skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are many, many open source web apps that work exactly as you describe. Drupal. Wordpress. Trac. About three hundred thousand personal blog engines. Every Rails demo app ever created.

All of these examples are highly extensible! Indeed, some of them are so extensible that people get confused and think that they somehow don't count as apps.

Meanwhile, it is senseless to propose to build Ye Olde Generic Web App. [1] Come up with a very specific idea for a very specific tool and try to rally people around that.

Note: Few if any open source projects start out as a statement of purpose with no code attached. Write some code, put it up on Github, and then try to evangelize it.

---

[1] Actually, it isn't senseless, but a generic web app without a specific purpose is called a framework, and the main reason not to propose one is that everybody will yawn. There are hundreds of existing frameworks. Every programmer perpetrates one sooner or later. Writing one is a fun exercise, but don't expect other people to get excited about it.
In other words, Git's abstraction is leaky

No, it means you're using the wrong abstraction.

As you change your codebase, files are modified. To the untrained eye, it looks like this a simple linear progression of history, and you just want to record savepoints as you go along. CVS lets you pretend this is the case.

Actually, that's not the case at all. What you actually want to record is the changes you're making, and the relations between them. In the vanishingly small edge case where you never have any collaborators, never any experimental code, you never need to backtrack, you never need to work on more than one portion of the code at a time - this is isomorphous.

The rest of the time, it's not. CVS & SVN try to stretch the first abstraction to take care of these differences, but fail.

git makes you face up to the fact that your abstractions are wrong.
I would like to know what Flash game are you comparing this simple game with.
You make valid points about open source tools frequently having leaky abstractions, and I often have exactly the same response that you do -- "Why don't people make more effort to make this elegant/pretty/intuitive?"

But the more I use git, the more I actually appreciate the fact that the abstraction is leaky. When I'm manipulating my history, I often really _want_ to have all the guts hanging out so that I can slice and dice them. If git wasn't designed using the "composable tools" idea [1] then it would make this stuff a lot harder.

The tradeoff is that it makes the learning curve a lot steeper. I understand that some developers don't want to know too much about their VCS, but I can't count the number of times when I have appreciated having an in depth knowledge of it [2].

I said this here once before, and I don't mind repeating it: git is a power tool for power users. It is also designed as VCS toolbox, so anyone who wants to write a more intuitive UI layered on top of git is welcome to. There are a couple out there, but they don't seem popular. I'm not sure why.

[1] Although this phrase also conjures the UNIX Hater's Handbook's take on it: "tools for fools"

[2] The next question is how much of the time do I get into these situations _because_ the guts are hanging out? Is that the reason I need the power tools to get me out of trouble? It's hard to judge because I'm too close to the trees to see the forest on this issue.
If they just have a secure, P2P Twitter with rudimentary social networking, that's enough to get them started.
Surely SVG makes more sense for vector games?

They should also try to recreate the arcade experience with the painted backgrounds, like from here:

http://mameworld.info/mrdo/mame_artwork/astdelux.png
Once more, the legacy of marketing!
Why is not possible to install the old firmware on the new devices?
The military will spend $5000 on a toilet seat, I'm sure they'd be willing to buy a PS3 at what it costs.
How about they are using wifi spot location info for non-GPS location services with Android phones?

Because that's what they seem to be doing:
+ GPS if enabled and have fix
+ Fall back to phone network (cell tower) and wifi spot triangulation otherwise

That's one reason why Android prompts you that they collect anonymous location information - they don't have to have a bunch of trucks going around, just a bunch of people with wifi + GPS enabled and there you go: cheaper positioning for everyone else....
To me this is not about Google's pledge to do no evil, but more like a call to action against Facebook, Microsoft, and yes, even Apple.

Unfortunately in the tech industry shareholders love to see large market share followed by strong lock in potential.

As technologists it can be very frustrating to see, what is often inferior technology, win the market.

But, even more importantly, consumers suffer when interoperability diminishes. The mainstream top end of the adoption curve can't be blamed for gravitating towards ubiquity, but as technologists we should always be putting a full court press on walled gardens.
If Twitter allows to search public statuses, then it's fine. If Facebook allows to search public statuses, then the world is doomed. Utterly nonsense.

If you don't like it, don't use it.
Security measures - Sony doesn't want you doing things like that because it gives people more opportunities to find exploits that will eventually lead to piracy (which will reduce its revenue).
3 Secret Ways to Stop Snoring | Hi Health and Fitness
See my comment below. Myth and DEViANCE were partners.
The most important web programming language (if brain damaged) is PHP.

If we went with "the most important, even if brain damaged" then VB would've been the language of choice years ago. I'd rather go with, "whatever will produce the most savvy programmers." In this light, there are good reasons to pick Scheme. Before that, I would also opt for a simplified assembly language, with a simple compiler targeting that language. For the first intro course, Python isn't a bad choice. Look how many programmers in their 40's got started in BASIC, then graduated to 6502 Assembly.
Works very well with Opera too.
I don't accept either the heavy-handed liberalism that says progress is inevitable or the reflexive conservatism that says we're losing something precious by casting off tradition-for-tradition's-sake. However, I do believe the following:

Sigh. As long as you view this conversation in some kind of cookie-cutter, political-box mentality I doubt you are going to make much progress.

Think of it like this: We now have immediate multi-sensory input into people's brains in a way that the species has never had before. The big evolutionary question is: what are we going to do with it? Are we going to join together into some kind of hive mind? Are we going to become permanent couch potatoes? Is each person going to have some super-cognitive ability they never had before?

Look for drivers and patterns, not ideology.

The driver I see dominating right now is the push to control brain-time. Every business that is half-way technology-related is striving to get some time on your brain. They'll do that with Farmville, they'll do that with wikipedia, they'll do that with YouTube, and they'll do that with Google.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the optimization is not around survival of the fittest -- at least from the individual's standpoint. At least so far, some new piece of trivia you picked up last night on the net is extremely unlikely to allow you to pass along your genes and/or prevent another human from doing so. But looked at from the application's and startup's standpoint, there is an intense evolutionary process going on where apps that take up more brain time get funded (and have spin-offs, er, children) whereas apps that don't find that brain time do not. Eyeballs always win out. This is why your argument of better information quicker fails -- the information is not a selection criteria. It's just information.

The interesting question is whether or not this evolutionary process of applications being easier and easier to find and harder and harder to put down ends up having some effect on reproduction. What the Atlantic and other articles talk about is the immediate effects -- much more interesting are the multi-generational ones.

I'd much rather talk about patterns of behavior in a system than the motivations of those criticizing (or praising) it.
That's great, but it existed as a DHTML demo for Internet Explorer 4.0 10 years ago. So much for the hype.
I know how they are cracked (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343066). I was wondering why no one was doing a file compare on the original Myth cracked exe and the one from Steam.

But you're wrong about game exes being packed by release groups. There is nothing to "hide" from other groups. Once you remove the commercial protector (SecureROM, etc.) the rest of the patches are pretty trivial.
I think your underestimating the cost of taking on a 6 year old business with 400 million users and $500m in revenue. I'd be more worried if they only got $10k.

Currently they are at $82,690 for 1945 backers which is $42.51 each, does anyone really care if it doesn't work out? Before you answer think about people spending $499 on an iPad, a device they don't need and might not even work on their WiFi [I'll be buying one anyway].

Also, don't forget that each of the donations is essentially a pre-payment for some part of the service if it succeeds.
SharePoint 2010 web launch delivers blank web page
outside of assembly, but as much as I love it, its usefulness is dropping every day...

I don't think that it's an accident so many good programmers got started in BASIC then graduated to 6502 assembly. There's something powerful in that combination. We can go it one better with Python, followed by assembly on an emulated simple processor. Follow that with writing a simple compiler targeting the same processor. (In Python, perhaps.)

C is nice, but I've seen too many C programmers who really just think of the compiler as magic and have no idea what is happening there. To produce top-notch CS people, you should get as close to the machine as assembly.
So Android and the Pre both have wifi hotspots, but iPhone doesn't. I had hoped they'd add this for OS 4.0, but of course that might hurt sales of the iPad 3G (and all the free marketing it generates from mobile networks).
Ruby being more popular than anything else flies in the face of all the other metrics. There's no way it's more popular, in general, than PHP and Java, for instance.
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I really can't feel bad for the USAF when Sony decides to no longer subsidize them.

I am quite sure the USAF has pockets deep enough for a supercomputer more expensive than a cluster of PS3s.

Right now, I would suggest taking the GPU route. The Cell BE was hot a couple years ago. Not anymore.
5 Twitter Users Every Info Junkie Should Follow
Yahoo CEO gets $47.2 Million salary package for 2009
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Clicking on the "Random statistic" link, I got this one: YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine globally. It is estimated that there were 17 billion search queries on YouTube in August 2009
Scroogle anonymising Google searches again
Weavejester, this is utterly brilliant. Like a lightbulb going on. THANK you!

I'd love to post it (with attribution, of course) as a followup article on The Reinvigorated Programmer. Please contact me to let me know whether that's OK -- mike@miketaylor.org.uk
I'm thinking this might be more like head shops. They sell water pipes that are surely used almost exclusively for illegal activities but can be used for non-illegal activities (i.e. smoking tobacco). I don't recall the head shops being asked to produce an actual example of a person smoking tobacco through one of their water pipes, how does this differ exactly?
The title of the article at law.com "HTC Sues Apple, With Help From Troll" is loaded! There is in no way any friendship or even co-operation between HTC and said patent troll, as implied by the wording of the title.
This reeks of the Apple-fanboi PR guerrilla!
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Hot off the heels of Steve Jobs’ scathing post regarding Apple’s decision to keep flash off of the iPhone OS come reports that the Cupertino fruit company may be facing an inquiry from either the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission. In this week’s re-cap we look at this story and other happenings from the last week in mobile tech.
Like the current folks in congress aren't nearly as smart as the folks who wrote the constitution.
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I can't help but wonder whether it's complex by design so people will stick with the defaults.
I didn't understand what Contacts Sync would do, so I skipped it, just to be safe. Who knows, worst case it would import everybody I follow on Twitter into my address book.

I am still not sure what it does. The only thing I can imagine is comparing email addresses and adding the Twitter name to address book entries if email addresses match.
NASA builds six legged robot for Mars mission
Here's one that does Perl5, Perl6 (Rakudo), bwBasic, Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, Io, Javascript (spidermonkey), Lua, OCaml, PHP, Python, Ruby, Postscript and Tcl !!!

* http://colabv6.dan.co.jp/lleval.html

PS. It was the sandbox used by Sunaba, a Perl5 Plack/PSGI online REPL: http://sunaba.plackperl.org/
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Great news for android users. bad news for PDANET for android. Now users can access internet without paying for an app.
Agreed. A Linux computer, even with the latest and greatest (and being greatest also means being fully supported) graphics and sound subsystems is a lousy gaming machine. It's, however, more or less the best serious computer money can buy.

For games, I recommend a PlayStation 3. For serious computing, a serious computer.
Still, it can't be right that "get checkout foo" does one of two COMPLETELY different things depending on whether or not there is a file called foo in the current directory. Surely one of those two commands should have a different name.
Hi guys. I use XSL everyday and what you need to understand it's not a generic programming langague like Python, it's a DSL meant for transforming from one form of XML to another.
If you're doing x = x +2 in XSL you're doing it wrong and that's why it's so awkward.
XSL is very strong in that one domain only - declaratively transforming XML.
It's actually much easier to maintain rules than any other language I tried for this particular purpose.
I just hope people won't try to use it too much - it has it's own niche and because XML is everywhere now it's a fairly big niche, but it's best used sparingly and in combination with other technologies.
Can the interface be used as a front end to what Diaspora builds?
Amusing. As far as I can tell, this is almost 10% of Yahoo's profits for last year (source: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=yhoo)
How Standardization Enables Specialization
Future of Flash
HTC calls for halt of iPad, iPhone and iPod sales in US
The tricky business of selling Ruby on Rails projects
How To Brainstorm New Ideas
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Git pull/merge etc. have a --no-ff switch that will do a normal merge even if a fast-forward is possible. You can even configure the default, though I don't remember the config variable.
Facebook interface issues are silly. The privacy settings are made confusing deliberately. They have plenty of talented people and could fix this quickly if they would want to. IMO the root problem is not interface design.
Hey, I’m all with you. I have a Mac. Also a sucky gaming platform. Doesn’t really matter as long as you don’t like games or prefer consoles.
“They have to explain how they do things, but that sometimes allowed people to game it.”

Does this mean the obscurity of the rating scheme would have helped to avoid the gaming on it by the banks? I don't think so. Yes, knowing how the rating is done would help to trick them. Like any function, as long as you know the parameters, you can modify the input.

But increasing the obscurity of the rating scheme would generate much more issues. The Kerckhoffs' principle is "valid" in cryptography and this is also applicable in the financial sector.
Forbidden Tree
The Cannes Short Film Corner – Vote for 7-minute animation from Iran. Now on the youtube link as explained below.

Youtube is blocked in Iran so we can only rely on your participation!

and spread the word by inviting friends or sharing the event!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b50Q93pXMF4
> For games, I recommend a PlayStation 3.

Yes, but only works for some tastes in gaming. E.g. I'd rather play old Quake 3 (which--by the way--runs on Linux) with keyboard and mouse than play a first person shooter with a PS3 controller.

Also epic strategy games--like Civilization or Master of Orion--don't tend to work well with a Gaming Console.
Cool. But the game is very sluggish and almost non playable on iPad. I wish these html5 games were built with some consideration for iPad.

Anyway, i really appreciate the effort. One step closer to a flash-less web.
Privacy Campaigners Welcome End Of ID Cards
Given the results he got, it doesn't seem like he needed to do so much better. (Of course, perhaps he was just lucky.)
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I've had the same thought - voter verifiability would certainly remove a lot of the ability to corrupt the vote.

However, my reservation is those who are pressured to vote in a particular way, their imam/husband/abuser tells them how to vote; that way the vote could be checked and so couldn't be consider truly anonymous.

If you go a step further and then have the hash encrypted with a one-time pad it's getting too complicate IMO and an abuser could simply demand the pad.
Digg’s Biggest Mistake: Removing the Top Users List
HTC Wants iPhone, iPad and iPod Banned In US
1996 actually, so 14 years, wow (when did I get old?!)

http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/samples/dhtmltech...

Only works in IE though.
I've had a similar impression. There's more than one time I've read a Phoronix article and thought: "Finally, an article on this subject! Only, this one isn't very good."
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Comparing git with svn doesn't make sense. It's two different tools with different use-cases and a transition from svn to git only make sense for some (motivated) teams.
I mean the animations are not smooth, it's probably the algorithm that rotates the asteroids, but well.. if noone can see that, i may be more sensitive about it, but it was the first thing i noticed.
Adobe fires back at Apple: "Adobe love choice & openness"
That's a lot of money for making Yahoo more irrelevant.
Nearly a quarter of U.S. homes only use cellphones
HTC's complaint against Apple examined
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Continuous Integration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_Integration
Defiantly, imagine how many young talented engineers that have ended up at places like Google, Apple and facebook they could have got for that amount.

It's kind of like how myspace, just because there is this so called middle America that still loves yahoo today, doesn't mean that they will be there much longer if yahoo stands relatively still. Probably won't worry Bartz who can just jump off the sinking ship at some point with a massive amount of savings.
This is incredibly timely and I for one appreciate the post. I'm just moving myself and a team from past-experience of SVN into the world of git.

None of us know git, but we're all vaguely aware of it. Unfortunately the place we are at requires us to integrate with ClearCase and SVN, and to make matters worse we're all on Macs and Linux for which ClearCase tools don't appear to exist.

Our proposed solution to bring sanity to this is to use git with git-cc and git-svn to act as bridges to the legacy systems, whilst putting all new work natively into git.

Now... I'll be the first to admit that we're not full of confidence about this as it's the fear of the unknown, so if anyone else has solid advice on how to work with git and workflows and integrating into existing legacy systems I would be keen to hear it.
Google seems to go all out to promote android, others be dammed: First with their free satnav (making TomTom lose 20% of it's value), now with tethering.
While I love tethering, I wonder what carriers will think of it. I can imagine this backfiring, with carriers less likely to push tethering-supported devices that eat into their (more profitable) laptop packages.
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There are a lot of opinions on the future of Flash. It would be interesting to see the statistics at the top of the article from now on, to see if flash will shrink fast, slowly or remain strong. Or even grow, but I would not bet on this last one.
Unions are fine, monopolies are not.

When the government grants monopoly licensing powers to a union they are virtually guaranteeing corruption, high prices, and methodological stagnation.