Director of Star Trek II and VI Joins CBS's TV Reboot - <AUTHOR> http://www.startrek.com/article/nicholas-meyer-joins-new-star-trek-series <comment><USER2> Nicholas Meyer has done a lot of awesome things besides Star Trek, including writing "The Seven-Percent Solution" which is still my favorite Sherlock Holmes derivative story. He basically wrote Star Trek II in a couple of weeks without knowing much about the show before he began, having been hired by Paramount which was up against hard deadlines and hadn't been able to get a usable story or script. He also wrote ST IV and ST VI, and is basically responsible for the rule that only the even-numbered Trek movies were good. His memoir, "The View from the Bridge" (if I recall the title correctly) is a really fun read.</comment>


How tech companies do engineering estimates (survey results) - <AUTHOR> https://producthabits.com/engineering-estimates/ <comment><USER2> What's the origin of this t-shirt sizing methodology? I've never heard of this before.</comment>


Space Archaeologist Wins $1M for Her Ancient Ruins Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.christianpost.com/news/space-archaeologist-wins-1-million-for-her-ancient-ruins-project-149646/ <comment><USER2> here's a good National geographic article on Parcak I linked on Monday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10536440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10536440)</comment>


I'm Solving my Problems by Writing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.petesoder.com/blog/2013/04/24/im-solving-my-problems-by-writing/

<comment><USER2> I find that formalizing my thoughts into a coherent description/post will most often result in one of the following:

        a. clear solution to my problem emerges organically
        b. makes me realize the problem is something different all together.
        c. at the very least, solidifies my understanding of the problem, and eventual solution will be hard to forget</comment>


Send Your Name to Mars - <AUTHOR> https://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/mars2020/ <comment><USER2> done, just in time!</comment>


Linux Marketshare Myth: 2012 Edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/01/the-linux-marketshare-myth/

<comment><USER2> Why does everyone keep forgetting about "the laptop"? It used to be a part of "the desktop", but it has now pretty much replaced it - no one I know uses a real desktop tower anymore, unless they need some extreme hardware power.

For all the advantages that the cloud and tablets offer, you'll have to pry my laptop out of my cold, dead hands.

<comment><USER3> For gaming laptops are a joke. And who doesnt prefer a huge screen to work with? Laptops are practical but never replace a desktop.

<comment><USER4> > _For gaming laptops are a joke._

I guess I've just imagined years of gaming on a laptop, then.

> _And who doesnt prefer a huge screen to work with?_

Got one. Along with an external keyboard and mouse. What's your point?

> _Laptops are practical but never replace a desktop._

I haven't used a desktop in years.

<comment><USER5> The laptops you can usually play a decent game on are so big they defeat the purpose of being a laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's all a matter of semantics at this point. What's the difference between a tablet with a keyboard and a laptop with a touch screen? Nothing. Maybe locked down software vs open software, but does that mean I can install android on my laptop and it becomes a tablet?</comment>


Photographer wins $1.2M from companies that took pics off Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/22/media-copyright-twitter-idUSL2N0J71Y220131122 <comment><USER2> I applaud this only because of Getty and AFP's willingness to prosecute others for the same and their unwillingness to share photos for personal/noncommercial use.

But this is a sad day. I've been a professional photographer for over 10 years, and it makes me sick how paranoid others in the industry are.

Why is it OK to quote what someone said for a news article, but not use their photo with proper attribution? Because they spent a couple hundred dollars on a camera? Why is a picture some sacrosanct object but what someone says worthless? You're pressing a button on a camera and then pressing some buttons on a computer later.

The balance of power is completely wrong, and photographers, musical artists, and other "creatives" only shoot themselves in the foot by slathering watermarks, issuing crazy copyright notices, and using DRM on their photos/creative works.

If proper attribution is given to the creator (same as quoting what someone says) then photographs should be shared. Encouraging the sharing of photos I've taken for clients has only increased my business. It's better for society.

<comment><USER3> I'm not a legal expert. But to me it seems like If you say something in public, it being transcribed into a report is a statement of fact and belongs in what I guess would be called the commons. A photo on the other hand is something quasi tangible that a person put time, effort and resources into to create.

Also if you spoke to a reporter I suppose that would be an implied consent to have your words used.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, pressing the button is the easy bit, it's getting there that costs the time/money/foresight.

<comment><USER5> The same could be said about a quote. Verbalizing the words is the easy bit, it's getting the education and life experience to come up with the words that costs the time/money/foresight.

I'm not taking sides with this comment, just pointing out the flaw in your argument.

<comment><USER3> Thats true, but a photo leaves a lasting artifact. where as spoken words unless they are transcribed or recorded more or less evaporate. When you take the effort to transcribe or record those words, you have at least some claim to use those words. thats all based on I think montesquieu or adam smith.

<comment><USER6> We're getting close to the point that every word a person speaks can be automatically recorded. (e.g. Google glass.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I run a small publishing business that does a lot of Facebook Marketing. Our primary means of promoting our business is to use original content posted regularly to our Facebook pages. These are usually images that we create ourselves. Our competitors, however, use an endless stream of pictures, cartoons, photos, etc that were created by other people. They use other people's creative work to promote their business, for commercial gain. Their page is filled every day with content from other people, copied and posted directly on Facebook. Occasionally credit is given, occasionally it is not given.

Recently, they used one of our images on their page. They gave no credit, no links to our site, no compensation, or anything. They did, however, link the image to their Pinterest page, which in turn linked to their Tumblr. All giving the impression that they created the image, owned it, and had the right to use it.

A successful Facebook meme has significant monetary value. The 'response' of a good meme is predictable, and can easily reach hundreds of thousands of people. When they posted this image, it did very well. It got thousands of likes and shares. Of course, this happens every day, and not just to us. People steal images all the time. It seems to be "the Internet way."

It is easy to turn a blind eye to this. And usually, we don't mind. But when a direct competitor steals an image and uses it for their own gain, it really pisses me off. It also harms my business. Each time a Facebook image is posted, it loses some of its value. Once someone has "liked" it, they've already liked it, and are less likely to respond in the future.

But, that's just one small piece of the issue. The fact is this competitor has built their business on stealing other people's content, in order to build an audience for their Facebook page. They've become rather successful. We are more successful, but are fighting an uneven battle because of our unwillingness to steal.

My only question, now that they've stolen one of our images, is what to do next. My goal is to 'level the playing field', so that I don't have to compete against thieves. Perhaps a scary letter from a lawyer is in order? They're in South Africa, and I'm in the United States.

I have a feeling, though, that this simply isn't a fight that I can win. Respect for copyright is almost non-existent these days. Look at the rest of the posts on this discussion.

Sigh.

<comment><USER8> I'm a South African. I worked a a dev shop and we have a sort of meme in our office, we call it "South African innovation". It came about from realizing how many start-up services from here are almost mirror-images of successful international start-ups. They don't just serve the same market, they're pretty much the same website, but for South Africans. Now whenever we spot a new service or an idea that is clearly an imitation of an existing thing, it is jokingly referred to as South African innovation. It's not dire, but it's a shame.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's a bad thing, unless they are really stealing the source code/layout of the page. Most successful businesses are not original ideas, but just slightly better/different iterations of an existing idea. Now I am sure that building a website for South Africa has it's own challenges, e.g. number of languages spoken, slow internet connection to the rest of the world, different cultures, etc. Why not have an South African version of X?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The hypocrisy of major copyright holders never ceases to amaze me. Getty would go after a business that redistributed Getty's photos for profit in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER11> I found the same irony in this story. Getty and AFP would prosecute anyone trying to resell work. I'm not to familiar with Twitters privacy policy so I'm not sure who actually owns the pictures that are posted there, but I'm guessing from the ruling that it's the users.

<comment><USER12> It's in section 5 of the ToS here: [https://twitter.com/tos](https://twitter.com/tos)

The short of it is that you retain copyright over your photos, but grant Twitter a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce them. You also authorize Twitter to extend that right to third parties via syndication agreements or APIs. This seems mostly intended to ensure that Twitter can set up APIs and feeds usable by third parties, although the permission as written would allow Twitter to engage in broader syndication agreements if they wanted.

But in any case, third parties can't just grab content and reuse it on their own. You _could_ probably make some kind of photo-feed website scrolling recently tweeted photos, maybe even sort them into galleries (as long as your website complies with the Twitter API's own ToS). But you can't just right- click/save-as and upload the JPG to embed in your news article, because that removes it from the context where you're covered by the license the photographer has granted to Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The astounding thing about this case is how little due diligence Getty and AFP did. In my capacity as a Wikipedia admin, I've handled copyright-related issues with images and text.

We put an enormous amount of volunteer labour into tracking copyright violations and removing them: if a photographer complains that someone has uploaded a copyright violation, our volunteers will go and forensically examine EXIF data, look at upload metadata on sites like Flickr, check for digital watermarks, check on Google Images and other search tools to try and trace the upload history of the image. And even after all that work, it still feels like it's not quite good enough.

On image licensing, I've emailed government lawyers to verify that our interpretation of their national copyright policies is correct.

Meanwhile, I've worked with people in the commercial sector whose modus operandi for producing social media campaigns is "open up Google Images/Flickr/YouTube and pinch all the things!"

If I can trace the copyright claims on an image by using tools like Google Image Search, so can AFP and Getty. Not just for copyright purposes, but due diligence to make sure the metadata checks out with the photojournalistic claim made of the image. That they aren't doing so ought to give one pause before trusting agencies like AFP to report the news.

</comment><comment><USER14> This ruling seems like a good thing to me. Just because a photographer's work is easier to copy and use doesn't mean we should be able to use it without proper compensation. It'd be similar to someone taking code from a website's source file and using it (In this hypothetical scenario the code is usable and not minified).

<comment><USER15> And what is wrong with taking someone's code from a website and using it?

I'm a programmer and I say NOTHING is wrong with that!

<comment><USER16> How about I steal your web code and designs and undercut you to your potential customers?

We're not talking about stealing some CSS idea on some site...

<comment><USER17> I get the point the OP is trying to make, it just may not be the best example. The web site code/design is not very valuable on its own without support/hosting/design iteration/backend design etc. It would be easy to steal web code and designs, but it's the "undercut to my potential customers" that's the hard part and already happens in this very competitive market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> AFP discovered the photos on a Twitter account other than the photographer's with their copyrights already stripped. It would have been interesting to see how much of the blame should lie with that Twitter user.

This was irrelevant however since the judge found that Twitter's TOS only allows retweeting and personal use, so commercially using the image was a violation of the TOS. I'm not sure how a Twitter TOS violation turns into DMCA damages. I suppose the judge didn't want to get into policing all the LOL cats on the internet.

In one sense this has parallels to the clip art wars. Lots of vendors sold misappropriated clip art in their collections. Buying it in good faith is not protection for the end user.

<comment><USER12> > I'm not sure how a Twitter TOS violation turns into DMCA damages.

It didn't directly. The photographer retains copyright of photos, and sued the companies for regular copyright violation. One of the companies' defenses was to claim that they actually had a license, and therefore it was not a copyright violation. Users who tweet photos do grant certain royalty-free reproduction rights to both Twitter, and third-party syndicators authorized by Twitter. See section 5 here: [https://twitter.com/tos](https://twitter.com/tos). Therefore, if AFP were using the photos in accordance with terms authorized by Twitter, they would be covered by this license, and they wouldn't be violating the photographer's copyright.

The judge ruled that their reuse was not within the scope of these terms, however, and therefore not covered by that grant of a royalty-free license. Therefore the defense fails, and they're assessed damages, not for the Twitter ToS violation, but for reproducing photos without a valid license from the photographer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is fantastic news. I always thought that the best way to undermine the stupid copyright regime was to make sure it was applied fully to big businesses. If only all of the other thousands of small rights holders whose works have been used without permission could also get million dollar payoffs, I think we'd see reform _post haste_.

</comment><comment><USER20> Photography is in a strange place. For one thing, it's remarkable that that concepts that negatives are rarely sold, and that the print constitutes the artwork, have carried over to digital photography. Both the bits as they emerge from the camera, and the results of a photographer's digital darkroom work take the place of the developed film, and prints, which are often the output of an ink jet printer, have roughly the same value in the fine art market as as exposed emulsion on paper, and to some extent exist side by side.

The artificiality of shoehorning digital photography into the same rights framework as evolved for chemical photography creates these stresses. At least there ought to be different categories of images and rights.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am glad to see this result. Getty and AFP seek to control their own material with an iron-clad hand but don't respect the rights of others.

<comment><USER22> Getty isn't a single hivemind, it is made up of many individuals.

<comment><USER23> But I'll bet that when it comes time to discuss IP rights, the company (as an entity) will have no hesitation speaking as if they have some sort of moral high-ground (e.g. people that 'steal' images are evil... except when we do it, then it's an accident and should be forgiven).

<comment><USER22> That is the policy of the company to follow that rule as a whole yes, but individuals can act alone. Just like individual cops can steal drugs from their busts, but this isn't the policy of the police or Getty to act in this way, so it is disingenuous to call out a single individuals act as a policy of the company across the board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So does this mean that Buzzfeed.com is going to be sued for $1 trillion?

</comment><comment><USER25> How does this effect the ability users have to embed Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook posts? If someone embeds a Tweet that contains a photograph is that considered fine under Twitters policy?

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand. Isn't anything we tweet public domain?

<comment><USER27> You're kidding, right?

(Just in case you aren't: no, it's emphatically not.)

<comment><USER28> I thought that was a fair question which crossed my mind as well. Do your tweets belong to Twitter (e.g. can they delete/modify your content once it's on their servers)? If you post a work on a public site, without explicit copyright, are you granted an implicit copyright? If I post a jsfiddle, are people allowed to use that in their code? I don't think the questions are that obvious, at least for me with zero background in copyright law.

<comment><USER29> Many tweets would not rise to the level of creativity required to earn copyright protection.

<comment><USER30> How do you suggest we measure creativity to know this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, serious question, does this mean that users of Twitter/Facebook can sue CNN, Fox, and other news sites that lift pictures from their pages without permission?

<comment><USER32> Yes

<comment><USER33> ... if you can pay the legal bills.

(Or if the lawyers will take your case on a no-win-no-fee basis.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> On one hand I want to cheer since this is an example of David winning a small scuffle against Goliath.

But on the other hand, the legal tools being employed by David in this case are the same tools that Goliath uses to limit speech on the web today.

Let's not forget that the copyright system is an anachronism that needs to be dismantled/rebuilt to suit the modern world. Just because the result in this case leaves you satisfied doesn't mean that the system in its current form is unacceptable.

<comment><USER32> What is wrong with the system, and how should it be fixed? The main problem I see (other than the numbers of people breaking it) are copyright lengths.</comment></comment>


Rural Chattanooga almost had 10 Gbps internet until the State stepped in - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/68941-residents-rural-chattanooga-almost-had-10-gbps-internet.html <comment><USER2> This is absurd.

However, I don't think there is a huge market for 10Gbps Internet is the suburbs of a relatively small city like Chattanooga. That number seems to be used more to highlight the absurdity, but I question it's validity as a comparison metric.

<comment><USER3> DSL often tops out at 1Mbps if you are far from the CO. At huge expense (I saw one DSL upgrade that was $8000 a house) you might get that to 2Mbps.

Once you have the fiber, it is possible to offer 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1Gbps or 10Gbps, in fact, the extra cost to offer the service isn't that much.

It shows how absurd the pricing models are for broadband in the U.S... That is, the real cost is building the infrastructure, once you have that, there isn't a big point in usage caps.</comment></comment>


A Summary of Zoom's Bad Security Month - <AUTHOR> https://arkadiyt.com/2020/05/23/a-summary-of-zooms-bad-security-month/ <comment><USER2> I suspect most organizations are guilty of these items and much more, they just haven't been thrust into the lime-light so suddenly like Zoom.

Having posts like this to learn from mistakes are great, but it also seems like these are mistakes that are repeated over and over. I don't know what the answer is, but it seems software will always be considered a joke to other engineering disciplines until we can actually get disciplined.

</comment><comment><USER3> > there's not a single commercial teleconferencing product available today > that provides end-to-end encryption

Not sure if you mean large scale calls only, but the vast majority of video calls I do while working remote is with 1-3 others. Wire can encrypt those for you.</comment>


I'm not sure you've really got this whole Object-Oriented thing down quite right - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100827.html#20100902

<comment><USER2> While reading that pile of code I couldn't help parsing it as Java, although syntactically it could be a wide variety of languages.

Are there any other languages' libraries with complicated designs like that one or is this a problem specific to Java?

Just to give an example, this is a snippet of code I had to write dozens of times in a college project using the javax.xml.soap library to create a simple soap message with a tag on it:

      MessageFactory mf = MessageFactory.newInstance();
      SOAPMessage soapMessage = mf.createMessage();
      SOAPPart soapPart = soapMessage.getSOAPPart();
      SOAPEnvelope soapEnvelope = soapPart.getEnvelope();
      SOAPBody soapBody = soapEnvelope.getBody();
      Name name = soapEnvelope.createName("HelloWorld", "hw", "");
      SOAPElement element = soapBody.addChildElement(name);
      element.addTextNode( "hello text message" );

It's not exactly the same issue has in the example on the blog post, but I think it also represents something that could be a lot simpler/shorter.

<comment><USER3> Would this work?

      SOAPEnvelope soapEnvelope = MessageFactory.newInstance().createMessage().getSOAPPart().getEnvelope();
      SOAPBody soapBody = soapEnvelope.getBody();
      Name name = soapEnvelope.createName("HelloWorld", "hw", "");
      soapBody.addChildElement(name);.addTextNode( "hello text message" );

<comment><USER2> Did the library design get any less bloated that way?

I don't think the last line would work...

<comment><USER3> Yes and yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's funny because it's true. How does a manager evaluate the work of his subordinate programmers (especially when the manager is a so-so programmer himself)?

1\. Count the lines of code.

2\. Randomly inspect code sections.

The verbose Bureaucratese sampled in the article responds to both requirements.

<comment><USER2> Instead of code inspection, maybe the manager should impose short and easy to validate requirements (sub requirements of the general requirements imposed by the client) and ask the programmer to show the software passing them.

Even if TDD is not being used, the programmer can write a simple test for it and then show the manager the test succeed.

This semester I had a class of Software Engineering when we did a project using Scrum and weekly we had to show our teacher that we had accomplished our tasks. The teacher was playing the role of someone who didn't know any code, but we still had to show stuff working. So we would write simple tests to show for instance that SOAP Messages were being sent by one entity and in fact received by the other.

<comment><USER4> Oh, it's a bad thing and there are much better ways to evaluate code. But it's done nevertheless.</comment></comment></comment>


Kofi Annan has died - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/KofiAnnan/status/1030752165663567873 <comment><AUTHOR> "Human rights are what make us human. They are the principles by which we create the sacred home for human dignity." (Kofi Annan)

<comment><USER2> So for the vast majority of history we weren't human?

<comment><USER3> > So for the vast majority of history we weren't human?

For any definition of "human" that is objective and universal, yes.

If you swore fealty to the wrong lord, worshiped the wrong god, were born into the wrong clan, ethnic group or state, you were considered something less than human. And of course, nobles claimed descent from divinity, making them more than human.

The concept of a common humanity with inalienable rights is relatively modern and in many places still controversial.

<comment><USER4> This is very true in Indian caste system. In fact in indian caste ladder system, one become lesser human as one takes birth in the lesser caste hierarchy. Except the Brahmin community in the indian caste system others castes are denied education as per the vedas. During the british rule everone got access to education and every one is trying to be a equal human fighting the caste system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He saved Kenya from an election that everyone agreed was rigged and manipulated by all sides. That is really tough to do!!

<comment><USER6> Annan facilitated the formation of the grand coalition government. A lot of the election reforms came out of that. May he rest in peace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> He is the first top-level official that I heard advocating for drug reform. Well remembered.

</comment><comment><USER8> A good man. RIP

</comment><comment> the-dude meta: interesting to see here on HN after the announcement of Aretha Franklin's death was removed from the FP this week.

<comment><USER9> I think it's to do with him being a political figure vs a pop culture figure, but I could be mistaken.

I sometimes see political news on HN, I don't think I've ever seen pop culture news.

<comment><USER10> I see political news flagged faster and harder. Was David Bowie's death flagged?

IMHO, despite all the work done here on censorship and topic management, I've experienced a greater level of meanspiritedness and unkind comments here than on any other comment forum I've frequented.

Perhaps that's >why< there is such a presence and the need to shut down check potentially conttroversial topics. It begs the question of what is different on this forum.

<comment> the-dude If you look at the comments for the Aretha thread as well as this thread, it seems not to provoke any interesting discussion.

I am happy to keep such main stream news off the FP.

<comment><USER10> How does that relate to what I said?

<comment> the-dude You seem to suggest these threads have been 'shut down' ( in reality, user flagged into submission ) due to controversy.

I am suggesting these threads were not controversial and were flagged down because they are boring.

<comment><USER10> Not what I was intending to suggest. I was merely noting that it is part of a singular, and heavy-handed, approach.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Special relativity and the startup paradox by Matt from Xobni - <AUTHOR> http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/07/12/special-relativity-and-the-startup-paradox/ <comment><USER2> I like the metaphor. Perhaps without meaning to you've also explained one of the reasons it's attractive to take VC funding. Working those 3 years without pay really sets you back, but if you're getting a competitive salary, it doesn't and it's more like "other" jobs (and arguably more fun in most cases).

<comment><USER3> except if you calculate the effective hourly wage, i'm working illegally in San Francisco where the minimum wage is something like $9.80/hr

<comment><USER2> $9.80! I think it's still like $6 here in MD.

What if you factor in the expected value of cashing out on your equity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "gambling with time" is a very good way to put it. Not sure who gets the original credit.

I also liked one of the comments on the blog post: "Keep travelling at light speed till you expire."

</comment><comment><USER5> Once a problem is characterized the solution often follows naturally.

Luckily there are no physical laws that prevent reasonable solutions to business/social problems of this sort.</comment>


Show HN: The Sochi 2014 medal count ordered by population - <AUTHOR> http://gflandre.com/olympics

<comment><USER2> Why is this labeled "ordered by population"? It's not, because if it were, China would be at the top. Wouldn't "medals per capita" be more accurate?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great! Since [http://www.medalspercapita.com/](http://www.medalspercapita.com/) is not updating any more I can use this site instead.

Any plans to sort by other items (GDP, etc.)?

<comment><AUTHOR> There would be so many more interesting alternative rankings to make out of this data. I'm thinking about it!

<comment><USER3> Great. You could rank by weird things too: amount of snowfall per year, average number of hours skiied per year, ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps it would be more useful to have not the national total, but the population living within regions that have snow on the ground at least _n_ days in the average year.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's wrong even then. Look at Italy and US. Italy should be ranked higher than the US on this basis.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, that's just gay[1].

[1] Disclaimer: [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Gay)

</comment><comment><USER7> You might find it interesting to read about small numbers and statistical comparisons, and how they don't work very well together. This is different topic than the strong law of small numbers, or survivorship bias aka the backbone of our financial system.

This brings up an interesting meta discussion of medal inflation. A simple wikipedia lookup and division shows 15K medals / 50 games is about 300 medals per game, but inflation has happened over the years so I think we'll have well over 300 medals this season.

This waters down the marketing message. There are 300 recent medal winning olympians, lets say they have a decade of marketing relevance, thats five sets of games, or 1500 medal winners. The entire NFL only has 1500 or so players, in comparison. I believe this waters down the usefulness of the olympics. If all the olympics had was the decathlon, that would mean something more than it currently means.

This is aside from the meta issue that's its basically a marketing and advertising trade show where as a side event some athletes perform. So the primary, important numbers are the dollar value of advertisements sold, sponsorships purchased, not some athletic achievement which was just a screensaver for the financial spreadsheet.</comment>


Indian High Court Upholds Freedom of Speech in VC Mahesh Murthy's MeToo Scandal - <AUTHOR> https://factordaily.com/mahesh-murthy-investor-seedfund-allegations-sexual-misconduct-rashmi-bansal/ <comment><AUTHOR> The Delhi High Court has vacated its interim orders of April 2017 restraining publication of certain impugned allegations of sexual harassment made against Mahesh Murthy, a Mumbai-based venture capitalist, by several women. A single- judge bench presided by Justice Jayanth Nath passed the order on Monday. [https://factordaily.com/delhi-high-court-sets-aside- interim-...](https://factordaily.com/delhi-high-court-sets-aside-interim- injunction-on-publishing-allegations-of-mahesh-murthy-sexual-harassment/)</comment>


Sunsetting Mercurial Support in Bitbucket - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket <comment><USER2> It's very sad to see bitbucket dropping mercurial support. Now only Facebook and volunteers are keeping mercurial alive. Sometimes technically better architecture and user interface lose to a non user friendly hard solutions due to inertia of mass adoption.

So a lesson in Software development is similar to betamax and VHS, so marketing is still a winner over technically superior architecture and ease of use. GitHub successfully marketed git, so git and GitHub are synonymous for most developers. Now majority of open source projects are reliant on a single proprietary solution Github by Microsoft, for managing code and project. Can understand the difficulty of bitbucket, when Python language itself moved out of mercurial due to the same inertia.

Hopefully gitlab can come out with mercurial support to migrate projects using it from bitbucket.

For people who believe in self hosted solution can install Kallithea ([https://kallithea-scm.org](https://kallithea-scm.org)) or Rhodecode open source edition. Kallithea is used by Unity engine to manage their source code internally with mercurial.

<comment><USER3> I started my distributed version control journey when SVN was still king of the hill and git and mercurial were both tiny challengers.

I actually picked mercurial first. I found the interface more intuitive, especially coming from svn. The problem was that everyday commands were just dog slow -- 5, 10 seconds on every single interaction. It felt like wading through molasses, contrast to git, which was effectively instantaneous on small repos and git on my large repo was still multiples faster than hg on a small repo. Also, IIRC hg didn't have a "git stash" equivalent. I chose git on its merits and didn't look back.

A few years later (2010 ish?) I met a mercurial evangelist who said things had changed on the performance front, but I checked and they hadn't.

I'll give hg the benefit of the doubt that it eventually got better, but I have serious doubts about your accusation that git's success had to do with marketing. I gave hg a more than even chance and it lost, fair and square, on technical merit, as weighted according to my everyday use cases.

<comment><USER4> Git was once fast for my use too. Then I returned to Microsoft to work on building Windows. Even after 2.5 years of improvement,[1] "git is slow" is still one of the most common complaints about the Windows engineering system.

On my Skylake+SSD desktop, it takes over ten seconds to switch branches with git checkout, several of which are used just to calculate the "your branch is ahead of origin/your-branch-name by N commits" value.

We are making many great strides here at Microsoft to improve git performance, such as with VFS for Git which my Windows repo clone uses. But with _hundreds_ of gigabytes in a unversioned download of the source tree, there is only so much we can do.

[1] since [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git- repo-o...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-on-the- planet/)

<comment><USER5> Definitely sounds like a problem. Do you think an alternative source control solution would handle that situation better? At some point huge with a large number of small files takes its toll.

It would be interesting for someone inside Microsoft to write a blog describing why Git works well for the Linux Kernel but not for the Windows Kernel. They cannot be that different from a layout perspective, can they?

<comment><USER6> I believe the difference is that the Linux kernel itself is not _that_ big a project. Windows is a lot more than just a kernel; it's more akin to having the source code for an entire Linux distribution in one repo.

<comment><USER7> You mean like Gentoo ([https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo](https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo)) ? It's not that big either (around 700MB).

<comment><USER8> That only includes the ebuilds, which are instructions for how to build from source, not the sources themselves.

<comment><USER7> So the sources for, say, Paint or Edge are versioned within the Windows repository?

<comment><USER4> Yes, most of the components and files in a default Windows installation are built from sources in the main Windows OS git repo.

Some parts of Windows have split out into their own repos and CI build and test pipelines, but splitting is a process that takes people's time and has pros and cons, especially when changes in the main OS repo are needed to give the separated components a complete, coherent API surface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's funny to see how the whole world concentrates on this Git thing, while there is a treasure trove called Mercurial.

Mercurial was made for humans. It is seriously convenient and productive. Something I cannot say about Git, which more reminds me of an adhoc job.

I use both Git and Mercurial on daily basis. But my preference goes to Mercurial: it is just more sane in a big way. It is clearly a piece of art and love.

<comment><USER10> And yet people overwhelmingly chose Git. Why is that?

<comment><USER11> No clue. I thought for sure Mercurial would come out ahead, it had some proponents:

* Bitbucket provided unlimited free private repositories and they were exclusively Mercurial. Github had limits for private repos.

* Google evaluated both and preferred Mercurial for code.google.com [http://www.saturngod.net/articles/dvcsanalysis-support-analy...](http://www.saturngod.net/articles/dvcsanalysis-support-analysis-of-git-and-mercurial-project-hosting-on-google-code/).

* Fogcreek (creators of Trello and Stackoverflow) picked Mercurial to power Kiln

Early on, both tools had different advantages but they evolved toward each other making the choice more about flavor and popularity. My guess is

* git was strongly associated with Linus so it won that crowd handily

* Github had a stronger association with open source than Bitbucket (dunno why though). Maybe it all came down to marketing. <\-- there's a startup lesson

<comment><USER12> > * Github had a stronger association with open source than Bitbucket (dunno > why though). Maybe it all came down to marketing. <\-- there's a startup > lesson

Maybe because it was bought by Atlassian.

<comment><USER13> > Maybe because it was bought by Atlassian.

Nope! Bitbucket had the "free private, paid public" model from the start. IIRC, Atlassian actually changed the model to allow unlimited public repositories after they purchased Bitbucket. It's possible that if BB had started with this model, they'd have been a much stronger competitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > June 1, 2020: ... _all Mercurial repositories will be removed_.

It's understandable that they would discontinue Mercurial support, but this part is shocking. No doubt that 1% includes more than a few obscure but historically interesting repos that will _disappear_ because the owner wasn't monitoring their email (or is no longer with us).

Is BitBucket really that pressed for disk space? I hope they will reconsider and move those repos to a read-only archive like Google Code and CodePlex did instead of obliterating a piece of history for no good reason.

<comment><USER15> They could just convert them to Git repos automatically. If you do that manually, their press release implies that the repos will stay around. So it can't be a disk space issue. Why haven't they offered to do this rather than just remove them?

<comment><USER16> According to the comments on the OP they tried to make a tool but couldn't make sure it would work in all cases for all repos, so they decided to not make a tool (and delete our repos instead). Such a disgrace.

The funny thing is that github has an import tool. Since we are forced to move to the industry standard of DVCS, I guess many will use this opportunity to move to the industry standard of platforms as well. For my use case Bitbucket is now inferior or equal in all respects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They link to an SO survey:

* [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#work-_-versio...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#work-_-version-control)

where "zip backups" and network copy (each 7.9%) and "no version control" (4.8%) are higher than Mercurial (3.6%).

If you're in that boat, I can understand not using git (87%) because its UI sucks (IMHO), and not using SVN (16%) because it needs infrastructure, but Mercurial has neither of those hindrances. Heck, even RCS would be better than nothing at that point, and Hg is better than that.

<comment><USER18> IMHO mercurial's usage is so low _because_ github/gitlab don't support it. I understand bitbucket not wanting to, but it says nothing about what mercurial's usage would be like if people didn't have to choose between it and being able to use github or gitlab.

<comment><USER19> Hi GitLab employee. While we don't officially support it, there is a friendly fork project of GitLab CE that does, and we do provide official support to them :) [https://heptapod.net/](https://heptapod.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not a Mercurial user, but some might be interested on this team that's working on adding Mercurial support to Gitlab, currently in the from of a fork or distribution called Heptapod:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/31600#note_19...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/31600#note_198825557)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for sharing, ppl may be headed to Gitlab then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sourcehut has Mercurial support. It's open source and community maintained, and will remain supported for as long as the Hg community wants it to be. We recently took our Hg team out to Paris to meet the Mercurial community at the first Hg conference, and discussed how we can get involved in the future of Mercurial and committed to continuing to improve our offering into the foreseeable future.

I've whipped together a script to help you migrate your repos to hg.sr.ht, for those interested:

[https://hg.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/invertbucket](https://hg.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/invertbucket)

Let me know how it works out for you - I'd like to hear some test results before I post it to sr.ht-announce. Cheers :)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for making `invertbucket`! I used it to import my bitbucket repositories and ran into a few issues:

1\. `invertbucket` should check that the machine has `hg` installed. (I accidentally ran it on a machine that didn't.)

2\. Say my sr.ht username is "thegreengiant" and my bitbucket repository is "abc". At the end of its run, `invertbucket` says:

> Imported to: > [https://hg.sr.ht/srht_owner/abc](https://hg.sr.ht/srht_owner/abc)

That URL 404s. It would be an improvement if `invertbucket` replaced "srht_owner" with "~thegreengiant".

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the feedback! Fixed on both counts.

<comment><USER23> What sr.ht URL path would I use to get a page to render as markdown? hg.sr.ht/~thegreengiant/raw/default/foo.md renders as text.

<comment><USER24> Only the readme is rendered as markdown right now.

<comment><USER23> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sigh. I really hate seeing hg languish like this. Command line is nicer, and I have yet to find _any_ git gui frontend that matches what TortoiseHG can do (both in terms of invocating dialogs from the cmdline; and in terms of presenting and manipulating the graph).

I really hope something happens to help hg start accumulating more market share. Not just for my opinion on the tooling; but because IMO the "git = github = the only place for opensource" monoculture is kinda problematic.

<comment><USER26> The best TortoiseHg equivalent I've found (after a lot of searching) is SmartGit [1]. It's not as good as TortoiseHg and its not free but it's nice enough for most of my use cases.

[1] [https://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/](https://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the pointer. I'll see if my company will "sponsor" me a copy. Looks nice indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been using Bitbucket with Mercurial repositories since 2011, both for private and public repos. I can count more than 50 mercurial repos that I'll need to manually move somewhere else. I'm really disappointed right now. I can understand their motives but they need to provide a single click method to at least convert a repo to git (this is a MUST IMHO).

I love mercurial but also can see that the community is shrinking, mercurial still relies on Python 2.7, and we are approaching to the EOL of Python 2.7. TortoiseHG also suffers from this, and the release cycle is always out of sync with the hg releases, and this breaks thg. These little things shows the sad state of mercurial, and in the end, this will drive most of the developers away from using it.

I guess it was great while it lasted... now, Bitbucket, please provide the developers the right tools to move away from mercurial with celerity.

<comment><USER29> Move your repos to hg.sr.ht: [https://hg.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/invertbucket](https://hg.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/invertbucket)

<comment><USER28> I'll consider it, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This suck big time.

HG is by far the best UX of all SCM I have used. Without bitbucket I think usage of hg will drop even faster.

The sad thing is that git requiere so much arcane usage that hg have spared me for so much time.

I wonder why the worst always win? C, C++, JS, MySql.

Don't tell me is for "speed" or "features". Is incredible how much stupid effort and money go in put a lipsick on top of that when nicer ways exists... and are know... and have proved to work... and even faster (look at you, C/C++ build times)...

Even MORE bizarre is why not improve the tools coping what is good from others AND cleaning the usage of them?

Probably only python of the "good" side have critical mass...

<comment><USER31> I'd like git internals (merkle-tree etc.) with Mercurial's CLI UI, I think.

<comment><USER32> It's quite possible to write your own Git CLI, the fundamentals are well exposed.

<comment><USER27> It works until it doesn't. One of the biggest problems with Git IMO is that it always exposed a plethora of internals which therefore have become public interfaces. One is to be expected to know the guts of .git as an intermediate/advanced user. And because those are interfaces, it's _always_ going to be very difficult to fix issues arising from previous wrong design decisions.

Fundamentals in Git aren't necessarily easy to use from the CLI, but you'll get by with a dozen or so command line invocations overall. And I found it astonishing and disheartening how so many people were able to make do with completely illogical commands like "git checkout -b" ...

But once Git sticks you the finger and you _need_ to delve down into its guts, you often have a problem.

Now don't get me wrong, the amount of GUI tools hiding Git's intricacies and web interfaces like GitHub glossing over numerous shortcomings of Git have certainly helped the UX and the popularity. But once you _have to_ delve down to CLI usage because you ran into an issue that your tool tries to gloss over, most people are at a loss. And most people will opt to scrap the current clone+worktree and clone anew. That doesn't really sound to me like people are in command of their tool of choice (Git), though.

And at this point we haven't even touched stuff like refs which only differ in case. It's all fine until Git starts unpacking the refs. Which can be fun on systems like macOS and Windows which have support for case-sensitivity in the file system, but who opted to forgo that via a setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I will be affected. I think I will take a serious look at sourcehut[1] now. I get a good vibe, but the bus factor scared me away before.

[1] [https://hg.sr.ht/](https://hg.sr.ht/)

<comment><USER24> Don't worry, in the event of my untimely demise there are trusted people with access to the servers to pick up the mantle.

<comment><USER33> Sir, I wish you long life and godspeed, but my threat model includes acquihire and lost interest ;)

However, I keep talking how we need to avoid monocultures, so I guess it is about time I assume some minor risk.

<comment><USER24> [https://man.sr.ht/billing-faq.md](https://man.sr.ht/billing-faq.md)

Sourcehut has accepted no external funding and once the alpha period ends, all accounts must be paid. Even with optional payment, it already turns a profit. I'm pretty confident in the sustainability of the service.

As for me losing interest, the good news is that I need software hosting no matter what I'm working on, so I'll always be working on it. And, since it's open source and patches are welcome, so could you add anything you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It would be interesting to read a breakdown of why Mercurial failed against Git. It is superior to Git in every way except performance and adoption. Git won because GitHub won, and I bet GitHub chose Git over Hg's Python implementation because it was too slow.

I wonder if Mercurial would have won if it was implemented in C or Rust (had it existed then).

<comment><USER35> > It is superior to Git in every way except performance and adoption.

Performance is _such an important advantage_ , though.

I type git diff hundreds of times a day, and when I switched from hg to git at Mozilla, this made such a big difference in my life.

These days I type hg histedit maybe fifty times a day at Google, and I cry every time because it is so. glacially. slow. hg diff too. And I'm working with a relatively small repository.

Speed matters for tools we use all the time.

I'd also posit that the process of writing "plugins" for git is much easier than writing hg plugins. A git "plugin" is just a shell script that uses git. If you can use git, you can write a shell script that uses it. An hg plugin...whoaboy.

<comment><USER36> Please feel encouraged to report a bug about histedit slowness with some details so we can try and reproduce and consider a fix.

<comment><USER35> I'll see what I can do. Because it's Google code, it may not be feasible. But we have a whole team of hg developers ourselves, maybe I should bug them before putting it on you. :)

<comment><USER37> Including durin42 himself ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Over the year I've used CVS, SVN, bazaar, Mercurial and Git. Mercurial has always been the one I struggled the most with. It never clicked with me. Just to respond to some arguments I see floating around.

In my last team we switched from Hg to Git and absolutely everyone but the CTO felt more comfortable with it. including the data scientists.

To me, Mercurial UI might be friendlier than Git's but it's really a moot point if it does not fit with the way people actually think/work.

Also, I sincerely think Git was getting more popular _before_ Github. Granted, it massified the adoption.

</comment><comment><USER39> I and the _dozens_ of other remaining Mercurial users will be severely inconvenienced by this.

Still, at least SourceForge still has Mercurial support!

<comment><USER40> I wouldn't trust SourceForge at all after all the horrible stuff they've done. I know they have allegedly improved after new owners and a come-to-jesus moment, but damn, that was some shady shit.

<comment><USER41> I think you are thinking about the old and nasty sourceforge. They have since been bought and the new owners have changed what nasty old sourceforge used to be

<comment><USER40> > I know they have allegedly improved after new owners and a come-to-jesus > moment, but damn, that was some shady shit.

If Facebook tomorrow started saying they're totally going to stop being creepy and got a new CEO, I wouldn't suddenly start trusting them either.

<comment><USER42> We're a small independently owned private company, and not a single person responsible for those decisions made years ago is still involved with the company. It's been over 3 years since we bought SourceForge and we reversed all the bad decisions on day 1 and never looked back. We still support Mercurial [https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mercurial/#pub...](https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mercurial/#publishing- an-existing-repository)

<comment><USER40> But why buy such a tarnished trademark which has garnered so much ill will over the years for horrible practices? Is it a form of "all PR is good PR", that it's better to have a recognized but hated name than to have a name nobody knows of?

<comment><USER42> Most people have gotten the message that things have changed at SourceForge. We bought it to redeem the name and protect free open source software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Doesn't this mean BitBucket will die? Slowly, sure, but Mercurial support seemed like a key differentiator relative to GitHub.

<comment><USER44> As a data point, our company that only uses git moved from GitLab to BitBucket literally about two months ago. No idea why (waaaay to low on the food chain) but I'm guessing it must have some advantages at least.

<comment><USER45> Most likely you will also see a Jira roll-out soon (unless that preceded the move to BitBucket)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is terrible news.

I prefer Mercurial to Git. I intensively used both for years and I can't say that Git is any better than Mercurial.

I do think they should at least come up with a plan to seamlessly migrate existing repositories to Git. Still, shocking.

</comment><comment><USER47> What a damn shame. I use git when I have to, hg when I get to choose. The usability and ergonomics are just so much better. I've never had any performance complaints. I chose Bitbucket over Github specifically because of Mercurial support. Unfortunately it's a business decision and they had to make a tough call.

</comment><comment><USER48> I remember playing pool with Chris Wanstrath back in the day and he was telling me how he just started a product based on Git. I told him to bail on it and use Mercurial instead! I listed a bunch of reasons why I thought it was the best distributed VCS. I remember shaking my head a bit thinking: "Whelp... good luck with that". I probably lost that game of pool too.

</comment><comment><USER49> OMG, sad. And I'm part of the problem:

I've always wanted to use Mercurial; I'd always found its user interface to be an improvement over git; as if it shipped with a great "porcelain" by default. I respect its ability to leak fewer implementation details while still offering plenty of power.

But I kept using git for all my projects, and GitHub with it.

</comment><comment><USER50> I feel old. I can literally remember dozens of silver bullet technologies I was told were necessary to know ("you're not a real professional if you don't..."), and then forgotten by nearly everyone. All of these were supposed to save the world and most of these were cutting edge less than ten years ago.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm astonished, just because hg _defined_ bitbucket for me. Else its other features were just OK.

Also, though I never found a reason to choose hg I had been told that it fit the Windows file system better than git. If so that wasn't enough.

</comment><comment><USER52> Since this is likely to attract bitbucket users, I'll toss out a question in hope someone knows:

It appears that in bitbucket enterprise cloud, there is no way for me as an administrator to prevent members of my team from making repositories public to the Internet. Is that true? If so I may need to look to on prem options, or perhaps GitHub enterprise cloud which seems to support better permissions. We deal in sensitive data so can't risk an analyst publishing them to the net accidentally.

</comment><comment><USER53> Strange. I would have thought that serving more niche customers would be a more sustainable business model than competing against GitHub and GitLab on their home turf.

Is Bitbucket profitable?

<comment><USER54> It's owned by Atlassian but who knows if revenue generated exceeds costs incurred for that specific product. Somehow doubt they're going to disclose that.

Would be nice if companies were transparent about which products and services made the most money, rather than (best case, public companies) stating earnings for the whole company and breaking it out fairly opaquely through categorizations.

On the flipside I could see this being useful information to competitors, and instructive on which parts of your business to attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The Software Heritage [1] was mentioned in another thread today. They seem to archive source code from most of the popular locations, but Bitbucket doesn't seem to be on the list?

If Bitbucket is planning on actually removing Mercurial repos it seems like a good idea to crawl and archive those before that happens.

[1] [https://www.softwareheritage.org/archive/](https://www.softwareheritage.org/archive/)

</comment><comment><USER56> I have 92 mercurial repositories at my company that I'll need to convert.

</comment><comment><USER15> All my software is in Bitbucket for two reasons: Free private repos and Mercurial. Now that Github has free private repos and Atlassian is removing support for Mercurial, I have no remaining reason to keep my repos in Bitbucket. Sayonara, Bitbucket. You just created a Github customer.

</comment><comment><USER57> When I picked up a DVCS years ago I initially went for Mercurial for its ease of use. It had a clean command line interface and it just clicked with me (Git still had some bits written in Perl). It worked very well for my small projects. Its hgweb worked without fuss on top of Apache (which was still popular). Bitbucket was a small time site back then (about 2008) and I mainly hosted the projects locally on a web server.

However the industry has voted by putting its weight behind Git and Git has won. It has caught up usability-wise. Its performance is miles ahead of Mercurial. While its underlying model is not straightforward to grok it enables great work flows.

Honestly I'm happy with Git and never looked back.

</comment><comment><USER58> Only reason I use Bitbucket is because of Mercurial. I guess that's what you get for using centralized services. The funny thing is that both Git and Mercurial was designed to be decentralized! But we humans are social creatures, and Github is like Facebook for invert's - instead of posting pictures of your acquaintance you post your software projects. Stars are the likes ... So in order to fully decentralize, the human/social bit also need to be decentralized. But there is also the convenience, while setting up Git and Mercurial hosted repositories is straightforward, I can understand why dev's choose to use a service instead, especially when it's free.

</comment><comment><USER59> When clicking on the link to "A Community thread to discuss conversion tools, migration, tips, and offer troubleshooting help", I see:

Article not found

The article you are trying to access is not available.

It may have been deleted or marked as spam.

</comment><comment><USER60> I am annoyed at this news. v1. Bitbucket == Mercurial v2. Bitbucket == Mercurial|git v3. Bitbucket == git However, GitHub is better at git, so now GitHub > Bitbucket

May bitbucket and it's management forever have it sheets and stocks shorted. They deserve it.

Since I want my repos' outsourced and I'm being forced to use git, I am moving to GitHub.

Define: git - [https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+a+git](https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+a+git)

</comment><comment><USER61> Guess I'm taking my money and going elsewhere, then.

Several things seem really odd to me:

      - They are ditching one thing that was a safe harbor from github.
      - No migration path to Git inside bb service.
        If I am going to migrate outside bb I might as well move away completely.
      - Armageddon-style wholesale destruction of the old repos.
        Could have left the read-only repos on a separate server. Or even just a tarball.

It just looks so disorderly and thoughtless...

</comment><comment><USER62> Damn, this is disappointing. I've long preferred hg over git but developer preference has clearly moved to favor git. I like using mercurial queues for managing local config changes but I guess I'll have to get better using `git stash`. I hope bitbucket provides some tools to easily convert repos from hg to git. Frankly, though, I'll likely just move from bitbucket now.

</comment><comment><USER63> For anyone looking to jump ship, check out invertbucket ([https://hg.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/invertbucket](https://hg.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/invertbucket)), a script which automates the transfer of mercurial repos from Bitbucket to Sourcehut. Support for transferring tickets and pull requests should be coming soon as well.

</comment><comment><USER64> A friend of mine is a core contributor to Mercurial. He is... well, I suppose "livid" is as close a descriptor as any.

</comment><comment><USER65> Enjoy your monoculture.

</comment><comment><USER42> SourceForge still supports Mercurial [https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mercurial/#pub...](https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mercurial/#publishing- an-existing-repository)

</comment><comment><USER66> Is there any feature in mercurial that git doesn't have? Is there some plugin to allow mercurial users keep using the client with a git remote repository (like the one for using git with svn)?

<comment><USER36> 1) hg absorb

2) hg-git exists, and there's other things afoot that should be better

<comment><USER67> As a daily hg-git user, could you elaborate on (2)?

<comment><USER68> Hopefully this: [https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial- devel/2019...](https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial- devel/2019-August/132993.html)

<comment><USER69> That would be helpful

I use hg-git to put all my Mercurial based projects on Github.

But the last OpenSUSE update installed Mercurial 5, but left the old hg-git for Mercurial 4. Now it does not work anymore.

<comment><USER68> On Windows it is broken since TortoiseHG 4.5.2

<comment><USER69> TortoiseHG is really cool

I used to use it all the time on linux.

Unfortunately the OpenSUSE update also removed it. Completely, it is not even listed in the package management anymore.

No one wants to maintain non-mainstream software

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> A disaster for me, I've got dozens of hg repos over there. Do they support an automated conversion? If not, probably no reason to use bitbucket any longer.

<comment><USER16> I'm in the same boat. And Mercurial support was the key differentiator for me, I'll probably convert the repos to git (hg is almost sure to die after this) and move to GitHub in the process, including the git repos I have on Bitbucket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> It seems that Bitbucket and GitHub are trying to emulate GitLab's strategy of being a one-stop tool rather than just version control.

<comment><USER72> The opposite is true actually, Bitbucket was bought by Atlassian in 2010 to make Atlassian the one-stop shop, a strategy GitHub and GitLab are emulating (GitLab launched in 2011).

<comment><USER73> Seems to me that one-stop shop is very different from one-stop tool. GitLab is aiming for the latter, whereas Atlassian (at least when I was using those tools) seems much less integrated.

Jira may be the most comprehensive issue tracker (which isn't necessarily attractive -- but then they have Trello now, too), but on the version control and CI front I don't think Atlassian will have an easy time competing against Azure/GitHub/GitLab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Anyone knows what happened to Spolky's hginit.com ? It used to be one of the most accessible Hg tutorials out there.

<comment><USER74> I also miss hginit.com. I've been referring new devs to [https://web.archive.org/web/20180924182907/http://hginit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180924182907/http://hginit.com/)

I guess hginit.com disappearing was a signal of things to come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Mercurial is officially dead.

</comment><comment><USER76> This is disappointing. Bitbucket is _the_ premier place to host free private mercurial repos. Just look at the hosting page on the mercurial website. There is literally not a single other place for free private hosting. There may be some smaller ones out there I'm not aware of.

Hacker news, question: Have you ever tried mercurial? Don't you like to save keystrokes? Isn't `hg com` easier than `git commit`? Isn't `hg pul` easier than `git pull`?

Is there any way to shorten the amount of keystrokes to use git?

<comment><USER77> > Is there any way to shorten the amount of keystrokes to use git?

Sure, you can just set up aliases in your shell and in git. Set an alias in your shell for git → g and in git for commit → c and you can commit with `g c`.

<comment><USER76> Awesome, wasn't aware of git aliases. Thank you.

<comment><USER78> Just be careful that if you define an alias that shadows a built-in command, your alias will be (silently?) ignored. Mostly a problem if a future version of git adds a command and clobbers an alias that used to work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My experience after pitching to an old school VC/angel - <AUTHOR>

As an FYI, I am no where located near the valley/bay area. I live in an urban city in Arizona where there's only one well known/reputable VC in town, not a lot of angel investors in here. If you are a tech startup in AZ, I guess you know what I am talking about. The culture is very different to those in SV.
I am about to launch my startup and currently is in the seed stage and have a working prototype done. My team just did a pitch an hour ago to this guy, had no high hopes as we've heard various kind of comments about him. We pitched the whole idea, first question asked was about the revenue source, second sentence that came out of his mouth is "do you have a business plan written yet"?
Just after this sentence was launched, I knew exactly that this is the wrong person to talk to. Which top VC's/angels in SV asks for a business plan during a seed stage of your startup (if there is one please let me know, then maybe my perception is wrong)? I get his point that we need to do more market analysis/research on the app, however to actually have a solid well written business plan at this stage is just ridiculous.
With regards to market research, I asked him if we created a website for user to signup, remind them when the product is launched(using service such as launchrock) and showed him we have 500k users signed up, would he be convinced enough in the market of our app? Then he sort of gives an ambiguous answer to it. Again, a ridiculous thought from my point of view. Almost every startup nowadays do use this strategy. I guess he just doesn't notice that.
Point to be made here is that, doing a startup is hard, but it's even harder when you're outside the valley. I know it's all about your effort of you to get connected/network, so you can reach Paul Graham/Dave McClure/Yuri Miler, etc. Some say that if you can't get those connections then you lose already. I don't have any connections with people in SV who can introduce me out to these great angels/VC's and that adds another challenge for me. There is a startup meetup here, but only 5-10 people is in the group and mostly they are just talking about side projects that they have, no one rarely talks about angels/VC's (another dead end for making connections to SV). Was planning to just put up my startup at angel.co and see what happens, don't know whether it's the right time or not. One concern is that most of those investors doesn't invest outside of SV. Would be way much easier if I am at SV, so to new startups out there in SV, be grateful for yourself as you're already one step ahead of us who are outside of SV.
Yet, this is just another confession from a startup founder experience. Feel free to comment <comment><USER2> I don't really seem the problem in his line of questioning.

Isn't this Paul Grahams goto question? Where is the revenue?

I wonder what your expectations actually were for this meeting? And what you imagine pitches would be like if you met with any of the SV heavy hitters.

They won't be any different. Getting people to give you money is hard work, and I get the impression you think the money is easier in SV? So easy in fact VC's don't bother asking questions about revenue and market research.

Plus, you don't even have a signup page? What do you have?

I'd get my ducks in a row before I started asking people for money if I were you.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's great that you got a first pitch out of the way. Congratz to that!

First off, startups outside SV/SF get funded...don't get it twisted. But, boo- who'ing over the fact that you can't get face-to-face with someone connected isn't going to get you anywhere. So, you are doing it wrong. There may not be lots of events in your city, so go to them. Period. If you can't find a way to make it happen, you probably don't have what it takes anyway. When you get there, network the hell out of them. Pitch people on the spot (don't suck!) and have a working product demo with you.

Secondly, when an investor asks for a business plan, they probably aren't from the SF school of investment thought. And while you retort mentioning things you could do to show traction should have been more relevant to him than they were, you really shouldn't have been pitching without traction. It sounds like your project is consumer facing, users get some value, but don't pay (ie maybe geo/social/photo/blah blah). If that's the case, your product should have a small, but growing, core group of fanatic users, before smart money will pay you the time of day. Once you have that, go to angellist.

It doesn't matter where in the world you live...if you have a good product in a good market and traction, you'll get meetings (though it's still a numbers game).

Listen, it's supposed to be hard-otherwise, everyone would do it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, I'm sorry to join the crowd, but it does seem like you need to adjust your expectations.

Ideas are great but what's better is an idea with a business plan; especially to an investor. This is especially the case if your idea doesn't clearly identify a revenue source. Unless you have a reputation or history creating successful start-ups, you shouldn't expect to just have someone take your word and believe that your start-up will generate revenue. There may be investors out there that just take chances like that...I wouldn't know. But I still fail to see the fault in his expectations I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems that you guys are misunderstanding my point here, I take this VC's point of having to show a proof of somewhat the business be profitable. I understand this very well. If I am positioned as himself, I would be asking the same thing.

What I don't like about it is the business plan that he's asking us to write.

I know getting money from people is hard, I am not expecting him to write me off a $100k check based on what I have. My point is that is it necessary for a business at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious to know more about exactly how you plan on acquiring your first 500k users and how long you expect that to take. Unless you have mad connections, 500k users is not exactly a walk in the park. If you aren't pulling revenue at that point, still haven't developed a business plan, and have zero investment, your startup might be dead by then. This reasoning fails if you're bootstrapped, which would leave me wondering why you're trying to raise seed funds anyway.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the app? Feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to chat, maybe I can provide some advice. Vladik dot rikhter at gmail

</comment><comment><USER7> :))...I think I know you from somewhere :). So, you did talk to a VC..is he from SV or from Arizona?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes and I think I know you from somewhere =). sent you a mail buddy

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To play devil's advocate here, an investor SHOULD (although apparently few do) want to know about the 'potential' of the company after 500K users have signed up.

For this 'potential', not even the 500K means much. So, to understand this potential, what's an investor to do? One approach is to wait a few years, but then it's too late to invest. So, how can an investor understand in time to write a check to the entrepreneur? If I were writing checks, then I'd want a clear presentation in, say, a 'business plan' of just why the potential after the 500K users was so good.

Next, if I were an investor, I'd want this understanding of the potential after the 500K user BEFORE I wrote the seed stage check and before the 500K users had signed up. That is, I'd want before any checks were written a solid case made, on paper, that this was a good business direction.

I'd want to take that paper with that solid case, after the meeting with the entrepreneur, and study the case, think about it, etc. before deciding to write a check.

Actually, it really is possible to give good descriptions of significant projects just on paper and to do quite well evaluating the projects, again, just on paper. And, the evaluations can be so good that the subsequent execution can be quite reliable, even for leading edge projects. Examples? Well, there is a funder and user of technology. They are by a very wide margin the most important funder and user of high technology in Silicon Valley, the US, the world, and all of history in this solar system. Thankfully for US national security, this user is, yes, the US DoD. Some of their history includes WWII projects in radar, sonar, the proximity fuse, and the atom bomb. Then they did little things like the hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, SLBMs, GPS, stealth, the SR-71, the F-22, ARPAnet, aka, the Internet, little things like that. The evaluations were nearly all just on paper, and for approved projects the execution was good with very high reliability.

Evaluating projects on paper instead of just with 500K users can be important. Maybe you met the only VC left in the US ready, willing, and able to evaluate projects just on paper.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's a few firms that invest in AZ. Highway 12, Flywheel, GRP... to name a few. Sounds like you didn't do enough research on this person imo.

<comment><USER7> I wrote an article about this: [http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/Startup- scene-in-Phoenix-Ar...](http://www.quora.com/Mircea-Goia/Startup-scene-in- Phoenix-Arizona-what-I-have-found-since-living-here)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am well fond of all of that</comment></comment></comment>


Startups Anonymous - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupsanonymo.us/ <comment><USER2> Not the OP, but I am one of the guys behind SA. First of all, thank you for the nice emails and the gmail recommendation (we are answering emails and hope to fix this ASAP). Bobby and I deployed this Saturday afternoon and told 3 people, so this caught us a bit by surprise. Apologies if we reply late to folks.

I must note that both Bobby and I agree that we are very fortunate to work in an industry like tech. The reason we started this site, was because we wanted to do 2 things:

1\. Pay it forward - when we closed our companies, people who heard about our troubles, some non-friends helped us out. We wanted to pay back the community which gave us so much.

2\. Start small - Bobby and I know precious little about the world, but this is one area where we thought we could actually help.

Thanks once more for the support, and if you would like to be part of the folks of willing to listen to others, hit us up. @mexitlan and @bomatson.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am torn. On the one hand, running a startup is a very stressful experience even when things go relatively well. And they almost never do, so it's usually plain hell. It's great to have somewhere to turn to even if it's just to vent. On the other hand, I can't help but think that self-pity is getting a bit out of hand in our community lately. Startups aren't a sickness (unlike alcoholism for example). Starting one is a choice we are all making fully aware that failure is the expected outcome. Rather than writing and upvoting stories about how bad we have it, maybe we should be seeking a different outlook that embraces the fact that those "terrible" events are just part of our job. Much like patients dying is a part of doctor's job (which you have to admit is a lot worse than your startup dying).

<comment><USER4> "Startups aren't a sickness (unlike alcoholism for example). Starting one is a choice we are all making fully aware that failure is the expected outcome."

I really don't think this is the case. Yes, people give lip service to that concept, but _no one_ thinks _they_ will fail, and investors don't think _their_ investments will fail. Yes, they may know statistics, but no one would explicitly start something with the expected outcome of wasting months/years of their life and boatloads of money.

It does seem to me that 'startup culture' is another avenue for some people with addictive tendencies to express addictions. TechCrunch is startup porn, and people get addicted to the stories it peddles.

<comment><USER5> That's a good test to evaluate startups. How honest are the founders on their expected failure rate? If you're not a person they need to be lying to (i.e. not a potential/actual employee, investor, customer, journalist, etc), will they tell you that their realistic probability for success is very low?

If they can't do this, that's a red flag. Their irrationality will injure people in a relationship with them. They may disrespect others. Optimism is vital, but so is groundedness.

<comment><USER6> Everyone is a potential employee, investor, customer or journalist.

<comment><USER5> I agree, you have to dislodge them out of that mindset, so they don't see you that way. You're there to help, which means honesty and seriousness. Otherwise you get the businessman bullshit for public consumption.

Having interests in common (outside business) helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "sometimes, a coffee can mean the world."

It's true--I can definitely still remember small but sincere acts of kindness that I've received from friends or acquaintances over the years. Seriously, the $8 it costs to buy some overpriced coffee and the value of a half hour of your time are repaid many times over by the gratitude the other person feels and the good you'll have done for their life.

<comment><USER8> $8 I hope that's for two people. $8 is obscene for an overpriced coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, if you're in San Francisco and ever want to grab a coffee and just chat with someone going down the same tough road, I'm happy to meet up. No pretenses, no bullshit, just real talk. You can also hit me up on IRC/Twitter: @dpg

<comment><USER10> thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> op, you're using Gmail to send emails to new users. Bad idea. Google will catch on soon and ban you. I'd switch to another provider asap.

<comment><USER12> Not OP, but curious. Please elaborate? Does Google not like if it is used as a SMTP service, by startups?

Also, any suggestions for mail providers?

<comment><USER13> For those cases, <https://mandrillapp.com/> is good. It's fast to setup and free for less than 12 000 emails. It's my go to email provider for all side projects (do not forget to set DKIM and SPF though, otherwise your emails will be marked as being sent via mandrill in gmail and a few email softwares)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think what is happening in the US right now is a wide sum of money but a shortage of good ideas.. (or there are so many projects that good ideas are hidden in the middle of confusion)

And i think part to blame, is a cultural aspect.. it looks to me that nobody want to work in a normal job these days.. so even when you need the talent for your startup.. or he will be working in a big company, or will be launching its own startup.. common guys, its madness..

For example when i see cases and protfolios here in Brazil, theres not that much of projects being backed up by investors.. but the one that does, are actually pretty good projects.. with more distinct ideas..

i fear that because of the cultural aspect of entrepreneurship a lot of people that shoudnt be starting a company, are jumping itself into the jungle.. so when the hard times hit theres no emotional spring to make the things workout in another way.. (and this emotional aspect is one of the most important things.. you need something to push you up.. no matter what)

</comment><comment><USER15> I would prefer to get someone's ear before my startup fails, not after. Sadly, most of my friends aren't into startups so I have few choices. Ideally, I would have a circle of say three other founders who serve as advisors to each other, but unlike typical advisors they would be peers rather than mentors.

I would call them co-dvisors.

</comment><comment><USER16> I thought this was going to be a modern fuckedcompany replacement. Have to admit, I was little disappointed.

<comment><USER17> Are there any sites around now like a modern fuckedcompany? The current startup world is definitely missing one of those. I guess we can look forward to that new HBO comedy, Silicon Valley from Mike Judge.

<comment><USER18> The closest that I am aware of is TechCrunch's deadpool tag (<http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/>).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's really nice to see entrepreneurs caring enough about other entrepreneurs failed endeavors to offer a helping hand. It's common for an entrepreneur to feel alone. We're a rare breed and sometimes hard to understand by others who have never experienced owning a business or building a startup.

I myself have started and owned 4 different businesses in the last 10 years, from the age of 18 to now being 28. Each lasting anywhere from 2-3 years, 2 of which I failed, the 3rd which I sold and the 4th which I still currently own.

Every failed endeavor was a pierce in the heart and a devastating experience. Every failed endeavor required some downtime in order to evaluate what went wrong and in order to rebuilding my confidence. Through it all I can now boast in my failures. They've refined my ego, they've turned reckless ambition into fine tuned ambition. I've learned more from my failures than I have learned from my successes.

I feel that I now carry a protective shield containing knowledge and experience which help me through not just my business endeavors but as well as my life endeavors. Our Ego's play a big role in how we feel/react when things go right or wrong. It's common that an entrepreneur wants to project success at all times, and there is nothing wrong with that, you should, but it's the way you project it that could be faulty. It's common to see entrepreneurs "fake it until they make it". I also see some entrepreneurs personalities made up of a mix of condescending demeanor's and know it all attitudes. You don't have to always be right. You should always be humble enough to accept critique, to constantly learn. Your happiness should be based on the fact that you are constantly learning and conducting, not how far away you are from a multi-million dollar exit or your companies profitability. Don't get me wrong, that is the main purpose of your companies existence, but it shouldn't be yours. Obviously a company is in the business of making money and should conduct its decision making based on those goals but the best businesses/products/services created are from those who are genuinely interested in what they're building. Money cannot buy passion, but passion can buy money.

Don't let anger be the motive. You're not out to prove others wrong, you're not up against the world. It's easy for entrepreneurs to end up with a chip on their shoulder as being an entrepreneur is being a part of a rare breed that is not always understood well by others. The more you share your ideas with individuals who don't understand business, the more you open doors to the non- believers, who then are perceived as "haters". This all ends up being a waste of time and energy. The less refined your ego is, the more devastating the hit will be. Stay humble, stay modest and work like no other. Your work should come effortlessly. Office hours should feel like gaming hours. It's fun...all of it. The obstacles, the profits, the challenges, the levels...it's all a game. If your time spent doesn't feel anything close to that then perhaps you should reevaluate what it is that you're doing and why. Being an entrepreneur is a lifestyle, if it's not your style, then it's not your style. Regardless of the potential money made you'll never be happy if it's a life you're not interested in living and happiness should be the ultimate goal above all else.

-Paul Hanna

<comment><USER20> Great post! Welcome to HN!

<comment><USER19> Thanks Scott, glad to be here :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why does it have to be startup-specific?

There are lots of people who could use somebody to talk to when things get stressful, and there are lots of more stressful situations than running a startup.

This just seems to reinforce the privileged status thing. I'd consider it crass if you set up a 'Harvard graduates hotline' too.

<comment><USER13> It helps to talk with someone who went through a similar experience. Of course there's other situation when things are stressful, and having someone to listen and talk helps but don't underestimate the value of a listener who has been there and can really relate to what's happening...

So I don't think it's about status, I think it's just that they have a limited amount of time and first try to help the people that they are likely to be the most helpful to.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Startups Anonymous. I think it's a great idea and I wished I'd had that a few months ago...

<comment><USER10> You're right gommm - our reason for starting this was to build a resource for fellow entrepreneurs to talk about serious issues.

The only person who can help an entrepreneur out of the hole is one who has been there him/herself. NO ONE ELSE

We are all human after all

<comment><USER22> How about we join forces bobby?We are both trying to help people, you more on the business side/me also taking care of the more personal side.I believe we can help more people this way.Email in the profile.In any case, good to see others help too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> brilliant idea :) and a well-written introductory text.

I think that it's great for everyone (even those who currently don't need it) to know that you are there and willing to talk.

</comment><comment><USER24> like it</comment>


The Future of Money: It's Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_futureofmoney

<comment><USER2> I read this article in the print version and I was a little disappointed.

It seemed to mainly focus on paypal, credit cards, new interfaces to paypal and credit cards, such as on mobile phones. Those are not frictionless and not almost free.

There was only a passing reference to Chaum and other money systems.

I think that a system that was very distributed, where each individual could play the role of a consumer or offer credit or lend their reputation to back others, could be pretty big and cut down on the currently exhorbitant middle man fees.</comment>


Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://lectures.quantecon.org/_downloads/pdf/py/Quantitative%20Economics%20with%20Python.pdf <comment><USER2> They also made the same lecture only using Julia rather than Python. I personally found it to be really useful and I taught myself enough Julia to be a danger to myself and others.

[https://lectures.quantecon.org/jl/](https://lectures.quantecon.org/jl/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just to point out: the co-author is Thomas Sargent, Nobel Prize winner and generally a big deal. If he's taught himself Python, then kudos (he's 76). Even if not, it's a strong recommendation to have his name on the cover.

<comment><USER4> He did not win a Nobel prize, as there is no such thing for economics. However he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

<comment><USER5> I don't think pedantry about the name is a useful contribution to the conversation.

While it's true that Economic Sciences prize is not a "real" Nobel prize, it is commonly referred to as a Nobel prize. Interestingly, the Nobel Foundation also lists "Economic Sciences" on their website listing Nobel prizes even though they do not award or fund it: [https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/)

<comment><USER4> There is no conversation here. I was merely taking the opportunity to point out that there is a common misconception regarding the "Nobel prize" and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Two distinct prizes, one commonly mislabeled. Repeating the misnomer just normalizes the error.

<comment><USER6> Um, yes, there _is_ a conversation here. It's the comments on this thread. And, until you hijacked it, the name of the prize was not what we were talking about.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I made it a topic as the term was used incorrectly. So I was pointing this out, as not to further this misconception. Is there any additional discussion on this topic needed?

<comment><USER6> Nope. Even the amount that was here wasn't needed.

<comment><USER7> What??? He was literally pointing out a misleading statement and correcting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want more than the PDF- here's the site: [https://lectures.quantecon.org](https://lectures.quantecon.org)

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're interested in econometrics, I highly recommend checking out Marc Bellemare's "Metrics Mondays" blog posts, which are full of useful, pragmatic advice for applying econometric methods to real-world data: [http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/metrics- mondays](http://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/metrics-mondays).

If you're coming from an ML-focused approach to statistics, studying econometrics can be an interesting change of pace, because the focus is totally different. ML practicioners tend to be focused on prediction, while econometricians tend to focus on causal inference - utilizing pseudo- experimental variation within the data to estimate causal effects between variables. This turns out to be really hard to do correctly, and learning the pitfalls can make it easy to identify potential weaknesses in other research.

Most econometric work has historically been done in Stata, although it seems like both R and Python have been increasing in prominence a bit recently.

<comment><USER10> When I was in school around 2010 or so, a lot of the younger econ grad students were primarily interested in R. I don't think Stata's going away any time soon, but it might not be completely dominant for that much longer.

<comment><USER11> A lot of people I know at various departments are switching their undergrad stats/econometrics classes from Stata to R. That's the beginning of the end of Stata.

<comment><USER10> That matters, but I don't think that's happening until all of the big graduate-level metrics textbooks get R versions. And even then, at least a few papers are going to run into trouble with older reviewers who are used to seeing work done in Stata and don't trust anything else.

<comment><USER9> Yes, and it's also non-trivial to write R code that matches your textbook's answer if your textbook used Stata. You have to do things like look up which specific variant of the sandwich estimator Stata uses for robust standard errors, so you can tell R to match that.

In Stata's defense: It helps that Stata is actually really good for the "running regressions" part. In particular, it gets robust standard errors right without much extra work in complex cases that would require a lot of additional code in Python or R.

R wins easily for data visualization and scripting, though. It's also much better as a skill you can "take with you". If you end up working in industry, you may not be able to expense a Stata license, but you'll almost certainly be able to use R (although maybe not RStudio).

<comment><USER12> You don't even want to expense a Stata license. Stata is the worst thing I've ever had to use. Maybe as a person who can't program it makes sense, but as a professional developer almost everything about Stata is non-intuitive, confusing, and stupid. Also the only thing to go on is their stupid pdf manual. Finding real people on the internet who actually use it is almost impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ahh, this is nice. I work in an office with a number of economists (energy economics consulting firm), but I'm basically the only python user. Feel like this could be useful in bridging some gaps for the folks who only use SAS and got their PhDs cobbling together whatever code (VB, FOTRAN, etc.) got their models to run back in the day.

I've written so much documentation on Confluence where it would have been easier to just send a pdf like this :/

</comment><comment><USER14> They also have a Julia version, which is more interesting.

<comment><USER15> I want to learn Julia but I have a very big concern: does it actually alter your personality in a way that makes you condescend to everyone about their inferior programming languages, or is it just that people who already are condescending choose to learn Julia?

<comment><USER16> Haha, this is a great question.

I remember thinking about this before I knew JULIA. I can't remember that time clearly. I have tried to black it out. Presumably, I was just sitting nude in a cave bashing two rocks together covered in faeces and confused shame...just like you.

Here are things I can guarantee: learning JULIA will make you stronger, more agile, your IQ will double, women will be able to smell your dominance, children will run from you screaming in terror, you will be able to grow a thick lustrous beard (even if you are a woman), you will be able to talk to animals and lead them in battle, and you will be able to throw a spear through a 5m deep concrete wall from 200m.

EDIT: I forgot, if you do learn JULIA be sure to avoid any contact with indigenous societies. They will likely think you are a God. You go to the Amazon one time, and suddenly these people are building shrines, making human sacrifices, and carving intricate wood etchings of benchmarks and terse, readable function compositions (they told me they were still using Python2.7...lol).

<comment><USER15> LOL. That's a shame. I like children, so I guess I'll just have to stay locked in this naively blissful void that I've been mischaracterizing as a 'brain' my whole life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FINALLY the field of Economics is waking up to the 20th (yes) century...

I've always loved the questions economics asks, but found the methodology for finding answers to miss out on ideas from computer science

<comment><USER18> I got lost at part 1.4.1 on page 6. I know python, but what would I need to learn to actually follow this pdf?

<comment><USER19> It basically assumes you have at least one year's grad school level background in economics. It does give some overview, but probably not enough to learn it from the book alone.

<comment><USER20> No, this is advanced undergrad economics or at the most it is in the first year of grad school.</comment></comment></comment></comment>