skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe the initial consensus was that a Python-based version control system was greatly preferred over anything else, and that for Git to be considered someone would have to show that it's much more compelling than the other systems. Git was allowed into the PEP later on, however.

Besides being able to say they're eating their own dog food, I think having the ability to easily extend their version control system was a factor in the choice. The Python developers would just be writing Python, after all, and Mercurial has a very simple extension system.

I believe Guido has had direct communication with some of the core developers of Mercurial as well, which was probably another factor. I'm not sure what Brett's DVCS usage survey had to say about Mercurial or Git, but that could also play a role in his decision.

Here's the original thread that led up to the PEP: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/98191. From what I understand, there wasn't supposed to be a lot of discussion until the PEP was written, but people couldn't help but voice their opinions on the matter. I'm guessing this is why Guido put his foot down: to prevent an endless religious debate. Hopefully the PEP will be revised with a more detailed explanation of his rationale.
he's going to have a hell of a time parking his car in there...
This is BS, utter and complete BS. This just allows Microsoft to perpetuate their myths and TomTom gets to violate the GPL without actually disclosing it.

Does anyone have the balls to actually stand up to Microsoft and finally invalidate their patent claims?
i love how people can't stand the guy who works on the line. This guy or gal works to make a car for you. The customer. This person puts up with all the same bs that you have to put up with on your daily job.
He/she was smart to get into the automotive and have a great job. One because they can support their family put their kids through college so their child has more of an education then they do. (that helps out America) and their children can succeed in America and not rely on the automotive to support them. Second,because this person turns around and puts that money they made, right back into their fellow communities. Spending money so others can benefit off of their hard earn money.Thirdly, they can give to charities help out others and do good for their communities.
So, why does everyone bug the guy on the line....becasue he makes good money and has no education, so what!!!??

What about the endless managers that leave the office and go golfing on company time that are educated? Or the endless lunches that they never return from that the company has to pay for? Or how they can micro manage everything and make it twice as worse then when they started it. Or the guy who works out of his house and only puts in 3 hours of work in a day. Please give me a break!!! this is not only automotive but it is with every corporation in America! When will the educated people quite ripping off the corporation's so that the people that can't get an education can make a decent living and survive in America and enjoy the American dream!! So please quit wasting your time to find out of much the average line guy makes and start looking into your own company and start making changes!! Why do you have to have a degree to flip hamburgers?? because that is what is happening to us. Quit pointing the fingers and start seeing what every manager and salary person is doing with the company money. Maybe its time to start working different in America, start working for the right reasons.
Sorry, it's part of a series and previous entries have been posted on HN. In that context, its a little more interesting, but reading again you're right, I shouldn't have posted it.
The only thing to say to this is that those people that constantly scoff at"yet another URL shortening service" have just been shown how wrong they were to dismiss them all :P
I think the problem was the loss of semantics from one side to the other. As long as the buyers are informed, all else should be fine.
Tell HN: A Twitter Media/Marketing Database of Press Contacts
No just give someone $15 to do your resume for you in Latex.
The debt doesn't exist -- my parents paid up front from savings bonds they had been buying for a decade precisely for my education. Between 97 and 2001, my education costed approximately 2000 dollars for the community college portion, and 10,000 for the university portion. I lived at home and worked to pay the additional expenses.
Interesting. In my experience, company leaders typically engineer discussions in order to validate what they already believe, and of course it can be a career-limiter to argue too forcefully with one's superior. I think it takes an executive with extraordinary vision to actually create a culture where dissension is encouraged and people with differing views truly engage and are fairly listened to.

I believe I've read somewhere that some high percentage of business leaders are classified as optimists, which probably creates a tendency to downplay the negatives of business situations. In an overall sense, this may be a good thing, as it leads people to attempt things that seem crazy to others, but it can obviously also lead to excessive risk-taking and sundry disasters.
Yes it's called "the rest of the world" who believe that you can't patent the process of replacing a long word with "~1"
not at all but it implies the potential!
With iPhone OS 3 due this summer, Skype should be able to rely on the notification service for taking incoming calls. It would notify the user that there's a call waiting and let you open Skype to accept it.
Yeah, after reading his explanation, I wished I'd chimed in and said I'm a non-Canonical coder who's been really happy with Bazaar.
it does indeed. It's interesting ron conway invested, must have big ideas for it.
AIG Wife Fights Back: Cassano, Government ‘Betrayed Us’
Git has excellent interop with CVS, so I imagine excellent interop between Git and other DVSs is in our near future.

-- EDIT --

By excellent interop with CVS I obviously mean the one way CVS to Git. I'm hoping Git/Hg will go both ways.
Your observations on English as an "interlanguage" is interesting. I can see this happening.

As to the observation of different Chinese dialects using English as an interlanguage within China (...I assume you didn't mean within China)...this is probably very rare. In my 9 years of living in China mingling with all sorts of regional and ethnic groups, I have never once seen this happen.
Ride the Snake: reddit keynote at PyCon 09
The alternatives to Eucalyptus seem not to be here just yet. I suggest that you get in contact with the Cloudkick guys. If I understand correctly, the purpose of their business is to integrate different cloud providers (Amazon and VPS'es) so that you won't have to (do this on your own).

They have just launched, at the moment only support Amazon and plan to support Slicehost. Talk to them, it might be beneficial for both of you.
Scribd has been under fire for some time now. Pournelle covered this back in 2007 - http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/jep_column-32...

If authors want their works to be available they have numerous outlets for doing it right. One of the good ones is the Baen Free Library - http://www.baen.com/library/
Is that even possible when mortgages are leveraged at a rate of thirty to one and sliced and diced and bundled in every conceivable way?
If the pool collapses with his kids in it, they might be killed. That plus the issue with damage to neighbors seems to provide a valid government interest to me.
Cool, and I like Guido's way of making decisions. But I'm just wondering why they're switching. Did they find that Subversion wasn't working for them?
Personally I wouldn't use UPX for distribution, it generates quite a lot of (false) virus warnings because it's immensely popular in that scene...
And beyond that it's somewhat domain specific as to what the tolerance for misses is. In something like recommending online (non-paid) content, it doesn't matter much. It's worth more to take a gamble on something a user will really like than to give them something you're sure they won't hate. If you get two great hits and three bad hits, it's probably still a net win for the user. On the other hand, if you're say, doing online dating recommendations, you probably want to avoid the polarized cases since you could lose a paid customer with one horrible recommendation.
Why not just buy tinyURL and a few of the other big link shorteners for 500K each, and then spend 1 million building an analytic platform.
Brains, Meaning and Corpus Statistics
Rather, not broken.
No good books on it, and Xavier Leroy has his head in the sand about concurrency and parallelism? It's baffling because other functional languages like Haskell and Scala are setting the example of how modern languages should handle many-core systems.
Git's pretty good going two way with Subversion. If nothing else, perhaps Subversion could be a poor man's bridge for the time being?
The actual article is here: http://aralbalkan.com/2067

The link just points to the root aralbalkan.com, which is the landing page.
That's not how it works, at least as explained by linguists. Those 1% do not exist to be the "pagerank 10" sources; they exist to analyze how language is being used, and adjust the official meanings of words to reflect that usage. That's how words and meanings get added to (English) dictionaries and grammar books.

Old meanings are not considered wrong of course, but are often pushed back to the higher-numbered definitions and eventually considered an old or archaic usage.

It doesn't work the same in all languages; for example, French has the l'Académie française which strongly attempts to regulate the meanings of French words, and is quite successful.

To prove my point: there are two official meanings of "begging the question," including the one you assume to be incorrect in your post:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/begs

Furthermore, I'm confident that with some research, we could find several words and phrases in your post which were considered "incorrect" several hundred years ago (despite being commonly used then) but are considered "correct" today.
Mercurial is still better supported under Windows. Anecdotal evidence: compare the Eclipse plug-ins (under Windows) for git and hg. (And before there's flak about Eclipse: it is a widely used tool, under Windows at least).
They are sliced, diced, and leveraged when they are resold to investors as MBS or CDOs, not when presented to the loan recipient
There's nothing unprofessional about turning down money if accepting it makes you uncomfortable.
Reading CouchDB documentation now and can't stop reading. It sounds like a lot of fun. Haven't understood yet how to handle the performance problems, but would like to use it just for the fun of it.
Yeahh, I have to agree with this reply. He may be an impressive salesman, but that only seems to make up for the lack of anything remotely interesting about what he is doing for the product now. Sure, it was an innovative concept when it first came out, but after four years of using Blackboard during college, it feels like he missed the boat on improving a product. I wonder if Blackboard is so popular now because of a bandwagon-effect instead of because of being a great product. There's so many things they could be doing to solidify themselves as a truly awesome (and modern) product that they're not. They still feel like software we were using back in 2002. Salesmanship is great, but I wonder how hard you would have to press if you were offering something awesome. Who knows...
Is copyright violation the new guerrilla marketing technique du jour? A decade ago, hotmail taught us the power of viral marketing. Now it seems like the youtubes of the world are teaching us the power of "controversy marketing":

1) Build a product that pisses off big fish

2) Let them scream at you

3) Leverage the ensuing brand recognition...
I used to do that but then got negative comments from HN. Anyway, the title of the article was a bit provocative, so I hoped answering in the same spirit would not be taken as offensive. It certainly is inspiring to look into CouchDB.
I like your point here. It sounds like Apple's MO for content sales to be hit-driven. I suspect that the billboards built into iTunes drive a lot of music sales too. The parallels between music revenue and app revenue might make a good post.
It is a form of DRM, but the delivery mechanism is just so easy that's it's worth the tradeoff. Any game you ever install through Steam is remembered by Steam. Format your computer? No problem, Steam will reinstall all your (Steam) games for you. No need to dig around to find the install discs.

It's the opposite of EA's DRM. EA's DRM makes life harder for the legitimate purchaser. Steam's DRM actually makes life easier for the legitimate purchaser.
Redbox's $1 vending-machine video rentals worry movie studios
The Economics For Indie Game Developers
...confessed to him that I had never studied finance, and I had only taken one course in computers

This lack of formal qualifications seems common on wall street, perhaps this isn't surprising.

I know I didn't want to work as a programmer for a finance company because I'd prefer to be a first class citizen in a software company even for much less money.

Perhaps wall street only gets second tier engineers, scientists and mathematicians?

I know of one specific case, where yet another person without formal training made it high up as a programmer at a well known large institution who's name I'll withhold.

This person was very well compensated for doing the kind of horrific wheel reinventing that only smart people without formal training can do.

Needless to say all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensued over that person's years at wall street.

In one instance he like all other programmers was forbidden to use malloc. And everything was on the stack and of size 512 - EVERYTHING. Who made that decision? Why the financial managers obviously!

And I'm thinking that a big part of wall street's downfall is all that under qualified personnel, there primarily for the money.

I think very few quants and people in their positions ever had the confidence and power to stand up to the finance guys.

I think if finance firms went to the trouble of hiring people who have better options they might not be in so much trouble.

Then again if you're gambling with other people's money and your compensation only has upside, no downside with risk - nothing would have prevented the crash.
> You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem

- Edward's law

The problem, I think, is precisely the one you highlight:

> If only more people dared to put up servers

"Society" can make it so that it's "dangerous" (for given values) and, more importantly, uninteresting (for the masses) to use the new tech, and thus it remains a non-solved problem, which could herald a bleaker future.
//edit: Nevermind. Ignore this comment. I've been corrected by folasm87 & it turns out I misread the johnrob's comment and applied what he was saying to the wrong party.

Of all the things lacking brand recognition in the global market, Harry Potter is not one of them. I don't think this is the case here.
True, but we don't constantly hear "gangstas" complaining about how everyone misuses their group identifier.
Yes, nadesiko: http://nadesi.com/

It would be hard for one to understand how anybody uses it, if you don't understand the language, but that does not imply non-existence. You'd also be hard-pressed to find any, because all your searches will come up in English :)

But if you're talking about cutting edge, then, no.
A DNS server - that is all it takes to beat the Danish version anyway. Or you can use the hugely innovative OpenDNS.
In this case I believe he was referring to Scribd.
The brain is way more complicated than that.
It wasn't down for me. You are sure you aren't behind some censorship system.
Vodafone confirms deal with Twitter
Do you find that misspellings of common words set your "bozo bit"?
For many years, I have noticed that when a person chronically misspells a very common, not at all obscure word ("break" vs. "brake", "pour" vs. "pore", etc.) that person's writing tends to set the "bozo bit" in my head and I find it difficult to take their arguments seriously. My best theory explaining why this happens is that such mistakes are generally proof that the person who made them never reads for pleasure and is thus almost certainly an intellectual lightweight. Am I being snobbish/foolish by making the connection? Or is there something to this litmus test?
Having perfected the ball-point, Paul Fisher wrote a plan to save the world
After a whole lot of stuff coming down at once (divorce, December holiday season, back taxes due) I was prescribed with Prozac. I took it for maybe 3 months, then stopped. I noticed that I became a plodder for the time being, which worked well for all of the crises. I got over the ex, I got through the holidays, and I set up a repayment plan.

But all in all, I had zero creativity. I do not remember coding anything of significance. Pretty much just a maintenance lifestyle. I behaved the same with alcohol and cannabis, so it is probably my specific make-up.

I really enjoy the creative side, and I choose to remain clear. It makes for better relationships for me, all around. I also love what I do, and I seem to get better enjoyment from it.

FWIW...
XNA Community Games Sales Figures Revealed
Yeah, the HN headline was stupid. Sadly stupid titles usually get a lot of up votes. By stupid I mean, intended to incite a knee-jerk reaction.
To the best of my knowledge I am not behind some censoring scheme, here in the UK my ISP is very liberal (did not block Wikipedia in the child pornography scandal) however I am unable to access wikileaks.org or mirrors they all time-out. I am slightly worried by this... please tell me wikileaks.org is down?
There is a very unfortunate drawback to this, readily evident in programming, at least in my experience.

Just as programming languages are expressive in different ways, so are spoken languages, and the designers of programming languages, when exposed to a few ways of structuring ideas, end up writing code the same way.

You can argue that mathematically they are all the same. The computer doesn't care, but the human-readable code is different. If you have ever structured your code so it reads more like English (example: _why's poignant guide), it reflects this thought process.

Another example: somebody once remarked that lisp is a counterintiutive way of structuring code because that's not how language is normally used. If one has learned a few other spoken languages, it is immediately obvious how intuitive the lisp syntax is.

Of course, again, on the metal it makes no difference, so technically we can all "not care"... but when I see elegant code, it's elegant both to the computer and to the human, and that's where it's art, otherwise it's just raw optimization.
Not a fan of this investment. Shorting a URL is a good with many substitutes and limited consumer lock in (unless you count bookmarks, which could be easily replaced).

EDIT: Guys, on Hacker News you shouldn't downvote comments you disagree with. You should only down vote comments that add nothing of value to the conversation. My position is very well reasoned out. And as for real time analytics, that's a good with a lot of substitutes as well. The referer given by your web browser for example?

Also, if knowing the click through rates for tweets ever becomes a market with money in it, Twitter can spend 500K to buy another one of the millions of URL shorteners out there and integrate it into their service. If their entire business model depends on analytics for Twitter, they are waiting to get stomped on by Twitter's tens of millions of venture capital.
CRC32 in Javascript, memcache & nginx compatible
JK Rowling has a pretty horrible record when it comes to modern thinking about copyright infringement.

Harry Potter Encyclopedia Barred From Publication (2008):
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9442061...
Now the admin account is changed, thanks for the tip. It was hijacked and I could not use it anymore - I deleted the user from the database and made a new one.
The difference is that you are choosing the documents to put on your site. Scribd does not choose the documents to put on their site, users upload them.

So if you ended up with pirated material on your site, you would be completely responsible. But that is not the case with Scribd. Anyone can submit material to Scribd, so people submit pirated material.

I believe that Scribd would qualify as a safe harbor under the DMCA. So all they really need to do is respond to requests to take down pirated material. Veoh was once sued for infringing copyright. The judge ended granting a summary judgement in favor of the defendant on the basis that Veoh was just providing user-submitted content and that Veoh did not even supervise the files that were uploaded. I am reading that as saying that if Veoh actively checked user uploads for pirated material, they might might have lost the court case or at least had their motion for summary judgement dismissed.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Ac....

That said, Scribd does have a problem with piracy.. One of my first introductions to Scribd was when I was searching for excepts from a book and found the full book on Scribd.
Clean, but what are you supposed to do with user agents which do not support JavaScript? Server-side templates still let you customize the page in that case.
This is one application I would easily pay for on the iPhone, especially given that I use skype's paid subscriptions already. I wonder why they chose to make it available for free download.
You could've said the same about Facebook a couple of years ago. What bit.ly has is momentum, especially among twitter users.
The $42949672.95 error for not checking a return code
No I couldn't have. Facebook has significant consumer lock in. Also, the costs of running a social network are high, while the cost of running a URL shortener is almost nil.
Samsung SGH M610 Blue Unlocked
Samsung SGH M610 it's the ability to text through regular sms or enhanced messages is one benefit, and the option to play either polyphonic or mp3 ringtones really demonstrates edge and a vga camera are also on-board to takes pictures of great events.
Also worth mentioning that, last time I used it, Blackboard was an unusable, bloated, expensive web application. If I'm not mistaken, it included a quaint forum application that used Java Applets. I'd really like to meet the guy who thought that was a good idea.

I would challenge anyone to get good use out of Blackboard on any platform.
I Chat, Therefore I am...
Scribd responds to false and misleading stories about J. K. Rowling
This reminds me of Microsoft's first attempt at web scripting, before ASP. Can't remember what it was called, but for each final HTML page it had a template file and a database query file.

It turned out to be just too hard to do anything useful with it.
Thanks for the correction - It doesn't seem obvious that it is the case though (to me).
Are Tweets Copyrighted ?
IPhone OS 3.0 Gets Enterprise Cred
The evolution of the 37signals home page
Juror #8 couldn't be fired by the other jurors.

If that had been a business he almost certainly would have been gone.

Which is why the only way business advances is through creative destruction.

And I've always thought that creative destruction implies that most enterprises go bust.

Thus having anything too big to fail should not be allowed. Failure is essential.
She had every right to do that. Those characters are her personal creations, and while she was fine with a free encyclopedia online, she didn't want anybody to profit off of her creations.

While I like the mindset that says you should be open with your creations, I respect the one that says your ideas are your own, and Rowling subscribes to that. I don't like this kneejerk attitude against people who want to retain rights to their work.