skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perforce is not terrible. I'd even go so far as to say; of the centralized systems, it's better than any other I've tried (including Subversion, and cvs). It could be better, but it could be much worse.

Things we like about perforce:
- Client side changelists for modified client side code. This helps organize our local
changes to make sure when we're working on multiple things they stay separate.
- The server is solid.
- Can handle large files, including the ability to 'forget' previous revisions to save space
on the server. It's abusing the system, and we've been told as much by Perforce. It just
happens to be the way we do business, and changing that is another project.
- It can do branching/merging
- The visual diff and merge tools are pretty good (mostly, more below).
- Everything that's under revision control is in one place. If you don't want to have the
files on your workstation you can simply remove that tree from your view.

Things we dislike about perforce:
- It costs money. At the size of our organization it costs about as much as another employee.
This is the reason we were 'given the OK'; developers don't really care about cost as long as
we're employed, and management doesn't really care about features as long as we're productive.
- We've had significant issues when merging. Conflicts are not properly flagged and "ghost" code
(code that didn't exist in either branch) sometimes appear in the merge result.
- The clients are very iffy. Crashes are frequent, and the merge problems are related to
client-side bugs.
- No one in the company is a fan of being required to 'check out' files to get them to be writable.
This is how perforce knows when files are modified and because there is no equivalent for new
files people frequently forget to add files and break the build.
- It can only show you < 1000 files in a given changelist. Big changes like that are when it's
most important to see what you're doing. This is pretty common when doing branch integrations.
When this happens you have to hit the "auto-merge" and hope for the best.
- Branching/integrating isn't streamlined enough to really support every developer having their
own branch. If it was dead-simple we could support a distributed development model with a
centralized server.
- No real way to share code (for reviews, or collaboration) without going through the shared
depot. We use p4tar, but it doesn't play nice with cygwin and has it's own problems.
- No direct way to revert code. Reverting is a 5 step process that isn't entirely obvious.

I think that's it.
Why not just hire him? Unless there's some legal mumbo jumbo related to closing down his services I see no reason to close up shop ... my guesses would be legal, or tax related.
Neat way of getting a list of outfits to avoid when you have a real software development task that you want to outsource...

(Though I bet it was done solely as a joke. Good one, too.)
Stack overflow is tying its innovative QA format to its subject matter in a way that results in both lost opportunities and dillution of their initial mission.

Instead of encouraging the qa format use in different subject areas by either segmenting the current website or creating a network of websites, they are insisting on this 'programmer-only' mindset which necessarily expands the amount of 'allowable' material to anything that could conceivably be thought of as a programming question, including 'programmer jokes' and what not.

A good idea would be to spawn different sections for application-related questions and maybe humour as well as anythng else they see as a viable section and then let the users decide which question goes where. That way you have both increased focus for each section and wider coverage.
To your points.

I've intentionally left out the delete function, nothing lasts longer than a week without manual intervention. Despite using the service daily, I can't think of any cases outside of me manually messing with data as tests that I've missed having a delete.

This is a great idea, and I'll definitely be making a new initial login "landing" page!

There's something odd in my Apache setup, as the slowness looks like it's from load, but there's not that much strain on the box. The other issue, which I've tried to optimize as much as possible, is that it loads a LOT of JS when you click the bookmarklet, and it doesn't show the message until it's all done. I need really should pare that down some more, thanks for the push!
Save yourself some time/money and install this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgr...

Just unzip and upload the folder to /wp-content/plugins

Then login to your admin, activate the plugin, click Manage and then on Automatic Upgrade.

I use if for all my blogs, saves me time and almost never horks anything.
Dynamic .WAV Generation in JavaScript
Is this a joke?

Some of his ideas are actually pretty okay, but others are just ... silly.
I understand your point, but overuse of the word "offensive" offends me.
no probs - and quick response.
That instantly gives you a huge edge over del.icio.us (INTEGRATE AMIGO!)
Wouldn't it be wiser to fine him something reasonable like $200-$400K That way he has a chance at paying it off and is therefore 'expected' to do so. But it's high enough that it would wreck his finances for years to come, thereby making him think twice about doing it again.
Sounds exactly like how I would answer the same question. Very rational.
When will we get jetpacks like these? (Video BBC News)
What else could you apply automated A/B testing to?

Headlines? The images that accompany news stories?
I'm not sure emphasizing how much easier branching is in Git is a good idea. Git already has a "herding cats" kind of reputation.

Programmers like branching because it lets them be less conservative in their planning. Project managers hate branching for exactly the same reason; only one branch is going to be the actual product and the other branches are wasted effort.
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Ruby, Rails,Blog Archive » Rails Rumble Observations, part II - trends in gem/plugin usage
Verizon Storm, the first touchscreen BlackBerry, bridges business and lifestyle
No Windows 7 public beta until 2009
PlaySpan Raises $16.8 Million For Virtual-Goods Marketplace
Yes, I'm familiar with rsync. We've talked with Perforce Support a fair amount regarding large files, and they remind us that we are abusing their system. It's like using Harley Davidsons on a worksite to move around loads of dirt. It may work, but it's not the intended use.

We might be able to get that to work for some of the binary files realativly easily. The problem is that the majority of these files are build artifacts for our test programs and the builds happen in the same directory as the source (yes, this is a stupid way to do things, but we need to do what customers do, and our customers do this). It would be very hard to distinguish between build sources and build artifacts. This leaves the issue of branches. Each branch would have to 'know' which of the binaries to grab in the shared space, and update other branches at integration time.

This could be a valid way of doing things, but it would take a fair amount of effort because our environment is like the real world; dirty and complicated. For the past couple of years it's been on the backlog to clean and simplify our environment, but something more important always comes up.
The internal free market for code
If he was running ruby enterprise and passenger for these comparison's then the results may be skewed. My understanding is that you get about a 30% memory usage reduction with ruby enterprise, but that's only on 32bit images... so he wouldn't get that benefit on a the stock 64bit slicehost install.
haven't published this job yet but id like to be as helpful as possible to this community. need a java apps developer (familiarity with a framework like stripes is very helpful) in santa barbara california.

funded and still quite stealthy you could say littleBiggy is mcluhan meets the white pages. our interview process starts with a sample project you do on your own time and get paid for. we learn about each other through working together and take it from there. i can be reached at fredb.
Why is Big Blue so concerned about Apple hiring a former IBM executive?
It's actually done with pigeons.

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Could you please tell me more about yourself?

I am serious, this is not a joke. Here's the thing, I am one of those get off my lawn old guys.

I am continually amazed at how many people on the internet have not seen the above picture. (Or any other old meme)

And I've always pictured the people to whom this stuff is new as technology novices.

But that mental image fails me when it comes to programmer jokes, those require insider knowledge to be funny.

And thus we have a paradox, how can you know enough to laugh at that and not have seen it in 1000 times before.

So yes, if you could say a few words about that it would help me understand the internet better!
Google CEO Eric Schmidt To Step Down?
Galaxies Discovered in Their Awkward Teen Phase
landing pages for user signups,
homepages for media websites (nytimes and other big blogs),
email campaigns,
product promotions and offers or even defining pricing if you do a saas company
Well, what's the user story that you see for delicious? Pushing bookmarks to delicious before they expire? That's the only scenario I can see being worthwhile, but as someone who swore of delicious long, long ago, I'm definitely open to ideas here!
JSCocoa Interactive Console for iPhone
Is your business ecosystem cash flow safe?
I wasn't. Plain old Ruby on both systems, for the time being.
> only one branch is going to be the actual product and the other branches are wasted effort.

Not necessarily. Where I work, the primary software development happens on embedded telecom hardware, which is then supported for years and years later. We have many different current and legacy versions of the same codebase that are still in various stages of development, production, sales, and supprot. On top of that, there are multiple releases of each version for various types of customers.

Now granted, we don't use Git (or any sort of modern VCS/DVCS), but the need for branching is very real and does not always stem from whimsical developers. There are plenty of real-world scenarios where intelligent branching is a huge benefit.

Another situation I know of is the Mantis Bug Tracker project that I work on. We just recently switched from Subversion to Git, and we have three primary branches in our repository for the old-stable, current-stable, and development versions of MantisBT. We use Git's branching to allow us to work on large changes to the legacy codebase without disrupting the stability of the development branch, and Git allows changes from one branch to be very easily ported to parallel or older branches.

"Herding cats" seems like an indirect substitution for "I don't like branches so no-one should use them."
Switch Seamlessly Between Trident, Gecko, WebKit
Color Quantum-Dot Displays
Cisco shutting down for four days to save money
I am 'GeorgCantor'... I couldn't resist because Gödel's reply seemed lame. He just assumed the undecidability and used it to bang on about his own ideas.
But who wants to spend time contributing when there’s no money to be made or fame left to be had?

Yeah, who would? Open source is not about altruism. It's about either money or ego. If there are neither of those to be had, what's the point?

However, there is plenty of money and ego left to be had in the Ruby community. The last few years have been about "hey, programming can be fun." Most of us knew this already, but some people assumed that Java was all there was (thanks to JavaSchools). The Ruby community, I think, made it OK to use non-Java languages and still be taken seriously. But with that out of the way, it's time to get serious. It's time to fix the ruby's memory leaks. It's time to tighten up the libraries. People who work on this will get money and fame, trust me.

I have been doing Perl for a long time. Even though I keep hearing that it's a dead language, I know for a fact that there is plenty of fame to go around for library authors and people that work on the core. So there is no need to leave the Ruby community if you want fame and want to use Ruby. (And if you don't like Ruby, why not give Perl a try ;)

(I should also point out that it took the Perl community almost 10 years to get a really solid implementation that didn't leak memory (it took until 5.10.0). The Ruby community has a lot of work ahead of them.)
> What have they done about drinking?

You just can't drink and drive any more. I'm not saying it like it's a bad thing, but it explains why people don't go to bars after work as much as they did before.

Regarding smoking bans, I think owners should be free to decide if they want to accept or ban smoking inside their property. You'll have family-friendly places with no cigarette smoke, and adult-friendly places with no loud babies; everybody would be happy!
Their strategy is to be open enough so others can do the work for them.
I think they've held off and even cut some features until the core product completely works & the uptime issue is solved.
Trick question... (S)he celebrates festivus.

Honestly, anything from thinkgeek.com should be fun, but I love what is going on with the donations from those T-shirts.
I'm not the parent post, but I've never seen that picture either. I'm 26 with a degree in computer engineering and employed as a web programmer. Maybe the picture is a less common meme than you though?
It is not part of their recommended way to do things. They do not provide support and they may close this opportunity at any time, even involuntarily.
"warning: eroticism unused in function main".

beautiful :)
Very cool. This is surprisingly quick. Its also nice that it works with the scroll wheel. Makes zooming in and out a breeze.

It looks like its using one large image as opposed to many smaller sliced-up images. I'm curious how this would affect performance.
The response by KGodel was classic.
My father was an architect and he once challenged me to find an area of study that he didn't need to know anything about, and as of yet I haven't. Designing a church? You better know something of the religion. An arena? You should understand the sport, otherwise how do you optimize the sight lines? A pharmaceutical factory? You need a good grasp of chemistry to design a safe environment. And then there are the studies of human psychology and interaction that should help inform the design of any structure as well as your requisite art, history, design, math and engineering knowledge.
Some good points, but the article is a bit spaghetti-like itself, a bit too vague about what it declares.
Gilt Groupe in NYC is hiring both experienced candidates and recent grads.

http://www.gilt.com/company/job/1337

Email me at amanfredi@gilt.com
That depends on what you're looking for. If you're just looking for a stable job, you're right. If you're looking for a position where you'll have a better chance of being in a leadership position, you're better getting in early. If the company's already profitable, your chance of eventually being, say, VP of engineering, isn't great.
I'm going to sidestep ranting about ranting about ranting about Ruby. The linked article seems very common-sense to me. But then, I never was much of one for ego-contests. I did however find something worth discussing in the blog post. Let me quote:

For myself, I’ve been learning to program with a language that doesn’t make me want to cry. I remember doing C++ and Java homework in CS classes in college; I do believe I have post-traumatic Java syndrome. It’s unbelievable even to me that I have dared to get into programming again. But Ruby is making it easy; even fun. I’m happy to code with it, and I’m happy to be enjoying the amenities of the lifestyle it has provided for us.

These sorts of experiences give me hope for the future of this profession. I firmly believe that the culture of good ol' boys' clubs and bondage-and-discipline programming languages are fettering access to the minds and talents of too many promising individuals. It's a crying shame.
True, but I don't believe this has anything to do with the company being from any particular region. There are very competent development shops in India and very poor ones as well.
> You'll have family-friendly places with no cigarette smoke, and adult-friendly places with no loud babies; everybody would be happy!

Well, except you don't. Owners are free to decide here in Austria, and people smoke everywhere. We have located three places that are smoke-free here in Innsbruck: Ikea, McDonalds, and Burger King. People who are ordinarily very polite, always stopping at cross-walks and such, think nothing of lighting up in front of a pregnant woman or a baby.

I think this is one of the most interesting solutions I've seen to the smoking problem:

http://oxonomics.typepad.com/oxonomics/2008/02/the-economcs-...

Which would be more likely to create the outcome you cite than either a blanket ban, or no rules at all.
Cloud as a feature
Waiting for that life-changing idea? Just sleep on it
Yes, but it's very, very hard. It always was.

In da Vinci's time, how many people could imagine a flying machine in a time when machines of any type were extraordinarily rare and expensive?

In 2008, most people in the developed world have the opportunities to excel that were almost unattainable 500 years ago, so the standards of nominal accomplishment are higher. Developing blueprints for a new style of flying machine is now an amateur's task; to be a world-changer, you have to build and market one. Or for another example, to work at the cutting edge of physics, you'll probably need access to expensive resources so you can test and refine your theories. This means that a lot more time and energy are sucked up by unglamorous tasks (e.g. raising money, or proving yourself in order to secure access to the choice labs).

In the Renaissance, few had any opportunities to excel, but those who did could get started right away. In modern times, there are a lot more brilliant contenders, but it takes longer to acquire the material and social resources necessary in order to get to work on the front lines.

However, the standards of creativity and aesthetic genius have not gone up nearly as fast. Shakespeare would still be considered a great writer today; and da Vinci, a great painter.
German invite-only shopping community raises 10 mio Euro
There was absolutely no need to name those countries. As somebody said before, the funny thing about racial privilege is how hard it is to see when one is the beneficiary of it.
State Dept. taps Facebook, Google, MTV to 'fight crime, political oppression and terrorism'
There is fragmentation, but social capital also seems to change its manifestation. Communicating with your other friends via Facebook adds to social capital.
Are YOU suffering from Cyberchondria?
My father designs HVAC systems for nuclear missile silos. I was asked him about how the embedded controls software works, and how they handle error conditions. The biggest concern? EMP blasts. The solution? Mechanical failsafes.
Hey, here's an idea. Just go through stackoverflow, grab the most highly rated questions (check the badges) and post them here. Your karma will skyrocket!
Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode
One way to satisfy AlanT's spec is to choose a "non-standard" language to write this this "Bug Finder" for. If the language has the strong normalization property (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_property), then the requested debugger is quite simple:

(define (halt? p) #t)

(As for error checking, assuming this means, say, type errors, I think if you choose a language like the typed lambda calculus that's easy too.)
If they're going with the platform strategy, I'll offer an analogy: Windows has basic features built in like Notepad and Calculator, but that doesn't mean others can come along and build a much better implementation of these programs.

I fear they're running the risk of creating a platform that's too "bland".

[I like TipJoy BTW :) ]
It may be a little shortsighted, but it's hard to sum up all my thoughts in one textarea.

The long story short of it is that in my experiences, a real life discussion about music among 5 knowledgeable people always turns into a festival of egos. I think if you put it on the internet, it's going to magnify that worse than what you could see in the hacker community because everybody who loves music thinks they like the music they do because their perception is unique and more insightful than yours (I'm guilty of this too). We could talk music for hours but as soon as you namedrop that band that I think is trash, I no longer believe your opinion counts.

If you can solve that problem, then by all means, I'll be a believer. I think that's why last.fm is so good. Yes, there's alot of echo, put in a band like Mono into the 'radio station' feed without logging in and you'll see there's not a whole lot of variety. However where it excels is if you listen, for example, to a lot of classical music, when you put in a post-rock band, it will find the post-rock music that appeals to you as a classical music fan and will inspire you to dig deeper into the genre.

This is what I think news sites need. The problem with them is that as more people sign up, you see the lowest common denominator trickle to the front page. What would be better is if, for example, I'm a big rails fan and I upmod an article that shouts the greatness of PHP, I'd like to then start seeing more php related articles on MY (not THE) front page. Initially they would start off being very rails influenced, but as I upmod more php articles, the system would wean me away from the ror crowd and more towards the php crowd, unless I'm the type who only upmods articles titled "php is great when it's like ruby", in which case I don't really care for other opinions anyways, so who's losing?

... in a nutshell
Very cool.

Slightly off-topic...Just over three years ago I came up with names for my future products that all started with Snap. Only SnapLeague made it anywhere. But I still have other domains. I wish I hadn't named it like that though because Snap as a prefix and suffix is getting overdone now. Makes me wonder if I should rename an upcoming product to something other than what I had planned.
hmm, a good point actually. Forgot you remove stories after a week.
I currently tag my delicious stories that I need to read later with "readlater" -- if I could import those direct to your site that'd be cool. Not sure if I could get thru them all in a week though!
It's been good lately, except the search is having issues.
When I was reading this I was thinking, wow, this is a really good book review. Which, if you think about it, is kind of sad-- the fact that reviewers who are able to pick out the thesis of the book and its main arguments are the exception, rather than the rule.
I wrote the software behind SnapAds. Before that I wrote an optimizer service for web pages that operates on HTML, CSS or Javascript. Check it out at http://demo.genetify.com .

Let me know if there is any interest -- I'd like to open-source the project.
Designers and Developers, Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Building an iPhone web app with Sinatra and iUI