skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the current policy may be wrong, this issue exists because the issue is hard.

You make it sound as if the policy makers are talented engineers who made the design decision because it was the best compromise on how to deal with the various trade-offs. That's simply not the case.

In reality, these welfare policies are a result of a chaotic process of various factions battling to get their hands on dollars. This process is not designed, and the welfare law has simply evolved into a giant mess over the course of many decades.

That said, politicians and policymakers are not idiots. They are simply controlled by events larger then themselves. It's the incentives of the political system that are at fault. ( See Government's End by Jonathan Rauch )

How do we subsidise to a minimal level without destroying incentive to work? It's not an easy question to answer.

Roll up all the welfare programs into one program - give every American over 21 a check for $10k a year. For people without a job, give a guaranteed government job for $6 an hour. For people who need hands on help, go back to relying on local charities and local government aid. They are closer to the problem and have the right incentives to actually fix things (and empirically, the local welfare systems of the late 1800's worked far, far better than our national system today).
So you're saying...

Properly escaping queries is a bad idea because you might forget to do it and if you forget to do it then it doesn't work.

Here's a funny thought, though. I remember, many years ago, doing a code review and noticing something odd. The very smart developer who always used parameterized queries had written a simple insert into table X. It was all properly parameterized. Table X, however, had an on insert trigger which called a stored proc which was about eight pages long. In that stored proc, two of the parameters were concatenated into a select which was then eval-ed, thus leading to a very serious injection possibility.

So, in response to your last paragraph, yes, you still have to think about injection possibility even if you use prepared statements.

Really, that should be the first rule of designing for security: ALWAYS think.
This is an incredibly important issue.

In the information world, fencing off "property" is so sketchy that either software patents will explode as vast rent-seeking sector or software and business process patents will be discarded entirely.

Long term, I can't see a middle ground.
Is this a form of discrimination? Is it legal?
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Experienced it in Slovenija as well, but almost in reverse. The only way we could get hosts to stop bringing out more prosciutto or olives or spirits was to go just short of finishing the existing supply. Too little and they might be offended. Too much and they could not be stopped from serving more!
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Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions
"As the lead developer..."

Great example of why I love HN (and IRC).
Is this your site?

The majority of the "articles" (http://japanesetesting.com/articles) are simply sections from Tae Kim's guide copied verbatim.

Although at Tae Kim's guide is CCL'd and there is copyright notice at the end of each of the posts... it seems a bit wrong to have them in separate posts like this. Why not just link to Tae Kim's guide outright, once?
Initial thought on reading the title was that it'd be a struggle to run road trains in most of the EU and UK, but thankfully the article wasn't referring to one of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Road_Train_Australia.jpg
Omar Hamoui on Ideas and Company Launches
I'm not a huge fan of "+" for string concatenation as "+" is, traditionally, commutative; I like Lua's "..". That being said I like "+" more than "strcat".
The definitive, two-part answer to "Is data journalism?"
Not defending the attitude, but wrt fostering a better attitude on HN towards YC-startups, maybe some "Meet the founders" threads would help? Purpose: provide HN readers a chance to offer constructive criticism to YC-startups early on, and give those startups some crowd-sourced wisdom from a lot of smart HN readers (there's an example below where Vidly got a valuable nugget on video compression).

In other words, get the "Review my startup" thread going a lot earlier than Demo Day.

Maybe these threads could be invite-only, or accessible only to readers over a certain karma threshold?

(Another epic stretch: from a community-management standpoint, this may also help bandage the "I got rejected"/"I got accepted" divide.)
The phrasing is a bit unfortunate, but I think a person talented enough to work there could probably make it happen anyway. They hired Zed, and although I'm not sure where he went to college, it was probably his demonstrated programming talent that did all the talking.
How Much is Twitter Worth? Less Than You Think
It is still possible to benefit from automatic generation even when a document is mostly written by hand.

For example, you can use generators to run embedded example code, to verify that the results are what they should be (both on day one, and two years from now when the API has changed). New users have every reason to believe that the examples actually work, and when they don't, their impression of the technology is soured.
It is elitist, but also their choice, and while the false negative rate may be high the false positives are what they are worried about.

I personally filter on "has made major contributions to interesting projects" and "speaks two or more human languages". That discriminates against a lot of people too. My tertiary filter is "ignores my filters but is impressive enough anyway".
That third paragraph, refering to dynamic SQL inside of a stored procedure, happens often enough that I thought it made sense to bring it up here several months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824594

You'd do well to read the rest of the recommendations in that thread as well.

I cannot understand why anyone would opt for concatenated SQL over parameterized queries when both were available. It seems like simple, ignorant arrogance. As a contractor for small businesses who won't have their code reviewed by people like us, developers like you should be especially sensitive to this issue; your customers are going to be screwed over by that code long after you've moved on.
As opposed to being forced to interview every candidate who applies?
I think the Korean War will turn out to have been the golden age of the fighter pilot.
Measure branch test coverage in python
Are you implying he nicked it?
Everytime someone takes the Austrian School seriously, God denies health care to a kitten.

Please, think of the kittens.
Also there is no way a program would have pulled off that 'land in the hudson river' thing that guy did a while back.

Everyone would have died on a computer plane.
Yup, it is my site, and yeah, I have always felt odd about the Tae Kim guides thing, but as they are CCL'd, I put them in there (of course with attributions!)

The main reasons they're there is:
a) they are an amazing source of information for Japanese students.
b) I'm currently in the process of creating testing and flashcard packs based around his methodology to supplement his site.
c) they filled up space while I started getting original content up. ;)

The articles section of my site were originally an "extra" feature, with the flashcards and testing information based on popular textbooks (without copyright infringing) was the main purpose of the site.

Essentially 'Here's a bunch of study materials based on the textbook you're currently using.'

Of course, as people sign up, and I get more feedback, that's been changing a lot. People are very interested in the testing features, but they also seem to want more articles than I originally anticipated. I'm currently in the process of releasing new articles, (like the Kanji one above), but you're right that having the Lesson articles in with the standard articles seems a bit strange. Perhaps I'll create a subcategory for textbook-based articles (like Tae Kim) and original articles.

Thanks for the advice!
I'm always looking for more feedback.
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One of the important fields on the insurance quote is the insurance coverage that a person wants to have.To make the people aware of the details, the insurance companies have started using the insurance quotes.
For people without a job, give a guaranteed government job for $6 an hour.

This sounds good but in practice would probably be a bad idea, for multiple reasons. The main problem is that government work programs would (by necessity) have to involve jobs that almost anyone is capable of performing, with minimal oversight required. This would be very susceptible to gradually becoming pointless busy-work, variations on the "one person digs a hole, next person fills it back in" pattern.

The net result would likely be money spent wasting people's time to do work that creates no value. The ideal goal is to get people into jobs where they're actually creating value, and spending time doing a useless "job" is actually counterproductive because it's time they can't be spending to gain skills or look for other work.

We'd be better off paying people $6/hr to get training in a marketable skill, or to search for work matching skills they already have.
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mises.org is to Austrian-school libertarians what Redstate is to conservative Republicans. Make your own call about whether we ever want posts from here on Hacker News, or posts that include the words "left-liberal do-gooders". I made my choice, and flagged this.
They didn't show how they are going to save edited image.
When I saw this post earlier today I initially didn't know what to make of it. So I decided to ask my girlfriend what she thought of it.

She said "why doesn't he just tell her?", Thus, we clearly don't understand the purpose of the application. She said "it seems pointless".
Web browser with 1 line of code:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
You are right. Political systems are not in a good position to design policies in the best possible way. I am completely willing to accept that. But there is some design going on, it is not complete chaos. It's not like neither of these goals has ever had any sort of influence on policy. It isn't as if this is just some big, obvious & uncontroversial policy mistake that everyone would see if they only visit reason.org that politicians have just overlooked.

The system, flawed as it is, is "trying" to solve the problem as I articulated, more or less.

Take your solution as an example. Don't you think these sort of blog posts could easily criticise it's consequences too? First, the same criticism of perverse incentives applies. It takes more compensation to motivate a person take a job if he already has $10k + $6h/hr. Second, you'd have a lot of people in guaranteed 'make work jobs' that are probably more expensive to run then just giving away money.

I'm not yours is a bad idea, but only because the problem is hard. Pretty much every proposed solution is messy & ugly with lots of loose ends & perverse incentives.

The elegant solutions can be found on either extreme of the political spectrum where you don't have to worry about one of the conflicting goals. They are also conveniently excused from reality because neither socialism nor capitalism has ever been truly applied.
Why Retweet works the way it does
I guess the 'Indian' here is referring to native Americans.

It amazes me that a bunch of Europeans occupy the Americas, call themselves Americans, and call the people who have been living there Indians.
Oh, ok. I haven't registered so I wasn't sure what the site was about. It looked to me like the articles were the main part.

Speaking of which, to find the index of articles I had to edit the URL by hand; there doesn't seem to be a link to them from the submitted link.
A pity, because the article makes an interesting point otherwise, when not drifting into deranged partisan territory.
I have a lot of respect for the Austrian school, particularly Hayek. But, the tendency of its supporters to see Economics as a philosophy & to defer to things like 'the law of unintended consequences' is insufferable.
It's tainted because of that. I became dismissive as soon as I saw who was behind it...
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Unfortunately, his point would be stronger if he had made it more in terms of a practical problem to be solved, not as an excuse to get in shots against The Evil Other Guys.

Partisan feuding is for people who want political power, not solutions.
His use of the word "embarrassing" is tongue-in-cheek.
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I have a hard time taking seriously any school of thought that's explicitly anti-empirical. This is the 21st century, have we learned nothing from the scientific revolution?
While you can try infer the meaning of words by knowing the english 'meanings' of the relevant characters, what's worked for me has been just learning a lot of vocabulary by rote and doing a lot of reading. I think the Heisig approach has let it sink in more - there have been a lot of "aha!" moments when I look up the actual english meaning of a compound and figure out the relation to the individual kanji meanings.

In terms of actually writing the characters, Heisig effectively taught me how to write each individual component/radical, so I think my writing is pretty decent in that regard. If you are practicing heisig (book 1), you should also be practicing stroke order, or at least a way to compose the character that works for you.
A much more interesting addition is the interface type and values.
I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but where'd you get that? I don't get it. :(
Also not to say that this is equivalent to the admin panel in Django, but I do enjoy using this cool rails plugin:

http://github.com/neerajdotname/admin_data

I am not the developer but I do use it for most of my projects. Basically just presents an easy way to view and modify the data in your tables using a slick web interface and it requires basically no setup beyond the install.
I'm not arguing that everyone is equal.

What I am saying is that it is almost but not quite discrimination. I can't control with total fidelity what school I get in no matter how good a student I might be -- ie, if I'm good enough to go to MIT I can go to MIT. They can't let in anyone who is good enough to go to MIT because there is only so much space. And besides, I don't have the money to go there nor did I have the money for the right college prep school[1]. I got handed some cards by life that meant I had to slowly work through a state university at my own cost.

I'm not mad at you or people who went to Ivy league schools, it's just that I get a little tired of people immediately shutting me out (parties, interviews, life in general) as soon as I mention that I went to some Unknown State university. Maybe it's just a SV thing but it gets old. Really old. So when I see it in a job posting I can't help but to take it personally. It's something you'll never have to worry about since you yourself are an MIT student.

I realize that they don't have to make me happy and they're free to hire from whatever school but they don't have to say it out-loud.

1 - Whether that prep school was an actual school or it was a parent who could stay at home screeching into the ears of their kids to motivate them or both, it means that they had the money for that school or one parent could stay home.
FTA: "Today, the world has changed. Displays are made of pixels but they all have, or can cheaply add, a “frame buffer” — memory containing the current image. Refresh of pixels that are not changing need not be done on any particular schedule. We usually want to be able to change only some pixels very quickly. Even in video we only rarely change all the pixels at once."

The trouble is, the system has to be designed to accommodate the worst case. "Usually" and "rarely" are of no more use in video than they are in realtime 3D graphics.
Searching "go programming language" (without the quotes in the search) seems to work for me.
might be influenced from this http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/limbo.html
I had the exact same experience recently while writing a dynamic programming simulation in Python. The naive (and elegant) solution to the problem consists of a 20-line recursive function which took me about an hour to write. Unfortunately function calls are very expensive in Python, and I my sim required a couple billion of them, so I started searching for ways to eliminate the recursion. 3 weeks and a deep foray into Numpy later and I had it.

The second implementation is about the same length and replaces all of the simplicity of the recursive solution with a bunch of five-dimensional arrays. Never before did I have to think as deeply about vectorized functions, array broadcasting, dimension matching, etc. The non-recursive version is about an order of magnitude faster, and what's better, using the numpy operators means nearly all of the processing is offloaded into low-level C routines, so the Python overhead is effectively nil. On the downside the code is extremely difficult to follow now... trying to visualize what's going on in 5 dimensions is a real pain.
import "fmt"

what advantages this have over

import fmt

that a new language is choosing this sytax?
It keeps the grammar simple, for one.
This is why the best bet for people like us is to found our own startup. It is easier to please the customers than the gatekeepers. It has always been that way and always will be. Remove the proxies and profit. IMHO it is not productive to rant about people looking for credentials. They are just trying to reduce their search space.
"abc" + "def"

a + d = e (1 + 4 = 5 = e)
b + e = g (2 + 5 = 7 = g)
c + f = i (3 + 6 = 9 = i)

I think he was making a joke about how + with strings doesn't necessarily mean string concatenation.
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This usage arises, of course, from Columbus's designation of the persons he encountered when he sailed to the New World,

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1966/does-indian-de...

and from mapmaker Martin Waldseemueller's labeling of an early map of the territories that Columbus and other Europeans had explored.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/951/why-was-america...

But while I can't comment on what speakers of Amazonian Brazilian Portuguese call various kinds of people, I can point out that the term "American" used in the United States refers to anyone in America, not just the European-descended people in America.
They've done tech talks and the like on it, but I'd strongly recommend anyone intending to write software to read this: http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

This topic is mostly section 3.3, but there's a lot to test.
Google to Let Users Post Bio Notes on Name Search Pages
No, not at all. I'd love for this not to be a concern, but unfortunately it turns out that it is. The administrators are responsible for ensuring that the students at the school are safe. Given the existence of bullies and the inability of the school to hire enough administrators to be everywhere at once, they need some other method for keeping students safe. Here are a few options:

1) Find some way to convince bullies to stop bullying and realize how stupid they are.

2) Cameras everywhere and punish people for beating up other kids.

3) Find out what provokes bullies and prevent that from happening.

4) Do nothing.

#1 probably can't be done quickly.

#2 might be reasonable but would be an invasion of privacy in some ways. this is another solution that deserves debate.

#3 is what the schools are doing.

#4 is unacceptable to many parents

So, if you are going to suggest that the school's policy is bad, you must either pick one of the 4 above or suggest a new option. There might well be a better option! If you have one, please please please put it up here.

So, I ask you, what should the schools do?
Nope, that's still more.
I sort of think the same about the Indians. You know, some people came to India and called themselves Indians. And the natives then became slaves.
(汗

There's a link on the right side, but you're right -- that's not very user friendly. laugh I'll put that at the top of my "To Fix" issues. ;)
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Absolutely. The article glosses over the other security features that are required to create a card number that would pass the extensive authorization process in the card networks. The information in the article is already in the public domain, so the 'exposure' doesn't increase fraud risk to anyone other than the companies offering 'free trials' for merely providing a number that passes a checksum test.

The amount of security in a particular system is typically proportional to the value of what is being secured. If the companies using a mere checksum test thought the process needed to be more secure they could do a real authorization against the number.
My twitter doesn't have this retweet functionality. I guess they haven't launched that feature yet?
A safety concern is anything that risks the safety of people. In schools, its anything that risks the safety of the students.

What you are saying is that in this case there are other concerns (self expression) and those trump safety. Thats a reasonable view. However, the school, and many people, don't believe that the school should prioritize self expression over safety. I'm sure many parents don't feel that they should either.

To say that the school's concern is not legitimate is unrealistic. Safety concerns do practice sexism all the time. Its unfortunate, but true. Most people are more scared of a woman walking home drunk at 2:00 AM than a man doing the same.

Edit: Deleted my last line.
I wonder if Go is what will "replace" Python internally at Google? ( w.r.t. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933493 )
Microsoft lifts GPL code, uses in Microsoft Store tool
Go: new open source programming language from Google
Ask HN: Best Web Language to Learn
Hi everyone, I'm trying to figure out the best web language to learn. My programming roots in Java, but I also know PHP, Objective C, and have dabbled in about everything else(.Net, Ruby, Python, etc.). I have about a month break coming up and have decided to learn a new language. I want something fast and quick to develop in. I've been looking at learning DJango framework or Cappuchino, but I'm not sure where to go. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Oh, element-wise addition. Somehow I didn't figure that out. Thanks.
"14 lines of code": Firefox says: 2.3mb download.

I'm sure it's a really nice rapid application development platform, but come on! I was ready for some serious wizardry. And, I leave disappointed. Oh well.
Interesting, I suppose I saw the stupidity of the error message and extrapolated. Thanks for the clarification.
Apparently, Go style is to use tabs (see go-mode.el). This is not Pythonic.
E = mc^2 is not an approximation. What are you referring to?