skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Git is actually as immutable as the next DVCS. Check out "git reflog"; it records the state of the repository for most, if not all, cases where it changes something around. Pragmatically, this allows you to recover from a botched rebase -i or something.

Where git differs is not in its mutablity, but in how it allows you to move around the head of a branch in a more free fashion than most other DVCSs. (I don't mean "more free" as a value judgment here, just an observation that it is a superset of typical capabilities.)

It should be pointed out this only address about a half of the objections you can raise for this re-writing; it is not true that you lose things because of the re-writing, because you can get them back from the reflog. But it is of course still true that history rewriting in the sense that most people mean it is true.

Basically, from a technical point of view this is a non-issue, but from a human point of view it still can be.

Personally, I'm willing to concede this is a powertool and perhaps isn't for everyone, and by the definition given it's not a "best practice", but I don't think I'm willing to accept that definition in general. I'd prefer something more relative to the local user set, not go for a global definition. Perhaps some teams would do nothing but shoot themselves, but in my experience with my team and the local related teams, history re-writing is a net gain in terms of how it impacts how we work. And it's hard to convince me of a point my personal experience doesn't correspond to.
Guy writes Common Lisp library to machine-tool casings for MIDI controllers
I'm in a bit of an opposite situation, I've been doing web development since high school (i'm 27 now), and am just now going to college for the first time. For a degree in religion of all things.

That said, I would never have gone to school for anything related to computers. I'm still not sure if I plan to continue doing development or go into something else completely, but I'm fairly certain that I could pick up more useful knowledge outside of school. Experience is huge, and at 3.5 years you are about at that level where it doesn't matter if you have a degree or not to many employers. I've worked with many coders with formal degrees, did well in college, but simply fell flat when confronted with a professional development environment. The best programmer I know personally has also never stepped foot in a college class room.

So my advice would be to stay away from formal education and keep coding. Do side projects when you can, You would be shocked how a weekend of toying with a new programming language will change the way you think of things and help your 9-5 programming.
For "simple [rdms] needs" I would recommend SQLite. For anything more, PostgreSQL. I find MySQL too buggy and it diverts from the SQL standard too often (or doesn't implement enough of it) for my tastes. A properly configured postgre install (granted, not exactly trivial) will perform at least as good if not better than MySQL and its advanced functionality is extremely mature and robust, unlike MySQL's which has largely been tacked on in the current major version (views, templates, triggers, etc.)
Key Lessons For Entrepreneurs
As a git user, I appreciate being able to squash commits together to keep things tidy for those who pull down my changes later — rather than seeing scattered changes that is merged with their own work, possibly interleaved with their own local un-pushed commits, they get one atomic commit for a feature.

That being said, I’m pretty sure Hg gives the same ability through the use of patch queues, which probably makes more sense.
From the little I know about of the Kindle architecture, it would be a simple software update to open it up. Right now, Amazon is making a hefty buck off only supporting its own proprietary standards. I'd imagine that Amazon is a smart enough organization that as soon as the business requirements change, we'll see Kindle supporting PDF, epub, etc., but while there is no market pressure, one can't hold it against Amazon from leeching the market as much as they can.
One thing to try might be to put together a portfolio of some kind. This way you can show people that, yes, I can do X, Y and Z and here's the proof. Good recommendations certainly don't hurt either.

I'm going to take a guess that just straight resume submitting isn't going to go so well. You'll likely get filtered out on the lack of college degree. This means you'll have to actively and creatively pursue getting in touch with a real life person to at least start the conversation on why you should be considered.

I kind of waffle on the more education part of the question. It really depends on where you would go to school. If you can get into a really good program, then it's well worth it as you'll learn a lot from the profs but even more from your fellow students. If you end up in a mediocre program, you'll probably end up frustrated like you did before. I wish I could give you some magical advice on how to determine a good vs. bad program, but I have no idea. (For myself, Ohio State was OK, I didn't put in enough work to get the most out of it. Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering was fantastic. I felt like the dumbest person in the room many times and that's great for learning.)
I think what he's describing is more common than you'd prefer to admit. It's not universal, but it's not uncommon either, so it's probably more accurate to say that he knows two men in the unluckiest quartile. That said, one can't always place the blame on the women deliberately changing into bad people after marriage; a more likely explanation is that the men ignored warning signs early in the process, because they were in love. The phenomenon of a relationship fizzling out and turning hellish is not unique to the US.

No one with a brain will say that all American women are bad. This country is way too racially and culturally diverse for a statement like that to be valid across the board. It's just much harder to find decent women if your selection pool overlaps significantly with the suburban American mainstream, because that section of society is a materialistic, vapid, and alienating cultural wasteland. Decent women exist everywhere, but the proportions are lower.
not all American women, just the married ones I know. Look I'll be the first to say, that based on the area that I live in the women are most likely slanted into the princess syndrome area. But that doesn't make what I'm saying any less true(at least for this area).

And yes they are spending all the money on themselves, they can do that, since their husbands cover all the other expenses.
They're all real, but it's easy to over-estimate them if you're an intelligent, reasonable, risk-averse individual (like most successful entrepreneurs).

Most of those are not "killer" issues, either, like the article presents them. They're just problems you'll encounter and deal with along the way. Being aware of them is worthwhile, but with the caveat that you don't need to resolve all that stuff immediately.

I mean, take the last few for example:

9. Are you a self-starter?

8. Do you have a concept you're passionate about?

7. How persuasive and well-spoken are you?

6. What's your track record of executing your ideas?

5. Are you comfortable making decisions on the fly with no playbook?

Sure, all those things help with running a business... but do you need to put ticks in all those boxes to start a business? Do you need to be confident in making decisions by the seat of your pants, have a track record of executing ideas, be a persuasive, well-spoken, passionate, self-starter before you even get started? Absolutely not. All that stuff will come with time.
Because in the context of the article, git fans can read the criticism despite "Schneier's latest cipher", it could be read as a wink-wink dig against Schneier.
you've just described described the source of the majority of humanities problems.
25 Things About Facebook's Value
Facebook had layoffs this year so that it will be profitable in about two. Odds are they'll survive. But they won't be as high profile as they used to be. It was a big deal there was "live news" coverage on Facebook through CNN in 2008 and 2009 with the election. Soon that'll be seen as a partnership as stupid as Yahoo! Music with RealNetworks Rhapsody.

My bet is Twitter. Its ubiquitous, and yet: useless. It's userbase is relatively small, and yet there's no good way to monetize them. Its provocative enough that people either love it or hate it, but not nearly useful that people will get an account just to have one (like richer social networks, where people joined Myspace/Facebook to avoid network isolation).
"It should not take seven years and a team of lawyers to open a small business."
Thats a great point and thats why I always take glorification of whatever society immigrants come from with a grain of salt. Immigrants are almost by definition more motivated than the normal people in whatever society they come from.
My first thought was actually "how does Dianetics even qualify for a nonfiction list?"
How about that they have a staff of 80 people, with the majority of them not working on something directly related to the site (Digg Labs) -- that's burning up all the site's revenue and profitability?

Reddit, one of their competitors, has a staff that probably numbers less than 10.
I noticed that, I have it on my shelf and I'm trying to convince my wife to read it. I've also been trying to get her to read Feynman's biographies, because I think he has one of the best thought-processes I've ever come to understand.
Women don't spontaneously mutate into bad women. The problem is likely deep, and societal. If it is societal, then we might (irresponsibly) say that the society produces bad women. If this is the case, then, speaking extremely, at some point you'll run out of the "good" non-native women, but the society is still a factory of bad women. Unsustainable.

This strategy reminds me of: we need energy; drill oil; oil dries; find new; repeat.

And never have I read someone talking about this, at least in regards to a sustainable society.
Ask HN: Please review our online collaboration chat tool - chatterbloc.com
Hi HN,

We'd love to get your feedback on a new chat and web sharing application called Chatterbloc that we have launched today. It takes chat one step further allowing participants to share links and view websites, video or flash movies together, at the same time.

The other part of this is the easy to create chat rooms (think of the ease of TinyChat), with features like Twitter integration, room history, live history searching, and of course the collaborative web sharing.

We'd love to get your constructive feedback on the app, we hope to iterate through new feature requests and bugs as often a possible.

Without further ado: http://www.chatterbloc.com

Thanks
Steve (http://www.reynoldsftw.com)
Just because something isn't easy doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. In fact, it often means the exact opposite.
How to Completely Scare Internet Noobs and Teach Them Something in the Meantime
Why you may never see Spotify on iPhone
Given a sufficient amount of extrapolation, everything is a waste of good talent. You wasted good talent by writing this comment, as I am now doing in reply to it. In fact, given your list of areas only, everything I have ever done in my life has been a waste.

There are a precious few people who have the talent and drive to devote their entire lives to the betterment of our world. The rest of us are just trying to get by, and have some fun in the process.
Most people have absolutely NO idea how much personal information they reveal when they visit websites, even if they don't register any of their details.

I am no noob, but I tried it myself, and even I was scared at how much information a website could gather about me without my knowledge.

The service is run by the nonprofit Internet Privacy Forum and is designed to educate ordinary people about online privacy.
I found Sabeer Bhatia's interview one of the less useful ones in the book, though it was still worth reading. He sounded too negative about VCs, became a Google fanboy for no reason multiple times during the conversation, and gave too much importance to the notion of the 'killer idea'. Compare this to (say) Mitch Kapor's interview, and you see two completely different personalities, only one of which I would enjoy working with.
If you don't mind my asking, where do you live?

I've been well-aware of the low average quality of American women since college. In high school, I expected them to have horrible tastes in men (pro-meathead jock, anti-smart guy) because that's what the movies told me was "normal" for HS. Actually, HS was not nearly as bad as I'd been led to anticipate. It was the realization that women's tastes didn't improve when I went to an elite college that led me to think something might be rotten in America. A semester abroad confirmed that there really is a difference in the average quality of women, and that the US comes up short.

However, this is an incredibly diverse country, and I live in New York. So, although the average quality might be low, it doesn't need to affect me and, since college, the problem has never prevented me from having a solid dating life in spite of it. Amazing women are definitely out there.
If you want to "stop reading websites and start doing things" though, you should be, you know, doing things, and not reading books. :-)
Sounds like a case of "if you don't like it, don't use it" to me. It's not like "--patch" was a mandatory flag.
Microsoft's stimulus plan: Train two million IT workers and Windows-aware individuals
He he, maybe this will finally scare my girlfriend into taking her online privacy and security a bit more seriously.

She still does not believe me when I tell her that people can see everything on your screen if you connect to an unsecured hotspot.
When Bill Gates told his son that he would have to start from scratch, I don't think he had _this_ in mind...
If you want Chicago-related news/announcements/weirdness my site, The Windy Citizen is (finally) starting to take off. http://www.windycitizen.com

There's not much tech on there yet, but there could be if local guys shared their stuff on there.

As far as I know we're the only local, social news site out there. Kevin Rose himself told me it was a lousy idea. I'm intent on proving him wrong.
You're right, life gets tougher for women after 30 but I am not following you in where does this benefit men?

According to your analysis a larger pool of men 21-40 are always competing for a smaller pool of attractive women 21-30, so if you're a single male, the ratio is always against you no matter how old you are.

And that's what I'm observing in real life. Perhaps I'm too young, but every public gathering I go to features a disproportional number of guys. And if you subtract overweight people from the picture, the ratio gets downright scary.
Leaving DreamHost
Long term? Not really... it's treading water. With either a product company, or a stable, steady job, you still make money when you go on vacation. Not so with freelancing. Unless you are doing genuine 'consulting', where you come in, give some advice, and get paid a crapload for it, freelancing doesn't really seem to be a path to anywhere. Generally, you have to be well recognized to get the really plum jobs, though... which is why you don't see many actual 'freelancers' who are older.

To tell the truth, one of the things that most inspires me about "the PG story" is that, at least from afar, he doesn't come across as a guy who wants to build and run a company for years, but who is good at building innovative stuff.
Most of the top 30 look like a recommended reading list from Mises.org. Not that they're bad books, it's just an interesting coincidence.
An In-Depth Look at jQuery UI - Part 1
I think most hackers would rather go broke than learn to speak corporate lingo fluently.
I was accepted for an interview and then funding last summer, but decided not to take it for various reasons. I wrote my advice to someone here on Hacker News, as you did, then expanded on it in a blog post:

http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/07/20/ycombinator-applicatio...
New Snow Leopard Images + Video
OpenJDK 6 Ported to FreeBSD
OpenJDK 7 isn't even done yet, and the FreeBSD geeks have already backported its changes into SE 6.
I live in NJ, so you being from New York can probably attest to the low quality of marriage material in the area. Not that it doesn't exist, but its more of a needle in a haystack problem.

So I find that its easier to date, at least that way when you both grow tired of each other, you don't lose half your stuff in the divorce.
Towards direct reading of DNA
I was working at a startup south of Market in SF during the dot-com boom and bust. Industry Standard, the TechCrunch of its day, had a billboard with an electronic tech news ticker that loomed large over the neighborhood and, TJ Eckleburg-like, over the startup scene at large. The day in 2001 when, walking to work, I saw that sign being dismantled was, for me, the day the dot-com era died.
Check out Slinkset (YC Summer 08) - lots of niche sites that are not about technology:

http://discover.slinkset.com/

(I started my own HN-like site for public corruption, using Slinkset: http://publicdime.slinkset.com/)

Also outside of technology, I read Universal Hub (universalhub.com) to get a handle on Boston-based blogs, but it doesn't have a voting system like HN.

In the tech sphere, I sometimes look at this one, focused on FOSS:

Free Software Daily -- fsdaily.com
I've watched this through it's development and various iterations and I can say that some serious dedication and work has gone into this. It's really taking shape - good work guys ! Good Luck !
Going back to school is kind of a reset button, and generally something you can only do once or twice. It sounds like your situation might make it worth it, but only if you actually want a reset. If you just want to weather the economic storm, 1.5-2 years might not be long enough. But if you want to change your direction a bit, either out of programming (sounds unlikely) or to get a more theoretical background (which you may have; some of your spelling and terminology is [are?] foreign so I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "technical school"), then go for it. Especially while you have no kids and no real expenses.

It also sounds like you aren't going to be happy if you're at a school where you're just an account number, as you put it, so maybe you should visit some schools and talk to professors and students. Then you can save yourself the time/effort/money of applying to, or even attending, a school that you won't like. Though this might not be practical for you if you have strict geographic constraints (e.g. you don't want to move).

Disclaimer: This is from the perspective of someone who went from high school to a four year university (studied CS) and then went straight to a CS master's program, which is where I am now. So I thought about some of these issues, and talked to a lot of people about them, but I don't have actual experience to justify some of the above. Also, I'm biased towards grad school, which is hard work but a hell of a time.
7 top 10's shared between Ayn Rand and Hubbard, there's no question if someone gamed the system it's guaranteed.

The readers version of the non-fiction list is so bizarre it obviously isn't a random poll. Like 80% of the list are political and exceptionally odd choices too.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm not from the US, but I've never heard of most of the books on the list and I'm well red. The books I have heard of are the political ones, most of which people I know would never dream of touching. I just have serious disbelief that so many Americans would read books from Rand and Hubble, yet in the fiction list there's like two mentions of genuinely famous writers.

The Radcliffe's Rival 100 is what I expect to see from a public list where Rand's publications are somewhere in the list, not clustered at the top. I mean why are all the classics like in Radcliffe's list missing from the public list when these are books everybody has read. I read a lot of these books in school, and I know lots of them are taught in american schools so why aren't they on the list?

I mean for fucks sakes, honestly why isn't there a book like Winne-the-Pooh in the public list?
Churn: does this keep you from hiring someone? I'm unfortunately just getting started, I've had a lot of contract jobs. When my job was done I moved on.

Gmail address: Seriously get a life other than worrying about who someones email provider is. If they have AOL so what? how does this affect the job they do for you, AOL allows you pop or imap right? (might have to pay extra) maybe they use a mail client... and because they've had it for so long they don't want to change. I'm not an employer (yet) but I really don't care what email you use to mail me, even if it's totally unprofessional/inappropriate. I'm going to give you a company email anyways, I assume you were just being efficient with your time and not going out of your way to make another email just to impress me.

Customization: I probably wouldn't reject a tailored resume, but to me this reeks of a person who wastes time on perfection. If you are seriously looking for work... you are probably emailing a lot of companies, tailoring for each one is just a foolish waste of time, there are better things you could be doing with your time, like learning something new. I'd make an exception for a place you really want to work, have inside info on, customer etc. but most places I've applied to have not made this list.

Email to the CEO: Really it's a good idea to waste the CEO's time? In a small business where the CEO is HR then it's fine. I think emailing the department manager that you want to work with is the right answer.

Numbers: the numbers this guys citing are probably BS, numbers like that are obviously made up, don't lie on your resume if you have numbers that you can prove you are responsible for, then don't list them.
Highly bothered by the 944x1384 image scaled to 200x293 with the IMG tag. Can't help it.
You can't be everything to all people.

Git is aimed at people who know what they are dong.

Others will benefit from a more restricted feature set.

The bottom line for me is, that criticizing Git for not being immutable is like criticizing Ferrari for being too damn fast.
Ok, but let me be devil's advocate, based on my experience trying to get everyone at my company to be more entrepreneurial:

* Some people suck at selling, and freeze up on the phone. They'll put off critical business tasks because they're shy or don't like feeling like whores. And they'll fail because of it.

* Some people (cough cough) are great at starting things but have no follow-through ability --- or, in our industry, will tweak and tinker endlessly but never release code.

* Lacking an actual playbook for "how to run a company", some people will hew to whatever received wisdom they find, and thus waste weeks getting 110% unit test coverage or waste tens of thousands of dollars hiring a human resources person.
This is such a tired argument. We all know these things don't really matter to the average consumer. It will be other factors that will determine it's success.