skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree with the purpose, the git CLI interface is pretty inaccessible to non-developers—more than it needs to be.

But you're totally right about the implementation. This just adds more commands under the git namespace, muddying the waters as much as providing a simple interface.

If the goal is to make git for mere mortals then what is necessary is to create new porcelain from the ground up and call it something other than git. That's a lot more work obviously, but git internals were defined to enable just that! Then in the fine print you could say "oh btw there's git under there for anyone that needs it". That's my idea, but maybe it would be better to just use Mercurial?
It's not really a decision that can be well reasoned when considering how it will affect the rest of your life, because there's so many ways it can affect you. You might meet your wife. You might meet your start-up co-founder. You might learn some nugget of philosophy or history or something that changes how you think, or influences a critical decision later in life. There's no way to know. But not having that exposure will surely not benefit you much at all.
Sococo, but I work there (architected the client engine).
Why does twitter need so many employees? I could see like 50... Nothing has changed in years there, they have 1 product which is posting 140 characters. Everything else is pretty basic, just big scale. I don't get the need for thousands of employees.
My first thought was "oh god, here we go, someone had to make this argument eventually..."

But then I glanced at the screenshot, and to be fair, it... feels wrong. Something about it doesn't quite sit right. Hmm, it gives me pause for thought.
Though can you opt to take these classes? That's the whole point, using the opportunity to broaden your own horizons and do what YOU want.

If all you want to do is follow the script or syllabus, then yes, skip college.
off topic, but Jonathan Ive looks really out of place on that page with all the others smiling... I wonder what they just told him?
That's easy! It's cygwin's :-)
This is great news for the Berlin technology scene, if for the halo effect alone (big brands attract big talent). Berlin is indeed a great place to live, and I think a lot of companies will follow suit in the next few years.

Accordingly, rents will continue to rise sharply and all of the qualities that initially made Berlin an above-average-attractiveness choice for employees and employers alike will eventually evaporate - but that will take ten years, and lots of people and companies will build lots of awesome stuff in the interim, all while saving tons on rent and other living expenses.

Give it a whirl! 'tis a fantastic place. Ping me when y'all arrive.
At my uni (Cambridge) you do your first year of CS in conjunction with another subject, for exactly this reason.

FWIW, I did Physics, but I definitely regretted not picking Psychology or Economics..
well, something that I can operate entirely with the keyboard would be good. Something that doesn't introduce 2-3 seconds delay between operations, due to page reloads.
For an example of the latter: http://moviepilot.com/
Unit-Test Patterns for .NET
"Those people who studied this their whole lives and have degrees and papers in journals don't know more about this topic than I do."

Just because you've studied something your entire life doesn't make you right 100% of the time.

"All those papers published in science journals are by Democrats!"

The problem? Many scientific studies are also political in nature and slant to one way, which is why I start to question many of them. I can see the bias 10 miles away and most people just read it as fact.

You make it sound almost like a religion: I'm not to question the supreme leader (people who are smarter than I am because they've studied a topic their entire lives), I just need to follow it. I will never think this way. Sorry.

I am in no way anti-intellectual. I just refuse to be force-fed things by people claiming to be smarter than me.
I've always wondered why language designers don't strive to optimize for the trivial cases. There is a natural way to design code for a beginner, and having that map to the most efficient constructs seems to be one of the areas of programming language research that is lacking. Maybe it's the need for the 'sufficiently smart compiler' that is holding things back, but given that PLs are abstractions, couldn't the underlying abstraction be completely different than the user visible abstractions?
>I think if you were to ask most 30-50 year olds if they could drop most of their current responsibilities (with impunity) and go to college full time, the vast majority would.

No. Especially not in the "Information Age". This from someone who continues to learn every day, to steal a quote "a day without learning is like a day without sunshine". When you ignore the social-club elements of college and focus on academia, there is never a moment I would drop everything and go back to college full time (or any level of time).
Some disciplines wound up having lots of handy LaTeX macros written to handle things that are common to the kinds of papers that get written, as well as there formerly being the requirement that papers be submitted as LaTeX documents. More the first reason, I think, tended to encourage LaTeX usage for a while. Once you got used to it, LaTeX really made it faster to get what you want without having to fiddle too much with the formatting.

I know I spent a lot of time with qtree, gb4e, and pstricks.
The real name is what people who live there actually use. You only sound like a twat when using Eire, or calling Irish "Gaelic".
Do > tell

Write > read

Think > speak

Left side matters more
Reminds one of another TV based interface... http://www.tsgmoc.com/NintendoWii/Images/WiiHome.jpg
I trust the average teacher more than I trust the average school administrator. I don't want to give the average school administrator tools that would allow them to remove above average teachers.

Most of these blunt instruments will catch just as many good teachers as bad ones.
Smithsonian Brings Classic Arcade Games to Life
Indeed. Even though the liberal arts survey classes everyone was required to sample were by their nature superficial, they did provide at least some exposure to a world wider than engineering and math.

I remember my American Literature class (at an engineering school), the first day the professor asked everyone to name the last fiction book they read. Every single person in the class, every single one, named a Tom Clancy novel. There was a benefit in pushing the horizons here.
Great stuff:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Ask HN: Signup Conversion Rates
Whats a good conversion rate for free signup forms? Obviously a huge range of factors will effect this but Im wondering what's good? What have consumer apps like twitter and facebook achieved and especially compared to enterprise apps like Box or Yammer?
Tulsa chapter 7 Bankruptcy Law Firm
Colpitts Law Firm helps people when debt becomes overwhelming.
that's all dandy until you run our of RAM, as everything is done in RAM and nothing to disk. you honestly don't see a scalability issue here? it may be ok for a few thousand concurrent downloads but anything above that will kill it. heck, you might not even get to 1k concurrents, depending on the file size..
he's also the only one wearing a t-shirt.
You forgot 3.b) Somebody else posted links to show that these photos where not from a few nights ago, but from 2 years ago.

"Bad journalism"? It is what it says it is: reporting of a major rumor that goes around Weibo. How is that not news worthy?
I second this, why not just use eg?
This covers only x8_64
For once you'll read a much more balanced and informative coverage of the same "news" on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/24/jobs-apple-tv-margolis/

Seriously, try it out. It goes beyond the link-bait headline ad actually gives some real information.
Liked the post a lot, there are a lot of things wrong with the investing and valuations frenzy these days. Personally, I was wondering whether a hybrid model is possible: while I do wanna grow organically from the profits of my company, I'm likely to need some initial funding usually in the seed range
Most Interesting / Well Done Google+ Ad Yet.
> How a language can be faster than C?

Turtles. Turtles all the way down.

Translation: If your language is "Turtles" then you need to use "Turtles" all the way down the entire stack, and that includes your "Turtles" CPUs.
AFAIK it's -e, not -E.
"? extends" is a cool question because even if you know nothing theoretical about generics, you can figure it out with a few hints because it does have an actual underlying reason.
Or you can't - even with massive hinting some people are just afraid to guess and reason. So it's a nice test.
Why ConTeXt over LaTeX
>If the answer is "panic", note that exceptions are superior here, since exceptions let you "panic" without having to litter your code with those calls.
If the answer is some form of "log an error message", exceptions are superior, since you can group multiple related calls into one try-catch block and avoid having to check at the site of each and every call.
If the answer is some form of "return a different error code to your caller", exceptions are superior, because you can catch many different types of exceptions in one try-catch block and re-throw a different exception.

How about locally handling the problem --which could be some non-issue-- and continue without the OVERHEAD of an Exception?

How about now using the verbose and convoluted try-catch-finally idiom for common and not at all exceptional error conditions?

How about THINKING about the error handling, instead of blindly catching "many different types of exceptions in one try-catch block and re-throw a different exception", which we've known for Java to result in a mess...

How about avoiding the exception stack penalty that happens when you "group multiple related calls into one try-catch block and avoid having to check at the site of each and every call" to merely log errors?
Heh, you could easily DoS a Canadian home internet user (not mobile) by transferring a massive amount of data behind their back. So many people here are stuck with 25GB/mo limits.
This is often overlooked, and is the reason I live here. My 1750 square foot penthouse apartment is $1400/month— including heat. Try that in any other world-class city!

The move from Manhattan nearly blew my mind. With transatlantic round-trip flights around $500-600 when booked properly, there's little reason NOT to live here. I save more than that on rent each and every month, not to mention groceries.

PS: Not that you said it outright, but neither Berlin, Hamburg, nor Munich are in the western hemisphere. UTC+1 baby!
The only reason I don't quit and go back to grad school full-time for a few years is that I can't afford it. I have a family to support now, and so doing that would be the height of irresponsibility.

It's not that I don't learn every single day now, because I do and I love that. But I can't focus single-mindedly on learning stuff because it's either cool or a stepping stone to learning cool stuff. That's what I miss.
I really like http://path.com. It's very simple, but the videos tell you the whole story. The same landing page looks great on the iPad and iPhone.
It's just part of the prescription though. The idea is to use GHC profiling code to find the real bottlenecks and then use techniques like stream fusion to cause those inner loops to compile to near C-optimal assembly.

That said, it's a tough process.
In the design of Rust, as a rule of thumb, we've always tried to make the simplest code also the fastest code, to minimize performance footguns. (Writing the Rust compiler in Rust and constantly running it through Instruments.app helps to keep us honest.)
I know regular expressions way better than most people I come across and I still never feel to good about my command of the more 'esoteric' features.

Having a version control system ( something that more people will use more often every day than regexes ) compared to them, is not a heartening thought.
Matt Greens' goal is to walk every street in New York City
If you treat your time in university as job training, then maybe it's not worth doing. But if you treat it as a time to learn about a whole lot of new things - including all those core subjects that so many 19-year-olds gripe about - and a time to dabble socially in environments you might not otherwise have, then it's a different matter.

The post makes reference to the author enjoying being part of a fraternity. Indeed, his blog subtitle is "the musings of an undergrad fraternity man". This is part of his identity for the moment, and now he wants to walk away from it because it's not helping him careerwise.

TL;DR: if you think education is just about your career, then you missed the point somewhere along the way.
The problem paul is that this same level of criticality isn't enforced uniformly. Many, if not most, of those same people who doubt anything that comes out of Harvard, MIT, or CalTech as Democratic propaganda will cite Rush Limbaugh as a reputable authority on virtually anything. CalTech says that a certain nuclear facility has problems, Limbaugh counters by saying, "If that was the case why are most of the people in the nearby city still born with 10 fingers. Clearly those at CalTech are lying."

I don't know if Wiles did or did not prove FLT. I've seen the proof, don't understand it. Do I believe it -- I believe that a good faith convincing effort has been made. For most things I know in life that is also what I believe. I haven't confirmed really anything about the periodic table or much about quantum physics our sun or even more basic things like the gravitational pull of things not as large as the Earth. I do generally believe what others have told me (and the fact that they "say" they've done experiments), especially if they have a history of telling me things that are consistent with other things in my life.

And to be clear it's not about people claiming to be smarter than you. It's about people who have consistently shown that they know more than you do about a specific topic. Of course if you must prove using standard levels of scientific proof everything all over again then I'd love to see your lab where you've done this work. It must be huge.
Since he's specifically saying that he does scientific computing, PyPy is not a good suggestion. Pretty much all of the codebases of the stack for scientific computing can not be used in PyPy, and this will most likely not change in the foreseeable future since porting them is non-trivial.

I'm not trying to talk down PyPy here, but for this domain of application, it's not appropriate at the moment.
There is a certain gloriousness to waking up WELL-RESTED at 3PM after a long night of hacking or clubbing, having a leisurely breakfast, and then hopping on IM with your colleagues in EST5EDT that just rolled in to the office at 10AM. Or maybe that's just me.*

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_sleep-wake_disorder
I welcome all attempts to create a better UI for git. Perhaps legit isn't it. Don't care. Eventually we will get this right.

I prefer git's internal branching model and few other features to mercurial but I really prefer the UI to git.

Keep it up people, eventually we will have a better ui.

All that said, I'd encourage people who are doing it, to not add the 'git' namespace. Create your own and just use the internals. Systems that add new 'git *' commands are just confusing an already confused situation.
I love D
I have to be honest, the writing quality of that article is so low and aggressive that I could not even finish it.
Munich is stuffy and expensive, Berlin is comparatively poor and open verrrry very late. The game hasn't changed - it's just a totally different environment, for vastly different hiring objectives.
Any chance that this can be used via a webcam (take a shot once a face is detected)?
Perhaps because the 'squashed' proportions of the icons are inconsistent with every other iOS icon and the OS X dock? They also don't look fully baked...
I believe they do optimize for the simple cases, but just in very different ways. Haskell optimizes for composition, abstraction and expressiveness in a function-application sense. C optimizes for imperative loops, simple functions and controlling your memory layout and execution precisely [There is probably a better characterization of C, please comment].

I think there are plenty of tricks involved in writing performant C code that aren't obvious. Things like cache behavior, memory access patterns, etc. The job of the compiler and PL is to help us by making it unnecessary to worry about such things unless we really need to.

It's a testament to the power of modern programming languages and computer speeds that there are many programmers who don't understand registers, caches, assembly, virtual memory, etc.
The colourful buttons, with their cheesy 2006 aqua reflection; near invisibly thin highlighting of the current section; too many colours not inline with Apple's increasingly monochrome designs; the reflective posters from the same era etc.. There's a lot of things not to like about that UI. It definitely feels like another Apple knockoff.
>I think if you were to ask most 30-50 year olds if they could drop most of their current responsibilities (with impunity) and go to college full time, the vast majority would

Where do I sign?
Josh, I applaud you. Don't let the people in this thread, your parents, or anyone else tell you differently, either.

I dropped out of college when I was halfway through my second year to take a full-time job in tech. I left that job less than a year later and started my own tech company. I ended up selling that business for $1.1 million when I was 26--when most of the people who graduated high school when I did were still in school!

Running your own business, especially a tech company (when you're already geeky), is some of the best education you can get. My parents cut me off financially when I dropped out of school. My mom told me it was "the worst decision I'd ever made."

But something strange happens: When you are forced to succeed, you often do. You make ends meet. I consulted building shopping carts and CMSes for customers in this new language called PHP (4.0 had just come out!) for the first couple years of running my business. Those clients became my first hosting customers, and then my tiny little hosting company beat the odds to become a Silicon Valley success story.

Now I'm doing it all over again with another startup. We have 4 full-time people here in Austin, TX. Three of us have no college degrees. But I'm pretty confident things will work out even better this time.

So avoid the naysayers, find your role models, and be driven to succeed. Start your own business, learn sales and marketing, and then hire the guys right out of college and have them work for you. (They're good folks.) And never look back.

(Here's my full story [written as of 2009]): http://www.erica.biz/2009/the-end-of-an-era/
On that side note, does anyone know what ever happened to Goldman Sach's special vehicle for outside Facebook investments? I.e what stops companies from setting up their own vehicles for the stock options of their employee's to avoid the 500 rule?
À quoi peuvent ressembler des aptitudes entrepreneuriales chez un enfant?
À quoi peuvent ressembler des aptitudes entrepreneuriales chez un enfant ? Le lancement de la nouvelle campagne de promotion de l’entrepreneuriat lancée par le ministère du Développement économique, de l’Innovation et de l’Exportation auprès de la jeune génération m’a soulevé cette interrogation. Les deux principales vedettes de cette campagne, les hommes d’affaires Louis Garneau et Dominique Brown, des entrepreneurs qui avaient des aptitudes entrepreneuriales dès le plus jeune âge.
As an 18 year old and soon-to-be-graduated senior, I am nearly at a loss of words in response to this article. He left high school with little practical knowledge ("HTML/CSS and some Photoshop skills"). To think of jumping into the real world with no experience and no skills? It just doesn't seem wise to me.

I'm going to college next year, and I'm glad. I'm in five AP classes this year, and I've taken four already. To think that I am educated enough to end my formal education here...well, it seems insane. I have much more to learn, and I can learn it in college without worrying about deadlines for jobs that will allow me just barely to make ends meet.
As I recall the written portion of AP science exams was like this. No prose necessary - you could just write a bullet list of the required facts and get full credit
That argument says that we should never codify abstractions built on top of pre-existing lower-level components. Not sure I can agree with that.
The benchmark is pretty simple and artificial.

I think what we should be looking at is that the performance can asymptotically approach C, where C is used because it's the closest to the theoretical optimum assembly that is still practical for writing large programs.

If a language can get arbitrarily close to C in performance, it starts to become a much better design trade-off to use.
Interesting comment. Would you say that your classmates' parents thought it was important for their children to be educated? What do you think were the major factors motivating your classmates to learn?
The important bit is that this is THE core abstraction used in node and the node community. If for no other reason, you should do it (if you're using node) because it's how you hook into the existing libraries.

The main benefit here isn't that it's possible to do this thing, as many people pointed out the myriad ways this is accomplished elsewhere. The key point is that everything that manipulates data, node core as well as the userland libraries, implement the same interface.
Two years ago I had to make a similar decision compared to what the OP did. I was about halfway through a top US university degree as an international student but suddenly excrement hit the fan, in the financial sense. I was faced with the choice of finding work in my home country, or spending another year trying to get enrolled at a university in my country that is worth going to (there aren't that many around here). Out of a whim and despite my lack of real world experience in software development, I posted my resume around and got a temporary job. It led to a better job, which led to another better one and another better one.

While my classmates are graduating this semester, I got to do real world software development, most of the stuff had to be learned on the spot. I frankly don't know if the outcome should I have sticked with college would be better than the path I took, but my choice certainly has been worthwhile. In terms of theoretical foundations, I admit that I'm lacking some, but I constantly supplement it with reading (and this recent wave of online courses has been great!) and self-studying on the side, most of which I try to apply immediately at work. I hardly think enrolled college students get to do that and get feedback from real users (instead of professors/TAs).

On the other hand, most prize the concept of college-life, dorm-life etc, which is great. I did have the opportunity to experience some of that. The problem is when people think that getting into significant debt and the uncertainty of not being able to be employed upon graduation is worth more than doing something else just because society dictates everyone should go to college, then something is wrong.