skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Merging: join two (or more) branches of history. The result is a new commit, which has all the merged commits as parents.

A1

|\

A2 B1

A3 B2

| B3

A4 |

| /

A5 (parents: A4,B3)

Cherry-picking: Pick one specific commit from another branch and apply it to the current branch. On your branch the commit gets a new hash (a new identity) since the commit identity is based of a) the parents of a commit and b) the file contents at this commit. There is no information left where the commit came from (aside from author and date).

A1

|\

A2 B1

A3 B2

| B3

A4

|

A5 resulting from cherry-picking B2

So both methods serve a different purpose: merging brings all of the changes of a branch into another branch; cherry-picking just brings in the changes from one commit into a branch. If you want to bring just one particular change into your branch there's no way around cherry-picking.

Another approach is to develop particular things in a topic branch from the start. If you like all of the changes in this branch you can merge it later.

The aversion against cherry-picking and its bigger brother rebasing (which basically cherry-picks all the commits of another branch) is based on the basic principle, that each commit represents a somewhat tested state of a program in time. All VCS want to ensure you can go back to these tested states later. Later, if a bug occurs you want to be able to find the commit where the bug was introduced, you can use git's bisect functionality to find this specific commit. There can be two types of bugs: original bugs and integration bugs. In the chery-picking/rebase case you have only one commit for a feature so you cannot easily decide if it is was an original bug or instead introduced by integrating a specific feature. Using merging, you end up having one commit for the feature and one for the merging (integration) and this can help in particular work-flows.

You might want to see discussions with and by Linus Torvalds on the linux kernel mailing list about this topic...
western australia

hmm.. thinks I want the flight time between Western, New York and Australia (19 hours 5 minutes if anyone's interested)

Every geographical location I've tried keeps giving me a us equivalent one :(

But, it's early days yet and this is a long term project. Can't wait to see what this is capable of in a year
The Perils of a New Search Engine
Interestingly, Google manages to do a better job for that particular question:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=speed+of+an+unladen+swallow...

Though to be fair, I don't think Wolfram had unladen swallows in mind for Alpha.
"To check that they had not merely discovered that creative people are more likely to choose to live abroad, Dr Maddux and Dr Galinsky identified and measured personality traits, such as openness to new experiences, that are known to predict creativity."

Is this what passes for controls these days? It'd be much smarter to test people right before they're about to go abroad.
Ok, they filtered out for some known factors that encourage creativity... but we barely know how creativity works, so how can they know for sure they've filtered for all the factors?

To me, it seems that it's as likely there's a factor they don't know about, as that their hypothesis holds (i.e. living abroad causes creativity).
Andrew,

You see spam on HN, but it is hard to believe this is a case. The story about profit per company had been up for about 10 hrs by the time I posted. A respected blogger with impeccable tech/startup credentials (founder of Tabblo acquired by HP) posted a thoughtful reply showing how poor PPE was at some large tech companies relative to other companies. It is related and interesting, if a bit mislocated.
Or do something like k/(n+10)
Warning: Auto-starting video

Finding which tab out of 30 tabs in 5 browser windows is annoyingly difficult.
You mean the difference between a pull and a cherry-pick? I've been a user of git for a year now and this is my understanding:

git pull is just a synonym for two commands: git fetch and git merge. git fetch gets a copy of the remote branch you specify, git merge merges that branch into your local one.

For the sake of this conversation we're mostly interested in git merge. The primary function of git merge (in this context) is to create a new commit with your local head and the head of the remote branch you just fetched as its parents.

git cherry-pick is different. Instead of creating a commit with two other commits as a parent, it creates a commit with just your local head as its parent. So a cherry-pick doesn't bring two branches together. It just extends your local branch by one more node.

"Well," I suppose the OP is arguing, "If the point is to take a remote's code and merge it with mine, why would I ever want to pop those changes on top of my own branch, extending it, instead of making a nice tidy commit that merges both branches?"

The answer is sometimes (especially when you're working on public projects with anonymous contributers), you don't want all of the changes in a remote branch. You only want some of them. Just the good ones.

In those cases, you can't create a commit with the remote head as one of the parents because that would tell git that all of that branch's changes should be merged in, and that's not what you want. What you really want is a ways to rebase just one or two commits from the remote branch onto your local branch.

And that is exactly what cherry-pick does. It lets you specify a single commit, then rebases that commit on top of your local branch, extending it.

I think the author's problem is he was using this tool thinking it would create commits with both remote and local parents -- that it would merge his branch and the remote one. Instead it created commits that had only his branch as a parent -- that is, it extended his branch.

When a tool does something unexpected, it can be scary. But in this case there's no cause for concern. If what he really wanted was to merge the remote and local branches, he cans still do that. Git is smart enough to know which remote commits have already been applied to the local branch via cherry-pick (or any other means). It then just skips those when resolving merges.
This article, like many other science articles, follows this template:

People have long suspected that <extremely general conclusion involving vaguely-defined terms with complex meanings, like 'intelligence', 'love', 'creativity', 'belief'>. But now scientists have proved it. <Description of experiment, in which some simple test is used as a substitute for the trait in question - either a psych test, or an MRI, or something - and middle class North Americans are used as a substitute for humanity>.

I find these articles really tiresome.
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Wolfram Alpha says 3 (siding with the lying owl).

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+licks+does+it+...
Nathan Bedford Forrest - Civil War Confederate Commander | TechJaws
Yet it seems to know the speed of an unladen European swallow:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+eur...

It's not as sure about unladen African swallows though.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+an+unladen+afr...
If they don't pay taxes, wouldn't they be subject to (real) pirates?
It's usually seen as a matter of trust. I consider the phrase "I trust you absolutely" not only pretty stupid but incredibly arrogant - you are not only saying you trust the other (which is good and reasonable) but you are also saying you could not be mistaken (which is foolish). Trust, but be prepared for being wrong in doing so.
What are some programming competitions coming up?
Does anyone know of any contests for programmers/developers coming up soon?
Al Zimmermann is due to start again fairly soon, and there's always Project Euler. Are you interested specifically in competitions with prizes, or simply having a challenge and pitting yourself against other programmers?
Calculating/displaying average karma discourages the type of behavior we want to cultivate on HN.

Users that care about their scores will only contribute to highly visible conversations in ways that are more likely than not to be up-voted. This will not only have the effect of squelching debate and the voicing of contrary opinions, but will also lead to an HN where only popular, big ticket posts are discussed while the rest are left to fallow.
I don't write articles on entrepreneurship and technology startups, either, if that is what you are trying to say. I don't purport to be an expert on entrepreneurship through articles from an authoritative sources like the NY Times. It's a matter of credibility when someone who supposedly understands how a system works falls victim to that system by his/her own actions or greed. If PG did a startup tomorrow, attracted funding, and then burned through it by buying Aeron chairs and Nerf toys, how much would you believe in his credibility as a writer then? I would be a bit more cautious.
I've seen a few comments write Wolfram Alpha off. WA is going to be 10 times better than Google for a specific set of queries and when it gets etter at recognizing questions (or when I get better at asking them since Wolfram is infallible </sarcasm>) I can see myself using this thing IN ADDITION to Google.
Sequoia China is kind of a joke in China. Countless epic fails. But after all, the Chinese capital market could simply be too capricious and treacherous for foreign firms to explore. Or, more broadly, the VC model for the Internet is largely broken in China. There are effectively hardly any laws protecting venture business in China. Greedy partners could steal the money and disappear. The government could shut down your industry over night. i.e. the online video sharing business in China. And Sequoia China may have fallen into every pitfall possible out there.
September 11, 2001
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=september+11%2C+2001
Death of Mohammed Atta (terrorist)
Actually, alimony is taxable to the recipient but child support is taxable to the payer.

That is, if the $4K/month is actually $3K child support and $1K alimony, the father's taxable income will be reduced by the $1K, but he's paying taxes on the rest. The ex-wife will pay taxes on the alimony received but not on the child support received.

This is one of the several reasons why women seek child support rather than alimony in divorce proceedings.
Startup Interviews: Zooppa.com
WolframAlpha is Not threat to Google it just have different target of people. It's more like online scientific encyclopedia + can preform complex math calculation.
Release Early
Watch prison break series finale online
Despite all the misses I'm pretty impressed it knew about my university http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=University+of+Skövde at all, considering it's tiny even by Swedens standards.
People who live outside the country are already outliers to begin with. Only 20% of Americans even have a passport.

(I knew a woman who was in her mid-30s that had never been outside the state of Pennsylvania; her first trip to NYC was at the age of 33.)
"Absolute trust" is stupid and arrogant - you are not only saying you trust the other party (which is generally a good thing) but also that you couldn't possibly be mistaken.
Erlang is pragmatic
In constrast "Is God Real"
Says it only takes 2 hours and 35 minutes betwee God, hungrary and Real, portugal. :)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Is+God+real%3F
Stopped reading it after the sentence "Erlang is not a functional programming language."

edit: http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/erlang-is-not-function... and others seem to agree that "functional" is not the antonym of "practical/pragmatic/useful."
By the HAL9000 thing, I assume you mean it does everything it can to protect the integrity of its mission and attempts to kill the crew.
"Input interpretation:
how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Result:
a woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood

(according to the tongue-twister)"

That was actually surprisingly helpful, as I've never heard the second part! And now I know.

[edit]

"Input interpretation:
how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? (etc.)

Result:
the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
(according to Bob Dylan)"

They've thought of everything!
but all problem description, no solutions

Left as an exercise for the reader. Good.

Seriously, now that you made me think about it, we are much too much inured to articles by writers who have solutions, and are damn well going to find problems for them.
The Codex Seraphinianus: Man and woman copulate, turn into alligator
Darwin's Nightmare
The cost of a home varies a lot more between metro areas than rent does. Similar rentals vary about 4x between the most expensive and least expensive metro areas; home prices vary more than 10x between the most and least expensive metro areas. (Both vary even more between particularly expensive and inexpensive neighborhoods - the numbers are metro area averages).
If the business logic is implemented in couchdb or implemented in serverside code, it's still business logic protecting the data.

It could be just as flawed, or even worse (e.g. sql injection allows malicious users to run database operations with no restrictions at all. If there were db level restrictions they could only destroy their own data).

This ALWAYS NEVER EVER type of mentality demonstrates exactly why CouchDB is simultaneously overhyped and condemned.
However, although this article itself might not prove much, when I was doing some research I came across this study which had found a link between eminent scientists and immigrants. I think it might be the cultural shock which perhaps forces the individual to once more learn the basics, i.e. customs, traditions, how to behave and of course language.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+owns+wolfram+resear...
Wolfram is the company, Alpha the product name.
Interesting.

Liberal arts majors still have nothing better to do with their lives.
I'm actually glad that this is not currently possible, based on the average quality level I see in iPhone apps. If it was opened up I could foresee a lot of mysterious performance problems solvable only by restarting or somehow managing specific processes. Enough of them have memory leaks and crash randomly to begin with.
The Fork Queue is a replacement for email patch management, not a merge tool. It is for cherry picking changes from contributors, not merging branches.

This is why the author information is retained and --signoff is used.

As Hongli Lai says in the comments: Most of the time, people who fork my projects make a bunch of changes, some which I want and some which I do not want. Cherry-picking instead of pulling totally makes sense in these situations.

This is the situation it was designed for - reviewing and signing off on individual commits, not merging branches.

I think the takeaway from this article is that we need to do a better job explaining the feature and what it's for. I understand now how someone new to the site would have no concept of email patch management or git cherry-pick and assume this is a nice interface for `git merge`.

As a first step, I've improved the text in the help dialogue to be more clear and link to the blog post + intro video more prominently. Maybe a next step would be making the actual help link itself (it's a small question mark next to Your <project> Fork Queue) more visible.

Also we could detect if it was your first time using the Fork Queue and offer help - that seems to be a popular idiom for web apps these days.

Perhaps in the future we can even offer a first class merge tool as the author suggests, but for now I've been extremely happy with how the Fork Queue compliments (but doesn't replace) my offline workflow.
I think we all know the answer to:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=meaning+of+life

I guess they knew their audience enough to answer the obvious questions.
I would love to see some diagrams of the design.
Ooops... availability* My bad...

Anyway, what has

> If they'd been left behind, stranded far away from the "land of opportunity," would they have been better off?

got to do with consent?

That apart, informed consent cannot nullify a crime. That is a well accepted principle. You cannot give informed consent for murder and such stuff. There is a libertarian school of thought that wants to change that but I don't subscribe to that school of thought. Slavery under consent is just as much a violation of human dignity and just as much a crime as far as my views are concerned.
I have a theory... They're collecting queries made with the Alpha release, and they'll just implement the suggestion (in a general form, like slurping up an alcohol database in reply to someone's query complaint), and keep adding and adding cases until it can handle 1000 times more specific queries.
More content we don't need.

Has any one here not read a plethora of articles like this already?
Hmm, while the point is good (and oft-repeated), this article is a little confusing in both its title and the way it phrases things...

The linked Mixergy extract is very good though.
google it, there are plenty.
It used to be, you actually had to build something to get a patent on it. Now you can just imagine it.
There's a creative edge of a person who decides to live abroad in the first place. There may be correlation, but what is the causation?
- A sense of purpose
- Fulfillment
- Biological drive
- Life goals
- Companionship
- Love
- To make the people you care about happy

Based on success statistics, startups probably don't make a majority of entrepreneurs happy either. But they still do it.
This isn't a very good study. What if the foreign students were simply smarter to begin with? I imagine they faced higher barriers to entry.
Apple Serious About Background App Support For iPhone 3.0
Live stream of the control room http://www.justin.tv/clip/2dd6b9f07e7f8a4e
Google Video is one of the best things on the internet. Too bad they stopped the uploading.

I had a vision last night of the television industry attacking internet video sites so they'd crash and people would have to go back to watching TV again...
Just to be fair, I tried a couple of your queries with Google, and the answers were not forthcoming either. But I suppose with Google I could do some SEO and get the answers to show up. Whereas I am not sure how to do that with Wolfram. Of course it only just came out.

The queries I tried were:

Q:distance traveled by space shuttle in one day
A:Lots of links, none of which gives canonical answer.

Q:explosive energy of five sticks of dynamite
A:Lots of links, only a few of which deal with dynamite the explosive.

Query time was roughly 9:30 AM Central Time Sunday May 16, 2009.

Still, I think both Google and Wolfram will go to this model over time. Which, of course, will be terrible for Google since revenue wise it is a one trick pony. I think it will be better for us though. It does seem more natural for me to ask for the population of Ningbo, and just get an answer instead of a list of links.
I agree with this concept fully.
Wolfram's talent for self-promotion has been nicely demonstrated by the publicity campaign ahead of his WolframAlpha launch. Multiple pre-announcements, screenshots, peek-reviews, demos have been appearing on NH for weeks already.

Which may not be a bad thing, except it all comes at a price of credibility. Why does one need to create all that fuzz? Isn't it because the revolutionary product/idea cannot win followers and reputation solely on its merits?

Same applies to his book. With a bit of modesty its impact could have been so much greater. Especially since its subject is indeed fascinating.
I was expecting reactions such as yours.

I think this article belongs to HN because it's about a smart expert in his field who failed hard because of irrational decisions he made :

It questions expertise we acquire thanks to our education and experience. Can you be smart enough to avoid stupid decisions other people do despite being an expert and not them ? The answer seems to be that it's not an absolute truth. That's one lesson he underlines.

I can relate to this (and a lot of people here too) because I'm becoming an expert (as in "focused") in web development.

I find it deeper than you describe it, having several approaches possible.

Finally it's very well written and entertaining too ;-)
Kurzweil's write-up on it is also good:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0464.html?printable=1
woopdidoo!! As if allowing the customer to close their account is really so 'above and beyond'.
We all know that the primary reason for 37Signals' success is RoR.
It'd be kind of neat if the Cherry-picked patch retained some idea of its original identity allowing you to traverse forward and backward in the branch of origin, although I'm not sure how that would work when a patch traveled further and further abroad.
Detecting Pedestrians
Wow. Personally, I can't think of anything better to do.
Neo:What is the Matrix? - Wolfram Alpha
There's the piracy, and there's also the question of replacing components. The costs of replacing machines on a boat are very different from on level ground that trucks can drive to.
I'm more impressed with the book than the review.

It's a good review, no doubt, but I think Aaronson, while catching Wolfram using a bit of hyperbole on occasions, misses the essence of what NKS is.

It's not simply a review of existing CS theory.

The Feynman quote was quite illuminating. Wolfram does take the discrete conversation to the next step. He doesn't answer the questions, mainly because what he is proposing is, well, a New Kind of Science. Which means that there are going to be hundreds or thousands of questions.

What might be missing the most is a methodology for exploration. But I think overall Wolfram is just a bit ahead of his time. Those things will be worked out.
Boom. GMail Allows Importing of Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL Mail and Contacts
Cloud Security Considerations
WA would have been much better off if they had slowly released it, gathered feedback and built up knowledge repositories.

Why can't you get http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+college+gradua....

But you can get it for each university with http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=harvard+graduates

Seems like it'd be a simple aggregate...

Little things like this would be flushed out with a bit of testing over time. The hardest part for WA is going to be figuring out how people want to talk to it, and that will take time.
Cutting-Edge Robots Show Off in Japan
also target for submarines sponsored by Microsoft live search
Lawsuit Says Google's Sale of Keywords Is Illegal
Longer Queries Driving Down Ad Impressions? How About Bankrupt Advertisers?
It isn't "opportunity" without consent.

That apart, informed consent cannot nullify a crime. That is a well accepted principle. You cannot give informed consent for murder and such stuff.

If there's consent, there's no crime, though. You can't give informed consent for murder because if you gave informed consent, it's not murder, but "assisted suicide" or some such. Current law has lots of victimless and presumed-victim crimes, it's true, but I don't subscribe to that school of thought. :)
From thousands of articles saying it's a Google killer. And I guess I'm not the only one who got that idea, because Google search for "wolfram alpha search engine" returns over 600.000 hits.

Also, it looks just like a search engine.
JavaScript Debugging Techniques in IE 6
Nokia N97 Theme: Music
Thanks for the alley-oop? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612002
The World's First Web Server
Does your future wife's company have a benefits plan you can be part of?
Especially since its [ANKS] subject is indeed fascinating.

It is not.

Or at best in a sense that Pythagorean Harmony is.

Subject has been explored to death long before ANKS. In sixties by every garden variety computer scientist, and in eighties by physicists, giving no insight for either science. Even as an art, his book was few years too late to "generative art" market.