skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In git committing and pushing are two different things. With git you have a copy of the repo, as does anyone else who checks it out. Think of each repo like its own little svn server, everyone has one locally. So you can commit to that and yes no one has access (unless you open it up to them, but no need to complicate this). So you can commit your unfinished work without other people seeing it, and still have history to be able to go back if necessary. Then when it's ready you can push that back to the shared repo.

Branching in git is really cheap and easy compared to svn. A good way to work to always branch before starting anything. Work on that branch, commiting whenever you feel like. You don't need to push that branch unless someone else wants to work on the unfinished feature with you, or needs something from it before it is ready. In the meantime if the mainline moves on ahead you can just keep merging it into your feature branch to get the new changes. When it's ready you can then merge it back into the mainline and push that.
I'm not looking for a stable job. I'm considering when I should get rid of one.
Social/crowdsourced companies do this all the time, they just don't have such sophisticated software. But that's hardly an inconceivable jump - I would certainly not be surprised to see a number of in-house versions of this at work all over the internet.

I worked with an early stage company that relied on user-generated content that essentially did this but didn't tell the new CMs, so we spent the first couple weeks trying to get increased activity out of the clones.

Bonus example, there was an interview with the founder of thathigh.com on here not too long ago where he talked about doing exactly this.

The game isn't new, only the players - and you can always spot a newb, even if he has really nice equipment.

[Edit, appending part of my reddit comment on the sme article]: Here in Chicago, elections are (or at least were for a long time) considered to be basically a running joke. It's a city of horriffic corruption, and everyone's pretty much gotten used to it. This should be far more unsettling than gov contractors manufacturing an echo chamber. At least when they're sneaky about it you know they're scared.
Kindly explain to me where above I made any mention of Apple having a monopoly. But if you must push me:
http://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=apple+mp...
and
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

Now when you're trying to sell apps on those devices, and Apple wants to 30% of anything that is sold for those devices and intentionally blocks out perfectly reasonable businesses, that becomes anti-competitive

Edit: Btw, I have stopped. I just bought a DroidX instead of the Verizon iPhone. But that won't get me my $600 back for my iPad or the money for my iTouch. Or the money for the apps I've paid for.
Union FUD? Really? Spend some time working in the trades (union and non-union gigs) and then come back and make declarative statements regarding unions.
The NoSQL Dogma - Showing MySQL being as fast as NoSQL
Can I take it, then, that you like the idea of federal contractors spending taxpayer dollars on semi-automated sockpuppets in order to spam propaganda on their behalf, as long as it's not liberal propaganda?
Yes, but wheter you like it or not, the government is tinkering with the rest of the economy anyway.

So it becomes a choice between anti-startup tinkering, or both pro- and anti-startup tinkering.

I prefer the latter, but then I am no VC.

(an additional thing to note is that the government is generally slow to respond to the economy, so if and when the tech economy goes into another winter, the government will at least be there like an old lady, putting out seeds in the snow, for startups to feed on :)
Fastersite: Chrome's 10 Caches
The bubble is rebuilding in Tech as the QE money finds its way into the market through VC funds, while banks are hesitant to lend their freshly printed reserves for house mortgages.
My short answer: yes.

My long answer: the economic growth of the 1990s went mainly to the upper classes (median wages hardly grew at all, especially when you take rising health-insurance costs into account). Instead of consuming their profits, the people in the top brackets keep looking for things to invest in. People who want to invest conservatively are pouring money into T-bills (thus, in spite of the massive deficit, Treasury rates are still quite low). People who want to be aggressive once invested in dot-coms, then stampeded to real estate and too-clever-by-half financial instruments, and now are pouring money into social media. Capital will continue to flit from one bubble-opportunity to another until the people at the bottom of the pyramid have more actual money to spend.
You have to wait for the host to finish.

Or, more precisely, you have to wait for the guy backstage who pushes his own button after the host has finished. If you push your button before he pushes his, you're locked out for something like half a second. His button is also connected to some light bulbs which are never shown on camera, which tell the contestants what's going on.

(But there are some human contestants who ignore the lights and try to time it anyway --- having practiced a lot at home, where they couldn't see them. One of them was a recent college champion, who was one of the pre-show speakers at a group viewing I was at for Monday's show.)
In light of Nokia's latest struggle with iOS and Android, aren't they both a success story and a cautionary tale for due diligence and proactive management. Nokia had a second fire-- a burning platform.

By the logic of the book excerpt that I finally had time to read, they should have read the tea leaves about the iOS and Android universes much quicker than they did. Nokia's burning platform memo would not have been so dire if their response had occurred one year earlier. Nokia was already considerably left behind by the application universe at that point. iOS had momentum then and should have been considered a direct threat even though the Android userbase was only 1/10th of the size it is now.

I still find that corporate cultures tend to sideline Android to this day because they underestimate the value of an open platform on commodity hardware with infinite hackability that intrigues developers. The same incredible growth occurred with Linux and Apache on the web as the 888% Android growth in the last year. Android will win partly for the same reason Microsoft beat Apple's superior UI in the 80s and 90s-- Apple is still tied to expensive proprietary hardware and the need to completely control their platform.
Another one; http://www.data-mining-blog.com/data-mining/the-real-data-mi...
Bad News For Groupon: 55% of Daily Deal Campaign Users Would Not Use Again
In the history of the web, most of the standards have simply codified what was already in common usage. We've already seen problems with implementing large standards after the fact: We had the box model problem in IE with CSS, for example. Some of biggest failures, like XHTML, were from standards committees and some of the biggest successes, like xmlHttpRequest (Ajax), just started out as proprietary features.

In my opinion, the best way for the standards to emerge is early and often implementation. It's best for everyone to be able to actually work with a reference implementation. This already happened, for example, with CSS gradients. It was a feature proposed by the WebKit team and Firefox took the idea and implemented it differently. Web developers got a chance to use both and weigh in on the pros and cons. Browser makers got to see how works in real situations. And, in the end, WebKit changed their implementation because the Firefox method turned out to be better and simpler. And now that has been put in the standard to become part of HTML5.

Microsoft isn't even in the conversation.
Google claims not to take a political stance yet this blog post features a screenshot of President Obama on The Daily Show?
Since I started paying attention, it's been like this:

1999: People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
2000: People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
2001-2003 Recession
2004 People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
2005 People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
2006 People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
2007 People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
2008-2009 Recession
2010 People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
2011 People asked "Are we in a bubble?"
Are we in a bubble?
Are we in a bubble?
Are we in a bubble?
...
Yes, apparently unless contraction is obvious, we're always in a bubble and everything in life is only ever getting worse and we'll all die horrible miserable deaths and then the zombie apocalypse comes. PANIC! OH NO! Run for the hills!

Or just work hard and try to do the best you can and stop worrying about things beyond your control.
The bug report for Chrome says it's because the site is optimizing for legibility, which is really ironic.
I'd be interested to know if Jennings had any influence on the title -- the phrase "unfair advantage" isn't used in the text -- he calls it an "advantage", but "unfair" lends it an entirely different meaning. The article is a very even-handed discussion of Watson; the headline is needlessly provocative, and makes Jennings sound like a whiner.
What in the world. The challenge was the natural language processing. Considering that Watson did that part admirably well, complaining about computers having better reflexes is just silly.
I'd like to understand more of your concerns.

Olark just help website owners take the information they already have about you (and that you gave to them), and use it to provide better service.

So if your logged into a website and ask a question the operator doesn't have to ask you for your username again (the website already knows it -- why shouldn't the person helping you)

Most of this parallels what goes on in the real world. If you often shop at the same store the clerks will start to recognize you and give you more personal service -- Olark just lets small business owners do the same online.
I agree: Sony's consumer electronics division has produced a steady string of losers lately, and they're having a rough time competing with Apple. I'm not sure what their other divisions are doing, but it's been years since Sony was hip.

Facebook, on the other hand, is sucking up a huge fraction of the hours spent online by hundreds of millions of people. If you consider them as an advertising-supported entertainment company, they're doing great. Facebook's revenues are still only a couple of billion dollars per year, but they should be able to monetize more of their traffic over time.

Note that I haven't run the underlying numbers on either company. But from 10,000 feet, it's [edit: not] automatically clear that Sony is worth more Facebook.
> I would consider a source code file to [be] a song.

To be fair, a song basically stands on its own. It may be part of a larger work, like an album or symphony, but these things are collections more than structures. The album does not fall apart if a song is omitted.

Songs themselves however are structures with dependencies: melody, harmony, rhythm, phrases, riffs, etc. If you remove the melody or the rhythm, the song is harmed in a much more fundamental way than an album or symphony would be by the removal of a song.

In other words, albums are composed of songs, but they are not built on songs. Songs are built on melody, rhythm, etc.

Now, back to source files. Applications are built on source files. It is tough to say what source files are built on, but they are composed of lines of code.

The analogy of a source file to a song breaks down, because the source file is only useful because the application is built on it. If we are determined to use this metaphor, applications are more analogous to songs, and source files are more analagous to structural elements like melody and rhythm.
> That said, source control is a must....

Based on my 25+ years of IT industry experience, I'd say
put that in an infinite loop. :-)
I understand it is not to be used in Florida, but it's CENTCOM from what I understand. That would seem to indicate a more overarching and widespread intent.
We should probably ask Jeff Gannon how that turned out.
Obvious but not worthwhile, as the issue isn't Java, it's multiple languages on a project.
Well in that case then, the title is still inaccurate, as the hackers could be Canadian as well and routing their work through China.
Watson received an electronic signal that the buzzers were active. The human contestants have to time it via Trebek's voice or the light.
I was here in the Valley for the original Bubble, and the situation
now is nothing like that was. Back then people were saying there
was a "new economy" driven by the Internet, and that productivity
was going to go up like a step function, which justified higher p/e
ratios for any company that could claim to be a participant. If
you had money to invest you felt like you had to have most of it
in the stock market, because money parked in bonds would miss out
on all this growth that was coming.

Back in the 90s I was sure there was a bubble happening, and was
notorious for telling everyone to sell. And yet I remember that
even I thought it was dangerous to have money sitting in bonds. I
don't think that now, and I don't think anyone else does either.

What's happening now is a lot more localized. A few professional
investors are paying higher valuations for startups than they were
a few years ago. But the number of participants and the amounts
of money moving around are both very small compared to the 90s.
Plus the companies are better. In the 90s, it was the dumb leading
the dumb: smooth-talking MBAs were raising money from hapless LPs
and investing it in startups run by other smooth-talking MBAs. Now
it's Yuri Milner investing in a company run by Mark Zuckerberg.
No, I definitely don't like the idea of a government spending taxpayer money on any kind of domestic brainwashing operations, high-tech or traditional-media.
What I think Obama is meeting with Jobs, Schmidt, and Zuckerberg about
Two Words: Demand Media

You have an entire company that is based on gaming google that ready to be publicly traded. And next you have AOL buying the Huffington Post which is designed to cheat actual newspapers out of pageviews — something that Google could change in a minute. I was around for the original dot.com bomb and this smells exactly the same.

The winners will be the companies who survive: My bet is on Facebook. But I'm not sure that I'd bet on Groupon or Twitter. By the way what makes Facebook special isn't the technology but the team.
tl;dr:

The author has a set of views about the benefits of hobbling programmers on large projects, which he takes as axiomatic. He espouses Java as a language suitable for performing said hobbling. He convincingly argues that permitting programmers to add Scala code to large Java projects undoes the hobbling provided by the Java language.

I can't argue with his conclusions, but I'll fight his premises to the death.
Help wanted — jobless need not apply
Poll: Hottest new area in technology?
In HN's opinion, what is the hottest area in tech at the minute? Also, what do you predict the next 'big thing' in tech will be?

Its a bit of an open ended question so feel free to be as creative as you like with the answer.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Anonymity has something to do with free speech but far from everything.

If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases.

Anonymity should obviously still be possible but the decreased trustworthiness of anonymous statements is just something that inevitably comes with anonymity.

(Who are “they”?)
I seem to recall Kasparov complaining of unfairness/cheating too, when he was beat by Deep Blue.
Good. I posted that before they updated their post to clarify that they were sending data over SSL. It doesn't sound like the issue is as bad as they had originally insinuated.
Focus on what you’re good at, and nothing else
The buzzer timing is a larger part of winning than knowing the answers. I would say, even though Jennings never does, that it was a huge advantage.
They should have had a human from the IBM team manning the buzzer based on a visual cue that Watson is ready to answer. Much like Deep Blue didn't actually move the chess pieces with a robotic arm.
In his Q&A session after day 1, Jennings said that "I wouldn't call this unfair...precise timing just happens to be one thing computers are better at than we humans. It's not like I think Watson should try buzzing in more erratically just to give homo sapiens a chance."

So my guess is that the daily news had more to do with that title than Ken. It doesn't seem like him, at any rate.
Well I work with the trades on a daily basis. I stand by what I said. The new guys get screwed, the pay scale is entirely weighted towards the guys who have the most years in the union. For the first few years you get paid like crap. And when there are layoffs they trim from the bottom up based on years of service. So it doesn't matter if the guy who is 25 is busting his ass, the guy who is 50 and slacking all day gets paid three times as much and can't be fired.

I know for a fact that the younger guys resent the older guys (and the union that protects the older guys) far more than they resent the non-union or even at times the company itself.

Now I don't know much about non-union welders other than two friends I know. One started his own business making railings and fences and things like that and makes a good amount of money working for himself. He's non-union but also a small business owner so maybe that is a bad data point.

If we eliminated the union at my company, the welders would get paid on merit. It would be a very good thing for most of the younger guys who work their butt off. It would be a bad thing for most of the guys who have been here for 30 years.
This is only the case if those root certificates are installed on the Playstation. I'm not sure if we know which ones are.

For the purposes of PSN they'd only need Sony root certificates, but I expect that they have others for general web browsing.
EBay is Magento’s secret investor
Interesting. I've been told that these options will not be convertible to cash except in the case of a buyout or IPO, etc.

Should I be ensuring that these options will vest over time, rather than all at once in case of a liquidity event, etc?
This makes we wish we could rate Watson's performance against the players in a way that didn't involve the buzzer. For instance, if Watson and each player were able to give responses for every single clue in the game, who would have the highest percentage of correct responses and/or the highest score?
Show HN: Simple hosted CMS for web devs (pre-launch)
The Secret World of Printing Concept Cars in 3-D
Died with his buzzer in his hand, Lord Lord...

Nice image by Jennings. But I was surprised to hear him complain about the buzzer reaction time advantage. In an earlier interview with the Washington Post he discounted this, saying that the best human players anticipate the timing while Watson has to wait for the signal.

"On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it's just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best... But I wouldn't call this unfair...precise timing just happens to be one thing computers are better at than we humans. It's not like I think Watson should try buzzing in more erratically just to give homo sapiens a chance."

http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-jennings.html?hp...
I'd never heard of this, but it is interesting. For example:

"To illustrate, assume that a homebuilder has built a house on Alicia's property. However, the homebuilder signed a contract with Bobby, who claimed to be Alicia's agent but, in fact, was not. Although there is no binding contract between Alicia and the homebuilder, most courts would allow the homebuilder to recover the cost of the services and materials from Alicia to avoid an unjust result. A court would accomplish this by creating a fictitious agreement between the homebuilder and Alicia and holding Alicia responsible for the cost of the builder's services and materials."

As a home builder a great strategy is to work with fraudulent agents, and build homes on a bunch of plots. And then sue the landowners.

The key simply appears to give the appearance that you're working in good faith, but once you do that your entitled to all services rendered, whether or not the "customer" actually wants it or not.

Although since it is small claims, probably not worth it.

But may be worth it for web design companies. Do the same thing -- build crappy websites for companies, charge them for the service and product.
My startup helps college students find internships.

http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/

Here's everything that we have in web development: http://www.onedayoneinternship.com/tag/web-development/
On email etiquette.
I'm using the hosting provider for email delivery and already hitting the limits :)

Was looking at moving to one of the email delivery services. Would love to talk. My email is in my profile.
bad programmers can make a mess in any language

My experience is that inexpressive or hobbling languages encourage good programmers to make a mess as well! To give an absurd example, I remember working with a dialect of BASIC that did not support recursion (this would have been the 1970s). To write a "Towers of Hanoi" solver, I had to greenspun my own procedure argument stack. While this is a useful learning exercise, greenspunning your own language features in an inexpressive language inevitably leads to half-baked implementations.

And that is what I see with modern Java: lots and lots of things greenspun on top of the language in half-baked ways. There is just as much functionality code in a complex Java application as there is in a complex Scala application, but in the Java application the domain-specific code sits on top of a rickety tower of awkward implementations and work-arounds.
I'm curious to see how many people who think we're in a bubble were around for The Bubble in '97-99. From where I'm sitting, this is not even close. Consider:

There were IPO's like every other day. Often, these companies were less than a year old.

People were driving up the wrong company's stock by 10% in a day because they mixed up the ticker symbols.

Stock swings, usually positive, of 30-50% in a single day were not uncommon.

Companies with no business at all were raising hundreds of millions of dollars in VC.

The number of VC firms was exploding.

AMZN, SUNW, DELL, and the like would go up 3-5% pretty much every day

Day traders with no experience were plowing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars into the market. There were companies who did nothing but cater to these people. (Not many of either are left).

Kids fresh out of college were being paid $125,000 to write plain HTML and getting pissed off if they didn't get huge raises.

Webvan - look it up.

So, I guess I' not seeing a bubble. Just a few wacky valuations here and there.
"Only recently did iTunes remove DRM from their songs"

A timeline:

iTunes store opens: April 26 2003

Steve Jobs DRM letter: Feb 6 2007 (4 years ago)

EMI content available DRM free: May 29 2007

80% of iTunes music DRM free: Jan 6th 2009

All US iTunes music DRM free: April 7th 2009

So I think you are stretching the meaning of "only recently", especially when considered in terms of the pace of technology development (as opposed to, say, geological time.)

You couldn't even buy an iPhone when they started removing it. The period over which they were exclusively selling DRM content is actually shorter than the period since they stopped.

(Update: that last part is not quite right - I was counting from the DRM letter date, not the EMI date. But it's close.)
more than a few large groups have been caught red-handed doing this

References please!