skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use both extensively (git for most personal projects, Mercurial at work), so I feel like chiming in here.

I really do think that Mercurial's user interface is easier for beginners to pick up, and more difficult to shoot oneself in the foot with. It's the little things, like the fact that Mercurial's push and pull commands do exactly the opposite of one another, that hg clone/pull URLs are identical to what you type into a web browser to browse the repo, and the ease of dealing with Mercurial "bare" repositories (hg up -r null) for mirroring and backup purposes.

And the way Mercurial's command-line interface strongly discourages one from modifying history; it makes it harder for things to get messed up on a small team coordinating with a shared-access repo. Yes, I know git has the reflog, but in general people seem to have much fewer "OMG WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO MY BRANCH" moments with Mercurial than with git. That (along with mq, which provided a unique solution to our team's needs) was the major reason I chose Mercurial over git at work. If we're going to brandish about the term "UX" here, then I'd say Mercurial definitely has a better "UX" than git.

But Mercurial has pain points, too. The biggest one, in my opinion, is the way branches work: Mercurial started out with named branches, which it seems the community has recognized as a mistake, and has moved to replace with git-style branches (called "bookmarks" in Mercurial land). These work better, but there are still some drawbacks: for one thing, Mercurial lacks the notion of a "remote", so unlike in git your local bookmarks and remote bookmarks have to share the same namespace. This leads to counter-intuitive behavior when it comes to synchronizing bookmarks with a remote server, and often you'll find that bookmarks aren't necessarily updated when you'd expect them to be.

Additionally, the notion of a "tip" makes working with feature branches frustrating, because by default Mercurial will check out from whatever branch was pushed to most recently, rather than a de-facto standard "master" as in git. Hand in hand with this complaint, by default Mercurial will want to push all your changesets, not just those under your current working bookmark, so you have to constantly specify e.g. "hg push -r master" to keep from pushing local throw-away branches. And it's not easy to delete local throw-away branches if you decide you don't want them (the downside of Mercurials aversion toward history modification), so one generally winds up using a separately-cloned repo for temporary work, which is unfortunate in contrast with git.

Mercurial and git are both great, efficient, high-performance tools. But if I had to generalize, I'd say that Mercurial is better for beginners and for "enterprisey" usage, whereas git, despite its interface inconsistencies, can be more powerful once you fully understand it and its data model (but only if you aren't working primarily on Windows, and don't need Mercurial Queues).
Unnecessarily harsh response to a good point.

Network effect: many many people pick git because everyone else uses it (and that’s a good reason), thus they never try Mercurial, which may or may not be better suited to their use case.
If it survives does that mean that the Pi can essentially saturate its network connection if it doesn't need to do any "real" work? I bet you could stick it in a rack in front of the grownup servers to act as a haproxy dongle, how hard can it be?

I officially dub it the cutest webserver.. in the world.
This is great, I'd like to see more snippets for beginners.
Youza! That is a big hole. Thanks for the link, filed under "things I don't want to be near when they happen." :-)
Loathe as I am to thank Microsoft (as a company) for much of anything, I'm glad to see that rational people actually work for them.

It's awesome to see sane-minded people shed light on the realities of what information ultimately is, and how and why we share it.

You can't keep clamping down on people for whispering secrets in each other's ears. To do so is to deny an individual of their own humanity. This is especially true, with regard to trivial pastimes, like reading works of fiction and experiencing the recording of music, sounds and abstract noise that we create with the hopes that people will actually listen to them.

Hopefully, these aspects of human behavior will be embraced as normal facts of life, rather than rejected as malicious and criminal. People who create content, after all, are really paid thinkers in the Greek sense, and that should be a truth that's understood by all these stubborn rights holders.

I hope the reaction to investigations like this will encourage tolerance of file sharing, rather than harden the resolve to purge it from whatever society we find ourselves living in decades from now.

Thank you, Peter Biddle, Bryan Willman, Paul England and Marcus Peinado!
(This comment assumes you actually did stop reading.)

I'm curious about the mind-set that says "Stop reading, I didn't agree with this sentence." Do you read part of a lot of articles on HN? Since you don't know what you're missing I guess you can't answer this but do you think this is a sound strategy for learning anything?
Though this is not the worst indiegogo project I've seen, Kickstarter at least has a policy against overhyping a product that doesn't exist. (That's why we see so many of these projects on sites that do allow this overhyping now.)
What's the status of implementations and/or toolsets for TACK? Can I test it on my clients' SSL websites? Are there settings in any popular webservers for activating TACK?

(Oddly, I care least about the browser for this particular question.)
+1 i spent many nights with this. Sonic Tank FTW!
I don't care about any language that isn't natively supported in the browsers.

Not all browsers have support for source maps, and sometimes you really need to debug browser specific behaviours without having to debug generated code along the way.

Additionally in most teams I work on, it is often the case that besides myself no one even knows what CoffeScript is.

CoffeScript just adds more code to debug without any real benefit.
Hey Who Would’ve Thought - Wendy Williams Doesn’t Wear Fur
Ask HN: why am i not able to post any comments after 24 hrs?
I find that having a face to face interaction with another human being at least once a day makes you feel more human.

Sometimes I can go a few days to a week where me and my friends are all busy doing things, I buy all my stuff from the self checkout or via amazon and don't really interact with anyone.

Then when on friday night I go out to a busy party it feels like a shock.
> How is its interpreter substantially different or more impressive than previous interpreters written in assembly language?

Traditionally, there were two implementation strategies: compilers and interpreters. JITs didnt become mainstream until Sun bought Hotspot and put it into the 2nd version of Java.

So you had to choose between compilers and interpreters. Compilers led to optimization, fast object code, but were complex to implement (especially multiplatform). Interpreters were simple to implement, very portable, but were very very slow.

Obviously there is more to both, but until recently, basically this is how people thought about language implementation. Considerations like a REPL, slow compilation speed, ease of prototyping, etc, were a complete side show (perhaps people cared, but you'd rarely see it discussed).

When all of the dynamic languages were implemented, they all used interpreters, written in C. They all used a simple dispatch loop to opcode implementation, and let the C compiler do the heavy lifting. All the research into fast compilers (the David Gregg/Anton Ertl stuff for example), looked at instruction set (registers/stack) and dispatch type. So when making interpreters fast, there were only 4 strategies:

- make a compiler,

- use better dispatch,

- rewrite using a register interpreter set,

- make a JIT.

Making a JIT is lunacy of course, because JITs are ridiculously hard, they're not portable. So that Pall was making a 1-man JIT (LuaJIT1) was incredible.

But that he made an interpreter that was as fast as a JIT was even more insane. In Trinity, all of us language/JIT/scripting language people were in one room, and when we heard about this we were just amazed. Nobody had even thought about the stuff - it was all brand new and novel in a field that barely had anything novel in decades! Until that point, basically all interpreters were one big while loop.

> How is its interpreter substantially different or more impressive than previous interpreters written in assembly language?

I wouldnt know, since I've not heard of any mainstream interpreters in assembly. I can only imagine that they were exactly the same as C interpreters: essentially a while loop with a switch statement, just written in assembly.

I find it amusing that you started at LuaJIT2. I would liken it to studying modern war, then wondering "why didnt they just use drone strikes at the Somme" :) Looking back from LuaJIT2, interpreters must seem really really primitive.
Specifically, AWS Beanstalk.
Did you even read the linked site?
Because the people that sweated and risked their livelihoods to produce these titles didn't actually offer them to you for free; instead, they were coerced into accepting free distribution when their work was illegally copied by companies that fund themselves by viagra and Adult Friend Finder ads.

Meanwhile, almost universally, the offerings nerds entitle themselves to are luxury goods that no person can claim an inherent right to access, so, not only are content producers and financiers coerced into having their return on investment redirected to porn ads and porn ad brokers, but that's happening solely to provide nerds with access to luxuries. Most of which they could trivially have afforded anyways.

But keep telling yourself piracy strikes some blow for justice. I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to.
Because CoffeeScript causes a cognitive dissonance by a) Attempting to address Javascript's shortcomings. b) Shows how much more comprehensible a well-designed language could be. c) Shows what one smart guy with a deeper CS knowledge and good taste could do.)
I think your HD price is off, and time capsules have not had a history of reliability.

However, I've also run a linux/netatalk box, back in the snow-leopard days. It did "work", but things would get screwed up for me if I ever closed my laptop whenever a backup was in progress.

I ended up using an airport extreme for time-machine backups. It works well. I have it connected to a Sabio raid box[1].

I don't think apple advertises that the extreme works for time-machine, but it's basically plug-n-play type setup. No hackery required. Just an external disk with USB connectivity.

[1] http://www.sabioproducts.com/products?page=shop.product_deta...
Apple's track record on the web has been poor. Their websites are not first class. So they could have to build expertise there. I think, for backend services, networking expertise on the OS teams would go a long way.

In terms of staffing and responsibility, I don't see that as an issue, since if this does make sense for Apple, Apple is large enough that handling the workload wouldn't be a problem.
as a side note, appboy does some great analytics without using udid
To make "distribution of child pronography" even more weird...

SCOTUS ruled* that children photographed not engaged in lewd acts does not commit a crime.

In other words:
Children nudists are legal to photograph.
Kids in bathtub are legal to photograph.
A 13 year old "seductively" sucking on a banana, fully clothed, is illegal. ?
A guy fapping to pictures of legal children nudists makes those pictures illegal?

So... What rules would be appropriate for the spirit of the law?
Subversion is really simple too: it only has files and directories, branches are directories, tags are directories. I don’t think stupid and simple worked very well in that case.

Arguments can be made for both sides, picking a single design decision and saying that that’s obviously better is not going to work. Implementation and (especially in a case like distributed systems) network effects are much stronger than any single isolated design decision.
Aside from the nuisance of having to do a full copy, you end up losing your history beyond that point which really hurts when you try to use Time Machine to go back and retrieve something old.
HN doesn't promise me encrypted access to content, so I do not care whether it's encrypted or not. HN is not an online bank.

My bank however obviously must promise me encrypted access, or else nobody would use it.

The browser has no way of knowing whether a site should be encrypted; only that is says it is encrypted.
Aycock paper is available here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~aycock/

title: "Converting Python Virtual Machine Code to C."
Perfect- great tip on recently accepted pull requests. Thanks!
The original questions was specifically about why git was so commonly installed on Debian hosts.
Which is why the warnings are getting steadily more annoying.

What's the alternative? There is no difference on the wire between a self-signed certificate for a site that simply doesn't care about certificates, and a self-signed certificate that is the sole marker of an attacker having hijacked the TLS connection of a site that very much does care about its security. A MITM attack looks identical on the wire to a self-signed cert.
Time capsules of any sort just aren't so useful anymore. They work fine most of the time, but they get inconvenient when you have to reinstall or migrate to a new machine. If you end up doing so and have to re-establish your backup, it might take 12 or 18 hours or more to do that! Add in the Time Machine memory leak, and Time Machine/Capsule no longer makes much sense.
Ah, the project link was what I needed. Thank you. Things are evolving rapidly on the front-end these days!
I assumed your comment would be related to the article, my bad.
Does anyone else have any experience setting up SPDY on a web server? Since SPDY is already supported by Chrome and Firefox, I'd be interested in at least experimenting with it if there is an Apache or Nginx based solution which is stable enough to work in production. Of course I would also need to serve old style HTTP for those that are using a browser which doesn't support SPDY but if there is a way to serve SPDY to those who can support it I'm all for trying it out.
> didn't Rails 3 have some last minute changes before its release as well, and 3.1 was a big jump also?

I'm not sure about 'last minute,' but yes, 3.1 was a big jump. Rails doesn't follow SemVer, neither does Ruby.

> They really need to spend more time on it.

This is absolutely true, and is my biggest complaint.
Some sites, like embedded products that are shipped to customers, are not compatible with the forced-SSL model at all.

If my fridge has a webserver I need to be able to talk with it.
Yes, it is rather nice to lay the book perfectly flat on a surface. But I tend to read sitting on a couch rather than a chair, or laying in bed, and the Nook form factor is lovely but isn't as good as a book most of the time. Consider how a paperback sort of gently 'clamps' onto your thumb as you hold it, or, if you are lying on your side reading, the 'unread' side lies flat and the 'reading' side sticks up straight, perfectly. With the nook I have to balance the edge on the bed and it's not weighted down by 'unread' pages.

Maybe one day they'll release an e-reader which is more like a paperback book: cover art, hinged with two reading sides, some visual indicator of where you are in your current book, etc. More
Univariate Distribution Relationship Chart (MUST CLICK)
Change the subject much? You missed the point entirely: you took one persons response and generalized it to the entire population of Mercurial users--claiming it is representative of an entire culture of that population. Then, you claim to be in possession of special knowledge as to what "SCM is for".
ObRef: Automated fresh pizza vending machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7_lxiU8eLM
The Myth of Austerity
You might be seeing a premium price for discontinued hardware. The current lineup of WD Green 2TB drives are ~$100. There is no way for me to know if these are lower quality than the previous model or not.
systems developers? You mean those guys who wrote V8 in C++?)
"people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones;"

maybe people should stop bitching about people bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones ? they sound ridiculous.

interesting how one man's 'bitching' is another's righteous rage against the ungodly heathen who don't believe exactly as he does.
You might like Honeybadger: https://www.honeybadger.io/

Full text search, a lightning-fast drill-down UI, and advanced collaboration tools make Honeybadger the best option to manage Rails errors. IMHO

Since our public launch we've gained a lot of traction. Many of the apps we monitor are household names. For the latest news: @honeybadgerapp.

Sorry for the blatant plug, but you asked. :)
Ask HN: Which Android phone would you buy (Nexus 4 sold out)
Since the Nexus 4 is not easily available, which Android Phone would you buy in its place?
Facebook launches Photo Sync automatic picture uploading feature
46 comments...

...and no one has mentioned the headline? :)
Will add Linux support asap :)
In case anyone here is interested in contributing to my Django app - https://github.com/freedomsponsors/www.freedomsponsors.org. - That's another free software application intended to make free software even better, one difference is that there are $ bounties involved.

Pull requests are welcome :)
I agree that function calls like that can get weird in coffee - I like to write them like this, which i think turns out to be a little more readable:

foo(
->
bar()
baz()
quux()

(error) ->
throw error if error
)
Adaptive A/B Testing - More on Bandits
I thought the same thing, but I've had success in the past making pull requests for documentation or other "little" things like that so you could still find ways to provide value without having to do too much.

It taught me to love Github even more - with the file editing in the browser I could clone, make my change and submit my pull request all without ever cloning the repo locally.
Subversion is used by very few remaining public projects, almost entirely for legacy reasons. Almost literally zero "recent" projects are using it at all. It has no more mind share than does CVS at this point, and "no one" uses CVS (again, except for a few legacy spots). I really didn't think that was controversial.

Subversion was indeed a much better CVS than CVS. And the world almost jumped on it as a standard. But then git appeared. If you were a young person looking at building exciting projects from source, you might never have reason to learn svn. I think that qualifies as "forgotten"
any additional info? tech involved? problem you're trying to solve?
I turned TTS-API.com into a wordpress plugin.. enjoy
turns all your blog posts & pages to MP3's (adds a player and download button to each) - enjoy.
The stupdily sharp edge on my Macbook Pro says otherwise.

Now where's my angle grinder...
Me: Really? Is that really a business requirement? Any other requirements you need done?

I landed a graduate assistantship in 1992 as "the computer guy's assistant" at my school's physical plant. My first assignment was to generate a fixed format file with one phone number per line. The file was to range from 1-900-0000 to 1-900-999-9999 and was needed by the campus telephone system to block all premium rate calls. They asked me to do it because they got back a 30 day completion estimate from the central IT department after filling out an internal RFP form.

I'm sure somewhere, someone has been paid to write a program that prints 1 to 100.
"Piracy costs HBO less than ... "

This depends on how risk averse one is. I personally would be afraid of getting on hit list for the movie association (can't remember the acronym now).
I had completely forgotten about Google+ Games... Are there numbers on how many people are playing games on Google+?
I can't get behind this. It's just some ads, chill out. Advertisers have the right to advertise and you have the right to ignore the advertising. Advertising is a form of speech just as the content you're going to the site to see. You say you understand the advertising industry and that sites are able to stay in business because they make money on the ads they show you but then you go on to basically say you think they have no right to do it. This sounds like entitlement to me. If I want to advertise on my own website then I shouldn't be stopped from doing so just because someone comes along and has a real hardline opinion on the matter.

You're also not being forced to view advertising in the same way you're not being forced to visit a website. To make this into some kind of high ideal/moral/philosophy is just silly. They're just ads. Go get adblock, don't click on the ads, or just stop visiting the sites that have them. A site you really like shows ads and so you think you're backed into a corner? No way. No site is obligated to present content to you in the way you like it. There's way too many people these days shouting about how they want their FREE internet services just the way they want it like it's their right or something. It's not anyone's right.

Now tracking, that's a different story. We should all have the right to opt out of tracking if we don't want it. But to say we should never have to see an ad because it might annoy us is just ridiculous.
Probably the user model, permission system, flat pages, media handling and comments system. Or probably extend all of that. I am not saying that it is impossible. But merely pointing out that Python web framework ecosystem is rich enough that many of its hundreds of frameworks are possible options.
Why not just say "oh yeah? your FACE is a game of thrones"? It would contain the same amount of content and at least people wouldn't have to wonder whether you were silly enough to think you were making a real argument.
I can't see how this isn't the death knell from Zynga. Maybe I am missing something, but Zynga loses all their mass appeal. Maybe there is a self contained group that runs under the radar screen at their site, but they lose much of the social connection.

Facebook can find other game makers. There is no other Facebook for Zynga. Facebook also gets rid of some unwanted Spam.
People aren't bitching about "how hard it is to get Game of Thrones", people are bitching because they'd love to pay for it, legitimately, but without subsidizing all the bundled crap .

I have zero interest in ESPN, Disney and "reality" television. I understand fully why HBO is making more money than ever out of the bundlers' desperation, and don't complain that they're "losing" money (which isn't the case) but I would certainly prefer to be given the option to buy the content alone.

"In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?"

The exact content is as irrelevant as your dislike of it. Dislike for Cable television providers didn't originate with GoT.
People just us Game of Thrones as an example because it was popularized by The Oatmeal (and possibly others) for it's status as being easier to pirate than pay for. I think they just use the name as a symbol now because if you mentioned a different piece of content people would wonder why you mentioned that show specifically.