skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'll assume it's an innocent question: Yes, there are huge numbers of people still using SVN.

SVN is a mature, easy, and simple solution. Git is wonderful, but all the improvements it brings aren't enough to actually convince IT departments to upgrade years of SVN over to Git (or to bother installing the Git-SVN bridge).

SVN gets the job done. With teams of under 10 developers on each project, SVN just works. There isn't a real bleeding need for Git's featureset, and especially if you've never used them, you probably don't know what you're missing out on. But the truth is, the answer to that is not much.

I know and have personally upgraded companies from SourceSafe to SVN..... after DVCS caught on. Sometimes the simpler solution is the safer bet, drastic change isn't always the answer and is never good for productivity, especially against a deadline as most companies and dev teams seem to be doing these days.

For myself, as a one-man dev team on projects with multiple simultaneous branches and 100k+ LOC and dozens of modules cross-linked and cross-developed......... SVN still gets the job done :)
The fact that templates are functions that use actual parameters (rather than backdoor means like instance variables) looks to be a huge win for me.
Sure, but today all it takes is a few people determined to kill themself - with all the technology that is available today, the power of a small dedicated group is vastly bigger today that it was 65 years ago, and it is only likely that it will get even bigger.
Everyone thinks that they are immune to the more gimmicky aspects of marketing: from smiling guys in suits to .99 pricing.

On average, they are not.
Some pretty darn good advice in here. This might be slightly embarrassing, but it actually makes me appreciate the value of Factories; something I always thought was a little overkill for anything but GUI code.
NSFW, in case anyone is wondering. (Flagged.)
If your browser supports GreaseMonkey, I've also had good results with Stealth Kiwi (more flexible than the /etc/hosts solution): http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8616
It's easy, just restrict everything you type to some arbitrary number of characters. Done.
unplug your work machine
echo "I am WASTING my work day!" | elm -s "Wasting My Day!" your_boss@your_work.com
Could you reword this defense in 160 characters or less please?
How incredibly insightful and true.

From experience, I can say that in one situation where things never got ugly, three was a great number. In another situation, pairing up to the exclusion of one was exactly the case.
That's not the point being made. The point is that the concept of travelling for wisdom should be familiar. Like fighting dragons to get princesses.
He's certainly a talented self-publicist, but I'd go no further than that. He's the Michael Moore of software. Or the Paris Hilton.
More important though than "everyone can become a broadcaster" is that broadcasting means you have something to broadcast. Putting together a broadcast takes time. You say "not many people were aware of ____, so you didn't reach many people", but the flip side of that is that people who are aware of xyz broadcast medium and wish to broadcast something (thus providing more content for consumers of the broadcast building into a feedback loop of broadcast/consumer growth...like television) don't always have the time or energy to produce something decent for broadcast, or to produce something at all. How many completely dead Twitter accounts are there?

Twitter's retention stats show that this is true even for something as completely cut down as Twitter (creating a broadcast requires mere seconds of time)...they only retain, what, about 10% of their users (or maybe rather 10% are active)?
It's only difficult in general. Nobody says there aren't any easy instances.
Coming from the non-technical perspective, I see little value that a non-techie can offer to a company for <=97% of the shares. Someone making you this kind of proposal surely does not understand how a web startup works because the value is in the development team and their resulting product.

In every endeavor I (try) to embark on, I always offer 50-60% of equity to the technical person, to show that im not a control freak and value their expertise.
If you go to stackoverflow, you'll see tons of people actively recommending new projects start using subversion for various reasons.

I have a skewed view of the world, I believe. I use the tools that solve my problems the best and don't care too much what the "general" opinion of them are. Much of the world sees stuff like this:

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/dec/26/stack-ove...
Both the IP of the server and the account are white listed.
Which gives me 40.000k lists to monitor (without counting that some people monitor the same list).

I would be more than happy to have this kind of scalability issue. Hopefully I'll make it to YC and have de facto preferred access to Twitter APIs. Fingers crossed :-)
I can decide if some programs halt. (Just not for all.)
Git is a blub. Compared to nothing svn is awesome! It is more then just the distributed nature. There are so many features that Git brings over older revision control systems that if I was forced to use an old one (and not allowed to use git-svn or something) I would change jobs. I can simply be way more productive with Git.
> But the truth is, the answer to that is not much.

This claim may sound like truthful only if one never
used git indeed.

EDIT: I think I should expand this. There is what I would miss if git is taken away from me, in no particular order:

Speed, speed, speed. Operations which SVN performs over network (and not
in the most efficient way) git performs locally and it's blazingly fast.

Ease of branching and merging.

Local branches, squash commits.

Rebase.

Staging area.

Stash.

Having entire history at my fingertips and not having single point of failure which SVN central server is. The fact that entire history in git often takes less space than single checkout of SVN is a nice bonus.

Not having each and every directory of my project littered with .svn

Github.

There is more, of course.

I was kind of Subversion fan when I first saw Linus talk on git (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 ) and I did not like it at all. Then I did try git and saw the light :)
I am still using SVN, but only because I have to. Now it looks dated (mature?), slow, clunky and fragile.
Perhaps, although I think I've linked to a different article than the one that shows up in the search results. This one is the author's response to the criticisms. The 'Revisited' is part of his title, not mine.

My thought upon reading the original articles was that this was a really silly idea, and that a 'checkmark' that appears if the two match would be much more useful.

But his Case #2 was interesting. He suggests that it can serve as an "Anti-Phishing Mechanism":

Similar to the account-specific images that online banking systems recently added, your password becomes a visual signature that you can look for. Websites can securely serve unique color signatures by issuing a hash salt through a browser cookie, for instance.

Let’s say you go to a site that you think is PayPal. If you start to type your password and you’re getting unfamiliar colors (or no colors show up at all, for that matter), you’ll know something’s fishy.

Maybe?
The danger there is false positives. To use my own name as an example, there are an impressive number of Timothy Wiseman's out there, at least two far more famous than I. Fortunately, a couple of the articles I posted do at least appear on the first page and the others are not programmers but it can be a major issue for some.
How Seattle venture firms are holding up
I wonder if over time this will drive parents to deliberately choose more unique names and drive people to start using their middle initial more frequently.
Everyone uses LAPACK. If you came along with your own versions of those routines, no-one would would trust them. LAPACK et al are the most optimized, most debugged code on the planet. Hardware vendors design around LAPACK. It's incredibly important.

Also check out Sage: http://www.sagemath.org/
Hello Reddit.

sigh
Creating Controversy for its own Sake (AA.com redesign fiasco)
Germany is the only connection between them. Proud members of the military are not very visible in modern German society.
Good enough. At least now I have to modify my hosts file to play that game, which makes it inconvenient
You're assuming that because he's loud, he's good.

Truth is, he is loud, but... he's not very good at writing software.

He's not bad at books, provided he has an editor working with him. The writing on his blog is a mess.
Sure, there's a bunch of trivial/easy ones for programs that do almost nothing, but I really wonder if are there any interesting programs for which tight bounds are known?
I love how you get a 90 day money back guarantee - when you pay for the next three years.
I definitely plan on switching jQuery over to using this compressor - excited by the output. However it appears as if it crashes when you push the latest nightlies of jQuery in. Not sure what's up with that.
Dell told the community college I am sys-admining for that we couldn't buy the special, we had to buy on GSA pricing (not educational since we are on Tribal land). The $499 package became $999 and it took weeks to find out why we were not considered an education institution.

Needless to say, we went elsewhere.
I suppose this proves just how effective the marketing is.
He's more Nichole Richie. He doesn't rise to the level of Paris, who was surprised by jail, but never surprised by wealth.
No, the issue is that, in SO karma, relatively common knowledge seems to be valued orders of magnitude more than insight on problems few people would be able to solve. While some of those questions are probably just obscure trivia, it also includes advanced knowledge of (say) compiler optimization. Cases where most people on the site wouldn't be familiar enough with the subject matter to tell an insightful answer from ignorant ranting.

It can also be a measurement of how much time you're willing to sink into talking about programming, rather than actually doing it. (HN has the same problem.)
What's the best way to take a study break? : Cognitive Daily
> Perhaps, although I think I've linked to a different article than the one that shows up in the search results.

Indeed. I put the search in to point out that the idea and technique has been mentioned before, and there is discussion elsewhere. The idea is to try to avoid repeating points and discussion needlessly.

I wish HN had a "merge discussion" facility, although I have no idea how that would work.
OMG 100%! Me n my bfz ll av realy profound QSO UzN as few chars as posbL!
Get things done. More building, less talking: A rule of thumb for raising money.
1. Start simple, stay simple. 4. Don’t do everything that is possible only what is necessary.

yet

6. A feature is not a product.

Dichotomy?
Password confirmations aren't really there for security. More as a sanity check to make sure the user hasn't accidentally typed their password incorrectly.
Yes, the guy is clearly not a "team player", not a "loyal" employee, he had to go.
I've heard that in previous rounds they e-mail around 9:30PM CST.

Makes sense, I mean if I were PG I'd take all the time I could (seems like a hard decision).

Also, be sure to check your spam folder as I've also heard the message can end up there.
> pay journalists less or hire fewer of them

That has been the practice of media companies for more than two decades. Mergers and aquisitions have reduced the number of print media owners to a tiny handful. The problem is more that those businesses are used to 20% profit margins, and with over-inflated prices paid during the acquisitions, there is far less incentive to pay market rates for journalists, or even to keep them employed.

While you might be willing to pay for the best journalism, the people hiring the journalists sure aren't. Furthermore, the line between editorial content and actual reporting has become so blurry that the smart thing to do is presume that the entire newspaper is editorial.
Definitely. Projects that predate git and don't absolutely need dvcs will probably stay in subversion for the rest of their natural lifetimes.

Plus tools like Joey Hess's mr make working in a heterogeneous vcs environment somewhat manageable.

A better question might be: why does anyone still use cvs?
Who should I email if I don't have a boss?
I've been using a SSD in a 2nd gen macbook pro for a couple weeks now. Huge improvement in system responsiveness.

Basically: it makes beach-balls go away.

If you look at the projections you'll see disk maintains a slight edge in capacity cost. Spinning disks will still be around for very cold data, much like how magnetic tape still finds a home in large data centers. (see the FAWN paper, Memory Cloud paper or the 2 sequels to Gray's 5 minute rule).
Properly, but does the blogger who told the story know that?
Could someone explain this one?

> Be Defensive [...] Defensively assert about the state of parameters passed in methods, constructors, and mid-method. If someone can pass in a null, you've left your guard down. You see, there are testing freaks out there that like to instantiate your object, or call a method under test and pass in nulls!

I'm not sure what he wants to change. Surely if the code would crash when I pass a null as an argument, it's better to make it throw the exception as early as possible. You can test that by asserting an exception when you call that_func(null);.

Why is that a bad thing? (Or did I misunderstand him?)
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part V: a.vim
The Very Strange Story of the Startup That Says It Made $10m Before Launching
Could someone explain: "Be Defensive - They're out to Get Your Code! - Defensively assert about the state of parameters passed in methods, constructors, and mid-method."?

which, desarcastified, I take to mean:

"Don't defensively assert about the state of parameters passed in methods, constructors, and mid-method."

Specifically:

"You see, there are testing freaks out there that like to instantiate your object, or call a method under test and pass in nulls"

Isn't it the case that a calling a method with (say) null parameters where they are supposed to be non-null should raise an exception? Isn't an assertion failure reasonable in this case?

I understood and agreed with a lot of the other stuff (although it struck me as a bit dogmatic) but this one I don't get.
Well, is there any real different between a first-class function and a closure that closes over nothing?

Is it possible for a language to support closures without first-class functions? How common is it to have first-class functions without closures? (I think Python sort of had this arrangement, but I think this is fixed now.)
Slow ADSL with 12.4 IOS version?
At least the _ part is used in both Haskell and Prolog.
Browse magazines on Google Books
Les Argots » La carpeta: Ensems
My netbook is without a doubt the best computing purchase I've made in the last 5 years. It's absolutely perfect for what it's designed to do, be a low power, super portable, ultra-cheap mini-laptop.

I use it in meetings, on the train, in coach seats on the plane (with room for a mouse on those tiny trays), out in the park. It's so stupid small and lightweight I basically just pack into my backpack even if I don't plan to use it. It's never let me down, and done exactly what I've asked of it. I'm not trying to run Crysis on it, but it surfs webpages fine (even Wave runs pretty okay on it), loads all my Office Apps, plays music, let's me compose music if I want. I can even do some lightweight programming on it. Basically all the stuff I want to do in a pinch but never do because carrying a laptop (even a 13") is just too heavy and cumbersome.

The only thing that would make me stop using it is if they came out with a version with a flip screen I could turn into a 9" tablet pc for maybe $50 more.

Plus it fit's into every hotel safe I've ever tried.
The reason that no one has hinted at "an idea of how to save print media" is that there is no cure for print media as we have had it in the recent past. Their business model has been in decline for several decades, and they're not interested in changing. If you graph subscription/readership, you'll notice that somewhere between 2015 and 2020 the last newspaper in America will close. The industry is dead. It is just a matter of time before the corpse finally stops twitching.
I think a startup's competitive edge is often not the product or space that they are in but the people on their team. For example, my company is in a pretty competitive space with lots of big corporations as our competitors--but we don't worry because the one thing that News Corporation or Rupert Murdoch doesn't have is me and my team.
You can pay $99 a year to be in a database where potential employers will contact you? I ended up on a whole ton of those for free back in the 90s.. :-)

I guess you're paying to prove that, yes, you will take their calls.
I've been wanting a SSD for weeks now. I think hard drive speed is why Windows XP is running so slow for me (via VMWare on my Mac).

Downside is I've got a 320 Gb hard drive so need something somewhat comparable. Bigger SSDs are still not cheap! Saw the 250 Gb ones on Amazon for about $600. Almost bought it yesterday, but decided to wait until after my next trip..
I agree. And for me, the awesomeness didn't really sink in from reading the documentation. I had to actually use it to be won over. Whereas, if you've used CVS, SVN is a breath of fresh air, but it just doesn't blow you away.
I'm not sure it should be that easy - if you left that page open and walked away for one second someone could delete all of your mail, calendars, documents, pictures, blog posts... the works.
Huh? What DE?
echo "I dont love you!" | elm -s "I dont LOVE you!" your_significant_other@your_domain.com
Power Up Your iPhone With Revolutionary New Twitter Apps
Anyone who enjoys the use of free AT&T phones has doubtlessly become captivated by the increasing functionality of mobile phone applications.
I think what the author is getting at is testing a particular method on an object without having to mock up all the data required by the entire object. I guess?

Agreed that the whole article would be more useful without the sarcasm.
Hit the road, but don’t forget your BlackBerry
Planning a motorcycle trip out on the open road soon? Want to leave society behind for a weekend, just you, the wind, and your iron steed
Correction though. November 5th is the date that Y Combinator will notify applicants that have made it to interview stage.
We're talking about the utility function of money. With enough money, it's definitely the case that it goes down, but I think it goes up faster than the apparent value for a bit as well. £20k is more than twice as useful as £10k is more than twice as useful as £5k. Where the crossover is, though...
Tangible interface "Beat Machine"
In other news, COBOL is excited to announce its imminent move to the Apache Software Foundation.
I remember the old days when they first added the SPC700 support. I believe it necessitated figuring out dynamic frameskipping which is something we see in almost every emulator today (and has been put to good use on low powered hardware like my GP2x Wiz).

ZSnes was my goto for a very long time since it just ran faster on my hardware. But Snes9x is really the SNES reference software.

Cool effort. Now let's see if he can do it in 4k.
Deb Landolt and Band's New CD Release "Diamonds on the Desert Floor"
Actually travelling great distances as part of one's education is more common, not less. I wouldn't be surprised if at least a million people a year move to distant towns to go to college or grad school every year in the US alone.
thx, this is useful. at least something free from m$.
So people are paying to get listed in a search engine before it even launches. What a scam.

Reminds me of online directory listing scams that get gullible small businesses to sign up over the phone.

Also reminds me of the million dollar homepage, for some reason. Probably because it's pretty clever :)
Computing in Dwarf Fortress
OO Design for Testability | Design Tech Talk Series
So that's basically allowing operations on a half-broken object, just so that you can test it without creating all the dependencies?... I see how it might be useful, but I just can't agree with that.

The tests are not the goal - a working product is. That's just making a trade-off between less lines in a test -vs- code that doesn't explode mid-transaction when that null suddenly occurs in a real-world scenario. If I'm supposed to write my code properly, testies should not be too lazy while writing the tests.
I don't know, it sounds like the marketers at Dell have done an excellent job of getting you to talk about their message and product. You even seem to have done a little market research for them.
We'll fund anything that scales like a startup. We had a very promising startup doing real estate two cycles ago, but they fell apart due to disputes between the founders. I still think it was a great idea.
yeah seems a bit shady, but a really cool social hack to circumvent typical funding. If people used the power for good it would make an inspiring Startup School talk, ala the 1MM px page.
In the comments he admits that public APIs should be defensive, but internal APIs should be 'known good' via testing.
> I don't want to fuck around with a salesguy, just tell me what it fucking costs.

I used to think this way until I started running a business and realized that people are people and they do things like give discounts, while web apps do not.

When we order with a web app we generally follow up with a call to a sales rep to see if we can get a discount (now, or in the future).

You should look into talking to people sometimes.
Also, f2py (distributed with numpy) makes it easy to wrap fortran subroutines in python.
Groundbreaking Prosthetic Hand
If you get an interview, unbalance school to get the prototype ready - 'don't worry be crappy' - for the interview.
The other Vim plugin articles on the site are also pretty good.
Well, I mean the starred out password fields. Why have them in the first place? Why not just have a password field that acts like any other text field, showing you what you've typed. Seeing this elaborate color based password match plugin kind of speaks to the absurdity of it.
I don't think they're paying to get listed in the search engine - they're paying for exclusive rights to Keywords for a year, and with first right of refusal next year.

Imagine you had exclusivity to a Google keyword like Viagra, Sales, or Wedding? Crikey that would be worth a lot, so what if, just maybe, Leapfish get it right and compete with Google? Their argument, which I guess current customers have bought, is that surely that's worth taking a punt.
Is spreading rate really the thing to measure here?

Once the rift reaches the red sea, we'd have the worlds skinniest ocean.

I want to know elongation rate. Is the whole rift spreading as one unit? Is it starting in the middle, and slowly working toward the red sea?
Where did you do your price shopping? I wasn't aware Monster Cable sold PCs as well as overpriced cables.
"I’ve long stopped working on Subversion code, but I wanted to make sure the project was parked in a good place before I could really walk away guilt-free."
Gladwell for Dummies
I have to say: watching that video made me want to grab a broadsword and kill some Orcs or something.
It's too bad Java/C++ were designed after unit testing became commonplace. Some of the advice here will actually improve your production code but a lot of this is just a case of the programmer having to work around the language.

For example, the advice to not "instantiate objects using new in the middle of methods" wouldn't be a big deal if if your test code could easily instruct the compiler to replace the concrete object with a mock when the test is run.