skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Their enemy is Subversion"

Sigh! Perhaps the enemy is the still surprisingly high number of programmers not using any source code control at all. Perhaps we should be working on educating those who still don't feel the need to use source code control on their own personal projects. But Subversion?

I just helped on a "major" project that worked remarkably successfully using good old CVS. I personally prefer Mercurial, and it's what I use for all but my smallest pieces of code, but did CVS work well for coordinating 50+ chip designers, software developers, document writers? Hell yes! Not even a single hiccup, no little thanks to a very helpful and standup IT guy. Good ol' CVS did the job just fine. Could newer technology be better? Yes perhaps I can think of a lot of hypotheticals where it would have been great to have a DVCS, but in practice, I can't think of all that many times where it would have made much of a difference. The fact that every one there, particularly the chip designers, knew how CVS worked, had worked with it for years, had their own work methodologies based on CVS, made the very thought of using anything else nothing but stupid.
Google Buzz Hacks for Users, Developers, and Haters
Why Web Developers Should Switch to Google Chrome
this shows you how to gain access to Google Buzz NOW, if you don't have access yet.
The problem with your analysis is that a business needs investors and customers to succeed. Excessive saving can harm an economy.
Finally some data to back-up what I inherently feel every time I visit hacker news: the US has a HUGE resource in the up-and-coming generation (and of course our friends around the world that participate!)

I loved this article, thanks for sharing.
His point about binary files is true. Until it gets as good as SVN at handling binary files then it probably will not have an easy time getting people to convert.

How likely is it that Linus will add better support for binary files from an outside project or do we just have to use the forked git?
Google Fiber Communities
I've gone my entire life without TV, at least on a regular basis; I've visited friends with TVs, had roommates with TVs, etc, but never have I or my immediately family owned one, and even my roommates with TVs didn't watch much.

I resented it a bit when I was a kid, since my friends would talk about shows they watched that I couldn't. By the time I hit my teens I had realized what a waste of time it is, though, and I haven't wanted one since.

I occasionally watch a show or clips online, usually when my girlfriend wants to; there are a few shows that she likes. I do watch movies. I will also occasionally watch the Daily Show or something similar online.

Of course, as time wasting and mind-dulling as a lot of TV is, I find that I waste as much or more on the internet, so I'm not sure it's a net positive. The problem is, I can almost always find content that interests me on the internet, that is even plausibly useful, so it's hard to get myself away from it. The social aspect of posting to the internet and getting comments, feedback, upvotes, and the like also helps to suck me in.

On the whole, I think a lot of the reason I don't like much of TV is the ads and the mass-market homogenization. Some niche content appeals to me, so I tend to get a lot more out of internet videos that would never be popular enough to be on TV (people swapping juggling videos online, small foreign productions that will likely never make it to the US like the IT Crowd, stuff like that). As TV and the internet converges, with more channels added, premium channels that are free of ads, and so on, it might be that more of the "TV" content will appeal to me, but for now, I just don't have much interest in a lot of the content that is out there.
No, but I remember FU-FMe.

Much more excited about that.
One slight correction: on the FAQ for "What is Preceden", your answer includes the word "let's", which should be "lets".

Also, on "Are They Private", you use the word "this'll", which I get as vernacular, but isn't a recognized conjunction in any of the dictionaries I checked.
The idea was meant to fairly generic. Your example would be closer to what I mean if your business model had some sort of regulation involved i.e. time or money you had to spend getting the greenlight from government.

An example idea was a one-click online employment agency. Employment in general is steeped with redtape.
Kind of surprised to see this here
Thanks for the elucidation.

So, the reboot is required because the patches cause the old code to remain but simply be long-jumped past to the injected new version of that block of instructions. Got it.

I'm not sure I'm in with you on Ksplice having to be really fast. The benefit is virtually no downtime but people are still going to test the patches on their testing servers and thus will still be testing in the wild before implementing fully.
Get Ready For the Undernet (aka the Non GoogleNet)  [2005]
Fascinating! Creating tools for developers is such a PITA.

Interesting observation:

Parsing is considered a solved problem. Unfortunately, this view is naïve, rooted in the widely believed myth that programming languages exist.

The C language does not exist; neither does Java, C++, and C#. While a language may exist as an abstract idea, and even have a pile of paper (a standard) purporting to define it, a standard is not a compiler. What language do people write code in? The character strings accepted by their compiler. Further, they equate compilation with certification. A file their compiler does not reject has been certified as "C code" no matter how blatantly illegal its contents may be to a language scholar. Fed this illegal not-C code, a tool's C front-end will reject it. This problem is the tool's problem.
The muffins!
I didn't say I like that song either, but it's a fact that that song is currently No. 1 on Billboard Top 100, which is the leading top chart in the United States and possibly worldwide.

It's an "engineered" song, it has a catchy tune, lyrics that might appeal to pre-adolescents, features "cameo appearances " from other well-known "musicians" and is heavily promoted by the record label. You probably already heard that song countless times even though you don't realize it.

Pop charts are like that, the fact that the song currently leading top charts are targeted at different age groups or social groups than you doesn't mean that you're getting old, it's just that it's "not your turn" now. In a few months, there's going to be a hit song that you'll actually like. Or maybe you don't like mainstream pop music at all, in that case, you shouldn't worry about pop top charts at all.
Facebook Connect: Nonconsensual Privacy Leak
Loss Aversion & The Amygdala
I wanted to read these comments before watching the interview... big mistake.
I would think it would be good for Google to partner with the local non-telco / non-cable provider of utilities. The local electric or gas company (who is used to commodity business models) would be a ideal. They already have access to the houses and would make a good "franchise" partner. They probably wouldn't mind another "dumb pipe".
"7 million people attempt to download Flash each month to their iPhones"

I find that extremely hard to believe.
Satellite internet speeds are acceptable for web browsing and is available everywhere. I'd consider subsiding the costs of such connections for those who can't afford it. My understanding is that things like Universal Service Fees subsidize even those who can afford it.
Try to study something you're interested in on the other side of the paywall. Your impressions might change...
Did you actually read the article? Hoarding 75% of the currency in an economy cannot, under any circumstance, be called "delayed consumption".

Before Scrooge, everyone earned its keep and got whatever he wanted. Life was good. It is true that not everybody have the same income or savings, but in general everyone was well fed and was able to buy whatever he needed. The savings where delayed consumption, you know... save $1 per day and by the end of the month you can hire two full time fellows for that home improvement project you had in mind.

Pre-Scrooge Dwarf Economy.
Daily income = Avg: $12, Min: $9, Max: $15
Cost of living: $3
Disposable income = Avg: 75%, Min 67%, Max 80%
Savings = Total: $16, Avg: $2.29
Population = 7
Employment = 100%

Now Scrooge comes. He hoards money for money's sake. He works in the dwarf economy full time, but only spends $4 per day for room and board. Eventually he holds all the money under his mattress and everybody is engaged in subsistence farming.

With-Scrooge Dwarf Economy.
Daily income = Avg: $3.5, Min: $3, Max: $4
Cost of living: $3
Disposable income = Avg: 67%, Min 50%, Max 81%
Savings = $72 ($75 - $3)
Population = 8
Employment = 28%

Now, if you ask me, the Dwarfs are pretty stupid. They sit on their hands all day long... waiting for someone to "hire" them. If you think in a community of 8, this is nonsense. But if you think in a city of 8 million, then you are on to something. People can barely find a job. factories run below half capacity, the ones who are lucky enough to have some savings hold to them for dear life... just in case the things get even worse and they cannot earn some more. Eventually, people move into informal DIY economy with poor skills and substandard tools, Big Depression style.
Reverso Time
I thought this was a fascinating read. Anyone else here do something similar?
Couldn't agree more. Its amazing how entitled some people feel.

Restaurants are probably the best example, especially when people are outrageous to the waiter, hostess, or barback when problems are clearly outside of their control (kitchen issues, staffing issues). Other good places to judge this characteristic: Taxi Cabs and customer-support calls (you dont need to be on the call, simply listening to the person will tell you enough).

Also, to be clear, that doesnt mean that people have to be doormats - just not a complete asshole. Empathy goes a long way.

I try to avoid doing business with people who fail this test - is usually means they are highly emotional / rash about decisions, or that they don't mind badgering other people to get their way. Both are bad.
It's a good premise, but suggestions seem very basic. Any advanced suggestions or case studies?

I'll volunteer one - I keep track of hours spent on tech support and make sure the number goes down over time. This requires bug fixing, usability changes, or sometimes even adding features that are so frequently requested it's easier to add them than explain why you won't.
It's the sort of next step in the blub problem.

People are coming from a world where they see svn as being so much better than cvs (and source safe and what-not), but the only thing close to it in its class is p4, and they have to pay a lot for that, so it doesn't count.

Then someone convinces them that there's a better class of things and they want to give it a shot. git users talk about the power and wonders of git. hg users talk about how much easier it is to use than git. bzr jumps up and down slowly and says, "me too!"

In this sense, DVCSs are each other's enemies preventing our own adoption.

I've used hg a lot and I've been using git almost exclusively for a couple of years. A project whose source is in git is more likely to get contributions from me because it's just easier for me. Projects that use hg will get a contribution if it's a big enough pain because it means more work for me.
You're right. But it does seem like the perfect place for the Obama administration to follow through on it's promises and release the raw data for these calculations to the public each month (in a machine readable format of course)
Point taken. I have to add something like that. A good article on queueing used in a web context is http://decafbad.com/blog/2008/07/04/queue-everything-and-del...
It's these people we really need to reach.

Hmm...do we? I mean, might the time to try and convince someone like that to switch to Git be better spent elsewhere, like trying to inspire the next generation of programmers who actually code because they love it?
Read the article. It's about iPhone users attempting to download it.

Assuming there's no smoke and mirrors (unlikely) it would be the best piece of leverage so far in this increasingly pathetic squabble.
Students should blog their essays
I'm actually not surprised, and I've worked on plenty of client projects where the "workflow" was to login via FTP and edit live files on the server. If there was a chance for a potential conflict, just yell across the room to the other developer to make sure you don't step on each other.

Sadly, a few of these were for large interactive agencies. I try and steer clear of these kinds of jobs when I can, or at least try and push them towards svn or git.
> Well, if you spend five minutes on chatroulette you've already seen so much offensive stuff that the next offensive thing you see doesn't really bother you all that much. You just click "next".

It might if you specifically clicked "please show me only people interested in chatting and not showing me their dicks."
I don't buy it. The whole premise is confused. On the one hand, the author makes some well-founded points about Japan's demographic situation, which is indeed pretty dire if gross numbers of working-age citizens are what you're predicting. China is in a similar boat, it's true, with the one child policy.

But Japan's downfall had little to do with demographics and a lot to do with an unsustainable bubble economy writ very large indeed. The problems with Japan are manyfold, you could write a very long essay just covering the major points, but basically boil down to cultural risk-averseness. There are not many entrepreneurs in Japan. The country needed to re-invent itself and failed.

China could not be more different. Many, many Chinese are entrepreneurial, brash go-getters. Whereas Japan is all about social harmony and "wa" and not rocking the boat, Chinese are the most capitalist people imaginable and a brief visit to basically any Chinese city will convince you utterly of this fact. I don't think you can compare the two at all.

It's true China has some systemic problems. If the banks' account sheets were audited properly I bet many of them are in the red, deeply. There is corruption and nepotism and all manner of petty inefficiencies imposed by officialdom. But the raw productivity cannot be denied.

The author also assumes the instability of the Chinese government. He/she seems to take this as a matter of faith - I see no signs of instability. If the government can raise people from poverty into a decent middle class - and they are doing an outstanding job of this - then their position is assured. The rich do not revolt.

I also have questions about the whole idea that more workers is what is needed to assure economic success. While it's true Japan's youth are dwindling in number, there is by no means a worker shortage in that country. If there was, wages would be high. They are not. There is plenty of youth unemployment. The growing automation of any number of industries may make all those idle youth obsolete. It may well turn out that in the future, less workers are needed, not more. And it's not as if America's teeming masses are particularly well-skilled. What will happen when a robot can flip the burgers? It's not too far off.

I could go on and on but basically I think the article makes an awful lot of assumptions and comes off as wishful thinking. I am not about to bet against America, but I wouldn't exactly sell my shares in China just yet either. I doubt China will rocket up to dominate the world like the breathless predictions of "sinophiles" but I can't see too many alternate futures where they don't have the largest economy by 2050. It's pretty hard to beat a 400% larger population no matter how much "sokojikara" you have.
This does not make logical sense. His original argument is basically "they took err jerbs!!" claiming that people who contribute unpaid articles to for-profit companies are unethically depriving "real" journalists of jobs.

This follow up article is his defense on why it is ok to blog for free, even though that should logically be unethical as well.

Assuming his original point is valid (i.e. it is unethical to contribute something for free which might remove a job from someone who wants to do the same thing for money), then surely blogging is unethical, as there are many professional bloggers.

However, his original point is clearly incorrect, so it's not really worth debating.
It's more likely 7 million users per month hitting a page with flash on it is somehow being translated into an attempt to download.
I thought this was a fascinating read. Anyone do something similar?
You are by no means an amateur researcher in that case. In this context, "professional" does not mean "paid to do it." It means vetted or accredited in some way. PhD students are in the process of being vetted, are a part of the system.
Folder printing
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No one has a better idea than ospf?
The current standard for intra-domain network routing, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), suffers from a number of problems-the tunable parameters (the weights) are hard to optimize, the chosen paths are not robust under changes in traffic or network state, and some network links are over-used at the expense of others. We present prototypical scenarios that illustrate these problems. Then we propose several variants of a protocol to eliminate or alleviate them and demonstrate the improvements in performance under those scenarios. We also prove that these protocols never perform significantly worse than OSPF and show that for at least a limited class of network topologies, it is possible to find efficiently the optimal weight settings. Some of the problems with OSPF are well known; indeed, there are several routing protocols that perform better than OSPF in routing quality (i.e., in terms of congestion, delay, etc.). OSPF's popularity persists in part because of its efficiency with respect to several resource bounds. In contrast, many competing protocols that provide routing superior to OSPF are computationally prohibitive. Motivated by this consideration, we designed our protocols not only to achieve better routing quality than OSPF, but also to use resources in amount comparable with OSPF with respect to offline broadcast communication, size of and time to compute routing tables, packet delivery latency, and packet header structure and size.
Why betweenness centrality and not eigenvector centrality?
Yeah, Subversion has always worked reasonably well for me. While I was in school at least, getting my project partners to use version control at all was a major victory.

With all the projects popping up on github I have a feeling I'll push one of my tinkering projects up there pretty quick.
A user uploads a file to your webapp.

Processing the file might take seconds or more. So instead of processing the file in the view, you schedule the processing job and return html output to the user "we are processing your request".

Eventually, the scheduled job will complete, and the result will be available to the user.
True. In our specialized economy everyone's dependent on each other.
Interactive Programming with Clojure, Compojure, Google App Engine and Emacs
I have to say I have an equal dislike for people who assume that any female who dares to enter the big bad world of technology must have some sort of clerical role.
The focus indicator is there, it's just subtle.
"if you are talking about TV shows I wouldn't consider them art at all."

Also tautological depending on your definition of "art". The definition I favor doesn't disqualify something for the medium it is in, but it certainly isn't the only relevant definition.
Don't most elections for which proportional representation is realistically feasible involve democratic governments above the local level, with tens of thousands of voters, serious worries about electoral malfeasance, and sales cycles which require legislation or in some cases Constitutional amendments?

These are not things I would go looking for if I were trying to start a small software business. I mean, in terms of "barriers to achieving conversion", passing a Constitutional amendment is pretty up there.

Not quite sure if that is relevant for what you are doing. If you're trying for a political movement, rather than a web app per se, you might want to lead with an example of a real election rather than a zombie gag.
The wire is also the only show I know of that moves slowly enough to tell an interesting story. I would put the wire up against anything period.
This is fantastic advice for people who want to learn the new things that they need to learn. However, not everyone does, and that's perfectly OK. I know we're biased towards programming here, but let's flip your example around: I know how to code, but I don't know how to do enterprise sales. Yes, it behooves me to learn something about it, but if I can hire someone to do it for me, why shouldn't I? My goal is to always hire people smarter and more competent than myself at the thing that I'm hiring them to do. I don't need to be the best at everything; I'd much rather be the best at what I'm best at :)
Ahhh yes... But buyer beware as they say... that story doesn't always have a happy ending. The person I used to look up to as a kid turned depressive and into an alcoholic. It is very painful to see a real-life role model nosedive like that and sometimes these things can be impossible to predict.
Oh, you lucky so-and-sos who get to watch Only Connect on BBC Four. There is no legal (or even expedient) way for me to watch it here in the USA. Then again, we don't pay for a TV license...
What is wrong with using git-svn on your local machine instead of trying to migrate everything over to git?
It's a charming anecdote, but don't take this as a story of individual brilliance. Read it as faith and perseverance triumphing over doubt, and conquering problems with appropriately applied work.

Note the crucial elements.

He talked to a lot of experts in field Y. This is not a "lone genius"!

He had the freedom and incentives to work on this almost uninterrupted. He would have spent at least 100 hours, which is worth at least as much as two undergraduate courses. Also, he was an expert in related field X, which must have helped.

Furthermore, he because he knew the practical problem, he could cut down the search space. He didn't have to investigate everything about field Y, just stuff applicable to him.

If you consider all that, the solution doesn't look so miraculous. What's more interesting to me is that I think even ordinary people could be achieving that kind of result all the time if they had the right background, incentives, and support.
I'm not worried about Google becoming a monopolist and raising prices; I'm concerned that they'll offer unsustainable (or even free) pricing in a small trial and many people will begin to expect other ISPs to match that pricing in nationwide deployments. Much like the complaints that US broadband sucks compared to South Korea, but worse.
Why MongoDB thinks single server durability is overvalued
Relating Disparate Datasets
Not a huge amount more (as long as your talking about an old desktop too).

We use a load of old IBM's in a similar way as monitoring stations/servers to shove into networks. For fun I've been running a few attached to power monitors to see what it's like; not brilliant is the answer. Power consumption is roughly the same as an old Dell server we also use.