skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"There is some social learning that you just miss out on if you don't spend time with your age-peers."

What if you've already learned it?

Two examples:

1) My little sister: never skipped a grade, but as early as 6th grade, she preferred the company of teachers to students. At middle school science fairs and such, teachers from other schools would occasionally ask her where she taught. Clearly, she was socializing on an adult level.

2) My wife: through a running start program, ended up going to college at age 15. Someone wrote an editorial in the college newspaper complaining about 16-year-olds on campus being hard to identify, and how embarrassing it is for a 20-year-old to find out he's been flirting with a minor. One of her 16-year-old classmates complained, and she countered that the editorial made a reasonable point. Her classmate's response was "you only think that because you're not sixteen." He mistook her for substantially older, again, because she was socializing like a 21-year-old.

The point of both of these examples: there's no reason to artificially push a kid to socialize with people of his age. Let him socialize with people of his social level. If he already socializes like a college student, he's not going to benefit from hanging out with kids who socialize like 8th graders.
11 things we do for effective bug tracking
I've got it working on 2.6 (as well as 2.4).

What's the error that you're getting when you try to run it? Are you using the patched file from my tutorial?
It depends on who you talked to at the time, I guess.

WMD were indeed the initial justification; however, when various U.N. investigations failed to find much in the way of evidence for WMD development -- other than a possible mobile chemical lab which may or may not have been used for WMD development IIRC -- the WMD justification came under heavy criticism by those who were following the progress.

The WMD reasoning in fact came under international criticism before we officially breached the Iraqi border. I distinctly recall this because this situation was what prompted my research and essay at the time. The U.S. had mounted large forces on Iraq borders and other points in the area, and I guessed that there was no way the U.S. administration would then simply recall of those forces. They were there, so they had to do something.

So, to counter the weakening of the WMD case, the case for human rights protection started making the rounds in mainstream media and talk radio. Suddenly the case wasn't that Saddam might be able to harm the U.S., it was that Saddam was a bad guy and we were going in there to do good things for the population that he was oppressing.

And that worked long enough to roll the troops in, destroy some cities, topple a statue, and find the guy hiding in a hole.
Pause machine, find new universe.
Well take China as a counter example. Britain is in part responsible for the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. At the time Lin Zexu was vilified by his own people because of the military attention he attracted from Britain (First Opium War). Britain didn't like the fact that Zexu was trying to prevent his people from becoming addicted to Opium. Today Zexu viewed as a national hero for trying to resist the British.

So if Britain was really concerned with stability, why didn't they just leave China alone? Britain did create stability yes, but only after they invaded a nation and remade it in their own image. Who knows how many African "Zexus" were suppressed by the British? Could African nations have created stable governments for themselves if left alone? The only reason why know about Lin Zexu is because China was powerful enough to resist complete control by the British.

I guess I'm not really challenging the fact that some countries were more stable under British colonial rule. I definitely understand the idea that British Burma is preferable to anarchist Congo. But these aren't the only two possibilities. China proves it was possible to govern without British rule. The Qing Dynasty (and subsequently) the Republic of China are evidence of this. It's not clear what kind of governments could have developed in Africa had the British not enslaved millions of the resident population right off the bat. If we extend our thinking to before the British actually colonized Africa, we no longer have to choose between British Burma and anarchist Congo

EDIT: So this gets at where the sense of inferiority comes from. In lionhearted's argument either we assume British colonization as acceptable and a given OR we assume that the African nations could not have developed a stable government on their own. If neither of those two assumptions are made then we don't have to choose between only British stability and general anarchy.
unless they're from YC startups? ;-)

Personally, I think we should allow (and even encourage) them as long as they're from someone already in the community (say karma > 300?) just like polls.

(PS. It was awesome meeting you at HFNYC!)
I've heard of this scenario before, but don't understand this situation. What possible technical reason would justify a billion lines of code needing to be in one repository? If it's a matter of history, perhaps we just need a better import tool.
git does have the ability to do partial history clones and partial repository checkouts.

However, you can surely see that the goals of requiring the code to be in a single repository but requiring the ability to only access part of it at a time are conflicting.

There are numerous ways to assemble a product out of lots of subprojects. It would be ridiculous for something like ubuntu to try to put everything into a single repository when all of the common usage patterns have the users working as if they were independent (and often even under different administrative domains).
Yeah, if you are a very sloppy reader :)

(http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofHistoryandAnthropology/...)
Does Ubuntu One (their version of Dropbox) count?
While I object to some of your argument (for instance, note the timestamps on the comments), the dynamics of the karma scores on our two comments is pretty fascinating. I was shocked to see I'd gotten voted up so rapidly, and I'm amused by how my score is eroding into yours.

Linus Torvalds is a gifted programmer. Eric Raymond is an insufferable blowhard. From the very first sentence of his mail, he's making it apparent that he is part of the senior cadre that makes the Internet works (to borrow a turn of phrase) and that he is condescending to explain to Linus how this software development stuff really works.

I think my comment does a rather fair job of cutting to the quick of the issue, but I respect your take on it as well.
sorry man, not aware what the protocol is. maybe if this was only visible to folks from an Indian IP address... seems like a great place to find people who want to build web-start-ups - already received emails from several young guys who are interested.
So people will ignore laws against drunk driving, but will obey laws against drinking in the first place. Interesting theory, if only we had some historical evidence to see if that would be likely to work...
It would be interesting to break this down by revenue, and compare what each company is actually making on each category.

Google would be dominated by search, which would likely be a fraction of the other companies business. Microsoft would dominate office suite and and OS while the others would be a non factor. But the rest of the categories would be pretty interesting.
I was referring to the last paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India#History , and I was being genuine: that paragraph reads as though certain issues arose specifically after independence, and if that's not the case at all, I would appreciate it if someone knowledgeable on the subject would edit the article.
What is a 'branch prediction of the CPU'?
A quarter is about right (it's 23.4% as of 2009). What's more interesting is the graph of US GDP and world GDP:

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&m...

In the 80s, the US sat at about one-third of the world GDP. Something happened in 2002, and since then the world GDP has been skyrocketing relative to the US.
I also find it a little funny to want the government to legalize substances which have more negative health benefits than positive.

Put the Twinkie down and come out with your hands up.
I gave a long detailed response to this over on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/biv72/why_git_a...
Great idea, until they starve to death once you depend on them.
Something more than a quibble: while the EU has a higher total GDP, that doesn't translate into a higher purchasing power or standard of living---which can get complicated. If some higer ticket items are simply out of reach, maybe there's better markets for stuff people like us sell.

To do this correctly, you need to look at what the markets for X are in a particular country or region.

I'm also appalled with two p's that the author is invoking the "Chinaman" sales fallacy. Once upon a time it was through that China had vast importing potential, for if you could get just 1% of its men to buy a wool suit, you'd be minting gold.

Of course, that ignores the minor detail of why anyone in China would desire a wool suit, let alone be able to pay for it.

Anytime you hear someone say "if we could get just XX% of this market", remember that each sale is made one at a time, and that those individual sales have got to make sense before you can get wild eyed with percentages and big numbers.
> But I work at a large company where all the source code is in a single repostory.

Sure, Google does this with perforce.

You are correct, that if you desire a single truly massive repository, you will eventually have trouble with git. However:

> It's just not scalable to large organizations.

Of course it is. The solution is to have multiple repositories and then use something on top of git to tie the repositories together as needed. For example, this is how the android project is being managed:

http://source.android.com/download/using-repo
Capitalism in a nut shell. For a few hundred dollars, you can get a computer with software installed that together cost billions of dollars to develop over the years. For free, you can find almost any information on earth with a search engine that also cost many millions of dollars to develop.

The only thing that stands out here is that by using the products of companies just getting started, you get to influence the development process to suit your needs.
> After all, the fact that I could, in principle, have sex with a woman—if I were plied with enough alcohol and she were tomboyish enough to create a suitable gender-modifying illusion—doesn’t exactly make me a heterosexual.

These are the words of a gay man.
"That paragraph reads as though certain issues arose specifically after independence,"

Every country has problems after independence. Or any given moment in its history for that matter. That is how history moves forward. It isn't as if Independence brings eternal peace and calm forever.

Let us take America. After independence from the British, all kinds of problems "arose". They continued enslaving people who had done them no harm, fought a murderous civil war over that issue, took over parts of Mexico, fought wars with the British, Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis and the Afghans. They had race riots in plenty. Asassinations of presidents and peaceful demonstrators. Terrorist attacks. Now they have a failing state on the southern border and drug wars spilling over.

Yadda Yadda. None of which shows that independence from the British was a bad idea or that America has "declined" since then.
CSS Selectors and Pseudo Selectors and browser support (Updated 2010-03)
May be you've seen these HN threads about self-learning maths already... if not, hopefully you'll find these textbooks useful. Here's a little HN link dump, in the order of time at which the discussions took place (from the oldest to the most recent):

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=108723

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201913

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458926

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755043

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058359

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193352

One caveat is that many of these textbooks do not come with a solutions manual. So, in terms of practice, I think that's where the dearth of uploaded lecture materials could come in. Sometimes, there might be no e-learning/opencourseware material for the topic you're interested in. In such cases, I found that if you look through universities' Websites closely enough, professors upload a lot of course materials on their personal pages. You can do this by finding a random university's math dept. page, then searching from course/faculty listings.

Last of all, I'm pretty certain you've heard of this site already, as it's being circulated quite a lot lately, but many have professed that videos from khanacademy.org to be quite helpful when grasping basic mathematical concepts.
If you're not going to use spell check, please turn your autocorrection off. Otherwise, I don't know how one can explain confusing "their" and "they're."
I'm having a Saturday morning-induced brainfreeze. What is this "common object" called, so I can go to Staples and get it right now?
For what it's worth, that bit about unlimited data plans isn't entirely true. The standard iPhone voice and data plans from Vodacom in South Africa bundle only 250Mb of data, while I'm fairly sure that Rogers in Canada and Vodafone in Australia don't sell the iPhone with unlimited data plans, at least not on all contracts.
"you wouldn't say we have a prohibition on rape, murder, or burglary."

I think that's because those are crimes against other people. You should be able to kill yourself if you really want to, but they won't allow you.

"I really don't see how a drug like crystal meth will help anyone in the long run."

Natural selection? If anybody is dumb enough to damage or kill themselves with the use of drugs it's fine with me. Same goes for cigarrettes.
Decline in prosperity? You have no idea, you arrogant idiot.

Not necessary. His intentions are good and I appreciate that lionhearted had the courage to bring up an uncommon point of view, even if it is misguided. He's honestly and openly asking questions and the implication of inferiority is not intentional.
I also use those binder-clip things to hold plastic bags (ie: like on snacks, etc.) closed after you've opened them.
As is to be expected from this author, this is definitely on the flame-bait side of things. I submit it because I believe there is an important point here: for the vast majority of startups, going with a relatively unproven "NoSQL" database is a premature optimization and an unneeded technical risk. I disagree with the author that these databases are a flash in the pan, but their over-application is.
Here's the difference between

bzr log on my clone of emacs:

23.040u 1.518s 0:25.31 96.9%	0+0k 0+73io 0pf+0w

git log on my clone of emacs:

2.197u 0.226s 0:02.89 83.3%	0+0k 36+14io 0pf+0w
Because it's a freaking lousy career that more women than men are smart enough to stay out of: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science ?

Especially given the much smaller fertility window women have?
A company with a couple of applications will likely have a dozen or more shared libraries or other resources.

You could create a repository for each resource, but resources are merged and split over time, a change in a resource may require application changes as well, etc.

All in all it is often just simpler to make a nice directory structure and treat it as one repository rather than deal with dozens of repositories.

I have sort of this problem myself, I have 20 or so shared frameworks in my “big repository” where I would like to release a few of them as F/OSS, but I am using Git and it is too much of a hassle for me needing to then put these frameworks in their own repositories.
The rulers of early Egypt were rich enough to have pyramids built. That's an expensive proposition regardless of how you handle the labor force.

You don't actually have to pay the workers extra money, either, if pyramid labor was a form of tax payment. It's still somewhat of a mystery how they managed to design and construct the damned things, but it would have required a large amount of skilled and compensated workers even if the brunt physical labor was borne by slaves. "The accuracy of the pyramid's workmanship is such that the four sides of the base have a mean error of only 58 millimeters in length. The base is horizontal and flat to within 21 mm. The sides of the square base are closely aligned to the four cardinal compass points (within 4 minutes of arc) based on true north, not magnetic north, and the finished base was squared to a mean corner error of only 12 seconds of arc." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza)

EDIT: Once you have enough skilled foremen, the gain from enslaving a bunch of other people to do the heavy lifting isn't as much as you'd think--especially for an already-rich civilization that already had to invent a lot of clever, labor-saving techniques just to get the damned things built.
"Not necessary. His intentions are good"

Yeah? I thought he was just being inflammatory and arrogant.

"I appreciate that lionhearted had the courage to bring up an uncommon point of view, "

When you are ignorant you don't need courage. I can bring in all kinds of "uncommon views" (hey George Bush was the real planner of 9/11!! Really! Because I say so!) if I don't have to substantiate them. I find his claim that India has declined since Independence from the British ignorant, and yes, idiotic.

"He's honestly and openly asking questions and the implication of inferiority is not intentional."

No he wasn't. He was making bigoted and inflammatory claims.

My ancestors died in British jails. My paternal grandfather never recovered his health from British torture for participating in a peaceful rally asking for independence. It wasn't that far away.

I understand and appreciate you feel differently.
Isn't it obvious that two patches in, say, different files might repair the same bug, but in incompatible ways? --It's the nature of programming, everything is connected. But they won't depend on each other from the point of view of the VCS, of course. If I pull and apply both, things will go wrong. Isn't this possible in all systems? I can always apply my way into a broken system.

When I have things right, and it compiles and I'm ready, I `darcs tag` -- for example. There are many ways of referring to patch-piles as adequate to compile together.

Though it's clear that `darcs` isn't good for all purposes, at least in its present form -- I don't think anyone says it is -- it is excellent for many; certainly almost everything up on GitHub would do better with `darcs`.

The most important advantage of it, it seems to me, is the complete transparency of the process and the underlying model; it is completely missing the black box aspect of something like `git`. People rightly praise many of the features of `git`, which I use, with amazement, in connection with some projects I help with. But I feel that all the enthusiasm for it is a bit like enthusiasm for something like Word, or some similar monster GUI program, on the part of people who have no idea what it's doing, how it goes about it; and all `git` tutorials are like tutorials for people about how to use Word. Learning new combinations of commands, is like learning about esoteric drop down panels in Word. --Though I suppose one can't blame `git` for the incredible tiresomeness of its enthusiasts.
Ah, the intersection of history and economics. A lot of the situation around the First Opium War was complicated by the prolific activities of the British trading company and the economic motivations of the crown. The British didn't want a drug-addled China, they just wanted to change the trade balance (in Britain's favor of course) and opium trade was a convenient way to do that.

Our notions of altruism now weren't prevalent at that time, so of course Britain would remake a country in its own image. They were terribly arrogant and had little to no respect for indigenous cultures (and I never meant to argue otherwise).

And, of course nations can potentially create stability on their own, and without British influence. Many have done exactly that throughout history. That said, I wouldn't tend to argue for the colonization of peaceful, well-organized countries.

I do think that colonization, under modern approaches and with the intentions of being present in a country only temporarily, is a reasonable approach to countries which can't seem to govern themselves.
It includes IE9 preview, and latest betas from Chrome 5 and Opera 10.

It's kind shocking seeing that IE9 is actually ahead of Firefox in this area.
What? It is all your fault! You are the freaking consumers! We have the misfortune to be the obliged way for Colombian drug dealers to pass the drug to USA, where the rich dumbasses drug-addicts live and are willing to pay.

Now you are going to take the moral high-ground here and say "eew! make that fence taller!"?
> Say what you like about colonialism, but this kind of shit never happened under the British Empire. They'd come in, kill the local armies and resistance, [...]

In your mind, colonialism[1] has had little to do with the situation we face today? Or its "downsides" are outweighed by whatever good was done?

[1] You know, arbitrary borders against traditional ethnic/cultural separations, slavery, stealing the natives' capital and resources, on one hand stunting the natural evolution of their societies and on the other accelerating it with technology, delaying developing their own good governance over time by installing colonial authorities, etc., etc.
I've done CPC advertising with Facebook and found the quality of traffic to be lower than G/Y/M but the lower CPC cancels out and makes my cost per conversion similar.
Sabayon 5.2 'Gnome Edition' Review
The Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010
A binder clip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binder_clip
whygitisbetterthanxIsBetterThanwhy-git-aint-better-than-x:

- more readable font sizes and font-vs-background colors

- better use of whitespace

- supporting graphics

- minimal, tasteful use of color/shading
From the article:

"Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don't want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?

The short answer is you don't. The only way to stop today's rebels for real is to capture or kill their leaders."

I agree completely and fully!
The author makes some very valid points, but I will retort that RDBMS are overused as well.

Sometimes you just want to store data on the disk in a safe and language agnostic way.

You don't care about relations.

In that case, many "NoSQL" engines are really great.
I am exhausting my somewhat notoriously short supply of patience, so please excuse the following outburst:

Why are you trying so goddamned hard to argue with me? All I've -- politely -- asked, for fuck's sake, is if you would mind contributing to a Wikipedia article on the subject! I'm not even disagreeing with you! And I cannot, if my life depended on it, fathom why you would write some counter-examples as a reply to my one sentence clarifying the article in question and my request.

Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Poll: What are you investing time to learn?
What are you investing time in learning? I've tried to be pretty general on the top level choices -- upvote as many as apply to you; would love to see specifics in comments.
An established web framework (Rails, Django, etc.
)
A new/developing web framework (Lift, Node.js, etc)
Native Mobile development (Obj C, Java)