Never used mercurial. I suspect it's just as good, but the problem the author probably sees is, like me, most everyone is familiar with git and new hires need to be trained in something unfamiliar with less community around it.
I wonder how large that friction is. I look at git, mercurial, etc as distributed version control first and foremost, and that they're more alike than different.
It could be that I witnessed the popular adoption of all this via Linux going from tarballs/patches/mailing lists -> bitkeeper -> git, and have used and witnessed-the-evolution-of rcs, cvs, subversion, various DSCMs, and so my concepts of source control are stretched more broadly than people that are experiencing the dissonance between (e.g.) mercurial and git.
Do you have anything you can point to for that friction? I'm always looking to do better than I already am and would be interested in understanding the issues here.
Used to work at Dropbox. Existing knowledge of new hires was 90% of the challenge with Mercurial with the other 10% being weird edge cases (e.g. very large/numerous repositories) that hadn't seen as much attention due to the smaller community.
I have only a very tiny amount of experience with Hg, and it was my first experience with DVCS. I found the learning curve on it much smaller (which is mainly why I choose it over git at the time).
The reason I switched to git was mostly inertia. Many open source projects were going to git, Github was starting to really take off, and just generally there was a bigger community around git. This mean git got more (and likely better) choices for tooling, more help, and personally I would have to deal with fewer SCM's when working on open source/etc stuff.
I suspect the author was talking on those lines, and the other thing already pointed out in this thread: ability to find experienced people.
In my experience, yes. With SageMath we put a huge amount of work into switching from Mercurial to Git (I had originally chosen Darcs, then switched to Mercurial, then we switched to Git). In practice, the depth of functionality with Git can sometimes be an order of magnitude greater than that of Mercial, just do to git accumulating so much more developer momentum (see, e.g., the man pages for "git log" versus "hg log").
My 2c: "Upvotes" is too noisy a metric, and will give too much importance to HN ranking. I strongly suggest tweaking the HN ranking model for "Apply HN" posts to be as random as possible.
Funny, typing "livingsocial layoffs" in google gives me these suggestions "livingsocial layoffs 2015", "livingsocial layoffs 2014", "livingsocial layoffs 2013"
I was bummed. They had an amazing bunch of developers, but there was just great talent all around. It was also nice because it was a great change of pace here in DC. It was by far the biggest player in the startup scene in DC in 2011 and 2012. I think just having it around encouraged others to try to build "the next LivingSocial". There's plenty of smaller startups here today, but nothing fills the same role. We need more fun companies in DC, even if it's Office of Company Culture-mandated-dusty-Xbox-fun.
Actually I noticed sites have simply changed policies -- if you're a regular visitor your cookies will identify you and block content. The Incognito mode trick works for WSJ and others that would still check the referrer header. Allowing Googlebot access and checking the referrer header are two different things.
Also, Google has published IP addresses it uses, so this extension might not last long...
What I found most heartening about the article was that it spent several paragraphs describing why they initially had to use Flash, and how they managed to get rid of it, but not a single sentence saying _why_ they decided to get rid of Flash. We've come a long way! (Also, thanks Steve Jobs!!!)
> Throughout the second half of 2015, Chrome, Firefox and Safari also began blocking the Flash plugin from automatically loading content unless users gave their permission. In order to continue providing a quality video experience for our viewers, switching exclusively to HTML5 video became necessary.
Easily the most amazing "How to Get Tenure" article that I've ever read, even though (or maybe because) it hardly talks about how to get tenure! Passion and success are so strongly correlated, and Matt Might is such a great example of this, as are most successful researchers and entrepreneurs.
They got in trouble with lawsuits because of the recent Uber employee vs contractor verdict. In addition, they were bleeding cash in customer acquisition so that didn't help too. The lawsuit was the trigger but the bleeding of cash was the fundamental reason.
I'm curious to know: is this sentiment widely shared? Is git really that much better than hg?