decklin

I don't understand the point of "uri":"/transactions/1". Isn't the new resource's URI already part of the response (in the Location: header)? It's sort of like saying GET /posts/show/1 vs. GET /posts/1.

Newton, MA - Full Time (also remote, see below)

Sonian provides a large-scale email archiving platform resold by several vendors you may have heard of. We run entirely on EC2, and Amazon was an investor in our Series B ($9M). We use Clojure for our backend, Rails for the frontend, and Chef to manage infrastructure (i work in the latter group). We are expanding, but the devs all know each other and we work in cross-functional teams whenever possible.

The development teams are mostly remote and use tmux/Skype to pair program. Our VP of E is looking for a Director of Development, however, and for this someone local is preferable. We're looking for someone with experience not just building reliable applications at scale but managing remote teams to do so. We have a longer formal posting ready, but it's not up yet so email me (decklin@red-bean.com) for more info.

Also, if you're a Chef expert or just an ops-and-dynamic-languages hacker who loves to learn new things, but not interested in management, please contact me too! Any location. I'd love to make the case for another devop on my team. A full posting for that is up at http://www.sonian.com/about/careers/development-operations-e....

Perks: get flown out to Boston twice a year (or if like me you're already here, Sushi Thursdays :-)), MacBook Pro or ThinkPad, good benefits.

For both positions, please contact jobs@sonian.net and let them know that I (Decklin Foster) referred you. Thanks!

I don't get it. Why not git merge --no-ff and put your formatted message in the merge commit?

I find it amusing that that the current domain-squatter-template's tag line is "Without books there would be no history!"

It doesn't say that on the page. I bounced because I assumed that any app that wants permission to post to my timeline is going to spam some kind of advertisement for itself -- unless I have a reason to trust it. In this case, I've never heard of the app and I don't know who you are, so I don't.

I'm just explaining why I immediately left; I don't know if this happens frequently enough for you to care.

Another interesting case: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/revert...

I'm not sure if the "forget whatever happened" metaphor works for me. In the "revert a revert" article above, the problem is that merging a topic branch doesn't cause the first few commits on it to be applied if those commits were already merged but then reverted -- the revert has no effect on the merge. This is precisely because every commit object, since it includes it's parent's sha1, uniquely determines a history of changes, and commits in that are in both ancestries don't get re-applied.

In Bram's example, you have the opposite problem -- two commits are semantically the same but were made independently and have different sha1s. If Linus were drawing this diagram he would label them B and B' (and so on... there's a lot). To git, B' is totally different so a merge applies the change "again". If the other person had noticed this and reset their branch to the first B, the merge would be a fast-forward.

IMHO, the Don't Do That should apply to creating those commits (by cherry-picking, or not rebasing duplicated work) rather than merging. Not because such commits are morally wrong or something like that, but because git intentionally ("the stupid content tracker") doesn't handle them well. That's the tradeoff of the nice object model.

Our git workflow at my job is pretty messy and does run into this sort of stuff. I'd love something just a little more darcs-y, like say grafting together the two branches in the second example that arrive at the same content (without having to manage a local grafts file separate from the repository), but that opens many other cans of worms that I'm sure I'm not intelligent enough to deal with.

Indeed. I rolled my own UI for doing this with HMAC because everything else seemed to be implemented with cargo-cult voodoo (I just read the SuperGenPass FAQ again to check... MD5 10 times? WTF? If 1 is not enough why are you using it? No personal offense meant to whoever wrote SuperGenPass, but it's not what I wanted. As for the parent comment... I don't know what to say).

Shameless self-promotion link, if interested: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mjafhhefmkfchamf...

Very strange that he describes the MIT approach as "good" and the New Jersey approach as "not good enough" -- I have always understood them as "good" and "good enough". As in: why didn't we succeed? Because good enough was good enough.

Based on this misconception he draws the conclusion that the Lisp folks think the C/Unix approach is "evil", which is just silly. Maybe this is why he thinks it's a cult.

I'm not sure why you think this lattice method does not teach place value. The page you linked to doesn't explain (at all) why it works, sure, but the method is just a clever way of notating place. I would expect any good teacher to get his or her students to understand that, and not just mindlessly fill in numbers.

Only on iOS. The Android version is ad-supported.

The auto-refresh on this page is rather annoying. I was attempting to skim the whole thing, and in the middle, the entire page was replaced by a connection-refused error (I imagine they're getting some heavy load, but I don't know why they wouldn't use some sort of AJAX refresh). Here's a link with that parameter removed:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/02/live-from-apples-ipad-2-e...

IMHO this is disingenuous linkbait. An attempt is made to connect a political speech issue with a technical measure used to block certain software. Whether Twitter has any interest in blocking content might be an interesting discussion, but it has nothing to do with this afternoon's hot story.

Yes, but if you want to be honest about numbers, you should say something like

Reddit.com HTML.: 37.6 KB Text in that HTML: 5.9 KB

(That's just what I got from copy+pasting.) The difference at issue is loading another 37.6 KB page versus loading whatever part of that 5.9 KB is the "interesting" text (i.e. probably not the header or footer) plus its links and styles and the overhead of whatever you want to stick it in (JSON, an HTML fragment, etc). The huge CSS and JS files are not reloaded every time you go to a new page.

I've always stuck with du | xdu. Except for the primitive rendering it is rather reminiscent of webtreemap (or vice versa, i guess) -- click to dive down, top to go back up.

I feel someone should point out that "set" in this usage is a csh thing. The slides and the referenced comment use Bourne-type shells, where "set" is a builtin mostly used to set shell options: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_...

In csh, where using "set" like this would work, you can actually put spaces around the = (go figure).

I'm not aware of () being used for quoting words in any variant of sh or csh.

I wrote http://github.com/decklin/curlicue for precisely this reason. It's kind of a hack (shell script!), but I've gotten some mileage out of it.

Don't automatically submit each article to HN. Have your hypothetical reader click a "comment" link which, if the article is not submitted, prompts them to submit it (and then leave their comment), or if it has been submitted, goes directly to the existing discussion.

If you really want to obsess about this stuff, this is a good forum: http://geekhack.org/

Is there a link to an actual PDF instead of a Flash viewer?

Try: http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/manage

I don't think any of these designs will help if they continue to give them away for free.

One of the things that I like about a movie is if it makes me think about who/what the camera is. Is it a character? A god? Part of some piece of architecture? ...etc. Does it control time/linearity, or does time control it?

The idea of implicitly giving it a pair of eyes a few inches apart kind of ruins that for me. Why fake biology if you're ever going to make a jump cut? Most of our visual grammar depends on things actual eyes can't do.

Not reading the linked article I expect, but not reading the one-word summary in the article's URL?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hiatus

Edit: to be fair, the title of this submission is misrepresenting.

Erm, sorry, I just meant DejaVu Sans. But I do appreciate that its metrics are still different from Arial. Is that important in every application? Maybe.

I might be daft, but this article doesn't explain (and seems to assume it's perfectly obvious) why in the world you should use

    Arial, sans-serif

instead of:

    sans-serif

at the bottom of a stack. If I am on a platform where Arial looks OK, it should already be my default sans-serif font, right? Currently, I have Arial installed, but I've set my default sans-serif font to DejaVu Sans Mono, which (subjectively) looks better on freetype. But most sites force Arial. It seems like a cargo-cult sort of thing.

This problem is worse with monospace fonts (even more subjectively, I am practically allergic to Courier New).

Nope; I'm using https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/epieehnpcepgfiil....

On Linux, neither Chrome nor Firefox are working for me, yet:

    $ host _why.usesthis.com                                                       
    _why.usesthis.com has address 74.207.245.100

odd.

[Edit: Looking at darshan's post below, I understand why: host (part of the BIND distribution) uses its own resolver; everything else goes through the system facility (i.e. glibc). I still don't know how to fix it, though.]

I would really like to see this. I'm inclined say it shouldn't have any relation to karma or killing, because there's nothing inherently wrong with meta-discussion, but the front page would be infinitely more pleasant to me if I could see "100 comments (90 meta)", instead of guessing if there were really 100 things to say about the article or if after the only 10 someone just hit a nerve with a downvote or a pointless "this isn't HN" snark and started something big and ugly.

I'd go so far as including a "meta" checkbox next to the reply button, defaulting to the parent's value, which it would be considered polite to set truthfully, but maybe that's just me.

I was curious, so I downloaded it and ran unzip -l.

It contains the contents of the .git directory and another copy of the .crx file, inside itself (who knows how many levels this goes down). Actual code (almost entirely jQuery and .psd "source" for the icons) looks to be ~100kb.

Authors, don't do this. git-archive is your friend.

I like this, but does it really make sense to call it a "command-line" application? I'd call it a terminal application (like w3m, lynx, etc). I can also type "firefox http://news.ycombinator.com/ at my shell, but I don't think that makes it a command-line app.