vote it in or out of future plays.
It's an easy way to get sued for discrimination.
Did WhatsApp Really Do No Marketing?
IF and only IF the spam filters are as good as Gmail.
No such thing as bad publicity. It gets the brand known "oh, yeah, puffchat, I've heard of that, can't remember why", and if they tell users that it's secure often enough, no amount of evidence that it isn't will make any difference - humans respond more strongly to an authoritative voice than to objective reality.
Their ironic last tweet before shutting down: https://twitter.com/flexcoin/status/438355933777756160
Nice of them to link to their terms of service. The relevant section being:

"We have taken every precaution to defend your bitcoins from hackers and/or intruders. However, Flexcoin Inc is not responsible for insuring any bitcoins stored in the Flexcoin system. You are entering into this agreement with Flexcoin Inc. You agree to not hold Flexcoin Inc, or Flexcoin Inc's stakeholders, or Flexcoin Inc's shareholders liable for any lost bitcoins."
Yes, I guess you'd have to use real world factors to try and trim down your n before you start with the n/e thing. Although if you're in a strange place you probably won't know that much about which areas are good or not.
I've written about it at length already and don't choose to relive it in detail, but I worked for an extremely unethical startup.

In 3 months, I saw... bait-and-switch hiring all over the place, multiple people hired into the same management role, and (after I left) a CEO who spent months trying to destroy my reputation.

At 3 months, I was brought into a room with HR and the CTO. Upper management wanted to get rid of early hires with "too much" equity and wanted to pull my technical credibility to justify their firing, but the documents I was asked to sign constituted perjury (blaming people for nonexistent technical shortfalls, claiming that I directly managed people I didn't even know, etc.) Some of the claims would have required revising my past and saying I'd consulted (a consulting VP/Eng, I can't make this shit up) with the company before the start date (in order to make the rest of the story check out). They fired me for refusing to do it. When I pointed out that I had grounds for a lawsuit, the CEO threatened to pull family connections and bribe judges.

I'm sorry, but I don't do "We're giving you 10 reports, and your job is to fuck over all of them over the next two months." I may or may not be a leader (that's not for me to decide) but I am surely not a henchman.

This is one of the VC darlings and although it was almost a down round (barely above flat) and dilution was heavy, they raised again in late 2013 (almost 2 years after that happened). Granted, this last VC round is essentially a severance, giving the company a couple years to run on fumes while its executives find better things to do with their lives. But I didn't get a severance, so why should they?

Now, I think companies that are that shitty are pretty rare, even in the VC-funded world. That might be bottom 1% overall and bottom-10% in the VC-funded world. Even most startups and ex-startups (e.g. Google) aren't nearly as bad, but there is a certain crappiness to the tech world in terms of how regular people are treated. Companies care a lot about image (being sexy, "cool", VC darlings, whatever) but not about long-standing reputation-- at least, on the latter, not enough to seriously value doing the right thing.

The old Silicon Valley was a pay-it-forward economy. Even when you separated, you were good to other people. If you had to cut people in your startup, you introduced them to investors. People helped each other out. You didn't fuck over a talented engineer, because you might want to work with him 5 or 10 years later. That's gone now.

I do have to offer this disclaimer, though. I never worked on the West Coast. Maybe it's different out there, but the things I've heard convince me that it's not that different, and I've definitely met dodgy characters in California.

Day to day, what angers me is the general lack of respect for engineers in the "new" Silicon Valley. I'm talking about the startups offering pathetic equity slices, and about the companies that are actually very business-driven posing as "tech companies". Engineering and research talents aren't really valued, despise the mouth-honor paid to them.
Here's the thing, though: Rails purposefully doesn't provide more than the minimum. I disagree with DHH on many things (ActiveRecord’s persistence model being based on MySQL misfeatures has been one of my biggest frustrations with Rails since he introduced it at a RubyConf where we both presented), but he's right that this sort of thing doesn't belong in Rails.

Everyone[1] needs a persistence layer and domain objects. That ActiveRecord is both ActiveModel and persistence is neither here nor there—and Rails 3 did a lot to making it possible to separate ActiveModel (domain object behaviour) and ActiveRecord (persistence layer behaviour) in a logical perspective so you can choose to persist differently than ActiveRecord does. Everyone needs some kind of controller. Everyone needs some kind of presentation layer. Aside from providing sane defaults for all of this, Rails doesn't try to dictate how your application is built.

The “more complex” architecture required for your application is unlikely to be a good fit for my application’s “more complex” architecture. For Rails to anoint one particular “more complex” architecture…is to fail anyone else who doesn’t need that architecture or would need something different. If you want to promote a particular type of architecture, there are ways: write an Engine; include generators. Give people guidance. Tell people why they want to use your particular architecture, but also tell them why they shouldn’t use it. If a lot of people need it, they will adopt it. Like Rspec. Like cucumber. Like ActiveModel::Serializers.

And, honestly, consider whether you really need your “more complex“ architecture or whether you can combat it the same way that Basecamp does. We're doing that with our product team, trying to find features we can remove and reimplement later when we really need them. Ours is a fairly mature product, so it's hard—but it's happening.

[1] For some large subset of everyone. Anyone who is reaching for something like Rails, Django, etc. needs some sort of persistence layer. Anyone who needs to store data needs that. Everyone needs domain objects.
It should be reasonably simple to add a "report malware" button next to banners when the search includes the word "download". It would be less simple to review flags every malware provider would make on every competitor, but the beauty is, you wouldn't need to - when someone asks for "download firefox" I'm pretty sure all banners advertising Firefox will include some form of malware.
I gave my local MP my opinion on extending the copyright law in the UK a few years back. The response was along the lines of "Our party believes this. You are in our constituency".

I wrote back explaining that I didn't believe that was the way democracy was supposed to work, the politicians are there to represent the people, not the other way around. The next reply was sympathetic to my view, but I have my doubt that my opinion was actually represented there.
Relive Jurassic Park's Iconic Hacking Scene Right From Your Browser
It's possible. I'm wary of anything from Google.
You are correct - it was hours worked, not # of workers. Thanks for the correction.

I'm not sure how it's a gross misrepresentation - Julia's impression was that free money induces people to become dependent and work less. How does the distinction in hours worked vs # of workers change that?
If they really were hacked, this was the catalyst for it happening.

PSA: Don't peacock.
RSA Tried To Get TrustyCon Booted
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The arguments in favor are that the taxi cab companies and the local governments have a deal going on. A regular cab pays taxes and fees to the government and if people stop taking regular cabs, all of a sudden a stream of revenue stops coming in. Also, cab companies are losing a lot of drivers and business to services like UberX, Lyft and Sidecar. I've been in many UberX cars in San Francisco where the driver is actually a cab driver, but just hates the way the cab business is run.

The cab companies have an inferior business model and lobbying is the way they compete. Welcome to the political game.
Amazing - thanks for taking the time to write up the process you went through. My situation sounds very similar and I can definitely reuse a large chunk of your approach.

I'd planned on doing de-duplication first. In my case I have legacy copies of libraries - but also a lot of duplication in within the main itunes library (due to exploding itunes dbs some time ago - that was the point I switched to spotify so my ocd didn't kill me). Should be easy enough to script something to handle that scenario. I did something similar a while ago to sort out my iphoto lib(s).

I saw the flat thing (I noticed it in the code). I don't think it would work in the particular case I ran into as the two discs are at the same level. As you say though, if I do a bit of grepping I could probably catch and adjust many of those before I start.
Facebook Eyeing To Buy Drone Maker Titan Aerospace
For Runner With M.S., No Pain While Racing, No Feeling at the Finish
Guardian has an article on this as well:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/04/bitcoin-ba...
I have to disagree, code completion allows my typing to keep up with my thinking. Sometimes I have a "picture" in my head about how to implement something and the only thing slowing me down is how fast I can get it into code.
This. Autocomplete is like GPS for writing code in the presence of large libraries and complex APIs. It has nothing to do (at least now) with saving on keystrokes, and intellisense marketing docs post 1997 exclude this as a selling point.
> That's a 38% discount: significant, but it doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me.

That's because it doesn't take into consideration the biggest cost into consideration - the cost of human capital. A larger manufacturer cannot cut down the costs drastically, as the human capital at bigger companies is much larger than a small scale business.
The 2.5 stayed local and made jobs. Its a huge difference. In essence, he gave the locals "permission" to produce these things for themselves.

Wealth disparity is an interesting animal. The rich don't consume 1000's of times more resources than the poor despite having 1000's of times more 'money'. The wealth divide seems to function like an insidious form control wherein the uber-rich are able to deny local markets permission to do things for themselves.

Its great to see when guys like this realize its all just made of paper (literally and figuratively in this case) and they can actually just do it for themselves.
It seems to me that there is an enormous amount of negativity towards academia, here. I think it's very unbalanced. Let me redress this a little.

It is true that young academics are not well paid, don't have good job security, and that the academic system is run from the top in the wrong way. Grant-chasing is a fact of life, and administration can distract you from your work.

However, being an academic can be great. I've worked in industry and academia, and I found academia to be less stressful, more rewarding, and more intellectually challenging.

Here are a few great things about academia:

* You get to work with really smart, creative, intellectual, people. Probably the smartest people you meet in your life will be colleagues. It's a very stimulating environment.

* You get to work with young and enthusiastic students and researchers, who constantly challenge you and bring new ideas to the table. It keeps you young.

* You see ideas and technologies that most people don't. For example, I recently saw a bunch of robots in development at another UK institution.

* It's an opportunity to continue learning, with access to great resources (huge libraries, experts on a wide variety of disciplines and sub disciplines down the hallway / across campus).

* You are not constrained to thinking about product development or the short-term. You can think on much greater timescales, and propose and investigate ideas with no direct application.

* When you make a real contribution, find a great result, or inspire other researchers, it's hugely rewarding.

* You're part of a machine that has generated enormous progress. Often people don't recognise it, particularly in Computer Science, because commercial companies appear to have "invented" things that they actually developed from work in academia. The most incredible discoveries and theories have come from academia.

* Every day can be different. You don't repeat the same research twice, so it's a constant progression. This can be really exciting and stimulating.

* You get to travel the world to collaborate, to attend conferences etc. Sometimes you can extend these trips to holidays; I've travelled more since I became an academic than anyone I know outside of academia. You have the opportunity to move overseas and work at foreign institutions.

* You have flexibility in terms of what you wear, how you work, where you work, who you work with -- you get to choose much of the time.

* You have an enormous amount of freedom to organise your time as you see fit. Your hours and holidays are incredibly flexible.

* The money, whilst not great, is enough to live on. If you progress up the ladder to be a senior lecturer or professor (UK), the money is good.
If it can differentiate itself by being private and secure, sure. That means non-US hosting, zero knowledge storage, PFS on all SSL/TLS, properly defined security policies from a company side to reduce social engineering, secure architecture, etc.

Many people on HN probably either host their own email or considered it, but a good secure service is better to sell to people without that technical knowledge who don't want to be a Google/MS/Apple/Yahoo/etc product. I've pointed less technical people towards MyKolab before; they are a good model for how an email service should be done.
Taking care of a baby for a few months or getting back to studying is hardly becoming dependent on free money.

Also, notice the last sentence: "basic income continued to influence following generations, both in terms of income and health." That was long after the pilot ended.
If this were Windows 7, it would actually be a gift worth receiving. Windows 8 is unusable. The lone machine on my local net is reviled and nobody wants to use it. It's slated for an "upgrade" to Ubuntu 12.04.
No worries, I am just one person who doesn't fall into the target market for your product - there may well be many valid scenarios where a having template, particularly with a good design could be useful. There are all kinds of different presentations requiring slide decks so maybe you just need to find the right niche?
And with IntelliJ IDEA you do not even have to remember the prefix. A substring is often enough.
The trick is to love yourself.
2. Health

Dont believe the hype if you work for a company that is going to sponsor your visa, chances are they will provide health insurance. I pay $25 a month for myself and $175 if I had a family of 4.

My girlfriend uses Obama Care and pays $21 for basic insurance. Unless you are self employed then chances are you wont be paying much and now with the new health plans even these plans are affordable.
Irreversibility is not a bug of Bitcoin, it's one of its greater strengths. Just look at the numbers that Paypal/eBay and merchants publish about the fraud caused by reversing payments. It's counted in millions, if not billions already. What we need is a safe way to use Bitcoin with all its strengths, not to make it more similar to flawed solutions that we currently have.
I think code completion would be enjoyed the most by those who don't know how to touch-type, since for them inputting the code is quite time-consuming.

But working with others (and occasionally using it myself), I've also found that code completion tends to encourage a "I think this is the right method/class/variable because it's in the list, I'll use it" type of thought process; and while it makes for easy generation of code that has no syntax errors, it also feels like it increases making logic errors since there is less thinking about "is this really want I want to write here" - it tells you what you can write here, and the instinct is to just pick the one that seems to feel like it would work.

Without completion I already code in the 100-120wpm+ range (and can comfortably write prose in the 150-160 range), so I don't think I need to make that any faster...
Liberty and Security
I find this very annoying too. Also, if you have a bunch of tabs loaded ready to read and you go out of signal range, you lose the pages!

I understand mobile browsers have a limited memory, but I don't see why they can't cache the resources required for currently open tabs in the local file system.
Apple Patents Live Voicemail Screening, Lets Users Pick Up Mid-Message
> It contains powerful new features and helpful developer tools, such as a built-in web server

I haven't finished the article yet, but really? Is that what PHP needs? A built-in web server? It strikes me that adding more tools that incompetent web developers can abuse is what got them there in the first place.

How long until we start having security releases for the PHP web server, because so many clueless devs decided to launch and run their site with it?
I'm guessing you mean Mailpile[0], but those guys are only providing an email client (which you can run both from a thumb drive or on a server).

[0]: https://mailpile.is/
The Tarim Desert Highway: Growing Bushes in the Desert (2012)
Jesus. Why does TED has to go and spoil every fucking good thing?
Existing discussion (with 111) comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7339313
People talk about bit-coin being algorithms, at a practical level it's computer systems. While most people have some distrust of there government and banks I find the idea that computer systems are more trustworthy is laughable.

Sure banks fail and make mistakes but the FDIC has kept small depositors from losing all there money for a long time. Computers are hacked or mess up all the time and with Bitcoin such issues are unrecoverable which makes trusting computers seem like a terrible idea. For reference 1/2 the people I know had there WoW account stolen and that's worth less than 50$, if significant numbers of people where to try to hold significant amounts of bit-coins directly you could expect similar things. Right now bit-coins are small enough and fractured enough not to be a useful target but it just does not scale without 3rd party institutions.
Bitcoin seems way too prone to being stolen or exploited for me to ever take it seriously. I dont have the same problems with exchanging real money, investing real money, and withdrawing real money.
With reference to the Green Card Lottery [1] "if you lose in the lottery, they'll refund the fees", there are no fees to enter the lottery, however if you win the lottery there are fees to start the interview and visa process.

[1] https://www.dvlottery.state.gov/
Yes, this is one of the features I am thinking.