skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The government can easily increase their operating cash balance simply by incurring more debt.

Except, and this is the whole reason that we currently have big problems, the Government currently can't legally incur more debt, unless Congress passes an increase to the debt ceiling. So cash-on-hand is currently a serious issue.
Towards a SQL-like Query Language for NoSQL Databases: UnQL
I think that Simpson's Paradox is: "You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't."
If you want to go that route, I would recommend picking an assignment you are very interested in, and going all out on it. Even if you get A's on your assignments, they're still probably not that impressive until you can put a few months of extra work into them. Also, if you discuss it with your professor, you have the added potential of building a good relationship with him/her.

Looking back, I really wish I had done something like this because I was in the same boat as you - a lot of motivation to build something, but not knowing what to build.
Whereas there is a lot of discussion on HN for product/market fit and solving pain points, this article shows what a smart/lucrative idea can do.

From the article:

“You have a drug industry that spends $14 billion a year to influence people who prescribe drugs. There are only 600,000 people who are allowed to prescribe drugs, so there is $14 billion spent against 600,000 people. If you have a channel to reach these physicians, it is a gold mine.”
Proof of the Infinitude of Primes
Nice article. Thanks.

That article is at about the level I need!

Yes, so far I'm trying to stay with the single byte character set. If my business 'goes international', then to convert my code to handle all the world's languages I'll have plenty of money and get consulting from Microsoft and/or hire people!

I never spent much time writing SQL queries, have been away from SQL writing ASP.NET and other work, so am rusty on SQL and ADO.NET. But I just checked some of my old ADO.NET code and see that at times I did 'parameterize' some queries instead of just doing a string 'concatenation' to get the SQL command 'text'.

So, if parameterizing permits sending SQL Server just any garbage data safely, and it SHOULD, then I should be fairly safe just by parameterizing, which is easy enough to do.

Your article also mentioned threats that could come from inside a stored procedure: So far all my ADO.NET SQL work is so simple I've not been tempted to write stored procedures! So I don't have any stored procedures to be threats!

My usage of SQL Server is intended to be dirt simple, almost simple enough for just some key-value store. But I writing for SQL Server anyway expecting that at some point I will be glad I did, e.g., for some off-line analyses.

Thanks for your article and your post here.
Obama Campaign Unleashes Twitter Hounds On Congress' Republicans
The Morning Star Paradox
You can certainly write good code in Java. Totally doable, never said it wasn't. But I'd agree with you that Java programmers tend to write horrible code.

I linked the essay by pg (which I'm sure our upset friends did not read) that suggests a decent reason why: I tend to find that in the Java world there's a lack of awareness of the proper (and I do mean proper) way of writing a lot of more advanced, more indirected code. (This is the "thinking in Blub" you see from pg or Joel Spolsky.) I have a hunch that this lack of higher-level awareness results in weird kluges and hacks that don't even really match the "canonical" design patterns and idioms of what you or I might call "good" Java.

I feel pretty confident in saying that people who are fully comfortable with a more expressive tool (C#, Scala, even dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript) will write better Java than someone who is inculcated into Java first and Java only. It's easy, if unpleasant, to move "down" the continuum that pg references--it's not so easy to move "up", especially when you don't see a reason to (as these posters clearly demonstrate that they do not).
It's tacky and even grandstanding to say "hey, we offered to buy this lady a new pad..."

From the start, there are ways to deal with this stuff, you do some analysis, figure out what this person wants or needs, you offer them a bit more than that in exchange for their silence. It's just how it is done. Once she started blogging about it, how do you fix that? If she takes the blog down for any reason then she looks pressured.
If that's the case, either EJ or AirBnB are lying.

Just one example:

> I've talked to the Airbnb guys and they are already doing everything they could be doing to help this woman.

From EJ's post:

> I arranged and paid for my own transportation while dislocated (with Airbnb's assurances that this expense would be compensated - which it has not been)

If EJ is lying, it should be easy to prove. But even if that's the case, AirBnB has dropped the ball in pissing her off so much that she has to continue to make an effort to paint AirBnB in a negative light.
You're wrong.

As long as those money are flowing, it helps the economy.
The only instance where it wouldn't is if it disappeared from the market.

This is even more obvious in Europe where a large chunk of all taxes payed comes from VAT; which are like sales taxes in the U.S. except everybody pays them.
I agree, you can build an app quickly. But Sencha Touch is painfully slow on most Android phones and iPhone 3G + it's very hard to respect Android guidelines :/ You can spot a Sencha Touch app on the Android Market quite easily.
How do they "just fix this" if her lawyer is saying "let's find the highest possible clearing price for this transaction"? In my experience, that's what a good lawyer is going to say. "This is just business."

Like in any negotiation, anything Airbnb offers is now the price floor. Her best interests are served by turning the pain dial to 11 for as long as the offer is on the table.

You don't even have to know anything about this person to wonder about this. You don't have to psychoanalyze her. You can just read between the lines. Even before 'pg said Airbnb offered to make her whole, reread her post. How does it even make sense for Airbnb to suggest she add a "happy ending" to her story unless they actually offer her something? But in the same post, she says she hasn't talked to them in a month and makes no mention of any offer. It doesn't add up.

There's nothing Airbnb can do here other than soak up the punches until they hit a number they can agree on.

Unfortunately, this problem is likely to recur until Airbnb figures out the business model tweak that mitigates it.
The question here though is not whether people can spell things correctly or correctly identify what state they live in, as whether you can write a computer program to, given what someone claims is their address, reliably break it down into parts to, for instance, extract what state they live in.

If you give someone separate fields for 'city' and 'state' you have some chance of figuring out where they are located if they type 'Washington' into one of those fields. If you ask them just for 'city, state', some people will understand that as 'city or state' and just type 'Washington', and you have no idea what they mean. The example I gave before, LA, is an example of a city which shares its name with a state abbreviation.

An anecdote for you: I was once working with UK callcentre system which had a form for callcentre staff to update customer contact addresses. UK postcodes are combinations of letters and numbers, and certain letters are excluded from certain positions to prevent ambiguous handwritten letterforms causing confusion. I naively implemented strict postcode validation, thinking it would help catch data entry errors. What actually happened was that we ended up, in a significant number of cases, telling people that the postcode that they had been using as part of their address for decades was not, in fact their postcode - it couldn't be because it was an invalid postcode. This made the customers quite cross, and we had to change it.

Do you want your validation message to be the one to break it to some eighty year old guy that Nebraska is actually NE, not NB any more?
Provide a "merge" mechanism. Keep track of merges. When merges exceed a threshold, HN merges them for all.
Unfortunately as good as the intent is, a malicious user with devious intentions can simply forge an ID or use one of the many IDs they've already stolen from their unsuspecting AirBNB hosts.
I don't think this line of thinking works. Criminals aren't your customers. If you respond to incidents with non-customers in mind, you're going to create a negative response in current and potential customers.

This was an opportunity for AirBnB to prove that their service is excellent and worth using. This was a chance to prove to potential customers that if the worst happens they'll be their. Instead they proved they won't support their customers fully when worst case scenarios happen. Because they were thinking more about people who don't pay them then people who do.
I think you intended the last item on your list to be pure software, but it's not.

You have hit the crux of the discussion. I am defining software as a tangible thing, existing as a pattern of matter and fields. It is not abstract, virtual, or ineffable. What you are talking about ("pure software") are ideas about the software's principles of operation. The mathematical and logical ideas by which we understand a process are not patentable, but their tangible embodiment (software) is patentable.

Consider an example of the difference. Prime numbers are abstract ideas that can be used to create difficult-to-solve problems, and thereby used for cryptography. As abstract ideas, they are not patentable. Someone could embody those ideas in a logic machine (like the RSA algorithm) and patent that. But somebody else could embody those ideas in an analog laser interferometer and patent that, without conflict with the other patent.

No one is arguing that a complete electronic timer should not be patentable.

And that is exactly what is covered by a valid software patent. Such patents claim something like "Claim 1: A stored-program logic machine, configured to provide the process described in claim 2." The configuration of the logic machine is the software.

A well-written patent will cover all variations of the software that are "obvious" to "a person skilled in the art". This generality is why all patents are so painful to evade, not just software patents.
I caught a lucky break and was able to snag an internship at a (at the time) pretty tip-top Silicon Valley company. I'd definitely grab your network firmly and give it a good shake. Something good could fall out.
It seems very likely to me that in the information they gave us, AirBnB was just relaying the information the police gave them. It's very likely the police told AirBNB to give them all the evidence they had so they could use it to prosecute the suspect they had in custody.

If I were the victim, I would not be satisfied until the perp got prosecuted for my crime either, but this pause in investigating this crime to pursue other crimes first, does not falsify AirBnB's statement that the perp is in custody, and that their information will become important evidence.

Anyway, AirBnB should have done a much better job of helping the customer and communicating both with her and the rest of the world.
Not necessarily.

Whether or not that is a sincere claim, I think it's saying they are the antithesis of "by any means necessary", more like "we have a set of (conscientious) principles to guide us".
How much have you tested it? Try running it in Android on an HTC device from last year.

Phonegap is not the problem, hardware and browsers of mobile devices are simply not up to handle the javascript required for a webapp.
Re: 3D, it's way beyond Nintendo...

It does seem many seemingly sane companies are going off the deep end here. What's with 3D? No one I know cares for or buys this crap (at least knowingly, one happened to buy a 3D-capable HDTV, but he's never attested to using it for that purpose)
I disagree. All sorts of things use filters to solve problems. From my point of view (an end user), I don't have to configure or manage my spam filters, I just end up not getting spam. I used to, it sucked. But now I don't and it's the same email address. I consider the problem solved.
Are casual gamers the ones who buy devices in the first 60 days after launch, though? Most "casual" gamers probably still aren't really sure exactly what a Kinect is or what it does. (I know I'm not...)
I don't think you really understand how the offshored profits work. It's not just that money isn't brought back from overseas, but that money made in the US can be sent overseas. You create a wholly-owned overseas company that gets paid to do some kind of work for you. Then you way overpay them for that work. As a wholly-owned subsidiary, all the extra money they hold is actually owned by you, but you don't pay taxes on any money you send them because you call it an operating expense. So you effectively send a bunch of money overseas untaxed. Your German division does the same thing, and now all your money is sitting in the Cayman Islands waiting for a tax holiday so you can bring it home.

Your German company scenario is incorrect as well. Firstly, because they don't have to make any significant profit in Germany. US Sprocket GmbH could buy the sprockets from US Sprocket Inc at nearly the same price they sell them for, transferring the money to the US corp while paying almost no taxes in Germany (high revenue with equally high costs means no profit). Secondly, Deutsche Sprocket GmbH is dealing with the same "double taxation" in the US, so it's not an economic disadvantage.
Exploring Space with Chip-sized Satellites
What debt crisis?

THERE IS NO DEBT CRISIS.

What we have here is a Congressional insanity crisis.

And a media fail crisis.
In theory, but I bet Nintendo is infinitely more militant about their approval process for their version of the App Store than Apple ever could be (not to mention their revenue sharing and pricing policy per app).

And, knowing them, it'll be the same stale list of 1st party Mario games, Tetris, bad EA ports, and flash or iPhone powerhouse game du jour all for the low, low price of $15 a game, a savings of $10 over cartridges. Break out the noisemakers, what a savings!
Her nickname is EJ, and she is indeed homeless. Her home was destroyed and ever since she has been bouncing around staying with friends. She is now without a home - that doesn't mean she is sleeping in the subway station, but it does mean she doesn't have a permanent residence anymore. Hence, homeless.
I think as long as they follow something similar to the guidelines in [1] they will be fine -- having good reputation information is too valuable to make illegal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act
Genuine question: are these repeats a bad thing?

When the articles appear simultaneously it's obviously a pain to have discussion fragmented, but if they're appearing distinctly, is it such a bad thing if people are discovering something new?
Meh. I'm sure when this is all over, AirBnb will have put some measures in place to add additional security (from a pr perspective at least). Really, nothing short of legitimate insurance is going to make using a service like this "safe" (id's are easy enough to steal/fake) and I'm sure that the people likely to use something like this (who were already ignoring the common sense dangers involved) are not going to be deterred by ej's story (she claims on her blog to have been the type of person to leap first and wait for a net to appear).

In the end, many people who were never going to use AirBnB to begin with will feel more certain in their (probably wise) decision, and many new people who will be open to the idea will now have heard of it for the first time.
Interview: creators of Hanging with Friends
I'd at least definitely drop the word "retarded-".

Seems super unprofessional and potentially offensive. I'd say it's damn near saying something like: "tired of all those gay products out there that...?"
By the time my kids are old enough to be trusted with portable electronic devices, they'll be old enough to have their own allowances and make their own damn decision about what do buy.
Seriously my friend, that site needs some design love.
I am no design guru here but that site desperately needs a designer.

Here are a few things I would suggest:

1. Search box at the top to search images.
2. slide show of random images front and center.
3. A call to action button to upload images.
4. scrollable or scrolling categories.

You pretty much have everything I said, but nothing stands out.
I agree. I think merging threads would be the best option.

I don't see every story that goes through HN, but I have often seen people post that a similar article was already posted with a link to that article. A merge mechanism (for those over a certain karma level) would allow people to recommend that two separate posts are merged into a single posting, with the karma from both added together and the responses sorted as they are now by karma.
To clarify for the downvoters, I'm talking about this in the context of CouchDB, which I believe was a fair assumption to make seeing as Damien Katz is one of the principle people involved and it was announced today at CouchConf.

In CouchDB, running a filter on top of view results is something you can only do in list functions or client side, so I am very curious to see how they incorporate this into CouchDB.
90% of my programming experience came from this: clubs and hobbies.

I'm sure your school has some sort of club you can join. For me, it was our IEEE student branch, where we competed in a robotics competition every year.

No club exists? START ONE! It's fun! Being a founder is fantastic for your resume, and you'll get a lot more experience than just programming.

In the next year or so, do anything you have to to get an internship.

Find a fun project to do on your own. Personally I prefer things I can touch, as opposed to PC applications. If you haven't before, check out the Arduino platform. I can give you lots of ideas of fun (and useful!) things you can do with it.
4chan hasn't been mentioned on HN for awhile
Originally I was just trolling you for making a bare assertion. After thinking about it a bit, sure, do you have any citations for "Modern scientific findings" being "astonishingly better" than "any traditional collection of folk wisdom" for the purpose of "human health?"

First, I haven't made an assertion that folk wisdom relies on citations. My impression is that folk wisdom is generally broader than religion, but I won't bother you with a citation request for that assertion. "Modern scientific findings" appear to rely on citations and you provided one that says the traditional Mediterranean diet is associated with some positive health outcomes; the Finnish one, not so much. Here's one for you about the negative health affects of a modern science-derived diet and lifestyle on folks migrating from a traditional diet and lifestyle to a modern one.

Type 2 (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes mellitus, migration and westernisation: The Tokelau Island Migrant study

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u9693ul1q81474u9/

Summary. The migration of Tokelauans from a traditional atoll in the Pacific to urban New Zealand is associated with an increased prevalence and incidence of Type 2 (non-insulindependent) diabetes mellitus over the period 1968-1982. During the same period, a lesser but definite increase is seen among non-migrants in Tokelau. The age standardised prevalence rates rose from 7.5 and 11.7 to 10.8 and 19.9 per 100 respectively in the male and female migrants compared with an increase from 3.0 and 8.7 to 7.0 and 14.3 per 100 in the nonmigrant males and females respectively. The incidence of diabetes is shown to be consistently higher in the migrants compared to the non-migrants giving relative risks of 1.5 in males and 1.9 in females. The factors most likely contributing to this difference, are changes to a higher calorie, high protein diet, higher alcohol consumption, a greater weight gain and altered levels of physical activity in the migrants. A number of populations in the Pacific have been shown to have a low rate of diabetes in their traditional setting, but may have a genetic predisposition for diabetes which responds to factors in the urban industrialised environment and life-style. The social and economic changes taking place in Tokelau are also clearly increasing the risk of diabetes. To reverse these trends and prevent the development of complications of Type 2 diabetes, it will be important to institute preventive programmes and to follow up the population in both environments for long-term outcomes, including mortality.
Why Strict Password Policies are a Bad Idea
Product Designer needed as a Co-Founder - Fast-Growing mCommerce startup
-- Be a Partner, not an employee

-- As our design-focused Co-Founder, you will drive and own end-user experience

-- We have many paying business customers, and a huge vision in the mobile commerce space

The two current founders are MIT and Stanford graduates with experience at top tier startups. You should love product strategy,
have some experience with front-end programming, and be based in California (or be willing to relocate).

If interested, please email us examples of your interaction design work

-- ycproductdesigner@gmail.com
A Case for Pseudonyms
Internet attorneys seem to love turning libel laws into this blanket prohibition on ever saying anything negative about someone or something that is not "100% true" and verifiable.

This doesn't even touch libel laws, and it certainly wouldn't be a _group_ culpability if there's one purveyor out there intentionally spreading malicious lies about some private person.
Money doesn't "dissipate" because it's spent. Money changing hands is what fuels the economy.

There's also no reason to assume that tax money goes from wealthy pockets to poor ones directly. The government can build infrastructure (which they do a lot more of than private industry), fund R&D, etc. Individuals could also invest their money into funds that fuel R&D, fund startups, etc. It's incorrect to claim that only the wealthy invest.
I wasn't really aware that it existed until Zero Punctuation reviewed Zelda for it the other day. Maybe I'm in a rather atypical demographic here in the intersection between "people with only a vague awareness of video games" and "people who watch Zero Punctuation", but there ya go.
SEC Questions Groupon's Accounting
And next bill will require all ISP's to run daily searches across the data looking for copyrighted material and other criteria that they will deem as "A threat to america"..........
The Illogician
No worries. :) As a homeschooling parent, I'm used to such comments. I didn't mean to berate as much as just to make sure you were aware that suggesting a parent is "taking risks" to "stunt a child's growth" can be considered offensive. +1 for dialog!