This is not a troll - could someone please explain to me why I might use Git instead of SVN? With Git, wouldn't I still need to merge all the streams through some "offical" repository before I release version x of the product? And if I'm doing that, then what's the difference?
The point of the distributed approach is precisely that you eliminate the need for a "official" repository.
If it seems pointless, consider a scenario where you have three separate teams (A, B, C) working on a product.
In a centralized approach, you'd want to create a branch for each team, have them working on their exclusive branch and have each of them make a merge to the main branch. If you are responsible for the "main" repository, you need to make three merges, one for A, one for B, one for C. This is hard and gets even harder when the number of teams grows.
In a distributed approach, each team is able to pull stuff from the other teams any time and as they see fit. In that case, if you are the responsible for the "main" repository, you could establish a policy where you will only pull code from the C tree, and let C be responsible for pulling from B, and B from A. With this approach, each team is responsible only for one merge.
And yet, even if you are antisocial, and would never dream of setting up a baroque collection of three independent teams, git is awesome.
You can have repositories all over the place. Creating or cloning them is about as hard as copying a file. You can make one for any directory in a few seconds. You can create them wherever you want on your hard drive. You can back them up by dragging and dropping.
You can create one repository for (e.g.) the official release version of Drupal, clone that to another repository that also includes some important modules, then clone that repeatedly every time you start a project. To upgrade Drupal, upgrade the first repository and then pull the changes forward to all the others.
The branching support works very well and is easy to figure out. If you touch a few files and then have second thoughts, you can stash all your changes in a branch and then go back to the original state. You can screw around with your source code with complete confidence.
Git repositories are non-magical -- each one is fully contained inside a plain-old directory. If you do somehow manage to screw one up beyond recognition, just restore an old version from backup. You won't lose anyone else's changes, because each local repository is exclusively yours. You won't run the risk of corrupting other projects, because each repository is local and includes just one project.
No server configuration, unless you really want to share with the world (and gitosis makes that easy).
Thank you very much for the breakdown. I still don't see the benefit, however. Saying that you don't have an official repository is just semantics, because someone will in fact be responsible for the final merge, and that's going to be the official repository, whether you call it that or not. Furthermore, the code all has to get merged in the end. How does it simplify thing to merge from C --> B --> A --> Official, rather than just have everyone merging against an official repository?
Again, I'm not trolling - I ask these questions because I'm working somewhere right now where they use Clearcase, which admittedly is a horrible, horrible, horrible tool, but which is being used in my current environment very much like a DVCS. Everyone feels "productive" because they can merge their branch into other folks' branches on an as needed basis. But the end result is freakin' chaos from the point of view of product management, because it takes - literally - weeks to get a completely merged codebase containing the entire product. How does a tool like Git help matters?
Perhaps because he has accomplished a great deal and may have some advice for those who wish to as well? Seriously, he is out of touch with reality because he doesn't waste his time browsing the web?
I don't think so, at least not hackers who are programmers. Most of the interesting links seem to be cross-posted from programming.reddit.com and receive relatively few upvotes.
I know a number of very good hackers and not a single one reads news.ycombinator.com. Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even bother with sites like this or reddit. You will however find a number of them posting on Lambda the Ultimate, and a few on programming.reddit.com.
My gut feeling is that news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented hackers.
Here is a list of the top 10 items as I edit this post:
1. Number of founders - statistics
163 points by fauigerzigerk 2 days ago | 34 comments
2. Pmarca donates US$28 million to Stanford's hospital (pmarca.com)
30 points by henning 16 hours ago | 16 comments
3. Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live (heroku.com)
19 points by chaostheory 13 hours ago | 6 comments
4. Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!
88 points by BitGeek 2 days ago | 92 comments
5. The Talent Myth, by Malcolm Gladwell (newyorker.com)
3 points by hhm 2 hours ago | 1 comment
6. Modern Lisp (with support for concurrency) based on Java Virtual Machine (sourceforge.net)
10 points by riobard 11 hours ago | discuss
7. Performance-pay Perplexes (newyorker.com)
25 points by davidw 1 day ago | 5 comments
8. Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective?
2 points by hhm 1 hour ago | 3 comments
9. Exercise on the Brain (nytimes.com)
29 points by jlhamilton 1 day ago | discuss
10. Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail (arstechnica.com)
8 points by muriithi 12 hours ago | 2 comments
I'd say #6 is the only item of technical interest and not a single comment!
The goal is not to have just articles about hacking, but articles of interest to hackers. We're not trying to make something like programming.reddit.com, but something like www.reddit.com was in 2006.
In that aspect I think hacker news is still not getting the message. Three possibilities :
1.To use your own metaphor, if you keep the animal in the cage for a long time, it takes a while for it to figure out that the cage has been lifted. But then this group animal never seems to get the hang of it. Perhaps this is a data point in group theory, namely that a group has far more inertia than single units.
2.Or perhaps the hackers are too busy startupping that they just cant be bothered about Intellectual curiosity
3.Or the third inference is the Hacker types that visit here are not into much else. An article about Pythagoras theorem being useful to measure n-dimensional distances made it into discussion here. In the math circles that concept is akin to understanding a "hello world" program. It is not surprising that experts in one area are totally naive in others, but I was hoping that hacker news could be a tool to alleviate that at least to some extent by bringing pointers and some discussion.
A long time back, I made this comment, and you agreed.
"*8 points by bluishgreen 132 days ago | link
It has become apparent that the quality of these social news sites depends on the quality/commitment of the society that is supporting it. It would be very interesting and useful to find out what the start up folks are doing on a daily basis besides thinking about start ups. Like I said, this could be a very good inspiration tool.
Lisp was a landmark in my large scale understanding of computer science. I wonder what are the landmarks in understanding something like physics, or say bio-informatics. What are the problems that these people are facing? Hackers like learning just for the heck of it. In the process we can bring about useful start ups to these domains instead of making another calender application and stacking outside some big huge company in the hopes of being acquired.
I am not asking for a general news site. I am asking for a site where news.yc culture and outlook is preserved, but the domain is slightly relaxed (Note: the relaxing should stop well before we start seeing LOL(pic) in the submissions). If you won't keep the same URL, its ok, as long as you some how figure out how to set up that "outlook""
Its in my nature to be optimistic, but 132 days hence, I don't think we are there yet.
to me if pg really wants Hacker News to be more like the old Reddit - to me this is the heart of the problem: http://news.ycombinator.com
It's context. By associating Ycombinator with Hacker News the people visiting it and the people attracted to it will have certain assumptions. Afterall YCombinator is seed funding and business mentoring for the technically and entrepreneurially inclined... is it really a surprise that the content reflects that?
if people really want a generic Hacker News as opposed to something just renamed from Startup News, YC needs to be disassociated with it (at least in name).
Besides as other people have already pointed out there are already plenty of other sites that meet general "hacker" news needs that are "good enough" (programming.reddit, dzone, slashdot, the list goes on...)
Startup News is a unique (and popular) niche of a niche (I haven't seen anything else with a following quite like it) - why change that?
I think the "Hacker" part of the name is a bigger problem. In the old reddit you could found scientists, mathematicians, people from Nasa and so on, none of which would generally understand what's the matter with being a hacker or not.
Lots of my friends still don't read this because it hasn't "sunk in" that it's not just startup news anymore. With perhaps detrimental effects to the pool of submissions - it's not quite reddit.com '96 yet.
Sure, but what sort of hacker? Hackers have narrow and deep interests, so they tend to spend time in communities that are narrow and deep like comp.lang.*, Lambda the Ultimate, A List Apart, etc.
Based on the most popular topics, comments, etc I would say Hacker News appeals mostly to people building web apps which generally breaks down into programmers, designers, and perhaps business types. My prior comment indicated why HN doesn't appeal to programmers, and I don't see a lot of deep design topics or discussions either.
I don't think a community that addresses "hackers" in general can work. By its very nature it would have too much noise on topics any given hacker isn't interested in. I suspect that is why the hackers I know spend time in several specialized communities.
Cool, reddit when it started was indeed very good. Maybe you can share with readers here, your thoughts on how to prevent hacker news from becoming another reddit. How do you plan to detect and eliminate cliques/cabals of the sort, that now rule the reddit front page. Also, I think it would be a good to have a static page that explains how the yc news karma works.
I think you're being a little too broad with your stereotypes:
"Many are too advanced, and too busy hacking, to even bother with sites like this or reddit"
"news.ycombinator.com appeals to the low end of the technical hacker continuum, and more to entrepreneurial/business oriented hackers"
I don't think being an advanced programmer and being business oriented are mutually exclusive. While I personally fit your stereotype(business oriented, low end of the technical spectrum--although I'd put myself in the top 10%), I know a few HackerNews readers who are both brilliant hackers and business minded. Plus if you make some money, you have more freedom to hack.
I don't know if being a great programmer, and great at business (as in management, sales, etc), are mutually exclusive or not. However they do seem to require very different attitudes and skills. For example, becoming a great programmer requires an incredible amount of solitary time spent reading, thinking, and programming. This would not be very appealing to someone who feels happiest interacting with other people, which happens to be a skill necessary for management and sales.
My comment certainly wasn't meant to disparage anyone. We all start out at the low end of the continuum on any given subject. A hacker is someone really interested in the subject who dedicates much time and effort to advancing their skill.
Yeah you're right, business is all about people and programming does require an immense amount of solitary intellectual effort. Thanks for the encouragement ("We all start out at the low end of the continuum")! I do hope to have more time someday to focus on developing my technical skills.
I prefer CentOS (http://www.centos.org) as a server OS. It is well tested, secure, and reasonably up to date. CentOS is very nice for the sysadmin: configuration is well thought out, handy utilities like "service" and "chkconfig", automatic security updates, etc. Plus if you need support, upgrading to RHEL is trivial.
Unfortunately I don't think CentOS is built for PPC.
E is a fascinating distributed programming language, designed explicitly for building secure systems. With E and capability security you can build digital currencies, mobile code, virtual worlds, etc and bypass many traditional security problems.
Amen! That was my very first thought as well :) You would think history provides sufficient demonstrations that private deals with tyrants usually backfire in the end.
You might have to work much harder being outside of a tech center, but if you build something great, people will initiate contact with you regardless of where you are. If your idea depends on having connections before it can work then you might want to try something else.
There are exciting and successful startups all over the world. There might be more concentration in SV, but I believe you can succeed anywhere with the right product.
How about doing some consulting for a startup, maybe even one from a previous YC round? You should be able to negotiate a pretty flexible schedule if you have expertise they need.
If your app is db-bound then use your favorite language. If it requires a lot of CPU time, you'll probably want a language that compiles to native code. Lots of choices there so look for the most productive one given your performance constraints.
Is your application highly distributed, or in need of fault tolerance outside of the database? Erlang might be an ideal fit. Can you build the entire thing out of Java libraries? Then Java's probably your best bet, but...
If you're building something and expecting tons of of concurrent users then you'll probably have to write most of the code from scratch. So keep that in mind when picking a language.
Client Side
If your client is very GUI-based then most cross-platform toolkits may not feel native enough. You might want to consider writing writing separate clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, If a purely native feel isn't necessary, you could use your favorite scripting language and GTK+, or wxWindows, or QT. Or Java and Swing or SWT.
If you have a unique, or web-like, GUI then maybe Mozilla's XULRunner would be a good choice.
