skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think it's more or less the DAG represented as an adjacency list. I'd have to think a bit about why there is a separate log file for each branch. It seems that there's some redundancy in doing that, and I'm wondering what the advantages and disadvantages are of splitting the history up in that way.

Think of each branch as a pointer. Then realize that you can make that pointer point anywhere on the DAG, even to parts of the DAG that have no connection to each other. The `reflog` is a (local, non-comprehensive) history of where that pointer has pointed. That's why there is a separate log for each branch. I guess that technically they could have a single log file and add another field to specify the branch, but using the same directory tree structure as under .git/refs/ makes the mental model simpler (and probably a performance improvement not to have to parse the reflog for every branch just to see the reflog for one branch).

> I've developed a loathing of excessive hierarchies/trees, so I'd rather see them flattened in a single directory. But that makes sense.

I'm not sure what branches living under .git/refs has to do with excessive hierarchies/trees. There are enough things stored in the .git directory, that if you mashed them all together it wouldn't make any sense.

> What's in an object?

If you really care to dive deeper, you can check objects here: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/object.h

You can get a shorter version towards the bottom of the git manpage (e.g. `man git`):

IDENTIFIER TERMINOLOGY
<object>
Indicates the object name for any
type of object.

<blob>
Indicates a blob object name.

<tree>
Indicates a tree object name.

<commit>
Indicates a commit object name.

<tree-ish>
Indicates a tree, commit or tag
object name. A command that takes a
<tree-ish> argument ultimately wants
to operate on a <tree> object but
automatically dereferences <commit>
and <tag> objects that point at a
<tree>.

<commit-ish>
Indicates a commit or tag object
name. A command that takes a
<commit-ish> argument ultimately
wants to operate on a <commit> object
but automatically dereferences <tag>
objects that point at a <commit>.

<type>
Indicates that an object type is
required. Currently one of: blob,
tree, commit, or tag.

<file>
Indicates a filename - almost always
relative to the root of the tree
structure GIT_INDEX_FILE describes.
I would love to see a Python (or Haskell) implementation of gzip (and others) that is optimized for:

* readability and

* introspection

rather than speed and memory usage. That way, you could step into every primitive, and see intermediate results in a human-readable representation (as provided by the programming language). Encoding that stuff to binary would always happen in a separate step.

That way, those compression algorithms, with all details, would be easier to learn and to understand. Also, development of new, customized compression schemes would be a lot easier than it is today, where you either have to take existing ones, or have to start from scratch.

A custom implementation might be as simple as a rearrangement and recombination of existing building blocks, or may introduce completely new (possibly domain specific) building blocks.
Edward Snowden not in top 100.

Goes to show my assumption that he would be says that I'm subject to a large degree of bias.
I doubt this is a case of hubris, but rather of the Pareto principle. For 80% of all users, the iPhone is either the right size or they want a tablet. What you (and others making similar comments in reply) fail to account for is that this still leaves 20% of users who actually do want a bigger screen on their phone.

Yes, 20% of all users is still a lot of users, but it's not the 80% that Apple has traditionally targeted.
And this is main in favicon:

https://github.com/dawjan/Open_Me/tree/master/JQ%20busy%20in...

Sorry no preview
> Thanks to PG's rankban (I say things he dislikes, so my comments get a personal penalty in placement) this comment will probably be in the middle-bottom (if not absolute bottom) of the page no matter how much you upvote it.

do you have any evidence for this? because your whole post sounds a little paranoid - not just the last paragraph. In fact a lot of your recent posts seem to have taken this kind of tone. I don't mention this out of spite, but out of concern. I hope you're ok.
If the NSA can't track its data, how can you?
Breaks the back button :-(
Dropbox is down
both the website and the service (mac client at least) are down for me, at least for the past few minutes
Elsevier does not coordinate refereeing for typical journals; this is handled by the scientific board, who are not Elsevier employees. Elsevier is in charge of copy-editing, typesetting, and distribution, and coordinates with the scientific board.
But if you use Tor for all of your day-to-day browsing, in strict contrast with the OP's recommendation, then there's not such a glaring correlation.
My analysis is that it looks plausible and not really surprising if one knows a little bit about molecular biology. The extension of this is that one could find a vulnerability (buffer overflow maybe) in one of the software used by gene analysts that can be used by the injected DNA to infiltrate a PC.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I swear I get the best nonfiction books from HN.
You're right that the past was not 'move innovative', but I think it's misguided to think we are not discovering new things every day - we certainly are. They're just not noticed immediately because of relative 'obscurity' to an existing paradigm we have built around imperative and structured models of computing. This is the real difference between the past and now - in the past they were free to explore without restraint, but now we are carrying baggage that can't simply be dropped (The requirement to remain compatible with C, JS or whatnot, and worse, the unwillingness of many programmers to learn new things.)

Even C had baggage, from (B)CPL and Algol. C wasn't some magical innovation that appeared, but the result of incremental improvements to an existing paradigm, and the popularity of C++, Java and the likes happen for the same reason.

Conversely, LISP was hugely innovative because it introduced a new paradigm for thought and experiment, which led to even more new ideas appearing that wouldn't have been discovered if we were only stuck in an imperative world, but some of those ideas were then able to be brought back into the imperative world which brings about more innovations. Likewise, integrating procedural ideas into the mathematical world has brought about new innovations too.

I don't see languages like Dart as very innovative because they barely add anything new to the mindset. It's largely existing ideas that have been tried before, getting rid of some of the bad ideas of past, and putting it together in a neat package, however, it's still very much in the same existing paradigm, and incremental improvements to an existing paradigm only tend to solve small problems.

Bigger problems will be solved by completely new ways of thinking, but one needs to be able to abandon existing frameworks in order to explore them, then worry later about how to integrate the good ideas into existing models. This can be seen with LINQ - an innovation which cleverly linked ideas from FP into C#, but which no imperative-only programmer could've ever imagined within their limited paradigm.

I think people are so disappointed with Dart, and somewhat Go, is because there's a huge amount of innovation in programming languages outside the popular paradigms which they have largely ignored for the sake of making 'simple' languages to appeal to popularity, but many hackers are more concerned with discovery, and advancing our subject.
I never implied that currencies should be gold-backed (quite the opposite, in fact!) My point in this area is that one of the big features of a modern fiat currency is the ability of the central authority to react to market changes. This leads to price stability, which IMO is a defining feature of a modern, global currency.

I'm not saying that that Bitcoin was poorly designed or anything; just that there are some big challenges with issuing currency if you don't have a nation-state backing it up. Nation-states have the ability to issue currency by policy, to remove currency from circulation through taxes, and resolve international disputes (with military force, if necessary.) Bitcoin, through its decentralized nature, has none of this.

And before anyone checks in saying that it's impossible to get 51+% of the Bitcoin node network... you don't understand the level of resources that banks can bring to bear if they have the right motivation. I wouldn't be surprised if we see one or more of them collude to take over the Bitcoin cloud and print money for their own purposes. If they could do it with LIBOR, they can do it with Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs has been driving up the price of Aluminum by controlling a significant portion of the global stock and keeping it out of circulation. It's naive to think that these companies couldn't/wouldn't exploit the fact that Bitcoin is almost entirely unregulated: if they can get control of the node network and print money, it's not clear there's anything illegal about it.
I've already spoken with you all on it. This is Michael Herman. :)

Show inputs and outputs!

Love the theme you have going. Cheers!
Ruby Devs,
Take note, Fedora 20 has ruby 2 & rails 4 available. to get started with rails, all you need to do is:

yum install rubygem-rails

and Bam, it will install latest ruby, rails & other dependencies. That's not all, they have more than 2thousand ruby related packages(all recent versions).

Fedora seems to have one of best ruby support. Way to go!

https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/s/ruby
Creating an artifical bacterial genome and transplanting it into a bacterium is still a huge effort and far from routine. As far as I know it has only been done once, and it did cost some tens of millions of dollars.

Genetic manipulation is typically done at a much smaller scale, and not by exchanging an entire genome. And on a small scale it would be very unlikely that such a switch would go unnoticed.

The way back from bacterium to executable is also extremely unlikely, there would be enough mutations after some generations that the program is unlikely to run at all.
How many drones would it take to replace Santa?
The Guide to Working Remotely
Ask HN: Why you love HN?
Internet is like invaded by cats, funny/ridiculous videos, meant-to-be-funny stuff; however HN is one of the sacred places which praises curiosity and effort. This is not only about tech, the only prerequisite is stimulating curiosity for a subject to get posted on HN. I can find lots of things to read from great variety of subjects here. When I lose my hope on mankind while wasting time on some social network site, HN shows up like a saviour.

That was mine. Why do you love HN?
Like any big project, I'm sure some of the money is going to well-connected people, and the route is partially influenced by politics. That's not the subsidy bit.

The real subsidy is that once the line is complete, the rail franchise will be sold off, allowing a company to run a rail service on the line. This is in effect a subsidy, since it's letting a company run a rail service without having to foot the bill for the construction. Sure, it's a form of rent, but the risks associated with the line construction have been swallowed by government money.

Plus, the UK government(s) have an absymal record for selling franchises below their 'true cost' (see the original rail privitisations, where franchises were bought and then sold-on shortly later at vastly inflated prices). Only an eternal optimist could happily assume they'll get it right this time!

Finally, consider that these big rail projects are never initiated by private business. Few enterprises willingly stump up the cash to construct a big railway line just so it can run trains on it later. They only do so when government invests the cash. This surely implies that the government-backed schemes must be of benefit to the railway companies => there's the subsidy.
Fuck ‘Networking’. Just Be a Human
At a micro level, this makes sense - you can expect to buy a few thousand in an equity and expect the price not to fluctuate due to your investment. But when you hit millions, I'm sure the price range by the single purchase will have a significant impact to the cost of these stocks - you would be buying more than what is available in some cases, sometimes even expecting to invest more than what the company has in market capital.
Reminds me of the API article recently on HN which basically argued about how nonsensical it was to have APIs on top of an existing HTML site since that was multiple ways of getting the same information and wasteful.

This seems to take that to the other end of the spectrum by actually communicating the same info in many formats, even to human readers. Great piece of geek humor here!
Finally!

TED is 80 % masturbation, 20 % inspiration.
I thought Edna was modeled after Edith Head [1]

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Head
This is a theoretical concept based on real data and experiments.
Is the top 100 actually the top 100? I'm sure it's filtered quite a bit.
Indeed... How do people google stuff like C or Go ?
Iron Man Factory
MegaBus around here has some pretty horrid customer service. Buses are frequently quite late (by several hours even), drivers then speed at 10-15MPH over the posted limit to try and make up time. The built in WiFi is generally either broken or basically inoperable (EDGE mobiledata is faster!). On top of that, the drivers are usually asshats about everything.
The difference being, we can travel back in time and see what TED was really like 5 years ago:

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_animal_movement.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEZrAGdZ1i8

Notice that I still picked a heartwarming personal story for the second one. See how different it is in delivery and intent to the heartwarming personal stories you get on there today.

Let me reiterate: I don't care about the audience - they don't affect me. It's the type of speaker which is attracted by the new, larger demographic that I don't like. The talks aren't written for the room any more, they're written for youtube, and by extension, the speaker's resume and lifetime earning potential. Compare the speakers' eyelines in those talks vs the new ones.
Possibly, but it's a very important thing to specify. It wasn't at all clear to me he was :)
''syslog is no longer included in default installations. journald logging serves most use cases as well as, or better than, syslogd.''

I think it has lots in common with this:

"Fedora 20 includes the WildFly 8 Application Server, formerly known as the JBoss Application Server, a very popular Java EE platform. WildFly is a very fast, modular and lightweight server."

keep producing more and more bloatware, without any other reasons than "because we have done it".

I think that blindly allowing freedesktop guys to mess up all the traditional Unix startup and now logging tools with some MS-inspired crap for a very questionable reasons is quite a step back.

It is also an example of an over-engineering bias (which comes from OO-only approach) - building up an unnecessary complexity. syslog and shell script based startup procedure are good-enough (and still good enough for sane systems such as BSDs or Plan9), while those who need a specialized logging (or startup) service could create it for themselves, as so many do.

Changing reasonable defaults just because someone is cocksure that we need more xxxxctl and xxxxx-bridge instead of plain old text-files looks like ignorant over-confidence. Those who cannot live without journald could install it manually, why to cause a headache to the rest of us.

I do remember that commercial variant of Suse Linux have tried "an innovative approach" to what a Linux server is. They introduced a set of some in-house made utilities (inspired by Netware I suppose) with non-intuitive logic and millions of command line options no one knows (which cannot be googled). Why, it is a way to success, now you could teach courses, do certification, issue meaningless titles, etc. Thank god its dead. ESX servers, btw, were (or still are) even bigger mess.

I doubt that Fedora is going this way, but the signs are bad.)
"This isnt a scam"

Oh rly. Prehaps you should have said so in the beginning of the text. But nice work. You got me this time, to read your advertisement.
The title to me is link bait, and the post considerably biased towards pricing, which is an important factor, but not the main reason I use high-speed rail. Not to mention that the author fails to mention how important, in passenger volume terms, are some of the routes he mentions e.g. Barcelona-Paris, come one, +800km on a train it isn't going to be cheap nor fast. High-speed travel works for shorter distances under 500-600km, not this.

I travel on high-speed rail 2-3 of times a month, and this is my choice over air travel because:

> Pricing: On average the train price is c. 20% more expensive than the plane, but that is one side of the story.

> Travel time: the fact is that the time I require to go to the airport is a minimum 30min ride (if I'm lucky) from city centre to airport. Add to that the need to be there 45min before the plane departs, and any of the usual delays. That's at least 1h 15min of my day gone in commuting to travel. If I travel by train my commute is not that different than that of going to work by bike, needless to say that the train gate closes 2min before departure, not 45min.

> Location: the train station being located at the city centre is extremely convenient, forget about getting a taxi and bumping into traffic, paying arbitrary "airport" fares, etc.

> Comfort: the leg space, seat width, baggage allowance, etc knocks out air travel. I can open my laptop on a tray way bigger than those on planes and comfortably work all the journey with my 3G/4G connection and get real work done.

> Flexibility: train frequency is much higher than that of planes, so finding a time that fits my agenda is not a problem. Add to that the fact that you can catch an early train if, for example, you finish your meeting/work early, without paying additional fees.
Was that a regular Megabus, or the special Sleeper Service one with beds?
One of the most successful pen projects on Kickstarter a bulk order from China?
While Google, Amazon, etc. being centralized might be bad in some ways (and good in others), I'm less concerned with that kind of centralization (because there are alternatives). The most dangerous centralization is at the ISP level, because it's the first gateway to the internet. When I saw the article title I was hoping it would be about that. Unfortunately, wired internet connections make for a really good natural monopoly, so until we have super fast wireless internet everywhere, I don't expect a solution. If any wifi mesh net appears, it would be a good start, but I'm skeptical it would become widespread.

The other dangerous centralization of the internet is the DNS system. I know, technically it's decentralized because there even thousands of root name servers. But politically it's centralized under ICANN. Domains are controlled by registrars and governments. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but a truly distributed system would help guarantee a neutral internet. There are some good solutions for this already, namely Namecoin (http://dot-bit.org), which uses proof of work and a bitcoin-like blockchain as a P2P DNS. Namecoin uses the .bit TLD, but probably the largest barrier to adoption is that it's not accessible by default on devices because it's not ICANN sanctioned and therefore not in the root name servers. There are workarounds for this. ICANN could add Namecoin to the root servers but then it would still be under the control of ICANN. The true solution would be for ISPs to add it to their DNS. If the ISP decentralization is solved, this becomes trivial.

In my opinion, this is the only real way to guarantee net neutrality and prevent censorship.
Full corporate was a fun read, I saw a few spelling errors but that doesn't ruin fun for me.
I'm not sure the validity of the post or the information therein. It did lead me to think of some futuristic use of implanting data into DNA:

Could it be possible for someone to take a corporate secret or information, translate it into DNA, incorporate the DNA into a virus, and then infect themselves with said virus? While they are incubating say, the common cold, they could be in physical transit to their destination with no electronic device. The virus could ultimately be extracted and it's information sold to the highest bidder.

Actually, it sort of reminds me of a novel by Alan Dean Foster - Sagramanda http://www.amazon.com/Sagramanda-A-Novel-Near-Future-India/d...
Edward Snowden is #97.
There are definitely still great talks being produced. There are a lot of not so great ones, but maybe the solution to that would be better website that sorts and allows for ratings of TED videos. Kind of like a porn website but with only TED videos.

One that inspired me recently: "How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries - Adam Savage" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8UFGu2M2gM
With Word and the like you can put 'ms' in front at least. The biggest issue I have when searching (for things I don't know the proper name for) is when punctuation is part of the search. Even with quotes it seems to ignore question marks and exclamation points and it feels really unnatural to type 'exclamation exclamation' for a search.
Why Outlook isn't sexy but still relevant
Ya the anonymity sometimes isn't because I'm doing anything illegal. I've been considering setting up Tor on my firewall/router and starting to funnel connections to google, bing, facebook and things like that through it. Probably eventually funnel all http and https through it.
it works, but someone has to compile a plugin for it..
Amtrak in the east surely does not care about "low tech" or "slower pace" people one whit. For example, all eastern corridor trains are off-limits for bicycles, all the time. And the NYC-Montreal service, while being the perfect duration for a night train (11 hours or so), only runs during the day, making it positively absurd for anyone to take the entire journey (it's not cheap enough for the unemployed).

Some buses will take bicycles, and they have more services each day too. Amtrak may as well not exist except for specific commuter services such as NYC-Boston Acela (which is not value for money unless you're in the 1%).

NJ Transit, LIRR, and Metro-North are fairly cheap, compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the first world. Too bad they're not long-distance.
The exact same problem happened a month ago with iTunes purchases and also Disney. Coincidence? I think they just were caught red-handed, twice.

Amazon's policy allows them to withdraw purchased items [1]. It could be a bug, it could be policy, it could be a bug that exposed an existing policy. There PR has been, unsuprisingly, silent on this front. This is why I have no faith in digital ditribution; the music industry finally got it, the movie and game industry still don't get it.

[1] Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions and for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming. You may download and store your own copy of Purchased Digital Content on a Compatible Device authorized for such download so that you can view that Purchased Digital Content if it becomes unavailable for further download or streaming from the Service.
Hibernate 4.3.0 released JPA 2.1 certified