skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your average user (even business user) will have no idea what a "version control system" is. Only developers will and they'll recognize that Dropbox only has rudimentary versioning capabilities [1]. There's zero risk of them confusing the two.

The "version hell" issue that David Pogue describes is something that most geeks solved long ago, but is far more common. There are millions of computer users who either don't have access to a file server, or their job requires them to collaborate on file sharing tasks with users that don't have access to the same file server they do. The work flow goes something like this:

* Allison creates a Word document with an agreement in it

* Bob and Mike need to review the document, so Allison emails it to the both of them

* Bob submits his revisions first, so Allison incorporates the changes, then emails the updated copy to both Bob and Mike

* Mike had previously saved the document from his email and had started his edits

* Mike submits the "old version" of the document with revisions, but many conflict with the changes that Bob submitted

* Allison is left with the task of sorting out the differences

For use cases like this, Dropbox is like "OMG it's magic!" to regular users. There's still the issue of editing conflicts (Dropbox doesn't support simultaneous editing), but this is much easier to work around than the game of "telephone" involved with emailing documents.

The moral of the story is that as geeks it's really easy to take our toolset for granted. "Solved problems" for us are a daily headache for your average person.

1 - http://www.dropbox.com/help/11
perfect, and just in time. I'll be announcing my own project here on HN in a week or two, and List.js will most certainly be taking a very central role.

So nice work, and thanks.
By oldest first, you mean oldest stories first? This is a prioritized feature: http://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/reading_from_old_.... I've been sitting on it since very few users have asked for it, but I have intentions of building it one day soon.
It would make more sense for Nato to attack Saudi/UAE/Bahrain etc.
They buy western hardware so if we destroy a few hundred Tornadoes/Eurofighters/F16s then there are big replacement contracts to create jobs in Europe and America.
Feedly is really good too.
> "I'm still not convinced that the Middle East is civilized... which is why I'm an isolationist."

If that kind of violence makes you doubt the civility of a people, you might want to add every other country in the world onto your list of "uncivilized places", and yes, including the USA.

> "My definition of "civilization" is a society "ruled by law" and something approaching a "democracy"."

The same "rule of law" that permits the USA to assassinate one of its own citizens without due process, only executive order? The same "rule of law" that permits it to covertly fund and equip rebel forces in democratic countries simply because their leadership dare oppose US national interests? (Chile is the most salient example of this, but far from the only one)

It seems your definition of "civilization" is less concerned with how much unjust blood is spilled, but rather how visible and public said blood is. This seems like a poor definition.
can't you just put those people you share with on reader into a circle on google plus and then just share it with that circle?

And they said they said they are integrating the two better, so I'm assuming its possible for them can make the sharing between the two fairly fluid.
I think he means Gaddafi, but he was killed by Libyans, not Americans.
I don't personally think there is a single, unitary self-- a man in the head so to speak. It may be a convenient useful fiction but it probably misleads our intuition on these matters.
This doesn't do that much for the finance industry since it has to be a cash purchase.

Still, I guess it'd drive prices up somewhat. The effect couldn't be huge, though... there's not that many foreigners with half a million bucks cash who want to leave their home countries and reside in the US.

On the other hand, given a choice of all possible immigrants, I don't think there's any problem with the US moving "those with half a million bucks" to the top of the list.
Or has been online sometime during the last 72 hours.

But yes, not the best article.
Venezuela, probably, if Russia would let it happen.
Anonymous actress sues IMDB for revealing age
Your idea isn't as bad as you think. You just described a text based Siri-like interface. Seems pretty popular with the masses.
OK, I support being precise with our terminology. What I was trying to emphasize is that, with regards to discussion of "free will", the important thing about "adequate determinism" isn't predictability. It's that we can trace back all causes to known (possibly intrinsically probabilistic) physical "stuff", with no room for a soul.
I don't think the 1 star rating is good for product reviews. If you like something, give it 5 stars, if not don't. You don't have a 1 star in electoral campaigns.
I should have verified that I guess, but it doesn't really matter either way. Brin is very visible as co-founder of Google and can expect his words to be quoted. And typically those quotes will come out in the worst possible way so when you make a public statement you try to do so in a way to minimize the possible damage.
MC Hammer is developing a search engine
Firemen have a similar lot. Sure, you think you get to drive a firetruck, and pull women and children out of burning buildings. But most of your calls will be extracting mangled teenagers from mangled cars.

And even if you get to go to a house fire, there's only a tiny window when you can enter the building, because modern homes are filled with plastic, which burns very quickly. And if you do enter a burning building, you'll smell like burnt plastic for the rest of the day (despite all your protective gear).
Thumbs down or dislikes are useful as a community based filter. Instead of looking at something with 0 upvotes and wondering "is this just new or terrible", I can just look at the downvotes and realize that it's probably the latter.
PEP712 - Proposal to make unittest2 more accurate
Haha, I certainly didn't mean to imply any of Google's current stuff should be rewritten. It's all very high quality, performant. Rather, I was thinking of new projects that might benefit from other languages or platforms.
CBS's mobile site is atrocious. Their online content is often riddled with poor grammar and typos as well. I consider CBS to be a premier journalistic institution, but their website makes them look like a high school newspaper. It's too bad, really.
6 Google Reader replacements
I love the idea but I'm not wild about giving my Dropbox key (which has about as much sensitive valuable data as my email) to a random wild application.

Dropbox really need to allow users to lock down application API access to a specific path.
Every creature starts from a single cell. At that point the only difference between a mouse and a human is the DNA, right?

No. That single cell is a working machine of which the DNA is just one component. The proteins which transcribe the DNA, they are in there too, but they are not the DNA. The whole point is that everything else that's in a cell, and there's a lot of "stuff" besides the DNA, has a major effect on what happens.

For embryos specifically both the egg and the sperm contribute "stuff" in addition to DNA.

The metaphor of code and compiler is a bit clunky but decent. If you think the animal as the compiled application and of DNA as its source code, it should be obvious there are millions of lines of code in the OS and compiler, which were required for the compilation of the application.

Is "Hello World" in C just the one .c file, or do we have to count the standard libraries? How about the hardware designs of the PC running it? If you look at just the .c file, it's a few lines, if you look at everything that's actually required to run it, that's a bit more complicated.
>is going to be far more useful in the long run //

This is the point were you assume what is useful and dictate that to us.
I find it ironic that the blog post does not have a "Share to google+", or the "+1 Button"
Meh…

If you don't register to Embedly, which is a commercial and proprietary service, you can't use this plugin, right ?

So… ok, it's opensource, but without a commercial part, it's completely useless… I have mixed feelings about that (and also about the name (the jquery part)).
Periodic Table of Perl 6 Operators
The only thing that bothers me about this proposal is that it might attract too many people doing PhDs for the wrong reason.

And people doing PhDs for the wrong reason usually wind up doing bad research.
I meant to say that I never used Google Reader's sharing mechanisms.

Those features of Google Reader (friends, sharing) were useless dupes of other features present elsewhere on other websites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter). I already have enough friend lists to maintain as is.

I used Google Reader for reading, and that is it. I don't care that they integrate it with Google+, although to me it makes sense. I just care that they remove the useless separate list and ecosystem.
The GOP might be singing his praises, but the Democratic Caucus would be screaming bloody murder about the lack of trials. It's all politics.
OP is ignorant and unsympathetic, which leads to racist behavior even without racist motives.
"Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells. While in the earlier part of this decade prices flattened for a few years, the sharp decline"
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm...

'The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. In fact, given that retail electricity prices are currently rising by a few percent per year, prices will probably cross earlier, around 2018 for the country as a whole, and as early as 2015 for the sunniest parts of America.'

If solar is at a 7% annual decline is that not a very rapid advancement?
An HN style social news site written in Ruby/Sinatra/Redis/JQuery by Antirez
> but I think something like that would be considered at least a "fire-able" offense at pretty much any company.

Only for insecure managers.
Apparently Paris.
Depends on your definition of civilized.

Having been born and raised in the middle east (Egypt), I can assure you that by many definitions of 'civilized' we fare really well compared to the US.

True, there isn't separation of religion and state, and that leads to much 'uncivilized' behavior, and a wacky sense of law.

On the other hands, we don't have nearly the same rates of murder, rape, theft that we have here in the States. And we don't put one out of every 300 people in prison.

Our elderly mostly die surrounded by family and friends in their homes, and very very very few people sleep on the streets.

Our health care system is much poorer, and much more primitive than the US system, but nobody gets turned away because of 'pre-existing' conditions or lack of funds.

In most of the Country, if you stop someone and ask for directions, they'll invite you to their home for a meal and be serious about it. Even though they make less than a .50 cents a day.

So yeah, maybe broaden your idea of what 'civilized' looks like and you won't need to isolate so much.

p.s. We cook a yummy Egyptian dinner once a month for friends, ping me and come over next Monday for civilized discourse over foul and falafel
Wow. Nothing there but an abbreviated spec sheet. Is this the most content-free article ever?
I actually like these news. I've been using Reader since it came out (what's it? 6 years?) but never get to use to their social features.

Also: star, like, share, tag. Those are too many options. Give me a +1 and a "Share" button and I'm set.

I thought this discussion needed a thread that wasn't all "I hate change".
I don't think it's known at this point that Qaddafi was assassinated by the US. The two more common things I'm hearing is that he was either shot by rebels or hit by a NATO air-strike, which is kind of ambiguous.
My favorite part about the Contrast Rebellion is that Media Temple is listed as one of the bad examples... and then at the bottom:

hosted by (mt) Media Temple
So with all of this top x% talk that is going on I decided to see where I was on the scale. It was pretty pathetic. Not because I was low on the scale but rather very high. I don't consider myself to be very wealthy at all. Don't get me wrong I am doing well for myself. I worked hard to get what I have and I am good at what I do, but I should not be in the top 3%. I am not trying to brag, I think it is stupid and wrong that I am that high up on the scale. I'm not saying I earn too much (I am actually underpaid according the the industry i am in.) It is just that I can't believe that others are being paid that much less.
No, David was kinda right. Dropbox has built-in version tracking. Only 30days of history is saved by default. Of course there are no commit messages, but it happens any time the file is changed, and the web ui presents it in a pretty clear way for non-techy users, by timestamp and author.

I think the specific version-hell he perceives is the where any member of the team does not have the latest version. So in his case it is the auto sync that scratches that itch, and not the explicit version tracking.

As for the "editor's initials" part. I think you might have misunderstood what he meant. The editor did not make another copy with a new name, she just renamed the file, as a signal to the team that her work was complete. Alternatively she could have just communicated by some other means, and left the filename in tact, but this is what they chose.

they sell a "packrat" feature with paid subscriptions for unlimited version history
Look out DuckDuckGo, MC Hammer is launching his own search engine
Why don't you think they do? Are you asking about any particular company, market, or region of the world?

I'd guess most startups already have flextime. You can come in real early or stay real late, but either way, you're going to work more than just 9 to 5. Getting things started is hard. Keeping a bigger business rolling along is easier.
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Search more. It's covered like once a month.
"how do you know?"

He was a politician wasn't he? Seems proof enough as far as I'm concerned.
What's interesting is that this is quite simple even for a programmer to follow, assuming you want to reproduce those exact shapes. For the fish, a few squares, some deformation, more shapes, and so on are trivial to do and at each step you can tweak the results until it looks visually similar. Competency with Photoshop or similar presumed, of course.

However, taking those concepts and doing a jungle theme with monkeys and vines will be a stretch if you lack the experience as there's no step-by-step to get the right proportions for those shapes.
Interesting that all the replies here are negative. Am I really the only one who welcomes these changes? Of the people I want to share with, only a few also use Reader. There are much more of them on Google+. This also allows for more fine-grained sharing, so I won't have to share programming-related posts with people who are not interested in that kind of article.
I can't add anything more to what @jsmcgd said but Rich's strange loop talk really brightened my day and more importantly gave me the tools to express what I sometimes try to share with other developers in the clearest way possible. Thanks man, really awesome talk. Invaluable if more people could start thinking this way. (which it sounds like oracle/java 7,8,.. will also help to do whether they like it or not and that's also awesome for that general clump of dev brethren)
patio11's answers are cute, but if you say things like that you'll probably just end up defending yourself against people's misinterpretations. "So you're a teacher?" or "You mean like a security guard?"

I think the best approach is a middle ground, rather than say what you are, or what the ultimate result is, just say what you _do_. "I build websites" or "I build iphone applications" or "I run servers and networks" is something accessible that people can comfortably take wherever they want, e.g. "what language?" or "oh, i just downloaded this cool app that ..."
Read my comment a few levels up.

The data says that Jevon's paradox is wrong. See the energy usage chart here: http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyran...

Since about 1982, the annual world oil consumption has held at roughly 32 billion barrels despite efficiency improvements in petrol energy usage.

Our technological efficiency improvements are doing more with the same amount of energy and not more with more energy, as Jevon's paradox predicts.

Think about this simplified example. Our cars get better mpg today. Which means that we have energy left over to use to sink those 2 mile long pipes into the ocean. Because of the efficiency improvements, we have just done more with the same amount of energy.
As long as we get the possibility to view the count of +1s/-1s separately, I'm all for this.
America has too many poor people, and not enough rich people.

And it's easier (and more legal) to import rich people than to kick the poor people out.

It makes sense that the countries of the world should be competing for the most talented people. And being rich is the best proxy for being talented that we have.
They talk about closing loopholes for individuals, not for corporations themselves.
Another terrible idea, in my opinion.

When an employee interviews with a company, the company should decide if the employee gets a job, not a visa.

When a PhD candidate defends a dissertation, the university should decide if the student gets a degree, not a visa.

When an entrepreneur applies for venture capital, the investor should decide if the entrepreneur gets money, not a visa.

And yes, when a buyer makes an offer on a house, the seller should decide whether the buyer will get the house, not a visa

None of these people should control whether a person gets to reside in the united states, and giving them this power is an invitation to government sponsored abuse.
> Copyright is the power that gives the 'little man' the ability to do that already.

I'm really sorry, but in what world do you live? Copyright is abused by the big corporations to secure monopolies, and isn't, wasn't and won't ever be meant for artists. It's the same argument as with patents, really. The myth that they serve to protect the poor, small man is a lie spread and maintained by exactly those who profit from them - the big corporations.

> The only proof one needs to see is that in the music business - where I come from - there has been a de facto absence of copyright protection for a decade now.

And what "music business" would that be? I only see copyright getting more draconian by the year.

> It has made it much more difficult for an artist to make money through sale of their primary product.

Well, maybe you should reconsider what your "primary product" is. A musician is a performer, first and foremost, and a concert is a service. There's also merchandise, which are tangible goods.

>album sales

Album sales have been dead for years now. Why are you trying to cling to a dead distribution/business model?
I don't know if the issue is as prolific in LA as it is here in Florida, but we're experiencing a huge number of thefts of air-conditioning "cores". The thief hits a sub-division that is largely vacant, pops the top off the A/C system, cuts the tubing and removes the largely-copper condenser coil. The thief then sells a truck load of these cores to a scrapyard for around $100 each. The owner of the unit is faced with a couple thousand dollars in repair bills. Thieves in this area have honed their core-lifting skills on unoccupied residential areas, and have moved on to hitting commercial properties late at night when no one is around to hear them. There were 7 homes hit in our neighborhood in the last 3 months, and at least one commercial business that made the papers because of the exorbitant cost of replacement ($15k).

There's a lot of pressure growing to enact policies that make it harder to traffic in the stolen materials, as well as providing a means to track down the sellers. This smells like the same thing.
Yea I did, but I don't take what Rich says as gospel. I think for myself, not just about code but how I allocate my time.
Hours a day I use a tablet computer 0, hours a day I use a desktop PC 8+. New Heading: dumb writer writes stupid article.
Try coming to the midwest. That buys a pretty good size house.
I also wonder if that's Apple the first time (IPO) or the second time (when the stock surged so much).
Perhaps, but there are reports coming out now that a Predator drone fired on his convoy, so the US wasn't exactly hands off.
Learning Scala? Learn the Fundamentals First
I agree in principle, though I think the concept of sovereignty at all is bullshit.

But to play devils advocate, we put down dogs who bite people don't we? Yeah yeah, human life is precious, but sometimes we need to be a little pragmatic.

In the particular situation you are referring to you are correct, but I don't think that is a generalizable concept.
Yeah, that's what they're pushing everyone towards: "you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles".

My bigger concern is the disconnect in sharing. Are they turning Reader into a one-way service, in that you share items to G+? It would seem incongruous to share things through Reader, but then have to go into G+ to see what other people shared.
Most of the deniers were never about if global warming exists, it's the cause.
Maybe there is more to the actual story but the article provides zero support to the headline as per the the surgery being 'life-saving'. It is even referenced as a 'stupid decision' to have put it off.

Pancreatic cancer has a dismal 5-yr survival rate - much less a 'cure' rate. This feels like a tabloid-y headline given the apparent lack of reality behind that statement.
I assume that following them on G+ will give you other extranious things, unless they have a seperate circle for reader followers. This was the advantage to following people on delicious as well, I didn't care about their other thoughts, but often they had good links.
I haven't seen anyone claim it's the best predictor of college performance. Some say it's an ok predictor, some say it's near useless, a good summary of different sides of this can be found here:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/592879.html
Although I'm a supporter of using Scrum over anything else in a context where that is feasible, the first paragraph alone illustrates the myopic view of this all-or-nothing attitude.

I mean, I would count myself very lucky if on a given project the only variables defining the problem domain were "technology, requirements and people".

The greatest weakness of Scrum is discounting "change" as a valid characteristic. In many environments sudden, intrusive change interrupting the cozy safety of the Scrum timebox is inevitable. It isn't failure, it isn't incompetence, it isn't mismanagement, it's the reality of the business, and the only way to avoid it is to get out of that business altogether.

And that is the reason why people, no matter how much they like and fully understand Scrum, are inclined to exchange Scrum's power for maybe less effective but more flexible methods.

After all, we don't make money by having successful Sprints. We make money by delivering business value.
Are you seriously arguing that "many" people are against the "rule of law" and some form of government "approaching a democracy"?

If so, why all the dead or deposed dictators?