skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmm I'm just trying to wrap my head around this. It sounds like git can't store 0-length data, but, it stores empty files (data, wrt your smalltalk example) just fine. So that must mean that it's not distinguishing between files and directories. It's probably also not storing other metadata like executable or permissions flags, labels (like on Mac OS), both creation AND modification dates, etc etc (but that's beyond the scope of this discussion).

Does anyone know if git stores the path separator as part of the path? For example does it store a path reference as a string "/var/log" or as a list {"var", "log"} internally? That gives us 2 options:

1) If git DOESN'T store the path separator, then that means there's no way to represent a directory as "var/", to signify that it's a directory (because a file could contain the path separator character). If that's the case, then perhaps I was wrong to call it a political decision. An argument can be made for purity here.

2) If git DOES store the path separator inside a path string, then a mistake was made, because there was a chance there to distinguish between a directory "var/" and a file "var". Sometimes I refer to these types of mistakes as political decisions, for example if it's easier to make the mistake than work through a full implementation. I can't imagine that git works this way, but I'm throwing it out there because I have seen stranger things.
If anything, at best this has left the comment quality unchanged. Now you have people bombarding sections with ASCII art tanks, memes and protests against the G+ revamp.

Personally I don't think YT comments, for all their vulgarity and chaos, required any "solution". They were cesspools, but ultimately cesspools of humanity. There is absolutely no reason one couldn't ignore them if they found them so distressing.
Disclaimer: the book is written under the pretense of "by a beginner, for a beginner", so it isn't exactly the best material ever, but I feel I'm getting good coverage on the main topics. I'm currently pushing hard for people to peer review the initial chapters before I continue into the next bulk of it so I can make sure the style its being done in is conducive to learning the material effectively. I don't want to plug it here because I'll seem like a shill, but if you are interested I can share the link privately.
(Big?) Data Question: Searching in a large dataset
I am working on a model of social interactions in mice. I have mice and boxes and a simulation that outputs which mouse stays in which box during which time period. The problem is how to obtain, in the end and from this, the meetings of two mice which were in the same box in an overlapping period.

Right now I have a MySQL database where the simulation directly inserts each stay result. And then another tool,written in Scala, just retrieves all stay result, in portions of a few hundred, loops through them and for each asks the database which stays were overlapping with it, and inserts each pair into the database, like this:

`box`,`id1`, `res_id1`, `id2`, `res_id2`, `from`, `to`, `dt`, `typ`

This means that mice id1 and id2 were in the box "box" in the interval between "from" and "to" with duration "dt" and the meetings was of type "typ". There could be four types of meetings depending on when each mouse was in the box (e.g. when the one entered and exited relative to the other). "res_id1" and "res_id2" tell which stay results were used to generate the meeting result.

Obviously, this is very inefficient. What would be a better way of doing it? I am not constrained to using a RDMS, but I though this would be the easiest as I am reading and further analysing the data in R afterwards. Would it make sense to output the stays in a text file and then use Hadoop to generate the meetings somehow? Or anything else?

For the duration of an approximately one quarter of one trial of the simulation I generate around 1.5 million stay results.
What you refer to as "dickwaving" is them attempting to understand your eye for detail. Great hackers often have fantastic eyes for detail. You might have one, but you missed your chance to demonstrate it by interpreting this so negatively.

Please read the Hacker School Manual for a look at how seriously they take treating people with decency and respect: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual
The reason that I hate stack ranking is that I have to keep people around that I would rank poorly rather than simply letting them go because I don't want better people to be punished/limited by it.
I didn't know they had that attitude with repeat applicants. That is really great, actually. I'm currently barely in a financial boat to support it due to some exigent circumstances, but I will definitely be applying next batch in that case :) Thanks for the words of encouragement! I just encounter so many ridiculously intelligent folk in this realm it gets imposing to think about working with many of them or even considering myself on the same level. Maybe my confidence is more important than I thought and should worry about it alongside my code and not put it aside completely.
If you can figure out a way of deleting one's Google+ profile without accidentally nuking Youtube uploads, Picasa images, Gmail etc, do let us know.
Yeah, this issue actually drives me crazy. I liked using Google+ as sort of a blogging platform, and I constantly linked to a lot of videos from youtube. (I've never had a youtube account, never posted a comment).

So, the other day, I link to a video I found interesting, and I notice I'm getting a lot more comments than usual. Problem is, they are all along the lines of "OMG, Why are idiots continuing to use hash tags" or "WTF man, who gives a shit about this video"

Just pure vitriol, where before the people who actually followed me on Google+ were at least respectful. As a result, I've basically resigned to not posting anything from youtube anymore because there is no way to disassociate yourself with the people who visit youtube.
So, you are surprised about a negative reaction on the social network for (former) Google employees?
One solution is to detect Googlebot and render the page server-side in a headless browser, and send the generated HTML instead of the full JS app. You could even cache the generated HTML to S3 to speed up pageload, which Google likes.

If you use Node...

http://zombie.labnotes.org/

http://prerender.io/

http://phantomjs.org/
Keep in mind that Google owns the old Deja News Usenet archive...
Release the Kraken! Best old movie line evsr
Because it costs far more for women than men to have children, biologically speaking.
That's exactly my point. I've read the hacker school manual. I'm suggesting that they are not very good at practicing what they preach, at least in my experience applying to hacker school.
Well considering it is probably a copy of someone elses who spent weeks figuring out the math required to do path finding while working on MSDOS or something. I kind of agree.

But then you see it also includes developer support and such so it all makes sense.

However this does lead to an interesting concern, what's the difference? I don't seem to see anywhere were it says you can't use the free version for commercial? Or what you get for free and what costs $60?
For that matter, if the drunk guy was a sleeping passenger in a car with a sober driver and there is an accident it is also "drinking-related".
Social peer-to-peer toy sharing marketplace for kids
A social platform facilitating a cost-effective toys sharing for toddlers and early teens (6 months to 12 years) with mobile and web applications. Easy inventory via photo upload, auto-categorization into shareable lists (Facebook, corporate, home owner etc.) , auto pricing engine, reviews system, calendaring and pickups scheduler. Parents community recommending recyclable toys

We are looking for devs and designers who would like to join our effort. Interested - email us at grukool@gmail.com
It could just be that they did leave the comment on purpose, though. Most online newspapers in my country have switched to a full-name policy over the last year, and you wouldn't believe the things people manage to spew out even when their full name and photo are attached to the post.

I am increasingly convinced that full-name discussion => fewer moronic comments is a fallacy. Or at the very least a vastly overestimated correlation.
The most important thing is to recognize that almost any software project will tend towards Big Ball of Mud as you add features. If you keep aware of this possibility then you can recognize when it is about to happen and give your head a shake, do a bit of design thinking, and move things to a proper loosely coupled architecture. A Big Ball of Mud is not inevitable.

It's also important to recognize that a lot of the hot new frameworks (ones that were hot when they were introduced) lead you straight to Big Balls of Mud. Things like J2EE, ASP.NET, Rails, Django, anything PHP. With these frameworks you really need to do some up front design thinking and figure out how to integrate multiple single function apps without linking it all together in a Big Ball of Mud.

Apache Camel helps with anything in the Java world. AMQP message queuing helps with any language/platform. In general, look at your framework and ask "If I had to integrate this with something build in Other Framework X then how would I do it? Build with your favourite framework but rigorously keep your options open for integration with other stuff and when you see the Big Ball of Mud rolling in, you can leverage this integration plan even if you only go for building several single purpose apps in Rails or J2EE or PHP or whatever.
> Exactly. I notice this pattern of thinking quite often on HN: X has some flaw (according to shoddy armchair analysis and vague anecdotes), so X is terrible.

Harvard Business School has studied employee performance evaluations and has found them to be flawed: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=44969
At this point, everyone really needs to decide whether all of their usage of Google services will be linked to their real-life identity, or none whatsoever (and migrate all usage of Google services linked to their real-life identity elsewhere)

Maintaining multiple distinct identities through various Google services is only going to become harder, and with shit like this I wouldn't trust even completely separate Google logins to maintain distinct identities in the future.
Google or Apple?

Funny. Do you really think they're same? A company making money by SELLING PRIVACY, and a company making money by SELLING HARDWARE?

A company exists to make money. And all what they do is decided to make money. Which one would really have interest to take your privacy? Apple? That really doesn't help them to make money. They even tried, but failed. They're really suck at making money from privacy, and it degraded reputation of their product.

If you really think Apple is selling your privacy, tell me what's the REASON. How will they make money from it rather than losing their money.

Google? See what's happening now.

Why do some people always want to tie Google with Apple? Which makes money from completely different sources. The money source defines how the company behave. If you really know that fact, you really can't say that stupid tie up.

Your life is beholden by Google, not Apple. Someday maybe Apple does that - which is very unlikely happen, but not now. And the day will come after whole existing privacy sells - such as Google - are dead, so Apple dominate whole the market.
The YouTube/Google+ integration would have been much smoother if it started by giving every existing user a G+ "Page" identity matching their YouTube name, and making that page their default YouTube identity. From the user's perspective there would be no risk of accidentally connecting their legal name to YouTube, and Google would have achieved their goal of a unified login system.
I don't think your analysis quite works, because the scenario in which nobody acts has the worst possible outcome.

Let's make a terribly naive model in which there are 200 passengers, and the percentage chance of them succeeding in fighting back against hijackers is equal to the number of passengers who fights back. One passenger fights back means 1% chance of success, 50 passengers means 50% chance, 100 means 100% chance, and any more just saturates at 100%. This is wrong since the real-world chances are almost certainly not linear, but I think the basic idea of the chance starting at zero and increasing with the number of passengers fighting is sound.

Now, start with a case where nobody fights back. That means there is a 100% chance that everybody is going to die. Thus nobody has anything to lose. If they fight back, then they have a chance at living. If they don't, they are certain to die. The rational choice is then to fight back.

Now, some people have chosen to fight back. Do you join them, or do you wait? Joining them increases the odds of success, and therefore your risk of death. Not joining them increases your risk of death.

The one complication in this is your chance of being killed in the fighting when the hijackers are defeated. However, I think it's reasonable to suppose that your individual chances of dying go down the more passengers who fight back. If many others are also fighting, your odds of dying are low. If few others are also fighting, your odds of dying in the fight are high, but your odds of dying because they lost the fight are also high. I suspect that the rational course of action is going to be to join them as long as the fighting group is smaller than a pretty large size.

In any case, it's impossible for there to be a rational equilibrium in which nobody fights back, because all actors improve their odds of survival by choosing to fight back in that case, even if they end up acting alone. The equilibrium thus must involve some number of people fighting, and although I'm not sure how many that would be, it seems reasonable to think that it's a lot.
You can do that by following the "Deleting my entire Google+ profile" procedure. I've done it few weeks ago and unless Google has changed which services get deleted along, you have nothing to worry about.
You can say, "thank you". :-)
I don't think everyone has to leave Google for you to have productive anonymous discussions. For what it's worth, I think reputations (under anonymous usenames) are A very important component in having accountability and quality in discussions.
I would buy things in large bulk to save money, getting a safe return on my investment.
It was about two years ago I closed my G+ account because of that https://jeena.net/gplus and I just had a look at my G+ account (which I closed) and there are posts that I have been using hangouts and some YouTube comment too. So I assume it is not possible to really close a G+ account.
Well, the canary you put in a coal mine isn't very expensive either, but it ought to tell you something...
Gruntfile to quickly develop Node-webkit based applications (OSX Based)
Here's the full procedure.

Deleting my entire Google+ profile

Your Google+ profile will be deleted along with other services and data that depend on your Google+ profile.

What to do:

Sign in to Google+.
Click on your full name or email address in the top-right corner of your screen.
In the Account Management section, click Delete profile and remove related Google+ features.
Select Delete your entire Google profile.

One question: with everything seemingly requiring a google+ account these days - what other services here do you end up getting rid of?
Why would it be a "travesty" than they have, whether through inattention or lobbying or whatever, managed to exempt a bunch of people from their idiocy?
Thanks. None of those quite seem to fit the email though. I'm guessing that the allusion in the email must have just been to general Klingon war-like attitudes.
There are no more video responses on YouTube:

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.ru/2013/08/so-long-video-resp...
I think they are aware of everything, they just don't care: those that make the decisions that affect the "peasants" won't take their own dogfood.

Suggested readings the texts about the "feudal internet" from Bruce Schneier.
I released an asynchronous JS pathfinder that handles path priorities and works on much, much larger grid a few years ago: http://lumakey.net/labs/ariane/
It's not clear to me what this site offers that isn't already provided by other sites. Avdi Grimm has a great site [1] with links to many resources for pair programming. For matchmaking with remote pairing partners, Avdi's site lists [2], [3], [4], [5].

[1] http://www.pairprogramwith.me/

[2] http://rubypair.com/

[3] http://letspair.net

[4] http://emberpairs.com

[5] http://www.airpair.com/
Anyone else notice that the second-to-last photo has 4 or 5 people in the scene, as well as a moving car? Otherwise, well done!
*learnvim.txt*  A Suggested Path for Learning Vim
Sometimes you would just email the author.
The one I use most often:

git commit --amend

will add any currently staged changes to your last commit, and allow you to change the commit message.

In the words of the manpage,

git rebase origin/master

will "forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head." In other words, if you have local commits, it throws them away and replaces them with different commits. This allows you to avoid making merge commits.

Interactive mode rebase, for example:

git rebase -i HEAD~4

will let you rewrite the last commits. You can use it for lots of things like: changing commit messages, changing commit contents, add new commits in the middle of a sequence, squash multiple commits into one.

git filter-branch

can be used to apply a script to all the commits in a branch. Situations where it's useful: "I don't like the username/email I was using, it didn't matter when it was just a local repo for me only, but when I publish it I want to change it", or "Oh crap for 2 years we've had files in our repo we don't own the copyright for, we need to get it out of our history before somebody sues us!"

FYI, when people talk about "destroying/rewriting history," they're usually referring to the above commands that take a bunch of commits and replace them with different commits. I wouldn't call push --force, reset --hard and gc commands that destroy history; instead I think of them as commands that help you work with different views of history. E.g. doing git rebase -i followed by git push -f, the rebase is what actually rewrites history while the git push -f merely propogates the rewritten history to a remote repo.
> Served better

From whos point of view?

As a merchant, I'd love it if our customers all paid in BTC as it would eliminate all fraudulent/charge-backed transactions which cost us $15 each time. (A nice little money earning industry for the CC companies btw!)

As a customer, I'd rather pay with my CC so I have some protection over my payment.

If you're looking for something that's better from both points of view, then drugs is the obvious one that springs to mind.

Consumer based foreign exchange (swapping my GBP for USD for my holiday to USD) by using Bitcoin as an intermediary vehicle could save me a ton of money as well, this isn't exactly possible yet but would be awesome if it could be done one day. It's better for everyone except the rip off middle men who charge horrible fees and rate spreads.

Another service that would be better with Bitcoin would be remittance. This one is cited often, and should not be overlooked. Again, middle men banks and rip off services are the only ones who would suffer. And it's a huge huge market.

Take a look at the control large institutions have on the market as well to see further benefit. Wikileaks for example endured a "banking blockade". The banking industry stopped for a moment in time Wikileaks being able to accept donations via Mastercard, Visa etc. With Bitcoin, no corporations can interfere with fund raising.

What about charity?

> When you donate via credit card, the charity has to pay a transaction fee of 2-3% on the transaction. If you make a $100 donation, your charity only gets $97 of it. According to a Huffington Post article, banks and card networks make about $250 million a year off of charitable donations.
http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/nonprofits/donate-charities-c...

Let's cut these middle men out of the equation, if I donate to charity 100% of my Bitcoin are guaranteed to arrive in their control. It makes me feel sick that when I donate to charity some credit company is taking their cut.
Hacker School founder here.

I'm sorry to hear you had a negative experience applying :( A few thoughts:

1) Our interviews are definitely short, which is a consequence of our wanting to give as many people an interview as possible. Even with our interviews as short as they are, we typically spend 200+ hours doing interviews each batch. So while we'd love to do longer interviews, it'd mean interviewing many fewer people, which we don't think is a good tradeoff (either for us or for applicants in general).

2) Again, because of time constraints, we can't give everyone detailed, specific feedback. However, if you email me (nick [at] hackerschool.com) the email address you applied with, I will do my best to get you specific feedback on your code.

3) I'm the first to admit that our admissions process is far from perfect. It's undoubtedly one of the hardest, most psychologically draining parts of running Hacker School. Even if we assume we get it "right" 95% of the time (which is probably way too generous to us), it still means we're going to make dozens of mistakes each batch :(

4) We occasionally will ask people questions along the lines of "what's the hardest thing you've worked on?" We've found this usually leads to a discussion of interesting challenges and problems people have faced, how they've approached them, etc. It's in no meant to be "dickwaving" or in any way arrogant.

I hope whatever other path you've ended up on to continue growing as a programmer has been fruitful and enjoyable!
yea they were fun to look at if you were looking for a possible laugh but really -- what do you expect from a single public chronological thread on a (possibly dumb to begin with) video viewed by millions?

if they were so desperate to give it value why not just make it display based on some algorithm (top comments or some hacker news-ish setup). they approached it in a completely uninspired way. Violating everyones privacy is not some dream solution. it seems more like "Plan D"....
> Would anyone be interested in me doing a writeup of this?

Yes.
> My argument was that once we hit the economic plateau, our quality of living will decrease if the population continues to increase.

This is totally irrelevant because (as I said) population growth is slowing down and the population is almost certainly not going to continue to increase forever. It's forecast that human population will max out late this century due to declining birthrates in countries that are growing wealthier; hitting the theoretical limits (e.g. max solar output) before then is so implausible it's barely worth discussing.

> Again, he covers this in his first post via reductio ad absurdum:

His assertion that SSP (and everything else) is impractical for sustaining 2% growth for a millennium is true, but practically irrelevant. Space-based exploitation can increase the plateau cap, allowing for higher standards of living for a future populace whose population is level or declining.
A Better Backpack: Sustainable Design - Sustainable Future
The Lean Hardware Startup: From Prototype To Production