skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A big problem with git is that the commits-and-branching model is poorly thought through

Really? I think that is one of its strongest points. being able to switch branches by just going 'git checkout <branch>' and immediately having the entire file structure switched out to what's 'contained' in the new branch was a big win for me.

Git also alerts you when you've made changes and are switching branches, so you can commit or stash your changes to the branch you were on and not mix it up with the new branch, unless thats what you really want to do.

> It's very easy to find yourself on no branch at all

Interesting. In what situation would that happen?
I always thought you had to be on some sort of branch (master) at least to use git.

> It's merging workflow is awful - I'm fine with correcting the odd whitespace-as-conflict, but I find the fact that git presents me with >>>>> eyebiting ====== conflict markers <<<<<< even when I'm using a merge tool difficult to excuse.

Sounds like we're complaing about a cosmetic issue.

> Frankly, I see two kinds of arguments in support of git:

How about the fact that its branching model is pretty awesome and it gives you the tools to do exactly what you want with your version control (rebase, amending commit histories etc)?
What constitutes an established account? I rarely comment on posts but have had an account for 2.5+ years and regularly upvote posts and comments. Is my account "established"?
Ask HN: Blekko - what happened on Day 0?
OK - so I have a relatively obscure website/blog. On a good day I have 10 or so weirdos lurking around it.
And yet, it seems Blekko has included it in its crawl of the web. Clearly Blekko could not have 'bootstrapped' the google crawl index (for ex by getting results of N pages for queries) - so the question then, I wonder is how they started, on day 1 to build the index. And how did they get to my site (because clearly I did not submit it)?
How would you go about building Google in your backyard?
TA: "Crazed boffins in the USA say they have successfully carried out a Jurassic Park-style project in which enormous flesh-eating creatures from the remote prehistoric past have been successfully bred in the laboratory. Incomprehensibly this laboratory is not located on a remote island."

First off, by "flesh eater" they mean a big huge dragonfly.

Second, this is not even remotely a Jurassic Park style project. No genetic engineering involved at all. All they did was increase the oxygen in the atmosphere to 31%.
my setup: firefox 3.6.12 and chromium 6.0.472.62, 64bit linux

flash (left) is faster/smoother than html5 (right), so much that right could never win.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857228
First, realize that web dev and web design are two different (although connected) fields.

You should have very little trouble with web dev, based on your coding and database background.

To get better at design, read and practice! Alistapart.com, csszengarden.com, etc., are all great places to find inspiration. 37 signals is another.

Finally, don't spend too much thought on the "scalable/optimized back-end". The only time you'll ever need to worry about that is if you're successful, which will depend primarily on your idea, execution, speed, etc., and much less on if your system scales.

So to sum: read design journals. Look for inspiration (include real life). Practice your basic frontend skills. Don't waste brain cycles optimizing.
At a very general level, accumulating savings while carrying debt only makes sense if you can get a greater (risk-adjusted) return on your savings than the interest rate you need to pay on your debt. So if your return on your savings is lower than the interest on the debt, paying off your loan with your savings is like getting the difference between the return and the interest rate for free -- i.e. you should definitely pay off your debt.

Of course, there are lots of complications to this general rule in the real world. The US, at least, taxes the returns on your savings (capital gains and dividends) and gives you tax benefits for your debt. When saving in a 401k, employers often match your contribution, which amounts to a guaranteed 100% return on your investment for the portion that's matched.

Liquidity is also a concern. For example, if you have a 30-year mortgage on your house at 5%, you probably wouldn't want to put all of your savings into paying down that mortgage since you can't get it out again until you sell your house. If you have a sudden need to raise cash, you'd need to get a home equity loan, which can be tricky if your house value has plummeted or if interest rates are high.

Thus the full answer is that, well, it depends on a lot of life factors, and although paying off your debts is generally good advice, especially for very high interest loans like credit cards, there are many factors to consider other than the spread between the return on your savings and the interest rate on your debt.
Is this a request for input?

I personally haven't come across any "rate my start-up" posts I'd considered spammy, but maybe that's because the measures that are currently being taking have been effective (marking as dead, lack of upvotes for spammy posts). Mostly I've only seen that kind of spam in comments.

As for RMS posts in general, I really enjoy seeing what other people have done. So I would be opposed to an outright or unnecessarily restrictive ban.
E.g., just ran across this article on design in the HN newest section. It's on how to apply phi (golden ratio) to your designs.

http://designshack.co.uk/articles/graphics/applying-the-gold...
I have read Driven to Distraction. I want to say I read it before I went to the therapist a decade ago, but I am not 100% sure.

This and other books (I recommend Delivered from Distraction, The checklist manifesto, The creative habit) helped form the core of my support structure, but I am not always good at using it. I keep revisiting my decision to get evaluated / take drugs but it comes down to this - I tend to use my weaknesses as crutches. It doesn't matter what the world labels my problems, they stem in my head and every non chemical way of dealing with them revolves around building habits that help address these. I am consciously eschewing drugs because I have a very addictive personality and I am just jumping ahead to working on my habits.
My mother says the same about me. She used to listen to a particular song when she was pregnant with me. After I was born, whenever my dad played that song, I would search for the source.
Sovereign immunity prevents certain types of lawsuits against the government. It doesn't mean you can't sue the government ever.
I'd rather see a fairly low karma and a few weeks or months account age thresholds, but then I'm biased, being mostly a lurker here.
Yes, but it feels like you're writing with a dull Sharpie.
> and the gitk and "git gui" tools are actually pretty good

Not to mention tortoise git http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/
Thanks for the advice. :)
Maybe the oldfashioned way; by putting a bunch of spiders out there? Don't forget they've been working on the index for a while now.
Insights, tips and more to migrate your apps to the cloud
I'm on the same boat with regards to attention span. Someone PLEASE answer his questions!!!
Maybe. Sometimes no matter how hard you try test and production are significantly different. I wind up in a number of situations where any meaningful testing has to be done in production.
So a hacker who has been reading HN everyday while coding his product, but does not post often; is not allowed to post RMS anymore?
I can't help but feel the bad reviews caused irreparable damage. Even if they'd had a few more months to tweak it, I doubt they would have attracted many gamers. It's not the first rushed but promising game I've seen sink on launch (see: True Crime NY). Big budget games are a somewhat different category than (business) (web)apps.
I have met quite a few people who think that they're doing it well.

It's not just "people who say" there are actual studies.
How we used KissInsights to A/B test surveys
1.

Teach him about managing money. Get him into the habit of saving from a very early age. And writing down all the expenses.

(Rockefeller had a rule for his kids. He gave them money for all the chores they did. And they had to donate 10% to the Church. And save 10%. But because they had to donate exactly 10% to the Church - and not 9.5% or 10.5%, they were required to keep an account of every penny they received. This: keeping track of money from an early age is the trick to making sure you never end up poor.)

2.

Teach him confidence. Elocution and public speaking and drama classes.

3.

Make him love reading. Dr. Seuss. Comics.

4.

Teach him how to delay gratification. The trick is to focus on other things.

5.

Teach him discipline in exercising early on. And healthy eating. Sports.

6.

Play all the wonderful board games besides the popular ones like Monopoly. Excellent for math and logic building skills. And figuring out the winning strategy.

These above are the building blocks. Its ok if he learns to code a bit late in life too.
But how are "rate my startup" posts different from any other posts?

I mean, if you invent special treatment for RMS-posts then why wouldn't the spammers simply go back to submitting their stuff without that prefix?
If you do just one thing do this.

Encourage a love of books, even if its just the picture books to begin with. Story before bedtime. Feel sad? Lets go read a book? Waiting for mom or dad to come home? Lets read a fun book.

Aside from that I do those large jig-saw puzzles with my daughter and those match the wooden shape to its equivalent spot on the board.

It should all be fun, playful and something you you're happy to do. No one wants to read with a grumpy dad.
So this is structured procrastination in action? http://lesswrong.com/lw/1fe/antiakrasia_technique_structured... :)
I don't quite understand all the anti-college rhetoric, especially toward what I consider to be a pretty hard science (CS). Personally, I pursued (and am close to finishing) my CS degree because I wanted to know what CS was and get good at it.

Right out of high school I was not qualified for an entry level programming job (I mean truly qualified, as in able to do the job, not just get the job). I'm now confident in my knowledge and qualifications. It's been worth the time and money (read: debt) to me.
Last time I checked, computers running Windows, OS X, Linux, or BSD all come with Dvorak.
I suspect it's at least partly a heads-up in case a reasonable story was mistakenly killed.
One of the best startup posts I've read yet - big kudos to @yegg, he's the man.

Thinking that you're going to win by just playing one or two hands is dumb. I also don't like the view that entrepreneurs do it because their personality naturally gravitates towards risk, that's just not smart business.

Only way to win is to take advantage of high EV moments in life, but to also maintain a long-term view and mitigate risk along the way so you can keep playing the game for as long as possible - survival goes before anything else.

Max Levchin failed 4x before he hit it with PayPal. No one becomes a great entrepreneur overnight.
Good advice. Thank you.

I am experiment with a version of PG's two computer solution from "Disconnecting distraction".
I was exposed to all of that, but 1) haven't used much besides Unix/OOP/Databases since, and 2) feel like I only learned 1% of what I use even in those areas during college.

A lot of it comes back to not having specific goals in college, sliding by like I always did in school.

That, and the excessive my focus on the band I played in. Not that I regret it, but pretty impractical.
Thanks for the measured response.

how do we determine the value: who should be allowed to vote

To be clear, I believe that everyone should be allowed to vote. I'd go so far as to say that even felons should be allowed to, for fear that the legal system could otherwise be used as a tool to stifle electoral dissent.

My suggestion that some people not cast a vote is intended to be entirely personal, as a matter of conscience and reflection. If anyone honestly believes that his ideas are the product of rational thought applied to an understanding of the situation, then by all means, cast that vote.

I don't think that your murky water criticism can apply, because I'm not asking -- nor trusting -- anyone else to judge. I'm asking for a person's own, honest, self-evaluation. No one else need know if you exercised this option or not, and it's none of their business.

Moreover, this doesn't relate to a single person monolithically. A person might have very well informed ideas about one topic, yet be ignorant about another. The decision ought to be made on a vote-by-vote basis. For example, this morning I did not cast a vote for County Freeholder. Although I know who the incumbent is, and don't have anything in particular against him, I don't know enough about county-level politics, nor the candidates, to make an informed decision, so I abstained. Yet I did cast a vote for US Representative, County Sheriff, etc.

I'm also sympathetic to the criticism that Dunning-Kruger might make this backfire.
Yes, but the trick isn't in defining meaning; it's in defining what we mean by scarcity.
Bing’s new social search features arrive today
Poor choice of title; should be "Startup accelerator in Michigan." Also, this isn't really news, as Momentum MI has been around for a couple of years.
I played high stakes poker for years and so understanding higher levels of "metagame" (I think that he thinks that I think, etc) comes easy to me. Naturally this is a problem when it's largely what my idea hinges upon and the target market isn't familiar with it.
I'm new to HN and I wouldn't post my startup link, as I've yet to contribute enough to the community to earn the time other members would need to review my startup. That being said, I do believe that a karma threshold for RMS posts would be a valuable asset to HN.
Colgate Patents Traditional Indian Tooth-cleaning Powder(thousands of years old)
There's a saying in MMOs, "You can't patch first impressions". It is kind of contrary to "just get it out there", but maybe not if you consider press coverage rather than shipping "getting it out there".
University of Hawaii Has Major Privacy Breach
What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?
Not when they are not needed, which is about 99% of the time. When I think "Flash", I think games, video and cool experiments with shining particles.

None of that requires those flags, so I think forcing those is not fair.
9 semesters of college on loans is 9 loans. Sometimes 18.
Spammers would just create accounts months in advance, and then use them when they mature. They're not above that sort of thing for high-traffic sites like this.
I think that could be a killer Facebook app (if such a thing doesn't already exist), but I think you're being too smart for your own good. If I want a way to find out if the person I'm into is into me, then I have absolutely no desire not to be warned if there is a match.

I have a similar issue with your chancemail idea. I can just about see the 'let fate decide' value, and also the bit where the receiver gets to pretend it never happened if they wish. But the bit about paying to remove all of this, and add in the receiver's mind the suspicion that you probably did so really muddies the waters.
Who doesn't store failed checkouts ? - I can't see why you would consider that any more of a privacy violation

It seems to me that a common failure mode would be entering a value into the wrong field, and that includes putting the credit card number into address or something. I want to do everything I can to avoid storing a credit card number (except for the one place it's saved, encrypted, at the customer's discretion).
Living In A Photoshop World
If the knowledge you describe is not scarce, than signalling that you have this abundantly distributed knowledge is not particularly meaningful. Let's say that the degree works exactly as you suggest: Everyone with a degree can and does have strong knowledge of the exact subjects you mention. But let us further say that this is not scarce: When we advertise for a position, 80% or more of the applicants have a degree and the knowledge that goes with it.

How then does this degree help us go from 100 applicants to five interviews? Sure we might choose to throw twenty resumés away right off the bat, now our problem is going from 80 applicants to five interviews. In this scenario, a degree is not meaningful to us because it doesn't help us make a decision.

I'm not sure what scarcity has to do with it. Either the skills are useful for the job or they're not. For example, being 7 feet tall is rare. But it's probably not something you care about.

What you really should do is enumerate the set of attributes that are valuable. And there are generally two types, those that are binary, and those for which more of the attribute is desirable (invert the attribute for negative attributes).

Now if the degree captures a lot of the attributes, especially the binary ones, and further if you think those w/o the degree don't have it then it is useful to list. Unless you really believe that the sample set contains 95% people with degrees.

The nice thing this allows you to do then is to focus on other aspects that you value. And for the ones that aren't binary is where you spend most of your time drilling. It's not about scarcity, its about optimizing.
I have no first hand knowledge, but I would be surprised if a 2.5 year old account with 250 of karma (like you do) is not considered established enough for this purpose.
i think this XKCD points out the issue rather well. http://xkcd.com/810/

Is there any kind of captcha on the submission for RMS? If not perhaps a direct link to the other RMS's and a requirement to post there.
I think it's better to put "rate" or "RMS" in the header/menu to distinguish from others.
Free Time Is So Overrated
Seems flawed. If all that McCandless did was scrape status updates for "break up" and "broken up", he may well have included events referring to bands or other groups breaking up. It would have been better to look at changes in Facebook's relationship status.

Also, I'm not so sure it makes sense to assume, as the author of the article does, that breakups before Christmas have to do with money. If the data is even valid, then it's quite likely that breakups occur before Christmas because people don't want to go through the charade of spending Christmas together and possibly with each others' families if the relationship isn't going anywhere.
The current system already has a licensing scheme.

Instead of it being based on education though it is based on wealth. The wealthy, behind closed doors, agree to a large extent on plausible policies for the country.

Then they present a limited set of alternatives and let the masses indicate which alternative makes them happiest.

The purpose of democracy is not to DECIDE anything. It is to give the illusion that the masses are in control. Without this illusion, they would turn violent.

Rest assured, the only policies the masses have control over are things that are emotionally potent but irrelevant: gay marriage, pledge of allegiance, etc. Distractions.
how about you just disallow all frontpage submissions until a certain karma level? make people comment before they're allowed to submit links or text content, since those are the easiest to game.

comments are easier for the community to moderate and its easier to pick out spammier ones, since they're clearly off topic or include random inappropriate links.
It runs on windows too, so it wouldn't be a very good indicator (assuming that you're saying the people who buy macs are more affluent than those who buy pcs).
Wufoo (YC W06) integrates Notifo (YC W10) for form notifications
The speed of updating isn't all that relevant, the time from typing "{yum|apt-get} install foo" until I can start getting work done in foo, is.
I'm sure number of votes and length of membership could be incorporated into some sort of algorithm to determine that?
I just don't think telling everyone to vote does any service to our/a country. Tell people to learn about the issues. Tell people to research the candidates. Then they will vote, and it won't be for the person on the sign they saw while driving to the polling place.
There is a smaller package (92M) which is often enough:

http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html
http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/mac/mactex/mactex-basic.pkg.z...
For a 3 day side project this is pretty cool. Say goodbye to pen and paper at client meetings. I think it'[s cool that it looks like their office too.
Trouble with false positives : http://liuliu.me/detect/detect.html#http%3A%2F%2Ffarm1.stati...
I was wondering why the ball appeared clipped on the flash side, even though I can't remember having seen this problem in a flash game before. It was also unusually slow. That old 3D first-per-view demo with textures had a clearer image and was faster.

I call it unfair.
In 1993, I was taking a course in Software Verification & Validation at the Univ of Houston Clear Lake, next door to Johnson Space Center and down the street from the IBM division doing the Space Shuttle software. That is the group that is CMM Level 5 and gets a bug report about once a year or so. It happened that the instructor of this course was a mid-level IBM tech guy in that organization. And he had stories...

After Challenger blew up, NASA demanded that every shuttle vendor report the cumulative probability that their component of the system would lead to a loss of vehicle accident. NASA took all those probabilities and came up with their best guess of the probability of a loss of vehicle accident for each flight. While Feynman praised the software process for the shuttle, the software group still had to come up with their number. So the instructor said they took all their statistics from the (individual, unique) software loads for each historical flight, and included the failures from their loss of vehicle accidents.

"Say what? The shuttle software hasn't had any loss of vehicle accidents." Well, turns out it had. Each unique software load for each mission is tested and trained against for many months before it flies. Sometimes they fail, just not yet in actual flight. For example, apparently one time the shuttle crew was practicing launch aborts, where the launch is aborted just after clearing the pad and the orbiter lands like a glider. About the only crew member involved in that is the pilot. Everyone else is just strapped in being bored, and after a few hours of sitting still, the co-pilot got "frisky." During the launch phase, he randomly tapped some keys on his keypad and ... BOOM! Loss of vehicle accident.

Monkeys at work! I suppose it could be argued that with all the bumping around during the launch phase, a stray hand could accidentally "fuzz" that keypad.
I don't think he intended to imply a correlation. But people do seem to use video games and television as a crutch to keep kids entertained at the expense of more enriching activities.
Not voting communicates acceptance of the current regime. Voting for third-party/write-in candidates communicates dissatisfaction with the current regime, as it is a (symbolic) attempt to change it.
You might avoid doing certain write-esque operations if you know you are in test mode. For example, you wouldn't want to charge a credit card or update someone's facebook status.
Yes, but perhaps larger forums with dedicated servers can handle it? If this is true, selling a Search Replacement for forum software could really be a viable business.
What about a 2.5 year old account with no karma? You'd be surprised at how many lurkers there are. I know quite a few (and was one myself up until a short while ago).

EDIT: added emphasis
The intended use for the Mac equivalent (described in the folklore.org story linked from another comment here) was to disable the quit command, so the test could be run for longer than it took the "monkey" to quit the application.

I imagine there are similar uses on Android.