skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Relatively unscientific, but git merges feel smarter. It notices when I've moved a file (without telling it I did), and I experience fewer conflicts that I was used to. Some possible suggestions as to why here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5035531/how-is-dvcs-git-m...

Also, the fact that commits have an atomic life is useful. If I cherry pick a change into a branch and then later merge it, Git generally knows what's up. With SVN this sort of scenario seemed to confuse things. Another advantage to this model is that it's very easy to compare (what commits differ between these, instead of a big code diff).

The differences may be subtle, but all in all I find myself much happier and more likely to use branches than I used to.
12.5% corporate tax.
If some country drops one nuclear bomb we will be shocked by how little damage it will do to the US and how swift the response is going to get.

If Russia or China starts a fullscale nuclear war, it is over before they have the time to consider a draft.

In any other case a draft is political suicide and will be the only thing (short of an invasion) that can united the country.

So a draft is extremely unlikely.
FTC: ID theft again tops consumer complaints
Try to have a team of developers working on various parts, you modify a function to add some code to it, another developer moves the function to the bottom of the file, and yet another developer modifies the code to fix an off by one error.

Git will happily merge the result together, in all of the cases I've seen it will do so without even needing user intervention and everything ends up where it should be. With subversion this is a nightmare. If code changes location in a file suddenly merge'ing in more changes becomes problematic.

Recently my boss and I were working on different parts of the same project. I proceeded to move a whole bunch of stuff around to clean up the entire source tree, in the mean time he had added two more files and made modifications to some of the ones I had moved. I then proceeded to merge in his changes, git happily merged in his changes to the now moved files, and added the new files into the original location I had just moved, I moved them, committed and everything was happy. We tried the same thing in Subversion not too long ago and it was a complete mess leaving huge merge issues that took a developer a while to figure out what was going on.
> Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x?

Nope; the reasoning for the inadequacy is based on the fact you can't please users by including just 80% of features.
Sure they use 80% at most, but everybody has different 80% [1].

A collection of objects (here: files) can only (reasonably) be a: 1) set, 2) directed acyclic graph - a.k.a. tree, 3) relational database (in the general sense)

1) is pretty much pointless,

2) is what my mom and little sister understand and use as it requires little querying,

3) requires a powerful query language (that's what right & comfy for us nerds, right?).

So far the filesystem-less software has been two-prong: mounting filesystems at certain pre-designated mountpoints (Windows & friends), nevermind that;
and presenting a querable database with a bunch of predefined queries -- AND NO WAY OF CREATING ANY MORE QUERIES.
That's the 80% your users aren't looking for.

Now if you come up with a query language that's quick and easy to use from GUI,
I'll buy you a week-long supply of your $FAV_BEWERAGE, cross my heart.
(drop me a line at dexen.devries + the usual gmail suffix).

But it will not `look like' -- semantics-wise -- as the curret breed of Symbians and iOSes.
QED.

--

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html
Mike,
I have two people on my team and we live in Baltimore. Should we apply as a team or separately?
Also, our product is targeting Russian market. Is that a problem? Do you only accept companies that target US to begin with?
Thanks
Very creative. Actually a somewhat addicting game as well!
Yes, exactly. I have a little web game that renders in SVG, and it puts up ~8000 shapes on the screen, updates at about 5hz on most desktop machines. This is ok, since it's basically a panning map that doesn't get panned much. If I switched to Canvas, it'd run quite quickly, but I'd lose all the wins from using the DOM.
Razor MX650 - The best motorcycle toys for kids. Get it here with the best price
It's stunning how easy it is to spot a specific lack of "automated production monitoring" after something fails. Hey idiot, you should've been testing that thing!

I've seen all of Fog Creek's automated production monitoring courtesy of their sysadmins and devs as it was months ago, and it was very solid. I'm sure it's only gotten better.

This is a case of a specific deployment failure slipping through the cracks and being honestly explained, apologized for, and rectified. I'm obviously biased due to my history (and probably-justified guilt for this particular failure), but shotgun criticism about formal release procedures is very misguided.
With just 100 hundred git branches, I think you're not really using git often and/or to its potential. On a busy coding day, I easily create a few branches. If you also count temporary branches on non-development testing machines (I do driver development on Linux for fun) that can easily reach a dozen.

Now what for? I create branches to test merges with other developers code, branches before refactoring my in-progress stuff (so I can go back and pick up the original branch with all its history in case it was a dead-end). I do new branches for simple fixes, tracking down bugs (versioning all test-patches so you can check the next day/week what theories you've already tested is sometimes extremely useful). Sometimes I just do a new branch to get the feel of starting with a clean slate.

Once a month or so a look at all the branches lying around and delete those no longer useful.

All this is only possible because git branching is _cheap_. Orders of magnitudes cheaper than on any central rcs. And the best part is that git never ever loses anything. git reflog shows you _all_ the states you've gone through to the current one. So all these branches are actually valuable.
High-end CAD tools used to be run almost entirely on Unix systems (Solaris, SGI, HP/UX, etc.). Back in the 1990s Windows systems couldn't handle these tools the way Unix workstations could, but once that changed there was no reason to spend far more money on a workstation. Perhaps if Linux had become popular a few years sooner the transition in high-end CAD would've been from proprietary Unix to Linux. See for instance http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware/current/support.htm where support for various *nix are being phased out by Parametric Technology, Linux included.
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Braintree
Today with terabyte harddrives, gigabytes of RAM and broadband connections, when is the binary size a more important factor than both execution speed and ease of development? Especially when the binary size difference is probably not huge?

Shouldn't the advice of this article just be "use exceptions"?
similar to this via twitter: by @paulrouget

http://grack.com/blog/
I didn't see any timings in his code.
> However, if I can choose a large enough regex, I can construct a decider for a given finite language.

What do you mean by this? What is a "decider"? What do you mean by a finite language?
Not all development targets desktops or laptops.
I don't see why this is even an issue. I imagined the link would contain a perspective on why coffee is bad in some way to productivity or personal health but instead I see a length conversation on how to reply to "let's do coffee sometimes."

IMHO say "sure", and then just don't have coffee. Does anyone really care _what_ you drink – I always though "getting coffee" was more of a social norm to have conversation over warm beverages?
In fairness, that's a description of what a routine and successful build "should" go like. I bet if IMVU were to post a blow-by-blow account of their hairiest deployment screwup ever, it would be a good bit more colorful than that.

There are some headscratchers in the description of the Fogbugz problem, but kudos to them for explaining how and why things broke.
Great as always, it's just sad that the competition is so much behind in js performance :( but awesome work chrome team! I have only noticed slow performance for one single thing in chrome... border-radius:

Have anyone noticed that Chrome is slow if you have a lot of elements (A table with 20+) or something TDs that has -webkit-border-radius ? Scrolling on the page becomes sluggish, but if you dont use the border radius scrolling is normal.

This also happends if you use draggables with jquery and -webkit-border-radius , it's more sluggish to drag this div around (With border-radius) than a normal div, guess it's more work to render round corners, but would be cool with a fix here.
And when I was there a few years ago, it was also the slowest service with the most downtime. grumblegrumble* I hope that they have addressed that by now.
I was in a Borders on Sunday getting cheap NoSQL books on sale. The guy stocking the shelves, who's getting laid off, was on a rant about how the last 6 presidents of the company didn't know what they were doing and that's the reason they're going under.
Inventor of SecurID Token Breaks Company out of Stealth Mode
I love CS, but this article doesn't seem to have much useful content that isn't arleady in the CS docs: http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
Remember, the iPad uses a 10" LCD(though IPS) vs. a 15.6" (a huge % increase in area).

The problem is that you can't really compare on specs. The problem I had with the article was that it compared it to the evolution from Mainframes to Minicomputers to PCs. Each step there, the cost was an order or more of magnitude cheaper(correct me if I am wrong).

When you can get "PCs" (a cheap crappy netbook is still a PC) for $280, the comparison falls apart completely.

Eg. You can get more than decent desktops for less than $500.

See:

Vostro 230s
Also Includes	Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93GHz	Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit	2GB	500GB	21.5" Monitor	DVD ROM	$499.00

My problem was the premise of the article, not about the supposed "value" of the iPad.
From what I understood, Lessig was looking for a broad-ranging principle, rather than something specific to the case in question and its related harms. He was overreaching.
"since you have to check every single line of code (indeed, every sub-expression) and think about what exceptions it might raise and how your code will react to it"

Yes, that's my concern with exceptions as well. It seems like the Java model (if I remember it right -- it's been a decade), which requires a method to either handle an exception that a sub-method throws or explicitly allow it to be thrown, would be preferable and help people avoid accidentally ignoring an exception.

I'd like to see support for exceptions like this in C++0X, but I haven't bothered to check to see if it's there...
If that's the case, I would probably not even allow them to browse the site until they signed up. I would focus on creating a gateway page that showed the user the CRAZY discounts they could be getting and put a lock graphic on it. "Sign up today and unlock incredible savings on stylish clothes and accessories". Make the deals update and show the countdown timer but they can't get any more details or proceed until they sign up.
I'll tell you what's wasting bandwidth on Tumblr: Inline CSS -- Every Tumblr page contains at least a kb of CSS in the HEAD section. This CSS is downloaded again for every pageload.

Not to mention that many of the tumblogs use the same theme (same CSS)
What data loss bug? The company I work for just recently switched to git and I want to make sure we don't lose any data.
Its easy for an able bodied person to call person in a wheelchair lazy.
To put it in context, Baltimore's homicide rate is six times that of NYC, which itself is also over the national average.

Austin, Texas which is slightly more populous than Baltimore has about 20 homicides per year. This is a similar per person rate as Edinburgh and lower than Dublin, but higher than London. Austin isn't amongst the safest cities in the US. It's just a major city I chose at random. I think it's fair to say that on the whole the US is dangerous for a rich country, but the average is definitely being pulled up by outliers such as Detroit and Baltimore.
Launchrock is a little too meta for me... it probably will never make any money but hey, it probably didn't really cost any money to make.

I guess that's one problem with people not working for big companies when they graduate college and instead just going to their startup, they don't know the kinds of problems real people are having. Now let me go back to working on my iPhone game.
Clayton M. Christensen to College Leaders: Get Ready for Disruption
Are Mobile Apps Violating Open Source Licenses?
Took me a while to come back here to comment. :)

Very fun, very creative. Abuse is most definitely the correct word.
yes; yes it is!
When I update to setZeroTimeout in those canvas vs svg demos, the drawing is so fast there is horizontal tearing and the frame rates are in the thousands.

Which means the FPS with setInterval is actually measuring how long it takes setInterval to fire, not how long it's taking to draw under the different methods.
As an Irish software engineer/wantrapreneur working in San Francisco here is my take on some of the comments around this article.

-Ireland is incredibly expensive for what you get, food/drink/eating out is on par or more expensive than San Francisco. The only thing thats cheaper is rent.

-Couple the previous point with the fact that Software Engineers in Ireland get paid roughly 1/3 of what they earn in the valley.

-Most good Software engineers leave the country so the ecosystem in Ireland is not so hot for finding top talent.

-Most big companies in Ireland do localization, sales/marketing, IT stuff. Very little real development is done there by big companies (i.e facebook/google/amazon).

-Infrastructure in Ireland is shit. Its a right pain in the ass to get decent broadband setup and the roads here are a joke.

If I wanted to do a lean startup in Europe I would incorporate in Ireland for the tax rate and setup shop somewhere sane like Berlin where rent and cost of living is cheap.
I've never been happy with the hand-wavy, almost circular definition of Turing completeness. We all know the "simulating a Turing machine/computing any function" bit, but what does that really mean? From a practical standpoint, what does a language need to be Turing complete? What key concept separates things like HTML and regular expressions from "real" programming languages?

I believe Petzold said this concept was controlled repetition. Conditionals and loops/jumps/recursion. This example, while nifty, doesn't show that HTML+CSS is Turing complete, because the user still has to provide the looping.
You very much cannot do merging easily in SVN, even with tortoise (which has a wizard which helps with the options).

I have never had a clean merge with SVN, ever. Whereas with git/bzr and friends doing "merge <otherbranch>" just works most of the time.
glad to hear it! But this is just one small facet of the tech scene in Baltimore...Please check out my response to kovar for a list of other resources you should check out.
Secret Fears of the Super Rich
The cult of 140
Very well put. Very sorry to hear about your experiences - I think this highlights quite clearly what a serious thing burnout can be.

Hopefully you won't mind if I mention my experience - though I didn't do a computer science degree (something I very much regret), my engineering degree was a very difficult time for me - a family situation carried on throughout the degree, a very, very serious situation (and also very personal, so not going to go into detail), as well as very many other bad things happening to me on what was already a ridiculously difficult workload (my Alma mater has a great reputation based on working people into the ground).

There are so many stories I could tell about that time... will stick with just one, however - in my final year my dissertation supervisor treated me like a research assistant - going off and looking at stuff for him which he'd review then throw away, rinse + repeat all year until 2 weeks before the dissertation deadline when he told me I didn't have a project (if I didn't hand anything in that would have been my degree over with, I would have had to repeat the entire final year elsewhere, and would find it hard to actually get a job, so pretty damn major).

After 2 weeks of 18-hour days I managed to write a 100-page dissertation and code (in fortran!!) the entire model myself. I eventually got an A grade for the dissertation despite everything, but this supervisor told me afterwards I couldn't pursue a PhD with him because I was a bad student (yeah, kinda dodged a bullet there, not to mention that it would have been a distraction from what I've come to realise was always my calling - programming).

In fact my degree choice was largely influenced by 'spiritual' beliefs held by my family, so I had the endless conflict of not actually liking my subject (I wanted to do maths or computer science) while trying to actually survive it.

I can't tell you how absolutely destructive that was, it's taken 6 years to even be able to cope with studying on my own, let alone doing the kind of work I need to go in the direction I want to with programming.

Anyway, now things are way more positive, focusing on studying the things I need to learn while avoiding burnout (see my other post). A lot of it is getting over the impact it has on self-esteem. Trust me, burning out like that is like a forest fire for the ego.
can anyone with some technical expertise comment on the quality of this write-up?
>Context-independent grammars probably are.

No they are not. Recursively Enumerable grammars are however. A context free grammar can't be turning complete because it can be decided with only a PDA.
Yeah, I've used T-Mobile since they were VoiceStream. Before that I used Sprint and I switched because they were such a hassle. Hard to imagine a worse outcome for T-Mobile.
just a splash page for now, designed by Mark Armbruster. The site is http://thestartupcity.com (the guy who owns startupcity.com wants a lot of $$$ for it)
This reads to me like 'writing good code is hard, and writing even better code is even harder'. With modern C++0x smart pointers (like unique_ptr) and RAII, you can get very high performance and (more) easily exception-safe code. Maybe a lot of C++ exception criticism comes from people still trying to code like C in C++?
One of the most creative things I've seen in a while. This wrinkles my brain and the best way.
I look forward to dealing with this on shady sites that want to disable the back button.
you should definitely apply as a team. We would love to back a company targeting Russia! It's a global economy, right? Also there's a large Russian population in Baltimore FWIW
I agree, video got too much attention at the landing page.

If you just scroll down you get all data and infographics in text form. Now I need to make this more intuitive so that anti-video folks can easily go to text/graphics content.

Video also has some advantages. It creates a bit deeper engagement. I think that people who decided to watch the video will remember your project better.
Free Place to stay in Silicon valley if you code
I would like to record for posterity that I was coding up pretty much exactly the same thing over the weekend without knowing this already existed, so when I launch please go easy. I have commits as proof!
Feels like we're back in the days of the Apple ][, only with a much, much smaller monitor. Things I'd like to see done in the URL bar using the History API:

• Rogue-like text adventure game
• Hitchhiker's Guide
• A reading app with page-turning animation
• Color

Whoever cracks that last one, mega kudos. Woz, you around? Feel like doing some magic?

It's also tempting to ask for a text-editor, but then, we sort of already have that!
Big Dictionaries I: query/update tradeoffs
The media library presents you the files pretty much as an OLAP cube. That's possible only due to metadata diligently assigned to music and photos (location, geotags and date and time). It makes much sense to filter by one or two attributes to pick the music for to-day. Try testing your media library with all the metadata removed...

Since the Word and Excel documents often have no such metadata, and the possible attributes are numberous, it's no wonder no `document library' got popular as of yet. The best you get -- the state of the art of desktop search -- is full-text-search with some semantic analysis, right?
So, that's one of the main reasons for doing this, to create that virtuous cycle, but at this stage I don't think we can require it.
Cache sizes have not seen gains proportional to RAM or HDs.
Yeah, I remember those days well, we had Unix boxes for CAD and 386s with Win3 for office work side-by-side. I think you're right - the transition to Linux would have been an obvious choice if the timing had been better.
Personally, I agree. I know our graphics designer whipped up one of the actual bell curve per VCS. Hopefully, we'll post it later.
Poor analogy. I already excepted physical disability in my comment.

Physical conditions, or cognitive events such as stroke, that make you unable to work are NOT analogous to losing motivation or getting bored.
Researchers unmasking anonymous email senders
tortoisegit improved by leaps and bounds in the last 18 or so months. it's quite feature-complete. i suggest checking it out even if you've been bitten by it in the past.
It was just a commentary; you are completely correct. Just an observation. :)
How Twitter Is Transforming Trading in Commodities
To be clear, we can't process visa applications, so you'd be moving from somewhere else in the US, not from abroad. (as a long-time visa holder in the US, I feel your pain, but there is nothing I can do right now)
Wish I'd thought of this. And that I'd made it.

And that it doesn't catch on.
A social dreaming application to harvest the power of the subconscious and connect our collective hivemind into a powerful dream society...
No, there is no incremental mode to the indexer, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

Create a counter table to keep track of what records you've indexed and cron frequent indexer runs using the latest records as offsets.

If you have documents that frequently change, maintain your full index less often and instead merge the two on a more regular basis.

Sphinx's indexer speed is one of its advantages, but it's largely dependent on the efficiency of your SQL and underlying MySQL indices. Perhaps something else is indirectly influencing your indexing performance.
This might be my favourite HN exchange ever.
I use both; I prefer sunspot if I need to index arbitrary ruby methods results (eg: methods that result in multiple queries/data clean-up) or if I work with MongoDB. I prefer sphinx when I need a more lightweight setup on RAM, or need an easy geosearch, or work with mysql.

EDIT:

- sunspot allows for per-request weighting in the search (see http://blog.logeek.fr/2011/3/4/hackerbooks-books-stackoverfl... for an example), not sure if it's possible with ts
Neat. "Shortlist" might not be the most apt title for the watched threads, though. . . calling it something like "Watchlist" or even just "Watch" might make it more clear at first glance.