skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i prefer hg too.

cheap local branching: there's bookmarks, there's named branches, and there is mq. one of the cool things about mq is that the patch queues can themselves be an hg repo. so if you're using a patch queue like you would the git index, you can 'push' that state somewhere else as way of backup. can one do that with the git-index? (if you rsync your tree, get ready to rsync huge pack files everytime they change .. see below)

everything is local: this is the exact same thing on git and hg. hg incoming means check another repo for incoming changesets. ergo it needs to contact that repo which need not be remote.

git is fast: we have our source tree in hg and git. ~10k files plus binary stuff. no one notices any difference. on windows, hg is faster.

git is small: maybe so. but you have to remember, (and perhaps understand) about git-repack and friends. hg, is like a self-cleaning oven in this regard.

staging area: if one needs such a thing, there are mercurial queues. if you dont, it's not in your way.

distributed: yes. hg is distributed. that's why it has commands like incoming.

any workflow: same thing in both.

github: http://www.bitbucket.org/

easy to learn: git is easier to learn than mercurial?

ok, now here's what i don't like about git:

storage: it's annoying to have to setup git-repacks jobs for each repo, but that's fine. the real killer for us is that it kills our incremental backup strategy. every time you repack you create a new pack file (in our case huge) and you have to back it up again. in mercurial you can back up the files that changed.

bundles: git now has them but they started in mercurial. i'm putting this down because there seems to be this perception that all the cool stuff happens first in git.

index: fine after you're a pro, but we have had accidents. learning curve is a bit strict with git.

documentation: better in hg. much better actually.

git has gone through a lot of interface changes. is cogito still in use? and then they broke renaming at one point. i'm sure these things are fixed, but we've had no such issues in hg thus far.

in the end they both rock, but i prefer hg.
I my self can be exceptionally lazy when I'm not doing something that involves creative thinking.

I tell you though, lately iv'e been feeling a little down due to pressure at work and iv'e just read pg's new essay and this one. Just reading the first words of pg's essay cheered me up. when pg talks about programmers, there's no worldly spirit in what he writes. You don't see words like professional, certification etc. He writes like a kid writing about his favorite hobby. This article actually saddened me. Like its been pointed out, you really feel the author squeezing the fun out of programming. It reminded be of the stories in the Bible with the Pharasees and Scribes. They put on the outer mask of religion but rejected it's inner power: The Holy Spirit. Similarly, there has to be that inner love for programming to make good stuff.

I'm not trying to say I think the guys wrong or a "Scribe". I just think that its sad that he talks about it in such procedural way. I would hate programming if I thought like that!
"I like my word and my signature on a contract to mean something, if only because that has value in future negotiations"

Hey, now you are implying that my signature on a contract does not mean anything and that, that is how I prefer to run things. We are talking about ONE certain contract...and in this case, it involves a month-to-month contract.

As for negotiating earlier, again, you sound like you are reading from a college textbook. Nothing wrong with it, but I run a start-up and things are not usually as perfect as books may make it seem. ie. We did just as aggressive negotiation at the time of signing up and got the best deal in the market at the time. Also note that at the time the server was given to us, the host had put in money that they had yet to recover. When we went back to renegotiate, that cost had been recovered.

"Why sign a contract and then renege six months in?"

Usually because some unexpected variables change. Happens all the time, especially in a start-up. And right now, in this economy, even more so!

Lastly, your point that you should negotiate just as aggressively at the beginning is well taken. However, doing that and re-negotiating to get the best deal at all times are not mutually exclusive.
This is precisely why I suggested doing a commit after every sequence of adds and removes.
True...but he'll just be trading off the cost of homework, for the cost of supporting himself. Personally, I'd kill for the kind of free time I had in college....
Why do you ask my country? Why do you want to confirm my email? Just trust me... Don't make me go that extra step, it just puts up another wall for me to climb before I get to try your app.
Well its about time they tell us - not that anyone couldn't tell you the same thing. Experts, sigh.
"(Linux grew even faster, up nearly 16.9% for the month, following a 22% drop the month before.)"

This casts serious doubt on the accuracy of this survey. The article is scant on details about methodology, but the anomaly is probably indicative of an unreasonably small sample size.
Be notified as soon as Google Chrome for Linux is available
If he wasn't profitable and was blowing VC cash it'd be different. He's spending money he earned.
i agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average? that's too much.

and i don't see any evidence that leah had that much to do with pownce's features. if her blog is indicative of her code, my first guess is the other pownce people were doing all the work.
convergence; when i cease to have to ask myself which competing urgent task i will complete, i will finally have peace of mind. is it too much to ask to lead my own startup and have only one job?

after that, i agree with others that it is nice be able to ignore money -- to me that again speaks to peace of mind.
Yes. There's nothing wrong with posting the same point on two sites, if you use two sites. And while this comment is excessively long, it's not nonsense.
Wasn't that what happened when Web2.0 was first starting? IIRC, the poster children for early Web2.0 successes were:

* Flickr (Vancouver)

* LiveJournal (Seattle)

* Del.icio.us (NYC)

* 37signals (Chicago)

* Friendster (Silicon Valley)

* MySpace (Beverly Hills)

* FaceBook (initially Boston)

There's a pretty good geographic mix right there, even among unprofitable ad-supported startups.
What was wrong with the CouchDBObject?
but that is (one of) the point of the index. that you can build of to a clean changeset to commit. hg mq is easier i think.
bonsaitree said water at room temperature. The vapor pressure of water at room temperature is around 25 millibar; nothing "local" about it.
They would be abnormal, but not egregiously so, especially if you were careful to change accounts periodically, or perhaps just paid off a better hand a few times for posterity. What tipped them off in the first place was people playing every hand preflop in a tournament and winning.
There are existing templates available for complete websites that use php and mysql for online jewelry stores and they will be far less costly than hiring a programmer to build a custom website. Have you tried using google?
Keep in mind Joel might have gotten his hands dirty at other times as well and kept it to himself.
Please, I don't want to have to sign up!
Heard of Dilbert?
Pownce wasn't different enough or better enough than Twitter for users to be willing to give up the critical mass of users that exists on Twitter.

Plus, they were competing with a bunch of other companies trying to beat Twitter.

How many Twitter clones do we need, really?

(Note the irony in this post: a me-too post about a me-too company)
Paypal also has a browser plugin which will generate a one-time Visa card number, for use on sites which don't accept Paypal.

I hear there are some sites on the Internet which take Visa.

This instantly solves a pressing issue for many 13 year olds, namely, how do I pay for my WoW account? And now Ebay will happily take, hmm, about fifty cents of every month's bill. Oh, want to order from Amazon? You can do that, too. iTunes? You can do that, too.

And when you get to 18 and can finally get a real honest-to-God debit card... why bother? You know how to do things via Paypal.

I think this is brilliant. (Note: no financial interest in eBay, aside from moving five figures through Paypal this year.)
It's a buck! Why does everything have to be free?
Android app market doesn't yet have a glut of todo list apps the way the iPhone does. It might be worth grabbing some land in an as yet undeveloped market, rather than being the 148th todo list on the iPhone.
Ask YC: Know any tools that help facilitate MySQL to Postgres migration? 
Hey guys,
I've been pondering on migrating our web app's current database from MySQL to Postgres. We still have a small pool of users for the mean time so I decided that the migration won't be as painful. A cursory google search did not yield the results I was looking for. What tools do you guys recommend to help facilitate our move from MySQL to Postgres? Thanks!
The most beautiful useless webapp ever. seems like it does the same thing as tadalist
"Good Programmers are not lazy"

But a Great Hacker is a really really creative lazy creature
You could set one up for yourself at shopify.com.
Perhaps I'm young, but right now I can't imagine not having free time. I mean, no matter what I do, I want to make sure that I'm doing it by choice. The only thing I don't like is being put on rails and made to do things that I don't see the point of.

Right now, I'm learning Processing in one class. I'm not learning anything new about language: I already know Java. Processing isn't used as much, and from what I've seen it's not doing anything that I want to do. We learned Scratch, which is a childish language, and ActionScript, which I've already worked with. I love learning new things; what I don't love is being in a place where I'm not learning and have to do busywork, while I have an idea and think I can mess with it. If that goes wrong, I'll know enough to find a program that teaches me exactly the thing that I go wrong with, and next time I'll be more prepared.
shrugs.

I've written a lot more code that's both more convoluted and didn't work. I'm not judged for this, because I don't often talk about it. But people should have the right to be occasionally mistaken on their own blog! I don't think the presence of such mistakes takes at all away from accomplishments.

Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence? Of being an impostor?
FYI, she updated the code linked in her post after some comments. You can find some bites of the original code in the comments though.
Nah. I'm going to public school. But - I said this before - the problem I'm having is that I don't see the purpose to the specifics of the things I'm doing. It saps me of some motivation when I'm doing things that not only aren't productive but aren't learning.
I don't think it failed, necessarily.

But if you're asking why Pownce never approached Twitter in popularity, I think that the case is the purest expression of network effects that you can find. That's not the whole story, of course, but it's most of it.
There are quite a few of these aren't there?
Mac version:

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/mac.html
Three Ways to Beat Burnout
Because (some) people are less interested in "microblogging" than "twitter as a platform". Pownce didn't have a useful API. At least not one that I ever found a use for...

And because people thought of it as a Twitter competitor (yes, I realize I just did this above), where it was more of a Tumblr competitor with a worse interface, ads, and paid subscriptions.
Because of this, I just signed up to try it. I'm going to be honest though: I wouldn't have without a private repository. I like to version control my homework, and obviously it's against school policy to publicly post solutions to homework. If this works out I'll end up paying for a micro plan, but I never would have even given GitHub an opportunity without a private repo.

Of course, that's just my opinion. :-) You may not even be targeting students anyway.
There needs to be a tl;dr analog for "Takes too long to figure out what website did; didn't use." I propose

tl;du
For Mercurial, there is TortoiseHg:

http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/
Japan Airline's CEO Slashes his Pay Below the Pay of Pilots
Yes I think the real lesson is "servant leadership" - what Joel (and Michael) did wasn't just a hollow corporate gesture (as it would appear if this was done in faceless BigCo as a matter of policy). But Joel is often like that, taking on the dirty tasks, building a installer for an app (cause it was grubby work that no one else could do, and he had some time) - I think its this consistent "servant leadership" that adds weight to it. And I massively respect that.
I agree. But it is also funny.
Users don't care about a better interface. Examples abound. The few that do will love you, but even a social site cannot run on love alone.

Users don't care about star power. When I think of Kevin Rose--or rather, when I think of Kevin Rose and am not overcome by waves of nausea--terms like "star power" and "geek cred" do not appear in my mind. Aside from Digg users, he has very little impact, and even among them, it's not much.

Users don't care about your revenue model. The few that do are the ones that don't approve of it and will ditch you for it.

Users don't care how much press you get. If it's a social site, your users are your press.

Users don't care about having more features. The few that do are a waste of your time.
Code-cracking and computers
"Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence?"

Yes.

I am not trying to be nasty here, but code like that makes me cringe. And yes, if I saw code like that, I would make a strong presumption of programming incompetence.(which is all right. Not everyone has to be a good programmer. As pxlpusher notes above, "get it done" competence is often more valuable).

Since it was publicly posted code, I don't see a problem with "public judgment" either.

"Of being an impostor?"

No. Programming Incompetence != Being an impostor. Anyone can be genuine and incompetent in a particular skill.
Southwestern Discomfort
1) I can't believe I clicked that link.
2) There is no way that guy is 6 feet tall.
Not to sound too condescending, but part of the goal of higher education is to expose you to things for which you can't see an immediate application. Your perspective is small; your professors' perspective is much larger. They're trying to teach you concepts, not languages.

That's not to say everything that you study will be meaningful and exciting. There's tons of busywork in college (especially in the first few quarters, when they're bringing the slow kids up to speed), but that's life! If you think you're going to escape busywork by starting a company, you're being naive.

More to the point, if the stuff you're studying is so boring and unrewarding that it makes you want to quit, then you've got plenty of time to work on side projects while things get more interesting. That's where the free time comes from!
Saw it coming from a mile away, before it came near. Nobody can write that much about 4chan without doing it.
So... banks do add value to the economy. They efficiently allocate capital. Quite a few banks nowadays may be overpaid and badly managed but that does not mean that there is no productivity in banking and finance and it does not mean that banks are useless. Financing and banking are critical portions of any well-developed and advanced economy like ours.
Most of what you do in a company -- startup or otherwise -- is boring schlep work. If you don't have the tenacity to put up with the relatively small amount of tedium that a university doles out, you're going to be in for a shock when you enter the business world.
Never underestimate the importance of luck. Right time, place, etc.
Six Apart seem to have voted with their pocketbook.
Perhaps. My immediate thought at launch was no Brit was ever going to use it due to the similarity of the name to "ponce."
they are lazy, and that is why they work hard to engineer the best solution so that in the future they won't have to do so much maintenance to the system and scope changes and future additions will be easier.
i agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average?

I like beautiful, elegant code as much as the next person. But I've done worse than this, often on purpose, in the name of just getting something working.
Just use Ubuntu, things pretty much work. For any reasonably sized project there is someone else who has already made it work.
The WSJ should be embarrassed at its [reporter's] inability to grasp simple stats and probability.

10% of the Fortune 500 are run by Harvard grads. Harvard's classes are about 1600/a. Just the Boston area has around 250k students. Let's assume only 160k of them are undergrads.

Even within Boston, Harvard is over-represented by 10x!
Since it was publicly posted code, I don't see a problem with "public judgment" either.

So judge that code. There simply isn't enough information to presume programmer incompetence (let alone make a strong presumption).

In my experience, code reviews are humbling to one and all: Bear that in mind before you raise charges of incompetence.
> if one needs such a thing, there are mercurial queues. if you dont, it's not in your way.

Very true. Mercurial's design puts most of its non-core functionality into extensions (which are easy to ignore if you don't need them), and has a clean setup for adding new extensions. How does git handle that? I haven't looked into the git source lately.

And regarding "incoming", the article says that git has a separate command (fetch) for caching server data, i.e. if there are incoming patches, when connections are available. (According to git-fetch(1), fetch looks more like pull without updating/merging locally. Unless I'm misunderstanding things, the comparison to hg's incoming is probably a bit of a stretch.)
I remember last year sometime I was at a friend's place and he had DVDs for some of the early seasons, including the one where Conan O' Brien was one of the writers. Watching those, I was amazed at just how much better they were than the latest few (several?) seasons.

Although it's perhaps admirable that the Simpsons have survived so long, I'm of the opinion that good series should be killed before they get bad. Too many shows' reputations have been destroyed because they let them drag on too long, way past the point where the show's writers run out of ideas.
Let me rephrase then, Java saw mass adoption from unskilled programmers similar to VB. C++ has always been big among skilled programmers, but skilled programmers are not the masses. Compare C++ numbers to Visual Basics numbers and then tell me C++ had mass adoption. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
I wrote a hn-like social news site in a week, and I'm sure that others could do the same. That's the easy part - the hard part is getting users.
Programmers with CS degrees are not the masses.
I never really associated TWiT with the success (nor afaik has anyone else). Diggnation was ranked pretty close in the early days of itunes podcasts.

I tend to associate most of the success with Paris Hilton and Yahoo ;-) In case you weren't around in Feb. 2005, her cell phone got hacked and someone put up some pictures and contacts on their site and then submitted it to digg. It got indexed by yahoo and ended up as the no. 1 and no. 3 search results for "Paris Hilton Cell Phone." Once we got the site back up :-( we discovered our traffic had increased drastically.
Vuvox Brings Rich Slideshows To eBay Auctions
Leah Culver is hot. Problem solved.
The Incredible Shrinking Consumer Electronics Show
"In my experience, code reviews are humbling to one and all: Bear that in mind before you raise charges of incompetence."

Sure, but as someone said above

"I agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average?"

We'll have to agree to disagree on whether code like this indicates programmer incompetence. To me, it does. YMMV.
They get to pretend to be relevant again.

They get shiny PR-magnet people as employees, halfheartedly using Vox.
11". Bit small for a TV.
Perhaps I'm alone in finding a 1,448 word dissection of comedy rather absurd.
If Pownce was doing well, they wouldn't have shut it down.
To Shop Non-solo on Cyber Monday is Quite Poetic
Was going to post about the advertising competitors thing. Even if it is sending you some cashflow still not a great idea I would think.

Also, the app interface doesn't seem to match the signup process. Seems kind of weird.

Nice clean app though.
You can build one with Slinkset in 10 minutes.

You're right though -- getting people to USE it is the challenge.
Same experience here. I launched OnSingularity.com a while back, and I ended up spending more time on marketing than development. What I learned from the experience was that there is still potential for niche social news sites, but it takes a really long time and dedication to grow the community beyond the tipping point. Unless you're someone with an already big following, then it's easier.
"... Because it simply doesn't matter that much IMHO. A startup doesn't succeed or fail based on which RCS it uses, it may fail if it doesn't use any at all ..."

But you are making a statement not using good tools and it might be harder to get good hackers.
Clojure is neat and all, but I can't see it being anything but a proving ground for some more esoteric technologies or methods. Lisp has been around too long to get mainstream acceptance and the "power vaccum" of which PG is fond of mentioning is marginal these days due to Ruby, Python, etc. Clojure has the attractiveness of running people's existing infrastructure (i.e. the JVM) but its nowhere near being alone in that regard. Its neat but don't look for it to be a world-changer.
A quick review of his employer:

http://www.fsmlabs.com/

and his publications and talks:

http://www2.fsmlabs.com/~cort/publications/

might give one a better idea of where he is coming from.

I have a hard time believing that Mr. Dougan has ever written any end-user business software. He also shows his ignorance when he claims that certifications such as the MCSE are "good beginnings". These certifications often prove little beyond one's test-taking ability.

I do not dismiss his views in whole. There is certainly a lot of incompetence in the industry. Many CS programs have been dumbed down to increase admissions. These topics deserve consideration and discussion.
Isn't UDP, by definition, unstable packets that could be dropped at anytime?
For an entrepreneur, building something this visible is a success. It'll build their reputation.
Lisp has a REPL.
Keep writing like this for 20 years, unalone.
http://unfuddle.com/ has free private repos and they support git
Little Known Ways to Ruby Mastery by Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Until Sunday, Try Out Any Paid GitHub Plan Free For A Month
On Reddit, it was after somebody said something like "You don't understand the jokes." I wanted to make a comment similar to the one I did there on HN, but I had a longer version quickly on hand, so I looked over it, rewrote a bit of it, and posted it as a comment. I didn't expect controversy.
Original sale: http://github.com/blog/247-cyber-monday-sale