skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has greater extensibility (both in protocol and the code itself), which is why Facebook and Google are looking at it in the first place: it's possible to hook into it in such a way that you can make it scale to ridiculous sizes (see e.g. https://bitbucket.org/facebook/remotefilelog) cleanly, in a fully backwards-compatible way, without forking the product. So it's worth looking at for at least that reason alone.

Beyond that, though, the team itself is leveraging that extensibility to continue to evolve Mercurial in new directions. Years ago, I was able to ship a third-party largefiles extension that worked similar to the GitHub external files thing launched a few weeks ago, and was able to get it integrated into Mercurial easily, where it was heavily used for years by people in the games industry. The team took "bookmarks" (Git-style branches) under its wing when they proved valuable, and have now added a ton of behavior to improve bookmark workflows.

They can even add huge new features. the big one that Git lacks is changeset evolution. Evolution allows you to get all of the benefits of rebasing and squashing, and all the benefits of a traditional DVCS merge-based workflow. Specifically, you can see all the previous versions of a given changeset, but those versions don't need to clutter up the history unless you're specifically interested. This means you're dramatically less likely to lose critical forensics information over the course of developing a new feature, and much more likely to be able to sanely see where, over the course of several rebases, you mucked up how a chunk of code actually worked.
It's indeed part of the problem. It's clearly a chicken and egg problem, because it was already engendered at the time, he did not think it would be useful (and it was already a bit out of fashion). But yes I agree. I call it a dialect myself because it relies at least 20% on french (I'm french myself). But after all, I'm not a linguist, they might disagree with the appellation. Maybe it would be a good think to document it I guess, for future purpose.
Time Out – The language where you have to wait
Poor practices are more common among front-end developers, partly due to people coming in from non-programming fields (graphic design, for example) and partly due to people who should know better saying "it's JavaScript, JavaScript sucks, fuck it, I'm not responsible."

Don't get sucked in to the JS blame game. There are many excellent tools and libraries available (e.g., Karma for cross-browser testing; JSHint for static analysis; npm for installing and updating packages) and good practices are entirely possible. Keep up the good fight.

I have a screencast series on this topic at http://www.letscodejavascript.com (subscription required) and an essay on tooling and workflow at http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/blog/2015/02/javascript... (free).
The results on every photo I tried were ludicrously wrong. The closest it got on photos of me was about five years older than me, but it ran anywhere up to 20 years too old.

The same thing on photos of others I tried: a 22-year old man was estimated to be 49, a fifty-year-old woman--who is generally considered to look young for her age--to be 69. Those are ages that no one would ever guess based on looks.

So I'd say the algorithm needs a little more work.
What kind of pricing would you expect? What size datasets are you using? You can create an unlimited number of databases for free, as long as each one is < 1200 records. We're also interested in exploring other pricing plans, especially for developers (our current plans are designed around business users)
Hi all, I'm a research engineering manager on the Microsoft Project Oxford Face API team, thanks for the interest!
This website makes use of the Project Oxford Face API technology we announced yesterday (http://www.projectoxford.ai). The age prediction is an experimental feature based on MSR face research investment. With Project Oxford's beta REST API we make this available to developers. These models will improve over time, please keep the feedback coming.
Ask HN: Game development resourses?
Hello,

I am a developer interested in starting game development for mobile devices as a hobby. I've been looking around and since I already know C# I belive Unity will be a good engine to start learning. I'm more interested in 2D games.

I'm looking for any recommendations, online resources/tutorials or good books that you have used or are using that can help me.

Thanks so much, anecdotes are welcome too!
Yea, nm I was wrong. Shapes do get distorted near the poles, but at fixed latitude the distortion decreases as their size decreases.
Oh, yeah, I didn't mean WP would take over. I do think WP will take a bigger chunk of the market and will be around for the long haul, though.

By cyclical, I meant the "cool" factor of companies. I'm sure many people here remember when Apple was a total joke after being awesome. Microsoft is coming out of their "joke" phase, IMO.
Awesome! We're actually working on Slack and IFTTT integrations at this very moment. If you shoot me an email at howie[at]airtable.com we might be able to set you up with early access!
Seems like it would be slightly loser ligaments which allow you to move your joints apart enough to create the empty spaces. Or, possibly, a different tension profile which causes your wife's joints to suddenly open while yours open more gradually.
RIP Paul, very sad. He has achieved what I have been trying to achieve my entire life (seemingly) an eternal memory or creating something great that will be remembered for generations to come. You will be missed.
Oh, boy, I'll try to answer, and perhaps later turn this into a FAQ for our wiki:

* revsets -- feature-rich DSL for querying your history, my presentation on them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NSLv...

* templates -- the output of just about any hg command can be customised:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/GenericTemplatingPlan

http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l...

* Evolve -- safely rewrite commits as a team, a safe replacement for `git push --force`:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OlDm3akbqg

* Very easy to write extensions:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/UsingExtensions

* Mercurial scales well to gigantic monolithic repos:

https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

That's all I can think of for now.
24k miles is Earth's circumference at the equator, not 85 degrees latitude.
I've been waiting for this!

I'm in the process of scaling up lead research for our sales teams and getting data in and out of spreadsheets is essential.
This is not different than having foo_bar and foo_Bar as two different variables.
Languages were invented as means of communication, so if all languages disappear except one it'll be tremendous boost to humanity.

But once you link disappearance of language with words like endangered, dying, extinct, all of sudden it sounds terrible.

Power of the words.
One short answer: changeset phases and evolution

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Phases

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ChangesetEvolution

The latter is embodied in the Evolve extension, which I use for day-to-day stuff and find incredibly useful.

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/EvolveExtension

The reason Google and Facebook are interested in mercurial is based on the remotefilelog extension:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ScaleMercurial

https://bitbucket.org/facebook/remotefilelog

https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

Performance on huge monolithic repositories like the ones Facebook, Google, and Mozilla work with is actively considered by the mercurial developers when integrating new features.
Glasses seem to throw it off. Between 3 pics it guessed 33, 31 and 36. I'm 34.
The No Whine Timeline
SDK is now up (full disclosure - I work on the team). http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/campaigns/service-fabric/
I'm sure that's the intended state of affairs. But there's a difference -- at once psychological and technical -- between "trusting someone else's application code" and "letting their developers have remote debugging access to your machine."
This. My girlfriend was happily uploading picture after picture until I asked her semi-rhetorically "I wonder what they're doing with all those uploaded pictures?" and after thinking about that for a second she closed the tab.
I'm thinking that wasn't the issue with the photo of my girlfriend, taken in natural light, that estimated her age to be 20 years more than it is...
It got the picture of me and my cats almost spot-on: 32. Since I was older than 31 1/2 at the time, I'm going to call that a hit. I attribute that to the cats.

I think I win for maximum error, though. On a picture of Jeanne Calment on her 122nd birthday, it guessed 43. Off by 79 years.
Since 2000, there were a few times in that first afternoon while doing the tutorial... March 2000? I think, but then I configured my editor to use spaces and subtly show tabs. That was the last time, yeah.

People that complain about whitespace haven't used Python much, it's a dead giveaway.

And yet, the benefits are enormous, I've probably skipped typing a hundred thousand redundant braces since then, and ended up with more readable code.
You can't even get close to AAA-levels of funding through crowdfunding. The only exception is Star Citizen which has raised $80 million by promising to be all things to anyone who wants to fly around space and do things.

The highest-funded video games on kickstarter barely crack $3-4 million, not even close to what you'd need to make a fully-fledged AAA game for current consoles.
Mercurial user for the past 6 or 7 years here. I cling to Mercurial despite people asking me to move some of my side projects (nothing substantial though) to git and github.

I refuse to do that out of principle. I think Mercurial should have taken the place of git as the widely used DVCS. And I try to be THAT change I want to see.

That being said, It would be great if someone can get the hg-git plugin to work seamlessly with newer versions of Mercurial on Windows and Linux, so that I can keep using Mercurial even if a project I am involved in uses git.
Sorry to be blunt but "Rather than try to raise funding and pursue this full time"? Do you really think you'd be able to raise money for a movie trailer app?
Miyazaki is a rising star at From Software. Also Kojima isn't dead. I don't expect him to stop making games just because he broke up with Konami. I have no doubt he'll land on his feet.
Haha, it said this picture of gary coleman was 45
https://tse4.mm.bing.net/th?id=JN.b8hUEXkcJ%2buUgxWJ5PAwdw&p...
Ask HN: Which Technology Should I Use for Web App Dev?
Maybe this question has been asked a lot of time but here it is again.

Which Technology should I use/learn fro web development?

Python/Django
Javascript full stack.
.NET MVC 5
Java EE 7
Scala / Play
Ruby on Rails.
Etc.

Goals
* Be Hireable.
* Can't think on another one, so basically be able to get a job.

Because if my goal were to pursue Computer Science as a lovely field, My choice would be C or Haskell.

Thanks for the answers.
Musk (or rather, SpaceX) has been putting stuff into orbit for paying customers for some years now, and has made five successful launches so far this year, which is a pretty much unprecedented launch pace.

Blue Origin, on the other hand, having been around even longer than SpaceX, just had their first ever test launch, of a sub-orbital rocket.

It's cool that they're doing this, but I wouldn't call it impressive (yet! maybe it could get there) and certainly doesn't seem to counter Musk's ridicule.

Edit: just confirming your memory of ridicule: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/09/26/elon-musk...

"If [Blue Origin] do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA's human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs. Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct."
It depends. Some technologies are adopted virally, some others need more effort to "spark" interest. In the latter case, you need an evangelist quite early.
tampermonkey script:

https://gist.github.com/ultimapanzer/68f601ef9ab7f599d3ce
It was released in October 2011, so it's almost 4 years old now. Still going strong, and runs the latest version of iOS (8), but it does feel a bit slow. The screen also feels a bit small, especially compared to my wife's iPhone 6.

No electronics at your workplace? That's an interesting policy. Is it something to do with security, or they just want you to focus on work?

Here's why I love having a smartphone. It's changed the way I:

* take notes (Evernote) and make todo lists (Wunderlist)

* communicate with friends & family (WhatsApp, Messenger), and teammates (Slack)

* get directions (Google Maps, Maps.me)

* manage travel and accommodation (Uber, AirBnb)

* translate conversations and menus overseas (Google Translate, WordLens)

* learn new languages (DuoLingo)

* take photos and videos - which are automatically synced and backed up on iCloud

* secure my online services (Google Authenticator, LastPass)

* manage my finances on demand (online banking apps)

* track my health and fitness (MyFitnessPal and Moves)

Not to mention the fact that I'm currently working on my startup's smartphone app.
Scheduling tasks intelligently for optimized performance
I guess you are right. The only AAA level crowd funding was Star Citizen. It's a shame there isn't similar demand in other genres.
If you're interested in the human side of age perception, we're running a study at http://testmybrain.org ("Understanding other people") where you judge people's age based on a photograph. We're looking at individual differences in face perception — how your age, race, and experience affect your judgment of others.
lol even MS think that TFS is shit
Mini Ask HN: Do you find it rude to crack one's knuckles in business meetings? I sometimes do this and wonder if it's bad form.
Also, Javascript is basically the Shadows (mordon.js lol).

"I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike, as a warning to the next ten generations that some languages come with too high a price. I want to look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this."
I don't agree with that. I actively hire guys off of internship. I welcome it. And I've even told guys when they were good enough to get more money somewhere else and I couldn't get it approved to keep them. Because a few years later, when they are established and I'm hiring that level of dev, I want to be able to try and get them again. And I have.

I don't really need to see a GitHub account. Actually, I don't want to see it at all, because I don't have time. Let's just talk about what you've built, what got you excited and what types of things you like to really get heads down in. I'm going to slip in some tech questions during the conversation but if you're a solid programmer you probably won't even notice it. If you're not, you're going to give me a deer-in-headlights look or worse, try to bullshit me. I'm not going to call you on it, but I'm not going to hire you, either.
Creating a throwaway for this because I don't want to get anyone in trouble.

Today, right now, neither Facebook nor Google are fully centralized on Mercurial. Facebook uses a mixture of Subversion of Git, and Google uses a mixture of a system that is totally not Perforce why do you ask please do not look behind the curtain, and Git.

Moving forward, this statement will be true for both companies. In Facebook's case, they are narrowly focused on truly moving everything into Mercurial, and are heavily using Mercurial's extensibility to facilitate that. remotefilelog (https://bitbucket.org/facebook/remotefilelog) is a key part of this, but they've been doing lots of other stuff that's not public that I can't link to that lets them get further. This process is well underway, but (last I heard anything) is incomplete.

Google is going a different direction, because Google. They're aiming to extend out their not-Perforce system to speak scalable Mercurial protocols. Given that they have experience storing Mercurial and Git inside Subversion repositories on top of Bigtable, this actually strikes me as a relatively sane engineering decision, from their perspective. This project is not ready for use. Even when it is, public Google projects will continue living on GitHub, which means that Go will continue being Git for the foreseeable future (as will FOAM, Blaze, and anything else they want contributions on).
Not blunt at all. Probably not until there's huge traction.
Nice. Could I use the API this as a database backend instead of something like parse? Been using airtable for a bit for personal stuff, but the API def expands the possibilities. User friendly DB interface with API for client side apps, or just hooking in the data.
Pretty much the entire field of rocketry is unbelievably phallic. I think you're supposed to just keep quiet about it.
hg-git converts git repos into hg repos, while hgit lets you do `hg commit` or `git commit` on the exact same git repo, with the exact same hashes.

Why is it better? Converting a git repo to hg takes a long time, you need a way to translate hashes back and forth between the two repos, bookmarks in hg are not exactly the same as branches in git. Or in the words of Cervantes, "translation from one language into another [...] is like gazing at a Flemish tapestry with the wrong side out."
Uhh, it's not a supercar to me until it goes through some real, honest to goodness testing. There's nothing wrong with calling it a concept car...because that's what it is, a concept of a supercar.

For all we know, the thing might be as viable as the last Vector Aeromotive concept or be as combustible as the Zenvo when Top Gear got their hands on it.

I mean, I love cars. I love technology. I really dislike putting the cart in front of the horse though...cough LM2 Streamliner cough...
I have had the same experience as you.

I used git for a couple of years and definitely had regular wtf moments. Switched to Mercurial and they just went away.

The complexity and counter-intuitive (to me, at least) nature of git's model was a major barrier to entry.

I still use git now and then because github is so popular, but for a small team on a moderate-sized project I really prefer Mercurial for its ease of use.
To add to the Google bit, from Facebook's F8 there was this interesting tidbit (source[0]):

> Quote from Google: "We're excited about the work Facebook is doing with Mercurial and glad to be collaborating with Facebook on Mercurial development." (Well, I guess the cat is finally out of the bag: Google is working on Mercurial. This was kind of an open secret for months. But I guess now it is official.)

As well, if you search the Mercurial-devel mailing list[1], you'll see that Google engineers has been committing to Mercurial for a bit now. (Looks like they started in Aug 2014, and really picked up in Nov 2014).

[0] http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2015/03/28/notes-from-facebook%...

[1] http://mercurial.markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Acom.selenic.m...
My experience with digital maps is that they were always a complement to my paper map, not a replacement. Sometimes you'd be traveling long distances and a 1:25,000 or 1:50,000 became too cumbersome to carry once you got out of the truck...so following along on a digital surface made some sense. But at present I think you're correct that digital maps aren't ready to replace the paper form at the tactical level. From a planning perspective, satellite overlays are extremely useful and taking a printed version of selected imagery with me on a patrol happened pretty much every time, especially if we were looking for something specific or searching buildings etc. Platoon leaders end up getting pretty good at arts and crafts...we'd spend a lot of time cutting and pasting maps and imagery together to get something as useful as possible, but just small enough that it wasn't too terrible to have in your cargo pocket or tucked into your plate carrier.
Minecraft Mod Developer Pack Extension
The modding API has been vaporware for so long it inspired a friendly roasting by the Yogscast - in the form of an animated cover of "Stop the Cavalry".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-zthYFjk6s

Practically speaking, for some time now Forge has been the community-made SDK that has replaced. There are a handful of others, but a vast majority of mods use Forge.

At this point, given how many mods are already written[1], it would probably be really hard to introduce an "official" API and/or SDK unless it has explicit support for Forge.

[1] one probably-incomplete list: http://modlist.mcf.li/version/1.7.10

edit: It seems MS's devkit does have Forge support baked in.

edit2: It's worth mentioning that Yogscast's "Where's the modding API" cover mentioned above was published on Dec 20, 2013.
"I was not able to figure out how to pass a static option to rustc"
Accidental collisions in a 256 bits space are not practically possible. You have 2^100+ higher chances that your CPU or RAM accidentally corrupts some data that leads you to execute the wrong JavaScript anyway, or that a meteorite falls on your head at this instant. It is utterly pointless to check the file name for this reason. If you worry about SHA256 collisions, you worry about the wrong things. That's why all modern crypto used everywhere around you already assumes SHA256 collisions are currently impractical.

All you need to do is to have an option to migrate to stronger hashes the day attacks start weakening SHA256, which is why SRI uses a "sha256-" prefix so we can migrate to stronger hashes when needed.
So, a few of those are kind of elitist.

React/Flux is still super new. Hell, there are like a dozen Flux frameworks out there with more on the way, and people are still arguing over what it looks like. So, you shouldn't ding people for that.

Functional programming is something that, at least for what you've mentioned, is a nice-to-know and easily explained insofar as it matters to front-end devs.

Security tends to be a rabbithole and something that, if taken seriously, can really slow down a project. So, it makes sense to market yourself as "Hey, I can backfill your security holes". No reason to be high and mighty.

CS basics is something you can again explain, or charge a premium for.

Devops is a pretty vague and bankrupt concept. Lack of automated deployments is not necessarily bad, it may just not be how they roll. Lack of automated builds and tests is a different matter. Deployment/adminny stuff is typically a pain point in any org, and it just sucks. Look at it as an opportunity on selling them how to do it the Right Way.

The stuff that I would absolutely be concerned about would be lack of testing (if they won't even acknowledge the deficiency), the lack of understanding git and project management, separation of concerns, and the CSS/HTML basics.

~

Long story short, though, is that it is exceedingly rare to see any shop that has everything on that list squared away--and if they did, they wouldn't be hiring freelancers to save their ass.
Is that why all of their Fire series devices come with an app that connects you to a live customer support representative in video chat?
...actually we didn't.
Yes, you're right, but also the FTDI problem[0] is rather related to "IP infringement" of sorts, and attempts to enforce claims to the IP by both FTDI and Microsoft.

[0] http://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innocen...
I might be biased, but I would still recommend Ruby on Rails.