Fossil vs Git - <AUTHOR> https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wiki <comment><USER2> I'm a big, huge fan of recording what should have happened instead of recording every typo and forgotten semicolon in your history. There's a difference between draft commits and published commits. When I'm reading published commits, i.e. history, I just want to know your intent, not your typos. So what are the tools that Fossil offers to make sure I don't have to see your typos in the history?

<comment><USER3> I'm also a big fan of not deleting data. I don't like squashing commits, for example. But I also want to be able to see high-level intent.

If instead of "squashing", it were "grouping", I'd be happy. I could encapsulate a bunch of messy commits that I made while I didn't know what I was trying to do. The intent would be clear at a higher level, but if you want to dig in to see what it actually took me to achieve that, you can see all my experimentation by looking at the commits inside the group.

Groups should be able to be nested, of course.

The only way I know how to achieve this in git is my relying on no-fast- forward merges. There's a post detailing this approach [1], but unfortunately a lot of git tools don't support this workflow that well. I haven't gotten it to work well in gitlab, for example.

[1] Git First-Parent-- Have your messy history and eat it too : [http://www.davidchudzicki.com/posts/first- parent/](http://www.davidchudzicki.com/posts/first-parent/)

<comment><USER2> You misunderstand me. Almost everyone does. I do not think you should squash all of your changes into a giant hairball commit, and I don't think first parent (which is effectively the same thing) solves this problem either.

I think _each_ of your commits should be _individually rewritten_ until each commit makes sense and tells a single, indivudal story that makes sense on its own, while at the same time be completely atomic and _as small as possible_.

You created a new function? That's one commit. Take a moment to explain why this function is going to be useful in future commits.

You called that new function from several new spots? That's another commit. Explain why each of these calling sites requires this function.

You decided that there had to be some style and whitespace changes? That's another commit. This one can go without explanation.

You found an old bug along the way that can be fixed with a one-line change? That's another commit. Hey, nice catch. Perhaps a few lines about this bug and why your small change fixes it?

Together, these are all individual scenes of a larger story. But the larger story doesn't need the behind-the-scenes of how you came up with these scenes. I don't need to see all your drafts of each scene. I just want the final scenes that make up the final story.

<comment><USER4> Ideally it should be this way, but it's impractical in reality.

It requires that you either stop your development workflow to commit as you go along, or that you untangle all the pieces after they're already entangled.

If you commit as you go, it's an expensive mental switch to fire up git and also run all the tests (since surely part of this workflow is to apply the principle that no commit should ever break the build). You also take an extra productivity hit every time you change your mind about something a little later (e.g. you added the function getFoo() but realize it should have been called findFoo()).

If you work for a while and then try to bundle up small, atomic changes, that can also be very difficult. Tools like git group together contiguous chunks of changes when committing, and prying them apart later can be difficult. I often do this with a combination of "add -p" and then "stash save -k" to temporarily get rid of things unrelated to what I'm committing, but it's a chore. During a selective "add -p" session you have to mentally keep track of what belongs together, thus what dependencies are between every chunk you're adding.

Committing as you go is easier, but it's slow, and doesn't work well when you're working across many files with a big change that introduces new semantics in a lot of places. _Both_ techniques require that you keep track mentally of which parts are related, of course.

<comment><USER2> Untangling is what I mostly do. I consider the untangling my own internal code review. I need to read my own diff and figure out what goes where and what each part does and why it's necessary. My commit messages are then my own code review comments.

I figure if I don't carefully read my own diff, why would anyone else? And once it's untangled, I am hoping others will find it easier to read too.

Git doesn't provide as many tools as I would like to make this process easier. It's partly why I don't use git. Mercurial's absorb command helps a lot: it absorbs changes from your working directory into the appropriate draft commit that corresponds to the same context:

[https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2018/11/05/absorbing-commit- ch...](https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2018/11/05/absorbing-commit-changes-in- mercurial-4.8/)

Wait, it appears someone finally ported it to git:

[https://github.com/tummychow/git-absorb](https://github.com/tummychow/git- absorb)

<comment><USER4> That's a cool script. I will definitely try that. Augmenting commits by doing partial commits then fixing with "git rebase -i" and squashing with "fixup" takes so much time and mental effort just to not make a mistake.

It still doesn't solve how to disentangle changes that have become interdependent. For that you have to concentrate on committing atomically and planning ahead a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I choose fossil at a time when it wasn't clear which one of fossil, Mercurial, or git would "win".

I choose it because it had a very clear and easy UI, guided you towards a way of working that is suitable for small teams (ie 99.99% of all projects), and had an approach to history which made it unlikely you'd ever accidentally lose work.

The only thing which has ever made me sad about my choice is pressure from people who think everyone should use git.

It also has some very nice features, like being able to give you a full web UI just by running it as a CGI process on a web server.

It is worth trying (and it can import and export git history). Just remember it's not git.

<comment><USER6> Been there, but with Mercurial. We chose it because it has sane CLI interface (as opposed to git), but eventually had to switch because we wanted to use GitLab. Not much difference all in all, except with git I still need to search the net to find a proper command, while with hg I could usually guess it and just checked help for confirmation. It saddens me that git won... Awful UX. But they had GitHub and now GitLab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Git: One check-out per repository_

 _Fossil: Many check-outs per repository_

git allows multiple checkouts per repo.

Official docs (good luck): [https://git-scm.com/docs/git- worktree](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree)

Random person's blog that explains it more clearly: [https://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2017/05/git-worktree- notes/](https://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2017/05/git-worktree-notes/)

<comment><USER8> I have no idea what use case is satisfied by git worktree, based on that blog post. In the case that you desperately needed to have two branches checked out, why not just clone twice?

<comment><USER9> With multiple clones, you would need to remember to update each clone regulary not only from remote, but also push/pull locally in case you want to compare your state with other branches.

A 'git checkout' on a large repository such as the Linux kernel may take a while (bound by I/O performance). Regulary switching between branches with many changed files becomes annoyingly slow.

If you keep multiple clones, you actually keep multiple copies of the full history, which seems like a waste of disk space (yes, deduplicating filesystems exist, but are rarely used).

git worktrees are also very useful if you have unfinished on a release branch. You do not have to make temporary commits or stashes you forget about, you can just leave the modified files as they are and switch to a different worktree to continue your work on another branch.

<comment><USER10> `git clone --local` does hardlinks, space usage is quite low, so I'm not really sure that part holds up. Maybe in Windows? Switching branches can definitely be slow tho, yeah. Do worktrees change that somehow tho?

From all I've read so far (quite limited!) they just sound like replacements for `git stash` or making a temporary commit / branch, but with a new set of commands and rules to learn. I don't find `git commit -am tmp` (literally, I just do that) to be particularly worth optimizing further, and worktrees so far sound like substantially more work.

\---

edit: ah, yeah, updating multiple clones is definitely annoying / easy to forget, totally agreed there. that alone might make it worthwhile. I only need it like once a year so I probably won't, but I do know some coworkers who do it a lot.

<comment><USER9> git worktrees can also be useful if your build system needs different arguments per branch. For example if you keep multiple release branches installed side-by-side on your machine, it is easier to just run `./configure --prefix=/opt/release-X.Y` only once on a worktree instead of repeating this procedure every time you switch branches. That way you can even keep all your object files around and save the time to compile them again.

The same also applies to languages such as Python or Node.js, where you might have a different set of dependencies depending on the branch and don't want to regenerate your virtualenv or node_modules on every branch switch.

<comment><USER10> aaahh, so it can track un-tracked files too? that I can definitely see being useful - the lack of a "local" / "remote" git ignore split makes this kind of thing hard :|

(yea, there's .git/info/exclude, but you can't add it to a branch and have it only exist locally. and it has weird interactions when something becomes tracked later.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the bullet point advantages listed for Fossil of allowing multiple checkouts per repository is also supported by Git. There has always been a way to do it, but since Git 2.5 or so, the "worktree" sub command was added for this purpose.

<comment><USER12> Huh. I've just used another git clone of the repo, but the worktree command seems to fit my uses very well. Thanks.

<comment><USER13> Git clone is still a fine solution, and the one I prefer.

Worktree adds the ability to share config and save disk space.

<comment><USER14> The other advantages of worktree are: you can update the remotes of all the checkouts at once with git fetch and you can see all the places your repository is checked out with a git command.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the features in Fossil and not in git:

> Branches in Fossil have persistent names that are propagated to > collaborators via push and pull. All developers see the same name on the > same branch. Git, in contrast, uses only local branch names, so developers > working on the same project can (and frequently do) use a different name for > the same branch.

Since the default is to use the name from upstream when checking out a branch, the vast majority of the time devs working in git also use the same name for a branch. Given that, this seems better stated as a feature for git (Easily Renamed Branches, perhaps).

<comment><USER15> That is very silly of the Fossil community. On the surface Fossil branching is a lot like Mercurial branching, but under the covers it's just like Git's branching: branches are just bookmarks for commits. And Git very much has local tracking branches (that track upstream branches), so it's as Fossil-like as you want, but doesn't pretend to enforce a merge-only workflow.

That's really the bottom line when it comes to Git vs. all the others: Git doesn't enforce a merge-only workflow, not even as a default, while all the others generally do.

Mercurial, for example, resisted adding cherry-pick and rebase for the longest time (just like Fossil), and when they finally added it they had to do it in gratuitously different ways from Git (e.g., you can rebase, or rewrite history, but not both at once) because they are so damned opinionated about how we all should do do our work. So now Mercurial has rebase, and it has "bookmarks" (i.e., Git-style light-weight branching), but you still can't really use it without heavy-weight branching, and you can still get into trouble where you end up with multiple tips on a branch, and it still tries to hide the machinery underneath, which makes it difficult to reason about.

Fossil also tries to hide the machinery underneath it, and that's its big sin. Just like Mercurial. The irony is that under the covers Fossil is a lot like Git but with a fabulous SQL store.

I believe the Fossil maintainers simply do not understand rebase. Or why it's necessary when you have thousands of people working on a codebase.

At Sun we did rebasing long long before that term existed, way back in the 90s (well before I went to work for them), and we did it using ancient tech known as Teamware. That's where Larry McVoy got some of his ideas, and thence Linus Torvalds. Later, when we selected Mercurial, we ended up doing rebase in Mercurial long before Mercurial adopted the feature -- we still didn't call it that, and it was all scripted. Indeed, you can rebase on Fossil just fine, if you're willing to script it around Fossil's primitive cherry-pick (which, incidentally, is pretty much how rebase is implemented in Git, though nowadays it's not scripted).

My theory is that Git -or any VCS- is only difficult to understand if you insist on abstractions that hide its mechanics completely. Abstractions are absolutely critical to what we do, so this might seem a bit incongruous, but I'm not asking for no abstractions here, just that their being leaky is actually a very useful thing in the context of VCS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Fossil, in contrast, puts more emphasis on recording exactly what happened, > including all of the messy errors, dead-ends, experimental branches, and so > forth.

I think this is an interesting distinction. The question is: what is the function of the history? Is it to document what happened - and if so, shouldn't every keystroke be committed? Or is it to document which changes relate together, and e.g. should be reverted together? Or perhaps something else entirely?

One thing that isn't mentioned is whether Fossil supports working offline as well as Git does. My impression from this page is that it emphasising creating every branch on a server as well, which implies you need to be connected? If so, I'd consider that a "missing feature" as well, as it's something I use regularly enough and that's important enough that it'd be something I'd miss if it weren't there.

<comment><USER17> > One thing that isn't mentioned is whether Fossil supports working offline as > well as Git does. My impression from this page is that it emphasising > creating every branch on a server as well, which implies you need to be > connected? If so, I'd consider that a "missing feature" as well, as it's > something I use regularly enough and that's important enough that it'd be > something I'd miss if it weren't there.

The way fossil works is that by default autosync is turned on, which means that _if_ you are connected to the internet all of your commits, wiki and issue tracker changes are synced to the server.

In the case that you're not connected, everything still works as expected, and will sync back up next time you're online and try to commit or just run `fossil update`.

<comment><USER16> Thanks, that makes sense then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your commit history should read like a published novel, not a first draft.

I think I might've read something like that in the Pro Git book and it rings true with me.

The philosophy of Fossil is to preserve the full history, which I think is a mistake.

<comment><AUTHOR> A nice feature would be the ability to group and split commits afterwards; like adding a "novel branch". So that you could keep both the exact history and a parallel high level description.

<comment><USER19> Your high-level description resemble a cover letter used on some open-source project to introduce a patch series, justifying the changes.

You could achieve the same by using an empty commit, or tracking those in the bug tracker.

DCVSs are already complex enough, this just seems like scope creep, trying to emulate a feature that is actually part of another tool (the bug tracker or the mailing list, depending on the structure).

Another issue is that it would foster a mentality where people would simply don't care about the exact history and push really badly structured commits, relying on the second-level history to explain their work. Except that if someone publishes something, it's not for this person, it's to be read by other people. The dev could keep a local branch with all their commits if they are so inclined, but that should never be sent to a shared server.

Most people are already bad enough at writing proper commits and dividing their work, I think your feature would make it worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ugh. Certainly there are things that git could do better but reading this makes me want to run far away from Fossil and never look back.

You can argue about whether "the Unix philosophy" is best for specific tools like version control, and maybe you can argue that "the Unix philosophy" isn't really about simple vs complex tools. But I don't think I've ever heard nor would I think you could find evidence that the Unix philosophy is "it just works". That claim makes me pretty certain that this is a tool I want to avoid at all costs. And the tone of the rest of this article confirms it.

<comment><USER15> My feeling as well. It's sad because Fossil underneath the covers is a lot like Git, but with a SQL RDBMS as the store. Fossil's design is much more powerful than Git's for that reason alone. But that super-opinionated attitude they have is a disaster. Run away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Git puts a lot of emphasis on maintaining a "clean" check-in history.

This seems like an inaccurate phrasing of this. Git (the tool) doesn't specifically emphasize this, but it does support this as a possible approach without excluding the other approach. Many teams have settled on development approaches with git that do indeed emphasize this, but not every team does. If you want to show your work, you sure can, but unlike fossil, git does not force this upon developers. Like the article, I don't see either approach as right or wrong, but know that I prefer the clean history approach rather than every typo commit ever.

<comment><USER22> Git's linear presentation of history encourages rebasing or squashing. Mercurial keeps the branch structure, which has the advantages of both squashed and unsqusahed commits.

<comment><USER21> I use the following fairly regularly (aliased):

        git log --graph --oneline

I can understand how you could see this as an advantage, but I see forcing this on the developer as more of a disadvantage. I literally never want to see in any history commits with junk attempts to fix something. After the fact, these are the least interesting things to me.

<comment><USER22> That doesn't keep the branch names. It also doesn't help bisect complex merges. Git may be better at that now, to be fair. So many projects rebase or squash that I haven't had to do it in a while.

Mercurial can rewrite history in the same ways as Git.

I never want to see junk commits, but I can't force other people to spend time cleaning them up. Squashing cleans them up quickly but loses useful information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In my experience, feature sets tend to converge within product categories, but I'm happiest in the long term with the program whose original design decisions I'm most sympathetic with.

In fossil's case this was architectural simplicity, an easy-to-use basic set of commands with a discoverable set of expanded commands that always seemed to meet my needs as they cropped up, collaboration features in the pre-GitHub era were killer. There are a few discrete layers of hackability for customization with minimal risk of blowing your project away.

Fossil still meets my needs admirably, and I stick with it even though it's harder to make the case for it in the current era of feature convergence.

<comment><USER15> Fossil's design and implementation are indeed admirable. Its insistence on merges is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As someone currently working in a project where parts are managed with git and others with fossil, I have a strong preference towards git. One major issue with fossil is the non-existent ecosystem. It simply does not integrate well with other frameworks and tools (e.g. Yocto/OE). Migrating to git entirely would be much better for the team and workflow as a whole, but unfortunately the seniors who are using fossil are quite hostile towards git, for mostly political reasons. The irony is that they have big performance issues with fossil, precisely due to the fact that fossil records everything and the push/pull commands sync the entire repo, not just one branch.

Fossil also lacks an equivalent to git submodules, which should be added to the list of features found in git, but not in fossil.

</comment><comment><USER25> The Fossil Logo [1] resembles so much the Lisp Lizard! [2]

[1] [https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki](https://fossil- scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

[2] [http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/logo_lisp.html](http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/logo_lisp.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> I agree with those who said they prefer git's "clean" commit history.

</comment><comment><USER27> The comparison table in section 2 could just as easily live in the git docs, under a page called "why use git instead of fossil".

</comment><comment><USER28> git-worktree seems to give git the multiple-checkouts feature.

Also, this page seems to do the common but frustrating thing of advertising how something is implemented as a feature. I'm sure it's very interesting to the developers that it uses a database in the backend or that your side- project is written in a niche language but, as an end user, I just don't care.

<comment><USER29> Here is an attempt to clarify why I think implementation does matter: [https://www.sqlite.org/whynotgit.html#git_makes_it_difficult...](https://www.sqlite.org/whynotgit.html#git_makes_it_difficult_to_find_successors_descendents_of_a_check_in)

When the design of a system makes something difficult, people tend to avoid doing that thing. The Git data design makes extracting some kinds of historical information difficult, with the result that many common tools (ex: GitHub) don't bother. This reduces the information available to users, resulting in reduced situational awareness.

I make no claim that Fossil is perfect in this regard. My only claim is that Fossil is better.

Whether you use Fossil or not, I don't much care. But I really would like you to understand some of the features of Fossil that (I think) make it better than Git, and perhaps start adding some of those features to your favorite VCS, be it Git or something else. Understand the general concepts, then port those concepts to other systems.

<comment><USER15> Fossil is better. Because it has a better design. Because it uses SQL (which makes it possible to write queries on the fly in ways that cannot be done in other VCSes). The use of SQL, and Fossil's use of fairly generic SQL, allowing the use of RDBMSes other than SQLite3, is brilliant, and would make it trivial to make Fossil scale better than MSFT is making Git scale, though with the caveat that you'd probably still end up wanting things like a Bloom filter for speeding up file-level log/blame, but you could probably make Bloom filters a transparent, RDBMS-level query optimization.

Fossil is worse. Because it doesn't have a CoW design in the format of its DB, though it does have a CoW design in its SQL schema. However, because SQLite3 is so good at handling power failures and such, this has not been a big deal (and indeed, Git has had more problems there owing to its ad-hoc storage model). This, of course, could be fixed by adopting a CoW backend for Fossil. This problem is hardly fatal.

Fossil is worse. Because of its insistence on merge workflows and not implementing rebase.

Fossil is worse. Because it has minimal mindshare. Mindshare is absolutely critical. The lack of rebase support is part of the reason that Fossil cannot get the kind of mindshare that would allow it to replace Git. And it may well be too late, but you never know.

It turns out that rebase is the more critical thing for me and many others. I think the Fossil community doesn't know it and doesn't get it because the projects it deals with don't have thousands of developers active every day. And, of course, rebase is really just a feature that can be built by using scripting on top of a cherry-pick primitive (which Fossil does have), so there's no real excuse for not having it.

Incidentally, GitHub used to also insist on merges in its browser UI, but eventually they added the "rebase and merge" feature.

Mercurial too resisted rebase. Boy did they. And they gave in and implemented it. Ironically many people rebased in Mercurial long before the feature was adopted -- we did, in Solaris engineering, a dozen years ago.

My prediction is that Fossil too will eventually support rebase (out of the box) for the same sorts of reasons that all other VCSes have tended to get it.

If I had to use Fossil, the first thing I'd do is script a rebase around cherry-picking. Because I could, because the market demands this feature, because it's a built-in feature of competing, more-successful VCSes, Fossil ought to adopt it. You wouldn't have to use it. You might have a way to turn it off on a project-by-project basis. But the rest of us should get to use it on our projects.

All in all, I neither use nor recommend Fossil. But I am envious, and I would use it, if it had rebase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Funny how they say that Git uses a "Bazaar-style development" process when Bazaar literally is another VCS.

I'm also not convinced it's a good idea to merge your bug tracker and version control.

<comment><USER31> There's a famous comparison of development styles that in turn predates the Bazaar software by years if not a decade.

<comment><USER32> Here's the wikipedia article about this work: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Push or pull a single branch

> The fossil push, fossil pull, and fossil sync commands do not provide the > capability to push or pull individual branches. Pushing and pulling in > Fossil is all or nothing. This is in keeping with Fossil's emphasis on > maintaining a complete record and on sharing everything between all > developers.

This is a kind of deal breaker if it just pushes all of my private WIP branches to remote. Is there any genuine use case for this kind of functionality? Apart from that, this looks interesting.

<comment><USER34> Fossil does have private branches[0] and the recommended way to publish private work is to integrate it into a non-private branch and sync as usual.

[0] [https://www.fossil- scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/private.wiki](https://www.fossil- scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/private.wiki)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Always surprises me how Fossil is popular on HN but very much not outside a few projects (e.g. sqlite)

<comment><USER29> Some data:

The fossil-scm.org server gets between 1500 and 2000 distinct human visitors per day on weekdays. (Lower traffic on weekends. Robots are excluded from the count. "distinct" means visitors having different IP addresses.) This is perhaps orders of magnitude less than git-scm.org (I'm guessing - anybody have stats?) but it is also non-trivial. With ~1750 visitors per day _somebody_ must be using it. And I would guess that most actual users do not visit the site daily. (When was the last time you visited git-scm.org?)

FWIW, today has already seen in excess of 10,000 distinct human IPs, likely due to this HN post.

<comment><USER35> > When was the last time you visited git-scm.org?

Like most people, I go to Google which then redirects me to the correct Stack Overflow question/answer the most often. I think git-scm.org is mostly a guide to get started and the reference documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Previous discussion 9 months ago about the "Why SQLite Does Not Use Git" page at [https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html](https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html) which has much of the same info: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16806114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16806114)

</comment><comment><USER37> > SQLite uses cathedral-style development. 95% of the code in SQLite comes > from just three programmers, 64% from just the lead developer. And all > SQLite developers know each other well and interact daily. Fossil is > designed for this development model.

Is this not terrifying? I've always thought the distributed nature of git is part of why it's so incredible. Not relying on a few handful of individuals.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The ability to show descendents of a check-in.

This is interesting. I wonder if the same thing could be achieved fairly simply in git though by keeping an extra area in the .git folder that handles reversing / denormalizing the DAG for some of the things that these reports show.

Microsoft are innovating in this area (bringing the improvements that they have in VSTS to the client). There's a good series of blog posts on this at [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/tag/git/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/tag/git/) (first article [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/06/25/superchar...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/06/25/supercharging- the-git-commit-graph/))

</comment><comment><USER38> fossil is also the name of a file system server on Plan 9 that dealt with hashes on the venti archival storage server.

[https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man4/fossil.html](https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man4/fossil.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> I think it really comes down to preference. Both work well and for different reasons and styles. Including tech notes and docs into the VCS could be nice, if you use it, but like most project management, it comes down to how you work-- that's one reason why there isn't a one-size-fits-all project management product that is infintely better than any other offering. There are plenty of times I wished I had something like the embedded tech notes to explain design decisions. I use git myself currently, but I've wanted to dip my toes into fossil for awhile to see if it matched my workflow. I think storing the whole repo in an SQLite database was brilliant-- self contained and you don't have a problem slicing the data to get things like all parent commits or descendant commits.

</comment><comment><USER40> As someone not versed in either, how much does not being able to track changes forward through the history matter? It sounds like that might be pretty important, but git's popularity would seem to indicate that it doesn't really matter in practice?

<comment><USER41> I have to say, I've used Git for many years now and I've never, ever, ever wished for this, nor even knew it wasn't possible. So this seems like a silly thing to claim as an advantage for Fossil.

<comment><USER29> I never thought I needed bisect, until I had it. Now I can't live without it.

<comment><USER41> Yeah totally fair point. I figured there's probably some usecase I haven't run into for this feature. Still, I think it says something that I've never missed it despite some fairly advanced Git usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The fossil all command

In git, this is pretty much a oneliner script dropped in your path and named `git-all`.

Something like (typing from memory on my non-work computer):

        #!/bin/bash
        find . -type d -depth 1 -exec git -C {} "$@" \;

Which allows any of the following to just work (I usually alias these commands):

        git all status
        git all status --short --branch
        git all pull --rebase

</comment><comment><USER29> Additional links for the curious:

[https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/quotes.wiki](https://fossil- scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/quotes.wiki)

[https://www.sqlite.org/whynotgit.html](https://www.sqlite.org/whynotgit.html)

<comment><USER42> I'll pull what I consider an important quote into this thread:

> _"SQLite uses cathedral-style development. 95% of the code in SQLite comes > from just three programmers, 64% from just the lead developer. And all > SQLite developers know each other well and interact daily. Fossil is > designed for this development model."_

FWIW, I consider this an extraordinarily productive development model.

Agile may be about People and Interactions over Processes and Tools, but (and it's too often forgotten) all dev must first be about effective output in the problem space. So, how do you optimize ratio of Outcomes to People/Interactions/Processes/Tools? This model.

FWIW, I also consider Linus' and Guido's "BDFL" approach a way the bazaar is channeled back into a cathedral.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://gist.github.com/nicowilliams/a6e5c9131767364ce2f4b39...](https://gist.github.com/nicowilliams/a6e5c9131767364ce2f4b3996549748d)

</comment><comment><USER43> I use Fossil for my own projects; I find it is less confusing than Git. However, I use cathedral style for my own projects, so that helps; I manage all of the code by myself but nevertheless will allow anyone to look at the code, make their own version with their own modifications (a fork of the project) (and do whatever they want with their own copy of the code), make bug reports, and submit patches for me to review, but not to directly write to the code repository (only I do that).

</comment><comment><USER44> Would you recommend using fossil for Unity3D projects? Needs to exclude certain files and being able to deal with binary files.

<comment><USER45> Just giving my experience - I working in rendering graphics and use fossil for version control. Some of my repos are more than 100GiB in size and fossil has no problem with it. Fossil handles binary files adequately but the only catch is file size is limited to SQLite 'Blob' size limits (which is currently 2GiB). So if you have asset files larger than 2GiB, you'll have to split it into multiple files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The comparison on GPL vs BSD is henious. The only disadvantage is that you lose the opportunity to be selfish.

</comment><comment><USER47> The comparison lacks a big item: distributed-ness: the whole git-remote push & pull symmetry. It allows not only offline bare-minimum operation, but full offline development, then later online merging. I don't see any signs that fossil can do the same.

The comparison re. licenses is factually mistaken in several ways, but that's probably not worth a great deal of discussion - it's too religious a topic.

<comment><USER48> Most comparisons points out the major differences, rather than all the ways they are the same.

As you can see from bullet point #5 from the fossil home page, it works offline:

> CGI/SCGI Enabled - No server is required, but if you want to set one up, > Fossil supports four easy server configurations.

and #6 concerns later online merging:

> Autosync - Fossil supports "autosync" mode which helps to keep projects > moving forward by reducing the amount of needless forking and merging often > associated with distributed projects.

There's also the quick start guide with an overview of distributed-ness - [https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/quickstart.wiki](https://fossil- scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/quickstart.wiki) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Some of those features are not features.

</comment><comment><USER50> That comparison table made me dislike fossil even more. Fossil took something that's not broken, and broke it.

<comment><USER45> I disagree. I would suggest you to atleast research it more before coming to such strong conclusions.

<comment><USER50> You're right; did more research and it makes more sense considering the problem niche it's solving. I jumped to assumptions too soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> ldap [https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/tktview/ec667f74f8](https://www.fossil- scm.org/xfer/tktview/ec667f74f8)

</comment><comment><USER52> svn again?

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm surprised git caught on despite mercurial being much superior (hadn't heard of fossil before). Git has the following shortcomings which are major (some shared by other VCS too)

1) UI- terrible, terrible UI

2) Unncessarily complex data model

3) Doesn't scale well to large repos (until Microsoft's VFS- windows only)

(and many others...)

<comment><USER54> Git won over Mercurial simply due to Github. There were some other minor contributing factors - association with Linus, speed - but they are insignificant compared to how popular Gihub was (for good reason) and therefore how many people were exposed to git.

The Mercurial alternatives like bitbucket just didn't have the same spread, and we got stuck with year after year of teaching new people a difficult interface.

<comment><USER55> Git won the war before GitHub existed. More projects were switching to git than hg.

GitHub was then mirroring open source projects git repos without asking. (Which I think is fine, but ruffled some feathers back then)

GitHub could have easily been hghub, but they targeted git because it was already winning.

<comment><USER22> Git was more popular for C, Perl, and Ruby. Mercurial was more popular for Java and Python. It was far ahead on Windows. Google and Atlassian bet on Mercurial well after GitHub existed. The idea that only one could win would have been strange to a lot of people at the time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why does Meetup use a massively long identifier in email verifications? - <AUTHOR> It's so long, it seems rather inefficient. Why?<p>Example: http://meet.meetup.com/wf/click?upn=pEEcc35imY7Cp0tG1yyTt-2BUBUoslNY-2BF5OpsN3Z-2B5GTP6dMs-2BjiVa79z-2BxCFoE0drJuI1EtUdyxnjPvAa2lBegHXkhLo3sGSLIKeLILvN49WNN69trj7APyfH86IArfi_UOCYJbMP7egxXfSOcMVtXoGiwcAh1owf-2F2SXfDH6qtGdLaPDQ2J-2BAHSDPPn3GNACaCM8fkS5c8B1bitAqQjLJUKWvK8nWogCDls-2BrGLd4LWpc2d4mG6rlc6uaYTcfDB5P1SQjPBo6Rj5FtPFUC86bPGH7Ck7fx69YEzOJvrJMji7BtRQxToTLB7S565BbWDFN183oUjE4c1dQhRB7Fu5hJNa4awX5o1sJDp19-2FLaE-2B8-3D <comment><USER2> It's not likely to be an identifier. It's most likely a base64-encoded JSON, or some other similar encoding, followed by an HMAC. Probably the encoded data includes a nonce too, which is a largish random number.

Why write something to a database if you can stick it in the url instead? When you stick it in the url it lasts exactly as long as a user is interested in it. If you stick it in a database and give out an identifier you then have to expire it out of the database some time later. This either disappoints users because you expired it too soon, or costs you to store it for longer than it was needed. The HMAC ensures that they can ignore any data that was modified by a curious hacker.

</comment><comment><USER3> That looks like a white-labelling (i.e. custom domain) of SendGrid's click tracking feature.

As db38x noted, SendGrid is likely encoding a bunch of data in the link to keep things simple/fast on the back end. Possibly it's the actual target URL and some associated data like the link text.

It's also likely that they're conservative on the encoding they use to prevent issues with different email clients (looks like Alphanumeric, dash and underscore only).

That saves them tracking all that data in a database, which I presume at SendGrid's scale is quite a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah - I had not considered SendGrid.

From an absolute security perspective, using some sort of hash or similar unique ID then referencing a database seems like the strongest solution.

But you are right, at large scale encoding the data in the URL plus some sort of HMAC would provide strong security with no database overhead, which I'm sure becomes significant at scale.

Might be interesting to try and reverse engineer their approach. Hash algorithms have a rather long history of being proven weaker than hoped... Especially down the road this could lead to some interesting possible exploits, mostly if the link was related to some kind of account a little more sensitive than meetup.com

Thanks for clarifying my thinking on this matter...</comment></comment>


Sodomy Hazing Leaves 13-Year-Old Victim Outcast in Colorado Town - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-20/sodomy-hazing-leaves-13-year-old-victim-outcast-in-colorado-town.html

<comment><USER2> _In at least four cases of sodomy hazing last year, the coach or supervising teacher was alleged to have known about it, ordered it, witnessed it or laughed about it, according to police reports and court filings._

Ugh. (Sounds like an argument for homeschooling.) I cannot imagine dealing with something like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> _While little research has been done on boy-on-boy sexual hazing, almost 10 percent of high school males reported being victims of rape, forced oral sex or other forms of sexual assault by their peers, according to a 2009 study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence._

</comment><comment><USER4> This is horrible...I will never understand why people do things like this.

I am glad to see that the victim stuck with wrestling as it is a great sport that has had a positive impact on many people's lives.

<comment><USER5> It is terrible, made my palms sweat. But seeing the reaction from The Authorities and the townspeople (misdemeanor charges, "After the principal reported the incident to police, townspeople forced him to resign") makes me think twice about the fear of exposure of hazing I have seen from victims. Kind of makes me think we should advise kids to take justice into their own hands, maybe. The victims might feel a bit redeemed after vigilante action, and AT LEAST THEY TRIED.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who attacks the victim, dismissing it as no big deal, should be forced to experience the EXACT same thing themselves. I bet that would change their tiny little minds in a hurry.</comment>


Why Online Dating (Still) Sucks, and a Simple Attempt at Fixing It - <AUTHOR> http://remarkedly.com/2012/02/21/why-online-dating-sucks/ <comment><USER5> The rash of online dating startups always strikes me as a misguided use of people's efforts. I can appreciate that people think there's something they can contribute to it, and that they see it as a really positive win for social interaction (and I think people should work on what they want to work on).

But the thing is, dating sucks. Full stop. And online dating is merely trying to slightly reduce the friction for the very tiniest part at the very beginning of it. It seems to miss the whole fundamental reason why online dating is hard, which is that dating is hard, and not easily abstracted.

Online dating is a misnomer, it's basically just online meeting of people.

<comment><USER6> > But the thing is, dating sucks.

Wait, what? No, dating in person is awesome. New people, endless possibilities, women laughing at jokes, stories and anecdotes your actual friends already heard 50 times, that slight rush with every approach, the new persona every time you're a little bored with your life... it's like travelling but less expensive and only takes an evening at a time.

Online dating sucks because it turns all that delicate social interaction into comparing of compatibility lists while those lists go out the window two minutes into a conversation in real life. Dating sites completely lack the ability to transmit behaviour, mannerisms, social reflexes, looks (photos barely count), all those characteristics of a person that actually matter, and instead basically allow anyone to publish their dating resume.

<comment><USER5> You bring up an interesting point, in that I stipulated that dating sucks as a fact, and that it never even occurred to me that it wasn't a universally held belief.

Because I can't think of anyone, besides those Seduction knuckleheads, who enjoys dating. Single people I know hate dating. People in relationships I know see the end goal that justifies all the awfulness that is dating, but are happy to move past it. And people I know who were in relationships but are now single again (divorced predominantly)are horrified by the thought of being back there.

<comment><USER7> Do you think meeting new people in general sucks too?

I think all the people I've managed to convince to meet me have been pleasant to hang out with. It's not so hard.

There are a few scenarios that might seem bad. If you're trying very hard to make an impression, it can make the situation unnatural and you won't feel comfortable either. Another reason might be feeling disappointed if the other person is not attracted to you.

I'm quite talkative and interested in many subjects though. If the other person plays along normally, it's easy to get laid back interaction. It would have been much harder to go on dates when I was 18. And probably the "opponents" have improved a lot too.

I also respect other people's right to not be interested in me. We all have our own lives.

For me the worst part is the early part when you're supposed to get some response out of the women, to get them to meet you in person. The yield is so low that it often feels like it's not worth the effort.

I think I've gotten myself motivated when thinking of it as meeting a random, likely nice and potentially interesting person. And both of you can decide what happens after that. Most likely not much. But even then it's been a quite pleasant experience compared to sitting at home on a computer.

Of all the people I've met through internet dating, I've ended up dating with one, am friends with many and don't keep contact with a few. But all have been positive experiences.

If I reverse the "filter" idea and think about the women that have had the most influence on me, I'd say it'd be pretty hard to separate them from a general mass of good people. So the filtering has probably a really low probability roof.

In keeping with the reverse problem theme, one could of course try the Bayesian approach. You take people who you know match and examine what makes it so you get a probable model. And then apply that model to unknown people. There are probably some general models (people like this are attracted to people like that) but also person specific models (this person is attracted to people like this).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Online dating is a sausagefest. It's the biggest sausagefest ever. I'm not basing this on any scientific or quantitative information at all, just my own personal experiences from online dating from 2004-2008, the end of which was when I met my now-fiancee.

The "sausagefest syndrome" is inherently why so many online dating sites suck. Guys sign up and get barely any responses to their profiles or messages. Girls sign up and get immediately overwhelmed with messages, some interesting but the rest mostly boring or creepy. Guys get frustrated at the lack of traction and leave. Girls get overwhelmed by too much attention and leave. It doesn't help when the online dating sites start using fake profiles and pictures to give the false illusion it's not a sausagefest.

I've seen friends sign up for Match.com and be like, "this sucks, they have no matches for me," and then I find they're looking for half-Asian half-Russian college-educated non-smoking dog-owners in a 2.5 mile radius, or something like that. That's almost guaranteed to not work. Unfortunately the alternative is some sort of "shotgun strategy," which if done poorly, means sending a message to 50 girls with the same copy-pasted canned sentences, which only contributes to the women being overwhelmed. You still need to aim the shotgun. I effectively had a routine where I'd spend an evening looking through profiles, only ruling out absolute deal-breakers, and then sent a message that while mostly short, at least made some reference to the actual girl. Out of 20 messages I'd get like 5 responses, which would lead to 2 phone calls, and probably 1 actual date. Rinse, repeat.

Yeah, it's kind of annoying to fill out a profile and all that, but to me that's never been the problem. I feel there's a lot more social friction to get women to sign up for these sites, because while online dating to guys is basically, "well, why not, it's another possible way to meet girls," to girls it's, "this is admitting I am incompetent at/undeserving of finding love." Until that's overcome, online dating will always be a poor experience for a lot of people that try it.

How do you overcome it? In a drunken night with friends a couple months ago, I started rambling about an online dating site that _embraced_ the male-female disparity, and basically would pair up something like 3-4 guys to every girl, and set up dates where you'd all go out like "The Bachelorette." There's a lot of reasons why that idea would be a hard sell, but if anyone ever does successfully do it, just make sure to give me my cut[0].

[0] <http://xkcd.com/827/>

<comment><USER9> The male/female ratio on major dating sites is much closer to 50/50 than the message ratio would have you believe. The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more aggressive in the dating arena.

For the "unfortunate" women who tragically receive too many messages, just implement something like LinkedIn's brilliant "InMail" system. Make it cost money to send a premium message. Now these women can focus on premium messages if they don't have time for the spammers. Even better, let the women choose how much it costs to send them a message. There, real-life dating boiled down to its essence.

<comment><USER10> > _"The fact that men send the vast majority of the messages is the inevitable > result of a positive feedback loop stemming from men being slightly more > aggressive in the dating arena."_

I think it's more complex than this.

It's a convergence of many problems really. The first, and _greatest_ problem with online dating is:

 _1_ \- Words are a really fucking shitty communications medium. Few people are good writers, and even fewer people are good writers when limited to the span of a few paragraphs. Body language and personality are far more self- expressive, but we have no good ways to pushing this information across the internet. Because of this, there is a _tremendous_ reduction in range of communication. All the profiles start to read the same, because we've essentially topped out how expressively a regular person can get with 3 paragraphs to describe themselves.

In other words, when you've crunched down people's self-expression to really short paragraphs and a bunch of multiple choice answers, _personality disappears_. And its place, the only sane metric one profile from another is physical attractiveness. Which leads to the next big problem...

 _2_ \- There are _no_ salient indicators of competition online, quite unlike the real world. How many of us here go after statuesque model-types, exclusively? Bueller? But we do it online, because without the ability to appreciate someone's personality, looks are the only measuring stick you've got left. In the real world this is balanced out the fact that competition is extremely visible, especially in an environment like a club or a bar.

You see a girl being hit on by an endless stream of guys. Do you line up and join the fray? Or maybe you find something else?

Online these signals do not exist, which means all men will simply line up to hit on the hottest subset of the population without knowing just how long this sausagefest-line is, and the complement of this is that anyone who isn't in, say, the upper quartile of physical attractiveness, will get crickets (or the spamalot shotgunner-types).

tl;dr, the problem is twofold: poor communication medium means that personality and unique traits are impossible to express well over the dating network, leading to physical attractiveness becoming the only major factor in almost all decisions, and _everyone_ (guys and girls) become way pickier than they would be IRL. Lack of visible competition drives traffic to only most attractive portion of population, where in real life visible competition will drive a considerable amount of "traffic" back towards average lookers.

<comment><USER11> >Online these signals do not exist

On OkCupid, they show a dot on each profile to indicate how responsive the person is. My understanding that any woman who gets an extreme number of messages will have a red dot, since it is impractical for her to respond to all of those messages. They also have star ratings, which should indicate how generally desirable the person is on the site.

<comment><USER12> Except people are unlikely to give someone a one or two star rating, and are likely to give four or five star ratings.

<comment><USER11> At least for women rating men on OkCupid in 2009, that's wrong. [http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/another-okcupid- st...](http://alvanista.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/another-okcupid-study- preselection-rears-its-ugly-head-again/) "Women on OkCupid have rated 80% of the men as unattractive." "The median man averaged 1.5 stars out of 5"

Also, all 1, 2, and 3 ratings are seen only by the person who made the rating so there is no penalty for rating someone low.

But it doesn't matter if the ratings are distributed evenly; there will still be some variance. Users who pay to have "A-List memberships" can use those ratings to search for matches of at least {3, 4, 5} stars to restrict their matches to the more heavily sought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A minor point: when filling out my political orientation, I noticed that "socialist/fascist" was an option. I really don't want to start a debate, but I think these should be separate. It seems in the US they are often both considered equally dangerous extremes, but in the rest of the world, there is a pretty significant distinction between the two camps.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, that made me chuckle. The USA is pretty quaint sometimes.

Then again, to us euros, all Americans are worldview-challenged religious fundamentalists who mock dying poor people in the streets while brandishing an Uzi in one hand and a quadruple cheeseburger in the other. So it goes both ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Real names? Never. It's way too easy to get a stalker even if you're initially anonymous. It would be just dangerous to use a dating site like that, especially once you add that location function into it.

Messages are a pretty important part of the online dating thing. Same thing with profiles. How someone reacted to your profile, how someone presents themselves, all that is really important when looking for people you'd like to talk with. And, personally, I have written quite a few messages on OKC, and never a canned one. Even if someone didn't answer, I hope I provided a bit of entertainment or amusement.

Now, the fact that OKC does thing like showing you profiles of people across the globe even if they're not interested with interacting with someone they might never meet – that's annoying.

</comment><comment><USER16> First off, you need women on your dating site. That's it. Just like bars, you don't need to target guys, they will just go where the women also are.

I'm not a girl, but the top reasons that I hear about from girls in regards to online dating. 1) there's still a stigma about online dating that some girls won't get over. 2) too many "creeps" who message them. 3) they fear they are getting "played" or are getting a message from someone who just spams the same message. 4) they get way too many messages to sort through.

In fact most girls try to set up filters, "Don't message me if you can't spell or if you don't know the difference between, 'your' and 'you're'". Honestly though I find it hard to believe that girls are that concerned with spelling.

I, as a guy, have to deal with having to prove to girls that I'm not creepy, or spamming message, and on top of that have to message them something to catch their attention. Personally, it's even worse for me when the girl has nothing at all in her profile for me to ask them about.

So what I suggest is, automatically filter out "hey whats up gurl" messages for women. Conversely also filter out any messages that are more than 2 paragraphs in length. Show women pictures and have them rate the pictures by whether or not they would date said person then algorithmically find people on the site that look similar to pictures she favored.

I'm trying to think of some more, but basically make it easier for girls to filter out people they would never date. And somehow make it easier for the guy to know that the girl has some interest in him, besides weird, "winks" and icebreakers.

<comment><USER17> How about a site where guys / girls set up challenges that guys have to perform in order to be able to contact them?

* Write a 250 word essay about your favorite british guitar pop

* Make a video of you cooking something using pumpkin (my favorite)

* Write me a song using the words panda and musk rat, and about Michigan (bonus points for name dropping the coffee shop with the best cheesecake in town - you'll know it if you've been)

etc.

<comment><USER18> Hmmm I like this idea. Are there any that implements this so far? Maybe something I can look into. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's the real reason why online dating sucks:

1\. The only good sites are the ones your potential mate is on. Size is a bigger feature than any you can design.

2\. If your site sucks, then people get frustrated and everyone leaves. If your site is great, then people get paired off and everyone leaves.

Online dating doesn't just suffer from network effects, it suffers from _second order_ network effects. Unless you're getting a constant stream of new customers into your site every day, your site will fail.

All innovation in online dating comes from the customer acquisition side, not the product side. If you manage to figure out an innovative new form of customer acquisition, you can make a go at creating a viable new entrant to the market. If you can't, it doesn't matter how good your product is, you will fail.

<comment><USER20> There's a solution to that problem - peer to peer - as in file-sharing. Create software that sits on each persons computer. This is freely downloadable. Users input as much information as they want into it, and it reaches out and grabs other users' data like file-sharing, and filters it to any sort of criteria.

This solves the chicken and egg problem.

People can make money on this by offering hosting services. It can be a hassle for the average user to run and update the software on their computer so many might opt to pay for a cloud service.

This model can also be used for business discovery. Google and ebay can only do so much, you might want complex querying and reporting.

edit: The software solution can be as simple as publishing rdf data. The Protege ontology editor (open source) is already available. Users could simply start publishing their data profile right away, and conventions would form around what you should be putting in it. Protege also has querying facilities built in already. This was actually the semantic web vision.

<comment><USER19> That's not a solution, that just pushed the problem one step up the chain, how do you convince people to download and install that piece of software?

<comment><USER20> Same as how people are convinced to find dating sites, create a profile, and spend hours/months/years finding the right person. Downloading a program and having it automatically do complicated filters to find the right person is a cake-walk in comparison. People are motivated by money and sex, they'll climb any hurdle to get to it. Installing desktop software is not a big one.

<comment><USER21> no you still missing his point. people were convinced to created their profile because other users were already in the network. your idea does not solve chicken-egg problem. I will not sign up for profile or download your software UNLESS you have a database of couple thousands men/women to go through. Unless you have a 25,000 single friends that you can eblast and beg to fill out the form or pay each a dollar for their time, you will fail. it wont matter whether it is profile registration or software download the value is in network.

<comment><USER20> It is different to regular dating site. It isn't a couple of guys. The software would be open source, I suggested starting with Protege. Since there is no single authority, a whoie bunch of entrepreneurs could pursue this, potentially in the thousands, seeding it with all their friends. Also, the functionality you get over traditional dating sites (and this also applies to business networking/sourcing such as linkedin/ebay) can be immense. You can run multiple queries over the profile data, whereas a site such as plentyoffish can't afford to. That alone should convince many people to contribute to this. I recall similar projects about a decade ago, such as rdf foaf, music brainz, but they didn't take off because their wasn't enough bandwith and computational power at the time (downloading millions of rdf pages wasn't possible then - now users routinely download gigabytes of video).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > You see real names

This would be a complete dealbreaker for me, even without all the other things that this service would share from my profile. I would never want there to be an easy way for people from the dating site to be able to find me on another site - you can shut down a dating profile or discontinuing using the service if someone's bothering you, but with this it sounds like complete strangers would be able to find/message me on Facebook outside of the site's control, and I wouldn't want to stop using Facebook because of some creeper. And if it's using publicly available Facebook data, it means I need to make a ton of my information public and accessible for the service to be useful.

That's not really worth the risk of using the service to me, and is probably why you don't frequently see dating sites that reveal full names/near-exact locations as you're suggesting. If you can find a way to display Facebook profile details without revealing the person's full name, you'd probably have more luck recruiting people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Essentially, the only data available given the "basic" settings on Facebook is name and friends.

Your name is already out there all over Facebook - friends of friends, random people in groups you're part of, people going to your events - they can all see it... why is it different to give your real name to a (real) person who matches very specific criteria that you set yourself, and which basically just signifies "I'm Single, and you may be a match" ?

<comment><USER22> I guess I see a few major differences between this and friend-of-friends. Most important is accountability - a friend-of-a-friend isn't likely to send me a creepy/sexual messages, since there would probably be social consequences for them from mutual friends. There's no such social barrier for people I don't know at all, so the only consequence would be me blocking/reporting them (and you can easily make a new Facebook account if that happens).

For members of groups who I might not know - yes, people in groups I'm in know my full name, but probably don't know enough about my life to make it worth behaving creepily towards me - and if they did, any actions would likely remain virtual. However, your service is telling people my full name, _and_ states that it will "sort by location" - so now someone knows my name, knows around where I live, AND knows that I am single (so it's more likely that I'm not living with a male)? That's not information that I'd feel comfortable broadcasting to people who have no accountability.

I know I'm focusing on the creeper/stalking issue, and I'm sure that's frustrating feedback when the majority of your users will be using this service with honorable intentions. I'm just trying to explain why I and most of my female friends would be instantly turned off by a service that shares this information - and from what I've read, attracting female members is a huge issue in the online dating space. It's really something you should try talking to female friends/family members/a focus group of potential online daters, because I don't think it would be an uncommon point of view and you don't want it to keep people from joining your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> it is a valid point, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Every time I pitch startup ideas to my gf, she always tells me it sucks and gives me great reasons.. but the other day, I had this idea about dating website and she kinda liked it even though she would never want me to work on something like that.

Instead of trying to use the Internet to solve a problem that is better solved in real-life (i.e. meet people and talk), why not create a whole fiction world where you can be anything you want. Basically, it's a game where you put the profile picture you'd like to have, and the 'about me' you'd like to be. So, you talk with lots of strangers and avoid the awkard thingy while still having fun and meeting people. Of course, after some time, it will naturally start to be more intimate and it'd be possible to share more real stuff.. but that's not even necessary.

Think about all the guys and girls in couple who'd like to have fun dating again but can't because they're already in relationship? Or single players who just want to have fun?

Here it is. It's rough around the edges but I hope it inspire someone.

<comment><USER24> That sounds like a pretty cool idea, create a whole fiction world where you can be anything you want.

People have implemented that in meat-space as the city of San Francisco.

If people find that the rest of their life tugs on them, perhaps you could sell an all-in-one escape month? It'd be perfect for the baby boomer who wants to try one month at not being the same person. Just take care of all necessary daily/weekly/monthly chores for a month.

(Obvious expansion into doing people's chores for them, pairing with tourism boards, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The list of reasons doesn't seem well thought out, rejection is part of the dating experience, I would think its much worse in real life when someone ignores you then simply just not responding to an email. I really wouldnt want to tie this to facebook for the reason of stalkers and weirdos now have personal contact with me. I would prefer to keep my dating life seperate.

</comment><comment><USER26> Really not interested in having to put my sexual and relationship ideals up on facebook where friends and family can see them... Facebook is where I go to talk to people I do not want knowing a lot about my personal life.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't how it works - it connects with Facebook so it can filter _out_ your Facebook friends - the whole idea is that only new people who you don't know can see that you're single and looking to connect.

<comment><USER26> This app connects to my facebook to check my friends and stuff, then I tell this app the stuff I am into sexually and romantically, and then it connects me to others on facebook who have the same interests, I get that. But the simple fact is, well, keep my romantic life out of my social life.

If I want my romantic life and social life to intermix that will be my decision, not that of some webapp. There is a reason Dating Sites exist separated from Social Sites, and it is not because no one has thought of the idea before.

Personal Preference: Ne'er the twain shall meet.

Just to be clear, it is a good idea, but I personally would not trust that small a level of separation between social and romantic life. There may be a market in it, I am not a member of that demographic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Online dating does more than reduce "Hi, my name is" friction, it also allows you to find people who have rare attributes and personality traits you desire in a partner, before you make the commitment to spend money/time on a first date. Lists of interests and questionnaires are exactly what online dating does right and moving to Facebook would be a step backwards.

EDIT: In other words, my Facebook profile is not a dating profile.

</comment><comment><USER27> The dating space is interesting. I think it's ripe for disruption. But thus far I haven't been able to figure out how to attack it, let alone where to start.

I think YC was right when it said you have to concentrate on solving the chicken-and-egg problem.

 _"...anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."_

If you're passionate about building an online dating site, I'd spend all of my time iterating ways to get users. Try a bunch of different ideas. And fail fast.

#8 <http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

<comment><USER28> Yeah but on a dating site with 20 users you could conceivably bang EVERY GIRL ON THE SITE! Achievement Unlocked! ;)

<comment><USER29> On a site with 20 users, they'd probably all be male.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _Am I missing anything?_

You're missing at least two things. Assuming (as is reasonable) that you're principally aiming at the heterosexual market, you face these issues:

1\. Men and women are different. How do you address gender imbalances?

2\. Not all women are equally appealing. How do you address attractive women being overwhelmed with male attention?

Some may object that I didn't include "attractive men" in #2. See #1. In particular, even the most attractive men are virtually never overwhelmed with female attention on online dating sites. (Those who are probably enjoy it.)

<comment><USER31> > In particular, even the most attractive men are virtually never overwhelmed > with female attention on online dating sites. (Those who are probably enjoy > it.)

This is really interesting if true (which I think it probably is) because real life is the opposite, at least if you measure by sexual partners: by definition, the average number of partners for men and women (in a heterosexual population) is the same, but it turns out that the variance for men is much larger; a few many get many women and most men get few, while most women get a typical number of men.

<comment><USER30> You've got the wrong metric. The reason some men have lots of sexual partners is because many men _want_ lots of sexual partners, and some have the ability to do so. On the other hand, most women of even mediocre attractiveness _can_ have lots of sexual partners, but fewer of them want to. This is just as you would expect based on the relative energy investment men and women make in producing offspring. Other animals with similar asymmetries in energy investment have similar sexual behavior to humans.

Incidentally, this observation puts the lie to the idea that having a stud/slut dichotomy is a "double standard". Having different standards for men and women makes sense; being a stud is _hard_ , while being a slut is _easy_. Indeed, the vast majority of whining about "gender double standards" can be rebutted with the simple observation that men and women are different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> my response to the article and many of my friends who've had a similar experience with online dating boils down to 'ur doin it rong'. here are some tips:

* CAREFULLY write your profile so that it will attract the kind of person you'd like to meet. be playful, fun, and funny.

* DO NOT BE OVERLY SERIOUS: unfortunately there's still a bit of a social stigma against online dating so people are often already on their guard and will already be wary of everything they read. so keep the profile and messages light and playful.

* okcupid has a great feature that lets you see who has visited your profile, use this to your advantage. you've already carefully written your profile to attract your ideal partner, so see who it's attracted. if someone has visited your profile a couple times already, the chances that they'd be receptive to a message are much higher

* do not get hung up on a single person. "OMGZ my soulmate didn't reply to my message! IM FOREVER ALONE!!" well, if you two were truly compatible, don't you think they'd find your profile and message interesting?

tl;dr be playful, have fun, and don't take yourself too seriously

</comment><comment><USER33> IMHO the real problem with online dating is that it's explicit. You need to go hunting for others, set up your profile etc.

Imagine a world where nobody is concerned about privacy. After a while, your search engine of choice infers from your search queries that you don't have a girlfriend, and occasionally shows you a message along side the result page, telling you about a girl who has search for several similar topics than you have, roughly your age and living not too far from you. She'll get a similar message, and if you both agree, a communication channel of some sort will be made available.

Don't reject the idea as being creepy. It might sound creepy, but it could actually work. Search engines know a lot about you, and might find matches without you having to set up a profile, and mostly bypasses the incentive to lie in order to make you look more attractive.

Oh and of course it wouldn't just work for dating, but also for finding friends in general.

If I had a job at Google, I'd love to try my hand at prototyping such a thing.

<comment><USER14> I would actually _love_ a site that finds me male friends. I always need local people to do eg martial arts, hacking on projects, going out to sarge, discussing philosophy, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love the bashing of this idea in the comments. Everyone saying that they wouldn't want to use a website like this.

What they don't realize is that the simple choice of which service they use can act as a filter. For instance: I wouldn't want to date you privacy freaks and you wouldn't want to date me. Already filtered down the sea of singles by just signing up.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if people will find dating and facebook too close for comfort.

</comment><comment><USER36> The facebook thing is an absolute dealbreaker, what don't engineers understand about people not wanting to use facebook for everything? So annoying. If you want people to use real identities there are plenty of other ways to go about it, furthermore it is not that difficult to create a fake facebook profile, i have three myself.

<comment><USER37> Are you kidding? Engineers are one of the most privacy-conscious demos out there, especially under 30.

Just read any post on HN about any site that uses Facebook Connect. Half the comments will be about how they refuse to so much as look at that button.

I disagree that going full-on-public is the right approach.

For women, especially, they get bombarded with all kinds of creepiness. I think it'd be hard to get people to waive their right to hand out information at the pace they feel comfortable.

Anything that alienates women from a dating site is a deal-breaker, IMO. The dating sites that do well are the ones that can attract and retain female users.

That said, there's a kernel of an interesting idea here. The process of dating is revealing increasingly intimate details about ones life. If you reach a point where it feels uncomfortable, you break up.

For the "online" portion of online dating, e.g., sending messages back and forth on OKC, this is very explicit. Guy sends girl a message. Girl responds. Guy reveals name. Girl reveals name. etc. Until eventually contact information is exchanged, and then you arrange an offline date.

So the "core" problem of online dating is one of building comfort.

One Facebook-powered feature that could build comfort might be to show how many friends you have in common (but not who). Another might be to show where your Facebook likes intersect.

But forcing people to reveal all their information immediately really runs against the grain of the whole idea of dating.

<comment><AUTHOR> regarding "forcing people to reveal all their information immediately really runs against the grain of the whole idea of dating" -- in most cases, the public Facebook profile is hardly "all my information," and sites like OKCupid that do online dating the "traditional" way are already out there. this is an alternative - for people who want to try going against the grain.

<comment><USER37> I'm not saying it's against the grain of today's dating sites. I'm saying it's against the grain of dating, per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My ideas on dating sites:

<http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-misc-dating-site-ideas>

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site- slideshow-a...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-slideshow- audio-voiceovers)

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-profile- improvem...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-profile-improvement- team)

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-that- gets-r...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-that-gets- reluctant-female-s)

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-with- gamifi...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-with-gamification)

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-walk-in-my-shoes- dating...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-walk-in-my-shoes-dating-site)

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-my-dating-profile- did-w...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-my-dating-profile-did-well)

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-staff-of- fe...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-dating-site-staff-of-female- helpers)

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-smartphone-video- speed-...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-smartphone-video-speed-dating)

<http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-adsense-for-dating>

[http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-photo-album-widget- for-...](http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-photo-album-widget-for-search- result-pag)

(I just pulled this out of Google, so it's not sorted by awesomeness or anything).

</comment><comment><USER38> Seeing that something sucks is not the important point. Everybody can do that. You must ask WHY, before working on solving your problems with the situation on hand.

And I think the reason for dating sites being quite bad is not, that nobody sees the problems. It's just that there are way bigger problems that need to get solved first and when these problems are solved you don't need to solve any other problem anymore to be successful (at least in the short run). And the big problem of all social communities and market places (dating site is something of both in my eyes) is that you need get people to come in. If there are a lot of people, other's will come automatically. If there are no people, nobody will come. The software or the service quality is only a second rank problem. So I wonder, how do u solve the community problem first?

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't understand why you're so determined to hide my friends. I _like_ my friends. I might conceivably want to date some of them, and in any case, I'd like to show them my profile for con-crit. Is there a way to turn the "feature" off?

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered that but I figured if you already know someone and like them, you should just ask them out in person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My advice, make the facebook connect a feature, not a requirement. I know this is no simple change, but you would get a lot of buy-in if you sell it as a value add.

"Setup your account! Don't want your friends to see your profile? click here! Want to see more people? Click here!"

So people connected through facebook can see everyone (minus their friends), and people who aren't can only see others who are not. Keep pushing them on facebook connect, when they do a search, tell them how many people they are missing out on! (3 results, 98 results if you click here!)

</comment><comment><USER41> I think this is pretty brilliant, the ease of use and simplicity - but the fundamental problem is the requirement on Facebook. Even if your not posting on user's wall trying to spread the site I think people will still be hesitant to connect their Facebook profile to a dating site, Facebook is just too personal for something that most people would prefer to be done anonymously. Not that there is anyway around that, since Facebook gives so many other benefits for this idea

</comment><comment><USER42> I've had a pretty good experience with Internet dating. I've met a lot of women, become really good friends with some, had brief flings and long term girlfriends. They all are deluged with messages from creeps, but that really shouldn't impact men who aren't creeps. Many reject me, but who cares? That's true in general. I dont want life to be softer on me, I just want to go HAM on life. If you're not satisfied with the Internet hit the grocery store checkout line.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> if anyone has any feedback - especially with regard to user acquisition or how to make this more viral, i'd really appreciate your ideas.

<comment><USER43> You're implementation still feels like a slight twist on what we've seen before. You list criteria which are used as filters, and you either show interest or don't. OKCupid is pretty much the same thing. Sure, you take away the profile filling, and uploading photos part, but it's still the same thing, but slightly different. Thing is, after a match is found, you don't solve the "well shit, what do I do now?" problem. You're back to awkward and possibly creepy part of messaging and setting something up.

I remember seeing a very interesting idea for a dating website a while ago on HN, where you're matched based on activities/events you're interested in going to. I really liked the idea, as it matches based on interests, and it automatically answers the what-are-we-going-to-do question.

<comment><USER44> Maybe this was the site you heard about: <http://www.howaboutwe.com/>

They've been doing a significant blast of advertising lately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Online dating sucks, and is hard to solve, because real-world dating sucks, and is hard to do, unless the following applies:

\- You're attractive

\- You're a social person

\- Both 1 and 2

You can be an attractive person, but shy, and still get dates pretty easily. You can be just average looking, but very social and outgoing, and still get dates pretty easily. If you have both, the world is likely your oyster. These types of people generally never visit dating websites, because they don't need to.

With that in mind, we can conclude the following:

\- Dating websites are mostly full of people who do not apply to the list above (e.g. unattractive introverts).

\- There are still of course attractive and social people using these sites for various reasons, but they are the minority.

\- Some of those reasons that minority exists may be because they have "issues", and regardless of being attractive and/or social, have trouble maintaining lasting relationships offline.

This means we have a mix of unattractive introverts not only mixing with each other, but mixing with attractive extroverts who are unstable in relationships. Then you have the "sausage fest" factor that has already been mentioned in the comments tossed into the mix, along with some dating websites simply being really, really bad (the only good one I can think of, which still has all of these problems, is OkCupid). This all sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

My theory on what might actually work, and how online dating needs to evolve:

\- In my experience, my best relationships have been a product of serendipity. You can filter through potential matches all you want, use data to try and find that perfect someone, but 9 times out of 10 when you actually meet, you'll feel absolutely no spark or connection, even if you both love all the same things. It's that spark that matters, and I've never experienced this through anything but a serendipitous encounter.

\- The actual problem is that we shouldn't be sitting in front of our computers looking for potential mates. We should be out finding them, in real life, where the interactions actually matter, and serendipity can do its thing.

\- This means we're trying to solve the WRONG problem. We're trying to make dating websites better. Instead, let's make it easier to get out of the house, and do the best we can to "engineer serendipity", or at least put you in situations where it's more likely to take place.

\- While I'm not going to plan out an entire solution here, it would likely involve some of the following: It has a mobile aspect, it involves overlapping friend circles (think degrees of separation, or how you'd meet a match at a wedding or dinner party), it involves social events and situations, and it's built in a way that is perceived as safe, non-creepy, and by people who understand real world social situations and complexities (i.e. not made by the introverts who can't date without a website).

At the end of the day, we need a solution that helps you easily put yourself into social situations you wouldn't otherwise be in, and replicates what happens and actually works in the real world, without feeling creepy or forced.

</comment><comment><USER46> My best advice is to reword the filtering section. The fact that you need to outline in red that it might work differently than people expect is a good clue that it is too hard to understand.

Other than that I think this is really nicely done and a great idea. However, apparently there are no 20-40 year old girls in Seattle yet. :)

</comment><comment><USER47> I have an idea in this space that I'd be keen to get feedback on. Have only ever seen one person mention the rough/loose concept before. If you have experience in this field or figure you're pretty good at picking a good/bad idea and have a spare minute, can you email me? My details are in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER48> I can never get over the fact that online dating will always be a very distant second to meeting people in real life.

Why don't more sites stop trying to force some artificial romance virtually and study how to get groups of people to meet in person and foster relationships.

</comment><comment><USER49> As a guy who met a girl on OkCupid and married her, I found the author's list of faults in existing online dating systems to be rather puzzling. Most of them seem like a) perils of dating in general or b) perils of interacting online in general -- problems that may not be solved by Yet Another Dating Site.

> Fake pictures. People always try to game the system, and the realm of dating > is no exception. It's not unheard of to create a fake Facebook account for > casual social engineering.

> Poor filtering. My personal experience doesn't match with this but YMMV. > OkCupid has rather good filtering using not only quantitative data (e.g. > location, age range, tagged interests) but also more qualitative data (e.g. > question system). I suppose Match.com was somewhat less effective.

> Can't tell who is actually interested. That's dating for you. Also, being > direct isn't creepy unless you're directly being creepy.

> Creating a profile is a huge pain. Probably the most legitimate beef with > online dating. I found OkCupid pretty straightforward and well-incentivized, > but YMMV. I wonder how indicative someone's Facebook profile is, though, of > what they offer in a relationship; plenty of people have profiles brimming > with the minutiae of daily life instead of statements about their > fundamental beliefs and desires.

> You may see someone you know. This doesn't have to be a huge deal. I saw two > of my friends on OkCupid, one of whom I was romantically involved with > previously. We had a good laugh about it and moved on. Don't buy into the > assumed social stigma of online dating -- it's not the end of the world for > someone to know you're putting yourself out there.

> Data never disappears online. I didn't know what to make of this point, > honestly. Don't people just delete/archive/ignore old messages? Is there > some concern that these become public knowledge?

> Rejection is painful, and there is more of it online. As another commenter > has said, dating is a numbers game. Online dating increases exposure to > potential dates, so rejection increases -- though (based on my experience > and those of friends who have also done online dating) roughly in proportion > to what is experienced with in-person dating. There's always a point in > dating where someone can get rejected; it can actually be liberating to have > small rejections up front instead of big rejections down the road (for > several reasons, not least of which is the lost opportunity cost of the > failed relationship). No matter how much a site tries to shelter a user, it > can't last forever. [ See also Rejection Therapy discussed on HN: > [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=rejection%2...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=rejection%20therapy) > ]

> It just feels juvenile. OkCupid allows good flexibility in how you express > yourself. The question system helps some people elaborate on topics that are > particularly salient to their interests; other people are more comfortable > writing short essays; still others are comfortable summing themselves up in > a few bullet points. Also, on this count you've disregarded a crucial > intermediate step between one's online profile and an in-person date: online > messaging. The profile establishes interest, messaging confirms interest, > in-person dates explore whether interest becomes a relationship.

krausejj, I'd be interested to know which sites you've used to reach your conclusions -- and, sincerely, best of luck refining the concept and creating a successful product.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think OKCupid is a great service and I've heard of several people (like you) who've found success with it. My idea is meant to be another alternative - <USER2> people who haven't. Also, there is nothing wrong with being on multiple types of platforms if you're serious about finding someone - most people are.

In response to a few of your points: 1) It is very hard to fake a Facebook account. It's hard to get those 1000 friends and tacky drunk pictures from college. 2) OKCupid already does qualitative filtering ad nauseum - <USER3> efficacy is debatable but for someone who wants more objective filtering that they can understand and doesn't take a long time to implement, Circl.es could be better. 3) Rejection is part of the game, but it can be reduced by making sure that you're only considering people with whom you have a shot - <USER4> people to say "no" before you even see them, filtering both ways, and forcing people to make simple choices early on can reduce the pain.

To be honest, my biggest beef with OkCupid is the complexity. A new user coming the site can barely understand how it works - it takes time and a lot of work to use the system. The other day I had a friend join and I just typed okcupid.com/profile/his_name into my browser and pulled up his profile (I'm not a member of the site). He was horrified! I know they have privacy settings, but it takes time for new users to "get" this. Furthermore, I have personal doubts about whether personality matching really works - I think the depths of the human psyche might be a bit beyond computing.... but that's just my opinion.

Ultimately, OKCupid is a very cool site - many people love it. My site is different and, if it is successful, will have a different set of strengths in terms of matching people. If you weren't married I'd encourage you to at least Circl.es a trial run to see how different it is!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> the male to female ratio on Circl.es just swung wildly towards the males since launching on HN (it had been primarily female). hacker girls - you have very good odds right now!

<comment><USER50> Hacker girls have been unsuccessfully looking for online dating sites with "very good odds" for _ever_ , to be sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I had a very, very similar idea (but with more facebook integration) less than two weeks ago. I'm glad it's already built. Now we just need some girls to join...

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm slightly offended that you combined Socialist with Fascist in the political views section.

<comment><USER53> (This is off-topic, and I see how it is slightly offensive, but the biggest Fascist party, the Nazis, called themselves "National Socialists". And in terms of the effects — for example, the gulags, war-like nature and authoritarian rule, they appear quite similar. Now I assume you are the good kind of socialist, that wants good for all (e.g. modern Europe), rather than bad kind (e.g. the USSR), (and I agree with you) so I can see why you would want to distance yourself from the Fascists, but historically they are similar.)

On topic: Can I expect more or less dates if I put my political views as Fascist...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Facebook was the best dating site ever invented, until they killed the ability to search on sex and relationship status within arbitrary networks.

By the way, to my knowledge, nobody has tried peer-curated online dating. i.e. an interested friend does the awful work of searching and matching, forwards minimal details for approval from both parties, and coordinates the meeting. In other words, online dating which more closely approximates traditional social methods.</comment>


Deep learning has a size problem - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/deep-learning-has-a-size-problem-ea601304cd8 <comment><USER2> This article confused me, the author referenced the time and power required to train a model, which granted is lots, but then talks about phones and mircontrollers which are less powerful but are far more numerous than the machines currently being used to develop these models.

Isnt that the point? The powerful machines create the models through training/data processing, then those models are loaded onto the less powerful units for use?</comment>


Show HN: Raise Your Flag – Start an awesome career without a degree or diploma - <AUTHOR> https://raiseyourflag.com/

<comment><USER2> I like the idea. I find it really odd that Web Developer is on the homepage but not on the site. (False advertising?)

Not much here, but it's a nice site if it becomes more populated. If you had a feed on these updates I'd like to watch it, but it seems the blog is well... a blog. :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. Agreed about Web Developer. It's high in our queue to add. We clearly failed by not having a career path for every featured career on the main page. As for the feed, we're planning a regular "roundup" blog series of newly added careers once we tackle what's in the queue currently.

Appreciate you taking the time to look at what we're building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the concept. However, it isn't really clear to me what benefits come from joining. It seems like I'm able to view everything without actually signing up for an account. Other than that, the site looks pretty nice and seems to work as expected.

<comment><USER3> Ryan here, co-founder of Raise Your Flag. Glad you like what we're working on. The difference between a registered user and the average visitor, registered users can search for jobs. Visitors must sign-up before getting job search results. Hope that helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't see a newsletter sign up, but I registered anyway so hoping to get some emails in the future when you add more paths (webdev!). Would love to see more service industry career paths as well. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER6> cool initiative, often formal education is hindrance for truly talented people in many part of the world especially in software industry. Of-course your's addressing every other industry as well. Does it provide only job search or some sort of grooming and guidance in shaping their skills?

<comment><USER3> We agree!

Job search currently. Grooming & guidance in the near future. Although the immediate need for a job is more of a symptom of the lack of guidance, we figured we'd start with the career path/job search as it's likely a pressing need for many. Plus, once the guidance features are implemented, we have somewhere to lead users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Beautiful site.

<comment><USER3> thank you!</comment></comment>