skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the alias I use in my `.gitconfig` for running log with graphical output (got this somewhere, not sure where):

[alias]
l = log --graph --pretty='%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cblue[%an]%Creset %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

The omglog gem is also useful for working with git. It gives you a graphical log of the entire repo (not just your current branch as a normal git log does), and it auto updates by monitoring for file system changes (OSX only).

To install:

sudo gem install omglog

Then just run `omglog` in the root of your repo, or use this alias in your `.gitconfig` to automatically run it from the root of whatever repo you're in:

[alias]
omg = !omglog

(shell commands, starting with a "!" command in a git alias are always run from the root of a repository)
Not taking things personally is a good motto, but an even better motto is trying to understand the other person.

Ok so they've just snapped something mean at you because you're slow with your job. Sure, it's mean, but maybe they're in a rush to get to their daughter who's just come out of surgery after a terrible car crash and they're, you know, in a bit of a hurry and not in the best of moods.

Because people are generally nice. When they aren't nice it doesn't mean you shouldn't take it personally, it means you should ask what's wrong.
Toyota in Canada doesn't allow haggling to the same extend as other manufacturers.
Ask HN: Is there a good resource for Quartz2D drawings?
I have been trying to get a better handle on Quartz2D drawing, but I haven't been able to find a good resource.

I was thinking of making a wiki that would contain examples. I have one set up at www.slyceapps.com/quartz2d, but I don't want to go far into it if there is another resource already set up. Also, is there a better way to set it up other than a wiki?

Thanks
Copying the design doesn't necessarily deserve "scumbag" treatment. Some brusque words, sure, but certainly not the escalation of DHH.

What Curebit did DEFINITELY qualifies as scumbag. There's some unknown tangible cost for 37signals (in the form of bandwidth, hosting assets for a competitor's site). There are small claims court cases considering similar situations nearly every day.
Stick this in your ~/.gitconfig

[alias]

lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %C(bold white)%s%Creset %Cgreen(%cr) %C(blue)@%an%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

Then use from the cli as `git lg [branch1, branch2...]

Sourced from multiple results on google and customizations over time.
Another bulletpoint suggestion for motivating top talent:
* Set up no-poach agreements with other employers so that they can never leave.

Wotta superhero!
I saw this play out yesterday in the comments and kept thiking "why won't someone stop him from posting?!" It was getting bigger and bigger the more he opened his mouth.

I learned an important lesson a few years ago: sometimes you can't make something better, and trying to make it better only makes it worse.

Stop, regroup with others and get a proper plan together.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "configuring the IDE"? I never had to configure Eclipse in any way to start a new project. I don't have much experience with NetBeans or IDEA, but I sincerely doubt that you need to do any special configuration before you can start a new project there either.
If you're talking about workspace preferences, then you should know that these can be imported, so again, no complicated configuration is really needed.
It keeps the upstream history cleaner at the expense of being locally historically correct. In my opinion the nice thing about having everyone rebase onto upstream is that when their changes get merged into upstream, upstream's history shows an accurate linear representation of when a piece of code was accepted into upstream, which to me is far more important than having an accurate local history.
Very good points, thank for this new perspective. If she were taking a year off for other reasons I would think about it in a very different way. But ultimately, the outcome would be the same.

You're right, we need to have this conversation before we dump more time into this.
Interesting, I always feel like 19.99 = 20, but that is probably because of how my Dad taught me to add and multiply quickly by doing so rounding first then backing off from there.
Hear hear! I'm a huge fan of Top Gear. I even had a subscription to the magazine (shipped from the UK) before it got ridiculously expensive.

Downloading is the only way I can watch it. Years ago, before I got rid of cable, it wasn't on BBC America. Now that it's available, in a horrible edited form, I don't have cable.

I've considered watching it on iPlayer via VPN but AFAIK the quality is much lower. Plus this would actually put the BBC in a worse position, having to pay for bandwidth I'm otherwise using from fellow enthusiast sharing the file.

I would pay if there was a way to legally watch it online, preferably in HD and close to the original release date.
Seems to be some logical inconsistencies in the startup community over what is and is not ok to copy. Usually, like anything, it comes back to whatever is self-serving to the person doing the talking.
Investors speak out against patents on methods of doing business because their well-funded current or future portfolio companies could "build on" the ideas and use the cash lead to make a ton of money.
Digital media distribution platforms want online content to be freely distributed off of or outside of the publishers' sites that paid for the content to be produced.
This is all still pretty new and the rules of law and of decency are still being determined (and, in the case of the latter, are different for each individual).
I think the more productive outcome of this line-crossing is this exact discussion to help shape those rules.
Can We? | Bizcovering
Also illegal: Downloading the same TV show with the commercial breaks intact and not skipping them
No, you are absolutely right. History rewriting is fine if you do it on a private branch, but on shared branches it can be problematic.

If there are updated refs on a shared branch, you need to use the --force flag when pushing, overwriting the previous refs. All the other people pulling will also need to use the --force flag to get their refs updated.

It could also lead to data loss on all the repositories that do this if something goes wrong. And it forces other team members to use the correct flag when pulling and otherwise dealing with cryptic error messages when they don't do this.

--amend is fine if you haven't pushed yet, otherwise it has the same problems as rebase for shared stuff.
From a copyright-law perspective, it's not a slam-dunk that Curebit infringed any protectable aspect of the 37Signals design, as opposed to "stock" elements.[1] West Side Story has a lot in common with Romeo and Juliet, but the latter itself has a lot in common with a long line of still-earlier romantic tragedies.[2]

Some of the reactions here are fascinating. As a group, HNers prize the freedom to copy from others and the ethic of helping others --- but for some, it seems to be "I get to copy from others, but no one else is allowed to copy from me."

EDIT 1: That said, from a purely-practical perspective it's usually better and cheaper to steer clear of controversy (depending on how you think the PR scales will tip). Curebit might have been better off had it not copied what it did, not least because this controversy is sucking up management time that could probably be put to better use.

EDIT 2: Plus, stealing someone else's bandwidth by linking directly to their copies of images, etc., without permission does cross the line, if that's what Curebit did.

EDIT 3: Even copying HTML and CSS might not constitute copyright infringement if there are only a limited number of ways to express the same idea(s). This is even more the case if there's an optimal way to code a given set of ideas.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet
Don't Home School Your Kids
It's one thing for the OS to be making this sort of decision, since it has a global view of resource needs, a single application does not.

Actually, I don't even get the sense that chrome has an adequate view of its own resource needs. My wife often finds that her browser and computer is underresponsive because chrome is using so much memory for background tabs.
Thanks for the link. And yes, this will be her first child so she is planning to take the year off (she'll be on maternity leave from her "real" job). She the kind of person that would probably squeeze in extra time for our project when ever should could, but I don't know if I want to put that stress on her.
No such thing as bad PR. Let's how well those guys will be doing in the future.
And I don't think it is in Exchange 2010
Mega Aftermath: Upheaval in Pirate Land
I think the JC Penney brand has already been placed into this cheaper segment. They are squarely aimed at the mass market.
Wow, talk about lazy. I'm ok with taking the layout, changing the images and using the same basic styles. At least change some of the fonts. I mean, How many sans serif fonts are out there that would've worked? Thousands.

They lost me when they started copying the HTML VERBATIM. Apparently they don't have capable developers either. The layout in question is not that complicated, and I'm struck on why they decided to do what they did. Even in A/B testing you could've mocked this thing up in a few hours and had it ready to go.

Inexcusable.
That's appealing, but I'm not sure it is correct. My father spent his career designing power plants. His company had an estimation group tasked with estimating costs and schedules before they ever bid on a job. We're talking projects that could easily run over a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They did an internal study to see how well the estimators did compared to reality. When management didn't lean on them to shave down an estimate, they were really amazingly accurate.

Now, we're talking about a dedicated group of people who aren't going to do the work themselves and who do nothing but estimation, but still....
"Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written."

Bill Gates sold open source software! Incredible!
Second that!
Great post, Ben. Keep up the great work.
What about their logo? https://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/163298220322209792
Lato is one of my current favorites, glad you included it. Orbitron, Jura and Cabin also work well in certain places.

I do wish there were more fonts with 3+ styles (reg, bold and ital at least), though I'm sure that'll change with time.
No I didn't track caloric intake. Why would I do that? One of the selling points of these low carb diets is that I wouldn't have to track such things -- that all I would have to do is not eat many carbs and that I would lose weight.

I'm certainly not claiming that this style of diet would work for everyone, but it certainly seems to work for many people. One thing I noticed is that when I wasn't eating carbs, that eating a rib eye with eggs and butter and bacon didn't seem nearly as appealing in large quantities as it otherwise would have. The diet did take away a lot of the pleasure of eating, which may be in part why it worked. I just ended up not being terribly excited by foods without carbs in them and consequently perhaps didn't over-eat. I would have killed for a saltine, though.

Another thing I noticed is that I wouldn't lose weight if I ate lots of nuts. It seems likely that the reason for this fact is that nuts are just too high in fat to eat in large quantities and continue to lose weight. But the diet warned against eating many nuts.

In any case, I think the point is not that you can eat any amount of fat and protein and lose weight, but rather than you can eat as much as you will end up wanting. (With the exception of nuts.) And that you won't end up feeling hungry.
Photographers seem to be enjoying it more than other "social platforms". Alex Wild (of myrmecos, photographer and entomologist) regularly notes that G+ is significantly better than "the rest" for photographers.

I'm not one so I wouldn't know, but he seems to genuinely prefer G+, and he is clearly more active there than on e.g. facebook.
There might be something interesting that they could do with defining a hashtag whitelist or a set of filter criteria for a circled contact.

Someone mentioned languages, too - what if autodetected language could be one of the filter criteria? I have a Russian friend who sends out a 50/50 mix of English and Russian. I would rather not see the Russian in my stream, partially because Google Translate usually doesn't do a great job, and also because I miss out on all the inside cultural references.
The Piratebay promotes Paul Coelho
this article is timed well with all of this hoopla about copying designs
> it's just a bit of design rip off

I'm surprised that some people don't even understand what is being discussed here. Hint: it's not the hot-linking, it's not the borrowing of html, css or anything else. It's the brazen theft of someone else's work that @allangrant has engaged in and his apparent inability to see why this is an incorrect attitude. Not being a designer is not an excuse for being an apologist, either.
Its called Too Much Money with Angles with too little time chasing wanabes
Exactly. That's the real problem.
You are right. Money is only a small factor. And an employee that gets swayed by money only might not deserve be bet on.

===

On a tangential note, I am worried about the groupthink of HNers (I am not talking about you). the one directional thinking is astounding sometimes.

Is there a problem looking at a situation from an alternative view point?
At what point does this become unacceptable?

Look at what Zynga did with FarmVille. At first, it was exactly like FarmTown. Same appearance, same menu layout, same gameplay. They weren't actually serving assets from FarmTown's servers, but besides that, the design was exactly the same.

Was this illegal? Probably not - design like this generally can't be copyrighted.

Was this successful? Yes - this sort of strategy led Zynga to be worth billions of dollars.

Was this ethical? I think intelligent people will differ.

Either way, DHH certainly uses his audience to attack people who come too close to the design of 37signals. A similar thing happened when Google launched Huddle, and DHH complained it was too similar to Campfire. In the end, Google rebranded it as a PR move and nobody cared any more.

Whether it's ethical or not, it certainly seems like a tactical PR mistake for a startup to annoy DHH this much.
From a purely artistic standpoint, imitation is a large piece of the modern creation process, if only because of it's increased use in modernism/postmodernism. Everyone's influenced by someone or something, it's just the way things work.

In terms of what is acceptable, I tend to lean towards the notion that it's fine for someone to be inspired, or imitate as long as they've added their own artistic flare/soul to the piece and it's not just a forgery. As in they've only imitated a part of the piece, and not it's entirety. The issue with this whole process though is, art is subjective.
Thank you OP (kennethologist) for fixing the title of this article. The nymag title is "JCPenney Permanently Cuts All Prices by 40 Percent" which is certainly not true. Copy editor Bill Walsh writes:

The company meant "permanent" in the sense of regular prices as opposed to sale prices. It’s lowering regular prices and cutting back on sales in a strategy that may or may not work. If the strategy doesn’t work, the company has every right to change course -- and if it does, a bunch of news outlets will be revealed as big, fat liars.

Bill goes on to criticize lazy journalists who just write what they're told:
http://theslot.blogspot.com/2012/01/penney-want-cracker.html
You don't find that when trying to negotiate up, you can't go beyond 10-25%?
Daniel Kahneman talks about the planning fallacy as well as many other biases and faulty heuristics we use when making decisions and predictions in "Thinking Fast and Slow" http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
Are these really the same CEOs?
When you are clearly in the wrong, a pissing match will never end well for you. Apologize sincerely, fix it, maybe offer some form of remediation, and let it blow over. You will never be able to make yourself look better if you try to make excuses or attack the grieved party.
Can someone put "[video]" in the title, please?
Summify Alternatives - Percolate, News.me, XYDO, KnowAboutIt, Utopic, Scoopinion
Unsolicited feedback
Just because something's legal doesn't make it appropriate or professional behavior.

It's legal to be an a-hole, but I usually try not to be one.
West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet share the same _idea_, not the same image file.
I believe there is a clear legal difference here.

These things are over the line (and illegal):

Using images without permission

Using code without permission

Referencing images and code from another site without permission

Gray area:

Designing a site from scratch to roughly copy another site's design
I know you can't say, but being another Seattleite, I wish I knew who this CEO is so I can be sure I never work for them.
Not sure how well his self-publish approach would work for first timers. As he said himself, he already had 5 books published by traditional publishers, was a writer on major media outlets, and has a significant blog following. Later books tend to be better as authors improve over time.

Most titles just languish, undiscovered.

One of the more disappointing parts to the article is that the books - self published or not - never made much money. Instead his money came from trading and selling companies talking about trading. A sad indictment of the state of fiscal capitalism.
Now I've heard of Curebit.
I've had blogs before, and having no readers is a little bit depressing for me. It REALLY doesn't seem worthwhile when no one is reading it. The few times I managed to get a link to stick on reddit's r/programming, the blog posts were mostly ignored, then buried and on one I was flamed because people didn't understand it.
Spell of the Pakistani Spinners
Ouch. I hadn't seen that one as part of the story. The whole looks worse that the preliminary part mentioned in this story OP.
Very good points. To be honest, I'm not too concerned with ownership. However, I do have a sense of this situation not being fair. The real problem is that I need her help, and I'm going to have a really tough time finding someone who has her passion, skill set and motivation.
That's my guess too. With digital IO, you can say "drive an output pin high". In the old days that was done with transistors (TTL, later CMOS). It's seems logical if you had hardware connected to a digital IO, you could refer to the software as driving the hardware.
Jason Calacanis' "This Week in Start Ups" is always entertaining an insightful
Why does this matter? If you're performing several commands with `sudo`, by default it will remember your password for several minutes.

There really is no good reason to log in as root except in exigent circumstances.

If you think you need a root login, you're probably doing something wrong.

(And actually, `sudo -s` is not actually "logging in." It simply starts a shell as user 1 with a sanitized environment.)
I don't have a strong preference between the two (I might be wrong not to).

Of course, that assumes both parties in the negotiation are rational and sophisticated. A typical developer is brilliant at designing software, absolutely terrible at understanding markets, and devastatingly introverted, and so is likely to lowball themselves. You will very rarely do much better than the first number you give. If you think you're not up to the challenge, putting the first number on the table may be a bad move. It depends.

What doesn't depend is your current salary. Everyone is going to ask for it. There's nothing wrong with asking. But don't cough it up.
And they don't copy paste dialogues. Paramount to using images from highrise.com (not even bothered to download and host them).
It's also often a very successful strategy for companies to copy the design of competitors, and differentiate on other things. Zynga copying competitors' games is a great example.

In this case, Curebit was only copying the design of a landing page, so it was probably not worth pissing off DHH even if that landing page was legally usable and worked better. Although it really seems that DHH was more pissed off by Allan's tweets and posts about it than by the design itself.
FBI will Monitor Social Media using Crawl Application
Improvements and Rip-offs are two different things.
At Twitter, The Future is You!
A good post but it misses the single biggest reason I blog - to share knowledge. I want to share what I've learned and for others to do the same so that we all can become improved.
How Your Startup Can Hook Into Facebook, Part I: On The Web
Ask HN: copyright licenses
When a work is copyrighted, the creator can grant a license for others to use the work. What if the creator has not completed the work, but wishes to sell licenses that would take effect after the work is completed?
This kind of thing happens often and I think it is ok as long it hurts no one and is temporary.

If you are testing 10 variations, getting "inspiration" is faster than come up with your own design and doesn't hurt 37Signals during the short length of the test.

Why did people get so angry so fast?

The only people who got really hurt in this story are Curebit, not 37 Signals.
Referencing images and code from another site without permission

This is not illegal, merely poor form and also a bad technical decision because the other site can then control you.

If this were illegal, you would have to get permission from other sites to use iframes. Things like stumbleupon's web version couldn't exist.
> Seems to be some logical inconsistencies in the startup community over what is and is not ok to copy.

Let's not pretend that we're dealing with a couple of noobs here, people.

If it weren't for the cumulative years of technology-related experience of everyone involved, a case could be made for excusing a blatant misstep with an admonishment, but for outright copy/paste theft? Allan Grant knew better and decided to steal anyway.
This CEO left town, so as long you're hanging around Seattle you're in good shape.
Anyone who says there's no such thing as bad PR has never worked in PR.

Yes, seemingly bad PR can cause unexpected good things, and bad PR can sometimes be turned into a good thing when handled skillfully (even then, not always). The idea that all PR is good PR is just naive.

If Allan Grant hadn't dug himself deeper into his hole, but instead come back with modesty, apologies and flattery to DHH at the very least (perhaps something outside the box as well, "Hey @DHH, to show we're sorry we'll donate $10k to a charity of your choice"?) then the bad PR would have got their name out there and their response might have prevented people from thinking badly of them, and even made people like them. But even then, there's never a guarantee that any response can turn bad PR to good.
<sarcasm> Naah, they were just A/B testing that one. I guess crediting it will make it fine. Unless the other party demands it to be taken down.</sarcasm>
DHH is well-known for being... crude, for lack of a nicer word. He's a guy who revels in the fact that he's arrogant.
Saints Row 3 Nude Mod: Uncensored Videos+Picture
Thanks. I think you may have overlooked this part, "The number one reason to blog for many people, is the desire to share their knowledge and teach others."
The report states that there were over 25 instances in a two-month period in which journalists in the US were beaten and/or arrested while on the job, with charges such as "public nuisance." That seems pretty clear to me, and consistent with their reasoning for ranking other countries.