skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had this discussion, and thought I would share a specific example of one case that to my mind highlights the issues.

I had some horrendously complex code to compute the two roots of a quadratic, and someone came along and "tidied it up." They replaced my code with:

delta = sqrt(b^2-4*a*c)
a2 = 2*a
x0 = (-b+delta)/a2
x1 = (-b-delta)/a2

They were then horribly confused over why the tests started failing, the check-in was broken, and all hell broke loose in the development branch.

He put it back and all was well, then came to ask me about it. I explained about numerical stability, and all was well.

So with regards comments:

Pro: He would've known not to change the code, and it was complicated for a reason.

Con: He wouldn't've come to me to discuss why it was a problem, and hence wouldn't've learned about numerical stability.

Gripping hand: With a comment he would've known why, and the time wasted changing the code, testing, investigating and putting it all back would've been saved, and better spent learning about numerical stability, which he then had to do anyway.

I'm in favor of the correct use of comments, and YMWV as to what that means. Dogma is the enemy of true progress.
Git core has support for CVS, SVN, Perforce, Arch and Quilt.

There are plugins for Mercurial, Bazaar and DARCS.

https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,...

Git to Mercurial.

http://hg-git.github.com/

Git to Bazaar.

http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/foreign/bzr-on-...

It doesn't seem other DVCS are that incompatible.
What do you mean? They see private profiles as pointless and made the business decision to not support this feature in the future.

They're not forcing anyone to have a public profile. You know what Facebook would have done? They would have simply made all private profiles public without any previous notification. That would have been evil. Instead, Google has chosen to follow a path where the default action doesn't compromise anyone's privacy and they have given ample time for people to decide whether they want to make their profile public or not.

From what I see, what they've done is pretty much the Right Thing To Do.
All I know is that I felt conflicted when I saw the tweet. "Do I retweet? It's for a good cause. But, I don't want to support Bing."

I didn't retweet and felt a bit guilty. I didn't want to be used either.
I guess this explains the frantic "Bank of America Sucks" domain purchases.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wow-bank-of-america-bought-su...
Information about me is pretty easy to come by if you try. I'm hardly a secretive person.

http://www.google.com/search?q=daniel+tenner

http://www.google.com/search?q=swombat

You can even see videos of me giving a talk based on my experiences as a startup founder.

Whether I have "real-world success", I'll leave you to do decide. I haven't achieved all that I want to achieve, by a long shot, so I wouldn't call myself a success just yet. I quit the corporate world 4 years ago to run my own business(es), and it's not looking like I'll ever need to go back. Is that some measure of success? I'm not rich yet, if that's what you mean by success. But I'm happy with my life, and I wake up every day looking forward to doing stuff I love doing. That's a different kind of wealth.

But, you make a good point. I'll think about how I can add some kind of "about" bio-type thing somewhere on the page, without cluttering it.
I never use the GUI.

Removal of ruby from apt-get and replacement with a working system wide rvm installation that can be overridden with individual user rvm installations.
That's quite confusing. How can I tell that a profile is private vs public (which seems to be a default)?
"Voluntary response data are worthless" is flat out wrong Period.

This poll is a case in point, I enjoyed reading the responses. And I enjoyed reading your rant about voluntary response data. Therefore there is some worth.
I heartily approve of this excellent statistician rant.

That said, I ask you: Why do these polls keep happening, even though "everyone knows" that they are statistical garbage? I assert that they are a sign, a sign of a serious problem with online media (or with HN, at any rate): We are standing in a virtual room with a large crowd of people, and we can't see any of them, and it's very disconcerting. My monkey brain wants to know who's there in the formless darkness. So we send out these statistically-primitive sonar pings in the form of polls.

You will learn one thing from this poll: That for any age group, there are some people here who are happy to claim membership in that group. And that is comforting. We're diverse! We're like a real family! The poll is a feel-good experience, the way It's a Wonderful Life would be if it had been written by actuaries.

You could usefully replace most HN polls with a simple icebreaker question ("Hi, I'm Bob, and I'm 37, and I'm wondering who is out there") except that such questions don't scale well (nobody actually wants to read the 2,000 responses) and they're kind of at odds with our local culture (which is about keeping in-band social niceties to a minimum, again in an attempt to scale well). So it turns out to be more socially acceptable here to pretend that you're taking a poll, even though polls on HN are utter nonsense. The clipboard and the questionnaire are a prop designed to help start a conversation.

Anyway, back to the real matters at hand:

A) I have just turned forty. There are people here older than me. There are many here younger than me.

B) Now we know why most social media has those profile pages with the little pictures and bios, and (e.g.) the real reason why IMVU is a success.
I'd be more interested in another question. What startups failed while using lean approach and why?
I don't mean this with any Linux-nerd snark at all: You shouldn't be administering a Linux server with remote desktop. You shouldn't even have X installed on your servers. Even if you can administer some things, you'll find the tools just aren't there, and you'll spend all your time in a terminal windows.

Honestly, your life will be dramatically improved if you spend 30 minutes getting comfortable with the commandline, the bare-bones-basics of vim and SSH/SCP. Copy/paste and file transfers are solved problems with PuTTY and Filezilla.

(In my personal life I am a total Linux/BSD user, but professionally I am a .Net dev who deploys to Linux on EC2 from Windows, so I have a little bit of standing to speak!)
I'm not trying to convince anyone that the containment vessel will fail or that they will have to do more steam releases. I'm simply saying that the arguments presented in the article are illogical.
Yes, they mentioned that was the best centralized place to do it from.
But I am sure they take into account the properties of graphite, and I'm sure making sure that Chernobyl thing doesn't happen is high on the list.
#1 Is obnoxious. There should absolutely be a way to turn off the drum-sound without rolling out gconf.
Amen to that, the product looks overly complicated, especially for a v1.
This is nothing more than an educated guess. While Gross is theoretically correct, I'm not certain our implements can detect a 5.4 µSec change over 3 days. Not only that, I doubt it matters enough for us to care.

Assume that our sensors are sensitive enough to detect this for a moment. The day-length of the earth changed by:

0.0000000000208333350570911 %

Who bloody well cares about that? I think scientific navel gazing just got a new mascot.
I actually have no complaints whatsoever about Ubuntu (except for the 'you must use google+gconf to turn off the login screen sound'). In fact, I've found it so appealingly easy to use over the past few years that I've switched to FreeBSD just so I'm a little bit over my head again :) I may be a perversely unique case and you probably shouldn't cater to me!
I'd say the most economical is picking up white tileboard or backerboard from a home improvement store. Roughly $10 for 3ft by 5ft.

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000679.php
http://www.homedepot.com/Flooring-Flooring-Tools-Accessories...
I do not live in the Valley, so I may be clueless, but...

I get the impression from afar that the Valley has become a center of hype more than a center of substance. The whole Singularity University thing strikes me as a shark jumping moment.
Facebook Will Introduce New Service That Sells Discount Deals to Consumers
> the world would be a much, much better place had it been as popular as Rails.

Why?
> The Earth's figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis in space, which it spins around once every day at a speed of about 1,000 mph (1,604 kph). The figure axis is the axis around which the Earth's mass is balanced and the north-south axis by about 33 feet (10 meters).

Could someone explain this paragraph? how does one measure a rotation speed in terms of distance over time ? And I just cant figure what the second sentence means at all...
Such a great PR strategy!
1. Copy permalink to profile in clipboard.

2. Logout from your google account.

3. Going to google profile permalink, should not show your profile information.

4. Login to another google account.

5. Going to google profile permalink, should not show your profile information.
You can use "system connections" so your wifi doesn't go down when switching between users, it works for me (I have a mix of kubuntu and ubuntu machines). I find it strange that nm-applet crashes, did you submit a bug report?
Partly for that reason, we envision the site as being most useful for groups above 20 and below 200. That way you have less of a risk of identifying specific users, while still developing a sense of community and relevance.
Read the Docs - Create, host, and browse documentation
Why not use evenly sized bins?
Even though it's easy to fix, moving the min/max/close buttons to the left is a major annoyance.
Real estate hyperinflation is probably part of the problem.

You can't afford to live well in the Valley unless you've had a liquidity event. This is particularly true if you want to start a family, which chops off the population at age 30 or so. There's a great romantic myth of the twenty-something founder, and sometimes it's true, but lots of great companies founded by 30-50 age bracket people with a lot of experience under their belt too.
I agree. I have 2 sets of small portable speakers I use at different times for my iPod. My thought is these are for "extreme" times when battery life or the weight of batteries would be an issue...which begs the question how are you powering the iPod?

I still like the idea and would consider buying them if I could see how they work in person.
The Japan Earthquake, captured by citizens as it happened
There's a tension between making software fast, reliable and attractive and making it completely configurable. The current culture in GNOME, as far as I understand it, is that the primary goal is to provide a great experience for your users, even if extreme configurability needs to suffer in some cases. Others can disagree and try to do different things, but if you want GNOME to agree with you the only route you have is to join the project and change things from within.
Brushing up on Computer Science Part 1, Big O
Ask HN: Looking for a version control based backup tool
I'm traveling all the time (every 2-3 months, I'm in a new city or country), with no real permanent address. I've managed to work out all the kinks...except having a good backup/sync solution.

I have a macbook pro & a thinkpad w701 (which runs two different VMs). It's a pain in the ass because making changes on one machine (such as adding some new music or updating some presentations) requires me to keep track of what changed where. And then every couple of weeks, after syncing the three different images, I try to manually sync it out to a backup drive that I carry around.

It's pretty much the most annoying thing ever...especially when I sometimes make changes on the backup drive and I have to remember not to override them.

What I'd really like is something simple that has more of a version control like workflow:
-I can push out changes to some central server (like a commit. Example: I add some changes to my music directory and then I can just commit those changes to backup)
-Before the backup happens, I'd like to see a "diff": what files will be overridden, which one's newer, etc
-I can access my files off the server (if I'm making an audio mix and need to pull out some songs, I'd like to get them from the server. All the backups can't just be one big binary compressed zip blob)

Dropbox comes pretty close but it lacks the "commit" & "diff" functionality. I thought about using Amazon AWS but that falls short because I can't see diffs and can't access my files directly off aws.

Any ideas? Or any other solutions? I guess what I'd really like is TimeMachine in the cloud or maybe even a NAS that's securely accessible through the internet
Two comments:

I spent the past week at a multi-lang conference in Montreal as part of the Ruby contingent. What i found is that most of the non-rubyists have a notion of Rails that is stuck back in 2007. Rails has changed a whole lot, particularly with version 3, and in doing so, has become a much better citizen in the Rubysphere, in particular it's integration with other libraries and tools. So in so far as that is the case, Rails follows a Rubyist paradigm now.

Second, i strongly disagree with the notion that the Ruby ethos and aesthetic "barely exist[s]". The number of Ruby conferences which do not have a rails focus that take place every year is quite large. Rails is and has been known to be different from Ruby, and once you are anywhere away from being a casual user of Rails, you will become familiar with the Ruby aesthetic by virtue of encountering libraries outside of Rails. The days of Rails plugins are gone.
I tend to agree with the author, but there are times comments are the only way to help the next guy looking at the code. Like when you're using workarounds.

E.g., I was recently writing for a JPA entity on Google App Engine where I tried using a @PrePersist function to update a field. Turned out that GAE won't call the @PrePersist unless a field is updated first...i.e., catch 22.

So, say as a workaround you add an artificial update to the field to null just so your @PrePersist is called, what are the odds that the next guy reading the code without a comment won't just delete that assignment thinking it's unnecessary?
They have already had many safety failures. No one can predict what will happen next.
My take is to never trust the built-in random number generator of any standard library. Get a copy of Numerical Recipes and implement your own, it's only a few lines of code.
Yeah, Oleg is a legend in the functional programming world. His work is totally brain bending but once you understand it it's amazing.
I am indeed. Voted up the 27-30 category as that fits with the other bins :)
Exactly. There isn't a programming language in the world, and never will be, that can explain the WHY of the code being written. I write tons of comments explaining WHY I'm doing things so that 1) I can understand what I did when I come back to the code and 2) Other people can understand what I was thinking and how the code fits into the greater whole.

I HATE code with no comments. And tests are not sufficient documentation, though that's an argument for a different time.
If you are basing where you move on a techcrunch article you may want to give things a little more thought.
Whatever. This guy really doesn't understand "The Valley" at all if he feels this way. He should just leave and go do something else.

I moved out to San Jose in 1994 and things were just starting to heat up with the Internet and it was super exciting. I lived through the crash and started a company in 2002. I eventually left the US for family reasons after having spent 11 years there.

Guess what? Things change constantly. That's the nature of the place. If you are worried that your friends are leaving etc. it's just that they are leaving, not that the place is dying.

> Of course, I’ve only been around for one cycle, and it’s quite possible it was ever thus.

He should have written that line, realized it was true and then deleted the entire article. Since he's obsessed with Zuckerberg he should think a little about the past: people were emulating Andreesen (now he looks like a pretty 'old' guy) and Filo and Yang were heroes. It just goes on and on like that.

> What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is this: I’m bored.

Fair enough. Naff off back to the UK or wherever. For my part, I'm happiest talking to the young engineers and entrepreneurs thinking of the next big thing while emulating Zuck or whoever. Who cares that they are emulating Zuck? If they have passion, they'll try to make something insanely cool. Many will fail, some others will become the people to emulate.

Sure, The Social Network was a good movie and all, but a good movie about Silicon Valley doesn't mean that now it's going to come to an end. How about Startup.com? That was excellent, or if you want to go further back read Soul of a New Machine (yeah, I know it was Route 128).

Frankly, you're a wannabe if you spend your time thinking Sarah Lacy, SXSW or The Social Network are in any way relevant.

All that matters are coders, and I'm guessing this guy isn't a coder. Just another moth flying around the flame.
This post is so trivial as to be flagworthy. If the author's coworkers ask him about design decisions, invariants, or other minutiae regarding a piece of code, does he explain it to them by writing more code? No? He uses natural language? Then perhaps there are times when an inline natural language comment is warranted. End of argument.
http://www.xkcd.com/386/ : Duty calls

http://www.xkcd.com/438/ : Internet argument
I can't speak to the numbers, but I've read about foreclosures thrown out of court by judges in the WSJ and Economist, so it has happened -- at least in the early days of the mess.
For people who are looking to switch to Mac OS X for it's looks and usability and are planning to buy Mac hardware just for the OS or stick with Windows, Ubuntu GNU/Linux would be an option on their current hardware.

I use an AWN dock in Ubuntu and would love to have the time to research/hack my way to the Universal menu bar. It would be great if Ubuntu would have a standard (optional) Dock and Universal Menu Bar.
What is wrong with the Windows guidelines?
Are you saying you've found a way to remotely browse the filesystem of your Ubuntu box from within windows (without resorting to FTP?). As in, something that ties into windows explorer and lets you deal with remote files as though they were local?

If so, please point me to it.

But that's sort of the point I'm trying to make. If the Ubuntu team wants to get Windows devs to try out their thing, they need to make stuff like this completely painless. To the point of building a "Windows Kit" that you simply install at your end and it hooks you up with a complete set of tools you need to interact with your remote server.
Ditto on this. I feel you usually have to know where a setting is so you can know where a setting is. There might indeed be a criteria for the separation (ie, sudo vs non-sudo), but the fact that it is not readily apparent makes it (imo) a bad implementation.
I find that when you are developing an open source application, its rude to not comment your code. Its the least you can do to help any other developers willing to work on your project. I feel like its more inviting as well.
Half tau day
I feel your pain. While they fix it I found that doing 'ALT+SPACE' and then pressing 'R' helped me a bit. But yeah, three keys for something that should be intuitive..
The universal menu bar approach was taken in Netbook Remix, whether it remains in desktop Unity will be interesting to see.
When I was starting out, I was so excited to do A/B testing. I was going to A/B every word on every page. The truth of the matter is, A/B is worthless when starting out because you need a hundred conversions or so for both A and B to have statistical significance. I'm getting less than 20 visits per day, but with a very good conversion rate, actually.

As for the URL - well, I'm not really into making a micro ISV/SEO-blatant site.

Facebook sign up - I really should have that.

I have personally never clicked a landing page video. I think the only example I know of it actually being a good decision is Dropbox. I want to see a description with images and text (something my page lacks, really).
InfoEther Acquired by LivingSocial
Nuclear plants are very complex. These people are going to be embarrassed how little they really know, as the events unfold.

So many blog writers think they have all the answers. Well just watch what happens there in Japan. It will not be pretty.
This explains why I feel so tired this morning.
Ask HN: Advice on non-profits
I've been working on a software project that's essentially researching possible solutions for a good cause, and I'm at the stage where I'm ready to do some much larger-scale testing of my ideas and get a bit more publicity - maybe attract some other volunteers to develop and test, and if I'm lucky, get some funding. I need to buy some resources like servers, etc... and get volunteers to help with some testing. I'd also like to be able to accept donations if anyone's willing (even though I'm prepared to fund this myself), but I seriously doubt it will ever grow into anything more than a few employees.

Having said that, I would really like to set up a legal entity to manage the project so that things like hosting and domains can be set up in the name of the project, etc... I'd also like to be able to make a clear distinction when it comes to taxes, etc... what is "my money", and what is money that I gave to the organization, etc...

I'm thinking of setting up a non-profit, but I'm quite ignorant of that aspect of business, and I've been having a hard time finding any good resources. So while I keep looking, I thought I'd ask for any comments from the community. Does a non-profit sound like it's actually what I need? Is there a specific type I should look into considering the purpose and size? Is there some gold-mind of information about forming a non-profit that's been evading me somehow?

Any feedback you can provide would be very useful and much appreciated.

edit: if it makes a difference, this will be in Utah, and the software is basically a platform for researching different ways law enforcement could cooperate with the community, while promoting openness and preserving confidentiality where necessary. It started as a project just for fun and learning, but it's turned out to be potentially useful.
"A well-designed program uses classes and design patterns"

Ha ha ... also don't waste your time asking me for a job.
Chain of fools : Upgrading through every version of Windows
People that write this sort of "If you have to write comments your code sucks" commentary are almost always the ones laying down new code. They're the grizzled veterans who don't think about the junior guys that have to update their code a year later and go "???" when they attempt to fix some subtle bug.

As I'm sure will be repeated over and over, comment the why, not the what or the how.
Journalists should be taught a few things about the current design of nuclear reactors. In the case of a complete melt-down, the radioactive material still can't melt through the steel containment vessel. It's designed explicitly to prevent such a catastrophe. Even 3-Mile Island, which had half it's reactive material melt, only made it through less than an inch of the containment steel.

So no, the article is very wrong in this point. In the event of a full melt-down, they'll have another completely useless reactor (pumping sea-water to cool it will require a new containment vessel due to corrosion anyway). It's hard enough keeping people informed of how safe nuclear power actually is without journalists constantly spreading FUD.