rick888

You won't always enjoy what you are doing, even if you are really passionate about your work.

The problem is that most people will slack off. To work remotely, you almost have to have the same discipline that you do when you work for yourself. Most people don't have this type of discipline.

"2. Building on Someone Else’s Platform is Risky"

This is a common mistake. You should only do this if your product/idea is short-term. I would never build a long-term business on Twitter or Facebook, but I see so many people attempting to do this.

If they make a change where you have to pay 10X for access, limit your bandwidth, or even come out with something that directly competes with our product, you are done.

"WHY on EARTH is everyone siding with this person?"

I've been wondering the same thing. I read through her initial blog post. She talks about renting out her place through Craigslist on multiple occasions (without any problems). This is extremely risky and I wonder if her place was vandalized through craigslist, would people be calling for them to pay for her house?

When the "Craiglist killer" was in the news, I would be curious to see if the responses here on HN were similar (that Craigslist is to blame for the murders).

If I hired a developer from HN and they ended up stealing my source code/IP, should I blame Paul Graham?

Emotions play a lot into it. Her entire post plays into our emotions and gets people to feel sorry for her. Politicians and marketers use this same technique, and I don't like it.

At the very end, she does admit that it is her fault. But not without a few passive-aggressive jabs about the assumption that because she had paid a service fee that somehow Airbnb had pre-screened the applicant. I'm not sure why anyone would make this assumption.

I think because the criminals are not here, and people need someone to blame, airbnb is the next best thing (having the deepest pockets in the situation helps too).

Everyone just needs to take a step back, look at the situation, and take out emotions for a second...they often cloud judgement.

The bad press is already out there. This isn't going to fix the problem of things like this happening in the future and buying a house for everyone that is vandalized is just not a scalable business model.

It would also show the world that Airbnb is taking the blame for this. It isn't their fault. They are just as much a victim as this women. Victims shouldn't be paying for other victims.

"Get insurance to cover the renters in future cases of theft or damage, and there will be future events."

This will most likely increase the service fees substantially..maybe beyond what people are willing to pay.

"Get a company that conducts background checks on applicants that wish to rent through their service. Anonymize the result and get the renter's approval before the transaction can proceed."

This is probably the best suggestion.

It happens to me from time to time. I find that reading a bunch of news sites during the day only makes this problem worse. Practice reading/working on only one thing at a time.

Wouldn't you?

I would most certainly at least try to get the user to remove the blog post or update it.

This is why I hate working for other people. This kind of politics is required to move up in almost any mid-large companies.

Working a 9-5 since I was 15 gave me my work ethic. I had it before I even got to college.

However, self-discipline took some work. When you have nobody to tell you what to do, it's not easy to force yourself to work.

Getting away from my apartment has helped. During the day, I force myself away from all distractions and only focus on my current projects. You should find a way to do this.

Until I read this article, I had no idea you could even upload music. I was under the impression that all of the music was being streamed from the grooveshark servers.

This is a really cool idea. Much less to worry about in terms of damages.

I thought they were already turning a profit.

I think it's better to save enough money for 6 months to a year, and then quit. This is what I did.

When you work a regular job, it's very difficult to switch your thought process from work to startup. Not to mention the fact that you will pretty much have no free time left over (which I need to be healthy and happy).

I tried to do both..and it just didn't work for me.

It's almost like comparing countries.

Some are dictatorships, others are free and more democratic.

Airbnb should partner with both and turn it into a business opportunity.

Which I find hilarious, because they themselves (anonymous) decided to censor the shooter frpm oslo's manifesto.

So when censorship fits their needs, it's okay.

If it's on a separate domain, it's probably because they want to do some SEO testing without losing any rankings for the origianl fogcreek site.

Wow, so Anonymous has decided to censor and alter something online. They are getting just as bad as the government(s) they claim to be against.

I'm not so sure about this. If a company knows they have massive piracy, they will concentrate on fighting it and it will take money and resources away from potentially better content. Real competition is what spurs innovation. Piracy is not competition.

I also don't see how innovating will even help (which leads me to believe that the examples he used got more viewers based on other factors). If the content can be pirated, your new innovations will then also be pirated.

The problem is that many gamers fall into this category.

I think they are fully capable of understanding. But I can guess that the LAN party probably gets tons of complaints regarding assholes and women every year and just decided to put a stop to it.

Just look at a site like Reddit (which probably is the same demographic as a LAN party). As soon as a women appears, the assholes come out.

"kicking out anybody who doesn't abide by decency standards."

I think they probably figured out that that would mean kicking 99% of the LAN party out.

you could upload the file to your server and do a mysql_import (I assume it's tab/comma delimited).

PHP can call system commands, so you could do system("Mysql import ...(file)...").

more info about the command here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysqlimport.html

If you are an employee, it needs to be about the money. When the company gets purchased for millions of dollars (unless you have major equity), how much money are you going to get?

Many startups use this excuse so they can pay employees peanuts, when they are working 70-80 hour weeks to launch a product that will make the founders rich.

This is why I don't work at statups, unless I started it myself.

"Sadly, that is not the way captialism works. The 1% of people will have everything and the remaining 99% will starve. I'm paraphrasing one of my favorite quotes: "Capitalism is the best system we have for creating wealth. It is a lousy system for the distribution of wealth."

This isn't true. It's one of (if not the best) system for distributing wealth. Anybody can start their own company (look at all the startups on HN alone) with relatively little money and generate wealth for themselves.

"Re. Tylenol, 7 people died in an isolated area, and the response was national legislation and money and materials spent tamper-proofing every drug made since then."

This needed to be done, otherwise someone would be able to do it again. It's not like it hasn't happened. This fear is based on a real case where real people died. Just like the security the US has in its airports. Which is interesting, because there hasn't been any successful terror attacks since 9/11. I would say that their job is being done quite well.

"People are still scared of Halloween candy being tampered with (which in and of itself has never been recorded as happening)."

I will agree with you here, this is a ridiculous fear, which is based more on myth than an actual case.

"By that logic, we should have outlawed cars years ago; more than 7 people die every day in accidents."

They do, but we need cars. We don't need non-tamper proof Tylenol. Although it may never happen again, there is an obvious flaw in the way Tylenol was bottled and that flaw needed to be fixed.

Of course, if they didn't fix this flaw, there would be a fear of Tylenol and people wouldn't buy it..and if it happened again, Tylenol would get sued from anyone that died (then what would we say..stop being afraid?). Fixing it is the smart thing to do.

Should we not wear seat belts either? The chance you will get in a car accident on the way to work is fairly low. Is this just "fear"?

We take preparations all the time, even if there is a small chance that something bad will happen. This is because when something bad does happen, it means death. It seems you don't value human life as much as the US government if you are willing to take that risk (and force everyone else to take that risk).

When Y2K happened, there were a ton of systems fixed (I worked on a few myself). After the new year, many people thought that nothing happened, so why did we make such a big deal about it? If nobody had taken the precautions and fixed these systems, there would have been problems. You (and anyone else against security) are comfortable. You don't see any direct threats and feel that security and precautions aren't needed as a result of this comfort.

"Classy."

It would shut everyone on HN (and the US) up that seem to think that we don't need TSA security.

"Nice flamebait. I'll resist the urge to resort to profanities."

Nice way to get out of a discussion.

"As for negotiating, who exactly is there to negotiate with in the first place?"

You said we should try to figure out why they are angry with us..as if it's the fault of the US for getting attacked (blaming the victim).

"You seem to be under the mistaken impression that there's some kind of top secret terrorist government hiding somewhere, and that "they" are secretly hatching evil plots to destroy "America". (Because apparently America is the only country that's ever been targetted by terrorists? Get over yourself.)"

Nice flamebait. In Many other countries, they have full-on profiling with armed guards on each plane. It seems to work pretty well on the middle east.

"There's nothing stopping Muslims from worshipping Allah as much as they please in the US. Nor should there be. And there sure as hell shouldn't be anything to stop "them" from getting on planes, looking at their watches, praying, growing big beards or walking around in whatever outfits they damn well please."

I never said they shouldn't be stopped. However, if there are a high number of attempted attacks and the description of the attackers match the type of people coming onto the plain, the TSA should be allowed to question/detain those people.

It's this type of thinking that stops a newspaper from putting a description of a criminal because it's not politically correct.

The US is a more aware society. Just because they are talked about in the news, doesn't make someone afraid, just more aware of the dangers in society.

"fear of walking the streets alone at night"

It depends on where you live. If I'm in Detroit, then yes, I will be a little more apprehensive about walking on the streets alone at night. It's just common sense.

"Fear of someone spiking your Tylenol"

If someone hacked into your servers and destroyed data through a weakness, would you fix the weakness or just restore the data and go on with your day? The Tylenol weakness has been fixed. It's the smart thing to do.

"Uncontrollable fear of a country across the ocean maybe having WMD's."

I love how you slipped this one in here. I actually would love for the US to stop all military actions and then have a major terrorist attack. I know I would be the first to blame all of the people who said we were too "paranoid".

It's funny because the reason people can sit and talk about all of these things we don't need is because all of the precautions we have in place are working. Kind of like the person that's bi-polar that stops taking their meds because "I feel fine, why should I keep taking them"?

"Until we learn to control that basic fear response, the TSA will still be around and people will still be scared of sitting next to a dark-skinned man kneeling in prayer."

Until the people in the middle east get their shit together, we will need it. We don't know how many attacks have been prevented because of high security (IE: not even bothering to try).

yeah, well, 9/11 still happened with people that didn't appear "normal".

"The way to fight it is to alter the conditions. To do this we must understand why people hate America."

We should bend over backwards to make the terrorists happy so they don't attack us? What if they hate us because we aren't part of their religion..is the answer to make the US a Muslim country? Negotiating with terrorists that clearly aren't interested in negotiating is not what we should be doing here.