skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When working from a single office, I have in the past defined a shared area as a nominated "binary repository".

The rules for the binary repository are that everything is versioned by filename and so a given file never changes - if you need to change a file you copy it and give it a new filename. Then you don't need locks. The versioned build script in the git repository finds the binary repository from an environment variable. This way old revisions in the git repository that depend on old binaries still work, but there is full visibility to delete old versions in the binary repository to free up space as required.

I used this kind of arrangement for things like upstream tarballs which changed relatively infrequently. I'm not sure how well this would work for you though.

One thing I think you might want is the ability to rebuild any revision out of your repository. Any revision control system achieves this, but if your build depends on binaries that aren't "in" the git repo, then how would this work?

If you still want some way of locking binaries, then there is an immediate question: how and when are files locked and unlocked? Manually (like SourceSafe)? Automatically on file open?

I would reconsider whether you want the binaries in the source tree or just running parallel alongside it. If they're not managed by git, then being in the source tree would cause confusion, wouldn't it?

For manually locked binaries, you might find a suitable WebDAV server useful, perhaps? The protocol supports locks. Maybe something built on git hooks and WebDAV with a central binary repository will work for you.

For automatically locked binaries available and modifiable across multiple offices, take a look at Synctus (my product). I'm not clear if this would be useful to you though.
Balderdash
@Steve Jobs, Stop Reading all Your Email Man
I know a lot of these competitions are centered around industries outside IT like Medical Devices, Pharma, Clean Tech, Aerospace, etc.These industries are hard to boot strap into or do "lean". These competitions serve as a bridge into these communities for smart technologists and entrepreneurs. MIT's 100K definitely fits this mold.
They claim to have a " rudimentary prototype of Diaspora running on [their] machines" which "includes GPG encryption, scraping Twitter and Flickr, awesome design aesthetics, and the initial stages of connection infrastructure (“friending” other Diaspora instances)." Wonder why they haven't done a show and tell with that?
Tools to link *inside* a PDF document
'goes down' in the title kind of makes it sound like the site is down for good, which isn't the case.
Why your Android app doesn't need an exit button
Starcraft 2 Beta ends May 31st
Ask HN: How on earth can I grow an "adult" company?
I know this is a little out there for HN, but I've been here and discussed my business several times and now for the first time feel comfortable asking for help.

A bit about me: I'm 23, this is my 4th "real" business, I've received angel investment for this project and one prior to this. The previous company was acquired for a small sum but I was ready to get out and everyone was happy.

I'm usually quite good at growing a business, but I'm not used to the restrictions imposed to "adult" businesses. I'm stuck.

About our situation: over 100k has been invested and spent, mostly on promotions and tech (a lot of backend management stuff). I'm the sole founder, but have had a team of 3 the whole time. I recently had to lay those people off and now it's just me. Our sales are stagnant and barely enough to pay for necessities... and I've been going at it for about 16 months now.

What would you do in this situation?

Link: http://myticklespot.com
Can We All Succeed?
I tested setting all my contact information privileges to Everyone and then re-ran the scanner, and it still claimed that my settings were good, which doesn't seem right. Might want to look into that, since I think a lot of people would tweak a setting, re-run the scanner, and see how it changed.

I'd also suggest that you post a human-readable list of the assumptions that the tool makes, since providing source code isn't particularly user-friendly for non-programmers.

cheers... -Adam C. Engst, TidBITS publisher
Alas these are mostly neologisms created by combining roots from classical languages. That's a recipe for creating new "obscure" words pretty much on demand. The best sort of obscure words are ones that are obscure because they're old or highly specialized, not because someone made them up and they never really became part of the spoken language.
Again, the choice is not "despoil the environment, or live in a pristine world of magic and unicorns". We need energy, and lots of it. So we can continue our current lousy policies, or look for alternatives which while not perfect are clear improvements. I'm pretty sure that the entire drilling operation in a tiny portion of ANWR would do substantially less damage than this one spill.
Patch-based stuff is simply based on obsolete 30 yrs old assumptions. Why should you need a combinatorial algorithm to detect changes if you can track every user's action? etc etc

OT is a dead end. The problems they struggle with could be trivially bruteforced by employing unique symbol identifiers.
http://bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/ctre.pdf
> I have often thought academics were in some kind of fantasy world.

I ran into the rift between academia and the real world a few weeks ago, and it changed my perception of both, specifically in regards to software engineering.

I feel like academia studies software engineering practices with the goal of wanting to increase the quality of the product. They come to conclusions about how great all the best practices are and teach their students that they should be using all of them.

However, when I started trying to build a product with those methods, I realized that academia has the luxury of ignoring time. In industry, time is the enemy. You have to beat the competition, release before the market opportunity disappears, and in the case of startups you have to find a product that people will pay money for before you run out of money. If you build a product that nobody wants, who cares what your test coverage is? When time is against you, all the best practices in the world probably slow you down too much, so you have to be more judicious in your application of them.

I don't want to knock academia too much. I think it's still very valuable, but I have to agree with edw519 that the real magic happens when theory meets practice.
Good strategy. People aren't going to care about the politics of file sharing until they can't get what they want for free anymore. Taking the Pirate Bay down is the first step towards organized dissent that removes the laws that the media companies are relying on in the first place.

Also, an injunction without oral arguments? That will last, oh, maybe a few hours...
What they ought to do is implement just one of their core
features (eg the friending protocol) and release that. With core functionality in place others can help them innovate. If they did that plus scalable status updates it would already be big.
I'm not sure what the problem is - is it because adult products aren't allowed in things like adwords or so, cutting you off from regular SEO? There are adult ad networks and things, though I imagine they're grossly inefficient by comparison. Otherwise, the way you'd grow any other company in the pre-internet era - use press releases, take some print ads in relevant publications , send sales reps to quality adult stores to demo your products, offer freebies to upmarket magazines and video companies like playboy etc.
In this way it's not terribly different from a lot of jobs. Sure, it's much better than most, but I would be careful about thinking life as an artist is truly an escape from the rigors of the real world.

FWIW, my suggestion was specifically to have art as a hobby, not a job. This way, it doesn't need to make you any money. Just to provide an escape and/or a stress relief. And in this case, who cares what others think of your work? You do it because you want to.
You see this with any service as it scales up, that's where the learning occurs.

As the number of requests climbs you reach limits, those limitations manifest to the end-user as suckage, slowness, errors, and in the worst cases lost data. You can't plan those limits out ahead of time, you discover them as you go.
CS 193P iPhone Application Development
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/downloads-2010-winter
You can watch all the classes on iTunes U
Good story, but I think many people might miss a key point about the one app-store success described in the story.

When the app was first released in the app store "This was a total failure - the reviews dribbled out, hits on the website were meagre, and it seemed the game might disappear without trace."

The app ended up being very successful and getting to the top of the charts because Apple featured the app in "New and noteworthy" and then in "App of the week".
Verizon Can't Keep Up with Demand for HTC Droid Incredible
Want a german translation?
I agree that two-stage commits is a great feature to have. But there are downsides to making it the default.

Obviously, it trips beginners up.

And it encourages committing stuff that may never have coexisted in the working tree - and thus have never been tested together.
True, but before Sybase got into it, it was a startup called Mobile 365. And there are several other startups in the telco space like these guys http://openet.com/.

Not disagreeing, just saying it's fully possible, and quite relevant to a board like this one.
Django 1.2 released
My team also recently placed runner-up in an Ivy B-plan competition.

We realized that the idea won't work well in practice and that the team dynamics are far from ideal. I got a taste for what a business plan looks like, and how it is not very helpful when it comes to actually building a business.
Who's hiring remotely?
It's been some time since the last time someone asked this question.

For example we are.
We're a web agency (looking to evolve into a startup soon) based in Northern Italy and looking to hire "junior" web designers and front-end programmers (we mainly use wordpress).
We mainly do web sites and web marketing (from search engines to social networks, etc) and I think are a great place to work also remotely.

I'm sure there are other startups or not-really/yet-startup like us looking to hire good people remotely so here you go :)

Edit - contact info: info@orioneweb.it
BPM, Usability and Aesthetics
The link doesn't work because it should be /classic, not /classic/.

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Fridge-Sized Nuclear Reactors to Tap $135 Billion Power Market
Yes, but the bookmarklet only contains one line of code, which fetches the remainder of the script from your server. So you could possibly replace it at any time with something evil...

Sorry for being paranoid. I very much like your initiative, but people are going to ask questions about these sort of things.
From the Release Notes (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2/) :

Support for multiple database connections in a single Django instance.

Model validation inspired by Django’s form validation.

Vastly improved protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

A new user “messages” framework with support for cookie- and session-based message for both anonymous and authenticated users.

Hooks for object-level permissions, permissions for anonymous users, and more flexible username requirements.

Customization of e-mail sending via e-mail backends.

New “smart” if template tag which supports comparison operators.
The Significant Digit Law in Statistical Physics
Rather, it should strive to be "art" by means of elegance, purpose, originality and in general an aesthetic which speaks of form and function joined appropriately. Anything less is merely "kitsch code" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsch. Most of us spend our days programming the equivalent of replicated garden gnomes each with a slightly different expression and perhaps a different hat.
Didn't read the entire paper, but the criticism on Google Wave is poor, baseless and subjective.

"The authors even had to enrich XML with additional entities named “annotations” to make it suitable for their needs"

This is what Etherpad did for adding support for lists, bold, italics, etc. Did anyone complain? Does it not work?

Granted, Wave's approach is way more ambitious. They support any sort of XML groves, and not just simple 1-level deep tags like Etherpad.
This is really quite well-conceived and executed. I just sent in my donation. Thanks so much.
A "life-changing" invention from the West Bank
I think you're making a false dichotomy.

I write about things I know about, and that fall under the category of solving a specific problem. :) The bits I don't know, I research obsessively.

I don't really pay attention to search traffic overall, except to drive a few extra sales here and there, but figure that if all the experts I know talked about it last year, everybody will want to learn it this year.

The three things I recommend are: solve a real problem (see DSO above, if you don't have the first clue about this), and build an audience and a mailing list, and charge a lot more than you think you should.

Charge enough and you only have to make a thousand or so sales to make a very pretty penny.
"According to an insider [10], in 6 months since the projects’s launch the possibility of working with partial histories is not implemented yet; pages are bootstrapped with their complete histories."

What I will concede is that their OT implementation is probably not perfect yet. If you read the comments on some transformation functions on their Java code, they shown concern and do extra logging in hopes to track unexpected issues they haven't solved yet.
It's a nice series. What I find hardest in CouchDB is dealing with eventual consistency and conflict resolution (instead of transactions). I wish there were more articles and literature about how to handle that stuff, in various kinds of application scenarios. (Not just documenting how _rev and _conflicts work etc.)
Watch Walmart Grow
Reverse engineering the newest facebook virus
Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power...

I've seen plenty of demonization of nuclear power, but (in my experience) there's a correlation with level of education (less education => more nuclear outrage) rather than a political left/right correlation.

I'm genuinely curious about this. Are there any stats to back up your assertion that liberals demonize nuclear power?
I'm going to be jumping on the bandwagon at some point for FridgeScript... made the decision a while ago, just need to take some time to do it. :)

Not that any significant number of people use it yet...
Tell HN: We launched Gaia GPS on Android today
That's a good point. The winners of two business plan competitions I attended recently built physical devices. Their inventions would be a lot harder to boot strap, especially the ones that have to pass FDA approval, but that doesn't prevent them from pivoting. I think the point of Steve's distinction between business "plans" and business "models" is that plans are static and models are designed to let you pivot.

For example, one of the winners at a business competition at my school was a guy who invented a new type of RF amplifier. His plan is to get it into cell phones. But what if it turns out that his amplifier would be a better match for another market? He can pivot by changing his market instead of changing his product.
Django advent is a very good series of articles about 1.2 http://djangoadvent.com/
The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution.

They'll be back.
Not sure why your posts are being down voted. Up voted to keep the discussion fair. Just because I may not share your opinion shouldn't mean that you can't be heard. :)
If I remember correctly the original TPB guys claimed that servers are out of their control now, which is why they can't take it down. But now I read there's "Managing Director Sven Olaf Kamphuis". Is there some official ownership of TPB again?
Release notes can be found here

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.2/
One quibble: Google's standard application form asks for GPA.
That's the URL I had on file as well. Great documentation on that site too.
imho, The value of a community is in its members, not in the software. Sure, UI can have an effect on the ability to build a community, but only upon the edge cases.

What made HN successful isn't the presentation, but the character of its members and its association with Ycombinator.

Whether wallstbeat succeeds is more a function of its ability to attract valuable commentary and users willing to share analysis in a public forum. Failing this, it's vulnerable to the same pump-n-dump trash you see on Yahoo! finance and other sites.
> Nuclear power has proven to be extremely expensive; I am not aware of any country that generates a significant fraction of its power using nuclear power plants without massive investment and control by the state.

"control by the state" is a choice. Many countries have national oil companies, but that tells us only that they like national oil companies as other countries have private ones.

The "massive investment" for nuclear power is well within the capabilities of many US companies. For example, at least three of the California utility companies can afford it. (PG&E has at least one. Sacramento used to and at least one of the LA basin companies is bigger than Sacramento's company.)

Note that at least some of the "expense" is also a choice. We spend a lot of money on nukes that has nothing to do with safety or power production.

I'll agree that nukes could be safer, but as long as we're spending money on things other than safety, I reject the claim that safety is a high priority. (And yes, some of those things are driven by folks who scream "safety".)
"By far the most surprising feature of their architecture is in Lesson Six, whose essential idea is: The key to speed is to precompute everything and cache It."

That made me LOL. Is this really surprising? A symptom of years of high-level web development or similar... ?

This is /the/ classical optimisation strategy - since the day of pen and paper computations (anyone remember "log" books?).
Also, we're still looking for more beta testers, so if you would like to get early releases and such, drop me a line at the email in my profile.
Drilling is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an improvement. It is rather a continuation of the lousy policies that we're already destroying the world with.

The answer is not more drilling, the answer is better ways to produce energy.

"I'm pretty sure that the entire drilling operation in a tiny portion of ANWR would do substantially less damage than this one spill."

Until there's another spill... this is the real world; there WILL be more spills, and in place like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, all it would take is one.
The author of this article is out of touch with modern engineering. It's nice to wax about the old days when things had simple linkages that were easy to debug, but I'll take my incredibly responsive anti-lock brakes, intelligent traction control, variable valve timing and electronic control of niceties before I go back to the bad old days.

I also have serious doubts that Toyota actually has any real problems with their software. I'm betting 90% of the issues are human error with a side of new-fangled-gadget blame.
Can we please give these guys some credit already?!

Thus far, they are doing great. They had an idea, published it and built a community. Whatever they build, thousands of people are going to test it, allowing them to make it even better.

What if all this was a legit ploy to edge their way into the startup scene? Mission accomplished!

And talent-wise it's too early to know but they do seem to have a good feel for community, design and architecture. They have a great mentor, too. Let's just wait and see.

In the meantime we can congratulate them for their success so far. If anything, they helped publicize Facebook's privacy problems.

Gee, cynicism and skepticism are NOT the same guys!
What's the real purpose of shutting sites like TPB down? People won't rush to stores to get the movies they want to see if they can't download them.
Kamphuis is the managing director of the hosting company
There's plenty of YC startups that don't have or haven't had a business model in the beginning.

Diaspora on the other hand has an obvious business model. Selling turnkey hosting.
up for me (US)
It should be incredibly simple to build with the graph API if you are interested. Here is your friends:

https://graph.facebook.com/me/friends?access_token=222747086....

docs here:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

Facebook isn't as tight with your data as you would expect ;)
Instead of copying and pasting jquery into your js, you could pull it from google's CDN, that way it would be cached for a lot of people and trustworthy. Well, trustworty-ish. :)
Market sales are bound to go up, I mean, it's more people. My question is whether or not the quality of the apps, namely games, are going to increase with the user base increasing. I really hope so, the market is crap right now in my humble opinion.
It makes sense now, thanks.
What I intended to convey was that your mind already possesses a filter for this type of thing that you could never hope to reproduce in software. I just don't understand what's preventing you from unconsciously applying it, since plenty of other people seem to be doing perfectly fine at doing that.
CS4 Crash Reports
Four questions to ask at every business meeting you ever attend
Thanks for a valuable comment. The problem is that I can not do all things at once. And I have precise business plan for making money on things I write about. If I will not be able to realize it I may try ebooks again. But I am not too talented writer at all and as I said this ebook has been written "by accident". But I can not say I will not write more in a future :)
No he's the Ellsworth Toohey of the Web.
If you believe this one's good I can unkill it.
Thanks for being a good spirit. I guess Haters gonna hate:
http://teddziuba.com/images/step-1-load-the-gun-step-2-kill-...
Am I the only one surprised that people still buy web marketing ebooks?
Slashdot Book Reviews: Programming Clojure
Thanks steve for valuable comments. I am doing it almost all the time. And meantime I am working on projects. Unfortunately I have only 24h per day and I still want to spend some time with my wife and my little kid (1 year old).
yea, I understand the concern, that is partially why I linked the source to my own github account (adds some accountability) and left everything uncompressed and commented. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to put the entire source into the bookmarklet itself due to browser length-limitations, so the remainder of the code will always need to be loaded separately.
Gaia is a great product and the beta has been fun. The different maps you can use, offline maps, and just the all around ease of use is great. Hope others try it out.
I didn't find my favourite in this list: wayzgoose.
As far as I know, Flash supports H.264 video, usually wrapper in a m4v, so it doesn't mean that HTML5 video is taking over. It may be that instead of encoding in a format readable only to Flash, it's becoming more common to encode in a format that both Flash and HTML5 can read.
I know this is glib but; it's more "raw" :)

But that's a personal preference. Git is just as good a choice.
How to read event logs of an unbootable machine