skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that this Social Proof is one of the most important factors we take under consideration, also in the internet - how often do you check google search results that are not on one of the first three pages?

And in this case it is also not hard to show that such behaviour is not a winning strategy, if you want to maximalize your chance to make the best choice. But still it seems to be a winning strategy, if you want to avoid making the worst one.

I think the catch here is that people tend to think that they in fact want to make best choices and not just avoid the worst ones.
Yes, if if, isomorphic, if, etc. The fact is you need to invent a whole pile of stuff that was nowhere on the horizon between 1200 and 1270 to draw a Mandelbrot set. And that's plainly obvious to anyone with the most superficial knowledge of the history of maths.
> They have some surprising statistics such as 90% of students work for free and 60% say the experience is not beneficial

That is indeed surprising. Why would the 60% for whom the experience isn't beneficial offer to work for free? I'm afraid you can't outlaw people working against their own best interest (or statistics misrepresenting them).

And the same goes for outlawing internships. If somebody wants to do grunt-work for free "to get a foot in the door" or whatever, I think they're for the most part stupid, but who am I to stop them?

Also, where is the line between unpaid intern and volunteering? Why is it OK for me to work 3x8 hour shifts at a festival for a free ticket when it's not OK for a student to work afternoons at CoolCo Inc. which, when on the resume, will open doors?
Nice... :)

Would be interesting to hear how your age affected (or didn't affect) your YC experience sometime.
Microsoft Finds its Innovation Mojo
I'm not advocating not getting a good night's sleep. In fact, my article doesn't even talk about whether you should implement monophasic, or biphasic, or polyphasic sleep, or some other creative variant. This article is about how to nap, not whether you should nap or at what time of the day you should nap (and whether you should let it affect your sleep).
Most people don't have a superficial knowledge of the history of maths, apart from perhaps the Greeks doing geometry and Roman numerals not having 0. Many people are surprised to find out that Arabic numerals are Arabic! (Yes yes, Hindu too, but that only drives home the point.)
I remember the time when bugged or, worse, malware-carrying emails were impossible. I even wrote an article on e-mail viruses circa 96.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making this too possible (by bundling HTML and scriptable Word processing into mail viewers)...
Better answer: go to work at a slightly larger startup, one that'll legitimately hire you in a non-technical role for a real (although likely petite) salary. Customer support or account management. Then, work your ass off. Take all the responsibility you can grab. Try to transition yourself into product management, and learn enough about how your product works to get the respect of the developers. Make a couple of job moves to get product positions with more responsibility, and eventually become a product-oriented founder with some of the developers you worked with.

I can tell you from personal experience that that route's worked at least once, and you get paid the entire time. Of course, I wasn't planning any of the above - I just dropped out of my grad program and needed to eat - and it took years. In my experience entrepreneurial non-technical undergrads who 'love startups' have no idea whether they love startups or not - instead, they're in love with the idea of founding a company and are rather impatient about it.
Social Proof is one of the most important automatisms we use everyday. Yet I don't agree that it makes sense to use it to avoid making worst decisions.

Last weeks of Bull market on stock exchange is the best example of the situation where people follow Social Proof and at the same time they are making worst possible thing (buying overpriced stock).
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
Crazy Little Thing Called Love, The Song Undone By Tim Urban, The song Crazy little thing called love was originally sung by the famous band Queen with the vocals as Freddie Mercury
You can only do it on the index, the query from the index will return in the sort order. You have to be very careful in your index and query design to make this work.

For example if your index is (username, date_posted) then you can do something like

SELECT * FROM table WHERE username='user' ORDER BY date_posted

but if you do

SELECT * FROM table WHERE username IN ('user','user2') ORDER BY date_posted

then it will need a temporary table.

You could change your index to (date_posted, username) to make it work, but then it will be slow when querying a small percent of the users.
I think the "problem" is compared to some of the quality ideas in the past (dropbox, reddit etc.) a lot of this round seems a bit trivial.

I'm pretty sure a couple of them, too, will bottom out quite quickly because they either don't appear to fit their market or understand it.

fnid2 is being silly in latter posts though; interestingly he trivialized/picked holes in the ones I think might do ok and sort of passed over the ones I think have major flaws.
Rebuttal to aforementioned article: http://www.puredoxyk.com/index.php/2006/11/01/an-attack-on-p...
Interview with Former White House CIO Theresa Payton
Can Microsoft really build a better browser?
"I wanted an easier way to compress my files that didn’t involve mucking about on the command line or uploading all my images to some server far away via a crappy flash application".

And this is why a 100% cloud future is unlikely to actually happen. Local apps not only use local and cheap computing power, but are often easier and more flexible to use.
Apple has usually been pretty good with labour costs in my experience. Recently, they didn't even charge us for labour when the hard drive on our iMac failed.

EDIT: They also accidentally scratched the display while repairing it, so they replace that for free. Win!
I was under the impression that PNG/Gif/JPEG are already in compressed form. Your examples also do not show achieving any significant reduction in image size.
Microsoft’s (desperate) open source love affair
Five Things Students Need to Travel Abroad Safely
With summer vacation rapidly approaching, if you’re like many students, you’re pondering the possibility of traveling during the extended break between semesters.
One question about admission system and rejection
While reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215182 something poped into my head.

Ok I have this question which I have been throwing at people for a long time, lets give it a shot here

"Lets assume that the proposition that someone who has higher marks in JEE or AIEEE or the state level entrance exam is better off than someone who scored below the even the cut off mark. (Even though most of them are just rote learners) You give him or her a chance to study under best university be it IIT , NIT or BITS. They know they are better and just go through the motions for four years. That explains the lacking culture of undergraduate research in any of those institutes.

Now on the other hand we have the Non-<good university> student. Studying under a state level university. Not one of the best even in his/her state. But as he didn't have the privilege of IIT, they try to educate themself more. They hate there studies, but love actually engineering.

Four years pass, we have a IIT graduate who just know what he has been taught in class. Never tried anything on there own and on the other hand we have a normal guy the lesser mortal who has been busting his/her ass for four years trying to learn.

Take your pick who will you employ?"
One question about admission system and rejection
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1215456
My parents teach astronomy to kids - and the #1 favourite question is about Pluto and why it's not a planet.

And usually one kid will try and explain at length why it still is :)
It's an interesting dilemma.

One one side what he does is obviously wrong. On the other side what fantastic skills.

With regards to the people of Austria I am pretty sure that the star wasn't made without exploiting other people.

Things like these are not so black and white.

That story is a film worthy.
Yoga: The Future of Yoga
Interesting, that you would attribute "righteous Robin Hood ethics" to my post. Not so. Read what I wrote.

They were stronger than him in the sense that they had more resources than he did. That they failed to utilize those in an efficient manner is another matter altogether.

Nor did I say that stealing from a bank is just, or that it did not impact anyone.

Framing the brinks guy? Was the man charged or convicted? No. Therefore, no frame.

Withdrawing from thousands of cards, thereby circumventing the security of financial institutions (who have billions available to them) qualifies as taking on stronger forces.

Stealing that jewel is another instance of that.

Nor did I say that he inflicted no harm on anyone.

Please, quote me on what I wrote, not what you fantasized and imagined I wrote.

How ridiculous, one states something, and here comes someone with deficient reading skills and whips up a slew of crap that has no bearing on what I stated.

Once again, go ahead, quote me on what I wrote. If I wanted to express the things you claim I did, I could have and can do so quite explicitly and clearly.
It's also worth considering that most big sites have more web servers than MySQL servers, and I'm sure Digg is in that boat as well. Doing your sorts on 20 front end nodes instead of 2-4 MySQL servers is obviously going to help improve performance and scaling of your MySQL servers.
I live in Japan now. Not exactly sane but at least it's civilized. ;-)

But look at the bright side. You can live very well in Brazil if you're a good developer.

(Me mande email se quiser)
what about avro ? http://hadoop.apache.org/avro/

"pip install avro"
NASA Posters
An appeal for unremarkable women
I applied to ten Australian Universities that looked interesting without much real knowledge of their relative prestige. I got rejected by 8. The one I went to turned out to be the consistent no. 1 in the country. Until about my third year, I dismissed all of this as insider nonsense assuming that every Uni says this about themselves.

Admittedly, I don't think they really knew what to make of my application being one of presumable very applicants with those qualifications. In my case, it probably was close to random.
It depends on the file. Larger png files can easily get a 20% decrease.

PNG and JPEG already compress the image, but the file format can be compressed still by removing extra data added by for example Photoshop.
And the software equivalent of the switch cover, the confirmation dialog ...

(which, coming to think of it, works the opposite way - instead of "enable, activate", it's "activate, confirm")
Yes they are but they can all be further losslessly compressed (even JPEG) than the output you'd traditionally get from an image editor.

This has become more well-known than it has in the past, so perhaps there is less low-hanging fruit, but it's still a worthy part of your optimisation routine.
Europe to call for ACTA to be made public
find me a successful person who has never been rejected from something important to them... :)
"I'm afraid you can't outlaw people working against their own best interest..."

Yes, you can, sadly. Minimum wage laws do exactly this. If you enact a minimum wage of X, some of the people who make less than X have their wages increase to X, and some get laid off. Or, less dramatically, they find it harder to get a job because their labor isn't actually worth X.

Ostensibly, this is balanced out by the benefit to the people who do find work, but it's indisputable that the downside does exist. If it didn't, it begs the question of why we shouldn't raise minimum wage another dollar, then another, ad infinitum until we're all millionaires.

The reason interns are de facto excluded from the laws is that they're generally not the class of people the laws are meant to protect. They're young people with a reasonable expectation of future earnings significantly above the minimum wage, not unskilled adults that might be poor forever. In the US, some states even carve out exceptions to minimum wage laws for teenagers working summer jobs for this same reason.
I can tell what you're thinking. Did he click Send or Save Now? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement of composing that angry email, I kind of lost track myself. Good thing we can easily undo a sent mail! Oh wait, we totally can't. Consider my seat, or at least that particular rash email, ejected.

If you ever wished you could undo that sent email, there's an "Undo Send" feature in Gmail Labs which you can enable.
Metamorphosis of the Japanese female student
Not really. Your skills and what you apply said skills to don't overlap.

What's a dilemma is that we only hear about these people when they apply their skills to evil. If he'd done a career in bank security, it's very likely we'd never have heard a word about what he did.

> I am pretty sure that the star wasn't made without exploiting other people

Sure, that's why it belongs to, and should belong to, the austrian people.

> That story is a film worthy.

Catch me if You Can II: The Austrian Job :)
Security guard ogling a girl "naked" in body scanner
D&T Charms
Everything made from D&T Charms is handmade and creatively crafted with lots of love. A great deal of thought, hardwork, energy, and love goes into every piece that is created.
Since Apple is most likely to make money off AppleCare, it means that it's probably not worth it. If there's a 50% chance your MacBook breaks and it's worth $1000 you're worse off when you insure it if your insurance premium is above $500. The AppleCare premium includes their profit and is thus above the expected value. Do note, this only applies to goods where you have the means to buy a replacement. If you can't afford a new MacBook (and need one to make a living), insure it. Health care as well, the odds of contracting a serious illness in your twenties are pretty slim but you better insure against it because you can't pay for it if you do get ill. In a similar fashion governments don't need to insure their buildings against fires. They have the means to rebuild, insuring would cost more.
"It's intended to improve readability when used properly."

Which was the point of my poorly worded comment on the post. I presented a survey of Clojure's "mini-languages" features without usage context. I wasn't trying to give a run-down of best-practices, so if the post came off as my trying to do so then I failed.

Thanks for providing some perspective.
It seems to me that the SAT results of the applicants are so good, they can't only use SAT results to select students.

When Stanford rejected me for undergrad years ago, they essentially said not to feel so bad because thousands of those who were rejected were valedictorians, had perfect or near perfect SAT scores, etc..
Works only for emails sent to other gmail addresses, I guess?
Hacker News clone for for hi tech entrepreneurs like us
You don't live in the US and your startup doesn't base in Silicon Valley? You have a passion, an idea, but think you don't have enough support from your community? well, it could be harsh for you, for people like us, but the beautiful part is we can change that, and this is the first step, we can form a community for people like us, to share thoughts and ideas as well as struggles in your life as an entrepreneur and we can support each other. we can survive and succeed in harsh environments and we will. It's always better when we're together
Why more bank regulation is not the answer
A Short Guide To Open-Source And Similar Licenses
You don't live in the US and your startup doesn't base in Silicon Valley? You have a passion, an idea, but think you don't have enough support from your community? well, it could be harsh for you, for people like us, but the beautiful part is we can change that, and this is the first step, we can form a community for people like us, to share thoughts and ideas as well as struggles in your life as an entrepreneur and we can support each other. we can survive and succeed in harsh environments and we will. It's always better when we're together
Wow, I rarely read non-technical stories online. I usually just skim and move on but this one I read every word. What is it about this type of story that is so intriguing? I guess I just figured this type of thing only happens in movies.
It used to be easier but since the Neufeld memo that came out a few months ago it has gotten harder. More details here: http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.asp...

Essentially, this requires that you prove Employer-Employee distinction. (Harder to do as a Founder). Something that you can support in the meanwhile is http://startupvisa.com

It won't solve your immediate need however.

I'd agree with most of the other comments here with your best bet is to consult with an attorney.
Recruitment companies use automated CV parsing software to extract structured data (contact details, employment/education histories, coded skills based on keywords in your CV, etc, etc) from all kinds of CV formats, including PDF.

From that structured data, they can recreate your CV content in their house style, even if it was originally a PDF.

(My employer is a market leader in this area, although 90%+ CVs I see are Doc files, and we mostly use an automated Word process for stripping contact details from those and adding recruiter's logos.)

Only the smallest recruiters are doing any of this stuff by hand using Word/Acrobat. It's all automated, like a sausage factory.

Anyway, if you make it hard for them to process your CV how they like it, they'll just chuck it. In that case, why bother sending it to recruiters at all? If you need their help, you need to play by their rules.
It just delays sending for a few seconds I guess. It shows the same orangy notification on top of the page as when you delete a message with a link to undo the send
No, it works for all email addresses. It basically just waits for a few seconds before actually sending.
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx in beta
Coasting uphill is a bad plan
Dependency Injection in Clojure
The video interview would be a lot better if it was recorded at the other end. Let the questions come out half garbled and get the answers in good quality.
Or you could use a good webapp, maybe something like this HTML5 tech demo from Mozilla: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/imageUploader/ (video if you can't run the demo http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/02/an-html5-offline-image-edit... )
For an April fools joke, it really seems interesting. It was a good read, even if not true. Reminds me of "the real rocket car" story - so full of really convincing details you start wondering if it is true or not.
Would content-aware fill be enough? http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/03/caf_in_ps.html

That's so amazing my brain won't stop screaming "FAKE!". :)
Golf Holidays Hot Deals
You will find various hot deals on golf holidays-online , here you will have a lots of destination choices such as Arizon golf, california golf, canada golf, Scotland Golf, Texas Golf and many more, all these packages are at affordable prices.
> How ridiculous, one states something, and here comes someone with deficient reading skills and whips up a slew of crap that has no bearing on what I stated.

So, I'm not going to waste any time getting into an argument with someone with deficient argumentation skills, except to clarify one bit:

> Framing the brinks guy? Was the man charged or convicted? No. Therefore, no frame.

So the police bust into his home, hauled him into custody, scaring the crap out of his wife and children, and searched everything. He was likely suspended from work, pending his clearing. And even after being cleared, there's no guarantee that the suspicion disappeared before the Dan guy was convicted. Not a frame? BS, it's the definition of a frame.
Need cell phone repair?
For all your cell phone repair needs, fastrepair.com would be the best choice.
"Most importantly, know how to answer the following question: 'What do you want to do if I hire you.'"

Great advice, and not just for startups. I think every major internship I had, the hiring manager asked me that. A few times, I had no response and was shuffled around my first few weeks. Eventually, I realized that probably wasn't the best way of going about things.

And all that was at companies with thousands of employees: It's a much more vital question to be prepared to answer (even if you're not asked) at smaller shops.

Great advice.
The terms syntactic-soup and misfeature are yours. I would not describe the features listed that way, nor did my original post. Likewise, with "achievement" -- I provided a survey of, in my view, useful features independent of context and best-practices. There is no particular reason for me to be proud, but I would think that Rich Hickey would deserve to be so since he's the one who has actually "achieved" something great by creating Clojure. You may not see it that way (clearly not), but it's probably best to keep the level of discussion on merits of this feature or that rather than false pretenses.
I'm wondering if this parachuting story has got any corroboration. I searched in German but found nothing. It's a good tale, the stuff of legends, but for all we know he just hid behind a curtain in one of those 1000 rooms until after closing time.
Neat. I've read that it's inspired in ImageOptim (OS X) and I love this app. It can strip up to 10% of the size of a 180k JPG photo and 60% of a tiny PNG. Will try.

There is one feature that I miss though, and it's some results about the compresion. Like "You saved 120KB (12%) of a total of 20 files (1024KB)".
He hadn't won as of 2004: http://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Solace-William-Gardner-Pierce/...
>If you ever wished...

For about 10 seconds after you hit 'send'. I'm assuming all they do is hold the message a bit before starting delivery.
Right, and one without the other doesn't do the trick. You need both auto-gensyms and namespace resolution to ensure hygiene in Clojure macros (cleanly at least). On the other hand as lg mentioned you can intentionally capture using the pattern described. So you get the best of both worlds with the stipulation that the case of intentional capture is a bit more cumbersome.
It bothers me that any alleged expert can say with a straight face that it's ok because the pictures are deleted and people are trained. If your system relies on data being deleted and people not abusing the system, then it is going to fail. It's only a question of how often. Like the old rule about guns that you should only point them at things you intend to shoot, you should only gather data you intend to keep forever, because more than data wants to be free, data wants to be immortal.
> The one I went to turned out to be the consistent no. 1 in the country.

For technology or business?

If the former, RMIT or ANU?
The minimum wage is just outlawing just one instance of people working against their own best interest.

The specific case I was hinting at, was the 60% apparently doing work, receiving no benefit. Either the stat is misleading (likely) or those are people who could play video-games instead of doing this work with no downside.

Otherwise it seems like we agree.
I switched to and finished a BS in MIS from a business school because I wasn't enjoying my CS major. MIS offered me more project work, team building, and business skills. I followed it up with an MS in CS from the eng school at the same university.

Now you know of one person!
But of course :)
What's a dilemma is that we only hear about these people when they apply their skills to evil.

It's a dilemma in the same sense that rain on your wedding day is ironic. You've just written Ms. Morissette's comeback single.