skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like just some fluffed up version of http://www.bain4weeks.com/
Because he was never a particularly talented coder, and because FB now has some top-tier talent that can do a far better job at coding that he can. Besides, contrary to popular belief, running a $100 billion company probably doesn't leave you with much time.
I am surprised that scammers, Nigerian or otherwise, don't know better than to still reference Nigeria in their emails.
Your question is difficult to answer in the light in which you intended it, because it doesn't really apply to me. I am not so invested in my source control system to say it "rocks". It works for my purposes and maps nicely to my view of how to handle source code--it's less that Mercurial is awesome, it's that I find Git unpleasant to work with.

I find Git over-engineered toward the wrong goals; while I don't doubt the development credentials of the Git developers, I think that too little time has been put into making developers' lives easier. Linus has said previously that speed was a priority for him, and that's great--for kernel sources, I'd definitely put a premium on speed. It appears, however, to come at a cost: Git has long struck me as extremely user-hostile. The documentation may have improved as of late (I haven't checked) but it was absolutely atrocious for a very long time. I find its interface unintuitive and nondiscoverable (and here hg-git could help, were it not for the cognitive dissonance of dealing with one against the other). And its Windows support, even today, is unacceptably poor given that I spend about 40% of my time working there.

hg-git addresses some of the more cosmetic issues noted above that I could, if so inclined, deal with myself, but it doesn't really address deeper concerns I have with Git itself. There are also issues of philosophy involved--Git requires you to accept certain behaviors and the cultural encouragement of same, e.g. rewritable history, of which I'm very much not a fan. (You can rewrite a Mercurial history as well, but it requires going out of your way to do so and is not culturally accepted. "Rebase" exists, via extensions, but nobody uses it. And I much prefer it that way.)

To me, Mercurial feels much more like its developers spent a bit more time thinking--looking at how a wider set of developers work, and building something that's comfortable to more people in less time. Git feels like its developers asked no questions at all and started hammering out what made sense to them. Which is fine when it maps to the way you think and the way you work, but it doesn't map to either for me.

(I also tend to think that Git wouldn't be nearly as popular had it not been reflexively adopted by everyone and their brother because of Github--this isn't "waah, my tool of choice isn't popular!", but more of a simple observation. I think it succeeds more in spite of itself than anything.)
we'll see how GH responds in the face of competition like this. Now I no longer need to go beyond the $7/month github plan.

I could see GH creating an "unlimited" account for $20/month that allows up to 3mb of files and unlimited repos.
Presenting the New Zaarly
I don't think the give-him-some-of-his-own reaction shows "how weak the defense is for this side of the argument".

You may be taking the reaction literally, but it likely just means this: If we mock this politician by threatening to apply his policy to himself, it may begin to dawn on his supporters that he is wrong.

So folks are just making fun of him, and rightly so. I just think that this particular joke may backfire (see my other comment).
The reshaping of communication and who controls how we talk to one another
Apple to allow iOS app rentals soon?
That's a great question, and to be honest it's a bit of a pain point so I probably should've talked about it in the post.

When developing a new M/R job from scratch I start by mirroring (at least part of) the data to a local database. Then I can iterate locally on the M/R using print() and printjson() to debug the map() and reduce() functions - those will print directly to the database log.

I tend to just embed the map() & reduce() functions as Python strings like you see in the post. I'm confident that there are better ways to handle this, though. One approach that can be interesting is to do development from the shell, that way you can write and debug the map() & reduce() in an actual JS environment. Once you're happy with them you can just drop them in as strings with the rest of your application code. Would love to hear how other people are approaching this stuff, too.

All of that said, I expect that the tooling here will improve over time.
Stepping Stones
Apple will Not stream tomorrow’s iPhone event
Itinerant writer talks of living, and dreaming, on $20,000 a year
Sure the economy sucks. But, personally, I'm tired of people complaining about a world they can't control. "We don’t choose the generation we live in." Kudos to the author for following through despite the challenges.
I encountered something similar as well with their subscription plans. This was before a friend pointed me to Bitbucket, at which I've been very happy since.
After thinking about this for a while and getting rejected twice as a single founder, here's what I've come to believe: Apply anyway. Bust your balls to be successful regardless of the outcome.

If you try too hard to find a co-founder, there's a good chance you will find the wrong one. Plus, YC hates newly wed co-founders almost as much as single founders (probably even more). And regardless of acceptance into YC, you don't want to end up with the wrong co-founder. It's better to go it alone.

The deadline for checking all the boxes to be a YC founder was three years ago. You could have met a co-founder in the normal way, in the way that lovers meet. You could have built cool shit to prove you're a hacker. You could have moved to Silicon Valley to work at some hot startups and build connections.

If you didn't, hard luck. Startups are hard, do it anyway.
This is cool. Thanks to the Day Software acquisition a while back, Adobe has quite a bit of things done on the open via Apache Software Foundation. JackRabbit, Tika, and now PhoneGap.

It also signals they're taking the web standards more seriously (PhoneGap mostly tracks the W3C Device API specs)
Yes, but they are more than 4 times as expensive, and most of their fonts are not optimized for the web (unlike Typekit's).
I went with 15" MBP. I really wouldn't trade it for anything. In the store, the 13" looked too small and an additional 2" was trivial in price (~200?).

A lot of people swear by the MBA - I'm not convinced. Do they weigh less than my MBP? Yes. But can I swing the extra ~3LBS of weight? Yes. MBP has expandable ram, more screen real estate, and a disk drive -- I need Windows for a few applications I run and occasionally for testing - I don't even know if it would be possible to install it without the disk drive.
How Take Control Makes EPUBs in Pages
What's stopping Amazon from becoming a device company (and I think they already are)? How can you be so sure about what Amazon's strategy could be? Do you have some insider knowledge?

Amazon's primary motive is to generate money. If device business adds 10 billion USD to their yearly revenue, who will complain?
Many serious developers opt to keep as much of their source open as they can. It's not uncommon to find dozens of public side projects in the repository list of Github users. Occasionally someone will stumble on something interesting and collaborators will sprout. This is far less common on Bitbucket.

Github's pricing policy seems to strongly encourage community and collaboration, and it works wonders.
Why? They still charge per user, and multi-user private account is what companies look for. Really, I don't believe that GitHub relies on profit from personal side projects. It's also companies they are after.
Also include the skills of the people operating everything. A MCSE trying to administer various Linux boxes will have terrible TCO, and a RHCE trying to optimize an NT box will have similarly bad TCO.
Thought this was great, will be trying to make one myself I think. Keep up the awesome work, I'm keeping your site bookmarked now. (I saw a whole bunch of other cool stuff.)
"Philip-Morris on why you shouldn't quit smoking"
I suspect one of the main features of an avowed unsocial site is that you can be certain you're not going to accidentally fatfinger/misclick and share something you really didn't want to with (some of) your social network.

The consequences of such actions are ever increasing as more people connect with more and more people, widening the visibility of any gaffe, and making recovery more difficult.

Those people with genuinely serious "something to hide" probably wouldn't be using a cloud-store anyway, especially not one that archives the content as well, but miscommunications happen all the time.

Try explaining to your grandmother that you were actually reading up on some bizarre sexual fetishes as part of an anthropology paper.
I don't think this is true. Have you ever read the code of a bigger Perl distribution. For example Mojolicious.

https://github.com/kraih/mojo

While I also like other languages and for example have great fun using CoffeeScript for my current projects Perl is really good when it comes to describing what the code actually does. This is a benefit of "there is more than one way to do it". At the beginning t is hard to understand this, if you come from other languages. There are lots of people writing C-like Perl code. It looks very static and usually extremely ugly. People see this stuff, for example in the documentation of various bindings, etc. and think "ugh, that's ugly".

Perl (designed by a linguist) is much more dynamic, like a natural language. So it allows you to describe things in an hard or easier way. In fact Perl was my first real language and it took a while until I understood how others work. Meanwhile I know a number languages and have seen various ways in which you can design a language. I can see why many people shun Perl. However, the main reason possibly is that the don't understand what it's concepts are about. They are very different. One can possibly compare this with the situation when you switch to a functional language, like Haskell or when you haven't used OO before.

Like with all languages I really recommend to learn it. Even, if you don't use it Perl _will_ widen your horizon.

Two tips, if you do: Modern Perl, is probably the best book for learning and it's available as a free online book (wish I had something like that, when I started). There are many very outdated and even completely wrong tutorials. Oh and "use diagnostics;".

It will take a while until you see it's flexibility, but it is like Perl would be a language inherit (or assimilate) all paradigms and concepts or like always had them and they were just slumbering.

Well, of course there are other things like CPAN that make Perl great. Yeah, other languages have similar facilities, but they don't come close. It is really great and they all have lots of tests and there are a lot of "CPAN Testers" that report problem. And when you want portability you'll love it. It runs on _very_ exotic platforms.
Catapult: A Shared Workspace/Coffeehouse/Community
Well, it doesn't work that well for everyone. Since health insurance cost depends on income, I previously had to pay more than $700/month for health insurance for myself. I haven't even dared to look at insurance costs more recently.
Ask HN: How do you stay motivated at your startup?
I always knew I wanted to work at a startup and the ideation and execution of the product was the easy part (I am a developer). But everyday I face small obstacles that bit by bit eats me away inside. And I have to buckle up and remind myself why I am doing this. It doesn't help that I am in this alone, and having a remarkably hard time finding talented individuals who would complement in what I lack, and am down to my last month in savings. And have begun seeking seed/angel funding.

I am going all out this last month to try to secure myself a certain posterity in my startup. This really mean making public pitches to various relevant user groups in my varsity. And cold emailing angel investors with my pitch.

How do/did you stay motivated? How can I go about convincing other people of my idea? I am not particularly good at that.
Liquidation Analysis
Larry Summers: Government is a crappy VC
Before you start packing, make sure to compare taxation and coverage.
My understanding:
The two-strikes plan is a really nasty thing in many ways which is perhaps understood almost unanimously in HN crowd.

The politician in question obviously does not understand that. He's the player at the poker table who doesn't know who's the weakest player at the said table. Therefore, he is that weakest player. He is therefore an idiot, as you have stated.

But the problem is that he is a dangerous idiot, and people are generally happy when a dangerous idiot is crushed by his own stupidity. He was dangerous and we could not do anything; but too good, he took care of that himself.

Nobody realistically expects the said law to be applied to the said politician. But suggesting that increases the level of that politician's misery and perhaps would teach a lesson to other dangerous idiots.
dBaseII - sales people don't want $SOFTWAREv1.05, they want The New Version. They can then sell that upgrade, and the extra features. PHBs get caught up in that. Kaizen and iteration doesn't feel exciting; you don't have a release buzz.
Don't worry, it will seamlessly work. They're just going to push out a change via the hosted JS that injects flash elements to display the fonts.
I think the clause about patents is right on. Given the current spate of lawsuits against tablets and android, building up a defensive patent portfolio makes good sense.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011
Again: if so, this is a problem with the consulting market, not Yale. You're not going to change anything by pleading with Yale grads to turn down lots of money.

Much more interesting is the argument that consulting, though productive, takes advantage of college student's fear of risk in order to win out over riskier options which are actually in the students best interest. (I'm skeptical.) Then, indeed, it would be beneficial to talk to these students about the problem.
Should I use MongoDB or CouchDB?
Nobel winner died days before award announced
The post is good, but the link in the one comment is amazing:

http://ycuniverse.com/interviewees.php

most complete list of YC applications I have ever come across.
Thank you http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=citizenkeys
PhoneGap and Typekit in one day? Two services I love. I see the TypeKit purchase but not exactly this. Because it's well out of what Adobe does, I envision them turning it into some kind of full premium application which would really deter me from using PhoneGap.

PhoneGap did recently launch Build a simpler solution for this and they may keep the old PhoneGap but develop build in a new way but as Adobe were never fans of HTML5 I don't see how this could have a great outcome.
I learned at PgWest last week that in August 2011 TransLattice (commercial multi-master replication system) became available. http://www.translattice.com/

It's based on Postgres 9.0 and Postgres-R.

Also, there is a talk "Total Availability With PostgreSQL & Multi Master Replication" on Friday October 21st at PgDay Denver: https://pgday.consistentstate.com/node/51
When we were prototyping Git support, one of the first things we investigated was having automatic conversion between Hg and Git on the server. We weren't able to get the performance to a level where responsiveness would be acceptable, and maintaining consistency between the two repos was complex.

It's something we might revisit in the distant future. As a middle ground, I've been thinking of implementing support for multiple SCMs in a single repository with the conversion/syncing process left up to the user. But that'll probably take more than a couple of 20% days to bang out. :)

If you're interested, I have some patches against hg-git that make it easier to take an existing Hg repo and convert it to Git (as opposed to the other way around). I haven't had a chance to prepare them to go upstream yet, but my repo's here: [link redacted]
So with the key fee @ 3 months' rent, first and last months' rent, and a security deposit, you could have to front 6 months' rent to move in!?
I also found it surprising that scammers devote so little effort to proper spelling/punctuation/grammar.

But then it occured to me: maybe errors help filter out attentive respondents, who have a low chance of completing the whole scam funnel. Those people who don't notice the errors, or don't consider them a red flag, are better leads.

In the context of a cliche'd Nigerian origin, sure, mentioning Nigeria puts anyone familiar with the 419 scam formula on guard. But anyone who does reply is likely a fresh, naive prospect. Ka-ching!
Great news! Wish I'd seen it before I finally took the leap and signed up for a paid GitHub account this morning.
The Fog Collectors: Harvesting Water From Thin Air
You pay for the delicious of 2005. No more comment.
Is Xbox Live Arcade past its prime? (data-rich post by World of Goo dev)
Rather than assume Adobe will veer PhoneGap away from HTML5 interoperability, I take this as a sign that Adobe is instead veering toward PhoneGap and HTML5.
Well, I did call our application successful, which ought to mean something ;-)

But you're right in that this was not totally clear, so to elaborate: Yes, we did get an interview, and we were subsequently part of the S11 batch (we are Proxino).
That speedtest is interesting considering popular conception of Japanese FTTH speeds. Under 10 Meg download for over $60 per month? Where's the 100Meg for $20 or whatever is usually mentioned in the "bash US broadband" articles?
They have not implemented seamless conversion from hg repos to git repos. However, there exist tools to do that: http://hedonismbot.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/hg-fast-export-c...
Just got the $49.99/year plan, I've been considering it and I figure if Adobe are going to raise prices they'll hopefully let older customers stick to their original pricing... so maybe I got a good deal.
You think I'd be better off paying for the Delicious of 2011?
Floppy drive reverb hacked to play Imperial March
The website doesn't work on Firefox 9.0a1 (2011-09-24). Is it something wrong with my setup? (I use AdBlockPlus + Ghostery)

EDIT: The website looks beautiful on Chrome! What tools did you use?
"Even a small productivity gain (say 5%) over a long period of time can make a very large difference, and is worth spending weeks to learn."

The question then raised is whether any given new programming language or paradigm will bring that 5% productivity gain, and in what circumstances. If it were an obvious and clear path to greater productivity, and superior to other paths to greater productivity (such as spending more time learning your editor and shell and environment, or learning about a new library in the language your work is written in, or learning new tricks in your current language), no one would hesitate to increase their productivity in this way.

You seem to assume that people are choosing not to become more productive by opting not to switch to Haskell or learn Haskell or something about Haskell. There are thousands of programming languages. Shall we learn them all to become five thousand percent more productive?

I'm not opposed to learning new languages. I think folks should tinker. But, I don't think it is provable that learning Haskell will make you more productive than other activities.
Just as a FYI - we don't have any disk limits (apart from fair use).

We don't want our pricing to be based on repos, or disk space, or any other limitation that is hard to predict, or encourages sub-optimal decision making to optimise cost. We think that users is the best way to price a product, and is easy to predict.

In terms of UI - there are things that bug me today, but our team is cranking along improving it.

But we have found that most of our users spend their time interacting via the command-line, and therefore we have prioritised features around stability and performance, as well as enabling Git support. Now that this is done, we'll be focusing more time on UI again.
I enjoy listening to motivating talks for at least a little bit each day. Seth Godin has a few on doing great work and I'll listen to Zig Ziglar for about 20-30 minutes a day. A month of this has had a significant impact on my thinking.

Just curious, what's your startup?
And requires the install of Adobe AIR.
I think Adobe has a better chance of getting the mainstream foundries aboard. If you think the music industry has been resisting modernisation, the type foundries are practically Amish.
Dude, just toss cyanogenmod on it.

Android is an open source platform that any manufacturer can easily port it to their devices. This makes things incompatible, slow, and downright unusable in most instances.

So you trust apple as a manufacturer to deliver good software, then you buy from an untrusted manufacturer, that you know has the freedom to muck around with the software as they wish without finding out if its going to be any good or not? And then you blame google for giving them the freedom to do shoot themselves in the foot?

Yes, HTC dropped the ball with the thunderbolt firmware, but I did my research and walked out of the Verizon store knowing the first thing I would do when I got home was to put better firmware on it.

In the end, Android users have no idea what a nice phone is since they’re used to such a sad piece of junk

Fuck you too, buddy. I have my old iPhone in a drawer somewhere and could go back to using it tonight at no additional cost, but I don't want to.
Ask HN: Print Magazine from Online Blogs
I have been toying with the idea of a personalized print magazine generated from online blogs and wanted to get some feedback. Readers could subscribe to authors and topics of interest and receive a personalized print magazine each week. As an example, imagine getting a magazine with the top HN articles delivered to you each week. Crazy idea or interesting concept? Is it something you would use?
Why assume my time estimate is wrong? I asked him for the estimate of hours. He doesn't include "research" time, I told him I'd pay for that time - he doesn't think it should be counted. In previous projects we've worked on, he has always underbilled we wanted to make sure that didn't happen this time.

I managed our frontend dev team and I personally estimated their hours (since I've managed software teams before) and got only 10-20 hours over.

I disrespect him because he started disrespecting me. Why assume the non-tech founder is always the bad guy?

One email for instance - "We have our life savings in this. This one feature update has taken over three weeks, please give us an ETA. Can another developer assist?" Answer: "Guilt doesn't work... I won't be able to see this until Friday. Sure another dev can take a whack at it, I'll add him to repo" (Email sent last Tuesday).
From the email I just got (I'm a paying customer):

"""
If you’re one of our customers, this announcement means things will only get better. Typekit will remain a standalone product, as well as become a vital part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Our team will stay together, and we’re excited to start working on even easier ways to integrate web fonts into your workflow.
"""

They're saying all the right things: standalone product, team staying together, etc, sure hope so.
I'd have to take the average up a couple of years. ~40 probably. There exponential growth of information, processes and technology makes it hard for someone to gain the blanket knowledge by their early thirties that would enable them to be the person they could've been twenty or thirty years ago.