skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Git has some learning curve, since you have to discard your notions of Svn, and learn how Git models a repository.

But once you grasp that, it's pretty easy, not to mention pretty powerful. For me, Git had certain features that gave me a "wow", as I learned about and got use to using them:

1) Local branching - branching is fast, and merging is relatively painless. This lets you experiment with things without affecting the main branch. Branches are like 'tabs' on my browser, but for my source control.
git checkout -b experimental_branch

2) Staging commits - You can fix little things that might not have to do with your current ticket, but add them to separate commits. You can do even split edits done to the same file to two different commits.
git add -i

3) Rebasing branches - You can move the root of the local branch if you want the changes since then. Even better, you can reorder the commits as long as you haven't pushed it to a remote repository yet. The same task allows you to squash your commits together for a cleaner history.
git rebase -i

4) Stashing changes - You can stash uncommitted changes, so that you can perform other operations that require no uncommitted changes. This is useful when you're working on something, but can't commit it to your local branch yet, and something needs fixing on production right now.
git stash

Basically, a lot of what Git enables me to do is switch between tasks easily.
and yet, I can't seem to recall a single fact or statistic with supporting information from Paul Graham's essay.

I'm not siding with the author, I agree in part with Graham's theory, but you're attacking someone for taking a contrary point of view supported with (what may be a best effort in self-conducted) research.
Tracking Your DVD Library
I suspect that many sysadmins have little experience with dm-crypt and all the key management you'd need with it, so learning and installing that stuff has a cost. And you better test thoroughly, because losing a key could mean losing all your data.
Thanks to all replies for feedback. I think I will try Git again. Any recommendations on a UI tool (or recommend that I don't use one?). I run Ubuntu and have Vista on my work laptop. If there's a good tool for simplifying adds and commits and what not, I'd like to try that.

I think part of my problem might have been that I tried to learn Git using Github, which made a multi-user situation out of a single-user situation and was unnecessarily complex. For my current project, the source is not public so I can't have that problem ;-)
By failing to recognize that this is the funniest parody in the entire history of literature, you unwittingly condemn yourself as irrational and anti-life.
Actually I started using git just for fun and it was on windows. At first I used just graphical interface gittk.
It was very easy and clear. I encourage every git newbie to try gittk. After using gittk "index thing" became a lot clearer.
So what I'm trying to say is that Git is not some complex beast with dark powers.
P.S. And I'm hardly an alpha geek or even power user.
i'll work on a bookmarklet for submissions :)
Interesting. I've been thinking about laziness a bit lately and am wondering why not to make it the default.

Of course my thoughts haven't produced much and I haven't went in search of arguments yet. But, the only argument against it that I can see is efficiency assuming your in a pure functional language. Obviously, laziness when the surrounding environment is changing can lead to unpredictability, but compiling memoized thunks to implement laziness seems like it could be optimized very well.

Edit: In regards to your actual suggestion, I'll take a look at the spec and the idea. Thanks
The flip side is that if an employee does generate that much income in one year, a large company isn't set up to reward it.

Case in point: I work for a $3Bn company and a year ago I developed a feature that saved the business ~$2M that year. We know the amount because when the problem raised its head we called together a number of people to calculate what the cost would be and estimates were between $1.5M - $3.5M if we couldn't find a solution. Not loss of revenue, but we would have actually had to pay out that much in support costs.
The problem was highly visible across the organization and I was able to find a way to solve the it in a way that was completely invisible to the customer, implemented it and released to the field. My manager looked good, his manager looked good. I got an "average" performance review. I was pissed and to this day I haven't regained my motivation to do that caliber of work again. I wonder if I ever will without leaving!
How Hard Could it Be? (Joel on Leadership)
'git gui' is a bit ugly, but it's actually a pretty nice ui in terms of functionality. give that a try, it comes with git. if you want a little primer from a windows perspective, i did a gitcast on installing git on windows and using the 'git gui' here : http://gitcasts.com/posts/git-on-windows
One anecdote data does not make, young Padawan.

I have seen the same results elsewhere. Married men tend to live a few years longer than bachelors. But, as they say :-0, better to live a year as an eagle than ten as a mouse.
It seems that too many internet startups nowadays exist just to be sold to another company or have an IPO. The company can't continue forever because the initial investors eventually run out of money. It is not self-sustaining. That roulette-wheel business model leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm a fan of true garage-style startup companies. You slowly build up your company until you become profitable enough to quit your day job.
I would actually downvote this comment because it seems you don't know what you're talking about. While a minute fraction of people do get jobs at i-banks through connections, the vast majority are admitted on merit.

I am an undergraduate (senior) at one of the nation's top i-bank feeder schools.
How about Google app engine?
I work in University City and don't really have any suggestions, except to take a trip to 33rd and Walnut and find the remaining pieces of ENIAC. I think it's on display in the Moore building.

Other than that, there are some hackers in old city at Indy Hall, who are probably nice to visit with, but that's a subway ride away (only $2.60 round trip, get off at 2nd st, get on at 34th and market).
Does Google Have a Legal Right to Censor?
Something you gave no mention of: what if any revenue is the site generating? Ads? Paid premium service?
Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce
Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart
The prim sergeant cleaning the toilet story is getting old, but the rest of the article after that was actually pretty good. Persistence, reluctant readers!
Pownce shutting down
The Simpsons mocks (m)Apple
The funniest parody in all of literature is Ulysses, and it's so funny nobody gets it.

McSweeney's is misinterpreting Rand. Rand isn't about making money. She's about creating good products and making money because people like what you've got. Kind of like how 37Signals does today: they're the "Atlas heroes." They do what they want, they don't compromise, and they're reporting doing well despite the crash because they're making something that people want.

McSweeney writers aren't bad, but they're immature. They take low shots and they're willing to be lame for laughs. In a way, kind of like Dave Eggers, who's quite good but who could be a lot better if he stopped the annoying little games. I like reading them on occasion, but this was one of their weaker moments.
For a small startup team, say 5 person max, is the workflow using git much different than using svn say?
I guess the best check (and benefit) for startups are commit mistakes early, commit mistakes often.
It's funny but I think what he's pointing out is that it's pretty easy to write a funny parody of a straw man argument.
Maybe the proper solution is to increase the production?

I found a much better article on bluefin tuna troubles in Scientific American - indeed there are attempts to farm tuna:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bluefin-tuna-in-peril

BTW that's also one of the reasons why I think predicting populations 40 years in advance is hard. Even for a good model assumptions can change. And for systems of nonlinear differential equations even small differences in constants can lead to widely different outcomes.
I think they are trying to do just that: they are trying to argue against the common 'widsom' that going to a prestigious school is going to get you a more prestigious job, along with the corollary that you should rank job candidates by which school they went to.
Which is what Atlas Shrugged is, arguably.
The Dow Is
Laughing at the write-up almost made reading that steaming pile of a book worth it.

"Why leave such an achievement to rot here? It's the greatest thing I've ever laid eyes on, made by a monumental genius, the sort of mind that's only born once in a century ... Dagny, why are you fondling your breasts?"
Actually, it is now officially a recession, and we've been in it since last December.

http://www.nber.org/cycles/dec2008.html
Anyone serious about programming should definitely make sure to have something like this in hand before they leave, if they want the good opportunities.

Every college freshman should be told this repeatedly. It is too easy to miss out on that bit of information and think that getting good grades and graduating is enough to land you a job out of college.
Another weekly post about why git's better that anything else.
It's just the fourth in four weeks.
This was my exact argument for Bazaar. After playing with Git 1.6 for a few minutes today all my usual commands work.

It took me literally 3.5 minutes to get Git setup using the OSX install package and fixing my .profile to include the new path. I'm very impressed.

Now if only Github had a trial membership with a Private repo...
oh, there goes another twitter-killer.
It's a Recession (Officially) - Since last December
Ask YC: DDOS Protection?
Some friends of mine have been running into an issue with massive DDOS attacks, primarily massive junk UDP traffic.

Right now, they're shunning IP ranges as fast as we can, but things change quickly, and often at night.

I saw the discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=106020 , which took place just under a year ago, but I'd love any advice.

I know that there are companies such as prolexic and Gigenet can offer substantial improvements, if I understand correctly, by re-routing our traffic through them, and then on to us.

Are there any companies that HN readers have worked with? What sort of pricing were you hit with? One quote I found online had suggested $400/Mbps/month.

Are there any programmatic solutions to maintaining a shun list? I could script something to blindly telnet in, but it seems like there's got to be boxed solutions for this.

The problem with most inspection techniques is by the time we accept the packet and start examining it, it's too late, and we start to get overloaded.

Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks To The Lori Drew Case, I Can Make Each Of You A Criminal
The only part that bugs me is: what kind of leader does something like this and then writes about it to brag?

I think Joel's actions, by themselves demonstrate humility and the quality of being down to earth. But the article...I think it would it would have come off a lot better if someone else wrote it about Joel.
Let's hope it wasn't for the programming talent...

http://leahculver.com/2008/11/25/couchdb-documents-python-ob...

http://leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/
I hope you're right.

Agreed. And I think the wonderful in this case far outweighs the awful.
Debian approves the AGPL
Yeah, but it takes itself seriously. A parody straw man argument doesn't make you think, and that's an essential for good comedy.

I read a very good parody of Atlas a while ago. It didn't take words from Rand and mash them up (like this does) - it does a good job of emulating her style while criticizing her ideas. This one's less clever than that, which is a shame.
I'm in agreement with Github having a free/trial private repo. It's a huge oversight.
There was a comment from Reddit from a kid who grew up with 4chan. It fascinated me. And it showed me just how different my generation will be from any one before it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/7f8x3/hey_reddit_whats..., if you want to read.
Clearly MySQL should stop using their bug tracker so they won't have as many known crashing bugs!

Seriously though, I wouldn't be surprised if the Postgres guys were creating more reliable releases, but this is a really weak analysis.
Basically, a lot of what Git enables me to do is switch between tasks easily.

As a single developer, I love this about git. Being able to instantly create a new local branch to work on something, even if I only have an hour or two to devote to it, then switching branches and continuing on with the next important task is awesome. At least for me, it basically encourages exploration and testing new ideas because it takes no time and I know the "real" code is still safe and accessible instantly.
Announcing the Ribbit $100,000 Killer App Challenge
build a flex or flash app and win!

WAYS TO WIN
Media, Advertising & Entertainment
Social Networking & Communication
Business & Productivity
Carrier, Network, or ISP Integration
Wildcard

The winner in each of the 5 categories will receive $15,000 and will be eligible for the $30,000 Grand Prize.

http://killerappchallenge.ribbit.com/
Yeah aside from the programming "talent", I'm quite perplexed as to the reason of this acquisition. Last I checked, Pownce wasn't competing with any SixApart services.
I have some sympathy towards Leah, because I'm not an experienced coder myself, and I'm also working on a start-up.

While I thought Pownce was useless and never used it myself, it was a good-looking product and it had a nice layout. Six Apart would do well to learn from the Pownce team about making a pretty product.
Ouch, what a burn. Just curious, what companies have you built and sold?

I tried to check your profile but it was empty.
Will be interesting to see what six apart does after this transaction. Seems like Pownce was always a "me too" web app that got some hype from being an idea of Kevin Rose. Its still a cool and useful app, just never had the critical mass to overtake twitter or become a real force in the micro blogging space. Despite this Pownce was a solid django web app, and its always good to see those out there.
Browser Head to Head: Chrome vs Firefox vs Flock
GitHub is totally free and unrestricted for public code. This should give you plenty of freedom to try out the service without paying. Also, as a promotion for Cyber Monday, new signups today (12/1) can get a paid plan free for one month.
It's a funny coincidence this turns up when I spent about 30 minutes trying and failing to get Git working with Github earlier. I'm not sure if it was the flaky Windows port or not, but it just wasn't happening.
'Changing the Game' book shows how games can help business
I think that "good-looking" and nice layout were both courtesy of Daniel Burka, and he's not going to SA.
Good to see they're planning AdBlock in advance. That'll hopefully shut up the nuts who're saying that Google will do anything to prevent AdBlock on Chrome and that it's all a conspiracy.
You're right, it was for the get-it-done talent that so few people actually have... developers are a dime a dozen. Stop glorifying yourself.
Well, right now this is primarily an intellectual exercise for me. If I were to actually do this, I'd want to get 1 or 2 female co-founders.

As far as online concepts of gender, the purpose of the site would be "a place where everyone presents their real-life female gender online." This is commensurate with Facebook, which can be seen as an antidote to the chaotic anonymity of the internet. There's a lot of reasons why the internet sucks for women. I suspect that a part of that has to do with the difficulty of escaping the hordes of (emotionally) adolescent males here.

http://xkcd.com/322/

Think of it as Curves for user-generated and moderated content.
Just goes to show that startups are more about making stuff people want than about technical ability.
Why Aren't More Advertisers Using Widgets?
I'm loathe to criticize Joel, but:

I don't see how taking 2 days and leadership time demonstrates concern for employees. Getting someone in who can take care of the problem quickly and efficiently* seems like it's better 'staying out of the programmer's way' than taking two days.

I think the lesson from the toilet cleaning was, "Look, if I'm going to require perfect inspections, I'm sure as hell going to have an immaculate bathroom. I also recognize that I need to show you how to perform to the level I expect. So here's how it's done."

That hands-on, know-what-you're-doing leadership is what's respectable. Making an object lesson, on the other hand, is hardly laudable.

*This falls into the "why I hesitate": if Joel could do it faster and more cheaply than having someone else come in that knows what they're doing, my criticism is less harsh, though I still think he's taking the 'wrong' lesson from his military experience.
Getting Real on Climate Change
I'm not sure Joel wrote about this to brag; at the very least, he wrote about this because it made for an interesting / relevant entry for his monthly Inc.com article.

I agree that it might come off a bit as preening, but to be fair Joel's column hasn't stayed away from mistakes and bad decisions he's made as well. As such I take the tone as being closer to "this is what I've done and why I've done it" than "look at this awesome thing I did".
shutdowns like this are going to be common. 90% of existing websites have no viable chance of being self-sustaining by ads or subscriptions...but this shouldn't surprise anyone, at some point, a near-frictionless model coupled with strong winner-take-all economics is bound to result in a few dominant players choking off nearly everything else
Any one know if Pownce was profitable? They've had ads from the very beginning and there are pro accounts, it would be interesting to know how effective these revenue streams were.
I'm learning this very fast (and the hard way unfortunately). I launched two technically deep projects to no response. Then I spent a week putting together a hack and people started buying.
That's just lousy.
Can't someone say the soup tastes like shit in some restaurant when all he can do in the kitchen himself is boil some water?
I'm not an experienced coder myself, and I'm also working on a start-up.

stop wasting the precious hours of your life
Pownce Deadpooled, Team Moves To Six Apart
The car horn is beeping useless.
"Wasting?" I have a brilliant idea, I'm good with visuals, and I've got a cofounder. And I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on.
Oh? What does Leah do on the team, then? What's she responsible for?
The author here comes across as too biased and passionate to be taken seriously. I understand that he wants to hype up his story to draw in readers but his "The sky is falling" attitude obscures any of the real issues and considerations involved.

Bittorrent, legal issues aside, is being throttled by many ISPs. It is only natural for bittorrent to fight back. There will be casualties, but I can't see ISPs throttling all UDP traffic, breaking VoIP. The internet won't break in some “Congestion Collapse”.

I also disagree that P2P applications would be indistinguishable from VoIP without deep packet inspection as the author suggested. The network usage statistics for VoIP and P2P must look quite different and should be easily distinguished.
what companies have you built and sold?

"built and sold"????? do you think these people "cashed out"??? i would be shocked if any member of the team was premiumed more than 50k...which probably doesn't even bring them to break-even given the starvation wages they were on before. this was a mercy killing and the powncers were likely happy to finally have their pointless crusade terminated
yes they can, but then they'd open themselves up to criticism...not sure what's 'fair game' here, but seems to me like complaining/criticizing others is indirectly saying "I can do better". Prove it.
Ask YC: Why do you think Pownce failed?
Why couldn't Pownce get enough users?

They had a better interface than Twitter.
They had star power & geek cred via Kevin Rose.
They had an actual revenue model.
They got tons of press.
They had more features.

Why couldn't they get users?
Dupe:

http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/01/six-apart-acquires-and-shu...
4chan is brighter than it lets on. But recently it's become a parody of itself. What once began hilarious and meme-laden has become a bunch of people repeating memes, which aren't funny unless they're clever.
and I've got a cofounder

good god please bury this term, the yc fanboys have turned the "startup" lexicon into such a shallow cliche that its almost at the point of parody. you don't have a "cofounder", what you have is a guy down the hall in your dorm

I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on.

try your homework, it'll pay dividends unlike yet-another pointless website
> I'm not so sad about the technology or the code, but about more about the people - leah

How to spot a fake coder.
Programming.

http://leahculver.com/about/

> I’m a founder and the lead developer of a social network, Pownce, that lets you send stuff to your friends online.
Sure, Pownce is no localeater.com or Mobile Drudge Report, but cut her some slack, huh?
Its Official: We're in a Recession
Subreddits have moderators. Some of them have really excellent communities.

Digg is still an absolute wreck. Reddit is actually pretty good once you're away from /reddit.com and /politics and /economics.
that's a non-sequitir. the original parent was talking technical talent (or lack thereof), not ability to build/flip a website.

the parent is disputing whether the acquisition for "the talent" in this case makes sense: your rebuttal here seems to be circular "6a acquired pownce because pownce founders are talented. pownce founders are talented, because they made something that got acquired by 6a".
I don't think he's claiming to be a humble person, just humble about his role within his own company. It's not necessarily a contradiction for him to claim that he's really good at being a humble boss.

If you truly believe you're awesome, I'm not sure it's beneficial to sit around and wait for someone else to recognize it. People won't ask you to contribute to the conversation; they'll assume that if you have anything to say, you'll speak up.
by the way, as a nice demonstration of some of this git/github greatness, there have been a number of useful changes submitted by users that have been pulled in and deployed now, including the beginnings of a french translation of the site that I've put up at http://fr.whygitisbetterthanx.com

you can see the network activity here : http://github.com/schacon/whygitisbetter/network - all of which has happened since I posted this news item 2 hours ago.
i'm just going to go out on a limb and say simplicity. pownce tried to solve a lot of problems, and in doing that, lost users. or, at least, thats why i didn't use it. if i wanted to do XYZ, i'd go do XYZ instead of using pownce's not-quite-as-good version of it.

also, the api took forever.
One reason is that they faffed around with their API, they spent forever trying to define the perfect XML and never produced anything I could build on. I like Pownce a lot (even paid for an account for a year) but if I couldn't a) build apps on it (not public facing) and b) find any of my friends on it it wasn't much use to me.
If they could bring it to Mac at the same time that would be fantastic.