skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Mercurial or git?
For a 50+ people development team working on several different projects, using Windows, Linux and OSX, Eclipse, Dreamweaver, Emacs to write applications in Java, PHP and Python (some Perl thrown in too) that has narrowed down the choice to one of the two mentioned in the question, which one would you pick and why?

And yes, this is the company I work for and this will be the DVCS I will have to use. ;-)
Your wish might come true (author of pfaide(pfaide.com) here). I'm so intrigued by the idea I wanna drop everything at hand and take a grab at this ;)
"You are talking about an internal mockup, not a released product."

I am talking about design work they used for promotional videos and screenshots. It matters in absolutely no way that upon this becoming public, Mozilla announced that they do not intend to use the design for production software.

"I would not reconsider working with a firm who acted this way."

I would not want a client who's hesitant to hire me on the grounds that they might not get away with ripping me off.
I have to strongly agree with your second paragraph, but finding the good opportunities is the trick.
You can transition "pay yourself" from your employer's (or parents) plan without running into the pre-existing condition problem. Preexisting conditions are only a problem if you have a gap in coverage.

Besides, most people don't have preexisting conditions, so the ones that do are treatable as a special case.
What you mustn't do is set a fire, shoot off flares, try to attract attention to yourself. If there are any humans out there they may be predators, and you don't want to give away your position without knowing theirs. Think defensively! You'll necessarily search in stealth mode. Of course, the others (presuming they exist) are likely doing the same thing, deliberately being hard to find. You'll only find someone if one of you becomes careless or complacent.
Some helpful Redis CLI bash aliases
Rapper mentions and urban demographics didn't save the T-Mobile Sidekick. I don't think it's a meaningful indicator of larger things.
You're seriously putting words in my mouth. Why do you think I want to coerce emotions in others? Wouldn't an entirely pragmatic interpretation fit just as well?

To paraphrase William Gibson: "My songs are of time and distance. The emotion is in you."

More directly: am I trying to coerce you into feelings, or talking abstractly about people's feelings now and in the future?
For everyone who has worked on a project with multiple directories, files, people and technology this looks really promising (if not awesome).
Getaroom.com Wants You to Create a Commercial
N-dimensional medians, and a hybrid between median and average
"This" being RSS readers, I presume.
Does anyone really need to read past the first sentence?

"Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 outperformed four other Web browsers in protecting against malware spread by social engineering techniques, according to a Microsoft-funded NSS Labs report".
I thought it was a HN app marketplace.

I guess, I would really, really like to have that.
> Why not? The irony of giving a peace prize to a military organization would clearly escape the grasp of this increasingly irrelevant group of nominators.

Western Europe was liberated by military organizations. The resulting several decades of peace had something to do with military organizations as well.

Short of Norman Borlaug, military organizations have produced more peace than anyone else.
We try and make sure all our clients use SSL for authentication and transfer of secure data. Just because Facebook and Google aren't as conscientious as they should be doesn't let you off the hook.

You don't need to pay a few hundred dollars for an SSL certificate, unless you need a wildcard. Go with a cheap reputable Certificate Authority and start this out right.
Looks good. It's so rare to see any real innovation in development IDEs. I also like the idea of colour coding bubbles or attaching icons to them, and being able to arrange them in chronological order.
I don't understand, how do I look at my own Google Reader feeds? This just looks like a bunch of random crap I'm not interested in.
Easily fixed (I think someone else here linked to the wiki page for the solution),but it is a good example of one of the problems (IMHO) with Emacs. It comes with shitty defaults. There's something of a chicken and egg problem with getting started with Emacs. Emacs can rock very powerfully when properly configured. But out of the box it sucks rocks. It's pretty hard for a beginner to learn enough about Emacs to configure it to be worth a darn before giving up in frustration. :-)
Hopefully when this finally happens to Facebook, the secret to recreating Farmville and Mafia Wars will be lost to history.
i wondered yesterday what new earthquake had brought down twitter, it turned out just being america waking up and twittering too many #ripbig
And coming from the Redmond Mag, "Independent voice of the Microsoft IT Community". Its about as valid is proclaiming Jesus was the son of some invisible dude that lives in the sky because this book the "Bible" says he was.
I'm 19 and from New Zealand. I've never heard anyone my age rave about twitter. There doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to use it when we already have facebook. It is hard to understand why you would want to follow random strangers.
Dinner is served, but we can't tell you where
Family Feud politics
I _believe_ this idea was taken from Hg, actually. Though it's not new - 'bundle' has been in Git for almost 3 years now, since 1.5.1
Google does do it after being being embarrassed into it by some security folk. The 'sign in' link on the main google.com page is ssl, as is Gmail, and http://google.com/a/domainname (at least for me) is redirecting to https.

Facebook does support ssl (https://facebook.com) but the problem is that they don't forwards regular http login to it.

Unless you need a wildcard domain, which you shouldn't, until you have to scale, it shouldn't cost you more than like $20 US for the cert.
Uh, what? One totally random article, then the second item: http://icanread.tumblr.com/post/432293483

Lovely. I don't have anything remotely like this in my subscriptions.
Few years ago, my cousins in India would tell me the same thing about facebook: hey we have orkut why would we need something else?

Fast-forward now, and they are all gung-ho over facebook. Not sure if Twitter is on the same trajectory but your line of argument("we already have x, why need y?") is very weak going by history.
I'd highly recommend any serious programmer with a screen smaller than 1920x1200, to upgrade... and get two of them while they're at it. After some time with that setup, it becomes painful to get back to something smaller.

I've tried 3 screens (in: square, wide, square configuration) for a while. I wouldn't say no, if anyone gave me that again, but I didn't notice any significant improvement over 2 screens.
We ended up with mercurial. We needed Windows, Linux, OSX and code in all kinds of languages.

git is fine I suppose - but we needed to support Windows and I'd rather know that Windows is supported properly (mercurial), rather than kinda hoping it works (git). Things might have changed since the last time I looked.

In either case, be careful with case-sensitive/non-sensitive file systems.

Also, consider the learning curve difference as you will suddenly become the go-to guy for issues.

In the end, I'm really a Bond fan:
http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/git-vs-mercur...
Sometimes people who are not your friends have interesting things to say.
I am only recently using Git for larger projects and in more different ways. It's great how you can give it a twist to the way you work :).
Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5
News flash: Social media won’t fix your content problems
Neat concept, the problem I see immediately as it assumes I am coding in Java. This would be fine if you worked in only one language. I work in several languages within an average day.
Very much appreciate your feedback. I've seen a few job placement services that employ such tactics. I feel like that borders on spam and would very much like to avoid it.

One of the biggest challenges is we want to do it "right", but there are many overly aggressive / shady services out there in this space that make employers run for the hills when you reach out. Ideally this should be mutually beneficial for student and employer (and us). Thank you again for the comment!
The TeX showcase
This site has a lot of cool examples of things you can do with TeX and LaTeX.
The demo is relying heavily on code navigation features that are only available to static language IDEs such as "Open Declaration", "Find All References", code completion, navigating object hierarchies, code outlines, inline docs, and other fancy code traversal techniques.
Digg Saying Yes to NoSQL; Going Steady with Cassandra
"The engagement just isn't there. I know someone mentioned the whole 90/10 ratio, but that's different here. Imagine if only 74% of Facebook users posted something or updated their profile. That's really really bad"

I'd be curious to know the stats on Facebook. I'd guesstimate that only about 20% of my FB friends post on a regular basis. Lots of people are on FB but not terribly engaged.
How to prevent Cylons from taking over your data (or how Zumodrive does it)
I'd like to have a dollar for every time I've seen a NullPointerException on some line that was constructed by someone who loves the list of methods that automagically pops up for the dot operator:

foo.bar().baz().qux()

...Grrrrr!
I don't think this is just another RSS reader. Here's why:

In a typical RSS reader, the relationship between the user and the content producer is more pronounced; the user proactively selects content sources and knows where each piece of content comes from; as a result, there is still a significant element of brand reinforcement.

The internet has discussed the economic implications of RSS readers ad nauseam so I wont go there. However, this isn't just an RSS reader; this site allows me (as a reader) to consume an amazing amount of content with pretty much no idea where it came from and very little inducement for follow-up interaction with the content creator.

In other words: Google Play is basically stumbleupon, except in Google's version, the "toolbar" takes up the entire screen. Google is redefining the transaction in a way that minimizes value for the content creators and maximizes value for Google.
Marry Him: The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough
Multiple resolutions is a problem compared to one resolution, you don't have to be an Apple 'fanboi' to realize that. Most artwork isn't vector and has to be recreated appropriately. Apple of course will upgrade the resolution (probably this summer) and it will create problems for iPhone developers as well. Another concern is no clear baseline of the Android hardware, considering it can run on anything from microwaves to tablets.
"The only compelling case for Twitter I've found so far are announcements from local merchants/organizations."

Where "announcements" == advertisements. Yes, that's the apparent and generally agreed (long-term) usefulness of Twitter.
Try to build as many long-lasting monuments as possible to inform the future starfish-based civilization of our achievements.
It's $99 per year and $50 for students. I've been on the fence for a long time, on the one hand there are tons of interesting papers to read, on the other I try to be a member of as little things as possible.

Also, plenty of the content that is available on the ACM portal site is available elsewhere, usually pre-prints on the authors websites.

Personally I think all research that is somehow subsidized ought to be accessible to the general public without payment.

edit: make that 2x$99, once for the membership and once for access to their digital content.

http://www.acm.org/membership/dues
Without downplaying the possible effect of the presented technology, you really should not need to poke through to find stuff or use the mouse to move around...

Vim (or Emacs) along with ctags == awesome. Go to any definition, open file if it was not yet open. Buffer stacks, split windows.
Did you read McCain's foreign policy plank? Obama gets it simply for not being McCain.
If you need more than a few ACM papers, it probably is.
I think that because not having typing information makes it more difficult for the IDE to help you out.
GIT, because it has the best performance and are backed by large projects like the Linux kernel, Wine, etc.

May I add that Mercurial has Python dependencies, while git are written in C.

If I were to bet who outlasts who, I would put my money on GIT. Also, considering GIT is so simple by design, I foresee it will be used in many other cases than source code management. As it is just a matter of creating new high level porcelain, like say, revision control. ;) How about that Linus?
Not Haskell. Something more permissive.
Fake goods are proliferating, to the dismay of companies and governments
It tends towards mapped bike routes. I don't think it would send anyone on Page for any reason other than it has a bike lane. I now live in NYC and it has mapped a few convoluted routes along the FDR bike path, when it would be far faster to use 2nd or 3rd avenue.
I'd say mercurial will be easier to deploy across that range of systems, and easier for people not familiar with the command line (Dreamweaver users ;)) to use.

Personally, I feel that git is technically superior, but throwing Windows into the mix changes things up a bit. You can use git confidently in Windows - I do at home, using Cygwin - but in terms of graphical support, it's still reasonably dodgy. You could definitely look into TortoiseGit, and then configure it using mSysGit and putty (I've tried this in the past and it works well) - but if anyone then wants to use Cygwin, things get very complex.

GitX is good for Mac users though!
Hot New [Squeejee] Business Cards
Ncreasing Automotive Complexity Requires Careful Planning and Execution
A ton are terribly engaged at looking at others profile pictures and playing farmville. That's probably all the value about 80% of facebook users get...including myself
I'd get used to feeling discouraged because this is the reality of competition on the net. As someone's already noted, a couple of sentences is more than you'll get from most people who just look and then dismiss it. There's great feedback to take from the original comment even if it's short - if you have a point of difference, it's not obvious.

FWIW, I also viewed it, thought 'what sets this apart from all the other alternatives?' and then left. I think your design is really loose. Other than that, I use a snippets function in my text editor and the things that doesn't cover aren't enough to warrant using a site like yours. There might be some advantage I'm missing though?
it certainly helped it spread and gain adoption.
The parts that are uncensored, minus the porn and lolcats.
Take a look at Squeak. The Smalltalk folks have been doing this for a long time with the GUI utilities. SLIME is another dynamic environment that knows and can tell You much about itself.
aren't articles published under the domain of academia supposed to be free of charge?
I think they're trying to reduce the impact of the superhuman levels of concentration displayed by the uberhackers. I don't like it.
How to Quickly Increase Your Website Conversions
elpa is good, but, since it's not exactly a standard, there aren't many packages available through it. Having a standard package manager in the emacs distribution would go a long way toward solving this problem, since people could be encouraged to package their .el files using it.
I'd like to see a mini map view, like in StarCraft, where you could select an area to instantly pan to that set of bubbles.

edit: ohh the top bar acts like that. Kinda cool. Very biased against vertical scrolling, which might be bad for certain kinds of files.
To be honest elpa isn't all that useful right now to get all your emacs plugins and I'm sure if a package manager came out that was integrated into emacs we would see a much larger use of package management in emacs.
MIT: Accelerating Startup Growth (Live Now) - Dave McClure, Simeon Simeonov
Try catching a block that does that is actually less code than a long set of conditionals. Granted it's basically saying:

if (foo != null) if (bar.bar() != null) if (foo.bar().baz() != null) {
...
worked = true;
}
if (false == worked ) {/*to do*/}

But, staying on the happy path until you can demo something is often useful. I think the problem is how you transition from demo to production worthy code.
It has a mini map on the top of the screen.
Designing Mobile Search: Turning Limitations into Opportunities (UXD)
> Anybody can choose to save some of that money every month with the intention of taking a good long vacation in the future.

Hopefully this was some lapsus related to the assumed readership of this particular site, in which case it could be somewhat closer to the truth. But it sure as hell is not feasible for everyone.

Count yourself very, very lucky.
Pretty interesting. It's the FastFlip of Google Reader. With FastFlip, you don't have as much choice as to the news they show so I guess they're going the same direction here with Reader Play
These things are possible in dynamic languages with static analysis, it's just not as easy. (Oh, and if you write code that's unreadable, then the static analysis fails. But most people don't do that.)
Yeah. good for learning how to program, but silly afterwards.
I'm sure there's an emacs mode for that ;)
Smalltalk images are a clear demonstration that it doesn't have to be "all or none." Given a clean runtime model, one should be able to switch the execution engine on the fly, just as Smalltalk lets a Smalltalk app (debugger) act as a bytecode interpreter for the process being debugged, then switches back to JIT machine code when you hit "run".
If only there was some combinator for sequencing computations... then you could write:

foo >>= bar >>= baz >>= quux

and there would never be a NullPointerException, because the >>= function could react appropriately when null was encountered!
Increase the productivity of your money by only renting one room...
The thing that makes Vim Vim is just that its modal and has keyboard access for everything. You can get as fast on this as Vim if the right model is applied to the keyboard. Just look at Vimperator.
I kind of wish they used Anyvite/Tweetvite for the RSVPs. I guess it's hard to remember all your portfolio companies when they get into triple digits.
Hopefully the interface points are well-defined enough that you wouldn't need a view like this over the entire set of projects.
Beside the academic papers, access to the Skillsoft courses and Books 24x7 are well worth the price of the basic ACM membership. I've found the free ACM journal often has useful content as well.
There's also a technical reason. They use their own audio toolkit which evolved out of Chuck, which Ge developed as his PhD thesis.

This would be a bear to port to Android. It would either require a complete rewrite or they'd have to use one of the weird NDK/Dalvik VM layer hacks that may or may not be officially supported.
feels like a faster, less relevant version of StumbleUpon
Ask HN: How to make money from a IE8 flaw?
I have found a flaw in IE 8. I can perform XSS, though I don't know where to use that to cause real damage to users. I am not a hacker, just a web developer that made some simple script that unveiled a flaw.

I know Microsoft and some other security companies once rewarded people that unveiled flaws. Are there any company that would reward me any value for telling how to perform that little trick on IE8?
And thus, the Maybe monad was born.
Check the "remember me" checkbox when logging in. Otherwise, yeah, your session cookie is deleted when you close the browser.
This makes a lot of sense. People who like ebooks, whether they own some sort of reader or just dont mind reading a book on their screens, are still a minority.

However, if they read something and tell others about it, they're opinions and hype are just as valid as the next man's. It follows that peers who don't read ebooks may be intrigued enough to actually buy a physical copy
You'd be starting the 'Pohl foundation for old programmers' from the proceeds before long, I gather.

Code like that is really common, and, unfortunately, so are blank 'catch' sections.
How Not to Do It: Liquid Oxygen Cylinders
You know what's even better? When someone who writes that style of code (in C++, no less!) knows that one of the intermediate values could be null, so they use a set of macros involving setjmp and longjmp, and trap SIGFPE, all to implement a fragile sort of try/catch for null de-references.

Clever? Insane? Horribly un-portable and prone to breakage depending on compiler, libc, and OS versions? All of the above!

(And yes, I have seen this coding style used in multiple projects at a major corporation. It was a favorite of a coder-turned manager, which means it tended to sneak in on any project he supervised.)
> my number one complaint, whether it be with eclipse, textmate, vim, emacs, whatever, is the clumsiness of going from one file to another and then back to the original.

Yes, that was something bugged me for a long time so I wrote an Emacs package to fix it. http://breadcrumbemacs.sourceforge.net/
I didn't read past the url: redmondmag.com
Nice stuff! I just played around with it for a bit and it seems you have the basis of something interesting there, now for an application!
Nintendo seizes R4 cartridges at Australian border
This site has tons of cool examples of stuff that can be done in TeX / LaTeX. My favorite is this one (warning, PDF): http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/ShowcaseCircular.pdf
I have heard this so many times from my non-tech friends:

"Your friend just took a crap & tweeted about it? Power to you"

"The popularity of twitter is testament to the stupidity of the human race"

I personally never tweet. I only follow popular people to hear what they say, news sites, local businesses, etc. I don't really know why anyone follows me.
This information comes from actually running the code.

Not that this is a bad thing, though. People seem really afraid of having the code they just wrote be executed, but I think this is an unfounded fear. And, as SLIME shows, you get great information from running the code; much better than mere static analysis.
Or conveyors.
You might be right that Heroku always keeps all of your dynos "spinning." If they do spin them down for the two less expensive shared cluster options, that seems OK, at least for my understanding of their service options. My customers used (for a while) the cheaper shared cluster options.

If you are paying more for the dedicated cluster options, then I agree with you that they should not be spun down.

Certainly, it is OK for them to spin down the free option dynos if they don't get HTTP requests for some reasonable time period.
I like the concepts of the bubbles and the fact that it show call execution so well instead of one file at a time. That's really cool, but what I find so amazing is that since they built on top of Eclipse they got much further towards a usable system like having an integrated debugger was a nice surprise to me. 10-20 years ago the gap between an academic project and a finished product would have been much wider. Not to mention they got to explore more ground with the concept. Just shows how open source software enables innovation better.
hg export, hg import