skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something where you can't draw a straight line between execution and billions of dollars in profits?
Interesting exercise, yet I feel a little detail is missing. In the two presented "views" of stock market functioning the first "informational" function is an integral part of price discovery, and so of the second "capital allocation" function. With that in mind the question turns into - who is an "authorized" entity to decide, how to proceed with price discovery?
I haven't been following this much, but it's sort of amusing and annoying when someone mirrors my thoughts on a subject so well.

The really bad thing that happened in this entire drama was that the list of donors was released to the public. That shouldn't have happened. Some quick googling, on the other hand, yielded this:

http://www.gayfresno.com/content/view/669/

To which I can ultimately only say, "Sigh."
Those things are all status quo, do you want clean water or innovation? Because apparently in some people's realities you can't have both.
> My take is that these problems stem inevitably from approaching the goal ass-backwards.

Yes, and that's the problem that's unsolvable. (Or very, very difficult.) I'm not saying people can't figure out how to use tools like Fit or Cucumber well; I'm saying that, for a lot of complicated human reasons, they don't. And I don't think there's anything a tool can do to change that.

The reason is that using Fit (or Cucumber) well requires that you change the way that you interact with your business-oriented colleagues. That's hard. It's not a technical problem; it's a social problem, and it needs face-to-face politicking. My experience is that teams that turn to tools first are even less likely to be able to solve these problems than those that don't. Many of them don't even understand that the problem exists.

In order for a tool to solve this problem, it would have to force—or strongly guide—the "proper" workflow and be highly desirable for everyone involved. Aslak & company are working on https://cucumber.pro/, which is a valiant attempt; it will be interesting to see if it works out.
Yeah .. Same here .. I got a similar one few days ago.
The funny thing is that the link in the email is broken and responding with "bad request".
Wait! .. Or may be I've just confirmed an active email address in their db .. I shouldn't fall for that! :)
did this comment add nothing to conversation?

Yup. It's a meaningless comment that doesn't back up its aggressive assertion or expand on the mental leap it makes.

- Can you prove that laws are made to keep status quo?

- Why does that alone mean we should break them?
The Internet of Autonomous Things: Strong Devices, Weakly Connected
Rent control is a broken system. You have cases of someone with a long rent controlled $1500 rent on a 3bdr that would go for 3k or 4k market rates. If they listed a bedroom at $500 on CL they would get ten thousand of applicants.
First paragraph under section 3, "Not Including Borrower Fees in Zidisha's Interest Rates".
I don't know enough to question your point, so I'll take your word for it. But the smell test is still strong here, even if HFT is neutral or beneficial to regular folk. You'll have a hard time convincing people with a complicated argument in the face of this obvious signal for unfairness.
At least in futball, you know who the refs are (hi dang!), what the rules are, and you know whether you've been red-flagged. On HN, the mods are new, the rules are unknown, and the default behavior seems to be not to tell anyone when they've been penalized.
Maybe start with the fact that the guarantee doesn't pay out claims to neighbors, and renter's insurance does.
"sharing" - while still extracting value via a middleman...
holly crap!
In this case the service that the third party is providing is telling the land owner that Disney has arrived on the market. That's, potentially, an extremely valuable service!
We've accepted a value system in the west that more males in a field == bad, unless that field is physically dangerous or otherwise undesirable. So the sex composition of things is noticed and considered important.

However, note that every frontier field is male-skewed, probably due to lower male risk-aversion. So this philosophy is anti-innovation.
Also, why am I being downvoted for asking intelligent questions?
I don't think it's silly at all to put some things behind auth. There's a fine line between usefulness and stalking.
Is it an idea that is not easily executable by someone else?

Does it have a high technical/expense barrier to entry?

I'm sorry, the valuation at those levels just seems way way out of proportion. Never mind the underlying legal problems.
I give them a dev test (Node JS) with their choice of database to create a small service (front end and back end).

Deliverable is code + db scheme + additionnal questions (mostly how they would improve if they had time, choice on tech etc.)

We also have in interview "do this function for me" to see how they think
They post a warning that you as a host are responsible for making sure you're following all your local laws.

Of course they're skirting the grey area of the law to make a profit. At the same time, every single host who affirms that they're following the laws, when they are not, are at fault.

If you get into the landlord business without bothering to check on local regulations, why should it be AirBnB's fault. Craigslist doesn't make you check a big box that says "renting this out short term is illegal", why should AirBnB?
On the other hand, that allows some people to live in the city when otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford it. The SF rental situation is not created by the few people that profit from temporarily renting to tourists.
Short term tenants are also exempt from the laws that protect SF nightmare tenants and having to pay $40k to move someone out. I know someone who has a legal in law unit in SF who basically decided not to ever rent it out because of those stories.
A lot of the DEC Voice stuff was part of a DARPA contract, it may be possible to liberate from some archive somewhere.
How about a site where you enter your SSN? Then if you're ever listed as deceased in the Social Security Death Index, that will be the trigger.
Opposing equal civil rights for gay people isn't really equatable in any ways to Communism. It's far more accurate to compare it to the 60s, when people demonstrated against Jim Crow laws, segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws.
It seems overly generous to assume AirBnB isn't offering insurance because they can't. Do we have reason to assume that, instead of them simply not wanting to? (As insurance, after all, costs money)
I agree with you about having a hard time. This is exactly what's so frustrating about the Michael Lewis book that kicked off the present round of controversy. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7548124
Hi zaroth,

Am I understanding correctly that you are suggesting we not use the term "interest", but instead call the amounts borrowers pay to lenders a fee?

That is worth considering. It would avoid much of the confusion over flat rates versus APR, and would still be clear to borrowers that the amount represents the cost of the loans.

I'd be interested to hear others' perspective on whether Zidisha ought not to use the term "interest" at all, but instead replace it with "fee" or some other term.
I agree with your take and Scalzi's take: it had to play out this way given the stakeholders. What's more interesting (and I think your last statement eludes to that) is the lack of tolerance for Eich's views.

The 'paradox of tolerance'[1]: To what degree should we tolerate others' viewpoints, even when those very viewpoints are intolerant?

Also see 'European immigration and Islam'.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I don't get this viewpoint.

You can say whatever you want, as long as you don't want a bullet in your head. Does anyone recognize that as freedom of speech? I doubt so.

Clearly we recognize freedom of speech as the ability to speak out with some limit on the repercussions of that. I'm not clear what they should be, but there certainly are some.
Haha, well that's an unexpected English-lesson for me. Really sorry for my mistake, and thank you for pointing that out.
Vandals Flip Smart Cars Over in San Francisco
why allow people to announce or rent places there in the first place?

Because they get a cut?
HBO puts 'Silicon Valley' First Episode on YouTube
RIP WWE 1999-2014
Yes, very sorry, it's all my bad English :)
There are different types of aquihires. Those that happen quickly, in which a fresh, innovative company is offered a large-to-them sum of money and cashes in their chips right away. And those that happen at the end of life of a company, when they are running out of money, and it's just a positive way to spin the failure. I guess this could be either but to me it seems to be the former, not the latter.
Ctrl+5 to reload the level after you changed it. Did you do that? On one of the levels I created a new exit inside, and it worked.
Ah - I see what menu does now. I love this game and have uncovered a few broken game states. This mainly happens when I reassign one of the API methods. Are you interested in user-submitted issues? Let me know; I could email them to you or log them on your GH; whatever is convenient.
I'm not sure if your question is rhetorical

With me, you can assume it's meant in the spirit of "can you give three examples?"
Mozilla reserves the right to hire and fire (which would have been Eich's fate had he not resigned)

On what do you base that assertion? There certainly was no indication for this, and the board claimed the opposite.
You can setup the SD card to run read only, and use a external usb hard drive when you need to write.
The drug war is also a spectacular failure and has been a main source of civil rights abuses until 9/11 response overtook it in that capacity (not that it doesn't continue to provide a healthy competition still). But yes, expecting that government wakes up to reason anytime soon may be overly optimistic.
Everything Old Is Unavailable Again
I'm extremely curious to know exactly what about the comment you're replying to sparked the "liberal" label. I don't want to create a political discussion here, but it seemed like the reply was taking pains to suggest it would be neutral.
That's the page. Something like "No fee to apply. You chose 5-30% interest rate. $12 registration fee applied to first successful loan."

A calculator like Shipwire uses to help people calculate the cost of their fulfillment services: http://www.shipwire.com/pricing would be ideal, but you'll run into very old browsers in those internet cafes. So even a more demonstrative infographic would help borrowers see just what's being offered.

I really hope you guys succeed, I've just worked with people who could use what you're offering and have seen them disappointed too many times by offers that were either misleading or that they just didn't understand.
> The fact Airbnb is allowing this to continue makes me question their ethics.

Don't ascribe ethics to a company. Companies are not people. Companies don't care about ethics. They care about legal responsibility.
Personally I disagree - I think donations to political causes and organizations should be considered public speech. Participation in a democracy takes 'a certain amount of civic courage.'
That's kinda the point, though. Read the comments for that file. ;)
that's if they were aware he was leaving. occured to you he might just have sent and email, published a blog post and left? ;-)
So I guess we should boycott every CEO that we don't agree with?
>The point is that Eich was lynched for his political or religious beliefs.

Eich caused an uproar due to his actions, not his beliefs. Pretending he sat on the side lines silently nodding in agreement with Prop 8 ignores the reality. He gave money to further a cause with the goal of dissolving families of same sex couples in California. He affected peoples' lives.
Why don't we just fucking let capitalism run where it may, instead of having all these stupid complicated controls which end up being exploited for profit anyway?
Nice, I have that on my bookshelf. But SICP assumes a working knowledge of basic calculus, right?
Thank you- that's a terrific writeup.

I had never put it together that the a main functional difference between tapply and plyr is that you can group by multiple columns.

One thing that I've had to use plyr for:
dfrm has three columns: user_id, vals, date

I want to know the average val for the first day of each user_id, second day, and so on. (In other words, average of vals across users relativized to the rank of the date for that user).

This is when plyr is awesome:
dfrm <- ddply(dfrm,"user_id",transform,dateRank = order(date))

That one line split my dataframe by user_id, performed a function over every sub-dfrm (ranking by date), then combined them back together into one dfrm, with a new column names dateRank that is appopriate for that {user,date} pair.

Now it's easy to:
summaryTable <- data.frame(mean=numeric(), median=numeric, n=numeric())
summaryTable$mean <- tapply(dfrm$val, dfrm$dateRank, mean)
summaryTable$median <- tapply(dfrm$val, dfrm$dateRank, median)
summaryTable$n <- tapply(dfrm$val, dfrm$dateRank, length)

And so on.
I guess I'm surprised to learn that any such subletting is illegal in SF.

Even prior to AirBnB it was really common to see offers on Craigslist or simply through traditional networks of friends and acquaintances, "Sublet my apartment while I'm traveling for six weeks," or "SFO-NYC apartment swap."
Since the term "insurance" sounds better and more universally accepted, I'd assume they would call it insurance if they could. There might be of course any number of reasons why they do not call it insurance despite it looking like one, I just assume most frequent and most probable one.
That's because it uses higher voltage. See the comment above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547420

Most of the pins of a CPU are actually power pins, because it can use >100W @~1V => 100 Amps through a lot of very small pins.
I think what we are saying, essentially, is that Joe Taxi Driver is leveraging the fact that he cannot be evicted to engage in aggressive rent-seeking behavior.
> Mozilla reserves the right to hire and fire (which would have been Eich's fate
> had he not resigned)

While I agree that Scalzi's post is a much more objective take on the events, you're false on this point. Brendan resigned of his own accord, and the board even tried to get him to stay on in another role even if he stepped down from CEO, but Brendan declined because he thought it would be better for Mozilla if he didn't.

(See https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...)
I've thought about that service a lot and this solution is not working because :

* I have to constantly check my mails to prove I'm not dead

* The other person's mail will without any doubt change if I die in 10+ years

* Can this service live up to 50+ years? I'm really doubting that as well.
I see it now. I believe the blog post author is mistaken though: the majority of the examples he provided were first loans.
Reddit's API is really easy to use, not sure if the data is going to be all that interesting or kid friendly, though.
I see your point and I guess I went a little far using "totally". In my mind, the governing factor in the taxi stories is a government created scarcity that results in some serious monopolies ($100,000 medallions). There is also a rather larger segment of private transportation other than cabs. The hotel / motel rules are less about scarcity than a history of really, really bad things happening.

People's homes are a pretty big issue in when threatened by neighbors that can destroy everything you own. People get the possibility of a car accident even if it can be much, much worse.
The form action for registration is not https. Also, they have nothing to prevent a MITM from changing where the form action goes.

Why would anyone use this...
This makes it impossible for a minority movement to slowly gain traction.

Why do you think secrecy in voting is widely considered to be necessary for true democracy?
Insurance policies can differ in what they pay for, but I don't see what would disqualify the airbnb guarantee from being essentially insurance policy, albeit with different terms than standard renters insurance.
The article states that it's not "technically" a meteorite until it hits the earth.

This shows how our environment has biased our science and thinking. An object hitting a planet's atmosphere should be thought of as having hit that planet. Otherwise, it becomes indeterminate to say when a meteor hits a gas giant planet, if at all. By the time atoms of the meteor get to where the gas giant planet's material can be described as solid, the meteor is no longer recognizably a meteor.
Good catch! We haven't been checking yet for tampering with functions, but we probably should. Don't think of it as a bug so much as a cheatcode you discovered :-)
Borks at level 7, upon touching phone with undebuggable message on canvas:

d up the function p 1, found:oad the level
Wone! number of exits ...
3 great free email programs for the Mac
These kinds of airbnb-based eviction articles make me laugh. The overwhelming media narrative here is "all evictions are bad, look at this rich uncaring landlord forcing this poor hardworking american into homelessness". But the other narrative is "tech companies are evil". So what happens when an evil tech company (or, by extension, someone using one like AirBnB) gets evicted? Are we supposed to hate the landlord for evicting, or love the landlord for fighting the man.

The articles I read on these subjects always feel schizophrenic
Interestingly I don't see an opt-out option for sponsored comments in the admin panel.
I'm not sure what the real intention of the level "Multiplicity" was, but just placing an exit anywhere you want works just as well!
I agree that "People don't know what open sourcing even means" and even that starts to change. We can use better terms like "open government". I don't think the government, as powerful as it be, can oppose the concept if gains enough popularity. It starts from words and inevitably moves to actions. But I we need to start talking about it more.
How a powerful opensource community helped us win a contest in just 5 days
I think that sentiment makes sense on a plainly logical level, but it doesn't work in reality, because it legitimizes our current plutocracy.

I could be more amenable to your viewpoint if the donation amount is hidden, though.

Edited to add: also agree with gcp's point, and am annoyed that it didn't occur to me, which it should have.
so if you lose your phone? Change your phone? etc...
Doesn't this also reduce the demand for renting by all the people who are renting those extra bedrooms? If all those extra bedrooms stopped being rented out, why wouldn't this increase the demand for renting elsewhere and thus drive the price up?
AT&T U-verse Service Suffers Massive, Nationwide Outage
It may come from growing up in a part of the country where there were a lot of Central European DPs, but I'm pretty sure that as a kid I knew where the Ukraine was.
Its an unexpected risk as presumedly the landlord vetted[1] the tenant, but the Airbnb customer was not so vetted.

1) credit check & renter history are standard
Why you should move your startup to Vietnam
The tab only plays sound while active here, a nice touch I think.
The list of donors to all California ballot propositions is in the public record. That's just the law. Everyone donating to ballot propositions knows it. If they don't want their donation to be public, they don't have to donate.
Unfortunately, just another usury-based company entering the market. What a way to exacerbate the already worsening economic situation.
I think the counter-artument to jalopy's point is to compare the relative degree of investment by "informed traders" vs "efficiency providers" (market makers, HFTers, etc). I think you'll find that investment by the former vastly outweighs the latter indicating that investment in efficiency providers is very unlikely to be too high.
I'm not religious but I do agree with the logic behind this comment:

"So we Catholics can start lobbying to remove all CEOs who advocate pro-Homosexual behavior or in anyway supported attacks on traditional marriage and religious freedom, following the same reason as Mr. Scalzi?"
Multiplying the exits is useful ;-)
For anyone looking for some good Javascript reads: http://javascriptissexy.com/

Unfortunately Richard Stanley hasn't updated the blog in more than 6 months, but in any case. If you want to sharpen your JS skills I'd highly recommend the site.
It's just the fundamental bipolar nature of Hacker News. For the VC side, a successful exit is the goal. For the programming side, a successful product is the goal.
Bizarre! I haven't been able to reproduce it. Can you share your code for that level (if it's been modified at all)?
A new form of money that nobody controls, which has its ledger stored in a public decentralized database, with cryptographically-secured transactions, with a limited total number of units, whose unit value is decided by the market, and where new units of the currency are introduced over time in a decreasing schedule by paying them to the enforcers of the security of the network, who are all voluntary.

There is no way this crazy idea could ever actually work...
Some nice body copy fonts, 2014
There is a lot more to this issue than that.

The reactions outside and inside of the company showed very little tolerance, and between dialogue/engagement and intimidation/suppression, the latter was chosen. This in itself is a massive problem.

I read a lot of nonsense lately about this being "the free market", "he can defend whatever he wants but then face the consequences", etc. Do these people realise that the exact same arguments were used for the suppression of gays? how are these valid now? is this the kind of discourse people support in the Valley?

But even worse than that is the argument that nothing illegal was done. Yep, the same as stripping Alan Turing of his awards was legal at the time, or put him under "treatment", or marginalising and ostracising him.

Quit focusing in the legalese and look at the lack of compassion as human beings people have for those who dissent in a way that offends them.
wonder how much this has to do with them getting rid of showing down votes on comments
I can only imagine it was used for maybe extracting the filename extensions but the alternative is to simply use indexOf and substr.
I feel like the word transients is too often used to refer to homeless people. My impression is that AirBnB caters primarily to upper middle class vacationers. Are they really a problem? This is a serious question as I've never had to deal with this sort of problem.
I proposed this in an earlier thread and got some push back on the utility of the concept https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509824
Contributing to a political campaign is promoting your beliefs.
> visual / declarative programming ... has the appeal of being very easy to get started

Does it, really? I spent the last 2 years building systems that ran off of workflows (as in flowcharts), and I think now that they don't make the big hurdle (capability for abstract reasoning) any easier at all.

They are fine to document and communicate things, but as input they are just flawed (except for some very very specific niches).