Hacker News Reader

kwison How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

The cereal was great, scrappy, creative hustle.

The spam is the opposite of all that. The spam destroyed a wonderful founding story. The spam destroyed their professional and ethical credibility.

kwison How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

The spam filters today are good not because of magic, but because billions of dollars have been spent securing email.

What a complete and utter waste of resources.

kwison How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

I'm very curious if they misrepresented the nature of their growth to their investors. If they did, they could be in violation of securities laws, in addition to CAN-SPAM.

kwison Don’t design like a programmer

"Error establishing a database connection"

Don't program like a designer?

kwison Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 Billion+ Valuation

If I caught the details correctly, they state that they do as many rooms in the NYC region as the largest NYC hotel, which puts them at 2k+ rooms/night in NYC.

Then I believe they claim about 5k rooms/night total, which means that >40% of their global business is NYC.

kwison Regulation, not technology is holding back driverless cars

They appear to be starting as 'driver aids' on new cars. Today's higher-end cars have adopted technology that alerts you when you drift out of your lane, watches your blind spots, safely follows the car in front of you, performs emergency stops, parallel parks itself, and adjusts vehicle dynamics in a multitude of ways.

My assumption is that this is a first step towards driverless cars, as it provides the manufacturers a way to test critical technologies in a safe environment. If the dealerships aren't downloading data from these systems, and sharing it back to the engineering groups, thats an enormous wasted opportunity.

kwison Your Commute Is Killing You

One of my first questions was whether some people with long commutes had them because they were 'B' or 'C' candidates with limited career options. If that's the cause of some of the long commutes, it'd explain many of the other factors nicely.

kwison BareMetal is a 64-bit OS for x86-64 based computers

That's interesting, though I think my takeaway was that the "performance tax" of the operating system layer is pretty minor, all things considered.

kwison Many don't have $2,000 for a rainy day

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5867.html

Here's a paper that's probably one of the original sources for the Freakonomics piece.

I would love to see Prize-linked savings in the US. It'd be fun to have some money sitting in an account that has powerball-esque payouts, but without the powerball-esque destruction of the original bet.

kwison Many don't have $2,000 for a rainy day

I've seen similar studies about emergency funds for many years. They all say roughly the same thing: most people don't save money. To the point that not only do they not have $2,000, they can't borrow $2,000 to handle an emergency.

kwison Online services I pay for

Hulu also works on TVs.

If I didn't love sports, and if an easy-to-use, unified interface wasn't crucial to my wife's acceptance, I could replace my $150+/mo satellite package with about $40/month of netflix, hulu, itunes and amazon.

kwison Honestly.com – Not acting so honestly

The privacy policy also states: "that some information may remain in our records after deletion of your account."

Not the best asterisk I've ever seen, given the complete lack of trust I have with this company.

kwison Lockitron (YC S09) Lets You Unlock Your Door With Your Phone

Confirmed. Schlage has a relevant patent.

Kwikset also sells an iphone enabled lock, but an extremely cursory search didn't turn up a patent for them.

I wish them the best, but I'm having trouble coming up with a compelling argument to buy from them instead of buying what appear to be more mature, fully-featured products, backed by major lock manufacturers that are pretty well guaranteed not to go away in a year or two.

kwison Lockitron (YC S09) Lets You Unlock Your Door With Your Phone

You could do this today with the Schlage system. It allows you to create a number of codes, and supports codes that work only during specified periods of time so a particular guest's keycode would only work for the duration of their stay.

kwison Lockitron (YC S09) Lets You Unlock Your Door With Your Phone

Schlage has had this for a while. I think their iPhone app has been working for 2+ years.

kwison Fukushima 'Full Meltdown' Made Official

According to the guidelines, this is off-topic.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This is covered on TV news, incites political debate, and is exactly the same phenomenon that's been rehashed to death.

kwison Satellite Images of North Korea Prison Camps Find 200,000 Living as Slaves

HN Guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This is off-topic. There is essentially no chance that anything useful will shake out from the ensuing discussion. It's noise, and it crowds out the signal.

I'm glad that tptacek's post is currently the #1 post.

kwison Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google

This was my first thought as well. Whether they like it or not, founders are always leading by example.

kwison Ask HN: What are the best books, blogs, articles and podcasts for consultants?

Thank you. It's ordered.

kwison The Free Software Foundation is now accepting Bitcoin donations

Even if they can't convert the bitcoins to dollars, it's a cheap promotion and lead-gen tool.

kwison CEOs say California worst place to do business, Texas best

> by simply moving your business to dallas you can improve your bottom line by about 30 percent

Assuming that Dallas has a talent pool that fits your ambitions and is willing to work at your company.

I wouldn't launch a paper mill in San Jose, or a startup in Montana.

kwison Doctors use copyright assignment in patient contract to stifle bad reviews

If I need medical care and that clause is paragraph 11 in the small print on the back of the patient check-in form, it's pretty doubtful I'll even notice that I agreed to it.

I'd love to see an example of how this gets used by doctors in the wild, to make it easier for me to protect myself against such absurdity.

That said, if my PCP asked and I had pressing medical concerns, I'd despise making the choice of 'free speech' versus 'need medical care', but I'd certainly choose the medical care.

kwison UCLA Researchers Predicted Bin Laden's Hideout Location to Within 130 miles

Here's the complete paper:

http://web.mit.edu/mitir/2009/online/finding-bin-laden.pdf

kwison After botched child porn raid, judge sees the light on IP addresses

> only minor issues with copyright

Unfortunately, I don't think there's such a thing as "minor issues with copyright" in the current code.

kwison Startups Are Hard

The #1 reason I ignored notifo is I couldn't understand the business model. As such, for our internal systems, we notify via SMS, email and jabber. Things that I know will still be around in a year.

kwison If You’re Going To Kill It, Open Source It

There's another reason: support.

There are a lot of people who believe they're entitled to support for any code you release. Even if explicitly noted in a 72 point font that it's totally unsupported.

kwison The cost of cloud hosting vs. colocation

Your 10 month payback calc falls right in line with my figures of 9-12 months, depending largely on the number of man-hours required to get going.

If you've never vetted a DC or picked hardware before, twelve. If you know of three good DCs, have negotiated contracts before, know that you want a pile of HP DL360s, and know where to buy them, nine.

kwison Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)

I'd bet that the net present value of your CMU CS experience is quite a bit higher than you estimate.

As a credential, it's very well known in tech-heavy industries and will help open doors there. Further, it's a good enough school that it will help open doors if you decide to pursue a graduate degree in the future.

As an experience, you got the opportunity to work with top professors and it sounds like you actively sought them out to get those experiences. Further, you almost certainly got to know a lot of students and if you were smart, reliable and hard-working, likely created a situation that could open professional opportunities in the future.

I'll concede that the correlation between a conferred degree and the value captured by the student is not perfect, and that a degree is not the only opportunity to capture value between the ages of 18 and 22. But I largely believe the "debate" consists largely of overblown, hyperbolic rhetoric and oversimplification.

kwison Dropbox Lack of Security

Tarsnap provides exactly the sort of service you're referring to, where they only store encrypted data and don't have a copy of the key.

I'm a big fan of that architecture, if only because it greatly reduces the payoff of a successful attack. When everything is stored unencrypted (or with a common master key), there's an absolutely massive payoff for the hacker who breaches the security.

kwison FBI seized PokerStars.com, FullTiltPoker.com, UB.com,... domain names

Good luck cashing that out without crashing the market. Somebody pointed out, just a few days ago, that a $10k sell-off recently scrubbed 25% off BCN/USD. A 400,000BCN sell-off would almost certainly drop it to pennies.