skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm afraid the git clone behaviour is unusable for the svn repository I work from. A clean pulled tree is over 1GB at the moment I believe, and contains many binary files (static libraries etc.) that aren't rebuilt that often, but often enough to make the repository as a whole very large. I don't know exactly how large it is, but it's large enough that it would take many weeks to download over VPN. Just getting a fresh tree takes over 24 hours as it is.

As for diff packing, it's as simple as this on the bash command line:

collect-patch $(now)-hint.patch foo/{bar,baz}

The collect-patch script will do an svn diff over foo/bar and foo/baz from the root of my working directory, and deposit the results in a file in my current directory (e.g. 2010-05-13_15-50-whatever.patch).

Then, I can revert local changes:

revert 2010-05-13_15-50-whatever.patch

(This reverts changes to the files listed as modified in the patch.) Because it's a file, I get completion on that. And to apply (e.g. after an svn update):

apply 2010-05-13_15-50-whatever.patch

If things get more complicated, and there are conflicts in the lines modified by my patch and the updated source (which is less than 1% of the time), then I do:

manual-merge 2010-05-13_15-50-whatever.patch

That uses a tool (BeyondCompare 3) to do three-way merging between the original revision of my patch, my local edit to the original revision, and the new revision that's been gotten locally. BC3 can auto-merge for all non-conflicting edit sections, but be interactive with a nice diff display and editing if there's a conflict (/automerge and /reviewconflicts arguments to bcomp).

I'm sure I could migrate this scheme onto an analogous git scheme that could keep track of the merges better, but in practice this scheme is enough - and because I wrote it, I'm intimately familiar with its mechanics, so I can extend it, and I'm not at risk of file loss, etc.
>iPad just isnt capable of doing even the basic 'interactive-rich' content

... on the web. Apps, of course, are a different matter entirely. But I get ya, mobile Safari needs a refresh.
I would not put out an ad asking for people to hire, rather I'd work with people on project basis, and if I found one that is a good fit, I'd ask him to join. Would that be illegal also?
How VC’s Value Early Stage Companies
I believe in the utility of my product more than he believes in his.

I can almost guarantee you this is false. His beliefs have driven him to stand on the street corner every day and yell at strangers. Your beliefs have you picking up the phone here and there or sending a few emails. Not even remotely similar in terms of evidence of underlying belief in what you have to offer.
Flash player? Well that allows them to sell Flash itself, to author Flash stuff. So, if more people have Flash on their websites, more Flash authoring programs will be needed, more people will have to learn Flash...and so on. Flash player is free but its authoring tool isn't.

I hope that's what you meant.
7 posts for entrepreneurs on motivation, fear of failure & more
Heh, now I feel weird. I work for a big corporation and I've been trying to make them worry about the "hit by a bus problem". Imagine having a very critical part of your application, without which your business logic can't run. Imagine that this part could bring down the production database server. Imagine that there's only one guy who knows the heart of that part of the system and almost no documentation at all.

Now imagine the situation in which that guy is trying -- and failing -- to make his bosses care about that...
Sure code is ugly. So is paint when it's sitting in it's container. But when used by someone with skill, great works of art are created. Same goes for code. Out of context it's ugly, but what it creates is beautiful.
For a start, I didn't realise the extent of Flash's Mac woes. I'm familiar with the problems with CPU usage during video playback (hence I implemented YouTube's relatively solid player in the site), and since switching to Mac as my main OS recently I've had a few browser crashes (mainly caused by blip.tv) but this was eye-opening. Also, there was a desired level of 'WOW'/impressiveness from the client that I don't think I could have met without Flash. I'm a Flash developer after all, and while I am also proficient with HTML & CSS, between the current state of browsers and my limited JS skills it just wasn't going to happen any other way.

To be fair, it only got really bad when I implemented Google Maps' 3D API for AS3, but even with that, it is still silky smooth on Windows. Needless to say, I am watching the progress of CSS3 & JS/Canvas as they becomes a more viable alternative. At the very least, it can be evenly slow across all platforms ;)
The government surely has an interest in the development of future generations. Watch e.g. Japan in this century for what happens when a national government totally screws up that sort of thing.
Anti Aging medicine to begin testing in 2012
I love how forcing them to replace 2 bags of 500 with 5 bags of 200 is supposed to impact organized crime.
You're right. I didn't know that the HTML 5 offline app installation possibility exists on the iPhone.

(It's not just a matter of reminding people -- this may need to be explained right from the basics in order to educate developers. I don't think I'm the only one who has assumed that Xcode + $99 + App Store is the only way to get an icon on the iPhone OS home screen...!)

Sorry about the low-content reply.
Ok, Yahoo laid of 600 people last year and she gets 47 Million. How did that save money? I am not making fun. Serious question.
OS forum software (simple, think vanilla forums, not phpbb) that I can easily run on google appengine so it's basically free to host.
If a carrier doesn't want to allow it, they will require handset makers to remove that feature on their phones.
What are the different use cases?

I would have thought they're both basically version control, since one of the decisions in version control is whether to use svn or git or something else.

So what use cases are svn appropriate for (and not git), and what use cases are git appropriate for (and not svn)?
Code Kata: Compressing Lists
Thanks, good to hear that.
Cascalog Presentation at Bay Area Clojure User Group
BlackBerry Tablet to Launch This Year
$47.2 Million? yahooooo
jslint solves all of these problems.
A 700$ dell laptop + 500$ iPad costs less than a Apple's cheapest 15" laptop 1799$ (MacBook Pro) and Apple's 17" laptop is even more overpriced.

IMO, the best option for most people is to buy a cheap 17" laptop and an iPad. And for gamers a desktop + iPad is much more reasonable than a "gaming" laptop.

PS: When you consider how often the average users system is down (software/hardware/virus etc) having a simple independent device that lets them use email and most webpages is a huge advantage relative to spending 500$ for a better version on the same basic HW.
> "What happens if you get hit by a bus?"

Put it this way: by hiring an unneeded developer you are betting circa $100k a year that you will be hit by a bus. From that point of view it seems like a losing bet.
C-Crete Wins MIT $100K for Making Cleaner Concrete
Adobe makes money from selling authoring tools not from the Flash plugin itself.

However, controlling the delivery platform (Flash) probably gives them an edge in the tools market too (similar to what Microsoft does. Silverlight is free. Development tools are not)
California Now One Of The Top Government Default Risks In The World
I don't think this particular model is all that great, but I applaud maxklein's willingness to work with a distributed/remote team.

[ rant begins ]

For people who (for whatever reason) can't move to Silicon Valley, it is excruciating to watch all the cool startups in the USA and be stuck with an outsourced enterprise maintenance crap job because that is all that is available locally.

It sucks when you read a startup dev job description, know that you'd be great at it and the very last sentence is "you should be a US resident. No remote working". I understand why people would want that, but it sucks anyway :-P.

I am luckier than most developers in Bangalore - I work on Machine Learning/AI projects, which is where my expertise lies - but working alone is a bit of a drag and if I could work for (just as an example) ReThinkDB without having to move to the USA, I would apply in flash. Working with some of the people I "met" on HN would be awesome. I would happily take a paycut.

Once my present project ends, I'll probably do something like this.

[ rant ends ]

Nutshell: I am very appreciative of any and all attempts by HN folks to work distributed/remote. Go @maxklein!
What would folks think of a chain of high-quality coworking sites in low-cost destinations -- so you'd be sure of having comfortable desks, big monitors, reliable bandwidth, whiteboards, and a projector when you need them?
It is the 'normal' way but I'm not sure it's the 'preferred' one for a x64 system.

Seriously, are you SURE you tried the x64 version? From the looks of it, you didn't, so I'd suggest you following the steps to get the x64 package.

Something like this should work:
http://nxadm.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/install-64-bit-adobe-f...
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/install-flash-10-ubuntu-linux-...

It's not flashplugin-nonfree, as the x64 version is still a beta package available separately (but drastically better than the standard one on x64 machines).
It's apparently time for an interview...
Click & drag events: mouse over -> mouse down -> mouse move

Hover & move events: mouse over -> mouse move

Since that website does not take mouse down into consideration (taking no action), then yes, 'click & drag' would work perfectly well.
>but if your virtual fence is 3 to 5 meters high, it can catch almost all mosquitoes that fly by

Yeah...it's never going to work unless they eliminate all the bugs.
he smiled
Watch and vote
The Rise of Self-Publishing
Sounds like you should be threatening to leave the company unless better compensated. While you're out, you could write the documentation that doesn't exist and sell it back to them :).
>If you want the same video file to appear in any browser

Except Mobile Safari...
Google-Backed SCVNGR Takes On Foursquare, Looks To Boost Fun With ‘Challenges’
> Well, if I want to view Flash on my smartphone later this year, I'll buy an Android phone. I will have that freedom of choice.

Android, right now today, gives you the choice to turn Flash off if you don't like it.

Not having software available at all on an OS platform isn't choice. A supermarket is not an OS platform, but to continue abusing the analogy, Whole Foods bananas refusing to work in the same meal as Tesco milk would be Strange and Wrong.
Cool - send me email, and maybe we'll see one another there.
My family has a few Kindles.

If you were married to someone who read a lot then I think you'd understand. At night you just can't share the same Kindle to read 2 different books at the same time:)
That's wrong. I know from big corps that employees always have to ask for work permission when going to the US (or other countries) for things like development, even for one week. For most countries in the world you actually need a work permission to do that. Single exception is when you do customers meetings all the time and have a secretary typing for you.
nice nice. can you texture map the objects?
Well, if she doesn't create a lot more value for Yahoo than her salary cost, her appointment will have been a failure and she'll have to leave.

In principle Yahoo could be turned around to be a growing and massively profitable company again though it's a very hard job.
I never understood how to do unicode in Ruby 1.8, though. Or I could never be sure would put it more succinctly. Especially not with Rails, somehow I could not even find anything about that via Google. It seemed to somehow work, but I want to know what is going on - is my stuff utf-8 or not.
One of the clearest explanations of cloud computing for the uninitiated I have seen so far:

"There was a time when every household, town, or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap. Cloud computing works a lot like our shared public utilities. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and, when the tap isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t paying for resources that you don’t use. Cloud computing is a new model for delivering computing resources – such as networks, servers, storage, or software applications."
A modern approach to the fully semantic free form client
Oh definitely, I'm not saying he won't be able to find people. All I'm really saying is I wouldn't accept a job that required that of me, and I wouldn't be happy if my work implemented this policy.

Different strokes for different strokes I suppose. <Insert celibacy joke here.>
yeah, even ads!
I suspect this only worked once for the novelty.
It's like sprint sessions at conference or emergency bug fixes at client sites - in terms of lines of code/hour it looks very productive but you can't do it for 30days straight.

But congrats for looking at the idea.
How many companies pay $100/sq ft for a prestige office space in downtown. Then cram employees into tiny cubicles (because it's costing $100/ft) and make you stay in Motel6 for $100/night on trips.
Iranian short animation among 10 finalist at Cannes
If you have a short attention span, just scroll down and watch the video. Awesome.

DIE, LITTLE BLOODSUCKERS!! :)

On a side note, in Asia I got the chance to use a device that's like a tennis racket with a bug zapper sandwiched between finger-impermeable outer net layers. So it's hard to shock yourself, but swing it through a cloud of mosquitos, and they pop, burn and die in a very satisfying manner.

It's hard to avoid maniacal laughter.
I worry that it won't be long before governments criminalize cash. They want to track everything (for a multitude of reasons ranging from taxes to criminal activity), and cash inhibits this.
Challenge HN: A reference implementation of HN on different platforms?
Hello HN,

This thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1342353 has got me thinking.

That usually leads to nothing, but this time something popped out that may be workable.

I'd like to propose a 'reference' implementation of a non-toy website on various platforms, showing what the best practice way is of solving the various challenges that you run in to when creating a web based application.

The goal is to get a common problem solved many times over for comparison purposes. It can help with learning a new platform (I think the main goal) when coming from a platform that you already know, so you are concentrating on studying the platform and the solutions when you already understand the problem.

Sort of a Rosetta's stone for web applications.

The idea itself is not original, in the middle ages of computing a guy called Lance Leventhal had a series of assembly language books that would re-implement the same programs on different platforms and it helped a lot when switching from one architecture to another to have both implementations in front of you.

Because we are all very familiar with the HN website I'd propose that we would spec HN down to the last bolt with respect to how it works as experienced by the user, and then use that to build the various implementations off.

Some languages may have more than one implementation (for instance, because there are multiple frameworks or because someone rolled their own or did not use a framework at all), but that only adds to the general body of knowledge of how things are 'done' in a certain environment.

Is this a viable idea?

Any takers?
I was hoping that this would fix my only issue, but alas I think my issue is with Chrome.

When I was a Safari user, I could call up Wikipedia and I knew that I just had to hit the TAB key once to get to the search field.

Now that I've been lured away by Chrome, I go to Wikipedia and hit tab about half a dozen times before I give up and use the mouse pointer to put focus in the search field. It's a frustrating detail that I think Safari got right.
I agree with both you and the parent. One of the problems with many sites is the expectation that there is a (dedicated) keyboard on the device that is browsing.

I think when one designs something like this, take cognizance that more and more devices have virtual keyboards.
I've noticed people often get bogged down on the issue of "beautiful" code in focusing on the syntax of the language. But that's only a tiny fraction of what makes code beautiful. The true beauty is in the underlying algorithm or idea that the code is implementing. Much like calculus problems aren't what I would call beautiful, but the underlying mathematical principles are.
Not so. If you keep the population down, you're already doing a great deal to stop the spread of disease - especially if you're mostly keeping population down in populated areas, where sick people tend to be located.

This is fantastic.
Unifying Isolated Sensor Systems Using Web 2.0
Yet another idea I had when I was a kid, now wending its way towards the market.
An engineer is the last person I'd want running a company like Yahoo! (and for many reasons). Hired-gun CEO's are expensive and don't always work, but the odds of success must be greater then hoping your brilliant founder/engineer works out as an executive. I would argue it's easier to educate an old CEO on tech than it is to teach an engineer how to be a successful exec.
I assume you're talking about the US (apologies if you aren't) - interest is not a protected class.

The following are protected groups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

Edit: See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_VII#Title_VII

I'll also state the obvious here - I'm not a lawyer and you shouldn't trust legal advice you receive on the internet.
I'm an iPhone user seriously considering a switch to Android due to the big "we must control your device" stick Apple has up its collective ass.

I've read posts saying that some Android phones can't be upgraded to newer OSs, and that people are waiting for certain features to show up on their device's special build. How true is that, and how practical is it to ignore and install fresh new releases from the Android team? Does doing that void any warranties? What about installing a customized build? Most critically, is any kind of jailbreaking or exploitation of bugs needed to get builds not released by the manufacturer onto the device?
Flash lite works fine on a Nokia E71. Also I can view Youtube on the Webkit based S60 web browser.
There has got to be some moral boundary on taxes. Most government are perfectly willing to cross that boundary. So I actually think that cheating the government of tax revenue can be okay in certain circumstances, but the government, if they could, would do away will all cash, and make all transaction electronic and auditable. Just look at that new regulation in the U.S. where you technically now have to issue a 1099 to anyone who you do more than 600 worth of business with... gas stations, retailers, etc.
Depends on what you mean by "work." If you mean "completely eliminate mosquito-borne diseases," probably not.

If you mean "slow their spread and reduce the number of people affected," or "help your party guests get fewer bug bites," then yes, it will work.
Ask HN: Any real Paypal alternatives? With Mass-pay?
I'm building a twitter advertising app that needs mass pay built into it so that i can avoid having to manually send out payments to vendors. Out of the blue paypal closes my account (after a random account review). So now i'm looking for a real alternative. I'm amazed by how little choice there is out there. :)
People with smaller/medium businesses don't typically put a lot of emphasis on websites (based on my measure/references). Users of these services probably acknowledge that fact and have grown accustomed to scheduling appointments by phone.

On the other hand, small/medium businesses that do put a large emphasis on their website, and do have a client base that regularly utilizes their online presence, might have anxiety about passing their clients along to another site to place appointments. They may or may not have their own online solution for this. But regarless, I'd bet they want to own that function themselves. Do you offer your service as module/plugin that they may insert into their site easily?

Another thing I'd suggest is being more clear on your home page about what you actually do (as a software). The testimonial on the home page is great, but not the best place for it.
Of course the question I want to know his how many sales does the angry subway preacher make. More then one every few months like this guy?
How would being religious affect anything? Aren't there Catholic churches in pretty much every major city?
I guessed I'd have something like that coming and yes, that might work.

Except when you regularly need to create new working copies on varying git versions where those config details tend to differ in subtle ways. Too often did I have to wrestle problems on someones MacBook simply because the config or command syntax changed slightly between a few git revisions.

I'd go as far as to say that local (i.e. not repository-wide) config settings that change the semantics of how the commands work are deeply harmful in a team-setting.

It's yet another layer of complexity that you have to keep in mind when debugging problems.

Sure, it can save typing when everyone involved uses the same git version and has a good understanding of git. Unfortunately neither has been the case on most projects I've been involved with.
That's not a lot different from how you'd do hiring for a face-to-face company though.
About to hit 100K, still have 19days to go, I wonder what the record is..
Ian Cruxton of Soca says that's entirely what investigators expect the gangs to do - but there are reasons to be optimistic because they're trying to disrupt the "business practices" of organised crime and force gangs to make mistakes.

It makes life marginally harder for 'em. Instead of walking around with a briefcase you're suddenly walking around with a suitcase. Instead of having to get one guy you really trust to carry the money you have to get two guys you really trust to carry the money. It's twice as hard to hide your huge cash wad when you travel through customs. Mostly though, the main goal is probably just to annoy them.
The Render Engine also has a nice demo up--I prefer its nifty particle explosions and rocket exhaust. I believe this uses the HTML5 Canvas.
http://renderengine.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/spaceroid...
I wanted a sprinkler system with lasers instead of water. Pop up, laser the grass in all directions, pop down. Just make sure nobody's in the yard, first. :)

In practice this is probably a terrible idea - your beautiful green grass is constantly being burned on top.
looks like SCVNGR might keep me interested longer than checking in did.
Personally I think they should spend the rest of their lives in jail for systematically and repeatedly abusing the power they have over the minors placed in their custody by society. Whether by ill intent or truly staggering incompetence and poor judgment means little to me personally.
Obviously, some people are spending just a few dollars a week, others are spending much more than that. Some people have a destructive pathological addiction, others have a moderate financial burden, and yet others have a relatively harmless diversion.
Interestingly, this very passage of code is subjected to a withering critique in Alexandrescu's recent article on iteration:

http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=1407...

(Not that recent, I guess. Nov 2009.)
So is the hardware. I got hod of a G1 side by side with a Nexus One the other week and couldn't believe they were only a year and a bit apart.