skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really see much value in keeping a branch around after development is complete (or defunct).

If you have both branches and a way to close them, then you have a much simpler way to get a feel for the history of the code. You know at a quick glance what sort of major work has gone on and what's still ongoing.

If you don't have that you'll end up inventing more complex ad-hoc schemes to get it (merging a branch, deleting it and tagging the merge commit is an example of one such scheme, and it doesn't do the same thing).

And the ability to mark branches as closed in Mercurial is, to me, an indication that the developers put some thought into the different use cases for branching and wanted to cover more of them than git's standard workflow does ;)
Typeface Clustering Based on Typewar
Anatomy of a feature
Because then I can mix <br> and <br /> without some smart alec telling me my document doesn't validate.
PCs aren't infinite either, but that doesn't help compilers prove halting / non-halting during analysis. A few GB of memory, never mind internal and external storage, is more than enough state space to be equivalent for proof purposes.
A Neighborhood of Infinity: Tagging Monad Transformer Layers
Make Your Web Site 'Groovy'
Top Proxy Lists
If the way iTunes runs on Windows is any indication, I have no desire to develop for it on Windows. iTunes does run fine on my iMac, so I'm sure Objective-C is a fine framework... just not sure about the Windows implementation.
Amazing paintings (I'm not a connoisseur but still...)
Snow Leopard
> I agree with Mr. Nee that police officers "are entitled to the same rights as every citizen" because they, simply, are.

I don't and they're not.

For example, "every citizen" is entitled to sleep in. If a cop does so and misses work, we're entitled to fire them.

If uniformed officers don't want to be recorded while doing their duty, they're "entitled" to get another job.
A couple reasons, some of which are personal. One major one reason I'm comfortable talking about is I feel that I owe 3 people who took a chance hiring me. They have been scrupulously fair in all their dealings with me, treated me well, and tolerated those parts of me that are not the perfect salaryman. I promised them 2 ~ 3 years, and they've done nothing to make me consider breaking that.
This is the comment where I point out that you copied this tactic from a recent video going around doing this same thing re: local news broadcast stories.
Type Theory Comes of Age
This is the opening of my remark, where I warn that my out-of-the-box thinking will probably get me down-voted, because the people I'm choosing to share my precious idea with are just that close-minded and contemptible.

This is the actual content of my remark, which is somewhat contrary to what some (but not all) people in the discussion have already said. Here is why I try to emphasize how radical and yet somehow self-evident my opinion is, despite it not really being either.
This is a comment where I point out that the article is good, but the title is slightly misleading and a link-baiting exercise.
The operating system (OS) for the iPxx devices... iPhone OS, etc.
I read the article, I enjoyed it. It reminded me of why I like git so much.

git-diff doesn't require you to do gymnastics to compare files from different branches in the same working directory: "git diff branch1 [branch2] path" where omitting branch2 compares the working path instead of branch2's.

And I think your second problem with git, that big hairy branches should somehow be distinct from small simple branches, is also a non-issue. Especially since you already recognized the solution: let big hairy branches live, and small simple branches die.

Since you can reconstruct deleted branches, I don't see the problem with deleting them. Bugfix branches for specific releases can be created as needed by choosing the release commit in master as the starting point for the branch. If you really want to keep dormant branches around you can rename them to keep them distinct from "working" branches.

Sorry for not having specifically addressed these in the original comment, which was actually supposed to be a reply to fexl http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1095116
I wouldn't call this an ad hominem attack. You've got to be able to say that someone is wrong (even that someone is often wrong) without being considered to be attacking them personally.
The Rise of JS and the New Server-side
Can You Trust Census Data?
This is a comment that states that this isn't Hacker News and has been flagged.
This is the comment where I say HN is turning into Reddit because of posts like this.
Fred Wilson: Quirky and The Cone Of Silence
The blurring distinction between fixed and mobile
Open Societies Need Open Systems
There is also an interview with Canada on this This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=126...
> But if you want to continue to accept CCs, then you should comply. Compliance is as easy as redirecting all of your CC work to a processor that is PCI compliant. So long as you yourself do not store, transmit or process the card data, you can worry about your business and forget about PCI and it won't cost any more money.

Hmm. Is it that the PCI doesn't cost the processor anything or that the processor eats the costs?
How to compete against Apple mult-touch with pen-based UI
That this audience and 37Signal's audience scroll doesn't mean that Paddy's point is correct. The rule of thumb is really about making sure you look after "regular" users.

I'd love to see the "below the fold" rule disproved, however the fact that Google and Yahoo! search engines still deliver a default 10 results with pagination suggests to me that most people don't scroll, still. When it comes down to it Google and Yahoo! test more than anyone and there is real money on the line there. They would increase the default number of results if it made sense to do so now.
Do Cell Phones Prevent Alzheimer’s?
I miss the old kuro5hin too, you guys. (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/31/7738/22985)

Edit to add link to this, referenced in the comments there, and reasonably awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=281ax7Ovlsg
Read Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" for more atrocities of the XXth century.
It is awfully hard to take an article seriously when basic errors like this are made:

"Groovy has its own version of Ruby called Grails, which is now part of VMware"
From MSFT evangelist to Mac enthusiast - the other side of the road
I've seen people renice one of Oracle's many processes then wonder WTF happened when every Oracle process is then waiting for that one to release a lock. Oops :-)
Is it possible to create an iphone app and put it on just your iphone (i.e. no distribution) using this software ?

Ofcourse I mean without jail-breaking the iphone or without enrolling in the iphone developer program.

Has anyone here tried this?
TL;DR: This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.
Any news article about a new medical research finding should be read with Peter Norvig's advice on interpreting research studies at hand.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

The autnor of the submitted article (Harriet Hall) is well aware of such issues, and raises many of them in this blog post. Her longer presentation on interpreting medical research

http://www.skepticstoolbox.org/hall/

is well worth a read.
"I see no good reason why they refuse to do svg in text/html mode"

This probably breaks major assumptions inside the browser engines. Rendering most image types is a one-and-done type deal, just setting up a few calls to libjpeg or libpng, but SVG actually has to be XML-parsed and rendered element by element on page load. To do it in text/html, you'd need to hook together the html parser with the XML parser with the image generator. That's a lot of work to break the rules!
Looks like I'm not the only one thinking about this:

http://www.zeldman.com/2010/02/01/flash-ipad-standards/

In particular:

"Developers who supplement Flash with HTML5 may soon tire of Flash - but Adobe has a brief but golden opportunity to create the tools with which rich HTML5 content is created. Let’s see if they figure that out."
One of the problems with CAs and chains of trust is that the decision is binary; if you want a more nuanced view of the trust one should have in a connection, the best you can do is examine the signing chain manually, through the nested dialogs.
This is a comment where I take an obvious corollary of the thesis and state it as if it, too, is a dazzling insight, in a shameless attempt to gain HN karma.
Never short a country with $2 trillion in reserves?
I don't do structured touch typing, I learned to read on a computer (early for my age, an old atari) and typing is more natural than writing. When I was in college, I used to do medical transcription and I peaked at about 120WPM with an acceptable error rate, I'd like to generate those diagrams myself... one thing is I'm much larger than average so one of my hands actually spans the keyboard, traditional touch typing rules just don't make much sense in my head.
In 1994, Jacob Nielsen did a study showing that 90% of users did not scroll to find more content on web pages. But just three years later in 1997 he wrote:

"In retrospect, I believe this was due to people treating a set of Web options like they would treat a dialog box... In more recent studies, we have seen that most users scroll when they visit a long home page or a long navigation screen. This change in behavior is probably due to users getting more experience with scrolling Web pages." - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9712a.html

"Most people don't scroll" was true 15 years ago. It's sad that it lives on as an urban myth despite being invalid for most web pages today. (I do agree that it helps to make key content visible without scrolling. I'm just pointing out evidence that most people do scroll these days, and that the evidence has changed since this was first studied.)

Google's pagination proves nothing. Even on a 1600x1200 display, you do have to scroll to see all the results on a typical Google search page. (Try out a Google SERP on http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ and you'll find that over 90% of users need to scroll to read past the eighth result - and there's no way to get to the next page without scrolling.) Google has other reasons for pagination, like reducing bandwidth, latency, and server-side CPU time.
This guy's report of his experiences at MS don't add up to me. My reply in the reddit comments...

> I still have the freedom to work on anything I want

I'm confused by this. In my 8 years at MS I have never heard of anyone being able to work on anything they want. Perhaps you are at MSR? At any rate being able to work on anything you want (full-time) is not typical of MS or most large corporations.

> They are out for blood in everything they do, and I've found that to be a surprisingly interesting motivator.

Also not my experience. People at MS are surprisingly normal, and the company has a pretty good track record of working with partners when it makes business sense. This comment strikes me as even more odd when coupled with the "I get to work on whatever I want" one quoted above.

I'm also puzzled that your reddit logon is "lnxaddct". I have nothing against Linux, but surely that is one of the things you can't work on at MS?
Engadget - We're turning comments off for a bit
Here are a couple pages I found in my bookmarks that contain some data.

"Blasting the Myth of the Fold (2007)" http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of

"The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing (2009)" http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/thoughts/the_myth_of_the_page_fo...
This is a comment which quotes the part of the Hacker News Guidelines which state "if you flag something, please don't also comment that you did".
My plan has always been:

* keep making tags lowercase

* keep quoting attribute values

* keep closing tags after I open them (and properly nesting tags)

* keep using the closing slash for standalone tags

* keep calling it text/html (mime type)

* keep using UTF-8 encoded Unicode by default

* keep not using xml namespaces

* keep forgetting to use the DOCTYPE declaration

* and start carefully using some of the neat new tags in html5
Key Types Of IT Company Data
Tim Berners-Lee, Internet Censorship and BBC's Virtual Revolution
This the comment where I quote the part of the Hacker News Guidelines which recommend that "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit".
This is the comment where I ask why people are voting the parent comment down.
I'm surprised Pinker hasn't had a bigger backlash than he did. I chalk it up to the people who would make the most noise not being the type to come into contact with his ideas.
Note that even in the 37signals example, the main headline, introduction, and calls to action (links to products) are clearly designed to be "above the fold." The Basecamp page is the same way.

Where exactly the "fold" falls isn't very important, and readers will certainly read down the page, but only if you convince them with the content at the top. So the important lesson is, put your most important message at the top--and make it concise--don't muddle it up with lower priority content.
Do policy issues such as "how to deal with China" get discussed in the TGIFs or e-mail lists? I would imagine that such discussions might become very long-winded and very prone to flame wars very quickly.
Running out of juice: How will we recharge all the electric cars?
I understand the math. Every business since the world's first has prioritized customer support relative to the value of the customer; this is hardly a secret exclusive to PayPal. Dave's proposition that other sites may alleviate some of these costs seen by PayPal is interesting, but unproven.

A more likely case than relying on "maybe users will remember their passwords better" is that Facebook could capture a larger part of transactions (say 30% as App Store does) which enables them to better cover support and fraud.
I don't see the point. They go on and on about playing Modern Warfare 2 but surely you need a mouse to play that with any degree of success, rather diminishing the value of the netbook form factor. And nice comment about playing it as you fly from NYC to LA, as if that's something the teenagers who like Alienware computers do every second day - not that you'd have room for the mouse in economy anyway.

And is that a VGA out port I spied in the video? What on earth is that doing there? The only conceivable use of VGA out these days is for road warriors connecting to projectors and I can hardly imagine any salesperson wanting to bring this monstrosity into a presentation.

And those gaudy, useless LEDs can hardly be good for battery life. Who the hell buys this kind of thing?
Ideas have consequences, for good or ill
This is the comment complaining about incendiary blog posts being so typical, lately.
This is the comment where I complain about people down-voting me and demand to know why they are doing so.
This is a comment where I point out a minor factual inaccuracy in your comment that does not affect your thesis in any way.
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/no-fold-h...

Caption for the PNG impaired: it is a heatmap pulled from my site, which shows interaction above the fold being absurdly more likely to happen than interaction below the fold, even for elements which are not actually clickable. (You can't tell but more folks click the "New Card" button on my screenshot, presumably expecting it to result in a "New Card", than click the below the fold calls to action.)

Strictly speaking it would be more impressive if I created two designs, one with an aesthetically pleasing design and the call to action below the fold and one with the same design but the call to action above the fold, then A/B tested them against each other. I'll do that when some talented designer pays me for the damage it would do to my business.

Sorry guys, art warms my heart but math pays the bills.
I disagree. school is not there to teach you procedural knowledge. school is there to teach you how to learn. once this lesson is properly instilled the rest is just frosting on the cake so to speak. fast moving technology doesn't demand people who learned about XYZ in school, it demands people who can constantly learn new things throughout their life.

we need a massive improvement in education because we have been backsliding from "teaching children critical thinking skills" to "make sure they know XYZ so we can shove them along." When you subsidize something you typically get more of it. We've been subsidizing crappy education for decades.
The Python mandelbrot program uses 4 cores the PHP mandelbrot program uses 1 - that's why Python seems so much faster on mandelbrot.

The Python spectral-norm program uses 4 cores the PHP spectral-norm program uses 1 - that's why Python seems so much faster on spectral-norm.

The Python binary-trees program uses 4 cores the PHP binary-trees program uses 1 - that's why Python seems so much faster on binary-trees.
Templatetags don't inherit (at least not in my experience) so if you don't want to have to load the tags on every template, add them to your global templatetags: http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/160/
This is the comment where I fly into a violent rage because someone had the notion of bringing up such an outrageous idea, and attempt to shut down the idea through a combination of wild accusation and difficult-to-verify conjecture.
Interesting article. I see barefoot/minimal shoe running as possible way to correct issues in running form. Could practice running on your toes on a track or something like that. You could also just spend time with regular running shoes to correct your running form away from the heel-striking which some naturally fall into.

Although interesting, I don't think I'd ever go for a run without running shoes. Just seems like a good way to step on something sharp and have it go into your foot.
I'd appreciate hearing from other people who came in, were similarly disgusted, but have come to understand the whole thing better.

Ok. The larger CL world is terribly fragmented. There's a smaller world inside the larger world which is really good. The trick for the beginner is distinguishing between the two, i.e. between what is detritus to be ignored ("massive twisty world of broken dependencies and half-finished libraries" describes that perfectly) and what is the real stuff (e.g. Edi Weitz's libraries like flexi-streams). Once you find your way to the smaller world, the fragmentation and dependency issues don't go away, but they become minor and occasional relative to the mind-blowing amazingness of what CL is good for.

How do you find your way to the real stuff? Trial-and-error and asking questions. Is that an acceptable answer? No; many people unfortunately never get over the confused/disgusted stage and bail. Does it work? Yes, very well, if and when you get over those initial hurdles.

I fully agree that the above situation is upsetting when you compare it to things that just work out of the box. There's so much half-baked and half-working stuff in the CL world that I can only compare it to spam. A lot of Lispers are unhappy about this, and many attempts have been made to fix it, but it isn't quite clear what a definitive fix would require.

My personal hope is that the work being done by the Clozure-with-a-Z people (CCL) will blossom into a well-functioning, self-sufficient, obvious place for people to begin with Common Lisp. They do seem to be getting there. Importantly, they have the nucleus of something that CL has been lacking for a long time (since, I suppose, the implosion of comp.lang.lisp into various forms of nastiness): a nice, normal community.
Sun/oracle closes project kenai
I don't think your comparison is fair. CSV has only one structure (tabular data) and only one datatype (string). JSON supports multiple datatypes and data structures (objects, lists, hash tables).
My worst iPad fears
You will have to pay apple $99 a year to be able to provision for your phone. That same $99 will allow you to distribute through the App Store, and on up to 100 devices outside of the app store. Right now, you pay to provision on phones, even if you aren't interested in distribution.

It is possible to create the app and run it in a simulator using some of these tools.
Echo Nest's Musical Brain API
idiots. a lot of seemingly nonsensical marketing makes more sense when you truly "get" what the average person is like. I recommend touring the flyover states.
This is a comment nobody actually really sees, because they skipped down the page when they saw the conversation indent this far over.
"Tell me about your Python experience"
"Well I started learning it about a week ago - I think I've pretty well mastered it."
"Thanks, we'll get back to you."
This is a comment where I commend parent commenter on a command completed as parent's comment's parent is now at +thirteen.
The Definitive Guide to Jython
I thought it was common knowledge that WWII era Germans supported Hitler. I doubt they also supported the genocide, or at least the harsh reality of it - I remember reading that even Hitler avoided giving direct orders about it.

If you want to call that evil... I guess you may. But I'd say all it shows is that in certain contexts we can all support evil things.
It's like an automatic mondegreen generator.
Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything
What a fine bait for those who gloat in form over content.
I'm glad somebody brought this up as it's a trend amongst CPC/affiliate folks that isn't going a way. I even tested the theory with one of my eccomerce clients by stripping away the site nav and constructing a page that was very long but told more of a 'story' with a call to action half-way down and in the footer. Results so far have been inconclusive but so far I've theorized that they are effective due to the audience, the product and the story.

I've also considered that what works for selling a $19.95 snake oil weightloss pill may not work for your $19.95 widget.
Facebook makes HipHop for PHP open source
I am pretty sure anyone can claim anything. I think you would have a pretty hard time going anywhere with a case against the news people, though.
TheFunded Ranks The Most Loved VCs Of 2009
I think this should go a bit further. The next time Google or Apple announces something major-ish, the entire Internet should just be turned off for two days.

Okay, so maybe not the entire Internet, but there really must be a better answer than to clutter my daily sites with everybody incessantly thinking they have a useful (or worse, humorous) opinion when they don't realize they are regurgitating other regurgitations of talking points introduced by hacks in the first place.
This is the comment where I spend entirely too much effort correcting that inaccuracy.
If you're looking for ways to help convince management to use Python there are some good tidbits in here: http://blip.tv/file/3041158

We also talk about hiring and training people who don't have Python backgrounds but have the right skill sets to transition.
Capture the collective Web intelligence of an enterprise
37Signals discovers the hyperlink
37Signals have obviously spent some time putting this video together, which serves to demonstrate their discovery of the "hyperlink", which allows users to navigate around their web apps.

I'm struggling to grasp how this adds more value than a bookmark in your browser. I.e. A "Deep Link" to your "Highrise Deals" page would be better served by a bookmark that takes you to a specific deal - far more efficient and fits a more realistic use case of navigating to one of several active deals instead of a list of them all.