skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hello Julia,

As founder of Microfinance Transparency, I know very well how confusing pricing can be, due to a combination of confusion of what definition we are using and because of the biases each speaker uses in choosing a definition.

Annualized rates like APR were designed to avoid both flaws. No ambiguity about sentences like "when they tell us they want to borrow $100 at 10% interest, they mean that they wish to repay $110." An APR gets around the ambiguity of how long the client has $100. An APR gets around the ambiguity of if they have the $100 for the entire time or are paying back some of it.

It is an undeniable fact that lenders did not invent flat interest to make things easier for borrowers. They invented flat interest to make the price look cheaper to borrowers. When that abuse comes to light, Truth-in-Lending legislation comes in to defend clients. I expect Zidasha believes more in defending clients than spinning the data for both funders and the clients, but the current policies are arguably more like spin.

I suggest one path forward on this, as I did when you and I spoke March of last year - MFT can provide a legitimate and unbiased method for Zidasha to use to calculate prices, so that the prices you publish more closely reflect true prices.

Regards,

Chuck Waterfield
CEO, MFTransparency.org
One positive side effect of regulation is that overt racial discrimination is illegal.

Black and Jewish folks used to have a hell of a time getting a hotel room in the US at various points in history. That became illegal with the 1960s civil rights laws, but recent media coverage suggests discrimination is rampant on Airbnb.

It also used to be nearly impossible to find wheelchair-accessible hotels.

I have no idea what the solution is here, but there are good things about regulation of these kinds of businesses.
Swype style keyboards work wonders. Double tap + drag to zoom.

I have smallish hands and it's just not that big a deal to be honest. My last phone was iphone sized and I wouldn't go back to that size for just about anything.
Honestly I think this is promising. The format is not "shady" or disruptive, and the company seems to have a good understanding that adds done poorly can be damaging.
The computer division is funded by the overall success of Apple. It allows the computer division to have a bigger budget to spend on things like marketing and R&D. It's not a coincidence that the computer division has been doing so much better since Apple had other mega-successes that serve as the cash cow for the entire company.

If the iPhone ever ceases to be as profitable it will have a ripple-effect throughout the entire company as they scramble to find the next thing that will replace those lost profits.
People throw around the word "unjust" too easily. There are plenty of laws I don't like (e.g. drug laws, sentencing generally), but I believe that in a democratic society people have the right to regulate individual behavior that has collateral effects. There are only a few laws I consider "unjust" either because society has very little real interest in regulating the behavior (e.g. bans on homosexual marriage), or because the results are wholly out of proportion with any legitimate interest (e.g. three strikes laws).

I dislike most housing-related regulations, but it's very difficult for me to find "injustice" in the commercial regulations voters (who are mostly property owners) impose upon themselves.
I broke level 4. Is there an obvious way that I am missing to reset at the level you're on when the reset functionality provided under the text editor is insufficient?
This music is awesome. What genre is it?
No, it stays in your project because you don't have to rip apart your previous work to salvage the expensive magic bit for the next great idea. You start building different kinds of projects because you know this and create many more awesome things that continue to make your life better after they are done.

The parts of projects that were left behind after pulling your expensive SBC are no longer junked so waste comes out a wash. In any case, a few makers experimenting in any fashion isn't even a rounding error compared to the mobile phone apocalypse thats hitting landfills now.
Laws are made to keep status quo. I'd say, break them.

EDIT2: I did not mean all laws. But law != morality.
EDIT: Cool to know that this community downvotes due to disagreement. Or did this comment add nothing to conversation? I won't be commenting again.
If airbnb reminds people they may face legal risks in participating in the service, the hosts may be less likely to continue, which is not in airbnb's interest.
Prove It
For this purpose I wrote a script which is run every minute by cron.

It checks if current IP has been changed since last run, and if yes, sends an API request to my VPS provider to update a DNS A record with the new value.

Here is a sample script with Linode and DigitalOcean API calls:
https://gist.github.com/Hangya/10026019
Good points, gap cover is the key
IANAL, but I suspect that they want to know as little as possible about specific users. If the play dumb and mention that you may need to check with local laws about the legality, then they can play dumb in court. If they know too much, they become complicit in the "crime" and may be fined, etc.
I made this one last year https://bitly.com/18y2kPE
Does a few of those things albeit not all that well.
Also due to Google charging for its API's it only can do 100 searches a day from them but Bing and Blekko keep working.
It isn't something you really want to know about. PeopleSoft is horrendous at the last large organization I worked for I'm fairly certain that a number of good employees quit based in part on being forced to use the PeopleSoft implementation for many basic HR and Administrative tasks like performance reviews.
Care to check a dictionary first? apendleton is not saying open source programmers should be ashamed that they haven't produce a high quality speech engine. Would you feel better if it was phrase like "it's a bummer that.."? Less hurt feelings?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/shame

5. an occasion for regret, disappointment, etc
Why liability would change? Main tenant is on the contract, and she should be liable for any issues arising due to airbnb rental.
level 2 can be solved by using the two "unlocked" lines to comment out the whole maze.create call, too.
As someone who listens to podcasts, this actually excites me a bit.
Yay, they are putting onboard flash! That's going to make the Pi way more reliable.

But boo, no more clock or memory. Lots of apps bump gracelessly into the 512M limit (libre office, IDEs, OpenElec+plugins, ...) 1G should give all of them enough breathing room that they don't need babying them all the time.

A little more grunt to the CPU would have been nice but that's minor. Overclocking the Pi seems mostly futile -- it just lets the CPU spend even more time waiting on I/O and cache.
The Reset button should completely reset editor state for the level. What happened?
The material you need is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconductor

the search continues...
5 Reasons to Apply to be a Presidential Innovation Fellow (Deadline is Today)
> "they are just borrowing it from the HOA while paying the taxes, insurance, and doing all the work for them to keep the house up."

I'm not sure if this sentence was meant to be snarky or if this was a genuine comment... if it's the former, then heheh, I will agree that the sentiment of the sentence does have some merit.

But if it's the latter, I just wanted to try and clear something up -- speaking as an owner of a condo (in an HOA) and as the former president of our HOA.

Typically, owners of homes within an HOA are classified as owners in a "common interest development", where owners are all equal share holders of the development as a whole. Meaning, if there are 100 homeowners in a condo community, each homeowner owns an equal share (1%) of that overall community's property.

The owner is not "borrowing" anything from the HOA... especially since the HOA, itself, doesn't actually own anything at all.

The HOA is technically a corporation (yes, all HOAs are incorporated as a corporation, at least in the State of California) which has been chartered to manage and maintain the common interest development property, while maintaining things like the reserve fund, enforcement of the CC&Rs, architectural reviews, etc.

SO as a homeowner in the common interest, you actually own the HOA (and not the other way around).

Furthermore, homeowners within an HOA are granted limited, exclusive use of a certain part of the overall property... in most cases, that is the space inside condo or townhouse unit itself, and maybe a patio or yard, etc.

What's key is the limited part of "limited, exclusive use", as well as what is noted in the CC&Rs, itself, which describes the definition of what is "limited". Yes, these limitations can very well (and usually do) include provisions on what can or cannot be rented out, how long guests can stay within your home, etc. Typically, these provisions are not meant to make life difficult, but these provisions are in place to help maintain the overall property value of the all the homes in the community.

But the most important thing to note is that the CC&Rs are, in fact determined by all of the homeowners, and not by some arbitrary "HOA" or "powers that be", etc. CC&Rs are (or should be) regularly reviewed by the board members of the HOA, and changes are required to be approved by a certain majority (or supermajority) of homeowners by anonymous vote (again, at least this is how it is in the State of California, as dictated by the Davis-Sterling Act).

Bottom line: if you are a homeowner in a condo or townhouse community and feel like you have no freedom to do with the home that you rightfully own, just remember that you actually just own a portion of a much larger community/property, and thus, you are bound by some of the limitations / restrictions that the overall community has placed on each owner. But moreover, if you feel that some of those limitations / restrictions are unjust, unfair, or outdated, then work with the HOA Board (or better yet, actually be on the HOA board) and work with your neighbors to get those rules and regulations changed.
Oh man, I thought it was so that my drinking water is clean, my roads are safe, and that I'm treated fairly when I purchase goods or services in my community.

Thanks for clearing that up for me.

EDIT: "Or did this comment add nothing to conversation? I won't be commenting again."

No. It did not add to the conversation. While I will agree that, at times, laws are lobbied for that attempt to maintain the status quo, the vast majority of laws are to keep society in an acceptable equilibrium (i.e. my rights end where your rights begin).
Show HN: BuyerBingo, A simple app to chat with stores in your neighborhood
At some point, the pants are what's inconvenient.

The current iPhone screen is too small. I'm glad to see Apple is starting to figure that out.
One problem in Boulder is that various entities (people, speculators, etc.) can be more aggressive about investing in affordable property, especially condos and smaller houses. Which they then operate as distributed, high-margin hotels. I don't think this is what Airbnb had in mind anyway, and it's obviously going to cause friction as the range in property costs collapses up into the high end (which is holding relatively constant).

Boulder is a tough market by design, but anything with this sort of impact is going to be closely scrutinized and evaluated for long term effects on the community.
(FYI mining Bitcoin can only be reasonably done using custom ASIC hardware these days)
Unfortunately, we have that already and it looks like this:

http://www.occupyforanimals.org/uploads/7/7/3/5/7735203/__95...
I just came back from SF having used Airbnb (studio apartment under the house) for the duration of my stay. I looked at hotels and hostels, however the night rate of a hotel was simply too expensive and I hate staying in hostels. Airbnb was a cheaper alternative that meant I could actually afford to stay in SF, while there I used the trams, bought coffees in local coffee shops (not Starbucks), ate in restaurants and visited the Exploratorium, all of which I assume SF gets a slice of through taxes.

My hosts own their property and as a result I think they should be able to rent it out on a short term basis if they want to, they should have to pay a (small) percentage tax of the rate they charge though. I think the law should be looked at if for those who own their property. Villas in Europe are rented out legally all the time and it drives lots of tourism and provides accommodation at much better rates than hotels etc.

If the host rents, then their land lord should be able to evict them if they sublet and they're not allowed to - they agreed to the contract and they should stick to it.
The Kiln Bottleneck
Reasonable for a phone with a $30 battery, less reasonable for an electric car with a $30,000 battery.
The first time I used AirBnB in SF, the renter invited me to use all the facilities of his apartment complex, including as much free coffee as I wanted, the gym, swimming pool, etc.

This struck me as not particularly sustainable. It also struck me as morally questionable. It was only a matter of time before the chickens eventually came home to roost...
> What kind of attacks is this practice vulnerable to?

I want to pretend to control target@example.com and the legitimate owner of this address is an OpenPGP user who has published a keyring on the public keyservers.

1) I create a keyring and add a single uid with my real name and target@example.com

2) I download the public keyring for the legitimate user target@example.com and extract the encryption subkey.

3) Even though I don't know the private key I can add this public key as the encryption subkey to the keyring created in step #1.

4) I publish this keyring on the public keyservers so that you will find it by querying the fingerprint I give you when we meet.

5) You send email to the real user target@example.com which they are able to decrypt and respond to. Of course there could be some confusion since the real user is not expecting an email which presumably talks about verifying keys.

6) Since the mail was decrypted and responded to, you sign the key and return it to me.

7) I revoke the certification on the encryption subkey I borrowed from the real user and add a new encryption key which I create.

8) People who trust your signature encrypt mail to target@example.com with the false key I've published.
Good.

Before Airbnb, when craigslist was the go to for short term rentals, they were not only cheaper but didn't come along with the stigma of ruining the neighborhood or being treated like a customer instead of a guest. There was much more of a mutual respect and even a feeling of gratitude on both sides. Now with Airbnb the whole things wreaks of an (illegal) business transaction with a flimsy guarantee, neighbors who want to catch you, no such gratitude to speak of and the costs have doubled.

The whole thing is obnoxious.
I wish there was a better way of determining whether you were alive or not.

There's an endless number of possibilities as to what could happen in order for me to not be able to go online and verify with that link. Why would I put myself through the stress of potentially forgetting and now I have to worry about the secrets of my dying breathe being released to the public while I'm still around.

If I wanted anything to be taken care of I'd feel much safer keeping it in offline storage with a note attached.

What I think you should do is have a tiered level of notifications. For example an email every week is the first round of notifications. Then I wonder if you could pull my last login info from major services that are going to be around for awhile like Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook(debatable), and if I havent logged into any of those services in 1 week, then go to the final round of notifications which is an in-person phone call.
I'm sure there are some protectionist elements to it, but it also prevents people from taking zoning-laws into their own hands. If an area is zoned as a residential zone, it shouldn't be turned into a commercial (i.e. hotel) zone because a bunch of people decide to turn their properties into nightly-rentals. If somebody decides their apartment would make a great night-club, they can't just make it a nightclub because they own their apartment. Zoning laws are designed to create a symbiotic relationship throughout a community, and AirBNB does very little to discourage its users from ignoring those laws.
iBeacons != NFC
Hello HNers,

We are launching the app soon and would like to know your inputs on everything around it. Throw everything you know at us.

Thanks!
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you suggesting that there's an insurance practice somewhere that will underwrite policies for ABNB renters?
Or just landlord who is looking for a reason to evict someone and get market rate for the flat.
Poor kerning/letterfit and wonky visual weight hinder reading. That would make Comic Sans objectively worse.
Going Blind: The Coming Satellite Crisis
If your server is detected, that's a security vulnerability.
You should never be able to identify the underlying technology of your stack or you open yourself to attack on any known vulnerabilities where as if your stack is unknown, then the vectors for attack are much less obvious.
Debug CSS faster
I'm not sure I agree; by that kind of logic there should be a law banning two income house holds, working from home, or any other creative way people might derive extra value from there living space surely that drives up the cost of housing as well?
It's arguable that Excel is the most widely used "programming language" depending on your definition. If you've spent much time around certain business professionals, you'll see that they really push spreadsheets to do unexpected things to solve their problems.

I've actually wondered why there hasn't been more exploration into visual / declarative programming since it has the appeal of being very easy to get started.
> Many people have essentially lost touch with their manual abilities

For many of us, using our manual abilities turns out like this:

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=316356132437

We haven't so much lost touch as came to an understanding with the universe. Niles and Frasier said it well on the episode "Seat of Power" on the TV series "Frasier", after their attempt to fix a running toilet went very wrong:

Niles: When you think about it, our only mistake today
was trying to fix that toilet ourselves.

Frasier: Yes, we tampered with the natural order of things.

Niles: But now, order has been restored. By hiring a
plumber, that plumber can now afford, say, a Dolly
Parton album. Miss Parton can then finance a national
tour which will, of course, come to Seattle, allowing
some local promoter to make enough money to send his
cross-dressing teenaged son to us for $150-an-hour therapy.

Frasier: [raises his glass] To the circle of life.
You make it sound as "sharing economy" is inherently lawless idea, which it is not. Of course, in cities like NY and SF, where people with money can buy any regulation they want, eventually entrenched business interests would buy laws that impede any disruption to their business. But that's hardly a fault of somebody who tries to do something new.
Perhaps create a script that does just that?

#!/bin/sh

mit-scheme < $@
You know what I'd buy in a heartbeat... an app that coordinates with other users of the same app to launch a DDoS attack against websites that disable pinch-to-zoom, or that railroad you over to a stupid mobile site.

Kickstarter, anyone?
I agree, Airbnb is a bad actor here, but by the same token so are the illegal landlords. I don't buy the framing that they are victims of Airbnb's willful attempt to keep them in the dark. They have just as much reason as Airbnb to know the law, just like Airbnb they decided to go into business for the purpose of making money and are responsible for doing so in a lawful manner.

The real victims here are the neighbors and in the case of subletters, the landlords. No one gets upset when the triggerman goes to jail, even if they also wish the Don would go too.
Not to mention the physical waste...
Not only that, but some owners may decide to go full short-term leases to increase profits. That reduces the market for long term leases, hurting the housing market.

Now this is definitely the case for cities like Paris, were the law exists but is not enforced. I don't know of it's true for San Francisco where the price is already high from high paid locals.
The Excuses for Purging Brendan Eich Are the Old Excuses for Firing Gays
So you respect my freedom of speech but believe that my "destructive" nature is worthy of punishment? Gee thanks, I guess. As long as your yakking it up over the 1st amendment, why not add "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" to the list of things you respect?
If you got n gallons you could possibly maybe travel more or less m miles

I track my mileage in a hardcopy log: miles driven, fuel consumed, and mileage.

While I see some variation (about 35% difference between worst urban and best highway driving), I've got a very solid idea of how much range I can get on a tank under various driving conditions. Sufficient to make "stop or continue" decisions when passing fuel stops on long road trips (though sometimes cutting that closer than I'd prefer).
It seems like the right order to do things actually, I can understand starting off that way. It's not too different from simply building a traditional house on the land permanently (whatever you think of building on your parents property), both are a step up in certain ways compared to simply living in the parents house. And this one is on wheels, it can be moved away at some point if they want to.

I think it'd be worth it, if at all possible, to build in such a way that real plumbing can be swapped in when the time comes. "litter box for humans" is making me cringe :)

Also the parts of this story that are about them as a couple are cute I think.
"Sorry English is not my first language and sometimes I end up writing convoluted sentences."

No worries at all. I certainly didn't mean to imply any sort of a judgement; I just needed clarification.

"Why would anyone but HFT traders need to move 10K lots through the market?"

To a first approximation, it's never the HFT traders that need to move 10K lots. In commodities, it's big producers and consumers - Chevron needs to secure crude stock, ADM needs to buy up a ton of corn, some mega-farm (or co-op of large farms) wants to lock in a price on what they're producing, &c. In equities, it's institutional investors, hedge funds, and possibly exceedingly wealthy individuals, who have decided they want to hold many more or many fewer of something. It's clearly going to be a big player - transacting 10k lots of a stock priced at $10 would be $10 million. Most people - including HFTs - aren't trying to move millions of dollars in one direction in a short time. Those who are have resources, almost by definition.
Doesn't Airbnb provide exactly this insurance? https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee
That's great until you're living next to someone with the same ethos.
My personal preference would be a single number for the interest rate, with everything calculated in, accounted daily (difficult to implement, easy to understand and fair to the customer).

Many of the new cool SaaS businesses try to do that. Most banks, mobile phone shops etc. don't.

Edited as I'm seeing that you're kinda defending your company from some strongly worded allegations. I just commented on the general state of the world, and didn't mean to attack you or your service.