skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With exceptions you can:
a) handle the exceptions higher up the call stack
b) consolidate error handling code for multiple error generation points

With Go you pretty much have to attach a conditional to many calls.

Your obsession with clean revision histories is another matter.
How to Collaborate Your Way to Better Code
Not all outages affect git. Several major downtimes were on the HTTP-side only, and git push/deploy worked for us.
bitbucket.org is not bad.
I really dread new MS Server releases, every one comes with major improvements so they're a no brainer but have three or four jaw-droppingly bad regressions.
These type of arguments are like No true Scotsman, just applied to the object instead of the subject.

Totally useless counter-anecdote to illustrate: I'm not much older than your son, I do program and tinker around with stuff and use command lines etc. but prefer Windows 8 over Windows 7. According to your logic that should not be possible, since if even your son doesn't like Windows 8, how can someone more technical than him like it?

BTW I don't care much for the Metro interface. It's barely usable on tablets but totally worthless on a desktop. However that doesn't make the desktop any worse – only the Start menu is missing, which I haven't used in Windows 7 either. Otherwise the desktop environment is another solid Vista-to-7 like improvement, though this fact usually gets lost in all the "OMG what is this Start screen" noise.
You say criminal like it's a bad thing. In some countries, speaking out against the oppressive government is criminal (e.g. North Korea).
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/doublefine/double-fines-mas...
Who cares? By the time this item gets upvotes the sites are almost always fixed. Is this hacker news worthy? I suggest we ban these submissions. This is the second, X is down notice today, Github [1] and Dropbox [2]. Personally, I'd much prefer a submission to https://status.github.com/ with a comment about the Major service outage. Posting the Github.com link is next to useless.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5793948

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5792510
Elon Musk’s Genius: Understanding the Cost of a Screw and the Value of a Photo
Great write up. Just what I was after. Thanks for the share.
I don't think US vs. humanity was the point of the article. The argument stays the same if you replace it with any other popular (technical) achievement in the country you are talking about ("Wirtschaftswunder" in Germany, Concorde in France, ... I don't know any others. Ignorant me.).

Still, your conclusion is absolutely right and exactly what is expressed in the article with the example of the Linux Kernel.
Because single points of failure are a big KICK ME sign. http://bit.ly/ZwhmHB
Github : Major service outage
I generally agree. Regarding #1, that should be the lowest level available, akin to IP addresses on the internet. There should be another layer of indirection available, so that I can e.g. register "mike@mikeash.com" with the post office and have it work for physical mail. That way I don't have to notify anybody else when I move, and I don't have to tell people where I live just so that they can send me mail.
So the company blog post was posted to news a few days back[1] but somehow there was no discussion or thoughts on the advantages of the service:

(open source client and server, over WebDAV against Apache (most any solid WebDAV service should work - hell this makes it easy to host against AWS!), seamless sync of the Dropbox sort, document-level sync (glares at iCloud))

In fact, OmniPresence seems to have completely gone under the radar on HN. It seems surprising as the service seems to address huge swathes of the concerns shared by much of the HN community about cloud data sync services.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5745750
We do not. I'd be interested in hearing suggestions on how.
Big Data: from ocean to stream to killing the dream
GitHub is down? Ugh! What is this? North Korea?
I believe that passwords are not transmitted like this in SSHv2 because of that very attack (not to say there are not overwhelmingly good reasons to use public key authentication anyway).
| walking around barefoot in the dirt [...] is
| VERY DANGEROUS

Really?
When I was little, we had no address. We did live next to the local post office, so using a PO box for mail was nice and simple. For UPS, we had to give an address like, "the house next to the post office on the east side". It usually worked, but occasionally they'd get their directions mixed up and deliver to the house on the other side.
Infograph: The 80/20 Guide to Finding the Perfect Ecommerce Platform
Lots of folks:

1) someone who is adversely affected by software hosted there
2) someone who sells source code hosting and sees GitHub as competitor
3) someone wanting to demonstrate fragility of software that relies on GitHub for underlying package management (such as NPM)
4) someone wanting to disrupt a blog that uses GitHub as the data store

etc
I love Windows 8 and hope they leave the option to keep the task like it currently stands. The negativity is bloggers, using Macbooks, trying to rekindle the Vista days for page views.
My highest rated comment (~50 upvotes) was a pun with no intellectual value. It's one of those things that makes you realize upvotes are meaningless; I now generally restrict my upvoting to behaviors I want to encourage and comments that I want higher exposure for (push them upwards).
This Startup Will Deliver Anything To You In Under An Hour
Steam DRM can still be annoying if you're internet connection goes down and you didn't manage to start steam correctly in offline mode and then refuses to play until you do connect.
its up for me too..
The metro interface is a list of live tiles that you put there. The start menu was a list of all programs you have installed, plus several useful tools. They're completely different.
Is this really true, or we suffering from Pauline-Kael syndrome here? How many people are actually aware of DRM outside of a rabid internet minority (and I include myself in that list)? It may lose some customers, but I bet its a minuscule fraction.
Chromium - Back swipe gesture causes scroll bug on Mac
It's not echo location, though. It's far easier to pinpoint where a sound is coming from than to echo locate; sighted people can do it, too.
I tend to only buy cheap games (or heavily discounted games) on Steam, partially because of their DRM. A game on Steam isn't bought, it's more of an indefinite lease. If Steam as a service shuts down, or something happens to my account, Valve isn't guaranteeing me access to my games (as far as I know).

I try to buy on GOG even if it's slightly more for games I wish to keep, archive the installer, and be able to revisit years into the future.
Tesla to triple supercharger network by the end of June
Well, one reason to move from Ruby to JavaScript is speed: there are very fast JavaScript implementations, compared to the fastest Ruby. And since you need to know JavaScript ANYWAY for the client side, it makes a certain amount of sense to just use it everywhere. So I guess that'd be two reasons, if I can go all Spanish Inquisition here...
Is it true that people who dislike DRM prefer GOG over Steam and that DRM-free is one of the primary features that attracts many users to GOG? Yes, it is true. How many - I can't say exactly, but this subject is often brought up on GOG forums and site features feedback - you can read about it. Minority or not, GOG responds to this demand, while Steam doesn't, so GOG is more competitive in this particular aspect.
Parents have gastric bypass; children’s DNA may receive the benefits
Ask HN: which consumer web company sold for $2 billion?
The article should have pointed to this rather than Linux IMO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Parc
This is a paid site? I've signed up for it and it seems great, but so far I haven't seen any indication that there is anything to pay for.
It seems that page must be manually updated or very slow to update. I noticed gists weren't working for what seemed like 15 minutes or more before it acknowledged there was an issue.

Even now it lists all services as available even though the top message indicates a major disruption.
Having a bitbucket mirror isn't a bad idea. They have free private repos for up to 5 users, so if you just have an admin and the deploy user on there you can get redundancy for "free". Just have to keep it in sync, but that shouldn't be too hard with DVCS and everyone having a local copy.
NASA Tracks Asteroid 1998 QE2 (live)
An NSA Big Graph experiment
I like that it looks like they learned a lot from the last kickstarter. Some noteable differences:

- Using an existing engine they're familiar with

- Asking for lots more money

- Cutting on shipping costs for rewards by moving them to higher tiers

- Targeting fewer platforms, initially
A map of the United States, according to Google Search results
Not only that. General stories have led me to be HIGHLY skeptical of any Kickstarter projects that make extreme claims. The more far-reaching the claim, the lower the chances I would even consider investing. This one meets my personal criteria for "I'd get a better return just burning the money, at least then I'd get some heat."
OmniPresence
I cant speak for your country/experience , but as in Greece you have to verify yourself :)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/button
The Surprising History and Bright Future of Data Science
I completely agree. A million years from now, there will likely still be human artifacts on the moon. Where will the linux kernel be in a million years?
I think it's fine to post about outages - that's relevant news, and even if site is back up, always results in relevant and theoretically good discussion.

I do agree that linking to the URL that's down is a special kind of stupid. At that point, it's a non-link, and there's little value in watching my browser spin.
"The main problem with DRM is that we can have culture lost forever"

That is just a side effect of the real problem with DRM: it takes control away from the owners and users of a computer and puts it in the hands of privileged third parties.
Innovate with Pivotal RabbitMQ and Rasberry Pi
> The amusing thing is that the creators of Go are some of the fiercest critics of Java, but they have created something that seems to follow a very similar philosophy to the original Java. I guess it remains to be seen if Go will have added as many features in 15 years time as Java has in the last 15.

Funny you should say that, because IIRC they also have stated that one of the reasons they are so skeptical of adding features to the language is that Java started out as nice and simple language that was a great alternative to what was available at the time, and that they don't want to repeat the mistakes of what happened after that.
I don't buy things from kickstarter in the thousands unless it's a proven name in a business. I often buy things in the hundreds, and have yet to be truly stiffed (although delays are a certainty)
Do you think that this is right or wrong? I think that it is wrong. Also the assumption that they make such a small percentage is wrong.
There are two kinds of "ripped off" when it comes to Kickstarter:

1.) They collect the money to do the project, attempt to do the project, and then fail for one of a hundred reasons and don't deliver a product.

2.) They collect the money to do the project, never actually try to do the project, and never deliver a product.

The first example is the nature of Kickstarter and embodies the risk that you take on if you choose to fund a project. Often times people feel like this is the same as being ripped off, but it's not.

The second example is just getting ripped off.
We use Gitolite, it's not totally amazing, but it works.
Consider adding "Use browser's Incognito mode for some sites"
Same reason why you should suck your kids pacifier if you have a healthy digestive system.
Stopped carrying a smartphone
I love the unique approach to the infograph. My favorite persona was the "Lifestyle Designer". It's something that I aspire to be, similar to my friends Cody and Sean Ogle.

EcommHub seems useful. I'll look into it.
Inocularnos.
Stopped carrying any kind of cellphone
And in Sri Lanka it would be written the other way around - 30/107 Tristan Way.
Statsite: Highly scalable StatsD implementation
Authorship ties Google+ to search. Can I have my photo next to my search result if I don't have a Google account?
So because Russ Cox didn't respond to some comments on his blog, the Go team is trying to shield users from generics because they think they're too complicated? I don't buy that. If you follow the go-nuts mailing list, the pros and cons of various generics implementations have been argued back and forth, and they have yet to find one that meets their criteria. I don't think they disagree that it would be helpful, they just don't think that the trade-offs current implementations provide aren't worth the convenience they add.
The situation is pretty similar to email addresses. You could try parsing them, but it's pointless, and usually not what you want. What you want isn't a street, 'zip code', or city name. What you want is a route from point A to point B.
My imagination of how this happend:

One Evening, Close to 5:

Boss: "I see we're getting quite a few exception reports in the code."

Developer: "Yeah, working on that. I just need a bit of time."

Boss: "Well, I want to see at least 10% fewer exceptions by tomorrow morning."

Developer: "..."

Next Morning:

Boss: "So I took a look at the reports this morning. Glad to see the number of exceptions are down."

Developer: "..."

Probably got a raise.
My point is that if you want to start to get traction, B2C isn't a bad place to start. That assumes you can either translate that to revenues, make a B2B pivot, or shim a B2B service in place at a later date.
Thanks for the comment. Yea, our goal was to approach it from the entrepreneur's angle. Instead of going through the pros and cons of each platform, I wanted to start with the entrepreneur in mind and what will work best for them.

I like the "innovator"
Show HN: Free hi-resolution photos for your website. 10 new photos every 10 days
You left out adopting the metric system.
Link shorteners are discouraged on HN. http://amyfelts.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/159580000x-ki... (It's just a cartoon of a "kick me" sign.)
What do you mean by "without stopping"? Are you including fuel stops? I don't know of any vehicle which has an 800-mile range, so in a purely superficial sense your statement is of course correct; but your reference to "driving behavior" and link to "drowsydriving.org" suggests that you are focused more on human limits than those of our vehicles.

If that is the case, I am here to tell you that driving from Seattle to San Francisco in a single run is neither impossible nor even particularly remarkable. I make this trip two or three times a year, visiting my California-based family. I-5 is a smooth, easy, comfortable road, well engineered and well maintained. The challenge is not fatigue but boredom, especially through the long, straight sections in the wide-open countryside of Nothern California, where average traffic speed approaches 80 mph. Bring an interesting companion or some good energetic music and you're set.
I have more than 60 GoG games. Most bought during their awesome collection sales. I have nothing but praise for GoG and all my dealings with them. They are the answer to piracy in that they make acquiring and owning games easier, and better than pirating them. I've bought a few games from them I had illegal copies of. Why? No DRM, extra stuff, the "right" price and this...

"The games are always remastered for modern operating systems as well, making them playable on new machines."

I haven't even played some of those 60 games. Bought as part of "deals" and in some sense I'm happy to give money to GoG for being fair / awesome and my trust / desire for them to continue doing so and thriving as a company and business model.

Being decent with customers, works.
you can also use linemode. it works for telnet and, uhm, it sort of work for ssh through a 3rd party patch.
it sends whole commands AND supports everything. That's because its not just a dumb echo, and require terminal support on the server side.

mosh actually does something in between (and thus have display errors sometimes)
Gave me a puerile giggle, thanks!
Why are you so vocal about DRM any way? I know why people are against it and I can imagine why others are for it, so yeah, why do _you_ personally favor DRM?
No. They are more interested in your money. You can even pay cash with a deposit.

Actually, hotels don't require your actual identity. Many people like celebrities, public figures, some business travellers routinely provide fake information to hotels.
I can imagine that there will be a very bloody political fight over self-driving vehicles as they become more mainstream, particularly when it comes to taxis and trucks, because of the vested interests of professional drivers.
I've always noted that it was interesting that link selling (in a non-obvious manner) was not an incentive for these Kickstarter projects. Donate $20 and get your name and link to your website on our contributors page! Shrug.
In many parts of the country, yes, you get worms this way.

Hookworms directly or some other worms via eggs into small cuts.
Because of their life experience, I wouldn't be so quick to reject either of these fellows' advice out of hand.
That's too bad, I guess the simple things don't always work (especially with autoimmune problems). I hope your wife can find something that works!
I think you meant: it just seems weird to actually have a face to go along with the search results.

And when I think about it, that's the whole issue: I'm beginning to think that images (of authors or webmasters or product logos) don't belong on the serarch results page--ever. I can't see a case where it helps the average person who is searching because the photo is always once removed from the actual content.

If I search for a "thingamabob" how does the photo of somebody who wrote about thingamabob help me choose a result? If I'm searching for a company, even the company logo doesn't help because I may not know it ahead of time. Or if I'm looking for a blog, how would I know the face of the blogger ahead of time? I just can't see that many searches where the author's face is relevant to choosing the content you want to see.

Then there is the issue of Google putting the photo in the hottest part of the user's heat-map eye-scan of the search results page. If you put an irrelevant item where the user is looking for immediate relevancy, that result will get skipped (just as the OP postulated and so many commenters are confirming here on HN).

Finally, you have to wonder what Google was really thinking. If images do have an impact on click-through rate, then the images will get SEO'd and become useless. There is a comment on this thread that confirms that putting a woman's picture for the authorhip increased hits. Great, soon every website will appear to be written by a hot babe showing skin (or hot guy depending on the target audience), or if logos are allowed, all competitors will have a logo that looks like the #1 in the field.

Google is killing the golden goose.
Github experiencing network problems
Actually, non-internet users are more likely to feel it, when they can't activate or play their games without a connection.
I love Windows 8 too. It feels refreshing just to see the lock screen on this bad boy. I can play hydro thunder, gravity guy, and then go back to writing my paper and churn out MATLAB calculations. I can press start button and look at weather in a snip. I can have a simple to-do list right on my start screen. It has improved my workflow, but alas I do not have a blog where I can ridicule existing technologies and make sponsorship money. Seeing the snarky comments/headlines makes me feel like a kid among bunch of grandpas.
I'm honestly wondering why this is here.

Specifically, the section on "Why not send whole commands" made me wonder who this is targeted at, its pretty basic UNIX stuff to know how an Async ASCII terminal works.
The scale part of it is rather simple ... you can get sensors for measuring the amount of pressure cheap and easily, just some calibration and you are set.
Soil transmitted helmiths (aka worms) are a huge medical burden on the world. CDC estimates more than 1 billion people are infected.
I would argue that a bitcoin has more intrinsic value than a beanie baby.

I would argue that it has less; kids have always loved stuffed animals, whereas no one found intrinsic value in a cryptographic hash until someone thought to brand and promote one.

A Bitcoin's value comes from the Bitcoin system, which does have some utility as a sort of distributed ledger. The problem is there are already plenty of e-cash systems already in place, virtually all of which are easier to use than Bitcoin.

As a currency, Bitcoin's volatility is a major disadvantage. No one will spend a Bitcoin if they think it will be worth more tomorrow. No one will take a Bitcoin if they think it will be worth less. Success as a speculative investment is generally antithetical to success as a currency.
They at least need it to buy the game. But when it's DRM free they can do it somewhere, and then just bring the installer home.
> Most users do not need or want root access to their mobile phones or even any of their devices.

Irrelevant: they may not _want_ it, but they have a _right_ to it.

> That if something is not 100%, exactly, totally, purely aligned to your personal vision it's fucking garbage, or worse, evil and bad.

Sometimes it _is_ evil and bad not to do exactly the right thing.
Agree. It turns HN into a defacto Github status monitoring tool. See these many examples: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%2...
I've wanted a replacement for Final Fantasy Tactics forever. That was a really amazing, cerebral game. I think that Advanced Wars is kind of the epitome of this genre, but I'd love to see what they can do.

These games are all about the execution; really easy to overcomplicate the interface.
Tesla Motors Supercharger
New Tesla supercharger network
Twenty years ago, at the rise of Internet, DRM would have been unconceivable. How come we're here now?
I'm pretty sure we didn't do that. :)

Unfortunately, this is one of the reasons we've been reluctant to publicize GitTogether. You never know if the login will work or the contact list will load.
I very good idea! got my vote
"Hire everyone you know at Stanford." NEAT TRICK. Also "ignore diversity of thought," and apparently diversity of almost everything else. Absolutely stupid.
Lights in the US have buttons that you can press. But they don't always work. There's one light in Cambrige, MA, that, as far as I could tell, never ever said WALK.
I started, and invested my own money (6 figures, that I earned) in a b&m business in my 20s, lost a lot of time, money, and experienced a lot of bullshit... but I learned a lot. That preamble is because, while I have no experience with your typical SV startup, I have put my own time and money at risk.

By joining a startup you are pretty much guaranteed a salary, an office to go to, and you have to weigh the risks of lower salary vs options, but so what? That's no more risk then someone working a corporate 9-5 and chooses to actively manage their portfolio, which really is minimal risk imo (wrong?). As an outside observer it seems to be in the financiers interest to perpetuate the sexiness of startups to "market" their investments. Can someone that is more into the startup culture clear this up for me? What risk is there in joining a startup as an employee other than what I have described?
Universal Music Tells Gangnam Parody to pay $42K
I mean when you buy a disk, put it into your PC, and can't play it because there's no internet connection. Or when your internet cuts out and your game quits even if you're not playing online, just because the DRM can't phone home anymore.
Was the SimCity 5 launch really bad for EA?