One question remains to be cleared: how did the guest got inside the apartment? What was the system used for the key transaction?
I don't know how it usually goes, but I'd like this blind spot to be cleared. She published a number, an email address and a nickname on her blog, but no postal address. So the keys weren't shipped.
She never called the number, and can't tell the gender of her perpetrator. Only the neighborhoods acted as mere witnesses of a "group of people" coming in. This suggest that nobody else was involved in the transaction, no friend or neighborhood to give the key and see the guy.
So the guys "came to her house" and got inside, but it doesn't tell us how. Nobody has been in physical contact with them, and the keys weren't shipped.
I don't want to sound insensitive, but this blind spot buggers me a little. Wonder if she can tell more about it, even if it doesn't sound relevant to her horrible experience. I believe her, maybe the key transaction process was bit naive as well and it wouldn't be relevant (hiding the key somewhere), but it could also mean that the burglary might have happened after the host left (while still being an improbable hypothesis, it would just open a new possibility). It's just a small bug that I'd like to be squashed.
I don't think she needs to explain every technicality of what happened. The police will deal with those matters. She's not on trial in the court of public opinion.
Actually she is, and she has already won by a landslide against AirBnB. She's the victim and I wouldn't want to be in her shoes, but I also find the reaction disproportionate toward AirBnB. It's only fair that those "techicalities" are made public as well before everyone trash them to death.
AirBnB gives tools to pick your guest, the first one being the track record and ratings. Was the rating of Dj Pattrson Good/Bad/Virgin?
They also have a pretty straightforward safety tips page ( http://www.airbnb.com/safety ), but not a single precaution was taken. It appears she didn't even try to call her future guest. No neighborhoods or friends warned, nothing.
AirBnB is taking all the shit for an objectively irresponsible behavior. Nobody deserve what has happened to her, it's just horrible. On the other hand, AirBnB taking all the shit for this doesn't seem fair as well. They handled the crisis in a poor manner, but the perpetrators should be the ones paying for the damages.
AirBnB aside, she doesn't seem to take some responsibility for it (the rape victim analogy), and it's just not fair or reflective of the whole picture, if you're being objective for a minute this is the simple truth. I truly hope she will recover and learn from this awful experience.
"Nobody here is claiming that she is 'on trial', but when you go public with a story there will always be questions."
By now, it should be pretty clear to everyone that she is 'on trial', although perhaps not by choice. I've observed with events prior to this that anyone can start one of these public trials by posting an accusation publicly. Then that opening statement is responded to by the defendant, also publicly. At which point its 'game on' as it were.
I suspect it is a natural consequence of the desire to know by the folks involved, whether its poor EJ here or 'geohot' or Charlie Sheen. Everyone wants to know "what is right?" or "what is the real story here?" and that process that people go through and the community that participates in it, has all of the elements of a trial. Evidence is uncovered and presented, testimony is called for and presented from various people involved, pundits line up to endorse or discredit evidence and/or folks testimonies.
So there are a lot of questions. Clearly there is a lot of outrage here and elsewhere. Hopefully it will be sorted out to everyone's satisfaction, and it certainly will provide a test of AirBnB's management team.
Like many here, I share the outrage and the commensurate desire to help. I recognize that being effectively outside the event horizon (wasn't a witness, not a personal friend, not an investor, not a freelance plaintiff lawyer, etc etc) I'm limited to offering moral support.
I agree completely that Jacques is putting her on trial. His claims he is not are about as disingenuous and manipulative as if someone said "Nobody here is claiming that Jacques is a 'cat rapist', but when you go public with a story there will always be questions." That is absolutely not just a casual well intentioned statement. It is a carefully constructed propaganda attempt designed to attack the target while superficially maintaining plausible deniability.
But she did this on her personal blog! She didn't go running to the media or fan this story. The story got picked up here then exploded. That was not her choice, and it caused her privacy to be invaded again -- by folks like us trying to figure out who she is, how credible she is, what she should or shouldn't have done, how she's feeling, etc. -- all while she's still recovering from the initial episode.
If you're referring to her follow up post, don't you think she's entitled to speak up to address this discussion, given how the circumstances unfolded (again, which she never chose)?
What are you talking about? I posted the story here after a month had gone by with no word of what the outcome was. It was picked up and went from there - I do not know her and nobody who does had anything to do with it.
Are you saying you don't believe me? First, I don't wish to have my email address passed on to other people without my permission. Second, I can't imagine what would be accomplished by my emailing you as opposed to addressing - or simply retracting - your unfounded statement here. Finally, your actions and assumptions you've related here today thoroughly creep me out and I do not wish to have private conversation with you.
> she chose to do so apparently because AirBNB refused to move on terms that are acceptable to her
There you go again Jacques with your wording that is designed to raise suspicion on the crime victim and her motivations. You pass her personal identity to an investor with a billion dollar reason to silence her, you say she should show proof she was really robbed in the form of photographs on the internet of her personal private home that was already violated, and now you are implying that she went public because she is greedy and is leveraging negative publicity in a negotiation of settlement terms. Yes, you will respond to this that you are not implying any of that and, but that is bullshit. You know exactly what you are doing Jacques, it's quite clear. Jacques, I want an answer for you, what are your financial and professional relationships with YCombinator. That's two questions there.
Putting her on trial and stalking her is disgusting. Your claiming you are not doing it as you are doing it is not fooling anyone. You are a psychopath. Stop what you are doing right now.
You want to know why she went public? BECAUSE AIRBNB DID NOT KNOW THE IDENTITY OF THE PEOPLE THAT THEY ALLOWED TO ROB HER HOUSE. That is legal negligence on their part, but it also created a situation where she is not safe. Not that she "feels unsafe". This has nothing to do with feelings. She IS unsafe because the people who robbed her apartment stalked her by email, manipulated her, and were still out there at large a month after the crime was discovered. Their stalking was almost but not quite as malicious as you are being right here right now with your public insinuations.
She IS unsafe because the people who robbed her apartment stalked her by email, manipulated her, and were still out there at large a month after the crime was discovered.
On the other hand, she had the good luck to be criminalised by people who went to all the effort of using a service to make sure the home they robbed was empty instead of chancing it on one that looked empty, to lie to her during the crime to keep from being discovered, to be gone before she returned, and to have not returned for a month afterwards.
I wonder if there are any studies indicating if she would be at statistically significantly higher risk of crime than most people now?
So this is not a trial but she needs to publicly provide documentary evidence for everything she has said up to this point, including photos of any damage and her entire "email cache"?
Please tell me who she owes this responsibility to?
Opera was the most suited browser for my eeePC (1gb ram, Atom in ecomode most of the time). I originally planed to use Chrome as I thought it was lighter and faster, but quickly found out that Opera fared much better globally.
Beyond the numbers, Chrome seemed to perform worse as my number of tabs growed. I had freezes and the pages didn't scroll smoothly. I don't have such problems with Opera.
I have over a thousand of synchronized bookmarks, 4 email accounts set-up, in the end it just saves me a ton of ressources as I don't have to open anything else for my needs.
Chrome is perfect as the secondary browser who doesn't save sessions, the launch is blazing fast.
Correct me if I'm wrong: you mean that in the real world, salted passwords have only one advantage over plain text passwords, which is to buy you some time ? (albeit it's a strong advantage)
A salted, hashed (with a slow hash function) strong (long, random, large character set) password, will take hundreds, thousands, or millions of years (average case) to crack with brute force.
It's only technically "buying some time." In reality it's keeping it completely secure.
And what use would a hacker have attacking a whole database full of them? It would take too long to do it, even with less secure passwords. It takes your fruit out of the "low hanging" category, which is a bit of security in itself.
Just a clarification : I'm not the original poster and this isn't a "Ask HN". I sent a message to the OP on reddit so he can find this thread.
With all the talks about the benefits of the Apple Store, I just found this story interesting. Before, I thought that jailbraking was a niche practice and that the iPhone/iPad were relatively spared from piracy.
I tried to learn programming but I was discouraged by the utter lack of pedagogy in the books I've picked so far. The author pretty much nailed it.
I even tried Land of Lisp only because it was supposed to be fun, but unfortunately it used this horrible and widespread format where the author writes all the code for you and proceeds to an explanation.
There is no creation (or creative problem solving) ! And creation is the fun component, it should be the point of programming.
Later, I read the Little Schemer and I found it very fun and engaging. Because I had to think by myself, I realized I learned more in 30 minutes with the Little Schemer than 200 pages of Land of Lisp.
My first attempt at programming was with an horribly dull PHP book. 5 stars on Amazon, but it was again the same format where the author writes all the code for you and then explains it, and did not provide any exercise.
I think the perfect programming book would be a mix of the Little Schemer and K&R : the quiz format for the theory coupled with challenging exercises. There is no greater reward and way to learn than solving problems by yourself.
Personally I cannot learn from a book where I am just given concepts and supposed to find a solution. I find reading other code to be a much better learning method.
I have seen most students prefer to presented with a whole working program and then expand on it in the challenges the book provides. The author of this article was expressing a desire for shorter books that give full code listings rather than code snippets and challenges that you seem to prefer.
SICP itself (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) is worth checking out, too. I doubt you would find the book itself to your taste, but there are programming exercises at the end of each section.
Also, for what it's worth, my favorite language for working Project Euler problems is Scheme, by far.
When it comes to justice Saudi Arabia is not an inspiring example, I'm not interested in this perspective. Their system is stuck in the medieval era, why should we take any pride from such a comparaison ?
I'm uneasy with this kind of plastering as well, it has this "mob lynching" vibe that is often for the worst rather than the best. It appeals to our worst instincts, and you can sense that the author is angry and we are helping him to punish this guy when we look at this.
I felt dirty to be honest. If you don't believe it, ask yourself: why didn't he blur his face ? Would his message be less efficient ?
Thanks for the feedback. Security and user experience is always a matter of balance. I was seduced by the idea of having a strong password, but I think the current implementations discourage it for a regular use. From what I understand the only alternative under Ubuntu is to disable the prompts altogether, which is really not recommandable. Windows 7 has a nice way to handle it, I wonder if it is secure enough.
As a French I don't vote anymore. The truth is that Freedom is incompatible with having full time elected people at all scales of the society, since they need to justify their work by taking all kinds of unsollicited stances and intempestive measures.
Left or Right ? Both of them will spend the most of their time fulfulling their purpose : to make new laws. Generally on a wide range of topics they don't understand (not only the Internet).
Unfortunately, the blank vote isn't recognized in France: abstention is the best option. So far, no political party suggests that we drastically reduce the number and power of representatives.
I think your stance should be commended. However, while they do say "We want full time parliamentary elected representatives, free to set their own agenda, free to control the country's budget, free to debate all public issues...", what are your thoughts on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Alternative ?
In the age of the web, we have the power to make democracy more direct. I also believe we don't need so much statemen whose daily job is to make new laws. A strong and centralized state is mandatory during war, and that's it.
In aviation, a lot of crashes could have been avoided if the captain released the commands instead of desperatly hook on them, because the plane is programmed to get back on its feets alone.
It think it would be the same for our governments, people would be really surprised to see that the world wouldn't collapse if you removed the bulk of our elected and non-elected statemen. We give them too much credits. The industrial revolution happened in spite of them rather than thanks to them, that's why every western european country encountered about the same progress overall with different political systems. Unless a certain amount of freedom was missing, progress grew naturally. Thats what happening right now with the Internet.
I don't know how it usually goes, but I'd like this blind spot to be cleared. She published a number, an email address and a nickname on her blog, but no postal address. So the keys weren't shipped.
She never called the number, and can't tell the gender of her perpetrator. Only the neighborhoods acted as mere witnesses of a "group of people" coming in. This suggest that nobody else was involved in the transaction, no friend or neighborhood to give the key and see the guy.
So the guys "came to her house" and got inside, but it doesn't tell us how. Nobody has been in physical contact with them, and the keys weren't shipped.
I don't want to sound insensitive, but this blind spot buggers me a little. Wonder if she can tell more about it, even if it doesn't sound relevant to her horrible experience. I believe her, maybe the key transaction process was bit naive as well and it wouldn't be relevant (hiding the key somewhere), but it could also mean that the burglary might have happened after the host left (while still being an improbable hypothesis, it would just open a new possibility). It's just a small bug that I'd like to be squashed.