skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't mean that they were the same thing at all; the "page" they are borrowing is the hiding of fees and service charges behind the bold text of a "low rate".

Your example is fine, by the way. Yes, that $50 is costing you 500% APR. And yes, that is exactly how you should think about it, and how they should advertise it. Anything else is problematic. It doesn't matter how the cost is arrived at, this is the cost to you of borrowing that money, and it is this entire cost that must be balanced against the value you will see from it, not any nominal rate.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing the sort of loan they are talking about, and the costs may be perfectly reasonable too; certainly microlending is a different risk landscape that typical bank loans.

However, the only ethical way to handle financial details like this is to always be as transparent as you can.

Lots of sectors get this wrong, by the way -- payday loans are particularly egregious but the auto finance industry is pretty slimy on this too, in different ways.

By the way, payday loans as an institution obviously meet a lot of market need that wasn't being addressed before them, or they wouldn't have popped up everywhere. I don't think they should be run out of town, but they should be honest about the costs.
In my opinion mobile web is yet to arrive, we have just gotten HTML5 standards finalized only about an year ago.

While native has had roughly seven years lead when it comes to providing quality online experience, web apps can beat native easily. And no it's not that web apps or web development or talent for mobile web development is limited or is the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is usually the vendors and support of standards in the existing breed of mobile browsers that destroy the web experience.

For example, Apple introduced this shitty non-standard swipe gesture feature on iPhone Safari/iOS7 that breaks so many things:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18889666/ios-7-is-there-a...

But I think this will change with more competition among tablets and mobiles. IMHO, it is normal for the web to catch up a little later; but when it does native will find it hard to breath.
Or the poster is female. People seem to forget that women's bottoms tend to have really tiny pockets (at least in the USA).
Is anyone aware of a standard promise or "contract" startups can sign with their users that says if we close or get bought and the product is shut down we promise we'll open source it within X days under Y license?

This happens so often it would be great to have a standard and clear expectations.
I think this kind of attitude is exactly what the OP denounces. Community are not driven by a need to acquire something (information, or whatever you consider to be "available") but by kindred minds coming together and working on fun stuff.
SSNs aren't unique, so this seems quite risky.
CS50 Guest Lecture by Mark Zuckerberg
They're not selling out, they're buying in. Big difference.
I don't mean to downplay the severity of this, and I could be missing something, but I fail to see how this is a new vulnerability that TrustLook has "discovered". We've seen countless stories on HN (unless I'm wildly misremembering) of credentials being leaked via client-side applications, including AWS credentials. Haven't developers been getting this wrong since the dawn of client-server authentication?
30 days seems long, but I guess if I am in a hurry I could set up 10 of them with 3 days in between so that it is always 72 hours out...
"So, the board of a private company appoints someone as CEO who is gay, many of the stakeholders of the company (employees, outside developers, companies whose products are accessed by the other company’s products) object and decide to act in their own personal or private capacity to complain and/or boycott, and ultimately as a result — and without governmental intervention at any level — the CEO decides his presence in the position is not in the interest of the success and welfare of the private company and chooses to resign."

Kinda different all of a sudden, huh.
The lesson Mozilla learned here is that the angry Internet mob can get whatever it wants. It doesn't really matter which side of history the mob is on. The lesson that other boards learned with this is not 'hire socially-conscious people', but 'keep your head down and maintain the status quo'.

Fifty years ago a similar uproar would have developed if a company hired a black CEO. The press release announcing his removal a week later would have been the same, some fluff words about being unable to effectively lead when he's spending all his time dealing with this.
Alnis, love the game! But I also ran into unexpected behavior after clearing level 7 (change your color). It kept reloading the same level, but opening up new levels in Level select. Even so, clicking on higher levels keeps reloading the same colors.js screen.

Another weird thing I noticed was that next to the computer and telephone in the inventory, two letters "k" appeared. I'm using Firefox 28 on Windows 7.

Here's the solution I used for colors.js
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/ab5cd3b393c290fbf8c1
Chromium/Ubuntu. Forcing HTML5 player gets me mostly: "video not available".
To be more explicit, and for those who do not know. Secured Amazon S3 buckets require signed strings to be passed with requests along with the request. These requests are generated by using the secret key of the owner's account.

Here's an example of a signed request:

GET foo HTTP/1.1\r\n
Host: myawsserver.amazonaws.com\r\n
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 15:26:45 EDT\r\n
Range: bytes=0-10\r\n"
Authorization: AWS AKIAOSF0DNN7EXAMPLE:UC901LzExamplebsGIQdEBeW+tt4=\r\n\r\n

In the above example a request that gets the first 11 bytes of file foo, the "UC901LzExamplebsGIQdEBeW+tt4=" is generated by using your secret key to sign a string, HMAC_S3Secret(string_to_sign).

There are many tools on Amazon, like boto and S3cUrl which help developers learn how to write S3 requests into their code. The problem is that they abstract the signing a lot.

It's possible, and probably a better idea, to pre-sign a token for a specific request either by generating on the server side on the fly, or creating a pool of valid request tokens.

The difficulty is that Amazon's documentation isn't very good if you're doing something like trying to limit file access to specific byte portions of a file, or limit access times.

I found that valid tokens last for 15 minutes from the time they specify in the signature. Anyways, hope this helps.
Airbnb residents are often a nightmare for other tenants in the same building- they often function as de facto customer support and are forced to put up with the extra noise. Beyond the legality, this business model is plagued by extremes.
Think it's a bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izs5wFFAaaU
I thought of something similar to send tweets from the grave, you add an app to twitter and it'll start tweeting messages after you stop tweeting for 2 years.
This is a nice python library for controlling a Sonos speaker.

https://github.com/SoCo/SoCo
Thanks!

Does your level 7 not look like http://i.imgur.com/AFTxPWC.png ?
That's interesting. Maybe it's 'cause I've just watched the first episode of Silicon Valley but, for most people, even if you're not doing something obviously good for the world, there's huge internal pressure to feel as if you're making a big contribution to some big picture things that matter.

That, I think, is why you get lots of "xyz startup is changing the world!" rhetoric. Because whether or not it is true, people worry about the optics of what they do, and need something meaningful to point to. To actually care about ethics involves making painful choices of the sort that it sounds like you've done. Say, choices that keep you from dying on the inside, but which are still painful. So kudos to you.
That's obvious and well known. Perhaps I should have phrased it as "their ethics towards their customers". Better now? I'm not discussing any of the laws involved.
How about some honesty? Eich spent money to oppose gay marriage and now he is hated by most everyone here. That hate will be disguised as "objective facts" and "best for Mozilla" or even "free market" and many other methods to cover up the real feelings and beliefs. Under all that smooth, phony bullshit is this simple truth, "I hate Eich for supporting Prop 8 and I will do anything in my power: lie, smile, scream, calmly debate, speak intellectually, smear, etc. needed to fuck him over." And you won... fine. Just be honest about your feelings and motives.
This vulnerability exists with EVERY client application. It is just much easier to obtain the applications with android(as opposed to IOS) which is the only reason i can assume Trustlook focused on android.

This isnt as much a "vulnerability" as it is a complete miss understanding of security and the technology they are using. Everything on the client side should be assumed as obtainable.
We're glad you like it!

No clue why that's happening, but we'll continue to investigate.
I'm of the view this is a lot of fuss about nothing. Big deal if people prefer apps over the "open" web. The reality is a large number of people use the likes of MSN and Yahoo as web home pages, and unless you were linked to from them they were unlikely to find you. The app launcher situation is an improvement over that.

The big problem is that dipping your toes into something via a website (assuming you don't hit an auth wall) is easier than finding then downloading an app.

Besides, a lot of these "web" apps are just things like Facebook or G+ which are no more open to scraping or any of the other supposed benefits of an open web than your average iOS or Android mobile clients are. The web has morphed into an unholy mix of the worst qualities of everything else.
How is it legal to take a commision from illegal activity? If people are using AirBNB for breaking the law, AirBNB should be prosecuted too.
Not splitting rent based on square footage is actually illegal in SF. If your roommates find out, they just have to go to the Tenant's board and complain and whoever benefited will be required to pay the difference back.
Markov-chain git documentation
>This would be dishonest for a US market, but I understand it here.

I don't know about this line of reasoning. If, as appears to be the case, flat rates were designed to mislead borrowers into thinking they were getting lower rates, then engaging in that practice doesn't seem to be any more just, simply because others in the market are doing it. APRs were mandated in the U.S. for a reason.

I get that they need to show competitive rates, which means showing APR vs. competitors' flat interest wouldn't work without additional explanation. However, there are fairly easy ways to educate their market and do so in a way that differentiates themselves even further, especially if their pricing is really significantly better.

For instance, if I were a potential client, I would greatly appreciate a quick lesson on APR, and a comparison to competitive programs that re-expresses their rates in terms of APR. You'd earn good will for transparency/benevolence and my business for the better rates.
Should have been 'Tx' then instead of 'TX' :)
Step 1: Ubiquity.
Step 2: Profit.

But honestly, YouTube is a good example of this model. It's the go-to site for videos, and bombards you with ads.
It's curious, because there's no reason to think the 'actual landlord' has a right to that additional income. They signed a lease at a given price for a given term. They could have signed that lease at dramatically higher terms. Just because the tenant made out good on the deal in the long term doesn't negate the initial contract. It's not like the landlord must be the only one that makes out best on any given contract...
#1 reason: PG IS A BUTT
Or at least the PR reasons ("do what the customers want") and the libertarian reasons ("private companies can make any decision that they want for any reason") for not wanting Eich for CEO are the old PR and libertarian reasons for firing gays.

What if your reason is that he supports the elimination of benefits for a commonly discriminated against minority class, and he's being put into a position to at least indirectly make decisions about those benefits at a company that has historically supported them?

Any way to figure out an analogy to that in discrimination against gays?

edit: That's a serious question, and if you have a serious opinion, I'd think you'd reply after downvoting.
I am confused. This makes Airbnb's business in S.F. (in addition to Airbnb HQ is in SF) and many major cities an oxymoron.
Hi zaroth,

This makes sense, and we are already doing some of that.

In the loan application form that borrowers see, the 5% fee to Zidisha and the interest offered to lenders is in fact combined. Borrowers choose any combined rate from 5% up to a maximum of 30%, with a text description indicating that the first 5% of this is paid to Zidisha and the rest is paid to lenders.

The loan application page also indicates the registration fee, as a cost separate from the combined interest / fee rate that the borrower selects.

We separate the service fee from the lender interest in the loan applications that are displayed to lenders, because the intent is to indicate the maximum interest that they can expect to receive from each loan proposal.
Companies are made of people. (Some) people care about ethics. (Somes) companies care about ethics.

For a company that is based on trust (https://www.airbnb.com/trust) I expect more from them than the lowly behavior we're used to see from other well known corporations that don't care.
Indeed, I think it depends a lot on the task.

It's a little dated now, but a Pew study found people overwhelming consume news from websites versus apps: http://www.journalism.org/2012/10/01/app-vs-browser-debate/

I also trust data from Pew considerably more than from Flurry.
here's another type of dead mans switch, embed 'where now() < '1st January 2016' in your SQL :)
The Guide To Launching Your Next Project Without Wanting To Kill Yourself
Can you tell us roughly what portion of the loans you offer are for established borrowers?

That is, are people really paying the registration fee once and then taking out multiple loans, or are most of your borrowers first-time borrowers?
No, most users are like you and wonder why every bank, florist, fast food chain, ISP has an app (that generally doesn’t do what you’d expect it to do). Even tailored Analytics solutions have apps. However, creating an app is not decided by those users directly: it’s a small and simple project by HN standards, one that most middle-to-large company has felt compelled to attempt to look cool, but it remains too difficult for most users who’d prefer synergies.

That's why I have (and alas, need) 15 airline apps, but actually would prefer to have only two that could handle everything much better: Kayak and Apple’s Passbook.
what if something happens to the airbnb renter? liabilities are way more complicated than it seems.
I wrote about this problem here (http://serv.github.io/blog/2014/02/20/unfortunate-state-of-m...). Mobile Web sucks because there's an incentive problem. No one really has strong incentive to make mobile web better. Performance issues are largely an effect of this root incentive problem. (edited from "cause" to "effect")

- Users have a strong preconceived notion that websites on mobile just suck compared to native apps.

- Management allocates less financial and developer resources into mobile web because users prefer native app strongly.

- Developers time and effort are stretched thin for web because management focus more on native app teams.

The mobile web will continue to lag behind native app for a while.
If your site is protected by CloudFlare (like HN is), you are automatically protected from this vulnerability (see: http://blog.cloudflare.com/staying-ahead-of-openssl-vulnerab...).
Ask HN: Best VPNs around?
What do you use everyday for Internet browsing and downloads? I'm feeling the urge to start using a VPN since where I live, the network is shared with hundred of people. Thank you!
You're over simplifying my comment. I gave further explanation by citing other examples which most people can recognize as ugly without further explanation. My point being that such things exist, and Comic Sans is one of those things. Whether you agree or not, I did not just dismiss people who don't agree as "wrong", as the creator of Comics Sans did.

Though, obviously, I do view them as wrong, I gave my reasoning as to why. I could go into more detail as to the exact reasons why Comic Sans is ugly, but others have done a better job than I would elsewhere.
This is all great, and indeed solves the security issues in exposing AWS.

And I'm sure it does wonders for locking in clients to AWS APIs ;)

As for scalability, there's no inherent scalability issue with middlemen services. There's potentially some added lag (not necessarily), but a pure middleman service (with maybe a bit of caching) is an "embarrassingly parallel" workload. If it gets slow, you just add more servers. And they could be Amazon EC2 servers, nothing bad about that! :)
Discovery, usage, and feedback are all more polished in native apps rather than on mobile web. Mobile web is the wild west in terms of experience and more of a stepping stone until you get frustrated enough to download the app or ditch that service altogether if they don't have a native app. Mobile web has lost many of its benefits due to some very distinct reasons.

Lack a stable Internet connection? Native wins

Home screen apps vs Bookmarks in browser? Native wins

Ease of discovery? Native wins

Ideal user experience? Native wins

Mobile web is lagging behind for good reason.
That's true. So perhaps that cut is high enough to make the rest worth it. I'm taking Airbnb out of my hip&cool list of companies :)
I had to google what "heartbeat extension" does:

DTLS is designed to secure traffic running on top of unreliable
transport protocols. Usually such protocols have no session
management. The only mechanism available at the DTLS layer to figure
out if a peer is still alive is performing a costly renegotiation.
If the application uses unidirectional traffic there is no other way.

TLS is based on reliable protocols but there is not necessarily a
feature available to keep the connection alive without continuous
data transfer.

The Heartbeat Extension as described in this document overcomes these
limitations. The user can use the new HeartbeatRequest message which
has to be answered by the peer with a HeartbeartResponse immediately.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-dtls-heartbeat-01

Edit: here is the commit patching the bug https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/7e840163c06c7692b7...
No, it isn't different -- in fact that's kinda the point. Do you really think there aren't groups, communities, and companies who would (at least tacitly) prevent such a thing from happening?

But y'all don't think that's a problem, it's only when it goes in the other direction that it's a tragedy, a lynching, a bullet in the head. The backlash against this is ridiculous.
He means level 8, I think. Or at least I have the same problem with level 8 (intoTheWoods)
> The reactions outside and inside of the company showed very little tolerance ...

The key to your nonsense idea that wanting to striping an entire class of people of a right (and materially supporting the effort) is simply a "dissenting opinion that offends them". It isn't offensive, that trivializes it. It is a legal attack on class of people.

If he had donated $1000 to a group to reintroduce segregation in public schools, I highly doubt you would defend him under the idea "he just has a dissenting opinion that races shouldn't mix and materially supported the effort" -- or would you?
Used it for a few hours. It was slow, switched back to sublime.
Waze CEO confirms Google aquired it for $1.15B, hints investors forced the deal
I am looking to use this / something similar at the startup I work at to toggle our robot's operating modes. I have a question regarding the voice recognition. Is the voice recognition stuff done on the Pi itself, or is there a service that Jasper taps into to perform voice recognition?
I found it easier to make myself invincible.

map.getPlayer().killedBy = function() {};

Drone just follows you around like harmless puppy.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/dfb6822e683ea7418ea8
web/app is not zero sum.

There is a wide overlap in functionality, but if the experience via mobile browser is sufficient, users won't care. They may even enjoy not having to curate yet another app.

App Pros:
Engagement lock-in
Richer experiences (performance, native advantages)

App Cons:
Dev costs
Fragmentation costs
Dependency on ecosystem(s)
App release cycle + cross platform synchro of dev efforts
Prop 8 succeeded. The court overturned it years later.
Yes, on reddit. I have a gold account, but I leave ads on because I feel that this site needs it more that I need my screen space. Also, their ads are not really intrusive and they often support charities.
you don't need 2 lines, you only need the one below to overwrite the map function, and leave an open dot :D

map.placeObject(7,4,'exit');var a = {map: {placeObject:function(){}}};a.
Former jock hatching new food biz with help from tech
Mobile websites can not send push notifications, use location information, receive iBeacon broadcasts, etc.

To provide a state of the art user experience on mobile devices, you need to write an app.
If you use Chef, at Balanced (https://github.com/balanced), we've built a pretty awesome tool called: "Citadel" (https://github.com/balanced-cookbooks/citadel) that uses IAM policies for fetching secrets securely stored in S3 buckets.

It's pretty awesome. We're porting all of our code to use this, so we can open source most of our code freely and not have to necessary find ourselves working around security hurdles like this one -- though I'm not sure how it would've helped in this particular use case.
Credit Karma and Fandango Mobile Apps Poses Security Threat : FTC
this happened to me, but i went through the exit again and this time it worked
I am sure they will be pilloried for this, but I never begrudge a company trying to come up with a sustainable revenue model. Nobody ever thought "I sure wish I saw more ads online" and people gripe every time they pop up somewhere new, and yet everyone wants free services. So I say good luck brothers.
Are the ads going to say things like "my sisters cousin makes $2000 a month by surfing the internet"?

Because if so, I think the program has already started
Your anger is misplaced. The root cause of housing stock is not how people are using the current stock but the complete refusal to amend the situation to build more housing stock. Many landlords (living in their property or renting out) actively oppose rezoning changes that would permit more housing in the city. Those renting out are very much in favor of current zoning because they earn far more money from units because of limited stock.

Furthermore, a lot of those I know who have an extra room and rent out on AirBnB are usually renting out to people actively trying to move to the city and need a place to stay (1-3 months) until they find a unit to live in. For those AirBnB hosts that keep a lease, almost all of them that I know are renting out on AirBnB for more than 30 days at a time (usually to people trying to move to the city), because its not convenient or cost effective to manage back to back short-term stays when you aren't living in the unit. At the end of the day, those subleasing are usually just absorbing the difference between the rent control they secured originally and market value, which would be absorbed by the landlord anyways the moment the lease was given up. i.e. If Bob rents a rent controlled unit from Alice at $1000 a month and then decides to sublet it at $1500 a month 2 years later to Carol, then Bob is making $500 dollars profit. However if Bob gave up the lease, Alice would rent it out again at $1500 to Carol anyways. Either way, Carol ends up paying $1500 a month.