skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you read some of my previous comments[1] on AirBnB, you'll see that I question many of the company's practices. AirBnB has constructive knowledge that some of its "hosts" are violating the law in certain cities where it is well-publicized that short-term rentals are illegal. And it has constructive knowledge that there are virtually no apartment leases that permit renters to turn their apartments into hotel rooms through short-term sublets.

But this story doesn't fall into those categories and your line of reasoning is not convincing. From what has been published, the so-called "victim" purchased a condo hundreds of miles away from her actual residence as an investment with the intention of producing income through vacation rentals. She was marketing its availability on multiple sites, not just AirBnB. AirBnB and the current crop of sites like it didn't create the vacation rental market. This market existed well before the advent of the internet. Before AirBnB emerged, there was no shortage of unsophisticated individuals trying their hand at real estate.

Making the landlord a particularly unsympathetic character here is the fact that, in the original article about this situation, she admitted to seeing warning signs early on. Instead of terminating the rental well before 30 days had elapsed when her gut told her that there was something off about her "guest", she decided to let the guest stay.

There's a saying, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered." I have absolutely no doubt that AirBnB could "retool its process" as you suggest and it still wouldn't prevent situations like this because no "process" is going eliminate greed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896538
They don't care, switching is a pain and the given excuse is offered just to pacify the complaining customer. "Nothing we can do."
Awesome. I'm actually building a company right now around an almost identical product. We aren't open sourcing it yet but we will eventually. Would love to talk about this with you (email in profile).

Any plans to integrate AAA with radius or similar? Any plans for squidproxy?

Also, I'm planning on working on a tool to easily deploy Tor hidden services as soon as I get some time. I think there's value in that aspect of your project alone -- maybe consider breaking it off on its own.
I like option one, but I don't think it works if there are more than two lanes
the free software foundation lists exactly one laptop that gets their 'respects your freedom' cert.

http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-fr...
Because the customer doesn't find out that the wifi is crap until they've already bought it, and they don't have an easy way of disputing the charge either. So unless repeat customers complain/start walking, the hotel has little incentive to pay money to fix this.
How the CIA Stole a Soviet Satellite
This is great, I've been toying with this idea myself for years! Makes me happy that somebody put the effort into doing it so well. The last update from the "news" section is from about a year ago: does anyone know if it's still being actively developed?
> I mow just as often as others,

That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid! :)

(Thank you for your post though, interesting clarification on how that approach to lawn care works.)
Twitter is acquiring CardSpring
this is definitely not my forte but if VC thinks they could flip the company isn't there a more direct route than buying into a round for the sake of press?
[citation needed]. I have a hard time believing that a layout which cuts the travel distance of your fingertips in half is worse for carpal tunnel.

Number of characters in your post: 139

Number of characters on Dvorak home row: 83

Number of characters on QWERTY home row: 41

A solid 1/3d of those are 'a', the homerow letter they have in common. Also, my original motivation in learning Dvorak was to stop myself from touch-typing (I repeatedly tried and failed on QWERTY). It was quite a success in that regard.

Incidentally, I do agree with the earlier post saying that it wasn't worth it. But I also strongly believe that it was an improvement (there's a reason why I don't switch back), just not an improvement large enough to justify the effort (which was much greater than expected).
We were using ImageMagick to resize images down to a smaller size. Turns out that, unless passed certain flags, ImageMagick would retain all metadata.

A few times, we'd end up with a 32x32 pixel image that was 20 megabytes in size - because that metadata included the original image.
Sort of. We are currently testing it out for some processes in our company,Ozonetel. We will most probably provide this as an add on for for contact center solution Cloudagent,http://ca.ozonetel.com. But personally I would like to see how this project grows out in the open and what new things can be done with this.

As next steps, I want to add support for inboxapp and also analytics
i'm not typically a fan of the 37signals blog posts which come off to me as arrogant. this one makes me laugh though; it does a really effective job of poking fun at the broken parts of the VC model.
I don't hire anyone, just to get that out of the way. :)

I don't want to go into to much detail but a .net financial management client and web application. Nothing fancy by any means. Let's also just say I don't have very many options where I live, and am geographically restricted because I don't believe in sacrificing watching my daughter grow up. I'm interested in remote work but that hasn't been very easy to look into. I'm in that mystical land between mid-level and senior and most remote jobs seem to want senior in both skills and time. I'd even consider getting away from .Net entirely and professionally pursing a new stack but those opportunities haven't been available at all when looking at remote positions (And I completely understand why).
Good HFT (High Frequency Trading) programmers make $500K or more, see: http://beta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2357190&cid=3693676...
I thought the same thing (re: hipmunk) -- working on it!!
Its not just "two factor" but next gen two factor; look at Emmental... Anyone using SMS pin codes should have a quick google on that term and see that its time for the next level of two factor to implemented.

We specifically designed our solution www.cryptophoto.com to BLOCK phishing attacks
You could secure a card deck with a rubber band. And if you had a card sorter and your cards has line numbers, you could recover it.

So they tell me - I missed punch cards by months. We had them around the lab as a reminder and as note paper.
Chromium Switching To BoringSSL
Dvorak wasn't designed for programming, which includes a lot of non-alphabetical symbols.

Wikipedia says:

"The carefully controlled study failed to show any benefit to the Dvorak keyboard layout in typing or training speed"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard

Note that this is for English, which means Dvorak fails to deliver even for what it was designed for.

As I mentioned above, Dvorak's performance and strain on your hand is even worse when you are doing something else than typing English (programming, typing another language, writing spreadsheets, etc...).
The point is also to fill both lanes, so your last suggestion doesn't work very well.

And I've been known to be a "vigilante" before. I'd give it up in a second if people would actually start filling the other lane.

There's a merge here in Seattle -- the southbound I-5 collector-distributor with the onramp to 90 where it merges back into I-5 -- where people zipper halfway reasonably well and I actually routinely stay in the less-filled lane and late-merge.

Washingtonians are awful at late merging/zippering though. Even when people are late merging you get tons of people merging early and then the line moves forwards and it screws over the lane that is being merged into. People just won't simply drive forwards to the merge spot.

Dividers might help in some cases, but when the road is empty and everyone is doing 60+ mph the dividers are going to cause accidents. You could try to put down double lines on the road to block merging, but nobody pays attention to those here either.

Getting zippering into drivers ed and getting them early, spamming the TV with ads, and putting signs up all over the place and carpet bombing the message might work.

Happy to see them doing this.

Oh yeah, and there's definitely an emotional component to it. When I'm stuck behind 50 cars and some asshat in a BMW goes speeding past to late merge the world goes completely red. I would love to stop doing that. If everyone zippers the asshat just has to pick a lane like everyone else, and there's no way to "cheat".

And yes, "asshat" and "cheat" are all in my own brain. I find it extremely difficult to stop thinking that way when I see it though.
It's actually really simple: early merge with cars going the same speed in all lanes is always better. You'll always get maximum throughput in the lanes remaining open, because the merge happens over a distance and so is smoother.

But that's in theory, with people actually cooperating. In reality no matter what education campaign for early merge some few percent of people are just dicks, and when they see an open road ahead will zoom through at twice the speed and this is what causes the merge problem (see the green car in video).

When people espouse late zipper merge it makes me sad because of what it says about human nature.
It is because of comments like this why I visit HN less and less each day. This is essentially a "plus one" style post with a short anecdotal example that contributes little to the discussion.
Coming from a formal symbolic logic background and 30 years of software development in typed and typeless imperative and functional languages, it's incredibly interesting, pleasurable, and more than a little frustrating to not understand this blog post in the slightest.

Not only do the words not really make sense to me in the order they're presented; and not only do the assertions seem alien and foreign in nearly every respect; but I can't fathom a pragmatic path by which even if I accepted everything here as given, it would give me an intuition I could use to do anything different or better than I do now.

And that's neat, because there's apparently (given the footnotes) a bunch of people for whom that is not true, so I have to be missing something somewhere, and that's a learning opportunity. And certainly I've enjoyed your other blog posts, tel, for their clarity and brevity and informational content. Nevertheless this is problematic, because I'm probably your target audience, and I couldn't be any more baffled or concerned by the idea that you'd be blithely mapping "+" (sum, addition) to "\/" (logical-or, disjunction) across fields and asserting conceptual equivalence like it's a given, much less a foundational building block of an argument.

Now off to bounce harmlessly off that blog post a few more times.
I just love all the analysis you've done about these face recognition systems. They're so insightful!
I don't see anything too surprising here. The big problem is the lack of disruption and innovation due to the government sponsored monopolies of internet/cable/network carriers over geographic regions.

However, it's normal to spend a lot of money on CAPEX and make higher profits on the services after the financing for capital expenditures used to expand the services has paid off. The only people who might find this less than obvious are probably solely from the lean internet business space, and haven't had any real experience in manufacturing or other capital-heavy businesses.
Not quite the same thing: those require purpose-built garages with car lifts etc, while this can be easily(?) retrofitted into any old garage.

Japanese-style automated garages: http://romaxparking.com/resources.html (videos below the fold)
Mind Control Cults
Yammer was never a good product. It's great he left Microsoft but I don't know why they got him in the first place.
I would be more worried that the results of these studies are not made freely available to everybody. I prefer having research funded by public money without seeking a profit.
You do realize that this information is already available by sniffing? You didn't leak anything.
Actually, I didn't notice that support was required. I was basing my cost comparisons on Rackspaces's "Raw Infrastructure" pricing — the fact you are required to purchase support at additional cost makes their pricing even less competitive.

They have a more detailed pricing page, with bandwidth charges listed near the bottom, here: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/
In the 1970s, Sweden briefly had a glitch in the tax system where the self-employed paid 20% plus income taxes of up to 87%, for a net of 107% if you were self-employed, filthy rich and stupid enough to declare it in Sweden -- not a common combo (rest assured the IKEA or Tetra-Pak guys weren't paying 107%!). But this was not the intention, and it was long since fixed.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=304500
This is nonsense. Google isn't making policy decisions about censorship and privacy, nor should they be. Instead, they're assessing when it is and isn't legally risky / expensive to return search result X to a user in country Y. At that level, privacy requirements and censorship requirements are functionally identical.

Just because the EU's legal restrictions are grounded in privacy doesn't mean another jurisdiction's won't be grounded in censorship. Which is one thing if those restrictions apply to search results intended for that jurisdiction and quite another if those restrictions are applied worldwide.
I love Trello. I have used it for several years now at work and for personal projects.

One thing I would like to know is what the hell is Yammer? Microsoft bought them out for 1.2 billion and I've never heard of it.
That might just be a bad example on the site but I'd there a better example for why we need it?
This is great, is there an API? ...I still remember paying $10 per 30 minutes of Wifi at the Ghana Airport
Our Brains as Alien Technology
Social Security spent $300M on system; doesn’t work
I'd like to clarify that this "leak" doesn't contain the master key, which makes it harmless. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to include Parse in your application without "leaking" your keys.
Airbus Wants You To Sit On A Bike Seat
I'm scratching my head as to why they couldn't ship the various pieces, and construct it in place instead ... but I'm not the expert.
It's ridiculous to claim that Simplified Dvorak is bad for programming while completely ignoring Programmer's Dvorak. Of course Simplified is worse at typing symbols, which is why anyone who cares about rapidly typing symbols will use Programmer's. But who are these programmers limited by typing speed? I've certainly never met one.

I don't take issue with the tests showing that Dvorak doesn't have speed benefits. My anecdata confirms this claim at the skill level which is relevant to me: my Dvorak typing speed, which I have made no effort to improve, is roughly the same as my QWERTY typing speed, which I also made no effort to improve.

However, Dvorak dramatically (factor of 2-3) decreases the fingertip slew distance which is monotonic in the distance your tendons will have to travel in your carpal tunnels for any given piece of typing. The difference isn't remotely subtle because it's easy to feel the tendons moving in your hand if you pay attention. In practice, it's the difference between tingles and numbness after 5 pages vs 15 pages of typing. So I do take issue with your claim that Dvorak is bad for carpal tunnel.

Your original post mentioned carpal tunnel and did not mention typing speed so I think it's more than fair to ask you to elaborate specifically on your claim regarding carpal tunnel.
The Technical Director of the NSA Information Assurance Directorate gave a less sinister explanation for this in a keynote talk[1]. It was dropped from 64 bits to 56 bits for two reasons: 1) they wanted to add 8 parity bits to make it more robust for tactical military use, and 2) they decided that 56 bits would be an acceptable key length to only last for a couple decades before it would have to be replaced. They had no way of knowing in 1976 what advances in cryptanalysis would be made over the next several decades, and wanted to make sure that the public wouldn't be tempted to rely on any one particular algorithm longer than was necessary.

This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but remember that the biggest threat to NSA cryptography was from Soviet cryptanalytic work, not from the public sector. Public researchers would publish any advances they made. If the Soviets cracked DES there wouldn't be any public notification - they'd just siphon off sensitive data for years until they were caught.

[1] http://vimeo.com/97891042 (the whole talk is interesting, but jump to 22:50 for the DES part)
My experience is the smaller the hotel, be it 3 stars or 5 stars, the wifi is generally better. So population is also a problem. Though you can argue that a big 5 star hotel should provide exceptional service compared to a big 3 star hotel. That's true. But thought I'd throw my 2 cents.
Isn't apple and Microsoft?
It's Facebook for enterprise. Basically, everyone in your company joins the social network and you have a wall, and can post and follow others and message, etc... My company has it and much like Facebook, I have an ongoing love hate relationship with it.

I'm in a completely remote company of ~65 people, and it's purpose is likely to replace some of the water cooler talk and serendipitous culture that you miss out on in virtual work spaces. I don't think it does this, but I'm also a pretty light user.
I agree. I live in a country where external connectivity is done by the cheapest possible nodes...
That -$3B, or whatever it's ballooned to now, comes even though a federal law makes it a felony to compete with the USPS and deliver "non-urgent" mail. That's why FedEx always claims to be delivering "urgent" messages. Here's a Baltimore Sun article from 20 years ago when armed USPS police were actively enforcing this law:
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-01-07/news/1994007008_...

If you give me a government-granted monopoly and a phalanx of federal agents empowered to put my competitors out of business, I'd have to be providing very poor service to be losing billions of dollars. Unfortunately, the USPS has managed to do just that.
>Haskell and the like will remain used only by people that just think there's no way to write any useful program without first learning all about category theory.

If that was Haskell's problem, its effects would be unique to Haskell. Rather, Haskell, like Erlang, Lisp, Eiffel, Smalltalk, and, in its early days -- and it had to fight to overcome this -- Java: these all have or had the same problem, which is that they don't integrate well with the "outside world". As a result, a great deal of effort is expended in the developer communities surrounding these languages to reinvent the wheel, axle, spoke, tire, hubcap, and spinner, which prevents said developers from making things that are truly interesting.

Languages which work with the "outside world" can be used to develop great software even if they are not popular, like Lua and CoffeeScript. Go, Swift, Scala and Rust learned this. The most obvious point of contrast, though, is how quickly Clojure became more popular than Scheme/Racket, despite being basically the same thing.
The shoes connect to smartphone. Even if the shoes have some technical issue, one can still use the phone.
What do you mean they are funded by public money? I thought Google is paying a clinic to get samples and pay researchers to work on the project, but the researchers have to get approval from the review board of their respective institution. The review board is funded by public money (more or less) I guess, but other than that, what else?
Here's an option for organizing a "bunch of scripts" app that might be less intimidating to maintain.

foo_script.py

from flask import render_template
from flask_wtf import Form
from wtforms import TextField
from wtforms.validators import DataRequired

class ScriptForm(Form):
param1 = TextField('Param1', validators=[DataRequired()])
param2 = TextField('Param2', validators=[DataRequired()])
param3 = TextField('Param3', validators=[DataRequired()])

@app.route('/foo-script', methods=('GET', 'POST'))
def foo_script():
form = ScriptForm()
if form.validate_on_submit():
do_stuff(form.data)
else:
return render_template('foo_script.html', form=form)

def do_stuff(data):
for key in data:
print '%s: %s' % (key, data[key])

foo_script.html

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block content %}
<h3>Run foo script:</h3>
<form method="POST" action="{{ url_for('foo_script') }}">
{{ form.hidden_tag() }}
{{ form.param1.label }} {{ form.param1 }}
{{ form.param2.label }} {{ form.param2 }}
{{ form.param3.label }} {{ form.param3 }}
<input type="submit" value="Run foo script">
</form>
{% endblock %}

base.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>FooCorp Script Service</title>
</head>
<body>
{% block content %}{% endblock %}
</body>
</html>

app.py

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config.from_pyfile('config.py')

import foo_script, bar_script, baz_script

config.py

# You need this for CSRF protection & cookie signing
SECRET_KEY = randomly_generated_secret_key

You should also look into Flask's blueprints at some point if it keeps growing. But it's not really essential, just another tool to help you keep projects organized. Flask is mostly "do whatever makes sense in your specific case" rather than imposing many global constraints on structure.

Also, I'd use gunicorn if you're deploying your own server. It's a bit less intimidating to get set up than uWSGI, and the main tradeoff is that it doesn't support quite as many thousands of users (i.e. not relevant).
You might want to seriously rethink re-working things without talk with your active users.
The question asks for billion dollar bootstrapped companies. Almost by definition, if a company is worth a billion dollars, investors will be "begging to throw money at it." :)
see the page linking to the release (http://www.mass.gov/ago/news-and-updates/press-releases/2014...).
But the tapes are missing so who knows :(

I was just googling data breach for hospital; not rare.
I'm curious how Transit handles cyclic object graphs for optimizing the payload size. Would be nice to see JSOG integration. https://github.com/jsog/jsog
I think it is condescending to associate a product with a country and not the company.
Ask HN: How do I meet startup founders in SF?
I am visiting SF next week and will be there for a few days. During my stay, I would like to meet founders and developers and have interesting chat.

I have fairly good experience with cloud ops and scaling apps and stacks across datacenters. So I might be able to bring something to the table as well.

If any of you awesome people are available next week, coffee is on me :)
As I understand it, the researcher works for Google, so I suppose that his results belong to Google. Is this not the case?
In Facing National Security Dilemmas, CIA Puts Probabilities Into Words
As a start, knowing mean and sigma may be a better option.
An external ethernet dongle is more likely to break or get lost. Wasn't there a push against dongles a while ago? Are they becoming normal again? There's no VGA port either which is a necessity for me. No CD drive either. Is this thing a laptop or a big smartphone with no touch screen? No numpad either, wow.
POSTGRES UNSTRUCTURED – NoSQL for the Enterprise