skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just curious, what about Git's branches and history management is better than Mercurials with the appropriate plugins turned on?

I've been able to successfully replicate all the Git use cases I can think of in Mercurial even if I think they are bad practices. Conversely, nothing I do makes git's cli anywhere near as good as hg. For me, that is the single biggest glaring problem with Git. I spend a very small minority of my time handling complicated history/branch issues as part of my major workflow and I spend an inordinate amount of time working with the interface to my source control. Git seems optimized for the minority case.
I think everything you've said in your comment is correct, but when did the alternatives become "be a mindless drone" and "be a mindless drone who reads hacker news?"
They apply the concepts from, say, subversion to git, and then have trouble.

I have found this to be true. I helped a lot of people at work switch from svn to git. As I showed people what to do the biggest problem was trying to make git fit in with what they knew from svn. Now I start every conversation with forget svn :)
No IPv6 :(
Are you working with a large team? I find that tends to be when your "VCS muscles" really start to get exercised.
Alright, I'll bite. Why did the attacker mine primecoin (rather than bitcoin, or any of a dozen other cryptocurrencies)?
Or use my favourite conflict program p4merge
This obviously depends on your specific scenario, but paying the maintenance/flexibility premium for something like AWS can be cheaper than something more rigid (see Netflix). I hesitate to make any generalizations like "building a private cloud can give you better performance at 20-30% of the cloud cost", because this is not true for all applications/businesses (it's certainly not for ours). For example, those with incredibly bursty traffic (Netflix, Amazon, other online retailers), can see some big wins with AWS. Not having lots of idle capacity that still has to be managed and paid for, not having to beef up the Ops/IT staff, not having to own your own/manage/maintain hardware, etc.

My advice to others is to be wary about generalized figures like "20-30% of cloud cost" from anyone with a vested interest in getting you to switch. Generalizations are dangerous when every usage case is different.

Also keep in mind that there is a lot of room for middle ground (even with AWS). For some (but not all), going hybrid can be the best of both worlds.
Just think of it as there was some confusion and possible ambiguity, and your clarification has cleared it up for anyone interested in the subject but not yet knowledgeable enough. Someone can skim through and have their mental model corrected slightly now - a very nice thing!
Time to abandon Gmail?
Equity: Startups, Companies and Death
HN isn't to blame for this, but the current Bay Area, VC-istan culture really is toxic. I don't know how people can stay motivated with their 0.03% equity slices when some completely unqualified idiot gets his IUsedThisToilet app acquired for $4 billion just because he went to the right schools going back to preschool. It's sick.

It's best to tune that shit out, but it's hard when people are young and impressionable, and given that the contemporary Silicon Valley culture is all about extending adolescence into the mid-30s (and then discarding people)... well it's easy see why people succumb to that nonsense.

The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.
I believe the GP was being ironic. Since, without insider information, your "accuracy" claim seems like jaded opinion.
Certainly, and yes that is tree traversal, but we don't refer to it in that manner. We refer to this in the context of recursion and iteration. Our interview process for devops is focused much more on practical application.

Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe I suppose.
It's the recent accesses by those IP addresses as well. Don't be thick.
CFFI 0.8 for Python has been released
That's badass, but seems tricky at a sit-down restaurant-- I wouldn't want to have to give my phone to the waiter and explain to him how to use it. Also wonder if this works with the square dongle.
People don't like change. People like what they had. People hate that Google is deciding to move forward. Now forcing the changes on their user base so that Google doesn't have an unlimited number of different things to maintain.
Google Drive Phish Deploys Data URI Technique
This is something that I feel so many people don't understand about EC2 (ELASTIC Cloud Compute). If you are using it like a traditional VPS provider, you are likely over-paying for something you could get cheaper elsewhere. If you are just looking at a price comparison to another VPS provider or even the private cloud, you are doing it wrong. One must consider how much (or little) ability they need to scale/up AND down at very short notice.

EC2 is a boon for those that need to add and remove capacity quickly. This is the appeal of EC2. It's not going to blow your socks off as far as performance per dollar. It is going to blow you away with its flexibility. If you don't need to scale up AND down quickly and regularly, EC2 is probably not a good fit for you. With EC2, you are paying for that flexibility.

Netflix is one of the penultimate examples of "doing EC2 correctly". Their traffic is extremely bursty. They are constantly automatically scaling up/down, and they do this and so many other things without human intervention.
You just reminded me I need to check my VPS, although I am not using a simple password :(

EDIT: It seems that leaving your VPS unattended for a month is a bad idea. I can't login, because the server terminates the connection immediately and the passwords for the host's backend is changed. Great!
Have you considered using something like Memcached or Redis then? There'd be some overhead sending data over a local TCP connection, but I think it would be a lot more memory-efficient.
AFAIK there's no shared, writable section in ELF.

But of course you could still easily mmap() a file to achieve the same thing (even from the shared library .init functions).

I can understand that the shared section might be abused by goofy programmers ("Hey guys! We don't need to open a file for storage, we can just build it into the DDL!") ... but is there a reason you think it's a bad idea otherwise?
Really cool game! One quick question before I enthusiastically throw you my money: It the music 8 bit too (like in the video)? :)
I know nothing about your situation, but I know from my own experience that as soon as you have multiple developers working on a project, plus staggered QA/Staging and Production deploys, things get really complicated really fast.

Then you add in stuff like experimental features (refactors, porting to new framework versions, etc.) that need to be developed alongside regular work without clobbering it, or features that get shelved while they are half-done, and things get just downright messy fast in something like SVN.

So my guess is that you aren't stupid at all, but that you just haven't had to deal with that sort of garbage.

(It's also possible your teammates simple deal with all this other crap for you, and don't bother you with the details.)
They cut prices for customers many times a year. Seems like we get 2-3 EC2 price cuts every year, and S3 continues to get cheaper.

They are one of the few vendors we use that regularly passes on savings to us.
TL;DR: the word "brain" in popular-science article titles is almost always clickbait and almost always bullshit.

This article is a great example of something I notice way too often: in so many articles that are supposedly about the brain, if you replace all the brain talk with talk about the mind, virtually nothing about the article changes.

In most of this article, that replacement isn't even necessary since there's very little brain talk, considering the word "brain" is in the title. It's almost all about tests of cognitive performance and visual perception. (Yes, everyone knows cognitive performance depends in some way on your brain — but from the test's point of view it doesn't matter whether you have neurons or jello or a dancing bear inside your head giving you the answers.)

But even the one part that does seem to rely on neuroscience only talks about the time it takes neurons to form connections. I'm sure it's true, but how different would our understanding of napping really be if we had never heard of synapses at all? At least, how different as far as this article is concerned? We'd still be able to talk about a schedule of learning just the same.

I'm not trying to insult academic (i.e., real) neuroscience. I've read several neuroscientists who express similar frustration with this type of publicization of their work.

Edit: I like naps just fine.
First off, I'm can't speak to Google's "maximizing profit" or what is wrong with Google doing it. I don't know anything about Google outside of what I read on the internet.

I can speak firsthand to seeing what happens when a company tries to maximize profit -- actually two companies.

One was a life insurance company with about 1,300 employees; another a tech company with around 500. The life insurance company was bought out by a large conglomerate and then a "management consulting / efficiency" company was brought in to "help". What really happened was the consulting company decided who was going to get laid off and who wasn't. While there was some dead weight in the company, many of the people laid off were not the dead weight - not sure how they really decided, but the outcome was not good from a personnel standpoint - it might have been from a profit standpoint initially. After that, morale was destroyed as well as the management culture becoming poisonous. Example: IT director charging departments for new computers and then keeping them for his area and giving the other departments his old ones. Basically it became a dog-eat-dog company that was eventually purchased by AIG - and most of us can remember what happened to that company.

The other company was a software and consulting company that was run by one of the founders until he decided to step back from the day to day operations (after he made a boatload of money) and have his accountant friend run the company. Prior to this, the company was one of the best to work for in the area. Its consultants were considered top-notch and the benefits were incredible. Since the accountant took over, morale is horrible and benefits are way down. I could go into detail, but you can find examples of bad cost cutting and morale busting decisions all over the internet - it seemed like this company did a lot of them.

The point is, maximizing profit often comes at the expense of the people who work for the company; and isn't good in the long run for the people or the company.
you will notice a serious performance upgrade by switching to a BeagleBone black. IMHO the BBB is about twice as fast (or more) as the rPi.

The BBB is lacking in community support vs the rPi.
Mathematics explain why women in the tech face so much sexism?
Perhaps you can clarify: Why are investors so concerned with the current CTO that they're asking for him to be replaced? (I would expect that if things are going well that most investors wouldn't want to change things unnecessarily. It seems like you agree with your investors... Do you?)
Pretty cool! I've been running http://jsonip.com for a few years too.
- still exists, and + is now "". That is, "foo" forces foo to appear exactly, just as +foo did.
They made a Model M like that. It's referred to as the Model M 84-key keyboard or the Model M space-saving keyboard. They are hard to find, and will probably cost you $200 or more. Here are some pictures: http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/categories.main/...
If you ask me, one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a company. The way many (otherwise intelligent) people talk about it, you'd think it was a religion.

What you're seeing here is not the shattering of a dream, but of an illusion -- Google hasn't been a scrappy, idealistic startup for many years. It's a fine company, but it's a big company -- a collection of tens of thousands of people, all motivated by different hopes and dreams. No institution of that size behaves consistently, let alone consistently benevolently.

In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you.
Use key based authentication in SSHd and do away with password authentication scheme, well you should put password on your private key but that should cover just about every password cracking case.
It's an avalanche effect. Once someone posts about Google, others start thinking and posting, and so on. Or maybe you can think of it like pinball machine, the ball goes in, and then just keeps bouncing around until eventually it dies down.

We have those often about languages, databases, operating system and so on. Sometime we see the opposite technology pop up. Like say one writes about "Why MySQL is awesome" then expect "Why MongoDB is the real deal" to appear on the front page.
It might be true that its use is on the rise, but that's an old idea. I encountered "ransomware" in the wild in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Their wording on that third slide threw me off. I thought that the actual data connection between the Clambook and the phone was done over 4G.
So, how many of you take naps at work?

[raises hand]

"Civilized societies have siestas." :-)
Google Coder: a simple way to make web stuff on Raspberry Pi
I never actually created a Google+ profile, but my Apps for Business domain gmail works fine.

I cannot, however, use Hangouts. Which is annoying as I like the new emojis
I just wish I could understand all the code - maybe a weekend project soon ^_^
Naps are one thing, but the older I get the more I am under the impression that my body very strongly desires to follow a segmented sleep rhythm - I tend to get very sleepy in the late afternoon. Sadly that's a time filled with many activities that often make it impossible for me to "listen" to my body, so to speak, and if I stay awake I don't really get sleepy again until after midnight, which makes a long sleep during the night problematic.

However, when I actually have the opportunity to take a long afternoon nap, I sleep in two separate three-and-a-half to four hour periods. In my experience I feel much better rested when following this sleeping pattern than when trying to sleep in a constant eight hour block.
When Google Voice and free calls stop being free, I'm completely jumping off Google's bandwagon: gmail, google voice, google search, etc...
That's true, but you can write C code in D as well, so switching to D won't make people write idiomatic code either. If they won't learn how to use one correctly then they won't care enough to use another correctly.

And if your company won't let you upgrade compilers, then it certainly won't let you switch languages altogether.
I think they should have wifi on board, then it would be much more usable.
I know many people have a problem with the binary blobs, but even with its limitations, the camera module is also at least $1000 cheaper than building a system using something like a PointGrey Flea 3 and better than any consumer grade USB webcam currently on the market. Power consumption is low enough that solar power is a realistic option while keeping the system portable. JamesH has also been very responsive with adding new features to raspicam/raspistill such as the very useful signal mode. It WOULD be nicer without the binary blobs.
This has been posted to HN a few times already:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=c.lear...
I've been hit with Narcan. That shit is horrible and put me in instant withdrawals. The overlap of people who inject heroin and other opiates, who aren't already at risk of being put into withdrawals from Narcan would be exceedingly low, IMO.

It did save my life, though.
One of the most salient facts to me is that Google was formed as a rebellion against the existing search companies and their business practices. I think "don't be evil" and "organizing the world's information" were entirely sincere, and I miss that spirit. Now I can't really distinguish them from any other company.

As hegemons go, I guess they're still better than average. And they're way better than Microsoft. But Google's decline makes me wonder where they're going to bottom out.
They used merchant silicon in their custom switches. Modern switch ASICs are 2+ billion transistor devices with lots of fancy custom logic for SRAMs and TCAMs and analog magic for PHYs. Even Google can't afford to do that by itself.
You really need to be careful how you implement the signing of these types of systems. I have broken several of these systems and extracted the secret key. If you can extract the secret key, you can essentially become anyone and do anything that is controlled by the state in the cookie. Properly implemented, this shouldn't be a problem. I recommend having a separate key for each client session and storing the sessions in something fast and ephemeral like memcache. This has the advantage of also giving you a place to store another secret key for CSRF mitigation. Storing information in the cookie is convenient but it isn't without its risks.
Photos of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley’s Early Days (2012)
Another example of why all previous versions of software should be made available to customers.
I read this on HN, so I'll keep reading.
I wouldn't call that an example of maximizing profit. I would call it a great example of poor management, and a lack of forward thinking.

Now, those terrible managers might have thought that they were maximizing profits, but like you said, they eventually failed.
Great comment. One nitpick: Bash, at least, is Turing-complete. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bash_Shell_Scripting
Apologies for misinterpreting you.
This is bad for many Indian developers, May be little down south of India can make a difference in quality of commitment and quality of code...! Much of North India, is known for cheating attitude...! Don't call me racist now...!
I'd just like to respond to all the people who are saying "Use the reflog" here.

Yes, you can recover lost commits using the reflog. But it is not well publicised that you can do this. Most tutorials do not mention it and most Git GUIs do not expose it. It is also not functionality that you expect to exist, so you are not likely to think to Google it. Unless you are an advanced Git user, your commits are indeed, to all intents and purposes, lost.
I think it's more than a dislike of change. It's not clear to me that Google is moving forward. I might characterize it more as "upward" in the sense that they're solidifying their dominant position. Moving forward is precisely what I fear them losing.

Of course, it's easy to move forward when you're new and have nothing to lose. Moving forward is much harder when you're the dominant player, because moving forward puts you at risk.
It's a sample of IPs that have recently been looked up, which doesn't necessarily mean that IP visited the site or used the API.
Excellent point. I was implicitly assuming that your costs were unchanged, but of course there are more ways to make a profit than more revenue.
> It's not shared state - dynamic libraries don't share any more state between processes than static libraries do.

The above sentence could be misconstrued.

I assume when you say static libraries, you mean standard shared libraries (i.e. those listed when you run ldd). Not statically-linked libraries?
The main argument in the article is that as Google has gotten bigger, its profit motive has become more important to the company, which is negatively impacting new and old products. While Google may have to continue to generate more revenue growth from AdWords and AdSense and YouTube in order to keep the stock going up and generate more cash, the majority of Google products aren't at all impacted by profit motive. In fact, most of the product initiatives at Google sap profit.

Android is a multi-billion dollar bet on mobile OS
Calico is a billion dollar bet on extending life
ChromeOS is a multi-billion dollar bet on laptop/TV
ChromeBrowser is a hundred-million dollar bet on browsing
Google Glass is a multi-billion dollar bet on next gen devices
Self driving cars are a multi-billion dollar bet on, well, self driving cars.

None of these, save perhaps Android, has any chance of driving material revenue to the business in the next five years. Most of the hardware bets Google makes are money losers because they routinely subsidize hardware.

When I was there, I launched two product features that each cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and were visible on the earnings-per-share number in the quarterly revenues we reported to Wall Street.

The argument might stand on Google.com, where the number of ads has increased. But for the majority of products (Gmail, Drive, Spreadsheets, Docs, Keep, Maps, Calendar, Books, Finance, Music, etc), it's hard to justify a profit motive argument.
Because primecoin is easier to mine because of the difficulty rate
I wish that nap time becomes a standard practice everywhere. Just like in Korea.

After lunch and 20 min nap I feel like newborn. And I have the same power for work as in the morning. And in contrast if the lunch was too heavy I may feel groggy the whole afternoon.

So, yes, naps work for me very well.
Shouldn't be a problem. Just start a rumor that you like interviewees that are showing their enthusiasm a lot. They would start showing it.
Mine has been running for a little over a year with no problems so far. It's not under very heavy load, though.
Very good article thank you :-) I'm surprised HN haven't removed it.
Great work!

'/as' and '/rbl' are quite useful.

thanks for sharing this and the source code as well.
I didn't need to do anything more complicated than pushing and pulling until I got my current job. Maybe it just depends on the team and codebase you're using.
Really? My experience has been the complete opposite.

Almost every time I've even been involved with or ran any medium/large mail infrastructures (200K active mailboxes) I've always found Dovecot to be a better choice.
> They founded the company with the motto "Don't Be Evil", and the unspoken question was, how long would this last? The answer, oddly enough, was "until Larry Page took over".

This is probably very to the point. "Don't be evil" was Sergey Brin's push, and Larry Page doesn't seem to share it.
Yeah, but it doesn't really seem to fit this particular format, in that this one is sort of an "idempotent" method where you submit your code and the results are calculated deterministically by the server. The other way would require something to be compiled and run on the clients' individual machines. It'd be nice to not have to install any libraries or worry about connecting to a server at the "right" time.
There is a lot of money in cardiology. Cardiology has a lot of patients that are older and wealthier. Cardiology and cancer get a lot of research grants, because the people who control the purse strings are older, wealthier folks.

Conversely, there is hardly any money in mental illness. Mental illness has a lot of patients that are younger and impoverished.

Anyway, making medical equipment isn't something that's just one step above a breadboard. Have a look at the article again - to get the regulatory stamps, for someone who's willing to sell at zero profit, will take $230k. For one product. Throw a lot of infrastructure around that, and it's easy to see how medical hardware costs a lot. Especially given that it's generally pretty low turnover. Sure, there's a nice amount of fat in there, but you get that in industries with a high barrier to entry.
Artist. Formerly known. [Craigslist Hires Larry Wall]