skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I like about Git over Mercurial is some stuff that may seem weird to others.

- The octopus tree merge, I use it much more than I previously thought I did looking at some of my non-public repositories.

- having branches that have completely different history (never did figure out how to do this with Mercurial)

- read-tree, filter-branch, and a whole range of other tools to re-write history or change somethings location and all that fun jazz.

- tracked branches, makes git push/pull easier

- the staging area and being able to select different parts of a patch to commit separately (This is by far one of the most important ones)

- amending a commit, rebasing and altering history isn't just supported it is recommended, and makes commits from multiple different sources look much cleaner in a tree view (more linear history). This is definitely great in a company where mainline may move fairly fast and rebasing by developers is a way to have the history look linear, without merging "master" into a feature branch.

- Git has support for short-lived play branches, Mercurial has this as well with hg strip, but it is an extension and not part of the core, or you have to clone a full repository, makes working with others harder too as I can't just push the play branch up to my clone on the server (assuming a Github model).

I've found that once I realised how Git works under the hood that it made so much more sense, not only that I feel that it is more powerful, for example here is a gist of something I recently did for a repo at work:

https://gist.github.com/878192

This helps with other internals projects in that we are not pulling in the full "master" branch, instead we are just pulling in a very specific sub-set of files, which is easy to keep updated with git pull -s subtree.

I'm sure that I have only touched the least significant parts of what Git has to offer, and that there is so much more waiting for me, but that is my reasoning and why I like it so much.
But it does ensure a minimum bar for those licensed to practice professionally. So, theoretically (heh), even the worst licensed MD/architect/etc has met the minimum requirements for practicing. I'm not saying they can build an 80-story skyscraper, but in software we have no such means by which to measure potential practitioners.

And getting a pilot's license is a little bit different from being licensed to practice medicine. It also depends on whether you're referring to a private or commercial pilot. Private pilots only need 40 hours[1] of time in the air. And even once a commercial pilot is licensed, there are other regulations in place. And a driver's license is an even lower bar, of course.

So no, licensing (in any form) does not ensure that the licensee is "good" or "brilliant,"
but it does allow us to ensure a minimum bar that does not currently exist in the software industry today.

(And no worries, it's a pet peeve of mine as well. At least at it relates to the software industry.)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_certification_in_the_Unit...
You'd think, but that's all my boy Cameron Mcefee. Wrote down some ideas on a wiki page and he showed up with this a couple weeks later :)
Looks very good. Found a small bug - At the pricing page I see a logout link, though I am not even logged in.
Because it has a more explicit interface (vs. Dropbox's "implicit" interface.)

That is, for what I can see with Receivd the user explicitly "opens" an app (as they're used to doing for almost anything else on their computer), which in turn clearly states "drag and drop files here to share."

With Dropbox the user needs to understand the concept of a shared folder that "magically" syncs with other computers. For many users this is an alien concept and may confuse them. I know of many people who have a Dropbox account, yet use the service exclusively through the web interface, simply because typing a URL, logging in, browsing for a file, clicking and downloading it is a concept they "get."

There's no such thing as "one size fits all" in this world---specially when it comes to user interface design.

Edit: I should clarify I do not work for Receivd, nor have any connection with the team, so I don't speak for them. This is just my assessment as a UI designer.
> So why hasn't Ahmadinejad been attacked?

Because we're already involved in two land wars in the middle east and asia?

Because Iran has at least tepid Russian support? Because Iran has a large enough army and national spirit that a war in Iran would be extraordinarily costly and long ranging?

The proclivity for removing repressive regimes does not guarantee that the international community will attack, just as the renunciation of nuclear weapons isn't a guarantee that a repressive regime will not be attacked. That's why i'm so skeptical of all of these moral hazard arguments on the international stage. International politics are really complicated, and there are a lot of factors involved in decision making.

> I like how you tiptoe around that last bit about nuclear weapons

Well caught, but i still think i disagree. It's true that the US hasn't ever attacked or declared war on a nuclear state (well, i'm not sure what the engagement between N and S Korea last year should be called), so we're in hypothetical territory on that subject. But one could equally ask why we haven't attacked Myanmar in spite of their horrendous human rights record, and the answer is simply that China is their sponsor. It's not because of their lack of nuclear arms.
Your idea doesn't make sense from a game theory perspective. You're taking a risk by breaking cultural norms and pissing people off, but what's the expected benefit? There's no payoff.
Suggest HN: Links should open in new tabs
I suspect everyone reading HN is using a relatively modern browser, and like me opens links as new tabs instead of having them replace the HN tab. So why not make this the default behavior and include a target _blank to the links?

Do you open HK links as new windows/tabs or have them replace the HN page?
No, to get flamed on HN you would have had to use PHP :)
It's partly a selfish, rational decision. In the borked world of corporate politics, firing someone on your team can reflect badly on you, or reduce your personal power (the size of your bonus pool is often related to headcount). Do you want your boss asking: "Why did you hire them in the first place?" "Why couldn't you just train them?" etc.
Link is definitely dead, mirror: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1r9XZZISS4
Goldman Sachs is buying back their stock from Buffet. Buffet calls the redemption by Goldman Sachs as "unwelcome". And rightfully so. Buffet bought the stock in 2008 while it was incredibly undervalued.. Goldman Sachs is buying it back from Buffet before the stock price gets too high to ever get it back.
Dropbox and why you should invest in people
"most" being the key qualifier there. And there's no requirement that they do, so no means by which to qualify them. Some of the best never do go through that process simply because the state of the art is advancing so fast. I'm not sure any regulatory body could develop a standard and keep it adequately up to date.
Norfolk Shipping Companies
Overseas shipping has always remained a cause of concern to Import/Export companies and many individuals who travel from one country to another in relation to work. We are a preferred international shipping companies when it comes to shipping household goods and commercial goods to and from Norfolk.
Of course they don't allow the patenting of processes essential to patent lawyering so the analogy doesn't hold.

But my point was that the patent system really is "used" by lawyers and they do, in fact, optimize it for their purposes (e.g., extracting wealth from others who actually produce things of value).
Did you try telling them you're going with a competitor? That might change their tune.
Happy Birthday Twitter. Now Back To Work (On Search And Archives)
The Airbnb Episode: Classic Narrative Fallacy?
It's very likely that Pakistan has covertly approved those drones.

Pakistan's government publicly condemns these attacks but has secretly shared intelligence with Americans[8] and also allegedly allowed the drones to operate from Shamsi airfield in Pakistan.[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan
"the weapons have brought peace between India and Pakistan."

only if the Kargil War(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War), which took place when both countries had nukes is ignored.

I am not contesting your larger point. Just reacting to "brought peace" which is not quite true. Nukes do prevent total, all out war to the death between Pakistan and India at present.

But a declared war in which soldiers die, and Pakistan's ISI sponsoring continuous terrorist attacks in India, and India supporting Anti-Pakistan elements in Afghanistan is not really "peace" (By contrast, England and France are at peace with each other, say, though they have fought each other many times in the past). What exists between India and Pakistan is just a different form of war. The relations between Pakistan and India are at best described as "no war, no peace"
Trying to start a controversy where there isn't one.
Money $$$$ talks and it sees no color. The IT people tend to be rational. They are swayed by a good, well explained idea that has potential - rather than anything else like a race or gender.
So do not expect to be discriminated in the IT world, but at the same time do not expect that the color of your skin, or gender, or anything else gets you an advantage.
Please, stop blowing smoke. I personally do not care how many founders are black, white, green, German, Polish, Russian, or Jewish. This does not concern me. I judge your idea and it's usefulness to my situation and not anything else.
A really old version of it - http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20060906221358/http://www.a...
In case you were curious of a source, this link cites Ann Landers as the author.

http://quotationsbook.com/quote/40407
I like to use isendr.com
They made themselves not worth it by their process.

By the time I went got ahold of the Sales rep again, and had him return an email, I would have been done with the project with their competition.
And it changed to a font that was much more difficult to read, too.
Nevermind...it redirects to sendoid now, guess it's the same thing.
Sendoid is iSendr.
Hmm, all of those things you described up top are working well for us - can you tell us what version of OSX you're running on? Also what version of Receivd are you using?

1. You can send a file to any email right now - once you invite an email, they'll be greyed out in the sidebar, then drag any files to them as you would with a confirmed user. They don't even have to signup to download the file. You can even add those folks to a list.

2. Interesting point. We'll think more about this.

Thanks a lot for your comments. Can we reach you directly somehow to figure out why you're seeing these issues?
woof... upon closer reading, the headline was misleading. the 2.4% rate is for overseas earnings. "Google’s overall effective tax rate [was] 22.2 percent last year".

it's not hard, however, to find evidence confirming the upstream point that large companies frequently pay a fraction of the 35% rate

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/01/ge-exxon-walmart-business-w...
Note that Dziuba quickly shut down Uncov after his startup Persai became the very thing he mocked.

Of course, he later had a very successful exit with Milo, so he still gets the last laugh.
Primary sources for pre-internet events are much harder to find than they are for internet era events. You will find information and analysis about the fall of the Berlin wall, but you won't find the kind of immediate responses that you would for 9/11.

This is a solved problem, but it has been solved by companies that charge for their services.
Minusfive's point of view tracks with years of working with non-technical customers, many of whom have a mental model suggesting that files "live in" the application as opposed to being in a folder somewhere.

I don't know how far dragging and dropping files is going to get them (many of my users could not locate a file if it bit them on the nose), but hey, it might work.
How short our memories are! It started with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, and the studies 'decided' to abandon HD-DVD (and the customers that chose the format).

At that point, Blu-Ray became a joke. The new LaserDisc.
Do you also own recievd.com? I'm sure a lot of people forget "I before E, except after C."
but, in spite of that, all evidence seems to suggest that the divide between rich and poor is getting bigger and bigger.
This is usually configurable in your browser. For example, in Firefox http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.link.open_newwindow
Credit card processing isn't the only problem. That goes down with the internet right now too. The problem is communication between the terminals, kitchen, bar, ect.

The way POS systems work is if you ring food and drinks in a terminal, the drinks get sent to the bar, and the food gets sent to the kitchen. If your using a web based point of sale system and your internet connection dies, none of this can happen. All the sudden you're running the orders around the restaurant by hand (which would _never_ fly).
And actually, I was careful not to call them performance reviews.

Performance reviews are horrible, and consist of all sorts of minefields and HR BS. E.g. rate yourself from 1 to 5 in these areas, but nobody gets a 5.

When I said mentally review their performance, I meant mentally ask yourself if the person is up to scratch. E.g. is their actual performance good. Now, most managers wouldn't be able to tell you this, so this shouldn't be something that is done by a manager. It should be done by a senior dev who has some kind of knowledge of the area the 'intern' is working in.

Alternately, you could have a tribal council of say three senior devs, and they vote at the 2w,4w,2m,3m periods. Anybody that gets too many downvotes gets to leave the island :D

But note also that if somebody is temporarily under-performing then you need to find out why and fix it (Note: not the same as 'fix them').

The goal is to as fast as possible identify the people who are consistently underperforming, or show enough signs of flakiness, so that you can utilise the built in 'thank you for playing, you are the weakest link, goodbye' clause built in to most contracts.
I wonder if this'll use a Git backend, like XCode 4 does.

I doubt it'll happen. But a man can dream!
The patents that start with "D" are design patents, not utility patents. I don't really know how big a problem they are. It seems like it would be pretty easy to avoid them if you knew about them, although how you would know about them all I have no idea.
I miss uncov
I don't think this applies to a startup environment or anywhere the company size is less than, say, fifty people, assuming 10-20% of them are developers. If you try to build something new with B or C players, you may not have a chance.

That said, once the company grows, there are places where a B or C player in one role could be an A player in another role, and vice versa. I think specifically about people who are promoted to their level of incompetence based on excellent performance and become miserable managers who make everyone around them miserable as well.

The important thing in that situation is to respond decisively and either support the person and train them to be competent, or respectfully return them to the level where they can excel.
There is 'etiquette' at SXSW? It's one of the biggest circle-jerks I've ever witnessed, second only to Twitter.
Waiting for the invite.
Seems this video came off the wrong way - I didn't mean to throw anyone under the bus, but rather highlight mistakes I wish not to repeat. As the founder I am accountable.

A few things I've learned over the years:

- Realize you're only as good as the people you hire.

- As a non-coding founder, it's important you perform deep reference checks and have a trusted senior developer review code samples prior to hiring. (We rewrote ALL of our early code base because we didn't take this step)

- Make time to interview every potential hire and vet them with proven experts.

- Ensure employees are a good cultural fit.

- If someone is doing a poor job, step-up and fire them.

- Look for employees that are up for the technical challenges. I remember several occasions when the answer was "MySQL can't do that" vs "we can do that, just not in MySQL".
We do, actually - it should be forwarding now.
I loved reading about that deal. Buffett handled it with aplomb and secured terms which warmed me to the cockles of my blackened capitalist heart. (It was very close to being a five billion dollar juice loan, because Buffett was standing on a large stack of actual money when the private equity markets were in barely restrained terror, and the BATNA to taking his money was probably bankruptcy or nationalization.)

Edit to add: The "juice loan" remark is in reference to the guaranteed 10% yield in perpetuity on those shares, which isn't actually a mafia interest rate but is such a worse deal than large megacorps usually pay for capital that it it had been done to a natural person I would hope a court would rule it unconscionable. At the level of megacorps though, shucks, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
Ahh...so Fred Wilson has started the 'come-to-Jesus' moment for investors.

I guess we can now expect to see many more blog posts about missed opportunities, and lessons learned.

That being said, thanks for the post Chris.

Makes for good reading :)
It's actually a pretty long list of countries that have signed that treaty.
Absolutely, but I don't want that setting for all sites.

I'm sure I could configure just HN to open in new tabs using an extension or similar technique, but I'm guessing everyone always uses new window/tab with HN, hence the suggestion.
This method uses a Yubikey - does anyone have any experience with these?
Python! MIT are now using it as the language in their introductory CS course. There are a lot of resources out there, books, videos. You might come across the question of v2.x vs. v3.x. I've ported my code base over to v3 and I haven't regretted the move. A year ago, v2 might have been the safer choice. Have a look at the advocacy page on python.org to see the many noteworthy organizations and people have made that choice. I especially like the way CPython works equally well (at least for me, YMMV) on Linux, Mac OS/X and Windows. With virtually every other language I've had to work around platform specific gotchas.
I thought Notes only compresses/resizes inline graphics -- ie if you paste a screenshot into the email it will resize it -- but attachments it leaves alone. Could be wrong though.
And if this fails, "referer: http://google.com/search?q=totallyfake " works just as well.
np, it's visible on my display just trying to be helpful based on past experience with others and seeing the initial comment. Part of what might actually be happening is that after seeing the header for each of the 3 columns, the eye sight jumps to the links at the bottom of the columns because it is higher contrast than the body text, and then the visual focus can't help but leaking further down into the "Oh ma" footer which also has higher contrast than the column body text, and then for each column the reader has to make a more concentrated effort to go back and focus on what that important content said. Whereas on the IE6 site, the body text of each column is actually higher contrast than its header and link footer rather than lower. So I think they got that annoying feeling you get when you have to reread a page of a book.
Can Buffet now either redeem the warrants at $115 and sell them back to Goldman in this transaction or is that a completely different transaction altogether ?

I guess they don't call him the Oracle of Omaha for no reason.

Kudos Mr. Buffet.

You licensed the rights of your name for a cool $3.7B for 2 years. I would love to know if that is the most lucrative licensing contract to date.
Ugh, didn't mean to downvote, sorry.
I love dropbox. Dropbox + git is beautiful as is Dropbox + markdown (for writing).

But I don't pay for it. I'm somewhere around 5+ free gigs of which I might use around 30%. Normally if I loved a product this much which I wasn't paying for, but ought to, then I would. But I'm not stealing my account, so I don't really feel like I should pay.

On top of that, I use a different paid service for storing large amounts of files. It ends up being cheaper and I feel both solutions work best how I have them - dropbox for sharing/working and the other for offsite backups that just transparently syncs every night or something.

I guess all that to ask a question...how the heck is dropbox making money? Between the amount of free storage they give and the fact that there are much cheaper remote backup solutions, I just feel like I'm missing something.
The main problem with the whole Digg affair is that it re-affirms VC's ideas that "the kids shouldn't be left in charge".

I hope this hasn't done a disservice to other "about to be" funded entrepreneurs who might not be so cavalier about their ventures.
i just googled "typography introductory textbook" and found at list one list of 15.

Are any of those good? Which of them is best? And most interestingly, what list are you looking at, as my Google results are a decent looking Amazon link, an empty Amazon link, a "Personality Quiz", a blog post with a few books, this comment on Hacker News, something on economics, something on typography on the web, et cetera.

Given the results, you could guess that the first link on Amazon might be okay, but this is garbage compared to actual research. At least the random blog post mentions a couple of options, but who is this person, and why is there only one such blog post? This is a really old subject, with lots of material - hiding somewhere.

More importantly, with Google we play keyword bingo. Your search of "typography introductory textbook" returns more authentic results than "typography textbook", which returns publisher links and promotional pages almost exclusively.
You'll find many references in the following.

http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+uses+open+source
Your tax dollars at work, kids:

http://goo.gl/DDw8e

Don't let Uncle Warren, or the finance kids around here, tell you different.

Jus' a simple capitalist from Omaha, 'spectin the govt. to make me whole, is all.

barf
Regardless, "I let someone fuck up" is not as forthright as "I fucked up".
PubbSoft.com - what do you think
Just finished the site and wanting some feedback on the site and the business concept.

http://www.pubbsoft.com

Thanks.
It's not about whether the technologies are supported. It's about the difference between what you get when you're identified as browsing on a mobile device versus anything else.
Copy And Paste Programming
I think it's easy to forget what the atmosphere was like when Buffett made the deal. Even the saner news outlets were entertaining some of the the financial armageddon scenarios.. and on HN, Buffett's attitude was mostly met with cynicism or disbelief: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=335452

As always, life and business went on and the brave made a profit. Unlike me who didn't invest during the last dip. D'oh.
Code rush perhaps?

That documentry also reaffirmed my commitment to not do pure sitting-at-desk software development. Because my god netscape looked like a horrible place to be, no matter how many smart people you had around you. (These days facebook looks similar, but worse not even cubicles for privacy)
Of all the investment bigwigs, Buffet -- the Oracle of Omaha -- has been the man to follow. Not only making good on investments, but he generally seems to care (where needed) about what he is investing in.