skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This still feels like the sort of statement that comes from having not worked with a (D)VCS that does branching well.

I've worked with both git and hg.

There is no "inherent organizational complexity" in me having a private branch that I share with no one and which is only used for an hour or two while I work on a critical bug fix.

What's the value of this private branch beyond simply committing to the actual branch?

If it's just a bug fix, how big can it be?

If it's more than a bug fix, why am I hiding this code from the team by implementing it on a private, local, non-backed up, non-code-reviewed, non-centralized branch?

Typical branch lifetimes are more like hours or days, rather than weeks or months. There are exceptions, but by-and-large, branches are just used differently in git.

Why wouldn't I just commit this work incrementally to the actual upstream branch, rather than hiding it for "hours or days" from the rest of the team?
I would say he did. He won Digg (which has a considerably larger userbase than Reddit), a sizable portion of Fark, and many other similar social-bookmarking websites.
This pitch wasn't done by Mint - it was a submission for a venture capital case competition where contestants had to analyze a startup. This particular team was from Berkeley. The exit numbers/strategy was devised by investment bankers.
"Your social graph is replicated in your address book"

Your social graph is a self-updating address book. That's the hard to replicate feature of it. Maybe it's taken for granted now, but I grew up in a time when your email address was probably tied to your school or employer, people moved around a lot for school or work, and mobile phones were still seen as a yuppie toy. Your social graph back then was a fragile thing that needed constant maintenance, repairing broken links, etc. If you were busy it was easy not to even notice it had fallen into disrepair. Our parents generation, or their parents, tended to stay local. Gen X/Y, slackers, whatever we were called, had transportation tech before we had communication tech to match.

Facebook solved that problem for 30-somethings so well that today's 20-somethings aren't even aware that it was ever an issue.

"If you have photos on facebook but not backed up elsewhere"

You've missed the point. I have all my own photos backed up (in a way that is guaranteed to last). I don't have every photo of me taken by other people and even if I did - I don't have all the photos that make up a coherent set of that party or that trip - and even if I did, I couldn't browse those photos and click to an up-to-date contact page for that person.

Don't underestimate how deeply FB has embedded itself in people's real lives.
What's for steak today?
In subversion, yes, you don't go through the hassle of creating a branch for all these reasons.

svn cp ^/trunk ^/branches/tentonova-bugfix-x

svn co ^/branches/tentonova ~/branch

I wouldn't call this a technical "hassle", and I'm not sure what organizational issues would arise here.

The vast majority of branches are never seen by more than one developer, they are simply an organizational tool to be used at your discretion without imposing any overhead on anyone unless you have good reason to.

Hiding your development branches on a shared codebase often incurs either communication overhead, or the costs of lack of communication.
Why is hacker news linking to blogspam instead of the original National Geographic website?

The blog is copying Clusterflock which copied kottke which credited biancolo who presumably saw it directly from National Geographic.

http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.h...
And the singular craziest bug is Incompleteness?
If giving to charity includes supporting the local church to promote prop 8 like laws, then I'm not impressed. And given that religious donation make up for 35% of all, it is actually kind of scary.

Countries like France are much less religious so it makes sense that donation there (to religious institutions and in general) are lower, plus, if you take out the few US billionaires there, I wonder if the French actually give less than the Americans. Also note that French and Italians and most European countries pay much more taxes than the Americans do, and donation are not as tax deductible in Europe as in the US. You can also consider taxes to be some kind of charity, in France, minimum wage is huge and people who are unemployed get almost minimum wage like compensation + health care. So you can consider that in Europe, the state takes care of charity while in the US, it is taken care of by the people (with little success for health care).
There's definitely a huge ego thing in distinguishing yourself as a "real programmer" or perhaps a "software engineer," vs. "a <x> who programs" or "a weekend hacker." In other words, a professional vs. an amateur. I don't think it reflects at all on the quality of the work, though, just on the attitude brought to the table.

The professional is going to want to overengineer, more often than not, because surely, with all the vast knowledge and experience they've accumulated, tackling the business's requirements with a quick hack is beneath them when they could do a "real" long-term solution instead! Right?

Coming at it from the "amateur" perspective instead is going to shift the perspective towards the opposite - the underengineered "good enough for now" solution that may ignore fundamental architectural problems until they've blown up into huge monsters.

So for a startup or early-stage product, the amateur attitude is probably the more worthy one, and as the concept establishes itself into more refined forms, professionalism, process, and specialization can take hold.

But the skills could easily be just as good from either angle - you just have to learn to "flip the switch" and use the right attitude for each situation. I've spent a long time obsessing over programming practice, and it's only been recently that I've managed to make myself back off. This conveniently started to happen only as I started pushing myself 100% to build a real, user-facing product, vs. some development tool or hack.
They need to prove statistical significance. Getting a 0.1% better drug past would require a pretty large control and sample group, making the drug more expensive to continue to test. Also, the doctors are given the drug's effectiveness vs placebo, and no doctor is going to give a drug that give the patient a 50.05% rate of recovery when 50% is the base.
Thanks! That was just what I needed. I downloaded he data dumps, ran some simple text processing, and now have over 400,000 unique artists to work with.

Cheers!
Thanks, Jing. I assumed this was Aaron's entry given the timing.

That makes this submission far less interesting!
Wow that is really quite profound.
In just 16 months Google Chrome overtakes Safari
It sounds like wishful thinking to me. What does Android have that other smartphone OSs lack, apart from the Google marketing machine behind it? BlackBerry's USP is its email integration. WinMo's is that you can take your Office stuff with you on the road. Symbian's is that it's technically mature (and that isn't enough to be commercially successful). iPhone's is that it's easy to use works seamlessly with Apple everything-else. Android's is... It's Google?
IMO, the slope of the lines in National Geographic chart show the Spending/LE relation better.
Such an app would be a violation of the FB ToS I believe (not to mention that you don't own those photos - before copying them off FB you would need to ask whoever took them, and if you're going to do that you might as well ask them to burn you a CD of the full-size photos).
Message in a Bottle (2007)
I don't think the 2001 crash is over yet. The 80s and 90s both had bull markets, phases of "irrational exuberance", the 00s was missing one. Gordon Brown said he'd do away with "boom and bust" and it turns out he has, by eliminating booms...
> Anything but 'managed' -- while conceptually it covers things quite nicely, in practice it's used almost exclusively to mean "runs on the CLR"

Evidence? I know at least one Mozilla dev who calls JavaScript "managed". I call such languages "managed" too, and I write much more non-CLR code than CLR code.
I'll sign up for deontology. The user has a right to learn from and improve their tools. If sapience has a purpose, that's a huge part of it, and I find this to be the main ethical argument the author neglected. I know some users don't care about this (they're honestly fine with doing only what the vendor supports) but I've never had much respect for that attitude, so I'm not moved to contribute to proprietary or non-copyleft work unless paid well.
My church feeds the homeless in Toronto, helps run a rehab clinic in Russia, and sends food and medical supplies to Haiti. Yes we do spend money on keeping on the lights and teaching our congregation about lessons from the Bible, but I've never even heard of the Pastor ever supporting a particular bill or politician. Maybe its because I'm Canadian.
Well, you started with a quantitative observation about income figures, but now have shifted to a qualitative (and more subjective) suggestion, that today's two-income families are worse off than the one-income families of the past.

Maybe they are, but it depends a lot on interpretation of whether the 2nd income is a matter of choice or desperation. And, one side effect of women working more is men working less.

For example, in this meta-survey of time allocation across many countries, average 'market hours worked' by women in the USA rose over 4 hours from 1975 to 2003 -- but the same figure for men dropped by over 8 hours. See Table II:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1233842

I know that no one household is exactly one average man and one average woman -- but if we imagine that as one possible data point, that household is working less overall, but with more of the working hours carried by the woman, and still earning more in real terms.
Yes but no-one really thinks the "war on drugs" is a war on chemical compounds. It's shorthand for "war against drug cartels" which are entities as well organized and armed as many nation-states. Since the "other side" in the war on drugs is actually people, then all the use of language is coherent. A druglord absolutely could negotiate the terms of a surrender if it were in his (organization's) interest to do so, just as a regular Head of State could. Now let me be clear that I am not taking a "drugs are bad" position here. I am pointing out that the "war on drugs" is actually fought by men in uniform (even if that's just gang colours) shooting at each other with automatic weapons over who controls what bit of territory. If that's not a war then what is?

Similarly "war on terror". No-one thinks it's a war against an abstract emotion...
I've been fairly skeptical of the Camel paper ever since reading Alan Kay's rebuttal: http://www.secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp

I trust Kay much more than these authors on matters of computer science, teaching, or ideas in general.
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
Data Explosion Remakes Retailing
Early Detection is the Key to Successful Breast Cancer Treatment
It doesn't seem to be very realtime.
But what's the fun in that? I was thinking about streamlining the process.
Check out the Productivity Games section here: http://42projects.org/ - Ross Smith at Microsoft has been using game dynamics to test Windows 7 language quality, etc.
http://www.42projects.org/docs/GTAC_LQG.PDF

I'm vaguely remembering that they were experimenting with code review at some point as well.

btw - my company provides game mechanics as a service that can be integrated into any app/website: http://www.bunchball.com/products/nitroworks.shtml
Researchers develop tiny autonomous piezoelectric energy harvester
Tech4000: The 17 best ‘best-of the year’ (and the decade) lists, of the week
> i said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in farmville than are sold in the US every year

(1) There are more farmers in farmville than there are in the US. Farming in farmville is all luxury activity, so folks will spend more time on fun activities.

(2) Farmville is a game where tractor buying is part of the game. Farmers buy tractors out of necessity.
Technologies That Will Rock 2010
We do that, and I will say that svnmerge.py doesn't work very well with older versions of svn. A common failure mode is when you merge from trunk to rebase a dev branch and find a conflict, your edits to resolve it are automatically ignored and not reflected back to trunk, and any overlapping edits you make later will eventually cause new conflicts when you finally go to trunk.

Apparently the new svn:mergeinfo property helps, but we haven't migrated at work so I don't know how well.
Just wanted to point out that although my "net worth" has not increased, I now have a phone that can pinpoint me on a satellite aerial map, and direct me to the nearest favorite coffee shop, I'm in better contact with friends and family than ever before-for less, and my desktop computer can do in a day what my 1999 computer took a nearly a month to accomplish, using less power. My TV has a resolution greater than my best 1999 monitor (oh and its the size of an aircraft carrier), even for broadcast junk, dvd's come to me in the mail, and even if they don't my internet is fast enough to stream them. I could go on all day.

Sure I don't have more money, but I sure as hell feel richer. Lost decade indeed.
3. could get fixed much more easily by dropping the 4-year pre-med undergraduate degree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-medical), and adding about 1 year of instruction to med school.
Amy Jo is brilliant.

Weight Watchers uses game mechanics: http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/commentary/games/2...

Mint was experimenting with it: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/28/mint-turns-personal-fin...

They're building achievements into the new Honda Insight: http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2009-02/eco-drivers-ed-20...

Yahoo calls them Reputation Design Patterns: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/people/reputatio...

They work. My company provides game mechanics as a service that can be integrated into any site or application: http://www.bunchball.com/products/nitroworks.shtml

Some of our customer sites that are using game mechanics successfully:
http://www.warnerbros.com/loyalty - WB loyalty program
http://www.espin.com - social network for teens
http://www.dundermifflininfinity.com - NBC's social network for fans of The Office
http://www.characterarcade.com/ - USA Network's casual gaming site.

You can see a video of me talking (very fast, for 23 minutes) about how this stuff works here: http://xmedialab.tv/auckland-%E2%80%9Ccommercialising-ideas%... - click on "Rajat Paharia presentation"

I tweet examples whenever I come across them here: http://twitter.com/bunchball
Twenty years on Japan is still paying its bubble-era bills
Actually, this seems like a terrible visualization because it's taken out of context, and was originally presented in a magazine. You can see where the article text would go, the United States label is hidden away near the binding and far in the upper margin, and due to expected info location/"eye drift" one doesn't find the U.S. at first.

Wish I could provide a scan of the page as it went to print, but I only saw it while visiting family. Regardless, the presentation is clearly to cause that double take rather than just to efficiently convey the information.
A donation to Catholic Charities would count as a religious donation although 0% if it will go to the Church's political activities.

A great deal of the aid to the needy in the US is provided by religious-affiliated charities. Heck, even the Salvation Army is a religious charity.

But I think you're right that the structure of a country like France allows it to run on less charitable giving. I would imagine that the welfare state eliminates the need for a lot of food kitchens and shelters, for instance.

American numbers are also inflated by a large number of organizations operating as 501c3s and collecting contributions that would not be considered "Charities" by most people. For instance, the second largest 'purpose' grouping for 501c3s is "education".[1] Is Harvard University really a 'charity?'

Notice that the largest purpose grouping (by revenue) is health care. I know that Advocate Healthcare -- one of the largest hospital chains in Chicago -- is a 501c3 which has been attacked by health reform advocates for being very stingy with charity care and engaging in aggressive billing practices.

The "healthcare" segment is over 52% of the 501c3 sector by revenue. Some of that may be charity clinics, but I imagine the vast majority of it is institutions like Advocate. If you combine the healtchare and education segments, they account for over 71% of the entire sector.

[1] http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/nonprofit-overview-sumR...
Walking a hay maze: unintended exploitable data hidden in plain sight
Often when working on a problem you are able to apply a general algorithm to solve it, but if you look under the surface you are able to find all sorts of hidden data about the specific problem that can be exploited. Recently I went walking through a hay maze and discovered just that. While I could take every right hand turn just by opening my eyes and ears I could solve it a tenth of that time. I wrote up the experience and thought you might enjoy it.

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/01/hay-maze.html
Almost anybody can dig ditches but fewer specially trained people can do surgery. Leaving aside remuneration and social status, when optimizing the use of your resources, you'd let people with that training to the surgery in order to achieve your goals in the most efficient way. So one could say that he actually cared about optimal use of human capital in order to best (= in cheapest way possible) achieve the goal. If you take the problem to that level, do you still care about the means or the ends?
The whole thing is a hate site. It exists for the sole purpose of one man's axe-grinding against another. This is a low-value pursuit and a complete waste of time. As for specific "hate speech" that I disliked, try the comment about a "cold dick in the mouth", or the one about how Gruber "has a hard-on" for Apple. Poor writing, pointless mission, and just an all-around waste.
The work here is actually useful in real world. For example, if a jison frontend deployed as a grammar checker for code snippet share site or more practical a SQL query web-interface, it can provide a more responsive interactive input area which eliminates the communications to sever-side for grammar errors.
Oh man, we should DO that!
I have two quibbles with their numbers. First, if WalMart gives 1% of revenues, and they have $400 billion in revenues, they give $4 billion to charity. They say $13 billion is given to charity by corporations. Note that U.S. GDP is $14 trillion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States), so WalMart takes in under 3% of that. It seems off that 30% of all charitable giving by corporations is high for one organization.

Also, it says that public charities "collect a total of " more than $1.4 trillion. But we only give $300 billion to charity. Where does the other $1.1 trillion come from?
Most of this points (at least 1-3, I don't know about #4) are also true in other countries (like mine). So they are not reasons for why the US health care system is expensive but rather propaganda.
Um, wow. That is drop-dead unbelievable. I had no idea that thought-based control had progressed to this point. Why am I just now seeing this?!
Android's is that its open. So there would not be only one company pumping in resources into it but many small developers and even other big firms who want to use it as a profitable platform. In this Android gains resources,mostly free marketing and probably some great breakthroughs.
Japan never actually dealt with the bust - and instead of taking the short term hit, they spread it over two decades. This was the problem - not the loss of confidence - which is an effect rather than the cause of the current malaise. When asset prices ultimately collapsed following the bubble, the government chose to prop up zombie banks instead of writing down grossly overvalued assets and restructuring debts - an issue that I worry about myself in the US though I think (and hope) American policymakers are wary of similar consequences.

This goes back a bit to the debate over whether or not it's possible to have economic growth without dynamism. That yes, you do have booms but you also have busts but that the net benefits of the booms (in productivity and innovation) far outweigh the consequences of any bust. Governments who attempt to dampen busts (e.g. minimum wage, stimulus, propping up businesses that should otherwise die off) as a corollary also tend to dampen recovery and growth (e.g. resulting higher interest rates, slower hiring, stagnant growth of new businesses as zombie firms squeeze resources that would have otherwise been reallocated).
Ask HN: How good are freelance programming sites?
Does anyone have any particularly good/bad experiences to share about using freelance programming sites like elance, rentacoder, scriptlance, odesk, guru.com, etc?

Would you recommend using them? Does any freelancing site stand out from the rest or are they all pretty much the same?

I've heard horror stories about people not getting paid, projects never getting finished, etc.. how representative are they?

Scanning through the listings on some of the sites, it seems a lot of ads are looking people with many years experience and a buzzword-compliant resume to work for them for next to nothing. Are there some good jobs to be had through these sites, or are they pretty much a waste of time?
How to Run a Meeting Like Google
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009869