skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does git make programmer A want to disentangle the fix?

How does git keep Programmer B from making changes against the wrong base? (Admittedly, git may make it easier to move that fix from the wrong base to the right one, but it doesn't make it harder to make the mistake; if anything, a prolifiration of branches an independent lines of development makes it easier to make that mistake, not harder.)

How does git make merging easier? Doesn't it do a traditional three-way merge, just like svn? And it seems like in DVCS you have more merging, not less...
Yeah, you're right that in this case SVN would have a smaller checkout size. So if this is something that you need then SVN would be a clear winner here in terms of disk storage.

However, with the more typical usage pattern of a repository of mostly code and perhaps a handful of smallish binary files, Git is almost always going to have a smaller checkout size despite including the version history.

I also think in this case the difference is like being shot in the stomach, or being shot in the knee. Both SVN and Git are going to give you serious pain.
A superset is not always better.

Consider domain-specific languages vs. general-purpose languages. You need to weigh the benefits of increased power with the drawbacks of additional complexity.
MIT Engineering: Ask an engineer
We've had proof of large rocky bodies for 4.5 billion years

By large, I mean significantly larger than Earth. We know about rocky bodies up to one Earth mass. We also know about low-density ice-gas bodies of 14 Earth masses or more. Bodies in between these two known types of planet, though, we're pretty ignorant about -- are they Earthlike or Uranuslike? Now, while N=1 makes for lousy statistics, we know that at least this one is Earthlike.

We're actually still astonishingly ignorant about how planets form in the first place, so anything we can find out about the compositions of exoplanets is pretty valuable.
The UK doesn't have the same kind of Freedom of Information Act as the US, or the same conceptual approach towards citizens being owners of the government.

A lot of stuff that is paid for by taxes in the UK is not automatically public domain, but copyright of the government (or technically, Her Majesty's Stationary Office, the govt. printing bureau) and only available on payment of a stiff fee. Basically the state qua legal entity is much more 'selfish' than in the US, where pretty much anything it puts out is public domain by definition, and it's deeply annoying if you're the sort of UK resident with a presumption of that information wants to be free.
No, but the deal was just announced today. I wonder if before long Google will use reCAPTCHA to digitize books as part of the Google books project - all without the permission of the original copyright owners.

Edit - To clarify, I think that making information in the public domain more accessible is a very worthwhile project.
Makes me think about how programmer certification would work in the context of licensing. Working as a government contractor, we already see a fair amount of certification requirements. At least those are tests though, just taking courses doesn't guarantee much of anything.
Also, they behave slightly different when it comes to arity:

def nuts(a, b)
end

foo = Proc.new { |a, b| }

nuts(1, 2, 3) # => ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (3 for 2)
foo.call(1, 2, 3) # works fine

We also have lambda, which is a Proc that works (almost) as a method: http://samdanielson.com/2007/3/19/proc-new-vs-lambda-in-ruby
How many people are using Twitter SMS messages? I assume that at this point most people that are heavily using Twitter on a phone are using it through a Blackberry/Pre/iPhone and using the 2G/3G internet.
Promiscuous title #1: Vice president
The study you reference from Duke for people suffering from depression is interesting. Another one I came across from Maastricht University in the Netherlands addressed aerobic exercise and cognitive ability in seniors:

http://www.emaxhealth.com/36/21947.html which references http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9346168

Here's a reference to a Columbia study:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/sports/playmagazine/0819pl...

However I'm failing to find the study comparing mental games and aerobic exercise among seniors.
I would guess that it's just good programming practice to feed a function the context in which it would normally be called -- which for the Math.max function is the Math namespace object.

It probably makes no difference what context the Math functions are executed in, since they are probably backed by native code implementations that don't rely on context, but one could imagine some JavaScript implementation taking a shortcut and doing something like:

Math.exp = function(p) {
return this.pow(this.E, p);
}

That function wouldn't work correctly unless it was executed in the Math context:

assert(Math.exp(1), "Works");
assert(Math.exp.apply(Math, [1]), "Works");
var obj = {};
try {
Math.exp.apply(obj, [1]);
} catch(e) {
assert(false, "Doesn't work.");
}
Ask HN: CareCloud.com Website Review
Hello,

We launched our website last night and I would love to hear any suggestions/feedback/comments from the bright minds at HackerNews.

Building this company from scratch and developing the business model has been one of the best experiences of my life. I want to thank all of you here for all the great insight, resources, and most importantly for asking great questions. I owe HackerNews a lot.

Thanks again!
They learned from the Google school of public relations. ("What, make money? Hah, hah, we're just a bunch of geeks who like interesting problems, no crass lucre here, no siree!")
Only when there is a usable command line user interface for it (gui is secondary).

SVN command line is better than Git, although far from perfect (hg is better than git).

I don't like the index being forced on me.

Long live commit -a by default.
All the new books are pretty high quality, compared to old printing techniques. There's a lot of valuable Public Domain data that we're all itching to have, and having Google be the source for that is a distinct possibility.
There's still a risk to Facebook that they'll come to be seen as stodgy as new generations come online. But given how well they've been conscious of, and managed, the risks of trends passing them by so far, I don't think it's a major threat.

In many ways Facebook's end-user lock-in is much stronger than even Google's lock on the search-user -- the folks who are now populating Facebook do not flitter to every new thing online, as a group, pulling all their relationships. (Google's economic lock on the advertising-clearinghouse side is still stronger.)
Thanks, I thought that had happened, but instead they apparently chose to fork GPLv3 into AGPLv3 for those requirements.
Cable: Let us lock down your TV (we'll offer movies sooner)
Checking the Status of Your NICs
Rich people don't need friends
I very much agree with the authors promotes insight assertion. Accurately naming at least functions and classes increases the value of your conceptualization of a problem. I have even taken to writing a non-programming description of my problem first, perfecting that, and then programming it.
In the name of science I'm converting the Mibbit repos from svn to git to see what the size difference actually is on a typical repos (I don't have videos in there ;)

Be interesting to see if svn is really that inefficient...

Who knows, maybe I'll try a few git commands :/
One could also use SVN and GIT together. That might solve a part of the problem with not submitting fixes because of being in the middle of other set of changes. Develop using GIT locally and submit to SVN repository when ready.

What is experience of HN readers with using a combination of centralised and distributed VCS together? Have you used it and in what situations, if any, is it useful?
Yes, compete only monitors US traffic but still better than alexa.

I think, Compete measures traffic in the US, so it will accurately measure traffic for sites which are either hosted in US or getting almost US traffic. This implies accurate traffic estimates for many sites.
Depending on how the system was decentralized, you could have a variety of companies all providing microblogging that inter-communicated with each other through a known protocol (allowing anyone to create their own software package to provide the same). This would allow the individual companies to provide the SMS Gateway while single people on their own hosting plans could op to just not use SMS (or go with a cell-network provider that provided their own email-to-SMS gateway).

Not only that, if it was popular enough to have a microblog on this platform, but very few (microblog) providers offered SMS functionality, it would be an opening for someone to startup their own service to offer the functionality for free/cheap to users that wanted to add it to their existing microblog.
I have never used SVN or Git (I use Hg at home and VSS at work), so I can't say there.

What I can say is that I didn't realize how painful Java was for me until I started learning Python. That may be a closer analogy, though still not perfect.
I also think this was one of the factors in PHP's popularity. Its documentation was (is?) excellent.
Coming Soon: An Array of Electric Cars
The Kepler mission? Yep, that's just getting started. So far all they've published is that they've tested it against a known gas giant and shown that yes, the instrument can detect it:

http://kepler.nasa.gov/press/earlyresults.html

Once the mission gets started in earnest it's mostly a waiting game. It'll be sitting there, watching a bunch of stars, and waiting to see whether a planet just happens to pass in front of one of 'em. This is unlikely for any particular planet, since it requires that the orbital plane of the planet just happens to be parallel to the line of sight between us and the star, and it'll also only happen once every "year", but we should be able to pick up a few eventually.
The service itself is great, but it's getting a little bit pricy for what it does.

I really like that you get a web-based terminal for the console session, if you need one.

The host I use in the UK (Tagadab) doesn't have that - but they have absolutely brilliant phone support.
The site is extremely well designed from an aesthetic point of view, but it is hard to figure out what problems you are solving? I work in the medical world and have some familiarity with the issues surround software in the clinical setting, but could not figure out what you do. Does this have an EMR component? Billing? Like a Pharma rep it is long on looks and short on info.
Sprinting is all fast-twitch muscle and technique. It has little to do with your brain. Anyone who ran track knows that short sprinters are the dumbest guys on the team. The smartest runners are the distance guys. Out of the whole team, the smartest guys were the ones who specialized in the oddball events like steeplechase, triple jump or discus.
Ringtones are also notoriously the subject of rebilling scams. Download ringtones for $.99! Get charged $20 per month automatically for the rest of you life or until you notice and cancel.
It seems like no one ever asks for enough money. Last week there was a woman on that had invested $100k of her own money into the business and was asking for $50k more. It seems like if she would have asked for $500k or $2mil, or something like that, they would have taken her seriously, but they weren't interested in $50k.
Why would I switch from horses to these new-fangled automatic carriages? Horses get me where I need to go.
That's impressive then. I wonder if there are any stats on the size of these repos (i.e. are people creating new repos for everything -- even tiny one-off scripts -- rather than just rolling the smaller stuff into a single repo?)
I disagree. I figure if I can't come up with a meaningful and reasonable name, then my understanding of the problem is incomplete. That is, if I've never named something before, that's because I've never had to think about it explicitly before. I'd rather sit and make sure my understanding is correct than plowing on through.
The trend of making businesses feel way more important than they really are doesn't stop at job descriptions. It touches everything from marketing documentation, to product titles, to physical buildings, to new actual words.

I feel if business didn't spend so much time puffing their chest and get lost in overhead, they'd get far more done. I never understood the business culture, and I guess I never will.

On one hand, this all seems inane, on the other it might be like dating. Some people might complain that human dating ritual is silly and we should just be frank with each other and eliminate all the chasing. However, the superfluous elements of human interaction exist because it really does make sense in an indirect way. (Human feelings aren't binary).
No need to set up a central repository. Your full history resides in your working copy.
Worrying about how "high frequency traders" are making so much money is like worrying about VCs making so much money. The best will make a lot, everyone else will break even or lose money.
Of course, now the warning is out, the spies can just remove enough unnecessary components to keep the weight constant. Still, I guess it at least makes their lives more difficult.
Very low on details.

Solution to malicious code being inserted into code by terrorists? Free Software.
Diamond Engagement Rings
Holding the epitome of beauty and sumptuousness for more than a century, diamond rings have embodied a woman with desire, lust and love.
21.56% of all sites (indexed by builtwith.com) use jquery!

Wow.
Wycats is in marketing. His biggest contribution was inventing the term "Strategic Eager Loading". He made no significant code contribution.

True, he did generate a SWIG wrapper to create the first prototype of DataObjects after a conversation we had where I suggested Ruby would be a better place with an ADO.NET-like database interface... but none of that was really usable since you had to have the exact same MySQL version down to revision, on the same system. The only other major contributor to DataObjects outside of the Wieck team I recall (and apologies if I missed anyone) was Dirjan Bussink fixing my broken Connection Pool. Later contributors (and Dirjan) ended up rewriting a lot of it for Asynchronous Execution, more driver support, etc. But that's the reason the thing looks so much like ADO.NET.

Oh, and Command#set_types was me too. Which is the reason DO is the fastest (last I bothered to look) database API for Ruby.

The marketing contribution was HUGE. It always surprised me how many new people showed up after one of Yehuda's presentations. DM wouldn't be what it is today without Yehuda. But your own opinion on DM's code is about as valid as Yehuda's. Just look at the commit-history.
Porn Hedge Fund Sics Half-Naked Models On Apple
Wait. I must be missing something:

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

The way I understand this, is that the user is presented letters from archival newspapers and must type in the text he sees, and recaptcha uses that text to improve OCR. But doesn't that imply that recaptcha was unable to interpret the scanned text before ? If so, how can it then verify the correctness of the text the user types in ? If not, how exactly is this helping OCR ?
My understanding of the problem is always incomplete when I start writing, even if my lizard brain is telling me I the opposite. So why waste time?
Testing function vs testing implementation
These are the same guys who sold the hip university research project "ESP Game" to Google.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_game
Because I want to make sure I understand the implications of what I've written so far.
I'm very enthusiastic about this mission -- it should answer a lot of questions. And hopefully pose even more.

How prevalent are earth-like planets? Planets in binary systems? Do Jupiters "clear out" space for inner rocky planets? etc.

It's all good stuff, and extremely fascinating.
Software As Engineering
reCAPTCHA presents two words. One is known, the other is unknown. The idea is that if you type the known word correctly, then you've typed the unknown word correctly as well. It also shows the same unknown word to many people as a distributed accuracy check.
Scientists say "super-Earth" has rocky surface
The Man Who Defused the ‘Population Bomb’
Why would there be a 'canary postal code' in the 'legal source?' At the very least, if it was there just in case the source was 'stolen' then they would have to tell people that legally purchased it to ignore that address. In that case, the information about the 'canary postal code' would be 'out there' anyways.
The Power of Twitter Accounts With Massive Followers - Or Lack Thereof
I just wanted add that building this company from the ground up and developing the business model has been one of the best experiences of my life. I want to thank all of you here for all the great insight, resources, and most importantly for asking great questions. I owe HackerNews a lot.
One should not so blithely throw away the concept of science as a type of philosophy and that philosophy is a type of religion.

Natural philosophy is a very good name for science, because it reminds us that "science" is based on a philosophy. This philosophy includes the concepts of control of degrees of freedom, replication of process and result as the axiom for "proof", and objectivity, among other things.

As an example, math is not science, it is a sub-class of philosophy. It is important to realize that the math used in science is fully in tune with the philosophy of science, and MUST BE in order to be a valid tool in scientific inquiry.

Philosophy, properly done, is a way of helping both group and differentiate (to classify) things. A fundamental difference, for example, is between the constructed experiential (such as a belief), and something that is physical and non-experiential (the atomic weight of iron). This difference, properly understood, is one of the beneficial results of studying philosophy, and it HAS changed the world.
While I can understand how git is better for the majority of use-cases, I found that it was far less suitable than SVN for what I want to do. I used git for a while (3-6 months) and then switched BACK to using SVN. It's true I didn't experience pain until I started using git. That's when the pain started.

First, as I said, my use case is highly non-standard. I'm the only developer on my project, so I don't have to worry about collaborators. I do my work on a lot of different computers, so it turns out that (for me) one of the biggest advantages provided by version control is effectively synchronizing source code between systems, many of which get erased (e.g. new OS installed ) on a regular basis, all of which have internet access. It is important that I be able to quickly and simply set up a development environment on a new system -- a somewhat unusual requirement, I realize. Under these circumstances the primary advantage -- not just of git, but any DVCS -- becomes a major disadvantage. The whole point of DVCS is that the ability to commit is separated from the ability to update the central repository (git push), where they are the same in centralized VCS. However... I ALWAYS want to push when I commit. If I commit to a local repository on a machine that gets wiped, it does me no good. It needs to get updated in the central, online repository every time. This can be done with a short simple shell script, of course, but remember: I need it it to be as simple as possible to set up a new development environment. This adds an extra step, and if I neglect it, I can lose a lot of work. If I use SVN, I simply don't have to worry about it. It's automatic.

Another feature of SVN that I like, that's impossible with DVCS: revision numbers. With SVN, revision numbers increase sequentially from 1 to whatever number commit the last one was. DVCS can't do revision numbers because you can't determine the sequence of commits until after the commits are made (everyone has their own repository!). Being able to refer to r378 is a LOT nicer than referring to an arbitrary hexadecimal identifier. Having commit identifiers that convey information is a huge plus.

For me, these reasons are enough to outweigh the advantages of having access to repository history while offline and the better handling of branching that git offers.
We have http://ridewithgps.com hosted on our own co-located server with http://colostore.com for $50 a month. It's a 2U server with dual 700w power supplies, setup on two separate breakers. Server was setup within 4 hours of UPS dropping it off last December, and we haven't experienced any downtime or network issues.

Colostore is the best Zack or I have found so far, however, they are not the people to use if you require much help or a managed solution. Also, it looks like they have jumped up the price of co-location since then to $70 a month, which is still pretty good for the level of service they offer (2TB a month, 5 IP addresses). I would still happily pay that amount for their service.
Can you explain this further. There are three machines A,B,C A can connect to B and B can connect to C but A cannot connect to C How can netcat/ssh be used to forward a port on B such that when A connects to that it connects to C [on a specific port]. basically B acts as a proxy.
> But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the
> system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how:
> Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is
> given to a user in conjunction with another word for which
> the answer is already known. The user is then asked to
> read both words. If they solve the one for which the
> answer is known, the system assumes their answer is
> correct for the new one. The system then gives the new
> image to a number of other people to determine, with
> higher confidence, whether the original answer was
> correct.

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
Hm, only Subversion so far has good and "easy" GUI integration over all platforms. GIT's only failing on Windows, or Mercurial's on the Mac. For a multi-level of expertise, multi-platform, multi-disciplinary team (front-end, back-end, flash developers) working on Macs, Windows and Linux boxes, it seems to me SVN is still the path of least resistance. Much as I hate it.
Awesome, it'll be interesting to see the results. Make sure you do

git repack -a -d -f --window=100 --depth=100

after converting from svn to git. Otherwise you'll have a lot of artifacts from the conversion lying around and the git repo will be HUGE.

(taken from http://marc.info/?l=git&m=120734745806416)
I just moved from a 4 man svn project to a 4 man git project. It took me a month before I didn't feel like an ass in git. I'm still not sure what I have gained. I know git is so powerful and does so many things, but I'm a simple user. To me version control is like a doormat: I pass it really quickly on the way into the house. If that's what it is to you git will not open up a new world. In fact it will just take you longer to become proficient and waste time that could otherwise be spent coding.
Hungarian Notation? Gaah! If I ever have to read a mluspidBlah = ConvertToSomething( mlusptBleah ) again I'll barf. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night.