Hacker Dojo Meets Fund-Raising Goal  - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/hacker-dojo-meets-fundraising-goal/

<comment><USER2> Great news, I is gratifying to see the support out there for these sorts of things. Now if we can get the Hacker Dojo enlisting people on disrupting the whole ADA 'racket' (where the cities exploit the ADA to raise revenue, egregious example: they changed the shade of 'blue' needed for parking spaces, need to re-paint them and get re-inspected, sigh.) That would be fabulous.

<comment><USER3> The regulations here don't seem to be a "racket" nor relating to trivialities like color of parking spaces (if _that_ were the problem, it'd be easy). As the article notes, the two "big ticket" problems, which are real problems but expensive to correct, are: 1) the facility doesn't meet fire code for a structure that's going to be filled with people regularly, as opposed to storing inanimate goods as a warehouse; and 2) there are no wheelchair- accessible bathrooms. If a building is going to regularly host gatherings of hundreds of people, sometimes 24/7, imo it's not a particularly bad idea that it should follow fire code and be disabled-accessible.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely, these are needed things, they also get abused by cities. Both statements can be (and are) simultaneously true. I've been orchestrating a facilities move and dealing with requirements, some of which I don't quibble with at all like the number of fire extinguishers in a building or placement of fire detection/alarms. Other things I do quibble with (like 3.5% incline in the parking lot vs an allowable 3% [1] incline, you show me a building inspector that can accurately survey a parking lot to a tenth of a degree and I'll show you a civil engineer. When the guy puts down his iPhone to use the 'level' app to measure in one spot, you wonder what they are trying to achieve.

[1] <http://www.ada.gov/reg3a.html> \- A4.8.2 Slope and Rise. Ramp slopes between 1:16 (3.58 degrees) and 1:20 (2.86 degrees) are preferred. The ability to manage an incline is related to both its slope and its length. Wheelchair users with disabilities affecting their arms or with low stamina have serious difficulty using inclines. Most ambulatory people and most people who use wheelchairs can manage a slope of 1:16. Many people cannot manage a slope of 1:12 for 30 ft (9 m).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is fascinating that this low-budget warehouse space is worthy of NYT coverage. I have gone to a bunch of meetups at HD & made a small contribution to the fund - it is a great local resource. I'm just surprised that this inconspicuous venue attracts national media.

<comment><USER5> Hi, I'm the director of development at Hacker Dojo and handle most of our press work.

For us, there have been two things which have really helped us get picked up by conventional media. The first is spending the time to figure out what stories will be interesting to their readers, and how events can be best presented in an entertaining and newsworthy format. The second is to develop relationships with the reporters that are meaningful. Send them story leads that you don't benefit from in any way. Talk to them when you're not asking for anything. Treat them like humans.

You can see some of the other press on this story at:

VentureBeat: Silicon Valley community Hacker Dojo finds a savior in YouWeb incubator [http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/19/silicon-valley- community-h...](http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/19/silicon-valley-community- hacker-dojo-finds-a-savior-in-youweb-incubator/)

Wired: Embattled Hackers Save Dojo With Help From Unexpected Savior <http://www.wired.com/business/2012/09/hacker-dojo-saved/>

Vator: YouWeb creator Peter Relan saves Hacker Dojo [http://vator.tv/news/2012-09-19-youweb-creator-peter- relan-s...](http://vator.tv/news/2012-09-19-youweb-creator-peter-relan-saves- hacker-dojo)

GigaOm: Andreessen Horowitz, Wozniak, Google, and others give to save Hacker Dojo [http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/investors-step-in-to-keep- mount...](http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/investors-step-in-to-keep-mountain- views-hacker-dojo-open-for-business/)

Mercury News: Hacker Dojo fights to the finish; last-minute donation propels organization to $250K fundraising goal [http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_21578858/hacker- dojo...](http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_21578858/hacker-dojo-fights- finish-last-minute-donation-propels)

SJ Biz Journal: Hacker Dojo hits fund goal to upgrade co-working space [http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/09/hacker- dojo-...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/09/hacker-dojo-raises- funds-to-upgrade.html)

Remember, we were partnered with YouWeb's media team for this particular effort, so kudos go to them and their skills as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Last night I gave a tour to my friend who'd never seen the place before. Just before midnight, we left a dollar in the donation box. This morning this story comes out.

I can only conclude I made the difference.

edit: and by sheer coincidence, I also work for one of Peter Relan's companies (Agawi)

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome... I was able to check it out once during the summer and it was really nice, but I expect I'll be spending more time there once my classes near there start up.

We'll see if I can afford the membership fee, or will have to salve my guilt with occasional donations.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great news, I can't wait to attend more classes and meetups at Hacker Dojo, I hope they will go back to hosting bigger meetups there!</comment>


Cool CSS MagmaRails Luchador - <AUTHOR> http://www.magmarails.com

<comment><USER2> It's a very nice design but it doesn't tell me where the conference takes place or what's the main theme. I get that it's about Rails, but what about it? I'd rather see illuminating information (conference venue, travel info, keynote topics, etc) than a giant parallax luchador.

Good example of putting style before function.</comment>


Dropbox Paper - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2016/08/paper-public-beta-and-mobile-apps/?ref=producthunt <comment><USER2> Why does everyone have to keep naming things "Paper"? It's so generic.

First FiftyThree released Paper, their excellent app for drawing/note taking on iPads.

Then Facebook released Paper, it's news reading app.

Now Dropbox is releasing Paper.

Stop reusing the same name over and over. It's confusing. And it's unfair to FiftyThree which I'm guessing doesn't have the legal resources to go after a Facebook or a Dropbox (assuming they could even win, with the apps doing different things maybe they couldn't).

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems quite like Google docs?

</comment><comment><USER4> Burned by Dropbox Carousel. After that, decided to use Dropbox only for its original purpose of syncing files. I am more than happy with OneNote.</comment>


When (not) static typing matters - <AUTHOR>

I have been through a lot of articles about static vs dynamic typing.
For me, static typing makes lot of sense when your language encourage you to create lots of new types (mostly classes/OO languages), because when you are working with such an API, static typing makes it clear about what a method takes and returns (and what those types represent) rather then going though documentation which hampers productivity. Static typing in practice is more about understanding a program/API rather than some academic "prove them correct" theory. Python, which encourage a lot of OO,class based programming including its so called frameworks is a not a good candidate for dynamic typing, coz every time you wana call an API you wonder what "object" it would take and what that object will have inside it including its base class etc etc.
On the other hand if you have a language like Clojure, with some basic types like vector,set,map, few other primitive types and "function type" (and if you don't create new types with deftype etc) then dynamic typing is preferable, because you know what all the function will be dealing with these types only and that info can be encoded as meta data on the functions itself (or comments if you don't have meta data facility in your language).
In end I would say if you create a lot of new types, then static typing is good and if you use some basic set of types (which are enough to represent any info/model) then dynamic typing is the way to do. So rather than discussing which is better, we should focus on which path we want to take while programming.
Let me know if this make sense for you guys.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Well, regarding yout API example, Python 3 introduces function annotations which let you specify the types of the parameters and of the return value. These types are not checked by the interpreter, leaving this job to the programmer (or framework).

<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3107/></comment>


Ask HN: "inspirational" jobs board? - <AUTHOR>

I think I saw a job board on HN or DN a while ago that was entirely about jobs that are "good" and "inspirational", basically stuff for a good cause. Did I dream this up or does this really exist? I would need to use it. <comment><USER2> It doesn't list jobs like a board, but fits the good/inspirational category: [http://rework.jobs/talent](http://rework.jobs/talent)

</comment><comment><USER3> idealist.org</comment>


Good Call to Action button text? - <AUTHOR> We've recently launched a new ecommerce service, and we've had good interest and strong early sales. However, we think our main button copy isn't great and isn't converting enough people to the next stage. We started with "Get Quote" (pricing isn't straightforward as SaaS, for example), and we'd love to try a bunch of different options like "Start Now", "Buy!", "Get started" etc. Does anyone have any thoughts on good calls-to-action, or links to any resources that talk about this stuff?<p>Happy to post the link to the site if anyone wants it, but obviously don't want this to be a self-promo thing! <comment><USER2> If the product and sales channels suggest that "get quote" is a plausible strategy, this suggests to me that focusing conversions from a landing page call to action may not be the critical path to growth _right now_.

The process is of providing quotes is high touch and human-in-the-loop on your end. The web, the browser, and text all create friction friction. Maybe meat- eating sales teams will offer better conversions, conversations, and relationships.

To put it another way, right now the business cannot offer standard pricing. That's incompatible with ordinary expectations for a website's call to action. Even worse, there's two decades of negative expectations behind "give me us email address": giving a company an email address is a commitment to managing recurring inbox spam for years to come.

So what random advice from the internet do I have? Maybe the call to action is a phone number to talk to a meat-eating sales person. Maybe the next step is to get a handle on pricing. Maybe it's to hire the best designer money can buy.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really useful insight, thank you!

Yes, we're actually trying to automate the quoting element, and make a traditionally high-touch industry a lot quicker and simpler.

This has genuinely given me something to think about - perhaps we need to stop thinking about it as a traditional CTA thing...

<comment><USER2> The core question is who benefits from turning high touch into low touch, the company or the potential customer? If it is the former, and it often is, there's nothing in it for the customer other than price competition. However, for anything of significant business value, the potential cost of a win-lose relationship, tends to make even a zero dollar price less attractive than "full retail."

I mean, a free ecommerce platform with a 1% chance folding in the next month, may not be worth $1000/month cost savings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, very true.

For us, we're aiming to save time (we've got a traditional average quoting time of days down to seconds), plus adding automated insight and data that will be of use to the customer.

You're right - Unless we can provide both the speed that makes it useful, and the confidence of doing a fairly high value transaction completely online, we'll face an uphill struggle.

<comment><USER2> I suspect it does little good to reduce quoting time down to seconds if describing, showing and selling the benefits of automated data and insight takes many times longer. A fast closing process doesn't matter if the leads are not qualified.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In India, engineering students outsource their academic projects - <AUTHOR> http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/future-engineers-take-easy-way-out-outsource-projects/1011221/ <comment><AUTHOR> Actually I posted this article not because I wanted to point out how bad Indian students are. Not all Indian students do this. And the Indian market is a usual mix of people of various kinds- Awesome, good, bad, horrible and even clueless people like this.

What I wanted to point out was how things work out in the real world. The thumb rule for describing these sort of things in India is the saying 'No good deed goes unpunished'. You will see most of these students doing these will actually win over the actual hard working guys. The guy who did the real project would have probably failed, or wouldn't have enough polish on his project. Or due to his sheer intelligence, and little touch of arrogance gotten out of favor of his professors. Due to all this he probably would have scored less marks, missed out the interview opportunity and then left to wander for jobs.

The guys who got the project done 'ready made', would have made their project look complete. Mugged up all the viva and etc questions. Got plenty of time to study interview books and questions asked in campus interviews. And due to all this would have easily cleared the already heavily gamed interview process.

So the net story is, if you cheat you are likely to win than if you work hard the true way.

When I joined the industry I noticed the process manifest in front of my own eyes. Every joe joining the company wanted to be a manager in 4 years, with a monthly take home of 1.5L, at least 3-4 foreign travel opportunities. Of course in highly political environments like large corporates, some played their old game and got through. But most who didn't had two options

        a) MBA
        b) MS in the United States.

I saw the very people who did all this once again went to tutions, cleared their GRE/CAT were granted bank loans to go study in the US. Most of them I know are working today in the US and probably will end up being US citizens.

The actual hard working technical guys(programmers, hackers or whatever you may call them) are treated like commodity, worst like a foot ball tossed around by 'business guys', because Indian IT religion creed says 'Being technical is not important, rather one must do smart work'.

So in the name of smart work, technical career has no growth path, no long term rewards. In order to grow and get paid well you have to be a 'manager'. Or worst work at a start up, where you are likely fail, not get compensated enough, Or if you are too unlucky work for a stingy/unethical founder and burn your hands then get back to your old MegaCorp back again.

When this is the routine cycle. What do you expect this students to do?

<comment><USER2> _So in the name of smart work, technical career has no growth path_

That doesn't quite make sense. Wouldn't technical work be the "smart" work?

<comment><AUTHOR> >>Wouldn't technical work be the "smart" work?

Its not very financially rewarding. And when you see the guy next to you making big bucks by just asking for status updates, forwarding mails and changing cells on excel sheets. You begin to wonder if its worth it.

<comment><USER3> >> Its not very financially rewarding. And when you see the guy next to you making big bucks by just asking for status updates, forwarding mails and changing cells on excel sheets. You begin to wonder if its worth it.

I had this same question and asked one of the more experienced guy in our team on why he didn't took the managerial path when he had the chance and experience - his answer was "This is what I like". I could see that there are more financially motivated people in the team than there are people who love technology. If tomorrow the whole IT industry in the country goes extinct most of the guys who fill in excel sheets will be happy counting boxes in a factory as long as they pay enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I study in one of the largest universities in India. It is also fairly reputed within the country as well as outside.

During my 2nd year of engineering we had to complete a programming "mini project". If you're familiar with these you may know the quality of most projects.

Year after year you can see the same projects reappear, some even to the point that the old student's details aren't changed in the source code to reflect the new owner's!

So we had to complete this project by forming a group - minimum of 2 students and a maximum of 4. The guideline? It should have a UI (duh!) and a database. The clear instructions from the professor were to use only Visual Basic or Java. The syllabus booklet obviously mentioned that any suitable language could be used.

I went to him to ask if it was OK to do a "web based", "database-enabled" & "User Interfacing" application. To say that he was agitated would be a euphemism. It was like I had insulted him. To placate him, I respectfully pointed out that it was perfectly okay for me to use a language that I was comfortable in and that a web-based project was in fact a norm.

To avenge the dishonor I had brought him, he bullied another member of my group to leave my group just an hour before the demo to an external professor (a professor from some other college who is invited for the demo and viva voce).

Meanwhile the demo went great, the external was very satisfied with the answers to his questions although I can be sure he was a little happily surprised that I had coded it myself completely. My professor sitting next to him was fuming with rage. I gladly left the hall being sure of making it satisfactorily.

I was dumbfounded when I found it on my report card that I had failed getting only 10% of the total allotment for the project and the re-hashed project managed to score 90% and above.

The sad thing is most of my colleagues didn't even try to code or come up with an idea. Even sadder is the fact that if you do, the professors make sure to take it personally and pull you down instead of motivating or giving a helping hand.

<comment><USER5> Your prof was a douche. Perhaps he required some special language to get through to him but you never know.

I know profs who would be more than happy that someone took some initiative.

At the same time the same prof was completely cognizant of how the game was played.

When I took a course and answered like a sane person, he held his head in his hands and directed me to a few students who reminded me that a 5 point answer was a minimum of 1 page of regurgitation.

I had even more fun when I spoke to the bio med students. I remember their jaws dropping to the ground when I described how I had worked on an autoclave/run gels and generally had fun running genetic experiments over summer break.

Their final project? Making ghaghras and perfect pineapple juice - because the board had decreed that graduates should have some "usable skills once they are in the real world."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Posting for a friend who wishes to remain anonymous:

I'm a mechanical engineering by education and one thing I have noticed is there are no such options available for mechanical engineers. I remember sweating it out at the workshop fabricating a continuous variable transmission (automatic transmission) unit by hand from scratch.

I went on to work with a "leading education company" in India and we rolled out an "innovative" program for engineering college students. I was fresh out of bschool and was mainly involved in preparing the presentations to be presented to the top management.

The plan was supposed to connect the student community with the industry to facilitate final year projects for "free". I was happy because this entire "outsourcing of projects" was always one of my pet peeves. I later found out that the real plan was to do the above, but do it slowly and when the students were running out of time, make them pay up and "sell" them a project.

The service didn't take off and boy was I secretly glad!

What did I learn from the exercise?

1\. There is a booming industry to sell projects.

2\. There is immense demand. The moment we started advertising, we got tens of thousands of calls every day.

3\. The students just want to get done with the projects. Why? They already have job offers from one of the various software companies and this is just a formality to get their degree certificate.

4\. They just aren't interested.

5\. We approached engineering colleges as part of marketing and most directors/principals we met were @$$holes who asked us just one question - Will this help me get more admissions for the next academic year?

6\. Most HODs wanted a cut out of the entire deal.

7\. Demand for projects (in decreasing order) EC>EE>CS/IT>EI>Mech/Civil

I do not know the solution to this problem, but the entire ecosystem is flawed.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. How much does "project making" pay compared to other available software jobs?

2\. Are those projects more fun than other jobs?

3\. Subvert the whole system: Create a project-making company. Keep good records. Refer your employees to employers, on the basis of their solid project portfolios. Basically, project-making companies thus displace the universities as the place where real learning happens and is proven.

4\. Thank you to all the Indians posting here today. I feel like I am reading hackernews.in, and it's nice to get a vacation from Silicon Valley :-)

<comment><USER8> 1\. 20 - 30 projects a year = 1 yr. inexperienced programmer salary. 2\. Fun - yes, Interesting - yes => if you can convince students to choose projects on whatever you want to work on. 3\. Project making companies are dime a dozen. 4\. Most welcome :)

PS - when I was a student I did 2-3 other projects for others...

AND students studying MS in USA and UK also send their assignments/homeworks back home - did those too ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> >>AND students studying MS in USA and UK also send their assignments/homeworks back home - did those too ;)

Actually MS in USA and UK in many(Not all, so please don't frown on me) cases is really for.

        a. Foreign degree.
        b. USA return/citizen stamp.
        c. Helps to get dowry in many cases.

How many people actually go there to study in the true sense?

<comment><USER9> I know it won't matter much and you would just have to take my word for it, but i would _love_ to study in valley, get a masters or something. Although would come back after education (if I am not selected into YC).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I despised this trend when I was in college and did not know the value of internships either. Most people I knew were outsourcing or buying projects or internship certificates to have more time for what they wanted to do after college - MBA, MS etc.

Me and my friend knew 8051 assembly language before project frenzy started. We wanted to stay away from outsourcing project sellers and build something on our own. There was a senior who'd built a Robotic arm to show it was possible. Our major was in Electronics and communications engineering. We built a GPS vehicle locator by making two GSM phones talk to each other using SMS. It even had a maps front-end in VB.

Nothing I had learnt in College prepared us for what we did in those 3 months. We took printouts of 8051 microcontroller, GPS module, Nokia, Siemens modem datasheets. We spent lot of time researching GPS modules which we could get in Bangalore and after numerous visits to circuit shops, setup a lab at home for soldering and burning microcontroller ROM. We burned code in 8051 ROM like 200+ times and spent the whole time learning soldering, writing modular code in Embedded C, talking to Siemens AT modems. When we finally got SMS response of GPS coordinates, we had 600 lines of Embedded C code. We started writing the client side in VB which was a breeze except for soldering a Nokia phone to COM port. We got the same grades as those who bought their projects, but we had the satisfaction of building something.

College in India is pretty much useless unless you have great peers. I was fortunate to have a liberal education in school where the focus was on learning and not rote memorization. I learnt assembly, gwbasic, C, VB while in school. My friend got a job in Embedded systems industry. I applied for GPS and fleet mgmt software companies but ended up working for a big IT company. I got out of that soon and joined a place where developers are not treated like commodities.

</comment><comment><USER11> The sorry state of education is a distraction, the real problem is something else. Most students in India are not given much of a choice when it comes to choosing their career path. Most of the students are forced to be doctors, engineers or civil servants. Very few end up being artists, singers, sports- person... anything which is not a "real" job.

The result being that a host of colleges have sprung up to meet this demand. These colleges are setup with the sole aim of making money. Education is just a side effect. Students get no academic freedom and have no space to learn outside of a very narrowly defined "syllabus".

The worse problem is that most students who end up in Engineering Colleges have absolutely no interest in becoming engineers. They do manage to somehow graduate and get an "IT job". They end up being mediocre engineers and at the earliest opportunity try to find a way out. These poor souls end up giving a bad name to Indian Engineers.

What about those who want to be engineers because they like to build things and love to tinker around? The hacker types? Getting into an engineering college requires a lot of money. If and when they do get into an engineering college it's a poor quality one. They are forced to spend time only on mugging up equations and theorems. They get no space to build circuits of their own or blow up stuff for the heck of it. Assignments are a joke, they require no application of thought and all that's required is merely copying stuff from the text book onto paper. The poor dispirted hackers end up languishing in low paying jobs or find an escape route by moving out of the country where their talents are recognised.

tl;dr : Quality suffers when quantity increases beyond limit.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like education could be even more disrupted there than here?

<comment><USER11> Definitely! At the very least some labs where hackers could come and make stuff with Arduino boards or write IRC bots that did crazy, but useless things. All for the sake of learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> For that to succeed you need to ensure technical folks getting hired are very well compensated.

The issue is most people coming from middle class background have big dreams to make money, build a good home and settle down. So the crowd goes where the money is.

Sure there are going to be passionate people, but if its not rewarding sooner or later they are going ask if its worth it.

<comment><USER11> One thing that could help is a surge of tech-oriented startups. Startups in India tended to be copies of well-established models in the U.S. Things are beginning to change. I've personally seen a few startups which have innovative and tech-heavy products founded in India which caters to the U.S. market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is another way of paying for a qualification that you don't deserve, and in doing so it dilutes the standard of graduates. I've heard personally from an Indian friend that this is very common - and is the reason that he came to Australia to study.

<comment><USER14> The situation in Australia is hardly any different. [http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/uni- cheats-...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/uni-cheats-buy- work-in-cyberspace-20121002-26xhj.html)

<comment><USER13> No doubt - there's cheats everywhere... but I don't think its near the scale of India.

<comment><USER15> @damian2000, [citation needed]

<comment><USER5> I can chime in here - I've studied in the India - then the states and then back in India.

Copying is endemic. Amongst the final year students in my CS class of nearly 50 I think maybe 1 person did it on their own.

The rest knew a guy who knew a guy who had a copy of the project.

This is for your undergrad degree.

For my 10th standard practical exams, which I did in one of the more strict institutions, the invigilator who came from another school left the room for a short time, and my physics professor came in and took a look at what we were doing.

he didn't give us advice directly, but with enough stern looks and exasperated sighs he let people know what they were doing wrong, and why certain experiments were doomed to fail. Then again given the sorry state of some of the equipment like the calipers, I doubt we could have gotten too precise a measurement anyway.

Similarly for the chem practicals and bio practicals.

I also know that our professors would go to other schools and invigilate there, where they would return the favor.

Onward to practical exams in undergrad - Comp sci was probably easier to copy and cheat. The engineering courses were similar though - you could find a talented student/graduate who would make your projects for you at a price.

This is still nothing, because every year there is a scandal where the question papers are leaked for almost every exam. This is constant.

People will find a bribe-able teacher or peon and get X or Y exam paper from them. Again constant and ongoing. This is often the option of the desperate, who also resort to interesting ways to cheat - such as having your text books hidden away in the toilets and so on, or on your phones, or scratched onto the desks or the walls.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>

I can't find it anymore, but there was a great article written by a professional paper writer in the US. He used to work for a firm that wrote papers and articles for college students who could afford them.

He never looked down on his students - some of them were quite wealthy and he knew that they would go on to do something else once they graduated. So for him this was just an extension of them learning useful real world skills and he appreciated those clients who made no pretense and could give instructions on how he would like an article to be written and what emphasis to be given.

</comment><comment><USER16> "After three years of engineering education, the final year student is struggling to make even a simple circuit work"

If this leads to outsourcing of student projects, and thus a habit to outsource professional tasks, then that education system is a failure - and an indictment of outsourcing in general. As engineers are replaced with "business people", the world becomes less capable.

</comment><comment><USER17> First of all an undergrad in India is naive and needs good mentoring. That's missing and no one cares to solve this problem!

I think we have to blame the Indian education system largely for this. The root cause is - The quality of the system is poor and is broken. But it should only get better over-time and its happening.

Indian Schooling system is not ready to bring out Quality Engineers. It doesn't encourage Creative thinking and promote an intellectual environment.

There are many IT companies that fill this void by giving 6months intensive training because they know the education system.

Another social-cultural reason being - Indians are spoon feed-ed right from birth. They aren't independent much and depend on schooling more. This promotes a conservative mindset.

But this norm will gradually change for the better, I'm already seeing today's young undergrads getting involved in Startup space by asking internships and are doing some really great work!

In my startup, we have given internship projects to undergrads but we never value their paper degrees or schooling. We only value their github page, OSS work and appreciate self-taught programmers.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wikipedia did a project where students at Indian universities were assigned to expand and write Wikipedia articles in lieu of their normal coursework. Two universities were selected - College of Engineering, Pune and Symbiosis School of Economics. It was a complete disaster - students plagiarized so much material that Wikipedia blocked one of the universities and then shut down the project prematurely. For the engineering school, just 13% of the content students submitted survived cleanup efforts. For the economics school it was a bit better, but just 29% survived.

Students simply did not have the experience of someone looking at their work carefully and checking that they were following the rules. The students also didn't have the skills to understand how to work with sources and how to paraphrase. Some students were willing and able to change their behavior in order to contribute good content, but that was only 24% for the economics school and 2% for the engineering school. Many students just did not have the English language skills to complete the assignment.

You can read an independent report here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Progr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis/Independent_Report_from_Tory_Read)

</comment><comment><USER19> There are some structural problems that contribute to (but don't cause) this phenomenon. By most university rules an engineering student needs to do an 'external project' with a company or research lab to complete his degree.

Technically you _can_ do a project of your own but most professors of engineering in India are clueless about real world engineering projects and don't do any research or have projects of their own. Most students are not pigheaded enough to buck the system by formulating their own projects and risking failure. (note: I said 'most', IIT s etc are different. Here one is talking about the equivalent of a school in Hicksville in the middle of nowhere and totally disconnected from industry).

There are tens of thousands of students needing such an internship/project in a given city every year. Most schools just wash their hands off the whole deal and ask their students to 'go get a project done' with no additional guidance. Most professors, with class sizes of 30 - 50, don't care about formulating or supervising projects.

How is a 19 year old supposed to get a non existent company to give them an internship on a sharply defined project?

In CS it is often possible to get some kind of project thanks to all the software companies in India, but in other fields like mechanical or electrical engineering, there simple are no projects available. These 'project providers' step into the void and provide 'internships' which exist only on paper and provide a complete project report to the student, who pays substantial (in local currency) fees, submits the report to his clueless profs and ticks off his 'project complete' checkbox.

Now, _added_ to this structural problem is the fact that most engineering schools in India approach the teaching of engineering as 'book learning'. Students memorize formulae and regurgitate them in exams without the faintest clue of how to actually build anything (hence the 'can't build a circuit' description in the OP). Just to complicate things, students have no training in technical writing, and even assuming they have a thesis, and know how to do confirming experiments and so on they still have trouble writing a hundred pages in English.

None of this is to excuse any of the participants in this farce. This needs to be exposed, and corrected. Just identifying some underlying factors. If the professors decided to clamp down on such fraud, there is _no way_ this will continue. But most are happy to play along.

An offshoot of this is the business of creating personal essays for admissions to US schools. Professors in the US, if you see a hundred admission letters starting with "Two Roads diverged in a wood " ( I am NOT joking. I've seen 'professionally prepared' essays that start this way,) you know your prospective student has outsourced his personal essay.

Some of these outsourcers get admitted to US universities, or get good jobs and so their path gets validated for younger generations as the 'smart thing to do'.

And so the dance continues.

somewhat tangential, personal 'external project' anecdote from a long time ago

I studied Industrial Engineering in a decent but not great school and my profs were well meaning but not particularly clueful. They saw Industrial Engineering as an offshoot of Mechanical Engineering and shot down all my proposed 'build a compiler' type projects (I wanted to do a software project), because 'That is computer Science, not Mechanical or Industrial Engineering. You have to do a project in Mechanical Engineering'.

So I compromised by forming a team with a couple of sharp guys, writing a small but sophisticated (given the circumstances) CAD program in Turbo C on a 486 PC ( hey it even had a scripting component - I did get to write a compiler after all), printed out all the code, added an introductory page and that was my 'project report'.

The profs were a bit taken aback at the hundreds of pages of C code (which they couldn't read or grok) but the software worked, I could answer all their questions, and CAD was "mechanical engineering" so I got top grades for the project. [1]

I later heard from some of my juniors that the profs used to tell them about this 'very talented bunch of guys who did a great project and you should emulate them' but I don't think anyone took that advice ;).

[1]That was the only 'course' for which I had anything like a top grade. I was bored to tears and rarely attended class and spent all my time chasing girls and scraped by in some of the "write down from memory the formula for stress in a cantilever beam" type examinations by deriving enough stuff from scratch to get a passing grade. Most classes (and exams) I completely ignored.

I completed my degree only because my employer(Cybercash, now defunct, but was one of the pioneers in payment processing, HQ in Virginia, with the devs in Bangalore) begged me to, so I could get a visa to go to the USA, and you couldn't get a visa without a degree. I wrote 22 exams in two weeks and got my degree. To this day I don't know anything about Mechanical Engineering.

PS: In retrospect I should have just (minimally) played the game of dutifully attending classes and so on and spend half an hour or so every day memorizing the facts and formulae required to get good grades. Would have saved a lot of stress.

Instead I rebelled against the insanity and quit attending class except to meet my friends. As pg said in one of his essays, (paraphrasing) when you rebel, you are still playing someone else's game,only with a logical 'not' added to the rules. You are still dancing to someone else's tune.

I don't have any regrets, but _then_ I was thoroughly confused by the way engineering was taught and learned and what behavior was lauded and what was punished.

This was before the internet arrived in India. Now Coursera etc offer me a veritable cornucopia of insanely great teachers, Amazon has all the books and I am as happy as a pig in a mud pit learning new stuff well after my hair turned grey.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>How is a 19 year old supposed to get a non existent company to give them an internship on a sharply defined project?

Actually answer to this question lies in understanding a simple thing. Most of us really study to just get a job. That is the fact.

Most people get into software after hearing stories from the 90's. How some some uncle of theirs, or somebody from their far relatives, or neighbors or someone from their village did CS engineering, Got into an IT company. And then went to the US, after which within 5 years the guy became a manager. Stories of how such people 1.5-2L a month, has a very posh home, car etc. And then talks of all the beautiful infrastructure, glass buildings. Lets be frank, most of the people join software for that reason.

The problem now is they don't really know what they are getting into. They lack the desire or interest to genuinely work towards solving problems. So at the end its all about 'Somehow get a job'.

The days of 90's are long gone. And there is no such rapid growth these days.

<comment><USER20> This could be, I suspect, both a blessing and a curse for companies like Coursera and Udacity.

On the one hand, many of the people participating today are probably highly motivated and doing it out of a desire to learn new things and solve problems. They may not have access to formal education, for whatever reason, but are determined to become more educated anyway.

On the other hand, some of the participants probably don't care at all about learning anything and just want a credential that will stand up to scrutiny. The goal for this group is to get a job, not necessarily to become qualified for a job (subtle difference).

Unfortunately, as the "value" of the education offered by online companies (i.e. recognition by employers) increases, the share of people in the second category will almost certainly rise quickly.

Ideally, the market will discount this form of education appropriately (as it theoretically does with all other forms of education). The "value" of a Coursera certificate, for instance, would be constrained by the risk of accidentally hiring a person from the second category above, who may have graduated, but failed to learn any useful skills.

However, the business model for these companies seems to be based on providing education to a massive number of people. If the market heavily discounts the education they provide, the business model might become impractical.

It seems to me that the biggest concern for Coursera and similar should be finding ways to enforce academic integrity standards to make sure that even the students in the second category actually end up learning something.

While this will, perhaps, result in fewer students initially, it will also keep the market from heavily discounting graduates of online programs, thus destroying the market for their services in the longer-run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> OK, maybe some students do outsource their projects. This does not mean that hard working students who can prove themselves otherwise are ignored. To companies like Infosys, CTS etc. who actually indulge in mass recruiting and have pathetic interview standards, of course, this might make a difference. But to good companies how want to recruit good Engineers, projects on the resume can only aid in interview calls. A lack of knowledge would be apparent in an interview. While you explain the problem, you never make an attempt at finding or listing a solution for the same. But instead, you end your post with a rhetorical statement.

Analyzing this problem, I think it can be attributed to widespread plagiarism in engineering schools in India. In the US, plagiarism is dealt with severely and can even lead to expulsion. This forces Indian students who used to indulge in malpractices in their undergrad to put on their thinking hats for once and be creative, for the fear of expulsion(which would be a disaster after so much preparation). Thats when one realizes the consequences of ones action. Such a system should be enforced in colleges in India.

</comment><comment><USER22> Fortunately, for these group of students the benefit is short lived and mainly on paper. They have better grades compared to their honest peers because of the complicity from professors (it is trivial to figure out whether someone has done the project or outsourced it, but they don't care).

But when it comes around to getting a job, they are the ones who usually struggle. I've seen so many students with average grades ultimately be recruited for the best jobs available on the market because they preferred to spend their time on TopCoder instead of gaming the system.

In some ways, I feel sorry for them. Most of them do it due to the herd mentality, everyone is outsourcing their projects so they must outsource their projects too. Clearly, this doesn't work out very in the long term and what they gain by taking the easy way out, they lose in terms of denying themselves the opportunity to gain some practical experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> >>Fortunately, for these group of students the benefit is short lived and mainly on paper.

Sorry these are precisely the kind of guys who end up being mid level managers in large corporates.

>>But when it comes around to getting a job, they are the ones who usually struggle.

Interview in India are a joke. Body shops pick up people for marks, and familiarity with objective questions roaming around on the internet.

<comment><USER23> > Sorry these are precisely the kind of guys who end up being mid level > managers in large corporates.

If it's any consolation, those large corporations get what they deserve: they end up with middle managers who cheated their way out of an education. There's some justice in this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just to balance out all the negative commentary about Indian education (which I'm not discounting by any means), I would like to offer my experience as a college student in one of India's premier engineering colleges (hint, y'all know it's name).

I was a chemistry student in a mostly technical (engineering) college. Nobody in this college would _dream_ of the kinds of blatant cheating I hear about at other places. Yes, people helping each other in their projects... imbalanced project teams with one brilliant student putting in most of the effort etc, that level of dubious behaviour was not uncommon (but not _too_ common either).

I got to play around with computers as my final year project. It was computational chemistry. I built a simulation model of a large number of molecules floating around under each other's forces and watch their emergent behaviour over simulated time. I'm rather proud of that project to this day.

And I was not alone by any means. A few of my batchmates' project work ended up in published papers (yes, our professors were expected to carry out international level research along with teaching). I interacted a bit with the computer science people too (since I was working on high performance compute clusters etc.). Some of the software I saw them build was impressive but I didn't know _how_ impressive at that stage in my life.

Later I switched fields and ended up doing a masters in computer science in a US university (picked up the under-graduate material through self-study and audited classes over a few years of pretending to do science research and TA'ing :-) )

Then I realized that the computer science students I came across back in my Indian college were doing some very impressive work for undergraduates.

So there. I hope it provides a reasonable counter-point to all the negative stuff about Indian students/colleges. My school is definitely not the common case... but it and many others like it do exist. (I'm posting from a throw- away account for reasons best left unstated.)

</comment><comment><USER25> This also happens in the Philippines. Sometimes the reason why students outsource projects isn't exactly related to how good they are academically. Some students(both good and bad) finish projects themselves and some outsource because they'd rather focus on a more important subject or project. Some even have part time jobs and really doesn't have the time. Even the really smart students sometimes outsource, these students have already been training and specializing on one field and if their project happens to be on a different field they'd rather have someone else do it than have bad marks. And about the project making companies, they're more like "teams" here in the Philippines. Mostly undergrads or graduates that haven't found jobs or programmers that have jobs but wants some extra-income.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think deciding that learning and understanding is more important than pleasing markers and getting a qualification is one of the most important decisions you can make.

One of my favourite movies ever is a bollywood film on this topic. 3 Idiots. Here's a snippet: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35sfBjmVWpU>

</comment><comment><USER27> Actually this is extremely common and infact, projects for undergraduates and post graduates are a thriving business in India. The colleges give a damn about this and they are seldom bothered. This kind of practice is extremely common in government aided universities in India.

But, I must also say that there are some universities where the students perform exceptionally.

</comment><comment><USER28> Problems like this are vexing, even to us non-Indians in the US. I've had the privilege of working with some awesome engineers from around the world, but issues of this ilk taint the opinions of many folks in IT and CS. It's bad enough that these assumptions hurt the careers of truly talented and dedicated engineers and programmers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Relevant experience of mine. [http://honestmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/sales- before-e...](http://honestmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/sales-before- engineering-lessons-i-learnt-from-my-first-business/) .

</comment><comment><USER30> Not every guy who did their project themselves ended up as an entrepreneur, but almost all entrepreneurs did their college projects themselves.

<comment><USER31> I think u r right. not many are business owners. I did my academic projects myself and now an entrepreneur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I did all 2 of my academic projects in my college itself, while many others did outside.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't think the issue is an Indian issue. More likely its just because a very small number of people should actually be taking engineering, but because of how lucrative it is, so many people take it who shouldn't be there.

I went to Stanford in the early 2000s for undergrad and majored in EE.

EE classes would normally have up to 50-60 students in lectures. Lectures would be taken by professors, many of whom were leading experts in their field, and some would be visibly bored or annoyed at having to teach ridiculously simple undergrad classes. You can imagine Nobel prize winners trying to teach basic physics.

Students did not learn much from these professors, some of whom would just recite from the textbook (which they had written). So students stopped coming to class. And Stanford even then recorded and streamed most engineering lectures, so by middle of the term only 5-6 students would show up to class. Then you go for the final exam and there are like 100 students who show up, everyone surprised the class was so big!

They had problem sets every week, and tutorial sessions where you could get one on one attention with graduate students. These were the most personalized attention you could get during the course.

You had a choice at Stanford. You could either choose to learn, or you could choose to have good grades. Only the top 5% of the class, the real geniuses could learn and get good grades at the same time.

I was not that smart. So I spent the first two years taking classes I was interested in. Mostly skipped the lectures, and took as many classes as possible. I was a solid B student. Then I got tired, and decided EE was not for me. Thought about switching majors but it was too late. So decided to get through on the bare minimum of effort.

As soon as I flipped that switch, I met the other group of people, the ones focused on good grades and enjoying life.

In order to get good grades, you have to do well in problem sets, midterm, final exam and project for each class.

Problem sets - It's ok to copy answers. We used to have a basket in the EE office where people turned in answers. Just go one day early and grab someone else's paper. Copy, return. If the guy turned it in a day or two early, he must have known what he was doing.

Project - Even easier. Stanford had so many socially inept engineers. Guys who don't even speak in class and usually very quiet or weird. These guys need friends too. Be their friend. Be in their project group. You don't even have to do anything. The smart guy will do all the work, won't even complain or tell the prof. Why? Because most of the really smart guys are really arrogant that their smart, and they believe they don't need anyone else. They're annoyed they have to have project partners. As long as they have to have a partner, then one who is friendly but doesn't interfere with their ideas or vision for the project is the best.

Mid-term and finals - The last week before the mid term or final, show up for the tutorials. Most of the grad students teaching them will focus on the problems most likely to come out in the exam.

Voila. I was an A student the last two years. And graduated without knowing anything. I told my faculty advisor I just wanted to get my degree and get out!

And the funny thing is, I have friends who have made a career out of "getting grades" this way. Think about all those venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Those were the kids who were friends of smart engineers. Think of Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt etc. The managers without significant technical knowledge.</comment>


Natural Language Processing with Python - <AUTHOR>

On flights from LA to Mumbai and back, I read this new book that uses the Natural Language ToolKit (NLTK). NLTK is written in Python and interfaces with the Python programming language. I was so impressed with the book as an accessible and enjoyable introduction to the subject matter that I made a podcast detailing my review of the book. The podcast can be found at href="http://www.awaretek.com/python" <comment><AUTHOR> Ok, it really is a good book, accessible to any programmer, even if you don't already know Python. I find natural language to be fascinating and this book is thought provoking. It covers symbolic logic, the lambda calculus, statistical techniques of speech recognition, and offers very practical and clear Python code snippets to show how to use the NLTK. I was too lazy to write a review but I did record my thoughts in the podcast at href="<http://www.awaretek.com/python></comment>


A Simple Explanation for Git Rebase - <AUTHOR> http://infinitemonkeys.influitive.com/a-simple-explanation-for-git-rebase/

<comment><USER2> I tended to use git rebase constantly before pushing, until I realized how toxic it really is.

In the original commit before rebase everything seemed to be working; but someone changed something else in the code you were relying on without creating a direct conflict, and now all your rebased commits crash and burn. What's worse, you discover it much later, when original commits are long gone, and instead of one merge commit being the easy traceable breaking point, you now don't even quite remember which exact commits were rebased and have to check EVERYTHING.

Or, and with merge commit you could've easily just check it right there with simple tests before committing — no such convenient option for rebase.

The thing is, it's a leaky abstraction. Rebase workflow tries to present things simpler then they really are, and you end up paying a price for it.

<comment><USER3> If you have a reasonably good+fast test suite and you integrate often, this isn't a huge deal. Just run your tests after using rebase.

If you have a failure, having a straight-line history makes it easier to do a bisect with your failing test and find the point of failure.

Unrelated to your issue with git rebase, but addressing another common complaint, git rerere allows git to remember and reuse previous conflict resolution so you don't get into resolution hell.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, I work on a project that (due to a various reasons) doesn't have any kind of automated testing, and it would be pretty hard to implement it. (But possible, and we definitely should do it in the future).

But thanks for git rerere! I've never heard about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just never find rebase very relevant because we'll have team members collaborate on the same branch. If you want to collaborate on an in-progress story that has its own branch, you have to push your commits. You might be able to rebase on any commits you push into the branch, but when it comes time to merge the branch into the main line (which might have received several commits in the meantime), you have to stick with the timeline of those pushes, so you lose much of the benefit of rebase.

Not sure why the author says that is weird - I can't think of an alternative if people are truly collaborating or pairing on a feature.

<comment><USER5> That's true but using branches is not always a good idea specially if you want to collaborate in big projects and have strong communication with your team.

Master can be used as a chat room (substitute english with code) and leave branches for very specific cases when that doesn't work. That's basically doing continuous integration. If you prefer, you can think of it as if you are still having branches with one commit each ;).

The important thing for CI is being sure that each commit is either hidden (through a feature toggle maybe?) or it doesn't break anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank you! I've always found this confusing and avoided it in my workflow. Assuming this explanation is correct, it makes a lot of sense and gives me a better workflow!

Are there any other useful ways to use git for a small team outside of pull and rebase? One thing that's bugged me is undoing (possibly partially) previous pushed commits while keeping everything past.

<comment><USER7> Rebase throws away your commits and replaces them with different commits. OP is using rebase to simply change the parent pointer, but git's interactive mode is much more powerful. To enter interactive mode with e.g. the last five commits, try this command on your favorite repository:

        git rebase -i HEAD~5

With this command, you can re-order commits. This is useful because often you will write several commits for A, realize A depends on another feature B, write several commits for B, then write several more commits for A. The history would be easier to read if B was developed first, then A was developed on top of it. Re-ordering the commits so all B commits are first accomplishes this.

You can also use the same command to squash multiple commits into one. This is useful when you write a commit, then have several commits gradually adding temporary debugging statements and unit tests, then more commits to fix any problems uncovered, then more commits to remove extensive print statements and other temporary debugging code.

Assuming you get the code working, most of these commits will be totally irrelevant to future development efforts. With the "squash" feature of git rebase -i, you can condense all these commits into a single commit containing only working code and unit tests, springing fully formed in a single commit, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

The git rebase -i command will also let you re-word or edit commits; the utility of those functions should be obvious.

<comment><USER8> Nice explanation. When I was first learning git, the most intuitive explanation of git rebase were these three links (if read in order... these links were once published on Hacker News many moons ago):

(1) [http://gitready.com/intermediate/2009/01/31/intro-to- rebase....](http://gitready.com/intermediate/2009/01/31/intro-to-rebase.html)

(2) [http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/11/pull-with- rebase.htm...](http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/11/pull-with-rebase.html)

(3) [http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/03/20/reorder-commits- with...](http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/03/20/reorder-commits-with- rebase.html) <~ talks about "interactive mode" with the -i option

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> simple but unenlightening - I guess you hope no one asks you what's really happening and just give up if you get a conflict.

It's not that complicated - rebase applies your commits to another branch as if they were patches. Interactive rebase gives you the option of re- ordering/removing/editing those patches before they're applied.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call I'll update the post to mention resolving commits. This was not intended to enlighten those who already know how rebase works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone document a simple workflow with three branches: main (public), development (public) and feature (private).

<comment><USER11> For three branches you can use the git-flow model.[0] Create a public repo, pull it on your local development machine and only push the main and development branch back to the public git repo. On github it is not possible to have private branches. [0][http://danielkummer.github.io/git-flow- cheatsheet/](http://danielkummer.github.io/git-flow-cheatsheet/)</comment></comment>


Apache Subversion to Migrate to Git - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/svn-migrates-to-git

<comment><USER2> Now _definitively_ an April Fool's joke.

Greg Stein's latest, and presumably last, comment on the JIRA ticket that started this furore: [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment- tabpanel#comment-13957226)

(ETA: they've also added "April Fools" to the title of the ticket itself.)

Quoting:

      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Resolving as "Not a problem". We sure as hell don't want to do this. :-)

My major thanks to [~jfarrell] for the concept.

And plenty of thanks to all of my co-conspirators on this issue. Yes.. even my antagonist [~jimjag] was in on the ruse :-) … the Infra team handled this with perfect aplomb. And the Directors and Exec Officers came in with a perfect level of wrath. Our Subversion teammates showed a great sense of community and circling the wagons… Thank you all for making this work!!!

Last but not least…

THANK YOU to all of you who actually BELIEVED.

<comment><USER3> At first I thought this was a serious thing even though I knew today is April 1st.

While I was believing the news, the second sentence caught my attention:

 _This will allow the development of the Subversion repository be developed with Git_

O_o

<comment><USER2> But that's already been possible for a good long while. They wouldn't be the first people to find git-svn to be a better front end to Subversion than the one that comes with Subversion itself :-).

<comment><USER3> Point is: if your _mature_ project itself is a VCS, it sounds contradicting to use someone else's VCS to host your VCS :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Give it a year and the Apache Software Foundation's sites will be switching to nginx.

<comment><USER5> Full disclosure: I'm an ASF member and one of the httpd developers and PMC members.

We're actually planning an experimental migration to nginx as part of Apachecon this coming weekend.

<comment><USER6> This has to be an April Fool's joke. Unless it's for legitimate competitive intelligence :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm STILL not convinced that this is a real story, and not an ongoing April Fool's prank. We'll see later in the week.

However, even if it DOES turn out to be legit... how dumb would you have to be to make any major announcement over the Internet on 4/1? Much less raise a question, conduct only a few hours of discussion and polling, and then make your final decision within a few hours... all on a day where most of the people commenting on that Jira ticket probably thought they were participating in a joke.

This is either the most well-played April Fool's joke since "OMG Ponies!!!", or else the absolute dumbest thing I have ever seen Apache do.

<comment><USER8> Real announcements do happen on April 1st. See for example gmail [1], perhaps one of the most important product announcements in the last decade.

Though I admit, I sometimes expect them to announce that it was a joke all along and shut it down.

[1] [http://googlepress.blogspot.ca/2004/04/google-gets- message-l...](http://googlepress.blogspot.ca/2004/04/google-gets-message- launches-gmail.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think tons of companies battle with the limitations of "we should eat our own dog food." It tends to be a general rule, even when you as an organization have only _marginal_ overlap with your target market.

I applaud Greg Stein's response (Stein is the founder and VP who was against the move):

> The short of it is: the Apache Subversion project chose this. We want to get > our stuff coded and released. For our backend, we don't need the super-huge > repositories that Subversion supports. Our project stores some binaries, but > we can make Git work for us. We have no need for Subversion's fine-grained > authorization ... shoot. We allow ALL ASF committers access to our > repository. There are no barriers to the migration here, and some of the > stuff that Infra has done for integration with GitHub? Pretty cool. > Positives, and only little negatives.

I love seeing this commitment to the community and developers.

 _Edit_ though for completeness on the whole "dogfood" issue, this is another comment Stein made:

>So I'll be able to use the _svn_ client to check out from the ASF git repo? Awesome. (...) We can dogfood svn against our own repo.

</comment><comment><USER10> Unless the author actually has access to the private mailing list where the vote supposedly took place, I still call BS. I believe this was a prank. I'm familiar with many of the commenters on the JIRA and they were very much out of their normal character.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really thought it was an April fools joke...

<comment><USER12> I read their Jira thread, and I was convinced it was a joke, too. The project manager mentioned some poll that no one else had heard of, and then other people kept coming up with reasons as to why it made sense to have had a short poll for such a major issue. I just assumed they were stringing everyone else along. :P

Honestly, if this _isn 't_ a joke, I think it doesn't really make SVN look bad (or dead). SVN's remaining proponents keep arguing that it works well in a corporate environment, while they agree that git is better for large, open- source projects. Well, SVN is a large, open-source project.

I'm still betting it's a joke, though.

<comment><USER13> I don't think it's a joke really. The ticket and a couple of comments would look like one. But multiple project leaders commenting more than once and (acting as if) getting quite annoyed with each other would be a massive waste of time for the whole org on a joke that doesn't need to be this long.

At this point, I think it's real...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, it was a joke. [0]

A pretty long one at that.

[0] [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment- tabpanel#comment-13957226)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm kind of confused at the people who thought this was an April Fool joke. Really? If the announcement was on a news site or blog, maybe, but a 'Task' issue on the INFRA JIRA is hardly the appropriate venue. Although, it seems that @jimjag (the ASF director) was pretty pissed at the Subversion PMC and lead [1] for making the decision without consulting the community, just taking a vote from the committers.

Note that the _interesting part_ of this is the move to use Git as the _back end storage engine_ for Subversion eventually, with 'svn' being just a client API. The code is available now in the 'ra-git' branch. [2] Also, see @gstein's comment to the committer, noting that using a Git repo for Subversion code will simplify testing the new libsvn_ra_git client when it's available:

> So I'll be able to use the _svn_ client to check out from the ASF git repo? > Awesome. [...] We can dogfood svn against our own repo. Thanks, Stefan

[1] [https://twitter.com/jimjag/status/450999640583053312](https://twitter.com/jimjag/status/450999640583053312) [2] [http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=r1583639](http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=r1583639)

<comment><USER16> Well this is embarrassing.

<comment><USER15> Isn't it? But, well played to the Subversion guys, et al. Was absolutely taken in... ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some interesting discussion going on in this ticket [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524)

<comment><USER18> This ticket is linked from the second word of the article. What does this comment add to the discussion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just think the PMC just figured out that they cannot compete with git and it's services (github, anyone?) so they are just doing the most natural thing to do using git. This is complemented with the ra_git upcoming release that will enable better svn/git integration. Having a svn that is able to talk with a git backend natively enables users to use tools designed for git also with svn. Many everyday git users i know complain about the verbose workflow that git imposes. Some of them even made scripts that mime svn update like behavior using git stash/pull --rebase and other svn like commands. So svn could really have a place being a git frontend with a simplified workflow

In short: may look silly, but in the long run i don't think it's a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm really surprised people thought this was serious. That's like RedHat announcing that they're switching their servers to IIS.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does this mean they won this year's April Fool's? [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedComm...](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?focusedCommentId=13957226&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment- tabpanel#comment-13957226)

</comment><comment><USER22> I just put a doc together on how to migrate from svn to git on my blog at [http://jmoses.co/2014/03/21/moving-from-svn-to- git.html](http://jmoses.co/2014/03/21/moving-from-svn-to-git.html) for all who is interested.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well it was just closed as Not a Problem and "April Fools" was added to the title.

</comment><comment><USER24> A joke or not, this makes SVN look bad.

As a SVN user I don't appreciate the message here. Every piece of technology is a platform that needs mindshare to survive. If it has no mindshare, it might as well be an excellent piece of engineering, but it'll still disappear.

In a perfectly rational world, with perfect communication, and universal understanding of everything, it wouldn't be a big deal - SVN and Git have different best use cases.

But in our _real_ world, this action gives excellent bullets for the anti-SVN people to use now in any discussion bringing Git vs. SVN.

<comment><USER25> I can't see this working out poorly for the pro-SVN people one way or the other. If you'd probably be better off with git, you should use git - but svn will certainly prove workable enough in the same situation. On the other hand, if you'd be better off with svn, most likely due to its locking functionality, by comparison git is very likely to prove painful enough to warrant a switch.

Ideally this will cement SVN's position in its niche. Most git users seem to deny that this niche even exists, but I think it is there. I see SVN's more natural competitor as Perforce (which currently beats SVN as handily as git does, though from the opposite direction), but its maintainers seem not to be bothering to take it on, presumably due to their perception of SVN's position in the marketplace. Were they to admit that it's lost to git on what has become git's home turf, which it seems that they're doing, perhaps this would help focus attention elsewhere...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> April Fools joke!!!

<comment><USER27> But so good because so very, very plausible.

</comment></comment><comment> Dorian-Marie If it is an April Joke, that would be ironic.

They think people would not take seriously, but as everybody knows, SVN is increasly being replaced with Git and that doesn't seem illogic even for them to use Git.</comment>


Little Snitch for phone? - <AUTHOR> Is there a program for the phone like Little Snitch? <comment><USER2> For Android: XPrivacy will alert you when apps attempt any type of network access and allows you to whitelist or blacklist specific hostnames or wildcards.

That isn't it's main/only function though. From their github page: "XPrivacy can prevent applications from leaking privacy-sensitive data by restricting the categories of data an application can access."

It is a module for the Xposed framework, and requires root.

[http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy](http://repo.xposed.info/module/biz.bokhorst.xprivacy)

[https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy](https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy)

</comment><comment><USER3> You can use most of the ones you use for Mac, but you have to set up a proxy so that the device traffic goes to your computer. Charles supports this directly.

[http://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/using- charles...](http://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/using-charles-from- an-iphone/)

</comment><comment><USER4> That's an (outbound) firewall for those not familiar with Little Snitch

</comment><comment><USER5> Not for iOS (unless jailbroken)

Android probably has something, would need root though.</comment>


Help HN: Does anyone need a programmer for the next two days? - <AUTHOR> I am in a bit of a tricky financial situation, and urgently need $300 by the next two days; no one I know is able to help me with this so I am reaching out to HN.
In return I will do any sort of programming you require for the next 48 hours solid. I can do web development(Experience with Javascript[ Node Meteor] Python[Django], Php[My own frameworks, CakePHP, Codeignitor... etc]), Java, C#...
Normally I would not post something like this but I am desperate. If you would like to know more email is in profile. <comment><USER3> I feel bad for you and actually considered simply advancing you $300. But then I saw this:

"From start to finish Devon wasted my time for nearly 6 months, teased me with a demo, then went AWOL, then came back from holiday without advising me and then still didn't provide any communication. I chased him for two months and been very patient but the lack of comms on his part was very frustrating. I would never deal with him again, as I cant trust his judgement and would not be confident for him to complete any work on time."

[https://www.elance.com/s/devonbarrett/job- history/?t=1](https://www.elance.com/s/devonbarrett/job-history/?t=1)

Noting that the other reviews by the same person don't fit that pattern:

[https://www.elance.com/e/public/Co5ig7n7zvxc7ns%257EoswA82UF...](https://www.elance.com/e/public/Co5ig7n7zvxc7ns%257EoswA82UFXEMJtbUiZqb%257EGxOsvm8-/)

Most of the other work for which you have positive reviews are for smaller dollar amounts.

Reason for the negative feedback?

<comment><AUTHOR> That project was hell.

It started as a simply Android and IOS apps. So I completed a version which outlined the basic idea that was agreed on along with an API that supported the apps. So once he was happy he paid the first milestone. Then I did go away on holiday for two weeks, I tried to send him an email but I saved it to my drafts by accident - my fault; and his right to be angry at that. We worked it out and agreed to continue. At this point I was waiting on him to provide the designs for the final part of the app. A week later still nothing, so we agreed to go on and have me just put a basic design to it, which I was unhappy about, as it was not what we agreed on, but I continued. Once I was done I went to run the app before sending it to him and it would not show any data...

He had another freelancer working on the site who had completely over written my API. He had no backups. So to make up for my loss of communication before I agreed to redo it for free, a week after agreeing to redo he cancelled the job and left that...

They are all small amounts other than the Karaoke Project, which went so well I have now been building new features for over a year on which is why it is still in continuation.

<comment><USER4> Might I suggest discussing version control with your clients in the future? "Collaboration" might be an over-charitable word for the relationship between you and the other freelancer, but even an agreement to commit in two branches to the same git repository (e.g. one hosted privately on [https://github.com/](https://github.com/) or [https://bitbucket.org/](https://bitbucket.org/)) would have gone a long way towards preventing this outcome. In this case, git would have kept a permanent backup of every new feature/fix in your development process, as well as each of the other freelancer's changes. You'd have been able to merge the two at every milestone (or every day!) with minimal pain.

If you're new to version control, GitHub has a nice git tutorial at [http://try.github.io/](http://try.github.io/).

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't worry I suggested it multiple times -_-

<comment><USER5> Give it away. Setup an org bitbucket account. Give other devs access - it's up to them whether or not to use it.

1) You have an out if others wreck the ship 2) At the very least you've backed up your stuff (good even if you're the only dev)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I notice your website has a projects page, but it's empty.

Can you tell us about anything you've worked on in the past?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I am in the process of creating the site. I'll stick to my web development history because that is probably the most appropriate.

I started the web development world in PHP where I used frameworks such as cakePHP, wordpress, codeignitior from there I progressed into python, Java Applets. Recently I have been really interested in Meteor and other java script frameworks. By far Meteor is my favorite tool of the moment.

In terms of what I have worked on: -Last year I was the lead developer on a web app that allowed users to create funeral programs and other memorial products. -I freelanced rewriting a music sharing/streaming service. -I have developed a multi-screen karaoke system for a London based Karaoke company. -I worked on a Medical system which allowed users to monitor their blood sugar level and receive alerts when it entered certain thresholds. ... and many more.

Please email me if you want more information about any of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you don't get a response, there is always odesk, freelancer, guru, etc..

<comment><USER8> Or do you have anything you could sell? That might be a quick way to get some money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Being the super geek I am, all the high value goods I own are either inside my computer or it is my bed.

<comment><USER8> Hmm maybe you could donate bone marrow then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can help out, and I do have a small (i.e. easily finished in a day) node.js project that I would love some help with. email me at the address in my profile if you haven't already found someone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just want to say a big thanks to everyone! I was completely taken a back by the reaction, and the fact this hit the front page astounded me - thank you! If I have not replied to you yet I will try to by the end of the night, I have been swamped. Thank you HN!

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to help a fellow hacker in need! We have a project that could use some django expertise. I'd love to see some of your work first though, mind sending it my way? My email is in my profile.

<comment><USER11> Do you mind if others contact you as well? I might be looking for Django work soon.

Also, the "email" section of HN profiles is private, so if you want other people to see your email put it in the "about" section.

EDIT: Soon as in "a couple weeks from now". Not trying to compete with the OP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do you need the money? Someone might be willing to float you if the reason/situation is valid.

<comment><AUTHOR> I brought an item last month with a deferred 30 day payment, which I was going to cover when a client I was freelancing for paid me last week. However, they have disappeared off the face of the earth and it does not look like they will reappear soon.

<comment><USER12> Is this you?

[http://mugshots.com/Current-Events/Devon- Barrett.7485208.htm...](http://mugshots.com/Current-Events/Devon- Barrett.7485208.html)

<comment><USER13> Why does it matter?

Trying to pull more information from people than they want to share is somewhat rude.

<comment><USER12> Because lending money is always about trust and managing risk.

In the context of potentially offering to float cash to a stranger - <USER2> getting a vague response about the exact situation requiring urgent cash - I'd like to know whether the person is trustworthy. Finding a mug shot that potentially resembles the cartoon version of the person requesting the cash from their website ( [http://www.devonbarrett.net/](http://www.devonbarrett.net/) ) I see no harm in asking whether the person in the mug shot with the same name and potentially similar physical attributes was the same person.

<comment><USER14> Except that he never asked anyone to lend him money. He asked for someone to hire him on a contract basis.

<comment><USER12> Totally accurate. But he also replied to my question about why he needed the money in the context of the money being a loan rather than for work performed, so I continued the discussion.

Personally, I'd trust somebody with $300 before I'd trust them with my codebase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I most likely would be willing to float you the money just email me, and we can talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the offer, but, where possible I would like to be able to work for it. But thank you very much though!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm afraid I can't help you out directly but I wish you best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> emailed

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! replied.

<comment><USER17> where'd you go? We were supposed to chat on Skype and you disappeared.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry everything swamped me, give me two mins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stop buying crack on credit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry the temptation is too much.

<comment><USER4> I like your style. Hope you find a good gig.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


17 cultural reasons why this European never wants to live in America - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/submit

<comment><USER2> [http://www.fluentin3months.com/no-usa-for- me/](http://www.fluentin3months.com/no-usa-for-me/) (2011)</comment>


DNA revealed the woolly mammoth's fate, and what it teaches us today - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/dna-reveal-woolly-mammoth-fate-beth-shapiro/ <comment><USER2> Original 2016 paper [1]. After the last glacial maximum, wooly mammoths went extinct on mainland Asia and North America about 10 kya but mammoths survived longer on two isolated islands.

This paper explains the extinction of the penultimate population 5.6 kya on St. Paul Island, Alaska (once part of Beringia). The extinction was caused by drought* conditions.

I wonder if this drought was specific to the current interglacial period or whether it is a cyclic event that occurred in each of the recent 100-kyr interglacials.

[1] [https://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9310](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/33/9310)

* Edit: corrected mispelling, thanks richrichardsson

<comment><USER3> kya?

<comment><USER4> It should technically just be "ka" which stands for kiloannum following ISO 80000-3:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Kiloannum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#Kiloannum)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article addresses how the very last surviving mammoths died out due to climate change on an isolated island in the Bering Sea. I think it's accepted at this point that mainland mammoths were hunted to extinction by plucky and clever bands of homo sapiens.

<comment><USER2> > mainland mammoths were hunted to extinction

Beth Shapiro's work on the _Rise and Fall of the Beringian Steppe Bison_ [1] supports an alternative narrative. Though I'm not sure why the last glacial termination was worse for large steppe fauna compared to previous ones. Maybe sapiens tipped the balance for a number of species already teetering on the brink of extinction every 100 kyr.

[1] [https://ir.lib.sfu.ca/item/15088](https://ir.lib.sfu.ca/item/15088)

<comment><USER6> The Younger Dryas saw temps swing from glacial temps to interglacial temps back to glacial temps before going back up to present-day Holocene temps: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas)

Those kind of oscillations in climate had to be massively disruptive for all life on earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not about mammoth dna, but about dna from organisms in a lake. I thought this would focus more on genetic isolation, but it's more about how resource isolation can cause a extinction.

<comment><USER2> It is not only about mammoth DNA but it was part of the mix which allowed them to determine exactly when mammoths disappeared (other proxies correlated to the timeline).

</comment></comment><comment> ur-whale Before you go read the article: this explains how _one_ _isolated_ group of Mammoths became extinct.

Unless I missed something, it doesn't explain how they all disappeared.

<comment><USER8> When the St. Paul mammoths died off, the population on the mainland had already been extinct for several thousand years, so the title is true, albeit somewhat trivially.

(There was also a contemporary population on Wrangel Island that lasted another thousand years or so, though they were likely hunted to extinction).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: An alternative to Uservoice and other feedback systems - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have a recommendation for something like Uservoice?<p>Almost all of my visitors (and the site itself) are in EU space, and some of them have voiced concerns over SaaS hosted in the US. It would be nice if it allowed submissions and voting without registration or login <and/or was self hosted>. <comment><USER2> Have you looked at "useresponse"?

[http://www.useresponse.com/faq](http://www.useresponse.com/faq) [http://www.community.useresponse.com/responses/php-source- co...](http://www.community.useresponse.com/responses/php-source-code-open- and-unencoded) [http://www.singularcore.com/](http://www.singularcore.com/) #This is the opensource engine based on php-zend framework.

For other alternatives look here: [http://alternativeto.net/software/uservoice-custumer- feedbac...](http://alternativeto.net/software/uservoice-custumer-feedback- system/) #Yeah, custOmer is spelled wrong ;)

disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with any of the products, just trying to help.

<comment><AUTHOR> So as far as I have searched, there isn't really one that's usable and not encrypted ioncubed crap.

Looks like I'm going to code then.</comment></comment>