skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Github makes millions of dollars per year and has a huge amount of users so the product is proven good. While I understand the need to be appreciative of Github, giving the organization a bit of user feedback is not going to hurt them very much. The response assumes that this is written because of the "Dear Github" letter.
> IMO constructors should be setting sane defaults and nothing more. If you need to do work that could fail put that into an "init()" function with a return type that can signal an error.

That allows you to construct the object in an invalid state. The whole point of RAII is to avoid that. The acronym literally means not having a separate init() function.
It simply get absorbed in the gut (like food or all medicines), into the blood. There is a 'blood-brain barrier' that many things cannot cross, but far from all.

Painkillers, caffine, LSD, and other psychoactive drugs all cross this barrier by definition. In terms of damage, there are many possible mechanisms once in the actual brain tissue. Quite often drugs would act on a receptor on a cell, which would change how the cell operates in some way, such as by inhibiting an ion channel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotoxin
Completely agree, also this post makes it appear like GH did all it has done out of the goodness of their heart... Sure it's great what they did for OS but to pretend that wasn't rooted in making money is just ignorant.
As someone with an economics background, I'm surprised you think the biggest problem is the statelessness of Bitcoin. The biggest economic problem to me has always been an unintelligent control of the money supply. You can criticize some of the actions that many central banks do to manipulate the economy, but I have a hard time buying the answer to bad management is no management.
great work @grodola !!
Inside the Home Owner's Mind
You downvote, but I've talked to countless people that hate their branding, purple being a large part of it.

Don't disregard good aesthetic taste, Yahoo clearly doesn't have it.
> I feel like Rust made a wrong turn here

I think the broader context of "the leakpocalypse" involved a host of difficult decisions, all of them suboptimal in their own ways. Of all the options on the table, it's my opinion that Rust took the most pragmatic one, especially given that the proposals that sought to ensure "never-leak" behavior all felt like they had undiscovered holes of their own, leading to a lot of ceremony for no actual benefit.

> I'm referring specifically to try!

I'm also referring to `try!`. :) It's a personal goal of mine this year to advocate a language-level replacement (and enhancement) for improved error-handling ergonomics.
> The issue is that if you want GH to be your authoritative repository you're locked into GH's way of doing things

You just push from your (private) authoritative repository to Github, and you're free from "GH's way of doing things"
Unless it's a short-lived CPU intensive task, in which case in matters a great deal.
The entire thrust of our medical regulatory system, from the Flexner Report to today, is the belief that it's better for 1000 patients to die of neglect, than 1 from quackery. Until this irrational fear of quack medicine is cured, there will be no real progress in the field.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819346
Thank you for your answer. However, I am still curious as to how many guns (per capita) you think are needed to maintain peace should police and other civilian authority break down.

The Czech Republic is much lower on list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c... . I only listed the top European countries. Finland should also be up on that list.
Ah, I see now. Looking back, it wasn't terribly clear what the parent meant by changing the orientation to carry it by, I just made the connection automatically and assumed it was there.
I have no clue on how to generate a patch. But I did a fair amount of pull requests... It might be a generation problem.
I purchased a 10" queen Tuft & Needle mattress right before Christmas. I had been having issues with a stiff back when I'd wake up in the morning and switching to this mattress has made a huge difference.

When the box arrived, I was convinced they had sent me a twin sized mattress because of how small it was. They don't just roll the mattress, but the compress it from the sides as well.

I was skeptical about buying a mattress without trying it first, but this time it worked out.
Or at least the linguistics department at the local community college.
If the target of medicine would be to maximize the amount of living humans, it's most effective method would be forced impregnation. If the target was to minimize the amount of deaths, then the optimal way to achieve it would be to sterilize everyone. It is clear that the solution has to be more nuanced than that.

Medicine should not exist to modify the body count of mankind. It's aim has to be realted to improving quality of life.
I recommend this amusing parody of the trolley problem: http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm
Constructive feedback is fine, but "I have told you, you know that, but you are ignoring me, what's wrong" is a different story. My reaction to that is 1) it shows you already sent the feedback, what you want is to complain in public, and 2) I own you no shit.
> Probably, most working people can afford $2,500 per year to keep civilisation running, especially if they're not paying any other taxes.

Sure. But how many of those who can afford it will send it in voluntarily? I seem to be more cynical than you; my answer is "not enough".
It's not just laptops. Many new keyboards ship with a laptop-like function-lock key that re-enables the functions you're actually seeking when you hit what you think are the Fn keys.
Just some background about clinical trials that may yield more insight into the drug approval process:

Phase I: intended to determine a loose range of safe doses for patients. Subjects enrolled in Phase I clinical trials are informed that it is unlikely for the drug to benefit them. Normally, subjects are healthy volunteers that are put into buckets of different doses to determine the Maximal Tolerated Dose (MTD).

Phase II: Intended to characterize the efficacy of the drug (on a small scale). There are several methods of conducting Phase II trials; some are simply longitudinal case studies, and others are structured more like randomized controlled trials (the type of clinical trial generally considered the most valid [i.e. maintains the highest internal validity]).

Phase III: Randomized controlled trial. Patients are randomized into the test group vs. placebo/current standard of care to determine whether the new drug is effective. The best RCTs are double-blinded though this is not always the case.

This drug, a monoclonal antibody intended to alter the immune response, was halted in the Phase I clinical trial.
Do you know if this intentional behaviour in Chrome? it can be annoying for some types of interaction, any good workarounds?
SDRs are no longer that expensive - even an Ettus or BladeRF device is within the range of the average middle-class engineer - and can be programmed completely in software to act as a cellular baseband device.
This wasn't the only feature that was activated without much documentation. MaxSessions has a significant impact on any systems using 2FA (as the default allows bypassing it if you are phished).

Just like unrestricted sudo, people have because accustom to the bad default behavior of MaxSessions being 10 and allowing un-authenticated multiplexing. (meaning, you auth once, and my trojan can use your session without authentication)
There is actually (Moonlight): https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/net-install-moonl...
IMO, there is a fair amount of. "Those who can do. Those who can't teach."

Sure, you can find some videos of people making a wooden clock online. It's much harder to find master craftsman making a watch. A few PHD students putting together an electric car vs. someone at GM actually designing a car. Home cook vs. Five Star Chef.

Granted, generally an amateur is fine. But, don't be surprised if there making several mistakes without noticing.
Pointers have the advantage of signaling a return value at the call site without having to look up the function prototype.
Before 2007, the way to participate in Open Source was fragmented. Each project had their own workflow, patches circulated in emails, issues were reported in a myriad ways, and if anyone wanted to contribute they had to figure out every project's rules.

Then, a handful of guys took the challenge to build an awesome platform and as a consequence of their hard work, their platform earned its hegemony.

Two things stand out in this "thank you Github" open letter:

1. While the situation improved tremendously in certain areas the way to participate in Open Source is still very much fragmented. Most of the major open source projects (like Linux, Mozilla, Apache and nginx, to name a few) still have their own workflows, patches are still circulated in emails and issues are still being reported in a myriad ways. Despite of the big visibility GitHub has among the new open source projects we are very far from not being fragmented.

2. Before 2007 we had, for instance, SourceForge that back then had also earned its hegemony and, for a series of reasons (one of them being too late to answer to the community wants and needs) lost its way, its hegemony and its user base.

There is time for praise and time for hard work and, IMO, the "Dear Github" open letter is a constructive way to call attention to the perceived problems while the 'Dear "Dear Github"' and this gratitude letter are dismissive to their concerns (the former) and mostly empty praise and adulation (the later).
I think a lot of companies forced this because for a while the api permissions weren't granular enough when dealing with private repos on organizations. They added the "Third-party application access policy" sometime in the last year or two. I might be wrong though.
Beautiful example of the permanence and yet fluidity of code. It takes on a life of its own once you put it out into the world.
American slang? Do you mean fuck, or the other f word?
PowerSpy: Location Tracking Using Mobile Device  Power Analysis
> impose taxes to drive the value of the currency

You have a bunch of down-votes, but you're right. Taxes are the best driver of demand since they force the currency to be the unit of account in a country. In essence, any bitcoin transactions in the US will need to be accounted in USD in order to taxes to be paid. Thus, bitcoin is, as you say, commodity money.

Bitcoin can only operate as a stand-alone medium of exchange in regions without taxes (or in transactions where taxes are ignored).
How Netflix Pioneered Per-Title Video Encoding
Voice Over LTE Enterprise Benefits
I said "intentional hard-fork" for a reason. For everybody's reference, the bdb to leveldb hard-fork happened in early 2013. Everybody acted swiftly to correct the issue by downgrading to 0.7 if I recall correctly.

An accidental hard-fork is a completely different animal from an intentional contentious hard-fork where half of the network goes one way and the other half the other way for the foreseeable future.
The one-time generic ID thing is an excellent idea.

In fact they should have run a control like that.
Following your logic, then any other sovereign non-US states must forbid their their citizens and companies to use US technology in order to avoid US stealing the data. At least they should forbid it to those organisations and citizens who as you say access sensitive information.

Still, even after Snowden, the whole world uses Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Google technology everyday.

This is not a prove that your logic is wrong, but I am wondering how much today's intelligence services are interested in protecting their own companies and citizens from data breaches. It might be that they are more interested into stealing as much data as possible themselves in order to be able to negotiate with foreign states/services.
Indeed. People who specialize in shorting stocks, bonds, etc. live on the cycle of finding dirt through thorough private research, shorting the stock, and then publicizing the dirt.

This is actually one of the mechanisms that Efficient Market Theory relies upon for disseminating market information. If you could only benefit from assets increasing in value, then there would mostly be negative incentive for anyone to try to expose companies that are weaker than the market assumes them to be.
The author clearly states the rationales for using OpenGL 1.1.

For the next two chapters, the discussion is limited to OpenGL 1.1. OpenGL 1.1 is a large API, and we will only cover a part of it. The goal is to introduce 3D graphics concepts, not to fully cover the API. A significant part of what we cover here has been removed from the most modern versions of OpenGL. However, modern OpenGL in its pure form has a very steep initial learning curve, and it is really not a good starting place for someone who is encountering 3D graphics for the first time. Some additional support is needed—if not OpenGL 1.1 then some similar framework. Since OpenGL 1.1 is still supported, at least by all desktop implementations of OpenGL, it's a reasonable place to start.

Later chapters of the book are cover the much more recent WebGL.
If you're using tor browser, what's the best way to discover .onion sites, and (as important, to me), avoid coming across disturbing, unpleasant or illegal material?

Anyone have curated directories of onion sites they'd like to plug?
This is becoming such a circlejerk. Git is for code, not stupid letters. If you want to post this drivel do it on your personal blog.
How Facebook and Google’s Plans to Boost Internet Access Advanced in 2015
How Bitcoin Loses to the CAP Theorem
The largest volcano in the outer Solar System found on a frozen dwarf planet
I think the meaning of the reference to "Lead acid" is this:

This is done less to retrieve valuable metals (which is the reason for recycling lead acid batteries), but for environmental reasons…"
The post is assuming nothing about the motivations, which anyone but founders can't but at most conjecture.
Depends on why you're complaining about censorship. If you're talking about some God-given right to free expression, sure, complaining about censorship is ridiculous. But if you're talking about what's best for a community, complaining about censorship is a good way to motivate change. People start asking, "Why, exactly, are we censoring these viewpoints? Is it for a good reason, e.g. preventing trolls from taking over discourse, or is it for a stupid or even malicious reason?" Stuff like that is what gets rid of toxic leadership. On the Internet, it usually manifests itself in all of the high-quality folks going elsewhere.

Basically, relatively few people have a problem with the idea of censorship; a certain amount of moderation is necessary on an Internet forum to prevent shitposting. What people are decrying is misguided, stupid, and / or malicious censorship - either due to juvenile power games on the part of the moderators, or due to an external agenda that said moderators are pushing.
There's this visual novel called Steins;Gate that makes use of this story a bit. I didn't know that this was a separate thing, so imagine my surprise when I looked up "John Titor", and found all these pages.
git format-patch --to=mymailinglist@lkml.org HEAD^ - send the generated email, done.
By your post timestamps, looks like it only took 3 minutes. Not bad!
How can I find someone to help me?
There is a massive difference between a currency peg and citizens using another nation's currency for transactions. In the former case the state still controls the currency and it's distribution, the latter they are completely divorced.

and yes sovereignty is of course complex, but if you can't control how your economy runs then you can't control your nation. Forcefully seizing notes or issuing new currencies is hallmark of a power transfer.
Yahoo is a farce. Ostensibly it is a kind of passive index fund that only holds two assets: Alibaba and Yahoo, which is rapidly declining in value and should be cashflowed out (remove overhead, no add'l investment and collect cash til it dies--or sold to a PE fund that will do that). Typical passive fund managers earn their fee 2%/20% by re-balancing their portfolio as needed to approximate the index. Yahoo is not even doing that. so in fact they are more like a pass through or shell entity that holds one asset, usually for tax advantageous reasons. thus the managers (yahoo management) should get some nominal fee comparable to a clearinghouse. Marissa Meyer earns $20mm per year for running a shell company. that's like paying your agent in the cayman islands $20mm per year merely to file the paperwork to remain incorporated there. what a fucking farce.
Self-hosted email solution with Docker
This is cool! The video made me chuckle because it's nearly content free but has a lot of techy jargon, and because of the shots of him outstretching his arm using "the force".

The tech is real though, even if they didn't say anything meaningful about how it's actually done.

I saw a research paper talk at the EVOSTAR conference in 2007, and the author had successfully controlled a mouse cursor in 2d using a handful of sensors placed on his head, and training a neural network. He couldn't move the pointer quickly or particularly accurately, but it definitely works. He also mentioned that using this contraption and training the software was the single most mentally demanding thing he'd ever done, and that he'd be completely exhausted and sweating from his scalp after 7-8 minutes of trying.

*edited for spelling
I find the current situation with Github very unhealthy, because, even though very unlikely, someone can literally pull off the plug of open-source. Not all, but a great part. If such thing happened, be it with government intervention or some crazy attack towards github, it would make us lose a lot time migrating to other solutions. It would be like a Great Barbaric Invasion of Open Source, where everyone migrated to Bitbucket or private solutions, sort of an OSS incastellation.
People often ask why WordPress doesn't use Github for its primary development (they do have official read-only mirrors there), and it's not just because they already had an SVN-based system in place when Github came to be. It's because the tooling they already had was more sophisticated, especially regarding issues.
For Science!
Is it completely legal to warn users of suspicious network activity like this? If for example Apple built detection into iOS and gave all users a warning that could do a lot for raising awareness and maybe some support for change. "The network you are using is likely being surveilled. Your identity, online activity, and phone calls may be monitored by government or criminal equipment"
> It may take Amazon a few years to build up the infrastructure but once they do, they could eat everyone's lunch.

They very well could be disruptive, but I also see this as a rising-tides scenario. There are plenty of companies that wish to facilitate international commerce without using Amazon. Amazon could raise the bar, making opportunities for smart startups to build solutions that will mimic Amazon capabilities for non-amazon customers.

I'm working on the compliance aspect of international commerce, specifically classification of commodities, and estimating duty and other international taxes. My dream is to allow any merchant the ability to easily have international customers without having to worry about cross border regulations.

Amazon getting in this space feels like momentum for updating a proven, but old model of doing commerce.
The motivation behind this letter is embarrassing.

It's as if they were talking to GitHub the thankless FOSS maintainer. Quit mirroring guys. It's a for-profit enterprise that would do well to listen to the concerns of its userbase.
I recommend, dont send any pull requests. On of the useless project on Github. How he gonna merge 1000s of PR - and PR to just add a name - seriously? This is just waste of time & resources.
Most CAs accept an email to an predetermined address at the domain, which validates that a DNS entry (MX record) on the domain points to a server controlled by the requester.

Many also offer the same thing as Let's Encrypt, which basically verifies if the A/AAAA record for the domain points to a server controlled by the requester.

What am I missing?
> That letter didn't feel ungrateful or malicious at all to me, but I sure hope it didn't come off that way to others.

It might have; software engineering is a big tent, and people who touch Github (in at least someway) no doubt comprise a huge part of it. Full disclaimer, I'm biased, as I opened an issue attempting to address some potential editorial/tone issues, and the initial response was not good (a big part of that may be questions of who exactly is "involved" with the letter. How should others become involved and contribute in a way the OPs feel is constructive?)

As another commenter pointed out, not everything is so black and white. In this case, no one should be "beyond reproach", but what seem like simple issues to Issues may indeed be representative of strong product/technical decisions from an opinionated vendor. IMO it's not inherently clear that the people behind dear-github entirely recognized the nuance here. No one is looking to pick fights or troll anyone, because no, not everyone who is passionate about this issue is a meanie. That said, the original letter and the immediate response could be interpreted as brash, and to that end, I wouldn't be surprised that someone responded with thank-you-github as an opposite reaction.
Holy cow, you made my day! <blush> Thank you! Fascinating what you said in another comment about the catch 22 of remembering and sticking to plans when you're feeling good. Actually, I'm realizing I'm confused about this. I'm so everything-looks-like-a-nail that it sounds eminently beemindable so it would probably be good for me to keep trying to understand what I'm missing there. dreeves@beeminder.com if an email thread seems easier.

Btw, I collected my replies from that SlateStarCodex comment thread and put them here for posterity: http://forum.beeminder.com/t/slate-star-codex-on-willpower/5...

Thanks again for all the feedback and kind words!
Here is a part of answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23445468/hover-state-is-m...
It's all about trade-offs. Bitcoin may have trouble competing against a "stable" currency like USD or EUR, but would have a huge benefit over a heavily manipulated one like in Venezuela, where inflation sits at ~60%.

If Bitcoin could become stable, then it would offer the freedom of converting wages into a more stable form. A Venezuelan would expect the purchasing power of today's wages to be 4% lower in just one month!
Yosemite to Rename Several Iconic Places
Have you read "Descartes' Error", by António Damásio (USC Neurology professor)? I must have recommended this a thousand times. Found it amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error
Also seems to be the case in ffx ...
If you attach to a network successfully, it means the its secret key stored in the SIM card matches that of the network.

Since your IMSI catcher is basically just a proxy between the mobile phone and the real network, you can therefore easily detect that the IMSI is who it says it is.