skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I said multiple times, in my humble opinion this is completely a useless effort. There are two cases:

1) Two databases are semantically very similar. In such a case even if the query language is different porting your application from one to another is trivial, especially if you have a minimal layer of abstraction between your program and you data, things like fetchUser(ID) or alike.

2) If the data model is different, using the same query language does not help at all.

So the question is WHY? :)
Ah, yes, because if you don't want to take the time to learn objective C, you're a crappy developer? Is that right?

Phonegap basically just addresses shortfalls (read: inbuilt, intentional limitations) of the iPhone.

If iPhone supported things like image uploads from the browser, phonegap wouldn't be necessary, people would write webapps, and yes, "write once, deploy everywhere" would work, as it has for almost every major webapp ever written.

Look at desktops right now. Most of the things I do with my desktop actually happen "in the cloud", I'm just running clients for them in my browser.

The reason this can happen is that my browser isn't artificially limited, like the iPhone. Phonegap addresses this.
Between this and the spammy--potentially illegal--posts to Craig's List (http://www.tnooz.com/2011/06/01/news/airbnb-admits-rogue-sal...) to generate rentals, it's very hard to think of AirBnB as a well run company.
Merging is the only solution that is feasible and doesn't lose content.

It just requires moderators or people over certain karma thresholds.
How do they do against CPU implementations of same?

I imagine you've really got to know what you're doing to compete, because that seems like a pretty branchy algorithm.
A compulsive gambler, already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, goes to a loan shark to borrow another five hundred bucks. He now has an operating cash balance of five hundred dollars, while still having a net worth of minus six figures.
Last I looked at this, I thought one of the requirements was that your startup had to directly affect Chile, like providing jobs or something of that sort. Am I completely incorrect or is there something on there with that provision?
This has nothing to do with AirBnB

Yes, so far as we know, the persons who robbed and trashed EJ's home were not employees of AirBnB.

In just about every other respect, however, this has everything to do with AirBnB. Four big points that have struck me:

* From a business perpective, such incidents were inevitable and yet the company seems to have had no crisis management plan in place. That is simply astounding.

* From a consumer perspective, it's worth warning potential users of the service that the company's prior attitude was "Don't worry, no one will steal your grand piano". As EJ points out, if AirBnB's "service" offers no more protection and fewer warnings than a free Craigslist alternative, you may want to reconsider using them.

* Given that some small percentage of renters are intent on breaking through your locked doors and storage cabinets looking for valuables, you might just want to reconsider renting your home out to people you don't personally know and trust. At the very least, a viewing of "Pacific Heights" is in order. (A landlord acquaintence suggested the film be required viewing for anyone who is considering becoming a landlord.) This might not seem AirBnB-relevant at first, but when you consider AirBnB's facile "grand piano" Web page, it seems quite relevant.

* Imagine if EJ had gotten suspicious and decided to check up on the renters herself or asked a friend to do it for her. Scenarios escalating to rape and/or murder are not farfetched. Even if you can ignore the pain and suffering of the victims, imagine what a PR disaster that would have been for AirBnB. (Which brings us back to the first point.)
I want to keep the site light and un-intimidating, but i'm wondering if this goes too far. Will this work?
Great -- so if logic programming and predicate dispatch allow you to tackle problems that would otherwise be intractable in JS... Do you have an example of such a problem that you've used logic programming in Clojure to tackle? Perhaps a link to your code?

I'd tend to give Turing-completeness a bit more credit where it's due, especially for flexible dynamic languages.
Yes, but such manipulation is much easier to spot given everyone's familiarity with GAAP.
If this was bound to happen, I wonder why AirBnB didn't have a better contingency plan.
The most fascinating aspect is that once you recognize the issue, you can't simply rely on using just the partitioned data or the aggregate. Be sure to read the "Implications to decision making" section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox#Implications_t...

The practical significance of Simpson's paradox surfaces in decision making situations where it poses the following dilemma: Which data should we consult in choosing an action, the aggregated or the partitioned? In the Kidney Stone example above, it is clear that if one is diagnosed with "Small Stones" or "Large Stones" the data for the respective subpopulation should be consulted and Treatment A would be preferred to Treatment B. But what if a patient is not diagnosed, and the size of the stone is not known; would it be appropriate to consult the aggregated data and administer Treatment B? This would stand contrary to common sense; a treatment that is preferred both under one condition and under its negation should also be preferred when the condition is unknown.

On the other hand, if the partitioned data is to be preferred a priori, what prevents one from partitioning the data into arbitrary sub-categories (say based on eye color or post-treatment pain) artificially constructed to yield wrong choices of treatments? Pearl[2] shows that, indeed, in many cases it is the aggregated, not the partitioned data that gives the correct choice of action. Worse yet, given the same table, one should sometimes follow the partitioned and sometimes the aggregated data, depending on the story behind the data; with each story dictating its own choice. Pearl[2] considers this to be the real paradox behind Simpson's reversal.

As to why and how a story, not data, should dictate choices, the answer is that it is the story which encodes the causal relationships among the variables. Once we extract these relationships and represent them in a graph called a causal Bayesian network we can test algorithmically whether a given partition, representing confounding variables, gives the correct answer. The test, called "back-door," requires that we check whether the nodes corresponding to the confounding variables intercept certain paths in the graph. This reduces Simpson's Paradox to an exercise in graph theory.
Wow, I completely missed that joke (when I originally read that section)
I'd guess in about 18 months when Wii U flops in holiday 2012 there is going to be a huge bidding war between Microsoft and Apple for Nintendo exclusivity.
I've just learned more about this situation, and it turns out Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning. From the beginning they offered to pay to get her a new place and new stuff, and do whatever else she wanted.

I think this goes a long way towards confirming suspicions some people have held since the beginning of the debacle, namely that the victim here is blowing things out of proportion in an attempt to mar Airbnb's reputation as much as possible.

Granted her situation is very distressing, but weigh that against the fact that even if she had not been participating with Airbnb her home still could have been broken into and ransacked. The upside here is that Airbnb was involved and it seems is trying to do whatever they can to help her, up to and including paying for a new place. Now that it's been revealed she is misrepresenting Airbnb's reaction and handling of her case in her latest post[1] it becomes hard to deny this "victim" is utilizing their situation, i.e. manipulating it. So it seems she has a particular ax to grind, apparently with Airbnb...

[1] http://ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2011/07/airbnb-nightmare... "Airbnb has not assisted me in securing my safety, if that is the implication being made in Chesky's article" and "But the staff at Airbnb has not made a positive contribution to me personally or my situation in any way, particularly since June 30." While maybe true in fact, clearly misleading her audience.

Edit: I can see the angry mob is already hard at work down voting me. At least provide some counterpoint if you feel you disagree; yes, my point of view is unpopular on this subject, but have I made incorrect observations here?
I think it's overblown. It's a one odd situation out of MANY good ones, same as couch surfing - from which airbnb is a commercialized version.
Honestly, an in-browser REPL isn't compelling to me. What's compelling is an on the fly compiler / evaluator so that I can run Clojure code via node directly (or some other JS via the CLI) without starting up the JVM.
But PR isn't about logic -- it's about storytelling. And if Airbnb isn't careful, the arc of the narrative here could seriously harm their business.

I agree with edw519: Airbnb needs to do something dramatic -- whatever it takes to transform EJ from a neglected victim of an unfeeling corporation to a hardy survivor who has moved on, thanks to Airbnb's caring and magnanimous support.
Normally i hate "This" posts, but HN does not display my upvote, so i'm writing this comment to reiterate how important this is.

This is the right way to do it. Paramaterize your queries, do not ever use string concatenation to generate SQL queries. If you try to sanitize the inputs yourself you will fail at some point.
Health IT Is the New Black
This number (the $73.7bn) is almost entirely meaningless. If you look at it from first principles, the US federal government does not need to maintain any accounts at all, since it is the entity that controls the monetary system. When they want to spend, they can just credit bank accounts directly; the money doesn't need to come from somewhere.

However, partly to make the payment systems run in a more unified manner, and partly for simple historical reasons, the Treasury does maintain accounts with a balance in them. Since the flows in and out of these accounts are important for maintaining the inter-bank interest rate, any movements there are closely coordinated with the open market operations of the Fed. In the end, the number in those accounts is basically whatever happens to satisfy the current monetary policy best.

To sum it up, the comparison in the article is void of meaning.

For understanding these kinds of things I found the writings of Modern Monetary Theory very interesting. See e.g. here: http://pragcap.com/resources/understanding-modern-monetary-s...
There is also an entire chapter in the book "Understanding modern money" by Randall Wray devoted to the accounting contortions that the Fed and Treasury do while running the payment system.
AirBnb is yc's baby, sure. But think logically. Either

- The woman is traumatized. The very first week, AirBnb does everything right to help. After a few weeks, the woman still feels mistreated and flips out. Writes an angry blog post. When AirBnb denies this, the woman doesn't feel like she's wrong. Keeps pressing her case. But also is touched by many people's help, and turns down free money.

- The woman is traumatized. After 5 weeks of run-around from founder and support (to buy time for funding), the woman is furious. Writes an angry blog. When AirBnb denies this, the woman is persistent in her case for justice. But also is touched by many people's help, and turns down free money.

which is more likely? Keep in mind, this woman, who feels that people are good and just, rents out her place with her stuff intact.
Not really. One thing we can be grateful for is that neither party really wants a default, because neither party is confident that it would be the electoral beneficiary.

It might seem that Republicans would get the benefit, but this fact in itself provides a reason for people to blame Republicans if things go bad, since they'll assume (as you appear to be doing) that they caused the default in order to get the benefit. This makes it pretty much a wash -- if bad things happen, both sides will blame the other and we can't quite see in advance how it'll all play out in the court of public opinion.
â€“ You might want to fix those encoding issues in IE9 & FF4. â€“
"Any globally-minded entrepreneur is eligible to apply, regardless of his or her nationality and all applications will be judged under the same criteria."
How to pitch a tech journalist
Can you run a C library on Android?
I sit on an Ikea stool. I'm essentially spending my summer doing sysadmin gruntwork at a tiny data center in an outbuilding in someone's backyard for less than the median wage of a Wal-Mart "sales associate", so perhaps that is to be expected. On a related note, if anyone has a use for an intern with functional programming experience please let me know.
Is it possible that the founders haven't been totally straight with you? There are wildly divergent accounts of what AirBnB has offered to EJ.

From her perspective, essentially nothing. Based on what they've told you, they've offered to make her whole. Unless there's been a seemingly unlikely misunderstanding, either she's lying, or they are.
They could only do it once, I suppose. But then that's why there's the "total cost + 20%" hold placed on the card. That way, if it is stolen and reported during the stay, AirBnB calls da cops and yay justice; if they leave scott free, well at least there is some recompense to the owner.

I really don't see people running robbery scams on Airbnb with any frequency. I mean, if they have that many stolen credit cards, why waste time robbing people's houses when they could, you know, buy stuff with those stolen cards?
another classical symptom is flashbacks, and they aren't necessarily separated by any specific time period from the original event.
And methylation patterns are believed to affect higher-order structure in DNA. This higher order structure has to do with the way DNA is packaged when not being actively read for protein synthesis or cell division. Most of the time it is stored in a tightly coiled form that renders it inaccessible to most of the DNA machinery, and it's believed that the methylation patter on the DNA affects the structure of this compaction.
And those don't get income taxed at around the higher income brackets of over 30%? Wont a corporation just be able to write off bonuses as employee compensation expenses anyway?
When I saw the post title I had my fingers crossed hoping "please be a paradox based on something from The Simpsons". Oh well... Interesting nonetheless
I suppose it depends on the browser and whether you use Google instant (which is on by default).

As soon as I type a letter, the "lucky" button vanishes.
It's not AirBnB's fault per se, but it's definitely their problem, because it puts their entire business model in doubt.
most of these is applicable to any MVC framework.
For me, the price point was way off and fixing that makes it more interested.

If any of these devices develops a decent 3rd party app ecosystem then that could be interesting too as long as the apps could do useful stuff (i.e. the API's were powerful enough).

I'd also really want PVR functionality but over time, as the channels I'm interested in improve their on-demand web-based offering that's becoming less crucial.

Oh and one more small problem. It doesn't work in the UK.
Not to get offtopce, but spam is not "solved". Solving spam would be something that does not require a user to implement filters and other mechanisms to auto-sort things into a junk box.

A solution would be one which prevents the sending of the spam in the first place, or an auto-rejection mechanism that was 100% passive and 100% accurate.

Spam is merely a problem that is manageable with some ultimately clunky tools.
I understand the thinking that the house owners can't do proper background checks, and they expect AirBnB to do it for them because of that... That's AirBnB's fault because of the way they are set up. (I assume that's to protect people as well!)

But when you rent your or loan your things to someone else, you take a chance that they will damage it. If you aren't willing to take that chance, you shouldn't be renting it out. You should have insurance for it, and you should put your valuables away.

You are not absolved of responsibility just because someone prevents you from doing a background check.
I'm really rooting for Phonegap. I really want to write apps written in html5/css/javascript, but what is really need is "proof" that it is possible to write a great app using these tools.

I've seen all the demos, and all the Phonegap apps in the App Store, but none of them are "killer apps". They don't have many ratings, and the ones that do have several ratings aren't so good. Hoping this changes soon.
I've never heard of Vina del Mar, but based on the name it sounds like exactly where I'd wanna go.
Yes true, but the reason isn't tabbing.
There are a lot of features / useful things that are actually in Sublime but just in a preference toggle where you have to look it up.

http://sublimetext.info/docs/en/reference/settings.html

An example would be
"trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true, (very useful)

Anybody else have any preferences that they use a lot that aren't obvious?
I trust that you do understand the concept of compilation right? It'd be terribly difficult and tedious to implement JavaScript, for instance, in x86 assembly (but possible!), much like it would be to implement the things that David's logic programming and predicate dispatch in JavaScript directly. Having a language which supports syntactic abstraction allows you to hide away lots of the complexities and let the compiler generate them for you. It's no different than using C instead of x86, or Scheme to C to x86, or whatever other path to x86 you can think of.
Transferring them in bulk wouldn't technically be against any of the rules. There are provisions that access to bulk data be limited to those that 'need' it. This is obviously ambiguous and up to interpretation of your auditor. In this case, since the auditor is asking for the data, one would assume they see no issue with it.

Typically communication of secure information to the auditor would need to be encrypted so there is little to worry in terms of a mail administrator having access to the list.

Remember, PCI very frequently ignores practical reality and common sense.
Yes. The Android NDK lets you write and use code in C / C++:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html
Not a surprise. Anyone who has used a Google TV device will tell you what a pile of garbage it is. For example, the remote for the Sony one is pure comedy: http://devilsworkshop.org/files/2010/10/sony_google_tv_remot...
I know this isn't the place for this, but I wanted to make sure you saw this...

For me, your Mono_Dyslexic font is life changing.

That is all.
I just disagree with the 1-based indexing...
Then I agree that the number is pretty much meaningless. The government can easily increase their operating cash balance simply by incurring more debt. It's the debt, and the deficit that seem most relevant to my untrained mind.

In fact, if you want to compare with a corporation, I'd compare the entity's deficit as a percentage of its revenue.
Uncle or Uncool. The hipster query language.
That seems to be true with the "blitz" of stories like the Airbnb ones, but at a more general level, a lot of duplicates seem to be occurring because there are lots of different subgroups now using HN at different times of the day.

For example, these are the same story but did well with similar karma and similar discussions, a week apart from each other:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2778219
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801263

I certainly visit HN far too much but I notice "repeat" stories like these frequently.

MetaFilter (which is certainly pretty resistant to change) ended up implementing an automatic search feature at the posting stage to highlight potential conflicts like these. It seems to work well (it's not enforced - it just makes users think first). Edit: Realized I should add I don't necessarily think this is a good idea for HN. Personally I'd prefer to see the per-page # of items go up a bit. A 50 item front page would better cope with the higher levels of FP items.
bcrypt isn't reversible (with respect to the password). The point is that Blowfish(key1, "message") is not at all similar to Blowfish(key2, "message"). This is called resistance to related-key attacks (look this up for a formal definition), and is an explicit design goal of every real-world block cipher.

bcrypt is just Blowfish(key-derived-from-salt-and-password, "OrpheanBeholderScryDoubt"), so it inherits this property.
My sympathies are for the victim but I think it would help to post the full context of her statement. She said

"One month ago an individual was apprehended, however as far as I know, this person was transferred to a neighboring jurisdiction for prosecution of previous crimes, and no charges or arrest warrant has been issued for my case within San Francisco County." (emphasis mine)

I don't think Brian Chesky or AirBNB can have much influence on what crimes the DA prosecutes these perps for. For all we know they committed a more serious crime in the neighboring jurisdiction and so were transferred there. AirBNB could have submitted the evidence they have and the DA might have decided to use it later, or not use it in favor of another case that is stronger.
Ah, yes, because if you don't want to take the time to learn objective C, you're a crappy developer? Is that right?

I never said anything like that—however, since we're on the subject, I will say that if you're an iPhone developer [1] and you don't want to learn the correct way of making apps, you're most likely going to make some very crappy apps.

[1]: By that I mean anybody making an iPhone app.
I have read somewhere that patent description are often deceitful. The abstract can be intentionally misleading and the wording in your case seems to be too.
STUDY: Internet Explorer Users Are Dumber
I have never used the service, but I always assumed that they pre-screened the customers and the hosts. I'm really surprised to hear that they don't have a screening process, like background checks, and that they don't carry some for on insurance to cover damages.

They certainly don't seem to make the effort to inform hosts of those two points. Hosts should be completely aware that AirBnB, 1) does NO background checks or verifications on possible tenants, and 2) does NOT insure any damages.
I'd tend to give Turing-completeness a
bit more credit where it's due

Turing completeness is a fun topic for conversation, but it doesn't stand up to practical application. That is, every language has a point of diminishing returns regarding expressivity vs. possibility. JavaScript falls somewhere on the spectrum with things like Underscore.js and Coffeescript providing increasingly more bang for the buck. If you were truly such an adherent to the Turing completeness trap then I would be a sad panda without the clear expressivity gains that Underscore and Coffeescript provide.
OnSwipe Just Opened Its Public Beta To Anyone With A Blog
If you mean the AirBnb news that's all over HN last day, leave it as is, it shows kind of the importance of a topic. It's big news, there should be many views/topics about it, it's logic.