skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Git absolutely cares about files.

In a sense. A commit is not a set of files, it is one or more blobs and one or more trees (which may in turn point to one or more blobs or trees.) A blob does refer to a file, both in content and location, but it's the blob that matters. The OP speaks of the files on disk, which Git doesn't copy around. Git does, however, change the state of the working directory to that which matches the trees referenced in the commit. What I don't like about this is that it tries to make it seem like the files on disk matter in a way that they don't from Git's perspective.

> I don't understand your objection to this phrasing.

I had a chat with a coworker and he agreed that my distaste with the "current branch" terminology is perhaps misplaced.

> When used as "git checkout <ref>", this is correct, but that is not what the author is talking about. "git checkout <ref> <file>" or "git checkout -- <file>" does exactly what the author describes, copying files from the given commit or index to the working directory.

Of course, the files that are being copied are not the files that the OP is talking about. The files being copied are the trees and blobs, not the files in the working directory. The effective result is the same, but thinking in files on disk will not improve one's knowledge of Git.

> Only partly true, but true enough. The commit isn't irretrievably lost, but the reflog falls more under "advanced usage"; certainly a git beginner shouldn't be making detached commits and relying on the reflog to get back to them.

Shunning the reflog doesn't do anyone any good. The OP not even mentioning the reflog is in poor taste, and makes the statement in the guide untrue.

I did a bit of research into the reflog after some questions arose and should update my prior comment about it to say: Any commit that Git determines to be unreachable (a list of which that you can see with `git fsck --unreachable`) will only be removed from the reflog after both the reflog's unreachable expiration time has passed (by default, 30 days for unreachable) and `git gc` has ran. At the very least, without mentioning the reflog, the OP should state that unreachable commits will remain for 30 days.
We had formalised design patterns and architectures back then.

Yes, and many of them described in books in particular languages. Not every language community that could have benefitted had the right book written using their language.

Like I said, a recurring condition and an opportunity.
The Elastic Beanstalk is really more of an AppEngine competitive product/response. More customizable and only Java focused but automated instances the way AppEngine is. Now Google Compute equals EC2 somewhat (more focused, less options right now) but similar. Google Cloud Storage = S3.
Actually RIM pushed radio and mobile forward. Intel had to innovate on projects just to support RIM's early phones. Not to mention their work in networks with Telco's. They used to make phones that lasted for weeks always on....but I digress.
Foreclosure and starvation on the other hand....
>Good. Please steal! I want that for Python.

Yes but, want what? What does my little ipdb snippet not do that you want?
Laughable. A GB is defined as 10^9 bytes. 2^30 bytes is a GiB, or Gibibyte. Just because you don't use appropriate terminology doesn't mean that Amazon exaggerates.
Better link: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2012-06/msg0009...
This is a little facile.

Incubator programs can hurt your startup. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded 460 startups with only a handful of big wins. The rest have faded away, been acquired quickly without growing out of a feature company, or continue to hang on as zombie companies, which are not dying, but not really doing anything either. Who knows how many of these companies could grow into something bigger without the pressure of generating a return for early investors in just a few short years.

This is always going to be true of every incubator. No startup program can promise to vault a majority of its participants to Heroku or even Reddit levels of success. Similarly, the top tier of VCs famously get the best companies; what's the win rate at Sequoia? It's truism regarding the whole market that the success of 1 startup in 10 pays investors for the other 9.

Also, while it may be worth scrutinizing less successful startup programs, this advice...

Take a look at the list of current mentors on the program’s website, and try to identify businesspeople that you admire. Do you recognize at least 50 percent of the names? Are there mentors who have proven themselves in your industry?

... seems to miss a pretty important attribute of the successful startup programs like YC: they have vast alumni networks. Has Paul Graham started a successful streaming company? No; neither has John Doerr, Ron Conway, or Greg McAdoo. But I'm pretty sure Graham can get you a meeting or 10 with Justin.tv.
The point of Android OS isn't to save money, it's to win customers. I'm not 100% sure why people prefer Android or iOS to BBX, but I think it's partly just psychological. Whatever the reason is, I think Samsung and Apple are pretty happy with RIM and Nokia using a different (even if arguably superior) OS which don't sell very well.

RIM has over 1B cash, has about 16,500 (soon 11,500) employees. Most of their loss was from writedowns, so their burn rate might not be too bad. They might have time to switch to Android. They can't afford BB10 to flop, but I'm pretty sure it will (even if it's actually a great OS).

If they can loose some heads, and switch to Android, they might generate some confidence which could help them get funding. An Android phone with a competitive advantage (in some niches) over Samsung is something I'd bet on. A phone with a new OS in 2013 is not.
The objective of simplifying the UI is to reduce as much as possible what a user has to learn. The thinking is that the less a user has to learn, the more a user gets to do and as a result the greater satisfaction gained by the user. Satisfied users are good for sales, so UIs have been getting simpler to generate more money.

It's no surprise that UI simplicity deters kids from learning about how computers work, since UI simplicity is supposed to deter learning, or eliminate the need to learn as much as possible.
> Actual radians (ie not expressed as fractions of 2π)

I think this is the source of your problem: you view an expression like "τ/8" or "π/4" as less an "actual" radian measure than the inexact ".785". That's a function of how a lot of us were taught math, I think, and I'm quite sure that it's only made worse by the fact that the use of π camouflages the fact that this is related to fractions of a circle. But your premise is faulty. Of course radians expressed in decimal are user-unfriendly, but radians expressed in decimal are no less "actual" than radians expressed as fractions of τ or π.
Pivoteer skills
Debugging Core Data Objects
There's no way it can compete with AWS at the prices they have. The cheapest option they have is

n1-standard-1-d - a single core at $0.145/hr = $105 per month (that's not counting any traffic or storage).

At that price I can get an absolutely kickass dedicated server from Hetzner with 32GB RAM, quad-core Xeon E3-1245, 6TB space, 6TB of disk space, unlimited traffic.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6s
I meant a sympathetic view towards dingleberry was partly due to a dislike of America( government, corporations, certain people) and not because they think he is a swell chap.
In the early days, the News Feed was a full feed of all updates, much like LiveJournal's friends page. Why can't they return to its previous behavior, subject to the restrictions you specify? (e.g. unsubscribe from app activities).
Just because you "toss stuff out there" in the hopes that someone will "show you" doesn't mean people will.

Oh, and let me take another moment to call you out for your "corrupted image" BS.
The browser versions here are never mentioned, which means this is "multi-browser", and not "cross-browser" (a large difference).

Furthermore, the following snippets are simply false:

> But Internet Explorer is the black sheep of the browser world. If your tests fail in just one browser, well, you get the picture.

Funny how older versions of browsers such as Opera are never mentioned. IE versions 6-8 seem to be the only "old" browsers that exist. Which of course is because they're still in use. Myopia reigns supreme.

I've often found that IE versions 4-9 will point out errors I've made in my code, as the IE platform is far more strict than browsers such as Firefox, which scramble to protect bad code.

> Accordingly, automating testing in Internet Explorer is much more involved than any other browser.

As someone that tests in 20+ browsers, I spend a lot more time on Firefox versions 1-13 than I do with IE versions 4-9, especially with scripting. Nevermind Google Chrome, which makes testing incremental versions nearly impossible (and no, auto-upgrades are no guarantee).

> Getting automatic cross-browser JavaScript testing working is a complex affair, and bound to involve some amount of trial and error.

Conclusion: test manually. There are no guarantees.
Full Show 6/27/12: Impeach Scalia
Message passing between a UIWebView is already one of the big complaints, requiring slow and klunky workarounds. To receive a message you detect URL anchor (#foo) changes in objective C. Sending is a bit better (inject a js string).

I wonder if its possible to sandbox a thread as opposed to a separate process. I doubt that Apple consciously neglects HTML5 app SDK functions. iOS has been the best platform for HTML5 for a couple of years already, supporting features (CSS 3d for one) that Android didn't.
Can't imagine the amount of arm twisting that was involved in getting this into the App Store. Must've really come down to the ultimate "No Google for you" argument.
I don't think Apple succeeded because people were looking for a change. They just made a smartphone that was usable for regular people (ie iPod users).

Nokia could have done that too. Maemo was comparable to (or better than?) Android in 2007. If they had really understood what made the iPhone a success, they could have spent a year repositioning Maemo to be competitive with iOS, just like Google did with Android.

Of course, they didn't since they were already heavily invested in Symbian, and that's why they stumbled.
Then why require sign up?
If we're going to be decorating the tau anyway, let's do it from the outset so I don't have to figure out which tau they chose to decorate in this book/paper/whatever.
Even simpler than that, in iOS 5, Apple broke local storage (by putting it in a cache folder than gets emptied every so often), making offline HTML5 apps unworkable.

A cynical mind might think they did that specifically to keep HTML5 from getting any closer to replacing the app store.
Apparently he still believes the media narrative that the Arab Spring was a good thing.
New color scheme for Instagram
Your icons _must_ be (rounded) squares. You can't use transparency.
If you can get away with storing your data in the DOM, then go ahead. But this technique is mostly applicable to low-interactivity views (see the view layer overview chapter) - once you start displaying the same data in multiple locations, having your data tied to the DOM structure and state goes from being a easy technique to a complication. Hence I don't really consider storing data in the DOM as a single page app technique as much as an easy way to do low-end interactive components.
Next month for car phone warehouse:

http://eurodroid.com/2012/06/28/16gb-nexus-7-tablet-launchin...
I think the big part for me was BB10 being delayed.

BB10 is QNX, which RIM acquired 2 years ago. They were ready to ship QNX when they were bought, so the 2 year delay is just evidence of RIM's inability to ship on time.

Sad to see what was such a giant misstep so badly and so consistently. :(
> It may very well be, but having a monopoly alone isn't not a crime. A crime in this case would be abusive practices of the monopoly.

Like not allowing third-party browsers to compete with your own on anything remotely resembling a level playing field? That's what we were talking about here, remember? Apple won't allow alternative browser engines at all, and if you decide to build a browser using the engine Apple provides for third-party devs, it's worse than the one Apple uses in its own browser.

> Apple does not have a monopoly over the dominant operating system for all tablets, only its own. Yes right now it is the dominant product in the space, but alternatives readily exist with the same availability as the iPad.

Macs were not particularly less available than PCs in the '90s. I didn't know anyone who really wanted to buy a Mac, but just couldn't find one. They were just radically less popular and generally considered to be a bad choice (I liked them even then, but I didn't have a lot of company with that opinion). Much like non-iPad tablets.
Check out the new data visualization from Trulia on home price ranges in Washington DC
They probably don't mind neglecting it for apps.
Contextual Index of logfiles with graylog
Incubators are becoming more and more like a popularity contest where the outcome is a crazy valuation. To me it looks like a broken system or one that's going to break sooner or later.

I was planning to submit my application to FounderFuel, a fairly new accelerator in Montreal, and decided to wait a bit. I'm still not sure if there is any value for my actual project in that kind of thing. The main drawback for me is the difficulty to focus on coding during the session.

Is this a problem for anyone else or is there incubators with a focus on coding?
Darwin support... is that what it looks like? Can I boot OSX from Grub2 now?
New comments module as well, for example http://instagram.com/p/MbKoiuPdPD/
Chrome Claims to be World’s Most Popular Browser [video]
It has not been removed. I just installed it.

Use an actual link for the store, try this:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome/id535886823
App Store Rejecting Map Apps Out of Hand
Right: taste dependent. I see what you're saying on some of that, but others just sound ridiculous (e.g. Watching a movie on 10" is bad enough, but sharing the screen? Not in my lifestyle, sorry.)

And some of your points (non-mobile web, remote desktop) mostly just amount to "10 inches is closer to a laptop", which prompts the question of why bother with the tablet when you already have a laptop?

And the rest just sounds like fanboism: why isn't it "really fun" and "sci fi territory" to have a 7" screen that weighs next to nothing in your hands? (And as I stated before, I have to quibble with the weight comment: the iPad is definitely not a one-handed device; I get tired using it like that.)

I'm not really defending the "paperback" form factor, as I haven't used it. I'm just very surprised at the level of resistance. It looks cute to me.
Investment banks do serve a purpose though. If you need multi-billion dollar financing for a new project, the local credit union isn't going to help.
It's just semantics. Pi and tau are the same thing. You don't see physicists going around saying h is wrong and h-bar is what they need to use.
Well said. I'll add that this is true for all parts of life, not just silicon valley.

I can't recall a situation where I wish I had been less respectful of another person, but there's quite a few in which I should have been more so. This is probably true for everyone.
It's funny how that "functional" name calling appears so convenient if it fits the own argumentation. (Not considering that Scala is foremost an object-oriented language.)

Groovy is trying to play catch-up with Java currently (typing-wise) and I don't see how they will implement a modern type system in the next decade with the amount of cruft they have accumulated since Groovy's inception.

Additionally, Java 8 will ship with closures, so I'm not seeing where a niche for Groovy will remain.
The company appears to have the financial wherewithal to last for quite a while as it attempts a turn-around.[1] So I expect them to continue trying with the existing business model for at least a few more quarters before they give up and join the Android bandwagon or sell their soul to Microsoft like Nokia.

[1] The latest financial statements at http://press.rim.com/content/dam/rim/press/PDF/Financial/FY2... show that the company ended the quarter with close to $1,467 million in cold hard cash and $780 million in investments, and no debt (page 8). Moreover, all of the reported loss came from non-cash accounting write-offs and accelerated amortization; the company's combined cash and investments actually increased during the quarter, from $2,111 million to $2,247 million (page 9) -- that's right: they ended the quarter with more money than they started!
Yeah. One of the ugly little truths about PPACA is that it's really a terrible law even if (or especially if) you are in favour of a government-run single-payer system.

Given that polls indicate that even a majority of PPACA supporters are against the mandate, it's actually highly plausible that we're about to see a repeat of Washington's experience: a repeal of the mandate, followed my a complete meltdown of the healthcare system, followed by sensible reforms.

In which case, it's going to be a really bumpy ride, and today's decision is just going to prolong the agony a bit. But we'll see...
Well, that's a part of it but it can be relevant to performance. Cache behavior and branch prediction aren't very visible in C. There's also a lot of goings on with memory where C just says, "Uh, unspecified!", particularly with multiple cores and/or cpus.
It's quite easy to operate in retail and have horrible customer service.

A fair point. But there's a big difference between a company that has provided customer service from the very beginning (even if it was poor at times), and a company that for most of its history has made a concerted effort not to have customer service at all.
How do you tell when the news is biased?
The bummer here for Google (and anyone else who'd like to provide an alternative to Apple's apps on the iOS platform) is that there's no way to set your default browser. Or email client. Or calendar. It'll be hard to use chrome if Safari opens up every time I click a link in email or any other app.
Not really relevant anymore, but I have a 9900 in my hands right now and I think it's the best phone I've ever used. It has never crashed on me. Going on one month always on now. Keyboard is legendary, touch screen is perfect, browser is snappy.
I don't doubt that SD card slots and 3G radios would have made this a must buy for people, but the biggest issue from Google's perspective is the lack of Android tablet penetration. Android tablets fighting the iPad front have failed to get traction, so Google is going to Kindle Fire route: cheaper cost, quality hardware missing a few bells and whistles. Except in this case the OS running on the device is far superior the Amazon experience.
Nitpicky, but no Twitter or Y Combinator? That's not right. Also Hacker News started early 2007, so wasn't far off.
I know you weren't trolling, but I'm a strong believer in giving credit where credit is due. Thanks again for your comments!
Luckily, it does get an overhaul in iOS 6.
You are monomaniacal.
Google offering consumer surveys
It is a bummer you can't make Chrome your default browser. However, if you move Safari to a folder and put Chrome in your launch bar, Safari being default won't bother you too much.
Took me a few tries. For me, it said that the app couldn't be downloaded a couple times. I just hit "Retry".
Very good point. Back in the old days (pre-iphone), I remember the conversation was ... oh no .. the carriers won't go for that. I remember getting slightly nauseated when I heard the amount of money made by the carriers in selling ringtones. Also, cellular data in Canada was ridiculously expensive (probably still is). I remember it taking $10 to download a single page off of CNN.

On J2ME, the early model was ... you had to pay 2K to get your app approved by the carriers. I was giving away some free apps in those days. I remember politely declining the rep I was talking to and thinking FU!!! You want me to pay you to get a free app into your store? The store that has almost no selection? This is before Ads on phones btw. Still ... many people thrived in that ecosystem. Anyone remember sites like Handango? Heh .. those were the days.

So ... the carriers still live. They didn't get what they deserved. The people who catered to the whims of the carriers are the ones who paid for it. There is a lesson in here somewhere.
The 8G tablet is only £159 in the UK, or £132.50 before VAT (US prices typically don't include tax). That's about $205 at current market rates, which is as close to the US price as makes no difference.

Surprisingly, the UK is getting the same deal as the US this time round.
Same issue here too.
Pocket Casts Review
Goodnight RIM
Web Hierarchy is for Chumps – Here’s My Website Hierarchy
Highly developed personal brands are simply the future of SEO—because social signals will EVENTUALLY displace the link graph, and those Likes, +1′s and Tweets will EVENTUALLY become qualitative in nature. Long-running social profiles in Gmail, Facebook Twitter become gold.
You don't see physicists going around saying h is wrong and h-bar is what they need to use.

Sure they do—or at least, they did. Physicists realized that h is "wrong", i.e., confusing and unnatural, because it's off by a factor of, um, 2 pi. They introduced h-bar precisely to rectify the problem. And the substitution worked: if you open up a standard book on quantum mechanics, the ratio of uses of h to h-bar is just about epsilon. (You'll also see lots of (2 pi)s.)
It throttles if your cpu is at 100% for a few seconds. Must cpulimit heavy processes. http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instan...
That works great until you are subject to an intermittent network connection. Then frustration creeps in!
The Non-Overnight Success: How Twitter Became Twitter
It was pretty neat for me today. When I woke up my phone told me it would take approximately 18 minutes to get to work given current traffic conditions. As the work day was ending I got a card saying about the same amount of time getting back - though by the time I left the timer had increased to about 30 minutes.

I like this a lot, if there is an accident or something I'll notice via this card and potentially avoid it. Great potential here.