skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Worry about correctness and repeatability, not p-values
They're clearly not the worst company in America. They're pretty bad though, and don't seem to contend that at all. Strange PR piece.
This seems to me to be like proposing a square wheel because round ones are unattractive.

If you have a universal cultural idiom, I think it means you won the war of conveying a concept.
Something that I wish I would have learned at 13 is basic accounting (accrual method). Since your daughter is running a vending business, she has a great opportunity to practice accounting! Perhaps this book would be a good one for her:

The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1402211864/
On The Michael Arrington Accusations
What exactly do EA hope to achieve with posts like this?

Have they not heard the phrase "the customer is always right"?
Reality check: billion-dollar company posts news message after news message about how a their-business-disrupting new technology is bad.
> $ git push origin gh-pages

I think that if you had changed the above to

$ git push -u origin gh-pages

then everything else would have gone smoothly.
Very few (if any) of those you have listed are "unskilled" blue collar jobs. The kind that my grandparents were able to raise 4 and 5 children families on. We've traded all of our union factory jobs for fast-food, minimum wage jobs that you can't support a family on. And for what? Are our electronics/clothes/food/cars any cheaper or a better value?
"The git, the?"

But seriously, yes, you have to learn how to use Git in order to use Git. But you don't have to use Git. Click here to renew your Visual Source Safe license, or better, just copy your file to file.1 every time you edit it. No way that can go wrong!
FYI this is not skeuomorphism, it's more like anachronism. Different 50-cent word.
Arrington’s History of Abuse Allegations Includes Assault Investigation
That's a great idea if we all had a versioning file system (or for that matter if the filesystem could be a bit more abstract from the actual bits on the disk), most of us do not. Because there are many cases I can think of where you don't wanna save.
The data is for 2007, when financial sector was one of their primary customers. A bunch of Infosys and Tata's major customers (Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns) are out of business, other entities are significantly smaller in size. That list might look very different in 2013.
I don't know why, but I always end up telling every single person who either 1) Bitches about git, or 2) asks for help, that I always, always, always tell "git push" or "git pull" which remote and branch.

It's muscle memory and makes everything more explicit and easy to understand. Although, in this case, it sounds like you expect git to be intuitive. (Which it is not)

So this basically amounts to a blog post complaining that git is hard.
There is a difference between EAPM, and effective EAPM, in the sense that if you have a high EAPM but do the wrong thing, you still lose the game. SC2 has a way of training you to actually think and make decisions faster, in addition to typing faster, and this is something that I have found to be valuable for increasing my productivity as a programmer.
Only tangentially related to the article, but I have to commend this guy on his design chops. The new Quizlet site is fantastic. Great job Anand!
git has no user interface. git expects its users to have an in depth understanding of its implementation details. These are failures of git. Ideally, studying abstruse man pages to avert disaster wouldn't be required of new users.
Go is my current favourite. It is opinionated in ways I appreciate and it is very low friction.
Yeah, that's goofy. Nothing that Matt Cutts is saying in that video makes any sense at all with respect to .io.
If your goal was to boost votes for Democratic Party, what demographics would you choose?
I disagree that no-one is ever likely to replace a floppy icon - the argument is based on the idea that everyone today knows what the floppy icon means.

everyone is only 1 billion people with a USA influenced cultural history and a Microsoft influenced PC history.

FirefoxOS stands a good chance of reaching a new billion people, and some mobile device will, and what will the chinese-ubuntu choose for save? There are going to be 10bn people alive in 2050 (I hope!) and 9bn of them have not seen a floppy disk icon.

It might be that we stick with the icon and everyone starts spelling skeuomorphism wrong. But is it likely?

So I quite like the discussion shown here. There are a couple of good ideas. And the new devices, then new mental models of synching local and remote storage, are going to need new iconography. Will these guys do it? Only if they buy a domain, produce high quality glyphs with open discussions, make it free and blog about it incessantly - then maybe when the next big thing comes along, they might just reach out and take the easy icon set. That would be nice.
Creating and Storing Images by firing 'Rubidium Atoms'
The fact that you don't manually save does not mean the files aren't represented on a file system. Source control, file transfer and editing in another program can work unchanged.

Though you would need to worry about atomicity when having a file open in two editors constantly "auto-saving" the document; you'd need some way to synchronise state. Probably easiest to make file write access exlusive by default.
And also because it isn't a shitty language, like js.
This is what I do personally. We also use rebases liberally at my office which requires us to force push upstream. On-boarding new team members scares the shit out of me.
I'm not trying to argue that git is divinely inspired or whatever— this is confusing behavior.

It tells me I can lose history, but this is a revision control system, surely they don't mean I can actually lose history?

Sorry, but why did you think that they said that except to tell you that you could actually lose history? You ignored the rest of the error message and used --force. And then you were surprised that what the error message told you actually came to pass?
Another +1 for Chocolat. I made the choice between this and Sublime and really like Chocolat. Besides, what does one really use the minimap for anyways?
But the memory model with which they are coupled is just as important (I have in mind the grid addressing system and dataflow semantics)

Totally agree. My startup is using hierarchical grids as our core datatypes for just that reason (we also support Function cells that are used as values).

"Naming" is one of the core problems in computer science, and grids/spreadsheets elegantly solve that problem for many ad hoc use cases, where functional programming (in all its forms) does not.
my pleasure! : )
The program was first come first server after financial crisis. Now US economy became more attractive to foreign engineers and consulting companies once again.
For anyone wondering how the 'Worst Company in America' is decided upon, check here http://consumerist.com/2013/03/18/here-are-your-contestants-....

So it's basically a bracket. Not the most well-thought-out approach. Who picks the companies that are even eligible? Why not just have one big poll at the start? Even if they took that approach, I think it's clear EA would still 'win' since there is definitely a votebomb-like effect (much like what happens with MetaCritic ratings occasionally). Clearly the type of people that were aware of this poll in the first place mainly reside on videogame forums (Neogaf, /r/gaming etc), so the mob mentality is natural. Who can honestly say they were aware of this poll?

If you knocked on the door of every household in America and asked them who they thought was the 'Worst Company' in the world, it certainly wouldn't be EA.

I am not defending EA as such, I don't agree with some of their business practices, but there are copious amounts of hyperbole and for people to be treating this like an accurate study is ridiculous.

There is certainly a first-world problems vibe when a videogame publisher wins a poll like this.
> If you do, you can file a disclosure with 30 days, identifying the origin and nature of the transaction

I smell a Fifth Amendment issue with doing this in the US.
From my experience, git pull origin branch didn't do what I expected. (Pulling from the remote branch to the current branch.) I haven't figured out what it does, so I just use git fetch then merge. :(
Apple Devices All Set To Outsell Windows For The First Time
There are obviously many reasons to hate EA, but it is FAR from the worst company in America. Overall EA has had a positive effect on the economy and created many jobs (even if they are not "great" jobs). Many other companies have taken govt. bailouts and/or gambled tax-payer money. Let's be civil and have some perspective.
Excellent points.

This would, of course, lead to any individual, or entity, simply keeping 2 sets of keys. One legit, taxed, & one gray/untracked. That way, they could play either the clean or dirty markets.

But, they still couldn't launder, or cross between dirty & clean easily. They'd still need a collaborative cleaner in between... Such cleaners are easily built in the model you mention. (Out of country, with hands in both clean/dirty channels.)
You expressed it very well.
As a non-gamer, I don't get it.

Why do people buy EA games if they hate them so much?
Whenever I'm pulling down code, instead of `git pull', I use fetch. I fetch the specific branch into the local remote tracking branch (remote/branchname). Then use rebase, rather than merge. I won't lose anything and it avoids those dumb merge commits. Also, aliases are great for this.

git fetch <remote> <branchname>:refs/remotes/<remote>/<branchname>
git rebase <branchname> <remote>/<branchname>
Here is the list from 2013, the situation is even worse, most Indian Offshore companies are among top 10 now: http://www.epi.org/blog/top-10-h1b-guestworker-offshore-outs...
One of my side projects[1] was shown for about 20 seconds on BBC News. Overall it drove maybe 10k visitors.

The traffic comes in huge waves. It jumps 500x in seconds and dies down almost as quickly. In my case there were aftershocks as the news piece was aired around the world.

[1] http://asterank.com
Crypto-currencies might be, but I don't think Bitcoin is an existential threat to the modern liberal state.

The anonymity that every mainstream article claims Bitcoin has is not nearly as strong as it's made out to be[1][2][3].

The built-in deflationary aspect of Bitcoin seems to prevent it from being used as a "serious" currency. Hiding money under your mattress should never be the optimal approach to making more money. (It might not prevent people from using the currency, but it's highly sub-optimal.)

The fragility of the currency concerns me (by which I mean the way it's possible to lose massive amounts of money by losing a file or forgetting a password). Maybe this is a technical problem that will be solved with a more mature ecosystem, but I like the way that a real bank always has ways to access money when bad things happen (at least in a functioning banking system). This thread[4] documents the loss of about 70,000 Bitcoins, which is worth about ten million dollars today. Related to this, if somebody hacked the EFF's Twitter account and posted that they were accepting Bitcoin donations on some address, a lot of Bitcoins would disappear into somebodies wallet. You could argue that Bitcoin is a more perfect sort of system, but it's not without downsides.

Maybe another crypto-currency will come along and solve these problems. I think I hope it does. But I don't see Bitcoin supplanting modern state-backed currencies. I find it hard to see Bitcoin being used more widely than by the idealogues, the speculators, and those who find utility in it (like Silk Road, but not just that).

1. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.4524.pdf

2. http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf

3. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity

4. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7253.0
Do gamers enjoy paying an extra fee to play used games online? There seem to be no end to the accolades thrown your way for centralizing multiplayer on EA servers and shutting them down a year or two after game release.

In case you really are kidding yourselves with this press release, you are likely being voted the worst company because your millions of customers are suffering your "innovations" -- not enjoying them -- in order to play series they've come to love: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and SimCity. You are cashing in the stored value of these brands, not building on them.

But look, Microsoft was hated for a long time, too, and it didn't seem to hurt them any. Well, except maybe in the instances where they got into telling their users what they wanted instead of finding out what they wanted. It's not like you folks are going down that road, right?
What is an Array?
related, render an audio file as an photoreal image of a vinyl record, then recover the audio from that image: http://www.renderman.org/RMR/Examples/srt2011/audiblyPlausib...
To be fair, people werent exactly happy when they had to sign into Steam to play HalfLife2 in 2004 either. Times are different i know, but people tend to forget that Steam was forced upon us in quite similar ways and really wasnt everyones darling like it is today.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.
I was excited by the prospect of seeing a new CEO come in and possibly change the culture of EA, but after reading this piece I'm thinking that idea was probably naive. This lack of user empathy seems pretty pervasive.
>The intersection of California Avenue and El Camino Real was about as reasonable a place to smell cake batter or cookie dough as Olympus Mons.

There's a bakery about 100 feet from that corner. They make 21 different kinds of cookies and various other assorted pastries. See: http://goo.gl/maps/DHFmn
"Hey Internet, I know you don't like us, but just so you know, you are wrong about your complains, and we are doing just fine"

Well, what a brilliant piece of PR there.
It's a problem of user interface design. Git's user-machine interface does not follow the principle of least astonishment. It's not orthogonal. Functionality is grouped in very strange ways (you list, move, rename and delete branches with branch, but create branches using checkout? Seriously???).

And don't even get me started on the nightmare that is submodules.

The whole thing reminds me of the bad old unix days of "if it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand."
I am not quite sure but I think it might be along the lines of the fact EA cannibalizes so many studios. If you are a fan of a certain game series and then EA comes in and buys the studio that makes it or the rights to it you are still going to try out the next release of the game. The problem is that EA ruins it almost every single time from what I have heard. You can say that people should know that is going to happen due to their reputation but people will always have hope that it will be different just this time.
> HSBC knew what they were doing, that is things were explicitly illegal, and profited from that.

The whole point is that the government couldn't prove that HSBC knew what was going on. The only thing they could prove was that the internal controls were broken (and that they knew they were broken and did nothing to fix it).
It's even more simple than that: There's nothing about paper money that enables tax collection either. And yet somehow, taxes continue to exist.

Bitcoin is only a currency, not an entire financial system. It is a replacement for pieces of paper or shiny metal with doodles of George Washington stamped on them. It is not a replacement for banks, or credit cards, most other ephemera that people have constructed on top of currency. In point of fact, people are having to re-invent financial institutions in order to make Bitcoin more useful. And it's those institutions, not the underlying currency, where government attaches taxation.

It may become more feasible in the Bitcoin era to run a financial institution that plays entirely outside the US's jurisdiction. Nonetheless, there would be a large market for legitimized (and taxed) financial institutions, to provide services to the large number of entities that the government would take a hard look at anyways. My gut is that two parallel economies is an unstable situation, and the shadow-economy would not receive must traction compared to the legitimized one.
While reading that line from the article I thought of a sign that says not to put a child safety seat in front of an airbag, along with the carefully rendered diagram of the airbag breaking the top of the safety seat off and striking the child in the head, and someone thinking "but these are safety restraint systems; surely they don't mean that they could actually harm the passenger?" and then going ahead with the incorrect safety seat placement without deactivating the airbag.
I think the disconnect there is that Half Life 2 was a superb achievement in gaming, and worth the investment of dealing with Steam (arguably, Counter-Strike 1.6 started the Steam train, though, and Team Fortress 2 keeps it chugging). If EA gave us a Half Life 2 of its own that required Origin, they might pull it off.

I can't think of one, which is telling. SimCity had the potential to be and, well, wasn't.
Ask HN: Why do designers begin with PS rather than going straight to HTML/CSS?
Web designers who know how to code.<p>I've heard a number of reasons for skipping Photoshop and jumping straight to HTML/CSS (e.g. it saves a lot of time). What are the reasons for using Photoshop first?
Synthetic tissue built with 3-D printer
Free mobile games such as Simpsons tapped out require you to signup to origin to interact with anyone else. That is a ton of people with origin accounts that have never paid a cent for anything and also haven't visited it outside of a mobile game.

Whereas I have a steam account with a heap of paid for games. So in both cases I contribute to the total user count, dollars spent though is completely different.
I don't know about you, but my iPhone 4 was feeling pretty sluggish doing normal everyday stuff in iOS by the time I upgraded to the 5. That said, I have used a friend's 4s and it was also quite a bit more fluid than the 4. Between that and LTE, I think there was quite a bit of value though I could see why people probably wanted more than just a performance boost and a slight physical upgrade.
And even if he's not - he should concede this point. There's no winning for EA if they continue to argue this, consumers have already made up their mind about it. They should cut their losses and own up to the SimCity debacle.
Here, I will translate the PR into English. Ahh-Hem,
"Go fuck yourselves. Lots of love, EA"
The same reason why people are customers of TicketMaster, BofA, Comcast, or many of the companies competing for Worst Company in America: While EA doesn't have a whole monopoly on their market, they are an unignorable player.

People hate TicketMaster but they aren't willing to forego a concert to voice their opinion. People hate BofA but they don't know about the great alternatives they have in credit unions. People hate comcast, but sometimes it's the only ISP available. Similarly, EA touches on all of these fronts.
Because on the whole they publish some very good games, even the most staunch EA detractor can admit that. The vocal minority isn't an accurate representation of the millions that buy EA games (and they publish some of the most popular games you can buy, particularly their sports franchises like FIFA & Madden).
I understand Hacker News is a place for "serious" discussion, but a good Simpsons' reference always deserves props.
i been using git for almost two years, never needed a gui
I've always found defensiveness really unattractive, especially in companies. Unless you are bringing new facts to bear, any piece that tries to make the "we're not so bad as all that" argument will probably be unsuccessful at winning hearts or minds.
I remember reading a blog post about balancing the relationship between investors and founders. Much like this article, it reminds me of the testing requirements in the US education system. The government wants this data to monitor the progress and state of students. The problem with this need and lack of trust, is that it forces teachers and schools to focus less on learning and teaching, and focus on testing and teaching how to test. The part about CH's acquisition speaks the most to this forced shift away from what worked at the start up, to what the acquirer needs. I think this is inpart due to a lack of trust and ego.
There's a limited number of people who can publish a AAA title. EA is one of those few.

Further, EA's strategy of late has been to acquire IP to which gamers have already developed a sentimental attachment. So you may hate EA, but you really love Commander Shepard, so you do what you gotta do to keep hanging out with her.
> Wind Waker

People were mad at Nintendo for going cell-shaded, but the cell-shaded graphics hold up much better to the test of time, than say The Ocarina of Time.
The Great Movies
Maybe have a call with the Microsoft's Xbox division to let them know about the potential pitfalls of "always on" ... err... feature.
An evil prank would be to change someone's 'git push' alias to use -f by default.
As a former employee of EA (Tiburon) during the EA spouse days, I feel entitled to say it's okay to hate EA.
EA has a LOT of money to throw at games. They're one of the few publishers that can play at that level and put out blockbuster, ridiculous budget games. People like the polish and shine of big-budget games, some of which are genuinely not possible with less money.

Unfortunately, there's also an aspect that consumers don't get a whole lot of choices. Movies are a decent comparison to that. Why are there so many bad sequels that everyone hates? Cause they still buy tickets. Any movie > no movie.

Plus, EA used to make great games.
IP mostly, for example, SimCity (2013) was the first (complete) iteration of the venerable series in 10 years. A lot of people (including myself) were interested in an improvement on games we played as kids and teens back with the first SimCity. The marketing, information and videos released ahead of the game indicated a solid and fun game. Fun enough to warrant at least putting up with an always online experience. To me the biggest issue isn't ultimately the online aspect (while I disagree with it, if it really bothered me I wouldn't have bought it.) The big issue is that for a game with a history of reflectively deep simulation and gameplay, this one falls on it's head hard. I've put a few hours into it, the only challenge in the game is fighting against things that are essentially design issues/bugs, not in the challenge of managing a complex and changing city.

Anyways, this is the first EA game I've bought for myself since SimCity 4, first time I actually installed their platform Origin. Actually that points to the interesting reality, the people who buy these games may be simply purchasing a gift.
That's equivalent to just doing `git pull --rebase`, no?
We just switched to Grande from TWC for our home internet and couldn't be happier for the service they provide at a fraction of the cost of our previous, slower TWC plan. That said, I think it will be hard to stay on Grande if Google Fiber really gets rolled out here.
In that case you use `history.replaceState()`, or just plain old `window.location.replace('url')`
you list, move, rename and delete branches with branch, but create branches using checkout? Seriously???

git checkout -b new-branch

... is a shortcut for:

git branch new-branch
git checkout new-branch

You can create the branch or otherwise manipulate it without actually checking it out, so it's useful to have it separate and have a shortcut.

(I agree that git's interface is terrible, but I disagree that this is one of those cases. :) )