skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one knows who runs Futaba. 2ch was owned by hiroyuki until he sold it a few years ago to some Singaporean company that no one knows about (probably because of all of the lawsuits that he faced and lost).

4chan does have text boards (like 2channel). dis.4chan.org runs on shiichan and is supposed to greatly resemble 2channel style, but it came later and as you say it is not that popular. There is also the tinychan imported text boards that are fairly recent and somewhat different.
Etherpad "Sunset Period" Over
Divvy (osx window/workspace management)
i think the 1000€+ "entry fee" in form of a macbook is a much larger damper.
Well, exactly. For the vast majority of people those are the only four commands needed. So hg is a great alternative to git.

If you need something more complex or specialist then git is the clear winner.
I Added some Eggs to my Toast today, and all I got was Toast&Eggs. Nothing Exceptional.
Andrahandskontrakt | Lediga Lägenheter
YouTube turns 5
Not too long ago there was a fuel oil spill in the SF Bay. Some of the oil washed up at Ocean Beach where I frequently run (barefoot).

A few times (long after the spill and several beach cleanups) I'd get home and notice a blob of tar stuck to my foot. It is nearly impossible to remove and extremely disgusting.

One can only imagine how much of this tar will be left by the BP spill and for how long it will remain.
I guess the real question is: does your tech support actually talk to the people who sign the cheques? If so, this could work.

In my experience, it hasn't been at all the case at all. The people who sign the cheques often speak a very different language and tend not to even use the product themselves...that's the job of their employees.
I'm glad this article was posted, because I had missed another article it references regarding Don Stewart's work using genetic algorithms to evolve good optimizations...which was far more exciting than the HN discussion would indicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1158300

A sample from that article: "Which LLVM passes to use, and which order to run them, with what analysis in between, is a huge search problem, though. There are roughly 200 optimization and analysis flags, and these, mostly, can be run in any order, any number of times. If we want to run say, twenty of the passes (about what -O3 does), that’s what, about 10^46 arrangements!"
The author is getting too much "information" from "Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired"; after these two extreme howlers I gave up:

"David Packard built the first transistor in his garage, initiating a technical revolution in radio transmission from which all the rest followed—and he just happened to live in Palo Alto."

"Home to MIT and leading high-speed computer manufacturers like Cray (which has since disappeared), Boston...."
Steve Jobs seems in denial about the jackboots kicking in doors over his IP claims.

Some people will just never get it as long as it's not their door.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Social...
a cursory glance at the screenshots there show it similar to git gui / gitx or similar.

I'm talking about fundamental interaction with the version control system, not a pretty gui. git has pretty gui too.
Wasn't this sort of thing discussed back in the heyday of Palm, when their devices started to get some wireless connectivity?

I seem to remember thinking about the potential of just such a system back then, even though I never did anything with it. I hope that Apple can (and will) do something more useful than just think about it. =)
Well, perhaps if we had opened up ANWR there would be less need for offshore drilling. Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power, apparently under the delusion the alternative is Living in Harmony with Gaia rather than coal and oil.
Mobwrite: Real-time Synchronization and Collaboration Service
I've used Git for three years, at two different companies and various personal and community projects. I sync my home directory between hosts using git, I have administered multi-user git repos using gitosis, and I have been a GitHub user since early 2008.

I started using Mercurial two months ago when I joined the Mozilla corporation, and now use it every day on one of the biggest and best-supported installations in the world. I also started using BitBucket for some of my Mozilla-related personal projects.

It might be that I don't fully "get" Mercurial yet, but I still find myself frequently missing Git. My first impression is that Git has a simple flexible model that supports a complex front-end, while Mercurial has a simple extensible front-end that ends up creating a somewhat more complicated model.

Any time I need to step outside the standard commit-merge-push workflow, I find the higher level of abstraction between Mercurial's user commands and its database makes it harder to understand what I'm doing, and sometimes prevents me from doing what I want. Things like rewriting history (e.g. for rebasing), or combining changes from multiple remote repos with different sets of branches, are still possible in Mercurial - but they usually require plugins to do well, there are more different incompatible ways to do them, and there are more opportunities to mess up your repo.

More concretely, I find that MQ is the best way to do many tasks in Mercurial that I would do in git with plain old branches and commits, and for many of these uses MQ is both more complicated and less flexible than the equivalent git commands. (But there are other uses where MQ is really better than the alternatives.) I also find that it's much more annoying to manage short-lived throwaway or topic branches in Mercurial, so much that I simply avoid using them much of the time.

But perhaps I'm just brainwashed (or brain-damaged) from too many years with Git. :)
The willingness/ability to work for free doesn't even begin to correlate with smart and determined.
It is very sad to see the extent of the problem.

However, as much as I hate to say, it doesn't really affect us directly, probably not those that are reading this comment on HN anyway. Yes, we're angry, disappointed, disillusioned - throw in other emotions - but that's about all.

Those who are directly affected are merely inconvenienced or at worst having to pay the price of cleaning up.

The wildlife there are paying with their lives, because of us.

I hope people with the power to effect change can learn something from this disaster, especially the CEO of BP who's going to get his million dollar paycheck anyway at the end of the year.
This study by Microsoft Research might interest you. It argues that the individual user rationally ignores security precautions because zis expected loss is less than the cost of a strong security posture.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/papers/...
What makes your web app great
Sorry for the accidental downvote. I was trying to upvote and missed!
Facebook Privacy Scanner is launched
I'm working on something sorta like that. Are you still in contact with that company?

I'm looking for IE6 apps to test with. :-)

http://www.publicstatic.net/2010/05/have-an-ie6-only-applica...
I could not imagine something that has less to do with hacker news than this.
Murdoch's Wall Street Journal: The next USA Today?
The package manager isn't the one included with Ubuntu. It has been rewritten from scratch and incorporates Mint Community ratings.
Do you think the photo revenue will be stable in the long term? I don't really know much about the stock photo market, but if you spent a few years to get 10x the amount of photos there as you have now, could you be making $5000 / month off of just that?
Is it possible that some group is just targeting GoDaddy-hosted blogs for attack, or is it definitely a failure in their shared server security?
I think the automation is not the traditional kind of automation, but instead software that supports getting the same thing done in a fraction of the time.

Just the act of beginning an edit in WP is painful. I see where the article text is, then I have to click the edit button and wade through the editing text (this can be very difficult sometimes) to find it.

The workflow that involves collaborating with other people is completely tedious- the talk pages are awful because this is not what wiki's were designed for. I would suggest moving to a model similar to version controlled software where changes can be staged and reviewed before committing, and discussions can be made around those changesets.
Ask HN: Uses for our data
Hello All,

We are a London UK start-up working in the local search space.

We have a platform to crawl the websites of ~1 million UK businesses and automatically extract structured/rich business data such as business descriptions, company logos, keywords/tags, brands, products, contact details (names, addresses, emails, phone, job titles) and opening times.

We have just finished our first project, licensing the technology to a large UK directory enquiries company and are now looking to make our next sale.

What applications or value might there be for this sort of data? Any thoughts much appreciated.
http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/status/1553046234
Cracking the Caesar Cipher - The Hard Way
Mac Mini, refurbished by PowerMax, 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, in the library with a lead pipe.

Seriously, that $1000 entry fee is halved (or less, depending on the Mini spec you're looking at) to about the price of a netbook.

Or, you know, I've heard of people (cough) who run Hackintosh perfectly well and are developing apps without issue. Takes a bit of messing around a bit, but hey, kids usually have a bit of free time for this kinda thing.
> I don't know how you could expect a delete not to be a delete unless you were familiar with something like git already.

Unless they were also familiar with functional programming and immutable data structures; it's the exact same mental model.
Ask HN: Binary File Locking solution that works well with Git?
Is there a script or binary file locking solution which works with git?

Yes, I understand "that goes against the ideas of distribution!", but yet, it goes with exactly what's needed for some projects, and I'm interested if there is a reasonable way to manage binary assets alongside or nearly alongside code in a git repository. The binary assets don't have to "be in" the git repo, but they do have to end up in the same source tree.

Don't think "small art", think "Huge 3d models, long pdfs, etc".

And yes, I am aware of the solutions which just "generate these from text*.

I am not looking for those. I'm looking for solutions which neatly lock the files yet is integrated with git.

Additionally, I'm looking for something technical, not something merely communication based (i.e. emails stating don't touch X).
AsAble.com interview of Jay Air, Founder of Anomaly Innovations
When I run sed on a file, I don't expect it to make a backup copy of my file. Similarly, when I run rm, it doesn't create a backup of what I'm deleting. Destructive operations are, well, destructive! I'm amazed at the response I got to my post. Read the docs on a mercurial command. Chances are if it is destructive it creates a backup for you. On the off chance that someone writes an extension that fails to do so, you can create the backup yourself. There's nothing magic about git's operation here. Someone simply took the time to create a backup in git for a command for which the equivalent mercurial command didn't. Big deal.
"freedom from porn"?!

I'm speechless.

What's the next freedom we are to enjoy? Freedom from controversial arguments? Freedom from dissent? Freedom from bad taste?
The single dumbest message ever emitted by a computer … it’s back
If there's no ongoing payments, then support only provides passive sales. It can only turn disgruntled users into advocates, and reassure people that it's safe to recommend the product to others. Never discount, however, the ability for high quality support to make a great part of any sales pitch!

But when there are oportunities for ongoing payments, especially in the case where these are actually for service support (and they often are), the quality of your service support is what will be looked at when it comes to renewing the contract. And if there's no contract, the quality of your service support is the only thing standing in the way of them switching providers (unless you've implemented some type of lock-in).

From a service support point of view, the real question is does the sales force actually talk with the support team? A contract that can't be met isn't profitable.
I fuzzily remember a quote about either the hot-air balloon or the gatling gun; something to the effect that it would make war so terrible that it would no longer be waged. It doesn't matter how terrible the consequences of something are to everybody else; if it profits someone who's powerful enough to get it done, it'll get done.
"git rebase" on its own does not permanently alter history. It creates a new branch that looks like a new history, but you can get back to the original history.

"git gc" will prune the unused old histories for that permanent effect.
1. The police are not jackboots. Please don't Godwin a thread right off the bat.

2. If you are speaking of the search of a Gizmodo editors premises, this was conducted to gather evidence with respect to the alleged purchase of stolen physical property, not over IP.

As far as "it" is concerned, I'm with Steve. If you traffic in stolen physical objects, I want the police to investigate thoroughly. If you aren't home when they arrive with the search warrant, I expect them to behave exactly the same way with your door as they would with anyone else.

The whole busting in the door thing would be far more effective rhetoric if the editor in question had been home and the police had burst in with guns drawn and executed a high-risk takedown. That isn't what happened. They knocked, there was no-one home, they entered the property to execute their search warrent.
Too Much Information: Taming the UAV Data Explosion
An example that trips me up frequently is creating a remote branch, then tracking it in a local branch. This is by far my most common workflow, but as far as I've learned so far, involves a couple of commands with some easy to forget options.

Granted, after a few times I just wrote it down, and now mostly remember, but it's not as simple as it potentially could be.

I was also a little shocked to find that I couldn't simply start tracking a remote branch after a local branch had already been created -- requires git 1.7. The workaround was simple (create a new tracking branch and merge the changes over), but to me this is an example of the UI being a little unhelpful.
Most destructive commands in mercurial do create a backup first. However, some command, for which all we know, could have been written by a third party, didn't. That's why I suggest that you read the docs for a command and test it out on non-important data before applying it to your only copy of a repository. Someone could just as easily create an extension in git that forgets to create a backup as well. What happened to the author is entirely the author's fault.
'Talk to you customers' is a bi ambiguoud, and could be wrong. My reading of the lean startup thing is that you look at the numbers and metrics of what your customers are doing, rather than ask them what they want. If you're not sure what feature to add, don't ask people, and do surveys, do a half version of all the possibilities, and see what features your customers are using.
Google and Intel  to launch “Smart TV”
Wholesale Applications Community
Dumb, but hardly the dumbest. I think "I don't know how to make love" gets my vote.
Subversion, the most used VCS in the world, has no totally destructive commands per se.

Once you commit something, it stays in the repository in the commited version forever.

In SVN if you really want to delete a file, you have to stop the service, dump the repository to a text file, edit the dumped file to delete the data (or alternative, do not export the latest revision), restore the repository from the file, and restart the service. SVN has no native way to do that, you have to use some external utility to totally delete something.

Now, it can be argued that this is good or bad design, or that centralized VCSs are bad/distributed are good. But you are making a broad statement about VCSs and ignoring the existence of SVN, and this is misleading to anyone who reads this thread.
I worked out the logic for a system like this for one of those "Someday I'd like to release this" projects. The way I looked at it is that basically it's just patch theory. It's the same problem you get with a source-control system, it's just happening faster. You can use the exact same patch theory.

In fact I think patch theory may even be stronger than the algorithms described here. This link says "we need to impose a restriction on the client: we can never send more than one operation at a time to the server.", but patch theory can handle that case just fine and still "recover" later. The only thing you need is some sort of merge policy, and my plan was just to arbitrarily (but consistently) pick a side, because unlike a code merge where you could literally have kilobytes of conflict and discarding either side could be bad, in the collaborative case you're looking at a few small commands. (Even a large copy/paste is just one operation, from the human perspective. No matter how collaborative your editor, two people editing the same character is always going to be a problem; there's really no point trying to get too clever.)

If you are interested in this topic, you might want to read http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Understanding_darcs/Patch_theor... as well. I think patch theory may be stronger than what was described because it can use patch inverses to do a few things I'm not sure operational transformation" can, and coming up with inverses for the collaborative editing case is quite trivial. Note that darcs had a well-known exponential case, I think in the collaborative editor case it could never come up as everybody is always within a few seconds of "HEAD".

(Incidentally, the patch approach would also potentially allow offline interaction as well, though then you can't ignore the merge issue quite so thoroughly and you could conceivably have exponential merges again, never got far enough to tell. Sounds like this approach would not allow that. Does Wave allow offline interaction which it then propagates up? If so then it may be using something more like patch theory.)
Oh, please, not again.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327309

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329751

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1344014

The problem with killing some things is that they get submitted again and again.
I see the overloading of operators to do fundamentally different sorts of operations as a mistake in all cases. That's not to imply that (in a language with infix syntax) operator overloading is bad, but that it should be used to add the same kind of operation to a new situation. Overloading + to work with a fixed-point math library makes sense. Overloading + to do concatenation does not.
Racism: Are Children Color-Blind?
Re: nature of the industry -- i think there is more sharing that goes on. People send each other emails all the time. On a macro level, this stuff is already out there and so you expect the FIRM to be executing on it. The bigger question is for an individual trader or analyst (or associate) are you up-to-date. So b-school classmates and friends from college help each other stay abreast of things, if nothing else as a safety net since it's always good to have friends at another building on the street.
Oh yes, most definitely. I was recently in the market for a new (to me) dirt bike and it was a pain switching around to different local cities and performing searches. And, because I was willing to drive for 2-3 hours to pick it up, some people would say they lived near a larger city to get more hits but when I called them up it turned out they lived like 50+ miles away from said city.
Thanks. I just added that header in what I believe are the right cases. Please let me know if you still see the problem, jrockway (allowing time for caches to clear).
I found a source, it was apparently in a chat he had with Albert Speer:

Ein Volk, so Adolf Hitler in einem Gespräch mit Albert Speer, das nicht bereit sei, "sich für die Selbsterhaltung einzusetzen", müsse "verschwinden... Es sei nicht notwendig, auf die Grundlagen, die das Volk zum primitivsten Weiterleben braucht, Rücksicht zu nehmen. Im Gegenteil sei es besser, selbst diese Dinge zu zerstören. Denn das Volk hätte sich als das schwächere erweisen, und dem stärkeren Ostvolk gehöre dann ausschließlich die Zukunft. Was nach dem Kampf noch übrigbleibt, seien ohnehin die Minderwertigen, denn die Guten seien gefallen". (http://www.mahnung-gegen-rechts.de/pages/staedte/Heilbronn/p...)
Lots of very good discussion on this email exchange here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350885
For all those holdouts still insisting that peak oil is just a silly theory, I ask you: if the easy-to-reach reserves weren't already in production, why would we be trying to pump oil out of risky, technically-difficult places like this?
understand (and agree with) you're point re: secrecy and trading mentality, but doesn't that also underscore the need for a no-nonsense, reliable yet dynamic source of good information and perspectives? also, many people in finance are information gatherers, but can't act (for personal benefit) on that data.

innate habit of "consumption" rather than "contribution" may be difficult at first, but perhaps self-reinforcing if it gained a dedicated readership?
The Open Source Divide
also, a lesson: enable capacity billing on your AppEngine account ahead of time, you never know when you're going to wake up in the morning and find out somebody launched your project :)

luckily AppEngine made it really easy to spring back, so it should be fine now (hopefully donations cover costs)
On the need for a second try at inserting a 4 inch tube to capture some of the oil coming out of the 21 inch riser pipe:

'“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring, doing it again.”' http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/18spill.html
Does this mean that the private message feature in facebook is not a social tool? IM is not a social tool? Going to work and talking with someone in the lunch room is not social?
Nice and useful, thanks
what exactly do you mean by more technical? technical as in finance-technical (mathematic, algorithmic trading, etc.)? or technical as in more related to the breed of content on YC?
It is, for the first time in history, a garden of pure ideology.