skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I don't mean this personally, but I'm getting a bit tired of git users pointing to the reflog as protection against data loss.... By default, this expiration time is two weeks."

So, set it to ten years, and lose nothing of interest. (It's not a Y2K-like problem because the value of a commit decays over time. Nobody will need to go back in time ten years to recover a commit that wasn't in the main line, because nobody will even know enough to ask a question that could be an answer to.) Does that answer your objection?

"This übercommit may still be sliced and diced back down to the buggy micro-commits that detail its dirty development, but, by default, will be presented as a single monolithic changeset to the user. No history is lost, and none is rewritten; you're simply altering its presentation."

You could do that with git now. Branch for every commit, and squash it back down onto the main branch. Tag the final HEAD of the branch and include the tag in your squash commit record, and you can use it to recover all the component commits. If it bothers you that git still won't understand what that means, you're just a couple of shell scripts away from having the functionality fairly well supported.

(git, thanks to its heritage, shell scripts fairly well, and of course anything else that can do "shell-script-like" things (Python, perl, etc.) can handle it too. We have several simple scripts that sit on top of git and help us impose policy on our branch management. So, I'm not terribly sympathetic to criticisms of git that are one config change or a quick shell script away from being fixed. Although, probably not for the reason you think; it's not because I think those who don't customize their VCS is automatically a lazy developer, it's because everybody has their own unique needs.)
Sure you could. You could have built the web and everything you needed and then written your app :)

"Development is faster" presumably means "relative to what people are trying to do". That's the sense in which the OP uses it, because he's talking about development going faster per project. The concept is problematic since what projects consist of has changed as much as everything else has.
It certainly was good, but, no.

Benjamin Button, without-a-doubt, should have taken cinematography.
I agree - Although the quality may be slipping, I still find the site useful enough to check it out daily in my news/info gathering routine in the mornings. If something interests me, I'll read the full post (which is becoming rare now days).

A while back I had sworn the site off because of link baiting headlines and the fantastically smarmy tone of some of the stories, but hey, there is still an occasion nugget or two.
Twitter could put search on every page (Twitter Search), generate 100 million searches/month and then put search ads next to them.
Won't work. Companies like that don't tolerate competence and creativity. Good developers will be beaten down by insecure and technically incompetent managers, even worse when you involve same from other departments. Requirements documents, high level design, low level design, review by the barely computer literate, turf wars, budgets that dont include your tools, internal standards, methodologies, and consultants. Sometimes even food on the table isnt worth it. Moreover the recruiters will recognize that the good programmer will be gone in 6 months and that will be another recruiting fee down the toilet.
I'd be really interested to know if any of you guys manage to find further exploits. Thanks!!
Learning to build or repair a car would probably improve your understanding of thermodynamics, aerodynamics, momentum, etc. Likewise, writing a computer program that simulates the motion of a planet around a star or renders 3D graphics might improve your understanding of classical mechanics and any number of topics in math, just to name a few examples; cf.

http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful...

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Classical-Mec...

http://www.amazon.com/Turtle-Geometry-Mathematics-Artificial...

This is not to mention that learning how to program a computer is just another tool to put in your bags of tricks for solving problems in any of the domains you mentioned (some better suited than others, of course).
What kinds of ads would appeal to people searching on Twitter? I've never done a Twitter search where a paid ad would have made much sense.
I'd pay $10 a month for Twitter no problems (only if it was for multiple accounts though, I have a few!). I've seen a lot of people say the same.

Twitter is monetizable - it doesn't need to be "useful" in any productive sense. Flower shops are still in business but they just flowers. Jewelry stores are still in business and they just sell pretty rocks.
Style is not a matter of control, it's a matter of consistency. There are many, many areas in English where there is no clear rule as to what's "right", so to ensure consistency style guides make explicit what a given publication will do in that instance. Numerals for example, are often written out one through nine, but digits after that. Others will always use digits. Neither is "right", but consistency matters.

As for the quotes, I suspect you'll need to unlearn that rule. I'm not even sure how you got there, except perhaps by misunderstanding the rules for nested quotations, Eg:

"She was absolutely furious, she shouted, 'I hate you' and then ran off," said John

(If it helps any US readers to understand the British usage of plurals, think about the police. You wouldn't write "Police says it has arrested two suspects, but it is still hunting for two more", right? That dissonance is exactly the same as how US usage of the singular, particularly when it comes to music groups -- "U2 says it will tour in the fall" -- sounds to Brits. )
Sync Google Apps Email, Calendar, Contacts To T-Mobile G1
APIs aside, I'm really struck by the lack of professionalism on behalf of the Facebook employee the author mentioned.

I'm friends with several Facebook employees and several times I've seen this type of behavior (mostly through notes that the employees share to gripe about what they perceive to be an obnoxious userbase). One of the more inappropriate exchanges I remember was where a user sent an admittedly hostile complaint to Facebook and the employee sent back an even more hostile response - in which he mentioned that he had checked out the user's profile, noticed he was a Christian, and then proceeded to mock him for it.
The liberating effects of losing control
5 Year Old Facebook's 4 toughest Lessons
Google makes $4 billion in profit on $22 billion in revenue. I'm pretty sure they're not going anywhere. They're more like Microsoft than an internet company now.
"The 2F5 antibody is especially valuable because previous research has shown it can successfully neutralize 80 percent of transmitted HIV viruses."

Wow, this is great news. Although they've only found one person(!) with said antibody, this is great to hear. Perhaps we'll have a vaccine after all.
Probably the people you want to work with won't mind, and people you don't want to work with might. I'd be careful who I sent that to if my goal was to be hired at all costs. (I don't know what your goal is.)

I don't think it would bother me, but you'd probably get an eyebrow raise from me from a guy whose handle appears to translate to "Aliens blowing up the Earth". I'm not sure I can promise that I wouldn't have at least a bit of a negative subconscious reaction. I mean, I live on the terra and all... :)
Hi Cosmo,

Thanks for your concern about HubPages. I personally don't believe in jinxes and even if I did, I'm not sure I would agree with your reasoning.

Are you saying that you are so sure of your viewpoint that Web 2.0 is dead that anyone who is doing well is lucky and if someone (me) takes this luck for granted, then the luck will go away.

HubPages is doing well because in this economy, revenue sharing web sites are a great way for people to make extra money. As long as businesses need to advertise and as long as online advertisement is a critical way to do this, web sites like HubPages will do fine.

Business model is key. Jinx is irrelevant.

-Larry
Does culture effect online behaviour?
In my view and in my experience, many of the comments on this particular article do represent the general public out there.

The roughly same comments are found in this thread on Hacker News.

We are unfortunately still living in a time when many people are not open minded.

-Larry
>On the flip side, companies make themselves very, very difficult to sell to

I think that is a MASSIVE point which very few people realise, until they go down that path. And then they are grumpy and don't want to talk about it ;)
I'm not clear I follow your logic. If you are focused on monetization, that just means you have a business plan with a great monetization story.

To get from a Business Plan to a staff, office, and working product, you need to get some moolah. If just a small amount of money, then you don't need VCs. Angels or bootstrapping will do. If you need a large amount of money, then VCs are the way to go.
There seem to be many articles of this sort that are around in various places. Why do they insist on using feel good adjectives in lieu of "you have adhd like behavior, here's what works for me to function well"?

The window dressing makes it had to pay attention to the ideas in these articles :p
Lawrence Lessig did a speech a while ago about the read-write web:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbRE_H5hoU

In that, he talks about how, when the phonograph came out, people were up-in-arms that it would destroy the performance and enjoyment of music as a social thing, which clearly happened. The music world is changing back to that again, and I'm kind of glad.

Also, he does a bitching powerpoint.
Sorry chap. Mike was the kid who was picking on you in school.
I'm not a fan. The new packaging looks like it contains a liquid I should be pouring in my washing machine, not my mouth.
I'm willing to host a South Bay one sometime but I have a day job so it'd have to be an evening or weekend. Email me if you're interested (email's in my profile).
I've also had some pretty terrible times working with the FB api.

To find the silver lining, it made my app better. Being forced to deal with frequent errors and service interruptions caused me to think carefully about error handling, and that work benefited every piece of my app.

I was cursing facebook's name though, every step of the way.
Good article by a defense attorney on Torrentfreak: http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-understanding-f...
I saw that and wondered why they didn't just include the entire Feynman Lecture series. The list wasn't supposed to be the most approachable non-fiction books. But then "best" is vague enough to be interpreted that way, I suppose.
Tell HN: Your startup's blog should have a link to your homepage
Your startup's blog should have a link to your homepage.

It seems obvious, right? But three or four times now I've read a post at some startup's blog and got interested in what they do, but I couldn't quickly get to their homepage – there was no link!

Make your logo link to your main site. Don't make it link to nothing and don't make it link to the first page of your blog. I am usually interested enough to hack the url, but it shouldn't be that hard.

(I was prompted to write this after reading the Heroku blog post about instant deployment and not being able to get to their homepage. But like I said this is definitely not the first time I've seen this.)
I present to you Chris Anderson, as theorized about by himself:

The way Chris Anderson has traditionally published is unsustainable in the face of new developments,
as outlined in this misleading neon spot-color info-graphic! *(not pictured)*

In the face of such a massive increase in critical attention towards my trite editorial, the way I
have traditionally published cannot continue. Each new dalliance I put on the cover of Wired is now
savaged for it's idiocy by domain experts before it even appears on newsstands!

How am I supposed to get an advance on the book version of my pop-science pablum if I'm not showered
with uncritical adulation? How am I going to debut on the NYT bestseller list in four months if I'm
already discredited?

Clearly, I need to develop a *new kind of* [1] Chris Anderson. A totally new model of exerting my
bloviations on the world. I need to find a way to publish to smaller, more sycophantic audiences in
private at first; gradually sowing my trite theories into the public discourse so that they are not so
easily mocked for what they are.

I need to explore the depths of my own *long tail* -- I need to expose my genius to my *social graph*
first. Publishing straight to the cover of Wired exposes my ideas to public ridicule by practicing
experts -- if I could limit my audience initially to *self-facilitating media nodes* [2] like myself,
I might be able to ride a wave of sycophancy right over any criticism!

I, Chris Anderson, hereby usher in a new age of post-pop-science! Jared Diamond and Malcolm Gladwell
don't stand a chance against my cunning insights into this world of post-hype I herald!

[1] http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1579550088

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4mpJumHU-w
No, I disagree. The function of a resume isn't to represent you, it's to qualify you for further relevant attention. Thus style may disqualify you without justifying your relevance unless the position itself requires style. If it does, then what you should be submitting is a portfolio and an audition.

This is congruent with why it would be offensive to ask for a resume from somebody you know well. Somebody you know well would have already qualified for your attention some time in the past, and asking for a resume would trivialize that relationship.
> My 'enterprise architect' has never even used Java 5 (her excuse: she hasn't had any training for it yet).

Training! Twenty-five years ago, the vice president of the engineering consulting firm where I worked got some bee in her bonnet and announced that the "staff" needed some sort of "training." Being young and politically foolish, I glared at her and said, "Training is for chimps. And don't call a room full of people with engineering degrees staff."

I have no idea what your 'enterprise architect's actual abilities are, but the poor gal talks like a chimp.
The Importance Of Knowledge While Selecting The Auto Insurance Policy
So in Rails best-practices, you'd still have 3 "languages", they'd just be spread around in 3 files.

I'm a Haml fan, so I'd have a view template like:

= paginate(@employees)

%ul
- @employees.each do |employee|
%li
= employee.first_name
= employee.last_name

and then a helper to fill out the "paginate", or some plugin to handle it for me, and finally an unobtrusive js file.

So I get 3 languages. The only real WTF I see here is the "onClick", and for an example in some documentation about a framework, its forgivable. Could also be broken up into separate files, because the pagination part is a bit complex for a view. Again, though, its a documentation example, on the paginator helper, no less.
Small print on the image says, "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By..."

I love it.
Every Lisp hacker has written their own version of XML as s-expressions. Here's one that actually has users other than its implementor:
http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/SXML.html

That snippet would look like:

(a (@ (href "http://news.ycombinator.com")) "News for" (b "Hackers") "!")

I'm an Emacs user, so paren-based navigation, highlighting of areas within matching parens, and concision because of the lack of closing tags wins for me. Maybe for somebody using MS Notepad it wouldn't be so great, since they don't have paren-based editing features so closing tags may actually be useful.

The snippet you showed is so small that XML's verbosity doesn't become a problem, so it doesn't really matter in this case.
Bioinformatics only caught on around 1999/2000. When I got into the industry there were very few people who knew their way around, especially from the programming side.

I've done a lot of nano over the years (before I ever did bio), and there is a lot out there, but nano in the nanomachine sense is still a pipedream and will be for a long time (IMHO).

On the funding side, the funds are there for sequencing, Genome Wide Association Studies, etc. Bioinformatics is part of that effort, and critical, but not directly what the funds are for
I'd have to agree with you there. It reminded me of some freshness and they did some good for the packaging, in my opinion. I might just go out and get a carton myself, for posterity, since they're discontinuing it.

It kinda reminds me of how when facebook changes its interface, people bitch and moan, for about a month, and then, they kinda just forget what it was like before.

This thing with tropicana just sounds like people resisting change, for tradition's sake, rather than evaluating the new thing on its own merits.
Google aren't going anywhere but what about YouTube? They recieve around 13 new hours of video every minute and that's just uploads! The storage and bandwidth costs must be horrendous. I just can't see how the very light amount of ads they serve could possibly cover the cost of such an operation.
This is a very good usability guideline. Make sure the sites under your own control link out in ways that help your other sites.
Reddit has 6.5 (one part time guy).
Hear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with copyrighted music in the background.
This was part of the point of Naomi Wolfe's book The Beauty Myth - that our "standards of beauty" are dysfunctional and "the system" is, as you put it, "a factory of bad women." Many survive and thrive despite the faulty process.
Its good for meat and potatoes description of how to use caching, but not complete by any means.

In particular it seems to not mention a lot of the gotchas: do you have a URL like /sales/report?year=2008 that you want to page cache? Gotcha! That is going to get saved at /sales/report.html and next time someone requests /sales/report?year=1952 they're going to get a report bitwise identical to 2008. Probably not the desired behavior.

The Rails Envy guys have an excellent caching tutorial on their site covering action, page, and fragment caching.

http://www.railsenvy.com/2007/2/28/rails-caching-tutorial

This predates the addition of Rails.cache in 2.1, so it doesn't cover that.

Fun stuff, though. I finally broke down and started using the memcached integration last night, as my new stats pages require repetitive expensive computations once for the page itself and once to produce the JSON for the FlashOpenChart on the page. It positively screams now.
Those guys have style, and always have.
Thats MPAA/RIAA's fault. They spent so much effort enforcing bullshit aspects of copyright, that they lost the goodwill of people to enforce the non-BS portion.
Ask HN: The best way to convert paper drawings to digital images ?
I am making an application for exchanging virtual goods. I have someone in the family that is very talented and can draw pretty much any form of art on paper. However, I want these drawings for my application. What is the best/easiest/cheapest way to convert these images to digital format ?
This is (mostly) how the Australian immigration system works. It's a point system which is weighted towards the young, healthy and skilled. People with certain in-demand professions (eg doctors) can get in relatively easily.
Is a desktop a desktop computer[1] or the desktop metaphor[2]? Anyway maybe a real world test of active Internet users (e.g. daily or weekly) would be more interesting than a survey (if less flattering).

You previously claimed[3] that "Sometimes multiple implementations are useful, but the unique value in SWF (and, to a lesser extent, PDF) is in the predictability of its rendering." PDF's far from dead so maybe now's a good time to open up the player side of Flash a bit. Otherwise you may well find an increasingly large percentage of the tens of millions of netbooks built each year shipping without it.

Sam

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_computer
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_metaphor
3. http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/06/apple-working-on-adobe-flas...
I dunno about saving a couple engineer's worth of money -- that's why Rails is massively viable in the first place.

You absolutely can iterate faster with fewer people and less wasted time.

Servers are cheap. People (salaries) are expensive.

(Well.. until servers become expensive due to straight up load/scale, that is.)
You are dead on about Europe and NJ. Nothing worse than Jersey dumpster diving, especially when you are unaware that is what you are doing.

Some friends of mine went to Europe and came back with 10s, all of them. The most shocking thing they told me was that to talk to women there...you don't even have to have anyththing, you can just be you

Unfortunately, I learned too late. For all the young college guys out there having a hard time, take heed. You get a dilution hit cashing out now, just hold onto your stock and ride it through. Time is on your side.
I'd kind of like to see the reverse. A bot that posts twitter posts (by a group of users) to IRC. If it already exists, great. Otherwise, I'll whip something up later. :)
I had a top of the line Garmin model which quickly noticed when you ignored a direction, and re-calculated the route in less then a second.

Until it got stolen.
Interesting commentary on the Gaussian Copula Formula in 2005:

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/09/gaussian-copula-and-cre...
Videogame Technology Helps With Disaster Modeling
Absolutely. I've come across so many startup blogs with great articles, but clicking the startup logo/name takes me to the blog homepage. Give me a link to your website homepage instead.
Some of the Garmin units come with a wire that hooks into your car that allows for "dead reckoning" by watching your speed and braking pattern, so it can keep up with you when you're going through an area with no reception.
GNU Bash 4.0 released with some new features
No, it's our fault for having an archaic copyright system that people are still trying to enforce instead of fixing the root issues.
The Index Funds Win Again
Whenever I read an article in the newspaper, I have to remind myself to filter it through the lens of all the times I've been misquoted or have caught glaring mistakes in stories about which I have first-hand or subject-matter knowledge.

As much as I depend on the media for information about what's going on in the world, I rarely can point to articles about subjects I know and say they're accurate.
35 million netbooks will ship this year, and that's set to rise to 139 million by 2013[1]. Say some of the main models were to ship with Android[2], or even a webkit-based or Firefox 3.1 (coming soon[3]) browser... then imagine that sites like Facebook and YouTube were to start serving up the VIDEO tag to compatible user agents. All of a sudden there is a lot less incentive to fight with binary flash plugins (when everything else is open source).

This could well happen virtually overnight.

Sam

1. http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1355-35+Million+Netbook+Shi...
2. http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/asus-developing.html
3. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/Schedule
For the vast majority of people looking at that claim the message is "Flash content reaches 99.0% of Internet viewers".

Sam
Russian version -- http://spring.jumpidea.com/post/80938207/paul-graham-13sente...
Microsoft considers building a new browser from scratch
Immigration policy by the US is, and has been for the past 200 years, determined by populist racial attitudes.
to help the iphone?
A scanner? If you want it vector then use illustrator to vector-trace it...

There are far too many options...
Understanding Swap Files in Linux
Right now we're estimating that our Rails premium = 4X the salary of a San Francisco engineer. But we do have a lot of servers.