skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, mercurial has exactly the same problem he mentioned: You want to push 'some' of your local uncommitted changes, but if the remote head has also changed you often can't. (hg shelve is a poor substitute).

This happened to my team enough in practice that they rebelled and forced a switch back to SVN.
For starters you should probably put up a minimal barrier at your registrar to make it less easy to figure out your personalia. That won't deter a big fish but it will help a bit and it will buy you a bit of time in case someone does say in the media that they'll sue you. Try to get in under the rights that the mainstream press has when protecting sources and the 'gathering of news'. Try to stay away from libel, phrase stuff as opinions unless you can back them up with evidence.

Second, the best defense against a suit like that is to make sure the data gets spread around. Set up a system of mirrors in different countries administered by different people that will host all the content regardless of where they sue. 10 lawsuits in 10 different countries is a whole lot harder than one against a sitting duck.

If possible host the copies of the documents outside the location where the target of your project is located, so if you publish on say a Canadian politician don't host your stuff in the US and Canada, but simply link to it.

Research your co-location facility how they act in the case of a takedown request.

Talk it over with them before committing.
You'd still need to commit the files you pulled (that have changes) though right? Which is sort of fundamental to the whole distributed VCS, it doesn't matter that they were committed in the pulled repository, you have to commit them in the new one.
Fermat numbers and the infinitude of primes - Open Bounty
I've talked with this lawyer about other things and briefly about offshore businesses to avoid litigation. I haven't needed it but I know he knows about the corporate structures necessary for identity obfuscation and gives thorough consultations. They may or may not pro bono but he could provide an informed referral http://www.web20lawyer.com/
CDN performance: Downloading jQuery from Google, Microsoft, and Edgecast CDNs
That doesn't work. The "git add README.md" completes with no output, but thereafter, "git commit README.md" still fails with "fatal: cannot do a partial commit during a merge."
'Secret' telecom anti-Net neutrality plan isn't
Maybe they'll all get hired.
Also, doesn't it tell you to do thst when the conflict happens?

edit, yup:

$ git status
# On branch master
# Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged,
# and have 1 and 1 different commit(s) each, respectively.
#
# Unmerged paths:
# (use "git add/rm <file>..." as appropriate to mark resolution)
#
# both modified: readme
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
just "git commit" after that, not "git commit README.md"

edit: it's infuriating that yc won't let me reply to you, so I have to reply in this edit. Anyway.

"git commit" says to git: "move anything in the index (i.e. things which I have 'git add'ed, or which have been merged) into the local repository".

"git add FILE && git commit" says "put FILE in the index and then commit the whole index to the local repository"

"git commit FILE" says "assume the index is clear, and only commit FILE" to which git says the logical response, "sorry, dude, the index isn't clear, I can't do that"

perhaps this will help: http://osteele.com/archives/2008/05/commit-policies
if you look at the IRC logs for the day you'll see i specifically warned some employees what i was doing hours before i did it. you'll also see i was instantly unbanned and was making jokes about how my boss would be mad at me if i got banned from github.

i could have easily not been detected doing this. i chose to to spam the site to see how fast it could respond. i got those 2k users in about 3 minutes or so....
Ask HN: Is the Y Combinator model dead thanks to Kickstarter-like crowd funding?
As of a few moments ago, the Diaspora project passed $50,000 — five times what they'd asked for, and it seems that people are still giving... there's 20 days left for them to keep doing so!<p>It's been exciting to see them double their "investment" in less than 24 hours and proves that it is <i>possible</i> to crowdfund startups.<p>So my question is whether such successes totally invalidate the Y Combinator model?<p>And, on a related vein, what sort of support infrastructure would people like to see with the crowd funding + social media approach?<p>Thanks!
"But no need to hate git for that. No one's forcing you to use it. You don't like vim? Go ahead and use emacs/gedit/eclipse/perl. You don't like git? Use mercurial"

If only this were true. But it's not: if I work on a project where my colleagues keep the source in git, then I have to use git (whereas if they use vi, I am still at liberty to use emacs). That's the problem with CVSs -- they have a lot more inertia than most other tools because they are, by nature, shared by groups.
Wave of democratization. Too early to tell.
Sybase is pretty popular in the financial sector.
Oh! Well, thank you. Yes, I see that that works.

But:

(A) I see that it still commits everything, just like "commit -a", including all the files that I didn't change but that my colleague did in the branch that I'm pulling; and

(B) Why would "git add FILE; git commit" but "git commit FILE" not work? I bet it's something to do with the index.
No.

YCombinator's value isn't the money, it's the vast network of connections and deep experience they can provide.
Very nice development, I wished they'd put an image of a slide with it, and the same slide at the same magnification from a conventional microscope.

This is really more like a very high resolution scanner than a microscope but still very neat.

If this works for microscopes, how about a lens-less wide aperture telescope made from a bunch of sensors?
Key Android exec, Tseng, leaves Google for Facebook
Currently we are starting with Java, but do intend to get to other languages. Feel free to vote for your language on the blog or on the HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338310
I think you're missing a huge benefit to having investors, which is that you're able to consult with them and get advice, and they have a very real motivation to give you good advice and to help you if they can.

YC also has the benefit of a large (and pretty successful) alumni network, and a lot of the YC people I've seen talking/writing about their YC experiences have listed that as a huge positive.

edit: Nothing's stopping you from applying to YC too, but the original question was whether or not this invalidates the YC model, and this is why it doesn't.
see above, I edited to add what I'm talking about
The value of Y Combinator isn't the money.
Google: Aussie net filter could legitimise censorship
I probably made a whole bunch of mistakes here, never mind the major pieces I omitted

Harms credibility.
The NYT thinks people who read the NYT care about it. My opinion last week was firmly in your camp on the general population. Now I'm not so sure.
The point being that the author isn't looking for solutions, but rather just wants to bitch?
Startup accelerator Plug and Play Tech Center to open in Vancouver
We all need to throw a tantrum sometimes when things don't work the way we like. It's ok. Let it out. We're computer users, we understand.

...feel better?

Now shut up and learn how to use your tools.
I presume you haven't come across Hg-Git, then.

http://hg-git.github.com/
If they wanted to rip you off they could just screen-scrape you anyway. So I'd just get a lawyer to draft an agreement and assume they're not going to rip you off.

Or alternatively you could offer them an api for it depending on how they want to use it.
Nice. Reminds me of some of the plugins for .Net Reflector, except more interactive.
.Net (C# primarily)
There's been only one fatal jet crash in the U.S. in the last five-plus years

That can't be right.
Looks to me like he had two problems.

The first was that git gave very poor error messages and needed a confusing series of command-line options. In mercurial, this is much better; the pull creates a new head, and tells you what to do if you want to merge them. Commit is one-step, instead of via the staging area. It just gives more feedback, more usefully, and requires less knowledge about the underlying representation.

His second problem is common to both systems, namely that during a merge-with-conflicts you have to essentially re-commit both changes. This is actually a kind of safety feature, since the conflicted change might have screwed up something and it's up to you to make sure the code is in a good state after the merge. If the merge isn't conflicted, then Mercurial (and probably git) does it cleanly without forcing you to read over your teammate's change, which he hates doing.
Yes and no. Others have already said 3 times now that the value of YC is not in the money, and I agree with that for the most part. But what Kickstarter does is it allows you to 'divorce' the advisory/networking roles and the funding roles.

There are plenty of people that can mentor but they may not be in a position to fund for a variety of reasons (for instance not being an 'accredited investor'). Like this you could actually hire them to give their advice, rather then to come to them for both money and advice, as well as a network.

So kickstarter may very well spell the end of the incubator, but via a completely different route.

Companies like YC thrive on the scarcity of the combination of people with the money to invest and the time to mentor.

If Diaspora fails the model will likely collapse though, they're a poster child for this model now, they had better succeed or die (figuratively speaking of course) trying.

No going back for them.

edit: and don't underestimate the power of being 'YC funded' for follow up rounds.
Look at PRQ for hosting, they hosted Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay and can probably give you some pointers as well.
Thank you.

I suspect these folks were OK with spending hours learning about their DVCS, but for most others, this just seems like unnecessary tedium and frustration, "When can I get back to worrying about the code?"

Someone needs to make the Mac of a DVCS, i.e. one that doesn't require a 20+ page tutorial to figure out, is completely intuitive and "just works."

I currently use Mercurial, and while I don't think it qualifies as the Mac of DVCS's, it seems to be working decently enough so far (for my simple purposes). I could learn git, but thanks to hg-git I'm hoping I won't have to.
Sybase is still quite popular in the investment banking world. GS is a big enough client that their ASE 12.5 installations are still being supported despite it officially being EOL for everyone else...
You should realize you've probably already compromised your identity with these posts (assuming your username isn't anonymized).
Probably the same if Microsoft were ordered to stop shipping Office/Windows. And since it never happened, we'll never know!
Also remarkable is that Qantas has had, I believe, no fatal accidents since 1951.
Because it has worked so well for the music industry.
I felt the same way about git but I wasn't able to articulate it as well as he did. Go mercurial!
He hasn't tied it to the project name though.

You'd need that tie in order to use it legally.
I'd never heard of Plug and Play, even though they seem fairly large. It's clear from their website that they're not quite a seed program like Bootup Labs or Y Combinator, but it's not exactly clear what they are. The feel of their site is pretty corporate and scattershot - does anybody have insight into what these guys are like and how they operate?
This meeting isn't an all hands, it's an employee-driven open forum. It was schduled because there has been interest around the public's recent reaction to facebook's privacy decisions. I don't expect any announcemets to be made, just a discussion to be had.

One lesson I learned from the internal response: Many Facebook engineers read HN. Your opinions are being heard.
Steam is a digital content distribution platform for games. It wraps up the online store, purchasing, user accounts, multiplayer gaming functionality (with features similar to xbox live), and actually downloading and running games on a user's machine.

It is Valve Software's creation that they use as a channel to distribute their own games (Half-Life, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Portal, etc.) It is one of the best platforms of its kind and a huge number of other game developers have been using it as a release channel for their games as well.

Porting it to Mac OS X and Linux is a big deal because it means those platforms now have a first-class digital content distribution platform for games as well. So, for example, all of those game makers who are already using multi-platform game engines and releasing their games on Mac as well as PC will be able to do so through Steam, rather than through Steam for the PC and some other channel for the Mac.

Additionally, Valve is porting several of their big (multi-million sales) games to the Mac, shoring up the Mac as a legitimate gaming platform. All of this helps spur a self-reinforcing feedback cycle boosting game development on the OS X (more sales, more games, more development of multi-platform game engines, all of which feeds back on itself).

In short, with this one move Valve has pushed OS X (and soon make Linux) from 2nd class citizen to nearly a full peer with Windows as a gaming platform.
I read this as a "Steam coming to Linux soon" not a "Steam is now available on Linux today, right this second" announcement.
Don't it's more hassle then it's worth. If someone isn't pulling their weight then split and come to an agreement how much you're willing to pay for the other person's work. If you can't come to an agreement throw the other person's work away and redo it from scratch.
It takes more than a few lines of code to make sure everything works. You now have to test on both kinds of filesystems which doubles the amount of testing you have to do.
The point being that the solutions are problematic.
Ask HN: Recommendations on Freelance Agencies
I'm looking to get back into doing some freelance work, and I haven't used sites like rentacoder in the past. I'm thinking they'll make it a bit easier on me - so I thought I'd open it up to all of you:

What freelance sites have you used in the past, and what was your experience with them? Specifically I'm looking to do software/IT.
MediaTrust is looking for interns in NYC
MediaTrust is looking for interns in New York City office w/ interest in Internet media & marketing.

DM or Tweet to @mediatrustpete
Because it will take a long time for that technology to be common, throughout the US.

On top of that, creating a CDMA iPhone would be a tiny amount of work, they would be crazy not too.

The only thing stopping them is the huge leverage they have over ATT, which they would not have over at a Verizon. We are not sure what special favors Apple get from ATT, but they are huge. If you look at the numbers, the growth of ATT has pretty much been due to just the iPhone.

And Apple probably employs more than one person, so they can afford to work on different areas at different times (CDMA and iPhone OS 4.0).

Why not wait, because the lose millions of dollars a day that the iPhone is not on Verizon.
The original title, The Toxic Nature of Email, might have flown better - at least, the post deserved to.

Observations: comparison with descriptions, from before 1970 or so, where executives dictate their mail to secretaries, brings two things to mind. First, that sheer physical bulk makes obvious that 200 pieces of mail is an insane amount. The dematerialization afforded by computers masks that.

Second, that the modern "do-it-yourself" culture is counterproductive. Anyone (highly paid) who gets 200 pieces of mail per day needs help that can judge what really calls for attention, and deal with the rest.
I think BGI is using an even older version. Those guys handle a few billion trades a day using Sybase, and I don't see them upgrading any time soon. They tried switching to Oracle a few years back but the project got canned.

When I was there at BGI, almost all the business logic was encoded in Sybase triggers & stored procs. It was pretty painful debugging a trade due to all the triggers.
PoolParty: Manage cloud computing in a single file.
A) Give them access to the database via a simple HTTP-based API. Let them run searches, or whatever they need against it. Restrict their queries per second and per day and limit how many results can be returned. Make sure you can track their usage and cut them off if they're doing anything shady. Have them sign a service contract. Charge them a setup fee and a monthly fee that's based on the number of queries they need to do.

B) Another option is to give them the entire database, and provide them with regular updates. They pay $100k for the database, and $5k every month for the latest version. This doesn't protect you that well, but if they need the updates it can be a good way to keep them honest.
I guess they better make something actually happen.
Eloquent Javascript (ebook)
I don't get it? It looks just like the "explore" page on github... am I missing something?
I don't even get that, just a blank screen :(

edit: It seems to be working now. I think I needed to go verify my email first. If you are also a new Steam user trying to download portal, go check your inbox first.
But how would you use this information? There are other consideration besides safety when choosing a seat (e.g., proximity to a lavatory, first/business class amenities, legroom, etc).

When you bring "chances of survival in a plane crash" into this equation without considering just how astronomically low your odds of an accident are, it's time wasted. IMHO in any reasonable, objective selection mental heuristic the size of this factor is so tiny as to be easily discounted.
Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking
Yes, absolutely. If you look at the distribution it is really impressive, quite a few in the higher brackets.

More dicussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342655

The comments on the kickstarter site are quite interesting to read, the mix in gender is relatively balanced and it does not seem to be a 'techie' crowd at all.

Just lots of people that wish these kids luck and don't mind throwing some money on the table for them to go and play with.

I really wonder how high it will go, they're in a feedback loop now, more $ means more press which in turn means more $.
And the problems shouldn't exist in the first place.
I'm confused about what part of:

(use "git add/rm <file>..." as appropriate to mark resolution)

is confusing...
Dreaming in numbers
It's their own fault for being idiots and not actually screening it in cinemas. People who download on bittorrent will almost never pay - they are not your customers. Ignore them.

Your customers will pay, but only if they can. It only screened in a few cities, so it's their own fault for making it impossible for people to pay them.

The movie business is doing really well right now. bittorrent has not had the slightest effect. If your are not making money on a movie it's your own fault - not bittorrent.
Mercurial also has had rebase built-in for some time. For git users who have compared both, what features made you choose git over hg?
Prior to the Microsoft all-hands meeting though, MS hadn't been deliberately making insecure software. Once they decided to focus on it, all they had to do was to execute.

On the other hand, Facebook's recent privacy changes have (presumably) come from the top. So if they call an all-hands meeting, it seems like it can only be to either say "we've changed our minds", or "the public are wrong, and we won't change our minds". I can't see much of an actionable outcome for FB staff, unlike after the MS meeting.
CDMA speeds are good enough for most people right now. LTE is exciting but it will probably be years before consumers are making buying choices based on LTE support. Apple did launch the original iPhone without 3G so they have a track record of making some conservative engineering choices. Verizon is doing an LTE overlay on top of their existing CDMA network so any future Verizon iPhone will almost certainly be an LTE/CDMA hybrid. From an RF perspective I would think engineering a handset to operate at 700-850Mhz for CDMA and LTE in the future is easier than even current GSM designs around the world. A future LTE/GSM iPhone is going to need antennas tuned for 850Mhz, 1900Mhz, 2.6Ghz, etc.
Kickstarter is a great thing to push people to get things done that they might not otherwise do on their own.

YC is a great way to kick your startup into high gear as well.

But that's where the similarities end.

They are not substitutes for one another. YC is also not a company. It is a pre-seed stage venture firm (with amazing advice from PG, Jessica and co) and a network of entrepreneurs who help each other.
It is. There have been 3 fatal commercial aviation accidents in that time frame but the other 2 involved propeller craft:

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/Paxfatal.htm

Also note carefully: in the US. You might be thinking about other recent fatal jet crashes that happened outside the US.
It's popular in the financial sector because of the speed of it's mathematical functions. Back 10 years ago Sybase was the default at the bank I worked at.
LimeWire Crushed in RIAA Infringement Suit
This is exactly the kind of unintuitive behavior that he was complaining about.
There is no "u" in Qantas. Also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qantas_fatal_accidents
Well they are actually getting investors at the moment, and they might get sage advice by people who are willing to do so on the net.
Seems to me he should just use Subversion. He has a mental model of how version control works (based on his prior use of CVS) and apparently doesn't wish to invest the time to learn git's model.
> (A) I see that it still commits everything, just like "commit -a", including all the files that I didn't change but that my colleague did in the branch that I'm pulling; and

'git commit' commits everything that is currently in the index. 'git commit -a' commits all files currently tracked by git in their current state (if the version in the index and in the working directory differ, IIRC, the version in the working directory is used). It's the equivalent of a "git add FILE" for all tracked files with outstanding changes, right before a 'git commit'.

> (B) Why would "git add FILE; git commit" but "git commit FILE" not work? I bet it's something to do with the index.

The index is meant to be the 'staging area' where you can pick and choose what you want to commit. See "git add -p FILE" for an example of more complex usage of the index than just picking and choosing which files to commit.

In general, think of 'git add' as your ability to promote changes from the working directory to the index, and 'git commit' as your ability to create a commit from the contents of the index.
That's totally me. I never played portal, got very late into COD4. The only game that I'm likely to get when it's released is Starcraft 2.
Tried to add this to the list but pbworks was playing up: http://jsconsole.com
Agreesies. I just logged out today after seeing 3rd party sites being too Facebook aware, and even regular Facebook still thought my session was hot, let alone 3rd party sites who are harder to gauge.
Once upon a time, I was a Classics student, and even in the 1980s and 1990s, people still got a lot of mileage out of Housman stories and quotations. (He died in 1936.)

Apparently, after he died, they found notebooks in his office that he had filled with long elaborate, witty, hurtful insults -- aimed at nobody in particular. When he wrote a review, he would tweak the pre-fab insults as needed and voila. A sick, twisted person, but fascinating. (If you're really curious, check out Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love.)