skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I hadn't heard of that, and it does sound like a nice feature, but it still seems a little hacky compared to Git branches.

It's exactly the same thing git branches do. If it seems hacky, it's also hacky in git.

> At best, it would be as good as them, but then why not stick with the original?

Stick with what original? The originals in mercurial are branches (where the branch name is part of the commit metadata and thus of the repository's history forever, save for history rewriting) and "anonymous heads".

Then users clamoured for transient (movable, renamable, deletable) git-style branches, so bookmarks were added as an option.

> cloned repos

Erm… you can also clone repositories in git.

> I'm not really sure how they all interact

At the end of the day, it's all commit DAG.
Can confirm.

I work for a telco and we recently upgraded our cable infrastructure to handle 100Mbit (previously 50Mbit was the fastest). All the customer needs is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, we re-provision in our system and they'll get 100Mbit. They come into our store, swap modems, and they're done.

As for the hilarious/stupid/disappointing things OP was told by sales/tech support/whoever, I can also confirm that. Every day I have conversations with people all over the business who don't know the basics of our business like the difference between Megabit Megabyte, etc. etc.

Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) and they'll even use the same lies and stupid answers when we as staff question this move. It's a money grab, plan and simple.
We're adding that next week
So Saudi Arabia?
Edit: Or Europe or the South Pacific depending on which website and where I click.
rsync.net looks awesome, but it is just way too expensive for me.
DeepDB – High-performing transactional and analytic database
Why are people sweating small stuff like version control systems? How can you be a fanboy of a thing that keeps track of branches and patches. It's only incidentally related to Software development, you shouldn't feel as if a limb of yours was amputated if you \gasp\ had to use a different one for another project.

It's like using a different mail client or a different bug tracker; it doesn't affect what you can express or how can you build a program. It's just Version Control.
Usually the drawbacks of any locality would only be apparent if you lived and worked there. For example: visiting Disneyland for a day versus woking at Disneyland for a year.
Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

The more people use your software, the more feedback you will get, the better you will make your sofware, and the more opportunities for engagement you will have.

Opportunities to engage to improve your software.

Opportunities to engage to spread the message of open source.

"This is free? What's the deal?"

"Well, it's like this...."

If you limit your software to those who are already on board, you do nothing to honour the spirit of the GPL, which is outreach and increasing freedom.

(Full disclosure: I use Ubuntu for my server, OSX for my desktop; I used Ubuntu on my desktop from about 2005 to late 2013, until I got tired of GUI churn, of having to roll my own to get reasonable UX, and hating going back to my laptop after using my wife's or daughter's Air. I still use a fair amount of OSS, e.g., brew, LibreOffice, a few others, because these fill gaps the main OS doesn't address. Combining proprietary and OSS gives a better UX.)
Map of Coins
You have to add the benefit of saving ~$250 to the benefit of getting the top post on HN. Then you divide.
Why are prisoners so muscular?
This is a common trouble. It is, however, a structural artifact of data size. You cannot solve this problem with a "code" solution because it is an actual computational complexity issue, not a implementation weakness.

This is why data design is with performance and security as an attribute that you must bake in. You cannot bolt on data design after the fact.
High fees pay for the lobbying of local government to continue the cable monopoly, in many places in the US.
You don't need crazy fast internet to watch YouTube videos. I've been watching theme fine since I was on 1 mobs broadband. And do you really think that if we suddenly have super fast connections people will spend time watching educational content instead of porn and cat videos?

My point of comparsion was between dailup and DSL, and how DSL enables khanacademy videos. With faster internet, it will alow things beyond khanacademy videos.

And do you really think that if we suddenly have super fast connections people will spend time watching educational content instead of porn and cat videos?

A faster internet allow more things that can be done to improve humanity as well allow humanity to watch better porn and cat videos.

They care about their shareholders and maximising profits. They are running a telecoms business not trying to improve humanity!

If you the rest of the comment. I was noting how short-sighted the cable corporations are. If anything, they are like paperclip AI that wishes only to make paperclips. Cable corporations are like that, except it's all about printing money.
If it helps other people save money, then the time spent is more valuable. Creating and curating accurate information is a public service.
The title is wrong. A correct translation from German would be "Germany plans to to defend against USA spying."
Ethics is the point, not ROI.
I have 6 mbps for $51/mo with AT&T. I quoted them 50 mbps for the same price with a local cable company.

I wanted higher speeds. They couldn't get me close to the other deal, so I told them they had to compete on price. They offered $35 with a year contract.

I told them I was going to get service with the cable company and call back to cancel and they dropped my price to %50 off for six months with no strings attached.

So shop around and call them and negotiate.
Kickstarter hacked
On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers' data. Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system.

No credit card data of any kind was accessed by hackers. There is no evidence of unauthorized activity of any kind on your account.

While no credit card data was accessed, some information about our customers was. Accessed information included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one.

As a precaution, we strongly recommend that you change the password of your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password.

To change your password, log in to your account at Kickstarter.com and look for the banner at the top of the page to create a new, secure password. We recommend you do the same on other sites where you use this password. For additional help with password security, we recommend tools like 1Password and LastPass.

We’re incredibly sorry that this happened. We set a very high bar for how we serve our community, and this incident is frustrating and upsetting. We have since improved our security procedures and systems in numerous ways, and we will continue to do so in the weeks and months to come. We are working closely with law enforcement, and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening again.

Kickstarter is a vibrant community like no other, and we can’t thank you enough for being a part of it. Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. You can reach us at accountsecurity@kickstarter.com.

Thank you,

Yancey Strickler
Kickstarter CEO
JavaScript Module Loaders Considered Harmful
Biathlon vs skiathlon shooting
biathletes shooting skiatheles like chickens
I love Unsplash, who's talking shit?
Why You Should Help Others To Feel More
Hi everyone, I'm showing HN a tool I created to help my configure my Django projects. I've since open-sourced it, and hopefully someone else finds it as useful!

It works as follows:
It prompts the user for configuration defined in a customisable, git-commitable 'schema' file, and outputs a git-ignored 'data' file.

Any reconfiguration uses the data file to provide defaults for the prompts.

Prompts are regex-validated, and there's support for only accepting a value from a predefined list of values.

Questions/Comments/Feedback/Pull requests welcome!
You mean like MaidSafe? http://maidsafe.net/

As Lawrence Lessig said, "code is law". We've seen it before. Governments are usually too behind in understanding what's going on. Sometimes it helps, like with bittorent and TPB, while other times it hurts us, like with DRM being able to lock stuff that shouldn't actually be locked according to the law, but the DRM makers are basically making their own laws through code, or with NSA who spies on anyone they want no matter what laws exist, because they will just twist them to mean whatever they want in their "interpretations" of the law - and then keep those interpretations secret for "national security".

I don't think it's "political" to say you want anonymity or privacy to exist on a network, or that you don't want a network to be censored. You say "just program like the Bittorrent programmers did". Isn't that what they're doing? Bittorrent appeared because Napster and Kazaa could eventually be censored and stopped. Now we need new networks and apps that are decentralized by default.

These also bring increased security for everyone, increased privacy, and more resilience against DDOS attacks, too. So I'm not sure what you're really attacking here.
Yea it's a bit tough to figure out the precise language for my point so that's why I wanted to show an example but that wasn't that much better.

I guess it does translate into something more along the lines of having something that you can explain and back up vs something that feels right. Having some basic heuristics to adjust the algorithm would be the latter but modeling out the actual environment would be the former. There's a time and a place for both but the idea is that for longer term projects you want to take the more rigorous, more difficult approach.

I think the biggest value is framing the problem properly and understanding the space. Once that's done the approaches can be modified and switched around pretty easily.
If you're going to downvote for an honest answer leave a reason why. Downvoting is not for disagreement.
Made a minor update but definitely let me know if something's still unclear.
Mine might be a very unpopular opinion, but I couldn't care less about different kinds of (D)VCS. I've got a feeling that recently I, and other team members, spend more and more time on branching, rebasing, cloning, merging etc. and less time on actual code writing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794083

:(
> And defaults cut both ways, I still can't fathom why `git log HEAD` would display the whole repository history.

I don't know why that's part of the defaults discussion, but okay.

> Why is a meaningless name better than no name at all? Why is git's default behaviour of losing unnamed heads altogether better than just leaving them alone?

Why would you give a meaningless name? That's a red herring. Do hg users just memorize which head is which?

Mercurial users seem to get hung up on detached heads a lot. They seem to be part of the Mercurial workflow in a way that I've never really understood. But git's detached heads are at least created when I expect them to be, are easily deleted, and are easily saved.

Mercurial's detached heads (or whatever they're called) want me to either merge them (why would I merge commits that popped up out of nowhere?), or close them as described in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3688263/mercurial-beheadi... (apparently causing these mysterious heads to be saved forever). I much prefer a DAG with labels, instead of all this state specific to Mercurial that I have to manage.
Not really. Over the course of the show they show a plausible number of crewmen (can't remember the exact number, but it was around the size of the stated crew count for the In Intrepid class).

Also, only a tiny number of people died in the first episode (I think only seven), and somehow it was almost the entire command staff, which seems really implausible.
ASCII Bernanke, Wikileaks, photos, and Python: hidden in the Bitcoin blockchain
"Don't you find that it should be at least somewhat commensurate with the work required though?"

Business doesn't work that way. You make hay when the sun shines.

And there are cases when you can't charge. Because of things your competitors are doing.

In a restaurant they don't charge you for napkins and water although they could. (Actually they do charge for premium water but that's a fairly recent invention).

The idea of business is to make money.

It's not up to anyone to decide how much profit is "enough" for comcast to make. If they could simply charge more per month without games they would.

Sometimes it's easy sometimes it's hard.

Take airlines. They would like to charge you more for a ticket but if they do you might not book the ticket. Better to be able to advertise a cheap price plus extras than an all inclusive price without extras. Why? Because people are not rational buyers (generally) who can figure in all the things and the "total cost of ownership" as they say with cars.

"doesn't that seem a little bit like they might be playing on peoples lac of knowledge of the systems involved?"

Well of course they are. But so what?

There are many times when companies take features out of a product just so they can make different tiers and charge premiums.

Take web hosting. Take companies who sell people extra disk space that they will never use and don't know they don't even need at all. There are many examples of this in business.
Show HN: HN-clone for 3D-printing news
I have no idea about this phone, but the iPhone is relatively powerful. Is this phone in the same league? If you have a phone that operates at half the speed or lower screen resolution it could easily be responsible for a better battery life, no?
There is no best tool for a job, this is just wishful thinking. The best tool is usually the tool you know and that allows you to finish a particular job in a given amount of time.

By agnostic I meant he must not judge an OS based on subjective criteria like it sucks.

Otherwise I suppose I'm just old and silly :).
Unfortunately, this is not about fighting mass surveillance, at all. This is just about defending against US spying.

Mass surveillance and spying are NOT the same. Spying is/was a targeted measure and will probably always exist, but mass surveillance targets every single citizen and therefor means "Death to democracy", even if you won't feel it, because it happens gradually and behind-the-scenes ("unfortunate events" will happen more often and we will not know why, how and who).

EDIT: And don't count on ANY government to do anything significant about mass surveillance. Every govt wants it, because it simply means "power over the people". Nothing will happen without an immense pressure from the citizen and consumer. Besides voting, we have a "purchasing power" and we should start using it.
Six Clicks: 2014's top Linux desktops
Actually, Flappy Bird did have Facebook sharing. And removing it then led to a drop in virality. So, unfortunately, it proves the opposite is true.

http://marketingland.com/viral-rise-fall-flappy-bird-73479
No, I don't.

I am not a fan of Comcast for many reasons. This fee isn't very consumer-friendly and it should be described more honestly as an "upgrade fee" or similar. But no, there's no reason it has to have anything to do with the "work" required to do the upgrade.

Is Adobe obligated to make the price of Photoshop commensurate to the cost of burning a DVD or downloading a file?
Given that you "spend more and more time on branching, rebasing, cloning, merging, etc. and less time on actual code writing", shouldn't you care more about the different kinds of VCS?

Seems having the right tool should be important.
I wonder if all-statically-linked Linux distros will become popular on the server as a defense against userland rootkits like this.
actually, it's possible to execute clone in git without it checking. If you do a local clone, it will happily hand you a broken repo.
It doesn't work that way. If you can take any given hour and trade it for a certain amount of money, then you're lucky. I don't know anybody who can take 12 hours and trade them for $240, or say $600 (as you are hinting that this time is worth significantly more than $20/h).

I could get a second job, but that would pay less per hour, would start at a higher (fixed) number of hours, and bring a lot of responsibilities. Plus, it would cut into my precious free time.

Only for hyper-demanded successful freelancers time is completely fungable and arbitrarily tradeable into dollars. The rest of us can't monetarize their free time so easily. And I think a $250 saving for a day's work is pretty good for regular people. Besides, I think there was a bit of hyperbole in the "10 hours"...
Unorthodox: Rabbi resigns over sock puppetry
I guess I read this incorrectly, but I thought it was going to be a fun play on HN-clones with a 3D print of news.ycombinator.com.
I've been playing around with Julia for about a week now too. There are so many things to like, but I agree - the tracebacks are pretty useless half of the time.
Good point. Makes me think of people who go on mileage runs to accrue airline miles for status. They tend to compare value in cents per mile, and if the run yields a low enough cost per mile, it's worth their time to take a flight just to turn around and come back. It would be interesting to see a similar calculation taking into consideration time, likelihood of getting on the HN front page (or being the top post), and value of getting on the HN front page.
Isn't it the case that it only actually sends an email if you forget your password or you want to sign up? That has been my experience with persona. So why can't you log in with your old email and then change it to your new email?
Circumstance: Traveling and working remotely for startup since I had to leave the US thanks to H1B visa lottery miss. Miss a cushy well-curated work environment, but the novelty of working in different parts of the world is interesting.

Software: Developing with Java+ADT/C#+Unity3D/Sublime3/Github. Test devices Nexus5 + 7 (KitKat). Google Hangouts for team-meetings/human interaction.

Hardware: MBA 13" 2013. Sometimes use Logitech G5 mouse. Sometimes the 22"Samsung external.

Edit: Tethered/hotspot-ified internet from the mobile carrier most likely to give me semi-reliable+cheap 3G on my Nexus5. Which is really not very reliable here in south India (BSNL).

Ergonomics: Fashioned a standing desk by putting a solid (brick-like) footstool on tiny desk in my parents' house. Perfect height. External monitor on a shelf next to the desk.

Geographic Location: Currently in tropical Kochi, south India, going to travel slowly to Singapore soon.

PS: Miss my i7/16GB RAM/GTX460/1900x1200 26"/CMStorm Quickfire desktop machine that I use for most of my sideprojects (art and gamedev). Left at my first travel stop out of the US =(
When you're trying to use Google Apps for business, for one, and you go to email.MyURL.com and get redirected to a standard Google login screen where you now have to click a button to not sign in as your personal account, then come back and sign in as a business account, plus also add the "@MyURL.com" at the end (didn't used to have to do this), and you're doing that with multiple different accounts, it gets pretty tricky pretty in a hurry.
You don't have a problem with calls for boycott, do you?

I don't know, I guess it depends, I reserve my right to judge on a case by case basis.
I don't think we have the technology today make a "global mesh network". We need new Wi-Fi technologies and products to appear, and I think they will over the next 10 years or so. We need to get the Wi-Fi Alliance to create new Wi-Fi standards for longer ranges, too, which would make this easier. It would also help commercial companies, especially if they want to disrupt wireless telcos (such as Google and Microsoft, who have been trying to work on this, too).

But until we get to that point, we can build the technology, and have it more localized in villages, towns, or even big cities. We can use the latest Wi-Fi routers, or mobile phones, to form these meshnets now. Then perhaps we'll get Wi-fi balloons like what Google is building in Africa, although I'm not sure how resilient those would be against a government, but perhaps there will be so many of them that shutting them down would be much like shutting down the Internet.

As for intercontinental meshnets, I think DIY sattellites will become more popular in the future, and could help with this, too.
I can verify this. I just built the house I live in now last year, so I'm the very first person to ever have Comcast / cable installed at my house. I have 105 megabit internet and there is no fee.

I've talked to a couple techs who mentioned it, but the appointment I made there was no such mention of fee nor was I ever charged.
It is guaranteed to return after either inserting or updating. Most implementors terminate the loop after some arbitrary number because an error elsewhere could prevent both insertion and deletion, and it is nice to get an exception rather than a hang in from your upsert.
> So the complete state of the repository is cryptographically secured

It should be noted, however, that Linus and others specifically disclaim that this is a security mechanism:

"Git uses SHA-1 in a way which has nothing at all to do with security.... It's just the best hash you can get.... It's about the ability to trust your data." --Linus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1#Data_integrity)

And in the midst of a discussion about how only professional cryptographers should design crypto, pretty much everyone insists that Git is not crypto (see replies to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961683)
How are you getting on with that? I do similar stuff, and love the idea of just docking in a tablet rather than a full laptop. I assume battery drops pretty quickly while running VMs?
"Our company has also started ripping people off in similar ways (like a $50 fee to downgrade internet speed) "

Explain why you feel that is a "rip off".

More specifically if this company came to you as an employee (I assume you are an employee) and they said "hey we aren't making money and we need to reduce your salary" how would that fly with you?

Anyway I'm asking a serious question. I'd like to know the exact metrics of how you have come to determine that the company charging $50 to downgrade internet speed is ripping people off. Is it because nobody else does that? Is it because it doesn't cost them anything but a button click to downgrade?
Moreover, Mercurial's storage scheme is built on append-only files, whereas Git periodically repacks its objects, which means that Mercurial actually has fewer opportunities for cosmic rays to hit the bits while they are in motion, and so less chance of corruption.
Как выбрать фотографа и хорошо получиться на фото?
That seems to contradict the article. If they really do need to wire your cable to some other piece of equipment then perhaps the field tech is there for a good reason.