skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a way, the Git vs. Mercurial debate feels like vi vs. emacs all over again. Hardcore emacs users never quite understood the appeal of a modal editor; hardcore vi users couldn't quite understand how people lived with an input model that constantly moved their fingers off home row.

Usability preferences can differ greatly by person. Another example is information retrieval in a personal database or help system. Some people prefer going through a search engine; others find a directory-based approach more intuitive (and forcing one approach on the other group does not improve productivity).

Similarly, having a unified set of tools for all kinds of version control problems is not necessarily an unalloyed good for everyone. Dealing with persistent history does not necessarily warrant the same approach as dealing with work-in-progress changes. For some users, it may be easier and better to consolidate both problems, for others, it can be more productive to keep them separate.

The Mercurial designers, for better or worse, have decided to separate persistent history changes from local work-in-progress changes, the latter being done via Mercurial Queues. That has the disadvantage that you need to learn a separate set of tools; it has the advantage that unfinished stuff does not pollute your repository's history and that you can tailor both sets of tools to their respective needs (whether they are in fact properly tailored is a different debate).

I suspect that, similarly, Bzr's one-directory-per-branch approach (inherited from Arch) is an easier mental model for some users to deal with than either git's or Mercurial's DAG-based approach, despite many git and Mercurial users not understanding the appeal.

Incidentally, both examples that you list (git stash and git commit --amend) are easily handled by Mercurial Queues. You don't need several separate extensions. (Obviously, some people do prefer special extensions because they reflect their mental models better or optimize common workflows.)
We are a bunch of engineers and developers. We have been working on this product for over one year now. Guys, it would be great if you could take a look and give us feedback both on concept and implementation so far. Thanks in advance!
When you have enough work to keep you busy all the time it's easy to pick out all the winners.
Well then, I stand corrected, you do have some basis for your statement. :)

Though it doesn't sound like you gained your livelihood from the production of such works. My dad is a farmer who wanted to pass on the farm to my brother. They had various communication issues, but one of the underlying complaints of my father was that my brother didn't understand the seriousness of being in business. He would say, "His nuts aren't in the ringer."

I don't think piracy ruins businesses. However, I don't think that anyone can make the argument that they ethically have the right to disregard the producer's terms for consuming their product, regardless of the form the product is in or how unreasonable those terms are. The creator of the product has the right to define their terms and if you violate his/her terms, it's a transgression. It's not a favor, a lesson, or a statement, you're taking without honoring their work in the way they've decided. Maybe it will turn out great for them in the end, maybe not- it doesn't matter, they set the terms and you violated them.

Piracy is parasitic, not productive, and everyone loses. We get these stupid censorship bills rolling through and resources are spent in trying to control the phenomena instead of innovating and addressing real issues.

Regarding Minecraft-- I did not realize that it was successful because it was pirated. I know that it got some good reviews on popular sites and I believe they sold a cheap development version and were successful because of this accessible model (versus a Microsoft approach). Wikipedia says that the developers decided to start their video game company and focus exclusively on it with the money they earned from their sales. To me, this does not sound like a pirate success story. It actually reinforces my belief that it absolutely requires resources to back any serious effort and this is something that piracy never provides.
Someone finally asked the question on Quora - http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Quora-redirect-to-URLs-in-a-wa...
Microsoft's HCCBs absolutely will not be replacing QR codes due to the fact that they are not an encoding format, only an arbitrary set of colored triangles which are sent to Microsoft's servers which then returns a result. There are far too many risks and barriers to that system for it to succeed over QR, especially with QR's lead.
Memoirs of an ex-pirate turned CEO
You're quite right. Sorry, missed that part. PIPA, I believe, defined foreign sites as foreign TLDs, but for the FBI to arrest people in New Zealand would require extradition or cooperation from New Zealand authorities. Otherwise, I fully expect the US to be invaded by the Kiwis shortly.
MegaUpload are foreign. They're based in Hong Kong.

Also there were pretty high profile domain seizures done in two bouts over the last two years. ICE/DOJ seized domains (google it) - some of those were foreign based but with .com or .net. (I don't recall if any were foreign TLDs) There already doing anything they want anyway - and happily ignoring any due process - codifying these actions into law with PIPA/SOPA is just the icing on the cake.
(I agree with JulianMorrison.)

Why doesn't it scale?
Almost couldn't finish :/

L-A-T-V-I-A
What Is A Blog? - An Essential Introduction — Monetize Blogging
It's not either or. After all, isn't spreading the power to many institutions the philosophy behind the American take on democracy.
You could have citizen referendums, give the citizenship veto power (one should probably require more than 50% of the voters for vetoing though). Many other solutions are also possible.
Super cool, but miss a lot of data, maybe you should start by filling something out yourself.. :)
I'm more upset with the precedent than I am with the particular site.

I've never made a DMCA request against them, but my understanding from the DoJ presser was that they did comply with the letter- They removed the links that were sent. They just didn't necessarily remove all other links to the same file.

When you filed yours, did you follow legal procedure, and go through their registered DMCA agent with paper mail, etc?
(I'm not implying you didn't, I'm trying to understand this whole mess)

Let's say for the sake of discussion that these were "Bad Guys", and the site was used for infringing purposes.

If they're following the US law, they still ought to be safe.
You can arrest people for breaking laws, but not for being assholes.
> But people NEVER have no incentive not to help anyone.

The rare triple-negative.
Abusing MS Research's Touch Mouse Sensor API SDK with a Console-based Heat-map
> I don't believe textbooks would last longer than an iPad, I believe they wouldn't last nearly as long.

According to some answers on Quora[1], textbooks are replaced closer to every 7 - 10 years, so, again, I suspect you're wrong in that they won't last as long. They're quite durable.

> I doubt there would be much iPad theft, and if there was, it wouldn't be too hard for Apple to provide technical solutions that make the schools iPads difficult to use and thus resell on the secondary market, much the same way the "Find my iPhone" lets you remotely wipe your phone.
If school districts opted for this feature, the iPad could simply stop working if not connected to the internet for a week, and when it does connect to the internet, it checks to see if its been stolen and if so, wipes itself and renders itself inoperable.

I agree that there are some solutions, but given how much there is to be gained by someone figuring out how to bypass it, I wouldn't be surprised if someone figured out how to.

Even given that textbook theft and iPad theft will be equivalent in dollars (that is, for every iPad that's stolen 5 - 10 textbooks are stolen), I would still question that calculation. For example, the $15/textbook only holds when iBooks is not the sole distribution channel. When it is, publishers can set their own price.

Now, don't get me wrong, I would love for this to work. I think this is a great idea. I'm just frustrated that it only works on the iPad, rather than being open and having a great app for the iPad. Being able to transition into it by using laptops, computer labs and iPads simultaneously would just be so much easier.
It's sold on its website.
Megaupload Indictment
As far as I can tell, it doesn't require any passwords..?
Wikipedia: thank you
According to The Verge article[1], it looks like Apple requires the price to be $14.99 unless iBooks is the sole distribution mechanism.

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/19/2718357/apple-ibooks-2-tex...
Somebody probably bought that song originally, and they are sharing it with you.
Quite right. Plus, I'd like to add, highly corrupt legislative bodies. Perhaps not nearly as corrupt as in many other places, but the stench of money and cronyism is pervasive in American politics.
At a company I used to work at they used to put the new engineers through kindergarten. They had a few tasks that needed doing and the way to get these tasks done needed a little bit of resourcefulness.

One of the tasks was to get a set of data from a very old computer (PDP-11) into excel. Of course there were lots of problems with doing this and of course most things were broken.

I was working at some crappy desk hidden near the PDP-11. The easiest solution I would tell everyone was to type the numbers into a laptop, it would take them about 2 hours.

The difference in the way people would listen to what I would tell them was as different as their responses. Most people would try something for about an hour or so then type it in. A few resourceful people would implement some very amazing solutions and then tell me about it, I was impressed. And then there were quite a few people who would spend two days trying to implement a technical solution only to end up typing it in or just give up completely.

Some of the resourceful results where quite simple. The main thing I found was that trying to tell the difference between the resourceful people who came up with a solution in 30 minutes and those who took 2 days was impossible. Neither of them really wanted to hear my answer. Observing the differences in how people would deal with the problem and then with the advice was enlightening to say the least.

The people who gave up because they didn't want to type in data for 2 hours ceased their employment rather quickly.
If it's SMS you're specifically looking for WebText.com† supports Ireland (and is based there), as well as most other countries.

†API docs: http://www.webtext.com/api-documentation/
The piece may be improved by highlighting the fact that while Mercurial users have to write extensions to work around problems, the flip side is they _can_ write extensions to do things the built-in tools don't do. For example, the Golang project has an extension that integrates with their code review system. With Git you can write shell scripts and tools that wrap git, but that isn't quite the same thing as an extension (though it can frequently accomplish the same purpose).

That said, I really enjoyed the article. As a hardcore git user, I've occasionally skirted the edges of Mercurial (mostly just by poking at Golang) and always been confused at some of the stuff I saw. I knew Mercurial branches were more permanent than Git ones, but I never realized quite how permanent they were.
Kimble goes to jail once again it seems.. I remember people downvoting me in an earlier bit about megaupload where i said that this guy has his hands dirty and should be avoided. People claimed i shouldnt judge him by his past crimes...well there you go ;)
> it was hosting pirated content. Not torrents, not links. AVI files of films. AND THEN CHARGING FOR ACCESS.

Good. More and more of it is happening all over the net.

I hope it drives the studios, MPAA and RIAA out of business forever. The force of the US government will only last them so long.
My machine runs Gentoo and it's not affected -- because it runs an older version of Xorg.

Just because the bleeding edge version of Xorg is available on Gentoo doesn't mean you're forced to use it. You can always decide not to upgrade and stay with an old version of anything.

On the other hand, if you stay with old versions too long, things might break when you finally do try to upgrade.
That's the thing, right?

"Complying in a minimal sense" is still complying. It shouldn't matter if their hearts were as dark as pitch.

We can't legislate the hearts of men. We can only use their actions in determining their fate.
Indeed, when a site built around (partially) illegal content being shared, it's OK with me if they earn just enough not to lose money on operating the site. However, I do not believe you should profit off the content of others.
Being overzealous, heavy-handed and causing a lot of collateral damage goes right against the presumption of innocence. Evil in my book.
> I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.

Still it seems this is just coming down to communication. Is it possible that the less successful ones were doing things in areas where you personally had less expertise? Perhaps your advice was impractical or irrelevant, but they felt intimidated into silence rather than feeling they could discuss the problems honestly and see how the advice could be adapted.
The RIAA and major labels are one and the same. It is disingenuous at best to try and distinguish one from the other, when the board of directors consists entirely of label representatives.

Meanwhile, precious few artists whine about piracy like the RIAA does, you hear a lot more whining about the labels, because they're the ones screwing artists.
1GB per file of reliable, fast storage. You can bet we passed larger files over it.
> fill it with full length DVD rips

As long as users do it, and the site takes them down when requested, I'm pretty sure it's legal under DMCA.
What does it do? Im curious to know :)
TBH companies aren't the problem. Companies are mindless automatons that act in one single purpose (to make money). Even people trying to change the world have to be money first to fund secondary projects.

So the behaviour is expected, the real problem is the political system and the legalised corrupt behaviour.

Maddox is correct, things are going to have to get worse. You need massive public anger to change what is essentially a few tiny aspects of how politicians deal with lobbyist, they are just gaming the system, they don't care if laws pass or don't as they get money either way, tonnes of it. The more ridiculous the law, the more money the get to push it. Tackle that issue and you'll liberate the whole country.

So you need to get people mad, how you do that is up to you guys as I don't live in America, I just watch from the side lines shaking my head.
>Microsoft's HCCBs absolutely will not be replacing QR codes due to the fact that they are not an encoding format

Exactly. It requires that microsoft's servers always be reachable (laughable for something you scan with your smartphone), online (this will eventually die), returning the correct data, and they get to harvest statistics.

All that, for zero gain?
So this happened on the 5th, I take it in secret? I wonder what the need for secrecy was, to try and obtain the offenders or something?
Git's tree structure can certainly encode an empty directory, the problem is the index file can't.
the first thing that comes to my mind is OpenGL backface culling, which removes invisible faces from a scene.

glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE);
glCullFace(GL_BACK);
Why is pirates in quotes? The article says these guys made over $150M in half a dozen years breaking international treaties and operating illegally. Stopping them is exactly what the FBI's job is. It's not like they're going after jay walkers.
don't bet on that, it breaks when I try it. maybe you're using a pre-vuln X.
Megaupload: The FBI Press Release
I followed the procedure to the letter - that was the whole point of the experiment. Do you honestly think they have a whole team of people diligently working through DMCA requests? Of course not - it's the foundation of their whole business.

Now proving this is no-doubt going to be difficult. And prosecuting in front of a jury who have been pummelled with anti-SOPA sentiment for months is a nightmare. So I think they've a very good chance of getting away with it.
Yea, prettymuch. You have to complete 3 practice runs correctly first, and then you can do the actual challenge. (Over skype, apparently)

The practice runs were all 5-10 lines of python where exactly one line had to be changed or added to correct the bug. I didn't come across any syntax errors, just logic errors, so I finished the practice runs pretty easily despite having almost 0 python experience. (I did miss one because I was too slow though. I found the bug and correctly guessed at the python syntax to fix it, but it took me 67 seconds.)
Sounds like you've arranged things so that you're "on" 24/7, or close to it. That's definitely a trigger - in my experience, at least. It looks like you're getting less than 6 hours sleep too, particularly with an 8 month old.

You could try scaling back your after hours commitment to your daytime job. If you didn't have to email your coworkers after hours, you could either work on your side project more (the idea being to get it done and out of the way, then rest) or get more sleep. If you don't draw a "line in the sand" somewhere, clients, work, etc. will just keep pushing you until you can't take on any more work.

The other thing that you mention is "constant deadline pressures" and a client who has "high expectations of quality and time". One of my takeaways from rereading Rapid Development is that (even when specifying everything that they can think of) developers underestimate tasks by 20-30%. It's possible that you or your coworkers are falling into the same trap. I've found that keeping a record of estimates and actuals really helps push back against ridiculous estimates and expectations.

Hope that helps.
I guess megavideo.com is also part of the "mega" network? I just was curious so I typed in megavideo.com and it looks like they're also down..my browser just sitting there spinning then timing out. Will be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out -- especially with that rapper just being appointed CEO...that must be the shortest time span a person has been CEO the world over..what was it a few hours?
Given this answer (and the amount of downvoting on my previous statement), I think that I might have been ambiguous and left too much space for misunderstandings.

What I am challenging is not the overall value of the initiative (through market effects such as competition), but its technological side: given our parent post's first paragraph, what is Apple's contribution to the current e-textbook toolset? Digital textbooks offer much potential for improving certain kinds of cognitive tasks in both sciences and humanities — the former being exemplified by gfodor. However, from this standpoint, I do not see a significant step forward; rather, I see the promulgation of what are mostly "vanity" features that offer limited additional value for study and learning over traditional tools, and which are often styled with a certain kind of eyecandy that I personally find distracting and detrimental in productive contexts.
> The reason it seems unlikely that the problem is on our end is the correlation between being difficult to talk to and failure in the outside world. If the problem was on our end, it we would experience difficulty talking to both successful and unsuccessful startups.

Not necessarily. YC's advice and guidance have huge value; so communications challenges with you and other mentors have a big impact on your startups' success. Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it doesn't rule it out either.
Rapidshare is Swiss based, and it responds to DMCA claims. I doubt it will go down any time soon.
My friends, clients and PAs often used MegaUpload to send me big graphic and audio podcast files, and absolutely none of it was pirated. I don't use pirated software, ever. I happily pay for software I want, without flinching for a second.

So your over-generalization is flat out wrong.
I found his comment about Swedish prisons to be interesting. From what I've heard and read, Swedish prisons (and Scandinavian ones in general) are some of the most mild in the world.
Piracy is not a big enough problem to deserve a legislative solution.
GPL violations are hypocrisy. We can judge people on their proclaimed beliefs without sharing those beliefs ;-)
ICE-SOAP
My own experience is that a son of a friend of mine goes to a high school that issued iPads 2 to all of their students. There was a deposit paid by the families. The students understand they're responsible if the iPad is lost, and so they all treat them very well. I haven't heard of any problems with theft. Anecdotal, I realize.
in spite of the 90% of entertainment industry lobbying that goes to Democrats.

I would like to verify this. Got a source?
Textbooks can last for way more than 3 years. Right now, my math textbook is in great condition, and just by looking at how many names it has in it, it probably has been used for at at least 4 years, and at this rate, it'll probably last for another 3 or 4 years, and that's a conservative number too.

My school has 4 classes per semester, and a lot of times electives, like construction, art, mechanics etc. don't have textbooks, so even if we go by 7 classes per semester, we can probably cut the amount of classes that require textbooks in half. And if you factor in the fact that textbooks can last 6 years (going by my anecdotal evidence), you can get the textbook and iPad price quite similar. In this case, schools may go with the iPad anyway, given the push made by made schools to provide students with digital literacy.
"I am also astounded that people on HN are calling this a legitimate business. What was its business?"

To be honest, I was not aware that Megaupload in particular was that pro-piracy. The times I've come in contact with them has been for legitimate content, a few times a month. I've never really liked them though, because of all the secrecy behind those who run it, and the design of the site itself which doesn't appeal to me at all.

You have to recognize that there are legal uses for such sites too, however. From my experience, people love sharing _their own_ music and images there, and that is reason I come in contact with them at all.
Marvel vs. DC: Could It Happen?
A small nit about git stashes: they aren't stored in a special linear branch. Each stash is a little branch off of wherever you were when you created the stash. The only trick is that the stash commits are named something weird so that "git stash list" can find them and list them.

You can check this yourself:

git show stash@{0}

Look where it says "WIP on {branch-name}: {hash}". That {hash} will be one of the hashes in the "Merge" header near the top of the commit.

You can also see this visually with "gitk --all".
At least one person's file created with vi can be edited by someone else using emacs.
Seems like megaupload.com is down for me.

Wikipedia states: "The site was shut down by the FBI on January 19, 2012, during an investigation into alleged copyright infringement." [1] Anyone knows any specific details?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload
I don't think pg is saying his communication is flawless, he's saying that the good teams could get past whatever those flaws are and the bad teams couldn't. The same would likely apply to another investor/mentor's differently-flawed communication style.

That of course is no reason for pg to not try to relentlessly improve, but the point about the founders stands.
Am I being downvoted because people think you should be able to earn money on pirated content, or because you think they should operate such sites at a loss (if at all)?