skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, for our site, tinyarro.ws, all URLs are all automatically previewed so you have a chance to decide. So if you can get over clicking silly unicode URLs, you should feel more comfortable. http://➔.ws/this

I'm a big fan of informed consent, and I don't understand why the other URL shrinkers don't do opt-out previewing rather than requiring people to track down some mysterious preview cookie or preview URL syntax.
Or, the tech industry is subject to its own efficiency; a poetic justice of sorts.
Can the late Steven Jay Gould be a hack and yet still have accurate ideas about some scientific issues? If I only believed statements by people who were absolutely above reproach, I wouldn't believe much.
Is this a PR piece created by the company that sells and manages the SAT?
I still meet people, both in real life and most recently in #startups, who don't use any sort of 3rd-party libraries or frameworks; they hand-code everything. I've been trying to explain for years how completely ridiculous that is for 95% of use cases, but still people fight me.

This is a great example of taking a bunch of existing tools and data then stringing them together to create something new. Granted, we don't have "The next Google" here (whatever that means), but it seems like people who still roll their own everything rationalize it by saying things like "it makes it more flexible" or "blah isn't scalable enough" or "I don't really like the conventions".

These are all pretty stupid reasons. Chances are, you're not going to need that flexibility anyway; if you can't name a half dozen things X doesn't do that you need it to, just use it. You probably won't ever have to worry about scaling, so forget it. And if those conventions save hundreds of hours, who cares?

We have numerous languages now, Python especially, where there is probably a library for anything you need to do. There might even be 3rd-party APIs for all the data you need. Embrace the work that others are doing for you: stop coding and start stealing!
i don't think it's that ridiculous. if i'm a recruiter for a consulting company (or any type of company), i want to know if you're smart. i can figure it out by talking to you, but that's limited by your ability to bullshit and my ability to figure it out. SAT scores can give them a little more information about you.

only stupid recruiters hire based primarily on SAT scores. It's silly to say that SAT scores should have zero influence. if you were hiring and saw two identical candidates (or more realistically, two candidates that, considering everything else, you thought were equally qualified), would you choose the one with the better SAT score, or flip a coin? Asking for SAT scores only takes 5 seconds.
Exactly. I consume all my twitter followees by RSS.

It's a bit of a weird article. He's conflating notification mechanism with social network. What does it mean to kill RSS? Every blogger now uses a tweet widget instead of RSS?
This is why I implemented url following on the server in Mibbit...

Having someone throw you a shortened url on IRC is a pain, so now the Mibbit server follows it, and sends over the destination URL, which shows when you hover over the shortened URL.

Means a few less surprises ;)

I've seen a couple of other sites do something similar, although it's usually an (expand) thing you have to click.
Go to Berkeley. The weather is better. The town is cooler. It's close to the ocean. And the mountains. There are cuter asian girls (and better looking men.) The school itself is ranked higher... in every subject. It's the best public university in the country.

No matter what your major, it's a university everyone in the WORLD has heard of before. You are therefore considered smart for going there even if you major in Psychology. UIUC is only known in Illinois and some engineering circles.

Nobody goes to Berkeley and thinks "I should have gone to UIUC." But they do wonder the other way around.

(I went to university in the midwest and moved to Berkeley after I graduated, and then kicked myself for not even trying to go to Berkeley or Stanford.)
But what if you want to get a low-paying entry-level job that will require you to live in India? Then you need high test scores!

(That's what I got out of the article, anyway.)
you're solving a problem you made. want a medal?
Our interns aren't "billable", but there's always plenty of work to be done to support the people doing billable work. Last year, one of our UIC interns wrote (in what I believe to be his first ever actual start-to-finish "program") a programmable symbolic process debugger for OS X, in Ruby:

http://bit.ly/13kxv3

Nobody paid us to do that, but that debugger work is now Ragweed, our house debugger, and we've got it working under Win32, Linux, and a couple embedded platforms. It's extremely useful. And we scored an excellent blog post out of it.

(Timur works for us full-time now, of course).

I don't have to compromise the work we deliver for our clients to put interns on useful projects. And we're a special case: we do hard core programming work on a billable basis. Most of the companies people talk about on HN don't have that problem. There's a million useful things an intern can do without jeopardizing product quality.
I am slightly interested in finance, mainly quantitative trading. While looking into the field, I found that the more selective banks and hedge funds asked for SAT scores.

I got the impression that the only companies that really care about SAT scores are the more prestigious ones, and those generally used it as a filter. If HR is interviewing top students from the ivies or MIT, I doubt a score at or above the 95% would be extremely impressive. I'd be surprised if most companies cared.

I did find one article talking about hiring the link between SAT scores and a fund manager's annual returns.http://www.quantnet.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1891

I have put test scores on my resume. I did decently well, so so my scores show some indication of intelligence. I don't really think most companies are very impressed by high SAT scores though. But I would doubt people would see a decent SAT score on a resume as a negative, and some companies care about SAT scores.
That's like saying that ruby is probably as fast as c because the interpreter is written in c.

http://tinyurl.com/daom93 - shootout numbers rhino v. java
Ask HN: Who is going to Startup Weekend San Francisco?
i'm going.
nail on the head
We didn't make the problem. We're just having fun with silly URL hacks and giving people something fun to show their friends. While we're at it, we're trying to do it the best way we know how.
No -- you didn't say anything about education level, which is tangential to GPA. What you said is "judging on the basis of GPA alone is class discrimination. Poor people don't stand a fighting chance." In other words, if you're poor, you don't stand a chance of (i.e. are prevented from) being able to achieve a high GPA. My experience says differently.

I've read one of Gladwell's other books, and I think he makes the same mistake you are making. A correlation does not necessarily imply "discrimination" or that the odds can't be overcome. For instance, women have higher GPAs than men, on average. That doesn't mean that using GPA as an indicator of performance discriminates against males. It might mean that males might need to work harder or do something a bit differently in order to get the same GPA.

In the end, my admittedly subjective take is that the biggest factor is individual motivation. We all have our setbacks and obstacles to overcome, but that's just the craps of life. I can verify, however, that it is indeed possible to go from moving out of your house at 16 with no money to graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford (not me, but someone very close to me). Difficult, yes... but it shows that there is almost always a "fighting chance."
Human evolution is over. I predict that in less than a century, having genetically unedited children will be viewed as an act near in its savageness to cannibalism or at the very least public defecation. At any rate, the necessary technology will appear long before the glacially slow natural evolution has a chance to substantially change us. Assuming the familiar nuclear/bioengineered plaugue apocalypse doesn't get us first.
The more it leaves the nerd world, I'm starting to think that Twitter should rename oAuth to Twitter Connect, or something along those lines.
In most places, the only high-speed internet ISPs are cable companies. So, ultimately the cable companies are in control over distribution of video--including internet video from Hulu and similar sites.

Right now I can get all the TV content I want OTA (yes, using an antenna) or over the internet except for HBO. Accordingly, I don't subscribe to cable. But, that will change as soon as my ISP (a cable company) starts capping my internet access. Then I will have to start paying a cable company to get my favorite shows. For example, Time Warner is taking the lead with internet-video-killing caps of 40GB/month. That's less than 15 minutes of HD video a day.

So, regarldess of what you think of the cable technology, the cable companies seem to be firmly in control of residential video distribution. Whenever they want, they will crank up the price until cable looks cheap. That is exactly what the wireless phone companies did with text messaging; the price of a text message used to be borderline bearable; now, they are so expensive that $5+ messaging bundles are relatively affordable.
Good comeback.
There's always the choice not to participate in some activity.
My theory is based on personal desire, and some early and very fake images of the iPhone 3G: video calling. A major desire for many users has been the ability to record video. If they give the chance to record it, they would also be pressured to let you send it to friends via email. But why stop there? Why not add a front facing camera and let users video call, simultaneously using their data connection and their mobile minutes?

Of course, these may once again prove to be pipe dreams...
Wow, now that I'm looking at the logs for the blog post, I'm seeing even more problems.

This is awesome: http://go2.me/36W

Guh
Agreed. Headlines are not supposed to editorialize. The HN editors should fix this one.
Well, it's different information. It is nice to know what it's about, but I'd rather read a random news.ycombinator link than a random article titled "Do Tiny URLs Suck".
One reason other URL shrinkers don't do opt-out previewing is because it defeats the purpose of the shrinker being convinient. For instance, I use bit.ly's plugin in my Gmail inbox. In two clicks, my URL is shrunk and pasted wherever I want it. If I had an automatic preview of the page, it would take longer to load, making the shrinking process less convenient.
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=545688
What does "finished" mean, with an operating system?

You can install and run HURD today, including X. It doesn't support as much out-of-the-box as Linux does (I've heard about half of Debian), but it's certainly a lot further along than Linux was 10 years ago.

Is Linux "finished"? What set of features makes it "finished"?
neat idea - but I open links and as they load look elsewhere - meaning I entirely miss your inbetween page.
silly - Allen Stern must be desperate for content.
thats a horrific web service.

Whats the solution for these services?

Always embed the shortened url domain in the shortened url? eg: http://is.gd/omgponi/4d

de-centralize it so sites can either a) easily provide services to shrink urls within their code base, or b) just use shorter url maps

wait for google/big corp to offer a solution that you "know" won't die tomorrow.
descriptive doesn't help with malicious intent
Ask HN: Password managers
HN is a security savvy crowd that, I assume, does not like to reuse the same password on multiple sites of dubious security. What software do you use to manage the proliferation of passwords, user id's, and email addresses you have to give out to register on so many websites? Do you synchronize these across multiple browsers/boxes?

Is there market opportunity for a piece of new password management software? What features aren't there that should be?
It's just like RSS! But worse!
Besides any ethical considerations about class-discrimination, unpaid internships are illegal unless the intern gets class credit, because it is a violation of minimum wage laws. Calling a job an "unpaid internship" does not revoke the minimum wage laws. However, these laws are not enforced, which results in more and more companies offering unpaid internships...
Wow. You are very passionate about this aren't you? (I'm not being sarcastic, I really admire you for voicing this).

I guess I just don't see this practice as unethical because if I look at the whole spectrum of unethical behaviors, this seems very minor to me. Does that make it excusable? Probably not. But to me this is just about acquiring a skill which I previously did not have. It's not about recognition or compensation.

But even still, I fail to see what my employers are doing wrong. You will be compensated for the skills you bring to the company and what you produce. And if you're middle aged with a family to support you could get a paid job there if you had the skills. If not, you could apply for the unpaid internship.

But nothing bars you from getting hired, so that's why I don't view it as an injustice. At the end of the day, its a choice, and if you didn't like the terms, you are perfectly free to go somewhere else.
And still we look around and all but one OS we use today are Unix-like operating systems... And the one that's not is a security nightmare sending almost all the spam and running each every botnet in existence.

Is _this_ the best we can do?
How can you say that paid search traffic converts less than
organic search traffic? The beauty of paid search traffic is being able to target the RIGHT keywords for the RIGHT customer and the RIGHT time.

It is inherently wrong to say paid search traffic converts worse than organic search traffic because different variables will change the outcome (conversion rate). Those variables can be keywords, negative keywords, type of keyword matching, ad copy, time of day, landing page, geography, industry, product. I can change these variables and make the paid traffic convert poorly compared to the organic visitors. I can also tweak these variables and have my paid traffic converting much better than organic traffic!

What is my point? The data that you used to draw your conclusion, that organic is better than paid, was simply data from a poorly converting paid search campaign. Not to worry though, most paid search campaigns are full of flaws because a lack of understanding of the Adwords system.

Furthermore, Google does not want me to "believe" anything. I have websites that rank organically AND which receive paid search traffic (Google). I have my own data to draw conclusions.
I am a software security consultant and developer, and I've got to say my favorite is PasswordSafe, originally written by Bruce Schneier, it's now open source and available on sourceforge. It's secure, lightweight, easy to use and can be installed on a thumbdrive for portability. http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/
This is a great interview. Specially since it is very clear about the shortcomings of the Ruby runtime.

Someone should port Rails to Scala :-)
methink mine was in the 1000 range, zomg i'm doomed!
I am not sure what your question is.

Is there a problem with his money specifically?

Unfortunately, I do need money to launch and achieve profitability. Search is funny like that. Rich Skrenta, founder of the Blekko search engine, made a big deal out of needing only $5M: “you don’t need a million servers and half of the phd’s in the field to build a search app. It takes 20 people and $5M of hardware…if you know what you’re doing.”

$5M might be excessive for my tool, but $0 just won't cut it.
Does it matter? All it's doing is providing yet another method of sydication. Roll with it.
Traffic estimates would be a good start.
How can I estimate traffic?
Yes, though not for the stated reasons:

Rob Pike: "We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date."

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/11532...

And, elsewhere, by others:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc3...

"You can say the burden is on us old-timers to tell you what's missing or we shouldn't be whining. But I don't see it that way. I see the burden is on the victors, who have the resources and who claim their way is better, to show us that they won for good reason."
HN shouldn't accept URLs that have been posted. I almost reposted another article too.
Alright. You got me. I shouldn't have made such a strong statement, but I think it's safe to say that you would atleast be put at a pretty big disadvantage. But you're right in that wherever there is a will, there is a way.
After digging out my books, I'm dead wrong.

Commendable of you to say that here on HN. That's a good example, one I will have to follow whenever occasion demands.

I had thought that there was some supporting research for the idea that cognitive tests are a reasonably well validated job screen, but I didn't have references at hand, so I'm glad you went to the trouble to look it up.
I removed about 1300 friends a couple of months before that campaign ran. I could have had a year's worth of whoppers!
You can't, not accurately. Everyone gets this wrong regardless of whether the business succeeds or fails.

From your post it sounds like webmasters with "search boxes" are the ones who install this. So first estimate how many of these there are and what their traffic is. Then make up a nice-sounding rate for market share growth and plot it.

That's really as far as anyone can tell you. You are the one with the most information. That process is useful because it forces you to really think about how your cool tech will actually operate in the real world.

Why did your advisors tell you to go after dumb money first? What was their reasoning? There is a problem with "dumb" money -- it's not as useful as "smart" money. They can't do anything else to help you (contacts, expertise, advice) except write a check.
I think the kill switch is intended for a martial law scenario, where lawsuits and the like will be irrelevant.
HAHA it's not like that, she's like one of the most well-connected 18 year olds on the west coast and I could be a part of a startup with her...

but thanks for the insight, exactly what my dad told me. ;_;
I always wondered what scenario I would have to revoke access. Thanks for the going rogue example. Any instance where that's happened to date?
How many do you think they'll round up? If I was fresh out of college and didn't need any money I'd just start my own and hang out at the meetups instead of working for free for someone who may or may not have a clue.
Agreed, I've seen jobs postings and had inquiries, and not entry-level, where a requirement is a 3.5+ GPA. GPA is like IQ in that employers can't ask for it. But on the other hand if you don't volunteer it (and it's 3.5+), they don't have to hire you, either.
Magical hits it on the head, except not the way you think. Magical thinking is what you can't do and be a good hacker. Magical thinking won't stop you from being a good business person with good instincts for opportunities who understands the bottom line, or from being a great sales guy who can close faster than a bank at 4.

The subset of hackers who can learn "business" is greater than the subset of business people who can be hackers because the particular style of thinking needed to succeed as a hacker has a unique rigor and need for persistence, and is comparatively rare.

This is true for comparing any less common skill to a more common one. The subset of NFL quarterbacks who could be good programmers is surely proportionally greater than the subset of programmers who could be NFL quarterbacks.

It isn't all about arrogance (although I don't deny arrogance is a factor).
Hosting: Rackspace, EngineYard, Slicehost
SCM: GitHub (included with EY)
Project Management: Basecamp
Storage: AWS S3
Merchant: PayPal and BrainTree
VoiceMail: GotVMail
Email: CampaignMonitor
I've been using Roboform but I'll definitely be checking that one out - thanks.
Ron Garret: How knowing Lisp destroyed my programming career.
Which One Better, N97 or iPhone
Freshbooks, Jotform, CampaignMonitor, Paypal
For anything not ultra secure (bank/paypal/email/etc.), I remember a main password and then use a bookmarklet that creates different individual passwords that work for each website. The advantage of this is that I don't have to do any synchronization at all, and I can access any website on any computer.

I really can't believe this hasn't caught on as a password solution, even among the geeks I know; it has all the advantages of a password manager without the disadvantages.

http://supergenpass.com/
As with others, I don't get my RSS-level news from Twitter RSS-bots. But I have stopped checking RSS as often since I became pretty active on Twitter.

One of my side reasons for reading a ton of RSS feeds was entertainment, getting a feel for what's new and exciting in the world. When I get that information through Twitter in a faster, easier-to-digest form, why would I trawl through RSS feeds? Hence why I don't.

There are still some sites worth checking on a daily or near-daily basis, and I usually just read them in a browser.

However, none of this means the format's dead, just that RSS as a means of information aggregation might be slightly ill.
It's not so much that there's a difference in the types of people as in the types of knowledge. Business has a large overlap with common sense. At least, the kind of business you need to understand in a startup does. Whereas hacking is a pretty specialized skill. So a hacker who needs to do something business related faces a nice smooth learning curve, whereas a non-hacker business person who needs to get a technical problem solved faces a step function.
Find something in a similar field and look at theirs?
The subset of hackers who can learn "business" is greater than the subset of business people who can be hackers

This is a common notion but after years of working in the software business I'm not convinced it is true at all. The successful biz guys I've known could easily learn some subset of programming. Most of the programmers I've known could not be a successful business person if their lives depended on it. YMMV.
Is it worth the $40,000 debt x 4? $160,000...
Heh, I recently blogged about a system I came up with to manage this, using a ruby password generator that was linked on HN and storing the results in a dropbox directory. Super super insecure but kinda fun to think through. http://digg.com/u19L9

I don't actually use that system though, I generally use the same user id and generate the password using a formula based on the website I'm registering at and other mysterious factors.
When my credit card expired, Linode deactivated my account and never responded to my emails after that. If I had data that I needed on that machine, I would've lost it forever.

They're cheap, so I still use them for personal projects, but personally, I'd never trust my business with them.

Just another data point.
Is failure really that bad?
Used to pay for basecamp. Then switched to Dropbox.
Rand wasn't an anarchocapitalist.
This is the first detailed account I've read of how one would incorporate in the US (though I'm aware it's state-specific). Suddenly the red tape and costs associated with incorporating in the UK seem less terrifying in comparison.
You can't block because the referer header info isn't from the url shortener. As they usually do 30x redirects.
Business is a broad arena, but if you were to narrow it down to "sales" I might agree with you.
Seems like something that could be fairly easily solved by proposing an extension to the DNS spec - making it ICANN operated public infrastructure might not be a good thing, though but it seems right from a technology perspective.