skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Between `git help -a` to see all the available commands, and `git help <command>` or `man git-<command>`, I don't see how Git is any worse than any other VCS tool. Git is extremely well-documented, and even goes so far as to provide ASCII-diagrams in the docs to help you visualize what certain commands do.

Or are you just being picky because Git doesn't name everything exactly the same as other tools do?
You failed my first test. I tried to load test my start-up - www.trailbehind.com - using your free service. However, it said I had already tried to load test my site and it failed.

I went through your registration process, and got nothing. Very disappointing - the type of thing that will make me never look at your website again and scoff about it to my friends should they bring it up.

And a couple other nits:

1) Your registration page where I choose my plan type is not intuitive. Maybe it's because green is not a good color to call attention to stuff.

2) Your Register and Cancel buttons should be different colors. I clicked the wrong one and had to redo my registration.

3) Don't ask for number of employees and industry. They're not required and they will hurt your conversion rate slightly. And it indicates to me you might sell my data.
I had to fire up Firefox.
The Chinese facebook (xiaonei.com) is another good example of this - it started as a complete facebook ripoff, but has now gained more momentum than facebook has in that country, and is evolving its own feature set.

This goes to support the point that, for the next while at least, "me too" business models WILL work in developing nations.
Asus may put Android on netbooks. One question: Why?
> There's been plenty of outrage to go around: Some parents are angry to see teens criminalized for simply being sexual, while others find the raunchy shots pornographic, another blinking neon sign of moral decay in a "Girls Gone Wild" era. In both cases, it amounts to a tug of war between teenagers' entitled sense of sexual autonomy and society's desire to protect them.

But jailing kids obviously isn't protecting them. The tug of war is not between protecting and empowering the kids. It's between punishing the kids, or not.
Death by Internet
They would need to be incredibly strong to support any load on that table, and the table itself would need to be strengthened. So, the bottom would need to be shaped accordingly, and likely the inner structure would be some type of honeycomb...

Do-able, certainly, but for the cost, I'm not sure you could sell enough of them.
Most meta travel sites like this get their commissions one of two ways, either a commission for booking a flight, or a click through commission to the travel site. It is in tripeedo's best interest to open as many popups as possible.

They are adding little to no value on the flight pricing. Thumbs down.
What I really like about the bicycle is that there is no visible mechanism for conveying power to the rear wheel. Maybe some sort of gear/bearing arrangement inside the rear casing?
I doubt this sort of scheme will gain real traction - much of the airline industry's scheme involves building consumer loyalty (e.g. "I always fly with XYZ Air, they have decent prices and I don't have to hunt around hard to use websites"). An open API destroys this, and makes airfare even more of a commodity than it already is. I've heard anecdotal stories about Kayak being constantly blocked by the sites they scrape.
Lost city of Atlantis found on Google Earth?
One buck per fuck is more or less the price of not having children. If you live on $1/day, that's 4/7 of your living expenses!

Economic growth tends to reduce birthrates. European birthrates have dropped below replacement levels. The US is hovering around replacement, as is Japan and South Korea. Other developing countries are following this trend.

Technology does increase agricultural output, but within the 20'th century, rich people have fewer children.
They won't partner I don't think. Airlines dislike fare competition, it drives profits down and worsens their already-bad financial situation. From the couple guys I know who work in that industry, there is real push-back against aggregation sites.

You also provided the evidence of this yourself - I too have had a lot of trouble with Kayak recently, and it seems their ability to scrape accurate fares is severely compromised, and I suspect that airlines have some hand in this.
"Imagine 5+ bowlers all using the same lane. The more bowlers you have, the more you will have balls bumping into each other, getting in the way, crossing paths, and falling into the gutter."

I suggest THAT is the problem. TDD is a band aid to cover the fact that such a team cannot function. The right team of <=4 can blow the roof off of ANY team of 5+ based upon communication network overhead alone. If you don't have the right team, you are hosed no matter what.
The more I look at that thing, the more my mind hurts.
I it's not that I have a desire for things to make sense, it's that I feel pain when they don't.
I think it would be better if git had decided to model its commands on Subversion, yes.

However, I am mostly complaining because certain very common operations are way more complicated than they need to be.
I chose none because there wasn't a "It's better" option. I've actually gained new contracts since things went south. So far the recession is working out fine for me. However, I know plenty of people who are struggling so it's not like I'm completely unaffected.
Just playing devil's advocate, but why would that person have to have a better idea? A person doesn't necessarily need to be in possession of good ideas in order to be able to sniff out bad ones.

Though I admit, it would be weird if someone can tell an idea is bad, but not be able to say why. In that case I think the detractor deserves to be ignored on the grounds of insufficient proof.
Cary Tennis is the only person worth reading over there anymore. I used to follow Salon's Broadsheet blog just for the feminist insanity, then I found Jezebel.com and my daily dose of crazy woman writing is much better satiated.
I started with cvs, years ago, moved on to subversion when it was good and stable, and am now starting to fiddle with git. I like it a lot, but it is "fiddly" feeling. I'm sorry I can't describe it better than that, but it's just a feeling I get from it. Maybe this covers it: I don't get the feeling that it's going to much effort to "make the easy things simple and the hard things possible". We know it can do the latter, but the former is not always true.
I think the git repository model is pretty much a clear win over the svn repository model.

Subversion would be better off writing a front-end on top of git. The subset of a repository issue is indeed something that git still doesn't handle very elegantly, but I think ultimately if the right front-end was built, the underlying git repo model would prove better even for this case than the subversion model.
Did you pull that from reading the Mystery method? :)
Phone interviews were you ask someone to write some code to demonstrate their skills would benefit tremendously from web-based IDE. Makes it easier to filter out not-so-great applicants earlier in the process. Might give you a better idea to whether or not a candidate is worth bringing in for a face-to-face interview.
The graphic also conveniently starts with the 1990 recession. Unemployment went from 5.6% in 1979 to 10.8% in 1982 (7.6% now).

But wait, what's this at the bottom of the graphic "Office of the Speaker"?!?!? Selective statistics from a politician? Who would've thought!
It's not spam but I flagged it and I don't feel the least bit bad about flagging OMG! Digg! stories on HN.
All major office apps have had 'auto-save' as a feature for oh I dunno .. a million years now.
Author here. This is really not a useful thing at all (most obviously there's no allocation whatsoever), and it is quite an old version. I pastebin'd it to show to someone on IRC, certainly not to have it show up on the front page of HN :)

Just me tinkering with LLVM, though it will probably turn into something useful (and, ahem, deliberately public) someday... (email of course appreciated if anyone happens to run with it).
Sites like Tripeedo are not geared towards loyal customers-they're geared towards bargain shoppers.

OTA is gaining real traction. By my count about 1/3rd of the companies listed on Tripeedo are members of OTA, while many more unofficially support some derivative of it. Most of these companies don't have open API's--they are very private and require NDA's and partnership agreements.

There are systems in place to handle use-cases like this. API's are in place for travel agents to search available rates and creating bookings. This is essentially the same concept.

Kayak is justifiably being blocked because they're scraping sites. If they had partnership agreements in place this wouldn't happen.
I used to be into Bill Simmons but lately not so much. I think once his wife (who knows nothing about football) beat him in NFL weekly predictions is when I made the switch from Simmons to Gregg Easterbrook.
Unmoderated forums quickly become dictatorships by the most insane. The fact that the links that float to the top on Digg are consistently bland, general-appeal, and uncontroversial despite the YouTube-like sophistication of its users suggests that the ranking algorithm is pretty far from democratic.
Summary: Bearded gentleman "hates" Facebook because he doesn't think they'll be able to monetize their traffic, and doesn't like being shown ads.

Not a very satisfying article. He doesn't really say anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Also, the ad thing? Now, I hate ads, I love Opera's content blocker, and I have to admit that Facebook is the only site that has ever shown me ads I want to click. I even bought something from a Facebook ad once!
Alice and Bob, an indecipherable love story
Sorry. I was attempting to argue with a religion. My bad.

The basic premises cannot be questioned. The words of the sacred order must be followed to the letter. They must be swallowed whole without modification. They are to be held to be applicable to all problems, all contexts, forever, amen. That is except when they don't apply according to some mysterious unwritten set of rules held by the sacred order.

Gad. I can't count the times I have seen this crap since I started developing software back in the mid 1960'sd. It started with designing software using an IBM flow chart template. Each "method" had their very narrow range of applicability. None were the cure all or ultimate solution they were touted to be.

Automated testing has a place. The place is small, narrow, and limited. I seriously question that it can make up for lousy programmers and lousy code. Especially since they are also usually the programmers of the test code.

This is an issue that is indistinguishable from my identified problem of infinite regression. How are you going to test the testers to make sure they are testing what needs to be tested the way it needs to be tested?

Ultimately its do the right things correctly. What that is is much more dependent upon the problem and its context than some sacred text and holy method.
The Danger of "Provisional History"
Mint’s Growth is "Unbelievable"
I'm a Customer - Meet Me Where I Am
Thanks, that fixed it. It would be clearer if you included the offending URLs in the error message.
StumbleUpon - Featured Celebrities sites
350k virtual desktops for Brazilian schools
That Sneaky Exponential
Digg is such a mess. The 1% of users who control the content and make up 50% of pageviews are completely at odds with where the owners want to take the site. There is so much payola going on behind the scenes. Not just on Digg, but Reddit, StumbleUpon, and any other social site that sends traffic. I'm talking armies of Indians and Eastern Europeans who do nothing all day but exchange votes and push stories. Eventually, they might just have to ban them all and deal with the huge drop in traffic and engagement that would result.
Not if he disclosed that fact.
I think they'll have the multi browser issues situated soon... at least I hope. I'm guessing within 1-2 months at most.
Unmoderated forums quickly become dictatorships by the most insane.

That is a pretty accurate description of reddit...I'm glad that HN has active moderation, even though it's rarely needed.
I must have missed the part of Wealth of Nations that you're citing. Because when I read it, Smith defined "wealth" only in aggregate, as the "net revenues" of the labor of a society. So ignoring, for the moment, the fact that Adam Smith's definition of "wealth" isn't the only one (and the fact that you're using the terms "wealth" and "value" interchangeably), I think you've misinterpreted what he wrote.

In other words, you're really stretching to use his notion of "wealth" as an argument that trade creates more wealth. Wealth generation does not occur when an item is traded -- it occurs when an item is created, using labor. Smith goes out of his way to say this:

"The value of any commodity, ... to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities" (Wealth of Nations, Book 1, chapter V)

The peanuts in your example didn't gain or lose value when they were traded for a paperback. Nor did the paperback gain or lose value. We merely created a market that defined their values as equivalent. Confusing this process for wealth creation is a big reason why we're in the economic mess that we're in today.
I'd say git is better for that situation because it's so simple to set up. That's one thing it really does well. Tons of branches and other stuff are likely to be less of an issue on small, personal, non-shared projects.
Was it an informational product the reveals the secret to getting $10,000 in Government Grants in ONLY 2 WEEKS!!!
I think there's a lot in common between R and S-PLUS.

Indeed. R is sometimes called "GNU S".
He's still using his old favicon...
R graph gallery (with code)
That's the spirit. Glad to see it's on GitHub, too.
It worked from me in Chrome.
Looks like Chrome is working now.
I see a potential legal problem with the way the stress test is "authorized". The thing is that web server access (putting the "loadimpact.txt" file in the server) is not exactly the same as web site ownership.

My paranoid mind can think of an scenario like this (INAL so I maybe be off): a web master asks for the load test, this is done and the site goes down for a while, incurring a monetary loss (loss in sales for example). The owner sues the testing company for a 'DoS' and the testing company has no way to prove that it was authorized (what text file, there's none!).

I personally wouldn't do a stress test on a server without written authorization of the owner. The way I would implement this on an online service is by asking the target web site and the email address, where this address has to be in the public whois information. Then I'd send a special message to that email address and by replying the owner gives authorization (this way I'd have something from the official email address). This is not a 'written authorization' but comes as close as it can and the whois email address is used for domain transactions etc so it has the same level of protection/legal procedure behind.
In the spirit of this news, I'd like to make an admission of my own. I...Post on Hacker News.

(The game is still "admitting painfully obvious stuff that everyone already knows" right?)
Maybe there is some natural limit(2.718...) and we shall never reach {profitability,semantic web,...} :)
I just recently heard of R, so don't chew me up for this...but...

How is R different than Matlab (besides the license issue)?
This goes beyond auto-save. He's talking about auto-first-save, or just remember-what-I-was-doing mode.
On iPhone apps: price cut on average results in a 130% increase in sales demand
That's not the main thrust of the article, it's about a class of apps like Yojimbo, iTunes and iPhoto that abstract away the underlying file system so that even the concept of saving data goes away.
My dad once told me (in a business context; otherwise this would sound kind of weird): "If you're going to get destroyed, you want to own the means of your own destruction." It makes sense to me, but maybe that's easy to say as a student and hard to say as an executive with shareholders.
The Life Cycle of a New Media
Thanks for posting that. It probably doesn't have much content that will be new to News.YC readers, but I'm a big fan of Marc Andreessen and the interview was a fun whirlwind tour of the industry.
What are your specific complaints, and are they anything more than the age-old "`git commit` doesn't commit everything by default"? I'm not trying to snark; I'm genuinely interested in what people find difficult about Git, that much more it's possible to "fix".

If there's something complex that you think should be easy, you always have two basic options:
- create an alias in your ~/.gitconfig linking a short command name to a long command/argument sequence
- create a shell script in /usr/libexec/git-core (or the equivalent) that does what you want, and you can instantly use that in the standard `git <command>` method.

For an example, I have aliased 'co' to 'checkout', 'ci' to 'commit -a', 'pullr' to 'pull --rebase', and 'fp' to 'format-patch --binary'.
I normally hate the summaries, but this was excellent.

Also, the author seems like he's really not very fun to hang out with. I bet his friends are glad he isn't on Facebook.
The point of the article was not that applications should have auto-save.

As I read it, the point is that our hierarchical filesystems are not an especially good abstraction for organizing many types of data, and that applications should provide users with better abstractions in more cases. It appears to be a response to The Case Against Everything Buckets (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460274).
My thoughts exactly. With the current implementation, you wouldn't even need anything as complex as a histogram, an MD5 dictionary of image files would be fine.
It's not far off of Wikipedia either. A large number of participants in my Wikiproject, including myself, were eventually burned out by dealing with a few too many highly obsessive and misinformed users.

Seriously, go try to edit one the few somewhat-prominent WP articles that aren't locked and see how quickly someone comes up with a BS reason to revert your perfectly good edits. This happens especially often if you edit something political or religious in nature. It's a mess.
People see patterns everywhere. See also: the Martian canals.
A recent scientific study concludes that 100% of all research is misreported or distorted when it reaches the general public.
Nice. Maybe they saw my comment?
Might want to add Cachefly, too? I think this might be what is stopping me from testing our site, but it doesn't specify so...
As someone who I'd like to think has proven to be of some worth to the community I can tell you first hand that people downvote based on disagreement all the time. In my experience it's just a few jerks (I've never been significantly down voted on a quality comment) but it does happen.

I think there was even an "Ask HN" topic on this a while back with people defending the fact that they downvote because the disagree (Sorry, not enough time to search for it right now)

Oh, and I agree completely about the article.
Web Application Launch Checklist
I'm interested in giving it a shot but site isn't opening. Is it just me?
Exactly, "claim your site"
Aww. :( I knew it wasn't going to be real, but I still wanted to believe for just a few hours before it was debunked.
largely inspired from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485553 but adapted for those doing web applications
The Sugar journal does the same. Its a shame the rest of Sugar is currently unusable as a main desktop.
Yikes, that was an awful experience. I didn't know it would open tabs, so I selected all items. And of all the tabs it opened, almost none gave me any useful information.
thanks. The FAQ link should be where the question arises (in the user's profile page).
You hate summaries? Why?
Haha, I don't have to try it to know not to mess with politics or religion on Wikiepdia. I don't bother reading those articles either, for the same reasons.
Thanks for posting speek! Really appreciate it. I think I like your new name for the analysis: Tippingpoint Labs' New Media Life Cycle Analysis. (Although that's a mouthful.) Maybe we can come up with some cool ACRONYM. Anyone?
Why? Because Windows is too expensive (and IMO a piece of crap). Linux? Yeah. But you want to have an alternative to things like KDE or Gnome. Something more multimedia and future friendly, where all the apps play nicely together in accordance to some standards in terms of UI which brings good UX. Android promises a good end-user friendly, coherent experience. Or maybe to stay ahead in the game. To offer something unique. And maybe Google is cooking on something. I don't know for sure.
To clarify: I presume you're saying that git is much simpler to set up. Which it is.
Are these opt-in? I know that Visual Studio is opt-in.

Depending on your market, the most desirable customers might be the ones the most likely to turn it off (opt in or opt out). That can skew your data a great deal.
A study published in Biologist, the journal of the British Institute of Biology, details...how the lack of real-world social interaction can increase your susceptibility to cancer, dementia, heart disease, diabetes, influenza, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus - even the common cold.

When I read this at the top, I thought to myself, "Wow, I wonder how they showed that! Especially since one would think that isolation would, at least, decrease exposure to flu and cold viruses. I better scroll down and find out."

Then I scrolled down, and:

Other studies have proven that social isolation reduces the effectiveness of tumor-fighting cytokines. Sigman cites a number of studies that have shown that socially active women with breast and ovarian cancer produce more and more-effective tumor-fighters, including the charmingly named Natural Killer cells.

Sigh. Correlation != causation.

It gets worse. Women with fewer social relationships experience strokes at more than twice the rate of those with more social relationships, and those with smaller social networks have narrower arteries - approximately one-third narrower, to be specific.

No, it stays the same. Correlation is still not causation.

Real-world friendships help prevent heart attacks.

They don't even offer justification for this one.
Ask HN: Please review, contribute to, fork, or sell my open source Rails Help Desk app
Hey HN gang,

I wanted to share my help desk app with you guys. I built it so our customers could submit help tickets and our staff could reply (this is a support app, not a bug tracking app).

Anyway, I decided to open source it and share with any startups that could benefit. I've learned a ton from HN over the last year, so this is the least I could do.

Right now, it's in beta(ish) but I will have a working demo and better docs before the weekend is over.

You can watch a quick preview here:
http://vimeo.com/3299895

And get to the repo here:
http://github.com/bigfolio/big-help/

At the moment, some of the content is specific to our business (we serve professional photographers). It's easy to change of course.

If anyone Rails hackers are interested in being a contributor, please let me know. If you want to fork it, sell it, or use it for consulting projects, knock yourself out.

Feedback is very much appreciated. I'll add a demo link here when available.
Woz brought the personal computer to HP, for nothing, and they turned it down. Another shining example of vision failure (and from a company that had historically been a leader in everything they did).