skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This actually seems like a bad idea at this point. As I understand it these four guys are going to get 50,000+ (maybe 100+ by the time all is said and done) in donations to implement this concept.

The first problem I have is that this is entirely too much money. This is an open-source project. The idea is not for them to take a salary. They really just need money for living expenses for the summer.

Second, I don't see any seasoned mentors in the picture. Not to be crass but I think young people are silly (I am a young person and I am no exception.) I think the money is overscoped and the time is underscoped. I can see a lot of that money being wasted. Prove me wrong guys.

Third, since this is not the typical investor/entrepreneur relationship, the incentives are much different. This is not a loan, where they will feel super motivated to deliver because if they don't they will lose money. This is not an equity investment where an investor puts in money and has a say on the direction of the project. This is basically a really big grant(1) from 1,573 people who trust them with their money based on a 5 minute video. If they fail, who do they have to answer to(2)? They can always just say, "hey, we are four students who bit off more than we can chew." I think they will deliver something but I am not writing "social networking revolution" into my calendar for September 2010 at this point.

I am totally happy for them, and happy that someone is doing this, but I am also skeptical that the final result will be anything revolutionary.

1 Regarding the donation structure:
"Projects must comply with Amazon Payments' Acceptable Use Policy. Among Amazon's restrictions:

*Loans, investment, and any kind of financial return are forbidden
*Lotteries, raffles, and sweepstakes are not allowed" taken from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines

2 They answer to themselves from what I gather: "Who is responsible for making sure project creators deliver what they promise? Project creators are wholly responsible for their promises. Kickstarter is a venue, like eBay or Etsy." taken from http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq#WhoIsRespForMakiSureProj...
Code as photo-op
If you are having trouble with git losing your changes you shouldf really be committing more often. Once a change is in git it is very hard to lose but until it is in git losing it is very easy.
Correction: There is no ad scrubbing involved. The results pages Scroogle scrapes (output=ie) have no ads to begin with. And, for whatever it's worth, they trigger less cookies from Google (only the PREF cookie is used, when I checked).

To reiterate what I said before, the difference is Scroogle allows the user query to be submitted via POST and over SSL.

The POST method effectively limits what the server can do with the data and what it can trigger automatically in the browser, without user input. Perhaps this is good for the user (more control), and bad for the marketer (less control). As such, it could be a controversial topic.

RFC 2616 Sec. 15.1.3 discussed the use of POST in the interests of privacy.

It would be nice if the output=ie option worked with Google Scholar/Patents and if Scroogle then supported Scholar searches.
No worries, color me unoffended. I should have generated the message I was talking about before I posted anyway.
Im not sure I understand how LimeWire is liable, sure they offer the software, but the infringement is done by their users and not the company themselves
(ahem) the correct quote is "huge success"
I installed Steam on my Mac, started download of Portal, then Steam crashed to desktop. Upon restarting it prompted me for my root password so that it could update itself. The combination of crashiness and needing my root password earned it an immediate delete. I'll try again in a year or two.
Don't forget "bouncing" the display when it reaches the end of the scrollable area! And of course the stunning innovation of holding two fingers down at once.
C in Danger – and thus Higher-Level Languages
For a relevant comparison: every bill Congress passes is hundreds of times longer than the Constitution. How does that make you feel?
Three Things I Love About C
Hm. Or I could take the obsfucated C version, dump it into an Inline::C block and then run it through Acme::EyeDrops. Then we could have a C version shaped like a camel. I am, however, far too tired to actually do so - anybody more awake is welcome to steal the idea ...
10.7 isn't being shown at WWDC, so it probably won't be released in 2011. Since 10.6 had very few visible new features, that's a long time to wait.
Yup, but note that the larger donations come with larger "rewards" later. Everyone above $350 gets a free year from the future subscription service. The $2000 and up donator gets a computer down the line. I wonder if the larger donations move down (up?) the continuum from encouragement towards investment.
re: 1: these are not loans or investments but donations

re: 2: that's the worrying bit. But there is nothing lost by trying, we'll all learn from this.

If they fail, then we can analyze why they failed. If they succeed there will be a lot of attempts to copy this success. There already will be I believe.

Something new is happening here, crowdsourced funding on a relatively significant scale.

And I think you could safely add a 0 to your estimate of how much money they'll end up with, which will give them several things: Investors will see the concept as 'validated' by the target audience before they've even written a single line of code. And big name companies with resources and experience will fall over each other by next Friday to have their name associated with this effort.

If they're smart they sell their skins dear and get a reputable investor on board for the expertise they miss and the networking factor.

The excess money will give them runway and extra clout during negotiations.
If it were just fear, people wouldn't hurl abuse at police officers, they would just be quiet. In fact, the amount of abuse that police take shows that most people don't fear them (not that they should).
These data seem out of date, especially with the facebook users of android, I personally know 6 people that are glued to their FB on android. I may be in an odd position since i only know 2 people with an Iphone
Isn't the message intuitive? Git usually says, "merge conflict, fix the conflict, stage the fix, and run git rebase --continue". If you follow the instructions exactly, everything works.

Now, I know he wasn't doing a rebase (but should have been), but still; when you edit things in git, you stage them, and then commit them. After a merge, the index is mostly ready to be committed, except for the conflicts. So you are supposed to manually stage the fixed conflicts, and then plain "git commit". Simple. It works exactly like anyone who understands git would expect it to.

Now, if you don't like the index, then git simply isn't for you. It's a core concept, you just can't avoid it. (Personally, when I was using non-git version control systems, I often had a separate working copy I used exactly like git's index. So having that built in is a joy for me.)
'svn checkout <filename>' isn't a valid svn operation; checkout applies to directory urls. Actually, beyond svn revert, I struggle to think of an easy way for you to lose your local modifications. If you really just wanted the latest version of <filename>, I guess you might use svn cat, but you'd have to redirect it to overwrite the other file yourself. For svn update, it won't overwrite local modifications.

svn revert seems to be better named for this purpose.
I'd be interested to see what income minus tax looks like.

It looks like there would be "income traps", where earning a higher base salary would actually leave you less well off. Good to see the USA rewarding hard workers!
On april 23rd 23andme.com had a sale, everything for 99$ but it seemed to good to be true, but now im kicking myself for not going for it
No, and I might be alone in this, but i'm pretty comfortable with fb.
More People Using 'Ninja' As Their Job Title On LinkedIn
There are only income traps if the marginal rate's >100% at any point, which it isn't here. Since the marginal rate's never above 44%, it means there's never a case when earning an extra $1 won't gain you at least an extra $0.56 in your pocket.
"Verizon’s interests are best served in a market where there are many phone makers"...

A simple application of commoditizing your complements. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

By that logic, though, Apple should aggressively be putting iPhones on all the major carriers - failure to do so is the probably the main reason there are more installed Android phones out there right now.

But I'm guessing AT&T is giving them an amazing deal, like a revenue share of the user's monthly subscription.
Although there are open source projects which are quite bad, I still think being open source does motivate one to write better code. Regardless, having tools at your disposal to quickly understand/ document code for yourself and maybe relay your ideas to others can be really helpful.
"svn update" will randomly delete your work with no way to ever get it back.

I don't think new git users migrating from svn actually understand that they can rollback any changes git makes. If a pull goes bad and you don't want to deal with it, just reset to your last head. All is forgotten until you feel like fixing it. And no data is ever lost.

(svn loses data by merging everything it can with your uncommitted changes, and then barfing when it can't do the merge. You're left with a bunch of conflicted file, and a bunch of merged files, with no way to ever get the unmerged files again. With git, this simply cannot happen. Git will not touch untracked files or unstaged changes, it will just die. And what it does automatically merge can be unmerged with reset. Or, you can commit the conflict markers to a separate branch, deal with it later, undo that commit, and move on with your life. Git makes easy things a little harder, but hard things easy. Subversion makes anything except hair loss very difficult.)

Oh, and also, the OP really wants his tree to end up like:

A--B--D--C

This can be achieved with "git pull --rebase" (or automagically with the config key branch.<name>.rebase = true). That is what Subversion does, modulo the ability to revert to your original branch.
That's welll over 97% of the meaning[0] but for some reason I must say more. I'd be very surprised if anyone described am elected judge in America as a politician, even though they're elected.

[0]Ain't spurious exactitude great?
You cannot make a professional movie in your garage basement using a Mac.

I wonder if a movie shot in 7 days that has made $192 million and had a wide international release counts as "professional": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal_Activity_(film)
No, “! [rejected] master -> master (non-fast forward)” is not intuitive. The example you give is one of the pleasantly surprising examples of a good error message from git. But, by and large, git's error messages are pretty awful.
Help need room/bed SFO next week
I'm a mature Aussie female entrepreneur from London pitching to vcs for a site here. I need somewhere to stay from 18thMay to 10July preferably SFO or Berkeley. I can't pay rent but can provide business coaching (ICF certified business coach) or housework etc. Email me if you have something that may suit ezebis at gmail.com Thanks
The crowd-sourcing aspect of this has me really excited. I think it is awesome that people are throwing their support behind these four random guys with a dream.

The skeptic inside me says, who the hell are these guys anyway? And how do I know they will act responsibly? And even if they attempt to act responsibly how do we know anything will come of it in a sub-optimal situation (sub-optimal in my point of view because they have little experience, no mentors, and don't have to answer to anyone. I don't think a great amount of experience is necessary but when combined with the other two it just doesn't look good.)

Also, it just seems like this system is ripe for abuse. If I just want 50,000 bucks it seems like I can use Kickstarter to mobilize people around some fake or inflated cause, do little to no work, and pocket the money.

No offense to Kickstarter, I participated in "New York Makes a Book"!

[EDIT] Also, I agree with pretty much everything you said. All of that can and will happen in the best case scenario, but how likely is it?
I'm presuming they are going to work on this for four months, and open source the code. Four People * Four Month = 16 People Months = $3100/Month for a project that I don't see a lot of financial incentive.

If they're half decent developers, they could, without blinking, get a job at $72K/year, which means, they are taking a 50% pay cut to do something interesting and useful, and perhaps educational, while simultaneously voicing the pain we all fell about the direction Facebook is going.

I sent them $25 (or, at least, pledged it to kickstarter) because I applaud anybody who goes to the effort to do something like this. I sent Firefox $25 to get their NYT advertisement.

These all seem like useful diversions of money, not sure what's up with the detractors - You think the developers at RedHat/Novell/IBM aren't taking a (much larger) salary to work on Open Source projects?
This looks interesting but sadly the documentation is in the same state that it was half a year ago: Non-existent.

If you want mindshare then write a long, verbose, tutorial about how to do something useful with it beyond spinning up a few instances.

Because, well, I can already do that in less lines of code than your examples using nothing but the default ec2 tools.
Google sues indie label over copyright claims
What else should a one-line summary of syncing master -> master say?

"Hello dear user. The remote server refuses to accept your branch, because it would delete information. As a result, your request has been rejected. Please rebase and try again. If you need help, hang up, and then dial your operator."

Personally, I am fine with [rejected]. I figured it out, after all...
link to your 14-liners?
Maybe, but only if that forced a real market in healthcare, with transparent and advertised prices and no tying between different services and specialists, so one could actually shop around. Right now, it's damn near impossible to get a rate sheet out of a doctor's office or a hospital, and they don't much like giving quotes on the phone either. Even auto mechanics are more transparent than that (they'll at least give you a quote or estimate if you insist on one). Why can't I go to five different doctors' websites and see five different rate sheets for what they charge for a range of common things, like standard office visits or vaccinations? Why won't a hospital tell me up front how much a surgery will cost, in total after all the different fees (surgeon, anesthesiologist, materials, etc.) are included?
Infrequently Asked Questions in comp.lang.c
Hear, hear. I am quite at the point where I play too much with Python's itertools and want a more pure language - but Clojure is seriously unhelpful in telling you how to actually construct any Clojuriffic code.
It's much easier to see when you use the proper font.

http://imgur.com/ztRPu.png
I would not apply for a job, or hire an applicant, that used 'ninja' anywhere in the text unless there was a dojo involved.
Ask HN: please review my web site
topytalk.com is a twitter talk-oriented timeline. The concept isn't mind-blowing, it is merely a tool to ease your life on Twitter.

http://topytalk.com

Your personal talkline is at http://topytalk.com/<yourtwittername>

Please tell me what you think. Many thanks!
Right, but look at how many other companies have lost in the courts, under similar circumstances. It isn't as though precedents have not already been set. The arguments about what users do with software are fine and well until you're on the receiving end of a multi-million dollar judgment.
Highly unlikely at the moment. Another 20 days of favorable press and a 0 behind the current figure and they're in the 'viable' department, even if they themselves are not capable of pulling it off they'll have to funds to attract the expertise to nail it and they'll have the 'ins' with VCs they need for the rest.

Hopefully they'll pick something like YC for their source of knowledge. Or they might crowd source that too, no telling. Already people are offering them fat pipes, infrastructure expertise and so on.

They're currently pulling in $3500 per hour, it is accelerating rather than slowing down. If they hit a feedback loop (if that isn't already happening) this will be the start-up story of the year. By some measures it already is.

edit: they just picked up another $2K donation, $55,429 now, that's a 10% increase in about an hour and half.
People keep saying this, but i don't think it is true. People do care about privacy quite allot, many will lower the shades when they undress, not all of them speak about their sexual identity for instance, a good number of people are nervous about the census, or get worried about NSA wiretapping.

What seems to be the case is that people are largely unaware what kind of data collection mechanisms are in place.

There is a growing concern, and it is not just facebook, it is very distressing to people when they find that their gmail\yahoo\whatever has been hacked and "they" ware sending Viagra ads to all their friends and colleagues.

I often meet people burned in such manner, and their attitude about online security changed dramatically, often without guidance they do not know how to approach the problem.

In addition the interface always gives a sense of security by abstracting your communication with other people.

There is a great market potential for a private by default.
But are they listening? Hearing me and listening to me aren't the same. Just go look at all those groups "We want a dislike" button, obviously the users want something and Facebook just sat back and went "Uh. No"
I remember reading once that on military planes, everyone sits backwards because that is safer. I wonder if it is true?
Sorry, it's been a while. But yea. 'git checkout <filename>' is basically doing what 'svn revert <filename>' is doing. So, I fail to see how one is necessarily 'more dangerous' than the other.
Personally, I don't have a huge beef with Facebook at this time, and I'm staying put there, but that's not to say other people shouldn't be thinking out loud, playing with and launching alternatives for how people stay in touch and collaborate online. Right now I'm not too concerned with these specific four's coding abilities or whether or not Diaspora stands a chance to attract a wide audience. What's important is that different groups of people try different things.

Having said that, now that they're raised a lot of cash in a short period of time, they have a responsibility to account for how it's being spent. What are the project milestones? What are they committing to release, based on their current budget? Where is the money going? What kind of availability do they have to work on this beyond the summer? What is their plan for when they run out of money?

They've attracted a lot of eyeballs and dollars because people decided to vote out of spite against Facebook with their wallets, and not because of careful due diligence of Diaspora's plan. The stakes are high and a lot of people will expect to see results before the year is over. These four are going to have a lot of Google juice associated with their names for years to come, so they better know what they're getting themselves into.
I'll tell you what happens when I use svn and there's been an upstream change: I never update my local tree with local modifications. Instead, I extract all my local changes into a diff, then I update my local tree, and then I merge my diff back into the updated tree and commit.

When I need three-way merging, which isn't often - usually patch can resync simple things like line offsets - it's handled by a file comparison tool. I have a simple script which handles this.

I work remotely (across the Atlantic) on a large svn repository, so I tend to not to update every day, nor commit every day. Instead, I version local changes with diffs.
Well 2 or in school, 2 are graduating I think.

There is no doubt that what they are doing is good and in the spirit of the hacker ethic. I think what they are doing is great. To me it seems like they are getting too much money and I have my doubts about what the final result will be...
Could be handy to add in a LaTeX-REP: http://mathurl.com/

While it's not a REPL for a programming language, it's one of the tools I use the most whenever explaining mathematics online. Oh and yeah, it saves your LaTeX-print as well.
That's not quite correct. Our original Cassandra nodes were on XLs. Only the new ones were on Ls, and that was because we couldn't get XLs during the outage. Later in the outage Amazon helped us get the XLs we needed.
svn update has never randomly deleted my work, but then I never willingly do an svn update with local changes.

svn update with local changes gives me this dialog:

Conflict discovered in 'test.pas'.
Select: (p) postpone, (df) diff-full, (e) edit,
(mc) mine-conflict, (tc) theirs-conflict,
(s) show all options:

However, I would normally just abort at this point, and make sure my local changes are packed up into a diff like they should be.
And no fatal crashes since the last fatal crash in 1951, before they had any jet airliners.
That's not quite correct. Our original Cassandra nodes were on XLs. Only the new ones were on Ls, and only temporarily.
The effectice payee of a tax has nothing to do with who officially pays it and everything to do with who wants it, or wants shot of it, more badly.

The impact of this excise tax is exactly the same as a sales tax.
On the face of it, I think it's dangerously misleadingly named, but that's all.
FBI Gets Evidence in Student Webcam Scandal
Alarm bells start ringing in my head whenever I see a "bandwagon" pattern. I always think to myself, is the popularity warranted here and I think the answer here is a resounding "no." The ratio of information provided to money donated is waaay to low and to me this indicates that people don't have a great idea of what they are donating to. Then again maybe there is very little harm since most people are donating very little money. If they raise 500,000 dollars that would be a truly remarkable outcome that I did not expect.
Your lungs less likely to collapse on impact. I've heard somewhere, not sure 100%.
I don't understand your "get out of jail free" comment.
It's the equivalent of being charged for robbery if someone saw your license plate number on the getaway car. While it seems plausible you could get a search warrant on that basis, unless they have other evidence I don't see how a mere IP possibly could be "beyond reasonable doubt".
The movie industry should spend less time on frivolous lawsuits and instead focus on creating a product that people will buy. Piracy is just a convenient scapegoat: it's easier to blame pirates than to admit you did something wrong.
I'm not sure Kickstarter is that tied to Diaspora. Depending on which community's blogs / trade press you read, there's a lot of interest in it from people who've never heard of Diaspora. Lots of people in the game industry are watching various indie-game-funding Kickstarter experiments, for example, and whether any of them pan out will be the main thing that'll determine whether people from that industry will take it seriously in the future.
Not a good comparison. "rm" stands for remove; "f" stands for force. Neither "git" nor "checkout" indicate anything irreversible or destructive.
Not that I'm a lawyer but I believe this will be tried in civil court where the standard of proof is lower than "beyond a reasonable doubt".